Lessons from running a $3 million per year business

Jordan Crawford: I’d love to just like kind of like dive right into it and have you introduce yourself, like, tell me a little bit about you give me a little bit about your backstory and like up to what you’re doing now. And then I want to ask some kind of technical tactical questions about what it’s like to run a company.

David Kelly: Sure, let’s do this. So I’m David. My job is general manager of AppSumo Originals. And what that specifically looks like is we’re a product business. So we create different products to try to get more people inside the AppSumo ecosystem. And really to just create great products that entrepreneurs and content creators love to use. So that’s our primary focus. And we look at competitors who are creating maybe more complex products that we can create simpler versions of, a lot of it’s created from our own need. And before that, I was a head of email marketing a student loan here, which was a FinTech company. So two lending tree for $60 million in cash. And I’ve also done a lot of consulting with startups and small businesses in the SAS space, CPG space, and all around. And it has been quite a journey, I think, as every entrepreneur will will gladly share the ups and downs of trying to create things that work and most of them don’t.

Jordan Crawford: I want to dig into the things that don’t work and how you decide about what to do. So maybe if you could kind of unpack what being a general manager means? And how is that different from a CEO or an ad where, you know, kind of where does your purview lie?

David Kelly: So I’ll answer I’ll answer the question. That’s easier. First of what a general manager does, although it shifts so much, maybe that isn’t the easier place to start. So I think being a general manager is really interesting, because the purview of a general managers to oversee the day to day operations of a business. So in our case, I oversee entire profit and loss for our 1011 person company, does about $3 million a year in revenue. When I think of a CEO, I think of someone who’s more strategically high level, so who steps back and is a little less involved in the day day. What I do think is fascinating, though, in tech is there so many different titles, and so many different names, and so many different things we call ourselves and call each other. So my advice to startups and to people who are looking for a job is try to just find what you really like to do, and then create a title around that. And that’s so much simpler said than done. But I think there is a weird obsession that we take away from these archaic, like fortune 1000 companies with 45,000 employees. That’s like, hey, you’re a VP and then you’re SVP, and then you’re an EVP, and then you’re President, and then you’re this and then you’re that. And we noticed in tech titles are a lot more fluid.

Jordan Crawford: Yeah, I have found the only way to do that is to find all the things that you hate doing and just keep avoiding them, eventually stumble into something that you’re like, Oh, I could, I didn’t fail at this thing. And I didn’t hate it. So I guess this is what I’m going to do.

David Kelly: Right. And with General Manager, it’s interesting, because I’ll tell you, like a lot of restaurants have general managers, a lot of gyms have general managers, and the purview of GM at a restaurant or a gym is a little different than what a tech GM does. So the narrowing down based on what we don’t like to do is actually really great business advice turn, I really liked that question. And that thought, it’s a good way to think about business and our careers.

Jordan Crawford: So you can’t tell me which pasta I should order because you do not deal with any of the GM of restaurants. Right? I want to kind of dive into how you choose to talk about competitors. And that you’ll look at what competitors are doing to create a simpler version of something. How do you figure out which products to build? And more importantly, which products that like, like, talk to me about the products that get to the 90 yard line? And that you’re like, No, we can’t, we shouldn’t build that.

David Kelly: Oh, boy, we have so many. So I think what Amazon is doing right now is really fascinating. And I think what Netflix is doing right now is really fascinating. And from the outside in observationally I think there’s a lot of great lessons for business leaders and want to be entrepreneurs to learn. And one of the things I noticed Amazon doing with their Amazon basics line is creating all these simplified products and owning the entire end to end process. So they control 100% of the revenue. They understand the data on what sells on their platforms, so they’re able to make database decisions. And they’ve expanded that Amazon basics wine pretty exponentially over time. And Netflix is really interesting too, because their push seems to be we will create tons of content at any cost as much as we possibly can. So the amount of original content that they’re creating under the Netflix originals umbrella is probably like 10x what Disney’s doing. Probably 10x What HBO Max is doing. They’re just going for the volume game. And I think there are two synergies with that with how we think about our business at AppSumo Originals. So we do have data and understanding on at this point 4000 plus deals that have launched on AppSumo over 10 years. And we’re able to understand what products perform pretty well. And we’re able to understand what are their concerns, and we’re able to understand where the opportunity lies. So I think data is part of the decision. But I also think if we just created products that were based on the data, that’d be a pretty soulless business, it’d be pretty, pretty sad. And I also think it’d be morally questionable to just try to bankrupt products that were just like, let’s just go after this because the finances are good. So there’s also this ying and yang process that’s involved with our product making decision. And with tiny cow, a product that launched this year under the AppSumo umbrella. Under the originals umbrella, specifically, as well as sleep bio, as well as email badge, our most recent product, there was a big portion of us creating those products, because we internally wanted better solutions for ourselves. So for Tidy Cow I was sick of using calendly. so confused by the features, didn’t want to pay for the excessive features that cost tons of money every month for just a booking tool. It was insane to me. And I wanted to create this product to bring it to myself and use myself and then bring it to the larger market. And that’s what we’ve done with our other originals as well since then.

Jordan Crawford: And how do you think about not complicating your products? Because I feel like the length of you know, it’s like, if you go into Google Ads today, there’s no way that any regular human can understand what the hell is going on. Right? There’s just like, right, there’s like 1000s of features. So I always thought that’d be a great thing to make like Google Ads one Dotto. It’s like Internet attack scaled, internet, enter in a description field, like pay. So how do you think about your products evolving over time, but not becoming this sort of bloated experience where you’re charging for things that people don’t need, and you’re building things that people might not need?

David Kelly: One of our product mantras, and one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about making products historically, in my career, is the thought that the best form of perfection, or perfection in general is ultimately achieved not when there’s nothing left to add. But when there’s nothing left to remove. I’ve always used that as a North Star for product creation. And I think an easy answer for a lot of us in our careers. And so many people listening to this probably understand it, where, conceptually it’s like, oh, we need to solve this issue. Let’s hop on a meeting. Let’s do this, let’s add this feature, let’s add more complication. Let’s add more options. It’s very hard to look at something and say, what does it not need? What can we remove, because then we have to have some challenging conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable to have because we’re having to say no to things. So when we look at creating the products, usually, there’s one to two things that we really try to, to nail down feature set wise. So for Tidy Cow, we really wanted to make an elegant solution to booking and for people to understand who was booking with them. So on both ends of the spectrum, the recipient and the Booker, for sleep bio, we wanted to really nail down analytics, because we thought it was really important for people to have this link tree like product that had very clear analytics, and also very easy ways to surface and showcase content. With email badge, we want to make it very simple for people to actually create a signature because other options out there like scribe or y stamp had very confusing editors that that in my opinion, were very bloated. So every product we think about when we identify the product, we start to think about what are the real key features that peredo principle in effect that we can really, really nail down to make sure that we’re covering 80% of our basis. And we noticed that with a lot of existing products out there, they have the core and then they just tack on a bunch of stuff, which adds to a ton of confusion, and is really not widely used.

Jordan Crawford: That kind of dovetails into another question I had here because you’re you’re building these products, you’re making them very simple. You’re taking these kind of key features. But there are a lot of calendar scheduling tools. So how do you think about marketing Tidy Cow for example? Or what is the kind of path to go to market because you solve something for yourself, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got a good distribution channel but you work at a company that is all distribution channels. So like, like talk to me about that and how you think about marketing your stuff.

David Kelly: We are lucky to have this 100 million dollar behemoth kind of kind of pushing our products and I don’t shy away from that, that a lot of our marketing Is because we’re part of a larger organization. And really, I think there’s an element of importance to just utilizing the channels we have. So it’d be stupid of us not to use AppSumo proper, because they’re such a massive reach. When I think about how we market outside of that, a lot of sales and you know this really well, Jordan, because you do a lot of this a lot of sales is like direct one to one outreach. So everyone, I remember the co founder of AppSumo, this amazing person who’s now the CTO, Chad Boyda. Everyone, he says worries about scale, before they even have like a product market fit. And his point was, if we can only be so lucky that scale becomes an issue. And what that drove home in me and we did this with SendFox, one of our other original products that we launched about two and a half years ago, and alternative to MailChimp. and is now a seven figure product we really honed in on how can we go to people who need a newsletter who are already using MailChimp, and just do one to one direct sales to get this thing off the ground. So for like three or four months, I was booked every day, just doing demos with tons of people who were friends of the business, my friends, people that had received, like an invite to SendFox or a friend of a friend, people who had sent me email newsletters that I responded to, and I said, Hey, we built a better solution. It was a very, very ghetto experience. And I think there’s like this, this perception that we become an entrepreneur, we launched this product, and everything takes off. And there is some truth to that I think really good products do rise to the top, I think the cream of the crop really does rise to the top. But I also think a lot of products need a push. And a lot of that push isn’t like, Oh, I’m just going to post on Twitter. And hope I reach this audience at large. A lot of it in the early days, the less glamorous part that’s not really publicly talked about by entrepreneurs and successful companies is like 10 to 12 hour days of just doing the same stuff every single day getting denied a bunch and then eventually, three months later you you start to build enough momentum that those initial sales start to add up.

Jordan Crawford: And how does that look like in? Like what like with a product like Tidy Cow? Like what did you do? Did you do direct outreach to your team do that? Is that part of the sort of birthing of a product that you have a sales motion that’s baked in? What does that look like? I mean, tactically, what does that look like?

David Kelly: Yep. So we have a launch plan for every single product we launch. And part of that is utilizing AppSumo channels. But part of it is also just basic things and putting it into a spreadsheet and saying, Hey, we want to launch our product on. And we want to post on Indie Hackers, and we want to post on GrowthMentor, and we want to message five influencers in this fear and try to get them some type of affiliate agreement so that they can promote on our side. I’d say a better example than Tidy Cow in this case is sleep bio, I think it’s going to be a little more clear for everyone listening. So sleep bio is like a link tree. Opportunity, right? So the opportunity within this link tree opportunity is to go to influencers and to try to get people to put in their social media profiles. So we started thinking about segments and audiences that we could one to one outreach that are social media influencers, who are those micro influencers that have 20 to 30 to 40,000 followers on Twitter that we can start hitting up directly where people that have link tree in their profile that we could go to and say hey, we’ve built a simpler, less expensive link tree. And I’ll tell you, man, we even thought of like some really interesting segments like part of part of what we were pitching hard and we ultimately didn’t do this but we might at some point is we’re like we should just go after everyone on Twitter who has an only fans and reach out to all these people with all the fans because there’s so many people that want to be influencers in this world, right? Whether it’s through the only fans market whether it’s through Patreon whether it’s through just being like a Gen Z or and seeing all the YouTube famous tik tokers whatever. Everyone wants to be an influencer, which means there’s so many opportunities to do direct one to one for a tool like sleep bio.

Jordan Crawford: And are you going to share your only fans link here with I, I’ve been searching for a dude, I can’t I can’t find it yet.

David Kelly: It’s pretty hidden man. It’s under a pseudonym.

Jordan Crawford: So it’s a street you grew up on and your dog’s first name, right.

David Kelly:That’s right.

Jordan Crawford: Yeah, you know, this is interesting, because my partner is, is sort of a micro influencer. And when she gets, you know, she’s just started to hit that level where people reach out to her. And because she, you know, she’s earlier on in kind of this, this journey, super responsive to the people that reach out, right. It’s not like, you know, sending an email to Kim Kardashian, who has, you know, a trillion followers and it was getting approached by these big brands. And so, I think That there’s something to be said about finding the people that are aligning with their interest, right? their interests clearly are to, you know, you know, to be known and to, to sort of grow their following. And not a lot of people are reaching out to them. So it’s kind of this undiscovered gem of these folks that have really tight knit small communities.

David Kelly: Totally.

Jordan Crawford: Can you walk us through like you talked about this sort of launch plan? Can you walk us through how you think about channel selection? budgets? And, and like when you know, something is working? Or also like, the reverse? Do you ever go through one of these plans and things flop terribly, and you’re like, Oh, my gosh, why did we build a left sock? finder? Like That was a bad idea. How did you know our next product? Yeah, I don’t want to give it up here. I know, we talked privately about Alan. Yeah, right.

David Kelly: Yeah. So I think budget can be, I so let me approach this a different way. I prefer not to use paid marketing channels as much as humanly possible. And the reason for that at least, or at least, it right, the reason for that is very much like you said, it’s a bit of a drug. And in the early stages of a business, I think it can make the the waters a bit cloudy on validation. So people will just dump a bunch of money in and the analogy I can think of is like you have a health issue, and you’re just taking a bunch of supplements, and I don’t know drugging yourself up, it’s like, Yeah, kind of mask the issue temporarily, but it doesn’t really cover cover the larger problem. It’s, it’s a drug exactly like you said. So when we think about marketing plans, what I’m always thinking about is, if the product is good, the purpose of marketing is to help boost this product into public awareness. And then the product kind of takes off on its own. And that is not like a like a universally true rule in 100% of situations and 100% of time, I think there are revolutionary products. And I think you work on a lot of these Jordan that are like next level products that people don’t maybe recognize now, as as like the next big thing. But for products that we work on at originals that solve specific needs. Now, I think paid marketing can be a bit of a hindrance to trying to understand what is going on with a product. So when we create this launch plan, we’re looking at a few different things. One is we’ve done marketing a lot. So we’re looking at what has historically worked for other marketing that we’ve done for other products. So a lot of people I notice in the entrepreneurial space, it’s like we’re all masochist, or something or we all want like a crazy story to tell, because everyone wants to hack,

Jordan Crawford: You know, just give me the one hack. Like, look, I don’t want to work out I don’t want to exercise every day. Just give me the one hack. It’s already done. Right?

David Kelly: Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to the golden golden bullet as it were. But I also think there’s a lot of masochism and just like weirdness around, oh, I gotta make this hard for myself, I have to, like, go out and find all these new marketing channels all the time. And when we think about marketing, a lot of what we think about is double down on what works, and then use the excess time to find new things. So when we think about marketing, new products, we’re thinking about what historically has worked for previous products? What are we hearing about from our friends is working very well, in a similar sphere. What article did I read online saying that this is working now, or someone trying this now. So we take those somewhat proven already, and we start to put together a plan around that. And then we’re also thinking about some really interesting blue ocean opportunities that are a bit crazy, right? So the only fans example is a great, great example of that. It’s like everyone competes in this marketing, red ocean. Everyone competes for the scraps of the Facebook ads and the Google AdWords for you’re competing against people who spend money on Facebook every single day. But very few people are going to micro influencers, like your partner. That was a perfect example of there’s so much opportunity, but no one is approaching her. So how can we think of things that are a little outside of the normal path? How can we consistently think about testing and trying new things, in addition to doing what we already know, is working. And in a perfect marketing system and a perfect marketing launch plan. And post launch plan, what we’re really looking at is, let’s go after these marketing channels that are working, let’s keep doubling down on what’s working in iterating to improve and prove and prove what’s working. And then let’s constantly cycle through side ideas with that 20% time, let’s say and think about how can we consistently try new things to add them to the either this has worked and we double down on it, or just discard immediately. So we’re adding to the existing pile of this is working. Let’s keep doing this or we’re getting rid of it so that we make space for a new experiment along way.

Jordan Crawford: Can you actually dive into specifics here? Like what are you seeing? Like what type of you talked about this? Like only fans example? Can you walk through some, like tactically here some channels that we like? Or here’s how much we think about spending, like, give give some meat to this bone? Yeah.

David Kelly: What’s most important to take a step back is understanding the goal. Right? What is the goal of my business? What is the goal in my launch? And the reason I say that’s more important than actually the most important thing is, if I don’t know the direction I’m going, how do I know if I’m successful? Or not? How do I know if I’m accomplishing what I want or not. So when we think tactically about our marketing channels, we’re also thinking very closely related to the goal. And everything should cascade down from the goal. So if I use a smart methodology, which is something I recommend a lot, which is being like pretty specific and measurable with our goals, I’m saying I want 1000 signups for my product within the first week of my goal. And then I know, okay, these are some of the marketing channels I need to go after. I’d say generally speaking, when I think of marketing channels that I really like right now, I think micro influencers, like your partner are great. I think there’s so many people that want to be an influencer, that have engaged audiences that maybe are smaller than people have historically thought of as marketing audiences, but they work really well. I also think of affiliates. So affiliates, you help sell my product, I give you a percentage of the product, which is usually a little different than influencers where I pay a flat fee, although there is some interconnectedness there. And I also think of stuff like Youtube, just generally content on YouTube, I think that’s really taking off, we’ve also noticed some things with Tik Tok influencers working really well. And then a lot of it is just identifying the target market that I think would really like my product and going to them directly and trying to get them to use it.

Jordan Crawford: You know, I’m, I’m an advisor to a company that is like, very young and young. I mean, in their thinking, and, you know, I think about this is like, I think about like marketers and kind of like three buckets, right? The first bucket are the really old school marketers that have done, you know, that have been around since the 1800s and do surgery. There’s like, there’s like people of maybe our ilk that are, you know, I’ve like kind of understand grown up in this digital world. But the next thing is like, no one’s gonna pay for marketing in the future. It’s just, there’s gonna be like, you’re just gonna contact the guy that can eat 1000 hotdogs in 10 seconds on Tik Tok. He’s gonna, you know, print your brand on the hot dog, and he’s gonna eat your branded hot dog. It’ll be $12 to have him do that. And it’ll go insanely viral. And that’s the way the marketing will work. Like, have you remarketing? Well, I and you know, chatting with this founder, and basically they have had, they’re, they’re very well connected on Twitter, they have a lot of investors in their company. And, and so they can push something to Twitter. And suddenly, it now has, you know, 5000 signups in day one, and they haven’t even built a product. They just built a landing page. So can you talk like, and how do you, you know, you talk about like thinking about new channels? How do you figure out what’s weird? And how do you do the weird things? And what are some weird things like really weird things that you know, about Tik Tok? Like, what are some weird things that you’ve tried recently that that are seeming to work? Or how do you incorporate that?

David Kelly: Oh, boy, God, this is such a such an interesting thing to talk about, because I don’t have a great answer for how we find these weird things. I think a lot of stuff I think about generally with businesses, am I doing things that are somewhat unconventional compared to common wisdom? So this is why I love talking to you, man, personally, the relationship we have personally because there’s so many people I talked to or that go online, and they’re like, have you heard of this guy? And I’m like, no. And then I look them up after the call. It’s just like one of 30,000 standard, like Click Funnels marketers that are just like, basically all the same, like, basically, everyone marketing right now for for most intents and purposes is the same. And I think back to a lot of what I saw or heard when I was doing some studying of Steve Jobs and his methodology. And what I mean by that is, one thing I thought was really interesting is his background in typography, and calligraphy, and how that made the like Mac fonts really nice. And the reason why I love that example is because how am I doing things outside of the ordinary that connect neural pathways in different ways compared to most people? So quite literally, with marketing, a lot of times what we’re trying to understand is, we have limited attention. We have limited channels, how do we compete in those limited channels and limited attention methodologies. And that’s What the red ocean marketing strategies are for a lot of people who read the same stuff. It’s like, oh, let me just get better at Facebook ads. Let me just study this harder. I don’t want to compete in that game. I’m trying to think how can I read weird books that have nothing to do with marketing your business and make different neurological connections so that I’m not competing in the red ocean? I’m competing in the blue ocean. So I think this is this is more of like a philosophy and an intention on just generally how I think about business and a real practical tactical approach of, of like, how do I find these new channels? I think we’re just constantly thinking and reading and looking at different things. And also, we’re really studying our users and talking to our users. And it really blows my mind how many people have like these huge large user bases? And they don’t ask the users like, Hey, what are you reading right now? Like, what blogs do you like reading? What newsletters do you like reading? Going back to what we talked about earlier, with people making business harder than it is. If we build a good product, we iterate on that product, we talk to customers about what they want in the product, and where they go to read about other products, or where they go to learn about products. That’s a lot of the equation right there. It’s not all of it. But it’s a lot of it. And that’s what I think about with marketing as well, how can we leverage our user base? And how can we leverage different thought patterns?

Jordan Crawford: You know, I thought it was interesting that you had talked about Amazon basics and Netflix, and my, my kind of understanding of those two processes are that Amazon waits for a competitor to do all that hard work. And then they they said, Great, you’ve you’ve looked, there’s been 1000s of people that experience 1000s of products. I know that people want weird batteries or whatever, like, it’s just like, it’s like, oh, it’s a shredder, you know, people want a Wi Fi shredder, that’s what they need, you know, and so I’m gonna find out that there had been 100,000 purchases of this Wi Fi shredder and make a copy. That’s half the price. And, and, you know, Jeff Bezos says very famously, like your margin is my opportunity. And, you know, at Netflix, I think, is that it’s the kind of other way around which is, like, if there’s an actor that we can pay money to show up on a camera, let’s just get them all. You know, it’s like, like, you know, I, we’ve all spent about 400 hours on Netflix, and then just give it up, because it’s like, I’ll just, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t keep up. Yeah, yeah. I want you to talk a little bit about how you kill something. Or have you had to do that, like, have you actually run through this process, you’ve, you’ve early understood the customers and, and it turns out that you know, that the world really didn’t need a new Gizmo.

David Kelly: Yeah, yeah, all the time, all the time. So there are two that really come to mind. One was a product that we were working on actually a little bit ago, we wanted to create, and I still have this idea, in my mind, create, like a marketing funnel simulator. And the reason why I think this is an interesting concept is because the core we try to answer at appsumo originals is really the why. Why would someone want this? Why would someone buy this. And for entrepreneurs and startups and small businesses, there’s something to be said, for us trying to figure out our marketing systems and to try to figure out a marketing funnel. So if I could put numbers into the top of the funnel and understand if I add these channels, or do these things with the end result would be, it would help me more clearly lay out my marketing system. And a lot of this is created from our own need of having a spreadsheet, but wanting something that’s a little better than just a simple spreadsheet with some formulas. Here’s the issue though, trying to create a product like this just didn’t make much sense. Like we we weren’t able to really figure it out. And here’s what’s also interesting about that, it’s not to say no one can figure it out. Maybe I say this right now, and someone solves the issue, and they create a great product, and they listed on AppSumo. Great, I hope they do. Or maybe we figure it out eventually. What I think is important to emphasize is the right time for the right person or the right team is really critical. So our team wasn’t able to figure that out. And our team is a little better. I think it more simplistic, less like math driven products. And this would just be like a heavily math driven product, just all about marketing. So that was something we held off on. We’ve also killed products in the past one that we killed a couple years ago that took us and cost us probably over a million dollars to develop is a product yeah product called Fam, which a lot of people might know. And this product was meant to be an automated email marketing system. Basically you put in a URL and it auto creates emails for you design copy. Everything is very impressive, very sophisticated. But when we get down to sophistication path, and I think one of the things we learned from it a couple years To go that we’ve since pulled into our originals team is like, are we building something that people actually want to use? They actually care about using. So going back to what we mentioned earlier about the 80% solution, just hyper focusing on what are those one to two things that people really, really care about and doing those really, really well. And then we can, we can add our own flair to it and in ways that we want to, but we went really far down the path of like, Oh, this is cool technology. It’ll be super fun. People really want it. And no one did.

Jordan Crawford: How did you? I mean, that’s such a massive investment. I think, you know, I think about the opportunity cost, right? You’re like, Look, we’ve are the sunk cost fallacy, right? You’re like, Look, if we’ve already put a million in, just we just need another 100,000. Right, like, so how did you know when was that moment where you’re like, I gotta, I gotta kill this.

David Kelly: I like to think about the kind of yearly patterns and just the yearly cycles. So we did this for about a year and I was I was basically leading products for it. No, and Chad, who are the respectively the founder and the co founder of the company, were the ones kind of championing championing this and and then ultimately, deciding that we didn’t want to do it was was partly their decision. I think we got to the end of the year, and something that that I always think about is like when we get to November, December, and we really step back, and we look at the forest for the trees as objectively as possible. How did it go? How did it go, and we’re making quicker changes and iterations throughout the year. But I do like the end of the year, like December area, because everyone’s slowing down. Everyone’s thinking about Christmas. It allows for really deep kind of introspective thinking. And I’ve been part of this, this organization now for I think, four years, probably something that range and every year, we’ve made pretty significant changes which have ultimately led us to more success in next year. Because we’ve we’ve had to let go of, I’d say let go of the good for the great, or even let go have the bad for the attempted good. But every year we’re letting go of something in order to try to accomplish something better.

Jordan Crawford: Dang, that’s a great. I think that’s kind of a great place to sort of cap in this. I do want to fire off a bunch of my product ideas here and you tell me if originals. Make this right, you ready? It’s a spray for your dog’s mouth to clean it so the dog can lick you.

David Kelly: Oh, I saw this on your Yeah, so good. Dude, here’s what’s interesting. Okay, so let’s let’s talk about this one for a minute. Here’s what I love about this idea when I saw this on her LinkedIn. Is everyone thinks they need like these huge ideas now, where it’s like they see Elon Musk, and they’re like, bro, I gotta go. I gotta go.

Jordan Crawford: What? What’s bigger than Mars guys? Wait a minute, Pluto. Right? Right.

David Kelly: And they see that. But here’s what I love, man. Like, I know a lot of people. And I’m sure you do, too. When I hear a lot of people that I trust, this information is true, that make so much money and are so successful with hyper niche targeted products. So something like that, for all the dog owners out there is is really interesting. And another thing I’ve heard man that I think is really interesting for the listeners as well. And I’ve always kept this in the back of my mind for future product ideas. People will spend an unlimited amount of money on their children, their wedding and their animals. And I think those markets are just like you can just make a killing.

Jordan Crawford: That child wedding dog product. deal to all three of those. Right?

David Kelly: And then you’ll be ready for any type of pandemic because it’s like the event business with weddings is knocked out. But everyone gets an animal. So yeah,

Jordan Crawford: Yeah, exactly. You’re all prepared. I got a couple more for you. Maybe you bought a sandwiches with needles that let you inject sauces into them so you don’t get messy.

David Kelly: I love that too. I don’t know. How, okay, let me ask you this. Let’s say you you had to go that idea. How would you get your first five customers? What would you do?

Jordan Crawford: I would just hang out a jack in the box and when people ordered anything with ciabatta on I’d be like, dude, you’re gonna want, you’re gonna want this.

David Kelly: See? And I love that because it’s exactly that we talked about. Growing a business some people would be like, Oh, I get Facebook ads and I do all this. It’s like No, just do the boots on the ground and like really go hard manually after it at first and there you go.

Jordan Crawford: Hey, let’s hang out at a bakery and listen for the guy that’s like I’ll take 1000 ciabatta rolls you’re like look like before you place this order. I have I got tiny sandwiches for you. I got to I got three mor,e Lacroix for sauces. So it’s like it but it’s like a sauce subscription. So you don’t know what you’re gonna get but every month you get random sauces that you can move on.

David Kelly: I like that one. And I The reason why I like that one is noticing trends is another really fascinating business strategy. And with the increasing immigration of people from Mexico into the US, the hot sauce market I was reading has never been better. It’s like exploding everyone’s creating hot sauces.So what can we do to get on top of the trend whether the trend is cryptocurrency or this or that whatever it is. So I like that idea.

Jordan Crawford: A driveway rental service for van life so you can rent your Airbnb for driveways. So you can rent a driveway for people. Okay.

David Kelly: How can you come up with these?

Jordan Crawford: Oh, I don’t I just like think of this like randomly. Okay, I think this is the this is the last one. It’s and this is actually something that you could build. It live streams, the founder in the bottom right corner of the website, so you can actually live video chat with the founder at any time. So it’s like Drift, but I’m always on so you just like click that button, and then I’m, I’m in the zoom.

David Kelly: That’s pretty cool. You get some absolute lunatics.

Jordan Crawford: It’s like you’d have to confront who’s visiting your website, and maybe you don’t want to know. Right?

David Kelly: Right. For the first like 5 to 10 people would be really fascinating. And then after 10 I’m like, please get me away from this person who emails me all the time.

Jordan Crawford: The people that came from your only fans like David. All right. Well, thanks so much. This has been super helpful. What’s like a parting sentence or two that you can give the people listening that are, you know, building their own product growing their own product? How do you get to where you’re at?

David Kelly: A big part of it is time man, which no one wants to hear. But like the perpetual momentum of consistency, I think compounds in such a way that people underestimate, especially in this social media driven landscape that we have people look around, and they’re like, Oh, this person’s like, on a yacht. And I didn’t even know them. So apparently, they just became successful overnight. Which is, is very rarely true. So the parting word to me is is really consistently going forward. And that doesn’t mean consistently going forward with your head down, ignoring all the noise but consistently going forward and iterating talking to customers, but really just everyday putting one foot in front of the other. In some of those days, it works out pretty poorly and you fall down and mess up pretty bad other days. Hey, you make it a few steps. Nice job.

Jordan Crawford: So that or buy bitcoin in 2010. So those are your two options, be consistent going forward or buy bitcoin in the past? Those are.

David Kelly: So invented time machine.

Jordan Crawford: Yeah, well, yeah, like that’s a small prerequisite. Sure. All right. Well, that’s been awesome. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.

David Kelly: Thanks for having me. And thanks to everyone for listening. Bye.