They Built A $2M Business To Fund Their Dreams

0:00 these two roommates built a $1.8 million year business in 2 years they've worked with some of the biggest names on the internet and have done over 1 billion views on YouTube with a simple formula for going viral but they have a confession their business is not profitable we had like $40,000 of just debt for like months and months and months they choose not to be profitable for a reason because their goal is to build a business that optimizes for having fun rather than profits and like Mr Beast in invest every dollar back into creating their own content and chasing their dreams make as much cash here and then dump that all into building the next Disney they invited me into their wacky studio in Chicago broke down all the ways they make money and showed me just how fun it is to build a

0:45 business with your best friend they also broke down their dead simple formula on how they can guarantee millions of views just humans are wired in this video Henry and Dylan put on a master class on how to chase your dreams while having a ton of fun along the way I'm Pat walls and this is starter story welcome thanks for having me tell me about who you guys are and what you built I'm Henry this is oh my best bud Dylan and uh we built clip. Co which is an animation studio that does 2 million bucks a year in Topline and then we take basically all the profits from that and we make these crazy animated shorts of our own to tell you know really complicated ideas in a simple funny way can you guys explain to me how your business works works and what your

1:31 goal is by creating this business to fund your creative Pursuits so basically we've got pool of the best animators in the world best animators and video editors and then we work with a lot of companies that have a lot of media that they want to make but they don't have anyone to execute on it so we just match up awesome animator with company that doesn't have any editors and we basically let them work together so that business clip. Co is this cash flowing machine that allows us to hire you know we have like 10 of our own animators that just work on our content and pay us so it cash flows into the content that we want to make and how much content are you guys making our goal with content is like can we just get out one short per day now I say that but they're like one of the most highly animated 60c shorts in the world we say it's like South Park for nerds so we want to explain

2:18 something in 60 seconds that may be really complex but tell it in a funny and simple way and we're also taking those shorts and turning them into an illustrated email so basically double the content and what kind of numbers are this this content that doing in the last year of putting out daily shorts we've done a billion views combined and then we just launched this smart nonsense newsletter which did like 10,000 Subs in the first month and now we're 3 weeks later and we're at like 20,000 Subs take me through the timeline of when you guys first met and everything you've built since I met Henry at this accepted student day in college in 2015 we're basically good friends through all of college the only like entrepreneurial friends we kept talking and by 2020 we're like hey let's take these conversations and turn them into a podcast and hopefully the whole world will listen he's like dude like I think if we

3:04 start a podcast and it'll be about this we'll call it smart nonsense and dude based on my numbers in 6 months we could have a million people listening to this thing and I'm like sign me up 3 months later we're running out of like unemployment money from the government and the podcast has 14 views um and so that's when we were like okay we need to figure out how to make money service business was the best way to do that we didn't really have anything it was just us we had some ideas we turned that into an agency which prints a lot of money and then we have all these animators and all this money and we're like 2022 is the year of making content so for the last year we've been making YouTube shorts and that's what's taken us from zero to a million Subs on YouTube and a billion views where did the idea for clip the agency come from it was basically like we made a podcast and hired editors abroad in the Philippines

3:50 to help us produce it we like did this whole system so I'm like let's try this little podcast system with our favorite podcast which the first one was my first million they're looking to crack into video Sam par and Sean Puri have no idea how to do a video podcast so they're hitting up Twitter like yo who's going to help us with video should we do video vote in this poll or whatever and we're like dude we'll do it for free and we're there tomorrow yeah and basically like forged plane tickets we're like dude we're we're literally there tomorrow I hope you're at your house and then Sam and like are you you guys serious like what the what is this so we had this strategy like we're crazy we're going to show you exactly what we're going to do for you and then just beat you over the head with it until you pay us money we tried this with the all-in podcast we want to work with them so like let's make one video for them that'll like wake them up second video

4:36 is like oh this is really interesting like what's Henry doing what's Dylan doing and the third video they're like how do we work with you and it was cool like in allin's case I remember the first Blitz video went out and Jason kakanis was like I don't know what you want but like you're hired so that it woke him up pissed him off one so you guys were basically just doing free work how did you guys fund this the first agency we worked with basically gave us a little bit of buffer we have maybe a month of free work we can do but they better pay us like the day that month ends Unfortunately they didn't pay us the day ended so Henry's credit card basically came into our lives and we had like $40,000 of just debt for like months and months and months and we were always of the mindset we were like okay if we can't pay this

5:22 credit card what's the worst it's a 20% premium we got to like we just have to make 20% more money that was kind of our mindset just have to sell one more client we can do that luckily we tend to grow the business to like pay it off but it is this risky like scary in the moment oh we do have a lot of debt like a lot writing on this you guys have worked with some huge names Will Smith Ali abdal nval how did you land huge clients like that we called it squatter marketing we're just going to pretend like they hired us and be the crazy person that like makes videos for them for a year straight just not getting paid but because they share all our stuff everyone thinks we work with them they're like oh if Allen wants to work with them why wouldn't we cuz that's the PIN so now we get all the clients from their Network quick break this is me 5 years ago desperate to start my own business but plagued with shiny object syndrome I

6:09 tried building SAS tools freelancing affiliate marketing but none of these business ideas ever panned out to anything but everything changed one day when I looked inside and wondered what if instead I built a business around what I'm good at and what I'm passionate about well that decision led me to building a business that now makes over a million dollar a year and that's what starter stories all about it's a community of thousands of Founders who changed their life by building an online business around their skills and their passions our 4,000 plus case studies and business idea breakdowns will show you how regular people just like you found the right idea and turned it into millions for example Luke join starter story and Dove or a case study about a newsletter business that makes over $25 million a year just one month later he

6:54 launched his own newsletter business that did $5,800 in Revenue in 30 days so so if you're serious about finding that right idea click the first link in the description we're running a special for the YouTube family all right enjoy the video I'll see you around peace you guys have done over a billion views on YouTube You've created viral content to a science so what's the secret of creating viral content how do you do it when we were trying to engineer viral content Dylan comes to me and he's like what have people been watching forever for the last tens of thousands of years and what will they keep watching and we came to the conclusion it was like story people were telling stories in cave paintings so they will be around another 50,000 years right we were doing all this content before that was like abstract and I was talking about book quotes and like who knows what and Dylan was like Henry just tell a really good

7:40 story humans are wired to listen to stories so if your story is good on a 60-second clip you can get people to watch for 55 seconds the human brain literally can't not finish watching a story like we want to close those Loops so that was the big breakthrough with story and then our advantage was we had this team of amazing animators so we could can now animate these stories and bring them to life with basically our version of South Park so now you're hooked on the story itself and then you're just following the journey on screen you guys have a team of 50 animators and editors tell me about how to hire great people and keep them on our principle has always been hire better so our current team we're not going to accept them unless they wow you meaning like wow this person is better than me I would learn from them and then

8:26 you look back and you have 50 people who are all just learning from each other and it's so Talent dense when we're looking at people's portfolios we should just trust our gut if they're really good our gut is always like whoo like did our did our jaw Hit the Floor were we like wow if we see someone work and our guts like on the fence never going to work out and where do you find this kind of talent we started hiring when we were getting money from the government to survive and we're like okay Henry will sleep on the floor so he doesn't need as much money and I just wear the same t-shirts every day so we'll take the extra money and hire editors but we we couldn't afford like A5 $6,000 editor in the us but we knew we also couldn't afford to be editing content daily if we wanted to make content daily we need to Outsource the editing immediately yeah or otherwise we'll burn out we can't

9:12 edit and make all the content if we want to focus on the content we need an editor immediately so we hired in the Philippines the Philippines is the best place in the world for Creative Talent what is the cost of something like that look like a lot the cost is a lot so our personal teams like maybe 25 or 30 grand a month which is funny because that's a lot of money to be paying for shorts that make 5 grand a month so operating at a total loss but for us it's like that never felt like much money because it was just cash flowing from the agency we never saw it it was never in our pockets like might as well be I don't know lit on fire maybe this is the benefit of doing the Mr B strategy of just throwing profits back into everything so it doesn't feel like we're spending anything for anyone watching this video

9:57 I want to know what it's like to start a business with your best friend I don't know how you could start a business without your best friend at this point the highs are so incredibly High and the lows are so Grim I guess one thing we do is just like use humor to get out of it every time it's like lucky we going to make 50 Grand by tomorrow how do we do that and he's like dude I don't know but we do it every time for any solo founder uh kudos to you but we could never do it this is like the best thing in the world I'll also add like so Dylan's a perfectionist through and through sweats the details every single one of um and my skill set is very much like let me just ship things that are 80% good enough so me without a Dylan over time just like starts sprinting in the wrong direction Dylan without me doesn't get enough stuff shipped out the door to

10:43 have iterations so I think are that kind of co-founder of maybe the executor and maybe the perfectionist or the Visionary um or the Builder and the seller I do think like that's probably the maybe the best archetype but maybe it's all I know so you guys have this business that makes $2 million but your whole focus is on creating content why content over money well we saw the The Pinnacles of success luckily like doing all this blitzing we got into the room into literal parties with some of the richest most powerful people and the funny thing was a lot of them were jealous of us and what we could do so they would ask us about like Hey how do you how do you build a personal brand like how do you grow and uh we're just like let's just make enough money we don't need a billion dollars like they do and just funnel all our money into content and

11:28 just kind like shortcut what they did walk me through a day in the life for you guys you got two really sides of the business that you're working on what does a typical day look like for you with these businesses at this point because we've outsourced the entire running of the agency it's just like explore ask the question why find that thread go down the rabbit hole and then our job is just like tell it in a 60-second book report which is super fun so we just get to learn and be curious and then I spend maybe an hour a day just like floating around the agency making sure there's no major fires and then we usually talk in the afternoon and he's got some crazy ideas something he's been uh thinking about that we explore what is the long-term Vision what does the future look like for what you guys are doing we're definitely lifestyle first so we're just like always optimizing for fun what's the path of least resistance how can we have

12:13 the fewest headaches like how can we just be happiest in the short run so it was always like how can we put the right people in place to make sure we're working on the content on the stuff one thing we like is this idea of being above the clouds it came from Colin and smeir but it's like you need to stay above the clouds have everyone doing what whatever they need to be doing below the clouds but the second you the the leaders or the Explorers The Visionaries the second you come below the clouds and you're like doing day-to-day stuff and like answering this and doing that fire you're in a lot of trouble beyond that we don't we don't plan too far out I have this tendency of planning and planning and planning and getting the logo design and doing the artwork and like not actually doing anything so Dylan having us just like default to action our plan is in the short run optimize for happiness and then like as a byproduct just teach as many people as possible seems to be working where can people watching this

12:59 YouTube video get ideas on how to make money now we started with our own itch we needed a podcast to get edited so we hired editors and then oh turns out other people have podcasts that they need edited so they just used our editors turns out they could pay us for that so we have always just subscribed to do what you want create the product you want and there are probably other people like you so sell them that product yeah if we create something we truly need right now there's probably 10 other people that need it and we can charge them a couple thousand bucks that's enough money to live so scratching your own itch last question we asked the founders if you could go on your guys' shoulders and give each other advice what would you do differently or what advice would you have for Founders the tendency because it was my tendency is to just over complicate almost everything in business I'm like thinking

13:45 about oh what's our subscription price and ah turn's too high and like we need account managers and we need project managers and we need quality assurance and dyan's like no if we can match an animator with a client for 2 years everything else goes to zero nothing else matter matters I think a big misconception is how you approach business business shouldn't be this you make money 10 years in the future which is kind of where Henry was going originally versus I'm like how do I make money 10 hours in the future how do I do something now make money today I think people just get scared about business and end up not doing anything when you could just go and Pitch your idea and try and make 10 bucks off it that's the advice I would give to anyone thinking about becoming an entrepreneur thanks for having me guys thanks for coming through follow this advice and you'll get 1 billion views and one here

14:35 nice