0:00 In order to be successful, you need to know that people have a small number of slots in their brain for who they remember. So, you've got to get into people's head. And in order to do that, you need to know two things. The first one is 7-11-4, which we'll talk about. And the second thing is that your brain is extremely good at deleting messages. But there's five things that will not be deleted by the brain. And the last two are the ones that are most useful. So, the first one is six. I wish I knew this stuff at the start of my career. Daniel Priestley is the money-making expert and serial entrepreneur who's built several multi-million-dollar businesses from nothing and has mentored over 3,500 businesses with the same frameworks for career success that you're about to learn. The problem that we have now is that we live in a digital world, but all of society is built for the industrial revolution system, which means that we're playing by an old set of rules and going through a schooling system that is preparing them for a world that no
0:45 longer exists. So, people feel like that there are no opportunities, there are no safe jobs anymore, feeling like you're in competition with AI, and that leaves a whole generation of people feeling absolutely wiped out before they've even started. So, what are the new set of skills people need to know to set them up in this digital world? Well, there's actually a step-by-step approach to doing that, including building a personal brand. Okay, let's pause there. Why does that matter? Cuz that's the key to capital, talent, customers. And it's not about becoming an influencer with millions of followers. But if you're seen as a key person of influence, that's enough to make seven figures. And is that where your five P's come in? Yeah, and I'll take you through all of those. And then there's the entrepreneurial pyramid, which opens you up to this whole other world of opportunities as well as side hustles and the two types of opportunities that everyone needs to know about. I want to go through all of that. Let's do it.
1:32 This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Daniel Priestley. How'd you define and describe what it is that you do with your content, with your work, um and through all of these books that you've published? What is the summary of what you do and who you do it for?
2:17 So, I have a massive passion for entrepreneurship. About 20 years ago, I started seeing a massive trend uh about entrepreneurs who could stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact in the world through business. Um I have built multiple businesses over the last 20 years, and I'm just uh fascinated by the predictable stages that people go through in order to build successful businesses. Um as I've been growing my businesses, I've been writing about it in my books, um mostly to document what I'm learning myself. Um and I also built a community of entrepreneurs who wanted to uh essentially make the most of the times that we're in. So, what's happening at the moment is we're going through massive amounts of change. It's very similar to the agricultural age, when it was replaced by the industrial age, and there were new economic rules that didn't apply to
3:03 the agricultural age, but did apply to the industrial age. So, the agricultural age was the feudal system, and the industrial age was the capitalist system. What's happening is the industrial age is fast being replaced by the digital age. And as we go through this massive change, we're seeing new rules and new economic rules that apply. So, give an example. In the industrial age, people had to to become successful, people had to gain skills, and then get a job and find an employer who would uh employ them for those skills. As we go into the digital age, what works is to build a personal brand based on your unique intellectual property, and then to position that brand next to a scalable digital uh elegant business model. And those who are doing that, and those who have figured that out, are doing incredibly well and succeeding at
3:49 speed. And there's actually a step-by-step approach for doing that. I want to go through all of that. I am I was running in Cape Town. Look at me plugging my running brand that's lasted for 5 days. Um I was running in Cape Town and a young couple came up to me at the end of my run when I'd stopped uh running at underneath this tree and they came to me it was about the 2nd or 3rd of January. They said um "Steve, we love your content. We've been listening to Diary of a CEO for a while." And they looked at each other and you could see that they were really stressed and they said, "We're just trying to figure out how to start a business and what we should be doing." And I could see in their face that they'd been mulling it for a long, long time. There was this like they're very, very young. I'd say they were like 21 years old and they were saying like, "What do we do?" And actually at that time I said, "You need to need to listen to an episode I did with Daniel Priestley." But I also knew you were coming on so I said, "And I'm recording with him shortly so make sure
4:34 you listen to that." So through the lens of that 21-year-old, you've detailed that their world has now changed. They're living in this digital world. Where would you advise those two to start if they want to capitalize on the opportunity that's presented itself? Okay, so I'll slow down for a minute. What's happening at the moment is people in that situation they're feeling incredibly invisible um that they don't matter. They feel stuck that there are no opportunities. You can't buy a house, you can't get a career, uh there are no safe jobs anymore, um AI's disrupting everything um and they feel detached from meaning and purpose. And that leaves a whole generation of young people feeling absolutely wiped out before they've even started. It doesn't actually exclusively apply just to people in their 20s. I know people in
5:20 their 40s, 50s, I know entrepreneurs who have traditional businesses who feel that way. So it's worth acknowledging that it's a widespread phenomenon. Everywhere in the world people feeling invisible, feeling the pain of like not being able to connect with the right people um and feeling stuck and feeling detached from meaning. So what we need to do is address that be- because what's happening is you're playing by an old set of rules and that's normal because the school system told you an old set of rules cuz it was based in the industrial age, and we have to start by learning the new set of rules. So, if I was advising 21-year-olds in particular, the first thing that you want to do is called an entrepreneur apprenticeship. Uh an entrepreneur apprenticeship is where you go and work in a small team of less than 12 people where you have direct contact with an entrepreneur, and
6:06 in particular, you're looking for an entrepreneur who has somewhat of a personal brand. So, they have, let's say, 5,000 to 50,000 uh followers on social media. And they've got an elegant business model that inspires you. It doesn't necessarily have to be exactly what you want to do in the future, but you need to learn the new rules. So, you need to learn how is that person building their personal brand, and how are they building their business so that it can scale. How do they communicate with people anywhere in the world? How do they sell to people anywhere in the world? So, those are some of the key things that you have to do. You do not want to become an entrepreneur straight away. It's too big a shift. You need to be a number two. I was a number two. I had a mentor. I worked for an amazing guy for 2 years. Uh we went from zero to 6 million in a year, and from zero people to 60 people in 1 year. So, I got the entrepreneur apprenticeship first,
6:53 and that's where you want to start. And then, once you do that, you can do side hustles, and then begin the entrepreneurial journey on your own. But how do you know if it's for you? How do you know if you're cut out for it? So, at the moment, what's happening is that the rules are changing so fast that you uh it's not like anyone's cut out for it, right? So, there is no sure feeling where you go, "Oh, I'm really cut out for this because it's giving me clear signals." During times of disruption, the signals get uh jammed. So, what's happening is people are going through a schooling system that is preparing them for a world that no longer exists. So, we go through 12 years of school, and it's saying, "Oh, you know, here's how you get ready for an employer." Well, there are no employers. And here's how you get ready for a career. There's no such thing as careers anymore. Um and here's how you get ready for a job. Oh, by the way, that job can easily be done
7:39 by AI already. So, all of this is happening, and that means that people are feeling this void, and they're saying, "Well, I don't feel ready for anything." That's because you had 12 years of training for a world that doesn't exist anymore. So, what we have to do is say, "All right, let's look at the world that is emerging, and let's position ourselves for that world, and reskill ourselves, and reposition ourselves for that world." When you were talking about that entrepreneurial apprenticeship, it sounded like a new form of education, a new form of university. Are there any other ways, if we're talking about that preparation phase, where you're getting ready, are there any other ways you would advise someone to rapidly excel their knowledge and skills in preparation to become an entrepreneur? Um is it books? Is it Do I sit on chat GPT? What worked for you? Books are
8:24 great. YouTube channels are great. I didn't have any of that. Um you know, believe it or not, even books were hard to come by when I was a teenager. Um you know, you had to kind of order business books in, or you had to go to a big book store that had a business book section. Um we didn't have Amazon, and we certainly, you know, anything like a podcast, you actually paid for cassette tapes and CDs, and they were $1,000. They were really expensive just to listen to some business content. Believe it or not, that was a thing. Um and all of it's for free now, online. However, there's you can't learn to ride a bike uh through books and videos. You have to get on the bike. So, the best thing to do is to work for someone who's building a business, and if you can't do that, become a co-founder with someone who's got more experience than you. Um and if you can't do that, then you need to do
9:10 some small side hustles. A side hustle is an open and shut business case. So, within 90 days, you're going to start something and finish something all within within 90 days. You're not going to get yourself into a long-term thing. You're just going to start something, see how it goes, and it ends in 90 days. When I was a teenager, I did nightclub parties. So, the nightclub party had a time where we would agree with the club that we were going to uh have the venue. Then we had a promotion phase, then we run the party, and then that was it. At the end of the night, we split the money, and that was the finish. And it all happened very quickly. And you get the learning experience, but you don't have the ongoing connection to the business. I also sold roses door-to-door. So, on Valentine's Day, I bought a few hundred roses, we dressed up in
9:56 tuxedos, and we went door-to-door selling Valentine's Day roses. And that probably lasted 3 weeks from the time we came up with the idea to the time we found a supplier, bought the roses, went door-to-door, and made our sales, and then it was all finished at the end of Valentine's Day. So, these are called side hustles, and the important point is that they're not ongoing ventures. They're just open and shut, and then you can reflect, you can then sort of see what worked, what didn't work, and then see if you want to continue after that. Something else that I I don't think I've ever heard many entrepreneurs or founders talk about when they're giving advice on that preparation learning phase is the importance of writing. Yeah. It's not had a profound impact on me. Um my the rate in which I learned was having a practice.
10:42 stage in your journey did you write? So, I made a commitment to myself when I was 24 to write a tweet every day. Okay. And I would screenshot it and post on Instagram. Now, this was maybe the single biggest hack in my life that I've never really talked about because of the all of the downstream consequences that occurred. Downstream consequence number one, got 2 million followers on Instagram by posting these quotes of ideas that I had every day. So, every day at 7:00 p.m. my girlfriend knew at the time she goes, he's going to go off for an hour and think of something to say. Um downstream consequence number two is it taught me how to communicate ideas in a concise high-impact way, and kind of what people respond to. And I'd say number three is it generally meant that if I went through my day and something had happened,
11:27 it gave me a moment to condense that down into wisdom, a piece of truth. So, that day I learned something and um without that practice, those learnings kind of would have passed you by. So, what you're describing is actually beyond just writing, it's publishing. Um and publishing means to make public, to put something into the public domain. So, yeah, there's journaling which you keep private, but then there's making something public. Um and when you have when you do this, you have to think about how would this be a value to others? Um so, you're thinking, you know, entrepreneurs have to be thinking about how would this be a value to others. You're putting it into the public domain, so you're getting feedback as to whether this is a good idea or a bad idea or okay idea. Um so, yeah, uh publishing doesn't have to be
12:12 tweeting, it doesn't have to be um writing a book. Publishing is video, audio. Um it can be long-form content, it can be short content. Uh you could do shorts, you could do tweets, right? All of that is publishing. The the essence of publishing is that you're taking your ideas and sharing it publicly, putting it in the public domain. That is a very rapid way to get started. Um interesting fact on this, that out of the billion people who use LinkedIn, only 3% are publishing regularly and less than 1% publish weekly. So, you think that you're in competition with a billion people on LinkedIn. 99% of people are just there to kind of lurk and watch what other people are doing. Only 1% of people are competing. 1% of people are creating the content on
12:57 that platform. Um when it comes to YouTube, there's 2.7 billion users of YouTube, but only 4% of people have a an account and only a fraction of those accounts are active. So, it's a tiny percentage of the world's population that are creating something. Most people are consuming. So, one thing that you're describing is the move from being a consumer to a creator. And entrepreneurs have to make that move. How have you accelerated your learning? Because you're someone that is able to give out lots of different ideas from lots of different reference points. And there must be some kind of underlying framework you're using to like learn, process, and publish, which now presents you, which is part of the reason you get invited onto the all these podcasts now, and people are paying you to speak at their events, etc. What was that framework for you?
13:43 So, my background was I used to have an agency, and we used to run all these different events, and we used to have to put stuff onto people's seats when we were running events, and I had to kind of write stuff all the time like quick reports and all of that. So, I got in the habit of writing. I saw the power of writing. Um in 2009, the entire world tipped on its head um after the global financial crisis, and I was completely disrupted. Uh I went from millions of revenue down to a few hundred thousand of revenue. I lost 90% of my revenue in 1 year. Um it was mass- It was I remember one Christmas party, 17, 18 people at a Christmas party, the following year was three. Um it was morbid. So, during that time where the global financial crisis had such a deep impact, I began writing about what is it that I
14:30 know to be true? What is it that like I don't know much because I've just had the rug pulled out from under me. What is it I do know to be true? What are the most uh strong truths that I could share? And I ended up writing the book called Key Person of Influence in 2009, and it came out in 2010. And what I felt very confident about was this idea that the future was going to see a shift from business and institutional brands to personal brands. That we would see the decline of big faceless companies and the rise of uh individuals whose personal brands were bigger than the institutions. Um and it was pretty radical idea at the time, but I felt pretty confident about it. And the more I wrote about it, the more I felt this was where the world was heading. Um if we look today, we can see Brian Cox, Professor Brian Cox, has more
15:15 followers than CERN. Um we can see Richard Branson has orders of magnitude more followers than Virgin. Uh we can see Elon's got more followers than NASA. Uh we can see, you know, Trump is way more powerful than the Republican Party. So, the the essentially the personal brand has just gone woosh ahead. Um but I was I I started that process very murky that I didn't quite know what it was. It was a feeling or a sense. And by the time I'd gone through the publishing process of writing, uh I was clear. And the macro factors that brought that about? What are those underlying shifts that happened that meant we went from the logo to the person? Let's zoom out 300 years. So, the the agricultural age
16:01 uh was essentially the economic system was called feudalism. And there was lords and kings and queens. And then there was serfs and people who served the land. Then technology changed things. You can imagine what it must have been like when 300 people were on a farm, and then they saw three people on a tractor. And then that tractor went and went and did the job of hundreds of people with three people on it. And it's like, "Oh my goodness, what are we all going to do?" Um how are we all going to live our lives anymore, right? And then they would have said, "Well, what are going to be the jobs? Like, everyone works in farming." And it's like, "Well, there's going to be this whole new system. There will be a completely new economic system called the industrial system, and it's going to replace everything." So, back in the agricultural age, uh if you were a lord, right? And if you were rich, if you were successful, you
16:47 had vast tracts of agricultural land. But as soon as the industrial age kicked in, you didn't even need land. You only needed a tiny amount of land to put a factory on. What mattered is that you had the ability to organize labor and machinery. And if you could organize a factory, that was way more economically productive than a huge hundreds of acres. So, the whole economic system got tipped on its head. And suddenly it didn't matter if you were a duke, it mattered if you were an industrialist, if you were a capitalist. So, this whole new system took over. We had 200 years of innovation, and it went through multiple waves. But, the important thing to know is that it's technology that changed things, right? It's always a technology shift, right? The the the fundamentals of the economy are dictated by the technology that we have available to us. So, what happened around the 2000s to
17:34 2020 is we had these general-purpose technologies that just got introduced as though they were nothing. You know, suddenly everyone can publish a video online. Suddenly, everyone can write a blog. Suddenly, everyone can tweet. Everyone can form a community on Facebook. Uh there's this device that you put in your pocket that is better than a uh traditional camera studio that the BBC would have had. So, the the power was just rapidly swinging from institutions to individuals. I'm sitting there going, "Wait a second, an individual has got all the things that a multinational corporation has access to, but they don't have the bureaucracy, right? They don't have the the weight on their shoulders. They don't make slow decisions. They can make fast decisions." So, as I witnessed this technology being introduced, I said, "The way this is going is it's going to
18:20 take all the power of big businesses and institutions and just give that to individuals." That's exactly what happened. And it I mean, if there was ever a year where that's been more in focus with this election cycle and what we've seen with Trump and going on Rogan and Kamala going on Alex Cooper in the media lens. That That's what cost the election. So, that's a big trend. Um US presidential elections have always predicted major trends. So, Franklin Roosevelt in the '30s, he did the national radio campaign. JFK in the '60s did the televised campaign. Obama in 2008 did the social media campaign. Each of those campaigns changed the game. Trump in 2016 did a hyper-personalized digital data-driven campaign, uh
19:06 famously with Cambridge Analytica. And that actually gave birth to data analytics and hyper-personalization. And then something big happened in 2024. And what happened is that Trump broke the mold on campaigning and he started going on all these major podcasts. And if we actually crunch the numbers, Trump did something like 40 hours worth of watch time. And it got 124 million views. And Kamala did, I think it was 7 hours. Just in the long form? Yeah, just on the long form. She did 7 hours total and it only got a few million views. And one of her podcasts only last 7 minutes. Now, what she did is she approached it like a McKinsey consultant, which is she turned up and she said, "Here's the
19:52 script, here's the questions. Ask me these questions and then I'm out of here." And it was very much the kind of professional corporate approach. Trump rocks up onto comedian's podcast and says, "Yeah, ask me anything." And then he just goes on a big rant and it goes for 3 hours. Now, what's actually happening is is quite predictable. In a world of short videos and in a world of AI and in a world of confusion and disruption and and where everyone's throwing punches at each other saying, "You're misinformation, you're misinformation." You've seen some of this, right? Going on, right? Misinformation, misinformation. What's actually going on is that people say, "Hey, enough's enough. I want to see a long-form piece of content and make my own mind up. I don't want anyone to tell me what's misinformation. I'm smart enough. I want to see if this
20:39 Trump guy is a crazy guy. I want to be able to see him, you know, for 2 or 3 hours and I'll make my own mind up on that because everyone's saying so many different things and I know that there's all this confusion. I want the long-form piece of content." So 2024 began the long-form unscripted era, right? So, now where we are with marketing is you've got to drop the script and you've got to do long-form content. And here's my prediction. The prediction is is we're going to see the biggest CEOs in the world clamoring to get onto this podcast and other podcasts like it. They're all going to be wanting desperately to build their personal brand because they know that the long-form unscripted podcast is the only way to hire talented people, the only way to get loyal customers, the only way to keep investors happy. It's
21:24 going to be the key to the entire shooting match is that the CEO of a big company has to become human and they have to be unscripted. And what advice would you give them because you consult for a lot of people? They come to you for advice whether it's the biggest influencers of the world or CEOs. If if you were giving them advice on how to achieve that goal, what would you say? Well, I I mostly talk to entrepreneurs and I mostly care about entrepreneurs. And the advice I give to entrepreneurs is work your way up the podcast pyramid. Um so, there's literally thousands and thousands of podcasts that get a few thousand views. Just go on those. Go on lots of them. Um if you do a good job, you'll eventually be invited onto a slightly bigger one and you'll eventually be invited onto a slightly bigger one again. And there's this pyramid of, you know, there's there's a few podcasts as big as yours, but
22:10 there's thousands of podcasts in every single niche and vertical where anyone can go on and you know, talk about who they are and what they do. So, for any entrepreneur, my challenge to them, the ones that I'm working with, is an absolute minimum I want them to create 10 to 20 hours of watch time in the year ahead. So, I want people to go on 10 podcasts that last for 2 hours or 1 to 2 hours and I want them talking through their business story, their origin, their mission, their vision, you know, how they got started, the types of people they employ, the types of customer problems they solve, the outcomes they deliver. All of that, put it all into a podcast, get good at that format. You publish in lots of ways, right? You publish written form, you publish in video. Is there anything at all that's
22:56 if there was one single thing that's helped you become better at speaking or communicating ideas and you can't say, "No, I'll take away the restraints." What would you say it is? Frameworks. Frameworks. What does that mean? So, you need communication frameworks. So, if I'm introducing myself to someone, I use something called name, same, fame, aim, and a game. So, we can break that down. What is my name and my business name? What is What is it that I'm the same as that you already understand? Let's pause there. What is Why does that matter? When people are storing information, they need to open a folder, and they want to open a folder that's very easy to label. So, they don't want to open a folder that says like I'm an energetic healer that works with
23:42 transmutational objects that that transcend time space and blah blah blah. They want to go, "Oh, you know, you're a life coach. Okay, great. I understand that." Or you're a vet. Okay, cool. You're a consultant. You're You know, you're a software company. Got it. So, it's like just the most basic thing that I can then hang everything on that. Mhm. Cuz I already understand it. So, name, same, fame. So, fame is like what makes you interesting? What makes you fascinating? What big brands have you worked with? What interesting projects have you landed? So, anything that would make you stand out. Any big numbers, any awards, any big names, any of that would be your fame. So, name, same, fame. Aim. What are you working on in the next 90 days? Mhm. And then game. What is your bigger
24:27 vision? What do you want to achieve in the next three to six years? I think a lot of people aren't even clear on that. A lot of people aren't, and that's why the framework's powerful, cuz it forces you to get clear on it. If you then get clear on it, you can introduce yourself with power and authority. You can do the beginning of a podcast. You can be on a stage. Just introducing yourself at a networking function. Believe it or not, you can cram all of that into 30 seconds. Mhm. And so, going back to this point of preparation. Right, so one of the big things that is going to give me a significant competitive advantage if I'm building a business is personal branding. What else do you think someone like me at the start of my career needs to understand about the game of personal branding? Is there are there any particular platforms I should be aiming at? A particular upload cadence? A
25:13 particular type of content? Here's what you need to know. You need to know that humans have a limited ability to remember names and faces. They only have a small number of slots in their brain for who they remember. And the number is about 1,500 in total. Um and it's about 150 that you can kind of remember well. And these are called Dunbar's numbers. And Dunbar's numbers basically said you've got a few slots for your family and then some more slots for friends, then you've got your acquaintances right out to 1,500 people that you can easily put a name and a face to. In order to for you to be successful, you've got to get into people's head. They have to kind of know who you are. Um in order to do that, they have to spend time with you. They have to have rep uh repetition with you and they have to see you in multiple contexts. So, the
26:00 research says 7 11 4. 7 hours, 11 interactions on four platforms. Per? In order for you to remember me. Okay. Total. Okay. So, for example, you and I, we've now connected a few times. Um so, we have probably clocked up maybe 7 hours together. Mhm. Now, what that means is that uh if I bumped into you at a conference, even if I was on one side of the room and you were on the other side of the room, you'd say, "Oh, there's Daniel." Your brain would immediately go, "Oh, there's Daniel. I'll walk over. I'll say hello." Because we've spent enough time together. Um now, there's this phenomenon called parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are basically one-sided relationships. It it's how we feel towards famous people. So, we think that we know George Clooney. We think that we know Angelina
26:46 Jolie. We don't. It's a parasocial relationship. That person we've spent time with them through their movies, through their media appearances, and therefore, because they've clocked up 7 11 4 with us, we then feel that we know them. Is this making sense? Makes perfect sense. Yeah, so what we have to do is build parasocial relationships at scale. So, what we have to do is put out enough stuff where anyone can spend 7 hours, 11 interactions for on four platforms. So, when I work with entrepreneurs, here's one of the questions I always ask. I say, "If I was to block out tomorrow, and I'm going to take all day to watch, read, or listen to everything that you've got available online, and uh I'm looking for things that are on message that tell me about who you are, who you serve, what it is that you do,
27:32 can I spend all day going through your online environment and just fill the entire day?" And most people say no. And then, occasionally, some people say, "Yes." And they say, "Yeah, actually you can. I've been on a few podcasts. I've got an audiobook that I released. I've got some videos on YouTube. I've got some posts on LinkedIn. You could go through all of that." Those are the ones that are scaling really fast, because they've put in the work to be scalable. They can build a parasocial relationship like that. And if we drill down into the art of building a parasocial relationship, Mhm. because it's funny, at the start of the conversation you said that these are the new rules in business in the world because of these macro changes. But at some point, the new rules become the old rules again, Mhm. when everyone listens to this podcast. And you kind of see it at the
28:17 moment on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a um a long stream of professional personal brand builders, whereas 5 years ago, it wasn't the case the case. But but the but the numbers are still only 1% of people are doing it. 99% of people aren't posting weekly. So, we're still early. We're still way early. But is there is there a a framework for creating some kind of differentiation amongst a noisy crowd? Because Yeah. So, the the differentiation So, a lot of people ask me about differentiation. So let's talk about what makes you different. And to you to talk about this, let's go through a scenario. And the scenario is that you're walking down the street and you're walking down Oxford Street and it's thousands of people, really busy street. And as you're walking down, your brain
29:03 has this limbic system that just deletes people. So you just kind of see people as blobs not to hit and you just kind of walk. And if I stop you at the end of the street and I say, "How many people do you remember seeing?" you'll go, "None. I don't remember seeing anyone in particular." If I said describe some of the people, what they were wearing, "I can't remember anything." So your brain is extremely good at deleting messages and this is what's happening in our marketplaces. People just delete everything. Here's what doesn't get deleted. So there's there's five things that will not be deleted by the brain. The first one is scary. So if something is scary, we pay attention to it. This is why the news has been so successful for many many years because they say if it bleeds, it leads. If it's scary, if it's horrible, people will watch it. Let's find the the worst possible things that
29:49 happened today. Let's blow them up and put them in everyone's house so that they spend time watching uh watching the news. So so be a scary person. scary right? Uh the next one is be strange. So if you saw someone walking down the street uh dressed as a giant hot dog, you'd say, "Oh, I remember the guy who was dressed as a giant hot dog." cuz it's so strange. Peacocking. Yeah. Well, peacocking, yeah. Uh you could try Yeah, exactly. You could wear that big kind of hat that you've got in the cupboard that uh that we don't talk about. Mhm. Uh and then the next one's sexy. So So we've got strange, we've got scary, we've got sexy. Now these are three things that most businesses don't want to be. So most businesses can't stand out and sexy, even if they wanted to be that, most people can't pull that one off anyway. Um so only a few lucky people get to do
30:35 that one. Um but actually the last two are the ones that are most useful. And that is providing free value, so free things. Anyone who gives free value away is immediately stand out. Okay, we've got to make sure that it is value. It's got to be value. Because everyone thinks what they're doing is value. Totally. It's got to be something that people would have otherwise paid for. Um and it has to be beautifully packaged. So, if I hand you a piece of jewelry in a plastic bag, you're going to think, "Oh, it's fake or it's, you know, stolen or it's, you know, not real or something like that. It's cheap." Right? If I hand it to you in a beautiful box and it's beautifully wrapped, you're going to say, "Oh, that's a very thoughtful gift." Mhm. So, it's the way that it's packaged and it's also, you know, that it's actually something that people would otherwise pay for. So, providing free value, um and also being familiar, which is
31:21 clocking up the 7-11-4. So, free and familiar are the two things that anyone can apply. So, look at Let's look at you, for example. You spend tens of thousands of pounds producing episodes of this show and you just make it freely available on um YouTube. I wish that's how much I spent. Well, each each show, right? Um So, you're putting all this energy and effort in and you're putting high production value. You're going to the expense of getting all these great guests. All of this stuff's going on and then you're making it free for so many people. You're including people in conversations that they normally wouldn't have access to. So, you have clocked up enormous amounts of standout value for people because you've been consistent, so 7-11-4. People have spent
32:06 7 hours, 11 interactions, four locations with you. Um and also you've done free value. So, you've given a lot for free. So, um essentially, those are the two um and you're also strange. So, So, with those three things, you've been able to uh succeed massively. We do have scary conversations as well. I have to be honest. We did the nuclear bomb conversation, right? And happy sexy millionaire, so you've got that as well. Yeah, sexy is what I'm Thank you so much for that, Daniel. You've got all five going on. It but when you were saying this, So actually thinking of this as a a marketing framework for brands as well. I was thinking of that kid that I met on the in the promenade in Cape Town with the couple and I was thinking if they were starting out with an idea today in a very saturated environment like Oxford Street in London, pulling in on some of these actually gives you such an unfair advantage to
32:53 get to get going. And I I I know this myself because when I was 18, one of the things that I realized in hindsight was working for me was I looked a bit strange. I had this big which some people will find photos of, this big hat that I used to wear and I would wear it everywhere. I wore it because my hair was But it became this like this distinctive thing that at conferences, at events, on my LinkedIn, it became part of my brand. That's why I interjected with the word peacocking because looking slightly different in some way does actually It does work. Yeah, it cuts cuts through the noise. The other thing too, let's go to your friends the 21-year-olds in Cape Town. One of the first things we can do for free is we can um productize what's called the demo and the customer needs analysis. So
33:39 let's get really tactical here. Um when it comes to what most people do to launch a business, they make a real focus on the supply of what they do. So if they let's say they want to do a drinks business, they're going to like talk to bottling companies and they're going to talk to, you know, how much do I have to spend buying the fruit to put in the tea and do all that sort of stuff. They're thinking about the supply of what they do. Um if they're going to launch a consulting company, they're thinking about, oh, do I have the right MBA qualifications and all of this stuff is the supply side of what they do. What we want to do when we launch anything is we want to test the demand of what we do. So testing demand, the best way to do this is uh one of the best ways to do this is to productize the demo and a customer needs analysis. Mhm. So that is where we
34:25 go around and we sell a presentation that might be 15 minutes to for hour where we present what it is that we can do and how it works and the principles of how it works and then we collect enough data to identify whether you've got the need for that product. So, it's called a customer needs analysis. So, the demo and the customer needs analysis you can package that up so it feels like a product. It feels like something free of value. So, give me an example then using I'm going to launch a a new coffee. Yeah. And it's the the the point of difference with my coffee is it is going to be good for your libido. Fantastic. So, uh let's imagine that we're going to sell that through retailers. Yeah. And the real customer is not the end user, it's the retailer who's going to stock it. So, what I would do is I would say we've got a new coffee brand coming and
35:12 it's all about coffee for libido boosting. Um and what we want to do is we want to present to you the data, the research as to how this coffee works and why it works and all of that sort of stuff. We want to show you the branding, we want to show you like what this is going to look like. And then also what we want to do is set up a customer needs analysis where we collect the data from several of your locations to find out in advance whether people would sample this product, whether they'd buy this product, how much they'd spend. Um so, we will at our expense do the clip boarding or we'll do the um wait list campaign um or we will uh collect the data uh through um a you know, a coming soon promotion. So, essentially what we're going to do is we're going to present the data and we're going to do the customer needs analysis or present the demo, the customer needs analysis and that's all
35:58 going to be packaged up as our first thing. Now, mind you, we may have no coffee at this point. We may actually have no physical product, but big retailers, they move slow anyway. Even if you had product, they wouldn't buy it today. So, they're going to say, "Oh, that's fantastic. That's what we'd like to do. We want to collect the data and we want to see the demo and see the research." So, by packaging that up as a first step, uh you're actually providing initial value. Do you know one of the things that I don't think I've ever talked about that I think um entrepreneurs and people that are founding companies should really consider is if you're thinking about let's say writing a book, instead of writing the book and then hoping it does well, Mhm. what you should do is you should take the book idea you have and then run it as a Facebook ad. Run 100 different titles. Um and when
36:45 people click on that Facebook ad, they hit a waiting list. Yes. Now, in that whole process, what you've just done there is you figured out the exact percentage of people that will click on um 100 different ideas. So, for my upcoming book, one of the things that I did and some people listening to this now would have seen the ads, is I ran 70 book titles. Mhm. Beautiful. So, 70 books like this would have popped up in your feed and people have clicked on them and they've said, "I want I would like that book." They put their email address in or something like that. And now I have this data and I can tell from the top of my head Which is the most successful? 15% of people clicked a certain one and the worst performing one was clicked by 0.3% of people. And I could have written a book um about that 0.3. And my math isn't exceptional, but the variance between a 0.3% conversion and a 15% conversion is like what's that? 1,500%
37:32 or something crazy? Um and all and it was and it would cost me 200 quid to run the test. Yeah, um that's the beauty of Facebook ads. You know, you can do a set I mean, at any given time we've got hundreds of different variations of ads running and they it's like, you know, it's basically the Hunger Games for which ad performs better. Um and people don't do this sort of stuff and this is how professionals like yourself launch businesses. So, um with anything that I'm launching, whether it's a book or a product or a new business, we're going to run a set of Facebook ads, probably 10, 20, 30 different variations. When you click on the link, it says, "This product's no longer available in your area." Or this product is not yet available in your area. Um but you can join the waiting list. Click here to join the waiting list. Now, once people click to join the waiting list,
38:18 uh that's where we ask about five or six key questions. So, there's this thing inside people's head called the situational model. And the situational model is where am I now, where do I want to be, what's in my way, and what do I perceive as the path of least resistance. So, all the questions that we ask uh tell me about who you are today, which best describes your current situation. Tell me about where you want to be, which best describes the outcome that you're looking for from this product or service. Uh what's in the way, which best describes the reason you've not been able to get that outcome in the past. Mhm. And what are you currently considering as an option for getting that outcome? Right? So, those are the key four key questions. Then we might ask some price questions. Uh what price do you feel would be a
39:05 fair price to pay? What price do you think would be so cheap that it would make you question the quality? What price would be so expensive um that you would no longer be able to afford this? So, we'll ask a few pricing questions. So, we don't just get people to join a waiting list. Sure. We're saying we want to understand the situational model. Because here's the interesting thing, especially with other products, not necessarily books, but with other products, sometimes you get a lower click-through rate, sometimes you get um what appears to be cheaper marketing, but attracts the wrong person. Yeah. And then sometimes you get a poorer performing marketing campaign. So, this one might produce leads at £10 a lead, this one might produce leads at £20 a lead, but this one might be attracting students who are broke, and this one might be attracting chief executive
39:51 officers who are on 500 grand a year. I'd rather pay £20 for that client than £10 for that client. So, by getting the situational model, uh we can actually then understand which is the best campaign. Is there anything else that's really sort of pertinent to testing if my idea has legs? And I want to just add an element to this, which is we're not just talking here about the first idea, we're talking about every product you you release in the future. every business. Even your marketing campaigns and everything you do. Yeah. The The world is moving so fast that if you're an existing business listening to this, let's say you're a big business, you do tens of millions of profit, you're going to be pivoting into new products, new markets, new territories. You're going to be um trying to attract different age demographics. You're going to be you know, all of that sort of stuff. This is one of the rules of the current
40:37 economy is about data and testing. You've got to be really fast with how fast you can prototype and test and get the data. Um so we love intro events where you just simply do an introduction event on Zoom uh to talk to customers. Um so we're introducing you to this new coffee. Um what do you think? Uh come and join the introduction event. We're going to share with you some research. We're going to have a a guest speaker who you've already heard of, right? So that would be an introduction event. Um I'm a big fan of discussion groups. Discussion groups are awesome for testing a an idea. So let's say um it's a discussion group. You know, let's say you're doing a a new brand of coffee and it's for Sex coffee. Sex coffee, right? Sexy sexy coffee. Um so yeah,
41:23 we're going to do the sexy coffee discussion group, right? And it's basically we're launching a new product um and it's all about uh bringing sexy back to coffee. Um and if you love having coffee and you want uh want to be part of this new brand that we're launching, join the discussion group. Discussion groups are pretty wild. So I'll give you two examples of discussion groups. One of our clients um Gabriella Rosa, she uh ran a clinic. Um and it was a fertility clinic and it was about natural fertility breakthroughs. Um and what she did is she had a physical clinic that was run in a traditional way. She wanted to go and be more digital. So she launched an online discussion group where she said, "This is a discussion group for people who want uh fertility breakthroughs." 23,000 people joined the discussion group, all right? And it was super active and she never had to worry about customers ever again and she built her
42:09 business then globally. Uh from there she wrote a book and she changed her business. She went from a physical location to a digital business, um but it it started with a discussion group. Um another guy, one of our clients, Max, he sold a business, not for a crazy amounts of money, but a decent sale, and he decided he wanted to um spend time with people who had uh family offices. And family offices have hundreds of millions of dollars to invest, and they're like basically the family office of multi-billionaires and things. He reached out on LinkedIn, and he said, "I'm launching a WhatsApp group for people who run a multi-family office or a family office. If you'd like to join, uh it's limited to 400 people. If you'd like to join, fill in the application form to be part of our WhatsApp group for family office." So, he ended up with 400 people who have
42:55 collectively over 10 billion to invest. And he built himself a a a group of people who are some of the most successful investors in the world and some of the biggest checkbooks in the world. Um so, it just started with a WhatsApp group. So, um a discussion group is just a super easy way to launch anything. Um and it costs nothing to set up a discussion group on WhatsApp, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. Um so, those are some of the some of the best ways. And then, the final one that I love is called an assessment. So, a quiz or an assessment. And this is basically where essentially you turn the customer needs analysis into an assessment, and people fill in questions to find out uh if they would like the thing. So, for example, I noticed on one of your uh what which one? Huel, right? Sorry. I noticed on Huel that
43:41 you have a quiz. Um and the quiz is which Huel is right for you? Um and if you click that button, you answer a series of questions, and it tells you which product would be the best product for you to uh for you to take. I noticed that Whoop didn't have it, right? So, I actually created one for you. But anyway, you. uh I'll give it to you later. Um but basically, if you wanted to uh launch a product like Whoop, you you do an assessment, which is how well do you know your health and fitness? You know, um do you are you tracking your sleep? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? So, by launching the assessment first, while you've got the product in development, you could get 10,000 people who filled in the assessment. Now, if they've come up with a score that is like, "Oh, I only know my health and fitness 22%. I need to get that up to over 80%. I need a product that helps me
44:28 to do that." So, that assessment is essentially diagnosing a need. You're helping the customer diagnose a need. Yeah. That maybe they weren't clear on. Yeah. So, this is customer needs analysis. Smart businesses often sell the needs analysis before they sell the product. Especially with anything that's especially anything that is complex. But, it goes beyond that because most customers now feel a sense of clutter in their lives. We've gone from feeling 100 years ago, we felt that we had lots and lots of things that we wanted or needed, and we had unmet needs. Most people feel the opposite today. We feel that we have too many books and we haven't read them. We have too much entertainment, we haven't watched it. We have too many clothes and they're cluttering up our wardrobes. Our houses are full of stuff. Mhm. So, people feel such clutter that they only want things
45:15 that are hyper-personalized to the thing they actually need. Um because otherwise, they feel, you know, that it's going to be another thing that they're not using. So, by selling a customer needs analysis, when people see that it's a perfect fit, then they want to buy. In my last book, The Driver of Success: 33 Laws, I talk about um the idea that friction can create value. Mhm. And I give examples of where someone has added friction to the customer process and it's resulted in more people buying. And one of the studies I talk about is where they took two groups of people, they exposed one of them to a survey in order to enter a discussion group. Mhm. Right? So, they had to go through this survey process to get in. And they let the second group straight into the discussion group. Yeah. And then they asked both groups to rate how valuable and enjoyable they
46:01 found the discussion group to be. Now, the group that had had to go through a survey to get in Yeah. reported that the discussion group was like really interesting, etc., etc. And the group that had been let straight in reported that it was boring. And it was an intentionally boring group. The stuff So, they made an intentionally boring group. But just because you made someone go through a process to get in, people reported that it was more valuable than otherwise, which says something about our psychology. does create value. Um demand and supply tension is the ultimate test of value. Um you know, it's horrible to say and I I hate this being true, but there is no such thing as objective value. Nothing is objectively valuable. Everything is subjective. Why is a Bitcoin worth what a Bitcoin is? Because there's more buyers than sellers. There's demand and supply tension. Why is water free? Because it's freely
46:47 available. There's no friction. Why do we never stop and think about how incredible it is that we have Google Maps? And like we go like, "Oh my goodness, someone spent a billion dollars sending satellites up so that I can have maps on my phone for free." Like no one's weeping tears of joy for Google Maps, and we should be. Mhm. Because he you know, someone spent a billion dollars on our behalf, so we've got free maps on our phone, but there's no friction around it. Mhm. Now, if they suddenly said, "We're taking it away," we'd hit the roof. Yeah. And if they said it's 10 bucks a month, we'd pay 10 bucks a month. Mhm. Um so, friction creates value. Um demand and supply tension creates value. Now, the very difficult thing that we have in the world right now is that in a digital environment there's no natural tension. Right? So, a
47:33 hundred million people can watch a video in a week and you know, it transcends time, space, wear and tear. There's no barriers. Nothing There's nothing that stops it. The money accumulates around those tension points. So, the successful businesses, they know how to use the digital environment to drive up demand and manufacture desire and manufacture demand. And then they have choke points in their business or tension points in their business where demand and supply tension is rife, and those are the places where they monetize. Mhm. Um something that's really interesting about monetization that's happening at the moment is that all the money is moving up to the top 10%, right? So, as as we go through this big transition, the affluence is all up in the top 10%. So, we did some research into this. The top 1% of people in your audience,
48:19 in everyone's audience, whether you're a you know, LinkedIn account or whether you've got millions of followers, top 1% have got a total of 15% of the budget available to spend. The next 9% have got 45% of the budget available to spend. So, in the top 10% there is 60% of the available budget. And then the bottom 90% collectively have 40%. So, what happens is that the new business model that's emerging is that you give free value to the bottom 90% and you don't ask anything in return, but you monetize the top 10%, and you find things that are very special, very rare, special experiences, special products, limited editions, um communities uh special access.
49:04 The top 10% have got all the money, so you just give free value to 90% of people, and you only create products and services for the top 10%. That's very much a new business model at the moment. And the 90% are driving your content, your business, your product to the top 10% through their engagement, their sharing, etc. Well, it's a fractal. It doesn't matter what you do, the top 1% will even if even if you only did something for billionaires, the top 1% of billionaires have got 15% of the total budget, and the and the bottom 90% of billionaires have actually only got 40% of the budget. If you take the Forbes list, it's still those numbers still apply. Um the key is is that you well, actually what you want to do is the opposite. You don't want to get dragged down into the 90% because the 90% are the noisiest,
49:50 they're the loudest. So, if you ask everyone how much should I charge, the average answer is going to be $500. But, if you ask the top 1% how much should I charge, the average answer is going to be $15 to $20,000. So, you have to be very, very careful not to create a product that gets dragged down towards the 90% cuz the 90% don't have the budget to pay the top money. You're far better off having a way of um uh a way of segmenting that top 10% so that you can actually pick up the signal from them and not the noise from everybody else. Are there any other frameworks that you would use in that early stage where you're trying to figure out if your idea has traction or even from a sort of motivation psychology
50:37 perspective if it's worth pursuing this thing for the next 10 years of your life. Because we talk a lot about okay, if someone's clicked on it, someone there's demand and interest, but the journey of an entrepreneur is an emotional one. And as you often say, there's you go through hell and high water, ups and downs as an entrepreneur. So, there's an element of this which is like figuring out what you want to commit your life to. Mhm. Well, we call this the entrepreneur sweet spot. And the entrepreneur sweet spot is a Venn diagram. And you're trying to balance between your passion, Yeah. the problem and the value of the problem that you solve, and how much people are willing to pay for that. So, passion, problem payment. Uh so, ultimately things that we're highly passionate about, that's great, but that only ticks one box. And if you're passionate about something, but you're not solving a problem for others and they're not
51:23 willing to pay you for it, you're going to feel very unrewarded, you're going to feel um disconnected, maybe you feel even unethical uh about that. Uh a lot of people in corporate jobs, they solve a problem and they get paid well, but they're not passionate about it. And what they tend to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater, and they go and pursue being a yoga instructor from being a corporate lawyer, and then they wonder why they got no money cuz they just kind of threw away the thing that they're very good at and the thing that they get paid for and just exchange it. So, what we have to do is actually try and capture all three by making some compromises. And the compromises are I'm not going to go to the thing that is the extreme of passion, and I'm not going to go to the thing that's the extreme of financial rewards. I'm not going to go to the extreme of my intellectual property and my problem-solving abilities. I'm going
52:10 to find something that is in the middle that ticks all of those boxes. So, I'm I'm getting a good blend. While understanding that I'm There's going to be a trade-off. There's going to be some shadow on the some trade-offs. Yeah, you can't have You can't have it all at the extremes. You can have it all, but not uh all uh at the extremes. You You talked about something at the start of this conversation. You mentioned the word geography. Um as we were talking about the macro factors that are at play in the transitions we've seen. My question to you is, does geography matter for success as an entrepreneur? So, those kids in Cape Town, do they need to be thinking, "Listen, we need to move to one of the major cities if we're going to have stand a chance in most of these new digital um opportunities?" It used to matter a lot. When we used to think about entrepreneurs, we thought about two men,
52:55 typically in their 20s, who came from an a prestigious US university. They got into a garage. They, you know, they dropped They dropped out of Harvard. They dropped out of Stanford. Uh and then they started something that was VC-backed. That was the old model of what we think of as an entrepreneur. And it was very much dependent upon those parameters. Entrepreneurship's transcended that. It's transcended geography, gender, race, um and and also the sca- size and scale of what we consider to be successful. So, what we're now seeing is people all over the world who uh are able to connect with markets anywhere in the world, launch a product that can be sold anywhere in the world. Um we're seeing people who bootstrap rather than get VC capital. Uh we're seeing people who um rather than trying to create something mass market, they create something niche
53:41 market. Rather than trying to scale to be a unicorn, they actually ask the question at what size would I be fulfilled? So, there are plenty of people who Well, one of the most fulfilling businesses that you'll ever have has between six and 12 people and does three or four million of revenue. And if you've got that, probably you're going to be the most fulfilled person in the world. If it's profitable. Yeah, well, cuz a lot of these businesses have 60% margins. If they're digital businesses, if they're intellectual property um you know, if they're running on the new economy assets, then they'll be wildly profitable. So, you might have six to 12 people do two or three million a year. You might make a million of clear profit. Um and then you're totally building a business on fun, freedom, and fulfillment. Are you the next Google? Absolutely not. Do you
54:26 have VCs breathing down your neck? No. Um are you able to pick and choose the types of people and opportunities you want to work with? Yes. So, incredibly fulfilling. So, that's a new type of business. I would call that a lifestyle boutique. Um there's another type of business called a performance business. Um and this is a business that typically has 30 people, normally working with some sort of technology, and they build a business that they build a business that can be sold for between 10 and 100 million. And that's my That's my game. I like businesses that achieve 10 to 100 million valuation with about 30 people on a team, and we can sell to either a publicly listed company, a private equity-backed company. Um we can exit to any of those kind of companies, but you know, we don't have
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