Transcription
I just spent 3 hours with a 27-year-old making $50 million per year. And I was so blown away by how simple his strategy is and how it will work for any business that I'm making this video to give you his exact playbook.
Because you can use his strategy today to immediately start growing your business, whether you're just getting started or already doing millions of dollars in revenue.
If you're new here, my name is Mica. I sold my last startup in 2021 and now I run a global VC firm called L7B.
So, I actually met this founder a few years ago back when I was still running my startup. I went to one of these, you know, startup happy hour things and I just happened to meet him and at the time didn't really think much of it. He was working on this app idea uh and he was still living on his brother's couch. Like that's how early they were in the company, not really much happening.
But then fast forward a few years and I kind of just forgot about him. You know, I'd see his app every now and then but didn't really think much of it until I ran into him at an event recently and he gave me the numbers and I was just so blown away. $50 million a year with massive profits, $1 billion plus valuation, and he's done it while completely avoiding, you know, big press headlines. He's a very private guy.
But I was able to convince him to sit down with me for 3 hours, and I just grilled him on everything he's doing. And after nearly 3 hours of grilling him, I got his entire playbook.
So, first, let me tell you what he's actually doing. So, the app he's built is actually incredibly simple. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about the tech or the experience or anything like that. without giving away too many details because I want to respect his privacy. It's an app that helps you improve your life.
Evaluating it as an investor. The thing that actually really stands out to me is that it's solving a painful problem for a very large percentage of the population. And I'll show you why that matters in a second. But here's how it actually works. When you download it, it actually lets you use the app and you get a 7-day free trial. And then afterwards, if you want to keep using it, it's pretty simple. It's just $150 a year. So, nothing groundbreaking in terms of monetization.
The thing that really makes it special is that as I mentioned it's a very large problem serving a massive massive what we call a TAM or total adjustable market. So my typical rule of thumb for a TAM is number of customers times the price you can charge greater than 1 billion or greater than 2 billion if you want to raise venture capital. But in his case the math actually works out to a TAM of over $100 billion. So, it's a massive market that was previously just being sort of ignored and underserved on the problems that they face.
By the way, if you're working on your own idea, I actually released a playbook that we teach all the founders we invest in on how to find and validate great business ideas. So, I'll put a link in the description. You can download the playbook. It's totally free. I hope it helps.
Now, let me tell you more about this business because having a massive market isn't enough. Lots of businesses have massive markets, but they never hit the heights that he's hit, and very, very few can do it this fast.
In order to scale the business, he first needed to find his growth engine. And rather than reinventing the wheel, he did what we always recommend, which is go look at what are the best players in the industry currently doing. They've probably tried and tested a lot of different methods. So, you can just go and copy what they're doing as a starting point on your distribution. And in his case, it was pretty simple. It was social media ads. The very best apps grow very quickly through social media ads.
But this is where his genius actually comes in. So he didn't just run social media ads or maybe what most founders would do is they would hire an agency or hire a marketing manager to run them. No, he made a list of the top 100 people on the planet that were growing apps with social media ads. And again, I have to give him so much credit here cuz even in my shoes, if I was doing this, I would probably email those 100 people and I'd maybe get like four or five responses. is I'd hop on a call with him. I'd ask them how they're doing it, you know, try to learn from them and then go implement it in my business.
That's not what he did. What he did is he made it his life's mission to meet all 100 of these people, like actually every single one. And he just relentlessly hustled intros, warm intros, connections to meet these people and not just meet them, but actually befriend them. He would go into their offices, see how they're doing it. He would run his own ads and share ideas. And by doing this, he basically built his own mastermind where he's just become like one of the world's best performance marketers. He's constantly learning and testing. And just at this point, I would say his execution puts him in like the top.1% of founders, top 001% even.
But this is not where he actually stopped. Again, I just have to give him so much credit. I I took away a lot from this conversation on how to actually execute as a world-class founder because what impressed me even more is how he's using this knowledge. Again, most founders with this knowledge would hire a marketing director, outsource it, and really just sort of implement the knowledge indirectly, but he has actually rolled up his sleeves and done the opposite. He is in the business every day making the ads. The ads are the highest leverage activity for him because it's the number one thing that matters to the business. And so he is still personally filming, editing, testing the ads himself.
And I asked him like, "Well, how many ads?" He said, "On a given month, they're usually testing about a thousand or more different kinds of ads by chopping up different intros, chopping up different midsections and outros." He's actually directing and filming and overseeing himself. If you're familiar with the concept of founder mode by Paul Graham, I think he's the living embodiment of founder mode. Even with over 100 employees, he has identified that this is the highest leveraged thing he can do and he's puts more time into this than any part of the business.
And as a result of his efforts, I mean, the odds have gotten so good and so profitable that in just a few years, he's been going from that kid that I met that was living on his brother's couch to now, like I said, over $50 million a year, $1 billion plus valuation.
So, here are the actionable takeaways for you that you can implement in your business right now. First, figure out what is the number one thing in the business that if you solve today would make your life easier. Spend some time really figuring out what's the one domino that we can knock over that just makes everything else easy. And once you've identified that, second question is who are the people that you can learn from to shorten your time to success? And I think this is where you know the goods are separated from the greats. The good people will maybe go buy a book, buy a course. The great people will make this their life's mission to become the world's best at this number one thing that is the number one most important thing for their business. So that means for you, find what that is. Go find a way to learn these things. Meet with the people, make it happen.
Now, even if you do all of this, there is still one thing that could end up making it all for nothing and you waste years of your life, which is picking the wrong business. So, to help you figure out which businesses to avoid and which ones you should double down on right now, I just made a video. I'll put the link over here. I hope it helps.