PLAY LONG

“Make sure what you're asking them to reply is quick and easy. So I've probably even suggested, hey. Ask someone to reply to your email. What's your biggest challenge right now? Which isn't a bad question, and you would probably get some interesting responses. But she had the good point that that's gonna take someone some time. They're gonna have to sit and think about that. A lot of people are not going to reply. But if you just say, reply hi, or, I'm curious. What email provider do you use? Reply one, if you use kit reply two, if you use Mailchimp, whatever people will just really quickly do that.”

“The only reason you're able to achieve some sort of level of success is the commitment and consistency. And just because of when you finally do achieve some sort of win, it doesn't just stop. It compounds. You keep practicing those rhythms and routines because it's what works. So I find that the early days are really challenging because you're trying to build these rhythms and routines of commitment and consistency and discipline in your life. But once it becomes a rhythm, once it becomes a routine, it's just a part of everything that you do. The results, just like investing money into the stock market in a good year, produce positive returns over and over and over again.”

“The only reason I started my local newsletters because the vision was I wanted to or I want to open a deli. And I was like, how does it how do you, on day one, get a line out the door? You have an audience. I think, so far, my plan is we're gonna do a pop up soon. I do think it's a real opportunity, and it is a real pathway. If you wanna start a restaurant or if you wanna start a brick and mortar, I think you can derisk it by building an audience first, and a local events newsletter is very easy to execute.”

“To be any type of professional athlete, that's a very selfish endeavor, you can still love and care for other people. But to be one of the best in the world, you have to really sacrifice a lot of things. And she was bearing, I guess, the burden of that in our business, in our relationship. And she just said, hey, I don't know if this is the best decision for us moving forward if you continue to chase this dream of making the CrossFit Games. I'd just spent four years trying to build there... it made me reevaluate one of my priorities.”

“We have, like, 12 core partners that we work with. Those core partners get a guaranteed number of impressions across the podcast and YouTube. And then with that, we basically include one to two newsletter features and then one to two Instagram story sequences. We could charge an extra 100,000 just for those things throughout the campaign, but we don't want it to come at the expense of okay. Now this brand's been an extra $250,000 with us and they're not seeing the ROI they want. We'd rather over perform for them.”

“Google, Gmail, they have a tool called Google Postmaster Tools. It's free to use. You just enter your domain. You have to verify that you own the domain by adding a TXT record to your DNS. Once you've done that, it will start to populate with the data Gmail has about your domain reputation, your email sending. I'm helping thousands of email senders a day, sending billions of emails. It is the go to tool for me and my team to diagnose what's going on with someone's deliverability.”

“I don't think the word viral in podcast should really sit in the same sentence, like, most times. Obviously, there's clips that pop off and things of that nature. But, in my experience, that doesn't lead to, like, you know, you just being a continued success thereafter. You get that pop, you see it in the data, and then it kind of flatlines back to a a new baseline. Chris has been podcasting for, like, seven or eight years now, and it wasn't until year, like, five that things really started, like, you know, chugging along for him.”

“Anytime somebody starts to do relatively well in local, they always think about taking it to another city. And I think this is the challenge that a lot of the big companies have had, which is finding the talent to pull it off in the other city. Because the heart of a local newsletter is a connection to the local community. And so I don't believe that you can really write these from afar. And the challenge is if you can find somebody who can really write it locally, they could just do it themselves.”

“One thing that we've actually we're starting to do a lot more is just having a pre call with the guests themselves and trying to unearth what those moments would be. I learned this from Tim Ferris years ago. He had an interview with Edward Norton. And he started that interview with a question about, like, surfing. Tim Ferris describes this as basically, like, the bottom little footer of Wikipedia is where he found that. So try to find those, like, you know, nestled in Wikipedia moments that are very deep, but have potential for that person to get really animated and excited about.”

“There's a guy named Grant Owen. He's got a show that is relatively new. If you go to his Instagram, his first post is like a pinned post, and he lists out, my goals with the show. One of the bullets says, keep your head down for five years and then look up. So it's like, if you love this medium and you want to do it long term, you kinda have to have that insane mindset of, like, just fucking grind on it for five years, really go hard, and then assess, is this working?”

“I think if you have a services company, they are one of the best opportunities out there right now. There are obviously people who are crushing it at local, like, strictly local media selling ads and stuff like that. I think it's harder, for a lot of reasons that we could get into, but the simple one is just like your market is capped, obviously. But if you have a services business, and this is the main way that the Austin Business Review has always monetized. I'll help founders with their newsletter.”

“I think what's gonna happen now is that content will start to matter more than it ever has, and it may be a new way where because it's now being scanned by AI, not just humans. So Gmail or whoever isn't just saying, like, is this a good sender? Is the email passing authentication? Do people generally engage positively with their emails? Okay. Let's put it in the inbox. There's now this new curator in town who is AI, and they are looking at the content of the message and doing things with it.”

“We speak about the definition for us of be all in is, it's your commitment to give the best to the task at hand, but it's you define your capacity of what you're willing to give, and then you give exactly that. For me, I'm willing to train twice a day... but if I start neglecting or sacrificing other responsibilities that are above those priorities, then I'm becoming all consumed. And we speak about the difference between being all in and being all consumed. And there's been plenty of windows where I have been consumed by the task and often athletic.”

“The fastest way to build an unforgettable personal brand isn't creating more content. It's creating more presence. And the highest leveraged form of presence is speaking. Am I speaking? I do not mean by creating video content. I mean speaking live either on camera or directly to an audience full of people. Your post can get you known. But your speaking voice, the way you show up when there's nowhere to hide, that's what makes people trust you. Your voice creates presence. Presence leads to trust.”

“The main reason we haven't franchised, opened multiple facilities when potentially the demand was there, is because bigger is not always better, and it's hard to find good people who are brought into the vision, who are committed to it, and who have more of an owner's mentality rather than a renter's mentality. And finding those people are hard, but when you find them, you've got to hold on to them with everything you got. We keep our team pretty small, keep our circle small, but we've now got a group that are basically your best friends.”

“So there's a woman here in town. Her name is Kirtana Reddy, and she writes a newsletter called Selling Austin, which is awesome. It's like a great weekly newsletter, pretty brief. There's, like, a handful of kinda market updates about what's going on in Austin, and then she'll feature a house or something like that. We haven't connected in a while, but at year one, I believe, she did something like $300,000 in what do you call it? Real estate fees? With clients who came to her via the newsletter. So the and that was with less than a thousand readers.”

“The single biggest test I ran that converted the best, and this might be unique to My First Million, is we ran a cross promotion with another show. The show that we did it with was just like this guy was a my first million die hard, and he happened to have, like, a really strong audience. He's in the personal finance space. And that single test that we ran was the most successful campaign we ran probably across the entire show. The reason was is, like, if you listen to the ad read, it was literally this guy saying, like, this is my favorite show in the world.”

“As you rise in leadership, your responsibilities increase as your rights decrease. A leader must give up to go up. And I thought a lot about that over the years because a lot of athletes, founders, business owners, people who are striving towards achievement and success, that is guided by purpose, it can become a very lonely journey. The heart of good leadership is sacrifice, not personal gain. I think a lot of people think that being a leader comes with all this personal guaranteed success... it's more gain. But no, it's actually at the heart of good leadership, it's sacrifice, it's giving up more, not gain.”

“It's something that we've always valued the quality over the quantity. And there's this saying that you can have control, or you can have growth, but you can't necessarily have both. And that's something I'm still grappling with, of how much control do you have? How much do you delegate and trust your team members? And I guess like, yeah, we're still learning that every day. And we're taking steps to build a team like you've got here at BPN to help you run this business, where right now me and Matty are very hands-on. But we understand if we want to grow, we can't always have a finger on the pulse.”