How Anyone Can Develop The Mindset Of A Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Daniel Priestley

Daniel Priestley 0:00 Wanting to have a side hustle, wanting to have this is all about your own personal needs, which are irrelevant to the market. The market does not care

Ali Abdaal 0:08 Daniel has written five books all about entrepreneurship and business and stuff. In particular, Oversubscribed is the book that I have most highlighted on Kindle out of any book I have ever read, and his whole library of books, essentially starting with The Entrepreneur Revolution, gives a very legit and systematic playbook for how you can start a business from basically wherever you are with a full-time job without having to give too much time to it.

Daniel Priestley 0:32 As an entrepreneur, you're kind of asking the question: What is the problem I'm trying to solve in the world? There's a group of people out there, they've got an unmet need, they're frustrated, there's something that they're not happy about, and then I'm gonna come along and solve that holistically for them.

Ali Abdaal 0:45 We also talk a little bit about Daniel's backstory from how at the age of 19 he got a job at a startup, started his own company at 21, became a multimillionaire by the age of, like, 23. Super, super interesting stuff. Uh, I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Just a very quick thing before we get started. If you have not yet subscribed to the podcast, either on YouTube or on your favorite podcast app of choice, then please do. It really helps us out a lot.

Ali Abdaal 1:05 Well, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. Um, it's really nice to see you in the flesh because, uh, your book, Oversubscribed, is, uh, the most highlighted book I have ever highlighted of all time on Kindle of, like, hundreds of books in my library.

Daniel Priestley 1:16 Amazing.

Ali Abdaal 1:16 Basically almost every other paragraph in this I was like, "Oh my God, this is so good."

Daniel Priestley 1:20 Just select all.

Ali Abdaal 1:20 [laughs] Just select all, yeah. [laughs] And there was a, a bit at the end where you say, "Hey, one of these chapters I wasn't even planning to include in the book, and it's up to you to figure out which one." [laughs] And I was always like, "But all of it, all of it is just sick." Anyway, um, you've written a bunch of these books, um, you know, The Entrepreneur Revolution, Scorecard Marketing, Key, Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets. Key Person of Influence is also quite influential amongst the sort of creator space-

Daniel Priestley 1:41 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:41 ... around, like, building a business around, around an individual.

Daniel Priestley 1:44 Personal brand, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:45 Yeah. All that kind of stuff. Um, but before we dive into all the business stuff, I'd love to open with how, how did we end up here, you and I talking to each other? You're from Australia originally. Like, what was the, what was the backstory?

Daniel Priestley 1:56 Yeah, I kind of did retirement first. Uh, I grew up in a beach location called Mooloolaba in Australia, which is, like, just a beautiful beach, um, and a small town. Uh, and, um, uh, I had the opportunity when I was 19 years old to join a startup, and basically I, uh, joined this startup when there's three of us around a table. There's no bank account. There's no business name. It's just we're gonna be starting a startup. This guy who's 37 years old, who's previously had businesses, he's gonna be launching something, and I'm 19 and I'm like, "Oh, okay, I'm joining something," um, 'cause I'd just dropped out of university. And, um, and it was really exciting and it was like, oh wow, okay, what's, what's gonna happen? And then, uh, over the next two years it really took off fast. So, um, we went from, you know, zero to, I think, 6 million in two years. Uh, we went to 60 people, so from a beachside location to 60 people inner-city Melbourne offices.

Ali Abdaal 2:54 Wow.

Daniel Priestley 2:55 Um, so it was really-

Ali Abdaal 2:56 What was the startup? What did it do?

Daniel Priestley 2:57 So it was a, a marketing agency.

Ali Abdaal 2:58 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 2:59 And, um, uh, it was very much focused on event marketing. And, um-

Ali Abdaal 3:04 Event marketing?

Daniel Priestley 3:05 Yeah. So, well, what, what-

Ali Abdaal 3:07 Like when Tony Robbins puts on an event, he hires a marketing agency to-

Daniel Priestley 3:09 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 3:09 ... get people to go.

Daniel Priestley 3:10 Fill, filling events.

Ali Abdaal 3:11 [laughs] Okay.

Daniel Priestley 3:11 Yeah. Bums on seats, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 3:12 Right.

Daniel Priestley 3:13 And, um, partnering with different, uh, people and brands to fill their events, um, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne. So that, that was this, uh, exciting first start I had to, um, being in business, and I had this amazing relationship with the founder, John, um, where I was always under his wing and learning and learning, and he would recommend books and he'd recommend these crazy challenges for me to complete. So I had to keep a journal. I had to stop watching news or, you know, no, no news. I had to carry $1,000 in my pocket. Um, there was all these kind of weird things that he got me to do, uh, over the, over the period of building that business. And then two years in, I go to John and I say, um, "I would really like some shares in the business because I was here at the beginning and I, you know, I've set up this subdivision, this regional division, and, you know, I'm doing all the right things." And I caught him at the wrong time. I remember it vividly. He was loading boxes into the back of his car and I'm asking him about shares in the business and, um, and he says, "Dan, if you want shares in a business, go start your own." [laughs] So, uh, so I did. Uh, at 21 years old, I went and started my own company. I replicated everything I'd learned from John, and I basically copied the business model I knew. It was the only thing I knew. Uh, I went and launched my own business, and it took off, and it went really fast growth. So-

Ali Abdaal 4:27 So you launched your own marketing agency?

Daniel Priestley 4:29 Yeah, event marketing. Um, and basically the, the whole business model was lead generation for companies that want lead generation and introduction events.

Ali Abdaal 4:40 What is lead generation for the unfamiliar?

Daniel Priestley 4:42 Yeah, so lead generation is where you get someone to signal that they're interested in doing business with you, right? So if you think about it like a financial planner, um, they could try and sell financial planning and, like, literally say, "Here's how much it is." Or they could say, um, take an online scorecard and fill that in, and then people, that's a signal of interest, and that person is a lead. Um, and another way to generate a lead is through an event. So you could put on a weekly event called An Introduction to Financial Planning or An Introduction to Building Wealth for Retirement. So that is, um, what I talk about in the book as a product for prospects or a lead generation product. Uh, and so my first business was all about creating these introduction events, and what we'd do is we'd partner with established businesses-

Ali Abdaal 5:26 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 5:27 ... and they were rightly focused on their core business, but they didn't really have a lot of time for focusing on lead generation. So we would do these introduction events, an introduction to, you know, whatever it was, introduction to blank, and we'd run these weekly events up and down Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and so-

Ali Abdaal 5:45 Like in real life?

Daniel Priestley 5:46 Yeah, in real life.

Ali Abdaal 5:46 Oh, okay.

Daniel Priestley 5:46 Back in, back, back before Zoom.

Ali Abdaal 5:48 Yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 5:48 You know? [laughs] Back before YouTube.

Ali Abdaal 5:50 Real life events.

Daniel Priestley 5:51 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 5:51 Oh, my God. Yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 5:52 Uh, like this was before, uh, MySpace.

Ali Abdaal 5:54 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 5:55 Uh, so we're going right way back. So we would just have these live events running. Um, in 2006 No, 2005, sorry. Uh, I did 174 live events that year. We did 10.7 million in revenue.

Ali Abdaal 6:11 Wow.

Daniel Priestley 6:12 Um, and it was year three, so-

Ali Abdaal 6:14 How... Okay, how, how does a company like this make money?

Daniel Priestley 6:16 Uh, so several different ways.

Ali Abdaal 6:18 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 6:18 So we would get paid sometimes per lead that we would generate. Sometimes we'd get paid per sale that would come through. Um, the difference was, is that most agencies love to do fee for service. Pay me 10 grand and then pay me this per week retainers and all that. What I did, which I'd learnt from John, was a risk to reward, uh, deal. So I would actually take the risk on running these introduction events, and I would profit share or revenue share with the companies. So my very first day launching my business was, uh, a newspaper ad that was, I think, $7,000 for a quarter page ad. I put it on my credit card. I had no way of paying for that other than if leads came in and we made sales. Uh, so that was the launch of my business on a credit card, taking out a quarter page ad. So really scary kind of stuff.

Ali Abdaal 7:09 How did you have the conviction to, to do that? That, like, even I wouldn't do that, and I think I'm a fairly risk-taking kind of guy. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 7:15 Well, it didn't feel super risky because I'd been doing it nonstop for two years with John.

Ali Abdaal 7:20 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 7:20 Uh, and I had actually just before leaving his business, I'd set up a regional events marketing business. So they were doing Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and I started with Tasmania and, um, [lips smack] a place called Geelong and Bendigo and Ballarat and all these kind of weird places that are a few hours drive out of a major city. And, um, I had basically been placing ads in their newspapers and running introduction, uh, presentations, introduction events, and I'd been through the motions f-nonstop-

Ali Abdaal 7:53 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 7:53 ... for two years. So for me-

Ali Abdaal 7:55 So you were pretty seasoned at the thing.

Daniel Priestley 7:57 I felt like, yeah, I was going through motions that were familiar, but oh my goodness, it felt different at the time when you're putting money on your own credit card-

Ali Abdaal 8:05 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 8:05 ... versus the boss's credit card.

Ali Abdaal 8:07 How does, uh... Okay, so

Ali Abdaal 8:09 a question on this front. D- A lot of young people wanna start their own businesses. Um, to what extent do you think it's useful to join an existing startup versus just start your own and have a punt and kinda do it anyway?

Daniel Priestley 8:20 It's, it's massively useful to join someone else's startup. Like, I would highly recommend that to absolutely anyone. So here's what goes wrong with a lot of young people. They go to careers fairs and all that sort of stuff. It's only big corporates that exhibit, so they end up being funneled down the big corporate, uh, uh, path. Now, you can start a business that doesn't exist. You can go to a big corporate. So in the UK, there are 7,000 large companies that have more than 250 employees. There's 5.5 million businesses in the middle that already exist, but don't have 250 employees. So, and the vast majority of them have 10 people or less, right? So it's huge- hugely stacked between two and 10 people is the small business landscape. So when you join a big corporate, you have no idea what the whole business does. You know, have no idea what everyone else does. Um, they don't bring you in on strategy or any of that sort of stuff. You are just completely in the dark, and they say, "This is your job. Go do that job, and if you can't do it, we'll find someone else who can," is the subtext. But when you join a business that's four people, five people, six people-

Ali Abdaal 9:25 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 9:25 ... you know exactly what the whole company does. You, you often know the revenue. You often know the profit. You often know the weekly activity of the entire team. So you get this kind of feeling and experience of what an entire team does and what an entire business does. And I, I would highly recommend anyone who wants to start a business, first do two years working inside somebody else's small business.

Ali Abdaal 9:49 Ooh, interesting. So, like a lot of people, um, sort of in, in our team when I talk to them about this or people who've done internships with us feel like... Say, say that, "Oh yeah, you, you know, I l- I, I feel like I'm learning a lot." And to me I'm always a bit confused, like, what, like, what is, what is there to learn? Like, 'cause we're just, like, doing stuff. But I guess for someone who doesn't have experience running a business or being in a... Or, yeah, it's completely different to life in Amazon HQ corporate.

Daniel Priestley 10:12 And it's also n- not too different to what you did with medicine, where, you know, you do your study and you do your education, and then you go and work in a hospital, and you're working around experienced doctors.

Ali Abdaal 10:23 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 10:24 And you're working, you know.

Ali Abdaal 10:25 And, like, the theory is all well and good, but, like, the two, first two weeks on the job when you realize, oh, this is the dynamic between the nurses, and this is how you request a scan, and this is how you do all this other stuff that you never... It's-

Daniel Priestley 10:34 Yeah, and here's how you talk to people-

Ali Abdaal 10:35 You can read about it, but you never really go. Yeah

Daniel Priestley 10:36 ... and, and here's how long this actually takes. And, you know, these little things that you... Like, in a business context, flipping back from medicine [chuckles] which I know nothing about, uh, you know, just things like, uh, well, how do you send out, like, a big bulk email to a list? Or where do you get a list from? Or, like, how do you sit down and have a lunch and negotiate a joint venture? So for me, my two years doing that when I was 19 to 21, I actually got to sit in on those meetings. So when John was negotiating to do a list swap, you mail your list for our product and we'll mail our list for your product, I'm sitting in on that meeting quietly and going, "Oh wow, that's how that happens."

Ali Abdaal 11:15 That's the thing, yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 11:16 Yeah, and when John was proposing, "Oh, here's what we'll do with the revenue. We'll do a revenue split, and we'll actually... This will be the first chunk for costs, and we'll take that out first, and then this will be... And here's how we'll measure it." And it's like, oh right. Okay, that's just a meeting that you have, and you just agree that in the meeting, and then you write it down and confirm it, and then you put it in the heads of terms.

Ali Abdaal 11:37 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 11:37 Okay, now I get it.

Ali Abdaal 11:39 Yeah, I think there's so much stuff like this where until you've had experience in a thing, it's just, it's, it's hard to even fathom what goes on. Like, this weekend I w- I was at this, like, phil- philanthropy conference-y type thing where there were people from, like, nuclear policy making and, like, grant making, and I was, I was asking all the basic questions. I was like, like, "What, what does it mean to, like, lobby a cong- a congressman?" And they're like, "Oh, you literally queue up, and then you literally give them money for it." And wait, what? That's a thing?

Daniel Priestley 12:04 [chuckles] That's a-

Ali Abdaal 12:04 And like, how, how do you contact a government official? Do you just, like, Google their name? And they're like, "Well, no, it's opaque for a reason, and you have to do this, and you have to..." Like, it's just completely mind-blowing that- This whole world of like government and policy and s- grants and philanthropy that I have zero experience in. And like I can read all the books, but I, I wouldn't know how to contact a government official-

Daniel Priestley 12:21 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 12:21 ... unless I know someone who is literally doing the thing.

Daniel Priestley 12:24 Yeah. And you hear these fancy titles, it's like, "Oh, I'm an analyst with, um, KPMG or Goldman Sachs."

Ali Abdaal 12:30 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 12:30 And it's like, "But what do you actually do?" "Oh, I get given a list of these people, and then I have to go and put these spreadsheets together."

Ali Abdaal 12:37 Oh. Oh, okay.

Daniel Priestley 12:38 Yeah. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 12:38 [laughs] Okay. So you're 21, you've started your own, I guess, lead generation company. Okay, so

Ali Abdaal 12:45 i- is this like, let's say I am an estate agent and I wanna sell houses to-

Daniel Priestley 12:50 I'll give you some real examples

Ali Abdaal 12:51 ... yeah.

Daniel Priestley 12:51 We worked with, um, financial planners. We worked with franchisors. One of the biggest deals we did was with franchisors who wanted to sell franchises, and what we'd do is a roadshow of events-

Ali Abdaal 13:01 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 13:01 ... introducing their franchise to potential franchisees. Um, now as a $60,000 franchise, we would get, uh, 15% of the franchise success fee, um, as our marketing fee.

Ali Abdaal 13:13 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 13:13 So they paid us, um, an amount that covered costs first, and then we got 15% success fee on, on top of that. So that was a great deal. They'd put a lot of energy and effort into creating a franchise.

Ali Abdaal 13:26 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 13:26 We, um... They... When, when I met them, I went to a franchise expo, and there were 300 franchisors all trying to say that they had the best franchise. And my-

Ali Abdaal 13:36 Franchisors, as in like Five Guys, McDonald's, KFC-

Daniel Priestley 13:38 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 13:38 ... would be a franchisor?

Daniel Priestley 13:40 Yeah, exactly.

Ali Abdaal 13:40 Okay, cool.

Daniel Priestley 13:40 And they're... Like, those are... Like McDonald's is the biggest well-known franchise.

Ali Abdaal 13:44 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 13:44 They sell you the rights to run their business. But there's all sorts of little franchises like, um, mortgage broking franchises, and even things like gardening franchises and-

Ali Abdaal 13:54 Oh, okay

Daniel Priestley 13:54 ... [laughs] and cleaning franchises.

Ali Abdaal 13:55 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 13:56 So, um, you, you basically... I go along to a franchise expo, and I see that there's 300 franchisors trying to stand out and be different, and I go, "This doesn't work for anyone." 'Cause if you're a customer thinking about buying a franchise, you've now got way too many choices. And if you're a franchisor, you're just standing right next to 300 competitors. So it's just feeling too weird-

Ali Abdaal 14:20 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 14:20 ... like too, you know, too, um, uh... It, it feels too saturated. So we just basically approached one that I thought was great, and we negotiated a deal, and we did a roadshow where instead of them being shoulder to shoulder with competitors, we would put them in front of 50 people who were potential customers and-

Ali Abdaal 14:39 How would you find these 50 people?

Daniel Priestley 14:40 So we'd advertise, do direct mail campaigns. We would do, um, uh [laughs] there was something called fax broadcasting at the time.

Ali Abdaal 14:47 Fax broadcasting. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 14:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 14:48 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 14:49 Let's not even go... Uh, I'd have to s-

Ali Abdaal 14:50 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 14:51 I'd have to even begin by telling your audience what a fax machine is.

Ali Abdaal 14:53 [laughs] Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Heights. Heights is a brain care smart supplement. It is two capsules that you take every day. I've been taking it for the last 12 months. And it contains over 20 evidence-based micronutrients that you need to keep your brain and body healthy. Like I said, I've been taking Heights every day for the last 12 months, and through that I've actually become friends with the founder, Dan, who we actually had on season one of this podcast. And this season we also have an interview with neuroscientist and psychiatrist Tara Swart, who is the chief science officer at Heights as well. And one of the things I love about Heights is the fact that every single thing they do is very evidence-based. Over on their blog, on their website, they've got tons of articles along with links to all of the different papers that they've cited that show all the benefits of the various micronutrients that they've got in these two little capsules. And the best thing about taking these is that it's just two little capsules every morning, so you don't have to deal with green sludge or any other kind of faf- faffery. It's just literally taking two pills. It's super easy to sign up. You just go on the website, you put in your address, and they send you either a monthly or a quarterly subscription. I sign up to the quarterly one myself because, A, it's cheaper, and B, I'd have to take fewer deliveries. And if you use the coupon code Ali15 at checkout, that will give you 15% off the already discounted price of the quarterly subscription, so you can try out Heights to your heart's content. So thank you so much, Heights, for sponsoring this episode and for helping improve my own brain care. Just a quick message from one of our sponsors, and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Shortform. Shortform is the world's best service that summarizes books. But it's way more than just book summaries. They almost have a whole study guide for every book that they've got on the platform, where they've got a one-page summary, and then they also have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns. And it's not just chapter-by-chapter breakdowns. Also in between the chapter breakdowns, they have interactive exercises where you can engage more readily with the ideas in the book. Shortform covers nonfiction books from a bunch of different genres that you might be interested in. For example, they've got a load of stuff in the business world. So if, for example, you're an entrepreneur or you want to become an entrepreneur, that'll be great for you. They've got books in motivation. They've got books in education. They've got books in lifestyle and communication. Basically, any genre of, like, nonfiction, personal developmenty, self-helpy stuff that will help you level up your life, it's all there on Shortform. Shortform publishes new book guides and articles every week. And if you're a subscriber, then you get to vote on what book they cover next. And in fact, through that system, I have voted for various books that they've then turned into summaries. For example, one book I recently revisited is, in fact, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Now, I read this book ages and ages and ages ago, I think when I was, when I was in school or university, and it really shaped the way that I approach my views of money. But to be honest, the book is kind of basic and it's somewhat out of date. Uh, but revisiting the Shortform summary of it meant that I could revisit the sort of abstracted lessons without having to deal with all of the, you know, the tone of the book, no offense to Robert, is a little bit, a little bit too brash, whereas a Shortform summary is, is in a way a nicer way of getting the same ideas. Anyway, if any of that sounds up your street and you would like to sign up to the world's best service that summarizes books, then head over to shortform.com/deepdive, and that will give you a completely free five-day trial, and you can try out the service to your heart's content. That link will also be in the video description and in the show notes. And thank you so much, Shortform, for sponsoring this episode. So, okay, so you as the marketing agency are, are trying to You're putting that in a newspaper being like, "Do you have 20 grand to spare? Have you thought about starting a franchise?"

Daniel Priestley 18:19 Well, no, we would do-

Ali Abdaal 18:20 Or-

Daniel Priestley 18:20 Uh, see, that's the mistake. So what most big companies do is they promote their core business. Do you wanna buy a franchise?

Ali Abdaal 18:27 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 18:27 So we would, what we would do-

Ali Abdaal 18:28 But that's not what you wanna do [laughs] .

Daniel Priestley 18:29 No.

Ali Abdaal 18:29 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 18:29 What we wanna do is we wanna create an introduction that is a low-risk first step, and it's not necessarily about... Like, so f- I'll give you an example from when we worked with a financial planning company. So they were marketing, do you want financial planning? And what we would do is, like, run, uh, events on, do you wanna understand the current market? Do you wanna know what the current trends are? Do you wanna hear from a financial planning expert to explain what's going on in the current market? So an introduction event is just a low-risk first step, um, to introduce the idea. Now, anyone who turns up to that event, clearly they have an interest in solving a problem, but what we're not doing is saying, "Do you wanna buy my stuff?"

Ali Abdaal 19:09 Yeah. Okay. So you give them essentially a load of free value at the event-

Daniel Priestley 19:14 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 19:14 ... or, like, very cheap value, and then some proportion of those will be like, "Oh, by the way, this-"

Daniel Priestley 19:18 Exactly. So, b- yeah, by the way, if you would like to talk to one of our financial planners, there's a diary up the back of the room and you can book a, a meeting one-to-one, and just g- head up and put your name in the diary, and there's all the slots are highlighted that you can go, and just f- fill your name literally with a pen and paper. And that was a big part of what we did, right? So it was putting on an interesting speaker, um, and getting 50 to 100 people to come along to that, and then inviting people to put their name in the diary.

Ali Abdaal 19:46 And then you either get paid based on how many people put their name in the d- in the diary, or if or, or how many of those then convert to a paid customer for the financial planner?

Daniel Priestley 19:54 Yep. Yep. So we would do a combination of success fees based on leads or sales.

Ali Abdaal 19:59 Wow. Okay. So when you were 21-

Daniel Priestley 20:00 And mind you, we're going way back in time.

Ali Abdaal 20:02 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 20:02 I'm 41 now, so we're talking [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 20:04 [laughs] So you start this lead, lead generation marketing business, and you, you said you were doing sort of 10 million plus?

Daniel Priestley 20:09 We got to 10.7 million, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 20:11 Within how long?

Daniel Priestley 20:12 Three years.

Ali Abdaal 20:13 Bloody hell.

Daniel Priestley 20:14 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 20:14 How did, how did that feel as a 24-year-old at the time doing that kind of numbers?

Daniel Priestley 20:17 Uh, it was pretty wild. It was a lot of stress. Um, it was, I mean, we had a huge team. Well, when I say huge team, we had, uh, we had about 20 of us working out of a massive seven-bedroom house. Um, you know, I was 24, I was buying, uh, like, a brand-new BMW X5, which I wasn't able to really even insure and, you know-

Ali Abdaal 20:37 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 20:37 ... things like that. Um, I, you know, I traveled constantly, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne. I stayed in five-star hotels and ate in Michelin Star restaurants because we were taking clients out and all of those kind of things. Sometimes I would be staying in Sydney and wouldn't bother checking out of the hotel 'cause I was ducking down to Melbourne for one night and, like, it was crazy. We were doing a million a month in sales. So, and we were very profitable. Uh, so it was a pretty amazing first start to life. You know, one of the lessons I got from my first mentor, John, is that success doesn't have to, uh, it can happen quite quickly, right? It doesn't have to be this long road, that actually if you tap into a trend, you can push the door and it can fling right open. Um, so a lot of the message that entrepreneurs get is that, oh, you've gotta really grind it out and you've gotta crawl across gr- glass and, you know, and then you can make $1 and then you can make $10 and... You know, we did a couple of million in the first year with John, and then we were-

Ali Abdaal 21:33 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 21:34 ... doing six million in year two. So it was in my head that it can happen quite quickly.

Ali Abdaal 21:38 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 21:39 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:40 That's interesting. Yeah, because th- th- that very much is the prevailing entrepreneur narrative, and that's

Ali Abdaal 21:44 certainly the, the narrative I peddle when it comes to creators and, like, YouTubers and stuff, where-

Daniel Priestley 21:48 Compounding

Ali Abdaal 21:49 ... yeah, compounding and long-term growth, and if you expect revenue within six months as a YouTuber, it's like, ugh, you, you might be kind of aiming for the wrong sorts of things. Um, in, in what way is, like, the entrepreneurship stuff different to that?

Daniel Priestley 22:03 So there are some businesses that are compounding businesses, and there are businesses that, um, are what's called a J curve. A J curve is where it loses money before it goes up. Um-

Ali Abdaal 22:13 Hmm. Okay

Daniel Priestley 22:13 ... so, and that's the, the shape of the cash flow is the J, right? That's what the J stands for. It doesn't stand for anything that begins with J. It, it's the shape of losing money and then making money. So that's called a J curve business, and the J curve business a lot of the time is like technology. So let's say you spend a million dollars building something, uh, of, of tech related, and then you sell it for 10 pounds a month, $10 a month, right? I keep jumping between dollars and pounds. Um, but, uh, you would have what's called a naturally occurring J curve. You've spent all this money to build something, and now you've got someone paying $10 a month. Now you've got 10 people paying $10 a month.

Ali Abdaal 22:51 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 22:51 So now the J curve starts.

Ali Abdaal 22:53 And now you're compounding.

Daniel Priestley 22:54 And you're... Yeah, and hopefully you get to the point where, oh, when we hit 5,000 people, then we break even, and then when we hit 10,000, it's all profit. And, you know, so that's the J curve, and the uptick of the J, uh, is what you're hoping for. That's why you're in it in the first place. But you've gotta get through the J. So that's, um, that's a lot of business models are naturally occurring J curves.

Ali Abdaal 23:16 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 23:16 Setting up a restaurant is a J curve.

Ali Abdaal 23:18 Like large expense to set it up, and then you need to hit a certain threshold of customers to break even and then be on-

Daniel Priestley 23:23 Vol- yeah, you gotta hit volumes.

Ali Abdaal 23:24 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 23:24 Right? So a restaurant, you know, the average spend might be $30 per person, so you gotta have a lot of people coming. Um, so that's a J curve business. There are other businesses that are not necessarily J curves. Like, for example, consulting. Um, you could sign up one consulting client who spends 80 grand a year with you. Uh, and, like, you've got almost no overhead-

Ali Abdaal 23:44 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 23:44 ... and straightaway you're consulting and let's say you get four clients, and now you're making, you know, hundreds of thousands, and you h- have very little overhead, and you might hire an assistant or you might, you know, do something like that. You might work on their site. Um, so for example, I know people who are, uh, consultants to manufacturing companies, and they optimize the manufacturing process, and they actually look

Daniel Priestley 24:08 for what's called lean systems, and they get paid hundreds of thousands to go and do manufacturing consulting. They work on site, um, very low overheads. That's not a J curve business.

Ali Abdaal 24:20 Yeah Yeah, that's, uh, that, that, that's so interesting. So, s- so two, two thoughts on this. Um, I think the, the business of, quote, "being a content creator" or doing the YouTube channel or whatever thing is definitely a J curve business. Um, even if you're not spending any money on it, it's definitely a J curve in terms of the time, 'cause you're a massive, like s- sinking so much time in, into the thing before-

Daniel Priestley 24:42 And not getting anything back

Ali Abdaal 24:42 ... exactly, before you hit the monetization threshold. And now all of those assets that you've spent years building up are now st- compounding, and then you get to stupid levels. But it's like people get disgruntled and discouraged because they, they're sinking in the time, and generally while they're a student or while they've got a full-time job-

Daniel Priestley 24:57 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 24:57 ... and they're not seeing a return straight away. Whereas... And I think it's, it's a lot less... Like, I listen to a bunch of business podcasts, and I generally don't hear about non-J curve businesses. Like, I've, I've g- I've got a friend, uh, from, from university who does this manufacturing consulting for fashion companies 'cause he's into, like, AI and sort of coding and stuff and loves fashion and understands how fashion supply chain works, and gets, like, stupidly large amounts of money for a single consulting arrangement.

Daniel Priestley 25:26 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 25:26 Um, and he's just, he's just making money. He doesn't have an audience.

Daniel Priestley 25:29 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 25:29 He's not trying to-

Daniel Priestley 25:29 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 25:29 ... do the whole YouTube thing. He's just making money from day one.

Daniel Priestley 25:32 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 25:32 And you just don't hear about those sorts of businesses. And so people who are like, "Oh, I wanna maybe start a business on the side," aw- uf- automatically feel like, "Oh, I have to sink two years of free ef- free work into this thing before I can make money."

Daniel Priestley 25:43 Yeah. And you do if it's a J curve, but not if it's not. Uh, so the typically the difference is the sales process. So a J curve business normally relies on almost a frictionless sale, where people either do a free, free piece of content, or they do a free trial, um, or they sit down at a restaurant expecting to spend, you know, $30 or something like that. So it's fairly frictionless. The non-J curve businesses normally have a sales process. So you're sitting down with a potential client, and you're actually convincing them to part with a sizable chunk of cash, and normally it would be thousands to tens of thousands per sale, and you need to generate leads, and then you need to make the sale. So you have to, you know, sit down with that fashion business and say, "Look, here's how your current system works. Here's some of the best practices that you're leaving off of the table." And you might sell an initial scope of work that is, like, fact find or something like that, and then you present that, and you come back, and now you're presenting a piece of work. That can also turn into a boutique. So you could have three to 12 people working together doing supply chain consulting together, and all of that, you know... Everyone can be making great money, you know, in those types of businesses. So anything that involves a sales process is normally a non-J curve business.

Ali Abdaal 27:00 Interesting. Um, w- what-- where does a freelancer fit into this?

Daniel Priestley 27:06 Yeah. So s- freelancer is self-employed, and it's not a model that I think is a great model. So you're essentially chief cook and bottle washer. You're doing strategy and implementation and finance and scheduling and all of that sort of stuff. Um, and essentially what you're doing is you're charging a premium because people don't have to commit to a, a long package.

Ali Abdaal 27:25 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 27:25 So what tends to work entrepreneurially is to not get caught up as a freelancer selling your own labor. All right? Let's just zoom out a little bit. The school system teaches us to be component labor. So when we go to school, right, the whole thing is about e- everything is based off the Industrial Revolution model, and most people end up as a component in a larger system. So we get taught how to become a com- a piece of component labor. So, um, when we freelance, we're essentially

Daniel Priestley 27:56 selling ourselves as component labor to someone else who has a bigger outcome in mind, right? But we're just doing that ad hoc.

Ali Abdaal 28:03 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 28:03 Now, the trick to, about being an entrepreneur is to separate from the mindset of being component labor and to actually move across to being outcome focused and looking at, what is the customer trying to get done? What does the customer want? Why is that customer buying this? What's the payoff for them? Radical empathy with the customer, and then saying, "I will build you a solution that you want, and I will find the components, whatever they are-

Ali Abdaal 28:26 Okay

Daniel Priestley 28:26 ... and I'll put those together and sell you that."

Ali Abdaal 28:28 And it may well be you doing the thing at the start, but they don't have to know that.

Daniel Priestley 28:33 You, you could-

Ali Abdaal 28:33 What's, yeah

Daniel Priestley 28:33 ... well, you could potentially be a piece of labor. However, the better option is to have some expertise such that you know how to organize other people's labor, so that you... Like, if you've got the knowledge of how... Let's use this as example, right? If you've got the knowledge of how supply chain should function, you should be able to, uh, organize a team of three or four people who know how to optimize that, and you should be able to select the right people. And then you, you're better off actually being the key person of influence up on stage telling stories, um, winning the deals, uh, writing a book about it, putting a podcast out there about it, and then having a team who deliver the actual outcome. Uh, but the trick is that you want to, as quick as possible, avoid being a component in somebody else's system and actually be someone who stands for an outcome and someone who's an expert in either talking about that outcome, selling that outcome, uh, overseeing that outcome, putting together teams that know about that outcome, et cetera.

Ali Abdaal 29:29 Yeah. And so let's say, uh, so ju- just to use a concrete example, um, I know a bunch of people who, um, are interested in writing, uh, they've maybe done, like, Eng- English degrees or something, don't really wanna... Maybe they've tried consulting for a year or two and freaking hate it, and they love the idea of, you know, live my dream remote digital nomad life, work from anywhere, type stuff on my laptop, become a, quote, "freelance writer" would be how... Oh, like, the default path would be, "I need to get a normal job." The, the, the next to default path would be, "I should become a freelance writer." But it sounds like, like, how, how would you be thinking about that to maybe think more entrepreneurially?

Daniel Priestley 30:04 So let's start with the downside. The downside is that that sounds lovely, and we love thinking about doing the work. So the freelance writer loves the idea of sitting in Bali with the laptop and doing the freelance writing. One of the issues is, is that in order to do the work we love, we have to win the work that we love. So now you're asking the question, well, okay, I know you can do the writing piece, but are you gonna be able to win the significant number of clients necessary in order to do that? Now, for most businesses, winning the clients is gonna be 30, 40, 50% of the time. You're gonna be constantly hustling for a client. So what you can do if you're a freelancer is you could try and find four or five, uh, companies that need regular work, and you split your time between them. And really what you're hoping for is that each one pays a slight premium, and they, they're not worried about your flexibility, that you can work from Bali. So that's the total upside package that you're looking for, maybe splitting your time between four, um-

Ali Abdaal 31:05 Yeah, and you're hoping for a retainer or something-

Daniel Priestley 31:06 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 31:06 ... so you've got a regular income coming in.

Daniel Priestley 31:08 And whereas you might have been paid 50 grand, if you split it up between several, you might get 60 or 70 grand, right? And you might get time flexibility or for, you know, that sort of thing. So it's, it's okay. The downsides are significant. You know, you don't have a, a real career path unless you invent one, and, um, you can easily have, you know, lack motivation because you're not in an environment that's dictating, you know, a, a level of performance. You're having to create those elements yourself. You can get caught up in things like finances and paying taxes and, um-

Ali Abdaal 31:39 Yeah, chasing up invoices [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 31:40 ... cha- chasing invoices, all of those things. Suddenly you realize that you've got all of the, um, downsides of having a business without the upside scalability. You've all... You've got all of the downsides of having a job without the security of a job. Uh, so freelancing to me is not necessarily a great idea 'cause it comes with a lot of the downsides without the upsides.

Ali Abdaal 32:01 Okay. So using this writer example, how might they level up their thinking and think more entrepreneurially?

Daniel Priestley 32:05 Well, you could create a writing agency. You could, um, create, um, uh, packages of content, intellectual property that you've created that you can then resell and onsell. Um, you could create your own, um, uh, written assets, uh, which get used in any number of ways, so you can create licensable assets. Um, so there is stuff like that. The difference is, though, you have to stop thinking like a technician. A technician is someone who's gonna... Component labor, they're gonna, you know, do a job for money. Um, you've got to start thinking about an entrepreneur, which is, "What problem am I trying to solve in the world?" So it all starts, as an entrepreneur, you're kind of asking the question, "What is the problem I'm trying to solve in the world?" Like, there's a group of people out there. They've got an unmet need. They're frustrated. There's something that they're not happy about, and then I'm gonna come along and solve that holistically for them. I'm gonna come u- up with a full solution, full and remarkable solution for them, and that's gonna solve that for them. And I'm gonna organize labor, systems, IP, technology. All of that's gonna be organized, and we're gonna put that together. So-

Ali Abdaal 33:09 Hmm. Yeah. So n- I'm not thinking, "I want to be a freelance writer." I'm thinking [chuckles] "What is the problem that I can solve?" [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 33:16 Well, the problem... The, the, the, the issue is if you're a freelance writer thinking about, "I'm a freelance writer and here's what I wanna do," you're essentially, you're your own customer. You're thinking about your own needs and your own problems, and that's the opposite to where entrepreneurs need to think. Entrepreneurs need to park their own needs and their own problems in order to research what somebody else needs.

Ali Abdaal 33:35 So in your example of g- going to this, um, franchisor expo realizing that, hey, there's 300 people out there, you... In- instead of thinking, "I want, I want to be a lead gen person running events," you were thinking, "What is the problem that these guys have, and how can I build a business to solve that problem?"

Daniel Priestley 33:51 Yeah. So I was marrying up a set of skills that I had acquired and, and a business model that I knew with looking at these people really clearly frustrated that we've paid all this money to come to this show and, you know, we're just surrounded by competitors.

Ali Abdaal 34:06 Okay. And so how... What was your relationship to money, like, the, in the, aro- aro- around that time if you can remember? Sort of age 19, you start working for this startup.

Daniel Priestley 34:20 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 34:20 You're earning a salary, and then suddenly you're sort of making, like, millions doing your own thing.

Daniel Priestley 34:24 Yeah. So as a university student, um, I was properly broke, um, to the extent that I would, uh, you know, go to the butcher and see if they had offcuts that were going cheap that day. Um, and I would go to the veggie store and get a box of, like, horrible vegetables that were, you know, going, like, for $2 a box. Um, I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver on $3 a delivery. Um, I was, um, a late-night barman. Uh, I was doing door-to-door sales for a roof insulation company setting appointments. Like, I was doing whatever I could to just simply survive. And I would work... If I wasn't doing uni, I was working, and I was, like, completely just trying to optimize every spare moment and making maybe, like, 1,000, maybe $1,500 a month, just enough to cover rent, and I was living with five people in a three-bedroom house. So all of those sorts of things. So I had a real s- You know, the evidence that I had was that money was very scarce, very hard to come by, and that, you know, this was something that was just how it was, right? E- everyone I knew was in that position as well. So one of the questions that happened with my mentor was he said to me, um, "Daniel, how much do you think is a lot of money?" And I said, "52,000 a year," right? If you earn a grand a week, there's... I, I remember saying, "There's not much you can't do on a grand a week." And he kind of laughed, and he said, "Daniel, I'm gonna put you in a sales role, and you're gonna get 10% per sale. And if you're only making 520,000 a year worth of sales, I'm gonna fire you 'cause that's way too little." He's like, "I need you to be m- making, like, 1.2 million a year worth of sales, and you need to be earning 120,000 a year." And I'm like, "What?" Uh, and this was kind of radical. But he said to me, "Dan, I think you need to adjust your psychology around money." Um, he said, "I want you to bring me..." I think it was 1,000, maybe 2,000. "I want you to bring me $1,000 tomorrow in cash." And I'm like, "Why?" And he's like, "You'll see." So I had a little bit of cash in the bank, and I think I might have borrowed some from Dad. I used to run these nightclub parties, um, in, in university and, uh, like, everyone paid in cash, and I had, like, a little stash of cash. So I kind of brought him $1,000. And, you know, it was like a lot of money. It was all my money, right? So he grabs a, a clip, a bulldog clip and he says, "Carry that in your pocket at all times. I want you to always have $1,000 in your pocket." And I was like, "Oh, okay." So for the first couple of weeks I'm walking around like this is very dangerous and ninjas are gonna come and get me and people will judge me and all this sort of stuff. And I'd... I think I'd gotten it in $100 notes at that point. So I've got like 10 $100 notes in my, in my pocket. And what was interesting is about two weeks or three weeks in, my brain starts to adjust that $1,000 is just pocket money. It's just the kind of money you carry on you. And my energy towards money just shifted very rapidly. So, you know, when I first was doing sales calls and I would say, you know, "Oh, uh, you know, this is $2,000," it was like my energy towards $2,000 is like I'm asking you for your kidney. Um-

Ali Abdaal 37:40 [laughs] Yeah

Daniel Priestley 37:41 ... and then a couple of weeks later it's like, "Oh, it's, you know, pocket money." It's n- not, not... Like my non-verbal communication, my energy towards money just shifted so radically just by carrying a bunch of it. So, um, several things happened. It surfaced up to... It brought up to the surface all of the issues that I had around money. So I'm gonna be judged. Uh, if I've got money people will judge me, 'cause I'm thinking what if somebody sees it and what if they think I'm some sort of high roller or something? What if I'm paying for something and someone sees my money clip? Um, and then it brought up if you have money people will attack you. Um, so that was another psychology of money. It's like you're gonna be attacked for having money, physically harmed. Um, and the other one was like money's really hard to come by. It's a very scarce resource, and it's like, you know, getting it is really hard and you have to hold onto it. Uh, so all of this kind of bubbles up to the surface and, um, uh, and o- the other one was, oh, what if a girl wants to date me because she thinks I've got lots of money but I don't have money? So it was this whole idea of like my only value as a man is like my having money. So all, all of that is like bubbling. And then because it's bubbling up to the surface you're able to think about it and process it and think, "Oh, is that the belief I wanna have? Is that something I like thinking?" Um, so it was a, it was a trigger for dealing with money issues very rapidly.

Ali Abdaal 39:10 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 39:11 And mind you, $1,000 back in 2001, 2002 was m- [laughs] was significantly more. If you wanna do the activity today-

Ali Abdaal 39:18 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 39:18 ... you probably need a couple of thousand. There's inflation. In fact, it's going up 10% a year.

Ali Abdaal 39:23 No, quite, yeah. So let's add, add 10% that

Ali Abdaal 39:25 number. Um, so s- sounds like a pretty cool mentor.

Daniel Priestley 39:29 He was great, yeah. John-

Ali Abdaal 39:30 Did you have any other lessons that he, he taught you in a sort of somewhat weird manner? [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 39:33 Well, well, I'll give you two.

Ali Abdaal 39:36 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 39:36 One was no news. So I was completely banned from the news. And he basically said, "Look, the news is just statistically irrelevant things that they present to you on a daily basis. You know, they're not gonna report to you that a plane landed safely. They're not gonna report to you that, you know, people woke up and went to work and, uh, had a lovely day. It's only gonna be the statistically irrelevant things, the things that happen to one in 100,000 people. That's the only stuff that you're gonna read in the news. The second thing about the news is none of it is anything you can do anything about. So you might think it's absolutely horrible what's happening in a particular place or a particular situation. That's not... You, you've got no ability to influence that. So get on with what you have the ability to do. Build your own platform, build your own life, and then you might have the ability to influence more stuff." So, um, so one of his rules was a complete blackout on any form of news. Newspapers, radio, um, television just completely gone. Um, and that is quite freeing as well, right? Free- frees up time, frees up head space, frees up negative emotions. Um, so that was great. And then the big lesson I got from John was everything is downstream from lead generation. So-

Ali Abdaal 40:48 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 40:49 ... you, you can't build a business if you can't generate leads. If you... You know, you can have a big audience, but if they can't signal that they're interested in something you can't build a business. You could have an amazing product that you've spent 10 years developing. If you can't get people to signal their interest in that, you've got no business. So he- his thing was everything is downstream from lead generation. Almost everything I learnt over those two years was just lead generation. It was all about how do you generate warm leads? And we... You know, there was dozens of different ways that we would go with and we'd, we'd constantly... The whole business was this idea of, uh, lead generation.

Ali Abdaal 41:25 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 41:25 And what was interesting about it is that when we would blow up a client's business it was just we turned the lead generation tap on. Nothing else changed. You could, like, you could have a financial planning business where they've, you know, they've been in business for 15 years and they're struggling month to month and they're really good at what they do but their, you know, their business isn't growing rapidly. You blow up the leads. You put on 40 events, introduction to, you know, the markets, introduction to investing.

Ali Abdaal 41:53 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 41:54 And then that business just goes boom, and it blows up in, in no time. So everything's downstream from lead generation. I literally watched our clients' lives completely change because we turned on the lead generation tap.

Ali Abdaal 42:09 Yeah, I... This is, this is sp- sparking so many, so many thoughts in my mind around our own business and like how... Like the first time we kind of really sold something, um, this was before I read Oversubscribed. Um, it was our kind of high ticket course and we just sort of launched it expecting like, I don't know, 12 people to sign up for like a beta testing cohort and like 354 people signed up.

Daniel Priestley 42:31 Wow.

Ali Abdaal 42:31 Which was like bloody hell. Um-

Daniel Priestley 42:32 Yeah. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 42:33 But, but I th- I think that's because we had four years' worth of like almost-

Daniel Priestley 42:36 Pent up

Ali Abdaal 42:37 ... pent up demand for, for this thing. But then every time we've run it since it's felt like harder and harder. It's felt like we've exhausted some of the warm audience more and more. And now it feels like we're having to do more to generate those leads. Um, but I guess, like, in my mind, I'm not even thinking of it as, as, as lead generation. Um, yeah.

Daniel Priestley 42:57 Ali, imagine this. You've got three and a half million subscribers. Most people don't have 3,000 people on a database. So whatever you're feeling and experiencing-

Ali Abdaal 43:07 [laughs] Yeah

Daniel Priestley 43:07 ... most small businesses are completely crushed by this problem. This lead generation problem is a crushing problem that impacts every area of their life, um, prevents them from taking holidays, prevents them from ever switching off on the weekend. You know, so if you take most of those five million businesses out there in the UK, the lead generation problem is the big problem. Like, they have no ability to generate leads.

Ali Abdaal 43:31 Just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode, and this episode is very kindly brought to you by Skillshare. If you haven't heard by now, Skillshare is probably the single best place in the world to learn anything online, and the best thing about Skillshare sponsoring this podcast is it's very exciting because I have actually been a teacher on Skillshare since 2019, and I actually have 13 classes on Skillshare. Yes, 13. Most of the online courses I've ever made are on Skillshare, where you can access them completely for free by going to skillshare.com/deepdive and you'll get a one-month free trial. Anyway, on Skillshare, there are thousands of classes on all sorts of topics from entrepreneurship and business to lifestyle design to interior design to cooking to graphic design to video editing, loads of stuff. But in particular, you might like to check out my own classes on productivity. I have three classes on Skillshare all about productivity. We have the productivity fundamentals, we have productivity creators, and we have productivity strategies. And so if you wanna do more things with your time, if you wanna do more of the things that matter to you in a way that's fun and sustainable, you might like to check out those classes, which again, you can check out completely for free by just going to skillshare.com/deepdive. And then once your trial is over, you can choose to carry on with the subscription. I pay for Skillshare. I think it's great. They've got loads of classes, and so it becomes one of my first places to go to if I wanna teach myself anything at all. So check out my classes on Skillshare, and thank you so much, Skillshare, for sponsoring this episode. Your recent book, Scorecard Marketing, kind of talks about that very tactically. Any- anything else you'd recommend for, like, helping someone learn the skill?

Daniel Priestley 44:54 So all of these skills relate to a broader set of skills, which is entrepreneurship, and some of the skills is understanding why people buy. So for example, all p- all people buy things to relieve a psychological tension between what they have and what they want. Um, so that is the underlying reason why anyone buys anything. Uh, there is some form of a psychological tension. Something's not right in the world. Uh, it should be this way, but it's currently this way, and I wanna close that gap. So that's the buying process. Um, now sometimes people don't have much psychological tension around something, but it could be widened. Some people have a dormant psychological tension which, um, they're not consciously aware of or they're not solution-seeking. They're just dealing... They're just h- holding onto the problem and holding onto the frustration, but they're not in the process, and you can spark a decision-making process. Um, so the more you understand why people buy and what's going on under the surface and the fact that there are people actively looking for things and then there are people who are, are passively dealing with a frustrational problem but not actively searching. So getting a, a working understanding of these things is really powerful. Um, the other thing that triggers every single sale is a combination of emotion, logic, and urgency. So, um, some-- And, and I've found that all businesses are only really naturally good at one. So some businesses naturally are good at generating emotion in their customers but not logic or urgency. Some businesses are really good with the logical side of why you should buy, but they're not very good at the emotion or the urgency. And some businesses are the hard sales business. They turn the-

Ali Abdaal 46:31 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 46:31 ... they turn the screws and they're all about urgency, but they're not very good at logic or emotion. And great businesses, they understand how to do logic, emotion, and urgency in the right doses, and they get the minimum effective dose across nicely and people go, "Oh, I'm, I'm excited to buy. I love buying from this company." Like an Apple would be a great example. They give you logic, emotion, urgency. Um, uh-

Ali Abdaal 46:55 Yeah. They have the, the pre-order for the pre-order, and I'm just like, "Oh yeah, this is so good. I can prepare my pre-order so that when pre... one, 1:00 p.m. comes around I can just hit the button and it's just..."

Daniel Priestley 47:03 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 47:03 Yeah [laughs] .

Daniel Priestley 47:04 And they do a, a great combination of like educating you about the phone combined with showing you stories of people who are out there taking amazing photos and they look really cool.

Ali Abdaal 47:14 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 47:14 And it's all woven in together, and then there's a moment to act. Um, so logic, emotion, urgency all coming together at once.

Ali Abdaal 47:22 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 47:23 So how do you, how do you learn these skills?

Daniel Priestley 47:24 [laughs] Well, uh, I've written about them. You can, you can, uh, read Oversubscribed and Scorecard Marketing. Those are two great books on that. Um, uh, so I, like you, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Um, but there's some other things you can do. You can survey your customers, right? So you wanna be able to ask lots of questions about why people are buying from you or not buying from you. Um, you wanna ask people questions where they quantify. Um, as a doctor, you probably asked people on a scale of one to ten how bad does it hurt.

Ali Abdaal 47:54 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 47:54 Um, and people are like, "Oh, it's a four." Okay, so it's not as bad as I thought, right? Oh, it's bearable.

Ali Abdaal 48:01 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 48:01 Or it's like, "Oh, it's a nine." It's like, okay, well, wow, that's pretty intense.

Ali Abdaal 48:05 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 48:05 So asking people to quantify with a number is really powerful because that is logic and emotion coming together. So when people feel something and quantify it with a number, they're integrating their left and their right brain, and they're giving you very clear signals and feedback as to what's going on. So some of the questions that are super powerful to talk to your market about is, on a scale of one to ten, um, how motiva- how motivated would you be to solve this problem? On a scale of one to ten, um, how frustrated are you by this? Right? 'Cause you're looking for things that people rate highly as a frustration if it's a dormant need. Um, uh, you know, on a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with your existing You know-

Ali Abdaal 48:48 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 48:48 ... solutions. So these are the q- kind of questions, and then you're trying to use that data to figure out, well, what is the solution that I can build that really helps people move from a low score to a high score, uh, on these, on these types of things? I know this is getting a little bit geeky, but conducting research of just 30 people, uh, is often very revealing. It tells you a lot about what you are doing right or not doing right. Um, and yeah, some more research is, is pretty powerful.

Ali Abdaal 49:17 One, one thing that I used to have a big hang-up about, and probably still do a little bit, is that sales and marketing equals bad. It's evil. It's, like, a bit icky. It's a bit scammy. Uh, uh, mm, and there was a lot of, I think, unlearning I had to do when selling our course for the first time two years ago now. Um, and yeah, d- is, is this... And, and, and it's, it's definitely a sentiment I've, I've heard from a lot of people that, "Oh, I just, I just hate the idea of sales. I hate the idea of marketing." What's, what's going on there?

Daniel Priestley 49:49 I totally agree. When you're a creator, when you, when you're building something and you put your heart and soul into it, the idea that you have to then justify that and that you have to convince people to do it, it's kind of like, you know, weirdly like trying to sell your best friend to someone or like, you know, it's kind of like this weird thing that you want, you want it to be self-evidently valuable. You want to be able to create something and people self-evidently just know about it and love it and all of that, and that's just not how humans work, right? So humans have to go through a process of discovery, and we have to get to know something, which is all about understanding the logic. We have to get to trust something, which is the emotional connection of like, yeah, I've done enough research, right? And then we wanna basically, um, l- we like it, we trust it, we feel a sense that now's the right time. So we're going through this process of discovery, and it doesn't really matter what the product is, whether it be, you know, camera equipment or musical equipment or any of those sorts of things. We, we like to do our research, and we like to go through a series of steps of getting to know things. So the evidence-based, um, research on this is from, uh, Professor Robin Dunbar and from Google, and they say that you go through 11 touchpoints before you buy something, uh, based on your Google Search history. And Professor Robin Dunbar says you go through about seven hours of contact before you feel a sense of trust. So if you just simply think about what is marketing there to do, it's there to accelerate that journey at scale with more people to help guide them through a process of discovery-

Ali Abdaal 51:23 Mm

Daniel Priestley 51:23 ... so that they get to know about something, like it, trust it, learn about it. Right? Re- you know, you're helping them to discover and research it. Um, unfortunately, there is a part of every sale that is urgency, and this is the ickiest part that most people hate, which is trying to tell people that now's the right time to buy something. So we... I don't think many people have a problem with communicating the emotional payoff of their product, that it's gonna feel great and that it's gonna be a really enjoyable thing. I don't think people have much of a problem talking about the logic. Sometimes they do, um, because logic is about quantifying and return on investment, and this is where, this is the cost to benefit analysis, right? It's, this is why you would do it. But then what people wanna do is they wanna be able to say, "Okay, when you're ready, come and b- come back and buy."

Ali Abdaal 52:13 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 52:14 But humans are humans. What do they do? They forget, and they go find something else and all of that. So we need an urgency trigger. Urgency is a little bit like a spice than an ingredient. You don't wanna overuse it, but there needs to be a subtext of urgency. Now, for most products, the only viable subtext of urgency that works is genuinely being oversubscribed.

Ali Abdaal 52:39 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 52:39 So genuinely being oversubscribed means that there are plenty of people who want this. There is genuinely a limited number available, or there's a start date. There's a reason that you need to begin, and unfortunately, i- it's only gonna be available for this number of people. Now, what the perfect scenario is, is that there's some form of demand and supply tension that's transparent.

Ali Abdaal 53:02 Yep.

Daniel Priestley 53:03 So for example, if there's a lineup out the front of the restaurant, oh, it must be a good restaurant and you must need to book ahead. Um, if there is, um, you know, if Apple phones sell out in the first week, and then you have to wait and it's a delay, oh, okay, so if I don't buy, then I'm gonna have to be the person who gets it three months from now. So the subtext of demand and supply tension and some form of transparency that we can see that transparency- transparently there's a lot of people who want this. There's only a limited number, or there's a start time.

Ali Abdaal 53:35 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 53:36 Uh, okay, I better do this.

Ali Abdaal 53:38 Yeah. Yeah, with my w- w- with my first business when I was 19 and selling courses to help people get into med school, uh, we did... And I, I, I'm, I'm not sure how ethical this was, but we would, uh, artificially sell out or, like, deliberately book smaller venues for places that we knew, like, wouldn't have that much demand. And so when we sold seven seats, it's like sold out, and no one has to know it was only sold out seven, but they just see sold out and l- and some CSS stuff to make it look red and, like, hmm. [chuckles] Um, and that seemed to just work.

Daniel Priestley 54:11 Well-

Ali Abdaal 54:12 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 54:12 ... here's the, here's the frustrating thing about humans. The frustrating thing is that taking no action is actually quite safe, and you can't... Most people kind of have a subconscious belief that if I don't take action, then nothing really bad can go wrong. But if I do take action, then, um, you know, something might go wrong. So it's unfortunate, but there is no really, there's no successful businesses that are long-term successful that don't do something around creating an urgency queue, uh, for, for buying, right? Uh, and if they do, if they don't do logic, emotion & urgency, they're normally not profitable. So you get a lot of businesses that they turn over money, but they're not very profitable. Airlines, for example- So can you imagine if, if there was such thing as a profit god who handed out profit fairly, and they looked at every business model and they said, "Only the business models that are really hard to operate and really important to society, those will get the profit. And anyone who's just superfluous, you know, you don't get any profit." So you look at the airline industry and you say, "You've got to have 100% safety, hugely capital intensive. Customer service expectations are through the roof. Lo- logistics, you've got to leave on time, finish on... Like land on time. If you're a minute late, we're gonna start charging you a, a fee, a penalty." And you think, "Wow, what an incredibly complex business model. I bet the profit gods would give them 50% profit margins." It's like, no, no, it's like 5 to 10% profit margins. It's nothing. Why? Simply because there's freely available, there's no... There's always seats available.

Ali Abdaal 55:49 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 55:49 You can buy a ticket when you want. If you miss this one, there'll be another one going in an hour, right? So all of that's built into it. Let's have a look at the opposite. The opposite is Rolex.

Ali Abdaal 55:59 [laughs] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 56:00 All right? So Rolex is a business that has barely innovated its product in many years. Uh, a Rolex today looks much the same as a Rolex 50 years ago. Um, it's made from the same materials. Uh, it's made pretty much in the same way, in the same place. So there's hardly any innovation. Uh, y- they're terrible at customer service. Um, the product itself can be easily copied. Um, a copy can cost one tenth to one twentieth of a, of an actual real article. But here's the difference. Rolex has a waiting list of 18 months to get a genuine Rolex, and when they call you, they say, uh, "We've got your watch available, but we can only hold it for you for three days. Um, if not, you'll miss out on it, and you'll go back on the waiting list for 18 months." Um, now, Rolex is massively profitable, something like 70% margins. So, you know, this is, this is the difference between being oversubscribed, logic, emotion, urgency. Um, actually, and I will say this, Rolex has logic, emotion, and urgency. The emotion is status and achievement and significance and, uh, marking a, a significant occasion. The logic is that they hold their value. They're incredibly good hedge against inflation. There are people who buy Rolexes and keep them in a drawer purely as a store of wealth. And the urgency is that there's an 18-month waiting list. So when you bring it all together, explosive.

Ali Abdaal 57:24 Nice. Okay, so the mentor, John, um, these three big lessons, the value of money, um, no news is [laughs] good, and, um, everything is downstream of lead generation. So what, what happened next in your story? So

Ali Abdaal 57:40 you're 24, you're doing 10 million a year in this company. You've got, you've got a team of 20 people. You're doing marketing for, for other businesses.

Daniel Priestley 57:47 Yeah, so we were pretty concentrated with one major client. I had a big falling out with that client. They were gonna acquire us, um, and then they did a really nasty negotiation tactic. Um, and I threw my toys out the pram and basically said, "Deal's off. I'm moving to London. I'm gonna go do something else."

Ali Abdaal 58:05 Oh, [laughs] okay. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 58:07 Because I was 24, 25... I mean, it's funny because I walked away fr- from tens of millions in that sale. Um, and they had disrespected me and tried to bully in the situation, not expecting... Like, because they're, they were more grown up, they would never walk away from millions and millions. But everything had come to me so easily and so quickly that I just had a very different attitude, and my business partner and I just went, "We don't wanna work with these guys long term. If this is how they are in the negotiation, then this is gonna be horrible. Um, let's turn it off." And they were shocked, and then they tried to sue us. Um-

Ali Abdaal 58:46 Oh, wow, okay. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 58:48 Yeah, they were like, really... It was really weird. It was very weird. But anyway, we, we untangled ourself from that. Um, and then I was offered the opportunity to go launch an office in London of that business and take it to London, and it was just kinda like, "You know what? This'll be really fun. Uh, there's three times as many people in the UK, and we're gonna just, you know, travel, and we'll go to Europe, and we'll go snowboarding, and we'll, you know, we'll go to, uh, Ibiza, and we'll, you know, do all that stuff." So we just kinda went, "Oh, that's it. We're gonna move to London." [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 59:17 Okay. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 59:18 So, so it was really random. We went from having tens of millions to, to basically shutting down the Australian business and moving to London.

Ali Abdaal 59:26 Why did you shut it down? Why not keep it going-

Daniel Priestley 59:27 'Cause I was a-

Ali Abdaal 59:28 ... project manager, all that jazz

Daniel Priestley 59:29 ... 'cause I was a 24-year-old.

Ali Abdaal 59:30 Okay, fine. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 59:31 It was just, it was just the next adventure.

Ali Abdaal 59:33 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 59:33 So we jump... You know, we'd ended the relationship with a major client who represented a huge chunk of revenue, and we could either restart in, uh, Australia with a new client or restart in London, and it just felt like a great time to go restart in London.

Ali Abdaal 59:47 Okay. So question on this front. So at this point, you're 24. You've presumably got a net worth that's in the six or seven figures, uh, probably seven, and you could, you could just choose to put your feet up and not work and, and, and stuff p- probably, live the g- the, the good life in Bali or, or whatever that looks like. Um, what gave you that drive for a kind of more, more ambition, more stuff?

Daniel Priestley 1:00:11 Um, it was hugely fun. You've gotta remember, we were working and partying and traveling and like, like, the business was not digging ditches. We were running events, going to restaurants, going to nightclubs, um, driving fancy cars. Um, all of my mentors were way ahead of me. Um, you know, I was hanging around with people who had businesses doing 50 million, 100 million. Um, I was regularly hanging around with people who had, uh, built billion-dollar businesses and things like that because we would hire speakers, and we would have people like dragons and, um, sharks and, um, best-selling authors and people who'd written, you know, amazing books and all this. So I was hanging around a peer group of people who normalized that level of life. Um, and I was being invited as this young k- ... entrepreneur into these really great, amazing circles. And, you know, I got paid to go to Bali and speak at a conference, and I got paid to hang out backstage with all the people. So why would I give that up? That, I mean-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:07 Okay

Daniel Priestley 1:01:07 ... and it was also everyone on the team was under 30, and we were all single, and we were all like nightclubby kind of people. So we'd all like, a typical week, we'd finish up the week, and then we'd all go clubbing-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:18 Right. Okay [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:01:19 ... as a team.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:20 Nice. Cool.

Daniel Priestley 1:01:21 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:21 So you're, so you moved to London when you were like 25 at this point? Like 24, 25?

Daniel Priestley 1:01:26 Uh, yeah, about 25, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:27 Okay. So what was the, what was, w-w-what was the story in London? Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:01:30 Well, we launched sim- we launched a similar business in London, um, working with, um, uh, international speakers to launch them in the UK market. Um, took off crazy, £4 million in the first year, um, and-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:42 And just doing the, the event stuff, lead gen

Daniel Priestley 1:01:43 ... event stuff, and all this sort of lead gen stuff. Basically doing launches for businesses that were successful outside of the UK.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:50 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:01:51 So we had a Singaporean company, and we had a US company, and we were launching them in, in the U- uh, in the UK. Uh, 4 million in year one, and, um, at the end of year one, we hired the London Palladium Theatre, 2,000 seats. Um, and we like did 600 grand worth of sales in the following week. It was just wild, right? So it was good times. And then the GFC came along, global financial crisis, and the whole thing came crashing down. So we went from making millions down to 400,000 in 2009. So it was like just a complete, like the recession just put a sho- stop to everything. Um, our Singaporean client, uh, almost collapsed in Asia and had to stop coming to the UK, right? 'Cause that was their growth plan. So that client was gone. Um, and then our US client, the, um, pound against the, um, dollar went from like two to one to like, it jumped by like 40% in a day. And it was just like unaffordable to do the deal.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:48 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:02:48 So it just wasn't, the exchange rate didn't work. Um, and we weren't able to successfully renegotiate. So I went from living in a penthouse apartment near Chelsea, uh, to, um, moving into my sister's spare room in Acton and, um, like just entering like a really weird, dark time of like, oh my goodness, everything's just literally come crashing down.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:12 Oh, wow. How, how, how was that transition? [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:03:15 Oh, it was great. Yeah, fantastic. I recommend it to everyone. [laughs] It was dark and horrible. Um, it was so dark and horrible. I remember in the middle of winter slipping on ice and like almost breaking my arm and, um, and I remember a really bad phone call and hanging up and being on a re- like on a reflex of just like anger, pu-putting my f-fist out like that and banging it into a wall, a concrete wall, and like almost breaking my hand. And I almost had a almost broken hand and almost broken arm, and I'm like, "What is going on?" Um, and yeah, it was a horrible time. Um, and it was a, but it was a time of reflection, and it was a time of th- thinking through what do I wanna do next. And the other weird thing that happened at that time is I decided to try and sell the business. And, uh, I had this guy who agreed to buy the business for 300 grand, two, two payments of 150 grand. And I was like, "Oh, you know, at least I'll start again with something new, but I'll have 300 grand." And anyway, on the day of exchange, um, he just doesn't show up.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:19 Oh.

Daniel Priestley 1:04:19 And turns out he'd had a heart attack and went into hospital [laughs] . And random-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:23 Oh my goodness

Daniel Priestley 1:04:23 ... randomly my acquirer-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:26 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:04:26 ... uh, had had a heart attack. [laughs] Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:29 Oh, yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:04:29 ... yeah. So weird, like crazy weird time. Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:33 How, how long did that period last?

Daniel Priestley 1:04:35 So in 2009, I wrote the book Key Person of Influence, which was all about my experience working with celebrities and authors and how they were building personal brands. Um, during my reflection period, I reflected on what am I really excited about, social media, um, this new emerging technology called Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all this sort of stuff, and how, how we've built these technological engines to build personal brands and how that will give rise to new types of businesses and all this sort of stuff. So 2010, I launched something called the Key Person of Influence Accelerator. It's a huge success. Um, we launch in London. It sells out three times in a row. We launch in Melbourne. We launch in Sydney. We launch in Singapore. We launch in Tampa, Florida. Uh, we launch in Canada. So suddenly I'm building a global business again, and we're back to like eight cities, a million per city, you know, so we're just smashing, smashing it. Um, so it was then it was another-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:32 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:05:32 ... uh, that was over the following couple of years.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:35 Oh, wow. Okay. So the Key, Key Person of Influence, the five-step method to become one of the most highly valued and highly paid people in your industry. I would love to come to this in a moment. Um, but I guess sort of you wrote

Ali Abdaal 1:05:46 Entrepreneur Revolution a few years later, and i- this is sort of the more, more like getting started with entrepreneurship beat type book.

Daniel Priestley 1:05:53 So when I was writing Key Person of Influence, there was about 8,000 words at the beginning setting the scene for the strange times that we're in-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:00 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:06:01 ... and that the world is changing in a massive way. And it just seemed like the book took forever to kick off and get going. So I cut that 8,000 words off, and I parked it, and then I released K-KPI, and it became a big... It became a good bestseller. And then the publisher said, "Well, what do you wanna do next? Do you wanna do another book?" And I said, "Oh, I've got these 8,000 words that I cut out." And I sent that across, and they went, "Oh, that's a book. That's a great book. It's all about how to start up as an entrepreneur before you're a key person of influence."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:29 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:06:30 And I'm like, "Oh, okay."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:31 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:06:32 So I released Entrepreneur Revolution.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:34 So what is, what is the Entrepreneur Revolution?

Daniel Priestley 1:06:36 So this is the idea, and a lot of your listeners won't get the significance of this, but, you know, I was born in 1981, and I was born in the industrial age of, you know, very much career and workforce and all this. There was no such thing as being a creator, and there was no creator economy, and there was, there was no just become a YouTuber You know, of course, none of that existed. Um, and then there's this whole other world that we live in now where people can live and work from anywhere. You can set up a business. You can have $1,000 startup costs and s- you know, start a business that's global. You could literally use your phone and build a business that impacts thousands of lives, and it's like, wow, what a time to be alive. Um, what an incredible moment in time that for the first time ever. So I likened this as an analogy to what it must have been like going from the agricultural age, where everyone had to have a farm, and you had to have a family farm, and you had to plow a field by hand or with a donkey, and then suddenly tractors, and then suddenly factories, and then now there's this entire different economy that exists with its own set of rules, completely different rules. And I use this analogy of like, you know, what must it have been like to look across to the neighboring factory and see a 22-year-old on a tractor doing the work of 100 people?

Ali Abdaal 1:07:57 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 1:07:57 And now we look at what a... Well, there's a 22-year-old with a TikTok account making $3 million or whatever.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:02 [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:08:03 And it's like, "Whoa, but how's that happening?" Well, they're, they're playing a different game, and there's this digital age. There's this entrepreneur revolution. So the book outlines the times that we're in, and then it says, "Okay, given that the world has changed and that there's a new set of rules, but most of us were raised in a schooling system that was built for industrial age, what are the new rules? How do we leverage the new rules? How do we start something that is in alignment with the new rules?" Right? "And how do we then build a successful business and launch a successful business with a different mindset?"

Ali Abdaal 1:08:37 Uh, yeah. That's-- [chuckles] I'm ju- I wa- I was just thinking that, um, the, the industrial revolution-y type mindset, I think is still very prevalent amongst probably, like m- most people that I know. Like every, every... anyone who's not an entrepreneur or a creator-

Daniel Priestley 1:08:57 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:08:57 ... like, ha- half of my friends are medics, and so that's still a very much a you have a job, you go to work. Like th- th- there's no innovation there. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:09:05 It's a system that shouldn't change radically, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:09:08 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:09:08 Because... Or it should change slowly-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:09 Yeah, exactly

Daniel Priestley 1:09:10 ... because you're dealing with people's health outcomes. So it's gonna change really slowly.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:15 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:09:15 And the school system is a really slow-changing system as well. So ultimately, we have a health system, and we have a school system that is very much entrenched in the industrial age.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:26 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:09:26 Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:27 And I think also that, that... And, and, and so like often it's, it's like when I was first doing, doing the YouTube stuff and even, even, even with my first business when I was at university, which wa- you know, was... I was making like, I don't know, 40K a year or 50K a year or something, which was the equi- equivalent of a doctor's salary when I was like in, in med school. My mind was just like blown as to how sort of qu- like easy it was to-

Daniel Priestley 1:09:49 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:09:49 ... to make that money compared to toiling away on a ward for 60 hours a week.

Daniel Priestley 1:09:53 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:53 And then when I actually started working and I was toiling away on a ward for 60 hours a week, and all of a sudden, like one 30-second YouTube integration where I just spoke to the camera about a freaking app was making the equivalent of one month's salary. It just completely-

Daniel Priestley 1:10:05 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:10:05 ... changed my entire world. Just-

Daniel Priestley 1:10:08 Totally.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:08 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:10:08 It's like you're on the tractor plowing the field in a day-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:12 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:10:12 ... or you're one of 100 people with a hand plow going, "This is ridiculous."

Ali Abdaal 1:10:17 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:10:17 And it's this weird thing of like, "Well, why would I not do it?"

Ali Abdaal 1:10:21 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:10:21 It's hard not to.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:22 Exactly. I like that. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:10:23 So there's some things that you'll notice in the industrial age. So for example, we teach kids that you should not be disruptive, right? It... The worst thing you can get on your report card is, you know, "Ali is a disruptive person in the classroom." The best thing they can possibly call you on the front cover of Inc. Magazine is disruptive, right? So, you know, there's a disconnect, um, between these things. In school, putting together a team of smart kids who give you the answers is called cheating.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:50 [chuckles] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:10:51 In life, that's called having an executive team that is a really high-functioning executive team. So if I-- for me personally, if I have a great CFO who does all my maths homework for me, that's smart. That's a good thing to have. But in school, that would be the worst thing to do. Um, so, uh, you know, we- we're now this... And I mentioned it before, component labor is the name of the game in the schooling system. Your job is to become a useful component of labor to someone's big machine. Um, and we're not taught anything about, you know, sales, marketing, money management, uh, coming up with ideas, ideation, minimum viable product testing, s- you know, market surveys.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:34 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:11:34 None of that stuff is in school.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:36 Yeah. I th- I think the school thing as well also encourages the sort of perfectionistic attitude of I'm gonna do the work, and then I'm gonna hand it in, and I'm going to get a grade for the thing, and I'm now... my self-worth is wedded to the grade. Um, and, uh, so like, again, if I just think of the, the, um, the example of a bunch of my friends who did really, really well in school, and they are doing well in their corporate jobs or something. To put out a single blog post or write a single thing on LinkedIn to them feels like, "Oh my God, this, you know, b- it has to be perfect."

Daniel Priestley 1:12:07 I know.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:08 And it's just this attitude of like, "I can't put something out if it's not-"

Daniel Priestley 1:12:10 Someone has to approve it.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:11 Yeah, someone has to approve it. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:12:12 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:13 And even al- almost a kind of, kind of maybe an unhealthy obsession with qualifications.

Daniel Priestley 1:12:19 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:20 Um, I, I randomly met a doctor, uh, at the train station who re- re- recognized me, you know, like last week sometime, and she had been in medicine for 14 years and was... had come across my stuff. I think she actually read some of your books as well, and was sort of transitioning out to become a coach.

Daniel Priestley 1:12:35 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:35 And she was doing a coaching qualification.

Daniel Priestley 1:12:36 Coaching qualification, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:37 And then we grabbed breakfast, and she was like... I, I was like, "Okay, so how's the, how's the coaching business going?" And she was like, "Oh, you know, I'm do- I'm, I'm doing it for free for a few friends." And I was like, "Okay, well, what's stopping you from charging?" And she was like, "Oh, well, I haven't finished my qualification yet." Like, "Oh, it's gonna happen in like four months." I was like, "Okay. And then when that happens, what are you gonna do next?" And she was like, "Oh, then I'll start posting on Facebook." And I was, I was like, "Well, when are you gonna charge for people for the coaching?" She was like, "Oh, you know, maybe in a year or two." Like one-

Daniel Priestley 1:13:00 Or when I get a letter from someone to say-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:01 Yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:13:01 ... "Yeah, now it's time to charge." Uh, I have a doctor friend who told me, "Oh, I'm thinking of starting a business." And then next time I saw him, he'd enrolled in an MBA. Um, for the certification. Uh, but I mean, imagine if in school they said it's actually the first person to hand in their assignment, and it only has to be directionally correct. [laughs] Like, like, then it would be a very different environment. It's like we're gonna mark you based on speed-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:27 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:13:27 ... to mark it. Like, here's the assignment. Clock starts now. Whoever can hand in something that meets minimum standards and is directionally correct, you're the one who does it, and, and extra points if you can pull together three or four people who all work together-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:42 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:13:43 ... and you, you can, you can get something there.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:46 Yeah. Yeah, I think on, on, on this point as well, like I,

Ali Abdaal 1:13:50 I've, I've had similar conversations with friends and, um, there seems to be a lot of resistance in the sense of, "Oh, but are you saying that a neurosurgeon doesn't need to be qualified?" It's like, well, no-

Daniel Priestley 1:13:59 Oh, definitely

Ali Abdaal 1:14:00 ... obviously that's not what I'm saying.

Daniel Priestley 1:14:01 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:01 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:14:01 No, definitely. There-- If you're component labor, you have to be certified. You have to, 'cause you're a component.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:06 Mm-hmm.

Daniel Priestley 1:14:06 You're a cog in the machine, and that cog has to be perfectly fit for the machine. Um, so you know, you absolutely have to be... There are certain professions, especially like medicine, that you've got to be qualified and, and, uh, yeah, perfect-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:18 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:14:18 ... perfectly machined within an inch.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:20 [laughs] But I guess the danger is then it ex- ex- sort of having that way of thinking, which then-

Daniel Priestley 1:14:25 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:14:25 ... bleeds into anything else, and you think that suddenly someone has to give you permission to do a thing.

Daniel Priestley 1:14:29 As soon as you're in the entrepreneur revolution, you're adopting a very different mindset. It's a mindset of not knowing rather than knowing. So the most curious person wins, not the most qualified person. So if you said, "Oh, I'm going through a period of great curiosity, I know nothing, and I'm trying to explore what people are frustrated by," um, that's probably the smarter position to take as an entrepreneur. Some of the best entrepreneurs, they love saying things like, "Talk to me like I'm a three-year-old. I just don't understand." Sometimes they deeply understand, but they'll ask dumb questions, uh, because they're trying to be-- they're trying to stay curious. Uh, Steve Jobs' advice in his, uh, commencement speech was, "Stay humble, stay curious."

Ali Abdaal 1:15:10 Yeah, that just sparks a thought. So a- again, when, when I was at university and kind of building this business and, and, and stuff, um, I would... It w- it was weird how often I'd be the one to put my hand up in a lecture and ask a question about something that was, like, apparently obvious. But, like, I, I just had this sort of complete non-fear of looking like an idiot, and a bunch of friends s- spoke to me afterwards, and even to this day, I w- I, I think, I think it was like two weeks ago I was, I was chatting to some friends, and they were like, "Yeah, I remember you would always ask these, like, dumb questions in lectures." And I'd be thinking the same thing, but I would be thinking, "I d- I don't want to ask the question because I don't want to look dumb." I was like, well, it, it... And it was, I think, d- having done the entrepreneur thing and trying to do w- make my web design business when I was 14 years old all, like, sort of en- entrenched in me this idea that, like, it's totally reasonable to ask a dumb question.

Daniel Priestley 1:15:58 Yeah. If you're a component, if you're a cog in the machine, you don't want to reveal that there might be a crack in the cog, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:16:05 Mm-hmm.

Daniel Priestley 1:16:05 'Cause then they might replace you. So it's better to be quiet and pretend that you're a perfectly formed cog as opposed to... But if you're building the machine, and you're looking for how could this machine run better, how could this be optimized to produce better outcomes-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:20 Mm

Daniel Priestley 1:16:20 ... then you're totally looking for, you know, how... You- you're basically going back to first principles. You're like, "Well, what problem are we trying to solve? What are we solving for? Um, how do we do that faster? What's the fastest point between point A and point B? Talk to me like I'm an idiot." Right? So those sorts of things, um, become very useful, and that's the big mindset shift. So in the book Entrepreneur Revolution, it's all about changing the mindset. It's about getting out of the traditional mindset. Um, I talk about three mindsets: reptile, which is fight, flight, freeze, um, anger, aggression, upset, emotional response. There's autopilot, which is learn, repeat, learn, repeat. Um, you know, repeat the past, repeat the past. Uh, put more inputs in, remember those inputs, then deliver the correct outputs. And then there's visionary: strategic thinking, um, inspiration, love, connection, empathy, uh, curiosity-

Ali Abdaal 1:17:14 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:17:14 ... all of those sorts of things. So it's about being in that visionary mind more than the autopilot or the reptile.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:22 Nice. Okay, so let's say someone is listening to this or watching this, and they've got a normal job. Uh, let's say, I don't know, they work in consulting or something like that, and they're like, "Cool, I love the idea of being an entrepreneur. I did my cons- I joined my consulting job because, quote, 'it would teach skills that I could then use to start a startup someday.'" But they've ended up there for way too long because the promotion cycle is al- or the bonus cycle is always-

Daniel Priestley 1:17:45 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:17:45 ... just, it's, you know, it's only four months away. Um, what would be the sort of next steps that someone would take to kind of develop this mindset slash become an entrepreneur?

Daniel Priestley 1:17:57 Well, you can develop the mindset by having a go at producing something of, of value. Um, there's a, there's a few sets of steps that you want to go through. So one step is ideation. Ideation is coming up with at least 10 ideas and then figuring out which one would be the best or which two or three ideas would be the best. So that's an actual process called ideation. Um, and most people jump from first idea to action rather than coming up with nine other ideas and saying, "Well, why did I choose that one?" And, um, you know, when I worked with one of our, our guys who was a billionaire, um, I said, "How do you create a billion-dollar company?" He's like, "Oh, it's easy. You come up with 10 ideas that could be billion-dollar companies and then start narrowing it down and then..." [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:18:36 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:18:36 So I was like, "Oh, okay. Uh, fair enough."

Ali Abdaal 1:18:40 Yeah. Love it.

Daniel Priestley 1:18:41 So he said, "Well, it's either gonna be a telecommunications company, or it's gonna be a tech company, or it's gonna be a bank, or it's-"

Ali Abdaal 1:18:46 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:18:46 You know. So he's like, "There's only a few things-"

Ali Abdaal 1:18:48 Actually just narrow it down, yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:18:49 Yeah. He's like, "There's only a few things a billion-dollar company could be. So you've got to then figure out which one would it be." Uh, like, what would be your take on it? What would be your spin? So we went through, and, and he was the first one to show me just this first step of ideation. So you want to go through ideation and come up with a bit of a criteria. As I said, by the way, joining an entrepreneurial team is, is better than trying to start one yourself. So I'm a big fan of... Let, let's say [laughs] I'm, I'm jumping around here, I apologize. But let's say you are a consultant for a large company. Go be a consultant for a 10-person company. Go be a consultant for a five-person boutique, and do that for a year or two. Um, and you're gonna be the special person 'cause you came from a big name brand, and now you're working in a boutique. They're gonna treat you like a king-

Ali Abdaal 1:19:32 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:19:33 ... right? Or a queen. So it's gonna be great.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:35 Okay, s- just on that note, um, I'd, I'd love to get your take on this. One issue that lots of people have is, um, I am currently making X at my current company, big company, et cetera, et cetera. I would be taking a pay cut to do this other thing that sounds cool. Uh, and it's-- I, I, I think it's interesting because usually X is, like, higher than what you would actually need to live, and usually the new salary is also a very reasonable salary. But people, I think, feel like, "Oh, I, I, I don't wanna take a drop in my pay to..." Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:20:04 Yeah, and I can understand that, especially... Look, you're in a unique position in the sense that you don't have kids. If once you've got kids, then as much as you might personally... Like, for me personally, right, I can personally happily live mattress on a floor, um, you know, ramen noodles, whatever, right? That wouldn't bother me at all. Um, but now I have kids.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:25 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:20:26 We have huge overheads, insane overheads every month, right? And, um, and I can't make decisions of like, "Oh yeah, we'll all just live on mattresses on the floor."

Ali Abdaal 1:20:36 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 1:20:36 Um, I might find myself divorced or something [chuckles] like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:39 [chuckles] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:20:39 So, um, so the, you know, the, the key thing-- or it wouldn't be fair to take them into that decision. So the key thing is there are certain people who can't take a pay cut. You've gotta figure it out. So you've gotta figure out, okay, um, what is my after-tax earnings? And sometimes a pay cut is not as savage as you think about it if it's after ta- after tax. Um, you also might be spending a lot of money on commuting, or you might be spending a lot of money on things to keep up that particular role, which may not come with a boutique role. Uh, you also might have a boutique plus your, uh, side hustle venture money a- as a bit of a, a crossfade. Um, or you might view it as making an investment. So let's say you're taking a 10 grand pay cut. You're actually... The framing of it is I'm actually investing 10 grand into the creation of a startup. I'm willing to invest up to 30,000, so I'm willing to take this pay cut for three years, um, as an investment into the equity that I own in my own business. So it's not a pay cut, it's an investment into the, uh, startup equity. You know, so it's a bit of a mental, mental gymnastics to justify activity, but, uh, you know, but essentially that's what you are doing. You, you are making an investment into startup equity. So, um, yeah, it, it is tricky. It is difficult. Um, one of the things that I recommend is you could do a little bit of, um, evening consulting or something like that. Uh, w- there have been times for me personally where I have taken on a client in LA, being in London, because I wanted to, uh, earn an extra amount of money, and being in London allows me to consult in LA at 8:30 p.m. till 10 p.m., right? So I can do a consulting gig and

Daniel Priestley 1:22:24 do it in my evening and their morning. So, you know, there are things... We live in this incredible range of options right now.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:31 Yeah. Just on that note, so we w- we were kinda talking about steps, s- steps to take, and we, and, and we said maybe joining an entrepreneurial company might be a good, a good sort of springboard. Um, one thing that a lot of people talk about in-- who, who've had, like, success in business is how in the early days it was, it was quite a lo- quite a long slog, quite a grindy, like, uh, or, like, even though it was fun, like, work-life balance wasn't quite there. And usually when people get older, by the time I speak to them on the podcast, they're a bit more, like, work-life balance-y and chill and, and stuff.

Daniel Priestley 1:23:01 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:01 And I'm always intrigued, like, uh, does... Uh, to what, to what extent is it reasonable to want to have slash have work-life balance while you're starting something versus once it's already successful and now you can chill?

Daniel Priestley 1:23:14 So it's quite a luxury belief, the idea of having work-life balance.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:17 Oh.

Daniel Priestley 1:23:17 It's something that-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:18 Oh, tell me more. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:23:19 Well, it's something-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:20 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:23:20 ... it's something that you can afford to have if you've made... So once you hit a certain level of wealth, um, and success, you can afford to pontificate about work-life balance.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:29 [chuckles] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:23:30 Um, and you know, if you're a, a single person who doesn't have any dependents, you can afford to think about work-life balance. Um, the, the numbers, the statistics are very, very clear that the vast majority of people who earn a lot of money, who make a, a breakthrough in business, have a period of being well out of balance. I mean, there is not anyone who's winning an Olympic me- medal who's not crazy focused on that goal. There's not anyone who is developing a high-rise building that isn't, you know, focused on that goal. So especially when you're creating a breakthrough, and especially if it's an outstanding result, the data doesn't lie about this. It's, it's for something like 65% of all people earning over 100 grand do 55 hours a week or more. So, you know, and when you look at almost all entrepreneurs, here's, here's the reality of business. You're... When you're starting a business, you're in the process of creating an asset, sweating that asset, and keeping track of the, what's going on. You're doing strategy, operations, sales and marketing, finance, HR. You're hiring people, onboarding people. So let's be real about it. If you were super optimized and gave each of those four things 15 hours a week, they're 60 hours. You know, and that's if you're doing part-time on each of those. Like, 15 hours a week is part-time sales. You know, 15 hours a week is part-time creating an asset. So when you get to work-life balance is when you have a team. If you have eight people working on a team and you take a holiday, seven out of eight are still working on the business, so it works. Uh, if you've got eight people on a team and, um, you know, you come up with an idea, you've got a group of people who can Refine that idea, implement that idea, work on that idea, and produce something. And you've probably got someone who's full-time sales, and you've probably got someone who's full-time marketing. So now you've got a bit of team dynamic, team play. One of the great things to come out of the industrial age was something called, uh, division of labor, which is that if people just focus on one job and don't jump around, they make a lot more stuff. Um, and that's true for any entrepreneurial business. A salesperson who's just focused on sales gets good at sales, and someone who's focused on editing videos gets good at editing-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:53 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:25:53 ... videos. So if you try and get the video editor to make sales, they're gonna suck at both. So, um, work-life balance does tend to come later. I know that's unpopular to say. Everyone wants to be like, "Oh, no. Peace, love, dove, Hare Krishnas. We can all just, you know, have a multimillion-pound business and now spare time." But everyone I know who's gone through that, even the people who talk about work-life balance, the way they came to work-life balance as a concept was by getting themself completely burnt out. Um, you know, and then they, "Oh, well, I'm, I'm reformed." Okay, great. You're reformed. Nice of you, now you're a millionaire-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:29 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:26:30 ... to be so reformed, right? Now you've got 55 people on your team working behind the scenes. Yeah, fabulous. Now you can just do a strategic role. Well, well done. That's the end state. But what they're not being honest about is how they got there, and they got there normally by being out of balance. They said no to a lot of stuff. Um, you know, they didn't go to the parties. They, um... You know, uh, like, for example, when I did the 10 million year, the, like, all of those five years working for John and then that, that was 60 hours a week every week. Um, we worked weekends. We ran events on the weekend. Uh, we might have had one weekend off a, in a month. We, like, when I was starting my first business, it was roll out of bed, have breakfast, and as soon as I finished breakfast, it's start work. And then it's work, work, work, work, work until dinner time, and then finish dinner, and then maybe do some more stuff after dinner and then go to bed. And that was every day. And now we were doing fun stuff as well, taking clients out to restaurants, going out partying, and all of that sort of stuff. There's no way I could have built those businesses without putting in serious time.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:37 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:27:37 Building an asset, making sales, the whole lot.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:39 [laughs] The whole thing. In your experience, like, having, having spoken to a bunch of people who are successful in business, do many of them regret the way that they spent their youth in hustle mode? Or, uh, is it a lot of it was like, "Oh, I'm, I'm glad I'm chilled out now, but I kinda had to get through that phase, and I don't regret putting in all that work back when I was young"?

Daniel Priestley 1:27:58 Uh, well, for starters, let's be... Let's go to the data as well. Um, most people who start a business are 42. Most successful entrepreneurs are 42 when they start.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:07 Oh, okay. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:28:09 Um, so m-most... The, the most well-worn path is that you work for someone in your 20s and you do an apprenticeship. In your 30s, you start to get your stride and you start to make some inroads, and you start to demonstrate value. You work up, up the chain a little bit. Um, towards your late 30s, early 40s, you start to figure out how this whole industry works, and you've got contacts, connections. You're trusted. And then at 42, you start a business that you then sell at 57, 15 years later, and make your millions. So that's the data, that's the path, right? So the path that most people take is career, and this is most successful entrepre- millionaire entrepreneurs. Started at 42, sold the business at 57. Um, so regretting the... There are very few who actually s- super successful entrepreneurs who started in their 20s. Um, I've not met many people who do regret that. Um, I think a lot of people went, "Oh my goodness. Thank goodness I, I jumped in with both feet when I had the, when I didn't have the commitments." 'Cause life gets more complicated, not less complicated. You know, we end up, you know, we end up with houses and families and, uh, you know, teams and, uh, all the stuff. We end up with sick parents. Uh, we end up with, uh, diseases or, or ailments. Um, all of that stuff, that's what, that's life, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:29:30 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:29:30 The least complex is age 20. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:29:33 Yeah. So there's a, there's a friend of mine who's, so she's, she's currently working full-time as a doctor and, like, wants to do a sort of creative thing on the side, and has kind of dabbled with it a little bit and has recognized that, hey, doing, doing the side hustle on top of the full-time job is incompatible with also having a social life and also doing hobbies and also self-care and also going to the gym every day and also doing, like, yeah, having good, sort of, uh, having, having e- eight hours of sleep a night. W- And I'm just like, yeah, it is. [laughs] Um, and you kinda have to choose if you want it and whether, whether it's worth the payoff. And like, how, how would you think about that?

Daniel Priestley 1:30:14 It's a huge risk. Um, there are very few broke, struggling doctors, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:30:21 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:30:21 Doctors cluster around a high point in society, around probably the top 10% of earners.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:27 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:30:27 Um, and it's very unlikely that you would meet someone who describes themself as a doctor who's just trying to get a break and trying to make it and, you know-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:35 Yeah, no, they're pr- usually pretty middle class, pretty ch-

Daniel Priestley 1:30:37 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:30:37 ... like, like, jealous from-

Daniel Priestley 1:30:38 There's hardly any that are crazy, like billionaires, and there's hardly any that actually drop below 35,000 a year or something like that. So you've, you've, you've got a very safe path. A safe path would mean the data clusters around a particular outcome, and all the data sits around that outcome, right? So that is the doctor's path. The doctor's path is very safely you're gonna end up in this good, comfortable lifestyle. That's not true for entrepreneurship. There are billionaires, and there are loads of people who are [laughs] completely broke and struggling.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:09 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:31:09 There are people who plowed their life savings in, um, you know, and, and they're, you know, it was the worst decision they ever made. They just weren't cut out for it, or they made, they made radical decisions. So, um, she's right to not take that lightly. That's a, that's an important decision to make. Uh, you need to really get- Good signals from the market that the market wants this thing that you have. So once again, wanting to have a side hustle, wanting to have this, is all about your own personal needs, which are irrelevant to the market.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:43 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 1:31:43 The market does not care, right? It... Like, if I go and buy a kebab at 3:00 in the morning, do I ever ask the kebab shop owner, "Are you okay? Are you managing your work-life balance enough? Why are you out here at 3:00 in the morning? You know, uh, is your family seeing enough of you?" I'm not asking anything like that. I'm just paying my £4 for my kebab at 3:00 in the morning. I have no ca- The market does not care about your work-life balance, doesn't care about how healthy or happy you are. It just cares whether you're meeting its needs. So the starting point for any business, first principles, is not what do you want, it's, like, does the market want something? And are you, are you willing and able to, to make that work for the marketplace? But you can't be too self-centered here. Your... Entrepreneurship is an act of service. It is a, it is a gift to the world. You're creating something that's gonna solve problems for others in a scalable way. You're gonna create jobs for others. All the hard... As you get bigger and bigger, all the hard problems are gonna roll up to your entrepreneurial desk. All the easy stuff will be solved by the people that you hi- hire, and only the tri- tricky stuff gets to you. Um, so you gotta work out, have I got a sufficient number of signals from market that the market says, "I need you to ha- I need you to do this"? You didn't quit your medical career until you were getting people signing up and subscribing.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:00 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:33:00 And there were good, solid signals, where your brain very logically and mathematically worked out, "No, no, I can, I can do this. Um, I'm getting a signal from market." But there are many people who might go, "Oh, it, he just jumped out."

Ali Abdaal 1:33:15 Mm. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:33:15 I don't think that's the case. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:17 Yeah, it was three years of, like, market making [laughs] and then of getting the signals to be like, "Okay, now it's time."

Daniel Priestley 1:33:21 Totally. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:22 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 1:33:22 Exactly. So I'd, I'd encourage people to... Th- Now, you don't have to take three years to get the signals. You could do 30 to 150 surveys, and people say 100%, "I really want this thing. I want that CrossFit gym in Putney to exist."

Ali Abdaal 1:33:34 Yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:33:35 "And, you know, we, we need you to set that up." Great. Um, and then I would also encourage, once again, go do a year or two with an existing business, um, you know, a boutique. Go work for an entrepreneur. See if you actually like the, like the, uh, lifestyle.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:50 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:51 Yeah, I love it. It's a, like a f- a fairly reasonable path of like, hey, this is, like, w- the, the entrepreneur game is a different kind of game. It's got different kind of rules, so understand what the rules are. R- Recognize that your outcomes may vary massively compared to the safe career that you're in, where outcomes cluster about a specific, a specific area. And now, given that we know that there is, there is a q- risky bet to make here-

Daniel Priestley 1:34:16 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:34:16 ... let's try and figure out a way to de-risk the bet. And signals from the market are one way of doing that. Um, and I guess even when someone has a full-time job, especially when someone has a full-time job, the ideation stage that we've talked about, coming up with 10, 50, 100 ideas for what could work, and narrowing them down, and then figuring out ways to test those without spending money.

Daniel Priestley 1:34:33 That-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:33 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:34:33 ... is the next step, called MVP.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:35 Oh, right. [laughs] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:34:36 Minimum, minimum viable product. So minimum viable product is one of the best things you can do, is set up either a scorecard or an event, and see if you can fill an event or get a scorecard. So let's say you wanna set up a health-related business, 'cause you're a doctor and you wanna, uh, zero in on a particular health-related set of products. Can you get 30 or 40 people to turn up to an event on that topic?

Ali Abdaal 1:34:59 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 1:35:00 Um, you might discover it's a lot of work just to get 30 people to show up to an event. Uh, you might discover you push the door and it flings right open. You book a venue for 30, and, you know, 70 show up, and it's like, "Ooh, okay, that's a pretty cool signal." Um, a scorecard is where you essentially set up an online survey or question where people can benchmark themselves, and that is an amazing MVP, minimum viable product. So you're essentially collecting data, you're collecting signals of interest, and you're getting people to reveal themselves as being interested in that topic. So you might say, "Oh, what I wanna do is I wanna be a marathon running coach. I'm gonna help people run marathons," right? And you say, "Okay, great. I'm gonna launch the are you ready to run a marathon scorecard, and we're gonna see if I can get people to take that for free." If I can't get people to take that for free, there's no way I'm gonna get them to pay-

Ali Abdaal 1:35:51 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:35:51 ... 'cause everything's downstream from lead generation.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:53 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:35:54 So if I can't generate the leads, forget about the business.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:57 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:35:57 And it's like, okay, what's my next idea? Oh, my next idea is diet coach. I'm gonna help people to eat better. Okay. Um, are you ready to improve your diet? Take the scorecard. Um, is your diet optimized? Take the scorecard. Uh, okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:10 Nice.

Daniel Priestley 1:36:10 Great. I'll answer the quiz. Okay. Oh, look, I've got 150 people who answered this-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:14 Mm

Daniel Priestley 1:36:14 ... and look, all of them struggle with this thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:17 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:36:17 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:17 And I guess you can just start by m- making one of these things on, like, some free software and chucking it-

Daniel Priestley 1:36:23 Facebook

Ali Abdaal 1:36:23 ... on your f- a Facebook friends list or messaging your friends on Instagram who you know might-

Daniel Priestley 1:36:26 Someone created that software.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:27 [laughs] Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:36:27 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:28 So what is a, what is a scorecard, and what's the deal with that?

Daniel Priestley 1:36:30 So when I launched The Key Person of Influence Accelerator, we created the Key Person of Influence Scorecard, and this became a massive thing. 90,000 people took it, and we made £15 million off the back end of sales.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:42 And it's just ba- like a glorified online quiz.

Daniel Priestley 1:36:44 It's a glorified-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:45 With, like, 24-

Daniel Priestley 1:36:45 ... online quiz, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:36:46 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:36:46 It's like a personality test. It, it essentially... In the book, it says, "Are you any good at pitching? Are you any good at creating products?" And it asks y- the scorecard asks you a series of questions-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:57 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:36:57 ... and it gives you a score.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:58 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:36:58 And it says, "You're a four out of 10 for pitching."

Ali Abdaal 1:37:00 There's something so addictive about that.

Daniel Priestley 1:37:01 There's something-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:01 I signed up with a CEO coach, like, two or three days ago. He, he had two scorecards that he made me take, and I was like, "Damn, I've got a lot of improvement."

Daniel Priestley 1:37:07 Yeah, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:37:08 Take my money. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:37:08 'Cause it's like if I ask you 50 questions, and each question gives you a little bit of psychological, um, you know, tension, and you're like... And then it adds up, and then your score comes out at 43%.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:19 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:37:20 And you being you, you're like, "Argh!" Oh, I've got to optimize right up

Ali Abdaal 1:37:23 Yeah. There's so much to improve. Isn't it great?

Daniel Priestley 1:37:25 Right. Exactly. So that quantification, um, on a scale of one to 10, how painful is it? Oh, it's a four out of 10, right? So the, all of this works. Psychologically, it all comes together in a scorecard. So basically, we launched a scorecard, Key Person of Influence. It was a huge success. Te- you know, lots of millions and millions worth of sales came off the back of it, and my clients started saying, "Hey, that assessment thing that I took, how do I get one of those for my business?" So at the time, I had an IT business, and we were building them for clients about eight grand each, and we're basically, my, my now co-founder, Steve, he was building them. I was selling them, and we sold, like, 10, uh, and everyone who bought one had a massive result. So we had this guy who was running a DJ school. He had this big social media following, and then he launched the DJ scorecard. Are you ready to become a professional DJ? We're gonna measure you on five areas, and suddenly, thousands of people are taking the scorecard, and he's got all this data, and he's like, "Whoa," and his business grew big off the back. So went from having a social media following to having proprietary data and leads. So we saw this working. We thought, "Okay, let's make it super easy and not eight grand." We created Scoreapp. Um, now people can just basically build their own scorecards. It gives you a template with a landing page and a qui-questionnaire and a results page and a PDF. Um, and then you create your own scorecards. Um, so, like, for example, you could do a productivity scorecard. Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:52 Yeah, I was just thinking of that. I was like, "Why don't I have a productivity scorecard?"

Daniel Priestley 1:38:55 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:55 That would be so good.

Daniel Priestley 1:38:56 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:56 I basically take all my knowledge of productivity and be like, "Do you currently have, uh, sort of life values? Do you currently do a weekly review? Do you currently set a daily highlight every morning?" And the answer to m- a lot of those things will... And if the answer to all those things is yes, it's like, I have nothing to teach you. But, like, for 99.9% of people, there, there will be holes-

Daniel Priestley 1:39:11 There'll be gaps

Ali Abdaal 1:39:11 ... in that thing, and I can be like, "All right, cool. Here are the resources that-

Daniel Priestley 1:39:14 And you don't have to waste time on the things that you're good at. You can just go straight to, oh, okay, all of your productivity issues relates to scheduling.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:21 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:39:21 So let's get you the, all the scheduling tools. So that, and that's your own proprietary data. At the moment, uh, it's unlikely, but at, at the moment, social media could just switch you off. They have done that with people. Um, I can't imagine you getting switched off [laughs] with-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:35 [laughs] Hopefully

Daniel Priestley 1:39:35 ... with your radical-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:36 I need to not say anything controversial. Yeah [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:39:36 ... beliefs on productivity. Uh, but, but the good thing about this is you would own your own database.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:42 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:39:43 You'd have your own data.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:44 Damn. 'Cause we do so much work anyway, creating courses and stuff, and we w- w-whip together a landing page and sometimes do a little bit of pre-collecting things, and then I read over subscribe and I'm like, "Oh, we should probably do a little bit more." We probably shouldn't just be like, "All right, here's the thing, guys. Take it or leave it." With like, there's, there's more to do. And a scorecard just feels like it's just like co... We just take our course syllabus and turn it into questions. And now-

Daniel Priestley 1:40:04 Yeah, yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:40:04 ... people identify that, okay, my camera confidence is at 15%. I have so much to go. This course will take me up to 95.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:10 Yeah. A- and they-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:11 So good [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:40:11 ... and then they take the scorecard at the end-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:13 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:40:13 ... and they go, "It did take me to 95."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:14 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:15 Uh-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:15 And if it doesn't, we can give them the, give them their money back-

Daniel Priestley 1:40:17 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:40:17 ... as like a guarantee tied to the thing.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:19 E- exactly, and it quantifies it, and it makes it r- ROI is clear. The other thing too is you might have lots of ideas, and you might say, "Oh, okay, creating a whole course is gonna take three weeks."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:29 It's like bollock. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:40:31 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:40:31 Takes ages, yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:40:32 Yeah, it does.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:32 Way more than three weeks for a lot of people.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:34 So let's say you say, "Okay, well, I've got three ideas, and I'm not sure which one."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:38 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:38 "I'll just take three scorecard. I'll create three scorecards."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:41 Oh, yes. I have an idea for a course of, like, um, uh, uh, essentially called something like the life-changing magic of a personal assistant.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:48 And the team has always been a bit like, "Uh, I don't know if anyone-"

Daniel Priestley 1:40:51 Should you hire-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:51 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:51 Should you to-hire a personal assistant? Take the scorecard.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:53 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:54 So then if-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:55 Shit, this is so good. [laughs] Take the scorecard

Daniel Priestley 1:40:56 ... if 4,000 people take the scorecard-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:58 It's like we should clearly make a course on this.

Daniel Priestley 1:40:59 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:00 And then we can, then we've got their email addresses. We can interview them. We can be like, "Hey, what are your problems like? Let's make sure this course is really good."

Daniel Priestley 1:41:04 Well, you'll know the question. You'll know what their problems are-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:06 Oh

Daniel Priestley 1:41:06 ... 'cause they'll have answered the questions.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:07 This is genius.

Daniel Priestley 1:41:08 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:41:09 Okay, cool. Anyway, I'm, I'm gonna take lots of notes off this. Uh, but you've just released this book score- like this week.

Daniel Priestley 1:41:14 Scorecard Marketing.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:14 Like, I, I bought it on Kindle, like, on Friday or something. I was like, "Oh, sick." Like, yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:41:17 Super tactical. You can see it's really short compared to the other business... uh, the other books, it's half the size.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:22 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:41:22 It's designed to be tactical, and, um, it's just about creating that MVP and that lead generation asset.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:30 Uh, by the way, just a quick thing to mention, we actually have a link to Scoreapp with a discount code in the video description and in the kind of show notes if you wanna check out this kind of lead gen method that Dan's talking about in this, in this episode. Okay, so I have an idea for a business, and I wanna test it by creating some sort of questionnaire-type thing that I can send to people that I know through Facebook or through-

Daniel Priestley 1:41:52 Yep

Ali Abdaal 1:41:52 ... being part of the Runners World Forum or part of-

Daniel Priestley 1:41:54 Yep, exactly

Ali Abdaal 1:41:55 ... menshealth.com or whatever. Chuck it on the forum or chuck it to my Facebook friends. Would you be interested in this sort of thing? Free scorecard, free questionnaire. They put their email address in at the end?

Daniel Priestley 1:42:03 Yeah, ideal- yeah, or at the beginning or at the end. Same thing if you run an event. So m- as I said, my whole first empire was, uh, intro events, introduction events, and that was the lead generation and warm-up phase in one. And then scorecards became the digital version of that, always available 24/7, collecting data, making recommendations on autopilot. So those are all lead generations, but they're also good MVPs. So anyone who's got an idea, run an event, see if you can fill it, launch a scorecard, see if you can get people taking it, and that'll tell you whether you're gonna be any good or not or whether you've got any chance-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:38 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:42:38 ... uh, to do this. Do it for maybe four months in a row and see whether you can grow it each month. 'Cause if you get 30, then 20, then 10, then five, then we're tracking it in the wrong direction. If you get 30, then 50, then 100, then 150, okay, maybe this could take off. So you want a very simple MVP. It's just lead generation at first. So all you're trying to do is can I generate leads? 'Cause everything is downstream from lead generation. So can I generate leads? If you can't generate leads, forget about how good you are as a doctor. Forget about-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:09 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:43:09 ... how amazing your product is. Forget about how well you, you know, can do it p- speaking, right? All of that doesn't matter if you can't get the lead. So ultimately, the first thing to test is lead generation. Can I generate leads for this idea?

Ali Abdaal 1:43:23 So what counts as a lead?

Daniel Priestley 1:43:25 Any signal of interest-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:26 Okay

Daniel Priestley 1:43:26 ... where essentially they're giving you some revealing signal of interest. So buying a ticket is a reveal. It's basically if I buy a ticket to h- the magical life-changing, um, power of a personal assistant, and it's a one-hour Zoom webinar workshop, clearly I'm the type of person who's considering-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:46 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:43:46 ... a personal assistant. So it's a signal of interest. Uh, name and email and, and, and I'm giving you an hour of time to tell me about this. Or if I fill in the scorecard, that's a strong signal of interest. So a lead is just a, somebody revealing themselves, uh, to say, "I'm interested." It's, it's that whole, "Hey, yeah, I'm, I'm interested in that."

Ali Abdaal 1:44:05 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 1:44:05 That's a lead.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:06 So what happens next once you've got the lead? I've got the email address-

Daniel Priestley 1:44:08 So that's called your-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:09 ... I've got the scorecard results. Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:44:09 ... minimum viable product. So the next thing is called product market fit. Product market fit is adjusting the product to meet the market.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:17 Mm-hmm.

Daniel Priestley 1:44:17 So you imagined the product would be red, but everyone wants it in blue. And you're like, "Ah, okay, as much as I thought it should be red, it needs to be blue." So this is where you do product market fit work. So you wanna be the marathon coach, and you imagined that you would be tweaking everyone's running style, but they all want help with diet, they all want help picking a pair of shoes, and it's like, "Ugh, just go down and get a pair of shoes-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:40 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:44:40 ... and, like, just watch this video on, on diet." It's like, "Yeah, but that's what we want." And it's like, "Oh, okay. So I need to include that in the product."

Ali Abdaal 1:44:48 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:44:48 So this is called product market fit, and it's essentially making adjustments to your product so that the product fits what the market wants.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:55 So we, I think, uh, accidentally did this. Well, it, it was accidentally. We, we, when, when launching the first iteration, iteration of our YouTuber course two years ago, we worked with this marketing coach, and he was like, "Okay, send an email to your list being like, 'What is your biggest challenge with growing your YouTube channel?' And see what happens. And then on the second page of that, ask them a few sort of more qualifying, more, m- m- a f- a few more questions." And initially, I was imagining our YouTuber course would be helping people from 100,000 subscribers scale up by building systems and processes and stuff. Turns out 95% of the people who filled out the survey hadn't, hadn't even made their first video, and, like, the other 5%, like, were all under 100 subscribers. And we were like, "What the hell?" Like, this is not what we had in mind. This is more like a YouTube for complete and utter beginners who w- have a job but, like, don't feel like they have the time to do YouTube properly and wanna just learn all of the-

Daniel Priestley 1:45:42 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:43 Oh, that's a very different product to, "Here is how you can hire and outsource a team and build systems and stuff to blow up your business."

Daniel Priestley 1:45:49 No-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:49 And, yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:45:50 ... it's like your market, they're like, "We wanna get started." And they almo- they almost always would say, "What equipment do you have?"

Ali Abdaal 1:45:56 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:45:56 And you might have gone, "Oh, well, just-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:58 It doesn't matter. Just start with your phone.

Daniel Priestley 1:45:59 Just, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:59 But, like, people love the equipment thing.

Daniel Priestley 1:46:00 They want the equipment thing. So that's part of-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:01 And people love templates, people love the whole like, "Oh, what, what's the template that you use for your videos?" It's like, I mean, it's, it's not that hard. It's just, just, it's j- it's just these three thing- But okay, let's package it up as a template.

Daniel Priestley 1:46:10 Let's call the three things and put it in-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:10 And now people love it. They're like, "Oh my God, thank you so much for the template. It's so useful." And I'm, I'm always a bit baffled, but now I've kind of learned over time that-

Daniel Priestley 1:46:16 But that's product market fit.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:17 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:46:18 And product market fit is often baffling because your values are different to the values of someone who's buying the product. Because if you're a fitness trainer, you've got fitness high on your values, and you research it all the time, you read it all the time. If you're a fitness trainer buyer, you're buying a product like that, fitness is low on your values, which is why you're buying.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:36 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:46:37 So you basically have a mismatch in values. The things that are quite obvious to the person who's setting up a business are actually non-obvious to the people who are buying from the business, and the things that are highly valuable over here might be too advanced over here. So there's always gonna be a mismatch, and you have to get into that alignment-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:56 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:46:56 ... and that's product market fit.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:57 Yeah. And that's where I guess, you know, our doctor-turned-coach thinks that people care about a qualification when in reality they probably don't. Like if f- or m- maybe they do, but, like, there's some level of testing the market to see if that's, if that's actually a thing.

Daniel Priestley 1:47:12 Yeah. Well, maybe they want a certificate that you're re- you're now certified and ready to put your first YouTube video up, and you... Maybe th- that's important, and you might sit there and go, "That's so silly," but it's like, "But I just want to be certified that I'm ready to start." And it's like, "Okay. Well, we'll-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:26 Yeah. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 1:47:26 "... here's the certificate." [laughs] Right? So that is all product market fit.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:30 Nice. And the great thing about this is that this is all stuff people can do, like, in a couple of hours on a weekend while you have a job.

Daniel Priestley 1:47:36 Totally.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:36 Like, it's not that hard to put together one of these things.

Daniel Priestley 1:47:38 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:38 Go on Scoreapp, go on any Google Forms or anything like that-

Daniel Priestley 1:47:42 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:47:42 ... and you can probably whack one together.

Daniel Priestley 1:47:43 Exactly. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:44 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:47:44 And you, you're collecting data, you're collecting signals of interest, you're getting leads. Remember, my background was, like, people ringing 1-800 numbers and, uh, people emailing that they would like to attend. So anything like that, like, you know, any signal of interest is gonna be a powerful signal of interest, and then product market fit is making adjustments. Now, the end result of product market fit should be a landing page or a brochure that when you show it to people, they go, "Oh, that's cool." Right? So we must... We... I know this sounds weird, but the end result for that stage is you now have a landing page or a brochure that is the document that shows this is the offer, this is the product. It's an offer form. Um, and most people, it's like they, they kind of steamroll ahead, but they don't produce that piece of collateral. That police- piece of collateral is a very important step where people can hold it, see it, open it, look at it.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:37 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:48:37 And you don't have to have it... Like, by the way, you, you, you could create a brochure for going on a trip to the moon, and, uh, it doesn't necessarily have to exist, and you don't have to own rockets and all of that sort of stuff. But you could say, "In 2025, I'm gonna be, um, partnering with a rocket company for a trip to the moon. Would you, would you sign up for this? Would you... You know, does this look like something you'd want?" And all it needs to do is be a brochure that looks like a trip to the moon brochure, and, you know, it says trip to the moon right there. And now there's no cost in doing that, right? A little bit of time and design. But ultimately, you can show people, and they can then go, "Yes, I want that."

Ali Abdaal 1:49:17 Yes. Wow. Yes. And, and this is... I'm just thinking, like, this is the exact stuff we used to do in, like, a ICT class in school of like, "Hey, pretend like you're designing this database," and, "Oh, let's make a brochure on Microsoft Publisher," or whatever it was back in the day around the thing. And I guess the equivalent in The modern world is either, uh, just like w- whipping up a quick landing page on like Squarespace or-

Daniel Priestley 1:49:39 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:49:39 ... anything simple, even like a Google Doc. Um, this, uh, a coach person who I had breakfast with was like obsessing over her WordPress website. I was like, "Honestly, I have paid for $10,000 coaching packages off the back of a Google Doc. You don't need the, like the thing where, where, where it's just like the offer laid out in bullet points."

Daniel Priestley 1:49:53 You need some document.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:54 Yeah, something that I can be like, "Okay, here is the offer, and here's how much it costs." Ooh, on that point, here's how much it costs. How does... Do, do you put the price on the product-

Daniel Priestley 1:50:01 So there's three documents that eventually come together. There's the brochure, the offer form, and the signup, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:50:07 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 1:50:07 So the brochure is all the kind of story around the product and what's included. The offer form is h- how much is it and what do you get specifically. Now, on a landing page, you would have seen if you hit the pricing button on most websites, and it gives you one of those drop-downs where it says gold, silver, bronze, and it's tick, tick, tick, cross, cross, cross-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:27 That's the signup page. Uh, that's the offer page.

Daniel Priestley 1:50:28 That's the offer.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:28 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:50:29 And the signup is where people buy, and they put in all their details, and they pay a deposit. Um, they... Often they'll pay just a holding deposit, um, for a startup. They'll just, um, or they'll say, you can say, um, [lips smack] "We will notify you when this is available." One of the best things you can do at the MVP level is you can put up a landing page. If people click the Buy Now button, it says, "This product's no longer available in your area or not yet available in your area. Um, join the waiting list." And then people go, "Okay, I'll join the waiting list." That way you don't need payment gateways. You don't need to have credit card machines or any, any of those sorts of things. You're just collecting the signal that they were willing to pay-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:09 Yes

Daniel Priestley 1:51:09 ... but you didn't let them.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:11 Is it at all useful to... So we're, we're, we're having this dilemma with our courses where it's like w- my instinct was that we should have the landing page before we even think about creating the course, because then we're like... And we should do the orders interviews and use that to tweak the landing page. And then we should have like a pre-order form that gives them like a big discount or something, and, uh, s-so that we in, in addition to getting an, an idea of how many people click the button, we get an idea of how many people were willing to pre-order.

Daniel Priestley 1:51:35 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:36 Um, is that something that you would generally recommend? Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:51:37 It's, uh, it's, it's so much better. You don't need to do discounts either. Demand and supply tension push the price up, not down. So for example, if you said, "We're doing a cohort of 300, and join the waiting list." And if it's transparent that three and a half thousand people joined the waiting list and there's only 300 spots, you don't need a discount. So transparent demand and supply tension pushes prices up. Uh, so essentially any join the waiting list or, um, register your interest or any of that sort of stuff, provided there's a level of transparency to show the tension, um, that will result in high prices, not low prices.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:16 Okay. So I, I f- I, I, I feel like I've s- like th- through, through reading your stuff, stumbled upon a lot of these ideas over the last se- several years. But when... I think when someone hears about it for the first time, the thought that you can sell a thing without having created the thing is gonna lead, leads to like, "Oh, is that unethical? That sounds evil. It sounds bad. It sound..." Like how-

Daniel Priestley 1:52:38 It's very evil

Ali Abdaal 1:52:39 ... what's going on with that? [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:52:40 Yeah, no. [chuckles] It's, uh, it's very simple. You're either, you're either asking them to attend an information event, which you're gonna deliver an information event on Zoom, or maybe you're gonna book a little room, right, a boardroom or something, but you're inviting people to an event, and that is a standalone thing that they can get some information and learn more about the topic. Um, or you're inviting them to take a scorecard or a survey, um, and they're gonna hand over some data in exchange for some feedback, right? So there's an ethical exchange. Um, or you're inviting them to join a waiting list where they know that the product is not yet available, but they're wanting to be, um, included in information and updates that when they become available. So Elon Musk knew that Cybertruck was not gonna be built for three years, but he launched Cybertruck. He showed people what Cybertruck would look like. He invited people to put down a $100 deposit if they wanted to be in the waiting list for a Cybertruck, knowing full well that it wouldn't be available for three years. Uh, he collected a million d- uh, deposits, a million $100 deposits, um, and that allowed him to raise an unlimited amount of capital from the market to then go and fulfill those orders. So he was able to go and build the, um, factories, and he... Like, imagine he hadn't collected those signals, and you go to J.P. Morgan and you say, "Hey, look, we wanna create a Cybertruck, and this is what it looks like. It's unlike anything that's ever been built." And J.P. Morgan's gonna go, "We can't give you money for a factory for that."

Ali Abdaal 1:54:06 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:54:06 But if you go in there and say, "A million people have put down a $100 deposit" -

Ali Abdaal 1:54:09 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:54:09 ... it's like, "Great. What are the terms?"

Ali Abdaal 1:54:10 Yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:54:12 Yeah. So, so you're not doing anything unethical. It's an event. It's a scorecard or it's a waiting list.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:19 Where did the name scorecard come from?

Daniel Priestley 1:54:20 [lips smack] Uh, well, a quiz typically is testing your knowledge. Like, um, if I quiz you on your Beatles trivia-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:26 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:54:26 ... you know, I'm testing to know what you know. Um, a assessment, uh, kind of feels like, uh, academic. Um, I just wanted to keep it like a fun-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:36 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:54:36 ... way of describing.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:36 That sounds cool. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:54:37 So it's like a scorecard. It's like, should you start a YouTube channel? Answer these questions. Find out. Uh, take the test. A- uh, get a scorecard. And the scorecard is like, because we've set up the s- the software so that you can have multiple categories, so you could have diet, exercise, and sleep, and then it's like, oh, your diet's strong, your exercise is strong, but your sleep is the weakest. So it's that kind of s- a scorecard of, you know, being able to look at different categories. Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:03 Yeah. Oh, man.

Daniel Priestley 1:55:05 So-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:05 Gonna make a productivity scorecard.

Daniel Priestley 1:55:07 De-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:07 That's gonna be so fun. Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:55:07 Yeah, definitely. And what categories would you do?

Ali Abdaal 1:55:09 Um, probably something like, um, do you know where you want to go?

Daniel Priestley 1:55:15 So like vision or-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:16 Like vision-

Daniel Priestley 1:55:17 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:55:17 ... type stuff. Uh, and then in terms of like, do you know where you wanna go? Do you know how you're gonna get there? So in terms of like the goal setting and-

Daniel Priestley 1:55:25 Tactical, so tactics-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:25 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:55:25 ... tactical planning.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:26 That kind of stuff. Then it's gonna be how good is your, uh, takeoff. So like getting started with work, b- overcoming cr- procrastination, all that kind of stuff. Then- How good are you at staying in, staying on the course? So like not getting distracted and focused and stuff. And then, um-

Daniel Priestley 1:55:41 Probably gadgets and tools, right? Some like-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:44 Ooh, good idea. Yes

Daniel Priestley 1:55:44 ... pe-people love, people love gadgets and tools.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:46 Definitely. How strong are your, how s- how, how strong are your supplies? Um, something around like to what extent do you regularly take breaks and recharge and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Daniel Priestley 1:55:54 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:54 Um, I think that'd be-

Daniel Priestley 1:55:55 So you probably wanna have, you wanna have three to five categories.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:57 Yep.

Daniel Priestley 1:55:58 You wanna boil it down to three to five categories.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:00 Yep.

Daniel Priestley 1:56:00 And you wanna then do six questions per category.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:04 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 1:56:04 Right? So it's 30 questions all up, something like that. And then basically when people answer the 30 questions, the scorecard will then break it into the categories and it'll say, "You have no gadgets. You're a zero for gadgets, uh, but you're h- really high on motivation. You're-- got an amazing vision, but your tactical, uh, implementation's low." So then you say, "Great, you've got a clear vision, but we need to work on your tactics and your gadgetry." Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:56:29 And then that gives a clearer indica- or even if I don't make the specific product of like, oh wow, loads of people are s- really struggle with motivation. Cool, let's try and make a video, write book to do, do a thing based on that-

Daniel Priestley 1:56:39 Ex- exactly

Ali Abdaal 1:56:39 ... market.

Daniel Priestley 1:56:40 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:41 Love it. Okay, sick. So we've got the idea, ideation thingy. We've narrowed it down, and then we have built the MVP-

Daniel Priestley 1:56:48 MVP

Ali Abdaal 1:56:48 ... which is the scorecard or the event or the webinar. W-on that note-

Daniel Priestley 1:56:51 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:56:51 ... what's the deal with webinars? Uh, they have a sort of a bit of a, in my, in my mind, webinar equals slightly scammy. Um, I, I, I guess it's basically event-

Daniel Priestley 1:57:00 I think COVID-

Ali Abdaal 1:57:01 Event but online

Daniel Priestley 1:57:01 ... COVID changed that.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:01 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:57:02 Um, it's just a cheap event that you can put on, you know, like I just think of it as a Zoom meeting, and you're just gonna present some slides. So if I was launching a new business, I'm gonna put on a Zoom meeting because I wanna reduce the amount of time that it takes for people to jump on or jump off if they don't like it. Um, so I might say, "Hey, I'm a doctor. I wanna do, um, a, a lecture on what we've been learning around gut health." Um, let's say, uh, "So I'm gonna do a, an introduction to weight loss through better gut health. Uh, would you like to jump on? It's gonna be a 45-minute lecture. Um, jump on Zoom." You don't have to travel anywhere. You don't have to catch a train.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:40 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:57:40 You don't have to do any of that. So it's a Zoom meeting. So yeah, look, any tool can be used for scammy stuff. Uh, y- a boardroom, there are probably boardrooms full of scammers right now, right? But, um, but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the boardroom.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:53 Yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:57:54 Uh, [chuckles] so it's just a Zoom meeting. It's low f- low cost for you-

Ali Abdaal 1:57:57 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 1:57:57 ... low friction for them. Uh, and it's just an easy way to test the market. Because if you can get 30 people on that webinar but half of them drop off, um, during the webinar, then it's like, okay, something's wrong. So it's giving you feedback, and that's all we're after at the beginning. So MVP, product market fit. The next one's called go-to-market.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:18 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 1:58:18 Go-to-market is where you're now pushing sales and marketing on. Uh, you might raise some money to go to market. Um, it's very easy to raise go-to-market money because you've done your MVP, you've got your data, you've got your testing, and now b- the data says we should go all in on this. So now it's go-to-market. When people think about starting a business, they normally mentally jump to go-to-market.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:40 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 1:58:40 So it's like, "Oh, I need to go and talk to people and quit my job," and all that sort of stuff, and they haven't done those first few steps. So go-to-market is where you turn on, uh, all your lead generation. Uh, you might spend money on ads. You might, um, do joint ventures and promotions. You're hustling. You're making sales. You might hire a team at that point. You might hire a salesperson. So that's all the go-to-market activity. You're, you're, um, probably going from testing revenue. Maybe you've earned 50 grand testing, and now you're gonna earn 500,000 or a million.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:13 Oh, where do, where did the testing revenue come in?

Daniel Priestley 1:59:15 Well, you might have had people put down deposits or you might have just taken on... Like l-let's say... Well, for example, when we built ScoreApp, I did like a dozen people who paid eight grand each for their scorecard, and we built it on WordPress, and we literally just charged them the full amount to build it from scratch each time. Um, and that's because there was no platform. That's how much it cost. Um, so we probably earned 80 to 100 grand worth of, um, people paying for a setup. Uh, but it was a hands-on setup.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:45 Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a lot of startups do this, where, um, y-you sign up to the thing, but in the early days it's someone on a Google sheet who's, like doing the thing. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 1:59:55 Yeah, it's a-

Ali Abdaal 1:59:56 And they know they're gonna build the software at some point, but at least they've got someone on, on a Google sheet doing the thing.

Daniel Priestley 2:00:00 That is the most successful startups.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:01 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:00:01 Yeah, that's, that's how it's done. That's how the professionals

Daniel Priestley 2:00:04 do it, by the way.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:04 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 2:00:05 A lot of the time, the amateurs think that the professionals go and build this amazing all-singing, all-dancing thing and then sell it. It's absolutely not. The more professional the entrepreneur, the more likely they are to be just like putting together slide decks and making the sale and then doing a hands-on one-at-a-time sale to see how the customer's interacting at every single step. Um, and you know, you might wanna create a productivity app, and you literally have a, a Google sheet, and you have a person who rings up and says, "Have you done your Google sheet today? And let's go through it together. Jump on and we'll both do it." And it's like, "Oh, this isn't an app. It's a Google sheet." It's like that's a pro... You know that that's a pro entrepreneur. Amateur entrepreneur will get the family's 300 grand, mortgage the house, like, you know, Grandma's money's in it, and then, like they built this all-singing, all-dancing piece of technology that nobody's ever gonna use.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:57 Hmm. Nice. Yeah, I think, uh, so, uh, personal trainers who do, like, online personal training and stuff, um, I, I, I feel like there's this thing where it's like they're, they're gonna give you the programming or something like that, but it's probably just like a Google sheet template that they just use for all their clients, and maybe at some point there's like a sophisticated level of like, um, customization. But realistically, everyone broadly needs the same plan, so like-

Daniel Priestley 2:01:24 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:01:25 ... it's not, it's not that hard.

Daniel Priestley 2:01:26 Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of the time people want hand-holding, they want support, they want accountability. Um, so what they're providing is those, those types of things. Um, but once again, that is a self-employed, um, freelancer type model. Uh, so it's not so much... Like what we're discussing is that world of the entrepreneur Building the scalable solution and building a business that will eventually have value

Ali Abdaal 2:01:47 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:01:47 Uh, 'cause ultimately an entrepreneur builds an asset. Um, and the reason entrepreneurs can sell their business is they have an asset, and the asset's saleable. Um, and that's the difference. Self-employed people aren't really building an asset. Uh, they're, they're selling labor. So, um, this is a pathway to that exitable, saleable, scalable asset. People who have work-life balance are underpinned by assets. So the reason I might have work-life balance is 'cause I've got best-selling books that are selling... Um, like it's weird, I sell a few books an hour every hour around the clock, and that is like a relationship engine always running, and people are learning about what we do and who we are without me having to physically be anywhere. So that's called an asset. An asset has been developed, and then that asset works. Online scorecards, we, we generated 90,000 leads on autopilot, and that w- those, those were always coming in. We automatically connected those to a salesperson. So when a lead came in, a salesperson got a notification, and then they pick up the phone, talk to that person, make a sale. So I can be anywhere in the world. Um, that is underpinning yourself with assets. So what we're talking about with entrepreneurship is the creation of an asset, uh, that, that does the work. Intellectual property, media, or tech is normally the... The primary assets that we work with as entrepreneurs is intellectual property, media, and technology.

Ali Abdaal 2:03:09 Right. So a- again, I'm think- I'm thinking to my hypothetical productivity course, for example. Um, the assets are the YouTube videos that-

Daniel Priestley 2:03:20 Media

Ali Abdaal 2:03:21 ... plug the scorecard-

Daniel Priestley 2:03:23 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:03:23 ... which then-

Daniel Priestley 2:03:23 Based on intellectual property.

Ali Abdaal 2:03:24 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:03:24 So the IP... The scorecard is technology-

Ali Abdaal 2:03:27 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:03:27 ... the videos are media, and your approach to it is intellectual property.

Ali Abdaal 2:03:30 And then every day, X number of people will fill out the scorecard probably, 'cause I'll just plug... It's a free scorecard, it's e- easy to plug in a video without seeming like-

Daniel Priestley 2:03:38 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:03:38 ... spammy in any way. The, this, like literally just a free scorecard. Of the people that are sufficiently then qualified through the scorecard, we could then either do a frictionless sale of like, "You, you would love the online course"-

Daniel Priestley 2:03:50 Yep

Ali Abdaal 2:03:50 ... or do a... Where does, where does a salesman fit into this, i- into this equation?

Daniel Priestley 2:03:56 Salesperson

Daniel Priestley 2:03:57 typically fits with any sale that is north of a couple of thousand.

Ali Abdaal 2:04:01 Okay.

Daniel Priestley 2:04:01 Um, because just by virtue of the fact that there's a spend normally requires some trust and some customization and conversation. So if you were doing a productivity rollout with a corporate, and they were thinking about doing this with 70 of their employees, um, then that would normally involve some form of sales conversation. It's unlikely that the NHS would roll out a-

Ali Abdaal 2:04:23 70 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 2:04:23 ... person trial, uh, on productivity without talking to someone first.

Ali Abdaal 2:04:27 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:04:28 So essentially when there's a commitment, normally for things that are less than 1,000 and that have a free trial, um, you know, any of those types of things, you don't normally need a salesperson. You can do it through media. But once we go into the thousands, um, most people wanna talk to someone and, and, and that's where a salesperson fits in. Um, and then when the leads come in, uh, that salesperson can talk to them and identify, you know, and reassure and give the right information.

Ali Abdaal 2:04:57 Mm.

Daniel Priestley 2:04:57 You know, 'cause you're taking... If a salesperson's good, they live and breathe this product and service. They understand all the complexity and all the moving parts, and then the person's got their narrow set of needs, and the salesperson is essentially sharing with them, "These are the features, advantages, benefits that are relevant for you."

Ali Abdaal 2:05:15 So our YouTuber Academy course is now north of $2,000. Uh, so like two grand, I think three grand and seven grand is three different packages. And I've always sort of thought, especially after reading Oversubscribed, "Hmm, do we... Would it be useful to have a sales function?"

Daniel Priestley 2:05:29 Well, you'd probably find that you could add a million a year just through a salesperson. So if you've got warm leads, there are plenty of people who are... They've already signaled their intent that they wanna do this. The only reason they're not buying is they're just not sure... I would, I would hypothesize that the number one reason people don't buy is they don't feel confident themselves that they will be the right person to do the work. And if you focus your energy on having a salesperson who can listen to what their idea is, show them some case studies or examples of people who've had a similar idea, help them to identify that, yes, there's a market for what you're talking about, or no there's not, um, and then just do a little bit of reassurance, and then maybe offer some sort of a guarantee period where you say, "Hey, look, it sounds like you need to test this idea. If you knew this would work, would it be a silly decision to spend two grand on this?" "No, I could do that." "Okay, great. So what if we have a guarantee period where we do some testing, and if you can get more than 50 people to subscribe to your channel, that's enough of a test in month one to know it's a good idea, and then you're happy to spend the two grand." "Yeah, okay, great." So anything less than 50 people subscribed, we'll, we'll refund the money. If it goes over 50, if you've done the work, you've uploaded these videos, you've got your 50 subscribers, then you're happy, right? So a little bit of that conversation, you probably find that you could make a sale a day, uh, 200 days of the year. There's another 400,000, you know, and up.

Ali Abdaal 2:06:58 It's not bad. [laughs] That could be quite fun. Um, yeah, like-

Daniel Priestley 2:07:02 Yeah, and it could be a good service, right?

Ali Abdaal 2:07:03 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:07:03 It's, it, it's, it's thinking... It's radical empathy for the person who's buying.

Ali Abdaal 2:07:08 Yeah, it's like, is this genuinely useful for the... But so, so like last time we did, like two cohorts ago, I was, uh, we, we, we sort of did like a Zoom webinary type of a Zoom call. I was available for an hour, like four times a day just to answer people's questions about the thing. But what I found was that like, I don't know, 20 people would show up, 15 of them would have their cameras off. Most of them were, were like younger people that were never gonna sign up but just wanted to have, see what I was like on a Zoom call, and-

Daniel Priestley 2:07:32 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:07:32 ... it just ended up being not overly helpful. Um, w- is that where you then start qualifying leads and have one-on-one conversations and, and stuff?

Daniel Priestley 2:07:39 Yeah, so you'd probably have a salesperson who does an email out and says, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you about your YouTube channel. Um, would you like to have a chat? Here's the link to my diary." People then book a, a time in the diary Maybe it's a 20-minute, 30-minute s- uh, slot. Um, tell me about what kind of YouTube channel you'd like to launch. Tell me where are you at in your YouTubing journey. Um, right at the beginning, I've got 100,000 followers, right? Who knows? Or maybe the s- the scorecard's already told you. So it's like, "Hey, a scorecard says that you've got 5,000 plus followers. Tell me a bit about how did you get there. So what are you looking to do next? What help do you think we can offer? What made you signal your interest in, in our product? Um, what held you back? What stopped you from going ahead with it?" Um, "Oh, okay, so you were just going away on a holiday and the timing didn't work. What about now?" "Oh, no, you're fine now." "Okay, great. [chuckles] I'm glad I called you. Let's get you set up." So, you know, tho- those things happen all the time, and sometimes people-

Ali Abdaal 2:08:32 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:08:32 ... will be too scared to ask you a question 'cause it's you. You're the figurehead. You're the key person of influence. So they might just be too nervous to ask a silly question.

Ali Abdaal 2:08:40 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:08:40 But they'll ask your salesperson.

Ali Abdaal 2:08:43 Yeah, and like the, the cool thing about this, I think, is that the ability to just offer someone a phone call is something that, again, anyone, anyone can do even when they have a job. Like I, I... Just the, the amount of people that I speak to who are like, "I wanna do this side hustle thing, but I have a job," or, "I'm a full-time student and, and like I've only got a few hours on a weekend." And, and sort of there's this impression that people have that they have to do this mountain of work over a period of several years before they can get any- anywhere at all. But actually this process of come up with the ideas, MVP with a scorecard or with a Zoom event or whatever, get pr- you know, the product market fit, hop on a phone call with some people and just actually figure out what their problems are and be like, you know, "Would you be willing to pay X amount for this thing?"

Daniel Priestley 2:09:25 Yep. Yep.

Ali Abdaal 2:09:26 It feel- feels very doable.

Daniel Priestley 2:09:27 It's all doable.

Ali Abdaal 2:09:28 Yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 2:09:28 Yeah. The hard part is go to market and scale and exit. So the next three steps is what we think of as entrepreneurship, which is go to market, which is ramp... You know, turn on the jets. Uh, let's go for it. Let's hire a team, a salesperson. All of that sort of stuff is all go to market strategy. Um, scale is multiple locations. Now we're gonna go out in... So we might start in London and then go out to Los Angeles and New York and different locations. So we're gonna go... Uh, scale is normally new products, new markets, new territories. Um, so we're gonna scale out, and then exit is let's sell this business and go again.

Ali Abdaal 2:10:01 [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 2:10:01 Um, [chuckles] so when we think of entrepreneurs, we think go to market, scale up, exit.

Ali Abdaal 2:10:07 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:10:08 Uh, but actually the first three steps are very doable, uh, which is ideation, m- minimum viable product, and product market fit.

Ali Abdaal 2:10:16 Amazing. All right, so we've talked a lot about these sort of first, these first few stages of the entrepreneur revolution, becoming an entrepreneur. I think we'll leave the entrepreneur subject there because most people, uh, as, as we get down the list, like [chuckles] the amount of people that scale up and go to market and exit is relevant to, like dwindles. But I'd love to hear like f- what's

Ali Abdaal 2:10:37 it like for you? Um, you now run a company that has like 100 plus employees, and you own multiple businesses, and you're living with wife and kids in London. It, it seems like you're living the dream, dream life. What's, what's that like? And I, I'm asking from a selfish perspective because I'm trying to figure out what does my career look like 10, 15, 20 years later. And at the moment I see examples of people like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday who do the sort of content thing and writing a book occasionally. It, it seems good. But I haven't really spoken to many people that do the... seem to be living their best life with wife and kids while owning multiple businesses and stuff.

Daniel Priestley 2:11:17 Yeah, well-

Ali Abdaal 2:11:17 So yeah, what's, what's it like?

Daniel Priestley 2:11:18 Well, wife and kids is the best thing ever, right?

Ali Abdaal 2:11:20 Yeah. [chuckles]

Daniel Priestley 2:11:21 Um, so, you know, that's the... For me, that's the thing that really completes life and makes it all worthwhile and makes the journey, uh, all the ups and downs just pale in comparison to when you get the family and the family home and all of those sorts of things. Um, so, uh, what... Well, what's interesting is that no matter what level of wealth you're at, uh, when you have little kids, life becomes very different, very boring, right? Routine-based. Um, it can be a massive challenge to your identity and your i- and your ego. Um, sudden- well, suddenly the whole world is not you. Um-

Ali Abdaal 2:11:58 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:11:58 ... suddenly you don't matter at all. Uh, so you, you go from being the center of the, um, your ego universe to being, uh, a second, you know, uh, a supporting act to the center of the world. Um, especially when children are very, very young and need a lot of, um, care and attention. Your partner will be very focused on them. Um, and right now you take it very much for granted that you can roll out of bed whenever you want and go for breakfast somewhere, and you can change your mind about something, and, uh, you can just simply jump on a plane and go on holiday. [clears throat] Once you've got kids, you know, all of that is logistics and y- you know, you find yourself with, uh, nannies, bigger house, bigger car, um, logistics. All, all of that stuff starts to... So it's a different, it's a different life. Um, it's a very good life. It's, it's lovely, um, and I recommend it. Uh, I think life moves in chapters, and I had an amazing chapter in my 20s, which was the globe-trotting entrepreneur, making millions and running team and partying and, and all of that sort of stuff. Um, [lip smacks] you know, I had a different chapter in my 30s building a global business as well and, you know, uh, in my 30s I wrote best-selling books. I spoke on big stages. I got paid tens of thousands of pounds to give a one-hour talk regularly. Um, I got to share the stage with my heroes like Richard Branson and people like that. Richard Branson follows me on Twitter, by the way. [chuckles]

Ali Abdaal 2:13:29 Yes.

Daniel Priestley 2:13:29 Right? Which is... He only follows a couple of people, and it's like that stuff. Um, and, uh, and then in my late 30s, early 40s, I'm now the family guy. Um, so we've got the big house, and we spend a lot of time at the big house, and we go to the park and we, you know, we... Little things are big things. G- getting on the swings is a big thing. Um, and, uh, you know, overcoming a fear of a dog, uh, that comes up and sniffs you is a big thing. So, um, you know, that, my, my whole world now revolves around this chapter, a very different chapter.

Ali Abdaal 2:14:04 So what does, mm- Now that you're in th- in this chapter, what does your work life look like?

Daniel Priestley 2:14:10 [lips smack] So I live a fairly normal work life now. I have work-life balance. Um, I, I arrived-

Ali Abdaal 2:14:16 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:14:16 ... at that place. So I typically start my day at 9:30, um, and I finish my day around 5:00, 5:30. Um, and a lot of the time I have nothing to do during the day, so I might go out for lunch with my wife and, um, I might pick... I often drop the kids at school and often pick them up from school. Um, and, um, you know, I might sit and play computer games with the kids and, and all that sort of stuff. So I have a lot of that going on. Um, yeah, so-

Ali Abdaal 2:14:44 How,

Ali Abdaal 2:14:45 how much do you care now at this point about making more money, like professional success and like how, how... Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:14:53 So for me, making more money is more about the fact that I've acquired a set of skills, and I like using those skills, right? I'm really good at buying and selling companies, for example. I'm really good at... I've done seven acquisitions. I've done several exits. Um, and you know, the, the cool thing with entrepreneurship is that it really starts getting going at 40, and you start getting really good at 40 and, you know, your career goes from strength to strength after 40. I, I felt it was a little sad, Roger Federer, you know, he just retired, and he has to retire because his body can't keep up with the demand of tennis. So the career ends at 40, um, whereas entrepreneurs don't really get going statistically until their early 40s. Uh, so one of the things that I really enjoy is that now I've got a set of resources and team and, um, data and skills that actually I can get a lot done, uh, in a fairly short space of time, right? Because now I've got the leverage. Um, but when I think about making money, um, it's really... I don't think a lot about making money, but I do think a lot about leveraging that set of skills and creating fun things, um, and having fun projects. I also love doing, um, businesses in partnership with people. Especially, I love doing partnerships, uh, like co-founding with slightly younger people, bringing them, um, you know, up in, uh, in their entrepreneurial journey.

Ali Abdaal 2:16:23 So it sounds like you're mostly motivated by like the enjoyment, the love of the craft, the infinite game that you're playing around like, "Hey, this business thing is cool. I like building and growing selling businesses. Let's do more of that."

Daniel Priestley 2:16:32 Yeah. Well, my, my infinite game is to develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact. That's my infinite game. So I do that through my accelerator programs. We develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up, and have purpose at the heart of their business, and we've done that with three and a half thousand companies around the world now. Um, ScoreApp is a piece of technology that solves the number one problem that people have, which is the lead generation problem. So it allows them to stand out, scale up, and start making a difference. Um, and, um, on my accelerators, I often put, uh, heads of social, um, charities and change projects and put them through and we like... I do one-to-one coaching with people who could be a key person of influence in a way that really changes the world. Um, so yeah, look, I have a, a bunch of fun, um, because if you have a set of skills, you wanna use those skills. You-- It feels right that you're drawn to use those skills because it's like, oh, you know, um, you know, if you... Like, if you're a ballroom dancer and you're really good at dancing, you wanna dance. Um, if you're a guitarist and you're really good at guitar-

Ali Abdaal 2:17:31 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:17:31 ... you wanna pick up the guitar and play. So if you're an, if you're entrepreneur and you start figuring out how this crazy world of entrepreneurship actually works-

Ali Abdaal 2:17:38 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:17:38 ... you wanna talk about it. You wanna do it. You wanna buy and sell stuff. You wanna-

Ali Abdaal 2:17:42 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:17:42 ... scale stuff.

Ali Abdaal 2:17:43 Yeah. One of my coaches asked a co- a few weeks ago, he, he, he asked me, you know, the thought experiment of what would life look like if I wasn't, if I, I wa- just was not allowed to create anything on the internet for the next like two years. And I was like, "Okay, I mean, fair enough. I guess I'd do loads of reading, get into philosophy and economics and politics. I'm interested reading all that kind of stuff. And then when the two-year marker is up, then I can distill all that stuff, and that would be super fun." And then he was like, "Okay, what if you're not allowed to do anything on the internet, any kind of teaching on the internet for the rest of your life?" I'd-- I was like, "Oh, damn, I'd be really depressed." Like, I guess I'd, I don't know, try and do it in like in real, like teaching in real life and post like lectures and stuff. But it just... That made me realize that for me, the infinite game is teaching, like learning cool stuff and teaching it.

Daniel Priestley 2:18:27 Learning how life works-

Ali Abdaal 2:18:29 Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:18:29 ... sharing it with others and helping improve their lives, right?

Ali Abdaal 2:18:31 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:18:31 So that's who you are, and that's, that speaks to your identity and, and, and all of that. The, the risk can be that your strong suit can become, um, overused. You can be a ballerina who dances until your feet bleed. Um, you know, so one thing that is a risk is, um, when you discover how great life can be with fun, freedom, and flexibility built in, you often become very picky about your partner, who you're gonna settle down with and have kids with and all that sort of stuff. So therefore, you get a lot of people like Tim Ferriss, um, bless him, but he's notoriously, um, single and footloose, fancy-free, and not having kids and all that sort of stuff, which is... I get it. It's kinda cool. I was, I was that guy, right? But, um, but there can be this risk that you've got your life set up so well that you don't wanna disrupt it with a partner or kids. Um, so that can be where your winning s- where, where your winning strategy becomes your losing strategy.

Ali Abdaal 2:19:31 Have you, have you come across this book called, uh, The Second Mountain?

Daniel Priestley 2:19:34 No. It sounds like a cool book.

Ali Abdaal 2:19:35 It's, it's by the... I think by David Brooks. Uh, it-- the, the thesis is that in life there are two mountains. The first mountain is the mountain of success and status and financial success and d- doing all the stuff. And then you get to the summit and realize that that's not where lasting happiness is. Or you get chucked off the mountain by like a health scare or someone dying or something like that, and you realize that there is a second mountain. And while the first mountain was the mountain of like happiness, the second mountain is the mountain of joy. And while the first mountain was all about optimizing for freedom and fun, fun and flexibility, the second mountain is all about like, "Actually, I really wanna invest. I wanna commit. I wanna build a home. I wanna give myself to a cause that I really care about." And- You know, getting off that first mountain onto the second is like, you know, people get to it at different points

Daniel Priestley 2:20:19 It's a great... I, I can relate to that. I think it's a great philosophy. And, uh, yeah, you don't want, you don't wanna just keep climbing up and down this same mountain. It's like, it's, you know, you're constantly searching for that new high of fun, freedom, flexibility. 'Cause I see a lot of people... I'm in the space where I do come across a lot of people who have done that. But, um, you know, I, I think that it's hard, it's hard to say, 'cause you only really kind of fall in love with your kids after [laughs] they're born and after they're es- I think it might be different-

Ali Abdaal 2:20:48 Once they're beyond a certain age [laughs] or-

Daniel Priestley 2:20:49 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:20:50 ... certain months or something. Yeah

Daniel Priestley 2:20:50 I think, too, maybe there's a difference between men and women. I think men don't necessarily naturally love the idea of kids, but once you have them, then it's like, "Oh, now I get it."

Ali Abdaal 2:21:02 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:21:03 Um-

Ali Abdaal 2:21:03 [laughs] Yeah, every dude I know who has kids has that kind of vibe. They're like, "Yeah, back in the day..." We were, we were talking to Gordon about this the other day. Yeah, like, you know, when people show you photos of their kids, you're like, "What the hell?"

Daniel Priestley 2:21:12 Yeah. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 2:21:13 And then you get kids, and then you start showing people photos of your kids. [laughs]

Daniel Priestley 2:21:15 You become that dad.

Ali Abdaal 2:21:16 Yeah.

Daniel Priestley 2:21:16 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I think it's important to have the second mountain, you know? And the other thing, too, is... So I have a friend of mine, sold a company for, um, 900 million, right?

Ali Abdaal 2:21:29 Wow.

Daniel Priestley 2:21:29 And cash, yeah. And has gone on to s- build several more businesses, and I totally understand. And, and they're worth hundreds of millions. I totally understand, and he's, he's also my age, right? I get that he's got this incredible unique set of skills for building extremely valuable businesses, but hasn't at all gone for the second mountain. And, you know, he's all about optimizing businesses and optimizing teams and building another $100 million company. But I sit there with my family, and I think I'm actually really happy I'm on this second mountain. My first mountain's going quite well, but, you know, I get more joy from the, the second one.

Ali Abdaal 2:22:10 Amazing. Dan, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. I will put links to all of the books in, uh, in the video description, in the show notes. Uh, any final asks of our viewers or listeners?

Daniel Priestley 2:22:20 Uh, final ask is this. My mentor said to me, "Daniel, don't watch the news. You live in the most incredible time. You couldn't have been born at a better time. Um, this is an amazing moment in history. Don't