Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You know how post works? You're the postman. Fix everything at post. All right, where to start? Video Husky done for you. Video editing. 2014. You kicked off?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: No way. Later. 2018, was it?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: 18? I'm aging myself. Okay, what was the inspiration? Why'd you want to do video editing?
[00:00:27] Speaker B: No way. Back then it was just, I guess, what, seven years now? @ that point, it was like when video was becoming a real thing on social. I guess it's weird to say, but Internet allowed you to actually watch enough video. So pre TikTok, pre reels, pre shorts.
And it was at the time that Facebook advertising was really going towards video. So I was trying to do video Facebook ads. Couldn't really find a good way to do it. Happened upon design Pickle's model for graphic design. And I thought, oh, we can do this for video editing. And yeah, that's pretty much the inspiration behind the idea.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: And your background? Ecom. You had success in ecom Prior background?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I don't really have a background, mate.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: You got a background, you got a profile.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Before that, I had. I was doing a combination. I had a wholesale T shirt business, um, and then an entirely other, like, online T shirt business. I don't know how it ended up being about T shirts. There were two entirely independent things, but that was the common thread. And the E comm. That was where I had learned mostly about Facebook ads through doing, like, drop print on demand T shirts for hiking enthusiasts.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Okay, so we can. We can give you the nickname the T shirt baron.
And I remember talking to you back in the day, which was if you kicked off 2018, must have been around 2018, 2019. I think one of the things that struck me early was that you got paid acquisition. Like it's paid acquisition to me seemed like it was sort of the engine of what you were growing at the start. I think you did pretty well with that.
Was that. Did you. Like, that was learned from the prior businesses, Right? Like you had the skill set from that?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah. I remember just thinking we had this conversation. I think this was like, I started Video Husky. Like the first. First iteration was like March 1st. I remember, like very clearly because it was like 90 days. Got to get 10 customers or it's not doing it. And like, that happened. But it took all the way until like end of August before I thought, oh, let me try Facebook ads. I don't know why it took me so long, given that was my own background. But we did it. And then at that time in 2018, that was when ads were cheap. As Chips so that really. And, like, nobody else is doing it at the time, so it actually worked out really well.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: That's funny. That's a kiwi reference, by the way. Cheap as chips. You definitely.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You stay here long enough and before you know it, you're speaking with. You're saying all kinds of weird things.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Are you hitting the cuzzies and the bros?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, a little bit here and there, but let's go.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Yes. I love it. All right, so 90 days, 10 customers.
Talk me through. Talk me through. Well, not then to now, because that's going to go for like 45 minutes of just uninterrupted goodness.
What was the next kind of phase or the next threshold that you got through after you got those first 10? Because that's like a validation stage, right? Like you feel like you've actually got something.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah, that's like a validation stage. After that, it just almost went straight to scale from like, if you say like the quarter four of 2018, I'd say all the way until maybe the 15 months after that. So the end of 2019, it was just straight growth.
It was just a huge need at that time. All the way. I'd say maybe up to quarter one of 2020. Right before COVID it was just straight, like, bringing on new customers, bringing on new editors, scrambling, doing as much as we could to lock things in, occasionally having to turn people away.
Yeah, that was. It was a wild time.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: And was the peak, like, did you peak around Covid or towards Covid or what was the impact of COVID when you're doing your thing?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Covid's impact was pretty big. I remember being quite.
Well, the growth in 2019 was up and up with editors, customers, revenue, everything. The one thing that wasn't really up was profit.
Just because we always had to bring on new editors in advance of new customers and their scaling needs and new websites and all these things. And it's not ecom. It's not like we have to do a big batch order, but it was still a phase where it was like, oh, you still have to put cash in. And I remember at January of 2020, I remember thinking, I was like, okay, I got to get a handle on this. Because it's like we're now like way over the 83, 84K mark.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: The magical million ARR.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Yeah, the profit isn't there. Right. It's like there's something wrong in January, I remember saying, okay, I'm going to do this right? And it's like, let's start figuring out what the P and L should look like.
And I came across this company, clever profits. And they had this thing, perfect P and L, and they showed you how much you should be paying for each sector of your agency business. I thought it was great. The only problem was when we started with them, it was February, I think, and then March, Covid hit. So it's like you're working with a certain top line, and then all of a sudden, 30% of the top line goes away. So I remember just feeling very frustrated. I was like, I felt I was being responsible for doing the right thing. And then. And then it just went straight into firefighting at that time.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: So did you need to, like, let people go and kind of.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah, we did, like, I think one or two. We did one big round of layoffs, and then, yeah, one big round of layoffs, and then everybody, I think, remaining at the company agreed to a 20% pay cut, which is very nice, actually. It was very, very rare instance, but everybody was okay with it.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: And that was just so you could keep a flight, I guess, like, keep the lights on.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: And, yeah, essentially it was that time it was either, like, it was. It was like a big town hall, and it was like, okay, still, blind vote. Are we letting go of more people? Are we all taking this together on the chin? And then everybody actually agreed to take it together on the chin. So that was a very interesting. I would. I think it's like the one out of, like, 50 situations where you can actually do a group pay cut.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Yeah, Very, very rare, huh? And so what was the team size then? Like, where did you end up during.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: COVID I think at that point, there was maybe 40, 45 people, maybe. Yeah. And then maybe 50 even shaved it down to like. Yeah, Maybe it was 50 shaded down to 40, something like that. Or maybe 50. I don't even know. It's been a while.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And as far as the product itself, like, what you provide, I remember back in the day, a big thing for you was having brand and having an identity. And at a point, I think you wrote something about it on Twitter, and he talked about it in, like, a thread, probably, and you're talking about this website that you built, and it was, like, pretty expensive. And then you actually looked at the numbers. So this stuff, to me is great because I'm of two schools of thought.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: You've got a really painful problem that you solve, and you can just thing we did with WP Curve back in the day that if you go back to Internet wayback machine and look at is like, it almost makes your eyes bleed. It's that ugly. But the problem was so significant that people would hit the Pay, like the PayPal Pay Button and do it. I mean, you can get away with that. And I know of a few productized services that have had terrible design for like seven or eight years and still been able to solve the problem. But you were pretty gung ho on brand and pretty gung ho on design. So talk me through a bit about your thoughts around like investing early in design and brand. Because by the way, I personally love the brand. It really has like a character and identity, which I think is awesome. And this a lot of pride in that. But yeah, walk me through that. And was it a Twitter thread you wrote about that? Because I don't know, maybe.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: I don't know. I wrote quite a bit more in like 2022, I think, but definitely not at the time. But maybe I had a blog post somewhere.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: I don't know, that might have been it.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought branding was quite important at the time. Just because, and this maybe comes from like a more ecom background. I don't know. It's like because you had Shopify, like Shopify instantly made everything look nice. And because if you were a Shopify storefront, you had to compete against Amazon and Amazon, it's like you have all the trust, authority, et cetera, et cetera. So the one thing you could do compared to Amazon was look good because Amazon saw standardized. Because of that, it's definitely old. So I always wanted Video Husky to look good because that's the first impression that you get. Um, and as like an online only store, it's like you're not even hiring the editor when you make the decision because you haven't met your editor yet. So you're trusting in something. And like a brand is like, you know, it's like Tinder, right? It's like you just, you make a judgment call in the first three seconds and every other like company, which admittedly at that time was like two other companies that did a similar model to us, they just had very, very ugly sites.
And it was like an instant differentiator. Now going back, would I spend that much money on the site? I don't know. But on the flip side, it's what, like seven, six years later now? Site still looks good, still very unique, I think. And I think it will still stay that way for the next 5ish years. So we don't have to go for a rebrand anytime soon.
Some pros Some cons, I guess.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Did you see a difference in conversion? Was there a business at that time?
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Could you say, because there was a slowdown in top line and the number of customers you're getting, or an increase essentially in the cost of customer from paid ads you said came online, and then it went right back down to what we really wanted it to be. And it lasted that way from the beginning of Q4 of 2019, when we began, all the way into the q, like quarter two of 2020, when shit hit the fan.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: Shit hit the fan. I like that.
Cool. So challenges with the model, challenges with what you do.
When I looked at Video Husky, I was like, if you can pull this off, it's a brilliant service because there's so many moving parts.
Very high, in my opinion. Very high touch. Until you get to a templated kind of model or you know what your client wants. So there's like a kind of a ramp to onboarding and maybe a ramp to.
But how did you go about running an efficient team when you're delivering a service that, well, in my opinion is pretty high touch? What did that actually look like?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: And this is maybe one of the struggles of video compared to, say, graphic design. Right. And I remember even Ross talking about this way back when. He talked about how graphic design is easier because it's a 2D medium.
It just makes it so much easier to understand and replicate something. Video editing is like a 3D medium, although of course not like in the physical sense. But you have to think through time.
And on top of that, you're not end to end responsible graphic design. You can be end to end responsible for creating everything.
Video requires good footage, and that does make it very difficult to guarantee a good end result.
And so for us, a lot of it came down to better onboarding and especially for the less technically capable, which you could split our customers right down in half. The people who had a video background, who understood how to shoot, who understood how to edit, and the people who just like, were still recording with their MacBook Pro cameras and no mic.
And so you almost have to have a different onboarding process for each. Um, yeah, okay.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: So I started with onboarding, but I'm trying to. It was back in the day, the project management system you used was wrike, I think.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: And I remember seeing how you'd configure this thing and it was like. It was an impression. Like, you did work on configuring this to, like, fit your workflow. Went back and forth on a bunch of different. I don't know, I guess, like workflow level tips. But did you see patterns around, like, I don't know, a customer, like, the difference in or the relationship between the complexity of what the customer needed to their ltv? Like what, what patterns did you start to see emerge over that time? Because I have my, like, hypotheses of what it would be. But so like, this can be. Sometimes the data is very different.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting because, like, it's quite different now. Right. It's like, I guess I was hands on to Video Husky all the way to 2021 and it's not 2025. So it's like, what, what's going on now? It's very different to what's happening, what happened back then. So it's like two different conversations.
@ least back then, the, the people who we found were the best customers were those who consistently already created videos and who were bottlenecked by editing. If you're trying to work with somebody who time doing video and they were looking for an editor, it's like we fit into their system. It's not the other way around. So it's like you almost have to already have a backlog of a lot of footage and ideally good footage and a vision of what you want rather. And that's the people who we work best for compared to somebody who say it was like their first time.
And so if you already had that backlog and if you already had that need and you didn't want to go through the difficulties of hiring somebody and you just wanted to be able to scale up and down because maybe your work is seasonal or your publishing schedule is seasonal. That's who we found were really good customers.
Yeah.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: And for the folks that were more on the beginner level, is that something that you would. During like the sales process or whatever else, you'd kind of qualify them in and out or how did you manage that? Or did you go, okay, well, we'll take the revenue and we'll try to like, figure it out as we go.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: I think for the most part we did say we did take the revenue. Even if we knew it was a. Like, we knew there was a very reasonable chance that they would not stick around for a long time.
And maybe this is like, you know, going back, it's like, there's a better way of running this business.
I would at least still think that in terms of, well, the ad money is spent or the marketing money is spent, we may as well recoup the funds, which is okay if you have like empty editor slots. The problem is when you are hiring additional editors in order to fill that need. But that need isn't actual like customer demand, but that demand isn't long term because then you end up with higher overhead. And that higher overhead means then you need more revenue to cover it. So this is where like the sizing of the business also matters quite a bit, I think.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: By sizing do you mean there's like, like a threshold in which you can operate where it's profitable, customers are satisfied? What does sizing mean?
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's just like the difference of call it a software business or a service business. Right. Especially a service business that you're not personally delivering. There is a point at which your team keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's just so much more complicated to run. And it's, I think the best example we could think of. I, like, I used to joke about was like, even if you think of birthdays, right, it's like when you have a team size of 5 people, very easy to celebrate birthdays, 10 people, you can still do it, right? Maybe once a month, essentially you can still send a birthday message. What happens when you have 50 people, right? Are you sending birthday messages every week? Are they? It's like it becomes more and more difficult to make something work for everybody and there and you know, like it's, it's like that thing where it's that you can no longer know everybody on a first name basis. You can no longer like keep in touch and that distance, especially in an online business, I think does it makes things trickier because you can't always have like the, like if you're in an office, it's like you have to give the benefit of the doubt because you see the human versus an online. It's very easy to just default to, oh, why couldn't things be this way or that way?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Jason Cohen has a really good article about this and I think it was, you know, the W. It was really, I think it was related to WP Engine. But he was saying that as you scale out things that are tiny problems when you've got like a thousand customers become much bigger problems at 10,000 and logarithmically, you know, at 100,000, obviously it tracks and those are, those can be big business risks. Like they can be meaningful things that can actually like be, I don't know, spanners in the works.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: What, what size did you, what size did you find was the happy medium where things are humming?
[00:18:19] Speaker B: I don't Know if there's a size. Things just got better after I hired a general manager.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Real talk.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
Hey, and this is maybe to each their own, right? It's like I remember like let's call it 2020 to 2021. It's like we go back to that timeline.
Q2, 2020 lost like 30% of our revenue overnight.
So it's like you're like in firefighting and whatever. And it's like we had maybe like what, two weeks of cash in the bank. So it's not like a ton.
But of course they turned the money printer on and then they had that PPP loan. So it's like all these businesses all of a sudden have all this extra money, right?
It took maybe another four to six months to get back to where we were and then the next six to 12 months. So all the way towards the end of the year, call it roughly got back to where we were then consistently, thanks to that, perfect. The clever profits and their profit and loss statement guide was able to consistently eke out profit. So built a good two and a half, three months worth of cash in the bank while still paying myself a good wage or a good wage at the time. God knows inflation has decimated that.
And yeah, that took us all the way until maybe towards the end of Q2 of 2021.
So I think we had redeveloped the sales process at that point.
So I think that was like roughly the.
It was around then that I just felt so, so, so burnt out from all the team managing and all the. It just felt very firefighting esque type work and I wanted to figure a way out essentially.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: So what were your pathways, what were your options at that point?
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Essentially you have three options, right? It's like one, can you scale your rollback so you're only doing the things you want to do. That was the first one.
I'd already tried that I didn't really like it and it didn't provide enough mental space or bandwidth to let me go and explore the next thing or think about the next opportunity. I didn't know at that time what it was, but I just have to figure that out. The second option is to sell.
Of course, if you were to sell in 2021, that was probably the peak of all times to sell.
I did not go down that path.
And I remember thinking like, at least my, my thought. And even though multiples I guess at the time was very high, I had a friend who like they mentioned like they got their business so it was like marked up like 5, 67 times. So it was like way above at the time, right?
[00:21:21] Speaker A: Is that EBITDA or revenue earnings?
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Like not EBITDA but like, you know, proper earnings.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: And it was like an agency. So it was like at the time, you know, like you could have a lot, you could have gotten a lot out of it. But I just remember seeing a good number of people, yourself included, where it was like the post sale founder conundrum was way too strong.
And I think at that point in life I didn't have enough other things solid that I could have that part of my identity change that quickly. At that point my then, well, my partner who at the time up till now is still same girl of course we were only a year into our relationship, year and a half I guess. And that was during COVID and we were in Australia and I didn't see our future being there. So it's like still newish relationship. We had moved to Australia in Covid. I wanted to leave Australia. We had to do that.
We didn't have a physical place that we were super set on and we didn't have a future direction that we're super set on. And her work, she also wasn't totally thrilled. So without something else solid enough, I didn't really feel comfortable having this also go up and out the window.
Yeah, that was at least my thought.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Process at the time, which there's some real wisdom in that man. Because I think sometimes when there's like a heap of change going on around you, it's quite easy to just go, oh fuck it. Like I'm just going to change this to whatever.
I know a lot of YOLO people, you know what I mean? And sometimes that works.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: But yeah, so I kind of like left the third option which was get a general manager, which I think it was Taylor Pearson. I talked to him at the time, he suggested it. So I, I thought about, look one, you can still sell the business in the long run. If you were to choose to talking to myself in third person, you would in some ways make it more valuable if everything else stayed the same and it may be a good middle ground and maybe if it worst case scenario. I remember thinking at the time, if it didn't work out, you would at least be probably six months removed from the business. So maybe you feel less tired, less burnt out less whatever and you could give another shot.
And one way or another it just gave me more, I think room to think through how and what I wanted to do. So yeah, that was essentially kind of like the thought process behind That I.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Like the fact that you kind of. You think forward in kind of periods. So it's like you run that decision. You jump forward, jump ahead, jump ahead. Okay, where's that going to land me? What's that going to take me?
The pattern that I've seen with the YOLO folks, which I love. Like, the YOLO folks are great because they're just like, I'll just figure it out. It creates an intense amount of stress. And if you're focused and you like to hustle, then you can figure that out on the way down. Like, you kind of jump out of the plane and pull your parachute on the way down and realize you don't have one.
The identity part that you talked about with the post cell conundrum, given that you'd poured so much time and energy and effort into Video Husky, after you're able to bring in a general manager, get them onboarded, where did that leave you personally? How did you feel about that? Where did you start to spend your time?
What were reflections on?
[00:25:05] Speaker B: So we hired Fed, I think end of Q3, 2021, around September, August, something like that.
And like the first six months, basically, we got the transition a little bit wrong. I met with Fed every two weeks.
It was the wrong system.
What ended up working, ironically, was just meeting once every three months, every two weeks.
It meant he felt like he always had to report some kind of a win after two weeks.
I was kind of in the business, kind of not. It didn't really work out that well until we, like. And then he. One of the changes that he wanted to make that at the time I was very rigid against, was just like, figuring out, okay, what's like, the proper, like, holiday schedule, right? It's like, are we following American public holidays? Are we following Filipino public holidays, which is where the majority of our editors were, or are we doing some kind of, like, hybrid? What is it? And he made, like, a big argument, like, for it, which a lot of editors had wanted. Like, a lot of our stuff had wanted clarity, about which I had always been against.
I'd always just wanted, like, free float leave. I will give you more leave days. Choose it yourself. I, at the time didn't respect. Oh, people want to do Christmas with their families.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Very stupid in retrospect. You know, you learn these lessons.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I guess, like, this is part of. I don't know, it's like a. I guess I grew up in a family. That Chinese New Year's thing, not Christmas. A little bit different.
Be more respectful of these things.
But yeah, he was very, very big proponent for it. I was a very big proponent against it.
But he got caught in the middle essentially. And so over trying to make this change, he had to try to explain my point of view to the staff which he didn't believe in, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just like it would put him in a very difficult, unfair position. So after talking about it, we're like, best way, I gotta get outta your way for you to do your thing.
And so let him do. Like we just said, once every three months there's a certain baseline of net profit that we want to see.
And yeah, we just operate on that and that's okay.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Is he incentivized for performance? So if you do better, he ratchets up. If you don't do so well, he ratchets down. That kind of thing.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: No, we always just said that.
Well, yes and no. At the time we just said if there was significant growth, call it like a significant increase in net profit, I promise to revisit and we can have a discussion which 100% would be the case in my book.
Yeah, we had just kind of let it be open ended sort of thing. Um, and yeah, but I just, we just made sure that like the base wage was at a good place. Um, that everybody was happy. So it wasn't like he would be unhappy if these things didn't transpire.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: How'd you feel letting go of the reins and handing. Handing over the baby husky out of the. I'm trying to find a husky joke. I've been thinking about it for 15 minutes.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: Clutch of puppies. Um, it's so hard to think back and be objective about it because it's been so long now that Fed's been in charge of video husky longer than I've been in charge of video Husky.
So I don't know, looking back, I remember thinking it was difficult. Now it's just so far away or a much smaller part of my personal identity that I think it's a better balance, at least on my part. It was harder at the time and I think there was like you feel more pressure but then as time goes by, things you hit kinks. Kinks work themselves out.
Yeah. Then it's okay.
I think that's a.
For my own personal situation at that phase of life and all these things, like having videoski as like a consistent present in my life, albeit a much smaller one.
But at the same time I don't have to like completely cut it off was a.
I think it it is a much better outcome than had I gone down the sale route.
Even, even if, maybe, maybe financially it wouldn't have been, I don't know.
But like emotionally, mentally, identity, whatever, it definitely was.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: How much? Post sale founder conundrum. That's a great Post sale founder conundrum. That's quotable, that one. That's a good one. How much of that did you see? Have you seen other folks that have gone through that or versions of it or just yours truly? And what did you take away from it?
[00:30:14] Speaker B: I think I forgot you come to mind, obviously, because we're talking now, but it was a good number of people who I talked to who this was an issue and then talked to Dan Andrews and Yin Shon about it, of course at Dynamite Circle and then one or two other people I forgot. And I just remember thinking I didn't want such a big change because I just want a room. And frankly speaking, it's like what, been four years now, I have had nothing stick.
Like there's been no project that has like revenue wise been like, oh yeah, this is like an instant hit. But also like on like an individual basis. And like I knew I didn't want to manage a big team. I knew I didn't want to run an agency.
But since then it's not beyond that learning.
I've wanted to become more technically proficient, which has happened, which is good. And I would like my career to go down that direction.
But it's like, but even past that, it's like that's pretty much most of what I have to show for the last like 3ish years. An independent basis.
Which, like, if you ask me at the time 2021, if I wish I had more chore, definitely. But then on the flip side, I've never had like a crisis moment because it's not like, because I always knew like Video Husky was just kind of like still there in the background. It's like both like financial support and like an independent, like not independent emotional support. I don't know if that's the right word, but like an identity support, which I don't. Which I think if it wasn't there then, then you feel very differently or. I feel very differently at least.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: Yeah, the conundrum is real.
I talked to Craig Hewitt yesterday, so he's talk. We were talking about exit and I try to put him on the spot and say like, what multiple would you be happy to exit Castos for? And he couldn't really, like, he didn't really have an answer because he's like, well I actually like just really like what I'm doing and I like, I'm enjoying software, I'm enjoying these challenges and in his life phase and with what he's trying to accomplish, it fits like it just makes sense.
I guess there's trade offs between being able to get something to the position where you can actually let it go and exit it and be exited, whatever else.
The thing, I guess the pattern that I've seen emerge from folks that I've reconnected with is that people that seem to be on a path where they seem quite steady and know what they. I don't know if they necessarily know what they want but they're looking for a broader purpose, some sort of impact that they can have and often it's through their business. It's like because of their business.
Jake from back in the day, I got to catch up with him and one of the things that he got involved with was a couple of his staff members had a ukulele, I write into ukuleles and they like did the, they built ukuleles. Right. But through Covid they couldn't, they couldn't build them because you couldn't have any like non essential exports and there wasn't any market.
But he loves music and he loves the craftsmanship and so he got in as like I guess a bit of a silent partner and was able to help them, you know, create an Etsy store, create a front of site, create some branding that was like nice and then have that type of impact.
Have you, Is there, is there a broader impact that you're looking to have at the moment? Are you involved in anything that like gets you fired up or any places where you, you know, put your time or your energy?
Because I know you got your hands full like new bub, that sort of thing.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I don't know, it was like from that period like I was still of course like looking for like a new another career direction or whatever. But I mean a lot of it also just kind of like boiled back down to just like personal things I wanted to do. I mean just think it's like oh, you know, like I'm not going to pretend like I'm like some major sacrifice story or whatever but it's like oh, it's like I started working from like a younger age, like I don't know like 17 or whatever. Like that was my first business. So I think it's like oh, didn't really do like end of high school. Right. Didn't really do College, right? So it's like I wanted to do a year abroad with my girlfriend. So we did that properly. Um, it's like, did some work, but nothing stressful.
And that for me was like, I wanted to do all that before we settled down and have a kid, which we have now.
So you can't do that ever again, you know, once you have a kid. So short of, like, you know, much, much later on in life.
But I felt like, oh, that was worth, like, I don't know what kind of money you'd. I'd have to take in order to say all of that experience is now taken away from me. It'd have to be exorbitant. Exorbitant amount.
Because, like, you can only do that in your 20s. You can only have that experience of traveling in your 20s. In your 20s.
I briefly tried to. I don't even know it was briefly, but I wanted to go pro as a. As a gamer for one. For a very, very niche game.
[00:35:29] Speaker A: What game?
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Age of Empires. I played it during COVID And then I just, like, I played it as a kid and I got super into the competitive scene and nowhere near the amount of talent necessary to even get to the top, but I had a lot of fun.
I know people say video games is video games that. But I enjoyed it a lot, so I can't complain too much.
And then, yeah, it's like after our year of travel or something, we had to find a place to live, ended up bopping around, came to New Zealand, really liked it, and so, no, here we are. And I guess that's home for the foreseeable future.
And I don't know, it's like talking to, I think a lot more people who are more like, I guess you're less nomad, but it's like people in Dynamite Circle, where it's like there was a more nomad type background. There is a debt that you do, there's a cost that you do pay if you want to go back to normie life.
It's like you save money on not having a car and not having your furniture and etc. Etc. Got a backpack. But then once you do settle down, then all of a sudden you do need all those. Need all those things.
So it's like all of a sudden it's like you're rushing to make decisions as to, okay, get a car. Okay, get a dog. Okay, get a desk. Oh, if I'm going to settle down, I want a nice desk. I want one monitor. No, actually, now I want two monitors. Actually, I also want a standing desk and I want a nice chair. So it's like, you know, you think, oh, I'm not going to travel anymore, then I want all these other things. So like, I think the 18 months, I think it's like two years now that we've lived here. It's just been straight. I think like really post Covid, it's just been a bit of a very, maybe not a sprint, but a very high intensity run with a lot of just personal stuff coming up. Just trying to manage and deal with all that.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: And so what are you doing these days? I know that we kind of talked about this in email, but where are you spending your time now?
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll kind of like back it up to like from like 2020, I call it 2022 to 2024. Just briefly. It's like I didn't want to take anything stressful, so I was thought, oh, maybe I just do some consulting coaching. Did that. Did not enjoy coaching.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Didn't like it. Tell me about that.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: I think a lot of the problem, like a lot of challenges, at least for me with coaching, is like, oh, and it's also different, I guess, like post, like post Covid is like your entire landscape, business landscape shift shifted. So it's like a lot of the arbitrage opportunities that were like available pre Covid and post Covid, they're no longer there. Right. Just through sheer amount of competition and people coming online and working in that way. So it's like what was once like a huge arbitrage opportunity. Everybody's figured out from cost of labor perspective to a Facebook ads have gotten more expensive to a Y combinator. Companies are going after the most basic software businesses now.
Yeah. So it's like there's no.
A lot of the meat has already been eaten from the bone. So it was very hard to say, oh, I have this experience or whatever, which is true. But number one, now a lot more people have the same experience. But most importantly, it's like because the landscape shifted, it's like everybody's fishing off of the same hole. There's not gonna be that many fish left. So I felt less comfortable doing coaching because I couldn't show you. Oh, what I did is gonna guarantee you the same results. And I didn't really feel comfortable otherwise.
Versus, like a video. It's like, yes, I can't guarantee you how many views you'll get in your video, but I can guarantee you'll have a video at the end of this.
So, yeah, coaching consulting wasn't really right fit for me.
I then did like a kind of like extended stint at a friend's company doing their marketing, first part time, then for a very brief period full time.
Wasn't really quite the right fit. I really liked the guy, but just like it wasn't the right interest area and like the, the growth potential I don't think was as much there as we originally hoped.
So left that I think at the tail end of last year, quarter three and maybe from halfway towards the end of 2023 to beginning of 2024, I started learning just some basic programming.
You start with HTML, a little bit of css. CSS became tailwind and then from there it just felt like a much better direction for me.
Granted this is right before Vibe coding became a thing, so I don't know how that plays out. Maybe there's a lot more competition there and that eats away at you there, but it felt right. At the end.
Before leaving that last role, I talked to my uncle and I just said, look, I have these new random skills that I want to work on and I want to test out.
So yeah, just been building websites for a few of the organizations he's affiliated with.
Helped them grow one of their organization's YouTube channels, which has been a very interesting experience being on the other end of Video Husky since of course I hired our own people.
But yeah, that's mostly been it.
[00:41:12] Speaker A: And in the future, do you see yourself? Because again, there's lots of different pathways if you wanted to go technical and work in a company, which it sounds like you tried a little bit. Do you have a view of where to from here?
[00:41:29] Speaker B: I think my own personal desire is still in the long run to run a one person solopreneur or at least at most small teams software product.
I think my own personal strengths come from systemization, workflow optimization. It comes naturally to me. So I would like to work more in that area and becoming more technically literate.
It's like, oh, that is also in the right.
It was the right thing to do for me. I think the best example that's something like say Vibe coding brings along. Vibe coding is kind of like an iPhone, right? All of a sudden everybody can take better photos. But just because you have an iPhone doesn't mean you stop hiring photographers. Nobody's going to use an iPhone for their wedding photos.
So I would still like to be technically proficient or even further along than I currently am. And I think over the long arc of a career I'm like, what, I'm 31 now. So they call it another, like 35 years. It's like there's a lot of change to happen in the future, and I think there's a lot more that will happen in an online AI type space. And even if the competition is much harder and the arbitrage opportunities are much less, I think I'd like to spend most of my career gambling on the next thing. On the next thing, on the next thing, which is not advice I would give to most people, but all things considered, it's like if I have Video Husky and I have, you know, like, you play it safe, play it conservative to an extent, you have savings and you can keep your own Runway low. And in my case, it's like, I also have a very supportive family.
So it's like it goes a long way, all these things that I would rather take those bets because your outsized outcomes could still be 100% worth it, even if the chance of success isn't high. So it's kind of like the direction I'd want to go down.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: And is the. Maybe, maybe it's a leading question, but when you think of an outsized outcome, is that in terms of personal growth, is that in terms of revenue?
What does outsize outcome mean?
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Revenue, of course, is like one frame of it is like one part of it.
Revenue, profit, etc.
But it's like.
But I think in terms of money, I think Dan and Ian talk about the freedom lines, and it's like your freedom line of you can go out to the restaurant and not think about how much you have to pay or you can take any flight you want. It's like once you've crossed that, without thinking about money, once you've crossed that freedom line, the next one is that much further away because the next one's call that somewhere between 5 to 10 million or whatever, somewhere in that ballpark. I think for most people, when you think about that kind of stuff, that's going to be a while away one way or another. So it's not a rush to get there if that ever happens. Maybe it doesn't, that's okay too.
But it's that it's like, oh, I could. I could keep on trying to do something that I think I would like to do, which would be. So to build something out. I think it's like defining success in your own way. I don't know, for lack of a better, like, less cliche way of putting it.
Yeah, I think that's how I'd like to put it.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: You're a natural Coach dropping lines like that.
[00:45:21] Speaker B: I don't know about that.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: All right, so I don't know, like, a few kind of roundup questions here.
If you could talk to the Justin of way back when you kicked off Video Husky, what advice would you give him, if any? And do you think he would listen or would you just have to, like, muddle through, figure it out for yourself?
[00:45:51] Speaker B: I'd like to think I listened to you a fair amount.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: So you actually, dude, you're very coachable.
I was always very excited to jump on our convos because you would execute and you would learn and you would reflect, and there was plenty to work with. The people that I would kind of get frustrated to work with sometimes would be where you'd have the same conversation week in, week out. And at a certain point, I'm like, you just got to take an action, make a decision and kind of learn from it. So, yeah, in that regard, man, you're a dream. So much fun, so much easier when.
[00:46:27] Speaker B: You'Re younger, because I already feel.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: So, yeah, you're.
You're malleable and you're like, you're willing to. Willing to be challenged and willing to learn. And there's like, maybe a little less ego.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: All right. I think two things maybe if I were to give advice to self, the first is that.
And maybe this is like a. A dude thing or a more like ambitious dude thing.
But it's like, there are really things that are worth more than, than revenue goals or success targets or whatever.
It's like, it's easy to think that it's like, oh, there are things that were just like, you take for granted or will come naturally in life. Oh, you're gonna have.
You're gonna have a wedding or you're gonna have a life partner or you're gonna have kids or you're gonna have, like. I literally, I just took this thing for granted when I was younger. I thought, oh, it's gonna happen sometime in the future.
And I'd say in my case, like, I guess we're not married, but, like, we're long term, committed partners, et cetera, you know, with a kid, with a dog. And now on the not other end of it, but it's like, oh, those things are.
You can't take them for granted. It's like I met my partner in a bar in Cambodia, and I don't drink, so I don't understand why I was at the bar, right? And like, and it's just like, you know, if I was there an hour earlier, there's There an hour later, I don't think like it wouldn't have happened. And I've like, we've talked about like, especially since having kids. It's like, I think in like 7 out of like 10 lives I don't have kids because like it required meeting somebody who was like, is like, like my partner was, she's just, she's just a very, very, very caring person and she is a very, very like, like she will take lead over, over this and it's like just a loving person. So. And I don't really have that. And not that I don't have like, you know, you know what I mean? It's just, it's not like my most natural forte.
And so it required meeting somebody who could do that. And I think it's very easy to take all that for granted.
So the first thing is just like what is tangible isn't always the most valuable thing.
And you see enough long term relationships not work out that you go, it's not easy. It's really, really, really not easy.
And then the second I think is that if like, if you say like there isn't necessarily one like definition of success, so like there's multiple paths that you want to consider, then it's like you also have to know. It's like things come in waves.
So if you need to always feel like you're winning, then you're always one way or another going to be winning small because you can't have the time to invest into something big.
I don't know if that makes sense.
[00:49:38] Speaker A: Play it back to me.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: All right.
Okay, let's use poker as analogy, right? If you always feel like, if you need in order in your head to be a good poker player, you need to be winning a hand every 10 minutes or whatever, you need that reinforcement, then you're always playing. The problem with always playing is there's a chance you're always losing because at the end of the day the majority of hands you get in your hand, they're going to be crap.
But if you're patient and you wait for the right opportunity and you can build up for that opportunity, the one that is uniquely suited to you, then I think your likelihood of success or whatever is much higher. And I think this is where post sale founder syndrome gets a lot of people in trouble and even myself to an extent.
Even after leaving Video Husky, what did I do? Took a, took a reason, like I don't know what, like 15, 20K sunk it into a bunch of random crypto tokens and whatever we talking NFTs?
[00:50:37] Speaker A: What are we talking about?
[00:50:39] Speaker B: NFTs. Whatever you want. And, like, thank God it was only like, 20k. It could have been worse. So imagine if I sold the business and I was like, it would have been. Maybe it would have been 200.
But like that, like, you always need to go from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. It's like, that can get you in trouble because then you're only seeing what's immediately in front of you. And like, the people who won out in the NFT crypto craze of 2021, the people who were there since 2017.
So it's like, if you're properly thinking through your career and the long arc of time or whatever, then it's like, you cannot always be winning by definition. There can't be the right way of doing it, because you have to know when the right waves are to ride. And in order to know when they are, you have to be. You almost have to be wrong for a long enough period of time because everybody will look at you and going, what are you doing?
To an extent, I'm sure there's a more eloquent way of putting that. But, you know.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: Yeah, the way. Yeah, the way that I would frame that is that there's a level.
Excuse me, there is a level of either unhinged or borderline insanity for founders that are doing something that is very far out because they can see something that's not there. So if that was in regular life, and I've had experience with this, but if you're seeing something that's not actually there, then by definition, your skew of the world or your view of the world is walked for some reason. You know, a founder who's got this vision that's 10, 15 years out, and they can see. They think they can see what it is, the level of conviction that you need to have to, like, accomplish that is you are. Yeah, you. By definitions, like, there's a bit of insanity to it.
But the other thing that I think you're. You kind of touch on, and I think. I think you've got the wisdom around this, which is there's also a sense of a bit of a Midas touch. So if you have a win and then you think you're kind of smart, and then you go into a different market or you go into a different vertical or you go into something else, it's kind of like, well, I can bring my skills to bear on this thing, and because I'm accomplished and I have Done some things before, then I should expect a similar level of success, which I think is also a little bit of a trap.
Yeah, and I've seen that a bit.
[00:53:12] Speaker B: I think especially like the.
It's like if you think about it in terms of like, again, like kind of going back to like, you know, like your ringers of ladders of freedom of money or whatever. Right. It's like if you have no money, then it's like you have nothing to lose. Then you don't have to think about it so much. If you have a lot of money, you also have, you know, like assuming you're not stupid, then you're also good to go. But it's like the challenge comes when you have a little bit of money.
And a little bit of money can get you into a lot of trouble. Look at the majority of people in Australia and New Zealand with their mortgages and leaky homes.
A little bit of money can get you into a lot of trouble just because you think you have something.
But you can only gamble that many times with a little bit before you're entirely in the red. And I think that's also like a post low seven figure founder difficult challenge because it's not quite enough to get you over the line, but it's not.
But it's also like you also don't have the mindset of, oh, I can just go live in Thailand or whatever off of a grand and a half a month and live very, very comfortably. You still end up, it's kind of like this middle area. And if you don't, and if you're not careful with that, it can go south very quickly, I think.
[00:54:32] Speaker A: I think like, at least in my experience, I try to be honest about what I had on deck. So if I had something compelling and like, for me it was conviction. If I had high conviction, I would be like relentlessly pursuing something until that vision came true. And when you know, you're in that trough of that wave and there's nothing that's really that can like, nothing that's really that compelling and you don't have that conviction.
My point of view was like, what's the next best thing that I can do? Like, risk adjusted.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: And for, yeah. And for me in that time was, you know, I coached for 18 months, two years, and I started to burn out on it because I was just telling the same stories over and over again. Like, I was just repeating a lot of. And I was like, I almost need a play button to tell this anecdote.
Charging people a lot of money, they're getting value. But internally I'm going, well, I'm not, I'm not showing up 100% and it feels disingenuous.
So I'm like, it's like, what's the next best thing? And for me I was like, okay, what would be the best company to work for where I could learn something? And that's kind of how I ended up at Canva, because brilliant product, growing like a weed, those sort of things. And. But then I get into it and I'm like, oh shit, I'm a terrible employee. I've made a huge mistake. Like what have I done?
But at that time, like in that, you know, season or whatever else, that was, you know, the next best thing that I had on deck.
And I think that sometimes it's hard, it's hard to look at these options and just you almost want to will it to success.
It's like, yeah, I've had, I've had a few half baked ideas on different products, how to look at a startup that was in the AI space, even went out and pitched some VCs and I'm like, I'm not built, I'm not built for that. Like getting rejected 20 times in a row on a concept. It's like neither of us know if it's going to be true. So I agree with all of your points. It's whether you back, you want to back it.
But yeah, there's some good stuff in there about recognizing where you're on the wave. The other framework that I think is interesting, there's a guy, his name is Billy Murphy and there's another dude, Todd Tressiter, and it is a gambling framework which is like ev.
I think it's like expectancy value or expected value?
[00:56:59] Speaker B: Yeah, expect value.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And you probably, it sounds like you play, do you play a little bit of poker?
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Like, you know, that was like another like small phase of life ended up like playing a good amount of poker here in New Zealand because I guess like New Zealand dollar is cheaper than US dollar and oh, that was also a very fun time.
[00:57:16] Speaker A: How'd you go?
[00:57:17] Speaker B: I went pretty well. But yeah, again it's not like you can't make a career out of it or you can, but it's very incompatible with family life.
[00:57:26] Speaker A: Call it, what would you have to do to make that workable? Because is that face to face like you're playing tournaments and those sort of things?
[00:57:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So like your two, I guess like your option, like if you really want to do it, you have to do it online.
So you play like nine tables at the same time.
And you know, then you're just sitting in front of a computer grinding. If you want to do it in person, it's just you play that many less hands, that many less hands. It means that you know your, your earnings are going to be lower and like, you can expect like to earn like if you're. If you're a good player over like a long arc of time, like, I don't know what, like five times the big button. So it was like if your big button's three bucks, like if you're doing well, you're learning, you're earning 15 bucks an hour. So it's like, it's also not really quite.
But it was a lot of fun.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: How long did you do that for?
[00:58:20] Speaker B: Maybe like eight months.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: I think that's a pretty decent stint. That's like a good nudge.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but it was like, what, like two, three times a week?
And the casino's not that far away from here. But I only did it in person. I didn't do it online. It was just like for fun. At least I came up like quite a bit on top, but like quite a bit on top is a few thousand dollars. It's not like it's a.
It's like life changing or anything, but it was very enjoyable and at least that I can say, oh, I tried that. Enjoyed it and didn't. Wasn't the direction I wanted to go down, but it was a lot of fun.
[00:58:58] Speaker A: Cool. Well, I think that wraps it. Man, it's been so cool to. Yeah, I definitely read your blogs if they're still around. Like where. If people want to read about you or be connected to your. Are you still writing? You're still posting stuff? What are you doing?
[00:59:14] Speaker B: This isn't really my thing. I did do a bunch of like Twitter posts for a while. Also. Wasn't the right fit, I guess. Like that's the thing. Maybe I said, yeah, you just keep on trying random things and then, you know, I guess, yeah, going back to like the poker or like dance. Like the dance. You just have to hope, you know, like you have to keep trying and you have to hope something works out.
Yeah. I don't know. I still want to hear about this. How you ended up in Canva and like going to China and not being able to go in and working in Pandora. I couldn't do that. And I'm Chinese.
[00:59:43] Speaker A: So when we, when we wrap this recording, we'll keep the convo going and I'll give you the inside scoop on that. So to answer that question, people can't find you online. Are you. They have to come to New Zealand to find you or what?
[00:59:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I still have my website online, Justintan me, but I haven't written on it in years now.
I don't know, eventually, maybe at some point we'll redo it.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: Well, I'm flashing back, I'm having a bit of a moment here, but I remember you writing and doing the personal writing at a time was a thing that was a priority to you. You wanted to create some space to be able to, you know, work on that. Yeah, that's. Yeah.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: And it did it for a while and it just like that's the thing that you try it think you try anything for six months and it doesn't like three months call it. And it doesn't stick. Then it's like, okay, it's okay. You tried it and then you can move on.
Yeah. Besides my. I have a very.
I don't know if you can see her. I have a very, very sad dog that just like requires a lot of attention.
See, she's black and it's dark over there.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: She's in the shadow, man.
[01:00:46] Speaker B: Yeah. She takes up all the leftover attention nowadays. So.
[01:00:51] Speaker A: Okay, so instead of.
