$1M Business With 0 Employees “The Simple Solopreneur”

Startup Sphere
22 followers
1 Video View·Dec 15, 2024
Neville makes a million dollars a year helping people write words on the internet.
And the wildest part is, he does this with no employees,
and he built his entire business to be dummy proof.
The dumbest awesome trick I've ever learned in my life.
That simple act has like got me some of my best friends,
some of my best investments, some of my best business contacts,
and just like a lot of fun opportunities.
It all started in college after learning one skill
and conducting a series of small experiments.
I think about the dumb way of like, let me just try a small thing experiment.
It's not a real business. I didn't incorporate it. I didn't do anything.
I spent 10 bucks on a domain name. That's it.
Wait, if I can do something I enjoy doing and make money at it,
that's like better than a job, right?
In this video, he shares everything, including how he got his very first clients,
all of his revenue streams,
the best copywriting books and exercises for anyone to learn today,
and the exact playbook he would do if he were to start again from scratch.
And that's probably my number one tip for copywriting to get better at it.
Just start doing it in your head everywhere you go.
These three are probably the ones I've go back the most to,
but that was a very profound shift with me that's like,
okay, look at these psychological triggers.
Which combo of one to three of them am I appealing to?
I was like, holy crap. I can't believe like I'm just hearing about this.
Hell yeah. I mean, I think it used to be like you get work from these big platforms,
but I think the best platform is...
This episode is filled with so many examples.
I sat down with him for four hours,
but we just took the very best parts for this video.
And what I love about Neville is not only does he share specific examples,
how to apply something,
but he also might just be the happiest entrepreneur I've ever met.
You'll see it throughout the episode,
but he's just curious and excited about what he's working on.
And there's so many lessons. Enjoy the video. Let's dive in.
Here we are. Neville, thanks for having us.
What's up, man?
So you've been copywriting for a few decades now.
How did you first get into this and why?
I mean, when the internet was coming out,
it was like very obvious that like everyone's going to be using this, right?
And sure enough, like from that,
almost all my best friends are from my blogging era days.
Yeah. Noah Kagan, Sam Parr.
These are all like people I've met like when I was blogging.
And in some ways you're finding these people across the nation,
across the world that have the same interests of you that are very like
aligned with you in a lot of ways.
And that was all from just like writing words on the internet back in the day.
And we all still do it to this day. It's fun.
I went digging on the internet and I found your old YouTube channel.
And I think the first video that's still public today was from 18 years ago.
You have all these little mini experiments,
things from like how to crash a party and meeting Elton John and Michael Dell
and Lance Armstrong to like your homeless experiment living under a bridge.
And there's something very unique when I watched that of
realizing that you're just experimenting with things and teaching as you go.
Do you view yourself as a teacher, as an experimenter, as a copywriter?
How do you look at it?
No, there's like no grand plan on this.
It was just kind of like, that'd be fun to record.
It'd be kind of funny and just like put it out and document it.
And that was really the whole impetus.
There's no like grand plan.
And I realized those types of experiments where you take a little bit more risk
and like do something a little bit more crazy in the real world,
do really, really, really well.
And I think you're still seeing it today with like people,
like people walking up on the street being like,
Hey, how much money do you make or whatever?
Those are still like some of the most popular videos.
And so I think it just like educated people, entertained people.
And also it's just like fun for me.
It's like scratching an itch.
It was like a fun hobby.
And back then I made no money off this.
No one was making money on the internet like that.
So for me, I was purely doing it just because I really enjoyed doing it.
So you talk a little bit about what your business is
and how these wacky experiments maybe led you down those breadcrumbs.
My whole life has been experiments.
It's just like, let me just try this shit out.
Let's just see what happens.
Like I'm going to do a little small thing.
I'm going to put up a webpage and see if anyone buys anything.
And so I always just try out these small little things.
And I put like a deadline on it.
Like maybe like, let's give it like a month.
If I can't do it in a month, I'm probably not going to do it.
And so my life has been a series of those.
And any business that's taken off has usually stemmed from like,
here's this dumb experiment.
And then it turns out this one actually starts making some money.
And I'm like, let me take it a little more seriously.
So in college, I did a bunch of these.
I remember running like 10 different businesses, quote unquote,
10 experiments that I was making money off of.
I was collecting like blogger.com templates.
And I put it on a website called fancyblog.com.
I tried joining a company where you sign up and people get text message deals.
I was trying that.
Started a rave company where I sold rave stuff.
And it turns out that was the one that paid for all my college tuition.
Wow.
Yeah.
And it's just like, despite me being bad at it and I was like, huh,
maybe if I spend a little bit more time on this one, it'll become a business.
And sure enough, it did.
And so in college, I was doing like hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue.
And then, you know, I made a percentage of that as profit.
If I can do something I enjoy doing and make money at it,
that's like better than a job, right?
So I was never against having a job.
I was just like, if I could do my own thing
and make the same amount of money as a job,
then I'd rather do that because the upside is unlimited.
The downside, potentially also unlimited.
I remember when I learned copywriting,
one of the biggest things it said was just like,
give people examples of stuff they can do with the product.
Because I was saying you could just go on a dance floor and go like this.
And that was all I was telling people.
And now it's like, wait, plumbers use them as a tool, as a handy tool.
Oh, people go camping with them, giving all the people in the campsite
because it's like, it's like five bucks for 10 of these things.
They're super disposable.
I listed out all the reasons why you should buy this product.
And that was my first like really high revenue day.
I made thousands of dollars in profit.
And I was like, wow, that was just from an email.
And I used to send out an email newsletter and it never made any money.
And then when I learned copywriting,
I did like the total opposite of my newsletter.
It was like actually kind of a very few images and just like,
it just told a story of how all these different people use this one product.
And I sold out of them immediately.
I had to find like a different supplier
to come up with as many orders as I got.
And so that's when I was like, copywriting seems cool.
I like this.
I like making a lot more money than I did before.
And at the same time, Noah Kagan, one of my buddies
was building AppSumo off my couch.
And AppSumo was one of his side projects at the time.
And he was really good at like collecting emails and marketing.
Man, his emails were like, they were crap.
They were, it was just, he was succeeding despite the emails being so bad.
And the emails were like, here's a hundred dollar coupon.
And I was just like, what if you applied this copywriting stuff?
And he's like, what are you talking about?
I was like, what if you said how people could use the software?
Why people would use it?
Give some examples of people making a bunch of money with it.
And so I was like, let me, let me do this for you.
We sent that out.
And I think like famously,
that was like the first like $10,000 profit day that AppSumo ever had.
It's a similar thing with my business where I was like,
wow, I just made all this money.
And the only difference was the email content.
All right.
The only difference, nothing else changed.
The page didn't change, nothing changed.
So it wasn't really risky.
I wasn't like some like extreme risk taker or anything in that sense.
It seemed actually quite logical to me that I'm making more doing this than a job.
So yeah, let's do that.
And you still haven't had a job.
I still have not had a real job in my life.
No.
For somebody listening to this has a bunch of ideas and they're like, okay,
I'm going to just start this monthly business idea.
Like how do you zoom in on the ones that are working?
There's two aspects of it.
There's the technical aspect of getting it built.
And then more so for a lot of people I've seen,
it's just like the psychological aspect.
Like people are afraid to put out a business.
And so a lot of people like, well, if I put out a business and I mentioned it on Facebook,
Twitter or whatever, and then it fails, it's kind of embarrassing.
Right.
Everyone talks about like failure and stuff, but it's like,
it is embarrassing to like lose money on something.
And what I'm telling them is like, consider it just a small experiment.
You're just, you're just putting up a webpage.
You're just calling a couple of customers to see if they'll buy something like that.
This doesn't have to be some grand business that you like incorporate,
do an LLC, all that kind of stuff.
If you're filing LLC papers and stuff, you're probably just doing it wrong.
Instead, try to get a few customers first.
And this is called like, you know, MVP, validation, whatever.
But it's just like, can you get a few people to pay you?
And then if it works, take it more seriously.
And if that works, take it more seriously.
Keep upping the ante until it's a big business.
But I think a lot of people get stuck on a business idea,
never try it or try it for years and think about it.
Whereas I'm like dumb and I'm like, Hey,
what if I just put up a webpage and see what happens?
And I put up a Calendly link and it's like, Hey,
no one in three months has actually contacted me about the service.
I'm like, maybe I'm doing something wrong here.
Maybe I'm not getting enough customers.
Maybe no one wants this service.
And so the important part about that is like,
every single successful business idea you've seen has like pivoted a bunch of times.
If you can talk a little bit about your business today,
like maybe top line revenue or your different revenue streams,
I think you've shared some publicly maybe.
Yeah.
So I'd say my business probably has like eight,
like tentacles of income total.
The community itself makes many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
It's a subscription-based community.
So it's like 97 a month, $700 to $900 per year.
Right.
And then if people renew, then it's like 365 years.
Cause we like having people on for a long period of time.
And so what that is, is I was early on that.
Like everyone's moving towards communities.
I realized with the course, the problem was
watching me talk about copywriting.
That's really cool.
Watching me talk about copywriting,
but then you showing me your copy and I can help you with it is way cooler.
We made like, basically like what I would call it a heavily modified forum software
where people can upload their copy to us.
Then myself and other professional copywriters that we hire,
they go through and like rewrite all your stuff.
It's kind of like consulting scaled,
just those changes within our community.
People see like all sorts of wins.
So I do make money from YouTube videos.
I don't think it's like a significant amount.
It's like a couple grand, like maybe at max $10,000 a year.
But then from there people will buy our stuff,
which makes a lot more people get into subscriptions.
Then another big part of my stuff is consulting.
So I'll take like kind of hiring consulting projects
and we've done stuff for like contrarian thinking.
We've done stuff.
We're going to be doing something for like the Daily Stoic.
We of course do stuff for AppSumo.
And then like a whole slew of marketing companies and stuff you've never heard of.
And then consulting is probably like the next largest revenue stream from there.
And then from there, there's like affiliates.
I wrote a book a long time ago.
I wrote two books.
One does really well while it was a smaller one.
And that'll still make between 500 bucks and $1,000 a month
from a book I wrote 10 years ago.
And that also, because people will buy the book,
they'll hear about my course and buy something from there.
And then I also use like some small affiliate links here and there,
and that'll make like 10 grand, 15 grand a year and stuff.
And then the other big thing is I also get the opportunity to like advise companies.
And I'll usually take some money for advising as well as equity.
And every once in a while, there's some sort of payout event.
Like I was an investor in like the hustle.
And when that got bought by HubSpot, I got a payout from that equity.
But one cool thing that I'd say I probably make more money off of
than the actual investing is just the relationship with the companies.
So we were talking about this earlier that like I have AppSumo equity.
AppSumo hasn't sold.
So I've made technically $0 from AppSumo equity.
But how much money have I made from the AppSumo affiliation of like being the brand,
the guy behind the voice,
being able to like get the marketing power of AppSumo behind some of my products?
Oh, millions of dollars.
Yeah.
So I would say like that actual like affiliation with certain companies
has been far more valuable than any palliative of God.
So you teach literally thousands of business owners,
some of these copywriting tactics,
and you see what doesn't work and what works well.
And you've sort of has distilled this into like your own almost copywriting principles
that you've of course borrowed from the greats, but have made your own tweaks.
And you had this viral video of nine copywriting exercises
that anyone can do right now.
And he spelled a W-R-I-T-E right now, which is great.
You know he's a copywriter.
And it's a great video.
Everyone should check it out.
There's a blog post on it too.
But I want you to like zoom in a little bit
on just the top two or three exercises that people can do right now.
I think you had one about taking ads and then rewriting them yourself.
Like anybody can do that today.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah.
I call it mental ad rewriting.
So you take any ad that you see while you're driving down the street
and there's a billboard, you're going on the internet.
You're like, there's an ad.
There's an Instagram ad you see.
So for example, if you look up at one of these ads,
it's like an old Ogilvy Volkswagen ad.
And it just says lemon.
And you're like, what does that mean?
And so you look at that ad and you go, how would I make that ad better?
Right.
How would I make this better?
Or why does it work?
Why did that grab my attention?
And so the reason that like that ad grabbed my attention so much
and I have it framed on my wall was just like, you're like, wait a second.
This car company is advertising that it's a lemon.
And lemon means like, you know, it's a bad car.
Yeah.
And so then you want to read that little small text under there.
So that headline works with the image to grab your attention
and make you read that text.
Mental ad rewriting is where you're like, how do I make that better?
Right.
And that's just good copywriting practice that you can do in your head anywhere for free.
You don't need anyone to tell you how to do it.
You just think like, why did that grab my attention?
Or how would I make it better?
And that's probably my number one tip for copywriting to get better at it.
Just start doing it in your head everywhere you go.
And when I first learned about copywriting, that's what I was doing.
Every ad I saw and like, I was like, you know,
reading a magazine in a plane or something back in the day.
I'd be like, this sucks.
I can make that better.
That billboard's terrible.
I don't even know what it's for.
I can make that better.
Yeah.
What if they just put the website on?
What if they put a phone number on there?
And just like thinking like that makes you a little bit more of an optimizer.
Yeah.
Every piece of advertising you see, what if we can make it 5% better,
20% better, 100% better.
Right.
That's what mental ad rewriting is.
Yeah.
So now that we're doing mental ad rewriting and seeing like,
why did that ad work?
Why did that ad suck?
What's good about that?
What's bad about that?
Well, now you got to collect them because like, you're going to forget,
you know, we're going to forget.
We talked about this in two days.
And so I started collecting a swipe file.
A swipe file just means like, it used to literally be like a physical file
that you just put like cool advertisements in a folder.
And now it's of course all digital.
But the most impressive thing is like, you can just do this for free now.
So I would use something like Google Keep and you can create your own swipe file.
Any sort of ad, you take a screenshot of it.
Try out keep.google.com.
It's really cool and it's free.
And you can basically make like your own Pinterest board of all the things you like.
So that's the benefit of keeping a swipe file.
And I will say that more and more, all my swipe file stuff,
like I'd say 80% of it comes from my phone now.
And how do you create a swipe file on your phone?
It's actually the easiest one.
Take a screenshot of anything you think is cool.
You don't have to annotate it.
You don't have to do anything.
And then in your photos, go to the screenshot page.
Yeah.
That's your swipe file right there.
So just take screenshots of stuff.
And on your screenshots, you look at it.
Every screenshot you have is right there.
That's your entire swipe file.
Right.
And so I can just click that and browse back on it and be like,
oh, that was a cool Instagram ad.
That was a cool YouTube video.
And then the step further to categorize it,
use something like Google Keep and you can send it to Google Keep
and categorize it under pricing, videos, images, whatever.
But keeping a swipe file stuff that you like and don't like is super important.
And then when you collect it all, it's easy to like, just say like,
oh yeah, I like those.
Let's move on.
Caveman mode.
The pro copywriter himself, the caveman.
This is caveman mode.
So what caveman mode is, whenever you're reading anything,
so whether it be a sales page, an email,
most people are not like paying attention to it.
They're reading kind of like a caveman.
So imagine this kind of like dumb, doesn't care caveman,
bleary eyed, being like, whatever.
And so that's the way I read people's copy.
The caveman is an editing method to like, you read through your copy.
And if you're like, should I keep it?
Is it good?
Dumb.
Third exercise I always recommend to people is copy work.
And a lot of like the legends of the past used to do this.
And what they, let's, let's zoom in on one of these like cool advertisements up there.
So for example, how to create advertising that sells.
That's a classic ad that in the eighties made the Ogilvy Corporation,
their big agency, like something like $2 billion.
There's a tremendous amount of money back then.
And what they did with, they basically listed out all their top marketing methods
in that, in that one page magazine ad.
And if you go through and hand copy it, what you're going to notice is like,
oh, he writes in really short sentences.
Oh, he's really small words.
He never uses like big, fancy words.
Oh, he kind of writes like a person would talk.
Like he doesn't sound like some aristocrat.
He sounds just kind of like a dude.
And so if you also go and do the lemon ad, the Volkswagen ad,
you read how that was written.
And you're like, oh, very simple words, short sentences, keeping the subject on track.
There's not that much copy.
There's actually only like, maybe like two paragraphs of copy on the entire thing.
And they're using that to sell an entire car.
And so you just learn a lot by picking this skill up.
And it actually say, find a couple of classic pieces of copy like that.
You can go on my site and find, you know,
copywritingcourse.com.
It's like copy work and find a bunch of pieces of copy work.
And the cool thing is you probably only need to do about three pieces.
I'd say you get kind of diminishing returns from there.
But once you do that first piece, you're like, oh, interesting.
You learn quite a bit just by copying someone.
So think about it.
When someone learns to play the guitar, they're not making up their own music.
They're playing Metallica or Green Day or something that's already been out there.
Anytime someone's learning something new,
they just copy what someone else did and then they can make their own later.
So for beginner copywriters, I'm like, start copying some of these ads.
Handwrite them out.
Yeah, that's a great exercise called copy.
With the modern form of copy work, I'd say I actually do a lot, but with Canva.
So instead of hand copying something,
I'll take it into Canva and break it down by layers and make something mine.
Like I saw a cool chart, like a flow chart of a guy's business with his emails.
And I was like, wow, that's really cool.
And I recreated it and made it for myself.
That was kind of like a form of copy work of like taking this thing
that's really cool and making my own.
And it actually made me think I was just like, holy crap,
how do I make money off this part of my business?
And then it flows into that on his one, but on mine, it doesn't do anything.
And so from that, I actually like modified my business model.
Yeah, I think just like there's so much content that goes out
that like anything that stands out a little bit
often gets a little bit more attention.
And quite honestly, like, I mean, here's, but it's just more fun.
Yeah.
Right.
So when I say like, hey, listen up, chump.
Someone's just like, oh, that's that starts off in a kind of an interesting tone.
It's not like, hello there, fellow internet reader.
It's not like that.
It sets the tone a little bit and it gets people to read on.
And some people might actually hate it, but then some people will really love it.
Yeah.
So anything that stands out just a little bit more tends to get a lot more attention.
This is actually a well-known thing that David Ogilvie always talks about.
And his stuff is like, when everyone's doing this one thing, you do the opposite.
It doesn't mean that it's going to be better just because it's different,
but it is something to experiment with.
Like what boundaries can I push here to get more attention?
You have tons of books in here, books over here, books over here.
I know you're very well read.
Can we talk about just your three favorite,
most impactful books for learning copywriting?
Dude, let's go grab them.
All right.
We got your top three favorite books.
Why these three books?
These three are probably the ones I'd go back the most to.
This one Ogilvie on advertising.
Man, I go back to this one all the time just for inspiration.
And the cool thing about this book is like, first of all,
it's filled with tons of examples, stuff that worked, stuff that didn't work.
But he would also be like, how do I get the entire United Kingdom
to buy a certain brand of rice?
How do I get people to visit Puerto Rico
before it was like a famous destination?
And he talks about how to sell on TV,
how to sell through newspapers, how to sell through radio
and the combination of all of them.
And I love that because to me,
copywriting is about getting a message into your brain
or getting a message into a million brains.
And the medium is like whatever the best medium is for them.
It can be text, it can be images, it can be video, it can be whatever.
And so I think David Ogilvie was like under the same impression.
And that's why I like this book all the time.
And sometimes if I'm stuck on a project,
I'll just open this up and start reading through it.
And not only is it just fun to listen to and kind of a fun read,
but also there's so many different angles and ways that he sells stuff in here
that you're just like, oh, that'd be a cool way to sell this.
And then you get an idea and you're off to the races.
So I read this book all the time.
I give it out as gifts all the time.
It's great.
All right, this one's called
The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman.
I've actually met this guy a bunch of times.
He's recently passed.
So even in here, he has a bunch of examples of things he sold back in the day.
But the brilliance of this book is he has a chapter where there's like
just under 30 of these psychological triggers that make people want to buy.
For example, belonging to something,
like being included in something is a psychological trigger
why people want to join a membership or a club.
Or for example, he tells a story where they were selling these collector's items
where it was like a silver airplane wing with the different,
like American Airlines, United Airlines, all that.
And they were made out of silver.
Profound to me.
Because before I used to sell something, I was just like,
uh, maybe we could just say that we got this on sale.
And I'm like, wait, wait, wait.
What's the thing that we're going after with this audience, right?
Are we trying to save the money?
Are we trying to make them look better?
What is the trigger that we're going after?
Sometimes there can be multiple.
But that was a very profound shift with me.
That's like, okay, look at these psychological triggers.
Which combo of one to three of them am I appealing to?
And let's go hard on that.
Third one is this book called
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You Got by Jay Abraham.
This isn't technically a copywriting book.
It's actually just more like a business book.
Jay Abraham was like this guy that was big in the 80s, 90s.
But this is one of those books that I pick up and I go to any chapter.
I don't want to read it through each time.
I pick up, go to any single chapter,
and then it starts talking about something super interesting.
And I get really good ideas.
I just open up a chapter.
It's about the best client to find.
And I'm like, oh, what does that say?
And then I'll read it and be like, holy crap, I'm doing this all wrong.
And so this is one of those books that I think it's taken his entire career
and compressed it into the minimum amount of space.
And it's one of those books I just can open up to anyone
and find something interesting to read.
That's why I keep going back to it.
And this teaches you a lot about business,
a lot about copywriting, a lot about marketing campaigns.
It's kind of like the lot of those three.
If you were starting again in your career, young Neville,
what would you advise to him?
I mean, I might be a freelancer at first just to generate cash.
That's actually what I did.
I did web design and stuff for people.
And they're like, we'll pay you $1,000 to make a website.
I was like, what?
I know how to make a website.
I'll do that.
So if I was, I would start a freelance business.
And I think a lot of freelancers, whenever they start,
they don't realize they're starting a freelance business.
And so one of the things I probably would have done back in the day differently,
it was start getting reviews right away.
So if you go on Amazon and something has one review,
you're like, I don't trust this.
It has 20,000 reviews.
You trust it.
It's not a big jump to see that if a freelancer slash agency,
such whatever has more reviews on a trusted site,
like Google local listings or something,
that it probably be more trusted.
You probably more likely go with them, right?
They get more exposure, et cetera.
First, I think you need to identify what you're good at.
So what do you do?
What do people come to you for help with, right?
So a lot of people come to me saying like,
I want to be a copywriter.
I'm like, cool.
What have you written?
They say, I've never written anything.
And I'm like, well, I don't even think you want to be a copywriter.
Write me three blog posts and tell me if you still like this.
By the second one, they're like, I'm out.
I'm like, cool.
We identified that you don't need to be a copywriter.
What other skill sets do you have?
A lot of people will come to me and be like,
oh, I was an accountant for a long time.
Now I want to do my own thing.
I'm like, can you start an accounting thing on the side?
Is that something you'd be interested in?
Yeah.
I think also think a lot of people don't want to do their current job
and they say they don't like it.
And I say, do you not like it?
Or do you not like the money you're currently making?
And that's a big thing to realize.
I'm like, okay, let's say you're an accountant.
You don't like it.
What if you get paid a million dollars a day?
Would you like it?
They'll be like, I love it.
I'm like, okay, the problem is not the accounting.
It's just like, you're not getting paid enough.
Is there something we could do about that?
Increase your prices, only work with larger clients, et cetera.
And a lot of people, if they don't like being an accountant or something,
but then they are just like an advisor to a bunch of different companies,
it might actually be a totally different job to you.
And it's a lot more fun when you're working on something on your own
rather than being told what to do.
Like you don't have to do this work.
You want to do it.
So I think there is a difference over there.
But also I think, so number one, finding like an offer to do.
And this is like, I think like a throw spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks.
You can offer multiple things.
So a lot of freelancers start out as like total generalist.
So try to find something that you're already good at
or that people already pay you for.
And that's like the best way to just get started.
Later, you can expand your offering.
But here's the evolution of a lot of freelancers I've seen.
I'm sure you've seen this a lot too.
Someone becomes a freelancer and then some company is just like,
hey, we're a really good match.
Why don't you come on?
Why don't you come as advisor or get some equity in the company
or be our early first employee?
Freelancing is a lot of serendipity.
The same time out of 100 gigs you do,
one of them might be like your golden goose that breed in years pays off.
Or that company gets really big and you were like,
I was the head of marketing at this XYZ insert big software company.
So a lot of those types of things happen.
And a lot of people that I see become freelancers
and are really good at freelancing,
they don't stay in freelancing forever.
They end up transitioning, like become part of a company
or own piece of a company or start their own company.
That's why I like freelancing.
If you're not sure what you're going to do,
it's just like, let's just start bringing in money.
And bringing in money is the universe's way of saying like,
yeah, you're good at that.
If you're bringing in a ton of money from video editing,
maybe you're good at video editing.
We had this one thing, we had this string of hot releases,
like three in a row of hot releases on AppSumo that I was involved with.
And I was like, I'm on fire.
I'm invisible.
I don't need it.
I don't need any more feedback.
I know what people want.
And previously, all those products were like people asking us how to do a thing.
And then we showed them how to do that.
This one was called like the Sumo Diet Course.
And it was when I started like eating healthier and working out and stuff.
And I was like, wow, I just have a lot more energy.
Everyone should know this.
And so I spent like a couple months putting together this product.
We launched it.
And I was like, everyone's got to know this information.
It's great.
And it was like the biggest flop ever.
Like no one bought it.
Like maybe two or three people.
But it was like sad.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a total waste of time.
And what I realized was like, no one has once ever asked me health advice.
No one comes to me for that.
I'm not just like not the guy.
Yeah.
And so I was just like, wait, I'm making this whole product about this that no one comes to me for.
But you know what people came in for?
For copywriting advice, help with their webpage, those types of things.
And so I was like, oh, I got to stick to what people are coming to me for.
What I'm good at.
Next, we got a tour of Neville's house, which included his home office, sauna, gym, and rooftop.
One cool thing I noticed is he's dummy proofed his entire house.
So if he wants to record a video, he clicks a button.
If he wants to open the blinds, he clicks one button.
And so many aspects of his life have been dummy proofed.
Let's check it out.
Yeah, this is the bedroom.
And right now it's in night mode.
But as you can see, we can transition to open mode over here.
These blinds open.
It's one of my favorite things in the morning to do that.
And like all the light comes in.
It's pretty cool.
Little outside balcony area.
This is a structural bar, but what I use it for is pull-ups also.
So come out here in the morning, do a couple pull-ups.
Pretty fun.
Yeah.
I asked Noah before this interview, what's the number one biggest thing he has learned from you?
Any idea of what he said?
Keep it stupid.
Keep it simple.
Similar, but he said how to be happy and your ability to be happy and not want more, more,
more, but to optimize for happiness.
No, I actually found this out in high school.
I read a book called The Male Midlife Crisis.
And I think what happens is that middle age, a lot of people realize they're like,
holy crap, I'm going to die.
And it helps you answer those questions really well by knowing that like,
at this date, I'm going to die.
So what do I want to do in the meantime?
And I think that's made me a lot happier.
Some people find it a morbid thought.
I think it's very logical.
And I'm just like, yeah, this makes me a lot happier.
It makes me appreciate the journey through life rather than trying to reach some end state.
And so for me, my whole life has been defined of like, I've shared my ideas with the world
and people have come out of the woodworks and be like, I like that idea.
Let's meet up.
That simple act has like, got me some of my best friends, some of my best
investments, some of my best business contacts, and just like a lot of fun opportunities.
And so I do think that sharing your ideas with the world, maybe it's not for everybody,
but if you're hesitant about it, like, what do I have to say?
Maybe you do have some unique ideas.
Maybe you do have some fun stuff to share.
Why wouldn't you want to share them with the world?
Really, what's the downside?
Unless you're talking about really crazy, controversial stuff.
I don't think there's really any downside.
You never know where that small bit of writing can really launch off an entire career or
a whole chain of serendipity down the line.
Amazing.
Where can people find you on the internet or any final messages for somebody watching?
Yeah.
My name is really easy to Google, Neville Medora.
And then you can also look me up at copywriting course.
You can look at swipefile.com.
And I'm on all the social medias, especially X and Instagram and YouTube.
