23 Year Old Making Millions on the App Store | Blake Anderson - UMax + RizzGPT

All right, Blake, you have been up to some shit, bro. I think the coolest thing about your story is how fast it all happened. Like, let's take us through where your life was, 18 months ago, year and a half ago. - Yeah, I think it's a good place to start. I think it's actually a really funny place to start because about 18 months ago, I think is when we first met. I had seen you blowing up on social media and you had the calendar link in your bio. And I was like, I feel like this is going to be a good connection to have. This kid seems to be on a very strong upward trajectory. So we hopped on a call and that was the fall of my senior year. I, at the time, was building a college marketplace app. And, you know, we had some big visions for the app, but it was approaching the end of my senior year. And I didn't have any income at all. All of my friends have full-time jobs in New York and would not making six figures, and I have no plans whatsoever. - New ones at SDSE, right? - No, I went to Tulane. - Tulane, okay, interesting. - I'm out then you moved to San Diego afterwards. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I'm at Tulane. I'm graduating, all my friends are going to New York. And I'm like, fuck, I really want to pursue entrepreneurship full-time, but, you know, I need to make money somehow. So, I moved back home. I'm essentially working out of my attic and a coffee shop. And I had this roommate in college where he was often asking me like, what should I say to girls on dating apps, right? He used dating apps a lot, and would often be like, okay, what should I say to this? So, at the time, ChatGPT had come out a few months prior. And I'm like, I think that ChatGPT could programmatically generate these responses. So, I started playing around with him prompting and was working pretty well. So, that's when I set off to build a RizGPT. This is a, so I'm back home. This is a month of June, and I'm building this app where you can upload a screenshot of your messages with a girl, and it will help you with what to say. And at the time, you know, I had no idea whether or not this thing would work. My co-founders had some experience in social media marketing, but we didn't really have experience with this type of consumer app, and then we launched. And from there, it was kind of like, instant product market fit, instant virality. - So, you started saying success right away. - Yeah, right away. We did two $50 promos with these kind of like underground Riz accounts on TikTok. And that propelled us to within the course of a week, 200,000 downloads, 80K MRR. And yeah, that was kind of the start of my journey. - Nice, so that's when you knew, like, wait a minute, okay. So, you've been an entrepreneur for a while though, first of all, right? I want to talk about your backstory, right? Obviously right now, how old you? - I'm 23. - You're 23, you're my age, you're making millions with various different consumer tech products, right? - Uh-huh. - And it's, you're not just like a one-hit wonder, like you built multiple different things that are all doing very well. So I'm excited to see what you do in the future. But let's take it back to the early days, right? 'Cause I didn't know this until I was watching the podcast that you sent me in the forest. You've been starting businesses since day one, so am I. So am I, so I love those early stories like that. Can you take us back to the first, your first experience as an entrepreneur? - Yeah, so when I was seven years old, Maya, we had a bunch of these rocks in my yard, right? And it was, we were constantly running and like stepping on them, hurting our feet. And my dad was like, listen Blake, I'll pay you 20 cents per rock that you pick up and clean up. And that's when it started to click for me. Like, what it meant to make money, what it meant to be an entrepreneur. And I would do all these little things. And so I wrote an ebook titled How to Make Money as a Seven-Year-Old. 'Cause I was like, this is, this is paradigm shifting. Everybody needs to know about this. And then from there, it was a ton of different things. I mowed lawns, I raked leaves, I shoveled driveways, I sold candy. - Addicted to making money. - Yeah, addicted. - And unique, non-practical, you know, nine to five traditional ways. - 100%. And it wasn't just about making money. It was more about like the strategy behind it. I would play these like tycoon games. I don't know if you're familiar with them on addicted games and whatnot. Where you're like simulating around a business, right? And I'm not making real money from this. But it's the idea around like optimizing a business in order to, you know, participate in the economy. And to me, it always felt like an intellectual challenge, right? So then throughout the course of my teenage years, a number of different things. Buying and selling mad and mobile coins, or I should say selling mad and mobile coins to other kids in my class. I was batting runescape. I built an Ethereum mining machine. I was running Instagram meme page promos. Were any of those successful? Did you make any money off any of those? Or were those all kind of like just random shots trying to figure out what would stick? - Yeah, I think that this is a great question. Something I really wanna touch on. I made some money off of all of these, but it was always in the range of like 50 to like a couple thousand dollars, right? And I think the really important lesson here that I learned is that like, iteration is very important because you can learn very quickly. But there always comes a time when you need to really double down on your skills, right? And so throughout my teenage years, it was a ton of learning, not much doubling down. But I'm thankful for that because that gave me this wide array of skills or this skill set such that when it came time to really grow and scale a business, and when RISGPT started to take off, I had all these various learnings across different domains that would come into play. For example, these Instagram meme pages that I would do promos with when I was selling counterfeit MBA jerseys, right? I learned how to negotiate a promo and include various clauses such as, okay, I'll pay you X dollars for the promo as long as it hits at least Y views, right? Or and here's an incentive if you exceed Z views. And there are hundreds of these different little learnings that all came back so that when it was really time to scale, I felt that I had the ability to do so. - Nice, and obviously it's working very well. I think that's important because a lot of, like so many of this younger generation, all they want to do is make money, right? But they're really hesitant to actually try things that might not make you money for a long time. Sounds like you've had like a dozen little ventures and you know, and you also went to land. Do you know Harry Gastenter? - Yeah, yeah, Harry's a good friend of mine. - No, okay, perfect, yeah, small world. But literally same exact story. Same thing now, he's the founder and CEO of this big tech company, but he told me right in your seat, he was like, yeah, actually know your switch, but he was like, yeah dude, I've had probably 10 businesses before this one. - Oh, certainly. - That's literally how it's supposed to go. Like you're supposed to try different things, you're supposed to fail, you're supposed to learn, and then one day one of them takes off. - Before building fanfics, Harry also tried to build a college marketplace app, and when I was working on the college marketplace app, I hopped on a call with him and I was like, yo, I love some inputty here. And he said it very kindly, right? But essentially was like, yeah, I don't know if I would continue on the college marketplace app. And I think that people have a tendency to be like, oh yeah, dude, you gotta go all in on this, keep working on it, work on it for years, even if you're not seeing the preliminary signs of success, but he, having been somewhat serial entrepreneur, was like, you know, sometimes you gotta call it quits, and I think that that advice probably doesn't, is not prominent enough on the internet. - Yeah, I think, well, it's just about like, as a young entrepreneur and anyone with a serious ego and pride, which I think you have to have, 'cause you have to have this mindset of like, no one's gonna stop me, right? Nothing, nothing can stop me. At some point, you do need to say like, okay, maybe it's on to the next thing. Doesn't mean you're a failure, right? You're supposed to fail, but you learn those lessons, and that's what enables you to find the thing that ends up clicking. But so on the note of, in your early days, lots of ventures, trying different things. At any point, you know, at least in my current experience, like it was very tough growing up, right? Like you almost felt like a black sheep, 'cause there's not that many young guys that are interested in entrepreneurship and kind of like always seeking challenges. What were those early days like both in high school and then in college? - Yeah, it's a great question. I think that I'm very fortunate that I had parents that were very supportive from a young age, and we're always encouraging me to try out new things. I would say the hardest part, probably, is when you're working on these things and not having success, right? And it's the sort of thing where like, you don't even wanna talk about it to anyone else. I remember starting to, or trying to scale YouTube channels, and when I was like 12 years old, and some of my friends found it and were making fun of me, and I was like, "Fff, damn, that really suck." - Yeah. - But on the flip side, it's extremely valuable to have a positive supportive network around you. So, I think early on, I was a little bit more, you know, kind of just like reserved and working on it, but something I think was very helpful in college was finding a couple of other guys who were like-minded and had a similar entrepreneurial mindset. Alex Lyman in particular, he was running a late-night food delivery company, and I think he was very influential in my pursuing entrepreneurship in the long term. He ended up becoming one of my co-founders of RISGPT. So yeah, it's a tricky balance. I would err on the side of like not really caring what people think or the judgements. They always stem from like insecurity, right, or people wanting to- it's an easy way for people to put themselves above you when you're trying something and not working, and it's not working, right? Yeah. Well, you went to college, now you're doing very well for yourself, looking back on it, because this is a question that's asked all the time. If I want to be an entrepreneur, should I go to college? What's your answer to that, or is it not that black and white? I don't mean that I'm wholly qualified at this point in time. I don't think that I have the full perspective yet. I think having opinions is great, but we don't always need to have an opinion on everything. Okay. I don't think I have a super strong opinion here. For myself, would I have gone in retrospect? Probably not, but I don't know that- I don't think that that applies to the average individual. Yeah. I think a lot of people, because I get that question all the time, and I think a lot of people, they think they have to make a decision, but it's meant to be like a period of your life when you're kind of figuring out who you are. You're meeting those other people that have similar interests. You're figuring out what direction you want to take in life. So I think if you have the opportunity for anyone watching, you should definitely consider it for sure. Socially, too. It's like- You build great social skills. Absolutely. You learn how to talk and communicate and form friendships within these large groups, especially being in a fraternity and whatnot for yourself. For yourself? Yeah. Yes. You yourself haven't been president, right? Yeah. I think it's a very complicated, complicated question. So yeah, I don't think that there's one size fits all answer. It depends on who you are, what your goals are, what kind of life you want to live. Fair. Very fair. All right. Well, you're going through college. You're hitting the end, right? And you might even be like a little bit stressed out, like, what am I going to do? Like, I am assuming you were definitely terrified of getting an actual job, right? 100%. As any college entrepreneur. You're like, I got to do something, and I got to do it now, or else I'm screwed, and then my life is over, right? I'm down this bad path that I don't want to go on. Absolutely. But there's also the perspective of like, there are a ton of people who say that they're going to go get a job and then pursue entrepreneurship, right? But the reality is, you get a full time job, and then your expenses start to scale, and maybe you have a girlfriend, and she wants to go on nice date nights, or maybe your friends want to go out a lot, and you start to spend more and more money, and then it just becomes more and more impossible to really quit and pursue entrepreneurship. So yeah, going back to my story, I'm graduating. My parents aren't doing well financially either. My dad had been like a pretty successful entrepreneur early on, but. So you had a bit of that in your life already? You okay? You understood the concept? Yeah. That's good. And I don't want to go too deep into these exact circumstances in my family, but in short, my parents weren't doing too well financially. So I moved back home, the house is on the market. My older brother is giving me loans for groceries. And RizGPT was essentially like probably my final shot. I think that if I had gotten a full time job, I would have pursued things in parallel. But I think that the value of going full time on something is significantly greater than trying to have a part time side hustle. And you didn't have a backup plan, right? You were like, "I'm going to move home, all I'm going to do is work on this thing." And there is no, what if it doesn't work out because it's going to work out? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There is no plan B. It was like fucking burn the boats. We've got to make this work. And yeah, so we launched, we go viral. And then it was, there was certainly a learning curve, right? Like when we first built the app, we didn't have all the basics. We didn't have notifications, reviews, right? We didn't have a formal back end, like we didn't have a user table. I don't know if that means anything to you, but developers would hear that. This whole, this whole realm that you're speaking of is very new to me, right? Not entrepreneurship, but software development apps, all this. How do you even get into that in the first place? That's so intimidating, especially if you don't have like a very extensive, you know, CS background. Yeah, so I hadn't built software before. I'd done some like coding in Python and whatnot, but Python's not so fun. Just for fun or just for fun. So I, I double majored finance in CS at Tulane, but Tulane CS program is not good at all. Like people came out of that program barely knowing how to write a for loop. And so, yeah, when we're first building this thing, I, you know, I didn't have the money for tutor or we didn't have anyone technical on the team. So chat GPT essentially served as my tutor. It wrote the majority of the code. Love to hear that. So yeah, when we launched, we didn't have all these basic, basic features within the app, reviews, notifications, what have you. And so there was an extensive process of catch up of getting in touch with people who had built successful apps before being like, yo, okay, we have a viral product. We found product market fit. What the fuck do we do now? And over the next few months, I got better at SwiftUI, which was the language that app is built in. And we scaled up to a little bit over $200,000 in MRR. It's a monthly recurring revenue. And then one of my co-founders and I kind of started to go head to head in terms of where we thought the product should go. So we amicably split. I kept my equity and I was, I was essentially unemployed. So as I had mentioned, my parents had been doing too well financially, home life wasn't great as a whole. And right after I split from my co-founders, I spent that month hopping from friends' couches. I was on my friends' couch, then my brothers' couch, trying to figure out what to work on. And this is when I discovered looks maxing. And this is when I saw your podcast with Sam Zia. The first one, I think about like three hours from like that. Yeah, I think it was the first in either October or November. And I'm trying to figure out what to work on. I had this strategy that kind of worked with RizGPT, identify a popping niche on TikTok, build a product to solve a consumer need. And I see your podcast with Sam and I'm like, so I start looking at Sam's page a little bit more. And I'm like, okay, this is starting to come together. It's sort of like in the space that you're into, it's like male self improvement as a whole. And you could just tell that Sam was going to blow up from the beginning. I remember when I first met Sam when he was at like 100k, maybe I was like, this kid's going to fucking blow up. He's got something about him, he's like one of those kids. And so I think I hit you up and I was like, yo, I'm working on this, blah, blah, blah. And you were like, yo, I think that my boy Sam would be great for it because he would just done the podcast with him. And so you connect me with Sam. And then it was kind of an investment. The best. So I think I, uh, the text we're going to talk about, you're like, that's the best hundred bucks for everything. Yeah. So the $50 I'd spent to hop on the calendar with you two years, yo, is what led to my working with Sam, right? Because you connect me with Sam. And so I texted you. I was like, that $50 investment I made for that call with you was the best $50 investment of my life. Um, yeah. So Sam's now my co founder, I bring my older brother on as well. We build this app. The core need it's solving is guys on TikTok or on social media as a whole, they want to know how attractive they are and how they can become more attractive, right? They want to know how they should style their hair, what sort of skin care routine they should implement. So we build this up and then similar to risk GPT, like after the first few promos, it was, it was, it was kind of just a game of scaling from there. Exactly. It was like, it was upward trajectory. Then it was just like, how far can we take this? And talk about perfect timing too, like it's like so much of business as you know, it's timing, right? You could have a great product, but if it's not the wrong time, it's not going to do anything right? Had Uber launched in the middle of COVID, it would have flocked, right? And door to ash blew up because it was perfect. You launched right at the perfect time when this looks maxing trend was first starting, you got the perfect people for it. So it's like, you know, destined to launch, it was crazy. It was actually, I think two fold perfect timing here. Now I also want to clarify, it's like, it's a relatively small app, right? It's not like we're Uber or door to ash size. Yeah, but yeah. Okay, can you, can we talk some numbers right now just for everyone watching? Like what do you guys, you know, what's the best month you guys have ever done? Yeah. So February, we did about 700,000 in revenue. Crazy. Yeah. Anyways, I think it was twofold, perfect timing. Perfect timing that the looks Maxine trend was like, if you look at the Google trends, it was just steadily moving up. And then in addition to that, technologically, it was perfect timing. The chat GPT vision API or the GPT vision API had just been released. And essentially what this enables is the ability to produce an app like UMex without having to custom train your own ML vision model, which could cost tens to a $100,000 to actually build an effective one in-house. Instead, you can just write some fucking words into chat GPT, attach an image of the face, and you can get this sort of output. So yeah, I think that it was both what's a new technology that's enabled as a result of recent development, as well as what's a popular space to apply this. And that's where you kind of have zero competition. - Yeah. In my mind, I think there's usually two types of people. There's the ready aim fire people, and then there's the ready fire aim. And you've seen from hearing the story, like you're a ready fire aim, right? Like you just will go, we'll start doing shit and we'll figure it out along the way. - 100% - I think that's so important, because whether it's with starting businesses early on, as opposed to waiting a few years after college, or simply just like attacking a trend, right, as it's developing, you're gonna be first to market. And you have the sales, and you have the exposure to fix those problems as they're popping up, rather than making sure that everything is perfect and ready to go before you launch something. That's just how you die, in my opinion. - I think that's a great framework. I think it also depends on what your time horizon and expectations for the business are, right? If you're trying to, in my opinion, if you're trying to build like an empire where the public perception from the start is important, it makes more sense to take your time, right? UMAX was a sort of application where like, it's an opportunistic play. The market wants something, it's not a guarantee that the market's gonna desire this for 30 years, right? It's not a massive market, right? It's kind of like, let's satisfy this consumer need as quickly as we can, and then, you know, the more mission oriented plays will come in the future. So, yeah, I guess going back to the UMAX timeline really quickly, so we launched, we're doing well, we have this competitor come in, and they copied everything that we did. Like, the exact outputs that we had, everything. And they were real competition. Like, they had achieved the number of downloads that we did in a little bit over a month in about two weeks. - Were they experimenting with influencer marketing too? - Yeah, they were, were they like attacking, like, your guys' enemies kind of thing? - Absolutely, and what's interesting here is, like, I kind of wanted to go a little bit slower with UMAX, right? We were still doing promos, but I wanted to take the time to really improve the offering, right? We had like this, almost like a full course within the app, just to learn about different ways to improve yourself, right? And it's nothing crazy. We're not recommending like bone smashing or anything, right? It's more like, okay, if you have this sort of skin complexion, this is the sort of skin care that's gonna be best for you, whatever. This have looks, Max comes in, they don't give a fuck about any of that. All they're trying to do is the ratings, 'cause they know that that's the most viral component. And they, yeah, they copied pretty much everything that we had on that front, and they're just pumping influencers from the jump. And so I kind of had to make a decision. I was like, okay, do we continue our path and potentially allow them to become the number one name and then try to overtake them? Or do we say fuck this, that's unacceptable? We're going big right now. And over the course of about five days, or sorry, three days, I deployed a little bit over $200,000 on influencers, which was all the money we had made up until that point. - And how are you doing that? Are you making a list of the top influencers? Are you DMing them? It's like, yeah, I'll pay you $10,000 right now. - So I had a list of the biggest influencers. Okay, Shami, Dylan Latham, Aaron, et cetera. And I hit him up, and I'm like, I want you boys on contracts right now. And they're like, you know, looks Max AI, they're trying to get us. And I call it K-Shami, for example. I'm like $50,000 this month right now. I'll wire it today, but you need to sign with us right now. And he's like, yeah, dude, that's what I'm gonna do. - That's exclusive, right? - Exclusive, yeah, you can't work with some kind of deliverables, do you get for a $50,000 check to an influencer for anyone who's curious? - Yeah, so I don't want to expose like his individual rates, but you'll get a number of posts. So what we had is like X number of posts for $Y. So for him, it's X number of posts for $50,000 with various view, actually we did not have view clauses for him, we just had approval. So very, very favorable for him. All he had to do was make posts that were like acceptable under some guidelines, and he gets paid $50,000 up front. - Yeah, the reason I ask is because influencer marketing is very tricky these days. - It's very, very saturated. Like one post might blow up, and it changes everything for your business. One might, if anything, I feel like most influencers these days are so bad at selling a product, whether it's a physical product or an app like yours, that it's just a complete waste of money. - Yeah. - So you have to really find the right person for it. - Something that I've been saying recently is like, when you're trying to do influencer marketing, you might DM 100, and then 10 will respond, three of which might produce profitable ads. And one of the key reasons that most people aren't able to run profitable influencer promos or influencer campaigns is 'cause they aren't able to identify those three. And I think the more that you understand your market, the easier time that you're gonna have understanding what sort of influencers are going to convert, what sort of messaging you wanna put out to the audience, right? And so this is where I think being your own customer really comes into play and knowing what's gonna resonate with your customer. - Nice. And so how do you, like what kind of return do you see on an influencer campaign typically on like a successful one? - It really depends on the product. So I think that it's just a game of RPM and CPM, right? So essentially any promo that you can run that is gonna produce a greater RPM after your variable cost and whatnot, then CPM or the cost for per thousand views of that post is gonna be a profitable one. So a key thing is to identify like what is your average RPM with an niche, right? Are you producing, so say an influencer does one million views? Is that gonna produce 5,000 in sales for your business? 10,000 in sales for your business? 2,000 in sales for your business, right? So the RPM being revenue per thousand views is the key. So let's say you have a $5 RPM, then maybe you wanna ensure that you're operating profitably, maybe you target an influencer campaign at a $3 CPM, right? You'll go to influencers and you'll say, "Hey, we're gonna, we'll pay you $3,000 for every million views." Or maybe they don't wanna do on a per-view basis. We got a factor in cost too, on your app though, you don't have like, it's already built, right? - Yeah, so this is why it's a RPM after variable cost, right? So if you have a physical product, this is the cost of the physical goods, this is your shipping, this is Stripe, right? For us, it's Apple. Now people don't really understand about Apple's, they take 30%. - Wait, 30? - Really? I thought it was 15. - Wow. - 15% up to $1 million in sales, 30% after that. - Wow. - Yeah. - They are cleaning. - No, no, they are, they built the railroad that you're now using to transport your goods, essentially. - Yeah, absolutely, around it. - They own the marketplace, right? And it's like, you can go on Google, right? They also charge similarly, but let's just say Google only charged 3%, you can only go to Google's marketplace, but no one wants to fucking, no one wants to pay for Google app, right? Android users notoriously don't convert. Apple has the marketplace. They have the people that are willing to pay. They provide free distribution for you, as well once your app starts doing well, right? Like half of our downloads for UMX right now, it's just Apple pushing it out, because we've generated so many up to this point, and positive reviews and whatnot. - So interesting. And do you do any sort of paid advertising at all, like meta, Google ads, or is it only influencer marketing? - So with Riz GBT and UMX, not much paid ads, the benefit of those sort of apps is that they are inherently viral, right? They do so well and organic, because when someone does a promo for UMX, especially in the early days, it would go more viral than that individual's average post, right? Because people are commenting they're like, "What the hell is this?" - Yeah, no way bro is using AI to analyze his face. Call AI, on the other hand, my most recent app, we have started doing paids. Right now, it's like still scaling it up. assessing real ass and whatnot, but interesting. So within, but it seems like, so you're sticking to the app niche, right? Do you, Dev must be like fascinating to you, right? There's so many different niches you can go into, you could do physical products, you could do online products, you could do websites, you could do for clothes like me, right? Why did you pick to stick with apps? Do you just like, this is what I'm good at? Or is it like, wow, this opportunity is just there? What I think is interesting is that software developers don't understand social media virality. And all the internet money kids don't understand software development, right? So it's like this weird thing where the, if you have the Venn diagram, the people that exist in the middle, it's such a small amount that there's a lot of opportunity in the space in that if you can, like there are a lot of niches that are very much so monetized with physical products, right? And the RPM that you're gonna get on advertising a physical product in that niche, would be $2. And then it's just a game of all these different physical products competing to figure out these novel ways of generating views, right? Because the only way that you can make money is to generate more views. Whereas in the app space, if you have everyone generating these $2 RPMs, $2 per 1,000 views, and I build an app for it. And the people who viewed this content have never seen an app for this space. Now you get a $5 RPM, and I can just pump in money faster than anybody else. And then if you pile on the fact that I know how to generate these views similar to the E-Com kids, right, then it becomes very profitable. So that's answered to your first question. Now in regards to the second question, is this a space that I intend to stay in? No, it's not. And the reason for that is that I think consumer apps, I'm in this space. I know developers who are doing millions of dollars a month in revenue across all my apps. I'm at about a million a month in revenue. It is pretty much entirely a game of optimizing the amount that you earn per user and getting as many users onto the app as possible, right? It's not mission driven. It's not about like how are we improving society, right? It's all about how do we make as much money as possible? It's capitalizing off trash. 100%. It's just capitalizing off of what people are interested in. Like I said, I know developers make millions a month that have explicitly said to me, I do not give a fuck about what I'm building. Doesn't matter at all. I'd build an AI girlfriend that's detrimental for society if it meant that I would make money. And I get it, it's capitalism. But it's also, I don't think it's deeply fulfilling. I got into this space because of the opportunity and because I view money as a tool and something that can provide leverage for the pursuit of doing things that are good for society, I think that there's a lot of messaging on the internet right now in general, that you should pursue entrepreneurship so that you can make money and have cool cars. It's all about money and cars and girls and watches and listen, I'm not gonna act like I'm some saint. I love all of the above, right? But I also don't think that it is pushing society in the right direction. - I agree, I fully agree. We have this conversation the other day, it's kind of like one big giant pyramid scheme right now of like I learned how to do something. I learned how to sell some product, I flip around, I tell other people how to sell it. There's so many people that claim to be entrepreneurs these days that are just selling info products or securities. - It's like, I made 25,000 a month doing social media management, copywriting, drop shipping, TikTok shop, app making, whatever it may be. - It's all I see on Tuesdays, too. - You're like, I made 25,000 a month doing it. Come learn from me. And now they're making a million a month, just teaching people. And so, yeah, that, I guess kind of leads me into like the next thing that I intend to work on. - There we go. - Leads me to the next thing that I intend to work on, which is going to be called Apex. Apex will essentially be an all-in-one male self-improvement ecosystem. So what I mean by ecosystem is we're going to vertically integrate across the self-improvement niche. We're going to produce social media content. We're going to build apps. Both of these will be 100% free, right? So apps that help tell you what sort of workouts to do help you meditate, help you improve your nutrition. Amongst a number of others. These will all be 100% free. And then we're going to be producing social media content. I told you a little bit about the house that we're getting and the few other co-founders that I have. And one of the key missions here will be to kind of reorient the way in which self-improvement is characterized on the internet. Right now it's like, get jacked just so you can get girls, get money, just so you can buy materialistic things. And I don't think that once again, it's a, I don't think that it's messaging that is good for young men and for people in general. And so that is going to be the core problem. - Dude, I fucking love it. Let me know how I can help them. Happy to help or like, you know, add in or give two cents or help bring exposure to it. And anyway, I think it's a great idea. - I appreciate that. - Yeah, I think it's a noble cause and I think it'll do very well too. And I think we're in a bubble right now when it comes to everything you just explained, right? I think there's just so many fraudsters out there. And it's about to burst. And then a lot of people are going to be laughing thinking, like, okay, what do we focus on now? So 100% I think you and I may briefly spoken about this, but I think it's important to work on things where even if you don't achieve your end goal, you still come out ahead, right? And so one of the issues with like pursuing drop shipping, which is you drop shipping as an example, there are a lot, or maybe trading, right? I think that these are somewhat one of the same. Okay, let's say that you build your Shopify store or you become a successful trader, right? You'll come out with a lot of money, but like decent skills, right? Maybe you become a little bit better at time management or managing people, but no real hard skills. Now, if you fail, you come out with essentially nothing, right? Whereas on the flip side, if you devote yourself to trying to cure cancer, right? Now, it's a much bigger and more difficult pursuit. Just use this as an example. If you fail at the very least, you're gonna have learned a lot about medicine. You're gonna have potentially made contributions towards that direction. You're gonna have become a more intelligent skilled person, right? And I think that encouraging people to pursue things that if they fail, they still come out ahead. I think it's a very, very valuable thing to do. And it exists a lot within the whole startup world, specifically in Silicon Valley, right? It's all about solving these massive goals and changing society, right? And I think that there's a underrepresentation of those frameworks when it comes to entrepreneurship on social media. - I agree. Well, let's talk about Silicon Valley a little bit here because obviously you were in San Diego a short while ago, but then you decided to, as far as I'm aware, move into a startup accelerator house of sorts in San Francisco, right? - Yes. - What is that like? How do you get introduced to this? Did they reach out to you? Do you hear about it? You reach out to them and you have to apply, you get in. What is that whole thing? - Sure, sure. So when I first started building UMACs, I viewed it as a wedge into this sort of plan that I have for eight packs, right? And I'm starting to build it and I have this big vision. And I get in contact with the startup accelerator, HF zero. They are a house of 20 people about 10 startups and it's a lot of people trying to change the world. - Is it a nice house? - Yeah. - It's like a cool environment to be awesome. It's awesome. They have gym and the basement, they make the food for you, they've cold plunges, the whole nine yards. It's right on Alamo Square Park, so I'd walk that park multiple times every day. And like I said, it's a lot of people trying to change the world. - That's bad ass. - There's someone building essentially Tesla for construction equipment, right? Or a company building an open source version of chat GPT amongst a number of others that are truly like generation defining products. And I had this goal for UMACS to become the sort of future of self improvement. And I think I learned a lot in the house about what it meant to be. truly mission oriented. It's also a lesson that I learned from Walter Isaacson who wrote the Elon Musk book. Because he's your mentor, right? Yeah, we can go back to that in a sec. But what happened with UMax is that we kind of blew up a little bit sooner than expected, right? We had this competitor where we had to really go all in on marketing and we started making a lot of money. And that's when I kind of realized that the sort of stigma of UMax on the internet was like, they're just trying to make money, right? And that's when I kind of decided to, all right, with UMax, we're going to continue to produce a bunch of profit. And we're just going to set this aside so that we can use all of this for the pursuit of the more mission oriented project in the future. So pretty much all of the earnings from UMax, as well as everything I've heard from RISGBT. Some of it, a portion will be going to my family, my parents. But then the rest will all be used for APEX. Nice, man. So I'm assuming you're not looking for outside capital or anything like that. You're going to bootstrap itself on, right? No. So we got 500,000 from HF0. We're going to have, they just hand you a check. Do they get equity here? Yeah, it's for a few percent equity plus a safe note. And then I'm going to be putting in at least 500,000 of personal money from UMax and probably more. And that will essentially serve as the starting capital for APEX. There's a decent chance we'll have to raise more in the future. And what is that money going to in that early stage? All development? Is it? Yeah, it's a combination of development, the house that we're going to be living in, the food, right? And then the, yeah, there are a lot of like various bringing out influencers to come like film with us for a week would have you. So that'll be, yeah, I guess at least like a million dollars right there. And yeah, I don't know, like for, I don't, I don't need to live like a super lavish lifestyle myself. I'm comfortable living like pretty, pretty normally. So I guess like all the money that I've made for UMax and RISGPT, I don't view it as like, I need to like have this little nest egg, right? Yeah. I view it as like, all right, let's fucking leverage this into building something even bigger. That's what I was going to ask you is how do you like, you know, being 23, having a huge chunk of money for your age, all cash right now, just sitting there. How do you balance spending versus reinvesting? Is there, it sounds like there's just no real desire to even go out and buy watches or. I got this one from Sam Z. Yeah, I mean, okay, I'm giving a decent amount to my parents, right? Then beyond that, it's like, I'll have a few million to sitting around at least 500,000 be going into Apex. Some of it will be sitting just like, you know, for future projects. And then if Apex needs it into that. But in terms of why I think this is a good point to go to Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson somewhat of a mentor of mine about a year ago. For everyone watching, that's the guy who wrote pretty much every book on every, all of the biggest creatives of our generation. Steve Jobs Elon Musk. So yeah, he spent like years with Steve Jobs, years with Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos, right, too, as well. Or was, did somebody else write it? I don't think so. I don't think it was the third one he wrote, because I remember there was a third one. Da Vinci. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think Sam was a professor of mine. And he spoke about the sort of qualities that embodied or were embodied in these serial, hyper successful entrepreneurs. And one of the ones that stuck out most of me was mission orientedness in addition to risk tolerance. Elon Musk, for example, zipped to, he made like $20 million, poured it all into PayPal, made $100 million, poured that all into SpaceX and Tesla, right? And Peter Thiel, as a quote, I believe, where he was like, we all thought that Elon was fucking crazy. He's a mad man for doing this. But then in retrospect, it's like, if one had worked out, we would have been like, yeah, maybe he is crazy, but that's still pretty impressive. But both Tesla and SpaceX worked out, right? And when he poured the money from PayPal, Peter Thiel was a co-founder of Elonip PayPal. And he's like, I think that the lesson here isn't that Elon is just crazy and takes too much risk. Maybe the rest of us don't take enough. And so, with the money that I will have made from these apps, I'm like, okay, well, I could go the risk of Earth's path and invest this in the S&P 500 real estate, whatever. But I'm like, I think the highest return investment is to combine this capital with my own skill set. Well, the best stock you can always buy is always yourself. Exactly. And you already know, like, I've done something in the past. It's the safest one. And it's going to give you that it has the most potential by far. And like, even if I pour all the money into Apex and it doesn't work out, right? This is kind of coming back to what I was saying earlier as well. Not just in terms of time, but capital too. I don't think that I will have regretted a thing. Bro, you're going to be so much smarter, more connected, more experienced, more mature, more prepared for the next thing, right? It's not even if it completely blows up and doesn't work, which I don't think that'll be the case, right? I think you'll figure it out. But even if it did fail, that's not a bad thing. And that's why I think so many people, like, you know, hopefully everyone watching this podcast already has this mindset. But this is something that majority of people don't understand that trying out something for even if it's for years, putting all your time and money into it and then watching it fail is not actually a bad thing because they think that, oh, you worked so hard and now you're up here and then you're back at level zero. It's like, no, like you failed, but you're still way up here. Yeah. I think that the key point here being like, did you learn, right? I think that there's also an important note here. It's like success is obviously fucking better than failure. Yeah. But at the very least, if you fail, it's better to have failed and learned, right? Then to have failed and not learned or just not fucking tried it all, right? So yeah, I definitely agree with that stance. All right. Perfect. Well, can you talk a little bit about what it takes because I'm sure there's so many people out there that, you know, maybe if this is their first time hearing your story, they're like, oh, damn, bro, this kid's 23 like you just fucking made an app and made millions, right? Wow, I can do that. Like there's going to be so many people out there, unfortunately, that are going to hear what you've done and they're going to say, how did I not come up with that idea? But I'd love to know like the behind the scenes of what it actually took to get where you are right now. Like, you know, we kind of talked to the beginning about how many failures you've had in the past, how many attempts at entrepreneurship, but specifically in the past year and a half, like, what did you have to sacrifice? What was your workload like? Did you go on dates? Did you hang out with friends? Did you go party? Did you travel? Like what was your last, you know, 12 months like? Yeah, yeah, sure. Great question. I think that so I was having a conversation with a friend recently and we were like, what do you think is the largest contributing factor to an entrepreneur success in general? Is it intelligence? Is it hard work, right? We were kind of going back and forth between these two, but I don't really think that it's either. I think that it's as we were just talking about, I think that it's risk tolerance and willingness to sacrifice. I kind of view these as somewhat one and the same. You're willing to take the risk, you're willing to sacrifice. That will produce the outsize returns. So over the course of the past year, I think that the biggest risk and sacrifice that I made was in the back half of 2023. So after I graduated from school, I was like only working, right? All I could think about was risk GPT. I was working in my attic and then it became tough to work at home for various reasons. So I would go walk to Starbucks when my mom couldn't drive me. I would sit in there from open at 6 a.m. to close. I think it was like 6 p.m. Go back home and continue working. Which is awesome, by the way. Like a lot of people might hear that and be like, damn, that sucks, but I'm sure that when you were doing that, you were like, this is exactly where I want to be. 100 percent. That grind is fun. I mean, yeah, when you're in that, I think it's a lot more fun than when you're in that kind of like bender mode, just like partying all the time. Which I think admittedly I've been doing a little bit too much the past couple of months, but it's coming time to lock back in. Yeah. So, yeah, I would state this Starbucks all day. I would go walk about 200 feet to go grab a lunch in the middle of the day and then back to Starbucks. And yeah, I, I don't, it's weird because I think relative to what everyone else did, it was like such a sacrifice. I hear people describe it as such. And you know, I describe it as such just based on the fact that once again, relative to everybody else, it was. But it didn't really feel like one at the time. It kind of felt like, well, this is just what I have to do in order to get what I want. So I didn't get to bend up about it. It was like work, work out, eat. Sleep, you know, nice and then Yeah, I think that doing that then gives you the ability to kind of spend your time however you want I don't work nearly as hard right now at least And like the past few months. I've been working far less hard than any of my nine to five friends Because I think those periods kind of oscillate in life. Yeah for entrepreneurs Something that I've noticed amongst every pretty much every single one of the guests I've had on is and it's hard You know choosing how to balance this but the most successful young guys that I've had on you know dudes like yourself that have made a few million guys that are Also our age that have made over a hundred million Most of them the earlier they got started the better right and maybe they sacrificed their high school years or their college years But usually the earlier they got started the better and the faster they made their money and built their foundation You know the more easily they were Allowed to go kind of let loose a little bit and enjoy that money while they're young So that's why I think it's so good to start early on and it's also the the least risky to start early on too Like bro, you're supposed to be grinding in these early years. Well, most people are still going out Yeah, no, it's it's very true. It's like a lot of people are gonna give the traditional path and then they're gonna look back when they're 30, 40, 50 be like you know I think that they're gonna regret it. I think that the here early 20s Don't just have to be like the most fun years of your life, right? They can also be the most fulfilling in terms of work now another interesting point I think here is Something I've been feeling increasingly recently is I always felt like when I got to the stage that I'm kind of at right now Did I would feel content that I'd be like man? This is it. I'm like this is not a worry in the world Uh, but What I've increasingly felt is You don't ever reach the top you just reached the bottom of a new level I think I heard Chris Williams and say that and that really resonated with me Uh, because now it's like I don't compare myself Uh, to like any of my high school or college friends, but to other successful entrepreneurs our age uh, and I'm not sure whether or not that's a good or bad thing, but It's definitely a motivating thing. I don't think it has to be a good or a bad thing I think it's just it's how it is. Yeah, it's just people always try and put labels on The the reason that people will try and label like a position you're in is to simply as we talked about earlier make them self feel better Right, I had a friend the other day that was like Pactor are you not worried that like You know, you might like lose some of your friends like working this hard and not like going and keeping up and checking in on all them And I was like, you know what? I'm not worried about I'm not worried about what I'm going to be worried about in the future Right, I'm just I'm focused on what what I can focus on right now and so many people try and analyze like how you should be feeling about a certain situation In reality, that's that's probably the biggest waste of time of all is is trying to dissect everything and figure out whether it's wrong or right Um, but I want to get into like some speed questions right now because we're on our final stretch. Let's do um What do you think your superpower is like what why are you the 23 year old worth, you know, a few million now um versus somebody else? Yeah, I think I briefly mentioned this on the other podcast I did with Omar, but I think that my superpower Is the ability to think differently for most and how I don't mean that in like a cocky sense, but um I think that I'm pretty creative when it comes to like logical insights and and and identify new opportunities um And I think that that is what led me to build a risk gpt would let me build umax I don't think that I'm the hardest worker. I don't think that I'm the most intelligent. I don't think that Uh, I'm the most skilled right? I think that I do a good job Um, thinking differently from most people um So nice well said what is Your advice for anyone out there Questioning how to pick a co-founder How important is picking the right co-founder and what do you look for in someone having had various different types? Yeah, it's hard um, I wish I had better advice here, but I think that it's it's very nuanced And I don't think that I have all the best frameworks here Though I do think something that is very important is to Pick people with moral integrity when I had my falling out uh kind of with my first co-founders The most important thing there was that they were moral people and that they didn't try to fuck me I didn't try to fuck them We were able to part amically um, and I've heard some really bad stories on the other side So picking people with integrity, I think is most important I want to touch on that as well too because I've had various types of co-founders um, I think Anyone whose morals are a little bit misguided in one area of their life It almost always translates over to 100 percent if some I've I talk about this all the time if someone Cheats on their girlfriend all the time if someone steals if someone lies All of those things. Oh, it's not that deep, bro. People will comment that on my video. It's not that deep. It is that deep, bro like how you live In one area of life translates over to everything else and so I think it's really important to yeah pick the person Even maybe there maybe you have two options one of them is genius But maybe you know, he does some things that are a little bit questionable versus the other guy who's like not you know Extraordinarily intelligent or smart or gifted, but you just know that this is a great human being I would pick that one right that that's who I'm gonna feel safer around and the safer that you can feel The more that enables you to be your best self in a lot of ways certainly I think it depends on what the expectations the time horizon with the the sort of structure that you have, right? But in general, yeah, I agree. I think morality above all else. Awesome. Well last question What do you hope to achieve in the next decade one people are you know looking back on this podcast 10 years from now, right? Because I'm sure you'll have created something massively successful You know, what where do you want to be at 10 years from now? It's a great question. I want to Influence society in a positive direction and the way I think that I achieve that is through redefining what self-improvement and what entrepreneurship mean To young people today. I think that The next generation is just that that is what shape society. I think the messaging on the internet right now Is not conducive towards building a healthy next generation that will continue themselves to push society in a positive direction so That that is my primary primary goal. I love it, dude Oh, yeah, and I'm excited to see it and I'm here to help and assess however I can I'm not sure if I'll be of that much assistance here for it Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on bros fucking awesome. I'm excited to see what you do Thank you everyone for watching. I'm going to link all of his socials and everything in the description And hopefully over the next couple of months next couple of years you start actually making more content On yourself and I will life because I think I think that's one of the best ways to As you're saying give back and promote this Lifestyle is by showcasing it yourself and actually advertising it. I think it's important a lot of people are humble And they don't want to they don't want to like show off what they're doing or whatever But I think it's really important to show the the right The right model the the podcast or kind of the start of this and then within two or three months Full scale nice. Oh, yeah Well, yeah, thank you guys again for watching, and we'll see you in the next one. - Thanks, brother.