Alongside Steve Blank and Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits is one of the most well-known leaders on the lean startup methodologies. In this guest episode hosted by Casey Armstrong – they will describe the relationship between the Lean Startup and Growth Hacking.

TOPIC PATRICK VLASKOVITS COVERS

→ He is a New York Times best-selling author and co-author of the self-published cult classic “The Entrepreneur and Customer Development”

→ He has spoken and held workshops with companies such as Google, Qualcomm, and Intuit

→ He is a mentor at 500 startups and advisor to Chromatic and other startups along with Sean Allison Keating, he coined the term “growth hacking”

→ He is currently working on workshops and seminars on growth hacking and full-stack marketing in Europe this summer with his co-founder Gabor

→ He coined the term “growth hacking” with Sean Allison Keating

→ He believes that Europe has less aggressive marketing tactics than the US and that there is an opportunity for digital marketers and startup founders to learn about the latest marketing tactics

→ He also suggests that European startups can find good technical talent and that American marketers can team up with European technical talent to start a company

→ He also suggests that American marketers can go to hardware meetups to find technical talent

→ He coined the term “growth hacking” because he believes that growth is imperative for success in startups

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

→ Superpowered.com

→ Fullstackmarketer.com

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Casey: Hi everybody. Welcome back to growth hacker TV I’m KCR show and I’m happy to welcome Patrick Smith, the New York Times best selling author of The Law and coauthor of self published cult classic The Entrepreneur and Customer Development. He’s there, flown around the world to speak with and hold workshops with companies such as Google, Qualcomm, Pitney Bowes, Telefonica, Ericsson, Intuit, Capital One, 7-Eleven, just to name a few. You’ve probably seen them on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, Candide, Elite and entrepreneur. He’s a mentor of 500 startups and advisor Chromatic and other startups. Just last year his site hacks was acquired and as they were enjoying over a million units a month and acquired nearly 200,000 numbers, I’m sure I’m forgetting a handful of other things if that’s possible. But along with Sean Allison Keating, Ciotti coined the term growth hacking, which I’m sure we’ll dove into a bit later. But anyways, quite the list of accomplishment. So I might know the answer to this, but what else are you working on?

Patrick: So yeah. So like as you know, I’m going in in Europe this summer with my family, but I’ll be there from in a mate till mid August, working with my co-founder Gabor and hanging out with family and friends. And then you and I are going to do some, some workshops and seminars on growth hacking and full stack marketing. So pull out to pull it up real quick. Our dates are somewhere here.

Casey: Yeah. I guess, you know, to talk about I guess what kind of a. What motivated you to spread this in in Europe and, you know, some some of the other speakers and whatnot. Yeah.

Patrick: So so go back story. So I’m I’m a dual citizen. I’m a I’m an EU citizen vis a vis my Hungarian citizenship and then I’m Muslim nationalism. And so I spent a lot of time in Europe and the states. And one thing you see sort of a glaring difference in the startups ecosystems between the United States and Europe is that Europeans tend to be a little bit less aggressive and a little bit behind in terms of the latest marketing tactics. Americans tend to be getting more aggressive, perhaps too much so, but but tend to really push the envelope in the marketing. And so I think that doing a full stack marketing minute where we sort of the fundamentals of the basics of digital marketing can provide an incredible amount of value to digital marketers, to startup founders, to product managers, anything that marketing touches almost everything in startups these days, we can help a lot and then also teach them much cool growth hacks from stuff that worked, right? So, you know, other hacks, you know, we had a million people a month visit paleo hacks. It did really well. We had, you know, the email list was, you know, greater than 200,000 when we sold it. There’s a lot of things we did well on site and learn a lot. And, you know, I had a for example, I think a paleo infographic that did really, really well is one of the best email harvesting machines I’ve ever built. And so there’s a lot of lessons there that we can pass on to. They’re not it’s not rocket science and we can pass on those those lessons in these workshops. I’m excited. You know, let’s in Madrid, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest. So I’m really excited to be a great summer and anybody wants to go, by the way, you’re going to gross ship S.H. I. Pinkham, I think we got him up there.

Casey: Nice. And yes, as you and I talked about plenty of times, whether people are in Europe or the US or anywhere else for that matter. But, you know, Europe in particular, they’re like hyper smart, something like hyper smart people from from the technical side. But, you know, if you don’t validate the product and really look for marketing opportunities, which is, you know, what kind of sprouted growth hacker TV, you know, it’s it’s all for naught. And so obviously there’s that there’s a there’s huge opportunity.

Patrick: But by the way, if there’s anybody who’s listening to this and watching this who’s like a really good marketer but wants to team up with some good technical talent, they should definitely head over to Europe and head to like Budapest or Vienna or Berlin or London. They’re like you said, a lot of good technical talents, but a lot less so sort of online hustler, digital marketer. And so if you’re looking to do a start up, there’s I know there’s, you know, I get asked probably once a week by my friends in Europe like, you know, any, you know, growth hackers, you know, growth marketers that would want to join an early stage startup or, you know, become a founder. So and others of this go to Europe. If you’re a if you’re a if you’re a hustler, you can find really good technical talent there. And you guys are very cool.

Casey: There you go. There’s your hat for finding the company CTO that everybody is chasing for that rails developer. And in San Francisco.

Patrick: Actually another hack is if you’re if you’re a particularly good, you know, businessperson, unless you’re going to be in partnerships and selling, it seems to be the hardware folks. Another case where I’ve been to a few hardware meetups and it’s almost like, you know, 90% technical folks who are begging, looking for looking for CEO type founder partners where you’ve got a lot of smart people doing super cool things. My friend Nick Pinkston actually runs the San Francisco Hardware Hackers meetup. He’s a CEO of a company called Plethora. Plethora, I think. Anyhow, I went to a couple of meet ups, incredibly smart people do really cool hardware things and they are like dying for for non-technical, you know, help in terms of sales, marketing and just getting shipped out. So another, another hot it’s your growth is your growth guy and you’re looking for someone technical go to Europe or go to these hardware meetups.

Casey: Yeah marketing getting it’s it’s credit I mean with people like Polygram obviously post like growth equals startups and whatnot. Obviously growth is is imperative for success. So speaking of growth hacking, like I mentioned before, I’m sure people want to hear like not only how was coined but, you know, where and and why. So you want to jump into that.

Patrick: Yeah. So that’s a pretty fun story. So this is back in 2010, Shawn Ellis, who’s a friend of of mine and yours and. So Sean Ellis he and Sean, I we were grabbing drinks at a restaurant called Memphis in in Orange County. And we’re just kind of hanging out, you know, jab it away. You know, and Sean was I don’t think Sean had started his his latest start up yet. And he was doing some consulting before kicking off this thing. And one of the stocks that he was consulting for and they said, hey, shall we want to hire you and shots? And well, look, I’m kind of busy with doing other stuff, but what’s what how can I help you with this? And. Well, look, we’re looking to hire someone. We want some that doesn’t want you do. So we want some help filling this VP of marketing position. And so Sean Sean sort of looked at their looked at their, their job description and he was talking about it with us and goes, you know, I don’t like that’s a pretty good job description for a VP of marketing, but I’m not a VP of marketing. And, you know, not a ton of success at Dropbox before that logging year. And then later on look out zombie. You know, Charles sort of has this, you know, Midas touch when it comes to growth, right? He knows how to recognize it early and he knows how to how to really bend those growth perks. Right. And so super talented guy. And he said, look, you know, I don’t know. I’m not a VP of marketing, even though I sort of play well on TV sometimes. And so, again, we were drinking I remember actually drinking mint juleps, which is like my favorite cocktail to drink and drink.

Casey: Tell me about it. You said that.

Patrick: Yeah. And let’s say Memphis is a Southern restaurant. It’s really good. And they have really good jobs. But it was hot day and. And then it was kind of kicking off what we call someone, and we tried to suss out what was, what is, what is, what does Sean do differently than most people? That’s not to say that, you know, growth hackers didn’t exist before. And in fact, one of my talks, I talk about a woman named Brownie Wise. Brownie wise was one of the original growth hackers. She she helped kickstart Tupperware, actually, back in post-World War two Americana. There’s also a guy named Daniel Conveyancer who was Pablo Picasso’s partner, an art dealer. He was very much a growth hacker, too. Anyhow, the so I was Sean and Charles. And really what the difference is between growth hacking and marketing, I think, is marketing. You’re typically executing on on understood and well known markets. That’s not to say that it’s easy because good marketing is always hard and good marketing is always cherished and hard to find. But generally speaking, there are you can you can you can write a plan and you can execute on a plan and you know the channels ahead of time and you have a pretty good understanding of how they need to be executed. Not to say there’s no room for Improvization or no room for creativity certainly is. But it’s tends to be more focused on execution. Executing in the know was growth hacking, right? The reason growth hacking is so important to startups because in startups, when you’re doing something really technical or something really exciting, theoretically you should be in some unknown space, right? Otherwise you’re not a startup. Right? And and in that case, there are a lot of unknowns and how to reach your customers, what sort of message, what channels work, what’s the value proposition, you know, all those things. Yeah. You know, kind of go back to lean startup roots. You have some strong opinions on them, but invariably, invariably, there’s always some change, not always necessarily, you know, wholesale change. Like I’ve been right on a few things. I’ve had some really strong guesses about whether it’s paleo or even super powered. That’s like pretty much me. But I’ve also been wrong on some things to the point as a growth hacking is about, I think about very fast iteration. I think Sean calls it high tempo experimentation nowadays, fast iteration experimentation. And the biggest thing for me, Sean and others might disagree, but I actually think that so the growth had to rule them all. Is the weight around finding new channels. Actually, I think that’s like the greatest. That’s the greatest. You find a new channel, you will make gazillions of dollars.

Casey: Going to give a quick example.

Patrick: Yeah. So I mean, a couple. So I like the story. I hate to tell, but I talk about is Tupperware because it’s not a tech story, so it’s sort of easier to understand. So back in.

Casey: Oh, yeah. So, so if I could jump in there real quick because it’s because you and I have spoken about this, you know, many, many times and you know, you’re a huge proponent of medium of the is the message. So this this kind of is a parallel to that or or is this.

Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. So that so that’s that’s a famous quote by what’s his name?

Casey: Marshall McLuhan.

Patrick: Marshall McLuhan. Thank you. Marshall McLuhan, the communication theorist was was pretty much very much out there. But he had a knack for seeing very. Witty, pithy things that really summed up some big ideas. And so the medium is the message. One of those one of those one of his most famous books. And actually the thing quotes. Another one is we shape the tools and the tools shape us, which is profoundly true. And it actually shapes a lot of how we think about things that super. But I, I can jump into some examples like.

Casey: Yes, let’s, let’s, let’s get some examples and some actual stuff for everybody.

Patrick: Sure. So I’ll give you an example. That’s the Tupperware example, someone that wasn’t doing that. That in a nutshell, the medium is the message. But the closest thing there is that most people take the information about, let’s say, a product not via the actual product, but how that what context that product is presented it. Right. Which sounds sort of sounds sort of obvious, but but for some reason, especially tech folks don’t seem they’re saying, whereas I think like the people who work in fashion or restaurant touring or art, they, they understand this very and very deep level marketing rockets, whereas tech folks, you know, often you run into engineers all the time that expect their products and the value propositions to be evaluated on merit alone. And unfortunately, humans just aren’t like that. And so so McLuhan’s famous example is when you’re sitting at a bar next to your best buddy and you’re drinking a beer and your best buddy goes, Hey, you know, did you hear Crime is up and you take a sip of your beer and kind of shrug your shoulders and you kind of talk about whatever football. That’s a very different experience than if you’re sitting around the kitchen table with your family and your kids. And then Walter Cronkite says, hey, crime is up in your neighborhood, right? You experience exact same message very, very differently. Those contacts. And the same is true for for selling, for selling and promoting and marketing products. And so. You know, we think of innovation as an advantage in the tech industry, but it’s really a barrier to be overcome at the same time, because when you do something innovative, you’re actually breaking context. And if you break context, what that means is typically the the the the the common mediums, the common channels aren’t actually going to be helpful for you to promote your products. And that’s really hard for people to understand. Right. And so the example that I like to think about is Tupperware. So it’s kind of old Tupperware, developed Tupperware back post-World War Two, had this cool plastic product, was called The Wonder Bowl. And what design awards you actually got into retail establishments in the hardware stores and Macy’s plus department stores like places like Macy’s. And it’d be sitting there next to the ceramic dishware and it wasn’t selling at all because people didn’t understand why they would need Tupperware and any other great product. He had retail distribution, he had no sales. And he ended up meeting a woman called Brownie Wise. And Brownie Wise was this like like phenomenal saleswoman, just super talented, spread, studious, very smart. And she developed the Tupperware party. And the Tupperware party was is part social events, part, you know, obviously sales event and ended up being their main channel for moving Tupperware. And she had to figure out how to provide the appropriate context for Tupperware, which is a great product. But the the the medium of Macy’s sitting next to the the ceramic dishware at Macy’s was not the right medium for that message. And the right medium had to be had to be developed. And so that’s why I think she’s certainly one of the original growth factors. And if you look at some of the history innovation, you see a lot of that. A lot of the companies that have really innovative products end up either hijacking or building new mediums wherein they can provide the appropriate context. And but what I looked at a lot of the innovation literature we were writing about from her, I noticed this. You saw a lot of this in, you know, innovation going back hundreds of years. And I was telling my friend Venkatesh Rao about it, and he’s the one who said, Oh, this is just like McLuhan’s medium, his message. And it’s exactly right. So I think about the mediums the in in for start ups is. If you do something, you can do something innovative. You have to find an equally innovative medium to push your message down.

Casey: To share some good, some good examples. I guess a startup’s summary recently that of yeah.

Patrick: So it’s interesting. So let’s let’s talk about like the Dropbox one is interesting. Dropbox pioneered this this is the two sided referral system. Right. And it blew up and really well. But now everybody does it. It doesn’t work at all. Right. Most recently, I talked to this talk about friend Patrick Smith of Power Supply. So he’s doing ready to eat prepared meals for a different fitness segment. So like the Paleo folks, the CrossFit folks, yoga folks, I think gluten free, dairy free. And he’s doing a masterful job. And he bootstrapped 2 to 7 figures and raised a lot of money. But he’s doing a masterful job because he’s built a new medium where now instead of if you’re, you know, a hardcore CrossFit or yoga person, you’re eating paleo or you’re vegan. Now you can pick up these meals at the yoga studio or at the crossword box or at the gym. And so he’s building this network of distribution points that that align with his segments, natural habitat, as it were. Right.

Casey: And removing friction.

Patrick: And removing friction. And it’s very simple. So your guide, your single guide, you know, your, you know, let’s say 25 after work, you go do CrossFit, you know, with your friends, your super jack and like, of course, you’re going to go eat a great, you know, organic ribeye and kale salad. Why would you go to a store where you can pick up a great one right at the CrossFit and you don’t have to go to the store. Right. I suspect Patrick is going to do very well. Yeah.

Casey: Plus plus. I mean, especially in an industry like that. I mean, now he’s like doing sales more at scale versus the one offs. Absolutely. You know, I always have a partnership to get these big wins. That’s I love that idea. Yeah.

Patrick: If you look at also like you look at like, you know, Hollywood, the wars like the big wars are always around distribution. Right. And it’s always been like distribution. And it’s just brutal, brutal, brutal game. That’s why, you know, he should distribute sort of wins, right? That’s when you get to like the distributors hold all the cards. And and if.

Casey: We see like the partnerships like the the Shrek toys at McDonald’s or something like that.

Patrick: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So so yeah, that’s that’s what we want to try to think of. Another one I see what I see the other day. I think of some more good examples. I think actually VR is going to be huge. I think you’ll see some really exciting sort of VR at the new medium that’s going to mean multiple mediums within VR. I think Bitcoin is interesting, right? Like no one’s figured out exactly what’s going out with Bitcoin. That’s going to be effectively a new medium and someone’s going to make or many people are going to make a lot of a lot of money. That’s why, you know, a lot of folks are really hyped up about Bitcoin, not because it’s a cryptocurrency, but it’s a new medium. Right. I’m trying to think of some good examples.

Casey: What about with your with your experience? Like, what about the likely notion or paleo hacks or. Yeah.

Patrick: You know, so well the entrepreneur, you know, we did some good marketing and some growth hacking. I don’t think we found any new mediums, but we did some cool stuff, right? So one of the reasons for our success is, you know, we did, for example, we partnered with American Airlines and they very generously flew around the country for our book tour. And so we’re very thankful for them. And, you know, they never sponsored a book tour before. They never pitched a book tour before, but they they did it. We had the same, you know, that initiative to support small businesses and startups and they really like to leave message. And and what Brett and I were about, this is a great partnership, I think that helped us tremendously.

Casey: To jump in there. I think what I left there is, you know, they might have been uncomfortable. You kind of had educate them a little bit. But, you know, if you won’t get anything, if you don’t ask.

Patrick: 100%, they were great to work with. So I’m really thankful. What else? You know, that’s the book’s behind. You can see it right by the Orange Book is right behind you. You know something else really that’s kind of cool that.

Casey: I got paid for.

Patrick: That was something that didn’t take off like I wanted it to is the All the art is done by guy in Ft. Graham Lock, who is actually a really good artist. And that’s really a mystery tastic artist. And he’s not just an illustrator. He actually really gives sort of symbolic and metaphorical thought to what he does. And so we commissioned him to do all the arts and then open source the arts. Anybody can use it. And so they’re freely available at our sites and you know, we use the art in our book cover. I was hoping that would drive things and unfortunately it didn’t. It did. It was great. I’m glad we did it. It was a great experiment. I think the book turned out great. His art made our book a lot better. He’s a very talented guy, but it didn’t drive sales or adoption like I wish it had, but something was worth definitely doing. Mm hmm. What else? We drove a lot of pre-sales with a lot of partners, so we did our own crowdfunding campaign where we put up a actually, this is a fun site. We put up a this funny video that I got a source of fiber. We source this thing on fiber, and we had like this guy, we had this guy do a Christopher Walken imitation. And I think I paid the hundred bucks for it. And we put it up on Larry Page and I think it 500 orders within a few weeks time. We haven’t written a word. And then I also remember like none of the Europeans got who Christopher Walken was. And so people, you know, like kind of laughed like, oh, it’s kind of funny, but I have to be like, that guy’s voice is so annoying.

Casey: I love that. That’s the I mean. Just you don’t need to spend a bunch of money. And also, like you said, you know, with the fake Graham, like stuff like it worked well to help sell the book because it, you know, it helped illustrate your points and the cover looked awesome, etc. But it didn’t necessarily have like a huge direct lift. But, you know, there’s, there’s a bunch of small touches going around like the fiber idea with is and then getting somebody to illustrate. I remember when he launched that video, that was awesome. It obviously picked up. So everybody knows Christopher Walken has such a distinct voice.

Patrick: Yeah, we didn’t know this until we did the book trailer video that actually worked out really good. So we partnered we with our friend Jeremy Abby. They are I don’t know, the company called it Jaded Media. They did our they did the book trailer video that Brad and I were in. And if you go to Lean Entrepreneur, actually, you can see that video and it sort of tells a story that actually did that was a phenomenal video. And people would email us, email us like they were late on the page. They were by our book, preorder our book and e-mail us. Like, your video is awesome. And so, you know, and that’s that book trend of that storytelling method there that actually have a lot and that that made us look, you know, it made us look professional. That is the promise of fun. And that video actually helped open a lot of doors for us, actually not actually did really great.

Casey: So it’s not like you, but it’s just like, you know, why again was the growth for TV? Something like this is around you know, you’re you’re able to with the video obviously blowing up everywhere, you know, you’re able to create more of a connection with your readers when before it’s like you know. The book’s out there and the author is kind of untouchable. But things are changing quite a bit now, as much as long braces as these other mediums.

Patrick: Oh, absolutely. Actually, that’s the big thing that’s happening in publishing, right? There’s there’s a shift me the book as a medium is shifting. Right. That we call this always happens, right? Like we call it e-book and e-book. It’s not really a book. Right? Or like an iPhone is not really a phone. Right. Because most of the time I don’t use it to make calls. I use it to do other things. So we’re mediums. The medium itself is shifting. You also see this with more and more authors doing info products, right where it’s pushing how to space, right? So being able to connect with Europe with your audiences via video is very powerful. Being able to teach him certain things and reiterate certain points via video and not just text webinars. And at some level these things have always been around, but with the tools now, the tools now are I mean, just amazing what you can do on a, you know, on a standard issue laptop or even iPad. Right. And smart, savvy authors are taking advantage of this. So if everything the authors out here, they think about that in terms of promoting your book, what can you do? What can you do? Guys like Ryan Holiday, Tucker, Max, those guys understand this game like Tim Ferriss. I mean, those guys understand this game very well. Tim did it very quickly here, Tim. Tim did a very cool growth hack where he packaged contents with bitcoins, right? So BitTorrent had these bundles where they would you would get free content of Tim’s on launch and it was just free content but end up driving a lot of traffic and a lot of sales. Right. That was Tim and Ryan exploring with a new medium for for Tim’s message. I thought that was pretty cool.

Casey: And like you mentioned, use an iPad or even an iPhone. I can’t wait to see him to see our full screen.

Patrick: Oh, George, strapless.

Casey: Yeah. So George mentioned, you know, some of these some of these, you know, YouTubers or whatnot. These people have huge followings. They have they’re making tons of money. Not to say through YouTube or from Google, but, you know, from from product, etc.. So they can easily afford the studio equipment, etc.. But it’s because they use their iPhone. You know, they their audience feels a closer connection. So everything doesn’t have to be crazy stuff. I know Wistia has an awesome video of, you know, for $109 or something, you can basically create like a studio look in your office such as this. Not that I created that, you know, but but just get a try it with your with your iPhone and get out there and test it out.

Patrick: I mean, that’s I mean, that’s the big. The unthinkable, like product of the other day right there. So every day, more and more products. Some are serious. Some are serious, some are silly. Some are are very exciting. Like, have we ever had a time where the, you know, the the it’s like the globe has united around building interesting things. Right. And the answer is no. Right. I mean, there’s always been tinkerers and hackers and makers and craftsmen, but we’ve never had a time when, like literally any young person or even old person is, you know, a few clicks away from producing something and in expressing themselves, whether it’s a book, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a web application, whether it’s a mobile application, whether it’s new hardware. And it was actually researching, thinking about kind of got products that don’t bother capturing all those people. Right. The pros and cons, you know.

Casey: It’s almost like a testbed or for these ideas. And I mean, I guess it can give false signaling where like by getting like a huge left early on and it’s it obviously can’t be your sole acquisition channel. But but yeah.

Patrick: But I’m saying product is almost an expression of sort of the, the. The benefits of, you know, all these cheap tools, inexpensive tools and kind of globalization and the Internet, right? So this is like if something like product wasn’t around, like you’d have to invent it. It would come from something like this with emerging markets where people can share all the things that they’re they’re inventing and building it and having fun with it.

Casey: So it’s a I’m glad you mentioned like the cheap tools again and and showing what they’re what they’re creating, what they’re passionate about. So, you know, obviously would see blank and you know you’re one of the most well-known thought leaders in like the start of lean startup methodology, etc.. Like how would you describe the relationship between Lean and growth that game? If there is a relationship.

Patrick: I think they’re very similar, right? So the heart of lean is is aggressive experimentation, right? So like Eric’s cycles build, measured, learn. I think you take that same cycle and you think about growth hacking. And so I don’t see any huge sort of philosophical differences or issues. You know, a lot of the growth hacking folks today are also sort of ex CEOs, for better or for worse, where they sort of rebrand themselves as, quote unquote, growth hackers. There’s nothing wrong with that per say, but they tend to have that could be very interesting sort of group of people sometimes. Let’s just leave it at that. I love them.

Casey: But they give you mint juleps next time and you can go deeper.

Patrick: Yeah, exactly. So look at the heart. I think it’s aggressive experimentation and and and, you know, in growth hacking where you’re trying to innovate on how you get to your customers and how do you acquire them fundamentally. Right. So to me, it’s sort of like peanut butter and jelly. And to me, I think it’s very, very, very similar.

Casey: Just so you know, we’re coming up on our end of. So a couple more questions. I know you and I will be covering this a bunch over the the Europe events and stuff both you and I have done in the US already. But what advice would you give kind of startups or tinkerers or whatnot in the early stage to kind of maybe test their ideas and, you know, kind of get that get that initial traction, you know, whether it’s work, work for you or, you know, work with people, you know, you know quite, quite well.

Patrick: So the first thing is to do something like an even a small thing, something like like I don’t know how many people I know that do grandiose ideas that depend on like, like this idea would be cool if I got this much money and this person work with me and I could do this, this, this and this, this, and then I would have to do something that you yourself can do. It doesn’t have to be super great. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Can you go find someone on Odesk or freelance or Fiverr to help you out? Just do something you can build from there. So like.

Casey: What? Like. Like you’re like. You’re like a entrepreneur’s guide to customer development. Yeah. Self-published to New York Times best seller.

Patrick: Absolutely right. Like we would have never had a chance, Grant. I would have never had a chance to do a New York Times best selling book, highly not written, the entrepreneur to get a customer involved. Right. And so I just do something. It’s sort of the number one thing to do to get so many cheap tools out there that you can use. And like, I don’t know how many, how many starts, I run into that like, oh, this cool explainer video. Okay. How would you spend like $9,000? I mean, are you insane? Like you. You almost. That could buy you a fiver. I’m like, if you’re well funded or are doing well, fine. You just pay net does most. But like otherwise, you know the whiskey approach, right? You build your little home studio for 400 bucks, tinker around there and you can do a lot. You can really you can really leverage. Right. So that’s I would really encourage that. And that’s something we still do today at a super power, you know, like we did this infographic with this really cool infographic that illustrated the Android audio latency path and we had this guy do it for us that there was 100 bucks or something, right? And like 100 bucks it was well worth it right at that price point. And that’s a good out multiple times. So. So that’s another thing like you can there’s a lot you can do for very little money. You just have to hustle. Right. And and perfection is not the key. Progress and forward motion is really what you want to concentrate on.

Casey: So hustle then. Yeah.

Patrick: Exactly. That’s right.

Casey: Awesome. Cool. Well, huge. Thanks. I’m sure everybody appreciate this. I know. I always learn a bunch. You want to end off any any notes? And how can other people contact you further?

Patrick: Sure. So? So my website was updated forever. It’s my last name. So it’s it’s dot com. Velasco Dot com. I’m really easy to find on Twitter at the letter P as in Patrick letter V as investments activity. That’s probably the best way. And then I don’t monitor growth hacker, but I have that Twitter handle as well. And that would be growth shipping. So if it goes out in Europe, the summer, come, come take me, come say hi, come to the event. Also, these days, I live in Austin with my family. So if you’re in Austin, come find me. But we’ll get a little trek. We’ll get to New York together.

Casey: Your your your paddleboard is getting dusty.

Patrick: I know, I know. I figure I got to figure out the water situation out here.

Casey: I know some stuff in California. So, anyways, L.A., thanks a lot. And yeah, if you guys have any questions, leave it in the comments or. But Patrick, you can pick me out there at the CIA. And thank you very much.

Patrick: Thanks. Bye.