Tucker Max is a New York Times best selling author, the founder of multiple startups, and an angel investor. This episode is a raw look at the growth of his multiple businesses.

TOPIC TUCKER MAX COVERS

→ The raw look at the growth of his multiple businesses

→ He’s a New York Time best selling author

→ The founder of multiple startups

→ His background as on Angel investor

→ How does he bring in other authors

→ What does he learn from the partnership experience in Lion Crest

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

→ Tucker’s blog website

→ Tucker’s personal website

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Bronson: Welcome to another episode of Growth Hacker TV. I’m Bronson Taylor, and today I have Tucker Max with us. Tucker, thanks for coming on the program.

Tucker: Definitely. Thanks for having me, man.

Bronson: Yeah, absolutely. Now, Tucker, a lot of people know one side of you. You’re a bestselling author. You’ve had a movie based on one of your books. But what I want to do is I want to dove into kind of the other side of your career that I don’t think as many people know about. But it’s been going pretty strong since around 2006, which is kind of the entrepreneurial side. So let’s jump in there. I think your entrepreneurship kind of began with Rudy as media and I this is a quote from you. You say it was a mess because of your mistakes. Yeah. So. So we’re going to start this interview by talking about your mistakes, but then the rest of interviews with all the stuff you did. Right. So you you made a number of mistakes around Rudy, mass media. And I want to touch on these because so many entrepreneurs make these mistakes. When I was reading them, I was like, Huh, that kind of sounds like me. And that kind of sounds like everyone else I know when they first get going in this thing. So let’s just jump in. The first big mistake was you said you didn’t understand the space you were competing in. Unpack that for us a little bit. What do you mean there?

Tucker: So what I had basically was a blog network. It was very similar to remember like Weblogs Inc that was bought by AOL.

Bronson: Or is it?

Tucker: Exactly. It was it was a similar idea, except the problem was I was trying to mix two different business sort of models. It was a blog network that wasn’t sort of news, quick updating, lots of posts. It was more content that was entertainment based. It was it was sort of like imagine, imagine, maybe sort of like like Paul Graham essays or things like that that were either funny or intellectual or whatever. And I was trying to apply the economics of a Weblogs Inc type, Gawker Media type model to a different sort of content. And I just didn’t really understand that the two models have very different economics, and you can’t apply one to the other. You know, you can’t treat a software company like a concrete company. They can both work. But. But, but not as, you know, not together. Yeah.

Bronson: Do you think that you have to be in the industry a little bit before you go and start your own thing? Or do you just have to be a student of the industry at least?

Tucker: Yeah, I don’t think you’re necessarily. It depends. So if you’re going into a very complicated industry, that’s very difficult to understand and that appears to be one thing, but is actually something else which most media industries actually are. Then I think you really should be at the very least, a student of the industry. But here’s the thing I don’t think you can be a student of those industries without being in those industries. Yeah, because I had to learn like how the economics of media really work. It requires what’s called tacit knowledge, which is very different than been sort of maybe what most people would call like school or sort of book knowledge. And there’s very little out there that that explains how economics of specific industries work. Like I’m a mentor in a consumer products incubator right now. And the stuff that that that we teach and we talk about in the Consumer Products Incubator. I would say at least 50% of it I’ve never seen written anywhere in any way, shape or form because the people who understand the like, the tacit knowledge about consumer products are generally people running consumer products companies or working in consumer products companies. They’re not people writing about this stuff. And most industries, I think there’s a disconnect between the the amount of information available externally and what you have to know to operate internally. And very few of those industries, I think you can be a student of from the outside and learn enough to operate in them. You know, you have to operate in them for a while to learn those things that can only be learned with with the sort of tacit knowledge that comes from experience, you know what I’m saying?

Bronson: Now, I couldn’t agree more with that. I mean, it really seems like we’re saying, here’s a mistake, don’t make it, but you kind of have to if you want to get ahead.

Tucker: Yeah, I mean, sort of you can go into an industry and not know anything. And as long as you know, you don’t know anything and you take the the perspective that, okay, I have to learn this and I have to learn it quickly and I have to learn it from people who know, not from reading a post on medium or something or or books about it. You can learn a lot from books, but you can’t learn. Sure. And as long as you understand that, then you can be a student. But you I guess here’s the distinction. You have to be an active student in the field. As you learn in the field, it’s almost impossible to learn from the outside.

Bronson: And you know what’s interesting about that is when you’re actually in there, you know, doing the tacit knowledge that you talked about when you read something that applies, you actually have a category to put it in, in your mind to remember it. When you’re just learning for the sake of learning, a lot of information passes through your mind, but it doesn’t stick because you’re not using it that day in a really relevant way. Right.

Tucker: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s hard to see. Well, think about this. Like, I mean, think about it like a jigsaw puzzle. Like, if you look at individual pieces of jigsaw puzzles, they don’t mean shit. Right. You actually have to have all the entire puzzle in front of you, even if it makes no sense in front of you. Then. Then a piece can start to make sense because it connects to another piece, which then connects to another piece. And all of a sudden you’ve got an edge. Yeah. Then from an edge, you can work outwards because your pieces are going places, right?

Bronson: Absolutely. It’s like a reflexive. Reflexive equilibrium, like your knowledge influences you’re doing. You’re doing influences your knowledge, and they work together, but you can’t isolate the two. Now, another big thing you said you messed up with was you picked a business model with no chance of success. And you already kind of mentioned you were applying the economics of one situation to another. Talk about business model for a minute, because business models, I think, should be talked about all the time. And it’s almost like we just kind of tack them on to the end of the discussion when isn’t that the heart of the business?

Tucker: Yeah. The problem for me was I, I, I was publishing essentially online content that was that the only way to monetize the content that I was publishing was sort of like set piece either. Either. So let’s just take my stuff as an example, even though it’s not the best example, it’s a good enough example because most of it, when I was publishing, was stuff that was similar in economics to mine. The only way to really make money on on sort of entertainment based content online, that’s not where you’re not posting a ton is to use that entertainment to get attention, to sell other things, or you have to own the IP of that entertainment content and leverage it to do other sort of things where you can make money like make TV shows or sell books or whatever, right? And so like essentially entertainment is it creates eyeballs or customers that can be monetized in ancillary ways. Whereas like Weblogs Inc or Gawker Media or TechCrunch model is let’s post a ton of sort of informational stuff, and then we make money. We monetize the attention through ads. Right. The to an ad based versus a sort of an intellectual property based monetization. A business model is a very different and I was applying one to the other and that was that was sort of the problem. And I didn’t really understand that you can’t just mix and match business models, like you can maybe figure out a new business model or a new way to apply a different business model to a different field. I wasn’t doing that. I was just trying to. I didn’t want to have to sell ads and I wanted to deal with entertainment stuff, but I didn’t really want to like have to sell products or do t shirt company or whatever. It didn’t make sense. Like, like the guys who did it right were like college humor is a good example. College humor, essentially the site college humor as a site existed to sell t shirts busted ts essentially. Right. Or you can go look at total frat move like they exist as a company to sell rowdy gentlemen’s stuff. Right. And so you can do that or you can sell ads one or the other, and maybe you can do a little bit of both. But I wasn’t really doing either one. I was I was trying to take the parts I wanted and leave the parts I didn’t want out. It just doesn’t work. Yeah.

Bronson: And you make an interesting point there, which is and you said this earlier, what you see on the outside and what they know on the inside are different. And it’s like when you look at those things and you realize that, Oh, Busted TS is how they’re making money. But if all you see is kind of the content side and you think, Oh, we’re going have a start up around this content, but you don’t have that other piece, then you’re taking half of their strategy and ignoring the half that’s actually paying their bills. And that happens a lot. What’s really going on inside of businesses that make them money is not what they’re talking about half the time.

Tucker: Yeah, it’s usually not what they’re talking about at all because it’s usually not the interesting part.

Bronson: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. I think a Starbucks can learn a lot from that. We do not keep our eye on the ball with the ball being the money. Now, another thing you said is you didn’t you spent too much time kind of fantasizing about the big picture instead of just dealing with the day to day business details. Is that kind of what you were saying? You didn’t want to do the entertainment upsell kind of play and you just want to ignore that and just make content.

Tucker: So I kind of have it’s like a half formed quasi idea in my head. And I’ll tell you what I think it is, and I don’t have a lot of support or evidence for the direct evidence, but I think this is true. I think a lot of people who start companies or become entrepreneurs do it to address emotional or psychological needs. They have that that having a company will address. And it has very little to do with actually the company itself. That’s changing, I think a lot in the last five or ten years are getting a lot more people into entrepreneurship who aren’t like that. But I think if you actually go and look at the history of, of of entrepreneurship in American last hundred years, I think you’ll notice that a lot of the people who start companies are either like serious type-A people or they have serious sort.

Bronson: Of the school’s ethical issues.

Tucker: The same psychological issues like holes in their soul they’re trying to fill with success in the way they do, resulting in company. Or you have narcissists who want attention, which is like you could probably say that I partially fit into that camp. That partially, but a little bit at least a little bit. Definitely better, whatever. I think if you if you actually look at a lot of entrepreneurs, that’s true for, you know, like. And so I think that was what I was doing was part of the reason I wanted to build this company was I wanted to like, say, I built this company that did these things. It was very much like a status signaling thing and very much like an ego thing. And it had very little to do with the actual granular nitty gritty details. Well, first of all, I wasn’t really solving a super important problem that a lot of people wanted solved. One and two, I wasn’t doing it in a way that actually made a company. I was doing it in a way that made me feel better, which are just not very often are not the same things.

Bronson: Yeah. You know, when you talk about kind of the brokenness of entrepreneurs like you mentioned, you know, in the past, it seems like as I look at your career, as I studied you a little bit, it seems like you became a better businessman the more mature you got just as an individual, period. Is that fair to say that those things just correlated in your life?

Tucker: Well, I think there was also causation, too. I think the more that I failed, a failure is like, you know, people talk about failure being important all the time. And I think people really don’t understand why. But the reason why is because then you can just be failure. But if you take failure and use it for what it should be, which is a unarguable corrective mechanism, if you look at it for what it is like, I’ve fucked up and I have to find out why. And then it forces you to strip all your bullshit and lies. You tell yourself away and to look at the real reality. If you do that, then failure makes you better. If you don’t do that, then you’re probably just going to repeat your mistakes. Yeah, so that’s my failures. All of them were painful and all of them sucked, and all of them were really unfun. And I would never want to relive any of them again. But I think I’ve been lucky enough or smart enough, or at least mature enough to not to not push my failures on other people or blame other people, but to ask myself, what did I do to cause this failure? What part of me is not working correctly? And how do I fix that? And I think part of it is just growing up and maturing. But the other part is really the reason I’m maturing is because I’m facing my failures and I’m letting my failures instruct me about what’s not working with the way I think about the world.

Bronson: Yeah. Now makes total sense. Now, your next company after that was Tropic and Publishing, and it had a couple million in revenues by 2012 or actually in 2012. So in a nutshell, because I think this is interesting, what was the innovation in publishing that you kind of brought to the market with Tropea on? Because you got some incredible margins that publishers usually don’t get or I should say you usually don’t get.

Tucker: Well, so it’s funny, like no one’s heard of that company because instead of worrying about creating a company that that gets a lot of attention. I worried about creating a company that actually made money. Yeah. And so it was very unsexy what I did. I basically just figured out how I could use mainstream publishing trucks and and distribution network to run my own publishing company. And I did. And so what I did was I just cut a middleman out and I captured a ton of revenue that generally goes to the middlemen by doing the work myself faster, cheaper, more efficiently. And so that that’s all that publishing company is. It’s not it’s funny, like I wrote a piece about this in Huffington Post that explained exactly what I did with my publishing company. And all these people thought it was so amazing. And it was this innovation. It’s actually really not an innovation. It’s just cutting a middleman out is all this.

Bronson: But it’s a lot of work. So you turn up on the word. That’s amazing.

Tucker: Yeah, it it is. It is a lot of work, but I didn’t figure out a new way to get books to people. I didn’t reinvent publishing. I just cut a middleman out, which can be very profitable. In fact. I mean, that’s that’s what a lot of very profitable companies do, is they cut middlemen out. But that’s all I do.

Bronson: Yeah. No, but I mean, it’s still a great company, though. And let me ask you this, because I understand how that it works for you as an individual author, because obviously, if you keep all those margins, I mean, your return just goes to the roof on a book. How do you bring in other authors? Do you just by cutting that middleman out. There’s so much pie there now you can give them more and keep more for doing it for them. Is that kind of how that works?

Tucker: Sort of. I don’t run. So I sold Trumpian because I didn’t want to run a publishing company. And I could I could absolutely turn on the company into just a better version of of HarperCollins or whatever. But the margins in publishing really kind of suck. And it’s really an unfun. Business to be in in a lot of ways. And it’s just a lot of work for not a lot of money. So I ended up selling that to a company called Iron Cross because they wanted to be in that company. And then, ironically enough, I left the company. They ended up sort of shutting the company down. I went back in and bought the lone Trumpian name back for almost nothing. And now I think I might actually reopen Lion Crest, but I’m going to take a totally different sort of take on publishing is more it’s more going to be like because there’s no reason. Traditional publishing is I’m a publisher. I give you money as an author. I bind basically your manuscript and I own your manuscript and then I try and sell it as much as possible. And then I give you a small royalty, right? I think the arrow should go the other way around. I think the author should put up the money. The author should own most of the profits, and the authors should hire professionals to help them at each stage of the process with the things that they’re not good at. Right. Yeah. And so what I’m what I’m going to turn, I think my interest into is essentially a publishing consultation and publishing consulting and publishing services. And so we’ll help people who want to write books and create books who can or are owned by them. Well, walk them through the process and then we’ll feel like, you know, do services for them that they don’t want to do themselves will essentially be book, book as a service, you know, as opposed to, to to selling the rights to your book, you know.

Bronson: Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense because I mean, I think you even listeners out on one of the articles where you talked about it, you said, here’s what a publisher does. It’s like five, six or seven things. That’s it is not 100 things are doing for you. It’s five ish things. And you looked at them all and you said, I can do all those except for the trucks and the distribution. It’s just getting the product to the right place. And so if you do all the rest for someone else, I mean, it’s a business.

Tucker: You know, the only thing publishing at this point, the only thing a publisher can do, they can do two things that are hard to replicate. If you need a lot of money upfront, they can give you an advance, but they don’t give advances to many people. And the other big thing they can do is they can get your book in bookstores. Right. That that’s that’s very hard to do. And the funny thing is, there just aren’t many bookstores anymore. And most people at this point are selling the majority of their books online. And if you look at a book as a sort of like a book as a business card or a book as a legion or a book as a way to establish authority, you look at the book as a piece of media that you can use to monetize other types of media or help achieve other business goals. It’s very easy to grow a book so you can kind of look at it from a different perspective. And that’s the way that I think that’s sort of the future that this the dominant future of publishing, not the only future. And so that that’s the company that I think we’re going to build. And if you look like now, I’m not making the mistake, the other the the mistake I made before, now it’s everything we do is for money. We’re putting no money up, but we’re people are paying us to help them achieve their goals that they think they can get in our alliance. Yeah, in publishing.

Bronson: And so with Rudy, as we talked about, lot of your mistakes, Trumpian things went well. And so what are some of the takeaways from Tropeano like? Okay, these are the things we did right, that now it’s kind of in your repertoire, they’re rolling into new things always.

Tucker: The big lesson was understand your model upfront, understand exactly how you’re going to make money, understand exactly what you need to do to make money. Have no like have a very clear path forward and, and, and, and then spend every single day getting up and executing a few things on that path. You know, like if you have 100 things you have to do to build this company, if you can do one or two every day, then you’re going to have you know, you’re going you’re going to do great. You don’t have to do the whole thing at once. And then the other big thing I think I learned is, well, this is not maybe it’s an idea, right? I think it’s maybe something I did wrong as I learned as I went on, I didn’t want to be in that business. So I think the thing I should have done at the beginning is I should have said and if I get if I turn this into the business I want, what’s it going to look like? And then is that something I want to do? Is that how I want to spend my time? And I realized I didn’t realize until after I had built it that once you build a publishing company, it’s essentially a lot of busywork and office work and administrative work, and I can hate that. And I didn’t really think of it because I thought, Oh, having a publishing company, this will be I thought the same and use that because we’re so innovative and so sexy and like. And then I got there and I’m like, Oh, this is the worst. I don’t want to do this. I like, I don’t want to I don’t want to do administrative work, you know, so, so now the lesson I’m learning now as I go forward, lie in trust is we’re building a company that has very little to almost no administrative work, and instead we’re selling information, expertize and management to authors who don’t want to do those things because that’s very easy for us to do and requires very little time.

Bronson: So it seems like with Rudy, as you kind of learned, product market fit man. That you have to have something the world needs. With Shopian, you learn. There’s also a thing called founder product fit. It has to be a product that matches you. So now you’ve kind of gotten two really important things under your belt. Now we’ll talk about your your newest company a second. But let’s talk a little more about Lion Crest, because they bought Shopian and then eventually you came on and did some things with Lion Crest became involved again. And you had some weird, bad sort of good experiences with partnerships there. Talk to me about how Lion Crest kind of went sideways and what you learned from the partnership experience there.

Tucker: Yeah. So the partners, the guys who bought the company or bought my old post are going to be Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher and they own idea incubator, which is they do a lot of Internet marketing. They run the traffic and conversion, some of the stuff like that. And they’re pretty big, pretty big Internet marketers and they’re smart dudes and they really they know what they’re doing. But my approach is always we need to do great content first and then we’ll market it after that, right? And then we’ll make money off of that. And their approach is sort of the opposite. Like, they’re like, let’s just do decent content. Let’s make sure it’s sort of acceptable, and then let’s market the hell out of it and sell and sell the hell out of it. And so what would happen is it was like we in our minds, the reason we got together is because we envisioned a world where I focus my 80% on content and it’s amazing they focus their 80% on sales and marketing, and that’s amazing. But what ended up happening is we we argued so much over what was good and good, what was good enough to sell and what wasn’t good enough to sell. And like, I wouldn’t put my name on this stuff they wanted to sell and they got they thought I took too long was too frustrating like in terms of of what I thought was okay to move and what was it from Amazon wasn’t so it was just sort of like it was two very different philosophies. I don’t think either one’s wrong. I just think they’re so different that they didn’t work in combination.

Bronson: Yeah, I mean, in theory, it sounds perfect for someone to focus purely on content who is good at it. Like you and someone focus purely on marketing, who’s good at it like them. I mean, those are known quantities that it’s a fact that you’re good at content and they’re good at marketing in the world. So do you think that it’s still a good theory for people to try? If you get the right characters together, the right people, they mesh the right way that there’s still something there. Well, there’s something more fundamental that’s broken about it.

Tucker: No, no, I think I think it’s really good. I think that the thing you really have to think about when you’re meshing sort of different founder teams of different people is basic philosophy. It’s not skill. Skill sets, I think, are easy to see if they align or not. I think the problem is, is sort of how do you view the world, you know, and you need to make sure that your the basic sort of foundational views of the world need to line up with your founders, because if they don’t, then the way you make decisions and what decisions you make will be fundamentally different, and then that will be your focus. Instead of making this decision and then executing, you’re just arguing over the decision over and over and over and over and over, you.

Bronson: Know, no. Makes sense. So now you’re the latest kind of company, a story arc. It’s a company you founded with Ryan Holladay and Niels Parker. I went to the website and it doesn’t really tell you a lot about what you guys do behind the scenes. It’s basically like we do some magic. You need us. Come to us, we’ll help you out. Are you disclosing what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it the client still?

Tucker: No, it’s sort of weird the way we started. The reality is we started off because Ryan is a book marketing company. I have a book publishing company and Neil’s has sort of an editing company and a run as a marketing company. And so we thought it would be really cool to combine them into one sort of entity. And what we realized was we had a very similar issue with Ryan. Perry’s is the way philosophies are the same, but the way we deal, the way we like to deal with clients and stuff just didn’t, it didn’t make sense to combine. And it wasn’t like an acrimonious thing. We’re just like, Oh, this is this isn’t working. It worked better when we were all just working together as independent entities. So what story arc actually turned into? We were going to make it sort of like 21st century sort of media publishing and marketing company. But what what we ended up seeing actually is that we didn’t really like client work, so it didn’t make sense to do that. But what we were really good at and what there was a big demand for was investing and advising help. So we actually, between me and Ryan and Neil’s advise something like, you know, formal advisors for something like 20 companies or something. And so what we do, what we’ve done is we kind of pooled money, the three of us, and we’ll put, you know, five, ten, 15, 20, 25 grand in a seed round and then we’ll we’ll get anywhere from a 25 to 50% discount on our money to come on board as advisors. Or we’ll just get advisors shares, you know, quarter point, half point, full point, whatever. And then that actually. Works out really well because between the three of us we bring an incredible skill set. And so a company can effectively get three advisors for one price. And then we like I get to pool sort of I get to effectively advise 20 companies with really only having to spend time with about seven of them, you know. And then the others, Ryan just asked me, Hey, this company needs this. I’m like a no problem and then I’m done, right? Yeah. So it’s like an investing advising company that we do, but we all each have our own independent companies.

Bronson: Yeah. Are you mainly investing in companies that are media companies, publishing companies, maybe a new take on those things? Or is it kind of all over the place?

Tucker: No, I actually don’t invest in this company.

Bronson: You know, like those industries.

Tucker: Out there, they’re really shitty industries and the margins are very good. And I don’t think there are any companies that there are there aren’t very many companies out there that are doing things that I think are right. I think that that that field hasn’t been broken open yet in certain ways. Yeah, the company is I’ll if you me if you look at my AngelList profile the companies I like to invest in in that story arc usually invest in or companies that either create new platforms or generally speaking, create platforms that eliminate middlemen. So like, like a great example of one of the companies we invested in is partner partners, essentially an inventory management system for liquor. And it sounds super boring like it’s just like an iPhone app and it sounds really boring. But if you actually know that industry, which I know, the liquor trade, the restaurant industry, I as soon as I saw this, I’m like, oh, my God, this is this is incredible. This is unbelievable. It’s like the cheap, easy way to think about it. It’s sort of like Uber for restaurants. That’s not really accurate at all, but that’s easy enough to understand. It’s your platform. You’re creating a platform where you can connect people who need information with people who want information, and then cutting out middlemen that are very expensive. And so like that company I think is going to do fantastic.

Bronson: Yeah. You know, a theme in this interview and a theme from the last interview, we had the senior vice president of GoDaddy on the last episode and he talked about unsexy businesses and how much he likes them. He wants the things behind the scenes that are kind of making the world go round, even if you’ve never heard of them. And it sounds like, you know, Tropea was finally working, but nobody’s ever heard of it. Rudy is. I heard about it wasn’t working, you know, same thing, partner. And I never heard of it. But you seem to think it’s going to work. Like there’s something here where the brand and the public perception is just not what matters of the day. And I’ve had this weird phenomenon where I learn that a company is doing 20 million a year and I go to their their Twitter profile and they’ve got like seven followers. But I’m like, that’s like used to I couldn’t get my head around that like a couple of years ago. I couldn’t understand that now. I actually expected half the time.

Tucker: Yeah, well, because here’s the thing. Here’s what people don’t understand. Media and sort of external facing media is only about what people care about. And most people don’t care about anything beyond their own, like what’s right in front of their face in their own lives. Right? So who gives a shit about restaurant liquor inventory? The only people who care are restaurants, but like. Like restaurants. People work in restaurants and the liquor industry and the distributors. That’s it. It’s it. No one else gives a fuck about it, right? I only care if I’m, you know, Joe Blow person x. I only give a shit that when I go into a bar they have deep Eddie that I want to drink and that’s all I give a fuck about, right? And so like it might be an interesting magazine article, but most companies don’t need to have a big public face. They only need to be known by the people that they matter to. And I think that some a lot of the early tech companies were sort of public facing and sexy, like Yahoo! And Google and Facebook. And so it got to be like this idea that you have to have a social media profile and that’s that’s fucking stupid. Most companies don’t need that because no one gives a shit.

Bronson: Yeah. You know, and it seems like there’s another kind of similar problem, which is, you know, to be in a business where there’s mass appeal and you have the Twitter following and you have the Facebook following, it means they’re going after everyone. And if you’re going after everyone, then no small segment falls in love with you enough to pay you millions year after year after year. And so it’s almost like to have the mass appeal. You’re making a cardinal business sin, which is by going after everyone and not someone, right?

Tucker: Oh, absolutely. There’s there’s so many of the companies that that we advise, they’re like, oh, yeah, like you guys, you know, you guys know, social media help us with our Twitter account. Facebook account. I’m like, You shouldn’t have one. Like, what do you mean? I’m like, I’m like, Do you have something to say that someone’s going to care about? Well, where do we announce our third quarter results? I’m like, no one gives a shit except me and your other investors. No one gives a fuck about this. Yeah, this doesn’t matter. People only care about their own lives. So if you don’t have a way to interact with them that provides value to them in their own life, then stop bothering them.

Bronson: Yeah. Now that’s awesome advice. Well, this has been an awesome interview talker. We got to get into a lot of, you know, the good times, the bad times, a lot of things in your career. I’d like to end on this last question. You can take it anywhere you want because it’s so vague and. Rod, but what’s the best advice you have for any startup is trying to grow.

Tucker: Try to grow?

Bronson: Yeah, trying to grow. Try and get users. Trying to make money, trying to win. Just how were you interpret that?

Tucker: Well, it actually ties into to to what what we just talked about a second ago. If you’re trying to grow, you need to I can almost guarantee you that there’s probably only one. There might be two, and rarely are there three factors involved. Figure out what the one or two factors are that that truly matter, what levers actually actually matter and focus everything on those. Ignore all the other bullshit because chances are it doesn’t fucking matter at all and focus only, only, only on the levers that move your company. And chances are and become experts at those, chances are you’ll hit scale that way.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s awesome. You know, I had this idea for a to do list, but you’re only allowed to put three things on it, and the font is like, huge. So you open up your computer and you can only type three things on it and it takes up the whole screen. And every day that’s your homepage, and you open it and you say, Am I doing one of those three? If I am, that’s good. If I’m not, I’m an idiot. And that’s it.

Tucker: Exactly.

Bronson: That’s very much. Well, Tara, thanks so much again for coming on growth RTV.

Tucker: Of course, Matt. It’s my pleasure.