How this Founder Lost Everything and Rebuilt it Back

title: How this Founder Lost Everything and Rebuilt it Back
author: Founders Podcast
publication: Founders Podcast
published: 2025-12-23T09:54:00
source_url: https://anchor.fm/s/10542bd40/podcast/play/111851361/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-10-28%2F413373789-44100-2-f8488e95d8c25.mp3

word_count: 10083

Hello, David. How are you doing today? Doing awesome, Ash. Doing awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited for this talk. Great stuff. Great stuff. David, before we start, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires you, motivates you, you would like to share with our audience? My favorite quote is actually something that I had over my bed in high school. And it was this poster that I brought when I was at a store. And it really moved me and it still speaks to me this day. And it's actually a quote from the fictional character, Rocky. I'm from Philadelphia. You know, we have the, I fill out Philly steps, the, the, our museum steps that Rocky ran up in the movie. And my favorite quote from that, from that, is going in one more round when you don't think you can. That's what makes all the difference in your life. And it's something that is wrong through throughout my life, beginning, from the beginning of my life to now, like, something I still think about. And, you know, while I don't have it over my bed anymore, I still have it entrenched in my mind. And that is quite inspirational. And that reminds me of my university Oxford days when we used to have these lectures in the class. And one of the, one of the lecture professor actually mentioned is that our body is capable of doing 10 times more what our brain thinks of it. So, you know, when you go to the gym and you're doing bench press or, you know, sit up, so whatever exercise you're doing. And then you're saying, oh, you cannot do one more. But actually your body is capable of doing 10 times more than that. It's just our brain doesn't want it to go through the pain, right? I agree. I've done six full Ironmans. And I can definitely agree. Moments when I, when I've been at that, like, slump in the, in the run, right? And don't think my body can do anymore. There's, there's much more left in the tank indeed. Perfect. So David, let's say we are in room of full of ambitious founders, early stage builders, right? No one knows your name. And you've got just few minutes to introduce yourself. You're sitting down on the chairs, looking at the stage and suddenly you appear on the stage with the mic or the splash lights on you. And they're looking at this person standing on the stage thinking, who is this guy? What is going to say? What would you say to them? What will you tell about your story so that they can stick with us for the rest of their? I almost lost everything and rebuilt it back stronger than ever. And I think I would start my talk with that because at the at the end of the day, that is sort of what was it a finding moment in the creation of the business that I'm working on now is, you know, I hit a moment of business where where I went to almost zero, right? And it happened virtually two times within the same, within the same two-year period. And, you know, it was like a punch to my right cheek and then a punch to my left cheek and like that I was sort of running out of face to be punched in at that moment. And, you know, I essentially had a business deal that went bad and I spent the majority of the money that I had at the time on this deal. And what I did is after that happened, I went back to basics. I went back to simple blockalling and tackling and I rebuilt my business the same position. It took me really five years to get to that point in the business. And I built back to that same level and started growing beyond that within about a year and a half. So, you know, I was able to compress the amount of time that it took. So it kind of taught me that, you know, I really do have the skills that it takes to build what I'm building because when I'm, you know, I really looked at it kind of like that scene in the Matrix, right? Where there's the red pill and the blue pill. And, you know, the blue pill was just me quitting, right? Like, just saying, hey, like I had a good run at this. You know, let me try something else. And the red pill was like, okay, how far into the depths of this can I really go and how how far can I figure out how far can I go to figure out like what I'm capable of. And I'm so happy I took that metaphorical red pill in the Matrix and went a little bit further than I thought I could with the business. And if I didn't take that option, I'm in that moment. I would not be where I am to that. My God. And I'm so intrigued now to, to, you know, understand more or learn more about that story. But let's, let's begin with with the starting point. You mentioned that you lost everything. Would you be able to share with our audience that what did that moment look like? And when you say you lost everything, was it like you had like only $10,000 in your account or like your like homeless or what was going on? And what do you exactly do after that point in order to reach where you are right now? Yeah. So, so what happened is my business was going along, was going along great. And I had essentially a bad business deal on someone that I trusted. And overnight, the revenue of my business, you know, basically fell off a cliff, right? You know, we lost, we lost around 90% of the revenue in our business. And we lost almost all the employees that were doing the work in the business. And when it ended up happening was we had enough cash to eventually last throughout three months. And we were making a little bit of revenue. So we had basically three months left to live, which in company time is like not a lot of time, right? Like your back is up against the wall. Like, yeah. So what did I think at that moment? I was sitting on a park bench with my business partner, Zach and we were just looking at each other like, what are we going to do? Right? Like we spent all this time getting to hear like, you know, what is the next step? And I we looked at each other and I don't know how we had this thought, but it was like, okay, we already did it once, right? We already got there once. We already were successful once. What is stopping us from getting there again? Is it the fact that we don't want to do it? Because, you know, we have a chip on our shoulder and an ego about the fact that like, you know, we lost this round? Or is it that we're going to put the gloves back on and go in one more round and start fight? And that's what we did. We put the gloves back on. And every single day, it was like, okay, how can we we develop the product in a way that would work better for the customer? And it was how can we serve our customers better? How can we call our customers? Figure out what they, we can, we can do for them, we can achieve for them. And it became, it started to become this, this, instead of spiraling down, like we hit, we hit that point, we started spiraling back up again. And, you know, client by client, customer by customer employee by employee, we rebuilt, we rebuilt the business over the past few years and have made it into this strong institution that has over 45 people, hundreds of clients, you know, really, really serves our, our customer's needs. I think at the end of the day, it was just a simple mindset, you know, as she said, sounds like a simple mindset and a decision that I made in my head not to quit. And I think good, you know, if you look at some of the businesses that have been around for years, a lot of it's because the founder or the leadership team just hasn't quit in the hard moments. In the hard moments, which there's going to be a lot of them. And there's still hard moments every, you know, every single year that come up, right? Are you going to quit? Are you going to just lean and dig into that hard moment? And that process is very, very painful, which I think a lot of people are doing it. And most people avoid doing it. But if you're able to dig in through that pain, what you achieve on the other side is a much stronger version of yourself and not the business that you're creating. Yeah, yeah. No doubt about it. And I want to go into more deeper, like the mindset that you have talked about, the shift from has led to CEO and building a prototype service that can scale. But just for our listeners, would you be able to share what kind of deal was it, which actually took 90% of your revenue down? Just, you know, you don't have to share any numbers or names or anything, just so that our listeners understand if they come across similar kind of situation in their life, what kind of red flags they have to look for so that they don't get into this kind of deal. Sure. This was a joint venture partnership with someone that we had been business partners for a little while, like they were a vendor. And we decided that it would be one plus one would equal three. And we decided to form a joint venture. And her and I got into business and decided that that was the best way forward for us was to combine forces. And the issues start to come up because when you sort of when you're when you're informal partners and you're working with a vendor, it's a lot different than being a partner that shares a bank account. And that's a very very serious thing. So, you know, it became an issue of the difference in values between her and I and it became a difference of values between between, you know, the value set of that company like really really came to life when it interacted with our company. And there was just clashes over that stuff. And, you know, one one day we woke up and the rub was pulled us. And, you know, it came as a shock because we invest a lot of time and money into the joint venture. And the person ended up with way more control over the organization than we had. Oh, you know, if I was to go redo that, I would make sure I had more control over the situation than I did in that. So, the red flag is the value alignment. So, always look for the value alignment with when you're going into the partnership with somebody and always have at least 50% of control, you know, never let someone else get more than 50% of control off your business because then you don't have as much as say as you think you do, right? These are the things. Yeah, especially if it's something that you're operating, right? You know, and, and, you know, I don't want to say there's a hard and vast role over 50% control. But, but, but I think that, I think that in looking at it, you want to make sure that, and, and someone, one of my good friends told me, told me this quote of, you know, you want to, you want to find someone that you would trust to leave your kids with with a week. Like, is that's the level of, that's the level of caliber of people you want to spend around. And, you know, I think if I, if I look back and look back at this person, it's, it's, you know, she was not someone I would leave my kid like, I don't have kids, but if I had metaphorical kids, you know, it's someone I would not want to leave them with for, for a, for any kind of, or we, so, you know, I, I think that is the level of caliber people that you want to be around from a character perspective. And I think it's something that, you know, if that gut feeling is telling you something, which it was, and I just, like, ignored it, you know, it's something that you want to make sure that, you know, you have that sniff test. Yeah, that's the test in, in place. Indeed, indeed, indeed. So let's, let's dive into the building of a product, productized service. And, you know, that can scale, which is one of your primary skills. Would you, would you talk to our listeners and tell them a little bit about what core problem should a productized service solve if it is to grow beyond the founder's personal output? Like, how do you decide which part of your service can be standardized without like reducing quantity? You know, when, when you begin, um, systemizing your offer, what's surprised this could come along the way, you know, with your clients? Yeah. Okay. So, so let's, let's back up, just for, for everyone, and like, talking about like, first, what is a productized service? Right? Like, to start out, you know, like, if you're looking at, there's two different types of businesses. There's a product and there's a service, right? Like, most businesses fall on one of those two categories. Um, yeah. So, you know, a service could be like a long, a long cutting service, right? Or a, um, you know, or a HVAC repair service or HVAC install service. A product would be something like the iPhone or, or an Apple computer, you know, something something like Macbook. Um, so if you're looking at the differences between those two businesses, one has a certain degree of customization, and the other one is more of like a rigid thing that's stamped out in a factory, right? And the reason that the, the latter is able to grow faster is because it's something that's replicable, repeatable. And you're basically able to run traditional, you know, productized, you know, product, you're able to basically run your business like a factory. The problem with a lot of service businesses is they've run everything as a custom, right? So what, what does that look like? It looks like an outer chaos inside of an outer chaos inside of the business. You know, you never know what the price is, which is bad for both you and the customers. When you sign up for a job, you don't know how much money you're going to make off of it, which is bad for both you and the customers and the longevity of them. And what productization does is it takes your offering and it puts a, puts a line in the sand. I'm like, hey, this is what our service includes. So for us, we offer video editing for our company, for our company. So we have, we offer that in one of five ways. You can buy five things off the menu. You could buy, you know, two alacard videos, or you could buy a 10-hour, 20-hour, or 40-hour video pack, right? Those are the, those are the five things you could buy off the menu. And when someone buys one of those five things off the menu, we basically go back into our metaphorical kitchen and we're able to make those five things in a standard process waste. That doesn't mean that you're not getting custom or quality work. It's actually quite the opposite. What our customers find is that it's more consistent. It's more repeatable. It's more scalable because they're getting something that's the same every single time. There's a certain system in a way in which you do it. That was a certain way in which you do it. That is just repeatable. That is essentially like what it means to be a productized service. Would you be able to share your story when you started productizing your business off? So let's, I'm guessing that you started as a video editor agency or a place where you started giving service to your customers. And when did you begin systemizing your offer? What was the conversation happening? What was the data you were gathering? What was the data points you figuring out? Okay. This tells me that if I customize my offer for like make it a product, it will bring more value to the customers. And what actually surprised you about what client actually value? Yeah. So clients, clients, I'll start with with where we start, which was we started out as a video production company. Clients would come to us and they'd say like, hey, I want you to make XYZ. They give us a scope of what they want us to make and we would go make it. The problem with that is like once you get past a bunch of different projects, it becomes really hard to track what is going into a custom job. And it becomes hard to scale because the roles that you need are not consistent. So we looked at that and we said, okay, like which part of this process can we productize and turn into something that's simple and repeatable? And we found that editing was the thing that was was simple and repeatable in our process. So the second part of that question is what happens to the customers? Why is this good for them? It's good for them because they know exactly what they're buying, right? Like when you're buying something custom, you have to put out a new contract and a new proposal every single time. And it varies depending on what customer you're working with. So you're selling something different and your pricing might be different. So like you could go to a website and you can know how much you're spending on a video and you can know if we're the right resource for you, right? Like we're very transparent about that. So in essence, the goal of privatization is to simplify both both the end production of the product, right? And simplify the purchasing of the product. At the end of the day, you know, Amazon and Jeff Bezos always talk about how how the customer is never going to want something slower. The company, the customer is never going to want something that's less quality over time. And the company, the customer is not going to want something that's more expensive over time. So in general, like looking at those three things, like the triangle of good fast and we say reasonably priced, good fast cheap where you can't have all three is coming to life, right? Like through Amazon, you can press a button. You can get something. I don't really think they're cheap. I think they're reasonably priced for what they offer. So you can get something good, good fast and reasonably priced from Amazon. So why can't you get that another areas of society, right? Like there should be some sort of very quality also. Like if you buy this thing from somewhere else, which is much cheaper, I think that quality depreciates so much. Yes, I agree. So I think I think taking from those principles of like, okay, customers are always going to want for us. They're always going to want their videos faster. They're always going to want more high quality videos. And they're always going to want to pay a reasonable price for it, right? Like in our industry, like not that people aren't as price sensitive as they might be for buying a commodity good. But for us, you know, they want to pay a fair reasonable price for the services that they're that we're rendering for them. So then the day by productizing, you're able to get the three things in the golden triangle, you know, you're able to get them, and you're able to light up that triangle for people and really give them what they're wanting at the end of the day, something that comes out good, good fast and reasonably priced. Got it. Got it. Got it. And why are you going through that journey then? I always, I always emphasize whenever I'm mentoring some college students from MBA that you need to build a business that funds your day-to-day life, you know, not just consumes it. And you also preach that, right? What does a life-align business actually look like in practice when you are a solo founder or somebody who is trying to, you know, survive on a small boat? What, what steps a founder needs to take to make sure that it's the business is not consuming the person, the business needs to fund the life of the person? Yeah, it's a great question. And to be frank, just to be realistic, the first couple of years that you're in business, it's going to consume you, right? Like, you know, you're going to have to work your butt off every single day to just get established, right? So if you're starting a business from scratch, like expect those first couple of years, or even you're buying a business, even if you're doing entrepreneurship through acquisition, like those first couple of years are going to be a grind, like figuring out the systems, figuring out the process, you're building everything from scratch. As you grow in your entrepreneurial journey, what starts to happen is you start to figure out that you can't do everything on your own, right? So I have a business partner exactly with a business partner for 10 years and probably could do a whole podcast on like what it needs to be a business partner as well, because that's like a whole that's a whole separate role than itself. What one thing you have to realize is your time is your time is finding and your goal is to find the highest leverage points for every single hour of your day. And you want to make sure that you are spending time on things that are actually moving the needle forward in the business, which in the beginning, okay, yet sales, it's marketing, you know, it's fulfilling the product and service, sell something, make something, sell something, make something, right? But over time, that does not become the highest point of leverage for you. And I think the biggest complexity selling that starts to happen in businesses is figuring out what you should actually be spending your time on that's driving the needle forward for the business. Sometimes you can waste time on projects that have no actual meaning to the bottom line of the business. Like as example, we we were trying to fix some efficiencies in our review process one time. And we went down this whole role of building out this whole software and switching from one software to another, we spent tens of thousands of dollars on this on this new program. And in the end of it, we figured out that it actually slowed down the review process and didn't speed it up, didn't create more efficiencies. And we had a couple of program. And then that three months of work that we put in fixing that problem wasn't actually the right problem to solve the begin with. It wasn't actually a bottom system. So I think like a direct answer is like if you're a solo founder and if you're someone who's working by yourself, the first hiring you should do is for the lowest possible value tasks, either in your life, right? Like the largest trade on time you can make as a founder is finding someone else to clean your house and just working during that time. The second highest leverage task you could do is finding an executive assistant or or someone to take off like your calendar, your email inbox, it doesn't move the needle forward and it's going to create more more time for you to focus on higher value things. So I think starting to think about things in that way like where did your leverage come in? And I think even now like my company, you know, we have we have close to 50 employees at this point, right? Yeah, that's that's every single week that goes by, there's 2,000 hours of productivity. I cannot possibly work 2,000 hours a week impossible, but the collective of my business can and the system that I've created creates it. So when I put in one hour, I get out 10 to 30 hours of productivity. So, you know, so it makes it really helps out a lot, you know, to realize like the game that you're actually playing as an entrepreneur and what you're building. Got it. Got it. Okay, so first couple of years, you have to, you know, work a lot. You have to make sure that it's you're adding a lot of value into your business. That's how you kind of win the customers, win the clients and then get the repeated customers right back into the business. That is one of the biggest challenges founders face right? What were the how would so take me through the process you took when you started this business with a productized kind of, you know, front, what did you do to gain the first customer and then after that first 10 customers? It's a great question. So, so in my business, the first, the first I would say 20 customers I got through coal calling. I didn't have any money to spend on ads. I didn't have any money to spend on production for myself. So, you know, so I couldn't create free content. So, what could I do? I could use my time to reach out one on one to coal leads. That's what I had. I had nothing else. I didn't have a network. I started running out of college. I didn't really have people that I could could rely on for that. So, what I did is I literally would go to every networking event. I would go to I would go to walk on business stores, knock on their doors. I had an old copy of my grandparent's yellow pages, business book, and I would thumb through the yellow pages and I would just co-call after co-call. I probably made in that first year, I probably made 2000 total co-calls. And then we ended up with our first set of customers. So, it was just a grind of, you know, calling people and figuring out, this was Vichier 2021-22. This was 25, this was 2015 when we first started the business. 2015? Oh, okay. That first might have been working. I don't know now if it is good of a strategy, but we still run cold emails, so that works great. And then over time, you start to build up more revenue and you start experimenting with other things. Partnerships is a great way to grow without ads. We just ads, we do cold out reach. So, we still do some of that old stuff that we started on the beginning, but in the beginning to get those first customers, it was just, it was just reach out. The more people that you could reach out to in any given day, the more opportunities and efforts you're going to get to have customers. And I still find that to this day, right? Like, the amount of rogue, aggressive effort that you need to put in to get customers, especially in the beginning, is high. As time goes on, it gets easier to get customers because you have references, you have testimonials, your back end is better, you're the stronger service, you have more reviews, you're more credible, you know how to talk the talk and more the more. But even now, you still have to put like an unreasonable amount of effort in to get every single customer. Like, it's important to be aggressive. And that was my second part, which you mentioned at once, your, you know, establish, you have reviews, everything, social probe, everything in the place. But years, you touched a bit a bit on the cold out reach via email. But what is your current strategy to gain customers? Well, get the customers into the into the gate inside. What does your funnel looks like? How do you like get the top of the funnel, uh, customer users or viewers? And then how do you like, how does your funnel get them into the into the customer position? Yeah, it comes down to upfront value, right? So, you know, when we're reaching out to people, we're giving them some sort of, some sort of value, whether that's in the form of free content, right? We're a video company. So we, we do a lot of videos like you go, uh, if you actually go to my Instagram at David Feynman, um, you can see like we're doing content and everything practicing what we preach. Um, and if you look at our company's Instagram, where we practice what we preach. So we do free content on the form of blogs, videos, we do have, we do everything, right? Like we're with that. Um, and then once someone comes into our world, right? Like we're, we're, we're giving them, you know, they sent up our email list, they come in as a lead, you know, we're getting on a call with them. We're, we're talking to them. And, and then we're just seeing if they qualify and, and we're enrolling them into our, our service, right? You know, it's not some sort of aggressive sales tactic, right? It's, you know, do you have a need for what we have to offer? Let's talk about it. Let's see if we're the right fit for the right fit. You know, then let's, let's start. Let's, let's jump aboard. And it's, it's really an easy, it's really an easy process. Once you get someone to your world, you need to start talking to them and, and, and really having a conversation about, you know, what, what is, what does that look like? You know, and for us, it's, it's about, it's about, you know, creating, creating as much upfront value for them as possible when they, when they come into our world. Got it. Got it. Great stuff. So let's move towards the new era of, of, not just video editing, but every single part of our life, AI. It is changing every single aspect of our life. And, you know, not, not just the video editing video production or this vertical off the business, right? Which part of your video workflow? You see clear gain from the AI tools or models, or elements you could use in order to sort of like automate things. And what new skills should a team or your team developing to stay ahead of these tools keep improving? It's a really good question. So, so we, we actually have a whole section of our business that's dedicated to R&D and coming out with new pieces of technology to make the process faster for creative videos. So we're constantly building in everything from script writing to ideation all the way through to like reviewing for quality and making sure that a video is a strong video. We're building internal tools that allow us to scale with the modern world. And it's not just a matter of like, using chat to be T better, right? Like, because that's like everyone could do that. There's other workflows and tools that you could build inside AI that actually create like real value for businesses. And I think, I think people look at AI as just like, oh, it's just touchy beauty or Gemini or rock, right? Like, that, that is a, is a form of AI. But really, it's sort of, you start to get into like, like creating agents, creating, creating like individual pieces of artificial technologies that can do specific tests for you. It becomes very, very interesting with productivity. And I think now more than ever, it's important for, for businesses to find people that are in touch and in tune with this modern world or start to train it. And actually, like, as a gift for your audience, you know, I have, I have this guide called how to hire a video editor that doesn't suck. And then a lot of these video editors, you want to make sure they're using modern technology. So if anyone from the audience wants it, again, with my Instagram at David Feyman, if you sent me a video that says, or if you sent me a note that says, ash guide, I can send you over that guide on how to hire a video editor that doesn't suck for the modern world. And we've hired like a lot of them over the years. So I think it's important to find those employees whether, whether it's a video editor, whether it's a, whether it's an operations person that really embrace AI and embrace this new modern world and use it for the right ways, right? Because you could use AI and actually like waste a bunch of time with it and not use it in the ways that actually save you time and create leverage on, on, on what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more with you on this one because we use quite a lot of AI tools in our business. And for, for just podcasts to have guests like, you know, amazing guests like yourself on the show, it's a lot of automation requires. Looking into that, we started thinking about like what we could do in order to improve this, because I was losing my mind with the podcast going on. We have lots of streams coming every day, but the problem is it takes us so much time. In order to resolve that, we created so many tools, nothing work out until recently when we created a Chrome extension, which is going crazy for our self. Maybe I can actually show you. Yeah, I don't know if I have this permissions here. Oh, there you go. So basically, this is our just, this is like literally a simple plug in here, which you can click and then it opens a sidebar where you can chat, but the magic is different. You can actually create as many prompts as you want. And let's say, you received, or let's say, you're on a Reddit website or you received this email, right? And I want to reply back to the email. What I do is I just copy it, highlight it, not copy, right? You go to my extension and say, okay, what do I, I want an email reply? What does it do? It actually, oh, because you can't see it, because, wait, you can't see it because it's the whole screen. This is, this is what it looks like on the screen. You look, is it? So when I, when I click right click on it, AI assistant, and then I click email reply, it actually created the whole reply for me for this particular email. There you go. I don't even have to type it. And then I will, you know, retype it based on customization. The email I sent you just before our meeting is, is both podcasts, same email, which actually analyzes the whole data and then sends the whole email like that. So that kind of got viral on LinkedIn because I shared it with my network and now people are downloading it. It's free. We just made it free and it's available online for everyone. So that's, that's what I wanted to show. So since the dawn of time, like people have been finding tools and ways to do things faster and better, right? Like, I saw this, I saw this very interesting story of like, if you had a town of like 100 people, right? It's, it's imagine this town's like a fishing town, right? And every single day each person requires one fish to survive, right? And, you know, everyone goes about their day, they go fish, they get that one fish, and they eat that one fish, right? So like every single person is in charge of fishing, right? Then one day a man from the town decides to come along and he says, he says, I just created this new trap that traps 30 fish, right? And, and, you know, I produce three of them. So I can now create every single fish in the town, right? Like, I could produce all the fish that the town needs to survive. I can create that in one day, right? Like instead of everyone having to go fish, now everyone's fishing for one day. What happens to those people? Everyone's like, well, do I lose my job fishing? No, now that, now someone figures out, okay, well, maybe I can like plant some trees and, you know, do that in a really special way and start getting apples. And, you know, maybe, you know, I can figure out a way to, you know, someone else in the town is like really good at cooking, right? And turning that fish into something and they start, say, start a restaurant, right? From that. So I think at the end of the day, like, like, productivity gains in society have always benefited society in the long run. And the short run, there's always pain, there's change, there's, there's a reshuffling thing. But, you know, people are always like, okay, what are we going to do with all this time that's being taken up with AI and robotics? We will figure out there will be new problems that will be created, you know, new levels kind of like every time you step up a level, a level in life or in society, there's a new problem that is created that will need to be solved. So what will those new problems be? It's kind of hard to say. But, you know, as, like, that task that you just showed me might have taken, you know, one hour free to do or 30 minutes in the past. Now, it took you five minutes. What are you going to do with those extra 55 minutes? I don't know, you could do nothing if you really wanted to. Or you could, you know, five X, the number of times you're doing it. And now you can do five emails the time that you used to take you to. Yeah. And vice versa, other way around, if you do not have time to do all these things, because I did not use to send this email to my guest in like last season, because I had literally no time. But now when I realize that there is an opportunity to save, what I used to do is I copy the guest name, go into their profile, learn about them a little bit, copy that content, go to the chat GPT, provide them that content, ask the chat GPT, can we get me the email properly design and then chat GPT used to give me and then I used to edit it and send it. So that all could be automated. I mean, part of it is automated now. So now I do it every time and my guests are like, okay, I received an email, I received a link, so we are up to the mark. So let's go forward with that. So that's that's the benefit of having something apart of your daily tasks, you know, automated so that you can improve the priority overall. And at the end of the day, there's really four main ways that you can, that you can increase your productivity of code, community, content and capital, right? Like in my opinion, those are those are the four ways that you can, that you can increase, increase your leverage points. All those four points are points of leverage. And you know, AI is really code, right? And AI is a form technology creating a new process and a new system that's code, that's a codified way of doing something. You didn't know it might be not. It might not be like a bunch of if-to-end statements and it might not be an AI thing, but you know, it's it's it's still a point of leverage. So then they're going back to like what do you want to work on as a founder? What are you working on as a solo founder? You're working on things that increase your leverage point, you know, and really allow you to produce more with the same amount that you have today. Indeed, indeed. So let's move on to the next part of what we wanted to discuss today is like how to scale the creative output with systems and not with more people. What does a well-designed creative system look like when it is working properly in your opinion? The way the way I look at this is describing this in one word, which is it is a flow. If you ever get into a if you ever get into a flow state where you're working on something and all of a sudden you snap your fingers in three or four hours gone by and you're like, oh my gosh, that was like a great session. A well-designed creative system allows the creatives to operate continually in a state of flow. Because at the end of the day, what we're optimizing for is people meets IT and technology, right? You match the two together and you have a system that works really well over time. So ultimately, what we're looking to do is improve that using processes and systems that allow someone to input something very simple at the front and someone to get exactly what they want on the back end and all throughout that that effort you're optimizing around the person, which is really like a video editor for us, you know, a well-designed creative system is optimizing around that person's time that they're spending editing. It's increasing the amount that they're able to do. It's increasing the quality at which they're able to do it, which ultimately produces a better product. So a well-designed creative system just kind of operates in a state of harmony where kind of technology, that nice little intersection where technology meets people. Can you recall a moment when you implemented a simple system or removed a bottleneck that people have been trying to fix for months in the organization? Okay, so the most simple one, right? And when you say it out loud, it's like, okay, that's so obvious. When a client used to request a video, we used to have them fill out a Google doc, right? They would fill out a Google doc with that would answer like five or six questions in a Google doc. We would then take that Google doc, copy it into an internal document, and put a due date on it, and send it off to that person. And there was actually people in our company whose whole job was it to do that. It was like a physical job in our business to literally push paperwork. One day, we woke up, we said, this is ridiculous. We're paying people to effectively do paperwork all day. And we decided that we were going to use this revolutionary thing called a form. Instead of filling out a Google doc, they fill out a form. As soon as they fill out a form, that information populated inside of a project management system that was both accessible to the client and accessible to our team. And then with a click of a button, a personal team can start a project really simple. And that simple change probably took about, you know, it took a little bit of time to build it. And then it took probably a month for our clients and our people to adapt it. That simple change allowed us to really, I think it's almost 4x, the amount of output we were getting from a single person in the company because nothing was on paper anymore. Nothing was lost. Everything is in categories. I think a lot of times the most the most seemingly complex bottlenecks in any processor system are a result of people saying that we've just always done it that way. It's just the way we do it. And people holding on to that work that they're doing because they think just because they're doing the work, it's valuable. There's certain work that's just straight up not not valuable. It could be automated. It could be systematized. So it's important to recognize what that work is. To have the people that are doing that work more importantly, accept the fact that their work can be automated and have that person have have a sort of change management process with that person so they can elevate and work and work on either that system or work on something else in the business that's driving the needle forward. So I think looking at looking at all those things, it's really just a factor of looking at what isn't valuable in a system and automating out what isn't valuable to move up to higher levels of work. Definitely. And just for the benefit of our listeners, we had this big issue like after every recording, we had this challenge that I used to request my guest to send me a video testimonial or feedback how the podcast went. That used to take months because I used to send emails, the guests used to record it on their phone or on their desktop or something like that. Then there is a problem of sending these huge files through either Google Drive or VTrans for whatever service you can use. And then I used to download it, send it to my editor. They used to like cut it in the square, put it on the website so long. I mean, it took me a year and a half to actually get proper nine to ten feedback on the podcast website. What we did is we created a simple web-based interface where our guest literally go, click start recording, say whatever they have to say, stop recording. They even have a teleprompter there if they want to read it. And then literally say consent and upload it. Literally upload it's on our server. And we just have to go and see through it. And then a tick-up prove and it appears on the website now. So all this month-long process we had for like getting the reviews, video reviews, is now shrinked in like an email. So you see how the automation is helping out there and improving. Great stuff. So David, before we move to our lightning round which is a quick fire lightning question, I wanted to ask you like being a founder, how should a founder document creative processes or any other processes going on in their business so they can actually repeated without becoming a like a formula. Like if they have a repeating process, they can improve it with automation system. What is the best way to document it? Or maybe I can ask this question in a different word, what is the framework you use in order to figure out these processes? Like the one which you figured out with the frog form, right? And then implemented later. So not the implementation or automation part, the figuring out part. Yeah. Okay. So how do you figure out what to work on is a great question. And I have a book behind me that I recommend that everyone working. If you can't see the screen because they're still sitting to this, the book is called The Goal. The Goal. And it's by, I think the author's name is Ellie Goldrat. And the whole book is about, it's actually a fantasy book about a factory. I think they're producing engines. And the whole idea is like, what is the number one goal of a business? And the number one goal of the business is to increase the throughput of the business. Right? And it's the, it's to generate a couple of, there's only really a couple of things you could do to move the needle forward. And this is actually a required read from like Jeff Bezos gives this as a required read to all of his direct reports. Like if you work with Jeff Bezos, you have to read this, this book. And I think when you read it, you'll start to realize that there's only really a few things that you can work on that that actually moved the needle in the business. And the things that you think you need to work on are often not the thing that you need to work on. And the number one thing to always work on is where, where is your business, the most constrained from, from growth? Like let's say you were to say, say, say, say to me, hey, Dave, what, what would stop you from getting from, from where you are today to, so five times more in the business? And if you think about that and you start to map out the system, you'll start to see where your bottlenecks are occurring, but you'll start to see where there's friction in the process. And wherever there's friction in the process, that is the thing that you should work on and what is probably constraining you from growth, right? Whether you're not getting enough leads to fill the salespeople's time, right? Like that's, that's a very common one. Or on the film inside, like maybe, maybe your fulfillment team is blocked, right? They don't have the right checklist. They don't have the right systems to do their job on a day-to-day basis. So I think that's, that's one thing. The other part of your question was like, how do you, how do you actually take that and then codify and turn it into systems in the business? And there's two things you do there. The first one is you create frameworks of ways that people can think, right? So for example, like we have this, we have this system for creating videos called t-times, right? What is a t-time? A t-time is thought example action, right? A thought is kind of like your hook in the video. An example is an example of something that happened to, to create that, to create that, create that second part of the video. And an action is something that an action that that person can take to follow up on the video. It's kind of like a called action sort of. So that is like a triangle framework that we teach and we talk about with our people. And then they go talk about that with our clients. Second one is creating SOPs and standard operating procedures in your business, right? You know, using, using things like Loom and and recording software to record what you're doing and then pass it off to someone else to be able to do it. So I think those couple of things, like, like working on working on those few things, we'll keep you busy for quite a while. And then as you go up the levels, as you go up in levels in the business grows, it never stops. Just to shuffle, start to buckle, shuffle, start to break off the new reorganizations, you know, recreate from scratch. It's a constantly evolving organism. Indeed, indeed. By the way, I'm in the middle of the goal right now. I am reached to the point where L comes out of the stakeholder meeting and it starts thinking about like, what is the goal of a business, right? There's pages of pages going through that. Like, what is the goal? So I'm towards the end of it. So hopefully I reached to the point where I get to understand it. Great stuff. So David, we have lightning right now. We have got six quick file questions for you. At any stage, you think that you don't want to answer any questions. Just give me a skip and then we can move to the next one. Is that okay? That's a great stuff. What are the top three strategies to generate more leads in 2025, 26 now because we are almost in there. Number one content. If you're putting out more content, it's a it's a pull strategy versus a push strategy. You'll bring people into your world. You'll give them value. You'll then reach out to them. You know, on whatever social media platform you'll be social with them. We always forget that. Social media, you have to be social with the people that are engaging with you. And you know, you'll get some leads from that. Number two is ads. I still see like paid ads. You know, paid meta ads, paid Google ads. I see that as a huge way to be able to get leads. The third one is one that I don't think a lot of people talk about, which is partnerships. If you're able to find someone that has something that is tangential to your business, like for us, if if someone is like a course creator around creating content or they are, a course creator around video video or something that's tangential to us, like they are a great partner for us because they have a constant stream of people that are interested in what we're doing. And we offer a done for your service. They offer more of an information economy. So finding those finding those like match up in offers is key to it. Okay. So what book would you recommend to our audience and why? I mean, obviously you recommended gold, but other than that. If I can only pick one, it's a really hard question. I'm going to give you two. I'm going to give you two. Although I could give you, I'm, I read, I'm always reading something, but I will, I will give you my two favorite books. One is Principled by Ray Dalio. What that book will do is it'll help you codify the way in which you the way in which you think and provide values for companies and like give people a way to think versus a way to do, which I think is huge. Number two is a book by Dan Martell, called Buy Back Your Times. I have a copy right here. It's a great book. This will really think about, really reshape the way that you are thinking about, thinking about spending your time in the business. If you have one, if you want any other book recommendations about something you're struggling with, like your audience can reach out to me Instagram to show the best way I did it. But, you know, if you're struggling with book recommendations, like I am chocolate, all of them. Awesome. I'll, I'll mention your Instagram. I mean, I've already followed you while we were talking. So you go one follower more. What one attribute are correct to give you a mind of a successful founder? And I would say endurance. You need to have a strong level of endurance. And I've learned a lot about this through competing in endurance sports, right? You know, your goal when you're doing a long distance race like an Iron Man is your goals to keep yourself in a state homeostasis. You know, you don't want, you don't want the highs to be too high. You don't want the lows to be too low. You just want to get through the whole thing. You're keeping a nice steady state to the whole thing. You're put on the gas constantly. And I think people often quit too early. So I think having a strong level of endurance and wherever you find that motivation, like for me, I've, I've learned a lot about myself through doing actual endurance sports, which I brought into my business. But I think, I think just being able to endure through the hard times, because there's going to be hard times, endure, endure through the good times, because sometimes you can ride your high a little too hard and like take your foot off the gas. I think that that is, that is key to, to success and all around. Okay. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? It's really simple. Put everything in your calendar. So, so, so everything's just in my calendar. My EA has everything dialed in my calendar. Like basically I wake up and I press play on my day. Everything's already baked. There's no surprises. You know, if, if I need time to do extra stuff, there's breaks in my calendar for to do like answer my email, answer some text messages. There's, there's time that's built into my calendar. I don't think there's, there's many more productivity hacks beyond that. Everything else is just, in my opinion, noises. Got it, got it. What's a new or a crazy business idea? You would love to post you if you had time. Well, that's a great question. I would love, I would love to spend time working on something in a longevity space if I had time. Something, something to do with health and, and longevity. Sort of like what Brian Johnson's working on. Yeah, yeah, definitely. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know? It's a great question. I mean, I guess if today's the first time you're meeting me, hi, I'm Dave. But an interesting fact is once I'm actually wrote my bike from Philadelphia, Florida. And I did it in 10 days and then did two back-to-back Iron Man's. Well, I was down there. Yeah, I've seen just one Iron Man whole thing end to end on the TV, but that's, that's the reach of closeness to the Iron Man competition I could have reached my life. So I can imagine the, the hassle you have gone through it. But so, Dave, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story and unpacking last few years building this business and some of the ups and downs. People want to check out, people want to get in touch with you if you have any questions. What is the best way to do it? Yeah, best way to get in touch with me, either our website, viralideamarketing.com or reach out to me on Instagram, super active there at David Feynman. And again, like for gift for your audience, you know, if you want to learn how to hire a video editor, it doesn't suck. I'll reach out to me with ash podcasts. Just do you have me that? And I'll send you over, I'll send you over that guy for your audience. Awesome. Great stuff. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your inspiring journey and the impact for what you're doing in media and video. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on founder's podcast. Thanks, sir.