2000 Weekend

SPECIAL REPORT
Forward
For five years, every Thursday that I can, I have been holding a Q&A ses-
sion on Twitter. At 3:30 p.m. EST and for the next 90 minutes, I answer
every question I am asked.
I started doing this in March 2010 and I quickly noticed something very
interesting.
People didn’t care as much about certain things as I thought. They thought
they did and I thought they did…
But what was really happening was that people really had many other
issues on their minds. How to get over a bad breakup. How to deal with
the shame of failure. How to deal with the panic of public speaking, or not
going to college, or learning something new.
I would answer in 140 characters and then quickly move onto the next
question.
But over time, I’d see the questions asked again and again and again. So I
end up spending a lot of time researching them.
Which is part of the reason I started my podcast. If I have a hard time

finding the answer to a question in books, I’ll just call the world’s leading
authority and ask them to come on my podcast and then I can specifically
ask them the question (ex. Matt Barrie who I will talk about later).
Then I write about it.
Then I teach it.
“Learn, write, teach, repeat” is a learning technique that has been very
successful for me.
T H E A LT U C HER R EP O RT
And not only that, it’s been very helpful to the thousands of people who
have shown up to these Q&As. Not because I know all the answers (I
don’t) but because now I know through years of research and study what
questions are important to people. And I’ve practiced very hard to figure
out the fastest way to find answers.
This is why I started my newsletter. Because some answers can’t, and

shouldn’t, be limited to 140 characters.
Questions about learning are always the most important in these Q&A
sessions. People want to find their passions. What they really want to find
is the answer to the question, “How do I find what I am good at?” Well, you
can’t. You get good by using the best learning techniques out there.
And, of course, money is VERY important. And not just stocks.
Many, many people have asked me this exact same question, even the
same dollar number:
“How can I make $2,000 in a weekend?”
I had some ideas for answers. But I decided to take it to the next level.
Just as I have said before, that I believe everyone has a book inside of
them that they could write, I also believe that everyone has the ability to
work for themselves.
For some people, that may mean going out and starting a brand new
business. For others, that may mean becoming a freelancer and working
when, where and how you want.
Regardless, though, this guide will help you in any aspect of business.
James Altucher
3
How to Make $2000

in a Weekend
Freelancer.com is a $500 million company trading on the Australian Secu-
rities Exchange that aggregates millions of freelance jobs every month.
The founder and CEO, Matt Barrie, is a friend of mine (I have included our
entire conversation at the end of this report).
So I called Matt and asked him the $2,000 question, but worded slightly
differently:
What jobs are constantly posted on freelancer.com where I can easily earn
$2,000 in a weekend?
I was afraid he would ignore me. Freelancer.com is constantly buying new

companies. Matt is constantly traveling. But the entire reason he started
Freelancer.com was to help people get out of their cubicle jobs and find
more opportunities to make an income.
He wrote back to me instantly. And, full disclosure, I have ZERO financial

interest in the company or in promoting it.
In fact, I am grateful to Matt. In 2007, I used Freelancer.com to build

Stockpickr.com (initial cost: $2,000), which I sold eight months later to
TheStreet.com for $10 million.
I knew that each job that Matt sent me would require learning some skills.
Otherwise it would be too easy (and, hence, these jobs would not earn
you $2,000 in a weekend), but I wanted the skills to be easy to learn. For
instance, using Lynda.com or codeacademy.com, you can be in the top 1%
of WordPress developers within just a few months of study.
Here is what Matt wrote back to me:
Hi James,
Every single project is tailor-made based on the needs and requirements of

each employer, and therefore depends on the complexity, timing and costs of
the job.
4
Nevertheless, please find a list of projects where freelancers can easily make
$2,000 or more in just a couple of days:
1. Video Animation — video projects for KickStarter/Indiegogo or

animation explainer videos for a new product/ service launch are
an easy and quick job to do online
2. Programming — e.g. for Ecommerce stores (Shopify, Magento), we

have seen a huge increase in ecommerce, as well as social media
commerce
3. Website testing or Web Scraping — last minute changes on the site

before the big launch, companies want to make sure the site would
work as intended so they simply hire someone to test it throughout
4. Website Development and Design (as you said, WordPress fits in

this category) — it can be templated but it’s quick and efficient and
it looks good
5. Children’s Book Illustration — incredibly popular job on the site that

pays quite well. Self-publishing is a big thing these days and illus-
trators on the site can provide for a huge range of different design
styles that fit any requirements
6. Writing — we have seen numerous requests from people needing

help with their business plans or book editing hiring experts in the
field on Freelancer.com. It’s especially popular among not native
speakers when they need something done in English or another
language and they want to do it right
7. 3D Rendering and Architecture Design — huge skill on the site,

studios are willing to pay a lot of money to get last minute support
and help with their projects or contests
8. Software Architecture
9. App development — full time staff or freelance temp workers may

not always be available to help out, especially during the weekends,
while our developers on the site can easily fix any issue or help to
finalize the project when deadlines are tough
5
10. P
hotoshop or any other graphic design work — companies would
pay substantial money to have their PowerPoint, Infographics,
Brochures or Keynote presentations designed by a professional
designer on the site.
The best thing about our service is that people can work in different time
zones, so employers can get 3 days work done in just about 24 hours. E.g.
someone in Europe working for an Australian while they’re sleeping.
Freelancers can also take on several smaller projects from different employers
at the same time so they can earn a big chunk of money by the time the week-
end is over. Not just individuals, but companies and agencies employing several
people work through the site, running several projects simultaneously so they
can maximize the earnings.
Matt
Some of these skills (software architecture, for example) might take more
than a few months to learn, but not that much more.
And things like 3D rendering, you’d be surprised, are actually quite easy
to learn AND are in great demand. In fact, most of the job categories
described above require skills that you either have right now (web scrap-
ing or writing) or can be learned with some study (through courses given
all over the web and YouTube) and practice (illustration, 3D rendering,
Photoshop, app development, etc.).
Many people think, “If I just pick the right stock, it can go up and I will
make a lot of money.”
This may or may not be true.
But with a small amount of money, the best returns can happen if you
invest in YOURSELF, learn skills for the above jobs, and then start taking
on more and more freelance work until you can quit your job, or work from
anywhere.
Matt gave the top 10 jobs he sees on Freelancer.com, but I didn’t want to
stop there. Here are some other jobs that could reap huge rewards.
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1. Copywriting
Copywriting can be one of the most lucrative jobs with a little bit of effort.
But what is it?
Think about it this way: every company has something they need to sell,
but not every company knows how. They may be great at creating an
amazing product, but when it comes to getting people to buy, they may fall
short (especially as more and more people begin buying products online).
That is where a copywriter comes in.
A copywriter is able to successfully reach the people and businesses most

likely to buy their products… simply by sending letters and emails to those
who have shown an interest in similar products in the past.
The great thing about copywriting though, is that you don’t even need to
be an amazing writer. You just need to be able to write a simple letter with
a compelling story.
Given a few months, you can easily begin to pull in more than $50 an hour
and eventually receive commission on the sales you bring in.
The best place to start if you would like to begin to learn how to become a
copywriter is by reading the following books:
a. Ogilvy on advertising by David Ogilvy
b. Scientific advertising by Claude C. Hopkins
c. Tested advertising methods by John Caples
d. Copy logic by Michael Masterson & Mike Palmer
Once you have read these, it is time to begin building your portfolio. The
best way is often to begin writing for a friends company, or reach out to
owners of Etsy stores and write for free.
Once your portfolio is built, you can begin reaching out to potential clients
that you would like to write for and begin your profitable new business.
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2. Infodoodling
This is related to what Matt was talking about above in video animation.
Infodoodling is one of the largest sectors of growth for freelancers.
You’ve seen these videos — one of the most popular TED talks ever was
an Infodoodle.
The reason these kinds of videos are so successful is because they are
more engaging than just a person talking. The viewer feels like they are
able to follow a story — even if it’s a boring one.
3. Voiceover
Doing voiceovers is one of the easiest and most lucrative freelance jobs
out there.
Besides the obvious skill of having a voice people want to listen to, the
only other skills you need are related to recording and editing.
I personally have paid people to do voiceovers for my podcasts and I know

that they made a ton of money for the amount of work it took to record
them. It was worth it, though, because the voiceover is the first thing
someone hears when he or she listens to my podcast.
I could give you a full walkthrough of how to become a freelance voiceover

artist, but this guide is better: thevoiceoverguide.com
4. Translation services
Bilingual? Then you have a job.
Speak an uncommon language? Then you can be paid a lot of money.
Being a translator can be a very profitable side business.
Below is a list of the most in-demand jobs related to translations. The great
thing about being a translator is that it doesn’t only have to go one way. Not
only can you be hired to translate English to Norwegian, or whatever it is
you speak, but you can translate Norwegian into English.
8
Your Guide to Becoming

An Entrepreneur
Those ideas for freeing yourself from corporate and making money on
your own terms will certainly come in handy.
But what if you have an idea or a small business and you want to take it to
the next level?
I’m a big believer that the next century brings something even more
remarkable to the public: the downfall of corporatism and the rising of the
“Choose Yourself” era, when technology will have allowed us to create our
income streams and choose our freedom with greater opportunities than
ever before.
The average multi-millionaire has over seven different sources of income.
SEVEN.
This doesn’t mean seven jobs. That’s impossible.
Full-time jobs are only one source of income. Even entrepreneurship is one
source of income.
I’m on the board of a $1 billion revenue employment agency, CRS (NASDAQ:

CRRS). We’ve gone from $200 million in revenues to over $1 billion in just a
few short years.
How come?
Because companies don’t like people.
A. They are now constantly afraid of a repeat of 2009 when they

had to do mass layoffs.
B. They don’t understand all the new rules and regulations that
have been imposed on them by the government. They’d rather
outsource the hiring to employment agencies.
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These are not sexy companies: Manpower, Kelly, CRRS. But they are all
providing more and more solutions to the HR sector about how to man-
age employee services through technology, through better recruiting, and
through better management of adhering to all the regulations.
I went on the board of CRRS (and I am a shareholder) specifically so I could

see in advance of the government and all the pundits what’s happening
with employment six months before everyone else does.
It’s scary.
This is the new generation of employment and not the corporatism that
we grew up in. That we thought we were safe in.
And it’s not a choice of “Should I be an entrepreneur or an employee?” I

don’t think entrepreneurs have it any easier. There’s a high risk of failure.
The key is to develop multiple streams of income. Many of the tools can
be found in my latest book, “The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth.”
If you Google “How to become an entrepreneur,” you get a lot of mindless

clichés like “Think big!”
But for me, being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean starting the next Face-
book. Or even starting a business at all.
It means finding the challenges you have in your life, and determining
creative ways to overcome those challenges…
I believe that creating multiple income streams is important for everyone.
However, for now I am mainly going to focus on the issues that come up
when you first start an actual company.
These rules also apply if you are taking an entrepreneurial stance within a
much larger company (which all employees should do).
I’ve started several businesses.
Maybe 17 have failed out of 20. I fail quickly. I fail frequently. Entrepreneur-
ship is a sentence of failures punctuated by brief success.
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I’m invested in about 28 private companies. I’ve advised probably another

50 private companies. I’m on the board of several private companies and
one public company. The companies range from $0 in revenues to $1
billion in revenues.
Along the way, I’ve compiled a list of rules that have helped me deal with
every aspect of being an entrepreneur in business (and some in life).
Here are the rules:
A. It’s not fun. I’m not going to explain why it’s not fun. These are rules. Not
theories. I don’t need to prove them.
There’s a strong chance you’ll hate yourself throughout the process of be-
ing an entrepreneur. Keep sharp objects and pills away during your worst
moments. And you will have them.
B. Try not to hire people. You’ll have to hire people to expand your busi-
ness. But it’s good discipline to really question if you need each person
you’re thinking of hiring.
C. Get a customer. This seems obvious. But it’s not. Get a customer before
you start your business, if you can.
So many people say to me, “I have an idea. Can you introduce me to VCs?”
There is a HUGE gap between “idea” and “professional venture capital.”
In the middle of that gap is “customer.”
D. If you are offering a service, call it a product.
Oracle did it. They claimed they had a database. But if you bought their
“database” they would send in a team of consultants to help you “install”
the “database” to fit your needs.
In other words, for the first several years of their existence, they claimed
to have a product but they really were a consulting company. Don’t forget
this story. Products are valued more highly than services.
And almost EVERY major software product company was a service com-
pany in the beginning. Don’t forget that.
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E. It’s OK to fail. Start over. Hopefully before you run out of money. Hope-
fully before you take in investor money. Or, don’t worry about it. Come up
with new ideas. Start over.
F. Be profitable. Try to be profitable immediately. This seems obvious but it

isn’t. Try not to raise money. That money is expensive.
G. When raising money: If it’s not easy, then your idea is probably not
good. If it’s easy, then take as much as possible. If it’s TOO easy, then sell
your company.
H. The same goes for selling your company. If it’s not easy, then you need
to build more. Then sell. To sell your company, start getting in front of your
acquirers a year in advance. Send them monthly updates describing your
progress. Then, when they need a company like yours, your company will
be the first one that comes to mind.
Don’t be like that guy in the TV show “Silicon Valley.” If someone offers you
$10 million for a company that has no revenue, then sell it. Not everything
is going to be Facebook. And even the Google guys tried to sell their com-
pany for $3 BILLION to Yahoo before they were revenue-positive.
SELL THE COMPANY.
I. Competition is good. It turns you into a killer. It helps you judge progress.
It shows that other people value the space you are in. Your competitors
are also your potential acquirers.
J. Don’t use a PR firm. Except maybe as a secretary. You are the PR for
your company. You are your company’s brand.
I’ve never had a good PR company. I’ve had good PR secretaries. But they
are cheaper. One time I hired a PR company and they accidentally sent me
the contract for Terry Bradshaw. He was paying $10,000 a month. How did
they do for him?
K. Communicate with everyone. Employees. Customers. Investors. All the

time. Every day.
Employees want to know what to do, and how well they’re doing it.
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Investors want to be your friends and want to know that they can count on
you when times are tough.
L. Do everything for your customers. This is very important.
Find them significant others. Speak at their charities. Visit their parents for
Thanksgiving. Help them find other firms to meet their needs. Even intro-
duce them to your competitors if you think a competitor can help them or
if you think you are about to be fired. Always think first, “What’s going to
make my customer happy?”
Note: EVEN if that means introducing them to a competitor. If you are the
SOURCE, then everybody comes back to the source.
Your customer is not a company. There’s a human there. What will make
your human customer happy? Make him laugh. You want your customer
to be happy.
Show up. Go to breakfast/lunch/dinner with customers. Treat.
History. Know the history of your customers in every way. Company history,
personal history, marketing history, investing history, etc.
M. Micromanage software development. Nobody knows your product

better than you do. If you aren’t a technical person, learn how to be very
specific in your product specification so that your programmers can’t say:
“well you didn’t say that!”
N. Hire local. You need to be able to see and talk to your programmers.
Don’t outsource to India. I love India. But I won’t hire programmers from
there while I’m living in the United States.
O. Sleep. Don’t buy into the myth that if you’re an entrepreneur, you should
be putting in 20 hours of work a day. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to
have a focused mind.
If you are working 20 hours a day, then that means you have flaws in how
you are managing your time. You can argue about this but it’s true.
P. Exercise. Same as above. If you are unhealthy, your product will be

unhealthy.
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Q. Stay emotionally fit. If you try to juggle dating problems and software
development problems at the same time, VCs will smell it all over you.
R. Buy your employees gifts. Massages. Tickets. Whatever. I always

imagined that at the end of each day, my young lesbian employees (for
whatever reason, most employees at my first company were lesbians)
would be calling their parents, who would ask them: “Hi honey! How was
your day?” And I wanted them to be able to say: “It was the best!”
BONUS: Invite customers to masseuse day.
S. Treat your employees like they are your children. They need boundaries.
They need to be told “no” sometimes. But within boundaries, let them play.
T. Don’t be greedy when pricing your product. If your product is good and
you price it cheap, people will buy it. Then you can price upgrades, future
products, and future services more expensively. Which goes along with
the next rule:
U. Distribution is everything. Branding is everything. Get your name out

there, whatever it takes. The best distribution is, of course, word of mouth,
which is why your initial pricing doesn’t matter.
Write a blog about your industry and be very honest about all the flaws
(even your own).
Authenticity is the best branding.
V. Don’t kill yourself. It’s not worth it. Your employees need you.
Your children or future children need you. It seems odd to include this in a
post about entrepreneurship but we’re also talking about keeping it real.
Most books or “rules” for entrepreneurs talk about things like “think big” or
“go after your dreams”. But often, dreams turn into nightmares. I’ll repeat
it again. Don’t kill yourself. Call me if things get too stressful. More impor-
tantly, make sure you’re getting professional help.
W. Give employees structure. Let each employee know how his or her path
to success can be achieved. All of them will either leave you or replace you
eventually. That’s OK. Give them the guidelines on how that might happen.
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Tell them how they can get rich by working for you.
X. Fire employees immediately. If an employee gets “the disease,” he

needs to be fired. If they ask for more money all the time. If they bad-
mouth you to other employees. If you even think they are talking behind
your back, fire them.
The disease has no cure. And it’s very contagious. Show no mercy. Show
the employee the door. There are no second chances because the disease
is incurable.
I don’t say this because I want anyone to be hurt. But if you’ve followed
the rules above, then you are treating employees well already. NOBODY
should spread the disease and badmouth you or your customers.
Y. Make friends with your landlord. If you ever have to sell your company,
believe it or not, you are going to need his signature (because there’s going
to be a new lease owner).
Z. Only move offices if you are so packed in that employees are sharing
desks and there’s no room for people to walk.
AA. Have killer parties. But use your personal money. Not company money.
Invite employees, customers and investors.
AB. If an employee comes to you crying, close the door or take him or her
out of the building. Sit with him until he calms down. Listen to what he has
to say. If someone is crying, then there’s been a major communication
breakdown somewhere in the company. Listen to what it is and fix it. Don’t
get angry with the culprits. Just fix the problem.
AC. At Christmas, donate money to every customer’s favorite charity.
AD. Have lunch with your competitors. Listen and try not to talk.
AE. Ask advice a lot. Ask your customers advice on how you can be intro-
duced into other parts of their company. Then they will help you, because
of the next rule:
AF. Hire your customers. Or not. But always leave open the possibility. Let
it always dangle in the air between you and them. They can get rich with
you. Maybe. Possibly. If they play along. So play.
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AG. On any demo or delivery, do one extra surprising thing. Always add
bells and whistles that the customer didn’t pay for.
This is such an easy way to overdeliver that I’m surprised people don’t do
it 100% of the time. They do it maybe 1% of the time. So this is an easy
way to compete: surprise and delight.
AH. Understand the demographic changes of the world. Where are mar-
keting dollars flowing and how can you get into the middle of it? What
services do aging baby boomers need? Is the world running out of clean
water? Are newspapers going to survive? Etc. Read every day to under-
stand what is going on in the world around you, and find a way to capital-
ize on it.
Don’t go to a lot of parties or “meet-ups” with other entrepreneurs. Instead,

work while they are partying.
AI. Going along with the above rule, don’t listen to the doom-and-gloomers
who are hogging the TV screen trying to tell you the world is about to end.
They just want you to be scared so they can scoop up all of the money.
(There’s a lot of money in the doom-and-gloom industry.)
AJ. You have no more free time. In your free time you are thinking of new
ideas, new services to offer, new products.
Think of new ideas for potential customers. Then send them emails: “I
have 10 ideas for you. Would really like to show them to you. I think you
will be blown away. Here’s five of them right now.”
AK. Depressions, recessions, don’t matter. There’s $15 trillion in the econo-
my. You’re allowed a piece of it.
FedEx, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and many other of the world’s biggest

companies were started in recessions or depressions. Leave economics
to the academics while they leave good business to you.
AL. Talk. Tell everyone you ever met about your company and what it
does. Your friends will help you to find clients.
AM. Always take someone with you to a meeting. You’re bad at following
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up—you have no free time, remember? If you bring an employee with you,
you can have him follow up. Plus, he’ll like to spend time with the boss.
You’re going to be a mentor.
AN. Always be thinking of new services for your consumers. Each new ser-
vice has to make their lives better. People’s lives are better if: they become
healthier, richer, are having more sex, etc. “Health” can be broadly defined.
AO. If your customers are advertisers: find sponsorship opportunities for

them that drive customers straight into their arms. These are the most
lucrative ad deals (see rule above). Ad inventory is a horrible business
model. Sponsorships are better. Then you are talking to your customer.
AP. The harder it is for a consumer to sign up, the fewer consumers you will
have. No confirmation emails, sign-up forms, etc. The easier, the better.
AQ. If you are making a website, have as much content as you can on the
front page. You don’t want people to have to click to a second or third page
if you can avoid it. Stuff that first page with content. You aren’t Google.
AR. Say “yes” to any opportunity that gets you in a room with a big deci-
sion maker. Doesn’t matter if it costs you money. And don’t accept a “no”
from someone who doesn’t have the authority to give you a “yes.”
AS. Sell your company two years before you sell it. Get in the offices of
the potential buyers of your company and start updating them on your
progress every month. Ask their advice on a regular basis in the guise of
an “industry catch-up.”
AT. If you sell your company for stock, sell the stock as soon as you can.
If you are selling your company for stock, it means:
a. The market is such that lots of companies are being sold for
stock.
b. AND, companies are using stock to buy other companies be-

cause they value their stock less than they value cash.
c. W
HICH MEANS, that when everyone’s lockup period ends, EVERY-
ONE will be selling stock across the country. So sell yours first.
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AU. Execution is a dime a dozen. If you have an idea worth pursuing, then
just make it. You can build any website for cheap. Hire a programmer and
make a demo. Get at least one person to sign up and use your service. If
you want to make Facebook pages for plumbers, find one plumber who
will give you $10 to make his Facebook page. Just do it.
Fail quickly. Good ideas are HARD. It’s execution that is a dime a dozen.
AV. Don’t use a PR firm, part II. Set up a blog. Tell your personal stories
(see 33 Unusual Tips to Being a Better Writer). Let the customer know you
are human, approachable, and have a real vision for why they need to use
you. Become the voice for your industry, the advocate for your products. If
you make skin care products, tell your customers every day how they can
be even more beautiful than they already are and have more sex than they
are currently having. Blog your way to PR success. Be honest and bloody.
AW. Don’t save the world. If your product sounds too good to be true, then
you are a liar.
AX. Your company is always for sale.
AY. Frame the first check. I’m staring at mine right now.
AZ. Pick a random customer. Find five ideas for them that have nothing
to do with your business. Call them and say, “I’ve been thinking about you.
Have you tried this?”
BA. No resale deals. Nobody cares about reselling your service. Those are
always bad deals.
BB. Your lawyer or accountant is not going to introduce you to any of their
other clients. Those meetings are always a waste of time.
BC. Celebrate every success. Your employees need it. They need a mas-
sage also. Get a professional masseuse in every Friday afternoon. Nobody
leaves a job where there is a masseuse.
BD. Sell your first company. I have to repeat this. Don’t take any chances.
You don’t need to be Mark Zuckerberg. Sell your first company as quickly
as you can. You now have money in the bank and a notch on your belt.
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Make $1 billion on your next company. Note Mark Cuban’s story. Before he
started Broadcast.com and rode it to a few billion, he sold his first software
company for $10 million.
BE. Pay your employees before you pay yourself.
BF. Give equity to get the first customer. If you have no product yet and no
money, then give equity to a good partner in exchange for them being a
paying customer. Note: Don’t blindly give equity. If you develop a product
that someone asked for, don’t give them equity. Sell it to them. But if you
want to get a big distribution partner whose funds can keep you going
forever, then give equity to nail the deal.
BG. Don’t worry about anyone stealing your ideas. Ideas are worthless
anyway. It’s OK to steal something that’s worthless.
BH. The most important rule: Have a customer before you start your
business. This is a corollary of the phrase “ideas are a dime a dozen.”
There is another corollary: Lazy is best. If you have to work for two years
before $1 of revenue comes into business, then that’s too much work. I’m
lazy so I like money coming in with as little work as possible. Mark Zucker-
berg, of course, is different. He put in years of work before the first dollar of
revenue came in. But we’re different people.
FAKE RULE: People say execution is important. That’s not really true either.
Execution is useless. It’s a commodity. The only thing that’s important
is money. You get money by having a customer. You get a customer by
satisfying a need that’s so important to them that they would be willing
to pay for it. If you have a customer who’s willing to pay you money, then
execution becomes a lot easier. Life as an entrepreneur is hard. Why make
it harder for yourself?
I like stability as much as I like taking risks. So for me, I need a customer.
It’s a matter of how much risk you want to take.
Earlier I suggested reasons why people need to quit their jobs and jump
into the abyss. If a customer happens to be waiting for you in the abyss,
then you won’t be lonely there.
19
Example: How I started Stockpickr
Tom Clarke, the CEO of thestreet.com called me up in mid2006. He want-

ed to meet and brainstorm ideas with me. So I had about two weeks to
prepare. I called up a development firm in India. MySpace had just been
acquired by NewsCorp, so I sketched out what I considered the “MySpace
of finance.” I threw in every idea from my own trading.
In other words, I wanted to create a site that I would use as a professional

trader and that I knew other traders would benefit from. And, I had a theory
about making a quality financial site that basically had no news in it.
My ideas for the site were purely based on my own 10 years’ experience
as a professional trader. In fact, I had just turned down working for a
multi-billion-dollar hedge fund based on a specific strategy I had.
Instead, I implemented that strategy within Stockpickr.com.
Within a week, for free (because I told the company in India that I would
build the site with them if they sent back good screenshots), the company
sent me back screenshots.
I met with Tom and told him, “I’m almost done with the site. Here it is.” (I
exaggerated.) And I showed him the screenshots. I had set up meetings
with Yahoo! and AOL as well to discuss them, so it wasn’t a stretch to say,
“I’m also talking to Yahoo! and AOL.” Nobody wants to be the first custom-
er, so you have to create the aura of many customers.
And so he said, “Why are you talking with them? You’ve been with us forev-
er. Let’s do this together.” So we negotiated right there. I said, “Great, how
about you guys take 10% of the company and put all of your extra ads on
all of our pages and let me link from every article back to Stockpickr.com.”
He said, “I thought we were partners. Lets do it 50/50.” So right away, I had

given up 50% of the company. Most people I spoke to thought this was a hor-
rible idea. In fact, one of my employees quit because I did this. But giving 50%
of your company away is often better than giving 10% of your company away.
When you give 50% of the company away, your partner is obligated to
follow through and be a real partner. He can never forget about you.
20
The most popular person in financial media, Jim Cramer, was also a 50%
partner in my business, since he was the founder of thestreet.com. If you
can get the top person in your field to take equity, you’re golden from day
one.
Again, it’s all about making life easy. With family responsibilities, health,
life in general, why make things even harder for yourself?
It’s like that saying, “When you owe the bank $1 million, they own you.
When you owe the bank $1 billion, you own them.” Three years later, I
watched as another company, which thestreet.com only took 10% of,
almost disappear, because thestreet.com was not obligated to follow
through.
So, at that point, without even having a site finished (or even started), I
knew I had three things going for me:
A. I was going to get traffic. I could write three or four articles a

day and link each one back to Stockpickr.com. Thestreet.com
got $100 million page views per month, so I knew I would get
some percentage of that.
B. I was going to make money. If I got even three million page views
a month and the average CPM of thestreet.com (according to
their SEC filings) was $17, I would make about $50,000 a month,
with expenses nearing zero. What if I put three ads a page on
the site? Then I would make even more. Slap a 40x multiple on a
growing company and before I even started, I had real value.
C. Profitability and growth from day one meant I could put the
company up for sale almost immediately. But that’s another
story.
With my first successful company, Reset, I had about 10 paying custom-

ers before I finally made the jump to running the company fulltime: HBO,
Interscope, BMG, New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers were all paying
customers before I jumped ship from HBO to run Reset full time.
When I started my fund of hedge funds, I didn’t put one dime into the ex-
pense of setting it up until I had the first $20 million commitment. Twenty
21
million dollars with a 1.5% management fee meant an instant $300,000

in revenues, plus extra money for legal fees, etc. Enough to pay a salary
or two. It took a year of cultivating my network before I had that commit-
ment, but it worked.
This is just me personally. Some people don’t mind starting a company

without any customers. I’m too conservative for this. I’m happy even to
give up equity to get that first customer. Fifty percent of a profitable com-
pany is better than 100% of a company that will probably quickly go out of
business. How do you get that first customer?
Who? List the top 20 CEOs or high-level executives you would like
to meet. If you have a Rolodex, great. If you don’t, then you might
have to write to 40 people. This is why it’s important to exploit your
employer and use some of the other ideas mentioned throughout
this blog. But it’s OK if your Rolodex is cold. Many successful busi-
nesses I’ve been involved with started with cold emails.
Ideas. Develop 20 ideas for each person. Get your idea muscle in
shape first.
Communicate. Write them all, giving at least 10 of the ideas, in

detail, and how you would implement them. Sometimes you have
to dig for their email addresses. Like I did here.
Meet. All this does is get you the meeting. Once you’re in the door,
the conversation can go anywhere. Of the 20 people you write, the
rule of the universe is you’ll get three meetings.
Ask. In the meetings, ask the question, “What one product can I
build for you that you will definitely buy?” Remember, execution
is a commodity. Because of globalization, you can build anything
for cheap. I built the first working version of Stockpickr.com for
$3,000 in Bangalore. Throw in another $150 from a design made
in Siberia. You need zero skillset for that. Just a good idea muscle,
an ability to sell and modest ability to manage a project.
Never say “no.” Never. If someone says, “Can you do this?” Yes.
“But can you do this?” Yes. “Can you do it for this?” Yes.
22
Follow up every day. Nice to meet you. Here’s my sketch of what

you want. Is this right? Should I start today?
Equity. If necessary, give up equity for that first customer. Or first

two customers.
Done. If more than one CEO wants the same product or service,
and the price is right, then you now have a business. Build the
product, sell it, and you’re in shape.
Repeat. You’re not really “done.” Every day you have to go back
and see if your customer is achieving more success BECAUSE of
your products. If he is, then ask him what else he needs and build
it. If he isn’t, then ask him what else he needs and builds it. Your
easiest new sales will be with your old customers.
This has worked for me on three different occasions. And each time
resulted in great profits for me. By the way, this technique has also worked
for people who have contacted me with their own ideas.
Listen. You’ve been hypnotized. You’ve been told you need a corporate job.
You need a college degree. You need stability. You need the white picket
fence. You need the IRA and the health insurance. Snap your fingers in
front of your face. The American Religion is a myth, just like Thor. Stability
is only in your mind. There’s $15 trillion in our economy, recession or no
recession. It’s falling like snow. Reach out with your tongue and taste it.
Questions from Readers

Question: You say no free time but you also say keep emotionally fit, phys-
ically fit, etc. How do I do this if I’m constantly thinking of ideas for old and
potential customers?
Answer: It’s not easy or everyone would be rich. Find the time in your
time. Working out or going for a run is a great place to think while staying
physically fit.
Question: How do I cold call clients?
23
Answer: Email them. Email 40 of them. It’s OK if only one answers. Email
40 a day, but make sure you have something of value to offer.
Question: Should I hire programmers?
Answer: Start with freelancers. Then hire.
Question: What if I build my product but I’m not getting customers?
Answer: Develop a service loosely based on your product and offer that
to customers. But I hope you didn’t make a product without talking to
customers to begin with.
Question: I have the best idea in the world, but for it to work, it requires a
lot of people to already be using it. Like Twitter.
Answer: If you’re not baked into the Silicon Valley ecosystem, then find dis-
tribution and offer equity if you have to. Zuckerberg had Harvard. MySpace
had the fans of all the local bands they set up with MySpace pages. I (in my
own small way) had thestreet.com when I set up Stockpickr. com. I also
had 10 paying clients when I built my first successful business full time.
Question: I just lost my biggest customer and now I have to fire people.
I’ve never done this before. How do I do it?
Answer: Be kind. State the facts. Say you have to let people go and that
everyone is hurting, but you want to keep in touch because he or she is a
great employee. It was an honor to work with them and when business
comes back you hope you can convince them to come back. Then ask
them if they have any questions. Your reputation and the reputation of
your company are on the line here. You want to be a good guy. But you
want them out of your office within 15 minutes. It’s a termination, not a
negotiation. This is one reason why it’s good to start with freelancers.
Question: I have a great idea. How do I attract VCs?
Answer: Build the product. Get a customer. Get money from the customer.
Get more customers. Build more services into the product. Get the VC.
Chances are that by this point, the VCs are calling you.
Your business is not your life. When you start a business, you also get a
cognitive bias that makes you think your business is GREAT.
24
Every day, make sure you are not smoking crack. The most important
thing is your health so that you can be persistent. If you smoke crack, you
can die.
Good luck.
Interviews with Top

Entrepreneurs
Interview with Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com
James Altucher: I have one of my heroes on the podcast with me today,
Matt Barrie. Welcome to the show.
Matt Barrie: Thank you for having me.
James Altucher: Matt I don’t think you even realize why you’re one of my
heroes so for A) I just want to explain for the audience, you’re the founder
and CEO of freelancer.com and in 2006 — one of the companies that you
have since acquired — I outsourced a development of a website for just a
few thousand dollars which I ended up selling for a huge amount just eight
months later. So I just love the whole impact that freelancer.com is having
on the entrepreneurial economy.
Matt Barrie: That’s phenomenal.
James Altucher: I’m a success story for you.
Matt Barrie: That’s great. What’s really exciting about running a market
place like ours — so folks, the listeners that are out there, I mean basically
we’re EBay for jobs. We have 15 million users from around the world. In
fact we just hit that milestone two weeks ago. We have posted 7.5 million
jobs and the sorts of jobs that can be done on our site are really anything
with a computer.
So jobs like website design — James did a website deal for example —
graphic design, translation, copywriting and so forth. About five or six
25
years ago we had about 20 different categories of jobs. Now we have 750.
So we have areas like aerospace engineering, genetic engineering, bio-
technology, manufacturing, you name it, so really any sort of job that can
be done with a computer.
James Altucher: So Matt let me ask you about that. What does an aero-
space engineer do on freelancer.com? How does he become a freelancer?
Matt Barrie: Well, it’s pretty amazing actually. You think our employers are
primarily small businesses, consumers from western economies so the
US, UK, Canada, Australia. The freelancers are primarily from emerging
economies, so India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Philippines. So you think
to yourself how is it possible that someone from emerging economies is
working in the aerospace industry and then you look at the Indian aero-
space industry and it’s huge. It’s much bigger than Australia’s for example.
So, you know, the sorts of jobs I’ve seen go through there and every year
it does blow me away in terms of the complexity and the sophistication
of the jobs. They really every year get better and better and better, but I’ve
seen things like computational fluid dynamics over an aerospace body.
I’ve seen, I think it was California Electric Car Company, get a drive train
assembly designed through our site.
I mean you do see all sorts of crazy things because you see in the develop-
ing world — just like you or I so you can get an opportunity in education just
as smart. I mean I know non-PhD’s, poor, hungry, driven. They work harder.
They have a much better work ethic than I think many of my compatriots in
Australia for example.
And you know, the Internet now is really proliferating knowledge in such
an amazing way where if you have an Internet connection and a computer
really you can just go on line and if you want to learn how to do, you know,
learn a subject in aerospace engineering — I mean MIT and Harvard and
Stanford and all the universities around the world have had their course
material on line for well over a decade or so.
And now you’ve got like this revolution in with the online universities where
you have more sophisticated courses being provided in really any subject
area you want. So you know, people who have an education can jump in
26
with these skilled areas. If you don’t you can skill yourself up thanks to the
Internet.
James Altucher: Yeah. So for instance as an example, let’s say someone

is feeling stuck and tired in their job and wants to work from home. Maybe
they want to be around their kids more or whatever. They could use some-
thing like Codecademy to learn WordPress skills and then suddenly, you
know, they can list their skills on freelancer.com and they can bid for jobs
and start making a living.
Matt Barrie: That’s right. I mean it’s a fantastic platform not just to turn
your ideas into reality if you’re an entrepreneur and you have an idea for
a web site like you did to kind of get them done really cost effectively and
quickly. But also if you’re a freelancer or you’re in a certain career and you
want to change career or you have a hobby or a passion or an interest in
doing something new, it allows you to really architect your career.
So maybe for a few weeks you learn about web design then you work on
a few web sites then you want to learn about mobile phone app develop-
ment. You can do that for a few weeks. Then maybe you want to learn
about music or something completely new, wearable computing or maybe
how to program the Apple watch that’s now come out; it really allows you
to architect your career. And it doesn’t matter where you are. You might be
in a remote community and you can kind of work in these areas which I
think is really special.
James Altucher: Right and the flip side of that is let’s say I’m an entrepre-
neur and I come up with an idea for an app for the Apple watch. I can go to
freelancer.com; I can put out the spec of my idea. I’m not — if I’m out-
sourcing to one of these third world countries I’m not really worried about
anybody stealing my idea. I get the app built and upload to the Apple Store
and I’m in business.
Matt Barrie: I mean it’s basically as simple as that. I mean really you’re
only limited by your imagination now. If you have that spark of an idea,
that spark of creativity in terms of starting a business or starting a, de-
veloping a product or a service or whatever it might be, we take the time,
the cost and the hassle how to turn that idea into a reality by connecting
27
you with an online work force. I mean to get like an app built for example,
I think the average price for like an Apple iPhone app at the moment is
around $650.00. So it really is quite inexpensive and quite a low cost to
really get these things done.
James Altucher: I don’t think most people realize that. Like I think a lot of
people think oh, I’m going to have to spend $20,000.00 for an app, but like
I’ll just tell you the example. So when I started this web site in 2006, first I
wanted some designs and so for a couple hundred dollars I specked out
this site and they designed every page of the site. And then I said okay,
implement it now, code it. And that cost me $2,000.00 to code the first
version of the site and then all together maybe I spent less than $8,000.00
for a site that had millions of users ultimately.
Matt Barrie: Yeah.
James Altucher: And you mention in your blogs — you have a blog,
nothing ventured, nothing gained. You haven’t written on it in a while, but
you mentioned one example where you saw an online store. I think it was
selling like pants or whatever and you decided to just completely duplicate
the store and then also hire a freelancer to get you high on Google and
then you started making like on average $300.00 a day in sales.
Matt Barrie: So this is — yeah. So this is a long time ago. This is when I
was — this is when I really discovered the whole industry before I started
freelancer.com. I was using some of the small sites throughout there in the
space and I had this concept in my head of in the future could there possibly
be companies that exist that actually don’t have any staff, where you got a
business model that works so well that, you know, really it’s just automated.
It’s all run by software and you can just generate revenue without actually
having to employ anyone.
So I had this little idea. I found this web site that did wholesaling of sort of
art and craft supplies and I basically just hired some freelancers to mirror
that web site but just mark everything up in terms of a retail price and then
I used that retail. Every time an order was placed on the retail web site I
basically sent an order off to the wholesale web site which would drop
ship it for me and I hired a freelancer for about $350.00 a month to do
28
customer service and just kind of deal with customer queries and update
the site and keep it running and so forth. In fact, the site wasn’t making a
lot of money, but the model kind of worked and I —
James Altucher: Could you have extended that like say basically do 1,000
stores?
Matt Barrie: I think I probably could have extended. I don’t know about
1,000 stores. I certainly could have extended that model significantly
further, but you know, in fact I mean that was kind of running for so long I
actually forgot the password to the PayPal account and a few weeks later
I was like oh, there’s money there. I mean obviously at a time that I didn’t
put any time or energy into that business so it did eventually come up
doing away, but it was interesting kind of little concept for what you can
do using freelancers.
James Altucher: You know, so who right now would you say is making
money, making a living even by western standards on freelancer.com?
Like what kind of skill sets? How do I — let’s say I’m sitting in my cubicle
and I’m stuck and how do I now — let’s say I have some skills or I take
some courses and take some skills, get some skills.
Matt Barrie: Yeah.
James Altucher: How do I become a freelancer and start making a living?
Matt Barrie: Well, I mean the beauty about the site is everyone on the site
is there to make money. So whether you’re an employer, primarily being
small business owners and startups and so forth in western economies or
freelancers in developing world economies, you’re there to make money.
So if you’re in the US, for example, you’re probably setting up a website to
do something. You sell products online or you come up with a blog, some
sort of model, maybe a membership model or whatever it might be.
If you’re a freelancer you’re there quoting a services business so everyone

is really there to make money. And so that’s what’s great. You’re dealing
with a network of really entrepreneurs where both sides, you’re empow-
ering entrepreneurs. In the west you’re empowering entrepreneurs to get
things done with the workforce. On the other side you’re empowering
29
entrepreneurs in developing economies with jobs and opportunity for

income where it doesn’t exist if you’re in Bangladesh and you want to work
in say SEO for example where jobs are very few and far between and don’t
pay very much.
Like you know, if you’re in the US for example, really where I encourage
people to use the site is to sell a business. I mean everyone’s got ideas on
something that they would kind of love to do in terms of running their own
business and we really make it easy to kind of do that right.
James Altucher: But do you think also there’s a trend towards insourcing
in the sense that if I’m in the US I still like hire somebody in the US and pay
the higher prices just because it’s easier to communicate and I understand
exactly what kind of work ethic I’m getting and I can do due diligence and
so on?
Matt Barrie: Well, I think there are good reasons to actually hire locally
and have employees. I don’t think it’s really the reasons are really around
communication or around the work ethic because I think you’ll actually
find that the work ethic of freelancers from emerging economies is way,
way beyond what you’d actually get from a local provider. I mean people
are making their month salary in a few hours or a few days, so they’re just
interested in whatever it takes to keep you happy. I’ll do your revisions, et
cetera and so forth.
I think the key reasons to hire and employ people directly is if you really
have something that’s core to your business, like really like core intellec-
tual property. If you’re a software company, for example, and you’ve got
some core algorithms or some core infrastructure, you know, it might
make sense that you need to have those done locally to kind of get the
business up, but there’s a lot of things that don’t need to be core and a lot
of things that get done a lot better if you actually outsource them.
So for example if you kind of want to get a whole bunch of, you know,
graphic design done, flyers or for brochures or you want to get, you know,
some marketing done or you want to get translation done, I mean basically
jobs — it’s much faster to use the freelance model than to actually try and
hire someone locally and you know, employ them full time.
30
James Altucher: I’ll give you a good example. I recently took a best-sell-
ing book, a book that’s on the best seller list and I used freelancer.com to
basically hire someone to rewrite the book but keep it exactly the same
but just change every word and move the sentences around a little so it’s
not a plagiarism. And so I have the exact — and then I used freelancer.com
to design a cover and I used Facebook to AB test different covers that I
got off of freelancer.com and the whole thing cost me about $3,000.00. I
haven’t yet released the book, but it’s ready to go.
Matt Barrie: I mean it’s just so easy. I saw another book that went through
a few weeks ago. This is pretty crazy. So we’ve got two different ways
you can get work done on the site. The main way that jobs get done is by
posting projects, which is the traditional outsourcing model. So you type a
short description of what you want done. You set a budget. You get post
and people around the world bid on it and you can ask them questions and
kind of pick who you want to hire and ultimately award them the job.
But we have another model in which you can get jobs done which is the
crowd-sourcing model and this is where you put up a prize and then peo-
ple compete for that prize. So you might say, you know, design me a logo.
The prize is say $50.00 or $100.00 or $10.00 or whatever it may be and
then people around the world will contribute designs and it’s very direct.
You say I like this. I don’t like this. Change the colors or whatever and you
can converge rapidly to a great outcome.
Now, the book I saw recently used the crowd-sourcing model and the book
was a cookbook for designing recipes with saffron. And what they said
was I want anyone from around the world can submit a recipe to me but
you’ve got to put a nice photo with your submission and if I like the recipe
and I like the photo and I select it for the cookbook I’ll pay you $7.00. And
it literally it was in a couple of days that it selected 100 or 200 different
recipes and basically the content of the cookbook was done. You just had
to get it typeset and the cover design and so forth, which also is very easy
to do on the site.
But it’s just amazing the power of crowd-sourcing and how you can just re-
ally supercharge the business models and supercharge ideas for products
if you think creatively and have an ability for these things.
31
James Altucher: So that’s amazing. So then they can upload — they have
a couple hundred recipes. They can upload that to Amazon. They can get
SEO going on saffron recipes and bam, they’ll make their money back and
then some.
Matt Barrie: That’s right.
James Altucher: So what’s like the craziest job you’ve seen outsource
where you said to yourself “I can’t believe this was put on freelancer.com?”
Matt Barrie: Well, I mean the stuff that I’m really, really, really excited
about right now that, you know, I think it’s kind of crazy when I look at
it — I guess it’s not crazy in the sense of crazy — is the stuff that people
are getting done in the manufacturing sections. So people are coming
with ideas like, you know, I want to have a lawn sprinkler that connects to
Wi-Fi that will connect to Twitter and Facebook and tweet certain things
at certain times of day.
And what’s actually happening is there’s a lot of factories around the world
in places like China that have spare capacity and they’ve all got design
teams. And what they’ll do is they’ll put their design teams onto bidding
on these jobs and design the product for you very, very cheaply because
they’ll say if you want 5,000 units or 10,000 units by next month here’s the
price straight on board to San Francisco or wherever it may be. So literally
people are getting products designed with just spark or an idea.
I mean there was a guy the other day that got a — he wrote in a little story
and said I had the most amazing experience. He had, he was living in a
dilapidated mansion and he said he called it the Playboy mansion and he
wanted to run a contest. And he was in Australia. And he wanted to have
these giant inflatable swans in this pool party. The problem is the only place
he could find to buy them on line is from the US and because they weigh 3.5
kilos when they’re deflated it was going to be very, very expensive for the
freight to ship them across.
So he thought well maybe I can get someone and try to make them for
me really cheaply and I can buy a bunch of them and sell some of them
on line and get my swans cheaply rather than to pay all this hundreds
and hundreds of dollars in freight. And so he posted a contest in the
32
crowd-sourcing model and design for me an inflatable pool toy swan. I

think he put a prize of about $400.00 for that.
These factories from around the world including China would bid on it
submitting 3-D designs for the inflatable swan, and literally he ended up
buying $5,00.00 worth of product because that’s the minimum order from
a factory generally. He paid $16.00 per unit freight on board delivered to
Australia. So maybe 400 units he got in his first order. He sold them on line
at giantswan.com for about $100.00 each and he’s built like this pool toy
empire now just sitting basically at home in his underpants or his pajamas
as you are now selling these things on line.
In fact he’s got a new product now called giant flamingo which is giantfla-
mingo.com and he’ll ship around the world these inflatable toys. And you
know, the box design I think was a contest that cost about $200.00 in the
crowd-sourcing model. The design of the toy itself was about $400.00. He
sells it using shopify so he did a skin for shopify which I think was about
$250.00 using freelancers.
And I mean really this is an idea that he financed off the back of a credit card.
He said he had a complaint recently. He said, you know, I used to just go
down to the post office every day and drop a few of these off of my scooter,
but now I’m now doing $3,500.00 a day in sales. I have to take my car down
twice with a load full of these products because I’m selling so many.
James Altucher: Could he drop ship from the manufacturer?
Matt Barrie: Well, they’ve offered to do that now so that’s exactly what he’s
done. And in fact, he’s now moved to Bali and he’s just living the life. You
know, he’s sitting on the beach somewhere in Bali selling these pool toys
internationally and it’s all being financed just off the back of a credit card.
James Altucher: That’s incredible. Okay. Tell me another story. You’re just
like an entrepreneur storyteller.
Matt Barrie: Look, I’ll tell you a pretty amazing story and this is a story
about using freelancers that my major investor in the business did many
years ago. And this is sort of how he made a lot of money at a very young
age. He started a company called PC Tools, and they produce a software,
33
antivirus software program called Spyware Doctor and he actually hired

some freelancers. This was many years ago. This was about a decade
ago and he paid $1,000.00 to a team in India to just write some antivirus
software and he put it on download.com and it became the number one
download on download.com.
So his product was originally $1,000.00. He would sell it on line for about
$40.00 per year. The business model was fantastic actually. The way the
business model worked was it was a freemium model. I think maybe some
of your listeners might know that. Basically it’s where you offer a free ver-
sion of the product which has some functionality in it, but then it you want
to kind of upgrade and get a premium functionality you have to pay a fee.
So what would happen would be you would get a virus on your laptop. You
would search Google for free antivirus. You would find, you know, Spyware
Doctor on download. com. It would be free. You would download it. It would
run on your computer for a few hours. It would scan for viruses. It would say
yes, we found viruses. Would you like me to remove them for you? You would
say yes, and it would say please put your credit card in for $49.95 per year.
He actually bootstrapped that business to $40 million a year in revenue with

no external financing. He paid $1,000.00 originally for the first software to
be developed and the rest of the business was absolutely bootstrapped
from that. He took a little bit of money in — he took out about $100 million in
revenue and he actually sold it to Symantec for about $300 million dollars.
Now that’s kind of originally how he made his money. Then of course he in-
vested in us, in the very, very early days and he’s made a significant amount
of money after that. This was a business that was basically started with a
bunch of freelancers doing a software product that cost $1,000.00.
James Altucher: So you’re right now able to see what the trends are,
whether people are buying, you know, they’re making apps for Facebook.
Are they making apps for the iPhone? Are they making apps for iTunes?
Matt Barrie: Yes.
James Altucher: What kind of trends are you seeing and what’s kind of
surprising you in the trends and what people are outsourcing right now?
34
Matt Barrie: It’s pretty timely you ask me that question actually because we
actually publish a quarterly trends report called the Fast 50. In fact that’s
going to be released on Monday where we will put — we think it’s a very good
forward-living indicator of what products are doing well, what companies are
doing well, what technologies are doing well and so forth. You know we’ve
seen a really big boom in all things 3-D recently so you know, everything from
3-D modeling to 3-D printing through to animation video, et cetera.
James Altucher: What do you mean animation video?
Matt Barrie: So you know, people are making video you know to shop
their products and so they’re doing this sort of nice little visual animations
where they hire freelancers to kind of do the graphics for them in those
videos and do it quite inexpensively. So you know, TV commercials and
YouTube commercials and things like that, product intros, product dem —
you know like you go to FAQ section now on a bunch of sites. Instead of
having a bunch of text there you can have little videos kind of explain how
the product works and so forth. So we’re seeing a big boom in that. I mean
we’ve just added the Apple watch category so we’re seeing — I mean it’s a
very low base, but we’re seeing pick up there.
James Altucher: What’s an example of an app for the Apple watch? Like
let’s say I’m going to start trying to be clever with the Apple watch. What
direction should I think?
Matt Barrie: Well I think the starting point for that is really going to be
around really notifications for the most part. I actually haven’t got my
hands on a watch yet so I’m only theorizing here in terms of its use. From
what I see or the apps that people are putting together right now it’s really
around, you know, communicating in some way. You’re using the watch
in terms of maybe you have an existing product which may be a mobile
app. Instead of seeing notifications on the front you know how you can
send them to the watch and get a glimpse of some stats or some data or
message coming in or an update or whatever may be.
James Altucher: I see. So it would be pretty cool for instance if I have my

global notifications, you know, pop up every time my name is mentioned
somewhere, I can now have it on my watch?
35
Matt Barrie: Maybe. I mean maybe in your blog you can maybe glimpse
it. If you’re selling products from your blog or subscriptions or what have
you, monetize it. Once in a while getting little updates, how’s it going or you
know, if somebody submits a query or sends you a message to the blog
you’re getting an update on that or traffic stats or alerts. If the blog is down,
for example, and there’s a critical error, you know, it’s streaming in the
messages from that. You know, I mean in terms of a category, the category
killer apps there are for the watch — they’re going to be around healthcare
and I’ve seen a lot of companies early stage pitch ideas around age care.
So senior citizens seem to suffer from things like falls and so forth and
if there’s a way you can put a watch on their arm and they can — get a
button to get someone to respond or get someone to come monitor their
health or get someone to kind of assist in something for them more easily.
I think there’s a lot of opportunity there in personal healthcare and per-
sonal analytics to health. I think it’s a whole new category and it’s a pretty
exciting category.
James Altucher: And are there freelancers yet on the other side of the
equation that have the skill set to develop Apple watch apps?
Matt Barrie: Absolutely. I mean they’ve been working on IOC’s working on

Apple and iPhone applications and so it’s just a network from that.
James Altucher: And so how much does it cost like for me to hire a
freelancer in the Philippines to make an Apple watch app?
Matt Barrie: It would be in the hundreds of dollars to low thousands de-

pending on the specs.
James Altucher: Wow. And android versus, you know, IOS, is that a trend
that you keep track of?
Matt Barrie: We do track in quarter and quarter. It’s a constant battle.

There’s been a bit of an upsurge just recently because of interest because
the Apple watch has come out so there’s been a bit of an upsurge, but
android has been dominating sort of quarter on quarter
James Altucher: In the US or around the world?
36
Matt Barrie: Around the world. I mean a lot more people have android
phones than they do Apple phones.
James Altucher: Right. So okay. So basically if I’m in the US, the way I
should be thinking is hmm, what businesses can I start cheaply that can
potentially scale up and I could use freelancer.com to hire someone super
cheap to make it whether it’s a book writing or a web site or an app or an
app on top of Facebook or whatever and if I’m in a developing country I
can certainly make a living if I have like WordPress skills, programming
skills, 3-D printing skills. Have you seen anybody make a living outsourcing
3-D printing jewelry or anything like that? Matt Barrie: I’ve definitely seen
some companies that are getting going in that slice for sure and it’s — in
fact actually I was at a University a little while ago and there’s a company
that came out of the graduate program there that was 3-D printing actual
fine jewelry. On the platform I’ve seen a few things go through. I think what
we’re in the midst of a big, big boom in this whole area. I mean it’s going
to revolutionize so many industries and just like the video, like the movie
industry and the music industry and so forth and the book industry had
this massive disruption when distribution became digital, you’re going to
see this now in the physical goods industry. So there’s a lot of companies
out there that make manufactured products that are actually quite straight
forward if you had a 3-D print out.
So things like — the starting point would be — imagine if you were Lego,
right. Basically you print plastic blocks and you sell them. You know, as
every little kid at some point I don’t know if will be this Christmas or next
Christmas there will be a $199.00 3-D printers under every kid’s Christmas
tree at some point. You know, the distribution of this product is going to
go digital even though it’s a physical product, right. And it’s not going to
be simple things like airplane models or Lego toys or whatever. It’s going
to be more complicated, sophisticated things, things printed in metals,
ceramics, models et cetera and really it’s going to — this is the really next
big thing that’s going to shake up the world. So I think there’s a huge num-
ber of opportunities here where people come up with ideas and startups
taking advantage of the upcoming revolution of the 3-D printing.
James Altucher: I mean right now all I can think of is jewelry really, like
if I have a design for jewelry and then I outsource to a 3-D printer maybe
37
through freelancer.com and then also let them drop ship it for me and I set
it up like an Etsy store or an EBay store and have the whole thing running
outside of my house.
Matt Barrie: There’s plenty of things and I mean I think Jay Leno gets his
antique cars — the parts are no longer available and the way the antique
car owners used to repair their cars is ideally to custom make the part from
scratch or you had to go to like these meet-ups or fairs or swap events and
try and rummage around in parts that people collected looking for the bits
and pieces. I mean there’s opportunity there in someone making like the
Amazon of parts for cars that are no longer manufactured, right?
So you know, I actually used freelancer to get a part manufactured. My

car — I have a car where the cargo clip broke at the back, which is holding
a cargo net in and so I actually I bought a 3-D — I had a 3-D printer and I
thought well, how can I get like a 3-D, how can I get the old to actually print
it out to replace this cargo clip because in Australia it’s very expensive to
get car parts. So I actually bought a 3-D scanner. I scanned in this part and
then obviously the part that I scanned in wasn’t perfect. I actually had a
friend fix the model and they made it smooth and made it the right size and
so forth. And I actually printed it out and I use it in my car. It wasn’t perfect
because the plastic material in the replicated version I used is I think it’s
going to wear out. It’s kind of brittle, but you know, you give it a year or two
and people will be printing all sorts of things. Why would you go to the
hardware store and buy tools when you could spin them out and when
you’re done with them you can throw them out in the hopper and maybe
recycle the plastic, right? I mean when they send the next mission to Mars,
they’re not going to send out the astronauts with this tool kit. They’re going
to send them out with a 3-D printer and a bunch of goop and they’re going
to print their tools on demand and then recycle them as they, you know, as
they stop using them.
James Altucher: So what’s the largest project you’ve seen go through

freelancer.com like in terms of dollars?
Matt Barrie: Last time I checked and it was a little while ago it was
$340,000.00. That was for a freelancer that was hired to do an ongoing
series of templates for a library of web site designs, but you know, we are
38
seeing some very large products go through on a regular basis. One that
happened last month was the hiring of a naval engineer in Spain to fly to
Norway and reverse engineer a boat and that was a $40,000.00 project
that was sourced and paid in full through the platform.
James Altucher: Wow. Was it a company that needed to reverse engineer

this particular boat or like a rich individual or —
Matt Barrie: You know, I don’t have the specifics. It was actually men-
tioned by the support team members who sent me an email of a ballot. I
don’t have full specifics, but that’s kind of like the general gist of what hap-
pens. I mean we have 6,000 projects a day go through the site, so there’s a
huge number of interesting stories that people, that kind of get generated
on a daily basis in terms of what people are doing.
James Altucher: You know, it’s very interesting as you grow you’re going
to start to become a slice of the world economy. So there’ll be much fewer
reasons for large corporations to fill certain jobs when they know they can
kind of have a chief of freelancing who will outsource many of the jobs
on a project-by-project basis. And you think this could potentially con-
tribute to a general decline in income or perhaps an equalizing of income
throughout the world?
Matt Barrie: I do think certainly at a time that worldwide labor wages are
going to start to equalize. I mean you see this already when you look at
countries like China and there’s rapidly rising wages, Philippines rapidly
rising wages. This is all fantastic because the quality of life of someone
changes just dramatically as they kind of go up that S-curve of industrial-
ization. When you go from making, you know, $10.00 a day or even less
than that, say $2.00 or $3.00 a day, which is the poverty line. The quality
of life going from $2.00 or $3.00 a day to $10.00 a day is huge in terms
of healthcare and education and housing and so forth. But going from
$10.00 a day to $10.00 an hour is again huge, it has huge impact on peo-
ple’s lives. So you know, I actually think that worldwide wages will continue
to rise in the developing world. Obviously the challenge in developed world
economies is to really move up the value chain and in countries like the
US and the UK and so forth, the big edge that countries like ours have is
really the level of education of the population. And you know, education
39
always has been the lubricant of upward mobility of a work force and I
think that they key challenge and the key thing I think western economies
think about is to really ensure that the work force is educated and flexible
as possible. And you know, it’s a challenge, but the great thing is that the
whole world of human knowledge is accessible through the Internet.
And you’ve got these great sites like Udemy and Coursera where you can
learn a new subject pretty much for free or very low cost. And so the way
education is going to be distributed globally is changing and again, that’s
all due to online education and mobile as well where you had the tradition-
al bricks and mortar institutions of colleges and universities they’re going
to struggle in a world where you can go and get a Harvard or Stanford or
whatever lecture on line for free to teach you just about anything you want
to learn.
James Altucher: Why do you think so many companies still require that
degree given that A, getting a degree still might not provide the skills nec-
essary for a job but many of the skills can be acquired like you say for free
or for low cost?
Matt Barrie: Yeah, well you know, for now it is a pedigree getting a bache-
lor’s degree, but I’ll tell you an interesting thing that happened a little while
ago. We hired an engineer from Poland to work full time here in the office
here in Sydney. And he had just traveled across the country and submitted
his transcript. His transcript had a master’s in robotics or mechatronics
from a Polish university, but he also listed the five Coursera courses that
he had done and the marks he had got for those courses. And actually the
team leaders of engineering who were interviewing him were more excited
about the courses that he had done on Coursera than they were about
the degree because they said oh, I heard about that course. That course
is fantastic. This guy is teaching it, et cetera, how is that? And they spent
the entire time talking about the courses he’d done on line rather than the
actual degree he’d done.
James Altucher: Got you. I hope my kids listen to this podcast because I
really don’t want them to go to college and I take courses on Coursera and
they’re brilliant compared to what I experienced in college. Matt Barrie: Well,
I mean just like on freelance you can architect your career, with Coursera
40
you can architect your education. Right? So instead of having a, you know,
a four-year bachelor’s style degree where you go through a rigid, structured
progression, you can really just architect the education you want. Right?
So maybe, you know, I’ve done a number of degrees and one of the things
that’s always frustrating when you’re doing a degree at a university is you
want to enroll in the course that’s over in the other faculty and they won’t
let you because, you know, it’s the wrong course code or the wrong faculty
or you won’t get credit for it, et cetera. And the great thing about on line
learning now is that you can do that. You can just kind of pick a bunch of
courses and kind of, you know, architect that path and not just that, but the
sophistication that’s going to come in with on line education it’s going to
allow you to learn a lot quicker because you can personalize the learning
experience based upon your progression. Right? So you have to go through
these check points. You answer questions and so forth.
The software is going to know where you’re doing well so it will let you
progress at a certain pace through that and where you’re struggling and
it’s going to come back and provide this reinforced learning around the
areas, you know, that you’re not so good at and maybe it will understand
that the reason you’re struggling in certain areas is because you don’t
have the foundations from some other areas underneath it and it’s going
to educate you on that.
James Altucher: I wonder if even freelancer.com could become a plat-

form for that kind of education. So let’s say I need to learn a certain set
of skills about WordPress and integrating with a shopping cart. I want to
outsource somebody to teach me those skills. You know potentially you
could be like a tutoring platform.
Matt Barrie: It’s funny you mention that because I’ve got, I’ve got several
dozen of the young engineers here that are really passionate about doing
exactly that. In fact we run a ideaa-thon every quarter internally when
people come up with their own ideas and kind of work in teams to figure
out how to deliver them and very often a bunch of the teams here work
on things around education. Now we do very little at this point in time. We
do set up five skill sets. We can do little multiple choice exams on the side
in various areas and get a badge to prove you have some knowledge in
a particular area. These are pretty basic certifications at this point, but I
41
certainly do think that an educational offering and of course, with 15 mil-

lion users we could parlay that educational offering with a whole bunch of
content from the freelancers who are skilled in all sorts of technical areas
and niches and so forth.
So it is exciting to think of the future. We’re not doing it right now but it is
something that a bunch of guys here internally are really passionate about
thinking about in the future.
James Altucher: The other thing is kind of creating a sort of consulting

platform. I don’t know if you’ve seen — you’ve probably seen the clarity.fm
where I could post my skill sets and then say how many dollars a minute
I charge and then people arrange calls with me and you know, people can
do consulting via that.
Matt Barrie: Yeah, yeah. So I think that’s an area that is going to go into in a
big way so I think that if you want a $500.00 per hour taxation advice I think
at some point in the future you’ll be able to go to a Linked In profile and
click on someone and get their pay per hour or pay per hour. Again, there
are so many different ways you can get work done, right? You get work
done. There’s on line project-based work, outsourcing work, there’s doing
crowd sourcing. You’ve got ways in which you can pay per action. There’s
local jobs. There’s on line jobs. There’s contract jobs. There’s so many ways
people can work which is really exciting and you know, over time we’re
going to build our offerings in all sorts of different areas. James Altucher:
And so was there kind of like a critical point where you were like on my
gosh, this is a great idea and I’m doing nothing with my life at this point so I
better start this and get going? Like how did you sort of get into this?
Matt Barrie: It’s kind of an interesting story. So my background is, I

did computer science and engineering. I went to Stanford in ‘97—’98. It
was kind of fortuitous in terms of the time. I did a master’s in electrical
engineering there.
James Altucher: So do you know Larry Page and Sergey Brin there?
Matt Barrie: I saw them around. I took pity on their web site because it was
Google.Stanford.edu and I thought okay, I’ll use their search engine because
I was kind of like the underdog at the time. I didn’t really know them. One
42
of the guys who founded PayPal, Ken Howery, so you know, you’re right in
the middle of the whole thing. It’s kind of funny. If I knew kind of now what I
knew back then it would be pretty amazing, but it was a pretty exciting time.
There was so much innovation going on and even while you knew, you’d
see all of these little startups on campus and at the time you thought well,
that’s kind of interesting. Is it going to take off, et cetera? And ten years later
these are very, very, very large companies. It was a pretty special place and
a pretty special time.
James Altucher: Well, to be fair, what’s your — your company is public on

the Australian stock exchange. What’s the market capitalization of your
company?
Matt Barrie: About half a billion.
James Altucher: Half a billion. So it’s not like you’re a small company
either.
Matt Barrie: We’re getting there. We’re getting there. Yeah, so I mean the
history about how I started it was I actually came back to Australia and I
worked briefly on venture capital, but I started a semi-conductor business.
I ran it for six years and it was one of these things where you’ve got great
technology, a great team it’s just way too early for market. We were build-
ing gigabit chips to scan network traffic in a world where there were no
gigabit networks in the early 2000’s. Today that technology runs about 180
gigabit per second. I mean it’s just, you know, why we sold it was all kind
of wrong, but that company ended up selling to Intel, which is great. So I
left that company in 2006 in December. In 2007, 2008 I was kind of looking
for something to do. I was working on a few little side projects and one of
the side projects I was working on was helping someone with a web site.
James Altucher: Were you a little depressed at this point? You had just
spent all of these years building this semiconductor company and now
you’re just working on people’s web sites? Matt Barrie: I was actually
crushed emotionally and physically. Crushed because the business didn’t
actually sell to Intel until 2013 so I left about 2006. I was doing a couple
million a year in revenue at the time. I hadn’t set the world on fire. I’d spent
six years, heart and soul really, really trying to — I was probably too much in
43
love with the product and not really thinking about it enough as a business.
You know, we were selling this OEM inter-network equipment, equipment

manufacturers so it was a very technical product we were comfortable
with, the VP engineering at MacAfee or LG or whoever it may be, but you
have the desire to chip into someone else’s product. I mean the product
might have an annual product cycle. You’ve got a two-year cycle to sell the
product in and then the year to design it in which maybe takes up to 18
months and then they’ll ship a product and because it’s hardware they’re
not going to put you in all the products. They’ll put you maybe in a small
product line, you know. It just takes forever--the business model was all
wrong. We should have made our own boxes and sold the boxes direct-
ly in an enterprise style model, but you know, we were inexperienced in
sales and we were scared about that so we kind of went down a different
business model route. So there’s a whole bunch of different failures there,
but anyway I was pretty crushed because I walked out of a business that
had taken so long to get going and it was just very, very tough to be an
entrepreneur, especially when most companies don’t succeed or kind of
limp along for a while.
James Altucher: Right.
Matt Barrie: And I was kind of looking for something to do. I was really
keeping myself sort of entertained a little bit helping someone build some
web sites and you know, I’d get some data entry done so I had to put on a
spreadsheet with the name of a bunch of businesses, the email address,
the phone number, the URL, et cetera. And you know I thought maybe I
need to get 100, 1,000 of these in the spread sheet.
It’s really boring work. The way you’ve got to do that is Google search these
businesses and enter in the contact details. I thought you know, some-
one’s little brother or sister would love to do this job. I’ll pay them maybe
$2.00 per row to fill in the details. It’s about 1,000 rows. I’ll pay them about
$2,000.00. Surely someone will love this job. And it just taught — I spent
four months trying to find someone who would do this job and it was just
impossible. I’d find people but they’d work a half an hour. They’d tell me it’s
really boring. I’d say yes, I know it’s really boring. I’m paying you $2,000.00,
right? You know, I’ve got soccer practice; I’ve got exams, and then eventu-
44
ally after four months I just got really, really frustrated and I did a Google
search. I think I searched a cheap data entry on line, something like that
and I found this web site called get a free answer and I looked at the site
and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It looked like Craigslist. It was
the ugliest web site I think I’ve ever seen. It was all these grays and whatev-
er. It was it just looked terrible, but it had all this activity on it. I wasn’t quite
sure what was going on. It seems like people were getting jobs on there,
et cetera. So I posted a job and I forgot about it. I walked away and three
hours later I came and looked at my email and I had 74 emails in my in box
saying I’ll do it for 2,000, 1,000, 500, 400, 300, 200, $100.00.
James Altucher: Wow.
Matt Barrie: I thought to myself no way. I’ve spent four months trying to
get someone to do a job and there are 74 people willing to do the job. I
just — unbelievable and for $100.00? I’m willing to pay $2,000.00. I couldn’t
find someone to do it for $2,000.00 now they’re willing to do it for $100.00.
This is ridiculous. This can’t be right. So I hired a team in Vietnam. The job
was done in three days. It was perfect and I didn’t have to pay him until the
job was done and I just thought to myself wow. This was the real sort of
Eureka moment. This was when the lightbulb was going. I just thought this
really solves a problem for me, you know. You know every great business
needs to have a problem that’s being solved, right?
James Altucher: So did you never experience this with your old business,
like that kind of excited feeling where on, my God, there’s demand for this?
Matt Barrie: No. I think in my other business I had a really active imagina-
tion. I kind of thought well, wow, this technology could do this and could
do that, et cetera, but it was really just a — it was a grind. You know, you
would go and you would meet with manufacturers. You’d pitch the prod-
uct. They’d kind of be half interested, say we’ll do a demo. It wasn’t this
moment where it was like wow, I can now hire an army with a credit card
to do anything. Right?
And here I am an entrepreneur, slightly crushed from my last business,

right, slightly demoralized, not really wanting to go do this — after six years
of really trying — I was flying trans-Pacific flights once a month for six
45
years and just physically tired. I thought wow, I can now start a business
with maybe no employees, sit at home in my pajamas and just hire people
so cheaply to do the things I can’t do. Right? Well I can program but I can’t
do graphic design. You know, it’s amazing. And I thought to myself, wow,
and I was thinking to myself I could build so many businesses just off the
back of a credit card and I then I thought to myself, hang on, this is kind
of like an EBay for jobs. I thought surely this is like a massive opportunity
here. I thought, you know, you have global market places for products.
Surely a global market place for services kind of an obvious category that
no one really had thought about at that point in time really. And I thought
why hasn’t EBay done it. So I thought I need to get in on this. I thought,
“this is amazing.” So I started a web site called biditout.com and I hired
freelancers, graphic freelancers, copy freelancers so you know, I would
do programming; they would do the graphic design and then this that
and the other. And after a few weeks I got a basic little prototype up and
running. I kind of figured out the model. I thought okay, well, let’s do a little
rudimentary financial model. How much money do I need to raise to kind
of get this going? Maybe I can raise about $4 million to get it going. Start
out cheap. That’s going to take a while. And I did survey and there were
hundreds of little companies trying to do this, but none of them had really
any traction. There was about 12 that had some traction, but no one had
really set the world on fire at that point.
I thought to myself wow. No one’s going to really finance me to be number

13, and so maybe I need to try and really buy rather than build and see if
I can kind of buy one of these sites to get a head start. So I asked about
six or so of them are you interested in potentially selling to me and about
three or four of them said yeah, I’m interested in selling.
James Altucher: For cash or for equity were they going to sell?
Matt Barrie: Cash. I had no equity to offer them at all at that point. I was a
guy at home in his pajamas, right? So I said well, okay, how much do you
want? And ironically, the one I liked the most was the one I used first which
was get a free answer and the reason why I liked it is because it had more
traffic than any other web site in the world in this space. And the reason
why I found it was because they dominated in search engine optimaliza-
tion, SEO. So when I typed in cheap data entry they ranked number one.
46
James Altucher: Okay.
Matt Barrie: And that’s why they had so much traffic. It’s just the site was
ugly. It was badly put together. I mean the guy who’d run it did a fantastic
job getting it where it got to. Had about a half million users, a huge amount
of traffic. It’s just that, you know, it just was badly monetized. And so —
James Altucher: Why did they want to sell rather than — they must have
seen the growth potential here.
Matt Barrie: Well, the issue here is the whole industry only really started
going around 2008—2009 and the reason why is because before 2008-
2009 there was no real Internet in the developing world. And before that,
back in 1999 if you think about this industry, the value proposition was that
web site that’s going to cost you $10,000.00 from a local web designer you
can get it done through a web site where it will cost you $10,000.00 as well,
but back in 1999, the Internet was kind of slow. There was no drop box.
You couldn’t really share files easily. You couldn’t upload the website to the
cloud. You had to meet the designer down at a café at some point and give
him the CD Rom or him to give you the CD Rom, the files back, et cetera.
So there was kind of an inconvenience going through a web site to get
these things done. I mean the speed of the Internet wasn’t there. The tools
weren’t there and so on. But over the years things got better and better. The
tools got better and better. Suddenly the world went and headed into the
cloud and around 2007, 2008 and ‘09 a few things happened. It was sort of
a apex of events. Number one the Internet hit the developing world so for
the first time in the Philippines or Indonesia, India and so forth you could
get a home Internet connection and so on. And so the developing world
was going on line
So you have 5 billion people connecting to the Internet. At the moment

we’re at 3 billion — 5 billion going at ten billion a day want to go on line and
the minute they hear about one of their friends making a month’s salary in
a few hours or a few days all of a sudden they say wow, how can I get on
the Internet, right. Like this is amazing. And there’s a really powerful moti-
vator to get connected and skill up and learn and get in there. So you had
like this huge labor force that was coming on line. At the same time you
had the global financial crisis in the US so small businesses are looking
47
for new things. They’re looking for new ways of doing things. Instead of
hiring that full time designer or whatever, maybe they find a cheaper way
of doing things, start searching the Internet. You have a lot of people in the
US out of work and they weren’t so much going on line and freelancing al-
though some were, but they suddenly had a lot of time on their hands. So
that web site I’ve always promised to build or help build for my wife or my
grandmother, for a café or whatever it is, you know, I’ve got some spare
time now. I’ll help them out. Right? And oh, that side project — I’ve always
wanted to figure out if I could get a little app or whatever it may be. There
is spare time now, go get that done, right. And so they had demand sud-
denly coming and new ways of doing things. You had supply coming on
line in a big way. The software tools were getting there. You had commu-
nication, voice over, things like that now that you could communicate with
someone and so the industry I think really got started around that time.
So all these guys who started in 1999, 2000, 2004, they’ve been running
their businesses for a long time. By 2009 it’s been five years just trying to
get the business grown and it was growing it was just five years of hard,
hard, hard work, being a little bit too early for the market and you know, at
that point in time I said to him how much money do you want. He told me
the price. I thought wow, that’s actually less money than I was going to raise
to start a business from scratch so I might as well try and buy this business.
James Altucher: Can I ask how much money? I mean it’s probably public.
Matt Barrie: It’s public now because we’re a public company so all this
stuff gets disclosed in disclosure documents. It was $3.5 million so and it
was doing about $1 million a year in revenue.
Matt Barrie: So you know, I thought wow. That first — any entrepreneur
would know this. That first $1 million in revenue is the hardest million
dollars you’ll ever make in your entire life. It is just — that first million is so
tough. Once you’ve got $1 million in revenue it’s kind of like an optimization,
operations research problem, right? You can pull a few levers over here and
you can statistically test that with AB testing and so on. Was that better or
is that worse. It’s better; let’s keep doing that. If it’s worse let’s do something
48
else. And so once you have that pump of that first million in revenue which
is what this site had done for me then you’re awake, right. And I knew there
was a lot of problems with the site and how it worked, the business model,
et cetera, and you know, basically I said Greg, let’s do it. I’ve got —
James Altucher: So you knew — like you were able to say to potential
investors hey, they’re doing $1 million in revenue, but I know with a few
tweaks I can get this up to like $5 million in revenue?
Matt Barrie: Yeah, I did. But the unfortunate thing is that none of the
investors would actually understand it, right. I mean most venture capital
investors expect four guys in a room with Power Point and no revenue and
here I was saying well, I want to buy this site and it’s doing $1 million a
year in revenue and it’s been running four years and it’s run by a guy living
on a fish farm,a Swedish guy. And they’re like what? And I looked at the
site. It looked terrible and what is this, a Swedish guy living on a fish farm.
They wouldn’t understand it. I’ll give you five percent of the company or
whatever. And it was very, very tough, but I found this guy I knew and he
got it straight away because he started his original business. You men-
tioned your web site and how you got it done so cheaply and you solved it.
Right? I mean he did the same thing so he built a software business using
freelancers and he so straightaway just got it. So he gave me the money
and I bought the business and I went there and I fixed up all the bugs that
I kind of saw in the site and I got the graphics up to date and every time I
improved something the revenue went up and I could use that revenue to
hire more people and that’s all I do in this business is I look for incremental
revenue opportunities and as I make a dollar more I hire another person.
James Altucher: So what was the biggest change you made early on to
kind of like quote un quote growth hack the business a little higher?
Matt Barrie: Well, several things. The business model originally was 10
percent commission being levied to the freelancers so the employees post
the jobs. That cost originally was $5.00 which was refunded to you if you
keep someone and then the freelancer had to pay 10 percent commission.
But if you were on a membership, a gold membership, that commission
was zero.
James Altucher: Ah, so that’s great.
49
Matt Barrie: So 76 percent of the turnover of the business was at zero and
so I changed it from zero to 3 percent and the revenue really peaked out.
The other problem was the membership program paid out 100 percent of
revenue so in those gold memberships the total was being knocked out at
100 percent so I mean the business was active. It had activity but it wasn’t
making money. And the other thing was the graphics were so terrible. It
looked like Craigslist and I just — I have a friend of mine who is a designer
in New York. I said listen, can you kind of come on to the template for me
or a skin and I actually did original programming to put that skin on the side
and that doubled revenue. It was just amazing. It just doubled revenue. It
makes me want to buy Craigslist because I want to reskin their website.
James Altucher: It’s funny the connection between design and revenues
actually.
Matt Barrie: Well the amazing thing about being a designer today is that
the designers really have the opportunity to move right up the value chain,
right? So the difference a billion-dollar business and a business that goes
nowhere is down to design. It’s down to user experience, understanding
behavioral economics, understanding conversion optimization and so forth
and behavioral psychology. And let me tell you if you’re a designer today you
— designers are the hardest job function that I — for me to hire. You know, I
can hire engineers. That’s tough. That’s in tough supply. Then the scientists
are remarkably easy to hire. I don’t know why. I would have thought that
would really hard but they’re actually really straightforward. I guess because
if you’re a physicist the opportunities are that you want to work at a startup
or whatever and not behave very much or work in finance and then if you
want to get to tech it’s a huge opportunity for you. Design is — yeah, it’s the
toughest role to hire to get really good designers and if you are really, really
good at what you do, you’re the guy or girl that’s going to turn a business
into a multi-billion dollar business. You can translate that into the design,
that is the key thing that will make or break a business in tech.
James Altucher: That’s really interesting. Well, this has been such a
fascinating conversation, Matt. Like I’m really jealous actually I didn’t buy
getafreelance myself at the time. Like you were there in the right place at
the right time and you’re right. Like I had the sense too this is a great idea
except I was using it to build businesses rather than buying the business
itself. So you were very smart.
50
Matt Barrie: Yeah. I mean in anything it’s timing and luck, you know, and
I guess —
James Altucher: No, I mean you had the instinct. You had that wow feel-
ing that oh, my gosh, this is real demand because I’m feeling the demand.
Matt Barrie: Yeah. You got to have initiative right, and I guess the combi-
nation of things — if I was six months earlier it would have probably not
have worked and if I was six months later, you know, they would have all
been financed by venture capitalists or bought and I would have gone. It
was like I went in there early and then the other thing I did was I bought all
the competitors so, you know, when I got going and I made a bit of money,
every time I made a dollar, I basically hired someone that was smarter than
me to help build the business and then when I got enough cash to buy the
competitors I started with the small guys and worked my way up. So we
bought 16 I think. That’s off my head —
James Altucher: Yeah. So scriptlance was the company I used in 2006.
Matt Barrie: Yeah, scriptlance, getafreelancer, Rent-A-Coder, Freelancer.

co.uk, you name it. So that was another pretty successful strategy to kind
of go there and buy out all the competitors before anybody else could.
James Altucher: And then you went public and now you’re still growing?
Matt Barrie: Yeah. So we went public in November of 2013. It was actually

a pretty exciting day because you know, we went public on the Australian
security exchange and for those of you who don’t know about the Aus-
tralian stock market, it’s the fourth biggest equity capital market in the
world. It’s the same size as NASDAQ. It’s just that it’s all in resources and
money for the most part but it’s done phenomenally well in financing the
resources industry. If you go out and start a mining company you don’t go
to down the road and knock on doors and beg for preferreds, a complicat-
ed preferred stock structure from a venture capitalist. You just go write a
prospectus and you crowd-source the financing through stock exchange.
Right? You grow a prospectus. You issue it to the market and people will
fund it, right? It would be like kick starter for grownups.
James Altucher: Funny.
Matt Barrie: And you know, I’d written prolifically beforehand saying like the
51
future of the technology industry in Australia is crowd-source finance through

the Australian security exchange. We’ve done it for resources; we’ve been doing
it for tech. We put several risk- reward profiles and the venture capital industry
in Australia is dead and will never come back for a bunch of reasons, so we
thought okay, well let’s give it a go. We bootstrapped the business from the orig-
inal fundraising from Simons for five years and then we wrote the prospectus
and we listed on the — the issue price was 50 cents. The stock broke into $2.50.
Matt Barrie: It was the third biggest opening ever on the Australian secu-
rities exchange. Actually opened at $1.1 billion market cap. I was kind of
looking for the share price. It was kind of like in that week you had Twitter
was IPO and they had that bird out in front of the stock exchange in New
York. We had our bird out in the front of the ASEX in neon. Had all the
press there and so forth. We were Justin Bieber for about five minutes.
They said ring the bell hard because the last person that rang the bell was
a little Japanese man who didn’t really make a noise so I rang the bell. The
bell broke. I had to explain this is what new technology does to old tech-
nology. I was trying to look at the share price. You know, the issue price
was 50 cents. I’m looking for something you know, 80 cents or whatever it
may be. I see this two dot five O. It’s the share price so it was a pretty phe-
nomenal moment for the world, but you know, it worked really well for us.
The business is growing strongly. We have a great team. Got a 400 stock
now around the world, 15 million people on the site, 7.5 million products.
If you haven’t given it a go I encourage you to give it a go. It’s free to post
a project. Now we got rid of that $5.00 fee. That was another little grow
tactic to pick up the business booming by the cost for demand side to
transact and it’s just incredible. People — investment banks — every time
I go talk to an investment bank or financial fund manager that’s now a
shareholder in the business, you know, they tell me the next time I meet
with them they’ve got their financial models now developed on freelancer
or they’re using freelancer to scrape the content off the sites, off the busi-
nesses that they’re invested in so they can track the performance of them
so they can scrape the listings off, job listings or car sales or whatever it
may be. People are getting financial models developed. I mean every year
the sophistication and complexity of the jobs goes up and up and up. It’s
just, it’s a phenomenal business to run.
52
James Altucher: I think the real exciting thing for potential listeners here
is to come up with essentially ideas for businesses you can start cheap by
using freelancer.com, businesses or books or any sort of project. So I’m a
user so I’m a big fan.
Matt Barrie: I mean if any listeners out there that’s got any ideas and post
or are about to post a job get your results, I’d love to hear how results were
and love to hear also the crazy things you’ve done. My email address is
Matt, M-A-T-T, @ freelancer.com. I’m happy to receive emails from anyone,
but you know it’s always exciting to kind of talk to people and see all the
wild, wonderful and crazy things they do on the site.
James Altucher: Well, Matt thanks so much. I know it’s like — I don’t know
— is it the middle of the night or the middle of the morning in Australia?
Matt Barrie: It’s almost midnight on a Friday night, so it might be time for
a beer or two.
James Altucher: Yeah. Well, good luck. Thanks very much for taking the
time and I hope people use the site and good luck.
Matt Barrie: Likewise. Thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed the
conversation.
James Altucher: Thanks, Matt. Bye. Me too.
Interview with Mark Ford:

The Man Who Built 100 Businesses
James Altucher: So, Mark. Mark Ford, thanks so much for joining me on
The James Altucher Show.
Mark Ford: Thank you for inviting me, I gotta tell you, like I told you before,
as far as I’m concerned, you’re a celebrity, I’m a big fan of yours, and I’m
thrilled to be here in Delray Beach.
James Altucher: No, I think people have to know what you’ve done. How
many businesses have you either started or been involved in?
Mark Ford: I don’t know, but certainly, it’s in the hundreds.
53
James Altucher: In the hundreds, okay. Okay, so the average, let’s say
investor, expects an 85% failure rate. What do you think your failure rate is
in all these businesses?
Mark Ford: You know what, it’s hard to tell —
James Altucher: I know that you were an investor, ‘cause you started tons
of these businesses.
Mark Ford: Right. There are two prongs in answering your question. One is
that I’m 64 years old, so it’ll all be in retrospect. And you know in retrospect
the vision gets cleaned up as you go. The other’s that I’m Irish. So, my feel-
ing is that 85% of them are correct, but the truth is I have no idea. I’ll say
this, I’m definitely not one of these people that have failed, and failed, and
failed, and then finally made it. I never wanted to be that way. I‘ve always
been extremely cautious as an investor of my time, and my resources, and
my money. So, my failures —
James Altucher: I like how you put that, by the way — time, resources,
money — money last. Time’s the most valuable.
Mark Ford: Absolutely, absolutely. Though, because of that — and of

course, it took long time to learn — I would say that it doesn’t feel like I’ve
had a lot of failures. But where my failures have been are generally in
areas that I knew practically nothing about. For example, investing — when
my career was basically the career of starting as employee and turning
into an intrapreneur, and then turning into an entrepreneur. And along the
way, as I was making money — I was accumulating money — I didn’t know
what to do with it, so I would invest it according to whatever half-baked
notion passed my way. And I did a pretty good job of losing a lot of that
money. And I do talk about that.
James Altucher: Welcome to the club.
Mark Ford: Right. But I would say that generally, I think the general idea
that to make more money you have to take risk is wrong. I feel the op-
posite. I feel that the way to make money, to give yourself the highest
percentage of chance of making money, is to avoid risky things and to do
things that are more like sure bets. I guess I’m the career equivalent of the
54
parent that says, “Forget about being an NBA player, forget about being a
rock star. You can be a doctor or a lawyer, or maybe a plumber, and just
stick with that.” That’s my view of —
James Altucher: But you haven’t stuck with one thing. I mean yes, you
started businesses, but they’ve been businesses in every category. And
you say, for instance, you’re not good at investing, and yet you’ve even
started businesses obviously in the publishing industry about investing.
Mark Ford: Right.
James Altucher: So you’ve been able to take this skillset of starting

businesses and apply it to any area, which is opposite — you know, many
people are told, “Find your passion first, and then start a business.” What
do you think of that concept?
Mark Ford: Well, you know, I thought both ways about it. I think it’s pos-
sible to find your passion, turn it into a business, and have a happy life.
But generally, I think if you turn your passion into a business, you’re going
to lose your passion. And so I think that there were things that we call
“vocations” and “avocations”.
And to me, the avocation is the thing that you love and you’re going to
preserve, your pristine — because the truth is, whatever we’re in love with
in terms of a career, we’re in love with it because we know practically
nothing about it. Being an astronaut, or being a doctor, or being a mission-
ary — and when you actually end up being a missionary and you’re riddled
with mosquito bites and you’re trying to help people, and they’re ignoring
you and they’re just asking for more money, and you say to yourself, “Geez
I wish I’d known about this when I thought it was so wonderful.” So, I think
that for me, there are parts of my life that I’ve kept as avocations — I’ve
never wanted to make a business out of. And you know what I really did
is, I accidentally got into the business I got into. I wanted to be a writer;
I started off as a writer, I was working for a small newsletter publishing
company in Washington, D.C. writing about Africa. Well I wanted to write
about African culture, but the job turned out to be a job writing about
African commerce. And I knew so little about commerce. I mean, I had a
master’s degree at this time. It was called African Business and Trade, and
55
I remember thinking, “What is the difference between business and trade?

In fact, what is trade?” I literally —
James Altucher: What’s business?
Mark Ford: Right. I kind of knew the concept of business but, I literally
didn’t know what “trade” meant. And forget about countertrade, barter, and
all the other things I had to deal with. So I ended up being in that business
and in three years I figured out how to become the publisher of that you
know — the top guy in a very small business. And then the —
James Altucher: Is that what you mean by “intrapreneur”? You used that
word earlier.
Mark Ford: Yes, I would say you become either the most valuable — or
one of the most valuable — and you get a compensation deal where it’s
tied to the sales or profits that you create. But rather than being the sole
boss and owning the business entirely — having that satisfaction — you
attach yourself to a larger group that maybe has a lot more potential than
you. And that’s the way I always felt, ‘cause there were so many things I
didn’t know how to do, like make money. And I’d rather have 10% of a big
piece than 100% of a very little piece.
James Altucher: I think that’s an important concept that a lot of people

forget. They think they’re either going to be in a cubicle, or they’re going to
be an entrepreneur. And somehow some consider being an entrepreneur
some magical thing, and being in a cubicle some hateful thing. But there’s
this middle place where — as you call “intrapreneur” — where you can figure
out how your success within an organization can tie itself to your success.
Mark Ford: Right. And I had noticed as devout reader of your stuff that one
of your most popular essays is Quit Your Job or How To Quit Your Job and
Do What You Love but I have noticed lately that you’ve been mentioning
that it’s possible within some kind of business environment where you’re
not the owner to become wealthy and have a good life.
And I think that that’s true for me. If you go work for IBM or Merrill Lynch
it’s probably not going to happen because those companies are so big and
so structured, that the way to become successful there is to just do what
56
you’re told and move through the ranks. But if you work for a smaller com-
pany like Agora — after Washington, D.C. I went down to Florida. And I don’t
know if I should tell this story. Anyway, I decided whether to be a journalist.
James Altucher: Florida being the ideal place to be a journalist.
Mark Ford: Exactly. But, no, I was going to Florida to visit my brother-in-
law, who had a jet ski rental business in Key Largo. So I decided to take a
journalist — I was looking for jobs as a journalist. I decided to take three
interviews in Florida, ‘cause I thought I would get a tax deduction. I was
trying to be clever. So I took an interview at St. Petersburg Times, Miami
Herald, and some newsletter publishing operation going on in Boca Raton
that I’d been getting mailers for. And I took the three interviews assuming
I’d be getting none of them, ‘cause in D.C. there were no jobs at the time.
And I got all three.
James Altucher: And to be fair, the Miami Herald has been one of the best
newspapers at least in entertainment and —
Mark Ford: No, it’s a good — it’s a very well respected paper, and St. Pe-
tersburg Times too, actually is a kind of a boutique newspaper that has a
good reputation. I think I got the job because a woman that was working
for me at night was the deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post if
you can believe that or not. Apparently, they didn’t pay their deputy foreign
editors enough so she was moonlighting for me.
And I would edit her stuff, and she thought — you know, it’s so much easier
to edit than write, as I’m sure you know — I would criticize something
she said, and so she thought I was brilliant and told these two editors. I
interviewed with the editor-in-chiefs Andrew Barnes and whoever else was
in Miami. So basically, I had these jobs. So suddenly I found myself on the
shores of Key Largo in a jet ski rental place sitting down, having three job
offers, and the guy next to me was — remember Sean Penn in Fast Times?
James Altucher: Yeah, sure.
Mark Ford: Okay. So that basically was him sitting next to me. And his job
in life was to fill jet skis with gas. And that was really the only thing he was
qualified to do. And smoke doobies nonstop. And so I couldn’t decide, you
57
know, but it was really two choices. I saw the Pulitzer Prize over there and I
saw a big bag of money in Boca Raton. So I decided I would explain this all
to this kid and let him decide, you know? It could’ve been a coin toss —
James Altucher: Your strategy?
Mark Ford: No, it could’ve been a coin toss, but I knew enough about my
life so far to know that I had no idea what was the right decision. So I
told him the whole story, and he just looked at me, and exhaled, and said,
“Boca. Go Boca.” Now, that was the decision, and really I took the job, and
this guy turned out to be an amazing entrepreneur, very aggressive mar-
keting genius, and he was publishing newsletters on robotics And I didn’t
know anything about that —
James Altucher: Who was he publishing to, was it the other businesses,
or to individuals —
Mark Ford: It was business to business. But as it turned out, it wasn’t

really a publishing company, because his interest was in raising the money
to start a publishing company through tax shelters — which existed at the
time for those kind of publications. And he did have one editor there from
McGraw-Hill that was a real editor.
But I don’t think the business would’ve ever really made any money. Until
a year later after I took a Dale Carnegie course and I realized that my big
problem in life was that I had too many goals, you know? One, common
problem is people don’t have goals, and then they say, “You don’t write
them down, you don’t do this, you don’t do that,” which I think is true for
many people. But I had a lot of goals. And I was trying to follow them all
at the same time. And I remember we came to that chapter and it said,
“If you have this problem, you’re gonna have trouble with this exercise.”
The exercise was to eliminate the — write down your top ten, narrow it to
three, and then go in. The Dale Carnegie program that I took was 14 weeks
and every week you’d read a chapter and then you’d go and you’d stand
in front of this audience, and you would tell them what you’re gonna do —
you make a little speech and if they liked you, you got a pencil. I don’t know
if you’ve ever experienced this.
James Altucher: Yeah.
58
Mark Ford: It sounds pretty corny, but this really changed my life. I got
down to three — teacher, writer, and millionaire, you know, rich guy. And I
could not decide. I was frantic. I was sweating driving there, my heart was
pounding — ‘cause I felt that if I chose one, somehow, subconsciously I
knew that it would change me, and I felt like I was giving up the others.
And so as I was walking up to the podium, I had this thought, “I need to
just make the money, because if it turns out not to be what you think it is,
then you just give it away.
And what the hell, you know, you could always do the other thing.” But
that’s what I did. I said I was gonna do that. And that changed me. I mean,
overnight, it changed me. Everything got clear.
James Altucher: Did you have to pick one?
Mark Ford: I had to pick one. And —
James Altucher: Okay. So you had to write down ten, you had to narrow it
down to three, and then that night you had to pick one.
Mark Ford: And for the rest of the course, which was another 12 weeks
or so — 11 weeks — you had to focus on nothing but that in terms of your
goals. Both when you went in and talked about things, and when you were
in your daily work.
James Altucher: So you had to kind of for the next 12 weeks or whatever,
you had to kind of come up with ideas that would move you forward to
being a millionaire?
Mark Ford: Exactly.
James Altucher: So like, what was the first thing that you thought you
needed to move forward?
Mark Ford: Good question. So, I get back in the next day, and I look on my
desk and my desk had this huge pile of paper — you know back then every-
thing was paper, you know? And I’d been writing this one book, basically
our own style manual for the publishing company.
You know, a style manual — and I know you know, but for the audiences —
59
like, how do you punctuate things, what’s acceptable usage, and stuff that’s
very interesting to an English major, but to everybody else it’s very arcane.
And I have realized I’ve been spending like half of my time writing this style
manual. Meanwhile, there’s a MLA style manual, there’s Chicago style, the
New York Times style manual, there were all these other style manuals
that my style manual could possibly equal. And that’s what I was actually
spending a portion of my time doing. So I just took the pay, and in three
months I threw it in the garbage.
James Altucher: ‘Cause it wasn’t moving forward towards that goal?
Mark Ford: Yeah, I knew right away that the only way I was going to make
money was to — I knew that the guy I was working for was all about
making money. And so I thought, “I gotta just start doing stuff that actually
helps us create more sales.”
James Altucher: You know, it reminds me though — I don’t know if you’re

gonna make this book public or not, but I just read Persuasion by you. And
that in a sense is a style manual, but it’s a style manual — and it actually
even gets down to punctuation — but it’s style manual that’s about selling,
it’s about making money. And by the way, you used examples from Stein-
beck, from literary examples, so it’s not that different. Everybody needs to
express their ideas. Whether you’re a fiction writer, or a nonfiction writer, or
selling something, and advertiser. So it’s the same type of style manual.
Mark Ford: Absolutely. And of course, Persuasion is about much more

than money. It’s about everything in life. If you have the ability to be per-
suasive — and we all do to some extent — but you can get more things
done, including — Just about an hour and a half ago I was at this little
— my wife calls it “the swamp house”, but it’s actually a very cute little
cottage I’m building on a lake about 20 minutes from here, on a pond. I
had to use my persuasive powers to convince her and the decorator not to
completely redo a closet, spend $10,000 completely redoing a closet that
we would only see once a year. And I’m happy to report I was successful.
James Altucher: And what was the persuasion technique used? We won’t
tell her, I promise.
Mark Ford: Well, and I promise you won’t — only if one of her friends sees
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it will she find out, ‘cause she doesn’t read my books, and she doesn’t
come to my lectures, or whatever. So, of course, it started with flattery.
You know, by saying that I thought that the original idea was very good,
but I also said that I know that I know that what you like is ample room for
the you know, whatever, brooms and — Anyway, so bit by bit I appealed to
her what I thought that she really wanted, and tried to explain how it could
be done very quickly and efficiently without necessarily moving everything
out and starting all over again. And so, it was cooperative. It wasn’t the
most masterful —
James Altucher: No no, but I like the technique. So kind of say, “Yes,”
right? And then you figure out how — you list the items, “This is what
you’ve said before, what we’ve invested in before that you’ve wanted. And
here’s we achieve this with minimal —
Mark Ford: In other words, you do exactly opposite what you feel like doing
as a normal spouse, right? And what you normally feel like doing, at least if
you’ve been married for 42 years you’re saying, “You always do this. You al-
ways insist on that.” And then of course, you’re gonna go nowhere. But this
was important. I wanted that closet to be — anyway, so, where were we?
James Altucher: Okay, so you’re at Boca Raton, this guy was very good
at —
Mark Ford: So almost the next day I realized that my job is — I was the
editorial director of this, and there were like 15 or 20 newsletters already —
and I realized my jobs was to try to help sell newsletters. And so I started
looking at the newsletters entirely differently — not how respectable they
are from a literary point of view or even a technical point of view, but were
they answering questions that were solving problems for people in the
industry? And it was like I took the shades off and suddenly the answers
were so obvious — what needed to be done was so obvious after that, and
virtually in all areas. If I had a conflict with an employee — I had a conflict
with the woman that was actually the vice president of the business — I
didn’t have the same reactions. I knew that she was gonna be gone even-
tually, ‘cause she was completely now on the other side. When I came in
I was on her side. Let’s build products — this is the corporate mentality
— let’s build products we can proud of as employees, which we can show
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to our friends and maybe win industry awards for. And who cares what it
costs, you know? And too, let’s try to make more money, so that my boss
one day will make me a partner.
And so I knew that she was gonna go, and when she started — I had lunch
like two or three days later with somebody else, where we had luncheon
meeting she was telling me about all the things that were wrong with my
boss, you know, our boss. And I knew it was to include me, and to be part
of their little clique. And I just knew that was the wrong move, so I just
said, “Listen, I feel uncomfortable about this conversation. I gotta tell you
right now, Joe hired me, I’m his guy, and I’m sticking with him.” And from
that day forward, the next day, at least once a week, I was called in in front
of Joe by her to try to get my fired. And she didn’t know anything about
really editing, so her husband who worked for us — a freelance editor —
would give her ammunition, and she would come in and she would kind of
repeat it as best she could, and then I would very calmly just explain what
I was doing, which was making the newsletter more sellable, and why I
wasn’t paying attention to —
James Altucher: But if you always brought it back to increase more sales
— which I’m assuming means this is going to create more value for our
customers — that beats editorial.
Mark Ford: Back then — I gotta be honest with you — I didn’t have that
elevated view. My view was very selfish, and very personal. I knew that Joe
wanted to make a lot of money. And that’s what he was in business for.
And everything I did was about pleasing Joe’s basic desire to make money.
And that was good, but it was bad. I learned enormous amount about mar-
keting, and about building businesses. He was a business genius — I gotta
tell you — business genius. But he was also — you know, he wasn’t the
most — let’s just say that his moral compass view of life was like, you take
care of your family like gold, and the people around you like silver — I was in
that category — then there’s — what’s outside of gold — then there’s —
James Altucher: Bronze?
Mark Ford: — and bronze, and then maybe lead, or dirt. And customers are
in the dirt area. And this was actually quite common in the direct marketing
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industry, because back then, you never saw your customers. You never
saw them, and —
James Altucher: You can’t have renewals, though. I mean —
Mark Ford: No, we did have renewals. You had to produce — yes, you’re
right — we had to produce better products that would get renewals. But
I’m thinking of other things in terms of refund policies — we were tough on
refunds, and we didn’t need to be. I learned later on we didn’t need to be. But
anyway, the truth was, my goal was to please Joe and my persuasion tech-
niques back then were all about persuading the people in the business to do
things that would increase sales. Later on, it was really — I almost thought
that business was that way. And think a lot of people do — that business
has to be this me first kind of activity. But it wasn’t really — of course I felt
terrible about when I thought I was doing the wrong thing, you know. But I —
James Altucher: What’s an example where you thought you were doing
the wrong thing —
Mark Ford: Well —
James Altucher: — when they were still making money.
Mark Ford: Some of our advertising was — we actually got in trouble

for — we were selling cubic zirconium diamonds. After we got out of the
publish — we sold the publishing business ’87, we got into the merchandise
business, which he already had some familiarity with. And so, well, I don’t
know if this is —
James Altucher: Totally different business.
Mark Ford: Totally different business, same principles. Joe said to me once
— He says, “Well, are we publishers, or are we marketers?” “I don’t know,
you tell me.” “Marketers.” I go, “Okay, what does that mean?” He goes, “We’re
getting rid of all these newsletters, ‘cause the stock market’s about to crash”
— this was, like, prior to 1987 — “We’re going back into the merchandise
business.” “Okay, let’s do it.” I was still about pleasing Joe, and so —
James Altucher: How would he know where to buy the cubic zirconium
cheap, where to sell it, like, how do you figure that out from scratch?
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Mark Ford: All I can tell you is, we had these — I think they were Hasidic
Jews — that would come into our office in Boca Raton, and be selling us
stuff that was made in China. Now this was back in ’87. And this was long
before China became a huge supplier of stuff. But we were buying watches
for $1.50 before everybody was selling $10.00 watches. We were buying ev-
erything. We were buying televisions for $16.00, you know? So we became
one of the largest direct sellers of watches, perfumes — knockoff perfumes
— jewelry, cosmetic jewelry, you name it —
James Altucher: Brand, like fake brand?
Mark Ford: Not fake brand, but because you know you couldn’t do that
without getting into trouble. But things that resembled the brand that had
similar titles, like instead of — give me a brand — like instead of — I can’t
even think of it — give me another brand.
James Altucher: Louis Vuitton?
Mark Ford: Louis Vuitton, we would call it “Pierre Boutton,” or something

like that. Anyway, so those are the kind of things I wasn’t exactly proud of.
But I think we tried to — one thing we had a deal —
James Altucher: Were you making money at this point in the sense that —
Mark Ford: Yeah, we were making money.
James Altucher: But you personally, was your income tied to the sucess
of the company?
Mark Ford: Yeah, I was making money I think within a year or a year and
a half of that Dale Carnegie moment I was a millionaire. I got rich pretty
quick because —
James Altucher: So you were about 34 years old at this point.
Mark Ford: Yeah. After I started fixing the newsletters, we decided to go

into the investing newsletter. He was in the investing business before.
He got a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. At that time, he was the
youngest person to have a seat, and he was — anyway, we went into the
newsletter publishing business, and forgot what I was even talking about.
64
James Altucher: He had a seat on the Exchange, you were a millionaire at 34 —
Mark Ford: Oh right, right. So, we were publishing the investing news-
letters, and so now I was trying to learn about them. Business was just
beginning back then.
James Altucher: And this was direct-to-consumer.
Mark Ford: Direct-to-consumer, publishing newsletters for individuals, how

to invest better. Joe happened to be an expert in penny stocks. And I knew
nothing about stocks at the time. Penny stocks are stocks that usually go
nowhere. But —
James Altucher: Particularly, based in Boca Raton.
Mark Ford: Particularly. In fact, they actually did —
James Altucher: Boca Raton is famous —
Mark Ford: I know.
James Altucher: — and Las Vegas as like penny stock land.
Mark Ford: And there was a New York Times article that actually drew a
circle around where he lived one time as the center of this activity. I hope
this doesn’t sound like I’m ungrateful. He was a tremendous mentor of
mine, and treated me like gold and silver. But, anyway, we were aggressive
marketers of newsletters — all kinds of newsletters, but including those
kind of newsletters.
James Altucher: And would you test? Like, would you put an ad in this
paper, an ad in this paper, and see what sold better?
Mark Ford: No, we sold mostly through direct mail, which was sending
actual sales letters to people in the mail — people who were buying other
investment newsletters.
James Altucher: You’d buy those lists?
Mark Ford: We’d rent the list. Right. We’d rent the list, and we’d send out a
letter, it would cost you a 35 cent, 40 cents per piece in the mail. You send
65
out 100,000, you spend $40,000, and hope you got back $45,000, and you
could stay in business. So, the whole direct response publishing industry
began primarily through investment newsletters. And anyway, though I
invented — I was looking at them. And none of them interest me, I have no
interest in stocks or bonds. But I was looking at what was working, and
I went to some conferences and met some customers. And most of our
customers were people that were in their 60s, or 70s, or older. And these
guys were basically my parents’ age, and they had been through World
War II, their parents had been through the Depression, and they had a very
particular view of the world. And I realized that these newsletters were not
addressing that. So I created an investment service that was — I wrote a
package for something that was brand new, that wasn’t just a newsletter,
it was a club. And that became The Oxford Club, which it still exists today,
and still a very successful financial service right now. And I went to Joe
and I said, “Well, I’ve written this thing, I’ve invented a product, I’ve got the
product, I got the copy, I’ve got everything. It took me three or four months
to do it. And I just want a piece of the action.” And he looked at it, and he told
me to wait, and he came back the next day, he said, “I’m gonna give you a
piece.” And I thought he was gonna give me 50%, or something. And he said
he was gonna give me 10%. I said, “Great.” He goes, “But I like your thing. I
think it’s worth at least — ” I don’t know what he said — $100,000. I said, “Oh,
thank you.” And he goes, “Okay, so give me my check.” And I yelled, “What do
you mean?” He goes, “You said you wanted 10%.” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “Well,
you gotta pay me $10,000, then.” “Well we haven’t even mailed it.” “Yes. You
agreed it was worth $100,000.” So, that was a lesson in itself.
James Altucher: That’s actually, that’s an interesting negotiating technique

where you establish the formula, and then bam, start filling in the blanks,
everyone agrees to the formula, and then oh, the negotiation’s over before
we even discuss numbers.
Mark Ford: He was a master negotiator. And if we had time, I would tell
you the greatest negotiating story ever told. We could do this afterwards
or when we have —
James Altucher: No, tell me now, it’s good.
Mark Ford: Okay.
66
James Altucher: The greatest negotiating story ever told, I have to have
on my podcast.
Mark Ford: And this will be, this will be. Okay. So, Joe is this great negotia-
tor. And he’s such a great negotiator that he got into a little of trouble with
people in the industry, because they would make deals with him and they
would leave happy, and then three or four months later they would feel the
deals were unfair. And they would complain. Now, I don’t believe in making
deals like that anymore, because that doesn’t help when you do stuff like
that. I saw it with Joe — if you make a deal with somebody, they’re happy,
and then three months later they’re mad, you have a bad business relation-
ship. And that’s not good. But Joe was just very skillful in the you know,
winning through intimidation, or the ideas that say, “Take care of yourself
first and the other person second.” I completely think that’s the wrong way
to negotiate. But, Joe was very good. And so Joe calls me in one day, we
had a syndicate and we had made tons of money in all these different cor-
porations, and we didn’t structure them right. And we were gonna pay like
$10 million in taxes that we shouldn’t really have been paying. We should’ve
been paying $3 million. So, we had his fatherin-law Sid settle the problem
with the IRS agent. And the guy — he worked hard, he took the guy out golf-
ing, he did everything. It was settled correctly. Then one day, Joe says, “did
you see he sent us his bill?” And I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “What did you think?”
I go, “Well, you know,” — it was like for $85,000 or something, you know?
I said, “It wasn’t what we agreed to, it’s more than twice what we agreed
to, but I think we got a great deal.” And he goes, “Yeah, you’re right. But still
it wasn’t what we agreed to.” And I go, “What are you getting at?” He goes,
“I think we have to bring him in and talk to him about it.” I said, “Come
on, this is crazy. You know, we’re making tons of money, and this is your
father-in-law, he’s rich, you’re rich. The only difference this makes to any
of us is me. And I don’t want it, I don’t wanna negotiate.” He goes, “You’re
right, you’re right.” Next morning he calls me and he goes, “I can’t do it. We
have to negotiate.” And I said, “All right, you know, if you want.” He goes, “All
right. It’s gonna be you, me, and Phil.” By that time, his son was working
there. “We’re gonna negotiate with him. And we gotta plan it out.” And I go,
“Plan it out? You’re the greatest negotiator ever — And so now, I’m com-
pletely mortified ‘cause this is the worst expression of all the bad things
67
that could go wrong that did. And so we actually practiced on negotiating.

So, make a long story short —
James Altucher: By the way, I wanna interrupt you again. I’m sorry, but I
wanna address something. The fact that you practiced negotiating, I don’t
think people realize how much of business is actually 95% talking about all
the interactions you’re going to have. There’s 5% of business that happens,
and then 95% is you and all your partners talking about how that 5% is
gonna play out.
Mark Ford: Exactly. And you know, that is one of the things Joe taught
me. As smart as he was, I’ve never worked with a smarter guy — and he
had this amazingly attentive mind — he practiced everything. And if he
was gonna have the meeting with somebody, he actually boned up for it.
Where I would just go in and wing it, he would bone up. And that’s one of
the things I got from him.
So we practiced, and I had my role as the kind of outsider, and Joe had
his role. And then poor Phil as the grandson had his role. And so the day
comes, Joe actually sets up — I may be making this up ‘cause I am Irish,
but I think he actually lowered the seat where Sid was going to sit. And
then we’re sitting around him in this big power office and — I happened to
be standing up — Sid comes walking in after golf. And I realize Sid is like
75 years old at the time and he’s got these little golf shorts, he’s got these
skinny bony legs, and he comes walking in like this. “Hey boys, what’s going
on?” And we were like, “Sit down, Sid.” And he goes, “Oh, all right.” So he sits
down like this, and he’s sitting in the chair like a little old guy, and we start
laying into him. And I am dying, I’m so embarrassed, you know? And we’re
just doing it, and he’s getting whiter and whiter, and I’m thinking, “He’s actu-
ally gonna die. And I’m gonna be part of this, and I’m gonna have killed an
old man. How greedy can you get? What is wrong with us?” You know?
James Altucher: And was his primary argument, “This is not what we
agreed to about everything”?
Mark Ford: I guess that — I don’t even remember. I couldn’t — Believe me,
I couldn’t think at that point, I have no memory of that. It was like a car
accident for me. I can only tell you what we planned to do, then it started,
68
and then I do remember the end of it. I’m watching Sid, and he looks like
he’s about to die — he’s getting whiter and whiter — and then he goes — we
finally stopped — and he goes, “So boys, is that it?” And we say, “Yeah.”
And he goes, “Well, I only have one question for ya.” And he goes, “Did you
think that was the entire bill?” I’m not kidding. We spend another hour
negotiating, we settle for $180,000.
James Altucher: Oh my god, so Sid owned the table.
Mark Ford: We doubled with that one question, “Did you think that was the
entire bill?” I never know to this day whether Sid — I think that was the en-
tire bill — but Sid was such a master negotiator, he knew with one question
he could completely knock Joe’s legs out. And we didn’t — we ended up
paying twice what he wanted.
James Altucher: So he changed the conversation. He changed it from the

what we agreed to, to —
Mark Ford: — what it was worth, what the —
James Altucher: $7 million — based on the $7 million, rather than what we

agreed to.
Mark Ford: Right.
James Altucher: So, changing the conversation’s a valuable skill.
Mark Ford: Yeah, it is. Yeah. But you know, we’re talking about —
James Altucher: And you refer to this in Persuasion — this is the important
emotional content — how would you feel without that $7 million? That’s
what he changed the conversation to. So it’s not whether — what it became,
“Hey, are you gonna live up to what we agreed to?” to “How would you feel
without $7 million?”
Mark Ford: Right. Exactly. Yeah you know, we don’t have to stay too long
on negotiating, but — Bill gave me a whole different perspective in nego-
tiating which I admire greatly. And I do think to be a good negotiator you
have to have some of the skills that Joe has. But I would say that I would
rather have 60% of what Bill does. And this is Bill’s technique.
69
James Altucher: So this is Bill Bonner —
Mark Ford: Bill Bonner, right. This is Bill’s technique. No planning whatso-
ever, just — discussing the plan about what the value of this might be and
what it might not be. So Bill comes in with a good assessment of what he
thinks the value is, and lets you present your thing, and he’ll say, “so, what
do you think is fair?” And then you’ll tell him, and then he’ll go — he only
says one of two things — he goes, “Well that seems fair to me.” Or he’ll go,
“Oh, I couldn’t afford that.” And if he says, “I couldn’t afford that,” not only
will you not complete that deal, you’ll never do business with him again.
Ever. Because what Bill’s doing is much smarter. What Bill’s doing is, he’s
looking for long-term relationships. He understands that the way business
is run is not by — well, I’m not talking about every business relationship,
like going to get your muffler fixed. But in terms of building businesses for
the long-term, what Bill understands is that businesses are built on lever-
aging good relationships where people help each other. And you can find
that out from the first negotiation. You know, fairness isn’t a dot. Fairness
is a range. You know, it’s silly to say that there’s a particular dollar amount
that a business is worth, and it’s not worth a dollar more or dollar less. So
with some kind of range and — After seeing Bill do this a number of times,
I started to understand that.
And what I’m looking for in a business relationship — in terms of evaluat-

ing business — is, does this person’s perception of my contribution and
his contribution in terms of its dollar value fall in a range that’s compatible
with each other? If this is the range, he might be up here and I might be up
here, but there’s plenty of overlap. But if they’re disparate, then I can’t do
business with him. We could make a deal, but we’re never gonna have a
relationship because the deal would just — won’t be satisfactory to each of
us. As for the other thing that I do — and this may be contrary to what oth-
er people do — is if I make a deal with somebody and then three months
later I can see that — I think you’ve actually mentioned this in Choose
Yourself Guide To Wealth— I feel that the good deal is not good for him, I
change the deal and make it good for him. Because I want the deal to be
good for him. If I make a relationship, then it’s not good for me, and he
won’t wanna change then maybe I got in bed with the wrong person. And
so that’s happened to me in my experiences. I’m fine, I do my thing and
70
then I stop doing business with you. And I have business relationships
where they’re people that I was kind of the partner relationship and I felt
like they didn’t handle it right, and I was happy, I still have lunch with them,
their business is going down, and I hope I don’t have any — what’s that
good German word for that? The pleasure in other people’s —
James Altucher: Schadenfreude?
Mark Ford: — schadenfreude, and I hope that it does pop up a little bit, you
know. I just smile at them, “Oh, sorry to hear that.”
James Altucher: Well Bill’s technique’s fascinating, because — what I like

about that technique is, he already has in mind the sense of the value that he
wants to negotiate. But instead of just saying, “I think it’s worth X,” he asks for
advice, “What do you think it’s worth?” And so he’s getting several things out
of that — first off, they might say something slightly less but still within that
range of acceptability, in which case he’s kind of “winning the negotiation”.
But he’s also using it as a test, “Am I gonna be on the phone six months later
arguing with this guy?” And it’s incredibly useful. That’s valuable.
Mark Ford: And it saves a lot of stress, too. You know, I don’t want to
make this all about — people’d be wondering, “Why did you want to be with
him? Why not try to be with Bill, which you certainly can?” But —
James Altucher: No, no, but you’ve got this experience from all these
different people, and obviously built hundreds of businesses off of it, so I
wanna hear how you’ve aggregated that wisdom from all of these people.
Mark Ford: Well Bill and Joe for me are two people I think about a lot,
‘cause they’re alike. They’re not rich, they’re poor a lot there, but they’re
hyper —
James Altucher: Evil dad, good dad?
Mark Ford: Well no, don’t say — he wasn’t evil [crosstalk]
James Altucher: All right, I’m not gonna say, “Evil dad.”
Mark Ford: He was a wonderful guy in many ways. But he was, let’s say
hyper, aggressive business type of dad.
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James Altucher: Well okay, you called it in one of your books “hoarder
versus sharer.” You did identify them, I know you were thinking that way.
Mark Ford: Well, anyway, so I learned a lot from both of them. But I think
in terms of living a stress-free life, Bill is, he’s a genius at that. And his
negotiating strategy — Bill also is a person that he almost never criticiz-
es you. And so the genius of that, when you don’t criticize people — and
I’m not that way. I mean, I’m more from the other side, but — is that you
attract people that are very strong people. It’s hard to hold on to great
employees if you’re very domineering. You can do it, but it’s work. Because
Bill has this I call it — it’s business equivalent of negative capability — he
allows you to be your full self in his presence. And he can see your full self,
which is a big plus — your strong points and your weak points — ‘cause he
lets you act out and he’s not battling you. He doesn’t feel the need to battle
you. So he sees your strengths and weaknesses, he makes comments,
and kind of lets you do your thing. As I said, one is kind of a hard way and
the other’s a soft way. One’s a tense way, and the other’s a relaxed way.
And I think for me — especially as you get older — I want my life to be 60,
or 70, or 80% relaxed, not — You know when you get older — you don’t
know this yet, you’re still a young guy, but — when you’re about 60 you
have a choice of two clear roads. You can become one of these — they
typical road, the big road is you’re gonna become old and crotchety, and
you’re not going to do anything, you’re not gonna leave, you’re not gonna
travel, you’re not gonna wanna do anything out of the ordinary.
Another one is you can become one of these really cool old people that’s
like relaxed, and they like people, and everybody loves them. I’m trying to
go in that direction.
James Altucher: Well, so we’ve been in Agora a couple times, they sell like
$350 million worth of newsletters, information products, other products.
And I do think the average let’s say 150 million people who are sitting in cu-
bicles right now would benefit from knowing — and you talk about this a lot
in your books, particularly Ready, Fire, Aim — would benefit from learning,
“How can I (a) come up with the idea that will get me out of my cubicle and
(b) how do I start marketing this?” I forget if you said it or someone else
said it, but school kind of teaches you to get a job, when no one teaches
you to get several multiple sources of income. And so, how can I — from
72
your experience with all these different businesses — how can I start from
step one, I’m in the cubicle, and I’m scared. I think I don’t like my boss, and
he’s gonna fire me or she’s gonna fire me. I have kids to raise, and I have
the alimony to pay. My mind is telling me I’m stuck. What’s the first step?
Mark Ford: Okay. There are two things you could do simultaneously that
don’t compete with each other.
One is you have to figure out how to become the most valuable employ-
ee you possibly can be, and really the most valuable employee in your
environment of your business, whatever that is — your department, your
division, however far you feel you can contribute. And you gotta figure out
what that means — I’ll get back to it in a second.
The other thing is you have to decide whether your business is the busi-
ness where an entrepreneur can thrive — many businesses are not. I have
to say that becoming an entrepreneur will not work — as I said — if you
work in a very corporate environment.
If your business is political, it won’t work. A political business is one where

position and power are more important than creativity, and productivity, and
profit. Profit — although when I was younger I wouldn’t have recognized it —
is the purifying element of business.
And when you have profit — when everybody’s thinking about making profit
— then politics — what you’re allowed to do, what you’re not allowed to do
— takes second seat to coming up with good ideas. So you have to be in
that environment. And if you’re not in that environment, I think you have to
move. You do have to quit your job. And generally speaking, if you go and —
for young people, I always say — go work for a small business that’s grow-
ing. You know when you’re working — you know they say, “A rising tide lifts
all boats,” and we all have different capacities and our own internal boat,
where boats of our brains or emotional intelligence have different sizes —
but if you’re in a company that itself is growing quickly, your chances of
moving up the ladder are much, much greater. And your chances of getting
a cross-departmental experience are much, much greater.
So, I do think it’s very important to figure out whether your business is a
business that would accept you if you were an entrepreneur that welcomes
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and lets people move up as fast as they — That’s one of the things about
Agora — in the old days, if somebody said, “Hey listen, I wanna start a
whole new division that I think will do well.” “Okay, go ahead, do it. Take your
chair.” I mean it was practically like that. Maybe that’s not so unusual today
when I think about — when I read about how some of these California type
businesses work. But —
James Altucher: But it’s definitely like — again, I always use Procter &
Gamble as like the classic example — but usually those are the current
Procter & Gamble.
Mark Ford: Right. Right. So that —
James Altucher: No offense to Procter & Gamble.
Mark Ford: And look, their system — and you know what, it may even be
that that’s the only way business like that can be. Because one the things
I’ve discovered as my businesses have gotten bigger from $1 million to
$10 million to $100 million to Agora’s now over $500 million is that a lot
the things that you hate in the small business happen inevitably. They hap-
pen for real reasons. There’s a reason why big businesses are bureaucratic
and not ‘cause evil people came in and decided to make them.
It’s just like government — there’s a reason why governments are so hor-
rible in so many ways. It comes from a natural process of trying to solve
problems of multiple people. But putting that whole issue aside — if you
are working for Procter & Gamble however, they’re not gonna change, so
you have to change. You gotta move, and go into a small, fast-growing
business. But in the meantime, while you’re waiting to get that better job,
you should try to become the best employee you can.
And by that, it means you have to — and I did talk about this in some of my
books — you have to recognize that every business has a base of three
pieces. They have the sales and marketing side, they have the product
production side, and then they have the management staff. Everything
else is external. The management stuff that’s done is not where you’re
going to become a partner in your business, you know. It’s very tough to
do that. There’s one position basically in that whole structure, and that’s
for somebody who really knows how to manage profits. If the business is
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structured — certain types of businesses where managing profits is very

important. But otherwise, it’s generally the sales and marketing area, or if
there’s some limited number of positions in the product production area
where you can get a piece of the pie.
So, what you need to do is understand, how does this or that work in your
business? How does your business make money? You know, how does
the marketing work, how does the sales force work, how do products get
produced, and reinvented, and reproduced? And find out where you are —
you in that mechanism — are you part of that, and if you’re not, can you
shift over? Can you start volunteering to at least learn about those things?
You know, it is a pretty strategic — I’m not telling people, just try to be the
best person you can be. That’s not gonna work.
And even being the best part of — this a big topic — part of this process
is not just being the innovator in a business or being the great marketing
guy. But you have to promote yourself. You do have to promote yourself
within a business, because if your business is at all big, there are plenty of
people who wanna take what you’re doing, take credit for it, and put you in
the closet. So, you have to know how to do that, too.
James Altucher: That’s interesting. So my only real experience with big

corporate America — I worked for HBO — and you’re right. There was a
production side, they made TV shows. There was a sales and marketing
side, how do we get more customers for HBO? And then there was the
whole kind of accounting/IT side, it was for the management side. And I of
course was on the management/IT side, so we were in another building,
no one to talk to. And the way I would try to succeed in HBO was moving
myself into the production side where I was obsessed —
Mark Ford: So you had the right instincts. My son — my oldest son Liam
— got into kind of like, he’s on the IT side of a company that does col-
orization for movies. They’re the biggest company in America — or the
world — that does that. And he went into the IT side, he started out as an
engineer. And I said, “I just want you to know that the problem with being
in that part of business is that the person that’s really making the ultimate
decisions about who makes money in business is looking at their employ-
ees in terms of the ledger. On this side of the ledger are the expenses, and
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on this side are the production people. And these are the people that can
make me money, and these are the people I need. And when you’re an
engineer, an IT guy, an accounting guy, even the legal guys — especially at
Agora — you’re on the expense side.
James Altucher: Always in the crosshairs —
Mark Ford: Yeah. I may need them, but you’re a cost. And I wanna reduce
that cost, and I wanna increase this. So how do I do that? By giving these
people more incentives — including financial incentives — and by just
holding people down, ‘cause they’re presumably they’re replaceable. And
so he’s doing the same thing, by the way — he’s moving into production
right now.
Because in that industry like every other industry, he got into it, he — Even
at ten years ago — this is something I’m sure is not interesting, but I think
it might be — in the movie business, the colorization — the movie was
business was still basically analog. The whole movie business ten years
ago was 80% analog. And all the colorization stuff was done on film. And
it’s only been in the last ten years that it went into digital. But man, in the
last five years, the digital stuff that was $1 million, paid $5000 for it. So it
happened so quickly.
James Altucher: It seems as the industry has a Moore’s law kind of effect.
Mark Ford: Right. Exactly. So he is a smart kid, and he can see the writing
on the wall, you know? He can hire people right out of college to do the work
that he was spending all night. By the way, he almost deleted — the first
thing he did was he almost — this is a lesson for young people. He called me
up and he said, “I’m in big trouble.” This was after about a month. He —
James Altucher: It’s a credit he called his dad as he was in trouble.
Mark Ford: Yeah. “I’m in big trouble.” “What did you do?” He was working
on I think Mission: Impossible. Okay?
James Altucher: Five, the next one coming up?
Mark Ford: No, no. This was the first one. Or something like that. I don’t
know. I don’t remember exactly. But it was a giant movie like that.
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And I said, “What happened?” He goes, “Well, you know how I kind of like
to tinker with things?” And I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “Well I deleted the movie.”
I go, “What do you mean, you deleted the movie?” He goes, “I deleted the
whole movie. It’s gone.” I go, “You mean it’s like a $150 million movie you
just deleted?” And he goes, “Yes.” I go, “Well, obviously it can’t be entirely
deleted.” And he goes, “No, no. It can be recovered. But it can’t be recov-
ered like until I do all these things that will happen by the time every one
is here- there’s a meeting tomorrow and he’ll — whatever his name is — is
coming in, and they’re gonna know. They’re gonna know what happened.”
So I’m like, “Oh boy, you’re in trouble.” He goes, “So they’re gonna come
in — ” I said, “I know this much — I don’t know anything about IT, but I know
this much about business. That the boss, the guy that’s gonna have to
deal with this doesn’t know anything about IT there. And he also knows
he’s probably buying a lot of stuff — you’re buying a lot of stuff from
vendors, right? All your technology and your stuff.” And he says, “Yes.” “So
then, this is the only thing you can do. You gotta storm into his office first
thing in the morning and start screaming and yelling about those damn
vendors, they effed everything up, and you’re tired of this, and you want
a raise.” I said, “That’s the only way you’re gonna keep your job. I was half
joking, but I was serious. ‘Cause I knew that that’s the only thing the rea-
son I would keep a guy on, if they were sure enough.
And then I forgot about it. And then like a month later I was talking, “So
whatever happened?” He goes, “I did it. I went in and did it.” And I said, “Did
you ask for a raise?” And he goes, “Yeah.” “Well, what did you ask for?” He
was making $45,000 at the time. He said, “I asked for $110,000.” I said,
“What? You asked for $110,000?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “How?” He goes,
“Well I added up all my overtime and I doubled it, and that’s what it came
to.” I said, “Oh my god.” And then I said, “He didn’t fire you?” “No, he didn’t
fire me.” I go, “Well, let me tell you what’s going on right now.” Yeah, and
this might have been a week or two after. He goes, “He’s looking to replace
you right now. ‘Cause, you know, he is a smart guy, and you’re asking
for way more than he thinks you’re worth. So one of two things is gonna
happen. He will — you will be replaced soon if he can find somebody for
$60,000 or $70,000 that’s as good as you. Or if you don’t get replaced in
the month or six weeks, you will get that raise. May not be as much.”
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And sure enough, like three months later, they flew him to Las Vegas on a
private plane, gave him like $90,000, and a free night in Las Vegas.
James Altucher: Well what happened to the movie? Did he —
Mark Ford: Oh, it went up. I mean, it got back up. The problem wasn’t that
the movie was permanently deleted. It’s just that by the next morning’s
meeting when they came in they had to tell — they were crying, “I’m sorry,
the movie is down right now.” And that’s how he told it to me. I was like,
“The whole movie’s gone?” You know?
James Altucher: Okay so we’re in the cubicle, this is a good example of him
being an intrapreneur, and you were talking about companies where you’re
either in the type of company where you could be an intrapreneur, or you
should even find one. But now, what if I also wanna make that transition
to entrepreneurship? And you’re a big believer in information products. So
products that you can make relatively cheaply, and market even relatively
cheaply, and that’s a good way to kind of get your feet wet in terms of en-
trepreneurship. But again, I’m in the cubicle and I’m scared ‘cause I’ve never
done that before.
Mark Ford: Well it just so happens I wrote a whole book for that person
called Reluctant Entrepreneur. I myself was never an entrepreneur, per se.
I was an intrapreneur. I created businesses within businesses, and then
while I had businesses, I was making more money than I needed, then
I would invest in other businesses, and start other businesses, with my
partner or other partners. You know, my thing is, never leave your day job
until the income from your side job is equal to your day job.
James Altucher: That was my exact technique when I was at HBO.
Mark Ford: Well there you go. Great minds think alike. And so you know,
what I would say is — this is a real challenge. It’s easy to tell people,
motivate people, but how do you actually help people go beyond that?
And that’s what I’ve been doing since about three or four years since we
started this business called Palm Beach Research Group. And my contri-
bution to it — I agreed to go into it if I could focus on creating wealth in a
non-stock, bond, non-financial areas.
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James Altucher: Which is really important, because stocks and bonds

aren’t going to change your life if the economy is completely changing.
And that’s what’s happening.
Mark Ford: And, you know, they do go up and down, and — of the decisions
I made after I decided to get wealthy was, I had this thought one day. I said,
“Wouldn’t it be cool if every day I got just a little bit richer?” I don’t remem-
ber — Back then, I’m already an investment business, publishing business,
even though I had no interest in it. I was watching what going on, and I was
seeing that a lot of people were making money, losing especially people
doing penny stocks. They’re doing penny stocks, people investing in mining
stocks, and there are so many volatile aspects of the market. And I said,
“What would I use that to make?” And so I thought, “What if I just got richer
every day?” And that was one of the first things I said, “I will do whatever it
takes, even if it’s just a nickel richer. I will get richer every day. I never wanna
get poorer.” And so I developed all these strategies, one of them was multi-
ple incomes. You have to have multiple incomes.
Another is, I kept a very minimum amount of money in volatile invest-

ments like stocks, and so on. And in fact, the only thing I really did in
stocks was index funds.
Anyway, so my whole approach was — and my recommendation for

people who wanna get outside of that to their own is — to keep your day
job, just work extra hours. You do have those extra hours, and you can be
better than 80% of the other employees working 25 hours smartly a week.
And even if they give you 40 hours you’ll be in the upper ten percentile.
And then what I did is I worked 80 hours a week. I’m dying to talk to Tim
Ferriss, but I’m sure he doesn’t work —I don’t think he’s ever worked a four-
hour workweek in his life. But that’s what you have — you do have those
extra hours.
James Altucher: I agree with you, but I think what he did was, he figured
out once his first business was rolling, he then fired the difficult custom-
ers and outsourced everything. He told me he originally wanted to call his
book The Two-Hour Workweek, ‘cause on his original business, that’s all
he was working. But he was then working the 80 hours on marketing the
books.
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Mark Ford: No, I think he’s a very smart guy and I think he — I’ve listened to
him and I defer over competitors. But he’s a very smart guy, he makes a lot
of sense. It’s a good angle. I mean look, the book sold like crazy. How could
I — mister marketing — be upset with him for gilding the lily a little bit?
Anyway, I think you use those extra hours, and the reason why I tend to fo-
cus on information marketing — I started doing this when I started writing
Early To Rise as Michael Masterson in the year 2000. And I went through
all the information publishing areas, all the ways you can do that. And I was
writing stuff that nobody was writing. That whole market is flooded with
experts and pseudo-experts right now that teach people how to do that.
And we have — in our program — we have about 14 or 15, maybe 18

information publishing — just publishing — advisory, information-rated
businesses that people can do on their own. It’s called the Extra Income
Project, and what it was, was I would write an essay of 3000 or 4000
words, sometimes 5000 words where I would describe from my point of
view these are all businesses that I’ve been in, or owned, or managed, or
consulted with. And I would describe how the business looks and feels —
but they’re all businesses that you could start for a reasonable amount of
money, you can make a reasonable amount of money, and so on. And —
James Altucher: What’s an example?
Mark Ford: Well, you could become a copywriter. I started a business

teaching people how to be a copywriter many years ago, ‘cause it was a big
problem finding copywriters in our industry. And we have a business called
American Writers and Artists. In fact, it does nothing but that, they have
thousands of students, and they — Agora probably hires 100 copywriters
a year, and I’ve yet to meet one in the last five or six years that wasn’t at
one time a student of this business. So you can go on to the business of
teaching people how to be copywriters, or you could become a copywriter
yourself. And it takes some time to learn how to be a copywriter.
James Altucher: And just being in copywriting is kind of this specialized

ability of writing that is extra persuasive, you might say.
Mark Ford: Yeah well, I would say that — I mean technically what it is, is
writing advertising copy of any kind.
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James Altucher: And most people don’t realize that’s actually a skill. I
would say the average person doesn’t know that there’s difference be-
tween — that there’s a special skill required.
Mark Ford: Right. Yeah. In fact, when we started this business, we got all
kinds of hate mail by copywriters who — ‘cause I had by that time trained
100 people to be copywriters, personally. And so we were saying, “I’ll teach
you how to be a copywriter.” And they were very upset because of course,
they thought that they were Hemingways, and Fitzgeralds, and so on. And
they were far from it. I mean the level of literary quality in advertising copy
is very seldom very high. It is occasionally — David Ogilvy and people like
that, but generally speaking, it’s quite low. But the persuasion techniques
can be taught and can be learned. And I have taught guys that are literally,
basically illiterate to be pretty good copywriters.
So there are skills, and you can learn them, and there are plenty of people
out there that understand them. And so you can learn that, and you can —
that program is if you’re going to direct response advertising writing, and
particularly if you wanna write about investing, or natural health, you can
easily make $100,000 $150,000 a year. Plenty of people — at Agora we
have several people that make over $500,000 a year. Several —
James Altucher: And what they’re doing is, they’re selling what you read
— whenever you get an e-mail like, “500% opportunity potential click here.”
I’m simplifying it greatly. But that’s a copywriter’s writing that and a news-
letter writer who’s writing the newsletter.
Mark Ford: Exactly. Right. Right. A copywriter that would try to sell the
newsletter by promising 500% is not a very good copywriter, in my opinion.
But yeah, that’s the idea. But also, I mean you could — there are all kinds
that you could do — you could be a copywriter for charities, or for political
groups. You can attach that skill to passions, to go back to our passion
discussion.
James Altucher: Do political groups realize they need copywriters, or are

they just hire anyone?
Mark Ford: Oh no. They hire the best. I mean the whole —
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James Altucher: So they know.
Mark Ford: The whole industry, I mean you know the whole political world
has changed in the past 15 or 20 years because of copywriting. Part of
Obama’s great success was from direct mail copy. The Republicans orig-
inally mastered it. There’s an organization — forget what it’s called, but —
that basically was creating all the funding for the Republicans. And then the
Democrats finally decided they would dirty their fingers and they’ve been
raising billions of dollars that way. The NRA — any kind of advocacy groups,
they all use copywriters. And if they have money, then you’re gonna make a
lot of money. If it’s a poor group — so if your passion is for some mission-
ary work in Angola, you’re probably not gonna make a lot of money, but —
James Altucher: Well let’s see the political situation. So our pathway
might be — okay, I’m sitting at Procter & Gamble, I’m gonna find the local
candidate, I’m gonna learn copywriting skill and write copy for him. And
then I can show other candidates, “Hey look, he won. I wrote the copy.”
And then you could start kind of getting 12 candidates as clients, and now
you have a business.
Mark Ford: Absolutely. In fact, if it’s a world that’s circumscribed as the

political world is, or even fundraising — you won’t have to tell anybody. If
you write a package that works, everybody will know about it, and — what
generally happens is, that kind of success happens once — if you’re very
good it happens once every ten packages you write. And so generally, peo-
ple don’t have those big hits. But if they do good work, they get better and
better, and then they get to write higher profile things and their — there’s
a whole — as I said, we have a whole business of teaching people every
aspect of it. And that’s just one way, it’s an obvious way of making money.
But you know, you can make — depending on how much money you want,
and you can make money by buying and selling products online, you can
make you know, as —
James Altucher: Like what?
Mark Ford: Well, you can make money buying and selling collectibles.
There are all kinds of businesses out there. I had an interest for a while —
I collect certain things — and I had an interest in cigar lighters, old cigar
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lighters. And I went online and sure enough, there’s a whole market out
there. And once you — if you know how to become a collector, a dealer,
you’ll focus in one area, you’ll learn what things are worth, you’ll buy them
cheaply and sell them —
James Altucher: How will you know to buy them cheaply? Like, won’t
everybody know that these are valuable?
Mark Ford: Well, then the margins do get smaller on the internet, because
everything’s available. It’s happening to every aspect of the industry. But you
have to really focus. You have to be able to — well, I’ll give you an example.
I was at a store — a fancy clothing store — and they had these very cool
old books — vintage books — out there — coffee table books. And I was
gonna pay $180 for it, ‘cause I was very excited. And then, Kathy wouldn’t
wanna pay $180 for it. So, she goes online right away and finds the same
book — I mean this is the most obscure book, and I couldn’t believe it was
online. There must be 30 in existence, and like 18 of them are listed. So
there’s somebody out there that knows these type of books — I don’t know
how to describe them — and knows them so well that he can be out there
buying them when people — obviously, what you’re doing in any market is,
when you’re buying and reselling, you have to be smart enough that when
you see something that’s underpriced you buy it, and then you sell it at a
markup that — When you’re in a market that’s beginning where there’s a
large interest in it, then you can make a lot of money. Like for example, if
you decide to buy surfboards — vintage surfboards or certain kind of surf-
boards — when you might be able to — A friend of mine — Steve Sjuggerud,
you may know him.
James Altucher: Yeah.
Mark Ford: Yeah. Steve likes to do that, he bought up a bunch of them. He

had a very interesting theory — says you buy what your generation thought
was cool when they were in their 20s or so. And then when they hit their
50s you sell it. I think it’s brilliant, actually. And so —
James Altucher: It’s a long-term holding strategy.
Mark Ford: It’s a long-term, yes. It’s a long-term — he’s a long-term guy.
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But anyway, so we have like 18 — you could be a graphic artist, you could
be an editor. There’s a huge demand for editors in our business. I know
four people that are looking for editors right now. They don’t know where
to find them.
James Altucher: Well, we’re looking for an editor right now.
Mark Ford: There you go. But the problem is, people need skills. And they
need skills in our industry, and so American Writers is now gonna start
training people to be editors, and then — So, you can make money as a
photographer — not much, but you can make money with a program like
that. You can make — you know, there’s a business — there are so many.
This is on the information side — I knew I should’ve prepared myself a
virtual list.
James Altucher: No no no, that’s okay. ‘Cause what’s interesting, like you
said, the photographer — what’s interesting there is people often ask me,
“I have $5000. How should I invest it?” And I often tell them, “Buy a cam-
era, a really great camera, and a book or watch YouTube videos on how
to be a better photographer. Because all you have to do is like one or two
weddings, you’ve just made your investment back. And now you’re gonna
make 3000% on your investment. Why buy a stock?”
Mark Ford: That’s a perfect example. I mean, being a wedding photog-

rapher is always in demand. You can learn — this is information. Well, I
guess that is information.
James Altucher: Oh but then you can write a newsletter on how to be —
Mark Ford: Absolutely.
James Altucher: — a successful wedding photographer.
Mark Ford: Yeah. Because there is knowledge, there’s things to be learned

there. I wrote like 12 or 14 essays, and not all of them were — most of
them on the information side. And Bob Bly — don’t know if you know Bob
Dwight, he’s just an amazing guy — he’s doing another 12 of them, so we’ll
have 24. But I’m also — I’ve asked him to do some that are not informa-
tion-oriented, because we gotta be honest, to be good in the information
industry, you basically have to be pretty smart.
84
You don’t have to be brilliant, but you gotta be a pretty smart person. ‘Cause
you have to learn some part of the industry better than most people — not
better than everybody, but better than most people. And then you have to
learn how to market, and so on. So, there are a lot of people that read our
publication that I know they’re either too old, or they don’t have that kind of
smarts, but they can do fine, too. There are plenty of people that get wealthy
that aren’t particularly brilliant. So I feel committed to teaching people how
to develop their own carpet cleaning business for example, or a business
maintaining lawns. You can get very wealthy — in Delray Beach there are
a thousand lawn chair businesses, but probably only two of them are any
good, because they’re all terribly managed. Or, I have a friend that —
James Altucher: So what’s the secret of the two out of the hundreds?
Mark Ford: Well amazingly, good service. The secret is that most people
that go into their business are really irresponsible people that don’t do
good jobs, don’t know what a good job is.
James Altucher: But if you just show up, and —
Mark Ford: Show up, do a good job, talk to your customers, make them
happy. I mean, these businesses require less skill in a way, except basic
human emotional intelligence type skills. So you can do that. Or you can
develop specialties.
The kind of grass I have here is not common in south Florida. But it’s very
expensive to maintain, and there are thousands of these properties from
here to Palm Beach. And you can make a lot of money starting a service
putting up Christmas lights and taking them down every year. I have a
friend that his first business he started putting his Guatemalan wife they
couldn’t speak English. He started a maid service around her and he ended
up with around 40 maids.
So there’s all kinds of businesses also outside of the information. But

they’re all about — every business has two parts.
One is the product, which could be a service. Though you ask me about
that lawn service, just give better service.
But then the other’s sales. The sales part is pretty easy, you know, for
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those kind of businesses. What he did is, he just went up to the people
with doorknobs and left a note — but a handwritten note — a nice, not the
typical thing. If asked you James, if you wanted to start a lawn service and
you wanted to get your first job — somebody to try you out. And you wrote
a handwritten note and said, “I’m James Altucher, I’m new in the business,
I’m an honest guy. I’d like to show you what my business is. I think I can
make your lawn look twice as good at 10% less. If you give me a shot, I’ll
do your first service for free.” If you put that on 1000 homes, you think you
would get a job?
James Altucher: Yeah, particularly if I added, “Oh, I see that you have this
type of lawn in your back yard —
Mark Ford: Even better. I gotta hire you for my next — you are very good in
the lawn service.
James Altucher: I gotta first learn how to use a lawnmower machine.
Mark Ford: That’ll be our retirement days. So the point is, after that, it’s
just numbers, you know? The —
James Altucher: And you test — you might try one type of letter here, an-
other type of letter there. And see what works. And I can do this while I’m
at my cubicle. Like, I can go out at night and put the ads on people’s doors,
or send out e-mails, or rent e-mail lists, or whatever.
Mark Ford: And everybody has an otherwise unemployable friend or

relative that you can get to the actual grunt work while your business is
growing.
James Altucher: So okay. So I’m in my cubicle, I’ve come up with an idea

that people need. I’ve come up with the basic technique for marketing.
I’m gonna wait until I can equal my pay before I’m quitting. What next
piece of advice would you give to the new startup entrepreneur?
Mark Ford: Well, the book that you looked at last night — Ready, Fire, Aim
— is all about that. There’s really — because I had so —
James Altucher: How did you know I looked at that book last night?
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Mark Ford: Because I had said to somebody, “I can’t believe he’s coming
— this guy interviews Tony Robbins — what am I gonna say to him? I’m a
little nervous about having this interview.” And Giovanni wrote me back,
said, “Well maybe he’s nervous too. He just asked for your book.” So I felt
better about that.
James Altucher: No, but I asked for the Living Rich book. Not the Ready,
Fire, Aim one.
Mark Ford: I know, I know. But I said, “Send him the Ready, Fire, Aim book.”
Because to me, it’s more interesting. The Living Rich book is a good book,
but Ready, Fire, Aim is really about this core thing. It’s how do you get a
business from zero to $100 million?
James Altucher: You know, there was something very interesting about
Ready, Fire, Aim I wanted to ask you about. There’s kind of an evolutionary
aspect to it.
‘Cause you said that you’d divided up the four types of businesses — zero
to $1 million, $1 million to $10 million, $10 million to $50 million, and then
$50 million to $100 million, and beyond.
So, but that also implies a certain number of people at the business. And
I think that’s evolutionary speaking more interesting in the sense that we
move from tribes where everybody knew each other to let’s say groups
of tribes where you had — you didn’t know everybody, but you can gossip
about everybody. Then, kingdoms and civilizations where you had to have
a story like where the best beer in the world, or where the best country in
the world — you had to have a visionary story that bonds people together,
so they can work together. And I thought you’d divided it up in kind of may-
be a subconscious way along those lines.
Mark Ford: Well no, it was more than subconscious. In fact — I think I did
mention it — I was grappling with the idea of whether I should divide it
up. It could’ve been numbers of people. I thought I talked about it in that
book, but —
James Altucher: You said you thought you could divide it up in terms of
numbers of people. And I thought the numbers were specifically almost
like evolutionary numbers.
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Mark Ford: Right. And you know one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books — it
might have been The Tipping Point — he goes into this idea. And it’s an
idea that I always think that he’s been reading my newsletters, ‘cause he
always comes up with stuff after I do. I just wanna state for the record
that this whole — I know it wasn’t his idea, he got it from somebody else —
about 10,000 hours?
James Altucher: Yeah, he got that from Ander — some guy from like 1991.
Mark Ford: Oh. I gotta find out who that guy is, because I wrote that essay
ten years before that book came out. My number was 5000 hours, and
this guy — whoever he got it from probably actually did some research —
but I actually — it was very early, it was in ’90, ’91, he was ahead of me — I
did not read his research, but I was just thinking about how long it takes to
become good at something. I completely lost track again, James.
James Altucher: No no, but oh, so does it take 5000 hours to become
good at something? Is that —
Mark Ford: Well my rule was, it takes 1000 hours to be competent — my

first essay, this is what I wrote. And 5000 hours to be a master. And if you
have a — I realized later after I wrote that, I changed the essay into, “But
if you have somebody that can help you, and teach you, and mentor you,
then you can knock 30% of that off.” Because I realized I was in the busi-
ness of helping and mentoring people, so I want to give them an incentive
to keep reading my stuff. But I think that’s roughly true.
James Altucher: Yeah, that’s a good point.
Mark Ford: I thought about Spanish, I thought about learning the languag-
es I’ve learned, learning musical instruments, all the experiences that I had,
different kind of complex skills. And then I thought, “You know, I think it
applies to everything.” It applied to jiu-jitsu — I learned jiu-jitsu — anyway.
I think it’s basically true. I don’t know. Who knows whether it’s 5000 — but
the main idea of that is that —
James Altucher: Of course Tim Ferriss knocks it down to four hours.
Mark Ford: I know, I know. He did it again. So, I heard of just yesterday [you
can become fluent in any language in — Well actually, what he said was
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true. He said, “You can become fluent in a language” in some number of

weeks. I became fluent in French in ten weeks, so he’s right. Anyway, so —
James Altucher: So let’s say that you get competent at doing a business.
Mark Ford: Right. So, what are we talking about in general? Oh, the four
stages I talked about — yeah, we were talking about something interesting
there, which is how do businesses grow? And I tried to classify it in terms
of dollars only because I thought it would be more interesting for people
to start off with. I’m gonna get it to $1 million, then I’m gonna get it to $10
million, and then —
James Altucher: Well it makes me feel competitive.
Mark Ford: But a lot of businesses, the number of people — I mean probably
more of the dynamic of the business and how it changes depends on the
number of people. Because — and there’ve been some number of studies
that had done this, but — my feeling is always, you can directly relate to like
seven or eight people — six or seven or eight people.
And I think Malcolm Gladwell mentioned that directly. And the thing about
a business is, when you’re a business owner, you hire seven people. Those
people can be — they only need one skill, primarily the skill of keeping you
happy, to keep their jobs. And then, each of them is gonna hire their own
seven people — now you got 50 people. The people that you hired — how-
ever great you think they are — they may not be skillful at training or teach-
ing or inspiring those other people below them. But at least those other
people below them can see you through them, because you got an office
of 50 people, they always see the boss. And they see their boss interacting
with you, so there’s that kind of communication. So the smart people like
I was when I entered that — the story I told you when I sat down at lunch,
I said, “Sorry, I’m with that guy.” — I could do that because there were only
50 people or less in that office. But once you get the next step, 350 — seven
times 50 — then you don’t see the boss anymore.
You don’t really know what the core culture is and what’s important. And
then the whole business can break down, you can be in a political envi-
ronment, so… Though for me from the owner’s perspective of the busi-
ness —that creates problems, you know? I could say at 350 people, what
beyond 50 people, your business adopts some real potential problems and
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challenges. So it is partly that. But it’s also partly cash, because you know
when that first level, zero to $1 million the whole big challenge is learning
how to make an efficient first sale — how to bring in the customer cost-ef-
ficiently. That is your number one job. If you don’t do that, your business
won’t work. And you know, 80% percent of people when they get involved
in business — well, I’m talking about real entrepreneurship, not starting a
business that you plan to sell to an internet company. I mean that’s not
something I know anything about, and that’s a whole different — there’s a
different idea there. I’m talking about — well actually, the sale there is the
sale through the internet company, so I guess it would apply.
James Altucher: That’s your revenue.
Mark Ford: Right, right. But from my point of view, a more traditional type
of company — until you get to $1 million, 80% of your time has to be spent
figuring out how to sell that product. So, if it’s a lawn service company, it’s
doing that testing that we talked about — what letter works better, and the
hanging on the doorknob, or sending in the mail, and so on. And so that
you get a customer efficiently, and then you have cashflow, and cashflow
solves all kinds of problems, and also gives you all kinds of opportunities.
And then your business grows, and then we get to this other threshold
where everything’s going quite good. But the business starts to stall at
about $10 million ‘cause this is very common. And it stalls because you
have one way of bringing customers in, you’re basically one line of prod-
ucts, and you’ve pushed that particular monolithic path to its limits, and
it’s just hard to grow it after that. And so then what you have to do is, you
have to identify what it is you’re — are you fish, or are you fowl? Are you
marketing, what kind of products is this, what are we really doing? And
then you start to replicate.
So, that second stage is skill that you have to develop there is the skill
of innovation and speed. Because what you need to do is you have to
replicate these things by innovating different versions of it. But you have to
test them very quickly — you can run out of money very quickly. You have
to invent a very efficient way of making the business grow without losing
money. And then the third stage, which I think was — I don’t know what
number I had in that book — but the third stage is when you do have 350
people and your business needs to be corporatized. It needs it because
you’re draining. Even though you’re still making tons of money ‘cause
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you’ve done such a good job innovating or replicating products, and pro-
motions, and what you haven’t done so well is in refining your systems.
So your IT system is slow, your accounting department can’t bring you a

current account for two or three months, and things are starting to bleed.
And so then you gotta bring in the manager. You know, and then is when
the guys start making the mistake of bringing in people from Ivy League
schools. I think that’s a giant mistake. And so anytime I ever hear an
entrepreneur that has a business that’s at least less than $1 billion telling
me he’s hired Ivy League person I just know that business about gone. It
means he’s run out of ideas, and he thinks these guys actually know some-
thing about small businesses. So you gotta bring in smart people like we’ve
been able to do — people that understand how to manage businesses, but
believe they’re responsible for maintaining profits, and they’ll tell you the
truth. So we have done that in all my businesses pretty successfully. You
gotta find the right person to do that, that you can trust.
At Agora we have a superb person in Miles, and he understands that part,

and so you get that part of your business organized. But then you realize
at that time, those bean counters — however necessary they are — they
do want to take over the business. The better ones wanna take over it
even more. So then you get to the struggle which other people have talked
about — larger companies have talked about — of how do you maintain a
kind of entrepreneurial spirit within the company? And the way we did it at
Agora — and I’ve done it with some other businesses — is by fractionaliz-
ing the business — decentralizing the business, and creating a cooperative
but competitive environment where you take your — You know what we do
is we have different publishing companies that all publish the same type
of information. There was a time when Bill and I had a lot of discussions
about should we have the franchise model or all our hard money news-
letters are gonna be here or our options services are gonna be here. And
then we decided that doesn’t work.
That what you really need are really good people running businesses that
wanna compete with each other. But then you force them ‘cause it’s your
business to share certain information like marketing information. A lot of
the trade secrets are not secrets at Agora. And our idea is — it’s the same
idea that I have about any skill — is we want people to know how people
were so successful and where their last advertising may have been. Then I
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want everybody else to learn, because I want the whole level to keep going
up. And if you’re mad at me because I shared that secret, I’m gonna say,
“James, you’re smart enough. You’ll come up with the next thing.”
James Altucher: Did you put out a newsletter about all the secrets of all
the campaigns that worked?
Mark Ford: Well —
James Altucher: Here is what we tried, here’s what worked, here’s the
percentages —
Mark Ford: Believe it or not, we are just finishing a 900-page book that
contains all of our secrets. And I wrote in the introduction that I know ev-
erybody outside of Agora’s gonna have this, and here are your secrets, and
enjoy them. Because it’s not about what was done yesterday. It’s about
being smart enough to see what was done yesterday and do something
new tomorrow — something not entirely new, but just new enough.
James Altucher: Well you bring that up too, that you don’t always wanna
create something incredibly new.
Mark Ford: No.
James Altucher: Look at something that’s worked over and over, and may-
be tweak it a little bit.
Mark Ford: Absolutely. Just a little bit new. I mean —
James Altucher: Which is different than, let’s say, an approach like Peter
Thiel who wrote Zero to One. He basically says, “Go from zero to one. Cre-
ate an entire monopoly that’s never been seen before.” It’s a little different
approach. And that’s kind of the Silicon Valley approach.
Mark Ford: Yeah. I mean, look, I don’t know anything about anything other
than what I know. And what I know is this certain kind of business that’s
easy to do, that you can if you’re scared, that you do if you’re not brilliant,
and so on. But I do know this — because I’ve been in the publishing and
storytelling businesses for a long time —the stories that we love to hear
are the exceptions, not the rule. Though, the stories about people going —
think about the story about a singer that became successful. All the tough
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times you went through, the rejections, and finally — or the inventor, and
finally it’s invented. Or the basketball player — the truth is, for every one of
those there’s 1000 and 10,000 people that fail. I don’t wanna give people
advice that has a 999% chance of failing, and 1% chance of getting on the
cover of Time magazine. I’d much rather tell you advice that gives you a
much better chance of succeeding and you probably won’t do it.
James Altucher: You know, and you say, “advice,” and you say — you were
talking earlier — and you said you’re in the self-help industry. But you’re not
really. You’re in the almost the help self industry in the sense that you’re
only talking about things that you’ve used to help yourself. And you’re
sharing those stories. You’re not kind of veering outside of that.
Mark Ford: No, not at all. You embarrass yourself very quickly the moment
you — believe me, if you give me a couple drinks, I will veer outside and I’ll
embarrass myself. But in a sober state I try to avoid that.
James Altucher: Well, let’s talk about your most recent book. I don’t know
when it’s coming out. When is it coming out? Living Rich.
Mark Ford: It’s actually out right now. It just went out.
James Altucher: Oh, it just came out? And it’s basically about — I read the
individual essays — and it’s basically about this idea that everyone thinks
they need X amount of dollars, but you basically say, “Why do you need
that? Because for X minus Y, you can achieve the exact same lifestyle.”
And the Y is usually a really big number close to X. So for almost zero, you
get a — and Tony Robbins is an example of this in his book Money, where
some guy says, “My goal’s to make $1 billion.” And he thought that was a
great goal. And Tony said, “Well really? Why do you need the billion?” And
the guy’s like, “Well I want my private jet. And the private jet with me and
then it costs like $150 million.” And Tony’s like, “You’re only gonna use that
ten times a year. So you don’t need $150 million, you need like $600,000.
So okay, now I’ve just wiped off $150 million, got rid of her.”
And he goes down the list and then turns out the guy really just needs
somewhere between $5 million and $10 million to have what he thought
was the lifestyle of a billionaire. And I say, “Just” $5 million or $10 million’s
quite a bit of money, but what’s some examples —
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Mark Ford: I think he can do it for much less than that —
James Altucher: What’s the minimum viable number you need to live a
successful life?
Mark Ford: I know that occasionally — I mean if you ask Tony Robbins
with question, and he answered you like a politician. But telling you a story
that is about to do this — but I promise I’ll come back to it. I wanna tell
you that I was in Africa — living in Africa a few years — I was in the Peace
Corps. I was teaching at the University of Chad. I lived in basically a mud
house with cement walls that had water running outside, no hot water, and
so on and so forth. And I was sitting on the porch, and I was poor — think
from Angela Ashes was just ordinary to me.
James Altucher: Frank McCourt and you refer to the book in your latest
book?
Mark Ford: Yeah. So —
James Altucher: So by the way, he wrote his first novel at the age of 66.
Mark Ford: That’s right. That’s right. Anyway, so I’m sitting there, and it’s
raining, and there’s — this is in the middle of Chad, they’re one of the poor-
est countries in the world. And I’m living in a mud house, I’m making $50 a
month, and it’s raining, and we got our dogs there, and across the street is
— I was teaching at the University of Chad believe it or not, English litera-
ture and philosophy. This is really bringing them up by their bootstraps.
But anyway, there’s a story behind that. But I was sitting there, and I was
thinking you know — and this is bizarre — I just knew that one day I was
gonna become rich, you know?
And I thought to myself, “Just remember this. No matter how rich you get,
you’re gonna live in a big fancy house one day, but it will not be better than
this house.” And I’ve never forgotten that. And it’s completely true. You
know, and I think we all know this — this isn’t anything that’s — the quality
of your life has beyond a certain level, has nothing to do with how much
you make. I remember when I first made over $100,000. That first year, af-
ter I made that decision, my accountant called me, “Mark, you got it.” I go,
“What do I got?” And he goes, “You hit the big time.” And this is — $100,000
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maybe it was worth $180,000 today. And I go, “What do you mean?” He
goes, “You’re as rich as you ever need to be.” And I go, “What are you
talking about?” He goes, “Listen, the money that you’re earning right now,
you can live in a nice house, you can drive a nice car, you can send your
kids to school, you can go on a vacation, take your wife out to a restau-
rant.” He goes, “Everything other than that is just this sizable toy. It’s just
toys and it’s the size of the toy.” And I thought, “Wow. That sounds pretty
much right.” But of course, you know how you say that to yourself and you
think, “Well, hell. Let me experience those big toys.” So, I went through it,
and I had those big toys and so on, and look, it’s fun to have those kind of
things. But the truth is — I knew it back then, and it’s been true now — that
the quality of life has nothing to do with that. And what’s worse is, in Amer-
ican culture — we’re so attuned to that. You know, like every time I watch
Sex and the City I wanna vomit. You know, it’s such a repulsive view — not
that I haven’t watched like 60 or 70 episodes, but —
James Altucher: I did the website for the TV show by the way.
Mark Ford: Oh. Anyway, but this whole materialistic thing is just so — but,
though, I thought, what about all these — ‘cause I’m trying to help people
create well, right? And this is my big promise — though I do everything I
can about the entrepreneurial side, and I’m writing about the investments
that I’m writing about — I’m trying to cover all bases. But you know, some
people — because of either their age or what their values in life — they’re
not willing to work 80 hours a week. And I wanted to say to those people,
“Who cares? You know? Who cares? You can live the perfectly rich life in
America making the equivalent of more than $100,000 a year” which is
whatever it is today, $150,000, $170,000.
We did that once, I can’t remember the number. And that could be comprised
of passive income if you have some from investments or whatnot. And the
quality of life really will be the same. And in that book I try to give examples
from the other point of view — like, what is a house? What’s a rich house? The
house next door — I don’t know if you saw it, this huge monstrosity — the guy
who built it actually is a very nice guy, but it’s this huge ugly — you saw the
house — it’s just — well you gotta see it. You gotta by and look at it. My house
is beautiful. You know, let’s admit it. It’s a beautiful house. His house is just a
big giant, he built it for $6 million, it would’ve cost you $10 million today. It’s
the biggest, ugliest, showy — he just wants to show people how rich he is.
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And so, he brings me in his house — he’s a great guy — and he’s excitedly
running me around his house. He’s like — you walked right in, and there’s
this huge gilded elevator right when you walk in. So you’re like, “Oh, ooh.
Boy is this tacky. Who designed this, Donald Trump? Well what’s going on
here?” And so I’m like, “Oh.” And he’s like, “Look at this elevator.” And then
I’m afraid he’s gonna say, “Isn’t it gorgeous?” But he doesn’t say it, and he
goes, “Guess how much this cost?” I’m like, I was so relieved, ‘cause I’m
like, oh god, this is gonna be fun, you know? So I go, “I don’t know, what,
$10,000?” “$50,000.” “$50,000? That’s fantastic. High five.”
And the whole tour was like, how much he spent on this, how much he
overspent on everything. So what’s that? Great guy, but what does all
this show to anybody that has any kind of sensibility? That guy’s kind of
a buffoon, right? And I could go down this block, and I can show you a
very little cottage that the woman who owns it probably paid $70,000 for
it. It’s worth a lot more than that now. But she’d never done anything but
take care of it, and fill it with all the mementos of her life. And it’s the most
beautiful place. And when I go in there, I admire her. To me, the quality of
the house is this — the test of a beautiful, wonderful house is this — if your
guest comes in there who’s not an idiot, and he wants you to leave the
room so he can look around. He wants to see what your life really is like.
But if your house looked like something that was designed by a decora-
tor — likes a TV set — what does that say about you? So, the truth is, from
every point of view, there’s no reason to try to get richer and richer and
spend more money. So in the book what I try to do is I try to identify all the
— there’s actually two parts to the book. The first part is I try to say, “What
do you need to spend to drive around the world’s best car?” Well I happen
to have the world’s best car. I drive it at time. It‘s a BMW, a 12-cylinder, not
the best eco footprint, but I only drive it two miles from —
James Altucher: I don’t even have a driver’s license, so…
Mark Ford: Okay, okay, good. Well anyway, so this is the car that is ten
times better than a Maybach. But you can buy a threeyear-old version of
the car for like $30,000. And you can drive it for 20 years. I buy my cars,
I keep them for 10 to 20 years. And it’ll cost you less than a Hyundai. So
you’re in a beautiful luxury car — so you get the luxury benefit, even. And
soyou know one of the things that matters, the first and most important
thing that matters is a mattress. You know? If you had to pick out one
96
physical object that matters is your freaking mattress. I mean, you’re

spending seven or eight hours a night on that mattress. You should buy
the best mattress in the world. And so we did the most expensive study
of mattresses ever done in humankind — this is when I just started, got
this idea of Living Rich. And I swear to god, we spent a year — we must
have spent $50,000 researching mattresses — we have this whole report.
And to this day — the Living Rich series first came out serially — this day,
when we still publish that as an essay, we get more response on that than
anything else. So, there is a potential for you.
James Altucher: It’s a third of people’s lives.
Mark Ford: Yes, exactly.
James Altucher: It rejuvenates you, it’s good for the brain —
Mark Ford: So there’s a job — mattress newsletter, you know, mattress

report.
James Altucher: Did you get a memory — you got a mattress from the
Hotel Benjamin, I remember recently. They do have very good mattresses.
Mark Ford: And we did a whole — there’s a whole study — anyway, the
mattresses won. So turns out, you can buy the world’s best mattress
for $1000 and $1500. Problem is, you can’t find one for $200. But I don’t
actually remember what the numbers are, but it’s a mattress you can keep
for ten or 15 years, at least. So the whole idea’s based on part one is, what
are the most important material objects, what are the best, and what’s the
best value you can get in terms of cost of use — not in terms of the price,
but the cost of use. ‘Cause everything is about cost of use — you could
buy a car that is less expensive, two or three-year-old car that’s not that
expensive but it may not be expensive because it’s gonna need a new this
and a new that, and it’s gonna turn out to be more expensive. But it’s just
a cost of use, and so the first half of the book was analyzing all the most
important objects in the world, and how you can get the very best one for
basically what I would call middle class salary — ‘cause somebody that’s
making $150,000 a year or a couple that’s making $150,000. If you’re mak-
ing $60,000 $70,000 a year, I said in the book, it’s very tough. You’re not
gonna be able to live rich, you know, I’m gonna be honest with you. You’re
not. You gotta go read my other books and get your income up a little.
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James Altucher: Or pick two or three of the chapters to focus on.
Mark Ford: Yeah, you can still absolutely. Then I have a chapter on eating,
you know, or wine. I mean, you can — you know wine is just ridiculous. I
mean, I have wine, and we actually have — this is embarrassing — I actual-
ly have my own sommelier for my house for my wine thing out there. And
every month he comes over, and he restocks, and then he gives Kathy and
I a lesson in wine, and so you know there are things you can do — frivolous
things, but — I asked him to write for our newsletter. I said, “I want you
to do two things. I want you to teach me things about wine, so when my
pseudo wine snob friends say things I can correct them. And I’m gonna
give you one really good one right now.” And when I said that, he got was
really excited. You know the wine M E R I T A G E, you’ve seen that on
menus all the time, right?
James Altucher: I don’t know, I don’t drink.
Mark Ford: You don’t drink?
James Altucher: No.
Mark Ford: Oh, geez.
All right, edit this out haha. Anybody drink wine here?
All right, menu. Can you visualize M E R I T A G E? How would you pro-
nounce that? Man: “Meritage.”
Exactly. And that’s how everybody pronounces it — “Meritage.” Well turns

out, Meritage, it’s not pronounced “Meritage.” It’s pronounced “Meritage,”
because it’s an American term, it came of a contest that happened in Cal-
ifornia, and it’s a combination of “merit” and “heritage”. So it’s pronounced
“Meritage,” but — there is very few people except Gordon — our wine expert
— but 99% of the wine snobs if you drive to dinner they’ll say, “Well let’s try
a Meritage.” Then you can say, “Well you know, actually, it’s pronounced
‘Meritage’.”
James Altucher: Well that’s a great idea actually for a newsletter, so now
he can have an alternative source of income. Every month I’ll give you a a
new myth about wine snobbery, and —
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Mark Ford: Yeah, and that would be a great bonus
James Altucher: — $5.00 a month.
Mark Ford: — a great post. So I told him, “$30 for red, $20 for white, and
you can get all the great wine in the world for less than that, even.” So
when you think about what matters — what are the experiences in life
that matter — you can narrow them down to get 80% of the experiences.
And you can — you know if you’re going out to — I almost had to write
this book, ‘cause my wife is the ultimate cheapskate. She just will not
spend money on anything. We have a very happy marriage too, ‘cause
usually one person makes the money and the other spends it. I’m the big
spender, not her. So we never fight about that. But one of my proteges, I
kid him because every time they go in to Paris they stay at the Georges
V — which is a very expensive hotel. My wife will not stay at a hotel that is
very expensive. I mean, it’s hard not to be an expensive hotel, but what we
do — ‘cause I wanna stay at the Georges V — so what we do is, when we
go we stay at our perfectly nice hotel that costs a third the price, but we
go to the Georges V we spend like a half a day there. And we sit around in
the beautiful this and that, and we have drinks, and we have the best of the
Georges V, and then —
James Altucher: So you get the experience of the place —
Mark Ford: I always take a photo, and I always send it to my friend who’s
spending like $3000 a day on his room, and say, “Hi, we were just at the
Georges V, and just to let you know.” That’s what I try to do. And the other
half of the book is really about time. Because living well — we started
the conversation talking about time. And time is really the most precious
resource, and it’s all about how to figure out how to make the time that
you’re spending the most pleasurable and the most valuable for you.
James Altucher: And what’s the most important idea you have out of
that?
Mark Ford: Well, there’s so many valuable ideas. One of the ideas is that
— the way I do it is I say that there are three levels of experience. When
we experience anything, let’s say entertainment, or educating yourself, or
— I’m trying to talk about life experiences in those terms. One of the types
of experiences you’re doing. And I say that — I don’t know if I did it in that
99
book or I did it in previous essays — but I said, “There are basically two
levels. There’s the experiences that enrich you, there is the experiences
that are kind of neutral, and then there’s the experiences that deplete you.
And for me, let’s talk about watching movies, for example.
There are to me, very clearly those three kind of movies — there are movies
like if you go to Schindler’s List, that make you a bigger, better person. You
know, you go to Schindler’s List, and you walk out of there and you’re like,
“F***. I gotta do something more with my life. I gotta be a better person.” And
those to me are very — it’s a very good way of spending your time. And then
there are movies that are kind of neutral. I talked my wife into seeing Up All
Night — a Liam Neeson thriller — and it was pretty damn good. It was ridic-
ulous, I mean… Typical Liam Neeson thriller, somehow, somebody related to
him got kidnapped, or hurt, or harmed, and he has to kill at least 1000 people
before it’s all done. But it was very satisfying in that kind of way. But I didn’t
feel debased. And then there are movies that you go to — well maybe porn
for some people, or movies that are just — really, when I see Sex and the City,
at the end of it, I feel debased. Like I feel like I’m lower in the human scale of
evolution when I’m done. So you know, my whole thing there is, just be aware
of — and the problem is that those experiences which we view as vibrating at
a higher level take more energy to put into them. We don’t wanna do that. We
want always — especially when we’re tired, we wanna be entertained — we
want to do lower energy. But my whole thing is, you just got to just get your-
self. Just start into those type of activities, and then know what moves —
James Altucher: So it’s almost like a practice to kind of find what makes
you enriched.
Mark Ford: Right.
James Altucher: You know, a lot of people are gonna listen to this and
say, “Oh, it’s easy for you to say. You’ve been successful, hundreds of
businesses — but I wanna remind that you started off saying you were at
the hut in Chad, saying this is the best place you ever wanna stay. And you
were thinking that then. And then you talked about the cottage down the
block, and how it’s just a feeling you got in that place. And I think people
forget that that really is so important — the money and the businesses,
you obviously get a lot of pleasure out of it, you get a lot of pleasure out of
writing about it, and talking about it. And it’s good to make money. There’s
100
nothing wrong with that. But it seems like you initially had this kind of feel-
ing of, “What is going to enrich me, as opposed to debase me?” And I think
that’s an important point.
Mark Ford: I think that’s something I got from my parents, and my parents
were kind of leftists, anti-materialist activists —
James Altucher: The Irish leftists.
Mark Ford: Yeah. So that’s the residue of that, but as I said, I wanted to
tell those people that are reading my newsletter, and they read everything
else, all the other advice. And they say, “Well, I’m not gonna become a mil-
lionaire.” I wanna tell them that that’s okay, who cares, really? There’s still a
good opportunity for you to have a beautiful life. To have the life that’s rich
in the most important ways, and life that’s admirable.
James Altucher: All right, well Mark. I don’t know which books to rec-
ommend, but Living Rich, Ready, Fire, Aim, Persuasion — will you make
Persuasion public to everyone? All right well, thanks Mark Ford, thank you
again for coming onto the show.
Mark Ford: Thank you, pleasure, pleasure.
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feedback only. For customer service inquires please email Support@chooseyourselffinancial.com. or call
(844) 342-7637. Please note: The law prohibits us from giving personalized financial advice.
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Yourself Media forbids its writers from having a financial interest in any security they recommend. All
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SPECIAL REPORT

Which is part of the reason I started my podcast. If I have a hard time

Then I write about it.

Then I teach it.

This is why I started my newsletter. Because some answers can’t, and

And, of course, money is VERY important. And not just stocks.

“How can I make $2,000 in a weekend?”

How to Make $2000

I was afraid he would ignore me. Freelancer.com is constantly buying new

He wrote back to me instantly. And, full disclosure, I have ZERO financial

In fact, I am grateful to Matt. In 2007, I used Freelancer.com to build

Here is what Matt wrote back to me:

Every single project is tailor-made based on the needs and requirements of

1. Video Animation — video projects for KickStarter/Indiegogo or

2. Programming — e.g. for Ecommerce stores (Shopify, Magento), we

3. Website testing or Web Scraping — last minute changes on the site

4. Website Development and Design (as you said, WordPress fits in

5. Children’s Book Illustration — incredibly popular job on the site that

6. Writing — we have seen numerous requests from people needing

7. 3D Rendering and Architecture Design — huge skill on the site,

9. App development — full time staff or freelance temp workers may

This may or may not be true.

That is where a copywriter comes in.

A copywriter is able to successfully reach the people and businesses most

a. Ogilvy on advertising by David Ogilvy

b. Scientific advertising by Claude C. Hopkins

c. Tested advertising methods by John Caples

d. Copy logic by Michael Masterson & Mike Palmer

I personally have paid people to do voiceovers for my podcasts and I know

I could give you a full walkthrough of how to become a freelance voiceover

Speak an uncommon language? Then you can be paid a lot of money.

Being a translator can be a very profitable side business.

Your Guide to Becoming

The average multi-millionaire has over seven different sources of income.

This doesn’t mean seven jobs. That’s impossible.

I’m on the board of a $1 billion revenue employment agency, CRS (NASDAQ:

Because companies don’t like people.

A. They are now constantly afraid of a repeat of 2009 when they

I went on the board of CRRS (and I am a shareholder) specifically so I could

And it’s not a choice of “Should I be an entrepreneur or an employee?” I

If you Google “How to become an entrepreneur,” you get a lot of mindless

I believe that creating multiple income streams is important for everyone.

I’ve started several businesses.

I’m invested in about 28 private companies. I’ve advised probably another

Here are the rules:

There is a HUGE gap between “idea” and “professional venture capital.”

In the middle of that gap is “customer.”

D. If you are offering a service, call it a product.

F. Be profitable. Try to be profitable immediately. This seems obvious but it

SELL THE COMPANY.

K. Communicate with everyone. Employees. Customers. Investors. All the

L. Do everything for your customers. This is very important.

Show up. Go to breakfast/lunch/dinner with customers. Treat.

M. Micromanage software development. Nobody knows your product

P. Exercise. Same as above. If you are unhealthy, your product will be

R. Buy your employees gifts. Massages. Tickets. Whatever. I always

BONUS: Invite customers to masseuse day.

U. Distribution is everything. Branding is everything. Get your name out

Authenticity is the best branding.

X. Fire employees immediately. If an employee gets “the disease,” he

AC. At Christmas, donate money to every customer’s favorite charity.

Don’t go to a lot of parties or “meet-ups” with other entrepreneurs. Instead,

FedEx, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and many other of the world’s biggest

AO. If your customers are advertisers: find sponsorship opportunities for

1. Video Animation — video projects for KickStarter/Indiegogo or

2. Programming — e.g. for Ecommerce stores (Shopify, Magento), we

3. Website testing or Web Scraping — last minute changes on the site

4. Website Development and Design (as you said, WordPress fits in

5. Children’s Book Illustration — incredibly popular job on the site that

6. Writing — we have seen numerous requests from people needing

7. 3D Rendering and Architecture Design — huge skill on the site,

9. App development — full time staff or freelance temp workers may

A. They are now constantly afraid of a repeat of 2009 when they

b. AND, companies are using stock to buy other companies be-

A. I was going to get traffic. I could write three or four articles a