John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill, aka Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth, and today on the show, we have Jay Yang. Jay is the author of You Can Just Do Things and has run an agency. He’s also worked for Acquisition.com and has recently wrapped that up so that way he can put full-time focus on his secondary book. I’m excited to talk about that book as much as he’ll share with us. But the first book, You Can Just Do Things, has got a bunch of very cool stuff for anybody who’s walking a founder path, an entrepreneurial path. Jay, can you talk a little bit about the book and maybe some of the stuff that you’ve gotten from people who’ve read it and used those ideas?

Jay Yang (00:00:43)

Yeah. Well, first off, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. It’s a pleasure to chat. You Can Just Do Things—I wrote the book because, honestly, I couldn’t not write it. It was the thing that was so top of mind for me. I started the initial drafts when I was a freshman in college. At the time, I remember sitting down and having dinner with a bunch of my friends, and they were all computer science majors. They were telling me how many companies they had applied to for internships. One of my friends applied to over a thousand companies; he mass-sent these applications. My mind was blown by how you could do so much volume and get no results at all.

So I was like, well, there’s got to be a better way. Actually, I know a better way, because I had been cold emailing founders in high school and successfully landing internships and getting opportunities. I was like, well, I think more people should know about this idea of what I like to call the permissionless approach. You Can Just Do Things is this idea of doing the work upfront, of not waiting for permission. Rather than sending a thousand applications to all these companies, it’s picking a few companies, doing your research, doing your homework on what problems they have, and then solving them before you’re asked to solve them.

So far, it’s worked out pretty well in my career, and so I wanted to help other people learn about that as well.

John SmallMtn (00:02:12)

So, okay. There’s a lot in this idea, right? Because a lot of people talk about that it’s hard to find good help these days, especially with hiring situations being the way that they are. For your own path, was this something you had to find for yourself? Was it something that just came naturally to you and you were able to put into play? How did you get onto this path of realizing that it was different than how most people approached their work, their growth, their development?

Jay Yang (00:02:43)

Yeah, I’ll kind of take you back to the beginning.

Back in COVID, I was playing video games in my room for five hours every single day. I remember thinking, man, I should probably do something better with my life. I probably should be more productive. So I Googled how to make money online, and one of the first things was to start a YouTube channel. I started a YouTube channel where I’d promote underground artists’ songs, help them get exposure on their music. I posted a song every single day for the summer during COVID. The channel didn’t really go where I wanted it to go, but it taught me the power of online content—of being able to make things, put it out into the world, and have people see it.

Then I started a bunch of other different projects—I like to call it my portfolio of failures. I started an Instagram theme page. I started a newsletter. I tried another motivational YouTube channel. I even tried a clothing brand, and none of them really worked out. So I was like, “Hmm, I’m working really hard, but I’m not getting what I want. Obviously, I don’t know how to work.”

So I said, “What would increase the likelihood that I get what I want?” That’s where I came up with the idea of: well, if I work with my favorite company, chances are I’ll probably learn something about running a company. So when I do start my own company, I’ll have learned the lessons, the failures, and the mistakes so that I avoid some of those with my own. That kicked off the whole start of my journey cold emailing different founders.

The first founder I cold emailed was Tyler Denk, the CEO of Beehiiv newsletter platform. I said, “Hey Tyler, I’d love to work with you. Here are three things that I think I can help with.” I listed out three project ideas. “Pick one. I’ll work for free. Put me in the corner, put me in a box, I don’t care. I just want to work with you guys.” Luckily, he liked one of the ideas, and so that was the first cold email that I sent.

The second one was after Beehiiv. I interned at Beehiiv, went back to high school, was playing basketball, and then I was like, “Well, I’ve learned a lot about marketing for a tech startup, but I’d like to learn more about how to market for personal brands and for founders.” I saw that Noah Kagan, who’s the founder of AppSumo, was looking for someone to help grow his newsletter because he was publishing a book. I dropped everything, and I spent the next 50 hours putting together a pitch deck. It was 19 slides deconstructing his entire social media and email funnel: “Here’s what you’re doing. Here’s what you could be doing better. Here’s what someone else is doing. Here’s what I’d do if I were to work with you.”

19 slides. At the end, I attached nine pieces of social media content ready to be published. I said, “Test it out, try it. If you like it, let’s work together. If not, no harm, no foul.” Luckily, he liked it, and so that kicked off our journey together.

John SmallMtn (00:05:28)

The gap between the first attempt and working with the team at Beehiiv to working with Noah and his team on the book—it sounds like this idea got way more fleshed out for you, right? Showing up with a massive deck and social media stuff, and having the confidence to be like, “Hey, here’s everything you’re not doing, here’s everything I would be doing for you.” Did that all come from the time at Beehiiv, or were you thinking about it differently, taking a different approach?

Jay Yang (00:06:05)

I think it was two things. The first one was, at Beehiiv, I learned the power of just over-delivering and far exceeding anyone’s expectations. The second one was, honestly, just me getting older and more experienced and realizing that a cold email with three ideas is cool, but if you can show instead of tell, it’s far more powerful. Rather than saying, “Hey Noah, here’s three things I can do for you,” it was like, “Here’s a bunch of things I can do for you, detailed how I’d do it step by step, and here’s nine things you can try right now.”

John SmallMtn (00:06:41)

Interesting. When you think about the difference between tech and SaaS versus the personal brand of the founder, I’m curious what sticks out to you as the biggest difference between trying to grow one versus the other.

Jay Yang (00:06:57)

I would say something that I learned from Noah is what he calls the “name test.” Specifically for personal brand content, whenever we’re putting out social media content, we want to write “one of zero” content—content that no one else can put out. If you were to cover your name and your profile picture, would people be able to tell that it was your content?

When I was working with Noah, a lot of the content that we put out was like, “Hey, I was employee number 30 at Facebook, and then I got fired. Here are 10 of the lessons I learned working directly with Mark Zuckerberg.” You can cover his name, you can cover his profile picture, but no one else can say that and no one else can share those lessons. A lot of times, especially with AI nowadays, I think it makes a lot of sense to lean into those stories, those lessons that only you can say and only you can tell. That’s where the idea of “do cool shit in the world and then talk about it” really comes about.

John SmallMtn (00:07:26)

Interesting. I like that. The zero of one, right? I’ve met Noah a couple of times. We’ve done some charity bike rides, and I’ve been reading his content for years. He’s one of the first people I ever studied in the space. He does have a flavor, if you will. You can kind of tell when it’s Noah. That’s fascinating.

Jumping ahead a little bit: a lot of people come and talk to me, and they have the same question of, “Okay, John, how did you know that you could do this?” It’s weird because I don’t think of myself as a super confident person. I’ve just been figuring it out and improving as I go. But one of the things we talk about, especially on the show, is the first sale is that you have to sell yourself on the idea that you can go do this thing, as opposed to waiting around for the perfect idea, the perfect situation, or permission from an outside source.

I’m curious: once you make that decision, where does the permissionless approach benefit founders and entrepreneurs the most after they’ve decided to take that first step of action themselves?

Jay Yang (00:09:04)

The way I’d approach it is this line that I tell people: empathy is the greatest skill you can have as an entrepreneur, marketer, and just human being in general. The ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and say, “Hey, what would make it easy for them to say yes? What would decrease the friction for them to agree or hire you or work with you or be a customer?” That is such a powerful question, whether you’re trying to land a role with your favorite entrepreneur or market your product—putting yourself in their shoes.

Once you give yourself the permission of “I can just do things,” I think the second question is, “Okay, well, why should anyone care?” That’s where the idea of “how could this be an absolute no-brainer for the other person?” comes in. Answering that question is the route to a lot of the solutions.

John SmallMtn (00:09:55)

Interesting. Okay. We talked a little bit before turning on the recording that you were running an agency team for a while. What did you learn about being in the founder seat for yourself?

Jay Yang (00:10:07)

A whole bunch of things. It was definitely a messy process, and something that I stumbled into and stumbled through.

I think the biggest lesson I learned was that what’s obvious to me is sometimes amazing to others and not obvious to them. For example, some of the things that came more naturally to me—which is writing for others or having conversations with founders—wasn’t as easy for some of the people I was working with. So thinking through: okay, how can I articulate, teach, or systemize the things that are in my head and share it with others so that they can duplicate and replicate it for themselves?

That’s when I learned a lot about what an SOP is, how you structure it, whether you need a Loom video attached to it, what happens if they watch it once and can’t do it or they don’t watch it or don’t refer back to it, how you reinforce them to go back and watch it, and how you reinforce the behaviors you want to see and not reinforce the behaviors you don’t want to have happen. It was a crash course in human psychology and leadership.

John SmallMtn (00:11:20)

Interesting. I know you were working with the Hormozis over at Acquisition.com, and you’ve taken a break from that to go write the secondary book. Do you see yourself going back into that founder path again, or do you think that you’ll continue to try to work with people that you’re excited to work with, but not really launching something else bigger?

Jay Yang (00:11:50)

I don’t have an answer for that. My North Star has always been a fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love, meaningful work, and enough wealth to not have to worry about it. If I know that’s my North Star, it makes sense to know A, B, Z, as Shaun Puri always says—which is where I am now, and where I want to be in the very next step. The next step for me is the second book that I’m working on. But for the rest of the letters in the alphabet, I’m not sure yet. Only time will tell.

John SmallMtn (00:11:52)

That’s fair. I think it’s a very cool thing to be able to hold space for whatever comes. It’s very easy to get too dogmatic with our own visions and goals and put ourselves under—I call it “negative goal weight.” It’s rare, especially being a little younger, to be able to say, “Hey, I’m just on a path, and whatever happens happens, but I don’t need it to go in a very specific way.” It keeps us very open.

Talking about writing, I would like to dive into this a little bit, because I’m working on my second book as well. I decided to make it way harder for myself because I just like doing these things. Has it been harder for you with the second book than it was for the first one?

Jay Yang (00:12:57)

Yes and no. In one sense, it’s easier because I know what the process of writing a book is like now. One of my biggest goals with the first book was to get it out into the world, messy and imperfectly, so that I could prove to myself I actually know how to write and publish a book. It’s given me a lot of confidence for the second book.

At the same time, no, because now my standards have raised. With this book, the goal isn’t to just get it out. The goal is to write an incredible book and market it at the highest level, now that I’ve worked with several different entrepreneurs and authors who have launched their books. So, yeah, it’s both.

John SmallMtn (00:13:40)

I feel that. It’s this false sense of security because it’s like, “I know these steps,” but it doesn’t necessarily make them easier in the day-to-day action of this thing. Do you talk about the book you’re writing now, or do you keep it all under wraps until you get closer to it and you’re ready to release it? I don’t want to pry if you’re not ready to talk about it.

Jay Yang (00:14:11)

For now, I don’t talk about it a ton, just because I found that when I talk about the book, I tend to feel proud of the idea instead of the work. So I’m trying to stay heads down and lock in.

John SmallMtn (00:14:23)

I appreciate that. I’m trying to do the same thing, because it’s helpful for me to talk about it, but there’s a stance to where if I’m talking about it so much, it’s like I’m trying to validate the hypothesis, validate the idea. I’ve got to be careful with that, because I want to write the things that I’m excited to write about. Now, it’s got to be within a lane of relevance, obviously, but I’m also trying to make sure that it stays clean to my original intention.

When you’re writing for yourself versus writing for someone else, is it—well, first of all, it’s very hard to write for other people in general. Because of your experience, or maybe you have some talent around this idea, do you have anything that makes it easier for you to write in the voice of someone else?

Jay Yang (00:15:06)

The only thing that I could point back to is just curiosity. One of the things that I’ve been intentional about is not writing for people that I don’t admire. When you write for someone else, you are thinking like them. When you are thinking their thoughts, you end up adopting similar thought patterns and making similar decisions. I’ve made it a point that I will only write for people that are, one, ahead of me; two, living a life that I aspire to live; and three, are clear thinkers that I admire. I would never write for someone—even if it’s a ton of money—if I don’t admire them as a person and as a thinker, because then I don’t want to think their thoughts. So I tend not to want to write for them.

John SmallMtn (00:16:01)

I love that, man. I think that’s a unique perspective. We’ve done some content for some other people. I’ve never really been in that spot where I had to make a judgment call around it, but I think I would err on the side of: I don’t think I could write in this voice even if I wanted to. Is it easier for you to write for other people than it is for yourself, or do you find it’s about the same amount of effort?

Jay Yang (00:16:34)

I guess a lot of my answers will be yes and no. On one hand, writing for others is easier because I have less internal judgment. I would say it’s harder just because, obviously, it’s both an art and a science. It’s not just what I want to say, but it’s what they would say and how they would say it—putting myself in their shoes, and then putting myself in their audience’s shoes, and then going back and forth. There’s a lot of mental chess being played writing for others that isn’t necessarily present when writing for myself.

John SmallMtn (00:17:11)

Interesting. When you’re writing for yourself, do you have any tips or tricks about beating back that internal judgment, that internal critic?

Jay Yang (00:17:21)

My answer is always: let’s just get it out first. You can’t optimize what isn’t there. I just try and write a terrible first draft, get it out on the page, and then from there, we can start to be nitpicky. The real problem occurs when you have both the writer and the editor thinking at the same time. I try and turn off my editor brain and just get stuff out.

John SmallMtn (00:17:33)

I’m very lucky in the fact that I don’t have to do my own editing. Until I realized how much that was hamstringing me—I get to work with my wife, and she’s my editor. Obviously, there’s a lot of trust there, and she knows my stuff. Just being able to divorce myself from that idea—because I would be like, “I don’t want to write anything bad.” Well, that in itself is judgment, as opposed to turning on the faucet and letting it come out of you.

I would love to zoom in a little bit. What does your writing process look like? Do you have a daily word count, or are you going for a certain amount of time? How do you hold yourself accountable to this thing and make sure that you’re staying on the path so that it gets done?

Jay Yang (00:18:29)

Right now, I am deep in writing the first draft of the book. I have a Google Spreadsheet with one column that has the date, and another column that just has a checkbox. I don’t necessarily have a word count. I write until I don’t feel as inspired, and then I put the pen down, per se, and start again tomorrow. My goal is to not break the chain of writing.

One of my earlier mistakes writing the second book was believing that I needed at least two hours of focused, deep work time to write the book. What I started to do was miss days doing other stuff. I’ve since realized and been reminded that anything above zero compounds. Even if it’s just 15 minutes of thinking about it or 15 minutes of writing words in a journal, anything above zero makes progress. I’ve since lowered the bar to increase consistency, and it’s been helpful.

John SmallMtn (00:19:30)

Man, I love that. For me, I always have a daily word count—at a minimum, 1,500 words. That’s the thing that really helps me be consistent. Ultimately, it’s about being consistent in the action. If you take too big of a gap away, you lose momentum, the critic comes back, and the fear comes back. This is the same whether it’s writing or whether it’s doing outbound, sending cold emails, and trying to set appointments. You take big, long breaks and you’re not consistent about it, it’s like starting over.

I talk a lot about chopping wood and carrying water. If you just do a little bit of it every day, you will get there. But it’s so easy to procrastinate. If you go looking through your email, you’re going to find something else to do other than the things you probably should be doing.

With stepping away from Acquisition and working on the book full-time, how else do you fill your day? You sound like someone who’s very driven and probably has multiple projects happening at any one time. How much of your day is spent on the book versus other endeavors? I’m curious how much space you hold just for silence, solitude, thinking, and stuff like that, and if that’s important to your process.

Jay Yang (00:20:50)

Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time since leaving Acquisition thinking about what my ideal day looks like, because a good life is just the collective sum of many good days in a row. To me, it’s: how can I design the perfect day and then live that day as many days in a row as possible?

For me, it’s a good day when I get to wake up and work on my book, have a very slow morning, eat breakfast, chill, do some social media work, eat lunch with friends, go to the gym, read a book or have some meetings, and then enjoy the evening with family. If I can live that day as many days in a row as possible—it might sound boring to others, but to me, that sounds pretty fulfilling.

John SmallMtn (00:21:42)

One of the reasons that I like doing the show is that I like showing everybody how wide this path can be. There are all these influencers, lifestyle bros, and all of that other stuff, and people start thinking, “Well, okay…” But there’s not anything wrong with just having the life that you want, walking your own path, and calling your own shots.

I’m not a lifestyle guy; I’m a homebody introvert guy who just likes reading, gaming, and working on hard things. All this work that I do allows me to go do that, and it’s not for anybody else. When I started out, I was doing the thing of, “Okay, if I do these things, I’ll then get to go do all the cool stuff that all the other entrepreneurs get to do.” Van life was something that I thought I would be really interested in, and now I’m like… I like my stuff. I like my space. No knock against anybody who does that path, but I’ve got a kid in high school, so stability is important for her, and I like having my stuff and my space. This is probably boring for most other people, but it’s the best lane for me, and that’s really cool. Doing it for yourself, as opposed to status or looking cool in your networking, is a thing that I see a lot of people get tripped up on. Just do it for yourself.

When you moved from working with Noah over to working with the Hormozis and Acquisition.com—I know Noah a little bit, but I don’t know the Hormozis at all—was it different? Based upon the content I see, they’re very driven people. I know Noah is a very driven person as well. Was it more or less the same environment? Did you have any culture shock, big changes, or differences in working?

Jay Yang (00:23:40)

I think the biggest difference, honestly, was that working with Alex and Leila was in person here in Vegas at the headquarters. When I was working with Noah, I was still in high school, so it was all remote. I think the biggest difference is: now I’m in an office, I’m at a headquarters, and I’m seeing people shaking hands. It’s an in-person thing. I think that was the biggest change for me: “Oh, you have the rest of your body! It’s not just the upper body on a Zoom screen. Hello!” That was probably the biggest change.

John SmallMtn (00:24:10)

I would love to dive into that a little bit more, because I know a lot of people are staunchly against on-site work. When you’re more experienced and you know what’s helpful for you, you can make a more reasoned decision. Do you think that being on-site has benefits that maybe some people who are solely focused on remote work are going to miss out on?

Jay Yang (00:24:38)

Yeah, I saw that thing on Twitter where a bunch of people were talking about the question: “Would you rather make $150K but work in person, or make $100K but work remotely?” A bunch of people were picking the remote thing, which—no judgment at all. But early on in your career, it makes sense to try and get somewhere in person because of the amount of context and little things that you pick up, whether it’s eating lunch, getting a coffee, or just the office banter—a lot of the things that you can’t get working remotely.

For anyone early in their career, it makes sense to find the best people you know and get as close to them as possible—physically, digitally, whatever—because you subconsciously pick up the standards that they have. Now that I’ve left Acquisition, anything that I work on next, I have such high standards for myself. I won’t accept anything other than the very best, because working with them, I learned a lot of the standards that they had. So, yeah, I think it makes sense to try and find what “great” looks like for you and get as close to them as possible.

John SmallMtn (00:25:48)

I love that.

In sales, it used to be you could just bring people together and put them in a boiler room and have them all call and dial, and you would learn by osmosis. Now, with so many remote teams—and especially younger professionals who were hitting the scene during COVID and immediately after COVID—there’s a developmental gap, especially on the sales side, of being able to be practiced, know what to say, and know how to respond.

I love the idea of being very focused on finding the right people to go that deep with, because it is super easy to get focused on, “Well, I just need a job.” But if you’re in that mode, there’s never going to be good work. It’s just going to be a slog, you’re going to hate it, and you’re not going to be bought in and invested.

If you find the right tribe, the right culture, and the right group of people, it should unlock you a little bit. My first 10 years of being in sales, I was not bought in. It was a thing that I did to pay for poker and martial arts training; it wasn’t a job that I ever wanted to do. Because of that, I was an okay performer, but I wasn’t a top-tier performer, and I had to relearn how to work outside of that mode. You can get very stuck with some of these things.

I was looking through some of the reviews on your book before the call earlier today. Has anyone taken the idea too far? Has anyone come back to talk to you about it where you’re like, “Well, you kind of way overshot the mark on the actual core idea”? Has it bitten anybody from taking it too wild?

Jay Yang (00:27:33)

Surprisingly, no. I haven’t found anyone who’s taken it too far. All the emails and messages I get have been overwhelmingly positive: “This inspired me to quit my job,” “This inspired me to cold email the author that I love,” “This inspired me to do the work upfront for this professor that I want to work with, and he said yes.” I’ve been blown away by the responses, to be honest.

John SmallMtn (00:27:46)

That’s awesome.

One of the things that I talk about all the time as a salesperson is: don’t just send a proposal. Make sure the proposal makes sense and make sure that there’s a need. When I first heard about your book and the permissionless approach, I was looking at it a little crossways because I like the idea of not waiting for permission, but especially on the sales side, it becomes super easy to sell ourselves on the idea that it’s a real opportunity when it’s not.

Are there any bookends to this idea? Because you talked about 50 hours of working on a slide deck and putting the idea together. Do you give any advice on—if it’s not overdoing it—when to call it over and when to go find something else to do?

Jay Yang (00:28:50)

Yeah, I think there’s obviously that healthy dose of common sense that needs to come into play. The one idea I wish I talked a little bit more about in the book was the idea that you cannot fail if the goal is experience.

In the process of creating these pitch decks, say the person says no. That’s okay, because you are building yourself. You are the product. Going through the process of putting these pitch decks together, doing your homework, doing your research, and practicing empathy—now you have the architecture to replicate this for the next person, and it becomes easier and faster. You begin to think in these ways. You start to ask yourself these mental questions: “What would it take for it to be a yes?”, “What would decrease the friction?”, “How would you make it a no-brainer for the other person?” Having these mental models in your brain automatically will serve you for the rest of your life.

I view it as: even if they say no, how do you win even if you lose? I think the pitch deck strategy is one of the best ways to practice that.

John SmallMtn (00:29:45)

Interesting. You said the same word twice, and I would love to learn a little bit more about this: the concept of empathy. I think it’s super important, because if we want to actually have connection with other people, what happens if you try to do the permissionless approach, but you’re not leaning into empathy?

Jay Yang (00:30:10)

If you try to do the permissionless approach and you don’t lean into empathy, it is very easy for the other person to say no.

For example, I had someone redesign my banner image on LinkedIn, and he did all the work. He sent over the banner image, and then he said, “Jay, that’ll be $200.” It was very easy for me to say, “No thanks. I like my current banner. I’m not going to pay you $200 for this.”

I think it’s honestly asking: what response do you think that they will give to this, and is that the response that you want? Going through these mental questions will increase the likelihood that they give you the response that you want.

John SmallMtn (00:30:55)

Interesting. How can people work on improving their skills at empathy? How have you gotten better at that yourself?

Jay Yang (00:31:06)

Asking those same questions: What is the outcome that I want? Will it increase the likelihood that I get the outcome that I want? Will it decrease the friction for them to say yes? Will it make it a no-brainer? If you genuinely ask yourself those questions, sit with them, and then take action on them, I’ve found that to be the best way to practice empathy.

John SmallMtn (00:31:28)

Awesome. I’m curious because we’ve talked about the ones you’ve won on: Beehiiv, Noah Kagan, and the Hormozis. Have you done one of these pitches and it’s not gone your way?

Jay Yang (00:31:44)

The boring answer is no, I have not. For every pitch that I’ve done, I’ve gotten the outcome that was favorable.

John SmallMtn (00:31:51)

One of the things that I think about—I used to be a poker player, and you can’t win all the time. Do you feel that that’s heightening your own standards and your own expectations? Does it make you at all gun-shy when you’re thinking about opportunities you might go after in the future? Because it might be important to keep that win rate versus flexing and pushing yourself as the product. Does that show up for you at all?

Jay Yang (00:32:23)

I would say no. The reason I have been more strategic on the things that I’m working on now is because the higher you go, the more opportunities and things you can do. That makes it even more important to think about what you actually want to do.

One of my favorite lines is from Charlie Munger. He says, “I’m here to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.” Now, especially in this phase of my life, I got a ton of opportunities since leaving Acquisition.com. It’s like: does that align with my North Stars? Is that where I want to go? That’s the frame I’ve been thinking through.

John SmallMtn (00:32:55)

Interesting. I’ve never heard that line before, actually: “I’m not here to fight all the alligators.”

Switching gears a little bit: as a writer, you’ve written for other people and for yourself. Everyone is talking about content, and if you look at guys like Hormozi and Kagan, they’re putting out mountains of content. Where have you shifted your thinking or perceptions about specifically organic content? Have you changed your mind on anything in that space?

Jay Yang (00:33:35)

I think the biggest lesson that I learned from Noah Kagan was quantitative marketing. Before working with him, I was what I like to call a qualitative marketer, which basically just means I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I would throw stuff at the wall and hope it sticks.

Working with Noah, he pushed me: “All right, Jay, why are we putting content out on all these channels? What’s actually driving the growth for the book? What’s actually getting book sales, and what’s actually getting us the results that we want?”

We realized Instagram wasn’t doing it. We said, “Let’s stop, let’s cut Instagram for now, and let’s double down on Twitter (X),” which was our top platform at the time. I think that approach of asking, “What are we actually trying to optimize for, is that getting us the result that we want?”, and then holding yourself accountable to that is key.

I would write a weekly report to Noah: “Here’s the content we put out, here are the results that content got, and here’s what we’re going to try next week based on this past week.” Constantly iterating. A lot of founders and entrepreneurs who are starting their journey with content can be consistent for the sake of consistency, but if you do not iterate, then you’re just putting out not-so-great content. The key part that a lot of people are missing is that iteration aspect.

John SmallMtn (00:34:59)

I love this. If you’re like Noah, you’ve been in the space for a while, you have a list, and everything else. It becomes super easy to use data: “Okay, this email didn’t do well, this post didn’t do well, these posts are doing well, I’m finding some trends and patterns.”

If someone is new to trying to develop their brand or create content, how should they be thinking about their iteration? Is it not focusing on vanity metrics and focusing on your own metrics? Is it not benchmarking yourself against other people? How can people who are starting off on this path do a better job of setting themselves up for success when it comes to content?

Jay Yang (00:35:42)

It’s two things. Number one is one of my favorite lines from Caleb Ralston, who used to lead content at Acquisition.com and is an absolute savage at content and brand. He says, “You cannot know what quality is until you do quantity.” It’s almost this spray-and-pray method of machine-gunning out a bunch of different content—things that maybe you don’t think will work, but how do you know until the market sees it? Putting out a vast buffet of content to see what sticks, and then from there, figuring out what works: “How can we double down on the top 10% and cut the bottom 10%?”

The second method is: who are the other people in your niche that are putting out content, and what’s working for them? It’s the inside and outside perspective: what’s working for us, and what’s working for them, and toggling back and forth.

John SmallMtn (00:36:34)

Interesting. What are your thoughts on over-focusing on signals and patterns of what other people are doing versus making the content that you want to make? How do you find a balance with that, and how do you talk about that balance for other people?

Jay Yang (00:36:56)

It goes back to: what are we optimizing for? When you do things for yourself, it’s a hobby. When you do things for others, it’s a business. If you are creating content to grow your business, then you cannot just think about what you want; you have to think about what your customers and clients want. If you are just putting out content because you love making content, videos, or writing, that’s a different story. It goes back to: what are we optimizing for?

John SmallMtn (00:37:26)

I like that. You said this line earlier: “Most founders should be optimizing for what their business can do for their life, not what their life can do for their business.” Where does that come from, and how do people misapply that thinking? Because it’s one of those lines where people think, “Yeah, that sounds good,” but a lot of people would probably miss how to apply that and be consistent with the idea.

Jay Yang (00:37:57)

It’s an idea I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently. I believe it is a fallacy to believe that you should sacrifice the journey in the pursuit of the reward, or sacrifice the enjoyment of the climb in the pursuit of the view at the top of the mountain. So many people will do things that make them miserable for 99% of the journey in hopes that when they get to that 1% at the end of the journey, they’ll feel happy, satisfied, and that it’ll be worth it.

Life is simply time and what we make of it. If you are sacrificing the 99%, that is your life. I’ve been obsessed with this concept of daily wealth: what is your ideal day, and how can you design your ideal day and live that day as many days in a row as possible?

For me, it’s: all right, if I know what a good day looks like, then within those confines, how can I make the most money living that ideal day? Instead of saying, “How can I make the most money possible?”, it’s, “What day do I want to live, and how do I make as much money as possible within those confines?”

John SmallMtn (00:39:11)

Awesome, man.

You’ve worked with some very cool names. If we look at your time at Beehiiv, your time with Noah, and your time at Acquisition.com, what is the biggest tip, leg up, or perception shift that you got from each one of those opportunities?

Jay Yang (00:39:35)

From Beehiiv, the biggest thing I learned was Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted to it. I observed that when we were launching features and products, we operated in two-week sprints, not month-long sprints. Simply having a shorter deadline—as simple and as trite as that sounds—will vastly improve the quality, output, and productivity of you or your company. The question I always ask myself now is: how can I do this faster? Why does the standard pace have to be my pace? That’s a question I often return to.

From Noah, I learned so much. I’ll just rattle off a bunch of sayings that live in my head rent-free. The first one is “Now, not how.” A lot of people get caught up on how they’re going to start the business or how they’re going to set up their LLC. What can you do right now to take action and test your goals? One of the things that he talks about in his book, Million Dollar Weekend, is validating your idea. Can you get three customers for your idea before you start the LLC, before you even have a product? Can you just ask three people—call them or text them—and say, “Hey, I have this idea. Will you give me a payment upfront to secure your product?” That is one of the best ways I’ve found, because 99% of people never actually start their business. That is one of the biggest things that people struggle with.

The second one is “Test and invest.” This applies to both strategy—what initiatives do we want to run?—and hiring. When I’m bringing on different people to my team, it’s: how can we give them a paid trial before we hire them? How can we give them a test project to see how they work? Some people may be great at interviewing and speaking, but not great at actually doing and executing. Test and invest. I learned a ton from Noah. I have a blog post that I wrote in my newsletter about 10 of the things I learned from him.

At Acquisition.com with the Hormozis, I would say volume negates luck. Seeing how much work, preparation, and time was spent on things that we were going to launch was eye-opening. For example, when launching 100M Money Models, Alex spent three years on the book. Not enough people are willing to delay their gratification. People vastly underestimate how much the initial work upfront matters. If you were to spend 100 hours on a product, you may get a 2x to 3x return. But if you spent 1,000 or 10,000 hours on a product, the result isn’t 4x or 5x—it’s 10x or 100x. It makes a lot of sense to spend a disproportionate amount of your time on the upfront work before you launch.

That’s what I’ve internalized for my second book: it makes a lot of sense to spend more of my time making sure this is the absolute best book that I can put out, more so than trying to spend all my time chasing it with marketing on the backend.

John SmallMtn (00:43:25)

Three or four months after I put out my book, someone asked, “When’s the next one coming out?” I was like, “Good Lord, we just got this one out!” The idea that I was going to become this person who has a book out every year—I applaud people that are able to keep up with that pace, but I have a business to run and a family to spend time with.

I start to beat myself up a little bit because the window has been bigger than I would like it to be, but I’m also trying to write it as a narrative, which fundamentally makes it so much harder than writing a standard business reference book. Ultimately, it’s the thing that I think will help more people. My favorite business books are all narratives, so if I put these ideas into a narrative, it’ll reach more people than a dry business book. We’re multiple years into writing this thing at this stage because I’m trying to make sure that it’s good enough that I’m excited to go out and push it. That’s the thing that people don’t talk about: you’re going to have to go put some weight behind it, and if you’re not proud of it, it becomes fundamentally so much harder to stand behind it and take the pushback.

Changing gears, Jay—I want to hop into some of the questions that I ask everybody. First: when you think about the permissionless approach specifically around content, what should someone who is starting out today and wants to build a brand be taking from the permissionless approach in the early days?

Jay Yang (00:45:20)

The permissionless approach to me is: how do you work with the people you admire? Taken through the lens of content, one of my favorite things to do is what I like to call the “public DM.” A lot of people try to cold email or cold DM the people they admire, but chances are you don’t get a response. It’s very easy for the receiver to say, “I saw it, but I’m not going to respond.”

If you take the public DM method, write your message, post it on social media as a piece of content, and tag the person that you want to reach out to, then you can have all your friends vouch for you and tag that person as well. It makes it a lot harder for that person to ignore that message, because chances are they see it, and now that you have social weight behind your post, they feel more obligation to give a response. It’s not a widely talked-about method, but if you are trying to grow your business at the start with content, that is an underrated approach to get some of those whales.

John SmallMtn (00:46:35)

I love that idea. I’ll see salespeople do it sometimes: “Hey, anybody know this person? I can’t seem to get a meeting with them.” I’ve never thought about it in terms of trying to find people to work with or make content with.

What is a piece of business advice that you appreciate now, but you had to learn the hard way—like running into a wall or falling into a trap—before you could appreciate it?

Jay Yang (00:47:09)

The biggest mistake I made running my agency was believing that the reason I plateaued or got stuck at a bottleneck was because I wasn’t good enough at the skill that I was delivering. I ran a ghostwriting and marketing agency, and I believed that to scale the agency, I just needed to get better at marketing and ghostwriting. In fact, the thing that was limiting my business was my inability to find, hire, train, and retain talent, because the business was constrained by the people and processes that I had.

I kept pushing harder on reading another marketing book, taking another marketing course, or putting out more content, but no matter how much I did that, the business was still limited by my personal time. At any given time, there’s one thing holding back your business, and oftentimes it’s the thing that you are not good at and do not enjoy. I loved marketing and writing, so I thought, “If I read another book and take another course, it’s okay, I enjoy it.” But oftentimes, it’s the thing you don’t enjoy that is holding the business back.

John SmallMtn (00:48:21)

Awesome, I love that.

You’ve had pretty crazy success in a very short time, and you’re still young, which is very cool. Even with your time on the path, you’ve probably seen the business path shift a lot, especially now with AI and everything that’s happening. What is your word of advice or word of warning to someone who’s going out today as an entrepreneur, consultant, or founder? What do they need to hear to be best set up for success?

Jay Yang (00:49:01)

It’s hard to give blanket advice for everyone, but the most useful lens that I can give as many people as possible is: what story do you want to tell at the end of this?

When you are starting out your entrepreneurship journey—as I think Elon Musk said—it’s like chewing glass and staring out into the abyss. Entrepreneurship is hard, incredibly lonely, and incredibly challenging. It will not be easy at the start. The question that I always come back to whenever I’m facing anything difficult is: what story do I want to tell at the end of this? Do I want to say that things got hard and Jay quit, or do I want to say that things got hard, Jay pushed through because he’s a winner, and he won? That is the most useful lens that I can give anyone starting their entrepreneurship journey.

John SmallMtn (00:49:54)

Man, I love that, dude. I wish I had more of this at my fingertips whenever I was starting, because I had all kinds of baggage and limiting beliefs, trying to find the right people to follow. The amount of progress you’ve had is very humbling as an older guy myself.

If people want to keep up with you on the journey of the next book and follow you around, where’s the best place for them to go?

Jay Yang (00:50:23)

The best place is my newsletter, jayyanginspires.beehiiv.com. I send a weekly newsletter with life updates, entrepreneurship updates, book updates, and a useful idea every Sunday.

John SmallMtn (00:50:36)

Awesome, cool. We’ll get a link to that in the show notes as well. Jay, thank you so much for coming on and doing this, my friend. A lot of people are stuck waiting for permission that isn’t ever going to come, and I hope that this gets them into motion and trying certain things so they can get moving as opposed to waiting. Thank you so much for doing this, man. I really think it’s going to help some people.

Jay Yang (00:50:59)

Thanks for having me on, John.

John SmallMtn (00:51:00)

You’re welcome. Cheers.