2000 Weekend

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GUIDE TO WEALTH
It’s all about money: making it, growing it,
keeping it, in America today. I’d love to tell
you all about it and how YOU can build real
wealth, just click the button below.
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This is an exclusive excerpt from
“The Altucher Report”

...a monthly newsletter filled with money, investing
and entrepreneurial strategies + much more.
Forward..........................................................................................3
How to Make $2,000 in a Weekend..........................................5
Your Guide to Becoming an Entrepreneur..........................12
Questions from Readers..........................................................35
Interviews with Top Entrepreneurs......................................38

forward
For five years, every Thursday, I have been holding a Q&A session 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.
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 prac-
ticed very hard to figure out the fastest way to find answers.
3
How to Make $2000 in a Weekend
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 busi-
ness.
- James Altucher
4
SECTION 1
Freelancer.com is a $500 million company trading on the

Australian Securities 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 con-

stantly 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 opportu-
nities 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.
5
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 week-
end), but I wanted the skills to be easy to learn. For in-
stance, 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.
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/Indi-

egogo 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, Word-

Press fits in this category) – it can be templated but it’s
quick and efficient and it looks good
6
5. Children’s Book Illustration – incredibly popular job on
the site that pays quite well. Self-publishing is a big thing
these days and illustrators on the site can provide for a
huge range of different design styles that fit any require-
ments
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 especial-
ly 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 work-

ers 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 finalise the project when
deadlines are tough
10. Photoshop or any other graphic design work – compa-

nies would pay substantial money to have their Power-
Point, 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 weekend is over. Not just indi-
viduals, but companies and agencies employing several people
work through the site, running several projects simultaneous-
ly so they can maximise the earnings.
Matt
7
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 actu-

ally 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 scraping 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 free-
lance work until you can quit your job, or work from any-
where.
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.
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).
8
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.
9
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:
http://thevoiceoverguide.com
4. Translation services
Bilingual? Then you have a job.
Speak an uncommon language? Then you can be paid a lot

of money.
10
Being a translator can be a very profitable side business.
Below is a list of the most in-demand jobs related to trans-

lations. 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.
Tip: Get certified by the American Translators Association.

When applying for freelance jobs on Freelancer.com or other
sites, this can help you stand out.
11
SECTION 2
So those are my tips for freeing yourself from corporate

and making money on your own terms.
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 cor-
poratism 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 entre-

preneurship is one source of income.
12
I’m on the board of a $1 billion revenue employment agen-
cy, 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 reg-

ulations that have been imposed on them by the
government. They’d rather outsource the hiring
to employment agencies.
These are not sexy companies: Manpower, Kelly, CRS. But

they are all providing more and more solutions to the HR
sector about how to manage 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) spe-

cifically 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.
13
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.”

THE CHOOSE YOURSELF
GUIDE TO WEALTH
It’s all about money: making it,
growing it, keeping it, in America
today. I’d love to tell you all about it
and how YOU can build real wealth,
just click the button below.
TELL ME MORE!
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 Facebook. 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…
14
I believe that creating multiple income streams is import-
ant 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 fre-

quently. Entrepreneurship is a sentence of failures punctu-
ated by brief success.
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 busi-
ness (and some in life).
15
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 being 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 business. 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 “pro-

fessional venture capital.”
In the middle of that gap is “customer.”
16
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 com-

pany was a service company in the beginning.
Don’t forget that.
E. It’s OK to fail. Start over. Hopefully before you

run out of money. Hopefully 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.
17
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 com-
pany 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 company for
$3 BILLION to Yahoo before they were reve-
nue-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 competi-
tors 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 pay-
ing $10,000 a month. How did they do for him?
18
K. Communicate with everyone. Employees. Cus-
tomers. Investors. All the time. Every day.
Employees want to know what to do, and how

well they’re doing it.
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 char-

ities. Visit their parents for Thanksgiving. Help
them find other firms to meet their needs. Even
introduce 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 every-
body comes back to the source.
Your customer is not a company. There’s a hu-

man there. What will make your human cus-
tomer 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.
19
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.
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 what-
ever 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.

20
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 expen-
sively. Which goes along with the next rule:
U. Distribution is everything. Branding is every-

thing. 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 employ-

ees need you.
Your children or future children need you. It seems

odd to include this in a post about entrepreneur-
ship 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 night-
mares. I’ll repeat it again. Don’t kill yourself. Call
me if things get too stressful. More importantly,
make sure you’re getting professional help.
21
W. Give employees structure. Let each employ-
ee 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. 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 badmouth 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.
22
AA. Have killer parties. But use your personal money.
Not company money. Invite employees, custom-
ers 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 introduced 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.
AG. On any demo or delivery, do one extra surpris-

ing 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.
23
AH. Understand the demographic changes of the
world. Where are marketing dollars flowing and
how can you get into the middle of it? What ser-
vices do aging baby boomers need? Is the world
running out of clean water? Are newspapers go-
ing to survive? Etc. Read every day to understand
what is going on in the world around you, and
find a way to capitalize 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 mon-
ey 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 economy. 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 eco-
nomics to the academics while they leave good
business to you.
24
AL. Talk. Tell everyone you ever met about your com-
pany 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 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 service has to make their
lives better. People’s lives are better if: they be-
come healthier, richer, are having more sex, etc.
“Health” can be broadly defined.
AO. If your customers are advertisers: find sponsor-

ship opportunities for them that drive custom-
ers 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 con-

tent 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 con-
tent. You aren’t Google. (And, 10 Unusual Things
I Didn’t Know About Google)
25
AR. Say “yes” to any opportunity that gets you in a
room with a big decision 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 prog-
ress 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 compa-
ny 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 because they value their stock less
than they value cash.
c. WHICH MEANS, that when everyone’s lockup

period ends, EVERYONE will be selling stock
across the country. So sell yours first.
26
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 Face-
book 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?”
27
BA. No resale deals. Nobody cares about reselling
your service. Those are always bad deals.
BB. Your lawyer or accountant is not going to in-

troduce 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 massage 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. 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 equi-
ty. 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 equi-
ty to nail the deal.
28
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 Zuckerberg, 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.
29
Example: How I started Stockpickr
Tom Clarke, the CEO of thestreet.com called me up in mid-

2006. He wanted 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 fi-
nance.” 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.
30
Here it is.” (I exaggerated.) And I showed him the screen-
shots. 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 customer,
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 forever. Let’s do this together.” So we negotiated right
there. I said, “Great, how about you guys take 10% of the com-
pany 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 peo-
ple I spoke to thought this was a horrible 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.
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 respon-
sibilities, 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.
31
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 imme-
diately. But that’s another story.
With my first successful company, Reset, I had about 10

paying customers before I finally made the jump to run-
ning the company fulltime: HBO, Interscope, BMG, New
Line Cinema and Warner Brothers were all paying custom-
ers 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 expense of setting it up until I had the first
$20 million commitment. Twenty 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 commitment, but it worked.
32
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 company 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 success-
ful businesses 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 ad-
dresses. 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.
33
-- 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.
-- 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 cus-
tomer. 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.
34
SECTION 3
Question: You say no free time but you also say keep
emotionally fit, physically fit, etc. How do I do this if I’m
constantly thinking of ideas for old and potential custom-
ers?
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?
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.
35
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 ecosys-

tem, then find distribution 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 suc-
cessful 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 peo-
ple go and that everyone is hurting, but you want to keep in
touch because he or she is a great employee. It was an hon-
or 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 reputa-
tion 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.
36
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 ser-
vices 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.
Every day, make sure you are not smoking crack. The most
important thing is your health so that you can be per-
sistent. If you smoke crack, you can die.
Good luck.
37
SECTION 4
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 thou-
sand 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.
38
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 mil-
lion 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 years ago we had about 20 different
categories of jobs. Now we have 750. So we have areas like
aerospace engineering, genetic engineering, biotechnology,
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 aerospace
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 freelanc-
ers are primarily from emerging economies, so India, Paki-
stan, 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 aerospace industry and it’s huge. It’s much
bigger than Australia’s for example.
39
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 com-
plexity 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 developing 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 with
these skilled areas. If you don’t you can skill yourself up
thanks to the Internet.
40
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 something 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 development. 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 communi-
ty and you can kind of work in these areas which I think is
really special.
41
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 outsourcing to one of these third
world countries I’m not really worried about anybody steal-
ing 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, developing 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 connect-
ing 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.
42
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 soft-
ware 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 basical-
ly 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 whole-
sale web site which would drop ship it for me and I hired
a freelancer for about $350.00 a month to do 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 –
43
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 mon-
ey, making a living even by western standards on freelanc-
er.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.
44
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 employ-
er, 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 web-
site 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 busi-

ness 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 empowering entre-
preneurs. In the west you’re empowering entrepreneurs
to get things done with the workforce. On the other side
you’re empowering 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.
45
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 peo-
ple 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 busi-
ness, like really like core intellectual 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 some-
one locally and you know, employ them full time.
46
James Altucher:
I’ll give you a good example. I recently took a best-selling
book, a book that’s on the best seller list and I used free-
lancer.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 people 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 rapid-
ly to a great outcome.
47
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 really supercharge the business models and
supercharge ideas for products if you think creatively and
have an ability for these things.
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 free-
lancer.com?”
48
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 man-
ufacturing 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 ca-
pacity 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 prod-
ucts 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 prob-
lem 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.
49
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
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 de-
livered 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 paja-
mas as you are now selling these things on line.
In fact he’s got a new product now called giant flamingo

which is giantflamingo.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-sourc-
ing 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 recent-
ly. 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.
50
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 some-
where 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 busi-
ness 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, 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 version of the product which has some functionality in
it, but then it you want to kind of upgrade and get a premi-
um functionality you have to pay a fee.
51
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 invested 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, wheth-
er 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.
52
James Altucher:
What kind of trends are you seeing and what’s kind of sur-
prising you in the trends and what people are outsourcing
right now?
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 re-
cently 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 You-
Tube 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.
53
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?
Matt Barrie:
Maybe. I mean maybe in your blog you can maybe glimpse
it. If you’re selling products from your blog or subscrip-
tions or what have you, monetize it. Once in a while get-
ting 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.
54
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 some-
one to kind of assist in something for them more easily. I
think there’s a lot of opportunity there in personal health-
care and personal 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 equa-
tion 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 freelanc-
er in the Philippines to make an Apple watch app?
Matt Barrie:
It would be in the hundreds of dollars to low thousands
depending 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 –
55
James Altucher:
In the US or around the world?
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 free-
lancer.com to hire someone super cheap to make it wheth-
er 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 Word-
Press 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 go-
ing 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 mas-
sive 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 manufac-
tured products that are actually quite straight forward if
you had a 3-D print out.
56
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 Christ-
mas 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 complicat-
ed, 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 number 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 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?
57
So you know, I actually used freelancer to get a part manu-
factured. 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 per-
fect. I actually had a friend fix the model and they made it
smooth and made it the right size and so forth. And I ac-
tually 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 astro-
nauts 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.
58
James Altucher:
So what’s the largest project you’ve seen go through free-
lancer.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 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 happens. 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 cer-
tain jobs when they know they can kind of have a chief of
freelancing who will outsource many of the jobs on a proj-
ect-by-project basis. And you think this could potentially
contribute to a general decline in income or perhaps an
equalizing of income throughout the world?
59
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 industri-
alization.
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 pov-
erty 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 edu-
cation 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
people’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 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 edu-
cated and flexible as possible. And you know, it’s a chal-
lenge, but the great thing is that the whole world of human
knowledge is accessible through the Internet.
60
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
traditional 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 necessary 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
bachelor’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.
61
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 expe-
rienced in college.
Matt Barrie:
Well, I mean just like on freelance you can architect your
career, with Coursera you can architect your education.
Right? So instead of having a, you know, a four-year bach-
elor’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 so-
phistication 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.
62
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 under-
stand 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 platform
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 idea-
a-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 ba-
sic certifications at this point, but I certainly do think that
an educational offering and of course, with 15 million 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.
63
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 plat-
form. 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 con-
sulting 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?
64
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 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 capital-
ization of your company?
Matt Barrie: About half a billion.
65
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 technolo-
gy, a great team it’s just way too early for market.
We were building 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 compa-
ny 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 love with the product and not
really thinking about it enough as a business.
66
You know, we were selling this OEM inter-network equip-
ment, 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 de-
sire to chip into someone else’s product. I mean the prod-
uct 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
directly 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 some-
one 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 may-
be I need to get 100, 1,000 of these in the spread sheet.
67
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, someone’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 soc-
cer practice; I’ve got exams, and then eventually 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, some-
thing 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 whatever. 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.
68
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 Eure-
ka 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 imag-
ination. 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 product. 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?
69
And here I am an entrepreneur, slightly crushed from my
last business, right, slightly demoralized, not really want-
ing to go do this –after six years of really trying – I was
flying trans-Pacific flights once a month for six years and
just physically tired. I thought wow, I can now start a busi-
ness 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 my-

self 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, graph-
ic 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 mon-
ey 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.
70
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 optimalization, SEO. So when I typed in
cheap data entry they ranked number one.
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 –
71
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 start-
ed going around 2008-2009 and the reason why is because
before 2008-2009 there was no real Internet in the devel-
oping world.
And before that, back in 1999 if you think about this in-
dustry, 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 go-
ing 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.
72
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 motivator 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 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 although 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 suddenly 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 communi-
cation, voice over, things like that now that you could com-
municate with someone and so the industry I think really
got started around that time.
73
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 actual-
ly 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 reve-
nue.
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, oper-
ations 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 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 –
74
James Altucher:
So you knew – like you were able to say to potential inves-
tors 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 rev-
enue 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 mentioned 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.
75
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 com-
mission was zero.
James Altucher: Ah, so that’s great.
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 per-
cent 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.
76
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 de-
sign. It’s down to user experience, understanding behav-
ioral economics, understanding conversion optimization
and so forth and behavioral psychology.
And let me tell you if you’re a designer today you – design-

ers 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.
77
James Altucher:
That’s really interesting. Well, this has been such a fasci-
nating 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.
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 feeling
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
combination of things – if I was six months earlier it would
have probably not have worked and if I was six months lat-
er, 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 –
78
James Altucher:
Yeah. So scriptlance was the company I used in 2006.
Matt Barrie:
Yeah, scriptlance, getafreelancer, Rent-A-Coder, Freelanc-
er.co.uk, you name it. So that was another pretty success-
ful strategy to kind of go there and buy out all the competi-
tors 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 Australian 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
complicated preferred stock structure from a venture capi-
talist. 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.
79
Matt Barrie:
And you know, I’d written prolifically beforehand saying
like the 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
original 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
securities 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 technology.
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 phenomenal moment
for the world, but you know, it worked really well for us.
80
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 mod-
els now developed on freelancer or they’re using freelancer
to scrape the content off the sites, off the businesses 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.
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.
81
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.
82
Interview with Mark Ford:
The Man Who Built 100 Businesses
James Altucher:
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.
James Altucher:
In the hundreds, okay. Okay, so the average, let’s say in-
vestor, 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.
83
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 feeling 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 mon-
ey. So, my failures –
James Altucher:
I like how you put that, by the way – time, resources, mon-
ey – 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 prac-
tically 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 en-
trepreneur. 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.
84
Mark Ford:
Right. But I would say that generally, I think the gener-
al idea that to make more money you have to take risk
is wrong. I feel the opposite. 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 equiv-
alent of the 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 start-
ed businesses, but they’ve been businesses in every catego-
ry. 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 busi-
nesses 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
possible 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 “voca-
tions” and “avocations”.
85
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 de-
gree at this time. It was called African Business and Trade,
and 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 coun-
tertrade, 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 –
86
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 busi-
ness entirely – having that satisfaction – you attach your-
self 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 mid-
dle 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.
87
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 you’re told
and move through the ranks. But if you work for a smaller
company like Agora – after Washington, D.C. I went down
to Florida. And I don’t know if I should tell this story. Any-
way, 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 broth-
er-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.
Petersburg 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.
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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 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
marketing 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 –
89
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.
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 sweat-
ing 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 oth-
ers. 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.
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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 need-
ed 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 everything was paper, you know? And I’d
been writing this one book, basically our own style manual
for the publishing company.
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You know, a style manual – and I know you know, but for
the audiences – 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 Persua-
sion by you. And that in a sense is a style manual, but it’s
a style manual – and it actually even gets down to punctu-
ation – but it’s style manual that’s about selling, it’s about
making money. And by the way, you used examples from
Steinbeck, 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.
92
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 persuasive – 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 cot-
tage 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 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 want-
ed, 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 –
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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 always 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 news-
letters already – and I realized my jobs was to try to help sell
newsletters. And so I started looking at the newsletters entire-
ly 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 sud-
denly 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
eventually, ‘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 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.
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And so I knew that she was gonna go, and when she start-
ed – 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 mak-
ing 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 person-
al. 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 marketing, 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 sil-
ver – I was in that category – then there’s – what’s outside
of gold – then there’s –
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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 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 techniques 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 busi-
ness was that way. And think a lot of people do – that busi-
ness 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.
96
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 market-
ers?” “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?
Mark Ford:
All I can tell you is, we had these – I think they were Ha-
sidic 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 everything. We were buying televisions for
$16.00, you know? So we became one of the largest direct
sellers of watches, perfumes – knockoff perfumes – jewel-
ry, cosmetic jewelry, you name it –
97
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 some-
thing 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 million-
aire. I got rich pretty quick because –
James Altucher:
So you were about 34 years old at this point.
98
Mark Ford:
Yeah. After I started fixing the newsletters, we decided to go
into the investing newsletter. He was in the investing busi-
ness 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.
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
newsletters, 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 individu-
als, 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.
99
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 market-
ers 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 pa-
per, 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 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 any-
way, 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,
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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 some-
thing 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.
101
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
negotiator. 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
relationship. 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 corporations, and we didn’t
structure them right. And we were gonna pay like $10 mil-
lion in taxes that we shouldn’t really have been paying. We
should’ve been paying $3 million. So, we had his father-
in-law Sid settle the problem with the IRS agent. And the
guy – he worked hard, he took the guy out golfing, 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?
102
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 negotia-
tor ever –And so now, I’m completely mortified ‘cause this
is the worst expression of all the bad things that could go
wrong that did. And so we actually practiced on negotiat-
ing. 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 prac-
ticed 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.
103
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 actually 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, and then I do re-
member 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.
104
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 entire 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 emo-
tional content – how would you feel without that $7 million?
That’s what he changed the conversation to. So it’s not wheth-
er – what it became, “Hey, are you gonna live up to what we
agreed to?” to “How would you feel without $7 million?”
105
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 negotiating 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.
James Altucher: So this is Bill Bonner –
Mark Ford:
Bill Bonner, right. This is Bill’s technique. No planning
whatsoever, 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 com-
plete 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 leveraging 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.
106
And what I’m looking for in a business relationship – in
terms of evaluating business – is, does this person’s per-
ception 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 dis-
parate, 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
other people do – is if I make a deal with somebody and
then three months later I can see that – I think you’ve actu-
ally 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 then I stop
doing business with you. And I have business relation-
ships 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.”
107
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 differ-
ent 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.”
108
Mark Ford:
He was a wonderful guy in many ways. But he was, let’s say
hyper, aggressive business type of dad.
James Altucher:
Well okay, you called it in one of your books “hoarder ver-
sus sharer.” You did identify them, I know you were think-
ing 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 criticizes 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 bat-
tling 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 be-
come 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 trav-
el, you’re not gonna wanna do anything out of the ordinary.
109
Another one is you can become one of these really cool old
people that’s like relaxed, and they like people, and every-
body 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 cubicles 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 mar-
keting 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 your experience with all these differ-
ent 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 employee 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 business 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.
110
If your business is political, it won’t work. A political busi-
ness is one where position and power are more important
than creativity, and productivity, and profit. Profit – al-
though 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 busi-
ness that’s growing. 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 and lets people move up as fast as they – That’s
one of the things about Agora – in the old days, if some-
body 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 & Gam-
ble as like the classic example – but usually those are the
current Procter & Gamble.
Mark Ford:
Right. Right. So that –
111
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. Be-
cause 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 inevi-
tably. They happen 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 govern-
ment – there’s a reason why governments are so horrible 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 manage-
ment 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 man-
age profits. If the business is 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.
112
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 cus-
tomers 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 –
113
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 com-
pany that does colorization 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 employees in terms of the led-
ger. On this side of the ledger are the expenses, and 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 pro-
duction 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 color-
ization 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.
114
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. 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
recovered 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.
115
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 any-
thing about IT there. And he also knows he’s probably buy-
ing 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 reason 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 hap-
pened?” 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.” 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.
116
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 compa-
nies 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 entrepre-
neurship? And you’re a big believer in information prod-
ucts. 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 entrepreneurship. 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 per-
son called Reluctant Entrepreneur. I myself was never an
entrepreneur, per se. I was an intrapreneur. I created busi-
nesses 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.
117
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 ac-
tually 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
contribution to it – I agreed to go into it if I could focus on
creating wealth in a non-stock, bond, non-financial areas.
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 deci-
sions 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 remember – 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 mak-
ing 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 mar-
ket. 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 multiple incomes. You have to
have multiple incomes.
118
Another is, I kept a very minimum amount of money in
volatile investments 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 customers 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 market-
ing the books.
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 focus 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-ex-
perts right now that teach people how to do that.
119
And we have – in our program – we have about 14 or 15,
maybe 18 information publishing – just publishing – advi-
sory, 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 de-
scribe 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 Writ-
ers 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 copy-
writer 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.
120
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
between – 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 copy-
writer.” 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 gener-
ally 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 copy-
writers. 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 newsletter writer who’s
writing the newsletter
121
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 –
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 originally mastered it. There’s
an organization – forget what it’s called, but – that basi-
cally 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 copy-
writers. 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 missionary work in Angola, you’re probably not
gonna make a lot of money, but –
122
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, every-
body 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 gener-
ally, people 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 buy-
ing 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 inter-
est for a while – I collect certain things – and I had an in-
terest in cigar lighters, old cigar 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 –
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James Altucher:
How will you know to buy them cheaply? Like, won’t every-
body know that these are valuable?
Mark Ford:
Well, then the margins do get smaller on the internet, be-
cause 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 in-
terest in it, then you can make a lot of money. Like for ex-
ample, if you decide to buy surfboards – vintage surfboards
or certain kind of surfboards – 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 –
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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. But anyway, so we have like 18 – you could be a graph-
ic 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.
Mark Ford:
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 camera, 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?”
125
Mark Ford:
That’s a perfect example. I mean, being a wedding photog-
rapher is always in demand. You can learn – this is infor-
mation. 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
information-oriented, because we gotta be honest, to be
good in the information industry, you basically have to be
pretty smart. 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 commit-
ted 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 man-
aged. Or, I have a friend that –
126
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 peo-
ple that go into their business are really irresponsible peo-
ple 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 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 Al-
tucher, 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.
127
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.
Mark Ford:
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, anoth-
er 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.
128
I’m gonna wait until I can equal my pay before I’m quit-
ting. 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?
Mark Ford:
Because I had said to somebody, “I can’t believe he’s com-
ing – this guy interviews Tony Robbins – what am I gonna
say to him? I’m a little nervous about having this inter-
view.” 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.
129
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 maybe 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 spe-
cifically almost like evolutionary numbers.
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.
130
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 business 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 lan-
guages 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 –
131
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 yes-
terday [you can become fluent in any language in – Well
actually, what he said was 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 be-
cause 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 prob-
ably 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, pri-
marily the skill of keeping you happy, to keep their jobs.
132
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 teaching 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 interact-
ing 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 im-
portant. And then the whole business can break down, you
can be in a political environment, so… Though for me from
the owner’s perspective of the business –that creates prob-
lems, you know? I could say at 350 people, what beyond 50
people, your business adopts some real potential problems
and 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-efficiently. 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.
133
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 thresh-
old where everything’s going quite good. But the business
starts to stall at about $10 million ‘cause this is very com-
mon. And it stalls because you have one way of bringing
customers in, you’re basically one line of products, 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 you’ve done
such a good job innovating or replicating products, and
promotions, and what you haven’t done so well is in refining
your systems.
134
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 something
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 per-
son to do that, that you can trust. At Agora we have a su-
perb 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 nec-
essary 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 compa-
ny? And the way we did it at Agora – and I’ve done it with
some other businesses – is by fractionalizing 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 compa-
nies 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
newsletters are gonna be here or our options services are
gonna be here. And then we decided that doesn’t work.
135
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 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 per-
centages –
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 everybody 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.
136
Mark Ford: No.
James Altucher:
Look at something that’s worked over and over, and maybe
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. Create 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 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.
137
James Altucher:
You know, and you say, “advice,” and you say – you were
talking earlier – and you said you’re in the self-help indus-
try. 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.”
138
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 –
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 out-
side, 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.
139
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 poorest 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 literature 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, after 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 may-
be 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 restaurant.” 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.
140
And what’s worse is, in American 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 entrepre-
neurial 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 actu-
ally 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.
141
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 go-
ing 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 fan-
tastic. 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 decorator – 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-cyl-
inder, not the best eco footprint, but I only drive it two
miles from –
142
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 three-
year-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 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 re-
port. 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.
143
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 making $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.
James Altucher:
Or pick two or three of the chapters to focus on.
144
Mark Ford:
Yeah, you can still absolutely. Then I have a chapter on eat-
ing, 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 actually 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.
Mark Ford:
All right, edit this out haha. Anybody drink wine here?
Mark Ford:
All right, menu. Can you visualize M E R I T A G E? How
would you pronounce that?
Man: “Meritage.”
145
Mark Ford:
Exactly. And that’s how everybody pronounces it – “Meri-
tage.” Well turns out, Meritage, it’s not pronounced “Meri-
tage.” It’s pronounced “Meritage,” because it’s an American
term, it came of a contest that happened in California, and
it’s a combination of “merit” and “heritage”. So it’s pro-
nounced “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 pro-
nounced ‘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 –
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.
146
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 Georg-
es 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 con-
versation 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 experi-
ence. When we experience anything, let’s say entertainment,
or educating yourself, or – I’m trying to talk about life expe-
riences 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 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 ex-
periences that are kind of neutral, and then there’s the expe-
riences that deplete you. And for me, let’s talk about watching
movies, for example.
147
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 some-
thing 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 ridiculous, 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 yourself. 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.
148
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, hun-
dreds 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 writ-
ing about it, and talking about it. And it’s good to make
money. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it seems like
you initially had this kind of feeling 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 millionaire.” 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.
149
James Altucher:
All right, well Mark. I don’t know which books to recom-
mend, but Living Rich, Ready, Fire, Aim, Persuasion – will
you make Persuasion public to everyone?
James Altucher:
All right well, thanks Mark Ford, thank you again for com-
ing onto the show.
Mark Ford: Thank you, pleasure, pleasure.

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special edition

I JUST WROTE A NEW BOOK:

This is an exclusive excerpt from

“The Altucher Report”

How to Make $2,000 in a Weekend..........................................5

Your Guide to Becoming an Entrepreneur..........................12

Questions from Readers..........................................................35

Interviews with Top Entrepreneurs......................................38

I started doing this in March 2010 and I quickly noticed something

People didn’t care as much about certain things as I thought. They

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

Then I write about it.

Then I teach it.

“Learn, write, teach, repeat” is a learning technique that has been

Questions about learning are always the most important in these

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

“How can I make $2,000 in a weekend?”

Freelancer.com is a $500 million company trading on the

The founder and CEO, Matt Barrie, is a friend of mine

So I called Matt and asked him the $2,000 question, but

What jobs are constantly posted on freelancer.com where I

I was afraid he would ignore me. Freelancer.com is con-

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

I knew that each job that Matt sent me would require

Here is what Matt wrote back to me:

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

Nevertheless, please find a list of projects where freelancers

1. Video Animation – video projects for KickStarter/Indi-

2. Programming – e.g. for Ecommerce stores (Shopify,

3. Website testing or Web Scraping – last minute changes

4. Website Development and Design (as you said, Word-

6. Writing – we have seen numerous requests from people

7. 3D Rendering and Architecture Design – huge skill on the

9. App development – full time staff or freelance temp work-

10. Photoshop or any other graphic design work – compa-

Freelancers can also take on several smaller projects from

And things like 3D rendering, you’d be surprised, are actu-

This may or may not be true.

But with a small amount of money, the best returns can

Matt gave the top 10 jobs he sees on Freelancer.com, but

Think about it this way: every company has something they

A copywriter is able to successfully reach the people and

The great thing about copywriting though, is that you don’t

Given a few months, you can easily begin to pull in more

The best place to start if you would like to begin to learn

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

Once your portfolio is built, you can begin reaching out to

You’ve seen these videos—one of the most popular TED

The reason these kinds of videos are so successful is because

Besides the obvious skill of having a voice people want to

I personally have paid people to do voiceovers for my

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

Bilingual? Then you have a job.

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

Below is a list of the most in-demand jobs related to trans-

Tip: Get certified by the American Translators Association.

So those are my tips for freeing yourself from corporate

But what if you have an idea or a small business and you

I’m a big believer that the next century brings something