The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about, cleaned up from the transcript with an AI tool. [Spotify / Apple / YouTube]
Hey,
This week it’s me and Eli in the studio, plus my daughter hanging out in the background because it’s summer holidays, plus a fire alarm inspection, plus plumbers on the way. Classic Unscheduled recording conditions.
It’s a hangout episode, but two proper threads came out of it: why wealthy people keep making content when they obviously don’t need to, and why adding a few thousand a month with a simple service business is easier than people think.
Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:
We react to last week’s broken audio: Someone in the comments pointed out that I constantly complained about Laura and Eli making chair noises, and then I went and played background music so loud that it drowned out several minutes of us reviewing a drink. We replay the damage on this episode. Eli’s defence is that the music was so loud in his headphones he assumed I was just vibing extremely hard. This is what completely unedited gets you.
Why rich people keep making content: It’s under every Alex Hormozi video: “why is this guy still making YouTube videos if he’s basically a billionaire?” The standard answer, “I want to help people”, mostly hides the truth. The real reasons: promoting the business is part of a CEO’s actual job, a lot of people (especially Americans, where the appetite for wealth is basically infinite) just want more, and past a certain point you’re doing it to feel useful and stay relevant rather than fade out. I’d respect people more if they just said that.
An audience buys you optionality: This is the part I care about most for Unscheduled. If we keep bringing together like-minded entrepreneurs every week, we’re never locked into one business: we could run a creative retreat one year, open a video game arcade the next. A side effect I didn’t plan for: the more I do this show, the more interesting rooms I get invited into, like the two hours I spent on Greg Isenberg’s livestream on Thursday. Greg is the perfect example of all of this, he was already very successful when I met him, started the Startup Ideas podcast anyway, and it’s now one of the biggest AI shows on YouTube.
The six-week hypothetical I’m never filming: Give me 30 freelancers for six weeks and I reckon I could get them making an extra $3,500 a month in profit with dead simple service businesses. Examples from the episode: helping local businesses like the Tyre King (a guy who comes to your building and swaps your tyres, we hire him all the time) show up in Google and the AI tools, for 150 a month, half of what he makes on one job. Designing and running company offsites, because an HR person is googling exactly that every minute and mostly finding crap. Building a lead-gen quiz like the facilitator.com one for a €500 one-time fee. It is NOT rocket science.
Your competition is fucking lazy: Someone pitched me this week in German, when every trace of me on the internet is in English. Someone else opened with obvious AI slop, and in my mind that person is blacklisted, because lazy outreach means lazy work. My split: use AI for the research, the strategy, the list of who to contact and what their problems are, then write the email yourself, click their website, watch their videos, maybe record a quick Loom. Ten extra minutes of effort puts you ahead of basically everyone, because the people you’re competing against will not do it.
Revisiting the coaches video: We replay a piece of “I spent $600k on coaches so you don’t have to”, the Blake La Grange part. We paid Blake $100K to map the journey to $10 million, and by the end of day one he was telling me I didn’t seem like the person who even wanted a $6.3 million company, that I seemed more like an artist. I’d been waiting for someone to give me permission to say that. If your business works fine but you secretly don’t like it much, go watch that one.
Where the show is at: Honest goal check: 10,000 weekly listeners by mid-September doesn’t feel realistic if we’re only counting the podcast. YouTube’s last 28 days: 11K views, almost 7K more than usual, and last week’s episode is at around 2,000 listens across YouTube and Spotify so far. Maybe the better goal is a minimum per episode instead of chasing an average. It’s good to have goals.
If you only listen to one stretch of the episode, make it the simple-business-ideas one in the middle.
Cheers,
Jonathan
P.S. If you know one business owner who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode. (On the recording I said probably don’t send anyone this one. Ignore me.)
