The Power of Storytelling: How to Touch the Hearts and Minds of Your Audience (E...

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:00:04 - 00:01:20

Hi everyone, thanks for dialing in from all around the world and today we have Jake Hurwitz with us. Now, Jake started his first business when he was eight. That was a couple of years ago. As you can see, he's a young looking guy. He started repairing skateboards around his suburban New York neighborhood. Jake is the founder of Thursday Labs and we're gonna ask him why he called that, a studio that specialized in various aspects of digital content creation, marketing, like selling, creating impact for websites and lead pages, creating high quality video and podcast content, managing blogs and newsletters and consistent delivering large volumes of content. And I've been in content marketing for a long time. So I'm curious about what his magic source is and what he's doing. This helps startups to obtain valuable insights into which styles, channels and hooks are affected with driving conversions. Prior to Thursday Labs, Jake served as the Chief marketing officer of Day One, a community and school for emerging entrepreneurs, supported by investors like Gary Vaynerchuk and Antler. Throughout his career, he's helped multiple startups grow substantially within six months and started six more companies. Welcome to the show, Jake, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here.

Jake Hurwitz

00:01:20 - 00:01:22

Thanks. It's great to be here.

Jeff Bullas

00:01:23 - 00:01:36

So, you started selling skateboards or repairing skateboards when you're eight. What was this entrepreneurial gene? What did you say? I just want to make more money because I wanna buy more skate clothes. What was the inspiration?

Jake Hurwitz

00:01:37 - 00:03:17

I actually, I don't know. No one's ever asked me, candidly, like why I did it, which is so funny that you bring it up. I think I just wanted to be more well known in the neighborhood. I mean, I lived in this like cookie cutter, kind of copy and paste style neighborhood about 40 minutes outside of New York City, all the houses were pretty much connected to each other or separated by just a few feet. So there were like a ton of mailboxes, right? They all look the same. And I just remember making these flyers that said, like Jake Skateboard Repair Service. I put them in every single mailbox. I definitely didn't do any market research. There's not a lot of people in my neighborhood skateboarded, let alone needed their skateboard to be repaired. Two funny stories from that actually. Number one, my parents got a fine from the neighborhood. I don't know, HOA, I guess that were said I'm not allowed to put flyers in mailboxes and if I do it again, we're gonna be fined even more or potentially threatened to have to move out of the neighborhood. We're like, really? I'm eight years old, like, try to build a business here. So that was probably my first run in with a funny, like, not the law but, you know, running with authority and ask me how I feel about authority these days. Second funny story was, I actually did have one customer, a very sweet old man who was a few doors down who went to the store, bought a skateboard, drove over it with his car to break it and then asked me to repair it and I couldn't repair it and I couldn't like mend two pieces of wood together. I was thinking more like if your screws are loose, I can tighten those or something. I, but long story short, I think I just wanted to do something and like, make a dollar for it.

Jeff Bullas

00:03:17 - 00:03:33

Okay. Right. So, you hadn't done the market research. So let's move on next because you did college or when you started, what was the next sort of major thing you did in the business era or training for it?

Jake Hurwitz

00:03:33 - 00:05:19

Yeah. First, I'd say like minors business was, it was my junior year of high school. Long story short, I got a car, gas was really expensive at the time, so I couldn't afford gas, but I was able to get the car. So I did the calculations and thought if I'd work at the local pizza shop or the bowling alley, like all my friends for minimum wage, I couldn't afford the gas. So I need to figure out a way to make more cash. So I started a tutoring business. I was, yeah, 16 years old. And I would work with about 20 to 30 students a week for 30 bucks an hour after school and teach them like first grade math or second grade science. It was pretty straightforward. And then after about a year of that, I built a business where I had a bunch of tutors working under me. So when I'd be out tutoring, you know, four or five students a day, I'd get a cut from them, but also about another 30 or 40 students that other people were tutoring under my business. That was like my first sort of company. Even though I didn't have an LLC or anything for that, it wasn't incorporated. But the first major thing was when I was 18. I started an agency, creative agency that just sort of was the vehicle for everything. I mean, I was building websites, I was doing video, I was taking photos, I was making logos and brands and I wanted to start working with startups. I had just moved from New York to Colorado. It was a great way to get connected in the local startup scene there. And we ended up working with about 85 companies in the first 18 months. The majority of which were startups, there were a few universities in our portfolio. And actually one that was pretty cool was Bob Dylan and his team launched a whiskey brand and we did some work for the whiskey Bob Dylan's whiskey line. So I was, yeah, I was a 20 year old kid working on clients like Bob Dylan and big universities and a whole bunch of startups.

Jeff Bullas

00:05:20 - 00:05:29

So that was in Colorado? So is Colorado still a sort of a startup hub?

Jake Hurwitz

00:05:30 - 00:06:26

Yeah, it was, I would say it was in the top five startup hubs from the years, you know, 2012 through, I don't know, 2017 or so. Denver and Boulder are still very highly rated in terms of activity and great place to work. Depending on the year, they are sometimes listed as amongst the top for venture capital dollars. But Techstars was actually founded in Boulder and it really took off around the years of 2013-2014. And that was right when I got there and it started the agency. And so you had lots of folks moving from the coast to Boulder, even if it was just for 12 weeks to be in the Techstars’ portfolio. But a lot of which stuck around and stayed. So there was an interesting era of time where Boulder and Denver were hotbed for startups around the US. Mostly led by Techstars, a few other small accelerators and Foundry Group, one of the greatest VC funds of all time is located in Boulder. So they really were the way of that scene.

Jeff Bullas

00:06:27 - 00:06:38

So what attracted you to startups as because it's like the Silicon Valley myth story is that, what attracted you to startups?

Jake Hurwitz

00:06:39 - 00:07:48

Not sure. I think it was just, these were people like me. I mean, folks that were, I felt at home with startups, I felt just connected with people that were trying to see how the world could be and make it happen versus just accepting the world for how it was. And I was one of those people and I didn't really know what to do with that energy and in suburban New York, like there was no startup scene. I didn't even know what a startup was. I just knew what entrepreneurship was, not the same thing where even at the time, like New York City, there wasn't even much of a startup tech scene that really didn't even start until like 2017 or so. And it really didn't become a thing until about two years ago. So anyway, when I got to Colorado, I knew there was a lot of activity around entrepreneurship in general and like cool people building cool apps and stuff. But it took me probably about a month but still not that long a month to have my eyes open to like, well, there's a whole culture and a lifestyle here and I just was hanging out around coworking spaces in Boulder and in Denver and really felt at home with that community.

Jeff Bullas

00:07:48 - 00:08:00

Right. So it almost sounds like New York was more established, traditional type businesses versus the new exciting frontier of digital and digital startups.

Jake Hurwitz

00:08:00 - 00:08:52

Yeah. At the time, startups weren't raising enough money to even afford to be in New York, New York has always been very expensive. To be here, you kind of had to be in finance or media. And then when startups raise startups began to raise a lot more money for many reasons, one cost of engineering was going up and also like just cost of living was going up. So founders and the returns were higher. So lots of reasons why startups began raising more. They could then be in New York, which I would say. And during COVID too, like costs went down in New York to live. So a lot moved to New York City during that time, a lot of startups did and are still here. And now it's the number one city in the country, probably the world to start a company. They also, and that statistic is based off the amount of venture capital that was invested over the last couple of years. New York City has surpassed that of Silicon Valley.

Jeff Bullas

00:08:52 - 00:09:11

Oh wow. Okay. That's very, very interesting. I didn't know that fact. So, let me ask you a question about what was your first sort of significant startup, the one that you sold, okay. Tell us a little bit about that. And where the inspiration of that came from. What was the name? And how did that come about?

Jake Hurwitz

00:09:12 - 00:11:44

Sure. So I was, it was like end of my junior year, early, senior year of college and I went and started my first startup. I mean, before that, I was running an agency and this was in the ed-tech space. That's not the one that did well, that one failed. But after that, after we shut it down, after about probably two years, I went and joined a startup studio. For those any listeners here don't know what a startup studio is, it's basically a VC fund that incubates its own companies invest versus investing in outside companies. So you've got accelerators, you've got funds, you have studios. So I went and joined a studio called Boulder Bits as the VP of branding. So I was in charge of everything for all of our portfolio companies in regard to marketing and creative and content and design and branding. So whenever we would incubate and launch a new company and we would do about four to six a year. It was me and my team that were in charge of building the website, coming up with the name, doing the logo, like creating the launch video, making their social media channels, like building the brand, building the thing. And some of that fell into product as well if we were doing like no code product. One of the companies we started though was a global network of startup studios called the Global Startup Studio Network or GSSN for short. And it's really funny how this one worked out because at first the idea was, well, we're a startup studio. There aren't that many around the world, there's like 80 and one of us are really talking to each other and we're not competing with each other and we're all struggling with the same things, we should be connected. So we started a Slack channel and this was in the early days of like a digital community. No one even was calling it that it was a Slack channel. We started hosting weekly events and bringing in the best studios to teach things to the emerging studios. We started bringing in lawyers to talk about how to like do the legal side of studio fund formation, brought in investors to talk about why they were bullish or bearish on studios. So just became this like cool consortium of studios. It grew very quickly. We then sold that to the Global Accelerator Network or GAN. And that was in 2019 and right around the time of selling GSSN to GAN, we also wrote the first white paper on the startup studio model and that was the publishing of that white paper came out at the same time that sale, the acquisition was announced and that was in I believe, March of 2019.

Jeff Bullas

00:11:45 - 00:11:53

Right. So let's move forward to, I mean, I’m interested about the story with the, you're getting involved with Gary Vaynerchuk and Antler. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jake Hurwitz

00:11:54 - 00:13:00

Yeah. I wasn't the one to lead those deals by the way. So, Andrew Hutton and Rahul Brumbaugh are the CEO and COO, co-founders of Day One. Andrew was the Chief Innovation Officer at Human Ventures for quite a long time. Human Ventures was a startup studio based in New York City. And when I was at Boulder Bits and when I was starting the Global Startup Studio Network, he joined the network as Human Ventures. So Human Ventures was one of our early members. Andrew became a friend and kind of personal mentor to me. And then around the time that COVID hit, he left Human Ventures to start day one. He and Rahul got in touch with Gary and Antler as investors. And then shortly after that precede round was closed. Andrew and I had, you know, we kept in touch, of course, all those years and it essentially was the right time for me to jump on board and become the CMO so that's when I joined. So it was right after the deal closed with Gary and Antler and a few other investors.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:01 - 00:13:04

So that, so what was the name of that business at startup?

Jake Hurwitz

00:13:04 - 00:13:05

Day One.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:05 - 00:13:09

It was called Day One. Okay, I put it in the studio. Okay. And what did Day One do?

Jake Hurwitz

00:13:10 - 00:14:37

Day One was cool and they are still around but now it's much smaller. But the approach was that we wanted to build a school for emerging entrepreneurs. You had, you know, tens of millions of people around the world in the US, especially that want to start a company, not just tech companies. I mean, any company, you could start a landscaping business or a protein supplement, sell it on Amazon or a tech startup or you just wanna like have a side hustle helping people, you know, with making logos, you name it. If you're not in San Francisco or you're not in New York or you're not in Los Angeles, the access to other entrepreneurs, investors, mentors even just like general knowledge and like how to start a company, very difficult to find all those things were difficult. If I'm in Boise, Idaho or you know, some random town in Missouri or Arkansas, you're just like in the middle of the country, you're not in a hotbed of tech and you're not in a hotbed of startups. So building a network, getting the knowledge learning the things that you need to learn to start a company was just all really hard. So we thought what if we built an online community and school, helping people connect with other entrepreneurs for the first time, connect with potential investors, mentors, advisors, you name it. And so people would join a 12 week boot camp to connect with people for the first time and just learn like this is how you be an entrepreneur and then they'd be part of the community for life.

Jeff Bullas

00:14:38 - 00:15:00

Right. Okay. Very cool. So let's leap forward now to what you're doing now with Thursday Labs. Where did the idea for that come from? Because I'm always curious about what's the inspiration for the businesses that people start? So where did Thursday Labs come from? The idea and what do Thursday Labs do exactly?

Jake Hurwitz

00:15:00 - 00:22:38

Yeah. The idea and the inspiration is kind of two fold. One, it is still the agency that I've been running now for 10 years, which I started when I was 18. So you could do the math and now you know how old I am. But so it's the same LLC, same docs, I mean, same lawyers, all of it. And I had continued to run that agency for all these years just on the side. So when I was at Day One, I was there for about a year. And the first half of that year was the tail end of the market being great, bull market. The second half of that year was started by the market crashing and now everything getting really hard. And before the market crashed, when everything was great, we were spending a lot of money on ads and content creation and we were just like throwing money at the wall, both in the type of stuff we were creating and putting out in the world. But also the team, the salaries of the people that we had in house to do marketing. And that was just what you did, like companies were raising $10 million seed rounds, hiring a world class CMO for $300,000 a year and then building a team of content creators and social media people and marketing managers all in-house to then go figure out how we're gonna market and grow and build a brand. And what was happening was that most of these companies, including us, it's just what we all did was they'd do that for about a year or two years. And the goal was to build the brand, do growth as our investors were calling it and figure out our unit economics, figure out the right channels to be using. So figure out the right product channels to distribute on and build a playbook and you would spend a million or $2 million over the course of a year or two to figure that stuff out. But the funny thing is none of us were figuring it out because most of the time acquisition was coming from Facebook ads or Google ads and the CPM on that is just getting higher and higher. And so we were basically just like buying customers and 50 cents of every dollar that we were spending on customers was just going back into the hands of Facebook and Google. Here's the funny thing. The investors in Facebook and Google are the exact same investors that are telling these startups to go do that. So who's actually making the money here at the end of the day? It's the VCS. That's fine. That's the game they play. I was in that seat for a little while and like it's, that's the business we're in. So anyway, when the market crashed, none of that worked anymore because we couldn't raise those $10 million seed rounds anymore. So now it's like, okay, we can only raise 3 million or 5 million or even a million and we need to still grow, grow, grow, we need to get to the next round, we need to get great terms on that next round and we need to not die. And when you do it by spending very little money, still need to spend something maybe more like 20 grand a month or 30 grand a month versus a hundred grand a month. And we gotta do it in a way that is sustainable and predictable and reliable. So I shifted my mindset when that became the reality when I was at Day One as CMO. And I thought, alright, well, if I have barely any money to spend now and I have pretty much no team now. Like, what am I gonna do? We still have to grow even more than we were before in order to survive at all and raise the next round, but we don't have much money to spend. So I started kind of digging into like first principles and in general, but also first principles for me, you asked a bit about what I was into as like a little kid when I started the skateboard repair business. Well, I've always been really into skateboarding and action sports and that whole world, surf videos, skateboard videos, surf companies, skateboard companies, snowboard companies. Those have always been in my mind, the companies that just did the best at creating great organic content and had the most conversion for it. And I would just be like such a die-hard loyal fan of these brands because of their content. They were never trying to sell me their skateboards or sell me their merchandise. They were just inspiring me to be a great skateboarder, right? And I love them for it. So I thought what if we do the same thing in tech and the two companies that really come to mind for me here that I follow essentially, the philosophy, and I'd scream this from the rooftops every day on social media are Patagonia and Yeti Coolers. What both of these brands do is they create beautiful. I mean, we're talking like highly, highly produced short films and documentaries, not about their products. They'll never put out a video that's just talking about how great the new Yeti Cooler is and how cold it keeps your beer or how cool the new Patagonia Vest is and how legit you're gonna look like when you walk into an investor's office, they don't do that. They put out films that show how amazing the lifestyle is of the people that use their product and I love that approach. Skate videos and snowboard videos and surf videos, they always did the same thing. So I would lose myself for hours and hours around watching a video of like a fisherman who just has a little Yeti Cooler on his boat next to him or a surfer who's paddling out with like a Yeti Cooler hat on.

They're not talking about the product, they're talking about the lifestyle. And so I thought, what if I could do the same thing for tech? Like if someone falls in love with a B2B SAS company to the same extent they felt that I fell in love with Yeti Coolers in Patagonia, like I'm gonna win bottom line. So I started doing that at Day One and telling some more other companies about it that I was advising and the whole approach was let's take an Emmy award-winning film crew basically and produce a docu-series about the lifestyle of our customers. And then let's take that long form episode and chop it up into short form clips and put it all over TikTok, put it all over Instagram and we're not pushing our product or our value prop. We're pushing again the lifestyle that our product enables or our experience enables. And people were loving this on TikTok and loving it on Instagram and loving it on LinkedIn. So we thought, let's do a blog too. We can turn our long form episodes into a blog and we could do a weekly newsletter, talk about all the different lifestyles that are being enabled through it. We grew 300% in six months without spending a dime on ads. And it was solely through this organic storytelling, like beautiful approach. And so January of 2023 rolled around, the market was real bad. Our burn rate was still too high at Day One and we couldn't secure the next round. So the whole team basically called it a day and I didn't even skip a beat. I just knew to answer your question from 10 minutes ago. Sorry, I went on this long tirade about it. I just kind of knew in my heart and soul like this is what I need to go do with lots of brands. I'll just go all in on the agency again, gave it a new name, rebranded it, very focused value prop and story here. So I come into startups that are a little bit too early to hire that full marketing department and sales department in house. But they are far enough along where they have some money to like spend 20-30k a month or so. Somewhere in that range, maybe a little less, maybe a little more. I joined them for six, maybe nine, maybe 12 months, maybe a couple of years, depending on the engagement and build the whole ecosystem and playbook of content for them using this strategy.

Jeff Bullas

00:22:39 - 00:23:31

Right. So yeah. So in other words, you actually, and Gary Vaynerchuck’s very strong enough to it's repurposing content and turning into multiple content. So, let's talk a little bit more about, so Thursday Labs obviously came out of the inspiration of how can you do more with less instead of just throwing money at the wall. So talk to me more about what's this type of, because people buy a product, not because they will actually affirm it or convince themselves with their mind and logic while they bought a new car, but actually they bought the new car because of how it makes them feel. So obviously, you're trying to create content in terms of trying to create feelings and inspire people rather than the head. You're trying to touch the heart.

Jake Hurwitz

00:23:31 - 00:23:32

That's right.

Jeff Bullas

00:23:32 - 00:23:52

Okay. So talk to me more about what are some of the types of short, you know, when you carve something up in the short form video, you because you've got a creative act, you know, side to you very much, obviously. So what's the sort of things you're trying to turn into like 30 second, one minute whatever video, take us through that process and what's the idea behind it.

Jake Hurwitz

00:23:52 - 00:27:41

Yeah, it's a very scientific process essentially and it's super simple and I hope every listener does the same or gives me a call and we can do it together. Step one is I ask the client or the company in discovery phase, who's our audience? Who are we trying to reach? Who's our consumer? We need to know this person better than they know themselves. Here's an example of the level of depth that I like to go to. Yeah, we go after divorced men between the ages of 40-42 who like to wear Adidas sneakers, they are allergic to dairy, they listen to Bruce Springsteen and they have the following four fears that keep them up at night. Like I need to know that stuff. Oftentimes the founders were that person, which is why they started the company in the first place. But not always, it's helpful when they were. So anyway, we start there like, who is the audience? Okay. Next step is part A and part B, step two part A is we have lots of conversations with those customers. Typically, the founder has already done this or their sales team has already done this. And the question that we're trying to answer is like, what keeps them up at night? What questions do they have about this space that we're in that are not being answered. And oftentimes the sales people can just say, oh yeah well, these are the five things that our customers and our prospects keep asking me for example, if we're selling for a company that sells protein supplements. And I use this example a lot, the people that we're selling to don't only care about protein supplements, they care about a lot of things that protein supplements are sort of related to. They probably have questions about their diet, their skin care routine and their hair care routine and their sleep performance and all these things related to health and wellness because they enjoy protein supplements. Like they have lots of questions about the life of being a healthy person. So part A is you ask it through more qualitative conversations. Part B though is we also do SEO research. There's a bunch of tools out there that you can do to see what are these people searching for on Google and how highly ranked are they. That's just basic SEO research. So we can target and reverse engineer. Like, alright, for 42 year old, divorced men who are interested in protein supplements, what are they searching for on Google? Like, what questions are they asking about health and wellness or whatever it might be, how to lose £10 without eating dairy? Great. How do I find other fit people to date? Because now I'm single and divorced and sad. And I wanna to go start dating like, right, they care about a lot of things related to health and wellness. So the bottom line with step two is ask ourselves, what are the questions and challenges that our customers have that are sort of adjacent to our space that are not being answered? And then step three is we go produce an episode, an interview series where we ask influencers and celebrities and the thought leaders within that industry to answer those questions. And so if we do a 45 minute episode and we ask them the 12 questions that are the top 12 questions that our audience is asking on Google and then they answer it. Well, now I've got a 30 second clip of a famous person or the most trusted voice in that space answering that question. And I'll put that on TikTok, TikTok is a great place for this because their algorithm is the opposite of everyone else's where if I put up a piece of content, they will go find the audience that's the best fit for that content for me. I love TikTok for that. And that's why I put every single brand on TikTok, especially the B2B ones who are all thinking. Well, we're B2B like we don't need to be on TikTok. Yeah, you do for this reason.

Jeff Bullas

00:27:41 - 00:28:05

Yeah, because that's what's really interesting about the, essentially in the early days of Twitter, it was like TikTok, you, the tribe, the content you created the tribe found you. And whereas now it's based around followers and basically maximizing revenue. In other words, it's pay to play. Whereas TikTok has almost, it's much more organic, isn't it?

Jake Hurwitz

00:28:06 - 00:28:38

It's becoming slightly less as it's just getting bigger and obviously, right? But yes, it's, I love that it's that way and I hope it remains that way and even the threat of TikTok being banned in the US and already was in one state is scary for this but they were too far in, someone will pop up and you know, this is here to stay this concept of like I can just yell into the void and then you'll bring me 300,000 people that need to hear what I am saying. It's amazing.

Jeff Bullas

00:28:38 - 00:29:10

In other words, yes, because in other words, Twitter and all the others are saying, well, we're only going to deliver it to the network, to your network or to your followers. And the only ones that we choose to let you actually use the algorithm that we're gonna allow to happen because we want to maximize revenue. So, tell us a little bit about, so what's some of your best or some success stories that you can maybe share that you've got the most views? I'd like you to maybe if you could give us a couple of examples of that and why they, why you got all the traffic and attention?

Jake Hurwitz

00:29:11 - 00:32:12

Sure. Upfront, I don't care so much about like a ton of traffic and attention, especially on the organic stuff. What I care about is the click through rate, the engagement rate. If we get a million eyeballs and only 100 people click through and like became a customer or even a lead. Well, that's a pretty small engagement rate and it's much harder to get a million eyeballs now, it's like you almost just requires luck when you're early on for a newer brand. But if we got 100 eyeballs and 100 people that click through, became a lead, it's 100% click through rate. That's like unheard of. But at the end of the day, you still ended up with 100 leads. So I look for niche high quality potential leads. So, I mean, at this point, I'd say that the most my videos, my client's videos have popped off is in the range of, you know, 30 to 100,000 views. Nothing outrageous. A typical one will land somewhere between like five and 10,000 views on a TikTok or Instagram. TikTok is very unpredictable. I mean, we had one the other day that hit 13,000 views and we only had 100 followers on the account and it brought us another like couple 100 followers in like an hour. So start with that one. But to give some context, it's funny because when I set out to do this, I was under the impression of we want to use content to maximize leads and all that. How are we gonna track the ROI on this? It's really hard and I wasn't really sure and I was quite frankly, kind of scared and still am always scared about like, are we really gonna be able to track how, you know, a TikTok video turns into booked revenue down the line? Here's what's really interesting though that we started to find with a couple of clients about three of them. The highly sought after guest that we got on the podcast who we were kind of using as are almost like spokesperson influencer to help us reach other people. Well, that guest became a client or became a customer because they loved what we were doing. They love for the first time in forever like a startup is investing in Emmy Award winning level content production versus just another Zoom recording. And when they become a client or a customer, the ROI skyrockets. So far, every company I've worked with has already seen. I mean, I started this in, really, February. So we're what, April, March, April, May, June, July, five months in. I'm really bad at simple math so I had to count it on my hand. We're five months in and the clients that are seeing great success after about three months are already seeing an ROI of about five to 10 X on what they're spending with me and my team based off of that, which is like the guests on the podcast are becoming customers and then of course, viewership is great as well. One number I could throw off the top of my head that I saw this morning as we were putting together a board deck for one of my clients, our content amassed 2.5 million views. I'm sorry, 2.5 million people, new people in the last 90 days.

Jeff Bullas

00:32:13 - 00:32:21

So you're trying to create emotive short-term form videos that actually hit that really tight niche, the customer that you have defined.

Jake Hurwitz

00:32:22 - 00:34:00

Yeah, here's actually a fun story, you'll like this one. And I'm trying to figure out how to put this into the case study for this one client. It was the fourth week of me working with them. We put out episode one, it takes about a month to produce the content and actually create the ecosystem of what we're gonna produce. So week four of me working with them, still kind of feeling it out with these guys. Both. They're filling it out with me and we put out the first episode of a 12 episode series. And within 30 minutes of publishing that episode, they got, the CEO received two texts. One text was from an investor that they really wanted to land about a year prior who ghosted them, just fell silent on them and said, hey, I just saw that video you guys posted, you still raising that round? He asked to get him a round that was already closed. And another text that he received was from a customer who was pretty far in the funnel but didn't close and then text him and said, hey, I think I'm ready to pick up the conversation, saw that video you guys did, would love to be and he became a customer. So at the end of the day, at the very least, it really excites me that because the quality of the content is so high. It's almost like baffling to people that they see this new scrappy startup, putting out content that's such high quality that the trust and the just general, I guess endearance, is that the right word? Level of endearment that they have for these startups just goes through the roof. So at the very least, I like to tell my clients like, yeah, if we work together, we create content, people are just gonna really respect you a lot more and do whatever with that, do that whatever you want.

Jeff Bullas

00:34:01 - 00:34:07

So what you're trying to do is create the highest quality content you can with the best guests that you can get on a podcast for example, is that correct?

Jake Hurwitz

00:34:07 - 00:34:15

That's right. And the cost to do that has never been cheaper, couldn't have even done this a year ago.

Jeff Bullas

00:34:16 - 00:34:19

And that's based upon what?

Jake Hurwitz

00:34:19 - 00:34:39

New AI tools. It used to take, it used to be a full time job for me. Literally, I was a full time CMO at Day One doing this for one brand and now I can do it with 4-6 at the same time because the amount of content we can churn out is just getting so much. It is so much more, so much faster.

Jeff Bullas

00:34:39 - 00:35:06

So what is, okay. So let's flip to discussion around about AI then and the tools you use. Okay. So AI has changed the game, everyone can create a lot of content. It's gonna be a lot of great content, it's gonna be a lot of crap content. So what are the AI tools you're using to create the content that you're doing today? Talk us through that process and the tools you're using. I'd be intrigued by that.

Jake Hurwitz

00:35:06 - 00:36:43

The only tool I'm using is ChatGPT4. I have tried a lot of other tools though and I continue to try new tools pretty much every day. I'm extremely pleased with GPT4 for three or four parts of my workflow. I have been very displeased with almost, yeah, every other tool out there right now that are kind of like built on top of ChatGPT for my workflow so far. But I do have faith that in the next month or even six months, we're gonna see enormous more lift here. What I'm really looking for right now is the, so you know how Photoshop just launched about a month ago, I think it's called Firefly. I played around with it a bit, Photoshop’s AI tool to make photos like, look amazing. I'm looking for the equivalent for video editing. That's what I really want. I want to take a clip from a podcast and like tell it what to do and it edit out the dead moments and size it properly and color it properly and add subtitles that are perfect and blur out or beep out swear words. And I wanted to add the right transitions and like animations and be roll when needed. There's one tool that I'm actually doing a demo on I think on Monday called Capsule that a few friends of mine funded, haven't met the founder yet aside from a quick email chain, when this episode is launched, I'm sure I'll have already done that demo. But yeah, check out Capsule like this is the type of stuff I want to really dig into. But so far ChatGPT4 is the only one that's part of my daily work flow.

Jeff Bullas

00:36:44 - 00:37:00

It's very interesting. So, yeah, so basically, I think what's gonna happen with business is that the advent of AI and the ability to scale our humanity and creativity is that we might be going to see billion dollar businesses run by three or four people.

Jake Hurwitz

00:37:00 - 00:38:18

One person or maybe zero people. I think that's very near future. I would say one thing though is we actually did an episode for one of my clients that was released this morning with a brilliant guy who is the go-to-gentleman for creating experiential and immersive experiences at the world's biggest music festivals and brands. So when a brand is like, we want to do a big activation or we have a big festival coming up. This is the guy we call. Actually, I'll give him a shout out. His name is Justin JB Bonino. His company is called Meta and he's the man, I love this guy. And his argument was AI is not creative, AI is just like better predictability tools. It's not original, it's not creative, can barely create a list. And that's just where we're at now. So this is the term AI, it's not new, it's been around for a long time. And the way he described that on this podcast episode was the most succinct and concise way I had heard it so far and I agree with him. I don't think AI is creative. I haven't seen it do anything creative yet. I have seen it though. Help me be more creative, which is great. I use it every day for that.

Jeff Bullas

00:38:19 - 00:38:27

Yeah. So, but wouldn't AI, doesn't AI help with actually putting things in different formats that you maybe hadn't thought of. In other words, it enhances your creativity.

Jake Hurwitz

00:38:27 - 00:39:27

That's how I do it. Yeah. So I, if I have like, let's say one idea for a blog post or I have a title for a video, YouTube video, I'll use GPT and I've got my series of prompts that I like to lean on and I'll be like, here's one idea and then I'll go out and find other maybe competing or inspirational pieces of content that I want to mimic or use as like, I like their style, I like their tone, whatever. I'll say, here's one idea, here's the format I want you to copy or follow. Now generate 12 more ideas for me or 100 more ideas for me and it does and I'll go through, I'll be like, wow, I really like those nine and those nine will serve as the framework for, or maybe our content calendar for the next month. Like, otherwise it would have taken me and a team an hour to sit down in a room and brainstorm all these ideas and do all this SEO research. Now, I did it in 0.5 seconds.

Jeff Bullas

00:39:27 - 00:39:38

Yeah. It really, well, it's basically scrape not, it's not scraping the web but scraping data which helps you. It does the heavy lifting for information.

Jake Hurwitz

00:39:38 - 00:39:40

Yeah. And it's great.

Jeff Bullas

00:39:40 - 00:39:49

Yeah, but it's, it's missing the inspiration, which is what you're doing by using the right prompts to actually get to where you wanna be.

Jake Hurwitz

00:39:49 - 00:40:05

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I think one of the most highly sought after roles right now and is a prompt engineer like someone who gets hired by a company to just come up with great GPT prompts to help the rest of the company. I think that's awesome.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:05 - 00:40:41

Yeah, I came across an example a little while back of ChatGPT being used by a designer and it was like the chief designer, then there was the junior designers and they were actually like a mini competition. So you could come up with the best product design, I think it was. And despite ChatGPT being able to be used by everyone. The best result by far apparently was the chief designer was the one that produced the best result because it, that designer, she was asking better questions.

Jake Hurwitz

00:40:41 - 00:41:01

Sure. Which I mean, you could even, we can get kind of existential here and be like, life's not about a better answer, it's always about asking a better question. I like that quote, I've heard that quote years ago. It's always about asking better questions butI love that story, thank you for sharing that.

Jeff Bullas

00:41:01 - 00:41:11

Yeah, it fascinated me. And so I go, okay, so because an expert has had much more experience, so they know how to ask better questions to get a better result.

Jake Hurwitz

00:41:11 - 00:41:12

Right. Totally.

Jeff Bullas

00:41:12 - 00:41:40

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about so we've talked a little bit about AI, so we have an emerging platform which is basically a copy of Twitter, Threads. Okay. So have you got any thoughts on with what Threads is gonna do to Twitter? The Threads gonna be useful or is it just, is Zuckerberg just decided that he saw an opportunity with must stuffing up Twitter? Okay. What's your thought about Threads?

Jake Hurwitz

00:41:40 - 00:43:13

Yeah. Candidly, I don't think I have an exciting opinion on it. In short, yeah, I think it was Zuckerberg seeing potentially just some vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the future of Twitter and wanting to have a platform that could capitalize on that. I'm obviously very impressed with the scale of people, number of users they got in their first day. It was like 100 million in like 72 hours or something like that. That's the biggest ever. It's great. I was on Threads, I remember I saw it in my Uber ride home from a dinner meeting a few like last week, it was like midnight or something. And I was an Uber ride home and I saw that, I was catching up on Twitter and I saw that Threads launch. So I joined it and I was on it till like for like four hours. Like I was up all night on Threads. Put all of my client's accounts on Threads immediately thinking like this, we gotta be on top of this. We gotta be early and then I was on it for a few hours, the next day and I checked it here and there, the few days after that I haven't been on it now in like three days. So it hasn't, it's not sticky, something hasn't kept me there. That's okay. It was kind of V one. I'd be curious how many of those 100 million people have been on Threads every day since they joined, including today. I think it's just another one. Nothing special. Nothing about it, in my opinion, is substantial innovation. It's incremental.

Jeff Bullas

00:43:14 - 00:43:28

It's very interesting. Someone made a comparison to Google Plus and Google because its own audience was able to grow Google Plus quite quickly. But the end of the day it turned into a ghost town because no one was went back and it just wasn't sticky.

Jake Hurwitz

00:43:29 - 00:44:22

Yeah. Well, here's one for you. So I actually made a thread. I threaded this the other day, the line was now, I think I had a couple glasses of wine and I was getting all in my head and I wrote ChatGPT Vision Pro Threads, 200,000 people laid off this year. What is going on? That was the thread. So there's a lot to discuss on that front. Like look at all this incredible innovation theoretically that had come out in the last what, six months from the three biggest companies in the world all in tech. Yet 200,000 people have been laid off recently and can't get another job. Like what is happening right now? I've just been blown away by that. But first question I kind of have for you actually is like, what, how do you feel about Apple Vision Pro? What's up with that one?

Jeff Bullas

00:44:22 - 00:44:27

I think it's gonna be a disaster.

Jake Hurwitz

00:44:27 - 00:44:28

Really? Why?

Jeff Bullas

00:44:29 - 00:45:57

Well, because who wants to walk around with something on their head. It, I really think that AI or not AI but virtual reality, augmented reality. I think that, it's been struggling to get traction for a long time. Facebook spent 10 billion, 20 billion a year. Its stock market dropped, that actually sale of their headsets has actually dropped in the last 12 months. I just think it's too hard. I really, it's not, it doesn't integrate into us being into being human, but I think it's that's my take on it. I still think that and at three and a half thousand US, it's a big ask. I think if anyone's gonna crack that, you know, that nut of augmented reality, virtual reality, Apple will be the one to do it. So let's see, but I'm quietly pessimistic on that particular aspect of tech, I think. Yeah. Something that sits easily like your ear pods. Great. Okay. Something that's on your, you know, your watch on your wrist. Great. Headset? Yeah. That's my take.

Jake Hurwitz

00:45:58 - 00:46:00

Yeah. Cool.

Jeff Bullas

00:46:01 - 00:46:10

So let me ask you a question. So we talked about the changing landscape too for venture capital, well, startups. We've had, what, 5-6 years of easy money.

Jake Hurwitz

00:46:10 - 00:46:16

Yeah. Less. I mean, it was, well, okay, sure, yeah. 5-6 years.

Jeff Bullas

00:46:16 - 00:46:52

Yeah. Anyway, he's counting. So the landscape's changed and what you talked about too about, you had to do more with less with short-term video, emotional video. What you described to me when you talked about, that was, what I was a term which is really popular seven or eight years ago called growth hacking. Essentially what you're talking about is growth hacking using short form videos. In other words, you are trying to actually because growth hacking is not about spending more money on advertising. It's about growth hacking organic marketing, which is what you just talked about.

Jake Hurwitz

00:46:52 - 00:47:03

Totally. It's so funny. I haven't heard that term in a while. I know I'm like getting a little blast from the past here right now you brought it up. That was a great phrase for a little while. It still is.

Jeff Bullas

00:47:03 - 00:47:04

But you're doing growth hacking.

Jake Hurwitz

00:47:05 - 00:47:08

Yeah, I guess so. I am doing growth hacking.

Jeff Bullas

00:47:08 - 00:47:11

Let's call it growth video hacking. Let's put a, you know, another word in it.

Jake Hurwitz

00:47:12 - 00:48:20

Yeah. It's funny when I think of growth hacking, I was part of this community called Bamp Badass Marketers and Founders, run by this guy, Josh Fekter. Brilliant grow, he was like the growth hacker. I mean, he's the grandfather of growth hacking 2017-2018 around that era. And I would, you know, growth hacks would be cool, things like export your LinkedIn list and then you're gonna, you know, distribute an email through this platform that reduces the bounce rate. And it was just like literally like hacking all these tools that were out there to maximize reach and all that stuff. And that's what I think about when I hear growth hacking, I feel like now I don't even do that phrase justice because I'm just kind of like taking video and putting it on social but making video that people actually connect with more. But yeah, I mean, the organic side of it though, if that's how we want to classify it, the organic side is, I freaking love that word organic, right? In so many ways. And that's really what this is, what it's more about versus the hack side of it.

Jeff Bullas

00:48:21 - 00:48:31

And I think the other thing that people forget because we're impatient little human beings is that we want instant quick fixes. We're not willing to play the long game.

Jake Hurwitz

00:48:31 - 00:49:33

Oh man, I struggle with that running my agency every day and this is exactly how it comes out. I think anybody who runs an agency on who's listening will probably smile when I say this. It's the potential clients who are like, help us go viral, can you make us go viral? And I get that a lot and I think it's a valid question. I know marketers all laugh at it because it's just doesn't make any sense. And that's, yeah, make, yeah, that's the quick fix. We want to go viral, we want to make one video that just was like the best video anyone's ever seen and we go from zero to a million followers overnight. We're also a species that is currently just chasing doing anything we can do to get quick bursts of serotonin. That's what our whole world is built on. Now, these quick bursts of serotonin. I would freaking love to wake up one morning and see that I had 100 followers yesterday and now I've got a million like that would put a lot of serotonin through my brain. The problem though is not a good strategy

Jeff Bullas

00:49:34 - 00:49:35

No it's not.

Jake Hurwitz

00:49:36 - 00:49:54

It’s luck and the strategy is consistency and quality and we're psyched if something goes viral, but it's not replicable, it's not reliable. I can't put an investor deck in slide 11 where we say our growth strategy that we're gonna make viral videos. You get laughed out of the room for that.

Jeff Bullas

00:49:54 - 00:51:01

Yeah. I've just recently read a book which was the history of BuzzFeed Huffington Post Gawker. It was content chasing clicks. It's about they were hooked on the drug of viral. Now that worked well until Facebook started changing the algorithms. The first hit to that algorithm chase was in 2014, 13, 14 when Facebook basically changed much more to pay to play. Viral was knocked then. 2017, it changed again and just interesting to read the history of companies that have crashed and burned or soared to the heavens and like, you know, Icarus, had their wings burnt by the sun flying too close to the sun. So BuzzFeed is an example of that, right? It was worth a lot of money. It grew amazingly quickly, but they were chasing viral.

Jake Hurwitz

00:51:01 - 00:51:03

Right.

Jeff Bullas

00:51:04 - 00:51:30

And I think there's nothing wrong with viral. I like to hit a viral. I've had viral traffic to my blog and so on. So the interesting thing is I think you've got to do both. You gotta basically be, you gotta be able to write such a great headline that people click on it without it being click bait, you've gotta write, create a great video that actually gets people to click through to a landing page. So because you're still gonna play a long game.

Jake Hurwitz

00:51:31 - 00:52:32

Totally. I mean, I have a thesis and a philosophy on all this and it's just so freaking simple. It's just like, be helpful, like if you're actually providing really helpful, valuable shit to a niche specific group that you really actually care about, you're gonna do great. You're gonna do fine. And if it's not taking off within that group, then it's not helpful enough, be more helpful, get to know them better, figure out what's actually keeping them up at night and just provide value and, I actually should have mentioned this before, but there's a couple of ways to do that entertainment, like just make someone smile, be entertained, age old. Education, teach them something that they'll feel smarter because of you and inspiration, inspire them, give them like a boost that keeps them going. That's kind of on the side of empowerment. You do one of those three things or two or all three of those, we're gonna do great.

Jeff Bullas

00:52:33 - 00:53:27

Yeah. I think that's when you sit down and you create content you're going, am I informing? Am I inspiring? Am I educating? They're the things you need to be asking when you're writing. In other words, you're putting yourself in the shoes of the people that need it to help them be inspired to start something or grow something. Yeah, it's I remember writing one morning because I used to write very early in the morning for about four years, got up at 4:30AM and wrote until, yeah, and I remember looking out at the windows dark when I said I'm writing for people behind all these windows is everyone feels pain, everyone feels joy. How can I actually touch their hearts and minds? And it sounds like with your videos, you're trying to do that, you're trying to touch their hearts especially.

Jake Hurwitz

00:53:28 - 00:54:21

I mean, I've got my little bookmark folder of the videos that have done it for me. I hope that there are people with my videos bookmarked in theirs for them and quite frankly, like not even no joke I was so damn inspired by that content growing up, that I moved across the country to actually live the lifestyle that that content was selling me on and it was amazing. It was exactly, it was better than I expected and I attribute it to that content. So why do I do what I do? Like that's why I mean, man, I want more people to have their life genuinely impacted by content. I mean, by stories, we, the word content dumbs it down, right? It's content, content, content. By stories.

Jeff Bullas

00:54:21 - 00:55:12

Yeah. And that raises an interesting area that I've been doubling down into recently which is, have you heard of Joseph Campbell? The Hero's journey? What I love about Joseph Campbell is that it's all about stories that touch people's hearts and it's the power of myth. And I think one of the key films he's looking after is, one of the key things he talks about is myths to live by. And I think storytelling is about getting to the heart of everyone's myth. And he, one of the things he used, which I thought was great. He said, basically myths are public dreams and, what does it say? And for individual dreams are private myths.

Jake Hurwitz

00:55:13 - 00:55:19

Interesting. I'm not sure I fully follow that. Yeah. Can you break that down for me?

Jeff Bullas

00:55:19 - 00:55:36

Well, a little bit. So what we dream about at night, our dreams, you know, become our private myths. But what's touching you in other words and it gets down to very, you know, Jungian and philosophy.

Jake Hurwitz

00:55:36 - 00:55:41

Anxieties. Yeah. My anxieties, my fears, my axes, all that stuff.

Jeff Bullas

00:55:42 - 00:55:55

Yeah. So, anyway, it's, I think that one of the, I think eight out of the top 10 movies of all time are based upon Joseph Campbell's story arc, the hero's journey.

Jake Hurwitz

00:55:56 - 00:55:56

Sorry, go on.

Jeff Bullas

00:55:56 - 00:55:57

No, no, go. Sorry.

Jake Hurwitz

00:55:57 - 00:56:43

One of my favorite, probably, actually my favorite startup story is Brian Chesky Airbnb and his team. When they were early on, they hired a Hollywood writer to write out using a hero's journey framework. I'm sorry, this is a Pixar writer like Pixar and they had that writer create a whole storyboard pretty much up until the point of like creating the film of what the most amazing Hollywood level blockbuster level Airbnb story would be of somebody who goes on an Airbnb, goes on a vacation and stays in an Airbnb. And the storyboard that came out of that was the source of their entire UX basically.

Jeff Bullas

00:56:43 - 00:58:06

Yeah. And I get that because it's getting to the core of being human. And because the whole thing about what Joseph Campbell did was he went to all many of the cultures of the world, many of the religions of the world. And he discovered that these aren't multiple myths. There is one myth that connects, there's, we have a global world, human myth because there's common themes in every culture and in every religion, what happens is that religion, well, don't normally touch religion but religion concertizes myth, makes it history rather than a story and that why it loses its power. The challenge was we have to work out what myths we're gonna live by in a modern age because the cosmology that drove myths years ago about the universe, science has actually disproved that. So, this is a really interesting time in terms of what are the myths we're gonna live by today in 2023. So, but yeah, it's fascinating storytelling and, you obviously enjoy storytelling and video is your favorite format. Is that one of the reasons why you're moving to California is to get closer to Hollywood?

Jake Hurwitz

00:58:06 - 00:58:38

It's no, I'm moving because I want to live on the beach and I have a slightly large dog and I love to surf. I've lived deep in the mountains of Colorado for seven years, I've lived in New York, I grew up in New York and I've lived in New York City now for four years. I haven't done the beach thing yet and, yeah, it, my company, I believe will continue to thrive in Southern California. So, we'll see. That's why I'm moving.

Jeff Bullas

00:58:39 - 00:58:47

Okay. I totally get that because I need to live near the sea. And we have some of the best beaches in the world in Sydney.

Jake Hurwitz

00:58:48 - 00:58:53

I’m sure I’ll be there at some point to surf and when I do, I'm gonna give you a call for you to show me around.

Jeff Bullas

00:58:53 - 01:00:20

I live near one of the best surf beaches in Sydney called Bronte, which is near Bondi. So I'm not a surfer, I grew up water skiing. So, because I grew up in a gulf where there wasn't much surf. So I ended up using smooth water rather than rough water. But yeah, I love being near the ocean. It's feeds my soul, that's for sure. And, yeah, so I love the fact that you're trying to create stories that touch people's hearts and make a difference. I think what you're doing is awesome, Jake, and look forward to hearing more about the storytelling. You're going, you're evolving because you're, it's a really fascinating time. We've got AI helping us as humans, but we need to use it as a tool and not as a crutch. And that's a really interesting, I'm struggling with. It's so easy to write content that is information with ChatGPT but it's still got to be human and it's still got to touch hearts and we need to tell stories better and that's what you do and that's what you're doing, which is awesome. So thank you very much for sharing your stories. Is there any tips to entrepreneurs, who want to be entrepreneurs that you've learned along the way? Like just a couple of tips. Just one or two if you got time.

Jake Hurwitz

01:00:21 - 01:02:47

Yeah, we can say a whole another hour to talk about that. Yeah, I mean a couple that really always come to mind. This game takes a very long time. This game is extremely hard. Everyone says it's hard but like the words couldn't possibly come close. I was always told time and time again by many mentors, many friends, many bosses even and investors even in me who are like, dude, if there's even an ounce that is able to not be an entrepreneur within you, follow that like, don't do this. But if you are a thousand percent unable to do anything else, then okay, be an entrepreneur. And I do agree with that, don't chase the quick wins every time you do it, it will fail and flop for many reasons. I can absolutely speak from personal experience there. Quick wins can mean, I need to make, you know, $100,000 in three months or we need to like, sell this company by next year. Anything you think is three to five years, it's seven to 10 years. Anything you think is 90 days, it's a year like everything just takes longer. So my advice is be patient and figure out whatever way you need to do to really genuinely enjoy the entire process of it. Those lows are so low, the highs are quite high, there are very few highs compared to the number of lows that there are. The highs just outweigh how low those lows are by the tiniest bit if at all the tiniest bit. And that's the reason I'm moving to California because I mean, like outside of my just daily work life in New York, I'm not getting the fulfillment I used to. I just kind of grew out of it and I like to be in nature more. And so like you gotta do what you gotta do for yourself so that you can enjoy this little life you've got here, the time you've got here as an entrepreneur, it's an entire lifestyle play. It's not like your job. So that's my advice and I can get into the little nitty gritty and like how to get an investor and how to raise money or how to make a sale, all that stuff. None of that matters. Unless the one I just mentioned is foundational unless that one's checked off, that's my advice.

Jeff Bullas

01:02:47 - 01:02:50

So, what you're saying is follow your bliss.

Jake Hurwitz

01:02:51 - 01:02:53

That's one way to put it.

Jeff Bullas

01:02:53 - 01:03:09

In other words, what brings you joy? And that's includes what the environment you surround yourself, such as nature. And also what you do each day. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to handle, you're not gonna be able to endure the long journey you're about or have started on.

Jake Hurwitz

01:03:10 - 01:04:55

Totally. I mean and I think there's a good lesson in how do you define joy, right? I don't believe in happiness. I think that's fake. I think it's just marketing. It has been since the 1700s. Happiness isn't real. Sorry, anyone who's listening who doesn't like that and wants to send me a death threat. It's not real. Our brains aren't wired for it. Joy is real, euphoria is real. So my whole thing is maximize the amount of things and feelings. Well, I'll rephrase, man that could have been so impactful if I got that right, I'll try again. Maximize the amount of moments in your life that bring you a feeling of joy both in how long you're feeling that joy and how often you feel it and it could be as small as, like just sitting on your porch listening to the birds chirp or catching a wave for like, three seconds or sitting on a chair lift and the snow is coming down or like walking through a crowded part of New York City and enjoying the sun shining through the buildings on a Friday afternoon you're like, on your way to a dinner, whatever. Maximize how much you can feel the joy and more importantly, though, within joy, you can feel pride. Do you feel integrity? Do you feel growth? Because I'm not joyful unless I'm like proud of the work that I'm doing. I'm not joyful unless I'm feeling like I'm working in integrity. And so if you're able, if those boxes are checked, like you're proud of the work you do, you're, you know, you're reaching the, you're being the person every day that you really want to be, then you're also feeling joy on top of it, then you're good. That's my formula. I don't know if that works for everybody but happy to offer it up if it could be helpful for anyone else.

Jeff Bullas

01:04:55 - 01:05:18

So let's, I was gonna ask you what brings you joy and so I'm gonna ask you, so just sum it up and because I, we actually ended up talking about what brings you joy. So, just sum it up for me, what brings you joy? Maybe it's a package but what brings you joy? What brings Jake Joy?

Jake Hurwitz

01:05:18 - 01:06:56

Yeah, it's a laundry list of things. A good view. We can love a good view of the mountains of a beach, a city skyline. I have to live in a place with a good view. Otherwise I can't, I work from home. I can't even like think or be the best I can. I love a good view. A lot of music brings me joy, a really great dinner party over some fantastic wine or Mezcal. Just that like the flow state of being in conversation and community with people that you, whether they're brand new folks that you just met or family and friends, like people that you just can feel joy with, alright, that brings me a lot of joy. And then a great country mountain or beachside drive. I love my truck, I love cars, I love just a good drive with my dog next to me. And it, I love quite a few sports. I always say like the day I can't really do my sports anymore. My action sports just like kill me honestly. I love to snowboard, I love to surf, I love to bike, I love jiu jitsu. Those are my main four things and two of which get me in my head. Two of which get me completely out of my head. Both are a different type of flow state for me and the joy, the endorphins literally. But also the joy of those put it in nature in a beautiful spot as well with a nice view and good music playing. Like that's like that I'm off, I'm off the rails and happy.

Jeff Bullas

01:06:56 - 01:07:15

So does joy also sit within your creative process in terms of. So, in other words, you go at the end of the day, I said I created this video that I got from different source of inspiration. I've edited it and I've published it and I've shared it. Does that give you joy?

Jake Hurwitz

01:07:15 - 01:08:59

Yeah. It's a different type of joy. I can sum it up with this feeling and I get this is why I love what I do so much because this happens like three nights a week where I mean, I'll work till midnight, 1-2 in the morning, I'll completely lose track of time building a thing, whether it's like building a website or creating a campaign or just just crafting something. It's my craft. I grew up painting like I used to be an artist and now this is my art in many ways. And then I go to bed and then I wake up at the crack of dawn and can't wait to get back to my computer to continue it. Like I only slept a few hours. I'm up before my dog sometimes. And that is when that's kind of my litmus test of like, am I even if I'm not making much money at the time and like money goes, comes and goes, if I've got that in my weekly regiment where I'm losing track of time late into the night and can't wait to jump out of bed in the morning to do it. Like it happens every week, sometimes a few nights, a week. If I've got that going on, I'm doing the right thing and I've had quite a few companies I've worked for or built that. That was not happening. When I kind of picked now as I'm older, I can look back and like, as soon as I realize it's not happening and hasn't happened in like a couple of months, move on, get out of there, find the next thing that does. And that's one of my wishes for a lot of people, for everyone. It's like, find the thing. I feel like 99% of people don't have that kind of bums me out and I would absolutely love it if everybody could find the thing that they lose track of time with and jump out of bed four in the morning to go do. Imagine the world we live in if everyone had that as a career.

Jeff Bullas

01:09:00 - 01:09:59

And I think you've just described the state of flow. And, it's not, that's not what we call, I suppose because joy is a word that's tossed around loosely. But I suppose it's deep satisfaction, which could be described as bliss as well. So, words are very interesting and I, what you talk to me about in terms of one of the things that brings you joy as a dinner party was sit down and you talk shit, you have fun. You have conversations, you play with words, you, that brings me joy as well. I just, and I've traveled a lot and I've gone to countries where English is a second language and I haven't, I've missed the conversations that you have happen around a dinner table or in a restaurant and I totally get that. It's about being human and sharing stories.

Jake Hurwitz

01:10:00 - 01:10:09

Totally. There's a campfire there too. It's so human. It's as human as it gets.

Jeff Bullas

01:10:09 - 01:10:25

And it's really fun. Like sometimes we exaggerate things and we tell stories, don't let truth get in the way of a good story, is a lie I love. And I've had partners say to me that didn't exactly happen like that.

Jake Hurwitz

01:10:26 - 01:10:35

Doesn't matter. That's, there's no truth anymore, right? It's just everyone's interpretation of it. I like that a lot. I'm gonna use that.

Jeff Bullas

01:10:35 - 01:10:41

Yeah. And you, right. That's where myth becomes powerful. It's not truth, it's not history but it tells a story.

Jake Hurwitz

01:10:42 - 01:10:44

Yeah.

Jeff Bullas

01:10:44 - 01:10:49

Jake, it's been an absolute pleasure mate. I really enjoyed, I think we got to some really good stuff at the end.

Jake Hurwitz

01:10:50 - 01:10:54

Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for having me. And you're a great, you asked great questions.

Jeff Bullas

01:10:55 - 01:10:58

So thank you. And how did people find you, Jake?

Jake Hurwitz

01:10:59 - 01:12:26

Yeah, I spent a lot of time on a couple of platforms. LinkedIn is my main spot. I sometimes I've had multiple people tell me like, dude, post a little less on LinkedIn, it's too much. I post a lot there. I share a lot of content. I experiment with a lot of different ways of storytelling. I kind of use myself as a guinea pig for then my clients and I'll. So anyway, it's Jake Hurwitz on LinkedIn. My company is called Thursday Labs. Our website exactly how it sounds is how it's spelled thursdaylabs.co. So you can find us there and then Instagram, that's kind of the more personal side. I decided to make my account more public recently. And that's, it's sort of the overlap of life and business and travel. I had this phrase for a while that was, it's no longer in my bio, but it was for a bit which was, build things, make music and travel well. And so my Instagram is largely about building things, making music and traveling well and my Instagram is, hey_i'm_jakehurwitz. And I don't know, people can find me. I share the name as a pretty famous comedian. So if you search Jake Hurwitz on Google and you see like this comedian with good looking guy with glasses and he's works of College Humor. That is not me, although sometimes I hope to be even an ounce as funny as he is. But people can find me.

Jeff Bullas

01:12:26 - 01:12:37

Right. Well, thank you for sharing your stories. I look forward to hearing more from you and enjoy your adventure to California.

Jake Hurwitz

01:12:37 - 01:12:38

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Jeff Bullas

01:12:38 - 01:12:46

To add to the joy equation with a beach, a surf and a dog and an adventure and a truck.

Jake Hurwitz

01:12:46 - 01:13:00

Yeah, man, that's what it is driving across country with my dog and my surfboards. It's gonna be nice. It'll be a nice view when we're about for what, 50-80% of the way there. That's when the view will kick in.

Jeff Bullas

01:13:01 - 01:13:11

And I'd love a good view. I couldn't live in a valley and do my head in actually. So I need a view as well. And when I travel, I'm looking for a terrace.

Jake Hurwitz

01:13:12 - 01:13:14

There you go. Love it, man.

Jeff Bullas

01:13:14 - 01:13:17

Thanks, Jake. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Jake Hurwitz

01:13:17 - 01:13:18

Take care.