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Oct 13, 2024

Success Stories

He's Launching A New $1M Business Every Month

Summary

Productized Service Strategy

Hunter Hammonds launched 4 $1M productized services in 4 months, with 3 out of 4 achieving multi-$7M ARR, aiming to build 12 in 12 months as cash flowing machines for larger ventures.

Successful productized services offer clear expectations of volume for a fixed monthly price, avoiding unlimited offerings that can lead to scope creep and customer dissatisfaction.

Scaling and Growth

Product-audience fit is crucial, exemplified by Ali Abadal's YouTube agency leveraging his thousands of students for rapid growth.

Scaling quickly requires cutting corners, strategic recruiting of individuals who thrive in ambiguity, and offering generous referral incentives to attract talent.

Market Approach

Hammonds targets crowded markets with strong brands, success stories, and a trusted creator for distribution, aiming to win quickly through a concierge high-end experience.

Timestamps

00:00 Hunter Hammett has successfully launched four million dollar businesses in the last four months, with the goal of building 12 million dollar businesses in 12 months, and so far, all four companies are generating over a million dollars in revenue annually.

02:21 A successful entrepreneur is launching a new $1M business every month by partnering with creators to provide predefined services and clear expectations, after building multiple successful businesses and generating eight figures in revenue.

04:46 Build 12 businesses in 12 months, starting with a productized agency, by studying successful businesses and avoiding their mistakes, entering a crowded market with a strong brand and success stories, and ensuring a product-audience fit.

06:58 The speaker emphasizes the importance of clear transactional relationships and simple pricing models, and has found success by partnering with influencers to build profitable businesses, leveraging their strong network and scaling their team rapidly.

09:22 Move fast, create chaos, clean up quickly; speaker discusses hiring great people through careful recruiting and referral incentives, attributing their success to their hardworking and experienced team.

10:51 The speaker discusses their daily routine, which includes making decisions on Mondays, taking actions on Tuesdays, sending messages on Wednesdays, having calls with other CEOs on Thursdays, and doing deep work on Fridays.

11:56 Productized services are a great first business to start if you have a unique skill set, and it's important to have a clear value proposition, consistently deliver value, and differentiate between building a business and freelancing.

14:29 Launching 12 companies in 12 months requires hard work and determination.

Transcript

00:00 This is Hunter hammett's. He's launched four million dollar businesses in the last four months. All of them productized services that use essentially the same strategy. I flew out to Chicago to meet him and he broke down each of his businesses as well as the method he's using to launch a million dollar business every 30 days really. What we're doing at the end of the day is just talking to our friends and seeing if it makes sense for us to build a business together. But Hunter's journey is not some lucky overnight success story. He started and failed multiple businesses over the last 15 years. Just decided like it's time to take a break and burned out now. Hunter's goal is to build 12 million dollar businesses in 12 months and then turn those businesses into a cash flowing machine. So we can build something even bigger. We just View productized Services as the first phase of what we're building. I'm Pat walls and this is starter story tell me a little bit more about yourself and what you're building I run a company called assembly which builds creator-led B2B Brands.We're building one company a month with the goal that each company hits a million dollar run rate within the first 30 days today. Like I'm happy to say that you know out of the four companies that were operating they're in the multiple seven figures of Revenue and growing quickly. We're on track to crack you know kind of the million a month Mark by the end of this year which is incredible and across the board. Like each of these businesses is just delivering incredible work to its customers so it feels pretty special. Can you break down each of the businesses that you've built sure most recently. We launched hey friends which is our done for you YouTube agency with Ali abdal. Another is off menu which is our full service design agency. We have viral cuts which is our high-end premium short form agency with Sam par and Cody Sanchez. We've got keyframe our Animation Studio with Dan Co and then we have a few other businesses that were kind of currently building in stealth that have some customers that will launch publicly pretty soon and can you break down a little bit how these businesses are doing. What's been the most successful one and then how does it look in terms of Revenue and customers so we started launching companies four months ago kind of crazy to say that all of our companies are doing over a million a year.In ARR. Three out of the four that are public are doing multi to pull seven figures a year right now out of the current portfolio. Hey friends and off menu are by far and away going to be the biggest winners but off. Menu is probably most exciting to talk about right now because it's the one that we're getting ready to announce next week. I'm going to call my shot I think off. Menu is going to crack a 5 million run rate by the end of October fast yeah.

02:21 How does it work fundamentally fundamentally. At the end of the day a customer pays us for a predefined service so in the case of hay friends. For example we have the Creator package that starts at ten thousand dollars a month and basically what that is is everything you need to release six really high quality YouTube videos per month. One of the biggest things for us there is setting clear expectations with our customers about how much volume you can expect from us. We're really not big fans of the idea of like unlimited. So we really want to make sure that our customers understand exactly what they're getting for when they pay us money yeah.You built these amazing businesses in the short few months. What's your backstory how do you get here. I mean I've been building businesses for the better part of 15 years which makes me feel super old at this point and I started my first agency when I was 19. There I met one of my closest friends to this day. His name is Austin. Cameron I hired him as my lead engineer at the time and together we started working on this idea for a startup we built that business to 3.2 million active users on 4 we can never really monetize. So we ended up selling all the assets of that and then I got an offer I could refuse from a big agency here in town that basically said look we'll give you a three million dollar a year budget to build your own team and basically build digital for our agency. It was fun at first we recruited an amazing team but then there were all these constraints that started stacking up even ways that we could like collaborate with our clients that were really really cool. Brands so that's where we got the idea originally of just saying like screw. This let's just start our own agency that's where Everest was born and I built that business into the eight figures of Revenue.We worked with Nike or Samsung or Obama right our accounts got bigger and bigger but the budgets were still kind of constrained and my life. Just became one phone call after another from VPS and EVPs just bitching about problems that didn't matter and I really quickly grew to just hate running that business ultimately just decided like it's time to take a break and burned out. So I took a six month sabbatical and basically just like around all day for six months did. Zero work just kind of reading and relaxing and really storing up enough energy to go and build assembly along the way of building Everest Sawhill Bloom and I became pretty fast friends and kept trying to find ways to like work on something together and near the end of my break. We had a call scheduled and you know both of us hopped on the phone and he's like dude. I got this idea that I want to talk to you about and I was like me too. We basically discussed the concept of partnering with creators to build B2B businesses.

04:46 I said look Let's Build 12 of them in 12 months because that'll give us a the most Diversified source of Revenue. We could possibly imagine B it'll allow us to generate so much cash that we can go and take a lot of really big bets. That's what we started doing. So I flew out to New York. We had dinner kind of aligned on what we were doing and I said look let's just let's build. A productized agency first and keyframe was born. Three weeks later.I spent seven years trying to build 24 different businesses but only one of them was successful. Now that business makes over a million dollars a year but I could have done it a lot faster. If I studied already successful businesses imagine you could read the exact steps to how some one built a million dollar business and the mistakes they made so you can avoid them when you launch well at starter store. We have a library of over 4 000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can do this all backed by real data. For example Loop joint starter story and dove into our case studies about a newsletter that makes 25 million dollars a year. Just one month later he launched his own newsletter and did fifty eight hundred dollars in Revenue. In 30 days. It's simple he studied what works implemented it and avoided the mistakes of people that were just a few steps ahead of him so if you're serious about finding a business idea that works and making your first dollar 10 times faster check out the first link in the description. We're running a special right now for anyone coming from the channel.Anyways enjoy the rest of the video peace. How do you usually come up with ideas for a new productized service to launch and how do you validate them when we're looking at building a productized service. We're looking for a really crowded Market if we can come into the market with a really great brand already populated with a ton of success. Stories and case studies make sure that it's a really concierge experience that feel feels high end in premium and then have a really trusted creator that serves as this massive boost of distribution. At the beginning of the business. We can probably win in that space. Really quickly. The success of the relationship really comes down to something that we call product audience fit so if you take all the Abdel for example it made total sense for Ollie to have a YouTube agency because he'd taught thousands of people. How To Succeed on YouTube. So what we do is. We come in with our Playbook with our team our expertise our recruiting engine and we build the entire Business proctise Services. They've kind of blown up over the last couple years. What do you think the opportunity is here. I think the opportunity is huge.

06:58 It's an interface to where a customer says hey. This is the problem I'm trying to solve or the goal that I have and instantly sees work. So I think that that way of working and just making it the super clear transactional relationship. I pay you X dollars you give me a y result is beautiful. We wanted to comment and approach it from the perspective of like let's build a really great operationally sound business. You know our contribution margins and like our cash flow cycles and how we're servicing customers to make sure that they're really well taken care of when you can do all of that and wrap it in this simple like pretty ten thousand dollar a month price point. It becomes really easy to sell especially when we have the distribution that we do but there's downsides of course.I think every subscription or productized service wants to view their business from the standpoint of mrr. But at the end of the day there's a finite nature to a lot of these projects you know off. Menu has like decently High chart but what's crazy is that doesn't matter because our average. You know customer values 60 to 75 000 while they're with us and the margins are fantastic. What you've done so brilliantly is you find influencers or creators in the space and build businesses with them. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and how other people watching could do something.Similar first I have to acknowledge that we kind of have an unfair Advantage. We're really fortunate that we have great Network. You know there's no big sales pitch for us to go to a Creator and try and convince and some to work with us. We already have these relationships really. What we're doing at the end of the day is just talking to our friends and seeing if it makes sense for us to build a business together. But I think what's most interesting is like how did I get there. I slowly over years just built my network by never asking for anything just always giving along the way you build. A lot of trust and people know you as a person that is just really high integrity really. Loyal. I think that's a really special thing that a lot of people miss when they look for that like quick buck and how does it work in terms of the partnership is there an equity split with the influencer or profit sharing or right the typical model. For this they're not like affiliate Partners. They're actual Partners. In these businesses. They're really instrumental in helping get them off the ground. They're instrumental in the insights that drive the business and the service it provides and that works really well for us. Building businesses like these require seemingly a lot of scale and you've gone from three people to over 50 in four months tell me about how you've been able to scale.

09:22 So I have this method that basically I say like let's move super fast break everything and just create this wake of chaos and then stop and just clean it all up. And so we just went through our clean. It all up phase. I do want to be honest and say like for us to hit that scale. So quickly. We really had to cut a lot of Corners um which has its pros and its cons.But fortunately I think we did a good job of recruiting people that were okay with that that could like thrive in that sense of ambiguity. What's your approach to finding great people and hiring them. It's different for every company that we run you know for off menu. For example we're only looking for like principal or creative level designers in above. So there it's all Network driven very carefully curated but if you look at a company like viral Cuts you're like hey friends to where we need to hire 50 video editors as fast as we can a lot of what we rely on is careful recruiting for the first handful and then we offer really great referral incentives if you know another editor or you're friends with somebody that's looking for a new role have them come here at the end of the day. Like one of our secrets recruiting is just being like a really great generous employer and that's worked wonders for us you're able to launch all these businesses. Most people including me have trouble just figuring out how to launch one business. Why is it different for you what's your approach. It's a tremendous amount of really hard work. I'm only able to do it because I've got a fantastic team that I'm working with some of the core team members that we have are guys that I've worked with for years and it's easy for us to just get into Rhythm and go so.

10:51 It's been one of the biggest drivers. But at the end of the day it's still you know. I work 10 to 14 hours a day. Six days a week yeah tell me about these 10 to 14 hour days. What is a typical day in the life look like you. What do you spend most of your time doing. I have this framework that I call damn decisions that I have to make actions. I have to take and messages. I have to send I structure my week. That way so Monday is all about decisions. Tuesday is all about actions and Wednesday is all about messages. I wake up on Mondays with a ton of data from our team and then I use that time to make a lot of decisions. Visions on what we need to do to essentially optimize the businesses that we're running or the businesses that we're currently incubating Tuesdays. You know the action part of my week. I really spend thinking through what actions do. I have to take today to move the rest of these businesses forward for the week based on the decisions that I made yesterday Wednesday's messages. I communicate all that to the team that's really the core driver of my work. Thursdays I leave for calls talking with other CEOs. Sometimes helping out with sales calls things like that and then Fridays I typically write I try and do more deep work.

11:56 Seems like you are making a big bet on productized. Services can you tell me more about that I want to be clear. It's just the launch pad we just View productized Services as the first phase of what we're building when you think about productized. Services you have this fantastic free cash flow engine. From there the question is what do you do with all that free cash flow and that's where we're thinking much bigger right. We're looking at products. We're looking at SAS. We're looking at really interesting ways for us to scale what we're building at assembly in phase two. Beyond this notion of a human being is required to turn a profit but it sounds like the productized service. As you said is a great way to start generating cash. Even for someone watching this video. It's kind of a great first business to start 100 if you think that you have a skill set and you're better at that skill than let's say 80 of the market yeah. You could probably build a successful productized service around that.But I think the thing you have to do is recognize. Three things one really think critically about the model of the business that you're building right make sure that you have a value prop for your customer. That's super clear make sure you're building it in a way that's healthy and that you can scale the second thing. I think is super. Important is make sure that in everything you do you're constantly over delivering that value to customers because that's how you'll build your business long term because you need referrals then three. I think the thing you have to keep in mind is how are you actually building a business and not just freelancing in Disguise as solopreneurship.So last question and that we ask to all founders is if you go back 10 years and sit on Hunter's shoulder. What advice would you give him the number one piece of advice I would give myself is to create content share publicly what I'm doing that's my biggest regret. My career 100 is that I didn't spend the last decade building an audience. The second I would say like I probably want to think more clearly about my long-term goals. 10 years ago. All I did was like make money and spend money if I wanted to do it I did it which was great because I collected a ton of like amazing experiences. But I really wish I'd taken a different approach and I built a more scalable business and really the other thing I would do. I would have spent a lot more time nurturing long-term relationships that's something that has always been one of my weaknesses. I get kind of introverted I get like lost in like whatever it is. I'm doing and I'm horrible at like following up with friends and staying on top of that as I've gotten older. I've learned from some friends that are just absolute. Masters at that art form. It's not easy like to pick up that phone and be like how you been dude like and keep that conversation going.

14:29 It's it's tough. You just want to go into your yeah pull and go heads down. I think you can do it yourself yeah. All right man thank you so much thanks for coming man yeah. It was great with all this advice and you will be launching 12 companies in 12 months. Hahaha.