393 - Beth Comstock: 3 Rules for Spotting Trends & Getting Ahead

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. So I've got here with me Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo, and I'm gonna call it the biggest indie search engine in the world. I'll take it. So you have Google and Bing, but they, like, take your information, spy on it, manipulate it, sell it, do things with it. You do nothing with anybody's information. Right? That is right. You don't even know who's, like, hitting you. Our privacy policy in a nutshell is we do not collect or share personal information. And you're getting, like are you allowed to say the number? How many Yeah. Our traffic is actually public. It's at duckduckgo.com/traffic. We get about 11,000,000, searches a day now. So of so 330,000,000 searches a month. Yes. And, do you keep track of anything else? Like, what do people search for? Or So we we we keep track of searches completely anonymously to help with spelling and other things like that. But, otherwise, no. We don't really know, Like, what's the most searched or item of the day? We we could theoretically figure that out. We don't we don't routinely look at that at all. Yeah. And just in a nutshell, I wanna get into your book, traction, how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth. But I'm gonna ask you things about traction you don't address in this book. So Yeah. I have some new questions. I wanna address your whole philosophy of what traction is across life. But, just what the hell is the business model of DuckDuckGo? So it it is a myth that you need to track people to make money in search. So our business model looks like Google's business model essentially for the search search part, which is if you search for car or mortgage or a book, you get a book or car or mortgage ad. And if you click on that, we get some money. What we're not doing is tailoring that ad to you specifically, which Google doesn't really do either on their search engine. Right. They do that outside their search engine. So, like, YouTube, Gmail, and all their ad networks that follow you around the Internet, Like, that's where all that tracking is for. Like, we just focus on web search, so we can just, like, serve you ads based on your keyword. So are you cutting off, like, a whole area of your of potential money by not essentially creating kind of that AdSense style network that Google has? We're we're certainly not in the we're not an advertising network. Yeah. And that's a very lucrative business, and we're not in it. What about having DuckDuckGo be kind of, you know, doing an enterprise to enterprise business, like making it this default search engine on various websites so you can kind of do that network approach? We thought about it, and we we dabbled in it a little bit, but, like, the people don't cover it back into regular search engine users. It just turns out. Like, if you power, like, someone's It's just it's just BS. Yeah. Even their blog search or whatever, like, it never translates back into actual search engine users. Are you happy doing it? You've been doing this for, like, 7 years. Yeah. I started companies right out of college. My last company, I sold in 2006. And after What was it? To who? It was, an early social networking company called Names Database, sold to classmates.com. Is this n n a y m z? No. Okay. What what how do you spell names? Just names? Yeah. It was the most vanilla name you could think of for a company. And classmates.com was public. It was United Online? Yep. They had just bought, Classmates a year earlier. Okay. Are they still around? I remember they were like They're still around. They had, like, a ton of cash, and they never really did anything with it. I know. Well, they thought they thought they might become an Internet conglomerate like IC or something. Uh-huh. But in any case, but the the crux of that story is I was not interested in that business at all. Like, the product, I wasn't a user. I'm not a social network user to begin with. I just kinda happened into that area. And so I decided I whenever I started next, I wanted to be interested in for at least a decade. And I Okay. I set out specifically to figure that out and tried, like, a bunch of different projects and eventually settled upon. So the short answer is yes. I that was a correct decision. I'm still happy. I can do this indefinitely. Yeah. Like, you don't feel like the urge, for instance, to sell and move on to the next thing? No. Will you ever sell? What do you wanna do? You know, our our, like, vision is to raise the standard of trust online. And, you know, and our mission really is to be the world's most trusted search engine. And so to the extent that someone could help us do that better and faster, like, we're not opposed to, like, joining forces with somebody. But we're not interested in, like, being sold and shut down, which is what happens with most acquisitions. Do you think anyone's tried to do that? Like, has have have Microsoft or Google tried to approach you and say, hey. You need to be shut down. Just let us buy you. We have been approached for acquisition offers, and we've turned them down. Okay. Yeah. Why do you think people approach you? Like, they were they thought they could build you up further or they wanted your revenues? Or, like, what was their goal in approaching you? You know, scale the scale in search is so vast. So, like, you know, we're at 300,000,000 searches a month. That's actually really tiny in the search market. And then we were at 30,000,000 that was different. And so each one of those looked similar to the outside. Well, that's a big number. But to the inside, those are very different types of companies for acquirers. So right now, our revenue is starting to become probably at the point where it's attractive enough where you wouldn't wanna shut us down. Before then, it was probably more for technology and just like search expertise. Because your technology, essentially, you encrypt from end to end. You know what? You don't even know what people are searching. You you there's no way for you to track anything. Yeah. So that's not the that that is all true, but that's not the cool part of our technology. Like, our main focus is on instant answers, pro product wise. And so we have we we took an open approach to instant answers, meaning that we What's instant answers? Instant answers is that stuff at the top above the links you see that complete your search without with 0 clicks. So on Google, they call it knowledge box or one box. Mhmm. You know, like, Wikipedia article. If you search James Altucher, you'll get, you know I don't know what your first sentence says about you now. I think if you search me, you get why I shouldn't what how how did most quickly die, things like that. Well, in any case, there's often an instant answer at the top. And, you know, our vision is that, you know, there are thousands of sites now that have great answers for every topic. So, like, Lego parts or bioinformatics or municipal bonds or whatever it is. There's a great site out there that has a good answers for that. And there's no reason why you should click on links to get those answers. Like, we should be able to put them above the links for you. You should, you know, just like how Google seems to have almost a symbiotic relationship with Wikipedia. I mean, I think I read somewhere that one out of 3 Google searches results in a go someone going to Wikipedia. So Google becomes only the interface between the user and Wikipedia. Crux of this whole idea. Yeah. Exactly. So so you should do something with, like, Quora or somebody like that where because they have so many answers to questions. Start the Quora is one of the ones in our pipeline of of of indexing. Yeah. So we have 600 instant answer sources like that. Okay. Good. Quora and all these other ones, like, they're even less popular, but very useful for people who search in that niche. And it's all open source, meaning, like, anyone can come and suggest ideas or code them or whatever. Oh, really? That's interesting. So that's the technology we're actually focused on a lot day to day. So what I wanna talk about well, a, I wanna talk about how you got up to 300,000,000 searches a month Yes. On duck.go, given that Google really is, you know, the king. So you're like the the half reprints or whatever. But but also just so you wrote this book Traction, and it's all about how any start up can, you know, achieve the kind of growth you've achieved, like this explosive growth. But I kinda wanna just explore it just the word traction a little bit. Like like, what what does that mean to you? Like, because it's obviously an important word, like, you included it as a as a title, and I get this asked asked this question a lot. You know, like, how much traction do you need to keep going? Like, people don't have a way of measuring. So a, people don't know how to grow something, but a but b, people don't know when to quit something. Yep. Like, when are they not getting enough traction? And I don't mean just in business. I mean, kind of in relationships or a job or anything. Like, and I know you're obviously focused on on the business. You've done hundreds of interviews for this book. It's really you've talked to so many people I know, by the way. Like, I I just like, you it's basically you took my list of all my people on my phone and talked to them all, except for me, by the way. But, so what is traction to you? So on the business side, I think of it as customer demand, and you can you can quantify it, but it's some level of customer demand. On the life side, I I'd say the concept probably But it's not just customer demand because Exactly. Customer demand during a certain amount of time. Like, if I do a business for 4 years and I have no customer demand, that's different than if I do a business for 2 years and I have no customer demand. So yeah. So I I I define it as growth, you know, growth and customer demand. But I think people would say that even a business that has no growth, I'm beating more abstract now, would still say it has traction. I mean, like, even if you're kind of, if you're operating a business by yourself sustainably and year after year it's spending off $1,000,000 or something, I'd say most people would say that has traction. You know? Maybe not in the investment side, like, in in Right. But that's that's like a lifestyle business. Right. Yeah. So it's a lifestyle business. They can if so it must be it's a good thinking broader to your point. But I think it's traction in the sense that, oh, they've achieved a degree of freedom where they've set up something sustainable that will sustain them and all their dreams and interests while they you know, maybe they can have traction in other areas of life knowing that they're gonna be in the is because they have customer demand. You know? Right. Yeah. But it's not necessarily growing in that case. It's not necessarily growing. You don't you don't associate traction with growing. But I'm what I'm saying is I I do. I do for in a business context. Yeah. I'm saying if you're gonna extrapolate beyond business to lifestyle businesses or to your life, you know, I think it's probably related to just generally customer demand. Like, there's some interest out there in what you're doing. You know? It's funny. A lot of people come to me with an idea and say, I have this idea. How do I get funding? And that's kinda, like, almost a wrong way to approach it. Like, I think customer demand is the most important thing because that's how you like, profits are the purifier of a business. So when you have customer demand, which is the first thing you need before profits, you at least know that there's some interest in your you at least know your idea might be good to some group of people. Yeah. Exactly. To your point about when to quit or not, you know, I tell people, are there bright spots in what you're doing? Can you identify anyone out there who actually loves what you're doing, even if it's, like, 3 people? Because then you can dig into them and say, okay. Are these outlier people? Are they just, like, crazy weirdos? Or, like, are they, like, maybe constitute some kind of group that you can build upon? But, like, I like, one time this is a long time ago. I started a dating website, and it got some sign ups. But, like, right away, I got this really awful sense that there was just zero traction there. Even though I had sign ups, it wasn't like I really Sign ups isn't real demand. Right. Sign ups is not demand. Customer demand is they're demanding your product. They're, like, coming to you every day and saying, I wanna use this. Right. And it's funny because the flip side is one time I started another business, stock picker.com, and people were coming to me and saying, hey. Can you block me from the service because we're too we're spending too much time on it. Demand. So that was demand. So I felt it then. Yeah. Exactly. So you kinda feel demand. Yeah. And okay. So yeah. Right. Like, what happened in the beginning stages of DuckDuckGo? Did you were you like, oh my god. Like, people were writing you, like, oh my gosh. You're gonna bring down Google or what was happening to the you're you're kind of core evangelist. DuckDuckGo, when it started, was not something you would wanna switch to. Like, it was not ready. But I I soft launched it to, Hacker News, if you're familiar with that site. Yes. And, they blocked me. It's true. I don't know why. F you. You must have said something. Anyway, they there was immediate obvious interest in, some kind of differentiator like, people were clearly there there were some amount of people who were, like, Google's too much of monopoly, and I want, like, another provider. Is that, like, quirky conspiracy theorist, though? Like, oh, Google's tracking my every move. The FBI knows what I'm doing. At the beginning, it what we weren't totally private. So it wasn't privacy reaction. It was more just people want there there's a thirst of early adopters just in the world who wanna try new things, and it was clear, like, search was so big, like, they were tired of Google not innovating, and they they wanted something new. Now we didn't have anything interesting at the time, but you could tell that there was demand there. And that that's what motivated me initially. So so the fact that there was some excited users looking for an alternative. I mean, why did you think, and and, again, I wanna get to the Yeah. The book and overall just attraction, but now I'm curious. Why did you think like, this is year 15 of of search engines. Why did you think in that year, you could come up with something new? Because nobody really has come up with anything new in a long time. I I don't know what the last I don't know what the next search engine after Google was other than Bing. Yeah. There were there were a bunch of the mid 2000 who tried some things. It just didn't get anywhere. Like who? Search Me did this cover flow thing, and there was Kewl and HiKEA and I guess, Mahalo. Mahalo is another one. Yeah. There were about 5 that raised, like, $50,000,000. They all kind of crashed and burned. And then Bleco was another one. And so this actually started out of complete personal interest. So I this was 2007. I was, I was being frustrated by my own Google results, and that that's how this grew up. And I was frustrated in basically three ways, and I I started side projects on all of them. None of them were privacy at the beginning because it wasn't on my mind. One was more instant answers. Like, there weren't instant answers on Google yet. And like you said, everyone's going to Wikipedia. That was one. The second was there was a lot of spam on Google then. I don't know if you remember back then, but, like Yeah. Not so much now, though. Not now. They cleaned it up in 2010. But, like, 2007, 2010, like tons of content farms, just, like, tons of links where you just go nowhere but ads. I wanted to clean that up. And then 3rd, to your core point, I thought there were lots of people who had better links in their head for certain things. Like, I went to the genesis of that was I signed up with a stained glass class with my wife, and they handed out this, like, sheet of paper that that was like, here are the best stained glass links that you should go to, like, some early blogs and stuff. And they weren't the links when you typed in stained glass on Google, and they were better, like, demonstrably better. And so I was like, oh, if you all these things could be interesting projects to, like, augment Google. And then I was like, after a year, I was like, oh, you know, we could put some of these together and make your own search engine. But but, like, Google has spent so many years now, and they they have, like, entire farms of computers with data on it. They do. Like, how do you just, technically, how did you kind of rise up to have to to to compete with their results? Well, I No. I don't want this to be I'm sorry to asking 2 technical questions. Oh, yeah. I've done it. I I don't care. Because they have such a head start. Yeah. So my thesis became that, you know, looking at Bing and Yahoo was still indexing at the time, and Yandex, which is the Russian search engine, started to index in the US. If you actually ran tests in Bing Ransom, if you took, like, Google's results and Bing results and you replaced the logos, they act people actually perceive the relevancy about the same. Really? Yeah. And so, like, the the links themselves and the ranking kind of had reached diminishing returns. And so my argument was, you know, that's essentially then kind of a commodity. And if I could get that from Yahoo or Bing or somebody else and focus on, like, value ads, then I could actually really add value. So you kind of take their I don't know if they have an API for it, but you take their their feed and then kind of augment it. Yeah. Exactly. And so then if you actually think about instant answers on top of results, people click on links in, like, a power law fashion. So they click on the first link. So if you put stuff above the links, like instant answers, even if you only do that for some percentage of the time, you're transforming the experience dramatically because that's what people click on most. And what if what if, Google and Bing decided to not let you use their feed? Like, they just arbitrarily decide to to hate you. Yeah. It that is a real risk. That risk has become less over time as our revenue has increased, and we become useful to these companies, you know, in a material way. Yeah. And more to the point for Bing and Yahoo, like, we're we're, like, the only search engine that's really gotten people to switch from Google, like, not from distribution deals or anything. So we're not really competitive with Bing and Yahoo in that sense. Like, we're taking share directly from Google. So it's like a win win across the chain. So they want you around. Yeah. Yeah. So so worst comes to worst because they because they offer a commodity, you can you you don't care which one you're getting data from, and and it's not gonna be the case that everyone colludes to hate you because someone's gonna like you. We hope not. Yeah. So so no. But that's reasonable. So okay. So traction again. So let's say I'm just gonna ask, like, a random question. Yeah. Let's say, you're in a relationship for 6 months, 12 months, 3 years, and the the the man or the woman is is unsure. When do you decide there's no traction in this relationship? Wow. That one's not enough. I'm qualified to answer. No. But your your whole book is about business, and we'll get to that. But I just wanna kinda explore what you think of the word traction in general. Yeah. Like, when does something feel burn out and if it's not moving? So the way I define it in the book and what I kinda believe in terms of fit probably relationships too is traction is growth. And so if things aren't growing, you you don't have traction in the business. Sounds like you you can't raise money. Can't do that. I kind of believe that way in relationships as well. I've been with you know, I met my wife in college when we were I was 20, and so I'm 36 now. Oh, so you've been with her for 16 years? Yeah. How fast did you get married? 2004, so, 5 years. Okay. Yeah. We've been so we've been married, like, 10 years. Yeah. I but I but we we're totally different people than we were. I mean, personality wise, we're similar, but, like Given that you've grown differently, how do you know there's how do you keep traction going in the relationship? Yeah. Right. That's kind of what I'm getting at as I I think, like, we grew together. You know? And I don't know if you can do that always, but, like, that's that that to me seems key to traction. So so so you've been lucky. Yeah. No. I'm sure it requires a bit of scale too. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You could get into, like, how we did that. I have no I have no counterfactual, so I have no idea outside us. But, like, communication seems to be key. I mean, she's my best friend. It's So, like, that's probably helps a lot. That's great. A lot of people listening to this really hate you right now. So, so, okay, traction on business because, everybody starts a business. They start they wanna sell something, you know, new oven gloves or whatever. And then the whole question is, how do they, you know, get, a, get an audience, get people to buy their product, to get people to spread the word on their product. And I have some thoughts on this as well. And I agree with a lot of things you say in the book because I've I've noticed with this with my own businesses. But how do we kinda go through these things one at a time and and you talk about them? And since you literally talk to every single friend I have, I'm able to add in a little bit about what I know of of their stories. So so, okay, the first thing you say, which I really agree with, is targeting blogs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so so backing up, like, just a bit, I think there's 2 overriding things people totally mess up is, 1, they don't start traction early enough. They kind of your premise is that they have an idea. Now they're going to they built the product. Now they're gonna get traction. Well, actually, I'm not gonna say that's the premise because I think you can actually build your own you can make yourself a trustworthy source before you have a product. Exactly. That would be the ideal way to do it, I I think. Like, starting to get traction right from the beginning, which is, you know, even if you build an audit, you can even build an audience first, like, essentially, you have, and then think about talking to your audience about what they want. But for instance, you could have written before you even started DuckDuckGo, you could have written a nonstop blog about all the problems of the current search engines. So and then you build yourself up as a trustworthy source in the kind of esoteric end of the search engine, you know, community. And then when you start something, people know who you are, and they start visiting it. Yes. And and and the reason for that the what I was getting back to the reason for that is people think that they know what to build. And it turns out that almost every product that launches is totally not sticky and has a leaky bucket. And people can prevent that if they constantly talk to new fresh customers about the product they're building. Right. And people hardly ever do that. They often get a beta list of customers, and even those people aren't fresh after the first time, you know, they saw the product. And so I think it's important to, like, get that fresh customers right from the beginning. Now targeting blogs, back to your point, is, like, an excellent way to do that because you can be blogging yourself or you can be targeting other blogs, like, before you launch the product and be talking about what you're gonna be doing and and getting fresh people on it all the time. I think there's a subtlety here too, which is that and this kinda came up in my discussion with with Ev Williams is that, when you target blogs, you're really targeting destination sites. You're targeting where the people are and you're not trying to create your own blog that's a destination site. And I think that's a mistake people make often. They sort of create their own blog hoping that people come to it. But the reality is people are at, let's say, TechCrunch in the technology community or they're at LinkedIn in the career community or, like, you launched your blog on, I mean, you launched your search engine on Hacker News, which is sort of the hacker community. You didn't try to drive people to your own, you know, destination site. You went to where the people are. And I think that's an important subtlety to to recognize. Yeah. The there's a meta point there, which is if you run traction tests right from the beginning, which is what we suggest in the book, and you, you you actually don't know which niche to focus on initially. Like, almost all products launch, they they need to pick a niche to focus on. But if you're targeting blogs, that's another reason why it's a great thing to do at the beginning, you can actually test different niches by targeting different audience types. Because, ultimately, when you're marketing, you're basically thinking, okay. Who is my target audience? Where do they hang out? They may hang out online. They may have offline, and you're going to places where they are is essentially what you're saying. But at the beginning, you don't even know which audience you should try. Right? Everything. Yeah. Hit a hit a hit a bunch of wall of sound approach. Yeah. And you can do that you can do that in a number of ways. You could do that using Facebook ads, you know, and test different cohorts or you can do it on Twitter. There's a bunch of places you can do to try to target different niches. But, ultimately, you wanna when you launch, you wanna know, you know, what niche to focus on, what marketing message actually resonates, and then what channel to use. And I wanna I wanna just hit one point there. Like, Facebook ads, People are like, oh, I can't afford advertising. But Facebook ads, you can get, like, a statistically significant result with just, like, $5 per per campaign. So for instance, I could hit, you know, women who love to cook or men who love basketball, and I could see which audience performs better for just $10. Yes. Exactly. And you you wanna validate those hunches because those will my my point of doing this right away is that that might change to what you do to your product before you launch. Like, if you decide, wow. Yeah. Men who like basketball are really my target audience or that's, like, the initial niche, you might change your product a bit. Certainly, the messaging. Right? Like a basketball logo. Exactly. How to, beam it up. Now the next one, I'm not so sure I agree with it because I've seen so many bad examples of it. You say publicity. Yeah. Now publicity is good, obviously. All news is good news sort of thing. But I feel like, the average, like, article written somewhere just unless it's, like, on one of these destination sites, just doesn't really get you anything. Right. So, back it up one more time. The premise of the book essentially is, you know, there are a universe of ways you can get traction. So, like, we identified 19. And from all the interviews and research we did, we found that companies different types of companies, consumer business, you know, bakeries, whatever, at all stages used all of these to get traction. Like, there were companies. Like, that was their main channel. So all companies used all of these? Yeah. To some extent, varying extent. Well, not each one used all of them, but, like, we found companies people will ask me, like the number one question I get is, okay. I'm a consumer Internet company. Which one do I use? And I'm saying that's the wrong question because the right question is, how can I be creative? Oh, you almost wanna go where people aren't. Like, if everyone in your industry is using x, you wanna use y. And we try to do is identify the universe of them and say you should take all of them seriously. Well and you mentioned you mentioned in the book, you you talked to Peter Thiel who who says, you know, you're gonna find one of these things. Yeah. Right. You just need to find one, and it it's unclear which one it is, so you have to do this this testing. So publicity in particular, I I generally agree with you, but DuckDuckGo has had one of our ways of growth on publicity. Well, because you have that interesting story, which is kinda like you have 2 great stories, which is the David versus Goliath story and the privacy versus Google takes all your information story. So you always can you're always good for a story. Right. Exactly. And so that doesn't work for all products. Right. A lot most products, I think your point is, don't have a good story. Right. So they're not gonna get good conversions or good press stories scalably. Unless and and that's why I like the targeting blog so much. Like, you you again, you could have got in in there and say, here's the problems I'm seeing. It was search engines, and then you could have seen what, you could have gone to the destination sites, written this stuff, and then seen what the audience was responding to, and that would help you define what your product would be. Yes. There's also a sense of, you know, at the beginning, you do stuff that doesn't scale. Right? And so this gets to your point to the point of what is your goal what is your traction goal, which is what I think you should identify first. When you're starting out, your traction goal is usually small. Like, you're just trying to get the first 100 customers or whatever. And then targeting blogs is really useful. When you reach bigger scales like us at 300,000,000 searches a month, you have to focus on things that can move the needle at your scale. And then things like publicity, mass publicity actually matter a lot more. Whereas, if you're starting out, you're not gonna try to manufacture, like, international press. Right. Right. So the the next one, which is sort of related, though, is unconventional PR. And I've I've made use of this in various ways. Like, what when I was selling this is not really a business. But when I was selling the book, choose yourself, I released it in a month in advance of the official release, Bitcoin only. So I was able to kind of do something a little quirky and go on CNBC and just because I did it's like Yeah. It's a perfect example. Did it work? Well, it's funny. On CNBC, they actually asked, did you just do this for marketing purposes? And I said, well, I am on national TV right now, so what do you think? So it did work a little bit. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Unconventional PR can be great Mhmm. For launches, but it hinges on creativity. Yeah. You have to Yeah. You know? And and you and you talked to Ryan Holiday a lot in in in this book. And, you know, one thing so Ryan Holiday and I kind of conceived that strategy. That's why it's just a coincidence here. And, you know, Ryan and I started brainstorming maybe 6 months before the book release to come up with, like, at least 3 different unconventional PR attitudes, including me, approaches, including me running for congress, which was became a whole thing. But, you did not go through with that? No. I I I started and then I stopped, and then the the unconventional PR became why I stopped. So Interesting. I I'm really curious about this next one because I always am skeptical of people who approach on so you mentioned search engine marketing is the next one, and and I always think the targeted blogs approach is so much better than search engine marketing, but I could be wrong. You know, again, like, I I don't wanna say one is totally better than the other because it applies in different situations. Right. I think targeting blogs is more universal at the first stage. Like, it's really easy to do. What's nice about search engine marketing is you can really test conversions at a small scale with very little effort. Like, you can bring it up in the next 10 minutes and and have people go into your website. You know? And let me ask you a naive question. Like, what is search engine marketing? Like, is it buying keywords? Buying keywords. Yeah. That's it. Or is it kind of, constructing your site correctly? I separate those out. Search engine optimization being the other one. Okay. SEO. Yeah. Search engine marketing is just buying buying ads. You know? Like, always the obvious ads are gonna be always the obvious words are gonna be too expensive. Yeah. This is generally why it's not great for for start ups. Like, you have to go really long tail with it or be in an area that doesn't have a lot of search engine ads, like a new a new industry. Okay. But if you're if you're going up you're starting a new insurance company, that's not gonna be the channel for you. Right. You're gonna pay, like, $100 a click. It's gonna be ridiculous. You know? You can't learn from that. And and and are are customers you get that way usually good customers? Because they don't know about you. They don't know if you're a trustworthy source. They just see that you're, like, you're versed in line. It really depends. Search engine, ads can make great customers because the people are literally searching for that thing. So it depends what they're searching for, like how like you said, how trustworthy they might be the source. But if you're actually searching for a solution and you see something that solves your problem, it's like, it can be great. So, like, if I search, like, bakeries, Montclair, New Jersey, I wanna be I if if I'm the bakery, I wanna be number 1 on that. So it's worth it for me to buy those that set of keywords. Yeah. I mean, DuckDuckGo is the first initially got users through SEO and search engine marketing. Like, people searching for Google alternatives on Google. That's interesting. New search engine on Google. Who searches for Google alternatives? People do. That's funny. Yeah. I guess there's a big enough population of anything. They you're always gonna get a long tail. And then you have, social and display ads, which we talked about with, like, Facebook. But do you think display ads work? Display ads being like a banner? Yeah. I mean, it it it depend it works in some industries, but social ads, you know, go beyond Facebook now. Like, Reddit obviously is a huge site you can put ads on. But now there are, like, even more niche sites you you can do that on. So it's becoming the case that, like, almost in each category, there's, like, a big site that you could probably get, you know, some either a social ad or a banner ad on. So, like, you like, a banner ad rent regularly might not work. But if you put it on a, you know, a car parts forum and you're selling car parts, then it might work pretty well. Right. Okay. Next one, offline ads, which I really feel never work, but you you you might disagree. I remember one time I was talking to the, a guy who used to run VH 1. The I don't even know if VH 1 exists anymore, but it was, like, the TV music channel. Yeah. And he and he was running a TV network and selling ads, and he said he would never buy an ad on TV. Yeah. I so I know of, a bunch of startups that have done well through TV ads. And then I'm also including Outside of infomercials and direct response? Yeah. Outside. Well, they're they're direct response Mhmm. But they're not infomercials. Okay. And then, you know, I'm including radio ads as in offline ads here, which you could expand to podcast ads. Yeah. And I think they work. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of startups that have grown a ton through podcasts and radio ads in the last few years. Yeah. It's not that expensive, I guess. Podcast ads have now gotten pretty expensive. Yeah. You tell me. I guess it's about 40 or $50 a seat per month. That's really high Yeah. I mean, comparatively. But, you know, a lot of the kind of unicorn companies in the, like Constant Contact and Blue Apron and all that kind of stuff, NatureBox, they're all advertising all over podcast now. Yeah. A company called, MeUndies, sponsors my podcast with, Stephen Dubner question of the day. So you get everybody on on there. Okay. Yeah. You mentioned search engine optimization. You know, here's a question for you. Just because you know you know so much about search engine marketing and search engine optimization, obviously, and you keep track of all the Google algorithms, I'm sure. I'm sure you personally do and your team certainly does. Why don't you start almost as, like, a separate or side source of revenue, an agency helping people or a product helping people with this stuff? So for instance, a site can run through your machine and see if it's perfectly search engine optimized, and they could throw in they could throw in their keywords, and you can do start doing the AB testing for them. Yeah. Lecco did do some of that. They're a search engine that kind of recently got acquired. Just Who acquired them? IBM Watson. God. Why who is who's acquiring these other search engines? Like, what do they use it for? It was more a technology acquisition. Uh-huh. You know, they they were, I think, putting some of their crawling data would be my speculation into Watson. Okay. To answer your question, though, it's all focus. I mean, and distraction. The same reason, like, we have no interest in kind of making more revenue by selling our own ads. Like, we're just focused on making the search product better. And that is in and of itself a hard enough problem. Yeah. No. I believe it. Content marketing, which is related to the targeting blogs. You do that a lot. Yes. No. I'm I'm I that works extraordinarily well. So for instance, just for building up an email list, I'll make a special report, give the special report away for free if you sign up for my email list. So that's a classic example. Yeah. A lot of these are, like, you know, my overriding message is the underutilized channel, certainly in your industry or just generally, is probably the best one for you because it's just more greenfield higher conversion. What do you mean by underutilized channel? So, like, if everyone in your industry does radio ads and no one is doing offline events and you do offline events, there's, like, pent up demand for that potentially. And as a result, you get higher conversions. So you gave an example of, another friend of mine, Dan Martell, Clarity dot f m, where he uses speaking gigs, which could be considered, like, offline events Yep. To drive traffic to Clarity dot f m, which is an excellent site for people to ask questions and answers to experts, and the experts get to charge per minute. It's really because no one it's underutilized because other firms aren't using it. But the reason why that's important is people don't expect you to be advertising there, and then all of a sudden people pay attention. Like, all these things are related to, we call in the book, Andrew Chen coined the law of s**tty click throughs. Oh, yeah. I like that. Every marketing effort eventually results in s**tty click throughs. That's just because it could become saturated and everyone's doing it. Right. So you wanna do things people aren't doing. How do you find, like, the like, for instance, you started big or no. You mentioned the example of Zynga, which started big using Facebook ads when before like, they were the 1st Facebook advertiser, basically. I remember at one point, they were, like, 30% of all Facebook ads was Yeah. Was Zynga, or at least some 30% of Facebook's revenues came from from Zynga, in some form or other. So how do you find, though, though, the next big thing that's moving up fast to start advertising on? And even though it's not caught up yet in terms of revenues for themselves. So I I think pursuing traction in general is testing, and it's really testing in 2 phases. You know, the framework we outlined is the first phase is you're basically testing different channels here that we're going through to figure out which channel could work for you, like, which is generally gonna work and is underutilized. Once you pick it, then it's testing within it, you know, new strategies and new tactics. So say, like, you determine social ads is, like, the way to go. Now you're focusing on social ads. It's your, you know, it's your job to become the expert at that. And so you need to be on the cutting edge of what is the new Facebook tactic, be it video or, you know, or go into Reddit or whatever it is. And the only way you really do that is by having your ear to the ground, going to talk to people, you running your own tests. It's that's why it's a full time job of spending time on traction, and we say you should spend half your time pursuing traction on the early early early stages. Like like, what would you what what sites do you like right now, for social ads? So we're we're at a I'm a little disconnected from the early stages. Because you're kinda you're kinda growing organically now. People know who you are. No. We're still we're in this process of running tests, and we're we're we're still focused on Reddit, which is why I keep mentioning them. I think they're totally underutilized. But there's a lot of new ones, you know, like, Pinterest. People are still doing stuff on that. You know, and all these new messaging apps, they all have new platforms. And And and you can I was like, like, can you advertise on, like, Telegram or Snapchat? Or I I don't think you can you can have it on Snapchat now, but it costs a ridiculous amount. Mhmm. But, like, Telegram and Kik and all these kind of, like, local messaging things, they all are getting new platforms where you can, like, make apps and bots for them and stuff. Mhmm. I'm guessing there's opportunity there. What about has anybody created kind of, like, an app advertising network so I I can go across all apps? Because it's hard for me to find, like, the right app to advertise. Google has AdMob, which they had bought, which kinda does that. But those have really upped in price recently as well because a lot of the social games are just completely overspending there. Right. They're like, everywhere is is social game stuff. So so next one, which I'm a big believer in, I'm actually I actually think this is my favorite, is email marketing. Yeah. I mean, it is the most personal Like, all these things are kind of related, but, like, how you build your email list is related to content marketing. Yeah. I think about it that any any major growth phase of a start up is usually has a core channel strategy. So it's one of these 19. And then if it's sophisticated strategy, other things are feeding into it, but they're not totally different. So, like, people are focused on email marketing. They do content marketing to build their email list. But there are other people who just focus on content marketing, and email marketing is kind of more of a sideshow. And they were really focused on the viral spread of their content. I think because people are afraid to start from 0. Like, email lists start at 0. Yeah. I think both of those. That's why they're underutilized. Yeah. And content too is, like, people are it takes a while to get an audience. I mean, you've been you talk about this a lot. But, like, you you don't have it from day 1. Right. It takes years. And so, like, people first thing is viral, but I don't have a lot of give up. You know? Like yeah. It it hardly ever happens. And at the very minimum, it takes 6 months to see any really useful results. Yeah. Like, almost every YouTuber I've spoken to, it was, like, on video number 50 before they finally kind of had their their tipping point. And it you know, to make a 3 minute quality video takes, you know, days or weeks of work. So imagine doing 50 of them before you get essentially. Yeah. I mean, like, Michelle Phan was one of the biggest YouTubers out there, was on her 54th video that she finally hit her tipping point. But because of that, it's become totally underutilized still. Yeah. And and you just have to, like, believe in what you're doing essentially. But you can And you have to be really beautiful. Yeah. So we can't make YouTube videos. That's why we're doing a podcast. So next one is well, but okay. But email marketing, though, I think is huge because those are people who have already signed up to see your content, and now you're and you're a trustworthy source. They've already set raised their hand and said this person's a trustworthy source. So if you say, hey. I'm buying this or I'm making this. Would you you know, what would you pay for it, or would you pay for this? They're your first customers. You're they're your early adopters, and you're talking directly to them. Yeah. And for each of these, you know, we recommend essentially testing a few at a time very cheaply and fastly. So, like, less than $1,000, less than a month of time to validate whether this channel could be useful to you. Right. And so we offer some suggestions for that. But I the point is, like, you don't you can test each of these without going all in. You know? Well, which brings me to the question of why did you like, given that you're very focused on your business, why did you write this book? Like, writing a book is very hard. Question. But is it a is it was this a marketing tool for you to kind of establish yourself as a source? That's why I asked if you almost wanna set up separate business or a separate revenue source. Yeah. No. It's not. I mean and and and it to be honest, DuckDuckGo is way beyond the scale where this would help DuckDuckGo at all. Like Right. Because the average book sells doesn't sell 300,000,000. Yeah. You know? We can have, you know, like, just to support a point on that, we can have, like, a front page New York Times story now, and it doesn't really move our numbers that much Right. Which is really unfortunate, but it's just the reality. No. I I, I really wrote this because I thought it would be it is missing part of the, what, business literature. I I thought it was filling on need. So you wanted you wanted to join the conversation. This was just a personal thing. You wanted to join the conversation of how marketing occurs, and you've seen it occur just in your own efforts at at duck.go going from 0 to a 100 to 10,000,000 searches a a day to or a month to now 300,000,000 searches a month. Yeah. Well, I mean, more personally, I started DuckDuckGo, and I tried to do the same thing I did in my last business, and it didn't work. And I didn't get any traction with DuckDuckGo initially. And I I went out to see if there was a book like this, and I couldn't find it. So you didn't get any traction? Like, you were stuck at, like, I don't know, a 100,000 searches a a day or a month or whatever? Exactly. And then I looked for a framework to apply, and I couldn't find one. And I started interviewing people. And then I also started angel investing, and everyone struggled with the same problem. You know? Right. And they they had no great framework to apply. So that that's why I wrote it. Yeah. That's interesting. So so now you've you've explored all of these. So now viral marketing, this is, That's how my last business grew. But this is a crazy one because not crazy in a bad way, but, like, you can't predict. Like, how do you how do you make something viral? You can't do it. Well, I well, that I did, but it's very I guess it doesn't. Very rare. Yeah. I mean, it has to be built into the product, basically. Like what? To be, like, an invite flow where you're you're inviting your users or or to use the product, you know, you know, like, it's a social thing in some way. This is to get truly viral, which is exponential growth. Well, this reminds me a little bit of One user bringing in more than 1 user. So it reminds me a little bit of and you you talked to Noah Kagan quite a bit for this book. Noah Kagan's got this product, KingSumo. Have you ever used that? Yes. So so you basically it's a contest, but if someone someone could enter it, but then they and then they get a link back in return. And when they share that link and other people enter using that link, they get the original person gets, like, 5 more entrants into the contest. So To get truly viral, you do something like that, and it is I did this for 3 years of my life. It is extremely time consuming to maintain that process because it's an exponential process, meaning that you get exponential growth, but you can also get exponential decay if anything goes wrong with the process. Like what? Like like your email deliverability somehow drops by, like, 5%. Or people just not interested in the product, but they're interested in the gifts at the end. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So that's that's getting it started. I'm saying even if you you reach the promised land and you you make a viral loop that is exponential, now you have to maintain that loop at all costs. And, like, any little thing that leaks out of your funnel because things change over time, like, dampens your loop, but you're no longer viral. Well, it's interesting. Look at, like, look at, like, musicians, who have broken, you know, broken through with viral videos, like, I don't know how to say his name, Psy, PSY, who had that Gangnam Psy. I have no idea. He he had that one video, and then never I never really had a video again as far as I know. Yeah. There's been a few, like, Okay Go. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't know I don't know that one, actually. Yeah. They're pretty good and, you know, Katy Perry, obviously. And there's there's been a few who've been able to replicate it, but it's very difficult. I mean, they they that's their whole effort. Right. So it's to create, viral marketing stuff. But how how did you make duck.go? Did how did you make use of viral marketing for duck.go? I did not. That's my problem. I tried to. I tried to use that in SEO, which is where my last business, you know, what channels that used, and it just it just topped out. I I have an idea for you. Yeah. How about you, the open source for duck.go, inviting other people to, you know, do it in that kind of GNU style way. Yeah. So where any changes they make Copy left. Yeah. Yeah. You, you can incorporate back into duck.go. And since you're the one with the name brand, you'll you'll benefit the most by open sourcing all your code. And then it's kind of viral, the 1st search engine to, like, open source their code, unless Google's done it, but I don't think they have. No. They haven't. Our our our instant answer platform is open source. One viral thing we tried, we we got really high quality T shirts, and we basically measured and said if we give a T shirt to the hands of a Doctor. Go fan, they actually end up spreading it to 3 people. It's an ad impression when everyone see when everyone looks at them. Yeah. People actually ask about it because the logo is kind of interesting, and they end up converting mainly their friends and family. But, like, why do you keep wearing that T shirt? But like you said, though, like, even that, like, with 300,000,000 searches a month, it's gonna be hard to move the needle on TV. Problem. Yeah. We we could we could get the numbers to work to more like a 1000000000 searches a year additive, but now we're at where we need to move more like 3 to 40000000, and it just doesn't add up anymore. What if you find kind of the top YouTube videos that are their channels are experiencing kind of exponential growth, but still the numbers are small? Yeah. You know, so 248 is exponential growth, but nobody notices it yet. Why don't you find them and then start sponsoring their channels? That is an interesting strategy. That went out. Business development. So this is kinda like where you go where, like, how Google originally had a deal with Yahoo, and they had a deal with AOL, where they were the official, search engines on Yahoo and AOL. And that was a large part of their initial growth Yeah. Particularly their deal with Yahoo in the very beginning until Yahoo realized, oh, no. We've created a monster. That's right. And it has it was the last stage of our growth too. So we we have a deal with Apple and deal with, Firefox. So we're an option in in Safari and Firefox. Okay. Are are you still the you're you're just an option, or are you the main default? We're an option. Main default would be awesome. Right. But that but those guys pay. Like, Google pays Firefox probably some enormous amount of money. Yeah. Recently, Yahoo started paying Firefox. That that that was a big deal. They switched, but it's, like, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. Right. So that's not gonna happen. It's out of our price range. So what other business development could do? You can do, like, again, like, blogs or, Twitter or Anything with massive distribution. It's hard to it's hard now to move that number that we have. You know, there are a bunch of the traditional deals outside the browsers are, operating systems and, you know, phones, like, via app as default installed or or on the desktop be like, you know, how Internet Explorer used to come with Windows, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't have I don't have an idea for you there. Because your your big challenge is when you reach a certain level of of traction is moving that needle. Yeah. So how do you you know, it's almost like you kinda have to at some points, throw your hands up and say, okay. It's either organic or nothing now. Yeah. And and and we have organic growth. We're just not satisfied with it. Like, we we want to grow faster. We wanna get the message out further. Well, how big is the search engine market altogether? Like, how many searches a month? It's a little unclear. Mhmm. But we're on the order of, you know, a little less than 1%, something like that. So And what about what about moving to, you know, other countries? Like, I imagine most of your growth is US. What about, like, being doing the same model in China, for instance? We're about half non US now. Okay. But we're 0 China because we're blocked. Oh, you're blocked? Yeah. Why don't you just I'm just saying hypothetically, I'm not making a political statement. Why don't you why don't you get yourself unblocked so then you at least beat Google and China? It's a political thing. I mean, to be unblocked, you you we have to violate our our, basically, our core privacy policy. Okay. I see. Because China wants to know who everybody is. Yeah. That's really interesting. Have you had any discussions with them? No. I mean, essentially, to do anything unblocked in China, you have to have a presence there, and you have to have servers there to abide by their filtering rules. So we just give up instantly. Not worth it. Yeah. Okay. So, affiliate programs are kinda critical in any sort of information product industry. I don't see it critical in your industry at all, but describe what an affiliate program is. Yeah. This is where because I think, by the way, this is the way you do generate sales for most people, like, lots and lots of sales. Yeah. I mean, this is anytime, you know, you basically hire someone to sell your product and then give them a cut. Right. But you set up but you can set up a platform so that essentially multiple affiliates, like, many affiliates can sign up, and everybody gets the standard deal. You can also AB test different offers. Done that with your books? Yeah. I have. Yeah. Huge. And that's actually been the largest source of selling books. Yeah. It's great with information products. In fact, I think this is why pub traditional publishers or traditional everything lose out to So how did you set those up? I basically worked with people who helped me Yeah. Who knew lots of affiliates, and then I would write extra material so that and I would bundle it together. So buy my book, plus you get these 4 other reports or you get some other book from long time ago for free. Stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you get it free, then you you charge whatever you want or you AB test what you could charge, and you get a list of, like, 100,000 people or more. And, you know, you have trustworthy sources recommending you, and, bam, it's huge. Yeah. It it is great. Another area where it's often used is any kind of hot really high value project that, like, has lead gen. So, like, insurance is a big one. Yeah. No. Insurance is huge. I have one friend who literally makes a living. Like, he has a travel blog, but he makes a living by he he's very he very honestly recommends why everyone should get travel insurance, but then the travel insurance companies pay him a lot of money on affiliate fees. Yeah. You can get, like, up to a $100 plus, you know, per sign up on those things. So I think the interesting thing to note there is, it's not only is it a great business selling your product through affiliate programs, it's actually a great business being an affiliate. Yeah. So the affiliates make most of the money. In any deal I've done, by the way, affiliates make, like, 80% of the money. Yes. Especially on information stuff where the margin is super high. Yeah. So so that affiliates clean up because for them, it's a one time thing. For you, you're hoping for renewals. What's actually funny with the first version of this book is, you know, we self published first version, and Audible ended up being like, audio ended up being a decent percentage of our unit sales. So it was, like, 20%. Yeah. Audible surprises me. I mean, I never thought audiobooks would be do well, like, because I never listened to them. Yeah. The publisher told me that it's generally, like, 5% or something, but it was, like, 20% for our book. And I think self help business books do well on audio. Interesting. Because people commuting to work with stuff. Too is, like, the money we made from Audible, half of it was just bounties from affiliate. Like, you automatically Audible has a program where, like, if if people sign up and just buy your book and then sign up for Audible, they give you, like, $50. Right. This is by default. You didn't have to sign up. And so that ended up being half of our, money from Audible. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how my I don't know. I didn't never broke it down with my books on that. I should take a look at that. Let's see what you've got here. Community building, which I think is really important. So so so for instance, for me, I've built communities around my books on Facebook, and they've done very well. And there was meetups, and this is really to offline events. I have meetups around the choose yourself idea, and that's done done very well. What would you say was the most driven channel for choose yourself? Affiliate. This stuff. Affiliate? Yeah. Affiliate and and targeting and content marketing and targeted blogs. Like, I've been writing blogs about these messages for 5 years, and then I had published a book on it. So I had a huge, you know, and and very receptive audience. So that was, like, your initial channel because it always pent up demand. Right. And then affiliate, like, took you to the next level. Right. Yeah. Interesting. And what about you think the community I think also having having a wall of sound approach, sort of being everywhere all the time. Yeah. And and it's not for books Yeah. In general. And it's this is not like an insidious way. Like, I believe in the message and wanted to get the word out. And so but it but it just worked because if someone reads LinkedIn, they don't always read TechCrunch and and vice versa. So you kinda have to be everywhere. Even if on sites that seem similar, it's it's people are gonna choose, oh, I'm gonna read this site and not this site. They're not gonna most of the time, they're not gonna read both or everything on both. Yeah. So you kinda have to be everywhere. That's why every site has the same article news article. That could be. Yeah. Well, every newspaper has the same articles. So so which which worked for you the best with DuckDuckGo? So we've been through 6 channels, really. We in each growth phase, we had to switch because it it topped out. So we started with SEO, which was a complete mistake. It's just topped out immediately. I wasted months on that. Then we Because there's nothing on the beginning of your on your site. Like, how do you even, like, optimize? It well, there was at the beginning. We I I I did all sorts of Wikipedia stuff, and I made a widget. Back in the day, like, you could make these widgets and then put a link at the bottom, and that would increase your ranking. So, like, I had a widget that said new search engine at the bottom, and then I got to number 1 on Google for new search engine. But it it just wasn't a lot of people is the problem. It topped up like 10,000 searches. Then I switched to content marketing First, my blog and then microsites. And then we switched to social ads on Reddit. When Reddit first started doing ads, we did kind of Reddit and Forchan ads. Then we switched to PR, print, and then, TV. In the snowed in revelations, we just did a lot of all the TV spots we could find. It was during a lot of That's great, because that probably create create a lot of awareness among people who would never have had any idea. Totally. Like, we were on, like, Fox News and, you know, CNBC and all these, you know, random shows. And then when that topped out, we switched to business development, which were these deals with, like, Firefox and and Safari and all sorts of other browsers you never heard of. And and did that work very well? Yeah. It worked really well. And then it's in an hour here where we have no idea what's gonna work next. Yeah. So so now 3 300,000,000 searches 1% of the of the market share. How are you gonna get to 2% market share? Yeah. So our target for next year is to double and, you know, and and be at, like, about 8,000,000,000 searches a year. And so we'll probably get, we'll get close to 4 this year, and we'll probably get an extra one next year just by end of organic growth. You know? So we need to find an extra 3,000,000,000 searches next year through one of these channels. Do people search as much anymore? I mean, I that's that's a stupid question. They do. They do. I just wanna feel like there's now I have now I know everything I need. Yes. You know, I I don't know, like, when Charlamagne was born, but I do know, like, how to order food online. You know? So I'll just go straight to that site as opposed to using Google. You are right that people are changing where their search habits, and especially on mobile, they're going directly to apps. Right? So you'll go to Yelp on your phone or something. Right. And it's In fact, the web is sort of like I don't wanna say the web is dead, but the web is transforming because we're moving into this mobile area now. It's transforming, and in particular, it's unclear where it's transforming. So, like, Facebook is betting that's gonna transform into Messenger, you know, and you're just gonna do everything in Facebook Messenger. Nevertheless, all of this, desktop searches are still increasing. So another question is, what about, doing something that no search engine does at all, which is deep linking into mobile apps? They're starting to do it now. Like, why don't you hook up with a company like Bitly, which is really good at deep linking? Like, they know everything inside the apps. Yeah. Include that their information in your search engine. Yeah. No. We are we're we we do stuff like that. Mobile is really challenging for us because on Android, we can't, you know, we we can't get access to be a default player because Google won't add us. And then on iOS, you know, we can be the default search, but, like, we can't otherwise get people to download our app and do, like, more interesting things. But that's why a company like Bitly, which is hired by the app developers themselves Yeah. To create links Yeah. You know, shorten links based on that go that look like web links, but are actually dealing with the mobile Internet. They could be interesting. IOS. Not trying to push them, by the way. Just full disclosure. I am a small investor in them. So I like Bitly. Yeah. Yeah. No. IOS is, kind of incorporating those things anyway. Like, you can now click on links, and they'll automatically open in in other, apps. Right. No matter But but can you search them? Can your crawler search them? You can't search them as easily. So that's something we could do. Although, that's what, Apple is doing for iOS 9. Like, app developers can now tell you tell them what to search, and they'll put it in Spotlight. Okay. Interesting. So what else on this book? What, what have I missed? I think I hit I hit all your points. Have you been happy with your with how the book's been doing? How did it how did it go from self published to now you have, like, a real publisher? And I I didn't even remember. I gave you a blurb. I'm a blurb on the back. I was like, oh, this is a book. Oh, so you so PortfolioPenguin, you're dealing with Adrian Sackheim? I am dealing with What what, sir? Eric Nelson. Okay. I published the book with him in 2008. Yeah. I think he he's relatively new. He's been great. I I don't know. I've not experienced you. You have a lot of experience with this. I don't this is my one time of doing this. You know? So the experience I've had going from self publishing to publish is that the publisher wants you to take down your book for a while. Yes. Yes. Yes. Did they ask you to do that? Yeah. They did. And how long did you take your book down? 2 months. Well, that's a long time. Were you scared when you took it down? Like, that your people were gonna forget about you? A bit. Yeah. Mhmm. And I think they did a little bit. Mhmm. But now this is really nicely done. I like this new book. It's a much so like, I would say that the reason why I wanted to do it was to make a much higher quality product. Mhmm. And I think it came out that way, not just physically, but, like, they helped reedit it and make it nicer. I actually think someone can take this book. They can start their own business on helping people market. Like, if you become an expert in all these different areas, you can actually Absolutely. Create a business You can do it for marketing. We could build a consulting practice on the back of this or anyone could, really. Yeah. It's no interest to me, but people could definitely do it. Yeah. There's value there. So so what's next for what's next for you? You're gonna write another book? I am not writing another book. This was a It's hard writing a book. Right? You have to kinda send your family away and, like Very this this I I started working this in 2009. You've written ton of books. I I I was doing this company. Like, I didn't realize how much work it was. Yeah. How much editing it was. It's crazy. Just sitting and, like, writing these squiggly lines. You know? I have idea. I I I I like books. I like writing because I feel it makes a unique impact. Like, you could do something that you could say things no one else is gonna say. And I have a couple ideas in there, but I don't know if I'm gonna pursue it anytime in the future. Well, Gabriel, thanks so much for coming on again. I am a user of DuckDuckGo, and, I think it's we might as well fight the power, which DuckDuckGo does very well. And I think this is for anybody starting any kind of business, whether it's a new search engine or selling cooking supplies or selling information. Absolutely, I agree with, like, all of these points in here. You should definitely get this book and and study it. And like Gabriel was suggesting, just, master the the 4 or 5 areas you use the most, and I think it it would be an excellent, addition to any business. So thanks for writing this, and thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. For more from James, check out the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network atstansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today.