suddenly you know my side hustle had jumped from 10K to 30 to 40K and then my income had jumped from 100K to 400k right you have to be consistent and just keep at it like you won't see results on the first time the second time maybe even third time right like but you still have to like go at it and eventually you'll start seeing little bit growth we're not trying to you know promote some kind of getrich quick scheme or some kind of grow tack where you can kind you know this is not a substitute for hard work leverage just gets you more mileage for your hard work if you're going to start on this journey it's not like let me just try this for a week and I'm going to go see results commit yourself to one year of hard work in consistent way and you will 100% see results by the end of it all right welcome back to the podcast last time we did this podcast we did a slightly different episode where we talked about five methods we'd use to find product ideas uh for building an AI and then I got a lot of emails or you know building on that there like you know cool you know uh building businesses is nice but I have a job right now and I need to figure out how to sort of you know either make more money on the job or S of progress toward toward an entrepreneur maybe so in this episode we're going to tackle that problem so uh with that being said I thought it would be pretty interesting for me and Hass to actually lay this down as a challenge and ask ourselves what would we do if we had to get to a 100,000 to a million dollars in income over the next 12 months so we want to make this as accessible as possible to everyone and to how basically you know if we had to start from zero starting January 1 in 2025 how do we get ourselves to a point where we're making either $8,000 a month or $882,000 a month by the time you get to December one hus how does that sound yeah that's exciting right like I think at the end of the day everyone loves to compound themselves and if you can give people a framework to think about like different areas of Leverage which can allow them to compound themselves and allow them to like move faster towards your goal I think that'll be pretty awesome so I'm excited for the conversation yeah 100% and we also just want to say one thing uh there's tons of ways to make money a lot of other ways than how we've done it but since this is how we did it we just feel like this is the most credible way that we can speak to it right so yeah take everything with the prince of salt apply it as you see Fed you know your circumstances might be slightly different and yeah with that being said we hope you find it useful and let's Dive Right In so first thing and this is the most important part of this podcast is the key idea that we want to drive home is that you need leverage if you want to make more money right so Leverage is anything which can basically multip apply the output of your input right uh so let me give you a very concrete example of that let's say you are trying to build a house um let's say it's going to take you one year to build that house if you're building it by yourself now let's assume you hired a friend or got a friend to come work with you who can now help you build that house so suddenly there's two people building that house and the time to build that house probably goes down by half that right there's lovers right you hire someone to do that job with you so that right there would be an example of Labor leverage right now let's assume you didn't hire someone let's assume assume you are working alone and you got a machine that can lay that can help you lay bricks four times faster so now instead of building a house in 12 months you're not building that house in 3 months uh by using technology which is another form of Leverage right uh or you could do something completely different right maybe you don't want to build a house from scratch maybe you want to get a readymade house and you go to the bank and you apply for mortgage and then you know you go buy that house that would be an example of capital or money leverage right so you basically got this money you put it on down payment you got that house instead of having the ability yourself amazing right so that that right there would be Capital leverage this idea has been there for for a very long time but for some reason you know either hasn't been explored well enough or people don't talk about it enough but in our experience you know in mind hus experience you know leverage definitely has been the key to increasing our our income over time do you agree with that assessment hust yeah I know 100% And and I think like it's very sometimes hard to like really understand the impact of Leverage right like compounding is a great example of Leverage right as well uh you have $5 you're making 10% on that it's just like0 50 cents uh initially but the next year that's going to be 55 cents and that just keeps growing right like suddenly in 8 years to like 9 years you may double that money and now you're growing at like a dollar and that's like money leverage now you have and I think compounding uh some people have said it's like another wonder of the world and once it starts playing it just gets crazy uh and one other example I have to share around this is also you you know you talk to a lot of people making your first million dollars is actually really hard once you make your first million dollars it becomes easier to make your next one it's not because you know it's not a lot of work it's the reason is that you have some Capital you have Capital leverage and you can play the compounding game much easily than you were when you were at z uh so I think people should start thinking about what are some competitive advantages they have at play which gives them some unfair advantage against anyone else right like into building leverage building compounding games supercharge your startup with Google cloud ready to take your startup to the next level the Google for startups Cloud program offers $350,000 in free credit expert guidance and cutting edgi tools don't miss this opportunity apply now at cloud.google.com startup slapp so we're just going to assume you're on the job right now um and you basically have close to no leverage and how you can build leverage from that point to either make more money at your job or S start a side project or maybe even start a a fullblown company so we're going to start you know hopefully from from the bottom and help you build up from there so yes okay let's let's jump in and and you know talk about the the five key forms of Leverage so the first one is knowledge right so with the right knowledge you can do something much better or you can do something much faster next one labor leverage I talked about the example with building a house if you have other people working with you you can suddenly do a lot more work then there's Capital leverage right like you know for example if you're using uh you know you're raising startup Equity or you're using uh debt to buy a property for cash flow or something along those lines that gives you example of of capital leverage right there's uh technological leverage so uh I right now you know one of the businesses that I run right now is uh the Superhuman newsletter and what happens there you know is I don't have to you know write the email out every single time I want to send it to someone and I don't go and hand deliver to every single person I'm relying on technology right so basically I write the email once I press scheduled and then it sends out to to millions of people another interesting thing to add here is also that like you know if you think about these leverages especially the technological leverage right all of these leverages to some extent are interconnected to get to Capital leverage to convince someone to give you money you need some knowledge of an industry and for you raising some Capital you need to have identified some opportunity that may require some technology that may have some distribution advantage that may have like uh some geography Advantage so like these are all also interconnected I think that's also very important to know right like it's not like you can just jump to one of them and just skip all others you need some sort of access to each one of them to together build a good foundation for like accessing leverage but you have to start somewhere uh as well and I think as we give we'll give you examples you will see that we started with specific ones as well and then eventually went into other areas to start building those leverage areas and that makes our compounding much faster and much better exactly uh I think nval Ravi cont has this concept of permission and permissionless leverage so you know for example with technology no one's going to stop you from building an app with median distribution no one's going to stop you from kind of going out there and putting out a tweet but capital is is you know sort of like you know um very permission like you can't just show up to a bank and and get money and you definitely cannot just show up to a venture capitalist office and ask them for money so this is you know as as sort of like permissioned and and gated as something in G so the final form of Leverage that I quickly want to touch upon is media and distribution leverage right so for example if you've built uh a following online maybe it's YouTube maybe it's Tik Tok maybe you have a newsletter where you've got a subscriber base maybe you've got a substack all those things essentially act as distribution for you and if you're a company and you you know sort of built a big marketing channel sales Channel that's basically uh distribution and media leverage for you right there right so a good example uh to convey the importance of this is um you know if if I try to meet people one-on-one for coffee uh I don't know maybe I can meet 10 people in a day but you know uh if I write a very important piece of content that reaches people like those I potentially could be reaching thousands maybe even millions of those people within the same day and you know sort of like some kind of uh connection is is established there and that becomes part of your distribution so uh maybe let's I'll love to share with folks like you know one example of like how I buil leverage right so for example when I was in school and you know getting close to graduation I don't really had any of the leverages we just went through so the step one for me was gaining a skill or knowledge leverage like you can kind of think about that uh because I have to start somewhere that's to some extent permissionless where you can go learn about something on your own or find someone who's willing to Mentor you or find a job or something which can allow you to like learn about something right like what are what are some skills or knowledge leverage which I ended up learning I think are very critical to learn is like Hey how do you build I think a second critical skill for anything you do in the world is like selling so like how do you sell like you know sell globally locally Etc uh how do you manage people because if you don't know how to manage people the label Leverage is very hard to gain because if you can't inspire people you can't manage them well you can't give them like a mission then no one's really going to work for you uh and then lastly I think was like Hey how do you manage money so how do how do I to go after like learning this knowledge first was I ended up joining a startup uh which was an early stage company where I got an opportunity to learn how to build we were working on cutting edge technology so AI in 2014 2015 very helpful to learn how like the AI world is going learning skills around that second there was no one in the team who was selling uh so that was my job so I ended up not knowing anything about selling but I had to learn by talking to people who are willing to Mentor me learn the skills from them and then just go out in the market and try to sell what we were building I also got an opportunity to learn how to raise money because we were a startup we fortunately got into y combinator by being part of that program uh and uh learning meeting a lot of VCS and investors I learned how to like you know raise money and raise money and deploy that money as part of this early stage company so I think the two key things here are one I started building a network of experts or mentors who had done this multiple times so they had playbooks where they're like hey how do you build something how do you sell it well how do you manage money how do you raise money and then secondly with these playbooks and mentors I was also doing these things at the right time as well so I was kind of implementing all this what I was learning from these mentors I think that's a great example in my case it was slightly different so I think Hassen was you know uh very fortunate he has a lot of like hustle Nam you know he you know he's this sort of person who can kind of go into room and talk to anyone I personally don't possess that skill the key thing here is if you are starting from scratch uh whether you've just graduated or whether you're kind of like you know at a job right now the most accessible form of Leverage to you is knowledge right uh it's knowledge that you can use to build a skill so in Huston's case he hustled he got into uh you know a startup which got up into a very exclusive incubator program where he met a bunch of uh you know very smart people for a lot of people you know it that might not be the case so in my case you know for example I you know was not that well connected so what I did in that situation you know besides getting a little bit of a help from Hass at that time is I just read obsessively right I just read everything that I could find Under the Sun you know I was reading books I was reading papers I was listening to podcast the key thing here is you need to learn and there's lots of ways of learning you can do it that way but you can you know if you don't have any kind of like uh access just pick up a book just you know try to read those books try to listen to podcast um try to find whatever medium you can maybe even it's maybe it's even YouTube videos right maybe find whatever medium you can that helps you learn 100% And I I'll like to add like something personal so Z and I were also roommates from like a lot multiple years so Zen is being very very humble here so he had like a job which he was working minimum wage but I think one critical thing is that about learning so he used to read almost like a book every 3 to 4 days and he would just tell me like hey man I read this new book I learned this new framework or I read about this history thing I read about this business thing like he was always reading like so he was not maybe so it's also an example of different personalities right so my personality was I was going out there and meeting a lot of individuals and going to conferences being out there being very extrovert while Zan Zan was reading a lot and then we were discussing and we had a group of friends we would just discuss all these ideas with as well so I think that is a critical thing as well is there was a lot of effort involved in both these motions so you the fundamental thing is that you need to have hey like I'm willing to work hard I'm willing to like put in the time and there are different Pathways you can do that but fundamentally you had to work hard yeah and I I also just want to say right like some folks might hear this and say you know man like reading like a book every 3 4 days feels inum I think it's very manageable to actually read one book a week and the strategy that I found around this is if you're reading a book most books tend to be between 200 to 250 pages I find and if you read them that's about 6 to8 hours whether you read them physically or you're listening to them through an audiobook so if you have the time you know maybe you have an hour a day before bed or sometime else pick up a physical book read it take notes on it but even if you can't do that you know let's assume you're commuting half hour each way to your office or maybe you're spending an hour you know cooking dinner or doing chores or maybe you're spending an hour going for a walk every day just pop in an audiobook and listen to it right something is better than nothing and same goes for podcast maybe books aren't your thing just listen to podcast a lot of this information does get covered in in podcast so you can go ahead and and consume it that way as well so you know just to give people a quick re recap because you know I think we're giving a lot of information so you know number one we said uh you need some kind of Leverage to build wealth right there's five key forms of Leverage you know there's knowledge there's labor there's Capital there's technology there's media um and if you're starting out as an employee or if you're starting out you know just graduated from college the reality is is you're not going to get access to these other forms of uh of Leverage necessarily so the best you can do early on is to focus on the knowledge leverage and try to get specific knowledge convert that into specific skill and then take it from there right and let me me stress why this is uh this part is important right so when you're com into a company um no one is going to entrust you with uh people leverage like they're not going to let you manage a team because why would they uh I mean you know you haven't demonstrated any capability of you either doing the thing yourself well or managing a team they're not going to trust you with capital or money or budgets or whatever that might look like because at the end of the day you don't have any proven track record with spending money being responsible with money with producing results so it' be insane for anyone frankly at that point to give you those kinds of leverages so your option there is pick one skill get really good at that skill and then you can can uh can upgrade right so the two sort of like you know skills that would come there is you know you can sorry the four ones that we talked about is building selling managing people managing money initially no one's going to let you manage people manage money so you need to learn either to build or sell and ideally you can do both but you know even if you don't have time to do both I think you should definitely pick one thing and and really focus on that I think an interesting thing which is happening today for the last few years is that there are a lot of large companies which are growing rapidly right so if I was graduating today and I was like either a technical or a non-technical person I create a list of some of the best performing companies or companies who I think are underappreciated by the market I think a good example is like you know palente in the last like 12 months I think has grown by 4X or something so if I was like you know non technical all technical person I would do everything to go work at paler which is rapidly grow growing the reason is that you want to find these rapidly growing companies even if they are large companies because there's so much growth happening that you will learn how to build and how to sell super well and once you spend one to two years you would build a network if people if youve done a good job building and selling some of people will be like hey this person is credible he or she delivers value and they will start start interesting you with either managing a team or giving you more opportunities at that point you can decide to go leave the company and go try to raise capital or build a team in together to like build a startup and that's how you start entering like other aspects of like this leverage awesome ideally uh you know you're at a solid company even if you're not at a solid company I think you can definitely learn a skill in put it to use so we talked about uh either building or selling so building very specifically you know is anything related to building the uh the product so you know could be something like engineering project uh product management project management uh design even writing so you know let's assume you're in a technology company in a technology that would look like you know maybe looks like engineering or product management but let's assume you're in a media company right in a media company that might look like you being a really good writer and researcher or fact Checker that knows how to you know create uh very compelling content for folks to either watch or read or or listen to the second side of this is selling right selling usually looks like uh you know Marketing sales or customer service something along those lines anything that you need to do to sell uh your product or your service right so you need to get good in in one of these areas you can get better you know in more than one of these areas but you know you should definitely pick one and get really really really good at it so in my case you know uh once I got into a startup uh I basically focused really specifically on marketing and getting really really good at marketing right so I got good at one marketing channel I got usted with another marketing channel after that once the employee for that channel left good luck to me uh and I demonstrated my competence over that channel as well once I demonstrated my competence over marketing channels uh suddenly uh my boss had no issues with leveraging me up with capital and with people so suddenly I was allowed to hire a team and then I was given a budget that I could go spend on on paid marketing as well a very large budget that I could go spend on paid marketing as well right so I started off you know with with the knowledge piece demonstrated my credibility as a seller and then I got rewarded by with more leverage in the form of capital and more employees that led me be more impactful H do you want to share maybe like an example of how you've done it or how you've seen this being done in terms of you going from from uh just that uh knowledge piece into into building up your your leverage uh on you know capital or employees or anything so as I was saying earlier in the podcast right right after school I spent and I got an opportunity to work at an early stage startup which allowed me to learn about building and selling taking that experience and I worked at another incubator program where I continue to learn and build this skill even further but from there these two experiences gave me credibility and allowed me leveraging my network be part of a founding team of a company that founding team of a company allowed me with like other folks you know like he we were able to raise money so the first thing here is that the first two experiences gave me access to other individuals who had also similar experiences and then together we built a team so it was not just like hey me just showing up be like hey I learned how to build and sell let me just go like to a VC or someone like get money it was a network uh impact as well as you kind of learn how to build and sell you start meeting other people who are also doing the skill and they're like moving fast in this world right so that's also critical thing you need other stakeholders who believe you who trust you as well so as I built this group of folks out of some of that came out like hey let's let's build a company together and as we built a company together we were able to convince folks to give us money so that was like my first time experiencing how to like Leverage capital and get money you hired a team we ended up selling that company to a very large organization called snowflake uh after that because I've done this once the second time I did this it was much easier right so that just like a concept of compounding right so one thing led to another the next thing let do another and you just got to keep the momentum going in a positive direction and forward but the key thing again is I started from zero I started from a job which allowed me to learn how to build and sell and then I did another job which allowed me to learn how to build and sell even more and then my network said hey you've learned how to build and sell why don't you just join forces and build a company to get yeah I also want to sort of highlight uh uh some nuances here so you know I talked about building and selling and engineering and marketing and sales and all these kind of different things don't get too caught up in labels and don't get too caught up in titles right the goal is not to go from like a junior sales guy to like a senior sales guy or a junior engineer to like a senior engineer those are the side effects of you actually knowing the thing right it's it's the skill right so don't Focus too much on these labels focus on actually becoming a better Builder or becoming a better seller regardless of what your title is Right another uh quick Nuance that I want to add here is you know let's just say you've proven yourself with your knowledge and skill and you've now been rewarded by more leverage in the forms of um managing money managing people that part you need to learn as well right it's not like you got uh you know rewarded with with you know like a team and with you know money you can spend and suddenly you're going to be good at these things now just as you know you had to get really good at the initial building and selling piece the managing people piece and the managing money piece is also extremely critical and honestly I think most people fail at this most people get upgraded into management positions and what they think is hey we'll just keep doing what we're doing and everything should be fine and this is how it's going to work and this just leads you to be a mediocre mediocre manager and it stalls your career so the thing at this point is managing people it goes beyond just you know being good at your job when you're managing a team what matters isn't your output it is the combined output of the team right that means you need to learn uh how to find strong employees you need to learn how to interview them and find their skill set you need to convince them to you know uh join the company then you need to train them then you need to Resource them then you need to help them level up then you need to come up with the strategy that they can go execute against uh all of these things are part of management that aren't part of like your day-to-day job same thing with money right learning how to budget learn how to Advocate to get bigger budgets learning how to manage those budget learning how to get you know strong Roi on those budgets learning how to allocate that Capital that is also a very difficult and very specific skill set so don't assume that now you've been you know kind of upgraded with with labor and capital leverage that things are about to get easier they're not like you know things still remain pretty difficult do you agree with that assessment Huston yeah I know I I 100% agree I was just like thinking about this right like it's like when you when you start building or selling you're learning you're like hey man holy getting so good at it I'm I'm I'm the and then you move to the next level and you're like holy I don't know anything about this level it's like in in life like as you get better at one thing you enter the next level of difficulty and you know each time you have to just like work hard continuing to like learn and level up uh it's not like hey you you become a manager life gets easier or you become like a CEO life gets easier and in most cases gets harder but if you have been learning all these things together it becomes better you have leverage so you're able to do much more in the same amount of time when you were starting to build or sell uh so I think I totally agree agree with that uh assessment fuel your startups growth with Google Cloud join the 90% of geni unicorns that trust Google Cloud get up to $350,000 in credits access to cutting edgi tools and expert guidance when you join but why Google Cloud because they offer personalized support from experienced mentors Technical Training to upskill your team and a vibrant startup Community to connect with like-minded Founders ready to take the next step visit cloud.google.com startup slapp to learn more and apply today at this point uh I want to take a quick pause and say if you've reached this level and executed it well I think you're in the range where you can get yourself to $100,000 to $200,000 in income but I think if you can execute these pieces well uh I don't see any reason you know if you're earning like you know entry level job you're earning Fork month uh I don't see any reason why you couldn't sort of you know execute this plan and get yourself to like you know that $88,500 per month and and get to get to get to that skill set so I will just add so let's say you were working an entry level job and you're like listening to this podcast you're like oh like awesome man I want to like dox my salue let's say you were at 5K uh right now just take the example if you're non-technical or technical it doesn't really matter like whatever skill you're good at and you've actually learned that just go on Twitter go on LinkedIn and just start talking about it and if you're really good at it other people will ask you like hey can you help us with that thing that's pretty much your Avenue to double your income straight up and within 12 months 100% if you're really good at a specific outcome which you can deliver let's say you can do SEO marketing really well or you're really good at building websites or you're really good at like you know building uh llm apps or you know may one specific thing you start talking about it for 6 months I can guarantee you you will start finding people who would like start coming to you and be like hey like come help me with this thing and I'll pay you for that the world today is very much attuned to an outcom driven culture and people are very much willing to hire people for specific outcomes much more than maybe 5 years ago even 10 years ago yeah agreed I think there's a key inflection point happening in the conversation right now which is you are now going from sort of like you know this rented leverage that your organization has given you in terms of you know uh people employees whatever else and now you are converting into a type of owned leverage which is the media and distribution leverage for yourself right first you were taking that knowledge and you were selling it to your employer in return for money now you are taking this knowledge and you sharing it with the world in in the form of content and you're using that content to then build your distribution and your following across whichever social media channel that is and this is sort of you know the path where you can switch over from making that 100 200k uh a year into getting into to that half a million to a million dollar range per year and this is how you know to some degree both uh both how Hass and I had executed our paths as well both of us had individual different paths but you know a lot of like overlapping similarities in terms of like how this was happened so around this time in our career you know where Hass and I are making you know1 $200,000 uh both of us got super active on on Twitter right uh both of us were sharing our knowledge I you know was reading a ton of books I learned a bunch of stuff on the job around growth hacking a few things so you know I was sharing a lot of stuff around career growth and marketing H you know had just started building his startup had raised money so hen had started you know really talking about you know um how to you know raise money for a startup how to build a startup um talking about he was talking about AI in the healthcare space as well and you know to to varying levels of success both of us built a sizable audience you know I you know reaching a point where it's like exceeded 2 million followers now but I think Hassen is you know in the 5200k range as well which is you know a very respectable size of audits and distribution as well anything H you want to add there yeah I think like other thing also to add is like maybe you're someone who does not like putting yourself out in the public and that and that's fine you know the the key thing is that when you start writing on a media platform you're just like giving access to hundreds and thousands of people or tens of thousands of people to like come reach you and maybe you don't want that but at the end of the day you still need some other people to know about like hey you have a skill and you have credibility right so that can just be your core Network like if there are 20 people in your network who believe you're really good at delivering an outcome those 20 people could be your audience who you want to keep sharing with being like hey like I'm really good at doing SEO I delivered this project this is the outcome and there's 20 people could like give you a project or like those 20 people would know 20 other people or 40 other people who will end up like that they will end up sharing it with them you'll get a project and then a word of mouth would start may start happening right so it's not like you just need Twitter and Linkedin which we have done uh as a distribution strategy but you need still the word to get out right you you need to like start telling your friends about it just need to start telling other folks in the industry about it one way or another I I couldn't agree more I think another way that I frame this is every business needs a marketing or sales channel to sell their product or service the same way treat your career your skill set your knowledge as your product and if you want to find distribution or buyers for that product or service you need to build an audience right so just as you know I'd use U you know salese to sell my I don't know s product uh you can use your social media distribution your newsletter your YouTube channel whatever else that looks like to basically communicate your skill set to a market of buyers who will be hopefully willing to buy from you down the line right whether that's offering you a job a higher paying job whether that's you know U using you know hiring you for Consulting uh you know kind of you maybe you launch service business maybe you launch product Down the Line This is basically you know sort of you know where you need to make the switch from just focusing solely on your skill set to now building distribution for your skill set so hopefully we've sold you on the idea that you should create some kind of content and you know build some distribution for yourself again content can be anything you know uh if you love being in front of a camera that can be YouTube video if you love writing that can be Twitter substack newsletters anything along those lines if you just love talking into a mic or having conversations with people maybe podcast uh is the right path for you right so there's a bunch of different ways that you can actually create this media and then you need to learn how to convert it into a compelling piece of content right maybe that's a you know uh a YouTube short maybe that's a podcast maybe that's a tweet maybe that's a LinkedIn post maybe that's an Instagram carousell whatever that looks like you need to learn how to make that content compelling best way to learn how to do that is honestly just watch other successful creators in your space see how they're creating hooks hooks tend to be you know the first couple of sentences or the first five or 10 seconds and then see you know how they're constructing you know each uh you know each feline block or each 5sec block throughout their videos or their podcast to really understand and build that muscle around you know pattern recognition so you can do the same yeah so so let's say like now you know you are someone who already has like the the labor leverage or you have the knowledge leverage and you're like hey you know that's awesome which you guys shared like I'm already like a bit I've already done half of these things how do I go from 200k 250k to like you know 2x that or 3x that so I think the critical thing is that your knowledge Leverage by itself may not be easily like you to get to that into million unless you're like hey a principal engineer at Google and you know you were making a million dollar like total comp or you're like uh a specific person like who is like maybe like you know very highly skilled areas like you know astronaut space Rockets things like that which are niches in most cases like jobs are majority of the jobs are like you know capped out at 2 250k you really need to think about how do I go expand from there so I think there are few ideas and few Avenues usually do that so the first of all if you're making like you know good money you should hopefully be saving that and you should be investing that money right stock market I think is one of the best uh areas for you to like create Capital leverage because you're investing money and that money can keep compounding and you can double your money like you know four to seven years depending on if you're good at like looking at picking a good company so I think that's one area I think the second area is if you're really good at some skill set you need to like learn how to manage a team and start generating labor Leverage even within your company so you go into management so like that gives you a bigger bigger p&l bigger opportunity so you're not just like hey I'm I'm an individual contributor but I'm like now going into the management area and I'm going to be contributing to a bigger bottom line of the business if you're a specialized skilled worker as we said like rockets all of these things like you know principal engineer like a large company maybe then that's also a good area you don't need to get into the labor leverage but if you're not then that's super critical to do I think the third area is that hey let's say you are not into like a very super Niche space you're like you know you're like hey you have skill set around accounting or investing or financial management then you really need to start building some media and distribution leverage right you need to go get out there and convince people that hey you can help them at scale solve some problem because you have done this or multiple years or multiple uh in areas and you now bring that skill set to them so you need to start writing either through Twitter through Linkedin through substack through a blog or whatever that is and there are multiple examples of individuals out there who have done that right it's not like just Zen and I just talking about this if you go on LinkedIn you go on Twitter you will find hundreds of people who are doing this so identify someone in your industry maybe few people in your industry who are doing this and try to replicate that the I think one thing a lot of people make a mistake about is like hey there only 20 people doing this I don't think there's an opportunity for the 21st person to do that you would be surprised how many how much opportunity there is like most of the world is still not leveraging AI like the AI bubble on Twitter is like maybe 12 months ahead I was talking to someone the other day and showed them the whisper model on open they're like holy like it just blew their mind they're like not even tried it very smart individual in a non- tech industry so just giving you an example of like hey like you really need to start thinking about like opportunity is massive there are a lot of people who are just not doing the things you might be doing doing if you're working at a Cutting Edge company at a good company you have a very strong skill set doing something very in an excellent way you're EXC excellent at your craft if you're excellent at your craft 100% you can bring value to a lot of other individuals so just make sure that you're leveraging one of these other methodologies to go get out there so you know just recap you need uh you know uh leverage if you want to generate Walt uh you know there's five key forms of Leverage if you're starting out in a job best ways to start with knowledge leverage and build yourself up to a little bit of capital and people leverage once you've done that you know uh once you've kind of reached you know hopefully this helps you get into the100 to $200,000 per year range pretty decent if you've gotten that congratulations now you want to start building some distribution now you want to take some of that knowledge that you have and convert it into a social media following a podcast listenership a kind of newsletter subscriber base whatever that is and once you're there once you've kind of built some kind of audience there's now three ways that you can basically make more money first one and the most obvious one is you can use it to find a better job number two is you can start a sort of consultancy or a consultancy service business and then the third and final one is you can start some kind of product right a product can be something very simple like a I don't know like a course could be something very complicated like a SAS product with that being said I want to now go ahead and give a concrete specific example of how I've done this in my career right so first thing that I did you know uh was obviously the salary one right I gave the example of how I had to you know I got good at those two marketing channels then I started managing a team uh and you know then I started you know get a hold of a budget as well at this point I you know sort of crossed uh you know from making started off you know making around $50,000 a year by this point I crossed into $100,000 a year right so very comfortable at this point at this point I executed the switch where I started building my following and I started building my distribution the first thing I started to do is I started to offer uh you know one-on-one Consulting to individuals medium success maybe, ,000 a month not nothing but you know wasn't sort of like you know meaningfully life-changing at that point second thing I did is I launched uh a course to help people you know build professionals build an audience on Twitter that didn't really uh work either where I really started to hit it is when I started focusing on Consulting for businesses and how those companies can build their audience very specifically on LinkedIn so suddenly those businesses were willing to offer me you know something like $22,000 a month to do four calls with them and I'd hop on those calls so you know that was like $500 for for one one hour call every week you know pretty pretty reasonable uh and you know I had like four or five companies got you know $10,000 extra per month just doing that then these companies are like you know okay you've told us how to do this but Frankly Speaking we either don't have the time we don't have the skill set we don't have the inclination to do this do you mind just doing this for us and I was like you know what um I have a full-time job right now I'm doing this Consulting thing on the site I just don't think I can do this so at this point I tapped back into labor leverage I learned how to hire and manage people so I hired someone parttime and then someone full-time to help me then turn this Consulting business into an agency that helped these businesses uh build their social media audiences on on LinkedIn so with that being said you know suddenly that income had generated you know gone from $10,000 per month which is me alone to like me plus one part-time person that had gone into like you know roughly $3 to $40,000 per month next thing that happened after this is I actually someone reached out to me and they offered me a job and it made a huge jump in terms of my uh sort of like salary in I went from making about $100,000 a year to making about $400,000 a year and the reason that that happened was pretty much just because I had built a distribution for my skill set right uh someone saw that I was really good at building social media audiences they had a business that was very uh focus on building a social media audiences and that's how they wanted to grow so I suddenly you know my side hustle had jumped from 10K to 30 to 40K and then my income had jumped from 100K to 400k right so you know this gives you an example of you know the Sal path SL service path at this point I launched a product right so like I'm at my new job I launched a product and this product was an AI newsletter so some of you who are listening to this podcast right now might already be familiar with that newsletter the newsletter is called superum AI I launched that newsletter that was a product and basically you know the predominant way that it grew was through my audience I would write every day you know social media posts about how to you know how how to use chat GPT how to use cloud how to use AI what AI even is what are the big companies who's raising money what's like you know going on in the space i' write you know uh either tweets or posts about it on LinkedIn the bottom of the post I would just say hey by the way if you want more in-depth breakdown just follow my newslet right uh you know every month when I you know once I started that every month I was getting tens of thousands of people sometimes I even got like 100,000 people in a month to come sign up for that newsletter and that newsletter within 6 months was doing more than $800,000 in Revenue like within six months we had broken the $100,000 per month Revenue right so first just to you know put this thing in context start at a $50,000 job built my S you know knowledge leverage into $800,000 then I switched over to you know building my distribution leverage leverag that into building a $10,000 sort of like you know consultancy uh business then you know into a $30,000 uh service business then got a job that was you know paying roughly $32,000 a month and then you know leverage that into building a product that you know now does hundreds of thousands of dollars in in mul Revenue right so that's been my personal Journey obviously it might look slightly different for you but I think this is a basic sort of you know method or blueprint or framework that you can use to basically navigate through your career as well I think like the key thing also for people to remember as you kind of heard these stories from us is that you have to be consistent and just keep at it like you won't see results on the first time the second time maybe even 10 time right like but you still have to like go at it and eventually you'll start seeing little bit growth and after like few months or maybe a year like that growth will just be very massive again as you talked about like compounding early on the first 100 people followers are is really hard to get or even like you know convincing one person to like like what you're doing and giv you like a job is hard but the next one becomes easier the next one becomes easier and once you maybe get to like 10 or 15 the next individual like the next kind of like opportunity is much easier than the first month so so remember that right like if you're going to start on this journey it's not like let me just try this for a week and I'm going to go see results that's why we said like the next year right at the start of the podcast it commit yourself to one year of hard work in consistent way and you will 100% see results by the end of it if you're just going to try it like you know halfhazard and just not really be consistent about it you most probably won't see the results you know like it's uh that that is like a very critical thing I I would like to say here yeah 100% And I just want to say like this is you know we're not trying to you know promote some kind of getrich quick scheme or some kind of growth hack where you can kind you know this is not a substitute for hard work let Rich just gets you more mileage for your hard work like you really do have to keep at it all I'm basically saying is you know this way at least you're getting a lot of you know bang for your buck and a lot of like Roi on the time that you're putting in that's it uh I hope you found this helpful if you want me to do more episodes like this please send me an email at zuph human. and we'll be sure to make more episodes like this thanks for watching and I'll see you again next week