My comprehensive year in review covering personal achievements, business developments, and investment strategies in 2024. I share a detailed breakdowns of my wealth allocation, business portfolio performance, and social media growth. The review emphasizes a shift toward business simplification, increased focus on AI and technology integration, and the importance of building sustainable, scalable ventures.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro01:38 Biggest wins05:54 Biggest losses and lessons11:47 - Q&A from social media18:00 - Growth across social platforms25:00 - Wealth breakdown and investments33:03 - Business updates48:16 - Productivity gains50:48 - New insights and learningsKey Points:• Personal milestone of having first child and significant net worth achievement• Business portfolio performance across Late Checkout Agency, Boring Marketing, and other ventures• Portfolio breakdown: 75% stocks, 16% private equity, 7% real estate, 2% crypto• Platform growth across YouTube (11K to 146K subscribers), X/Twitter (361K to 420K followers)• Strategic shift toward simplification and focus on building "skyscrapers, not strip malls"1) BIG WINS 2024:• Had a baby • Started lifting consistently (+15-20 lbs muscle)• Grew podcast into major platform• Hit personal net worth milestone2) Portfolio breakdown (fascinating):• 75% stocks• 16% private equity• 7% real estate• 2% cryptoTop holdings:• 10% Berkshire• 10% SPY• 8% Apple• 7% Amazon3) Business Updates:Late Checkout Agency (LCA):• Found their niche: AI interfaces + community products• Booked solid with major brands• Started taking equity deals with billion-dollar companies Boring Marketing & Boring Ads:• Both crushing it• $100M+ in ad spend managed• 76 meetings booked in next few weeks• Unbundling tools for DIY customers• Created Boring Holdings umbrella company5) Key productivity unlocks:• Switched to Yerba Mate for afternoon energy• Simplified from Notion to Apple Notes• Using Things app for to-do lists• Less tools, more focus6) Platform Growth 2024:YouTube: 11K → 146K subsX: 361K → 420K followersLinkedIn: 82K → 149KNewsletter: 72K → 120K subsPodcast: 360K → 575K downloads7) Best decision framework:"Friday Afternoon Test"- Only make big decisions Friday PM when tired- If it still feels right then, it's probably right- Prevents caffeine-fueled impulse choices8/ MAJOR hiring insight:"Day Zero Integrity Test"• Give unclear instructions for small task• See if they ask questions or just guess• Reveals everything about future behavior9/ Key lessons:• Trust but verify (especially with remote teams)• Simple over Complex• Double down on what's working• Build skyscrapers, not strip malls• Tech investment over immediate profits10) 2025 Focus:• Finding long-term business partners• Building more proprietary tech• Simplifying business structure• Going harder on current opportunities• Scaling what worksNotable Quotes:"If this scales, do I want to be in that business? If not, what is the business that I want to be in?""My main mission is to build skyscrapers, not strip malls."Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses [https://www.startupempire.co](https://www.startupempire.co/)FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg
What a year 2024 is done 2025 incoming. And today, what are we going to do today? We're going to talk about my big wins, my big losses, how much I've grown on social, a wealth breakdown, including all the different stocks and equities. I own some business updates, like how my business is doing, um, productivity unlocks that I've had any insights and learnings.
We're breaking it down in this video. Um, and the truth is I don't know where this video is going to go. I don't know where this pot is going to go. I didn't come super prepared. I just wanted to, I wanted it to be like a conversation that I'm having with a friend. I've got a few ideas on what we can talk about.
And it's just going to be me and you having a conversation about my 2024 year in review. And my hope is that by listening to this, you will get some ideas about your year. And it'll get your creative juices flowing. I'd like to start off by talking about my big wins. So I actually haven't announced this anywhere, but me and my wife had a baby. Yes, we had a baby. She's seven weeks old.
And it's just completely changed my perception about everything. I know all parents say this, but I'm still processing what... what it all means. Um, but I can tell you that it's, uh, it's just, yeah, it's one of the most beautiful things, if not the most beautiful things, uh, that has happened in my life.
Um, and, uh, yeah, just having like a, a mini you kind of in the world that you get to teach, um, is, is so cool. Um, Yeah, had a baby. Looking for all the baby advice that you can possibly give. And excited to join this adventure. So that was number one. The second thing is I started working out consistently. I started actually lifting consistently.
And the amount of mental clarity that I've gotten from that has been amazing. I've also gained weight. I've gained a lot of muscle weight. I think 15, 20 pounds, something like that. So I'm bigger, which is kind of weird because when I look in the mirror, I look more broad. Honestly, I don't even know if I like the look. But the mental clarity is unmatched. So highly recommend lifting.
And how I got into it, I guess, is I got a personal trainer. So I got a personal trainer three times a week. I have to show up. I'm there. And I might reduce my personal trainer maybe to once a week. Now that I'm in the flow. But yeah, definitely enjoy just the benefits of lifting. I actually can't believe it took me until 35 to do it consistently.
And then the last biggest win is I basically grew this podcast into a serious platform. Actually, I'm going to give one more big one after this. I grew this podcast into a serious platform. Last year, going into 2024, there was a very small group of people who listened to this podcast. I switched the name from Where It Happens to the Startup Ideas Podcast.
I really started focusing on giving away everything I could in terms of value. I really just wanted people to take the ideas from the podcast and implement it and see what happens. It was in a lot of ways like a social experiment. People took these ideas. They learned... growth tactics on how to grow their businesses. They took a lot of the startup ideas and actually just went and built them.
It was a success and people just started talking about the pod and it's probably one of my biggest wins of the year. The last biggest win is I hit a financial net worth number that has always been in my head that I thought that I would never get to, but I hit it. I don't really want to say the number. That's not the point, but I did hit it.
I'll talk more at the end of why I hit it, but basically there was a company that I had stock in and it there was liquidity. I had a liquidity event and that was a good feeling. Okay, big losses and lessons. Obviously, not everything is rosy. I think one of the biggest ones is I felt that throughout 2024, I wasn't working on the most important thing. For example, I'm one of those people who
A lot of people tell me this, that I'm really quick on text and I'm quick on Twitter and I'm quick to answer people. And I don't think that's a very good thing. I find myself... I could get distracted by... Someone sends me a text message and be like, what do you think of this? I just find I get distracted a little bit too much. And I...
it's not like I'm distracted in the sense that I'm going to go and play Fortnite, um, distracted. It means that some other business text comes in and then I end up or email comes in and I end up, uh, I just end up in a rabbit hole and all of a sudden like two hours, uh, goes by and I'm, I'm, I'm just really unable to, to get back to where I was thinking.
So, you know, I'm, I'm spending more time on do not disturb mode. Um, I really think that it's the only way to get work done. I'm spending more time with pen and paper. I'm starting to write things down more. I'm spending less time in more hardcore productivity software stuff.
So less time in places like Notion where I get distracted and more time in places like Apple Notes where I feel more focused. So that has been a loss just because I haven't been able to get to the goals I've been wanting to get to just because I've been getting sidetracked throughout the year. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire.
So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience?
How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So You can check out the link to StartupEmpire.co in the description.
Another big loss has been I put too much trust in 2024 in certain teammates without checks and balances. So I'm one of those people that I look at
Uh, you know, I hear people like Andrew Wilkinson, you know, friend of the pod talking about how he hires CEOs and he builds these businesses and he has complete trust, you know, and a lot of trust with these people or, you know, Warren Buffett talks a lot, a lot of, a lot similar to that too, where, uh, you know, he trusts management to do the right thing. Um,
I feel like it's trust management or trust teammates but with checks and balances. There needs to be checks and balances and I didn't include enough checks and balances in 2024 and I had to pay the price. This is going to sound really dumb and I'll admit that this happened but we had someone on our finance team that was just putting in not the right numbers. The numbers were incorrect.
This was a costly mistake, hundreds of thousands of dollars type mistake. And it's going to be OK. It's fine. But we figured it out. But this is a person who we hired remotely who is literally working a second job. She wasn't doing it maliciously. But you need to have these checks and balances. Especially in a remote work environment, you need to have checks and balances. Big lesson learned there.
And then I'd say another big lesson or key learning, I should say, is that this year was a less profitable year than in 2023. And that's okay. On one hand, we did a year in review and like, oh my God, we made less money this year. We pride ourselves in building cash flowing businesses and And the reality is we were less profitable this year.
But it's okay because we are reinvesting our businesses, reinvesting more of our cash into technology and I'll talk more about that later. But It is a loss. The truth is, it's a loss. We should be at least 15 to 20% more profitable every single year. From a free cash flow perspective, we weren't. Next year, we'll do better.
I'm telling myself, we're just reinvesting more of the money into technology. That's true, but I think we can do that while also maintaining profitability. So right before I recorded this, I went on Twitter, X, and asked, recording your year-in-review podcast, what questions do you want me to answer? Nothing off-limits.
So let's actually answer off-the-cuff some of the questions that you all have, and let's rock. Or says, what are you least happy about in your current life? I would say I still, I've gotten much better at sleep, but I find I still wake up sometimes at night and I wish I had more deep sleep. And I'm still trying to figure out how to optimize it.
I know that sounds so trivial, but sleep matters so much. To me, it sets the tone for your whole day. Just crushing sleep is what I'm least happy about. Eric says, what are the stupidest things you're doing right now? Stupidest things I'm doing right now, honestly, is probably not just going harder, doubling down. This is such a good time to be building businesses.
I feel like I have so many unfair advantages. I feel like I'm going fast, but if I'm being honest with myself, I think I could be going faster. What's the one best idea to have to grow your business next year? Invest in technology. Just build software around each of our businesses. If you were to focus on just one thing, what would it be?
Hiring great CEOs and finding partners to incubate businesses with. Is that two things? It's basically like finding partners. The one thing I want to focus on is finding business partners and business partners that I want to work with, not just for one year, four years, like for the rest of my freaking life. What was your primary leverage for expanding your personal brand this year by Cody?
Probably X is the leverage. I think that's what you're trying to ask, right? I used X to create the flywheel for everything else around my personal brand. How did that growth impact sales and revenue? I would say without my personal brand, sales and revenue would be like 40% less. So millions and millions of dollars a year. Yeah, it's actually crazy. Many, many millions of dollars a year.
Joe Devon says, for obvious reasons, no one wants to talk publicly about hidden techniques to win at the social media game. From paid engagement to astroturfing and engagement pods, it's gotten harder to reach critical mass. What percentage of large accounts got there using these techniques? Honestly, I don't even know what astroturfing is.
The engagement pod stuff, I feel like it's definitely happening, but it's not the number one reason why someone grows. I don't like this mentality, to be honest. Yes, it's hard to grow, but it's also... I don't even know. Honestly, I think it's probably, on X specifically, it's probably easier to grow to 0 to 100,000 followers today than it was last year at this time.
And that's because the For You page of X... highlights more smaller accounts. So just like, honestly, like forget about paid engagement, AstroTurfing, whatever that is, and engagement pods, and just like create really great content that people need in a format that they want to accept it and do a lot of, and be a reply guy, like reply a lot to people, build relationships.
Um, and just like, forget about, just forget about these things. What single thing is having the biggest impact on your biz? Building media around our businesses. What's your best return on investment item? Like physical item? I mean, MacBook? Right? Given the volume of ideas you've generated come across this year, how did you keep yourself focused?
I should have been more focused, but every day, I write down the three things that I need to get done today. What are the three most important things? How many hours do I work on average in 2024? Hot take, 40 hours a week. You can get a lot of stuff done in 40 hours per week. Honestly, 99% of my entire career has been working 40 hours a week.
Of course, there's been times where I worked 70 hours a week and there's some deadline to hit. But I think you can get a ton done in 40 hours per week. You've got to be very constrained and focused. What is everyone in your industry completely wrong about right now? that GPT wrappers aren't real businesses. Did anyone take business ideas and run with it?
People are always taking business ideas from this podcast and running with it. It's absolutely amazing. Those are some of the interesting questions from the tweet. Okay, let's talk about platform growth. YouTube. At the end of 2023, I was at 11,000 YouTube subscribers. Today we're sitting at 146,000 subscribers. So that's an absolutely insane growth trajectory. I actually cannot believe it. And
The insight here is, I talked a little bit about in the beginning, it's just like knowing who your audience is and really just leaning into it. I think another smart thing that we did was we got really good at titles and thumbnails. And I think that helped. And the way we did it is we reached out to people who are the best in the game. We reached out to
the guy who did titles and thumbnails for Mr. Beast and was like, would you give us 15 minutes of your time? You'd be surprised. Either you can ask these people to give feedback or just pay for their time. Be like, hey, how much is 15 minutes going to cost to give us a little bit of
direction on where on where we can go and and a lot of these people i mean you can even like here's a hack like go to and i'm not affiliated with these people but go to like intro.co and like see like what are popular youtubers on there and and and just be like there are youtubers there that have millions of subscribers that you can just be like hey i'll give you 250 dollars or whatever they cost for 15 minutes and tell me everything you need to know about type
I need to know about titles and thumbnails. So YouTube, big lesson there. Focus on the niche. And titles and thumbnails make a big difference. X, I grew from 361,000 followers to 420,000 followers. So about 59,000 followers there. A lot of people here know me from X. I think most of my followers came from a few tweets. That's just the reality of X today.
Either your tweets go ballistic or they go absolutely nowhere. But I still think it's a great place to gain followers in the business niche. And my strategy there is the same. I've talked about it before. I have a notes file with... just key observations I make through the week. On Fridays, I'll go through it. I'll make it more into actual tweets. Some of them are bad. I'll discard those.
And then I'll post the ones that I'm ready. And I try to make my social platforms a bit more aligned. I don't want YouTube and the pod to be the only place where I talk about startup ideas. So I started on X to just be like, okay, here's some free startup ideas you can take. And it started to work. And I think I started to become known more in 2024 as a guy who gives startup ideas.
So that was a huge win on the X front. So not only did I grow, but I think I also kind of changed positioning and perception there. LinkedIn, I went from 82,000 to 149,000 followers. That's literally with doing zero work. It's just... copying and pasting my ex-tweets and posting some of them on LinkedIn. Podcast, again, big year for the podcast on audio and Spotify, which by the way, you know,
A lot of people listen on video. Definitely go and listen on audio on Spotify and Apple if you prefer to just go for walks and listen. I know I enjoy that too. It went from 360,000 downloads in 2023 to 575,000 downloads. I think it grew, but not nearly as much as YouTube. I'm still trying to figure out audio. I'm still trying to figure it out.
I also have a bunch of bad reviews on audio, some mean reviews. I don't like that. I don't know why I have some mean reviews there. In 2025, I'd love to get more podcast downloads and I'd love to get less mean reviews and more nice reviews. My newsletter went from 72,000
subs to about 120,000 subs so huge growth there and I finally cracked the nut with the newsletter so created a bit of a flywheel with people I post on X some free startup related content then there's a call to action to go and listen to the podcast or watch the podcast on YouTube and then people watch the podcast on YouTube mostly.
Um, and then there's a call to action with a lead magnet that says like, Hey, if you want more of this stuff, go and download X, Y, Z guide. So in 2024, I started creating guides that were lead magnets. So, uh, the, that flywheel works. Um, and it really started taking off towards the end of 2024. Um, I wouldn't be surprised if this time next year, uh, the newsletter exceeds 200,000 subscribers.
I think that's relatively conservative and totally possible. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it.
They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. Okay, we're going to go into the next section. It's the wealth breakdown section. I'm going to tell you about some of the stocks I own, stuff like that. So this year, my net worth has gone up 38% year over year.
So it was probably... It's my biggest year ever. A big reason for that, as I mentioned, is there was an investment that I made years ago that I got liquidity in. Also, the stock market ripped. The stock market absolutely ripped. Those are the two reasons. My net worth in terms of breakdown, it's 75% in stocks. 16% in private equity, 7% in real estate, and 2% in crypto.
So I'll just tell you some of the stocks that I own. This is not financial advice. Do your own research. I'm just sharing in case it's just interesting to people. 10% of my net worth is in Berkshire, Berkshire Hathaway. And the reason there really is I'm doing such more high-risk tech stuff. I'm just like, what's something that's extremely boring?
And that's why it's such a large percentage of my portfolio. Same is true with SPY, 10% of my portfolio. SPY is the S&P 500 index. Apple, 8%. Amazon, 7%. Microsoft 6%, WCLD 5%, which is a ETF for the Cloud Computing Index. In my last year, 2023 year interview, I talked about my thesis on this and it panned out. If you would have listened to that video and that episode.
and actually bought WCLD, you would have done really well. The thesis at the time was, and it's still a similar thesis, is that if you're a cloud company, you're very well situated to be an AI company. So the thesis was that cloud companies were going to become AI companies, which turned out to be
true um in a lot in a lot of sense so you know that that's wcld google five percent i actually trimmed some google uh towards the end of 2023 shouldn't have done that i was worried about um they're losing their search uh you know advantage and of course i i do think that they will like they had they had a monopoly on search so uh And it is their big moneymaker.
But at the same time, they have so many different business units now. It's such a conglomerate. Waymo is really crushing it right now. That's a part of Google. They've got Android, they've got YouTube, Google Cloud. Again, that's a part of my thesis. And Google Cloud is absolutely on a tear. So, I'm feeling good about Google, and it trades at 27 times PE or something like that.
So I don't think it's super overpriced. Pershing Square Holding is Bill Ackman's fund. He actually owns Google. He owns Chipotle. My thesis there is basically, he's kind of like a mini Warren Buffett. So I wanted to place a bet there and see what happens. Yeah, just place a bet there. IWM, which is an index of the Russell 2000.
If you look at the growth of S&P 500 versus Russell 2000, which I think it's Small cap stocks under $1 billion. The S&P 500 has absolutely destroyed the IWM, the Russell 2000. Just pulling it up. For example, year to date, the IWM is up 11% where the S&P is up 26%. I actually think that
small caps are going to be they've just been not in favor but i actually think they will at some point come back in favor so that's why i placed the five percent bet in iwm constellation software constellation software is another part of like you know i invested five percent into a minute you know bill ackman's uh
Pershing Square, which kind of operates similar to Berkshire, and Constellation Software also operates similar to Berkshire. They own vertical SaaS businesses, a bunch of them, and it's a 3% allocation there. Mark Leonard is the founder. He kind of looks like Rick Rubin. He's like a Canadian Rick Rubin, doesn't do interviews. He's like
We'll put up a chart of how well Constellation has done over the last 20 years. It's absolutely insane. Gone up, let's see. I mean, it's up 24,000%. all time. It's just absolutely crazy. Absolutely crazy. So he's a good steward of capital. And we'll see. That's a bet. Other stocks at 8%. Fixed income and cash at 3%. The private equity is mostly in funds and startup investments. Real estate is
I actually bought a new apartment for our growing family, so that's a part there. And crypto, 2%, and that's mostly Bitcoin. I guess this is a bit of a loss. I trim my... I rebalance my portfolio. I'm not one of those people that is glued to my phone to see how my...
portfolios doing at any given time i think that's a huge distraction but you know every month or every three months i'll look into it um and rebalance so i was rebalancing crypto as it was going up huge loss there right um i was selling bitcoin you know when it was at 60 000 and 70 000 and 80 000 um But that's the way I roll. I keep it pretty disciplined.
I think that a crypto allocation of 2% is healthy. And also in my private equity investments, call it another 2% or 3% is in crypto funds there as well. So for all the crypto heads who are like, I can't believe you're so low investment in crypto, I think I probably have a 5% allocation in total. which I don't think is crazy. So that's my wealth breakdown 2024.
And I don't really think I'll make huge differences in 2025. Maybe just add to those positions as I get more information. Okay, business updates. Late checkout agency, which is our...
design agency that builds new products uh for for the biggest brands in the world from you know shopify to nike to dropbox um had a great year it had an absolutely great year and i think we really hit our stride especially as you know we've we've designed some of the the biggest ai products um because people were coming to us and and you know years ago literally and saying hey like
We're Dropbox and we're looking for a new AI product and we want to build a new AI product so we would build it for them. We would design it for them. We would help them to think through a lot of these things. I would say there that it was a good year. The lesson there I think is, especially with agencies in general, is you do need a niche down. I feel like we found
our two niches in 2024, which is building new products. I call them community-based products. So what is a community-based product? It's like, we'll basically go into your community and build them a website, an app, a new product that really speaks to that community, that drives revenue and drives word of mouth. And then just AI interfaces. We've become known as an AI interface agency.
And we are just booked up. We are so, so booked up. We'll probably do more partnering with some of the big AI companies and just basically take some cash and some equity as a part of those deals. So we did a little bit of that in 2024 and we'll continue to do that in 2025. And what's really cool about that is
The costs are covered, and then you basically just get upside in these really, really fast-growing businesses. They're not even startups at this point. And then you just build that portfolio, and I'm very excited about that. I don't think a lot of people are doing... equity for services. And we're very specific on there's only a few companies in the world that we'll do it with.
And they need to be multi-billion dollar companies. But I expect to do more of that. Oh, and by the way, Late Checkout Agency, we actually kind of rebranded to LCA. I don't know if it was a good thing, honestly. I don't know if we should have just kept it Late Checkout Agency or just call it LCA. We did a whole rebranding thing, effort. It's definitely fun to rebrand, but did we need to do it?
Does Late Checkout Agency, is that a better name? I'm starting to get used to LCA, but I do notice that people still call us Late Checkout or Late Checkout Agency. I don't know. That's a, that's a question mark. That's me being real with you. This is me having that friend to friend conversation. Uh, who knows there, but, uh, okay. Next business update is boring.
So boring marketing, the end of 2023, we had started to scale it. I was doing millions of dollars a year of revenue, AI assisted SEO. Um, And it continues to do that. It continues to scale. We're starting to use a lot more agents. The implementation of boringmarketing.com has a lot more agents and a lot more AI, a lot more proprietary technology that we built.
What you're going to get from us in 2025 is just more tools that you can use on your own. So you won't need to you won't need to sign up to the service to actually get the amazing result of boringmarketing.com. That was one of the key insights, I guess, for 2024. Some people have their own SEO teams or have their own marketing teams and are just like, I just want to implement myself.
And it's like, okay, great. We're unbundling a lot of the products. In early 2025, you'll see some cool stuff there. We also launched BoringAds.com. So boringads.com is crushing it, absolutely crushing it. And it's the same idea, which is AI-assisted for creative and the best possible ads. Because the reality is...
meta and a lot of the platforms, they do a good enough job at actually managing it. But it's like, how do you actually analyze the best industry and competitive ads to find winning creative strategies fast? And I think it's really, really starting to pay off and work. We spent $100 million in ad spend. We've scaled billion-dollar brands in 2024. this is going to be a killer business.
It already is a killer business, but I wouldn't be surprised if boring ads becomes bigger than boring marketing. You'll see the same sort of approach, which is we start with consulting to figure out the problem. Then we build technology to optimize our workflows to be ahead of everyone else. Then we We sell that into our consulting clients. They start getting really good results.
Word of mouth goes like crazy. I'm boring marketing and boring ads, the word of mouth is absolutely insane. I got a note in our Slack yesterday that we have 76 booked meetings in the next couple weeks just for boring marketing. And I'm sure boring ads probably has more. It feels really good not to have a lead problem.
It feels really good to have customers have great experiences and just tell other people. I think what will happen with boring ads is, again, same sort of thing with boring marketing, is we'll unbundle some of these ad tools that people will be able to use themselves. We're already doing that. Stay tuned.
And what's happened is now we have Boring Ads, Boring Marketing is now under a new company called Boring Holdings. So it's essentially we incubated a holding company. So it's pretty meta. We have Late Checkout, which is a holding company that owns LCA, owns Boring Holdings. So that's an interesting thing that's happened here in 2024. Okay, business updates and you probably need a robot.
You probably need a robot was a newsletter, was a newsletter that 60,000 people signed up to to get information about AI and how to use it to become a better solopreneur, better an entrepreneur. And we shut it down. So we shut it down. Well, we shut down. Yeah, we shut down.
You probably need a robot and as is and turned it into a bit, you know, added it to a business that we already had running called Startup Empire. Now, what is Startup Empire? A lot of you already know what Startup Empire is. It's a membership that people sign up to who want to accelerate their ideas, who want to build businesses. There's a ton of contents there, tools there, community there.
In some ways, it's almost like the de facto membership for this podcast. And there's like million plus dollars a year in savings and discounts for tools. You get a free school membership, which is worth $99 a month. And people pay $149 a month to be a part of it. And it's really designed to essentially break even. But for us, like the Late Checkout team, to basically...
hire from there, buy companies, invest companies, stay connected. What we basically realized is the startup empire monthly email was so similar to the you probably need a robot monthly email. It's like, why are we dividing and conquering? How do you simplify that in a way that just makes sense? We just basically said, okay, We're going to bring that email into Startup Empire.
We're already doing so much of the same stuff, which is people in Startup Empire are interested in using AI and agents to build their businesses. Let's bring it in there. It was a win for the Startup Empire community because now all of a sudden they've got more content and they're getting better emails. And
And it was a win for like late checkout in the sense that every time you add a new company, it's just like another trial that you have to manage. So if we can simplify things, that's something we really want to do. So that is what happened with you. You probably need a robot. Did it fail? I mean, it failed as is, but is it succeeding in some form? Yes.
Startup empire, people are getting tons of value out of it, and it's nice to see it live on. DesignScientist.com. That is a design subscription that people pay monthly for and they get on-demand decks, on-demand social assets, that sort of thing. That business did... Oh, I think around 1.3 million in revenue.
So it has some staying power, like people like the product, but that is being evolved into something else. I'm not ready to talk about what that is going to be. But there's some product market fit there. But I think it could be a lot bigger. In the current setup, I don't see it getting to $10 million. It's one of those things where you have to ask yourself, if this gets to $10 million...
Do I want to be in that business? Do I want to have 200 clients I'm managing? And the answer is absolutely not. So it's a helpful exercise for people to basically ask yourself, if this scales, do I want to be in that business? Oh, if not, what is the business that I want to be in? And that's the current exercise that we're doing with Design Scientist.
We actually have an off-site Jan 6th to 9th where we're going to be talking with all the partners of Late Checkout what we're going to be doing with it. So stay tuned. So that's the business update of all the businesses. Overall, super happy with how things are going. These are cash-flowing businesses every single day, spinning off cash, great teams, teams happy.
We don't have a lead problem, which is really good. It's just about fine-tuning, optimizing, and scaling these businesses to being Businesses that have more enterprise value, less services driven, more AI driven, working with more cool companies, and looking to acquire and partner with interesting entrepreneurs. That's something that...
Boring, for example, came out of a 50% acquisition that we made in December 2022. We want to do more of these things. We want to find entrepreneurs to partner with and build businesses with. We want to do more of that in 2025. I didn't really mention it, but we're also incubating a bunch of new products. I talked about
Offerbutton.com, which is kind of like a little widget to help you sell your company. And there's things like that that we're incubating. So we have a little dedicated team that's incubating a bunch of different products using AI coding, using agents.
And it's one of those things where you throw stuff against the wall and you see what works and you evolve them into something that you're excited about. And that's what it is. That's the big learning from running a holding company is You throw a lot against the wall, you make a cash flowing, you evolve it into something that excites you, you simplify it wherever you can.
Last year, 2023 going to 2024, I said my main mission is to build skyscrapers, not strip malls. Which what I mean by that is instead of having like a hundred little companies, how do we have only a few companies and build it up higher and higher? And that's kind of what we're doing. We're trying to simplify as much as possible.
And we're kind of asking ourselves the hard questions around, are we excited about these businesses? And if not, how do we evolve them into something that really gets us stoked? Okay, moving on to the next section, productivity gains and productivity gains. Unlocks, 2024, what's things I've changed? One is I started sipping on Yerba Mate.
Okay, I got to be honest, this is coffee, but Yerba Mate, I try to drink in the afternoons. I drink a brand called Amanda, I think it's Amanda Traditional. I can include the links in the description.
and uh i just i find i sleep better because i'm not like drinking coffee in the afternoon um i get the energy kick from it it's more sustained um the way i drink it is over ice with a little bit of honey because it's a bit bitter um you can also use maple syrup syrup shout out canada and uh And I've been enjoying it. So highly recommend Yerba Mate.
Number two, I started using Apple Notes way more. So from 2023 into 2024, I was using Notion for everything. Our whole business is run on Notion. Our team likes it. I'm not hating on Notion. But for me, it's too complicated. And Apple Notes is the bare minimum of what I need. And I just find I'm extremely more productive with Apple Notes. It's simplified my thinking process.
So I highly recommend just simplifying your productivity stack if you can. The last thing is I use an app called Things on my phone and on desktop. It's a to-do list app. It's just like the most beautiful to-do list app I've been able to find. And I honestly have had Things since 2011. But I haven't really been using it. I've used more complicated to-do list apps.
And again, you're hearing it again. It's like simplification things. It's very focused. It's a really pretty app. And it's been really helpful in terms of productivity gains for 24. Another section, new insights and learnings. I wanted to share a couple of these with you. There's something I call the Friday afternoon test. I didn't make it up. A friend of mine told me about it.
He basically is a CEO of a few hundred million dollar company. He says he only makes big decisions on Friday afternoon. He says, if it feels right when you're tired and ready for the weekend, it's probably right. I thought that was really interesting. A lot of the time, you make these big decisions when you're in the moment and you're really stoked.
You've got a lot of coffee in you and you're like, this is amazing, let's go. Take a second. Don't make any impulsive decisions. Let it sit for a bit. And when you're tired and ready for the weekend, let's say it's a Friday afternoon, how are you feeling about it? Are you still really excited about it? Are you more excited about it? Are you less excited about it?
And maybe it doesn't need to be Friday afternoon for some people. Some people it could be 6 p.m. on a Wednesday, right? You're trying to get through it. But I think the point is have that weekly reminder, Friday afternoon, Wednesday night, whatever it is for you, and ask yourself, is this the big decisions I need to make this month? Maybe it's not a weekly meeting. Maybe it's a once a month.
These are the big decisions I need to make. Am I excited about it? And the same founder actually gave me another insight in learning. He calls it the Day Zero Integrity Test. So he gives someone a small task with unclear instructions and then he, you know, he basically sees if they ask any questions or they just guess. What's cool about that is it tells you everything about their future behavior.
This is for when you're interviewing someone or it's their first week on the job. Just give a small task with unclear instructions and you'll learn a lot about how someone works. I guess my last insight, and this is going to be obvious to people, but like,
I don't know if I can sleep with all this like AI agent stuff that's going on, you know, like my insight here is there's a ton of opportunity right now. And, um, some of the biggest opportunities are, are in the kind of the most boring spaces. so I'm just, I'm trying to strike while the iron's hot. Um, I think the iron's going to be hot for at least 2025, maybe even 2026.
Um, but it's a really, really exciting time to be building. Um, and, uh, and I want to thank you for being with me in 2024. This has been the most fun year of my career. Uh, it's been so fun, you know, recording this podcast, having people listen, seeing the comment section blow up. Um, Thank you for being there. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for liking. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you.
This year I will give more startup ideas, more growth tactics. I will never gatekeep anything from you. This podcast is not about gatekeeping. This is about just giving you free value. I hope that in 2024 I gave you an ounce of free value. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. This is it. This is what I'm going through at the end of 2024. These are the things I'm thinking about.
And I'm curious to know what's on your mind. So thank you for listening and see you in 2025.