Stop Asking Questions

I gotta say. So Jason Cohen, who is speaking here at the conference, and so many other people were on back when, I started interviewing. And it's been amazing to watch these people, like Ryan, with determination, with a vision for what they're gonna do, and watch how far they've come. And then Jason Cohen came over to my house, the guy from WP Engine recently. He and his wife were over. You were over at the dinner too. Yes. And just to watch these people I didn't do the tequila. And building.

It's it's ex the reason I'm saying this is I've gotten to know them professionally through the interviews, and then personally to see how good they are as people, and how good they are as friends and relationships and now with their wives and with their kids, and it's it's exciting. It is exciting. So, it's funny. You guys saw me do this yesterday with Ross on stage, when he won give revenue. I sort of already knew that twenty twenty one revenue was confirmed at forty one million before I reshared and reminded him that he told me that a couple years ago.

I said, have you doubled since twenty twenty one? You know, and he said yes. And I said, okay. So you're doing eighty million bucks of revenue. That playbook came or that question, that framing came straight out of this outline on just right down page thirteen. Okay? Andrew Warner's got sort of this these thirteen tactics he uses, and it's all about not only just having a guest on, having a great interview, but how to do the prep work, do all that stuff. Now before we get into, like, the meat of the book, there's an Alaska story here we have to jump into.

So, actually, it was even harder than Alaska. One the year before the pandemic, I had this goal of running a marathon on every continent in one year. That's easy. North America, I'm here. I could do it. South America, no problem across the border. All that stuff. Antarctica is really tough. I And I called up the marathon in Antarctica, and I said, can I run your marathon? And they said, yeah. I said, great. When? Twenty thirty. I go, no. I gotta do it all in one year. They said, too bad.

There are international laws about who can get there, what you can do. I was offering to pay any amount of money to get to Antarctica. Couldn't do it. Twenty, thirty, whatever. I go on my podcast and I say to my entrepreneur audience, how do I get to Antarctica? This guy, Eric, says, there's someone who has an old Soviet plane. You can get on that flight, get to the heart of Antarctica, and run your marathon, which is what I did. And And the reason I bring this up in here,

this actually is the mug that they gave me when I got there, so that I could stay warm because it is cold in the tent there. The reason I bring that up is because we're doing these interviews and there's so many business benefits, but when you're reaching the right people, the benefits go beyond business. Anything that you want, you can get done. Things even that you can't get done with money, you can get done by reaching the right audience. That's how you and I met. That's exactly right. Now out of curiosity, how many of you guys, for your SaaS companies, are thinking about building an owned and operated media brand so you don't have to pay for somebody else's traffic?

Raise your hand high. Raise your hand high so we can take a quick pulse. Okay. Yep. Pod okay. Great. So maybe twenty, fifteen, twenty percent of the room. Take us back. When did what was the year you published your first episode? It was a while back, two thousand six. That's wild. I mean, did the iPhone wasn't even or I mean, how do people listen to you? The year before, they would listen on the computer. Okay. Yeah. Wow. On the iPad. Yeah. IPad. Okay. Wow. Interesting. So that's how it all got going. Now, when you first got going, you sort of tell this story about how sort of, like,

this sort of awkward and you needed to sort of, like, programmatically attack interviews to get more out of it. What were you thinking about that first year? I just wanted to I I don't know if anyone saw the Malcolm x movie x. You saw it? He stands outside of churches trying to convince people to follow his religion instead of the one that they just walked out praying to, And I felt like that's what I wanna do. People were going into jobs. They were going into these old fashioned business models.

And I said, no. There's this new thing. It's entrepreneurship. It's SAS. It's you building a different life. And that's what I was trying to do. I was just standing and evangelizing this new life. Yep. I had a company before and so I knew how good it could be. I don't know how to ask good questions unless they're super relevant and selfish to me. So that's what this is gonna be, basically. Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. One of the things that drives me crazy while listening to other people's podcast is the the the the host. So you guys with your own show, you feel an allegiance to the guests. You feel like you your job is to make sort of the guest feel good.

And so what happens then is you let the guest keep talking. When they're not giving any good value. You don't have to cut them off. The problem is your audience doesn't even stick around. You guys know I cut people off like crazy because my allegiance is the audience even if it comes at the expense of the guest sending me a cease and desist. You caught the promotion stopper. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When people just keep going and going and going tactic. You have really good ideas how to get out of this. The technique is to do what you just did, which is to say, I'm sorry to interrupt, but and then you tell them why why you're interrupting, what the other thing is. And I do this in dinner conversations too.

I might say, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I gotta find out about this thing you told me last year. Mhmm. Mhmm. You just give people the higher reason, and they'll go onboard anything. Mhmm. You also have an affinity for data. There's episodes early on where, you'll sort of hit for the data. And and sometimes they you know, people go, Nathan, why do you end an interview early because the host the the guest sort of blows up, and it goes downhill quickly? I haven't figured out how to recover, but you have a very good strategy for, like, when you ask a direct question, the person responds negatively. You read that and figure a way to pivot and move on.

Tell us about a horror story where it didn't work and then how you taught yourself to get around that. The the worst is, if you guys know Jason Fried of Basecamp, he's been really good to me over the years. But man, he could be really tough. And he's everything that he's doing is exactly right. He's he's promoting his ideal. And I go, Jason, can you tell me about a time when things didn't work for you? And he goes, no. No. No. Sometimes when things are right, they just work. I go, Jason, but you're creating Basecamp. It's project management. But wasn't there ever a business that didn't work? He goes, listen.

Sometimes things just work if you're right. And if you're on the right track, it's great. I go, nothing worked with him. So then I hired a producer, and I said, look at this transcript. What could I have done differently? And the producer goes, you gotta join the resistance. I go, what do you mean? He goes, when people put up a fight, when they won't tell you, just go, yeah, you know, you're right. So what I learned to do in this work, the next time I interview Jason, I go, Jason, tell me about a problem that you had. And he goes, we didn't have any. I go, must be so great to have it easy, man. So many of us have to work hard, and you just get to have it easy.

He goes, have it easy. Do you know that Campfire was a product that we tried to create, and it didn't work out? Now look what's going on with Slack, and they took off, and these other businesses took off. I go, great. Join the resistance. You he gives great examples like that in the book. Again, it's called join the resistance. It's one of the six converse or nine, eight conversational tactics. Another one that I really liked that you used, you call it, the double barrel question. Can we try and role play for a second? Let's say you were interviewing me about founder path. Team me up with a double barrel question. I'm putting you on the spot.

Okay. No. No. I have it. I just want you to like me, and so I'm holding off. No. You don't. You don't. Your allegiance is to them, not me. Make make them love this even if I hate you afterwards. You know what? I'm noticing that there are a couple of people who used to be here that aren't. Is it inappropriate to ask if founder path is struggling now? So that's a great question, Andrew. One One of the hardest things about founder path is when we give money out, there's no collateral to take over. There's no assets.

And so sometimes if somebody's late, we have to go actually, you know, take in and do what's called a UCC recovery. So you're right. There are people here, that haven't done that, but it's also the reason that we intend to be here for ten years. It's because if we don't collect on bad debts, our fund goes underwater, and we can't offer an option to early stage founders that banks ignore and VCs ignore. Ignore. So we're okay with a couple people not showing up year after year. Okay. Yeah. God. That was pretty good. I do. So the barrel the double barrel.

I gotta polish that a little bit, but That was good. The double barrel question is, if there's a question that you're not sure you wanna ask someone, like, are you still married was one of the questions that I had for for an entrepreneur. It could be a real turn off. Look. We're talking business. Now you're asking me, am I still married? But it's relevant because they started the business with their wife. How do you ask? So what I've learned to do is to ask two questions in one. Isn't it appropriate to ask you if you're still married? Is it too personal to ask you about your wife? So now you ask two different questions,

and people instinctively will take the easier question. And if you watch my, man, what's that, that customer support software that's Zen something? Zendesk. Zendesk. If you watch my my interview with the founder of Zendesk, I did that with him. I said, is it inappropriate to ask you if you and your wife are still together? Because he kept talking about the problems that you have when you're working and still have a family. And he goes, yeah. It's inappropriate. And you moved on.

So people will push away and move to a different topic. And if you look at the video, you see you start smiling and laughing. If I would have just been, tell me about your wife. It would have been too That's the difference. You and me. You move on and say, well, why didn't you wanna talk about it? In the interview, we would do that. I would yeah. Because I know that that episode will then end early because he'll hang up on me, and I'll get the most downloads.

And, still, I do see that the people who you've interviewed, you build friendships with. A few people here who are speakers, who are guests, you've built relationships with. What do you do to build relationships with the people you interview? I think the the people that respect my style of interviewing, they value the data a ton because they're so used to being sold consulting services from people that have never done it. Right? And so they know that at the heart of the movement, what I'm trying to do is just make sure that if you're

listening to any content by Nathan Lacka, Laca, you know that I verified the person that I'm interviewing. They they are walking the walk. They are talking and talking. You're gonna get the data. And so the way I look at it, you know you know, I've done over three thousand three hundred interviews. You know, if one percent of those are unhappy, that's thirty people complaining and sending you cease and desist. That's actually a lot of people. Some people don't have thirty total episodes live. I'm totally okay with one percent of the of the guests hating me afterwards. It's it's part of the show. I do remember, actually, we were friends and I said, I don't believe that you get cease and desist.

And so you started texting me the cease and desist letters. So Adam Robinson don't try it because I never we've never lost. But, yes, we get them all the time. Adam Robinson's gonna speak in a little bit. Yes. Hey, Adam. Freaking guy is so good on LinkedIn. Right? Why do you do interviews instead of, like, getting better at and promote or producing a podcast or something else? Why interviews for you? What have you found? Because I'm lazy. Seriously. The best way the the lowest energy and the least cost cost and the most efficient way for me to produce content is

sitting out on Zoom for twenty minutes and doing my thing. If I then have to actually put together the playbook to cut, copy, paste, scrape, cut, add the script, add thumbnail, SEO optimization, it just I then don't enjoy the process as much. So we're you know, we that that's the actual reason. Right? That's why I keep doing interviews. I I think that's a very legitimate reason to do it. He's got a whole team of people. I had no idea we were talking about. Well, you're gonna see his p and l too. He's gonna show you the cost of his team. You'll see it's not cheap, but he's investing.

I'm cheap, Adam. It's like, you know, I'm like, give me a two dollar freelancer to to fix the interview on Lipson, and that's all I need. So that's the By the way, that's the beauty of interviewing that you really can let the guests do half the work. I didn't have to be great. Right? Ryan had to have a great story. All I had to do is say, hey, Ryan. Can we do an interview? Yes. Yes. Now can you tell me the numbers? Can you make this all be amazing? Yes. And now because of the interview, things do well. Now what I have seen people do though is they say, okay. Now I've done the interview.

I'm gonna pull out the guest best ideas and put it on LinkedIn and put it on Twitter and other places. Our big growth sort of tactic is is GitLabKit today gets about six thousand organic clicks from Google per month. If you guys search any software company right now on your phone on Google search plus the word revenue, we will rank GitLab will rank number one for it. And so our email list is massive. Where does SEO play? Yeah. That's such a great idea. I didn't think to do that. That's our only thing, though. But you do you do other things much, much, much better than we do. That works really well. Yeah. I love that. I wanna touch on one other thing because I think it's really important.

Sometimes, you know you're about to ask a question on an interview Yeah. Where you need to sort of, talk about an icon that you've interviewed in the past and sort of give the guest permission to sort of mimic or answer sort of, like, the icon story. Tell us about how you use an icon story. Actually, what do you mean by an I Yeah. You would say something like, okay. Let me think of an example. Actually, can I Okay? I have an example. Go ahead. You know you're entering a founder where they had a massive clash with their cofounder, and they, like, bought their cofounder out.

And you know it's gonna be hard for you to ask them that question live. So what you do is you say, hey. Jeff Bezos had a cofounder founder that he had to buy out. Yeah. Yeah. I hear what did you do with your cofounder? What I do is I find someone who they admire, their icon, and I use them as an example, and then I get the so the best example was for years and probably still to this day, Paul Graham of y Combinator was one of the most admire admired entrepreneurs. He said something like, you have to be a little bit mean or a little bit something.

Right? You have to be a little devious. That's what it was. So I would say to entrepreneurs, Graham Paul Graham says that you have to be a little devious. Were you devious? Now they either don't live up to Paul Graham's standards, and they shouldn't be entrepreneurs at his level, or guests? Yes, please. Because the truth is, a lot of people who are listening here are saying and and when you

had you bought so many of my books yesterday so that I could sign up for you. I'm like, how many people love this? So the big question that came up was, how do I get these these big people to come and do an interview with you? Real quick. On the count of three, yes or no, do you wanna hear how to get great guests? One, two, three. Yes. There you go. Go for it. Yeah. Especially since it's hard to even get a client on the phone. The the the thing to do is to look for those motivated moments, those moments when they've just published a book. When you publish your book, you are out there doing interviews all over the place. When somebody launches a new bit when you launch a new

business, you are much more likely to say, yes, I will talk about it to new people. You look for those motivated moments, and at that point, you say, can I do an interview? And another thing is you stick with the person, meaning, like, you ask them a couple of times. A lot of people who you wanna get to do an interview with you will have these BS detectors, and part of their detection is to say no to see if you'll come back. Just come back a month later, two months later and say, can I can I do an interview with you now? And then the final one is ask your audience. I could not get Fred Wilson, the investor,

to do an interview with me. I said to my audience, can anyone get Fred Wilson to do an interview with me? People started just approaching him because it gives them something to talk about. One guy got him in the elevator of their building because they happen to be in the same building and said, you should do an interview on Andrew's podcast. He goes, fine. I'll do it. That's awesome. Yeah. And you got him. And I got him. And it it's great that the audience asked, and it's great for the audience to have some way to reach out, some excuse to reach out to people. I love that. The book is called Stop Asking Questions. We've got five minutes left. And, unfortunately, I just have a sneaking suspicion. You're about to get, like, good questions.

So, I'm just gonna open it up to you guys. Any questions you want for Andrew Warner? Raise your hand. I'll call on you. You'll yell it out. We'll rock and roll. Who's got a question? Who's got a question? While you guys are thinking about your question okay. Go ahead. And just your name? Juan. Juan. Run away. What do you got? Andrew, how do you stay consistent for so many years without, you know So let me repeat the question. Andrew, how do you say consistent for so many years? How many interviews have you done? Over two thousand. How do you do it? The thing is that if you create a Calendly and you start handing it out like, I just handed it out to Adam.

We were shaking hands. I go, great. Will you do the podcast so I can ask you about this LinkedIn thing? He goes, sure. I sent him a Calendly link. Now he's going to book, hopefully, for next week, Adam. Please. I gotta find out. Good. There you go. And then I'll do the same thing. And if you have people on the agenda, you can't just back out. If you're a decent person, you show up for what you've scheduled someone for. Now once you show up, if if you have a team that's producing it, they're just gonna publish it and it's gonna then the machine just keeps working. Mhmm.

And so unlike a writer who can have just the they have writer's block, there's no such thing for interviewers. You always have the curiosity about something. Yep. Before we go to the next question, hey. Photo team, total permission to come behind us. Try and get a shot behind us. This is a good crowd, and this is a great guest. Yeah. Thanks. Okay. Cool. Second, who's got another question? Yeah. Name, and what's the question?

Okay. So to repeat it, how do you do the research process to prepare for the meeting? The number one thing I think people should do is just get selfish and go, what am I trying to do? What do I wanna know? And that really helps me. Like, I and I hate to keep coming up with you, Adam, but I'm curious about how you're writing on LinkedIn and promoting and building your audience. I could do this whole BS song and dance about how did you start your company, what did you do this, what do you believe about that. I don't care about that. I care about how he built up his his LinkedIn following,

how he's creating content on a regular basis, why it matters to him, if at all. Get really get really selfish, and your audience will love it because they are also curious about what you're curious about, and they won't deal with you being half assed and not really interested. Mhmm. Good one. Next question. Who's got a question? Right in here. Yep. Name first. Charlie. Rich, do you have sponsors for how to make it profitable? So let me repeat. How do you make it profitable? Do you make money? I do. There are a few different ways. So I'll tell you the evil way because I know you're gonna love it

because I think it's been fantastic. Helping my brand here. No. I am. Okay. So a few people years ago said these interviews are so good. You should pay for it. So I we should pay for it. So I said, okay. I'll put the old ones behind a a paywall. Great. What happened was, though, now people will go back and look for, how did linda dot com create this content company that she sold to LinkedIn for a billion dollars? Let me go and look. She did an interview with me. For an hour, she told the whole story. They will go and try to get that because there'll be a big play button.

As soon as they hit the play button, a pop up comes up and says, what's your email address? Meaning, add so let's say, okay. I'll add my email address and I'll get it. After they do that, they say, okay. Now what's your credit card? Because you need to pay to get the old stuff. Now I'll be honest with you. Hardly What do you charge? It's fifty bucks a month. Is that what's even on that? Interesting. Is it inappropriate for me to ask how much revenue you do today? It is. So here's Get off the stage. No. No. No. I'll tell you. Truthfully, I I don't know the number right now. It's not that much.

It's never reached more than, say, three hundred thousand Okay. A a year, not a month. Okay. So but what here's what it does let me do. I have an automation that about an hour later, I emailed back because I know they're not gonna buy it. They don't know who I am. What am I gonna give this guy fifty bucks for an interview with this woman? I come back and I say, you didn't get this thing. I want you to have it. I care about you more than I care about money. Here's a link to get that thing. Now that creates a relationship where they don't just say, here's another piece of content that I found on some kind of

Google thing. It's Andrew values it. Here's a thing that Andrew values that he's giving me for free. And I got that from Naval Ravikant. I go, Naval, you're fucking sorry. You're freaking rich. Why are you selling fifteen dollar ebooks? He goes, so then I could give it away for free and people appreciate what I wrote. Oh, that's so smart. Yeah. That's great. That's a great nugget there. Alright. We've got we got a minute and a half left. Next question. Alright. Right in the middle. Go ahead.

Quality versus quantity. I think what you should do is you should go for quality quantity first to otherwise, if you're getting started with an interview, with writing, with anything, you're gonna get in your head, and you're gonna go, this is not as good as the people that I admire. What am I doing with this? So you're gonna keep polishing and polishing until the thing never comes out. But if you have quantity as your goal, publish an interview. For me, it was publish every single day. I moved to Argentina. I got disconnected from all my other stuff, and every single day, I was gonna publish an interview. And you naturally will get better. And if you have to produce,

you'll naturally start to make small improvements and iterations. And I think quantity first quality will come from that. Last one, right in the middle.

How much did you spend on the podcast in the first year? I I used to do it myself, Then I hired, someone else to to produce for me, someone who was inexpensive in Guatemala. Like how much? Couple like, dollars. It was it was under a thousand. A few hundred dollars. Then I hired a great producer that my first million just hired to produce their podcast. And I said, wait. Maybe if people care about my producers so much that they're gonna hire them away, I'll just let people hire my producers part time.

So lately, people have been hiring my producers part time. Are you wait. Are you offering us as a service? I am offering it as a service. Oh, wow. Okay. So where can people learn about it? Come and talk to me. And, it's andrew at mixergy dot com. Come talk to me. But even if you don't wanna work with our team, I really want you to see the value of this. Just like Nathan, we talked a few years ago, I got no upside from it, and now we've got such a great relationship. They've helped me so much over the years. I will help you with anything that has to do with your podcast, with getting to know people, with interviewing people, because I know ten years from now, you're gonna be on stage somewhere like Nathan. You're gonna say, Andrew,

come sit on stage here or something else. And I really would like to be a part of that journey with you. I love it. And before we wrap, grab your stack of books here. Let's hold just hold them up front here. Here. And I want people to take a picture of it because you only have eight or nine. Is that what I have? Well, whatever you have because there's not enough for everybody. But stand up here. I'll hold up the book. Oh, thank you. So people can take a take a hard cover. I like to look at that. People can take a cover, a picture of the cover, and grab it on Amazon if they can't get assigned one. But, guys, give it up one last time here for Andrew Warner.