- Hello everybody, it's Sam from the Financial Samurai podcast and in this episode I have a special guest with me, Dan Andrews from the Tropical MBA. Say hello. - Hey, thanks for having me man. This is cool. - No worries. I thank you for joining. So I first discovered the Tropical MBA when I started Financial Samurai in 2009 and you also started the Tropical MBA in 2009.

And one of the things that was so interesting about your site was that you were living, I think in Thailand at the time or somewhere in Asia, and I wanted to live that digital nomad lifestyle because it was the financial crisis and the recession and you were living it.

You were living the dream. So I'd love for you to talk about why you started the site and how did you get the gumption to go out to Thailand and to do the things you were doing? - Well first off it started with China, which was my, I'm not a good business person necessarily, but I would walk around and touch everything and be like, "Is this made in China yet?" That was my way of having a business idea.

So I become acquainted with sending faxes and emails abroad and then waiting 12 hours for them to come back and this idea of globalization was very real to me when I started reading books like 4-Hour Workweek and stuff like that and I'm like, "Yeah, I do work at 9pm to make sure that our partners abroad are carrying on." So 4-Hour Workweek was kind of a really seminal book for a lot of people because at that time people felt like the workday didn't end at 5 and that felt new.

I don't know, that felt like, or just something that was very frustrating about our careers, that it was just like all the time. And so I started spending more time in China and then when I realized SEO was going to be a thing. >> So search engine optimization for those who don't know.

>> That's right. But also that we couldn't afford it as a small manufacturing company. I started seeing these gurus pop up online, people like John Jonas who were saying, "Hey, did you know that there's over 100 million Filipinos that speak English?" And I was like, "No, I did not know that at all." And started kind of going down that rabbit hole and with the combination of traveling to Asia I got a sense that we could really build a strong digital marketing presence in Asia and that's really how the whole journey started for me.

>> And before that decision to move to China and do that, what was your educational background and how did you decide, "Well, let's just go to China because I don't think most people would think that." I think 60 plus percent of Americans don't even have a passport. >> Yeah, I probably had early formative travel experiences which blew my mind and I didn't really control my time or my location my whole life.

I was always in school or at a job and it was incredibly frustrating to me especially as my work hours and my salary started to go up. I remember when I started making $100,000 a year I was working for a small manufacturing company and I realized, "My God, I can't travel anywhere." I mean between dentist appointments and family responsibilities and some fun here and there, I really can't do much even though I've reached this goal I had for myself to "make a lot of money." My background was I studied philosophy and with the sense that I might be able to go into academia so I'd have the freedom to read and write for a living.

What I found was it was extremely competitive. The compensation was really poor and also you got kind of locked into these random locations like "Yes, Iowa State" or whatever. That would be a really good job and I thought, "I can't." >> Oh, but that's where the Writers Guild is, right?

That's like the top. >> Well, yeah, I mean for sure but you have to live in Iowa so I don't know if I'd make the trade. >> Okay. Iowa's got some good stakes though but yeah, I hear you. >> Yeah, I mean it was always just sort of a thing in the back of my mind that I guess I equated travel with freedom and that I would ultimately need to find a career that would allow me that freedom.

>> Yeah, why not do both, right? Instead of maybe what most people do is they work all their years in one country and then when they retire, then they go and travel the world. >> Essentially, yeah. >> How long were you in -- when did you go to Thailand and how long were you there?

I think was it in Chiang Mai? >> So basically what happened was I moved to the Philippines to start recruiting a back office staff. We started hiring developers and writers and I was spending a lot of time in Manila and things thinking, "Oh, you know, Manila's a great place to hire but not really where I want to live." >> Oh, interesting.

>> So I started exploring the region and at that time, we were having so much fun. I thought, "Man, I bet other people would want to come out and do this." I bet people would take a pay cut to come work for an e-commerce company. And so that's where the Tropical MBA came from.

It was literally like, "Come to the tropics and I will teach you how to be a marketer for an e-commerce company. I will teach you SEO. I will teach you all these skill sets and then you'll be able to go start your own company in the next couple of years." And that's really, it wasn't even a blog at the beginning.

It was really just a job offer. "Hey, I'm paying this developer in Manila a thousand bucks a month. I'll pay you two thousand bucks a month and just come hang out with me and we're going to build this business." And that was kind of the concept. >> I mean, yeah, I was very back in the financial crisis.

I was thinking to myself, "If I lost my job, I would hopefully get a severance and then maybe I would try to do that internship. Even if I couldn't get that internship, I would go anyway and just try to live my life out there and see what you all are up to." Because it was the new frontier then and now it seems pretty ubiquitous about people making money online.

During your business time, where did the main source of revenue come from? Like what was e-commerce but then you had marketing. So how did that look like? >> Just to piggyback on that instinct, Sam, it's funny you mentioned that because we had ended up doing 12 internships and a lot of it was fun.

One is a very famous dividend investor right now. A handful of them turned out to be very wealthy. It was a lot of people that were on the fast track that just wanted to see what was going on. And then the other half was people just out of college that wanted to do the classic internship.

So it was this very vibrant community when we ultimately got a villa in Bali and had a pool. >> I mean, that sounds amazing. >> It was super fun and it really felt like a moment. We couldn't believe that you could do it. It was still kind of that, "This is so crazy.

We're making more than we made in jobs, but here we are in this affordable, fun paradise." Now it's a cliche, I think, the digital nomad thing, but at the time it really felt special. It really felt, to me at least, like a dream come true. So at the time we ran a company that had a warehouse in Temecula, California that warehoused parking products.

So especially valet key stands that you see outside of hotels. That was our best product. And so in Manila, in Bali, we'd be building this website called the valetspot.com. You can still go there. We'd be doing outreach to partners. We'd be putting up SEO optimized articles. Maybe one of the big challenges for us at the time was there's not a lot of good e-commerce solutions like Shopify today.

So we were building our own shopping carts and website using systems like, I think at the time we were using Drupal, which is quite a complicated web framework. So that's why we needed these developers. In California, I was getting guys nights and weekends for like $3,500 a month. And in Manila, I sat right next to a partner who was a high level developer for a thousand bucks a month.

And that was the arbitrage that we were taking advantage of at the time. So for listeners listening to this, I mean, that sounds so random. You're creating valet parts in California in a factory and then you're in Asia arbitraging the developers. I can't even imagine how to start thinking about that.

With listeners thinking, most of the folks probably have day jobs, maybe they're investors, entrepreneurs, I don't know. How do you even conceptualize that idea and then execute? Because it feels like a lot of people have a lot of ideas, a lot of places to exploit profits, but execution is a real big problem.

I think one of the mistakes people make is they read a book like 4-Hour Workweek or Dan Kennedy or name your business guru and they say, "I want a business like that." But then to forget about the fact that you're already probably getting paid a lot of money for your skill set, kind of start with where you're at, like a moneyed skill set.

At the time, I did contract manufacturing. That was what I was good at. If Sam, you come to me and you say, "I want 150 tables that are built out of this material and I want them delivered in St. Louis in six weeks." I would go to China, I would have my designers in California figure it out and we would do that for 150 pieces.

Now at the time, I'm starting to think to myself, this really sucks that every time Sam or Paul or Jane calls me, I got to build whatever they're talking about. I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if I could just make a thousand of something and keep selling it?" So that was a problem I saw.

And then we say, "Well, how would then you identify what to build?" And at that time, there was this concept called keyword research that people on the internet were starting to talk about. And I was learning about it because we were trying to market this contract manufacturing. I thought, "Wow, you can really figure out how many people every month search for something." And you can get a sense for whether or not they're buying intent keywords.

And so we had all these ideas like, "We're going to do cat furniture and dog furniture and we're going to do..." It was all across the board. And we found this really tasty small niche of valet parking products. And when we started to do research on the incumbent players, we thought, "Man, we're actually a little bit more sophisticated.

Some of these people are welding in Los Angeles and then they're shipping on pallets." We do knockdown fabrication. We build in China at high-class factories. There was all these things that gave us the confidence that, "Hey, maybe we could get involved in this space." And we just pieced it all together.

And of course, we were broke. We were young kids. And so we were like, "Well, we can't afford to build an e-commerce site." So that's really where the Philippines connection came in. So we just pieced it together by what was right in front of us and trying to improve our situation rather than saying, "Oh, I'm going to be Tim Ferriss and sell supplements on the internet." We were inspired by that.

But we looked at what we were already doing and good at in our current relationships and kind of improved from there. That's fascinating. And you actually just kind of went and did it. So for me, I... Well, part of the reason I did it, Sam, is that I didn't have a lot going for me.

I mean, you know what I mean? I think it's a lot harder if you have a great career, if you went to a great school. That's true. I don't think I necessarily would have taken this path, but I don't know. I didn't go to a great school. I didn't have a great career in front of me.

I was just working really hard for a small manufacturing company. I thought, "It's better to try out the Thailand thing." If I'm going to toil away at my desk for the next 30 years to go to Thailand someday, I might as well test it out to see if it's worth it.

Where did you go to school and how much did you make before you decided to be an entrepreneur? So I went to Clemson. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship my second two years. It was about $14,000, $15,000 a year. I studied philosophy. So I accumulated about $45,000, $50,000 in debt during college.

And so I kind of had that. And then when I came out my first job, I think I made $32,000 a year. And within a four-year period, I got four or five-year period, I got not up to $100,000. And that was kind of like the ... I was still in debt at that time.

That was at the moment in my mind when I thought, "I don't think a higher salary solves this problem for me." I've got a spending problem. I've got an earning ... Because I was living in San Diego, I've got a cap on my income. I'm going to have to work for a very long time to get percentage increases.

And then I also have a lack of freedom and time. I used to do these calculations where between doing my laundry and purchasing new khaki pants and driving to the office on the 5, I really only had a few hours a week to invest in myself. I was listening to these books and podcasts on the drive.

And I realized I didn't have enough time to implement or chase after the things I was learning. And I think it was the combination there that really started to crack my worldview. And I thought, "Man, I need time. That's my constraint here." Now, you said you were making 100 grand four years after college, so around '26, '27, but you still had some student debt.

Did you have a financial kind of buffer or target where you had to save up before you said, "You know what? I'm going to try this and take this leap of faith"? No. I don't know. No. I was just saying, "Well ..." Let's go for it. Not at all.

Not that I recall. I mean, I probably had $2,000 or $3,000 in my bank account, maybe $6,000 or $10,000. It wasn't a lot. And the buffer for me was cash flow. So at the time, I had started this business and it was cash flowing. And I remember I walked into my boss's office and it was a terrifying conversation.

I should have read your book first. And I said, "Look, I got to go." And he's like, "What do you mean you got to go?" I was like, "I got to see this through. I got to figure out what this business is going to be about, what web marketing is going to become." And I said, "I think I'm going to go to like Vietnam or Buenos Aires." I was 27.

And I remember he said to me, he said, "You can't go." Well, I was like, "Well, what do you mean?" He's like, "Well, I'd like to continue working with you." He's like, "I want to see what you're going to see too. I want to be involved in the web marketing stuff." And I said, "Okay.

Well, you can't keep paying me $100,000. So how about you pay me $50,000 and we'll work on the stuff together?" And sure enough, we worked together for the next four years. That $50,000 I made from him was a critical part of my entrepreneurial journey. That severance or that consulting gig with my former employer made it so much easier to be more aggressive with my own business.

And because that client had cash to invest. So I took another $50,000 from that company, which at the time had about 40 employees, and I was investing that money into a web marketing team on their behalf. And I learned a lot from spending and investing that money. And so it turned out that it's a classic example of if you close a door, maybe another would open.

I would never have expected that to happen. I wasn't depending on it, but it became a critical part of my journey. Wow. Actually, that sounds like a great severance. Great cash flow, great backup plan. I mean, that's really smart in being intentional to give you that financial buffer to take the leap of faith and do something else.

Because as you know, most businesses fail after maybe five years, definitely after 10 years, they just can't keep on grinding because of whatever exogenous variable. So that's pretty amazing. And so now- Well, one of the ways your audience can apply that is, my partner recently did this where if you make a good amount of money as a professional, you can typically downshift and fractionalize out your skill set for a small amount of time of your week.

So as an example, if you make $150,000 a year as a director of marketing, you could take on one client for $2,500 a month and do one day or $5,000 a month and do one or two days of work for that money. And then now you've freed up three or four days.

In particular, if that client has budget and you're just deploying and managing the budget, which was my case, so I actually didn't work at all for that money, I simply deployed the budget and managed the team. So it took me half a day a week and that was a really good deal.

Got it. Now just on procuring products from China, so I have a business idea. I play a lot of tennis and my shoes, the soles, they wear unevenly. And so on the outside of the sole, it just wears and then it's just unbalanced. So how hard or easy would it be for me to come up with a prototype and then go to China and say, "Manufacture these soles that I could just plug on to my sole of my shoe so it's flat again and then I can just elongate the life of my shoe," because the sole is what wears out first, for example.

Cool product idea. I love it. Now I'm waiting to hear your golf swing aid coming next. For me, nowadays, the hardest part about manufacturing in China is really the demand part. From which side? Well, making sure you can sell the things. So for example, if you told me, "Here's what I suspect the margins will be," which would be pretty easy for us to figure out.

Yeah, 50% margins. Yeah, okay. So then we can project out on a pro forma, we get a sense for what this is going to mean for us financially if we can sell X number of them. Now that's the hard part. If you can figure out the demand part, if I come to you, Sam, and I say, "I think based on this funnel I built or whatever, we're going to sell 10,000 units in our first 12 months," then for sure we can get it made.

The hard part is how are you going to fund your trip to China? How are you going to invest in that relationship? The hardest part of the equation with 90% of products is the demand side. Interesting. When you go to most of these industries in China, it's been there, done that.

Yeah, they have built replacement soles. So it's just a matter of digging into the details of what that's going to mean in your particular case. Interesting. Yeah, because I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. Depends how innovative, I guess, is what I'm getting at. I mean, this is going to be really innovative, cool colors, amazing material.

It's going to make your shoe greater. It's going to make you taller, all that good stuff. And I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who have product, but their number one problem is distribution to get that demand. So for Financial Samurai, there is distribution because there's an audience. Correct.

But I got no product, except for, well, I got my "How to Engineer Your Life" e-book, and then I've got a book. And other than that, I'm not selling anything, really. I think, by the way, I was doing an episode about how to have business ideas recently. And I think that going to, well, we call you an influencer, a thought leader, with solid operational business plans to responsibly capitalize on their distribution is such a cool idea.

So, for example, in my case, I could imagine a world like I have group coaching experience where I could find a way to get on your calendar and say, "Hey, Sam, would you consider a joint venture for six months where here's how we would address your audience?" We'd walk through it.

I have my whole team involved, and we'd responsibly walk your readers through financial training in a group setting. And you would be able to watch it in these ways, and here would be the revenue split for that. I feel like that is, especially for creators who mostly want to build out what they're really good at, their work, having an operational partner that could come in and responsibly monetize the audience, I think, is a great business idea.

In terms of product people, you asked earlier, "Why are our products so random?" It's because I think something about the literature we were reading at the time, it made us understand that in this new world, the demand part was going to be where the winners became the winners. And also, for us, it was a new opportunity.

In the good old days, you had to have a rent place on Main Street. Well, now, with Google Search, you could have the equivalent of the nicest real estate for just hard work. And that, as young kids with no money, was a very obvious opportunity. So when we saw something like valet parking products, which we estimated to be worth...

It's like having the storefront on the corner of Main Street, because it's a multimillion dollar industry, well, we could have that for free. And so that's why we did it. It wasn't because we were passionate about parking products. It was because we were passionate about whatever we could own the best real estate for.

That totally makes a lot of sense. And especially post-pandemic, with a business that can't be shut down, having an online business is even more valuable, more lucrative. So I guess my question is, why don't more people do this? Why don't more people think about the online business world instead of just going to a day job where they make $50,000 a year out of college and then just grind it out for the next 20 years or 30 years?

That's funny. It was the same question we were asking at that pool in Bali. Why does everybody want to come? I remember asking that question. And the answer that I got from my friend David McKeegan, who ended up building one of the businesses I admire the most. It's called Greenback Tax Services.

And what he does is taxes for expats in a productized level. They have really made an incredible business out of this. And he turned to me and he said, the reason is, is because it's going to take 1,000 days of effort where you're making less than what you'd make at your professional job.

And he says, I just don't think that people are willing to go through those 1,000 days. And I since just ripped the idea off from him and I just went around and writing about it and it seems to really resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs because a lot of us remember fondly that being broke to do this.

I just don't think people want to be that broke to build cat furniture or parking products or to write blogs on the internet and to be mocked and derided by your former colleagues and your family. Oh, man. Man, you're bringing back all these memories I had. I was totally mocked.

I mean, my parents were not – I mean, they were – support is not the word I'd use but they were great. But like – Yeah. I mean, they thought I should have stayed in my job which I think is decent advice from parents but I think that's a journey that's for people who are willing to take that risk, I guess.

Yeah. I think we mostly optimize for safety, stability. We invest in index funds instead of taking concentrated home run bets. But as a result, you end up just kind of average, average life which is fine. If you have no regrets, then I guess that's fine. But I resonated with A Thousand Days because I started Financial Samurai in July 2009 and I didn't leave my day job until what, May, April, May 2012.

I remember when you left. Yeah. It was really scary times but I mean that's almost three years of just kind of grinding it and just writing what I wanted until I felt confidence. But it was really that severance package that gave me the confidence to say, "Oh, do or die.

Let's do it." So I hope more listeners think about entrepreneurship not as such a scary, impossible thing but something you can actually do on the side before you go to your day job or after your day job because you never know what could happen. And clearly you, Dan, have crushed it and have continued to do what you're doing.

And I think it's way better now than can you imagine still being whatever you were doing at your day job making now maybe $160,000 a year? I remember my business partner, we were having dinner last night after a bike ride and we're all sitting around a bunch of founders and he's like, "Sometimes I wake up and I pinch myself.

I haven't gone to a job for 20 years." Yeah, jobs were hard for us, I think, emotionally. It was hard for me. I don't know why. It was hard for me to feel nervous about getting a dentist appointment. There was some of these small indignities. I couldn't… I had to ask for permission to kind of be somewhere.

As an adult now. I feel guilty about it. Yeah, and it wasn't even necessarily about the money or not having more than three weeks vacation or two. It was more those small indignities about my day-to-day life that became untenable for me. But I do like your advice a lot about finding parlays and sticking in your day job as long as possible because there's… By definition, you're making… You're a profitable business if you have a job.

And so really digging into how you can be better at your career, how you can have a side hustle, how your career could support you in your next… And keeping the cash flow going. So I think having a mind to entrepreneurship and not just cutting the cord is a better strategy generally.

Yeah. So tell me, you were in Asia for a long time. And when did you decide to come back to America and why? Well, one of the simple insights that your writing recognizes that not a lot of financial writers say is you talk about relative wealth. And so one of the cool things if you do have a writing or podcasting or creative project, you can just move to Chiang Mai and you'll have a hard time spending more than $3,000 a month and living a good lifestyle.

And all of a sudden, you're relatively wealthy. Yeah. Very wealthy. And so that's a nice little hack if what you want to do is free up your time and you have some savings or a smaller cash flow. Or that would be the reason to get that one client that's paying you stress-free $3,000 a month to do what you do at high stress for your job right now six days a week.

You can move to a place like Chiang Mai and leverage those other four days. So I ended up, I think what happened for me was I was doing better financially. And a lot of places in Asia are developing and have frustrations that come along with living there. And at first, it's an adventure.

But then it becomes frustrating. And so I thought, I went to a few conferences in Barcelona and different places in Europe. We started another business where we started pulling together founders at events. So I got to see all these new cities. And I remember the first time I came to Barcelona, you know how when you have an image in your head of a place and then you go there, and it can be a lot different.

Sometimes people think Tokyo is going to be a bunch of robots running around. And then you see a bunch of hipsters. It's more subdued in terms of maybe the branding. And for me, Barcelona's brand was so understated at the time. When I got there, I was really blown away by how beautiful it was and how close to nature it was.

And so I thought, well, I can afford it. I'll move to Europe now. I did that for about three or four years. And when the pandemic hit, I finally decided that was time to return back to America. Oh, yeah. I love Barcelona. It's an unbelievable place. Good nightlife, good food.

I remember going to Barcelona, then Mallorca. People love life in Europe. Compared to the United States, people really live it up. Maybe that's why the unemployment rate is so much higher, taxes are so much higher, and there's less innovation out of Europe. But strategically, making your money in America and then moving to Europe is a good plan, I think, for a lot of people.

If you have a hustle mindset and you want to get something off the ground, America and Asia are better places. But if you want to enjoy your money, the fruits of your labor, Europe is a better place. If you're the one person there that's hustling in Europe, you're swimming upstream a little bit because the whole point is to enjoy yourself, or at least a lot of places in Southern Europe that I hang out in.

So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Travel has never left that passion for travel. So for example, my partner and I, we're taking off here in a few weeks. We're going to be going to Paris, to London, to Barcelona, to the mountains, to Italy, to New York, to ...

It sounds exhausting, doesn't it? Then we'll be going to Bangkok. Then we'll be going to Osaka. So the whole rest of half our year is a bit of a digital nomad party, so to speak, because we'll probably be building a family here in the next year. So it's kind of just that last hurrah.

Go around, visit as many friends as possible. Go to as many cool conferences as possible, and to bring my bike, too. So yeah, that's, for me, my version of enjoying what we've built is being able to ... I love taking a few days off and then opening up my laptop in Paris and genuinely working, like working on the business for a few days, but also being able to meet people there and enjoy a different sort of life.

It's pretty exciting for me still. No, it's the magical lifestyle that I dreamt about, but I was stuck in the grind and banking, and then I had kids in 2017. So it's really like if you have the opportunity to travel and do something and go on an adventure, go take it, because I don't think you'll ever regret it.

No, but I don't think you'll ever regret having kids, too. Kids to me is like higher up on the achievement level. Anybody can get a plane ticket, but ... That's true. Yeah, it's not easy having kids. I mean, I don't want to take it for granted that we have kids, but I'm kind of in a holding pattern now where I got to wait until my kids are old enough, so the youngest one is only three and a half, so maybe when she's five and a half, then we can go travel.

So then that way she can sleep better and remember her travels. Yeah, my best friend and business partner, his son is five and a half, and he knows that he's going to Barcelona in a few weeks. I just called him the other day and we were talking about it.

And he goes to a different school there, and he has different kind of ways to play there. And one of the things that I think is interesting when you leave America with kids is how much more kid-friendly a lot of other societies are around the world. Strangers will interact with children.

There's safer places to play. There's sort of spaces where parents maybe have some food and drinks while there's like a communal playground where there's a bunch of restaurants surrounding it. It's really kid-friendly in Europe and in Asia, I found, relative to America. That's actually good to know. A lot of my friends who are parents, they really look forward to that time of year when they go abroad for a few months.

And it's just a lot easier to have kids in a lot of these cities that are more walkable and less traffic and things like that. Did you experience any reverse back to America besides the kids thing or what you noticed? Reverse culture shock. I think the most shocking thing about America is how expensive it is.

There are certain things that are very good value in America, maybe square footage, clean air, recreational, national parks, stuff like that. But a lot of the services, luxury stuff, it's a really sticker shock. My little heuristic I've been rolling with is in order to have consumer freedom, I feel like you need to be making four times what an average professional would make in wherever country you're at.

I've been going around doing that math. And for here in Austin, Texas, you have to make over $200,000 a year, I think, to just basically have the sort of freedom that I've been working for. So that's the first shock. But honestly, I think a lot of the culture shock stuff for me was in my head.

Maybe I was trying to figure out who I was and build an identity for myself. And when you come back to go to a wedding or to do a family responsibility or a conference or something, you think, "Man, I worked so hard to get free from all of this." I think a lot of that was really in my own head, Sam.

So no, not really. Sticker shock, not culture shock. Sticker shock, not culture shock. Got it. Well, it seems like you're still going to have the best of both worlds. You're going to go on your lounge like maybe family is in the works. Are you excited about that new stage?

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I'm thankful I was able to build the business in a way that I think is sustainable and has longevity. And also, yeah, travel and go on a bunch of adventures. I'm ready to go on the big adventure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The big 18-year-plus lifetime adventure.

So what is your latest business now and how can listeners follow you and keep in touch and see what you're up to? Yeah, I mean, we've built, much like you, we have a podcast called Tropical MBA and essentially that's our distribution. And so every few years we sort of ask ourselves, "Well, what does the audience want?" It started with events and then it became a private forum.

And our most recent, oh, then it became recruiting services and hiring services. So we started providing those to the audience. And we would bring in division heads, performer recruiting professionals to run those different divisions. And our most recent one is seven and eight figure founders. They want a cool kids table.

They want a cool kids lunch table. They want their own private community and mastermind where they know that when they go to an event or show up to a mastermind call that everyone has built wealth from their own location independent business. And so we recently started this new community and we've got over a hundred applications for it and it's been going great.

So it's been fun to pick up the phone and speak with people with much larger businesses than our own that are seeking to connect with each other. So it's essentially like a networking and mastermind business. So it's been a fun and exciting year. That's great, Dan. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me for this past half hour.

It's been great seeing your journey and I'm really excited for your next journey. Being a dad is probably, I think, harder than being an entrepreneur, especially harder than being a day job employee. So best of luck to you and if you have any questions or want any advice, just shoot me an email.

I will do so on that, Sam. And to all the respect in the world for what you've built, I've been following since day one. And I think you're an incredibly unique voice in this space and we appreciate it. Thank you. Cool, man. Thank you. Let's see. Cool, man. Thank you.

Thanks for watching!