[00:02:05] Patrick Donley: I’ve been having a good time already talking before the interview and hitting record.

[00:02:09] Patrick Donley: So this is going to be fun. I just want to thank you for your time. I’ve been a big fan of yours and Noah’s and Sam and all these guys for a long time. And it’s just, it’s fun for me to get you on the show and talk and hear a little bit more about your life and what you’re up to. So I wanted to get into some of your early days stuff.

[00:02:25] Patrick Donley: You’ve got some funny stories. Like I listened to an interview that you were doing online, online sales. And you told your parents that if you didn’t keep up a certain GPA, that you were responsible for your tuition. And I think at a certain point like you didn’t hit that GPA that they said you had to hit and you paid them, you wrote them a check, and boom.

[00:02:45] Patrick Donley: I want to hear about some of that. Like, how did, what was the online business? How did your parents view this? Cause you were thinking what, like law school or when you were in college?

[00:02:54] Neville Medhora: I tried computer science originally because that’s the hot thing in the year 2000 or whatever, 2001 that I went to college and everyone’s doing computer science.

[00:03:01] Neville Medhora: I had a weed-out program. So there are 16, 000 applicants in 5000 spaces. So I got weeded out. So after that, I was like, I guess law school could be cool. I wasn’t really set on that, but it was, let’s see where this takes me. It was too early to decide, but my parents did want me to have a high GPA.

[00:03:16] Neville Medhora: And I was messing around with this online business stuff. And you have to remember at the time, that was very unusual for a younger person to have. Like when I said I had an internet business, people were like, what? Like it just, it wasn’t like a normal thing at the time. And so I owned a rave company.

[00:03:29] Neville Medhora: This was what? 2001? 2001. Yeah. I’d started it in like the summer before I went to high school or somewhere around that time frame. I’ve been messing around with websites and stuff. And I realized you can sell stuff online. 

[00:03:41] Patrick Donley: And the dot com crash had just happened, right? 

[00:03:44] Neville Medhora: Just happened. Although I was too young to, I don’t know if I really felt it.

[00:03:48] Neville Medhora: I didn’t have an impact, right? Like it didn’t, I didn’t really feel it necessarily. And so I think the big downturn was in 2001 with 9 11. That was like, that was the cratering, but I know there was like a dot com bubble. You heard a lot about it. So I made a website called houseofrave.com and I sold rave stuff like glow sticks, light disco balls, and stuff.

[00:04:04] Neville Medhora: And I had a drop shipping company. that fulfilled it. So it was another supplier that sold the same things and I called them. They never asked how old I was. I never was, I was like 17 at the time. And I said, Hey, I’m going to rank on Google for all these things because I did know something about SEO at the time.

[00:04:20] Neville Medhora: And SEO is much simpler. And I was like, so if we all rank at the top of Google, you’ll own all those results. And therefore if I send an order, I’ll just send it to you and you make a little bit less, but you don’t have to do anything for that order. They would fulfill that order. So someone ordered 50 bucks of glow sticks from me.

[00:04:35] Neville Medhora: I paid 30 for it. I took that 20 percent spread and that was my profit. That was the business. At the time, that was like an innovative model. Now dropshipping, the cat’s out of the bag. Everyone knows about it. But that was innovative at the time. And that’s how I was making money. And I had a bunch of little side hustles with Google AdSense sites and stuff.

[00:04:51] Neville Medhora: And I was making a few hundred bucks a month, maybe sometimes a few thousand bucks a month, depending on the month, and yeah, my parents were like, you have to hit this GPA, and I did not hit it, and in reality, they were still going to pay for my school probably, but I wrote a check and paid for the tuition, I think it was like 6, 000 or something for that semester, and they were like, where did he get this kind of money?

[00:05:09] Neville Medhora: And 6, 000 in the year 2000 was, I’d say like a lot more than it is now. And so they’re like, Oh, this online business thing is actually making money. And I think that’s the first time that they were like, Oh, that’s interesting. Cause just remember not that my parents were against me trying things.

[00:05:24] Neville Medhora: This is just like a new paradigm that the previous generation had never seen before. Making money on the internet was not really a thing that anyone was familiar with at the time. So yeah, that was the first time that they were like, Oh, huh, maybe this is paying off for him. 

[00:05:38] Patrick Donley: So you went to the University of Texas.

[00:05:39] Patrick Donley: I think you were in the same dorm as Michael Dell, right? 

[00:05:42] Neville Medhora: Yeah. Jester. Jester Hall or what? Was that it? Yeah. It was called Jester. Yeah. It was like a big door. A lot of people live there. I think there’s 2000 people that live in Jester, but yeah, it’s just this notoriously large, I think maybe the largest of the United States dorms.

[00:05:55] Neville Medhora: And yeah, Michael Dell started Dell out of Jester as well. Yeah. Good memory. 

[00:05:59] Patrick Donley: So was he an inspiration? As you’re doing these entrepreneurial things, was he like an icon at the time that you looked up to? 

[00:06:06] Neville Medhora: Yeah, everyone knew about Dell at the time. He spoke at the University of Texas all the time.

[00:06:10] Neville Medhora: I actually sat next to, get this is a Michael Dell story, I snuck in with fake press credentials to the World Financial Summit or something like that. like a long time ago. And I sat next to Michael Dell watching the speeches. I sat directly next to him and chatted with him. 

[00:06:26] Patrick Donley: That’s amazing. And Lance Armstrong was there too, wasn’t he?

[00:06:29] Patrick Donley: Was that a different one you crashed? 

[00:06:31] Neville Medhora: Yeah, that was a different one. I crashed. I’ve met Michael Dell a bunch of times. That was an Andy Roddick charity benefit, I believe. And I crashed that. And I also briefly met Michael Dell. It wasn’t like chatting with him or anything like the other one, but I met him a bunch of times and saw him speak at the University of Texas.

[00:06:46] Neville Medhora: He would frequently come back and speak. And you go listen to him and stuff, shake his hand, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. He was definitely an icon. He’s still, I believe still lives at least partially in Austin. So pretty cool. 

[00:06:57] Patrick Donley: So you’re doing this business, the rave business at any point where you’re like, I think I’m done with college.

[00:07:02] Patrick Donley: I think I’m just going to go, I don’t know if Michael Dell finished, but like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or the Steve Jobs route and just drop out and focus on this full time. Or was that not an option? 

[00:07:13] Neville Medhora: I never thought like that. I grew up in Indian culture. I was just like, I’m definitely going to get a degree.

[00:07:18] Neville Medhora: I never seriously considered dropping it. I think a lot of those guys, what happens is their success is so meteoric that you’re like, okay, look, college will always be there, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, right? You’re on this train that’s going to the moon and that’s not a common thing to catch.

[00:07:32] Neville Medhora: So if that happened, maybe I would have considered that, but that wasn’t on such a meteoric rise. There’s like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dell. These are like once-in-a-generation opportunities. Like successes like that, they drop out. So people were like, if I drop out, I’ll just go full on my thing.

[00:07:45] Neville Medhora: I’m like, but those guys were already on a rocket ship to the moon and that’s why they dropped out. They weren’t like, I’m just gonna drop out and try something. So I think Elon Musk was the same. All these people, they were just like, we are catching a wave and we gotta ride this, and if I gotta take two years off school, so be it.

[00:07:59] Neville Medhora: But yeah I never thought of dropping out per se, but it definitely did distract me from school a lot. I remember there was one semester where my server went down and that’s if you owned a physical store, your store burns down, right? It’s on fire and you got to go put the fire out. And I remember it was during exams time and I did really bad that semester because of that.

[00:08:17] Neville Medhora: That was partially at least the cause. Also me being dumb, that’s probably like another thing, but also just being distracted, like my stories are like, I couldn’t think about anything else and I had to solve it. And so it definitely did impact my studies to some degree, but overall, I’d say in retrospect, that experience was far better than anything I learned in college.

[00:08:34] Neville Medhora: So I’ve never been one to slam college. I’m not like colleges for suckers or all that. Maybe if you get an English degree or something, I agree. That’s probably stupid for the most part. I don’t think that’s helpful, but if you are getting a solid degree, then I love college. I thought it was a great experience.

[00:08:47] Neville Medhora: I recommend most people do it if they can and they’re getting a good degree. 

[00:08:52] Patrick Donley: You thought about computer science, you ended up in poli sci, you did not apply to law school, right? You’re doing the rave thing. Did you end up ever having a quote-unquote real job where you went through the interview process your senior year and went through that?

[00:09:05] Neville Medhora: No, never. I got job offers. I was in an investing club called University Investors Club, and there are roughly two, 300 people in it. No one really bought and sold stocks except me. And that was a funny thing because I had a business inside Income. I could actually buy and sell stocks. So I tried some day trading and all that kind of stuff.

[00:09:22] Neville Medhora: And I would give presentations about what I learned and these people from Morgan Stanley saw it, they would bring in like these people from different companies to talk and they’re like, Hey, it’s a pretty good interview. Do you want to work for Morgan Stanley? And that sounds cool at the time, but really what they want you to do is sit there and cold call all day.

[00:09:38] Neville Medhora: And I was like, I don’t think I’m the guy for that. So I never accepted one of those, but I got job offers from several places. And that’s what gave me some confidence, like, if I don’t get a job right away, I probably could get a job at some point. So I knew I could, I had some sort of skills that I was like, okay, these people do want me to come to work for them.

[00:09:55] Neville Medhora: I could probably get a job if this fails after two years. So that gave me some confidence to go out on my own. Because like I said, that was a very unusual path for a college student back then. I think now it’s very common.

[00:10:07] Patrick Donley: I want to talk a little bit about the investment club and day trading.

[00:10:10] Patrick Donley: Did you have a strategy that you were using or how did that go? Do you have any kind of memories of that time? 

[00:10:16] Neville Medhora: Yeah. Of course, I was young and dumb as 18, 19, 20, that timeframe. And I would wake up in the morning and watch CNBC and listen to the bell ring. I hate to wake up in the morning, but I would do it for that.

[00:10:26] Neville Medhora: I had the two monitors going with all the charts and I’m like Oh, I think this one’s going to go back up. It was like hunches. Yeah. It was like dumb stuff. It was gambling. And so I started watching all that, but I will say to change course on this one, what changed my mind about day trading was Warren Buffett.

[00:10:41] Neville Medhora: And yeah. He had been rich for six decades at that point. So you’re like, okay, maybe this guy knows something about something. And so I listened to all his stuff and he was talking about day trading. Most days traders don’t make money. You pay a lot of capital gains, you make one big win, but you have five big losses and no one ever talks about those losses.

[00:10:56] Neville Medhora: They only talk about the wins. And at the end of a year of trying to day trade, I remember making like breaking even essentially. And then like taxes, I was so young, I didn’t know what taxes I would pay. pay. And I’m just like, man, even if you did decently well with this like you don’t make a lot of money and it’s a lot of stress and it’s a lot of luck.

[00:11:13] Neville Medhora: It’s just a lot of I hope this goes up. I heard this hot stock tip when I was on a forum and I saw someone talking about this. That was literally my strategy. And then Buffett, what he said is I don’t look at the prices. I don’t follow the prices. I don’t care what the price is. I read the reports and I see is this a solid business?

[00:11:29] Neville Medhora: And so I started doing that. I started printing out, actually at the law school, I started printing out these big like K 1 forms and then their quarterly forms and yearly reports about the business. Most of them were kind of garbage, but every once in a while I’d read something and be like, wow, this is a solid business.

[00:11:44] Neville Medhora: They’re investing heavily in stuff. They’re making a lot of money. I can’t see any problems with this. Like, why wouldn’t this stock go up? And I started thinking more and more like that. And so Warren Buffett was the one that changed my mind at day training. After that, I just stopped. And I will say, and stop me if you want to interject or anything here, but my first big win was a company called Dynagy.

[00:12:01] Neville Medhora: Do you remember Enron, the big giant oil company, oil and gas services company, and it just went to zero after a big scandal. So what happened is a couple of different companies. Got hit with big fines that were involved. Like one of their corporate top people was colluding or something like that.

[00:12:16] Neville Medhora: So Dyna was one of them. I had heard of Dyna, ’cause I grew up in Houston, oil and gas and stuff. So I printed out the Dyna G reports after that and their stock had fallen from $35 to 35 cents. So I was like, what’s going on here? I got to see the story and everything in the press was like, they’re going out of business.

[00:12:32] Neville Medhora: They’re the next Enron. So you’re like I don’t want to buy this cheap stock because it’s going to go to zero, right? It doesn’t matter. The price is going to go lower. And so reading the reports is fun. And I was like, wait a second. This doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying on the news that this is going to go bankrupt.

[00:12:46] Neville Medhora: In reality, nothing has happened to this company at all. In fact, they got a 2 billion fine. And the reason that they went down to zero profit per quarter from 600 million a quarter is because they were aggressively paying off a 2 billion fine. So I was like, okay, 2 billion. They’re paying off 600 million a quarter.

[00:13:02] Neville Medhora: By like Q4, they’ll be paying Somewhat profitable again, right? And then the next year they will be fully back to normal. What am I missing? And I just remember not being able to compute what I was reading in the press, and then what I was reading with my own two eyes over here.

[00:13:16] Neville Medhora: That company is going to be profitable again. And so I put what was significant, it was probably a few thousand bucks at the time, but I put significant money for me at the time into Dynegy at this really low price. And I was like they will be profitable again. And is no one seeing this? And sure enough, on that day that they came back and I was in a geology class, I remember, and the stock price jumped like 3x in one hour or something like that.

[00:13:40] Neville Medhora: And I was, I remember going oh shit, like in class and people looked at me and I was like, sorry, it was my first big win. And it was because, and I held that stock for a few months and everyone’s going to go bankrupt. And I’m like, But I don’t get how nothing’s changed. And that was my first big win.

[00:13:54] Neville Medhora: And I was like, thank you, Warren Buffett. And it ended up going up like 10 X, 12 X, or it went back to its original price. Because it started being profitable again. And that’s when I realized I think that’s the way to play investing, understand the business in the short term, who the hell knows what happens.

[00:14:06] Neville Medhora: Like we talk about Bitcoin price going up or down today. I don’t really know. It doesn’t really matter, but where do I know it’s going to go in five years? That’s a different story. And so that was like the Buffett way. And from then on, I was like, wait a second, I made far more money from this DynaG trade and I did nothing except read a couple of reports.

[00:14:23] Neville Medhora: That’s it. I wasn’t trading. I wasn’t waking up in the morning. I wasn’t thinking about what the price was today. None of that. And I made far more money on that one trade than I ever did all the day trading I did. So that’s what converted me to just looking at solid businesses and holding them for a very long time.

[00:14:37] Neville Medhora: And that’s still what I do today. 

[00:14:39] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s a great story. So you bought it at 35 cents and then did you ride it all the way back up or did you realize it again? And you were like, I’m out. 

[00:14:48] Neville Medhora: I don’t know if I wrote it all the way back up, but I am and this is why I actually recommend a lot of college students go through a day trading phase because when it’s your own money, that’s a very emotional ride.

[00:14:57] Neville Medhora: And now I’m less emotionally attached to it. Now I don’t care. But that taught me a lesson because I would do these Yahoo stock trader things, the stock simulator and they give you like a million fake dollars and you’re like a hundred thousand on this, 200, 000 on that, but it’s not real money.

[00:15:10] Neville Medhora: And so you don’t have any, but then when you have 10 bucks of your own writing on a game or a stock, you start thinking, Oh my God, I made money. I just got, I gotta take it out. And so I learned to ride things out. Like just because something goes up one day, it doesn’t mean it’s going to, and it goes down the next day.

[00:15:25] Neville Medhora: It doesn’t mean you should sell it. You need to wait for a long time to get where you think it’s going to be and have an investment hypothesis on that. So now if I were to play that, I probably sold a little too early. If I would have played that, I would have said the company is going to go back to its original stock price and its original multiple.

[00:15:39] Neville Medhora: Once they have a few quarters of reporting back the same thing, that’s how the public’s going to perceive it. So it will go back up to 35. So I should have held it for a little bit longer, but I probably sold it a little bit before that. 

[00:15:49] Patrick Donley: So did you get into a, you had a financial blog then? Did you get into writing and blogging and it was finance and investing focused, wasn’t it?

[00:15:57] Patrick Donley: Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[00:15:59] Neville Medhora: Yeah. I was learning about this stuff as a younger person in college. And so there was no real place to put it online other than a blog was the perfect format. So I call it Neville’s financial blog. It still exists to this day, nevblog. com. I don’t call it Neville’s financial blog.

[00:16:12] Neville Medhora: Cause it’s just like a personal place to put writing with and no one’s allowed to leave comments or anything like that. It’s just my own personal space. But what I was doing was like, I was learning about all these businesses that I was starting and keeping track of the income and I would publicly post my income and we’re talking about I made 35 from this AdSense site and I was very public about it and people started reading it, 

[00:16:33] Patrick Donley: That level of transparency was new, right?

[00:16:36] Patrick Donley: People weren’t really doing that at that 

[00:16:37] Neville Medhora: Now on 

[00:16:38] Neville Medhora: Twitter, people are like, I make 35 K a month on my business. Now this is how much I did. Here’s my monthly state. It’s totally normal now. But at the time, especially for my parents, they were just like, what are you doing? You’re talking about how much money you make?

[00:16:48] Neville Medhora: Like what? That’s crazy. And then until the numbers got big enough to where I didn’t want to start publishing them. Then I started taking that down. But at the time it was a great way to get people to pay attention and be like, Ooh, this is super interesting. Cause there’s no content like that. And that was my first popular blog.

[00:17:01] Neville Medhora: And unbeknownst to me, people started reading it and people were leaving comments. And I’m like, where are these people coming from? And then other financial blogs started popping up and there’s this whole financial blogger community. Ramit Sethi, who you may know, was part of that. And so there’s a whole like financial blogger community talking about personal finance, like how to save for your 401k or how to invest or what stocks to put it in, that kind of stuff.

[00:17:21] Neville Medhora: Just like little things like that. Other people that are a little older than me, we’re talking about here’s how to refinance a mortgage and all this information was new to a lot of people unless you read a book on it Like you didn’t just get this information back then right kind of the dawn of the internet So that was cool to meet a lot of people.

[00:17:36] Neville Medhora: That’s how I met Noah. Actually, that’s how I met Sam through my early blog. Yeah, that’s how I met everyone Oh, really? Okay. 

[00:17:42] Patrick Donley: Let’s get into that. I want to get into that a little bit. The relationship with Noah at AppSumo and Sam, I’m from, the hustle and my first million. Tell me about that.

[00:17:50] Patrick Donley: So you’re doing the rave thing. Did you end up selling that? And then talk about yeah, just connecting with Noah and like where that lit. 

[00:17:57] Neville Medhora: Yeah, so I met Noah in 2003 through our blogs. Me and him both had blogs in 2003, 2004, something like that. He came to Austin for a trip. We met up. I met him at a coffee shop and he’s I got to take a dump.

[00:18:08] Neville Medhora: I’ll be back. And that was my first intro to him. And he took a newspaper with him into the bathroom, which I thought was weird. And then 30 minutes later, this guy comes out and I was like, Oh my God. I was like, what the hell? But anyways, we hit it off. And then every time I would go to California, I would meet up with him.

[00:18:22] Neville Medhora: And then over the years, he moved back and forth to Austin. We always kept in touch. So we originally met through our blogs like that. So it was like early social media, I guess you could call it. And yeah, we’ve been friends ever since. And then similarly with Sam, he, we met in 2012 or 2013.

[00:18:36] Neville Medhora: He was a reader of NevVlog. And so he invited me to speak at his book club and a conference he was throwing called, it wasn’t called HustleCon back then. It’s Bootstrap Live. It was the first one he ever did. It was me, Andrew Warner, and his name slips me at the moment, but he has a mushroom growing company.

[00:18:52] Neville Medhora: Like you grow mushrooms in your house, not illegal mushrooms, like normal mushrooms. And so we did like a little conference and he sold tickets to it. And I met Sam. He said, I want you to come see me on BookHub. I’ll provide travel and accommodations. So he bought me a Southwest ticket and accommodations generally meant a nice hotel suite or something like that.

[00:19:09] Neville Medhora: And what that meant was he picked me up from the train station in San Francisco. And I slept on a couch with his dog in his basement. That’s what accommodations meant to Sam at the time. But he lived in a house. It was, I wouldn’t, I would say it’s like a hacker house, but everyone there, like young, smart, doing fun stuff, trying a lot of small business, very San Francisco y.

[00:19:28] Neville Medhora: So I was pretty happy with that in terms of it being a dirty house. There’s a bunch of young guys living there. Sam gave me a towel that was so moldy that when I dried off, I smelled worse than before the shower. I was like, dude, you gotta get cause, cause I’m a little bit older than Sam.

[00:19:40] Neville Medhora: I’m like, I think he’s 34. I’m like six or seven years older than him. So I had been that person before and I was like, Oh my God, I got certain things were just like, he was just a young guy. So it’s pretty funny. That’s when I met Sam and he was running a little side hustle called Itch Juice. I don’t know if he ever talks about it, but he’s basically selling poison Ivy lotion or something like that.

[00:20:00] Neville Medhora: And he literally had a bottle of Bucket of it, and he would scoop it with a little scoop and put it in like a hockey puck container looking thing, and screw it on, put it in an envelope, write the address, and like literally walk over to the post office. That’s what his job was at the time, and he had tried a bunch of little things.

[00:20:15] Neville Medhora: I think he started a small company called Apartment List. It was like. Tinder for roommates or something. I think he got hired and he worked at a different company for a year. Nothing big. Like it wasn’t like some big life changing some, but he was like, he was a hustler.

[00:20:27] Neville Medhora: Like even back then he was always like always trying something super interested in business. And so I immediately liked him. He was cool. And then. What really made him stand out was he threw this thing called Bootstrap Live and he got 150 people to pay for things and he was very doubtful. He’s I don’t know if I’m going to fill this up.

[00:20:44] Neville Medhora: Like he wasn’t as confident as he was now. And it was like, like this might fail, but was really impressive. He had a whole staff working there. I was like, how are you paying all these people? He’s Oh, they’re all volunteers. I’m like, How’d you get 12 people to volunteer for this?

[00:20:55] Neville Medhora: And he basically said he’s there’s all these kids that couldn’t afford the ticket. So it was like that you could just work here. And you’ll meet these cool people. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting that you got so many people to just come work with you for free. And keep in mind, he was not a big deal back then.

[00:21:07] Neville Medhora: He was not like now, I think if he did that, you’d be like, Oh, of course he could do that. But he was not like anybody. So he was just a dude. So it was really impressive. And that’s the part that I was like, Oh, that’s weird. I don’t know if I could have done that. And so that’s why I was like, okay, this gets onto something.

[00:21:21] Neville Medhora: And then from that, he would, he tried to promote another event called hustle con. And he realized by promoting it, you have to send out a ton of emails to the people to get them excited for it. And here he quickly realized, Oh, you could probably make more with a newsletter than the actual event because the event is just one time and you people also get event fatigue.

[00:21:39] Neville Medhora: If you throw an event four times a year, people don’t always want to come to every single one, right? Or just, they just can’t, they’re out of town or whatever. It’s a physical location thing. So the newsletter was like this thing like, Oh, we could keep sending out newsletters and get sponsors rather than just these events.

[00:21:52] Neville Medhora: And eventually the hustle became a newsletter instead of just an events company.

[00:21:56] Patrick Donley: So you’ve been working, you’ve worked with him at Hustle, you’ve worked with Noah at AppSumo. When did you start getting into writing and copywriting 

[00:22:03] Neville Medhora: and I was already into writing, like I had already started with NBL in like early 1999.

[00:22:08] Neville Medhora: I started publishing stuff online. I had a, I don’t even know if it’s up anymore. I don’t think so. I doubt I have the server that’s still running it. It was called Neville one.com. ’cause I just couldn’t get neville.com and I originally started writing on that and I wrote in H TM L like that was the way you did it back then.

[00:22:21] Neville Medhora: Yeah. You had to write like an HTL. And or I use Microsoft’s frontpage at the time to blast from the past. And so I was writing online already. So I already had some sort of knack for writing. I enjoyed it. I didn’t think that anything of it at the time. I didn’t realize that skill would translate to anything, but I would just write, and I never really thought about the style of writing.

[00:22:40] Neville Medhora: I was never interested in writing like in English class. Like I always did well in English class, but they would write like these like bizarre types of in formats of to whom it may concern. And they would have these indexes and all these rules. And I was like, You don’t, what’s the point of this?

[00:22:54] Neville Medhora: I’m trying to just get my thoughts into your head. I don’t need all this crap. This doesn’t need to be like that. And also it was like, it was more boring to write in that formal way with big words. So I would just write like I spoke, which is like a tenant of copywriting. So I naturally wrote like that a little bit.

[00:23:09] Neville Medhora: And people enjoyed that. People like that style, that personal style. I also try to use a lot of images. I always prided myself on knowing Photoshop and even back in the day, just like taking an image, editing it a little bit, cropping it was hard. Like it was hard. You had to know Photoshop back then for that kind of stuff.

[00:23:23] Neville Medhora: And then to embed it, you would have to upload it to a server and then manually link it by HTML. And so my content had a lot of images, a lot of graphs, a lot of things like that. And I do think people like that rather than just plain text. And that was another advantage I had. So that was my early internet writing and I just always continued.

[00:23:37] Neville Medhora: I did it for free with nevblog for years. I never thought it would turn into anything that could be a monetizable skill in any sort of way. And then I found Gary Halbert in roughly 2012, 13, something like that. And a friend put me onto him, a guy named Ryan Levesque, who’s actually popular online as well.

[00:23:53] Neville Medhora: He has a book called Ask that got him really popular. And I had met him in China randomly. Like I went to China in 2007 and on a nevlog I posted and this guy reached out and was like, Hey, I’m here too if you want to meet up. And this is early days of meeting up with people from blogs. I didn’t know anything about him.

[00:24:06] Neville Medhora: I was like, this guy might be trying to kill me or something. It turns out we ended up becoming good friends and he got me onto copywriting. He’s got to read the Gary Halbert letters. And so I started applying copywriting to my emails for House of Rave. And before they were not performing well, they had images.

[00:24:19] Neville Medhora: buy now buttons, everything. But Gary Halberd was like, you got to tell a story about a product, give different uses for a product showcase. Quick example, I was selling these finger lights. It was like our best selling thing. It was like just lights that go on your finger. And I thought it was for 16 year olds that just like to dance like this with them on.

[00:24:33] Neville Medhora: But I knew from picking up the phone, cause I was customer service as well, that people would, a plumbing company bought 50 pairs of them. And I called to see, I was like, is this a fake order? And they’re like, no, our plumbers use them to look under the sink because like their headlight can’t reach, right?

[00:24:49] Neville Medhora: And they’re cheap enough to wear like we just throw them away if they get dirty. I was like, huh, never thought about that. Someone said that their child uses them to check for monsters under the bed. One person said they had an autistic child and playing that helped them in some way. MTV bought a bunch to use for some show they were doing, to make fake Ray guns or whatever.

[00:25:07] Neville Medhora: People are using Halloween costumes. I remember telling a story. In an email about how all these people used this product, these finger lights for different things, and it was my bestselling day ever and I was like, holy crap. Maybe there’s something to this copywriting thing. And happenstance was Noah was building app sumo as like a little side project off of my couch.

[00:25:25] Neville Medhora: You guys were living together. He had a place. Living with another guy and he would come over to my place and we would just work. Just keep in mind, most people had jobs back then, right? We were just two losers with no, no job, just working on dumb stuff on the side. We were making money and stuff like that, right?

[00:25:40] Neville Medhora: Like we’re making as much money as people with jobs. So he would just come over and work with me. And that was always fun. And I had a nice little setup at my apartment. We had a coffee machine and a pool out there, all that kind of stuff. And so he’d come over and he was building AppSumo. And I would look at some of the emails he was sending.

[00:25:54] Neville Medhora: I was like, dude, you got to apply this copywriting thing to these emails. These emails suck. And so I tried writing one and it was his first 10, 000 profit day ever. And then from there I became part of AppSumo. And then, so I was writing all the emails, I had equity in the company, that kind of thing.

[00:26:09] Neville Medhora: And then I sold House of Rave to a competitor. And at that time, and that was a nice transition time because House of Rave was a dropshipper, right? I was just a middleman. And at the time, more and more people started coming on. And that was also Amazon’s kind of meteoric rise time. And I was noticing it was getting harder and harder to make the same amount of money.

[00:26:28] Neville Medhora: It was just more difficult. I was getting really good at SEO. Like I dominated the search engines for all the search results. I crushed it with that, but it was just really difficult. to compete with Amazon, right? And like thousands of different sellers from all parts of the world, the margins were getting squeezed for certain products.

[00:26:44] Neville Medhora: So I remember towards the end, my bread and butter was disco balls, actually. Disco balls were like the thing that they couldn’t sell. It was, they were just too big. And the logistics didn’t work out. And I was making a lot of money off those. But at that time, AppSumo was also coming up and there’s so much going on with that, that I was like, I got to get rid of House of Rave because I can’t split my attention too much.

[00:27:01] Neville Medhora: And so I sold it to a competitor. I was looking, we have a crush on SEO. Just take this and pay me off over two years. And that’s what they did. 

[00:27:08] Patrick Donley: And then at that point you went almost full time with NOAA, like growing AppSumo? 

[00:27:14] Neville Medhora: Yes. And it was mainly, I was like it was weird, I was like not an employee of AppSumo.

[00:27:19] Neville Medhora: I owned equity in the company and I was definitely helping out, but I was selling my courses through AppSumo. So I was making courses on my own and then selling them often in conjunction with AppSumo. And that worked really well. I was making way more money than I ever had. before, I like way more money than with House of Rave.

[00:27:34] Neville Medhora: And so that was pretty cool. So it was like work. It was like a hybrid. I was like working for myself and then not working for myself at the same time. It was an interesting thing, but it was a great combo. So the course was copywriting, right? No, the first one I ever made was Behind the Scenes of a muse.

[00:27:50] Neville Medhora: And the reason it was called that was because Tim Ferriss had come out with a very viral blog post called like a muse business. And just keep in mind the context of the time. It was like, there are people out there that are making money off of their computers and they only work on it a few hours a day.

[00:28:05] Neville Medhora: And I was just like, Huh, this sounds a lot like house of rave that I do that provides me a full time income and I work on it maybe one or two hours a day, sometimes eight hours a day, but sometimes not that much. And so people were always asking me about it and whenever I would show people in person, like how it worked, log them into the backend and be like, this is how many people ordered.

[00:28:23] Neville Medhora: And this is what I do to send the orders over. They were always fascinated. And so I recorded some screen share videos. and sold it as a course. And that actually did quite well. I was making a bunch of money from that. I was like, Holy crap, this is pretty cool. And then with AppSumo, so many people responding to the support email being like, how do you write these emails?

[00:28:40] Neville Medhora: These are so fun. I’m not even going to buy anything, but these are so fun to read. And I would respond back, Oh, actually it’s this thing called copywriting. And then when you have to answer email 100, you’re like, okay, perhaps we should make something to demonstrate this. And so that’s where the copywriting course was born out of how we wrote the AppSumo emails basically.

[00:28:55] Neville Medhora: So I made a copywriting course and that was like a smash hit. So I was like, okay, we’re onto something here. Yeah. So it was born out of people just asking me that question over and over. 

[00:29:04] Patrick Donley: It was always telling people, telling the market, telling you what you were good at, and just following the hints and the trails and doing what’s next.

[00:29:10] Neville Medhora: Apparently it’s a good strategy. Yes. Yeah, 

[00:29:13] Patrick Donley: You had Nick Huber on recently, and he talks about writing being a superpower. It has been for you, obviously, it’s done. Writing has been a superpower for you. I wanted to get into it. I’ve heard Sam talk about the ADA. Can you go into a little bit of the basics of copywriting and how you grab people’s attention?

[00:29:30] Patrick Donley: Like you said, your job is to put your ideas into someone else’s head. So I wanted to hear a little bit about the ADA process. 

[00:29:36] Neville Medhora: Yeah, so a lot of times if you’re trying to get someone, like in the classic example I use and it’s been ripped off a bunch of times, it’s like water. If I want to get you to drink more water every day, how do I do it?

[00:29:46] Neville Medhora: And I can’t, if I just say you need to drink more water, like a nagging mom, that doesn’t work great. That’s not like a great way to do it. Instead, you use ADA, which is attention, interest, desire, action. This is an old formula from back in the day. And trust me, I’ve written so many blog posts about copywriting formulas.

[00:30:02] Neville Medhora: I’ve been through all of them. ADA is just the one that you can use over and over again and you can modify it, add more things to it. But ADA is the basic structure. And what it means is you first have to get someone’s attention and how it relates to them. So I’d say, Patrick, do you work out at all?

[00:30:15] Neville Medhora: Whatever. I do. You lift weights and stuff like that? I do. Okay. So how about this? So you’re already spending time in the gym or lifting weights. You’re already dedicating time to this. If there was a way that you can get 30 percent more gains with a very small hack, would you do it? Would you be interested in hearing what it is?

[00:30:30] Neville Medhora: Okay. So the interesting thing is the way your muscles build more muscle as they have to have water. Water is the universal solvent. All your amino acids and everything need water in order to build muscle. And if you have more water in your muscles while you work out. you will gain more muscle. It is just that simple.

[00:30:44] Neville Medhora: 30 percent more. Now, the way you do this is you drink about a liter of water before your workout. Not after. Most people will chug a lot of water after. The key is you drink about a liter of water just like an hour before your workout. That’s it. So your body is flush with water that has all the stuff it needs to build more muscle.

[00:31:01] Neville Medhora: And so is that a deal? Will you just now, will you just drink a little bit more water, like chug a bottle of water before your workout, like an hour before your workout? That’s it. That’s all you got to do. That sounds easy, right? So what I did was, I did the ADA formula. What I just told you, it was completely false.

[00:31:15] Neville Medhora: I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if you build more muscle, but it sounded very convincing, right? It did. You were getting my hopes up. And what I’m doing in my head is I’m going, okay, how do I get his attention? It has to be something about him. I think most guys work out, want to look cool.

[00:31:27] Neville Medhora: Strong, if they can maintain muscle. And then I’m going into something interesting. So I gave an interesting fact, an interesting testimonial, and an interesting thing about that topic. So I say, if your muscles need water to grow and most people are dehydrated when they work out and then desire, I want to make you desire this action.

[00:31:44] Neville Medhora: So like when the new iPhone comes out, it’s very expensive, but people just want it so bad that they desire it. So therefore they must have it and they get it. So I need to make you think you want to drink more water. And that’s what I’m saying. Like, all you have to do is the guys who make, build a lot of muscle, they just drink a bottle of water before they work out.

[00:32:00] Neville Medhora: And so then you start thinking in your head, I could do that. It’s not that bad. And then action, I get you to take the action being like, okay. Made me a promise. Like you’re going to start drinking a bottle of water before you work out. So that is the way that you convince someone to do something. And you could apply that to a kid cleaning his room.

[00:32:14] Neville Medhora: You could apply that to someone buying a product. You can do that to get someone to buy the copywriting course. So instead of just saying buy this is a nice little framework to get people to want to buy the product and understand the reason they should buy it. A lot of people just say you should buy this because it’s really cool, but it’s like, how does it impact their life?

[00:32:32] Neville Medhora: How does it make their life better? And that’s what selling is all about. And AIDA is like the basis of it. And you can use AIDA to tell your kids to clean the room. You use AIDA on a sales page. You could use AIDA in an email, or use AIDA in a conversation. So it’s a fantastic formula for life and business.

[00:32:47] Neville Medhora: I love the AIDA formula. It changed the way I write completely. 

[00:32:51] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I’ve heard Sam talk about it. I think he used it to get his wife or, like he would use it, like getting girlfriends. 

[00:32:58] Neville Medhora: And because me and Sam have talked about this. Yeah. We’ve talked about it extensively. He picked it up for me and I picked it up from Gary Halbert.

[00:33:04] Neville Medhora: Gary Halbert picked it up from the 1800s. And so it’s been a formula that’s been passed along, but it is one of those things where you think about even dating or anything, people have asked can you help rewrite a dating profile? And you think okay, how do you get someone’s attention on a dating profile?

[00:33:18] Neville Medhora: It’s not like holding up a picture of a fish or anything like that. What you do is you talk about them. The most interesting thing in the world to you is Patrick, right? If you see yourself, if you see a photo of you with 20 people, what do you immediately do? You look at yourself, right? And you’re like, Oh my God, I have a pimple in that picture.

[00:33:34] Neville Medhora: No one’s looking, no one’s looking, no one’s care. You didn’t notice the pimple on anyone else, right? No one cares. Like you are the most interesting person in the world, according to you. And everyone’s like that. And so how do you relate it to them? And I think that’s what ADA teaches people that like, no one really cares about you as much as they care about themselves.

[00:33:50] Neville Medhora: For example, I don’t really care about Warren Buffett. I just care that he’s been rich for so long. So therefore I care about his advice in that it will make me rich. That’s why I care about Warren Buffett because it ultimately reflects a selfish thing. And I don’t mean selfish in a bad way. That’s just how it is.

[00:34:03] Neville Medhora: And so that’s why aid is a big thing, especially with dating. It’s just maybe you can ask the girl about what she wants, or weed people out, tell them like, I’m going to save you time. If you don’t like anime hardcore and go to anime conventions every weekend, I’m not the right guy for you.

[00:34:15] Neville Medhora: Whatever. You got something like that, just put it out there and people respect you when you save them time like that. So AIDA is a very important formula to learn for people. 

[00:34:23] Patrick Donley: I love it. Talk to me a little bit about the copywriting course. What if I were to sign up for it? I like to write. I’ve been doing some Twitter threads, just for our art company, TIP.

[00:34:32] Patrick Donley: And I really enjoy it. There’s a whole art and process that I enjoy studying. I’ve learned from a lot of different people on the internet. and Twitter. But talk to me about the copywriting course and what somebody would learn, like going through it, the cost of it. Give me the, I want to know the details.

[00:34:47] Neville Medhora: Yeah. So writing is a bit of a superpower and a lot of people don’t know how to do it. They have the old English style mentality of to whom it may concern. That’s not the world we live in anymore. So the copywriting course is a set of courses. That’s going to teach you how to write better. The first copywriting course, you can get through it in just a few hours, not even a few hours, but a couple of the lessons will get you to think in a totally different way.

[00:35:06] Neville Medhora: For example, Ada, is one of the things that we talk about. And I go through examples so people really get it in their head. But the other thing about the copywriting course, it’s not just courses you watch. You can do a lot of that stuff on YouTube, but you can actually practice. So we have practice where you can write the Ada formula.

[00:35:19] Neville Medhora: I try to make you sell me a boat. That’s one of my favorite ones. I get you to sell me a boat by writing an Ada formula. So you get the practice. You actually get your fingers on the typewriter, on the keyboard. And then we have writers and myself who go through and give you critiques and be like, what if you did that?

[00:35:32] Neville Medhora: What if you did that? So I’ve noticed the Best way to get people better at writing is to get them to write and give them feedback on it, not to just train them with a bunch of videos. That doesn’t do much. But instead, we also have a forum and office hours where you go, you’re writing Twitter threads, post it in there, and we’ll give you feedback on how to make it better, right?

[00:35:49] Neville Medhora: If it didn’t perform too well, Let’s try to see how we can make it better. So people post LinkedIn posts on there and we’re like them. And we’re like, what if you did this? What if you put those in bullet points? What if instead of these four different lessons, you break it into one lesson that’s really good and make that the whole post.

[00:36:03] Neville Medhora: And then they go and repost. And after a time, they’re like, holy crap, that did so much better. That went viral. That did so well. And so that’s the way to learn writing by learning some principles. Applying it by publishing it and then revamping it over and over. So the copywriting course is courses and you get access for 97 a month or 750 a year.

[00:36:20] Neville Medhora: But you also, and this is the killer feature, you get access to our forum and it is a forum because you can actually post long things like sales pages and emails and we go through and modify them and make them better for you. And that’s the real value. And then we also have weekly office hours where people come talk directly to me like this.

[00:36:36] Neville Medhora: And we go through and actually share screens and redo their stuff. And people ask about all sorts of crazy types of stuff. We’ve had people launch books in office hours. We’ve had people do viral promotional campaigns. One guy went from like zero to 115, 000 Instagram subscribers in the last two years, and then launched a suite of books off of that.

[00:36:53] Neville Medhora: But we’ve had people make bigger companies than ours. out of it. We’ve had people hire our writers. It’s pretty cool. The amount of wins that people get from just a little bit of training and a little bit of practice. So that’s what the copywriting course is. Yeah. So it was a way to amplify your writing to the world much better.

[00:37:07] Neville Medhora: And think about it when you write, not only are you writing on social media, if that’s your, if that’s your bag, but you’re writing emails to sell things, you’re writing sales emails, you’re writing product pages. You’re reaching out to people, you’re putting pages on Google local listings, you’re doing a lot of writing that you may not know, and if you can make every single piece of writing 10%, 20%, 100 percent better, imagine the results that compound from that.

[00:37:28] Neville Medhora: And that’s what the copywriting course is about. 

[00:37:30] Patrick Donley: How is your average day? Is this how you’re spending most of your day on the copywriting course, or are you involved in a whole bunch of other things? I am just interested in what your days look like. Or is it varied? 

[00:37:41] Neville Medhora: Yeah, it’s random. People are like, what do you do on a different day?

[00:37:43] Neville Medhora: Mondays, I have one, one meeting with an employee that I try not to like all the writers and stuff. I don’t have regular meetings, nothing. I don’t regularly schedule anything except for one employee. And we just go over to do lists and stuff like that. And then the rest of the day, I’m either writing.

[00:37:57] Neville Medhora: Okay. Playing around on social media or just like literally my job is to read the internet and browse the internet and find cool stuff. That’s a lot of my job. So a lot of my job is browsing Twitter. I use Twitter quite a bit. I browse Instagram quite a bit. And then I browse Reddit quite a bit. I used to browse Dig quite a bit, but they’ve been acquired by a different company.

[00:38:13] Neville Medhora: I don’t use them at all. So those are the main things I’m doing all day. I’m meeting with friends, having conversations. I kicked up my podcast again in terms of I haven’t called it a podcast. We just publish these YouTube interviews, but those have been really fun. And I can’t believe that’s work or even that this is work.

[00:38:28] Neville Medhora: This doesn’t feel like work to me. We’re having an interesting conversation and usually I’m the one asking questions. So I’m getting a ton out of it. And I just asked, like I had Jason Cohen of WP Engine. And this guy started 2 billion companies, two separate ones by himself bootstrapped, which is rarefied air.

[00:38:44] Neville Medhora: There’s not many people that have done that. And he’s just like him, he’s a nerd. He’s what I call an endearing nerd that even though he is so post economic at this point to where money doesn’t like factor into decisions, he is still so interested. in things and like following along on Twitter and engaging and like programming.

[00:39:02] Neville Medhora: I love people like that. And so it’s do I have questions to ask someone like that? I’m like, hell yeah, I have a lot of questions. And so I get them on the podcast selfishly all the questions I want and get to publish it. And somehow that works. That sounds like a good life to me. So a lot of that’s my work.

[00:39:15] Neville Medhora: Yeah. Working with freelancers to get things out the door, chopping up all these clips, all that kind of stuff. I don’t do it myself, but manage a team that does all that kind of stuff. That’s just what I do on a day to day basis. Yeah. And I’m getting married this year. So that’s a full time job.

[00:39:28] Patrick Donley: And that isn’t a full time job. I just got married a year and a half ago and it literally felt like a full time job planning it. And it’s a lot. So congratulations on that. That’s great.

[00:39:37] Neville Medhora: It totally is. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But my days are varied. I like working like that. I don’t like the scheduled stuff regimented.

[00:39:44] Neville Medhora: I’m going to wait until I have kids before I get more regimented. I feel like then you’re going to need some structure. But I do enjoy just the randomness of it. 

[00:39:52] Patrick Donley: You had a Twitter post I saw or it said that you wanted to do more crazy experiments in 2024. So it sounds like you’re getting married.

[00:40:00] Patrick Donley: Do you have other plans for crazy experiments? I love some of them. I want to get into some of the fun, interesting things that you did in the past and then write books about them. But I want to hear about any other plans for 2024 trying crazy experiments. 

[00:40:13] Neville Medhora: Yeah, the ones I used to do back in the day were very crazy.

[00:40:17] Neville Medhora: I don’t know if you remember, I went homeless for a week or actually four nights, five days. That was crazy. That was also 10 years ago or maybe a little bit more. It was 2012 or something, but I don’t know if I would do it again. 

[00:40:28] Patrick Donley: I think I saw that and then wrote a book about it, right? 

[00:40:30] Neville Medhora: I did publish, it was like a long blog post I self published as a book.

[00:40:33] Neville Medhora: Yeah, and I actually gave it away for free. I wasn’t trying to be a money grab. I just thought it was like an interesting social experiment. And so I wrote a book. I think you have to charge 99 cents on Amazon at the time. So I had to charge something for it, but I put the lowest amount, but those were crazy experiments.

[00:40:48] Neville Medhora: I might not do as in my forties, but I did try. I like validating ideas. And a lot of my friends, even Noah, Sam, like they’ll validate ideas all the time, even though they have successful things going on. And that’s what I really admire about a lot of these people. And so at the beginning of the year, I tried to validate a newsletter writing company.

[00:41:04] Neville Medhora: And I backed away from it because I validated it and saw that I think this is not the right company to start. Say more. Why is that? A lot of people are like, you should start a newsletter company. This seems like the right thing to do. And what happened was a lot of the leads that reached out were people that had businesses that were struggling and they thought the newsletter would be the answer to the bad sales.

[00:41:22] Neville Medhora: And it’s that’s a lot of pressure to put on me to like now I have to really improve your company. So that was difficult. So I realized, okay, I have to make it to companies that already sell something profitably and are doing well, like a software company, but they just don’t send out emails or good emails.

[00:41:37] Neville Medhora: So I realized there needs to be a lane that we pick. It needs to be a very narrow scope of the company that we work with. And then I also realized there was a price ceiling because after a certain amount, like we charge 10 grand a month they can hire a full time good writer for 10 grand a month to just come in the house.

[00:41:50] Neville Medhora: So there’s like a certain amount of money that you can charge. It’s going to be a certain amount of churn that happens, There’d be a certain amount of hiring that I would have to do to scale it large. And I thought that there was like a cap on how big this could go. And so I put out a landing page.

[00:42:03] Neville Medhora: I got leads for it. I called all these people what they really needed. And I was like, I don’t like this isn’t hitting. Like it’s not like I hit it. I felt like it just didn’t seem like the perfect fit. It felt like what I could do was start your newsletter cohort. where I say, Hey, you’re a small business instead of five grand a month that I was going to charge.

[00:42:21] Neville Medhora: What if you pay 1200 bucks and we help you together to create a newsletter over the course of a month or two, that could have been, that could be a thing still. But I thought the newsletter only company was not fun. Also, it’s What do you really want to work on? Was I just doing it as a money grab or did I really want to work on this?

[00:42:37] Neville Medhora: And I never really wanted to work on it. It was just like so many people were like, Oh, you should totally start this. And they weren’t thinking about it. And then when I explained why I wasn’t going to start it, they’re like, no, that makes sense. So yeah, now there could be something out there like that still, but I just, from my experience, I was like, I don’t know if I’m the right person to start this.

[00:42:54] Patrick Donley: I wanted to get into productivity hacks. I saw an interview that you did with Dan Martell, who wrote the book. What’s it called? But how to buy back your time or buy back your time, something like that. Tell me about that. Like some productivity hacks. He had some good ones. I’m actually in the middle of reading the book.

[00:43:09] Patrick Donley: I just started it. Somebody recommended it. One of my interviews that I did, and I thought it was pretty good. Did you have any thoughts or takeaways? Productivity hacks that you’re trying to implement from that interview with him. 

[00:43:20] Neville Medhora: I’m a lazy person. I have to fool myself into working. And so I have this on my to-do list for today.

[00:43:26] Neville Medhora: And what I do is I’ll scratch out the first one and then the next one and then the next one. And if you just keep going, you finish the whole to-do list and not, I’m not saying it happens every day. But generally, that’s how I try to work. And what I do is I take a sheet of paper and I cover the whole thing.

[00:43:40] Neville Medhora: So I can’t see anything, but I move it down one line and I’m like, okay, I just have to work on this thing. And that’s the one thing I work on. And then I scratch it out and then I move the sheet of paper down and I go do that thing. And that’s the way I try to get things to work. And that’s been a big productivity hack for me.

[00:43:54] Neville Medhora: I also like to work in different places, so I’ll walk over to the library and work. There’s a library near my house, but unfortunately about three o’clock school gets out and all the school kids from next door come into the library, and then they’re all really loud and I leave , so that’s another hack for me.

[00:44:09] Neville Medhora: I go work at different places. I used to live next to a WeWork, and I love WeWork. WeWork gets a bad rap now, but everywhere I went in the world, WeWork was awesome. I think it’s a great place to work outta, and my trick was I need someone to see my screen. So whenever I go to the library, I purposely won’t sit in a corner where I could just read Reddit all day.

[00:44:27] Neville Medhora: I go sit where someone might walk behind me and I think they’re seeing my screen. Now here’s the thing, no one cares what I’m, have you ever looked at someone’s screen and you’re like, what are they doing? You don’t care. But I think they’re judging me. And so therefore I work harder by showing my screen to other people.

[00:44:40] Neville Medhora: So I like working with others, so I frequently invite friends to work with me too. And we just, and I always say, we have to work on the same side of the table. Because they can see my screen. And that makes me work harder. So if someone can see my screen, I work harder. That’s why I think people work really hard in planes.

[00:44:55] Neville Medhora: Because you don’t want to see someone, you don’t want to be scrolling Twitter for two hours on a plane. You’re like, someone’s going to see me. So you just do work. So those are my main productivity hacks. The other thing is I put my phone upside down all the time. I think that’s a good productivity hack.

[00:45:07] Neville Medhora: Putting your phone upside down so it does ping and ding you with all the notifications. That’s a big one. I put focus mode on my phone. You go to focus mode, click for one hour. And it just completely means no one can get through like it’s an impenetrable fortress. So that’s another productivity hack.

[00:45:22] Neville Medhora: Another one I have is earplugs. So I wear earplugs when I work sometimes. Now these new AirPod Pros are so good that they act as earplugs. So that’s another way to do it. But earplugs are also so I don’t have the option of watching something on them because these are always connected to your commuter too.

[00:45:38] Neville Medhora: So if you watch something, you’re like, Hey, now I can watch with earplugs. You can’t do anything. You just write. But yeah, those are my main productivity hacks. Everyone’s got their own. But I have to fool myself into working and guilt myself into working. And then the other thing is if I want to do a big project, I’ll put it out online and tell people about it.

[00:45:54] Neville Medhora: And that holds me accountable. I feel that it really helps me actually. 

[00:45:58] Patrick Donley: What about the Dan Martell stuff about buying back your time? He had some good ideas in that book, just like outsourcing a lot of stuff. It’s a little bit of Naval’s idea of if your hourly rate that you put for yourself is 1, 000 an hour or whatever your arbitrary number is, like anything below that, have somebody else do.

[00:46:15] Patrick Donley: Do you do anything like that? 

[00:46:17] Neville Medhora: outsourcing stuff. Yeah, I have an assistant that does a lot of stuff. I have someone that’s worked with me for a long time that does a lot of that kind of stuff. So if I need to make an image or post up a blog post, I’ll have her help me with that just so I don’t, and it’s not that I’m against doing it and I like being able to know how to do it myself.

[00:46:32] Neville Medhora: But the thing is, if you’re doing that stuff all the time, I get distracted, right? So if I log into my WordPress and make a post, I’ll see oh, there’s an issue with updating a plugin on WordPress, and then I’ll start going into that, and then I get distracted. So I have someone else do some stuff like that.

[00:46:46] Neville Medhora: Of course it saved me time, but man, I’m a distracted person. So it really helps keep focus by having someone else do that. So I’ve been doing that for a long time. Yeah, I don’t agree with doing everything, so I think some people are like that. anything like cooking, whatever. Like I want to be totally optimized.

[00:47:00] Neville Medhora: I think some of that stuff, like you need, and it just depends on person to person, but I enjoy grilling and stuff like that. I think it’s some time to take your mind off things, listen to a podcast, have some fun. It’s a good time. So I think stuff like that, I enjoy doing myself, even though I could outsource it.

[00:47:13] Neville Medhora: But I do think people I know have tried to outsource everything. They’re like, there are some things in life that are fun to do. And it could be like, yes, assembling Ikea furniture can be solved for a hundred bucks on TaskRabbit. I get it. But it’s also fun, right? It’s also fun. And you feel proud that you built something.

[00:47:29] Neville Medhora: And it’s sometimes fun to work on a project with someone else or something like that. It’s a fun time. So I think outsourcing is great. to a certain degree. But yeah, I do buy back my time quite a bit like that. Yeah. 

[00:47:41] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk about back to the books that you’ve written. You’ve got one.

[00:47:45] Patrick Donley: It’s called what this book will teach you how to write better, which is great. But I wanted to talk about the one you’re going to die. I wanted to hear about that a little bit. I think it’s more like your life philosophy. So I wanted to hear a little bit about some of the ideas that intrigues me. I love this kind of philosophy.

[00:47:58] Patrick Donley: I want to get into some other questions about models for human beings that, like you, have lived a good and happy life. But first I wanted to talk about you’re going to die. 

[00:48:06] Neville Medhora: Yeah, so you’re gonna die came out of a thing I’ve always thought like people always ask like the meaning of life I like reading and people ponder this meaning of life and I’m like, I mean I think I know the meaning of life and it’s that we’re a bunch of particles that like got together in some sort of self replicating thing And so at our core, we’re like a self replicating piece of DNA, and this is the manifestation of it.

[00:48:27] Neville Medhora: And our job in life is to replicate or perpetuate the species. So I think if you’re young and your genitals are working, replication is, I believe, what you were designed to do, right? I think that’s a pretty well established fact. And if you’re older and, childbearing is no longer in the cards, then perpetuating the species, that’s why grandparents love taking care of their grandkids, right?

[00:48:46] Neville Medhora: Passing on wealth and things like that. So it sounds like that is the purpose of life, that there’s no other big purpose. And the problem was, I think a lot of people like to try to make up a purpose that sounds better than that. And I think it’s just built on false premises. And so just understanding that, to me, understanding that this is the basis of life and therefore if there is no other purpose, then the goal is let’s have a good time.

[00:49:06] Neville Medhora: Enjoy the journey, not the destination, the kind of thing. ’cause the destination is like death. So you’re going to die. I was like, okay, except that you’re going to die. But what I had, that was interesting since high school was I always picked a date that I was going to die. And that date is November 17th, 2067, my 85th birthday.

[00:49:21] Neville Medhora: And people were like, that’s so morbid. I’m like, why is it morbid? And they’re like we’re going to die. I’m like, why is it morbid? Yeah, but everyone’s going to die, right? And statistically, I’m going to die before that. I think 78 is probably what my average lifespan is statistically. And so let’s say between 70 and 90, I’m going to die, right?

[00:49:38] Neville Medhora: So I just picked a date between 80, 85. If I know that I am going to die and I pick a date, now I can work backwards to optimize my life for a good life. And so I think a lot of people will wait till they’re retired, especially back in the day, they would travel. And it’s when you’re 65 and retired and finally have the means to go for fancy travel you’re going to be too old to really do anything.

[00:50:00] Neville Medhora: If you want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you’re just not going to be able to do it at that age, or it’s very unlikely, or you’re more likely to get hurt. Instead, if you’re 25, Hey, like you might not be able to afford luxury travel, but you’ll be able to get there and climb Mount Kilimanjaro and be great.

[00:50:13] Neville Medhora: And so it’s just doing things now. Because at some point, something like this isn’t going to end well. It’s not like you have a great life and then just die. It’s usually like a slow decline that happens before you die. And so I saw that a lot in India, going out to India every few years as a kid. We saw distant relatives and stuff that had grandmothers that were like 101 years old and they were just skin and bones and they would pray for death every day.

[00:50:39] Neville Medhora: They’re like, why won’t God take me? And I’m just like, yeah, Someone put this lady out of her misery. What is the deal? She’s literally asking for it. She’s not going to get better, and so for someone to do this with dogs, right? As a humane way to put them down. We do it with horses.

[00:50:53] Neville Medhora: Why don’t we do it with humans? And so I thought if no one’s going to do this for me, I’m going to do it myself. And I’m going to have a date where I’m just out. And it was also like Jerry Seinfeld always talks about there’s this like a few seconds or a few minutes too long. You can go if you’re really killing with the audience and doing a great job that if you’re on too long, they start to go like, all right, let’s wrap this up.

[00:51:13] Neville Medhora: So a good comedian knows to go off a little bit early, leaving them wanting more. And I always thought that’s probably a good way to approach life. Let’s go out on a high note. And just leave it there. Sure, it’s sad that you got to get off stage, but like it’s also sadder to watch a slow decline.

[00:51:27] Neville Medhora: So I think that’s where that came from. And it’s like a mental framework. And I never really pushed this book too much. Cause I’m not like, you need to think like this. In fact, I’d say 50 percent of the people are like, that is a crazy way to think. To me, it sounds totally logical. to think back like when do you think you’re going to die?

[00:51:44] Neville Medhora: Like how old do you think you’re going to be when, like, how old will your kids be when you die? Like you don’t know that answer and that’s probably an important thing to know. And most people never even think about it. And so I think like just dispassionately thinking okay, let’s say 85 how old will I be, what do I need to do before then?

[00:52:01] Neville Medhora: And also let’s say that someone needs to, let’s say someone needs to take a job in a different city or something. for a long period of time for five years and go to some place they don’t want to go to. If you’re thinking like this is five years of the prime of my life, would you do it? You’re never going to get that time back.

[00:52:16] Neville Medhora: I wouldn’t, I would say I don’t want to do that. So just like I was talking about the newsletter thing, like the newsletter company, it’s just I could do this. I could do this. But I don’t want to go there, there’s only so many years of life that you have and I don’t want to spend some of it doing that thing.

[00:52:29] Neville Medhora: And so I think it’s a great way to filter out bad ideas or bad decisions and make better decisions with your life by thinking backwards. It’s just a, it’s a fun way to think that just not a lot of people do for some reason. 

[00:52:41] Patrick Donley: I like it. It’s a little, like we talked, mentioned Ryan Holiday, I think before we started the podcast, but he’s got this whole idea.

[00:52:47] Patrick Donley: It’s a stoic idea really about memento mori. Remember your death, basically. And you’re familiar with Kevin Kelly, the thousand true fans guy, right? He’s got this whole idea of slack, like up until you’re 30, Have a bunch of time, a lot of slack time to go do these interesting, adventurous things that when you’re 70 or 80 years old, you’re not going to have the energy, health, strength to go do.

[00:53:09] Patrick Donley: And I like some of those ideas. So I’m going to have to check out the book. Was there anybody that influenced you while, like the writing of it? Like any, you said you read a lot, but. Any philosophers or 

[00:53:20] Neville Medhora: I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies about people and it’s just okay, so if I was an alien looking at this, what are the similarities between all these people?

[00:53:28] Neville Medhora: It’s they’re born, they do things, they die, right? It just happens billions of times over with every species, animal and human on the planet so far. So I thought okay, this death thing is such a natural part, but no one thinks about it. It’s always sad when someone dies unexpectedly.

[00:53:42] Neville Medhora: And you’re just like, but is it that unexpected? Like everyone dies, right? Like, how is it, how’s this unexpected? It’s going to happen. And I, and it just whenever I would talk about it with people were always just so repulsed by the idea that of thinking of their death, I’m just like, but why, like what’s.

[00:53:56] Neville Medhora: Yeah, it’s going to happen. So would you rather plan it out and have it in a bed by your loved one side and also, You I have seen people’s families be ripped apart by and not even large amounts of money, but when someone leaves money or a property to like siblings and who gets the property?

[00:54:12] Neville Medhora: I lived on the property, that kind of thing. And so it’s just wouldn’t you like to disperse all of your wealth before then and split it up evenly and equitably and give it to the right places and put all your ducks in a row and then take off? Wouldn’t that be better than rather just like leaving things to 

[00:54:26] Patrick Donley: Yeah, and see people enjoy it while you’re alive.

[00:54:29] Patrick Donley: And, you’re not going to see it once, once you’ve checked out. 

[00:54:32] Neville Medhora: I also think that there’s a tough call. Like a lot of retired people have to make, let’s say they’re living on a fixed income for, or they have a certain amount of money. It’s like, how much money do you draw down?

[00:54:40] Neville Medhora: Because how long do you live? And you just don’t know that. And then also as you get older, your, the amount of medical attention that you need, it gets higher, that you need more pills. You need more study. Everything’s harder. So it’s like your expenses are going up while your earning potential is tanked.

[00:54:55] Neville Medhora: And so it’s like this weird thing. If you knew when you were going to die, I think a lot of people would have a better retirement if I knew that this is the latest I can go. And I think this is a morbid thought for a lot of people. I don’t want to think about it like that. But I don’t know.

[00:55:06] Neville Medhora: I somehow don’t have a problem with that. So yeah, that was the book. And I wrote a book called you’re going to die and actually have, if you go to a copywriting course. com slash death dash calculator, actually have a calculator that you type in your age and based on us statistics, it’ll show. Not only how many years roughly you have left to live, and this is just based on averages.

[00:55:27] Neville Medhora: So you might be more, you might be less, of course, but it also shows, and this is an important thing, how many people your age are still alive. So I don’t, I think what happens is people think like when they’re 20, they’re like I would still want to do things when I’m 80. It’s okay, but when you’re 80, 98 percent of the people you know are dead.

[00:55:43] Neville Medhora: They’re all dead. So your siblings, your parents are long gone. Like before for the most part, all the people you love and care about are dead. And of course this is average. I’m sure there’s weird exceptions here and there, but that’s an important thing to know about. And so it’s an eye opening thing for people to see sometimes.

[00:56:00] Neville Medhora: Also women typically live four years longer than men. I also learned like in every case. There’s that. 

[00:56:08] Patrick Donley: Yeah, there’s a quote. I forget. Something like, nothing focuses the mind like your own death is like a great mind focuser. So it gets you to think about these bigger questions and how you want to live.

[00:56:19] Patrick Donley: And it’s definitely a good thing to think about. I want to hear you mention biographies. I wanted to talk about, you asked Sam, what’s a model for a good and happy life or who are some people like that. You look at their life and you’re like, that’s a good life or that’s a happy life. And I think he mentioned Joseph Kennedy, I think he mentioned Ted Turner.

[00:56:38] Patrick Donley: I forget who else, but do you have any like models for a life? Like how you want to clone them? Anybody that comes to mind? 

[00:56:45] Neville Medhora: Yeah, there’s no one like exactly. I think you pick and choose things like Warren Buffett. I admire his investing strategy. It sounds like he’s not a great father. He’s not a very present person.

[00:56:54] Neville Medhora: His kids are all like, yeah, he’s in the house, but he’s upstairs just reading, like he never really talks to us. And so I’m like I don’t that part of it. But I think that’s like a sacrifice. You have to be a psycho to be that successful sometimes for that long.

[00:57:06] Neville Medhora: And so I’m like, okay, perhaps I could give up. that level of success for a little bit less. So I try to pick and choose what I want, like just a grocery store, pick and choose whatever I want from someone’s life. Ultimately, like from reading so many biographies, what you realize is like a lot, it’s like the little small things throughout the day that make you happy.

[00:57:24] Neville Medhora: Watching your favorite show, grilling on the grill, cooking for people, having some friends over, chatting with people, having a drink with someone. Those are the things that make life things happy. I think kids are a big factor of it too, can probably cause a lot of stress, but also a lot of happiness.

[00:57:38] Neville Medhora: Grandparents, I know grandparents that’ll pack up and move across the country just to be closer to their grandchildren. You’re just like, it just depends what section of life that you’re at. When you’re 20, I’m like, I don’t want to live next to my nephews. I don’t really care all that much. I want to get rich.

[00:57:51] Neville Medhora: But then when you’re older, you’re like your priorities shift so much. So I think it’s hard to say what era of time you’re talking about. So like Ted Turner may have been a corporate raider and buying companies, but when he’s 85, he’s probably just wanting to play with my grandkids, and have a good time.

[00:58:04] Neville Medhora: It just depends what era someone is in. But I think people are happy. There, like it’s an effort. You have to make an effort to do it. So I think for example, living close to friends is a big thing. I don’t know if Sam and I live next to each other. We were four houses apart. We bought houses four houses apart because I grew up like that where we had family friends very close by.

[00:58:23] Neville Medhora: And those people are lifelong friends. Like you, it’s like your brothers or something. And so that’s always important to me. There’s like little moments throughout the day, just having friends to go to, like little fun things are fun in terms of life. I’m more pragmatic. I don’t think I need a crazy level of success, but I would like to be where I don’t have to think about money.

[00:58:43] Neville Medhora: I think that’s the medium I would like to be in, where I have enough money coming in, regardless of what I do, where I can live and live a good life, not just survive. So I would like that, but also To pay attention to friends and just remember, like the point of life is not to work all the time, but rather to have fun and do fun work.

[00:59:01] Neville Medhora: And so I like to think of it like that. That’s the life I would like to live. 

[00:59:04] Patrick Donley: Yeah. You’re familiar with the 4 percent rule. Do you have an X number that once you hit, like you’re, whatever, you’ll spend time with family, friends, traveling, whatever, non-work activities? 

[00:59:16] Neville Medhora: Yeah. The thing is, the funny thing is like, there’s like a slippery slope of once you reach a level, you want to get to the next level.

[00:59:22] Neville Medhora: And people always say that’s a bad thing. I’m just like, that is natural. Okay. You will never just be 100 percent content. And I don’t think you should be, I think you should always be like, 80 percent content, but there should be 20 percent of you. Could I do something more? That’s how you grow.

[00:59:33] Neville Medhora: And so I think that everyone I know is at that level. And I know people who are very rich, who like, once you get used to that, it’s not crazy anymore to you. You mentioned Naval Ravikant. He had a great quote. He’s just the first four times you fly in a G6 across the country. It’s so awesome. And you’re so proud of it, but I guarantee you, you will get bored of doing it.

[00:59:52] Neville Medhora: It will just become another experience. Again, you mentioned Costa Rica. You mentioned Palm Springs. Have you ever rented a really cool house, like on the beach, an amazing house? You get in, you’re like, Holy crap, this view it’s unreal. And then by day three, you’re like, I didn’t even notice it. It just blends in.

[01:00:08] Neville Medhora: It’s just the background. It’s just the background. Yeah. It’s the whole, the hedonic treadmill or whatever. Exactly. And that’s how it is. I think you’ll always maybe think okay, I have 20 million in the bank, but what if I had a hundred million that I could buy a private jet or something, right?

[01:00:21] Neville Medhora: There’s always going to be this next level. And I think that’s fine. But I think being able to live on 50 grand or a hundred grand a month would be sufficient to like, that would be like a nice spot to be in. I think there’s a level I first heard it on the Tim Ferriss podcast or maybe Biology or something.

[01:00:35] Neville Medhora: where he said post economics. And I always thought that was a great term that someone is post economic, meaning no matter what it is, they can buy it. And we’re talking jets and everything, right? You see the new G 700, 000 comes out and you’re like, yeah, I have enough money to purchase that. I don’t want it, but I can.

[01:00:51] Neville Medhora: I think that’s when you’re like post economics. That would be a cool place to be. 

[01:00:55] Patrick Donley: Yeah. How do you structure your own portfolio? Do you like index fund guys? Are you a Bitcoin guy? Real estate guy? What do you think about your own investments? 

[01:01:05] Neville Medhora: I try to think what am I going to invest in that in 10 years is probably going to be higher and preferably much higher.

[01:01:10] Neville Medhora: And so I think a lot of it is I think Amazon’s not going anywhere. I also think that the bare metal of the internet is not going anywhere. So the companies that run the internet are technically Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, those are the comp, at least the American companies that run.

[01:01:24] Neville Medhora: And then there’s some Chinese ones. So those are the types of investments I’ll make. And I know those are all big companies, but I mean if you look at all the big stuff coming out like Apple, Meta Quest, Google’s like Google gets a lot of flack, but it’s like they’re still so dominant. I use them every day in every part of my life.

[01:01:38] Neville Medhora: It’s like those companies are almost too big to fail. They run everything and not in a bad way. Like we like using their products. Their products are so good that we all use them. So those are like the stocks I invest in. And then I have two crypto things. It’s Bitcoin and Ethereum. So Bitcoin, I think just because it has the story, you can’t really change it that much.

[01:01:56] Neville Medhora: It’s never really going to change all that much. It’s such a democratic process that it’s going to be slow to change. But I think Bitcoin will be the largest for a long time and could probably be like a competitor to gold. It seems like it already is. So I do see that those two are my favorite trade.

[01:02:10] Neville Medhora: And then I invested in VOO, which is just the S&P 500 index. And that’s just every month, a certain amount of money goes into it. Cost average basis, whatever the term is for it, cost average buying. And then that’s a Warren Buffett strategy, just the S & P 500 index. And so it’s literally, and I remember back in the day, people would tell me that by a S&P 500 index.

[01:02:29] Neville Medhora: And I’m like what does that mean? I’m like, I’m telling you the stickers, VOO. That’s the one. And there’s other ones that are exactly the same, but that’s particularly the one I put in. And it’s just like an average of the American stock. So that’s my entire investing strategy. I do have 30%. I had a 30 percent investment account in college and an investment account means I will never ever think about buying a book.

[01:02:49] Neville Medhora: I will just buy it. I will never consider the cost of it. Some sort of educational product, I don’t consider the cost of it. If I’m going to use it, I will buy it. That type of thing, that I can invest in unlimited stuff. I have bought things under my investment account, such as a suit. When I was crashing parties and stuff, I needed to look nice and I just looked garbage.

[01:03:05] Neville Medhora: So I bought a suit for 150 bucks, which for me at the time was a lot. And those are like investments in yourself. I guess don’t go buy your whole wardrobe on that. But at the same time, like there’s certain things that like to make yourself better, you need this. And I’d need to spend the money on it.

[01:03:20] Neville Medhora: So that, yeah, that’s, that was 30 percent of my income in college when I was starting. And that was very important to me because you just don’t have a lot of money. Like you, you do think about 30 books sometimes. And I was like, I don’t want money to hold me back from learning something that can make me millions because I’m trying to skimp out on 30 bucks.

[01:03:38] Patrick Donley: Neville, this has been a lot of fun. Where can people learn more about you, learn about what you’re up to, get in touch with you, things like that? 

[01:03:45] Neville Medhora: Yeah, best way to work with me and learn and support me at the same time, if you want, go to CopywritingCourse. com, join, sign up for, but preferably the whole year.

[01:03:52] Neville Medhora: That’s always the best when people sign up for a whole year. They have time to learn everything, absorb everything, do lessons, and get feedback. And it dramatically changes the way people write forever. So I’d say 750 bucks in exchange for changing the way you write everything in your entire life and communicate is pretty good.

[01:04:06] Neville Medhora: You can also follow me on Twitter at NevMed. I also have a YouTube channel. So YouTube’s not copywriting with a K or the old spelling of it. So I put out some free training and a lot of interviews over there and those have been really fun. So I’ll continue to do those. And yeah, so YouTube, and then I also have Instagram.

[01:04:21] Neville Medhora: If you want to look me up, I also post some personal stuff there. So Neville Medhora, check me out there. 

[01:04:26] Patrick Donley: Cool. Good luck with the wedding. Best of luck. It’s an exciting time. It’s a lot of work. 

[01:04:30] Neville Medhora: Thanks so much, Patrick. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate the honor. 

[01:04:33] Patrick Donley: Thanks Neville.

[01:04:36] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

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