Brad Weimert 0:00
Yielded about 100 million views towards the end of the month, and you spent 100 grand on editing last month. I want people

Sean Mike Kelly 0:07
to be scrolling on Tiktok. Gonna see me every 510 videos I’m posting 40 times a day. Oh, Jesus, yeah. I’ll sprinkle in like an only fans girl, like once or twice a month, because I know I’ll pull views. I sucked at first at podcasting. I have autism, ADHD, childhood trauma. Anyone could take one of those and use that as an excuse. I knew this podcast when I started it was going to be big, because I knew I was locking in and going all out. What

Brad Weimert 0:29
is the structure of a clip for you? Is there a specific CTA? Is there a specific open Congrats on getting beyond a million what got you here, won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Sean Mike Kelly, it is awesome to turn

Sean Mike Kelly 1:19
the tables here, yeah, I’m here after filming 11 episodes here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man,

Brad Weimert 1:24
that is fucking bananas. So for those that don’t know, you have a kind of a wild entrepreneurial background with stuff that from crypto to more traditional e com stuff, but that you grew entirely on social with $1,000 investment to now a podcast, digital social hour, which is massive at this point, and what’s interesting to me about that, one in particular, is how quickly you grew it. I want to talk about both the podcast and your business past, but before we dig into that stuff, I want to get kind of a fundamental idea of how your podcast works. So can you give me kind of a frame and structure for it? I saw a post that you did that you spent 100 grand on editing last month and yielded about 100 million views or So towards the end of the month. Yeah. How do you structure the whole podcast? What’s the workflow like? What’s the team like? How’s that set up? Yeah.

Sean Mike Kelly 2:12
So I announced that we’re, we’re planning on spending 100 grand a month. I haven’t done it yet. Right now, we’re at about, think 30 to 35k a month, and there’s two types of editors. So the main editors I have are kind of more in house, so that’s the content you’ll see on my pages. So I pay those guys monthly for X amount of clips. And then what I did recently, and this is how we’re gonna get to 100k a month, is they called clippers. So they post on their pages, and they get paid based off how many views they get. So every million views they get is $400 so we have teenage kids now making, you know, a couple 1000 bucks a month just recipping my content posting on their pages. We’re doing about 10,000 clips a month. We just started last month, so we’re gonna scale that up to 50 to 100,000 clips a month, and at that point, yeah, it’ll be probably around 100

Brad Weimert 2:58
grand, if you back out, like 10 years, we kind of launched into this influencer space. Okay, I’ve got a product I want to sell. Let me go find functionally affiliates, but like people that have some audience to go push it for you. This is sort of the evolution of doing that, and it went from kind of traditional affiliates to shout outs to now you’ve got clippers, yeah, right. Where do you find them and how do you like rally them and harness them. Now, you’ve got all these agencies that do stuff like

Sean Mike Kelly 3:24
that, right? Good question. Yeah. So I’m still new to this, granted, we started this month, but from what I’ve researched, there’s two of the main apps right now, which is discord and wop, W H, O, P, so we’re testing both right now. Wops pretty, pretty good API. In my opinion, Discord is kind of hard to use, and I’m a millennial, so that’s saying a lot. It’s really complicated, and you could get hacked and stuff. But yeah, I’m figuring it out. So I would use one of those two. If you’re, like, not as techie, I’d say, whoop, is easier. And what they do is they just have a bunch of people in these servers, and then you post that you want this amount of views, you will. You set the prices. So some people pay $600 per million. If you’re famous, you pay less. So like Mr. Beast is only paying $50 for every million views, because he’s already famous and it’s easier to get views. So right now, I’m starting at 400 over time, that’s going to go down to 200 $100 for a million as I get a bigger audience. Wop

Brad Weimert 4:14
is kind of like is an interesting tool, because it’s a marketplace, right? So how did you get turned on to that? I know a bunch of creators that use it, but is it just going into it and looking for people specifically that are offering to do this, or is it an offering that wop has? It’s

Sean Mike Kelly 4:29
an offering they have. They just launched it this year, clipping. There’s people in our space using it already. I saw pace more beyond there, and a couple other guys. I just met the founders at Click Funnels. Dan Fleischman connected us, and yeah, they’re killing it. So I like the API, like I said, it’s easy, and we just launched the Andrew Tate clipping campaign there right now, so they’ll get a ton of views sick.

Brad Weimert 4:50
That’s good to know. Views versus subscribers. Views,

Sean Mike Kelly 4:55
I care more about views, same with followers. I care more about views and. Engagement over

Brad Weimert 5:00
followers. Did that transition happen at some point? Was it previously about subs? For you? Yeah,

Sean Mike Kelly 5:04
followers and subs used to matter a lot to me, but as the algorithms have advanced, actually, they’re becoming more and more irrelevant. So like, followers don’t matter. You could have 10 million followers get no engagement. You see that all the time on YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram. So followers are just kind of social credibility, and it helps you get responses in DMS. So I look at it from that angle. I don’t really care about followers. That’s

Brad Weimert 5:25
an interesting distinction, because for there’s like, now we’re in a world where it seems like you need to have a presence, or there’s a huge advantage to having a presence, I should say, in a personal brand. Does it make sense to launch something now that’s new and not focus on subs or followers at all.

Sean Mike Kelly 5:42
Yeah, because of the algorithm, you could have zero followers and get tons of views. So, like, I wouldn’t worry about it more than engagement. If you provide really good content, the the views and the engagement will come. Just use followers as a score keeper, I guess, but don’t obsess over it. Yeah. Well, to that end, the other thing that seems to be bouncing around is, like organic aiming for viral or paying for traffic. Yeah, how do you look at those two things? I don’t do any paid personally, which is probably a mistake, but yeah, I’m all organic. We’re getting a lot of views, and when I do launch an offer or whatever, I’m probably gonna have to start doing paid because you can only get so much revenue with just straight organic. So I do acknowledge that part of it, but I think paid is getting harder from what I hear. I mean,

Brad Weimert 6:24
paid is always kind of a bitch in every area, right? Like you still have to figure it out no matter what, and that’s never been my area of expertise. I similarly, with easy pay direct anyway, and with beyond a million, it’s always been organic word of mouth, right? That can just take a lot longer to build paid. Obviously, you can just spend money and get stuff right away. The challenge for me with paid, or like, the question for me with paid is, does it squash organic reach?

Sean Mike Kelly 6:50
Yes, because I’ve experimented with YouTube ads, so I guess I had done paid ads. I misspoke earlier, but yeah, I’ve heard that from platforms. When you start boosting the posts on whatever platform you’re on, it’ll start suppressing your reach. Your reach is already being suppressed. Anyways, I only reach 1% of my followers. A majority of my views come from non followers. So even though I’m getting hundreds of millions of views a month now, like I said, we have the clippers and then with the algorithms, the way they’re structured, your followers aren’t even seeing your stuff, you know what I mean. So yeah, I agree. Does it make

Brad Weimert 7:21
more sense for you to spend I think I know the answer for you and your approach, but does it make more sense to spend time trying to get a viral clip or just to go full press on as much as you can with other people’s

Sean Mike Kelly 7:35
uh, pages? I think you want both, because you want to build your pages and your credibility, but you also want to be everywhere as a podcast. So like, I want people to be scrolling on Tiktok and see me every 510 videos. That’s the level I want to get to. That’ll help the evaluation of the company and the presence and help me get more sponsors and everything, you know, so it just helps me in the long run. What do you

Brad Weimert 7:54
think the biggest mistake is that new people make when they’re launching a podcast a

Sean Mike Kelly 7:58
lot? It’s not an easy space. Man, yeah, I think people underestimate how difficult it is. I think people have this notion they just show up interview people, and they can even interview big people that have a following and expect views, right? It’s not like that. My most viewed guests aren’t big people, usually. So there’s a formula where you can get the best out of people without having celebrities on your show, but it takes a lot of trial and error. It’s a lot of work a formula in terms of how you structure, structure the clip, like the editing of the clip, you know, captions, whatever. I don’t think it matters too much. I think it’s more so the editing and the consistency. Yeah, I’m posting 30 times, or wait 40 times a day, on my own pages, and then we have this, yeah, we have the Clippers because of trials. So we should talk about that. Instagram launched a new feature called trials, so now you can post content it doesn’t show to any of your followers. And the ones that do well, you could push to your main feed. So out of the 40 I post, about three to six do well. Well, for me, is 100,000 views. So if it hits that, I’ll push it to my main feed, and then I’ll get another couple 100,000 views,

Brad Weimert 9:01
sick and trials at this point, it’s mid March, 2025 Yeah. Trials came out one a month ago, about a month. Yeah,

Sean Mike Kelly 9:09
that’s why I’ve been milking it, because prior to that, I was only posting three times a day. But whenever there’s a new feature, you got it, you got to milk it, because they push it really hard.

Brad Weimert 9:18
I hear that a lot, and I also think that, I think that, I think that there’s always this question with entrepreneurship of, when do you allow yourself to get distracted and try something new versus just doing the thing you know is working? Yeah, I agree with that. But

Sean Mike Kelly 9:31
trials is such a like it really doesn’t take much additional work because you’re posting your old content. So the thing with podcast is, we have so much content that never gets repurposed, and that’s not just for podcasts. That’s for just media in general. So just post your winning videos that performed well six months ago, 12 months ago, I use a program called sludge AI changes the metadata the video, because if you repost the same video, it won’t pop off again. You have to change the metadata. So sludge AI, I’ll send you the link to. Put it in the video. So

Brad Weimert 10:01
you also just had the Opus guys on. So how have you seen so Opus, it’s Opus. Is it Opus? One is the wine? It’s opus.ai Yeah, Opus Pro, or some Opus Pro, something like that. We used them in the past. And kind of like my general take on AI video clipping has been that it’s not really there and you can’t get you rarely get something dope out of it. Agreed,

Sean Mike Kelly 10:24
they’ve started, they’ve improved a lot. I haven’t used their newer versions, but now they have a lot of advanced features. But yeah, when I started, it was on Opus. I remember it was a big deal at the time, two years ago, just to get subtypes on your video right. And then it became like, oh, what color and what font. And now it’s evolved to like, oh, you need B roll. You need people get so distracted. If you don’t have B roll, it’s hard to watch. So, yeah, it’s always changing. You got to be on top of the trends. If

Brad Weimert 10:50
your whole world is content creation, it makes sense that, like, you’re gonna have to be testing that shit all the time, yeah, trying new stuff all the time. So that’s not really a distraction, I suppose, but more of a core feature. What is the structure of a clip for you that you think pops off? Is there a specific CTA? Is there specific open Yeah, does that look like? Well, my guests differ a lot, but overall, I’d say really interesting hook is the most important part of the video. So the first three seconds,

Sean Mike Kelly 11:15
and Instagram just launched a new feature this week where it shows you what your watch time is. Actually, finally, they needed that for a while. And if you’re not, if you’re losing a lot of people in the first three seconds, they actually penalize you heavily. So that’s the most important part of the video. So get a really viral hook, then from there, just, you know, back it up with facts or whatever. But the hook is the main focus. You’ve really got to know that I see a fair amount of people looping clips. Yeah, do you invest time in doing that to make sure that the clip loops. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve seen that. I see that in basketball content and podcast clips. I might have to try that. I

Brad Weimert 11:47
know I get stuck watching the same fucking clip like three times because it just keeps playing.

Sean Mike Kelly 11:51
So Tiktok did announce that is plus five points in their scoring system when you re watch. So I’m sure Instagram is similar well. So

Brad Weimert 11:58
you’ve got the structure. One of the things that’s interesting about your podcast, versus like beyond a million is predominantly business content, right? And so it’s narrow in focus, and it’s also more narrow in guests, because only so many people do eight, 910, figures, etc, right? But you have a broader audience, so you’ve got like, business people, then you’ve got influencers, you’ve got athletes, like you have celebrities, all sorts of stuff. Is there a particular type of guest that you think performs better than others?

Sean Mike Kelly 12:30
Yes, but it always changes. So like, politics was obviously really hot before the election is still pretty hot, but that that year, I definitely milked that right before that, biohacking was super hot, like health, and that’s still decently, yeah, attractive. So it’s always changing. Right now, debates are really hot, so I’m moderating debates. I’m really passionate about that. I think it’s providing a lot of value to people see both sides. And yeah, I’d say debates right now are my main focus for this year, at least, you know Rick Rubin is, yeah,

Brad Weimert 13:03
I’ve heard Rick Rubin talk about, it’s like, basically, his thesis in life is that artists should only produce things for themselves, and if they produce for themselves, it will create the highest quality thing that other people will like. But if you start to produce for other people, that’s where you end up blending into the rest of the world. Interesting. How much do you think tracing chasing trends is important versus pursuing stuff that’s interesting to

Sean Mike Kelly 13:31
you? You need both. I think because chasing trends will get a lot of views, but you can’t fall into that trap of what Ruben’s talking about, where you’re just trying to people please every single person. That’s a dangerous road. So, yeah, you need both. That’s why I’ll sprinkle in, like, an only fans girl, like, once or twice a month, because I know a pool views. I’ll have Lily Phillips on. I just had her on. She’s the one that slept with 100 men in a day. Oh, Jesus, yeah. Did you hear about that? No, really. Wow. You’re pretty removed from social media, well,

Brad Weimert 13:54
or just, like, generally, porn, yeah, by design, probably, yeah. So

Sean Mike Kelly 13:58
she broke the internet for that, and then, yeah, so I’ll sprinkle those in, but yeah, at the same time, my main value, or my main thing I want to do is provide value

Brad Weimert 14:06
to people. Yeah, that’s interesting. So like, if you think about providing value to other people versus scratching your own itch, how do you stay engaged with that?

Sean Mike Kelly 14:15
Yeah, it’s a balance, because what I’m interested in isn’t what the masses are interested in, right? If I’m similar to you, where I’m interested in high level business and like bio hacking and all this advanced AI stuff, that’s not going to get hundreds of millions of views, right, unfortunately. So yeah, because I’m trying to sell this thing one day, I have to attract the masses get as many views as possible, because that helps the company grow. So I’m kind of playing that game at the same time

Brad Weimert 14:42
when I when we started beyond a million, probably the same time that you started digital social hour, two years ago? Yeah, probably, I think we were two and a half, so probably beginning of 23 Yeah, the premise for us is eight, 910, figure entrepreneurs talking sales, marketing, operations, technology and taxation and. And the a big part of that is that there’s this gap in business of, how do you do things once you get it started? There’s a lot of study and case study, and even colleges study businesses that are bigger, and what works when you’re bigger? And there’s lots of stuff on startups, but this sort of messy middle of, like a few million bucks to 10 or 20, yeah, where everybody’s sort of starting to specialize, like in the beginning, everybody wears a million hats, right? And then people start to specialize. And so you can clean up the business, but that interim phase is really sloppy, yep. So we started only interviewing those people, but the number of people that have a massive audience that are, you know, 1010, 100 you know, billion dollar companies. It’s not very big. Slim picking. It is, man, because most of the people that focus on large audience are doing so to grow the company, yep. And by the time you’ve grown the company, most people aren’t concerned with building a big audience,

Sean Mike Kelly 15:55
super slim. And I know this for a fact because I was researching billionaires to invite on the podcast, and I asked chat GPT, how many billionaires have been on podcasts? It could only come up with 11. Could be a little more than that, but that’s a very little number for billionaires. Yeah?

Brad Weimert 16:09
Well, I know that. I’ve definitely had friends that have declined to come on because they do not want a social presence that are kind of in that yeah, a lot of billionaires are low key, yeah, that multi, nine figure plus range. They’re like, yeah. Why would I do that? Makes them a target? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Why would I buy I don’t blame them. No, no, I don’t either. But, you know, we’re kind of, I think at this phase in society, they had to start their financial journey a long time ago, right? So they’re already established in that path, into that mindset, and I think that that’s probably going to change over time. I

Sean Mike Kelly 16:41
think. So, yeah, you’re seeing more and more, not billionaires, but like nine figure guys going on pods. I’m seeing that for sure. So I think they’ll open up over time well, and those people will naturally grow to the billionaire stats, right, right? Like you give it 510, 20 years, that’s what happens with money, yeah, yeah, yeah, great, yeah, he’s gonna be excited. That’s my most exciting thing. Is the network I’m building with the podcast, yeah, because we’re two years in. But imagine the because I have a group chat of all the guests, I think you’re in it, right? Yeah, yeah, I have to mute that. But imagine that child have like 800 people in it. It’s at 1000 I reached a limit on what’s up. I had to make a second one actually, because we’re at 1500 guests now. But imagine these chats in five to 10 years, yeah, like the level of influence these chats will have, yeah, it’ll be crazy. The indexed aspect of that will be amazing, like, if you, if you port that out, or, you know, probably, yeah, I’ll probably just grab it at that point, which is, yeah, priority hazard, yeah, definitely, already, Opus connects with your YouTube now, so it’s automatically, you know, right? Yeah, it’s all in there. It’s got it all. Yeah, it’s got everything. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 17:38
your team was actually telling me yesterday they use Opus for B roll. Yeah, it’s good for

Sean Mike Kelly 17:43
B roll, man, because B roll is hard to find, and you got to be careful with B roll, because you could get copyright strikes. So you need B roll that’s license free. You don’t want to get in any copyright trouble,

Brad Weimert 17:52
yeah, well, in the flip side of that is that taking B roll that is copyright free. Often, it’s just trash, usually, yeah, it’s like the generic, like, we have cut so many editors from our stuff because they just put this generic bullshit. And I’m like, Hey, shutter stock stuff, yeah? Like, do not do that shit. It’s

Sean Mike Kelly 18:10
terrible, yeah. I wonder how my guys are finding it. Hats off to them. Well,

Brad Weimert 18:13
yeah, they were saying that with the with Opus, you can, because it pulls all your content in. You can search. You can search for like, a topic, and it will pull stuff from your library, wow, and say, Hey, when did I talk about whatever? That’s cool, right? Or show me this guest, shout

Sean Mike Kelly 18:29
out to Opus man. They’re, you know, zero to eight figures in 10 months. People don’t know how hard that is. That is super hard. It is. I mean, they caught a trend too, but it’s super hard, yeah, even with the trend, though. I mean, it’s impressive, yeah, yeah. Well, to that end, how are you monetizing the podcast? Like, what is the business model? We are profitable. I could say that I’m still figuring out the full monetization capabilities. The events are doing really well now. So I think that’ll probably be the main monetization for this year and next year. We basically have networking mixers slash meetups. We have one tonight. The cool part about building the podcast is I don’t have to run any paid ads for the event, so I’m able to get 1000 to 2000 people. We actually have 4000 sign ups tonight, but usually about half show up. But I’m able to get, like, 2000 people in any major city to show up to a room. Yeah, and I don’t charge for tickets, and I don’t sell yet, so there’s definitely money to be made on the back end, somehow, I got to figure that out. But on the front end, for now, we have sponsors, so the events are bringing in good money with sponsors setting up tables and stuff. So they’ll probably bring in a few million this year, and the margins are really high because I’m getting the venues for free. I learned that from Dan Fleischman, oh yeah. So that saved pretty much no expenses based on brand. Yeah, no marketing expense. I’m bringing the business, the venue a lot of business. And then on the podcast side, we make, you know, decent money from the views some guests pay to come on, if they’re they don’t have a big following. And then sponsors, yeah,

Brad Weimert 19:49
that’s interesting. I mean, I think most people look at this stuff. I mean, I shouldn’t say that. I know a lot of clients that we have who have major podcasts monetize. Through information products, yeah, or or physical product, right, supplements, or whatever. Has that been of interest? It

Sean Mike Kelly 20:09
has it had to, it has to be the right product. I’m very skeptical, because I come from E commerce, and the margins are just so thin, so I’d probably lean more towards the info side, slash community side, because I love community building, communities masterminds or whatever. But yeah, it’s definitely been in conversations. So live events, sponsorships, and you, you have thrown everybody into this Whatsapp group, but that’s predominantly, I mean, that’s all guests, right? All guests and sponsors. So I try to provide value to sponsors, because they’re

Brad Weimert 20:35
important. Yeah, is there an issue with sponsors just blasting the fuck out of all the guests? No, so I

Sean Mike Kelly 20:40
make it clear in the rules. I’ve had to kick a few people, unfortunately, because, like, after your intro message, you’re not allowed to promote your business unless someone asks about your business specifically, because I don’t want it just to be a shill fest. Yeah. Why did you choose WhatsApp versus another platform? Because when most people think about community, they think about sort of a searchable, formatted structure thing, and WhatsApp this scrolling feed of kids? No, there’s probably a better one, to be honest, because, yeah, there’s a lot of chatter in there. But I just always felt like Facebook was weird for groups. I wasn’t a fan of Facebook groups. Yeah, and I think a lot of people are not using Facebook anymore, at least in my generation. What do

Brad Weimert 21:16
you think is weird about it? I mean, aside from the fact that they obviously control it and can take it away from

Sean Mike Kelly 21:21
you? Yeah, I don’t know it’s just for me. Like, I don’t know if it’s clunky or just like a weird setup, but maybe it could be a age thing. Do you like Facebook groups?

Brad Weimert 21:29
I don’t like any of it. Yeah, no. I think it’s all fucking pain in the ass. But I will say that there’s definitely an age thing where younger generations move. Have moved more to the feed based stuff, like a some DM platform, functionally, right? And just living in that short form discord, yeah, just exactly in discord I find to be chaotic as hell, so hard to use. Yeah. I mean, I’m getting messages in all different tabs, notifications everywhere. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t use discord or Telegram, because Telegram, a lot of people don’t have Telegram, so I felt like WhatsApp had the slight edge over telegram. So we’ll see if there’s a better one. Maybe wop or school will come up with something that I can transition over. And as people use circle too. Circle, I haven’t heard that one circles. It’s a third party. It’s like a sort of serves the purpose of a like a Facebook group would, but it’s an app on your phone and kind of has the ongoing feed chatter, but you can organize it into different groups, yeah, yeah.

Sean Mike Kelly 22:21
So topical stuff, yeah? Well, a lot of shows are launching their own chats now, so it’s cool to see that I kind of was the first to do that, and I’m in like six WhatsApp style for other shows. Yeah.

Brad Weimert 22:31
What do you think is, if somebody has an existing business and they’re launching a podcast, you launched quick, and that’s why I want to ask you this, because you launched super quick. Like I said, a lot of people want to build brand to support a business that they have. What do you think the best way is to convert people from the podcast to your brand or product? Yeah, I

Sean Mike Kelly 22:51
guess it depends on every person’s goal. For me, I’m just aiming for visibility. So I’m just aiming for clips, and I’m posting a lot so consistency. But for a brand perspective, if they want more awareness, I could see it working, because if they’re not pitching too much, and it’s natural, like it could be a similar system to how I have it, where they just have on people from their industry, and they just chat the shit like they’re not really pushing. I think the problem is, when it’s too salesy, that’s where a lot of brands like try to start podcasts, and just becomes too much of a pitch. So just keep it natural. And I think with the right formula, the right editors, I think what I’ve done is duplicatable. And honestly, girls get way more views than guys. If they’re like intelligent like my most viewed clips are attractive females that could talk well. So if you’re a brand, I would try to put not to be sexist, but like a female host, and I think it would do pretty well. There’s

Brad Weimert 23:42
a conversation going that I have all the time with different people about when, when they’re launching an independent podcast or YouTube channel, whether it should be your name or a brand, right? You’ve got Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, or you’ve got digital social hour, how do you pick whether it should be your name or some other name.

Sean Mike Kelly 24:03
Forget who I had on, but he was nine figure guy. He works with Tony Robbins, bald guy, but he told me never to do your name, because if you want to build it to exit, it’s going to be really hard. I kind of agree with that. At the same time, I’m using my personal social media handles, so I messed up there. So yeah, I think you should use a name if you plan on exiting, but if you plan on just having it forever, just do whatever you want. Yeah? You know,

Brad Weimert 24:25
yeah. I mean, the trade off, right? Is that if you, if you have a brand that you’re pushing digital social hour, it’s easier to sell, right? And you could swap the host later if you wanted to sell it as an asset, but you don’t have the same personal branding play for yourself. Yep, right, agreed,

Sean Mike Kelly 24:42
yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with that, but I’m planning on selling, so hopefully that happens one day. You have a timeline. We actually are getting offers already, which is crazy, but no probably, like few years. Yeah, because revenue doubled and profits going up. Up, and that’s before the events really took off. So I want to do this for another year or two, see where we’re at once we hit maybe eight figures in revenue. Then, then I’ll start shopping. I want a high eight or nine figure exit.

Brad Weimert 25:13
Yeah, that makes sense. Then what?

Sean Mike Kelly 25:16
Um, well, you’ll still have to podcast. It’d be similar to how Rogan structured it, where you just get a lump sum up front. They start keeping all your sponsorship money, but you still do what you do, which is what I want. I just don’t want to sell to someone that will tell me who to have on and what to say. Like, I wouldn’t do that for any amount of money. Yeah, I want the freedom of the like, I love where I’m at now, because I could have on whoever I want. No one tells me anything. I probably lost tons of money doing that, but it’s all good. You know, I’ve had some sponsors back out. How did you transition into this? Let’s back out jerseys. Yeah, well, it was jerseys. So it was e commerce jerseys, and then it was pandemic hit, I think, yeah, pandemic hit. And then it was masks. I think we talked about that on the first episode. Then it was crypto. That’s the first year I made eight figures in a year, and then it was the podcast. So I did really well in crypto, made a ton, lost a ton, and then had no meaning in life for a few months, and then started the show looking for meaning and purpose. And here we are,

Brad Weimert 26:20
two years later. Interesting. Well, tell me, I don’t think we got any of those stories.

Sean Mike Kelly 26:23
Oh, we didn’t. I know we talked about the mass stuff. Well, I think we talked about it personally, but I don’t think we actually got it. So, yeah, summarize, basically I did. So what was the, yeah, what were the Econ Jersey story? Yeah, it was called Jersey champs. That was, like, my second business. My first one failed. I tried doing concert bookings, total flop, um, almost given my dad a heart attack. And then second one, Jersey champs e commerce, typical drop shipping store. Drop Shipping was hot at the time. This was like 2015 everyone was doing it. So did that for three years. I was in college, dropped out for the was making 50k a year, but the revenue was decent. The peak year was 1.2 million. And then from there, transitioned into masks because the pandemic hit. I’ve never done B to B before, so I was learning all of this on the fly. I downloaded zoom info, rocket reach, paid a ton of money for those databases, and was literally cold emailing hospitals and governments, and it somehow ended up working. Man, I figured out the right distributors, suppliers, and connected the dots. We did, I think 20 million in revenue. I didn’t make that much, but just to see like that was possible from my bedroom was insane, like, so I fell in love with, like, cold email. Well,

Brad Weimert 27:27
give me a timeline on that, because, like, when COVID hit, masks, there was a huge shortage, right? Yeah. So the huge issue, which obviously, was the catalyst for this, how did you even get the mass at that point in time?

Sean Mike Kelly 27:38
Yeah. So we had a few deals we closed from Chinese supplier, which my mom had connections to. I’m half Chinese. She grew up in Beijing, and then we had a agreement with a 3m distributor in the US. They just had a big back order, but we still got those orders in. And I think they got fulfilled over time. Some of them canceled, but still, yeah, it was about about a year of that just every single day, waking up at 6am cold emailing. I had a partner doing the cold calls. He was an older gentleman named Seth, and we did really well man. Revenue wise, I didn’t take home that much, but it was really good proof of concept. And I still cold email every day to this point now. Oh damn Yeah, I cold email and cold DM every single day. I’ve done cold DM for probably 10 years straight. Damn. For guests at this point. Now it’s for guests, yeah, but it could be for anything, whatever business you’re in, like, just shoot your shot. You know,

Brad Weimert 28:30
how much time do you spend doing that? And how do you track it? Well, now I’m more picky.

Sean Mike Kelly 28:33
I used to send 100 a day when I was doing jerseys, and now I’d probably send maybe 20 a day inviting guests. So I scroll on my feed looking for viral guests. DM about 20, say about half get back to me, and then maybe eight or nine get on the show from there. And we’re filming about 60 a month. We’re booked till May. So that’s kind of what I’m doing with DMS now and then with emails, we use it for the networking events. Got it. How much time do you commit to it. Well, once it’s set up, I mean, because it’s all automated, we use a program called instantly.ai we’re able to get about 1000 people from just the podcast at the events, and then the rest are from cold email campaigns. So you can export entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas making 5 million or more a year in revenue, put them in an email campaign, send about 100 emails a day, and that’s how I got the rest of the attendees, for the attendees, and what about the DMS? DMS is just for podcast guests. I’m manually doing that. That probably takes because I’m scrolling, depends on the day, maybe an hour or two a day, yeah? But it’s fine, and I’m learning a lot about what’s going viral. So it’s a win, win.

Brad Weimert 29:35
Yeah, I get it. I mean, I think that I ask because it’s really common, like one of the fundamental sales premises is people think they’re doing more than they’re doing, right? So you said I started with 100 then I went to 20, and tracking that stuff for most people is mission critical to make sure you do it. Yeah, absolutely, especially when you’re stuck in your fucking feed and you could just be scrolling for an hour. Yeah,

Sean Mike Kelly 30:00
I used to DM every day till I was blocked. That’s how I knew I hit 100 because I think the hunter was like, the limit. I don’t know what it is, a limit per day, yeah, just copy and pasting like a machine. It’s funny, though, because Instagram has all your old messages. So now, when I’m inviting people on the podcast, I have to unsend the jersey stuff because it’s like, a little embarrassing. Seven years ago, you know? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 30:20
no, that’s great. I definitely, I pulled up a Sun Life organics. Yeah, he you did an intro. We’re gonna record later, yeah? But I pulled up, I went to text him today and pulled up a thread from 2020 Holy crap. Yeah, you guys met at an event or something. No, somebody else in town had introduced us, wow, and I don’t even know who, because I didn’t find the group chat. I just found I just text him directly. Wow, small old that’s cool. But same thing like, and I actually love that the old messages pop up because stuff like that happens. Yeah, yeah, right. And that gives you another point of conversation with somebody, unless you just, like, spam them. Maybe I should keep my old text. I had it set to delete all my old texts. Oh, dude, I’ve got wine since, like, 2007 Damn. Yeah, mine

Sean Mike Kelly 31:02
Delete. I only have the past year. The reason for that is actually wild. I manually text every single event attendee, damn with my personal cell number, and I’ve been doing that since my first event ever, which had 20 people at it. But now it’s gotten to the point like this last one, I couldn’t hit up everyone. There was 4600 sign ups. I hit up about 1500 so I need a better system for that. Yeah, like, don’t do it well, part of me, because the people come up to me, they’re like, they love that personal touch, sure, and that means a lot to me, but yeah, now it’s getting the point where it’s too much and yeah, my personal numbers, I need to value that more. I think,

Brad Weimert 31:36
yeah, yeah. I think so. I think it’s an inevitable path of giving your

Sean Mike Kelly 31:40
phone away. Yeah? So that’s why I had it set to a year, because it was taking up so much storage. Oh, yeah, on my phone, I reached the max storage,

Brad Weimert 31:48
yeah, I just let it roll, and I do not text 4000 people for an event.

Sean Mike Kelly 31:54
Yeah, it’s probably not the most efficient way. It takes a lot of time. I don’t

Brad Weimert 31:58
know. Man, I think that there’s a there’s this balance, especially today, of personalization versus automation, and what actually makes sense? And I think that very often personalization is the more efficient path. It feels like it takes a lot more time, but pound for pound, you get a better, effective net response, right? I think

Sean Mike Kelly 32:18
for high value tasks, yes, like for a podcast, you want that personal invite. You don’t want a copy paste message,

Brad Weimert 32:23
no, no. And even, like, I just got back from an event A few weeks ago, and I got emails like follow up emails, people that I met at the event, or texts, and one of them was clearly a copy and paste. And it was like, still pretty well done. But it was like, Yeah, something’s a little off on this. It was too generic. Okay, you know? It was like, it was great meeting you at the event. I want to keep the conversation going and find out what else is going on in your life. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that if I got that right, you know? And it’s kind of like, you have to, and then you’ve got the ones that are copy and paste with one thing change, right? Yeah. For me, I bring

Sean Mike Kelly 33:00
up something personal when I do the follow up text. So if they told me about their kid, if they told me about their wife, or an event they’re going to, or a vacation they’re about to go on, I’ll bring that up. And I think they like they value that, yeah, I think

Brad Weimert 33:11
there’s no question about that. So that’s hard to do, yeah, yeah. I keep notes when I’m at an event, yeah, yeah. Or I try to that depends on my drinking. Yeah,

Sean Mike Kelly 33:22
yeah. I’m pretty much sober, so I got an edge there, yeah, yes, but I trade off the happiness of drinking, so

Brad Weimert 33:27
that’s yes, yes, yes. That’s the balance. Well, that’s actually why I take notes on it, because whether I’ve had one drink or many, either way I want to have that. Yeah, sort of follow up course of action. Do you do it to loosen up, or are you like, socially, yeah? Yeah, I do. It’s loose enough, yeah, and, you know, it’s, I think that it’s a variety is kind of a an ongoing, interesting conversation, because there’s no question that you can have those social engagements without drinking. I think there’s also no question that it changes the dynamic and things come out. Oh, yeah, drinking, no, not otherwise, yeah, for good and bad both, yeah, yeah, depending on how drunk you are, yeah, right. I’ve seen it go horribly, but I’ve seen it like I know a lot of introverts, and a couple drinks, you know, makes them definitely more lively. Yeah? Well, I definitely had conversations with people that have allowed us to dive into conversations that have been much deeper and connect in a way that we never would have. Yeah, no, I could see that yeah, if there wasn’t Yeah, for me, I’m so open about, like, my insecurities in my past and everything. Yeah, I guess I don’t need to drink. I’ll just come out if it happens, yeah, my like, out there, just spewing it for no reason. But if it comes up, like, oh yeah, I’ll talk about it without any shame.

Insert, funny advertisement here, or just check out easy pay direct. It’s epd.com forward slash, bam, and you can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing, and this seemed like more fun than. Writing a script to that what, uh, what do you think the most difficult thing you’ve had to overcome is

Sean Mike Kelly 35:05
I had a lot of doubt, insecurity growing up about my looks. I couldn’t even so I didn’t look in the mirror for 10 years. Wow, yeah, cuz that girl called me ugly in like fifth grade, and it just broke me on Ubu. You remember UVU? Oh, they just went out of business. Did they? They were like, a Skype Oh, god, yeah, no, I never lose Middle School. Call me that, yeah. So that fucked me up, yeah, and I was super skinny. I was like 130 540 pounds, six foot five in high school, still a giant, a lot of body issues. So that for me, just always talking to girls and even guys like I was the weak, scrawny guy. So, but now I’m, you know better. So, yeah, yeah. Just got in the gym, started working, started making money, and I just had a lot of confidence issues. I think growing up only child, divorced household, really shy.

Brad Weimert 35:49
How did, how did your parents impact your risk assessment, your entrepreneurship, etc, specifically, sort of immigrant background,

Sean Mike Kelly 35:59
yeah, I got both ends of it. My mom wanted me to take the safe route for sure, with academics and nine to five and work my way up the corporate ladder. She came from China 20 bucks, didn’t speak English, scrub kitchen floors, worked her way up to a self made millionaire doing that route through education in nine to five, and she’s still working now. She works at AWS now, so hats off to her doing that. Super impressive. But my dad was an entrepreneur on the side. He had a nine to five same company as my mom. It was called Telcordia. They got bought out by Ericsson, and then he sold books on the side. And I saw how passionate he was. We would go in dumpsters, and I would pull books out of the dumpster library, and we would go to book sales. And those are, like my favorite memories with my father, so I think I got the entrepreneurship from him. What books were impactful. I wasn’t too much of a reader until college. I was more like an audio guy. I started off with TEDx talks. Just binge those in college, just to get motivation, because I think there’s different stages of learning, so at first, I just needed the motivation. So yeah, blasted the TEDx talks. And Gary V at the time, he’s pretty motivational, and Les Brown and motivational speeches. And then I started, yeah, getting into more into books and podcasts. But it changes right now. I’m actually doing relationship books, because I feel like I’ve done so many business books and self development books. I milked that category and I neglected my personal relationships, so I’m working on that now. A lot of sacrifice to get to where I’m at in my personal life. I’ll say that. What do you mean? Just like to have this success fast. It comes at a cost. Yeah, you know, yeah, I’m 28 and for my age group, like I’m way ahead on paper, but it came with a lot of personal sacrifice with my own health, with relationships and

Brad Weimert 37:43
friendships. Are you conscious of that while you’re doing it?

Sean Mike Kelly 37:46
Not at the not early on, but now I am. And even though that I still am, I still want to work. It’s like a weird dichotomy, but, uh, I think in the long run, it’ll it’ll play out, but I know I’ve done some harm. You know, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, five years straight, while dating someone that’s hard on her, yeah, you know, not giving them time. How does, how does she look at that? Now, we’ve reached a compromise, but it’s still like a conversation ongoing, because stuff will pop up. Like, I don’t film on weekends usually, but Andrew Tate was in town on Saturday. I’m like, let’s reach an agreement here. And now we’re at a good point where we can have those conversations before I felt so much shame to even ask that about traveling this summer on the weekend or something like that. But yeah, now I take weekends off. Ish, like, I work a few hours a day. I used to work weekday nights. I kind of take those off now too. So it’s just having conversations. I think that there’s definitely some truth in the way that you can be the best for other people is by focusing on being the best version of yourself. And you know, you can go through phases in life, but if you’re really passionate about building something, the way to do that is to have relentless focus on it. It’s my opinion. Yeah, has that? Is that first off? Does that resonate with you? Oh, 100% I lock in whenever my mindset, like I knew this podcast when I started, it was going to be big, yeah, because I knew I was locking in and going all out, I probably spend, I don’t know what other podcasts spend on their podcast, but if I had a guess, I’m I must be spending the most time like, I don’t know anyone working as hard as they are on their shows as me. Yeah, what I’ve seen at least,

Brad Weimert 39:24
yeah, well, I don’t know anybody that’s recording in such significant blocks and putting out so many so fast. Yeah,

Sean Mike Kelly 39:31
1500 episodes in two years. I was actually on Guinness the other day. I wanted to see if it’s like, a world record or something. But no, the world records 4500 episodes now. So I’ll get that in maybe four or five years.

Brad Weimert 39:42
Damn. Where I was going with that was with this shift in schedule with the girlfriend and now taking some nights off, taking weekends off to spend time. Do you look at that as a sacrifice to the pursuit of the business, or as a desirable path to longevity? Or both, both?

Sean Mike Kelly 40:01
Yeah, first, I would lean towards more of the first answer. You said, thought it really affected the business if I wasn’t working on it non stop. But I also think it’s good to take some time off and reflect and think too, because the first three years, I was just grinding with no time to, like, reflect on anything. I was just doing minuscule tasks and doing customer service and graphic design and everything myself, and that’s not productive. You know. Now I’m at a cool spot where I’m finally hiring, because I was such a micromanager for years, but now we got a nice team, and that’s how I’ll probably get to nine figures, because I’ve always been stuck in the seven to eight range, like for years, for probably, like, seven years now, but I think to get to that nine figure range, I’m gonna have to build a team, because I’ve never seen a nine figure entrepreneur solo, have you

Unknown Speaker 40:42
No? No. But

Sean Mike Kelly 40:44
I think we’re probably going down that path. Because I think with the tools coming out, with AI feeding itself into all these different spaces, I think we’re gonna probably start seeing that. Yeah, I think so too, without question, leverages people. Yeah, and it does feel great having a team, like, with the same mission, like, feels really, uh, empowering. And, you know, to see the lives I’m changing now is cool, yeah, one of my employees has, like, a elderly dog, like rescue, kind of, like a bunch of dogs that she’s rescuing, and just to be able to provide for that is a good feeling.

Brad Weimert 41:17
Yeah, yeah. No, I get that. I get that. It’s good to have people around too. Yeah, doing stuff with people is more fun, absolutely, if they’re the people you want to do it with. No,

Sean Mike Kelly 41:26
absolutely, because I’ve traveled alone and it never hits the same. You could be in the nicest resort alone, five star, 5000 a night, or whatever, doesn’t hit the same. No, it’s, to

Brad Weimert 41:34
me, that’s not even fun actually. Like, it’s, like, sort of entertaining for a minute, and then I’m alone, yeah? And I’m like, okay,

Sean Mike Kelly 41:41
yeah, it was the worst trip of my life, the one I did alone. I’ll never do it again. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 41:45
yeah. I mean, I travel solo all the time for a business, but it’s, it’s to go to some events, yeah, that’s different. Yeah, it is different. But it’s still like, I’m still alone there, you know? And like I’m alone in my room and at this place. And, okay, yeah, you know that makes sense, yeah, especially if it’s an event that’s new, right? If you go to like, like, you go to one of the masterminds that you’re a part of, or something that you’re at routinely, where you know people, then you’ve got community. But if you’re new to something, then you truly are just alone, showing up 100% which goes back to, I guess, if you have a strong personal brand, you show up and people know you. That’s

Sean Mike Kelly 42:17
what I’m seeing more. I’m getting recognized more and more. Trying to stay humble about it. Hopefully I can maintain it. It’s a challenge, though. Like, it just being honest, like, Sure, getting these crazy numbers and, like, more and more people coming up to me, I could see how it eats people. What’s the worst question people ask you when they meet you? You play basketball, or how tall are you? I mean, whatever.

Brad Weimert 42:39
What about relative to the podcast? What’s the dumbest question people ask about the

Sean Mike Kelly 42:43
podcast, either how to start or how to grow it. I mean, I could see how to grow it, but how to start easy? Killer. I just asked you, like, 15 questions about that. Yeah, no. But like, how to start is, like, come on, bro, yeah. Like, just get started. I filmed on iPhone eight refurbished. Like my my first podcast set up. I was renting a studio with iPhone eights. Like, who cares about the quality at first? Just get the reps in. The reps in. Yeah. I refer to myself as a recovering perfectionist. I used to be a huge perfectionist. It’s like, so toxic, though, in business it is,

Brad Weimert 43:09
well, there’s a so that. That brings another question, which is my stance has been, v1 shouldn’t be a shitty version of the product. It should be a really good but very scaled down version of the product. The alternate approach is just do a ton of shit and eventually get something decent out of it. Yeah. Which direction do you lean? I

Sean Mike Kelly 43:30
lean towards the one where it’s just get started, because I sucked at first at podcasting. Yeah. I think it’s very hard to just train yourself before you even start filming to be good at it. I think you need to do it. Like, I don’t think anyone can just do it. And, yeah, some people are naturally good at talking, so it’s easier for them, but I think just get the reps in. Man, you don’t even have to air the first 10. You just practice. Yeah? So I’d be more towards the first one, I think, yeah.

Brad Weimert 43:54
I mean, I suppose it depends on what medium you’re talking about. Like, if you’re building software, then having a shitty version out there, right? That’s different. Just to do reps probably isn’t that product. No, you’re right. It depends on the industry for sure. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point with recording stuff. And there’s no question that there are people that are naturally charismatic, but that’s it. It can also be a condition skill set, right? And maybe you do 1000 reps and you still aren’t very charismatic, you still kind of suck. Yeah, it’s possible, but you’re definitely gonna be better than you were when you started. Yeah.

Sean Mike Kelly 44:21
I mean, look, on paper, I should not be good at podcasting. I did a brain scan. I’m not sure if I told you, but I have autism, ADHD, childhood trauma, all these mental conditions, and anyone could take one of those and use that as an excuse. Yeah, you know, but I have all of those. And, yeah, it was a huge introvert. I had agoraphobia. I couldn’t even leave my house, but you can train to be a good podcast. So it’s a good conversationist. Are there

Brad Weimert 44:45
things that you do deliberately to be better at conversing? I think it

Sean Mike Kelly 44:49
comes with the reps. Comes with studying. You could study, but you also have to take action. So I watch the top shows. I study the questions they’re asking, the guests they’re having, on how they’re sitting, how they’re like, using HEY. And gestures, everything you could definitely learn how to be and going to events, talking to different people, different walks of life, I’ve gotten a lot better at reading people from the podcast and feeling out the vibe of the room. Are there any mentors that you have had on the upswing here? Not direct one on one, but just indirect, because I study all the top shows, but now I’ve built relationships with some big hosts, so yeah, maybe their mentors. We text about podcasting, what are the shows or who are the people that you think are best at interviewing? Oh, there’s some good ones right now, since we’re in Austin, I’ll shout out. Chris Williamson, oh yeah, he’s got a great show. Yeah, actually was messaging. He’s going to come on this year. Patrick bet. David, amazing Pierce, Morgan, Love him or hate him, he kind of innovated this political debate world, killing it. Every YouTube video gets a million views. Obviously, Rogan’s to go. There’s a lot, man, there’s really good. But there’s a big gap between the top shows and the rest of the shows. So yeah,

Brad Weimert 45:58
those are interesting ones, because Chris has a wildly different approach and style than like Patrick by David. Yes, right. Like Patrick by David has this very, I’ll call it natural charisma, and he just goes, yeah, and Chris is like this incredibly thoughtful, slow, insightful question. Asker agreed, yeah, yeah. Do you think that one one style is better than another? No,

Sean Mike Kelly 46:27
because they’re being themselves. They’re being their authentic selves. They’re not putting on a mask. So like, Chris is probably more introverted. Pat’s more extroverted. He’s a go getter and straightforward guy, straight shooter. So no, they’re just playing into their themselves. So yeah, you can be a good host as an introvert and an extrovert and just be yourself, like people are, like, trying to cap on these podcasts. That blows my mind. Yeah?

Brad Weimert 46:48
Well, look, I mean, I think that goes back to like, you’ve got the podcast as a business model, and there are people that just want to do the podcast and nothing else in their life, and like, that’s the thing, right? And then you have people that leverage podcasts, like HubSpot has a podcast, yeah, right. And now they have a podcast network that clearly is all about monetizing HubSpot, right? The whole thing, right? Do you think it makes sense for businesses to leverage podcasts for monetization purely and in does that warrant a different structure, a different organization, less authenticity? I think it could work. So HubSpot is a good example, because they have the show my first million Yeah, yeah. And they do a phenomenal job like that. I should have mentioned them earlier, but yeah, I love that show. I watch almost every episode. So and they like, yeah, HubSpot, yeah, they’re great. But HubSpot advertises on their show, and it seems super natural and organic. So if you do it that way, yeah, that’s a great idea, but yeah, you can’t be too pitchy, because then you’re gonna lose viewers if you’re not providing value. Yeah, I feel like there’s got to be alignment, but it has to be entertaining. And yeah, those guys are entertaining, man. Super good duo. Super entertaining. Yeah, Sam was in town for a long time. I think he moved but, oh yeah, I think he’s about, I think he sells property here, but he’s moved around quite a bit. Which

Unknown Speaker 47:56
team are you on? Team Sam or team Sean?

Brad Weimert 48:00
Well, I’ve met Sam a couple times, and he’s like, in mutual circles. I I don’t, you know, I find I like both of them. I haven’t met Sean.

Sean Mike Kelly 48:09
Sam’s more my style. He seems more of a straight shooter. More East Is he from the East Coast? Give me questions. He gives me East Coast energy, yeah, super direct. Sean gives me Cali energy. But they’re both really intelligent guys,

Brad Weimert 48:21
yeah. Well, I think that the having two people doing it is also an interesting dynamic for a show, because they independently are entertaining, you know, and have banter with each other, yeah, versus sort of a question answer podcast, you know, they’re just sort of fucking around,

Sean Mike Kelly 48:36
right? For sure, the all in podcast does really well, too, I think talk about a different

Brad Weimert 48:41
format, though, right? All in is incredibly structured and, like, they’re playful, but they’re like, a different caliber of thoughtfulness, and they’re very macro, right? They’re studying that stuff all the time, like their job is to study the macro trends in the world for the sake of investment. Yeah, right. And I guess you could sort of say the same about Sam and Sean. Sam and Sean and my first million kind of, except they’re not professional investors, right? They’re sort of serial entrepreneurs that are doing things and just interested and curious. Well, that’s why I think, well, both shows do well, but Sam and Sean, it’s more relatable if that makes 100% Yeah. Well, it goes back to the small audience, big audience thing, right, right? Like the my first million is focused on new entrepreneurs, right? And all in is focused on an elite group of society that is focusing on investment and macro world trends, right? It’s just going to be a smaller group. Yeah, right, yeah. I agree,

Sean Mike Kelly 49:29
yeah. There’s an audience for for a lot of different niches. You got to find your lane and your goal with it. But I’m going out through a mass audience.

Brad Weimert 49:35
Well, that’s, that’s we got off that track at some point, but that’s, I know we started with that, but I have to for beyond a million. We’re starting to do sort of multi seven figure folks, yeah, which are just different conversations than the eight, 910, figure folks, but it’s easier to find people that help grow the audience of the podcast in the seven figure range. Absolutely. Yeah. I agree. Many, many more seven figure entrepreneurs that. Have big audiences. It just is a different conversation.

Sean Mike Kelly 50:03
I agree. Yeah, I’m in the seven figure range now, to be transparent, but I’ve done eight once, and that fucked me up. Yeah, hopefully I’m in a better mental spot next time I do that. Why did it fuck you up? Was that just the crypto Yeah, just making that much money, that quick? I think I was too mature, too greedy, lost it all. I’ll be in a better way, better mental framework next time. Yeah, so when that happens again, I’ll be chilling. We didn’t get there, so you did the mask thing. Oh, yeah, we didn’t that got to 20 million or something. Yeah, in revenue, I rarely made any money, to be honest. So no margin, pretty much no margin. Well, there was, but a lot of people canceled later because the mask took forever. There was, like a 10% margin. So I was supposed to make, you know, a million or two, yeah, but that didn’t happen. I remember jumping in my bedroom like, Babe, I’m a millionaire. That first million hits, man, yeah, man, yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna ever, I’m gonna ever feel that way again. No, but yeah. So then I did become a millionaire through crypto, launched nfts, gotten some coins at the right time. And, yeah, crypto was a right time, right place. I can’t say how much skill was involved, because I got really lucky. Honestly, people don’t admit that about crypto. They think they could predict it, but no one can, yeah, so just submit. You got lucky. And, uh, yeah, lost it all. So you

Brad Weimert 51:22
could take that story and slap it on a million people. What was, what coins did you do? How did you do it? What was the structure? Just kind of like, find something and jump on it. Yeah, research it. Were you involved in crypto groups? Yeah. And this is like 2021 Yeah. So it was the third Bull

Sean Mike Kelly 51:38
Run, I think. So basically, launched the NFT. Did well, made a million net off that, and then reinvested that. I started these, or I first I joined the groups, and then I was like, let me just start mine and look connect people together. So I had a whale group, and they would post random coins. It’s been so long I don’t even remember some of the names, because these coins cycled so fast, but yeah, got in on some of these meme coins and, made a lot, lost a lot, and ended up getting a 10 million. I literally could have pressed sell and cash it out, and I didn’t. That went all the way down to a million, and it’s probably even lower now, and that I had it all in, like a couple coins, meme coins, and, yeah, I didn’t cash out what I could have, man. So it’s now, you know, March 2025, are you involved in crypto at this point? I’m not, unless it left such a sour taste in my mouth, and that could be bad, honestly, like I probably could have been capitalizing this whole time, but I’m chilling right now. I’m so focused on the pod. Yeah, if I went back to crypto, deter from the podcast? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 52:33
no, I get it, though. We are, you know, in another run of some sort, right now, it’s down, I know, but the but we’ve been up for the last several months, and so how long is it going to be down right now, Trump just announced that we’re gonna have a crypto reserve. Yeah, and nothing really happened when he announced it. It went down when it, when he announced it, but like, something’s gonna happen moving forward, for sure, think for your side house. So

Sean Mike Kelly 52:58
if you just follow the cycles and not over thought it, you would make a ton of money, but people always try to day trade and buy meme coins. Yeah? So for now, you’re just staying out of it for now, but that might change if the right text message comes through. Like, imagine if you knew Trump’s team when he launched the Trump coin. Yeah, should have made millions from that one connection. That’s why I value connections and relationships, because I do know people that made a killing. I just wasn’t in, tapped in enough, I guess, to that team. Yes, somebody

Brad Weimert 53:23
in Mike Dillard is in town, and Mike is, he’s always been involved in finance, but super involved in crypto, yeah, and he got wind of the Trump coin at like, $3 Damn, I know. So he made a ton. He didn’t, he didn’t invest in it, yeah, it

Sean Mike Kelly 53:41
was one of these, like, that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I know it was

Brad Weimert 53:44
one of the I can’t remember why. I can’t remember if he was busy or made a conscious choice not to do it. Yeah, because he tracks this stuff pretty tightly. But

Sean Mike Kelly 53:52
yeah, those ones seem obvious. I was at inauguration that week when they launched it, and just doing podcasts and guests were coming up to me, like, Yo, I made this much. I made this much. One got me, like, 10 mil. I’m like, damn, I was filming all that.

Brad Weimert 54:04
Well, that goes back to staying focused on what you’re doing instead of chasing the shiny object. Yeah, million opportunities that come and go. Yeah? Plus, I

Sean Mike Kelly 54:14
don’t value money as much as I used to. I think, I mean, I still love money, still probably top three for me, but used to be number one by far.

Brad Weimert 54:21
Oh, my rule for investments is, if there is some crazy sense of urgency behind it, and I’m gonna miss it because of that, I’m okay missing it. That’s a

Sean Mike Kelly 54:30
red flag, right? Usually, yeah, there’s rare acceptance, like the Trump coin, but I think usually it’s just a big red flag,

Brad Weimert 54:35
yeah, yeah. I think you have to really know your shit to be able to capitalize on something that has urgency behind it, where you can see it immediately, have already assessed it, already know what’s going on, then you can pull the trigger. That’s a good point. But if somebody’s pushing you to assess something in real time, get the fuck out of yeah, that’s,

Sean Mike Kelly 54:51
I love that advice. Honestly, I’m out. If that’s out, yeah?

Brad Weimert 54:54
Well, I appreciate carving out time, man, it’s always good to have you in studio. Yeah?

Sean Mike Kelly 54:58
Great interview, man. And let me know how we can work more in the future. Yeah, love that. Where should people find you? Digital, social hour be best. Just dropped the Tate episode this morning. Gonna spend probably 50k on clippers for that, so you guys can see me in real time with this strategy. See how many views it gets and try it out on your own if you want. Fuck

Brad Weimert 55:17
yeah, until next time. All right, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe, and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact, it helps other people find us. Also. You might not know this, you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson and Neil Patel at beyond a million.com.