721: 543 Upvotes Got Him on HackerNews Front Page
Owen Sadeghpour. A year ago, he was the technical employee or founder at an earlier company and has raised over $50M. Now, he\u2019s working at a successful company. He\u2019s also got a different project called You Exec.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? \u2013 Blue Ocean Strategy and How to Win Friends and Influence People
- What CEO do you follow? \u2013 Jeff Bezos
- Favorite online tool? \u2014 Squarespace
- How many hours of sleep do you get?\u2014 6-10
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? \u2013 \u201cThe older you get the more you realize that human relationships are 50% of your work\u201d
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Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:05 \u2013 Nathan introduces Owen to the show
- 01:46 \u2013 You Exec is a community of professionals that are looking to improve their careers or the way they have relationships with people
- 01:57 \u2013 You Exec creates incredible resources for free and for paid members
- 02:13 \u2013 The paid members have the advantage of more features than the free members
- 02:26 \u2013 Paid members pay $4/month
- 02:43 \u2013 You Exec also takes insightful books, like The Lean Startup, and summarizes them
- 03:30 \u2013 You Exec\u2019s content is usually posted on many different channels
- 03:56 \u2013 You Exec has a mailing list that people subscribe to
- 04:25 \u2013 You Exec used to be something else
- 04:33 \u2013 As a technical person, Owen would write technical articles which were posted on Hacker News, a Y-combinator news stream
- 04:43 \u2013 Owen\u2019s article landed on the front page
- 04:59 \u2013 Owen\u2019s first article was Google and Facebook Ad Traffic is 90% Useless
- 05:20 \u2013 Nathan shares how he found Owen and what piqued his interest in him
- 05:50 \u2013 Owen has been a follower of Hacker News
- 06:02 \u2013 The first article wasn\u2019t intentionally made to blow up
- 06:49 \u2013 When Owen submitted the article, it got 30 upvotes only after a few minutes
- 07:03 \u2013 The readers were mostly looking at the tools that Owen featured
- 07:16 \u2013 By the time Owen got 50-60 points, Owen noticed that it wasn\u2019t getting on the front page which was supposed to happen
- 07:27 \u2013 Owen got some coffee and after 6 hours, he got tons of emails and the article was on the front page
- 08:20 \u2013 Owen\u2019s objective in creating the article was to share with engineers that they\u2019re wasting their money
- 09:10 \u2013 The article got a total of 30K views
- 09:47 \u2013 Owen wants people to see You Exec\u2019s value; that\u2019s why they sign up
- 09:51 \u2013 Owen doesn\u2019t share You Exec\u2019s numbers
- 10:40 \u2013 You Exec has around 1k signups on the paid membership
- 11:11 \u2013 Owen has Google Analytics on while working so he saw where the referrals are coming from
- 11:56 \u2013 The first article still gets around 10 readers a day
- 12:20 \u2013 Owen focuses on insights to bring traffic
- 12:50 \u2013 Owen is passionate in improving patients\u2019 lives
- 13:08 \u2013 Owen believes that a media company is great, but his passion lies in helping individuals
- 13:44 \u2013 You Exec also pays for resources
- 14:25 \u2013 When You Exec pushes out a weekly newsletter, they include references to the creditor
- 14:50 \u2013 The article should save You Exec\u2019s members hours of work
- 15:25 \u2013 You Exec pushes out all the sources of things
- 16:44 \u2013 The Famous Five
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3 Key Points:
- Create something of value and people will stick with you.
- More and more people are finding ways to shave hours off their workload WITHOUT sacrificing their quality of work.
- Relationships with your colleagues are KEY to having a great work experience.
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Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox \u2013 The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio \u2013 Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar \u2013 Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you\u2019re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling \u2013 Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator\u2013 The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible\u2013 Nathan uses Audible when he\u2019s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives