Make Money Online

Well um pens, uh disposability, form factor, budget. I have so many questions. So many questions.

Well, yeah. I mean, you can get a pen anytime, man. I mean. Again, it’s a personal decision.

May I recommend going on the website jetpens. com? It is basically the entire pen and stationery section of Tokyo hands rendered in America. This is amazing. Fucking incredible. I actually just placed a giant order for my notebook on jetpens. com. And if you just go pens. So they have fountain pens, they have gel pens.

They have scented gel pens. They have enough scented gel pens. And enough Scented gel pen enthusiasts that they felt it necessary to create So look at just if you scroll down on the landing page for gel pens, you get all of the photos. And just look at those. They have different tips for the gel pens. They have erasability, they have sets, they have product lines, they have pen type A on there, which is really stupid and weird. Yeah, pen type A, they literally call it this pen is overengineered to crazy town. It is a $160 gel pen. Welcome to your new reality. Like. Your budget could literally stretch into five figures of pens.

This is insane. It’s insane. You just went down a very deep.

So this is the thing with a lot of pens. A lot of the value is in the barrel. So there’s a there are two companies in Japan. One of them is called Platinum and one of them is called Nakaya. Nakaya is Platinum Nibs. Grafted onto a custom handmade barrel, and the difference is $300, like for the starting pen. And It’s all in presentation and luxury, and how you promote yourself. This is why Alan Weiss says. You know, get a Cartier or a Mont Blanc, right? And he’s wrong because there are a million better brands than Cartier and Mont Blanc, but he’s right in that the pen signifies.

So I’m Googling Mont Blanc Inc. Okay, I’m at the the website for Mont Blanc Inc. $19 for a refill of Mont Blanc Inc. And it cost and it’s got you, you know, probably Several dozen at least refills because it’s 60 milliliters of ink, right? So you’re getting the ink from these high-end pens, but like a Mont Blanc starts at like $600. Again, you’re paying for the barrel. So when I’m say I hear disposable gel pen, I think your budget is topping out at like $3 for a pen, right? Or $5 for a nice pen.

I’ve got a pen that I’m holding right here called a Lamey Safari, and it’s a fountain pen, and it’s got a very nice nib on it. It’s a $20 fountain pen. And that sounds expensive, but when you think, okay, this Lamey Safari has the exact same nib on it as a Lamey Studio, which costs $120. But if you Google Lamey’s Safari and Lamey Studio, they’re vastly different looking pens. One of them looks like it would be owned by an executive or given as a corporate gift or something like that. And the other one, um, they literally call this a student pen. So that you can be a college student, get like a beater pen to learn on and and fuck up the nib on. And and that That’s that’s a category of pens like literally a category of pens That’s insane. They call them beginner pens on jet pens. But yes, they got a Lamey Safari. I don’t know why it’s $28. 50. On Amazon, it’s like $20. I think I paid $20 for mine. But it looks like a. Weird chintzy plastic pen that happens to have a nice metal nib on it.

They’re amazing. And they’re. Expensive, but you’re paying for it being good quality, expensive stuff. I use some of the highest end ink on the market, and it was $30 for the bottle. Wow. 28. I’m looking on jet pens right now. It says it’s 28.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is an Akaya. Because I’m that guy. And people will comment on Skype about my pen. And it’s this tiny, crappy image. Like, how are you physically capable of sussing out that I have a nice pen? I’m grateful for it. People are like, wow, what is that pen? The instant I pick it up, I’m like, jump. It’s just a Japanese, tiny, family-run business. It’s good. I like it.

There are rip-off Mont Blancs. And I won’t say rip-off because they’re high quality. There are a lot of things, just Mont Blanc. It’s more like high-end couture fashion. You have one industrial design that sets the standard, and then all of a sudden you have Mont Blanc-like things. So it’s not like you’re getting like a ripoff of a coach purse or something like that, where it’s not the high quality that you would expect it would, right? It’s still a fancy object. You’re just paying $200 for it and getting it from Japan, and it doesn’t have the little white dongle thingy on the top, right? So I’m pasting you this link right now. This is my favorite thing in the watch industry right now. Some Swiss company made a $30,000 watch that’s in the exact same form factor as the Apple watch. It’s 38 millimeters. It’s the exact same shape. And it takes Apple Watch bands.

And they’re making only 50 of them. And it’s what, $25,000 each? I think it’s like that. But it looks exactly like that, which is shocking to me.

Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is an heirloom object. Like, it’s, it’s a high-end mechanical watch that’s meant to be passed down among generations. The whole Adaj with Rolex being the same way. And it’s a family-run business making 50 of these by hand. And it’s a rip-off of an Apple watch. Looks like an Apple Watch. It looks exactly like an Apple Watch.

To the millimeter! It’s a 38-millimeter watch! And nobody’s going to go and say H. Moser in C is like Making garbage here. Like, this is clearly a beautiful object. And if you handed one to me, I would be gobsmacked and probably eBay and buy a car. You know, this is a car worth of a watch. Right.

So the whole, like, I mean, when somebody’s like, I want a pen, and they come to me, I’m like. Okay, what’s your budget? How many zeros is at the end of your budget? Because I have to cringe a little, wondering: are you coming to me wanting a high-end pen? Are you coming to me saying, Do I want a Mont Blanc? It’s like I want a restaurant in Chicago. Can I send you to Garib Nawaz, which is $4. 50 for curried goat parts? Or do you mean girl and the goat, which is more on the $80 slow food side of things? Or are you actually just leading into the sentence, I really want to go to Alinya? Because all you’ve heard of in Chicago is a lineage, and you don’t know anything else about the dozens of other fine dining options in the city, all of which are Michelin rated. And you think Alinya is good because Grant Acketts has promoted a certain measure of authority on who he is. And then I have to go and wind that back and suggest things that cost a third as much and are just as good or better. There’s something to be had here. We are recording a Make Money Online episode right now. We just began this phone call. There’s something to be had about how you build your authority and how you. How you promote yourself. Because when people think high-end pens, they think Mon Blanc. They think if they really bother digging into it, they might think cross or pilot. Um but they don’t think of all of the like mom and pop shops or all the like the ones that aren’t really talked about like Sailor Coeco, which is not a mom and pop shop by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s what like If you go to like a like a hipster boutique and for some reason they’re selling a fountain pen, you get a Koico. Like it’s that brand. They’re like hex barrel, made of aluminum. They’re tiny and they don’t show off. They’re not made of gold. How you position yourself as a luxury good? There’s tons of lessons from places like Mont Blanc or Rolex or Or this, or any of the things you see on Hodenkey, which is the watch site I just sent you. If you just click around that, like it’s all about high-end mechanical watches, and you’re talking. Into the millions complications that are like 35 different moving elements in it. And There’s one called The Grand Super Complication, which I love the name of so fucking much. Oh my god. And it’s by Patek Philippe, which is like one of the highest end Swiss watchmakers. It’s owned by like some Qatari or Emirate. Like Like chic or something, like some high-end royalty in there. And it’s this enormous, insane, custom-made watch. And like that got built, and that exists.

Kai, sometimes it’s cloudy and you can’t see the night sky for yourself, or you’re in a city where there’s light pollution and you can’t have the Milky Way above you. So, this watch is there to solve your problem. Can you imagine how your problem that exists? Can you imagine how Horrible it must be to wind this thing.

Yeah, there’s probably. It’s probably like your lead butler, like the head of the butlers, the team of butlers that you have. I assume there’s more than one butler and there’s a pecking order.

Get it custom-made for yourself or doubts really the tradition of watchmaking. They look at Apple watches and smart watches and they think, well, now the watch industry is fucked. Which it might be, it’s unclear. Um, but like there was a person with tweezers machining and placing every component of this watch. There was an engineer designing every component of this watch, and there’s one of them.

So I think that’s kind of interesting from a, like, I don’t know, like. almost a Wu-Tang album standpoint where you press only one of them and it gains this lore about it. Because that sort of thing fascinates me.

Having it pass through hands, like, oh, a Qatari royalty owned this and before that, I don’t know, some idol of of yours owns it or or whatever, you know, like what what the story is behind it gains this like This like baffling legend. And there’s legends in there’s legends in consulting. I’m going to bring this back to making money online now. Um there’s there’s like gigs that went particularly well, there’s things people did. Um, there’s one guy uh who’s known On his Wikipedia page, because of course he has a Wikipedia page, for making the first designs of the Facebook like button And like, that’s kind of amazing. You know, that had to come from somebody. And if you can say, oh, my portfolio contains the like button, it’s like, oh, you designed a like button. No, I designed the like button. I designed the ontological concept of the like button. That can be lore, right? And you can spin that in a way that puffs you up significantly. Can you imagine the engineer behind this watch?

People forget that Larry Page and Sergy Brin invented PageRank, I feel. You know? Like, they just think of them as the founders of Google and they don’t. They don’t bother to stop and ask, like, you really kind of made the internet indexable. You made it. We went from having like a shit show more ass of Alta Vista and Lycos and Ask Jeeves and all these other things competing with one another. You made the Internet legible in a lot of ways. And no, they just get known for being the CEO and co-founders of Google. And I don’t know if that’s quite as important.

Right, right, right. Grossly oversimplified, but that’s enough for a podcast.

Absolutely. You’re asking a lot of questions, right? So, one of my closest friends is this is going to make all of you cringe. He’s a car salesman. And he outperforms by like 6x everybody in his department, and he’s been promoted twice in the past year. He sells more cars than any person on the like On the showroom floor. And people need cars. So, you know, and they need traditional sales process. They get the cars sold to them. So this guy provides a valuable function. And what he told me was, like, you know, I just ask questions. I just like figure out what their needs are and make sure that they feel heard. And that does two things. Number one, you end up with a car that you’re actually going to want to buy as a consumer if the person is asking questions. And number two, you feel heard. There is such a strong impulse, very deep lizard brain psychological impulse for humans to feel heard. It’s why we get on phone calls with people. It’s why we complain about our day. It’s why we enjoy getting interviewed. There’s a lot of reasons why we want to be heard. And we have everybody has that impulse. You have it. I have it. And think about the opposite. If somebody is like super type A, and just steamrolls you and only talks about themselves, you’re going to think they’re a blowhard. Right? So um my friend does well in his industry by asking questions. And what was the first thing I did when you Like, asked me about the pen. I like took a deep breath and asked you three questions. And that was to make sure: okay, well, this guy isn’t just taken by Mont Blanc’s marketing. He wants A certain type of pen with these certain needs at this price point. So I should direct them to jet pens and not a blog called Pen Addict, which is a guy who owns a ton of fountain pens and tests them out. Etc. , etc. , etc. It gives me a game plan because I know enough about pens to not sound idiotic on a podcast that is being splayed out to a lot of people. But, you know, not enough that I know you and your needs.

And knowing where to go, knowing what the resources are. I had somebody email me today. He was like, I need to, I run Drip, which is an email marketing tool, and I want to AB. Test my drip campaigns. I’m like, great, wonderful. I don’t know how to do that. I’m going to, you know, go over here and inter Google how to do that, and I’m going to learn it. And I know where the resources are for it. I know a lot about A-B testing, and that’s how you branch out, right? Any programmer listening to this is like knows about Where to go to learn about programming languages. They go to Egghead or Upcase or Stack Overflow or whatever have you, and they skill up. You end up becoming more of a You become a generalist scale-wise, even though you may position yourself as a specialist. People don’t hire me to write drip campaigns. They don’t. They hire me to do design, but sometimes I end up doing drip campaigns because that’s just what the problem is in front of us. And what am I going to do? Say no to it? Tell you to go someplace else? No, you’re paying me. And I love learning new stuff. I love having that curiosity about my job. I’m going to learn how to make a drip campaign. And I might hate it, but I won’t know until I try.

Right. Right. Absolutely. Every time I’ve grown my business, it’s been because I was curious about something or because I ended up doing something frequently for a client. I started in on A-B testing because I was doing analytics for Clients after I launched. And I was like, well, now that we’ve launched, what now? I started cadence and slang because I started writing out various principles, published them in a tiny thirty-page zine and had a bunch of people like, you should do more with that. Yeah, I started coaching because I would tell people what to do with their businesses and they’d be like, I’d pay for that advice. And I’m like, oh, really? Now you can. Check out here.

Tons of good stuff there. I would add on that: not only are you making those changes and adapting, but also you’re in an industry probably that’s a moving target. And if you’re not. Adapting, then the target will move out of your way. And you should not have that happen. That is scary. You should always be trying to stay on top of stuff. You know, like Half the JavaScript frameworks that exist out there right now didn’t exist five years ago. So if you’re a developer, that should scare the absolute living shit out of you. Responsive web design did not exist a decade ago. Mobile device design did not really exist a decade ago. I mean, you could have made an application for the Palm Trio, whoop-dee-doo. As an interaction designer, I could go and continue making enterprise applications for desktop operating systems, and I would be on the wrong side of history.

Nobody gives a shit what you specialize in. They don’t. The only person who cares is you. Maybe your partner and your mom, but that’s it. I mean, you can reinvent yourself. There’s an opportunity there, right? And you can evolve. Like, you can. Change your specialization. And what you’ve done, Kai, is evolve your specialization in ways that make sense, you know, like they. Step B came out of step A. You didn’t just throw it away and go to underwater basket weaving.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m ramping up Design again after roughly two years of doing A-B testing. And I’m still doing A-B testing. I just answered a long email as a prospect for wanting to do A-B testing. I’m not abandoning it. I’m not throwing away that image and constantly correcting people when they call me the A-B testing guy. I would be crazy to turn down that kind of business. But I know that A-B testing is only the hotness in certain limited ways. And as people gain more insight into what it is and how it can help them, the more you realize like It’s actually not for mom and pop businesses. It’s more for giant clients because you have to get enough traffic. And those are I’m historically allergic to that. So I mean, we can talk a lot about qualifying clients and being picky on a future episode, but I think that’s We’re kind of running into the end of the podcast here, this particular episode.

Buy Montblanc in and fill a low-end pen with it. and evolve your business over time and find ways to position yourself that make you look more like a luxury good. But own that stature. Like that raises the expectations of you. And you can’t be sloppy, you know, like that’s not. That’s not allowed when you’re a luxury good. Like people buy it because it’s a safe bet. People know that Mont Blanc is great because they have really good customer service and really good warranties. And if it breaks, they’ll fix it easily. Having a premium service means you have to have premium delivery of that service.

Well, let’s do that next time.

Oh, no problem, man. Happy to be here.