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[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello. And welcome back. This is Colin Keeley here,

[00:00:03] Brent Sanders: And I'm Brent Sanders.

[00:00:04] Colin Keeley: and we are two guys buying and building wonderful internet companies.

[00:00:08] Brent Sanders: Yes we are. And this week has been pretty interesting. One thing I think we left off with last week was diving into process capture. We were gonna go back to that. So hoping to give an update there. But, before the, we started recording, I was complaining about. So I've got a three week old now at home and, a two year old.

And I haven't worked out because the, the baby just got here and the routine is all scrambled and just finally got to work out in for the first time yesterday. And my body has been falling apart. It's no working out my knees start aching. My hip starts hurting. Cause I think I'm, sitting at my desk too much or just not strengthening.

And so I'm old. I'm going to be 40 in February. So it's really getting clear to me that like strength training and just lifting weights on it, at least a couple of days a week basis is I think that's my thing. Moving forward. That's going to be like food, water, shelter, and just some form

[00:01:05] Colin Keeley: Getting jacked.

[00:01:07] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. Constantly getting gains. No, but it's funny. I've never, I really only started lifting weights for the last four or five years. Now it's turning into, and also just from a brain health and mindset perspective, it's it's so necessary. I can't go more than a, now it feels like one week.

And like my body's putting me on notice being like, Hey, if you want to start limping again, keep going, punk. I don't know. Are you begin to the strength training world.

[00:01:39] Colin Keeley: I'm not big into it, but yeah, I do it. I probably weight lift two to three days a week and I do something every day. So two to three days a week, weight lifting two to three, basketball. I just, I want to do yoga like twice a week. And I was good about that for a while, but, it's more like once every two weeks now, so that's not great.

And then recently pickleball on Sundays if a plan, with the olds, the old people, so huge pickleball fan.

[00:02:02] Brent Sanders: That is like the number one, Florida inter injury, by the way, like my dad is 80 something years old and he's always telling me from down the street, they broke their hip playing pickleball. They broke their leg, playing pickle. They broke their wrist playing pickleball. It's all these old people just getting wrecked on the pickleball court.

It sounds like, and not to go off the rails on pickle ball, but it does sound like a really fun game where you can just totally get into it, but also fall in your.

[00:02:23] Colin Keeley: It's a beautifully designed game where it's like, the wiffle ball slows down and it's a small court. So even if you're older, as long as you could react relatively quickly, you could play. But I do see the old people, they don't have like the stopping power, so they enter like a controlled. so if they run after a ball, like they don't have the quad strain to slam their need of the ground and stop. So you have to take some extra steps and yeah, you definitely see some wipe outs where they're, they don't stop in time.

[00:02:48] Brent Sanders: The Florida hospitals and orthopedic surgeons love that game, but, but yeah, it's something where it's I got to get into this routine. And so at home, I don't really have anything. When we started talking about, kettlebells and you were saying you've got a hundred pounder,

[00:02:59] Colin Keeley: I just have one and it's a 70.

[00:03:02] Brent Sanders: 78,

[00:03:04] Colin Keeley: I, if you like trying to work out in five minutes, it's probably the most efficient I do. Mostly single arm swings with it. And then I just alternate arms. I do double arms, like my arms get tired too fast. So I called the alternate. But, my other, my big thing, like halfway through COVID I got into it is this knees over toes.

Got it. He's like revolutionizing. I would say the workout world. And everyone is stealing his exercises now. So he sells some training. That's 50 bucks a month. You don't really have to do it. If you just go to YouTube, you could figure out all his exercises. But his big thing is like mobility.

And so it's a combination of strength and flexibility and the stuff he could do is just incredible. Th this is all I got into this because three years ago, I tore my ACL, playing basketball three games, one day game the next morning. And just then I drive with lazy movements, is like step my left knee down in a bent inward and tore my ACL. So nothing crazy, no contact or anything, it's just lazy movement. And so like ever since then, The big, biggest thing you can do to protect yourself is just get your legs really strong. And that's his whole thing is get really strong, like compromise positions. So like when your legs fully excited, Like you're slamming down really hard. So it's like a lot of walking backwards is like the most basic form of movement is like you do everything forward. How you get strong is in protect your knees, get your hamstrings choice shot. So Nordic curls are really good where it's like, You're kneeling on the ground. Someone's holding your heels down or I have a weight bench that holds my heels down and you, with your own body weight, pull up against it.

Reverse Nordics is similar where it's more in your quads or VMO. Squat is where you're on a slant board in reverse. So instead of your toes facing up, they're pointing down, and that kind of replicates the movement of stopping. So I almost, all of them, aren't very hard. It's just like you slowly improve and improve on them week over week.

[00:04:56] Brent Sanders: that's great. Yeah, I've done those Nordic curls for, and they work. Yeah. They definitely target that area effectively, but it's weird, it's, I've got to get a better set up at home. I've, I've got a gym that I can go to finally and, starting to figure out the new schedule, but like with the baby it's, before I had a couple of hours in the morning, I had blocked off like the set time.

And so when I'm going to try to start doing this, instead of doing lunch is like just, eat at my desk, which I did anyways. I I try to go to the gym then and just keep my energy up. I think that's the other part of it is like, after, I can do cardio and nothing like going hard for 45 minutes or an hour, with heavy weights.

Just, I feel like so much more energy afterwards. So you got to change the routine, got to adapt to the new environmental situation. And, get back on it. Cause man, it's one is just the aches and pains, but two is like what you're saying. It's just being able to do things and not hurt yourself.

My son's almost, he's 30 pounds now and just like picking them up and throwing them in a crib and picking them up and taking them down the stairs. You feel that, that pain, thankfully, I'm strong. Now I can, it's not a big deal, but, he definitely puts you in some strange positions where it's you're extending your arms over something, putting them into a crib.

It's, hopefully we just need to get them out of the Caribbean and the toddler, but maybe that's the right solution, but kids are, they get heavy and they get big pretty quick. So you gotta be able to stay strong and pick them up.

That's the, the strength piece of this. I think that's all I got to say about working out right now, other than it's just been totally, totally critical to me.

[00:06:33] Colin Keeley: Ah, cool. So I guess the other big update on my end this week I ran ads for my course, for the first time the, how to buy a small companies course. And it was really successful. So I've never used Twitter ads before. This is my first experience and the product is horrible. Like I couldn't actually get an ad set up without talking to them.

Cause I couldn't select a tweet that was newer than 2018 and they're just like, oh yeah, that happens sometimes.

[00:06:57] Brent Sanders: Okay.

[00:06:58] Colin Keeley: It's wild. I don't know how this is a real company that is as big as it is because they are very bad at building like their main product that makes money. And then every day it would just stop running and then it would run the day after.

So every other day it would run. It was like, why is this happening? And they were like, oh Yeah.

that happens too. We'll fix it on. Pretty rough getting it started, but a very effective. Three four times ROI, on M and a pushed it out to half a million people. So that was super successful.

But what you're doing is basically like forcing your tweets to go viral. And anytime a tweet goes viral, you get a lot of crazy people reaching out. So definitely got that in what I didn't realize is a micro PE sounds like something else. So I got a lot of micro penis jokes.

[00:07:44] Brent Sanders: You serious.

[00:07:46] Colin Keeley: Oh man. So you could read through the responses. But yeah, it was like one and I was like, that's weird. I don't get that. And then it was like two and then three and I was like, what is going on? And then I finally put it together, but had to be well over 10, but I

[00:07:59] Brent Sanders: I mean it is Twitter, so I shouldn't be surprised, but that's hilarious. Twitter is, it's such a funny, like it's such a funny place on the internet, at least it's you truly get the, some of the. Goofball oddball, fringe, society, thoughts ever, as well as just some really good insights from people you would otherwise never get, straightforward or clear exposure to.

But yeah, there I've run it. We used to use it to run ads for just like piloting ideas. It's weird. It's like Twitter is a product. And then the ad piece of it is an afterthought slapped onto it. I hadn't run into some of the issues that you were describing, but I'm not terribly surprised.

It doesn't seem and maybe you'll find this out, but it doesn't seem like, a platform you could like, if you were to say, I'm going to 10 X, my investment, I don't know if you would get the same results you would get from something like Facebook that it's like that's their central, money-making avenue, which I think I heard recently that due to these congressional.

Interviews that, Facebook's been under the microscope, they were saying somebody quoted, they make $51 per user per month currently. I don't know if that's, if I'm misquoting that, but, talk about prioritizing that number is really stuck with me. I'm curious if Twitter is even registered on that same, if it's even a dollar a month per user, but I just don't feel like it's as, Central commerce is central to it.

[00:09:25] Colin Keeley: No they're bad at making money. I think that's spot on like Facebook's ad product is incredible. And that's why, everything that they buy is just so fruitful. Like Instagram, WhatsApp. Like they just said this monster very effective ad targeting Twitter is just abysmal. It's insane. I don't know how you can't just steal people away from Facebook and recreate it or Google or anyone successful.

I, the explanation you always hear is that Twitter just has so much tech debt that they like literally can't do anything and they can't improve like messages or DMS or anything. I don't know how that doesn't get fixed. I think Jack was working on fixing it over the last year, but, it's incredible how bad they are at everything.

[00:10:01] Brent Sanders: It's really hard. I like the back of the fail whale days. Like the idea that you have, the amount of data. Just flying through and it's easily searchable and followed, it's just amazing that the technical feats that they're in. I just imagine that it's probably the rooted, I don't know if I'd call even tech that just by design, it's this massive database, these little messages that you can pull up in real time and you can pull them up from years and get threads and see how everything's interconnected and you can load that data.

And it doesn't in such a way that it doesn't take forever to load either. Passing, to get Collins' tweets from five years ago and then the responses and, it's, it is, quite the feat because I think they, there was some, oh man, I forget the name of it. There was some alt-right version of Twitter that was going to go up that I think a parlor, yeah.

Parlor came down and they exposed how that was written and it was nowhere close to being even sophisticated and they just ran. IDs. It was just, it shows you that it's not as easy as you think. And so I think that the developers of the architect at parlor must have been his first time, but, yeah, it was a mess.

It there's a lot to Twitter. There's a lot of innovation there. I think they probably are just like ads, whatever we're focused on, just getting the system to run and stay, keep it.

[00:11:25] Colin Keeley: Yeah. So that's, that's, I guess the bare minimum and they're succeeding at doing that nowadays. So I like my other thought with this course is, I don't know, like what direction to take it. I got pretty consistent feedback that it's like wildly under priced for the value. So I'm going to continue increasing it.

So I think I'm going to increase it to 400, like this one. From 200 and, so like the two different directions, and we can talk about each and people doing it well. So there's cohort-based courses. So like David Perell has write a passage. He makes $2 million a year doing that. Tiago forte, has building a second brain.

I think he makes over a million doing that. And that is, you have a bunch of people over the course of eight weeks, you meet twice a week live and you like accomplish something by. And that is, it's much less about the content and much more about the networking. Like they put you in small groups and you work through activities together, and it's like a forcing function to get people to do stuff.

And so David PRL, I think charges like 7,000 now a class Tiago has maybe more like three or four. And that is. Interesting to me, I wonder if you could make a credible college alternative where it's like teaching people to buy a business instead of, give them a hundred thousand dollars in debt this way you get, a a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt, but with an SBA loan at the end of it, you have a business that, makes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[00:12:41] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah, that would be amazing.

[00:12:44] Colin Keeley: I think that's super interesting. I don't know of anyone doing it. Like back in the VC days, I talked with the CEOs of like almost all the colleges alternatives, and I feel like this is thrown around, but no one is really doing it at a high level. I'm intrigued by it. I don't know. It's a lot of work, obviously it's much more about like a personal audience.

You build a newsletter or organic marketing. So that's one path and the other path is just continuing to add content, continue to improve the course and continue to increase the price. So like a premium prerecorded course and this, I know people that are doing it around a thousand bucks. I don't know if you could go much higher than a thousand for this.

Non cohort-based. And then you have a community on the backend, and then it's very much a paid marketing exercise. So the people that are doing this and like the seven figures in revenue a year, they are spending 30 to 40% on ads, 30 or 40% of that revenue.

[00:13:33] Brent Sanders: Which I think is great, right? That doesn't seem nearly as high as you would. You'd even think.

[00:13:39] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it's pure profit, right? Cause digital product effectively. But that is much more of an exercise of churning out really effective YouTube Facebook ads and scaling it up. And I know people doing, 20 million plus doing this with courses and they do it pretty quietly because once something starts succeeding, like you don't talk about it, is the play,

[00:13:57] Brent Sanders: comes out of the woodwork. They want to loan money,

[00:14:00] Colin Keeley: More. So like you're inviting competition, right? It's pretty similar with any startup. You talk about it a ton, and then it starts working and you just, you be quiet. You don't talk about big fundraising rounds or anything like that. Cause it just invites competition. But I don't know. I think both those paths are interesting.

I think the product is like moving in the direction of being a credible option. I don't know any feedback for me on either of these baths.

[00:14:23] Brent Sanders: Yeah, juicy. If you have good return on ad spend, which I think you're already seeing, it's just continued. I really liked the idea of continuing to add value to it. Even if it's incremental or even if it's as. The discord gets better, right? The resources and the conversation and the, the context there that's even valuable and having a dynamic price makes sense.

I like the idea of, on a weekly basis, this is going to get more and more expensive because on a weekly basis, you're adding something to it that gives it validity. Even though I do. I agree that it's under priced a lot of the other courses out there, in the low thousands. And this is not a UME course.

This is not a. It just, it's not very like theoretical and what I call mental masturbation. It's very like real-world, this is like actual deals, actual documents that are, that we're using in. It does seem under price. So I think that lever is a great one to continue pushing on it. Just Hey, this is either monthly or weekly.

It's going to go up in price. And if you were thinking about doing it. I don't know what, going back to, could you structure something where you basically help people get SBA loans or not help them, point out how to do it and, put some structure on that. That is, is tough because it's like, it's almost like the materials you need for the course.

You're going to have to go and find a business. And I found when the added. Restrictions to the SBA loans were a little bit harder to find businesses, right? To find something that's going to fit all of the, check all the boxes for the SBA loan and also be a great opportunity. It's not always, it's not going and picking up your book at the bookstore to participate in.

[00:15:57] Colin Keeley: This is something I've struggled with of David Burrell's writing course, it's like you have a nice blog and some nice pieces written at the end of it. And that's like a clear deliverable, Tiago building a second brain. You have Rome or Evernote, whatever set up nicely. You don't really want to rush in.

eight weeks to buy a business like you could, but. Not great. You would have the infrastructure in place to like, be searching for a business and the know-how. And I do think some people want that forcing function of I'd love to buy a business someday, but within these eight weeks, like I'm going to be taken seriously. And I'm actually going to look and go through it with other people and get feedback.

I dunno if eight people are all trying to buy a plumbing business, they could be in a group together and they're not competing. Cause they're all in their own, like locality. But that would be like a forcing function to get people, to take it serious.

[00:16:44] Brent Sanders: Yeah, I like it.

[00:16:46] Colin Keeley: it's definitely, more involved for me I'd hire like a course manager or something, but I don't know.

I don't love things that are like recurring, like prerecorded course. it.

just is right. Twice, three times a year running this like cohort based stuff is very intense as, David Burrell and those other folks talk about.

[00:17:03] Brent Sanders: I'm sure. I'm sure it's stressful too. This is the best part of the product is that it's just going to continue to, it's largely just continued profit. And even if you are spending some time to improve it and increase your you're increasing the price. So you're increasing that profit.

So it's.

[00:17:21] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

The other thing, I there's some ongoing, like I saw, I moved from circle to discord, cause it seems like this court is like the place for community. Now. It's been much more active and really fun. I am in there every day, like checking and replying to report. So that's where a lot of the value of the course has come from where it's like people ask questions.

I make a new lecture on those questions and just continues to improve, which has been a pretty fun, like MVP, improve rate, surprise process. But the discussion that was really good around, like when people have live deals, they asked for feedback. Like we were looking at buying a course business and I was asking for feedback there and people are giving me feedback.

I'm like, have you looked at this? Have you looked at this? What multiple you're paying? All that stuff has been super valuable.

[00:18:03] Brent Sanders: Greed.

[00:18:03] Colin Keeley: I guess any other thoughts in the course, otherwise we'll move on to a

[00:18:07] Brent Sanders: No, I'm excited to see it. I'm really happy for you that it's growing. This is I think the hardest part is now behind you. It's like going from the, getting the first people to sign up, getting that first reaction. And it sounds like the reactions know overwhelming be overwhelmingly, been positive.

So congrats that, not to say that you're done, but this is like that's to me, the hardest part is like, May, I mean beyond even just recording the course, but getting the first cohort in and seeing that their reactions are positive. So it's not that it's all gravy from here, but it's it's all stuff that I think you're going to be really well suited to managing growth.

So I'm super happy for you.

[00:18:48] Colin Keeley: Thanks, man. Yeah.

I would say it's the same with any product it's like finding that product market fit of actually making something valuable to people is it is the hardest as we know, and we've done a million times. So it's clear, like there's something here it's just, pushed on the gas.

Kind of the opposite of this is a, cost savings. So I guess I could tee you up with this a little bit. Like we've been looking at businesses and they have some of monstrous AWS expenses in some way. I've been able to cut it from like a hundred thousand dollars to $0 a month. And they have other hosting fees, but the other hosting fees, haven't really changed.

So can you talk a little bit about like tech savings and how something like that is even possible?

[00:19:24] Brent Sanders: Yeah. We, every single business we look at has this, even, we have an on blink sale. We have it. We have a pretty big hosting bill with, engine yard, which is a layer on top of AWS. So you'll have services that will manage your AWS for you. And then they'll throw a couple hundred bucks on top of their AWS bills.

It's basically the nature of cloud infrastructure, is really popular the last 10 years. It is, everyone uses it and it's really rare to not use it. And there's generally, I I try to think of it as these are layers of abstraction on top of like you having a manager server or a data center, and manage the services on that box.

It's It actually, there's a lot of, in the tech world, there's a lot of, discord around this. Does it even make sense to use AWS, which is it's great for getting up and running and you don't have. The costs are higher to get a slot at a data center, or just use a bare metal.

What's called a bare metal host, which is, they're just going to give you a server. And it's literally a server. It's not virtualized. When I say virtualized it, AWS, you can spin up. I'm putting my bunny ears up a server, but it's really an instance or a compute unit, which is part of a huge network of computers.

And they virtually are giving you, basically a quota or a version of, a server. What would feel like a server. And you're on their infrastructure for everything from there on out. When I say for everything, networking, like the data that comes in on the server, the data that goes out on the server and I'm using the term server interchangeably, but in short, AWS is super expensive when it scales up, everybody knows this, and this is the brilliance around their startup.

They'll give you a hundred thousand dollars credit. And so if you are a startup in the first year, you end up using. You're, they're going to get that a hundred thousand dollars back from you pretty quickly, because once you start getting into the actual, like high demand tiers, or you need more CPU, or, you're serving, a lot of users per day, you're transferring a lot of data.

And what a lot of these, virtual hosts, Azure, Google, Amazon, They're all going to ding you for just data going in and out of their systems. And that's probably the number one biggest, red flag when it comes to, I shouldn't say red flag, but like cost out opportunity. When we do diligence, it's are they on AWS?

And it's not an easy answer. It's not easy to just say, oh, just get off AWS. And you're saved money. You need people to do that. You're going to have site reliability. People are going to have. Technical resources to be able to execute that. But when you can it's great. And it's generally out of initial.

I'm not going to say it's laziness, but it's laziness. It's like when you go from the metamorphosis of being like a prototype product and then you start growing, that's a really hard time to say. Let's change all of our servers. Let's go to somebody cheaper. Let's go to a bare metal situation.

It's really difficult, but it is the way that you can drop hundreds of thousands of dollars off your, off your P and L at least off your liabilities. It's But it's difficult. And so hats off to people that have tried it and succeeded. It's not going to happen without some bumps, especially if you have a, high, highly traffic, technical product.

I think it's a great strategy that we're going, what I would call like cost out approaches. It makes a ton of sense. It's a great way where it's like, Hey, rather than firing a bunch of engineers and moving all your engineering. Bratislava or something and paying, much less in that may be a viable solution.

And we talked about this with ESW. That's like their playbook, but, this is just a, I think a good thing to. That every acquirer should be considering as what can I do to pay down what I would call like a, this is technically a part of tech debt. It's what can we do to pay this down in order to just bring the operating costs down on a business, which, we've done this with blink sale.

We could probably continue to do it. But every business it's a good opportunity for a new acquire. If you're coming into a situation. Nobody's really addressed it and it feels scary to do it's probably the right time to do it upon acquisition to just correct. Overpayment and in general, it's super duper expensive to run things on Amazon at scale.

[00:23:27] Colin Keeley: Yeah. So we had this with a blink sale. Like they were on a huge Zendesk account and they couldn't cancel it. I don't think cause they were locked in for awhile, but we didn't, that's an asset purchase so we could cancel it. Like we're that company doesn't exist anymore. We didn't acquire their liabilities.

By Zendesk,

[00:23:45] Brent Sanders: Right.

[00:23:46] Colin Keeley: that is just, on a higher level for some of these other things.

[00:23:49] Brent Sanders: Exactly. And it's just there's lock-in, but it is difficult to make these changes and it can be costly, I would say as well, like doing a lot of this work. Let's say you had to move your entire infrastructure onto a bare metal server. There's a great deal of risk with doing that may scare you away from it.

But the other alternative is there, there are companies that have popped up now that we'll just consult on helping you get your AWS bill down to size. And because their pricing structures are incredibly difficult. They're convoluted. They're fair. In a sense like if, Company, if you have all your infrastructure and your traffic's being metered, and so they're pricing it in a way that's based on, I think what their costs might look like, or, it's very granular though.

It's you're getting billed for everything. So it's not going to be like, all right, we'll just charge you a thousand dollars a month for this. And you can use it as much as you want. It's we're going to charge you for this much CPU, this much memory, this much traffic in this much transfer in our network, this much transfer and external networks, it's like very granular.

And so you have to dig into it in order to even just get an understanding of what are our costs even going to be per month. So that's where this world of like bare metal servers, which the whole internet was based on before this sort of craze, because it's, it is a little bit. Tricky to deal with.

But I think the realization I've seen a handful of hacker news conversations, where people posted their savings after getting off of cloud infrastructure,

[00:25:16] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

[00:25:18] Brent Sanders: but make no mistake. You need people. If you have a, if you are a non-technical founder or a non-detectable technical owner, you bought a company and they've got, a a thousand dollars, a couple thousand dollars, AWS, you probably could save money, but you'll end up paying. That to a developer or a, an engineer that's gonna help you migrate.

And then you're going to probably have a little bit more work to manage that system. Making sure it stays on and is maintained properly. So it's a catch. And it's it is that generally that level when you're sizable enough, that it makes sense to do where it's like, Hey, we could probably make a deal with somebody.

Meet all of our hosting needs, meet all of our scale needs and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is where these bills just get. So big.

[00:26:00] Colin Keeley: So this may be a basic question, but is that a specialist skillset or do all developers know how to do that? And like dramatically cut the cost and they just haven't.

[00:26:10] Brent Sanders: Yeah, it's J it's a specialist thing. It's, you'd hear a developer that you'd want to ask them. If they're like one term for, it would be like dev ops. Some people call it that. That's not to be super specific, but like a dev ops or infrastructure engineer, it's generally the they're developers.

They're less so on the software side, they're more so on the. Infrastructure you'll hear terms like Docker, which there's a whole bunch of great new technologies coming out that make it easier to deploy services to cloud infrastructure, but also to then lift that and put it anywhere, which is if you're thinking about.

If you've heard the term Docker in your company or you're looking at a deal and they everything's, dockerized, that's a great sign because that means you generally can move it from either different cloud hosts or your own bare metal server, which, you can benefit from some of the cost savings there, but it is definitely a specialization infrastructure.

Engineers are a lot of this, could be. The equivalent of a SRE site, reliability engineer, they don't really mess with the, making feature changes to your code, but, they're concerned most with, keeping things running and how things are, how your software is being delivered to the end user.

It's a cool world. It's super nerdy and I love it. Like I would love to, if I had to pick one thing, I don't know if I'd be able to just. In that world, but when you start working on this stuff, it's like tuning a motorcycle. It's there only, there's a finite number of pieces and it's like tons of different options and it is quite fun to do.

And if that happens to be your hobby, and you buy a technical business, you'll be being locked because. Just unlimited amount of options that you can use to, to improve things. But it's, in my mind, it's a little scary, cause it is a high wire act. It's like you make big changes and you are a software business.

It's like changing the tires on your car while driving. It's pretty difficult to do unless you have a very clear plan on how you do it.

[00:28:03] Colin Keeley: I was completely shocked how impactful it could be. Like, I, it.

never occurred to me that some of these companies could like double their cash flow. Like I didn't realize that they could be overpaying by that much.

[00:28:14] Brent Sanders: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's just a matter of like how painful will it be to shut these things off? How painful will it be? And generally you need someone at the helm. Who's not so concerned with, maybe it's a short-term pain. You're gonna, you're gonna lose a hundred thousand dollars one month to pay a crew to come in and fix the problem.

But you'll, the yield you'll get from that month over month is.

[00:28:36] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it's good to hear.

[00:28:37] Brent Sanders: Yeah, dig. And do you know if you're looking, you're doing diligence, you're looking at a business, dig into where things hosted, what are the costs? You won't be able, if somebody has a hundred thousand dollar AWS bill, they may not be able to tell you why it is, or how they can get that down.

But somebody out there can help you with that. And there's a lot of resources and in ways, Look at moving things off of those platforms because they're not in it for charity. So it makes sense why they're doing what they're doing. And, they just generally tend to pinch you when they scale up.

That's, that's, it's like paper use. It's like the buffet model, but once you start getting that, fourth, fifth plate of mashed potatoes, it starts getting pretty expensive.

[00:29:17] Colin Keeley: Or, better yet. Don't dig in, use Brent as a service

[00:29:21] Brent Sanders: Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah. I would say I w I've looked at a handful of these and, I've shied away from, there are points where it's yes, you're paying Amazon a lot, but depending on what you're doing, there are services. You may have locked yourself into, so definitely look at businesses, try to understand what services are using.

If they're using, there's generally an open source version of anything Amazon's doing. I can't really think of anything that they now have cornered now with CloudFlare coming out with their own storage services. And, there's always alternatives for how you do things. And there might be bare metal versions.

It's just trading risk, right? It's do I want to have multiple data centers? Do I want to have. Multiple points of failure versus just with Amazon, but at the same time, we all know when, when somethings, when Amazon's down, half the Internet's down and sometimes it's nice to not be on that, wagon.

But yeah. Let me know if you need some Brent as a service and we'll talk about it.

[00:30:14] Colin Keeley: Yeah, we launched a tech diligence. You got some inbound from it. So if you're interested, hit us up.

[00:30:20] Brent Sanders: Yeah, happy to do. It's something that we're piloting, during the first couple, to start out, but it's, it's no different than what I'm doing for Vern or what I've been doing for the last 20 years or so with my, it was my aging legs and knees and back.

[00:30:34] Colin Keeley: Okay. You donkey can no time. Just need some more knees over toes exercises.

[00:30:38] Brent Sanders: Is that how you've? It doesn't hurt that you're a little taller than I am, but is that how you've been able to dunk have been these knees over toes exercises?

[00:30:45] Colin Keeley: So I'm six, seven, so it's maybe a little less impressive. I'm at my peak, like a multiple times in my life. I could stand beneath the basket and jump up off two feet and dunk with two hands. So I can do that half step. So like you're Right.

Legs back right now. And you like step up and do it. And that's completely credit to like knees over toes, over the last six months.

Yeah in game dunking again, which I haven't really done since like probably five years ago. Yeah. Dramatic improvements, dramatic improvement in confidence as well of

[00:31:14] Brent Sanders: Yeah. That seems to be the best effect. Obviously you're getting two points for that dunk, but it's also the emotional impact that it has on the other players.

[00:31:22] Colin Keeley: Yeah. It's fun. I recommend it. If you could experience it.

[00:31:26] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Awesome. I think that's it for this week.

[00:31:30] Colin Keeley: Yeah, for sure. Take care everyone. Bye-bye.

[00:31:32] Brent Sanders: Thanks for listening.

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