SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 107: Did going through 3 dads make you more creative? With Jason Zook
08 Nov 2015
Chapter 1: What is the premise of Jason Zook's entrepreneurial journey?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, every Monday I give one of you 100 bucks to invest in your idea and get to the top. To enter for your chance to win 100 bucks, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. This week's winner was Matt Wolfe in Chicago at the DDB Agency.
Coming up tomorrow morning, we hear from FinCon founder Philip Taylor, and he breaks down how he sells 900 tickets at $240 each and makes a lot of money off conferences. Top Tribe. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I am here in Roanoke in the studio with my tea. I'm going to love I know you're going to love our guest today. His name is Jason Zook.
Now, you might not recognize his name because he changed it so much. We'll get to that in a second. But he is best known for being the guy that made over a million dollars wearing T-shirts for a living and selling his last name. And he did that twice. He also recently sold his future. Jason, are you ready to take us to the top? Nathan, let's do it. Okay, what does this mean?
What do you mean you sold your last name?
Yeah, I saw an opportunity to let a company buy my last name when my mom went through a divorce, my third father at the time, unfortunately. And I was left with a name that I no longer wanted. And what do you do? And at the time, I was the I-wear-your-shirt guy. I had been wearing T-shirts for a living, working with sponsors for four years. And I said, screw it. Let's sell my last name.
But you know, if I could sell t-shirts for a living, I got to be able to sell my last name and launched a website. And believe it or not, first day, $33,000 was bid at the end of the first day. And it was a 30-day auction that ended at 45 grand. I went on to sell it a second time. And I lived with a last name that was a brand's name for two years. And my life changed in no way whatsoever.
That was the crazy thing.
What was the $45,000? Who was the brand?
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Chapter 2: How did Jason Zook sell his last name and what was the outcome?
It just kind of felt natural to me. And so I think that with any idea you have, if you can bring people along in the story, you know, transparency, authenticity, these things ring true and people get behind them. And for me, it just is what I really love doing. So yeah, Buy My Future was very successful. I really enjoyed it.
People talked about it. Jason, people are going to want to reverse engineer that landing page. Give us the link real quick. And I'll also put it in the show notes at nathanlatka.com forward slash the top 107. But is that link still up? Is the landing page up?
Yeah, buymyfuture.com is still available. And actually, if you just Google Project Galaxy and I'll just give you ā you can grab the link. But all of the journal entries are archived on Medium. And so you could go through and you could read like you've never heard of this before.
And all my fears, all my doubts, everything I went through every day that I wanted to share, my marketing tactics, all this stuff, how I got 25 podcast interviews to launch on the day of the project launching. Everything I did was outlined in detail in that journal.
And that, I think, is why the project was very successful in its first time ever existing, me putting it out into the world and letting people buy my future.
So I will link to that in the show notes. I won't ask you questions about that. I think it is genius, though. I spent time reading it. We'll link to that in the show notes. But I want to do two things, Jason. One, I want to piss off James Altucher and push hard. hard on the shitty project side and how you can sell something like really bad.
But first I want to just talk about the unit economics around buy my future real quick. What was the cost and how many did you sell?
Yeah, so there's a whole journal entry that I kept updating to on expenses and happy to share it now. It was just under $9,000 total, so it was like $8,900. That included the video that you see on the Buy My Future site. That included a bunch of just odds and ends, things that just continue to add up. And so before the project launched, I know I needed to make $9,000 to make it profitable.
And it was only open for two weeks. There are no deals, no discounts, no buy early, none of that. And in two weeks, I sold 165 units of my future, if you will. So basically made $165,000, which, you know, there's payment plans and things. So it's not like I have that sitting in my bank account at the moment.
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Chapter 3: What creative strategies did Jason use to promote 'Buy My Future'?
But for you to open the curtains and stay in the theater, you have to pay a grand. The acts are going to happen anyway. All you're doing is basically saying pay and I'll pull back the curtains and you can see how I'm going to launch a business book, a web app, a community choice thing, right?
Yep, that's exactly it. And the fun part too is that if I want to sell all those projects individually, I totally can. So I'm not limiting myself to the amount of money I can make. I'm basically controlling the exact way that I want to sell things. And to be honest, I was surprised at how well it did because my logo was 100 sales and to get 165 is fantastic.
But it's even better that the people who are in the community already are saying, I so already got the value from this. Like, I'm so happy this got me unstuck from the thing I wanted to do. I now have a like-minded person I can brainstorm with. You know, just all these little things are happening that I'm really pumped about.
So I don't want to talk about how to get featured on Forbes and Inc. and Entrepreneur because we had Sujan Patel come on in episode 50 and do that really well. I also don't want to talk about how to get on podcasts. I know you do both of these things extremely well.
Give me like the weirdest thing that you did promotional-wise that you think we probably haven't talked about yet because it's so out of the normal that you did to sell 165 units of Buy My Future.
Yeah, I mean, to be completely honest, the most successful thing that I did was having phone calls with my existing customers. And those phone calls were five to ten minutes long. Some of them were three minutes long and were really awkward. I'm not going to lie. It just was weird talking to people. You know, it is. Some people are just, you know, they're really weird. But I just asked them.
And the key, Nathan, the absolute key that I got from this was I heard them reply to me in the words they would use to describe Buy My Future. And so because this project didn't have a sales page yet, didn't have anything, I was just telling them the idea. They would just reply and go, oh, I feel like I'm getting maximum Jason lifetime value.
Or I feel like I'm buying into the lifetime subscription to Jason. Or I feel like I'm getting access to all your crazy thoughts. These were the things I heard them say. And so I took those words and put them right on the sales page. And so then other people who are like-minded people who are in the same place go, oh, this resonates with me. I get this. This makes sense.
And I think too often as business owners, we think of the catchy marketing phrases, all the things that we describe ourselves as. Those are labels we put on our businesses. They're not the actual words that our customers are using. So that to me, those customer interviews, it's hard to scale that. But it was so huge for me. And I plan on doing it next year as well.
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Chapter 4: What were the financial results of Jason's 'Buy My Future' project?
It was so weird to me. So now I'm in bed by 11 or I stay up and I force myself to stay up till 1 a.m.
Very interesting. Hey, you got to know your body, right? Exactly. Number five, Jason, how old are you now? 33 years young. Take us back to even younger, 13 years ago. If you wish your 20-year-old self knew one thing, what would it be?
Oh, man. This question is difficult for me. And you've probably had other people say it is because I wouldn't change anything because it wouldn't be who I am today. It wouldn't have shaped the person I am. You learn from all these experiences. But I think if there's one thing I could go back, 20-year-old me, I would just say start a business sooner.
Because hopefully I could have learned my lesson about debt and getting into debt a little bit faster. Because I reassure it was my first real business with expenses and profit and loss and all these things. And I just didn't know what I was doing and I had too much money flowing in to make big mistakes.
So I would go back to 20-year-old Jason and I would say start something, learn about profit and loss and experience it yourself. You're not going to learn in a book or in a course or anything. You have to do it with your own business and apply that.
top tribe there you have it isn't this guy good or what jason from selling over a million dollars of just wearing other people's t-shirts to selling your own last name twice to just now selling 165 grand of units for your future thank you for taking us to the top Okay, Top Tribe, I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.
And don't forget, before you go listen to other episodes, subscribe to the show on iTunes right now for your chance to win $100 next Monday. This week's winner was Matt Wolk from DDB Agency in Chicago. Yesterday, we heard from Greg Petruzinski. He's 28 in Poland, and he wants a $20 million valuation on his business.
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