WORTH WATCHING:
The Kid Who Stopped Asking Permission
The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Josh Suggs · ~61 min
Josh Suggs was one of the first people to put me on camera. When I was ramping up my own social game and getting ready to launch this show, he had me on StreetTalk. He is 23 going on 50.
On paper he was not supposed to make it. A 2.1 GPA, special ed, the lowest math class at his high school, not even allowed a free period. His twin sister finished every AP class by sophomore year and took a full ride to the University of Chicago. In his words, "In every metric, I was the one that was not going to succeed."
Then he made $200,000 in one summer walking around a New York park with a microphone, asking strangers about products and selling the videos to brands as ads. Two years on, StreetTalk has over 100 people and, by his own count, eight figures of revenue.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
Five years ago this job did not exist. Josh did not wait for anyone to hire him and he did not wait for the category to make sense to anyone else. He invented the thing, then went and found the customers.
That is why I wanted him on. AI is going to create jobs like this that none of us can picture yet. If you had told me in 2002 that "street talker" would be a career, I would have told you that you were smoking crack.
You do not need a college degree or a network to do this. Josh had neither.
My favorite part is the manifesting. He tells me he will be a billionaire by 30, and then, "I promise you I believe it." You can decide what you make of that. Here is what I know. At 12 he wanted into the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, a private club for magicians. His parents burned every contact they had and could not get in. Josh got up at 7am on his first morning in the city, walked Culver City doing card tricks for strangers, and spent 45 minutes on an old man reading a book on a bench. The man owned the Magic Castle. He emailed over five VIP tickets for that afternoon. I would not bet against him.
THE LINE THAT STUCK
"As an entrepreneur, you never ask permission."
He is describing what he worked out at 12, on a bench in Culver City, years before he knew it was a business lesson. Watch him tell it →
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 61 minutes
→Sell to people who have money. At 15 he walked into barbershops, asked who the owner was, came back on the day they were in, and pitched a $3,000 retainer for before-and-after photos. "Don't sell to people with no money."
→Let your customers do the marketing. He taught tennis having never taught a lesson, then scaled it by giving free lessons in exchange for a post in Westport Front Porch, the town's Facebook group for mothers. No mother could open that group without seeing his face next to a different smiling kid. That summer: $45,000.
→Hire around your weakness. Josh sells. He merged with an operator in Missouri who could hire and train, then put Jesse Eisenberg in as CEO over himself. Eisenberg spent 17 years at Tinuiti scaling it from $1M to more than $200M.
→The moat is the reps, not the idea. Eight hours of interviews a day, 30,000 steps around New York, shorts and a t-shirt through the winter. "Send anyone else on your team out there, they're not going to do it."
PRO MOVE
Name the one thing you are genuinely the best person in the building at. Now list everything else you did last week. That list is your hiring plan, in order.
