Latest / The Action Catalyst / Hostage Situation, with Alex Neist (Sleep, Football, Marketing, Entrepreneurship)

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Hostage Situation, with Alex Neist (Sleep, Football, Marketing, Entrepreneurship) · The Action Catalyst

0:00
Adam Outland: Hello, Action Catalyst listeners. Today, our
0:34
guest is Alex Neist, the founder of Hostage Tape sleep
0:38
enhancement tape, as well as an entrepreneur and former
0:41
professional quarterback in the Arena Football League. Recently,
0:44
he has also founded Neist Media with a mission to build econ
0:48
brands with passion. Alex, nice to meet you.
0:51
Alex Neist: It's good to be here.
0:52
Adam Outland: Look, we're honored to have you and I love
0:54
focusing kind of on early days a little bit, Senator due to we
0:57
have a lot of business owners on here. They're going to be really
0:59
curious about scalability. So you got started wearing pads and
1:04
helmet?
1:04
Alex Neist: Yes, my first love was football. I was a football
1:08
player as so there's this great story when I was probably 13 or
1:14
14 years old, somewhere around there was at a birthday party.
1:17
And it gave everybody these acts of Topps baseball cards. I
1:22
wasn't really much of a football player back then. And so we got
1:25
these cards and we opened them up. And the very last card that
1:28
I got was a Joe Montana card in everybody around the table is
1:32
like oh my god, you gotta Joe Montana card. He's the best
1:34
quarterback in the league, like a light bulb went off for me. So
1:38
then it was at that moment, I knew, I want to be like that.
1:41
Everything I do was breathing football, living football. And
1:45
then my dad built the net, we lived out in the country, in
1:48
southern Minnesota. So out of the country that I had, we had a
1:51
past year where my dad built this net, or I would be outside
1:55
all day, from morning till noon, when the sun went down, just
1:59
thrown the ball. And even before I had the net, what I used to do
2:02
was I would go out and I would just throw the ball at all the
2:04
trees, and then that prompted my database. All right, so you're
2:07
killing all the trees. Let me build a net for you. So man, I
2:11
wanted to be at the time the next Joe Montana. And then as I
2:14
got older, that was the era of Kurt Warner, right, this this
2:19
underdog story. And I'd always kind of had an underdog
2:22
mentality and underdog story for me too, that I love the Kurt
2:27
Warner story so that I always wanted to be the next Kurt
2:29
Warner. Nobody ever thought I was gonna go play college
2:31
football. And then I went, I played college football. I went
2:34
to the University of Minnesota I was a gopher, and then from
2:37
college, I wasn't a starter I was I was a backup. So nobody
2:42
ever thought like what kind of a backup actually continues on and
2:45
keeps playing. But I had a mentality much like Kurt Warner
2:48
did, where I just I knew I was good enough. I knew I could
2:51
play, I was able to get into arena football. I was always
2:54
that guy that nobody ever ever be counted me out. But then I
2:58
always had a chip and I'm like, I can do it. I know I can add
3:01
this like dude, delusional confidence. But look, man, in
3:05
this day and age when you're playing with a playbook that's
3:08
this thick. There's so many options. And there's so many
3:13
reads and things are so complicated, you have to have a
3:15
smart guy, you've got to have a guy who can take all that and
3:19
learn a new language and think on the fly, and can go into a
3:23
meeting and command the room. Because the reality is this, you
3:26
got a billion dollar organization behind the guy,
3:29
those guys in that room are not going to follow him if he's not
3:33
working harder than everybody else. And he doesn't actually
3:37
show that, Wow, that guy knows what he's doing. He can coach
3:42
everybody in the offense, everybody in the room, everybody
3:44
in the huddle, they have to be able to follow that guy. And if
3:47
they can't follow that guy and trust that guy, not gonna work.
3:50
A great example is Johnny Manziel. You're seeing a lot of
3:53
more media come out, especially with the Netflix documentary
3:56
that That dude was so talented, but it was obvious why he
3:59
failed. He just was not doing the work. He was not studying,
4:04
not doing film, not doing all the things. And then he lost the
4:08
entire locker room lost all the coaches. And it was obvious.
4:12
Adam Outland: Yeah. So I mean, it's a good pivot actually to
4:15
talking about business. So talk about the transition from
4:18
athletics to business.
4:20
Alex Neist: I think it's an easy transition in the sense that
4:23
when you're an athlete, especially a high level athlete,
4:25
and you make it to college sports, or some level of pro
4:28
sports, you know what it takes to actually put all the work in,
4:32
day in and day out the grind. That's the thing that most
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people don't understand about being an entrepreneur and
4:39
building a business. They look at it from Instagram ago. Oh,
4:42
wow. Look at all the amazing things they're doing. Look at
4:45
what they've accomplished, like the it's like an overnight
4:47
success. But what they don't see is what all of us athletes have
4:51
gone through is that dude, you're going to practice every
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single day you're working on every single day. You're doing
4:56
all the little things every single day. that then pays off
5:01
every weekend every Friday night. So it's a very similar
5:04
mentality of, of what we need to do on a daily basis, that grind,
5:09
you have to do you just, you don't need motivation, you just
5:12
need dedication, and you need consistency, to continue to do
5:15
the right things day in and day out, and you're gonna fail. And
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that's okay. Right. And that's another piece of it is that
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being a great entrepreneur and a great athlete is learning how to
5:24
be able to use failure, you know, you're going to fail, you
5:28
know, you're going to fail. And it's using that failure than to
5:31
learn from it to then get better and try not to make those
5:34
mistakes, again, keep moving forward and keep stacking. Diet,
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there's one thing that my, my mom taught me, and I say this to
5:42
my kids, you can accomplish anything in life, if you want,
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you just have to be willing to work for it. And if you're
5:47
willing to work for it, you can do it and you can accomplish it.
5:50
And you could make your own luck to get to it.
5:53
Adam Outland: That's good. I know, it wasn't like a complete
5:55
transition right into the businesses that you that you're
5:58
known for. Now, you're the hostage tape, which we'll talk
6:00
about a little bit. But you kind of had this like pivot point of
6:04
getting into sports video analytics, which was related,
6:07
right?
6:07
Alex Neist: Yeah. You know, when you're an athlete, so I was also
6:10
a coach, like when you're playing arena football, like we
6:12
all make tons and tons of money, your goal is to try to climb to
6:16
make it to the NFL. And that was obviously my goal. And so while
6:19
I'm doing that, I'm also coaching football, I was a high
6:22
school football coach for 15 years. And so when you're a
6:25
quarterback, and you're a coach, you're student of the game. And
6:28
so as a student of the game, back then this was in the early
6:32
2000s, mid 2000s, right? Where the internet, the internet
6:36
wasn't what it is today, you weren't watching video, and
6:40
interacting with software in the browser the way that we are now
6:44
and we're used to it. So back then everything was very,
6:47
Alright, hey, I'm gonna want to mail you a DVD. Right then meet
6:52
you in McDonald's. And we're going to hand off tapes, it was
6:54
very rudimentary and how we used to exchange information, video
6:58
and study things at the dawn of that was certainly Netflix was
7:02
starting to change and grow, YouTube was starting to change
7:05
all these things were happening. And so I knew all right, there's
7:08
something here online with being able to take video and share it.
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So we actually just started out as it was a file sharing site,
7:15
game exchange, changing game video. But then we pivoted and
7:18
we said, let's actually take that though and add more to it,
7:22
we'll let the sexy build an application in the browser that
7:25
people are going to interact with, we pioneered this concept
7:27
of using humans to watch the video and tag it so that way,
7:31
then as a, as a coach, you play the game on a Friday night you
7:35
woke up the next day, your game was entirely tagged with the
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data points that you could search and pull up to be able to
7:42
teach your players more effectively. Because most teams,
7:46
especially Olympic sport teams, they've got one maybe two
7:50
coaches on staff, how the heck are they going to take a 90
7:52
minute match? add data to it, so they can actually use it with
7:55
their players? Most don't most didn't? At the time, they were
7:58
just like, All right, we lost anything we can learn. I don't
8:02
know, let's move on. Because I got a game in two days, that
8:04
really catapulted us into where, you know, we were doing seven
8:09
figures a year with our business, and then we
8:11
bootstrapped it ran it for 16 years, and then I sold it to a
8:14
company out of Tel Aviv, that kind of led to ending that
8:18
chapter of my life into a new chapter.
8:20
Adam Outland: And in tell me like if you you know, there's
8:22
the same, you know, there's, so much of what you go through in
8:25
life is preparing you for your moment when it comes right, what
8:29
was the preparation this business gave you?
8:32
Alex Neist: Well, in 16 years, I failed an awful lot. Right? When
8:35
you when you run your own business, you fail a lot. And I
8:38
was just fortunate enough to not fail too much that we were still
8:42
in business, and we lasted for 16 years. Or you could look at
8:46
it as I failed so much that I was able to learn enough to stay
8:51
in business for that long to then get to this point. But so I
8:54
negotiated the deal. I negotiated it myself, I didn't
8:58
have a broker or banker or anybody. And I'll tell you when
9:01
you're when you're an American negotiating with an Israeli,
9:06
that's an interesting negotiation that most people are
9:09
not prepared for. Because like, we're not as Americans were not
9:12
brought up in a culture of negotiating and haggling. We're
9:16
just not, we're just not prepared for that. They don't
9:18
teach that we should be teaching in our kids and they should be
9:22
teaching in school how to negotiate. So shout out to this
9:25
book, never split the difference. But Chris Voss Yeah,
9:28
he needs to read this book, this book changed my life. So when I
9:32
read that book, it changed everything about how I approach
9:36
business, how I approached my relationships, and then it
9:39
really helped me helped me set up be able to go in and
9:42
negotiate that deal to sell the company. Now I know the things
9:45
that I need to learn when I build my next company that's
9:47
going to be big. And I also learn what do I not want to do?
9:51
How do I not want to be how do I not want to manage my people and
9:55
lead my people? I learn all the a lot of things I don't want to
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do.
9:59
Adam Outland: How did this come about? I mean, this seems like a
10:02
departure from you know what you've done previously?
10:04
Alex Neist: Well, the story is actually this five years ago, I
10:07
thought I had everything right. I had the business, the seven,
10:10
figure your business, I had my wife I had, we had house, I had
10:13
two kids, then literally two years after that I lost all of
10:16
it. I sold the business. And then I went through divorce,
10:20
because I was super laser focused on the business. But
10:23
also, I was a terrible snore that have pushed my wife into
10:27
the bedroom. And a lot of people think, Oh, you store sleeping
10:31
separate better. And that's great. It's not great. And not
10:34
good for relationship to be sleeping in separate bedrooms. I
10:36
don't care what you think it's not. I've been through it. And
10:39
then I only saw my kids at the time. And then as a result, I
10:41
had to sell the house. And I was living in my mom's basement. So
10:44
then it was in that moment where all right, I'm investing out my
10:48
equity. And I'm at like my rock bottom moment. And I'm going,
10:52
what do I need to do? What do I need to do is change the work on
10:57
myself? So I started with my sleep. And I went down this
11:01
rabbit hole of what do I how can I improve it? How can I improve
11:04
my snoring my sleep all of it. And I discovered this article
11:07
written by James Nesta and James Nesta wrote a best selling book
11:10
called breath. And in this book, there's an experiment that they
11:13
do where they go to Stanford Medical Center, and they plug
11:15
their nose for 10 days to see what would happen both
11:18
anecdotally and what the doctors would say. Throughout this 10
11:21
days, they developed sleep apnea, snoring like crazy and
11:26
dangerously low levels of blocks. And once that's done,
11:29
they unplugged their nose, they tape their mouth, everything
11:32
went away in a day. So when I read that, I went, is it really
11:36
that simple. It's mouth breathing, because as an athlete
11:39
my whole life, they never taught us that they never taught us the
11:42
dangers of mouth breathing, and the benefits of nasal breathing
11:47
in so I then went okay, went on to Amazon, I had no idea what to
11:52
get. And I just bought some cheap stuff that like I will
11:55
just try this out. And everybody, same reaction. Wait a
11:59
minute, if I put this on, am I gonna die? Like, is there a
12:02
chance I die? And I'm like, I'll be fine. Come on. So I put it
12:07
on. When I woke up the next day, I felt like a kid. I felt like
12:10
my 14 year old son like the amount of energy that I had.
12:12
Because when you get more sleep it stacks. So I finally felt
12:16
what it was like it was jolting. And that's when I knew, Okay,
12:21
I've got something in and on top of who and you're like, we're
12:24
gonna call a hostage tape. They're like, yeah, like, the
12:27
amount of pushback I got from that. Our people didn't like it.
12:31
But when you have polarity and a brand and you're gonna have
12:34
people who love it, people hate it. When you know, you've got
12:36
something good hostage tip. Why would you call it that? When I
12:40
first started mouth taping, I used to warn my kids, I would
12:42
say Hey, guys, I'm gonna warn you. I'm gonna put some tape on
12:45
my mouth. Right? It's gonna look like I'm being held hostage such
12:48
as, don't freak out. But it's also tapping into this core
12:51
emotion. People feel people feel held hostage by poor sleep, or
12:55
their partner, and they don't know what to do. And I knew
12:58
you're going to scroll through your seat and you're going to
13:00
see such tape. Whoa. And you're gonna remember you're never
13:03
gonna forget that. And people don't.
13:06
Adam Outland: I was just thinking like it sometimes you
13:07
like glanced at it maybe on like an ad scroll down and you're
13:10
like, Wait, is this like the s&m feed at first?
13:14
Alex Neist: What are they going to sell ball gags next?
13:17
Adam Outland: But then to your point, polarity causes you to
13:20
read. And then as long as the science backs up the tool, it's
13:23
it's it's compelling. What were the exercises that you took in
13:28
exploring the marketability of this?
13:32
Alex Neist: There wasn't much that I did to like, past. I just
13:35
knew in my bones that this was that. Oh, the challenge, though,
13:39
is is that because it is a commodity essentially, right? I
13:42
mean, anybody can take the concept that we've made, and try
13:45
to sell it. But the real brilliance of it is creating
13:50
this brand that we've created in this movement that we've created
13:55
the largest brand in the world. It's not even close. Like you
13:58
look at the web's statistics. Nobody's even close to us. No
14:02
competitor, nothing. What was amazing is a few weeks ago, Joe
14:06
Rogan, he was talking to an MMA fighter on a pod. And the guy
14:10
said, oh, yeah, you know, I'm taping them at night. And he was
14:14
Oh, yeah. Do you use hostage tape? So we've got the biggest
14:18
person in the world equating a category to us. Yeah, in the
14:24
manner of two years, we have taken over a category and we are
14:28
the category when somebody says mouth tape. Oh, yeah, that's
14:32
your hostage tape. Right?
14:33
Adam Outland: That is the hard part, for sure.
14:35
Alex Neist: The first year was my co founder and eyes all
14:38
internal. We didn't hire an agency didn't hire anybody else.
14:41
And so it was that medium. And then I had hired on a my head of
14:46
support a few months after that, because if there's one thing I
14:49
learned from my previous business, as a SaaS company,
14:52
your customer support the has to be dialed in has to be dialed in
14:56
early. It was the three of us, you know, really for that whole
15:00
Last year, and I learned Facebook ads myself, I had never
15:03
done Facebook ads before. But I knew this was our ticket. And I
15:09
learned how to do it. It took me six months. And I learned how to
15:12
do it. I struggled and fumbled and figured it out. But that's
15:15
the way I'm wired, as an entrepreneur, like I figure
15:18
everything out, and I identify what are the things that are
15:21
going to move the needle the most. And I went, and I learned
15:24
how to do those things. Now, I completely understood it,
15:27
because that was why I didn't want to go hire an agency is I
15:30
wanted to understand how the biggest thing that I was going
15:34
to be spending my money on, and the biggest thing that was gonna
15:36
move the needle, I needed to understand it, right, I wasn't
15:39
gonna hire somebody who had just some 24 year old kid running our
15:43
ads who didn't really care. Right? He was just put on the
15:47
project. Because we were paying that agency. He's not the one
15:51
who took all of his money. And he put into this business, his
15:56
sweat, you know, I put my life into this business. So I'm gonna
16:00
make sure that it works.
16:02
Adam Outland: So like you have a valuable product, but you're
16:04
creating a market in some ways, because it's just not there yet
16:07
that wall of like, I don't understand it.
16:09
Alex Neist: Yeah, there's, there's totally an education
16:11
piece to our product, for sure. Because most people see, and
16:14
they're like, this is stupid. But then it's like, oh, wait a
16:17
minute. Most people here don't actually understand the
16:19
difference between nasal breathing a mouth breather. And
16:22
this is why it's important that like, oh my God even know that.
16:25
So when it comes to branding, we've got a 25 person team in
16:29
when I hire my team, there's a very particular type of person
16:34
that I like to hire. I like hiring optimistic people, people
16:37
that have an optimistic mindset. And also, they're, they're
16:42
people who they might be entrepreneurial. They might
16:46
leave in 234 years, and then start their own brands. Because
16:51
that's a do like, those are the kinds of people that I look for,
16:54
mostly, and I tell them all, hey, if you've got your own
16:58
brand, your own idea, I'm totally cool with you working
17:03
with it as a side hustle, I encourage it, and I'm here to
17:06
help in because I know that you may not want to be here, your
17:11
whole life, you might want to eventually learn everything you
17:14
can and then move off and do your own thing. And so right now
17:18
I've got I got two brothers, my head of growth, and his brother,
17:22
they've got a brand that they're working on. And it was funny,
17:25
like we were on a call one day, and they had a name for the
17:29
brand, a mic that doesn't work doesn't make sense, like the
17:33
name of the brand didn't make sense for what they were making
17:36
and where it was going. And his wife had said something. And
17:41
then I heard and I went, That's it. And I said, you're gonna do
17:44
this, this isn't this with it. And it was like, Holy crap,
17:47
that's it. So part of it is there's years of experience that
17:50
sometimes it takes to really be able to nail branding and know
17:53
what's going to hit what not hit. But in this day and age,
17:57
you have to be able to get people's attention, blend in. So
18:02
you have to be willing to take the risk of making something
18:06
that polarizing, when you're building a brand it has to stand
18:09
out, it can't blend in to this wall of social content, right?
18:16
Because there's so much that it's so easy for somebody to
18:19
start a Shopify account to go on, and put a brand on start
18:23
doing a Facebook ad, it is so much easier nowadays. Be willing
18:27
to put your neck out there, if you believe in it, and you
18:31
believe it's a great product, and you believe it's going to
18:34
maybe it's going to change people's lives. Maybe it's gonna
18:37
be life changing, maybe it's gonna be this or that be willing
18:40
to do it be willing to take a risk and be polarizing be
18:43
different.
18:44
Adam Outland: Good point, to really, like, emphasize, because
18:48
most people struggle I feel with the need to be liked. But if
18:53
you're liked by everyone, you're loved by none.
18:56
Alex Neist: And that's the other side of this. Right? Exactly
18:58
that it's too too many people will go Oh, wow. I want to make
19:03
sure that like this person likes it and this person every now
19:06
that's these desktops that you should do is assuming the team's
19:08
big enough that assuming that all right, this isn't like 1000
19:11
people, assuming you have a large enough Tam and for the
19:14
audience damage your total addressable market, your total
19:17
number of people that you think are actually your demographic
19:20
that you could sell this to zoomies, it's big enough. Go
19:24
after those people. Religiously, hardcore, go after them. And
19:30
that's what we did. We went, alright, we're gonna go after
19:33
men, or when he five to 50. Right? I have those middle aged
19:37
men who they have facial hair, the growing facial hair, and
19:42
they're probably married and they're having trouble sleeping,
19:46
and they're probably pushing their wives into the other
19:47
bedroom. We went hardcore after that guy. And now as a result,
19:54
what you start to see happen when you when you take that
19:56
approach as a brand, because you really nail a demo. Rafic now
20:01
all of a sudden, everybody starts and it's successful,
20:03
everybody else starts to see you go. Well, that's actually really
20:06
interesting. I see how it's helping that person one figured
20:08
out me. And now, ironically, 25% of our customer base is women.
20:15
And we are buying it and using it.
20:17
Adam Outland: It's kinda like Stanley Cups.
20:20
Alex Neist: Yeah totally, right.
20:22
Adam Outland: That's awesome. Just a couple of rapid fire
20:23
questions that I think is gonna be really good for our
20:24
listeners. Alex, one question that I have for you that if you
20:30
can't, like, concisely, answer, everybody has a different
20:33
definition for what success means to them. That can mean so
20:36
much to somebody. So for you, what does success mean? And when
20:41
do you know if you've achieved it?
20:43
Alex Neist: I heard a great businessman say this one day. I
20:46
think it was on social. He said success means that when I'm 50
20:49
6070, and my kids are out of the house, that they still want to
20:53
spend time with me. And it's something I'm working on.
20:56
Because part of the story that I didn't didn't mention, Adam, is
20:59
that the best part of the whole, this whole thing is that my wife
21:03
and I and my kids were all back together. So that happened about
21:07
two years ago.
21:08
Adam Outland: Wow. Completion story, not not one that everyone
21:11
can say. But that's really cool. Good for you. One piece of
21:14
advice you would give yourself, the 21 year old you Alex.
21:19
Alex Neist: Learn emotional intelligence at a much younger
21:22
age, I was too inner focused on just me what I wanted, what I
21:28
was trying, you know, as an athlete, you are right, you're
21:30
always focused on what you need to do to move forward to get to
21:33
there. And I just didn't understand how to actually
21:36
interact with other people how to network, how to use
21:39
relationships, to build relationships, how to make
21:42
people feel heard, how to just do all those things that you
21:44
need. You need to have if you're going to be a successful person,
21:48
whether it's business family, a partner, a parent.
21:52
Adam Outland: There's one more question I got to ask you
21:54
morning routine.
21:56
Alex Neist: You ready for this? Okay. Rivalry routine is I'm
21:59
usually up at 530. Every morning, I stretch or at least
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30 minutes, I do red light therapy than I do sauna. I do
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cold plunge. And then I'll do either depending on the day,
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I'll get a three to five mile run in, or I'll do the gym. Now
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a really important piece of that is when I'm in the sauna every
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single day I do visualizations. I am visualizing exactly where
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I'm going to be where I know this company is going I'm
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feeling what that feels like. Nada. I hope I do this. It's
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this is what it feels like when hostage to build a billion
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dollar company. This is what it feels like what I know this
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company and where we are going to be huge part of that, then it
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come back and and that's usually two to three hours of my
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morning. Very important that morning routine, taking care of
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yourself all entrepreneurs out there taking care of yourself is
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one of the best things that you can do. Because the end of the
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day you have all these people, your family, your work would
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depend on you. And if you're not taking care of yourself, then
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how the heck are you going to take care of them?
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Adam Outland: Yeah, listen to the flight attendant put your
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oxygen mask first. Right well now it's great having you on
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thanks for giving us this time. Really good interview.
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Alex Neist: Great to be on. I appreciate it. This is great.
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Don't let bad sleep hold you hostage.