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How a 17 Year Old Landed a $150K Job Producing Content · Gimbal Podcast

0:00
I have a running Google Doc, hundreds of pages of everything that I've learned at acquisition.com. What is the difference between an S tier employee and say an A tier employee? The best way you can use content to showcase your competence and create opportunities is to... My name is Jay Yang. I am a 20 year old bestselling author. And before this, I've worked behind the scenes with some of my favorite entrepreneurs.
0:22
Jay, you have worked for Alex Hermosey, Noah Kagan, and Tyler Dank, three of the most well-respected names in the entire creator economy. How did you get an opportunity to work with those people?
0:34
Yeah, so it started with Tyler Dank at Beehive. I was 16 at the time. And before then I had started a bunch of, you know, what I like to call my portfolio failures and nothing really worked out. And so my mom suggested that I work with one of my favorite entrepreneurs and see if I could learn something from them. And so I went to Beehive's website and I typed up like,
0:55
internship and you know obviously nothing appeared and so i said all right i'm gonna i'm gonna create my own opportunity i am going to create my own internship and so i cold emailed tyler dank with a pitch deck a 10 slide pitch deck with three summer project ideas that i could do because i knew that if i was tyler and i got pitched the number one friction point i would have is
1:16
Okay, this kid seems cool, but what do we actually do with him? And so I wanted to reduce the friction it took for Tyler to say yes. So I pitched him three ideas. I said, here's three things I can work on. Just pick one of them and I'll do it for free. And that kind of kickstarted the rest of my journey.
1:30
And so that eventually led to an opportunity working as head of content for Noah Kagan, where you were earning, I think, $150,000 a year at 17 years old, which is absurd to me. What happened from the moment you left Beehive to the moment you joined as head of content?
1:47
Yeah, so I saw that Noah was looking for someone to help grow his newsletter. He was going to launch his book soon, and he wanted to grow his newsletter. And I was like, well, I just came from a newsletter company. I think I can help. And so I knew that the pitch deck worked with Tyler. And so he said, I'm just going to do it bigger, better. And so I dropped everything, and I spent the next 50 hours creating a 19-slide pitch deck
2:08
deconstructing Noah's entire social media and email funnel. And the question I asked myself was, if I had this role, what would my strategy be? And then I try to deliver it to him upfront. And so I said, all right, here's what his newsletter looks like. Here's the landing page. Here's what platform he's using. Here are all the social channels he's using to grow the newsletter. Here's how he's doing on each social channel.
2:28
Here's what I do and change if I were to run this. And then I sent that pitch deck to him along with nine pieces of ready to be published content that he could test right away to test that I knew what I was talking about. That's incredible. And then that obviously led to him reaching back out to you.
2:44
Yeah, exactly. I got a DM from like, yo, man, this is Noah. Saw your presentation. This is fire. Here's my number. Give me a call. And it was just, I was so excited. And I remember like I was in class at the time. I think I was in a business class and I got just goosebumps, chills because I've been watching Noah's content on YouTube for a long time. And, you know, he's someone I looked up to. And so I was definitely, definitely pretty nervous and pretty excited. Did you get offered a position right on that phone call or did it lead to something else beforehand?
3:13
I don't remember how the exact phone call went. I do know that I started with Noah on a trial, and this is one of Noah's core philosophies, which is test before you invest. And so whether we're trying to onboard a new teammate or test out a new tool, we always try and see, or even like test a content strategy, we always like do a mini test before we fully invest time, energy, and resources. And so I started on a free trial with Noah, where basically for the first 30 days, I was just writing his Instagram captions. And it was the most like,
3:41
unglamorous, boring, tedious work ever. But I try to over deliver as much as possible. I'd write the captions and then also design an Instagram post. Hey, try this out. And so I constantly try and give him like ideas to test. And slowly over time, I would absorb more responsibility until I started leading all of his content. It must be kind of daunting to do a lot of free labor without knowing if this is ever going to yield some kind of return for you.
4:05
Yes and no. I think the mindset reframe that I give a lot of people who are like, oh, that's they're taking advantage of you. You're working for free is when you have like nothing going for you, then you have nothing going for you, which means you have to like use what you have. And I had a lot of time and energy. I didn't have a lot of money or skill set. And so I had to use what I had to create opportunities.
4:24
And I think the second reframe is no matter what happens, you get better. It's an asymmetric bet. The downside is you get a no or rejection. And the upside is you get everything you want. It's like in the process of doing this work up front, in the process of using the pitch deck approach, even if Noah said no, I just spent 50 hours getting better at my craft of doing research, doing an audit, practicing a cold pitch, practicing creating a public pitch deck, practicing content strategy. What goes inside a pitch deck to make it excellent?
4:52
most of my pitch decks are tailored to each client. And that's part of the audit process. It's researching and it can be even as specific, like for example, like for the pitch deck for the Alex or Mosey role, at the end, it's like, who is Jay? And it's like a picture of me flexing my bicep because I know that Alex likes working out, right? And so the pitch deck is both about like strategy of the role, but also just like doing research into their personality and their values and things they like and believe because you wanna show that you are in their in-group, you are like them.
5:21
There's a golden rule like treat other people the way you want to be treated. But I think there's a rule above the golden rule, which is the platinum rule. Treat other people the way they want to be treated. That's empathy. That's putting yourself in their shoes. And so the question to ask is, if I was Alex or if I was Noah, if I was Tyler, what would I want to see from someone who's pitching me? What would make it a no-brainer for me? Then reverse engineering the things that you put into the pitch deck.
5:44
I've always had this like really profound respect for people who can get their point across with brevity. And I think about the people that I work with or the people that you have worked with. And these are people who are exceptionally busy and get pitched multiple times a day. How do you know with a slide deck or with any kind of outreach that you do when to add a word or a slide? How do you how do you make sure that you're being concise, but also empathetic, as you said?
6:10
I think the question I ask is like, what needs to be true for them to be able to make a decision on whether they should work with me or not? And so obviously I try and front load a lot of the core strategies in the pitch deck so that if they just skim it, they immediately feel like they got value. And so if you look at Noah Kagan's pitch deck, the very first slide is a very visual contrast between his current landing page and the landing page that I designed for him.
6:32
And so it's super visual. It's super easy to skim. You can immediately see the value and the difference. And then throughout the rest of the presentation, it's more tactics. The reason I like pitch decks more than memos or anything else or even videos is it's so easy to just even open on your phone and just like swipe through. And you can do it in like 30 seconds. I know that like Noah's busy, Alex is busy, Tyler's busy. And so I'm a big fan of pitch decks because you can show instead of tell with pictures, images, and graphics.
6:55
You have listed on your website that this pitch deck to this free working opportunity with Noah ultimately led to a $150,000 job working for him. And this was when you were something like 19 years old. When did that conversation actually happen where you said, OK, it's time to actually start earning from this opportunity? And how did you get a rate that at that age and at that time is exceptionally respectable?
7:20
Yeah, I was actually 17 at the time. Even younger. But the conversation with Noah was pretty candid and honest. At the time, Noah wasn't my only client. I was also doing work for other startups. And so he asked me, like, hey, Jay, what would it take to bring you on full time? And I told them what I was earning with some of these other clients. And I said, if you can just match that or go a little bit above that.
7:42
that would make it more likely for me to want to work with you full time and like dedicate my my life and career to this. But I think like the more important part is the reason Noah asked like, hey, what would it take for you to go full time is because throughout my I think it was six months working with him before we had that conversation. I was constantly absorbing responsibilities and problems like to take it off his plate. I tell people I call it finding your and situation.
8:05
Whenever you want to do something or learn something, you have to think about it from the company's perspective, which is let's use the acquisition.com example. I joined the media team as a written media strategist. And so I was doing a lot of tweets, emails, but I wanted to learn ads. I wanted to learn paid marketing because I knew that was something that was the constraint of my career. I didn't know it.
8:24
And so rather than saying, hey, can I transfer from the media team to the marketing team, which is risky for the company? I said, I'm just going to do my job and I'm going to do paid marketing. I'm going to just insert myself in here. I'm going to write a batch of ads. I'm going to send it to the director of marketing. I'm going to make it an absolute no grainer for them to want me to be on the on the marketing team.
8:42
And so similarly with Noah, it's like, how can you do your job and the next job so that it becomes a no brainer when they say, hey, we need a head of content? It's like, oh, well, Jay's kind of been doing it informally for the last six months. And so it's an absolute no brainer. Let's just make Jay the head of content. I love that. So you have worked with some incredible people. I want to know what have you learned about greatness from somebody like Alex Hermosey or Layla Hermosey or Noah Kagan or Tyler Dank?
9:08
If I had to boil it down to one word, it would be intention. I think the common through line between Tyler, Noah, and Alex is this immense amount of focus on what they're doing. For example, when I was working with Noah, before we launched the book that ended up becoming a New York Times bestselling book, he spent the 18 months prior working on the launch strategy, going on podcasts, testing the book title, testing the subtitle, testing the color of the cover, like running Facebook ads to test the color of the book.
9:38
The amount of intention and things that went into the launch before the launch even happened was just crazy to me. It completely reset my standards for what greatness looks like. That's what I think is most valuable about working with people who are at the best of your at their craft is like your standards raise. How have you cultivated intention in your own working life now?
9:59
I think it's just operating on longer time horizons. For example, Alex wrote his third book, $100 million money models, six years before he launched it. Like, can you imagine that? Like, I haven't even been doing marketing for six years in total. And he just spent six years on one book.
10:14
You know, now that I'm writing my second book, it's realizing that the alpha, the value in doing the pre-work before something is out is 10 times the value of the work you do after the launch. And so I'm willing to spend an extra year, an extra two years on this book so that I know when it does launch, it can get 10x, 100x the results because I spent that much time on the minutia, the details that makes this book great.
10:39
So the philosophy in Silicon Valley of shipping things at 70% done, would you disagree with that? I would say similar to Noah, it's test and invest. And so a lot of this book, like, you know, I'm testing a lot of the chapters as newsletter editions. I'm testing a lot of the sentences as tweets. A lot of the stories like in podcasts like these. And so that when I do ship the final product, the book...
11:01
I know that all of these concepts are validated. This chapter did well, let's front load that. This story did well, let's highlight that. This sentence did well, let's bold that. And so the book is just the most hyper-tested premium product because I know all the concepts have been tested and validated. I love that. Mark Manson, who I used to work for, he followed that same strategy when he was writing his book. He was a blogger for a decade before writing that book. And one of his most popular blog titles, the one that went most viral on Facebook was...
11:31
titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving Up. And so he knew when that book got published that that was a really strong title. So I love that philosophy, that principle. It makes so much sense. I wanna talk about you being an excellent employee. This is a podcast for people who work for other creators. And some of the quotes that are on your website, one from Tyler Ferris, this kid is gonna be a beast.
11:52
One from Tyler Dank. I'd put every dollar I had into Jay Yang. So you're obviously some kind of S tier employee. What is the differentiator between an S tier employee, an A tier employee, and maybe a B or an F tier employee?
12:07
If we were to zoom out, I think the common traits between people who are A tier employees, and now I'm like at a point where I'm hiring my own employees and teammates, and it's cool to see the difference, is it's how large of a responsibility you can give a teammate with as little instruction. And so for example, if you told a toddler, like, hey, get better at basketball,
12:27
Like they don't want to know what to do. Right. But if you said, hey, toddler, here's how to make a good chess pass. Put your right foot forward first. Have the ball with two hands. Extend your elbows. Finish with your thumbs down. And that's how you make a good pass. Do that 100 times. And then you keep. So like it's good employees. You can just assign responsibilities. Bad or not as high performing employees. You have to break it down into chunks and into steps and kind of have to hold their hand. And so.
12:51
as much as possible you know i try and be proactive with a lot of the things that i do and so for example one of the tactics that i used at acquisition was a monday morning visibility email and so every monday morning i would send an email with what i got done the previous week as well as things i got done during the weekend because i knew that alex and layla like people who work weekends as well as things that i'm going to prioritize for the following week and why i'm prioritizing them in that sequence
13:15
I got to show like how I'm thinking as a leader. Like I'm not just assigning, I'm not showing you a to-do list. I'm showing you what I'm doing and why it's sequenced in that order in terms of impact and importance, as well as the things I did last week. And I think it's little things like that to push information to your managers instead of having them have to pull it out of you. That like makes it so much easier to work with you.
13:36
Okay, I'm going to adopt that because I think that's super clever. And so this was not something that was assigned to you. This is something that just came to you. You said, I need to tell my management team exactly what I'm working on. Yeah. And it was birth because Alex was like, what are you doing, Jay? Like he didn't think I was doing anything. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm always the first one in the office, last one to leave. Like I'm doing everything, but he didn't know that. And I think it's probably a little bit because of my Asian background. Like
14:03
talk about what I do or brag about what I do. I just kind of like doing good work and letting the work speak for itself. But what I realized at an actual company was, visibility does matter and you have to kind of play that game. And so you can have a lot of impact, but if your boss doesn't know you have a lot of impact, then did you have a lot of impact? And so there's kind of the game of like 10 out of 10 impact with zero out of 10 visibility equals zero out of 10 opportunities.
14:24
And so you need to kind of play that game of also letting them know what you're working on and how it's going. Now that I'm hiring teammates, the ones that I know are going to be A players are the ones that immediately have a high volume of activity when they start. We start on Monday and by Friday they have five things done and the next week's stuff done and questions for me.
14:46
versus another employee, maybe a B-level employee, start on Monday and by Friday, they're still like, hey, what's the login again? I can't, you know, I'm struggling with this. And so I think the Monday morning visibility emails allow them to see the amount of high volume activity that I've been doing and the impact that it's had.
15:02
I want to talk about you leaving acquisition because that sounds like such an incredible opportunity. Everybody on the planet would want to have FaceTime with Alex Hermosi. And you did. And then this past January, you packed up and left. Why would you do that?
15:16
Yeah, I think the best way to explain why I left is to first start with why I joined in the first place. Okay. And so as you guys know, I joined Beehive at 16, Noah Kagan at 17, started a ghostwriting agency at 18, and got to mid-six figures while I was in college. And so when the opportunity at 19 presented itself, I was kind of hesitant. I was running a business. Do I really want to shut down this business dramatically?