- Fancy homes.
Private jets.
Condos overlooking the Strip.
I've had it all.
But you know what one thing I haven't had is?
I haven't built a billion dollar company yet.
And I'm gonna share with you how to build one,
and the mistake that stopped me from building one yet.
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Most of my friends are entrepreneurs.
Similar to me, they've done well.
And when you look at me, you think, oh successful guy,
nice home, he has money, he dresses decent.
But you know what, compared to my friends,
I'm really, really poor.
I have a lot of friends whose salary,
not business revenue, but their salary
is in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
I have friends on the Fortune 1,000 list,
and people are worth five, 10...
Actually I don't know anyone above 10,
but I know quite a few people between five
and 10 billion dollars.
That's a lot of money, right?
People think millions of dollars is a lot of money,
no, billions of dollars is a lot of money.
I've seen some of my friends walk in a Vegas
casino, and people are really sad, and they're
like here's 50 grand.
But you know what?
Them giving 50 grand to people is like
me giving a dollar to someone.
That's how rich they are when they're
worth five or 10 billion dollars,
on the Forbes, or Fortune 1,000 list.
So here's a thing that you need to do if
you want to build a billion dollar business.
It's not about how hard you're working,
or how smart people you have on your team,
because you know what, to create a million
dollar business, or a multi-million dollar business,
you need that as well.
But the difference between creating a business
that does hundreds of millions, versus billions
of dollars is you need a business that solves
a problem for a really big market cap.
One of my first businesses is called Crazy Egg.
A lot of businesses are using it.
We have hundreds and thousands of companies
that are using Crazy Egg each and every single month.
And what it does is it helps you optimize your website,
so that way more of your visitors
convert into customers, and that's a decent pain
that a lot of people are experiencing.
But here's a problem, and here's why Crazy
will never be a billion dollar business.
It doesn't solve a big enough problem.
Now think about Uber on the other hand.
They're solving transportation problems.
They're making it more efficient
for you to get to one place, to another,
and spending less money doing that,
and best of all, you don't even have to drive.
You can be a poor person, and now you
can have a driver just like those rich people have.
Uber is solving a huge problem.
It was such a big problem that they
increased the market size of the whole taxi industry.
That's right, before Uber, the taxi
industry was actually smaller.
They didn't just take a portion of the taxi industry,
they grew it, and making it way bigger.
So if you don't solve a big problem,
and go after a huge market, you're not
gonna create a billion dollar business.
Now whatever idea you have, you have somewhat competitors.
It may not be direct competitors,
like Uber's not directly competing with taxis.
A lot of people aren't like should I take
a taxi, or Uber, it's more so they're like
oh I need to go to a place, I'd rather
have an Uber, versus having my own car.
Like me, I don't even drive, right,
but when I'm in New York it's easier
to grab a cab, then it is to grab Uber in most cases.
But if you're not going after a really big market,
you won't do well.
And a lot of people, and you may be thinking,
hey if I wanna create a billion dollar business,
I wanna create this new category, but no, stop.
Sure you can innovate in a sector,
but go after something that's a really big TAM.
If you're not familiar with TAM, T, A, M,
stands for, TAM is total addressable market size.
So if you go after something big like a Salesforce's
market size, or the CRM market, and lets
say they're worth 50 billion.
Will we be bigger than Salesforce?
If you dream it, maybe it'll happen.
But chances are you're not, but that's okay.
If you're, you know, 5% of Salesforce,
you're still a billion dollar company.
So if you go after something that's really huge,
like the advertising space, or the CRM space,
or support, or if you go after transportation,
or automation, or trucking, or shipping containers,
how boring that may sound, like companies
like Docker, or Dock, or whatever they are.
They're huge.
It's because they're going after
something that's totally big.
And if you go after a really huge market size,
even if you take 1% of it, you can do well.
I was at a conference the other day,
speaking in Arizona, and a company was holding it.
It was called NexCon, and it was held by
this company called Nextiva, which offers
voice over IP phone services.
And they're already doing over
100 million dollars in revenue.
And you know what the founder told me?
He's like, "Neil, it's crazy, the voice over
"IP market, you know like those Vonage commercials,
"the woo-hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo, and you pick up the phone,
"and you can call over the internet, those guys?
"That market has only 8% penetration."
That means 92% of the people out there are
still using landlines.
That's a small market penetration.
But that means five, 10 years from now,
it can grow to be even bigger and bigger.
Yeah Nextiva's doing over 100 million dollars,
and they're not even the biggest player in this space.
There's companies like Ring Central,
and Vonage, that are already worth a billion plus.
But as you can see, you probably haven't
heard of Nextiva, yet they're still making
hundreds of millions of dollars.
So if you go after a huge market, you have a much
better shot of creating a billion dollar business.
And that's why you see me creating multiple
products in the marketing space.
It's not that I want four, or five
different companies, it's because I can
combine them all, and I eventually will,
and I can have a business that's going
after a really big TAM.
Total addressable market.
And if you go after a big market, what does that mean?
You can have a big company.
So if you're not sure if your idea
is going to be big enough, where you can
hit that billion dollar mark, leave a comment,
and I'll respond, and I'll tell you
if it's a big enough idea.
And if you're unsure, and you need help,
go to Google Finance, you can see other
publicly traded companies, and their financials,
that'll help you determine if idea's a good idea.
You can just type in a stock hold
like Apple, AAPL, and it'll reveal
their stock price, and market cap.
The other thing you can do is go look
at Google Trends, and type in key words
related to your space, and it'll show you
how many people are searching for
stuff related to your space, like the word computers.
So once you have that chart, and if it's huge,
you're doing a good job.
If it's small, you're doing a bad job,
and compare it when you're using Google Trends,
to the term digital marketing.
It has to be at least 10 times bigger
than the word digital marketing.
And again, if you're unsure, leave a comment,
I'm here to help you out.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel,
and I'll speak to you in my next video.