MM 2.27.23

Matty A.: [00:00:00] I'm excited to welcome into the show, Dan Zeni. How we

Dan Zavorotny: doing, brother? Hey, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Super.

Matty A.: Yeah, man. Any, anytime you get to connect with somebody that has an epic journey, immediately, I just wanna start asking all kinds of amazing questions. Not only your journey from, Ukraine to the US but your, successful journey of building a hundred million, startup company.

So why don't we, Back up a little bit. And for those that don't know who you are and your entrepreneurial journey, I know we'll unpack what you've been building over the last few years and how amazing that has, turned out to be. But where did this all start for you, man?

Dan Zavorotny: Sure. So I was born in Ukraine and I moved to the US when I was a little kid, and we had the.

for immigrant story where when we got to the US I think it was something like, it was my parents, my uncle, his family, my grandparents, me and my sister. At one point it was like 12 people in one bedroom apartment who you know, and then slowly became a two bedroom apartment. And then we moved up in life and became a three bedroom apartment, then a town home.

Slowly we had a house and overtime moved to a [00:01:00] middle class. But what I really enjoy about that experience is you realize even at the worst of it, it was not that bad. And I think. Was the thing that made me realize that as long as you build skills that are valuable, that are high value skills, then you are able to not have a fear of failure.

And this is the thing about startups, everyone's always a failure. What if I fail? What if doesn't work out? What? What do I do next? And that's what nobody ever takes the move or a step forward, but once you've been of at the bottom, you realize it's not that bad. And it really changed that click in your mindset.

I'm in Brazil right now working remotely, and I walk around and I see. really globally poor looks people don't have shoes. They live in no rooftops. And you realize that's poor. And like our poor in America is nothing compared to this. And so you start realizing like life is not that bad no matter what it is.

These are just perceived invented mindset that we have of just like failure. Oh my God, will people think of me? And then it really doesn't matter. And the goal here, what I realized early on is you have to [00:02:00] learn how to learn very quickly, really effectively. That's number. . And then once you learn that skills, that skill, it's learn, use that to learn skills that are valuable.

So you always have a backup plan. So as I started my career journey I went into first in finance, corporate finance then I went into healthcare consulting. And my job was basically optimized profitability for HO hospitals, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers. And what it really taught me is how to very quickly and effectively understand a business.

right? Something that takes people a decade to understand, I can figure out in two, three months. And then how to optimize that business from a revenue and a cost perspective. And it's a skill that, interestingly enough, it's not a hard skill where it's like, Hey, I'm writing code or I'm designing a new landing page.

It's a skill that it's purely intuitive over time. But once you develop it, it becomes very, I. . And so as I had this opportunity to develop a skillset I realized that I was actually doing that much great ness for the world. Optimizing, hospital profitability, if you think about it, what, how do they do it?

Cut costs, drive revenue. , [00:03:00] how do you squeeze as much cash as you can from every single patient? Like the inverse of actually providing health outcomes. Yeah. And so I was finally at a point where, I'm like, my parents you've made it. Everyone's like, wow, you are the, the joy of the family.

You've made the American dream that I always hear. and I feel like shit about it, to be honest with you, . But I had these skills that are translatable and I said, you know what? Let me go pursue something where I actually can also feel good about it. And I was thinking about different areas of field that I wanted to do and I was exploring, around human potential around just corporate health corporate health in general, also human resources.

And I happen to be in a healthcare conference in silicon. and I ran into one of my friends from childhood and he was wearing a device called Continued Glucose Monitor and he said, Hey, do you know anything about it? And I ha said, yes, I do. I just happened to be like one of the experts on this topic, cuz my background as well as my sister, was a type one diabetic.

So she's been wearing this device for over a decades. So I saw the hardware improving as well and he said, Hey, I'm thinking about starting this company, you're interested. And I [00:04:00] said, better time than now. And I just jumped, I just quit my job two weeks. . And again, the same thing. It's the immigrant mentality of like, why did you do this?

Like it's a risk. Why would you quit if this finally made it? My parents were like, are you insane? But to me it was, I have these high skills now, high network skills, while simultaneously, what's the worst that happens? I go get another high paying job if it doesn't work out right? And so I started this and the first thing he said, okay, and he's had a couple exits before this.

He said, okay, the only thing, two things that matter is sell and. , which one do you wanna do? And I said I know how to build financial models and strategy. And he said no. Build software or sell the stuff. And I said I don't know how to do either one of those. And his question is so the hell are you gonna do here?

? And I said, okay, that's interesting. He's do you wanna learn how to write software? I'm like I don't know if I can learn fast enough. He's like, all right, then go sell it. And I was like, okay, how do we. . He's like, on the internet. I'm like, what do you mean on the internet? At this point?

I have no idea how to run a Facebook ad. Google had nothing. And he said okay, you should think about this [00:05:00] because I dunno if we need you here. So then I go Google how to sell 'em the internet. And I go, I find hundreds of strategies. I download 'em to Big Excel file, put 'em on a cell tab, and I go, okay, I found all these strategies.

I'm gonna go, what's our budget? And he goes, zero. And so that luckily, interestingly enough, helped me eliminate 90% of strategies. I could do it look like 2%. And so I'm like, all right, this is gonna be, less choices. There's a paradox of choice. Too many choices make you not know how to move.

Now when you only have six choices left in total, you now just can try all of them. And two ones I tried right away were Facebook groups and an Instagram influencer. and I just sat there and started reaching out hundreds of influencers, join hundreds of Facebook groups, and just trying to convince people to buy something that has not yet been built, by the way, , right?

All we had is Alan Page just said, give credit card here, right? And I'm like adding people on Facebook group, chatting with Facebook group, then adding on there and chatting, asking questions, what do they want? Things like that. And within two weeks, I convinced like 13, 14 people on the internet [00:06:00] that I've never met to put their credit card.

And then we got some revenue. I think we got some, seven or $8,000 in revenue that first two weeks. And then I came back and I was all happy and my friend goes, great, but if we wanna be a high growth company, you can do it again, but more . So I had to do it again. And then he actually now f we finally released a product.

The people prepaid for. and we actually used that prepaid cash to actually start hiring people. Help us a little bit, to actually run the operations of the business. So next month I got 13, 14,000. Next month I got like 30,000. And every month there's just more and more. And every time I would get pretty good at it, I would try to optimize the funnel or how I do the marketing.

I would say, okay, great, we got interim influencers, great. Let me hire someone, teach 'em, make it, make sure they're better than me. Now let's go to ads, Facebook ads. I would do that, get pretty good at it. Then hire someone at least three times better than. . And then with that person next I'll go to Google ads, then Twitter ads, then content strategy, and I'll just go one at a time like this.

And now we have something like a 25 person marketing team, and I do zero marketing now, now I do something completely different. Now I'm doing the learning bot, HR and [00:07:00] finance, and accounting, and audience all over the place. But really that's been the ambition. Get in there, learn as quickly humanly possible, and then hire someone three times better than you.

Step away. How are you measuring?

Matty A.: Whether or not somebody's got that three X skillset set beyond you.

Dan Zavorotny: Yeah. So before I even answer that, it's interesting. I was amazed how many people would do a job for 10, 20 years, and yet they would know it worse than me after I did it for a month. I was mind blown away by that.

And you realize that majority people in the world, they're not passionate about things. They look at job as just like I go do this. do it. I do just get paid and I wanna do their ambition release to, how do I do as little work as humanly possible while I get paid as much as possible? That is like 95% of people's ambition, right?

And based on that I had a mindset of, okay, how do I get good enough so I can even measure, right? If I just interview someone in something I've never done before, I don't understand. So first I would have to go learn. And so what, the way I would learn, I use three steps really. Step [00:08:00] one. I would invest some kind of small amount of money, say Facebook ads.

I wanna learn Facebook ads. I would go sign a Facebook ads and say, I'm gonna spend $500. No one's gonna bring zero value outside of learning. And I would go and break that thing. When I say break, I'm gonna click on every button. , I'm gonna just try to understand every single thing I could possibly do and any button I don't understand, like I'm gonna go find out and I'm gonna call the reps 30, 40 times Facebook.

And to the point where it's like every time I would go on this platforms, I'll spend 50 hours just for $500, and I would have like dozens of questions on pages of questions, so for them, right? And number two is also just get obsessed as every podcast on topic and very niche podcast, every YouTube tutorial, every single thing go as deep as.

And the third one is, this is the more crucial one is finding a mentor, one to two years in that field ahead of you. They have to be one to two years ahead of you. If you go six months, that's not far enough. If you go 20 years, you have these people who are like running multi-billionaire companies.

They're so far ahead, they don't remember, or like the scars are not there anymore, or they're running a [00:09:00] team or the world has changed. TikTok not blowing up. Three years ago nobody even knew TikTok was. . And so having that combination is very effective. And I will tell you, you be amaz some people you can get to and who will actually willingly help you as long as when you come in and you actually ask good questions, right?

Yeah. So it's not Hey, what's a Facebook ad? That's ridiculous. You can Google that or how do you run account, but actually Hey, I ran this ad and I combined it with this wide listing and this is the result. I'm thinking this happened. What do you think you. . And when that happens, people really get excited about helping you.

Cuz they'll say, sometimes they'll be like I've never seen that problem. And success people just love problem solving. That's all it really is. Business is just solve one problem at a time over and over and hard of The problem is, it's exciting, right? And I've seen this over and over by the way, where smart success people, they've run toward problems.

Even my company, when I see people, when they see oh, somebody's gonna sue us or someone's gonna follow something smartest, people are like, Hey, can I do that? Can I do that? I'm like, and they say I've never done that. I wanna experience this one. And so same thing with reach out to us. Folks [00:10:00] are super impressive on resume or accomplished life.

They're excited about helping other people and they've won new problems. They won new challenges. Sometimes they've already cashed out and they've retired and now they're bored in there. And maybe they don't want to go to the grind or start another company because they're like, they know the, sweat tears you have there, but they still want challenges.

They want to talk about it. And so this is a good way getting intrigued. but using those three steps of really just breaking a system, like actually breaking it. Knowing and knowing you're gonna fail at it. That's the key part here. People are afraid to break it cuz they're like, they're afraid of the feeling.

I almost psych myself up knowing Hey, when I go do this thing, it's not just I'm gonna fail, but I already, I go through the conscious decision of I'm gonna feel anxiety, my heart rate's gonna go up, my pupil's gonna dilate, I'm gonna be nervous. and that you thinking about those steps that are gonna happen makes you anticipate it, makes you more comfortable with it.

Because people always say accept failure, but just you say, I accept failure. The words themselves are not what's driving the fear, it's the body feelings and the way our blood pressure goes up when [00:11:00] we're failing and you feel stress and you can almost tense and angry, plain nose in your mind and getting in that like almost physical situation early ahead of.

Makes you more comfortable with it. Yeah. And then the second two, as I mentioned, is just like to actually learning and absorb as much knowledge as possible. And the third one is getting the mentors. So those helped you. I want to break

Matty A.: down for those that you know, are entrepreneurs or business owners and understanding a little bit more about some of the, breadcrumbs of success and failures in your journey.

Yep. Going from. , zero to a hundred million valuation in a very short period of time, going from zero to a hundred and what, 70 employees in a very short period of time. Yeah.

Dan Zavorotny: 170 now. 170. Yeah. Yeah. So talk a little bit about

Matty A.: the early stages of startup mode and some of the things that you guys did wrong, and some of the things that you guys did right, that you would share with individuals that are early in their entrepreneurial or business journey.

Dan Zavorotny: Yeah, I the [00:12:00] things we did wrong is I think you too early on, one of the things that you start focusing on is like what the world thinks. People say there's a new competitor coming to place, or Hey, what does someone else think about your business investors? Our customers, and it's really thinking about this.

No matter what business you're starting, especially in the us, there are what, 350 million people? , there's this joke in entrepreneur world that there's always a million people for something, right? For almost any product. And so in the end, when you're so tiny, none of it really matters. What I mean by that is that doesn't matter what your competitors are doing, they can get the most famous, they get rapid of the world on their team.

It doesn't matter. You should be focusing specifically on like, how do I do one next thing, ignoring all the noise. because to this day, every single person said there's all these competitors, how are they doing it? If we have $10,000 in revenue and they have $30,000 in revenue, does it really matter?

We have a multi-trillion dollar economy in the US and like it simple doesn't matter yet. Those are things that people [00:13:00] focus on, right? And it took me a very long time to realize it simply doesn't matter because you guys are all so small. In the end, it just, it's unimportant. And interestingly enough, when as we start all getting.

whenever our competitors got some press release, we got extra traffic and revenue. Whenever we did. They got it too, because it was many ways. When you're creating a new industry, you're not actually competing as much with each other as much as with the old industry, right? . And you see this with Blue Apron, a home chef.

These other companies that did like home delivery food and stuff like that, and cooking a home, they did the same thing. I used to think they were competing with each other all the time. Early days they said no. We're competing with the old school. Are you gonna go to the grocery store and shop, or are you gonna let us deliver?

So it's that change in mindset. So I think one is the ability to ignore the outside noise early on as you get big corporation, yes, the matters, but right now it doesn't. That's number one. Number two is this concept of micro optimization. If you have a job in a corporate world, you will have one 10th of one process and your goal is to just optimize that for the next couple years.

And if you do, cuz [00:14:00] company's big, that could be millions of dollars. And that's what happens when people start companies, the first thing they do go, okay, I started a. . I have a hundred people coming on my website, two people pay. I need to make that three people, four people. I need to work in that bottom of the funnel every single time.

And my answer is yes, it sounds nice, but it's such a small amount. Figure out how to improve the top first. Yeah. Get a million people come to your website because that matters more in the early days because it just doesn't matter, right? Because if you keep too focused on a micro optimization earlier in the funnel, It simple doesn't do anything right and your die by the time you figure out how to improve that funnel and you won't get the more people coming in.

So it's ignoring the micro optimizations earlier on. I see this over and over. Whenever somebody starts immediately, they go, I'm gonna improve this little process. I said, no, don't do it. It's 70% good enough, don't worry about it. We need to do things that are improving revenue and improving exposure and brand right away, not these little micro.

then corporations, that's what we're taught, right? Yeah. We're all little cogs. And then it's this little thing, what do I do to make it better? And that's who you get paid for. You get paid for making little things be better and. [00:15:00]

Matty A.: It's great. Great. I think reminder for a lot of people, right? Cuz they get stuck in the weeds on the little things.

When really if they were to focus their energy and attention where the multiple of value that's captured on that larger stuff, they really neglect a lot of that, thinking that the smaller stuff needs to get fixed. And that's really, that's the

Dan Zavorotny: thing. But we're taught this, right? We're taught. And when ingrained in us from university for our jobs, it's all be the bestest one little thing.

And so how do you remove that mindset? . And I think that mindset's only removed by almost getting kicked an ass. Really? Yeah. It's if revenue's not there, our company. Yeah. So how do you get it going? So in talking

Matty A.: about that because for business owners, we know that revenue is the ultimate right piece of success in any company.

Yep. And you live and die in your revenue. You've been talking a lot about marketing and Yep. You know how you got more brand recognition, how you aligned with certain partnerships. Scaling the way you guys scaled so quickly. There's obviously some. [00:16:00] Strategic approach you guys took for spotlighting marketing and really getting it going.

So obviously you kicked it off with no marketing budget, but as you started to get some momentum, and maybe for others that are starting with a very tight and hamstrung budget, what did that gradual progress look like? And when did you guys really go? We got our funnel dialed in. Yeah. We know our conversion and our KPIs on our marketing.

We're turning this baby up.

Dan Zavorotny: Yeah. So even before you start turning baby up, you have to ask yourself. You have to be, this is. Self-awareness is so critical. A lot of people think oh, I'm a marketer. I'm great at this. But the question's like, are you actually great? Are you one of the best? And I see people all the time when they start a company, they'll get a like co-founder, right?

A little happiness. People will get a copy of themselves. Let's say they're engineer, they'll get another engineer to a company with, if they get, if they're consulted, get another consultant. They're market into the marketer. So number one is you have to get people who complete opposite skills of you.

almost at odds because you hang out people just like you, right? And so you need to get someone completely different. [00:17:00] So we talked about, like earlier in days, we said, okay, first that's revenue, sales and building. And then the first, then right afterwards, we got those too. We started, and we need someone to maintain revenue.

So it's create revenue, maintain revenue, build product. So we had this triangle, right? And so that's first is like where do people actually fall into, right? And that, that requires a very tough convers. , right? It could even be requiring talk to external folks and be like, how do you value me as individual on this skillset?

Because if you don't have the skillset, you'll have to build it very quickly. You have to bring someone else who can, and those are very tough conversations because we all think naturally the we're the best at everything. I think last time I read that as a nation, we're the 17th smartest people.

Yeah. We're the most confident about our skillset as number one. , I think Finland was like number one or something. Actual skillsets. And so how do you. Have that conversation with yourself. That's number one. Once you do it, let's say you are the right person first. You start off and you gotta actually, you have to only pick one channel that you thinks can work, and you have to just double down and [00:18:00] grow, and to become better than everyone else, you have to stand out from the crowd of there.

And this is almost at odds where when you get bigger, because as you get bigger and bigger, you have to diversify away from one channel and go as many channels as possible because you don't wanna be reliant on one. However, in early days, you have to pick. . And the reason for this is that it, you have so much catching up to do to brands that exist and penetrate through that if you start off right away in many channels, you'll just never get good enough.

Yep. I think, what is that? There's that famous line that no one ever gets mad from buying from, what is it? Ibm. No one gets fired from buying from ibm. Meaning no matter if IBM does a terrible job, it doesn't matter because everyone trusts 'em. It's the brand's famous. And here you gotta remember when you're starting a company, People don't even know who you are.

Nobody even trusts. Are you not gonna feel the credit card? You're overcoming these high level burdens of simple are you a real person? Will you send me your product? You're a person on the internet, I've never met you. So you have to really build this brand. And it starts with this one channel, one little niche audience administration.

I was literally Facebook group and Instagram influencer, one at a time just [00:19:00] messaging people, right? And then once you start getting that flow going a little. , then you could start thinking about, okay, how do we do second channel now? And we saw this when we started with Facebook groups and Instagram influencers.

Then it expanded to Facebook, paid, then Google paid, then Twitter paid, and now content. For example, our seo, it's something like 30 to 40% of our revenue, right? And so that's number one. It's the, but number two is also about what are the things that drive revenue right away versus long? . If I convince an Instagram influencer post and then I get revenue right away, that's great.

Versus if somebody sees a Facebook ad, it usually takes a little bit longer to convert. So you think about a, the time to get revenue from the money you spent. But the problem with those things is the moment you turn 'em off, they're done. Like you don't keep getting revenue from Facebook versus things like content strategy around search engine optimiz.

you could spend it, it takes a year and a half spend money over and over running content over and over. However, it doesn't really hit for you for a year and a half. But the nice thing about once it hits you [00:20:00] haven't, you own it forever. Yeah. So I was looking at it as one, how quickly you can get your revenue.

Number two, do you own the audience or not for long term? Yep. And then number three specifically is like, how much does it. and I use those kind of frameworks, all three to determine and essentially you could turn a lot of channels from from cash. For example, when we started with influencers, we were first paying 'em only on conversions.

We were saving money in that regard, but it was much slower because you have to convince out of a hundred people, tool will work for you. When you pay people up front, everyone's gonna work with you. The trade off is that, , it takes, more time when you do pay for conversion, but you're reducing your risk upfront.

They'll do right away, but a lot of these things aren't gonna work out. Yeah. So it's really plain with those cash flow. Balance and idea here is that over time, as you have more and more cash, you're willing to take those bets more and you're willing to scale more and assume certain, again, certain risk of failure, knowing that 20, 30% of these campaigns are gonna go down, toilet [00:21:00] the money wasted without trying can't no.

In the early days you can't. Every single one has to. Yep.

Matty A.: So talk a little bit about that. Were you guys. As you were building the company early on, were you guys building to hit a certain valuation, therefore your strategies and, actions were, aligned with, Hey, sure, we want to get here to get that valuation.

Or was it, hey, we need to be as profitable as possible. There's obviously many different approaches a startup founder can take. Yep. When it comes to building their company. , what did that look like for you guys and why did you guys choose that path? Yeah,

Dan Zavorotny: so I, I look at it three stages. The first stage is really, we need revenue to show that people actually want this.

And it does not have to be scalable at all. It just, we need revenue, we need to sh it doesn't, it's usually very manual and need to show that people want this. That kind of puts you to the next stage. Now you can show people some people want this, and it helps you fundraise some cash from investors.

Cause people are like, okay, there's some traction here. The next stage of it, , you will keep doing the manual [00:22:00] stuff, but you have to start experimenting with scalable things, right? Because everyone to know can I press, can I, if I put 10 million, a hundred million, whatever, if you put more money and I press go, can you scale and go faster?

And so you have to start showing early evidence of this. And the third one is now you have to move. Everything's scalable. That's kinda what we're trying to move to right now. So just to summarize, first one's all unscalable. Next one is like 80% unscalable, 20% testing of scalable, and the third one is all scale.

because you can't do manual things anymore. And those transition points are where you end up getting bigger valuations as well. More money. And the point for this is that for the scalable portion, people underestimate what they can actually do. The money someone gives you $20 million, it's actually very hard to spend it when I actually spend it.

I don't mean just give it away, but actually spend it effectively. We have returned on every single investor dollar. Yep. And people always say like they, there's a famous thing called use of proceeds. What are you gonna spend it? and we used to say oh, hire 20 people and 15 million in marketing.

And then when you actually go through and try to hire 20 good people, it's very hard. [00:23:00] Yeah, it's hard to hire one good person. And this is the part that we always underestimate, like the, you just put in these models of we're gonna hire 17 people this month, good luck. You might have to do 30 enemies, find one good person, and you have to onboard 'em for three to six months.

And so those things are critical to really understand what are you gonna use the money for? So it's not just sitting in the bank account doing. Yeah. Does that help clarify?

Matty A.: Absolutely. I think those are things for any individual, sometimes entrepreneurship, especially for early stage entrepreneurs is very romanticized and it's, it's gonna be all Yeah.

Rainbows and and roses and brutal. And it's a game of stamina and grit and discipline and like you said, just constantly feeling your way forward. with where you guys are at now having a hundred million dollar valuation, most people would say, what are you doing? Are you guys gonna exit?

Yeah. What is the vision for what you guys are building? And why are you guys motivated to build that right now?

Dan Zavorotny: Yeah, so I interesting. Covid was a interesting perspective on this cuz like at what covid things [00:24:00] came out that, a lot of people passed away, but the, one of the biggest factors, there's two biggest factors were lack of vitamin D and the second one was actually poor glucose.

Those are literally two factors and it exacerbate people's understanding of why health is so critical and why can't just wait. And for us as a company, when you're early stages, you just of wanna get something going. You wanna prove like you're worth it. Yep. And you almost have this perception of yourself.

Like it doesn't work out, it's your own fault. But as you get bigger, he used still realizing, Hey, what are you the billing for? And as you start getting more comfortable with financial, you start. , this is, you get the freedom. As I said, I'm living in Brazil right now, and I'm gonna probably go to Italy afterwards and do whatever I'd like.

You get the freedom, the financial freedom to do what you like in life. But more importantly, you get to actually say, what impact do I want to have in the world? And people often ask me like, okay, if you try to build a $5 billion company, but if it, but you could fail on the way there, aren't you angry? And to me, I start looking at things very differently.

I've now built the skills by building this. that I can always go get another job [00:25:00] somewhere else that pays me more than I may before. So that financial freedom now exists. However, I now can pursue the passion of helping as many people as possible in the world. And what's interesting, even if our company fails in our health and wellness industry, we've now motivated the old players to push forward.

because now all these big companies that are multibillionaire companies have these contracts have not made any difference at all, are now getting called from their, their employees and their subscribers saying, I want the one nutrients has. And we've now had big, we've had big corporations reach out to us, we've had insurance companies reach out to us, Hey, we wanna build this thing with you guys.

And sometimes the ironies, a lot of investors and our advisors say a lot of times they just come and learn from you and copy you just steal and do the same thing. and they're like, oh my God, you gotta be careful. Don't share all knowledge. But the way I look at it's okay, let's say steal and they jump ahead by 10 years, still brings a value to the world.

This is health. They now serve a hundred million, 200 million people in a healthy possible way. So what's the [00:26:00] big deal? And I think that mindset took me a while for me to develop because now I started believing this idea of like positive energy and like almost karma in some way.

If we're burning positive things to the world, then it's not a big deal if we fail because we're pushing the world faster and forward. Yeah, I mean

Matty A.: it's totally rooted in abundance which I love. And that's real legacy too, right? Is when you are ultimately leaving humanity much better because of something that you guys had a very big part in especially on the health front.

What are your thoughts around. exiting the company is there Yeah. Some certain number that you and your co-founder have, in the back of your heads or, I'm

Dan Zavorotny: sure guys, I'm sure you'll we have not we, it's funny when we first started, we did, but then we have the Slack channel where everyday people give us reviews.

And remember people on our company our members range from type two diabetics to pre-diabetics to weight loss, to Olympic athletes. And we have this channel where people leave reviews and we send it to our company and we have like hundreds of reviews every day. And someone will say you changed my.

or [00:27:00] I set a record, I won a championship. And you get so inspired that you almost forget the financial metric. And then other fear is that let's say we exit company, we get cash out a lot of money, what do we do next? Gotta start all over again. Look for a new idea to build because they just get bored after a while, right?

Yeah. And people always talk about when you retire, you just age like 20 years in a year. So me and my co-founder basically said, let's just keep building forever. and the goal for us really is, this is where investors hate us, and I hope they don't listen to this podcast the week after this , they're like, what's your exit?

We're like, oh yeah, X amount of money. But in reality, it's help as ma transform as many lives as possible from a health perspective, and you just keep going forever. , that's actual our ambition. , they have more financial metrics they'd like to see, we'll see how that plays out. That's awesome,

Matty A.: man.

We'll, talking about kind of the financial side of things, obviously, business and startup and entrepreneurship has been your vehicle for building wealth, unlocking financial freedom. As you've done that, what do you like to invest your money in?

Dan Zavorotny: Interesting. Early, say, startups,

I actually, I, there's a bunch of these interesting platforms that lets you buy secondaries into [00:28:00] markets, add, like series B, C D. And again, it's, and that's what's interesting, people don't realize, but by the time companies get to like series C, and D, like the, like of them going, i p O are very.

they're no longer the risky, where it's like one of a hundred succeeds. This is like Sequoias, the world have already put in the billion dollars. Yeah. They're pretty much gonna make it. And what Essent people don't realize that, but if you invest right before the IPO o or a couple years before the ipo, you can make good return.

And so they have these, I think one thing called MicroVentures example one where you can just invest, I don't know, small amounts of money. Depends relative 10, 10 K to a million if you want. And they sell you the equity before the company ipo. and so I've invested in SpaceX and companies that nature or things that are doing biotechnology because again, like the likelihood of success is more like 60, 70%.

If you will get a return and it's things I'm super interested in. So you don't have to spend as much due diligence because someone else already did it for you. Yeah. And you still get a return. So that's what I've been investing in. Dude, I love

Matty A.: that. I haven't heard too many people talk about that.

And I've done a handful of pre i p o investments, like you said, and I just [00:29:00] completed one in green Coffee company and they're on their series C right now. And I do Palantir before Palantir went public and Yeah. Yeah. And all of those did really well. And obviously, like you said it's, you're not gonna bat a thousand.

I love that being your one area of, wealth building that you lean into. That is obviously, in a space that you have a lot of experience in and a lot and

Dan Zavorotny: passion for. It helps if, if you have more insider knowledge, just cuz your background than anyone else, it gives you an advantage, right?

Yep. People always say you have to do real estate. I'm like, yeah, if real estate, you should do real estate . But if you don't know, good luck. And so if you already have some knowledge and you understand, whether it's our consumer b2b like. How to even read the financials to understand what they mean.

, that's critical. That's an advantage you have over on else. And so that's what I've been investing in. I found it pretty lucrative and I like it. Plus again, feels good. Like I think SpaceX is a cool company, right? Yep.

Matty A.: And you talked about some different platforms where for those that maybe wanna learn a little bit more, what are

Dan Zavorotny: some of those platforms?

Yeah, there's a bunch of 'em. Like the one I've used called Micro Venture. . Okay. They have some smaller ones you [00:30:00] could even up to like minimum 5,000 checks. What they do is, let's say a company wants to sell some equity. Yep. And then the MicroVentures or a company like it will say, okay, we'll take 10 million allocation or a hundred million allocation, and they'll go back to the customers like us and they'll say, Hey, you can put in minimum X and it'll pull the money together, basically.

Yep. And this way you get into big deals, like the big players get the big deals. Otherwise you wouldn't have opportu. I think I should work for MicroVentures for this, but

Matty A.: yeah. Seriously, . So as we wrap up, I wanna talk a little bit about legacy and impact for you. Obviously making a lot of money is great, investing it wisely and growing it is fun.

What are you gonna do with all your money when all is said and done?

Dan Zavorotny: So the three things that I'm really passionate about at least in a US economy is education. I think education system completely broken, makes no. . The second one's fertility and the third one's preventive health.

Preventive health is on focus on now. Fertility. We see this now over and over. I read a study that said that by 20 30, 40 5% of women are not gonna have [00:31:00] kids in us. Which is, you think about it, I think 30 years ago it was something like 13%. , right? And so this is gonna cause havocs down the line.

Both in ac I first of all, it's just having children naturally. It's makes things way more complicated to the health of the children the third one economically, because you need children, support the retirees, keep the economy going. So how do you fix this big problem? And I think that's something I, yeah, I think it's very impactful and I wanna focus on but those are two areas left for me to double

Matty A.: down by sounds, sounds like another startup in the in, in the

Dan Zavorotny: works, man.

Yeah, exactly right. That's the thing. As long as you're. I don't know. I sometimes see some startups that like just have another person like their picture or video and it's cool they make ton of money, but do they actually care what they're doing? I get excited on Sundays. People always, know, people always say Sunday scaries, I'm stoked for Sundays because on Monday,

We have 170 people that keep leverage and we get to accomplish more back in the corporate days every time. And I'm like, oh, Sunday work tomorrow. And that's changed. There's a switch. I changed. Yeah. And I think when you have that ability to find something you're passionate [00:32:00] about, it's lucky. I feel lucky every day and that's what I just wanna keep building.

It's, doesn't feel like work, you like I sometimes sit till two in the morning. I'm like, shit, it's two in the morning. I lost track of. That's

Matty A.: great. My partner. That's when you know you're doing something that you love and that you're you're mining in the right vein. Dan, it's been a pleasure connecting with you today, brother.

I know a lot of people are gonna want to check out Nutrisystems, they're gonna want to check out what you guys got going on. They may want to engage or follow with your content or what you're up to. Where's the best place for them to do that?

Dan Zavorotny: Yeah feel free to, a LinkedIn. I'm always happy to help send me any questions you guys have about any topic.

As long as they're, if they're good questions, I'm happy to answer. And. I always mentor people too. Just no ask. Just want to give back to the community. That's awesome,

Matty A.: Dan. Appreciate you coming on the show today. We will have all the links resources in the show notes at millionairemindcast.com on Dan's episode.

Keep crushing it, brother.

Dan Zavorotny: Appreciate it, man.