[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined for the second time by one of my best friends. My best friend, but just the coolest guy I think I've ever met in my life. Greg Shepard. How are you 

[00:00:40] Gregory: I am good, and thank you for the kind words.

[00:00:42] Jay: Oh, dude. All right. So I was gonna tell you something before the show. I'm gonna tell you now your book, which we talked about, forever ago. You sent me a copy of it and I felt very, very, very fortunate to kind of get a look at that before everybody else. That book was in my Amazon cart. I. Longer than anything has ever been in my Amazon cart in my entire life, I think it was six to eight months.

Every time I would go to order something, I would go, oh, there's that thing that I'm gonna get in September of 2024. And sure enough, I have it. it's somewhere around here. I should, if I was a good host, I'd have it and hold it up, but I have it in the background of your screen, so we're good to go. An amazing book based off of all your experience with startups and helping people and growing companies and selling stuff. so today, I wanted to kind of come on and have you talk about. your book from the first customer perspective, right? I mean, there's a lot to building, the idea of making a book and then like, how do you, what do you do, right? So there's a lot around that. Just like, how do you start, if you have an idea for something like this, and then how do you make it popular, right?

So we're, and this is probably part of it, right? We're on the PR circuit. You're doing your thing, but I want talk about that as well. But let's kind of rewind a little bit. Why did you write the book, and where did you get the idea to write the book?

[00:01:49] Gregory: I mean, first of all, I did that research project, so I did this giant research project on why, when, and how founders fail. And then I was sitting here with all this data and I was like. I need to get this out there. So I started where it took me four years just because they were thousands of transcripts, 200,000 case studies.

I mean, it was a monster, monster project. But then I finished and I was like, oh, okay. Now I understand why, when, and how they fail, but I don't know how to make 'em successful. So I need to write a book that says this is why they fail and this is how you don't have to. Right. And so that's where the startup lifecycle came from.

The process is actually really fascinating,and a bit stressful. but I, but that's why I wrote the book in the first place was because I wanted to make sure that all of this data that I had acquired was in the hands of people that it could help. That was my main motivation.

[00:02:41] Jay: Why did you do that research project?

[00:02:44] Gregory: I was, at the time, I was working with congressional candidates as a chairman, and I was trying to move money from Congress down to startups. And the problem is that, you know, you have a super high failure rate. So the government's sitting there going, well, that's not a good investment. We'll do some, but we're not gonna do any more because of the risk.

So I said, well, what if I find out why, when and how they fail? And then I can show you data that may alter your decision, right? So. I did that. Nothing happened. 'cause politics is just ridiculous. So nothing happened with it. So I was like, okay, instead of starting from the top down, I'm gonna start from the bottom up.

And so I started with the book, and then I created the startup science, platform, you know, to back up all the phs that I didn't get in the book.

[00:03:29] Jay: Yes. well, I mean, you're the startup guy, right? I mean, you've got the platform to kind of help people just navigate the entire process of a startup, which is fantastic. Which I think is that still kind of your main gig? Is the startup science? Is that kind of your baby still?

[00:03:45] Gregory: Yeah, that's my baby. And you know, we launched it like four months ago, or no, now it would be six months ago. We have 10,000 founders, like 200 programs, a hundred and. 137,000 mentors and 215,000 investors. so it's really screaming along, aided by the book. I have to say. There's QRR codes in the book that you can scan and it takes you to the content that I couldn't include in the book.

I mean, that's where it all came from, right? I was like. I wrote 5,800 pages, you can only have a 250 page book. So I was like, I had all thousands of pages and I was like, I don't wanna just like not, I wanna make sure this gets in the, in front of the founders so I can help 'em. So I was like, I gotta create a platform so I could put all this in it.

And then it created, it turned into this big thing. I mean, it's kind of like my mo right.

[00:04:33] Jay: yes. It's a snow. you're the human snowball, right? Everything just snowballs together into greatness with you. I love it. now I do have a, an interesting. I'm like,saturated oversaturated with AI conversations right now. So this is

certainly not gonna be a, not gonna be a theme of this podcast, but I'm curious from a guy who's sitting down to write a book, how do you not use AI Too much.

[00:04:56] Gregory: Well, you. So here's the problem with ai, right? Is that all it's doing is regurgitating what it finds on the internet. And a lot of the stuff on the internet is crap. So you know, crap produces crap, right? So you're out there and you're like, tell me about this. And that's what they call the hallucinations, right?

So you get a lot of this data and it'll source the data, but it sources the data to the first contact. So let's say somebody wrote an article and they said in there something. That something actually was sourced by another article that was sourced by another article that was sourced by, and the first guy didn't know what he was talking about.

And then it just passes through. And this is the nature of virality and the nature of, you know, we're in the age of producing content and everybody's trying to produce content, so we're using everything we can. Because you're just trying to get eyeballs to look at your content. So for me, not using ai, I mean you can use AI to augment your writing.

So let's say that, you know, you find a bunch of data and you write a few pages, and then you're like, Hey, Gemini are chat GTP, can you make this sound a little better? Right. That's a good use of ai, right? Because. That's what an editor does, and AI is a really good editor. but to produce the content itself, I think it's a fundamental mistake because you're just regurgitating stuff that they could just go and type in anyway.

Right. So it's like, what? It's, I'm not, I wouldn't feel like I was giving people value if I did that.

[00:06:26] Jay: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And did, so, did you use AI as an editor while you were going to kind of keep the flow moving and make

sure everything was good? Yeah.

[00:06:34] Gregory: Yeah. And I'm writing another book right now. I'm writing two at the same time 'cause I get bored and I,

yeah.

[00:06:40] Jay: are.

[00:06:41] Gregory: But what I did is I'm using it more now as an editor than I did before. I used more human editors before.

But there's a process, you have to get it to a certain point before you can get it in front of an editor.

and I write like a child, so you know, like I'm terrible. Like I think I read and write at like a fourth grade level. Like, you know, I'm like a chimpanzee. So when I write this stuff out, I go into chapter GP and I'm like, make this sound like I'm not an idiot. And then it fancies it all up and then you can get to the point where you can send it to an editor.

[00:07:14] Jay: Right. No, 

[00:07:14] Gregory: editors do more than, yeah. And editors do more than just, you know, edit. Right. They rewrite, they reorganize. You know, there's a lot more going on there than just looking at the font and the text and the language, et cetera.

[00:07:30] Jay: I feel like I need to write your biography or like, I need to have like a show that's like the biography of Greg Shepard, like a full hour of just like, and so then let me write that book for you. Okay. I know you got enough

[00:07:41] Gregory: going on. I'll do that one for you. I am being interviewed by Netflix for a documentary.

[00:07:46] Jay: I'm just gonna say, of course you are about everything that you say today, because of course of a fucking course you are right. you're, you're one of the rare people who's done just about everything and continues to find new stuff to do that people go, oh, of course that's what he's doing because, he's just a maniac and just does all these incredible things. so. You sit down, you come up with this idea, you're like, I have all this great data. I'm gonna write a book. It's gonna be around startups. You kind of get it together. You start to, you know, maybe get some momentum and you build a book and you make a, but then what, like, what the hell do you do with a book that's just like on your laptop?

Like, where do you, what do you do?

[00:08:21] Gregory: Yeah, so I'll start with this. I, it took me about a year to figure out the algorithm that are, that, that. It's how books are engineered. Like basically there's an architecture to a book and it took me a long time and I'll just tell everybody right now because I'm trying to help people. But first you have parts so you can have one to, to four parts.

Right inside the parts you have chapters. Inside the chapters, you have sec sections, so that's how it breaks down. You start with a section, which is basically like a blog post, and then the sections add up into a chapter and the chapters add up into parts, and then you go back over and you put in quotes, I call 'em quotes and jokes.

So you go back over the content, you put in good quotes that illustrate what it is you're trying to say in a very impactful way, and it could take. It took me months to find the quotes, right? Because I would, I was looking at thousands and do I have books? I have a stack of books over here with quotes in it.

I mean, it's like crazy that I have this book. I have this book, you know, I have like, there's a whole. Bunch of them over here. And those books are what I use to go through. Not to mention going online, you know, and finding quotes there. And then jokes are another thing, right? So I would go online and I would say, I need a dad joke on this, or whatever, right?

And then I would start to find those. And then there's stories. So stories are broken out into two segments. One, one type of a story is a personal story, and another type of a story was a third party story, right? So one is, I have this happen, or I did this, or whatever. And the other one is, I saw this happen, I witnessed this happen, or I learned about this happening to somebody.

Right? And then you weave this into the tapestry of the book. And then you have something that's what they call readable, right? Something that's somewhat entertaining because I, you know, you read these business books and I don't know about you. I listen to most of my books, and when I'm listening to them, I'm like sitting there and I'm like, falling asleep.

And I'm like, this is like Jesus. I'm like down in coffee to try to stay awake, right?

So I wanted to do something that was more exciting and more captivating. And every time you turn a page, you're like, what? You gotta be kidding me, right? So that's what I focused on, and that's like the structure of building a book and the format, which I think is helpful.

So now you have a book, right? So now you're sitting there and you're like, okay, I have a book, and now you have to find a publisher. So you can go and try to contact publishers yourself, or you can get an agent if an agent will pick you up. So I got, I was able to get an agent. The agent brought me to five publishers.

So they interviewed me, I interviewed them, and then I chose the publisher I chose because I could be a big fish in a small pond. If you go with, and you know, they're all owned by each other anyway. Right? It's like. There's five big ones and every, all the little ones are owned by the big ones.

And it's kind of like how it all works.

and so I chose one of the smaller ones because I was like, I didn't just want to be a number. I wanted to be like a special. a special author with them. and so then what happens is you take your rough draft. It's not your manuscript, it's your rough draft and you send it to them and then they read it and they come back and they start making offers to you.

Right? So it's like, you know, we'll give you this much for your book and this much in royalty or. We'll give you this much in royalty and nothing for your book, or we'll give you this much for your book and no royalty. Right. So it depends on, you know, what you choose to go with. I chose to go with sort of a hybrid.

I took less on the book and then some high and some royalty. 'cause if there's one thing I know I can depend on, it's myself, right? So I was like, if the publisher doesn't sell the books, I will right. So, so I'm like, I'm not going to, you know, it's if you're painting your life, you don't want to give the paintbrush to somebody else, you know?

So,

[00:12:23] Jay: I love that.

[00:12:24] Gregory: so I'm like, I took control of this stuff. And so that's the way I went about it. And then you start the real process.

[00:12:32] Jay: Right? Yes. And then it becomes, your life, right? I mean, you said this is your, you're now the startup lifecycle guy and people wave you down the street. They go, there's the guy, maybe not yet, but they will eventually. so I mean,

[00:12:45] Gregory: You're so funny, man. You.

[00:12:46] Jay: Well. I just, well, thank you. I, if I can hit on like 20% of what I try to make funny, then I consider my day a success. I just realized where my book was, like your cop, my copy of your book, my 20-year-old son has, who is trying to start his own business. So that is where that book is. I just remembered and I texted you that when you, when I, when you sent, when I got the book, I said actually I hand it to my son, after I read it.

And so he's had that for a few months. That's where that book is. I didn't lose it. It's actually in better hands than mine right now.

[00:13:16] Gregory: All right. All.

[00:13:17] Jay: we'll see. We'll see if he's the next mogul. Thanks to you. so you get this thing together, you publish it, you make the deal, and then like you said, then the real work kind of begins, right?

So we talked about. I would consider that, you know, kind of a first customer kind of experience, right? Like you, you've never done this before. You gotta find an agent, you gotta find a publisher, you gotta negotiate deals, you gotta do all the same stuff you have to kind of do when you're finding a customer. but then we talked to before the show, like, there's certainly the other side of this, which is like the people who are buying your book, those are your real customers, right? The ones that are gonna drive those royalties, they're gonna drive the recognition of the book, they're gonna drive the sales on Amazon, all that different stuff. What did, like, obviously the publisher has some, you know, onus on them to push the book and do whatever, but like, what are you, what have you been tasked with as the person who like built it, sold it, these publishers to, to do their thing? And then like, then what happens? Are you just you gotta figure it out as your agent kind of saying like, Hey, these are the things that you need to go do, that every other author does that is successful.

Like, what's the game plan for success for somebody after they've gotten their books on the shelf?

[00:14:17] Gregory: Yeah, I mean, the publisher does some of the stuff for you, but you know, if I'm honest, it's like they're, they have a process. They do and they just kind of goes through it. But I put together a full on go to market strategy for the book as if it was a startup.

so it includes about 700 different, specific.

tactical things that I do. So this is everything from like book clubs to paid search, to optimizing in Amazon and all the other platforms. blog posts, like guest blog posts, you know, YouTube shows, podcasts, I mean, it goes on and on, right? I mean, this is huge. Huge thing. so I started executing on those things myself.

So I just hired a full-time person to execute on selling the book as if it's his own business. And the crazy thing is that you start to get so busy with people that just wanna talk to you, that it becomes really difficult to judge. Have time for all the people, right? Because I don't just want to talk to people that, are willing to pay me money for a conversation or whatever.

I wanna try to help, I really do. So you're sorting through, you know, thousands of LinkedIn messages and emails and all this stuff, all, all over the place to try to suss out, like. You know, who can I actually help, versus who's willing to pay me to have a conversation so that I can take the high road, you know, and do the right thing, you know?

[00:15:44] Jay: Well, I'll give you, the, I'll let that be the excuse for why it takes you so long to text me back. But, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I'm very high maintenance as a friend, so, you know, I, you know, I expect some text responses, but a guy who just launched a book and has thousands of people messaging him, I think I'll give a little bit of pass. so I mean, you're welcome. so I mean. Hinted at this before the show too, is it never ends. Right. So, I mean, I know you've got these other books going on. You've got like, when do you kind of, like, when does the plan shift a little bit to like, okay, now it's there on the shelf. I've done my, you know, tactical things and I've treated it like its own business and I've done whatever like. When is it time to move on, quote unquote, from that book onto the next experience, the next book, the next project, the next, like how long do you give it to, to spend all this time that you're spending? Like what do you, what are your guardrails for that? Do you have a set time where you're like, next year I'm gonna move

on or this?

How's that work?

[00:16:45] Gregory: for me it's two years.

[00:16:47] Jay: Okay.

[00:16:48] Gregory: For me, it's like, you know, I think two years is enough time for the publisher. It's five years, but for me it's like two years because I really, I'm trying to produce a book a year. So, you know, there's seven stages in the lifecycle and I wanna write one book for each stage plus the lifecycle book that I already wrote, right?

So that's eight books. So that's eight years if I do one every year. So it's, But it's, it gets easier once you've done it and you understand the algorithm and you you know how your neuroplasticity in your brain just kind of adapts to something and you're like, oh, I know what to do, and you kind of go through it.

Like when you do a bunch of startups, you just kind of know what to do. so they're getting faster. Maybe I can do one every six months. In a couple of years. I.

[00:17:36] Jay: well, I mean, you know, look, I have obviously thought of writing books and I have, you know, 200 plus episodes of this show out there where I've learned, I. Lots of incredible things from lots of incredible founders, including you along the way. if somebody was, and I'm sure you get this all the time, but like, step one's writing a book? Like what's like a real, like, like to really make it beyond just like being notes on your notes app on your iPhone. Like how do you take it. To like a real place, like is there a plan that somebody should put together? Is there some sort of like book they should read about writing books? Is there some resources that, you know?

Like what do you do? Like if you just, if you think you wanna write a book, but you don't have anything beyond that, what do you do?

[00:18:19] Gregory: What I do, what I start out with is I start out with a narrative, right? So I say, what do I, what is the top level thing I wanna write about? So, and it'll change. Like when I started, it was all about trying to explain to people why founders fail. You know, what are the reasons and when do they fail and what are the specific, like how, when, and why, right?

After I kind of started to go through that path, I started to realize this isn't helpful. They need to understand how, not only why these things happen and when they happen, but how not to make 'em happen, right? how to avoid 'em from happening,in the first place. And so the book changed. So at the beginning I started with a narrative like I wanna explain to founders in an organized way, why win and how they fail.

It changed to why, when, and how they fail, but how they cannot fail. And that creates like the narrative and I call it a narrative spine. And each vertebrae is a topic. So narrative is why do they fail? And then each vertebrae is a topic. And then the format that I gave you previously, that's the format underneath one of those topics.

And then you put the whole thing together and you have a book.

[00:19:27] Jay: It's that easy.

[00:19:30] Gregory: Yeah, I mean, logically it's that easy, but the, you know, obviously there's a lot of work to, it took 

[00:19:36] Jay: a lot of work. it's, I mean, as far as sales go, like how does any of that work? Like, is there just some big master dashboards you wake up to and you're, you know, in your boxers every day and you're drinking your coffee, like looking at your big dashboard of all your sales? Like, is everything like nice and packaged like that when it comes to selling books?

Or is it like, oh my God, I've got 50 different places that's being sold. Like, do you have any idea of just like general numbers and as it, you know, can, you know, put in one

place 

[00:20:07] Gregory: I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, so what you're, basically, the objective is to sell 10,000 books in a year. That's basically what you want to get to. so I. You know the, a lot, the majority of what gets you a best seller or gets you the big sales have to do a two things. I mean, Amazon's 90%,

but then you have, you know, Amazon reviews.

You know, the more reviews you get, the more Amazon promotes you. So you have to get the reviews and then you have, optimizing Amazon. It's just like a search engine. It's exactly like a search engine. So you have to do paid and organic search and you know, you have to do like books, so you have to go out and, you know, I did a huge amount of research and found like 500 books that if people read this book, they would also like mine.

And then you have to put those into the engine. So there's a tremendous amount of work, but after you get everything set up, yeah, you're pretty much just logging into the. The author, dashboard that Amazon and, Barnes and Noble and all these guys have, and you're just sort of looking at how many books you sold.

in the beginning I did that like every day. And now I do that like once a month, you know? 'cause you have to log into like, you know, 15 different places to get your book sales.

[00:21:20] Jay: Yeah, I was wondering if there's any like central dashboard for. All those places, but I guess not.

[00:21:25] Gregory: No, you gotta log. I mean, you can get it from the publisher, but you know, it takes, you know, you learn that the publisher's really good for some things and some things you just, they're too slow. I mean,

for them, maybe for them it might be fast, but if you're in a startup world, everything is slow.

[00:21:45] Jay: Right.

[00:21:45] Gregory: You know?

You're like,now.

[00:21:49] Jay: well, so you had a couple ideas for your next books. Is it just you're going in order from

[00:21:55] Gregory: Yeah, because what I realized with people that were reading the life cycles, they were like, okay, well there's only one chapter on the vision stage, but the, that could be a whole book by itself. Because you have to think of not just what is the stage and what happens during the stage, but how do I execute that stage?

Like how do I raise money?

[00:22:14] Jay: right.

[00:22:15] Gregory: Stage and who do I raise money from and what does my pitch deck need to look like and how do I even get ahold of these people and what do I say when I get 'em on the phone, and how much should I be raising and what should my valuation be and all this stuff, right? There's so much that you have to put into each chapter that describes each phase of the lifecycle, that each one deserves its own book.

In order for me to feel like I'm doing justice to these. To these, you know, I call 'em, startup entrepreneurs. They're like the Navy Seals of business. You know,

[00:22:47] Jay: I

[00:22:47] Gregory: not a lot of them make it, but if they make it, they are badass.

[00:22:50] Jay: Right. Yeah. They're the ones taking down Bin Laden for sure.

Yeah.

they're badass. Well, let's end it there, man. This is great. I think everybody should check out the book. I think everybody who doesn't know you should check you out. I send everybody I know that could be remotely interested in anything you're doing your way just because of obviously illustrious background. I love talking to you. I love the thought. Of just trying to help people and I think that's a very overused. Phrase these days, because a lot of people don't mean it, but I know that you mean it. So like I'm okay with you using it. I think you are genuinely out there to try to kind of transfer this knowledge that you've used to be very successful, to the next wave of entrepreneurs, man.

And it's a noble, you know, very real, thing you're adding to the startup community. So thank you for your hard work and your four years plus. And I'm sure, you know, maybe we'll connect after the eight years is up and we can have a big review on all. All of your books together, in the big series. but yeah, man, I'm very proud of you as I know it's a lot of work and, I'm very lucky to consider you a friend and hope that you had the best of luck with these sales.

I'll continue to send it to everybody and everybody I know. and, you know, we'll point people to the book from this episode. But other than that, man, let's just stay in touch and, you know, it's a pleasure.

[00:23:59] Gregory: Thank you. It's my honor and I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much and thank so much for all these, you shower all these kind compliments and it's just,ah, I don't even know what to do, but I really appreciate it.

[00:24:13] Jay: Well, 

all of them, you know, I don't wanna flatter you, but I mean, all of it and somebody's gotta say it, right? So, Greg, you are fantastic. If people wanna find you or the book, how do they do that?

[00:24:23] Gregory: My website is gregoryshepard.com. If you're a founder and you click on Founders, you can get the access to the platform. It's free. So there's investors in there, there's grants in there. I mean, there's so much like, check it out. the book is in Amazon. It's called The Startup Lifecycle. it's also an audible, and all the, what's I mean, it's everywhere.

So it's called the Startup Lifecycle.

[00:24:45] Jay: Beautiful. Well, we'll send people your way, brother. All right, man. Be good and we'll catch up again soon. All right, Greg.

[00:24:49] Gregory: Thank you.

[00:24:50] Jay: Thanks buddy. Talk to you. See ya. 

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