This guy John Arrow started over 10 companies, one was an agency called Mutual Mobile which grew to 400+ people then sold for $70m.

We go over:

What John thinks of the agency business model in the age of AI.
4 unique campaigns he did to get large B2B clients.
How John is using AI in all his new projects.

After every interview I manually take notes on them, so if you want to read my notes here they are bellow:

(0:00) Intro

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(0:58) Hampton did pod discussing $70m net worth

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(2:16) In college there were VERY FEW people who started businesses, John was one. Out of 200+ people in an entrepreneurship club there were only two people who had businesses.

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(2:34) John lists out all the businesses he had since college.

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(3:30) John made a mega viral Facebook tracking widget called UnFaced, and Facebook banned him 😂

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(4:40) I (Neville) got in trouble for a site called FacebookProfile and got a cease and desist.

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(6:04) John approaches every problem uniquely. He sued a Yahoo exec personally to get an issue resolved quickly and it worked. Even made a business out of it called Recourse which allowed you to make a lawsuit for $99/mo, and it actually got me free hotels for 7+ years.

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(7:00) If you want a mid-level manager to buy something from you, instead of convincing them, get their boss to tell them to buy it.

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(8:50) John filed a lawsuit against Amex for me who was withholding 1,000,000+ points, and their head of Law in New York called me the next day and fixed it. The lawsuit kicked the higher-ups in gear and got it resolved.

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(11:26) John tells the story of his 400 person company Mutual Mobile which got acquired for $70m+. In 2009 the iPhone App Store was released, and that prompted him to start the company.

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(13:28) I watched John grow his agency incredibly fast, versus other agencies that plateaued around a few people.

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(14:45) They bought up all the Google Ads inventory and collected all the leads for every “app development” keyword.

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(15:46) The agency business model. Mutual Mobile was profitable, but barely, as all the money went directly into growth till they hit 400 people. Revenue rose fast during that time. “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.”

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(17:53) As competition was rising for iOS apps and it became a cheap commodity, they fired all their small customers, and just worked exclusively with Fortune 1000 customers.

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(19:08) “Would you ever start an agency again?” A lot of consulting companies days are numbered because of AI. If you run a “solutions” company it’s much better because you’re tied to an outcome not an hourly rate. They are running some tests with an AI-only consultancy. Many agencies will die, but 1% will become huge.

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(22:02) I have two businesses, one is negatively impacted by AI, one is growing because of AI.

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(22:45) Every new model gets so good, all the stuff you need to do like prompting or skills just gets absorbed.

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(24:15) Since ChatGPT in November 2022 came out, each layer of abstraction to use it has become irrelevant. John suspects the next wave will be outcomes, where you just give the AI an outcome and it’ll do it. Coincidentally Google had JUST released something like that called Jitro.

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(27:48) The thing AI can’t do yet is physical world stuff (until robots get good in a few years), and John actually started a company called Borrowed Eyes.

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(28:45) If I had a next generation Tesla Optimus I’d have it take care of my baby and clean the house. It will follow the same arc of Full Self Driving on Tesla’s where it sucked at first, got better and better, and is now fully autonomous.

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(30:15) That sinking feeling that if you work on an AI product now, that the next version of AI will just do it for free. John says the way to get around that is have an “Outcome Mindset” where you sell the business result. He says Perplexity Computer is really like having super powers like this.

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(33:07) It used to be creating a software company was the golden standard, now it’s soooo easily to replicate them. Or you can build stuff and give it away for free.

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(35:14) The guy with a huge superyacht was an exec who helped create Microsoft Word and Excel…now AI can build versions of these in 10 minutes.

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(36:31) There’s an analogy for this AI Boom to the Dot Com Boom. Everyone was correct, but the timeline was wrong. Intel after 26 years of the Dot Com Bust finally surpassed it’s peak valuation. The difference is the velocity of progress. It’s only been 4 years and it’s taken over the world, the internet was slower because it involved hardware.

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(40:30) What’s the AI version of the “iPhone Moment.” Maybe it’s AI mixed with StarLink.

Maybe it’s letting your AI see/hear everything you do. It might be AI glasses.

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(42:07) My hypothesis is the AI “iPhone Moment” is glasses with a small screen, kind of like how Steve Jobs released the original iPhone.

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(45:40) We now have more conversations a day with an AI than real people.

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(46:15) The parallel I draw with AI, is back in the day you used to “get online” but now you’re always online. The next version of AI won’t be “asking the AI” it’ll just know what to do.

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(47:18) Highest ROI Campaigns John has run.

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(47:35) Enterprise customers might spend $10m+ so they bought iPads and put a presentation on it, and sent it to all the decision makers. They spent $20,000+ on iPads.

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(49:20) Instead of just presenting themselves as an agency, they’d be proactive and make a smart app for a mattress company. They spent $50,000 where they build a prototype and Select Comfort hired them off this for a $5m+.

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(50:15) They found a loophole to find execs emails for cheap, and saved $250,000 in those services.

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(50:54) Cold outreach doesn’t work as well unless you up the salience (make it stand out in some way). Cold email outreach is harder because people are flooded with AI.

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(52:12) They would fly customers in for promo videos, but really it would just make them wanna do business again with them. Cost them $2,000 but returned 1,000x for a contract from Greenway Medical for $2,000,000+.

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(53:30) A thing he created called FreedomGPT went mega viral from Reddit posts. Oddly enough ChatGPT started telling it’s customers to go to FreedomGPT if the question was censored!

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(55:59) One of our friends was sued by Impossible foods for his brand, and he just won a case for $3.25m.

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(56:45) There is no replacement for getting on a plane and meeting customers bar none. They would sometimes do conferences, but it would only do well if Mutual Mobile was a speaker at the conference.

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(58:05) He started an investment company, and Anthropic at Series B was their biggest investment so far.

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(1:00:28) John’s read on what will happen with SpaceX and Tesla.

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(1:01:25) Businesses John is looking at are generally outside of pure AI space.

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(1:02:03) I like companies where they went through a hype cycle, went down, and are now climbing again with real world applications. An example is Coinbase or Ethereum that went through big hype cycles. In a world of AI, it needs it’s own financial system that makes more sense than credit cards.

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(1:04:13 ) What about paying for content, I wish there was some crypto where you tip the entire internet of stuff you consumed.

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(1:07:40) Find John Arrow on X: @johnarrow

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(1:08:4) Signup for SwipeFile.com and get our full database of high ROI campaigns, plus spark ideas for your marketing you never would’ve thought of.

• Watch the interview on YouTube
• See this post on the web
• Follow John Arrow on X

Sincerely,

Neville Medhora - SwipeFile / Kopywriting

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