Mani Vaya joins Charles Max Wood to talk about how developers can add the enterepreneur hat to the others they wear by starting a side gig. They discuss various ideas around entrepreneurship, the books they got them from, and how they've applied them in their own businesses.

 Follow JavaScript Jabber on Twitter > @JSJabbber

Special Guest: Mani Vaya.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome to the show this week. I'm doing a little bit different thing with my friend Manny Vaya. We're going to be talking about entrepreneurship and Manny's been on the show before. We were talking about kind of the stuff going on out there in the world these days. And you know, some people are worried about stability. Some people just want to have something else going on. Some people want to get out of their jobs and go full-time. And so,Um, and I have people ask me, you know, how, how do you get out and run a business? How do you get out and go freelance? How do you get out and, you know, whatever. So yeah, so I was like, well, Manny, you've read a zillion books on this. So, and you're running a business and I'm running a business. We talk about this stuff a lot. So I figured what the heck, right? 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. 

 

When it comes to test maintenance, the biggest complaint that teams have are flaky tests. Tyco is a Node.js library built to test modern web applications. It creates highly readable and maintainable JavaScript tests. It's simple API, smart selectors and implicit weights all work together toward a single goal, fixing the underlying problem behind flaky tests to make browser automation reliable. Tyco is open source and free to use. Head to tyco.dev and get started. That's T-A-I-K-O.dev. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Mani, do you want to just remind who you are real quick, because you've been on JavaScript before. 

MANI_VAYA: I've been on JavaScript, Java a couple of times. I've been on a bunch of your podcasts a few times now. And I think I've been on React and RubyRogs and all of those. So just to give, just to think through this with you, Chuck, both of us are programmers. I used to be a programmer in my past life. You used to be a programmer in your past life. I was more of a computer engineer, more hardcore, low layer programming, like kind of C and all those things. I used to design mobile phones. I used to design, literally write software for mobile phones or the modems that go into mobile phones. I used to write software for DVD players. So very close to metal kind of programming is what I used to do. And I left all of that to start a book summary business, which has got nothing to do with programming. And when I think of the situation that we're in today, the crisis that we're in today in the world. I think of how, you know, we're all, we are all reacting to the challenges of the world as they are, but one thing is common. Everyone wants safety. Everyone wants stability for themselves and for their families. And one of the reasons why I started my business back in 2015, where we summarize the knowledge from the world's best business books and personal development books, most of you guys know it's called 2000 Books. The reason why I started it was because I wanted freedom. I wanted to be able to work from anywhere in the world from any location in the world at whatever time I want in the world. And today I feel like I'm blessed to be able to literally, if I wanted, I could just hunker down in my home for the next three months, not even step out for one day and just make this business, like just continue to run this business as if nothing, like I wouldn't need to be in front of a single soul to make this business happen. Or like last year, I spent three months traveling around in Bali and Thailand and China and India and Mexico and all of those places and running my business from all parts of the world. So that freedom that I have today is a result of me starting a business. If I was still in my corporate computer engineering job that I had, where I was managing billion dollar cell phone projects, I would have never had the freedom. I would never have had the security either because they can take away my job anytime. And I've been through that. I've literally been laid off three different times in my career. So I know how hard it is to go through a layoff and how hard it is to go find another job. And that was part of the reason why I said, I don't want to keep going through this. I want to have my own thing. I want to build a business. And I'm, as an engineer, as a programmer, I think we're very smart people and we can build. Today, if you look at it, all the businesses, all the great businesses that are being built today, they're all built by programmers. They're all built by, you know, on the backs of technology. And so as a- As programmers, we have probably the greatest opportunity in front of us today to build a great business, whether you want to build a side hustle, which makes you like thousand, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand dollars a month, or you want to build a billion dollar business. Whereas a programmer, you have all of those options available to you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, it's funny you're talking about sort of the freedom that you get from not having that full-time job. Because yeah, I mean, you're like, I got laid off three times. I personally got laid off twice. Um, and it's funny because I found that, uh, the jobs that I wanted to keep were the ones that laid me off and the jobs that I hated, hated, I mean that were, okay. So they were awful. Just, just stay in there. Right. I try not to swear on these shows and I came close, but they were terrible places to be at. And those were the ones that, uh, you know, when I went in my boss and said, I'm out of here, they, tried begged, pleaded, threatened everything to try and get me to stay. Uh, one of my, one of my bosses, I called him up in the morning and I was like, dude, I need to talk to you. And I'd rather do it in person. And he's like, okay, I'm on my way into the office. And I called him again a couple hours later and he said, well, let me finish up my round of golf. And then I called him a couple hours later and he's like, well, I'm just finishing lunch. What do you want? And I said, dude, I am quitting today is my last day. And I was in charge of the big project for the company, right? And so, so then he came in and that tells you what kind of boss he was, right? He was only hands on when it was painful. 

MANI_VAYA: It's amazing. Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: He chewed me out for two hours cause I was trying to quit. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. It's amazing how, um, you know, the idea of freedom that we have as you and I have, and maybe a lot of our other friends who have businesses, it's completely separate from what is possible for an employee today in today's day and world. And more and more, like almost every company saying, Hey, you need to work from home. But also the realization that businesses are going down, Dow is falling, all of those things like the stock indices are falling. So people are, people are beginning to see the pinch. Even if, even if people are not seeing it right away, as the money starts to freeze up in the market, we're going to run into a lot of challenges. I don't want to be a fear monger. I mean, you and I were talking just today, we were talking on our mastermind group about how one of the great books of all time, good to great that you and I both have read. One of the great principles in that book. It's a great, it's one of the greatest entrepreneurship books in my opinion. But one of the principles in that is the Stockdale paradox, the idea of that. And I don't want to go into the full story of Jim's, maybe I should. So Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war. He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. And Vietnam were the, like he was a, a US Navy fighter pilot who, uh, whose plane was shot down, he crash landed into Vietnam and those prisons of Vietnam were like torture chambers, literally torture chambers. Very few prisoners of war would make out of them. And what Stockdale found was that there were three kinds of prisoners and only one kind of prisoners actually survived. So the three kinds of prisoners were the ones who were very pessimistic. They were thinking, oh my God, this is the worst situation I could be in. This torture is horrible. I can't survive. Well, guess what? They did not survive. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All those people are on Twitter. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, exactly. All those fear mongers or people who are like, oh, the hell is falling and everything and we may not survive. That's the pessimist. The other side is the optimist, the rose colored glasses. There are other side of the people on Twitter who are saying, oh, this is not a big deal. Nothing's gonna happen. I'm still going around. I'm still gonna do everything. I'm not buying anything. I'm not gonna do anything. Well, same what Stockdale found out was that people who had the, the, literally the prisoners of war who had rose colored optimistic glasses on, they didn't survive either because they were always thinking, Oh, I will be released by Christmas or I'll be released by new year, or I'll be released by Easter or Thanksgiving or Christmas. And they just died of hope. Right. So they didn't survive either. The third class of prisoners, the ones who survived were the ones who had what's called optimism that I will survive. They had the faith, the blind faith that I will get through this no matter what. But on the other hand, they were realistic. They were able to see the situation as it was that these tortured timbers are painful. They are horrible. This is hard. Life is hard. I accept that it's hard. I accept that it's going to be hard, but I will still survive. And that is what we need as entrepreneurs. That's one of the biggest lessons we can take away as entrepreneurs. And that's in the book, Good to Great. You and I both love that book, but there's such a fundamental lesson for today's life. Don't be pessimistic. Don't be optimistic. You've got to live in the zone of stock deal paradox where you know, you will survive, you have the extreme faith that you will survive. It's not just blind optimism, but also, you know, it's going to be hard. That means you're going to have to bring your very best every single day. I'm literally planning. Like I'm thinking what happens if for a year business gets really like really, really, really. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: How much toilet paper do you have, Mani? 

MANI_VAYA: Only two boxes. Oh, okay. Just two. Only two. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's all he could fit into his car walking out of Costco. 

MANI_VAYA: So think about like what Stockdale Paradox is teaching. It's a lesson for life, but it's also a lesson for any entrepreneur, any business owner, that we have to go through these hard times and we have to understand how to handle these hard times. So when you are starting your side hustle, when you're starting your business, you will find these situations.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I've been through a little bit of this lately and you know, you go listen to entrepreneur programmers and you can hear about some of it. But ultimately I kind of started out with the optimism, right? But it wasn't optimism like, Oh, well eventually it'll all, you know, be okay. My, my version of it was, well, I'm a good guy and I haven't done anything wrong. So it should just work out right. And yeah, I kind of had to get beat into realism. And it's not to say that I don't have some optimistic tendencies here, but I've also come to the realization that it really depends on what I put into it, right? It's, it's the work that I'm going to do in order to get there. And I think that's where a lot of people really fall apart when they're trying to make their entrepreneurial start or continue their entrepreneurial journey is they look at it and they either go, there is no way or they look at it and they go, oh, well, you know, that there's tons of money out there for entrepreneurs. So if I go out there, it'll just work. And what they really need to understand is is that the whole thing hinges on how much work they're willing to put into it. 

MANI_VAYA: Oh yeah, man. This is so crucial what you just said there. There's a great book called Millenia Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, great book. 

MANI_VAYA: Great book. And he talks about the same idea. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It's a short one too. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, and most people who live in this mindset. So there's, he talks about the two or three different lanes, but let me just kind of give the perspective of the regular programmer. The regular programmer is thinking, Hey, I have a job. I'm going to go to my nine-to-five. I'm going to make money. I'm going to save it away. I'm going to put it into stock market. I'm going to invest it somewhere and hope that by the age of 65, I will have enough money to survive. Well, and then something like this black swan event happens. And suddenly you're panicking. Suddenly you find yourself in really dire situations. So that is the slow lane to wealth as as this guy talks about, as MJT Marco talks about. But the fast lane to wealth is understanding that you will not build great wealth through a job. The only way to build great wealth is through a business. You have to build a business in order to build wealth and in order to build wealth fast. Most people, and I remember this back when I was in the engineering career, the biggest talk for most people was how their stocks were doing most of the times because they were hoping to hit the lottery mindset. They had the lottery mindset that hoping that one of these, if they pick the Teslas or the apples at the right time or the Amazon's at the right time, and suddenly that will blow up 10, 20 X and suddenly they'll be rich and hope that the hope mindset and the lottery mindset that somehow they'll make all this money and they'll retire and never have to work again. But the realistic mindset is the process mindset as in I will do the work. I will put in the work. I will build a business and that will turn out to bring me great wealth. That is such an important distinction. You have to not have the lottery mindset in life, which is the worker class mindset, hoping that somehow you will keep working and somehow your stocks will take off or your, uh, your retirement plans will take off. That's the lottery mindset. No, no, no. You have to have the creator mindset, the, the, the mindset of process as in I will do the work. I will build a business because that's the only way to build great wealth. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I want to throw two more at you. Um, one, just talking about. Building Wealth by Building a Business. It's, what's his name? I have the book sitting on my desk, so I'm just gonna, Robert Kiyosaki, the cashflow quadrant. He talks about this, right? Where there are different places where you can wind up in your career and the one that builds the most wealth, the most reliably is running your own business. And then you're talking about getting in and doing the work, and that reminds me of another book. And this one, this is one that you told me to read. And I think I listened to it on Audible and then went and actually bought the book and read it because I'm going, this stuff is gold and that's ready fire aim. 

MANI_VAYA: Oh yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: what, what it talks about is, yeah, you have to go out and you have to find a customer and then you go and you do the work and you find another customer and then you go find another customer and then you go find another one and another one and another one. And eventually then you start building a process for finding customers, right? And you get better at it and better at it and better at it. And that's, that's the way that you grow. And I think people have this idea in their head that if I build it, people are going to show up and they're going to beg for it. And the reality is, is it just doesn't work that way. And the people that you see that seem to have that happen, because I have a few friends where they're like, well, so-and-so, they built their business and then they just had hundreds of, of customers. Well, you have to realize that those people had an audience of thousands of people. And so when it looked like an overnight success,they had already found their customers and then they built a product that those customers wanted. And so finding that customer over and over and over again, they had done that without actually really realizing that they had. 

 

Early in my career, I figured out which jobs were worth working at and which ones weren't, mostly by trial and error. I created a system that I use to find jobs and later contracts as a freelancer. If you're looking for a job or trying to figure out where you should go next, then check out my book, The Max Coder's Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job. The book walks you through figuring out what you want, vetting companies that meet your criteria, meeting that company's employees and getting them to recommend you for a job. Don't settle for whoever is listed their job on the job board. Go out and proactively find the job you'll love. Buy the book at devchat.tv slash job book. That's devchat.tv slash job book. 

 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. I mean, think about, so to the, to the, you know, for those of those of you who are listening, who are trying to build a side hustle. There's so many different ways you can build a site as a programmer. Like I could not even count, but let's count. Let's count. Let's take a look at your business. Let's take a look at my business and let's take a look at some of our friends, all the things they're doing and what programmers have really built today. Okay. So you have a podcast network, right? You make some money. Yours is content centric business. You make most of your money from sponsorships and affiliate marketing. Mine is a book summary business. I have a YouTube channel, I have a podcast, and I have a blog where we get all the traffic from all of these different places. We sell book summary. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: But yours is product sales. 

MANI_VAYA: We sell product and we sell coaching, where as in I coach people on how to build their online businesses, right? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So, do you have a subscription to that? 

MANI_VAYA: I have a subscription as well for that, which is an ongoing accelerator to help people through their phases of the different business, which is more of an ongoing monthly coaching, which is very affordable for most people. But,think about all of the different things we've just talked about. And that's just a starting point, right? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: A lot of people are thinking about SAS, especially in, right. 

MANI_VAYA: There's, there's SAS products you can build web apps, mobile apps. You can start your own side gig as an agency, right? Doing development work for some other, someone else for like six or seven years. Our mutual friend, John Sonmez, that's how he cut his teeth. Like he literally started to do side hustles where he was like a freelancer and he was making $300 an hour by being able to market himself by building a blog, right? Just by building a blog, he became so successful. He was charging $300 an hour. Not only that, he also made millions of dollars on selling courses on Pluralsight. Programming courses on Pluralsight. So the prob, like the outcomes that are possible are endless, especially as a programmer today, because you can build something, you can build a technology, you can teach a technology or you can literally bank your expertise. You can do the work, you can build an agency, you can build a blog, you can build a podcast channel, you can build a podcast, you can build a YouTube channel. You can create courses on Udemy. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You brought up Udemy and Pluralsight, but Wes Boss sells his own courses on his own website. Scott Talinsky, same thing, level up tuts. You've got Kent C. Dodds does workshops. Ryan Florence does workshops on React. I mean, there are all kinds of opportunities out there, right? 

MANI_VAYA: Online conferences, in-person conferences, you are, literally, if you look at your credit card bill, anyone who's listening or watching, you're probably spending money on all of these things anyways. You're probably spending money on certain SaaS products that you could have built yourself. You're probably spending money on learning about specific technologies, that you are an expert at some other technology and you could be selling that expertise to the world. Why are you not doing that? Especially in today's world where I cannot trust. I, I, I think as an employee, one of the biggest reasons why I left my job was because I couldn't trust my, um, my employers anymore. I'd been laid off three different times. I just didn't believe they had my best interests at heart anymore. I knew I had to stand for myself. I had to build my own thing. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think, I came to the same conclusion, right? Because it was like, Oh, these people want to keep me. And if I have to stay here another day, I'm going to put a hole in the wall. And the other ones, well, I love being here. I love all the people I'm working with. They've promised both, both places that laid me off. We never ever, ever lay anybody. Yeah. Right. Never lay anybody out. 

MANI_VAYA: Yep. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So they lied to me. So yeah, same, same deal. 

MANI_VAYA: Right. Employees are the most vulnerable in this environment because you have no control. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But in a lot of cases, depending on where they're at, they do have the option to go to another employee's situation. 

MANI_VAYA: Right, and that's the most control you have. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yes. 

MANI_VAYA: But as a business owner, you become, you're ultimately, you're a sovereign person now, you own your destiny. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yes. 

MANI_VAYA: And the thing is, like what we're talking about is building a side hustle. Like literally, for me, the book that changed it all was the four hour work week. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, interesting. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, I used to be, you know, I used to work 16 hour days until I got the book, the four hour work week as a gift and the title was very interesting to me. So I was like, what? Four hour work week? What does it mean? So I started reading and I could not stop reading. I was like, this is fascinating. And that truly spoke to me because of my situation, because I had been laid off a few times and I could already see that I wanted to go and start a business. But I was also concerned about starting a tech startup because I knew that if I started a tech startup, I would be beholden to other, you know, investors and all this stuff and my movement would still be very limited. My parents live in India. I want to be able to go see them whenever I want. So this kind of business really appealed to me, like building a blog or YouTube channel or a website, like building content first business and then literally using that to build a following and sell courses, sell all sorts of products and services. For our work week for me was seminal to really believe that it was actually possible to have a business, have an online business, which I could run from anywhere in the world, literally made that dream a reality last year, spending three months traveling while running the business. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I mean, I have five kids. So, you know, when they're in school, it's a little hard to move around, but that's a constraint not from my business, right? It's from life. But yeah, I wanna go travel. I wanna go see places. I think last year, So last year I got silver medallion status on Delta because I'd gone to so many conferences, a lot of which had actually paid me to come. Um, you know, and so that's, that's always good. Of course, um, in our current situation, nobody's paying me to show up. I had, I had one company that was not on the fence and yeah, and they, they emailed me and said, yeah, we're not going to book your travel because we're moving the conference to September. But I mean, you kind of get the idea, right? And so, yeah, to me that was a lot of freedom being able to interact with the people I want, being able to meet the people that I like, because honestly, most people, I send them an email and say, I'd like to meet you, do you wanna come on the podcast? And I get to meet the people I want, right? And so I have that flexibility. In the summer, if we wanna take off and go on a vacation, we can, and if something breaks, because that happens too, I'm running technology, I whip out my phone, I log into the server and I fix it while we're waiting in line at Disneyland. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And that is the, that is the great advantage we have today with our online business. One of the books you were talking about was the ReadyFire AM book, right? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I need to read that one again. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. Phase one of that book, he talks about zero to $1 million, which is all about selling, selling and selling more. But like only recently, one of the members of my business accelerator, he reached out to me saying, Hey, I want to sell, sell, sell more what do I do right now? Like, how do I sell more? And I asked him like, where, what stage of business are you in? He's like, Oh, I'm just developing this mobile app and I need to start selling it. I'm like, have you gotten product market fit yet? He's like, well, what is that? I'm like, well, you need to go read Lean Startup before you jump into ready fire. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, that is a, that is a classic book too. And it's really great not just from the standpoint, because a lot of the books that are out there, um, they kind of give you a high level ideas on how to do it right. And so it's like, you need to be doing these kinds of things. But Lean startup is extremely focused and tactical. And so it's you want to know if you have product market fit, here's how, right? And then you want to know if now that you have market fit, you want to know what to do next. Here's how you do it, right? And it's all focused on what the feedback you get from your customer. 

MANI_VAYA: That was a seminal book for me, because literally the whole philosophy of lean startup is the idea that how do you start a business on as little money, as little resources as possible? How do you validate your business? And how do you like literally scale your business on minimum amount of money possible? What's the way to test it? How do you do it the fastest and the cheapest way possible, right? So when I first launched my first product, it was an information product. It was summaries of the greatest books on building mental toughness. And you would argue that doesn't really need lean startup, quote unquote methodology, because that's more suited to technology business. But no, I use the exact same principles of lean startup to launch my product. What I did, and this is, this is instructive for anyone who's listening today, no matter what kind of product you're building. This is what I did. So, to do a book summary package of the 40 greatest books on mental toughness, that would take that at that time, it would have taken me three months to build out the whole product before I could even go to market to try to sell it. But the problem with doing something like that was that if I built the book summary package of 40 greatest books on building mental toughness, and I spent three months, what if I spent three months building the damn product and nobody bought it? Yeah. We cared for it. Right. So green startup actually addresses that concern. That's the biggest challenge for a startup. Most of the people I have in my accelerator, the biggest challenge I have is that they assume that if they build a product, everything will work out. But that's not the case. Lean startup teaches us that you can't just build a product and hope that people will sell, people will buy it. So what I did, here's what I did. I probably had, at that time, I had a YouTube channel of maybe 5,000 subscribers at most. I just put out a simple video on one key to building self-esteem like the number one key to building self-esteem. And there was just once one little idea from one of the books that I had in the mental toughness program, literally put it up there. It was like a seven minute video on building self-esteem. The first key to building self-esteem from the books, six pillars of self-esteem. There was a seven-minute video and on at the back of it, it was a one-minute pitch for my product, for my mental toughness, book summary pack. And in that I literally said, Hey, if you like this, I will give you 40 grades, some 40 summaries of the form or summaries of the 40 greatest books on billing, mental toughness, including self-confidence, self-esteem, self blah, blah, blah. And this, this is one of, this is how the videos are going to be. This is what it's going to look like. If you like it, click below to buy it because the price will go up next week. Right. And so, and then I watched what happened. So depending on the number of views, how many people bought, and that's what happened. Like I had like four or 500 views in the first couple of weeks. And I saw like 10 people buy it. It was, it was an incremental process, but I knew it. If 10 people bought it from you know, probably even more. So over time, within the first couple of weeks I had validated my product because I knew if I could get 2% of viewers to buy my product, this product had legs. And what I did was when people bought it, all they got was an email saying, Hey, the product will be ready. And I actually told them in the video that the product is not ready right now. It will be ready in three months from now, but that is why you're getting a discount. That's why I'm giving you a giant discount. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. 

MANI_VAYA: And literally when they signed up, it was just a simple, when they landed on the page, it was simple page with a PayPal button saying, pay $29 here or something. They paid it, they got an email saying, I'll send you the details two months later, three months later. So imagine this, all of this testing, instead of doing three months of work to figure out if I would be able to have a product, I literally just spent a day or two to validate the product. And that's exactly the idea of Lean Startup in some ways, how do you get product market fit? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. 

MANI_VAYA: So I I got product market fit with such a quick test compared to what I would have done if I had not known the idea of lean startup and the idea of product market fit. I would have made a lot of stupid dumb mistakes if I had not read a lot of these books as I was building the business. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. 

MANI_VAYA: So go ahead. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. It's it. I mean, it's interesting too, cause I mean, we had a conversation a little bit about Gary Vaynerchuk's crush it, right? And you were like, man, that one changed my life. And I basically said, well, it felt like so much fluff to me. Right. And what it really boiled down to is that I think I was just not in a position to take advantage of it. Right. I had been paying attention to Gary Vaynerchuk. I picked up his book when it came out, but I was freelancing at the time. Right. And so he's talking about stuff that just didn't really click for me. And so I'm going, it's motivational, but it's not, you know, it wasn't what I needed at the time you know, and so now I go and look at some of the stuff that he's put out since then, you know, as follow-ons and so, and the way that he talks about those books, I'm like, yeah, that's really relevant to me. And so I think that's a big part of it. Um, yeah, you know, then I go pick up another book like clockwork, for example, or, you know, when I'm trying to build systems around things or the checklist manifesto or something like that. And it walks you through, okay, you know, here's how you build a process and here's how you train people and here's how you delegate. You know, here's how you procrastinate on purpose is another book, you know, and, and, you know, so these things hit me in the place where I actually needed them. And that's the thing too is there are a lot of great books out there and a lot of them have the information you need for where you're at. And if you just start working through them, you can grow into the place you need to be. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. As you go through them and as you find those lessons, they will start. The interesting thing is what I've noticed now, is that I'll read a book and sometimes just like what you said, Chuck, you might have felt like it was just motivational. What you did with dev chat, you subconsciously applied those principles because you built a content machine. You built something around your passion. You built a use using a medium that you enjoy, which is talking to people rather than being on video or writing a blog. And then you went and monetize all of that. So you literally like you read the book, you use those principles without knowing, without really realizing that you are actually doing some of those things that were already talked about. Probably what happens a lot of times is as we read these books and as we read one book on top of the other, we start to expand our vocabulary. We start to expand what we understand and we start to become so aware of all of these different ways in which we need to run this part of the business or that part of the business that sometimes a book like that, we might feel like, oh, it's it's too early or maybe it's too not. Oh, I'm not sure if I got what I was looking for, but believe it or not, later on down the line, suddenly it clicks and you're like, oh my God, he was so right. 

 

Are you stuck at home climbing the walls when you should be hanging out with the community at the latest conference to get canceled? Are you wondering where to hear your JavaScript heroes like Amy Knight and Douglas Crockford and Chris Heilman? After the cancellations, I decided to put on a JavaScript conference for you online. I invited my favorite folks from around the web and got them to come speak at an online event just for you. Go to JS remote conf.com and check out our speakers and schedule. The conference is on May 14th and 15th. The call for proposals is open until March 31st. Come join us at an online conference that we guarantee will keep you safe and keep you informed. JS remote conf.com. 

 

MANI_VAYA: Recently, like I read good to great six years ago, one of the greatest books I were, right? I had summarized the damn book six years ago and I went back and summarized it again because the idea of flywheel finally clicked for me. After six years it finally I figured out oh my god this is what he was talking about. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: If you say flywheel to me again I'm gonna scream. 

MANI_VAYA: But you've been a you've been a victim of flywheel I'll tell you that in the sense we have forced that flywheel down your throat more or less or you have tried to yeah you figured out that you need to have that. And that has in some ways hopefully created a lot more momentum in your business. You and I know that it has that flywheel. Right? So the books live with you, they grow with you without you even realizing that that's happening. The concept of flywheel finally like hit me so hard. I was like, yes, you need to build momentum. You need to keep doing that thing. And you need to keep doing it more and more and more, simplifying the business, tightening up the flywheel more and more. And that's what you did. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit, how you applied the concept of flywheel and don't kill me if you don't like it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No, it's, it's fine. Um, yeah. So many, and I talk every week. Um, and yeah, it was just something that came up over and over again. And yeah, basically, um, I was trying to do like six different things, right? To, to create income and you know, he and John Sonmez, um, you know, continually reminded me that I needed to just focus on the one thing. And what was interesting was, was that as I did that, yeah, things started to materialize out of that, that never really would have happened if I hadn't been solely focused on that one thing. I've kind of broken away from the flywheel a little bit lately with, you know, another project, but it ties back into that flywheel, right? And so, you know, I feel like it can help add momentum to the flywheel and we can argue about whether or not that's actually the case, 

MANI_VAYA: but we'll talk about it on the next Mastermind call that we have. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

MANI_VAYA: But you add to it, like what you're saying there, you built your flywheel and it's you basically built your flywheel and you built your optimum selling system, which, you know, Michael Masterson talks about in Ready Fire Aim. So these books are all interrelated. That's the fun part of it. Right. There's Good to Great that's talking about flywheel, but he's not as hands-on as Michael Masterson is saying, hey, you want to build a flywheel, build the optimum selling system for the flywheel to make your business grow at this stage of your business. And then when you realize that, then you suddenly go into, okay, well, there's more to this. And then you find a book like Clockwork, right? And that adds another level of detail to the whole building. Like how do you build this clock? How do you build this flywheel? How do you, there's even more level of detail, like books like clockwork and EMIT to teach you that. So how did clockwork help you? Cause I know that was, that was useful for you as well. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I mean, clockwork is focused a lot more on essentially building the systems in your business and then getting them automated for lack of a better word, as best you can. So some of the automation takes place through technology, right? So it's when this happens, you know, trigger this other thing, you know, so, so I use Zapier for a lot of that stuff, but there are tools that integrate with Gmail or other systems, Google calendar and stuff that aren't necessarily Zapier that do a lot of that stuff. But then the rest of the automation is the process where, you know, we record a podcast episode, for example, right? Like we're doing right now. It'll wind up in zoom. And then my, uh, production manager, she actually just has all this stuff in the calendar anyway. So she makes sure that it gets put into a list for the editors. And then the editors will go pull it off of zoom and edit it. And then, um, you know, somebody will write the show notes for it. And that's, you know, so, so there's kind of a process there, but it all just kind of happens on its own without somebody shepherding the process through, right? Everybody's aware of the piece, the part that they play. And so it all kind of works like clockwork to have. 

MANI_VAYA: And these are not things that are easily visible to someone who's starting a business, but as you build your knowledge base, as you begin to understand the principles of clockwork and how to build a system, how to build processes, how to build your team, how to assign work and how to get them to do the right things at the right time. All of these are very complicated systems. They sound very simple when Chuck is explaining them or when I'm explaining how we do summaries and all that stuff. They're very complicated systems and you need to learn how to build those systems and processes to build a scale like to build and scale your business. So I think, partly for someone who's listening, who's trying to build a side hustle, you have to realize that over time, maybe you will start with an idea, with a simple idea, maybe you will start with a blog or maybe you start with a SaaS, or maybe you start with a consulting project, whatever it is, that is the starting point of your business. But you will need to learn all of these different fundamentals of business in order to do business the right way or otherwise, you just end up wasting your time and money and your effort and all of that and nothing comes out of it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right, now we've been talking for a while, 

MANI_VAYA: I think people kind of get the idea of why and  some people like to teach how to code, or some people want to be on a YouTube and some YouTube channel or build a podcast. All of these are possible. You choose what you like to do. I think it's an intersection of three things as Jim Collins talks about in the book Good to Great. It's intersection of what you're truly passionate about, what you can be great at, and what will actually create money in this world. What will drive the economic engine? If you have the intersection of those three, you will find a way to build a business around the intersection of those three things. So focus on those three things and you will find a way to build a business. There are tons, there are amazing great books written on all of these different ways, like whether you want to build a blog or YouTube channel or a podcast, or whether you want to build a tech startup or SaaS company or agency or whatever, but the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, like these are the things you need to learn in order to build a side hustle. Even if all you want to do is make thousand dollars a month, you need to figure out how to build a blog. You need to figure out how to build an email marketing machine. You need to figure out how to build a course, how to launch a course, book like launch will help you with that. How to position yourself as an expert. Well, book like expert secrets would help you build that. How to, you know, build a selling system. Well, a book like Ready Fire Aim will help you with that. Maybe you're trying to build a subscription model and a book like Automatic Customer will help you with that. Maybe you're trying to build systems and process, a book like Clockwork or Build a Business Not a Job or Emit will help you with that. Maybe you're trying to become, you know, scale your business. A book like Traction will help you with that. Maybe you're trying to bank on your passion. So a book like Crush It will help you with that. So there are books that have been written on all of these topics. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's a lot of books, man. 

MANI_VAYA: What kind of, yeah. A lot of books that you need to read to build a great business. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah.

MANI_VAYA: You can't run away from that. I was just watching Bill Gates's interview. He said he still reads 50 books a year. He reads a book a week. Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world. He still reads six hours a day. Elon Musk. He literally finished reading all of his school library by the age of 15. Jeff Bezos, same kind of craziness. All of these richest people in the world, they're reading. 

CHARLES; So I know you do book summaries and I'm assuming that you have a book series on entrepreneurship. And so, yeah. If people want to kind of shortcut the process, how do they get your shortcut for the process? 

MANI_VAYA: So what I do, we literally create summaries of the world's greatest business books and personal development books. And recently we launched a package called the Entrepreneurship Book Summary Pack where it literally summarized 50 of the greatest books ever written on entrepreneurship. Whether you're trying to start a business, whether you're trying to grow your business, whether you're trying to start a startup, tech startup, or whether you're trying to start a blog or YouTube channel or a podcast, whether you're looking for a business idea, whether you're trying to validate your idea or you're trying to scale, you're trying to hire employees. All of those topics are covered. Whether you're trying to innovate, you're managing your startup, you're growing, you're scaling, you're building a lifestyle business, building an online business. All of those things we've covered in those 50 book summaries and people can go access that. I've literally summarized all of those books. They are in video format. They're in audio format. They're clickable mind maps. I'm a very logical thinker. I like to see visions visually, what a book is like. So, those, the package has 50 book summaries, 300 of the greatest ideas on building a business on entrepreneurship. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That makes sense. Um, you know what? I know you're probably going to give out a link, but, uh, Mike, my listeners are pretty used to me just, uh, setting up a kind of a shortened link forum. So devchat.tv slash something. 

MANI_VAYA: Okay. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So, uh, is there a keyword to this that you want kind of want to create it on and then we'll just throw it out before. 

MANI_VAYA: Let's do this. Uh, devchat.tv slash hustle. And the coupon code. So because you guys are listening, for all of those who are listening, for the first 50 people who sign up, because I'm not going to give this discount to everyone. Only the first 50 people who sign up, I will give 40% off the package, 40% of the book summary package, the entrepreneurship book summary package. I want you guys to go and build great businesses. And I know this will help you a lot. By the way, Chuck, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: what's the coupon? 

MANI_VAYA: The coupon code is hustle. So devchat.tv slash hustle, the coupon code is hustle. So that's really simple. That's really straightforward. Build your side hustle. Now build a great business, whatever you do. By the way, I want to emphasize one thing for everyone who's listening. And since Chuck, you and I are friends, that they have 180 day money back guarantee. So they can trust you and they can trust me that if they don't like the product, they will get their money back. There's nothing to worry about. Even in the most dire circumstances and the most challenging circumstances, I still want to give people the ability to go use it to apply the principles because I know even just one idea is going to be worth thousands of dollars to anyone who goes and applies it. So people don't refer to our product at all because they know how much value is there, but I still give 180 day money bank entity and people. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I trust you to put together a great product and honestly, you've summarized some of the best books that I've read on entrepreneurship. 

MANI_VAYA: So yeah, all the books that we talked about today, by the way, all of them are summarized. And I've given you recommendations for books that have literally like you've read and reread and you've talked about them and hope, and I know that they have changed your business. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I either read or listen to depending on whether I'm on audible or on my iPad on the Kindle app. I probably go through two books a month. So yeah. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. Yeah. I go through seven books a week, but that's a separate thing. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's your own brain damage, dude. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. That's, I'm just screwing myself over by doing something like that. But yeah. For those of you who are listening, the first 50 people to use it, it's devchat.tv slash hustle, coupon code hustle is 40% off. And you guys enjoy it. 180-day money-back guarantee. I don't know if I can do anything better for you guys. Give it a try and just try it out. If you don't like it, just ask for refund. I don't worry. I don't even worry about it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. Sounds good. Well, I've got a call in like three minutes. So let's go ahead and do some picks real quick. Do you have some stuff you want to shout out about on the show?

MANI_VAYA: Damn man, we picked quite a lot of books, but if I were to give people one of the greatest books ever written on entrepreneurship, or let's say two, I'll give two, Good to Great and Lean Startup, the foundational books on entrepreneurship, no matter what kind of business you're building, blog or YouTube or whatever, that's it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, and I'll go ahead and throw out a couple others, and I know we've already mentioned a lot of these, but the one that I'm reading right now is Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, and it is, it's awesome. I'm really, really enjoying it. One other pick that I'm gonna have, we've talked about a lot of books, but I have to say, I got a giant kick. And if you've been, if you're a little bit behind on Masked Singer, which is a reality show on TV, I'm sorry for spoiling this for you, but I swear the funniest thing that I ever saw was they had the bear get eliminated on Masked Singer and they pulled the head off of the bear. And I nudged my wife and I said, look, it's Tina Fey. And then she turned around and it was Sarah Palin and she was doing baby got back. She was rapping on stage and she's like, okay, so she's older enough than me than she, that she seems a little bit old even though she doesn't look super old. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. She was 50. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But anyway, it was hilarious. Cause then you're sitting there going, wait, Sarah, pay baby got anyway. I just thought it was funny. So go watch the mask singers bids. It's funny. 

MANI_VAYA: Oh my God. You guys, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I know, right? It's my guilty pleasure. I'm sorry. I get it. You have the time now. Yeah. Anyway, so, uh, yeah, so those are our picks. Many, if people want to check you out online, uh, where do they go? 

MANI_VAYA: Um, just if you're listening to the podcast, just check out our podcast, 2000 books, 2000 books. And if you're on YouTube, watching it on YouTube, just check out our YouTube channel, 2000Books200Books. We have like 45, 46,000 subscribers there. And just go to 2000Books.com if you want more of such summaries on all sorts of topics like productivity, mental toughness, social skills, entrepreneurship, money, investing, finance, all sorts of things. Maybe we'll get to them at a later time. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Sounds good. All right, well, I've got to jump off. So we're gonna wrap this up. Max out, everybody. 

MANI_VAYA: All right, guys, see you later.

 

Bandwidth for this segment is provided by Cashfly, the world's fastest CDN. To deliver your content fast with Cashfly, visit c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com to learn more.