Andrew Bachman, the CEO and driving force behind Creators Inc. joins the We're Out of Time podcast. And I was so rock bottom at this time of my life when I met this gentleman. This guy was a Harvard neuroscientist. Meditation was the key for me to stay connected to myself. My mission was to start businesses and I tried and failed a thousand times. I've taken a lot of people from literally maybe $100 in their bank account to over seven figures in their bank account. You can't stand on the edge of the beach and say, stop crashing waves. What you can do is grab a surfboard and you can just surf and you got to ride the waves. We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our listeners. Because of your incredible support, We're Out of Time has reached number one on Apple's mental health podcast chart, number two on the health and fitness chart and number 20 overall. We couldn't have done this without you. Thank you for being part of this journey with us. If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call one call placement. That's 888-831-1581. And if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, We're Out of Time. Today, we are joined by Andrew Bachman, the CEO and driving force behind Creator's Inc. One of the fastest growing companies in the creator economy. Andrew's story is one of serious highs and lows, building and selling companies, facing major setbacks and then staging one of the most remarkable comebacks in business. In just one year, he's taking Creator's Inc. from concept to a $60 million powerhouse, representing and scaling some of the biggest names in the influencer space. He's a straight shooter with lessons on resilience, branding and winning in an industry that never sleeps. How you doing, man? Doing great. Thanks for having me. No, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Now, is that true? $60 million in a year? What's true is that I started Creator's Inc. from my parents' kitchen table on Cape Cod when I was 35 years old because I was completely busted out when it happened. I'm 42. And I had nothing but a laptop and this was January 2020 pandemic. And I'm going to go back, but I'm just going to give you why somebody watching this might want to stick around. Creator's Inc. did $60 million in its first year. It's five and a half years later. We've done over $1 billion in sales, over $300 million in EBITDA. So far? Yeah. And you don't have any partners? No. I told you I was 42 years old. My parents are very conservative Jewish physicians. Growing up, I was alone a lot. I was basically like an only child that I would come home and there'd be a nanny and I would find myself out playing by myself in the woods. And before I went to public school, I had a lot of self-confidence. I thought I was going to be a famous actor or athlete or something. I get to high school. I'm 103 pounds soaking wet. I was a wrestler. High school wasn't a great time for me. Girls didn't like me. I got into a lot of fights that I did not win because I was tiny. And junior year of high school, I'm in the locker room after wrestling practice and a kid comes into this is the year 2000 or 1999. And kid comes into the locker room and says, I'm so excited. I just got into the number one school in the world for entrepreneurship called Babson College. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't exist for six, seven years, right? That Facebook doesn't start till 2006. This is 1999. Never heard the word before. I looked at him and said, the hell is that a lung disease? Entrepreneurship scoffing and he says, no. He goes, guy named Arthur Blank went to my college. He got fired from his job. He went to a local coffee shop. He wrote the business plan on a napkin that became the Home Depot. He's a billionaire. He owns the Atlanta Falcons. That's entrepreneurship. And that stopped me in my tracks. I do a gap year. I somehow figure out how to get into the school. And 2002 in the fall, I show up to Babson College, driving to Forexplore, wearing abracadabra. I'm thinking that's as bling-bling as the world got. And I see all these kids from Saudi driving Ferraris around. And I asked some kid who gets out of his car what dorm he's in. And he says, Habibi, I lit at the rinse. And I said, what the f***? He invites me out to a nightclub in downtown Boston. And I didn't know that you needed $20 to get in. And so I had to sneak down into the nightclub. And when I got downstairs, these 18, 19-year-old kids who were in my class were popping $400 bottles of Cristal with black cards. And I never forget the competitive wrestler rush that came over me. I was a good wrestler. I was very, very serious and competitive. And that was just a great sport for me. And I got very competitive. So I went back to college and my mission was to start businesses. And I tried and failed a thousand times. Ended up meeting a smart kid from China who was two years younger than me, who was doing Google AdWords arbitrage before Google was even public. And I basically became his... And he was a little bit of an introvert, kind of an awkward guy. And I kind of became his crutch to speak, walk, talk the language. We would go to trade shows. I would be the networker. He was the back-end guy. We ended up building a really, really serious company that became the third largest behavioral ad network in the world behind Google and Yahoo at the time. So what my business partner figured out, his name's Lin Mao. He's got an interesting story too. He did a couple years in federal prison. And we'll get to that in a second. But we were kids in a dorm room and Lin figured out very quickly that he could sell things online through just arbitraging AdWords. He could bid on AdWords and direct people to websites. And it was so early, like he could do that profitably before people figured out how to advertise on the internet. Really smart shop kid. But his real genius was understanding early on that not everybody had a credit card, but lots of people had cell phones. And lots of kids who had parents had cell phones that could subscribe to things and he could get affiliate money like that. End up making a million dollars from our dorm room. We think it's the biggest deal in the world and kind of have a party. But the carriers all were like, what is this nonsense? This is just creating tons of customer charge backs and it's spammy, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was kind of seen as like Dodge 2008 comes. The world falls apart. World falls apart. I'm 25 years old getting phone calls from the C level execs at AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. Hey, Andy, how do we do more business together? This is a great stream of revenue. And what Lin was looking for was basically an API into these backends and ends up doing a huge amount of... I mean, it was probably over a billion dollars in sales in this mobile subscription business of ringtones and horoscopes and all sorts of sh**. But at the time it converted. And then the iPhone and the smartphone came. You got to remember back at the time this all was happening. Anokias and nextels and sh** like that. Now, if you want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, you pick up your app and you click on it and it tells you. But back then you would opt into these deals and for $9.99 a month they would charge you. What I would like to share publicly and feel comfortable sharing is basically that I had... I crashed out, right? I had a really bad thing happen to me. And I'll tell you how the comeback happened. I've never had a financial mentor in my life, but I did get lucky to meet a very important kind of health and wellness mentor. This guy was a Harvard neuroscientist and he taught me something called P-I-E-S-S-S-O. Physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, sexual, occupational. He called these your seven dimensions. And basically he sat down with me and said, where are you on a scale of one to 10 on each one of these? And how are we going to get you to a 10 out of 10 on each one? And I was so rock bottom at this time of my life when I met this gentleman that I clung to this. This was my Bible, right? Physical was my diet and exercise, right? Hit training in high omega-3, low omega-6 diet. I fasted, I did autophagy, but when I ate it was all healthy fats for the brain, salmon, avocado, nuts, seeds, things like that. Intellectual, he had me learning every day, but not just about business, what I liked, languages, instruments, things that create new pathways in the brain. He explained to me that old people do crossword puzzles because your brain is a muscle. If you don't use it, it gets soft. And when you discover something new, you get this new pathway, this new rush. Emotional, he taught me how to meditate, right? The first day I met this guy, he was selling a protocol to the military. The US military has a division called DARPA, the Department of Advanced Research Projects. They spend a trillion dollars a year to make sure that we have the most powerful military in the world. You go to DARPA and say, hey, I have this watch when your soldier's wear it, the brain will be 70% more efficient under in a stressful situation. They'll laugh and say, okay, how much? And you can say $10 billion. If they really want what you got, they'll cut you a check as they print the money and they've got them. And that's what he was doing with this protocol that he did for me. He was living in the South Shore of Massachusetts, did not have access to a lot of people who had bright business minds like me. I come into his office, he sees my business mind and sees that I'm busted out and basically probably thinks to himself, oh, I could put this guy to good use. And this is the story that he tells me. He goes, what was your first moment of life? And I thought he was asking me what my first memory was. And I start saying, oh, I don't know, I remember being in a kid eating ice cream. He goes, no, no, no, you were a sperm and you were on your way to be Andrew and you had your blinders on and you were so excited and you said, I'm going to be Andrew, I'm going to be Andrew, I'm going to be Andrew. Until you said, wait a minute and you looked to your left and you looked to your right and you said, there's 200 million permutations of Andy and Andrea all racing towards mom's egg. And you go, holy, and you start going and you get to the egg and you start pounding on the door and you say, mom, let me in, let me in, let me in. And here's what happens. And I didn't know this. Four sperm touch the egg wall and the egg has to profile the final four and picks the one with the highest survival index and opened the door for you, for me, everybody you meet in this world. And for the next nine months, you're in this quiet, dark, warm, amniotic fluid. You know, he explained to me that in the Middle East, they don't have a lot of luxuries, but they always have tea on the table. When you drink warm tea, it reminds you of being in the womb. It's comforting. And so undistracted, your brain, your fingers, your toes, your eyes, your lungs, everything develops. And then nine months in a day, you get pushed out of the birth canal and wha wha wha, mommy and daddy say, oh, you're so cute. And they wave a little made in China rattle in your face and you whack it away. And then they say, what's wrong with this kid? And they wave it and you grab it. The first time you grab that, you know, rattle is the first time something limbic in your life, you start to get turned out, right? And you go through your life looking back in these 42 years and realizing that I didn't need Tony Robbins or Kane or self-help books. I won the greatest race I'm ever going to have to win again, which was life or death. If we could even understand how low the odds are of us being born, we probably couldn't even get out of bed. It would be so overwhelming. The problem is you get into this world, we're all predating on each other. We're all trying to sell each other, whatever the f**k it is, we're trying to sell each other. Everybody's got a hose. It's so nuts. Go on. You drive down the highway. Every billboard, you know, oh, this martini is so classy. Come out to a bar and poison your brain. You know what I mean? You get it. The point is, he made me realize I was already hardwired to win. I just got f**ked up by everything out here because I didn't have control of my mind. That's excellent. And so meditation was the key for me to stay connected to myself in this busy world and become what he called a kind or a monk warrior. So that's the PIE and I can, if you want me to keep going, that is when you were going down that list of seven, I was thinking, I'm not 10 and any of them. This is what I want to know. What's the biggest misconception people have about managing only fans, models and adult content creators? Now, before you get started, I envy the position you're in. But I would have, I'd have to light myself on fire if I dealt with those people all day long, flaky, you know, not showing up. Like, you get all that stuff from these people, right? It's got to be, right? Or no? You're in the service business and you were in the service business too, right? Yes, but boy, my people are sick. Here's the thing. We love making money, but running a restaurant is a s**tty business, right? Service business is tough. Service business is tough. So I think the toughest thing about my managing people was I've made a lot of millionaires. I've taken a lot of people from literally maybe $100 in their bank account to over seven figures in their bank account. And I think when it becomes your new norm, not often do you get the sense from your clients that they feel like we did this together, right? And, you know, you're more of a janitor than anything else. So, you know, maybe that. But the biggest misconception for my business is just how creative and how much strategy actually goes into it. This isn't just like, I'm hot and I'm going to do only fans. I mean, these are people who are really understanding the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok and Twitch and Twitter and building contextual relationships with an end user through making good content. What do I mean by that? If I did only fans, the only people that would care would be maybe the people I went to high school with because they know me they'd be like, because you doing on there, you know what I mean? But other than that, I don't mean anything to anybody. And so these content creators are building that feeling at scale by making excellent content. And it's not a joke. It's not haha. I mean, like this is this is this is real. I gotta tell you something. I don't understand what world we're living in. I remember a time where people were famous for actually having talent. You know who's not famous anymore? The people who actually have talent. They're just not. It's a bizarre celebrity has changed. And here's what's happened. Networks used to decide who is going to be famous. Networks decide who is going to get airtime. And you know, if you had to go to be in a movie, you had to go sit on Harvey Weinstein's couch, right? Now, if you've got one of these, the market decides who's going to be famous. And there is a lot of brain rot out there to be successful on some of these platforms. Like you can do dumb shit. And but but people doing dumb shit on social media are very, very smart. They're elite at playing the game they're playing. And you know, the the the dynamic has definitely shifted. Celebrity has definitely changed. You're right. Yeah. Okay. With increasing concerns over influencer fatigue and algorithm shifts, they always shift every five minutes. What role do you see companies like yours playing in helping creators maintain stable and sustainable growth? That's a great question. Creator burnout's real. And just like anybody who does anything, you know, you've got to take care of yourself mentally and physically. I was telling you a little bit about kind of my routine that got me into the best form, best human form of my life when this opportunity came to me and I was ready for it, because I was calm, I was clear minded. I was sober. The real answer from what I do for our clients is I help them be prepared, right? I cut out the confusion. I help them get scheduled. We give them teams that are very structured in how we communicate, how we died and how we do the marketing for them. We help them delegate almost everything that they can possibly delegate and give them as much bandwidth back to just be creative. And then there's a lot of things that we're very good at in terms of like recycling. Some of our top clients don't make a lot of content and they don't need to because we know how to market to new customers quite often. And I mean, it's a very perfect business model. So it wasn't really a roundabout question, but it's really the truth. I don't have a magic potion to make somebody not feel burnt out besides go take a vacation and sleep a bunch. But we help our people by being very structured and very prepared for them. Do you ever tell them just to lean into it? And this is what it takes? Yeah, absolutely. I'm blown away. I didn't want to do this today. I was not in a good space to do this today. Okay. But this is what I do. I had a commitment with you, right? I'm not going to go ahead and reschedule something because I've been screaming at people all morning. Okay, that's not what I'm going to do. These people look for any excuse in this age range in the influencer community. Don't they? Isn't it harder to work with people who aren't like minded like you and I that actually do things that we don't want to do? What I've noticed is that there's two us. There's who you are right now sitting here in this situation on a podcast with me, never met me before, see another Alpha guy, we're both in kibitzing, blah, blah, blah. And then when you go lock yourself in your bedroom by yourself or you're in your car by yourself and you're really your raw form of self with your complete guard down, leaning into it actually as a creator, believe it or not, is the people who are most successful are able to act as naturally as they're in not in a situation, but when the camera's rolling. Those people are authentic and they're actually getting a lot of contextual value from their audience. You've got to surrender a lot, right? When I first got into this space, I tried to be the super agent. I made sure our clients were filing their taxes and doing everything right and really planning. A lot of our clients, some of them don't have great relationships with their parents and I was becoming this parental figure and they didn't want it. They rejected it. Like, don't talk to me about my taxes. I don't give a f***. And I would say, okay, I actually lost some clients because I was overbearing and trying to get them to do the right things. And as, you know, all you can do is surrender, right? You can't stand on the edge of the beach and say, stop crashing waves. What you can do is grab a surfboard and you can just surf and you got to ride the waves. And so, when you're dealing with young people, just as I was, right, I had to piss away my first million dollars on an iced out AP and a car and all this bullsh**. Then wake up and be like, don't have anything to invest because I put it in dog sh** assets. But, you know, a lot of our clients are starting to get through that first phase of getting it out of their system and then their brains open up and they're ready for feedback. Have you ever battled with your own mental health while running these high pressure companies? Definitely. I remember a time in my life where I was running a company and I was, here was my routine. I would wake up and I would take 50 milligrams of Zoloft for depression. I would take Adderall to put the car on drive. I would take an Adavan or a Xanax when the Adderall was coming out of me. I would drink half a bottle of brown liquor when the sun went down because it was fun and then I would take an Ambien to go to bed. I did that for six, seven years. No, never. No, not my thing. Okay. So you were functional, I guess. I mean, you are optimal, but you were functional. Was there ever someone close to you whose drug use took their life or destroyed their career? What did that teach you? I have a very, very dear friend who is spending a year or two in federal prison camp and probably would not be if it weren't for their severe alcoholism and not a guy who goes to a bar and gets martinis and gets up and gets loose and parties. A guy who is a successful finance dude, has a normal life, drives a Mercedes, just gets stressed out and has to go to the liquor store and buy a plastic bottle of dog shit vodka and drink it till he falls on the floor for 10 days until his body starts to fail and he's aware enough to dial 911. But I watched that guy throw away his wife, his kids, his grandkids and just make decisions that ended up in federal prison when it probably was beyond avoidable. So yeah, I've seen it. Do you know anyone who's died of fentanyl? Not personally. Lucky. Almost everybody does now. Yeah. All right. What's one behind the scene story from creators, Inc. that completely changed the trajectory of someone's career? The very first person who called me was a female friend of mine who knew me when I was in my 20s and I'm sitting in my parents' kitchen in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, January of 2020 and she says, Andy, I need your help. I got $100 to my name. I'm some Jewish ladies, Nanny and LA doing her grocery shopping. I'm stressed out about getting coronavirus. So I made it only fans, but I can't figure it out. So what the fuck is that? I logged in and I said, oh, you're trying to thrash strap at scale. What's thrash strap? You sell kind of racy pictures. You don't have really marketing logic to attack this platform and this platform doesn't do a good job at all of telling you how to do that. But it is very robust in facilitating these transactions. She had 50,000 followers on Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitch, no Twitter. They didn't even call them creators yet. I swear on my life, I might have created the term creator. Everyone called them models or influencers or girls and I said, no, these are content creators and that's why I called the company Creators, Inc. And that's a different story. But anyway, I just understood how she could go about maximizing the lifetime value of all these kind of horny guys who are trying to buy her pictures. She makes a quarter of a million dollars in her first month. She starts to run around LA. She had been the personal assistant for some big celebrities and starts saying, hey, don't trust your only fan's business to nightclub promoters and rappers. There's these Jewish guys from Boston. Look at my numbers. I start getting inundated with phone calls, made so much money with one of our first clients. The word kind of got out who I was and it was suggested to me from some of the powers in the industry that, hey, if you, you know, Actress and Writer Strike is going on, CAA, UTA, William Morris, all these companies are destroyed. If you feel like, you know, a traditional Hollywood agency, but your new Hollywood, all the biggest celebrities in the world are going to come to you who are pissing away their opportunity and that's what happened. That's how I built the company into a billion dollars in sales. That's fantastic, man. That's fantastic. All right. What's one piece of financial advice you would give anyone trying to start a company? Okay. Trying to start a company, you need to have a good idea and that idea can't just be good. It's got to be profitable. So it's got to be very apples and oranges. I think a lot of people, you know, I went to a school where kids are sitting around saying, oh, we're going to raise 30 million from Kleiner Perkins and three years later without any revenue, then we'll figure it out, right? Like, I don't subscribe to that. I would rather invest in someone's cleaning business that has a van and a mop and pine saw and goes to somebody's house and makes $200 and 100 of it is profit. I understand that, right? Like, that's the type of business. So I'm a big believer in just very much understanding your cash flow. I think the biggest financial advice that I give to just, you know, creators in first time starting out is that if you leave your money in the bank, you're actually losing money because of something called inflation. The U.S. government prints more dollars, things get more expensive. So if your money is not making money, it's actually losing money. You've got two choices. You can't explain that to people that aren't financially literate. You can try, but they just can't get their head around it. Sorry for interrupting. Go on. Oh, just that you've got two options. Money markets at 4.5%, 5% or the stock market, which 11% a year, maybe over a long period of time, you can get absolutely crushed in any given year. But if you're long term minded, that's what the S&P shakes at. But I think going back to in terms of just financial advice for anyone, I would say this, in my 42 years looking back at all the mistakes I've made and the success I've had, you're the jockey. The decisions you make in life are the horses. And your only job is to figure out which horses to ride. Is there anything you want to talk about? Is there anything I left out? Is there anything you want to promote? When you were talking about advice for somebody starting out and money and going back in my head to when I so badly wanted to be successful before I was in the decisions I made, the right answer is doing what you like to do and being happy more than anything. And as corny as that sounds, because when someone's wealthy and they've got money, it's easy to look at them and say, oh yeah, sure. Of course, that's what you're telling me. But once you get it, it just becomes your norm and it's just stuff. It doesn't make you happy. It doesn't fulfill you inside. But do you know about the science experiment where they took the rats and had them tread water in the glasses? Tell me about it. Really, really fascinating. So glasses just like this filled it up with water. They dropped some rats in it. In about 15 minutes, the rats give up and drowned. They start the experiment over. New glass, new rat, new water. Rats start treading waters at 14 minutes this time. They pluck the rat out. They dry it off. They give it something to eat. And they drop it right back in the water. Now the rat just swam till failure, right? Almost failure. It lasted 15 minutes before it drowned. How long do you think it lasted on the second go around? Two minutes. 60 hours. Shut up. 250 times as long. Why? I don't know. Because it believed it was going to be saved. And that lesson taught me that what I believe in and what you believe in or your beliefs is the most powerful thing on the planet. So when you start a business, you better believe in it and like it and love it because it gets hard no matter what. You start a business that's just about making money on day 16 when you inevitably realize why something wasn't what you thought it was or it's tough or impossible, you give up. But if you believe, you never stop. We're going to end it right there. That was beautiful. Thank you, sir. All right. Now, before we do that, where can people reach you? Our Instagram page is at creatorsank. We're a talent management company specifically focused on content creators who monetize with paywalls. And we're growing above and beyond that. We're helping content creators become financially wealthy with their own direct-to-consumer products, tech platforms, lots of different things. Thanks for coming, brother. That gets you 1.2 and 3, 4, 5 and 6, 7, 8, 9. So you're trying to get the most points you can. You get five tosses, I get one. Okay. All right. Do it. Two. Nice. Four points. Two points. Okay. All right. Here we go. Bang. Hi, Ray. How much could I make on OnlyFans? I mean, depends on your audience, but you could do quite well. You probably, you know, I'm going to just guess the mate. You probably make $60,000, $70,000 a month in your first month. Do I have to show my... No, you don't. Okay. Why would somebody give me $60,000 a year as a 59-year-old man? One person wouldn't, but people might open up, you know, you're a quite fit, good-looking guy. People might open up your lock picture sets for $10, and if you multiply that out by $6,000, you're doing pretty good. Can I just show my feet? Sure. And not my face? You can show whatever you want. How much do I get? How much do I get for my feet? Well, the question is, you know, is there a market for people who want to see your feet? But if there was, you could get a lot. Is there a market for someone who wants to see my feet? To be honest, there probably is, because the human need and desire to procreate is very strong. You people are f***ing up. Go on.
