#56 Teen CEO Builds AI Company That Replaces Human Sales Reps | Joey Seeman

What you can learn in a classroom versus what you can learn by doing the experiential learning is such a different thing. School is so fucking horrible at teaching you things. I've learned so much more since I left school. And when I was in school, I learned so much more outside of it. It's never helped me learn things, ever, besides the alphabet. Imagine having direct access to someone who's navigated life's toughest terrains and come out stronger. Someone who's been there, done that, and can guide you with empathy, experience, and honesty. This isn't just advice. It's a lifeline, a strategy session, a chance to learn from my journey so you can accelerate yours. Without the ability to be self-aware and introspective, the ability for you to get to where you want to go, nearly impossible. Hey everybody, welcome back to the David Gutman Podcast. Really excited about my guest today. You will officially be the youngest person I've ever had on my podcast, usurping Max and Sergio. Joey Seaman, really excited to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So founder and CEO of Nova Echo, co-president of NextUp, which we haven't even talked about. I'm assuming that has something to do with these masterminds that you guys put together, but I wasn't sure about that. But so, you know, 17 years old, you know, CEO of a company for a couple years now. Maybe start back, like, what your folks did, what got you into wanting to be an entrepreneur in the first place, and how you even came up, you know, with the idea. I heard from our friend Sergio earlier, which I didn't know before, that you were doing like clipping stuff or Andrew Tate. I didn't know that. That's kind of cool. So I'd love to kind of know about your come up and, you know, kind of how you got where you are. Yeah. Yeah. So I grew up with a single mother, actually. It was just me and my mom my whole life. And when I was probably six years old, I started to learn more about business because she was— So what age? Six. Six. Okay. I thought I heard you wrong. Six. Okay. Where does a six-year-old stumble across some business shit? My mom. At that point, it wasn't a lot of research. It wasn't what I was doing now. You weren't reading annual reports of publicly traded companies. Not yet. But I was interested in it. I didn't quite understand the concept that much because I was six, but I was interested in it because my mom actually was a homeschooling consultant before she had me, and she's always been a big believer in focusing on entrepreneurship and doing things on your own terms compared to just following the typical path that most people follow. And so she would instill a lot of those beliefs in me even when I was very young. So I always knew I wanted to work for myself in some way, even though I didn't really understand the concept of business or entrepreneurship as well as I do now. Then it was never really a big thing for me, but as I got older, it was always in my mind. And when I was 12, I became a pro video game player because I had been interested in video games since I was a little kid. I always loved them. I'd always grind them very hard. And when I was 12, I started playing like 16 hours a day. I was building a team and I was getting together a lot of people and training them and managing them so that we could win these championships. And I was also starting social media for the first time. So I had a YouTube channel where I was posting about these games and I was teaching people how to play them the correct way. And I was showing people gameplay for me and my team versus other teams. And that grew a lot for what I was doing at that age. And I was getting tens of thousands of views on long form YouTube videos. So that was very good at that age. And I started to really have a love for marketing, even though I didn't quite understand the term yet. And I had a love for social media and I had a love for video games, of course. And that was my first experience in what would become entrepreneurship because it was a form of marketing. It was a form of competing. It was a form of managing. Even though I didn't understand it, it just like other sports is a great base for entrepreneurship. Then fast forward to when I was 14, I was, I had just moved to Florida from New York city and I was in the shower one day and I was just thinking to myself, I am getting older faster. At least I felt like I was. Oh my gosh. Tell that to a 59 year old, but keep going. Yeah, I know. That's what I had to laugh. but I know that I need to do something because I've always wanted to do something for myself. Now I understand how money works to a decent degree. I have this experience building social media accounts. I need to do something. So I was like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to just start researching about what I can do business-wise and what I could start at this age because I didn't at that time really realize that something would be possible to start at this age. I'd always just assumed, well, after North High School, I'll start something. Right? So I did some research the next day, did research for the next week, the next month, and I came across copywriting. So copywriting is basically persuasive writing for businesses. And if you're a copywriter, you're writing articles, you're writing ad copy, you're writing websites for business owners that they can sell more efficiently. And I love the concept because I'd always enjoyed writing and I always enjoyed convincing people of things. And so I was like, okay, this is interesting. So I started studying it for months. I basically wrote a book on copywriting. I took so many notes. It was like 80 pages of notes. And I had done so many practice articles, practice newsletters, practice ad copy. And that's when I started my outreach. So I was doing thousands of emails and DMs, stuff like that. And it went absolutely nowhere. I got nobody even on a call with me. Nobody was interested. and so after three or four months I was like okay this is very slow and then I found out about affiliate marketing which is what you had mentioned before and I was like okay this is interesting I think it will be faster I already have experience with social media now I know how to script videos now I know how to write captions now I think I can do this even better so I got into the affiliate marketing first month a couple thousand views second month tens of thousands of views a couple hundred followers. Third month, many videos with millions of views, over 10,000 followers. So I was doing well. And I was like, okay, this is some traction. This is awesome. And during the affiliate marketing, we can talk more about this later, but I was nonstop. It was just video, video, video. I was barely getting any sleep because I was also going to school. And that was all I was thinking about. After the affiliate marketing, or the affiliate marketing was going well, but again, it wasn't making any money. And then that led me to eventually meet Sergio. And I found out he was running his marketing agency, but I didn't know what a marketing agency was. I didn't understand how it worked. How did you guys meet? Was it video games? How did you guys meet? So when I was in school, I was in a gym class because I love working out and he was also in a gym class. And one day he was like, Hey, how you doing? And he just dabbed me up and I had no idea who he was, but I was like, how you doing? Hey, all I just matched his energy. And we got to talking a little bit, and we would just say hi to each other every day for like three months. And we didn't even know each other's names. We knew nothing about each other. Turns out he thought I was somebody else the whole time. That's funny. But, you know, that's how things go. That's how things go. So anyway, one day he lost a very expensive watch that he had, and I asked him, like, what does your dad do? Because I assumed that it was his dad's watch, and I was like, hmm, this kid is around money, and I was interested in it. I wanted to get in with him. And he was like, oh, no, that's my watch. And made me pause because I didn't understand that it was possible for somebody at, I guess he was 16 at that time, to have a watch that was worth thousands of dollars. So I was just like, okay, what do you do? And he said that he runs a marketing agency. And then I was like, oh, I do affiliate marketing. And then we started having that conversation. So anyway, got in with him in the marketing agency. And long story short, closed some deals there. That led me into AI. And that's when I started Nova Echo, which is my main project right now. Okay, so there's a whole bunch of things I got to unpack there. So I want to go all the way back to your managing video game players and teaching them how to, like, that seems like a leap. So you love playing video games yourself, right? How do you make the leap to, hey, let me start a team? Was it that you wanted to be in a team competition and you didn't have a team so you needed to create a team? or like what was the impetus to even push to do that in the first place? So there was a very specific game that I started playing when it first came out. So it was very new. Nobody was really good at it. And I just became really, really good at it. So I was one of the best players in the world at that specific game. And that's all I did. And this was during COVID. So when I got home, I would just play the game. When I woke up, actually, I wasn't even getting home from school. So I would just play the game nonstop. And then I heard that they were doing a championship where they were starting to do teams. there was cash prizes and I was like this is awesome I can win that because I'm so good at this game and so I started doing some research and I came across a friend who had a team so I joined his team we won we won some championship we were like gold but then there was also platinum ahead of us so we were doing good but not fantastic and then through that team I met a lot of other people and I decided to just build my own team because I felt like I could do it better than he did okay got it so then you the i'm curious what you learned because you sounded like you were doing the copywriting thing and you go it sounds like several months and you get literally zero right no one responding no phone calls nothing no that's still like keeping up three months of doing it for three months getting that little positive feedback that's unusual like do you realize that's unusual or did that just seem like normal to you it was normal because of what i've done in the past since i was little i'm an only child so i play with my i play by myself a lot and so i'd have puzzles and i have little games to play and every single time i had one of those i just wouldn't stop until it was done and it was just that's just kind of how i grew up naturally and so when i played the video games if there was some challenge or some shot i had to do i just wouldn't stop until i did it and it would take hours and so it was just the same thing here I'm thinking of those, I'm sure you've seen them, those videos where how many hours it takes of doing some weird thing where they're like throwing something up there and then they throw a dart and they have to do it like four trillion times until they actually get it. That's you basically? Yeah. Yeah, I don't start those because I will finish them and it wastes so much time. I've done it before. It's just, yeah. Right. Right. Well, so the other thought, the other part of your story that I wanted to just understand a little deep, more deep, more deeply is, so it sounded like you did the copywriting thing, dead zero there, but then you start doing the affiliate marketing thing and you did get some traction. So you're like, oh, I got a few hundred, got tens of thousands, got millions of the views, at least even if it wasn't monetizing. What did you learn in that journey? Like what were you doing differently that like you, or was it just the consistency? No, I learned a lot. Yeah, I changed a lot. So through the copywriting, I learned, first of all, the structure of how to make a video that actually is persuading. And it can be persuading to just watch the rest of the video, right? And also how to create captions that persuade people to watch the rest of the video. I also, through the affiliate marketing, got really, really good at editing. So I became a great editor when, when I first started, I was horrible. I did not know how to edit at all. And through every single video that I created, I got better at editing. I tried different styles, So different captions, different colors, different starts, different ends, you know, everything you can imagine. I tried everything. And then once I found one kind of video that worked, 60% to 70% of the videos I posted were that kind of video. And the rest were other things I was trying. And I just continued that over and over and over. And then when that 30% to 40% was good, I would just switch the 60% to 70% to that and continue on. And with enough time, it worked really well. I had made over 300 videos within those three months and posted them. Wow. So I learned a lot because I was just doing so much volume. Yeah. It's funny because I say this all the time. It's the reason I ripped up my Wharton diploma is you learn by doing. You don't learn in a classroom. I mean, it's not that you can't ever learn anything in a classroom, but what you can learn in a classroom versus what you can learn by doing. The experiential learning is such a different thing. it's like you understand it at your bones you know as opposed to just this intellectual piece of knowledge yeah i i could talk about that forever school is so fucking horrible at teaching you things i i've learned so much more since i left school and when i was in school i learned so much more outside of it it's it's never helped me learn things ever besides the alphabet that was That was actually it. Yeah, that was actually it. Wow. Well, so you then just said casually, then I started an AI company. I feel like, wait a second, there had to be some impetus to, like, some insight you had, some tool you started playing with ChatGPT. Like, what was the thing that said, hey, this AI thing is something I want to go down that rabbit hole, and then B, hey, I think I could create a company to leverage AI in a way that's really useful and interesting. Yes. So taking it back to when I was around eight, so I was in elementary school, I started watching these videos of a robot solving a Rubik's Cube because I was also really interested in the Rubik's Cube stuff then. And it just amazed me that I could understand what the Rubik's Cube looked like and solve it using an algorithm. I didn't understand how it worked, but it was amazing to me. And I had always remembered that, and I always researched AI in some form or fashion, even though I had no idea how it worked. And then when I was 15, I was working with Sergio. I was getting a little bit of money from the marketing but I was like I want to start something in this AI thing Because now it getting real popular and even though most people didn know ChatGPT yet because it kind of just first launched I knew about it and it was fascinating to me So how early were you in the ChatGPT world? Were you like version 0.1? How early were you? Well, when 3.5 launched. Yeah, GPT 3.5. A couple weeks after that launched, it got really popular. So I was there like maybe a week or two after it launched. Got it. Yeah, so it was fairly early, but yeah. So me and Sergio decided to actually start an AI agency where we would sell an AI chatbot to go on a website. And that was kind of going alongside with his marketing agency. And so we started that company together. We started pitching people. We got a few sales calls booked, but no one was really interested in it because they were just like, we don't really need a website one. It'd be cool if it could text people, but the website's not really useful for us. And we got a lot of that. So then after a month, I was like, all right, this one I'm going to call quits because I just don't see it going anywhere. And so we called it quits. I kept doing the marketing for another month. Then I have a dinner with one of my mentors, and he just invites me to dinner randomly. So I have dinner with him, and he starts talking to me about this new project. He goes, Joey, this is insane. There's this new technology this company reached out to me. I've never heard of something like this. It's an AI that can do sales calls. and it sounds like a human. I go, what? Really? That's possible? It blew my mind. And he's like, yeah, it's a six-figure deal. I'm trying to work out with them, da-da-da. And I was like to myself, okay, if he's excited about this, it's completely out of my league. This guy's a lot older than me. He has a lot more money than me. So I didn't even think about it. I just let it leave my mind. But I was like, that's awesome. I kept doing the marketing. Then like a week or two later, I go to the Instagram account that we had made for that AI agency we had built just to check it out. and one of the first things I see is an ad from the company that he was talking about that does the AI calling. I'm like, hmm, I'm going to click it. Why not? So I click it. I go to their website. I see their pre-launch, but I hear a demo recording, and I go, whoa. He wasn't kidding. This is actually real. This sounds just like a human. This is insane. So I immediately go on Discord, which is like an app to communicate a lot of tech and video game guys on there, and I find the Air Discord server, which is the name of that company. I reach out to the CEO on Discord, and I say, hey, I'm in marketing. I really want to market for you guys. You guys are doing something amazing. Let's see if we can work together, something like that. No response for a week. Then I send them an email to their support. I find their actual emails. I send them an email there. And then finally, one of their salespeople call me, and they're like, hey, we're trying to get more people on this app. Would you be interested in talking to somebody on our team? I was like, yes. I just wanted it. So I get on the call with somebody from their team, and they start talking to me about the agency partner program because this was a brand-new program that they had just launched, and they thought I might be a good fit for it. So long story short, they pitched me on a $5,000 package one time, and I'd be able to become an agency partner with them, be associated with their company, and be able to sell their technology. And I was like, okay, this is the next big step because this technology is going to change the entire world. My mentor is excited about it. And it's only $5,000 to get in. Except at that time, when I had $300 in my bank account, it wasn't only $5,000, it was $5,000. So I couldn't afford it. But I was on a call with them for an hour and a half. They're telling me all about the program. And basically, I get a percentage of every single minute that somebody used whenever they signed up through my account. And I could also sell build-outs. So I was like, this is awesome. I felt like it was going to be huge. I just knew it. It was intuition. So I remember I get off the meeting with the founders of Ayr, which were very big at the time and popular, and I walked outside my room into the living room, and I said, Mom, I have to have a conversation with you. She's like, what did you do? I was like, no, no, nothing bad. But I just got off a call, and she knew I was in business, like trying to build a business at that time. And I was like, I just got off a call, and this is going to change my entire life forever. But I need five grand. Right. And she had never seen me make money before, so she looked at me insane. And she was like, what? And just for some context, she is a teacher at that time. She's been a teacher for pretty much her whole life, or director. And teachers don't make millions of dollars. Right. She doesn't have $5,000 to give me. But she said, after an hour of me convincing her that this was going to be huge, okay I'm going to take out a loan on my credit card and give you the cash and you pay back month by month when you can and I gave her a huge hug I said thank you and about a week and a half later the zero interest credit card came in so we were able to take that out and we paid for it so now I have this founding agency partner license is what it was called and I don't know what to do with it to be honest because I have it now but I don't know how to really market it because I've only ever marketed things that are completely different then I click on this random ad again and I talked to somebody named Antonio which is from Patrick but David's team and I was like okay they're throwing some event next year the vault conference that sounds interesting I think I can meet people there so I signed up for that I don't have the money to do it once again, but I call Sergio. I would say, Hey, come on, split this with me. Let's, let's get two tickets here. Cause it was a discount. And then I call my grandma and she agrees to loan me the money for the, for the other ticket. And so at that point, okay, now I have access to this amazing community of people and I have a membership or a license to air so I can sell this technology. So I go there, I start selling and I get my pitch down to a science over those three days. Then I'm like, okay, time to start content because that's what I can do. So I start up a YouTube channel and through the YouTube channel, I'm posting videos about the technology because I'm the only person that understands this technology because no one's used air. But it's growing really fast. They have tens of thousands of users right now, but I'm the only one that really understands it. And there is another 50 or so agency partners, but none of them have any tech experience. And I threw myself fully into this because I knew that I could learn it quickly. So I understood the technology behind it. so now I'm making videos about it as the videos are getting more and more and more and more views. I start getting book calls. Now I, I got my pitch down at the vault conference. I started this YouTube channel. I'm starting to get book calls and now I have to learn sales because I've never done an actual sales call. So the first one is real choppy. Please tell me you have a recording of the first one. I have early ones. I have early ones. I don't think I have the first one because I didn't even expect like I didn't know this was going to happen. But so I start with a couple calls a month. I'm like, whoa, I'm talking to real business owners. These people, this person's making hundreds of thousands. They have no idea. How old are you at this point? 15? 15, yeah. So they have no idea they're talking to a 15-year-old. At this time, I looked a lot younger then. So some of them do. Okay. But is it a video call or is it just voice? Yeah, yeah, video. Okay, okay. Some of them didn't ask. So that's helpful. But for the first person that was interested in actually getting the product, I was like, they were like, so what's the price to set this all up? And I was like, 500? I had never sold something that large before. And they were like, yeah, sure. I was like, okay, thank you. And then they paid the 500. That was the first money I made. Then more and more calls started coming in. Next week, I said. And you're also going to make something on every minute that they use, right? Exactly. So it starts building up. Next week, another call comes in. I'm like, 1,000. Okay. Because it's brand new technology. No one has it. Okay, sure. So I get $1,000. Okay, next week, $1,500. Right. Sure. So I keep going like that. And then at this point, I'm starting to get like 10 calls a day being booked off my YouTube channel. And I'm starting to charge higher and higher prices. And it's getting really exciting. Now I have some money. My mom sees I'm making some money. Now I can start paying back these loans and everything. And that's awesome. Then the next month, I get a ton of calls. I raise my prices even more. And I close like 15 deals that month, and I'm charging more money. So now I'm making real money. And the month after that, which was December of 2023, I raise my prices even more. I get even more book calls, and I make more money than I ever could have possibly imagined. How much? Multiple five figures. Wow. Okay. So I'm ecstatic, but I'm calm. I didn't tell anybody how much I made. My mom had no idea how much I was making. My grandparents had no idea. My friends had no idea. Nobody in my school even knew I was making money. Let me stop you there for a second. I would think you'd at least want to go to your mom and be like, Mom, Grandma, that investment paid off. Oh, yeah. No, I told them that. I was very appreciative. I told them it's working. I don't like discussing exact numbers. Okay. It's just, that's fine. Yeah. But I was very clear with them that it was working and they could see it. So nobody knows what I'm doing, but I'm in school. And I remember this one time I was in school in a class and the teacher told me to put my computer away. I was like, no. And I just, I'm on my phone. Cause like, come on. Like just, that's money. Yeah. Come on. So I'm on my phone and I closed the deal for like $1,250. Like, yeah, $1,250 in school. Right. I don't say a word, but I just go. The brightest smile on my face. I just made money in school. It blew my mind. Right. So anyway, that continues. And it's going well. And I have, at one point, I was getting like 20 clients in one month. And I was doing build-outs for all these people. So now I have to learn prompt engineering. I'm doing 20 build-outs for professional companies a month. I need to get amazing at prompt engineering. Right. And I need to work 24-7. I need to get amazing building automations. I have to build automations for all of these companies. Mind you, I have zero tech experience, except for always being on video games, which is tech experience, I guess. And I need to learn how to manage these people. I don't know what softwares are. I don't know how to use softwares, but I need to start building infrastructure so I can have systems to manage these people without getting confused. So I start doing that. Okay, now I'm getting too many calls. I have to bring on a salesperson. I brought on a salesperson. Now I have to train them. I have to manage them. I have to compensate them. I have to learn how to do that. Okay. Now, these build-outs are too much. I can't do it anymore. I don't have time. So there was one kid in school, besides Sergio, that seemed like he was on the right path to me. He seemed like he was just a little bit different than other people. And he seemed like he was interested in similar things that I was. His name was Nash. No Nash, yeah. Yeah. So I go to Nash, say, hey. He doesn't even know what I'm doing because I haven't talked about it. But I said, hey, Nash, I started this new company. It has to do with AI. It's an AI that can do sales calls. It's going well. We're getting a lot of clients, and I need somebody to build out these agents for me. And he's like, okay. And I said, so I'm going to pay you, you know, X number of dollars per agent that you build out, and I'll train you, and we can work together. And he's like, okay. So I brought him on my team. I started paying him per build out. We've been working together for two years now, and he's now the head of fulfillment at Nova Echo. And he got, again, really good at prompt engineering. and really good at building automations. I gave him as much knowledge as I could about what I had learned during that process. So this continued on. In early 2024, Air, which is the company that got in with, started going downhill. Nobody knew it. I knew it because I was so close to them, and I was one of their founding agency partners, and I was their top agency at the time. And so I was very close to their team. I could see things were not quite turning the way that they should have been. Support was slowing because they were getting clients too quickly, and they weren't hiring the right way. The technology wasn't improving fast enough. So it was just like I had an intuition, again, that it was not going to go well. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to sell this agency. So I made a YouTube video saying I'm selling my agency, and I found a buyer through that video, and they bought my agency, including the minute spend that I was collecting from all these people. So I sold that in early 2024, and I used that money to reinvest into Nova Echo, the software company. So no longer a voice AI agency, but now a voice AI software company. Now I'm building the best technology, better than AIR, for other agencies and other business owners like I was. So now, instead of relying on AIR's technology, I can have what I know is going to be better. Because I knew, again, just like the video game thing, I could do it better. I just wasn't able to in that situation, so I had to move out of it. So how did you know, so what, did you basically reverse engineer their tech? Or it sounds like you dug in pretty deep on the tech. so you understood enough did you and but you don't have the engineering expertise so how did you find someone to build the to build the platform yeah yeah so we started off kind of in a mix I did a lot of research into their technology nobody understood how it worked that I knew except for me at the time now pretty much everyone understands the general concept of how it works in the tech space but nobody quite knew how things were fitting together there I did a lot of research, I started to understand it. And it was kind of like a jerry-rigged system for a while. But then I brought on a CIO. His name is John McGowan. John McGowan, yeah. And he has a lot of deep tech experience. So he has worked with IBM, Oracle, Google, Apple, Microsoft, U.S. Army, TD Bank, Citibank a lot of enterprises And he implemented technology for all these people He helped launch the first mobile wallet as well similar to what Apple now uses So he came on the team in late 2024 and he was like okay this tech thing is messy Here's what we need to do. I got him a Myro board. He did a lot of architecture. He did a lot of designing, and he designed what would become much better technology than air and anything else that's on the market. and he also brought on a developer he had been working with for years named Charlie who's the lead developer at our company and they started getting to work on making Nova Echo amazing you know long story short and so through bringing the right people on my team I was able to build technology that far surpassed what we had before and through bringing other people on my team I was able to sell and distribute that technology much easier and build systems around it so that I wasn't getting overloaded with 20 clients anymore. So how long did it take them? So basically you get, you sell your company, you then take the proceeds of that to start Nova Echo. How long does it take John and Charles to build out the tech? That's actually good enough that you can actually sell it. Yeah, so we have a jury rig system for like eight months. Okay. So you're selling the jury rig system in the short term while they're building the industrial grade one. Yes. Got it. Yeah. So it's slightly better than Air because Air really didn't know what they were doing. They were the first, to be fair. But it wasn't great. So anyway, they start building it. We're still constantly developing it. It's not easy to build this technology. So it was a year's work to actually get it to a point where it was usable and sellable. And now we're switching over and over to the second version of this new technology, which is Nova Echo 2.0, which is really exciting because it's so much better than our 1.5 version. So many more features, lower latency. It's just much better. So we're continuously improving on this technology. But yeah, it took a while, and that's with my vast experience in specifically voice AI and John's vast experience in technology and Charlie's vast experience in AI development and other people on our team as well. We had an advisor that was the ex-CIO Bank of America. She assisted as well with some things early on. It was just like. How did you connect up with her? Through John or through some connection you had? Through another connection that I had. Okay. Yeah. I'm just trying to wrap my head around what must have been a 16 or 17-year-old saying, oh, yeah, I can get the CIO of Bank of America to be an advisor. Like, that's not a normal thing. How does that, you know, how does that process go? I mean, maybe, look, at the end of the day, I will say this too. Like, since the first time I met you, one night I didn't know how old you were. I would have thought you were in your early 20s at least. You seem like a very mature kid. But you don't seem, I could have this wrong, you don't seem insecure about your age, which is wonderful. But, I don't know, maybe you just had it well. Yeah. I mean, there's positives and negatives to it, you know. I've experienced a lot of the negatives of it, of course. Like, not being taken seriously is probably the biggest one. Right. But there's just proof. Like when I was 15, I would not have had that confidence. But by 16, I had made an immense amount of money that I didn't think was possible at the time. I had built a team. I had serviced dozens of clients. So I just had the confidence in numbers. And it was like, okay, I know where this industry is going. I know where our company is going. I know how good our team currently is. That just breeds confidence. and also I had been working on self-improvement since I was 14 as well. So I've gotten a very good control over my own mind, basically. I want to come back to that, but while we're talking about people not taking you seriously, I just have to tell this part of the story for the podcast because it's so fucking funny to me. A couple days ago, you get pulled over in your cool Mercedes with your vanity license plate at four in the morning. Thank God you're not drinking. wonderful but you get pulled over by these cops and they see you're 17 and they're like i'm sorry but we're gonna have to call your mom please tell this story because that is just fucking priceless and by the way i thought about it again like i was saying with sergio's content you've got to see if you can foyer his body cam you know video because that's that would be fucking gold dude that would go viral that's cool that's cool um yeah so i was i was driving back to the villa that we just that it's like four in the morning. I'm, I just drove an hour and a half and I'm six minutes away from the villa. It's like at the end, the lights yellow. I'm like, just give me the turn. I'm tired. I just want to go home. Right. Um, so I just, I step on the gas a little bit and the, the inch before I cross the line, it turns red and I see a cop there. I'm like, please don't be petty. Please don't be petty. Please don't be petty. And I look at my back. Yeah, exactly. I look at my back mirror. I see it. I go. So I go over the train tracks over there. I pull over to the side. and you know I lower my window put my hands on the steering wheel and officer comes over the flashlight he's like hi I'm like hey how you doing I thought I was gonna be a little nervous but I was just you know very calm again like I was talking about before it helps a lot when you can just control yourself so it's like hey how you doing officer and he said why are you driving at night I said I'm throwing an event here I'm just heading back to it I was I was up in Boca and he's like okay let me have your license so I pull out my license I give it to him he walks back to the car he comes back and he's like he just looks at me for a second and looks at my license he goes you're 17 and i was just like yeah you're very expensive mercedes yeah and i was just like yeah but i'm throwing an event here i throw events for business owners and i also have an ai company that's why my license plate says you know ai on it and he was just like okay and i was like it seemed like he didn't believe me i was like i can show you on my phone if you want and he's like sure I'm curious. So I pull up my Instagram. I show him the events that we throw. I show him a little bit about my company, my company's Instagram. And he's like, wow. And he goes to Sparner, this kid's 17. He runs an AI company. And Sparner goes, what? So this partner comes around the other side. So I lower the other window. And he's like, hey, bro, how you doing? I'm like, good. How are you? He said, good, good. I'm 22. You know, I'm trying to get into crypto and AI. I don't really want to be a cop anymore. And it's really inspiring that your license plate says that. Tell me more about what you do. I was like, oh, well, I have an AI company. and make sales calls, six customer service calls over the phone for business owners. He's like, oh, that's awesome, man. Meanwhile, the other cops are standing there. And then he leaves. He comes back, and he says, hey, you know, this would have been a very expensive ticket. We're not going to give you a ticket. You've been very quiet. Oh, I did miss something. All right, right before that, he goes, okay, well, you are a minor, so we do have to call your mom. And I was like, okay. So I call my mom. At 430 in the morning or whatever it is, right? Yeah, which I don't know how I feel about that. But I called my mom, and I was like, hey, I accidentally ran through a red, and I got pulled over. And the cop was like, your son's been very cooperative, whatever. And he, we just need to call you because he's a minor. And mom was like, oh, yeah, I know he's heading back to the event. That's no problem. Thanks for calling me, though. And the cop's like, perfect. And then he goes, he comes back, and he gives me something that says, hey, it would be a very expensive ticket, but you've been amazing, so we're not going to give you a ticket. And congratulations, man. And he's like, wait, by the way, is this your car? And I was like, yeah. He's like. And then the other guy gave me his Instagram, and the cop gave me his card. So, yeah. Unbelievable. What a great story. You guys, seriously, I don't know if you had a body cam on, but if you can get that video. Dude, think about that. That video would be gold. Yeah. I might give him a call. You got his card. That's right. And you have his Instagram. And just tell him, you just want the clip about we have to call your mom. Just that part of it. That would be fucking gold. Well, so let's talk a little bit about how you have such good control. You know, you seem like a very stoic guy, very in control. Where did that come from? Have you always been that way, or is that something that you set out to become? Yeah, no, I've always been that way to some extent. I've continued to refine it. But even since I was little, it was kind of stupid, but when I was like six or seven or eight or nine, I was like famous in my elementary school class for never having cried. Okay. In school because everyone would always cry all the time when they got hurt. And I was like proud of that then. It was, you know, a little kid thing. But anyway, I'd get hurt at the park all the time, a lot worse than other kids actually because I'd be very active. And I just, I don't know. I don't know what it was in me. I just never cried. I'd feel the pain. I'd feel like I wanted to cry, but I would just stop myself from doing so. And that was just an early example that I can remember, but that continued on. And I've spent a lot of time, a lot of time, a lot of focus, a lot of energy just thinking about my thoughts and thinking about my feelings and being able to control them. Not feeling them, but being able to choose which kinds of emotions that I feel and how I feel them and how I express them or don't. and having that control over your mind and your body is really important because if i'm in any situation where i need to just be like this which is a lot of situations when you're business i can be and it's easy for me at this point so and it goes vice versa too if i need to be very like up and and energized i can do that too with the snap of a finger so anything that i need to be, I can just be, I don't need anything to be it. Right. So, um, how big is your organization now? And be like contractors and employees total? Nine people. Yeah. Nine people day to day. Yeah. Got it. So I remember, um, when we were in, on the Costa Rica trip, uh, I'm spacing on his name, a good looking Dominican kid, black guy. Yeah. So, um, if I remember the story he told me correctly, you guys met in a sauna at lifetime. Was it, I think it was. And, uh, said he wanted to get in tech sales. And so you recruit a guy who's what, uh, 12 years older than you at the time you were what? Probably 15 or 16, 15, 15. Um, tell me how that conversation went from your point of view. Cause I, I, that's just blows me away. So you're in a sauna sweating your ass off and, and, uh, you start talking about your company and next thing you know, you got a sales guy. Yeah. So what's funny is when I first started working with Sergio, he brought me to lifetime, which is a fancy gym. And when I first walked in there, I was like, Whoa, this is amazing. Cause I was going to planet fitness and I had never experienced anything. They haven't seen planet fitness in a lifetime. Yeah. Opposites. So I never experienced that. And I walked in, I was like, this is a resort. This is where rich people go. I was blown away. Going to the sauna that day, the first time I go to the lifetime fitness and we meet a guy there named, uh, John or Jake or something. He was a very nice guy and he was a business owner. I was like, Ooh, that's a cool connection that we just met in the sauna. So then I go back with Sergio next, the next week. And we meet that mentor that told me about the AI company. Wow. So look how that works. And he's taught me a lot of other ways as well. Then I decide, okay, this is awesome. So with the little bit of money I made from working with Sergio, I'm like, okay, I got to get a membership here. I can't afford it, but I'm getting it. Yeah. Because I don't want to make money. You can't afford not to. Right. Exactly. So I get the membership, and a couple months later, I'm in the sauna. I'm always having business discussions in the sauna, and I have one guy here who I'm talking to. And he's like, oh, what do you do? And I was like, oh, I run a software company. Or, I don't know. Memory's all mixed up. So he's talking to Hamley in the sauna, and Hamley's talking about how he does metal sales. The guy's telling him about his business. Then the guy sees me in the sauna just watching their conversation, and he goes, oh, what do you do? And I say, oh, I actually run a software company. And then Hamley goes, oh, I was looking to get into tech sales. I said, all right, well, let's talk because I have a software company, and I'm looking for somebody to do sales for me. So let's exchange contact info. So we get out of the sauna. He gives me his number, and I text him. I'm like, okay, let's hop on a call. I've never really hired somebody. I don't know how this works. I don't know what I'm supposed to ask them. I just know I'm supposed to do an interview. So we hop on a Zoom call, and I'm just like, hey, what sales experience do you have? And he tells me, oh, I have a couple years. I'm like, okay, and what's your goal with tech sales? Why do you want to do that? And I just start asking random questions. I probably got like three or four questions in, decent questions. but that was it. I didn't know what else to ask. I had no idea. And then he starts asking about me. He's like, how old are you by the way? I was like, Oh, I'm 15. And I could see he's just like, what the fuck? Yeah. He's just like, okay, this is a joke. There's no reason I should be talking to you. And I think he just like dismissed it. And I kind of dismissed it too. Cause I didn't really know if I need a sales rep. I didn't know how to find a sales rep. So I was just like, all right, whatever. Then next week we happen on another call. We get to know each other a little bit more next week. Same thing. And I'm like, all right. He's like, why don't I shadow you on some calls? And I'm like, okay, sure. That's a good start. So he starts shadowing me on some of the calls, and he learns the sales process. So he shadows me on a lot of these calls, like probably dozens of them. And he learns how I talk about the technology. He learns about the technology. Then I start assigning some calls to him, and I start shadowing his. He's not even an employee yet. No. He's just like, yeah. Whatever. Okay, yeah. I start assigning some calls to him. I start shadowing his calls now and reviewing his calls and training him a little bit more and that kind of just continued to progress and progress and progress and now he's the head of sales at Nova Echo and he's doing amazing so yeah freaking unbelievable honestly it's like you know what's so funny to me is when I talk to people that are not not not natural entrepreneurs all I hear are excuses right it's like well I don't have this I don't have that I don't have this I don know how to do this I don know how to do that You knew nothing You didn know how to do anything And you figured it all out And like everything every single step along the way you learned by doing And not only that, but like we were talking about earlier, that experiential learning like is just so much deeper than the ivory tower classroom bullshit that is almost, one, it's whatever you're hearing is usually 10 or 15 years out of date anyway, and it's just not practical. um so you know what's you know as you think about you know even though you are a few years in now um and the business is doing pretty well i think from the last conversation we had is that still just things going pretty well in general yeah um you know how do you think about do you have a three-year plan do you have a five-year plan like how do you think about the future of it um you know is this something that you want to do for a long time or you want to get it to a certain you know, state, you know, size and, you know, have a really big exit and then take the proceeds of that and do an Elon Musk and start some other shit. Like, what are you thinking? Yeah. I try not to think too far into the future, which sounds counterintuitive, but I like setting a very general goal for where I want to be in the future in my head and then completely forget about it and just focus on the day to day because thinking too much about what I'm going to do in 10 years, five years is crazy because five years ago, I wasn't even in business. It's different when you're older, I'm sure. And I'll experience that then to some degree. But right now I'm focused on, okay, next month, what do we want to do this month? What do we want to do? But okay, generally in three to five years, I do want to exit. I love this company and I want to grow it a lot and help thousands, if not tens of thousands of business owners and then I want to exit it and move on to the next thing. I love innovating. I love figuring things out as I do it. And once the company gets to a point where innovation drastically slows, I'm going to want to innovate on something else. That's going to be a very long time in my industry because it's so new. So it has that longevity of innovation. That's also why I love technology. But a lot of technologies will eventually come to a plateau in innovation where they still innovate. If you don't innovate, you die. but it's not the same level of, okay, I don't know how to do this. I need to solve the puzzle. How do I do this? I need to do it. I need to fail. I need to then do research after I fail to learn why I failed and then do it again. So kind of the school sort of education but in small amounts right after you fail, specifically about what you failed about. Sure. I love that. So, yeah, long story short, three to five years is when I want to sell the company and then move on to something which will probably be hardware. because by that time, software is going to become way too easy for everybody, and there will be no challenge anymore. Interesting. I will say, though, even when you're older, the way I think everyone should think about business, and it doesn't matter how old or how experienced, is you should have a very, very detailed plan for the next 12 months. And everything past that, I think it's useful. You might say, hey, I think I want to exit in three to five years, but if in year four you realize if you did it for five more years you could get a 10x valuation maybe you stay longer like like you know so you want to have the traject the trajectory of hey i want it to be this right and this is very generic i'll use it very kind of you know almost like set it and forget it kind of like you were saying but that next 12 months that needs to be you know really thoughtful knowing that you'll make adjustments right that that's that's been my experience about what works best regardless of how old or how experienced. And if you don't have that detailed plan for the next 12 months, you can still make great progress. You just won't make it quite as fast and quite as constructively as if you did have a plan. So that's my experience for what it's worth. Well, so let's talk a little bit about, you know, the more personal side of things. Do you have, because you didn't really mention much other than you said your mom was a single mom, Do you have any relationship with your dad or is he in your life at all or no? Not too much. Not too much. Not too much. So I have a donor. So my mom had talked to a lot of people that she thought she might want to marry, but she didn't find anybody that she loved enough to spend the rest of her life with. She always wanted a kid. She just couldn't find anyone that she really wanted to spend her life with. So she was like, okay. She was 36 when she had me. So she was like, okay, you know, there's a time limit. And I can't find anyone I really want to have a kid with, but I really want to have a kid. So she got a donor, and she had me alone. My grandparents have always been very close to me and my mom, so they've been extremely supportive. Okay. Always there to help us. But, yeah, she just decided to do it alone. Wow. You know, it's funny because I've heard many women say that. Your mom is the first person I've ever heard to actually do that. It's interesting. Yeah, it's risky. Yeah. It takes a lot of guts. Yeah, it does take a lot of guts. Well, so, you know, as you think about, you know, your life trajectory and you think about things like dating and relationships, and I think, you know, we've talked about this, you know, Yumi and Sergio and some of the other guys. But, again, I think that one of the biggest blind spots successful men have is often in their romantic relationships. It's a thing that, you know, often is their Achilles heel. You seem like a very, very thoughtful guy. I'm guessing this is something you probably thought a little bit about at least. yeah of course so what are your thoughts in that direction like is it something like hey look I'm going to have relationships you know I'm still really young and you know 10 or 15 years from now I'll think about it more deeply then like how do you think about it yeah I have never personally seen a way that a relationship in my life would be a net positive to my work other than things I could have a personal assistant do. But that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to have a relationship. I would have a relationship purely for the pleasure of it and not, you know, just generally. Like talking to, when women are around, talking to women, it's just always more fun. It's just always more fun. I very much enjoy talking to women, you know, in a relationship sort of way. And you can often go a lot deeper when you're talking to a woman for some reason, at least for me. Because they're very just emotional. They're just, I don't know. They're just the perfect creature to talk to. That sounds bad, but it's true. Outside of raising a child. So when it comes to raising a child, I could never hire a personal assistant or a maid. Or personally, I don't want to hire a nanny either. The woman that I choose is the woman that I want my kids to be like. So I want her to be the one that raises them for as much time as possible. They should be around her and me as much as possible because we're the people that they should be like. but when it comes to other things I don't see how a woman would necessarily improve my work compared to the time that I would spend with her it won't it won't I can tell you for certainty it won't but I absolutely want a long term relationship I think it's great and I really want kids and I think it's really crucial for kids so yes I've thought about it I've spent time talking to girls that I know I never ever want to marry and spend my time with. And I've talked to girls that are like, okay, they'd be the perfect wife and a great mother to my children. Right. I need more time to understand exactly what I want. And the reason I say that is because a year ago I thought I knew what I wanted and now I realized that I was an idiot then. So clearly it's going to happen again. But. Yeah. So how do you think having your dad just be a donor versus someone your mom was romantically involved in and not having a father, how does that change or impact the way you view the kind of father you want to be? That's a good question. I have become a lot more independent because I didn't have a father. And I think I've become more in control of myself because I didn't have a father. But it can go the opposite way as well. I think it's kind of like a high risk, high reward kind of thing where when you raise a kid differently, there's a much higher risk that they go to jail and they end up doing a ton of drugs and they end up horribly. But there's also a small chance that they could become even better than the average in some ways. So I want to still raise my kids in a way that encourages independence, which means I'm not necessarily telling them what to do when they should do it, and I'm not telling them always that this is right and this is wrong, kind of letting them figure it out for themselves, which is what my mom let me do, but being there to guide them and keep them safe when needed. That's how I want to raise my children. I think independence is the most important skill you can teach somebody because it just allows them to teach themselves their own skills, and people that don't have dependence because their parents are helicopter parents, they're always people that I don't want to spend my time around because they can't think for themselves. They are rarely entrepreneurs. A lot of entrepreneurs grew up in households where they had to be independent and they had to figure things out for themselves. So, yeah, independence and freedom, which kind of go together, is a really big value for me. You know, it's funny. I was thinking I want to have dinner with yours and Sergio's moms. Yeah. I want to talk to your mom about her lending you the five grand. Yeah, no, that was a huge risk as well. Well, I'm guessing they're pretty proud of themselves right now, patting themselves on the back. Well, Joey, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Again, shamelessly plug yourself and your company. Where can they find you? Where can they find your business? And start using you to... Actually, before you do that, actually, let's talk a little bit about the unit economics of your business. So if someone's using your business for, you know, so a sales AI agent that's going to help book calls or customer service, like what's the per minute cost versus like what's the ratio of what it would cost to have a human do it versus having your technology do it? Yeah. So with our technology, there's a small monthly subscription and then there's a per minute cost. So right now, let's say if you're doing customer service, let's say it's 15 cents per minute of talk time. Right. That means if you're getting, let's say, 100 calls a day, each of those calls are roughly two minutes. 200 minutes times .15 is $30. So $30 is what you're going to spend per day for using our technology if you get 100 calls a day. If you get 100 calls a day and you have a human there answering those calls, let's say if they're two minutes, that's about three hours and 20 minutes of time that they have, and that's over the course of a day. So, yeah, you're going to need one full-time employee probably because the calls are going to be at the end of the day. So you're spending, let's say, the wage is like $20 for that in America times eight is going to be $160 versus 30 with us. So just off that, you're like 20% of the cost. Right. Yeah. Wow. And not only that, but it could be uniformly perfect. They didn't wake up hungover. They didn't show up late to work. There's none of those headaches. You don't have to worry about turnover and training and retraining. When you have turnover, all that goes away. Yeah, it's uniformly perfect while still being very human-like, which is the perfect combination that wasn't possible with these robot answering machines. We do not do press one, press two. That stuff is horrible. I don't like it. Nobody likes it. So we don't do that. We kind of took the best of the robot and the best of the human and combined it. And it also allows for human customer service reps to move up and be promoted. So, for example, if our AI is doing the base level customer service or sales, it can do outbound and inbound calls, then the sales or customer service rep can now do so much more with their job. They have higher leverage because now the repetitive tasks like just constant follow-up calls or answering basic questions that everybody asks on the website can be automated. And now they can help the most important customers. Let's say customer service can help the most important customers handle the questions that are really complex. that the AI can't solve. Right. So that allows the customers that have complex questions to get those complex questions answered instantly because there's capacity and allows everyone else to get questions answered instantly because there's a robot such AI doing it. So it just, it helps the consumer, it helps the business, it helps the actual people in their job because they'll have more time and have more leverage. It's just a net positive for the world. Well, and I guess, are you able to extract from those calls themselves the most commonly asked questions, you know, sentiment about whether people are annoyed or not. Like, is there any tech around that to extract other metadata from those calls that you would never get if a human was taking them? Yep, yeah. So we have detailed analytics, so it pulls out call scoring, pulls out a summary, pulls out tags based on what was said in the call. It will eventually be able to tell you what to change in your script or change it for you so that it will be better on the next one. and that way you have an employee that trains itself, which is pretty cool. Wow, amazing. Well, where can people find you and where can they find your company? I'm on Instagram, Joey Seaman. That's J-O-E-Y-S-E-E-M-A-N. My company website is NovaEcho.ai, which is N-O-V-A-E-C-H-O.ai. And you can also find me on X at the same name. Joey, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. you