This is a fantastic interview that I (kinda) did with Yaro, a serial entrepreneur that's been in the game for decades. Instead of a typical interview, Yaro did a voice recording where he answered all questions about how he:
- Created Inbox done (a full service inbox management company)
- Accounts for the 70 contractors he uses to keep his company running smoothly
- Created his dream life and tips for how you can too.
This interview is long but I dare not cut it down as everyone of his answers is a gold mine of insights.
Along with the written version, I'll include the audio version of this interview (just below).
Enjoy!
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your business.
So my name is Yaro Starak, and I am the co-founder of inboxdone.com. inboxdone.com is a virtual executive assistant company that specializes in email management.
We've been in business for about seven years now, and pretty simple business, we step into a person's life, especially their inbox, and reply to their emails for them, we provide two assistants to every client. Our clients are usually small business owners or leaders in small companies, and they're just drowning an email and all the tasks that emails trigger, and we step in and take those tasks and those emails away from them, we reply to the emails, not just manage them, and usually it gives people back one, two or three hours a day of time. So it's a pretty big unlock for the right people.
I'm a co-founder. I have one other co founder with the company we started seven years ago, but I've actually been an entrepreneur myself since the late 1990s as a teenager, after graduating from high school, the.com bubble was happening back then, and I was very interested in the internet and and got my first broadband connection back then, which really kicked off a love affair with the Internet. I won't go into every business I have, but, you know, I started a little e-commerce Store, trading cards.
Then I had another agency back then, it was an essay and thesis editing service. Then I got into blogging and podcasting, and I had a whole career there, for about 15 years as an online coach and teacher. I wrote content, I had a podcast, I created courses, wrote ebooks, spent a lot of time just being a creator and making a very good living doing that.
It was a lot of fun. And then seven years ago, inbox done was started, actually, because way, way, way back when I was in my early 20s, I was drowning in email, and I had to delegate email to an assistant, and I always thought that was a service that more people needed. So although it took me 13 years later to actually start the business, the idea was I was back in the early 2000s.
What inspired the idea of your company?
Okay, well, I've just started to answer that. So, the slightly longer version, I was running an essay editing, kind of a very small agency, you know, I was like, 20 years old, so I was just learning about business and entrepreneurship, and I had some success.
It took a while, and I was reaching the point where I did want to travel, basically, that's the simple answer. I wanted to have a bit more time freedom. And I was very big on the idea of a lifestyle business that gives you the freedom to choose how you spend your time. And email was the thing I was trapped to. So it was kind of like the last step in what you'd call systematizing a business. I needed to bring on a person who would reply to the emails, which, in a lot of ways meant they would run the business, because the business was run entirely through email. All the jobs from our clients would come into the inbox.
All the communication with our contractors who did the work was through email. You can, you know, check if the money came in. All of this, I basically handed over to my first ever email assistant. She was a friend from university about to have her first child. She was looking for a stay at home job. We thought we'd give it a try, and it took a while.
I had to spend a month or two just teaching her how to deal with each different situation that hit my inbox, and how to process an email, reply to an email, and how to deal with situations that those emails refer to.
But once I was up and running, after a month or two, I would wake up in the morning and my inbox would be empty, which I think was probably one of the biggest breakthrough moments in my life, and it's actually the breakthrough I love to give our clients today. That feeling of waking up and having zero emails in an inbox is pretty special, so that's the origin story for the idea.
Can you walk us through the process of developing your product?
Yeah, so, you know, in our case, it is a service, but it's very much a productized service. So the way it actually started, in terms of the actual business starting. So as I said, the idea for it was all the way back in the early 2000s and it wasn't until around 2016 that I was winding down from my coaching, teaching business and wanted to start something new, something that wasn't about me, could have a team behind it. So I had this idea for this service, and I wasn't sure if it would work, if it could be profitable, but I knew how to. Test it.
So at the time, I actually had three people on my inbox managing my email because I had quite a few customer service questions come through for my coaching business, and one of them was a very proactive person. Her name was Claire, and she had a lot of leadership qualities. She was always asking for raises, so I thought she might be the perfect person to be my co-founder and test this idea up, because we could combine the two things we needed.
She could be the first person to be the email assistant for our clients, because she had the skill from doing that for me, and I could bring, hopefully, the first few customers because I had a small audience with my blog, my podcast and my email newsletter.
So I could go to my audience and say, who wants to have their email managed by the same people who manage my email, which is exactly what I did. I went to my newsletter, I sent an email like that. We ended up getting five people interested. I made calls with all five of them.
Three of them were serious. Two of them signed up, and those two became our first clients. We charged $1,000 a month, and my co-founder went to work managing their email, building the systems that we use in my company for them and see if it worked. Short answer, it did.
They were happy. In fact, one of them is still with us today, seven years later, and we were able to see that there was a profit margin so we could actually build a business around it. Obviously, there was a lot to learn. Still, we'd never hired anyone else to do the service.
It was the co-founder being the only person providing the service to start with. So that's how it started. And then going forward, we had to learn a lot more. So I was on the marketing side. I had to keep figuring out how to find our next client and our next client and our next client.
I'm still doing that today, and my co-founder started to build a team, so she created systems and processes and to do what I said before, we productized our service. So today, we've got a team of about 70 contractors, as well as a management team of about six or seven people. And the process we go through to deliver the service is very much a process.
So, you know, we have one core service. It's a subscription based service, so there are different prices, but it's only for the same service, just more or less of it, you know, the number of hours we work, and there's, that's it like, there's no complicated pitching, there's no quoting process, no negotiating.
It's, like, we're going to manage your email. We're going to do all the tasks. We have a system for taking it all over. We obviously have a hiring and training system to find the right people to do this. So it is a very systematized service business.
When you started building your business, when did you notice traction? Oh, shit, moment?
Yeah, that's always a, you know, the first sale is always a big deal. You know, I guess you could say those first two in the test run with my newsletter, once they'd been onboarded, once we knew that they were finding value in the service and that my co-founder was able to do the work and still leave a profit margin. So, you know, pay her as the first contractor, but leave a profit for the company that validated the possibility that this would work.
That's probably the time where I was, like, ready to put more energy into, like, we didn't even have a website yet. Like, that's, that's how simple it was. We just went to my newsletter.
So after that, we had to build a website. I think for me, though the real this is going to work, it was the point where we hit 10,000 a month, which actually happened really quickly. It's kind of funny to think back, because the initial start was quick to 10,000 but then we went through a really slow period of, actually, a number of years. So I went from very excited to oh my god, this is growing a lot slower than I expected, especially after that fast start.
But I'll save that story maybe for some of your future questions here. But yeah, within the first year, we knew we had something that people valued. It's you're dealing with people.
There's always, you know, variables that you have to deal with, and the bigger you get, the the more variables you're dealing with. So like all agencies, it's not necessarily the easiest business to run, but it's an easy business to start. That's what I love about it. You can test service business ideas very quickly, very easily. Just go out there and see if someone wants a service and then you deliver it.
What strategies have been most effective in acquiring customers and reducing churn.
Okay, yeah, two sides of the equation there. So I'm on marketing side of things. Acquiring customers has been a constant, never ending battle. The initial starting point, as I said, was my own audience.
It was really easy, I just went to my newsletter subscribers and asked “who wants the service.” Then I went to my social media following.
I continued to go back to my newsletter, my blog, I mentioned it on my podcast, like I sponsored my own podcast with my company, and all that brought in our first three or four clients, which was good because it helped us just to perfect our systems, learn more, and, in fact, hire our first team members to delivered the service, which was really important, because that's actually where we built the company.
You know, when it's just me and my co-founder, it's really just a test, once we had our first staff members, like, can they deliver the service that we've come up with? So from there, marketing was a series of experiments, which we still do today. We've done Google ads.
We've done a lot of work on organic SEO with Google, creating content for our blog, our website, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Facebook, Instagram, meta ads. We've sponsored conferences. We have hired agencies to improve on all these different ad platforms.
We've sponsored other people's podcasts. I was a guest, and for many years a guest on podcasts, which was, again, a way just to build exposure. So all of these things worked to varying degrees. In summary, today, really, Google would be probably number one still in terms of both organic and paid, LinkedIn, has been a pretty good source on the paid side, and then referrals, obviously, the bigger you get, the more referrals start to come in. So that's a source.
And then there's all kinds of weird places that people find us, you know, like they hear about you in a mastermind group they're in, and that's a referral, but you don't really know how they heard about you.
Like someone in the group heard about you and then they heard about you, and how did they hear about you? You don't really know that makes marketing a challenge, because you're never 100% sure where your next customer is going to come from. But yeah, it's definitely a never ending battle.
But I think one of the best things about time is you start to see the patterns. You start to see what you start to get better at what you do, which actually is probably the connection to your second half of your question about reducing churn so agencies, especially recurring based agencies like ours, churn is such a huge part of the success of your business.
Because, you know, even if you have a consistent churn, let's say your churn rate is 5%. 5% when you have 20 clients is 1 client a month. That’s a bad month. You lose one but the bigger your number, the bigger the amount you lose. So I guess what I'm trying to say is early days.
We might go one month two, month three, month with no one leaving, and then you get someone leaving, and that's when you've only got 10 clients. Then you get to 20 clients. And you know, you might get a month where you lose two and that's a 10% churn rate. And that's not good.
You can't survive at a 10% churn rate. We've actually been consistently under 5% in fact, usually we're around two and a half percent with our churn rate. You know, two and a half percent, when we're at 70 or 80 customers, actually is two customers a month, and that's a lot.
So if you don't either grow bigger, like you bring on more than two a month, you're going backwards every month, which is not a good feeling, right? So the bigger you get, the bigger your churn.
Like, if we get to 1000 customers, suddenly, two and a half percent, you know, what is that? There's going to be reasons people leave. They have issues with their funding. They bring on new staff. Situations change. That's always the case. So if we stay around two and a half percent forever, I'll be very happy.
The reason why, I guess it is as low as it is for us is we have, first of all, a service that is very much never ending. Everyone gets emails every day and never stops. So we always have something to work on. For people. It's not like a project where we do it, we finish it, it's done. Nope.
Tomorrow, there's gonna be another 100 emails in the inbox, and we're gonna deal with them for you. So that helps. Obviously, it helps that we have our own systems and processes, and a lot of that's about the onboarding, how we first introduce our team to the client.
How our team onboards with them, learns how to reply to emails, embeds with their process, works directly with them, builds a relationship. All these things make our service very much embedded in the life and the business of our clients. So that's also helpful. I could go on more. There's a lot in our hiring that we look for quality control.
We don't offshore to low cost labor. Most of our team are North American, Canadians, and Americans. There's a reason we do that, especially around just written English, emotional intelligence, empathy, communication skills, problem solving, all those kinds of issues, because email is very dynamic, and you need a certain level of skills to deal with it.
So that's probably the main thing, but I do want to emphasize this connection between churn and growth. So you know, if we're adding four clients but losing two, great, we're growing, and we're growing at a pretty good rate. I can look back, though, and there'll be a month where we'll have zero churn, and we'll get three clients, still great.
Then we'll have six clients, but lose three. Still good. But then we'll have, you know, around Christmas, often it happens where people are thinking about New Year's tightening up their budgets, whatever it might be, they cancel the service, and suddenly we'll lose five clients in one month.
Maybe we'll be okay, because we'll also get five clients that month or not. So it can be frustrating, especially when you're working on marketing, because you're really pushing hard to get every client, and then every time you lose one, you feel like it's fruitless, but our company has grown, you know, we're well over seven figures now. So overall, it's grown more than it's lost. And I hope that continues is the short answer, right?
How much revenue was your best year?
Okay, yeah. So to answer your question, I just mentioned that we're a seven figure business.
If we're talking our last or our current run rate, we'll probably do 1.5 million by the end of this year, maybe a bit more in revenue. It's been a good year, but as I said, You never really know like you could. We've had bursts, and then suddenly we'll just sort of stagnate and stay where we are, and then we'll go through a burst again. So it is that kind of business.
That's what service businesses are like. So I suspect we'll just keep doing what we do, which is roughly 25 to 50% growth every year. And honestly, if that kept going, I'd be very happy. So in terms of our margin, you know, the margin is always hard to discern, because I'll put it simply, myself and my co-founder, we will take out whatever's left over every month, depending on what I should say, we take out the profits.
But the profit is really just salaries for my co-founder and I, and that will be very variable, because it depends on, for example, we had to pay for our insurance last month.
That's another $3,000 just added to our variable expenses. But if you put it kind of simply, there's a core expense of our team that we have to pay. And then there's, and that's by far the largest, then there's marketing and software, which will be, you know, probably another 10% of the margin, and then the rest of the margin, which you would call profit, or maybe retained earnings, or seller discretionary income.
I think at the size of our business, is what it's actually called. So sell a discretionary income, which I say that seller, because that's when you're selling your company. It's really the owner's discretionary income. We don't pay ourselves a salary, so there's no set expense for the co-founders. We just take out what is left over. So it really does vary a lot.
There can be amazing months and not so amazing months, but I will say the margin, if you, if you call the money that the founders take as the profit margin, somewhere between 20 and 40% a month will be the margin. I think, to be a true entrepreneur, you have to obviously look at the margin that's not paying the leadership team.
So if myself, my co founder, were replaced, and we hired people, and they'd be well salaried people, probably both of them would be six figure staff members, because one's the CEO and one's the CMO, that's me and my co founder, the margin would probably drop to actually, what is traditional, around 20% I would say, would be what the company earns, just as profit over overall, and that would just go to the owners, obviously, or just, you know, stay in the company. And that's pretty typical for a service based business.
But yeah, as two co-founders right now, you know, it's taken a while, like, I took zero money out of the company for the first three or four years because I wanted to keep putting back into marketing and growth. So it's definitely been better than the last three years. Let's put it that way.
What is your biggest overhead expense?
So I just mentioned our team, by far, because we have a team of about 80, all up, almost all contractors. Well, actually. They're really all contractors, including ourselves.
And it's, it's part of our business. In order to grow we need to grow our team. And we're always doing that juggle between hiring and the demand. You know, new clients, new hiring, new hiring, new clients. That's the way it works.
What was your childhood like? Were you slinging candy on the playground?
I definitely had some, you know, desire for independent income and being able to make some money in non traditional ways. I guess the obvious thing for me, I didn't have, I did not have a lemonade stand. I grew up in Australia, and they had this thing called the trading post, which was essentially like a classifieds, pure classifieds newspaper.
I loved it every month. Oh, it actually came out every two weeks, and it was just full of secondhand stuff for sale. And I initially was using it just because I'd like to, you know, buy Nintendo games or things like that. But later, sort of, when I was 16 or 17, I started to use it just to sell stuff. Even before that, actually, I would sell my old toys. I would sell my video games.
More often than not, I was just selling old to buy new, like trying to generate some cash for the latest Nintendo game by selling all my old stuff. And that certainly showed me the, you know, the potential of, I guess, e-commerce, and there's money to be made selling items online. And then much similar to that, I got into eBay, and that's where I continued to sell some things. It wasn't really, though, until when I was 19 and I started a Magic the Gathering website. That's where I really got to experience a business, because I was buying and selling cards.
I was dealing with customers. I had the media side of the business. We were creating content. In fact, I think for me, the media has always been the sort of one consistent thread. I've always enjoyed publishing content, having some sort of content as part of a business, even though my current company in buckstein, it's probably the least content oriented business.
It is a service, but we have a lot of content on our website targeted at the niche phrases to bring in the right customers. So it's still a part of what we do. But everything I've done all the way back to that first business, we were writing articles, articles about people playing in tournaments for the Magic the Gathering card game, and that's how we became somewhat well known in that space, and that's how we got customers.
And we had a trading forum where people would trade cards directly between themselves. So a lot of learning from that first magic of the gathering experience.
How many attempts at building something did you make before you found what you're working on now? Did you always have an entrepreneurial drive?
So I think I've made that pretty clear. Yes, I've had the businesses that have worked to a degree, the card game business when I was 19/20 the essay editing agency when I was 20,I sold it when I was 27, I had a blog which led to a podcast and a newsletter, which then led to selling online courses, a membership site, some ebooks, and also just being an affiliate and making money from advertising, a classic influencer, creator, teacher, coach, type business, and that was like 15 years.
And then I've had my current business inbox done for seven years, another Services Agency, those are the things that have worked have made me money. Now along the way, I spent 50 grand on a software startup that ended up doing nothing or did something, but I realized it was not going to go where I wanted to go, so I stopped. I did dabble with other sort of content based websites along the way, but, you know, I tried a bit of software.
I built a plug in for WordPress with a friend, and we made a bit of money from that, but it was really just part of my media business, my blog business.
So other than that, it's just a graveyard of domain names and website ideas that I never really wholeheartedly got into. But you know, there's always those failures along the way that help you learn.
What's a big problem you faced as a business owner, and what were the emotions behind it?
Yeah, well, it's definitely not always glamorous. It's interesting, because I never considered another option. I never wanted a full time job. I never wanted to be earning a salary.
Have my income potential capped. Need to have a boss. I especially did not want to have an alarm clock. You know, have to get somewhere before 9am. I like to sleep late and work late. So for me, entrepreneurship was the only path.
I didn't see it as glamor. I mean, I saw sides of that obviously, you know, Richard Branson being a prime example. Everything he did seemed glamorous and exciting, and he was making big money starting all kinds of interesting companies. But I was also aware that there were lots of other companies. You know, the local Chinese food shop is a company.
So I knew what were the examples of what a small business might look like as well. What I didn't know for me was like, What business model did I want to get into? And I, as I mentioned earlier, was lucky that when I'm 18, the internet starts to become a place to start a business at the same time.
So I'm becoming an adult. The internet's becoming an adult when it comes to commerce, and I was just able to ride that wave and figure out ways to make money with different business models.
None of that was glamorous. Some of it was incredibly freeing. It's probably the best word to use, and maybe glamorous from a distance, like people would look at my life, especially when I ran my my blog, coaching, teaching, business. Because that's a very simple business model.
I traveled with it. There was a moment when I was 28 years old, I did a full trip around the entire world. I left Australia, flew through to America, Canada, over to Europe, then through the Middle East into Singapore and back to Australia. And that was like a nine month circle. And that entire time I was making money, I was sitting in cafes, writing my newsletter, writing my blog, and launching a course with a friend while I was sitting on the beach in Greece.
And I made more money during that time than I spent on the trip. And I spent a lot of money on that trip, a lot of flights, a lot of hotels, a lot of, you know, accommodation. So it was a real demonstration of what today, you know, you call, like, The Four Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss idea.
That was before Tim wrote the book, but I was very much living that kind of ideal lifestyle, especially with my, my teaching, coaching, content business, because it is a simple business. You just get to sit in cafes and write, build your audience, and you can make good money with good margins.
That's a kind of business, information products you can have 80% profit margins, especially if you keep things small and lean, which I did for about 10 years, or just me and a handful of contractors, was able to buy my first property, buy an investment property, buy a car, all thanks to that business as well as obviously, travel.
So all of that does look, I guess, glamorous, especially if you're the person sitting at a cubicle working a full time job you don't like. The lifestyle definitely looks a lot better, and it is a lot better. Don't get me wrong, I loved that part of my life. I still love it, but yeah, that was a great way to spend my 20s. For sure,
What do you spend the majority of your time doing in a given week?
So I'm mostly marketing and I guess coordinating the team. And then when I say marketing, a lot of marketing for me is not me doing the marketing. It's just doing approval, like looking at media, looking at keywords, looking at audience types, getting reports back from a few contractors, whether they're a consulting agency that's working on the LinkedIn ads, or the salesperson who's doing some of the sales calls and some of the follow up we do over email and text.
So a lot of my time is just replying to Slack messages and doing a few zoom calls here and there, checking on stats, you know, logging into the Google account, logging into the LinkedIn account, just checking out what's going on there. I do some sales calls still, which I love, because it gives me a real sense of the person that we help.
I learned about them, and then I do other things like those are the sort of main tasks I do for my active company. But I also have a couple of property investments. I've done a solar farm project in Ukraine, which is obviously a challenge right now, with the war going on.
I do a bit of angel investing, some stock investing, so there's a lot of paperwork as well, and admin that comes with all of these things and paying bills. But, you know, my main task is always inbox done and finding our next client. But yeah, it's not like I'm definitely not doing nine to five.
It's very ad hoc. You know, you wake up slowly, you do an hour here, you do a sales call. There, you go to the gym, you cook a meal, you meet a friend, you come home at night and do some more work. Then you might even do a sales call at night. So it's what I love about it. It is dynamic.
It's not structured. I can work with my emotions. I think this is probably the biggest thing I love and preach as being an entrepreneur as the key benefit. People talk about freedom being important, and this is true. This is a form of freedom. It's being able to work with your emotions, wherever they are, like if you are not feeling like you're going to be productive, just don't work. That's the great thing about being an entrepreneur.
No one's going to stop you. If you're, you start something. Like, for me, sometimes I'll do a task that's not business related. Like, I'll wash the dishes or do my laundry, and that gives me this energy and like, you know what and how many go write this article, or I'm going to go and research this new marketing method we might try or, you know, create something for the team to do.
And it's just the energy starts, and then I'll keep going, much like I'm doing right now talking to you. I'm going to make some calls to some other people after this, because I'm using my voice. I'm going to keep going. I've got to check some references for a new accountant.
So I like to ebb and flow with the energy, and that's probably the biggest thing I benefit from. This allows me to be moody when I want to be moody, lazy, when I want to be lazy, productive, when I want to be productive.
Your best advice for people that want to start their own business but feel stuck.
So when I was a coach, probably like 2007 to 2017 when I was actively coaching and teaching, I dealt with a lot of people like this. They were trying to build some kind of content based business around their expertise.
And so many of them, the majority of them, just could knock any momentum going. They'd have trouble even writing their first article or, you know, creating anything that would actually move them forward. Some of that, I think, is purely mental. So there's a sense of paralysis that comes from not being committed to a direction, not being committed to whether it's a topic or a business model or whatever you choose to sell.
And that's a problem, because if you don't feel the motivation behind what you're trying to build, you're just not going to do the work. There'll be too much self doubt, and that's unfortunately, a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't do the work, you don't get the outcome, and then your doubts are reinforced.
So I think what I like to tell people who are not sure you need to get sure enough about an experiment, not necessarily about it working, about it being a new business, but at the very least, you need to say, I'm going to find out whether coaching on this topic will work, or selling this e commerce product will feel good, or building this SaaS software is what I want to do. It might even be an experiment just to create something.
You don't have to make any money, but just go through the process of hiring a contractor on Upwork, working with them, seeing the problems you face, seeing the output they create, and building something. Sometimes it's building a website, sometimes it's building a little beta version of a software tool. Sometimes it's just doing a little survey of asking people what they want. You know, what their needs are. Sometimes just writing a blog post or creating a video on YouTube, just something that's like, Okay, I need to find my motivation and I need to learn. And learning only comes from action.
And then this is probably the most important point. You will never get tangible results from any sense of contemplation or study or looking at other people. You can do that for motivation. You can do that for learning, but you won't get any kind of tangible, accessible reaction from the world until you do something that puts something into the world. So that's what I encourage people to do.
Sometimes people, you know, have a tendency towards action. That's a simple way to put it. But I think the key here is to have a tendency towards experimentation, to give you some kind of real world feedback that doesn't have to be tied into whether you are going to succeed.
You're going to make money. It can just be tangible for the next step or the next goal. And sometimes you just find out, actually, you know what, I don't like selling e-commerce stuff. I'm glad about this experiment because I don't like the steps that are required here. I don't want to do this every day. I'm not going to do it. And sometimes you, you know, you do it, and you get this tiny little bit of glimmer, and you go, Oh, that was exciting.
I want more of that feeling. I'm going to do more. That's what happened to me. For example, with blogging, I did not have any expectation of building a business around having a blog, but I was finding myself enjoying this idea of sharing stories as an entrepreneur, as blog posts, and I started writing purely just to do that. Then I got some comments, some feedback, some emails from people, and then I got some subscribers, and then I'm like, Wow, I'm actually really enjoying all this interaction with people, I wonder how far I can go.
What's the next story I can share? I wrote another article, another article, and then my audience grew. And then I'm like, Ah, this. I have an audience. I might be able to make this into an income stream.
So, you know, I start doing some advertising, and each little step is a positive reinforcement to take the next step. So it helps if your energy is going in the right direction. That, to me, is the most important thing. If you're feeling stuck, you have to get the energy going in the right direction.
Do you have any crazy or interesting stories you'd like to share about your entrepreneurial journey, a crazy marketing tactic that you tried something awesome, that unexpectedly happened?
My most interesting experience has been the people I got to interview before they've been famous or during their earlier days. For example, Tim Ferriss was on my podcast three times the first time, and this is probably the most interesting story.
So my blog was started in 2005 and I think Tim's book came out in 2006, maybe 2007 and I say Tim's book, I mean his first book, The Four Hour Workweek, the most famous one. And my blog at that stage was, you know, well known in the internet marketing and sort of lifestyle design space, but it was a very small space, we’re talking early, early days. Very, very little YouTube, no Facebook. It's really just bloggers writing content.
And I was sharing stories about being an entrepreneur, and very much in a style of Tim Ferriss, where I was trying to build businesses for lifestyle, income, to travel, to have freedom and so on. And I had enough of an exposure that people would each week say, Hey, do you want to come read my book? I'd love for you to read it, review it, write a blog post about it, and so on. And sometimes I said yes, but more often than not, I started to say no, because I just couldn't read them all.
It was too many and I didn't want to write a review about a book I hadn't read. So what happens is this person named Timothy Ferris, who no one knows back then sends an email to me and says, Hey, I think we're kindred spirits. Your blog is very much in line with, you know what I'm interested in and, you know, passionate about. I've just written a book, The Four Hour workweek. I'd love to send it to you.
You know, no pressure if you want to review it in any kind of way, that'd be great. You don't have to if you want a copy of the book, and I say, Thank you, Tim for the offer. I've just got too many people offering you books right now. I have to just say no, because I'm not gonna have time to read it. And he's totally fine with that, of course. Now if you go go forward in time, there's many, many, many, many times where Tim has talked about the launch of that first book, and how he did some very strategic things around bloggers, in particular, attending a conference that was full of bloggers, building relationships, and then when it came time to release his book, using the blogosphere as a launchpad, so getting all these blogs to write about the same time.
So a few weeks later, maybe a few months later, after Tim sent that email to me, I noticed that these reviews start popping up on a lot of the blogs I follow, of this new book called The Four Hour Work Week, and I'm reading the reviews, and the book sounds really interesting, right up my alley, and I'm starting to regret the fact that I've rejected Tim Ferriss book when he emailed me. So I email him then and say, Hey, Tim, change my mind. I'm seeing all these reviews. I'd love to get a copy and read your book. So he sends me the book. I read it.
I eventually have him on my podcast, I think a year later as well, for the first time, and later on, another two times. And you know, for a while, he would actually be very much responsive to my emails and available to me. Then he became incredibly famous, and now he's too busy, and it's very hard to reach him, but it was nice to have that kind of connection.
And there's been, over the years, a number of people who I've connected with, especially through podcasting, that I was surprised by. You know, once you have a podcast and you invite people on, they'll show up.
You know, a few billionaire entrepreneurs that you wouldn't have heard of, they're more behind the scenes. And then some people who are, you know, TV actors. Had the creator of the MacGyver TV series on the podcast, which is kind of random. I would never have thought a business podcast would get me those kinds of people.
So it just showed me how much potential there is to reach people through the internet, even if you're just a podcaster, you know, or just a blogger, a writer, content creator, so that's probably the most fun story I've got to share.
Do you recommend any specific books or education that has had a massive impact on your journey?
So in terms of business books, I think, like, if I go back in time, there's, I find there's two types of books.
There's motivational books that are really inspiring. Give you a lot of stories about an entrepreneur. You just walk away feeling like you can do anything and you want to build an amazing business. Sometimes you get a bit of insight too, into the mindset and maybe some of the business models that they're using, but it's not getting a lot of tactical things you're not learning, like a step by step marketing technique, and then there's the tactical books, which is when you do get more of the tactical step by step, kind of like, here's a case study, here's what we did, here's why we did it, here's what worked. And that, to me, was often a lot about copywriting, like, really about positioning, the words you choose, and all of that, which is a whole subject in itself.
So in my life, the early days were filled way more with inspirational books. So Richard Branson's, I think losing my virginity was the first half. He wrote a second one, I think, called Finding my virginity, which came out 20 years later. They're both really good.
They both cover all of the amazing business things he's done, but his first book was really influential on me back then. I think the E Myth revisited. I read two in those early days. Again, this is before the four hour work week, but the E Myth was kind of the four hour work week, before the four hour work week, because it was all about, how do you build a business that can run without you and give you that freedom to do things like The Four Hour Workweek? So I certainly found the E Myth a very helpful book for me to realize that a business doesn't need to be a job that sucks all your time, which unfortunately for a lot of entrepreneurs, that's what happens.
I remember this too, because when I was like, 18/19, I was looking at different businesses to start. I noticed a lot of the entrepreneurs were working 12 hour days, and actually seemed to be more stressed than people who had nine to five jobs. And I was like, geez, I got to be careful here, because I want to avoid the nine to five, but I don't want to swap the nine to five for, you know, the seven to 11 that ends up being more stressful for less money. So I have to be careful what kind of business I choose and how I build teams and systems around me so that I can work on a couple hours here and there and get a good financial result. So the E Myth was a big part of that.
There were some other books that were, again, more motivational, the richest man in Babylon, the One Minute Millionaire, obviously Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That to me, wasn't as big for me, because I am not super into property investing, but that's great for sort of pointing out some of the things that you know help you get rich. What is it? Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. Lot of these are, again, they're more aspirational, inspirational than tactical. Later on in my life, I started to read more biographies that I think really help you get more of a sense of scale and time and the steps required.
For example, I'm listening to an audiobook now about the creator of Whole Foods, which is possibly my favorite place on the planet. I love going to Whole Foods. And this book is very step by step.
How did the first store get built? You know? How did the idea happen? Where they source products, what makes it work? It's about setting up the aisles in a certain way, the signage they use, the placement of the store, the movement in the economy, towards healthier food, you can start to see all these things coming together. And then you fast forward chapter by chapter. The second store, the 10th store, acquiring other stores, the IPO, all these big steps, but it builds on the previous step.
So I think any kind of bio, and I've read a lot of BIOS about businesses, from Starbucks to eBay to Google to Facebook to Twitter, you know, to Amazon, to smaller sites.
Back in the day, in Australia, I read a great book about realestate.com.au, which is Australia's large real estate website. How that got started. So I love tech stories about startups that did big things, Airbnb, Uber, you know, them all. All great stories turned into movies and TV shows.
Anything you'd like to share with the audience, a shameless plug, new features, etc.
Okay, just for me, there's only two things. There's my current company, inboxdone.com, if you are drowning an email, calendar, scheduling admin tasks, we provide two virtual executive assistants who will step in roll out our process to take over replying to your emails, doing all the tasks that those emails trigger, which might be things like follow up, entering data into CRMs, onboarding processes, invoicing, you know, following up with potential customers, and then other things, booking research, helping you manage and coordinate events, all the things that an EA an executive assistant can do, especially email, that's what we are great at. Then check out inboxdone.com if you just want more of my own stories.
I still have my blog. I still have a lot of teaching content on it. It's called Yarrow, y, A, R, O, dot blog. And you can dive into the back catalog there of everything, including those three interviews with Tim Ferriss. They're in there as well.
Find Yaro and his services on his website: www.inboxdone.com
and his blog Yaro.blog