Owen Sadeghpour. A year ago, he was the technical employee or founder at an earlier company and has raised over $50M. Now, he’s working at a successful company. He’s also got a different project called You Exec.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Blue Ocean Strategy and How to Win Friends and Influence People
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Squarespace
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-10
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “The older you get the more you realize that human relationships are 50% of your work”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:05 – Nathan introduces Owen to the show
01:46 – You Exec is a community of professionals that are looking to improve their careers or the way they have relationships with people
01:57 – You Exec creates incredible resources for free and for paid members
02:13 – The paid members have the advantage of more features than the free members
02:26 – Paid members pay $4/month
02:43 – You Exec also takes insightful books, like The Lean Startup, and summarizes them
03:30 – You Exec’s content is usually posted on many different channels
- 03:35 – Some of these channels include Medium, LinkedIn and Facebook
03:56 – You Exec has a mailing list that people subscribe to
04:25 – You Exec used to be something else
04:33 – As a technical person, Owen would write technical articles which were posted on Hacker News, a Y-combinator news stream
- 04:43 – Owen’s article landed on the front page
- 04:59 – Owen’s first article was Google and Facebook Ad Traffic is 90% Useless
05:20 – Nathan shares how he found Owen and what piqued his interest in him
05:50 – Owen has been a follower of Hacker News
06:02 – The first article wasn’t intentionally made to blow up
- 06:49 – When Owen submitted the article, it got 30 upvotes only after a few minutes
- 07:03 – The readers were mostly looking at the tools that Owen featured
- 07:16 – By the time Owen got 50-60 points, Owen noticed that it wasn’t getting on the front page which was supposed to happen
- 07:27 – Owen got some coffee and after 6 hours, he got tons of emails and the article was on the front page
- 08:20 – Owen’s objective in creating the article was to share with engineers that they’re wasting their money
- 09:10 – The article got a total of 30K views
09:47 – Owen wants people to see You Exec’s value; that’s why they sign up
09:51 – Owen doesn’t share You Exec’s numbers
10:40 – You Exec has around 1k signups on the paid membership
11:11 – Owen has Google Analytics on while working so he saw where the referrals are coming from
11:56 – The first article still gets around 10 readers a day
12:20 – Owen focuses on insights to bring traffic
12:50 – Owen is passionate in improving patients’ lives
13:08 – Owen believes that a media company is great, but his passion lies in helping individuals
13:44 – You Exec also pays for resources
- 14:25 – When You Exec pushes out a weekly newsletter, they include references to the creditor
- 14:50 – The article should save You Exec’s members hours of work
15:25 – You Exec pushes out all the sources of things
16:44 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Create something of value and people will stick with you.
More and more people are finding ways to shave hours off their workload WITHOUT sacrificing their quality of work.
Relationships with your colleagues are KEY to having a great work experience.

Resources Mentioned:

721: 543 Upvotes Got Him on HackerNews Front Page

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders