Turning What You Know Into a Business - Justin Welsh, Founder of The Saturday Solopreneur

Shiv Gaglani: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani and today on Raise the Line, I'm happy to welcome Justin Welsh, who will share with us his remarkable story of building a one-person business after burning out of a very successful career as an angel investor and startup executive. A massive panic attack several years ago prompted a reevaluation of what kind of life Justin wanted, which led him to launch his own online information business that leverages LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms to help creators build their own knowledge businesses on the internet. In just a few years, Justin has grown a following of over 750,000 people and has the number one rated LinkedIn course with over 10,000 students. So, Justin, as a fan of your work, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us.

Justin Welsh: Shiv, thanks so much for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Shiv Gaglani: Of course and so, one thing that also attracted me to you is you began your career in healthcare. You have worked with some really well-known players such as GlaxoSmithKline and ZocDoc. Can you tell us in your own words about what attracted you to those kinds of companies and healthcare in general?

Justin Welsh: Yeah, initially, it was just sort of what I knew. My dad started working in pharmaceutical sales in 1970 and I graduated college and '03, so he would have had a thirty-three-year career at that time and he worked for one company -- Burroughs Wellcome, which became Glaxo Wellcome, which became GlaxoSmithKline. So, I got into pharmaceutical sales because I looked at my parents. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio and we had a nice house, we had two cars and I was like, "Oh, this is the thing to do, right? Just follow my dad's footsteps." That's how I got into it. We can talk more about whether I was any good at it. That's a very different story. But I was in three parts of healthcare: I was in pharmaceutical sales; I was in medical device sales; and the last part of my career was healthcare technology, which I really enjoyed the most.

Shiv Gaglani: Yes, let's talk about that. Because I mean, ZocDoc and PatientPop are well known and you were an executive there doing sales. Tell us about those companies, and also...a lot of why we launched the Raise the Linepodcast is to prepare our audience for where the puck will be -- as Wayne Gretzky said -- to let them know what's happening in healthcare, digital health, remote patient monitoring, etc. So yeah, let's delve into some of the highlights at ZocDoc and PatientPop.

Justin Welsh: Yeah, so I went about six years in pharma and med devices and I was very bad at it. I probably could have been good at it because I'm generally a pretty good learner. I was just super immature, I wasn't ready for the workforce, I cared more about working out and having fun and meeting people and things like that. I got a chance at ZocDoc, which was really interesting. I created a resume, which was probably quite blown out of proportion -- that might be a good way to describe it. I had been fired three times from three pharm and med device companies and ZocDoc was this cool and interesting business. It was only nine people big in 2009. I took a bus from Allentown, Pennsylvania to New York City to interview for the job.  

I was really well prepared because I wanted the job. I was ready to talk through my accomplishments, for lack of a better description, and I got the job. Something really interesting happened in that role, which was very different from the previous roles that I had been a part of. Number one, I was in New York City. So, like, I had been in Allentown, Steubenville, Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, St. Clair Shores Michigan...I had been in all these small towns and suddenly I was in New York City. It's like this energy, all the people moving around. I was working for a tech company, like a cool company that solved a problem that I understood, the people were super smart, and my own maturity was like increasing. I had hit twenty-eight years old and I wasn't mature by any means but I was certainly more mature than I was when I was twenty-three or twenty-four. 

And so all these things came together at the exact same time. I went on my first day, and I made a sale with my boss. It was like, I'd never gotten a credit card for anything before in my life. I never closed a deal in my whole entire career, because I was an influencer in pharmaceuticals, influencing physicians. For some reason, that flipped a light switch and I was like, “I like this, and I want to live in the city and I want to be successful and I want to do all these things that I hadn't done before.” I spent five years there. I broke a bunch of sales records, I managed local teams, I ended up managing six states on the West Coast and then I ended my career at ZocDoc reporting directly to Cyrus the CEO building ancillary business units and I parlayed that experience into my first executive job at thirty-three at a company called PatientPop, and spent five years there growing that business from its first dollar in revenue up past fifty million in recurring, and that was a wild run.

Shiv Gaglani: Definitely incredible. Really, really amazing work at both of these companies. Obviously, a lot of our audience have used or at least have heard of these companies as well or will be using them. So, let's fast forward to kind of the burnout. One of the things we keep covering on this podcast is provider burnout. It's one thing to train clinicians or people to go into the healthcare workforce, it's another thing to keep them there and the way health systems have treated a lot of these clinicians or the health system in general -- not any particular health system, the system itself -- has led to a lot of them leaving the workforce. 

Just last week, I was talking to a surgeon in Boston who's looking for a career change and I was thinking that you appearing on this podcast would be very interesting to many of our audience who are looking to maybe go part-time or, or even just become solopreneurs. So, tell us about the burnout, the panic attack, and how that changed your trajectory?

Justin Welsh: Yeah, so I did five years ZocDoc, and they had a stigma in New York City for being a really hard place to work. I loved it there. But the reality of it was that you get hired in classes of thirty people, and two weeks later, you'd look around and twenty-eight would be gone and you'd be like, "Oh, wow, this is like really cutthroat.” And so it was hard. It was stressful. It was high performance. I loved it, because I was a high performer, and I thrived on that environment. But of course, it was stressful, right? 

So, five years were super stress-filled and when I became an executive at PatientPop -- I was the VP of sales -- my expectation was that I would get that business to a million or two million dollars in recurring revenue. To me, that was huge, right? That would be like the biggest thing in the world for me and then they would bring in someone with gray hair with thirty years of experience, and just say, "Hey, this guy is going to take it from here," and I would be maybe demoted to a lesser role. 

That did not happen. We got to three million in year one, we got to like twelve million in year two, thirty million in year three, fifty million in year four and it just started growing really fast. I went from stretch executive hire - guy who was supposed to get it to two or three million -- to managing a 150-person team, six direct reports, fifty million dollars in recurring revenue, multiple board meetings, tons of stress and pressure. The average job cycle of a VP of Sales is seventeen months, and I was going on four and a half years. 

The burnout happened not because of overwork. I think that's an incorrect stigma around burnout. I can work all day long. I like to work hard. Burnout to me is about losing control. It's about being unable to solve problems, and problems beginning to stack up, with no end in sight and that's what happened to me. I am not afraid or embarrassed to admit that as the business got super huge, I didn't know what to do. I wasn't the right guy. I like early stage...give me zero to twenty million, or zero to ten million. I love that stuff. But when it's like fifty to 200 million, I'm not your guy. 

So, I started to get lack of control and when you have no control at work that often spirals into other areas of your life. Things started happening to me that probably a lot of people can resonate with, which were over drinking, overeating, lack of exercise, and not enough sleep. To give you a sense, I'm about 200 pounds now. I was 235 pounds at that point. I was drinking a bottle of wine every night and sometimes more. I was eating really poorly. I wasn't exercising. I was sleeping six hours. 

On December sixteenth of 2018 everything just sort of came together and I had this massive panic attack. I think people have had panic attacks before and can probably know what that's like, but I was hallucinating. I was screaming for two hours and my wife had to call 911. All the EMTs came, hooked up all the wires, told me I wasn't dying and I finally calmed down. That was pretty intense. So, it was a pretty good indicator that something needed to change.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah, my God. That must have been so harrowing, especially because so many of the people who listen to this podcast are high achievers like you. They can work all day. I think when they lose autonomy, or mastery or these other indicators of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in life, that can happen. 

So, you're one of the most well-known creators on LinkedIn and Twitter and the internet in general. Can you tell us a bit about your Saturday Solopreneur business?

Justin Welsh: Yeah, I think the easiest way to define what it is that I do -- and I struggle with it... it's always a fun party conversation -- is I'm a knowledge entrepreneur. I don't code. I don't build SAS platforms. I use the knowledge that I have to build knowledge businesses. My core focus is helping people build one person internet businesses using the knowledge they have between their ears. So, if you know how to be a product manager or you know how to do SEO or you know how to build landing pages or you know how to grow on social media or you know how to set up an effective healthcare practice, that knowledge is worth money to somebody who doesn't know it. I have spent the last four and a half years equipping people with the opportunity to identify the knowledge they have, share the knowledge they have, and monetize the knowledge they have. That's what I do in my business.

Shiv Gaglani: So you've grown quite a following, right? Because I think your message resonates with a lot of people -- not just in the tech sector, especially now with all the layoffs -- but also I think in healthcare and in any other sector where people are just people. They want to be happy. They want to have a good balance. That's something you talk about a lot in your content. 

Tell us about the journey of going from zero to 750,000 followers, and where you see it going? In your wildest dreams, what's the next five years for you? Like, are you happy with growing to one-point-five million followers? What do you think? 

Justin Welsh: It's a good question. I don't have an end goal in mind. I think more about process than outcomes. I would assume this rings true across all platforms -- I don't know because I'm not on all these different platforms...I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn -- once you reach 50,000, or 75,000, the next milestone is just time bound. It's just a matter of time until you hit it, right? You just continue to do what you've been doing for the period of time. It just grows incrementally over time. 

So, to go out and say “I'm going to reach 1.5 million” isn't a goal, because it's just bound to happen, knock on wood, if everything keeps going in the same direction. What's more important to me are three things: the first thing is how I get there. How I spend my calendar weeks. The time I have with family and friends. The reduction of unwanted obligations on my calendar is a really big thing for me. I don't want to do things I don't like doing. I'm just not in the position right now where I feel like that's a good spend of my time. I like spending time with my wife, I like spending time with my parents, while they're alive, right? I like spending time with my friends, while they're close by. Those are the things that mostly drive me and so I kind of focus on that. 

The gaps occur where work comes in, and so the next thing that I want to do is use those gaps to impact as many people as possible. I'm of the belief that if I impact as many people as possible on social media to help them grow a side hustle or to grow their first online business or to leave their nine to five or to simply have a better life, that that, in turn, will lead me to the outcomes that most people look for growth and all that stuff. 

The last thing is, I'd like to make an income, right? I say this a lot on podcasts: I'm not Mother Teresa. I want to make money. I want to have a thriving business. But to me, that is also an outcome of doing the second thing well...helping people achieve their goals. So, I don't think about "Do I want to be at one and a half million followers or five million followers” or even a revenue number. It’s just like plodding along, try and make your weeks as great as possible. Try and fill the gaps with things that impact people and the outcome should be more followers and more revenue. If it's not, well then I'll have to figure something else out. But, I'm also four and a half years in and I have a shelf life of about five years in everything I've ever done in my whole life. So, who knows? I might run a hotel a year from now. I have no idea. So, it'll be fun to see.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah, that will be really fun to see in six months what you do with it. I like that you focus on process. We've had people like BJ Fogg on this podcast who wrote the book, Tiny Habits. James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits talks about outcome goals and process. There's an outcome which we talked about, don't pay attention to that. It's very Buddhist, very Hindu. There's the process which we just talked about. There's your identity, which you've carved out as a solopreneur...like that's your current identity. Obviously, we can have multiple identities and lives and then the best way to create that identity is also just surround yourself with other people who help reinforce that. 

So, for example, if you want to be a great cyclist, make a bunch of friends who are cyclists. If you want to be really fit, make a bunch of friends who are fit. One of the cool things seeing you on LinkedIn and Twitter is you do engage a lot with this tribe of people like Sahil Bloom, Dan Go, Dickie Bush and a number of others. I'm curious, is that just an online kind of identity, like tribe? Or do you guys ever get together and you know, work together on different things. And why stay solo when maybe you could do something together or figure things out in other ways? I mean, you've gone the VC route before, you know what it is to run a big company and have direct reports.

Justin Welsh: It's a good question. I think the easiest way to describe it is my longest internet friend is probably Austin Belcak, so you might see me interact with him a lot on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Austin and I met in 2018 online when I was just writing on LinkedIn, and he reached out to me. He had 100,000 followers, I have like 20,000, and he was like, "Hey, man, I see you writing. Here's a book that I read that was really helpful. Here's a PDF copy of it." And I was like, "Oh this is awesome. Thanks, man. How are you? Good to know you." And as I grew, and he grew, we shared some tips. 

He found out that I was a craft beer fan, so we started doing like an IPA exchange. I was living in LA when it started and then in Nashville as it continued, and he was living in New York. So, he would send me beers from New York and I would send him beers from Atlanta and Nashville. We built this cool friendship, and that's been going on four and a half years. I've never met him. I am going to meet him for the first time in two weeks when I go down to the City for a Lasix consultation. 

The rest of those guys -- Sahil Bloom, Dickie Busch, Nicolas Cole -- have been met in some really interesting ways. I met Cole because, as I was consulting for healthcare companies back in 2019, I didn't want to write my own blog posts to generate leads and Cole was running a like a blog writing agency. I was like, "Oh, maybe I can outsource this stuff, because I don't feel like writing about health care.” I got in contact with him and that started a relationship. And then it circled back around when he and Dickie started “Ship 30 for 30.” I had met Dickie because I was on a podcast with him, so that started there. Sahil Bloom had reached out to me on Twitter and said, like, "Hey, man, you're doing really cool things on LinkedIn. I'm interested in learning more," And I said, "I'm interested in learning more about Twitter." So, we jumped on a Zoom call. 

All of these things are really organic. It's not like someone threw us all together which is, I think, a lot of times how people think about it. I am working really hard to meet Dan Go, Jay Klaus, and a couple of other really cool creators in person through a little creative group that we're trying to form and do some interesting learnings as solopreneurs, and we want to run some in person events. 

I think why we don't do anything together is that we all have thriving businesses. We're probably all staying away from managing and running a big sort of conglomerate, for lack of a better term, and we all like our autonomy. I think that's probably why in five years, could me and Dan Go have a business? Sure. Hasn't happened, and I guess that's the best answer I have.

Shiv Gaglani: That makes a lot of sense and that's exactly what I was thinking. What is that parable about the Mexican fishermen. This business school person comes and says, "Hey, if you fish a little more, you can get more boats, you can hire more people, you can fish more.” Ultimately, your dream life is the life you already have, which is you work a couple hours a day and spend the rest of the time with your family. You're healthy and you're happy and you're reading and doing all these other things. 

Another person I think who has influenced you and me and a lot of us is Naval Ravikant and his book, The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant. He talks, interestingly, about the four forms of leverage: labor, capital, code, and then content, right? So obviously, you're in the content category. You've been in the other categories. This seems like an existential moment for content because as of late November last year, ChatGPT came out and we're just seeing the early stages of that. It’s like the evolution from dial up to what we have now with Starlink, which may even happen faster. As a leading content producer who has that leverage from your content, what are your thoughts on generative AI, ChatGPT and those kinds of tools and how it will impact what you guys do in the next say year or two years?

Justin Welsh: It's a good question. The way that I think about artificial intelligence is when knowledge and information becomes commoditized, wisdom becomes that much more valuable. I have built a multimillion-dollar one-person business, and I've run a $50 million annual recurring revenue business. I wasn't the CEO, but I was eventually the chief revenue officer. So, I've run big units and big teams. ChatGPT could spit out how to best do that, but if it comes from somebody who doesn't have that experience, people will see through that. Maybe some people won't, right? There will be grifters till the day that I die. But I think that ChatGPT will help people who have wisdom distill it more cleanly, more efficiently, more effectively. 

I know that I've used it multiple different ways. I use it to organize my information. I use it to summarize things that I want to summarize. I use it to remember things...there are so many different ways that I use ChatGPT. But I don't think it fills a wisdom gap. That's my thought on it. 

Now, I might be proven wrong. Maybe, you know, the next evolution of that will come up and suddenly, people will become wiser by using it. But I just don't see that happening. So, I think the gap for large creators who have very specific wisdom...I think ChatGPT will accelerate that. I think for people that don't have wisdom, they will use ChatGPT to try and fill that gap and ultimately find that wisdom cannot be filled by that. I think they'll waste a lot of time trying to do pretend work and sure, they'll get some people in their circle and other folks will follow them, but the true sort of wisdom is out of reach, at least in today's current AI landscape. That's my feeling.

Shiv Gaglani: That's a super nuanced answer and I would agree with a lot of that. Ultimately, it's just how data evolves. You want to be more predictive and then now it's generative. But in the wrong hands, it's like a shortcut, like cheating...you know, writing a final exam essay or a job interview question. People will eventually see through that and so by focusing on having substance over style makes a lot of sense here. 

I have just two more questions for you. The first is, what advice would you give to our audience? Again, many of them are healthcare workers, or will be healthcare workers, but others are digital health entrepreneurs or in other fields kind of adjacent to health care. What advice would you give them about approaching their careers?

Justin Welsh: For personal careers, it could be so much advice, but I'll give them advice that comes from a place of where I currently play today, which is this: burnout is happening to so many people and the pandemic accelerated the opportunity for burnout because we're isolated. I think a lot of our mental health was impacted way more than we even realize, and so I think a lot of people are teetering on the edge right now, kind of back where I was on December sixteenth of 2018. 

So, what I might recommend is that if they're feeling as though they're either undervalued at work, they're overworked or they're losing control, the first thing that I might do is find out how they can dip their toe in the water of something that they truly enjoy on the internet. And I know that sounds cliche, "Oh, do something that you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life." That's completely not true. You'll work very hard, but you'll at least enjoy it. There's a difference. 

I would also say, go out and find that small tribe on the internet. We talked about it. I'm friends with Dickie and Cole and Sahil and Austin and all these guys. Go find that tribe of people who are related or are relevant to whatever you do -- cardiology, digital health entrepreneur -- there are people on the internet, in that tribe, who are trying to find their passion and trying to monetize their passion and trying to impact people, trying to use online to build a business. Go find those people and spend a little bit of time networking on the internet. I have found that by networking effectively, I have been able to learn and accelerate that learning curve so fast to grow my business much more effectively. Do 1% more on the internet than you're doing today, right? Start by networking. Then next up is research and then the following thing is action. Take some action, write something, share your thoughts, work on yourself, document, share with others. That would be a big piece of advice that I would have for anyone who wants to start untethering themselves from the lifestyle that they currently have.

Shiv Gaglani: That's great advice and I think you make it so bite sized and approachable. I think some of your tweets and posts under Saturday Solopreneur are about taking action and learning and iterating from that action. I think a lot of our listeners are in school right now creating side hustles and putting their knowledge online. Hopefully, they grow big enough that they have the optionality of whether to trade their time for money doing something they enjoy. So that's great advice. What else would you like to leave our audience with before we let you go for the day?

Justin Welsh: I think the last thing that I might leave people with is, as you mentioned, there's a lot of artificial intelligence coming into the fold. There's ChatGPT, there are things like giant pods on the internet that you can get into to accelerate your growth or engagement. Try not to look for ways to cut the line, right? Cutting the line means that you sort of push aside the real learning that you get when you do the research, figure things out on your own, do things the effective way. All of the things like hard work, the research, the mistakes, the analysis, the iteration...that doesn't just help in the beginning of your journey. That helps through the continuation of your journey. 

If you start shortcutting everything using artificial intelligence, joining pods, trying all these different things that shortcut the journey, that will become a habit. I'd highly recommend that you don't make line cutting something habitual. Instead what I'd recommend is, do the work, make the mistakes, analyze the mistakes, iterate, repeat. Do that early on and you will train yourself to do that throughout the continuum of your career on the internet. And as you get better and bigger and faster, sure, lean on some tools, right? Lean on some friends. Do whatever it is that you need to do to continue that path. But train yourself in the beginning. That would just be a piece of advice that I might give anybody who's getting started as a creator on the internet.

Shiv Gaglani: That's awesome. Well, that's really a lot of wisdom. I appreciate all your advice here, Justin, and everything you put out over the last four and a half years on the internet. It's really valuable and I recommend our audience go check it out.

Justin Welsh: Shiv, I really appreciate it. Great interview, man, and thanks for having me.

Shiv Gaglani: Thank you. And with that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show, and remember to do your part to raise the line and strengthen our healthcare system. We're all in this together. Take care.