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☀️ Wanna know Andrew Huberman's Morning Routine? This Founder Built a Profitable Business Around That

☀️ Wanna know Andrew Huberman's Morning Routine? This Founder Built a Profitable Business Around That

Today's insanely helpful deep dive takes less than 3:14 mins to skim and 7x more helpful than the last podcast you listened to

Joel Hansen
January 26, 2024

Hey, this is Napkin Notes: we ask the sharpest founders how they validate and scale their startup ideas so you can sit cozy at home and enjoy your Friday morning latte ☕️

Today’s deep dive is for all the morning routine gurus. Ever wanted to know the morning habits of:

Tim Ferriss?
Hailey Bieber?
Andrew Huberman?
Athletic Green’s Kat Cole?
or even Tiny Capital’s Andrew Wilkinson?

So did Hamza.

So off the side of his desk, he spun up routines.club and after leaving it on cruise control for a little while it’s taken off.

Since this idea wasn’t Hamza’s full-time gig, we wanted to ask him:

how he validated the side project
why it started making $10K/mo in profit and
what the future growth could look like by the end of 2024

Sound like a plan?

Awesome.

Before we dig in, here’s some of the latest startup news if you were in Mexico with the fam or deep into flow-state with your Q1 projects.

📰 Latest News:

Apple Vision Pro pre-sales are running hot. Magnificent 7 stocks are flying high again. BeReal (the GenZ Instagram) is up to 23m DAUs. Europe’s VC market is on the rise. Brex cut 20% of their staff. Google Chrome added 3 new AI upgrades. This Jeremy Giffon interview was 11/10. And Kernal Research co predicts a 92% probability your angel investor friend is OOO sending you selfies from the ski chalet this week.

If that’s you, know that you’re not alone.

Now in the words of the great Cali Swag District, let’s get down and dougie. 🥁

📈 How Hamza Started and Scaled a Side Project to $10,000 Profit Per Month

Let’s set the tone here. It’s Janurary. We’re all

trying to drink less booze 🍻
striving to get more sleep and 😴
attempting to optimize our gym schedule 🏋️

But if we’re being honest with ourselves, our friends at Frobes, tell us:

only 8% of the world accomplishes their NY goals that they set out for every January 😅

That’s right. 92% of people give up.

To go a step deeper, Kernal Research & Co (an entirely fake corporation we use to talk in the 3rd person) believes that the #1 leading reason for this is because you haven’t turned your goal into a routine.

And funny enough, today’s guest actually turned his love for learning about morning routines into a profitable side project. 💰

Before we dig into how he got started and what he’s learned along the way, can you lovely folks help us give a nice napkin notes welcome to our guest Hamza? 👏

Some fun facts about Hamza if you haven’t met him:

🧊 Can cold plunge for 15+ minutes
✏️ Wrote Harry Potter fan fic when he was 15
⚡️ Was obsessed with question cards for sparking good icebreakers

Any other Hogwarts fans out there? 🧙‍♀️

Well, let’s cast spells later. We’ve played enough get-to-know-you games.

It’s time to hit the lights, grab a towel and start the fireside chat.

🔑 Q1: When did you first get the idea for Routines.club?

A: “In late 2022 Tamba (my design/dev agency) landed the redesign of Examine.com.

Around the same time I met Andrew Huberman, and his daily routine was blowing up. I saw an opportunity in leveraging an Examine-like website but for Routines of interesting people.

It took me another 6 months to actually put this idea into practice and launch the website”

🔑 Q2: What 2-3 steps did you follow to validate it?

“The first thing I always do is post my ideas to my Instagram (@humzajaved) and twitter (@humza_j) and gauge interest before building anything.

Once I saw interest, I built a simple website in webflow, added Andrew Huberman’s routine, and ran a targeted FB campaign. Here I wanted to see the cost to acquire a new user. 🔑

Funny enough, SEO picked up really quickly and I never needed to do paid acquisitions again.”

🔑 Q3: For those that don’t know, Hamza is full-time on his agency (doing $1m+ a year in sales) and routines.club was just a fun side project he’s been running for 6 months with little effort.

So our next nail-biter of a question is:

“Can you share why you think Routines Club could be a $100m dollar business in 5 years?”

A: “Happy to.

- In my work, I’ve seen health influencers build 100M+ businesses from as little as a 2M subscriber base.

- One reason for that is that the health focussed audience has high purchase intent. I’ve already seen this with my audience and affiliate sales.

- Routines can capture chunks of various influencers’ audiences and become a satellite business that redirects traffic to either our products or affiliates.

- We’re already on path to 500K unique visits this year at the current rate - and this is not taking growth into account.”

🔑 Q4: Any metrics you're most proud of with the startup idea?

A: “With almost no effort it achieved:

📌 40,000 unique monthly users (all organic)

📌 $8,000-10,000 in monthly profit just from affiliates (highly under-optimized)

📌 Overtook our biggest competitor (fingers crossed they’re not a subscriber of Napkin Notes reading this)

📌 Landed partnerships with AG1, Momentous Supplements, Oura, InsideTracker

📌 10,000 person email list”

🔑 Q4: Any goals for 2024 with this startup idea of yours?

A: “My simple napkin notes plan for 2024:

- Scale to at least $100,000/month

- Launch a Routines Podcast

- Launch various Routines products (e.g. a Supplement tracking app.)

- Double down on partnerships with influencers and brands

- Launch our newsletter

- Launch on social media”

🔑 Q5: We heard you’re moving to NYC soon. Any dream folks you wanna meet our readers can keep in mind in case we know them?

A: “I love building community, and I love meeting awesome people. Happy to meet all the incredible folks in NYC!

Please connect me with people who can be on Routines, partner with us, be a podcast guest, work with us, etc”

You can reach me on Instagram, X or LinkedIn pretty easliy.”

Time for our last and final question:

🔑 Q6: Imagine you’re on stage in front of 10,000 people who wanna learn more about how to start and scale their own startup. The interviewer asks you over the mic “What’s 2-3 things actionable things people can do this week to increase their luck surface of building a sustainable startup venture?” What do you say?

A: “Speed and action are a start-up’s (or any company really) best friend.

🏃‍♀️ Speed: Fail faster. The faster you move the more time you have to try new things, figure out what works and discard the ones that don’t - and it’s better for your runway.

⚙️ Action: I like the motto “bias towards action”. A lot of people get caught up in the idea of doing something and playing 4D chess in their head instead of actually doing the thing.

Come up with a hypothesis, a plan, and then be decisive and execute.”

So there you go folks.

That’s the story behind how Hamza started and scaled Routines.Club.

If you wanna go nerd out on some killer morning routines, tap below.

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