How a Highschooler Got a $150,000 Job With Me

This episode explores how unconventional job-seeking strategies, like proactive value demonstration and direct contributions, can dramatically elevate a candidate's career prospects.

1. Proactively demonstrating value can lead to high-paying jobs and client relationships.
2. Providing specific, actionable improvements to potential employers or clients is more effective than traditional applications.
3. Showing real results and potential impacts through unsolicited contributions can set candidates apart.
4. Continuous learning and adapting one’s skills to the needs of the target employer or client is crucial.
5. The concept of 'pre-work'—doing the job before being hired—is a powerful strategy for career advancement.

1: Introduction

Noah introduces the topic and sets the stage for discussing the power of proactive job seeking. He promises actionable insights into transforming job hunting by offering value first. Noah Kagan: "Today, I’ll show you how doing some upfront work can land you a six-figure salary."

2: Success Stories

Noah shares personal stories and examples of others who have successfully employed the strategy of pre-work, including a detailed breakdown of how these strategies led to job offers and client engagements. Noah Kagan: "I landed my first major role at Mint by presenting a marketing plan I created on my own time."

3: Methodology

The detailed tactics and methodologies used for pre-work are discussed, including how to identify potential improvements for businesses and execute them to showcase one's skills. Noah Kagan: "Don’t just offer to do the work; do the work and present it."

4: Results and Expansion

Noah elaborates on the outcomes of these strategies, how they have been refined, and their implications for long-term career development. Noah Kagan: "This proactive approach has not only landed me jobs but also shaped my career trajectory."

1. Identify key areas a company is focusing on and offer specific improvements or solutions.
2. Research and present case studies or success stories relevant to the target company to demonstrate understanding and capability.
3. Use social media and professional platforms to showcase your skills and attract the attention of potential employers.
4. Follow up proactively with any presentations or proposals to keep the dialogue open.
5. Always tailor your approaches to the specific needs and culture of the company to which you are applying.

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In today's episode it’s all about landing those big-paying jobs by working for free. That’s right, you heard me, that’s no pay today BUT… a huge one down the line, let’s call it ‘Prework’. Roll in the six or seven-figure paydays.

I'll share how I snagged jobs and clients I wasn't qualified for; from my experience at mint.com, to how Jay Yang, Mitchel, Jeremy and Cameron all landed incredible opportunities working for me by going the extra mile. I'll break down how you can do the same and make it easy for people to hire you by putting a little extra effort in first.

In this conversation, you’ll enjoy 3 BIG things:

How to stand out and why those generic "Can I Help You?" messages fall flat

Where to uncover the hidden value your future employer is overlooking

Make yourself indispensable by going above and beyond, even without being prompted.

Enjoy these 3 things plus many nuggets along the way.

If you dug this episode and you're a fresh-faced job seeker, don't miss out on more career wisdom ‘10 Career Tips For Ambitious People in Their Twenties’ you find that in episode 162 of this feed.

FiveTaco is the easiest way to find software for solopreneurs, from productivity tools, to the latest AI tech to help run your business.

I have also been sharing emails on my brutally honest advice on a variety of topics. People have been loving it. Sign up at noahkagan.com and join 350k other people who get juicy insights every week.

People

Noah Kagan, J. Yang

Companies

mint.com, Appsumo

Books

Mentioned: Books by Seth Godin relevant to marketing and business strategy

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Noah Kagan
What is up, you sexy bastards? It is your boy the bee's knees, aka Rabbi can't lose, aka Noah Kagan. I'm going to be sharing how working for free can make you six figures. Now, that sounds really preposterous, you might say, but no, it is true. I have done it and tons of other people have done it.

Whether you're applying for a job, starting a business, or you're trying to grow a business with sales. Now this is going to be a really interesting technique, and I'm going to share my story@mint.com. Dot and stories of other people, of how you go a little bit beyond what people expect can get you paid super fat. Here's three gigantic things you're going to take away. Number one, what messages to send and not to send to get people to respond to you.

Number two, how do you find out what is actually valuable to another person? And number three, how do you make yourself indispensable? And what is the 1% more you can do so that you can get paid six figures and more? You're going to enjoy those three things, plus a bunch more ear nuggets along the way. I got to give a quick shout out to a brand new tool that we just launched over at Appsumo.

It is $9 for life. It is Breez doc. That's breezedoc.com dot. Now, if you've been using docusign, hellosign or any of these things with a subscription, Ugh. That's disgusting.

Subscriptions suck. And with Breez Doc, it's a breeze. You never have a subscription again. And now you can send all these big ass clients to pay you using breezedoc.com. Also, a special pre show shout out to listener Jason D.

2951. Sounds like a robot. Noah is fun and smart. I love this podcast. Noah does a great job interviewing people and then other times he shares what he does in his own business.

It's very helpful. Thank you, Jason and every other one of you gorgeous listeners. Now, if you've got five to 10 seconds right now, go on Spotify, go on iTunes and just leave a review. I check every single one of them and I'd love to shout you out in a future episode.

Let me just share a few different stories and I think the stories and we'll break down some of the elements will really help you in your own journey. So when I saw mint.com comma, I got introduced to it through a friend named Dave McClure and it was called Mymint at the time. And Aaron, in a room by himself for six months. Didn't have any friends, didn't have a network. Showed me this product, and I was like, aaron, this is the best product I've ever seen in my life.

And he said, cool. And I said, oh, I see you're hiring for a director of marketing. Could I do it? He's like, well, you don't know anything about marketing. I can't give you the job.

I was like, that is correct. I said, aaron, here's what we're going to do instead. I'm going to spend this whole week coming up with a marketing plan. Give me a goal. He's like, I want 100,000 users when we launch, within six months of launch.

I said, all right, let me spend all week coming up with a plan, and I'm going to present this plan to you. And if you like this plan, you can pay me to execute it for three months. And then after I do that, you can give me a six figure salary. My first six figure salary ever. This is when I was around 25, 26.

So I spent the next, literally probably 60 to 80 hours alone working on something for free for Aaron. Now, I was researching online. I was reading Seth Godin's books. This is 2007. There wasn't a lot of stuff necessarily out there.

And I put together what became the Mint marketing plan. And this plan is what helped Mint eventually sell for almost $300 million. I didn't get any of it, but that's not the point of this story. Part of the story was that I spent the week working on it. I went back to Aaron.

I showed him the plan. His mind was blown. He hired me. We executed the plan, and it crushed. So this is how you can copy it, whether you want to get a job, but also if you want to get clients.

I see a lot of people that are freelancers, agencies, or even selling a lot of different products. The idea here is, instead of going to someone, literally, let me just pull this up on my instagram. I get these. Since million dollar weekend's been out, I get these probably about 50 a day. It's like, hey, man, I see that you're trying to grow on YouTube.

Do you want help with editing? And it's just like, I really love you guys. I hope I'm just going to start sending them this episode from now on and make it a lot easier for them. So what these messages, let me just read one of them off. Hold on.

Hey, Noah. I'm going to be really quick. And then they send a long message. I've been watching your videos for some months until now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What can I do to work with you?

So it's nothing that this person's doing anything wrong, but what you have to do and flip the script is how do you make it based on what you can perceive as important for the other person? Send them something so insanely valuable that they are forced to reply to you. Again, I love this line. Don't offer to do the work, just do the work. So I'll give a few other examples during the story.

But thinking about this for yourself in how to get your own six or seven figure paydays, it's how to do something for free so that people want to pay you seven figures. Now let me share the next story from Jay Yang about how he did it. And I want to share as well from Mitchell. I'm going to share from Jeremy. Just so you guys have so many interesting stories of approaches in a lot of different aspects.

So I did it with a job@mint.com. Dot. I also have done this with customers, so you can do this when you want to get customers and so forth. So J. Yang is in school in Chicago, I think is where it is.

And so he's hanging out with Kanye west. They're having a great time. And Jay Yang contacts Jeremy, who was the former creative director of our YouTube channel, says, hey, Noah Kagan sucks on his social media and his email, which was true because I really wasn't doing much of it at the time because I was really focused on YouTube and the million dollar weekend book launch. So Jay Yang sends me a 19 page presentation. And by the way, no one asked him for this, but what you need to be thinking about is what are you seeing externally that is maybe important to the person.

And you can see what's important externally because of what they're doing. Are they posting on Facebook a lot? Maybe not. Then don't help them there. Are they trying to sell a new course?

Are they tweeting about something specifically? Are they trying to get new customers? If you are trying to get a sales job, the easiest way to get that sales job is bring that company a customer, email them and say, hey, I got you a customer. Who should I connect them with? You don't think you're going to get a response.

100%. You're going to get a response. So Jay knows I do social media. Jay knows I have the book, and so he can say, hey, I can see you're doing this stuff, but you're not doing it well, so think about that for the person you're working with. I'm going to walk through for some of the people on podcast world what Jay's presentation included.

It literally was a 19 page presentation breaking down all of the aspects of my site. So it said Noah's landing page on noacagon.com dot. It showed a before and after of the images. It's funny, I literally just paused the show to go and send Jay. Hey, you sent me some good ideas.

I don't think we've done them yet. Maybe you should go try those out. It was literally saying, oh, let's do more social proof. Let's change the wording on your landing page. Then he showed me how we can change some of the email design.

Then he showed me, hey, I did an analysis of your growth channels, but it doesn't seem like you're actually using any of your growth channels or social channels to grow your email list. And it showed, hey, you're growing a lot on YouTube, but all these other channels are neglected. Maybe we can grow some of those. Then he compared me to Cody Sanchez. He said, your Twitter is lower, your Instagram is lower, your LinkedIn lower, your newsletter is lower.

Maybe if we start copying some of these strategies that I can do for you, you'll be more competitive. Doesn't mean I have to. Doesn't mean we have to worry about how other people are doing. But I thought it was a really good presentation, that every time when someone's done this, I almost always hire them and I never regret it. The other thing I always ask when people have gone out of their way to do this, I always ask, how much time did you put in?

And I kid you not, it's always around 20 to 40 hours of work. And you can do it for less. I promise you can do it in 5 hours. But again, if you want a client, if you want a customer, if you want a job, you do some of these things. I promise you, if it doesn't get a response, you at least get some learning and expertise in a skill.

So the next slide, Jay said, was he showed my Instagram page versus Cody and he said, oh, here's some ways that you can change your page to get more engagement, which will then get you more email list. He then talked about how we can do video podcasts like this, which turned into Twitter threads, which turned into Instagram, which turned into email, which is now actually how we're doing a lot of the Noah Kagan content. He also talked about how we can change the CTA's on YouTube talked about how the CTA's on Twitter are not very good and we need to redo them. And then he actually said, hey, we should do some feedback surveys to the Noah Kagan audience. Then he talked about having higher quality lead magnets across all of our channels.

A referral program, which I was not as excited about. Newsletter swaps, which are definitely very popular nowadays, but I think the quality of the content is debatable. An indoctrination sequence. I don't like that word. But indoctrination sequence is more the Autoresponder series.

So day one, when someone joins Noah, email. Day two, day three, day four, and day five, which we've since updated based on popularity and what our objectives are, which is to get people to buy a million dollar weekend, leave a review like me, and really take action for themselves and their own business journey. Jay convinces me and tries to say, hey, you really need to grow your email list and stop being a lazy bum. Slide 16 is Jay saying, he's an entrepreneur, he's got his own newsletter, he's worked for another company, and, you know, he showed me my trajectory of my newsletter growth. If someone like him was able to help me go and do it.

And Slide 18 was, he actually even created some content for me to go use. So he created three Twitter threads, three Instagram carousels, three LinkedIn carousels. Dude, this is bomb. I got to hire this guy. And so, just to give you the backstory, I did hire him because after about a month, I was busy with the book launch.

But after a month, I said, all right, Jay, you can come try this out for the next 30 days. A lot of times when I hire people, I like a clear, hey, in 30 days. Here's how we have alignment on expectations for success. We didn't really exactly do that, but it was like, all right, 30 days, go work on Instagram. I try to generally give people something a lower risk area.

And after 30 days, all right, I paid him $500, and then I gave him another 90 days of work. And it was, I think, around $1,000 a month. And after 90 days of work, I was like, Jay, this is insane. You're doing so amazing. What would it take for you to go full time?

And he had so much of his own side hustle work that to get him to go full time, I had to give him $150,000 over the next twelve months. Now, I think most of you would, if you don't have jobs or if you have jobs, or if you want more money? Or if you want to grow your business, copy the J. Yang approach. Copy the Noah Kagan approach.

Copy Jeremy Marie and Mitchell Cohen approach, which I'll share their stories in a little bit. But think about how most literally, I was reading another message. Hey, Noah, I'd like to work with you. Hey, Noah, your editing sucks. Hey, Noah, your social media sucks.

Like, you don't have to go this far, but this is how you get a six, seven, and eight figure paydays and make it easy to convince customers, easy to convince hiring managers, easy to convince partners. And it's the same thing we do@appsumo.com. Dot when we contact people, we actually are like, here's how much money we're going to help make for you. You don't think most people are going to respond to that? And there's more nuances in there, but that makes it a lot easier.

It's the same thing I did at Gambit. It was a payments company for Facebook games. I literally just saw an old example of a screenshot. What I used to send people is I would have, like, a one pager explaining our services and how much money they were going to make them. And I'd also mock up how our service would look in their game and tell them, hey, if you're making 100,000, we're going to make you 125,000.

And here's how it would look. It made it very easy for them to understand, one, the results they're going to get, and two, see that I'm willing to put in the work to earn their business. People like seeing people that put in the investment. Cause they know that they'll continue to do that if they hire them. So these are some of the examples I wonder how you can think about for yourself today in your job.

Doesn't mean you have to go in your day job. What can you do to show your boss if you want a salary? Hey, here's everything I've done and why it makes sense for you to hire me for a little bit more money. If you want a customer, could you not send them something that you would actually do it and do it for free? Say, hey, if you like this, maybe you want to hire me and pay me for more work.

That is exactly what Jay did. It's exactly what I did with mint.com, and it's exactly what you can do in your own businesses. Now, I'm going to give you a few other examples so that this point has really hits home. So, Jeremy Marie, I got a cold DM for this guy. So Jeremy hits me up.

This is about five years ago and he sends me examples of Instagram things I could just post right away. And I was like oh that's cool, you did the work. He said why dont you just let me do it for free for two more weeks and if you like it you can start paying me. Fast forward. Jeremy started making a good six figure salaries as eventually my YouTube producer and really helped grow the channel to over a million subscribers.

And now hes running his own YouTube agency, helping other people do titles and thumbnails. You can also check him out his podcast which is backstage careers. So do 1% more to stand out. Im saying literally 1%. You dont have to do even that much more.

So make an IG reel, make a pitch deck. Publicly review someone else. One of my all time favorite hacks, frankly to get people to promote me or frankly for me to promote others. And I'll, I'll just tell you right now, if you have read million dollar weekend and you've had any success with it, let me know at Noah Kagan on Twitter or send me an email noahdollerweekend.com dot I want to promote you. I want to help you grow your business.

There's a guy recently who I'm going to feature, David Whitlock. He emailed me and said I love your book. Here's exactly what I did. And now I made $7,200 selling vintage prices of porsches with a 1600 person mailing list. So because I want him to look good, that makes me look good, which makes million dollar weekend look good.

I'm now doing a podcast and an email with him. So if you are a customer of someone, maybe it's in clothing, maybe it's a course, maybe it's a youtuber, maybe it's someone do a review or send them the success that you've had from working with them or from purchasing their product. And I think you'll be surprised how excited they are to potentially share you with their audiences. The coolest thing about this approach is that you don't have to have any experience. You don't have to even have any money.

All you have to do is put in some effort to do the work for this other person, send it to them, and if you do this enough times, I promise you you will be getting six or seven figures. And a lot of people say, well, I don't want to do free work if I don't know I'm going to get paid. Well, just have fun. Staying small, rich. That's my new phrase for poor.

I think it's more optimistic. Yeah, but think of it instead of I'm not going to do free work, I'm going to do work where I learn. And that is going to keep you growing and growing and growing and growing. The best case upside, you get a job and payload. The worst case, you learn and build a portfolio.

And you could say, hey, I made this thing for Noah Kagan. He didnt use it, but this is what I made for him. The one last story I do want to share. So the original Mint marketing plan for some of you guys that are curious out there, and you can get a full, really sexy nice one on appsumo.com dot. Wow.

It was a five page 1600 word plan. Talks about how to get 80,000 users as public launch plus get a write up in a major publication. Objectives Target users blogs to target mom blogs to target forums to target press releases, timeline registration homepage action marketing plans Alpha beta and public launch strategy 30 days post public launch strategy wow. I'm actually pretty impressed. I used to be really good.

What happened to me? Anyways, this is all stuff I did totally for free. A lot of it was still what I used to this day with appsumo, with million dollar weekend, and with the YouTube channel. Now, the last person I do want to shout out is just to kind of keep giving you more and more examples of how to do. It's not even free work.

I really think it's pre work to get paid work. So removing the free thing, because you're going to be learning either way, is Mitchell Cohen. So Mitchell contacts me because he saw that, I don't know, I think Mitchell saw that I was doing a charity bike ride called Sumo Ride, and he contacts me and he says, hey, no, I see you're doing this bike ride. Can I volunteer for it? I was like, sure, that'd be awesome.

I didn't know anyone would actually volunteer. So he comes and volunteers at it and he did a really good job. He went above and beyond and I was like, hey, do you want to do another one? He's like, sure. So he helps me with the second one again, kind of doing the pre work and seeing what I need help with and then offering it ahead of time.

I think that's the key thing, is that if you email someone, the literally two worst things you can ever ask someone for is number one, can I pick your brain? That is just one. No one wants their brain picked. I only pick my boogers. But no one, wants their brain picked.

It's just not something, especially if you're busy, you want to be asked. And two, hey, can I help you with anything? Because now it's putting the onus on the other person to figure out what they need help with. And I've definitely made this mistake over many, many years. So it's not that you shouldn't be doing it, but as I teach a million dollar weekend, you got to get better at your asks.

And this is improving your ask muscle. So you almost never get rejected. And if you get rejected, you get a rejection goal. You're getting so much benefit out of this rejection, you should try to get a ton of these ones. So over time, Mitchell kept offering to help with the charity ride.

And long story short, now Mitchell makes over six figures, and he runs content and helps with influencers over@appsumo.com dot. And that's all because he just said, hey, yeah, I think I can help this person. I don't think he had a superior motive to finally work with me because maybe he regrets it. I'm just kidding, Mitchell, you know I love you, but it led him on this path. So in your own life, how do you not offer to do free work?

You just do it. Secondly, you can stand out with just 1% more work. It doesn't have to be even something paid. It could be something so light, like a lot of the examples that I've been giving you today, blogging, video reviews, slide deck. And don't make it a big thing for the other person.

Like, hey, can you watch this 20 minutes video for me to see if you want, you know, learn about you? No. Hey, I saw that you're making YouTube videos. I made you a 62nd video. I think you might like it.

If you want to use it, feel free. I promise you, you're going to get a response. Number three, don't let your inexperience stop you. This is a way to get experience. The way you go from inexperience to experience is this.

You do things to get your experience. And the best thing about this, this experience is going to build your confidence. It's not free work. It's pre work. And lastly, your persistence is going to beat resistance.

Some of these people may not respond. Some of these people respond and say thanks. And eventually you do this enough times either. A, people are going to start coming to you because you can share that you're doing this stuff publicly, and b, you actually will start getting paid clients, customers, business partners, all these things by just doing the thing over and over and over. So this is exciting.

I love how people are thinking, man, I'd love to stand out. This is how to stand out. I don't think the whole point about this is how to get a job. I think this is how to stand out. Whether you want to get a partner, whether you want to get a customer, or whether you want to get a job.

It's how do you do the pre work so that you can get the paid work also, oh, my God. Another example cam, the video editor makes six figures working with me. He didn't just say, hey, no, I want to edit your videos. He made a video that was really good, that made me engage and put a trial video with him so that now he made six figures and now he's going off to do consulting and having a dream life over in Dubai. Shout out to my Dubai people.

So this is an awesome approach, especially if you're just getting started in your career or if you're in a career and you want to have a shift, use this in all different aspects. Like, hey, you want to be a content creator or work with a content creator? Make content for them, send it to them, and you will have a lot of success with that. Damn, this is a good one, man. I'm excited for all you guys out there.

If you have things for me, let me know. Let your boy know.

Have fun. Love you. Tabooches.

That is a wrap. I hope you loved the episode as much as we did making it for you. Before you go, check out five taco.com dot. It is going to become the number one online software directory. So if you're thinking I need a marketing tool, five taco.com dot.

If you're thinking, hmm, quickbooks alternative. Where? What should I get? Five taco.com dot. We just launched it over at Appsumo.

It's totally free. If you have a software tool list, it's. If you're looking for tools, go check it out. Fivetaco.com dot. Before you go slide in my DM's.

Oakagan, I love hearing from you. Finally, a couple shout out to the amazing team who make all this happen. Jasonodcasttech.com. Thank you. Thank you to jeremy so much.

Cam, Sylvie, Jay, Diego, and memo from the dork team. For all the magic, y'all do have a perfecto day. What's your favorite animal?