Hostage Situation, with Alex Neist (Sleep, Football, Marketing, Entrepreneurship)

This episode delves into the personal and professional journey of Alex Neist, from his early passion for football to his current ventures in entrepreneurship and product innovation, particularly focusing on his development of the Hostage Tape sleep enhancement product.

1. Transitioning skills from sports to entrepreneurship can be highly effective, emphasizing discipline, resilience, and strategic thinking.
2. Innovation can stem from personal challenges, as seen with Neist's creation of the Hostage Tape after his own struggles with sleep issues.
3. Branding and market differentiation are crucial, even in seemingly niche markets; the polarizing name 'Hostage Tape' effectively captured attention.
4. Entrepreneurial success often requires deep personal investment and a willingness to learn from failures.
5. Maintaining personal relationships and emotional intelligence is as important as professional achievements.

1: Early Influences

Neist discusses his early life and initial interest in football, sparked by a Joe Montana card. He shares how childhood experiences shaped his passion for sports. Alex Neist: "When I got that Joe Montana card, I knew I wanted to be like him."

2: Transition to Business

Exploration of Neist’s shift from sports to entrepreneurship, detailing the skills transferred and the initial challenges faced. Alex Neist: "The grind of being an athlete is very similar to that of building a business."

3: Development of Hostage Tape

Neist recounts the personal health problems that led to the invention of the Hostage Tape and its impact on his life. Alex Neist: "When I woke up after using the tape for the first time, I felt rejuvenated."

4: Business Strategies

Discussion on the strategic decisions behind building and marketing the Hostage Tape brand, emphasizing innovation and customer engagement. Alex Neist: "We created a market by educating our audience about the benefits of nasal breathing."

1. Apply discipline learned from one area of life to another to achieve success.
2. Use personal challenges as a springboard for innovation.
3. Understand the importance of distinctive branding in capturing market attention.
4. Continuously learn from both successes and failures to refine strategies.
5. Prioritize emotional intelligence and relationship-building alongside professional goals.

Alex Neist, founder of Hostage Tape sleep enhancement tape, shares his first love of football and his time as a former professional quarterback in the arena football league, explains how dedication is just motivation over time, gives the story behind the name “Hostage Tape”, and talks about the importance of being polarizing, targeting your T.A.M., the TRUE definition of success, and finally making it on Rogan.

People

Alex Neist

Companies

Nice Media

Books

Breath by James Nestor, Never Split the Difference by Chris Wallace

Guest Name(s):

Alex Neist

Content Warnings:

None

Alex Nyst
Wait a minute. If I put this on, am I going to die? Like, is there a chance I die? I'm like, I'll be fine. Come on.

So I finally felt what it was like. It was jolting. And that's when I knew, okay, I've got something. Top leaders, meaningful conversation, actionable advice, bulldoze complacency. Ignite inspiration.

Create impact. Produced by southwestern family of companies. This is the action catalyst. Are you interested in advertising? With the action catalyst, our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now.

Alex Nyst
For details, shoot us an email@infooactioncatalyst.com dot. Hello, action catalyst Listeners. Today, our guest is Alex Nyst, the founder of hostage tape sleep enhancement tape, as well as an entrepreneur and former professional quarterback in the Arena Football league. Recently, he has also founded Nice Media with a mission to build ecommerce brands with passion. Alex, nice to meet you.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Look, we're honored to have you on. I love focusing kind of on early days a little bit in this interview, too. We have a lot of business owners on here. They're going to be really curious about scalability of what you built.

Adam
So you got started wearing pads and helmet? Yes. My first love was football. I was a football player. So there's this great story.

Alex Nyst
When I was probably 13 or 14 years old, somewhere around there, I was at a birthday party, and they gave everybody these packs of tops, football cards. I wasn't really much of a football player back then. And so we got these cards and we opened them up, and the very last card that I got was a Joe Montana card. And everybody around the table was like, oh, my God, you got a Joe Montana card. He's the best quarterback in the league.

Like, a light bulb went off for me. So then it was at that moment I knew I want to be like that. Everything I do was breathing football, living football. And then my dad built the net. We lived out in the country, in southern Minnesota.

So out in the country then I had. We had a past year where my dad built this net, where I would be outside all day from morning till when the sun went down, just throwing the ball. And even before I had the net, what I used to do was I would go out and I would just throw the ball at all the trees. And then that prompted my dad to be like, all right, son, you're killing all the trees. Let me build a net for you.

So, man, I wanted to be, at the time, the next Joe Montana. And then as I got older, that was the era of Kurt Warner, right? This underdog story. And I'd always kind of had an underdog mentality and underdog story for me, too, that I loved the Kurt Warner story. So then I always wanted to be the next Kurt Warner.

Nobody ever thought I was going to go play college football. And then I went and I played college football. I went to the University of Minnesota. I was a gopher. And then from college, I wasn't a starter.

I was. I was a backup. So nobody ever thought, like, what kind of a backup actually continues on and keeps playing? But I had a mentality, much like Kurt Warner did, where I just. I knew I was good enough, I knew I could play.

I was able to get into arena football. I was always that guy that nobody ever. Everybody counted me out. But then I always had a chip and I'm like, I can do it. I know I can.

I had this, like, delusional confidence. But look, man, in this day and age, when you're playing with a playbook that's this thick, there's so many options and there's so many reads, and things are so complicated. You have to have a smart guy. You got to have a guy who can take all that and learn a new language and can think on the fly and can go into a meeting and command the room. Because the reality is this.

You've got a billion dollar organization behind a guy. Those guys in that room are not going to follow him if he's not working harder than everybody else. And he doesn't actually show that, wow, that guy knows what he's doing. He could coach everybody in the offense, everybody in the room, everybody in the huddle. They have to be able to follow that guy.

And if they can't follow that guy and trust that guy, not going to work. A great example is Johnny Manziel. You're seeing a lot of more media come out, especially with the Netflix documentary that that dude was so talented, but it was obvious why he failed. He just was not doing the work. He was not studying, not doing film, not doing all the things.

And then he lost the entire locker room, lost all the coaches, and it was obvious. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a good pivot, actually, to talking about business. So talk about the transition from athletics to business. I think it's an easy transition in the sense that when you're an athlete, especially a high level athlete, and you make it to college sports or some level of pro sports, you know what it takes to actually put all the work in day in and day out?

The grind. Yes. And that's the thing that most people don't understand about being an entrepreneur and building a business. They look at it from Instagram and go, oh, wow, look at all the amazing things they're doing. Look at what they've accomplished.

Like, it's like an overnight success. But what they don't see is what all of us athletes have gone through is that, dude, you're going to practice every single day. You're working on every single day. You're doing all the little things every single day that then pays off every weekend, every Friday night. So it's a very similar mentality of what we need to do on a daily basis.

That grind you have to do, you just, you don't need motivation, you just need dedication and you need consistency to continue to do the right things day in and day out. And you're going to fail. And that's okay. Right. And that's another piece of it, is that being a great entrepreneur and a great athlete is learning how to be able to use failure.

You know you're going to fail. You know you're going to fail. And it's using that failure then to learn from it to then get better and try not to make those mistakes again and keep moving forward and keep stacking. I tell you, if there's one thing that my, my mom taught me, and I say this to my kids, you can accomplish anything in life you want. You just have to be willing to work for it.

And if you're willing to work for it, you can do it and you can accomplish it and you can make your own luck to get to it. That's good. I know it wasn't like a complete transition right into the businesses that you, that you're known for now, the hostage tape, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but you kind of had this, like, pivot point of getting into sports video analytics, which was related, right? Yeah. You know, when you're an athlete, that's always also a coach.

Like, when you're playing arena football, like, we don't make tons and tons of money, your goal is to try to climb to make it to the NFL. And that was obviously my goal. So while I'm doing that, I'm also coaching football. I was a high school football coach for 15 years. And so when you're a quarterback and you're a coach, you're a student of the game.

And so as a student of the game back then, this was in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, right. Where the Internet the Internet wasn't what it is today. You weren't watching videos and interacting with software in the browser the way that we are now, and we're used to it. So back then, everything was very, all right, hey, I'm gonna mail you a DVD. Yeah.

I'm gonna meet you at McDonald's, and we're gonna hand off tapes. It was very rudimentary in how we used to exchange information, video, and study things. At the dawn of that was certainly Netflix was starting to change and grow. YouTube was starting to change. All these things were happening.

And so I knew, all right, there's something here online with being able to take video and share it. So we actually just started out as a. It was a file sharing site, game exchange, exchanging game video. But then we pivoted and we said, let's actually take that, though, and add more to it. Well, let's actually build an application in the browser that people are going to interact with.

We pioneered this concept of using humans to watch the video and tag it. So that way. Then, as a. As a coach, you played a game on a Friday night, you woke up the next day, your game was entirely tagged with the data points that you could search and pull up to be able to teach your players more effectively. Because most teams, especially Olympic sport teams, they've got one, maybe two coaches on staff.

How the heck are they going to take a 90 minutes match, add data to it so they can actually use it with their players? Most don't. Most didn't at the time. They were just like, all right, we lost, uh, anything we can learn? I don't know.

Let's move on. Cause they got a game in two days that really catapulted us into, uh, where, you know, we were doing seven figures a year with that business. And then we bootstrapped it, ran it for 16 years, and then I sold it to a company out of Tel Aviv. That kind of led to ending that chapter of my life into a new chapter. And.

Adam
And tell me, like, if you. You know, there's a saying that, you know, there so much of what you go through in life is preparing you for your moment when it comes, right? What was the preparation this business gave you? Well, in 16 years, I failed an awful lot, right? When you run your own business, you fail a lot.

Alex Nyst
And I was just fortunate enough to not fail too much that we were still in business, and we lasted for 16 years. Or you could look at it as I failed so much that I was able to learn enough to stay in business for that long to then get to this point. So I negotiated the deal. I negotiated myself. I didn't have a broker or a banker or anybody.

And I'll tell you, when you're, when you're an american negotiating with an Israeli, that's an interesting negotiation that most people are not prepared for. Cause, like, we're not as Americans, we're not brought up in a culture of negotiating and haggling. We're just not, we're just not prepared for that. They don't teach that. We should be teaching, you know, our kids, and they should be teaching that in school, how to negotiate.

So shout out to this book. Never split the difference by Chris Wallace. Yeah. Needs to read this book. This book changed my life.

So when I read that book, it changed everything about how I approached business, how I approached my relationships. And then it really helped me, helped me set up being able to go in and negotiate that deal to sell the company. Now I know the things that I need to learn when I build my next company, that's going to be big. And I also learn, what do I not want to do? How do I not want to be?

How do I not want to manage my people and lead my people? I learned a lot of things I don't want to do. How did this come about? I mean, this seems like Archer from, you know, what you've done previously. Well, the story is actually this.

Five years ago, I thought I had everything right. I had the business, the seven figure year business. I had my wife. We had a house. I had two kids.

Then literally two years after that, I lost all of it. I sold the business, and then I went through divorce because I was super laser focused on the business. But also, I was a terrible snore that had pushed my wife into the other bedroom. And a lot of people think, oh, you star sleep in a separate bedroom. That's great.

It's not great. And it's not good for a relationship to be sleeping in separate bedrooms. I don't care what you think. It's not. I've been through it.

And then I only saw my kids at the time. And then as a result, I had to sell the house, and I was living in my aunt's basement. So then it was in that moment where, all right, I'm vesting out my equity, and I'm at, like, my rock bottom moment, and I'm going, man, what do I need to do? What do I need to do to change, to work on myself? So I started with my sleep, and I went down this rabbit hole of what?

About how can I improve it? How can I improve my snoring, my sleep, all of it. And I discovered this article written by James Nestor. And James Nestor wrote a bestselling book called breath. And in this book, there's an experiment that they do where they go to Stanford Medical center and they plug their nose for ten days to see what would happen, both anecdotally and what the doctors would say.

Throughout this ten days, they develop sleep apnea, snoring like crazy, and dangerously low levels of blood oxygen. Once thats done, they unplug their nose, they taped their mouth. Everything went away in a day. So when I read that, I went, is it really that simple? Its mouth breathing?

Because as an athlete my whole life, they never taught us that. They never taught us the dangers of mouth breathing and the benefits of nasal breathing. And so I then went, okay, went on Amazon, I had no idea what to get. And I just bought some cheap stuff that, like, I will just try this out. And everybody has the same reaction, wait a minute.

If I put this on, am I going to die? Like, is there a chance I die? And I'm like, I'll be fine. Come on. So I put it on.

When I woke up the next day, I felt like a kid. I felt like my poor 14 year old son. Like the amount of energy that I had, because when you get for sleep, it stacks. So I finally felt what it was like. It was jolting.

And that's when I knew, okay, I've got something. And on top of it, when you're like, we're gonna call it hostage tape, they're like, yeah. Like, the amount of pushback I got from that, a lot of people didn't like it. But when you have polarity in a brand and you're gonna have people who love it, people who hate it, that's when you know you've got something good. Hostage tape.

Why would you call it that? When I first started mouth taping, I used to warn my kids. I would say, hey, guys, I'm going to warn you. I'm going to put some tape on my mouth, right? It's going to look like I'm being held hostage, so just don't freak out.

But it's also tapping into this core emotion. People feel. People feel held hostage by poor sleep or their partner, and they don't know what to do. And I knew you're going to scroll through your feet, and you're going to see hostage tape. Whoa.

And you're going to remember you're never going to forget that and people don't. Yeah, I was just thinking, like, sometimes you like, glance at it, maybe on like an ad, scroll down, and you're like, wait, is this like the s and m feed at first? And all people are like, what are they going to sell ball gags next? But then to your point, polarity causes you to read. And then as long as the science backs up the tool, it's, it's, you know, it's compelling.

Adam
What, what were the exercises that you took in exploring the marketability of this? So there wasnt much that I did to like, pest. I just knew in my bones that this was it. The challenge, though, is that because it is a commodity, essentially, right? I mean, anybody can take the concept that weve made and try to sell it, but the real brilliance of it is creating this brand that weve created and this movement that weve created were the largest brand in the world.

Alex Nyst
Its not even close. Like, if you look at the web statistics, nobody's even close to us. No competitor, nothing. What was amazing is a few weeks ago, Joe Rogan, he was talking to an MMA fighter on his pod, and the guy said, oh, yeah, you know, I'm mouth taping them at night. And he goes, oh, yeah, do you use hostage tape?

So we've got the biggest person in the world equating a category to us. Yeah. In a matter of two years, we have taken over a category and we are the category. When somebody says mouth tape, oh, yeah, that's hot. Your hostage tape, right?

Adam
That is the hard part, for sure. The first year was my co founder and I all internal. We didn't hire an agency, didn't hire anybody else. And so it was that medium. And then I had hired on a, my head of support a few months after that, because if there's one thing I learned from my previous business as a SaaS company, your customer support that has to be dialed in, has to be dialed in early.

Alex Nyst
It was the three of us, really, for that whole first year. And I learned Facebook ads myself. Id never done Facebook ads before, but I knew this was our ticket and I learned how to do it. It took me six months and I learned how to do it. I struggled and fumbled and figured it out, but thats the way im wired.

As an entrepreneur, I figure everything out. I identify what are the things that are going to move the needle the most. And I went and I learned how to do those things. Now I completely understood it because that was why I didn't want to go hire an agency, is I wanted to understand how the biggest thing that I was going to be spending my money on and the biggest thing that was going to move the needle, I needed to understand it. I wasn't going to hire somebody who had just some 24 year old kid running our ads who didn't really care.

Right. He was just put on the project because we were paying that agency. He's not the one who took all of his money. And he put it into this business, his sweat. I put my life into this business.

So I'm going to make sure that it works. So you have a valuable product, but you're creating a market in some ways because it's just not there yet. That wall of like, I don't understand it. Yeah, there's totally an education piece to our product for sure because most people see it and theyre like, this is stupid. But then its like, oh, wait a minute, most people here dont actually understand the difference between nasal breathe and mouth breathe.

And this is why its important. Theyre like, oh, my God, I didnt even know that. So when it comes to branding, weve got a 25 person team. And when I hire my team, theres a very particular type of person that I like to hire. I like hiring optimistic people, people that have an optimistic mindset.

And also there are people who, they might be entrepreneurial, they might leave in two, three, four years and then start their own brands because that's what I do. Those are the kind of people that I look for mostly. And I tell them all, hey, if you've got your own brand, your own idea, I'm totally cool with you working with it as a side hustle. I encourage it and I'm here to help. And because I know that you may not want to be here your whole life, you might want to eventually learn everything you can and then move off and do your own thing.

And so right now I've got, I got two brothers, my head of growth and his brother, they've got a brand that they're working on. And it was funny, like we were on a call one day and they had a name for the brand. I'm like, that doesn't work. Doesn't make sense. Like the name of the brand didn't make sense for what they were making and where it was going.

And his wife had said something and then I heard it and I went, that's it. And I said, you're going to do this. This isn't this with it. And it was like, holy crap, that's it. So part of it is there's years of experience that sometimes it takes to really be able to nail branding and know what's going to hit, what not hit.

But in this day and age, you have to be able to get people's attention, blend in. So you have to be willing to take the risk of making something that's polarizing. When you're building a brand, it has to stand out. You can't blend in to this wall of social content, right. Because there's so much of it.

It's so easy for somebody to start a shopify account, to go on and put a brand on, start doing a Facebook ad. It is so much easier nowadays. Be willing to put your neck out there. If you believe in it and you believe it's a great product and you believe it's gonna, maybe it's gonna change people's lives, maybe it's gonna be life changing, maybe it's gonna be this or that. Be willing to do it.

Be willing to take a risk and be polarizing, be different. Good point. I mean, to really like, emphasize, because most people struggle, I feel, with the need to be liked. But if you're liked by everyone, you're loved by none. And that's the other side of this, right?

Exactly. That it's too many people will go, ah, well, I want to make sure that, like, this person likes it and this person, everybody like, no, that's the exact opposite you should do. Assuming the tam is big enough, assuming that, all right, this isn't like a thousand people, assuming you have a large enough Tam. And for the audience, Tam is your total addressable market, your total number of people that you think are actually your demographic that you could sell this to. Assuming it's big enough, go after those people.

Religiously hardcore, go after them. And that's what we did. We went, all right, we're going to go after men who are 25 to 50, right? Those middle aged men who, they have facial hair, they're growing facial hair, and they're probably married and they're having trouble sleeping, and they're probably pushing their wives into the other bedroom. We went hardcore after that guy.

And now as a result, what you start to see happen when you, when you take that approach as a brand, because you really nail a demographic now, all of a sudden, everybody starts and it's successful, everybody else starts to see and go, well, that's actually really interesting. I see how it's helping that person. I wonder if it could help me. And now, ironically, 25% of our customer base is women buying it and using it wow. It's kind of like Stanley cups.

Yeah, totally. Right? That's awesome. Just a couple of rapid fire questions that I think is going to be really good for our listeners. Alex, one question that I have for you that if you can, like, concisely answer.

Adam
Everybody has a different definition for what success means to them that can mean so much to somebody. So for you, what does success mean and when do you know if you've achieved it? I heard a great businessman say this one day, I think it was on social. He said, success means that when I'm 50, 60, 70, and my kids are out of the house, that they still want to spend time with me. It's something I'm working on because part of the story that I didn't, didn't mention Adam, is that the best part of this whole thing is that my wife and I and my kids were all back together.

Wow. So that happened about two years ago. Wow. Completion story. Not one that everyone can say, but thats really cool.

Good for you. One piece of advice you would give yourself, the 21 year old you, Alex. Learn emotional intelligence at a much younger age. I was too inner focused on just me, what I wanted, what I was trying as an athlete. You are.

Alex Nyst
You are always focused on what you need to do to move forward, to get to there. I just didn't understand how to actually interact with other people, how to network, how to use relationships, build relationships, how to make people feel heard, how to just do all those things that you need, you need to have if you're going to be a successful person. Whether it's business, family, a partner, a parent. There's one more question I got to ask you. Morning routine.

All right, you ready for this? Okay. Morning routine is I'm usually up at 530 every morning. I stretch for at least 30 minutes. I do red light therapy, then I do sauna, I do a cold plunge.

And then I'll do either, depending upon the day, I'll get a three to five mile run in, or I'll do the gym. Now, a really important piece of that is when I'm in the sauna every single day, I do visualizations. I am visualizing exactly where I'm going to be, where I know this company is going. I'm feeling what that feels like. Nada.

I hope I do this. This is what it feels like when hostage tape is a billion dollar company. This is what it feels like, what I know this company and where we are going to be. Huge part of that. Then I come back and that's usually two to 3 hours of my morning.

Very important that morning routine. Taking care of yourself. All entrepreneurs out there, taking care of yourself is one of the best things that you can do because at the end of the day you have all these people, your family, your work would depend on you. And if you're not taking care of yourself, then how the heck are you going to take care of them? Yeah, listen to the flight attendant put your oxygen mask up, right?

Adam
Well ouch. Great having you on. Thanks for giving us this time. Really good interview. Great to be on.

Alex Nyst
I appreciate it. This was great. Don't let Batsleep hold you hostage.

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