Luke Lintz – Founder & CEO of HighKey Enterprises | Failed Dropshipper To Millionaire Marketing Mogul

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About The Guest

Talking Points

• 00:00 — Intro
• 03:24 — Luke Lintz’s origin story
• 13:45 — What was the first version of Luke’s marketing agency?
• 22:58 — How does Luke work with celebrities and how did he build his personal brand?
• 43:31 — How to build a community and why did Luke get into the NFT space?
• 49:41 — What is Luke’s NFT project about and what is its utility?
• 1:01:15 — Luke’s future plans for HighKey and himself
• 1:03:34 — Pros and cons of working with your family
• 1:05:25 — Regrets and failures of Luke’s career
• 1:06:51 — Luke Lintz’s mentor
• 1:08:13 — A book or podcast recommended by Luke Lintz
• 1:09:14 — Something Luke would tell his younger self
• 1:10:48 — What does success mean to Luke Lintz?

Show Links

• https://instagram.com/lukelintz/
• https://www.lukelintz.com/
• https://www.twitter.com/lukelintz/

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On this podcast, you’ll find interviews, Q&A, keynote presentations & conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

The podcast is hosted by entrepreneur, business executive, author, educator & speaker, Scott D. Clary.

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Machine Generated Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

giveaways, people, business, clients, instagram, followers, celebrity, wireless earbuds, heike, crypto, content, building, agency, backpack, project, selling, money, talking, brand, hiring

SPEAKERS

Luke Lintz, Scott D Clary

 

Scott D Clary  00:00

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I’m your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and the blue wire Podcast Network. The HubSpot Podcast Network has incredible podcasts like my first million. My first million is hosted by Sam Parr and Shawn hurry. They feature famous guests. They discuss how companies made their first million and then some they brainstorm new business ideas based on the hottest trends and opportunities in the marketplace. Here are some of the topics he talked about. If you like any of these, you will love the show three profitable business ideas that you should start in 2020 to drunk business ideas that can make you millions, asking the founder of Grammarly how he built a $13 billion company or Sass companies that anybody can start. If these topics are up your alley, go check out my first million. Listen to it wherever you listen to your podcast. today. My guest is Luke Lintz. He is the founder and CEO of high key enterprises. He’s a serial entrepreneur, he stepped out of an economics class at 16 to start his first e commerce business. 90 days later, he sold his entire inventory at a 375% ROI. He’ll walk you through exactly what he did, and also walk you through some of the lessons that he learned and some of the things that didn’t go so well. When he first got into dropshipping and entrepreneurship. Now he’s built highkey enterprises from the ground up what they focus on as they focus on helping people build their personal brand, also helping businesses build their personal brand online. Some of the strategies that he’s used for his clients he’s used on himself, which is what’s so incredible because how many people talk about being a great social media agency or a personal brand building agency or whatnot. And they can’t even do it for their own accounts. But he’s a massive following over 1 million on his own social media accounts. He’s worked with and partnered with some of the largest celebrities in the world, including 21, Savage, Cardi B six, nine. What are we going to Okay, so we spoke about his origin story going into dropshipping very early on some of the wins and the losses and the highs and the lows that he learned getting into entrepreneurship at a very, very young age. We spoke about building a digital agency from the ground up how he differentiates high key because the space in digital agency is so noisy, there’s a million in one digital agencies that you’re competing with. If you try and start one. We spoke about personal brand, how he built his personal brand, how he builds brands, for businesses and for clients. Without spending money on ads. I spoke about the three key elements of personal brand. We spoke about niching down at the beginning of your business journey and the importance of niching down we spoke about how to get press publications. We spoke about the importance of money, connections, relationships, that how that all ties in to your personal branding press strategy. We spoke about the Win Win Win formula, tied to social media giveaways. And some of the celebrities and influencers that he worked with. We spoke about his foray into crypto, decentralized social media, or dezso, and how he’s bringing web three into a traditional marketing environment to create an incredible community. And then lastly, we spoke about some of the lessons that he’s learned building a business, which are just great entrepreneurial lessons, but also he’s done it with his two brothers. And that adds a whole other level of complexity. So he spoke about building the business with his brothers and some of the positives and negatives that you get when you build business with family. So let’s jump right into it. This is Luke Lintz. He is the founder and CEO of high key enterprises.

 

Luke Lintz  03:25

Born and raised in Winnipeg, 20 years there,

 

Scott D Clary  03:27

okay. So okay, Canadian boy from Winnipeg. When did you Okay, so what’s the first version of because right now you do a lot of stuff. You’re throwing a party last Friday, you started an NF T project. You’ve been you built your own? So I don’t mean, I don’t want to call it marketing agency. I don’t know what you actually call what you do. It’s an agency of some sort. You’re doing stuff. But what did you start with? Like, how did you get into building your own business? How did you get into working with your brothers all that?

 

Luke Lintz  03:56

Yeah. So I was in I was in grade 10. At high school. Okay. And I started with an E commerce company, I called Heike technology. And so we sold a wireless earbuds before any other wireless earbud company, air pods. We’re now at Samsung Galaxy Gear icon, none of them. We basically like thought of the idea of wireless earbuds because we were gym Bros and you’re like, Damn, we hate when the cords get ripped out. And so like we had that problem. And so we’re finding the solution. So we found found wireless earbuds on Alibaba, only one pair of wireless earbuds at the time, purchase them, did a bulk order, figured out a name high key, slapped our logo on a bulk order of like 100 of them and then just start selling them through Instagram through like different types of content like marketing. We had no idea what we were doing. I was in grade 10 at high school. My brother was in his first year of university, my older brother first year of university in business. And so we had no idea what we were doing. We were just testing different stuff. It just like we got really lucky because we had a winning product just right off the bat. And we struck gold and we we made $60,000 in sales in the first like For months over no idea what you’re doing no idea. Yeah. $60,000 And like we were doing Shopify, Shopify straight shot built a Shopify store with just wireless earbuds on them. And, and then like, it kind of hit and so we were like, wow, we could, we could run this up. And so we just kept doing more marketing and kept testing what what was working, we were doing mainly like Instagram meme pages. So we were, we were making content of ourselves with like product, placing the earbuds in it, and then making and then posting that content on meme pages like Instagram pages with like, million plus followers. And then we got to a point where we ran up the business to seven figures in sales, with knowing nothing so and was

 

Scott D Clary  05:43

it just did you hire out? Or was this just like you and your brothers? And you’re just managing this dropshipping store? You found some meme accounts, you’re throwing stuff up on there, and you’re selling? So seven figures a lot of volume? For like not having anybody Yeah, right. Just pure dropshipping. So that must have been like customer service headaches sometimes and shit like that.

 

Luke Lintz  06:02

Yeah, it was it was myself, my older brother and then one other business partner that we had at the time. And one our other business partner handled all the customer service. So all the emails and stuff I handled, I taught myself video editing and graphic design. So I used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, edited all the content because we like our entire source of income was through content marketing, only thing we didn’t run any direct advertising was like, just through content on Instagram. We grew to seven figures just content on Instagram, back in 2016 2017. Yeah, and then. Oh my God, dude, we made some crazy mistakes with that business like wild mistakes like

 

Scott D Clary  06:41

1. Okay, so why did you why did you kill that business? Yeah. Okay, because everyone who’s listening is like, oh, that’s going great. Like these like these, like kids kind of got a little lucky, probably little less lucky over time you start to figure shit out, you start to learn what not. So at some point, I’m sure you figured out like what content resonates how to run a proper store. Like you know how to scale it now scaled seven figures. Congratulations. That’s a lot more than what I was doing high school. So why did you kill it?

 

Luke Lintz  07:08

Yeah, yeah. So we were doing really good. We brought on consulting, like, we start bringing on like, really good people in the industry at Facebook ads, and they were consulting us about how to create a better website and everything. And everything was scaling up. But then we made a major error where we had wireless earbuds. So that was making seven figures in revenue, unbelievable product. And it was because it was winning, because it was before Apple Earpods samsung galaxy like and everybody wanted wireless earbuds. And so we didn’t really draw that correlation, because now we were hitting a time where Apple air pods just came out. And huge buds went around that in the entire wireless earbuds game and brought traction away from us. So there was that component of things. And then there was also the component of things where we were always long term thinkers. And so we were thinking of this could be a very long term brand. But we need to branch out just from wireless earbuds so people don’t see us as just a wireless earbuds brand and diversify. Exactly. And then so we created a few other products, we created a really cool portable speaker that was so dope the quality was off the charts. And we paid like it was like wholesale us buying in bulk $40 per sale during dropshipping at this point, not not doing drop shipping anymore. And we’ll get we’ll get into that. And then so so we we ordered, we bulk ordered backpacks, charging backpacks that we completely designed. I fully designed them like I taught myself design work and how to communicate with the suppliers design, we went through seven prototypes, and we brought it to a charging backpack. And this thing was sick, like I loved wrapping it. And we have these backpacks to this day. And we basically, were so involved in this backpack and so committed to it because of how much time we spent to it. We didn’t do any product market research. So we didn’t like test the product at all in the marketplace. 20 did you spend on it to do so

 

Scott D Clary  08:59

I see where this is going? Like it sounds like it’s it was a fucking nightmare. I’ve

 

Luke Lintz  09:03

explained this story so many times and like it hurts me every single time because like if we just had a business mentor at the time, and we ask them like one simple question. Like if we ask them one simple question, it would have all been avoided, but we didn’t have anybody at the time. And so what it was, is basically we were coming up on Christmas time, which was our biggest year we would make biggest time of the year we would make 60% of our entire yearly sales in Black Friday to Cyber Monday. And so we were coming up on Christmas time and we were like listen, we need to make sure we have enough inventory so that we don’t sell out and so is our greedy mind talking being like we don’t want to sell out so we can maximize our sales when in reality looking back we should have just sold out and it would have been sick it would have created more demand. And so I was doing calculations like kind of like out of nowhere like a thin air because I had no business like knowledge in terms of like doing doing Like research estimating how much we would need in terms of like at that specific time. And so we bought 2000 backpacks, because like that was the minimum order quantity they gave us because it was like a prototype. And we took a loan for it, because our cash flow wasn’t there at the time. And so we took a loan from our dad, actually. And, dude, it was really bad. It was really bad. We went into Christmas time, sold only 100 backpacks, which was like still pretty good, like 100 backpacks.

 

Scott D Clary  10:27

I mean, wasn’t good. If you didn’t have 2000, it would have been

 

Luke Lintz  10:30

good if we didn’t have 2000. And then it just kept downward spiraling into more airs. Basically, we bought the 2000 backpacks, we didn’t account for fright in shipping, which is the shipping from China, bulk inventory of 2000 to the US turned out to be like $50,000 of shipping costs during account for freight out shipping, which is shipping from the US to each individual customer, which was like $20 per backpack. And we we’ve lost hundreds of 1000s of dollars on that one that one backpack mistake and yeah,

 

Scott D Clary  11:00

but most people Yes, that. I think that yeah, of course, a business mentor, somebody who would have sort of point you in the right direction. Like there’s like 20, red flags, even if you’re just telling me the story before you did it, I’d be like, well check this, check this, check that, but Okay, so that’s fine. But you still now you’re in the hole, but you still had a winning formula. So it’s not like the first ecomme the first iteration of your EECOM store didn’t work like it was working. So why didn’t you go back to that model? Like, how did you deal with this? 100 plus $1,000? in debt?

 

Luke Lintz  11:32

Yeah. So it’s amazing that you brought that up, because it was the aspect of us having a winning model. And so basically, after us being in debt, and, and looking like, basically, like outside and being like, how do we get out of the hole here, what it was, is that we weren’t necessarily good at dropshipping, we weren’t necessarily good at like selling products. But what we knew we were for sure, good at is bringing in revenue and building a brand because like, that’s how all of our sales came in was through content marketing, building a brand on Instagram, building a brand on social media, and then marketing. And so what we decided was, it was during the summer of like, summer of 2018, where we were like, Let’s, let’s turn this into a marketing agency. Okay, and build a marketing agency start selling services to other product based businesses, and and brands. And so we were thinking about that. And then the only other thing was like, how do we get customers for that?

 

Scott D Clary  12:26

That makes it okay, so I want to just before you go into that, because that that’s sort of like the first version of what you were doing pre nfts? Correct. Exactly. Yeah. So just just to point, any lessons from taking money from your parents? Because I’m just curious what the dynamic was, at that point in your family

 

Luke Lintz  12:43

do never, never, ever, ever, ever take money from your parents. Like I was stressing? Oh, dude, we were living with our dad at the time, I was living with my dad. And like, I’ve never been inherently good at communicating with people, especially people who are close to me, something that I struggled with always, especially about, like very stressful matters. And so we were living with our dad, I wasn’t communicating with him with how our business was actually doing. And like that, we were like, big time in the hole. And I owed money to him. And I was trying to figure out a way that wasn’t a proven way to get out of the hole. And so like, there were so many dynamics that was by far the most stressful time in my entire life.

 

Scott D Clary  13:27

How did you Okay, so what was so obviously you’re not, it’s tough starting a business when you’re not in a good mental space either. Because already you’re coming from like a very stressed out plays. So every decision you’re making, in the back of your mind, you’re only thinking like, How the fuck do I repay my dad? Like, how am I that? So? Okay, so you figured it out, though, obviously. So what was the first version? What was the first version of the marketing agency? How did you because that’s something that you’ve never done either.

 

Luke Lintz  13:52

Yeah, so so the first version was me just bring it up to my brother bringing up the idea of it. And it was just that idea stage for like about three months where like it was tossing around the idea being like, being like, I think that this could be a way that we could make it back and like that we could actually grow something huge from this, but us not having a plan there at all. Because we’ve never, we’ve never done that. And then it just so happened that we were out for we were out for lunch one day with our with our mom, myself and my two brothers. And there’s this person right behind us in our hometown of Winnipeg. And he’s talking about real estate. And he’s just talking with his solos. It seemed to be his business partner across the table, talking about just bashing his current marketing team being like, this is horrible. The content is horrible. I’ve been spending so much of my own time on this. And my mum overheard that when he walks up to leave the room, my mom says, Excuse me, sir. I heard that you were talking about marketing. And then he’s like, Yes, I was. And then my mom’s like, my sons are actually unbelievable marketers. And she knew because we talked with our mom about like us wanting to

 

Scott D Clary  15:00

how you made money with ecommerce company and how you were working with like Instagram accounts. Yeah.

 

Luke Lintz  15:04

And possibly getting into an agency’s Yes. And so she had that in the back of her mind. And then his name was Stefan Stefan Aarnio. And he was he leaned down at us, and he’s like, how old are you? And I’m like, I’m 18. And he’s like, how old are you to my older brother. And he’s like, he’s like, I’m 21. He’s like, perfect. He writes down his number. He writes, There is never on a postcard. He hands it to me. He’s like, give me a call here. And he gave me exact time. It was like, give me a call at 4pm. CST, and Woombye. That’s what he said. And then he left. And that’s all he said. And he wrote down his name and number. And so afterwards, we were like, Whoa, what, like we searched him up on social media. And he looked like a complete scam, complete scam. He had no, he had an Instagram page said real estate in the bio. And then like he had pictures of like pizza and like, just like girls that he was with like random stuff. Or like, this is a for sure. A scam on Google, there was nothing. And so I give him a call. And I’m like, we want to set up an in person meeting. And so we set up an in person meeting, we went to his office, and we were we were at the office, and he had an entire team. And we were like, wow, this could be real.

 

Scott D Clary  16:07

So what did you do for him? That was your first client? Yeah. So

 

Luke Lintz  16:10

I set up a huge proposal, massive proposal, we said we would take over everything, every single social media platform, all content, I would film it, edit it myself, I would do everything. And it was 5000 a month. And he’s like, Listen, guys, I’ll give you a try for two months, is like if it does, well, then we’ll keep going. Over two months, we crushed it literally absolutely slammed it like he he got 10,000 followers on Instagram, naturally, just by the type of content, we were getting him to film, we were making him go way outside of his comfort zone doing viral content. And then after two months, he paid us $10,000. And he was right with his word. And he’s like, I want to partner with you guys. And I want to I want to bring all of my clients who are high level, he was a real estate investing coach. And so he was he had a ton of real estate investors. And so he was able to bring that to us.

 

Scott D Clary  16:55

And you just you just copied and pasted that playbook like that, that content marketing playbook is your like, I think that people are, are used to that kind of style of content now, like you have to put yourself out there and whatnot, you have to be creating viral stuff, you have to be going on video and whatnot. So probably the stuff you’re doing when you started working with them. But a lot of agencies or B were not forward thinking in their marketing, and they kind of just sucked, especially people in the real estate industry, super legacy. So you were sort of modernizing them and bringing them up to speed with how like marketing should be. And now Now business is trying out on social

 

Luke Lintz  17:26

Exactly. Like there’s so much content going out on a daily basis, like every single second, the amount of content that’s going on, so you really have to do some creative stuff to like, set yourself apart.

 

Scott D Clary  17:38

Okay, so you started building that agency out was okay, was that Heike was that so

 

Luke Lintz  17:42

that that was so we had Heike technology, which was the E commerce company. And then we were like, Let’s just keep rolling with the Heike brand. So yeah, so we separate into Heike agency, which was specifically social media management for clients. Okay, cool. And so we partnered with Stephen, Stephen Aarnio on that, and we partnered up and then he he sent us like a few clients right off the bat. And then And then things just start rolling. after that.

 

Scott D Clary  18:09

I started getting more clients still still social media agency work at that point. Yep. Okay, cool.

 

Luke Lintz  18:14

All social media management, like doing management on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and then tick tock went started coming around to YouTube.

 

Scott D Clary  18:21

But that’s still hard to scale with just how many people you’re working with right now.

 

Luke Lintz  18:24

It’s right after we signed our second client on Heike agency, that’s when we hired our first ever employee. And so he was a good employee that hired and each he came into the business and treated like it was his own for a while.

 

Scott D Clary  18:39

And just a question on that, like, when you started doing this is this what was the strategy that you actually use for social back then? Is it still applicable now? Or has that changed?

 

Luke Lintz  18:48

Yeah, stuffs definitely changed but like the main stuff is just like capturing the attention of a user so like, it never really changes inherently it just like changes platforms. And then different platforms are used for different things and then they’ll always keep changing. And so like there’s there’s things with every single platform like YouTube like your vote like five to 10 seconds to hook the audience your thumbnail needs to be absolutely amazing eye catching needs to relate to the content, the title, it’s very SEO based and so the title and the description needs to needs to be good for like SEO optimized optimization for people to search it. Instagram is like very fast paced, IG reels are unreal, it’s still picture based so it’s still like

 

Scott D Clary  19:31

you got to hook people in and whatnot and get people well it’s also because like I’ve noticed that and you probably know this because you’re in social but we were talking outside about like my content strategies and just and then I’m sitting down I’m like this guy No, I just telling him my content strategies like yeah okay all right let’s let’s move on like I already know this shit. But know for all the for all the new features that like platforms launch like they give massive organic reach to Yeah, so you can nail like we were talking and I was like, Oh, I gotta figure out like YouTube shorts and Snapchat spotlights and reels and because they give massive organic reach, which is half the reason why it’s so damn hard to grow on Instagram now because your organic reach and you’re starting a brand new account is like nothing big time.

 

Luke Lintz  20:06

Yeah, yeah. And that’s why like, that’s why I wish I went a bit harder on Tik Tok when it was like, really popping. It’s just, it’s still popping right now but it’s like steadily decreasing like it is with everything as as more content gets published on the platform, you want to do it. Exactly. Yeah, but like, those types of things are unbelievable to capitalize on and that’s like how we started our first business with the E commerce space is we capitalized on Instagram because the the natural engagement was unreal. We have 10,000 I was just showing my my buddies the other night is like we scrolled all the way down the at high Kiko Instagram feed and we had like, 10 to like 20,000 Instagram followers at the time gained like 2 million view videos on our Instagram account, exactly like Tik Tok is now and with like, our own faces. And so like we have so many followers on that account that like with us since the OG days of like watching us like progress to this.

 

Scott D Clary  20:58

So you also like I know, you go on to new platforms, because I saw like, I saw you on Bitclub. Yeah, so you jump on the new social and shit. And you’re like, you’re trying to figure that out? Like, you’re still obviously like very much with it. And you’re still trying to, but you don’t do Do you still do like the day to day social management for agency?

 

Luke Lintz  21:11

No,,no, no, I exited that about I eggs that quickly. Why are you quit? Why? Because I want to, I’ve always wanted to get to a point of like scaling a business. And so like, it’s hard to scale, very hard to scale. And so like, I actually realized a huge talent of mine is like, I’m really good at hiring people really good. I’m really good at seeing like, value propositions and people that like are like their skill sets, even if they don’t see it in themselves. And so I found that like, after I hired our first three employees that Heike agency, I’m like, I’m better than this, even at social media management. So I just need to find people that are better than me at social media management. And we have that now. Like, I’ve a unbelievable team of social media managers better than me. And like I get on our weekly calls. We have two times a week about all of our social media management clients, and they bring up ideas that I can’t even think about on for different by

 

Scott D Clary  22:06

the way actually, I actually didn’t mean like, do you specifically still do the work for people I met? Like, are you still in the like the content creation game because I know that you do other stuff now because now you work with, like celebrities and influencers? You do some sort of like, giveaway thing as well. Yeah. And I think you do PR as well, because usually the whole gamut of shit.

 

Luke Lintz  22:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Content is a forever game. Yeah, I always want to be in the content. And so like, I go through, like, and I want to get to a point of being consistent, but like, I go through like bits and periods of like doing more content than normal. Like my Instagram page is like, I don’t really post that much business stuff on like, my main feed, I just like keeping it like looking cool. Yeah. And then I make videos every once in a while for our business accounts, Heike agency. And then we fly to every single celebrity practically every single celebrity that we film, like our giveaway collaborations with. And that’s, that’s content that goes up on on hiking, clout,

 

Scott D Clary  22:58

okay, so I want to understand, I wanna understand how you work with celebrities. And then I also want to understand how you built your personal brand, because I’m just assuming what you do for your clients that like, you just take the playbook that’s worked for you, and then you’re using it on your clients. Yeah. So what is what is the celebrity play? What is the giveaway play? How does that work? Why do you go into that? Because that’s something that I’ve seen some people do, but I don’t quite understand it. From like, a marketing perspective. And yeah, like, walk through that piece.

 

Luke Lintz  23:24

This is cool. We’re like literally going through like the timeline. Yeah, like everything,

 

Scott D Clary  23:28

I find it interesting. Like, what I’m trying to do is like, so you’ve done a couple businesses, you’re trying to figure out like, why you’ve gone into each one, how you’ve made it successful, and sort of like lessons to pull out of that particular business. Because I know people that are going to listen to this that are trying to start like a social agency. So like from day one, like what are the things you want to get into while you’re trying to hire the right people, you’re trying to figure how to scale yourself, like don’t do all the work yourself. Maybe try and find retainer clients is another thing you mentioned, as opposed to people that just go into like freelancing work. And they just literally want to start a business. But they just started another job, right? Yeah. So that’s what I like to be pulling out the different stages, because you’ve done so many different things. And then we’ll eventually get to NF T’s and all that.

 

Luke Lintz  24:03

So the biggest thing of starting up an agency for me is, and I think for everybody who’s starting up an agency is having an all star client. So having a client that you can show all other potential clients. And so what we did is the person we partnered up with Stephen reo, we used him as our All Star client. So we over delivered so much on his services. Like even though he was a partner, he was still paying for services for his personal but he was paying like, he was paying like 7000 a month for us handling everything, which is like really, really cheap when you get into like, where if he had in house people, he would need minimum like three in house people to handle all this stuff like content on every single social media platform scripting, management, all of that outreach, all of that. And so we just way over delivered on his stuff. And every client who we got on the phone with, which was mainly in the real estate space, is we would send them his profile, and we’d be like, do you want your page to look like this? And it was always like

 

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Luke Lintz  26:04

yes. And then the only other thing rebuttal was like price, yeah. And then I just had to convey the value in the price to them. And so that was the main thing is setting up the setting up the all star client. But then we got to a stage where we were growing him so much. And our our personals were at like 1000 followers, no content, and I was getting rebuttals on sales calls being like, if you believe in this so much, why aren’t you doing this for yourself? Yeah. And I, it was like a switch switch in my head. And I’m like, Whoa, and practically, since that, since that time, and since that like idea. And like that, that brain switch is like, every single service we we’ve ever sold since then we’ve tested on ourselves beforehand. Okay. And so that’s when we started working our personal brands, which come back down working with our personal brands, as we started working on personal brands with growth management content. And so like we were, we were practicing what we were preaching basically.

 

Scott D Clary  27:03

Okay, so you started building up your personal brand, your practice what you preach that the smart sales strategy, of course, but and that’s funny, because not a lot of people actually focus on that you see people that like sell very expensive 7k for all inclusive is like cheap. Yeah, maybe like 1020. I’ve worked with agencies that are upwards of 50k for some, like super extensive marketing plans. So 7k is relatively cheap. But if you don’t, you know, if you look at an agency, and you’re like, Yo, we’re gonna run your social, and they have like, 200 followers on their Instagram, you’re like, really? What, what can you do for me? Why haven’t you done it for yourself? Anyways? Okay, so the whole celebrity giveaway thing, what is that? How the hell did you think of this particular business model? Because that’s not something you copied and pasted. Like, just like another agency.

 

Luke Lintz  27:43

So after, after we ran the agency for a bit, it was self sustaining really good. We had our team, but yeah, yeah, we had about, we had about six employees, six employees at the time, about 10 contractors that were pretty much full time working on like all of our clients, we were bringing in all on monthly retainers to clients. And so we were bringing in revenue, and we didn’t have to worry about money anymore. Practically, we still had the loan that we had to pay off, we were just still burning, but like, we knew we were on the track to finally getting there. And stuff started being in that upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. And we got connected with other people in the industry that we’ve been connected with, like all the way through even the E commerce days of when we were selling like products. And these one guys, were doing these giveaways, they were doing very, very small giveaways, like 10,000 follower giveaways, 5000 follower giveaways with people like supreme Paddy, like really, really like mid mid level influencers. And we were like, interesting, because a lot of our clients are having the problem that Instagram engagement levels are inherently going down. Yeah, natural following is going down even though that they still have to be putting out content. And so like a constant concern of them, and they were like, we had a few clients that were like we’re leaving unless you guys can get us followers

 

Scott D Clary  29:04

because you were because you were so good at it it almost like beat you in the ass. Because then as Instagram and there’s more creators and Instagram reach is going down. So even though you’re operating at the same level, people are like I’m not getting the results that I saw a year and a half ago. So like figure it out.

 

Luke Lintz  29:19

Yeah, it’s really hard if you’re doing a service based business to be charging people the same price with them getting like slightly less results like they’re they’re trying to like constantly scale and it’s hard to scale against like a decreasing platform. Yeah. And so that’s what we were handling with Instagram. And so that’s when we got found out about giveaways were like it was practically the only way to grow scalable growth on Instagram significant growth within Instagrams Terms of Service people obviously know you can go on panels on Google and like to buy 10,000 fake followers that are bullshit it would it would destroy your Instagram account and like Instagram accounts get disabled all the time from this one. But these loop giveaways they’re like called like loop giveaways. Basically a celebrity or influencer promotes the giveaway. They say, Guys, I’m giving out like cash or I’m giving out this car, and they actually give away those prizes. And then they say, all you have to do to enter is go over to this Instagram account and follow everybody that they’re following. And so they go over to a host account, which like in when we first started, like in the giveaway space, there were no Host account, like people had no brand associated with it. And it was like miscellaneous pages, like just being like a random giveaway. 111, like, go into this and follow everybody that they follow. And it looks sketchy. But it got the job done. And I got 10,000 followers for our clients. And they were more than happy they stayed with us. And then they started paying for the giveaways. And what we realized is restart, we could start reselling these people who are already running these giveaways, we could resell spots for them, and like create a whole new revenue stream other than just the social media management that we’re doing. And so we started reselling giveaways and like they were going like very fast people, everybody,

 

Scott D Clary  31:02

But the secret in this is like actually getting the celebrity on board. Because for sure I can I can sell somebody like I’ll get you 10,000 20,000 50,000 Fall that’s that’s not a hard sell. Yeah, like how do you get like a I don’t know, like a tiger or something like that. Like, how do you get somebody like that.

 

Luke Lintz  31:19

So before when we were first getting going there was there was no celebrities in us. It was only like influencers. So it’s mid level influencers. And they were getting paid like $5,000 $10,000 to do a giveaway, which was easy for them that the pitch was, hey, do you want five to $10,000 for one Instagram post that you leave up for seven days, and you’re giving away stuff to your audience? And they’re like, it’s a no brainer? Yes. And so like that’s that was an easy pitch for mid level influencers. But then once we started selling, we started selling like 20 sponsorship spots a giveaway. And we were like, Yo, we could run these giveaways ourselves and do exactly what we do best, which is brand these giveaways. And so we started up an Instagram channel called at Heike clout, which was our giveaway channel, we picked that as our giveaway channel, we call that high key cloud because high key, our main name, and then cloud because people were able to get clout in the easiest way possible by sponsoring our giveaways. And so we started, we ran our first giveaway and we were like, Let’s do this, like out of the water. Let’s run this like crazy. And we put together 1010 influencers, where it’s it was never like really done before. There was like a couple of really big giveaways before but we put together 10 influencers. And we ran a massive giveaway they gave away like $20,000. And it was huge, like bad baby was a part of it. And we just got connected them through our past connections. And we paid a ton of money. But we also made a ton of money we made we paid out like $150,000 to all the other like mid tier influencers and then made about 100 grand profit from like the the giveaway sponsors that

 

Scott D Clary  32:57

and then that’s how people are actually that’s how somebody can actually grow because then you get like massive influxes of real people. Because you’re getting exposure across somebody’s 5 million 10 million person audience.

 

Luke Lintz  33:08

Exactly. Cool. Yeah. And so after we did that first giveaway, we had a fair amount of capital from that and our agency, and we were able to start making some huge pitches. So we made pitches to everybody we possibly could. We started doing outreach campaigns to managers that we were connected with, and we it just was an upward snowball like yeah, we did giveaways with Kevin Hart, Snoop Dogg to baby little baby Bella Thorne. And it’s an unbelievable business model because everybody wins in it. And we also gain these connections with these ala celebrities.

 

Scott D Clary  33:43

I just want to take a second to thank the sponsor of today’s episode. HubSpot. Now, as a leader, you’re always on the lookout for more ways to arm yourself with knowledge, the books, the seminars, and most importantly, the podcast and help you make the best possible decision for you, your company, your customers, because when you know more, you can apply more. And you can grow with HubSpot CRM platform, you can store, track, manage and report on all the tasks and activities that make up your relationships with customers. With a bird’s eye view over all your customer interactions, HubSpot empowers your decision making like never before, so you can give your business and your customers all the good. You’ve got learn how to make your business grow better@hubspot.com. So the only thing that I want to challenge you on his house defensible business model. So how do you differentiate versus someone else who just listens to this and is like, I want to go into this now.

 

Luke Lintz  34:38

Yeah, so the the competitive edge that we had is the brand. Okay, and so our Instagram account and it’s what we do based

 

Scott D Clary  34:45

back to it takes back to why you’re building a personal brand was so important.

 

Luke Lintz  34:49

Exactly. And so the Instagram page that we have at Heike cloud, it’s verified on Instagram. So every single person who’s entering the giveaway is able to go to that hosted page show With that we’re legitimate. Also, we have over 1 million followers, you can scroll back all the way to 2018 showing the our first giveaway campaign we’ve given away over $1.5 million just on that one Instagram page $1.5 million, like verified given away in cash prizes like PS fives and IMAX and then also cars.

 

Scott D Clary  35:20

Very good. Okay, so then, as you Okay, so this was, when was this this time period for the actual like the giveaway that was sort of like the next version of the Heike agency. This was up until just recently, right, and then you started to go into NF Ts. Is that correct?

 

Luke Lintz  35:35

So other so giveaways. Giveaway started picking up like for us, where we started doing our own giveaways in 2019. And then all the way up until now, and we’re gonna be doing giveaways for the rest of our lives for sure.

 

Scott D Clary  35:48

And helped me understand something else as well, because it’s something that I was trying to figure out if I wanted to actually take part in a giveaway. So how do I how do I know which giveaways work for me meaning if I go with like, a Cardi B, for example? How do I know that her audience worked with me? Versus if I went with like, obviously, there’s not a ton of like business influencers that are like a Cardi B or probably have that level of reach. But still, that would be a better audience.

 

Luke Lintz  36:13

I know. It’s a really, it’s a really common question that we get with practically every single sponsor that we have that’s like new to the giveaway space. And it’s, it’s this comparison, that’s like best best for it. Like, it’s the only way to build scalable Instagram followers, only way on Instagram. So if you’re trying to grow your Instagram, this is the only way

 

Scott D Clary  36:34

give us okay, give us give give me give us give us give us people listening number. So when when you spend x amount of dollars, I’m trying to compare it to other marketing. So if somebody was like, Oh, I’m a marketer, I run for example, maybe I run ads, you try and get influenced, to get followers get followers. So there’s like a, there’s $1 per follower, or whatever it is, or maybe $2 per follower. If you there’s one book called, I think, a million followers where he tries to like run ads and like, all these like other countries around the world that have like a lower CPM, and he gets like 20 cents per follower or whatever. So what’s like the actual dollar value per follower?

 

Luke Lintz  37:06

Yeah, so we ran Facebook ads to get followers without a giveaway associated just with like, for example, you like cutting up your content on your podcast, delivering it to an audience that you’re looking for in the US, which was obviously be really targeted. And you’d be paying about like two to $3 per follower, but it’d be like, really targeted business people. And it would it’s not like inherently, like extremely scalable, because two to $3 could fluctuate a ton. Because there’s no real way to like Target for followers. And there’s very like, No, you’re right, there is Yeah, and if you think about yourself, like just scrolling through Instagram and stuff, like How often would you see a direct advertisement brought to you by Facebook to follow or like go to their page and follow?

 

Scott D Clary  37:49

It’s weird. It’s, it’s so like Twitter, does it? Yeah, Twitter actually has like a paid to follow. Yeah. But Instagram, you have to just run like a super compelling ad that would make somebody like, want to just

 

Luke Lintz  38:01

talk exactly. And so you’re paying like two to $3, practically minimum for a very targeted follower. And so like, the the negotiation and like the counter argument of the giveaways in terms of scalable growth, is you’re able to gain hundreds of 1000s of followers on a monthly basis. And it’s around 10 cents of all. Okay, so then sorry. Yeah. And so, so

 

Scott D Clary  38:25

even if even if some of them aren’t your, your perfect audience, it still is. Yeah, incredibly cheap. So you’re hoping that if like, say 50%, or even like less than that, if 50% of your target audience then you have you have volume, which I guess helps with like your cloud and just like your, your social proof, because you have the volume there. But then maybe like 40 or 30% of them are actually like people that would buy your service or engage with your content assumption

 

Luke Lintz  38:51

exactly in a lot of our clients are, especially if the giveaways a lot of our clients of the giveaways are people who do high ticket sales. So for example, like we have a lot of plastic surgeon clients, we’re like, yeah, yeah, like the number one plastic surgeons across the US, like millions and millions of followers. And the reason for that is it’s just a numbers game, like they do one plastic surgery, and it’s like $20,000. So for example, we have a we have a Nicki Minaj giveaway coming up, it got postponed, but it’s going live on Thursday, March 24. And that’s like around $10,000 to get in, or 10 cents per fall or kind of 75,000 to 100,000 followers. So they’re getting the plastic surgeons and we have a ton on on this giveaway list. It’s 75,000 to 100,000 followers, and they just need to get one client out of 75,000 to 100,000 followers directly coming from Nicki Minaj and they’re in the profit and so like those are like the ideal clients and those are the clients that like our recurring because they do make that and they consistently make that and they bind to every single one of our giveaways because of that, that starts to make Yeah. And then besides that, besides that the people who other than those high ticket sales, a huge portion of clients specifically for the giveaways are people who are just trying to initially grow their brand. Like they have 1000 followers, and they need to get over like that 10,000 or 100,000 follower mark just for brand legitimacy. So like, it’s like, they need to get over it for brand legitimacy. And then if they get sales on the back end from it, it’s like a bonus. But yeah,

 

Scott D Clary  40:26

no, that’s smart. It’s an interesting, it’s an interesting strategy. Because I’m wrestling with the concept of doing it myself. And I’m trying to figure out because I’m, I’m at like, 840,000, or something, but I don’t have a high ticket offer. So for me, it’s like, when does it start actually like being like, positive ROI for me? And

 

Luke Lintz  40:42

I have to figure that I don’t know, how did you get up to eight,

 

Scott D Clary  40:45

it was just an insane amount of content. Yeah. So I’m like three to four pieces per day, I ran ads, I ran ads, but they were very expensive. So I stopped. So yeah, I turned myself into a content marketing machine. And that was pretty much it. That was, that was how I grew. And I’m doing that for a long time. So

 

Luke Lintz  41:00

but I also that’s, that’s the ideal way. And it’s either benefit, it’s either time or money. So I get

 

Scott D Clary  41:04

I get also I have an edge because I get celebrities on my page, right? So I get notable names, and I get when somebody comes on the show that has could be it doesn’t matter how many followers, if I put that content out, then they’re reposting it against it. So I’m getting access to some celebrities, audiences already that normally most people can’t get tagged and be reposted on whoever’s audience, right, like doesn’t really happen for most people. Top the reason why I love podcasts is because it works, right? You put out a piece and you tag the person who you interviewed. And they either will actually ask you for that piece and post it on their channel in like an actual infeed post, or they’ll just read it, they’ll put it on to stories, and then that’s across all their social. So I could like you know, you tag them on Twitter, they’ll retweet it, you put them on LinkedIn, they’ll repost or reshare it on their timeline.

 

Luke Lintz  41:50

And it’s a great pitch like, yeah, you’re going up to them giving value.

 

Scott D Clary  41:54

Not only am I saying you’re getting access to the audience that I have, I’m also saying that I’m going to basically be like an outsource content marketing team for you, with all the stuff we put together. So I’m gonna get like out of this, probably like 30 different clips. So sick. Yeah, exactly. So my editor is going to like edit it all out. We’re going to timestamp all the different questions that I asked. And each one of those is going to be like, you know, even like 45 seconds, like two minute clip, yeah. And that’s going to be like 30 pieces of content that that person can use on their website, you can use on your Instagram, use it forever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t even care if I’m in it. Usually they include me in it. But like, at the end of the day, like if if I keep doing that as a service, it’s zero extra effort to make them already doing it for my own channel. Yeah. But also it’s going to get me exposure to their audience. So but I mean, that’s like very different than what most people have access to. Most people don’t have that access unless you start a podcast and you do have incredible people that come on the show. Most people don’t just get retweeted or like or share to a story of a celebrity, right. So but that’s exactly. That was like my marketing mind at work. And I’m like, how do I grow my own personal brand? It’s like, I need people who are like super impressive to talk about me. And this is how I’m doing. It’s so dope. Yeah, I never said but the strategy makes a lot of sense. In the end, the cost per follower is like, incredibly cheap. Yeah. It’s super, super cheap.

 

Luke Lintz  43:10

It Yeah, doesn’t get any cheaper.

 

Scott D Clary  43:13

So when I ran ads, when I ran ads for followers, I would run ads, like anywhere like outside of North America, in North America. So most most expensive Mark doorknobs like us, like two to three bucks a follower. Canada, Australia is like maybe a buck a follower. Yeah. And then like, Philippines, Pakistan, anything outside of that is like between 20 to 50 cents a follower still very targeted. Yeah. So you can target a little bit you can target like their interest and their language and whatnot. But it’s still Yeah, the cost is still expensive. So it’s like, if I could get 10,000 followers from Nicki Minaj, that’s probably still more targeted than if I’m running a campaign and targeting some country in the world that does the US going to be like 20 to 30 cents per follower, but it’s still like, not easy to do. Exactly. There’s no direct ad set that you can run that will push people to directly follow you. It has to be like a choice on their on their behalf. So the ad has to be super fucking compelling to make sure that they actually do

 

Luke Lintz  44:07

that. Yeah. And you got to run like a engagement campaign. Yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  44:10

Yeah. Well, you just try. Yeah. And then forget about the testing phase, which also is just super expensive, where you test like, the creative and the copy and the targeting, and you make sure that all that resonates. So yeah, it’s, it’s smart. Very smart. Okay. So this is what Okay, so this is and you’ve, you’ve run these on yourself, I’m assuming as well, like you’ve run we put

 

Luke Lintz  44:29

ourselves in every single given. That’s how we rent. That’s how we got from the 1000 followers that we were at to over a million followers. Okay, so

 

Scott D Clary  44:36

talk to me about community building. And why I say that is because that’s what you’re doing now. So I when I look at your brand, I see you as a great community builder. I see you as all the stuff you put out the parties that you hold the NFT that you dropped, all that seems to be I don’t know if you did this purposefully, but it seems to be a community building because at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to basically make that business take off. So did you do this purposefully when you wanted to drop an NFT were you like, I want to create community, I want to create assets I want to create events, or was that something that you almost did just because you enjoy doing that, like, you seem to like, like love partying and shit. So it’s like, I want to create a project that sort of like helps me, like, sort of double down on what my brand is already about.

 

Luke Lintz  45:18

Yeah, so for NFT projects, specifically, it’s 100% of our community. Yeah. The entire NFT community is like, each project is like how valuable you can you can build a community and like how much value you can bring to that community. It’s with every single like top project, like the board API club. Yeah. Which is like one of the top prod NFT projects like out there is it is what is because of the community that they built. It’s like amongst celeb owners, and very, very rich people that people want to buy into it solely to get into that community and get access into that community. So like, yeah, that was like top of mind in terms of what we were dealing with, like, so our NFT project, it’s called, like fraternity apes party, frat apes. Yes. Yeah. And so so we were we were waiting to launch an NF T project, because we wanted a utility component to the project. And because we’re in a landscape, now we’re only NFT succeed if they have a utility.

 

Scott D Clary  46:19

So for a long time, they like there was like, there was like hype at the beginning. Yeah. And then you see, like, even like the search terms on Google, like they’re drastically declining. So we were talking before about, like, all the other crypto projects that failed, there is no business fundamentals, no utility. So now when you launch something, you have to figure that out. So what is okay, so how did you figure out utility? How will you like, this is how I want to create utility for eternity?

 

Luke Lintz  46:41

Yeah. So it came because back in 2021, we got the opportunity to throw a massive party, because we had a sponsor, we had some of our clients in Miami at the time. And it just lined up where we were doing two giveaway campaigns back to back we were, we were filming with Rick Ross, and we were filming with lo baby on the same weekend. And so we were like, on top of the world. And we were like, Let’s do a crazy party. Let’s let’s do a crazy event. And so we set some things up and we had a we had a yacht event at the start, and then a job and at the start where we tied up three yachts together 375 foot yachts. And then we went we went to a mansion the next day and through a crazy mansion party. And we were able to do that because one of our clients who’s like, such a good friend, and like we do tons of investing with him, like in real estate. His name is Robbie Clark. This guy’s a savage. I was talking to you about him today. I

 

Scott D Clary  47:36

see. Yeah, I saw. So I was gonna do a show with him too. Yeah, yeah,

 

Luke Lintz  47:39

I’ll line that up if you want. And he’s great. He owns like 300 million plus in real estate right now in Canada, trying to bring it up to a billion by the end of this year. And so he helped us out with sponsoring the entire event, the first event, and we thought that would be cool, because we had the opportunity where it was over a huge event. It was the it was the Floyd Mayweather and Logan fight. And so everybody was in Miami. And so we were able to reach out to all of our celeb friends all of our influencers and be like, Yo, we’re throwing these crazy parties like come through if you’re if you’re okay to post on your Instagram and stuff and like, want to want to do anything. And so on the yacht, we had like little baby and blue face were there and we had a great time. And then at the mansion, it was it was blue face came to perform Rich The Kid came to perform. And then like a bunch of like random selection, just

 

Scott D Clary  48:32

because this is because you’ve been doing this and you’ve been like building out these connections and this network for all the actual work that you’re doing with Heike, previous to the NFT. Launch.

 

Luke Lintz  48:41

Exactly. Yeah, it was the accumulation of all the connections that we built. Yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  48:47

You don’t want to suddenly be like, this is like, you know, you did it one way to build this incredible network and look at what that allows you to do. Yeah, that’s, that’s an awesome network to have when you want to do anything. Now you have this like group of celebrities, you can tap into the same shit with like actually building a podcast, like literally you just find you have to find ways to like, to orchestrate like connections. So like, how do you orchestrate connections? Well, these people that are operating at this level, like a celebrity or like some, like an incredible business person who who’s achieved so much success, like you’d have to provide value to them in some way. And like, if you want to, like, I don’t know, like hockey stick growth curve, like exponentially grow your career, like find a way to provide value for like, the most influential people in the world. And like, you’ll find yourself in a pretty damn good spot. But it’s like, I think that you have to think like that when you’re trying to build a brand start a side hustle like how do you not just cater to like the average client, but how do you cater to the people that are the most successful at what they’re doing? Because there’s more than just closing a client. You want a client with a network with relationships, like with things that can provide, like ancillary value outside of just like the retainer or the dollars that they’re paying you

 

Luke Lintz  49:57

100% Yeah, there’s been clients that like over the years We, I’ve done so much free work without taking a single dollar because I know that just building the relationship and having the relationship there, like with them referring over clients or like just talking about us to like a high level group of people, and then like the business that brings in the long term is unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. Like in in reality, like the, the time that we’ve been in the business space has been very, very small compared to our entire time horizon. And so like, if I can already see a justification of like building relationships and like what that does in terms of like revenue and, and bring in like natural business and bringing business like from friends and stuff, like it’s the way to win in the long

 

Scott D Clary  50:40

term 100% Okay. So, okay. So NF T project understand utility. So, what is what what is utility? What comes fraternity? Ah, yeah. And also and also why did you go into NF? TS? So what why do you believe in web three NF TS crypto all that? Yeah. So

 

Luke Lintz  50:55

with the NF T spaces we were, we were heavily in the crypto space already. So like, when we go on to NF Ts, we had a we had about 90% of our net worth in crypto real. Yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  51:09

And diversify. Like you’re all in. Oh,

 

Luke Lintz  51:10

yeah, dude. We’re so young that like I always ask is like, yeah, like, I’ve thought about everything. Like, when we first started up our business in when I was like, 18. And like, all my friends were going to college of high school, and like I already had the business is I’m like, damn, like, I could fail miserably. Like, yeah, absolutely, miserably till 25. And as long as I had a ton of knowledge, like real world applicable knowledge from it by just like grinding and like learning it, but I could fail miserably go bankrupt. 25 I could I would be more set than the people who went to college for business. 100. So that would that is

 

Scott D Clary  51:48

a whole conversation about why traditional schooling is yeah, not setting people up where they need to be. Yeah.

 

Luke Lintz  51:53

And so that was my mindset of that were like, I could just miserably fail. And so like, that was the that was the same mindset with like, I’m going all in and risking everything. If I see a huge opportunity, because I can I still have that time horizon like I’m 22 right now. And so I could still miserably fail force, I could still miserably I could still miserably fail for like four years. And like, we’re at a point with our business where it’s like, it’s not possible to fail. Like we have things set up where we have so many streams of income that are coming in. So it’s that we’re like, even with our investments, like with crypto, crypto could go to zero, which like, is impossible, but like crypto could go to zero theoretically, and we would still be good with like our revenue and stuff. So that’s always even

 

Scott D Clary  52:35

when you went into crypto like I found you on Bitcoin, like you were figuring out like, you were figuring out like the intersection of like crypto plus social, you’re putting out like a ton of like memes on crypto as well like, and it was just like, you just like, dive into new stuff. Like really effectively. I think that’s probably always been I don’t even know if you’re like aware of this. I think that’s how you’ve always succeeded. You just dive headfirst into shit without even like, not even like not even like, not even stressing about it like you just like who starts like mastering big cloud through like crypto memes. And you built out like a huge brand there. Like it’s just jumping into stuff before you’re ready before the before. There’s a playbook for it. That’s literally been everything you’ve done.

 

Luke Lintz  53:19

Yeah. Yeah. And for anybody who’s listening who doesn’t know about bid cloud, it was previously bid quote, which was like back in March 2012. And then it switched to D. So because they went through a rebrand because they had a ton of like, really bad stuff that came right at the forefront of it. Yeah, but now it stands for decentralized social media, which is way better. It’s literally on coin base now D so that money sign d so and then they they did that because people conceptualize big clout as just a one application like Instagram, where it’s like competing with like Twitter. So it was like the decentralized version of Twitter and was competing with it, but they switched it to D. So because it’s a layer one blockchain, that decentralized social media platforms can build on top, you’re going to build applications on that. Exactly. And there’s already tons of applications built on it. It’s nowhere near where it’s where we believe that it’s going to be. And like we know the people who who create it, who founded it. And we’re heavy believers just in the aspect of decentralized social media so much like we’ve been headfirst in social media for the past six years, six, seven years and we think that decentralized social media is the next step even though it might not be here yet. Like we know that that’s 100% the next step and giving people ownership back in their content, giving people ownership of the platform giving people control of like no advertisements being on the platform like so many different aspects of like being able to invest into people’s the craziest thing on our mind is being able to invest into profiles Yeah, so it’s like brings a gambling component brings a component of like, long term value like being like for example, like you being Unlike a platform that’s on de sol, and like, I’m like, I’m just on this podcast, I’m like, damn, like, I really believe in this podcast. And like, this is like, fast forward to the future with DISA was like, the main thing. And I’m like, wow, I really believe in this. I’m going to put money into your social despite your social profile. Yeah. And because I believe in it and passive income being made just by you delivering?

 

Scott D Clary  55:23

Well, that’s the thing about like, like, with NF T’s with with D So, and even like the first version of Bitcoin was about, like, how do you unlock all these opportunities for creators? How do you unlock because for the longest time creators are getting screwed by social because they were socials making so much money off of the eyeballs that we’re looking at these creators and like, yeah, maybe YouTube pays them a little bit. But outside of that, creators really get screwed. So this is like you give creators the opportunity to not only do incredible work, but now actually get paid for it exactly. Who can actually put their dollars where they want to put their dollars versus putting, you know, $30 towards like, you know, Google or Facebook or whatever it is, right. So very cool. Okay, so that’s why that’s why you’re doubling down on NF Ts, you started your own project. So talk to me about fraternity eggs. What what is it? What are you trying to do with it? What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the community you’re trying to build?

 

Luke Lintz  56:17

For? Sure, yeah. So we started for attorney apes like building it out in 2021. So we are already heavily invested in the crypto space already, like, already doubled down on like D so which is decentralized social media. And we were we were like, now it’s time to launch our own NFT project, especially during this time, we’ve also done marketing for other NFT projects. And so like we, we showed our capabilities of what we could do with like building communities, building a Twitter audience, building a discord audience, building these massive projects that like a majority of them sold out. And some did, well, some didn’t. And so that’s where we had like, as like our backbone, and then we thought we were thinking about like different utility aspects that we had. And it was just like, all the value propositions that we had. So basically, we we could give people access to celebrity events that we had in the future, because like, we throw them at massive mansion, since there’s more than enough room, and everybody wants to meet a celebrity and talk with a celebrity at mansion. And so we give access to celebrity parties. That’s what one thing we can we thought about hosting zoom meetings and masterminds and discord ama is basically like huge meetings with like holders, where we could express like different things about how to grow a business, all the mistakes that we made, and then do interactive AMA’s, which are like ask me any things where people could ask about, like, their problems and anything that they’re struggling with in business, just like how we made the backpack mistake, who knows one of our holders could be coming onto one of those stages, and asking me about asking me about a specific situation, I say one thing that changes their entire trajectory. So that’s another thing offering consulting and, and that and then building an extremely, extremely strong community. And, and like all the things that we’re going to come from in the future, like they get, they get access, so all of our holders get access to our entire brand. And so like whenever we, whenever we partner up with a new celebrity, like we’re partnering up with Nicki Minaj, that’s going live May a couple of days, partnering up with Cardi B next month, that’s indirect Association, because we’re Heike is the backbone of fraternity apes?

 

Scott D Clary  58:28

Was it is it hard to like, now that NFT so there’s like, kind of like, hype around NF Ts, you had like stuff like people selling stuff for like, like x millions of dollars, like it just insane. Now that it started to decline? Do you have problems marketing NFT projects? Do you feel like you have to like regain trust in people? Or are people still on that bandwagon?

 

Luke Lintz  58:50

For sure, people are very skeptical about projects, especially like whales and stuff, and you have to really win them over. And they usually don’t see it, don’t believe it until they see it type of thing. And so like, that’s what happened with our project to like, it didn’t go as successful as like we hoped for. But like, we’re going to be winning over people in the long term, just like how some projects just like split up and like either either, like don’t sell out or like sell it very fast and then drop in value a ton, like, people are gonna be seeing like the value that we constantly deliver over the long term and then get into it after after they see that and where

 

Scott D Clary  59:27

do you think like we’re so NF T’s went up went down? Where do you think the actual like future of NF T’s are going to rest in terms of like community creator economy, what purpose doing they’re going to serve?

 

Luke Lintz  59:40

So the basis of NF T’s is like basically the thing that’s behind it is the smart contract, where like it’s a digital contract that auto fulfills, and it’s coded into the contract that it auto fulfills on us specific certain requirements. And so I think that smart contracts are going to be everywhere in the future and And it might be a theory and there might be a different blockchain Aetherium has a ton of kinks that they need to figure out to, to be able to lower gas fees and all that. But I think that smart contracts will be everywhere and used amongst all things like the most major thing and industry that will break through is is into real estate. And like there’s tons of barriers that we’ll have to go through. And like in crypto time, it’s going to be like, so long. And it could be like five years, it could be 10 years, but it will come where Yeah, yeah. Where people will be able to, in China, buy a piece of land in Canada, without a lawyer or anything like that with a smart contract. And like, if you’re in the NFT space, and if you’ve bought NF T’s before you can see like how unbelievably easy it is. If you understand crypto and understand like the basics of crypto, it is very easy. And like the thought of that being in a physical realm of like, say real estate is really cool. Because like I’ve been in real estate investing, as well. And the amount of paperwork and the amount of lawyers the math fees that go on with that is is disgusting. It like makes my makes my stomach turn on how much time and money that goes into it. And so like that could be saved. That could be Yeah, I agree. Revolutionary.

 

Scott D Clary  1:01:15

I agree. I think it’s a matter of trust and time. Because crypto is not new. It’s just a matter of getting people to try to build out utility and to build up mechanisms that make it more easy than dealing with a lawyer or dealing with an intermediary. Right. Like I think that’s just I think it’s going to be a long game for crypto. But I think that if you start building out projects that actually provide utility, like what you’re doing right now, and then people start to see projects where they’re like, if Oh, I want to get into this, I don’t just want to buy in for like the for like the investment opportunity I want to buy in for the actual utility. And then it’s going to end and that’s going to create some sort of, I don’t know, some, some trust in the industry. Because for a long time people created projects and businesses without utility. And that’s what screwed over all the Trust for sure. Okay. Okay, so where do you want to take this next? Like, what do you want to go into now? I want to do, we’ve been doing this for like about like, an hour, hour and a bit. Now. I

 

Luke Lintz  1:02:13

want to do it over an hour. Yeah, I

 

Scott D Clary  1:02:14

think to the students, I want to do a couple I always do rapid fire at the end to close these out, too. But what’s next for you? Like what’s next for high key? What’s your, you know, what’s your goal in the next three, five years? What do you want to accomplish?

 

Luke Lintz  1:02:28

Yes, the next three, five years is we really think that in the next three, five years D so in particular is going to take off, and if it takes off, we will be billionaires, the amount of money that we have invested in that and the percentage ownership that we have in that so anyway, let’s see this in three five years.

 

Scott D Clary  1:02:47

Right? Yeah, at this age as well. Yeah, yeah, we put

 

Luke Lintz  1:02:49

a lot of eggs in that basket. Yeah. Yeah, so like that’s one thing that we happily believe in and we’re working on but it’s not distracting us from our main businesses our main source of income this currently over the next three five years we won’t be doing giveaways. Yeah, for sure. It might change platforms like Instagram is lessening in terms of like the value that’s that’s coming through it and so it might change to another platform if like our clients are more interested in tick tock, you might change that. giveaways will always stay a thing. We want to be investing more money into crypto of all of our all of our properties, but

 

Scott D Clary  1:03:27

what is outside of obviously your own NFU project, but what are the ones that you look at? Right? Yeah,

 

Luke Lintz  1:03:32

yeah, we mainly store all of our money into into Bitcoin or Aetherium into like the main ones, outside of like, projects that we go heavy into like de Sol and our own NFT project. Yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  1:03:45

When it’s all said and done in the 150 years from now, and you’re dead and gone. What do you want people to say about you? How do you want to be remembered?

 

Luke Lintz  1:03:53

Man, I’ve never even thought about that just because of how young I am. Because like

 

Scott D Clary  1:03:57

I usually interview people that are like three times your age and

 

Luke Lintz  1:04:02

I honestly I don’t really care. I’m just trying to have I’m just and I’ve thought about this and I don’t really care how people think about me when I’m gone because I’m gone. And I this gets into like a huge other topic but like what do you think happens like after life like religious beliefs and stuff, but I mainly just want to have a damn good time while I’m here. I want to constantly be lessening my stress. I want to be improving myself and I just want to do good and like make sure I’m building relationships and having fun time with good people. I love it. Yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  1:04:36

Okay, so a couple rapid fire Um, first thing that I’m just curious about I don’t always ask everyone this but how’s it working with your brothers? Benefits? Drawbacks working with your family

 

Luke Lintz  1:04:44

so sick. The number one thing is that it’s

 

Scott D Clary  1:04:49

like kick him out of the room, like an honest answer. Yeah, my little

 

Luke Lintz  1:04:53

brother brothers in the room right now. But the number one thing the number one thing for sure. It’s always been I’ve been with In business with my little brother for like two and a half years now with my older brother for six to seven years since we started, the number one thing is trust. And like we’ve been through, we’ve been through two business partnership breakups for people who are outside of the Brotherhood. And and now it’s just the brothers that own Heike, like we’re the only percentage owners of Heike and it’s the trust thing, it’s that you, you trust them with everything and like you. There’s, there’s nothing that could like come in between us. And like that’s different for some families, but like, we’ve been through, like a lot of hardship when we were younger. And like we fought through it together. And like, yeah, we’ve gotten through that. And and so that that may is pretty strong together. Some things are some drawbacks are like the communication aspect to it. And like a personal relationship. I find this all the time, like I talked about how I have a horrible communication problem, but like, we rarely talk about anything personal, like nothing really still. Yeah, yeah. And it just just gets to that point, because like, we’re talking about things that are like $100,000 topics. And so like, we see it as like, they just gets complicated that way. And so we’re gonna have to work on that over time. For sure.

 

Scott D Clary  1:06:09

Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I’ve never worked with my brother on anything. But yeah, he’s your brother in business. He’s going to law is going to law. So he’s younger than me. Yeah, he’s 25. So naturally, he will be Yeah, so I’m waiting for him to write a law school, then I’ll hire him for some time as a lawyer. Yeah. Exactly. 100%. If your own family, you can’t represent you, what are they good for? Okay, so any regrets or biggest failures that you’ve had in your career,

 

Luke Lintz  1:06:35

do not single regret. And that’s like the number one thing that I like, I’m pushing for, like, in every single goal that I set it. And the reason we threw the parties The reason we start up an NFT project, even though it’s an NFT bear market right now, is because I don’t want to have a single regret in my life. I don’t want to be at 8090 years old, looking back on my life and being like, damn, I regret doing that. And like, I knew I would have regretted not launching our own ft project. If we did that. And tons of other things I knew I would have would regret not going all in ID. So no matter how it plays out, I’m fine with losing that money. If

 

Scott D Clary  1:07:10

you have convictions on that you have incredible convictions on how it’s gonna play. Yeah, I think you don’t want that. Like you have to have that. Yeah. To be successful. Yeah, you’re doing it in a very new industry. But anybody who’s had success in anything, they always go, like tripled down on ideas that everybody else thinks is a little bit crazy. Yeah. So I mean, what if it’s D? So if it’s like, if it’s if it’s your own company, you start from the ground doesn’t in any industry? Like, you have to be like a little bit like, obsessed,

 

Luke Lintz  1:07:39

obsessed, insane. Yeah, yeah, you should see my older brothers only only thing he talks about is D. So

 

Scott D Clary  1:07:45

that’s probably why you’re gonna be successful at it. Like, obviously, you’re writing industry ways, which is outside of your control. But like, if industry goes, well, you’re going to be at the forefront of that right? One person who’s had a major impact on you, there’s obviously been many, but pick one. What was that what they did,

 

Luke Lintz  1:08:00

Stephen Aarnio. So yeah, he was the person who was our first business partner. And he taught me, he taught me a lot of what I know today, even though he didn’t necessarily bring a huge amount of value to highkey agency, like he brought a lot of value upfront. And then he had to focus on his other business, but I was always with him. And like, I was with him on a daily basis. And he became my like, best friend. And I was with him so much. He taught me sales negotiation. He taught me hiring techniques, everything management techniques, a lot of stuff where like, I could come up to him with a ton of different questions. And he would always either have the answer or like, give me thought provoking questions to challenge you on stuff. Yeah. And it’s unfortunate because like, he actually he actually passed away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he passed away. He had cancer and very young age he was he was like, 32. And so that that was really hard for me because like he was that he was by far like other than my brothers, like, by far my best friend at the time. I hung out with him like every single day called them. And he taught me yeah, he was definitely yes. A Tribute to Stefan RNAO over this one blog.

 

Scott D Clary  1:09:15

That’s, I’m sorry. Yeah. A book podcast something that’s impacted you

 

Luke Lintz  1:09:21

thinking Grow Rich 100% I read that book and I did so much crazy stuff after that in terms of like, I did a I did a dream board where like, I always go like bigger go bigger go home strategy. So like I I created a visualization of everything that I wanted in the future, like for the next like 10 to 25 years. And then I got I paid one of my buddies, who’s a friend of mine $1,000 And he painted on an eight by four foot like mural of it basically. And then like, I got that on my computer screen. I have it I’ve at random on my phone and stuff and like thinking Grow Rich, like really breaks down about, like, visualizing and breaking down your goals and like your ambitions, and really unreal literally teaches you how to how to do goal setting. And

 

Scott D Clary  1:10:14

in the book now, that’s a good book. I’ve heard a couple people recommend that as well. If you question the question I always ask, but this is relevant to you. So we’re gonna take it back a little bit younger. The question is, if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, but I mean, like, that doesn’t apply. So like, if you could tell your younger self one thing, what would that be?

 

Luke Lintz  1:10:33

It would probably be something around the backpack mistake that we did. So it’d be like something around like, don’t be greedy. Always do. Always do product market research. Before launching something new. I’d say those two things. Yeah. Yeah. But like I say that as lessons, but like, and this is where I don’t regret anything is because, like, if that backpack mistake never happened, we will potentially still been selling products up until this day. And so like, yeah, so that was the sole reason that backpack mistake and us going in debt was the sole reason why I had the luxury of no other offer opportunities, no other options. But besides do anything possible to get that money back, which ended up us going into an agency, which became like, very successful and like thankfully, like, able to able to come over the over the dirt Stop, stop doing the E commerce. So yeah, that’s why I don’t live

 

Scott D Clary  1:11:38

lessons learned. But ultimately, everything also happens for a reason exactly like, and like the key takeaway is it? You know, if you if something screws up, like it’s only really a screw up if you don’t learn from it? Yeah. Right. And obviously, you did, and you improve, and you’re good. And then last question, what does success mean to you?

 

Luke Lintz  1:11:56

Well, that’s a good question. Success. I don’t think that I’m, I’m successful right now. And I think success means to me is because success is like a couple of different things. For me, it’s getting to a level of where you never think about money anymore. And so like the level where you swipe your credit card at anything, and you you literally do not think about it. And so like that’s with anything that you buy any dinner that you go to no matter how bougie it is, and and swiping the card and not not not even thinking about it. So that’s one level. And then there’s the happiness level, which I do think I’m successful. And because like I’m an all around happy person, I’ve always been like very happy. Even when we were in the dirt, I was happy. And so that’s one aspect, happiness, the money, and then also no stress. And so like that’s one thing that I’m constantly working on, because I definitely have stress. And everybody has a certain level of high

 

Scott D Clary  1:12:55

performer though. So how do you deal with stress? Almost impossible. Yeah, but

 

Luke Lintz  1:12:58

like, it’s true, it’s true, it’s impossible to get rid of completely stress and like you probably have tons of stress. Yeah, you want

 

Scott D Clary  1:13:07

1. Because like, even if even if, say you had like, like literally unlimited money, and say you had like all the happiness in the world. I think that that’s a tough thing to get rid of. Because that’s more of a Am I trying to always push myself to be better. And if you if you do believe you can always be better, which most high performing people do believe it, I don’t know how you wouldn’t have any stress, you can almost just like learn to accept that you are on a journey versus like trying to ever hit like the end result.

 

Luke Lintz  1:13:35

And that’s exactly what I was gonna get into is that it’s not about taking away the stress. It’s about getting better at handling the stress. And like I’ve heard tons of people talk about this like tons of very, very high level people about like, the stress never goes away the stress constantly keeps increasing. It’s just how about you handle it? How well you handle it. Yeah, and so that’s the aspect of it but about being able to handle the stress of like higher level problems and then like constantly gain to

 

Scott D Clary  1:14:01

that very smart Okay, and then most importantly, where do people connect with you? What all the social webs and all that Yeah,

 

Luke Lintz  1:14:06

yeah, anybody can connect with me through Instagram mainly at Luke lens. A UK e li NTZ. Check out check us out on D so check out D Sar. Do some research on that. Check our NFT project fraternity apes party. I guess there’s links will probably be five Yeah, yeah.

 

Scott D Clary  1:14:24

Anything you want to link will do for our names. We’ll do all the social and those in the show notes.

 

Luke Lintz  1:14:27

Cool. Cool. I appreciate you having me on.