Transcript of What a Harvard Neuroscientist Taught Me About Achieving Success: Andrew Bachman

Andrew Bachman, the CEO and driving force behind Creators Inc, joins the We're Out of Time podcast. And I was so rock bottom at this time of my life when I met this gentleman. This guy was a Harvard neuroscientist. Meditation was the key for me to stay connected to myself. My mission was to start businesses, and I tried and failed a thousand times. I've taken a lot of people from literally maybe $100 in their bank account to over seven figures in their bank account. You can't stand on the edge of the beach and say, Stop crashing waves. What you can do is grab a surfboard and you can just surf, and you got to ride the wave. We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our listeners. Because of your incredible support, we're Out of Time has reached number one on Apple's mental health podcast chart, number two on the health and fitness chart, and number 20 overall. We couldn't have done this without you. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call one call placement. That's 888-831-1581. If we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time. Today, we are joined by Andrew Bachman, the CEO and driving force behind Creators Inc, one of the fastest-growing companies in the creator economy. Andrew's story is one of serious highs and lows, building and selling companies facing major setbacks, and then staging one of the most remarkable comebacks in business. In just one year, he's taking Creators Inc from concept to a $60 million powerhouse, representing and scaling some of the biggest names in the influencer space. He's a straight shooter with lessons on resilience, branding, and winning in an industry that never sleeps. How are you doing, man?

Doing great. Thanks for having me.

No, thanks for on. I really appreciate it. Now, is that true? Zero to 60 million bucks in a year?

What's true is that I started Creators Inc. From my parents' Kitchen table in Cape Cod when I was 35 years old because I was completely I was completely busted out when it happened.

What are you in? I'm 42. Okay.

I had nothing but a laptop, and this was January 2020 peak pandemic. I'm going to go back, but I'm just going to give you why somebody watching this might want to stick around. Creators Inc. Did $60 million in its first year. It's five and a half years later. We've done over a billion dollars in sales, over $300 million in EBITDA. So far? Yeah.

And you don't have any partners? No.

I told you, I was 42 years old. My parents are very conservative Jewish physicians. Growing up, I was alone a lot. I was basically like an only child. I would come home and there'd be a nanny, and I would find myself out playing by myself in the woods. Before I went to public school, I had a lot of self-confidence. I thought I was going to be a famous actor, athlete, or something. When I get to high school, I'm 103 pounds, soaking wet. I was a wrestler. High school wasn't a great time for me. Girls didn't like me. I got into a lot of fights that I did not win because I was tiny. Junior year of high school, I'm in the locker room after wrestling practice, and a kid comes in. This is the year 2000 or 1999. And the kid comes into the locker room and says, I'm so excited. I just got into the number one school in the world for entrepreneurship called Babson College. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't exist for six, seven years. Facebook doesn't start until 2006. This is 1999. Never heard the word before. I looked at him and said, The hell is that?

A lung disease, entrepreneurship, scoffing. And he says, No. He goes, A guy named Arthur Blank went to my college. He got fired from his job. He went to a local coffee shop. He wrote the business plan on a napkin that became the Home Depot. He's a billionaire. He owns the Atlanta Falcons. That's entrepreneurship. And that stopped me in my tracks. I do a gap year. I somehow figure out how to get into this school. And 2002, in the fall, I show up to Babson College, driving a Ford Explorer, wear an Abercrombie, thinking that's as bling-bling as the world got. And I see all these kids from Saudi driving Ferraris around. And I asked some kid who gets out of his car, what dorm he's in. And he says, Habibi I lit at the Ritz. I said, What the fuck? He invites me out to a nightclub in downtown Boston, and I didn't know that you needed $20 to get in. I had to sneak down into the nightclub. When I got downstairs, these 18, 19-year-old kids who were in my class were popping $400 bottles of Cristal with black cards. I never forget the competitive wrestler rush that came over me.

I was a good wrestler. I was very, very serious and competitive. That was a great sport for me, and I got very competitive. So I went back to college, and my mission was to start businesses, and I tried and failed a thousand times. Ended up meeting a smart kid from China who was two years younger than me who was doing Google AdWords arbitrage before Google was even public. And I basically became his... And he was a little bit of an introvert, an awkward guy, and I became his crutch to speak, walk, talk the language. We would go to trade shows. I would be the networker. He was the back-end guy. We ended up building a really, really serious company that became the third largest behavioral ad network in the world behind Google and Yahoo at the time. So what my business partner figured out, his name's Lynn Mao, and he's got an interesting story, too. He did a couple of years in federal prison, and we'll get to that in a second. But we were kids in a dorm room, and Lynn figured out very quickly that he could sell things online through just arbitraging AdWords.

He could bid on AdWords and direct people to websites, and It was so early. He could do that profitably before people figured out how to advertise on the internet. Really smart shop kid. But his real genius was understanding early on that not everybody had a credit card, but lots of people had cell phones, and lots of kids who had parents and said, cell phones that could subscribe to things, and he could get affiliate money like that. End up making a million dollars from our dorm room. We think it's the biggest deal in the world, and have a party. But the carriers all were like, What is this nonsense? This is just creating tons of customer chargebacks, and it's spammy, blah, blah, blah, blah, The world falls apart.

World falls apart.

I'm 25 years old getting phone calls from the C-level execs at AT&T T-Mobile Verizon. Hey, Andy, how do we do more business together? This is a great stream of revenue. And what Lynn was looking for was basically an API into these backends and ends up doing a huge amount of... I mean, it was probably over a billion dollars in sales in this mobile subscription business of ringtones and horoscopes and in all sorts of shit, but at the time, it converted. And then the iPhone and the smartphone came. You got to remember, back at the time, this all was happening on Nokias and Nextels and shit like that. Now, if you want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, you pick up your app and You click on it and it tells you. But back then, you would opt into these deals, and for $9. 99 a month, they would charge you. What I would like to share publicly and feel comfortable sharing is basically that I crashed out. I had a really bad thing happen to me. I'll tell you how the comeback happened. I've never had a financial mentor in my life, but I did get lucky to meet a very important health and wellness mentor.

This guy was a Harvard neuroscientist, and he taught me something called P-I-E-S-S-S-O, Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Social, Spiritual, Sexual, Occupational. He called these your seven dimensions. Basically, he sat down with me and said, Where are you on a scale of 1-10 on each one of these? How are we going to get you to a 10 out of 10 on each one? I was so rock bottom at this time of my life when I met this gentleman. That I clung to this. This was my Bible. Physical was my diet and exercise. Hit training in high omega-3, low omega-6 diet. I fasted, I did autophagy, but when I ate, it was all healthy healthy fats for the brain, salmon, avocado, nuts, seeds, things like that. Intellectual, he had me learning every day, but not just about business, what I liked. Languages, instruments, things that create new pathways in the brain. He explained to me that Old people do crossword puzzles because your brain is a muscle. If you don't use it, it gets soft. When you discover something new, you get this new pathway, this new rush. Emotional, he taught me how to meditate. The first day I met this guy, he was selling a protocol to the military.

The US military has a division called Darpa, the Department of Advanced Research Projects. They spend a trillion dollars a year to make sure that we have the most powerful military in the world. You go to Darpa and say, Hey, I have this watch. When your soldiers wear it, their brain will be 70% more efficient in a stressful situation. They'll laugh and say, Okay, how much? And you can say, $10 billion. If they really want what you got, they'll cut you a check because they print the money and they've got them. And that's what he was doing with this protocol that he did for me. He was living in the South Shore of Massachusetts, did not have access to a lot of people who had bright business minds like me. I come into his office, he sees my business mind and sees that I'm busted out and basically probably thinks to himself, Oh, I could put this guy to good use. And this is the story that he tells me. He goes, What was your first moment of life? And I thought he was asking me what my first memory was. And I start saying, Oh, I don't know.

I remember being a kid eating ice cream. He goes, No, you were a sperm, and you were on your way to be Andrew, and you had your blinders on, and you were so excited. You said, I'm going to be Andrew. I'm going to be Andrew. I'm going to be Andrew. Until you said, Wait a minute. You looked to your left and you looked to your right and you said, There's 200 million permutations of Andy and Andrea all racing towards mom's egg. You go, Holy, and you start going… You start going, and you get to the egg and you start pounding on the door and you say, Mom, let me in, let me in, let me in. Here's That's what happens, and I didn't know this. Four sperm touch the egg wall, and the egg has to profile the final four and picks the one with the highest survival index and opened the door for you, for me, everybody you meet in this world. For the next nine months, you're in this quiet, dark, warm amniotic fluid. He explained to me that in the Middle East, they don't have a lot of luxuries, but they always have tea on the table.

When you drink warm tea, it reminds you of being in the womb. It's comforting. And so undistracted, your brain, your fingers, your toes, your eyes, your lungs, everything develops. And then nine months in a day, you get pushed out of the birth canal, and mommy and daddy say, Oh, you're so cute, and they wave a little made in China rattle in your face, and you whack it away. And then they say, What's wrong with this kid? And they wave it and you grab it. The first time you grab that rattle, it's the first time something limbic in your life, you start to get turned out. And you go through your life Looking back in these 42 years and realizing that I didn't need Tony Robbins or Cucane or self-help books. I won the greatest race I'm ever going to have to win again, which was life or death. If we could even understand how low the odds are of us being born, we probably couldn't even get out of bed. It would be so overwhelming. The problem is, you get into this world, we're all predating on each other. We're all trying to sell each other, whatever the fuck it is we're trying to sell.

Everybody's got It's so nuts.

Go on, you drive down the highway, every billboard, Oh, this martini is so classy. Come out to a bar and poison your brand. You know what I mean? You get it. The point is, he made me I realized I was already hardwired to win. I just got up by everything out here because I didn't have control of my mind. That's excellent. Meditation was the key for me to stay connected to myself in this busy world and become what he called a kind or a monk warrior. So that's the P-I-E. And if you want me to keep going.

That is... When you were going down that list of seven, I was thinking, I'm not 10 in any of them. This is what I want to know. What's the biggest misconception people have about managing OnlyFans models and adult content creators? Now, before you get started, I envy the position you're in. But I'd have to light myself on fire if I dealt with those people all day long. Flaky, not showing up. You get all that stuff from these people, right? It's got to be, right or no?

Well, you're in the service business, and you are in the service business, too, right? Yes, but my people are sick. But here's the thing. We love making money, but running a restaurant is a business. Service business is tough. Service business is tough. I think the toughest thing about my managing people was I've made a lot of millionaires. I've taken a lot of people from literally maybe $100 in their bank account to over seven figures in their bank account. I think when it becomes your new norm, not often do you get the sense from your clients that they feel like we did this together, right? And you're more of a janitor than anything else. So maybe that. But the biggest misconception for my business is just how creative and how much strategy actually goes into it? This isn't just like, I'm hot and I'm going to do OnlyFans. I mean, these are people who are really understanding the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok and Twitch and Twitter and building contextual relationships with an end user through making good content. What do I mean by that? If I did OnlyFans, the only people that would care would be maybe the people I went to high school with because they know me.

They'd be like, What the fuck are you doing on there? You know what I mean? But other than that, I don't mean anything to anybody. And so these content creators are building that feeling at scale by making excellent content. And it's not a joke. It's not ha-ha. I mean, this is real.

I got to tell you something. I don't understand what world we're living in. I remember a time where people were famous for actually having talent. You know who's not famous anymore? The people who actually have talent. They're just not. It's a bizarre-Celebrity has changed, and here's what's happened.

Networks used to decide who is going to be famous. Networks decide who was going to get air time. To be in a movie, you had to go sit on Harvey Weinstein's couch. Now, if you've got one of these, the market decides who's going to be famous. There is a lot of brain rot out there. To be successful on some of these platforms, you can do dumb shit, but people doing dumb shit on social media are very, very smart. They're elite at playing the game they're playing. And the dynamic has definitely shifted. Celebrity has definitely changed. You're right.

Yeah. Okay. With increasing concerns over influencer fatigue and algorithm shifts, they always shift every five minutes. What role do you see companies like yours playing in helping creators maintain stable and sustainable growth?

That's a great question. Creator burnout is real. And just like Anybody who does anything, you've got to take care of yourself mentally and physically. I was telling you a little bit about my routine that got me into the best human form of my life when this opportunity came to me and I was ready for it because I was calm, I was clear-minded, I was sober. The real answer from what I do for our clients is I help them be prepared. I cut out the confusion. I help them get scheduled. We give them teams that are very structured in how we communicate, how we guide, and how we do the marketing for them. We help them delegate almost everything that they can possibly delegate and give them as much bandwidth with back to just be creative. And then there's a lot of things that we're very good at in terms of recycling. Some of our top clients don't make a lot of content, and they don't need to because we know how to market to new customers quite often. It's a very perfect business model. So it wasn't really a roundabout question, but it's really the truth.

I don't have a magic potion to make somebody not feel burnt out besides go take a vacation and sleep a bunch. But we help our people by being very structured and very prepared hard for them.

Do you ever tell them just to lean into it and this is what it takes?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm blown away. I didn't want to do this today. I was not in a good space to do this today. Okay, but this is what I do. I had a commitment with you. I'm not going to go ahead and reschedule something because I've been screaming at people all morning. Okay, that's not what I'm going to do. These people look for any excuse in this age range in the influencer community. Isn't it harder to work with people who aren't like minded, like you and I that actually do things that we don't want to do?

What I've noticed is that there's two yous. There's who you are right now sitting here in this situation on a podcast with me, never met me before, see another alpha a guy, we're bulling and kibbitzing, blah, blah, blah. Then when you go lock yourself in your bedroom by yourself or you're in your car by yourself, and you're really your raw form of self with your complete guard down. Leaning into it actually as a creator, believe it or not, is The people who are most successful are able to act as naturally as they're not in a situation, but when the camera is rolling. Those people are authentic, and they're actually getting a lot of contextual value from their audience. You've got to surrender a lot. When I first got into this space, I tried to be the super agent. I made sure our clients were filing their taxes and doing everything right and really planning. A lot of our clients, I Some of them don't have great relationships with their parents. I was becoming this parental figure, and they didn't want it. They rejected it. Don't talk to me about my taxes. I don't give up.

I would say, Okay, I actually lost some clients because I was overbearing and trying to get them to do the right things. All you can do is surrender. You can't stand on the edge of the beach and say, Stop crashing waves. What you can do is grab a surfboard and you can just surf, and you got to ride the waves. When you're dealing with young people, just as I was, I had to piss away my first million dollars on aniced-out AP in a car and all this bullshit. Then wake up and be like, Don't have anything to invest because I put it in dog shit assets. But a lot of our clients are starting to get through that first phase of getting it out of their system, and then their brains open up and they're ready for feedback. Have you ever battled with your own mental health while running these high pressure companies? Definitely. I remember a time in my life where I was running a company and here was my routine. I would wake up and I would take 50 milligrams of Zoloft for depression. I would take Adderall to put the car and drive.

I would take an Adavan or a Xanax when the Adderall was coming out of me. I would drink half a bottle of brown liquor when the sun went down because it was fun, and then I would take an Ampion to go to bed. I did that for six, seven years. No ? No, never.

No, Aaron.

Not my thing.

Okay. So you were functional?

I guess.

I mean, you weren't optimal, but you were functional. All right. Was there ever someone close to you whose drug use took their life or destroyed their career? What did that teach you?

I have a very, very dear friend who is spending a year or two in federal prison camp, and it probably would not be if it weren't for their severe alcoholism. And not a guy who goes to a bar and gets martinis and gets up and gets loose in parties. A guy who, successful finance dude, has a normal life, drives a Mercedes '80s, just gets stressed out and has to go to the liquor store and buy a plastic bottle of dog shit vodka and drink it until he falls on the floor for 10 days until his body starts to fail and he's aware enough to dial 911. But I watched that guy throw away his wife, his kids, his grandkids, and just make decisions that ended up in federal prison when it probably was beyond avoidable. So, yeah, I've seen it.

Do you know anyone who's died of fentanyl?

Not personally.

Lucky. Almost everybody does now.

Yeah.

All right. What's one behind-the-scenes story from Creators Inc. That completely changed the trajectory of someone's career.

The very first person who called me was a female friend of mine who knew me when I was in my 20s. I'm sitting in my parents' kitchen in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, January of 2020, and she says, Andy, I need your help. I got $100 to my name. I'm some Jewish lady's nanny in LA doing her grocery shopping. I'm stressed out about getting coronavirus, so I made an OnlyFans, but I can't figure it out. I said, What the fuck is that? I logged I said, Oh, you're trying to thirststrap at scale.

What's thirststrap?

Sell racy pictures. You don't have really marketing logic to attack this platform, and this platform doesn't do a good job at all of telling you how to do that. But it is very robust in facilitating these transactions. She had 50,000 followers on Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitch, no Twitter. She was not... They didn't even call them creators yet. I swear in my life, I might have created the term creator. Everyone Someone called them models or influencers or girls. And I said, no, these are content creators. And that's why I called the company Creators Inc. And that's a different story. But anyway, I just understood how she could go about maximizing the lifetime value of all these horny guys who are trying to buy her pictures. She makes a quarter of a million dollars in her first month. She starts to run around LA. She had been the personal assistant for some big celebrities and starts saying, Hey, don't trust your OnlyFans business, the nightclub promoters and rappers. There's these Jewish guys from Boston. Look at my numbers. I start getting inundated with phone calls, made so much money with one of our first clients. The word got out who I was, and it was suggested to me from some of the powers in the industry that, Hey, if you Actors and Writers Strike is going on.

Caa, UTA, William Morris, all these companies are destroyed. If you feel like a traditional Hollywood agency, but you're new Hollywood, all the biggest celebrities in the world are going to come to you who are pissing away their opportunity. That's what happened. That's how I built the company into a billion dollars in sales.

That's fantastic, man. That's fantastic. All right, what's one piece of financial advice you would give anyone trying to start a company?

Okay, trying to start a company, you need to have a good idea, and that idea can't just be good. It's got to be profitable. So it's got to be very apples and oranges. I think a lot of people... I went to a school where kids are sitting around Oh, we're going to raise 30 million from Kleiner Perkins, and three years later, without any revenue, then we'll figure it out. I don't subscribe to that. I would rather invest in someone's cleaning business that has a van and a mop and pine soil and goes to somebody's house and makes $200 and a hundred of it is profit. I understand that, right? That's the type of business. So I'm a big believer in just very much understanding your cash flow. I think the biggest financial advice that I give to just creators in first time starting out is that if you leave your money in the bank, you're actually losing money because of something called inflation. The US government prints more dollars, things get more expensive. So if your money is not making money, it's actually losing money. You've got two choices.

You can- You can't explain that to people that aren't financially literate. You can try, but they just can't get their head around it. Sorry for interrupting.

Go on. Oh, just that you've got two options. Money markets at four and a half, five % or the stock market, which 11 a year, maybe over a long period of time. You can get absolutely crushed in any given year. But if you're long term minded, that's what the S&P shakes out at. But I think going back in terms of just financial advice for anyone, I would say this, and my In my 42 years, looking back at all the mistakes I've made and the success I've had, you're the jockey. The decisions you make in life are the horses. And your only job is to figure out which horses to ride.

Is there anything you want to talk about? Is there anything I left out? Is there anything you want to promote?

When you were talking about advice for somebody starting out and money, and going back in my head to when I so badly wanted to be successful before I was and the decisions I made, the right answer is doing what you like to do and being happy more than anything. And as corny as that sounds, because when someone's wealthy and they've got money, it's easy to look at them and say, Oh, yeah, sure. Of course, that's what you're telling me. But once you get it, it just becomes your norm, and it's just stuff. It doesn't make you happy. It doesn't fulfill you inside. But do you know about the science experiment where they took the rats and had them tread water in the glasses? Tell me about it. Really, really fascinating. Glasses just like this, filled it up with water. They dropped some rats in it. In about 15 minutes, the rats give and drowned. They start the experiment over. New glass, new rat, new water. Rat starts treading waters. At 14 minutes this time, they pluck the rat out, they dry it off, they give it something to eat, and they drop it right back in the water.

Now, the rat just swam till failure, right? Almost failure. It lasted 15 minutes before it drowned. How long do you think it lasted on the second go-around? Two minutes. Sixty hours. Shut up. 250 times as long. Why? I don't know. Because it believed it was going to be saved. That lesson taught me that what I believe in or what you believe in or your beliefs is the most powerful thing on the planet. When you start a business, you better believe in it and like it and love it because it gets hard no matter what. You start a business that's just about making money on day 16 when you inevitably realize why something wasn't what you thought it was or it's tough or impossible, you give up. But if you believe, you never stop.

We're going to end it right there. That was beautiful. Thank you, sir. All right. Now, before we do that, where can people reach you?

Our Instagram page is @creatorsinc. We're a talent management company. We're specifically focused on content creators who monetize with paywalls. And we're growing above and beyond that. We're helping content creators become financially wealthy with their own direct to consumer products, tech platforms, arms, lots of different things.

Thanks for coming, brother.

That gets you one point, two and three, four, five, and six, seven, eight, nine.

So you're trying to get the most points you can. You get five tosses, I get one.

Okay, all right, do it. Two. That's a good Nice. Four points. Two points. Okay.

All right. Here we go. Bang.

I ring.

How much could I make on OnlyFans?

It depends on your audience, but you could do quite well. I'm going to just guess the mate, you'd probably make 60, $70,000 a month in your first month?

Do I have to show my- No, you don't. Okay. Why would somebody give me $60,000 a year as a 59-year-old man?

One person wouldn't, but people might open up... You're a quite fit, good-looking guy. People might open up your locked picture sets for $10, and if you multiply that out by $6,000, you're doing pretty good.

Can I just show my feet?

Sure.

And not my face?

You can show whatever you want.

How much do I get for my feet?

Well, the question is, is there a market for people who want to see your feet? But if there was, you could get a lot.

Is there a market for someone who wants to see my feet?

To be honest, there probably is because the human need and desire to procreate is very strong.

You people are, go.