Greg Isenberg: How to Successfully Build a Portfolio of Companies

Tim Stoddart (0:19)

Hey, everyone, welcome to The Copyblogger Podcast. My name is Tim Stoddart. Thank you so much for joining me.

My guest today is Greg Isenberg. Greg, what's up, man? Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Greg Isenberg (0:29)

It's a pleasure and an honor to be here.

Tim Stoddart (0:35)

Stop, I'm not that cool. I promise you.

All right.

Greg Isenberg (0:39)

It's not about you, Tim, actually. It's about Copyblogger.

I've been following the amazingness for, I don't know, 15 years. Is that possible?

Tim Stoddart (0:54)

Yeah, that's how long I've been following it. I only took over in bits and pieces. I bought chunks of equity at the time, but I'm the full owner of it as about five months ago.

I really appreciate you saying that. Thank you so much. It's an honor for me as well. I think it's always pretty funny because it's one of the great things and one of the bad things about the Internet, where it's like I'm still the same person that I always was, but now I'm the guy from Copyblogger and all of a sudden, people want to talk to me.

That's pretty hysterical, but nonetheless, it's an important brand and I take it really seriously. It changed my life and so I really feel like I'm carrying the torch for the next round of writers, if that makes sense.

Greg Isenberg (1:47)

It does. I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Tim Stoddart (1:52)

Thank you. Well, I'm going to start at a little bit of an unconventional place because one thing that is a little bit unique about you and your business is your website, your latecheckout.studio website. I got to tell you, man, I've never seen anything like this before for anyone who's just listening to it.

The website is basically like a 3D interface that looks like a theme park.

I think that's what you were going for, a theme park like a town, a town square. Then as you scroll over the front of it, these little buildings pop up and these buildings essentially turn into the links, which link out to the different brands and the companies that you own. I know it's a weird place to start, but I got to know about this website. Did you come up with this idea or did somebody put this together for you?

Greg Isenberg (2:42)

I came up with this idea at Disney World in Orlando.

I was walking through Disney World and just noticed how incredible everything was designed.

The smells, the buildings, the neighbourhoods. Everything was really well thought of and well placed. Later I watched the Imagineering documentary about the Imagineers, the people who actually come up with the concepts for the rides and stuff like that. And they take it really, really seriously about immersion and creating a space that people want to stay a while and that they sort of, you kind of lose sense of where you are. And I wanted to do something similar with the website. So when you go to the website, you know, it feels different. It feels like a place. It feels like a place that you can explore. And because Late Checkout is a holding company, meaning we're a business that owns multiple businesses, I wanted people to, yeah, just treat it as like, you know, the quote, buy the ticket, take the ride. It was almost like you were buying a ticket to the experience. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We're actually like adding a ton of new Easter eggs and immersion to it. So stay tuned. But and then I will say it doesn't hurt that we have a innovation agency called Late Checkout Agency, which I just went to them one day and I was like, hey, what would a website that looked like Disney World look like? And because they work with the largest brands in the world, like Nike and Shopify and Dropbox, they were stoked. It's like my own digital imagineering team.

And I will say, I'll say this, I'll say that while it might look like the website isn't a conversion machine, because it is not standard, the brand and the word of mouth that is built has 100% driven, you know, millions and millions of dollars of revenue just from that website. So I highly recommend if you're looking to build a website, think about and you're looking to build a brand, think about how can I make this unexpected?

Tim Stoddart (5:18)

Yeah, what's the expression like, don't be better, be different?

It's certainly different. I've never seen anything like it.

Okay, there was a bunch of places that I was thinking about going and talking to you. You and I just recently started chatting through Twitter. There was a tweet. It's more like an essay now that Twitter is or X, excuse me, is a little bit more long form now. And so I want to talk about that. But before we get there, man, you mentioned Late Checkout being a holding company.