How I Made My First $1M - The Andrew Wilkinson Story

**Andrew Wilkinson** (0:00)
I was making a small amount of money for something I hated, and then I started making a large amount of money for something I would have done anyway. Like, it was fun.

**Shaan Puri** (0:17)
All right, what's up, we got our friend of the house, Andrew Wilkinson here. Andrew famously is the co-founder of Tiny.
He started off as a barista, ended up creating a design agency that was super, super successful, designed Slack and a bunch of other popular Silicon Valley products that you may have used, started buying businesses, read about Warren Buffet, read about Charlie Munger, started buying businesses, now owns a portfolio of 30 plus companies, I think, and recently took the company public and then stepped down to CEO. And Andrew is here on his, I don't know, vacation tour after stepping down to CEO. Andrew, good to see you, man.

**Sam Parr** (0:50)
Your skin looks great. The glow looks good. You seem happy.

**Shaan Puri** (0:53)
You got that non-operator glow.
All right, let's take a quick break. I gotta tell you, you ever seen those Coachella posters where it's got all the artists' names and you're like, oh my God, wow, they got Fred again and Skrillex and that's what the HubSpot inbound conference looks like. Just listen to the speaker list that they have. I don't know how they pulled this off, but listen to this.
Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, Kara Swisher, Matt Wolfe, Darmesh, they got Brian Halligan. They got tons of good speakers at HubSpot inbound. It's coming up, it's September 18th to the 20th. It's live in Boston and it's where you go if you wanna learn marketing, sales, AI trends. You wanna know where the puck is going so that you can be there before everybody else. Tons of great talks on stage where you're gonna learn sales strategies and proven marketing tactics, but also the networking where you get to meet other people and understand what are other people in the industry doing? How are other people getting ahead? So check it out, go to inbound.com to see the lineup and grab your tickets today.

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
Enough about talking about how much of a babe you are.

**Shaan Puri** (1:50)
All right, so Andrew, I sent you a voice note.
You started off as a barista at a coffee shop and you've done very well in business. And I said, I wanna know what were the different jumps, like income jumps that actually made a difference? And you said there was four levels.

**Andrew Wilkinson** (2:04)
Yeah, totally. Well, I think the best money that I ever made was jumping from being a barista to making like 60 bucks an hour.

**Shaan Puri** (2:12)
Well, so you go from barista, you start designing websites. So you go from 650 an hour to $60 an hour. And it sounds like that might have been somewhat happenstance.
Was that intentional to make that shift or just kind of you got an opportunity, a lucky bounce came your way? What made that shift happen?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (2:26)
So I was working, making coffees every day for all the people that come in. And there's these two guys that would come in every single day, they'd roll in, looking like they just got out of bed at 10 in the morning. They're probably like five years older than me. So like 24, 25
And they would just come in and they would sit on their laptops all day, just drinking espresso after espresso.
And one day I asked them, what do you guys do? Like, don't you have jobs?
And they go, oh, we're web designers. We just walk into random businesses. We ask them if they have a website and then we say, we'll make one for 500 bucks. And so that day I was like, well, forget this. Like, I don't want to make the espresso. I want to be drinking the espresso. I want to be these guys. And so I went and I bought a book on web design. And a couple of days later, I walked into a place and sold the guy a website. And within a couple of weeks, I'd quit my job.

**Sam Parr** (3:23)
Wait, did you know anything about design?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (3:26)
Yeah, I did actually, because when I was a teenager, I had a tech news website and I knew how to use like Dreamweaver, like really basic web design and stuff.
So it like wasn't rocket science to me. Like I knew these guys were smart, but they weren't, you know, they didn't have any crazy qualifications. It was nothing I couldn't learn. And so I just kind of dove in and got lucky.