Building & Marketing Real Products | John Fio

Eric: Now it’s my pleasure to introduce our headlining act. The man who makes the rest of us look like we were dressed like a blind hoarder of athleisure, Jon Fio. Hello. 

John: Okay. 

Eric: You were on the main stage last time, this must be embarrassing for you to be interviewed by me instead of Patrick at The Ragtag Cinema.

John: The acoustics in here are nice. I like it. 

Eric: I'm very excited [00:01:00] to have a forum where you have to answer my questions because I find you to be deeply fascinating as a person and you guys are just going be along for the ride on my curiosity here. 

I would love to prompt you with a quote of yours from Twitter and see where we go.

“If you've never made magic, or even worse, don't believe it exists, at some point you will make the mistake of trying to kill the wizard.”

John: I don’t know where that one came from. Twitter is the worst thing ever.

Eric: You're so good at it. 

John: Last year I had like 5,000 followers and I was like, alright, I'm gonna like see what I can do here.

And I went to 250,000. And it was the stupidest shit of all time. It was like, oh my God, is this how you win this game? This is totally not worth anything. It has not [00:02:00] translated into anything. I totally disagree with you guys. I really haven't had much happen after building a Twitter following except for like a bunch of crypto bots basically wrecked my account.

So now I get to have a big following. I get to tweet dumb shit like that, to have people like this ask me about dumb shit, that ends up getting like three likes out of like 200,000. 

What I meant by this is a little bit of a philosophy I have of why things end up working and I just kind of have a deep belief that anything that is actually real ends up standing out in a very real way that gets the attention of the consumer. And then not only can it get it, but then can keep it, and then understand how to continue to do that over and over and over again. That is the equivalent of a very real magic trick and it is sorcery in a way.

And so these archetypes that start to emerge and those that are able to do [00:03:00] that, resemble the wizard. My critique on a lot of people is that they try to figure out the game and they think that there are these systems and rules. If I'm really thinking about why my thing ended up starting to work, it was because they came from a very, very, very strange place. And I would describe that place as somewhat magical. 

Even if you're trying to explain to people how a thing happens almost no one actually believes that there is an unexplainable magic that happens in the world where you get these crazy outliers of creation that really shift the world.

Then when you tell them there's actually no playbook for this, [00:04:00]good luck, push yourself off the cliff and like try to figure it out, when you tell them that there is a thing in your brain that just says no, no, no, no, absolutely not. No way. Like there has to be a thing here that I can put on paper and repeat. 

I am kind of a deep believer that that is not the case. I think if you look at really special things. big or small, really special things that are copy and paste or super competitive thing. When someone in a room tells a joke that is so out of left field that the whole room laughs in this way that is completely different than the vibe that has existed in that room prior to that joke. That is sort of this magical wizard moment. 

And you can see this in tiny areas, a part of that was a personal story, and then you can see this in gigantic areas where like the same [00:05:00] hero's journey archetype happens over and over and over again, where someone has a very special ability to do something special, the big suits don't believe it, and they end up kicking him out, killing him, or telling him to step aside and the entire organization basically collapses and loses its soul and everyone's like, Oh, what happened? It's like you fucking killed the wizard. You killed the thing that made it work. 

Eric: It feels like an extreme version and I want to see how far it goes.

Is this an argument for living the qualitative, not the quantitative? Or is this an argument that there's quantitative, qualitative, and then magic? 

John: Yeah, I think the way that I would describe it is that the last 20 years have been like a complete worship of the quantitative. I call it number worship.

This idea that reality and real is this thing that we can put on a piece of paper, measure, and map. I think in the last, you know, six months or so that in a variety of different areas of our life has completely collapsed. And I've been pushing on [00:06:00] this in a way. when someone tells me some sort of quantitative fact, I'll just rip off three counterexamples. Or I'm like, that's totally wrong. What about this? There's this thing that happened over here. If that's true and repeatable and factual, do it again. And they can't do it. 

Psychology has never had a repeatable study that has yielded significant results. The entire field is basically fake. You can see this over and over and over or fake in a sense of what people are certain is real about it.

Last night I got into a huge fight explaining why there is an equal chance that dinosaurs are completely fake and made up as they are real. If I said that eight months ago, I think the table would have kicked me out. After all this shit that's happened in the world in the past year or so, people were like, Oh interesting. Can you explain that to me? Where did that come from? Why do you think that? 

So I think we're in this really interesting place where we had this number worship. I kind of fought that number worship and rode my Twitter followers. It's [00:07:00] just like, that's totally wrong. Totally wrong. Went on the qualitative side of it.

But I think what you described as magic, that's really the lane that I try to force myself down, which is sort of this resonant point of both of those. And if you can get both of those, the qualitative and the quantitative or the IQ and the EQ, if you can focus that under a singular point of resonance, that is what I would call a place of magic. And you get these really crazy long lasting outlier moments. 

Eric: How do you discern, is good magic just magic that it works, and when you attempt magic and it doesn't work, it's just, alright, you look crazy? Is it just disappear? 

John: I think it's very obvious when you do something and it works.

This is a little counterintuitive to what we've been told. And this is like my big meme on Twitter is that ideas [00:08:00] are totally without question, more important than execution. Execution is basically a cookie cutter book that you can teach anyone. The actual magic comes from having these really, really insane, deep insights, that are ideas that can be spoken. And those words that are spoken are like, if you put those in the right, correct order, the entire world just sort of collapses around you. 

I have made the most money by doing the least work because that idea was so good. Every time I'm trying to really, really, really work and optimize… And what if I did this text message that converted an extra 2%? It's like the idea is shit. It's just not working. Go and do something better and bigger that is a little bit more magic. 

When you say is there good magic or bad magic? I think that there is an undeniable response that [00:09:00] the market will throw in your face that is undeniable. If it is real… one of my favorite examples that people would always counter on this with my pushback on that is it's very easy to make bad magic look really good on a short timeline. It's basically impossible to trick, to do that black magic trick lying strategy on something that really stands the test of time.

Truth, existence, God, whatever you want to call it, just fucking wipes it out. And there's just no one that has really figured out how to game that system. One of the ones is Peloton. When I would say that a couple of years ago, everyone was like, Oh, but you know, look at Peloton.

And one of my biggest misses ever, which again, like I'm not really interested in having these moments where I can find a thing and get out. It's just not that fun for me. I like to like to make bets on things that I think are like real magic. I tested out a beta product of Peloton and I was [00:10:00] like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

Eric: You like to talk about things as being like a demon.

John: I mean it's fake. It's a trick. It's a black magic trick. I think reverting back to these old words that we've sort of cast out are actually incredibly helpful.

What do you do with anxiety? And insecurity. I don't know. I guess we can talk about it or diagnose it. All the diagnoses again, you can't repeat them. So it's like, is that even a diagnosis? What do you do with a demon? You fight it and like you kill it.

And it's like this actionable thing that you can do that makes these, again, these words, these ideas very, very powerful that immediately put a different framework in your mind that set it in to stone.

But to bring it back, Peloton is a really good example that people would push back on me and they'd be like, you know, it's not all ideas.

There are of ideas that have been put out into the market that the market ignored for a long [00:11:00] time. Like look at Peloton, Peloton did a Kickstarter, the Kickstarter completely flopped, they did $125,000. No one heard about them for the next two years. And then it like totally, completely ripped and four or five years later, COVID moment. Boom. Is that real? My argument is no. It was not that sick of a product. It caught a moment in time that was totally gamed. It became a meme. And the second that the product and the company become this outlying event, that is not rooted in truth. I'm totally freaked out and I run the other way and yeah, Peloton… basically over.

You can trick the market on a short timeline, bu then you're basically playing the lottery and I do not want to play the lottery. I want to go the exact opposite way from anything that feels lucky. I want to have a thing. I want to take bets and [00:12:00] spend my time on things that I know are real.

I think that is a similar question. How do you know something is real? How do you know something is working? How would you say that that thing is magical? That is worth your life's work? I think that those things are very obvious. And the easiest thing to do is lie to yourself about that. You might have that thing. You will know so quick if you have one.

Eric: I think that's an incredible establishment of your worldview. And I'm sure by now everyone is kind of very curious about the specific, how do you, what are the things that you are working on? There's always a breadth of projects, right?

So like maybe talk about some of the things that you're actually working on. And I think with that intro, it'll be clear that your soul is in all of them. They have like, And you're kind of…

John: Yeah, uh, is any of this making sense? I had way too much Celsius. Celsius might be a demon, dude.

Total demon, total 280 grams. It's like, come on, I'm possessed right now. [00:13:00] Uh, so talk about my projects. So for context, if anyone's like, what is this guy talking about? I tried to do a lot of different things and a lot of different areas failed a lot, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

Trying to pull one over on the market, like I just kind of described. And then, you know, I had a moment where I had one hit and I was like, Oh, it was like dancing to the music for the first time. It's like, Oh damn. Like that, that is what you do to make something work. Okay. This is like totally different.

The first one I did was the first weighted blanket called Gravity blanket. That idea came from a crazy, out of left field moment. Off of that I did a beanbag called Moon Pod. Off of that a personalized astrology gift company. And now I have stuffed animals. And I actually just opened a restaurant. And then I just started an Italian bespoke suit company.

So totally all over the place. But, I think that kind of goes back to what I was [00:14:00] saying, I'm more interested in finding these really, really unique things. And making sure that those seeds are planted, that I can just sort of water on their own timeline and I'm not worried about kind of gaming some sort of efficiency metric because I am very worried and very cognizant of I am going to make these things real, which is a totally different framework to how to approach building a business.

I've never taken investor money which is a whole other conversation. I don't have a board. I don't have mentors. And I think, I really like to try to submit to this idea of the market and I actually don't go back on a lot of these tropes that have been become popular in the last couple of years.

I don't think you should build for yourself entirely. I don't think that you should follow your passion. I think it's really, really important to understand that you are doing this for someone else. [00:15:00] And again, like these tiny little differences in how you approach these things will immense differences on the outcomes that you receive.

Eric: You talked about things feeling real or feeling true. does that feeling, does come from an internal place? Does it come from an external place? Is that a test of time and the market? Like the reality of the market's response to what you're doing?

John: I think a lot of these answers is paradoxically both. And I think it's a lot easier to sort of understand this than people think. It's just how unbelievably painfully honest are you willing to be? I'm trying to think of a good example of a moment. I think you guys could all play this game with yourselves.

If you can identify a thing that you without question know is real. Like my jacket is blue. If I were to sit here and say, my green jacket, the thing that immediately happens in [00:16:00] your chest is, what? And you're like, that's not a green jacket. And then you all of a sudden have this cognitive dissonance.

If I said, oh, no, no, no, my blue jacket, all of a sudden there's, like, an entirely different thing that happens in the room, where, this sort of air settles, your chest sort of loosens up, and you have this moment of, like, oh, yeah, no, no, no, we're all experiencing the same reality, thank God.

I think that that is very similar to what I'm trying to say. When you hear or experience the truth, it's a totally different feeling than when you're trying to sort of game the system. And a lot of people get really caught up in thinking that like, you know, consumers are dumb, the market's like, you know, sheep, and I can just sort of like pull one over on these guys.

And I would go the exact opposite way and say, you are not good enough to do that. And no one is, and you're way better off trying to be as honest and real as possible. I think that just totally [00:17:00] feels entirely different. 

Eric: How do you do that work to shrink that gap towards reality? 

John: How deep do you want to go?

I think it's a lot more spiritual and a lot more philosophical also while not turning into like some like love guru yoga guy and at the same time being very disciplined on numbers and data. And I think it's like this very weird balancing dance that you try to do.

And then once you hit it, you really try to internalize that. I used to play drums. I was a drummer my whole life. I went to college for jazz. That was my whole thing. One really crazy moment I had with my drum teacher, it was like real sensei stuff where you had to get to a certain place to get accepted by this guy.

Eric: You were whiplash.

John: Total whiplash, except like this guy was way more fucking intense, like way more intense. [00:18:00] He died of a heart attack, yelling at a student. I was like, Bob did it, dude. He died doing what he loved. That was how intense it was. And like, I could never fucking play where he was satisfied.

And I remember I was like, the only chance I had of going to college was if I got a scholarship, a jazz scholarship. And so I was really playing. And I played the song that he was trying to get me to do for the audition tape was Giant Steps, which is like an incredibly fast, hard jazz song.

And I remember playing it once and, it was after like seven lashings, and I played it. And I kind of just like forgot everything and just like played and it ended and I was like ready for him to just like fucking kill me again and he was like, stop, take a moment and think about how you feel right now, reflect on like what that was like when you played that [00:19:00] song. and he was like, you have to remember exactly what you're feeling right now and go back to that place every time you play. Cause that was the best I've ever heard you play by far. 

And I was like, Damn. And this sounds cheesy and whatever but lke that energy and that feeling of, okay damn, that was true. This same exact feeling was what I had when I uploaded Gravity Blanket to Kickstarter. And we did a million bucks in like 20 minutes. It was just boom. Oh that is the thing. Remember what that feels like. 

And that is just super, super, super rare. And right now, the last couple of years, I haven't launched a new company or a successful one in a real crazy way. And I'm really trying to hold my reins back to just totally not trick myself into trying to think that I'm good enough to make that happen myself.

It has to be sort of discovered. 

Eric: When you have an idea or a feeling, do you have to battle with yourself if it feels too obvious? [00:20:00] Or is it just like, this is the only thing in the world?

John: It's a muscle. It's a total muscle. The first time when I discovered the idea of weighted blankets, I basically still had my satchel of ideas and it took me a year to work through in a bunch of different ways to get certain ideas to market, to get to a place where I was like, okay, you know what? Fuck it. Like I'm going to be the crazy guy that launches a 25 pound blanket. Cause, I got nothing left. All my stupid venture backed ideas, they got funded, but I gave the money back.

I was like this is stupid. And then I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do the one that's totally insane. And that one worked. So yeah, it is a practice. It is like a dance with the music that you can't hear. And the more that you kind of understand how to dance to that invisible music, the better you get at it.[00:21:00] 

Eric: Not a wizard. 

[Here questions are taken from the audience that are not picked up on the microphone. Question asking John to expand on his thoughts on Peloton:]

John: Sick, sick question. I think that's a really good question. I tend to speak in very absolute ways, but I think there's nuance to all of this stuff. I think a more interesting way to look at the Peloton question is, where is the magic in that business?

And my guess is that it's a lot less of a product innovation or a network effect or like these things that the shareholders were essentially buying into. That growth happened on a thing that is not sustainable, which, in my opinion, was everyone was stuck in their homes and they caught the new shiny toy.

Now, if you identify that as the magic and you engage with that asset with that understanding, then you'll be right. But if you try to pull one over on yourself of like, Oh, this is some revolution. I mean, how many times in the last month have we been told that there's some God-savior coming?

The semiconductors and this and aliens, it's like all of these things that like come up that everyone gets totally enamored with. And then it's just over in like two weeks, right? It's really hard and it's very tough to tell the difference between those two narratives.

And I think what I'm trying to say is it's a lot easier to not leave that job on yourself. And it's a lot easier to throw that onto the market and watch how the market is interacting with the thing. 

And the astrology thing. I think to take a very digestible data type of approach, you can see this shit very clearly in different tests. It started out with an astrology candle. I ran Facebook ads. I did this test, all the dumb tests that you do. And I was like, ah, let's [00:23:00] actually see if there's real retail potential here. I went into a retail store, put it on the shelves. Quite literally every single person that walked by the candle shelf picked that one up and looked at it and read it and was like, huh, and I was like, oh damn, okay. That was like unbelievably clear. It wasn't two people. It wasn't five. It was like every single person that went toward the shelf picked it up. 

Eric: It sounds like the magic is subjective. 

John: Oh, it's okay. 

Eric: That's not a criticism. Is that your perspective? 

John: No, I think it's the exact opposite. I think magic and beauty and all that stuff is totally objective. I actually think trying to focus on the gradient and the gray is the wrong exercise.

And it's like, find the thing that like stops everyone in its tracks. Like there's just almost no one that looks at the statue of David and is like meh, right? That is a thing that commands everyone's attention and respect objectively. 

Eric: Another word that you use a lot of [00:24:00] times for your products or when you are talking about something is personality.

I think you could see that an argument for Peloton's beauty is that people connected with the personalities that are in that box. It's also a huge part of Moon Pals, which is the stuffed animal. And so I wonder what gives a product or a service a personality. 

John: To harp on the Peloton thing, I think Peloton was super real in a lot of different ways.

It wasn't even close to what people thought it was going to be, right? And I think they had a lot of interesting mechanics, the personality being one of them. The way I look at personality and the reason why I think personality is why X is going to be exponentially more valuable in the future is that anything, I mean, we're seeing this with AI, right? Like anything can be copied almost at like mind numbing speed right now. Like everyone here, I could teach in quite literally an hour, how to start a product brand, sell it online and get your first sale [00:25:00] in like three hours. The second that is the reality, it's not valuable if it is not. Hard. It's not valuable.

What is the hardest thing to copy? I think that you can see it happening right now where you have these mega personalities that are sitting on a thing that cannot be copied. Just explode. There's no middle ground. No one can fake it. There's no algorithm game that you can play. There's no optimizing X, Y, and Z. The whole idea that Mr. Beast got famous because he obsessed about the thumbnail. It's like, dude, what a perfect trope for him to teach people how to like be the thing. Whereas the real answer that he's not ever going to say is that he is a once-in-a-lifetime mix of personality, charisma, creativity, entertainment, and non-stop relentlessness.

That's not fun to hear because you can't copy that, but because you can't copy that, it's exponentially worth more. And I think as we move towards everything becoming very, very efficient and [00:26:00] the arbitrage is that people can take advantage of are totally collapsing.

And so these things that are super unique, like personality are going to be worth a thousand X. I started my career in music and you saw this happen in music. Music was sort of the first medium that went to like zero. It costs nothing. It costs nothing to distribute. It costs nothing to create.

And where the value is actually captured there was not the long tail or the mid tail. It was owning the 0.01 percent of forever hits. The top 10 streamed music on Spotify are all songs that happened in the last 20 years. There's nothing new. There are no artists that took advantage of democratizing the creation and distribution of music.

It's like, no, total and utter stars are now the most valuable thing. And they're worth a thousand X. Buying the Taylor Swift catalog was way better than trying to start a new label that took [00:27:00] advantage of Spotify. So that kind of just goes back to what do I think is the most valuable thing moving forward?

It's things that in the last 20 years, it was things that you could kind of out execute, you could out raise against. It wasn't really about this and that. I think we're moving to a point where the thing that is the most valuable or these things that can't be copied. So identifying the thing that can't be copied and quadrupling down on that is going to be worth a thousand times more for how you spend your time would be my advice. 

Speaking about imbuing magic. I charge $40,000 for my suits, and I show up at your door and we do this whole crazy thing, and it's me and it's this crazy dude who's made suits for the craziest people all over earth that lives in Milan and people pay for it and you can't copy that. And the way that I pick it out for you is totally different than anything else. And if I'm able to deliver on that [00:28:00] promise then they tell their friends. But I'd kind of rather take that approach to a suit company than trying to start suit supply right now.

Eric: That's a product with a service and a personality, a strong opinion, and it has magic. 

John: Yes. I think mixing all of these pieces together, and it's hard, it's super hard. I wouldn't fall for the trap of what we just saw is scale for the last 20 years. I would not fall for that trap moving forward. I think we're living in a totally different world right now. 

It's not the suit thing, it's honestly a thing that I just want to do for the next 40 years. I'm not going to retire. 

Eric: You looked great on Tuesday night. If anybody saw you looked fucking incredible.

John: Yeah. Yep. Totally.

[Audience question]

It depends on the future, but I sold that business for a reason. I didn't want to do it. I couldn't come up with an idea to make it uniquely different. Yeah, I was super broke. Gotta get [00:29:00] that first nut. Yeah. It was like, you know, gotta do the first thing and then you learn.

And again, like everything that I'm talking about sounds like I am Miles Davis and James Cameron and like some gigantic entrepreneur. I'm talking about this as here's the five steps that I took. Here's what I've learned about each step. Each step I took. If you look at the products and the brands, they're moving closer to this thing that I think is more and more valuable.

That's retaining more customers that is locking in more people, And, you know, the more and more I try to sort of capture and more of that value while not blowing up the company is kind of what I'm talking about here. The Gravity Blanket was like the worst. I still lose sleep over that.

We fucked up so I mean, it was sick because I made a ton of money really quick and got me not being homeless. That was dope. But that should have been a billion dollar brand easily. [00:30:00] 

It's a secret. No five steps. Yeah. Sorry. 

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This transcript was generated with Descript AI