BIO: As Co-Founder & CEO of Mode Mobile, Dan Novaes is leading the transformation of how people interact with technology. His “Earn As You Go” software empowers millions of consumers to turn daily habits into passive income.
STORY: Dan decided to take the bold move of turning his treasury into a long-term crypto strategy. What started as $2 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum ballooned to $30 million, but the 2022 crash and business pressures forced him to liquidate at low prices—missing out on what could have been a $100 million windfall.
LEARNING: Don’t chase aggressive expansion without a clear path to profitability. Stick to your core business. Separate your business from speculative bets.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Take a moment of deep thinking every week when things are going well, think about everything that could go wrong, and then reassess your position.”
Dan Novaes
Guest profile
As Co-Founder & CEO of Mode Mobile, Dan Novaes is leading the transformation of how people interact with technology. His “Earn As You Go” software empowers millions of consumers to turn daily habits into passive income. Under his leadership, Mode achieved 32,481% revenue growth from 2019 to 2022 and ranked #1 in Software on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in North America.
Worst investment ever
In today’s rapidly evolving and highly interconnected business world, companies are increasingly relying on external partnerships to drive growth and innovation.
Dan’s story begins in the early days of crypto. His company had raised funds through Bitcoin and Ethereum when Bitcoin was valued at just a few thousand dollars and Ethereum at only a few hundred. This early success in the crypto market was a testament to the potential for significant growth that these investments could bring.
Once the business had a comfortable runway, Dan made a bold move—he turned their treasury, which is the accumulated profits and cash reserves, into a long-term crypto strategy, much like what companies like MicroStrategy would later become known for.
Riding the wave
At first, the decision looked genius. That $1–2 million ballooned into $30 million. Dan was on CNBC, celebrating as Bitcoin crossed $10,000, and his company seemed unstoppable. They never had to fundraise again—until the 2022 crash.
The crash
In 2022, Bitcoin’s price fell from $63,000 to $18,000, and pressure mounted. Compounding the pain, many of Dan’s advertising partners went bankrupt, leaving unpaid bills. This was a significant blow to the company’s financial stability. To survive, Dan’s company had to liquidate almost the entire treasury at depressed prices.
Had Dan managed his growth and financials more cautiously, that crypto position could have grown to $100 million or more. Instead, he walked away with far less—and a bitter lesson.
Lessons learned
Growth at all costs is dangerous. Chasing aggressive expansion without a clear path to profitability can leave your company vulnerable when market conditions shift.
Profit-taking matters. Riding the wave without ever securing gains turned paper wealth into a forced liquidation.
Stick to your core business.
Discipline is everything. Not letting market euphoria dictate strategy is critical to long-term survival.
Andrew’s takeaways
Separate your business from speculative bets. Don’t gamble with your excess cash on foreign exchange trades. Instead, hedge your risks because trading currencies isn’t your core business.
Have cash discipline for survival through decades of ups and downs.
Guard your cash, respect your core business, and don’t confuse speculative opportunities with sustainable operations.
Actionable advice
Take time every week for deep thinking. When things are going well, take a moment to ask: What could go wrong? By slowing down and imagining worst-case scenarios, you can prepare contingency plans before you get “punched in the face” by reality. This proactive approach to risk management will keep you prepared for any eventuality.
Dan’s recommendations
Dan recommends building the habit of scheduled deep thinking. Carve out one or two hours weekly—whether it’s through running or quiet reflection. The practice isn’t just for investing; it sharpens decision-making across life and business.
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Dan’s goal for the next 12 months is to double revenue and triple EBITDA through acquiring and growing new businesses. It’s a bold target, but one grounded in the hard lessons of the past. This time, growth will come with more balance, more discipline, and a stronger focus on sustainability.
Parting words
“Thank you for having me. Feel free to reach out.”
Hello fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever. Stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win an investing you must take risk, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and I want to thank you for joining this mission today, especially my listeners in Miami, Florida. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Dan novayas. Dan, are you ready to join the mission?
Dan Novaes:
I'm here and I'm ready. Yeah.
Andrew Stotz:
I mean, your company is so interesting that I'm excited to get into it. But let me introduce you to the audience. Dan is a co founder and CEO of mode mobile. He's leading the transformation of how people interact with technology. His earn as you go software empowers millions of consumers to turn daily habits into passive income. Under his leadership mode, achieved 32,000% revenue growth from 2019 to 2022 and ranked number one in software on Deloitte technology fast 500 in North America. Dan, take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.
Dan Novaes:
Yeah, well, thank you, Andrew for the awesome intro. So yeah, we are adding value by helping the people that are using their smartphones every day. Average person today spending about 40 to 50 hours a week. As you know, there's about 168 hours in a week in total. You know, if you're sleeping in hours a day, there's only 112 left, and people are spending 1/3 to one half of their waking life on their smartphone. And at the end of the day, the people that are making trillions of dollars on this is big tech, and you're getting nothing, because if the products free, it means that you're the product. And so we really flipped the model upside down, and really is this idea of rewarding people for the things they're going to do. So that could be playing games, reading the news, trading stocks, depends on what your habits are, and so very similar to what Uber did for cars or Airbnb did for homes, we're doing for the smartphone space. Obviously you're not going to earn as much as you're going to earn from your car or your home, but not everyone has a car or home. Everyone has a smartphone around the world, and we tend to focus on those budget conscious consumers. So at high level, that's what we do. You know, we have 10s of millions of people around the world that have used this software to take their smartphones, turned them into earn phones. We also launched our own earned phones and got them into major retailers like WalMart, Best Buy target and so on. And now we're starting to license this technology to other phone makers and carriers so they can launch free phone plans and phones that pay you as you use it, and we believe that to be the future of the mobile sparks in space
Andrew Stotz:
interesting. And if you go on your, let's say iPhone, you know, I'm sure it's the same on others, you can see, oh, geez, in the last 24 hours, I've spent X amount of time on this app, X amount of time on this app, X amount of time on this app. What is it that you know? What is the model, or the revenue model here? What is it that's valuable? Is it your, where you're spending time, or what you're doing in that time? What is the value? Yeah.
Dan Novaes:
I mean, your value is your attention, right? Your attention is actually your most valuable thing that you own. And I think that if you go and look at the platforms, you know, you're spending that attention, and as you're scrolling those news feeds or reading those articles, there's advertisements that are popping up. So our model operates in a very similar way, you know, we know that people are going to do these habits, you know, and these are everyday services. So an example is, you know, someone likes to play games. We know they're likely going to want to play Candy Crush or, you know, Clash of Clans or whatever, and that advertiser might want to pay, you know, to get that consumer to do that. And so what we'll do is we'll reward you per minute that you play Candy Crush for, say, like a week you build a habit. It's a win for Candy Crush. It's a win for you. You get a little bit of reward. And we take a margin for doing that. But we'll do that across every facet of you know, someone's life, you know, news or stocks you know. So Robin Hood is another example is they want traders to deposit at least $5 into a brokerage account. They may be willing to pay $150 for that action. And once that action is complete, we will share $75 maybe to that consumer, and they'll get about $30 in free stocks. So you know, now the consumer gets 100 bucks. They're very happy. Robin Hood gets a brokerage account, and then we get a margin from that. And so that's very simply how the business model operates, you know, at the base level.
Andrew Stotz:
And just maybe even simplify it a little bit more, for the revenue model, who's paying you for the value that you're delivering? That's Robin Hood or
Dan Novaes:
Yeah, Rob, yeah, Robin Hood is paying mode. Mode mode is then sharing a portion of that revenue back to you, the consumer, for taking that action. And you know, it's say, it's a 50% rev share. You know, it depends on the action the consumer. But you know, we might take half of that $150 and so it's 75 for you, 75 for me. And then I. Robin Hood gets the action that they want, right? And so it's always the advertiser, and vast majority of our revenue is advertising centric. We do have a subscription model, kind of like how Costco operates, where you can earn faster, you know, if you want to, you know, pay for that, but it's optional. And then now, most recently, we started buying a lot of other apps and services and embedding them into our ecosystem, and kind of doing what you would see in like a PE roll up, you know, we see a lot of great cash flowing apps and games, and we're buying those and also exposing consumers to those, and vice versa, those consumers to our product.
Andrew Stotz:
And for let's just take Robinhood for a second. If they didn't have you, they would have to go, let's say, on Twitter, x, and they would do advertisements, and they would capture that same person. Let's say, let's say it's me. I'm on there, and I see an ad for Robin Hood, I click on it, and I sign up, and I set up an account, yep, now they've paid Twitter or x to get access to the platform, and then put up their ad. And so really, what in that case, all that ad revenue is going to Twitter, correct?
Dan Novaes:
Yes, in that case, but the way that advertising generally operates, it's like, we deal with this ourselves, you know, we spend, you know, millions, 10s of millions of dollars a year on advertising. And ultimately, you know, there is an efficiency point that beyond a certain amount, it no longer makes sense for me to advertise on this given network. It just because the competition gets too high and it gets the payback period is too long. So that'll happen on Twitter. So typically, the way to think about this is, like businesses that are trying to grow, they're trying to find consumers that fit within the budget that they have to acquire a customer, whether they can get, you know, 20k a month in good spend with us, and 100k a month in Twitter, that's that's fine, because at the end of the day, all that's profitable. And, you know, we're not getting paid for a user that's already has gone to Robin Hood. So it's a first time user. And so basically, they can attribute that to us as the original referrer.
Andrew Stotz:
And is that the ideal, or the only type of advertising that you do, which is where you can show proof that that ad, that that I, those eyeballs, led to actions, or is it just eyeballs also,
Dan Novaes:
um, it's a that's the vast majority, where there's proof that there is some sort of action that's, you know, correlated to that. Other ones are maybe display centric, where, hey, like a display advertisement occurs, and then we are charging on a per view that's occurring. But, you know, the vast majority of our network is performance centric, meaning that some sort of action must be taken for that basically proves that, hey, we are the original referral of this traffic.
Andrew Stotz:
And do you get any blowback from the platforms or the apps that say, Hey, that's our ad revenue, and you know, you're, you're, you're grabbing a piece of that, or do they don't see it that way?
Dan Novaes:
They don't really see it that way. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, it's pretty cut and dry, you know, at the end, because all these things, like any good marketer knows where the referral traffic is coming from. I mean, obviously there's organic traffic, and you don't necessarily know where that is, because it gets, like, stripped, but that's a problem that everyone is going to have. But, you know, the Facebooks of the world. I mean, they are automated platforms. You know, at the end of the day that you're going in there and buying just traffic against
Andrew Stotz:
and just one last thing on the let's say on the user side, what's the ideal type of person that should download your app and do it? Let's say, you know, obviously, if somebody's not on their phone much, or, you know, that type of stuff. Probably they're not going to get much out of it. But if somebody is on their phone all the time and they're doing different things, what would be the ideal person or the ideal user that would be suitable to get on to download your app and get benefits and get, you know, get returns from it?
Dan Novaes:
Yeah. So, I mean, our main users tend to be more budget conscious consumers, and people coming from emerging markets are primarily the people that are using our service. Now, what's interesting is that, you know, we before the show you and I were talking a little bit about this, but we have a we're one of the largest like, crowdfunders in America, retail crowdfunders, and so 70% of the people that actually investing in our business tend to identify as boomers, meaning they are older than 55 or 60. They are not my target market at all. They tend to be wealthy. And so what's interesting is that we are getting a lot of people that are not in our target something at all, that are interested in participating in the mission of the business, even though they themselves are not the exact type of consumer that's going to use it, because they saw the transformation of what happened with the iPhone in 2008 and this like one of the first big business breakthroughs, I would say, in, you know, the smartphone space, this new business model that's kind of operating so, you know, while people may not be our consumer, they see kind of that opportunity. And we started with budget conscious. Because. Yeah, you know, if a free phone or free smartphone plan is a really big opportunity, you know, this is something where there's 6 billion devices around the world. If you can unlock that market, it's a trillion dollar market. And so, you know, we tend to focus there first, and then over time, you know, you focus on products that are focused more on the wealthier individual, but they're going to naturally care the least about, you know, making a few extra $1,000 in savings a year, you know, as opposed to people that are really struggling to make ends meet, you know, which is happening with the rapid inflation that we have right now in the
Andrew Stotz:
country. And when you look at your business, you know, what do you think is the revenue potential for something like this? I'm not necessarily asking for specific numbers, but just the idea, like, I think we can 2x I think we can 20x you know, like, where, where do you see the future for this type of business? Your business?
Dan Novaes:
Yeah, I think our business is a is a really unique business, because, you know, at a surface level, you know, we've really focused on this idea of the earning as you go, and the Earn OS and whatnot, I think, like where we've really innovated on the way we can grow and and why I see that there's a, you know, 1,000x opportunity, is because we're also in the business of, of taking a business model that's worked quite well for almost any other industry, because We are going out and buying other apps and services that fit within our mandate, and those are typically businesses that we're buying for two to 3x EBITDA, and kind of taking that same private equity playbook and rolling them up into one larger ecosystem. And so then you're building a network effect, right? So anytime that you could do that and use capital efficiently to do that, you know, that's really powerful. And for us, like, you know, if I, if you ask me this question maybe two years ago, you know, something that's been really important to me is, like, I don't want to extend the payback period that we just talked about, you know, because in the past, I had gotten down that that was one of my worst investments. Actually, it's not the one we're going to talk about today, but that was one of my worst investments, is basically growth at all costs. And, you know, we had extended payback periods, six, nine months, you know, before we were seeing even a break even dollar. And then when the market fell in 2022, because a lot of our revenue at the time was FinTech and crypto, and a lot of these companies went bankrupt, we were left holding back. And, you know, it almost took down the entire business. And, you know. And so the next time I was like, hey, if I ever have an opportunity to raise significant amount of capital to grow my business, I'm going to be really diligent about the payback period and only spend up until that point, and then we're going to find a better use for that capital. And that's when we started really thinking about buying these assets and buying these cash flow product, Market Fit products, building a network effect, and then growing this huge network. And so, you know, we see this as a, you know, definitely an 1112, 13 figure business, and that's my goal, to take it over time, is to take it public.
Andrew Stotz:
And I feel like, I feel like I want to do a whole nother episode to talk about your funding structure, but in a very short, you know, description, you know, you mentioned the word crowd funding. And when people think of crowdfunding, like oldies like me, think that you're talking about, what's the website where you put stuff up? Kickstarter? Yeah? Kickstarter? So okay, yeah, we think, okay, crowdfunding is Kickstarter? When you say crowdfunding, you just mean that you it's mass funding. Or is there? What is the meaning of crowdfunding? And just maybe give us a little background on how you raise funding. Yeah.
Dan Novaes:
So the way to think about crowdfunding is that, instead of you focusing on institutional like venture capital that are putting up, like, if you're raising a $50 million round, you may have like, two or three investors that are do that round, you are basically bringing on retail consumers that are making up that round so in our case, we have 50, over 55,000 shareholders in our business. You can do this legally. You go through the SEC, there's a reg CF, there's a reg a, these are regulations. You have to have audited financials. You have to do everything like, it's almost like a mini IPO, but you don't have a publicly traded stock price. Stock price. And then they go to our site, and it's like, checking out on Amazon. You know, X amount dollars per share, you're investing this much, and, you know, they become a part of our cap table. And so that's, that's kind of crowdfunding. And there's usually, yeah, you're, you're totally right. There's two types of crowdfunding companies in the world. I'll say there's, like, the guys that are the baby seeds, that are maybe raising 50 100k for their idea. And then there's like I would call moonshot businesses, and there's not many of them, I would say, you know, every year you're going to see about a dozen or two of these that have the capacity of raising, you know, 2550, 100 million plus. You know, through their lifetime of crowdfunding, and we are one of the leaders in that in the world.
Andrew Stotz:
You know, one of the things that's interesting when you look around the world, and, you know, my job is really, what's fun about what I do is, you know, it's, I'm, like, completely global, whereas a lot of guys, like American guys. Are American centric, and then they look outside of America. But because I've lived outside, and, you know, my whole career has been outside, I kind of look at things globally. One of the interesting trends that's happening in the world is that capitalism, if stock market and IPOs are one of the signs of capitalism, it's an absolute decline in America, as IPOs continue to decline, and it's in the rise. It's on the rise in Asia, as you know now, China has more large and liquid companies in their stock markets than the US does and so and that trend is only getting you know that gap is getting more and more to China's advantage on the IPOs and all that. There's a lot of reasons not to do an IPO these days, particularly, you know, if you think about all the pressures that are on listed companies for disclosures, and then, and then you get all kinds of, you know, climate this, and you get ESG this, and all of these different pressures. So there is some benefit of, kind of not putting your head above the parapet and, you know, just but still having access through a broker, as as you've told me earlier, that if I buy shares in your company, I can also exit, you know, so I'm getting some of the benefit of what the stock market does, but without all of the, you know, additional burden, is there any downside for you of not going listing on the stock market, or is it like, Absolutely, it's much, much better to be listed versus what you're doing. I'm just curious how you look at that.
Dan Novaes:
Yeah. So I think the Yeah, the ways to look at it is, like, the benefit for these investors that are investing in us right now is that they're getting in relatively early on the story. Typically, when you're IPO and you're already at a given stage, you know. I mean, there are companies that prematurely IPO because they need capital or whatever. And you know that is not going to be, you know, mode, but nonetheless, like, you know, that is something that happens quite often. The to answer your question in terms of our perspective on it, I think, like, yeah, the downside of us going public too early, and I think any company is going to be, you know, your ability to predict your revenues, any early stage business, that's one of the hardest things to do, and especially when it's a consumer business, and because if you miss your earnings you forecast incorrectly, you're going to get hammered, you know, and You're going to learn it's going to be very painful. And I think that, you know, for us, that's kind of like, why we've waited a bit. We want to be at a certain scale. We want to be able to be really thoughtful about how we predict revenue. We've already been kind of modeling that for the last, like, two years, and, you know, we're still not fully there, you know, it's like, you know, we need to be in a place where we feel really comfortable around that. And so I think that that's kind of like that discipline is what it's almost like practicing to go public is the best way describe it. You and I were talking about some other things that we do. We do, like earnings calls twice a year. We do a lot of investor monthly communications. We do all these things that I think actually a lot of public companies don't even do themselves to have that direct relationship. And so, you know, for us, we do intend to eventually take the business public, and that's our intention. But you know, we want to do it in the right circumstance. You know, at that same time,
Andrew Stotz:
I just have so many questions about what you're doing on the funding. I think it's so fascinating. But for the purposes of today, now comes the big question, which is, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be, tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it,
Dan Novaes:
and then tell us your story. Okay, and let me, let me phrase that this was my worst. It was an investment that actually still was a good investment. Happy I went through it, yep, but it was the biggest loss I've ever suffered, in terms of, or not like, I didn't gain, you know, in that sense. But it was just such an extravagant number that I feel like it was perfect for the episode. Okay, so here's the context. Our business was very early in the crypto the idea behind crypto, and in fact, we had a different type of fundraise, you know, early on, that was, like a token oriented and we were able to actually raise a good bit in Bitcoin and eth at the time. And at the time, eth was two, 300 bucks, and, you know, a few $100 and Bitcoin was, you know, a few $1,000 and during that period of time, eventually, once we finally figured out what our runway was for a period of time, we converted and did basically what the micro strategy model is today, or meta planet, which is like, Hey, we're gonna have a treasury strategy for our business. And at the time, everyone thought I was kind of crazy to do that because, but I was like, it's, it's a couple million bucks. We have three or four years of runway that we just kind of converted into cash, and we're good long term, right? And this is still with that mindset of, like, you know, growth at all costs, like, we're going to build this crazy thing, and over time that that one or $2 million Um, ballooned to $30 million and because of the price of Bitcoin, and I was on, like, CNBC with Andrew Sorkin, talking about Bitcoin just hit 10k it was like, yeah, the next five years, it's gonna happen. And we never had to fundraise again, you know, through that time. But then in 2022 we had this crazy, you know, went from 63 down to 18. And during that period of time, we had to exit a lot of our petitions because also we had the compounding effect of, you know, pressures in the business because of all those bankrupt companies that didn't pay us our advertiser fees. And so we had to exit our entire Treasury position, not almost all of it, into cash to fund the business. And had we, you know, planned better on the financial side of and not just in anything that today, would have ballooned to, you know, north of well over $100 million and we would have created this kind of treasury concept, you know, right around the same time as MicroStrategy come out. Now, we didn't like think about it in that way, but it's something that, you know, we were really early in, and it was just like, this idea of like, being kind of like, ahead on the curve, but at the same time not having the foresight of where things were going to happen. At the time, we didn't have Blackrock in and you didn't have like, all this kind of regulation going in the right way. So, you know, it worked out like it still was a very significant net positive for a balance sheet, but it was one of the worst decisions I've ever made for multiple things in terms of, like, growth at all cost, and liquidating our treasury that today would have been, you know, a pretty big windfall for the business.
Andrew Stotz:
So, what's the lesson that you learned from it?
Dan Novaes:
I think the lesson, well, the main lesson that I learned is like, sometimes it's like, it's better. You always need to be sensible into how you're growing. Like, you know, I got too carried away with what the market was doing. And one of the things that allowed us even to be in that position in the first place is that we never cared what the price was. We, like, literally adopted it as a treasury strategy. And we were like, hey, like, maybe over time, you know, we were actually earning some income on it through, like, you know, selling covered calls and things of that nature, which was a nice additional, like, you know, one to $2 million a year to extend the runway. But the lesson was, you know, we over levered on acquisition costs. It is over leveraged in a different way. It's not like we were over leveraging our assets, but we over levered in the sense of not being like, you know, rational in how we're thinking about taking profits or finding a profitable model in our business, and ultimately it costs us, you know, having to liquidate that early. And I know that, you know, 10 years from now, when I tell this story and that 100 becomes a bill. I mean, I'm always going to have that. I was like, Man, that was a huge error.
Andrew Stotz:
So, yeah, I mean, I guess my, one of my thoughts on it is just that you have to make a decision of, you know, what is our business? And a good example is, I have a coffee factory here in Thailand, and my best friend and I run it, and he runs it basically, but we with the, what do we do with the excess cash? You know, we going to trade that, for instance, on foreign exchange. Are we going to try to make predictions on what's happening on different currencies? So when we want to import our Brazilian coffee or something like that, we do we want to take some currency position? Well, our answer to that is Nope. That's not our core business, and therefore we're going to hedge almost all of what we're doing with knowing, knowing that we're never going to get the big upside on those currency trades, but it's not our core competency. So I would say with a traditional business, it's really easy to kind of separate the core business from the cash, you know, the what we do with the excess cash and so, but as you get into a little bit, you know, companies that blur the lines as far as what they're doing operationally and other things, it gets harder. And I think the other thing I learned is that, you know, so we've had our business for 30 years. We've been through a lot of ups and downs, and from the beginning, we both felt like we're never going to get financing from Thai government, from Thai banks or anybody. We just didn't think anybody's ever going to help us. And so we always were very, very careful about the cash, because we knew that if we ran out, then we're just it's over. Like the consequences of running out was just over. And so we've survived for 30 years in with that, like, I would say, pretty low risk mentality, and those are some of the things that I'm thinking about as I'm listening you. Anything you would add to that?
Dan Novaes:
I mean, I echo what you're saying. I think, yeah, ironically, I was on another podcast earlier today. And, you know, this, this whole true when I first started my career, like I've been I started. A company when I was in high school, and by the time I was about 1819 it was doing a couple million dollars a year. It was all bootstrapped e com business, doing drop shipping and stuff. And I didn't have any investors. I didn't have anyone that was like, kind of like funding, and it was just profitable, you know, and at the end of the day, didn't have parents to rely on anything. And I did that all through, you know, my early 20s. Then you get caught up in the next phase. The next phase is the VC phase. And then people are, like, growth at all costs, IPO this, IPO that. And so you get, kind of like, you see what's happening in the market, and then you get sucked in. And it wasn't until like, these kind of huge drops happen that you learn, hey, we need to get back to basics and build, like, a good business. And it'll take you a while to get that and then, you know, fortunately, you know, now we're hitting profitable months, and this year will be a bit of positive for us, but it took a lot of time, and, you know, a lot of pivots to get there. And you know, now we're thinking about a treasury strategy again, just because, you know you're not burning and you don't have to dip into that, you know, numb that, that of what you do with your money. But, yeah, I mean, I definitely echo everything. You're, you're, you're saying there.
Andrew Stotz:
So, you know, part of the purpose of this podcast is to help people who are in a situation similar to what we messed up. And we want to help them, you know, think about it. So based on what you learn from this story, and what you continue to learn, what's one action that you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate. Let's imagine they're in the exact same situation, and yeah, they've got the same type of decisions they got to make. And you know what would be the one piece of advice you would tell them,
Dan Novaes:
Look, I think that the best as the saying goes, like everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And I think that that is the to take the deep thinking like, you know, take that moment of deep thinking every week and when things are going well, and think about everything that could go wrong, and then reassess your position of what you would do in that scenario. Because I think that if I could go back to that time when I literally had this, the best quarter we've ever had. And you read the growth stat, right? That 32,481% that was us missing plan by 50% we were supposed to get 64,000% growth, and so we still hit that. But it was the best quarter and the worst, because we got punched in the face. We got knocked out in many ways, but then, and so, if I and so, I've always been thinking like, you know, what could go wrong in all these, you know, things now, and I try and take that time and schedule it actually weekly, like I flow every week, for example, on a float tank, like an isolation tank, right to go through deep thoughts and deep thinking of these types of things. Because, you know, in your day to day, you might not be thinking about it, you know, because you're just operating, you know,
Andrew Stotz:
W, C, G, R, what could go wrong? Yes.
:
What could go wrong? Yes.
Andrew Stotz:
That's good. Because, you know, you ask people that, and they're like, no, no, no, Bitcoin couldn't go down. Come on. What are you talking about? Yeah, and that's the point of slowing down too to think about that so excellent. And let me ask, what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?
Dan Novaes:
A resource I'd say, probably be that one. I mean, I think, like schedule that, like at least one or two hours every week of deep thinking, and you're kind of thinking, literally, put it into your calendar and take that time. For me, floating is what works. I also like go on runs and, you know, whatever. But I think that that's actually one of the things that I really wish I would have started that habit, like more than 10 years ago, like I made it just would have made a huge difference in my life.
:
I love
Andrew Stotz:
that, and I'm gonna, I just wrote down schedule, W, C, G, R, deep thinking time. I using that because, you know, we're talking about risk management. But of course, deep thinking time just generally is critical, and it's, it's harder to get when we're selling our attention
:
Exactly. Yeah, that's so last, one last
Andrew Stotz:
question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?
Dan Novaes:
Number one goal for the next 12 months, well, we're in an interesting phase, you know, we're, we're buying a few different businesses, and, you know, my goal is to at least double our revenue and triple our EBITDA, you know. So that's what I'm focused on for the next 12 months. It's a very good goal. And, yeah, small goal, you know. And then, you know, where'd I make it happen?
Andrew Stotz:
Well, I can't wait to talk about that in 12 months. Well, listeners, there you have it, another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And as we conclude, Dan, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?
Dan Novaes:
Thank you for having me. Feel free to reach out. You know my email is down@modemmobile.com and feel free to check out. You know, anything that was interesting in the. Go and happy to chat on it. Fantastic.
Andrew Stotz:
And we'll have links in the show notes, so click on those. Go check it out. That's a wrap. And another great story to help us create, grow and protect our Well, fellow risk takers, let's celebrate that. Today, we added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside. You.
