Interview: Making friends, keeping friends, and growing your network (from the master Nick Gray)

Nick Gray is the master of developing a great friend network, we go over some of his success in this area, his book The Two Hour Cocktail party, and his past business successes. See the full blog post and long notes here:

https://copywritingcourse.com/courses/interviews/making-friends-nick-gray/

0:00: Start

0:05: Making T-shirts with friends faces for $20 is an amazing investment.  

2:00: The t-shirts started with Noah Kagan and I made custom shirt with an iron-on paper, but then started using Canva. 

3:20: Nick Gray is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, it’s difficult to describe him and all the fun he brings. 

3:40: He started a company called MuseumHack which he sold in 2019, and also helped build his family's aviation company from the ground up before selling it to a big private equity company.”

4:20: “I’ve been on more private jets than anybody but they’re all broken.”

4:50: His engineer dad built a product in their basement that shows an in-air flight display (like you see in airlines) but for private jets. Nick joined as employee #1 and helped grow it to 80+ employees before selling in 2014, then got an earnout from the company. 

6:30: Working with a family business was very informal, and while there was a small amount of butting heads overall it was a great and fun and easy experience and in fact BROUGHT HIM CLOSER TO HIS PARENTS than ever.

8:16: Nick’s involvement for Flight Display Systems (FDS) he took over marketing and international sales. He learned everything on the fly (no pub intended).

9:00: Middle East clients had INSANE private jets and essentially unlimited budgets. People would request showers, glowing floors, and all sorts of things and they would engineer it and build it. Their bread and butter was in-flight entertainment. Nick’s dad figured out how to make the standard $70,000 “Flight Map” for around $10,000.

10:53: Sales all came from a small network of aviation professionals and tradeshows, specifically one called NBAA which his whole family would all go to every year. 

11:34: Nick did something innovating with pricing in the aviation industry. Talking about prices was considered uncouth, so he zagged and made Best Buy style giant price tags at their tradeshow booth. Other booths were making fun of them, but their booth was completely full of end customers! 

12:53: Nick learned to be very upfront by asking: “What do you need, what do you want, what can we do for you?”

14:17: Do you still think tradeshows are still the best way to get leads? Yes…but “conferences” are hard, but “tradeshows” are super profitable. 

15:13: If Nick ever started a business it might be a tradeshow (not conference) because you can monetize them so well. 

15:40: For Nick’s 42nd birthday he threw a “Birthday Conference” where people paid ~$1,000 to come to a three day event, and it was really cool high up people and felt like an expensive conference. Price anchoring for conferences is very hard. He sent out a survey how much people would pay and it always ends up at $1,000. Unless you get very big sponsors it’s hard to make big money with conferences. 

17:04: There’s nothing like meeting in person to connect with a person. Something still very different from online. We went to a HubSpot conference and met a lot of people we knew online in real life. Even brief moments of meeting IRL are impactful.

18:48: In early 2000’s the only way to hear amazing people speak was at a live conference. But with the rise of TED, YouTube, and podcasts all of a sudden you could hear BETTER versions of these in person speeches. The benefit of conferences quickly shifted from hearing a speaker to meeting other conference attendees. 

19:51: We went to a conference where we saw some famous names, and honestly it’s better to listen to a podcast than the live...