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

Neville Medhora Talks Copywriting

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 talk. BUT you still need the big conference speaker names to sell tickets.

21:12: I went to Summit At Sea and the conference speakers were essentially stuck on a boat with you, so you actually got a lot of time with Eric Schmidt, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kimbal Musk, Quintin Tarantino etc because of this. They changed the venue the next year to be in Los Angeles, and it was a totally different vibe since the speakers could just leave.

23:27: One person that totally stood out was Gary Vaynerchuk. He was up early in the morning till 3am at night talking to people, giving advice, holding court. It was very impressive to see him giving-giving-giving-giving constantly.

25:15: Nick tells a story about a Gary Vaynerchuk employee (Nick Dio) whose job it is to just spend millions a year just taking people out. He does this just so rising talent thinks highly of Gary.

26:16: Figuring out social media ROI is like trying to figure out the ROI of your mother raising you. It’s very hard.

26:44: MuseumHack sold for millions of dollars, and Nick started this from his hobby of going to museums and giving friends tours. A popular blog called Daily Candy wrote about Nick Gray’s friend tours being one of the coolest things you can do in New York, and from there it blew up with 1,300+ people sending emails to get a tour and he had to hire employees and start charging for tours to meet demand.

29:40: It was difficult for Nick to charge for something he just loved doing for free, so he originally just charged for people to skip the waiting list.

30:57: Nick used theater people and stand up comedians to give the tours not boring art history people which made it WAY more fun! They would just try to deliver the craziest experiences possible like illegal concerts that would get shut down by security.

32:30: They opened up tickets to the public and it started taking off, Nick had to shut down a big New York Times article because he wasn’t ready to grow the business so fast.

33:18: An average ticket cost $80/each, but the real money from MuseumHack came from corporate gigs and team building exercises. Instead of 2 people at $80/each, he could charge $10,000+ for a team building experience. They grew to 45 employees this way.

34:19: Nick sold the company to his own CEO in a seller-financed purchase which ended up benefiting both sides.

34:45: Nick does so much free stuff that many people think there’s a catch. But in reality Nick has been financially set from his two past company sales.

35:44: Start your business on nights and weekends, don’t quit your job. It puts too much pressure and doesn’t give you enough time to figure your product out.

36:16: The Two Hour Cocktail Party book is what Nick is most known for now.

party.pro/book

Amazon link

36:40: His book The Two Hour Cocktail Party teaches people to host their first event so they can meet/make more friends and deepen friendships. Gives a step-by-step guide for doing it.

37:48: The NICK Method: N = Nametags. I = Icebreakers. C = Cocktails or mocktails only, no dinner. K = Kick em out.

38:16: Total over 1,000+ events thrown like this (over 500+ actually verified).

38:46: Using these methods in two months Nick Gray had more friends than our entire friend group.

38:57: Noah Kagan did this by throwing a “No-Networking Networking Event” and giving out free drinks (which cost $1/each). He’d spend a total of $90 to $150 for the event and became well-known.

39:52: It’s weird for most people to show up to a party solo and network, so introductions and icebreakers are important. In a small party environment this is SUPER DUPER HELPFUL so people meet each other.

41:37: When people complain they didn’t meet friends at a party, they miss the point that going to events must be a consistent thing. You won’t meet a group of BFF’s right away. “Make hosting a habit.”

42:30: There’s a shopping list of basic snacks in his book, and Nick notices everywhere he goes in the world they have all his favorite snacks there!

45:13: Icebreakers are so important. Before you can send a guest list with people’s social media or bio, during the event do an in-person intro/icebreaker.

46:18: I kinda want Nick to do an icebreaker at my wedding!

48:26: Which platforms do you most post on? X and Instagram is where most time is spent, including a private X account which he originally started because in his previous company he couldn’t be very public since aviation was a very conservative industry.

49:43: “The Japan Blind Date” post went ultra-mega-viral for Nick and had people glued to the updates, including producers from NetFlix and other major outlets who wanted to make a show out of it.

52:36: Been working with writing more, since a lot of short form videos have been bombing compared to the text posts. Text posts are optimized for time-spent-in-post. Longer text posts have been crushing for Nick compared to video 10-to-1.

54:12: An interesting social media hack is where you share a picture of a lot of writing, and since people click and zoom in to read the algorithms think it’s a hot post and promote it more.

54:49: Another mega-viral post 40,000,000+ (if not 100,000,000+ in total) was when got a waterpark all to himself one day and the comments and shares went absolutely bananas. The problem with these short form hits is “you’re just a busker” and they don’t really follow you, so he goes only by how many comments a post guest.

55:47: LEAVE A COMMENT IF YOU’RE WATCHING ON YOUTUBE!

56:12: The waterpark stunt that got 100,000,000+ views. He didn’t even want to do the video and walked out of the waterpark but he was doing a “1 video a day challenge” so he went back to the waterpark and quickly filmed it, and that blew up big time.

58:10: Comments on a viral post are usually insane. The more viral the post, the dumbed the comments. Nick Gray leans into and “kills people with kindness” in the comments.

1:00:21: Going mega-viral is a big rush. Opening your phone is insane with notification. “It’s like your birthday every single day of your life” since so many people are reaching out saying they saw it. Other content creators said to keep this up you’ll have to be the “I got a ____ to myself guy” and go to museums, theme parkys etc. Nick didn’t want to do this but it was interesting advice.

1:02:43: A huge indicators to algorithms are internal social shares. In order for people to share you have to be adding value.

1:03:15: Algorithms keep changing to prevent certain tactics from taking over, like ultra-dense intros. Slower videos being watched long are getting more popular.

1:05:30: If you don’t have a social presence for a lot of people they just don’t think about you or hear about you. If you have a large social following more people know you.

1:07:07: If you don’t know where to start posting, send out an annual friends newsletter via email. You need to add value (your favorite books, reads, songs, family photos etc). This will keep you top of mind and add value to your friends.

1:09:10: I post my monthly goals every month, and it keeps me accountable because “I THINK” people are keeping track.”

1:10:17: Neville will just share his screen and work on stuff to keep accountable, also uses a thing called CaveDay which is coworking over Zoom with 50+ people.

1:12:03: Making yourself useful and adding value before you need it. Nick did this with Sam Parr and myself at a HubSpot conference really well, and it was so nice to have him there. He acted as a “Body Man” which is super helpful to have. He would “bear the burden of awkwardness” to keep fans moving along, get pictures, and keep things on track. He also organized a super-fan whirlwind JFK Museum visit.

1:18:10: “Being helpful” is good for your mental well-being. For example I love cleaning things up, I don’t mind doing it, and it makes me feel good that I improved the area.

1:19:43: Nick likes Neville’s “Give Pics To The Party Host” method he does. It’s a high value add, it’s free, and it means a lot to the host. Take pics of the food, with the host in it, take candid photos, use Cinematic Mode video sometimes, and maybe even send some edited photo.