From Near Death Situation to Most Innovative Business People Award, the Story of Tim Ferriss

Jumping from service to product is like a dream for most business owners. 

Especially the ones that started from service-based agencies. 

Tim Ferriss is not entirely an agency owner, but his career started off being a consultant, giving one-to-one consultations to different companies or business individuals. This involved personalized attention and tailor-made solutions, hallmarks of a service-based approach.

But soon enough, he jumped into the product-based approach. Later in the years, he came up with Brain.fm and Tribe to offer standardized solutions packaged as digital platforms accessible to a wider audience.

“It’s far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor”

But how? Almost every service-based business owner may at some point dream of building a product out of it. But how? The knowledge of truly building a product like a product that is not a service, is not freely available in the market.  

Let’s look at Tim’s story who made it possible.

The Beginning

Tim grew up like any other American child. The only difference was his health. Growing up with health issues led to a young Ferriss obsessed with self-improvement. At this stage, he had just graduated from Princeton, finding his life in the Corporate sales part at a Data Storage company.

And… soon he found himself burned out from it too. While still employed at his prior job, his obsession for self-improvement led him to found BrainQUICKEN, an internet-based nutritional supplements business which he later on sold to a London-based private equity firm in 2010.

“The options are limitless, but each path must begin with the same first step: replacing assumptions”

It was named BodyQUICK then. This showed his early-stage obsession with building products, and even though he sold it great in 2010, back in 2001 he took it as a side gig, nothing else. But things changed the same year. 

A near-death experience in 2001 served as a wake-up call, pushing him to explore alternative work-life paradigms. So he walked out on his own by 2002. Tim Ferriss then began offering consulting services around 2003-2004.

Around this time, he’s known to have started offering his expertise informally to friends and acquaintances, honing his methods and building a small client base. That’s how he initially built his consultation firm on his own. 

This predates the release of "The 4-Hour Workweek" in 2007, allowing him to test his ideas and build a reputation before achieving his explosive book success "The 4-Hour Workweek," is his desire to escape the traditional grind that led to his first book. The book soon became a runaway to the New York Best Seller list in 2007, counting over 2.1 Million copies sold to this day.

He didn’t stop there, he also followed it up with other "4-Hour" books on body, chef, and sleep, cementing his reputation as a productivity guru. During this time, aside from writing the “4-hour” series, Tim also gained a huge network and name around the town, adding to his previous consultation-based services.

To scale his impact beyond the limitations of one-on-one consulting, he wanted to explore more productivity sides to practically implement his ideas.

Founding Brain.fm

In 2009, Tim Ferriss began experimenting with the use of music for focus and relaxation, inspired by studies on binaural beats and their potential cognitive effects. Later in 2012, he attended a conference where he met Daniel Landin, a neuroscientist and musician. Together, they began developing the concept for Brain.fm based on Landin's research on brainwave entrainment. Finally, in 2015 it was live. Brain.fm: A scientific music platform for focus, productivity, and relaxation. 

And you guessed it right. He started recommending this product to those in the network to boost their productivity to a whole new level. Here his already built network from consulting did the charm for him.

Finding Tribe: 

In 2014, Tim published the "Tribe of Mentors" book, featuring interviews with over 100 successful entrepreneurs, investors, athletes, and artists. By 2016, Tribe launched as a social learning platform based on the book's concept. It offers access to exclusive content, courses, and mentorship opportunities from leading experts.

Even now, Tribe continues to operate as a subscription platform connecting entrepreneurs with mentors and experts. It has expanded its scope beyond entrepreneurship, offering learning opportunities in various areas.

Not to mention, he is now known as an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others). Who knew a corporate sales guy from some data storage company could go this big right? But he is a true inspiration.

While some criticized his optimization-focused approach, his impact was undeniable: he inspired millions to question their lifestyles and seek new possibilities. This is how he built his products and if you search, both of them are still active out there. 

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