Building a Business with John McAfee

$30m market cap in 6 months?

This is my friend John McAfee. He's dead now, but while alive we started a business together that grew very fast.

Today marks 6 years exactly. This is my story.

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During the fall of 2017 I discovered something incredible. I was able to predict the price movements of smaller cryptocurrencies (altcoins).

How? I measured the "hype" of a coin and divided against market cap. That's it.

Hype was measured with a simple algorithm that scraped social media for # of mentions.

High hype divided by low market cap = coin is about to go up.

Low hype divided by high market cap = coin is about to go down.

It worked marvelously, so I had to let the world know.

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What to do? What else? Cold email John McAfee.

At the time he was the biggest crypto influencer on Twitter, with 900k followers.

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Guess what? He's a pretty private dude. His email address wasn't floating out there, so I had to guess it.

john@mcafee . com? nope
jm@mcafee . com? nope, bounce back
johnm@mcafee . com? Bingo. Delivered and opened. No reply. ☹️

I followed up 11 times, he kept opened but not responding.

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Finally, email #12 was a hit. He responded with this:

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Not the enthusiasm I was hoping for, but let's roll with it.

He told me to present the idea at his house in Lexington, TN on January 27th at 1:23pm. He'd provide the address the morning of.

The day of, I set off from Huntsville, AL and I emailed him,

"I'm on my way. What's your address?"

No reply. I kept driving and checking, driving and checking, no reply.

Finally, around 12:45 he replied with his address.

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I pulled up to his Spanish style home in his southern style neighborhood and knocked at exactly 1:23.

The driveway had a yellow Hummer next to a beat-down Altima.

He answered, annoyed and flustered. Bodyguards were everywhere.

An Australian film crew was everywhere.

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He sat me down at a kitchen table and then took everyone to the liquor store.

Yes, John Mcafee, the world's most paranoid, private and secure person, left a stranger at home at a table littered with hard drives.

I took a video of my surroundings in this moment but X won't let me attach it to this post, so I will in the post below.

(I'm skipping some parts of this story for brevity but I'll email the detailed version out to my newsletter at some point in the future).

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He and the film crew came back from the store and he sat me down at a different table to do the demo. I got into it and he interrupted me, "Do you mind if we film this?"

Of course I did.

"Nope!" I gulped out. They filmed it. Boom mic and all.

30 seconds into my pitch and John interrupted me.

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"Chris. I get it. Of course this works. It's common sense. There's so fundamentals behind these coins. It's all just hype.

This is brilliant. You're brilliant. What can i do for you?"

Me: "I want you to tweet about this twice per week every week and I'll give you 25% of the profits."

Deal.

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We shook. No back and forth.

I was going to build a free community that had access to a small % of these picks, and then a paid community hat got everything.

We'd grow with John's tweets.

I stayed the whole day and ate bad Mexican food.

I later found this pic online of his two bodyguards. We got to be decent buds that day.

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I drove home on cloud 9. I had made it. This was my big break.

The next few months were a blur.

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On the day we launched the community (in a Discord group), I didn't set the settings right.

Anyone that joined the discord group could make themselves an admin.

Within minutes of his tweet over 10,000 people were in the community.

And then, within seconds, hundreds of them were suddenly admins, taking over the channel entirely.

I told him to delete the tweet so I could re-make a new group.

He was very angry. He NEVER deletes tweets, he told me.

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He did. The new group was a success.

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We launched a paid community and our own token.

We were listed on exchanges and reached a $30m market cap.

My (old) twitter account grew from 300 to 60,000 within a few months, all thanks to his tweets.

It was a wild ride that lasted about 18 months. We were swimming upstream against a falling market.

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I made some money, not much, and then handed all the IP over to the community.

I still have John's manic voicemails saved on my phone.

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Was he shady? Yes. Brilliant? Also yes.

His house was literally littered with guns and he acted exactly as you've seen him act online.

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Thanks for reading. I'll most more details of our launch and my day at his house when I have more time.

Would love a follow @mhp_guy