Hostage Situation, with Alex Neist – Episode 456 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Alex Neist, founder of Hostage Tape sleep enhancement tape, shares his first love of football and his time as a former professional quarterback in the arena football league, explains how dedication is just motivation over time, gives the story behind the name “Hostage Tape”, and talks about the importance of being polarizing, targeting your T.A.M., the TRUE definition of success, and finally making it on Rogan.

About Alex:

Alex Neist is the man behind Hostage Tape. This ecommerce marvel is radically improving sleep quality, one mouth at a time. Alex has already skyrocketed Hostage Tape to 8 figures a month. He previously devoted 16 years to a sports video analytics company, bootstrapping it from scratch before making a graceful exit (VidSwap, a service which helps sports teams and athletes win with live video replay, automated video analysis, and collaboration from any device). During his tenure, he pioneered the use of humans to tag games, making them easily searchable for coaches and athletes – kind of like a human Google, but for sports. Before his business feats, Alex sported the helmet and shoulder pads, gracing the field as a professional quarterback in the Arena football league, with the Tri-City Diesel, Tulsa Talons, Spokane Shock, and the Bakerfield Blitz, winning three division championships with 3 different teams. When he wasn’t calling plays on the field, he was coaching them, with a coaching career spanning over 15 years. Whether it’s strategizing in business, on the football field, or in the realm of sleep, Alex Neist loves traveling the world looking for his next adventure with his wife and 2 kids.

Alex also founded Neist Media in 2022 with a mission to “build ecom brands with passion”.

Learn more at HostageTape.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Hello, Action Catalyst listeners. Today, our guest is Alex Neist, the founder of Hostage Tape sleep enhancement tape, as well as an entrepreneur and former professional quarterback in the Arena Football League. Recently, he has also founded Neist Media with a mission to build econ brands with passion. Alex, nice to meet you.

Alex Neist
It’s good to be here.

Adam Outland
Look, we’re honored to have you and I love focusing kind of on early days a little bit, Senator due to we have a lot of business owners on here. They’re going to be really curious about scalability. So you got started wearing pads and helmet?

Alex Neist
Yes, my first love was football. I was a football player as so there’s this great story when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, somewhere around there was at a birthday party. And it gave everybody these acts of Topps baseball cards. I wasn’t really much of a football player back then. And so we got these cards and we opened them up. And the very last card that I got was a Joe Montana card in everybody around the table is like oh my god, you gotta Joe Montana card. He’s the best quarterback in the league, like a light bulb went off for me. So then it was at that moment, I knew, I want to be like that. Everything I do was breathing football, living football. And then my dad built the net, we lived out in the country, in southern Minnesota. So out of the country that I had, we had a past year where my dad built this net, or I would be outside all day, from morning till noon, when the sun went down, just thrown the ball. And even before I had the net, what I used to do was I would go out and I would just throw the ball at all the trees, and then that prompted my database. All right, so you’re killing all the trees. Let me build a net for you. So man, I wanted to be at the time the next Joe Montana. And then as I got older, that was the era of Kurt Warner, right, this this underdog story. And I’d always kind of had an underdog mentality and underdog story for me too, that I love the Kurt Warner story so that I always wanted to be the next Kurt Warner. Nobody ever thought I was gonna go play college football. And then I went, I played college football. I went to the University of Minnesota I was a gopher, and then from college, I wasn’t a starter I was I was a backup. So nobody ever thought like what kind of a backup actually continues on and keeps playing. But I had a mentality much like Kurt Warner did, where I just I knew I was good enough. I knew I could play, I was able to get into arena football. I was always that guy that nobody ever ever be counted me out. But then I always had a chip and I’m like, I can do it. I know I can add this like dude, delusional confidence. But look, man, in this day and age when you’re playing with a playbook that’s this thick. There’s so many options. And there’s so many reads and things are so complicated, you have to have a smart guy, you’ve got to have a guy who can take all that and learn a new language and think on the fly, and can go into a meeting and command the room. Because the reality is this, you got a billion dollar organization behind the guy, those guys in that room are not going to follow him if he’s not working harder than everybody else. And he doesn’t actually show that, Wow, that guy knows what he’s doing. He can coach everybody in the offense, everybody in the room, everybody in the huddle, they have to be able to follow that guy. And if they can’t follow that guy and trust that guy, not gonna work. A great example is Johnny Manziel. You’re seeing a lot of more media come out, especially with the Netflix documentary that That dude was so talented, but it was obvious why he failed. He just was not doing the work. He was not studying, not doing film, not doing all the things. And then he lost the entire locker room lost all the coaches. And it was obvious.

Adam Outland
Yeah. So I mean, it’s a good pivot actually to talking about business. So talk about the transition from athletics to business.

Alex Neist
I think it’s an easy transition in the sense that when you’re an athlete, especially a high level athlete, and you make it to college sports, or some level of pro sports, you know what it takes to actually put all the work in, day in and day out the grind. That’s the thing that most people don’t understand about being an entrepreneur and building a business. They look at it from Instagram ago. Oh, wow. Look at all the amazing things they’re doing. Look at what they’ve accomplished, like the it’s like an overnight success. But what they don’t see is what all of us athletes have gone through is that dude, you’re going to practice every single day you’re working on every single day. You’re doing all the little things every single day. that then pays off every weekend every Friday night. So it’s a very similar mentality of, of what we need to do on a daily basis, that grind, you have to do you just, you don’t need motivation, you just need dedication, and you need consistency, to continue to do the right things day in and day out, and you’re gonna fail. And that’s okay. Right. And that’s another piece of it is that being a great entrepreneur and a great athlete is learning how to be able to use failure, you know, you’re going to fail, you know, you’re going to fail. And it’s using that failure than to learn from it to then get better and try not to make those mistakes, again, keep moving forward and keep stacking. Diet, there’s one thing that my, my mom taught me, and I say this to my kids, you can accomplish anything in life, if you want, you just have to be willing to work for it. And if you’re willing to work for it, you can do it and you can accomplish it. And you could make your own luck to get to it.

Adam Outland
That’s good. I know, it wasn’t like a complete transition right into the businesses that you that you’re known for. Now, you’re the hostage tape, which we’ll talk about a little bit. But you kind of had this like pivot point of getting into sports video analytics, which was related, right?

Alex Neist
Yeah. You know, when you’re an athlete, so I was also a coach, like when you’re playing arena football, like we all make tons and tons of money, your goal is to try to climb to make it to the NFL. And that was obviously my goal. And so while I’m doing that, I’m also coaching football, I was a high school football coach for 15 years. And so when you’re a quarterback, and you’re a coach, you’re student of the game. And so as a student of the game, back then this was in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, right? Where the internet, the internet wasn’t what it is today, you weren’t watching video, and interacting with software in the browser the way that we are now and we’re used to it. So back then everything was very, Alright, hey, I’m gonna want to mail you a DVD. Right then meet you in McDonald’s. And we’re going to hand off tapes, it was very rudimentary and how we used to exchange information, video and study things at the dawn of that was certainly Netflix was starting to change and grow, YouTube was starting to change all these things were happening. And so I knew all right, there’s something here online with being able to take video and share it. So we actually just started out as it was a file sharing site, game exchange, changing game video. But then we pivoted and we said, let’s actually take that though and add more to it, we’ll let the sexy build an application in the browser that people are going to interact with, we pioneered this concept of using humans to watch the video and tag it so that way, then as a, as a coach, you play the game on a Friday night you woke up the next day, your game was entirely tagged with the data points that you could search and pull up to be able to teach your players more effectively. Because most teams, especially Olympic sport teams, they’ve got one maybe two coaches on staff, how the heck are they going to take a 90 minute match? add data to it, so they can actually use it with their players? Most don’t most didn’t? At the time, they were just like, All right, we lost anything we can learn. I don’t know, let’s move on. Because I got a game in two days, that really catapulted us into where, you know, we were doing seven figures a year with our business, and then we bootstrapped it ran it for 16 years, and then I sold it to a company out of Tel Aviv, that kind of led to ending that chapter of my life into a new chapter.

Adam Outland
And in tell me like if you you know, there’s the same, you know, there’s, so much of what you go through in life is preparing you for your moment when it comes right, what was the preparation this business gave you?

Alex Neist
Well, in 16 years, I failed an awful lot. Right? When you when you run your own business, you fail a lot. And I was just fortunate enough to not fail too much that we were still in business, and we lasted for 16 years. Or you could look at it as I failed so much that I was able to learn enough to stay in business for that long to then get to this point. But so I negotiated the deal. I negotiated it myself, I didn’t have a broker or banker or anybody. And I’ll tell you when you’re when you’re an American negotiating with an Israeli, that’s an interesting negotiation that most people are not prepared for. Because like, we’re not as Americans were not brought up in a culture of negotiating and haggling. We’re just not, we’re just not prepared for that. They don’t teach that we should be teaching in our kids and they should be teaching in school how to negotiate. So shout out to this book, never split the difference. But Chris Voss Yeah, he needs to read this book, this book changed my life. So when I read that book, it changed everything about how I approach business, how I approached my relationships, and then it really helped me helped me set up be able to go in and negotiate that deal to sell the company. Now I know the things that I need to learn when I build my next company that’s going to be big. And I also learn what do I not want to do? How do I not want to be how do I not want to manage my people and lead my people? I learn all the a lot of things I don’t want to do.

Adam Outland
How did this come about? I mean, this seems like a departure from you know what you’ve done previously?

Alex Neist
Well, the story is actually this five years ago, I thought I had everything right. I had the business, the seven, figure your business, I had my wife I had, we had house, I had two kids, then literally two years after that I lost all of it. I sold the business. And then I went through divorce, because I was super laser focused on the business. But also, I was a terrible snore that have pushed my wife into the bedroom. And a lot of people think, Oh, you store sleeping separate better. And that’s great. It’s not great. And not good for relationship to be sleeping in separate bedrooms. I don’t care what you think it’s not. I’ve been through it. And then I only saw my kids at the time. And then as a result, I had to sell the house. And I was living in my mom’s basement. So then it was in that moment where all right, I’m investing out my equity. And I’m at like my rock bottom moment. And I’m going, what do I need to do? What do I need to do is change the work on myself? So I started with my sleep. And I went down this rabbit hole of what do I how can I improve it? How can I improve my snoring my sleep all of it. And I discovered this article written by James Nesta and James Nesta wrote a best selling book called breath. And in this book, there’s an experiment that they do where they go to Stanford Medical Center, and they plug their nose for 10 days to see what would happen both anecdotally and what the doctors would say. Throughout this 10 days, they developed sleep apnea, snoring like crazy and dangerously low levels of blocks. And once that’s done, they unplugged their nose, they tape their mouth, everything went away in a day. So when I read that, I went, is it really that simple. It’s mouth breathing, because as an athlete my whole life, they never taught us that they never taught us the dangers of mouth breathing, and the benefits of nasal breathing in so I then went okay, went on to Amazon, I had no idea what to get. And I just bought some cheap stuff that like I will just try this out. And everybody, same reaction. Wait a minute, if I put this on, am I gonna die? Like, is there a chance I die? And I’m like, I’ll be fine. Come on. So I put it on. When I woke up the next day, I felt like a kid. I felt like my 14 year old son like the amount of energy that I had. Because when you get more sleep it stacks. So I finally felt what it was like it was jolting. And that’s when I knew, Okay, I’ve got something in and on top of who and you’re like, we’re gonna call a hostage tape. They’re like, yeah, like, the amount of pushback I got from that. Our people didn’t like it. But when you have polarity and a brand and you’re gonna have people who love it, people hate it. When you know, you’ve got something good hostage tip. Why would you call it that? When I first started mouth taping, I used to warn my kids, I would say Hey, guys, I’m gonna warn you. I’m gonna put some tape on my mouth. Right? It’s gonna look like I’m being held hostage such as, don’t freak out. But it’s also tapping into this core emotion. People feel people feel held hostage by poor sleep, or their partner, and they don’t know what to do. And I knew you’re going to scroll through your seat and you’re going to see such tape. Whoa. And you’re gonna remember you’re never gonna forget that. And people don’t.

Adam Outland
I was just thinking like it sometimes you like glanced at it maybe on like an ad scroll down and you’re like, Wait, is this like the s&m feed at first?

Alex Neist
What are they going to sell ball gags next?

Adam Outland
But then to your point, polarity causes you to read. And then as long as the science backs up the tool, it’s it’s it’s compelling. What were the exercises that you took in exploring the marketability of this?

Alex Neist
There wasn’t much that I did to like, past. I just knew in my bones that this was that. Oh, the challenge, though, is is that because it is a commodity essentially, right? I mean, anybody can take the concept that we’ve made, and try to sell it. But the real brilliance of it is creating this brand that we’ve created in this movement that we’ve created the largest brand in the world. It’s not even close. Like you look at the web’s statistics. Nobody’s even close to us. No competitor, nothing. What was amazing is a few weeks ago, Joe Rogan, he was talking to an MMA fighter on a pod. And the guy said, oh, yeah, you know, I’m taping them at night. And he was Oh, yeah. Do you use hostage tape? So we’ve got the biggest person in the world equating a category to us. Yeah, in the manner of two years, we have taken over a category and we are the category when somebody says mouth tape. Oh, yeah, that’s your hostage tape. Right?

Adam Outland
That is the hard part, for sure.

Alex Neist
The first year was my co founder and eyes all internal. We didn’t hire an agency didn’t hire anybody else. And so it was that medium. And then I had hired on a my head of support a few months after that, because if there’s one thing I learned from my previous business, as a SaaS company, your customer support the has to be dialed in has to be dialed in early. It was the three of us, you know, really for that whole Last year, and I learned Facebook ads myself, I had never done Facebook ads before. But I knew this was our ticket. And I learned how to do it. It took me six months. And I learned how to do it. I struggled and fumbled and figured it out. But that’s the way I’m wired, as an entrepreneur, like I figure everything out, and I identify what are the things that are going to move the needle the most. And I went, and I learned how to do those things. Now, I completely understood it, because that was why I didn’t want to go hire an agency is I wanted to understand how the biggest thing that I was going to be spending my money on, and the biggest thing that was gonna move the needle, I needed to understand it, right, I wasn’t gonna hire somebody who had just some 24 year old kid running our ads who didn’t really care. Right? He was just put on the project. Because we were paying that agency. He’s not the one who took all of his money. And he put into this business, his sweat, you know, I put my life into this business. So I’m gonna make sure that it works.

Adam Outland
So like you have a valuable product, but you’re creating a market in some ways, because it’s just not there yet that wall of like, I don’t understand it.

Alex Neist
Yeah, there’s, there’s totally an education piece to our product, for sure. Because most people see, and they’re like, this is stupid. But then it’s like, oh, wait a minute. Most people here don’t actually understand the difference between nasal breathing a mouth breather. And this is why it’s important that like, oh my God even know that. So when it comes to branding, we’ve got a 25 person team in when I hire my team, there’s a very particular type of person that I like to hire. I like hiring optimistic people, people that have an optimistic mindset. And also, they’re, they’re people who they might be entrepreneurial. They might leave in 234 years, and then start their own brands. Because that’s a do like, those are the kinds of people that I look for, mostly, and I tell them all, hey, if you’ve got your own brand, your own idea, I’m totally cool with you working with it as a side hustle, I encourage it, and I’m here to help in because I know that you may not want to be here, your whole life, you might want to eventually learn everything you can and then move off and do your own thing. And so right now I’ve got I got two brothers, my head of growth, and his brother, they’ve got a brand that they’re working on. And it was funny, like we were on a call one day, and they had a name for the brand, a mic that doesn’t work doesn’t make sense, like the name of the brand didn’t make sense for what they were making and where it was going. And his wife had said something. And then I heard and I went, That’s it. And I said, you’re gonna do this, this isn’t this with it. And it was like, Holy crap, that’s it. So part of it is there’s years of experience that sometimes it takes to really be able to nail branding and know what’s going to hit what not hit. But in this day and age, you have to be able to get people’s attention, blend in. So you have to be willing to take the risk of making something that polarizing, when you’re building a brand it has to stand out, it can’t blend in to this wall of social content, right? Because there’s so much that it’s so easy for somebody to start a Shopify account to go on, and put a brand on start doing a Facebook ad, it is so much easier nowadays. Be willing to put your neck out there, if you believe in it, and you believe it’s a great product, and you believe it’s going to maybe it’s going to change people’s lives. Maybe it’s gonna be life changing, maybe it’s gonna be this or that be willing to do it be willing to take a risk and be polarizing be different.

Adam Outland
Good point, to really, like, emphasize, because most people struggle I feel with the need to be liked. But if you’re liked by everyone, you’re loved by none.

Alex Neist
And that’s the other side of this. Right? Exactly that it’s too too many people will go Oh, wow. I want to make sure that like this person likes it and this person every now that’s these desktops that you should do is assuming the team’s big enough that assuming that all right, this isn’t like 1000 people, assuming you have a large enough Tam and for the audience damage your total addressable market, your total number of people that you think are actually your demographic that you could sell this to zoomies, it’s big enough. Go after those people. Religiously, hardcore, go after them. And that’s what we did. We went, alright, we’re gonna go after men, or when he five to 50. Right? I have those middle aged men who they have facial hair, the growing facial hair, and they’re probably married and they’re having trouble sleeping, and they’re probably pushing their wives into the other bedroom. We went hardcore after that guy. And now as a result, what you start to see happen when you when you take that approach as a brand, because you really nail a demo. Rafic now all of a sudden, everybody starts and it’s successful, everybody else starts to see you go. Well, that’s actually really interesting. I see how it’s helping that person one figured out me. And now, ironically, 25% of our customer base is women. And we are buying it and using it.

Adam Outland
It’s kinda like Stanley Cups.

Alex Neist
Yeah totally, right.

Adam Outland
That’s awesome. Just a couple of rapid fire questions that I think is gonna be really good for our listeners. Alex, one question that I have for you that if you can’t, like, concisely, answer, everybody has a different definition for what success means to them. That can mean so much to somebody. So for you, what does success mean? And when do you know if you’ve achieved it?

Alex Neist
I heard a great businessman say this one day. I think it was on social. He said success means that when I’m 50, 60, 70, and my kids are out of the house, that they still want to spend time with me. And it’s something I’m working on. Because part of the story that I didn’t didn’t mention, Adam, is that the best part of the whole, this whole thing is that my wife and I and my kids were all back together. So that happened about two years ago.

Adam Outland
Wow. Completion story, not not one that everyone can say. But that’s really cool. Good for you. One piece of advice you would give yourself, the 21 year old you Alex.

Alex Neist
Learn emotional intelligence at a much younger age, I was too inner focused on just me what I wanted, what I was trying, you know, as an athlete, you are right, you’re always focused on what you need to do to move forward to get to there. And I just didn’t understand how to actually interact with other people how to network, how to use relationships, to build relationships, how to make people feel heard, how to just do all those things that you need. You need to have if you’re going to be a successful person, whether it’s business family, a partner, a parent.

Adam Outland
There’s one more question I got to ask you morning routine.

Alex Neist
You ready for this? Okay. Rivalry routine is I’m usually up at 530. Every morning, I stretch or at least 30 minutes, I do red light therapy than I do sauna. I do cold plunge. And then I’ll do either depending on the day, I’ll get a three to five mile run in, or I’ll do the gym. Now a really important piece of that is when I’m in the sauna every single day I do visualizations. I am visualizing exactly where I’m going to be where I know this company is going I’m feeling what that feels like. Nada. I hope I do this. It’s this is what it feels like when hostage to build a billion dollar company. This is what it feels like what I know this company and where we are going to be huge part of that, then it come back and and that’s usually two to three hours of my morning. Very important that morning routine, taking care of yourself all entrepreneurs out there taking care of yourself is one of the best things that you can do. Because the end of the day you have all these people, your family, your work would depend on you. And if you’re not taking care of yourself, then how the heck are you going to take care of them?

Adam Outland
Yeah, listen to the flight attendant put your oxygen mask first. Right well now it’s great having you on thanks for giving us this time. Really good interview.

Alex Neist
Great to be on. I appreciate it. This is great. Don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage.