My First Million: #184 - Making Millions Improving Mobility, How to Beat Linkedin & Why You're Early Even When You're Late

With this guy, Ben from Knees Over Toes, I bet you he's doing 10 million a year in sales,

and he doesn't even have his own app.

Let me give you some updates real quick. Podcast numbers.

Some people-

Can I tease some ideas? Because I think people might be like,

why do you guys keep telling us about the podcast and get to the ideas?

Let me tease the ideas, and then you say your thing.

I have four good ideas today.

I'll just say the names of them.

How to beat LinkedIn.

Super joints.

You're going to like that one, or you're going to hate it.

That's another topic.

Canva for video.

All right, so those are three that I'm going to throw at you,

that we're going to talk about after this.

You might have some other ones.

Okay, now go back to the podcast update.

Just really quick. I'll make it quick.

All right, last month we are at-

Last month-

About 60, right?

Last month, no.

Last month we were at 430.

This month, we were supposed to be at 550.

I think we might get 600, just so you know.

That's right.

So I think that's going to happen.

So 600,000 listens a month.

Some more update stuff.

Tomorrow, I'm recording with Andrew Wilkinson.

I'm doing another one of his things.

His things are always the most popular.

So I'm going to do another one of those.

Originally, I signed up to do this because you just had your baby,

and I wanted to record more, and you couldn't do it.

So we're going to continue doing that.

But tonight, I'm flying to New York.

I had this guy reach out to me.

This guy named Loeb.

He started-

What's his first name?

I don't even know his first name.

Michael Loeb.

He started a price line, and he invited me,

and he somehow listened to the podcast or something like that.

He's the one with the Billions House.

Yeah.

So I'm going to fly to his house tonight,

and I'm going to interview Andrew from New York tomorrow.

But June 3rd, Sean and I and a bunch of people on my team

are going to be in Austin.

We're doing a live event.

I think it was sold out right away,

but we're going to see what we can do.

And then the next-

We should do something else because it's sold out so quick.

If there are more people who want to do it,

we should, I don't know, let's capture their info somehow,

and let's just do, I don't know, a hangout.

We'll just, I don't know, let's go to a park.

Well, let's go wherever.

I know we may not have a venue,

but let's meet and greet some people

who want to hang out or something.

I don't know.

Let's do something.

Let's go to a bar.

Who cares?

And then the next day, we're going to do Miami.

So we got-

June 3rd, Austin, June 4th, Miami.

If people want to attend, Austin's already sold out,

but there's an event right for it.

Miami, we're putting up the event right.

Yeah, and that one can seat 150 people.

So that'd be cool if we sold out,

but maybe we won't.

Who knows?

So it should have plenty of room.

Last thing, we've got some-

By the way, on the pod, we shouted out,

we said, Mayor Suarez to the mayor of Miami.

We said, if you're listening to this,

we need a venue.

We need blah, blah, blah.

He replied on Twitter.

He goes, I got you.

Let's talk.

And then somebody else came through

and was just like, here's the venue.

I don't know if we want to shout out their name.

Somebody hooked us up with a sweet venue.

No, we'll hook them up.

We'll shout them out next time

because I've asked them exactly

what they want us to shout out.

Gotcha.

So I've already asked them.

Last things.

All right, we got a couple of guests coming up.

The first one, Mark Lohr.

So Mark Lohr started Jet.com,

which he sold for billions, I think.

Three billion, I think.

So that guy's cool.

And he started something before that.

I think it was a diapers.com.

Yep.

And he just bought the Timberwolves.

NBA basketball-

NBA?

Dude, I'm such a dork.

I don't even know.

Yeah, with A-Rod.

And A-Rod bought the Timberwolves.

And then we have Mike Maples coming on

who people probably don't know,

but he's a pretty big name, V.C.,

and he's funded a ton of stuff that you all know.

Yeah.

And then finally, Bill Smith.

This name, generic name.

But do you know who Bill Smith is?

He, you love this guy, dude.

You are, this is like your new obsession,

is Bill Smith?

Yeah, I'm going to tell you why.

So he started like a credit card company in his 20s,

and he sold it right away for millions of dollars.

Then his second hit was starting SHIPP.

So SHIPP was based out of Alabama.

It was basically very similar to Instacart,

but he self-funded it,

and then he sold it for like $600 million.

Now he's got another thing,

and the guy's only like 33.

He's got another thing called Hello Landing

that I think is really bad at.

So that guy's coming on soon.

But that's the updates.

We just hired this guy yesterday.

What's his name?

I'm afraid you're Dan.

Dan?

Off to a great start.

Yeah, I think it's Dan.

I think Kerner's his last name.

I don't need a name.

We here at the hustle have a tremendous culture.

We really care about our people.

Dude, after you're hired, we find out your name.

And after that, we...

Do you know, you want to hear something funny?

You know C.A.V.A.?

Yes.

One of my best friends.

Like one of your closest friends.

No, he's my best friend, dude.

Well, I've known him for 10 years almost.

I can tell you how to say his last name.

Yeah, C.A.V.A. because he gave a Russian name.

So I don't think it's important to...

Sam, what's my last name?

I have no idea.

What's his first name?

Well, I'm Brayu Andrad.

But I don't know how to say it.

You definitely called him a brew for a while.

I just don't think you need to know someone's name.

I mean, I try really hard to remember people's name.

I hate when people say I'm bad at remembering names.

So I always try to remember someone's first name.

But I don't think you need to know someone's name.

But I don't think you need to know someone's name

really to like know them well.

I'll just call them Bob or Chief.

Those are the two Bob and Chief.

All right, quick break to tell you about another podcast

that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast

called Another Bite.

Every week, the host relived the latest and greatest pitches

from Shark Tank, from Squatty Potty to the Manchana Bench

to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding,

pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically, all the things you want to know

about how to survive the tank

and scale your company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite

on whatever podcast app you listen to,

like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right, back to the show.

All right, you have something in your hand.

What is that?

That's an idea.

Is that a stress ball?

Oh, I didn't know you could see this.

No, it's just Chapstick.

I'm just trying to put Chapstick on.

Are stress balls still a thing?

I remember when I was a kid, I went to my mom's office

and her and every other person had a stress ball

on their desk.

And now that I think about it,

I haven't seen one of these in like 10 years.

And what a great idea.

What a genius name and invention to just be like,

how do I sell this like five-cent item

to every worker in a cubicle in America?

Let me call it the stress ball.

Let me tell you that this gets rid of your stress

and just make it kind of fun to fiddle with and play with.

Why aren't more people doing that?

We have fidget spinner for kids.

We need the stress spinner for adults.

I want to invent the next little silly putty gadget thing

that you feel addicted to playing with on your desk.

Good luck.

If anyone's going to be able to do it, it's going to be you.

I had these things on my desk that I used to fiddle with.

I think it annoyed everybody

because it kind of made a little bit of a sound.

But that's who I am at work.

I breathe loud.

I eat at my desk.

You know, I'm that guy you hate at the office.

So I had this thing that was like these magnetic,

it was like a little magnetic toy or something.

I don't know what it was.

It was like tiny little blocks that are magnetic,

so they stick together.

And then you just, whatever shape you put them in,

it just like sticks in that shape.

Or you can pull them apart and stick them back together

like a magnet.

And these things are so addictive.

They weren't for playing with at your desk,

but they were really effective.

So maybe it will come out with a line.

By the way, I've kickstarted a task to make us dope merch,

not to make money, but because I just want to wear our own stuff.

And I figured out the first two items

that we need to have in our merch line.

Well, the first one is easy.

That one's a notebook.

So like the joke that we get in the comments,

which is like, don't listen while driving

because you want to take notes and you'll crash.

Yeah, we are known to be more dangerous

than drinking while driving.

It's actually in several states.

It's outlawed.

I hope a notebook is one of the two.

A notebook, okay.

A notebook is one and that's actually in motion.

So for the course I'm making,

I found this illustrator, Yanis, who's amazing.

I put out this tweet.

I said, who's the next Jack Butcher?

I saw that.

And then I got a bunch of replies.

I found this guy.

He's amazing.

Don't tell Jack, but I think his stuff

might be better than Jack's.

Jack's more clever,

but this guy's actual illustrations are amazing.

I told him.

I said, hey, I've been using this thing

called the self journal or something like that

for a long time.

I think the founder of that listens to the pod.

Do you know her name?

Catherine.

Catherine, yeah.

Great product.

And yeah, we should come up with like

a limited edition notebook thing.

So I got that in motion.

I'll run it by you.

But the merch stuff that I was thinking about was

when biology came on and we were trying to beat

around the bush and be like, so you're like super rich, right?

And then he was like, yeah, the most humble way possible

was like, I'm post-economic.

And then I was like, oh, fuck, that is, that is it.

That is the best phrase.

So now I'm getting hoodies made that just say post-economic.

And, you know, those will go out to anybody who wants

to buy a post-economic hoodie.

So that's the best one.

That's a good one.

That's a good one.

So notebooks and post-economic.

The other one that I was thinking about,

you know how we have our Harvard shirts

because we visited the campus?

So I think I might sell some bootleg Harvard merch

before they shut me down.

And all it is is it's Harvard.

Yeah, I've been there.

Or like, you know, love that campus.

Or was there an 04?

Like Harvard 04 and on the back it says, you know, like tours.

So maybe a Harvard one.

But the real one that I want to make there is, you know,

the like kind of like, like take the Harvard style

of a sweatshirt or sweater where it kind of looks like,

you know, you're a scholar, right?

I went to this school.

That's where I learned.

That's where I got my education.

That, but it's just going to say the internet.

It's just going to say internet or it's going to say YouTube

because that's where I learned everything.

And there's a lot of other people that are,

you're like that too, where everything you learned

was just through the internet.

That's who we should really be giving credit to.

Giving credit to for our education.

So I'm going to make a university looking piece of apparel

that's just either calling out the internet

or YouTube or Twitter or something.

I think the post-economic theme will make money.

Well, it has to.

That's my definition.

All right.

So anyway, you want to talk about Canva for video?

Or do you want to talk about super joints?

No, let's do Canva for video.

So, so I stole this idea from my buddy Sully.

He tweeted this out.

He said, who's creating Canva for video?

And I've had this same idea.

So if you don't use Canva,

you're probably not going to fully understand this idea.

Not just because of the metaphor,

but you're going to be like, when I describe it,

you can be like, that sounds simple.

Like, I'm sure there's stuff like that that exists.

No, there's not.

So Canva, why don't you give the download on Canva?

I'll talk about why Canva for video needs to exist.

Yeah. Canva was started in Australia at this point.

It's maybe eight years old.

I went and did some research there.

You have $15 billion valuation, $500 million in revenue.

And what's cool is that the CEO,

I think her name's Melanie, this woman named Melanie,

she's like a superstar.

You hear her talk and you're like, oh, I will,

whatever you say, I'm in.

Her and her husband are the two co-founders,

which is pretty badass,

because collectively they own 30% of the company,

even though it's at a $15 billion valuation.

So they crushed it.

But basically the product is,

you can make really simple images.

So a lot of times people use Google slides,

like I do, and you like put an image on there,

and then you could write some text on there,

and then you stick a screenshot and tweet that.

With Canva, it's all a little bit more intuitive,

and you can make really, really simple, like-

Good-looking design.

Good-looking design.

It's like Photoshop for eight-year-old like me.

Yes, Photoshop for people who don't know Photoshop.

That's the best way of describing it.

So before, when you wanted to make a marketing brochure,

a flyer for your event,

Instagram ad, whatever,

any kind of image or graphic to go alongside your product

or your event or whatever it is,

you would be like, great,

let me ask my designer friend to make one,

or let me go into paint or one of these Google slides

or PowerPoint or whatever and try to make one myself.

And it always came out looking budget,

like you made it yourself.

Or you had to overpay somebody who knows Photoshop,

who has graphic design skills,

who knows that this should go at this angle,

and that this is a cool way to do a collage

and to do a mask and whatever.

So what they did was,

they just created this enormous library of templates.

So you go on there and you say,

great, I want to make an ad for a sale.

Well, guess what?

A lot of people have that problem.

And so what they did was,

they just created or surfaced hundreds of templates of sale,

you know, how to present a sale if you're a store.

So now I don't need a designer.

I just go in there myself, I change the text,

I drop my image into where their image is,

and it's like nicely cut into a circle automatically

or it removes the background automatically

without you having to know

how to do that with the magic wand in Photoshop.

So that's what Canva does.

It's amazing.

It's grown like crazy.

Like you said, 500 million in revenue, done very well.

I think it went public not long ago.

So Canva does that for images.

And they kind of have some like animation stuff,

but nobody has done this for simple videos.

So I'm talking about the whole world has moved to video,

whether it's long form like Netflix,

medium form like YouTube, short form like TikTok,

even shorter form like a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad.

And it still requires people who know how to edit video

in order to make a simple video.

And that's crazy to me.

And so there's people who've tried to attack this

from many angles.

I would say that a lot of people try to do

is they try to make figma for video,

which is like they take iMovie and they say,

no, it should be in the cloud.

You should be able to have multiple people using it at once.

And you see each person's mouse moving around the screen

and it saves it all in the cloud, blah, blah, blah.

No, I think you need Canva.

I think you need off the shelf ready-made video,

like short video clips that you just swap and replace

your text and your images or your video clips into those.

And there's some things like this that exist,

but nobody has cracked this nut.

I think Canva is most likely to do it.

I'm sure they think about this all the time.

You know, it's not like they're listening to this and saying,

oh my God, genius, we never thought about video, right?

But like, I do think it's a gnarly problem.

And I think if you are focused on this,

you can outflank a lot of people just by finding

the right library of templates and then getting the UX right

where you can make it easy to swap out text and images

with your own stuff.

So I think that this might be a great idea,

but look, I'm gonna default to pessimism

just for the sake of argument.

I think that there's a few reasons

why this would be really hard.

The first reason is that, well, this is actually

the main reason, which is more people use videos,

use image-based stuff and they do video-based stuff.

So at a company, most everyone would, not at most everyone,

but a very large percentage of employees

would want to use a text-based stuff,

whether you're making just a silly graphic

for an internal email, whether you're making a sign,

this is happy birthday for your employees,

all the way up to you making the social posts

so you're mocking up a website, yada, yada, yada.

Oh, by the way, someone made fun of me for saying yada, yada,

yada, I'm not gonna say it anymore.

But anyway, there's like so many different instances

of that, right?

Is there actually that many people that would use-

Huge need, dude.

Huge need, yes.

Yes, okay, it's the internet.

Text is massive, image is as massive, video is massive.

They're all massive, they're all super massive.

Bro, how many people write words on Facebook and Twitter

than make videos on YouTube?

Like-

It's a business use case.

So if you're a business, you need to be doing all three.

You need to be creating text content,

you need to be creating image content,

and you need to create video content,

and you do them at different times.

The video content is often the one that you need,

that's the highest value to you,

and it works the best in terms of getting people's attention.

And so there are tools to do this.

So I shouldn't say that there's not, right?

promo.com is one of them.

So promo.com, it has a bunch of templates

to let you do videos.

I've used it, it is good.

It is probably the closest thing to Canva for video.

There's a startup called motionbox.io,

they're doing this, it looks pretty cool.

I haven't actually had a chance to play with it yet.

Capwing is a big one.

I've heard of that one.

Really popular, that one's more for memes.

So they made it really easy to make video memes.

We talked about pinning out of farms also

to make video memes.

When I was moving out of San Francisco,

the guy, I posted on Twitter that I was selling my gym

and the founder tried to come and buy all my gym equipment.

That's how I met Capwing.

The founder of which one?

Capwing, yeah.

Nice, that's great.

So here's my take of what's the opportunity here.

The opportunity here for me is,

I should be going and trying to invest

in all of these companies.

I think they are all, this space is gonna be big.

These are all viable companies.

They're all at different stages.

I'm gonna go try to put a check into all of these

because I'm such a big believer in that space.

Really?

But the other thing, yes, for sure.

The other thing is if you're building,

how would you differentiate?

I think one of the ways to differentiate,

the one I would do is I would focus on Facebook ads.

I've talked about this before,

but if you think about,

Facebook's one of the largest companies

because it makes a shit ton of revenue.

How does it make its revenue from advertising?

Who's advertising?

You know, hundreds of thousands,

if not millions of businesses that advertise on Facebook.

And if you can do things to help them advertise,

either save them time or make their ads better,

you're gonna make money on either one of those two axes.

And I've found that Facebook ad tech

is sort of, of course there's companies in that space,

but there's much less than you would think.

There's a lot of people that build,

that try to build on top of platforms.

And I think that the Facebook ad platform

is a great place to build products

because if you make someone's life better,

you are making them or saving them a lot of money.

And so it's not hard to capture your $100 a month

if you're able to do that.

Yeah, I think it's cool.

I think that there's a,

I'm just gonna default to bad stuff

because that's the dynamic we're taking right now.

But the, dude, selling stuff for $200 a year,

that software is so freaking hard.

So go to, are you on your computer right now

or are you on your phone?

Yeah, computer.

All right, Google Buffer Revenue, okay?

So Buffer is this awesome company.

I mean, it's kind of awesome.

And they are one of the first people

that made famous sharing their revenue.

So if you're listening out there,

type in on Google Buffer Revenue

and you're gonna be taken to a,

I don't know what the platform's called,

but it's some type of platform

where you could show all their revenue.

What's the revenue look like, Sean?

So this post that was late 2019 was,

revenue is 21 million.

They have 75,000 customers

and they make a quarter million dollars per employee.

Go to Buffer.com slash revenue.

Right, so their current one, yes.

Actually, this is, yeah, so flat lined out.

So that number I said 2019, that was the peak.

2020 was the same, 2021 is the same.

So it's still at 21 million.

If you're listening, go to Buffer.com slash revenue

and they're gonna see all their revenue.

It's pretty amazing.

Well, it says $26 of revenue per account.

Yeah, and so what you're gonna see,

here's what you're gonna see.

The revenue on this Buffer thing,

the revenue goes up really fast and then it plateaus.

And that is what happens when you sell shit

that costs $20, $50, $100.

It's incredibly hard to keep going.

It's really hard to keep going.

And that happens, and I study a lot of these graphs.

So like there's ConvertKit has another one.

There's a lot.

And if you look at the metrics,

if you Google like average price for SaaS,

there's a lot of research on,

where they look at companies that go public

and they look at how much their software costs.

There's this dead zone of like $200 a year

or $300 a year or something like that.

And it's like, it's incredibly hard

to build a big company when shit costs that much.

Some people have done it, Mailchip has done it,

Canva has done it.

I think it's almost impossible

for most other types of people to do it.

Well, we are talking about Canva for video.

So I'm gonna hope that it falls into that category.

I actually just want Canva to do this because-

Am I wrong though?

Am I wrong?

You're not wrong in that there's an effort

to acquire customers, it costs money and it takes time.

And if your size of the prize is $26 or $99,

it is very hard to get to the point you're talking about,

which is go in public or being a multi-billion dollar company.

No, but my point though is not necessarily,

if you're listening to this and you wanna build something,

that has to be the goal.

But when I think about stuff, sometimes I think,

now this isn't always, but sometimes it's far easier

to be a small fish in a massive market

than it is to like be a big fit.

Like, I'd rather be like the shitty person

in something that's booming

because it'll be way easier to crush it.

Yeah, although you also say niches get riches

type of thing, right?

Where you'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.

Well, I said, I don't always think that way.

I'm saying like, if I wanna build something

that can just make a good living, then yeah,

that's one thing.

If I wanna create something that could take off,

I would probably wanna do the other way.

Right.

And I think the thing you just said that's important

is you said a market that's booming,

that's different than a big market.

So a big market is a already big market.

A market that's booming is a growing market.

And so if I was gonna rank the three,

I would say small fish in a booming market,

then big fish in a small market.

And lastly, small fish in a already big market.

All right, a quick message from our sponsor.

You know, I was thinking about the shortest day

of the year earlier.

And while we technically have the same amount of time

as every other day of the year,

the lack of daylight makes it feel so much shorter,

which is exactly the same kind of feeling

as working with disconnected tools.

Our work days, the same length as always,

but before you know it,

we spent three hours just fixing something

that was supposed to be automated.

Thankfully HubSpot's all-in-one CRM platform

can serve as a single source of truth

for managing your customer relationships across marketing,

sales, service operations with multiple hubs

and over a thousand integrations,

an easy to use interface.

HubSpot lets you spend less time managing your software

and more time connecting with your customers.

Learn how HubSpot can help you grow your business

at HubSpot.com.

Yeah, I think I agree with you.

Can we talk about SuperJoints?

Yeah.

I looked it up while you were talking

and I have a lot to say about this.

Okay, well, I don't even know what you looked up.

This was my own name of an idea I had.

So it's- Oh, wow.

SuperJoints is, do you remember?

So we talked about the book Happy Body.

Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

SuperJoints is also the name of a book.

Google SuperJoints, it looks just like the Happy Body.

Yeah, it looks exactly like it,

like 1970s or 80s design.

But we don't have to talk about that.

I thought-

Well, the thing I was thinking about is,

so my mom is staying with me right now.

She's been here for the last few days

and my mom has always got some ache and pain

and she does a good job of trying to exercise

and stretch and whatever.

Do the things that she can do to,

we bought a special pillow for the bed

so that kind of if she's in bed, watch TV,

like she's not in a crappy posture or whatever,

we try things.

But this is that every aging person problem

is that you get bad back, bad knees, bad hip, bad shoulder,

whatever, right?

Like you risk pain.

This stuff comes up.

And I started thinking like, okay,

I think this is gonna be a massive, massive market

that nobody really is able to do much with.

And so I thought, well, what is the solution?

I think there's two solutions.

I think the end solution is fixing it from the inside.

So that's some version of like stem cells

or like regenerative therapies

where you're able to regrow cartilage

or strengthen the tendons

or do something like that

to reduce the irritation inflammation.

Okay, I don't know too much about that.

I don't know where we're at in the stem cell world.

Then there's the fix it from the outside.

And I thought, oh, this might be actually easy.

So I was watching somebody move a couch.

You know, my neighbor had a truck

and they're moving and like, you know,

it was one person just with a dolly

just moving this like huge couch and bookcase

and all the stuff.

And it got me thinking like, man,

with these simple tools that we've made,

that man has made, you have so much leverage,

you can lift heavy objects.

Why don't we just have these like,

as like a little knee brace that people wear

that just helps you when you're trying to get up.

It's just like a little spring action

that is like a super joint.

It is a sort of an external fix to the problem of joint pain.

That sounds like such an infomercial thing.

I can imagine this now in my head.

Exactly, that's exactly what I thought of my head.

I see the old lady sitting on the couch,

she's trying to get up and she's struggling

and then it like fades.

The black and white, yeah.

Yeah, it fades to black and white and she's in pain.

And then it's like her again on the couch

and she gets up and she just gets up effortlessly

because she's got this little thing she wears around her knee

that essentially like, as she does this motion,

it's a spotter.

And I just thought, why don't we have spotters

for our own, carrying our own body weight?

So, what do you think of this?

I think that that, you're cool.

It sounds like some shitty Alibaba product that you...

I think you're thinking about this totally wrong.

So like what you're talking about is like a silly brace.

I wanna like actually solve the problem.

And there's three companies that I've been paying attention to

that are in this space.

And they're all centered around mobility.

So what I've noticed amongst my friends

and like the people in Austin now is a lot of them

are less focused on lifting heavy weights

and more focused on this manly version of yoga

that we call mobility, right?

Right.

It's yoga.

I mean, it's like...

I'm doing mobility training.

Yeah.

Are you stretching?

Yeah.

You're stretching.

It's a little bit more interesting than yoga

and I do it a lot as well.

So there's three things that I like.

There's one called the ready state, thereadystate.com.

There's another one called,

I actually don't know how you pronounce it,

but it looks like it's go-wad.

So the word go,

and then I think it stands for workout of the day.

I'm a paying subscriber of it.

It's great.

And then the third one is the knees over toes.

Knees over toes guy.

Have you seen knees over toes guy?

Dude, I'm all into the knees over toes guy.

I've done the whole program.

It's wonderful.

Oh, you did?

I've done the whole thing.

It's so good.

So basically...

Did your vertical leap go up?

Yeah, but yeah, it all works wonderful.

I love it.

But basically the first two that I've described,

so go-wad and the ready state,

it's an app that you pay $100.

And the founders of go-wad,

I've actually talked about on this podcast two years ago,

I think, or a year and a half ago,

and they messaged me and they said the numbers that you're,

it was someone who works there.

So the numbers that you're saying are way smaller

than we actually are.

And I think I said they were doing

half a million a month in sales.

And so they're both apps where you spend 30 minutes a day

and they just do stretches.

It's just the simplest app ever.

It's just a video that shows you a stretch

and it counts down from 60 seconds.

The other thing is this guy named Knees Over Toes Guy,

that's like his handle, his Knees Over Toes Guy,

his name's Ben Patrick,

and he went viral on TikTok and Instagram.

I found him on Instagram.

And it's basically this crew of guys,

and he's like the leader,

but they're like these quote manly men,

like they like are strong looking and fit and all that,

but they stretch a ton and they're really focused

on one-legged pistol squats

and being able to touch your toes and-

But we should say he's called Knees Over Toes Guy

because in classical kind of like training,

anytime you train, they're always like,

don't let your knees go over your toes

because they thought that's how you get injured.

That's when you're doing a squat wrong or a lunge.

Oh no, you're not lunging right.

You want your knee to never go past your toe.

If you're biking, they always say the same,

adjust your seat height

so your knees doesn't go over your toes.

And this guy was like, hey, I blew out my knee,

I tore my ACLs and I started trying to figure out

how do I actually strengthen my legs?

How do I strengthen my knees

so that I don't get injured again?

And in fact, he ended up getting stronger through it.

Like so he did some self experimentation and whatever.

And then now he's, I don't know, 43, 45 years old.

He's got like a, I forget how old he is.

He's in his 40s or even maybe even his, like maybe he's 50.

No, he's not gonna get old.

He's got a 43 inch vertical leap, he can dunk.

He's like, he jumps higher now than he did in his 20s.

And he's been athletic the whole time.

It's just that now he strengthens his leg

in this way that breaks all the rules.

So his stuff is intentionally let your knee go over your toes.

Why?

Because we wanna stabilize our knees

when they're in these uncomfortable compromised positions.

We'll do it in a controlled way now

so that you don't get hurt later.

So that's the theory behind this stuff.

And this guy has almost 500,000 followers on Twitter

or on Instagram.

And he is putting on an absolute masterclass in marketing.

I followed him and like, cause I'm an internet guy,

I know exactly what he's doing and I'm like,

it's working, it's working.

I bought it.

He charges $50 a month.

And the reason he charges $50 a month

is cause the churn is probably astronomical.

So the average user I bet only stays for three months

because when you do the program, like I did,

I just wrote it down and I'm like,

oh, I know exactly what to do.

It's just like, right, it's as basic as a PDF.

So like, I know what to do.

But he got my $150 for three months.

I got results, I loved it.

And the way that this guy is getting,

he's basically doing, you know, the best person

I've ever seen at this fitness marketing

is that woman, Kayla, it's new, I think her name is.

And she has, it seems, and she has an app called Sweat

that's scaled to $100 million in sales.

If you're a guy, you probably don't know who she is.

It's my wife, Sarah used it and she crushed it.

And all she did would sell PDF.

And then eventually it went to an app

with this guy Ben from knees over toes.

I bet you he's doing 10 million a year in sales.

And he's not even, he doesn't even have his own app.

There's all these apps called Trainerize

and similar apps where what you do is

you just put your program on their thing

and you give them a little tiny cut of the revenue.

It's a pretty amazing business.

I mean, the high churn, but like,

it looks like a really fun lifestyle business run.

Totally.

It's what we were talking about with Judge Judy

and Michael Buffer last episode, I think it was.

We talked about building a personal monopoly

and finding your niche.

That's what this guy did.

Brilliant branding, knees over toes guy, right?

Beautiful, beautiful branding to latch onto that.

It's a different, it's sort of, I don't know if you remember,

but one of my kind of core content beliefs

came from the guy who writes, wait, but why?

And actually his buddy, there's two guys behind it.

So this is not Tim Urban.

It's the guy who helps him with his business, Andrew.

Right, he was nice enough, took a call from me one day

and I said, yeah, I'm thinking about my content

and what's the strategy, what's the brand?

And he goes, I have a really simple way of thinking about it.

And he goes, you know, in the matrix,

we have, Morpheus reaches out and says,

do you want the red pill or the blue pill?

Meaning like, you want to keep living in your fantasy land

of the way that you were told things are,

or do you want the truth?

That's the red pill, the harsh red pill

that you got to swallow.

And Neo chooses the red pill

because he wants to know the truth.

And he basically said, that's what,

the best way to build your content brand

is by giving people red pills.

So people, you know, if people think one way

or society tells you X,

I'm going to tell you the truth and here's why.

And so that's what Knees Over Toes guy did.

It's a perfect red pill.

Everybody says, don't move your knee over your toe.

I'm the Knees Over Toes guy.

And so he built his niche there.

He built his brand there.

He went viral on TikTok

by showing some pretty amazing stuff.

And then he's translating that into a business.

Now, I have a quick opportunity

for somebody who wants to do this.

So one of the things that he does in his program,

you tell me, you did the program.

My trainer takes pieces of the program and gives it to me.

But did you buy that gadget that you,

that you wear on your foot, the monkey foot thing?

Yeah.

And who did you buy that from?

The monkey foot guys.

It's, I think it's called Animal House Fitness.

Is that who you bought it from?

Yeah.

And is that his brand?

Or is that somebody else's brand?

It does not appear to be his, but I didn't recently.

Not his, correct.

Okay.

So Knees Over Toes guy, if you're listening,

this is for you.

Or if you're not going to do it,

we can pair you with a hustler who's going to do this.

You need to be selling this device.

Okay.

Yeah.

So what this thing is, is the boot,

it's like imagine a ski boot that you put on your foot,

you step into it.

And under the boot either you can put a tiny little dumbbell.

So you can put like a five pound, 10 pound,

whatever 15 pound dumbbell into it.

And so then when you do leg extensions or calf,

sorry, knee raises, things like that,

you have like weighted resistance

and it helps you build strength faster.

And so it's one of his like core things.

Did I miss anything on it?

Yeah.

He also makes slant boards.

So yeah, I think that like there's an entire brand

to be made around this like,

I wouldn't call it masculine

because I think women like this too,

but a non-yoga-esque, like I don't want to go

as far to say it's feminine,

but you guys get the idea.

Like a-

Well, it's gotten cooler because Tom Brady,

you know, the greatest quarterback of all time

came out with the TB12 program,

the Tom Brady 12 program.

And people like, great, Tom Brady, you're still plenty.

You just won the Super Bowl last year.

I don't know what he is, 42, 43 years old.

So this is the oldest quarterback to win a Super Bowl.

How are you still playing?

And, you know, he credits basically like he eats super clean

and then he doesn't do like strength and explosive training.

He does all flexibility, mobility, pliability.

That's what he, those are his focuses.

That he's like, that's how I don't get hurt.

Brother, and we talked about this a year and a half ago.

I was all about this.

You were talking about the subreddit you visit, right?

Which is a mobility subreddit, right?

Yes, I've been all about this.

The reason I'm all about this

is you can feel it in your body.

Like I do different athletic challenges

and I have done challenges where I try

to get incredibly strong and I know how I feel.

I'm like, oh, I feel kind of swollen.

I feel bloated.

I don't feel awesome.

And then I do these things where I just try to squat

all the way when my butt in the ground with no weight

and I'll just sit there for, you know, 10 minutes

or I'll just work on flexibility.

And I'm like, oh, I feel so, I feel alive.

I feel so much better.

And so I've been talking about this forever.

I just sent you an Instagramer guy named the FlexiBull.

That's another amazing name.

I love the FlexiBull.

You immediately know what it is.

It's a strong person that's flexible.

And so anyway, I'm all about this niche of,

I don't know what we're gonna call this,

like flexibility culture, whatever it is.

I think that these things are the best.

I think there's a bunch of interesting things

going on in this space.

I've seen a few people.

I've seen this one guy,

let's just think of a human garage and they go there,

you go there and they stretch you.

So I love all these things.

I'm totally into them.

I also have seen that the tests,

the mobility tests go semi-viral.

So I saw something or I don't even know,

me or my mom, I don't know.

One of us saw it and then they shared it with the other.

And then everybody in the family did the test.

And all it was is this get up test.

So you sit on the ground.

Indian style. Cross legged.

Oh sorry, is Indian style not PC?

I think it's about the Native American Indians.

So, you know, you might piss off two groups if you say it,

but yeah, you sit on the ground Indian style

as we used to say back in second grade.

And then you're supposed to get up.

And the idea is that you,

I think you like for every part of your body

that you have to use to touch the ground to get up,

you sort of deduct a point.

So like for me, when I'm sitting like that,

first of all, I can barely even sit like that.

Second of all, if I have to get up,

it's like a fucking process, dude.

It's like, roll to the left.

Now I'm laying down, elbow on the ground,

forearm on the ground, hand on the ground,

second hand pushes me.

Now I'm gonna push up position.

Now I get to my knees.

Now I stand up.

I stand up like an 80 year old.

And the test says you're basically

have the fitness of an 80 year old.

You have the mobility of an 80 year old.

Cause I lose, it's like you started seven points

and you deduct a point for everything

that touches the ground, something like that.

And so then I did it.

And then my mom did it.

My dad did it.

It's like everybody does it.

And so there's something interesting there of,

let's say you wanted to build a program like this

or sell a tool like this.

There's something interesting

like we talked about last time of personality tests,

IQ tests, horoscope tests,

people's most interesting subject is themselves.

Similarly here, I think you could build

a following or an audience by giving people

a simple diagnostic, a simple test.

Can you like, it's like the kind of,

can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time?

It's like, everybody wants to try it when they hear,

oh, that's hard.

That sounds easy, right?

I saw one the other day that was like,

take your arms to the side,

reach them straight above your head

and then like, do they like keep your arms straight?

Does that do it?

Keep your arms straight?

Yeah, so you, okay, you're not so bad,

but like you're tight.

You can see you're tight.

So his is like, if your bicep is able to like touch your ear

while maintaining the straightness

and like crossing, you're able to cross your hands,

then your shoulders are like adequately,

you know, flexible and mobile.

And if not,

then you want to do these three exercises to improve that.

And so I love this model

of sort of diagnose the problem

and then prescribe your solution.

And I think that would be a cool way to kind of grow this,

but I'm with you that,

hey, flexibility, mobility, pliability,

I think these are where the fitness trends

are going right now.

And to wrap it up,

I'll say it's never been easier

to make money off this type of thing.

This guy, Ben, knees over toes guy,

as I said, he doesn't have his own app.

He's using Trainerize, this other app.

You can literally launch this today,

today with 20 bucks.

All right, you want to talk about LinkedIn stuff

or what are you, Google?

Yeah, let's do LinkedIn stuff.

So you said something the other day,

you go, this guy lives like down my block

and he created, I don't even know,

what was it?

Some guy who's done something cool,

he's built some cool business.

Student loan hero.

Right, and you were like, he lives,

I don't know, how long, he lives like all the time.

Yeah, like 10 doors down.

10 doors down, all right, it's great.

So I don't know how you found that out, but.

I'll tell you, it's pretty funny.

I tweeted a picture of myself

in front of my new house and he DMed me and he goes,

I don't want to be weird,

but I know that house, I lived on the block.

So that, and that's a cool moment.

You met somebody who's like kind of professionally relevant

to you, that's also locally relevant to you.

What does that mean?

I think that there's an opportunity

to build a location-based professional network

or professional networking tool,

especially now that the world has gone remote.

So you got a bunch of people relocating,

you have people getting out of offices

where they would normally be seeing kind of like peers

and coworkers and stuff like that all the time.

And most people think the answer is create a co-working space

or some kind of like flexible work space

where you go and you work

and that's where you're going to get professional interaction.

Well, I've actually seen kind of this other trend,

which is you discovering people who live around you

that are like kind of like interesting business people

that you would want to meet with.

And you guys kind of both opted in to be like-

Who are you learning this from?

Well, I'm saying I had a similar experience the other day,

did a call, guys like, where do you live?

I said, oh, I live in this little place

right outside of San Francisco.

He goes, oh, my friend just moved there,

or my friend lives there too.

He's the chief product officer at Blankety Blank Company.

Which company?

And I was like, oh, sick.

Well, I don't want to give out his identity or whatever,

but like a company, don't worry about it.

It's kind of like a well-known company.

He's like, oh, yeah, he lives out there too.

And I was like, great, I'll intro you guys,

you guys should hang out.

Because like, it's like, oh, like, you know,

we're sort of like, we could be friends

and we live near each other.

So that's the excuse of why we might actually hang out.

So I thought, that's kind of interesting.

What if you could get people to basically just say,

here's my job, and here's where I live,

or here's where I am.

And it just notifies you about other people

that are also there, that are kind of like

professionally relevant to you.

If you could kind of figure out people's like,

I don't know, without being a douche, but like,

if there's a CEO, you kind of want to talk to other

like C-level people.

Just a serious guy, yeah.

Not like the product manager of some other company

that's not like super relevant to you.

So I think that would be kind of cool

as a way to, as a cool product to bootstrap

a new style of professional network

and a new style of interaction.

And first of all, let's even mention that

LinkedIn's freaking, everyone says the same thing.

LinkedIn sucks.

How does everyone use LinkedIn?

And yet we all use it, or a lot of people do.

I don't use it anymore, but you get the idea.

Yeah, it is used and it is still the number one,

even though we all say how much it sucks.

And I think it's true.

What I think that it means is,

you have to find an angle that's not a direct angle.

You can't beat LinkedIn by just building LinkedIn again

and being like, but I have better features.

I have better design.

That's not going to work.

So the best angle, so every time,

all right, I see so many companies

that are trying to beat LinkedIn.

And I think it's a worthy thing to try to do, I think.

Cause I think it can be done.

And I think that you can build a big business.

And even if you can't bundle them or whatever or crush them,

you could do pretty good.

And the only kinds I've seen people do it,

that seems any traction,

is they divide it up into subgroups.

So it's typically race and it's typically gender.

Or it could be industry, like Angelus did it with startups.

Angelus basically took the whole startup companies,

jobs and candidates off of LinkedIn

and just said that we can do this better.

I've never seen it done really with industries.

I don't agree with your,

I don't totally agree with that assessment

because you're kind of right.

Yeah, I guess you are right.

But I do, I haven't seen many.

I've seen a ton of women, women focused ones.

So there's girl boss.

There's this other one called Levo.

I think it was called L-E-V-O.

Like also girl boss failed, right?

So it should be fair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But there's chief, chief.com,

which I have no idea if it's succeeding or not,

but it certainly seems like it is.

There's a lot of black focused ones.

I don't remember all their names,

but I remember seeing them float around

and they seemed mildly successful.

Like they have some traction,

but obviously I'm not a user.

But I've seen race and gender LinkedIn.

So here's the ones that I think have worked.

I think Angelist worked, right?

Three to $4 billion company.

And if I'm a startup, I might have a LinkedIn,

but with all of my startups,

I've found better luck finding jobs and candidates

through Angelist.

Dribble did this?

Yeah.

So Dribble was like, ah, if you're a designer,

LinkedIn's kind of like,

it's hard to show that you're a good designer there.

I would say Behance did it better than Dribble

because they had a $175 million exit.

Yeah, so designed, let's just say,

where you're putting your portfolio up there,

you're networking with other designers

and then other people can come find,

they find images and then they say,

who made this?

And then they basically hire you, right?

So I think that was kind of successful.

GitHub?

GitHub for developers, exactly.

That's another one.

And then there's the low end where it's like Upwork, right?

Where it's just like, they went,

kind of like geography, like you were saying.

And Upwork basically says, here's a way to find,

workers can find jobs and jobs can find workers,

but we're going to go for like,

kind of like outsourced labor arbitrage type of thing.

So I think those have all worked.

Now, here's a different, like take,

here's a company I invested in

that I think has a cool chance of beating LinkedIn.

I want to describe their strategy,

but I don't want to use the Silicon Valley jargon.

You know this word orthogonal?

No.

Have you heard people say this?

That it's like, yeah, you have to take an orthogonal angle

or it's an orthogonal attack.

Was that like Orwell, Orwellian?

No, it just means like, you don't go directly,

like you don't beat LinkedIn.

Like, okay, here's the example.

Let's say you think PowerPoint sucks.

You're like, I'm going to build a better PowerPoint.

The way to build a better PowerPoint

is not to make slides that are easier to make.

It's to look at the fact that people use slides

to give their bosses presentations

about how the business is doing.

And actually the orthogonal way to attack that

is to build dashboards that automate them,

that are always automatically updated,

that your boss can just check,

and now you don't even need slides, right?

Right, like in order to build the best hotel business,

you don't create better hotels on sale.

You get other people to list their homes.

You get Airbnb, exactly.

So orthogonal just means sort of attacking it

from another angle.

So here's an orthogonal attack on LinkedIn.

There's this company called Palette.xyz.

Have you seen this?

Palette, how do I spell it?

Palette, P-A-L-L-E-T.xyz, I think that's the name.

You're not going to learn too much from this,

but I'll tell you kind of like where

you could see this in action.

How did you find these guys?

Dude, how do you find all this shit, man?

Bro, I've already given people the secret sauce,

which is be super curious and then surround yourself

with interesting people and then share it, right?

Like my crew, I think Ben found Palette

or maybe Zach found Palette.

I'm not sure.

If somebody found Palette, I talked to the guy behind it.

He's awesome.

He's like a 23-year-old ex-Stanford guy.

Like you just talk to him and be like,

oh, okay, you're going to win.

Like whether it's this business or the next one

or the next one or the next one,

like you're going to win.

You're clearly super smart.

You're way ahead of your time

in terms of just like polish as a CEO

and you're an engineer and you recruited

under other good engineers, great.

But what he's building is actually pretty cool.

We found him because I am pretty interested

in like what I'm calling like kind of like the creator stack

or basically like the solopreneurs playbook.

So I look at people like Pomp, right?

Pomp is a creator, he creates content in the niche of crypto.

Say who Pomp is.

I actually don't think everyone knows.

Okay, his name is Anthony Pompiano.

He's kind of like a friend of ours.

We don't know him super well,

but his friend Lee's come on the pod.

We've been on his pod and he's super well known.

He used to work at Facebook.

Then he was like, I don't know,

chief something at Snapchat left really early on

or like kind of like that in the last very long,

went on his own and started creating content

about Bitcoin in like 2016, 2017-ish.

And as Bitcoin got more popular, he got more popular.

So he's got like, I don't know, a million followers now.

He's got a sub-stack with 170,000 subscribers

or paid subscribers.

He's a Bitcoin media personality, but like he's-

He's on CNBC to talk, anytime Bitcoin happens, Pomp,

tell us, is it good or is it bad?

And he's kind of on troll on purpose.

Like I like Pomp, but he like, he like fucks with people.

I don't call him a troll, I think he's a...

Somebody said this and they said it

in a way that was derogatory,

but I actually think it's like a good description

of like people like this.

They called him a carnival barker,

which is basically like your hype man,

like somebody who's going to just keep pounding the pavement

and keep knocking on doors and saying the message.

I don't mean troll disrespectfully.

I mean, like he's funny, like he's a shithead.

Yeah, and he has a good time, he's got a good personality

and he's extremely talented with content creation

and branding.

So we'll talk about one of his other projects

that just came out.

But anyways, my point is Pomp created this job board

called Crypto Jobs or something like that.

Like he's like, you want a job in crypto

and I'm a trusted guy in crypto.

If you want to work in crypto,

here's my personal job board.

I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Like we've talked in the past about job boards.

Andrew Wilkinson talked about how good

of a business job boards are.

And I thought, I wonder how successful

an individual's creator's job boards could be.

And the reason I'm interested in this is because,

A, that's like kind of like my career path is being a creator.

And I think about like the previous wave,

like Tim Ferriss and those guys,

they didn't have any of these different business models.

They didn't have rolling funds.

They didn't have ghost kitchens.

They didn't have job boards as like a way

to capitalize on their audience.

They just sold books.

And then like that was kind of it.

And now creators have a whole different arsenal

of ways to make money, one of which is a job board.

So he did this with Pomp.

He did, Palette does this with Lenny,

the kind of like the product management guy.

So Lenny's got a job board.

If you want to become a PM,

well, you could just go to like LinkedIn or Indeed.

But if you're a PM and you follow Lenny

and you love his content about being a better PM,

kind of makes sense.

So what's Palette?

Why did it drop there?

Palette is the job board software

that all these creators use.

Bro, you think that's going to be a huge thing?

I've created job boards.

You used a WordPress plugin.

Yeah, so here's the difference.

This is like a classic,

I think this is a classic mistake,

which is like web flow.

Dude, I could use Wix, right?

Like Shopify, I can do this on Squarespace.

It's like, there is a benefit

to when something really focuses on a use case

and a niche and attacks it in a different way.

So what they did was they built this job board thing

to go to creators or communities.

So like for the hustle, you guys could be,

the hustle could be, you guys have a job board or no?

Yeah, we launched one as a test.

How did it do?

It didn't do well,

but I wouldn't say it's because the idea is bad.

It's just that we were, when we were deciding between trends

and something else, that something else was a job board.

And we were like, yeah, let's do this other thing.

So these individual creators,

guess how much they're making off their job board?

Pond, Lamy. I would love to know, I don't know.

Give me a guess.

What do you think Lenny's making off his job board?

100 grand a year at most.

So I don't want to blow up these guys' own economics,

but let's just say I looked at 10 of these

and I looked at, okay, how much money do each of these make?

People of their level of fame,

which is like, they're not truly famous.

They're like niche famous.

Yeah, internet famous.

Quarter million dollars in a,

Pomp I think is going to make about a million dollars

off his job board this year.

He's going to make more off his job board

and he doesn't have to create content every day.

He doesn't have to, you know, get on, right?

So his newsletter, he's got to write a fucking newsletter

every morning, right?

That's his, people pay him $9.99

and he got to write the newsletter every morning.

The job board, that's just for free

after already building the audience.

So he doesn't need to imagine.

So what's the business model for palette?

So they basically take a percentage

of whatever the creator is making.

So how does the creator make money?

Creator makes money because the companies

who want to access talent in that niche

go and they pay the $500 or $1,000 to post their job.

And so they pay, let's say $1,000 per job posting.

They're going to get candidates that are highly qualified.

The creator can sort of like do two things.

They can take some of the jobs

and they can sort of like boost them

and basically say, if I was good, if I was you guys,

these are companies that I would go work for.

So you can endorse the jobs.

You can also endorse the candidates.

So you can take your audience

and just instead of just saying,

hey, my full audience is this,

you can say, hey, these 400 people

are like kind of like the top,

the cream of the crop in terms of my audience.

These guys are like kind of like the superstar talent.

And so you actually have to pay more to access them.

Or when they match with this,

when you post a job,

I will actually specially message those people.

And that's like kind of like a premium offering.

So they basically give you the software to do this.

The reason I think this is interesting for LinkedIn,

LinkedIn is one giant central job board basically, right?

So like that's the way LinkedIn makes money is.

I forgot what you're even talking about LinkedIn.

So I think this is a distributed version of LinkedIn.

It's basically saying,

nobody's going to build a 500 million person

social network for professionals again.

That's LinkedIn's advantage.

But what if instead of 500 million people on one network,

you had 50,000 people on whatever 100 networks

or whatever it is, do the math.

And so you split it where like one example they have is

there's like a community of developers who all write,

let's say Angular, Angular is a JavaScript like framework.

So they have a big discord of thousands

of Angular developers.

Well, they should have a job board

for people who are trying to hire developers

who write Angular, right?

Angular developers.

That would be the business model for running that community

for putting in all the hard work

and running a great Angular community.

The job board would be a great way.

And if I'm an employer,

I'd rather go to the Angular community

and write on their job board,

than just post on LinkedIn.

Wow. So this is this company,

they've like raised legit money.

Who pallet?

Yeah, they're not like a second.

I mean, they've raised $4 million.

Yeah, it's like a startup startup.

That's pretty a while.

So you kind of turned my opinion on this.

Who all, anyone interesting investing in this besides you?

Yeah, a lot of the creators,

because a lot of the creators are like, Holy shit,

this is great.

Like I will invest in this and I'll be a user of it

because this solves a problem of mine, right?

If I've done all the hard work to build a free audience

and build trust with them and build a kind of a niche,

I'm authority in a niche and that niche is like a job.

Maybe it's design, maybe it's product management,

maybe it's developers or back-end engineers,

machine learning experts, whatever.

And once I've done that,

if you have a way for me to monetize

that doesn't require me to get up there

and either teach or write content every day,

I'm in, right?

And the economics seem to work.

And then the more job boards,

the more niche job boards that get created

through this network,

now they can just, when a company wants to post a job,

you can say, hey, you came here to post

on the Angular community,

but we have these five other job boards

that are all for developers.

Would you like to cross post

and they can help like get more reach on the job

and they can help those creators get more money

without marketing themselves?

So these guys, yeah, you changed my opinion.

It's pretty dope.

And the reason why it's interesting is the way

that you described it was far better

than what I thought it was going to be is zip recruiter.

Do you know zip recruiter?

I know the ads.

I don't, but what do they do that's different?

They, it's, oh wait, that's the same thing.

It's one place and they go post on Indeed

and they post on all the job boards, right?

Yeah, so zip recruiter at the time

and still could be the case.

They were the fastest growing company out of LA

and the largest series A company ever,

meaning their valuation was the highest ever for a series A.

And I believe it was, it's crazy how times have changed,

but like their series A, they value to them

at like hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now it's like way different.

But, and what they do is you, so they raise,

I'm looking at now.

I think they're, are they not like public?

Like they advertise on Bill Simmons's podcast.

Like, yeah, they're probably close to,

so their series A, they raised at a $300 million valuation,

which unfortunately is considered small now, probably,

but they, they're, they're going to go public.

Yeah, they're public size

and they make hundreds of millions of dollars revenue.

And what you do is they make a really,

so they, what was that term Orwellian?

What's that?

Orthogonal.

Orthogonal.

That's, it's a good term.

I'm going to steal that one.

So what they've done is they do a couple of things.

And if you told me what they were trying to do

I would actually say,

oh, wow, this is way too complicated.

I don't think this can work.

But basically they do a couple of things.

The first thing is that they make it really easy

to post your job anywhere.

So you just click, you upload the job description

and it posts in every single place.

You don't have to go to each one.

And so that's why an employer posts there.

The second thing that they do is now once,

once they got all these people to start posting

their jobs on ZipperCruiter,

you can now go to ZipperCruiter.com

and it says look for a job.

And so they get recruits right there.

And then on the backend,

they've now created a way

that you can manage your hiring process.

And the way that they make money,

I believe is by, I think it's software.

So you can, you can,

you can pay a fee to get access to like the CRM

as well as they'll post for free,

or you could do one off

where they'll post,

you got to pay for it to be posted in all the places.

And it's a, this strategy works really well.

So I'm on board.

I think ZipperCruiter is great.

But it's one of those,

like I don't know if this idea is going to work.

I thought it was worth a bet.

So I invested, right?

So I'm talking my book a little bit here,

but it's more like all startups are, you know,

it's unlikely that they succeed.

I wouldn't say the probability is that they go

and defeat LinkedIn.

It's just that I thought, oh wow, that is smart.

Actually, you're not going to build

the 500 million person social network.

That's just so hard.

You have to, who's going to be able to do that?

Instead, if you just say,

well, all these individual creators and communities

are already building their own little network,

what if I created a decentralized job board,

the job board instead of being in one spot,

it's actually lives in each one of their little communities.

And that makes sense to me.

Cause like our friend Andrew, you know, Andrew Chen,

you know, my favorite person who blocks me on Twitter,

you're a good buddy.

He's got a great growth blog.

And then, you know, a lot of growth marketers.

Yeah, he's the post growth.

If he had his own, if he had his own growth job board,

he would, you know, with essentially zero work,

probably making, I don't know,

easily 150 grand a year, 250 grand a year

of companies that want to hire growth,

growth hackers and growth marketers like Andrew.

And so that would be a better,

more targeted place to hire somebody from

than going to this sort of general sea of job,

you know, job applications.

And so I think that that,

that part is what made sense to me with this.

Although I was like you when, when I first heard this,

I didn't even want to take the meeting.

I was like, great.

Like, you know, bloggers are going to become

like blogger job boards.

What the hell is that?

Right?

Like I remember reading once that,

I can't get this out of my head,

which is like, they go sub-stack where B players

teach C players what A players do.

And I was like, oh shit, that's so good.

That's such a kill shot.

Who said that?

I think it was Hunter Walk.

I think it was on Twitter.

Right.

And, you know, but it's such a good call out, right?

In many ways, it's true, right?

The most successful people, the true icons, you know,

they're not creating a ton of content typically.

And sometimes they do when they retire,

sometimes it's part of their growth strategy.

But for the most part, Elon Musk doesn't have a sub-stack,

right?

He's not trying to teach you and sell you a course

on how to be a good CEO,

because he just is a good CEO and makes all his money there.

So often it's, it is a B player teaching a C player

what the A players do.

And I think that's like a harsh but true critique.

And, you know, I myself, you know,

feel like that many times.

And I think that's when I was like, from that angle,

I was like, oh, will this job or thing work?

But once I looked into it, I was like,

this actually makes a lot of sense.

Can we speak, this is kind of relevant.

Can we wrap up with this thing you have here about

you're never, even when you're late, you're early?

Yeah.

This is a very typical you thing.

So I asked Sean last week to, we said,

let's come up with a 10 minute short episode.

This morning, I get a message from him saying,

I just did it this morning.

And I, that's all he said.

And I clicked play and it said, the first line was like,

I just woke up this morning and lost $500,000.

I was like, oh, hooked, I'm in.

And we can't run this on Sunday.

We have to run this right now.

And so what happened?

And I guess what's this, you're not late type of thing.

Do you want me to talk about the thing from this morning?

Or do you want me to talk about this, you're not late thing?

This late thing.

OK, the late thing.

So I was looking back and I was doing a little kind

of retrospect, I said.

So I graduate from college.

You did it today when you like lost all this?

No, no, no, this is like a month ago.

I was looking back at 2010.

And I remember being in college and I had an iPhone.

So I knew Apple was the shit.

I used Google constantly.

I used Chrome and I knew Google was the shit.

I was a believer in Tesla.

I think I own Tesla shares at, I don't know, 20X cheaper

than they are today.

So I saw all these companies.

And at the time, Google seems super established.

Google's been around for, Google had been around in 2010

for so many years, over a decade plus or whatever.

Same with Apple was even older, 20 years old.

They seemed like mature companies.

They didn't seem like where all the upside was.

And I looked back and I just did a little analysis.

I said, when I graduated from college, how big was Google?

What was the market cap?

If I had just invested that day.

And this isn't like when you say, oh,

if you invested in Bitcoin in 2010,

you'd be worth a jillion dollars.

Well, yeah.

That's because Bitcoin was worth like 10 cents back then.

And it was like nobody knew if Bitcoin was going to be a thing.

But with Google, it was clear it was going to be a thing.

Apple, it was clear it was going to be a thing.

Facebook, it was clear it was going to be a thing.

Like my whole college was obsessed with it.

It was obviously going to be somewhat successful.

And so here's some numbers.

2010 when I graduated, Google's revenue was $5 billion.

Today, its revenue is $55 billion.

And you could do the same thing with Amazon, Facebook.

And if you had just bought those companies back then,

you would have made 10 extra money.

So like if I had just taken my last year of college tuition,

and I had just said, hey, dad, instead of putting that

into college, let's just put it into these four companies

that we use their products daily.

They are already successful.

Google's not going to tank.

It's not going to fail.

Let's just invest in Google.

We would have 10 extra money or whatever by now.

I don't know the exact numbers.

It's not what's important.

The lesson is even when it feels late,

like you're established, if it is a mega trend,

mega trends have way more room to run than you expect.

Some of the mega trends were the internet as a whole.

Internet was a mega trend.

Mobile was a mega trend.

And Apple has been running on that mega trend for a while.

Cloud, cloud is a mega trend.

And you see AWS, AWS is big.

And every year, it just grows at the rate of the fastest

growing startup.

But AWS was already like $40, $50 billion in revenue.

And it will just keep growing really fast.

And so I think that mega trends are not

to be underestimated.

And I was listening to this Peter Thiel thing.

Peter Thiel, who is like investor,

was one of the first investors on Facebook,

created PayPal, that sort of thing.

Peter Thiel said, there are many money managers out there,

financial advisors, investment bankers, mutual funds.

And they'll all try to pitch you their strategy, hedge funds.

They'll all tell you how they're going to beat the market,

how they're going to do well.

He goes, as an investor often, it is the simplest

and stupidest strategy, the most obvious strategy

that is all you need to do.

He goes, in 20, I think it was 2013 or 2012,

Jim Kramer, the mad money guy on CNBC.

Who, by the way, I think is like pretty awesome.

I think he's like a pretty good guy.

And his picks are not so bad, are they?

I think, I don't know, I haven't looked too much into him.

I don't know if he's a good guy, I've never met him.

But I know that for his, he's an entertainer, right?

He's on TV, not because he's the best stock picker,

he's on TV because he plays really well

in the living rooms of America.

And so anyways, he did something,

which is what entertainers do.

He made up a catchy phrase.

He called Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, fang.

He made that up.

Yeah, he invented fang in 2013.

And Peter Thiel pointed out, he goes,

if you would just put your money into fang,

which were obviously great companies,

there were technology companies that were growing.

And you didn't even need to know how fast they were growing.

But if you just said, these are solid companies that,

seems like everybody in America is using their products,

you would have made six times your money

in the last eight years.

And he goes, that would beat the performance

of almost having any money manager or hedge fund

or investment banker that you're thinking of working with.

He goes, the problem is the strategies are too stupid.

Even if a financial advisor thought

that was a good bet, they could never

charge you the 1% of all your assets

that they charge as their fees to just tell you

to invest in Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google

and go to sleep.

Don't touch it for 10 years.

But in reality, that was the best advice.

And he goes, the same thing.

He goes, I believe the same thing is true for Bitcoin today.

And the advice is almost so simple

that a money manager would be embarrassed to say

that this is their strategy.

So they'll come up with a more complicated strategy

that will actually underperform.

Well, I don't think it-

Just blind Bitcoin and chilling.

I agree with that sentiment.

I don't think it's just a money manager thing.

And I would say, look at your actions.

And my actions are similar to yours.

But we are, we do a lot of silly stuff.

You're investing in risky startups.

When you're right now, you're pontificating

that you think Bitcoin is gonna 6X in eight years.

If you think that it's gonna 6X in eight years,

put all your money in it then.

Right.

So I don't think-

To be fair, I pretty much have at this point.

And I'm using you as an example.

I'm incredibly guilty of this well.

And just, I mean you as a human being.

But basically like that's what we do

is we fuck stuff up because we can't sit still.

What's like the famous quote of like,

all of humans problems exist

because we can't just sit silently by ourselves.

A man can't sit alone in a room for 30 minutes.

Yeah. And that's kind of the issue here.

And it's kind of sucks because I'm in the same boat.

I know that if I just play it,

like I'm even more conservative than Fang.

I'm like S&P 500.

I'm like, so long as the hundred,

trailing hundred years repeats itself.

Like if I don't think the trailing hundred years

is gonna repeat itself

and there's probably like huge problems with America, right?

And so I'm like, as long as that trailing hundred

repeats itself, like everything's gonna be great.

And days like today happen and I'm like,

oh fuck, gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta do this.

Right.

Yeah, so I guess like the, I was a little bit long-winded

in that.

I don't think I really nailed my point.

My point is when there's a real mega trend,

what feels like, it's already played out.

Nope, there's a lot more to go.

And the hard part of course is figuring out

what's a real mega trend and what's not.

But in retrospect, they were sort of obvious.

Mobile was a mega trend.

Video is a mega trend.

Internet was a mega trend.

And I believe crypto is a mega trend.

And so those are mega trends.

And I remember, I texted my dad today,

I go, hey, today's a great day to buy Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's 30% off, it's Black Friday.

And because every day he badgers me like,

he's like, ah, you've been talking about Bitcoin

since it was at 500 and then it got to 2,000.

I thought it was too much.

Then it got to 4,000, it got to 20,000.

I thought no way this goes above 20,000.

And then recently it's been sitting at 50, 60,000.

And he's like, now, if I buy in, I'm buying at 50, 60,000,

I should have bought it before.

So did he do it?

So I told him, I said, hey, you've been bitching

and moaning about this, like here it is,

it's at 30 something thousand.

Go buy, now is the time to buy.

And I know what's gonna happen.

He's gonna think, well, now it's in the bread,

now it's not hot.

Now I'm a little bit afraid

because the whole market's afraid.

And so now he'll either not do it or he'll tiptoe in

and then he'll regret it later, like I only put in so much.

Because that's the classic psychology of an investor, right?

Of a bad investor, I should say.

And so I guess like the thought process for me here is that

if you think this is a mega trend, even 50K,

is it's not too late because it still has so much more room

to grow if this is true.

Now, of course, could be wrong, could not be,

it could all over, could fail for many reasons.

But I think that when you identify these things,

the one of the worst mistakes you can make

is either selling too early

because you don't ride out the winner.

And then the second, I think mistake I think you can make

is feeling like you're late when history tells us

that these things play out over like a 20, 30 year arc.

I agree with everything.

I'm nervous that, because I don't, I'm not,

the most education I have on Bitcoin is you telling me

whatever you, like whatever, what you tell everyone else

is like, this is my education on it

because it just doesn't interest me

other than sticking it to the man.

And I have doubts, but not, I mean, I'm six figures in.

So not that many doubts,

but maybe I'll take your advice and do it.

Well, I would say like, you know, you never, you know,

probably the best advice I could give is never invest

on somebody else's conviction.

Cause when they're wrong, it really leaves a bad taste

in your mouth because you didn't believe to begin with.

Well, I believe in the premise of like, you know,

like the government doesn't control it.

No one controls it.

Like it's kind of crazy that, you know, yeah,

I agree in the high level premise.

I think you want to, what I'm saying is,

I think you want to take somebody's,

if you hear my conviction, the answer is not go do it.

The answer is go learn for yourself and ask yourself,

how much conviction do I have in this?

And then invest proportionate to your conviction.

Cause then at the very least, when you write a wrong,

you're going to, you're going to assign the credit

or blame to yourself.

And you'll have either a lesson learned

if you were wrong or a lesson learned

if you were right about how much you followed

your conviction and if your conviction was based

in something real.

And so anyways, not financial advice.

That's not my point.

My point was sort of like,

I thought it was very interesting observation

that sometimes it's the,

the simplest investment strategies where you,

where you set it and you hold it and you leave it,

actually I'll perform.

And one of the reasons people don't do them is,

it's almost so stupid.

It's embarrassing if that's your strategy,

especially if your job is to be an investment, you know,

manager or financial manager or financial advisor.

Then it's really embarrassing to just recommend

such a brain dead approach.

But history will tell us that,

that often that is the best returns.

Great.

Well, I think that's a great place to end.

I always like ending in those rants.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it.

Like no days off on a road.

Let's travel never looking back.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.