My First Million: #88 with Greg Isenberg (part 2) - Why Plugins Are Big Business
Hubspot Podcast Network 7/3/20 - Episode Page - 9m - PDF Transcript
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 hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty
Potty to the Mench on a 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.
Welcome back.
This is part two of our brainstorm session with Greg Eisenberg.
We're going to continue on.
We talk about a bunch of different topics.
It's pretty fun.
Greg's a good guy.
Hope you guys like it.
So here we go.
Part two.
Let's do it.
I basically sold a box of air on eBay for like three to seven bucks, and it would make
money on shipping, but I would say like, hey, you're buying a box of air and people would
think it would funny.
It was funny.
And they were buying it for somebody else as a gag or what?
Yeah.
I think it was mostly a, it was a gifting thing.
Did you get a P.R. for it?
I got, I got some P.R.
Yeah.
A little bit.
A little bit.
All right.
I'll tell you guys something.
One interesting thing that I'm paying attention to Greg, are you a car guy?
I like cars.
Okay.
There's this guy named Doug Demoro.
Do you guys know who Doug Demoro is?
He's this really nerdy, just like a horribly nerdy guy and he reviews cars and he's really
funny and he's cool and he's well loved and he's got two or three million subscribers
on YouTube and he'll review all types of cars and he's funny and he's like cute and
endearing and he just launched his own car auction.
It's pretty amazing that he did this because he's a YouTuber and you think, well, like
he's probably not that good at doing other, I mean, you know, he's a YouTuber.
I wouldn't expect him to build a content thing, but I accidentally pulled up.
It's called carsandbids.com.
He launched this site.
It looks amazing and he's already populated the site with hundreds of like fancy cars
for sale.
So the whole point is that it's cars that are vintage or cars that enthusiasts love.
So like a 2013 BMW M5, it's not like a particularly expensive car, but people who love BMWs love
this model of car.
It's amazing that this guy built this and I think that what's interesting to me is that
a lot of people, I don't know if he's partnered with someone.
I think that, I bet you that's what happened, but a lot of people partner with YouTubers,
kind of like what they did with Ipsy and the Kardashian lady.
And this is just the perfect execution of this.
It just launched two weeks ago.
I think this is going to be a huge thing and these car companies are quite interesting.
These are places.
So this is brilliant.
I think if you marry the unbundling of Reddit with the partnerships of influencers, you're
good.
Right.
There you go.
You get the credibility from the influencer, put them in, put them on the cap table, whatever.
Right.
Because look, for any lifestyle trend that you find on Reddit, like the body weight based
fitness thing that Sam's talking about or vegans or whatever, there's going to be
lifestyle influencers that live that same lifestyle that have gotten famous for it on
Instagram, on YouTube, whoever.
And if you marry those two together, you use Reddit as the source for, okay, which lifestyles
are trending?
Okay.
The fire movement is trending in the personal finance community.
Cool.
Then I need to go find people who live that lifestyle, partner with them for distribution
for my product.
And in this case, the influencer did it themselves, but more and more people are sort of doing
it on an equity basis instead of, you know, pay for post type of thing, which I think
is, you know, has its trade-offs, has its pros and cons.
It's pretty interesting.
Like another thing, what I would do is I'm quite fascinated with the job board space
still.
I don't think anyone has completely nailed the job board space, but you could definitely
do it where you partner with people and you talk about cool companies because the pay
per lead for jobs is quite high.
So did you guys see what Andrew Wilkinson, another friend of the pod who's coming on
I think next week, did you see what he posted yesterday on Twitter?
I think this is pretty smart.
He posted about this Gmail idea, Sam, did you see it?
I did.
I did.
It was a, it's a plugin for Gmail that I don't know what it does.
I forget.
He basically, he took, he replicated the two features that matter in hay and hay.com.
Like, hey, you could screen, you know, new recipients first before they show up in your
inbox.
And also it'll just hide all your newsletter cruft in one spot, like better than the core
thing.
And that was the crux of his idea, but it's like, Hey, do you want those cool features
of hay without having to like go get this new email service and like go learn this
new thing?
Cause I was making an add on for Gmail and I was like, this is why this guy is smart.
That was like such a simple, beautiful idea.
And I really hope he makes this and not just tweeting about it, but I know how he rolls.
He tweets to like publicly commit to doing something.
And so I think he's actually going to get this built because he definitely got a good
response from it.
But I thought it was a great idea.
What do you think of that Greg?
I love it.
He got 2.4,000 likes and was I right about the summary of what it is?
Yeah.
So it's basically, and I love the way he, he actually like communicates it, which is
also just seems like a magical part of how he operates, which is read it out.
All right.
I'm working on a fun little Gmail plug inside project dot, dot, dot.
New line.
It's an email firewall colon.
Number one filters out newsletter slash noisy crap emails.
So I know for, you know, Greg, so I know that's like beautiful, like layman's terms.
Number two, screens, first time senders, similar to, hey, number three delivers emails a few
times a day on a set schedule versus 24 seven and brackets like DND.
Who wants the beta test, 782 responses.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, we got to invest in this little Gmail plugin that like that, that's how that's
how good this is.
This, this is like a real idea because it's a, if you did these three things, productivity
would rise significantly in an email, which is something that everybody's using.
And so I think a, he's the right type of guy to kind of spearhead something like this.
He communicated it well and it's just a simple, it's a simple, good idea.
Greg, dude, who else do you know that has, do you know any big Gmail plugin or Google
Chrome plugin businesses?
I do.
So I invested in a company called vidIQ, Sean, you, you know, Rob, right?
Rob.
Dude, the guy is a legend and rushing it.
Can you tell the story?
I can't tell you the numbers.
He's a tank.
He's a tank.
Physically, he's a tank.
We got to say that.
Physically, he's a tank.
He's like the most lovable Teddy bear X football player of all time.
He's in San Francisco, he raises money from like all the right people.
He builds a startup basically like Hootsuite, but for YouTubers.
This isn't like 2012-ish, gets, you know, the top 10 biggest video publishers on the
platform, AOL, Yahoo, all these, you know, big companies, realizes that there's no,
although it like looks cool to work with big companies, you can actually make more money
if you just work with like little to medium size video creators ends up doing at this
time.
This is like 2014, maybe like the, the equivalent of nuclear bomb, which is number one, he like
gets rid of most of his team and moves to Santa Cruz, California and becomes like surfs
every day, like four to five hours a day.
So number, you know, now remote is obviously more of a thing, but like back then, like
that's how that's really going to work out.
Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.
Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. The guys discuss: Andrew Wilkinson Hey.com replacer, VidIQ for influencers, why Grammarly is a huge business, learning via text messages and Stadium Live (ESPN for Gen Z).
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.