My First Million: #92 - A Three Month Old Company Profiting $90,000 A Day

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.

What's going on?

Not much, dude.

Before the podcast, Abreu was telling us about a guy who is just uploading, you know, instead

of competing on YouTube, he's just uploading his videos of him hanging out with his friends

talking onto Pornhub.

It's getting popular because it's not porn on Pornhub.

How big is it?

Maybe we should do that with the podcast to grow this thing.

Just a bunch of guys talking about ideas on Pornhub.

Abreu, how popular are these videos getting?

Not sure how many views they have, but he gets a ton of free press from.

I've seen so many articles, like every now and again, I'll see articles on it.

Okay, so I've got a few quick fun updates that are just funny.

So Heineken 0.0, I've been talking about how I drink a ton of these each day.

They just DM'd me trying to get that sponsorship.

So here we go.

0.0.

Yeah.

Second, have you seen, did you see this thing?

I'm testing out Tempo.

Yeah, you posted a video of this on your Facebook or in the Facebook group and it looks like

a bootleg mirror.

So these guys aren't a sponsor or anything, but they did give me a free thing to try out.

It's like mirror.

So it looks like a TV, but it's self-standing, but it's got this like, what was that video

game that had a camera that would tell where you are, a Kinect or something?

The Kinect?

Yeah, like Xbox or something.

It has one of those on there.

So it tells you if you're form is shitty or not shitty and it also has like 200 or something

pounds of weights and I'm testing it.

Okay.

Well, like as a resistance band or as in a dumbbell?

Like literally like plates of weights and it has a barbell and a dumbbell and you put

it on and then there's a leaderboard and it can tell what type of weight you have on and

how many reps you're doing and you compete and anyway, it's freaking awesome.

But there are a few bugs that I'm noticing.

So is this like released or is this a private beta type of thing?

It's out.

It's out.

It's out now, but they are a new company and they, it just makes you realize how hard

that type of hardware is.

Why did you buy this versus like tonal or mirror or whatever?

I didn't buy it.

They just, they saw that I liked this type of crap and they go, hey, you want this for

a few weeks.

You can try it.

If you want to share, you can.

If you don't, you don't have to.

I go, yeah, I'll try it.

Right.

And I just like trying these stuff out.

So tonal is kind of like this, except if you install them to your garage, like you have

to like nail it to the wall and mayor is no weights.

This is just Peloton, like Peloton with weights, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So do you like, now that you use it for a couple of days, are you like, this is the future?

Yes.

I'm in.

No, but it's cool.

It's kind of like, it's as revolutionary as Peloton, which is like, it's just got to

get maybe a handful more people into that sport.

Right.

No, it's not revolutionary, but it's quite fun.

But like, would you be disappointed?

It goes away.

They take it back from you in a couple of weeks.

Yeah.

I would have bought it.

You would have bought it.

I would have bought it.

Yeah.

It's pretty, pretty sick.

And then I want to bring up one more thing that I'm learning about.

Wait, what was the name of that one again?

Let's shut them out.

I think they're URL.

Like you can't find them anywhere.

It's called Tempo, but if you Google Tempo, you don't find it.

I think you said, I think there's Tempo.fit.

Is it something?

Tempo.fit.

Right.

It's cool.

It's just nifty.

The guy who started it is like 27, real young, 26, like a young guy.

It's neat.

And are you on the website?

I'm on it right now.

It's like, cool.

So I like the idea and obviously mirror got bought and that's cool.

And everyone's like, wow, what is this thing?

I think this device is not like as good looking as those are.

It looks more like an air conditioning unit than mirror, which looks like a, it's like,

you know, mirror on the wall.

But that's because mirror, it's just like mirror was like the woman who started it was

a ballerina.

It was all about like body movement, and I mean, that's what she was.

She was ballerina.

I've never met someone who's actually a ballerina.

Yeah.

She was a ballerina.

So it was all about mobility and body weight stuff.

This is just a little bit different.

It's, this stuff's fun though.

I love it because when you go, the bad part about work at home is, or working out at home

is the lack of competition.

Yeah.

It doesn't feel as intense.

Yeah.

This stuff's fun.

And the second thing that I'm learning about, what did I watch?

I watched, you know, I like history.

So I watched Alexander Hamilton, then I've somehow Wikipediaed my way to Ford.

Let me tell you something about Ford.

And this, I see this consistently of businesses of this era.

So when Ford started Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, when he started Ford Motor Company,

they raised $28,000, okay?

And that was in like 1903, I think.

So $28,000 in 1903.

Competition calculators are never entirely accurate because there's just too much.

It's too hard to, yeah.

But like we could probably say that, let's just say it was 10 to 20 times X, 10 to 20

X, 10 to 20 X bigger.

So let's just say $700,000 or that's, or a hundred or a million dollars, whatever.

It's a fucking car company.

So they started the, they started Ford with $28,000 in 1903.

Okay.

So they used that and by 1905, three years later, they were giving out dividends to shareholders

to the point of shareholders 3Xing their investment.

Is that crazy to you?

Like I read this all the time that A, these companies take so little money to start back

then and B, they're paying out dividends so quickly.

Yeah, it's surprising because there's obviously like a fixed capital cost there to do things.

So I don't know how they did that, but I don't know.

It seems like, all right, so there was this tweet over the weekend that's related where

some VC, this guy Josh Felser, he was like, he's a freestyle capital, also a Duke alum.

So he was like, oh yeah, you know, give me a great, I'll take a great entrepreneur over

a great product any day or something like that, just tweeted that out.

And two funny things happened.

One, this other founder replied and he was like, you don't take founders.

That's the problem with VCs, you have it all backwards.

You're capital is a commodity, you get chosen, you don't choose founders, this guy got really

upset and like this is not what he was talking about, like I will take you.

He was just saying like, I would, yeah, exactly, he was not thinking that he was about to get

sideswiped by this guy and then he had to like apologize because every VC has to like,

you know, toe the line, it seems like with this type of stuff.

So then the second thing was, there's this old Mark Andreessen article called the only

thing that matters.

And Mark Andreessen has this blog that's like offline, but there's a thing called the P-marker

archive that still has his old blog posts.

And the blog that says the only thing that matters basically says, hey, there's this

debate.

What matters most team, product or market is like a lot of people, you know, think the

best product wins, but once you get some experience, you realize that's not true.

You know, you do need a good enough product, but that's not the most important thing.

And a lot of people will say team because that sounds really great because you, you

seem like somebody who's betting on people, it's a great way to get people to feel flattered

and take your money as an investor.

But you know, there's that old Warren Buffett quote, when a great entrepreneur walks into

a crappy business, the crappy business keeps its reputation.

Yeah.

And he says, he goes, a great team is, it's a nice to have.

Right.

And he goes, I will propose that a great market is the most important thing for any, any,

start up, I'll take a great market over a great team and a great product any day of

the week.

And he explains why.

So anyways, long way of saying how much of, you know, like when you talk about forward

back then, cars, the whole automotive industry, I mean, what a hell of a market, right?

That's still today, one of the largest markets that's out there being early to that market.

Like, I think you can perform miracles.

You can start a business on a small amount of money, be returning capital within a couple

years and, you know, grow a brand that endured a hundred plus years later because of how

good that market was, how strong that market was.

I get that.

Yeah.

You're totally right.

But even for, let's say like the Bitcoin guys, like that in 2000 and what is all that

craziness going on 14, if you like started like 2009, 2010, but then the hype happened

2012, 13, 14.

So even if you started a Bitcoin thing around the hype trade, I mean, that's like, you know,

I mean, you're going to take off, it doesn't matter how bad, if you have Bitcoin in it,

you're taking off.

But even then, like a lot of these businesses had a rate, like raise a lot of money.

And I'm like, and this is my favorite era in history, about 1900 to about 1930, Carnegie

did the same thing where he created, he built a bridge and was turning crazy amounts of dividends

to investors in like one or two years.

And dividends from startups, this isn't really something you hear about right now.

It's more so.

And so anyway, that's just like, I'm crazy fascinated on.

So one, there is one major thing which is income tax didn't happen until like the 1920s,

I believe.

So.

And also, I, you know, I don't study history like this at all.

But my questions would be, I would love to just see the use of funds.

So where does that $28,000 go into starting this?

So, you know, what were the wages of people, was it, was there actually just a lot of debt

that he was able to use?

So he raised a little bit of money and then mostly there was a huge amount of loan financing

back then that he was using to build this company.

I'm not sure, but that's what I would need to know to kind of judge how the hell you

could pull something like this off.

It's just fascinating.

I just love what I love reading about.

And this is the reason why.

How much money did you initially start to hustle with?

Nothing.

Zero.

And then you raised, would you raise like a million bucks?

Yeah, I didn't, I shouldn't have done that.

You raised a million bucks and you never needed that money.

You never used that capital, correct?

You like kind of always had a surplus, basically, cash in the bank.

For sure.

But I'm not building a fricking car.

Yeah, but like, you know, whatever, your modern day Henry Ford, that's what I'm trying

to say.

No, I noted.

It's just fascinating.

I think I love reading about these people who just do things differently and I have no

idea of what they, if they were different back then, but they are certainly different

to my perspective.

And I think that that's exciting to see someone who's doing something different than what

your expectations are.

You want to talk about ideas?

Yeah, I got a bunch.

Okay, where do you want to start?

So let me start with, also with the company I saw that was kind of cool.

Okay, so I saw this guy on Twitter.

Oh, before, and before you get into that, did you get a ton of tweets?

Thule.

Yeah, said it wrong.

Sorry guys.

I've been talking about Thule for two episodes now, Thule, and it's, and it's, and it's,

is it Thule and it's not Switzerland or wait, it's Sweden, not Switzerland, sorry.

I'm reading, we're, I'm reading while we're talking.

So my apologies.

Yeah, look, this podcast, the energy is great, the ideas are interesting and the facts may

or may not be correct.

Like that's what you need to know coming in.

That's the disclaimer.

If we were, if we were sitting here trying to do research on the pronunciation of these

Swedish company names, like, you know, then I wouldn't have time to do anything else.

So thank you for the corrections though.

And it looks like it rhymes with mule, Thule, give me a break.

That's their fault.

That's not my fault.

Okay.

So there's this guy, I'm going to say his name wrong too, Lloyd Armburst.

So I saw this guy's Twitter and first of all, Twitter is the most fucking amazing thing

in the world.

Like Twitter today still is just so awesome and you don't have to know anybody.

You don't have to be anybody and you can just like get the best education, best network,

you know, on Twitter.

So anyways, I saw this guy and his, his bio says tech founder, then there's the American

flag, which I, you know, that was great.

Where are you, Sean, on this?

I'm on this guy's Twitter.

His Twitter is L arm, arm burst, A-R-M-B-M-U-S-T.

I know Lloyd.

I had dinner at his house.

Okay.

Great.

So you can tell me about this guy.

So here's what I saw.

So I saw Y Combinator 2010.

I saw five acquisitions and then he says parentheses, five kids, but five kids too, but unrelated.

And I was like, okay, this guy's, you know, already caught my attention.

This guy's a legit player.

I don't know what these five exits were.

You probably know better than I do.

My good friend Noah and Neville, we had a, what's the dinner on Friday night for Jewish

folks?

Shabbat.

We had a Shabbat at Lloyd's house and so I had an intimate dinner with him for three

hours.

That's how much I know him.

Intimate.

Excellent.

Okay.

Well, you know, like a family, a family dinner.

So what caught my eye was that he's working on something new.

So if you go to Armbur's USA, he's doing US made medical masks, which sounds like the

most like simple obvious idea right now with coronavirus, but when you go to the site,

you could tell that this guy's like gone all in on American made, you know, medical equipment

starting with N95 masks.

And I was looking at his interviews.

I was watching his videos and I definitely think that the pendulum is swinging back this

way, which is that from a government level or a consumer level, I think made in America

is finally going to matter.

I've been talking about this for months.

And yeah.

And so I think, you know, he's trying to bring manufacturing back to America.

I think the government is has realized, holy shit, we had way too much dependence on China.

China is an adversary as well.

It's a friend of me basically.

And you know, yes, things were cheaper there.

Yes, we could outsource a lot of our labor there to to markets with cheap labor, but

man that nurtured this like massive dependence.

And yes, we lost jobs, but we also lost our, our freedom because we depend on China for

medicine, for clothes, for toys, for, you know, for masks or whatever that whatever

the hell, you know, you can think of it's manufactured outside of America for the most

part.

So I think this is the right idea at the right time is to become, if you were playing the

long game, which it seems like this guy is, if you got five acquisitions under his belt,

I think if you're playing the long game, I love the idea of trying to build an American

manufacturing company starting with masks right now in Texas.

I completely agree.

I've, and I'm going to send you, I'm sending you an email right now and we're going to

bring up this file.

I have the financials from a mask business that we can kind of go over, but that's cool.

So I've been buying Red Wing boots for a long time and I actually think that the little

secret is, is that they're not made in America anymore, but they're like their, their whole

shtick was that they've been around since 19, oh, yada, yada, yada, and they're hardcore

and American.

I agree.

I think that I completely agree and I actually surveyed my audience on Twitter and asked

how many would are going to pay extra for items that are made in America, a significant

amount said they would.

I completely agree.

I mean, when I see, when I see May in the USA, I buy it over other stuff.

Now there's definitely a threshold, but I do.

Yeah.

My brother-in-law was telling me the same thing.

He's like, yeah, I'd buy these jeans.

I buy this type of gi for my HGTSS stuff and I was like, well, you are actually paying

the premium.

Like, you know, these are not small premiums, like 50% more or 100% more in some cases.

But he's like, yeah, and he's like, I don't know if it's the time.

I don't know if he always did that.

I don't think he always did that.

I think the way the world is going, I think there's a strong nationalist movement around

these sorts of things.

Yeah.

I've been about that since I was, you know, I grew up in Missouri with a lot of union

guys and like in the parking lots would always say for American cars only, which at this

point, like at this point, like Nissan's an American car.

Like they make Nissan in Tennessee.

You know what I mean?

Like who knows what, the definition of main America is like pretty skewed at this point.

I just sent Sean the financials of a mask business.

I'm not going to say who it is or where I got it from, but it is the month of June.

It's their financials and what you can see, let's not say exactly what's going on, Sean,

but let's just say that they're doing around 2000 to 5000 orders a day and they're making

around $30 to $90,000 in net profit a day and this company was launched in I think May.

That's insane.

And so it also doesn't seem like this is big enterprise, like it's not selling the hospital

because the average order value is more like, you know, 50 bucks.

It's not like it's, you know, $50,000 orders by, you know, small, sorry, like a handful

of large hospitals or companies.

Yeah.

And so what Sean and I are looking at is it says date, order number, unit sold, shipping

fees, average order value, cost of goods sold, gross margin, returns and Facebook spend.

So they're spending a lot of money on Facebook.

Yeah.

But they're still profitable.

They're still profitable in the, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

That's cool.

This is awesome.

Thanks for sharing that.

And, you know, if you're listening to this, don't run out and start a mass business unless

you know what the hell you're doing because literally you're putting lives at risk if

you're fricking up or if you're like, you know, working with some random supplier who

says it's N95, but it's not really N95, which is a big problem that's happening right now.

Or you're like the third middleman in a four middleman chain and, you know, you're just

ending up marking up these things a lot.

So, but I think if somebody's going into this with some authenticity, which it seems

like this guy's doing with his American manufacturing facility and his plants that you can see

the videos of.

Lloyd's a hustler.

I'll say that like the small amount of time that I've hung out with him, a great guy,

total like real sharp businessman.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool.

Anyways, I thought this was a good idea and I wanted to shout it out because I think

it's a good thing.

It's a good thing for a smart person to work on now.

So what I'm doing with the hustle lately is I've been emailing out surveys.

So last week I asked how many people are going to move into the next six months and 33% of

people told me they're moving and within six months and I think seven or 8,000 people answered

the survey.

This week, what I was going to ask was how many of you won't be able to pay your mortgage

or rent in the next two or three months.

I'm curious, curious about that.

But I could do made in America about what are you partial partial towards made in America

or made in your home country, right?

Or like, you know, in the last 30 days, have you, have you knowingly chose an American

made product and spent more on it because, you know, like, did they actually put their

money where their mouth is versus like, yeah, I would consider it.

I think everybody's like, yeah, I would prefer an eco-friendly product and then do they choose

it or not?

No, that's a different question.

So well, let me see if I can ask something like that.

Okay.

Those financials are freaking crazy that I sent you.

I think that it's bullshit.

I think that if, if you're going to start a mass company just for like the revenue that

you're going to get out of it, I feel like you're going to get crushed or it's just

not going to exist in like three months.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I would not do it as a, I would not be thinking of it as a durable business.

Yeah.

And I would, I'm not a fan of it.

What software publisher is Sean?

Software publishers.

All right.

So this guy brought this up again, stolen from Twitter because that's where I get most

of my ideas.

I forgot who it is.

I wish I had wrote it down so I can give them credit, but somebody said, you know, in many

other industries, right?

Music industry, you have publishers, you know, book writing industry, you have publishers

where you have, you have a separation between the talent that creates the thing, the creative

talent and the, the body that's, that's meant to do the sort of distribution sales, getting

you into, getting you in front of customers.

And so there are a whole bunch of industries where you have publishers, but weirdly in software,

there's very few software publishers.

Usually when you start a software company, you're going to be responsible for the idea,

for the creation of it, for the iteration of it, for the distribution of it, for the

sales and marketing of it.

And I thought, you know, that's actually kind of interesting.

I was curious why, why, why you think that might be the case that, you know, that's not

the case with music.

It's not the case with books.

It's not the case with a whole bunch of other, you know, fields where you have publishers.

Why don't we have software publishers where a random engineer can build an app, you know,

pitch it to, or get picked up by a publisher who says, Hey, this is a good utility.

You know, you're great at programming, but I'm great at distribution and marketing.

I'm going to take it from here.

Okay.

This is a great one that I know a little bit about.

So someone who's a little bit older than me might criticize me because I'm not getting

exactly right.

But in the 80s and 1990s, when I was the model, this was a thing.

And so it actually worked like soft bank.

I've mentioned soft bank a lot.

They had a magazine, a tech magazine.

Well, they would also like, there was many companies that existed that were basically

like software stores.

So you sign up and they tell you all the latest software and you go in, you buy it and they

send you the CD like Amazon for software.

Right.

At one was called, that's what soft bank had.

That's how they grew to be so big, so fast.

The other one was started by one of my favorite guys ever, his name was Felix Dennis and he

had micro warehouse and it was a warehouse for software and you can go and buy whatever

you want.

From zero to publicly traded company in like four or five years, massive.

And so I think that this, and there's many other examples that I could find like that.

And we should also say the gaming industry still works like this.

Where software for games, whether it's a small little boredom killer game, whether you play

with your thumb or you're flicking noodles around a screen, you might get picked up

by a catch app or by line studios or whoever.

And then also on a bigger level, great games can get bought by Riot or Blizzard Activision

or whoever.

And then, okay, cool.

Now it's under that umbrella.

That's the public.

Games are kind of like their own thing a little bit like the games are weird and games are

their own beast.

But like if you're talking about like software tools, which I think you are, I have also

wondered this because I'm like, this model did exist.

And it is weird how like when you picked Slack at your company, it was probably only because

some other company used it or a friend used it.

I saw Mark Andrewsson tweet out the growth curve of Slack and I was like, huh, what the

hell is that?

And then I downloaded it and started using it.

Yeah.

Now some people like a small insider, inside baseball community might discover stuff on

product hunt, but that's only the latest and greatest in the trending.

But it was the latest really, not necessarily the greatest.

Yeah.

It's not the greatest.

It's just the latest.

It has always baffled me why there isn't a more central place to discover all types

of stuff that exists and like your Amazon, like people also bought X, Y, Z.

Right.

Or put differently, maybe there's a, there's room for a publisher that says, Hey, there's

a whole lot of apps out here for managing social media for companies, whether it's like

a Hoot suite type of app, it's an app like mentioned, it's, you know, some analytics

thing, whatever.

And I'm surprised that there's not a software publisher that takes either one area of the

business, like either one business model, like SAS or one area of the business, like

HR tech, and just says, okay, cool, we're going to be the best HR tech software publisher.

We already have our one flagship thing that everybody uses, but then we're going to sort

of become the publisher for these independent projects that we think we will find the best

in class, you know, customer service chat bot.

And then that will get distributed under our umbrella.

I feel like somebody, you know, an enterprising individual could try to bring software publisher

model back and basically not be creating products, but just curating products because

there's so many products out there.

So if you have the trust of the consumer and you have the relationship with the buyer,

then being a great curator is way better than being just yet another creator and a CEO of

creators who are all building, you know, these tools and just like, Oh, which mail software

should I use?

There's 50,000.

How do I know which one to use?

One of these companies is called G2, and they are just in the news today because they laid

off a ton of people and raised $100 million, even though they took five to $10 million

from the PPP thing.

Right.

They're not a publisher, right?

There's a reviews platform, right?

There's a fine line.

I think that you could argue that maybe they are, but correct.

Yeah, they are not not in the way you're describing.

No, they are not, but they are a central location to discover new stuff.

So the other, I'm not even convinced that this is a good idea.

I just thought it was an interesting question.

Why doesn't this exist here where it exists in all the other fields that are very similar?

The other one of this that I've heard that's interesting is basically the Hollywood agent

model for top programmers.

So the same way that athletes, musicians, actors have agents who do the negotiation

for them, take them from project to project, engineer, like top, top engineers are compensated

in the millions of dollars at tech companies today.

So why don't they have agents and why don't they have agents who negotiate on their behalf,

who move them from company to company and will take offers and solicit bids and say,

look, like, I think a good agent negotiate, I think anybody who negotiated for a good

to grade engineer could get them an extra 20% annually just, just on better negotiation.

How many engineers at Twitch do you think make over seven figures a year annually?

Twitch has 3000 employees, right?

No, just under 2000.

The product and engineering would be like, I don't know, let's call it 700 folks.

I'd give or take.

I'd ignore it.

Well, of 2000 employees at Twitch, how many think you think make over seven figures annually?

10 to 15, something like that.

That'd be my guess.

10.

So that's 10 to 15.

Are they all exact?

Those are like senior execs or like probably super senior engineers.

Now the problem with that is that the stock price appreciated.

So whatever the offer was, the offer might have been worth $400,000, but Amazon stock

has gone up so much that that $400,000 offer is now worth 1.2 million because the stock

price has quadrupled in the last five years.

So 10 to 15.

I mean, I think you're kind of explaining why this doesn't exist.

But that's one company and that's a small company.

At Google, there are individuals at Google who are making $50 million a year.

No way.

Who?

It's public.

There's guys you can look up.

I forgot the guy's name, but there was a guy who either left Google to go to Facebook

or whatever in that transition.

They basically said what this guy was making every year at Google and this guy was literally

making $50 million a year.

Now he's an exception, not the rule, but I think that at Google, there are easily, easily

250 plus people who are making over a million dollars a year.

Easily that.

It could be 1,000 people.

Isn't that nuts?

Isn't that nuts to create a widget that's so big that your non-owners are making $50

million or even a million a year?

I understand it.

I understand it.

If it's salesperson makes over a million dollars a year, that's easy.

That's a no-brainer.

You just get a percentage of what you make the company.

So yeah, the upside's unlimited.

But the fact that just like a salary or like normal-ish non-sales employee can make over

seven figures is fucking mind-boggling for me.

Yeah.

So I think you don't have to have huge quantities in the same way that there's, I think, 350

or 450 total NBA players, period.

So I think in the same way there are more people in the technology industry that earn

a million dollars plus than there are NBA players who earn a million dollars plus.

That'd be my guess.

And so if NBA players can have agents, I'm curious why top talent in the tech industry

also doesn't have agents that work on their behalf.

I think that's a different answer.

Yeah.

So Avery, you just found the article.

Google paid a total of $105 million to Andy Rubin and this guy, Amit Singhal.

That's the guy I was thinking about.

Well, Andy Rubin...

He got acquired.

That's different.

He built...

Yeah.

They created Android.

But yeah.

This guy, Amit Singhal, they agreed to pay $45 million but ended up paying just $15 million

because he went to go to a competitor.

Imagine getting guaranteed $45 million and then leaving to go to a competitor.

That's amazing.

That's what Zappos guy did.

Well, he walked away from the buddy.

I'm saying, imagine what the other offer must have been that this guy switched teams.

It's crazy, man.

It's crazy.

Like the top AI people, the top machine learning people, the top self-driving cars people, these

guys are making millions of dollars a year.

God bless America.

Let's talk about the CB Insights.

I did a call last week with the founder of CB Insights.

Do you know what that is?

Yeah.

Okay.

So listen, there are CB Insights.

They're most famous because they have a newsletter like the Hustle.

The guy who owns the company or is CEO writes it and he's kind of quirky and funny and irreverent.

What they do is...

So CBInsights.com, the guy, Sean, who is the CEO, he's got a huge Twitter following because

he's really funny.

His Twitter handle says, buy a CB Insights subscription.

I owe people money.

Do you know who he is or what's his name?

It's Anon.

I don't know how to pronounce it, Anon.

Anon.

Sorry, Anon.

And so what CB Insights does is if you go to their website, they say they help you find

which company to buy next.

So you're thinking like PE companies subscribe to them.

And I just did a call with him.

They're huge, by the way.

Huge company.

I'm not going to reveal anything else other than that, but they're big and everything

else I'm going to talk about is public.

But if you go to their pricing, their top tier pricing is $250,000 a year.

And I go, what is CB Insights?

And he was like, basically, we are a cover your ass.

Cover your ass.

CYA.

Yeah.

Have you ever...

I'd never heard that term before.

And apparently...

Dude, go to a big company.

You'll see CYA all over the place.

I've never heard of it.

It's basically like if you're going to make a decision, you need to cover your ass.

So you're not the one to blame if that decision is a bad decision.

And so an oversimplified example of this is, let's say you're a huge company with 5,000

employees, and you have to choose between this company and this company for, let's say,

like your Salesforce thing.

Like you're trying to figure out, do we use HubSpot, Salesforce, this or that or this?

Now that's over simplification.

Usually it's for smaller vendors.

And you've got to do research on them to figure out, are they going to go out of business

in 10 years?

Shit like that.

And I have never heard of someone needing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 a year to solve

this problem.

Have you?

I didn't know how much we spend on it, on things like that.

But I have seen, yeah, CYA type of business.

I've always thought this is exactly what they are.

I love that he just said it.

Most people never say that that's what they are.

But it's true.

You know, when we have to write a report or, you know, say how big, hey, I think we should

go into Russia and because Russia is a growing market, well, nobody cares what Sean thinks

about Russia.

Nobody cares what Sean has heard about Russia or Sean's opinion of how big Russia is going

to be.

What Sean needs to do is go and get these great reports that are done by third party

consultancies or research firms, pay thousands of dollars for our annual subscription to

those reports and pull out a number that says, Russia's mobile market is growing at 30%

Kagger.

Okay, great.

That's the thing I need to justify the budget I'm asking for, to justify the headcount I'm

asking for, to get the green light on my project.

And that's just the way the world works.

These are like, you know, insurance for schmucks, you know, on, on, I don't have to put my name

on the line.

I put their name on the line.

And in order to put their name on the line, I just have to pay them a nice little fee

every year.

It's just crazy that a business that can be worth maybe a billion dollars or billions

of dollars in the gardener's case exists on the on, on, on bullshit politics inside of

a company.

Well, okay, look, they do do good research.

So that's cool.

They are also often wrong because they're forecasts are forecast and people suck at

forecasting things.

And the things people want to know are usually the uncertain things and you're going to be

more wrong on those.

So I'd say they do provide value, like it's not like you don't get anything from it,

but you would never pay that amount for that, for that level of information.

You pay that amount because it's a seal of approval.

It's a, it's a, it's a source cited for your decision making.

Well, I got curious about that.

So I'll give you another example.

Have I told you about WGSN?

No.

Okay.

So let me make sure I said it right.

WGSN.

Yeah.

Okay.

It stands for, well, I don't know what it stands for actually WGSN.com.

It's owned by a public company in England.

So you can go and learn all about it.

What they do, and this is again, an oversimplification, is they tell you which color is going to be

popular in the next year.

So if you're Starbucks, yeah, if you're Starbucks and you need to figure out-

That's all they do right now.

That's just like one thing that they do.

They, they-

That's what they're known for?

That's what they're known for, but they'll tell you like what type of outfit will be

popular in a year.

So if you're Starbucks and you have to buy, you know, 100,000 uniforms, you want to know

which shade of pink is going to be cool, or if you want to make like a new sleeve for

your cup, you need to know which shade of red is like the thing.

And so it's an oversimplification, but it's fashion forecast, particularly around colors,

I believe.

And this company makes around $90 million a year recurring revenue just off this stuff.

It looks like they have like food and drink, beauty, fashion as they're like kind of core

things.

Okay.

This is incredible.

I'm going to sign up for get a demo.

I hate to get a demo, schedule a call.

That works so unsportsmanily.

Is this not crazy fascinating?

Abreu just sent me one called sentair.com, and they do the same thing, which they tell

you which scents are going to be the most popular.

Like not even like perfume, but like what, what smell you want your cut, your restaurant

to be or your casino or your office or your hotel, that's fucking crazy.

And it's just nuts.

It's nuts.

I think it's awesome.

And I actually understand this one, but I want to know how these guys get customers.

So is it that they, that's more interesting to me, right?

Cause okay, I can see how this would be useful.

You just get a sales team, bro.

And you just, you got it.

You, a lot of these, is it outbound sales or is it putting out free reports, but then

like kind of the full report.

If you want the full report, you know, click this button, you know, what, is it content

marketing or is it outbound sales?

Or is it both?

It's both.

It's both.

Um, I mean, I have experienced a little bit with these types of things.

Yeah.

And the, the fact is, and a lot of people are afraid to it, I don't know if they're

afraid to admit this, but they don't want to acknowledge it for some reason, but a sales

team creates demand.

So when I had the hustle, we were at, me personally, I sold advertisements and I got us to 30

grand a month in revenue, like right away.

Like it was like, we got to like 50,000 or 100,000 subscribers and I go, all right,

I'm going to go do ad sales.

I got us to 30 K a month.

Then like with the same amount of subscriber base, we went and hired two or three sales

person and it got to like 200,000 like immediately.

And I was like, holy shit, that fucking worked.

And I learned more about this and I learned that like, I listened to an interview with

the founder of maybe square space or WordPress, who was like this like engineer, dork type

of guy who typically hates sales and marketing and they're like, yeah, sales and marketing

just let us on fire and we just exploded once we hired a sales team.

And so the fact is my point is, is like, if you have like a pretty good product that

solves the problem, if you hire a sales team, you explode.

So how do you count the economics of a sales team?

So you're like, how much does each salesperson need to make for you for that to be viable?

Yeah.

So you traditionally give a relatively low base.

So it could be 50 grand, it could be 100 grand, it could be 150 grand.

And then you say you get 2% to 5% usually of all the sales that you bring in.

And so you're on target.

How much do you think a salesperson needs to generate?

And what doesn't one individual salesperson need to generate for you?

What's your target?

At least a million, but tip tip.

So in media sales, it's around one to three million in software sales is probably around

500,000 to 1.5 million software.

So you need a salesperson to bring in a million dollars a year of revenue.

Yeah.

And I'm doing some rounding here, but yeah, that's not a hundred thousand.

It's more like a million.

That's what you're saying.

Yeah.

And that's very doable.

And a software company that has recurring revenue, you could get, if you had a salesperson

that cost you 150 grand a year and they are bringing in 500 grand a year, that's pretty

good because hopefully a lot of those folks are going to renew.

TV is there.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I've never built sales teams.

It's always something I've gladly not had to do.

Yeah.

A lot of right circumstance, it's obviously, it's great.

You know, if that's the model, if that's the growth engine, then you need to become a fucking

master of building sales teams or hiring people who have built sales teams before.

But that's what, what you just said is how most of the smart nerds who build the great

stuff think they go, oh, I don't want a sales team.

And I'm like, you do.

It's the same thing is I don't want to learn taxes and, you know, how to optimize that.

It's the same thing of like, Oh God, I got to incorporate and figure out if I should

be a C Corp or an LLC and I got to set up my blah, blah.

It's like the perceived schlep of doing it makes me just not want to do it at all.

It makes me want to be ignorant to it and makes me want to avoid it until I'm like,

Oh, the money is on the other side of that wall.

Okay.

Now I need to learn how to climb this wall.

And then I climb.

I'm like, Oh, that's not so bad.

Actually, I kind of like that wall.

That's a pretty useful little thing to get over here and get this pile of money.

And that's how I feel about taxes now.

That's how I feel about, that's how you feel about sales teams.

Yeah.

I feel that way about taxes too.

There's this company that I hung out with in Austin and I won't name their name, but

they have software and they have like a software company and they have like 200 employees and

like 150 of them were salespeople and they like grew it just like crazy.

And in my head, I'm like, as like someone who is a little bit more nerdy than I am

salesy, I'm like, uh, that you are selling paperware, but they got results.

So let me, okay, I'm going to give you two ideas that could use salespeople and I want

you to tell me what you think.

All right.

So I'm going to start with the one I'm more excited about.

Yeah.

I want to even get to the second one.

Let me, let me see if I can articulate why I'm excited about this.

So okay, at the last two companies I've done, I created a, so we use Slack as the primary

way the community, the company communicates and Slack's great.

Um, Slack did a great thing, which was you got us out of email and it got us out of direct

messaging where I just like, Oh, I'm going to bug Sam about this or create a giant group

for like everybody who's working on the marketing campaign or whatever, right?

And Slack created channels and channels were sweet because it's like, you make a channel

for the marketing, for marketing, that's where I go talk about the marketing campaign.

And whoever is interested, like a lot of people can see it, but nobody feels obligated to

reply.

So it's a really helpful way for information to spread inside a company.

But what I found was that there was a whole bunch of things that I just wanted to share

that like I didn't, didn't need to go into any specific channel.

And it wasn't like, I wasn't trying to create work by sharing it.

I just wanted to share a thought on my mind.

So I created this Slack channel in my Slack called Sean's inner thoughts.

And I branded it like that because I thought people would be curious what my inner thoughts

are.

And so I had a whole bunch of employees join that channel and really all it was is just

a place for me to dump random thoughts that I have about stuff, something I saw was cool,

something I thought we were doing, something I'm noticing, blah, blah, blah.

And um, and that was always well received.

And now after we got acquired, um, my coworker Jason did that at Twitch, he created Jason's

inner thoughts.

Like 80 people subscribed to this thing and it's kind of like just like a private Twitter.

Um, he just posts random stuff and sometimes people react to it, but nobody feels obligated

to respond.

And um, because that's like the, that's the norm of that channel.

And so I've been thinking about this, like, why isn't there a place to share stuff that

is like the stuff that didn't need to be shared necessarily, the non essential communication

of a company that, that does actually bring out interesting conversations.

It helps people bond because they see what you're all about, what you're into.

So the, the way I will phrase this is Twitter for companies, which is not a new idea.

So basically this is what Yammer was like, I don't know when Yammer started like a decade

ago.

So Yammer was started during like the social media hype phase.

It was like, oh shit, we have social networks, uh, for our friends and our family, we need

a social network for our company.

And they basically just copied the UI of Twitter slash Facebook and they were like, cool, it's

Twitter slash Facebook, but the only people that will see this are all your coworkers.

And so you, you know, you close a sales deal, you could post it there and a whole bunch

of people could react to it or get excited about it.

Um, or you could post a funny video from the, the, you know, the office kitchen and post

it there and it'd be relevant to all those people in that group.

So it's a kind of like the non work chatter and I think it got bought for a billion dollars

by Microsoft like three years after starting very quickly.

Yeah, so it grew super fast, like ridiculously fast because it was a social network inside

company.

So I had this amazing network effect and amazing in, in company virality and then it started

making money because they would then, first they just got the company that like employees

to start using it.

And then they went and they sold the keys of the, the car to the, to the admins and

they said, Hey, you know, all your employees are using this thing.

Um, don't you want to have some oversight over this and be able to manage and monitor

it a little bit?

Um, well here we have an admin tool that we'll, we'll charge you an arm and a leg for because

now your whole company's already addicted to this thing.

So the gets bought kind of gets shut down, kind of gets lost like many acquisitions do.

Yammer's not a thing anymore, blah, blah, blah.

I think that there's still a big need for this.

I would literally, if somebody, if there's a credible person out there that I'm going

to restart Yammer, I would write them a $50,000 check tomorrow and I would say, great.

I think there's a great need for this.

I think you could do a better job of it today than you could have done back then because

the tools are much better.

And I think there's a more need for this now that everybody's in the cloud because now

there is no office chatter because you're not in an office.

So let me read this online.

Let me pitch this a little differently.

Have I told you about what Washington, Washington Post is toying with?

You told me that they kind of have like a software arm where they're like making other

tools like.

I don't know if it's going to, yeah, I don't know if it's going to be any good, but they're

piloting it and it's what inspired me.

What I would do is I would build a media company.

It's almost like you have media companies or media websites, but only for internal stuff.

So you.

We talked with like the high school newsletter or high school newspaper company.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like that's what I would do.

It's like a weekly, like it's just a, it's like, here's what's going on in the company.

Here's what people are thinking.

Here's some ideas.

Like I, that's what I would build is I would build and I, I think at Airbnb, they built

their own for this at our company.

I tried building our own and it was just Google, like a Google website, everything's called.

But it's a solving a similar problem as to what you're describing, which is.

I love this idea.

I love that.

I love your idea.

Actually, even maybe more than my idea.

Like you could have podcasts.

You could just like a, you just have like Airbnb internal.com and you just either, you have

your login and it's just a, like we've aggregated all the happenings of the, of the business

going on.

And you can log in.

What's interesting here.

Is it what's happening as in like kind of company announcements, news, the metrics, that's

maybe a part of it.

Is it part of it?

Is it like a high school newspaper where somebody can just write an op-ed, you can just write

an article, um, if you're interested and like you basically contributed a column basically

for the day.

I think, I think, I think that is yes.

And but I would make it so where the thing about you said like a private Twitter is that

like some of these like the, when people think of like media or an article, they're like,

oh, that's a lot of work.

Then when I think of Twitter, they're like, Oh, I'm just going to do this in five minutes.

But the thing is, is that often those old five minute tweets add as much value or more than

a long article.

Absolutely.

And so you'd have to build it in such a way that like you can solicit this information

from your employees and in a low pressure way because someone like I have this woman

Becca who runs our email business, I'm like, you don't write this report, is this a good

idea or not?

Yes or no?

And why?

Just like riff, like you already, I already know you know off the top of your head, right?

Cause you're in the thick of it.

Something like that.

But where you have to make it like a little bit more knee jerk reaction.

Yeah.

You like the lightweight, low pressure Twitter, not or not blogs basically.

Yeah.

I mean, those are, both are important, but a lot of people undervalue those little just

like gut instinct things like you've described, like they're just like, but anyway, I agree

with you.

I do think that there's room for, there's room for that.

Yeah.

I like this a lot.

I'm excited about this.

Maybe I'll do this.

Maybe I'll do this.

We've talked about this with a, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of movement going

around.

Um, I Axios, the media company Axios, I actually somehow got my hands on a demo.

They're launching a product where they're doing internal newsletters in the concise

format that they use for their company.

Right?

Yeah.

It's not there yet.

Like it's cause it right now, the way that it's built out is it's like mail.

I'm like, I could just use MailChimp, but you're just allowing me to send emails to an

internal email list.

So they have to add more stuff to make it interesting.

But I understand the problem you're trying to solve for and I agree with you.

I think it's quite interesting.

Yeah.

I actually like the Axios thing, even if it is just a mail list, because people today

just use Google lists and Google lists are fucking awful.

They're awful to find.

Google groups is like miserable.

That whole process, the whole listserv is, is awful.

Then people reply, oh, and it's misery is that whole thing is terrible.

I'm going to make Google lists and listservs for companies less shit.

I'd be like, oh, wait, that's, that's so smart.

Why are you so smart?

That's what I would say to them.

And there's two interesting things about this.

If you get it done well, you can charge a lot of money, but the switching costs once

you start seem to be quite high.

And so you'd probably have a pretty good, like a low churn number and a high net retention

rate for revenue.

Like you could probably add a lot more people.

The more people your company hires, the more people who need access to it.

Yeah.

This thing could make money and okay, I like that a lot.

All right.

So two other quick ones.

So, so one thing I saw that was pretty clever that I think is a great example of a niche

product that somebody's doing to build like a lifestyle business.

I was on Reddit and I saw an ad that said, get notified when your company's mentioned

on Reddit.

Have you seen this?

I've seen things like it, but not that I'm like, so, so there's products like this that

are out there, like monitor Twitter, monitor, you know, newspapers, media, you know, Forbes

and shit to see when your company gets mentioned.

But this is a bigger, this is a bigger, sorry, is a more niche version of that, which is Reddit.

Reddit's its own little beast.

You kind of have to scrape it in its own way to be able to track things properly.

What's it called?

I don't even remember.

I saw an ad for it.

I was like, this is smart.

And I moved on, like, because I don't need that right now.

And I was like, if, you know, for most companies, I'd like for you guys, I bet, I bet the hustle

would want to know every time you get linked to a reference or on or on dig or anything

like that.

And so, so yeah, so I think that that's a really smart, simple idea that somebody could

do.

They're using Reddit ads to distribute it.

They all they had to do was really like focus on being able to track keywords on Reddit.

And then, you know, market to a bunch of companies who are like, yeah, actually, I do want to

know when there's a conversation about my brand going on on Reddit.

I do want to, I think interface, I think a brain you just find is a track Reddit.com.

If this wasn't it, this is just like it.

And Reddit is so huge now that you kind of, but it's still underestimated.

It's not as mainstream.

So the traditional tools don't typically take in Reddit, but Reddit is more influential

than, you know, any, you know, article actually is like, you know, just some general publication.

And so anyways, I thought it was a very simple, smart idea.

And I think if you're looking for like, how do I come up with an idea that I could build

in two weeks that I think could make me 250 grand a year or more, this would be a great

example of a simple app that I'm sure does that.

I just use like a no code version of building software, like a platform.

What's it called?

Bubble.

Bubble.

Oh my gosh.

Have you seen bubble?

Yeah.

Is that as...

Okay.

So can you give listeners background here?

Yeah, so bubble is one of the no code platforms.

That's pretty popular.

And I think bubble.io is the handle for it.

I found it Friday and I was like, is this...

And it's one of those...

So when we say no code, no code can mean a lot of things, but bubble is, is one of those,

it lets you build apps, not just websites.

So there's a lot of website builders, Squarespace, Wix, whatever.

What bubble does is it lets you actually have a backend.

So like for example, this weekend I built myself an app in no code in one hour as a challenge

to myself.

I wanted to have a meal tracking app, like a food journal.

And so I was like, oh, I want an app that just, I take a photo of what I eat and it shows

it on a grid.

And at the end of the day, I can see everything that I've eaten for the day.

And so I built myself a little thing.

I was going to use bubble.

I ended up using this other thing called a dollar.

And I actually built it.

Like you can have it.

If you download this app, you can see what I eat every day.

But I was like, this is amazing that I was able to do this thing where I'm like, I have

a UI.

You can use the phone camera.

It saves it in a database.

I don't know what the hell a database even is, but okay, you know, it's saved somewhere

and I can display it in an Instagram like feed.

And I was able to build that in an hour and I'm below average intelligence.

So I'm like, this is amazing.

Shit.

Now.

So, and you did that on that site?

Yeah.

I did it on something called a dollar because they let you actually make a mobile app.

So like I have an actual app now.

So you can see these, this is my food grid.

Wow.

And if I wanted to add something, I could just add like another one.

So what's this, what's the thing called that I mentioned bubble, man, I went to it.

It was so cool.

Um, I'm like, I don't know if they're promising too much and they can't deliver on it, but

it's still complicated, but it was certainly, it's definitely complicated.

I used the other one cause I thought it was simpler, but I think bubble can do way more.

So like there's people who are just going to specialize in bubble.

They're called no coders and they just learned these no code tools and they overcome the

learning curve on these things.

And they're not really traditional programmers, but they know how to use bubble and all these

other little random no code tools really well.

I thought it was awesome.

That thing, that was really cool to me.

What else you got?

Did I talk about this kids Etsy thing before?

No.

Okay.

So kids Etsy, what the fuck is kids Etsy?

So this is a half baked idea.

So I have a niece who's six or seven years old.

She's like, she wakes up and she just starts making shit all day.

She just like, okay, start doing art, then gets bored of art and decides I'm going to

make Legos and something gets bored of Legos and just takes a bunch of paper and we'll

make like a paper fort.

And then we'll do this like imaginary restaurant and like her whole day from like the moment

she wakes up to the moment she sleeps, she is just imagining, creating and just like building

random stuff.

And obviously it's mostly crap.

Like she'll do a drawing or she'll make a book.

She'll literally draw like 10 pages, you know, 10, 10 different pieces of paper, staple them

together, bind it.

And it's like, here's a book for you, Uncle Sean and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.

But of course, it's not actually amazing, right, because she's six and it's like kind

of crappy.

But I was like, you know, kids love making stuff.

They love arts and crafts.

It is one of the core things they do, but there's kind of this like, there's only so

much stuff you can put on the fridge.

And so I was like, wouldn't it be cool if you could also teach your kid like kind of like

a mini lemonade stand.

So what if you had kids at kids Etsy where they just push a button and they set up their

store and it's just a camera and they take a picture of the thing that they made and

that becomes a listing.

And then they can browse any pictures that other kids made and they can just click like

buy it.

You just create this little economy.

So every parent pays like 15 bucks a month that gives you like five tokens.

And then you use a token to buy something that somebody else made.

And then that kid gets excited.

It's like, whoa, you get a notification.

It's like, whoa, you know, Zoe in California just bought that little stupid book you made

or that little like book you made out of paper mache or whatever.

And then you're like, you have customers.

And so it's like this mini fake Etsy for kids that I think kids, I think it'd be really

cool to teach kids kind of like both arts and crafts and entrepreneurship to like own

a little store online.

And it's kids buying from kids.

What do you think of this idea?

I am so wonderful.

I'm so not in the know of this market.

Like someone told me about kids Uber, like when it launched, I was like that's for like

carpooling, like to school.

You mean?

Or like an Uber driver that you can put your children in and I was like, that's a stupid

shit ever.

That's a big thing now.

So is it when people love that, I don't know.

That's wild to me.

I'm the kids market is just so foreign and be like launching a company in China.

Like I just don't know anything about it.

I like because I see these like toy review sites and they just crush.

I see, you know, this is how I feel when you tell me about like Henry Ford in 1903.

I'm like, dude, I don't know, man, I have no, I just don't have the, I don't have the

insights on this.

Like I just don't know.

And it sounds like you're not around kids a whole lot.

Not at all.

And I don't understand like, I, I understand, I understand the idea of like, you'll do anything

for your children.

Okay, get it.

Like that's the only thing that matters.

I feel a little bit of that with my, some of my nephews and it's like, okay, I'll give

them anything to make them happy.

Right.

I get it.

I get it from that perspective.

But like, it's like, do kids want to buy other children's books?

Yeah, I don't know if they, that's the part I don't know, like, do, do, do they actually

want like other kids junk or they only like their own junk because it's all junk.

But the reason I thought this might be interesting is because they do this at school.

So like, you, you remember like science fair, where it's like, everybody makes kind of a

crappy thing.

And then you get to stand by your little volcano and everyone walks by and you get this good

feedback of like, oh, cool, you know, whatever, and somebody wins a prize.

Um, so my, my niece's school did like an in-person version of this where people would make stuff

and then they could count, they, it was like a school fair and all the vendors were just

other kids.

So you brought all the stuff you made and you're at the kids fair and you can go walk

around and see what the other kids made.

And some people are actually pretty good at it and some people are really bad at it.

And you could kind of barter or exchange or like buy, you know, each other's stuff and

the parents are happy to pay a little bit just to give each other the good feeling.

It's like burning man.

I'll bring a little bit of money and then like, we all have the good, you, every kid

gets the good feeling of getting to buy and sell an item.

And so I was like, oh, that'd be cool to just do online at scale, basically.

And I bet some kids are actually amazing at building stuff and they would be kind of the

star Etsy shops that would like actually be making cool bracelets and stuff that other

kids want.

But I think for the most part, it's about the good feeling of having your kid make something,

post it, get good feedback from other people where they want your thing or they buy your

thing and having that feedback loop, and I think parents would just pay a subscription.

And then the actual buying and selling is all funny money.

That's just check-e-cheese tokens.

But I think you could get, you know, thousands of parents to pay 15 bucks a month to have

their kid be on this platform.

That's wild.

Let's get someone to make it.

Yeah, it's cool.

Let me bring up one more thing.

Yeah.

I heard about this.

This is all rumors, but I did some digging.

I can't find any verification.

This guy I'm friends with on Facebook, he owns this company called Golden Hippo.

Have you heard of Golden Hippo?

No.

Drunken Hippo.

Okay.

You probably have never heard of Golden Hippo.

If you go to Golden Hippo, all it says is we build brands that make the world a better

place.

Okay.

And I'm like, that could be anything.

And so what they do is they partner with, like, for example, they have this one doctor

called Dr. Marty.

And I don't know if this is scammy or not.

The Dr. Marty sell is a line of pet food.

They also have this other doctor that sells like something for your gut.

So like potentially scammy stuff, but all those ads that you see at the bottom of Breitbart

or Fox or CNN, they buy all these outbreaks ads and they use long form copywriting to

get people to buy pet food and things like that.

And they do about a billion dollars a year in sales.

The companies that Golden Hippo supports?

They own those companies.

They own.

Oh, these are their companies.

I believe they own about 12 of them.

Did you say a billion dollars a year in sales?

I did.

And your friend owns this thing?

He's on Facebook friends with them.

I don't chat with them on regular basis.

But and then I did.

I want to see one of their brands.

They like don't list their brands on their website.

What's a brand?

Yeah.

And when I heard what I said, they have 800 employees and they don't list their brands

on their website.

I was like, oh, this is awesome.

Right.

Google Dr. Marty.

That is one of them.

Dr. Martin.

And I think they're, I don't mean to like disparage them.

I think they are legit, a legit company or they are, they are a legit company.

I just don't know any of their brands.

Interesting.

I have another one called, there's this one doctor.

It's like a white guy doctor with a fucking, I'll look him up.

Dr. Sue, I don't know who this guy, Steve Gundry, G U and D R Y.

So Google Steven Gundry, Dr. Steve, Dr. Gundry's books and podcasts, and he sells books on

a family cookbook book for the crock pot.

He sells, it's just all types of crap.

It's just freaking crazy.

These guys like, it's just so funny to hear about these people that aren't in the mainstream

are kind of behind this.

Here's what's interesting.

All right.

So I go to Dr. Marty, right?

He's got an ad, he's running an ad around this article that's called three dog behaviors

caused by a poor diet.

Now the ad is actually going to a different website called caninecodes.com, not his sales

website.

So Dr. Marty writes this article, Marty Goldstein DMV, I don't know, DVM, I don't know what

that means, Dr. Veterinary Medicine, maybe.

What does your dog's behavior actually mean?

And he's talking about this stuff.

And then how does this link to their dog food?

I'm sure it's somewhere here.

You probably give them your email, but like, all right, if you go to GundryMD.com, you'll

see his website and he sells something called Vital Reds, which is concentrated polyphenol

blend.

I have no idea what that is.

I'm looking at their website and it's $70 for one jar.

I'm looking at their website.

According to a similar web, they get north of 2 million visitors a month.

If you get north of 2 million visitors a month to a store that sells a $60 product, you're

probably most likely crushing it.

Right.

So this guy seems legit.

So Dr. Stephen Gundry, he's a renowned heart surgeon and a New York Times bestselling author

of the plant paradox and the plant paradox cookbook.

Okay.

I thought for a second, they're just making up fictional like Aunt Jemima or like, you

know, Colonel Sanders.

I didn't, I didn't know if they were like trying to create like characters or if these

are actual, like actual doctors.

No, I think they're like Dr. Oz types, but I don't know.

But this guy, GundryMD, he sells supplement skin and hair care food, dog food, books and

magazines.

And they're not, the websites aren't slick.

Yeah, not at all.

And Tony Robbins is an endorse, he endorses them.

It's just crazy.

Like I said with Henry Ford, I love seeing things that break my frame.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting this.

It's like, my brain is like, I'm struggling to even talk cause I'm just like, my brain's

like breaking and trying to re-figure out, okay, what is this new, new, new information

that I need to process and figure out what the hell this was for and, you know, why am

I not doing this?

But I can tell you, like people have emailed me and I, I'm almost 100% positive.

They're pushing a billion dollars a year in sales.

They have 800 employees.

This is all in the last door.

And I looked them up on Reddit and it says, golden hippo media is constantly hiring copy

writers and constantly hiring media buyers.

And I've seen this Dr. Gundry all over the place on these outbrains.

So I know what they do is it would be interesting.

We should like find out who are the top advertisers on Outbrain because I think Outbrain is something

everything.

If you know, if you don't know about it, you're like, what the fuck's Outbrain?

If you know about it, you're like, oh, fucking Outbrain.

And you just like disregard it.

But like, look, there's a reason Tabula and Outbrain, like there's a reason they make

all this money.

There's a reason people are spending money on these ads because they're working.

So who are these advertisers?

Who are their top 10 advertisers?

What I would want to know.

And I, you know, I bet I would have my brain broken five more times in that list.

So I just did a quick Google editors choice.com is the largest advertiser on Outbrain, followed

by Edmunds.com, which is cars, cars, yeah, followed by health grades.com.

Have you been to editors choice.com?

What is this?

I have no idea.

It's like bootleg WordPress site with like random articles.

It gets 10 million unique visitors a month.

I must have typed something wrong.

This is no, no, you're right.

I went there too.

It's crazy, man.

It's crazy.

Okay.

No, no, no.

Now I went to the right site.

I don't know where I was before I was on a healthier patriot.com buys 1% of Outbrain ads.

I'm telling you, there's a lot going on in the world that like we just don't even think

about.

I can't even, I can't even get to the website of healthier patriot.

I don't know what.

If you, if you Google it, the first thing comes up with, this is a scam.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I can't find the actual website.

Oh, I saw it was a scam alert.

Okay.

Weird.

I need to, I need to spend more time on this.

It's crazy.

Like there's a lot of stuff going on.

Dude, this is turning into a true crime serial type of podcast where we get to the bottom

of these businesses.

Um, Maggie Q, have you heard of Maggie Q?

No.

Yeah.

I think that's another one they have.

That's an actress activated you.com.

And like the personality type is this woman named Maggie Q and they sell probiotics.

And this website is one of, I think Golden Hippo's website.

So much so that when they sell so much stuff that I Googled them, they opened up a massive,

I think 20 or 30,000 or 40,000 something huge square foot warehouse and met this.

But where are you seeing?

Okay.

So they're hiring a bunch of cooperators.

What are you seeing that they need all these cooperators?

So I see some blog posts, sure, but they're not like doing sales pages.

Like you just don't, it's always, you always go to the side door.

The sales pages are for where you send, you send paid media to the side doors and those

side doors that work best are long form copywriting.

So if you go to Outbrain, go to Breitbart.com with your ad blocker off and scroll to the

bottom and you will 100% see an ad bought by Agora, which does long form sales pages

to get you to buy a $5 book or give you their email.

Oh my God, Sam, now I got a whole bunch of stuff I got to do today just to, just to get

my head around this.

Okay.

So you've given me my homework.

Crazy, right?

It's freaking crazy.

We'll come back to it on, well, we have Andrew Wilkinson coming on Thursday.

So maybe we can bring this up to him and get his opinion.

I, it's weird, man.

It's weird.

I just love having my frame broken and this will break anyone's, most anyone's frame.

Yeah, for sure.

Okay.

Cool.

I'm excited for the rest of the week.

We've got Andrew Wilkinson.

We also have the CEO of Barstool coming on.

So that's going to be exciting.

Yeah.

We're recording that on Wednesday, right?

Yeah.

That'll come out, I think next week.

All right.

Well, uh, we good?

Yeah, we're good.

Let's go.

Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on.

So nobody just linked this tweet thread that we got to read.

So 10 things we've learned at Golden Hippo after spending over $1 billion, parentheses,

of our own money on online media.

That's Craig.

I've talked to Craig.

Yeah.

He seems like a nice guy.

I've hung out with him at a conference.

He, I don't know if he still owns it, but he owned it.

Okay.

So this is interesting.

Um, he says the, the, the idea that you might, they must see your ads seven times before

they buy is the biggest line of BS and advertising history, uh, no matter how long you've been

doing this, what you think will work is often wrong.

Great.

I had great ad ideas come from anyone.

Influencer marketing is for companies that like burning money.

Your customer cares literally zero about your company, your story, your brand, or even your

product.

What they do care is what it can do for them.

Don't fight this.

Embrace this.

Okay.

So this guy, Craig, is he a cool guy or what?

Let's have him on.

Yeah.

Um, I'll message him right now.

I met, I'm texting him right now.

All right.

So, uh, on the podcast, we've talked about this million dollar idea thing.

How, what did we say, Sean?

Yeah.

Thought exercise, something you could build in two weeks that can drive over $3 million

of revenue within, I don't know, three months, let's call it.

And you can't spend like $3 million to get it, right?

So you can't like spend on ads like that much.

So the budget restraint was, so it's two weeks to build $3 million as your goal within three

months, let's say, and a $10,000 initial investment.

That was the, that was the thought exercise.

And we are going to bring our ideas to the table up for that.

I have a couple of thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think, what you've

been thinking for, not, not ideas yet, but just about this experiment sounds like a ton

of work.

I'll do it for fun.

So maybe in the next couple of weeks, we'll actually address this and do this.

If you want to participate in this tweet at Sean or I and let us know if this gets

like a ton of interest, we'll actually follow through with this.

Yeah, it turned out to be harder than I thought to think about this stuff and I'm a professional

thinker about stuff for, for, for a living.

So I was like, okay, I actually need to sit down and do this.

I can't do it off the top of my head.

And I wanted to come to the table with something interesting that's actually relevant and not

like, you know, a total knee jerk half baked answer, but I'm actually going to break it

down into three groups.

The first one is the exact thing that we just said, two weeks to build $3 million in three

months of revenue and $10,000 initial investment.

The other part of that first one is you can't use your personal assets.

So I can't say like, oh, I just invest in this company or I would, you can't use the

hustle to like, you know, do some crazy shit.

It's like just you as an individual person without using your other resources.

So the second thought experiment is if I had to make a million dollars in the next two

months using my existing resources, how would I do it?

Which is less relatable to a listener, but more related, more relevant to us.

Cause we like, why would we take the hard path?

We would actually take the easier path, which would be to use our actual assets.

So that would be the next thing that that's the second thought experiment.

And then the third one that I'm thinking about is the same like sort of overall criteria,

but with a larger budget for the initial spend.

So if I knew I was going to make $3 million, you know, I would actually be willing to put

up up to, you know, let's say half a million or a million dollars as my marketing budget

behind something.

And so that's the, that's the third one.

Now I'm going to come to the table with answers for all three of those buckets, but I need

time to think about it.

Same in all categories.

And if you guys are like truly into this, we, uh, we're, me and Sean are, are men of

the people.

So if we got to see what your, your responses, right, right on.

Okay.

Cool.

We've addressed the elephant in the room.

Awesome.

Okay.

Cool.

I'm going to go swim, but this is fun.

All right.

Tough life.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.