My First Million: Companies of One that Make Millions with Steph Smith

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.

This is awesome.

Ben texted me or like slacked me while we were doing this and he goes, Steph's been

spitting fire for the last 50 minutes.

So this is badass.

About to see my first a million, got to the safe and the spilling up, got to the bank

is not big enough.

Got to see my first a million, million, million.

My first a million.

Add another zero to that price, buddy.

My first a million.

The way to do it is to be different.

To the way to be different is to be completely you.

I am human optimization.

Look at me.

Don't figure this out.

Cheers, bro.

And the stakes are up now.

My first a million.

I'm good.

How are you?

I'm good.

All right.

You're back.

Sean is on a family vacation and you are the sub and I think it's a good sub.

So you sent me this document that we're going to go through a ton of stuff.

There's so much stuff on here.

How are you?

Is this like a list that you've been keeping for months or is this just you made this just

for this?

This is part of a list.

I've been keeping for months.

I keep this list in my Evernote that just every time I see a new idea, whether it's

from like a newsletter or something you guys talk about on my first million that I want

to respond to, I just have a running list.

So this is probably like a quarter of that bigger list.

What?

This is 15 pages.

How many words?

Yeah.

Just what we have here is like 10,000 words.

We should share this.

I mean, at least parts of it because we're not going to get through all of this.

This is amazing.

If I was you, I wouldn't share this.

I would charge people for it.

This is good.

I mean, there's definitely things that I'm excluding from here.

You know, you don't share the ones that you actually want to build.

You told me one time that you want to become a billionaire.

I think I want to.

We'll see if that actually happens.

Well, I said, who cares if it happens or not, but you said that's what you wanted.

What are you going to do to become that?

I mean, I feel like if I ever become a billionaire, we're going to talk hopefully about Tyler

Perry later.

It has to come from building something on my own.

I need to have equity in something like you don't become a billionaire from working for

a company and buying ETFs.

Well, there's a few examples, but the likelihood of becoming a billionaire is slim to none.

The likelihood of becoming a billionaire by being an early employee somewhere is much

slimmer of that subset, but it's possible.

It's definitely possible.

Should we talk about these companies of one, which I feel like are kind of anti, not anti-billionaire,

but a different approach to building?

Yes.

And I actually don't think they're anti-billionaire.

I think you can become a billionaire this way, but just so people know.

So this is Steph Smith.

Steph, you work at The Hustle.

You basically helped me start Trends and you ran it for a while and you still kind of run

it, but you also do a bunch of other different projects.

And you have this Gumroad book called Doing Content, right?

Is that right?

Yep.

And it made like 150 Gs in the first year or something like that, right?

Yep, exactly.

And you are the...

So we aren't really partners anymore, but I felt like when we...

When you ran Trends, I viewed it a little bit like a partnership.

So I've worked with you pretty closely for a while.

Now we're just friends, but is that all accurate?

What am I missing?

I think so.

Yeah.

I build stuff on the side for fun, taught myself to code a couple of years ago, and now I also

have a podcast.

So if people like what they hear here, it's called the shit you don't learn in school.

That's my little plug.

And you are very...

You and I are similar in that.

It's kind of like Sean.

There's like this overlap of things that are very, very similar between us, but there's

things that are very different in that what you're different about is that you sweat the

details like crazy and you're pretty technical in the sense of like...

I really think it's just...

You're just smarter than me.

Like you can just figure things out.

I don't know if that's true.

You can just figure certain things out.

So your research is actually typically more like in depth and technical than my research.

And I like that.

Thanks.

I mean, I don't know if I actually sweat the details.

But if anyone knows me closely, like if you'd ask Cal, he'd be like, no, she's like a mess.

So I appreciate that I come off that way.

So let's talk about companies of one.

So you have a list of like 10 or seven companies that are run by one person that are shockingly

big.

Let's go through some of them and talk about them.

Yeah.

So I think you called out two before, so I'm going to just call out those two quickly.

You called out built with before, which is the site that basically can tell what a site

is built with.

Like WordPress or Squarespace or what plugins is it is a site using.

And that one at the time when you found it was, I think, doing around 14 million.

And then you've also covered Nomad list and remote okay by Peter levels.

And those two, I think together are doing around a million a year.

And those two, I think are both completely solo founders.

I know Peter certainly is, but there are a couple others.

So have you heard of Agmonk?

Well, hold on.

So built with, so people know, built with is like maybe one of the most impressive ones

here, but not the, but one of built with is like, it's like a, I think they have a

plugin as well, but it's a website you go to built with.com, you enter in the hustle.co.

Let's say you want to, you, you see something on our website that you like and you want

to copy and you're like, how'd they build that?

What plugins did they use?

What, whatever you use built with and they make money because what do they do?

I think like sell people's data or something.

I'm not sure.

Actually, let me look this up because I know they get a crazy amount of traffic like they've

got plans on their site.

So they've got a basic plan, I don't know what you get with it, but it's $295.

Oh, I know what you get.

You get basically, I believe you sign up and it tells you people's.

So it, it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have

on their website and what type of plugins.

And I think you pay money and it'll say, we have the emails or contact information of

all types of people who use blank plugin and you sell a plugin that is complimentary to

that, therefore pay money and you could now target them and advertise against them or

things like that.

Yeah.

They charge.

So their basic plan is $3,000 a year.

Their pro is $5,000.

Their team is $10,000.

There's a cool little trick they have on their pricing page.

If you go to it and you hover over, they have like technologies, keywords, and they have

these little gifs that they're actually like showing what you would get with the product.

I've never actually seen that before.

So that's a cute little hack.

And it's built by basically one guy in Australia.

All right.

So what are some of the other companies?

Okay.

So I was going to call it Ugg Monk.

So this one's not as big.

I actually don't know exactly how much they're making, but it's a really simple e-commerce

store.

They started just selling really nice t-shirts, which sounds like, okay, like there's enough

t-shirt stores out there.

But this guy, Jeff Sheldon, he focused on just really high quality shirts.

And then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff.

If you, are you in the dock?

I'm looking at Ugg Monk.

So when I go to Ugg Monk, I see like a pen holder and I see like a to-do list, like a,

it's like cute, well-designed like pen holders, which doesn't sound neat, but it honestly,

it looks pretty sick.

Yeah.

It looks surprisingly sick.

If you go to, let me, if you click in the dock where it says, look at this, if you click

that, that is his setup.

And he, he's like one of those builders who I think has built a little Twitter following

as well, and he just has this beautiful desk setup, which is like the perfect ad.

And I-

Oh, I've seen this.

It looks awesome.

I never thought I'd want to go and buy like a $100 to-do list, but I, I think I'm gonna

buy one.

Yeah.

I, it's just like cute, easy to use, like mid-century modern stuff.

Yeah.

I'm on board.

How much revenue does he do?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure he does several million a year.

He gets over 200,000 page views a month and he's been going at this for several years.

So I know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago and he's grown

a lot since then.

So I'd probably say a couple mil.

Wow.

That's crazy.

All right.

That's a, that's a good find.

It's just one guy.

He's the only employee.

I think so.

I mean, he's certainly, he probably has some staff now that he's been growing, but I'm

pretty sure he doesn't have a big team.

All right.

What's next?

All right.

Card is actually one guy.

He's not one of the contractors, but Card, C, A, R, R, D. I've built sites with Card.

People probably recognize Card, or they've almost certainly been on a site built by Card

and it's built by this guy, AJ, and it's doing $1 million a year AR.

I think he actually just raised money now.

So I think he's kind of going for- Did he really just raise money?

I would love to invest in this.

Yeah.

You raised money earlier this year.

He was like big in the indie hacker community.

And then I think he posted on indie hackers this year, like, look, I'm, I'm going to raise

money.

I'm going to, you know, really go for it.

He, it's kind of crazy.

2.5 million sites have been built on Card.

What?

And yeah.

So Card is like a million AR.

So it's a free platform for building simply, for building simple, fully responsive, one-page

websites that can do anything.

I actually think, so there, there was this company called, you remember about me?

No.

What is that?

About.me.

So go to about.me.

That's the URL.

You don't remember that.

I'm just a little bit older than you, which, which is like, then that few years probably

makes a difference because about.me, when I was just getting started was considered

like the preeminent builder in this space.

And they made it, it was a one-page website where you can explain stuff about you.

And it was started by this guy named Tony Conrad, I believe his name is, and he's this

cool looking dude who is also an investor now.

And he sold it after only two years to AOL for like $40 million and it was bootstrapped.

You see about.me?

You see how it's like basically the same thing.

Yeah.

It reminds me of, you've heard of Unsplash, right?

I love Unsplash.

So, or sorry, I'm not thinking of Unsplash, I'm talking about Unfold.

Unfold is this app that basically for Instagrammers, it adds different, like it allows you to

kind of piece together pictures for your Instagram story, but they also started these like one-pagers

more basically because all these Instagrammers, they're like, oh, I need my link in bio.

Link in bio is also a site like that, but Unfold was sold to Squarespace, I think like

last year or something.

I don't know for how much though.

Man, I think that these one-page website builders are actually really cool.

So there's this other business I almost invested in.

I think it's called themediacits.com or.co.

I believe it's just called Media Kit.

And all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could create your

media kit and send it to people.

And whether you're the Hustle or you're just an Instagram person, you just had the Hustle.co

slash media kit or like, you know, StephSmith.com slash media kit.

And it was that your media kit was on there.

And that sounds like not that important, but it's kind of like DocSend.

So DocSend, if you don't know what DocSend is, DocSend is basically, all it is is PowerPoint

in the cloud, but email gated, so you have to enter your email and then you get all types

of information.

So you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you want to send it to investors

so you know who has it and who views it and how long they've used it.

And it's basically that.

So anyway, Card is pretty badass.

That actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here, I think.

Yeah.

And I mean, he actually runs Card as a subscription business.

So that's 1 million ARR.

And I think it's probably way past that today.

I think you're going to like the next one, though.

Go to this nextepisode.net.

I think it's actually next-episode.net.

It's such an old site.

I think the guy's been running it for 15 years.

And if you just open it up, you'll get a sense about the UI hasn't caught up to where we

are today, but it's amazing because this guy's been running it for 15 years.

Guess how much traffic this thing gets.

I'm looking at it on similar web.

This is crazy.

So what is this called?

So next-episode.net.

What is this?

Yeah.

I think we're basically like, there's no way I would think that a site like this would

still exist, but people use it.

That basically helps you track your TV shows and it's a little bit of a community.

So I think I've never used it, but you know, people watch The Bachelor, they hang out on

this site and they find other people who watch The Bachelor and they talk about it.

But it's kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets.

This is awesome.

And so here's why I know this is a big business.

So if you go to similar web and you look at the traffic, the estimated monthly traffic

is 3.6 million uniques a month.

That's decent.

That's not like the best, but it's like really good, particularly for one person.

But if you go to traffic source, it says that 80% is coming from direct traffic, which basically

means that there's a lot of people that are just typing in this URL and going there on

a consistent basis.

And if you do that, you probably can have a huge business and it looks like they have

got a premium, which is only $2 a month.

But how big is this?

So I don't know exactly how big it is, but he's been running it for 15 years and I know

he's definitely, I found him on Hacker News, one of those posts that was like, hey, who's

a solopreneur who's doing this thing on their own?

And he's like, I've worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years.

So.

What?

This is crazy.

Good find.

I can't.

Wait, so what's this person's name?

Do you know?

Let me send you.

Here he is.

I found him.

Nikolay.

Yeah.

Wow.

This is a good find.

How much revenue do you think he does on this?

I don't know about today, but I'm assuming like if he's getting that many million pages

and he's been working on it for 15 years, I'd say like maybe a million a year.

What do you think?

Yeah.

I would agree with that.

And it's probably mostly all profit.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, he's literally the only one who works on it in one of the posts on Hacker

News.

He's like, yeah, I started it for myself because I couldn't find such a tool back in the day

and basically he's like avoided hiring other people because he doesn't want to like scale

through hiring.

All right.

What else do we got?

There's a ton on here.

There's some, there's one called Hostify by a guy named Riley who basically, you know,

has scaled that to like a million a month and a year or two.

There's some good stories from back in the day where apparently SurveyMonkey was doing

$19 million in revenue with 12 employees, so not a one person thing, but plenty of fish

is another example where they were doing currently $10 million and the guy was by himself.

He might have even been part-time.

So that's kind of a crazy story from back in the day too.

How did, how do you know this about SurveyMonkey?

So it was posted, it was actually you posted about built with a while ago, I think.

And then I went through all of the comments of you basically, you were like, can anyone

tell me something more efficient than that?

And this guy named Trip posted, yeah, SurveyMonkey was doing 19 million with 12 employees and

you asked him if this was documented.

And basically someone else commented and was like, yeah, Trip's too modest to say this,

but he actually invested in SurveyMonkey in 2009.

So he probably knows the numbers.

Wow.

This is amazing.

I've heard this, I've heard rumors about SurveyMonkey doing this.

This is crazy.

This is so cool.

So did I tell you about how, I told you about Craigslist, right?

So the hustle, our very first office, it was this apartment, it basically, it looked like

a town home, like a typical San Francisco town home, but it was zoned as business.

And on the bottom was a piano teacher in the middle, it was like a three story town home,

but they like divvied it up into apartments.

So the bottom one was a piano teacher.

The middle one was this company called Nugs.net and Nugs.net sells, it's like a marketplace

where you can trade like fish and Grateful Dead like CDs that you recorded at their concerts.

And above that was Craigslist and Craigslist moved out and we moved in and this was in

2016, I think, and which means Craigslist at the time, the landlord told me, he goes,

they were making around $300 million in revenue and they worked out of this little office

and this office was so small.

It was basically a three or two bedroom apartment.

And he was like, there's basically like 14 people here and that was the whole company.

And they were so cheap.

Craig was so cheap that the rent, the rent I was paying was like 500 and I split it with

my friend, C.A.va.

But so the rent for the whole place was probably only $2,000.

So they're paying two or three grand in rent for this place when they were that big.

And they were so cheap that in the lease, apparently it said like toilet paper is provided

by landlord and every once in a while, I think his name was Ishmael.

He would forget to or Emmanuel, I forget it was like this old Jewish guy, he would forget

to put the toilet paper in replenish it and they wouldn't pay the rent.

They go, until we get the toilet paper, you're not getting the rent.

And additionally, Craig worked out his, I used Craig's room because it had a kitchen

table in one of the bedrooms that he used as his desk.

It was like this ugly kitchen table that was like his desk, but it was really heavy and

they couldn't move it and they just left it there.

And that was my desk for a long time was just like weird kitchen table.

And that was out of the Craigslist office and that's how scrappy they were.

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So I mentioned Peter Lovells before, he's a friend of mine from Bali.

He once tweeted about this, so I don't feel bad sharing it, but he used to walk around

with this like, you know, those bags that you get at a grocery store, the like plastic

bags that are like a dollar.

So you'd think that some guy making like a million bucks a year, all profit is going

to like upgrade his lifestyle.

He would carry his laptop around in one of those bags and like that's it.

And you'd see him walking around in flip-flops and a t-shirt and you'd be like, dude, like

respect because like you make a lot of money and everyone knows that because you have that

open page, but he's like walking around with like a grocery store bag as his laptop holder.

That's stupid.

That's very stupid.

It ruined your laptop.

All right.

What are some other smaller ones?

All right.

So I want to call it a couple.

These are actually also some people I know from Bali.

So it's kind of cool when you live in a place like Chengu because you're just running into

people just like this.

So one of them is the thing called Banner Bear.

So if you click on the link where it says Banner Bear, that's their open page.

So a lot of these people also create these cool open pages like the ones from Nomad List.

But I wanted to show you this one because if you scroll down, if you're on the page,

do you see the motor?

I can't even say it, the Moto Meter.

Yeah.

What is this?

So I'm looking at basically a pictures of motorcycles.

Yeah.

Of like nice Triumph motorcycles.

So basically like he's got his revenue and you can see his MRR and it's pretty impressive.

He's at around an error of 300,000, I think he only started this.

You can see in sometime in 2020.

But he kind of rethought the open page and he was like, you know what, I don't want to

just show my revenue.

I want to show people like what I want to spend this on.

So he loves motorcycles and he has like these different goals.

So like if he hits a certain MRR, he like unlocks a new motorcycle.

And so I thought that was just like a kind of cool, cool little thing.

And you can see just like Peter, he shows all of his data.

Like you've had the number of trials per month, his churn, obviously the Moto Meter, his

GitHub commit activity.

So I think that's pretty cool because like I think years ago there was some people showing

their like open revenue, but now people are kind of like rethinking what they can share.

What the hell is Banner Bear?

This is so cool looking.

What does it do?

So basically I think it's like, it's basically like an API for generating images.

So do you know how like we could have used this at trends, honestly, do you remember

we would run events and we'd have to like go on fiverr and like, you know, it would kind

of, it wasn't very expensive, but it takes some time and you're like, oh man, like we

should just have like an image template for all of our events and it has like a certain

background, a certain theme.

And so he's made it possible to basically generate images based on certain inputs.

So you don't have to like go and hire a designer to do that.

You can like auto generate images.

And so some people use this for like social media, right?

So you have like a certain theme that aligns with your brand and you're just like adjusting

like all of your blog posts to like use banner bear instead of going and hiring a designer

to create an image for each one.

This guy's site is beautiful.

He reminds me of, how do you say that Peter levels guy?

Is that, is it Peter?

Yep.

He reminds me of that.

This guy looks like an artist.

Yeah.

I mean, I think what's cool about all of these folks is like they do the whole stack.

Like I guess you have to as a company is one, but they do like the marketing, they do the

design, they do the development.

And what's cool is that like, because they're not necessarily experts quote unquote in these

spaces, like they're just kind of hacking it together.

I find they're actually a lot more creative, right?

So they're like, they're not like constrained by the marketing degree that they had, you

know, before.

And so Peter is like another example where he's, he pretty consistently does pretty cool

things on marketing or on Twitter.

For example, recently he like, instead of paying $10,000 for ads, he's like, I'm just

giving $10,000 away to like someone who retweets this and it got like 11,000 retweets, which

obviously is like much more than he would have spent on ads.

This and this website banner bear, it was launched in 10 of 2019.

So let's round up to be 2020.

So let's say it started in 2000, January of 2020.

That means it's what?

Two years old?

Yep.

Is growing pretty well.

Does it say his growth rate?

I mean, this could be pretty, this could be a really good business.

Yeah.

I mean, and it's just him, I think he like might have hired like a part-time customer

service person, but yeah, it's going really well.

Wow.

This is amazing.

How big do you think this could get?

I think pretty big because it's actually like, you know, it's one of those niche problems

that you're like, what, like you're going to create a product that auto generates images.

Like who needs that?

But then you actually think like, wow, every company that has a blog has to generate all

these images on mass, every company that runs something on social media, like I think the

reason it's working is it's actually, even though it seems like a niche problem, it's

a problem that most companies have.

Wow.

All right.

You want to pick a couple more?

We can just call out one more, which is, have you heard of headline?

No, what's that?

How do you find all this stuff, by the way?

Well, like I said, I combed through some of the threads that you posted before, but headline,

banner bear, nomad list, like these are all people who were nomadic.

And I think it's like the indie hacker community and the nomad community overlap because they're

both kind of like rebellious in a way.

They're like, I don't need to live in one place or like, I don't need to raise venture

capital.

And so I think there's an overlap there.

And so yeah, most of these guys are people that I used to like co-work with in Bali.

Wow.

Okay.

So what's headline?

So headline is a super, super simple app, but Danny, the guy who built it, built it in

like a couple months and within a year, he sold it for seven figures.

So all it was is it was using AI to generate kind of like landing page headlines or copy.

And so if you look at the landing page, it kind of looks like a much more complex product,

but it's actually pretty simple.

And if you've heard of copy.ai, I think there's like similar elements to it.

Oh, hey, look, on the website of headline, they use my name.

They're writing it.

Wait, really?

I just noticed that you must have seen this before.

I've never seen this.

This guy's using my name.

I've never, that's so funny.

Is he trying to tell me to use this?

I don't know because I also don't know.

Like I said, he sold this.

So I don't know if he put that there, if the new founders put it there.

God, that's so funny.

Why is my face on here?

Whatever.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Well, this is just like a super simple one where it's like, I love, it's like perfect

example of like just being scrappy, building something.

The exited seven figures within I think eight months is pretty crazy.

And yeah, I just, I think one theme is just like, these people find like a niche problem

that isn't, or at least seems niche, they solve it has to be an existing problem that

people want solved.

I think the thing that a lot of people do wrong when they're trying to like do their

own little startup is they look for things that like don't really exist.

But these are like perfect examples where it's like, of course people need sites to

like house their, their work.

And of course people need like nice t-shirts and productivity stuff.

Of course people need like landing page copies.

So I think that's the like one learning for me.

How did this guy build this?

He built it in the open on Twitter.

So he just coded it and he would like keep giving updates.

And then I think he launched it on Product Hunt, like pretty classic launch strategy.

But I think it kind of blew up after Product Hunt and then he sold it.

But it's just built on top of that GPD three thing.

Yep.

Wow.

All right.

So I can't believe that.

Good.

Fine.

You want to try something else?

Yeah.

Let's talk about just a couple of these.

So another thing that I did, which kind of overlaps with what we talked about is just

like sites that have a surprising amount of traffic.

So sites that you're like, wait, really?

Like there's no way.

And then you look it up and you're like, wow, I guess like, you know, 20 million people

a month actually looked this up.

So one of them I want to show you is called glitching deals.

Have you heard of glitching?

No.

What's that mean?

Okay, so you know how like, of course, e-commerce is popping off.

A lot of companies have e-commerce sites.

Not all of them have fully functioning e-commerce sites.

So sometimes they glitch, right?

So sometimes an airline will, you know, show a flight for like 20 bucks, that's really

meant to be 200.

Sometimes, you know, there'll be something that's a dollar and it's like really supposed

to be a hundred.

It's just like a decimal place error.

And this happens all the time, right?

And apparently, according to the law, like if you advertise it for a certain amount,

like you have to sell it for that amount.

So there are all these sites that basically look for glitches.

And I found this out because I was at my partner's like family home for Christmas last year.

And I remember his aunt being like, Hey, do you want like a podcast mic?

And I was like, I don't like, sure.

I don't know.

Like why do you have, she's like, I've got 30.

Like I just don't have to give them away.

And I'm like, what do you mean you have 30?

And I guess she found a glitch in one of these groups.

And yeah, like she just got 30 podcast mics that like she, she got for free.

So free.

It was free.

In that case, it was free.

Most of the time it's just like a crazy wild deal that the company didn't mean to do.

So like I need to buy, I'm trying to up my game and get that garage fridge.

You know, I'm talking about that garage fridge so I can store all my meat.

And so I, uh, on here, they've got a $25 garage fridge.

I need that.

No way.

Yeah.

And that's how you know, you make it when you get a garage fridge and they have one

for $50.

And it looks kind of complicated to use though.

Yeah.

So I have to say, I've never actually glitched myself.

I think it's one of those like rabbit holes that like the same way people go and like

try to like enter sweepstakes.

I think it's like a similar phenomena, but there's a ton of people doing it.

So this glitch in deal site gets four million, uh, page views a month, but it's only been

around for a year.

How do they find the deals?

I think they must scrape them or they have them at least, I think it's actually a separate

glitch site, but has, they have a Facebook group and this Facebook group has 342,000

members.

What?

How many people post a day in this Facebook group?

How many?

250 plus post a day.

That's crazy.

When I checked it had 262 posts and it was like, it was like 11 a.m.

So I'm not that surprised because when we do giveaways for the hustle, we'll do like

a t-shirt giveaway and like these websites, it's like a circular, like they all like copy

each other and it's basically like midwester knee, stay at home moms mostly and they love

giveaways and like one time we've like, we're giving away stickers and I saw one of them

post this on like a forum like, Hey, there's this newsletter called the hustle.

You just got to share your referral link and they'll send you stickers.

I just got mine and there was hundreds of people commenting on it, like talking about

different strategies that allows them to get more referrals for the hustle.

They'll get their t-shirt or their stickers or whatever.

People like this demographic, it's mostly women I've noticed and it's mostly like stay

at home mom types.

They love this shit.

They love these deals.

They love free stuff.

They love it's like it's like a challenge for them because I remember asking his aunt

like, why did you do this?

Like you don't need 30 podcast mics and she's like, I just wanted to like I just wanted

to like win almost and I think it's so interesting that so many people are doing this because

like you're saying it's like a crazy amount of people who are like, who probably don't

need this stuff, but are like, I'm so stoked that I got like a gas grill on clearance.

Yeah.

We were giving away, we were giving away like stickers that said the hustle and it's like

these ladies, like they don't care about business or technique.

Like they just didn't, they didn't care about our brand, but they just wanted it just because

it was available to get and they felt good.

Yeah.

It was crazy to me.

What else we got?

Okay.

So let's go to nugget comfort.

So if you want to click on that, it is, it was actually something shared in the transcript

a while ago.

I don't even know how to explain what these are.

They're basically like cool children's pillows, but they're children's pillows that you can

basically make into like different shapes and forts.

And it was just crazy to think.

So nugget was, I think started relatively recently, it's in the last year or so, I think

they had some mailing lists for a prior product before that, but they made over four million

in sales in a month with zero ad spend.

So nugget comfort was doing, it's doing over four million a month.

Yes.

What?

If you go to it, so here's how I know that they're at least pretty big.

You go to their website.

So it looks like they're based in North Carolina.

You go to their website and you look at, you click careers and you see here, they're hiring

for, they're hiring a senior accountant.

So you know that they're, they need help counting, counting the money, counting that

bread.

And then they need a bunch of different warehouse operators.

They need a production associate, which means that that production associate is going to

report to someone.

So, you know, there was like a huge, like a pretty meaningfully sized, meaningful sized

team here.

This company is only a year old.

Who started it?

I'm not sure who started it.

Let me pull up this Facebook post.

So it's basically, it's called nugget comfort.

It's like, it looks like pillow cushions that it's like pillows, but you can like build

with them.

It's almost like a combination of Legos meets pillows.

Yeah, exactly.

And I don't actually know exactly who the founder is.

This was shared in the Facebook group.

Looks like it might be someone called Hannah Fussell, a former elementary school teacher.

Yeah.

So actually nugget was launched.

So it had a previous product that I think was not geared towards young kids.

And I guess they had some kickstarter at the beginning.

And then ultimately, I think COVID hit and they had to reposition.

And somehow they came up with this like children's product, which I think is just so interesting

because I feel like there are certain, certain industries like pets or children that like

people have just like an endless budget to spend on.

And so these pillows, I think, I think they're like 200 bucks or something.

It's only $300.

It's not a lot of money.

Yeah.

It's like, if they call it a pillow couch, this is amazing.

This company, this is one of the wilder things.

This is brilliant.

I totally understand it.

What a cute, cool thing.

This is amazing.

All right.

Let's move on to public domain review.

We'll do one more.

This one is just relates to something you guys have talked about before about how certain

IP is not in the public domain and then it moves into the public domain after a period

of time.

And so this is a site that basically tracks all of that stuff.

I think I originally found this because apparently Winnie the Pooh is going into the public domain

in January.

And so I think I found some article about that and it was on the public domain review.

So I think it's public domain review.

So what's going to happen?

What's going to happen when that happens?

What type of opportunities are going to be there?

And what businesses do you think are going to pop up?

So I think, so just for like background for people listening, there's tons of obviously

different books or like the Bible, for example, that's in the public domain.

People can like buy and sell.

You guys talked about like cool millennial Bibles.

Winnie the Pooh is a book that, you know, was written ages ago and then in 2022 would

go into the public domain.

So I believe, I think there's like several different things that are different, not patents.

What's it called when something is not in the copyright?

Yeah.

So several different like copyrights and so you need to look into exactly what this covers

versus what else exists.

But you could like, for example, potentially like go and like take a Winnie the Pooh book,

make it modern and like resell that to new customers.

So for example, on this website, public domain review.org, they've got a store where you

could buy prints like the print on the wall and it's like really sick art.

So you're saying like now they can use like Winnie the Pooh in that art or they can like

resell old Winnie the Pooh art or something like that.

Yeah.

And what I'd be interested to find out is specifically about merch.

I don't know exactly if it's just the book, right?

Like the book IP or if it actually has to do with just like the IP overall.

But the crazy thing about a lot of these big franchises, Pokemon, Hello Kitty, Winnie

the Pooh, they've all done over $80 billion of sales in merch alone.

So a lot of people think like, okay, if you're talking about Pokemon, they made a lot of

money off the show.

No, they actually didn't make that much off the show.

They made a ton of money off the merch and the same thing is true for like Mickey Mouse

or Star Wars.

That's where all the money is made.

And so what I'd be interested to know and I don't know the answer to this is whether

these things moving into the public domain, does that mean like I can then go sell like

a Winnie the Pooh shirt?

I'm not sure.

First of all, how long does the copyright last?

Is it 76 years, I think?

You are going to know this better than I do.

I believe it's 76 years, but it's pretty messed up actually when you think about it.

So like, let's just say that like a family invented, a person invented Winnie the Pooh.

They die.

They leave it to their family.

So you're telling me after, I think it's 76 years or it's death of the creator plus

76 years.

Yeah.

It's from what I see now, it's death of the creator plus at least 50 years, but it can

be extended to 70.

Is it 70?

I remember it because it's like the, it was like, I remember the law.

There was a law created that did that.

It's kind of messed up actually when you think about it that that is going to expire.

Why would that expire?

Like why?

I don't know.

I guess it depends.

I mean, you see the same thing with drugs, right?

Where you don't want someone to be able to like capitalize on something forever and I

think probably has to do with like the public benefits from something being in a free market

over time.

Yeah, but that's bullshit because if I bought a piece of property and a piece of land and

like, wouldn't that be weird if like on the third generation, you could take back that

land?

I guess so.

I wonder like, yeah, I wonder how they determine what things have these expiring copyrights

versus what things like that doesn't exist.

I think that's interesting.

I would like to learn more about that, but sorry, go ahead about publicdomainreview.org.

Well, it's just another one of those sites where you're like, wow, that's one and interesting

site where you can kind of browse and see like what is moving into the public domain.

It's a beautiful site.

It's very fun to read.

Yeah.

It also gets, I mean, not a crazy amount of traffic, but 500,000 page views a month.

And so I wonder actually, I didn't notice they are selling art or like different collections.

I was wondering how they were monetizing, but it must be through that.

This is awesome.

I love this website.

You want to do one more?

Sure.

Do you see one that you want to do in here?

I mean, one of the ones that we can talk about, which is just like a super fun little thing.

It's like an internet find is this foodtimeline.org.

There's not much of a business opportunity here, but I just think it's like a fun thing

to browse.

Basically, someone has gone down the internet rabbit hole and found like the first citations

of when a food existed.

So it starts with like water and ice.

And then, you know, you get like wheat and things like basically there's like a bunch.

There's like hundreds of different data points here.

And then of course it moves to like 2013, which you see like test tube burgers.

But I just think this is like an awesome thing where like, again, I don't know what the business

opportunity is here, but like if you have extra time, you can create really nifty things

like this online and this site, this page alone, there's only like one page here gets

over like 150,000 page views a month, I think.

So I don't know.

I just thought it was like a cool internet find.

This is awesome.

Broccolini was only invented in 1993.

It's kind of crazy to look and see like, wait a minute, like, I guess it makes sense because

it's fermented, but like kimchi was invented in the seventh century.

But then like you scroll down and you're like, yeah, what, like what we didn't have.

I don't know.

Yeah, like you said, broccolini until 1993 or it's another crazy thing on high fructose

corn syrup 1967, I would have thought that was far sooner, buffalo wings only 1964.

How intriguing.

This is a really, really cool website.

I think that the reason why I think this is cool.

So this woman, it's Lynn Oliver.

She launched it in 1999.

The reason why this is cool is because I respect.

So listen, Lynn Oliver, she or Oliver, she was born 1958, she died in 2015.

She was a library and food historian and the sole author of food, the food timeline website.

So there's this, she has a Wikipedia page.

I just love that there's someone who's this weird and quirky enough to dedicate time to

do this because I love people like that and people who are crazy enough to put all their

energy into something like this.

Exactly.

I just think like this is the coolest thing ever.

And whoever actually created this, like, thank you for doing that.

I've actually one related business opportunity.

Oh, listen to this, according to the Wikipedia, the sites domain supposedly support expires

in 2025, but as of September, 2020, the Huey's database shows that it's set to lapse on

April, 2022 because she died.

So she died and now it's set to go out, go out on April, 2022.

So there you go.

A lot of copyrights.

There you go.

One, I guess, food related opportunity.

Have you ever looked up like healthiest fast food or like healthiest cheese or like, totally

do you remember that book?

You're not American.

So I don't know if they have this in Canada, but it was called eat this, not that.

Yes.

You remember that series?

It's such a good book series.

And I would like use it to figure out like what's a good, like if I want to eat a burger,

what's the healthiest burger at a fast food place?

So you're not the only one and I discovered this because I think one day I was looking

up something ridiculous, like healthiest cheese.

And so a ton of people are searching this every single month.

So I think some of these numbers are old, but something like healthiest cereal, which

we all know, like cereal is not good for you.

50,000 searches per month, healthiest bread, 30,000 searches a month, healthiest cheese,

20,000.

And then there's also a ton of search volume for things like, yeah, like healthiest meal

at Taco Bell or something like that, which I just love because it's like, it just shows

again, this problem where it's like, people want to eat healthy, but they're realistically

in some cases like unable to, but it also reminds me of something that Peter levels

did with his like nomad list site, which is basically, I call it your listicle is my

opportunity.

So whenever you go...

You made up that phrase?

Yes.

I've been thinking about it for ages, but I like, basically whenever I search something

and the, all of the results on that page are listicles, right?

So you look up like healthiest cheese and you get to a site and just like five, it's like

a long article with like five types of cheese and you're like, oh my God, like this should

be easier, right?

And there's so many sites that have basically found things with a lot of search volume and

made it easier.

Like that's what nomad list does.

He's like, you know what?

There's all these like variables and you can play with them yourself.

I'm going to collect this data so that instead of getting a bunch of listicles when you look

up like hot place in June to go traveling, he's like giving you that information so you

can access it yourself, right?

He's basically like refining the information.

And you've seen tons of other people do this.

I think like that was basically like rich Barton's strategy, right?

When he built things like Expedia.

Kind of.

Yeah, kind of.

But listen, I will help someone do this or if they want to partner with me, I'll do this.

So here's what I'm going to do.

I bet you I can make a fair bit of money, like $10,000 total, but like have a business that

makes single digit thousands of dollars.

You could do this in 30 days.

Here's what I would do.

Here's what I would do.

So Steph, have you?

So we're doing this contest called, I forget what it's called actually, but people are

taking our clips and they're turning them into TikTok videos and they're posting them

on TikTok and they're getting tons of views.

So the hashtag MFM clips in a matter of like, I think we only launched it seven days ago,

but I forget it's less than 10 days in that short amount of time.

That hashtag has around 10 million views, meaning kids have made videos that have 10

million views on TikTok.

It's crazy.

There's a couple videos.

I think there's one video that has like 1.3 million views and then there's a whole bunch

of other videos that have about or over a million and for sure hundreds of thousands.

And these guys are killing it.

And so the way that they did it, they created like a handle called like MFM clips or like

the hustles pod or hustlers diet, like they just, they made these things from scratch.

And in literally seven days, a couple of them have a million views.

What I would do is create a TikTok page that says craving a chicken sandwich, don't eat

the Popeye ones eat because it has this gram of the fat.

They use this types of chemicals instead eat the Chick-fil-A one because it has this or

like craving a cereal, don't eat this, eat this.

Why?

And then you'd be like, you want more go to this website and you create like a wire

cutter style website that does this and you for sure, for sure can make a really good

revenue like the thousands of dollars we're talking off of affiliate websites, an affiliate

website and then eventually do brand advertising deals without a doubt.

I would bet that would and that would get popular.

If you had the right face, you need like a hip TikToker young looking person to do this.

It would absolutely crush.

Totally, I mean, I feel like just the TikTok side of things, like that's going to trend

no matter what.

And then there's so much search volume for this stuff that like you'd build up that

sustainable business over time.

And there's so many queries for this.

So if people are actually going to go build this, I want someone to do that.

Go to Ahrefs, go to the keywords explorer, enter healthiest food.

And then if you go to matching terms, it'll basically give you this like list of terms

that are similar.

It'll be like healthiest food, which we already talked about, but also like healthiest taco,

healthiest spreads, healthiest breakfast, healthiest restaurant, healthiest Starbucks,

healthiest Mexican food.

And you just like go down the line and there's like, how many there's like hundreds of terms

already just like seated there for you.

And what's crazy is I was actually pretty surprised to see that the keyword difficulty

for a lot of these was not very high.

Like I would have thought if someone told me there's search volume for the stuff, I would

have thought like, Oh, someone's already tackled this.

No, no, no, no, no, I'm not.

I just Google healthiest cereal and like pure, pure wow ranks number one.

I could outrank.

Wow.

Exactly.

It's like Thrillist or like Healthline and you're like, someone should go and create

like a site just for this and it'll rank surprisingly quickly if you can target the right keywords.

This is just fantastic.

The eatthis.com kind of does that.

It's owned by galvanized media.

So whatever I do is I go to these websites, I scroll all the way down to see who owns

the copyright galvanized media is a website that owns like a ton of different stuff.

They own eat this, not that.

They own Travelicious.

They own Celebwell and a bunch of other stuff.

I would, I bet you I can figure out how much money these guys make, but I would imagine

like in the 20 or $30 million range, if I had to guess, based off the website, probably

a really good business.

Wow.

And I mean, you can start with healthiest stuff and then obviously like expand past that,

but that's actually like a surprisingly, well, I mean, I guess not surprisingly, I think

that's a big niche, not so niche niche.

Wow.

Okay.

Let's wrap up with two more things.

Okay.

You had something in here about chess and this guy, Magnus, who you're like this chess

nerd, you're a chess prod, you're a chess prodigy, you go to chess.com and you play

there.

You're known for being a chess person.

You had some amazing stats about this guy.

Can you tell me about this?

So if people don't follow chess, Magnus is the number one chess player in the world.

But the cool thing about Magnus, I read this the other day, is that unlike many athletes,

if you want to call chess a sport, he's actually managed to already kind of build a little

business empire.

So what a lot of, you know, celebrities or athletes do is they focus on like getting

paid at the time, but then they really, really struggle to build up any sort of equity in

like a product or a brand that they're building, which as most people know, the way that you

you know, actually a career wealth is through equity.

We'll talk about that with Tyler Perry.

He's managed to create this guy Magnus.

How old is he?

He's not very old.

He was like a GM by the time he was like 14 or something.

And he's like kind of good looking or like he's cool looking.

He like, it looks like he's kind of charismatic.

He's just like, like there's a story here.

It's not like he's just good at chess.

He's like, seems like a, like a, like an interesting person in itself.

Yeah.

He's 31.

So he's a, he's not old at all.

And yeah, there's like videos of him when he's like 12 and they're like filming him

at, I think like world championships and stuff.

So he was really talented really early.

And now he's only 31.

He's built up a little empire.

So not only does he like compete in chess still.

And I think he streams on Twitch and all that stuff sometimes, but he also built his own

little company.

It's called Magnus Chess.

So if you go to, I think it's Magnus Carlson.com or sorry, it's played Magnus.com to get redirected.

He has this plus membership.

I don't know exactly what you get from it, but it's $14 a month.

And here's some of the stats, basically his company play Magnus already is a publicly

traded company, has 250 employees, 4 million registered users and a market cap because

it's public of $115 million already.

How much revenue does this make?

So I don't know how much it makes currently, but I mean, let's look it up.

It's a publicly traded company.

And it's publicly traded in France, I think, or is it nor, I actually don't know where

it's publicly traded.

So it's definitely, yeah, it's in France, FRA.

I think it's, it's in euros.

Wow.

This is amazing.

Who would have thought?

And does he own this?

He owns a stake in it.

So he owns not, you know, not a ton, but he still owns, I think, oh, actually, never

mind.

He owns 85% of the business.

Holy crap.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

So this guy's, this is amazing.

And so do you know what's the sales?

So it looks like revenue last quarter was 5 million.

So it's doing around 20 million.

Actually it's grown a lot recently.

So it's only started looks like in 2019, 2020 had total revenue of 20 or sorry, $8 million,

but it's, you know, last quarter was five.

So it's trending towards $20 million.

Wow.

And that's recurring revenue.

So that's a subscription.

Yeah.

This is amazing.

And he owns 85% of this.

So he basically has a, has a 120 or something like that million dollar net worth just off

of this.

Yeah.

So it looks like I'm getting a little confused.

There's something called Magnus chess and then there's something called play Magnus.

So actually I think he owns only 9% of play Magnus, but then he owns something else, which

I think is like a streaming platform called Magnus chess, but either way he owns substantial

amount of, of one of them Magnus chess and he's worth several million.

Wow.

So we, and we also actually covered chess.com, chess.com.

I think it might be mostly bootstrapped and it gets something like, have you seen, what's

the monthly uniques of chess.com?

Have you looked at that?

It's super high.

Yes.

It's like 150 million.

I think chess.com currently has 150 million monthly uniques and I've heard rumors that

it's a multi-billion dollar company.

I mean, people pay a lot for it because they've actually built in some pretty cool features.

So light chess is a competitor.

Light chess, some people like, cause it's more like indie, but chess.com has like, if

you go on there, you can play.

And then after your game, it'll basically say like, actually here are all your blunders,

your mistakes.

And this is actually like exactly where you went wrong.

And it's interesting because those are the things people used to pay coaches for.

Like when I was little playing chess, a coach would come over once a week and he'd like

sit down and I'd go to tournaments and at tournaments you'd write down your moves and

then we'd like study them after and he'd be like, see that move?

Like, do you see how like eight moves later that really hurt you?

But chess.com has that basically like built into the software where they're like, see,

like that's where you went wrong.

This is awesome.

Ben texted me or like slacked me while we were doing this and he goes, Steph's been

spitting fire for the last 50 minutes.

So this is badass.

You definitely have to come on again.

And there's like way more notes here.

If I was you, selfishly, I want to say don't share this and we'll do another one in the

next week or the week after.

Ben, what do you think?

What do you think about this?

What do you rate this?

I just got, I was getting flack the other day for giving you guys too many A's.

So I guess I leave it.

But this one really was like an A plus.

I, Steph, I know you've got your course and it's doing well.

You should do another course on like how you do research.

People, I do kind of want to say to us, what was that?

They tell me and Sean that you're saying she's even better.

She's better.

She's better than you.

She's better than you at this.

It depends.

I think, so you and Sean are like A plus entertainers.

I got to work on that.

And I know it's something I got to work on.

You guys are so good at like making a conversation flow, all your like funny bits.

And so I think like, yeah, I mean, I could share how I do research on.

Give me some credit, Ben.

We do this two or three times a week.

Steph's doing this once every month.

Yeah.

No, it's true.

It's true.

You do it twice a week, but it's just, and so it does like it's a little unequal because

this doc that Steph has is just like, it's amazing of really interesting ideas.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'm down to come on any time.

I was a little nervous to come back on every time I come on like, you know, the first time

it was sometime in 2020, you guys had maybe like 5,000 listens in episode and then like,

it's gone up so much since then that every time I'm like, dude, you guys just had like

Hasan Minhaj, you've had Gary V and I'm like, I'm just this like trans analyst or still

feel that way.

So yeah, if people like it, I'm happy to come on anytime.

But if not, we can also just like open source this research.

I don't, I don't think I included anything here that I am going to build myself.

I was actually previously going to build the like healthiest X thing and then I just realized

like that's been on my to-do list for two years.

So probably never going to happen.

I'm going to ask Sarah.

I'm going to go to the other room right now and tell my wife, Sarah, I'm like, Hey, do

this.

She should.

I mean, seriously, this is like, the reason I had it on my list is because a lot of the

ideas that I've shared in the past, I'm like, yeah, those are cool ideas, but like, can

you really do it?

And can you do it with not that much money?

And is it pretty likely to succeed?

Right?

Those are like the variables in this one, like checks those boxes.

Dude, that's awesome.

Thank you.

This is badass.

We're going to wrap up if Steph, what's your handle on Twitter?

Steph Smith?

I owe and I'm just going to plug my podcast again, because I'm trying to grow it just

like that is, um, it's called the shit you don't earn in school.

All right.

Sick.

Thank you.

And that was, uh, you do it with Calvin.

You're, uh, your boyfriend, your fiance.

Yeah.

Good dude.

All right.

Thank you.

Talk soon.

Thanks guys.

About to see my first a million.

Got to the safe and it's filling up.

Got to the bank.

It's not big enough.

Got to see my first a million.

Got to see my first a million.

Got to the safe and it's filling up.

Got to see my first a million.

Got to the safe and it's filling up.

Got to the bank.

It's not big enough.

Got to see my first a million.

A million.

A million.

My first a million.

Add another zero to that price, buddy.

My first a million.

The way to do it is to be different.

To the way to be different is to be completely you.

I am human optimization.

Look at me.

Don't figure this out.

To your bro.

And the stakes are up now.

My first a million.

And so I just wrote future owner of the LA Lakers.

It's my brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

My brother.

Future owner of the Bliss.

My first a one.

Biliades.

Biliades.

That's why you're playing the game.

And your goal is to be happy every single hour.

On every single day of your life.

First billion

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.