My First Million: Tiny Desk Awards: 13 Companies Making $1M+ With 0 Employees

Like have you done any deals like that would have heard of and he's like, you know Disneyland

He's like a lot of windows in Disneyland. We do all the windows in Disneyland

They bought a window company got him a Disney contract we do all the windows in Disney

I

All right, what's up, we are talking about something pretty special this episode

This is gonna be different than our normal episodes, which are you know, freewheeling freestyling today

We got a plan and the plan is we're gonna talk about companies that crush it with only one or two employees

So the reason we thought about this was there was some news

I don't know a couple weeks ago that a company that I had never heard of called war graphs

sold for 54 million dollars and

The yeah, that's I mean that's obviously impressive

But the most impressive part was that war graph was just one dude

So one guy sold his company for 54 million dollars and I don't know. Do you know what wargrass did?

No, is it a gaming thing? It's a gaming thing. Yeah, so he built basically a companion app

I think for a league of legends

So if you play league of legends, this was like a thing that would keep tracking your stats and stuff like that

Help you get better at the game

so he built this little companion app and

It had gotten really popular

I think he got into like a million players that used it and was generating serious revenue

And so he sold it for 54 54 million in cash and he was upfront

He was like I got half of the sorry

I got half of the 54 million in cash up front and I have the other half as like my earn out that I have to leave it like

You know if it hits, you know our milestones along the way, which is just super impressive for a one person company

And how old was the person? I think he started when he was young, but now it's been like, you know seven or eight years

So yeah, that's amazing. I'm gonna guess something like 30, but

The the they got me thinking it was like everybody talks about big businesses for good reason big businesses are awesome

There they are but what about mighty businesses?

What about the the the guys who were punching above their weight?

So somebody who has just themselves or we're just one or two people that does millions in revenue

Profitably flies under the radar and how many other war graphs are there out there?

So we did some research and we found some and so that's what this episode is gonna be about and we've kind of

Touched on this before we've done some of our most popular episodes if you go on YouTube

You'll see the episode of Peter levels. I think has a couple hundred thousand listens the episode about a bit

I'll grow all the guy who builds

G-suite, you know basically like Google Sheets plugins

He does millions of dollars in revenue as just kind of one guy who was a blogger turned at builder

And so those have been some of our most popular episodes

So I think this is gonna be a good one to Sam anything else before we jump in

Yeah, I want to give an honorable mention to this one person

Have you listened to juvenile growing up? Remember rapper the rapper dupe at aisle guards. You're giving him a shout out like he's listening

Yeah, I

Like last year NPR they do this thing called the tiny desk concert series. You know what that is

It's like they're in the office like playing acoustic songs. Yeah, those are cool

They said who should we have and this one guy goes you should have juvenile and juvenile replies and he goes

What the what that it goes WTF what what the F is a tiny desk and hell no

You know what they got him to do it anyway it happened this weekend

And so in preparation for this one-man band show, I've been listening to that juvenile concert at the tiny desk

NPR series. It was awesome. It was awesome

You remember back that ass up and

It was so good it was so good

I had to be inspired him and Manny freshen it and it was awesome. It was awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So

Honorable these are the tiny these are the tiny desk awards then let's call it that these are the tiny desk awards

The businesses that can be run off of one tiny desk cuz it's just one or two people

All right, we're gonna do this like an award show. So we have a long list, but that'd be kind of boring

So we're we broke it up into categories and we each have our answer for the category

So for example first category

It's gonna be biggest one-person business, but we also have to set some rules here

Yeah, some of these things one person. It's a bit vague

Yeah, one person oftentimes can mean like the founder and like a team of contractors or in many cases

It's going to be agencies that they work with of course

Or it started as one person and it was that way for a long time and then they hired a team

Exactly. So it's more of the spirit of the law than the letter of the law here. So, you know, they don't have

T-shirts for the company because you know, there's they don't have like, you know a bunch of employees and and you know

Morale, they probably won't have a an office which a bunch of people go into

It's either one or two people who are kind of the core drivers

And maybe they use some contractors or vendors or agencies for for other things

But that's that's generally the the way we're looking at this. Yeah, let's get into it. So what's the first one?

The biggest is it the the biggest so you go first

So I'm gonna do one another gaming one that I doubt you know of do you know what Stardew Valley is?

No, what is that?

So Stardew Valley is this game and if you look at the game the game art looks like it's like 8-bit art

almost it looks like a very very simplistic game and

It was made by one guy this guy Eric Barone and

He's basically is like, you know, I'm he gets out of school. He doesn't want to get a job. So he's like, well

You know, I'm gonna teach myself how to code instead of going get a good job

So he's like, why don't I learn how to build a game in order to teach myself how to code?

Like I don't want to just code for coding sake

I'll try to do something with it and he always liked these games back in the outfield of Harvest Moon

It's like this kind of like farming

Simulator game these like very simple kind of like you know had like a cult following and so he's like

I'm gonna make my version of Harvest Moon

Which was like kind of was popular when I was a kid like, you know, they're 15 years ago 20 years ago

so he spends basically

Four years in solitude just building this game by himself before he releases it for four years job

He just lived off his girlfriend because girlfriend had a like a grad degree stipend and he had a part-time job as an usher

Which is amazing. I mean an usher is a terrible unless you're literally

Trying to be like a cover artist covering the artist usher like, you know, you ever want to be an usher

That's not the that's not your crew is not going the right direction when you're doing that

So anyways the he launches this thing

Stardew Valley has sold 20 million copies but it sells for $13 a pop and so, you know, he sold this thing

I think over time it has done a hundred and fifty million in

Sales or revenue and he's the only guy who built it just by himself

Which is honestly not that uncommon Minecraft was largely built the same way

There's this guy Notch who was the developer behind Minecraft

And if you've ever seen it, he'll get on Twitch and he'll just code Minecraft

Like he'll just stream himself for like 12 hours just building the game

And like I think Minecraft have more people overall

But like one guy was really the driving force and the driving energy around it for many many years

But Stardew Valley is my pick for for biggest 150 million off of one one game death

The guy Notch when he sold I think he sold for like multiple billions, right?

three billion two billion something that and he I think he bought like an like he outbid Beyonce for like an

$80 million mansion in LA and he was tweeting out or sharing how

Everyone hates him now. He was like, I'm so lonely this sucks

But he's still in this like fancy $80 million mansion

Do you remember that whole like ordeal where he was talking about how he like didn't give equity to people?

And so some of the people who he hired hated him and it was lonely

But he was having all these huge parties and he was lost and all that stuff. Do you remember all that?

Missed all that

Dude, he like went through this whole schmiel on on Twitter about how like he hates his life, but oh, well, you know

I'm looking at this house. This house is insane. Was it 80 million 70 million

Yeah, it was like a it was a fat. I remember like I would love to see Beyonce getting the news

It's like, oh, who did it who outbid me was it was a Spielberg

Who was it? Oh, no, it must have been Lenny Kravitz. Who was it? Who outbid me on this like not notch

Got him

All right, mine is a stream yard so stream yard

I'll have to remember when they launched but I think they launched in 2019 right before the pandemic hit and it was basically a

It was a way to stream events online and stream interviews and things like that online

these two guys scaled it to 30 million dollars in revenue in one year or 18 months or so and

This mostly happened because the pandemic they ended up selling it to happen for 250 million dollars

It was a mix of cash and stock and hoppin ended up laying up off a bunch of people like last year

But I've heard rumors that it's killing it. Have you heard these rumors hoppin?

Yeah, no, I have not heard. I've heard the opposite of those rumors, but I don't know

What have you heard? Well, just like when the layoffs happened and it was like basically post covid events came back online like in person

So that's naturally gonna hurt the business

Then they had massive layoffs and I heard that the the founders had taken a ton of secondary or something like that

So I heard like a hundred million plus in secondary. Yeah, but maybe the business one. Well, I have no idea

I just heard kind of like the generally though when you hear those three things. It's like massive layoffs, you know market

You know the crazy event that was driving your growth has stopped

And the founders took and people start talking about how much secondary the founders took

It's usually because the business is going on the wrong direction

Usually people don't bitch about secondaries when the thing is exploding

I don't know. I heard the other way

I I also thought that and I heard the other way around

We talked about stream yard like right when they were getting going and then we talked about them again when they were acquired

Did you say you knew these guys? I think I'd met

To bet when I was doing video streaming I met like kind of everyone in this space

I I don't know. I got to look up who these guys are

But I do know that they got to 14 million in ARR

When it was just the two of them

And then it got to 30 million when they had by that time they had hired up a team

So this is kind of like a hybrid they got they got really far with just a couple people and then they hired up

You know from from as they scaled it before they sold

And I remember going to their website when it was just them and I there was like the founder and he was he was on the

He was on the homepage and he was giving like a tutorial video on how to use the product

And it was just him like with this camera on his lap practically and he looked exhausted

He looked so worn out

I remember this during the pandemic when we were thinking about using them for something

And he looked like super haggard

But it was very impressive that these two guys have built this to sell for 250 million dollars

And I although it was cash and stock so I don't know if the stock is worth anything

I heard it might be so that might be one of the biggest ones that I've heard of at least recent big ones another big one

That it happened a long time ago. So I have no connection. It was plenty of fish

How much did plenty of fish get acquired for like 550 million dollars? I guess hundreds. Yeah

And that was started by one guy named Marcus who now I see online

And he seems like he like lives the most lavish life and just does crazy shit

And so plenty of fish was basically one of the early dating websites. It was a marketplace. It was like, okay, QB

But I think it was

Predominantly Canadian and that had to be probably the biggest exit that I've ever heard of for a really small small team

Yeah, plenty of fish was unbelievable that guy. Isn't he like a nut the plenty of fish founder?

I feel like that's a whole another story we should do one day. I think it's a whole another

I think I don't know I haven't researched it enough to actually like verify the claims

But I've heard like a little like grumblings like a little little stories that something weird is going on

But I don't know the truth

Also, I love the fact that you've met the streamer guys and they looked haggard and you're like

It's like in Silicon Valley when you see somebody like that you put your arm around them and you're like, hey, you're right

Is it

Is it because of too much traction or not enough? I just need to know how I'm gonna treat you too much

Yeah, oh, it's too much traction. Okay. Okay. Come here. Come here. You sleep on my couch. Let me feed you

Just take this check

Put me on your cap table. You know, like there's there's really, you know, one out of ten of the haggard people

They're getting beat down by too much demand and nine out of ten. Who have you met like that?

Who have you met like that? Who else have you met where you remember talking to a guy who this guy abdur met a guy abdur

And he was doing something pretty I met him after the fact

But he told me the story and I always it was stuck with me and I always remember

Here after hearing the story. I was like I should look for that

So what happened was twitter started taking off in popularity

right when it kind of got going in silicon valley like it became like a thing and

abdur was

Him and his team or they're like kind of like data science type people

And so they were like, all right

What can we build that makes twitter work better because twitter was such a simplistic product

And at the time it was like almost like a protocol

Like anyone could kind of build apps on top of it or use the data for something

So he's trying to build something and he doesn't know what he's doing. He's like

He's sitting on a train and he starts coding this thing. He's like, oh, I had done this research on sentiment analysis

And he's like, I was like, okay. So, you know, this story sounds a little bit boring. Who cares about sentiment analysis

He's like, yeah, you could he's like you could figure out like how people are feeling about a certain topic because they're talking about it in a

Certain way

So he's like Tom his story was boring right when he got you know, my

Lord the chin started to drift

Yeah, I was like, is there anyone else in this car I could talk to I was in a car with him in Ethiopia

You know four hours straight. There's nowhere to run. So I'm hearing I'm like, all right. Let me hear out the story

Sentiment out. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me more about your phd and sentiment analysis. What did this do?

and he's like

So I was on a train and I'm building this thing

I'm trying to analyze what people are saying on twitter to see if I could get the sentiment the current mood or whatever

he's like, but then I realized

Actually, what I'll do is instead of figure out their mood. I'll just figure out. What are they talking about?

A lot of like a lot more than usual. That's kind of interesting

And he basically created

Trending for twitter off of twitter. Oh, cool. So he's like he's like, oh, I could figure out that the word

Olympics normally is only said this much

But it's being said 10 standard standard deviations more

So that means Olympics is trending that that it's it's above its par

And he's like, this is super cool

Like I basically have the 10 things that people are talking about on twitter

I can kind of get that I get that signal

In a way that you couldn't really get at the time on twitter

And so he creates this and they create a separate website off of twitter called twitter trending

I forgot what it was called its loan website and they start getting millions of hits on this thing and they're just trying to and

And he's trying to keep it keep it up because he's basically drinking from the twitter fire hose

And he's got all this traffic and so he's trying to keep both of them working eventually twitter buys them

So they become like employees

10 through 20 or something of twitter. Oh sick and at the time twitter had the fail whale

It was just like constantly twitter the service was going down

It was had so much usage and it was like in this web 2.0

Like what it wasn't like scalable yet. They didn't figure out how to scale it

And he's he told me he's like he's like for six months

He's like I just woke up every day with like an imprint of my keyboard on my forehead

Like I had just passed out. I was working trying to keep this damn side up pass out wake up

Oh, where was I and I just kept going he's like that was six months straight of my life

He's like I've never experienced anything like it

And at the time I remember thinking oh, there's levels to this thing

Like that's what it feels like when you really have one of the winners

Like and if you talk to people early at facebook and they talk about like what the what

What it was like working early at facebook facebook. It's like

When people talk about living in new york, they're like just the energy was it can't explain it

And it's like that's that's what you get when you're inside one of these generational companies at the early stage when they're they're scaling too fast

Dude, that's exciting. I love that one. I like hearing those old stories like that

I always read those old books like the the hatching twitter and all that shit. I love that shit. Yeah, me too

All right, next let's go to let's wait. Let's go to a highest degree of difficulty. We'll skip a category and come back to it

Okay, so this is the hardest one the hardest example the one that we're like

How the hell did you even do that and there's no way anyone else would have done this you go first

All right, I have one it's called tiny while. So I think the url is just tiny wow.com

So do you have that pulled up tiny while? Yeah, got it

All right, so I met this guy. He's a member of Hampton. That's why I met him. His name is Evan Gower

He had a another website called tech junkie

Maybe you heard of tech junkie, but they like just talked about like tech topics whatever

It's pretty normal website, but he ended up selling it for eight figures and on the side

He started this thing called tiny while which is a bunch of tools that include like how to convert a pdf

But then image editing tools that use ai and it's one of those websites where you google like convert

This file to pdf it is able to he's able to come up first right now

it has 6.6 million visits a month and the reason it's

Yeah, it's insane. The reason it's interesting is right now

It only does 20,000 a month in revenue because he says I haven't I just haven't turned on any of the

Monetization it just has like little ads. He goes. I'm gonna turn it on eventually

But right now I'm just enjoying the summer and time at my family. So I haven't really like dug deep and like built it

And so basically this guy evan he was talking about the weather put on adsense. What are you doing?

This is insane

Dude, that's the cool part about these one person businesses

And this is another guy who I'm going to tell the story about has said the same thing

He goes, I felt like taking the summer off. So I just let let it ride for a little while

So this guy evan he basically had a history as a developer

He says he doesn't do any development now

But he has a team of three people who are helping him or one contractor who helps him with overseas

Who's helped them actually like build it implement?

He basically just draws it and designs it

But the reason why this thing has taken off is if you google or do you remember?

Like do you ever see those videos on tiktok that say like here's five websites that should be illegal

But aren't so good that they should be illegal

Yeah

So that is basically how the the website got popular is it's gotten popular from those videos

And so the reason why this is really hard to create because a getting traffic to a

Like a content site or any type of website like this. It's very challenging. Oftentimes building the product is not the hard part

It's getting users

And getting 6.6 million visits a month mostly from social quite challenging

We'll see if he's able to turn this but I asked him I was like how big can this get he's like well

Like I think of like canva. So I'm like can we I think it can make tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue because

We're gonna ultimately we have this traffic

We can have like a feature that says hey you can edit this picture using our platform

And we'll charge a small fee. I think this actually could be a big business

But right now it's really tiny. He told me it costs $10,000 a month to run and it's making $20,000 a month in revenue

Wow, yeah, do you know how much remove that bg makes who?

Do you ever use remove dot bg?

No, what is that?

Oh, that's I mean that's that was the old way

It's like if you need to remove a background from an image like you need to just cut out the object and remove the background

Remove dot bg was this website that was like just the go traffic

Yeah, it was just a go-to and oh my god 50 to 60 million in monthly monthly visits

So it's just like insane and remove dot bg

It just had a stranglehold for me at least on on doing this. It was like super quick

You just drag your image in it just removes the background. Boom. There you go

And then they charge for like, you know, you want it like 1080p or whatever

They started charging for like little things like remove this watermark. I'm sure this thing crushes

You know, I don't know. I don't know how much revenue they do now

But I'm sure this is one of these like mighty businesses where it's a very small team

Here we go. Just googled it canva

Canva acquired them. It says that they had at least a hundred million people coming to their website last year

That's a that's crazy. So it's acquired by canva. So you can probably I don't know if canva has gone public yet

Maybe they have I think actually they just did of last month

You might be able to dig through their numbers and see if they got acquired and for how much but that's crazy

That's so much traffic this site tiny while definitely could be something like that. They started this in 2019

It's this company called collidio

And then they so they started in 2019. They sold it. This was

2021 so two years later for roughly a hundred million dollars

Wow, do they have funding?

I think the parent company it looks like it's a side project of the parent company

The reason why I said these are the hardest to make is getting that scale of traffic that fast is so

Challenging, you know, like there's a lot of like software products that we're going to name as one person companies

And that's challenging in the sense of like you have to put it in a ton of hours

And you actually have to like invent stuff and that's very challenging

But getting traffic to me is more of an intellectual challenge or it's like I have no idea like where to start like whereas

When starting with software like I I'm going to make this one feature that I'll do this other feature

I'll talk to my users

It's a little bit involves a little bit of luck a little bit of skill

But getting a lot of traffic to your website early on

I think there's less people that know how to do that. And so that's why I think that this is one of the harder things to start

So here's my my answer for highest degree of difficulty

photo p

So photo p is very very similar

Basically, it's one guy who recreated the entirety of photoshop in a web browser for free

So oh my god photoshop is one of the most complicated products in the world

He recreated it by himself

Gives it away for free

And made it work in the browser, which photoshop doesn't photoshop is uh, you know

You have to download the app in order to make it work. It's just remarkable

The guy barely monetizes it

doesn't want to sell it

And if you go just search his like just search photo p read it or like, you know founder read it

He goes and he talks about like, you know, why he built it how he built it and what, you know

How he thinks about it or whatever. It's pretty insane and I think it how much traffic does it get?

Traffic wise like 13 million according to similar web per month

And he does at the time this was a couple years ago. He said that he was doing a hundred thousand a month

off this thing and it was like literally from the most basic

absolute most basic of like ads like this is one guy Ivan who made it and it's he just like puts like the very simple banner ad

On the site and makes like a hundred hundred thousand dollars a month. He did a post in hacker news on april 11th 2021

He goes, hey guys, I'm Ivan. I'm the creator of photopy

I made almost a million dollars in the last 12 months 90 percent from ads the rest is from premium

Which is users who pay to hide ads. So it's not even much of a premium

When you start your own project, do you ever know if it'll make 250 thousand dollars?

But if you get hired you can be quite sure that you will never make more than 250 thousand dollars

And so that's why I started it and so this company photopy

I don't know how big it is but depending on how many users it has

I could see this getting sold for nine figures over a hundred million dollars. So

He did an AMA on reddit and they said hey, have you hired your first employee yet?

This was a year ago and he says oh after I did my first AMA on reddit lots of great people got in touch

I did end up hiring one guy from prog who went to my university

But it'll take some time for him to get familiar with the code. He hasn't done it. He hasn't done anything yet

It's pretty crazy how this guy operates. So why do you think this is the most challenging just like technically recreating photoshop

feature for feature

Is absolutely insane

Like I think that's just an insane endeavor

And then making it work in the browser like making it performant in a browser is not easy either

So like for one person to do this. I think it's crazy

That's insane. Yeah, I the cool thing about these like what I think the the downside of these one person companies is that everything relies on you

And that you don't have like anyone else to ask for help and you can't hire to when you can't have anyone better than you're doing

Something because you're the only person and so in order to do this

I think a lot of these people they have a they have a handful of traits that we'll talk about in the end

But I don't understand how he could grind that hard for that long with all this pressure on him

By the way, this guy says he put 7 000 hours into it before he made any money from it

That's insane. So I think that that that just takes so much will do you remember viral nova?

It was a guy named scott de long. So viral nova was basically an upward the clone

It was it says like they're like here's a list of 10

Reasons why you don't want to go swimming after eating you're not going to believe number seven

And so this guy would talk about like how it was just him writing 10 articles a day

And he was like i'm the pressure of all this traffic and all the success. It's killing me

I feel so worn out all the time and I don't understand how some people can sustain that for a really long time like this photo p guy

Yeah, this is like, you know when you go to someone's house

And they're like, oh, do you want to see my model train?

Set i'm building you're like, what? Yeah, sure. Why not? I'm here and they take it down to the basement and then it's just like

They've recreated like the city of vienna through their like and they're just tinkering on this like one thing you're like, uh

How many hours how long have you been doing this and they're like, oh, I just come here every night

I love it and this is what I do it makes me feel so good and you're like, holy shit. This is like the most intense hobby

That's how that's how I feel. I'm not that I'm not that type of person. Are you you're definitely not I think right?

Come on

I'm not

Yeah, I envy those people that that's an amazing willpower. All right, let's do another one. Let's do on the other end

Easiest to recreate. So which of these one person one or two person businesses

Do you think are easiest to recreate that is the opposite of the highest degree of difficulty? Go ahead

So mine would be anything that sells information or service

So I put just any course creator

But you and I know a bunch of these people of which you and I are

Both of those people, you know, we make

hundreds of thousands or millions dollars a year from like a course or two and

I think they're fairly easy to recreate another one is there's this company called design joy

You know what they do? I believe the design subscription. Basically. That's him. He's yeah, but

The way that he positions it it seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth

But basically it's just this designer that you pay

Thousands of dollars a month for and you ask him to make small changes to

Different design related stuff and he claims that it's just him

But I believe he claims that yeah, but he says it's just like he does a hundred thousand dollars a month

So he just 1.2 million a year or so rough around that range

And it's basically you buy a subscription plan. So you pay and you buy like the five

It's like four or five thousand a month and then you you basically get one request at a time

And that's it

You get to just say I'd like this design thing done and then he turns around and some

I don't know what his sla is of how long he takes to to do this

But it's like it's cheaper than hiring a full-time designer probably unless like in any of the us

But yeah, that's the I think that's the easiest to recreate

But also the worst to run which we'll talk about later

But that's probably the easiest one is like a bunch

Do you know any of the course people that do like

Like I know sam ovens does 10 million in revenue 5 million in profit and for a while it was just him

I met these guys

I'm a guy recently who does like a product management course and I was like, oh my god

Who's taking a product management course? He goes. No, no, no, it's how to

Ace your job interview as a product manager

Like how to get a job as a pm at one of these tech companies

And I think he was doing what was he doing but like 2 million a year or something like that

I think they were doing like

What 2 2.5? Yeah 2.5 million a year

Roughly in in revenue. I think was like 80 percentish margins

And what they would do is they would basically say they would give away free content that was like

How you know how to get a job as a pm how to interview as a pm how to

Prep for this interview what it was like talking to a facebook pm

Blah blah blah they give away free content to get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website

And then they're like, hey, do you want to like?

Get a job as a pm which will pay you let's call it

$30,000 a year

If you want that job

By this course and join this cohort or course or whatever and they basically sell this course for a couple thousand dollars

That's going to help you get this job. That's going to pay you over $100,000

And that's just like a very simple value proposition for somebody who wants to do that with their career

And it was just him

It was him and three it was three of them three three p.m

That kind of like got together and made this thing another example of an easy one to start

I think I told you about this. It's called cyberlead. So you go to getcyberleads.com. So it's c y b e r leads

So getcyberleads.com. It's this guy named alex west and basically it's a newsletter where I think it costs four

To a thousand dollars a month so four hundred to a thousand dollars a month depending on what you get what you do

But basically he goes and he hand picks different companies that have recently raised money and based off a bunch of attributes

He thinks are about to hire an agency

And then he gets all these agency owners to sign up to his service and he emails this list out once a month

Along with like the contact information the hiring decision or the hiring like whoever's managing ad spend whatever and you can just contact him on

He's got your face in quota as a testimonial. Do you use this?

No, I don't use this but I talked I talked about it on the pod. I talked about it on the pod like two years ago

I've never used it. I've never you've never used it. But he sure used you

He is using me. I don't know. Is there anything it can I can you say anything about these people who do this?

I talked about it on the pod. I said it's so frick frick and simple the value's so clear

I guess I said that on the podcast and he uses that as a quote

Is there anything I could do to sign you can take them down. You can always say that

Oh, sorry, let me wrap up my thing selling information. So anything that you sell information. That's the easiest thing to start

Yeah, I think so I went the same route

But I'm gonna give more detail because I think when you tell somebody selling information is the easiest way they're like cool

What so what do I do?

Bits I gave three examples

Yeah, but I think you have to break it down a little further. So

You know this guy Lenny Lenny

Russian last name

I like Lenny

Rigausky or

Rigausky

Uh, something something along those lines. I like Lenny

So Lenny I think used to work at Airbnb or something. He was like a growth slash like

product guy

And so he's got Lenny's newsletter. He's got Lenny's community. He's got Lenny's job board and basically he was like

I'm gonna become he's like I'm gonna put out tons of free thought leader content on

A specific super niche topic that only

Certain people are gonna care about but they're gonna care a lot

And that's that that's kind of the key with this stuff is how do you put out free content to establish yourself as an authority in a niche?

So that you can then monetize that through either

consulting services job board

paid community

Or or paid content paid newsletter, right? That's that's the formula and you can look at the design joy guy

He does exactly this he puts out

Free content examples of design work and then says you can hire me for design work

Lenny does the same thing. He puts out free content. He's got really good stuff like, you know, how did

These 10 huge marketplaces. How did they get their first thousand users and he goes deep and these like I'm gonna interview them

I'm gonna talk to them

I'm gonna get the real answer on this specific zero to one question

That's gonna be highly relevant to other people going through that same challenge

I think he has a podcast too. He's got a podcast like at one point his job board was doing a couple hundred thousand

I'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred thousand in sponsorships

Are you talking about monthly or annually annually?

At least

Minimum

I know at the beginning his job board is crushing. I don't know what they're doing now

but like

I would bet his entire roll-up of job board

Content sponsorships so podcast plus newsletter and then he's got a paid thing right ben. He's got like a paid

Paid community. What's it? What do you think Lenny's total thing is two million three million?

Yeah, for sure about two to three million a year and he did that

I would say in a period of like two and a half three years

It seems like like I think I think he has a fun too. He kind of put his foot down on the content side

He can appeared on the scene. I would say like two two years ago

obviously

You had to know your stuff, right? So he's like, you know spent time learning

You know a decade being awesome inside these companies in order to do so

So I don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic, but there are people who did it without that too

So another example is harry dry one of my favorite content creators in the whole world a guy

I'd try to recruit like a hundred times to do something with me because I feel like

Me too something great

He keeps he keeps bullshitting and not saying yes, but he's gonna say yes eventually

So he's got marketing examples

He does a great job with this blog called marketing examples

Now, I don't know how much marketing examples makes I would guess quarter million to half a million as just him making content

I think he's young. He's very young. He didn't do the put in 10 to 15 years become an industry

Like like do the job cut your teeth then go make content. He's like no

I'm pretty sure I could just look at what's out there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work

I'll study this shit

And that's how I feel like, you know, a lot of people also can do it

You could be the curious novice

Approaching these topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely

And so I think harry dry would also be one of the easiest to recreate not because he's not talented

He's super talented, but I think that's kind of something anyone can do anybody could just say yo, I'm gonna study

What makes ticktox go viral?

And I'm gonna put out content about viral ticktox

I'm gonna become the expert of breaking down content ticktox going viral

And then people brands are gonna know me as the guy that they should talk to you about ticktox consulting

Right like or like advertising on ticktox and like you could just build your niche audience and your niche authority in that space

A lot of people are trying to do this AI right now

And the thing about lenny and harry was people were doing so first of all like a newsletters community podcast

That's existed since forever

So it's not a unique business model

And also people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time

But what's interesting is that they were both early ish where there was only maybe I don't know how many but they felt like

They were early ish talking about it to this customer to this community on this platform

So both of those guys I think got popular on twitter right before the pandemic started

I think I remember seeing harry in 2018 2019, which I wasn't even really using twitter as a power user back then

But they all seem a little bit early

So I think timing matters for a lot of these things speaking of which that facebook threads thing

No idea if that's going to be a thing or not

But that's an example of like hey, there's this new thing right now if you want nothing to lose you better be there

Yeah, just go get go be around there see what's going on. Yeah, that's one of those things people did with clubhouse

I don't know if that worked out or not

But the way I say it is like most entrepreneurs you were actually surfing waves you don't get to create the wave

But you do have to paddle out

You got to be on your board out there in the water you got to paddle out

And you know which is takes effort and then you got to wait and sometimes it's a dud

Sometimes it's just a small wave you're gonna have to paddle back out again

Well when you catch a good one, you know, that's what you get and we'll see how good you are at surfing

You might wipe out the first couple times you try it

But like that's your job as an entrepreneur is to paddle out

Be out there and start trying to surf these waves and and get a sense for where are the big waves

And and how do I not wipe out when I do when I do find one

So this episode you're giving a really in-depth surf analogy last episode you gave a slow a baseball

What did you say a fat a slow?

Fat pitches

I have you ever played baseball or surfed in your life, bro

I was starting right fielder for my high school team

Which anybody who knows baseball knows that means you're the biggest scrub on the team

Because that's who that's who they put in right field is the guy who's you know, you know the ball never comes to right field

And did you play baseball in china?

Like they were just learning. I might have been in china. I might have been in china

You went to high school and you went to high school in china. Yeah, I mean or australia like it was the scrubs. It was like

We played the ball as it lies there. I got a golf analogy for you too. I was in china. Well, that's where I'm gonna be

All right, so let's go to the next one

Most fun one person business. So the one that seems like the most fun to to work on

I'll go first

Joe Rogan

so I'm pretty sure Joe Rogan's media enterprise

is

bigger than all the late night talk shows combined

So forget the tonight show letterman and any of these guys whoever the new get going in whoever these guys are

Dude the letterman's been retired for 10 years, man. Jimmy Fallon. I don't know bro. Who's watching this stuff?

His audience is bigger

He makes hundreds of millions and he's made hundreds of millions doing it

And i'm pretty sure it's just him and young jamie

I've heard from a few of my friends who have been on it how it works

So basically they told me that it's jamie who produces it and it's joe

And then they have one other guy named matt. I think and I forget his name exactly

I think it was matt and basically matt sends joe a list of like 30 people

They're like, hey, I can get these 30 people these 30. Let me know who you want

And sometimes he just ignores it everyone smiles say that person and that person and that's all he says and i've heard that

It's just those three people

that's amazing

so

I think most people just think oh joe rogan. He's just a podcaster. Yeah, he is a podcaster

But that thing is a juggernaut. It is immediate juggernaut. So the you know

Spotify obviously paid him, you know hundreds of millions to to be there for a couple years

But even before that, you know, just off the sponsorships off of off of the alpha brain, you know, a product that they built off of it

Joe rogan, I think has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet

Is my sense he took all of his hobbies. He's like, oh, I like ufc

He gets to be the ufc commentator

We're doing exactly what he would want. He gets to go sit ringside commentate for these fights and analyze the fights

But he only does it for the ones in vegas that are an hour flight away from him

He doesn't do any of the the ones that require a bunch of travel

And so all the bit he does all the best ones. He does none of the worst ones

You know, he was like, I want to do stand-up comedy

So he does stand-up comedy sells out, you know theaters all around the country

And you know gets to make people laugh for a living does his podcast where he's like, I'm gonna have conversations

With the people I want

And people are like, oh joe three hours is too long. He's like, that's the type of conversation

I want to have so I'm gonna do it my way and it worked and so like I just think he just

Dictated how he wants to live life on his terms. I think he has the most fun

I think his business is absolutely a mighty business and that it's just

Let's say one two to three people that is building a thing that does, you know

Over a hundred million dollars in revenue, which is like if you just valued something like that traditionally, which is not

it's not apples to apples, but like

If you have a thing that can do a hundred million a year in revenue

For multiple years for multiple years

You typically that's a billion dollar property, you know, obviously it's weird. You can't really sell the jail rogan experience because

You need him it's tightly branded with him. But let's say at least he's built something worth a hundred million dollars

I think we can agree on that because it's generated a hundred million a profit for him

And so he's built, you know with a very small team a multi hundred million dollar business at the minimum

And he has this new thing called the comedy mothership

It's like a mile from my house in austin and there's always a line out the door to get into that place

Yeah, it builds his own comedy club right now. Why not if you drive by it at six o'clock?

There's every single night there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome right

Who you got most fun? All right. It sounds like I'm trying to like promote Hampton. I'm not it's just that when I had to prepare for this episode

I just went through our database and like picked out people and we had just written a blog post about this guy

His name is Joseph Mombra and he started this company called a gym streak

And this guy's super fascinating because he has all the attributes of like what a lot of these

Like tinkers have but basically he's from Zimbabwe moved to england when he was like 12 or 13

That was the first time that he experienced the internet. He taught himself how to code

He taught himself design and then he launched this thing called gym streak at first

It was just an app for tracking your workouts

And then he what he did was he went and got his buddy to wear one of these like suits

And that way he could do 3d visualizations of all the exercises and what they need to look like

So he has hundreds of them and so his app it's free to use and they have some like premium thing

And basically you track your workouts

He uses ai to suggest which weights you should do for the next workout

And if you don't know what the exercise does and they'll they'll suggest

Workouts and exercises to do he has

Hundreds of these 3d models of like what a proper bicep curl or what this other type of exercise looks like in year one

He did 300 000 that was in year 2021 in year two

He did 2.5 million and his goal he says is by in the next two years

I want to get the 15 to 20 million dollars a year in revenue and he's the only employee

I don't believe he has any contractors

I think he he told me that he got most of his users from facebook and tiktok ads

And he hired a consultant in an agency to help him learn how to do that and right now he said

I'm taking the summer off

So our growth this year might still only be 2.5 or 3 million a year in revenue

But I because I don't feel like buying ads or staying on top of that

So I'm taking the summer off because we just had a kid

But super fascinating to see a guy who basically came from zimbabwe didn't use the internet until he was 12 13

And taught him some how to do all this

He's like one of those really cool tinkers and on that blog post you can see pictures of him

Like arriving from africa and like learning how to work the computer. It's super fascinating

You'll see pictures of him with his like iphone and a laptop at the gym

Filming people doing like the curls so he can use his ai or whatever to like get the 3d imaging really fascinating company

I think jim streak is awesome if this could get to 15 or 20 million a year in revenue like he thinks

That would be a monster business for one person. Yeah, that's an amazing story. Wow. Love that good for him

That's that's really really cool next category

Business we most want to own

so this is

I think this is specifically a good question because

For us a business we want to own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us want to really run an extra business right now

So it's like which business would you want to own?

Because it is very much, you know autopilot. So it's not design joy. It's not

People are paying you and you're providing a subscription. It's not one of those content or course businesses where you constantly have to create new

Content in order to stay relevant and get more customers. I think we both have the same one

Let's just do the same one that we we both are really interested you explain it

No, you go first. All right milled calm. So most people don't know milled calm. It's m i l l e d dot com

And it's a really really simple website. It's just a compilation

of email marketing that different companies do so

If you want to see like what are my competitors sending for their fourth of july sale?

You just go to milled calm you search the brand and you'll see okay

Here's what ridge wallet sent for their fourth of july email. It's the top one on the on the side right side right now

So it says, you know, you just click and it shows you the exact email that they sent

So you can see the design you can see the offer you can see the copy

And you could use that to get inspiration for what you should be doing for your email marketing

And this guy built the site. I don't know how long ago now, but

He's post on hacker news a little bit about it and it's one person

It's a side project. He does a million dollars a year on it. He said I was doing email marketing for a brand

I noticed two things one. It's took us several days to create each email blast

And two I had to subscribe to like dozens of other

Competitor emails just to do research for for them

So my hypothesis was I could create a site that would just sign up for all the brands, you know

Email newsletters and then make it easier for anybody who's trying to do email marketing, right?

That's that's the core core pitch for it

And he's just been running it as a side project doesn't take much maintenance

Doesn't you know, he could just do nothing on it for a little while and it makes money through ads

Yeah, so so they use ads on the left side here. You could see like I have it open and

He's basically got like a link to the brand itself

And then he's got like a cyber security like ad here popped up on below and he's got like a skincare ad

Yeah, it's just display ads. So but here's another way how he makes money

So basically you you're a marketer you go to milled and you want to see like it looks like some shoe brand

They run they ran this campaign and you want to check out the email and you read it and get inspired or whatever

You click that ad and it takes you to the shoe company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes

Right, this is a horrible way to monetize. This is a really amazing product

Under mono under monetized website for sure, but good for him for getting the traffic in the first place

But that's a horrible way to monetize. Yeah. Yeah, I agree

But I think the guy doesn't care. He's just like this is easy low maintenance

Which is why I put it in my one-on-one own because it's low maintenance and I think it still has a lot of upside left

I'll do one for one. I want to own so I said anything that is like market placey

Sort of like a marketplace because sometimes if you do it right those don't they don't run themselves entirely

but the the community kind of handles business built with so built with was started in

2015 or 16 probably built with is like the most niche shit ever

But there's it's a really big niche

So you go to built with in order to see which plugins a website is using if they are using wordpress

And the reason why that's important is you go to a website that you like and you go, oh, I love this feature

They have let's go and see what this word press Shopify also

That's new it started with just wordpress

I think and so you're like just tell me like the plugins and tell me the everything that they're using

Shopify and built with Shopify and wordpress

It has something like tens of millions of people going there a month and does at the time when I first

Found them. I think in 2020. I think they're doing 14 15 million in revenue with just one person

So I think that would be a really cool company to own

Because I think it's super valuable once you get all that traffic and those people coming back to you all the time

I think it's a really valuable site. Do you know anything about built with?

Yeah, just what you told me what you said there. I've been using it for a long time

Basically, if you see a website you want to know what they use for whatever they use

Just go to build with it's pretty great. That's kind of like a data

It's almost like a data index, right? It's like more like a database than it is a marketplace in a way

But I agree. It's kind of amazing. All right, let's keep going. We got a couple categories left

We have a rookie of the year so a new one a new a new one that we found

I think you might have already covered yours in here, but it's boring

I didn't want to say the same thing twice, but this guy joe mombrae this joseph mombrae like

I love his story

I think that this guy's going to be a big deal and I and I take a lot of pride and try to find people before

They're like really popular. I think he's read the blog post that I that I've linked up there from the hampton site

It's really good. I think this guy's going to be a winner. So that's my rookie of the year

What's only finders only finders it is mine. So this is one that I don't know how it is maybe a couple years old now

So only finders is a search engine for only fans. So if you want to find a

type of

Model on only fans. So you you know, you're into

You know blonde agents or like, you know, whatever good-looking midgets whatever whatever you're into

You can search on only finders and it will give you a list of

top rank profiles for that thing

So as you know, I've been down the only fans rabbit hole where I'm like

I think there's a lot of potential in the only fans world of like businesses and this was one of them that I found

And only finders run by one guy. He's awesome. He listens to the pod

And he crushes it

So he crushes the seo game for for only fans if you search for a bunch of different popular searches

And in fact, actually what what it what he did was smart

Which is he didn't want to just rank for like the general searches like best only fans or something like that

Like he wants the high intent ones

So he wants the person who's searching for like whatever. I don't know what people search for but like red head

Yeah, red

If you go to his site you could you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are

So it's like indian girls with boyfriends. Whatever. Yeah, I don't even want to read half of this stuff

Stuff that people are so it's what he categories

What he did was he ranks really high for the categories that people are that's like clearly people's thing

And it's like, I don't know what your thing is but I got if you got a thing

I got it for you and because of that those are really really high intense searches

And then what he does on the other side is he goes to only fans models and agencies and he says

Hey, if you want more traffic, I have tons of people searching for your exact thing

Pay me per click for every person I send to you. So he's basically recreated google

It's a search engine where you get paid per click

To send and somebody with intent to your to your to your site

It does a really really good job

And only fans does not have a discover section on purpose. They decided they don't want to be in the discovery business

They want to only be in the like the kind of the underlying tools underneath these crater profiles

And so he does this and this site only finders generates like a million dollars a month because this is incredibly lucrative

business that he that he has and so

And it's just been surfing the growth of only fans which has grown like

Exponentially like only fans a few years ago was very small

You know five, you know, whatever four or five years ago was very small and then it got bigger and bigger

it's like sort of like

I mean the curve looks looks unreal like only fans is bigger than twitch

It's bigger than like some of these massive

Websites now and it generates a lot of money like they pay out billions to creators on the platform

And so if you could be part of that ecosystem, it's valuable

That's insane. I have now met multiple people and only fans that you've never heard of

Girls that are doing between one and two million a month on their profile

No way it's all in a month because their body is the cogs

It's all profit basically they have like, you know, usually they have like

They'll have like some of them as you get bigger you have like an agency that manages it

And the funny part is by the way like the only fans works is like

Okay, so the money is made

in

Basically like the chatting so it's not you pay for a picture

It's actually you pay to like kind of like have some personal connection with them some chat with them

And it's like the conversation and the stuff that happens when they're upselling them in the conversation is where the thing happens

And so they just have like a call center

They have like a farm of people in the philippines that are doing the chatting for them and they pay them

Like a rev share for the revenue that they generate during the chats

And so it's basically lonely dudes in in in america talking to lonely dudes in the philippines

It's like that's what all the fans, you know, you know

Sort of like boils down to in many cases for these like really popular accounts because no one person can handle the amount of volume that they get

So what are they doing with this money? They're just

They just have huge income and how long do you think can they do it for five years three years? Yeah

And it's funny they kind of that some of them kind of exit they burn out

And they'll just sell their like name likeness and photo library and be like you run it and just give me a rev share

Give me 50%

It's like bruce springsteen. That's what he did the same thing

The boss this is insane. I I don't know much. I I don't know much about this shit

This is absolutely insane the engagement on these things are wild if you have a only fans business reach out to me

Shawda shawd puri.com

I want to invest in only fans businesses that are just cash flow. Are they cool like when you met these

They're cool. The problem is they're very hard to sell and they're very easy to be killed and so they need kind of like

Strategy on like no, I mean the girls. Oh, I don't know. I don't know

You said you hung out with a couple of them. I hang out with them. I just talked to them

Yeah, they're they're nice people. I don't know

That's insane. How did you get in touch with them?

Internet bro

What do you mean, you know, I how many times on here if I talked about only fans and then people basically like

Oh, you're into that so that they email you and they're like, they probably have a million indian guys like DMing them

I mean, that's insane

This is insane. I don't go I don't go through, you know

If when you see a big line at the front door, you don't you don't you don't go waiting that line

You have to go find a side door and the side door is generally

You know some some dude who listens to our podcast that runs their business or as their manager and that's kind of like the way

All right, let's that if we do all right the last category is worst of the best

I have a different one, but I would have to say only fans would be up there

But what I have another worse one is these are all cool businesses

But which ones are least favorite so yours is gonna be only fans

No, I mean it would be but I already had something else kevin van trump. So kevin van trump

I met this guy. Sean likes him a lot now. I met him in 2018. I was at a conference

And kevin van trump is like six feet tall and he's like really big

He's like a very very large

Overweight guy and he walks up to me and he's got this super thick axe and he goes

Hey, what's up, man? I do it like it just starts talking to me and I'm like

This guy's so confident and he starts talking about all my newsletters

In the hustle and all this stuff and he's got the thick accent

He's wearing a Ramones t-shirt and he's got like converse on he just looks like a like a like a like a wallmark guy

and then like

He dropped

He drops like one or two lines where for some reason we talked about art

But he was like, oh, yeah

That Picasso I got one of them some bitches like he said something like that

I was like what so I let it slide and then I go how many subscribers are on your your newsletter and he goes like

Oh 60,000 and he goes. Hey, how much do you guys charge for yours? And I go. Oh, it's free. We make money on ads

You charge it goes. Yeah, we charge like 300 a month

I forget exactly what it was and I like do the math in my head and I'm like wait

That's 20 million dollars a year. He goes. Yeah, it's something like that

I don't even know and I started hanging out with him and he basically this guy's named kevin van trump

He's got this newsletter where he talks about agriculture and like how it impacts commodity prices

and

He's brilliant and I get to know him a little bit more and you're like, oh, no

You just have a southern accent. He like was a wall street like trader. He's the guy's brilliant

He's amazing and he lives in Kansas City and I've done a zoom call with him

And you see like he's got like these custom built motorcycles in the back of his like house

And he's got like all these Picasso's and shit the guy's killing it

But that same day when I hung out with them, I was like, hey, do you want to go get dinner?

He's like, yeah, I can go get dinner

We we hang out at 8 30. He goes, hey man, I gotta run. I gotta go write tomorrow's newsletter

And I was like what he goes I do it every day. I've done it every day for 10 years

I go, what do you mean every day? He goes six days a week. I send a newsletter and it's 2000 plus words

It's really long. He does it every day and he was making all this money

I don't think I would trade life with him though just to have all that money

I had the same answer. I think he's amazing. You put me on to him. I met him and his son such awesome people

They're awesome. Super fun. Just fun to be around smart

Really nice just kind people don't like, you know, no no pretense about them

And same thing. He was hosting farm con. I went because you had told me about him and introduced me to him

And when when I go there, he's we're having a conference called farm con

He's got farm con, which is like the biggest farming conference get together. So I go to Kansas and I

Was it awesome? Yeah, it was amazing and I'm there and we're talking it's like 11 at night

It's like the the whole event's done. Everyone's at the bar

Every single person is drinking a beer

Every single person is drinking a beer and he's like, I gotta get up. You gotta get up to the bedroom

You gotta gotta go back to my room real quick right the right tomorrow's edition

And I was like, wait, you write it yourself still and he's like, yeah, I write it

I've written it myself by hand every night and he started this thing more than 10 years ago

like I think he'd said like

Almost like 20 years basically and he's been writing this thing 18 years or something insane

Every day almost. Yeah, and it's long too. It's not like just some cookie cutter like here's three links that are interesting. It's like

My drone pal came down said this and he said this said that, you know, here's how this is going to affect corn futures

And here's what I'm betting over here and oh, and then there's a bunch of memes

It's amazing. It's basically his market analysis for like crop, you know, crop commodities

And then it's a bunch of memes underneath it and he's like nope never do ads

Like I just wanted to build as much trust as I can in this community. So I never advertise

I charge for it. That's why we have farm cons. So everybody shows up

Is because you know, they they I build a lot of trust over the over the years

And I learned more about business from that guy in like one hour

Then I did in my entire like four-year education at Duke

Like he said to me he said a bunch of things that I that I loved I put this in my my my newsletter

I did a feature on him that I wrote a bunch of the lessons but one of them that he said was

he goes

Yeah, content's cool

But he's like being he goes being an investor is the best job in the world. You kidding me

He's like and he just said it so matter of fact that he's like there is no better job in the world than being an investor

It is it is the best and you sort of think about that. You're like, all right. Well, that sounds you know, whatever

I guess kind of obvious

And it's like, okay, if that's true, then how do you get into that job?

Like if if that is true for you

How do you architect your life to get there because he was basically just like look this newsletter is great

Yeah, it crushes makes a lot of money

But I wish I was just an investor

It would have been a better better better choice blah blah and he talks about investing because

He I think he was on wall street before he started doing what he was doing. Yeah, and he goes I was early into bitcoin

I was early into facebook

I was like really and he's like, yeah, he's like I wasn't as early as I could have been

He's like I got into bitcoin like at 20

He's like we started hearing about it at farmcon like in 2013 2014

I didn't buy until 2015 2016. I should have been in it right when I first heard it

He's the same thing with facebook

He goes two lessons for you in investing number one

The best trades are going to be one where bonds where you buy them and you put them in the drawer

You never think about them again

He's like that he's like that was the best thing I did about bitcoin

I bought bitcoin I put it in the drawer never thought about it again heard all the news

Didn't care it's in the drawer and I was like damn in the drawer

That's a cool concept of like what investments can you just have the conviction in you put in the drawer?

You say I'm not going to react to the daily news cycle about this investment

I'm going to let the 10 years play out on this investment because it was a

Let's see what happens on the long-term type of bet

Second thing he said was he goes

You always get a second chance to get on the train with the best investments

There's always a second chance on the train. He's like with bitcoin

You know you think you missed it and then the price will come down

That's your chance to get back on the train and most people by that time

You know they spend the whole way up wishing they had got on the train

Train comes back around and they get scared. They don't get back on yeah the same thing happen with facebook facebook

You know we had our chances when it was private and it goes public

It goes up up up crash back down to 19 dollars

I got back on the train that train came around I got right back on

And he's like you know that will happen for the best investments and I sort of look for this now of like

How do you override the psychology that most people have which is when it's going up?

You wish you had gotten in earlier then when it crashes down

You're too afraid to buy in because you feel like oh shit. Did it is it over did it pop?

Is it did I miss it was I wrong and it's like well

Then you lose lose

You know you want to buy on the way up and you don't want to buy on the way down

That's that's a recipe for being poor right like you know buy high don't buy low right?

That's not going to work and so those two little lessons were ones that stuck out for me

But this guy's business is amazing

He's an amazing guy and the reason he's amazing among other things is he breaks all the stereotypes

He you'll think that he's just this like hicky guy

Just like people used to think about me and like I grew up around people just like him turns out

He's like brilliant. He'll he'll like you're like you're gonna talk to me about facebook

And he knows way more about it than you do. He'll probably knows all about bitcoin

I mean the guy's brilliant and I love hanging out with him and his friends because

You it teaches you like I'm a fucking idiot for judging people a certain way these guys are all badass and they're fun as shit

I did a call the other day with another guy. So another guy from farm con same same sort of guy. He's just white guy maybe

I don't know

It is fifties ish something like that

Was he super rich because so many those guys are rich

And I think this guy, I don't know how rich this guy is private jet rich

I don't know how rich this guy is but the guy who introduced me to him is just like, yeah, this guy's worth

You know, 300 to 500 million dollars personally and I was like, wow, okay. That's crazy because I was like

I was like do his deals like he's always talking about these deals

Like does he actually make money on these like is he had a track record of success? He's like, yeah, he has

So this guy this guy's got phrases for days

So I I have this doc that I keep on my phone. I call freezes anytime somebody says something that's just like

Funny or worded. Well, it just sticks out to me. It's a punchy phrase. I write it down at farm con

I filled out my phrases thing like because there were so many so this one guy

I don't want to say his name to put him on blast

But he he was at a dinner with so it's kevin van trump and then this guy was at the dinner

it was like a private dinner at the at farm con and

He stands up and he goes there's everyone the table's doing introductions and sit there

I'm like, oh, hi. I'm Sean and I work in tech and uh

Just fucking kill me. I guess I'm boring like, you know, like that's

I felt during the introduction this guy stands up. He goes

Yeah, my name so-and-so he goes

Exactly he said he goes

I don't know who won the world series

I can't tell you how to get six pack abs. Hell. I don't even know where the remote is in my house

But I know one thing I know how to structure deals and today I'm gonna tell you guys about a deal that I'm doing

And he like gave this intro and I was like, what an incredible

I was like, what an incredible way to introduce yourself. I don't know where the remote is

But I know one thing I know deals and I was like that is incredible

Then he's talking about how old he is. He goes you cut me in half. There's gonna be a lot of rings

That's the best nice

And then he goes and then I did a call with him the other day

And I get on the zoom call and I had just finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because I was like

Dude, I gotta run. I gotta be on this call. He's like, all right

Just take your call

But let's do your like kind of like we try to do like this like myofascial like you're rolling like a

Like a foam roller type of thing like you're kind of like foam rolling out at the end

So we were doing it and he's like just do it while you're on the call foam rolled with this guy

So I get on the call. I turn on the video and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna show him what's going on

So I'm like, sorry this looks weird. I'm doing like some stretching

And he goes

So he's a big dude and he goes, okay, cool. If it looks like I'm stretching call that one one because I'm having a stroke

Dude, why would you take a call like that? Incredible way like to have that line

Immediately ready when I say, you know that I'm stretching if it looks weird. I'm stretching. I was like, wow, that was

Literally so fucking funny to me

I was blown away. I was like, I don't even care what else happens on this call that that was so impressive. So good

What state did he live in? He's in Tennessee. I think

What the hell is a deal struck? I don't even know what that means like he like he does

Private equity so he buys companies

But he's like, I just know how to find a great deal

How to put the financing together and how to structure it so that like

I get the maximum value out of these deals. It's kind of like what he does and like, you know, I'm like

Have you done any deals or like that would have heard of

and he's like

You know disneyland

He's like a lot of windows in disneyland. We do all the windows in disneyland

Oh my god

But a window company got him a disney contract. We do all the windows in disney

Do what with the windows like clean them. We gotta have this down the pot. This guy's incredible

What's yours for a world's worst of the best?

I had both design joy and the kevin van trump just because of the time thing

So I love that kevin van trump has built like this

This amazing power niche in the farming industry

But I I would not want to be

The guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure is it's got to go out tomorrow morning

I felt that during milk road for a month and I was like, nope

Not doing it this way. Yeah, although I think if I was him, I would just find a way to hire somebody to do that

Like I can't believe he hasn't done that yet. Does ben thompson still do

I haven't read. Oh, yeah, so ben thompson is my version of that. So he does strotechery

and every day he writes a newsletter about

Basically the same four things

And I don't even know how he does that like he talks about facebook google amazon apple netflix

And like what's going like the kind of the business and strategy of what they're doing. They're so long

These are so long and he does this daily

Long form his audience is like has the highest bar his audience is like the smartest people in the tech industry

Like, you know vcs and all the they that's who reads him every morning. So he's got to come with like

Original content that's super smart

About the same topics. He's been doing this for like a decade and he makes three million dollars a year roughly

Doing this office paid and he only charges 120 dollars a year

Yeah, I think he upped his price. I don't know if what it is now, but he like did raise his price

Is at some point 120 it's 12. I think it was 100 and now it's 120

Oh my god

$1,000 a month for this thing, you know, but but he's you know, I think ben's awesome

So I don't read it as a knock for him. I'm saying I would hate the pressure of

the daily

Super insightful thing that I have to write every every morning original content about

Like the same kind of like 10 companies is I don't I literally don't even know how he does it

If somebody had told me they're gonna do that I'd be like, what are you saying?

This makes no sense. He does it every day sitting in taiwan

This is the worst. This is the worst. It is it is amazing

But yeah, I would never want to do this. So what do we think that?

I wonder what I want to know the listener if they think that these one

All in depth on one topic if they dig this they dig the award category style or the award style

What do you think? Yeah, this is an experiment for us of like doing a few focused episodes themed episodes

Today's theme was these one or two person businesses that crush it

Do you like this or do you like the freestyle freestyle is a lot easier?

This one takes a lot of work

But if people love this you got to go in the youtube comments and show us

If we should do more of these or no, we're cool either way, but this is an experiment

So let us know in the youtube comments. I think we should do some takeaways. All right, so

Here's my my quick takeaways

The most common industries you see these one to two person businesses that crush are

Just like thought leader on on social media. So just putting out free content on social media

Ecommerce we didn't do any ecom ones in this but like there's a bunch of ecommerce

That could do like, you know a million dollars a year in profit that are

Run with one or two people and then you can do agencies for everything else

Games so we talked about started valley minecraft. There's a bunch of games that are built like this apps and plugins

So plugins on top of things like a figma plugin a google sheets plugin a gmail plugin

That sort of thing and then data aggregators like built with which are basically the compiling data like mill dot com

Compiling a bunch of things that are of the same thing

So it's you go search and you find what you want because they've aggregated everything only finder same thing

It's a data aggregator

Strategy so here's a couple strategy points. You need to be either

Amazing 100 awesome at distribution meaning you're the influencer

You're the content creator or you need to be 100 awesome on product. You're the guy

Coding the game and and and you'll you'll hire a publisher to do the publishing

And so I think that if I was going to do this if I was going to try to make this happen

I would say

Where can I be either an incredible at distribution or incredible at product?

And I want to just like put all of my emphasis on that in order to make this happen the next one

You need attributes. So a lot of these we made sound simple

But you got to have some attributes some skill copywriting design, you know the ability like investment judgment market analysis

Like you got to be expert on one of these things if you're going to make this happen

And so, you know, you got to get to that expert master master of your craft level if you're going to do this

The last one it's all about leverage

So the way you can get a one or two person company to get to millions tens of millions or even some of the examples

We gave were hundreds of millions of dollars was leverage. So you need to be using code

Build it once and then it runs as software

You need to use media like podcasts or newsletters or whatever

Or you need to use capital because you're not going to use labor, right? Like most companies use labor

That's why they have hundreds of people working for them

But if you're going to not have hundreds of people working you got to use these other forms of leverage code

capital some money

Or media are are your tools of choice?

So you got to figure out which of those three can I use and that's how I'm going to do it

And the beauty of it is because of the internet

If you're the best at x you now get to sell to the whole world

So like we didn't give an example miss excel

So miss excel is this girl who goes on tiktok

It's you in a high energy way dances and tells it teaches you how to use excel like Microsoft excel better

And she's the best in the world at teaching excel. It turns out the best in the world of teaching excel is

You know how to do the popular, you know the the useful stuff and you can dance turns out

that's what the best teacher of excel looked like

And she now gets to teach the entire world excel

Like the best of anything gets to just to provide that product service or education to everybody

That's the beauty of of the internet

And so you need to figure out how to become the best of x because and then just make it available to everybody

And the last thing I I was going to say was it's fucking lonely

Like the best times that I have in work is when I'm

Whether it's in the trenches and like it's a shitty day or it's a great day is celebrating with co-workers

These jobs are lonely

I'm actually surprised when I hear about this about like how they are able to push like I push myself because

Oh, I have mouths to feed or I want to be held accountable by these other people and make them proud

It's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when you're by yourself

And it's just hard to do this every day alone. So hopefully you have like a good spouse or

A significant another or something because it's just challenging

I immediately when I started this I was like, oh, I want to be a solo solopreneur

I wanted to be a solopreneur or they call it a solo capitalist

I raised a fund and it's like I want to be a solo capitalist and I was like

Oh, this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself

Yeah

And not only is it not that good to do things by yourself because you know a little bit of

Help can go a long way a complimentary person who's good at the things you're not good at is really really useful

But on top of that it ain't no fun and like most of life is the journey not the destination

And you don't want to have the shitty journey for this awesome destination

And so very quickly I was like, yeah, this is a duopreneur. This is me and ban doing this or in the fund

It's me and romine doing this and I basically immediately was like

I'm going to do this even my ecom business

I gave a chunk of it to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and would give me some money

And I was like why just because like I don't want to be reporting into myself and only like

Have myself as a thought partner to be sparring with on ideas about this

I want to have somebody awesome just just to do some you know idea jousting on this

And so I think doing it by yourself is honestly a terrible idea

And you should definitely try to get one other person to do this

I think two people is the is the sweet spot where you get sort of the most autonomy in the least like management headaches

And you still get the most shit done and have a lot of fun along the way

All right, that's the pod whether you're listening on itunes or spotify or whatever go to search

My first million on youtube and go to the comments on this video and actually let us know we'll read them and see if we should keep doing these

That's it

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel never looking back

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.