SPEAKER_01
This is why on all my landing pages, I always ask for email first. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on. On the road, let's travel never looking back.
SPEAKER_02
What's up? We're back from Miami and we got a new nickname. I am Sean Fury. He is the vanilla gorilla and we are back.
We had to wing it this episode because we had a guest cancel last minute, but I think it turned out pretty good. Sam, what do we talk about?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So this episode actually turned out, I think to be one of my favorite in a long time. We probably discussed maybe 20 or 30 ideas.
The ideas start about halfway through, but we have a bunch of interesting ideas that are scattered throughout. So a few things that we've discussed. So businesses that we've both invested in recently, including an event business, we've talked about slingshot ideas.
So slingshot ideas that are ideas that have been kind of under the radar because of COVID. But now that there's a lot of pent up demand for events, for interaction, things like that, these are going to be slingshot. Is that the right word? Slingshot, slingshooted back into popularity.
We talked about litigation finance. So basically there's a whole bunch of people that will finance lawsuits and then take a cut the winning settlement. Kind of interesting.
We talked about secondhand stores. Shockingly, that's actually, it seems like a huge idea. And then finally, we wrapped up with one of the best shawng stories I've ever heard where we talked about door to door sales.
Trust me, it's going to leave you fired up. It's in the last 15 minutes. It's awesome.
We were supposed to have Bill Smith from Hello Landing On. I got an email from his PR team, literally 60 seconds before we were supposed to hit record saying he's not going to make it. I don't know what we're going to do today.
I'm so angry about that. Oh my gosh, I'm frustrated.
SPEAKER_02
I got to give you credit. You replied back to the email to the PR person. The PR person, 60 seconds before the podcast is supposed to record.
Right? So I'm in a sound room, in a green room getting soundcheck. And it's like, hey folks, sorry, not going to be able to make it today. Looking forward to rescheduling.
And Sam just goes, are you kidding? One minute before the podcast? No context. And I thought the, are you kidding? Was very ballsy. I would have just ate it, just took the slap.
And I think you rightfully, you're rightfully like, what?
SPEAKER_01
I mean, okay, so I'm reading this book called nonviolent communication. I'm reading it for two reasons. The first reason is I've gotten repeated feedback from you and Abrayu and my coworkers that I have a temper.
And I don't think I have a temper. So I'm trying to get that and my wife, Sarah, the second reason is that-
SPEAKER_02
And this feedback is pissing me off.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think I could be a little hot.
SPEAKER_02
Hey, we got to say, I was with you the whole week, we went to Austin, Miami, and you were like an angel. You were totally patient. You were just being grateful the whole time.
It was amazing. And then you, I think you even noticed at the end, I was going to tell you, and then you go, I've been really kind this whole trip. I'm feeling really kind and grateful.
SPEAKER_01
So I guess we can, we can talk about that. But yeah, so Bill Smith, sorry brother, like I have a feeling, I have a feeling it wasn't Bill's fault. That's what I would bet.
I bet he's got people and I bet that he screwed that up. They screwed it up, not him. But I-
SPEAKER_02
You know what happens? Like sometimes you don't sort of, you don't really think about the other side. You're just going about your day. One thing is rolling over.
This other thing comes up and you're just like, we got to move that call thing. We got to move that podcast thing. And so, you know, I've been on that side where, you know, I don't sort of fully, you know, appreciate that the other side of it has, you know, there's a lot of prep that goes into a podcast.
There's like multiple people on board and timing and then you need to record because you have to release and then you're preparing for him. You're researching him. You're not researching other topics.
So then you got to go live without him. But I-
SPEAKER_01
I just think that- The show comes on. Look, we're not big shots yet. I would love to be a big shot.
We're not big shots yet. But I would say we are big enough shots that like someone like it would be wise to take this at least seriously and give like a little bit of a heads up. I'm not saying that we're like big deals, but like it's a good enough platform.
SPEAKER_02
He wouldn't have rescheduled Tim Ferriss a minute before the pot. Is that what you're saying?
SPEAKER_01
Oh, definitely not. Like I'm not saying that we're big deals, but I am and we are. All right.
Whatever.
SPEAKER_02
Let's do this role.
SPEAKER_01
So, I hope you come back. So I don't know what we're going to talk about, but you want to do a recap of this weekend?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, let's do it. So we had a fun week. We went to, I went to Austin, which is your hometown, state of your house.
Not my hometown. My- Or your current town. Yeah. And we did a live show. I don't know, about a hundred people were able to fit into the venue.
We did it at the AppSumo office with Noah Kagan. That was fun. Then we hopped on a plane next morning, 5 a.
m. and got to Miami where the Bitcoin conference was happening. We had 10 to 20,000 people in town for this Bitcoin thing and we were there for our Miami show.
And I think, I don't know, a few hundred people, I don't know how many ended up being, maybe, I don't know, what do you think, Dan? 250, 300 people, something like that?
SPEAKER_01
Well, 300 people RSVP'd, but I think, or no, sorry, 350. 3,200 show up.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, something like that.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So 200 people showed up or so, did the live show there, met a bunch of cool people, people who flew in from Paraguay and all different types of places to attend. And yeah, then we hung out and we flew home.
So that was the, that's what happened, but there were some interesting things that were going on. Give me your kind of like, what do you think would be the most interesting one or two things to talk about from the trip? I have a couple.
SPEAKER_01
So I have a bunch and thank you, Bill Smith. So I'm just rattling this off the top of the dome. There's no research here.
But the airports and hotel situation in both Miami and in Austin, bananas, absolutely crazy. We went to the airport. I think we got there at about 6am.
We left my house at 5.30, I think. And it was like an hour long wait, including TSA precheck to get past security.
And it was booming. I went to Miami. The reason I came home early is because my hotels, I went to book on hotel tonight and they all got canceled for some reason.
And I couldn't find a single hotel in between the ranges of $200 and $2,000 in Miami. I had to go stay at a family, a family's house. Hotel is crushing it right now.
I'm just shocked at how booming everything is.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. And also I came from California and in California, there's just like COVID, you know, precaution everywhere. And as soon as we got to Austin, you were like, oh yeah, this is my favorite, like, you know, coffee shop slash bar.
I don't even know what the place was, a Lazarus or whatever it's called. And we walk in and I was like, I was like stepping into a time machine. I was like, whoa, everybody's just chilling.
Everybody's hanging out at a restaurant indoors, no masks. Some people had their masks on. That's cool.
That's their choice. And other people didn't. But it just, it was like, wow, life has really gone on and people are back to normal.
And because in Florida and Texas, I think there are probably two of the most like kind of forward states as far as like returning to the norm. And then, you know, California, I come back and it's sort of the same thing, you know, if your nose peeks out of your mask, you get three dirty looks. And I'm over the mask, mask time.
I'm like, I'm vaccinated. Let's let's roll here.
SPEAKER_01
While you're listening to this podcast, you're probably doing something else too. It's cool. We get it.
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com. Yeah. So that was a takeaway with some COVID stuff. My thing, where do you think that the, do you see any opportunities right now? So like you had heard about pent up demand and how the economy is going to bounce back after seeing Miami, after seeing Austin airport, I've seen a little bit of New York.
It's just, it's booming. Where do you think the opportunities are? Do you have anything else to top your head that you're looking at?
SPEAKER_02
I'm glad I bought Airbnb stock when it was down because I think Airbnb is going to do very well because I do think people are pretty roaring to get back out there and doing things, traveling, traveling especially. I know a lot of people that haven't seen their family in like, you know, a year and a half type of thing. So I think that people are going to be coming back out.
That's not that like, you know, insightful of an answer. It's just sort of obvious. And I think that a lot of things that we, we did as a necessary evil are going to go away and people are going to ditch those with quickness.
The same way I was ready to just ditch my mask as soon as it was okay to do it. I think, you know, all the remote learning stuff is going to go away pretty quickly because people, if it wasn't a better experience, it's like going to the graveyard as soon as you don't have to do it. And I think remote school is one where every parent and every kid I've ever talked to that had to do remote, like, you know, zoom school.
They are not like, oh, you know, I really, really enjoy, you know, school from home. Like there's people who enjoy work from home. I don't know anybody that enjoys school from home.
So I think that's, that side is like going to take a big hit.
SPEAKER_01
Did you see this company? So I'm going to talk about a startup real quick that I just invested in, I bet you looked at it as well. It was called Mary. Have you heard of Mary? It's bemary.
com. No, tell me about it. So Ankur.
So basically I'm friends with this guy named Ankur, who's a successful entrepreneur and he invests in stuff and he just sends me interesting stuff. I thought you were on that list because you-
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I just missed it or I'm-
SPEAKER_01
I think I have a feeling you missed it. And so there's this, so basically I'm on the lookout for companies that are going to be taking advantage. We have to come up with a cute name for this like pent up demand because it's like, what are people going to care about right now?
SPEAKER_02
So Jason Talcanis had a good phrase where he goes, slingshot startups. They had a setback. They were pulled back during COVID, but it like, it's like a slingshot when you, when you, when you pull it back is yes, it's gone backwards, but it's building up this momentum to slingshot forward.
And I thought I liked that. That was a good little visual.
SPEAKER_01
So slingshot startups. So I'm looking at like a vet, a vet related stuff. I think sex related stuff is going to be quite interesting.
What are some other-
SPEAKER_02
You're making me blush. What are some other- I'll give you two examples. I invested in one company called Fitness AI and this was like an app you use when you go to the gym.
So it's like a trainer. When you're at the gym, it would be like, hey, cool. Like it knows your progression.
So it basically say, it tracks all your reps. So it knows what weight you need to do next to get the next, to get the maximum gains over like a few month period of time. Now when COVID hit, Jim's clothes, his whole app became like useless overnight.
And so he had to re-architect the whole app to do in-home fitness. But the reason I would say is it's not that this startup necessarily benefited from it, but you got to see what different startups are made of when you saw the entrepreneurs pivot the plane mid-flight and find a new path and actually start growing at a time where they should have been having a setback. Another example is there's these guys who keep emailing me, Guru Hotel.
They were a YC startup and they were a software for hotels to increase their bookings and it's focused in Latin America. And of course, COVID hits, nobody's booking hotels. Their business should really struggle.
And they just made all these tweaks and all these adjustments so that they first stayed flat and then actually started to grow at a time when their business should have cratered and many less determined entrepreneurs, less adaptable entrepreneurs would have gone under. And so I think it was a great filter. It weeded out the entrepreneurs and you got to see the entrepreneurs who actually succeeded despite the circumstances.
And those are the ones I think worth betting on.
SPEAKER_01
What's Guru Hotel about?
SPEAKER_02
I don't know exactly what they do. They basically, I think what it is is it's like Shopify for a hotel. So most hotel websites suck.
So what they did was they just make, they make your hotel's website higher converting and higher upselling. And so you're going to get an incremental 10 to 15% in revenue because instead of paying some, you know, your nephew to build a WordPress website for your hotel and it hasn't changed in eight years and you don't even touch it because you don't know how to code it, they basically take over the front end website for your hotel. And in doing so, they generate more revenue for you and then they take a cut or they take a fast.
SPEAKER_01
That sounds pretty great to me. Have you heard of MindBody? You know MindBody? Yeah. So MindBody, they're publicly traded.
They were started in 2000. So they've been around for a minute and basically they kind of started out doing that a little bit just helping a yoga instructor. I think it's mostly like it's health stuff.
SPEAKER_02
Studios. Yeah. So it's basically like yoga studios, Pilates studios, stuff like that. And they became the website and the booking system and payment system for all those physical locations.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Crazy good company. Kind of quietly. I think they're based out of San Luis Obispo, so they're not Silicon Valley and so they've probably been quietly crushing it.
And what's this called? Hotel Guru?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Oh, they should call it the other.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they should switch it. They should be Hotel Gurus.
SPEAKER_01
They should switch that.
SPEAKER_02
It's like so obvious when you said it, I hadn't even thought about it.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. They didn't even change that. Guru Hotel.
Oh, no.
SPEAKER_02
Never mind. Recind all five of the compliments.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think there's a MindBody component here of like you just create the first thing and then next, next, next, next, next. So are you going to invest in that company?
SPEAKER_02
Maybe. And like they keep sending me updates and it all sounds good, but I just have this inherent thing that the best startups don't reach out randomly to non-superfamous investors like me. So unfortunately, and this is like, this is kind of a screwed up thing, if a startup is reaching out to me to try to make room, I already discount 20%.
That doesn't mean I don't do it, but I discount 20% how good it is even when it looks good.
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I'm sorry to find anybody else. I'm the same way. I'm like, oh, you're willing to, like, it's like, that's what I felt like when I was dating, like, oh, you like me? Something's bad here.
Right. This is crazy. So there's, there's this company called Mary.
I just invested in, like I said, we send it to you and I'm not sure if this is going to be the biggest thing, but I think it could definitely be a very profitable investment. It's called Mary. M E R R I.
Did you go to it? It looks like a very, be Mary.com. I'll tell you why I'm interested, but I'll tell you first what it does. So what it does is you need to organize an event.
They've uploaded. I don't know how maybe there's a huge database out there, but they've uploaded massive amounts of renderings or like floor plans of event space. And then they make it really easy to drag and drop different tables and chairs and whatever you need for a wedding or a conference.
And you get outline what the event is going to look like and you do it in 3D because somehow the floor blue.
SPEAKER_02
So it looks like, it looks like the Sims. So it's like you take, you have the venue and then it lets you upload like circle table, chairs, banquet chairs. You know, like speaker, like podium or whatever, right? It looks like the Sims.
You make a little 3D rendering.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly. And the reason I invested in this was because of something that Andrew Wilkinson said on this podcast, he called something an airport business. I think he called, uh, what's that thing he owns, dribble? Yeah.
He owns this thing called dribble and where dribble is is, uh, or I think he was referring to dribble when he was talking about airport business, but basically with, uh, with, with an airport, you arrive at the airport and you're there. You have to be there for three to four hours. Uh, you're going to buy whatever they have.
You're going to, if you're there, it's very easy for that airport to sell you candy, a
SPEAKER_02
magazine, your captive audience.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. You're a captive audience. And what Mary did is they made it where they uploaded all of these venues.
And so people who are executing weddings can go on there and pay a fee to use their software to drag and drop and like organize stuff. And then what they've done is so the vendor can come on and put their, the stuff that they want to sell. So like certain types of chairs, whether it's for rent or to buy, it could be on there.
And then as the, um, event planner is on there doing their thing, they can sell just the event planner, loads and loads and loads of different stuff. So they can make money through affiliate. They can make money through subscription fees.
They can make money through a lot of different stuff that they're on there. And the reason why I invested in this is I think that this is a boring, boring thing that could work quite well. And there's going to be a massive pent up demand for events.
And so we put a little bit of money into it. We'll see if it works. But I love the business of house.
Do you know how H O U Z Z?
SPEAKER_02
I've heard of it. And I think you used that or something like that for your house, right?
SPEAKER_01
No, I use something like that. Yeah. So I use what houses, you probably don't know houses probably the audience is probably majority women. It's a, you basically can design your kitchen or your bedroom on house and they make like a billion dollars a year through affiliate fees.
It's quite amazing. And it's a multi-billion dollar company, but it's kind of been quiet in the background. It's kind of amazing.
What I used was, what the fuck did I use? I use this service where you take a picture of your house.
SPEAKER_01
I think you told me. Yeah. Mods. I think the thing where you take a picture of your house and then they, you pay $300 per room. So I think I paid like 1200 bucks.
A designer designs it and then if I choose to, I can purchase all these stuff that they're telling me to buy or I can just go buy stuff on my own that kind of looks like it.
SPEAKER_02
Right. By the way, I like these models where I don't know about you, but for me, whenever it's like, hey, you get the free consultation and ideas and then it's up to you if you buy them. And at the beginning I'm always like, sweet, let me get the free expert advice and like, I'm not going to buy the things.
That's how I go in. And then as soon as I see it, I'm like, oh, that looks really good. Like I could just push this button and just order these items.
Right. Like I could just buy these things. And so it ends up being where I go in knowing eyes wide open on the model.
Like it's like nerd wallets. Like, cool. I go in, I read the blog post about the credit cards.
I'm not going to like just pick one of these credit cards right off here necessarily because I kind of know, you know, there's like affiliate thing. But but then I do because it's so convenient and there's something to that. When I was selling my house, it was the same thing with staging.
They're like, cool. Like we're going to give, we're going to do all this work to give you these three free options on which one you want to do. And then as soon as you see it, you're like, okay, give me the, give me the expensive one.
I'll do it. It looks so much better. And so, you know, it sort of breaks you over time.
Like a, like the puppy clothes where they give you the puppy, they let you keep it for the weekend and you're like, great, I'll just play with this puppy for the weekend. And then by Sunday night, you're like, this puppy's never leaving my house. I didn't know that was a thing.
You never heard that and sales.
SPEAKER_01
No, puppy clothes.
SPEAKER_02
Basically you give them the thing. And then instead of having them opt in, you have them, okay, you can opt out if you want and nobody ever opts out.
SPEAKER_01
Do you, what are some other slingshots, startups that you're seeing? Or slingshot opportunities?
SPEAKER_02
So the slingshot, so it has to be something that was set back during COVID. So what was set back during COVID? I think physical, I think physical retail schools, travel, hospitality, like we just said. There's other things that are like, you know, like concerts and stuff like that.
I think those are, I think those sports games, concerts, I think those are all going to come back. So I'll give you one, which is sports games. So the NBA playoffs is going on right now.
And I always wondered, would people have kind of like PTSD from COVID where they don't want to be in, even when it's safe, they just don't want to be close to other people without, you know, in confined areas. But these arenas are sold out. You know, as many people as they'll let in, it's packed.
People are going nuts. They're having a good time. And you know, it just feels good to be back in a high energy place again with a whole bunch of other screaming, you know, lunatics.
And so, but I think what happened is, I think the, it's sort of like the NBA franchise or the league had to get pretty, had to get like double resilient because all of a sudden this thing it just took for granted, which is all this ticket revenue went away for like a year. And so now they open their mind up to, well, what other revenue streams should we have? Should we allow sports betting? Should we like, should we do that? Should we sponsor things that we weren't sponsoring before? Should we do NFTs? Oh, okay, cool. You know, NBA top shot will do NFTs as a source of revenue.
So I think it's pretty interesting that I think all these like pro sports are going to bounce back because they were already a premium in person experience. And now they were kind of lazy before at innovating. They didn't have to innovate and COVID made them innovate the fan experience and the like business model.
And I think, you know, we should see some, some good things come from that.
SPEAKER_01
All right, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by imperfect action hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpot's podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Imperfect action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor. She answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and marketing for strategy for business owners.
A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch. Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming.
So check it out. It's called imperfect action. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts.
Last night. So did you watch the Logan Paul, Floyd Mayweather fight?
SPEAKER_02
I watched a little bit of it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
I was in a warehouse where we didn't have streaming internet very strong. And so I, you know, it was choppy, but I got to see the last two rounds only.
SPEAKER_01
So it was, it was, it was exciting. So basically if you were going to go, I was going to go, but then I realized I didn't shoot things happened. One, someone gave me tickets and then right before I was about to go get the tickets, they were like, also like, are you going to mention this in the hustle? And I was like, no, not a chance.
I thought this was a gift. Thank you, but no, thank you. I didn't know there were strings attached.
I'm out. I didn't know I was going to get tickets. And also I didn't like Miami, so I came home early.
Right. It wasn't for me. Not for me at all.
I can see why some people like it. It ain't for me. So last night, basically Logan Paul is a six foot two.
Probably he weighed in at 190 probably fought at 210, 210, 205 huge guy. And he fought Floyd Mayweather who's 44, best boxer of all time, but 44 and 160 pounds at his heaviest. Right. And I thought for sure Floyd was going to win and ended up being basically a draw because they don't declare a winner because it's an exhibition, but Floyd did not do well. And Logan did as good as he possibly could have, which is he didn't get knocked out.
SPEAKER_02
Well, and from what I understand, Floyd did the Floyd thing where he just didn't do anything. He just played defense. He just let the clock run out.
He didn't. Was it that he was unsuccessful on offense or he just didn't try any offense because he didn't need to because he got paid either way.
SPEAKER_01
I think he's old. I think that he, I think age, it was a factor here. And I think that he size is a factor here.
I think that the reason why everyone says Floyd lost because a loss or Floyd is not winning and not knocking him out. Everyone including me thought for sure Logan's going to get knocked out. He did.
He did great. He's a winner. The guy like went from vining to fighting Floyd in a stadium, total winner.
But what he did before the show was Logan is known for like collecting Pokemon cards. And there's this whole trend, if you don't know about this on unwrapping cards. So I actually love watching unwrapping NBA cards.
I don't even like the NBA, but the title will be like, unboxing and Michael Jordan card. I think it's awesome. I love doing it or love watching this.
Logan has this whole thing where he does it. And he, in his, he created a necklace that was basically the most expensive or most rare Pokemon card of all time. And he like put it in some type of like safety thing and he wore it around his neck as he was walking out.
And what I think is going to happen, that was what I would look like what he's setting up is that he is going to sell that. And I think that what his brother did, Jake Paul was they, during the knockout when he, when his brother fought a few weeks ago, they had an NFT right after the fight. And I think that them selling the memorabilia right away after the fight is a brilliant idea and that started a little bit with NFTs and I, but I think that that idea is here to stay.
SPEAKER_02
That's interesting. Yeah. So, so just for the context, so he basically had like the way that most fighters come out, they come out with their gold chain there, you know, they come out with diamonds on and he basically had a sort of diamond chain, but the pendant was a Charizard, a $1 million Charizard card that was laminated as a holographic Charizard rare, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I'm wearing a million dollars on my chest right now.
And it just helps because he's already invested in Pokemon. So him giving it that sign and giving it that credibility using the platform made his own collection worth more and made that individual one worth more because it now has the story of this is the one that you saw on TV, not just the fact that it's a rare Charizard card. So smart, smart move all around.
These guys know how to make money. Floyd had his mask sponsored. He had, he had like everything sponsored on his mask.
SPEAKER_01
His mask was sponsored by Ethereum something.org. Like, did you see that?
SPEAKER_02
I don't know what it was. It was crazy. So his hat, his mask, everything was sponsored as he walked out because these guys, this was a all time money grab.
It was great. So I want to tell you a cool NFT thing. Most NFT things, by the way, not that cool.
SPEAKER_01
You have to explain what we're adding so many listeners, Sean, that you have to actually say what NFT is. I think like a lot of people don't understand, I've got, I've got an aunt and a mother in law listed and get to explain what an NFT is.
SPEAKER_02
All right. NFT is a piece of art that is digital. That's the way that most people are using it today.
It stands for this thing from crypto. So you've heard of Bitcoin, might have heard of Ethereum. Ethereum lets you create this thing called an NFT.
An NFT just means it's a unique, a unique thing. So for example, if I have a $100 bill and Sam has a $100 bill, we could swap it and we would just know they're all the same. The $100 bill is the same as the other.
But if I have a piece of art on my wall, Sam has a piece of art on his wall, we can't just swap it because my art is unique and his art is unique and they're not going to be worth the same amount. Even if we had sort of the same pair of Jordans, they might be in different condition or different years, whatever it is. So an NFT is more like a pair of fancy basketball shoes.
It's something that collectors will own. It can be used in many other ways, but the majority is that. People are using it to create and collect digital art.
They got popular because a whole bunch of people who were what I'll call crypto rich, they made their money on Bitcoin, they made their money on Ethereum, they got tons of money from that. And when NFTs came out, they were using their winnings to buy NFTs. And so they were buying NFTs for literally millions and millions of dollars.
And it blew people's mind. It's like, wait, that's just an image on a computer screen. Why are you buying it for millions of dollars? And they would say, what's the Mona Lisa, but some paint on a piece of paper, right? Its value is in the meaning that people give it.
So anyways, NFTs got popular. They've had sort of a crash since the hype cycle because everybody poured in, thought there was a chance to make money. And then the NFT market's down like 80 plus percent right now from where it was just a few months ago.
So it's been very up and down. But I'll tell you something cool that the people who were not, there's a group with any technology, there's a hype cycle where people jump in just to try to make a buck. And then there's like the people who just believed it at the whole time.
And when the crash happens, they stay, they don't go away. And so I'll tell you a cool NFT example. So do you know who Lamello Ball is?
SPEAKER_01
A basketball player from the ball family. And they're kind of like a little obnoxious. So like the Kardashians of like NBA.
SPEAKER_02
So go to LamelloBall.io. So I met this guy or, you know, actually I haven't met him yet. Ben met him because we thought this project sounded really awesome.
So he partnered up with LamelloBall and LamelloBall created his own NFT. Now here's how it works. The website looks awesome.
Yeah, exactly. Very good website. So there's like four different types.
It's like he turned LamelloBall essentially into a Pokemon card. Okay. So you can collect these different LamelloBall types of cards. Now what do they do? Well, the twist here, the reason I think it's kind of cool is that this is called a dynamic NFT, meaning most NFTs, when you make it, it is what it is.
The image or the video is what it is. It stays that way until the end of time. A dynamic one will update or upgrade based on things that happen.
So what this is, is it's sort of like a bet on the player. So you can buy one of these. You can buy the MVP card.
And today it's worth not so much because he's never won an MVP. But if in his career, he ever wins an MVP, the card will evolve like a Pokemon card. It'll upgrade because it has been unlocked because the thing actually happened in real life.
So it's like today you're betting these cheap options. Will LamelloBall ever win the NFT? Will he ever win MVP? Will he ever win Rookie of the Year? Will he win a championship? And if he does, your asset that you bought will dynamically upgrade because it takes in the data from the real world that, hey, this event has happened and it is now worth more and it could do more. And specifically just to round it out.
SPEAKER_01
But the price isn't, it's not worth more necessarily, right?
SPEAKER_02
Well, it's like most things, right? If I buy a Michael Jordan Rookie card and then Michael Jordan becomes the greatest player of all time, that Rookie card's worth more than it was when he was a Rookie and nobody knew how good he would be.
SPEAKER_01
So what I'm looking at here is basically this 3D rotating image of LamelloBall.
SPEAKER_02
It's like a little trophy almost.
SPEAKER_01
How are they making, I mean, this looks awesome. Like the resolution is amazing. Everything about like the way it looks is cool.
How are they making that?
SPEAKER_02
I think it's just 3D animators on the internet, right? They get them to make some custom stuff for them. And by the way, that's a group of people who've had a renaissance right now because there's a whole bunch of famous people that want their own NFT. And to do that, you need a digital artist to make you your cool thing.
So anyways, one cool thing about this, by the way, you buy the thing and it comes with access. So like, let me just read off the perks if you bought like the most expensive one. So the gold Lamello one is the Rookie of the Year one.
It is guaranteed to evolve if he wins Rookie of the Year, which by the way, he will this year. It comes with a physical card. It comes with $750 in guaranteed endorsement deal rewards.
So basically his endorsers have to give you free stuff, which is kind of cool. It comes with some official merchandise from him. You have a chance to win NBA game tickets valued up to $5,000.
You have a 50% chance to receive autograph memorabilia and you're going to get exclusive access to video calls that he's going to do with holders of his collectible. So it's kind of cool, right? What if a basketball card came with access to the player, right? Like you buy the little bronze card and the bronze for all the holders of the platinum card, he's going to do a Skype call with them or why did I say Skype? A Zoom call with them, you know, once a year or something like that. Or you get, you know, a pair of game-worn shoes.
You have a 10% chance of getting those or something like that.
SPEAKER_01
This is great. I think this is so cool. What I want to ask, well, I'll ask that in a second, but this is awesome.
I think like I'm not necessarily...
SPEAKER_02
By the way, the guy who made this, I think he's like 20, 21 years old. He's like Steve Bartlett type of... I'm seeing shades of Steve Bartlett again in this guy who's a hustler who made this happen.
SPEAKER_01
So that's actually what I want to ask about. I wasn't going to skip ahead, but I do... We'll come back to this. So what I'm seeing on this website is that this is basically.
.. This Lamello thing is basically a creation of a company called EtherCards. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Maybe that's the name of his company.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah. His company is called EtherCards. I'm looking at the traffic.
If you go to a similar web and look at the traffic, basically nothing, nothing, nothing. And then in one month, 3 million visitors, all the traffic is direct, meaning someone very likely is... There's just 3 million people in the very first month of this thing being launched in March typing in EtherCards. Those numbers, if you don't know anything about these numbers, that's phenomenal.
What I want to know is how are people discovering these types of things?
SPEAKER_02
So beautiful question. I should have said this at the beginning. The change here is not, oh, we went from a basketball card that's a piece of cardboard that you buy from Target to now a digital thing that you have on your phone or on your computer.
It's not just that. Lamello owns his own IP. He is releasing his own card set.
So otherwise, the NBA signs an agreement with Panini. They're the guys who make all the basketball cards or TOPS, right? These brands that make cards. And the players don't get directly assent from their own cards popularity.
So right now, like Luca Donicic, he has the most popular Panini cards. And they're going up, they're being sold on the secondary market for thousands and thousands of dollars. You know, like a LeBron card will sell for $200,000.
But LeBron doesn't get a cut of that transaction because he didn't issue it. He as a collective group, they signed the rights when they become an NBA player, they cut a deal and so they're going to, sure they get some like shared royalty stream of like, you know, whatever the licensing agreement was NBA wide, but the individual player doesn't get anything and therefore also has no incentive to promote this thing. Whereas with this, Lamello has minted his own card.
He owns whatever percent he negotiated with Ether cards. And Lamello is going to be putting this in his Instagram story all the time. And he, guess what? He's got millions of followers on Instagram who love Lamello ball.
And so he's going to get more value out of this than he would ever get out of a traditional basketball basketball card.
SPEAKER_01
Walk me through how this young guy made Ether cards and this business. So basically Ether cards, he just, you know, he made the website. It's very slick, very cool.
How is the tracking of all these cards possible? The back end technology of like tracking the payment and all that, do they actually make it, make that? Are they building on top of something else?
SPEAKER_02
I don't know. I think they're probably building on top of something else. It's one of the best parts of crypto is that because crypto is open source, crypto is about building protocols.
You can use those protocols to do anything. So we had Furcon on here. I don't know.
Did he talk about PAC protocol? I don't know if he did. He's building, Furcon's building something called the PAC protocol out of his thing, NFT labs. And basically it's just a protocol where you or I can go on there and say, Hey, you know, just like you said, you love to watch people doing PAC breaks of NBA cards, we could make our own MFM PACs, just like Jack Butcher, I think did with Visualize Value.
We could say, Great, we want, we want to, we're going to offer these 10 possible cards. Right. Inside one of them gives you like an hour of business coaching. Another gives you a shout out on the podcast.
Another gives you a free shirt. Another gives you just a Twitter follow, whatever we come up with our rewards. We just type them in and it basically says assign the probability to each.
It's like, Oh, you know, the follow is high probability and a hour of business coaching is only 1% of people should get this when they open a PAC. We set the price and it'll basically spin up like Shopify for NFTs. It'll spin up a website where we can sell our PACs and fans can come, they could buy them and they can open them up and they can have a chance of winning X inside.
We didn't have to do any coding to make that happen because they have built the PAC protocol and to make this happen and it's all saved on the Ethereum blockchain. Like all the ownership is there. And so, and they just take a cut of every buy in exchange for having built this technology for us.
SPEAKER_01
And back, and but back to the ether card. So these kids like built just the front end and use someone else's protocol and then they holler at it. They somehow got in touch with Lamello and mean like, Hey, do you agree?
SPEAKER_02
And by the way, sorry, just to catch up one second. They, I don't know how we got to Lamello. I've been asking him, but after launching this project, so this thing did hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first day when it dropped.
So you know, just the Lamello thing or all the thing did, did, I don't know if I can say the exact number, but north of $300,000 in during the drop.
SPEAKER_01
And then other players, by the way, it's so funny saying like north of 300, like it did over 300, 400, 33,000 dollars.
SPEAKER_00
Like, I said, like,
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you know, we got to give the people the information without giving me people the
SPEAKER_01
information. It rides with heaven, $100,000. Like that's like what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, basically. So other NBA players, including one of the most popular NBA players on the planet hit them up and was like, Hey, saw the Lamello thing. Let's like talk to my people.
Let's do it.
SPEAKER_01
Let's do my own. And did this kid have a following already on Twitter? What platforms are you using?
SPEAKER_02
So he, I'm going to chat with him this week, but Ben talked to him while we were in Miami and what he said was that he got big. His claim to fame before this was helping artists go viral on TikTok. So he partnered with a bunch of musicians.
He's like, you know, you know, a bunch of the viral things you've seen on TikTok. I kind of architected those behind the scenes. I don't know what that means, but I'm like, you got hustler dripping off you.
Like this is good.
SPEAKER_01
And did you, how did Ben, so Ben, if you're listening is Sean's coworker. They scheme together. How did Ben find this?
SPEAKER_02
We saw the announcement on the ESPN announced Lamello Ball is doing his own NFT. We saw an article. I go, I read the dynamic NFT part, how it updates based on the player's actual achievements in the real world.
And I go, I just, Ben, I go, this is fucking genius. Find the genius who made this. And he went and he found the guy who made it.
He scheduled a call. I couldn't make that call. Ben, Ben did the call and Ben gave me the lowdown on like who this guy is.
He's like, he's awesome.
SPEAKER_01
You should talk to him. Ben met him on social.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Just DM them. Ben has my, I don't know if he used his Twitter or he has access to my Twitter where he could just DM anybody from my account.
And because my account has more followers, I get a higher rate of reply.
SPEAKER_01
So let's do, there's so many takeaways here for a listener. I want to actually want to go through the takeaways. The first is like, I'm actually amazed at this.
The way that you found this was not special. Maybe if Ben used, so Ben doesn't have a big following, right? He's just, it looks normal.
SPEAKER_02
DM Levy, Ben Levy, Ben, I don't know, it's Twitter, something like that. Ben, I'm Levy.
SPEAKER_01
So yours looks special. You have 144,000 people. Most people would reply to someone.
They have 144,000 people, but Ben does it. All I did was DM them. Did the kid even know, does he know who you are? Like, does he know Sean is like a popular podcaster or anything? No idea.
Okay. Great. So that's the takeaway here. Is that like you found an opportunity by seeing it on ESPN.
You had Ben, but you didn't have to have Ben.
SPEAKER_02
I've done this myself. That's how I found Ben, by the way. It's the same thing.
Just a cold week out.
SPEAKER_01
That's a huge takeaway here. The other takeaway is just that the set of T thing is cool.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think you're going to see more of this.
You're going to see famous people launching their own limited edition NFTs that come with access to the person and they own the whole thing. So they're not using, they don't have to sign with a label or sign with, or like rely on tops to go make their card for them. They're going to release their own cards and they're going to own their own upside, which is obviously a much better thing for the talent.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. This is amazing. I love this.
SPEAKER_02
I have a couple other topics if you want to do it. Go, go, go, go. Okay. Let's do two things.
SPEAKER_01
How do you, how do, so normally when we, when we research, we have a document.
SPEAKER_02
What are you using? Oh, sorry. Mine's just on my notes on my, my, my, it's from my phone's notes because I was typing it while we were like, we'd be out, we'd meet somebody. Like for example, at the event where we did the podcast, some guy came up, he's like, hey, I'm a lawyer, I am, I've been a lawyer in Dallas for a long time.
I drove down for the event, drove from Dallas to Austin and, you know, I just love you guys always get the wheels turning. In fact, I can't just like be a normal lawyer anymore. I really want to do more.
And he has this idea for litigation finance. He goes, you know what that means? Did you talk to this guy?
SPEAKER_01
No, but can I guess what that means? Yeah, please. Basically, I think this is what Peter Thiel did. So is it with, it's okay.
So basically Peter Thiel is this billionaire guy who had a vendetta against Gawker because Gawker outed him as being gay. So Peter Thiel is like a powerful VC. He's gay.
He didn't want anyone to know he's gay. Gawker wrote an article saying he's gay. And so he plotted for 10, 15 years.
Probably 10 years. He goes, whenever I see these guys slip, I'm pouncing. So 10 years later after this article, Hulk Hogan has a sex tape issue and Peter Thiel has two guys on staff just sniffing out an infraction.
They go, Hey, this Hulk Hogan thing, that's it. So the story is Hulk Hogan was either Hulk Hogan was having sex with someone. Some third party filmed it without his consent.
A Gawker published the video. Peter Thiel goes, boom, that's it. Hey, Hulk, I got the best lawyers.
I'm going to fund you. And if the case wins, just give me a little cut of it. Peter Thiel probably didn't even take a cut of it.
But that's how it could have worked.
SPEAKER_02
How it could have worked. Exactly. And he did.
He, they did the lawsuit. They bankrupt. They basically put Gawker out of business.
Gawker no longer is in business. The guy who built that site over the years, you know, it all came falling down because he pushed it too far. He pissed off the wrong billionaire.
So and by the way, some people think this is bad, whatever. I don't care.
SPEAKER_01
So what not that you don't care that if it is or is not bad, you're saying it's interesting
SPEAKER_02
regardless. Irrelevant to what we're talking about is whether billionaire should fund lawsuits and take down media or not. Okay. Whatever. So yeah, so litigation finances is exactly this.
So basically what he does is he's a lawyer. He analyzes cases that could be pursued. So oh, you might have a lawsuit here that you should be pursuing you for whatever reason.
Maybe you don't know if you could win. You don't realize it's a, it's a, you could potentially sue for, for being wronged. You don't have the money.
The, you know, the corporation can, can throw all their lawyers at this and you, you don't want to go broke trying to, trying to just sue. So you kind of sit on it. So I think it was like 70% plus of potential suits go unfiled because of, you know, one of many reasons.
And so the idea here would be if you see, you can submit to them, Hey, would you back my case? And they basically underwrite the risk of it. They look at it. They say, Oh, I think you have a really strong case or no, I think you have a weak case.
If you have a strong case, they'll say, great, we will fund the lawsuit. You get a piece of it. If it works, if it doesn't work, you lose nothing.
And, and so that basically the guy had, had now raised or is raising millions and millions of dollars from family offices and other folks to fund these cases. And so that's what they're doing now as a thing. Anyways, I thought it was a cool listener idea.
I don't know what you think of that.
SPEAKER_01
How much have they raised? How much has he raised?
SPEAKER_02
I think they raised something like $6 million so far to, to fund this. And he's trying to get, you know, basically it's a proof of concept. If they can show that, yes, we are successfully able to underwrite these cases, meaning we can correctly select the winners and offer a payback.
Great. If once we know that we're able to pay you back 25, 30% on your, you know, annually on your, on your financing here, then we can go raise 50 or 100 or 200 million to do more.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. I, I, I've heard of this. I didn't realize this was such a thing.
I am so in. So there's a company called Burford Capital. It's found in 2009, located in England.
Did you see it?
SPEAKER_02
He told me about it. He goes, this is big in England. It's a multi-billion dollar company, Burford, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01
I just Google this while you're talking. I Googled finance legal stuff. The first, the first website went to Pravarty Capital.
The website has like a, like a, like a Monday night football looking guy wearing a white dude wearing an ill fitting suit. Right there. I'm like opportunity.
Okay. Like anytime there's like these like shitty wicks websites with like basically looking at white dudes, I'm like, that's interesting. The second, the second thing that came up was Burford Capital.
I just Googled it as a market cap of $1.8 billion. Starting in 2009, that's pretty good.
Right. That's pretty, this is pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly. So he was like, you know, send me the information. And I told him, I said, look, this sounds great.
I don't know anything about this. So I'm probably not going to fund it just because I have two options. I can either invest in things I really understand or I can invest in things I don't understand.
I used to do both, but now that this podcast got so popular, now the number of opportunities that I do understand are so large, they exceed my investable capital. Now I don't have to do shit. I don't understand anymore.
SPEAKER_01
This is a really interesting business. This is, but was, so when I, you're a further along, and I would actually say you're probably a better investor than I am. When I look at these types of companies, I think like, what's the idea that's important? Right.
I think of, I don't have enough time to go and verify if this is like a solid market. So I look at who else is investing. That's probably a lot of people say, oh, that's boring.
Are you ever going to take a chance? Well, probably not, to be honest. I like looking at that. But then the third thing is I look at the person.
Are they a competent person? So does this person seem like they're going to build a huge company office?
SPEAKER_02
He seemed like a competent person. He seemed like a lawyer who, I don't think you need to be the visionary or like the shark executor. I don't think you need to do anything for that.
I think you literally just need to be somebody who's going to do the blocking and tackling to make this happen. I don't think it requires genius, which is great. That's actually a positive thing for this business.
You don't want to invest in businesses that require genius.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, but you're more likely to not need some type of charisma in order to be, I mean, like you either do need to be a genius. So you do need to be like a Peter Teal type of guy. You do need to be maybe like a one or like you or me type of person, which we don't really know how to do that much, but we're charismatic enough to convince other people to come work in our companies and convince them to do the work.
And then you have like a few like industry knowledge where maybe this guy has, but you
SPEAKER_00
need something.
SPEAKER_01
You need attributes. As Conor McGregor once said, if you're going to beat me, you're going to have some attributes.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, if you're going to beat me, you need some attributes.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So like, look, if you're going to like succeed, you need some attributes. So what are the attributes going to be? Like something like when you're building a fighter or building a sports team or building like a NBA player on video games, and you can like put like, do I make this person like as fast as possible? Do I make them as tall as possible? Do I make them as strong as possible? You need something there.
SPEAKER_02
I think that's the next shirt. You need attributes to beat me.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So like what attributes does this guy have? So that's what I'm curious about.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I think his domain knowledge. I think that's the biggest one.
SPEAKER_01
Do you agree with me? By the way, you need some attributes.
SPEAKER_02
You do. And I guess like the only point I'm starting to make is that some require more attributes than other, there are some where you have to be the smartest and the fiercest and fastest. And you know, like that's, there's some businesses that require that.
And there's some where you can be the tortoise, not the hare. Right. And I think this is one where you could be the tortoise. You just have to keep going forward.
SPEAKER_01
And that's not to me, by the way, but termination and just I'm willing to do it all the time.
SPEAKER_02
Exactly. And you know, having the steady hand and being, being good at actually selecting the cases, right? Cause that's going to just prove the track record out over time. So I think the domain knowledge matters.
All right. I'm going to do some other topics. So I have like three, but I don't know which one I want to do.
Okay. I'll give you, I'll give you some options.
SPEAKER_01
This is amazing. By the way, this is turning out to be quite good. Totally unplanned.
SPEAKER_02
So by the way, I wrote these down just while we were talking at the beginning when the guy canceled. All right. So Bitcoin Miami, I have a few comments on what was going on in Bitcoin Miami.
I don't know if it was horrible. So we can talk about that. We could talk about, um, I have a thing on second hand e-commerce.
If you want to hear that, um, also door to door sales, I have a story there. And the last one is a framework about the next Apple, the next Google, the next Facebook. So, so tell me, give me which one you want to do.
SPEAKER_01
Uh, the second one and then the fourth one.
SPEAKER_02
Okay. The second one I think was, uh, the second hand e-commerce thing. Yeah. All right. So let's do that.
So, um, so as you know, I've been dabbling in e-commerce and, you know, building a, built a brand and then have gotten built a community called club LTV that has like, I don't know, a hundred store owners each doing somewhere between a one million a year and a hundred million a year in sales. And so in that, I've started to learn some of the problem, the pain points of e-commerce. One of the interesting things that I didn't know about that you might know about, right? Cause you've used Poshmark.
I think when I was at your house, you told me, guess what me and Sarah did this weekend, we sold like $97 worth of old clothes on Poshmark. And I was like, dude, you're, well, what's happening? This is your hobby. And you're like, yeah, I love this shit.
Um, I didn't realize how big the second hand market for, for e-commerce is.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, Poshmark is huge. It's crazy. So let me tell you Poshmark, uh, going public, multi-billion dollar valuation.
SPEAKER_02
When public, what is it? Uh, I don't know. We'll look it up. But yeah, it's a public.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. There's thread up, spoken hustle con, raised $250 million either going public, or public or went public already. Uh, there's grailed.
I discovered grail in 2011. I didn't have any money. It was launched, uh, for men.
SPEAKER_02
Poshmark's 3.6 billion.
SPEAKER_01
Great. There's grailed. I, I DMed this guy because, or I messaged him on Reddit years ago because I was on the day he launched it.
I was going to the website. I didn't invest in it. I think it's still could be great.
It's basically Poshmark or hip dudes. What else is there?
SPEAKER_02
I mean, there's like eight others that are like substantial. So let me tell you what I think is interesting here. We for, for our store, for our, our, our DTC brand, we have a large amount of people who buy new and they, they're willing to spend more buying new because they know there's, this has secondary value.
They know they could sell it three months from now, six months from now, either new or used and recoup a good amount of the money. So a certain, certain categories you could do that better than others. So anyways, the, uh, but the, but managing this thing is, is really awful.
So the way that people do it today is sometimes they list on Poshmark or the real, real or like, uh, I forgot the other one, McCurry, McCurry's huge. Um, they go, they go list on those exchanges, but a big part of it is they have Facebook groups for every brand. So every brand will have any brand with a, with a cult following will have a secondary market Facebook group called buy, sell, trade BST and will be asked to BST.
So you can look up any brand name on Facebook, go type in the brand name and like, I don't know, your favorite boots or leather jackets you liked or whatever, just type in that BST. So what you'll see is that there are these, these private groups on Facebook communities for buying, selling and trading. What you already have, what you do is you take a photo of your, your closet or your, your item, you lay it down on the floor, you take a photo of it and you just write, you know, like there's all these acronyms.
Like if you go in there, it's another language. It's like MWT. That means new with tag.
Okay. Great. Uh, or like, you know, ISO in search of this product. And so they have their own little lingo.
It's an insider community. And the post the item and you just say, here's what I have, here's what it's for. I have no pets in the house, no smokers.
And then somebody in the comments will just say, um, they'll just type in a number. It's like an, a little auction. Those should be like $40.
And then you just say, done, send me your, what's your email? I'll send you the PayPal invoice. So there's this like, it's like this kind of like stitched together experience where then you have to send them the PayPal invoice. They have to pay it.
Then you have to like find them, get their mailing address. You have to ship it.
SPEAKER_01
And then do I just Google BST? I just found what paintball BST, 20 K members.
SPEAKER_02
Right. And that's what they'll have. They'll have tens of thousands of members often and they're very active.
And for the brand, for the brand themselves, this becomes kind of a headache. It's good, but it's bad. Why is it bad? So the first thing is a bunch of people will buy your product just to flip it, right? So they'll go and they'll sell it for more.
So we have a product. And then we have one of our products, it sells for $65 and then it immediately, so it sells out the first minute we release it and then it immediately starts selling for 10 times more. So $500 or $600 on Mercari or the second hand websites.
SPEAKER_01
What's the, what's that Mercari one?
SPEAKER_02
M-E-R-C-A-R-I. You've probably seen their billboards before. They're very big.
That's cool. So anyways, so one pain point is these flippers, but that's okay. The other part is like you don't benefit from the second hand market directly.
You don't get any cut of those sales that are happening, but you do sometimes have customer service problems because people complain, oh, I bought this thing from the official buy sale trade group and they scammed me or they didn't send it or they sent the wrong item. And you're like, dude, this is not my problem. That's not even us.
That's like Craigslist. So like you can't complain to us about what's going on on Craigslist. So this company we found has a very interesting take on this.
So I'm trying to invest in this. It's called TRED.
SPEAKER_01
How did you find this? How do you find all this crap? Guess who? Can I, how do I share him?
SPEAKER_02
You need a, you want to give a love letter to Ben? I think you fell in love with Ben on this trip.
SPEAKER_01
I did. TRED is TRED.com. So Sean has this guy who he pays a great salary to and his name is Ben and I hung out with Ben for the first time and what Ben, I admire him so much. Ben is, and I say this with love, pretty nerdy, a nerdy guy and not like in terms of like looks or acts, but like just like his interests.
Like he just loves like gadgets. He loves new stuff. And I started talking about him and he just brought or talking to him and he just told me he just browsers the web to find the latest and greatest stuff and he'll use it and then he'll DM or email or message the person who starts the thing and just say, this is neat.
Here's tips that I would do to make it better or here's been my experiences in your thing. And that's all he says. And in doing that, he sees everything and knows everyone.
And I think it's so fascinating.
SPEAKER_02
Right. He's just, he's just helpful. Okay. It's not, it's not TRED. TRED is the name of it.
TRED.co. I'll send it to you. T-R-E-E-T.
co. Okay. So check that out. So what they do is they have this idea of circular commerce, meaning you make an item, you sell it, and then that person, instead of it just going to waste, they can resell it to the next person and they can resell it to the next person.
Sort of a circular commerce model.
SPEAKER_01
So what they do is- Say the URL again.
SPEAKER_02
T-R-E-E-T.co. So what they do is they give your Shopify store a page or a tab that just creates the secondhand market right there in your store. So somebody who wants to buy a used item can just go buy it secondhand from within your store.
You don't have to do the whole PayPal, invoicing, Facebook group, questionable integrity type of thing anymore. Customers can just list their stuff here. It can be bought from your store, which has more trust than just a random group.
And the transaction is processed online using normal credit card processing and stuff on this. And the brand gets a percent cut. You can set your percent cut of what you'll take out for hosting the secondhand market.
So it's an additional new revenue stream for a DDC brand. I think this is really, really smart. This does two things.
A, it legitimizes the sort of secondary circular nature of it. And a lot of people like that. That it's not being- That's like a less wasteful version of consumerism.
The second thing is that it takes resale and it makes it a part of your business model as the brand. So for consumers, it helps because it's higher trust. The technology is all built.
You don't have to do this manually through Facebook groups. And for the brand, here's an extra X percent of revenue that you're going to make every month because now you participate in the resale market.
SPEAKER_01
That's crazy. I don't know if this is a good idea. How would you feel as a business?
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you do- I'm going to use this because I want this for our business.
SPEAKER_01
Do you think a lot of people feel the same way? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
You know what my gut says? Super early. Make more shit. Don't sell out.
Is you selling out? That sounds like a you problem. Not a you need a plug-in problem.
SPEAKER_02
It's not just for selling out. Some people just can't afford the full priced item. You bought those dumbbells in your garage, secondhand off Facebook marketplace or whatever.
If you can get the item in good condition for half the price, that opens up your buyer pool into a different segment that can't maybe always afford the full priced item. And you don't have to do heavy discounting as a brand.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. So I'm just Googling as you're talking because we didn't have time to research. So Patagonia's CEO has this great saying where he goes, I actually don't want you to buy more stuff.
Buy one thing from us and if it rips, if it rips, we'll fix it and it should just last. So like only buy one thing. So I just Googled Patagonia pre-owned.
They have a URL that's dedicated to it called oneware.patagonia.com. And I'm pretty sure they have their entire, yeah, they have an entire way to buy and sell their own gear. Kind of cool actually.
It is actually cool. You know who would buy, use Patagonia stuff? Me. Me. I buy youth clothing all the time. Whenever I buy red wing boots, I always buy them used.
I actually changed my opinion very quickly. I think this is cool.
SPEAKER_02
All right. I'm glad Patagonia got your cross line. Okay. I have another topic for you. Do you want to do another one or? Yeah, keep going.
SPEAKER_01
Wrap it up. Keep going. This is good.
Okay. Let's do one more.
SPEAKER_02
Well, no, you had four things. Which one do you want to do? So your remaining options. Door to door.
Door to door.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. So this is a little bit longer. Patagonia is pretty on website by the way.
It's fucking sick. $90 jeans for $38 bucks.
SPEAKER_01
In. But could treat be a big business as a Shopify plugin. Am I being a hater just because it's a simple Shopify plugin?
SPEAKER_02
Well, I don't even, it's not, I don't even think it is a Shopify plugin, but I know what you mean. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's the wrong way to think about it because if you look at how big the centralized marketplaces are, McCurry, Poshmark, those are three or four billion. This is that same thing, but just decentralized instead of one website where you go to find all the brands.
Every brand has your little marketplace embedded into it. So I think it's a smart strategy where you give the brand the marketplace instead of trying to get the customer to come to your app.
SPEAKER_01
This is fucking awesome.
SPEAKER_02
Okay. So here's some more. So door to door sales.
So this thing has been happening recently and I know you love the Mormons. So I think you'll, you'll dig this. Love the Mormons.
Love the Mormons. So I have met and I've heard these stories in the last few days. I'll give you two of door to door sales.
I have never done door to door sales, but I'm almost jealous that I have it now. So I'll give you two, two examples. Do you know who Brian Johnson is? Genuinely, might not be, might be hard to place.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So I know two different Brian Johnson's. One sells books online and the other started brain tree.
SPEAKER_02
Brain tree is the guy I'm talking about. Okay. That's, that's pretty good. You know, you get, you get 200 points for your house there.
All right. So, so Brian Johnson, I was listening to his interview. He went on Lex Friedman's podcast.
I was listening to it. Does he still work? Yeah. So, so here, his story is insane.
So he basically creates brain tree, which is like a payments. It's basically a online payments company. Stripe before Stripe.
It was striped before Stripe. He comes Stripe, but it sold for about $800 million, I believe, to PayPal. And he owned most all of it.
Yeah. Exactly. He owned a huge chunk of it.
He also, I think they bought Venmo along the way. So he had the strategy early on, which was like, we go to the merchants, we get the merchants to use us because we're so easy to use online. And then we'll build a consumer like side of the, we'll buy the most hits consumer app.
And that was, that was Venmo. And that will be a valuable company. And anyway, so he builds his company for $800 million, he sells it, and he decides what he wanted was he wanted to have a huge nest egg to just reinvest into a world changing idea.
So he's like, how do I get as much financial capital as possible in the next few years so that I can sell fund and work on one of the most like gnarly, you know, like life, world changing problems. So the thing he's working on.
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, he thought that brain tree wasn't going to be, I mean, that's like pretty pretty.
SPEAKER_02
And Lex even brings this up. He's like, you know, online payments actually does help the world. He's like, yeah, that's true.
But I knew that if I didn't do online payments, somebody else would, I wanted to work on something that if I didn't do it, I don't know if anyone else would. And so the thing he's working on is that same thing that, that Elon is working on, neurolink. So his is called kernel kernel.
It's a brain interface. So what that means is you put this like helmet on, it looks like a bicycle helmet. And it's basically reading your brain waves while you're sitting there.
And so, you know, what does that mean? First it can analyze your brain while you're just doing things. So that's interesting. You can get more insight about yourself.
And they're what his, what his company is trying to do is basically spit the data out so that all he's trying to do is be able to read brain data than any developer can take that those data and those learnings and actually build any application to improve your life off of it. So that's what they're trying to build with kernel. So, and by the way, he took I think $60 million after he sold brain tree and he funded the first 60 million into kernel himself because yeah, I'm reading about that right now.
SPEAKER_01
He put a, so they've raised 53 from outside, 54 from his own money.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. 54, 50 more for a million of his own money. Exactly.
And so I think, you know, most investors didn't want to touch it because it's like, dude, this is just going to be a money pit. You know, it's the hardest technology requires the most expensive engineers. We're not there yet.
It's going to take 10 years. And he's like, yeah, don't worry. That's why I have this nest egg to fund this thing myself.
SPEAKER_01
How much did he make when he sold brain tree, you think?
SPEAKER_02
I don't know. I don't know the exact number. But anyways, this doesn't even matter.
This is just set up. That's the guy, cool guy. I would have featured him maybe as Billy of the Week and maybe we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive.
SPEAKER_01
Hey, Dan, let's get this guy on the podcast. This guy is cool.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. We'll get Brian on. The part I thought was pretty remarkable is his door to door sales part.
Okay. So what happened? So when he starts brain tree, he, I think he had done a startup and it was fail. It either had failed or it was failing.
And what he did was, I hope I don't butcher this story. I'm just trying to remember this off top of my head because we didn't have time to prep today. So what he did was he needed some money.
So he's like, okay, how do I get money fast? My start was failing or it already failed. He's like, okay, I need like a sales job. So he goes and he gets a sales job with a sub kind of like financial product company.
I think it was like either like a credit cards or something like that for businesses. And so he's like, he's basically a sales rep. And he's like, okay, how do I become like the best sales rep for this? And so it became a door to door sales challenge.
And so he was going door to door to each merchant and he was selling them on the benefits of this product. And he would then get a commission off of like kind of the, whatever the value of that customer was over the next period of time. And so I, I'm going to butcher this because I can't remember the hack he used, but he had a, he had a very clever technique he was using when he was going door to door that enabled him to become the top salesman in North America.
And so I'm going to go Brian, Brian did. Yeah. So he became the number one sales person. He basically goes door to door and he figures out how to sell this product.
And what he said was like door to door sales is like just this, um, like really formative, formative experience for anybody, uh, because you have to have like an incredible amount of determination. You're going to get rejected all the time and you need to learn how to like get your foot in the door, how to get somebody's attention, how to get them interested and how to close them in order to sell any product door to door. And then I, so, so I heard the story from Brian Johnson and he talked about how important that experience was to him.
And so the next day I go meet my uncle. I have an uncle who I've talked about on the pod before because I consider him to be the happiest man on earth. He's real estate uncle, but real estate uncle, his name is Uncle Vinny.
Literally people just coined his name smiley. So they just stopped calling him Vinny. People just call him smiley because he's just so smiley.
Like his company, they got him a trophy because he was the number one salesperson and on the trophy, they didn't put his name. They just wrote smiley and that became kind of like the nickname that stuck and they didn't even ask his permission. They just knew this is the right name for this guy.
So he's incredibly happy, but he's also been incredibly successful. And I would say I don't think he's in all of my aunts, my uncles, in terms of IQ, just raw intelligence, I don't know, he's probably either 50 percentile, maybe even less, maybe
SPEAKER_01
maybe half, I don't know, maybe half them. Sorry Vinny.
SPEAKER_02
No, I've been this with love because the point I'm making is, good thing they didn't
SPEAKER_01
call him dopey.
SPEAKER_02
He's smiling a lot better. He's the most successful of anyone in our family, but it's not because he had more raw horsepower in the brain. That's not the reason that he was able to do it.
And so I was telling my trainer about him and he goes, I'd love to meet him. And I go, what? He goes, yeah, does he, where does he live? I go, he lives in Danville. Actually, he lives, you know, not far away from here, you know, 30 minute drive.
He goes, could we just go meet him? I was like, yeah. So I texted my uncle. I said, hey, I was telling my trainer about you and he just wants to meet you.
And he goes, he was like, sure, come on by. No problem. Yes. Like, can't wait to see you. And I was like, who does it? And I was like, I noted to myself, he didn't even ask why, what's the context? You want something from me? He's just like, yes.
You want to meet me? Yes. And I also thought to myself, what a goal, by the way, to be the type of person that people want to make a pilgrimage out, you know, to go drive an hour to go see, just because of a description of the way you are. I thought that's kind of amazing because he doesn't want anything from him.
He's not trying to get a business deal or get a customer out of him. He just heard how his personality is and was like, I got to meet this guy. So we go, we drive out there and we sit down and, you know, he's already on level 10 excitement and we're having a great time.
And I started asking him, I said, you know, when did you become you? When did you become this way? You weren't born this way. So how'd you become this way? And he's telling me the long story and he talked about this door to door sales job. He goes, I came from India and I'm a student at university.
He goes, George Washington University, I think, he goes, I needed a summer job. I needed it. He's like, I came here.
I only had enough tuition. The government paid for my tuition for the first year. I had no idea how I was going to pay for the second year, but like I have one summer to bridge that gap.
Like how the heck am I going to make next fall's tuition? So he looked for a job and his roommate was like, Hey, I worked for this company that called Southwestern. I don't know if you ever heard of this company. You're going to love it.
But basically it's company called Southwestern. And what they do is they sell books. So they sell books door to door.
They have this fleet of college students that will go out and they'll sell these books like encyclopedias, dictionaries, Bibles, you know, any textbooks of any kind.
SPEAKER_01
Southwestern advantage is what it's called.
SPEAKER_02
And they've since grown like crazy. They acquired all, now it's like 20 something companies and it's like a multi-billion dollar company. Crazy story about the founder.
I'm going to have him as the Billy the week as a special profile, but I'm going to tell this door to door sales story. So he goes, Okay, great. So what do I do? He's like, you know, I can barely speak English because I'm just here from India, but okay, I got to go do door to door sales.
How do I do that? He's like, they gave this, this training where you, they give us seven books like, you know, how to win friends and influence people, you know, like the seven kind of classic self-help books, Tony Robbins and whatever. He's like, read these seven books and then come to this training seminar. He goes, I go to this thing.
It's an auditorium and it's me and like, you know, the 50 other college students and there's this stage and there's just a door frame on the stage and you'd have to get up and you'd have to knock on the door and then they would have an act, you know, like the person from the company on the other side, an actor who is like, I'm Mrs. Johnson and you open the door, Mrs. Johnson and she would simulate like slamming the door on your face and being like, like stop bothering us, right? Or somebody who's like Luke warm or somebody who's interested and they would teach you how to sell door to door.
And he taught, he talked to me. Like I used to, they used to, uh, but my job basically every day in the summer and I'm in the, you know, the heat of summer, I would, my roommate would drive me to some neighborhood, any neighborhood, I would just pick a different one every day and at nine a.m. he would drop me off. I didn't own a car.
So I needed him to pick me up at the end of the day. So he's like, nine a.m. He'd drop me off in a neighborhood and nine p.m. He'd come pick me up at the end of the day. And he's like, I would go door to door and I knock and they would teach you the skills of just selling door to door.
So do you know, I don't know if you've ever heard this. I was fascinated by how you act. What is the actual method of selling when you're door to door? Have you ever heard this?
SPEAKER_01
Um, no. What, well, so you typically say, Hey, I was just talking to a bunch of your neighbors and they thought this was interesting. And so here I am talking to you.
SPEAKER_02
That that's definitely part of it. But he broke it down step. He's like, there's a scientist that they taught us at this training.
He goes, first you ring the doorbell, you're not going to door and you don't look into the door because when you look at the door, it's a little bit intimidating. Um, and they see your face. They recognize that they don't know you.
Um, he's like, you want to look slightly, you know, I'm not sure. I'm 45 degree angle away so that they're going to like, when they look through the people, they can be like, okay, I don't know who this guy is, but it doesn't look too threatening. I know.
SPEAKER_01
What do they try to get you to do? Like to step your foot into the door eventually.
SPEAKER_02
Basically. So you, they open the door and you, you explained the pitch that you just said, which is, you know, hi, my name is, you know, my name is Vinny and, um, I'm a student here at George Washington nearby. Um, and I actually have been, uh, you know, I've been talking to your neighbors.
Uh, we, what we do is we sell, uh, you know, we sell tech or whatever it is. You basically saying, I was talking to your neighbors and I wanted to stop by your place. I'm a student nearby.
Right. So you, you become a local, you're not a stranger. You're a friend.
Right.
SPEAKER_01
So you, you, you, you imagine you want to put like a timestamp. Like, um, is it only going to be, um, I mean, I actually, I have to go in a second.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Exactly. I don't have a bunch of time, uh, but I would love to just, you know, chat with you, whatever.
Right. And he goes, he goes, um, a lot of people, what they would try to do is the door sample, meaning they would tell them, I'm here to sell you a textbook. Check out this book.
Is this something you're interested in? And then, you know, the learning is nobody ever buys a book at the door. And I thought, but that's actually like a very applicable thing for almost every kind of sale is your, because you're afraid of getting rejected, you rush, you rush to try to just sample it, you know, give them, give them the value so you don't annoy them. But the reality is that that's not how a product like this would ever be bought.
Nobody's ever going to buy this at the door itself. So he goes, you want to get into the home. The whole objective of the door is to get into the home.
And it reminded me of your writing style where you go.
SPEAKER_01
I was about to say this. This is why I always say longer is better. I want them to fall down my slippery slope and explain the slippery slope.
SPEAKER_02
It's like the first line, the goal of the first line.
SPEAKER_01
Look, there's only one goal of a headline of a sales page. And that's to get you to read the sub headline. The only goal of the sub headline is to get you to read the first sentence.
And the only goal of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. I'm going to keep on doing that until you fall down the slippery slope. And not only, a lot of people say, I want to make this very easy to read.
So do I. I want to make it easy to read as well. But I'm going to tell you a story and I'm not going to rush it.
And I want you to fall slowly, fall down the slippery slope. And I want to make it kind of hard for you because the more pot committed you are, the more likely you are to buy.
SPEAKER_02
Exactly. Exactly. So this is the same exact thing.
So he wanted to get into the home. So he goes, you asked to come in and you don't look at them in the face. You sort of lead with your arm and your face.
You sort of like point where you're trying to go, like into the living room right behind them. So you say, would you mind if I come in for a moment and you sort of point your way into the door? And if you're once you're in the door, now your close rate has gone from like 0.01% to like 30, 40% just because you're there.
You're sitting and you're sitting down. So you're not like standing anymore. So now you're comfortable.
SPEAKER_01
By the way, this is why in all my landing pages, I always ask for email first because once you give me your email, you're just a little bit more bought in.
SPEAKER_02
You're in the door. Exactly. And you know, they might offer you a water or a drink.
You say, yes, you don't say no. Now you're both sitting there. You have your water and you start to explain to them.
And now you need to put it in the context of their problem. So you look around the house. Oh, I see you have children.
How old are they? Oh, I got a boy and a girl myself. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. This age is the craziest, blah, blah, blah.
What are your kids doing for? What do you do for kind of after school education for your children? And that's how you're leading into the encyclopedia sale. That's how you're leading into the textbook sale is you need to frame your product as a solution to their problem. Right? So this is all like, you know, this is common sense.
I just loved hearing it.
SPEAKER_01
It's not that common, dog. I think that like a lot of people don't know this. I think you want you.
So I learned it. So I read how to win friends and influence people. By the way, all those old like fuzzy books like how to win friends and people influence people thinking we're rich.
It sounds silly. I endorse all of them fully. That shit totally helps you.
Tony Robbins totally helps you. I'm entirely on board with that. Right. A founder of Panda Express makes all of his employees go through a Tony Robbins and how to in front influence people seminar. Totally on board with it.
I learned how to do this when I was selling hot dogs. And then you know what else I did? Like every other 18 year old, I use it to meet girls. Right. And it totally worked and I mastered that. Well, I wasn't like that good, but like I stepped up my game from significantly when I learned how to do all this.
SPEAKER_02
Right. Right. Exactly. And so he told me a couple of things out of that.
He goes, he's like, here I am. I'm a Hindu selling Bibles to bear. I'm an Indian Hindu selling Bibles to Americans.
And he's like that experience that whole summer, he's like, you know, I, it changed me. He's like, first I'm working hard. I'm there at nine AM.
I'm walking around carrying loads and loads of books and I'm walking door to door and I'm getting mostly rejected. But then, you know, if I got even an inch, he's like, I used to schedule a same day follow-up. He's like, so, oh, now's not a good time.
You know, would it be better this evening when your husband's home? Like maybe five PM. Great. And he's like, I'm just walking around this neighborhood anyway. I'll walk right back to this.
He's like, so I was scheduling same day follow-ups to keep the, keep the, he's like, by the second time they met me, now I'm not a stranger. He's like, nothing has changed. They don't know anything more about me, but it's just the second time they've seen me.
And so there was all these little things I thought were really applicable to sales. But also I started thinking about these formative experiences, the really hard experiences, like what's a hard business experience. And I think this is actually pretty underrated.
So he said, learn to work hard. I learned how to sell. I learned how to build rapport and talk to people.
And he's like, I wasn't doing it to manipulate anybody. He's like, I just genuinely, life was a lot more fun if I got to know the person rather than, you know, having a standoff relationship and then being angry that I'm bothering them that day. And it got to the point where one woman would be like, are you walking around carrying all these books? He's like, well, yeah, you know, I have to.
And she was like, here's the keys to my car. Here's my van. Drive my van around the neighborhood instead.
So she gave him his car to actually do the sales. So it went from most people slam the door on a door to the salesman. She gave him his car to make it easier for him to go do what he was doing.
He still keeps in touch with her 36 years later or something like that. 40 years later, he's like, yeah, you know, she just sent me this cake and like Mrs. whatever her name was, he's like, we're still good friends actually because and we met because I sold her, you know, a Bible back in the day.
And so I thought this was interesting. So I think there's something to this in from two levels. What are the opportunities here? I thought, hey, who's doing door to door sales now? Are there still companies that primarily sell door to door? I'm going to research them and find some of that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, like some really, the probably the most famous one is cut, you know, cut
SPEAKER_02
co. No, what is that?
SPEAKER_01
Wow, you've never heard of cut co. So they make knives in kitchenware. Their knives are actually pretty good, but their whole business model is door to door.
And like I've got friends that I've done it. It's reputable in the sense that it's a good product. Some people think it's scammy because they're like direct sales and multi-level marketing, but it's legit.
SPEAKER_02
Right. And so I'm interested in these direct sales companies. I'm also interested in hiring people who are successful door to door sales people.
In fact, there was a guy on the podcast early on who did this for solar. He's like, my first job was door to door sales. I was selling solar.
Like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about doing solar at Lowers Your Bill and blah, blah, blah, and we can help you out. It's good for the environment. And he's like, dude, it was hard as shit, but I got good at it.
I became the top sales person. And I kind of feel like I can, I will never go wrong if I hired the top sales person from any door to door sales company. It's like, works hard, knows how to sell.
I'm like, what else do you need when you're, when you're trying to hire somebody?
SPEAKER_01
Well, you want to hear something funny? You know who Jordan Belfort is?
SPEAKER_01
The Wolf of Wall Street. Oh, we talked about it this week. And I think you haven't read his book.
You should. So Jordan Belfort was the Wolf of Wall Street. He made hundreds of millions of dollars selling penny stocks to rich people.
And he was a great sales person. He created this thing called Straight Line Persuasion. He started by selling fish and steaks door to door.
That's how his entire thing started was door to door. Yeah. It's a great book, but it was all, it was all door to door sales.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So I don't really have, I don't really know what the point of this is. It's more like I loved hearing these stories.
I am sort of jealous I never had this experience because I think I would be better at what I do if I did. And I want to go further. I want to research these companies and I want to start hiring people out of this pool of talent.
I think it is an underrated pool of talent. Just like we talked about, you know, sort of Mormons who go on the mission and they have to sell sort of the hardest thing, sell a religion to somebody who never asked you to come sell it to them. And they have to do that for two years.
That does create a certain sales ethic and work ethic in a person. And we've seen that take place. That's why almost all the direct sales companies, all the successful direct sales companies are all based out of Utah because that's where the talent is that knows how to do this sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01
And I think for, I would say for not preparing this episode to not be pretty amazing. And I would say even amongst all episode, this has been one of my favorite. Dan, do you agree that this has been fire? This has been great guys.
Come on. The door to our sales was awesome. What about the other stuff? The other stuff was good too.
You guys just finished with a big bang. Yeah. I think this ended up being a winner. So that's the episode, I think, right? We're going to wrap up there.
Tomorrow, or Wednesday, I want to talk about coworking spaces. I think we have to have a My First Million coworking business. Yeah, you like that idea.
I do. That was another Ben idea. And I think it's wonderful.
So I tweeted out who I could talk to. I got a bunch of interesting stuff. We're going to talk about that next week.
All right. Or Wednesday.
SPEAKER_00
Let's do it. Let's do it. You guys, we'll hang out tonight at our delivery space next week.