SPEAKER_02
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Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. What's going on?
SPEAKER_01
Not much, dude. Before the podcast, Abraiyu was telling us about a guy who is just uploading, you know, instead of competing on YouTube, he's just uploading his videos of him hanging out with his friends talking onto Pornhub. It's getting popular because it's not porn.
It's not porn on Pornhub.
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we should do that with the podcast to grow this thing. Just a bunch of guys talking about ideas on Pornhub. Abraiyu, how popular are these videos getting?
SPEAKER_00
I'm not sure how many views they have, but he gets a ton of free press from it. I've seen so many articles, like every now and again, I'll see articles on it. Yeah, I just need to buzzfeed article.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so what do you want to talk about?
SPEAKER_02
I've got a few quick fun updates that are just funny. Okay, so Heineken 0.0, I've been talking about how I drink a ton of these each day.
SPEAKER_02
They just DM'd me trying to get that sponsorship. So, here we go. Shout out to Heineken.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, second, have you seen, did you see this thing I'm testing out Tempo?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you posted a video of this on your Facebook or in the Facebook group, and it looks like a bootleg mirror.
SPEAKER_02
So, these guys aren't a sponsor or anything, but they did give me a free thing to try out. It's like mirror, so it looks like a TV, but it's self-standing, but it's got this like, what was that video game that had a camera that would tell where you are, a Kinect or something? A Kinect? Yeah, like Xbox or something. It has one of those on there, so it tells you if your form is shitty or not shitty, and it also has like 200 or something pounds of weights.
And I'm testing it.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay. And then it... Well, like as a resistance band or as a dumbbell?
SPEAKER_02
Like literally like plates of weights, and it has a barbell and a dumbbell, and you put it on and... I see. And then there's a leaderboard, and it can tell what type of weight you have on and how many reps you're doing, and you compete. And anyway, it's freaking awesome, but there are a few bugs that I'm noticing.
SPEAKER_01
No big deal. So, is this like released or is this a private beta type of thing?
SPEAKER_02
It's out, it's out, it's out now, but they are a new company. And they, it just makes you realize how hard that type of hardware is.
SPEAKER_01
Why did you buy this versus like Tonal or Mirror or whatever?
SPEAKER_02
I didn't buy it. They just, they saw that I liked this type of crap and they go, hey, you want this for a few weeks? You can try it. If you want to share, you can.
If you don't, you don't have to. I go, yeah, I'll try it. And I just like trying these stuff out.
So Tonal is kind of like this, except you have to install into your garage. Like you have to like nail it to the wall.
SPEAKER_02
And Mirror is no weights. This is just Peloton, like Peloton with weights. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So do you like, now that you use it for a couple of days, do you, are you like, this is the future? Yes, I'm in.
SPEAKER_02
No, but it's cool. It's kind of like, it's as revolutionary as Peloton, which is like, it's just got to get maybe a handful more people into that sport. Right. No, it's not revolutionary, but it's quite fun.
SPEAKER_01
But like, would you be disappointed? It goes away, they take it back from you a couple of weeks.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I would have bought it. Bummer. You would have bought it.
Yeah. It's pretty, pretty sick. And then I want to bring up one more thing that I'm learning about.
SPEAKER_01
And what's the name of that one again? Let's shut them out.
SPEAKER_02
I think they're URL. Like you can't find them anywhere. It's called Tempo, but if you Google Tempo, you don't find it.
SPEAKER_01
I think you said, I think there's Tempo.fit. Is it something?
SPEAKER_02
Tempo.fit. It's cool. It's just nifty.
The guy who started it is like 27, really young, 26, like a young guy. It's neat. And are you on the website?
SPEAKER_01
I'm on it right now.
SPEAKER_02
It's like, cool.
SPEAKER_01
So I like the idea. And obviously, Mirror got bought. And that's cool.
And everyone's like, wow, what is this thing? I think this device is not as good looking as those are. It looks more like an air conditioning unit than Mirror, which looks like a mirror on the wall.
SPEAKER_02
But that's because Mirror, it's just pot. Mirror was like the woman who started it was a ballerina. So it was all about body movement.
I mean, that's what she was. She was a ballerina.
SPEAKER_01
I've never met someone who's actually a ballerina.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, she was a ballerina. So it was all about mobility and body weight stuff. This is just a little bit different.
This stuff's fun, though. I love it. Because the bad part about working out at home is the lack of competition.
That's such a thing.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it doesn't feel as intense.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, this stuff's fun. And the second thing that I'm learning about, what did I watch? I like history. So I watched Alexander Hamilton.
Then I somehow Wikipediaed my way to Ford. Let me tell you something about Ford. And I see this consistently of businesses of this era.
So when Ford started, Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, when he started Ford Motor Company, they raised $28,000. And that was in 1903, I think. So $28,000 in 1903.
Inflation calculators are never entirely accurate because it's too hard to get. But we could probably say that, let's just say, it was 10 to 20x bigger. So let's just say $700,000 or $100 million, whatever.
It's a fucking car company. So they started Ford with $28,000 in 1903. And they used that, and by 1905, three years later, they were giving out dividends to shareholders to the point of shareholders 3xing their investment.
Is that crazy to you? Like, I read this all the time. That A, these companies take so little money to start back then. And B, they're paying out dividends so quickly.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's surprising because there's obviously like a fixed capital cost there to do things. I don't know how they did that. But I don't know.
It seems like, all right, so there was this tweet over the weekend that's related where some VC, this guy, Josh Felser. Yeah, I know him. He was like, he's a freestyle capital, also a Duke alum.
So he was like, oh, yeah, give me a great, I'll take a great entrepreneur over a great product any day, or something like that. Just tweeted that up. And two funny things happened.
One, this other founder replied, and he was like, you don't take founders. That's the problem with VCs. You have it all backwards.
You're capital is a commodity. You get chosen. You don't choose founders.
So this guy got really upset. And this is really not what he was talking about. I will take you.
He was just saying, I would put that on base. Yeah, exactly. He was not thinking that he was about to get sideswiped by this guy.
And then he had to apologize because every VC has to total the line, it seems like, with this type of stuff. So then the second thing was, there's this old Mark Andreessen article called The Only Thing That Matters. And Mark Andreessen has this blog that's offline, but there's a thing called the P-Marker Archive that still has his old blog posts.
And the blog that says the only thing that matters basically says, hey, there's this debate. What matters most? Team, product, or market? He's like, a lot of people think the best product wins. But once you get some experience, you realize that's not true.
You do need a good enough product, but that's not the most important thing. And a lot of people will say team, because that sounds really great because you seem like somebody who's betting on people. It's a great way to get people to feel flattered and take your money as an investor.
But there's that old Warren Buffett quote, when a great entrepreneur walks into a crappy business, the crappy business keeps its reputation.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and he says, he goes, a great team. It's a nice to have.
SPEAKER_01
Right. And he goes, I will propose that a great market is the most important thing for any startup. I'll take a great market over a great team and a great product any day of the week, and he explains why.
So anyway, it's a long way of saying, when you talk about Ford back then, cars, the whole automotive industry, I mean, what a hell of a market. That's still today one of the largest markets that's out there. Being early to that market, I think you can perform miracles.
You can start a business on a small amount of money, be returning capital within a couple of years, and grow a brand that endured 100 plus years later because of how good that market was, how strong that market was.
SPEAKER_02
I get that. Yeah, you're totally right. But even for, let's say like the Bitcoin guys, in 2000, what did all that craziness go on? 14? Have you launched?
SPEAKER_01
It started like 2009, 2010, but then the hype happened 2012, 13, 14, yeah.
SPEAKER_02
So even if you started a Bitcoin thing around the hype trade, I mean, that's like, you're going to take off no matter how bad, if you have Bitcoin in it, you're taken off. But even then, a lot of these businesses had raised a lot of money. And I'm like, and this is my favorite era in history, about 1900 to about 1930.
Carnegie did the same thing where he built a bridge and was turning crazy amounts of dividends to investors in like one or two years. And dividends from startups isn't really something you hear about right now. It's more so.
And so anyway, that's just like, I'm crazy fascinated on. So there is one major thing, which is income tax didn't happen until like the 1920s, I believe. So.
SPEAKER_01
And also, I don't study history like this at all. But my questions would be, I would love to just see the use of funds. So where does that $28,000 go into starting this? So what were the wages of people? Was there actually just a lot of debt that he was able to use? So he raised a little bit of money, and then mostly there was a huge amount of loan financing back then that he was using to build this company.
I'm not sure. But that's what I would need to know to kind of judge how the hell you could pull something like this off.
SPEAKER_02
It's just fascinating. I just love what I love reading about. And this is the reason why I love that.
SPEAKER_01
How much money did you initially start to hustle with?
SPEAKER_01
Zero. And then you raised, would you raise like a million bucks?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I didn't. I shouldn't have done that.
SPEAKER_01
You raised a million bucks, and you never needed that money. You never used that capital, correct? You kind of always had a surplus, basically, of cash in the bank.
SPEAKER_02
For sure. But I'm not building a freaking car.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but whatever. You're modern day Henry Ford. That's what I'm trying to say.
SPEAKER_02
No, I noted. It's just fascinating. I think I love reading about these people who just do things differently.
And I have no idea if they were different back then. But they are certainly different to my perspective. And I think that that's exciting to see someone who's doing something different than what your expectations are.
You want to talk about ideas?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I got a bunch. OK, where do you want to start? So let me start with, also with the company, I saw that was kind of cool. OK, so I saw this guy on Twitter.
SPEAKER_02
And before you get into that, did you get a ton of tweets? Thule. Yeah, said it wrong. Sorry, guys.
I've been talking about Thule for two episodes now. Thule. And it's Sweden. And it's Thule.
And it's not Switzerland. Or wait, it's Sweden, not Switzerland. Sorry. I'm reading while we're talking. So my apologies.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, look, this podcast, The Energy is Great, the ideas are interesting, and the facts may or may not be correct. Like, that's what you need to know coming in. That's the disclaimer.
If we were sitting here trying to do research on the pronunciation of these Swedish company names, like, then I wouldn't have time to do anything else.
SPEAKER_02
Thank you for the corrections, though. And it looks like it rhymes with mule, thule. Give me a break.
That's their fault. That's not my fault.
SPEAKER_01
OK, so this guy, I'm going to say his name wrong, too. Lloyd Armburst. So I saw this guy's Twitter.
And first of all, Twitter is the most fucking amazing thing in the world. Like, Twitter today still is just so awesome. And you don't have to know anybody.
You don't have to be anybody. And you can just, like, get the best education, best network on Twitter. So anyways, I saw this guy.
And his bio says, tech founder, then there's the American flag, which I thought was great.
SPEAKER_02
Where are you, Sean, on this?
SPEAKER_01
I'm on this guy's Twitter. His Twitter is Larmbrust, A-R-M-B-L-U-S-D.
SPEAKER_02
I know Lloyd. I had been there at his house.
SPEAKER_01
OK, great. So you can tell me about this guy. So here's what I saw.
So I saw Y Combinator 2010. I saw five acquisitions. And then he says, parentheses, five kids, but five kids, too, but unrelated.
And I was like, OK, this guy's already caught my attention. This guy's a legit player. I don't know what these five exits were.
SPEAKER_02
You probably know better than I do. My good friend Noah and Neville, we had a, what's the dinner on Friday night for Jewish folks? Shabbat. We had a Shabbat at Lloyd's house.
And so I had an intimate dinner with him for three hours. That's how much I know him.
SPEAKER_01
Intimate, excellent. OK, so.
SPEAKER_02
Well, you know, like a family dinner.
SPEAKER_01
So what caught my eye was that he's working on something new. So if you go to Armbrust USA, he's doing US-made medical masks, which sounds like the most simple, obvious idea right now with coronavirus. But when you go to the site, you could tell that this guy's like gone all in on American-made medical equipment starting with N95 masks.
And I was looking at his interviews. I was watching his videos. And I definitely think that the pendulum is swinging back this way, which is that from a government level or a consumer level, I think made in America is finally going to matter.
I've been talking about this for months. And yeah. And so I think he's trying to bring manufacturing back to America.
I think the government has realized, holy shit, we had way too much dependence on China. China is an adversary as well. It's a friend of me, basically.
And yes, things were cheaper there. Yes, we could outsource a lot of our labor there to markets with cheap labor. But man, that nurtured this massive dependence.
And yes, we lost jobs. But we also lost our freedom, because we depend on China for medicine, for clothes, for toys, for masks, for whatever the hell you can think of. It's manufactured outside of America for the most part.
So I think the right idea at the right time is to become, if you were playing the long game, which it seems like this guy is, if you've got five acquisitions under his belt, I think if you're playing the long game, I love the idea of trying to build an American manufacturing company starting with masks right now in Texas.
SPEAKER_02
I completely agree. And I'm going to send you an email right now. And we're going to bring up this file.
I have the financials from a mask business that we can go over. That's cool. So I've been buying red wing boots for a long time.
And I actually think that the little secret is, is that they're not made in America anymore. But their whole shtick is that they've been around since 19-0, yada, yada, yada, and they're hardcore and American. I agree.
I think that I completely agree. And I actually surveyed my audience on Twitter and asked how many would are going to pay extra for items that are made in America, a significant amount said they would. I completely agree.
I mean, when I see May in the USA, I buy it over other stuff. Now, there's definitely a threshold. But I do.
SPEAKER_01
My brother-in-law was telling me the same thing. He's like, yeah, I buy these jeans. I buy this type of gi for my HGGC stuff.
And I was like, whoa, you are actually paying the premium? Like, these are not small premiums. It's like 50% more or 100% more in some cases. And he's like, yeah.
And he's like, I don't know if it's the time. I don't know if he always did that. I don't think he always did that.
I think the way the world is going, I think there's a strong nationalist movement around these sorts of things.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I've been about that since I was, I grew up in Missouri with a lot of union guys. And the parking lots would always say four American cars only. Which at this point, like, at this point, like, Nissan's an American car.
Like, they make Nissan in Tennessee. You know what I mean? Who knows what a, the definition of Made in America is like pretty skewed. At this point, I just sent Sean the financials of a mask business.
I'm not going to say who it is or where I got it from. But it is the month of June, it's their financials. And what you can see, let's not say exactly what's going on, Sean, but let's just say that they're doing around 2,000 to 5,000 orders a day.
And they're making around $30,000 to $90,000 in net profit a day. And this company was launched in, I think, May.
SPEAKER_01
That's insane. And it also doesn't seem like this is big enterprise. Like, it's not selling to hospitals, because the average order value is more like, you know, $50.
It's not like it's, you know, $50,000 orders by, you know, small, sorry, like a handful of large hospitals or companies.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. And so what Sean and I are looking at is, it says date, order number, unit sold, shipping fees, average order value, cost of goods sold, gross margin, returns, and Facebook spend. So they're spending a lot of money on Facebook.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. But they're still profitable. Every single day is profitable in the tens of thousands of dollars.
That's cool. This is awesome. Thanks for sharing that.
And, you know, if you're listening to this, don't run out and start a mass business unless you know what the hell you're doing, because literally you're putting lives at risk if you're fucking up or if you're, like, you know, working with some random supplier who says it's N95, but it's not really N95, which is a big problem that's happening right now. Or you're, like, the third middleman in a four middleman chain. And, you know, you're just ending up marking up these things a lot.
So, but I think if somebody's going into this with some authenticity, which it seems like this guy's doing with his American manufacturing facility and his plants that you can see the videos of.
SPEAKER_02
Lloyd's a hustler. I'll say that. Like the small amount of time that I've hung out with them, a great guy, total, like, real sharp businessman.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. OK, yeah, cool. Anyways, I thought this was a good idea and I wanted to shout it out because I think it's a good thing.
It's a good thing for a smart person to work on now.
SPEAKER_02
So what I'm doing with the hustle lately is I've been emailing out surveys. So last week I asked how many people are going to move into the next six months. And 33% of people told me they're moving within six months.
And I think seven or 8,000 people answered the survey. This week what I was going to ask was how many of you won't be able to pay your mortgage or rent in the next two or three months? I'm curious about that. But I could do Made in America about what are you partial towards Made in America or Made in your home country.
SPEAKER_01
Or like in the last 30 days, have you knowingly chose an American-made product and spent more on it? Like, did they actually put their money where their mouth is versus like, yeah, I would consider it. I think everybody's like, yeah, I would prefer an eco-friendly product. And then do they choose it or not? That's a different question.
SPEAKER_02
So well, let me see if I can ask something like that. OK. Those financials are freaking crazy that I sent you. I think that it's bullshit.
I think that if you're going to start a mass company just for the revenue that you're going to get out of it, I feel like you're going to get crushed. Or it's just not going to exist in three months.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would not do it as a, I would not be thinking of it as a durable business.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I would, I'm not a fan of it. What software publishers, Sean?
SPEAKER_01
Software publishers. All right, so this guy brought this up, again, Stelman from Twitter, because that's where I get most of my ideas. I forgot who it is.
I wish I had wrote it down so I could give him credit. But somebody said, in many other industries, music industry, you have publishers. Book writing industry, you have publishers, where you have a separation between the talent that creates the thing, the creative talent, and the body that's meant to do the distribution, sales, getting you in front of customers.
And so there are a whole bunch of industries where you have publishers. But weirdly, in software, there's very few software publishers. Usually, when you start a software company, you're going to be responsible for the idea, for the creation of it, for the iteration of it, for the distribution of it, for the sales and marketing of it.
I thought that's actually kind of interesting. I was curious why. Why you think that might be the case, that that's not the case with music.
It's not the case with books. It's not the case with a whole bunch of other fields where you have publishers. Why don't we have software publishers, where a random engineer can build an app, pitch it to, or get picked up by a publisher who says, hey, this is a good utility.
You're great at programming, but I'm great at distribution and marketing. I'm going to take it from here.
SPEAKER_02
OK, this is a great one that I know a little bit about. So someone who's a little bit older than me might criticize me, because I'm not getting it exactly right. But in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was the model, this was a thing.
And so it actually worked like SoftBank. I've mentioned SoftBank a lot. They had a magazine, a tech magazine.
Well, they would also, there was many companies that existed that were basically like software stores. So you sign up, and they tell you all the latest software, and you go in, you buy it, and they send you the CD, like Amazon for software. One was called, that's what SoftBank had.
That's how they grew to be so big. So fast. The other one was started by one of my favorite guys ever.
His name was Felix Dennis, and he had Micro Warehouse. And it was a warehouse for software. And you could go and buy whatever you want.
And they went from zero to a publicly traded company in like four or five years, massive. And so I think that this, and there's many other examples that I could find like that.
SPEAKER_01
And we should also say the gaming industry still works like this, where software for games, whether it's a small little boredom, killer game, or that you play with your thumb, or you're flicking noodles around a screen, you might get picked up by a catch app, or by, you know, line studios or whoever. And then also on a bigger level, great games can get bought by Riot or Blizzard Activision or whoever. And then, OK, cool, now it's under that umbrella.
That's the public service.
SPEAKER_02
Games are kind of like their own thing a little bit. Like, the games are weird. The games are their own beast.
But like, if you're talking about like software tools, which I think you are, I have also wondered is because I'm like, this model did exist. And it is weird how like when you picked Slack at your company, it was probably only because some other company used it or a friend used it.
SPEAKER_01
I saw Mark Andrewsson tweet out the growth curve of Slack. And I was like, huh, what the hell is that? And then I downloaded it and started using it.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, now some people like a small insider, inside baseball community might discover stuff on product hunt, but that's only the latest and greatest in the trending.
SPEAKER_01
But it was the latest, really, not necessarily the greatest. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
It's not the greatest. It's just the latest. It has always baffled me why there isn't a more central place to discover all types of stuff that exists and like your Amazon, like people also bought XYZ.
SPEAKER_01
Right. Or put differently, maybe there's room for a publisher that says, hey, there's a whole lot of apps out here for managing social media for companies, whether it's like a Hoot Suite type of app. It's an app like Mention.
It's some analytics thing, whatever. And I'm surprised that there's not a software publisher that takes either one area of the business, like either one business model, like SAS, or one area of the business, like HR Tech, and just says, OK, cool. We're going to be the best HR Tech software publisher.
We already have our one flagship thing that everybody uses, but then we're going to become the publisher for these independent projects that we think we will find the best in class customer service chat bot. And then that will get distributed under our umbrella. I feel like somebody, an enterprising individual, could try to bring software publisher model back and basically not be creating products, but just curating products because there's so many products out there.
So if you have the trust of the consumer and you have the relationship with the buyer, then being a great curator is way better than being just yet another creator and a CEO of creators who are all building these tools. And just like, oh, which mail software should I use? There's $50,000. How the hell do I know which one to use?
SPEAKER_02
One of these companies is called G2. And they are just in the news today because they laid off a ton of people and raised $100 million, even though they took $5 to $10 million from the PPP thing. Right.
SPEAKER_01
But they're not a publisher, right? There's a reviews platform, right?
SPEAKER_02
There's a fine line. I think that you could argue that maybe they are, but correct. Yeah, they are not.
In the way you're describing, no, they are not. But they are a central location to discover new stuff.
SPEAKER_01
So the other, I'm not even convinced that this is a good idea. I just thought it was an interesting question. Why doesn't this exist here, where it exists in all the other fields that are very similar? The other one of this that I've heard that's interesting is basically the Hollywood agent model for top programmers.
So the same way that athletes, musicians, actors have agents who do the negotiation for them, take them from project to project, engineer, like top, top engineers are compensated in the millions of dollars at tech companies today. So why don't they have agents? And why don't they have agents who negotiate on their behalf, who move them from company to company and will take offers and solicit bids and say, look, like I think a good agent negotiate, I think anybody who negotiated for a good, to great engineer could get them an extra 20% annually, just on better negotiation.
SPEAKER_02
How many engineers at Twitch do you think make over seven figures a year annually? Twitch has 3,000 employees, right?
SPEAKER_01
No, just under 2,000. The product and engineering would be like, I don't know, let's call it 700 folks. I give or take, I ignore it.
SPEAKER_02
Well, of 2,000 employees at Twitch, how many you think make over seven figures annually?
SPEAKER_01
10 to 15, something like that? That'd be my guess.
SPEAKER_02
10? So that's 10 to 15. Are they all exact?
SPEAKER_01
Those are like senior execs or like, probably super senior engineers. Now the problem with that is that the stock price is appreciated. So whatever the offer was, the offer might have been worth $400,000, but Amazon stock has gone up so much that that $400,000 offer is now worth 1.
2 million because the stock price has quadrupled in the last five years.
SPEAKER_02
So 10 to 15, I mean, I think you're kind of explaining why this doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_01
That's one company and that's a small company. At Google, there are individuals who, at Google who are making $50 million a year.
SPEAKER_02
No way. Yeah, it's public.
SPEAKER_01
There's guys you can look up. I forgot the guy's name, but there was a guy who either left Google to go to Facebook or whatever in that transition. They basically said what this guy was making every year at Google and this guy was literally making $50 million a year.
Now he's, you know, exception, not the rule, but I think that at Google there are easily, easily, 250 plus people who are making over a million dollars a year. Easily that. Could be a thousand people.
SPEAKER_02
Isn't that nuts? Isn't that nuts to create a widget that's so big that your non-owners are making $50 million or even a million a year? Like I understand, I understand that if a salesperson makes over a million dollars a year, that's easy. That's a no brainer. It's just, you're just, you just get a percentage of what you make the company.
So yeah, the upside's unlimited. But the fact that just like a salary or like normal-ish non-sales employee can make over seven figures is fucking mind boggling to me.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So I think, you know, you don't have to have huge quantities in the same way that there's, I think, 350 or 450 total NBA players, period. So I think in the same way there are more people in the technology industry that earn a million dollars plus than there are NBA players who earn a million dollars.
That'd be my guess. And so if NBA players can have agents, I'm curious why top talent in the tech industry also doesn't have agents that work on their behalf. I think that's super interesting.
Yes, look, it says, a bird who just found the article, Google paid a total of 105 million to Andy Rubin and this guy, Amit Singhal. That's the guy I was thinking about.
SPEAKER_02
Well, Andy Rubin,
SPEAKER_01
He got acquired, that's different.
SPEAKER_02
He built, yeah, they created Android, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01
This guy, Amit Singhal, they agreed to pay $45 million but ended up paying just 15 million because he went to go to a competitor. Imagine getting a guaranteed $45 million and then leaving to go to a competitor. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_02
That's what, Zappo's guy did.
SPEAKER_01
Well, he walked away from the buddy. I'm saying, imagine what the other offer must have been that this guy switched teams.
SPEAKER_02
It's crazy, man. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01
Like the top AI people, the top machine learning people, the top self-driving cars people, these guys are making millions of dollars a year.
SPEAKER_02
God bless America. Let's talk about the CB Insights. So I did a call last week with the founder of CB Insights.
You know what that is? Yeah. Okay, so listen, there's CB Insights. They're most famous because they have a newsletter like the Hustle and the guy who owns the company or is CEO like writes it and he's kind of quirky and funny and irreverent.
What they do is, so CBInsights.com, the guy, Sean, who is the CEO, he's like kind of, he's got a huge Twitter following because he's really funny. His Twitter handle says like buy a CB Insights subscription.
I owe people money.
SPEAKER_01
Do you know who he is? Well, what's his name?
SPEAKER_02
Anon, A, and I don't know how to pronounce it. A, N, A. Anon, Anon.
Anon, sorry, Anon. And so what CB Insights does is if you go to their website, they say they like help you find which company to buy next. So you're thinking like PE companies subscribe to them.
And I just did a call with him. They're huge, by the way, huge company. I'm not gonna reveal anything else other than that, but they're big and everything else I'm gonna talk about is public.
But if you go to their pricing, their top tier pricing is $250,000 a year. And I go, what is CB Insights? And he was like, basically we are a cover your ass, we'll cover your ass.
SPEAKER_02
Have you ever, I never heard that term before. And apparently I would do.
SPEAKER_01
Go to a big company, you'll see CYA all over the place.
SPEAKER_02
I've never heard of that. It's basically like if you're gonna make a decision, you need to cover your ass. So you're not the one to blame if that decision is a bad decision.
And so an oversimplified example of this is, let's say you're a huge company with 5,000 employees and you have to choose between this company and this company for, let's say like your Salesforce thing. Like you're trying to figure out, do we use HubSpot, Salesforce, this or that or this? Now that's over simplification. Usually it's for smaller vendors.
And you've gotta do research on them to figure out, are they gonna go out of business in 10 years? Shit like that. And I have never heard of someone needing to spend 50 to $100,000 a year to solve this problem, have you?
SPEAKER_01
I didn't know how much we spend on it, on things like that. But I have seen, yeah, CYA type of business. I've always thought this is exactly what they are.
I love that he just said it. Most people never say that that's what they are, but it's true. When we have to write a report or say how big, hey, I think we should go into Russia and because Russia is a growing market.
Well, nobody cares what Sean thinks about Russia. Nobody cares what Sean has heard about Russia or Sean's opinion of how big Russia is gonna be. What Sean needs to do is go and get these great reports that are done by third party consultancies or research firms, pay thousands of dollars for our annual subscription to those reports and pull out a number that says, Russia's mobile market is growing at 30% cagger.
Okay, great. That's the thing I need to justify the budget I'm asking for to justify the headcount I'm asking for to get the green light on my project. And that's just the way the world works.
These are like insurance for schmucks. I don't have to put my name on the line. I put their name on the line.
And in order to put their name on the line, I just have to pay them a nice little fee every year.
SPEAKER_02
It's just crazy that a business that can be worth maybe a billion dollars or billions of dollars, in Gartner's case, exists on bullshit politics inside of a company.
SPEAKER_01
Well, okay, look, they do do good research. So that's cool. They are also often wrong because they're forecasts are forecasts and people suck at forecasting things.
And the things people wanna know are usually the uncertain things and you're gonna be more wrong on those. So I'd say they do provide value. Like it's not like you don't get anything from it, but you would never pay that amount for that level of information.
You pay that amount because it's a seal of approval. It's a source cited for your decision-making.
SPEAKER_02
Well, I got curious about that. So I'll give you another example. Have I told you about WGSN?
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so let me make sure I said it right. WGSN, yeah, okay. It stands for, well, I don't know what it stands for actually.
WGSN.com, it's owned by a public company in England. So you can go and learn all about it.
What they do, and this is again an oversimplification, is they tell you which color is gonna be popular in the next year. So if you're Starbucks, yeah, if you're Starbucks and you need to figure out-
SPEAKER_01
That's all they do or no, that's just like one thing that they do.
SPEAKER_02
That's what they're known for? That's what they're known for, but they'll tell you like what type of outfit will be popular in a year. So if you're Starbucks and you have to buy, you know, 100,000 uniforms, you wanna know which shade of pink is gonna be cool, or if you wanna make like a new sleeve for your cup, you need to know which shade of red is like the thing. And so it's an oversimplification, but it's fashion forecast, particularly around colors, I believe.
And this company makes around $90 million a year recurring revenue just off this stuff.
SPEAKER_01
Amazing, it looks like they have like food and drink, beauty, fashion as they're like kinda core things. Okay, this is incredible. I'm gonna sign up for get a demo.
I hate to get a demo scheduled call. That feels so soft.
SPEAKER_02
It works so unsportsmanently. Is this not crazy fascinating? Abreu just sent me one called sentair.com and they do the same thing, which they tell you which scents are gonna be the most popular.
Like not even like perfume, but like what smell you want your restaurant to be, or your casino, or your office, or your hotel. That's fucking crazy. And it's just nuts, it's nuts.
And I think it's awesome. And I actually understand this one.
SPEAKER_01
I wanna know how these guys get customers. So is it that they, that's more interesting to me, right? Cause okay, I can see how this would be useful.
SPEAKER_02
You just get a sales team, bro. And you just, you got a lot of these,
SPEAKER_01
if it's me. Is it outbound sales, or is it putting out free reports, but then like kind of the full report, if you want the full report, you know, click this button. You know, is it content marketing, or is it outbound sales, or is it both?
SPEAKER_02
Oh, it's both. It's both. I mean, I have experienced a little bit with these types of things.
Yeah, it's both. I mean, the fact is, and a lot of people are afraid to it, I don't know if they're afraid to admit this, but they don't want to acknowledge it for some reason, but a sales team creates demand. So when I had the hustle, we were at, me personally, I sold advertisements, and I got us to 30 grand a month in revenue, like right away.
Like it was like, we got to like 50,000, or 100,000 subscribers, and I go, all right, I'm gonna go do ad sales. I got us to 30k a month. Then like with the same amount of subscriber base, we went and hired two or three sales person, and it got to like 200,000 immediately.
And I was like, holy shit, that fucking worked. And then I learned more about this, and I learned that, I listened to an interview with the founder of maybe Squarespace, or WordPress, who was like this engineer, dork type of guy, who typically hates sales and marketing, and they're like, yeah, sales and marketing, just let us on fire, and we just exploded once we hired a sales team. And so the fact is, my point is, is like, if you have a pretty good product that solves a problem, if you hire a sales team, you explode.
SPEAKER_01
So how do you count the economics of a sales team? So you're like, how much does each sales person need to make for you for that to be viable?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so you traditionally give a relatively low base. So it could be 50 grand, it could be 100 grand, it could be 150 grand, and then you say, you get 2% to 5% usually of all the sales that you bring in, and so you're on our agenda.
SPEAKER_01
So how much do you think a sales person needs to generate? And what does one individual sales person need to generate for you? What's your target?
SPEAKER_02
At least a million, but so in media sales, it's around one to three million, and software sales is probably around 500,000 to 1.5 million.
SPEAKER_01
Software sales. So you need a sales person to bring in a million dollars a year of revenue?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I'm doing some rounding here, but yeah, that's that.
SPEAKER_01
It's not a hundred thousand, it's more like a million, is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and that's very doable. And a software company that has recurring revenue, you could get, if you had a sales person that cost you 150 grand a year, and they were bringing in 500 grand a year, that's pretty good because hopefully, a lot of those folks are gonna renew. TV is there, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, yeah, I've never built sales teams. It's always something I've gladly not had to do.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, a lot of people say that.
SPEAKER_01
But in the right circumstance, it's obviously, it's great. If that's the model, if that's the growth engine, then you need to become a fucking master of building sales teams or hiring people who have built sales teams before.
SPEAKER_02
But that's what you just said is how most of the smart nerds who build the great stuff think, they go, oh, I don't wanna sales team. And I'm like, you do.
SPEAKER_01
No, it's the same thing as I don't wanna learn taxes and how to optimize that. It's the same thing of like, oh God, I gotta incorporate and figure out if I should be a C-Corporate LLC, and I gotta set up my blah, blah, blah. It's like the perceived schlep of doing it makes me just not wanna do it at all.
It makes me want to be ignorant to it, and it makes me want to avoid it until I'm like, oh, the money is on the other side of that wall. Okay, now I need to learn how to climb this wall. And then when I climb, I'm like, oh, that's not so bad.
Actually, I kind of like that wall. That's a pretty useful little thing to get over here and get this pile of money. And that's how I feel about taxes now.
That's how I feel about,
SPEAKER_02
that's how you feel about sales teams. Yeah, and I feel that way about taxes too. There's this company that I hung out with in Austin, and I won't name their name, but they have software, and they have like, it's a software company, man, like 200 employees, and like 150 of them were salespeople, and they like grew it just like crazy.
And in my head, I'm like, as like someone who is a little bit more nerdy than I am salesy, I'm like, ah, that you are selling paperware,
SPEAKER_01
but they got results. So let me, okay, I'm gonna give you two ideas that could use salespeople, and I want you to tell me what you think. All right, so I'm gonna start with the one I'm more excited about.
Maybe I want to even get to the second one. Let me see if I can articulate why I'm excited about this. So, okay, at the last two companies, I have done, I created, so we use Slack as the primary way the company communicates, and Slack's great.
Slack did a great thing, which was, it got us out of email, and it got us out of direct messaging, where I just like, oh, I'm gonna bug Sam about this, or create a giant group for like everybody who's working on the marketing campaign, or whatever, right? And Slack created channels. Channels are sweet, because it's like, you make a channel for marketing, that's where I go talk about the marketing campaign, and whoever is interested, like a lot of people can see it, but nobody feels obligated to reply. So it's a really helpful way for information to spread inside a company.
But what I found was that there was a whole bunch of things that I just wanted to share that, like I didn't need to go into any specific channel, and it wasn't like, I wasn't trying to create work by sharing it. I just wanted to share a thought on my mind. So I created this Slack channel on my Slack called Channels Inner Thoughts, and I branded it like that, because I thought people would be curious what my inner thoughts are.
And so I had a whole bunch of employees join that channel, and really all it was, is just a place for me to dump random thoughts that I have about stuff. Something I saw was cool, something I thought we were doing, something I'm noticing, blah, blah, blah. And that was always well received.
And now after we got acquired, my coworker Jason did that at Twitch. He created Jason's Inner Thoughts, and there's like 80 people subscribed to this thing, and it's kind of like just like a private Twitter. He just posts random stuff, and sometimes people react to it, but nobody feels obligated to respond, and because that's the norm of that channel.
And so I've been thinking about this, like why isn't there a place to share stuff that is like the stuff that didn't need to be shared necessarily, the non-essential communication of a company that does actually bring out interesting conversations. It helps people bond, because they see what you're all about, what you're into. So the way I'll phrase this is Twitter for companies, which is not a new idea.
So basically this is what Yammer was, like I don't know when Yammer started, like a decade ago. So Yammer was started during like the social media hype phase. It was like, oh shit, we have social networks for our friends and our family.
We need a social network for our company. And they basically just copied the UI of Twitter slash Facebook, and they were like, cool, it's Twitter slash Facebook, but the only people that will see this are all your coworkers. And so you close a sales deal, you could post it there, and how much people could react to it or get excited about it.
Or you could post a funny video from the office kitchen and post it there, and it'd be relevant to all those people in that group. So it's kind of like the non-work chatter.
SPEAKER_02
And I think- Did they shut it down though?
SPEAKER_01
Like it doesn't even exist. So it got bought for a billion dollars by Microsoft.
SPEAKER_02
Like three years after starting.
SPEAKER_01
Very quickly, yeah. So it grew super fast. It was like ridiculously fast, because it was a social network inside company, so it had this amazing network effect, amazing in company virality.
And then it started making money, because they would then, first they just got the company, that like employees to start using it, and then they went and they sold the keys of the car to the admins, and they said, hey, you know, all your employees are using this thing. Don't you want to have some oversight over this and be able to manage and monitor it a little bit? Well, here we have an admin tool that will charge you an arm and a leg for, because now your whole company's already addicted to this thing. So the get spot kind of gets shut down, kind of gets lost like many acquisitions do.
Yammer's not a thing anymore, blah, blah, blah. I think that there's still a big need for this. I would literally, if somebody, if there's a credible person out there that said, I'm gonna restart Yammer, I would write them a $50,000 check tomorrow.
And I would say, great, I think there's a great need for this. I think you could do a better job of it today than you could have done back then, because the tools are much better. And I think there's a more need for this now that everybody's in the cloud, because now there is no office chatter, because you're not in an office.
SPEAKER_02
So let me read this online. Let me pitch this a little differently. Yeah, do it.
Have I told you about what Washington Post is toying with?
SPEAKER_01
You told me that they kind of have like a software arm where they're like making other tools like...
SPEAKER_02
I don't know if it's gonna, yeah, I don't know if it's gonna be any good, but they're piloting it. And it's what inspired me. What I would do is I would build a media company.
It's almost like you have media companies or media websites, but only for internal stuff. So you...
SPEAKER_01
We talked with the high school newsletter or high school newspaper company, yes.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that's what I would do. It's like a weekly... It's just like... Here's what's going on in the company. Here's what people are thinking.
Here's some ideas. That's what I would build is I would build... And I think at Airbnb, they built their own for this. At our company, I tried building our own, and it was just Google, like a Google website, everything's called.
But it's solving a similar problem as to what you're describing, which is...
SPEAKER_01
I love this idea. I love your idea, actually, even maybe more than my idea.
SPEAKER_02
Like you could have podcasts. You could just like a... You just have like Airbnb, internal.com, and you just either.
.. You have your login, and it's just a... Like we've aggregated all the happenings of the business going on, and you can just log in.
SPEAKER_01
And so what's interesting here? Is it what's happening as in like kind of company announcements, news, the metrics? That's maybe a part of it. Is it like a high school newspaper where somebody can just write an op-ed? You can just write an article if you're interested, and basically contribute a column, basically, for the day?
SPEAKER_02
I think that is yes. But I would make it so where the thing about... You said like a private Twitter, is that like some of these... When people think of like media or an article, they're like, oh, that's a lot of work. Then when I think of Twitter, they're like, oh, I'm just gonna do this in five minutes.
But the thing is, is that often, those little five minute tweets add as much value or more than a long article. Absolutely. And so you'd have to build it in such a way that you can solicit this information from your employees in a low pressure way because someone.
.. I have this woman, Becca, who runs our email business. I'm like, you don't write this report.
Is this a good idea or not? Yes or no? Why? Just like, riff. Like you already... I already know you know off the top of your head because you're in the thick of it. Something like that.
But where you have to make it like a little bit more knee jerk reaction.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you like the lightweight low pressure Twitter, not blogs basically.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, both are important, but a lot of people undervalue those little, just like gut instinct things like you've described. Like they're just like a boom. But anyway, I agree with you.
I do think that there's room for that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I like this a lot. I'm excited about this.
SPEAKER_02
I maybe have to do this. Maybe I'll do this. We've talked about this with.
.. There's a bunch of movement going around. I Axios, the media company Axios, I actually somehow got my hands on a demo.
They're launching a product where they're doing internal newsletters.
SPEAKER_01
Right, oh yeah. In the concise format that they use for their company, right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's not there yet. Because right now, the way that it's built out is, it's like mail, I'm like, I can just use mail champ. You're just allowing me to send emails to an internal email list.
So they have to add more stuff to make it interesting. But I understand the problem you're trying to solve for, and I agree with you. I think it's quite interesting.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I actually like the Axios thing, even if it is just a mail list, because people today just use Google lists, and Google lists are fucking awful. They're awful to find. Google groups is like miserable.
That whole process, the whole listserv is awful, then people reply all, and it's miserable. That whole thing is terrible. If somebody just said, I'm going to make Google lists and listservs for companies less shit, I'd be like, oh wait, that's so smart.
Why are you so smart? That's what I would say to them.
SPEAKER_02
And there's two interesting things about this. If you get it done well, you can charge a lot of money, but the switching costs, once you start, seem to be quite high. And so you'd probably have a pretty good like a low churn number and a high net retention rate for revenue.
Like you can probably add a lot more people. The more people your company hires, the more people who need access to it.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this thing could make money. And OK, I like that a lot. All right, so two other quick ones.
So one thing I saw that was pretty clever that I think is a great example of a niche product that somebody's doing to build a lifestyle business. I was on Reddit and I saw an ad that said, get notified when your company's mentioned on Reddit. Have you seen this?
SPEAKER_02
I've seen things like it, but not that ad.
SPEAKER_01
So there's products like this that are out there, like monitor Twitter, monitor newspapers, the media forums and shit to see when your company gets mentioned. But this is a bigger version of that, which is Reddit. Reddit's its own little beast.
You kind of have to scrape it in its own way to be able to track things properly. What's the call? I don't remember. I saw an ad for it.
I was like, this is smart. And I moved on because I don't need that right now. But I was like, for most companies, like for you guys, I bet the hustle would want to know every time you get linked to a reference.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, or on dig or anything like that.
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that that's a really smart, simple idea that somebody could do. They're using Reddit ads to distribute it. All they had to do was really focus on being able to track keywords on Reddit.
And then market to a bunch of companies who were like, yeah, actually, I do want to know. And there's a conversation about my brand going on on Reddit.
SPEAKER_02
I do want to see the interface. I think a brain you just find, is it trackreddit.com?
SPEAKER_01
If this wasn't it, this is just like it. And Reddit is so huge now that you can't, but it's still underestimated. It's not as mainstream.
So the traditional tools don't typically take in Reddit. But Reddit is more influential than any article actually is. Like, you know, and send us some general publication.
And so anyways, I thought it was a very simple, smart idea. And I think if you're looking for like, how do I come up with an idea that I could build in two weeks that I think could make me 250 grand a year or more, this would be a great example of a simple app that I'm sure does that.
SPEAKER_02
I just use like a no code version of building software, like a platform. What's it called? Bubble. Bubble.
Oh my gosh, have you seen Bubble?
SPEAKER_02
Is that as, OK, so can you give listeners background here?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so Bubble is one of the no code platforms that's pretty popular. And I think Bubble.io is the handle for it.
SPEAKER_02
I found it Friday and I was like, this is the same thing.
SPEAKER_01
And it's one of those. So when we say no code, no code can mean a lot of things. But Bubble is one of those.
It lets you build apps, not just websites. So there's a lot of website builders, Squarespace, Wix, whatever. What Bubble does is it lets you actually have a backend.
So like, for example, this weekend, I built myself an app in no code in one hour as a challenge to myself. I wanted to have a meal tracking app, like a food journal. And so I was like, oh, I want an app that just, I take a photo of what I eat.
And it shows it on a grid. And at the end of the day, I can see everything that I've eaten for the day. And so I built myself a little thing.
I was going to use Bubble. I ended up using this other thing called a Dallow. And I actually built it.
You can have it. If you download this app, you can see what I eat every day. But I was like, this is amazing that I was able to do this thing where I'm like, I have a UI.
You can use the phone camera. It saves it in a database. I don't know what the hell a database even is.
OK, it's saved somewhere. And I can display it in an Instagram feed. And I was able to build that in an hour.
And I'm below average intelligence. So I'm like, this is amazing.
SPEAKER_02
Shit, now. So and you did that on that site?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I did it on something called a Dallow. Because they let you actually make a mobile app. So I have an actual app now.
So you can see, this is my food grid. Wow. And if I wanted to add something, I could just add another one.
SPEAKER_02
So what's the thing called that I mentioned? Bubble. Man, I went to it. It was so cool.
I'm like, I don't know if they're promising too much and they can't deliver on it. But it's still complicated. But it was certainly.
SPEAKER_01
It's definitely complicated. I used the other one because I thought it was simpler. But I think bubble can do way more.
So there's people who are just going to specialize in bubble. They're called no coders. And they just learn these no code tools.
And they overcome the learning curve on these things. And they're not really traditional programmers. But they know how to use bubble and all these other little random no code tools really well.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I thought it was awesome. But that was really cool to me. What else you got?
SPEAKER_01
Did I talk about this kids Etsy thing before? No. OK, so kids Etsy. What the fuck is kids Etsy? So this is a half-baked idea.
So I have a niece who's six or seven years old. She's like, she wakes up and she just starts making shit all day. She just like, OK, start doing art.
Then gets bored of art. Then decides I'm going to make Legos. And something gets bored of Legos.
Then just takes a bunch of paper and will make a paper fort. And then we'll do this imaginary restaurant. And her whole day from the moment she wakes up to the moment she sleeps, she is just imagining, creating, and just building random stuff.
And obviously, it's mostly crap. She'll do a drawing or she'll make a book. She'll literally draw 10 pages, 10 different pieces of paper, staple them together, bind it.
And it's like, here's a book for you, Uncle Sean. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. But of course, it's not actually amazing, right? Because she's six and it's kind of crappy.
But I was like, kids love making stuff. They love arts and crafts. It is one of the core things they do.
But there's kind of this like, there's only so much stuff you can put on the fridge. And so I was like, wouldn't it be cool if you could also teach your kid kind of like a mini lemonade stand? So what if you had kids Etsy, where they just push a button and they set up their store. And it's just a camera.
And they take a picture of the thing that they made. And that becomes a listing. And then they can browse any pictures that other kids made.
And they can just click buy it. You just create this little economy. So every parent pays like $15 a month.
That gives you like five tokens. And then you use a token to buy something that somebody else made. And then that kid gets excited.
It's like, whoa, you get a notification. It's like, whoa, Zoe in California just bought that little stupid book you made. Or that little book you made out of paper mache or whatever.
And then you have customers. And so it's like this mini fake Etsy for kids that I think kids. I think it would be really cool to teach kids kind of like both arts and crafts and entrepreneurship to like own a little store online.
And it's kids buying from kids. What do you think of this idea?
SPEAKER_02
I am so wonderful. I'm so not in the know of this market. Someone told me about kids Uber.
Like when it launched, I was like that.
SPEAKER_01
For like carpooling, like to school, you mean?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Or like an Uber driver that you can put your children in. Trust with your kid.
Yeah. And I was like, that's so stupid as shit ever. That's a big thing now.
So is it when people love that? I don't know. That's wild to me. The kids market is just so foreign.
It'd be like launching a company in China. Like I just don't know anything about it. Because I see these like toy review sites and they just crush.
I see.
SPEAKER_01
This is how I feel when you tell me about like Henry Ford in 1903. I'm like, dude, I don't know, man. I just don't have the insights on this.
Like I just don't know. And it sounds like you're not around kids a whole lot.
SPEAKER_02
Not at all. And I don't understand. I understand.
I understand the idea of like you'll do anything for your children. OK, get it. That's the only thing that matters.
I feel a little bit of that with some of my nephews. And it's like, OK, I'll give them anything to make them happy. Right. I get it. Love that perspective.
But like, do kids want to buy other children's books?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I don't know if they. That's the part I don't know. Like, do they actually want other kids junk? Are they only like their own junk? Because it's all junk.
But the reason I thought this might be interesting is because they do this at school. So like, you remember like science fair, where it's like, everybody makes kind of a crappy thing. And then you get to stand by your little volcano and everyone walks by and you get this good feedback of like, oh, cool, you know, whatever.
And somebody wins a prize. So my niece's school did like an in-person version of this, where people wouldn't make stuff and then they could come. They was like a school fair and all the vendors were just other kids.
So you brought all the stuff you made and you're at the kids fair. And you can go walk around and see what the other kids made. And some people are actually pretty good at it.
And some people are really bad at it. And you could kind of barter or exchange or like buy, you know, each other's stuff. And the parents are happy to pay a little bit just to give each other the good feeling.
It's like burning man. It's like, I'll bring a little bit of money. And then like, we all have the good.
Every kid gets the good feeling of getting to buy and sell an item. And so I was like, oh, that'd be cool to just do online at scale basically. And I bet some kids are actually amazing at building stuff.
And they would be kind of the star Etsy shops that would like actually be making cool bracelets and stuff that other kids want. But I think for the most part, it's about the good feeling of having your kid make something, post it, get good feedback from other people where they want your thing or they buy your thing and having that feedback loop. And I think parents would just pay a subscription.
And then the actual buying and selling is all funny money. That's just check-y-cheese tokens. But I think you could get, you know, thousands of parents to pay 15 bucks a month to have their kid be on this platform.
SPEAKER_02
That's wild. I, let's get someone to make it. Yeah, it's cool.
Let me bring up one more thing.
SPEAKER_02
I heard about this. This is all rumors, but I did some digging. I can't find any verification.
There's this guy I'm friends with on Facebook. He owns this company called Golden Hippo. Have you heard of Golden Hippo?
SPEAKER_01
No, Drunken Hippo.
SPEAKER_02
Not Golden Hippo. You probably have never heard of Golden Hippo. If you go to Golden Hippo, all it says is we build brands that make the world a better place.
OK. And I'm like, that could be anything. And so what they do is they partner with, like, for example, they have this one doctor called Dr.
Marty. And I don't know if this is scammy or not, but Dr. Marty's cell is a line of pet food.
They also have this other doctor that sells, like, something for your gut. So, like, potentially scammy stuff. But all those ads that you see at the bottom of Breitbart or Fox or CNN.
Outbrain. Yeah, they buy all these outbrains ads. And they use long form copywriting to get people to buy pet food and things like that.
And they do about $1 billion a year in sales.
SPEAKER_01
The companies that Golden Hippo supports?
SPEAKER_02
They own those companies. They own, I believe.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, these are their companies.
SPEAKER_02
I believe they own about 12 of them.
SPEAKER_01
Did you say $1 billion a year in sales? I did. And your friend owns this thing?
SPEAKER_02
I'm Facebook friends with them. I don't chat with them on regular basis. But and then I did.
SPEAKER_01
So what's an example? I want to see one of their brands. They don't list their brands on their website. What's a brand?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. And when I heard what I said, they have 800 employees and they don't list their brands on their website. I was like, oh, this is awesome.
Right. So Google Dr. Marty. That is one of them. Dr. Marty. And I think they're, I don't mean to, like, disparage them. I think they are a legit company.
Or they are a legit company. I just don't know any of their brands. Interesting.
I have another one called, there's this one doctor. It's like a white guy doctor with a fucking, I'll look him up.
SPEAKER_01
Dr. Sue, something like that.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Steve Gundry, G-U-N-D-R-Y. So Google Steven Gundry.
Dr. Steve, Dr. Gundry's books and podcasts.
And he sells books on a family cookbook, book for Crockpot. He sells, it's just all types of crap. It's just freaking crazy.
These guys, like, it's just so funny to hear about these people that aren't in the mainstream, are kind of behind the scenes.
SPEAKER_01
So here's what's interesting. All right. So I go to Dr.
Marty, right? He's got an ad. He's running an ad around this article that's called Three Dog Behavior caused by a poor diet. Now, the ad is actually going to a different website called caninecodes.
com, not his sales website. So Dr. Marty writes this article, Marty Goldstein DMV. I don't know, DVM.
I don't know what that means, Dr. Veterinary Medicine, maybe. What does your dog's behavior actually mean? And he's talking about this stuff.
And then how does this link to their dog food?
SPEAKER_02
I'm sure it's somewhere here. You probably give them your email. But like, all right, if you go to gundremd.
com, you'll see his website. And he sells something called Vital Reds, which is concentrated polyphenol blend. I have no idea what that is.
I'm looking at their website, and it's $70 for one jar. I'm looking at their website. According to a similar web, they get north of 2 million visitors a month.
If you get north of 2 million visitors a month to a store that sells a $60 product, you're probably most likely crushing it.
SPEAKER_01
Right. So this guy seems legit. So Dr. Stephen Gunry, he's a renowned heart surgeon and a New York Times bestselling author of The Plant Paradox and The Plant Paradox Cookbook. OK, so he's not like, I thought for a second, they're just making up fictional Aunt Jemima or Colonel Sanders.
I didn't know if they were trying to create characters or if these are actual doctors and vets.
SPEAKER_02
No, I think they're like Dr. Oz types. But I don't know.
But this guy, Gunry MD, he sells supplement, skin and hair care, food, dog food, books, and magazines. And they're not, the websites aren't slick. Yeah, not at all.
And Tony Robbins is an endorsement. He endorses them. It's just crazy.
Like I said with Henry Ford, I love seeing things that break my frame.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's a great way of putting this. It's like my brain is like, I'm struggling to even talk because my brain is breaking and trying to re-figure out, OK, what is this new information that I need to process and figure out what the hell this is for and why am I not doing this?
SPEAKER_02
But I can tell you, people have emailed me. I'm almost 100% positive. They're pushing a billion dollars a year in sales.
They have 800 employees. This is all a glass door. And I looked them up on Reddit and it says, golden hippo media is constantly hiring copywriters and constantly hiring media buyers.
And I've seen this doctor gunjery all over the place on these outbring. So I know what they do is they say.
SPEAKER_01
It would be interesting. We should find out who are the top advertisers on Outbring. Because I think Outbring is something everything, if you don't know about it, you're like, what the fuck's Outbring? If you know about it, you're like, oh, fuck an Outbring.
And you just disregard it. But look, there's a reason Tabula and Outbring, there's a reason they make all this money. There's a reason people are spending money on these ads because they're working.
So who are these advertisers? Who are their top 10 advertisers, what I would want to know? And I bet I would have my brain broken five more times in that list.
SPEAKER_02
So I just did a quick Google. EditorsChoice.com is the largest advertiser on Outbring, followed by Edmonds.
com, which is cars. Followed by healthgrades.com.
SPEAKER_01
Have you been to editorschoice.com? What is this?
SPEAKER_02
I have no idea.
SPEAKER_01
It's like bootleg WordPress site with random articles.
SPEAKER_02
It gets 10 million unique visitors a month.
SPEAKER_01
I must have typed something wrong.
SPEAKER_02
This is for you. No, you're right. I went there too.
It's like, what the hell is this? It's crazy, man. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01
OK, no, no, no. Now I went to the right site. I don't know where I was before.
I was on the right.
SPEAKER_02
Healthierpatriot.com buys 1% of Outbrain ads. I'm telling you, there's a lot going on in the world that we just don't even think about.
SPEAKER_01
I can't even get to the website of HealthierPatriot. I don't know what's going on.
SPEAKER_02
If you Google it, the person comes up with, this is a scam.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly. I can't find the actual website. I saw it was a scam alert.
OK, weird. I need to spend more time on this.
SPEAKER_02
It's crazy. There's a lot of stuff going on.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, this is turning into a true crime serial type of podcast where we get to the bottom of these businesses.
SPEAKER_02
Maggie Q. Have you heard of Maggie Q?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that's another one they have. So wait, Maggie. That's an actress.
ActivatedU.com. And the personality type is this woman named Maggie Q. And they sell probiotics.
And this website is one of, I think, Golden Hippo's website. So much so that when they sell so much stuff that I Googled them, they opened up a massive, I think, 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000. Something huge.
Square foot warehouse in Memphis.
SPEAKER_01
But where are you seeing? OK, so they're hiring a bunch of copyrighters. What are you seeing that they need all these copyrighters for? I see some blog posts, sure. Because they're not doing sales pages.
SPEAKER_02
You just don't. It's always. I'm not finding them.
You always go to the side door. The sales pages are for where you send paid media to the side doors. And those side doors that work best are long form copywriting.
So if you go to Outbrain, go to Breitbart.com with your ad blocker off and scroll to the bottom and you will 100% see an ad bought by Agora, which does long form sales pages to get you to buy a $5 book or give you their email.
SPEAKER_01
Oh my god, Sam. Now I got a whole bunch of stuff I got to do today. Just to just to get my head around this.
OK, so you've given me my homework.
SPEAKER_02
Crazy, right? It's freaking crazy. We'll come back to it. We have Andrew Wilkinson coming on Thursday.
So maybe maybe we can bring this up to him and get his opinion. It's weird, man. It's weird.
I just love having my frame broken and this will break anyone's most anyone's frame.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, for sure. OK, cool. I'm excited for the rest of the week.
Andrew Wilkinson, we also have the CEO of Barstool coming on. So that's going to be exciting.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, we're recording that on Wednesday, right?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that will come out I think next week.
SPEAKER_02
All right, well, we good?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we're good. Let's go. Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on.
So a brave just linked this tweet thread that we got to read. So 10 things we've learned at Golden Hippo after spending over one billion dollars, parentheses, of our own money on online media.
SPEAKER_01
This is the founder.
SPEAKER_02
I've talked to Craig. Yeah, he seems like a nice guy. I've hung out with him at a conference.
I don't know if he still owns it, but he owned it.
SPEAKER_01
OK, so this is interesting. He says, the idea that they must see your ads seven times before they buy is the biggest line of BS in advertising history. No matter how long you've been doing this, what you think will work is often wrong.
Great ad ideas come from anyone. Influencer marketing is for companies that like burning money. Your customer cares literally zero about your company.
Your story, your brand, or even your product. What they do care is what it can do for them. Don't fight this.
Embrace this. OK, so this guy Craig is a cool guy or what? Let's have him on.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I'll message him right now. I'm texting him right now. All right, so on the podcast, we've talked about this million dollar idea thing.
What did we say, Sean?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thought exercise, something you could build in two weeks that can drive over $3 million of revenue within, I don't know, three months. Let's call it. And you can't spend like $3 million to get it, right? So you can't spend on ads like that much.
So the budget restraint was. So it's two weeks to build $3 million is your goal within three months, let's say, and $10,000 initial investment. That was the thought exercise.
And we are going to bring our ideas to the table up for that. I have a couple of thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think, what you've been thinking for. Not ideas yet, but just about this thought experiment.
SPEAKER_02
Sounds like a ton of work. I'll do it for fun. So maybe in the next couple of weeks, we'll actually address this and do this.
If you want to participate in this, tweet at Sean or I, and let us know if this gets like a ton of interest, we'll actually follow through with this.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it turned out to be harder than I thought to think about this stuff. And I'm a professional thinker about stuff for a living. So I was like, OK, I actually need to sit down and do this.
I can't do it off the top of my head. And I wanted to come to the table with something interesting that's actually relevant and not like a total knee jerk, half baked answer. But I'm actually going to break it down into three groups.
The first one is the exact thing that we just said. Two weeks to build $3 million in three months of revenue and $10,000 initial investment. The other part of that first one is you can't use your personal assets.
So I can't say like, oh, I just invest in this company or I would, you can't use the hustle to like, you know, do some crazy shit. It's like just you as an individual person without using your other resources. So the second thought experiment is, if I had to make a million dollars in the next two months using my existing resources, how would I do it? Which is less relatable to a listener, but more relevant to us.
Because we like, why would we take the hard path? We would actually take the easier path, which would be to use our actual assets. So that would be the next thing. That's the second thought experiment.
And then the third one that I'm thinking about is the same like sort of overall criteria, but with a larger budget for the initial spend. So if I knew I was going to make $3 million, you know, I would actually be willing to put up up to, you know, let's say half a million or a million dollars as my marketing budget behind something. And so that's the third one.
Now I'm going to come to the table with answers for all three of those buckets, but I need time to think about it.
SPEAKER_02
Same in all categories. And if you guys are like truly into this, we, me and Sean are men of the people. So if we got to see what your response is.
SPEAKER_01
Right. Right on. Okay, cool.
We've addressed the elephant in the room. Awesome. Okay, cool.
I'm going to go swim, but this is fun.
SPEAKER_02
All right. Tough life.