SPEAKER_01
All right, so welcome Harry Harry Campbell the ride chair guy. Thanks for having me on Greg. How are you? So I remember hearing your story 2015 2016 I Had heard that there was this guy named the ride chair guy who was a an Uber driver, I think who started a blog that was getting a ton of traction and For people who don't know about you Can you give a little background about you know? I'll call it a media empire around the gig economy and what's the scale today?

SPEAKER_00
Definitely. Yeah, no, and I appreciate that term because it is a little bit tough to describe what I do and I mean really kind of what it boils down to though is you know, I started driving for both Uber and Lyft all the way back in 2014 on the side, you know just to try it out make some money I had a full-time day job as an aerospace engineer working for Boeing so kind of the opposite of what I do now But obviously during that time period the company started exploding raising crazy amounts of money Hiring hundreds of thousands of drivers and you know, I was really just like a leech on this rocket this rocket ship And so the company's exploded and you know, I think really Because there were so many people out there and this job was new too, right? Like people had driven taxi people had driven cars But driving for hire in this kind of fashion was so new there was just so much interest and excitement around it And so I kind of latched on to that. I started my blog.

I started doing three or four articles a week myself and You know, I started a YouTube channel. I started a podcast the rideshare guy podcast Which I still run to this day, so it's sort of a weekly podcast a little bit more focused on rideshare and gig delivery Industry topics these days and kind of like I started off as like nitty gritty. I went out and drove Friday Saturday Sunday night Here's how much I made You know this person puked in my car here's how to avoid a puker, you know And I will say there is like no shortage of Content and topics that you can kind of cover you would think like how hard is it to be a driver? But really it is kind of a lot harder than it looks and it's not rocket science, but I think I kind of just Took advantage of the fact that there's so many people doing it It was growing so fast and people didn't really know what they were doing and It's a little harder than it looks and so over the years.

I've built out a team of Contributors, you know, we've got the blog podcast. We've got a couple different podcasts YouTube is probably our fastest growing platform right now. I think we have about 150,000 160,000 Subscribers, which is you know, not huge but pretty good size.

You can make a full-time living off of that We've got the courses for drivers. We've got audio books Kindle books Kind of I usually joke like any box on the internet if you type in something related to Uber lift gig economy will probably pop up

SPEAKER_01
so Right now over the last 12 months. There's been this trend, you know for these anonymous accounts people are calling it the guy mafia

SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah, they totally are I'm totally on board with the guy mafia

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so what they mean by that is like the strip mall guy the self-storage guy the designer guy and You know, you really pioneered that concept I think How do you how important do you think the name the ride chair guy was to? Unlocking a lot of the success in the early days

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I will say I totally ripped it off from one of my idols the points guy So I was a big before I ever started the ride share guy, you know, I've always been dabbling in online businesses You know, I started three personal finance blogs. I was doing freelance travel writing Just kind of covering topics that I was interested in and I you know I wasn't an expert from all of those, you know businesses or gigs that I that I did but you know, I learned a lot and kind of like got my feet wet, I guess you would say and And so I totally loved the points guy was like the only travel blog I read and you know So when I kind of started brainstorming ideas and names from my site the rideshare guy kind of rose to the top of the list And I wouldn't say that it I You know, like when you introduced me you said the rideshare guy like I've walked into rooms at Lyft and uber and they're like Oh, it's the rideshare guy So it definitely there's something there with the branding But I think that like a great brand on top of a great community or on top of a great platform is like The key to success right if you just have a great name it, you know, not like you know Any revelation or anything like a great name on its own doesn't do much But I think like that kind of in tandem I think has you know, helped me a bit made me a bit more memorable So I'd say it's in like that 10 to 20% Range that it's given me like a little bit of boost like if I would have picked a shittier name Maybe I would have got 10 or 20% less revenue or deals or connections I think it did have an impact, but maybe not a huge one, you know my take on that is

SPEAKER_01
I think it had more than a 10 or 20% lift I think like naming in general is just really underrated Especially when you were coming up with this name like the points guy was pretty massive, but like yeah You know, it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now I actually think what's gonna happen with the guy mafia is there's there's almost like a saturation of guys now When you're coming up with a name for a business Do you have any naming frameworks or how do you come up with names for companies products podcasts communities?

SPEAKER_00
I feel like in general I either Let someone else smarter than me or more creative than me come up with a name and work with them So my co-founder for my conference Jonah He came up with a name called Kerber vor because it's sort of at the intersection of last mile delivery and Policy and restaurants and retail everything that's happening at the curb, you know, right? He'll pick up and drop off so we do an in-person event in LA and everybody loves the name Kerber vor You know sort of like play off of herbivore, but you know eating the curb and Other than that though like when I've came up with the rideshare guy name and want to be angels with my co-host Colin for that podcast I think we just wrote down like the rideshare guy I specifically remember writing down like a list of 50 different names And I think the key that I've discovered with naming is you kind of want to be niche, but you don't want to be too Niche you don't want to be too broad like that I knew for sure that I didn't want to be like the uber guy because I was like Well, what if there's another company beyond uber, right? And so, you know, I think rideshare guy was sort of like a little bit lucky that I picked the right niche But you know for a while in 2018 and 19 our most popular content on both the blog and YouTube was actually scooter content when Bird and lime and all these companies were exploding and so I was sort of like oh man everything Everyone thinks of me as the rideshare guy But like our most popular content is all about scooters now and charging scooters and in the last two three years Honestly, we've had a lot. It's probably 50 50 now But like we have a ton of interest in delivery And so, you know people still think of me as the rideshare guy But like half of our revenue and traffic probably comes from you know last mile delivery now So uber eats instacart doordash, you know that those types of topics So I think to me I think about it like hey, I don't want to be an expert in every one of these domains I want people to think of me as the rideshare guy Anything any uber or lift question come to me I'm the guy to talk to but you know, we also dabble we know enough to be dangerous in some other areas like food delivery And even though, you know, I might know quite a bit about food delivery I'm not really trying to like actively market myself as like the food delivery guy if that makes sense

SPEAKER_01
Would you ever consider sort of unbundling the rideshare guy into? Multiple accounts slash businesses. Yeah

SPEAKER_00
So I thought about it when the scooter craze was happening because it was you know, it was still gig work But I mean we were doing YouTube reviews of scooters and posting on the rideshare guy YouTube channel So you have like a video about how to drive uber and then the next video was like a scooter review, right? Pretty random, but our scooter reviews were getting hundreds of thousands of views. So I was like, all right Well, I kind of have to do this and I think what I've learned over the years is you to segment audience You really have to have a big following I think it sounds great in online marketing, you know, if you've got an email provider, they're like, hey You should take your rideshare people. You should take your delivery people You should take your full time who likes videos who like articles and create all these different segments And in order to do that, you have to have like a massive following I would say like in the millions of people in the hundreds of thousands maybe to really start segmenting Like the only segment we do is like rideshare and delivery, right? So we have like two really high level segments and I've experimented with a lot of different others And it's just so much work that goes into like managing those different segments Like if you launch a brand new account unless you've got like unless I had a million subscribers on YouTube I think that it would be really difficult to kind of get those economies of scale from launching a second channel I think you see like Mr.

Beast. He's got his main channel and he's got his philanthropy channel And that works out really well, but he's the biggest and best creator on all of YouTube, right? Like I'm way below Mr. Beast So I think that would be kind of my personal experience and caution Is that it sounds so good on paper or on a PDF or you know when you're taking the online course Like oh segment this and that but in reality it's a lot of work And I don't really recommend it unless you have a huge huge following

SPEAKER_01
Quick interruption from me If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify You're getting any value You need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens Podcast YouTube channel I promise you the experience is richer more interesting So if you're getting any value just stop what you're doing Open up the YouTube app Go to the website and press subscribe at Where It Happens on YouTube And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed What are you doing? Go go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show Could you talk more about the business model of the whole of the whole company? So you've got all these content you know properties and and you know you mentioned courses I'm sure there's ad revenue like how do you how you think about business model And when did you think about this model? I wasn't really expecting to make much money at the start in general with content

SPEAKER_00
I always tell people like do it for a year pick something you like pick something that has a good business opportunity and see what happens But at the end of that year I think you should sort of be happy with the journey and the results and if you made money along the way Great if it exploded into a huge business even better and so that was kind of my initial framework going into the rideshare guy And within about three to six months I did start making some money and that was more off of driver referrals So Uber and Lyft kind of have famously paid thousands of dollars for driver acquisition over the years And now it's kind of come down maybe more normal acquisition prices hundreds of dollars for a driver and so over the years We kind of started off monetizing by mainly driver referrals some affiliate stuff which would be you know a gas app like get upside is one of our top affiliate partners You know they help you save on gas so pretty good fit obviously for Uber and Lyft drivers who put a thousand to two thousand miles a week on their car And so today we have three or four main revenue sources probably the biggest one would be affiliate so that would be you know either signing people up I kind of call it affiliate you know signing people up to drive for Uber Uber eats Instacart doordash and you know really any kind of platform Signing them up to be a driver that kind of falls under affiliate and then we also have other affiliates like you know get upside is a good example because they were sort of VC funded had a lot of money At a certain point and I think they were paying us like five dollars you know acquisition for a free app download for like a perfect product for our audience right and I think at one point We probably did fifty thousand referrals in a single month for them at like the heyday two three years ago when they were spending a lot on marketing and you know kind of we were ranking number one for every code around get upside get upside you know download get upside referral promo code all of that And you know so the affiliate stuff is definitely temperamental and kind of goes up and down and they can pull the plug at any time but affiliate is probably our main one and we also do a lot of direct advertising and so over the past two three years we've done a lot of direct campaigns with you know the platforms themselves

SPEAKER_01
So some companies we might be an affiliate and they're like hey you're doing great as an affiliate let's do some extra work with you on the affiliate side of things what does like an Uber pay for a referral to you know for a driver just to give people a sense of like

SPEAKER_00
You know so probably one to two hundred dollars I mean in the heyday they were paying five hundred to a thousand dollars and that's sort of where like I kind of feel like I had a little bit of a cheat code in the first few years like I shouldn't have been making I ended up quitting my day job within about nine months of starting the ride share Guy and I in a normal situation I probably shouldn't have been able to do that Uber was kind of like a once in a generation kind of company where they were growing so fast and raising so much money that they were just paying literally five hundred to a thousand dollars for driver referrals and they were double sided like the new driver signing up was getting money I was getting a lot of money and so we kind of monetized off of that so these days it's come down quite a bit maybe more in the one to two hundred dollars range for delivery services it might be twenty five to a hundred maybe up to two hundred and some of the top markets but sort of ride share delivery and then you know all of our other affiliates might be more in like the five to fifty dollar range you know if it's a free mileage tracking app you know that might be two to five dollars per download if it's more of a bank account you know that might be more than the fifty to one hundred dollar kind of range

SPEAKER_01
so the point guys an interesting story so point guy started very similar to you I think it was he worked at Brian Kelly he worked as an investment banker yeah investment banker at you know JP Morgan or something like that Morgan Stanley actually and you know he just started blogging about you know points on different credit cards yeah right after the great financial crisis so there was a lot of demand for you know saving money and points and he ended up taking a different path than you did although he did monetize the affiliates like you did but the different path that he took is he sold his business to bank rate in twenty twelve which I think got acquired again in twenty seventeen have you ever thought about ventures right yeah exactly have you ever thought about I'm sure you have but like when is the right time to sell or how are you thinking about it.

SPEAKER_00
Until recently I guess you would say I've always thought about my business as like I probably value it a lot more than someone is willing to pay like hey if Uber came and offered me. I don't know 1020 50 million dollars for it tomorrow I'd probably sell it but I doubt that they value it in the same way that I do right because I put so much time and energy and you know like I also like what I do you know like every like I only work on parts of the business that you know I enjoy and you know I've kind of transitioned and done a lot of different roles and hired people and all of that so like I wake up every Monday morning like pretty refreshed you know I just went on vacation last week and I was pretty excited you know to come back to work and check all my emails right because I knew it would be like kind of fun stuff you know Greg. E-mailing me about coming on the podcast you know fun stuff to do so.

I think like when it comes to selling the business I've never you know it's never been a goal of mine by any stretch but I've definitely over the past two to four years. And really what that means for me personally is you know there's the brand the rides your guy people know me that's how they think of me but if you go and look at our videos our content I've got a number of contributors it's really not me anymore doing the content I'm still you know not even the face I'm still. I'm not involved you know people still know me but I think that like if someone did want to come in and buy the rides your guy tomorrow.

It wouldn't be like they're buying me I think they're buying a brand you know most of the time if we get a media inquiry you know I've been quoted like over 3000 times in the media you know as a rideshare gig economy expert but. And actually like kind of stealing from the points guy I remember I heard this NPR interview once and they're like we're gonna bring in you know senior contributor at the points guy Kelly something you know Kelly whoever and she's gonna talk about points and I was like that's awesome like the points guy is getting mentioned in this NPR. Story and Brian the CEO or you know founder doesn't even have to be on the interview like that is really cool to me and so that's kind of how you know I think I've done a pretty good job of that over the past few years and I actually ended up bringing on a business partner earlier this year.

They're called MMG media they've bought and sold a bunch of properties and they've exited businesses and their five person team that I've been really enjoying working with and really it's to kind of take have them take over a lot of the back end I think the things that would be even more attractive to a potential acquire like they're gonna care a lot more about affiliate revenue then upfront sponsored you know like advertising deals right so this is the first time I've heard about MMG media and they look awesome.

SPEAKER_01
I'm just on the website on their website it says we are obsessed with building notable brands that meet people where they are in their financial journey. They basically have three services they either number one they build or buy number two they scale number three they sell so sell meaning they've got strong relationships with the network of buyers. Scaling is basically I think similar in your boat where we grow revenue and traffic with a heavy emphasis on SEO and affiliate partnerships and then the build and buy and they've got a portfolio looks like bank bonus dot com.

Millennial money financial residency and of course the ride chair guy can you talk us through your like your relationship with them and what they handle and how it's yeah.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah definitely so grant the CEO I've known for a while since I sort of got my bearings in the personal finance world and you can sort of tell from the sites they listed off they've got you know they've been kind of more focused on the finance side of things and they've got a lot of experience and are good at some of the things that. I'm not good at and so I sort of feel like it was like kind of fitting two good pieces of a puzzle and so at a high level that's kind of what interested me in the first place in working with them and. I mean we've got an official partnership agreement and all that and they're kind of my official business partners but I will say that you know kind of like integrating a business like mine that's been doing something you know in all our different ways for 10 years almost is like.

You know it's there's a lot of moving pieces right and so basically we're kind of at the stage where they're really focused on the website and SEO and we've kind of actually completely redesigned the site back in architecture redone hundreds if not probably close to 2000 pages on the website and optimized for SEO you know we're starting I'm about to record a bunch of you know like really high quality videos with a videographer for our top seven SEO affiliate type pages or really just trying to at this point to like build up the traffic you know it was kind of like hey we've got this ship and now we're kind of writing it in the correct direction not that we were doing a bad job before but you know if you look at like how much money can you make driving for DoorDash that's probably like a top keyword for DoorDash affiliates and there's a lot of sites with lower domain authority less credibility than us outranking because the SEO side of things has never been my area of expertise focus or something that frankly I even enjoyed and so it's sort of like hey I knew we were always leaving some money on the table but you know I like working on things that I enjoy and that I'm good at they're basically like a 5050 partner I guess you would say and so they have a lot of upside in the business if we do really well if we exit whatever it might be and so that's kind of you know what they're handling for me I feel like this is a model that's going to happen a ton in a bunch of other niches so what I really like about the deal that I set up with Grant and his team is that I'm really I'm paying them nothing up front like they are really putting their money where their mouth is and they have a lot of upside but it if you know things don't work out they're not going to make any money and so it's sort of like combining right like I think a good example like I do a lot of stuff with the media and I usually kind of like work horse it myself and you know like work with the startups and companies like get them featured or whatever it might be and there's a million PR services out there you can hire for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and none of them will guarantee anything right so it's like you could pay someone a lot of money with no guarantee of results and to me like that's like a space where there are definitely some good people but I feel like a majority are just going to you know kind of like talk a big game and it'll sound really good and you'll end up wasting your money and I think in the deal that I set up with them with MMG media they have a lot of upside you know sort of like they've got that social proof but then they're putting their money where their mouth is and to me I think the biggest you know reason why it's a good fit is because like what they bring to the table and what I bring to the table are two really good skills but different I'm good on the content and creative and relationship and marketing and they're kind of good on like the more boring stuff like you can't hire the best SEO person in the world for $100,000 a year you probably can't hire them for a million dollars a year to be perfectly honest like you almost have to get the best people you know incentivized upside equity you know that kind of partnership but it can be really you know complex and you know you're doing a deal where you know you kind of connect on a personal level and you know like you should almost like agree on a handshake basis and then you obviously have to like legalize it all up but you know it's like you kind of almost have to like agree on like bigger picture level you know before you go into anything

SPEAKER_01
I recall earlier this morning with a entrepreneur who has a partnership opportunity on the table he's got you know a pretty good business and he doesn't know if he should bring them on as equity partners and he's got this big fear that well what if you know what they say they're going to do is not exactly what they're going to do and what advice do you have to someone like that

SPEAKER_00
I mean I think that that is a very reasonable fear I feel like most partnerships don't work out to be perfectly honest you know like whether it's like a personal relationship or a business partnership like business I mean literally you know anytime you bring two people together right or two groups together it's like tough I feel like there was like 10 different things that happened in my life in order to get me to say yes to this partnership with MMG media you know the first thing would be like hey I've done a good job building something up on my own but I think to get it to that next level I've tried and I haven't quite you know been able to do it on my own hiring the people that you know I've been hiring number two I've done a lot of business partnerships you know sort of like starting my first course that I started like eight nine years ago you know we started off with another guy and it ended up like after two three years we sort of broke up and it was somewhat amicable and I think I kind of paid him out of the business but you know it was like I don't think we had an actual agreement for that like my Kerber for conference co-founder we usually at the end of every year we like decide how we want to divvy up the money you know what I mean it's like not the best way of doing it and then you know maybe third or fourth like I've seen MMG in action right like again with that PR example like there are one or two PR firms that I actually recommend to start ups because I've seen them work with companies of mine it's like yeah they'll charge $10,000 or $7,000 a month but I think I've seen them you know with a good company and with a good pitch get great write ups and do good work so it's like they've got that social proof and then you know with the MMG it's like alright now they're putting where the deal we structure they have a lot of upside but they're putting their money where their mouth is they're not taking anything up front so I think like I would kind of look at it like combining two, three, four, five, six things anytime you're looking to bring someone on as a partner like it can't just be one thing that sounds good it sort of has to be like wow there's a multitude of factors that all lead me to saying yes and then I think the other thing too is like my business is quite different than you know like a bootstrap you know I would call my business bootstrap I've never raised money or anything like that you know a bootstrap type of business I think like giving up equity is a lot different than you know I think I'm sure taking on like a 50-50 partnership as like a VC funded startup is like crazy but in bootstrap world you know it's like completely different I think you know different situations so I think that's the other sort of caveat

SPEAKER_01
the advice I gave to this entrepreneur was create a timeline of all the interactions that you've had with this potential partner just like get a piece of paper write down all the interactions that you've had okay how many years has it been one, two, five, ten okay how did they make you feel when they did this did they under promise and over deliver did they say they were going to do this thing and it didn't happen and just all the things that you can possibly remember just like write it on a timeline and most importantly write the outcome of how you felt in that moment because if you're getting into business with someone like you want to have fun and you want to smile and you want to have a good time too so you want to you know you want to basically have records of how you're feeling about all these situations and I asked this guy and he to come back with me with this timeline and he texted me actually today and he said like you know what there's been a few interactions with this person yeah that have been pretty negative but they are the best they are the best and insert social proof here and I was just like it's not worth it so it's not worth partnering with someone where you're going to have you know 10-20% negative outcomes yeah because it's very hard to undo these relationships

SPEAKER_00
yeah yeah I like that framework and I think that you know I haven't thought about it too much was kind of fun that you're asking me about this but I imagine that like if everything isn't aligned like I feel like most often in business partnerships things like diverge then get better you know what I mean like you almost have to be like 1000% on the same page because you're gonna it's gonna be tough you're gonna have some ups and downs and people's personal lives or situations change and that adds you know a wrench like oh I can't spend as much time because I have a kid now or I moved or whatever right so it's like it can only add more to the mix so if you're not like super aligned I mean even one thing I considered in working with Grant and MMG it'll be funny if he listens to this interview is like I liked him as a person I would much rather work with people that I like hanging out with and I know this sounds a little bit weird but like it's really hard for me to be friends with people that I work with if they're not good at their job like if they don't excel at their job like I can't shoot the shit on the phone with them and I'm like hey how was your week I'm like no let's not talk about your weekend like why isn't this done what's going on you know like my first priority is business and working together and if we can crush it on that then like let's go have some fun together let's hang out let's talk you know let's vacation together whatever it might be

SPEAKER_01
last question because I got to run if you were to summarize a decade of your knowledge and building content base niche businesses what comes top of mind what is what is the most powerful advice you can give to people who are interested in becoming the future ride chair guy of their own spaces

SPEAKER_00
pick something that you're interested in pick something that has some or a lot of business opportunity and you know I think it feels good to help people so you know if you're you know can find find something that's you know more helpful to you know drivers making $15 to $20 an hour I think you'll get more personal satisfaction out of that then helping you know hedge fund guys so you know if you can kind of gravitate towards that and then on the actual sort of tactical side I think content and working online I am such a huge proponent of it because the amount of work that goes into one piece of content and the potential reach is infinite right I mean you can literally put out a blog post or a video that reaches five people ten people a hundred people or 100 million people and obviously the higher you go up in that stack you know it's a little bit it's a lot tougher to reach 100 million than five or ten people but I mean our most popular video on YouTube has five million views and it's all about truck driving super random but you know it's like you can kind of do that I love the kind of short form platforms right now are investing a lot in short form content, tick tock YouTube shorts Instagram reels because discoverability is so high you know you put something out there and it can go viral a lot easier I would almost say it's impossible not impossible but it's very difficult for a blog post you know on a brand new site to go viral relative to a lot of the short form video platforms are out there since they're more you know kind of algorithmic discovery based now so I think kind of leaning into video and you know really just kind of creating consistent content for a long period of time like be a cockroach never die that's why I say if you pick a topic that you love and you just like doing you know one podcast a week for ten years like good opportunity I guarantee you know if you do one podcast a week for ten years good opportunities are going to come your way and that might be more of the extreme but you know I always say like one year you know one year when it comes to content try to be consistent for one year

SPEAKER_01
don't even worry about monetizing for the first year if something falls in your lap great but you know I like that kind of one year threshold be a cockroach alright where could people find you on the internet and thank you for letting us crawl inside your brain for an hour.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah no that was fun I think you asked some good challenging and new questions I haven't done an interview like this in quite a while so it's fun I would say if they're interested in anything rideshare gig economy just type it into a box on the internet and we should pop up and if not let me know if there's some box that we're not popping up on I'll take that as a personal challenge but we've got the rideshare guy dot com our YouTube channel the rideshare guy is growing pretty quickly I kind of share my personal you know sort of thoughts on the rideshare and gig economy industries on my weekly podcast the rideshare guy and then on the content side sort of the I'm probably most active on Twitter at the rideshare guy and then I've got my new podcast it's more focused on investor investing in startups and things like that called one of the angels and we're doing a weekly live show there that's it's a new show but getting a lot of traction and been a lot of fun so far.

SPEAKER_01
There you have it the rideshare guy awesome love it thank you.