My First Million - #166 - Why a Sudoku Company Sold for $640m, "Opendoor for X" & Franchising Tech Companies

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: refer.fm/million --------- --------- Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP): (1:42) Chess.com is huge, what're other similar opportunities? (9:23) Misspelled domain opportunities (13:40) Sam's angel investing update (18:55) Brainstorming "Opendoor for X" (32:03) Franchising but for tech companies --------- --------- Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

The very bottom, it says, this domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry. Last updated, July 2007. Right. So I emailed this guy and I was like, hey, saw your website. Like, I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this.

But I'm curious. Like, why aren't you trying to sell this? And he's like, refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious. What? What is this? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Let's talk about business ideas. First of all, let me give you an update. Did you see someone in the Facebook group launched a pickleball newsletter because we told them to a few months ago? Because we told them to. It's now their full-time job.

And they traveled the country, getting their products into stores and things like that. So it started as a pickleball news. newsletter. Right. And then they partnered with the pro tour of Pickleball, which I didn't know. I was a thing. And then they started selling their own stuff out of a van, their own pickupball equipment. And now they're in retail stores.

Good for them. What's their name? Give a shout out. Thomas Shields. Good job, Thomas. Thomas looks like a young kid. He looks like a younger, better looking version of me. Let's see.

I can't. Yeah, he looks young. He looks real young. So congratulations, Thomas Shield. That's great. I think the CEO or the founder of pickleball. either listens to the pot or he messaged once being like, yeah, I'm down to come on.

So we can have them on if you ever want to. We can do an episode about kind of like alternative sports, basically and do some research and have them on as well. Great. And speaking of alternative sports, do you want to talk about chess? Yeah, so I have a follow-up there. I don't know if you have one or just what I put there.

Go ahead. What were you going to say? So we talked about the background is we talked about chess.com last episode. I tweeted about it because I was even more interested in it. People loved that tweet. That tweet had tons of engagement. It was good. And the summary of this is that I actually, we underestimated it.

So chess.com gets around 200 million monthly uniques. They have 60 million registered users. Traffic has grown significantly. If I had a guess, they do at least 100 million in recurring revenue, subscription revenue. Potentially is worth a billion dollars. Super fascinating company. Go ahead. So we were trying to hype it and we actually were under-hyping, even though we were

trying to hype it. And by the way, the guy who started is like an ex-Stanford guy or the guy who owns it. There's two, I think, Stanford guys, which is cool. Like, you know, they didn't go the same track probably as 95% of their classmates and they're going to outperform 99% of them just by doing something really simple that the world wanted. So I started thinking about this because we talked about it. You brought it up. Cool topic, cool bit, really cool business. It really fits the, what we call the New Zealand type of business that Andrew Wilkinson kind of coined that.

phrase, which is, it's this independent thing. It has like a cult following. It's profitable. It's simple. Nobody competes with it. It's like New Zealand. Nobody's going to war with chess.com. You know, the biggest competitor, I think it's called lie chess or something like that. It's basically like an open source free, you know, like kind of like alternative. And it's also doing extremely well. Those are like the two. But it seems like people kind of prefer chess.com. So I started thinking, okay, what's the nextchest.com? What are the others? Is there a whole slew of these guys because I think that's where we didn't talk about last time that we should have. And so I wanted to double click in a little bit.

And that's a really, really hard question. I've been thinking about it too. I only came up with like dominoes. I looked into Solitaire websites. A lot of them crush. But yeah, that's a hard question to ask. So I still think he spent 10, 15 minutes on it, but that was enough to tell me something very interesting. So the first one that came to mind was because here's the characteristics that you need.

You need a game played by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people that is not owned by a brand. Chessf works. Checkers also works, but the problem with checkers is it's so simple that it's not as like, there's not as much depth to it, therefore, not as much of a like, kind of like money-made and passion around the sport. Sudoku was the second one that came to wine. So I went to Sudoku.com and Sudoku.com, it's little just like chess.com. It's like, you go to sonoku.com and there's already a Sudoku board waiting for you with clock going. And it's like, oh, play, here it is. You don't need to download. You don't need to sign up. You don't don't need to do anything.

Just play Sudoku. I love that. Then you scroll down a little bit and you see like this advertisement for like a mobile app, a mobile Sudoku app. So I click that. I'm like, I bet this app, I bet this is an amazing distribution for this app.

App crushes. So this company called Easy Brain behind it. So the Sudoku app that they have has 50 million downloads. The, on just Google Play. Forget about iPhone. That's just Android. It's probably 100 million total lifetime downloads.

The website itself, gets, you know, 10 to 20 million visitors a month. So they're getting free, basically free traffic to their mobile apps where they're able to monetize. And EasyBrain basically makes, they're like a mobile app developer that makes these apps. They've had over 750 million downloads lifetime of these little simple number game apps, starting with Sudoku, then like a remix of Sudoku, then like another number game, if you like that one.

And they just cross promote them within each other. I bet this company is crushing it. They're based in Europe. It looks like. I have information on them. I just found some interesting. stuff. When I googled them and went to the website, there was something amazing about them that immediately stuck out. And just this quick Google, I'm wrong. But it is based in Cyprus.

Anytime a company is based in Cyprus, it turns out these guys actually are from like the Belarus. They're actually from this area. But they're based in Cyprus. So I just Googled it real quick. So do you know that it was, they were acquired three months ago? No, I did not know this. So that's the other piece. I have their revenues. I have their profit and I have the, all their user numbers and I have. Can I guess? And I'm going to be totally wrong, but I like to guess. By the way, little tip. Always guess before you hear any number. That's how you get good at knowing numbers because you guess and then when you're wrong, your brain remembers that shit. And you start to hone that gun instinct. Okay. So here's, here's, here's my.

I guess it. Okay, well, how much were they? What's their revenue? I'm going to guess that their revenue was $400 million a year. Okay. What's their profit? $90 million a year. Pretty good.

All right. How much were they required for? I'm going to guess that they're required for $852 million. Okay. And how many, how many daily active users do they have across their 15 games. I'm going to say they have 25 million DAU.

Okay, so you didn't do horrible. Okay, so Easy Brain was acquired last, this most recent February. They were acquired for $640 million in stock and up to $125 million of additional consideration if they hit it. So 640. Yeah, what is that?

Isn't that exactly 850? No, what's six, What, 640 plus 100 is 740 plus 25 is 765. So great job. You guessed 850. Great job. You're almost there. Their revenue is in 2020 revenues were $210 million.

Okay. So you were off there by half. You guessed $400 million. But their profit was $70 million. You guessed $90. Pretty good. They've had 750 installs over the course of the lifetime of all their, all their things, all their games.

They have 15 live games with 12 million daily active users. You guessed 25 million. Okay. Not bad. Not bad. What a company. So, okay, so that was the first one I thought of. And by the way, I think that there's other versions of that.

Like, you know, I don't know, go look at like, you know, Sidokuonline.com. I don't know. What's that? Like, you know, all the things people are going to Google search. If you can get the top level domain for those, that's really interesting. So then I started looking at some others. poker.com. So I went to poker.com and poker.com is like,

kind of like this crappy, like, just describe what you're looking at when you go to it. Let me look at this. But you can't, this is an actual poker, right? You're not betting. It's not even a, as you can't play there.

It's just like reviews. It's like an affiliate site. So it's like, oh, here's a place to play poker. Here's where you can go, because they get big kickbacks for basically sending a player to poker sars or wherever if they deposit.

And so, it's horrible. A horrible website. Crappy kind of like affiliate and reviews site. Dude, you could do so much more with this website. Like if somebody was like, dude, I'm going to, I have a, if you have a mobile poker app that's like good, I would pay like ungodly amounts of money for poker.com. I think that that's a. And they also, if you like do their traffic search, see what they get.

It's nothing. So they should be getting a lot more traffic having poker.com. Okay. So then there's some other ones. Crossword puzzle. dot com. Crossword.com. Go to those. Like, they don't even, like, crossword.com or something doesn't even like

render. It's like a, there's like five asterisk on the screen. Yeah, like what's going on here? Because crossword is the other game that's like Sudoku. It's like chess that people played religiously and they love. We talked about how much the New York Times makes off their mini crossword game. I think the guess, the number was

$90 million dollars in subscription revenue from crossword puzzles for the New York Times. So I am surprised at Crossword Puzzle, CrosswoodPuzzle.com, I can't believe that these sites are not being leveraged. So I was very surprised to see this. And yeah, that was my follow up from this. So you go to Crosswood Puzzle.com.

It says, please email suggestions to DKW999 at Yahoo.com. Right. So I emailed the guy. So you see this, the website is basically like a white page with a bunch of text. And it's basically just linked to crossword things. the very bottom it says this don't know this domain is not for sale please do not inquire about purchasing it all emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored sorry last updated July 2007 right so I emailed this guy and I was like hey saw your website um

like I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this but I'm curious like why aren't you trying to sell this and what's your you know what do you want this to be why do you believe like why do you believe that it should be done this way you know I'm just super curious, like, what's your thought process? So we'll see if he replies. There's another website that's like this. And, Bray, see if you could find the name of this. I don't remember call the top head, but Sam, you might know this.

There is a website that's like, it's like a misspelling of Google.com or gmail. com. I think it might be gnail. com or something like that. And it's the same thing. It's an all white web page that's like, yeah, Frank and Susan, you know, we were married in 1977 and like, oh, blah, blah. No, if we're not going to put ads on the site.

No, we did not. We owned this before. Gmail came out. It's like they basically just have this web page that gets like, and they have a counter of how much traffic they get. And they just show that they're getting like hundreds of thousands of hits a day. And like, he's like refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious.

What? What is this? Brady, do you find it? I'll find it after the pod. Otherwise, I have this in my like things to tweet about, you know, full. That's actually such a funny idea. So like if we just looked at the most visited website and find out what the typos are for

each one and go and look at what those are. So like if you go to goggle.com, so G-O-G-L-E, Google owns it. So it redirects to Google. Most of the time the company owns like their plurals and their misspells, but sometimes they don't. And then those are hilarious. Oh my gosh. I just, uh, I was looking at Bing.

I changed it to bang. Don't go there. Found something else. Yeah. Don't go there. Um, what else is there? That's like a, what's a like a, like a YouTube spelled wrong? Like you can do like Facebook, uh, but you could do like,

I don't know, like you lose the A or something like that. I don't know, see what that is. God, that's so interesting. That's actually an interesting thing. Facebook owns Facebook with 1-0. Pretty interesting. That's actually an interesting thing. I'm going to research that after this.

I don't know if you know the guy who owns Bitcoin.com. So this is a guy Roger van derr or whatever. I don't know what his name is, but he's like kind of hated in the Bitcoin community by like 80% of the people because he tried to create his own, fork of Bitcoin. So they forked Bitcoin. I think it's Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, BSV. I forgot which one he's associated with. I think is Bitcoin Cash. Basically, he created, you know, they forked Bitcoin and they have their own, but this guy owns Bitcoin.com. And, uh, and so he's like a billionaire guy from Bitcoin and like he refuses to give up

Bitcoin. But it's like, it's like points to the other version of, the not popular version of Bitcoin. You know, it's like the fifth of Jonas brother who's not in the band or whatever. It's basically like, it's kind of a waste. And nobody can sue them because there's no company behind Bitcoin and nobody owns the trademark. Oh, that's a pain in the ass. I hate that. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Let's talk about, which one you want to go through?

We have a bunch on the agenda here. Okay, does this interest you? Well, first of all, I want to tell you about a company I just invested in. And I want you to criticize it or tell me if it's awesome. Oh, you actually read it. Okay, so I'm doing, we just did a podcast. a second ago, and Sean talked about angel investing. I've been doing a little bit of angel investing now.

And my whole thing is I'm doing this thing called a syndicate. I almost did a rolling fund like you, but I didn't really want like a full-time job. So I was like, I'll just do this. So it's deal by deal. Or not a full-time job, but whatever it is for you. Right. And my premise is this. And you confirmed it a little bit by your reaction.

What I'm trying to do is find interesting deals that other angel investors who I think are smarter than me or other like firms who are smarter than me are also investing in. But I try to find them where they're explaining the company really poorly. And I'm spending time with the founder listening to them. And then I'm rewriting a memo about the company. And I'm sending it to people to invest in. And it's kind of working. So I sent you one deck.

And it was really bad. It was confusing. And then I just rewrote it. And you're like, oh, I want to invest in this company maybe. And it worked. I was kind of gushing. I was like, dude, did they write this memo? Like, who wrote this memo?

I was like, this is the best investment memo I've ever read. You were like, dude, shut out. I just wrote this in 20 minutes. I was like, no, no, no, trust me, I read a lot of these things. And I was like, the memo was so good that I had to separate the writing, which was really entertaining and persuasive and likable from the business. Because I was like, dude, I don't want to just like convince myself this is a good business. I want it to be a good business.

I love pictures where the founder can just barely explain what the hell they're doing. But then I'm like, oh, that makes total sense. And I'm like, yes, that's like you get it. You're not like a salesman. so I'm not going to invest in this like hand wavy shit. It's like, no, it's real and it's working. And you're explaining it in kind of this nonchalant way, but it's actually super legit.

You just don't like get really excited and animated and you don't have great words to describe it yet. And actually I can help you with that. It sounds like you're thinking about the same thing. I'm actually thinking I'm going to simplify my thing, which is like just helping them with their landing page and their communication because almost every company invest in their landing page kind of sucks.

And landing page is really hard to make, but they need a lot of help. And it's like something that not every other investor is offering to do for them. And they actually are not that good at doing it. And so anyways, as I got off topic, but your memo was really great. I actually want to like publish it in some way without like, I don't know what you can do,

but like I feel like that should be public. I want to point to that and be like, this is great writing. Here's why. You can go to, you can if you like go to Angelus Hampton VC and you can invest if you want to do. Or you can even just say you're going to invest and then like look at it. And then once it's done,

you can publish it or I'll publish it. But this company, it's lobby.com, L-O-B-B-B-I-E dot com. It's so funny because he actually did something really good. Basically, and this kind of sounds like simple and negative, but it's a cool company. I've invested in it. It's basically software that helps doctors schedule appointments or patients schedule appointments with doctors in just a good way.

And it's kind of like an archaic space. But he was like, we're making the lobby. digital. And like, and I, that's so much better than creating, than say we are creating software. That's just a CRM for a doctor's office. And I'm like, they're like, no, we're making the lobby room, the lobby digital. We're going to save people so much time. And so basically the software, what it does is, you can, you can schedule an appointment online and they'll alert you if the doctor's running late. And when you get in the parking lot, you can tell them. So you just wait your car. And they'll tell you when it

come in. Yada, yada, yada. I mean, it's like, the interesting thing about it is the guy has already started and sold the company in the space, and it's at worst going to be okay. At best, might be big. Right. Anyway, I just thought it was so interesting how it was digitizing the lobby or the waiting room of healthcare. And I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's so cool how they repositioned that to make something that isn't that cool sound kind of neat. Right. Yeah, you know, that's a skill. That's like a superpower in and of itself. I don't have a ton of thoughts on the business itself, so I don't have too much to add there, but I agree with you. Basically, the most interesting part of talking about lobby was your memo was so damn good,

and I think we should show it to people so that they can see how do you make a business seem really juicy to be a part of, to invest in, because I think you did a good job of that. Well, that's what, and that's what we're going to do. So I'm doing it with Joe, and you and I will probably do a bunch together, I hope, where I'll invest in yours and you mine. And the whole thing is I'm not trying to sell people. I'm not trying to sell people. I'm not trying to convince people to do it. You either want to do it or you don't. I'm not going to try and convince you to do it because that's kind of unethical. But I just want to paint the business in the most positive light or at least what I believe it to be accurate. Like an accurate, it is cool and I want

to make sure you know it's cool. And I think that this whole copywriting thing for angel investing might end up being a hit. Yeah. I think it'll be easy for you to get people into your round because people like you and the memos are good. So I think those will be, those will be good. I have a company I wanted to tell you about. That's a cool company that I think you're going to have a good opinion on. So have you seen what Keith Rubei is doing as his new startup? No.

So you know who he is? Yeah. So he's the guy who, he was like ex-Paypal, then he was the CEO of Square. He's kind of a known investor at Founders Fund. Then he started over- He's a known asshole. Like people think that he's a- Total asshole on Twitter.

Super hilarious to follow because he's just absolute jerk to people. You know, his number one tweet is just like wrong the period. And he won't tell you why. He won't argue back. He just calls you an idiot. And then if you like try to argue, he's like, this is why I was more successful at the age of 27 than you are at 40. And he just like rips people like that.

And like, who does that? That's nobody does that. So I think that's just like really crazy and entertaining to me. But anyways, he's doing it. So he did Open Door. And what Open Door is now is like a publicly listed company because it did us back. And Open Door is a multi-billion dollar company. And basically it was like selling your house is a time-consuming and stressful process.

What if like the day you want to sell, you could just sell your house right away. Give you a price. You say yes or no. And that's what Open Door did. So they basically would just buy your house. And then they had a lot of data to know how much to buy your house for. And then they were the brokers. They could keep the broker fee for themselves, buying and selling.

And then they would sell it within like 90 days, hopefully. And they do this in a whole bunch of markets like Arizona and stuff like that. And so they've done very well, you know, kind of like on paper. And like Zillow now like does the same thing to try to compete with them. They kind of changed the way that the business model of these big real estate companies worked. Where now like the money to be made is in basically like auto buying your house and then reselling it for you and using a bunch of technology to do that. Anyways, his new company, he's starting with with Jack Abraham is called OpenStore. And so you have Open Door and now you have Open Store.

They haven't released a bunch of details, but I think I know what it is, which is it is Open Door for buying businesses. So it's the same idea for buying. I think it's going to be specialized in online businesses, but maybe not. Where basically you just say, here's my business. And then they say, here's your offer. We'll buy it off you. And so I don't know if this is going to be specialized like e-commerce roll-ups, like a

thraccio. I don't know if it's going to be online and offline. Like, where did you learn about this? And what can I go? Is there a website yet? They announced it. So I heard about it a few weeks ago, like six weeks ago maybe. And I was like, oh, that's super interesting.

How did you hear about this? So somebody told me about it because their friend interviewed at the company. And so it's like the only way you can know about it. Because like when you interview, they kind of tell you the premise of the company. And that guy was like, oh, dude, you know, he's always doing a new thing. It's basically open door for bit by businesses. And I was like, oh, that's sick. that's a great idea because selling your business is also just like

is even more than buying a home in terms of time consuming, stressful, uncertain on what price you're going to get, uncertain what price it even should be. And the marketplace is to do that online, like buy biz sell or whatever that website is, like dot com. Buy biz sell. They're so like old school on how they do that. And so I think there's like room for improvement there.

So I found that to be really interesting. Let me bring this up real quick, which is it's so crazy how often Internet marketers who often are accused of being sleazy, and many of them are. I mean, they're accused of being that because they are. But they're often ahead of the game. So, for example, email marketing, email newsletters are all the rage right now. Scammy guys, like, I don't think this guy's actually scammy, but David D'Angelo. He used to sell dating books in the 1990s by having these long emails.

I just stole and copied from him. The other thing is paid memberships. Paid memberships have been a thing for decades. Now, guys like Greg, your friend, our friend, Greg, is doing a paid community thing. And Greg's like a cool guy. And so it's like cool to do it. And there's so many more. And this is another one.

Buying and selling businesses online has been a thing that internet marketers, so for example, Flippa where you can buy affiliate websites, that's been a thing for years. Empire Flippers is another one. Empire Builders, yeah. Empire Builders. And if you go, Empire Flippers or Empire Builders, I think those are actually two different things. But if you go to those websites,

a lot of people are going to be immediately turned off. You're going to think, what the fuck is this? And fucking startup guys like us, we just come in. I guess that's what we are. We just come in and we take this stuff that these guys have been doing for years. Lipstick. Put some lipstick on it. One, 2.0, making a flat, beautiful color.

It's so funny. Because, like, cool, this sounds neat. But this isn't unique. Right. Yeah. I think, you know, there's no unique ideas, really. There's remixes of ideas, there's old ideas that you make new. There's new platforms.

But I think it's cool. And I think it could be big. It's one I'm going to keep my eye on. Then I saw another business like this. So I started to put together a little bit of a pattern here. And I said, oh, what is open door for X? So what other parts of life and the world could use instant liquidity? Because that's what this is.

It's basically taking something that was kind of illiquid, like your house. and it takes a lot of time to get liquid where you actually sell the thing and takes a lot of, you know, you got to move out, you got to stage it, you got to repaint it, you got to get a broker, you got to list it, you got to do tours. No, instant liquidity. We buy your house today. Don't do any of that shit. Same thing with buying your business.

What else needs that? And then I saw another one. And this business is called, I kind of grab the name, but it's basically doing this for used electronics. It's called Backflip. Just got funded. And Backflip is basically saying, We'll instantly buy any of your used electronics. And because there's not a new thing either.

And I think it's awesome. And so it's not that it's new. It's basically that there is a big swing being taken by people who are going to try to do this at scale using like the modern kind of internet marketing and models to do it. And so like, you know, like we buy gold or whatever. What else is those billboards? You know, like gift cards. Yeah, exactly. And there's like a gift card.

There's actually a gift card startup that's crushes. that basically took the old bottle and just as it knew. What's it called? Raze, I think. Yeah, I'm on their website right now. I'm looking at Rays.com. Holy shit. I can look at the traffic and just tell you these guys are printing money.

Yeah, raise is going to be like a billion dollar plus win. And nobody even hears about this company. Nobody talks about this company. But, you know, super simple business of like, you know, the gift card business, resale of gift cards, essentially. And so anyways, I'm interested in this open door for X, which is basically instant liquidity for things that were pretty illiquidual. That's interesting.

All right, let's play off that. So houses, okay, there's Equity Zen, which I think is badass. So Equity Zen lets you- But also Equities in kind of looks more like Flippa than it does like Open Door, meaning like it's kind of hard to get in. It's kind of obtuse. You've got to like sign up to see shit. Not everything is there.

It's like a 10-step process to do an investment. It's like Equity Zend is not like, it's not Robin Hood on my phone where I can just like, do my thing. And so like secondary shares, yeah, it's like a shitty name. Like, I don't know. Like, it's just bad all around. And Forge Global is the other one.

It's like also bad. I don't know. I feel like somebody should do this better. Carter is trying to, Carda X is trying to do this better right now, which is like secondary shares of private companies. Yeah, I'm not a fan of Carter, but I could see them doing well.

But I'm not a fan of Carda, so I don't know if I want them to be the best at this. Angelus is also trying to do it. There's a bunch of people trying to do this. second trying to do open door trying to do what they're trying to do is a little bit different they're just still trying to do the marketplace what open door did was different it wasn't like open door wasn't just another housing marketplace it was i will buy the thing off you right now because i know what i can sell it for um and i'll i'm comfortable with this 5% spread that i will i will keep so

you give up 5% of your upside but you get the certainty of it being done now and um i'm comfortable in that 5% spread so somebody would need to do this for secondary shares where they just go you want to sell your your your company stock done. And then I will figure out how to reflip this thing on the other side with my own spread. So there's a few people that have done this with furniture. And furniture is really hard because furniture doesn't ship well. Yeah. But there is if you, I don't know if you know it. I mean, I like buying used furniture because you can get like $10,000 couches for like three grand. And oftentimes they're really nice. Use furniture is not really a thing on the internet, or at least it's not

hugely popular. But I think there is still an interesting way you can do this. this with used furniture. Right. So I think training cards is one. So I know a lot of people that have sports cards. They collected as a kid. It's in their attic somewhere. It's in a box.

They kind of heard, oh, cards are worth something, but they don't know what they have. They don't know what it's worth. They don't have them graded. They didn't send them into PSA and pay the money to get them graded. So I think if somebody basically did the shoebox model

where you basically say, put it all in a shoebox and mail it to us, and we'll pay you for it. We'll do all the work of figuring out what it's worth, and then we'll pay you, you know, 70 cents on the dollar. for what it's worth. And like today, you're getting nothing for it.

And like that that's the, and if you don't like our offer, we'll send it back. And I think that if somebody do that, they could just hoover up all the long tail of like trading cards that are out there that people are not doing anything with that they want to monetize. That's interesting. Okay, so we've, we've, furniture is not that good. Trading cards are pretty interesting because it's a lot of easier. Cars, everyone, a lot of people do cars. Carvana does cars.

that that is so sick. They're a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. Is that the same model they use where they'll instantly buy your car off you? Yeah. Like they'll buy it in a matter of minutes, which if you told me this like years ago, I'd be like, no way. That can't be done. But they made $5.6 billion last year in sales. So it works. Okay. So it's working. Open door for cars. It's working. Yeah. Yeah. Totally works. What else is interesting? What's a huge thing? Like, what are some of the bigger assets that you possibly have in your life that you want to, wow, Carvana's market cap is $45 billion. Holy shit. Yeah, it's working.

What else is there? I don't know. There's going to be some obscure shit like, oh, like life insurance policy payouts or something like, you know, like something like that. That I'm like, I don't even know that space, but that makes sense. It takes, you know, it's something that you get, or like social security. Like, I know, like, my parents are getting to the age where they can collect social security.

Like, would they take a lump sum of all their social security now, you know, at 70 cents or 72 cents on the dollar? And then, you know, this company just collects the payments overtire. I'm like probably I don't know like there's a lot of people who would make that trade dude did you know this so there's this a company I have to go and look at what it is but you guys can probably Google it actually but I think some banks do it like Goldman will do it but if you have a winning lottery ticket they'll buy it off you right and they'll give you the money up front and it's structured in such a way where they're still able to make their profit but they'll buy lottery tickets from you like we're talking like 10 million dollar lottery tickets or seven figure uh I, it's kind of interesting. People buy winning lottery tickets off of people. That's actually kind of an interesting one. I would actually need to do some research.

How many people do you, how much money do you think is won in the lottery per year? Oh, dude, I have no idea. I mean, I feel like the weekly lottery, the Powerball, every week is like, you know, between $50 and like $200 million. It's like, that's like, on a weekly basis that it's, now it doesn't get won every week. That's how it accrues and that's how it gets bigger.

But like, you know, I don't know. Do you have the number? in front of you? I'm looking at it. I don't know. No, I I can't find it. There's 1,600 lotteries created each year. So there's at least 1,600 unique winners.

No, I don't. I don't have the numbers. But lottery tickets might actually be kind of interesting because you said the life insurance. I'm like, what do you wait to get paid for that you would take a discounted upfront payment? Lotteries is actually kind of interesting. And I do know that some banks actually

do that. Right. You know who else does that is Whitey Bulger. You remember Whitey Bulger? I've never even heard those words in my life. Do you know the movie The Departed? Yes. You know Jack Nicholas's character? Okay.

Yes. It's modeled after Whitey Bulger. He was a gangster in Boston. He was an Italian or an Irish mafia guy. He or a mobster guy. He ended up going to jail recently. They found him and they, he got beaten the death in jail. So it was like a crazy ending to this story.

of him. He was America's most wanted man for like 20 years. And anyway, he, as part of his story, he won the lottery three times. And the way that he did it is people who had won the lottery in the neighborhood, they would have to go to him and he would buy it from you and he would go and cash the ticket. And so this is like a famous, like the numbers game they call it. That's like a famous mafia thing. Wow. Okay, I had no idea. Yes, I don't know.

Maybe if people have good ideas on what part of life could use instant liquidity, I'm curious to see what that would be. Okay, so a couple of other things I wanted to bring up. One is a pain point or kind of a business opportunity. Maybe this exists. If it exists, tell me, because I want to use this service. So in e-commerce, most e-commerce brands are just local in their own geography. So most are, let's say, most U.S.

E-Commerce brands basically just sell in the U.S. And then it takes time and then you start selling in Canada, and then you start selling in Europe and then, you know, but it takes a long time. and the reason it takes a long time is because of the international logistics. So for example, you want to ship something to Canada, they have to pay like a pretty heavy duty, like an import duty on the product. So you sell like a $50 product.

They're going to have to pay like $20 of import taxes in addition to the shipping. So it just becomes like irresponsible to buy. And still some customers do because they can only get the product from the US-based company, but it really sucks. And then the company has to like fill out this form that says these good, are worth $14, and then you submit that at the thing, and then it's just annoying, right?

And so I think there should be a company. So there's these brands trying to do these e-commerce roll-ups. I think you should do it differently. I think some enterprising entrepreneur can basically say, look, I will boot up your Canadian operation today. I'll boot up your UK operation, your France operation. I'll do Europe. I'll do UK.

I'll do Australia, whatever, right? So basically say, I'll import your brand today. You do no work. So all you have to do is you need to ship me this product to this warehouse. So here's the address. Ship me your products. I need like, you know, whatever your normal inventory is, ship 10% to me. And let's see how I do.

And basically you get one giant warehouse where you're warehousing for all the brands that you're going to work with. And you just say, look, in exchange for doing this, you pay me no money. I will start generating sales for you. But I want a royalty. I want a royalty of 10 cents or 15 cents for every dollar that gets made. But what's your point? How is this interesting or new? Because I don't know of a brand that does this that exists.

So my wife has an e-commerce brand. We sell in the U.S. I would love to be making more money by selling in Europe. But the time of operational overhead to go to Europe right now is just crazy. So why aren't there more people that are reaching out to e-commerce store owners and basically saying, I will run your international operation and make it a low-risk to no-risk proposition for them in order to do so? And I think there's a lot of money to be made. given the number of e-commerce brands in the U.S.

And how you could, if you're in Brazil or you're in Australia or you're in Canada or wherever, I think you could become the leading, trusted, like, kind of like, we are your Canada, go to Canada, go to market plan for Canada. And we just do all the work for you. This is actually quite common in media. So there's business insider India. There's business insider Australia. There's business insider Germany, I believe.

And then I think, I believe, I believe. the Wall Street Journal does the same thing for those same countries, but there was BuzzFeed France, Huffpo, France, Huffpo, Australia. It's actually pretty common in media. But who runs those? So is it run out of the U.S.? Or they hire a team there or it's a local team there that just licenses the brand, basically? When they report the revenue, it's under licensing. And so I don't exactly know what that means, though, because I was

trying, I was thinking about us. And I was like, man, we have a lot of people who are English as a second language folks in Germany. So like, I guess, is one of the most populous. I don't know the numbers. I guess it's one of the most populous places in Europe. It's a very business focused. So, you know, the Germans liked us. Same with Australia.

Australia. Australia's loved us. And I was like, yeah, let's go do it. But what the fuck do I do? Do I just fly over there and just start recruiting? Like, it's crazy. It's a big list. And then another thing is in particular,

China and Japan. and there's actually a whole word for this. There's a word, I can't remember what the word is, but there's a word that describes why it's difficult to break into Japan. And the reason is, is that it's hard to break into an island, in particular, Japan. And I would love to have paid someone to be like, hey, can you be my Japanese coniglary,

like my capo on the ground? Those are all mob terms because I'm into the mafia now. Can you be my guy on the street of Japan and let me know, is this good? am I getting the right people? I think that's incredibly interesting. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not saying that this doesn't exist.

I'm saying there's still a lot of room there because I know a lot of people. I have a lot of friends who are doing e-commerce, right? We host Club LTV. There's 75 to 100 e-commerce brands each doing over a million dollars a year in there. And every single one of them, I think, has the same problem, which is that we're all U.S. focused. And why are we U.S. focused? Because it would be too much of a Lyft, too much of a Lyft.

too much of a lift to go figure out how to do Australia. It's too small of a pie to do manpower on or spend brain power on. But if somebody in Australia was like, hey, look, this is what we do. This is our business model. We help you get sales here and we just take our cut. And so I just think that like there needs, there's more opportunity for this. And that's cool that in media, it sounds like there's also an opportunity to do it in media too or is being done in some way by the big players. It's being done in some way.

But like I remember when BuzzFeed, like we're going through some troubles. they had to lay off like their whole French office. And I was like, BuzzFeed has a French office. What the fuck? That's the opposite, right? We have a French office and then you have to do things like that when it's like not working out. I'm saying no investment, no consulting fees. You just take a royalty on sales.

And these are all incremental sales that I wasn't getting otherwise. And you take care of the whole operational headache in this case for e-commerce about like, I just ship your goods to your warehouse. You ship it to the local customers. Customers don't have to overpay. Customers don't have to do import duties for every order they made. And so I just think that there's an opportunity in e-commerce to be the go-to-bran for every DTC brand to partner with in each of these locales. What country would you go to next?

I think Europe is probably the best because you want the next wealthiest, high populace place. But really, it can work anywhere. It's just like the biggest market is doing it, you know, throughout Europe. Now Europe is made up of so many countries. Maybe that's a pain in the ass. If not, like Canada is the next. no-brainer. Australia next. Japan is a good one. Those would be the ones. India, maybe. Like, for example, I know a bunch of people in India who did this. So my dad introduced me these guys,

and I was like, oh, wow, why these guys, their house is humongous. You know, what do they do? And it's like, oh, yeah, they partnered with jockey underwear and they just became the jockey seller here. They have exclusive rights to sell jockey in India. Next guy at the dinner table. What do you do? Oh, we're the Domino's guys in India. What? Yeah, we're their exclusive franchisee of dominoes for India. Okay, what does that mean? Well, we have, like, India's didn't really eat pizza before this, so we're, like, teaching people to eat pizza.

They fucking love it, turns out. And so we have, like, you know, 9,000 dominoes throughout India now. Like, oh, my God, what is it going on here? So, like, you know, local franchisee, but for, for... What's this called? What's the term it out? What's the term for this? I don't know.

You know, maybe I should have gone to business school. I think it's probably just called, like, in brick and mortar, I think it's just called franchising. franchising was the way to spread geographically. You know, when your brick and mortar can only scale so fast, that's how you would do it. You would franchise out. And then the franchise would pay a royalty back to the master franchise, the brand of their sales. And they're the local operator.

But with e-commerce or with digital media, it's a little bit different. But it kind of has the same problem. So I don't know if there's a new word for it. Man, I think this is wildly fascinating. I didn't think it was that interesting at first. but now I know what you're talking about, where I've heard so many stories of the same thing, but maybe not of India,

but I am the official importer of X, Y, and Z. Yeah, we're the distributor of X. Or like for you, just think about for your business, right? Like, could you have sold for more if you had like 250,000, you know, or like 500,000 subscribers in Japan? Dude, I think there's a world where I would have been, where I could have made more money in those markets than I did in America. Because even though America has more people,

I don't think the French or I don't think that the Germans, I don't think Facebook kicks as much ass over there as it does here with Instagram and everything. And so I think the ad markets, because I do think that Europe, sorry Europeans, if you're listening, I do think that you guys are five or ten years behind when it comes to some technology stuff. And the ad markets suck because of Facebook and Google. So like if you could still capture a little bit of that revenue, I think you could. Well, I don't know if any of that's true, but what I do know is that. It's true.

trust me. As you're building, I think like everybody uses Facebook everywhere. So that's the part I'm saying. I don't know. Well, sorry, but what I mean is like old media

still does quite well abroad. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. The thing I'm just saying is like, if while you were building your U.S. business and all your employees are focused on your U.S. business, if somebody said,

I love your product, I'd love to license the brand from you, or I'd love to be your partner in the UK or in Japan or in Australia. And I will build, I will use the same playbook. it'll be under your company. I just want my cut for building this for you.

Yeah, I would have done it in a heartbeat, right? And so the fact that you didn't means there was an opportunity for some entrepreneur that should have been reaching out to you saying, this is a no lose proposition. You still own it. You still make money off of it. It's still your name brand.

I just get to go, I get to basically take your brand, take your product and localize it or distribute it here where I am from. And I know the market. Yeah. And my product's way easier than yours. It was right. Because it's pixels. It's not anything.

real. And I would have loved to have done that. And I used to have people email me all the time. And then we had a bunch of people in Russia, some people in Mexico who would just verbatim copy our shit. And I would find it. And I'd be like, you guys stop this. You're not a lot to do this. And then I'd have other people who'd email me and be like, hey, can I try? Could you stop anyone from doing that? I feel like you can't do shit. If somebody takes your newsletter and they just word for word, transcribe it in Russia, and they're like, we're called whatever, hustle are you? No. There's nothing you could do. The only thing that I was able to do, the only thing that I was able to do, the only thing I was able to do, we had someone do this in Italian, we had someone do it in

Mexico, yeah, Mexico. And I basically shamed them. I said, like, I'm just going to, I'm just going to call you out. And so I would tweet at them or I would email them. I would just would make it well known. And my network was large enough that someone of someone knew them and they were embarrassed. And they, yeah, and they stopped doing it. But no, I can't do shit. Yeah. And I had people email me all the time saying, hey, can I do this for Spain? And I would say, yeah, but I don't really know anything about you. I don't know if you've got good taste. I don't like, I know

nothing about you. And I would just throw it off to the side and just right kind of forget about it. I wish I would have done it. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more. I'm surprised there's not just like free free media.com based in Cyprus. That basically takes all the content from behind the paywall of Wall Street Journal and just says, cool. If you ever hit

a paywall, come here. Look. Like, input the URL you're trying to go to. Here's the article for free. I'm surprised somebody hasn't just tried to do that. Like, it's totally bootlegs, piracy, right? But like, it is so hard to enforce that stuff. I can't believe that somebody internationally isn't doing that. That seems like the way to do it.

Do you know what Outline.com is? I know about it. I don't know what I could say publicly about it. But yeah, I know. Explain it. I don't have any insider information. So maybe you do. I don't.

Explain what it is. So Outline.com, it's the tagline is read and annotate without. distractions. Frankly, I have no idea what that means. But the way that I use it, the way that everyone else uses it, is when you come across a paywall website, you put the URL into outline.com, and you can see the whole article. It doesn't work for everything. I don't think it works for New York Times, but you can get, you can get away with that. A bunch of sites they kind of stopped working on, but initially it worked on everything. And the person behind this is somebody we know that's like a well-known kind of tech person that works at one of the big

companies and was like they had to like distance themselves. It was getting like millions of it. Like people were using this thing and they had to distance themselves from it because they were like, uh, yeah, like I was kind of told I had to knock it off. He's like, I didn't make it for that purpose. It just works that way. But, uh, yeah. Is it a Brazilian?

No. Sight? Oh my God. Oh, okay. I, uh, yeah, yeah, I see. yeah, I know who you're talking about. How interesting, Outlying.com. What the heck?

It's that big. I just Googled that or I just looked at a similar way about how big it was. Outline.com, crazy fascinating. Yeah, so I think that one's cool. All right, Albreu, how did we do on these? Wait, hold on. Just quick question. Does Outline.com make money?

I don't think so. I don't know. I have no idea. Wow. This person is so interesting. All right. that's it that's the episode

by the way for the people listening we actually just did like a Q&A before this Sean I think it was too much talking we got to do the Q&A on the second half because oh yeah I'm fucking exhausted right now but like I feel like the blood is drained from my body right now I'm tired from listening

I'm so dead I can't if we're going to do two hours again we have to do the heavy lifting in the front I tried to keep the energy high but like in my brain and I also haven't eaten anything today so I'm just like dying on all fronts right now I'm hurting I'm hurting yeah no it's gonna be a separate episode dude so we're getting two episodes out of this yeah we got a I can't do it next time yeah I thought we would be able to but yeah this is painful maybe this is hard and stay another one tomorrow yeah I can do another one tomorrow

I can do I can do one a day easy uh I think I think I can't yeah we'll have to try something else if we want to keep doing the Q&As. I like that one. I thought the Q&A was almost better than the actual episode, maybe because you guys retired, but the Q&A came out a lot better than I thought. I think people are going to like both of those. Yeah.

No, the whole thing is good. So, good job, guys. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.