My First Million - #181 - How Virtual Horses are Making Millions, A Potential 9-Figure Company & How to Bet on Anything

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Virtual horse racing? That's right Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) break down a virtual horse racing company doing millions. The company is so hot right now, Sam even tried investing but wasn't able to. They also talk about a company delivering testosterone right to your doorstep. We've talked about this business before, and Shaan even said it was one of the best ideas we've had on the pod. We also cover BeeRoll (Shaan thinks this can become a 9-figure company), Polymarket, and a bunch of growth tactics at the very end. --------- * 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: https://refer.fm/million * 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. --------- Show notes: * (3:04) The company delivering testosterone to your door * (13:58) Making millions from virtual horses? * (28:38) How BeeRoll is turning regular people into micro-influencers * (43:18) How to bet on anything * (52:23) Updates on the podcast

Do you own Dogecoin? You tweeted out that you owned it. Do you, is that real? Yeah. Fuck. I mean, so it's a huge thing for you. Well, okay, so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way. 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. All right, everyone. Welcome to the episode. Do me a favor. MFMpod.com. So that's my first million, but abbreviated.

So MFM pod, like podcast, so MFMPod.com. If you go there right now, you're going to see an inbox, an email form, enter your email. In each Thursday, Sean's sending out an email that does a summary of all the episodes that we've discussed or launched that week. So make sure to sign up, you'll get a description of every single episode along with all the links that we've mentioned, all the cool companies that we've mentioned. And also, we're doing a tour.

So that comes out soon. But this June, we're going to June, or we're going to Austin and then Miami. and we're going to announce those dates and everything like that. So go to MFMPPod.com and sign up and you can be notified when all this is happening. And you'll get your weekly email that discuss the podcast. Sean, what are we talking about today? Today we talk about Peak, a testosterone subscription company. We talked about B-roll, which is a small little kind of bootleg company that I think could be big, could be bigger.

But it does have some problems. And then we talked about a couple of gambling websites, gambling products that I think are cool. Zed run, which is. is all the rage right now, people selling digital horses for $20 million, and Polymarket, a place where you can go bet on anything. So we talked about that as well. And make sure to listen towards the end, or I'm not trying to trick you. You could just skip ahead. But we said our feelings on today's episode, and I think a lot of people are going to like what we had to say. But you might need to listen to the first half, at least to understand the context. So give it a listen.

Do you guys want to do the intro? Yeah, let's do the intro. I feel like I kind of fucked up that episode. I don't feel like I did a good job, but leave this part in too. So I think it's worth Why do you think it was a dud?

Sometimes I just look at the clock and I'm like, oh fuck, we're halfway through the episode and I feel like we, what have we said so far? You know? And then like that's how I judge it. Abrae, what did you think? Yeah, I thought it was a be. I thought we spent too much time on things that weren't ideas.

Some of the ideas that we did talk about were things that we've talked about before, like Pek and Z-run. I thought B-roll was actually really cool. I'm glad we spent time on that. But overall, B. All right. And you guys just didn't have the energy. Sam, you didn't bring the energy today, man. Is that crazy how you could tell.

I don't feel well at all. But I didn't think that I was low energy. Dude, some days I'm just like having a sluggish day, bad day. I get on this call and I get your guys's energy. That just like helps me get through the day. That's funny. No, I feel horrible. I didn't sleep all that.

I mean, I just feel, I do feel sluggish. I just didn't, I had a bad night's sleep. That's so funny that that radiates. That sucks. I thought you were fine, but you usually have one or two moments in the episode that are like the sand moment where you like get really either excited or you think something's really dumb. And yeah, so that didn't happen. But let's talk about some stuff. You want to talk about peak?

Did you invest in peak? I did. When? Over the weekend. I talked to him maybe Friday. and on the first call, I was like, and I was actually quite skeptical of this. So this will give people the context.

This is one of the first ideas that we've ever discussed as this new scheme. I think literally episode, maybe one or two of when we started doing the brainstorm, Sam goes, TRT subscription. And I was like, what? He's like, so I've been taking testosterone. TRT is testosterone replacement therapy. I've been taking testosterone. And I think this could be a great business.

because, you know, if you take it, it helps you, you're going to keep taking it on a subscription. Like, we were talking about why the business might be great. And we were both like, dude, that's a great idea. Why doesn't somebody do this? And obviously people were already doing it. And so you recently were like, hey, this company peak that I'm investing in that does that testosterone thing. You should talk to them. And so I did.

And I went in with honestly kind of like lukewarm expectations. I don't know why. I don't know. I just didn't like, I didn't know how big it was going to be. I didn't really know. Like I myself, I don't take it because I'm like,

I had some concerns. Like, is this really good for you or bad for you, blah, blah, blah. And then I was totally convinced on the call. The guy was a, the guy saw who you introduce me to. It is an amazing communicator.

Like, this guy was so good at selling me on the business. I was like, you're going to sell everybody, your product if you can sell me this well on your business. He was a really, really talented guy. Yeah, he is talented.

It's a really, I think it's a pretty safe bet is what I think. I think it's a safe bet. So basically, TRT is, I believe it, you know, I should know, I put it in my body, but it's, I believe it's synthetic testosterone. And you can put it in via, like you can rub it on your body. We should explain the problem, right, which is that males, you know, as you age in general, your testosterone levels go down, right? So in your 20s, you're the stallion, and then by the time you're in your 40s,

your testosterone levels are, you know, I don't know, multiples less than they were in your 20s. Okay, that's just nature taking, you know, that's father time. Okay. But there's also, like, other issues, which is that today, a guy in his 20s and 30s has the testosterone levels of like a 70-year-old man 50 years ago or something crazy. There's some stats here. And there's a lot of reasons to why that's the case, although doctors and scientists, they're like, well, we don't exactly really know, but it could possibly be that we live like pretty soft lives.

Like there's not that much fear or like compared to like we don't have a death threat on a regular basis or a dying of different diseases, although maybe that's different for the last two years. We, we drink plastic. We, or we drink out of plastic. What else did they say? We smoke less, which a lot of people think nicotine and testosterone levels are correlated. And there's a variety of other reasons. But basically the average person's T level, the average person, the average boy, man, the 25-year-old is like that of like a 56-year-old yada, yada, yada, yada. And what that means is a lot of guys think, well, testosterone, okay, so you're just going to have big muscles and look good naked.

That's actually kind of like a secondary thing. The first thing is that you're actually becoming incredibly depressed and like bum. And you just don't feel like, I call it like aggressiveness, but it's not really like I want to fight you aggressiveness. It's like I can, I'm like a little bit more confident and I have a purpose. Anyway, I got tested for this and I had a low T and I tried a lot of different solutions. So I tried this company. It's pretty great. I think it's a, I think it could be pretty cool.

I think they're doing pretty big numbers already. We'll see if they can pull it off. I think a company like a testosterone business, this is one of those companies. I think, Sean, you said it one day where you're like, there's a bunch of different risks here. There's technological risks. Like, can you actually build it? There's market risk. Like, does the market actually want this?

In this case, those two things aren't risks. The third risk is operational excellence. Are you competent enough to pull this off? And that's the risk that they have. And I actually think that's a pretty easy risk because that's a commodity. I mean, there's, if you overpay a handful of Uber employees, they're going to figure out the problem. Yeah, you go find the guy who opened up Uber's like Atlanta business and you're like, hey, I need you. You are an operational person.

I need you to come here and solve this problem. By the way, I think I've invested in four companies and on the founding team of each of them was like, I opened up Uber in Canada. I ran Uber's Canada business. I went there first to open it. I became the GM or like there's an Uber competitor, Uber for Flowers. If I bloomed that, I invested in the guy who like ran that because it's like these guys have operational excellence. They just needed to find a good market that really wants a product. So I think you're right that the market does want this, but there is, you know, an education step that has to be done.

product, yeah, they have almost zero product, product, Chris. But it really is about regulation and operational excellence. So do they have regulatory risks and do they have operational excellence because you have to properly handle it, right? The flow is they don't just give testosterone or anybody. You take a test. So you're at home finger prick. You send the blood to the lab.

The lab gets reviewed by a doctor and the doctor says, yeah, your levels are great or your levels are low. And if your levels are low, we can offer your prescription if you want. and then when you get the prescription, they need to keep measuring over time to see if your levels are improving or not and that sort of thing. And so there's a big kind of like time lag.

It's not just like buying a thing off Amazon or two days later it's at your house and there's no risk in playing with that toy. It's like, no, there's risks. This is actual medical. It's a digital medical workflow. And those are new. So like all of the telehealth products are like this.

Hems and Roe are probably the most successful versions of these where they took Viagra and they said, okay, how do we market to people who might have erectile dysfunction? How do we get them a prescription? How do we, so how do we pair a person on Facebook who sees our ad to a doctor who can prescribe them, you know, that they had diagnosed them with erectile dysfunction, prescribe them a medicine? And how do we create the generic version of Viagra? How do we take this product and how do we sell it? And then how do we do that whole thing profitably? Right. So similar, similar mindset, those have become multi-billion dollar companies.

And I think that there's more to come in that vein. I've invested in a couple of peak being the latest. But yeah, I think this is great. And like you said, the thing I would have been worried about was twofold one. Does this really work on what are the side effects? And as he was talking me through it, I was like, okay, well, you're very convincing, but obviously you're somewhat biased right here, like the owner of this company. But he started as a user of the product.

So I think it is somewhat organic. But I was like, okay, that sounds good. I'm going to do some independent research and I'll figure this out for myself, The second thing was, I didn't like the idea of injecting myself in the butt or I don't know, where do you injure yourself? The thigh? I put it in my thigh and it doesn't hurt at all. I do it two days a week.

So why don't you take the gummy or like the cream? That seems like a gummy seems way better than a shot. I got used to it and I didn't want to deviate. I had a provider that only did the shot and I just was like, yeah, I'm used to it. It also like feels like it's going to work better. I don't actually know if it does. I asked him this. I go, he said he has all three.

And I go, why would anybody choose the shot? He goes, actually, if you look in popularity, our shot is the most popular. And the second is this and the third is this? And I said, is that because it's more effective? And he goes, no, it's not more effective. In fact, the cream is the most effective. But people believe there's a perception that the shot, oh, this is, I'm doing the real thing. I'm getting the full effect of this.

And I thought, oh, that's funny how that, like perception is reality. Yeah, so I like it, but I've been doing it for a while, and this isn't like a peak commercial. And so we'll just be explicit about this. Sean and I both have a financial incentive in this company. We are both investors of this company. But it's sick. We've been talking about TRT for a while. I'm a fan.

And I've been taking it now for two or three years. It changed my body. I didn't take it from my body, but it changed. I think there'll be at $100 million in sales in the next three years. That's my prediction, my bet. Yeah, I believe that. The question is who buys it? And I don't know yet.

I mean, it's a pretty taboo thing. So they got to fight some taboo stuff. But yeah, we'll see. I mean, because people, when they say, they're like, oh, you're taking steroids. And I joke, I'll be like, yeah, I take steroids. It's not actually steroids, right? It's not an anabolic sterobloid.

Right. But they do, they've got some, they've got a little bit of culture of uphill battle to fight. But I think people are going to be open-minded to this actually far more than I ever thought. I know a lot of people who take Tierty. And I was shocked that many people do. I thought I was going to be the only one. Especially because Joe Brogan, aka the male Oprah, does it and vouch us for it.

I think that goes a big way. Like that guy has like a pretty massive mainstream following. And when he normalizes something, it's just a matter of time. You know, first his diehards will go do it. And then the other people will get curious and check it out. And eventually as it gets more popular, people will remember that Joe vouched for him. Joe does it. So, you know, I think that goes a long way. Just like Oprah had a big effect on a lot of businesses. I think a person of Joe Rogan's magnitude is actually not just any other influencer.

Do you want to talk about some of these ideas that you have, you've got some amazing ideas. Do you want to talk about Zed? That's crazy. Let's talk about Zed. Okay. So we both, we mentioned Zed on the pod before. Why don't you explain what it is? And then no, you do it. It's so, this is like perfect for you. This is like a Sean company. Okay, it's really simple. Zed is a, it's digital horse racing. So if you've ever been to a horse racing track, super fun, you know, Saturday, Sunday experience, you go to a track. There's a bunch of horses. You don't know anything about horse racing that you don't know anything about the strategy. You look at the sheet. You know, what do you do at a horse racing event? You sort of drink and you bet.

And so the betting part is there's eight horses that are about to run. You don't know anything about any of the horses. You look at the names and they all got funny names like, you know, Mother's Last Hope or something like that. And then you're like, you know what? I think Mother's Last Hope might win. I'm going to bet $50 on Mother's Last Hope, 90 on, you know, Sam Parr's Pony Tail. And then the last one, you know, is like whatever, me lucky charms. And so you bet on three horses out of the eight.

The horses run across. You're cheering like crazy. You just want your horses to win. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. And whatever. It's a good time. And so horse racing is almost like the purest form of gambling because you really don't,

there's really no strategy that you don't need any skill or strategy. but you're safe because really the other people also don't have any skill or strategy. So it's not like a poker table where if you don't know what you're doing, you'll get taken advantage of. Horse racing is very simple in that way. So what Zed did was they brought that online. Okay, well, that seems kind of niche. The smart thing was they brought it online in the crypto format.

So the way it works is it is a crypto project. It is an NFT project, which we've talked about before. So you go on Zed and you can buy a horse. so you can buy a horse or you can breed two horses together. And so you'll have a horse and then you can race your horse and then your horse can win for you or it can lose for you. It's sort of like a little Tomicacci pet of yours. And every horse has like these characteristics.

So there's like a probability when you breed your horse or when you buy your horse, there's like a probability it's going to be like a small fraction of chance. It's going to be the LeBron James of horses. It's so athletic. It's just going to win every race. And then there's a probability it's going to be average or below average. And so there's a gambling aspect

just in the breeding and buying of horses, not just the races themselves. And so people are going on there. They're buying and collecting horses like their Pokemon, and they race them against each other and they win money. And these guys are crushing it. Yeah, so what Sean just said,

so the URL is zed dot run. So zed dot run. What he just described, it sounds kind of silly. And look, like it is silly, I guess. I guess gambling is silly. but whatever, it's fun.

And the artwork is cool. And what he just sounds sounds like a small idea, but their numbers are astonishing. So go ahead. What are the numbers? They sell horses like in a batch. So it'll be like, you know, in June, they'll do like a drop of new horses that you can go buy.

And so they just did a drop a few days, two days ago, I think, three days ago. So they did a drop. And it was 18 million in digital horse sales. So they sold $18 million of, digital horses to 2,400 buyers. The top spender paid about $800,000. And the top hundred spenders spent $8.3 million. And so what's happening here under the hood is that there's a group of people who are

investors, they believe in NFTs. They love to gamble. One of my friends is those guys. Well, Joe, we'll just say Joe. He spent six figures on it. That's amazing. We're going to have one of the biggest whales on the pod. I forgot to tell you this.

One of the biggest whales in this whole space and the NFT space reached out, and he has a crazy story. And he's like, I'd love to come tell the story on your pod. So we should have him on. We'll go more in depth of him there. But my understanding is that there's these people that were really big into daily fantasy, like they play draft kings, fan duel. And these were the whales there.

And then, you know, they were doing daily fantasy for a while. And then Top Shot came out, NBA Top Shot. And they went heavy into Top Shot. They bought a bunch of Top Shot. things. They were buying and selling from each other, and I was driving up the prices. And they had these huge Topshot collections, and now Topshot was worth a lot more money, and they did well there. And then they said, all right, great, what's the next top shot? And they went to Zed Run. And Zed run is the next top shot. And so that's what they were doing.

So, of that $18 million, where do the proceeds go? So I think it goes to Zed. I don't think there's anybody else to go to here. So I think Zed basically mince the horses, and they buy them. So they, So Zed gets the sort of initial sale. And then from there, you know, if I sell my horse to you, I get the proceeds of that sale. Then from there, there's maybe some transaction fee. So I think that's it. I don't think there's miners and other stuff involved, but I can be wrong.

Who puts up the, and then we buy your horse. And then what's the likelihood that your horse is going to win a race? Is it, do they establish you basically, when you're buying a horse, you're buying that probability that it's going to win? I'm out of my pay grade here. I don't know exactly how the horse racing probabilities work. You know, how does the slot machine work? I'm not exactly sure. I just know I pulled the lever and looking for cherry.

So it's crazy. So let me tell you, I'll give you some inside baseball here. Sean talked about, told me about this 60 days ago, maybe. Our friend Narendra told us about it, told both of us about it. Yes, and you brought up a podcast. And this was, was this 60 days ago maybe two months ago? And you guys described it, and I was like, this is silly. but Sean's been pretty spot on with some of the stuff.

Narandra's been spot on as well. He was early in Clubhouse. Even, you know, he sees shit. And I contacted the founders of Zed, and I got him on the phone, and I spent like an hour talking to them, and they're raising money, and I was like, I'm in.

They're going to let me invest. And they took a week, and they said, no, we don't have either. It was a vague, either, like, they don't have room, or they're not sure if they're going to raise. regardless, well, that's cool. But it's pretty nuts the amount of interest that they had been getting. And the founders were really cool guys. And I was devastated.

I didn't get in. You guys are listening. Call me. But it's pretty crazy, like how much interest that this company is getting. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I almost bought a $10,000 digital horse over the weekend because I wanted to get in before this drop. And I just got busy with Mother's Day stuff and didn't get around to it.

I think, you know, I don't know if this is a good investment or bad investment. I would, my personal opinion is that this is going to have a hype cycle and the price are going to go up. It's going to be like, oh, my God, there's, you know, this company's done 300, 300 million dollars of digital horse sales. And then, you know, 400 days from now, we're going to be like member Zed run. That was, that was a fun four weeks. Kind of like, kind of like we, BitClout.

Kind of like BitClout, kind of like Topshot, kind of like Clubhouse, right? Like, this is not uncommon. And it's not really even a knock on them. Like, look, they did better than 99% of startups that don't get a hype cycle. But I don't see how much longevity there is here because the trick is when the primary value is speculation, then it's hard for something to sustain. And then here it's like primary value number one is speculation. I'm going to get this horse. I'm going to sell it for more.

Primary value two is a game. And both games and speculation, you know, sort of fade over time. With everything except for Bitcoin, because for Bitcoin, the speculation is actually what makes it valuable. People speculate that the price will go higher. The higher the price goes, the more it actually is a store of value. So the speculation actually creates the product, whereas that's not the case for Zet. Do you ever ask yourself, how are we going to build or individually, how do we make stuff on the internet that can actually last 20, 30, 40, 50 years? because you think of the things that are in the top 50 companies right now.

Most of them, I bet, that are tech-based are launched inside the last 15. How old is Google? 20 years old-ish. Yeah. Year 2000, maybe, or 96, so 25. Yeah. Everything's so new and changes so rapidly. Do you ever ask yourself, how are you going to create something that can last a long time,

or do not care about that? I don't really care about that. I don't really care about it. I guess, like, my view is that you've got to go on. either end of the spectrum. Either you try to build something that's going to be really defensible and valuable and really what I mean. So for me, it's not about something lasting over time. It's this one theory which is, does it have a positive flywheel? Which means the more people who use it and the longer it's around, does it become more and more valuable? There's something called

the law of increasing returns. And so I want to be in a business that's like that. It might be hard to get the flywheel turning. Explain that. What does that mean? Yeah. So like an example of it, is as many, but let's say Amazon, or Amazon is the classic example of this. So what makes a shopping store valuable? A store is valuable if it has large selection, low prices, and fast delivery. So with Amazon, for every single customer that comes on, for every single product that they add to it, they're increasing the variety available to that customer. Because they have so many customers, they can offer the lowest prices.

and because they have so many customers and so much like built up, you know, sort of supply chain infrastructure behind their thing, they can offer the fastest delivery. And so for them, every new customer or every new merchant is just like, it's kind of like you used to say with the hustle. Every email is a wind, you know, we're a pirate ship and every email subscriber is a little wind in our sales. It's that, but basically it makes it better for everybody else. The classic example of this is Facebook, right? So every person who joins Facebook makes Facebook more valuable to all the other people on Facebook. And so in the beginning, when Facebook has zero people on it, it's not very valuable to anybody.

Even the first 10 people is not very valuable to anybody. But once it gets every additional person, the thing gets more defensible over time. It gets more valuable to its existing customers, which makes it harder for anybody to compete. And they don't have to do a new thing. They don't have to come up with a new idea or a new business line. Like, all they had to do was just get more people using it because the people were the value. and Uber, same thing.

Every additional driver on the road makes the service more valuable to everybody because you get faster pickup times. And faster pickup times means more people will take rides. More people take rides means more dollars available for drivers, which means more drivers on the road, which means faster pickup times again, right? So that's the law of increasing returns.

So that's what you really want is what's called a positive flywheel. So I care about that a lot because business is really hard anyways. but when you don't have that, you're just always working harder and harder to get more, whereas with those businesses, you work extremely hard at the beginning to get it going, but then momentum starts to be on your side, and I like that.

And I used to be, and I have to fight this. You and I are quite, I don't know if you are, but you might be, where I like to take shortcuts when I first start stuff, or at least I, like,

it's easy to get going here. Yeah, like, let me, like, because I was always really good. I'm like, I can blow,

I can blot, I can, you know, brute force this. People always just say like, well, you know, if you want to chop down a tree, you should spend most of your time sharpening your axe. I'm like, fuck that. Give me a sledgehammer. I'm going to start banging. And by the time you're done with your sharpening, I'm going to knock the shoe over. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, just get out the way. I'm going to use strength and just will, you know, force a will. And I'm going to get it done. And that actually is super effective a lot of times. but it's incredibly harmful some of the time because I have taken shortcuts where I'm like, man, had I done in this this way and just slowed down and done it the right way, I would have been, it would have paid huge dividends eight months, 10 months,

14 months later. Right. I wish I would have done that. And when I hear these stories, I definitely think, like, is definitely the right way. You have to put faith that you are going to be happier two years from now than you are, if you do this one way, even though it sucks now. Yeah. So I think the important thing is to recognize the companies that are businesses that don't have this advantage. So let's take e-commerce. E-commerce is actually quite easy to get going, right? Like you don't even have to have a product. You can drop ship or you just start doing, you know, you can do $1,000 of ads and make $2,000 of revenue. Like, great, you're in the game. It wasn't that hard to get started. You didn't need a license. You didn't need anything to get going. Maybe some initial inventory. That's kind of like the biggest barrier.

But e-commerce doesn't ever get this law of increasing returns. I don't think so at least, or it's minimal at best, which is that, you know, if you're at $1 million in e-commerce sales, getting to $2 million, you're going to have to do more work. You don't get less work over time. So you have to keep manufacturing the product. Whatever you did last year, you know, doesn't really behoove you, doesn't really benefit your growth. You keep having to spend money on advertising and marketing.

It doesn't get cheaper over time. It gets more expensive. the bigger you try to scale it. And so those have sort of almost negative effects over time. At the very minimum, it's neutral. And so, so yeah, basically I'm just trying to describe kind of like a network effect or a flywheel style business where how is it that when you, if you draw an arrow between all the different parts of your business,

I get customers, they do X because of X, because of X, Y happens. Because of Y, I get more customers. That's what you want. The circle has to connect. And if the circle connects, it doesn't matter that if it's hard. to get off the ground. Once you do it, it's going to like start spinning faster and faster and get more and more valuable over time. That's how you get a long lasting company. That's one way. The other way, the other thing I think about is the exact opposite. What's something that's super

disposable? Yeah, this arbitrage opportunity may not be around forever, but it's here now. And so when I look at opportunities, I look at one of, I try to go like on one end of the spectrum or the other when I'm being smart. And then sometimes I'm not being smart and I go in the middle and I hate my life after that. And I actually think that it's important. acknowledge that there's room for that second one, which is everyone says like, or myself as well, I'll look at something like that and I'll say, oh, this is like a get rich quick thing. This is just some stupid, meaningless arbitrage. And the answer is, yeah, it is.

Exploid it. It exists. Have we talked about B-roll? We haven't talked about it before. Okay. So B-roll is a website that is not very well-known, but it's useful in the e-commerce world. So what is this? So one of the most effective forms of advertising is what's called.

UGC, user-generated content. Why does this work? Well, most people are advertising on platforms like Facebook or Instagram or, you know, Snapchat, Pinterest, places like that. And what are you competing with? You're not actually, you're not competing with other advertisers. You're competing against the feed. You're competing against the scroll.

If somebody is going to scroll right by your ad to the next piece of like entertaining content, right? Because you're here trying to sell a product. And the next person is trying to make the person laugh, or click the like button and then keep scrolling. So, you know, you're competing against a meme. You're competing against an influencer. You're completing against like, you know, some model in her bikini on Instagram.

So how is your ad going to compete in that environment? Well, turns out the best way to compete is actually not to stand out, but to blend in, to look like Instagram content. Well, how do you do that? So what people started doing was they were paying, started paying influencers. How do I get the Kardashians, you know, it's like that brand sugar bear hair. They went and they paid the Kardashians, you know, silly money. to post a picture with themselves with the little blue gummy bear in their teeth,

in their mouth. Basically, they're holding it. They're like biting it down on it and they took a picture doing that while holding the bottle of sugar bear hair. And so they go and you pay a lot of money for influencers to do things. And influencers are kind of hard to deal with. They're divas. They have managers. And, you know.

And this is b-roll.io. B-E-E-R-O-L-L-O-B-R-O-L-L-O. B-R-R-O-L-R-E. And so what does B-R-R-R-R-D-R-R-O do? B-roll basically says, hey, let's give, we will get you content that looks like a person on Instagram just using your product. It looks like someone just posting a review, you know, a video review where they say, you know, I bought this hat, found this hat, I really love it. Here's why, you know, I have this problem with the sun getting in my eyes. So this hat is amazing

for XYZ reasons. Or they'll be like, you guys, I just got my package from blah-bidi-blah in the mail. I'm so excited to open it. I've been waiting for weeks for this thing. And it's like, what is this? Who is this person? What are they been waiting weeks for? And then they open it up and they're like, great, here's this eye wrinkle cream.

And it's going to be so good. I'm going to try it on, blah, blah, blah, they make this video out of it. And so B-roll is basically a way to push a button and get a bunch of average-looking people to create the content that fits your story that you want. So you almost write a little script, a little storyboard where you say, first, say that you got the package in the mail and you're so excited. Second, open it up while you're

in your bathroom and show your face in the mirror before. Third, put the cream on. Then fourth, you know, do your makeup, do your hair, improve the lighting and then show how much better you look now that you put our cream on and then say, guys, you got to try it. I want you, you know, if you guys follow me, you guys got to try this. So how do they make money? They take a cut. So what they've done is they went and got all the like wannabe influencers of the world, micro-influencers. This is like, you know, some mom in Florida who wants to make 40, 50 bucks for making a video

while she's at home while her kid naps. Or it's like, you know, some girl in college who's in her dorm room and wants to make, you know, $100 this month to pay for whatever, you know, a manicure and a pedicure. And what they get is they get your product for free and then maybe they get a little bit of cash. and in return what you get is content for your ads that looks like real human beings making content because it is real human beings making content for you. Is it a big business?

It's a good business. I don't know. It's not a big business yet. But I think this could be a big business. It's sort of criminally undermarketing. I mean, explaining this is probably the best marketing they've had. And ironically, this is actually like a B-roll, right? I know.

If they're going to use this. Did you see there's an app called Parcast, I think, something like that? No, it's not called. I forget what it is. Penaata. And they're using your voice and me like commenting as an ad. I got, I kind of got angry at them. So what's this company called B.I.

Be wrong. I talked to the guy who owns it. I actually would like to buy a business like this. I think this is a really good. This is a business that can make, I don't know, it can make a lot of money. So here's what I relate this to. There's a business called user testing, which we've talked about on here. I like user testing.

User testing did the same thing. They activated the stay-at-home mom workforce, which is there's a whole bunch of people that are staying at home. They want a little bit of side income. They don't want to have specific skills, like some coding or designing or something like that. And they just want to make a little bit of money. They're willing to basically trade half an hour or an hour of their time for 10, 15 bucks.

And they have flexibility. They do it when they want and they don't do it when they don't want. And so what user testing is they basically matched up that mommy at-home work with companies that wanted feedback on their website. So go to my website, try to do X, Y, and Z, and record yourself while you do it. And if you get confused, I want to see that so I can go improve my design. And user testing has become a very large company, hundreds of millions in revenue, and we'll go public, you know, probably in the next 12 to 24 months is my guess.

And so user testing became a large company, a multi-billion dollar company doing that. I think this activates the stay-at-home workforce in a D. different way, which is to say, hey, do a review or a testimonial of my product that I can put on my website or in my marketing, right? Why wait for, why pay, I overpay for influencers or wait for customers to like take the time to do this? I'll pay you, I'll give you some free product. I'll pay you a little chump change to create a testimonial or a review or create whatever, you know, little short video clip because that's what I need to be advertising on TikTok or anywhere else.

Great. Can I explain to you what I would do if I wanted to make money off this? Yeah. I used to have like a little

like e-com things and I would go to I hate admitting this because frankly I don't think it was a good idea but I would go to Fiverr.com and I would write a script

and I would pay someone five to $100 to record them as a testimonial. Really it wasn't even that good because they make it look too professional. Yes, too professional.

Yeah. It was a testimonial nonetheless. us. Now, I have no idea if this is what's it called B-roll. I have no idea if this is what they did. But basically what they're doing is they're just taking a very specific niche of Fiverr. Fiverr.com is probably the leader in this space. It's a publicly traded company. The whole shtick was $5 things that you could do now. Like you can draw a logo or make a 30-second video and people would game it. I use Fiverr.com to get 10,000 Twitter 5.5.

followers and it automatically looks like 10,000 Twitter followers would make me look legit, yada, yada, yada. People use it for scams. What I would do is I'm looking at Fiverr's annual report and they'll actually tell you more likely than not what some of the fastest growing categories are and what the fastest and most popular services are or you could just go straight to fiverr.com and do like rank by popularity. And I would just rinse and repeat and I would look at what B rolled in and I would look at which category is the most popular and I would create a website just for that. And I think you could probably. build a pretty good business doing that. We should, we should go into, we should do a dive into

Fiverr's, you know, like public reports and let's see what we find, because Fiverr is a pretty interesting business. We could do Fiverr and maybe like Upworker, whoever. I'm going to show you, oh, you can't see my screen, huh? Like you could do, you could do like, like, all right, I'm just on Fiverr.com, like, Fiverr, but only focusing on voiceovers. So it's like for $500, we'll read whatever you want for a 60 second thing and I sound like this voiceover I sound like a movie guy or you can get this other person who sounds like a commercial lady from a credit card commercial yada yada yada yada yada yada yada you can do you can do like i'm going to send you a screenshot of the of the like the storyboard that I submitted to to use this thing and uh I mean it's the design looks like a little bit crazy

but but it is pretty cool you'll see like how this works and I think I think it makes it very real in your mind, like, how powerful this would be. It's like, so for example, if you're an e-commerce store right now or an e-commerce owner, which is all, there's a lot of these, right? Shopify has exploded in popularity. And you, you book a photo, you book a professional photographer, you go to a studio and you go look at all your favorite brands, Lulu Lemon, Nike, Gap, whoever, right? And you say, we want to make commercials like them. We want to have our photos like them. That's the way this should work. We want beautiful. beautiful, clean, you know, like perfect lighting, cute models, wearing our stuff, smiling and

holding hands. And then you go put that on Facebook. And then next to it, you take out your iPhone and you record your face and you're basically set, you basically are holding up your product in shitty lighting in your bathroom. And you go, guys, I just got this, you know, whatever, lip gloss. And I don't know why I pick lip gloss. I wouldn't even know the first thing about what to save a lip. Sorry, let's pick a different one.

Guys, I just got this hair product for my men's long hair that I have. I don't know about you guys, but I wake up in the morning. It looks like this. And then what I do is I just squeeze this on, put this in my hair, and bam, I look fantastic. And, you know, whatever, even less salesy than that. It's just like, guys, it looks so good, except for this little part here. But I got to work on that. Anyways, you guys get the idea of blah, blah, blah.

That ad will kick ass compared to the studio photographer official high quality. quality, you know, professionally done. Have you even seen that the commercials on TV people are doing this now, too? Yeah, because they saw, because before you couldn't measure TV well enough, right? TV was hard to measure. You couldn't figure out what works and what doesn't. Now you throw both ads on Facebook. You throw a thousand ads on Facebook and you'll see this one gets the most clicks.

This one gets the longest views. This one results in highest number of purchases. So then they probably did that, spent $100 million on Facebook and said, this is the best way to communicate our product to our customers. Now, hey, TV guy, roll this instead. And then they're like, are you sure? It looks like, shit. And it's like, no, no, no, trust me, this works.

And so this lifestyle type of content or user-generated style of content works so well. So then the question is you're basically feeding into Facebook's ad engine. So this looks like a small business, right? It even sounds like a small business, B-roll, you know, like B-E-E, like a little bumblebee. The website looks like shit. You know, it seems like... How much revenue do you think they make? I think they're probably doing a couple million, one or two million a year, as my guess.

And I think that this could easily be, you know, nine-figure business. Why? Because you're taking a subset of the Facebook ad engine, right? Facebook, people are spending billions and billions of dollars on Facebook advertising. If you have a way for them to create more ad creative that converts better at scale without hiring their own people and doing this stuff in-house, people are going to take you up on that bargain, but you'd have to like, you know, basically market yourself as well. You'd have to go and figure out how to get them all to use you. You know what would be kind of cool? I'm just thinking about this as we talk about so many things

that I would love to do. I'm like, oh, this just seems exciting. And a lot of people think that way. We should do an episode one day or make a list of where we list out the type of headaches that each business comes with. So I think the issue is that we make things sound easy. And in some regard, they are really simple. But they have. Issues. Everything has issues. So like with media, the issues is you have to deal with people, personnel, because it's your people make your stuff. With econ, you have to deal with, like, the shipping and logistics. You have to, what do you have to deal with? Cash flow issues, whatever. The whole supply chain. Yeah. Supply chain stuff. With B2B software, you have to deal

with enterprise sales. And you also have to deal with, like, it can feel like it is a little slow sometimes. Like, it can be a slog. Yep. Like, there's issues for everything. thing. I would love to hear like what the headaches are for this and some of the other stuff that we talk about. So like what are the issues with this? Probably maybe people, because you're dealing with like it's quality control. So the biggest issue is I'm an advertiser. You did all the hard work to convince me to start to try using B-roll to get some videos made. I put up my brief. Well, I kind of wrote it in kind of a shitty way because I don't know how to do this, right? I wrote my script. My script kind of sucks. It was unclear. It was open-ended, blah, blah, blah.

that goes to some, again, some person in Tennessee who's just doing this for fun on the weekends to make a little side cash. They half read the thing. They record the thing, but there's like background noise, you know, behind them to the point where you can't hear what they're saying. Or they didn't follow the prompt. The client really said, start the video holding up our product. And the person just didn't do that. And now the video is in. The client expects to get the video they wanted.

the video creator expects to get paid, and nobody's happy. The client didn't like the video and the creators said, I did the work, what's up? And you're in the middle, and you're now having to figure out how am I going to ensure quality so that my advertisers don't get fed up and leave

throughout this process. This is the problem for user testing as well. User testing has a whole fleet of humans and robotics to make sure that the tests that get submitted are going to make the client happy, and the client's not going to say, hey, I want a refund, this person didn't even follow our directions. Or, you know, they didn't speak.

They just clicked. They didn't even give their thoughts out loud, right? So like, we can't, I don't want to pay 15 bucks for this test. I didn't get what I wanted. And you still owe the guy 15 bucks because they did the work. And if you don't pay either one, they're going to leave the platform. If you don't give either one what they want, they leave the platform. Now you have a churn problem.

So quality assurance is the number one issue with a marketplace like this. In addition to the normal headaches of going and getting people to, you know, join your platform of a two-founded market. I just want like a glass door for different business ideas. Like where's the downside? Just because everything has it. Just tell me what the downside is, when I got to deal with.

Do you want to do one more or no? Yeah, let's do one more because I feel like I was long-winded and not that interesting today. So I'm going to try to make up for it. All right, let's do one. Okay, this is cool. Polymarket. Have you seen Polymarket?

No, tell me. All right. I'm going to screenshot what I do on this thing. So Polymarket is a betting. network, it's a place to bet on the future. So you can bet on anything. So if you go to- Bad on your beliefs is the name is called, or the phrase is bet on your beliefs, the trademark. So it's similar to any betting platform like, oh, I can go bet. Will the Lakers win tonight or they're going to lose, right? But you bet on different type of stuff. So here's the top bets right now.

Number one, will Dogecoin reach $1 at any point before June 15, 2021? Will Andrew Yang win the Democratic primary of New York City in 2021. And so let's take that Andrew Yang one. By the way, really quick, do you own Dogecoin? You tweeted out that you owned it. Do you, is that real? Yeah. Fuck.

I mean, so it's a huge thing for you. Well, okay, so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way. So I bought a million doge at three cents. And so that would be, you know, I would have made, I don't know, like half a million to a million or something like that if I just held the whole thing. But I sold at 8. I sold at 15. I sold at 30.

I sold that. So now I still have a slug of it left. And I'm just letting that ride at, it's at like 50 cents now or something like that. Yeah. Only tweet the good stuff. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah.

Okay. So anyways, so you could bet on something. So like there was a bet or there's a bet right now. Will New York City be fully reopened by July 1? And then there's a price on yet. It's all simple. Yes and no. So if you just look at this site, it'll show you that 60 grand has been bet on this bet.

And most people are betting no. So out of 100% of people who bet, 73% said no and 27% said yes. And so when you go bet, you get better odds. Like if I'm betting the yes side and only 27% people have said yes, I get paid more if that ends up being correct. If you take one of these other bets like we'll both like this one, I bet this one, which is will Floyd Mayweather beat Logan Paul in their upcoming boxing match? to me, this is like a hundred percent probability that if the fight happens,

Floyd Mayweather is going to beat Logan Paul. Yes. But on here, you know, it's 94. You get 94 cents basically. It's 94% think yes. And there's 6% if you bet the other side, if you bet Logan Paul is going to win. And so to me,

that's free money that's going to happen in one month, right? And so I can make like a 6% return on my money this month just by putting it into that bet. Well, no. So I put in 10 grand. and if he wins, I make 10,161. No, it's only a 1.6. Well, so the problem is, so that's the thing.

There's slippage if you bet more. So there's only been $6,000 bet into this bet. So if you bet $10,000, you would have moved the market, right? So put it in $100 and you can see what your return is. And so for the bigger, the more popular bets, you can bet 10 grand and it's not going to move the market. Right. The Andrew Yang one has 260 grand in. So your 10K is not really going to move the price.

that much. That's interesting. I'm going to bet on this Floyd one. By the way, Floyd's going to just, it won't get me close. Of course. It's not even a question to be.

Anyway, so there's a bunch of these things that are like this. But I think this is really cool. It's a really cool product. It's a predict. People have been talking about these prediction markets in crypto for a while.

And this is a crypto-based thing. So the problem is, who created this? Just like, I don't know, some team of people in the crypto world. And so what they say is, if you see at the bottom, there's a disclaimer.

Polymarket is only for informational educational purposes. We do not custody your money. We do not take profits. We don't host these bets themselves. So what they say is there's a betting protocol. Betts get made on there. And this is just a website displaying the bets and letting you like bet into those markets or bet into those, bet into the protocol or not. And so these bets are all made on the Ethereum blockchain.

So you like the whole bet is made there. And then they have a system for validation. So how do like who's going to say. if Floyd Mayweather beats Logan Paul. Well, there's, like, details in there of how they're going to decide. And then there's what's called trusted, like, there's trusted or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a decentralized group of people who will all submit their answer.

What happened? Yes or no? And once there's a consensus, like, if there is consensus, then the bet finishes, it closes. And if there wasn't consensus, like, you know, whatever, is New York City fully reopened by July 1? That's something to me where I'm curious. I don't know how they're going to resolve that, like, fully. open. It says it needs bars, restaurants, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, what if there's some gray area? I don't know how they resolve these bets in that case. But I find it really

fun to, like, I think if you listen to this podcast by now, you know I'm kind of a gambler. I find this to be a fun way to gamble on things that, you know, your betting are going to happen. And so I put 5K into this thing and I started betting on different bets. And I'm having a blast. And so I'm going to keep doing it. I think this is going to be quite large. Like I want a bet for the Saturday Night Live thing. said, will Elon Musk mention Dogecoin on Saturnat Live? And yes was paying out at like 94 cents, but I was like, I'm pretty sure he's going to do it. And so I bet yes. And so I bet $250 and I made $330 or something like that. So I made like a profit of, I don't know,

I don't forget what it was, like 80 bucks or something like that on the bet. Dude, this is badass. So how did you find this? People in crypto talk about this thing. I'd heard the name before. I've been to it before, but this was the first time I actually started betting on it. Like on Twitter, they talk about it? Yeah, I don't even know, man. I'm just like so knee deep in the crypto world. I don't even know when I hear about things.

Maybe it's Twitter. Maybe it's a friend. I have no idea. Oh, they just raised money. Yeah, they've raised money. They're kind of well, they're like a well-considered brand, I think. Which is kind of weird because this thing, like, if you go to the website, how it works and stuff, it's like pretty skimpy.

They don't really do a great, like for a financial betting website. You would expect them to have like way more like legalese and fine prints and everything. and they really don't. It's very bare bones. But yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like a Las Vegas betting system built on top of Ethereum. Yeah, this is great. Ethereum, right?

So if you wonder, what's the value of something like Ethereum? Is it just speculation? Like, no, people are building essentially casinos on top of Ethereum, right? Outside of the financial system. It's pretty cool. Do you want to do, for the next episode, do you want to do the first segment on a how-to? We can do, because I think I've, I've, got good research methods, and I could explain mine.

But would you be interested in explain? Do you have a particular way that you find? Because I mean, I get anything that I, a lot of stuff that I've invested in or that I invest time or just like curiosity into, I learn from you. Do you want to share how you do that or is that not even a shareable thing? Well, I have an idea of something I could share when you started talking, but my brain started to think about that, which is how to win inside a big company as an entrepreneur. How to like make a mark inside a big company.

So I've done a couple things since joining Twitch that I think allowed me to, I just like didn't do the rat race. And instead I just put a little effort into these like four or five other things that nobody else in the company does. And because of that, I got like an outsized reward. I basically like I made a name for myself in a good way. You know, by doing X, Y, and Z. And so, like, if you're somebody who's in a big company and you're like, well, I'm just,

at this point, I'm just another fish in the sea. Or, you know, I want to get promoted, but I'm like, I have to climb this ladder the way it's currently constructed. My answer is, no, you don't. There is a way to be, like, interesting inside a big company and do a few interesting things that will let you leave a larger footprint than just your job if you do it the way everybody else who has your same job title in your company will let you do. And so I'd like to share some of those things, the how to, how I made my mark inside a big company.

And I'd like to share that, you know, for others to do in their company. So how to, I don't know what we're going to call it, how to succeed in a huge company as an entrepreneur, how to, what I want to do is like how, how we do research. And then maybe a third one that I want to learn from you is how do you manage this small team of people? and because you have like a personal crew and like what do you pay them and what the cost and what's the ROI and things like that. That is something that I would love to learn from you. Yeah, I'm done to do that one as well.

And yeah, some people have asked me about that. So yeah, we can do that one. I think more people want to know. So I think people want to know that one. And there's a lot of people who listen to this that have a job. And they're not like ready to go quit their job and start a company. They don't want to tweet out. You want to tweet out.

those three ideas, or I can do it and we'll see what the people say. Yeah, let's do it. I think we should do all three, just in what order? We'll do one each time. It's okay. June 3rd. I think I said June 3rd to you. Sean and I are doing a meetup.

Well, I guess it's trends and the hustle and Sean and I, whoever's doing it. We're going to be there. We're going to host an interview. I think we can do our thing in front of everyone. and then also Noah Kagan will be there. Do you know Noah? I never met him in person, just on the pod. So he'll be there.

We're going to do it at his office. So he's been kind enough to let us have his office. So you can go to MFN, like my first million, MFMPod.com and enter your email and you'll get notified when that's being released. Like the, if you're in Austin. Yeah, when we come to, like we're going to start with Austin. Yeah, we're going to start with Austin.

and that's on June 3rd. It's likely, I'm almost positive. It's completely free. And we'll have room for small, 50 people. And then we haven't settled on this yet, but not the day after, but likely the day after we might go to Miami. We haven't,

we got to lock that in. If you have an office that could host a hundred people. Dude, let's lock it in. What are we waiting for? Let's lock it in. It's done. We haven't found the venue, but the decision is done.

Yeah, like I'll, I'll plan to go, but we don't have a place to be. So we'll figure it out. If you want to host us and basically if you want to provide light drinks and light food and you want to have 50 to 100 people, tell us. It's going to be in the evening. It's going to be like a 7 o'clock thing. Maybe 500 people.

Mayor Suarez, if you are listening to this, hey, we've traded a couple DMs. Hey, you know, I've been seeing you talking to my friends. Let's do this. I think we could get 100 or 500 people. I just don't know if I personally would want to. Would you want to, like, riff in front of 500 people? Yeah, if I'm going to do 100, why not 500? It doesn't make any difference to me.

Well, I don't even want to do 100, but let alone 500. But yeah, whatever. I'll go with the flow, but we need a place. So if you want to host us, you can't. And I've got a couple other update. So we're going to talk. We got a strong actually did most of the research for this one. We got a ton of cool ideas.

But do you want an update on some podcast stuff? So I've been working with our team. Okay. So in 3-1, so what was that? March, March, we did 38,000 downloads. In April, we did 436,000 downloads. So that's a 30% gain about. In May, it's tracking towards around 520,000, which is another 20% increase. I think we can keep going.

And I want to tell you what I think is causing all this. The first is the biology episode. So guests typically we have found don't work that well, but a really big name guest or someone that has a cult following, like a Thai or a biology, that works. Ty? Who's Ty? Lopez.

Oh, Tai Lopez. Okay, gotcha. When we did that one. He has like a cult following and a cult unfollowing. He's got both. Yeah. Yeah. So that works.

So the biology's episode is probably going to be the most listened to one ever. How much more is it than the usual? It's like 20% more, 50% more than a typical episode. It got to 30,000, like in the first week. Typically our episodes get to 30,000 over like two months. Gotcha. Okay. So it did that in like a week or whenever it was, when did it get released?

Five days. Five days. I talked to him on the phone and he said, yeah, a good episode. I shared it. So hopefully that helps. and then he's down to share more. We only tweeted out, I think, one clip from it. So he's down to share more clips.

And he liked the animation. He was like, oh, like, looks like production values going up. I was like, sweet. Yes, it is. Yeah. So that worked out well. And then you want to know us what's working really well is how tos. So anytime a title is called how to build a paid community,

how to build paid events, how to, whatever we've done, those rank the highest no matter what, are not. no matter what, but more often than not. So like in our top 10 most downloaded stuff, it's either an interview with a huge, a well-known person, which like an Andrew would be a well-known person or a how-to-blank. So we have to do some more how-to. It's almost like they don't care about us and our great ideas.

They care about themselves learning something and being able to do something they want to do. I think that's exactly what it is. And then it's ourselves peppered in there. We are the spice, but the meat is the how-to. Right. And then finally, I got a last update, we're running some ads on, do you know this thing called the billionaire investors podcast? Or what's it called? It's like a famous thing. Is it we study billionaires?

Is it that one? Yeah, I love that podcast. Yeah, they're good. Yeah. So we're running an ad on their network on that podcast. I think we bought it last week. I think it's going to go live this week. So there's two types of podcast advertising that I'm learning about.

But one is what we do is people advertise now HubSpot advertises on our podcast. and people go to HubSpot.com slash MFM, whatever. The other one is podcast platforms. So like Overcast, have you heard of Overcast? Yeah, like these clients, these apps you can use to listen to podcasts. Yes. And on those clients, those users click subscribe. And the strategy that I'm doing is what we're doing is we are going towards niche

niche ones because those niche ones typically have a far loyal following and if you get low cost per click to downloads and subscribes. And it makes sense because the- those people, if you are, you got to be a real podcast junkie to go get like a new podcast app because it has these extra five features about podcasts. So it's actually a really good audience. That's probably really cheap because nobody else really goes for them. So I like the strategy a lot. And they're like tech, tech, tech, their early doctors. Yeah. And so we're running ads currently on cast box. I've never even heard of them, but it looks cool. And then overcast.

And so those are some of the updates. It's going well. Okay. What about the, so the ad on the we study billionaire's podcasts, what is it? Because I'm always like, if I'm listening to a podcast, what's actually going to make me go subscribe? One is a guy comes on or a girl comes on and they're a guest. Like this happened with Elaine. Elaine came on our podcast. She did ideas.

And she said it was like, I don't know, one of her biggest, her newsletter got like a huge spike in subscribers. Like her next email send was, welcome all my new subscribers. This is amazing. And she said she got, you know, thousands of new subscribers from her appearance. on the pod, which is great. And so that one makes sense because if I go and guest on somebody's

podcast, you listen to it for 45 minutes or an hour because that's your favorite podcast or that's what you listen to regularly. And you might be like, oh, that guest was cool. They said they have a pod. I'll go check it out. I like that method. And I'm, I've said I got to do this. I still have to go do it, which is I want to go guest on as many podcasts as I can. That would be part of my contribution to this growth strategy. But this ad is a little bit different. It's just like a 30 second sound clip. What are we saying in that? three second sound clip that's going to make somebody want to subscribe. Unfortunately, it's not a clip.

I think it's going to be Stig, the main guy, reading. But frankly, I don't know. We just closed the deal on Friday. Okay, fair enough. So I have to figure it out. But we have our guys. So we got this team, Henry and Dylan, they're making like a hype, like a sizzle reel. Right.

And we might be able to use that. But I don't know. But I agree with you. Like, in theory, I agree with you. I just don't know what's available at the moment. And we're doing some other stuff to make it easier to follow. So I'm emailing, I've grown my email list in this year from zero to 26,000 subscribers now. And at 26,000, I just sent it out the first time last week.

So just, it's just shanpuri.com. So if you go subscribe there, you get all my emails, but one of the weekly emails I send now is a podcast recap. So if you don't have time or you listen to the pod while you were on the go, I basically take the best three bits from the last week of episodes. And I say, this was the best idea. this was kind of the second most interesting idea. And here was the third one. And so sent that out for the first time. And I think that will also make it easier for people to like follow along.

And if you were kind of on the fence or you were, you're in and out, you listen sometimes. You don't listen other times. I think that'll keep you on the hook. And we at and then I copied your email like from Sean and I sent it to like 30,000 hustle people who clicked on my first million link in the past like two weeks. And we're actually going to increase that. So it's like 100,000 people. And my takeaway so far is it actually might be good for the user, but shitty for our numbers, because you just get the information without having to listen, which kind of sucks that that

has to be the case. Yeah, I thought about that, but I don't think that's actually how the world works. I think if you keep giving people value in every form that they want it, short form text, long form clips on Twitter, clips on YouTube, video on YouTube, podcast audio, if you just keep giving people value, they will learn that, oh, and whenever I want ideas, whenever I want to feel that my wheels turning, if I want to get that juice, that energy, Sean and Sam are the place to go to get it.

And our best, the raw source, the real deal shit is in the podcast. And so I think over time, those clips, they just bring people who are on the fringes closer to the core. I hope that's the case. And I'm betting that's the case. I'm putting my money on that.

But yeah, but it's a fear. And I want to bring this back to one thing, which is a lot of times we talk about this inside stuff. and hopefully it's not like a circle jerk like, oh, we're awesome, yada, yada. I'm revealing this because a lot of people like this. I like it when I hear other people say the numbers. But also, I want to point that I think we're doing really good, but I actually don't think that we are good.

I think persistence is good. And the reason why this is working is because persistence works quite well. So we're actually on, we're close to episode 200. We've been doing this for, is it going? going to be two years. Almost two years. Yeah. Two years maybe in September or August.

July, something like that. July. And I would say that we miss, I get sick sometimes and I miss stuff. Sean will miss stuff because he had a baby. But we're pretty much always on. And at worst, we're mostly at least good. Like, it's typically always at least okay. Sometimes it sucks.

Sometimes it's really good. Mostly it's okay. and like sorry mostly it's good i would say but that consistency is actually really important and we're going to app sumo um and i guess now in three weeks and there's a great story that noa told me or and basically no kegan runs this company called absumo um it's a it's a weekly email where you get deals on software this year they're going to do 100 million in gross revenue and of which like 50 50 million is their revenue it's a great business it's 10 years old and he was like you know i really something that this business that we're running, it's done really well, but it didn't do well at first,

but everyone wants to know, like, why is this doing so well? And he goes, I really just put in 40 hours a week, but I just did it for 10 years. And it has finally started to pay off and turn out and done really well. And it's just like, it's just a job. And I just, but I do it all the time. And I treat it like a job. And that has paid dividends. And I think that more people who listen to us could kick ass a lot harder if they treated their side hustle like a job. Yeah. I would, so I agree with you. Persistence is great.

The one thing that this reminds me of is I got some advice from the CEO of Twitch, Emmett. And we, so when I got acquired, when our team got acquired, our company got acquired, we were put on a special project inside Twitch. And it was kind of like one of the like, most people at Twitch are, working on something that already exists. Hey, this, you know, people already use us. We're already the category leader.

You've got to make it better. Make it more profitable. Make it smoother. Make it whatever. It's more like maintaining and improving an existing winner. And we were put on this little, we're on the edge of the island. And we're the only team of the company, basically, or one of three teams that was working on something that where we weren't the winner, it wasn't proven.

And so we, it was considered like a kind of a top priority. So we did this thing. Every week, my team would present to the CEO, the C.O and the chief product officer, we had an hour with them every week. And in a big company, you don't really get an hour with those three people every week. That's like a very expensive meeting, as they say. And because it was important. And I used to go in and I would try to basically, every, I feel like every two weeks, I was pulling a rabbit out of my hat, trying to be like, and here's the new genius tactic that we're going to do, and this one is going to be the one that works.

And like, some of them did make an impact, but Emmett had this observation where he was like, you know, I feel like you have a lot of good ideas. And then every month, we're like sort of like on a weekly or monthly basis when we sit here, it's always like, yeah, it's good, but it's not as good as we want it to be. We're still like, we're so small. We want to be so huge. And he's like, you're impatient with the results. And so I changed one thing.

At the top of every update that you have to bring in a memo, at the top of every memo, I was the only person in the company that was doing this. Everybody else said their memo goes straight into like, here's the weekly update, here's how it's going. Here's what we're doing next. At the top, I wrote in bold, impatience with action, patience with results. I said, that's our team motto. I'm putting it up here, mostly for myself to remember.

Impatience with action. That's when impatience is good is when you're being impatient about taking action. But impatience is bad when you're impatient about results. So I'm putting it at the top of this fucking paper every week. So we're all going to see it. So that was cool. Then the second lesson came like six months later, nine months later when he was like, by the way, you guys notice like we got the results?

Like it's actually coming to fruition now. And if we look back, we can't say which one thing we did was like the big growth mover. and he goes, there's this phrase that I think Andreessen Horowitz uses, which is, or they made it more popular, I guess. I don't know if they invented it. But Ben Horowitz has it in his book,

which is there's no silver bullet. There's only lead bullets. And this is about, this is basically what that means is there's no silver bullet strategy. There's no one thing you're going to go do that's just going to magically like make everything okay, make everything work.

The only growth strategy that truly works over time is a many lead bullet strategy, which means you fire a, you do a bunch of things and you keep firing, keep firing, keep firing until the, you know, the thing falls over and it finally, finally you break through. And so I would say this is a good, and so that became the second motto, which is, remember, only lead bullets. And so that, that was, those are at the top of every weekly update was those two things. That's pretty good. To catch myself, because I'm good, but my, what's my leak? My leak was impatience. My leak was looking for. for the genius tactics, when all it took was lead bullets and patience.

And so, you know, if you take away one thing, you know, us talking about our growth numbers, I think some people will like it because they like hearing the actual numbers. It's great when somebody's like transparent about things. Cool. We're at over half a million downloads this month, like monthly now. And we're trying to get to a million. Some people will be like, why do they talk about their podcast number so much? But I hope the takeaway is forget about how our podcast is growing.

That's probably irrelevant to you. but you probably have a project you're trying to grow, and hearing how Sam thinks and talks about how he's growing this podcast is going to be beneficial for how you do it. Okay, how to grow a thing. Yeah. Back to our how-toes. I think that, and we'll move on,

but the phrase that I've been thinking about a lot lately is people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but they underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years and decades. Right. Absolutely. And that's kind of an example here. We've been frustrated on some month-to-month basis or a week-to-week basis, but like, it's kind of cool seeing these numbers, like, really start to pay off. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.