My First Million - #189 - Second-hand E-commerce, Door-to-door Sales, and Live Show Recaps

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Sam (@theSamParr) & Shaan (@ShaanVP) discuss second-hand e-commerce, door-to-door sales, and business poised to bounce back after COVID in this episode. They start off the episode recapping the live shows in Miami and Austin which leads them into personal travel and other slingshot business set to rebound after a COVID slump. The guys transition to the Mayweather Paul fight, the infamous Charizard necklace, and to some exciting things happening in the NFT space. They close it out with Shaan sharing ideas on litigation finance, second-hand e-commerce, and a fantastic story on door-to-door sales. --------- * 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: * (1:16) - Episode Overview * (2:31) - Intro * (5:44) - Recap of Live Shows * (6:55) - Personal travel is crazy right now * (10:10) - Sam & Shaan on slingshot startups * (20:26) - How sports are innovating * (23:09) - Floyd Mayweather vs. Logan Paul * (25:27) - The Charizard Necklace * (27:18) - LaMelo Ball’s NFT collection * (33:55) - What is Ether.Cards * (41:52) - Peter Thiel and litigation finance * (50:22) - Second-hand e-commerce * (1:00:42) - Mega-segment on door-to-door sales * (1:20:11) - Outro

This is why on all my landing pages, I always ask for email first. Yeah. 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. What's up? We're back from Miami.

And we got a new nickname. I am Sean Fury. He is the Vanilla Gorilla. And we are back. We had to wing it this episode because we had a guest canceled last minute. But I think it turned out pretty good. So, Sam, what do we talk about? Yeah, so this episode actually turned out, I think, to be one of my favorite in a long time.

We probably discussed maybe 20 or 30 ideas. The ideas start about halfway through, but we have a bunch of interesting ideas that are scattered throughout. So a few things that we've discussed. So businesses that we've both invested in recently, including an event business, we've talked about slingshot ideas. So slingshot ideas that are ideas that have been kind of under the radar because of COVID. But now that there's a lot of pent up demand. for events, for interaction, things like that. These are going to be slunk shot.

Is that the right word? Slung shot. Slung-shooted back into popularity. We talked about litigation finance. So basically there's a whole bunch of people that will finance lawsuits and then take a cut the winning settlement. Kind of interesting. We talked about second-hand stores.

Shockingly, that's actually, it seems like a huge idea. And then finally, we wrapped up with one of the best song stories I've ever heard, but we talked about door-to-door sales. Trust me, it's going to leave you fired up. It's in the last 15 minutes. It's awesome. We were supposed to have Bill Smith from Hello Landing on. I got an email from his PR team literally 60 seconds before we were supposed to hit record saying he's not going to make it.

I don't know what we're going to do today. I'm so angry about that. Oh, my gosh, I'm frustrated. I got to give you credit. You replied back to the email to the PR person. The PR person, 60 seconds before the podcast is supposed to record. We're in like the sound room, you know, green room getting sound check. and it's like, hey folks, sorry, not going to be able to make it today.

Looking forward to rescheduling. And I just goes, are you kidding? One minute before the podcast. No context. And I thought, are you kidding, was very balzy. I would have just ate it, just took the slap. And I think you rightfully, you're rightfully like, what? I mean, okay, so I'm reading this.

book called Nonviolent Communication. I'm reading it for two reasons. The first reason is I've gotten repeated feedback from you and Abraeu and my co-workers is that I have a temper. I don't think I have a temper. So I'm trying to get that. And my wife, Sarah, the second reason is that. And this feedback is pissing me off. Yeah, I think I could be a little hot. But we got to say, I was with you the whole week. We went to Austin, Miami. And you were, were like an angel. You were totally patience. You were just being grateful the whole time. It was amazing. And then you, I think you even noticed at the end, I was going to tell you. And then you go, I've been really kind this whole trip. I'm feeling really kind and grateful.

So I guess we can talk about that. But yeah, so Bill Smith, sorry, brother. Like, I have a feeling. I have a feeling it wasn't Bill's fault. That's what I would bet. He's got people and I bet that he screwed that. They screwed it up, not him, but I reply. You know what happens? Like sometimes you don't sort of, you don't really think about the other side. You're just going about your day. One thing is rolling over. This other thing comes up.

And you're just like, we got to move that call thing. We've got to move that podcast thing. And so, you know, I've been on that side where, you know, I don't sort of fully, you know, appreciate that the other side of it has, you know, there's a lot of prep that goes into a podcast. There's like multiple people. on board and timing and then you need to record because you have to release and then you're preparing for him.

You're researching him. You're not researching other topics. So then you've got to go live without him. But I just think that, look, look, we're not big shots yet. I would love to be a big shot. We're not big shots yet. But I would say we are big enough shots that like someone, like it would be wise to take this at least seriously and give like a little bit of heads up.

I'm not saying that we're like big deals. But like it's a good, it's a good enough platform. He wouldn't have rescheduled Tim Ferriss a minute before the pot. Is that what you're saying? Oh, definitely not. Look, I'm not saying that we're big deals, but I am and we are. All right. Whatever.

I hope you come back. So I don't know what we're going to talk about, but you want to do a recap of this weekend? Yeah, let's do it. So we had a fun week. We went to, I went to Austin, which is your hometown, stayed at your house. Not my hometown. My current town, yeah. And we did a live show.

I don't know, about 100 people were able to fit into the venue. We did it at the App Sumo office with Noah Kagan. That was fun. Then we hopped on a plane next morning, 5 a.m. And got to Miami where the Bitcoin conference was happening. So there was like 10 to 20,000 people in town for, you know, this Bitcoin thing. And we were there for our Miami show. And I think, I don't know, a few hundred people.

I don't know how many ended up being maybe. I don't know, what do you think, Dan? 250, 300 people, 300 people, something like that. Well, 300 people RSVP, but I think, or no, sorry, 350 show up. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so 200 people showed up or so, did the live show there, met a bunch of cool people, people who flew in from Paraguay and, you know, all different types of places to attend.

And, yeah, then we hung out and we flew home. So that was a, that's what happened. But there was some interesting things that were going on. Give me your kind of like, what do you think would be the most interesting one or two things to talk about from the trip? I have a couple. So I have a bunch. And thank you, Bill Smith.

So I'm just rattling this off the top of the dome. There's no research here. But the airports and hotel situation in both Miami and in Austin, bananas, absolutely crazy. We went to the airport. I think we got there at about 6 a.m. We left my house at 5.30, I think. And it was like an hour-long wait, including TSA precheck, to get past security. And it was booming.

I went to Miami. The reason I came home early is because my hotels, I went to book on hotel tonight, and they all got canceled for some reason. And I couldn't find a single hotel in between the ranges of $200 and $2,000 in Miami. I had to go stay at a family's house. Travel is crushing it right now. I'm just shocked at how booming everything is. Yeah.

And also, I came from California. And in California, there's just like COVID precaution everywhere. And as soon as we got to Austin, you were like, oh, yeah, this is my favorite, like, you know, coffee shop slash bar. I don't even know what the place was. a Lazarus or whatever it is, whatever it's called. And we walk in and I was like, it's like stepping into a time machine. I was like, whoa, everybody's just chilling. Everybody's hanging out at a restaurant, indoors, no masks.

Some people had their mask on. That's cool. That's their choice. And other people didn't. But it just, it was like, wow, life has really gone on. And people are back to normal. And because in Florida and Texas, I think they're probably two of the most like kind of forward states as far as like returning to the norm.

and then, you know, California, I come back and it's sort of the same thing, you know, you if your nose peeks out of your mask, you get three dirty looks. And I'm over the mask time. I'm like, I'm vaccinated. Let's roll here. Yeah, so that was a takeaway with some COVID stuff.

My thing, where, do you think that, do you see any opportunities right now? So, like, you had heard about pent up demand and how the economy is going to bounce back. after seeing Miami, after seeing Austin Airport, I've seen a little bit of New York, it's just, it's booming. Where do you think the opportunities are? Do you have anything off the top of your head that you're looking at? I'm glad I bought Airbnb stock when it was down because I think Airbnb is going to do very well because I do think people are pretty roaring to get back out there and doing things,

traveling, traveling especially. I know a lot of people that haven't seen their family in like, you know, a year and a half type of thing. So I think that people are going to be coming back out. That's not that, like, you know, insightful of an answer. It's just sort of obvious. And I think that a lot of things that we did as a necessary evil are going to go away. People are going to ditch those with quickness. The same way I was ready to just ditch my mask as soon as it was okay to do it,

I think, you know, all the remote learning stuff is going to go away pretty quickly because people, if it wasn't a better experience, it's like going to the graveyard as soon as you don't have to do it. And I think remote school is one where every parent, every kid I've ever talked to that had to do remote, you know, Zoom school. They are not like, oh, you know, I really, really enjoy, you know, school from home. Like, there's people who enjoy work from home. I don't know anybody that enjoys school from home. So I think that's, that side is like going to take a big hit. Did you see this company?

So I'm going to talk about a startup real quick that I just invested in. bet you looked at it as well. It was called Mary. Have you heard of Mary? It's be merry.com. No, tell me about it. So, Onker, so basically I'm friends with this guy named Anker, who's a successful entrepreneur, and he invests in stuff, and he just sends me interesting stuff. I thought you were on that list because you... Maybe I just missed it, or I think I have a feeling you missed it. And so there's this, so basically, I'm on the lookout for companies that are going to be taking advantage. We have to come up with a cute name for this, like, pent-up demand because it's like what are people going to care about right now so jason calicanis had a good phrase

where he goes slingshot startups they had a setback they were pulled back during covid but it like it's like a slingshot when you when you when you pull it back is yes it's gone backwards but it's building up this momentum to slingshot forward and i thought i like that that was a good little so slingshot startup so i'm looking at like event event related stuff um i think sex related stuff is going to be quite interesting what are some other blush um I'll give you two examples. I invested in one company called Fitness AI, and this was like an app you use when you go to the gym.

So it's like a trainer. When you're at the gym, it would be like, hey, cool. It knows your progression. So it basically says it tracks all your reps. So it knows what weight you need to do next to get the maximum gains over like a few month period of time. Now when COVID hit, Jim's close, his whole app became like useless overnight. And so he had to re-architect the whole app to do at in-home fitness.

But the reason I would say is it's not that this startup necessarily benefited from it, but you got to see what different startups are made of when you saw the entrepreneurs, you know, pivot the plane mid-flight and find a new path and actually start growing at a time where they should have been having a setback. Another example is there's these guys who keep emailing me, guru hotel. They were a YC startup and they were, you know, software for hotels to increase their bookings and is focused in Latin America. And of course, you know, COVID hits.

Nobody's booking hotels. Their business should really struggle. And like they just made all these tweaks and all these adjustments so that they first stayed flat and then actually started to grow at a time when their business should have cratered and many lesser, less determined entrepreneurs, less adaptable entrepreneurs would have would have gone under. And so I think it was a great, the great filter. It weeded out the entrepreneurs. And you got to see the entrepreneurs who actually succeeded despite the.

circumstances, and those are the ones I think worth betting on. What's guru hotel about? I don't know exactly what they do. They basically, I think what it is is it's like Shopify for a hotel. So most hotel websites suck. So what they did was they just make, they make your hotel's website higher converting and higher upselling. And so you're going to get an incremental 10 to 15% in revenue because instead of paying

some, you know, your nephew to build a WordPress website for your, your hotel and it hasn't changed in eight years and you don't even touch it because you don't know how to code it. They basically take over the front end website for your hotel. And in doing so, they generate more revenue for you and then they take a cut or they take a disaster. That sounds pretty great to me. Have you heard of MindBody? You know MindBody?

Yeah. So MindBody, they're publicly traded. They were started in 2000. So they've been around for a minute. And basically they kind of started out doing that a little bit, just helping a yoga instructor. I think it's mostly like it's health stuff. Studios. Yeah. So it's basically like yoga studios, Pilate Studios, stuff like that. And they became the website and the booking system

and payment system for all those physical like locations. Yeah, crazy good company. Kind of quietly. I think they're based out of San Luis Obisbo. So they're not Silicon Valley. And so they've probably been quietly crushing it. And what's this called Hotel Guru? Guru Hotel. Yeah. Oh, they should call it the other. Yeah, they should, they shouldn't switch it. It should be hotel gurus. They should switch.

It's like so obvious when you said it. I hadn't even thought about it. Yeah, they didn't even change that. Guru Hotel? Oh, no. Never mind. Rescind all five of compliments. They, uh, well, like, I think there's a mind-body component here of like you just

create the first thing and then next, next, next, next, next, next, next. So I, are you going to invest in that company? Uh, maybe. And like they keep sending me updates and it all sounds good. But I just have this inherent thing that the best startups don't reach out randomly to non super famous investors like me. So unfortunately, and this is like this is kind of a screwed up thing. If a startup is reaching out to me to try to make room, I already discount 20%. That doesn't mean I don't do it, but I discount 20% how good it is even when it looks good.

So yeah. I know. I'm sorry to I'm in anybody else. I'm the same way. I'm like, oh, you're willing to like, it's like that's what I'm. I felt like when I was dating like, oh, you like me? Something, something's bad here. Right.

This is crazy. So there's this company called Mary I just invested in, like I said. We send it to you. And I'm not sure if this is going to be the biggest thing, but I think could definitely be a very profitable investment. It's called Mary, M-E-R-R-I. Did you go to it? It looks like a very... Be Mary.com.

I'll tell you why I'm interested, but I'll tell you first what it does. So what it does is you need to organize an event. they've uploaded, I don't know how, maybe there's a huge database out there, but they've uploaded massive amounts of renderings or like floor plans of event space. And then they make it really easy to drag and drop different tables and chairs and whatever you need for a wedding or a conference. And you can outline what the event is going to look like. And you do it in 3D because somehow the floor blue.

So it looks like the Sims. So it's like you have the venue and then it lets you upload like circle table, chairs, banquet chairs, you know, like speaker like podium or whatever, right? It looks like the Sims. You make a little 3D rendering. Exactly. And the reason I invested in this was because of something that Andrew Wilkinson said on this podcast. He called something an airport business.

I think he called, what's that thing he owns dribble? Yeah. He owns this thing called dribble. And where dribble is is, I think he was referring to dribble when we're talking about airport business. But basically with an airport, you arrive. at the airport and you're there. You have to be there for three to four hours. You're going to buy whatever they have. If you're there, it's very easy for that airport to sell you candy, a magazine. You're a captive audience. Yes, you're a captive audience. And what Mary did is they made it

where they uploaded all of these venues. And so people who are executing weddings can go on there and pay a fee to use their software to drag and drop and organize stuff. And then what they've done is so the vendor can come on and put the stuff that they want to sell. So like certain types of chairs, whether it's for rent or to buy, it could be on there. And then as the event planner is on there doing their thing, they can sell just the event planner loads and loads and loads of different stuff. So they can make money through affiliate. They can make money through subscription fees.

They can make money through a lot of different stuff that they're on there. And the reason why I invested in this is I think that this is a boring, boring thing that could work quite well. And there's going to be a massive pent up demand for events. And so we put a little bit of money into it. We'll see if it works. but I love the business of House. Do you know House, H-O-U-Z-Z?

I've heard of it, and I think you used that or something like that for your house, right? No. I use something like that, yeah. So I use what houses. You probably don't know. House is probably, the audience is probably majority of women. It's a, you basically can design your kitchen or your bedroom on house,

and they make like a billion dollars a year through affiliate fees. It's quite amazing. And it's a multi-billion-dollar company, but it's kind of been quiet in the background. It's kind of amazing. What I used was, what the fuck did I use? I used this service where you take a picture of your house. Modzi, I think you told me.

Yeah, Mazzi. I take a picture, this thing where you take a picture of your house, and then you pay $300 per room. So I think I paid like $1,200. A designer designs it. And then if I choose to, I can purchase all these stuff that they're telling me to buy, or I can just go buy stuff on my own that kind of looks like it. Right.

By the way, I like these models where, I don't know about you, but for me, whenever it's like, hey, you get the free consultation and ideas and then it's up to you if you buy them. And at the beginning, I'm always like, sweet, let me get the free expert advice and like, I'm not going to buy the things. That's how I go in. And then as soon as I see it, I'm like, oh, that looks really good. Like, I could just push this button and just order these items, right? Like, I could just buy these things. And so it ends up being where they, I go in knowing eyes wide open on the model. Like, it's like nerd wallet. It's like, cool. I go in. I read the blog post about the credit cards.

I'm not going to like just pick one of these credit cards right off here necessarily because I kind of know, you know, there's like an affiliate thing. But then I do because it's so convenient. And there's something to that. When I was selling my house, it was the same thing with staging. They're like, cool, like we're going to do all this work to give you these three free options on which one you want to do. And then as soon as you see it, you're like, okay, give me the, give me the expensive

one. I'll do it. It looks so much better. And so, you know, it sort of breaks you over time like a, like the puppy clothes where they give you the puppy. They let you keep it for the weekend. And you're like, great, I'll just play with this puppy for the weekend. And then by Sunday night, you're like, this puppy's never leaving my house.

I didn't know that was a thing. You never heard that in sales, the puppy clothes? No. Basically, you give them the thing. And then instead of having them opt in, you have them, okay, you can opt out if you want. And nobody ever opt out. Do you, what are some other slingshot startups that you're seeing? Or slingshot opportunities.

So the slingshot. So it has to be something that was set back during COVID. So what was set back during COVID? I think physical, I think physical retail, schools, travel, hospitality, like we just said. There's other things that are like, you know, like concerts and stuff like that. I think those sports games, concerts, I think those are all going to come back. So I'll give you one, which is sports games. So the NBA playoffs is going on right now.

And I always wondered would people have kind of like PTSD from COVID where they don't want to be in, even when it's safe, they just don't want to be close to other people in, you know, in confined areas. But these arenas are sold out. You know, as many people as they'll let in, it's packed. People are going nuts. They're having a good time. And, you know, it just feels good to be back in a high energy place again with a whole bunch of other screaming, you know, lunatics. And so, but I think what happened is, I think the.

It's sort of like the NBA franchise or the league had to get, had to get like double resilient because all of a sudden, this thing it just took for granted, which is all this ticket revenue went away for like a year. And so now they opened their mind up to, well, what other revenue stream should we have? Should we allow sports betting? Should we like, should we do that?

Should we sponsor things that we weren't sponsoring before? Should we do NFTs? Oh, okay, cool. NBA Topshot, we'll do NFTs as a source of revenue. So I think it's pretty interesting that I think all these like pro sports are going to bounce back because they were already a premium in-person experience. And now they were kind of lazy before at innovating. They didn't have to innovate. And COVID made them innovate the fan experience and the like business model.

And I think, you know, we should see some some good things come from that. Last night. So did you watch the Logan Paul Floyd Mayweather fight? I watched a little bit of it. Yeah. A little bit. Really? I was in a warehouse where.

We didn't have streaming internet very strong. And so it was choppy, but I got to see the last two rounds only. So it was exciting. So basically if you're going to go, I was going to go, but then I realized I didn't. Two things happened. One, someone gave me tickets. And then right before I was about to go get the tickets, they were like, also like, are you going to mention us in the hustle?

And I was like, no, not a chance. I thought this was a gift. Thank you, but no, thank you. I didn't know there were strings attached. I'm out. So I gave up the tickets. And also, I didn't like Miami. so I came home early.

Right. It wasn't for me. Not for me at all. I can see why some people like it. It ain't for me. So last night, basically, Logan Paul is a six foot two, probably, he weighed in at 190, probably fought at 210, 205, huge guy. And he fought Floyd Mayweather, who's 44, best boxer of all time, but 44 and 160

pounds at his heaviest. Right. And I thought for sure Floyd was going to win. It ended up being basically a draw because they don't declare a winner because it's an exhibition. But Floyd did not do well. And Logan did as good as he possibly could have, which is he didn't get knocked out. Well, from what I understand, Floyd did the Floyd thing where he just didn't do anything. He just played defense.

He just let the clock run out. He didn't, was it that he was unsuccessful on offense or he just didn't try any offense because he didn't need to because he got paid either way? I think he's old. Well, I think that he, I think age was a factory. here and I think that he sizes the factor here. I think that the reason why everyone says Floyd lost, because a loss or Floyd is not winning and not knocking him out. Everyone, including me, thought for sure Logan's going to get knocked out.

He didn't. He did great. He's a winner. The guy went from vining to fighting Floyd in a stadium, total winner. But what he did before the show was Logan is known for like collecting Pokemon cards. And there's this whole trend, if you don't know about this, of unwrapping cards. And so I actually love watching unwrapping NBA cards. I don't even like the NBA, but the title will be like,

unboxing a Michael Jordan card. I think it's awesome. I love doing it or love watching those. Logan has this whole thing where he does it. And he created a necklace that was basically the most expensive or most rare Pokemon card of all time. And he like put it in some type of like safety thing. And he wore it around his neck as he was walking out.

And what I think is going to happen was what I would. what looked like what he's setting up is that he is going to sell that. And I think that what his brother did, Jake Paul, was they, during the knockout, when his brother fought a few weeks ago, they had an NFT right after the fight. Right. And I think that them selling the memorabilia right away after the fight is a brilliant idea. And that started a little bit with NFTs and I, but I think that that idea is here to stay. That's interesting.

Yeah. So just for the context. So he basically had like the way that most, fighters come out, they come out with their gold chain, they come out with diamonds on. And he basically had a sort of diamond chain. But the pendant was a charzard, a one million dollar charzard card that was laminated as a holographic Charzard rare, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I'm wearing a million dollars on my chest right now.

And it just helps because he's already invested in Pokemon. So him giving it that sign and giving it that credibility using the platform made his own collection worth more and made that individual one worth more because it now has the story of this is the one that you saw on TV, not just the fact that it's a rare Charzard card. So smart move all around. These guys know how to make money. Floyd had his mask sponsored. He had like everything sponsored on his body.

His mask was sponsored by Ethereum something.org. Did you see that? I don't know what it was. It was crazy. So his hat, his mask, everything was sponsored as he walked. out because these guys, this was an all-time money grab. It was great. So I want to tell you a cool NFT thing. Most NFT things, by the way, not that cool. You have to explain what we're adding so many listeners, Sean, that you have to actually say what NFT is because I think like a lot of

people don't understand. I've got an aunt and a mother-in-law listening. You've got to explain what an NFT is. All right. NFT is a piece of art that is digital. That's the way that most people are using it today. It stands for this thing from crypto. So you've heard of Bitcoin. Might have heard of Ethereum, Ethereum lets you create this thing called an NFT. An NFT just means it's a unique thing. So, for example, if I have a $100 bill and Sam has a $100 bill, we could swap it and we would just know they're all the same. $100 bill is the same as the other.

But if I have a piece of art on my wall, Sam has a piece of art on his wall, we can't just swap it because my art is unique and his art is unique and they're not going to be worth the same amount. Even if we had sort of the same pair of Jordans, They might be in different condition or different years, whatever it is. So an NFT is more like a pair of fancy basketball shoes. It's something that collectors will own. It can be used in many other ways, but the majority is that people are using it to

create and collect digital art. They got popular because a whole bunch of people who were what I'll call crypto-rich, right? They made their money on Bitcoin. They made their money on Ethereum. They got tons of money from that. And when NFTs came out, they were using their, they were using their their winnings to buy NFTs.

And so they were buying NFTs for literally millions and millions of dollars. And it blew people's mind. It's like, wait, that's just an image on a computer screen. Why are you buying it for millions of dollars? And they would say, you know, what's the Mona Lisa but some, you know, but some paint on a piece of paper, right? Art has, its value is in the meaning that people give it. So anyways, NFTs got popular.

They've had sort of a crash since the hype cycle because everybody, Everybody poured in, thought there was a chance to make money. And then, you know, it's down, and the NFT market's down like 80 plus percent right now from where it was just a few months ago. So it's been very up and down. But I'll tell you something cool that the people who are not, there's a group with any technology, there's a hype cycle where people jump in just to try to make a buck. And then there's like the people who just believed in it the whole time.

And when the crash happens, they stay. They don't go away. And so I'll tell you a cool NFT example. So do you know who Lamello Ball is? a basketball player from the ball family, and they're kind of like a little obnoxious. So like the Kardashians of like NBA. So go to lamello ball.io.

So I met this guy or, you know, actually I haven't met him yet. Ben met him because we thought this project sounded really awesome. So he partnered up with lamella ball and lamellible ball created his own NFT. Now here's how it works. The website looks awesome. Yeah, exactly.

Very good website. So there's like four different types. It's like he turned lamella ball essentially into a Pokemon card. Okay, so you can collect these different Labelibol types of cards. Now, what do they do? Well, the twist here, the reason I think it's kind of cool is that this is called a dynamic NFT,

meaning most NFTs, when you make it, it is what it is. The image or the video is, it stays that way until the end of time. A dynamic one will update or upgrade based on things that happen. So what this is, is it's sort of like a bet on the player. So you can buy one of these. You can buy the MVP card. And today it's worth not so much because he's never won an MVP. But if in his career he ever wins an MVP, the card will like evolve like a Pokemon card.

It'll upgrade because it has been unlocked because the thing actually happened in real life. So it's like today you're betting these cheap options. Will Lamella Ball ever win the NFT? Will he ever win MVP? Will he ever win rookie of the year? Will he win a championship? And if he does, your asset that you bought will dynamically upgrade because it takes in the data from the real world that, hey, this event has happened. And it is now worth more and it could do more.

And specifically, just to like kind of round it out. But the price isn't, it's not worth more necessarily, right? Well, and, you know, it's like most things, right? Like if I buy a Michael Jordan rookie card and then Michael Jordan becomes the greatest player of all time, that rookie card's worth more than it was when he was a rookie and nobody knew how good he would be. How do they literally, so what I'm looking at here is basically this 3D rotating image of Lamello playing basketball. It's like a little trophy almost. How are they making, I mean, this looks awesome. Like the resolution's amazing, everything about like the way it looks is cool.

How are they making that? I think it's just 3D animators on the internet. They get them to make some custom stuff for them. And by the way, that's a group of people who've had a renaissance right now because there's a whole bunch of famous people that want their own NFT. And to do that, you need a digital artist to make you. cool thing. So anyways, one cool thing about this, by the way, you buy the thing and it comes with access. So like, let me just read off the perks if you bought like the most expensive one. So the gold, the gold lamello one is the rookie of the year one. It is guaranteed to evolve if he

wins rookie year, which by the way, he will this year. It comes with a, it comes with a physical card. It comes with $750 and guaranteed endorsement deal rewards. So basically his endorsers have to give you free stuff, which is kind of cool. It comes with some official merchandise from him. You have a chance to win NBA game tickets valued up to $5,000. You have a 50% chance to receive autograph memorabilia, and you're going to get exclusive access to video calls that he's going to do with holders of his collectible. So it's kind of cool, right? What if a basketball card came with access to the player, right? Like, you know, you buy the LeBron card, and LeBron, for all the holders of the platinum card, he's going to do a Skype call with them or video. Why the hell did I say Skype?

A Zoom call with them, you know, once a year or something like that. Or you get, you know, a pair of game worn shoes. You have a 10% chance of getting those or something like that. This is great. I think this is so cool. What I want to ask, well, I'll ask that in a second, but this is awesome. I think like I'm not necessarily. The guy who made this, I think he's like 20, 21 years old. He's like Steve Bartlett type of, I'm seeing shades of Steve Bartlett again in this guy who's a hustler who made this happen. So that's actually what I want to ask about. I wasn't going to skip ahead, but I do, we'll come back to this.

So what I'm seeing on this website is that this is basically this La Mello thing is basically a creation of a company called Ethercards. Is that right? Yeah, maybe that's the name of his company. Yeah. His company is called Ethercards. I'm looking at the traffic. If you go to similar web and look at the traffic, basically nothing, nothing, nothing.

And then in one month, three million visitors, all the traffic is direct, meaning someone very likely is there's just three million people in the very first month of this thing being launched in March, typing in ether. Dot cards. Those numbers, if you don't know anything about these numbers, that's a really, that's phenomenal. What I want to know is how are people discovering these types of things? So beautiful question. I should have said this at the beginning. The change here is not, oh, we went from a basketball. card that's a piece of cardboard that you buy from Target to now a digital thing that you have

on your phone or on your computer. It's not just that. Lamello owns his own IP. He is releasing his own card set. So otherwise, the NBA signs an agreement with Panini. They're the guys who make all the basketball cards or tops, right? These brands that make cards. And the players don't get directly assent from their own cards popularity. So right now, like Luca Donchich, he has the most popular Panini cards. And they're going up, they're being sold on the secondary market for thousands and thousands of dollars. You know, like a LeBron card will sell for $200,000. But LeBron doesn't get a cut of that transaction because he didn't issue it.

He, you know, he as a collective group, they signed the rights, you know, when they become an NBA player, the NBA cuts a deal. And so they're going to, sure, they get some like shared royalty stream of like, you know, whatever the licensing agreement was NBA-wide. but the individual player doesn't get anything, and therefore also has no incentive to promote this thing. Whereas with this, Lamello has minted his own card.

He owns whatever percent he negotiated with ether cards. And Lamello is going to be putting this in his Instagram story all the time. And guess what? He's got millions of followers on Instagram who love Lamello Ball. And so he's going to get more value out of this than he would ever get out of a traditional basketball card. Walk me through how this young guy made Ether cards in this business. So basically, just, you know, he made the website. It's very slick, very cool. How is the tracking of all these

cards possible? The back-end technology of like tracking the payment and all that, do they actually make it make that? Are they building on top of something else? I don't know. I think they're probably building on top of something else. It's one of the best parts of crypto is that because crypto is open source, crypto is about building protocols. You can use those protocols to do anything. So we had Furcon on here. I don't know. Did he talk about PAC protocol? I don't know if he did it. He's building, Furkan's building something called the PAC Protocol

out of his thing, NFT Labs. Yeah. And basically it's just a protocol where you or I can go on there and say, hey, you know, just like you said, you love to watch people doing pack breaks of NBA cards.

We could make her own MFM packs, just like Jack Busher, I think did with visualized value. We could say, great, we want, we're going to offer these 10 possible cards right inside. One of them gives you like an hour of business coaching.

Another gives you a shout out on the podcast. Another gives you a free shirt. Another gives you just a Twitter follow. Whatever. We come up with our rewards. We just type them in and it basically says assign the probability to each. It's like, oh, you know, the follow is high probability and an hour of business coaching is only 1% of people should get this when they open a pack.

We set the price and it'll basically spin up like Shopify for NFTs. It'll spin up a website where we can sell our packs and fans can come. they could buy them and they can open them up and they can have a chance of winning X inside. We didn't have to do any coding to make that happen because they have built the PAC protocol to make this happen and it's all saved on the Ethereum blockchain. All the ownership is there. And they just take a cut of every buy in exchange for having built this technology for us. And back to the Ether card.

So these kids built just the front end and used someone else's protocol and then they hollered it. They somehow got in touch with Lamello. I mean, like, hey, do you agree? By the way, sorry, just to catch you off one second. I don't know how we got touched to Lomelo. I'm going to ask him, but after launching this project, so this thing did hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first day when it dropped.

So, you know, just the Lamello thing? Just the Lamello thing did, I don't know if I could say the exact number, but north of $300,000 during the drop. And then other players. By the way, it's so funny, say, like, north of 300. Like, it did over $300,000, $433,000. Like, that's it. You know, you got to give people the information without giving people the information.

I'll give you a hit. It rides with $7,000. Like, that's the way you're saying. Yeah, basically. So other NBA players, including one of the most popular NBA players on the planet, hit them up and was like, hey, saw the Lamello thing. Let's, like, talk to my people. Let's do it.

Let's do my own. And did this kid have a following already on Twitter? What platforms are you using? So he, I'm going to chat with him this week, but Ben talked to him while we were in Miami. And what he said was that he got big, his claim to fame before this was helping artists go viral on TikTok. So he partnered with a bunch of musicians. He's like, yo, you know a bunch of the viral things you've seen on TikTok? I kind of architected those behind the scenes.

I don't know what that means, but I'm like, oh, you got hustler dripping off you. Like, this is good. And did you, how did Ben? So Ben, if you're listening, is Sean's co-worker, basically they scheme together. How did Ben find this? We saw the announcement on ESPN announced. Lamello Ball is doing his own NFT. We saw an article.

I read the dynamic NFT part, how it updates based on the player's actual achievements in the real world. And I go, I just, best is Ben. I go, this is fucking genius. Find the genius who made this. And he went and he found the guy who made it. He scheduled a call. I couldn't make that call. Ben did the call.

and Ben gave me the lowdown on who this guy is. He's like, he's awesome. You should talk to him. And Ben met him on social. Yeah, just DM them. Ben has my, I don't know if he used his Twitter or he has access to my Twitter where he can just DM anybody from my account.

And because my account has more followers, I get a higher rate of reply. So let's do, there's so many takeaways here for a listener. I actually want to go through this takeaway. The person is like, I'm actually amazed at this. The way that you found this was not special. Correct. Maybe if Ben used, so Ben doesn't have a big following, right?

He's just, no, it looks normal. BM Levy. Ben Levy. I don't know his Twitter. Something like that. Ben M. Levy. So yours looks special. You have 144,000 people.

Most people would reply to someone. They have 144,000 people. But Ben does it? All he did was DM them. Does the kid even know, does he know who you are? Like, does he know Sean is like a popular podcaster or anything? No idea. Okay, great.

So that's the takeaway here. Is that like you found an opportunity by seeing it on ESPN. You had Ben, but you didn't have. have to have Ben. No, I've done this. That's how I found Ben, by the way. Same thing. Just cold reach out. That's a huge takeaway here. The other takeaway is just that the SNFT thing is cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think you're going to see more of this. You're going to see famous people launching their own limited edition NFTs that come with access to the person, and they own the whole thing. So they're not using, they don't have to sign with a label or sign with

or like rely on tops to go make their card for them. They're going to release. their own cards and they're going to own their own upside, which is obviously a much better thing for the talent. Yeah, this is amazing. I love this. I have a couple other topics if you want to do it. Go, go, go, go. Okay, let's do two things.

So normally when we research, we have a document. What are you using? Mine's just on my notes, for my phone's notes, because I was just typing it while we were like, we'd be out, we'd meet somebody. Like, for example, at the event where we did the podcast, some guy came up, he's like, hey, I'm a lawyer. I've been a lawyer in Dallas for a long time. I drove down for the event,

drove from Dallas to Austin. And, you know, I just love, you guys always get the wheels turning. In fact, I can't just, like, be a normal lawyer anymore. I really want to do more. And he has this idea for litigation finance. He goes, you know what that means? Did you talk to this guy?

No, but can I guess what that means? Yeah, please. Basically, I think this is what Peter Thiel did. So is it when, okay, so basically Peter Thiel is this billionaire guy who had a vendetta against Gawker because Gawker outed him as being gay. So Peter Thiel's a powerful VC. He's gay.

He didn't want anyone know he's gay. Gawker wrote an article saying he's gay. And so he plotted for 10, 15 years. Probably 10 years, he goes, whenever I see these guys slip, I'm pouncing. So 10 years later after this article, Hulk Hogan has a sex tape issue. And Peter Thiel has two guys on staff,

just sniffing out an infraction. They go, hey, this Hulk Hogan thing, that's it. So the story is Hawk Hogan was either Hawk Hogan. Hawke Hogan was having sex with someone. Some third party filmed it without his consent. Gawker published the video. Peter Teele goes, boom, that's it. Hey, Hawk, I got the best lawyers.

I'm going to fund you. And if the case wins, just give me a little cut of it. Peter Thiel probably didn't even take a cut of it. But that's how it could have worked. That's how it could work. Exactly. And he did. They did the lawsuit.

They bankrupt. They basically put Gawker out of business. Gawker no longer is in business. The guy who built that site over the years, you know, it all came falling down because he pushed it too far. He pissed off the wrong, the wrong billionaire. So, and by the way, some people think this is bad. Whatever.

I don't care. So what litigation- Not that you don't care that if it is or it's not bad. You're saying it's interesting regardless. I'm saying irrelevant to what we're talking about is whether billionaire should fund lawsuits and take down media or not. Okay, whatever. So, yeah, litigation finances is exactly the,

So basically what he does is he's a lawyer. He analyzes cases that could be pursued. So, oh, you might have a lawsuit here that you should be pursuing. You for whatever reason. Maybe you don't know if you could win. You don't realize you could potentially sue for being wronged. You don't have the money. The corporation can throw all their lawyers at this.

And you don't want to go broke trying to just sue. So you kind of sit on it. So I think it was like 70% plus potential suits go. unfiled because of, you know, one of many reasons. And so the idea here would be if you see, you can submit to them, hey, would you back my case? And they basically underwrite the risk of it. They look at it. They say, oh, I think you have a really strong case or no, I think you have a weak case. If you have a strong case, they'll say, great, we will fund the lawsuit. You get a piece of it. If it doesn't work, you lose nothing. And so basically the guy has now raised or is raised,

millions and millions of dollars from family offices and other folks to fund these cases. And so that's what they're doing now is a thing. Anyways, I thought it was a cool listener idea. I don't know what you think of that. How much have they raised? How much has he raised? I think they raised something like $6 million so far to fund this. And he's trying to get, you know, basically it's a proof of concept.

If they can show that, yes, we are successfully able to underwrite these cases, meaning we can correctly select the winners and offer a payback, great. If once we know that we're able to pay you back 25, 30 percent on your. you know, annually on your, on your, on your, on your, on your, on your, on your, on your, on your, financing here, then we can go raise 50 or 100 or 200 million to do more. Okay. I, I, I, I've heard of this. I didn't realize this was such a thing.

I am so in. So there's a company called Burford Capital. It's, uh, found in 2009, located in England. Did you see it? That's, he told me about it. He goes, this is big in England. There's a multi-billion dollar company, Burford, blah, blah, blah. I just Google this while you're talking.

I googled finance legal stuff. The first web, the first website went to Provar The website has like a Monday night football looking guy wearing a white dude, wearing an ill-fitting suit. Right there, I'm like, opportunity. Okay. Like anytime there's like these like shitty wicks websites with like basic looking white dudes, I'm like, that's interesting.

Second, the second thing that came up was Burford Capital. I just Googled it has a market cap of $1.8 billion. Starting 2009, that's pretty good. Right. That's pretty, this is pretty amazing. Yeah, exactly. So he was like, you know, I'll send you the information. And I told him, I said, look, this sounds great.

I don't know anything about this. So I'm probably not going to fund it just because I have two options. I can either invest in things I really understand or I can invest in things I don't understand. I used to do both. But now that this podcast has gotten so popular, now the number of opportunities that I do understand are so large. They exceed my investable capital. Now I don't have to do shit I don't understand anymore. This is a really interesting business.

This is, but was so when I, you, I, you. You're further along. And I would actually say you're probably a better investor than I am. When I look at these types of companies, I think like, what's the idea? That's important. Right. I think of I don't have enough time to go and verify if this is like a solid market. So I look at who else is investing.

That's probably a lot of people say, oh, that's boring. You know, are you ever going to take a chance? Well, probably not, to be honest. Like, I like looking at that. But then the third thing is I look at the person. Are they a competent person? Right. Like, so does this person seem like they're going to build a huge.

company office? You know, he seemed like a competent person. He seemed like a lawyer who, you know, it's, I don't think you need to be the visionary or like the shark executor. I don't think you need to do anything for that. I think you literally just need to be somebody who's going to do the blocking and tackling to make this happen. I don't think it requires genius, which is great.

That's actually a positive thing for this business. You don't want to invest in businesses that require genius. Yes, but you more likely than not need some type of charisma in order to be, I mean, like, you either do need to be a genius. So you do need to be like a Peter Thiel type of guy. You do need to be maybe like what are you, like you or me type of person, which we don't really know how to do that much. But we're charismatic enough to convince other people to come work in our companies and convince them to do the work. Yeah. And then you have like a few like industry knowledge where maybe this guy has.

But you need something. Yeah. You need attributes. As Connor McGregor, if you're going to beat me, you're going to have to. some attributes. Yeah. If you're going to beat me, you need some attributes. Yeah. So like, look, if you're going to, like, succeed, you need some attributes. So what are the attributes going to be? Like something, like, when you're building a fighter or building a sports team or building, like, a NBA player on video games, and you can, like, put, like, do I make this person, like,

as fast as possible? Do I make them as tall as possible? Do I make them as strong as possible? You need something there. I think that's the next shirt. You need attributes to beat me. Yeah. So, like, what attributes are? Like, what attributes? is this guy have. So that's what I'm curious about. Yeah, I think his is domain knowledge. I think that's the biggest point. Do you agree with me, by the way? You need some attributes. You do. And I guess the only point I was trying to make is that some require more attributes another. There are some where you have to be the smartest and the fiercest and the fastest. And, you know, like that's, there's some businesses that require that. And there's some where

you can be the tortoise, not the hair. Right. And I think this is one where you could be the tortoise. You just have to keep going forward. And that's an attribute, by the way. Determination and just I'm willing to do it all the time. Exactly. And having the steady hand and being good at actually selecting the cases, right? Because that's going to just prove the track record out over time. So I think the domain knowledge matters. All right. I want to do some other topics.

So I have like three, but I don't know which one I want to do. Okay, I'll give you some options. This is amazing, by the way. This is turning out to be quite good. Totally unplanned. And by the way, I wrote these down just while we were talking about the beginning when the guy canceled. All right. So Bitcoin, Miami, I have a few comments on,

what was going on in Bitcoin, Miami. I heard it was horrible. So we could talk about that. We could talk about, I have a thing on secondhand e-commerce, if you want to hear that. Also, door-to-door sales. I have a story there. And the last one is a framework about the next Apple, the next Google, the next Facebook. So tell me.

They're all great. Give me which one you want to do. The second one and then the fourth one. Okay, the second one I think was the secondhand e-commerce thing? Yeah. All right, so let's do that. So as you know, I've been dabbling in e-commerce and, you know, built a brand and then have gotten, built a community called Club LTV that has like, I don't know, 100 store

owners each doing somewhere between 1 million a year and 100 million a year in sales. And so in that, I've started to learn some of the problem, the pain points of e-commerce. One of the interesting things that I didn't know about, that you might know about, right? Because you've used Poshmark. I think when I was at your house, you told me, guess what me and Sarah did this weekend? We sold like $97 worth of old clothes on Poshmark. And I was like, dude, what's happening? This is your hobby?

And you're like, yeah, I love this shit. I didn't realize how big this secondhand market for e-commerce is. Dude, it's huge. It's crazy. So let me tell you, Pashmark, going public, multi-billion-dollar valuation. Win public. Yeah, when public. What is it?

I don't know. We'll look it up. But yeah, it's a public. Okay. There's thread up, spoken hustle con, raised $250 million, either going public or went public already. There's Grail. I discovered Grail in 2011.

I didn't have any money. It was launched for men. Potsmark's $3.6 billion. Great. There's Grail. I DMed this guy because, or I messaged him on Reddit years ago because I was on the day he launched it. I was going to the website.

I didn't invest in it. I think it still could be great. It's basically Poshmark for hip dudes. What else is there? There's like eight others that are like substantial. So let me tell you what I think is interesting here. We, for our store, for our DDC brand, we have a large amount of people who buy new and they're willing to spend more buying new because they know this has like secondary value.

They know they could sell it three months for now, six months from now either new or used and recoup a good amount of the money. So certain categories you can do that better than others. So anyways, but managing this thing is really awful. So the way that people do it today is sometimes they list on Poshmark or the Real Real or like, I forgot the other one. Macari is huge. They go list on those exchanges. But a big part of it is they have Facebook groups for every brand.

So every brand will have any brand with a cult following will have a secondary market Facebook group called buy, sell trade, BST. BST. So you can look up any brand name on Facebook. Go type in the brand name. Like, I don't know, your favorite boots or leather jackets you liked or whatever. Just type in that BST. So what you'll see is that there are these private groups on Facebook communities for buying, selling, and trading what you already have. What you do is you take a photo of your closet or your item, you lay it down on the floor. You take a photo of it and you just write, you know, like there's all these acronyms. Like if you go in there, it's another language.

It's like MWT. That means new with tag. okay, great. Or like, you know, ISO, in search of this product. And so they have their own little lingo. It's an insider community. And you post the item, you just say, here's what I have, here's what it's for. I have no pets in the house, no smokers.

And then somebody in the comments will just say, they'll just type in a number. It's like a little auction. Those would be like $40. And then you just say, done, send me your, what's your email? I'll send you the PayPal invoice. So there's just like, it's like this kind of like stitched together experience where Then you have to send them the PayPal invoice. They have to pay it.

Then you have to, like, find their, get their mailing address. You have to ship it. And then people just Google BST. I just found one. Paintball BST, 20K members. Right. And that's what they'll have. They'll have tens of thousands of members often.

And they're very active. And for the brand, for the brand themselves, this becomes kind of a headache. It's good, but it's bad. Why is it bad? So the first thing is a bunch of people will buy your product just to flip it. Right? So they'll go and they'll sell it for more. So we have a product.

we have one of our products. It sells for $65. And then it immediately, so it sells out the first minute we release it. And then it immediately starts selling for 10 times more. So $500 or $600 or the secondhand websites. What's that McCarrey one? M-E-R-C-A-R-I.

You've probably seen their billboards before. They're very big. Oh, that's cool. So anyways, so one point point is these, flippers, but that's okay. The other part is like you don't benefit from the secondhand market directly. Like you don't get any cut of those sales that are happening. But you do sometimes have customer service problems because people complain, oh, you know, I bought this thing from the official buy sell trade group and they scammed me or they didn't send it or they sent the wrong

item. And you're like, dude, this is not my problem. Like this is, that's not even us. That's like Craigslist. So like, you can't complain to us about what's going on on Craigslist. So this company we found has a very interesting take on this. So I'm trying to invest in this. It's called Tread. How did you find this? How do you find all this crap? Guess who?

Can I, how do I share him? You need a, you want to give a love letter to Ben? I think you fell in love with Ben on this trip. I did. Tread is, tread.com. So Sean has this guy who he pays a great salary to, and his name's Ben. And I hung out with Ben for the first time. And what Ben, I admire him so much.

Ben is, and I say this with love, pretty nerdy, a nerdy guy. And not like in terms of like looks or acts, but like just like his interests. Like he just loves like gadgets. He loves new stuff. And I started talking about him and he just told me he just browsed to him. And he just told me he just browses the web to find the latest and greatest stuff. And he'll use it. And then he'll DM or email or message the person who starts the thing and just say,

this is neat. Here's tips that I would do to make it better or here's been my experience using your thing. That's all he says. And in doing that, he sees everything and knows everyone. And I think it's so fascinating. Right. He's just helpful. Okay, it's not, it's not tread.

Treat is the name of it. Treat.com. I'll send it to you. T-R-E-E-T dot co. Okay, so check that out. So what they do is they have this idea of circular commerce, meaning you make an item, you sell it, and then that person, instead of it just going to waste,

they can resell it to the next person, and they can resell it to the next person. and sort of a circular commerce model. So what they do is... Say the URL again? T-R-E-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-O. So what they do is they give your Shopify store a page or a tab

that just creates the second-hand market right there in your store. So somebody who wants to buy a used item can just go buy it second-hand from within your store. You don't have to do the whole PayPal, invoicing, Facebook group, you know, questionable integrity type of thing anymore.

Customers can just list their stuff here. It can be bought from your store, which has more trust than just a random group. And the transaction is processed, you know, online using normal credit card processing and stuff on this. And the brand gets a percent cut. You can set your percent cut of what you'll take out for hosting the secondhand market. So it's an additional new revenue stream for a DDC brand. I think this is really, really smart.

This does two things. A, it legitimizes the sort of secondary circular nature of it. And a lot of people like that, that it's not being, that's not being, that's a like a less wasteful version of consumerism. The second thing is that it takes resale and it makes it a part of your business model as the brand. So for consumers, it helps because it's higher trust. You know, the technology is all built.

You don't have to do this manually through Facebook groups. And for the brand, here's an extra X percent of revenue that you're going to make every month because now you participate in the resale market. That's crazy. I don't know if this is a good idea. How would you feel as a business? I mean, you do. I'm going to use this because I want this for our business.

Do you think a lot of people feel the same way? I don't know. We'll see. You know what my gut says? Super early. Make more shit. Like, why are you selling out? Don't sell out.

Like, is you selling out? That sounds like a you problem, not a, you need a plug-in problem. Well, it's not just for selling out, right? Some people just can't afford the full priced item. Like, I don't know, you bought those dumbbells in your garage, secondhand off Facebook marketplace. whatever, right? Like, if you can get the good, the item in good condition for half the price, that opens up your buyer pool into a different segment that can't maybe always afford the

full price item. And you don't have to do heavy discounting as a brand. Okay. So I'm just Googling as you're talking because we didn't have time to research. But so Patagonia's CEO has this great thing where he goes, I actually don't want you to buy more stuff. Buy one thing from us. And if you, if it rips, if it rips, we'll fix it and it should just last. So like only buy one thing. So I just Googled Patagonia pre-owned. They have a URL that's dedicated to it called oneware.patagonia.com.

And I'm pretty sure they have their entire, yeah, they have an entire way to buy and sell their own gear. Kind of cool, actually. It is actually cool. You know who would buy used Patagonia stuff? You? Me. Me.

I buy youth clothing all the time. Whenever I buy Red Wing boots, I always buy them used. I actually change my opinion very quickly. I think this is cool. All right. I'm glad Patagonia got you across the line. Okay, I have another topic for you. Do you want to do another one?

Yeah, keep going. Wrap it up. No, keep going. This is good. Okay, let's do one more. Well, no, you had four things. Which one you want to do? So your remaining options.

Door to door. Okay. So this is a little bit longer. Did Patagonia's pre-owned website, by the way, it's fucking sick. $90 jeans for $38 bucks, on board. But could treat be a big business as a Shopify plugin. am I being a hater just because it's a simple Shopify plugin? Well, I don't even think it is a Shopify plugin, but I know what you mean.

Yeah, I think it's the wrong way to think about it because if you look at how big the centralized marketplaces are, Mercari, Poshmark, those are three or four billion. This is that same thing, but just decentralized. Instead of one website where you go to find all the brands, every brand has your little marketplace embedded into it. So I think it's a smart strategy where you give the brand the marketplace instead of trying to get the customer to come to your app. This is fucking awesome.

Here's some more. So door-to-door sales. So this thing has been happening recently. I know you love the Mormons. So I think you'll dig this. Love the Mormons. Love the Mormons. So I have met and I've heard these stories in the last few days.

I'll give you two of door-to-door sales. I have never done door-to-door sales. But I'm almost jealous that I haven't now. So I'll give you two examples. Do you know who Brian Johnson? is generic. It might be hard to place. Yeah.

So I know two different Brian Johnson's. One sells books online and the other started Braintree. Brain Tree is the guy I'm talking about. Okay. That's pretty good. You know, you get 200 points for your house there. All right. So Brian Johnson, I was listening to his interview.

He went on Lex Friedman's podcast. I was listening to it. Does he still work? Yeah. So here, his story is insane. So he basically creates Brain Tree, which is like a payments. It's basically online payments company. Stripe before Stripe.

It was Stripe before Stripe. It didn't become Stripe, but it sold for about $800 million, I believe, to PayPal. And he owned most all of it. Yeah, exactly. He owned a huge chunk of it. He also, I think they bought Venmo along the way. So he had the strategy early on, which was like, we go to the merchants. We get the merchants to use us because we're so easy to use online.

And then we'll build a consumer like side of the, we'll buy the most hit. consumer app, that was Venmo, and that will be a valuable company. And anyway, so he builds this company for $800 million. He sells it. And he decides what he wanted was he wanted to have a huge nest egg to just reinvest into a world-changing idea. So he's like, how do I get as much financial capital as possible in the next few years so that I can self-fund and work on one of the most like gnarly, you know, like

huge world-changing problems? So the thing he's working on And by the way, he thought that brain tree wasn't going to be I mean, that's like pretty And Lex even brings this up He's like, you know, online payments actually does help the world He's like, yeah, that's true But I knew that if I didn't do online payment, somebody else would

I wanted to work on something that if I didn't do it, I don't know if anyone else would. And so the thing he's working on is that same thing that Elon is working on Neurrelink. So his is called kernel? Kernel. It's a brain interface. So what that means is you put this helmet on.

It looks like a bicycle helmet. And it's basically reading your brain waves while you're sitting there. And so, you know, what does that mean? First, it can analyze your brain while you're just doing things. So that's interesting. You can get more insight about yourself. And what his company's trying to do is basically spit the data out so that all he's trying to do is be able to read brain data.

Then any developer can take that data and those learnings and actually build any application to improve your life off of it. So that's what they're trying to build with Kernel. So, and by the way, he took, I think, $60 million after he sold Braintree, and he funded the first $60 million into Kernel himself because. Yeah, I'm reading about that right now. He put, so they've raised 53 from outside, 54 from his own money. Yeah, 50, for a million of his own money, exactly.

And so I think, you know, most investors didn't want to touch it because it's like, dude, this is just going to be a money pit. You know, it's the hardest technology requires the most expensive engineers. We're not there yet. It's going to take 10 years. And he's like, yeah, don't want to. that's why I, that's why I have this nest egg, uh, to fund this thing myself. How much did he make when he sold, um, Braintree, you think?

I don't know. I don't know the exact number. Um, but anyways, this doesn't even matter. This is just set up those, that's the guy, cool guy. I would have featured him maybe as Billy of the week and maybe we'll do a little bit of a deeper job. Hey, Dan, let's get this guy on the podcast. This guy is cool.

Yeah, we'll get Brian on. The part I thought was pretty remarkable is his door to door sales part. Okay, so what happened? So before he starts Braintree, he, uh, I think he had done a startup and it either had failed or it was failing. And what he did was, I hope I don't butcher this story. I'm just trying to remember this off top of my head because we didn't have time to prep today. So what he did was he needed some money.

So he's like, okay, how do I get money fast? My startup's failing or it already failed. He's like, okay, I need like a sales job. So he goes and he gets a sales job with some kind of like financial product company. I think it was like either like credit cards or something like that for, for businesses. And so he's like, he's basically a sales rep.

And he's like, okay, how do I, um, how do I become like the best sales rep for this? And so it became a door to door sales challenge. And so he was going door to door to each merchant. And he was selling them on the benefits of this product.

And he would then get a commission off of like kind of the, whatever the value of that customer was over the next period of time. And, and so I, I'm going to butcher this because I can't remember the hack he used. He had a, he had a very clever technique he was using when he was going door to door that enabled him to become the top salesman in North America. And so I'm going to go.

Brian? Brian did. Yeah. So he became the number one salesperson. He basically goes door to door and he figures out how to sell this product. And what he said was like, door to door sales is like just this, like really formative, formative experience for anybody. Because you have to have like an incredible amount of determination.

you're going to get rejected all the time and you need to learn how to get your foot in the door, how to get somebody's attention, how to get them interested, how to close them in order to sell any product door to door. And then I, so I heard the story from Brian Johnson and he talked about how important that experience was to him.

Next day, I go meet my uncle. I have an uncle who I've talked about on the pod before because I consider him to be the happiest man on earth. He's real estate uncle. Real estate uncle. His name's Uncle Vinny. Literally people, just coined his name Smiley.

So they just stopped calling him Vinnie. People just call him Smiley because he's just so Smiley. Like his company, they got him a trophy because he was the number one salesperson. And on the trophy, they didn't put his name. They just wrote Smiley. And that became kind of like the nickname that stuck. And they didn't even ask his permission. They just knew this is the right name for this guy.

So he's incredibly happy, but he's also been incredibly successful. And I would say, I don't think he's in all of my aunts, my uncles, in terms of IQ, just raw intelligence, I don't know. he's probably either 50 percentile, maybe even less, maybe half, maybe half that. Sorry, Vinny. No, and I mean this with love because the point I'm making is, they didn't call him dopey, smiling a lot better. He's the most successful of anyone in our family, but it's not because he had more raw

horsepower in the brain. That's not the reason that he was able to do it. And so I was telling my trainer about him, and he goes, I'd love to meet him. And I go what? He goes, yeah, does he, where does he live? He lives in Danville, actually. He lives, you know, not far away from here. 30 minute drive.

He goes, could we just go meet him? I was like, yeah. So I texted my uncle. I said, hey, I was telling my trainer about you. And he just, he wants to meet you. And he goes, and he was like, sure, come on by. No problem. Yes, like, can't wait to see you.

And I was like, I was like, who doesn't? And I was like, I noted to myself, he didn't even ask why. What's the context? Do you want something from me? He's just like, yes. You want to meet me? Yes. And I also thought to myself, what a goal, by the way, to be the type of person that people want to make a pilgrimage out, you know, to go drive an hour to go see. Just because of a description of the way you are.

That's kind of amazing because he doesn't want anything from him. He's not trying to get a business deal or get a customer out of him. He just heard how his personality is and I was like, I got to meet this guy. So we go, we drive out there and we sit down. And, you know, he's already on level 10 excitement. and we're having a great time. And I started asking him, I said, you know, when did you become you? When did you become this way?

You weren't born this way. So how'd you become this way? And he's telling me the long story. And he talked about this door-to-door sales job. He goes, I came from India and I'm a student at university. He goes, George Washington University, I think. He goes, I needed a summer job. He's like, I came here.

I only had enough tuition. The government paid for my tuition for the first year. I had no idea how I was going to pay for the second year. But like, I have one summer to bridge that gap. Like, how the heck am I going to make next fall's tuition? So he looked for a job. And his roommate was like, hey, I worked with this company that called Southwestern. I don't know if you've ever heard of this company, you're going to love it.

But basically, this company called Southwestern. And what they do is they sell books. So they sell books door to door. They have this fleet of college students that will go out and they'll sell these books like encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibles, you know, any textbooks of any kind. Southwestern Advantage is what it's called. And so they've since. grown like crazy. They acquired all. Now it's like 20 something companies and it's like a multi-billion

dollar company. Crazy story about the founder. I'm going to have him as the billy of the week as a special profile. But I'm going to tell this door to door sales story. So he goes, okay, great. So what do I do? He's like, you know, I can barely speak English because I'm just here from India, but okay, I got to go do door to sales. How do I do that? He's like they gave this, this training where you, they give us seven books like, you know, how to win friends and influence people, you know, like these seven kind of classic self-help books, Tony Robbins, and whatever. He's like, read these seven books and then come to this training seminar. He goes, I go to this thing, it's an auditorium, and it's me and like, you know, the 50 other

college students, and there's this stage, and there's just a door frame on the stage. And you'd have to get up and you'd have to knock on the door, and then they would have an act, you know, like the person from the company on the other side, an actor who is like, I'm Mrs. Johnson. And you open the door, Mrs. Johnson, and she would simulate, like, slamming the door on your face and being like, like stop bothering us, right? Or somebody who's like lukewarm or somebody who's interested. And they would teach you how to sell door to door. And he talked to me. He's like, I used to, they used to, uh, my job basically every day in the summer. And I'm in the,

you know, the heat of summer. I would, my roommate would drive me to some neighborhood, any neighborhood. I would just pick a different one every day. And at 9 a.m. he would drop me off. I didn't own a car. So I needed him to pick me up at the end of the day. So he's like, 9 a.m. he'd drop me off in a neighborhood. And 9 p.m. he'd come pick me up at the end of the day. And he's like, I would go door to door and I would knock and they would teach you the skills of just selling door to door. So do you know, I don't know, have you ever heard this? I was fascinated by how you act. What is the actual method of selling when your door to door to door? Have you ever heard this? No. Well, so you typically say, hey,

I was just talking to your neighbors and they thought this was interesting. And so here I am talking to you. That's definitely part of it. But he broke it down step up. He's like, there's a science that they taught us at this training. He goes, first you ring the doorbell, you're knocking the door. and you don't look into the door because when you look into the door, it's a little bit intimidating and they see your face, they recognize that they don't know you.

He's like, you want to look slightly, you know, off 45 degree angle away so that they're going to like, when they look through the people, they're going to be like, okay, I don't know who this guy is, but it doesn't look too threatening. And what are they trying to get you to do,

like to step your foot into the door eventually? Basically, so they open the door and you explain the pitch that you just said, which is, you know, hi, my name is, my name is Vinny, and I'm a student here at George Washington nearby. And I actually have been, you know, I've been talking to your neighbors. We, what we do is we sell, you know, we sell tech or whatever it is.

He's basically saying, I was talking to your neighbors and I wanted to stop by your place. I'm a student nearby, right? So you become a local, you're not a stranger. You're a friend, right? So you position. And then I imagine you want to put like a timestamp. Like, it's only going to be, I actually, I have to go in a second. Yeah, exactly.

I don't have a bunch of time, but I would love to just, you know, chat with you, whatever, right? And he goes, a lot of people, what they would try to do is the door sample, meaning they would tell them, I'm here to sell you a textbook, check out this book, is this something you're interested in? And then, you know, the learning is nobody ever buys a book at the door. And I thought, that's actually like a very applicable thing for almost every kind of sale is because you're afraid of getting rejected, you rush, you rush to try to just sample it, you know, give them the value so you don't annoy them.

But the reality is that that's not how a product like this would ever be bought. Nobody's ever going to buy this at the door itself. So he goes, you want to get into the home. The whole objective of the door is to get into the home. And it reminded me of your writing style where you go, I was about to say this. This is why I always say, longer is better. I want them to fall down my slippery slope.

And explain the slippery slope. It's like the first line, the goal of the first line. All right, look, there's only one goal of a headline of a sales page. And that's to get you to read the subheadline. The only goal of the subheadline is to get you read the first sentence. And the only goal of the first sentence is to get you read the second sentence. I'm going to keep on doing that until you fall down the slippery slope. And a lot of people say, I want to make this very easy to read.

So do I. I want to make it easy to read as well. But I'm going to tell you a story. And I'm not going to rush it. And I want you to fall, slowly fall down the slippery slope. And I want to make it kind of hard for you. Because the more pot committed you are, the more likely you are to buy. Exactly.

Exactly. So this is the same exact thing. So he wanted to get into the home. So he goes, you ask to come in and you don't look at them in the face. You sort of lead with your arm and your face. you sort of like point where you're trying to go, like into the living room right behind them. So you say, would you mind if I come in for a moment and you sort of point your way into the door? And if you're, once you're in the door, now your close rate has gone from like 0.01% to like 30 or 40% just because you're there.

You're sitting and you're sitting down. So you're not like standing anymore. By the way, this is why in all my landing pages, I always ask for email first because once you give me your email, you're just a little bit more bought in. You're in the door, exactly. And, you know, they might offer you water or, you know, drink. You say yes, you don't say no. Now you're both sitting there. You have your water and you start to explain to them. And now you need to put it in the context of their problem. So you look around the house. Oh, I see you have children. How old are they? Oh, I got a boy and girl myself.

Yeah, you know, blah, blah, blah. This this age is the craziest, blah, blah, blah. What are your kids doing for, what do you do for kind of after school education for your children? And that's how you're leading into the encyclopedia sale. That's how you're leading into the textbook sale is you need to frame your product as a solution to their problem. Right? So this is all like, you know, this is common sense, but I just loved hearing it.

It's not that common, dog. I think that like a lot of people don't know this. I think you want to, so I learned it. So I read how to win friends and influence people. And by the way, all those old like fuzzy books, like how to win friends in people,

influence people, they can grow rich. It sounds silly. I endorse all of them fully. That shit totally helps you. Tony Robbins totally helps you. I'm entirely on board with that. Right.

A founder of Panda Express makes all of his employees go through a Tony Robbins and how to influence people seminar, totally on board with it. I learned how to do this when I was selling hot dogs, and then anyone else I did, like every other 18-year-old, I use it to meet girls. And it totally worked and I mastered it. Well, I wasn't like that good, but I stepped up my game from significantly when I learned how to do all this. Right, right, exactly.

And so he told me a couple things out of that. He goes, he's like, here I am. I'm a Hindu selling bibles to bear. I mean, Indian Hindu selling Bibles to Americans. And he's like, that experience, that whole summer, he's like, you know, it changed me. He's like, first, I'm working hard. I'm there at 9 a.m. I'm walking around carrying loads and loads of books.

And I'm walking door to door and I'm getting mostly rejected. But then, you know, if I got even an inch, he's like, I used to schedule a same day follow-up. He's like, so, oh, now's not a good time? You know, would it be better this evening when your husband? home like maybe 5 p.m. Great, I'll be back. Because he's like, I'm just walking around this neighborhood anyways. I'll walk right back to this. He's like, so I was scheduling same day follow-ups to keep the, keep the, he's like, by the second time they met me, now I'm not a stranger. He's like, nothing has changed. They don't

know anything more about me, but it's just the second time they've seen me. And so there was all these little things I thought were really applicable to sales, but also I started thinking about these formative experiences, the really hard experiences, like what's a hard business experience? And I think this is actually pretty underrated. So he said, learn to work hard, I learned how to sell. I learned how to build rapport and talk to people. And he's like, I wasn't doing it to manipulate anybody. He's like, I just genuinely, life was a lot more fun if I got to know the person rather

than having a standoff relationship and then them being angry that I'm bothering them that day. And it got to the point where one woman would be like, are you walking around carrying all these books? He's like, yeah, you know, I have to. And she was like, here's the keys to my car. Here's my van. Drive my van around the neighborhood instead. So she gave him his car to actually do the sales.

So it went from most people slammed the door on a door to a salesman. She gave him as her car to make it easier for him to go do what he was doing. He still keeps in touch with her. 36 years later or something like that, 40 years later, he's like, yeah, you know, she just sent me this cake and like Mrs. whatever her name was. He's like, we're still good friends actually and we met because I sold her, you know, a Bible back in the day. And so I thought this was interesting.

So I think there's something to this from two levels. What are the opportunities here? I thought, A, who's doing doordator sales now? Are there still companies that primarily sell door to door? I'm going to research them and find some of the past. You know, I mean, like some really, they're probably the most famous one is Cutco. You know, Cutco?

No, what is that? Wow, you've never heard of Cutco. So they make knives in kitchenware. Their knives are actually pretty good, but their whole business model is door to door. And like I've got friends that I've done it. It's reputable in the sense that it's a good product. Right. Some people think it's scammy, but because they're like direct sales and multi-level marketing, but it's legit.

Right. And so I'm interested in these direct sales companies. I'm also interested in hiring people who are successful door-to-door salespeople. In fact, there was a guy on the podcast early on who did this for solar. He's like, my first job was door-to-door sales. I was selling solar. Like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about doing solar? It lowers your bill and blah, blah, blah. And we can help you out. It's good for the environment. And he's like, dude, it was hard as shit. I got good at it. I became the top salesperson. And I kind of feel like I can, I will never go wrong if I hired the top salesperson from any door-to-door sales company. It's like, works hard, knows how to sell. What else do you need when you're trying to hire somebody? Well, you want to hear something funny? You know who Jordan Belford is? Yeah, the Wolf of Wall Street. Oh, we talked about it this weekend, I think. You haven't read his book.

You should. So Jordan Belford was the Wolf of Wall Street. He made hundreds of millions of dollars selling penny stocks of rich people, and he was a great salesperson. He created this thing called Straight Line Persuasion. He started by selling fish and sticks door to door. That's how his entire thing started, was door to door. Yeah, it's a great book, but it was all door-to-door sales.

Yeah, so I don't really have, I don't really know what the point of this is. It's more like I loved hearing these stories. I'm sort of jealous. I never had this experience because I think I would be better at what I do if I did. And I want to go further. I want to research these companies and I want to start hiring people out of this pool of talent. I think it is an underrated pool of talent, just like we talked about, you know, sort of Mormons who go on the mission and they have to sell sort of the hardest thing,

sell a religion to somebody who never asked you to come sell it to them. And they have to do that for two years. That does create a certain sales ethic and work ethic in a person. And we've seen that take place. That's why almost all the direct sales companies, all the successful direct sales companies are all based out of Utah, because that's where the talent is that knows how to do this sort of thing. I think for, I would say for not preparing this episode turned out to be pretty amazing.

And I would say even amongst all episode, this has been one of my favorite. Dan, do you agree that this has been fire? This has been great, guys. Come on. The door to our sales was awesome. What about the other stuff? The other stuff was good, too. You guys just finished with a big bang. Yeah. I think this ended up being a winner.

So that's the episode, I think. Right? We're going to wrap up there. Let's wrap. Tomorrow or Wednesday, I want to talk about co-working spaces. I think we have to have my first million co-working business. Yeah, you like that idea. do. That was another Ben idea. And I think it's wonderful. So I tweeted out who I could talk to. I got a bunch of interesting stuff. We're going to talk about that next week. Wednesday.

Let's do it. 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.