My First Million - #19 - Drone Light Shows, No Code Movement & Plugin Empires

Episode Date: October 20, 2019

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This week they shoot the sh*t about the no code movement, reinventing fireworks through drone light shows, creating a brand around miniature things, putting tiny houses in your backyard, the huge business of website plugins and social agencies. If you enjoy this and would like a weekly briefing on super in-depth research in these trends, Sam has offered a discount on The Hustle's Trends newsletter, go to https://trends.co/million.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A million dollar brainstorm. We're back, episode three. It's been fun so far. Like, we had a guy, the guy who texted us about the TRT thing. I got to call him back. Yeah, we got to call that guy. So the guy who reached out to us. Jason. Jason? Yes.

We talked about the TRT businesses. He has owned, apparently a few, sold it for what he said with seven figures. He's interested in expanding. I'm not going to start that, but. Somehow he got both of our numbers. I don't know how. I thought he was a friend of yours when he texted us. I thought he was a friend of yours.

He texted us like, like he had known. It was forever. Well played, Jason. So he somehow got both of our numbers and was like, hey, guys, you're talking about this TRT thing. Trust me, I know way more about this than you do. I started a TRT business brick and mortar, sold it for seven figures. I can help you guys do this thing you guys are doing.

I'm going to do it and you guys can sort of be involved in some way. And I was like, wow, that's cool. Like, this is luck coming to us. Yeah. Love that. You're right. Well, let's create more luck. And where we left off last week, I had brought up the idea of Zapier.

Are you familiar with that? I am familiar with it, but if you need to give the basics. Wade, his name's Wade, he's a young guy. I don't know him, but I've chatted with him on Twitter. So the story is that he went to college at University of Missouri. They raised a million dollars in funding from YC or something like that, and they're fully distributed. I've got a friend who works there, so no office.

And what they've done is they've built a really easy system to, it allows you to connect to programs via API. So for us, we run our whole business off of this. So like if there's a new entry form onto Google Sheets, it will tell Slack you have a new entry form. And you could do that with probably a thousand different apps that they have already uploaded. It's like plumbing or piping between all your different programs. Yeah. I think that this is the very early stages of that.

And this whole idea of connecting different apps through a way that does not involve coding. It's this whole thing right now that I've heard people refer as the no code movement. Have you known code? I've heard of this a lot lately. I think this is this is trending yes and it is going to get much bigger so first of all zapier they've built this company now I've heard they're speaking at hustle count so we'll learn but I've heard that it's a 50 or 60 million recurring business they've only raised a million dollars in funding so like on the really high end this company could be worth half a billion dollars on the lower end maybe like a few hundred

million dollars so very valuable and so why why is this growing so fast and I think it's because this whole no code thing. And I'm incredibly fascinated by companies in that space. So another one's Webflow. Webflow has been around for six years. They actually started right before I started HustleCon. I talked to Brian before he launched it. I thought it was not going to be a big thing. It is going to be a big thing. And then there's a handful of other things. Have you seen any other no code once? Yeah, there's a couple good ones. So Webflow and Xavier are the two sort of most successful ones now. I have one on my phone. People are trying to do this where can you make a mobile app without coding, right? Yeah. And I don't think this is not going to be a bad. I believe this is going to be a thing. Yeah.

So much so that a friend of mine, his name's Andrew Wilkinson, he owns this agency called MetaLab, which is, I think they're like 200-person agency. They create user interfaces like Slack or they created that for Slack. He is opening up an agency only around no code. So the goal is how do we hire just like designers and marketers and have them actually build no code experts? No code experts. That's amazing.

So if I was trying to make money right now, I would create an entire community around this. So I had a guy reach out at the last one. said, hey, I heard you guys mention no code. By the way, I've created the largest directory of no code tools and reviews. And here, check this out. I think it's called Codeless. And he sent me an invite and was like, you know, let me know what you think. Was it awesome?

It wasn't super awesome yet, but I was like, look, here's three things I would do with this if I was you, right? Like, I don't think you need a director of everything. I think you need to be able to say, here, you're trying to do X. Here's the best no code tool. And here's a course on how to use that no code tool. And just be like curating the best no code tools and then training people. on how to use them.

Kind of like what you're doing. So I want to use that as a segment into something similar. Wait, I have one no-code tool. We should know. I want to hear what you have to say. Retool is the name of the no-code tool. Have you heard of this? No.

All right. Retool. I think, you know, I saw the founder of Stripe tweet about this. He's like, this is awesome. And I saw it and I was like, this is actually amazing. So what these guys did was every company has like internal dashboards. So you create some. So we use Periscope data.

So everybody creates something, not just about data, but like, you create some like admin interface. It's like, oh, I need to be able to, you know, for you guys. you might need to be able to go in and change something in the email for tomorrow or go in and give the advertiser some permission or something like that. So most software companies have some admin panels, admin dashboards that you need to do. Dashboard, not for data, but for doing things, like running your business. And so what Retool did was they were like, look, developers, like smart developers hate building these things. And typically people do a poor job of building them because it's like, oh, this is internal anyways. It's just like task work.

It's just task work. You kind of need it to run your business. and the UX always sucks because the designers never touch it because it's not facing customers. And it'll break and you're like, oh, I'm working on this huge project. I know, but come on, I need to do my job. And everyone's admin tool. It's like, oh, there's all this like internal knowledge. It's like jerry rigged, right?

It's like, oh, you need to click that button twice for a torque. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's broken. We haven't gotten around fixing it. So what Retool did was they made internal admin dashboards as a service for any company and they are taking off. And so we used them. Yeah, we used them with our e-sports platform because sometimes we needed to go in and manually,

update the scores of the tournaments if our scoring system was wrong and we needed to be able to go look up if someone was cheating or not and so we use them for our dashboard so for you still need to be a developer but it makes the developer like way easier and you also don't need to be like a deep full stack developer you could be like you know very very sort of a light engineer and use retool and set it up for your company so are these guys how big is the company so they went through white combinator recently I don't know how big they are in terms of revenue or people but I do know that you know for the first six months eight months they were kind of floundering it wasn't really working and then all of a sudden it started taking off this past year it's just been like they're in

that mode where you're just trying to keep up with growth and like 30 people 10 people I haven't I haven't met them I haven't I don't know how many people are in the company probably something like 15 to 20 people so let me tell you what I would do right now this I am all in on this okay I think this is going to be huge the first thing that I would do which would be hard but worth it is you start one of these companies like all around no code that that is not going to happen overnight you're going to have to get a team together maybe raise money you're going to have to get people together to build this 100%. I would pick a niche and go after this. But the second thing, which is, oh, and by the way, those things can be huge. So you do know, Tablo? Yep. So, I don't know. I mean, these are multi-100 million-dollar-year companies publicly traded some of them at billions of dollars evaluation. This guy's the limit for anyone in this space. The second thing that I would do, and this is more labor-intensive, but you could crush it right off the bat is I would create a business that goes into companies like The Hustle or Twitch and charges $10,000 to $30,000 for a two- or three-day seminar and says, on the promise of this, hey, head of growth marketing or marketing or, hey, head of this department,

I'm going to make it so your team can move two times faster by teaching them just how to make their own stuff. You're not going to need any debt time. Right. Would that interest you? Of course. Of course. Let me come in and teach your team how to use this suite of tools and they'll never have to ask a dev for help again. I would do that. I would pay my company, which is a small company, I would pay someone $3,000 to $5,000 to come and do that. Right. So trend here is the no code movement, the availability of all these no-code tools. What you're saying is a couple companies to keep an eye on WebFlow, Zapier, retool. And then now you're saying new opportunity, you can actually like serve that industry either

through workshops, through building a no-code company, connecting a bunch of different tools, building a directory, whatever it may be. Do you have budget where you're at now to make that call? Like to hire people to come in and train? Yeah, yeah, we have like a training budget. A few thousand dollars. I wouldn't because my team is all engineers. But what I would do, I also work with this other group called partnerships where

they literally would beg for engineering time and can never get it in the company. And so if I told them, hey, look, here's three tools out here that could make job a lot easier. And these guys are going to come in and do this. Yeah, I would pay for that. There it is. All right. I got a different idea.

Drone light shows. Have you seen this? Have you seen this? They're awesome. Totally awesome. If you're sitting in front of a computer, Google this right now, drone light show, think fireworks, but modernized. How big do you think the firework industry is?

I've not done the research. It's definitely seasonal. Who's the person in the back here doing trends research? Look up fireworks and look up drone light show. So basically what these guys do is they get a fleet of drones like, I don't know, 50 drones, small little cheap drones. And they put lights on them. Yeah, like tiny little drones. They put lights on them.

You use software to synchronize the patterns so they can go and they can dance and they can go into different shapes. It can be a flower and then a rainbow and then whatever. And they do this at, you know, music festivals, birthday parties, conventions, whatever. It is the new fireworks. And it looks so cool. the product sells itself because if you see it at one event, you will, like, someone in that thousand person event will want to use it at their own event. And so I think that drone light shows are going to be really big. So your wife does things at conferences where she draws. Correct.

And she draws what the conference speaker is speaking about. Exactly. You might have seen that. Someone's talking in live in real time on a giant whiteboard that's as big as a wall. She's drawing like an infographic story of what the person is saying live. And this is like a magic trick. And she makes a wonderful living doing this. Yeah. She makes great money. She has no website, no business card, has never had one, has been doing this for 10 years, and has basically booked you around if she wants it. She just turns down gigs. And I'm like, because the product is viral, because people see it at the conference and they want it for their company.

I have to have that. Yeah. And do this for the drone fireworks. I love that. I would want to Google drone fireworks or drone light show right now. I will invest in a drone light show company right now because I believe, as soon as I saw it, that would just be a cash flow thing. That would make cash from the first couple weeks.

Yes. after you started getting bookings. Right, exactly. And drones are kind of like commodities now. Like you can buy very cheap drones. The programming of drones is very, very simple now. And then the last piece is, by the way, somebody could make a no code type of tool to program drones. People are doing no code type tools to program, you know, like Amazon Alexa, like voice apps.

I can make a voice, I can make an Alexa skill without knowing how to code now. Somebody's going to do the same for programming drones as drones get more and more popular. I love it. So two ideas right there. Okay, go. What's the next? So you were talking about someone who had a directory that would tell you the best no code tools. Okay, so my company, the hustle trends, we're a small business of about 30 employees.

We make, let's just say, eight figures in revenue. So a small business, but big enough that we are spending money on stuff. So the way our costs work are we spend the three top tiers are advertising to get new customers, people, employees. And the third one is software. I was doing our accounting the other day and looking at our numbers. So our company, like I said, is small. We might spend $20,000 to $30,000 a month in software. Yep.

These are things like, you guys may not use this, but MailChimp and then Slack and then other tools. But then also payroll. I just paid $15,000 for years to switch to Rippling or close to $15,000. Kaiser Healthcare, like just like all these like platforms, like stuff that you just have to have, including payroll, HR stuff, performance review stuff. Right. Anyway, I bet you have wasted at least. least $100,000 in the lifetime of our company by selecting software that I didn't know why I did it

because I thought it was a thing and then I realized like oh wait a minute this is like already packaged into this other thing and I'm like shit I got to like I'll just I'll just let the so like right now we're paying two grand a month for something and I'm like damn this other thing already like is going to offer this I just got to let this expire I guess right I just I'm out of the money and so but here's the thing is that most all early stage companies have like it's like an 80 20 thing like 80% of us all just need the same problem solved. And so I've been thinking a lot about this, how this could be solved, almost like a business back end in a box, which is what like gusto or Zenofits or something is trying to offer. But what I'm interested in is content sites, like a wire cutter. In my head,

I'm like, why is there someone not blogging and just telling me like, all right, you need your basics, this will do the job, just install this suite of tools, you're good. That would have saved me so much money. And here's why it's lucrative for the content owner is because, So let's say I don't know this for a fact, but it is generally true with a lot of companies. Something like a MailChimp. If I tell you to sign up to MailChimp and use my link and you pay $100 a month for MailChimp, MailChimp will pay me, the affiliate, $30 a month for life. Right.

Amazing. For life. Huge affiliate fees. And that makes sense. So trends in the subscription business, I will gladly pay someone like a 30% percentage for a new customer for life. Right. Well, we do, actually. And in my head, I'm like, someone saved me money and just tell me.

like do the be the wirecutter of business software and just tell me exactly what to do. I don't want to read this article like this really long thing. Just tell me. You know what I mean? Yes. I have an idea that's similar to this in the same space. But this is this company called vendor. I'm looking them up right now so I make sure that I get it.

Right. V-E-N-D-R is their company. And I think what they're doing, I might be wrong, but I think what they're doing is you pay for, you know, these same seven pieces of software. What they do is they realize that you can, all these are negotiable, all the prices are negotiable, mailchams prices negotiable. slacks prices negotiable. They do group buying.

They do basically group buying and they do negotiation on your behalf. That's cool. And whatever they save you, they keep a cut of whatever they saved you. And because companies spend so much on software and especially big companies, they spend so much on software,

these guys will manage your contracts. So they show you what cycle everything's on, when it expires, all that stuff. And they save you money on the different stuff that you're buying. I was just telling someone the other day, I'm like, man, I just looked at our expenses. And we had two or three different people paying for Photoshop.

and two or three people paying for like the Wall Street Journal. I'm like, God, we should have just shared this. What are you guys doing? Like, I just want to sign up for something and they just find out where all the duplicates are or things that we're not using and they automatically cancel it for me. And I'll give them a cut of the revenue that they saved me. Like I looked up this company and I have one template email that I send to like a few companies a year, which is just, hey, founder's name.

Hey, Ryan. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, this idea. Let me know if I can help or invest. And you send it to them. And then we got in touch. But like this is one of those ideas that I love, love, love, love, love, basically. Great. We're on the same page.

Okay, I got another one for you. So this is kind of a follow up on last week's. So we talked about the miniature cookware. And I was like, oh, of course people love mini stuff. This week, I like what you guys did, which was you followed up. There's a presentation that you guys made. I don't know if you even saw this deck. That was like, Minif Smith made it.

Mini everything. Yeah, shout out to Steph. So mini everything, it was like miniature cookware is on the rise. Guess what? Tiny Holmes is also on the rise. Guess what? Here's this other thing. And also here's how they're doing it.

They're leveraging YouTube because tiny stuff is really entertaining to like vlog about. So people are vlogging, hey, I live in this 100 square foot tiny home. Dude, they're getting millions of subscribers. This whole tiny home thing is the greatest. And so there's something to this mini thing. And I just liked the follow up deck because it actually shows that you could build a brand around the lifestyle of tiny, of minimalism. And if you look at like Marie Kondo and kind of minimalism, I think is a growing trend. And I think that tiny stuff and miniature versions of things is related there.

And so you could build a brand that does the cookware that does the homes. You could do everything just with one powerful overarching brand. Yeah, that was a good deck. I love that. I had no idea that miniature was such a thing. But when you actually think about it, getting distribution, getting eyeballs on a business that sells these miniature things, so easy. Just because, like, you already can see what the Instagram ad is going to look like in your head. It's so novel.

There's like 10 or 20 different combinations of an Instagram ad where you're like, oh, they click on that. That's going to be stupidly high. Yeah, exactly. You know, I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw one of those tasty videos. And tasty videos, if you haven't seen it, it's those videos on your feed that are like, it starts with like a really juicy burger. And then you see somebody putting some sauce on it. And like all of a sudden you've watched 30 seconds.

It's a 30 second recipe. And I like this general premise of working backwards from what would work on the Instagram feed. That's how I think about things, by the way. What's really visual, what's really novel and would catch my eye on Instagram and then work backwards and build a business. That's how I think about it, which is I like the eighth. a principle. Attention, attention, interest, desire, action. Okay. Attention interest, desire. Yeah, that's my framework when I do copywriting. So when I think of a business, I go, ooh, does this have a really

fast attention grabbing headline or attention grabbing video? And then, like, can I make anyone stop in their tracks? Okay. And then can I interest them as to like get them to fall down the cliff a little bit further to watch my video? And then can I make them desire it by actually showing them the value? And then can I easily collect their money by getting them to take action? Right. So like a tiny home would be a little bit difficult if you have to do financing, but like a miniature set of something, that's 50 bucks. Just take your credit card. That's easy. So another one that came to me on Twitter today, related to tiny homes is rent the backyard. It's a new startup that's basically doing tiny homes, but it puts it in your backyard as a guest house that you can Airbnb. And so a lot of people

don't want to move into a tiny home because that's a pretty radical life shift. What if I could put a tiny home in your backyard? You could use it to Airbnb and then you have it whenever it's not Airbnb as like a novelty thing. I can't have it in San Francisco, but. But one day when I move, I will be in a heartbeat. Yeah. And so I thought, oh, this is another one of those. Hey, guys, I love, love, love, love this idea. This is really good.

Did they get back to you? We'll see. I got an intro from a friend. So we'll see. But like my parents have a tiny backyard. I have a tiny backyard. If I could put a little tiny home in the tiny backyard, I would do that. Is that what's it considered a structure?

Do you have to get permits? So all the big cities, because they don't let you build, the compromise that they're doing on the regulatory level is they're saying, okay, these in-law homes, which is what these are like your in-law and guest house or whatever, these are now allowed. So if you have this much space, you're allowed to put an additional structure because they think, oh, that kind of eases the burden on the housing problem in a lot of these cities. And so they actually are encouraged, whereas before it was outlawed for a very long time. That's awesome. And that's changing.

Love this. I love anything that makes it really easy for someone to make side income. Right. Easy. Okay. I think I have one more on my list. Okay. So I'm sick of talking about direct-to-consumer stuff.

Okay. Like hard goods. The reason why is I don't think it's very intellectual. challenging. It's just like the same crap, but you just smack on lowercase letter logo and like a pastel color and then you triple or quadruple the price and call it premium. Easy. Do it, but it's easy. But I do like the ancillary things around it. So there's this guy who I know, I'm not close with him, but I've hung out with him a couple times. His name's S.Y.E.D. He owns this blog called W.P. Beginner. Okay. It's a eight figure of your blog. And all he does is he blogs about the best WordPress themes and

plugins and over the years i've gotten to know them and i've read about them what sayed has done is built an empire or WordPress empire so he owns wp forms which is installed probably by a million people and if you want the premium version it's like 50 bucks a month he owns opt-in monster he owns like i'm almost positive he owns 40 or 50 more plugins and if i had to guess i would say he makes 50 million a year doing this and what he's done is he's uh this blog that he has w p beginner he's being able to see what's the most clicked on affiliates or themes And then you just go to buy them or starts them. And it got me really interested in this.

And so there's this company called Envado. I wrote about it on Trends a while ago. And Invado, all they are, they probably wouldn't like my oversimplification, but it's basically a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins. And since 2008, this thing has grossed $300 million in sales. And in 2017, they did $94 million in revenue with something like $33 million in profit. Right. And I'm amazed at that.

And so I asked myself, well, what's the thing? What's the next thing? Well, it's not even the next thing. It's already here. It's called Shopify. A friend of mine, I mentioned him earlier, Andrew Wilkinson, last week or two weeks ago, he announced that they raised $25 million or $30 million. And their whole purpose of raising this money is to go out and buy Shopify plugin. And I think that it's not like early, early, but it's still early enough that there's a lot of... There's still opportunity left. And so I think that people, I think Chrome plugins are like this as well. I'm going to be incredibly fascinated to see all the Shopify plugins and a holding company. exist that will buy all of these. And so the reason the WordPress thing works is because WordPress powers like 22% of all websites. Yep. So if 22% of all the websites are using WordPress, there's going to be this economy around

making your WordPress site better. And these guys have capitalized. Yeah, I just bought it in Vado theme yesterday on a whim for $100. I bought one as well. Shopify is very similar where I don't know what the percentage is, a percentage of online stores that you Shopify, but I guess it's probably also like 22% or 50%, you know, something like that. Therefore, and also these people are all making money or have the dream of making money on their shop.

So it might be even the plug-ins marketplace might be even better for something like this. It might be even better, yes. And so if you Google WeCommerce, which is the name of Andrew's new company, you'll see they go, we've just raised $33 million or 30 or some number like that. And all we're going to do is buy Shopify partners, which means plugins and things like that. Right. Not the shops themselves. No, these guys would never do that. No, it's picks and axes, not gold.

Gotcha. And so I like this theme. And I like what you said there too, which is that part of that empire is the content sites that say, hey, we recommend this. Here's a tutorial about how to do this. Well, you need insider knowledge. Right. And so these guys have insider knowledge because they own an agency that would build Shopify stores for people. And so they started like, oh, man, everyone's installing like this commenting software for their Shopify site.

Right. That's that third type of luck, the keen eye that's able to see opportunities before others. Yeah. And that luck's really easy to get. get in the mix. Right. Okay, I have another one that's similar to this. So my buddy, Zach, has sleep apnea.

And I think I also have sleep apnea. I just haven't gone and done the sleep test because I don't want to get diagnosed because, A, the diagnosis is really annoying. You have to go sleep overnight at this lab or whatever. And then B, if you have sleep apnea, which a lot of people do, you get put on this, like, breather machine when you sleep. And it's supposed to help, but it's like you feel like, you know, a dying patient, given the way that the treatment works.

And so Zach went through this process. He's going through this process where he is like, all right, I've had this my whole life. I've been snoring. Nobody wants to sleep in the same room as me. And I think I have the sleep apnea thing, but this whole system seems busted. Here's what I'm going to do.

So he created a YouTube channel called Sleeping with Zach. And so for 30 days, he's basically going to document his journey of figuring out, do I have it, how do I get tested, trying out all the different products in this industry to be like, what actually works and what's bullshit? And then getting to the bottom of like, can I actually cure my sleep apnea in a way that I want? And I think this is a really, really smart way to start this business. I think it's a catchy name. I think doing the YouTube videos would be fun.

I think other people want to see it and not be sold something, but say, oh, yeah, this guy's like me. He's had problems snoring his whole life, and he's trying to solve it. He's trying to try all the different stuff. What's that last name? Hargraves. I think I know him. Yeah. He's in our kind of circle.

Here's my prediction. If he executes him this well, he will be able to sell this for at least a million dollars. Yeah. To a sleep apnea company or make a million dollars in sponsorship. So there's the content side of things. And then if that starts to pick up steam, and, you know, there's the potential also to even start a sleep apnea company where, you know, he actually devises a better product for either the diagnosis or the, like, could you not diagnosis with a phone listening to you while you sleep? Could you have a wearable? Or is there on the treatment side, is there something?

Well, so long as he has the sleep apnea audience, the sky's the limit. Exactly. That's why I like that he started with the YouTube channel. Normally I would just be like, just cut straight to the chase. But in this case, I like the idea of starting with the audience and seeing if you can build that. Sleep with Zach. Group of people. Yeah.

And I called this approach, the curious beginner. So I believe in content. There's like two major routes you can go. You're either the generous expert. I know something. I'm going to tell you guys about it and I can get famous for that. The other one is I know nothing, but I'm going to go do all the work and research and I'll share with you guys what I'm learning. I'm just as clueless as you.

That's the curious beginner. And so I like that he's taking the curious beginner approach. I say the same thing. I go, when you want to find good social content, just learn and post what you learned the week before. Right. Exactly. It works. And the way I do this podcast is both. So when I interview guests, that's my curious beginner. I'm saying, hey, how did you do this? Can you tell me what you learned?

And I'm just sharing it in real time. What I'm learning from these successful people, I'm just sharing. And then this episode is a little bit different where it's like, hey, we have some expert knowledge about some different opportunities, different spaces because trends is doing all this research. We have friends that are doing interesting things. We're thinking about stuff. And we're just giving away these ideas for free, essentially. Okay. Can I wrap it up with one I do? Yes, please.

Okay. This is not a trend. It's like a case study type of thing. So there's this company that you're friends with the guy, Steve. We don't have to talk about it too much because he's going to be on your. Yeah, he's coming on the pod at some point. So I read an article, this company called Social Chain. I think I'm going to dumb it down about what I think it is, is that they own loads of different Twitter handles,

which I actually follow a ton. And one of them is called like failures or what I'm called like shit men do or something. And it's just like funny Twitter videos. They call them theme pages. Theme pages. I love them. I follow a lot of them are like this day in history. And it's an agency, basically. So I'll give you the brief story because it's kind of amazing. Steve's 18, 19 years old, starts a company, and he's targeting college students. It's like a Craigslist for college students.

He wants to market, but he has no money because he's 19 years old. He's broke. And so he's like, oh, you know what? Me and all my friends, we all follow these two Twitter accounts. One was like a shit freshman say, and then the other one was like overheard in the library or something like that. And the student theme meme accounts, and they had millions of followers. And so he reached out to him and was like, hey, can I get you to shout out,

out my product. And it turns out it was owned by like another student at the school. All of these meme pages were created by like a 17 year old kid just having some fun. And then, you know, fast forward six months and now they have two million followers. And they didn't kind of realize they were sitting on a gold mine. But Steve was pretty smart. He did realize that. And so he started to accumulate these. He started buying them when he could. Like, hey, I'll give you 500 bucks for your page. People were like, all right, cool. And then when he couldn't buy them, he would partner with them and say, hey, can I add you to my network of theme pages? And when we get some advertising money, I'll give you, you know, I'll pay you to post. And so he built up this agency. They had about 25

employees. All of them were under 23 years old. So it was like the upstart ad agency. He would go on stage and he would start a talk and he would be like, hey, we control the internet. And people are like, okay, what are you talking about? He's like, watch, give me a word. And I'm going to make it trend on Twitter by the end of this talk. And somebody would throw out a word from the audience. and then the theme pages would all start, like, dropping, like, memes about that word. And sure enough, by the end of the talk, it'd be like the number one trend on Twitter. And so he harnessed this and then did the same thing with Instagram. And he built the biggest collection of these theme pages.

And it's like influencers, but you don't have to deal with the personalities because it's a, it's a theme. It's not a human being that's behind it. And so you can actually control all of the influence. And you can own the influence instead of being, like, the manager to a Logan Paul or something. So the idea of this sounds amazing to me. When I hear you describe this, I'm like, if that is as good as you're saying, it is, I think that it's amazing. My prediction is that it is a horrible business.

Let me explain why. And we'll find the truth. I definitely want to be wrong. Maybe a month ago, I did a breakdown of what I think Gary Vaynerchuk's VaynerMedia, what his revenue is and what his employee head count is. And so I've tracked it for nine years. And so this is all based off of public data. So it could be wrong, but this is straight out of his mouth.

So I got it from year one and nine. And it basically ranges from, or it starts at, 500,000, 1.3 million, 4.7 million, 14,000, 30 million, 54,000, 76 million, 100 million, 125 million. So that's super fast growth. But in order for that to grow, his head count has grown from 520, 30, 125, 300, 500, 500, 800, 800, 800, so the rev per head count is like under $100,000. Right. That's what I think will be. When I hear this company, in an article I read about the social chain thing, and I have no insider information, and so you'll have that soon. I'd like to know the truth. It said something like 800 employees and like not a lot of revenue.

Yeah, I think that's wrong, so I think they have a lot of revenue, but we'll have Steve clear the air. So before speculating, I would say this, agencies are bad businesses in general. Maybe bad is not the right word. Pain in the ass is the right word. They're painting the ass because you're dealing with clients, which are typically a pain in the ass, and a lot of headcount, which is also pain in the ass. But the reason I say that is because they're not very defensible, right? Like, you don't accrue a whole bunch of value. You kind of have to keep fighting for clients and you have to, and the channels you're advertising on always change. And it's not like you're building one product. You're constantly having to be the most creative

kid on the block coming up with a thing that's going to give the clients a performance. So at all of agencies, what I did like that they did was they started launching their own products to their own audience. So that's the twist. They use their data to say, oh, look, we have these five pages about food. The audience is all female. Let's create cookware. They did another one with women's athleisure and they created an athletic brand. You know, I'd have to look it up. It's in my DM somewhere. Yeah. And I think you should have an entire episode around this because and I wrote about this. If you sign up in Trends, you'll see this or if you're already part of trends. I'll share in the group actually right now. Where I already have. Basically, if my numbers are

right, which they could be wrong, but I think they are. I think that having an agency like this looks cool on the outside is hell on the inside. Because like at my company, we're growing and we're profitable, but if I want to be more profitable, I'm just not going to spend on advertising, and I'll just make millions of dollars in profit. And I can do that with a click of a button. When you have an agency, it doesn't work like that. And I see these numbers, and I'm like, oh my God, this sounds like hell. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll find out. Well, I guess we will. So if you own an agency, tweet at us, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, but it seems like a grind. It seems really hard. We should give a shout out to the guy

who did the airplane cocktail kit. Yeah. So last week, Trends wrote about airplane. cocktail kits and how people are searching like that like crazy so explain what this is what is an airplane cocktail kit so it's not i'm not the target demo because i don't drink but apparently i guess when they serve alcohol on a plane they don't really give you a lot of accessories and so this it comes with i think it comes with sugar it comes with all the mixer so let's say you want to have a moscow mule a great drink when the air host is coming down the aisle she's not going to stop and make you a moscow mule and mix the bitters and do this thing and shake it up but this looks like a little sewing kit right and it has all need. I think it's like you could charge $20 for it. It's $24, I think, $25 to buy one of these. It's

nicely designed. I looked to the packaging. It looks cool. That's for sure. I'm also not the target demo. I would never buy something. I barely drips. But I get it. It's like I would buy that for someone as a cute gift. And so this guy, we wrote about it. And then an hour later, he comes back and he goes, hey, everyone, I just bought airline. What was it? It's like airline cocktail kits.com. Yeah. Yeah. He goes, I'm going to start selling them. Right. I was like, boom. I don't know what he's going to do with it, but I appreciate the, like, bias for action of like, you know what? It doesn't matter what he does with it, because if he creates a Shopify store and then run some of these Instagram ads where, like, the theme behind the ad is like, do you, like, make it

look like you're in, like, a smoke jacket and, like, in your, like, den with mahogany wood and you zoom out and you're really on the airport. Right. Or, you know what I mean? And you, like, make that ad. It's kind of, you can, you will sell $10,000 a month in products. Right. Yeah.

So shout out to, I think his name's Ankur, who, uh, who bought the domain and took some action right away. Okay, cool. If you like this, let us know. You can email me. It's puri.shon at gmail.com. If you are doing one of these ideas, let us know we want to track it and hear what happens. And we'll be doing these for a while longer. And this is my pitch that I will always be giving is if you want to be part of trends and get these reports that my team is doing all day, trends.com slash million. You'll get like a special deal if you sign up there. Trends is so good right now that I don't know if it's because you guys launched a new product and you really care about it. So you're making it really freaking good every week.

So I'm like, is this sustainable? Like, can they continually, like a year from now? I'm curious. I don't know. Is it going to be as good? Here's what I think's going to happen. I think trends is going to turn into like Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal or like the hustle is going to turn into like the Wall Street Journal and trends is like our real estate section.

And I think our goal, I think it's like your high value. Yeah, I think we're going to have multiple sections. So right now trends is like a general interest thing. Soon we're going to have trends just for software. Then it'll be just for D to C stuff. And I think you'll pay one fee and you can get access to all of it. It's really interesting right now. So I like it.

Whoever's, whoever's behind it. Great job. Okay, cool. We're done.