My First Million - $1M By 19, $100M+ By 35 -- Here's How He Did It

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sits down with Val Katayev (@ValKatayev) to talk about how he got his start making millions from a ringtone business, why he's currently launching a startup in the jewelry industry, what has fueled him to greatness along the way, and much more. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (00:23) - Val going viral on Twitter (1:35) - How he got his start (19:15) - How he builds launches new products (37:40) - Are you driven by money? (42:30) - How Sam accidentally exposed Val ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

It was strange. I was pulling up to my university or to the college. And I would pull up in a, I would pull up in like a drop top Lexus, like a $70,000 car. And I was like 19, right? Dude, so Val, Sean, he's not making it today, but that's okay. So your thing went viral today. How many likes did you get? Like 3,000, 3300? Something like that.

I had to turn off my notifications. I can't do when you work with. I don't know how you guys do it. I don't know how people do it while running full businesses, but I had to turn that off because I just can't concentrate. That thing just, my phone was just blown up all day. Now you know how I feel. It's crazy, right? It's crazy.

So you had 3,000 followers and now you have like 9,000, maybe, 9,000? Something like that. Yeah. I mean, it took me how many years to get up to like 2700? Yeah, now it's, I don't know. I didn't look, to be honest with you, but I'm probably at like 8, 9,000 at this point. So, all right, the background here is I met you through my, like, we share like a best friend, Joe. And Joe told me about you.

He goes, this guy's crazy. And so, Val, let me tell you what I know about you. And you tell me if it's right or wrong. And then I want to hear your story. But basically, he goes, and I won't reveal too many numbers. I'll let you talk about any number that you want to talk about because I don't know if what I know is confidential or not. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to mention them. But you, as a 19-year-old, you came from Russia.

You came from Russia? I came from Uzbekistan. At the age of 11. And then you come here, you get a computer at like 16 or 17. You start this affiliate marketing business. You're the only employee. By age like 22, 23, you've made something like 30 million in profit from this like one little business. From there, you parlayed that into a lyric website.

that was like one of the biggest leerk websites in the world, which doesn't sound that impressive, but most people don't realize that lyric websites are some of the most biggest websites in the world. And so that made like another eight figures in profit. From there, you parlayed that into ad network that now is like huge. From there, you've now launched a jewelry business that apparently Joe has said it's bigger than all your other companies, but I don't know if that's true or not. And then throughout all this, you've acquired and sold and developed like a hundred hundred plus million dollars of real estate. Is all this accurate?

Some of it. Okay. So, well, actually my first... By the way, the reason I'm having you on here is because we've had a lot of really successful people on here do interesting stuff. And there are like a lot of them are well known. But you don't... I basically the other day begged you to like tweet something and I helped you write this tweet and it took like a few days and we got it out there. But like besides that, you've pretty much have never done any press. You've never talked about this publicly. And when I met you, like this is a gold mine. This guy has so many interesting stories.

We got to tell this story. So anyway, what was wrong and what was right? So, okay. So, well, actually, the funny part is that the first business I had was a PlayStation, like a video game website. So it wasn't like huge, but, you know, I was in high school and making like $5,000 bucks a month. That actually taught me a lot of lessons.

So the, so the search marketing. And you actually told me, I actually told me, I actually. tweeted another thing about you where you said, hey, my 12-year-old son has a website that's making like 2 Gs a day or something like that. And he needs an email service provider. Which one should he use? And I tweeted that screenshot. Yeah, well, that was anonymous. I guess it's not anonymous anymore. But so he's, yeah, that, that, that, oh, this is interesting. I saw you post that. And he still has a website. It's not doing it as well, but not quite a 2,000 a day anymore. But he's uh he's uh he's working on like coding this thing away and he's like figuring out all these

things so it's actually amazing to see it you know at his age at you know he's so where'd you get it's crazy that you and your family you just find all these opportunities where did it start so your thing first thing was a PlayStation website which what is that so it was a site called PSX Extreme um we this is like i launched like 98 99 or something like that actually it was 99 it was right before the bubble the dot-com bubble burst

I was like about eight months into the the bubble and it was doing really well it was very easy

to generate revenue and you know once I got the traffic the site was all about anything

related to PlayStation so like get cheat codes your reviews screenshots whatever anything for

like PlayStation fans so it was like a PlayStation fan website then the dot com bubble hits

my revenues disappeared 90%. My traffic was still up there but I had no revenues because all the ads revenue disappeared like it went from being $3 CPM down to 30 CPM if you could be lucky enough to get that. How many people were going to this website? It wasn't huge but I had like 10,000 Unique's a day, maybe 20,000.

In 99 and 98 that's got to be a massive site. Yeah, it was a good amount of traffic and it was all free. So it was interesting like experience because I had to quickly learn how to generate revenue. And I had to go out there and sell advertising myself. And then once I figured out that I could sell advertising, I didn't have enough traffic.

So I started going to other video game sites and saying, who had much more traffic than me and say, hey, I got all these advertisers who would spend more if I had more traffic. Like, I'll, let me put ads on your sites. So I went to all these other video game sites. and like just was a broker for advertising. So that was kind of like my first, you know, making decent amount of money.

I was making five and like just from the site and I was making probably another 10 a month from being a broker. And then the thing that you tweeted today or maybe last night, basically you told the story about how when you were 19 after this PlayStation site, you built an affiliate ad,

site and it made like, I forget the, I forget the numbers, but in two or three years, it was like over 30 million in profit. So what were you, you were selling stuff on behalf of half.com or eBay? Who were you? Or, no, New York Times. You had like 800, basically you had like 800 ad accounts that sold different stuff. So like a New York Times subscription for, or which sold for $100, but you were able to sell it for only 30 bucks. So you were able to keep the difference, something like that. Yeah. So, you know, it's affiliate market. but I used page search, which was very new back then. And at the time, when after the dot-com bubble burst,

all the advertisers got all of a sudden advertising, digital advertising stopped being interesting. You know, for a moment there people thought, businesses thought it might, you know, internet might be over, over-hyped, right? So all of a sudden, you see kind of all these budgets get, you know, just get pulled back, right? Especially all the brand advertising.

And but nobody really, you know, so everybody had to still figure out how to get customers. So they say, okay, you know what? We won't do brand advertising. But if somebody drives as customers, we'll pay per customer. Like, we can't lose on that, right? So performance marketing. So that was around and it was very accessible. And at the same time, the media wasn't expensive.

right because the supply was there but the demand wasn't there so that's what I took advantage of I start buying up a lot of the supply mostly was search search page search and that's what made everything so profitable because I was just playing into those supply demand dynamics that were working in my favor but yes what I would do is I would find an advertiser that had a product I would test it on at the time you know, kind of like the modern-day Yahoo page search, or back then it was called go-to.com. And then later Google came around.

And so I would test that ad. If it works, I expand on it. If it doesn't work, right, I would figure out how to make it work, right? If there's a, if there is a way to make it work. And yeah, just like, it just, you know, I was able to spend a dollar in generate three. And what things were you selling? Oh, man, everything, everything. Um, yeah. And all of this, and all this was making like, uh, like many millions of dollars of sales for your little one person operation every year.

Yes. That's crazy. Yeah, tell us a little bit about like what was going on in your life at the time. Like, did you try and go to college? Were you doing this while you were at college? Did you drop out? Like, what are you doing with your life? Uh, so, um, I already had the business. Um, and, um, and, um, and, And I got into, like I love finance. So I was like, all right, so I'm going to do business finance. And I didn't really feel like I should be, but I only did it because, and I had no time for it. You seem like you'd be awful at that. I was awful.

I was actually interested in the topics, especially the topics I was interested in, like law or finance or business, accounting. All those things were interesting. Like, I couldn't sleep through biology. But even though they were interesting, I had no time to study. so I would suck the tests. My GPA was horrible. I can't remember what it was, but it was just horrible.

Because I just didn't care to, you know, get prepared for the test. I slept in half the class I was just catching up on sleep because I would go to sleep at 4 o'clock in the morning. Don't you still do that?

Don't you go to sleep at 4 and get up at noon? Yeah, average 4, 5. Yeah, so if I go to sleep at, I think yesterday I went to see with 4. Today I woke up at 11. I try to get seven hours of sleep. It doesn't happen all the time.

You know, a lot of times I have to, you know, live on five, six hours. But do you, do you recognize that you're a weirdo? I'm used to. I'm used to it. You know what? I'm a weirdo. I know. I do everything in reverse.

My wife keeps telling me like, like you do everything backwards. So you're studying finance, but you're not doing well. Because you're running these businesses. Well, I'm in school just because I have a Jewish mother, and she wanted me to go to, like, you have to be in college. Right. Or you have to go to. But did they know that you're like, hey, mom, like, I bet you're making more money than you?

I think she kind of knew. I don't know if she knew, but what I was making, I don't remember. But it was strange. I was pulling up to my university or to the college. I went to Baruch, New York City, Baruch. business of finance, Zickland business of finance. And I would pull up in a, at some, I would pull up in like a drop top, Lexus, like a $70,000 car.

And I was like 19, right? So or 18, whatever I was. I think it was 18 at that point. I don't think I even started the paid surgery viz at this point. So this business is just like crushing it. So like a few years in, you've, in your tweet, you said it made over 30 million in profits like three, four, five years in. So it's gone really well. You're paying like a crazy amount of taxes you said. So you decide to move

to the burbs a little bit outside of New York City and you like buy a cheap house and cash. So things are going well, right? Like it's but you you said, you know, I'm a little bored with this or I'm not I don't really want to go much further into this in this racket. I want to try something new. And then the next business was mobile fuse, which is around today, right? So I actually launched around the same time we launched two businesses. So, hold on. So I launched the, let's call the music content distribution company. Oh, that's right. Sorry.

Right. So that, so we didn't own, I didn't own actually live excites. What I did is I built a service. I built a system that connects, called ringtone matcher. and what I realized was there was demand for ringtones and there was all this traffic for all this music-related traffic

especially in lyrics and so what I did is I built a service and the other thing I realized the traffic was very much international like 70% of a music site or a lyric site was non-US and I noticed that some of the advertisers like ringtone advertisers were advertised

they'll do okay but they would have only you what they could only accept u.s customers and they could only accept like verizon customer or only t-mobile customer so i built this thing called ringtone matcher and ringtone matcher basically integrated like 60 countries into one system so if you have a music site you could drive that those users to ringtow matcher and ringtone matcher and ring ringtone match, we'll figure out, based on geo, like what country you're in, right, based on what carrier you use, because it's carrier billing.

So it's important that, you know, I figure out, like, if you have T-Mobile and to match you up to a ringtone service that actually is compatible with T-Mobile. And then the third thing we look for that content is available. So if you're clicking on, hey, get this, get toxic by Britney Spears, ringtone on your phone, I need to make sure that that song is also available in their catalog. Because some ringtone providers had like Warner music and some of some of them maybe just had the EMI.

They were like four major music companies at the time. And, you know, these ringtone providers didn't have all those catalogs. So they might have one or two at a time. So I would take all that data and put it into one simple link. And how big did that get? How big did that business? I was in front of, Ringtone Matcher was in front of a half a billion people a month. Yeah, half a billion.

So, and it was everywhere. I mean, it wasn't just lyric sites. I was on CBS radio, AOL radio, Yahoo Radio, Last FM, like every, pretty much every music site. I remember even talking to musically, which is TikTok now, right? I remember even talking to those guys. I was talking to, we were talking to, we were talking to talking. into WhatsApp in the early days, like when they were just two guys or something. Like, we wanted to integrate because anytime somebody mentions music or a song or something,

like I wanted to be, I want my, I want a ring to matcher there to show up. And but what, but you're using the word we again, it's not we. No, no, this company was. So actually that company, I started ringtone matcher myself. Again, I was a one-man show. at some point I um we you know there was one little group of guys who were pretty good at dealing with advertisers and uh or actually ringtone providers and I felt like I need help on that front and so I merged those guys in so there were five guys that merged into my company um two form

when you say merge who bought who I was majority owner of the company and then the the five guys had the like they they had a third of the company I had two thirds how big it was it when it was just you it was just I was going nuts but I think I believe the the year I think the year we merged it was 10 million just again just you yeah 10 billion 10 billion profit with just you. Do you, why do you think, so this is the, we'll get to the rest of a minute, but why do you think that you find this weird stuff and why don't you hire people, two different questions, but how on earth do you find this type of stuff? You know, it's, it's,

it's funny. Like, I know, I see how organized you are, right? Like, you make your goals, you lay everything out on paper, right? You're very organized. Then you could think about it. You ask people for feedback. Um, I'm totally opposite of that. I just kind of go with where, like I'd like to test things. And I guess I'm very curious. And I could be very, very focused. But if I get distracted, I get very easily distracted, right? So it could be like sometimes it's a curse, but sometimes it's a blessing.

A lot of times it's a blessing. And I come across these interesting things and my curiosity just takes it further. So when I, when I, so the way I actually came across this thing was because I felt that that there was a point of my life where I was seeing Google was just too dominant part of my business and I didn't like that because I didn't want to rely on any one thing. So I started looking outside of page search for supply. And I came across. these music sites and I actually started testing Rhapsody on them because I had such a good deal with

Rhapsody I was like when you start marketing outside of search and it did okay and I had these you know start building these relationships with the music sites and then then I kind of tested a ringtone service and it just crushed like it was not even close like it did three times better and I'm like wow this thing did three times better than Rhapsody and that ringtone provider was just covering US just like one or two music labels and like two carriers out of four. I think there were four major carriers at the time. I was like, hold on a second. If it's already doing three times as well, what happens if I start integrating everything

globally, right? So that's how Ringtone Matcher came about. When you launch stuff, what's your first version like? junk like do you get the idea and it's alive in 12 hours it was a kitty script i wrote um this you know guy was kind of freelancing for me a little bit um i just i didn't want to tell him about the idea he's actually a ctio of one of my companies now um he was like 15 16 years old and i didn't want to tell him the idea so i said hey how do you script this how do you script that So I scripted it myself.

And so yeah, so it was pure junk. It was literally just a bunch of if and then statements on, and ASB. We were running Windows server on ASB infrastructure. So I had a bunch of redirect that were just doing a bunch of if and then statements and redirecting people based on certain parameters. And when you're doing it, Are you like, see, every time I've hung out with you, the reason I like hanging out with you and Joe, I consider Joe one of my best friends.

And so I have like his attitude. You and Joe have the same attitude, which is like, he's a little more laid back than me and you, I think. He is, he is, I've never seen him lose his temper. He is very calm. And I'm like, hey, this didn't work out for this reason. He goes, oh, that's okay. Like, he's super calm. But you have that too.

I think that, like, I think that what it is, you have this like, you have this, like, I don't know if the right word is like Hutzpah, if the right word is like, I don't know what the word is, but it's almost like things, I've heard, we're going to get to the rest of the stories because there's like this jewelry business that you started, which is like, seems like even bigger than all the other things that you've done potentially. And you like do these things where I'm like, but like, Val, you don't know anything about that. And like, you don't even have any employees. Like, you don't know anything. And, but you just are like, yeah, but I, you know, whatever. I'll just, we'll just go a little bit further and then we'll see what happens. And then if it,

if it sucks, I'll bail. You know what I mean? Like, you have this like, aw, shucks attitude. Like, oh, you know, yeah, we'll see what happens. It's very interesting. Whereas, like, if I was doing what you were doing and I started seeing those results, I'm like, is this illegal? Am I breaking the law? Am I going to go to jail? What is going on? Like, it's almost like I would have, most people would have self-destructive tendencies when they see this, like, going so well. Yeah. Look, I see that all the time. I feel like people tend to, to overthink things and spend a lot of time like analysis paralysis. And the reason I think a lot of people are successful, especially somebody like me,

is while somebody's thinking about making perfecting one thing, which by the way will still have a 60% failure, right, on that one thing that you just overthought, I'd rather test 10 things within that same time period. And I will likely have, I have a better accuracy or I'll have a better chance of hitting it out of the ballpark with one of those 10 things, maybe more than one of those things. Yeah. How did you get into the jewelry business to start with? So after I sold those two music-related companies, which, I was.

I took like three years off, off, you know. I thought I retired. I'll retire. But it was anything but I just got, start getting like, my curiosity was just taking me into all different, like, I was on all these boards. And I was like, you know, investing into a bunch of things. And I realized that's the three years that I need to build something again. So I started looking at, I knew that I wanted to do something where it's fixing or, you know, disrupting a fragmented space.

I didn't really want to go after like corporate America. I wanted to go after like mom and pops that when I say mom and pops, it could be like, you know, I'm taking like car dealerships, right? They do tens of millions of dollars. It doesn't mean they're tiny.

Right. So I wanted to go after something like along those lines. And I had some investments in the jewelry space. I had some family in a jewelry space. It's a pretty tight-knit community. I just happened to be, I had some family that knows that business. I actually worked as a teenager.

I worked every weekend. I worked in a jewelry store. I knew how to fix jewelry. I mean, I would sit on a bench with a blowtorch at like 15 years old because my cousin taught me. It was a family business, my aunt and uncle's business. They had a couple jewelry stores. And they taught me how to fix jewelry.

And to, you know, so I knew the business a bit from the retailer's perspective. It always seemed like a very weird way to do business. I always had questioned everything like they're doing. And so, so, so the idea was, hey, like these retailers, if we could integrate build a platform and services, and we could integrate into them. And this is a $300 billion industry, by the way, globally, which fragmented, but controls, is actually bigger. Independence are bigger part of the business, fine jewelry,

than the majors, the chains. So I knew that, again, if I could build distribution, but I had to bring, then there's a lot of power there. But I have to bring value. And that's where my expertise in data and marketing, digital, all that came into fruition. So we basically put this thing together. We integrate into the stores and help them grow, help them bring customers cut costs, increase their revenue. How much do you invest to start it?

To start it. I mean, to start it, I think we started off a couple million. So you put $2 million of your own money. In the beginning, yeah. How big is this? But you've done more. I think you put more in since. How big is this going to be?

I put in way more. I mean, at this point, I put in eight figures into this business. I think it's a multi-billion dollar company in the future. For real? You think it's a multi-billion-dollar company, like to sell? Yeah, market cap. I believe that,

I don't know if there's a really big enough to buy my company or this company. We actually have a lot of people this time around. It's not longer just Val. We have a lot of employees. I believe this company will be, if it's successful and we could do what we need to do and we could really help all these retailers step up their game.

I don't think there's really a company in that space that would be big enough to acquire us. But are you the CEO of that company? Is that smart? I mean, that doesn't seem like you're just, you get up at 11 a.m. And like you go to bed at 4. how are you the CEO of a company that could be a billion-dollar company? Yeah, no, good question. Look, we have a great team that is able to execute.

How many people? It's hard to say. We became pretty global, but our offices outside of the U.S. are not all. They're not employees, right? So all in fact, we talk about factories, our tech teams, our marketing business. teams are um we're probably talking about 70 people at this point wow and who's like but you're not running the day-to-day of the business oh hell yeah yeah 95% of the time goes into this business so then are you like talking with the employees and things like that i mean you're

like running all-hands meetings and things like that yeah i'm not big on meetings i'll be you know to be honest with you but um but i'm very accessible to all my team i mean everybody on my teams have access to me. I go into the office in the city. We actually had the, we were in the office June, June 2020. I mean, we had, you know, COVID. Like, it was ghost town in the city. And we had to figure out how to be in the office because it's not an, it's not just a digital ad business that I could just operate from, from work from home, right? We had to have people in the offices. And we did all kinds of things. We, we, we, we got cars to car, um, to pull people in to the office.

But anyway, we, yeah, I'm, I'm there. I'm in the weeds. But it's not like you're kind of downplaying it. I invested in one of your properties. We bought a sixplex and Greenpoint, I think. I forget. Well, we essentially bought land, right? We bought a house because it's going to be knocked down.

We're going to build a brand new. We're going to ground up construction. It's going to be like a nice, a nice condo building. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean, but I didn't even look at the details. I was just like anything that Val does I'm part of, but it's way bigger than you're you're just saying like it's a project. I mean, I think you've bought like a hundred million dollars with the real estate, right? No, I haven't bought 100 million. We have six projects. A couple of them already completed. Third one is just about to be completed. Actually, the first two were completed and completely sold out. The third one is about to be completed and go on the market. And then we have three other projects and they're all getting bigger and bigger. the value of the combined sale value of those projects would be approaching $100 million. What do you what are you tinkering on now? What excites you now? And someone asked a good question, which is what is the equivalent of ringtones today? What's the equivalence of like it's just crazy that it's just like you're kind of like this like digital

cowboy you're just like this one guy in the wild west doing this shit with like no rules it's just i just think it's hilarious that you are just a pirate who's taking it to the extreme where are the digital pirates at right now uh it has to be like tictock what do you mean it's it's you know you look for like those spaces that haven't been touched right um because people ask me i think i think what that's what you're saying like what's what what can you what can be marketed these days and how to get that kind of scale and i i don't it's hard because what i've seen over over my career is that the windows of opportunity those white spaces right the windows windows are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter every iteration right there was the page search probably

lasted a good six years. After that, around that same time, there was display. That probably lasted a little less. And then there was social media. That window probably, you know, the arbitrage window, you know, that probably lasted two, three years at best. Now you talk, you know, now you got like Instagram and TikTok and you got the Instagram Reels. I mean, those are probably also one year windows of opportunity. If you could kind of catch that lightning and build on it, then you got something. But your window... And it's all rooted in distribution, which is how do you get distribution quickly? And you're saying that you think that's TikTok. Do you think that window is still open?

I think if you have a knack for understanding how get virality or get content, then you have your own distribution. If you don't have that knack, you got to figure out how to work with people that have that access. So there's one company that could work with all the same parts, right, all the podcasters. How much is that worth? Like, we're using a platform here right now, right, that is smart? They're doing the right thing. Like, they're focusing on guys like you who have all this access, but they're not selling

anything, right? They're just selling you a platform. If somebody could sell, figure out how to sell a product across number of podcasts, that's worth a lot. And you could sell, you can move a lot of product. And by the way, it doesn't have to be podcasts. What about all the TikTokers who are doing all those dances, right? I know, like for one company, they scale to like 80 million in sales a few years ago. I'm not going to mention the name of it, but they scale up to like 80 million in sales

just on the back of YouTube influencers. What was the product? It was cosmetics really like product and they just Cosmetics. What was that? Cosmetics. It was just like makeup or something or lotion. Yeah, yeah.

The numbers were just insane. And yeah, it was just a long day. It wasn't just the big influencers, even the like thousands of mediocre. influencers or smaller ones that just drove it. So stuff like that, like latch on to something that is big, especially if you could latch under like the long tail of it. Because not a lot of people look at the long tail part of businesses. Well, so one thing I wonder, you know, like this thing that Val talks about of testing

out 10 different things before the other guy can put his pants on, right? Like, you're, building your, uh, perfect thing that's going to take you six months before you even get to market. Great. I'm going to test 10 things in that time. That sounds really nice, but also, like, I guess I'll actually ask Sam first, then I'll ask you Val. Like, what do you think it is about Val? What do you think it is about either his skill set or his personality that allows him to do that much testing where other people just like can't figure that out apparently? The, I think that this is a common thread that I've seen. My buddy Joe is just like this.

There's this thing particularly, I find it amongst immigrants or children of immigrants. And maybe because they've like experienced some type of hardship where they're like, like dude, I've experienced some crazy shit or my family has experiencing, has experienced crazy shit. I have zero fear and looking like a fool. If that's the worst, if the worst that's going to happen is I'm going to look stupid or lose a tiny amount of money,

I'm okay with that so I don't have any fear about that that's what I think I've noticed that's the trend I've noticed amongst people like Val look I think there's a I think that's a huge

that's a huge factor and one of the things I look at like I'm raising kids now right how do I make sure that they kind of because they're not going to grow up the same way I grew up right

they're not going to come out the resources they have the access they have it's very different from what i grew up with so what i think i realized is the power the power is in resourcefulness okay i was able to make a lot or do a lot i should say whether it's money or whatever it is right doesn't have to be just money it could be whatever whatever it excites you right but i was able to do a lot with very little. But it's because I had no choice, and I had very little. Like, we weren't poor.

Like, I didn't come from poverty or anything like that, but again, my parents couldn't afford a computer for me for the first six years of my life here, right? So I got to think, like, how do I recreate that? And you can't really recreate that for your kids, but I figured, okay, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to give my kids everything on a silver platter. So, I mean, you just talked about my son.

Like, he is, his DNA is very like mine. Like, he's way ahead of me because he has all these tools. Like, you know, he has a computer way before me. I didn't buy him a computer. I made him save up the money. I don't care how he does it, birthdays, work, whatever. During that time, he researched all parts and everything. I think at the age of like seven or eight, he built a computer, bought the parts by himself.

He built a computer from scratch by himself. I didn't even help him. That's crazy. So he now built two computers. And he taught himself how to code. So I suppress resources for my kids systematically. Not like I don't feed him. Like they're doing just fine.

That's good to hear. They go to a big school and everything. They live in a nice neighborhood. But I systematically make sure that they're not given all the resources because that's how you naturally learn to become resourceful. What do you think it is? Yeah. Fundamentally, it's about doing more with less, essentially, you're saying.

Yeah, yeah. But it has to start from day one. Are you driven by money? Yes and no. Yes, because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I don't see how money. It's like a, it's like a number in a bank account, right? Like, you don't, it's not like back in the days where you look, you know, you, you know, you, you know, it's not like we're Scrooge McDuck, like can you get to jump through the, to the vault of cash, right? Like I, I, um, I, um, would watch it as a kid and I was like, wow, I want to be that guy one day.

Um, and, um, but, uh, no, I think, I think what I'm driven really is by just winning. And, um, there is, I think there is a bit of sense in me of, um, that I'm one step from losing it all. You still feel that way? Uh, I feel like it's still possible. And I think it's a, I think it's like an immigrant thing, um, probably by the way I feel exactly the same way I was like in bed last night telling my wife I was like I need to go like a therapist or something I'm like I'm freaking out we're going to lose everything is this is all going away I feel the exact I feel like I for a long time I like had a plan on where I would go if I was homeless like I still believe that is all

going in some ways in a in a weird way kind of excite you not I don't know about homeless but that you got a chance to figure it out from scratch again? Yeah, because it does kind of make me, because when you have nothing, it's kind of fun to play games because it's just easier to bet sometimes. You can't bet as much, but it's kind of exciting to be like,

just like a hood rat with nothing, like which I was. It is kind of exciting, but I get fear of, like the anxiety I feel of losing everything. Like, I, Like, I have so many spreadsheets that map out. Like, all right, when the money gets to this number,

then I got to go and panic and get a job and start, like, Ubering. Like, I have, like, a plan for that. We, um, the reason why I had you on and Ben, the reason why I wanted to show you this guy is now it's, he's hard to explain. But I wanted people to understand, like, a truly unique and original thinker. and I don't you know I you're going to have to come on again but like do you does it do you understand what I'm saying bed it's very original thinking yeah and you can see that just in the way that like you've out have attacked have tackled like a different set of problems than anyone else I've

ever talked to just like I've never talked to someone who's like yeah I tackled bring tones and then ad networks and then peer to peer lending and then the jewelry business like Like, I just think that kind of belies how your mind functions differently than other people. Do you feel that way? Like, do you feel that you just have a unique perspective? Have you met anyone that looks at the world the way you do? And if you acknowledge that it's weird, and you're saying that you didn't actually realize it was weird until I talked about you in the podcast like half a year ago, which is weird. Because how old are you like 39, 38?

And you're now just realizing that you're an oddball. Yeah, so I didn't see myself that way until you did the whole expose with that show on that one episode that you didn't tell me about. But after our lunch. I know. By the way, I told Joe, I was like, dude, I'd never do that. I almost always asked for permission before I talk about it, but I just was too excited and I forgot. It was, I have a story. but I'll tell you that after.

Okay. But, um, so to me, like, when you said, like, oh, this guy goes from this industry to that industry, he's like jumping all over the place and he's, you know, kind of successful or successful and doing it. This is like crazy. I was like, huh. I never thought of it myself that way. But it makes sense.

Like, I don't know. I keep jumping different categories. I guess, again, that curiosity just kicks in and, and, and I just, But I go after it instead of just what if, you know, I just kind of go after it. But, no, until now, I really haven't realized how odd that is. But thank you for letting me know that I'm really strange. I just think that like there's just a bunch of unique, there's just a bunch of unique things about you. And I think it's so cool.

When I say weird and odd, that's a really good compliment, by the way. Yeah, listen, I know you well enough now to know. that's a compliment. So the funny story about, again, before you, I was pretty under a radar, right? Like, yeah, you can find stuff. I mean, you have to really look. Like, nobody really put it out there, right? And so then Joe tells me, like, you're going to do the podcast, and I didn't tell my wife. And then the podcast comes out. I'm like, hey, Sarah, This guy did a podcast on me. She's like,

who cares about a podcast? She's like, you know, but he's going to talk about me. She's like, who cares? Like, what a couple hundred people are going to listen? I'm like, apparently this guy has like a million people listening. She's like, oh, great. She's like, did he ask you permission? I was like, not really, so I don't really know what he's going to talk about.

So it's like, okay. So the thing comes out. I was like, so we're listening to it. And you keep saying vowel. You keep saying val, val, like you never say, right? Never say my last name. And then you and Sean go into like this tangent talking about red pill and blue pill or whatever. So she's like, and so we thought like it's it, the vowel part is over, right?

She's like, okay, it wasn't so bad. He never mentioned your last name. Who'd how he's going to figure out who's vowel? And then after you went off to your tangent about the pills, and you're like, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention his full name. let me spell it out for you and you literally spelled my last thing so she's like I'm going to kill this guy oh she was bad she's she's very

she's very she's very nice everything I thought that everything we said you could find publicly and we didn't reveal anything like crazy and I tried to only like I just read your LinkedIn that's basically all I did yeah you can find stuff but it's you know it's one thing to information to be out there for somebody to look for it.

But it's another one when you're on full blast, right? And it's being discovered. So right? By audiences. So that's all new to be. I know. I felt like an asshole when that happened. I'm normally always good about that.

So like if someone, if we're out with friends and people are talking about stuff, I'm like, hey, is this private or not? Like they have to make sure they say it's private around me. You're a nice guy, so I'll let it slide. Yeah, I blew up your spot. Yeah, that's something. I remember the day that happened.

I was like, oh, my God, Joe, I didn't even realize it. Because sometimes when Sean and I were recording, I forget that it's a podcast. I just like, it's just like friends talking to one of the. And I forget. I'm like, oh, my God, I forgot. That was, I just said that on air. I can't believe that. So that was one of those examples.

but um dude this was awesome what do you think ben this is this is pretty badass this is great it's got me fired up to go i know you're doing your air bs this year sam that's kind of your thing but it's got me not to do it though right before this podcast he said don't do it oh really yeah i think i'm going to do it anyway but he i told him these two ideas that i might work on and he basically said uh dude i was like should i work on going hard on content should i work on this job board idea or this Airbnb thing and he goes, do content. And I was like, oh, that's what I don't want to do. I said, don't do it now.

Well, I didn't actually, he literally sent me his response like three minutes before the podcast. So I didn't entirely read the, I haven't read the whole, his whole reply. But he's like the, he's like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the land thing. That's just going to bog you down. That's what he said. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think so.

I think something you could do in the future, but not now. I do feel inspired after hearing for about and from Val. of like, I need to be trying more things, like, just taking more swings and, like, putting more experiments out there to see kind of what lands. I like that. Yeah. Throw stuff against the wall. Like, see what sticks.

What's the worst? But when you throw, when most people throw stuff against the wall, it's a half-ass attempt. When you throw stuff against a wall, like, you spend money or, like, you said that when you were, like, when you didn't have much, you spent like $6,000 or $7,000 on ads to see if this X thing could work. Whereas most people will like, like, oh, that's, I'll lose a couple hundred bucks. I don't want to do that. It's like you, you actually try.

But that was an accident. Like in that thread, that was an accident. There were no budget caps back then. So I turned it on. I go to sleep and I woke up to a $6,000 spend. Yeah, but you still did it. I mean, I get just like most people just don't do. Your, your attempts are like good.

So when I was going to all these music sites, you know how I get their attention? I would go to a site and I would just kind of through Alexa or whatever, I kind of do how much traffic they have. And I knew these guys were outside the country. And to get their attention, I would literally email them to say, hey, I'll give you $100,000, or I give you $50,000, I'll give you $20,000. Prepaid, I'll wire tomorrow just so you could test my ringtone matcher link for seven days. If you don't like it, it doesn't make you enough money, take the link off.

We'll never talk again. If you like how much it generates, you'll sign a contract. And everybody signed a contract. Because those two text links were generating like five times. Like somebody who was making like a like, there were sites that were making like top sites were making like $100,000 a month. I would pay him $400,000 a month on top of that. And how many people actually took you up and said, all right, fine,

why do you the money and then I'll put yours? They all wanted the money first. Oh, the money. My success rate on that email was just, I mean, who the hell is I'm going to take money, like, up front? I would be like, you know what? I don't need you to do it up front. I'll give it a try just because you're serious. And you actually told the story on POMS podcast because you, like, you were like bold, but you have high integrity because, like, I think there was a guy who you owed a lot of money to because they were a customer of your, or they were a vendor.

And you just had a bill that you had to pay them. and they like changed their address or something and you like dude i can't find you i owe you $60,000 and you like held on to the $60,000 for like a long time and you just were seeking them out everywhere like hey where'd you go i need to pay you your money yeah yeah it pays off like um it's we because we had so many international people um in the music business when the great recession hit and they were they were in all these countries and uh where their banks, a lot of them were, banks were located in weird areas, weird countries like Cyprus.

And they would literally tell us, hey, stop, stop wiring this money. We don't trust the bank we're working with. I got to get a new bank account. Like, we held their money for, they told us to hold their money for, I mean, we had millions in our bank account that didn't belong to us. And all these sites basically told me, told me, like I was kind of like their bank for for a while because they didn't want to get paid and they didn't, they didn't trust the bank. It was phenomenal to me.

Like I couldn't understand that they, they trust us, trust me with their money for, I mean, it was, I think some in some cases up to a year. We were holding their money because he had nowhere to send it. That's crazy. Dude, this is a good conversation. I'm happy you came on. This is awesome. Listen, you're, you're doing. I told you before.

I love your podcast. It's very, it's very like, it's very like, it's very like, layman terms, right? It actually takes a lot of intellect, in my opinion, to dumb things down. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It helps. Yeah, oftentimes I wonder, like, I've, a lot of my friends are English as a second language. Maybe, uh, it's, like, I'm always amazed.

Can you imagine coming to another country where you don't speak the language at, like, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and then, like, just crushing it. I did. So I think that's just, like, amazing. I've got a bunch of friends who are ESLs and they'll, they'll, like, I'll help them write stuff because, um, they're just a little rough. And I'm like, dude, how are you so badass? I'm amazed at you're, I'm just amazed at some of these folks.

And you're one of those people. Yeah. Yeah. Like, whether you're a cell, I'm like, my English is pretty good now. But I still can't put my thoughts together in a way that makes it so interesting for people to understand. And you know, you know, you know, you help me with some of my, so my, you know, one of my, you know, pieces on that. So that's, that's power. well thank you i appreciate you coming on this is badass listen i appreciate you guys having me on