My First Million - #66 - Life Coins, Amazon FBA Rollups & Going Back In Time

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back to talk wearing ivy league swag (3:24), Thrasio Amazon FBA rollup (6:20), Classpass for online courses (16:16), Real life bruce wayne Kinobody (19:45), What's a way the hosts have hacked a shortcut for themselves? (24:31), Looking at old newspapers to see what they got right/wrong (28:50), Personal ICOs (37:31), Billionaire of the week: Jim Patterson (44:44), Do you want to become a billionaire? (52:36) and Sexy notary business (57:05). The way you write has a huge effect on what you get — both in your business and personal life so why not learn how to write like you speak and sell like hell: search Kopywriting Kourse and improve you life 100x.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

All right, we got a friend of the show here, Jordan Harbinger. He's one of the guys who's been advising us on how to build this podcast because his podcast is way more successful than ours and has been around. He's been doing podcasting for like 12 and a half years, which, Jordan, that's got to be as long as podcasting has existed, right? Yeah, I think podcasts have been around for like 14 years or 15 and I've been around for 13 of those. So, yeah, when I started, there was no way, there were no iPhones. So you couldn't get podcasts on your phone. You had to use an iPod to play them. Yeah, straight to cassette. That's how long this guy's been doing it. So Jordan, you know, I like your show. I've been binging it while in quarantine because, you know, what else am I going to do besides try to learn something new or improve myself in some way? And I got to say, I like it because you do the, you know, the interview style show where you go deep with a guest. I think, you know, I was listening to the one with Tony Hawk, which was pretty awesome. And I got to say, I like that you don't do the kind of surface level, you know, just, you know, pitty patting around.

with the questions or trying to do, you know, inspirational fluff where you're just saying, go, you can do this. So with that episode with Tony Hawk, what was that like? Because Tony Hawk's an icon. How is it, you know, interviewing Tony Hawk? It was great. He's a really interesting guy, really open and fun. And he told some pretty funny stories.

One, which was very apropos of what's going on right now is one day he walked into his agent or some sort of marketing team that he'd hired. He walked into their office. This is like at the height of video games where he's making, I don't know, well, I'm 50 million bucks off these skating games and these brands. And he goes in and he says, look, I got this backpack that was made pretty shoddily, and it's got my name and face on it. I don't want any more stuff like that.

And as the agent market or whatever is sort of nodding his head and understanding, Tony goes, wait, what's that on your shelf? And it was a roll of toilet paper with Tony Hawk's name, face, and logo on it. And he goes, what the hell is that? And the guy goes, oh, yeah, anything we put your name and face on does so. well, we were joking that we could put your face on toilet paper and we'd still be able to sell it. And he fired them on the spot because it was clear that they didn't value his brand, which I thought was a funny story. He's got a ton of stuff like that that he talked about on the show.

That is epic. You know, I actually met Tony Hawk. We went on a trip to Africa, a charity trip together. And believe it or not, we were halfway up up a mountain in Ethiopia where, you know, it's a like, this is a mountain village. And somebody saw him there and they were like, Tony Hawk. You know, that's probably the only English word they said, us all day. They identified Tony Hawk on a mountain in Ethiopia. That's how famous that guy is. So that's an amazing guest to have on the show. Imagine being that famous that you get recognized in the middle of countries where like nobody speaks to your language and they maybe don't even have skateboards. Yeah, we were there trying to give people clean water. They didn't even have water,

but they knew Tony Hawk. That's how that's how famous I got. Amazing. Awesome. Well, if you want to hear more from Jordan, we're going to be having him on more and more. He's a friend of the house. And you should listen to his show. It's one of the podcast that I would recommend. If you like Tim Ferriss's stuff. If you like our stuff, you're going to like his stuff. And so go check out the Jordan Harbour and get your show on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. You'll find them there. All right. We were back. Man, I started off with a big, um, that's not cool. Sam, you are wearing a Harvard shirt. Why go to the school when you can buy the shirt for $35 and get half the benefits? It was $60, Sean. But whenever I wear it, they go, you went to Harvard? Yeah, I went to Harvard.

I've been to Harvard. I took a... I paid $20. I got a tour there last year when I was 28. That's actually a great conversation starter. And then they don't know how to escape. They thought they were going to have an alumni chat. Harvard, you bid. Yeah, I went for Easter.

It took a tour. It was lovely. It'd be a great school to go to. That's great. That's great. I actually, this is like a weird thing. I have a lot of weird collections, and one of them, I like collecting university sweatshirts. So I have, I didn't go to an elite school, but I respect them.

I have a Stanford one. I have a Harvard one. I think I have a Dartmouth one. I've got all the cool ones. My wife went to Ivy, Penn. I have a Penn one. I have a Harvard one, too. I don't even know why.

I don't even know where it. I don't even think I bought it. It's just at my house somehow, and I wear it. And then I didn't buy any of my college gear when I was in college, because I was like this is expensive and a little bit lame how people would wait in line for hours for a free shirt I would wear a Duke one though you went to Duke yeah I went to Duke but I like the stuff I just didn't I just thought it's too expensive and then now like literally uh during Black Friday everybody was shopping and I was like oh shit I want to shop I got the urge to shop too but I don't know what the hell to shop for

so I bought a bunch of university shit 10 years later 10 years later and so now I have like all Duke care I wear like you know every day I would wear uh Duke stuff too I I would wear uh Duke stuff too I I would be proud. I think Duke's cool. Okay, I'll hook you up. I have a bunch. I will get you a Duke sweatshirt. Well, Duke probably has, like, really good dry fit basketball gear and stuff like that.

I'm going to, I'll go and buy some. I'll buy some from Duke. What else should I add to my collection? Cornell, that's, like, a cool one. Maybe, like, an edgy one of some kind. Like, you should get, like, you know, what school has sort of fallen out of favor? Or you should just do, like, the, like, Theranos shirt or, like, Lambda School shirt or something. No, I want universities.

Like, uh, fuck. I don't know. Maybe throw a little Oxford in there. Go international. Ooh, I could do Oxford or like a, like, is Rhodes Scholar a thing? I think that's, I think that's part of Oxford. I don't know. Alan just told me to wear a University of Sydney one, because I did go to University of Sydney for a year.

Yeah, it's less interesting when you actually went there. I know. So anyway, I'm wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and I'm drinking Kool-Aid. Yeah, he's drinking a glass of Kool-Aid. The mood is set. That is the perfect formula. So let's jump in. What do we got?

We can talk about a bunch of interesting things. You want to bring up this Amazon company? Yeah, so this company, I don't know how you say it exactly. I think it's called Thrasio. So saw the news recently. I think probably a lot of people listening to this have heard of this. So we'll just give kind of our opinion. Okay, so Thrasio is the name of it.

It's a roll-up company. So we've been talking roll-ups, you know, here and there. So this is a roll-up company. and what they're doing is they're rolling up Amazon FBA businesses. So brands that are built and sold just pretty much exclusively on Amazon. And these are usually like private labeled goods. So they find some shit in China, slap their name on it, posted on Amazon, and they try to just surf the search traffic on Amazon.

And so these businesses are, you know, they can be decent. And so these guys have rolled up so many of them that basically, so they just raised $110 million. at a $780 million valuation. It's only a year old or two years old? Two years old, exactly. So two years old, and they've built a ton of value. So this valuation at $780 million is 30 times what it was 18 months ago.

So they've built a pretty big company. So the holding company, they say their gross revenue is over $200 million, and they have $35 million in trailing 12 months, EBTA. So $35 million of EBDA the last 12 months. Um, not bad. Now, this is a little bit controversial. So when I first saw this, I was like, oh, that's interesting. That's smart. Um, they own a bunch of brands like, I think they own 35 of them or 200 of them. 43, 43 brands. They do all cash transactions. And, uh, so some of the examples, they have a brand called Beast Gear, which I think is a fitness brand. They have a trail buddy

hiking poles. I've seen that. Anti-fat, floor mats, pet deodorizers. So all these like little niche businesses that will do individually, you know, single digit millions a year in revenue, and they're rolling them up. And so on one hand, I was like, okay, this is a quick way to, like, build a lot of value because, you know, the sellers in these markets kind of know, they built a thing to, you know, let's call it $4 million in revenue, and they're doing all right. But they'll, you know, if you would pay them out three or four million bucks, they'll take it because that's three years of, you know, cash flow, and they'll, they know that FBI businesses are very fickle. So that was the kind of downside.

Okay, but where's the bot? The butt is Amazon FBI businesses are not durable or defensible. Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these guys have a contrary point of view that's correct. But the conventional wisdom here is it's very easy for a competitor to come in and compete with you. It's very hard to build any kind of moat because you're just hoping to be at the top of the rankings. On top of that, Amazon themselves is going into different categories and creating Amazon Basic Brands.

Yeah, I mean, I just typed in anti-fatigue mat. Their brand is number two, and the number one brand is Amazon Basics, and it's $10 cheaper. And then there's probably, I don't know how many more, like right next to that, there's probably like a bunch more that are in that same category. Yeah. And, you know, what works in the algorithm for some amount of time, like, let's say you bought a bunch of fake reviews or something like that, that can get penalized and then boom, your brand. drops to essentially zero or it can it can drop like a like a rock okay well let's play devil's advocate here though let's explain how this can be great so if you let's just type in phone charger Amazon so there's this brand called anchor A and K-E-R you know that brand?

Yes started in China in what's the Silicon Valley of China's called Shosen or I don't know I think there's a few different hubs. There's like a manufacturing hub. There's a tech hub. There's different hubs. Here's Alan messaging me. Shen, Shen Zen. Okay, the guy, he worked at, I think his name was Peter.

I believe he worked at Google in Sanford or in California. And then he's from this area and he moved back there and he started this charger company called Anchor. And he goes, when we, when we started this business, our goal was to be at a, we would want to rest in the four to four and a half star review on Amher. So we wanted to have products that were pretty good, but affordable. And they started making phone chargers. And it's a billion dollar company now. And they lived on Amazon for a long time and then have since built a brand beyond it. And I love their products.

So it is definitely possible to build beyond. But there are so many Amazon-only companies that just suck. Right. Yeah. And so the question that I have for these guys is, what does the hit rate need to be for this to work? So, like, out of every 10 businesses they buy, if one or two of them next year have been out-competed or delisted or deranged in the Amazon search and, you know, revenue drops by 40%, 50%, 80%, which can totally happen on Amazon, can their business still work? Or do they need a high hit rate? Or do they have some sort of durability where they can take some losses along the way?

Like a venture capitalist can invest in a portfolio. of companies, they don't need most to work, they need one or two to work for the whole portfolio of return. But for other types of businesses, when you're buying, you know, you're buying based off of EBITA, I don't think you have that same luxury. So I'm very curious how this works. Now, what I would say is if you're the founder, you kind of had nothing to lose doing this, right? There's an opportunity to do the roll-up. You used other people's money to do it. You've built a, you know, presumably $800 million company in two years. And you can take some secondary off the table and then your free roll in the rest and maybe this works if

even if there's a 20% chance of it working you you know for the entrepreneur I think was a good bet for the investors I don't know so that valuations and it doesn't seem crazy rich to be honest 35 so that's only is that 12 times profit yeah which is a lot for these FBA businesses individually are selling for I don't know two three X so yeah but none of them have 35 million dollars in profit and do they get $35 million in profit in two years? Yeah, but like they're not growing at a rapid pace because they're, you know, one company is growing.

They're just, they're paying for each, each, you know, incremental growth, right? They're acquiring companies to grow. And so. And I agree with you. I'm just, why the group would be worth more. I'm just playing the other side here. Instant pot. That was basically an FB, or that was like lived only on Amazon.

I mean, so it could happen. That's a defensible product, right? So like if you go, as I have on Alibaba and you go try to find an instant pot competitor, it is not easy to get a product that is of the same quality as instant pot. It is not an easily clonable business. Whereas this, you know, the business they wrote in here, Beast Gear, the number one selling product looks like it's hand wraps for like boxing. It's not really what it is. You search wristwaps in Amazon and you get tons of competitors.

I could go start a wrist wrap, you know, boxing gear brand tomorrow. Like, give me 18 hours and I'll have a clone of Beast Gear spun up. That doesn't mean I'll be able to rank as high right away, but it's, you know, the products are not as durable. Is it Gear Beast? Yeah, Gear Beast. They have a ton of crap. They've got a cell phone holder that goes on your water bottle. That's kind of cool.

No, Beast Gear, not Gear Beast. Oh. Is sure? Yeah. Well, this. So it's all fitness equipment. I'm not saying it's bad. It might be fine, fitness equipment.

What I'm saying is this is a clearly, you know, private label, Amazon supplier. You can find this in a very short, you can clone the product in a very short amount of time. Yeah, I'm looking at this beast here. This looks like shit. Yeah, the harder part is to rank high, right? So, but the problem with that is just like, you know, we have a friend who has a business that he bought for a million, between one and two million dollars. and was heavily dependent on SEO as well as YouTube. So it was doing great in SEO.

It was doing great on YouTube. I was bringing in close to a million dollars in revenue a year. And the SEO and the YouTube rank was very strong. Now, two years later, I just talked to him and he said it's fallen off a cliff. YouTube changed their algorithm and Google changed their algorithm slightly and my business is essentially dead. and now that's a you know that's a business he bought for for over a million dollars yeah he shouldn't have bought that in the first place it was obvious that was going to happen but and so these are you know the number one thing you know we just had Andrew Wilkinson on the podcast and he's

talking about buying businesses i think you know my point of view is aligned with his which is that durability is you know one of the top characteristics that that you look for when you're buying a business yeah um i i think that this is a risky bet but the guy who started it seems really interesting. What's his story? He worked at Seamless. I mean, he seems like a, like a, I think he worked at Seameless. He just seems like he's just been around a bunch of fast-growing companies.

Gotcha. Let me look him up. What was the, Thrasio. Yeah, he just, he like, I believe he's in New York and he started a bunch of companies. And then the guys who started Seameless are, are a bit involved. So he seems interesting. and the people who invested in him said that he was kind of a force to be reckoned with. So maybe they know something we don't know.

This is not easy to do. So I definitely give them credit for doing this in such a short amount of time. Again, as an entrepreneur, I think it's a great bet. As a, do I think that this business is actually going to work? And would I invest in this business? No. Yeah, I agree with you. But yeah, it's pretty amazing what they pulled off.

So good for them. Okay, I got a, I'd not. I got a half-baked idea for you. Okay, so I don't love this idea. I'd give it a four out of ten, but there's something there. I think it can be improved a little bit. So this is the second one.

So right now everybody is at home, and a lot of people are sort of, you know, finding in-home entertainment. Some people watch Netflix, you know, Twitch, YouTube, et cetera. And some people are trying to figure out, okay, how do I do home workouts? How do I improve my fitness?

Some people are, you know, doing online, And so online class is kind of interesting to me, right? You've taken a bunch of online classes. You guys offer online classes. I've taken a bunch as well. I pay for it. And I was wondering, you know, like every time I see an interesting online class, I'm like, okay, you know, the risk of this just being some like shitty, you know, good sales pitch shitty class is too high.

And I'm always just like, I wish I could just, you know, kind of try this or have kind of an all you can eat pass where I can just try as many of these as I want. So the idea is, why isn't there a class pass for online courses, or even better, why isn't there just a pirate bay to have all these for free? That's the bootleg version. There is a pirate bay for it. I mean, I've downloaded a bunch. What is the pirate? Is it just the pirate bay or is there a different one? No, I mean, look, you know how, like, we find, like, illegal streams of UFC events and stuff like that?

And you just, like, know it to Google, like, UFC cracked stream or like. Right. Allegedly, yes. Yeah. Or on Reddit, you could look it up on Reddit. Or you can look it up on Twitter. there's the same thing. So, like, for example, there's this fitness guy who advertises on YouTube called KinoBody.

And he's like shredded. Keno Body, dude. That guy's got the best ads. His ads are so funny. And I was like, I just got to buy this just to see what, like, what it's about. Like, I don't even want to do it. But I just typed in like Kino Body Torrent Dropbox or something. And I was able to download it for free.

Amazing. Okay, this week's episode is brought to you by Neville Maduro's copywriting course. If you listen to Sam, you've probably heard him say the word copyrighting a million times now. He did a whole podcast talking about one of the skill sets that has helped him the most as well as, you know, you did this in your recession-proof skill sets, podcasts, I think. And a lot of people were asking, okay, where do I go to find it? When you did it back then, you were just saying, you know, the tools and the books and the stuff, you know, the things that have worked for you.

You were not paid to say it. You truly believe it. This time, it's an ad. We are paid to say it, but we still believe it. I actually have bought the course as well. I've gone through it, you know, two months ago, three months ago. And I mean, it's amazing. If you want to, the fastest way for me to increase sales or increase conversions or increase

growth has been to change the words on the page or change the words in an email. It is way faster than trying to come up with new features or hold new ideas to try to grow. So, copyrighting, I'm a big fan. Sam, what do you think? Yeah. So I think that it definitely changed how I wrote copy and I got more sales. But more importantly, to me, copywriting means understanding what motivates me. people and figuring out how to communicate how my product will solve a problem in their in their life and

i took neville's course in 2013 i believe and it really kind of opened my eyes to how to do this so if you're into this if you want to try it just go to copywriting course dot com that's copywriting course and neville's kind of funny uh he's a he's an oddball and he spelled copywriting with a k and course with so just google copywriting course and you'll see his blog and you can sign up to his course if you want and if you just want to go straight to the course just google copywriting course join and you will see a link for it okay so for people who haven't heard of kino body you need to find this guy's youtube ads so just go facebook ad library which if you didn't know is amazing you can go see any brands facebook ads so google facebook ad library then type in kino body and then watch these guys ads this

guy basically he tries to position himself as like um Bruce Wayne's wayne's real name Bruce Wayne yeah he's like in front of a castle he's in front of Wayne Manor and he's out in nature he's shirtless and he's super ripped obviously and he's just stretching he's just doing this like push-ups in like in front of a Ferrari and then the Ferrari's behind him and then like a woman comes up and hands him a glass of champagne he drinks the glass and then he continues his workout and it's like this over-the-top ridiculous lifestyle ad it's like Thai Lopez if Tai Lopez was jacked it's so funny it's it's great you know I've actually I like got caught by the ad I was like this guy's funny like I got a dude I bookmarked it and I sent it to friends I was like this is the best ad I've ever seen

Yeah, it's like, I feel as though he's definitely mocking himself a little bit. Like he's, it's like, and I did research on him. His name's Greg and his family is wealthy, not like billionaire wealthy, but just like good gigs and stuff like that. I think they live in Canada. And his program is, it's fine. It's great advice. And, you know, the good thing, so you click the ad and then it basically takes you through this quiz of like, you know, the reason I haven't been able to get as fit as I want is it's hard to stick to my diet. or I don't like going to the gym.

And you start taking this quiz and there's two giant buttons on the screen and you're just picking your answer. And like 10 questions in, he's like, all right, I'm formulating the perfect plan for you. And of course,

it just fits out the same three plans. It's like, do you want to be a Greek god body? Do you want to be the lean shredded machine? Yeah. Or would you rather be, you know, whatever,

you and not buy my program. And you just pick one of those and it's like 60 bucks. And I think this guy's making like somewhere, you know, six, seven million dollars a year. I looked it up. I think it was like eight to three.

10. 8 to 10, yeah. He said it in some interview, and you know, I would totally believe that. That makes sense to me. Yeah, he's got a great YouTube channel. I love that guy. What's to say Greg McCafferty or Greg? No, no, it's something else. He's great. You know, he kind of, his whole brand is like Oh, Gallagher. Oh, Gallagher. He's got this brand that's like a mix of Bruce Wayne and American Psycho, and his YouTube ads are so good. And what I always tell people who are interested in internet marketing is I go find out what the affiliate marketers or the fitness people or anyone you think is scammy, find out whatever they're doing and copy it. And because it works.

It's so effective. And it's not the best way to change the world, but it is an amazing way. That advice is an amazing way to actually build the core skill set you need to sell anything and make anything successful. And like if I was 20 to 26, I would be. on that. I'd be like, okay, hey, it looks like this gamer energy drink is being, you know, slung around and doing $20 million a year. Okay, I'm going to make my own gamer energy drink or I'm going to make my own keynote body or I'm going to make my own whatever. And I would learn the core

skill set of internet marketing to be able to succeed in anything. Because usually these guys, they typically, they have a wobbly moral compass. So they're willing to do some things that most people are not willing to do. And also, they start with nothing and they have to spend a dollar and make more than a dollar. And so what I like to say is whatever tactics they're doing, just take all the Silicon Valley funding that you've raised and definitely be ethical and have a really good product, but also do all that stuff that they do. Right. And you can sell a shit product, you can sell a great product. Yeah. That's one way of, that's one way of thinking about it. Right. And so whatever the internet marketers do, do that. So there's a reason why you see those

internet marketers with long sales pages with lots of text. There's a reason why you see them, you know, with a Ferrari in the background. It works. So on the Y Combinator application, if you want to apply to YC, they have one question that's kind of the famous question, which is tell me about a real life system you've hacked to your benefit. And what they mean is basically like, tell me where you, you know, didn't follow the standard playbook, you came up with some clever solution, and you got a good result for yourself out of it. And they're not looking for anything unethical. They're just trying to say like, you know, oh, you know, I realized that, you know, I really wanted to place, you know, during COVID. I realized that, you know, grocery shortage was a big problem.

I realized I could scrape all the availability windows at midnight every day, Eastern time, because that's when their servers updated. I could find the delivery times and I could book them for me and my family or whatever. What's your answer, Sean? You know, I had an answer for that because I did apply to YC. I just try to think of what it would be. I'll tell you mine what you think. Yeah, go for it. I have too many that I don't want to say on air because for a bunch of reasons,

I don't want to incriminate myself or also look bad when I don't think it's actually that bad. But I'll say one. When I was in college, they let you take 28 hours, up to 28 hours of summer school, but they don't define what summer is. And so what I would do during a semester was I found out that summer school could also be online school. And LSU has courses that you can take that only costs 600. or $400, whereas at my university, like the credit, I forget how it was structured, but like the equivalent was like 10 grand.

And so I signed up for $20 through LSU and it was all online. And you could sign up for these bullshit classes. And then I hired an Indian to do it for like 50 bucks, like so cheap. You just wrote these crap essays and then a TA like graded it. And so a whole semester of school was just that way. Dude, that's hilarious. I don't know what mine would be, but I have a very very. similar one, which was when I was at Duke, I was doing so poorly in all my classes. I was like a

very mediocre student. And I was like, man, these people all work harder than me and are smarter than me. Like, there's just not really like a great path for me to, you know, in high school, I was the smartest kid and didn't have to work that hard. And here, everybody is the smartest kid from their high school is all here. So now that doesn't work anymore. And so I looked around and I realized, man, what are all these athletes doing? Because the only not smart people on campus where the athletes, for the most part, except for Brian Zubek, shout out to Zubek for being smart. So I looked at what the basketball players would take, so I found a way to look at their class schedule, and I signed up for all those classes. And one of them in particular that I saw

all of them were in was this one, it was like this business, it was like this business course. And so I signed up for it. And first day of semester, I was like, okay, where do I go? Like there's no classroom listed here. I like email the professor. I'm like, hey, there seems to be some error. There's no classroom. did on the thing. And he was like, oh, yeah, this is a virtual course. You just need to read these three books. And they were like, it was the Lance Armstrong book. It was like two like other like super light, like breezy reads. I was like, you have to read these three books the whole semester. And at the end, pick one and write one page about it.

Kind of so stupid. Just email that to me. And I got an A. And it was just me and all the athletes in this course and nobody else even knew about it. And so I got a. That's so stupid. And that course, that course for I don't know if you were in scholarship or not that that was probably 10 grand yeah well that's the thing we for them they're on scholarship I was the only one paying for my tuition so that's so stupid that's so stupid this is why I don't want people to bail out um folks who have loans because I know it will hurt them but in the short term it will hurt them but in the long term it should make these schools should go out of business when I was in school I went there on a track and field scholarship I had to take a gym class so I took a robic walking right

Oh, God. Yeah, there's literally like rocks for jocks and all these, like, you know, secret classes that were so easy to be in. It says the guy who is wearing the Harvard sweatshirt right now. Hey, Harvard seems great. Oh, I thought Duke seemed great. But the fact that those things existed, that's so stupid to me. Dude, another one like that. So Harvard has this thing called the extension.

Have you heard of the Harvard extension? Yeah, it's like people go, like executives go and they pay and they let everyone in. And then on their LinkedIn, they put that they went to Harvard. No, so that's the executive MBA, which is just straight up, yeah, you pay an absurd amount of money, and you take this thing online. On Tyra Banks is Lincoln. It says, graduate of Harvard. And she went to an executive.

So my cousin had this where he had a Harvard thing on his resume. I was like, dude, you went to Harvard? And he was like, oh, no, no, there's this extension school. It's like two blocks away from Harvard. And anyone can get in. You just pay and you go. And it's called Harvard Extension. He's like, but when people read the resume, they just stop at Harvard.

They're like, okay, cool. You know, they don't even know what this other EXT stands for. I hope your cousin's listening. Yeah, he's great. He's actually really smart and has been super successful since then. So, yeah, anyways. Okay, you want to talk about some hacks? I want to talk about this Jim Patterson guy.

And then I want to tell you and the listeners, one thing that I do, I told Andrew about this here today and he loved it. Have you heard of newspapers.com? No. First of all, awesome company. Love this business. Newspapers.com, Martin, I'm going to it. I believe it's owned by, uh, ancestry.

It's owned by ancestry. Um, it's amazing. I'm a subscriber. I pay $10 a month, maybe $20 a month. I forget. I love it. And it's, what do you do with this?

I'll just tell you. It's an aggregation of all the newspapers ever, or at least they try to make it that. And what I love to do is whenever I read books, which I love biographies and I love books. So right now, I feel like a douche admitting this. I'm reading the fountain head. I've never read and ran, but I've never read it either. never read any of that but everyone says that i should so whatever i read it it's based in 1933 and so what i'll do is and they talk about architecture and architecture nowadays that doesn't that's not

like a particularly like a sexy job but it's according to that book it was and so i'll use newspaper com and i'll set the time range from like 1928 to like 1933 and i'll just type in like new york architecture and i'll read cool new york article articles about architecture and i'll kind of or like the book is based on frank lord right so i'll look at articles about him Or when I read the biography of Ted Turner, I'll type in Ted Turner. He had an advertising company in 1973. But the problem is if I Google that, Ted Turner, CNN will show up. And Google didn't exist in 1973.

So I want to look up articles about it'll say like Edward Turner buys new billboard in Athens, Georgia. Are you trying to see what were they saying about this back then? Yes. What did people think back then and not the revisionist? Before they knew. Yeah, before they knew what the outcome was going to be. So another example, I started reading about Dan Gilbert. The guy started Quicken Loans.

And he owns all the stuff, big deal. He's revitalizing Detroit. Everyone knows his name. I was like, what was his path? Like, what did he start? And so I went to Dan Gilbert, 1994, quick and loans. And it was like, his company was six years old. And I looked at how they were describing him.

And they described him as very similar to what they described him as now. I'm like, wow, that guy kind of had the it factor back then. And it's really fun to see that. Same with the have you heard of fossil watches? Yes. That guy who started it, he also now owns this thing called Shinola, which is really cool.

And everyone knows him as Shinola, but I just like looked, I was like, I wonder what he was like when he was younger and just getting going. And I just read all about him and his brothers starting with fossil watches and they show him in their garage.

And it's just really cool to read all about that. And so that I use it like crazy. And I read a lot of biographies set in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, all the way up to the 70s. And it's the only. source that you can go and get real facts and information about it. I like that a lot. I'm a little different than you in that I don't, I don't, A, do as much biography type of stuff

as you do, but be my method for this. I have the same it. I try to scratch, but I scratch it a different way. So I think we've talked about this once before, but if the itch is, I want to know what people were saying back then when we didn't know what the outcome was going to be. Because in reality, when you look at today, that's what today is. Today people are talking about stuff and they don't know what the outcome is going to be. And so to train your mind to understand how, like, not just to believe everything you read today and how to put this into context.

And man, everybody was wrong about X. I have a bunch of different like methods of doing this. So first is we've talked about these like memos before, like the original memo when they were like, hey, we're going to create PowerPoint or the Facebook memos when they're like, hey, I think we should compete with, you know, we should buy Oculus for this reason. And the back story to this is you worked with Emmett, the founder of Twitch, and he wrote a memo or wrote a bunch of stuff saying why they should pivot the company from doing this, what they were doing to start Twitter. I emailed the CEO, or not email, I slacked him. And I said, hey, do you have any of the original document plans, pitches that you had from

when you started the company 10 years ago before this was a multi-billion dollar company? And he sent me a bunch of the raw research, like user interviews, PowerPoint presentations. he was giving the like investors and it was awesome to see that's what that's how sophisticated it was back then and also um that's you know there were certain things they were totally wrong about and and and so what do you mean it was sophisticated so when emmett was starting twitch you're saying um i'm saying you know like when you look at the pitch it's not a polished thing there's not a ton of well-researched data uh same thing we you know sully our friend uh who started a really successful mobile gaming company called tiny Tinycoe, I had asked him, I said, hey, you raised all this money from Andresen Horowitz.

He raised $16 million. And if you go look, Ben Horowitz writes a blog post about him and says, like, this founder kicks ass and this company's going to be awesome. And here's why. And I was like, dude, what was your pitch to them? I want to see the deck you sent them. And he sent it to me. And it was no joke, all black and white, like no styling, like two images in the whole thing.

there's some really like bold like proclamations about what they were trying to do and why why it was going to work and that like it was just so interesting to see the content like the name of the company was something totally different back then yeah it was called like Brooklyn Packet Company and so yeah I like I like seeing stuff back when it started when it was unclear what the outcome was going to be the other thing I do with this is my own emails so I frequently if I make a decision I will email the decision out to the people who are involved in it and they're like yeah I know we just talked about this on the phone for two hours like why did you and it's like a diary it's a diary and then I go back and I look at this I'm like okay I was a dumbass what was I wrong about then that I now can see and I'll go back and I'll read my old emails to like help refine my own game so I can make better decisions as I go forward that's a great um you ask that question all the time what am I say it again uh what am I wrong about my question is uh when if we look back in 12 months six months from now and we say, hey, man, that podcast was great. You know, you were really excited

about it. It seemed like it was going to work. And let's assume like 12 months from now, it's failed. What's the most likely reason you're going to say why it failed? That's a question I ask myself on any project I do. What's the six months from now, if we fast forward to there and it's failed, what's the most likely reason I'd be giving you over a beer when we're like, dude, what happened? That was great. And then I write that down now and I start to work on it now. But then I, you know, six months later, I'll go back and I'll look at those things and I'll say, okay, what was I right about? What was I wrong about? And it's really just a humbling exercise because I'm like, okay, cool. I know, you know, today how, like not to take at sort of face value all the stuff I'm reading

from others as well as things I'm thinking myself because I just seen over time how wrong people are. Yeah, I've stolen that from you. I always asked, I have been asked myself what exists now that I need to take advantage of that won't exist in the next 10 or 20 years. For me right now, it's cold emailing. I think it's pretty crazy that you can email anyone. Like this hole is open? Yeah, I think it's nuts.

It'd be like if I had anyone's, if I could easily guess everyone's phone number. Right. It's like, well, why wouldn't you call them? So here's another version of that. So Paul Graham, again, YC, has this essay and he's talking about like how to get great startup ideas. And if you're listening to this, you want to get great startup ideas, I would go, I would recommend you go read this as Paulgram.com.

I think it's just slash ideas. Is that the one called Schlep? No, that's a different one. But this one, he basically says, look, the easiest way to invent the future is to just live in the future and then figure out what's missing for others. Right. So he was like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, when he created Facebook, he already was blogging on these like, you know, kind of blogging wasn't as big of a thing, but he was blogging. He was talking, he was sharing life updates and photos online with other people who, you know, he didn't even know super well, but they were just following him online. And he's like, for him, living online and posting your photos, your status updates, your thoughts, that was normal.

But for everybody else, it was abnormal. So he was sort of already living in the future. And he just needed to build what was missing for everybody else who was currently living in the present. And there's like, so the blog post is really good. It talks about the same thing with like, there's old painting quotes. Like, how do you paint the perfect painting? It's like, first you become perfect and then you just paint. And it's the same idea, which is like, if you are already living a lifestyle that is awesome for you,

but you are doing it in a kind of manual way or you've hacked the system into where you are, you have these products or benefits that other people don't have, you just have to figure out how to make that accessible and educate the market on those things and so that they can come live the same lifestyle you're living. So I have an example of this. I was reading something recently that was really interesting. There's this guy named. Alex something. I don't know. It doesn't matter what his last name is. So his name's Alex.

And he did something very interesting. So he created, he's in the crypto space. And crypto has never been more interesting to me than it is now because now everybody who was just like here for the bandwagon has jumped off and has moved on to the next shit. And so only the real diehards is still in it. Just making progress every week. And so this guy's one of those diehards. He's still in it. And what he did was he created what I'll call a life coin. So he's He created his own currency called Alex. It's dollar sign Alex if you want to buy it. Wait, a life coin is the category.

Life coin is my term. That's not like what they call it. But, you know, it could also be called a personal ICO. He created a social currency for himself. There's no like terms for it. That's how new this idea is. I call it a life coin. Basically, he minted 10 million Alex coins.

And of the 10 million Alex coins, he kept a bunch for himself. And then he's like, okay, I will see. sell some Alex coins to the general market. And the contract is this. He created an income sharing agreement. He's like, hey, I'm 20. I really want to go to this crypto conference. And, you know, I don't have the money to pay. I don't have three grand. I can go pay for this now. And some guy on Twitter reached out was like, I'll loan you the money. You just pay me back. And he's like, but let's do it through a smart contract using crypto. And so that was kind of how this started. And so eventually what he did was he financed his education doing this. So he sold

$20,000 worth of his student loan, basically. and he has an income share agreement, which means after he graduates, whatever job he gets for the first three years, he's going to pay back the holders of this. Alex coin at some predefined rate. Yeah, I have, I just Google it. This is amazing. It's smart kid.

He's only 21 or 2 from France. Right. And so he did this. And so I started looking into this because I'm very intrigued by this, because there's so many people who I'm like, like, we have this friend, Vishal. He's really young. He's like, I think, 22 now. But for two years now, I've been like,

this guy's going to be a billionaire someday. If I could just own 5% of Vichal's future earnings, I would pay a lot of money for that. I wouldn't bet on every individual venture because, dude, I don't know. It might not be this one, you know, but by the time this guy's 40, he's going to be a billionaire. You feel that about him? What's that? You feel that about him? Oh, yeah, for sure.

He's also maniacally focused on becoming a billionaire. It's the only thing he does and cares about in his life. He doesn't date. He doesn't work out. He doesn't have hobbies. his hobby is making money his interest is making money his friends are people who have money like that's who this guy is let's we got to spell his name i don't i've never met vshal even though he's good friends with you yeah we should have him on the podcast what's his name so it's v i s h-a-l and

his last name is if you just do his twitter it's vshal hark um how do you spell the last name h-a-r-r-p yeah vashal harp i got to find him so i have confidence that this guy going to be a billionaire someday. And so I would love to invest a hundred grand right now and own a piece of his future earnings. Now, he might not take that trade, but there's many people out there who don't have access to capital, don't have access to fund their education, or they're just, they're being like an NBA player is a great example of this. So there's this NBA basketball player called Spencer Dinwiddie who did this also. He just signed a contract with the Nets. That was a four-year $29 million deal, a three-year, a three-year-old $29 million.

idea, something like that. And he wanted to basically sell fractions of his future NBA earnings through crypto. The NBA ultimately blocked him, but he was literally trying to do it. He was like, hey, look, I just signed a $30 million deal. And I'm going to sell off part of my future contracts today. I want capital today. And if you bet that I'm going to get my next contract going to be bigger, then you're going to own a piece of something that's bigger. It's like a stock, but it's my future earnings. Well, you know, people do this illegally, obviously. Like, this is what you do in high school when you when you see it like this happened all the time where like a good high schooler would be we'd be great at basketball and a guy would be like all right I'll buy you a car now

and I'll buy you a house now but when it comes back you got me right and the NCAA tries to block all this and like you know Nike does this all the time where it's like oh why does this guy's uncle why is he now like a senior VP at Nike it's like well because you know that's their work around to like get in with this guy so he signs with Nike and so anyways I think this is interesting for musicians. I think it's interesting for athletes. I will say up front, I don't think this is really a thing, but if this was a thing, it would like change the way the world works. So I'm very intrigued by it. I'm keeping very close tabs on every example that I see of these. And in fact, this guy, Alex, is using this company called Roll to do this. I think it's like, I don't know,

tryroll.com or some shit like that. And the founder reached out and DM me and he was like, hey, you know, you guys could do this for your podcast. Like let's say you created the Millie coin and you create the 10 million millic coins and they could be redeemed for you know if you have 2000 you could get a sponsorship slot on the podcast so you could let's say buy slots today that could be redeemed in the future

as the show continues to grow and now you're getting better value or it could be used for a one hour coaching session for us or whatever right like we can create a social currency within our community that can be traded on the market as well as redeemed for value with us or our podcast That's pretty cool.

I think it's very interesting. I'm kind of tempted to try it because I just, again, this is one of those where I want to try to live in the future. Maybe this is the future. Did you see what Alan just sent? It's called pandopooling.com. I have not seen this. Look up pandopooling.com. It looks like a sort of share your future earnings, like sell off your future earnings or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, dude. There's something to this. Or I shouldn't say that. I think that this, if this worked, it would be, it would change a lot of shit. And so I want to be one of the first people to test this out and see what's what. That's cool. This is, yeah, there may be something here.

I like this because it's really weird and I don't think it would work, but most cool things that are really innovative won't work. Right. Initially, yeah. Initially at least. Maybe never. I mean, it was kind of like Blab, though, where you were saying the other day that if Blab existed today, it would have worked really well. And if your first Cloud Kitchen would have existed today, it would have at least worked, survived. So maybe it was just maybe a one day it will work, but not for a while.

Yeah, you know, I tweeted this out, which was being early is the same thing as being wrong. Or another phrase of that is if you do the right thing at the wrong time, you get pain. You don't get pleasure. Right. And you are just two years off. Yeah, it was a few years off. But, you know, and then a lot of people were like, oh, well, if you guys had just persevered, you know, who the hell knows, you know. You want to talk about this guy named Jim Patterson who I discovered?

Yes. So this is the Billy of the Week. Cue the song. We should make a song for the Billy of the Week. Here's why I like this. Now, sometimes I wonder, like, do you, so this guy who I'm about to mention, He's interesting, and I'll explain why, but he is like people who I bring up a lot, which is these old companies that I don't think they grow slow. I mean, but they definitely, like, it's not like a zero to massive in three years.

So, but it's definitely massive. And Mark Andreessen has like a famous quote that I can't find, but he's basically trying to say that he's like, Mark and Driesen says the things that Warren Buffett love. loves sea candies because it grows just a little bit each year, but it's really stable. I'm trying to build things that crush Warren Buffett's things. Most of them won't, but some might. Mark Andreessen said that? I believe he did. Yeah, he was like, with Seas Candy, he's like, that's great for him.

And it definitely works. But I'm trying to build are the things that will crush that. He goes, we're not going to invest here what he says. He goes, we're not trying to invest in Seas Candy or Coca-Cola. We're trying to invest in the things that crush them. Interesting. So, here, let me find the exact quote. Is it on here?

Anyway, yeah, he says, absolutely. He goes, you're not trying to build the next Csies candy. No, absolutely not. And every time I hear a story likes these candies, I want to go and find some new scientific superfood candy company that will blow them right out of the water. We're wired completely opposite in that sense. Basically, we're betting against change.

We're betting, or he's betting against change. We're betting for change. When he makes a mistake, it's because something changes that he didn't expect. When we make a mistake, it's because something doesn't change that we thought would. And it's just two ways to look at it. Both are successful. Very interesting. I like when people can distill their whole strategy down into like two lines.

And that's what, that's exactly. Yeah, and it's great. It's just different ways to go about looking at things. I tend to, lately, I've been liking things that are more long-lasting. And so anyway, let me pull this up. There's a guy named Jim Patterson. Have you ever heard of this guy, Sean? Not until you mentioned them.

Okay, he's interesting because, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, he owns this thing called Patterson Group. Now, from the looks of it, he owns 100% of this company, and it's in Canada, and it's privately owned. I don't think it's true that he owns 100% of it, because I don't know how that would work. That just seems like impossible. But anyway, he owns 100% of it. It does 10 billion in sales, and they own roughly 25 divisions of the business.

So ranging from lumber to Ripley's, believe it or not, to Guinness Booker World Records, to 30 different car dealerships. They own just everything. And he's this shorter guy. He's like 5-4-5. He's 90 years old. He's like this like not a hillbilly, but like this like down home. Like he drives the same pickup truck forever. And he's really smart and bright, but he like walks around eating popcorn.

Like, you know, he's supposed to be this like normal guy. That's like the schick. And it seems legit. And he's bullish on lumber. He owns lots of lumber companies. And I posted the growth of his businesses. So in the group channel or in the dock. But he has 45,000 employees in Canada.

It's just super fascinating guy. And some of the brands that they own, I'm on their website right now. So some of the brands that they own are, here's the ones I've recognized, Guinness Book of World Records, Ocean Brands. Ripley's believe it or not Those are the only ones I recognize And it looks like there's a bunch of food Advertising media

They're in eight different Sort of industries They own Wine They own gold seal They own oceans Which is Is that cranberry juice or

Is that juice? That's what I was thinking when I read it But maybe that's a different brand I think it is They own Mines in Canada They own dozens of car dealerships he started it as a car dealership in 1961.

Which is tuna, by the way. Oh, tuna. Sorry, I do know he owns fishing businesses. Then he parlayed that 1961 car dealership. Four years later, he bought a radio station. Then he bought an advertising and billboard company. Then he bought magazines. Then he bought a mine.

Then he bought more car dealerships. Then I think they bought like a... And then he, like, bought Ripley's, believe it or not, because he went to an auction. And it was like, he, like, went to an auction or something like that. And it was like for sale. And then he also bought, like, Marilyn Monroe's dress that she's saying, happy birthday, Mr. President to JFK for, like, $5 million. And was like, all right, we're in the, like, souvenirs and, like, museum business now. Like, he's just super interesting and a little sporadic and very cool.

And let me ask you, how did you even discover this guy? I'll show you. Well, the way that I discovered him is how I discover anything, which is anything I find interesting. So, like, Ripley's, believe it or not, has always interested me. So did Guinness Book of World Records. You and I one time talked about the business behind, like, certifying and, like, giving, like, a seal of approval. I got interested in that, and I thought, what out there is kind of like that? And Guinness Book of World Records was one.

And so I clicked on it, and I always do the same thing, where I go to the very far right, and I see who's the parent company and owner. And then I click that and then I read the history and it says, this person bought it, sold it to this person, sold it to this person. I always open up all those tabs and I like to see how they're connected and I like to see the history of the person. And so when I did that with Guinness Book World Records, it said Patterson Group. And I clicked that and it says they own Guinness Book World Record and they own car dealership.

And I was like, okay, interested, what's going on here? Then I go to newspapers.com and I type in Jim Patterson and I read all about them and that's how. By the way, I remember, you know, I've wanted to have a Guinness Book of World Record record for a while just because, again, I'm a sucker for the credential. And it's hard to get because they have to like come out and there's like all these rules. But there's a startup that Chris Saka and others invest in called record setter where it was like way easier to just like get the actual records that. You just have to like submit a video. They didn't have to send an official person. and out or whatever.

I wonder if this thing succeeded. This is a while back. I'm going to see if they've... It doesn't look like it's... Doesn't look like they succeeded. So there are 1.5 million raised start in 2008. Yeah, so probably either dead or extremely profitable. I think there's only two paths for how that happens.

Yeah. So what I learned about Guinness Book Girl Records is Jim Patterson changed the business model. So, like, you can pay like 100 grand, and then they like send coaches to, like, show you exactly how to break the record. And it's like, so like, for example, Toyota wanted to set some world record on X, Y, and Z. And so they sent like these scientists to Toyota. And they go, all right. So in order to break it, you've got to do this, this, and this.

The best way to do that is this, this, this and this. And just get it all ready. And we'll be back out in about a month. And we will give you the record so long as you achieve it. That's amazing. And so anyway, Jim Patterson, super interesting, 90 years old, still working. There was a story that I saw about him that happened just a few months ago and a camera. crew went with him he wanted to go drive and see one of his supermarkets somewhere south of vancouver

and he drove his car like six hours slept at a dazen motel got up went to the supermarket unannounced just to check in on things and then drove home um really interesting guy and well liked do you want to be a billionaire is that a goal of yours i want to get into trouble and like like scheme until i die and And I believe that massive amounts of wealth are going to come from that. Oh, that's perfect. So like, Yeah, like, I just love, I love the thrill of doing shit. Like, it just excites me more than anything.

And so, yeah, like, for example, I am with you, dude. Like, going to, like, just seeing a, um, uh, a grocery store for something. sale and it's like, oh, this is cheap. I bet maybe I could, it's like, I don't give a shit about grocery stores, but just like the act of doing. Right. It's like a business fantasy plays out in your mind. What if I bought this grocery store? And then what if I did this? What if I did? Yeah. And so like I, I think that I, I for sure think that before, I think before 40, for sure, I'll be well worth over $100 million and be very liquid. Nice. Okay, great. Great. Love it. I would bet that too. I would buy your life coin if I could.

You want to talk about one or two more things? Yeah, actually, let me ask you that. If somebody was, if I wanted to buy 10% of your lifetime earnings, so whatever you're making per year, I get 10% of you get 10% of your lifetime earnings. I would never do that. There's no price, not for a billion dollars you wouldn't give up 10% of your earnings? Okay, yeah, there's a price. I don't know. Why were you allergic to it just now? Because I'd rather be poor than have to owe someone something like that,

or like be told what to do. You wouldn't be told what to do. Yeah, I don't know. It's basically just a fronting you capital. It's like, hey, if you had $10 million right now, would that make you more dangerous? Would you be able to build more faster and do more interesting things? Well, okay, you know, would you give them?

think that would make me more dangerous because I have access to that. Like capital is the easy part. So maybe like 20 million bucks right now. I don't even know. That's what people don't understand. It's like capitals is rarely, rarely is capital the missing equation. Right? Yeah.

I think it is missing for a lot of people, but it shouldn't be. And I think you're right that like you can get yourself to a point where accessing capital is, No longer a bottleneck at all. For a lot of people that is the bottleneck they're stuck on. Yeah, but I just think that convincing rich people to give you money typically is not the hard part about getting wealthy. So like building a company, convincing a rich person to give you money is the easiest part because what you're saying, it's all false.

Like it's all like there's no truth to it, right? There's like ideas and there's promises. It's not that it's all false. It's unfalsifiable. Right. It's like, we can't prove what this is or is not going to happen. Yeah, so I can tell you like, look, this is going to happen. I'm going to do this, this, and this.

And I think it's going to work. And you could tell people anything. And as long as you're charismatic enough, you get the money. Yeah, or credible enough, yeah. Yeah, but most people aren't credible. I mean, you're credible in that, like, dude, when, all right, I raised a little bit of seed money. And I had people, we, most people invested $25,000 a piece and we raised not a lot of money. I called email people and I met with them for 30 minutes and then they gave me a check for 25 grand.

And I was shocked. But you're charismatic and credible. How did they know I was credible? Well, you've done stuff, right? Like you guys had built a list. You had done events. You had done things before. Yes.

Yeah, that's true. And you could speak with confidence and clarity around what you were doing. That was just like a false. Like it was just I thought it might work. And I had an on like you could do the. math, you're like, all right, I think this, this works, I think. But anyway, my point is that I don't, I think that people would be shocked at how getting access to startup capital is typically one of the easier things in the progression. Right. Right. You want to talk about one or two more things? Yeah, let's do one more.

What do you want to talk about? Let's do this notary thing because I know this company and it's huge. Yeah, so, okay, so I just refinanced my house and, you know, every time I go through a process, I've reframed pain and annoyance as opportunity. And so now, so I'm going to this process and it's like the most annoying thing to refinance your house or get a loan in general, if we get a mortgage loan. And so, you know, it's taken us months to do this to finish this, mostly because I'm too lazy to do the paperwork that they, this endless amount of paperwork that they keep sending me. But we got to the last step and the last step is basically, hey, you need to sign your documents. And with COVID, you basically, they needed to send a mobile notary to our house. So they sent a

mobile notary, he guys shows up at our house, he stands there and sort of sign here, sign here, sign here, okay, cool, I'm an official notary, this is now an official document. And then that goes to the title company and the title company just does like nothing because, again, I already own this house and I'm going to own this house again and yet they're going to make $5,000 out of this transaction. The notary said he can make, you know, between $100 to $500 depending on who dispatches him out. He's an independent contractor. So anyways, as I was going to this process, I was just trying to figure out, okay, wow, what is this whole space and where could this be improved? It's crazy.

There's so much money in it, and it's still so archaic. Exactly. And so the notary thing, it looks like it's being modernized, and there's a company called Notarized, which is sort of leading the way here. So these guys are raised about $50 million. I was just messaging with the founder right before we went live. And I basically said, hey, give me some numbers that I can brag about that, you know, you You could share. How are you messaging him on Twitter?

Yeah, just Twitter. Because I've been following him for a while. I like this company. And so I just reached out and said, hey, I'm about to shout you out on the podcast. Tell me some of these things. And so I'm pretty certain that they're doing over 50 million a year in revenue. He didn't say that. That's not recurring, though, is it?

No. And how do they make money? Well, part of it is recurring in the sense. It's not a subscription, but their customers are essentially the title companies, the escrow companies, the banks. And so they just have this sort of, you know, trusted set of vendors that they'll use for notarizing. And so he said that this month alone, 2,500 lenders and title companies have come inbound to their service. The volume is doubling every week right now, and they're hiring 1,000 notaries right now to meet the on demand, to meet the demand for this sort of mobile notaries.

They also have an online notary function that they've created, which is great because you don't have to send the person. in person to your house or whatever to sign. And basically, you know, what they're just trying to do is make this less painful. So how do you make it more convenient reduce errors? Like the guy who came to our house, he made an error. He's got to come back again today to do it again because the paperwork has to be airtight. You know, it has to be instantly given to the title company so that you can close your loan quickly. So anyways, I think this is very interesting.

They have this fleet now of thousands of notaries that are like, cool. I don't have to work for a company. I work for myself like an Uber driver. And notarized basically has aggregated the supply of notaries and then the demand side as well. And so I think this is an example. This is the opposite of the company we said at the beginning of the podcast, Thrasia, which was like kind of like a, you know, house of cards versus this to me is a simple, durable, defensible, profitable company that will be built in this space.

And it's kind of boring because nobody gets up and says, man, I want to change the, you know, the notary world, but I think these guys are actually going to do it. This is awesome. There's another one called Snap Docs. Have you seen that one? They're in a similar space. They've raised $55 million, also a big company. It looks like Notarized is literally just notarite.

How do you say it? Notary. Notary. Yeah, notary. SnapDoc is similar, but a little bit more. It's notary, but just for real estate. Yeah, huge space. I love this.

You know, this reminds me of Checker. Do you know Checker? Yeah, Checker. That's another one where I was like, soon as I saw it, I had to like take a time out for 10 minutes and be upset with myself that I didn't think of this idea.

So checker, it's checker, but there's no R. So the word check and then the letter. No E. Sorry, no E. It's the word check and then an R. Raise $150, $200 million at a billion dollar evaluation. And it's crazy simple. All they do is they do the background checks

for particularly for a lot of the gig folks so like Uber and Lyft whenever they want to they you know they don't they don't let people with DUIs and things like that be drivers and so they they do that for them and crazy simple incredibly effective huge company got huge very fast and they they basically turned a background check into like an API call and it's as simple as that yeah amazing company they just laid off a ton of people I guess because You know, there's not as many people wanting to get background checks right now, but I still think it's going to be great. Okay, maybe it's not as profitable and durable as I thought. Well, I think they got huge fast, like they hired a ton of people quickly.

And Uber's revenue for driving is just going down like crazy. So I imagine they just aren't having to do a lot of background checks at the moment. I believe that will, you will always need that. It's just a matter of how much will you need and when. Yes. Okay, cool. this is interesting. So notaries, background checks.

Is there anything else that's interesting in that category? If there's something in that category, tell me. I bet you another one is locksmith. I would love to know what else. Yeah, and if anybody can figure out how to take a refi and make it 10 minutes online, that would be amazing. And I would invest in that company. I don't know what the bottleneck is.

I don't know why it can't be as simple as that. But it should be as simple as, hey, here's your current rate. here's the rate you can get on the market that's cheaper if you'd like to refi 10 minutes and you're done that's how it should be anything else you want to go over you want to save them for the rest for Thursday for Thursday all right uh let us know what you think about this tweet at us leave reviews and we will talk to you soon see yeah