My First Million - #92 - A Three Month Old Company Profiting $90,000 A Day

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. This episode Shaan and Sam talk: Ford's small raise, a mask business doing millions per month, software distribution, agents for engineers, private Twitter, Etsy for kids and Golden Hippo.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What's going on? Not much, dude. Before the podcast, Obrayu was telling us about a guy who is just uploading, instead of competing on YouTube, he's just uploading his videos of him hanging out with his friends talking onto Pornhub. It's getting popular because it's not porn. It's not porn on Pornhub. How big is it?

Maybe we should do that with the podcast to grow this thing. Just a bunch of guys talking about ideas on Pornhub. Aubrey, how popular are these videos getting? I'm not sure how many views they have, but he gets a ton of free press from. I've seen so many articles like every now and again, I'll see articles on it. Yeah, we have to do that article. Okay, so what do you want to talk about? I've got a few quick fun updates that are just funny.

Okay, so Heineken, 0.0, I've been talking about how I drink a ton of these each day. Yeah. They just DM'd me trying to get that sponsorship. There we go. Shout out to Heinrich. 0.0. Yeah. Second.

Have you seen, did you see this thing? I'm testing out in tempo. Yeah, you posted a video of this on your Facebook or in the Facebook group and it looks like

a bootleg mirror. Yeah. So these guys aren't a sponsor or anything, but they did give me a free thing to try out. It's like mirror. So it looks like a TV, but it's self-standing.

But it's got this like, what was that video game that had a camera that would tell where you are, a connect or something? Connect. Yeah, Is it like Xbox or something?

It has one of those on there. So it tells you if your form is shitty or not shitty. And it also has like 200 or something pounds of weights. And I'm testing it. And then it is a resistance band or is it a dumbbell? Like literally like plates of weights and it has a barbell and a dumbbell and you put it on. And then there's a leaderboard. And it can tell what type of weight you have on and how many reps you're doing and you compete.

And anyway, it's freaking awesome. But there are a few bugs that I'm noticing. Is this like released or is this a private beta type of thing? It's out. It's out. It's out now. But they are a new company. And they,

it just makes you realize how hard that type of hardware is. Why did you buy this versus like tonal or mirror or whatever? I didn't buy it. They just, they saw that I liked this type of crap. And they go, hey, you want this for a few weeks.

You can try it. If you want to share, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I go, yeah, I'll try it.

Right. I just like trying these stuff out. So tonal. is kind of like this, except if you install into your garage, like, you have to, like, nail it to the wall. Right. And mirror is no weights. This is just Peloton, like, Peloton with weights, you know what I mean? Yeah.

So do you, like, now that you use it for a couple days, are you like, this is the future? Yes, I'm in? No, but it's cool. It's kind of like, it's as revolutionary as Peloton, which is like, it's just got to get maybe a handful more people into that sport. Right. No, it's not revolutionary. but it's quite fun.

But like would you be disappointed or it goes away? They take it back from you to a couple weeks. Yeah, I would have bought it. I would have bought it. Yeah, it's pretty sick. And then I want to bring up one more thing that I'm learning about. And what was the name of that one again? Let's shut them out.

I think their URL, like you can't find them anywhere. It's called Tempo, but if you Google Tempo, you don't find it. I think you said, I think there's tempo. Dot fit. Is it something like that? Tempo. Dot fit. Right.

It's cool. It's just nifty. The guy who started it is like 27, real young, 27. 26, like a young guy. It's neat. And are you on the website? I'm on it right now. It's like cool.

So I like the idea and obviously mirror got bought and that's cool and everyone's like, wow, what is this thing? I think this device is not like as good looking as those are. It looks more like an air conditioning unit than mirror, which looks like a slick mirror on the wall. But that's because mirror, it's just pot. Like mirror was like the woman who started it was a ballerina. So it was all about like body movement.

I mean, that's what she was. She was a ballerina. I never met someone who's actually a ballerina. Yeah, she was a ballerina. So it was all about mobility and body weight stuff. This is just a little bit different. It's, this stuff's fun, though. I love it because when you go, the bad part about work at home is or working out at home is the lack of competition.

Yeah, it doesn't feel as intense. Yeah, this stuff's fun. And the second thing that I'm learning about, what did I watch? I watched, you know, I like history. So I watched Alexander Hamilton, then I've somehow Wikipedia to my way to Ford. Let me tell you something about Ford. And this, I see this consistently of businesses of this era.

So when Ford started Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, when he started Ford Motor Company, they raised $28,000, okay? And that was in like 1903, I think. So $28,000 in 1903, inflation calculators are never entirely accurate it because there's just too much. It's too hard to, yeah. But like we could probably say that, let's just say it was 10 to 20 times X, 10 to 20 X, 10 to 20 X bigger.

So let's just say $700,000 or that's or $100,000 or $1 million, whatever. It's a fucking car company. So they started the, they started Ford with $28,000 in 1903. Okay. And they used that. And by, uh, two, or sorry, 1905, three years later, they were giving out dividends to shareholders to the point of shareholders three-xing their investment, their investment. Is that crazy to you? Like,

I read out this all the time, that A, these companies take so little money to start back then, and B, they're paying out dividends so quickly. Yeah, it's surprising because there's obviously like a fixed capital cost there to do things. So I don't know how they did. that but I don't know it seems like all right so there was this tweet over the weekend that's related where some VC this guy Josh felser that's yeah I know family he was like he's a freestyle capital also at Duke alum so he was like oh yeah you know give me a great I'll take a great entrepreneur over a great product any day or something like that just tweeted that up and two funny things happened one this other founder replied and he was like you don't take founders

that's the problem with VCs. You have it all backwards. You're, you know, capital is a commodity. You get chosen. You don't choose founders. So this guy got like really upset. And like, this is totally not what he was talking about. Like, I will take you.

He was just saying like, I would. It's just poop tweeting. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He was not thinking that he was about to get side swiped by this guy. And then he had to like apologize because every VC has to like, you know, tow the line. It seems like with this type of stuff.

So then the second thing was there's this old Mark Andreessen article called the only thing that matters. And Mark Indeaton has this blog that's like offline, but there's a thing called the PMarka archive that still has his old blog posts. And the blog that says, the only thing it matters basically says, hey, there's this debate. What matters most? Team, product, or market? He's like, a lot of people, you know, think the best product wins, but once you get some experience, you realize that's not true. You know, you do need a good enough product, but that's not the most important thing. And a lot of people will say team, because that sounds really great because you, you seem like somebody who's betting on people.

It's a great way to get people to feel flattered and take your money as an investor. But, you know, there's that old Warren Buffett quote, when a great entrepreneur walks into a crappy business, the crappy business keeps its reputation. Yeah. And he says, he goes, a great team is, it's a nice to have. Right. And he goes, I will propose that a great market is the most important thing for any,

any startup. I'll take a great market over a great team and a great product any day of the week. And he explains why. So, anyways, a long way of saying, how much of, you know, like when you talk about Ford back then, cars, like the whole automotive industry, I mean, what a hell of a market, right? That's still today one of the largest markets that's out there being early to that market. Like, I think you can perform miracles. You can start a business on a little small amount of money, be returning capital within a couple of years and, you know,

grow a brand that endured 100 plus years later because of how good that market was, how strong that market was. I get that. Yeah, you're totally right. But even for, let's say like the Bitcoin guys, like in 2000, what did all that craziness go on? 14. If you launched- Started like 2009, 2010, but then the hype happened 2012, 13, 14, yeah. So even if you started a Bitcoin thing around the hype train, I mean, that's like, I mean, you're going to take off, it doesn't matter how bad. If you have Bitcoin in it, you're taking off. But even then, like, a lot of these businesses had a raise, like, raise a lot of money. Right.

And I'm like, and this is my favorite era in history, about 1900 to about 1930. Carnegie did the same thing where he created, he built a bridge and was turning crazy amounts of dividends to investors in like one or two years. And dividends from startups isn't really something you hear about right now. It's more so. And so anyway, this just like, I'm crazy fascinated on. So one, there is one major thing, which is income tax didn't happen until, like the 1920s, I believe.

And also, I don't study history like this at all, but my questions would be, I would love to just see the use of funds. So where does that $28,000 go into starting this? So, you know, what were the wages of people? Was there actually just a lot of debt that he was able to use? So he raised a little bit of money and then mostly there was a huge amount of loan financing back then that he was using to build this company. I'm not sure.

But that's what I would need to know to kind of judge how the hell you could pull something like this off. It's just fascinating. I just love what I love reading about, and this is the reason why... How much money did you initially start the hustle with? Nothing. Zero. And then you raised...

What did you raise? Like a million bucks? Yeah, and I didn't... I shouldn't have done that. You raised a million bucks, and you never needed that money. You never used that capital, correct? You, like, kind of always had a surplus, basically, of cash in the bank. For sure.

But I'm not building a frickin' car. Yeah, but, like, you know, whatever. You're modern day Henry Ford. That's what I'm trying to say. No, I noted. It's just fascinating. I think I love reading about these people who just do things differently. And I have no idea if they were different back then,

but they are different to my perspective. And I think that that's exciting to see someone who's doing something different than what your expectations are. You want to talk about ideas? Yeah, I got a bunch. Okay, where do you want to start? So let me start with, I'll start with a company I saw that was kind of cool. Okay, so I saw this guy on Twitter.

And before you get into that, did you get a ton of tweets? Thuley. Yeah, said it wrong. Sorry, guys. I've been talking about Thule for two episodes now. Thuley. And it's, is it Tuley? And it's not Switzerland.

Or wait, it's Sweden, not Switzerland. Sorry. I'm reading while we're talking. So my apologies. Yeah, look, this podcast, the energy is great. The ideas are interesting and the facts may or may not be. correct. Like, that's what you need to know coming in. That's the disclaimer. If we were, if we were sitting here trying to do research on the pronunciation of these Swedish company names,

like, you know, then I wouldn't have time to do anything else. So, it's, thank you for the corrections, though. And it looks like it rhymes with mule, thule. Right. That's their fault. That's not my fault. Okay, so there's this guy, I'm going to say his name wrong to. Lloyd Armburst. So I saw this guy's Twitter, and first of all, Twitter's the most fucking amazing thing in the world. Like, Twitter today, still is just so awesome and you don't have to know anybody you don't have to be anybody and you can just like get the best education best network you know on twitter so anyways i saw this guy and his his bio says tech founder then there's the american flag which i you know thought was great

where are you sean on this i'm on this guy's twitter his twitter is l arm brurst arm b o'st i know i had dinner at his house oh yeah great so you can tell me about this guy so here's what i saw so i saw why Combinator 2010. I saw five acquisitions and then he says parentheses five kids, but five kids too, but unrelated. Now I was like, okay, this guy's, you know, already caught my attention. This guy's a legit player. I don't know what these five exits were. You probably know better than I do. I, I, my good friend Noah and Neville, we had a, what's the dinner on Friday night for Jewish folks? Shabbat? We had Shabbat at Lloyd's house. And so I, I had an intimate dinner with him for three

hours. That's how much I know him. Intimate. Excellent. Okay. Well, you know, like a family. A family dinner. So what caught my eye was that he's working on something new. So if you go to Armbrust USA, he's doing U.S. made medical masks, which sounds like the most like simple, obvious idea right now with coronavirus. But when you go to the site, you can tell that this guy's like gone all in on American-made medical equipment starting with N95 masks. And I was looking at his interviews. I was watching his videos.

And I definitely think that the pendulum is swinging back this way, which is that, from a government level or a consumer level, I think made in America is finally going to matter. I've been talking about this for months. And yeah, and so I think, you know, he's trying to bring manufacturing back to America. I think the government has realized, holy shit, we had way too much dependence on China. China's an adversary as well. It's a friend of me, basically. And, you know, yes, things were cheaper there.

Yes, we could outsource a lot of our labor there to markets with cheap labor. But, man, that nurtured this like massive dependence. And yes, we lost jobs, but we also lost. our freedom because we depend on China for medicine, for clothes, for toys, for, you know, for masks, for whatever the, whatever the hell, you know, you can think of. It's manufactured outside of America for the most part. So I think this is the right idea at the right time is to become, if you were playing the long game, which it seems like this guy is, if you've got five acquisitions under his belt, I think if you're playing the long game, I love the idea of trying to build an American

manufacturing company starting with masks right now in Texas. I completely agree. I've, and I'm going to send you, I'm sending you an email right now and we're going to bring up this file. I have the financials from a mask business that we can kind of go over. That's cool. So I've been buying red wing boots for a long time and I actually think that the little secret is, is that they're not made in America anymore. But they're like their whole schick was that they've been around since the 190 yada, yada, yada, and they're hardcore and American. I agree. I think that I completely agree. And I actually surveyed my audience on Twitter and asked how many would, are going to pay extra for items that are made in America, a significant amount said they would.

I completely agree. I mean, when I see made in the USA, I buy it over other stuff. Now, there's definitely a threshold, but my brother-in-law was telling me the same thing. He's like, yeah, I'd buy these jeans. I buy this type of ghee for my jih Tzu's stuff. And I was like, well, you are actually paying the premium? Like, you know, these are not small premium. It's like 50% more or 100% more in some cases. And he's like, yeah. And he's like, I don't know if it's, the time. I don't know if he always did that. I don't think he always did that. I think the way the world is going, I think there's a strong nationalist movement around these sorts of things. Yeah, I've been about that since I was, you know, I grew up in Missouri with a lot of union guys

and like in the parking lots would always say four American cars only. Which at this point, like at this point, like Nissan's an American car. Like they make Nissan in Tennessee. You know I mean, like, who knows what, the definition of Maine America is like pretty skewed at this point. I just sent Sean the financials of a mask business. I'm not going to say who it is or where I got it from, but it is the month of June. It's their financials. And what you can see, let's not say exactly what's going on, Sean, but let's just say that they're doing around 2,000 to 5,000 orders a day. and they're making around $30,000 to $90,000 in net profit a day. And this company was launched in, I think, May.

That's insane. And it also doesn't seem like this is big enterprise, like it's not selling the hospital because the average order value is more like, you know, 50 bucks. It's not like it's, you know, $50,000 orders by, you know, small, sorry, like a handful of large hospitals or companies. Yeah. And so what Sean and I are looking at is it says date, order number units sold, shipping fees,

average order value, cost of goods sold, gross margin, returns, and Facebook spend. So they're spending a lot of money on Facebook. Yeah, but they're still profitable. Every single day is profitable in the, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So that's cool. This is awesome.

Thanks for sharing that. you know, if you're listening to this, don't run out and start a mask business unless you know what the hell you're doing because literally you're putting lives at risk if you're fucking up or if you're like, you know, working with some random supplier who says it's N95, but it's not really N95, which is a big problem that's happening right now. Or you're like the third middleman in a four middleman chain and, you know, you're just ending up marking up these things a lot. So, but I think if somebody's going into this with some authenticity, which it seems like this guy's doing with his American manufacturing facility and his plants. that you can see the videos of. Lloyd's a hustler. I'll say that. Like the small amount of time that I've hung out with him, a great guy, um,

total, uh, like real sharp businessman. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Anyways,

I thought this was a good idea and I wanted to shout it out because I think it's a good thing. It's a good thing for a smart person to work on now. So what I'm doing with the hustle lately is I've been emailing out surveys. So last week I asked how many people are going to move for inside the next six months. And 33% of people. told me they're moving within six months and I think seven or eight thousand people answered the survey this week what I was going to ask was how many of you won't be able to pay your mortgage

or rent in the next two or three months I'm curious curious about that but I could do made in America about what are you partial partial towards made in America or made in your home country right or like you know in the last 30 days have you have you knowingly chose an American made product and spent more on it because you know like did you do they have actually put their money where their mouth is versus like, yeah, I would consider it. I think everybody's like, yeah, I would prefer an eco-friendly product. And then do they choose it or not? You know, that's a question. So, well, let me see if I can ask something like that. Okay. Those financials are freaking crazy that I sent you. I think that it's bullshit. I think that if you're going to start a

mass company just for like the revenue that you're going to get out of it, I feel like you're going to get crushed. Or it's just not going to exist in like three months. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I would not be thinking of it as a durable business. Yeah, and I would, I'm not a fan of it. What software publishers, Sean? Software publishers. All right. So this guy brought this up, again, stolen from Twitter, because that's where I get most of my ideas. I forgot who it is. I wish I had wrote it down so I could give them credit. But somebody said, you know, in many other industries, right,

music industry, you have publishers, you know, book writing industry, you have publishers, where you have a separation between the talent that creates the thing, the creative talent, and the body that's meant to do, the sort of distribution, sales, getting you into, getting you in front of customers. And so there are a whole bunch of industries where you have publishers, but weirdly, in software, there's very few software publishers. Usually when you start a software company, you're going to be responsible for the idea, for the creation of it, for the iteration of it, for the distribution of it, for the sales and marketing of it. And I thought, you know, That's actually kind of interesting.

I was curious why, why you think that might be the case that, you know, that's not the case with music. It's not the case with books. It's not the case with a whole bunch of other, you know, fields where you have publishers. Why don't we have software publishers where a random engineer can build an app, you know, pitch it to or get picked up by a publisher who says, hey, this is a good utility. You know, you're great at programming, but I'm great at distribution and marketing. I'm going to take it from here. Okay. This is a great one that I know a little bit about.

So someone who's a little bit older than me might criticize. me because I'm not kidding it exactly right. But in 1980s and 1990s, when I... This was the model. This was a thing. And so it actually worked like SoftBank. I've mentioned SoftBank a lot. They had a magazine, a tech magazine.

Well, they would also, like there was many companies that existed that were basically like software stores. So you sign up and they tell you all the latest software and you go in, you buy it and they send you the CD, like Amazon for software. Right. That's what SoftBank had. That's how they grew to be so big, so fast. The other one was started by one of my favorite guys ever.

His name was Felix Dennis, and he had micro warehouse. And it was a warehouse for software. And you could go and buy whatever you want. And they went from zero to public trade company in like four or five years, massive. And so I think that this, and there's many other examples that I could find like that. And we should also say the gaming industry still works like this, where software for games, you know, whether it's a small, little, you know, boredom killer game that you play with your thumb or you're flicking noodles around a screen,

you might get picked up by ketchup or by, you know, Lion Studios or whoever. And then also on a bigger level, great games can get bought by Riot or Blizzard Activision or whoever. And then, okay, cool, now it's under that umbrella. That's the- But games are kind of like their own thing a little bit. Like, games are weird.

Games are their own beast. But, like, if you're talking about, like, software tools, which I think you are, I have also wondered this because I'm like, this model did exist. And it is weird how, like when you picked Slack at your company, it was probably only because some other company used it or a friend used it. I saw Mark Andreessen tweet out the growth curve of Slack. And I was like, huh, what the hell is that? And then I downloaded it and started using it. Yeah. Now some people, like a small

insider inside baseball community might discover stuff on product hunt, but that's only the latest and greatest in the trending. But it's just the latest, really. Not necessarily the greatest, yeah. It's not the greatest. It's just the latest. It has always baffled me why there isn't a more central place to discover all types of stuff that exists. And like your Amazon, like people also bought XYZ. Right.

Or put differently, maybe there's room for a publisher that says, hey, there's a whole lot of apps out here for managing social media for companies, whether it's like a hoot suite type of app. It's an app like Mention. It's, you know, some analytics thing. or whatever. And I'm surprised that there's not a software publisher that takes either one area of the business like either one business model like SaaS or one area of the business like HR Tech and just says, okay, cool, we're going to be the best HR tech software publisher. We already have our one flagship thing that everybody uses, but then we're going to sort of become the publisher

for these independent projects that we think we will find the best in class, you know, customer service chatbot. And then that will get distributed under our umbrella. I feel like somebody, you know, an enterprising individual could try to bring software publisher model back and basically not be creating products, but just be curating products because there's so many products out there. So if you have the trust of the consumer and you have the relationship with the buyer, then being a great curator is way better than being just yet another creator in a sea of creators who are all building, you know, these tools.

And you're like, oh, which mail software should use? There's 50,000. How the hell do I know which one to use? One of these companies is called G2. and they were just in the news today because they laid off a ton of people and raised $100 million, even though they took $5 to $10 million from the PPP thing. Right. But they're not a publisher, right?

There's a reviews platform, right? There's a fine line. I think that you could argue that maybe they are, but correct. Yeah, they are not. In the way you're describing, no, they are not. But they are a central location to discover new stuff. So the other, I'm not even convinced that this is a good idea. I just thought it was an interesting question.

Why doesn't this exist here? where it exists in all the other fields that are very similar. The other one of this that I've heard that's interesting is basically the Hollywood agent model for top programmers. So the same way that like athletes, musicians, actors have agents who do the negotiation for them, take them from project to project. Engineer, like top top engineers are compensated in the millions of dollars at tech companies today.

So why don't they have agents? And why don't they have agents who negotiate on their behalf, who move them from company to company and we'll take offers and solicit bids and say, look, like, I think a good agent negotiate, I think anybody who negotiated for a good to grade engineer could get them an extra 20% annually, just on better negotiation. How many engineers at Twitch do you think make over seven figures a year annually? Twitch has 3,000 employees, right? No, it's just under 2000. The product and engineering would be like, I don't know, let's call it 700 folks, give or take. Agnoy. Well, of 2000, of 2,000 employees at Twitch, how many think you think make over seven figures annually?

10 to 15, something like that? That's what that be my guess. 10? So that's 10 to 15. Are they all, are they all exact? Those are like senior execs or like probably super senior engineers. Now, the problem with that is that the stock price appreciated. So whatever their offer was, their offer might have been worth $400,000. But Amazon stock has gone up so much that that $400,000 offer is, that $400,000 offer is now worth 1.2 million because the stock price has quadrupled in the last five years. So 10 to 15. I mean, I think you're kind of explaining why this doesn't exist. But that's one company, and that's a small company. At Google, there are individuals who, at Google, who are making $50 million a year. No way. It's public. There's guys you can look up.

I forgot the guy's name, but there was a guy who either left Google to go to Facebook or whatever. and in that transition, they basically said what this guy was making every year at Google. And this guy was literally making $50 million a year. Now, he's an exception, not the rule. But I think that at Google, there are easily, easily 250 plus people who are making over a million dollars a year. Easily that. Could be a thousand people. Isn't that nuts?

Isn't that nuts to create a widget that's so big that your non-owners are making, 50 million or even a million a year. Like, I understand, I understand that if a salesperson makes over a million dollars a year, that's easy. That's a no-brainer. It's just, you're just, you just get a percentage of what you make the company. So, yeah, the upside's unlimited. But the fact that just like a salary or like normal-ish non-sales employee can make over

seven figures is fucking mind-boggling to me. Yeah. So I think, you know, you don't have to have huge quantities in the same way that there's, I think, 350 or 450 total NBA players, period. So I think in the same way, there are more people in the technology industry that earn a million dollars plus than there are NBA players who earn a million dollars plus. That'd be my guess. And so if NBA players can have agents, I'm curious why top talent in the tech industry

also doesn't have agents that work on their behalf. Yeah, see, look, I, so a Brady just found the article, Google paid a total of $105 million to Andy Rubin and this guy. Mitt Singhal. That's the guy I was thinking about. Well, Andy and Rubin, he got acquired. That's different. He built, yeah, they created Android, but yeah. This guy, Emmett Sigel, they agreed to pay $45 million, but ended up paying just $15 million because he went to go to a competitor.

Imagine getting guaranteed $45 million and then leaving to go to a competitor. That's amazing. That's what Zappos guy did. Well, he walked away for the buddy. I'm saying, imagine what the other offer must have been that this guy switched team. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. Like the top AI people, the top machine learning people, the top self-driving cars people. These guys are making millions of dollars a year.

God bless America. Let's talk about the CB Insights. So I did a call last week with the founder of CB Insights. You know what that is? Yeah. Okay, so listeners, CB Insights. They're most famous because they have a newsletter, like The Hustle, and the guy who owns the company or his CEO, like, writes it. and he's kind of quirky and funny and irreverent.

What they do is, so CB Insights.com, the guy, Sean, who is the CEO, he's like kind of, he's got a huge Twitter following because he's really funny. His Twitter handle says like, buy a CB Insight subscription. I owe people money. Do you know who he is?

What's name? It's Ana. A. I don't know how to pronounce it. A. Anon. Anon. A non.

Sorry, Anon. And so what CB Insights does is, if you go to their website, they say they like help you find which company to buy next. So you're thinking like PE companies subscribe to them. And I just did a call with him. They're huge, by the way, huge company. I'm not going to reveal anything else other than that, but they're big. And if you, and everything else I'm going to talk about is public. But if you go to their pricing, their top tier pricing is $250,000 a year.

And I go, what is CB Insights? And he was like, basically, we are a cover your ass. Cover your ass. CYA, yeah. Have you ever? I, I never heard that term before. And apparently, Oh, dude, go to a big company. You'll see CYA all over the place. I've never heard of that. It means basically like if you're going to make a decision,

you need to cover your ass so you're not the one to blame if that decision is a bad decision. And so an oversimplified example of this is let's say you're a huge company with 5,000 employees and you have to choose between this company and this company for, let's say, like your Salesforce thing. Like you're trying to figure out do we use HubSpot, Salesforce, this, or that or this. Now, that's a little, that's over simplification. Usually it's for like smaller vendors. And you've got to do research on them to figure out like, are they going to go out of business in 10 years? Shit like that. And I have never heard that I've never heard of someone needing to spend 50 to $100,000 a year to solve this problem. Have you?

I didn't know how much we spend on it on things like that. But I have seen, yeah, CYA, CYA type of business. I've always thought this. This is exactly what they are. I love that he just said it. Most people never say that that. that's what they are, but it's true. You know, when we have to write a report or, you know, say how big, hey, you know, I think we should go into Russia because Russia is a growing market. Well, nobody cares what Sean thinks about Russia. Nobody cares what Sean has heard about Russia or Sean's opinion of how big Russia is going to be. What Sean needs to do is go and get these great reports that are done by third-party consultancies or research firms, pay thousands of dollars for our annual subscription to those reports and pull out a number that says Russia's mobile market,

is growing at 30% cagger. Okay, great. That's the thing I need to justify the budget I'm asking for, to justify the headcount I'm asking for, to get the green light on my project. And that's just the way the world works. These are like insurance for schmucks. You know, I don't have to put my name on the line.

I put their name on the line. And in order to put their name on the line, I just have to pay them a nice little fee every year. It's just crazy that a business that can be worth maybe a billion dollars or billions of dollars in the Gardner's case exists on on on on bullshit politics inside of a company well okay look they do do good research so that's cool they are also often wrong because their forecasts are forecasts and people suck at forecasting things and the things people want to know are usually the uncertain things and you're going to be more wrong on those so i'd say

they do provide value like it's not like you don't get anything from it but you would never pay that amount for that level of information. You pay that amount because it's a seal of approval. It's a, it's a source cited for your decision making. Well, I got curious about that. So I'll give you another example. Have I told you about WGSN? No. Okay, so let me make sure I said it right. WGSN. Yeah. Okay. It stands for, well, I don't know what it stands for actually. WGSN.com. It's owned by a public company in England, so you can go and learn all about it. What they do, and this is again an oversimplification, is they tell you which color

is going to be popular in the next year. So if you're Starbucks, yeah, if you're Starbucks and you need to... That's all they do or no, that's just like one thing that they do? That's what they're known for? That's what they're known for, but they'll tell you like what type of outfit will be popular in a year. So if you're Starbucks and you have to buy,

you know, 100,000 uniforms, you want to know which shade of pink is going to be cool. Or if you want to make like a new sleeve for your cup, you need to know which shade of red, bread is like the thing. And so it's an oversimplification, but it's fashion forecast, particularly around colors, I believe. And this company makes around $90 million a year recurring revenue, just off this stuff. It looks like they have like food and drink beauty fashion as their like kind of core things. Okay, this is incredible. I'm going to sign up for get a demo.

I hate to get a demo, schedule a call. That works. fortunately. Is this not crazy fascinating? Abraeu just sent me one called scentair.com and they do the same thing which they tell you which scents are going to be the most popular. Like not even like perfume but like what what smell you want your cut your restaurant to be or your casino or your office or your hotel. That's fucking crazy. And it's just nuts. It's nuts. And I think it's awesome and I actually understand this one. But I want to know how these guys get customers. So is it that they that's more interesting to me, right? Because okay, I can see how this

would be useful. You just get a sales team, bro, and you just, you got a lot of these. Is it outbound sales, or is it putting out free reports, but then like kind of the full report, if you want the full report, you know, click this button, you know, is it content marketing or is it outbound sales or is it both? Oh, it's both. It's both. I mean, I have experienced a little bit with these types of things. Yeah, it's both. I mean, the fact is that a lot of people are afraid to it, I don't know if they're afraid to this, but they don't want to acknowledge it for some reason. But a sales team creates demand. So when I had the hustle, we're at me personally, I sold advertisements and I got us to 30 grand a month in revenue, like right away. It was like we got to like 50,000 or 100,000 subscribers.

And I go, all right, I'm going to go do ad sales. I got us to 30K a month. Then like with the same amount of subscriber base, we went and hired two or three salesperson and it got to like 200,000 like immediately. And I was like, holy shit, that fucking worked. And. And, And then I learned more about this. And I learned that, like, I listened to an interview with the founder of maybe Squarespace or WordPress, who was like this, like, engineer door type of guy who typically hate sales and marketing. And they're like, yeah, sales and marketing just let us on fire. And we just exploded once we hired a sales team. And so the fact is, my point is, like, if you have like a pretty good product that solves a problem, if you hire a sales team, you explode.

So how do you count the economics of a sales team? So you're like, how much does each salesperson need to make for you for that to be viable? Yeah. So you traditionally give a relatively low base. So it could be 50 grand. It could be 100 grand. It could be 150 grand. And then you say you get 2% to 5% usually of all the sales that you bring in.

And so you're on target. So how much do you think a salesperson needs to generate? And what doesn't one individual salesperson need to generate for you? What's your target? At least a million. but tip so in media sales it's around one to three million in software sales it's probably around 500,000 to 1.5 million software so you need a you need a salesperson to bring in a million dollars a year of revenue yeah and and i'm doing some rounding here but uh yeah that's not a hundred thousand

it's more like a million is what you're saying yeah yeah and that's very doable um and a software a company that has recurring revenue, if you had a salesperson that cost you 150 grand a year and they are bringing it 500 grand a year, that's pretty good because hopefully a lot of those folks are going to renew. LTV is there, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I've never built sales teams. It's always something I've gladly not had to do.

Yeah, a lot of people. There's a circumstance. It's obviously, it's great. You know, if that's the model, if that's the growth engine, then you need to become a fucking master of building sales teams or hiring people who have built sales. sales team before. But that's what you just said is how most of the smart nerds who build the great stuff think. They go, oh, I don't want a sales team. And I'm like, you do. It's the same thing is I don't want to learn taxes and how to optimize that. It's the same thing of like, oh, God,

I got to incorporate and figure out if I should be a C-Corp or an LLC and I got to set up my blah blah. It's like the perceived schlep of doing it makes me just not want to do it at all. It makes me want to be ignorant to it and makes me want to avoid it until I'm like, oh, the money is on the other side of that wall. Okay. Now I need to learn how to climb this wall. And then when I climb, I'm like, oh, that's not so bad. Actually, I kind of like that wall.

That's a pretty useful little thing to get over here and get this pile of money. And that's how I feel about taxes now. That's what I feel about sales teams. Yeah. And I feel that way about taxes too. There's this company that I hung out with in Austin. I won't name their name, but they have software and they have like, there's a software company. they had like 200 employees and like 150 of them were salespeople and they like grew it just like

crazy and I'm in my head I'm like as like someone who is a little bit more nerdy than I am salesy I'm like that you are selling vaporware but they got results so let me okay I'm going to give you two ideas that could use salespeople and I want you to tell me what you think all right so I'm to start with the one I'm more excited about maybe I want to get to the second one let me let me see if I can articulate why I'm excited about this so okay at the last two companies I have done. I created, so we used Slack as the primary way the company communicates. And Slack's great. Slack did a great thing, which was he got us out of email and it got us out of direct messaging where I just like, oh, I'm going to bug Sam about this or create a giant group for like everybody

who's working on the marketing campaign or whatever, right? And Slack created channels. And channels are sweet because it's like you make a channel for the marketing, for marketing, that's where I go talk about the marketing campaign. And whoever is interested, like, lot of people can see it, but nobody feels obligated to reply. So it's a really helpful way for information to spread inside a company. But what I found was that there was a whole bunch of things that I just wanted to share that, like, I didn't need to go into any specific channel. And it wasn't like, I wasn't trying to create work by sharing it. I just wanted to share a thought on my mind. So I created this Slack channel on my Slack called Sean's Inner Thoughts. And I branded it

like that because I thought people would be curious what my inner thoughts are. And so I then a whole bunch of employees joined that channel and really all it was is just a place for me to dump random thoughts that I have about stuff something I saw was cool something I thought we were doing something I'm noticing blah blah blah and and that was always well received and now after we got acquired my co-worker Jason did that at Twitch he created Jason's inner thoughts and there's like 80 people subscribe to this thing and it's kind of like just like a private Twitter he just post random stuff and sometimes people react to it but nobody feels obligated to respond and because that's like the that's the norm of that channel. And so I've been thinking about this,

like why isn't there a place to share stuff that is like the stuff that didn't need to be shared necessarily, the non-essential communication of a company that does actually bring out interesting conversations. It helps people bond because they see what you're all about, what you're into. So the way I'll phrase this is Twitter for companies, which is not a new idea. So basically, this is what Yammer was like I don't know when you ever started like a decade ago so Yammer was started during like the social media hype phase it was like oh shit we have social networks uh for our friends and our family we need a social network for our company and they basically just copied the UI of Twitter slash Facebook and they were like cool it's Twitter slash Facebook but the only people that will see this

are all your co-workers and so you you know you close a sales deal you could post it there and how bunch of people could react to it or get excited about it. Or you could post a funny video from the, you know, the office kitchen and post it there and it'd be relevant to all those people in that group. So it's kind of like the non-work chatter. And they shut it down though? Like it doesn't get bought for a billion dollars by Microsoft. Like three years after starting. Very quickly. Yeah. So it grew super fast. It was like ridiculously fast because it was a social network inside company. So it had this amazing network effect, amazing in-company virality. And then it started making money because they would then, first they just got the company that, like, employees to start using it.

And then they went and they sold the keys of the car to the admins. And they said, hey, you know, all your employees are using this thing. Don't you want to have some oversight over this and be able to manage and monitor it a little bit? Well, here we have an admin tool that will charge you an arm and a leg for because now your whole company's already addicted to this thing. So it gets bought, kind of gets shut down, kind of gets lost like many acquisitions do. Yammer's not a thing anymore, blah, blah, blah. I think that there's still a big need for this. I would literally, if somebody,

if there's a credible person out there said, I'm going to restart Yammer, I would write them a $50,000 check tomorrow. And I would say, great, I think there's a great need for this. I think you could do a better job of it today than you could have done back then

because the tools are much better. And I think there's a more need for this now that everybody's in the cloud because now there is no office chatter because you're not in an office. Let me read this online. Let me pitch us a little differently. Yeah, do it.

Have I told you about what Washington Post, Post is toying with. You told me that they kind of have like a software arm where they're like making other tools like I don't know if it's going to yeah I don't know if it's going to be any good but they're piloting it and it's what inspired me. What I would do is I would build a media company. It's almost like you have media companies or media websites, but only for internal stuff. So you like the high school newsletter or high school newspaper company.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's what I would. do. It's like a weekly, like, it's like, here's what's going on in the company. Here's what people are thinking. Here's some ideas. That's what I would build is I would build. And I, I think at Airbnb, they built their own for this. At our company, I tried building our own. And it was just Google, like a Google website, I forget what their things called. But it's solving a similar problem as to what you're describing, which is. I love this idea. I love your

idea, actually even maybe more than my idea. Like, you could have, podcast. You can just like a, you just have like Airbnb internal.com and you just, you either, you have your login. And it's just a, uh, like we've aggregated all the happenings of the, of the business going on. And you can so what's interesting here. Is it, what's happening as in like kind of company announcements, news, the metrics? That's maybe a part of it. Is it like a high school newspaper where somebody could just write an op-ed? You can just write an article if you're interested and like you basically contribute in a column basically for the day? I think, I think that is yes. But I would make it so where the thing about you said like a

private Twitter is that like some of these like the when people think of like media or an article, they're like, oh, that's a lot of work. Then when I think of Twitter, they're like, oh, I'm just going to do this in five minutes. But the thing is is that often those old five minute tweets add as much value or more than a long article. Absolutely. So you'd have to build it in such a way that like you can solicit this information from your employees and in a low pressure way because someone like I have this woman Becca who runs our email business.

I'm like you don't write this report. Is this a good idea or not? Yes or no. Why? Just like Rift. Like you already I already know you know off the top of your head. Right? Because you're in the thick of it.

Something like that. But where you have to make it like a little bit more knee jerk reaction. Yeah, you like the lightweight, low pressure, Twitter, not, or not blogs, basically. Yeah, I mean, both are important, but a lot of people undervalue those little just like gut instinct things like you've described. Like, they're just like, but anyway, I agree with you. I do think that there's room for, there's room for that. Yeah, I like this a lot. I'm excited about that.

Maybe I'll do this. Maybe I'll do this. We've talked about this with, uh, there's a, there's a, a, bunch of, there's a bunch of movement going around. I, I, Axios, the media company Axios, I actually somehow got my hands on a demo. They're launching a product where they're doing internal newsletters. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. In the, in the concise format that they use for their company, right? Yeah, it's not there yet. Like, it's, because right now, the way that it's built out is, it's like mailch, I'm like, I just need mailchimp that you, what you're just allowing me to

send emails to an internal email list. So they have to add more stuff to make it interesting. But I understand the problem you're trying to solve for, and I agree with you, I think it's quite interesting. Yeah, I actually like the Axios thing, even if it is just a mail list, because people today just use Google lists, and Google lists are fucking awful. They're awful to find Google groups is like miserable. That whole process, the whole list serve is awful.

Then people reply all, and it's miserable. That whole thing is terrible. somebody just set up, I'm going to make Google lists and lists serves for companies less shit. I'd be like, oh, wait, that's so smart. Why are you so smart? That's what I would say to them. And there's two interesting things about this. If you get it done well, you can charge a lot of money, but the switching costs, once you start,

seem to be quite high. And so you'd probably have a pretty good, like, a low churn number and a high net retention rate for revenue. Like, you can probably add a lot more people. The more people your company hires, the more people, who need access to it. Yeah, this thing could make money. And, okay, I like that a lot. All right, so two other quick ones.

So one thing I saw that was pretty clever that I think is a great example of a niche product that somebody's doing to build like a lifestyle business. I was on Reddit and I saw an ad that said, get notified when your company's mentioned on Reddit. Have you seen this? I've seen things like it, but not that ad. I'm like, so there's products like this

that are out there like monitor Twitter monitor you know newspapers the media you know Forbes and shit to see when your company gets mentioned but this is a bigger this is a bigger this is a bigger version of that which is Reddit reddit's its own little beast you kind of have to scrape it in its own way to be able to track things properly what and so I don't even remember I saw an ad for it I was like this is smart and I moved on like because I don't need that right now but I was like if you know for most companies I like for you guys I bet I bet the hustle would want to know every time you get linked to a reference yeah right right Or on dig or anything like that.

And so, so yeah, so I think that that's a really smart, simple idea that somebody could do. They're using Reddit ads to distribute it. All they had to do was really like focus on being able to track keywords on Reddit. And then, you know,

market to a bunch of companies who are like, yeah, actually I do want to know when there's a conversation about my brand going on on Reddit. I do want to use the interface. I think a Bray you just find it. Is it track Reddit.com? If this wasn't it, this is just like it.

And Reddit is, It's so huge now that you can, but it's still underestimated. It's not as mainstream. So the traditional tools don't typically take in Reddit, but Reddit is more influential than, you know, any, you know, article actually is like, you know, some general publication. And so anyways, I thought this is a very simple, smart idea.

And I think if you're looking for like, how do I come up with an idea that I could build in two weeks that I think could make me $250,000 a year or more, this would be a great example of a simple app that I'm sure does that. I just use like a no code version of building software, like a platform. What's it called? Bubble. Oh my gosh. Have you seen Bubble? Yeah. Is that as, okay, so can you give listeners background here? Yeah, so bubble is one of the no code platforms that's pretty popular. And I think bubble. dot I is the, bubble.io is the handle for it. I found it Friday and I was like, and it's one of those. So when

when we say no code, no code can mean a lot of things. What bubble is is one of those, it lets you build apps, not just websites. So there's a lot of website builders, Squarespace, Wix, whatever. What bubble does is it lets you actually have a backend. So like, for example, this weekend, I built myself an app in no code in one hour as a challenge to myself. I wanted to have a meal tracking app, like a food journal. And so I was like, oh, I want an app that just I take a photo of what I eat and it shows it on a grid. And at the end of the day, I can see everything that I've eaten for the day.

And so I built myself a little thing. I was going to use bubble. I ended up using this other thing called a Dalo. And I actually built it. Like, you can have it. If you download this app, you can see what I eat every day. But I was like,

this is amazing that I was able to do this thing where I'm like, I have a UI. It takes, you can use the phone camera. It saves it in a database. I don't know what the hell a database even is,

but okay, you know, it's saved somewhere. And I can display it and an Instagram like feed. And I was able to build that in an hour and I'm below average intelligence. So I'm like, this is amazing shit now.

So, and you did that on that, that site? Yeah, I did it on something called Adalo because they let you actually make a mobile app. So I have an actual app now. So you can see this is my food grid. Wow.

And if I wanted to add something, I could just add like another one. So what's the thing called that I mentioned? Bubble. Man, I went to it. It was so cool. I'm like, I don't know if they're promising too much and they can't deliver on it. But it's still complicated, but it was certainly. It's definitely complicated.

I used the other one because I thought it was simpler. but I think Bubble can do way more. So there's people who are just going to specialize in Bubble. They're called no coders, and they just learn these no-code tools, and they overcome the learning curve on these things, and they're not really traditional programmers, but they know how to use Bubble

and all these other little random no-code tools really well. Yeah, I thought it was awesome. That thing, that was really cool to me. What else you got? Did I talk about this Kids Etsy thing before? No. Okay, so Kids Etsy. What the fuck's Kids' Kids Etsy?

So this is a half-baked idea. So I have a niece who's six or seven years old. She's like, she wakes up and she just starts making shit all day. She's just like, okay, start doing art. Then gets bored of art. Then decides I'm going to make Legos and stuff gets bored of Legos and just takes a bunch of paper and we'll make like a paper fort. And then we'll do this like imaginary restaurant. And like her whole day from like the moment she wakes up to the moment she sleeps,

she is just imagining, creating and just like building random stuff. And obviously it's mostly crap. Like she'll do a drawing or she'll make a book. She'll literally draw like 10 pages, you know, 10 different pieces of paper, staple them together, bind it. And it's like, here's a book for you, Uncle Sean. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. But of course, it's not actually amazing, right?

Because she's six and it's like kind of crappy. But I was like, you know, kids love making stuff. They love arts and crafts. It is one of the core things they do. But there's kind of this like, there's only so much stuff you can put on the fridge. And so I was like, wouldn't it be cool if you could also teach your kid like, kind of like a mini lemonade stand. So what if you get kids Etsy where they just push a button and they set up their store

and it's just a camera and they take a picture of the thing that they made and that becomes a listing. And then they can browse any pictures that other kids made and they can just click like buy it. You just create this little economy. So every parent pays like 15 bucks a month that gives you like five tokens. And then you use a token to buy something that somebody else made. And then that kid gets excited. It's like, whoa, you get a notification. It's like, whoa, you know, Zoe in California just bought that little.

stupid book you made or that little like book you you made out of paper machet or whatever and then you're like you have customers and so it's like this mini fake Etsy for kids that I think kids it would think it would be really cool to teach kids kind of like both arts and crafts and entrepreneurship to like own a little store online and it's kids buying from kids what do you think of this idea I am so wonderful I'm so not in the know of this market like someone told me about kids Uber like when it launched I was like that. For like carpooling like to school, you mean? Yeah, or like an Uber driver that you can put your children in.

Yeah, and I was like, that's so stupid as shit ever. That's a big thing now. So is it, would people love that? I don't know. That's wild to me. The kids market is just so foreign. It'd be like launching a company in China. Like I just don't know anything about it.

Like, because I see these like toy reviews. sites and they just crush. I see, this is how I feel when you tell me about like Henry Ford in 1903. I'm like, dude, I don't know, man. I have no, I just don't have the insights on this. Like, I just don't know. And it sounds like you're not around kids a whole lot.

Not at all. And I don't understand, like, I understand the idea of like you'll do anything for your children. Okay, get it. That's the only thing that matters. I feel a little bit of that with some of my nephews. And it's like, okay, I'll give them anything to make them happy. I get it. Love that perspective.

But like, do kids want to buy other children's books? Yeah, I don't know if they, that's the part I don't know. Like, do they actually want other kids junk? Are they only like their own junk? Because it's all junk. But the reason I thought this might be interesting is because they do this at school. So like you remember like science fair, where it's like everybody makes kind of a crappy thing. And then you get to stand by your little volcano and everyone walks by and you get this good feedback of like, oh, cool.

you know, whatever, and somebody wins a prize. So my niece's school did like an in-person version of this where people would make stuff and then it was like a school fair. And all the vendors were just other kids. So you brought all the stuff you made and you're at the kids fair. And then you can go walk around and see what the other kids made. And some people are actually pretty good at it. And some people are really bad at it.

And you could kind of barter or exchange or like buy, you know, each other's stuff. And the parents are happy to pay a little bit just to give each other the good feeling. It's like burning man. It's like, I'll bring a little bit of money. and then like we'll all have the good you every kid gets the good feeling of getting to buy and sell an item and so I was like oh that'd be cool to just do online at scale basically and I bet some kids are actually amazing at building stuff and they would be kind of the star etsy shops that would like actually be making cool bracelets and stuff that other kids want but I think for the most part it's about the good

feeling of having your kid make something post it get good feedback from other people where they want your thing or they buy your thing and having that feedback loop and I think parents would just pay a subscription and then the actual buying and selling is all funny money that's just checky cheese tokens but i think you could get you know thousands of parents to pay 15 bucks a month to have their kid be on this platform that's that's wild i uh let's get someone to make it yeah it's cool let me bring up one more thing yeah i heard about this uh this is all rumors but i did some digging i can't find any verification there's this guy i'm friends with on facebook he owns this company called Golden Hippo. Have you heard of Golden Hippo? No, drunk of

Okay, not Golden Hippo. Probably have never heard of Golden Hippo. If you go to Golden Hippo, all it says is we build brands that make the world a better place. Okay. And I'm like, that means that that could be anything. And so what they do is they partner with like, for example, they have this one doctor called Dr. Marty. And I don't know if this is scammy or not, but Dr. Marty sell is a line of pet food. They also have this other doctor that sells like something for your gut. So like potentially scammy stuff. But all those ads that you see at the bottom of Brightbart or Fox or CNN, they buy all these outbrains ads and they use long form copywriting to get people to buy

pet food and things like that. And they do about a billion dollars a year in sales. The companies that Golden HIPPO supports? They own those companies. They own, Oh, these are their companies. I believe they own about 12 of them. Did you say a billion dollars a year in sales? I did. And your friend owns this thing? I'm Facebook friends with them.

I don't chat with them on a regular basis. But, and then I did. What's an example? I want to see one of their brands. They don't list their brands on their website. What's a brand? Yeah. And when I heard what I, it said they have 800 employees and they don't list their brands on their website.

I was like, oh, this is awesome. Right. So Google Dr. Marty. That is one of them. Okay, Dr. And I think they're, I don't mean to like disparage them. I think they are a legit company.

Or they are, they are a legit company. I just don't know any of their brands. Interesting. I have another one called, there's this one doctor. It's like a white guy doctor with, uh, fucking, I'll look at what. Dr. Seuss. I don't know who this guy. Yeah.

Steve Gundry. G-U-N-D-R-Y. So Google Stephen Gundry. Dr. Gundry's books and podcasts, and he sells books on a family cookbook book for Crockpot. He sells, it's just all types of crap. It's just freaking crazy. These guys, like, it's just so funny to hear about these people that aren't in the mainstream are kind of behind the scene.

So here's what's interesting. All right, so I go to Dr. Marty, right? He's got an ad. He's running an ad around this article that's called three dog behaviors caused by a whore diet. Now, the ad is actually going to a different website called caninecodes.com, not his sales website. So Dr. Marty writes this article, Marty Goldstein, DMV,

I don't know what I mean. It's Dr. Veterinary Medicine, maybe. What does your dog's behavior actually mean? And he's talking about this stuff. and then how does this link to their dog food? I'm sure it's somewhere here. You probably give them your email. But like, all right, if you go to GundrymD.com, you'll see his website and he sells something

called Vital Reds, which is concentrated polyphenol blend. I have no idea what that is. I'm looking at their website, and it's $70 for one jar. I'm looking at their website. According to a similar web, they get north of 2 million visitors a month. If you get north of $2,000. two million visitors a month to a store that sells a $60 product, you're probably most likely crushing it.

Right. So this guy seems legit. So Dr. Stephen Gundry is a renowned heart surgeon and New York Times bestselling author of the Plant Paradox and the Plant Paradox cookbook. Okay. So he's not like, I thought for a second, they're just making up fictional like Aunt Jemima or like, you know, Colonel Sanders.

I didn't know if they were like trying to create like characters or if these are actual like actual doctors. No, I think they're like Dr. Oz types, but I don't know. But this guy, Gundry MD, he sells supplement, skin and hair care, food, dog food, books, and magazines. And they're not, the websites aren't slick. Yeah, not at all. And Tony Robbins is an endorse, he endorses them. It's just crazy.

Like I said with Henry Ford, I love seeing things that break my frame. Yeah, that's a great way of putting this. It's like, my brain is like, I'm struggling to even talk because I'm just like, my brain's like breaking and trying to re-figure out, okay, what is this new, new, new information that I need to process and figure out what the hell this was for and, you know, why am I not doing this? But I can tell you, like, people have emailed me and I, I'm almost 100% positive. They're pushing a billion dollars a year in sales.

They have 800 employees. This is all in the last door. door. And I looked them up on Reddit and it says, Golden Hippo Media is constantly hiring copywriters and constantly hiring media buyers. And I've seen this Dr. Gundry all over the place on these Outbrains. So I know what they do is... It would be interesting. We should like find out who are the top advertisers on Outbrain. Because I think Outbrain is something everything, if you don't know about it, you're like, what the fuck's Outbrain? If you know about it, you're like, oh, fucking Outbrain. And you just like disregard it.

But like, look, there's a reason tabula and Outbrain, like, there's reason they make all this money. There's a reason people are spending money on these ads because they're working. So who are these advertisers? Who are their top 10 advertisers, what I would want to know? And, you know, I bet I would have my brain broken five more times in that list. So I just did a quick Google. Editor's Choice.com is the largest advertiser on Outbrain, followed by Edmonds.com, which is Cars. Followed by healthgrades.com.

Have you been to editorschoice.com? What is this? I have no idea. It's like bootleg WordPress site with like random articles. It gets 10 million unique visitors a month. I must have typed something wrong. No, no, you're right. I went there too.

It's like what that was this? It's crazy, man. It's crazy. Okay, no, no, no. Now I went to the right site. I don't know where I was before. I was on a real. Healthier patriot.com buys 1% of Outbrain ads.

Dude, I'm telling you, there's a lot going on in the world that, like, we just don't even think about. I can't even, I can't even get to the website of Healthier Patriot. I don't know what. If you Google it, the person comes up with, this is a scam. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I can't find the actual website. Oh, I saw it's a scam alert. Okay, weird. I need to spend more time on this. It's crazy. Like there's a lot of stuff going on. Dude, this is turning into a true crime serial type of podcast where we get to the bottom of these businesses. Maggie Q. Have you heard of Maggie Q? No. I think that's another one they have. So, that's an actress. ActivatedU.com. And like the personality type is this woman named Maggie Q. And they sell probiotics. And this

website is one, I think, Golden Hippo's website. So much so that when they sell so much stuff that I Googled them, they opened up a massive, I think 20 or 30,000 or 40,000, something huge, square foot warehouse in Memphis. But where are you seeing, okay, so they're hiring a bunch of copy editors. What are you seeing that they need all these copyrighters? So I see some blog posts, sure. Because the way that they're not like doing sales pages like you just don't, it's always, you always go to the side door. The sales pages are for where you send, you send paid media to the side doors and those side doors that work best are long-form copywriting. So if you go to Outbrain, go to brightbart.com with your ad blocker off and scroll

to the bottom and you will 100% see an ad bought by Agora, which does long-form sales pages to get you to buy a $5 book or give you their email. Oh my God, Sam. Now I got a whole bunch of stuff I got to do today just to get my head around this. Okay. So you've given me my homework. Crazy, right? It's freaking crazy. We'll come back to it on, well, we have Andrew Wilkinson coming on Thursday. So maybe we can bring this up to him and get his opinion. It's weird, man. It's weird. I just love having my frame broken. And this will break anyone's, most anyone's frame. Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. I'm excited for the rest of the week. We've got Andrew Wilkinson. We also have the CEO of Barstool coming on. So that's going to be exciting. Yeah, we're recording that on Wednesday, right? Yeah, that'll come out, I think, next week.

All right. Well, we good? Yeah, we're good. Let's go. Hold on, hold on. So, Brady just linked this tweet thread that we've got to read. So 10 things we've learned at Golden Hippo after spending over $1 billion, parentheses of our own money on online media.

That's Craig. I've talked to Craig. Yeah, he seems like a nice guy. I've hung out with him at a conference. I don't know if he still owns it, but he owned it. Okay, so this is interesting. He says, the idea that they must see your ad seven times before they buy is the biggest line of BS in advertising history. No matter how long you've been doing this, what you think will work is often wrong.

Great ad ideas come from anyone. Influencer marketing is for companies that like burning money. Your customer cares literally zero about your company, your story, your brand, or even your product. What they do care is what it can do for them. Don't fight this, embrace this. Okay, so this guy, Craig, is he a cool guy or what? Let's have them on. Yeah.

I'll message him right now. I'm texting him right now. All right. So on the podcast, we've talked about this million-dollar idea thing. What did we say, Sean? Yeah, thought exercise. Something you could build in two weeks

that can drive over $3 million of revenue within, I don't know, three months, let's call it. And you can't spend like $3 million to get it, right? So you can't like spend on ads like that much. So the budget restraint was. So it's two weeks to build. $3 million is your goal within three months, let's say, and a $10,000 initial investment. That was the thought exercise. And we are going to bring our ideas to the table up for that.

I have a couple thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think, what you've been thinking for, not ideas yet, but just about this thought experiment. Sounds like a ton of work. I'll do it for fun. So maybe in the next couple of weeks, we'll actually address this and do this. If you want to participate in this, tweet at Sean or I and let us know if this gets like a ton of interest, we'll actually follow through with this. Yeah, it turned out to be harder than I thought to think about this stuff. And I'm a professional thinker about stuff for a living. So I was like, okay, I actually need to sit down and do this. I can't do it off the top of my head. And I wanted to come to the table with something interesting that's

actually relevant and not like, you know, a total knee-jerk, half-baked answer. But I'm actually going to break it down into three groups. The first one is the exact thing that we just said. Two weeks to build $3 million in three months of revenue and $10,000 initial investment. The other part of that first one is you can't use your personal assets. So I can't say like, oh, I just invest in this company or I would, you can't use the hustle to like, you know, do some crazy shit. It's like just you as an individual person without using your other resources. So the second thought experiment is if I had to make a million dollars in the next two months using my existing resources, how would I do it? Which is less relatable to a listener,

but more relevant to us because why would we take the hard path? We would actually take the easier path, which would be to use our actual assets. So that would be the next thing. That's the second thought experiment. And then the third one that I'm thinking about is the same like sort of overall criteria, but with a larger budget for the initial spend. So if I knew I was going to make $3 million, you know, I would actually be willing to put up up to, you know, let's say half a million or a million

dollars as my marketing budget behind something. And so that's the third one. Now, I'm going to come to the table with answers for all three of those buckets, but I need time to think about it. Same in all categories. And if you guys are like truly into this, me and Sean are men of the people. So we got to see what your response is.

Right, right on. Okay, cool. We've addressed the elephant in the room. Awesome. Okay, cool. I'm going to go swim, but this is fun. all right tough life

bye bye