My First Million - From $0 to $100 Million In 3 Years Selling Cold Plunges

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Episode 527: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) reveal the numbers behind Plunge.com, predict the next TikTok, and share $100M business ideas for the health and wellness trends of 2024.   No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (0:30) Plunge.com - $270K to $100M in 3 years (12:30) Trusted Supplements Tester (19:30) It's time for a new Consumer Reports (25:30) How Andrew Huberman monetizes trust (30:00) Gossip like your life depends on it (39:00) ReelShort - the next TikTok (51:00) Shaan hires an AI tutor — Links: • Plunge.com - https://plunge.com/ • Examine.com - http://examine.com/ • Flavcity - https://tinyurl.com/2xndaj9e • Consumer Reports - https://www.consumerreports.org/ • ReelShort Romance - https://tinyurl.com/npkta3sx • The 4-Day MBA - https://keystothevault.com/the-4-day-mba/ • Good Business - Bad Business - https://tinyurl.com/y6aejb22 — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Free 2024 Goal-Setting Session - https://planfor2024.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

All right, today we're talking about an app that is taking off that I think might be the next TikTok. It's a Chinese app that you probably never heard of. Sam got all the numbers behind a cold plunge business that's doing over $100 million years, including their ad numbers, which is rare. You almost never get to see that. And lastly, we talk about lessons that we learned from Jess Ma, a founder who has built a business up to $900 million, and she shared one or two golden little nuggets that we wanted to talk about. Enjoy this episode.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be. what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. All right, let me give you an update on something. So we had, you know, I take a lot of pride in the fact that we've had some people on here right before their, like, fame arc really took off. We had Brian Johnson on here.

You said that he mentioned like, yeah, you guys were one of my first people. Another one, Andrew Humerman. We talked to Andrew Humerman. I remember we talked to him, and I think he was like in his hallway in Stanford or something, like doing an interview with us. And after the pod or during the podcast, I told him that like cold plunging is interesting to me. And after the pot, he goes, hey, I want to send you a cold plunge.

And I was like, that's very kind of you. I would love that. And so he introduced me to this guy named Ryan, Ryan Dewey. Ryan sent me a cold plunge. And the company now, it's, it's a, what's the URL actually? Is it? Plunge.com. What is it?

Plunge.com. It's just called plunge. He sent me this thing, and I started using it. And I loved it. And I dug it. And by the way, this also sounds like an ad. This is not an ad. I have nothing to do with these guys.

But. But Ryan, I will take a free plunge. I said no earlier. I changed my mind. Did you say no when he offered you one? I said no the first time. That's crazy. And I was wrong.

I'm man enough to admit it. I was wrong. I would like a plunge. Thank you. Yeah, they're awesome. But here's the deal. When he was selling them at the time, I think they were like $3, $3,500.

Now I think they're like $5,500. And I didn't know if I liked doing it. So I was like, yeah, I'll take one. because that's a lot of money to spend just to test something out. And so I got an update on these guys. I think they only launched in 2020. And in preparation for this pot, I just went and talked to them. We got a bunch of numbers.

This year, so listen to their revenue. In 2020, so the way it started is Ryan and his partner, Michael, they each separately owned brick and mortar business. One of them, Ryan owned this thing called a float therapy center or I don't know. Float tank. Yeah, it's like you go. It's like a, I used to call it deprivation take. I used to do it in San Francisco every once in all.

You're like sit in this like tanning bed that's filled with salt water. You basically float and it's completely dark and no noise and you feel funky. It's kind of cool. His other partner owned like a, I think it was called a reboot. It was like a sauna that you could go to in L.A. But COVID happens. So both of those businesses get screwed. And so they're like, man, we got to figure something out.

And they noticed that at their places, people were asking for cold plunges. And they also saw that online, I think at the time, it was like 15 grand to get a coal plunge. As opposed to what a lot of people do, what I used to do in college is you get like a big, trash can and you just got to go to like 7-Eleven and buy ice and fill your thing up, your bucket with water hose or hose, water from the hose and it takes forever, whatever. And they're like, all right, let's create our own. So 2020, they did 270,000 in revenue. 2021, they did $8 million.

2022, I think we got it in 21 or 22, whenever Andrew came on. 2012, they did $33 million in revenue. This year, 2023, they're doing around $10,000. million a month and they're going to surpass a hundred million in revenue off freaking cold plunges. It's wild. Insane. And the way he told me they got started was they basically DM'd Aubrey Marcus, who's this health guy on Instagram who owns on it.

And they were like, hey man, we're going to, we'll come to your house and just set up a cold plunge for free. And so they get a U-Haul and they fill it up with their little homemade thing that they did. They used like a bunch of parts from Home Depot, I'd imagine, because I had an early version. It looks like something you could kind of hack together. And they brought it to his place and they set it up for him. And they were like, is there anyone else you think we should talk to?

And he's like, yeah, Huberman, talk to this guy. And so they get a U-Haul and they fill it up with five more. And they start delivering it to these guys. And I guess that's how I got it was a plunge tour. They would fill up four or five of these going to plunge tour. And they would Instagram while they were doing it. And so people on IG would see it like, like me, I would see it on IG. And it'd be like, damn, this must be like some super successful company because

they're they're only delivering to people that I know, like, you know, influencers basically, even though there were no other customers. It was only those customers. Yeah, and it was only like a few of them. It was like they threw this thing together. And I guess that's when I, that's when Andrew, like, I guess they were like, Andrew, you know, we have this money for you to give away. Do you want to give away to whoever? They gave one to me. They gave one to Sahel. So far, they've given away hundreds of these things. And they're killing it. And never in a million years would have thought a cold plunge business would do north of a hundred million in revenue. By the way, they've given away over a thousand plunges. That's insane, right?

That's like, that means influencer marketing was like so important to them at the beginning. A couple other fun facts. I said to say a couple of these that you have on your notes. Yeah, do it. They bought plunge.com off of a New Orleans jazz band for 250K, which is just hilarious. That's wild. They basically are riding this wave. So if you look on Google Trends, we'll put this up on the screen on YouTube. You could see basically cold plunge versus ice bath and just both of them rising over time as you know, the kind of the Huberman era kicks in here. So they're right in the back of that. But the insane thing is this ad spend.

You got to talk about this. You talk about it because this is your wheelhouse. But basically what they did was they, Brian, I've met Ryan, he's almost like, I don't know the best word to describe it, but he's one of these guys that was doing ayahuasca before Iowaska was cool. Like when I went and hung out with him, like he had his toenails painted because like there's something around that. I don't exactly know what it is, but there's like something around that.

like he's like eccentric and I don't think he probably knew anything about Google ads or Facebook ads and so he said he hired a guy on Upwork to help run Google ads for them and that's how they started so what and he even sent me a screenshot basically it shows their revenue it shows their ad spend and it shows it broke it down on Google Facebook and even Bing a little bit but like just looking at their total paid media that's what does I want to zoom in on this this is these are kind of bonkers numbers so this is is this a month what what is this is This is monthly. I think this is monthly, which is crazy.

So last month, I don't know if it's last month, but one month, 860,000 in ad spend. So 860K in a month. And then their ROAS on that return on ad spend was 7.1. To get, just to put this in, this is the, that's bananas. Nobody has seven or eight X Roas. They said they've had that basically from the beginning. They used to get over 10x. Now it's sort of like between 7 and 10x.

to get a 7X ROAS. That means you have a machine. They put a box in this guy's house, and it's a magic box. And the box says, if you put $1 into this box, you get $7 out. That's what that means.

And so they have this box that they're able to put $800,000 in each month and get out, you know, $6 million back. And they're just doing that month after month after month. And so you see it on Google. Their ROAS is, you know, 5.8.

On Facebook, it's 10.7. I don't know why they're saying this, by the way. I would never reveal this information. If I found a magic box that does this, I would never share this with anybody, but they said to do it. So, you know,

here you go. I think maybe they think they're pretty far ahead in terms of competition, but I don't know. If you can get these numbers, anyone can get these numbers on Facebook. They have no special sauce there that's going to be, you know, uncopyable,

I guess. Why did they agree to share this? I just said I'm going to talk about you in the pod. Let me interview and I said whatever we talk about. This is like on the record. So I guess if they change their mind, they'll let me know. Well, I mean, it's cool that they get a big feature. That's cool.

But also, this is crazy. And just props to them. These numbers are insane. And they own the whole thing. So they bootstrapped. They haven't taken any funding. And this is, by the way, 2020. So they're coming up at four years.

So on Facebook in this snapshot here, this is accurate. The CACH on Facebook, so the cost to acquire a customer on Facebook for them is $387. They're selling this thing for $5,000. So you can see you're paying just under 400 bucks to get somebody to pay you $5,000. Amazing trade on the ad spend. And you could see why this thing is scaling so crazy. It's wild, right? 8 million, 33 million and then now over 100 million.

And they bootstrapped it. This is profitable. They didn't raise any outside money. And now they're expanding into like saunas and other shit too. So that's pretty insane. What do you think this company could sell for? Let's say they get to, I have no idea what the profit is. Let's say get to 100.

So 2020, they started at 20. they started at $2.5 million in 2020, in year four, their fourth year of business, they're going to do $100 million. What could this sell for? Is this, could this be a $200 million company? Definitely. Definitely. You know, I would, if you're getting, like, just to put this in perspective, if you're getting 8X ROAS under money, and let's say that continues, they'll say they can, if they said they're doing, you know, whatever, $8 to $10 million a month. So they're over $100 million, I'll say $120 million in revenue. the minimum that they should be selling for is one X revenue, so 120 million. In this case, let's say that because of their growth rate, because of the insane profitability on their ads, this company has to be, you know, make a bank, right? Like normally, most people in e-commerce are break-even or slightly losing money on first order. You know, that gets you, that's like you have a ROAS of like between one and two.

These guys are doing, you know, six or seven times better than that. that. So that's kind of insane. This company should be worth, you know, $250, $300 million right now. I don't know how big that Clearlight Sona company is, but I pretty sure it's pretty big. Man, if I'm these guys, I might take that sale to make that amount of money in three or four years. And I don't know what their financial situation was before, but let's just assume that they were just getting by owning a brick and more business. That's wild. That is a crazy story. I would take advantage of that. Or I would sell like $30 million, of secondary. I would sell like $30 million at even like $100 million valuation and

delute 30% only. But now you guys, you know, you put 15 million bucks in the bank and you can keep going. If you really want to keep going, that's what I would do in this case because you can bank that huge life-changing sum. Because these e-commerce companies, let's say that, you know, ad flips, competition flips, whatever, they don't like retain that much value because the sale is already done in the past. You basically get no credit for past, you know, past sales here because It's not recurring revenue. It's not like a network effect style business. So you're really only as good as your next year when it comes to e-commerce, I think, at least.

So, yeah, I would definitely take some money off the table. It's crazy, though. And by the way, I don't know like what the science is behind cold plunging. I still, how long have I owned it for two or three years? I still use it three days a week. Like, I'm into it. It's clinically proven to make you post on social media at least three times more. So that's one proven effect.

There was this one TikTok where these guys were joking. and they were like, you know, it's crazy to think about it. But for the first 20 minutes after the Titanic sank, the passengers were actually healthier until they died. They actually were increasing their lifespan by 20% during that first cold plunge until they suddenly died. They're like, too bad Wim Hof wasn't there to teach them how to breathe. Right. They reduced their risk of heart attack.

They're like, imagine if Wim Hof was there. this feels nice. But there was about 15 minutes. He should rebrand to the Titanic method. He should be like, oh, you don't do Titanic breathing? This would save, you would live, even if you're on the Titanic, if you learn this shit. It's about 15 minutes where they are at peak physical shape. Anyway, that's the update on Pludge.

I finally got an update on them. I'm shocked at how they're doing. I guess I'm not that shocked. It's a $5,000. I guess I'm shocked at how many people would buy into this. Never in a million years would I've thought this many people would buy into this and want to get cold however many times a week. So that's my update on plunge.

I got one thing I want to jump right into. It's something that's been on my mind. It's been grinding my gears. It's been a little itch I need to scratch. And that is supplement testing. So you're a big supplements guy. It sounds like you're setting up an ad, by the way. we have to say this is not an ad.

No, no, this is not a dad. This is just me being corny. So I've been thinking about this idea because I've been buying a shit ton of supplements. And I don't know about you, but people are like, oh, you know, you take that. I'm like, yeah, they're like, how does it like, is it working? I'm like, how would I know? It's a supplement. You never know if supplements working, right?

Like, I personally feel that way. I don't know if I'm just not in tune with my body. When you take stuff, do you have like a clear. like this is helping me versus this is not when it comes to actual like supplements. There's basically

only one or two supplements that I've ever taken where I'm like this is working. So I take either melatonin or magnesium at night. And that's the only

those are the only two where I'm like, all right, it helps me go to sleep faster. Besides that, protein. But protein is it, protein's a supplement,

but it's a nutrient. So like when I eat more protein, whether it comes through a powder or not, I notice my muscles get bigger. Besides that, I don't think I've noticed a difference in mostly anything. Even protein for me, it's not even like I feel my muscles getting bigger. I just feel more full. So I'm like, okay, that did something. Like that is like kind of like a meal replacement.

I got it. But like even creatine, I start taking creatine. And I thought that creatine would be, I thought creatine was going to be the hard shit. I was like, oh, okay, here we go. I've crossed the line. I'm doing the hard shit now. now it's just going to be like a little unfair these gains that I'm about to be having. Can't feel anything.

You with creatine? No, I don't feel anything. When I was taking testosterone, I felt that. But that's, I don't know if that would be under the heading of supplements. But like, basically, if it's illegal or banned at sports, I've noticed a difference. Besides that, if I could buy it at Target, I don't know if I've noticed a difference. Right. If you're not having to text a guy to get it, you're not going to feel it.

So I feel like with supplements is an opportunity. The opportunity with supplements is to be the most trusted source when it comes to supplements. So for you, where do you go when you want to find out if which brand you should be taking or which brand you should not be taking or what's the most effective? What's the cleanest? What's the healthiest for you? Where do you go to get that information right now? So I use Examine.com to figure out which supplements are like. which the science has shown that it works.

But examine.com... That's not the brand, right? Yeah, examine.com in order to stay neutral, they don't promote any brands. And so I go to Amazon, I talk to friends. It's pretty challenging. It's also challenging because do you remember the mattress review websites? Like the top one, it ended up being owned by Casper. And so it was incredibly challenging to find which, like, for example, some protein

brands will say we have 25 grams of protein per scoop. And then you go to research it. And it's like, no, this one actually only has 18. Or this has some certification, which means they had to jump through this hoop or that hoop. It's actually quite challenging to figure out who's clean and who to trust. Yeah, I think it was Casper that owned, was it Casper or Purple that owned a bunch of the top mattress blogs that had like, they were like for 15 years, they were like a normal blog

and they went bottom out and then they like started to promote their own shit. And it's the same thing with supplements. You know, like what's rule number one if you create a protein brand? you buy your brand name, your domain, and then you buy the truth aboutprotein.com because you're going to need that too in order to promote your own shit. It's really hard.

It's really hard. The reality is that supplements and health and wellness are on the way up. People are, it's becoming more and more normal to take a wider and wider variety of these things. There's more and more brands in the market because now you have D to C brands.

So anyone can create a brand. You don't need to fight for shelf space because you can just be on the internet, the infinite shelf. And I think the need has become bigger than ever for somebody to become the trusted person. And I say person, specifically here, the trusted person around supplement testing. And have you seen this guy, Flav City?

No. How do you spell it? FLAV, then city. So Flav City is this guy that my mom will send me. My mom will always send me this thing. So this guy's schick is genius. Like in terms of content creation, this is such a good niche. And it is so perfect.

So what he does is he's like, I'm a trusted guy. I'm not like some super expert or whatever, but I just, I'm a guy who knows things. And what he does is he goes to a grocery store. If you go look at his Instagram, he'll go to a grocery store,

be at Costco. He'd be like, the thumbnails, him holding up, let's say, almonds or no, it'll be like parmesan cheese. And he'll be like,

don't buy this. See, and he'll turn it around. He'd be like, see, it has parmesan cheese, milk, that's fine,

but then it has artificial flavors. We don't like artificial flavors because they're going to be bad for blah, blah, blah, instead buy this one and he'll have another one at Costco that's better he's like see this one doesn't have artificial flavors doesn't have this it doesn't have this but it's the best one you can find at Costco

so he's doing it right now on Instagram he's doing it for veggie straws which is like those potato chips that are like whatever they're supposedly made out of vegetables he goes this is bad for this reason here are some better ones for you lesser evil power curls

siette puffs Jackson's sweet potato chips. And he looks at the back of veggie straws and he tells you what's wrong with it. Right. And I'm giving this to my kids, right? Veggie straws. Oh, that's better than chips. It's veggies, right? And it's like, so he's, he just debunks a lot of things. And he's got his whole thing. He's very high energy. He does mainstream products that are in shopping stores. And he'll be like, this one, Bobby approved. And he's like, got his own little schick where he's like, this is Bobby approved. And he's like, he's basically Doug DeMoro, but for, you know, packaged goods instead of cars.

And he has 2.5 million followers that posted the veggie straw ones that I just said has 25,000 likes. Exactly, because it's super forwardable. Because as soon as he says something, and you know somebody who eats that, you share it with them. And then he becomes a trusted source. He's not selling you anything. He's just telling you better and worse. He's telling you what to avoid.

Or he's like, okay, it's the holiday. He's got one, holiday booze halls. These are the things to buy and don't buy when it comes to booze. Or farm salmon. Is farm salmon good or bad? And he just uses the like thinker emoji. So you're like, oh, shit, is there something I need to know about farm salmon? Is that not, is that not healthy? I thought that was. He's got another one, ditch the goldfish, right? So he's

taking these popular products. He's doing this. So I think this is genius. I think more people should literally just copy him because there's room for more here. And you could differentiate by being, you know, a mom who's going to be trusted by moms and do more mom products than what he's doing. Or you could be a meathead who's doing more protein gym, Jimbrough type of content. That's kind of what more place, more dates is doing. But I think this format is beautiful. So let me just tell you about this opportunity. Okay. So here's how I'm thinking about this. Do you know consumer reports, they test like every product, ellipticals and, you know, coffee machines and whatever else? Do you know about the company itself? Consumer reports? I do. We brought them up. I'm not going to,

I'm not going to steal your stees here, but it's wild. It's wild. They're a nonprofit. Do you know, you could give me an accurate guess. You don't have to give me the home. me guess where your guest's low just to make me feel good. Give me what you think the real guess is. Their revenue per year. Do you know? A hundred. Almost 300 million a year. 289. That's insane. It's crazy, right? And it's all subscription revenue. What's that? It's all subscription revenue too, I think. Yeah, I don't know the exact mix, but it's a nonprofit. So you can actually go find a bunch of their stuff. So they have like 250 million of assets on their books, which like nonprofits are famous for like having,

you know, high revenue, high expenses. And then just like a lot of assets on the books. You have to spend $160 a year in order to get access to their articles. And it's old as old as hell. Like you go there and literally like the website looks old. You know, like when you see videos of people from like the 90s or the 80s and it's just like the haircuts are old, the fashion is old, it's all old. And like these people have 80s haircuts. And I just realized when I saw this, it's time for a new consumer reports. JD Power does this for cars, right? JD Power. What is it, J.D. Power in a I don't know who these people are.

I don't know what they do. 240 million a year revenue. So I think there's an opportunity to create the new age consumer reports or JD Power around supplements specifically. And I would do it in the TikTok format. So what Flavis City is doing, I would do it that way. And I would test every single product. And I would test it in a scientific way that people can't.

So they claim that it has this many grams of protein per scoop. Let's find out. Truth or dare. Right? I dare you to have the amount of protein you say. And you do a little 15 second, 30 second video that's kind of, you know, talking about each one of these products. The beauty of short form video is for the, Mr. B said this to me and I kind of was like, huh, I never thought about this before. He goes, for the first time ever, short form video is the only content format that can be posted on every social network at the same time.

I was like, what? He's like, yeah, basically let's take, you know, Instagram is a single photo that's filtered. Cool, you could post that on Instagram. You could kind of post it on Facebook. you might be able to post that on Twitter but it wasn't the native way of doing things but you can't post that on Snapchat the same way you can't do that but with short form video

you can literally get on TikTok YouTube Instagram Facebook Snapchat every single social network is compatible with short form video which means short form video is now the dominant content format to be creating it

and so I think if you do this you could go across all of them You can't monetize that. So typically the way, there's basically two ways that you, maybe there's three. There's two main ways you monetize this. So there's affiliate, which is wirecutter.com. I've got a, I know a guy named Dennis who started Best Reviews.com. He sold it for $110 million to the worst named company on Earth.

It was called Trunk, which was, it's basically the company, I think, that owns L.A. Times. And he sold it for 110 million bucks after. Trunk should definitely be like a women's. jeans brand that's like, Tronk, all about your butt or something. Yeah. Tronk is a horrible name. Got junk in the trunk, you know what I'm saying?

It's a really bad name. It's one of those names that sounds like a noise. And so they sold the trunk, I think, after four years, and they monetized it the same way as wirecutter. So it was through affiliate. But wirecutter is one of the few, I think NerdWallet does a good job where they do trust,

where for some reason I still trust them, even though I know they're getting paid per click. Right. And then the other one, which is harder to pull off, but a way better business, is subscription. And that's what Consumer Report does.

You know why Wirecutter, I think, has that trust even though they're clearly pushing, you know, they're clearly making money off the recommendations. I think it's two things.

One, it's like good design and copywriting, so it feels like a person is talking to you and it feels like, it's a clean. Same with the points,

guy. They're not saying who's the best. What they do is they say, best on a budget, this is the one we recommend. If price is no, problem. This is the best one period on the market. And then kind of the most common popular option is this one. So instead of it being here's our favorite and yeah, it's the one we're

getting the best kickback on, they kind of give you options of like, depending on your situation, we think this is the best in that situation. I feel like for some reason that changes. And then it's like, yeah, we make money. You know, we get an affiliate on each one of these, but like, they're all equal. We're not saying one is better than the other. We're saying one is better in this situation. And one of the reasons why I think they do that is I know. the founders of NerdWallet. And if I remember correctly, so nerdwollet.com slash best dash credit dash card. So that's one page. If I remember correctly, that one, so basically their whole business model was to make that page rank number one in Google if you search

best credit card. And for a long time, that one page was making like 40 million of their like $45 million a year in sales. And then they were like, all right, now we need to do best credit card for students, best credit card for fixed income people, best credit card for your first time credit card. And they had to diversify because best nerdwalt.com slash best credit card was getting all of their sales. And their whole company strategy was write articles that get linked back from like USANews.com or business insider, whatever, get high quality links. And then in those articles, link back to slash best credit card. It was a pretty wild strategy. And it worked or it's working. Yeah. You basically want to.

write articles that get links to your overall domain authority goes up, but then you got one or two moneymaker pages. And those are those are the pages that you need to be the number one search result for. The way you do it is by creating all this goodwill around the other pages, this sort of SEO goodwill. So I think you would think that short form video is hard to monetize, but that's not what you're monetizing. You're not monetizing the short form video. You're monetizing the trust. So today, who is both the most trusted voice in science and supplements and the man most likely to be in Sam's fantasies? Yeah, my husband, Andrew Heberman. Exactly.

And as a, what do they call them? My Huberman husbands or something like that. What did they say? So I posted a shirtless picture of him and he's like, and I was like, people were like, what did they say? I'm Huber's man. Yeah, he posted his first shirtless video the other day, and men around the world were gasping. Clear the calendar, honey. All right.

So Huberman makes money through his ads and his podcast, but remember when Rob Deerick was on the pod and he was talking about Momentous protein? And he's like, yeah, Momentus was kind of dead in the water. We thought we had made the best cleanest protein, but it really wasn't going anywhere. and then we did a deal with Andrew Huberman and we were like, how much did you pay him? He goes, I don't know, whatever it was, it wasn't enough.

It wasn't enough. And he was just like laughing at how crazy that that was. So, you know, I think the business model here is you build trust for a couple years and then you come out with your own branded supplement. You want to be in the supplements game. You don't want to be in the same thing.

That ruins your whole premise, though, of finding the most trusted. No, no, no, no. You are the most trusted. You build the trust by saying, and then finally you say, look, I've had it with these companies. I've had it with these. I am just going to make the one that I wish existed, the one that is truly clean. That is going to hold the utmost standard, right? Derek from more plates, more dates.

That's exactly what he did. Somebody like Jessica Alboy with Honest Company kind of did the same thing. She built up a bunch of fame and trust in one area, but then she comes out with the honest company. And she's like, this is going to be the honest brand, the product I want to give to my kids. Which, by the way, I buy Momentous Protein, in part because I trust, Rob and Rob was involved and I buy BPN, which is Nick Bear, you know, the Jack guy who runs fast. I was like, well, these guys both seem trustworthy. I'll buy their stuff. So I spent all my money with them. Right, because what else do you have to go on? You have nothing else to go on,

this packaging or that packaging, right? Like, what else do you have to go on besides the words of somebody you trust? And so I think that's the way you do this ultimately is you ultimately build your own supplement franchise around this, more like the honest company. But I think first for a couple years, you're just becoming the most viral trusted source when it comes to the truth about X. And you've got to pick things that are going to be very shareable as well as, you know, establish your authority in that niche to be able to. I'm the most knowledgeable trusted source when it comes to. What should I be taking? By the way, we've talked about the eat this, not that category.

And we loved it. I think we talked about it a year and a half or two years ago. We love to eat this, not that category. It's the best. I love that stuff. When did we say that? Because I remember talking about Flavis City because that's his thing, right? Eat this, not that.

He was doing it. I mentioned it maybe a year ago, but I really hadn't like fully wrapped my head around it. So eat this, not that was a line of books. I remember buying it Barnes & Noble. Like, I didn't even know to say that. How do you say it? I used to call him Barnes and Nobles. I remember buying it at Barnes and Nobles years ago when I was like in fourth grade.

It was eat this, not that. and it would just show a picture of Doritos and then it would show an alternative and it would explain why it was a massive hit for a book series and I remember buying like all of them and I think we said we're like fine for a book but this has to be beyond that and we talked about it I think with Steph two years ago. Yes. Yes. So I think this is a clear like content niche that can turn into a pretty monster business and there's a bunch of different and there's a bunch of different angles depending on who you are. Derek for more plates more dates obviously hits the Jimbrough market but then Flavis City hits the like mom

Costco shopper market and you should just keep there's a lot more niches than that. The New York Times did this article the other day or a few weeks ago and it was My Guru is better than your guru and they talked about how people like you and I you and I are team Heberman but then there's

this other group who's team Peter Atia and there's this other one who's team Peter like my father-in-law loves this guy named Mark Hyndamund or something like that and it's like well my guru said this And it's just crazy how we find these guys that we stick to. And whatever they say, we don't know.

Like, I can't tell you entirely why Heberman suggests X, Y, and Z. But I know he suggested that. And I will go to bat and fight other people who's their guru said X, Y, and Z. And I don't even know why. I just know that I trust Andrew. That's my guy. And I thought it was really interesting how it is turning in to be something like that. Have you ever heard this explanation of why gossip exists evolutionarily?

No. It's sort of nerdy, but it's found fascinating. So everything has a value, right? Like even like what we consider negative emotions, like fear. Why is fear have value? Well, you know, if you're a hunter-gatherer and there's a lion, you know, fear or paranoia can be a very useful survival tool. And you needed to be super fearful and paranoid at a certain period of time, maybe less so

today, but we can see why that's evolutionarily baked in. But that applies to everything. And so gossip is a good example. gossip, if you just talk to most people, gossip, negative thing, right? Shouldn't do it. Bad, you know, poor form. It's a, it's sort of a lowly thing to do. And actually, gossip is extremely useful. So you think about humans, live in tribes, and we're in this society. Well, it's impossible for me to know one by one with each person about their character and their reputation, myself, through only firsthand experiences. And so how does a tribe function?

well, gossip is actually a necessary thing. I should know that if this person is untrustworthy, because rumors should spread so that the tribe as a whole becomes almost immune to this charlatan through gossip. And I don't have to myself go and have a firsthand bad experience. So in that way, gossip has saved me from getting my hand burned on the stove many times. And so I kind of feel like the same thing exists where it's sort of silly in a way to, you just trust these online influencers, these gurus.

Don't you know, they're just trying to sell you something? something. Well, yeah, and there's there's some amount of that. But at the same time, what am I going to do? Go test all my supplements myself? Like the inefficiency that would be brought in if I didn't trust these people. What am I going to go read all the white papers myself about clinical studies? No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to, we're all going to outsource that task to somebody and we're going to trust them until they burn our trust and then we're going to move on to the next one. But like almost like as a tribe, it is the efficient way to do things, even though it's kind of seen as this low IQ move. It's actually not a

low IQ move. It is the sort of like game theory optimal move to trust people or to trust gossip in certain situations where you're not going to want to do the firsthand work yourself. Look, if George Fordman tells me what grill is best for my bratwurst, I listen to George. He looks like he eats a lot of bratwurst. No, I get it. Where did you just go and read a book on gossiping? Where did you get this? I heard this a long time ago. And, you know, my brain was just connecting the dots just now. I want to tell you about another health company that's related to all this. But before you do, we have a quick segment. It's called Thrill of the Shill.

And so it's a time where we're each going to take a turn. Your turn is this time to promote whatever we want. But it's the thrill of the shill because you're going to shill something, but you're going to thrill me a little bit. So about eight months ago, you invested in a company called Shepard. You sent me a graph. I get updates every once in a while. I try not to get too much information

because I don't ever want to reveal something I'm not supposed to reveal. But you sent me a graph. Things are going more than good, I think. I think it's, you can say how many times it's multiplied. But now is your 60-second thrill-the-shill moment. Oh, amazing.

Oh, the pressure is not to thrill with this show. Listen, the way I'm going to make this thrilling is I'm going to share a little info. Share a little info, not about the business and the internal numbers necessarily, but about what's working. So I can, what I can say high level, the business is already doing great before we joined.

The company's called Shepard. And what they do is they basically make it easy to hire. So I was using them to hire for my e-commerce company because I wanted to hire more people, but I didn't have the budget. So I was like, Shepard has talent in the Philippines, in Latam. So like we needed a Shopify developer.

All right, I can either pay an expensive agency or hire some guy, but I found a guy for $2,500 a month who's awesome. And I did the same thing with customer support. And I did the same thing with a whole bunch of these roles. And so I was using them and I was like, this is a great business and I'm going to buy into it. So I bought into it. And since then, the business have basically tripled.

So we've tripled the business in eight months. And the business was already doing well to begin with. So that was kind of like way exceeded expectations. Now, what actually worked? Well, when I joined, I thought, all right, boys, I'm coming in hot. I got ideas. I don't know if you've heard. I got a business podcast.

I think I know a thing or two about business. Why don't you listen to my ideas? And I had all these exotic ways that I thought we could, you know, make things better. And the reality was, the big lesson, the big takeaway here was a lesson that I had heard early on in the podcast. There was a guy who came on this podcast. I don't remember his name, but he made this, he has a bag company, peak design. I forgot his first name.

Sorry. But it peaked design. And I was like, dude, you sell like $80 million worth of this like camera bag. What the hell, man? Like, what's your, what was your growth hack? What's your secret? And he's like, oh, dude, I used to listen to all these business gurus. they talk about this like advanced planning and like you know like long long term thinking and super

strategic stuff he goes to me business is the six inches right in front of your face and I was like what and I was like this is also the speech from any given Sunday and he's like yes business is the six inches in front of your face and you just got to keep knocking out the six inches and so when we were talking about shepherd it was like all right well you know cool ideas Sean but like what's the six inches right in front of our face and we basically did one thing one thing that really, really worked. And the one thing that really worked that was not expected for me was they just did a very simple analysis. They go, how do we get more of our best customers and less of our worst customers? Which is I think an exercise anybody should do. Like, did you ever do

this with either advertisers at the hustle or like for Hampton? Like, did you ever like, like, buck it out? Like, who are the best customers? Who are the worst customers? Because the worst customers take up 80% of your time. Basically what happens is you get in this habit of where you're just like, I'll take any customer and take any money, whatever, I'll just do whatever. And then you get all these shit people. And then you're like, oh my God, this sucks. Like this guy takes so much time and I don't even make that much

money from them. I have to learn who do I fire and who who do I go after instead? Exactly. And what most people do is they do it at the beginning, which I think is the wrong move because you don't really know. And you do need to be just a little bit desperate and kind of brute force things. But there's a point where you got to check in. Like, you know, if it nine months in, you haven't checked in, do this check in. which is basically draw a little piece of paper and write our top, you know,

10 to 20% of customers and our bottom 10 to 20% of customers. Bottom is like drag out your time, lowest profit, you know, like most headache, most support required. And then the top is the opposite. And so we did this little exercise. And the thing we realized was we thought the business was people hiring virtual assistants because that was the most common thing people would come in for, right? You come in, you need a VA just to do some tasks or maybe it's a personal assistant for you or travel booking, meeting, scheduling, that stuff.

And it does do that. That's fine. But then we were like, you know, who's this group of customers that they hire twice as much as everybody else? And the like LTV, the lifetime value of these customers is also like, you know,

40, 50% higher. So who was it? And it was people who needed bookkeepers. I was like, what? And they're like, yeah, bookkeepers.

And they're like, you know, the reason we didn't see it is because it's all concentrated in certain spikes. So basically bookkeepers, everybody hires them after tax season. It's like you go through the pain of tax season. in and then you're like, all right, never again, am I going to feel that? And so you're like,

companies will basically hire a bookkeeper like, dude, it was such a mess, such a time suck this year. We just need a bookkeeper. And we're like a small business. We don't need like a fancy bookkeeper. Let's hire an overseas bookkeeper. And so they do that. Or accounting firms or anybody who is a tax company, they need more bookkeepers or they're a bookkeeping firm. They need more bookkeepers. And so they would hire, they would hire lots of the same talent. That talent is priced a little bit more. So there's more profit on that hire. And so anyway, Anyways, just by identifying one little thing, but there was like three things like that that we did, those were the like tweaks that weren't very sexy that made a big difference. So that's my little, my thrill of the show today is to remind you, go do that little 80, 20 exercise on best and worst customers once you're like, I don't know, right around a year into the business because it will refocus you in a good way.

You got to give the URL. Oh yeah. So go to supportshepard.com for whatever you need to hire for, whether it's bookkeepers, virtual assistants, developers, designers, designers, designers. designers, they got, you know, basically they go find the top 1% of talent in these countries. They got boots on the ground there, like literally interviewing people. And then you can go find the elite talent there for basically 80% less than if you hire people in the States. All right. That's the thrill of the shill. That's pretty good. Pretty good. First thrill. First thrill. Yeah. I was thrilled. All right. So let's do another one. So I got, I got one thing for you. So did you see Trung tweeted this out? And I found this kind of

interesting. So he tweeted out about this Chinese quibby. Did you ever see this tweet? No, but is it working? So yeah, I think it is, which is the funny part. So is it Chinese as in China or for Chinese American, but Chinese content?

Is Chinese like TikTok is Chinese? It's made by a Chinese company, but it's at the top of the U.S. charts. It's a company called Real Short. Real Short, it's called? Real Short. It's called? Real Short. So basically, here's what he says. It's bite-sized English scripted video content.

So it's like quibby, but instead of paying for Hollywood hitters, it's cheesy degrade soap operas slash hallmark films. The shows are all about affairs, scandals, marital intrigue, and absurd plots. For example,

son-in-law's revenge. I'm getting married without you or never divorce a secret billionaire heiress. Let me just pause here. I'm in on real short. Okay, that was all I needed to hear. This smells like a winner to me.

All right. So I like this general concept. Short video that's scripted versus just like people's, you know, TikToks. But it's like junk food. It's junk food content. It's like, you know, Moripovich, Hallmark film. Like, you know, it's just stuff that like it's not highbrow. It just appeals to people. People are general, you know, people have to turn their head to look at this stuff.

It's like Hallmark, right? So he goes, a show is typically 50 episodes. Each episode's only 90 to 120. seconds each. They started off by adapting a bunch of Chinese romance like kind of soap operas for Western audiences. It's free to watch, but you watch ads to unlock more episodes, or you could pay coins to unlock them faster.

TechCrunch estimates that this app has been downloaded 11 million times already across iOS and Android and generated over $22 million in revenue since August 2022. So $22 million in year one. Not bad. It's owed by this Chinese company, COL group and they're expanding their audience because the shows were so

kind of like addictive and like you know bad that they were banned in China so where do you go America the Las Vegas of the world or anything goes and so they brought it here pretty crazy and so don't you what do you think of this concept?

I'm it's this is insane to me so the actors and actresses they're white people so is it white is it like are they appealing to American Asians This is four Americans. It's like everything else. Made in China, made four Americans.

So who's buying? I mean, so this is just boggling my mind. So you know Hallmark, you know, Hallmark, like, you know, the cars and channel. Familiar. Yep. So that company still does about $5 billion in revenue. I think it's a family-owned business. So it's still like a huge thing.

Wait, is it the shops plus the TV or are they separate businesses? It's, so the whole company does $5 billion in sales. But I think a significant amount. of their revenue is not from cards. I think it's from the channel. So it says worldwide Hallmark has 27,000 employees. Holy crap.

So, and Hallmark Channel is like a big line of their business, which I think they sold part of it to Liberty Media. And so it's like a huge company still. And I think it's family owned based out of Missouri. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay, so Hallmark's great. So you're in. Tell me you're in.

So a few years ago, I've told this before, my friend Ramon and I ran a test where we created this book called Captivating Claire. I think that's what it was. Was it called Captivating Claire? And basically, Ramon ran a soap opera website. And he had this guy on his staff that loved to write short stories. And they were erotic short stories. And what we did was we created a WordPress blog, a, a,

WordPress blog, and I think we called it short but romantic.com. And basically, over the weekend, he wrote a story on a Friday. On Friday night, the WordPress blog was made. And at the very bottom of the WordPress blog, it was basically just one page of a blog post. And it said, we hope you enjoyed this first iteration of captivating Claire from short but romantic. If you want to see part two, here's a PayPal link. It's $10 a month. Sign up. And we will mail you the part two of the story next week when it comes out. And we used Fiverr and we got a narrator to do it. This whole project took $400. We drove traffic for it. The next day on Saturday, we had like $300 in sales. And we were like, holy crap. And if you look up the blog, you might have to use

web archive to do it. Because I think we took it down or the domain expired. I remember reading it. If you look at the blog and you go to the comment section, you'll see these people were obsessed with this. They were like, oh my God, cleared at this. I can't wait to read part two. And it was mind-boggling. And then we were, on Sunday, we are like, we don't really want to be in this business. Like, this doesn't really fit our interest. I think he still should have done it. Well, he was going to. Ramon was going to do this business. We, we had both invested in him. He was about to do this business. And then one of his other businesses kind of took off. So that, that began. Yeah, dog ramps took off. But he was like, really dead set on this. And I was like, I don't know. It seems like it could be pretty great. And this

real short is proof that that that idea I think was on to something it's I was amazed at young women and what they wanted to buy. Being you were undoubtedly you know

we're trying hard with this channel. We go every week, we work on this channel. We have YouTube and it's growing. We're doing great. Small and mighty, we've been climbing up the charts and in about a year we got to

about 350,000 subscribers. And when we really knock it out of the park with a great episode, we might get a few hundred thousand views. Well, just go look at real short on YouTube. So somebody started uploading the real short episodes, but like episodes one through 20 together. So real short romance,

330,000 subscribers. They posted a video like two months ago, and it has, you know, it's a double life of my billionaire husband. 3.7 million views. Go look at the comments. It's exactly what you're talking about.

Christine Joy says, I hope there will be more video from these two, the chemistry they have, heart emoji, prayer emoji. Dude, and they're not even optimized. They have a real short

watermark on them and it's vertical video. Yeah, exactly. And then another person, you know, Jolin Bongo 6996 says, oh,

I watch this on Facebook Reels. I got hooked by it. I love the story and the cast. Good job, guys. I can't wait for the next episodes. And there are thousands of comments in this comment thread that are all about,

I can't wait for the next episodes. I love the storyline. This is better than Hollywood. Oh, my God, I'm hooked. This is working. And this is, what is my take here?

So my take is number one, interesting business that I'd never heard of. Good job, Trunk. I had never heard about this. So I'm glad he put this on my radar. Second thing, the difference between a good idea and a bad idea

is just a few small decisions. Quibi gets made fun of as a classic Silicon Valley idiotic startup. It's like, oh man, remember Quibi, it's like the butt of a joke in Silicon Valley. Yeah, this will be as successful as Quibi.

Quibi, I think, was the right idea. small micro content like, you know, TV shows shrank down, I think can be really successful. The problem was they raised $2 billion and spent it all on like really high production quality stuff that wasn't that juicy,

never got people hooked. Whereas real short is basically like starting with getting people hooked and then figuring out, you know, the rest as it goes. The third thing is, the other takeaway is, why do I have so much faith in the Chinese?

Like, when I even started to read his tweet, I was like, oh, a Chinese company's trying to do quibby, but better. And I was like, probably going to work.

I would bet more on this random Chinese company that I've never heard of than Jeffrey Katzenberg, the guy who created Quibi that was like the creator of DreamWorks. And why is that? I don't know. Maybe it's because through my e-com brand, I like do business with, you know, Chinese companies. And the way they run their businesses, I mean, like, that's my real MBA is when I talk to like the factory owner in China about how he's running his business.

And I watch how he moves. And he came out here to meet us and we're talking to him. And, you know, just the way they conduct themselves is all. Awesome. The way they work is awesome. The level of complexity they can like handle is awesome. And it used to just be with manufacturing only. And then TikTok came and was a total narrative violation. It was like, oh, you think they could just, you know, make cheap plastic toys? No, no, no. Watch this. We'll make the hit social app that's all about cool and culture. We'll appeal to the U.S. team better than an American startup could. That's amazing to me. It's a lack of ego is what it is. So Quibi was this cool LA company. I think they even reached out to, you and I. They're like, you guys want to make content for this? Business show? Business and we're like, yeah, I was like, I don't know, but, but not that we're quote, cool guys, but we are based in San Francisco and we lived a, on paper, what seemed like an interesting life, like people building startups. Whereas, if you're going to spend money on us to

start your platform, your platform's going to fucking fail, all right? Obviously, but we should not be part of your platform. But they went after like cool people. Like, you know, I imagine they had like high, like big time celebrities and shit. like that. Whereas I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley in LA, I think they do the same thing. You know, if you look at a lot of the DDC brands, it's like they spend most of their money on shit branding, some agency that was overpriced with lowercase letters based out of Brooklyn. And in reality, like this whole middle America, I think, particularly since a lot of entrepreneurs in the tech space are young men, they forget that there's this whole contingency

of 150 million people who are at home and they just want to goof around. and watch something like this, and their ego prevents them from creating something that's, quote, low quality, which this fits that bill. You would see this, and you're like, this is stupid. No one will watch this.

Whereas someone else who's just like, yeah, dude, I just want to win. I just want to do whatever it says. I'm going to follow the numbers. And I think a lot of people would be embarrassed to create this thing. And I don't think they should be, but I think they feel that way.

Whereas whoever we're talking about these Chinese folks, they're just like, yeah, but we're just setting out to build a great company. Right. You know what I mean? What is their demand for? We can be supply versus, you know, we hired, you know, if your company has 20% of people that wear non-prescription glasses, like you're not going to make it in this game.

Because you just have too much, you know, sort of like hipster into you that's not actually going to focus on what the market wants. You're going to try to sell them what they should want rather than what they actually do want. Someone tagged us in this picture of a Thai restaurant and it was called Thai near me. Thai food near me. Yeah, Thai food near me where it was clearly someone was just naming the restaurant you know, AAA locksmith in order to rank high on Yelp.

Yeah. And that's that immigrant hustle that I appreciate and I respect. And they actually made their branding cute. It was like a cute sign and it was clearly a joke. But that is lacking, I think, in a lot of our circles. And this app, real short, they don't have that. Yeah, it's Typhoo near me. They've got, they're just a, they own a store and they're like, oh, looks like people

buy a lot of vapes. Looks like we're in the vape business. You know what I mean? And I appreciate. that. Man, these kids love this great-flavored smoke. We're going to start selling more of that. Even though I don't always agree with it, I appreciate the mentality.

So you weren't there for this one, but I did an episode with Jess Ma. I don't know if you heard it yet. Yeah, I started watching this morning. I love Jess Ma. Do you know her besides the episode? Like, had you met her? Well, so Jess Ma was, I was going to ask you all about her. But Jess Ma, I know her as like she was the prodigy.

So she was like on the cover magazines at the age of 19. or 20 for starting in De Niro and accounting software. She was like the person on the cover of ink before, right? The month before me was Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah. So she was like the it person for a minute. But then over the last like six years, she's went silent, which in my head,

that either means you've done something bad or you're just quietly killing it. And you just don't want to talk about it. And it sounds like the second one was definitely the answer. And Indanero has been crushing it. And she's been taking the profits or money from that and doing more things. Is that right? Yeah, pretty much. Exactly. So she was like, all right,

Indira is a good business. It's not going to be a monster business. She had like a crazy life experience where her boyfriend died suddenly and then she was like, just kind of depressed, didn't want to even go into work and was just like, all right, what don't want to do with my life? Like, you know, reminder, life is short. Nothing is guaranteed. But she didn't say how big Indanero was though, did she? It's over nine figures and it's profitable is what she had said. Wow. So it's over a hundred million in revenue and profitable. So she was like, all right, I don't want to run this company anymore. I'm hiring somebody to run that.

and I'm going to do whatever's most interesting to me. And so her bets were kind of like, she wanted to like, she's like, well, you know, like what am I, like what if I wasn't afraid of failure?

What would I go do? So she had a couple things in the episode I think are going to get lost in there. But the big thing that I took away that I went and like, basically after every episode, I send a voice memo to Ben about like, here's the three things that like really like that are my notes from this episode. Dude, I,

I keep my notebook right here. But basically the thing I wrote, I was like, she had like three or four golden questions. One of them was, what would I do if I wasn't afraid to fail? The other one was... What was the other one?

Wasn't it like, what would I do if I was a billionaire? Yeah, if I had, you know, if I had $5 million in the bank, what would I do with my time? And she had another one which was, how will I deal with being an absolute beginner? Because if I'm going to go do something new, by definition, I'm going to be a beginner and suck at it. And I know I'm scared of that feeling. And I know that feeling is uncomfortable, especially now that I have a little bit of an ego, I've been on the cover of magazines. People think highly of me.

how will I deal with being at the bottom again? And just asking that, sort of acknowledges that. And then it kind of takes the power away from like that insecurity. So I thought she had some like golden questions. And then one of them was like, she's like, yeah,

like, I was like, dude, you're building these like biotech companies. You're telling me about these technologies that I can barely even understand. Do you even understand these? Like,

is this your background? Are you just a science genius? She was like, no, like I was a C student in biology. Like, you know, and now I have a biology company that's valued over a hundred

million dollars. There's some irony there. And I was like, you know, so what is it? Are you just like making it until you make it? Or did you like get really good, really fast? She's like, well, no, like I partnered with people who are experts. And I do the stuff that they're not experts at, like commercializing it. She's like, but also I just started as a beginner. She's like, I literally hired a biology tutor. And I started watching podcasts and TED Talks and then I would go meet the people and I would ask them like a thousand questions. And I would go do research after they answer those. And I would ask them 10 more questions after that. I would just keep doing that until like I felt like I had a handle on things. It's amazing.

And I was like, oh, well, it's simple when you say it like that. And so similarly, I don't know about you, but every day I go on Twitter and I see AI magic in my feet. And AI is the best magic trick, like awesome, cool demo product that I've ever seen in my life. It's just like an endless supply of awesome, cool 10 second demos. I don't know if those will all become big companies, but they're amazing demos. And you did a tutor thing. And so I did a tutor thing. I was like, oh, yeah, I should just hire somebody who, because I was like,

Like, either I'm going to drop everything that I'm doing and like go learn about AI from as a beginner or I'm just going to sit this one out because I don't know. It's just this fast moving thing that the kids are doing. And I guess I'll just kind of catch up later. That doesn't feel right either. So I was like, why don't I do this? I was like, I put out a tweet that was like, well, if you're somebody who plays around with all these tools, knows how to use them, I will pay you $500 an hour.

I'll pay you whatever, 500 plus an hour to just sit with me a couple times a week and just show me, just teach me about these tools to save me the kind of like 10 hours of fumbling around I would be doing myself. How many emails did you get? I got like over 100 replies from like really interesting people. So it's going to be hard to kind of pick. I might pick a couple people actually instead of just one because there's so many good ones. And I might publish this. So I'm thinking about creating a side channel.

This is like Sean's playground, my little YouTube channel. I'll actually just publish the call so that even if somebody's not paying $500 an hour for this, they can just get the benefit from it. because I don't need to hold this close to my vest or anything. But I think this is great. And I want to get myself a little pat on the back, but I really want to say it out loud because there's probably a lot of things like this. I know you're taking a finance course right now. And that's like the same version.

That's like the same thing. Like don't be afraid to go be a beginner. You're supposed to be Sam Parr, business podcast, sold a business. You know, you're supposed to be the guy who knows a bunch of stuff. And you came out and you're like,

I feel like an idiot when it comes to finance. Like corporate finance. I just really don't know what the hell I'm doing. What's the best course in this thing I could take? I think you spent like five grand on a course, right? How's that guy? Yeah, it's called the four-day MBA with Keith Cunningham. And yeah, I'm trying to learn how to do all this stuff.

Coincidentally, someone did a video, some billionaire guy did a video and he's like, don't get an MBA, just go take this course. I know, huge endorsement. Like, I saw it when you said, I went to the website, website sucks. And I was like, this sucks. Why did Sam do this? And then I heard that clip and I was like, okay, that's now two people that said, this is awesome.

I will now go do this thing. It's a great course. It's a great course. And I think my opinion, how do I say this without sounding like a huge douche? Once I got a little bit of success, I got way less nervous about hiring people to teach me how to do things. Additionally, I mean, we talked about a ton of my body tutors and hiring a fitness coach, hiring coaches and things like that kind of changed my perspective of the whole coaching industry, which I used to think was bullshit. it. No, like teaching, having people teach me how to do stuff has kind of changed my life a little bit. And this course is awesome. I have nothing to do with it. I posted that link and people

thought that I like, I was like, no, I just think it's cool. It's changed my life, to be honest, like going back to school and like learning and having people just teach me things. I think it's going to be really smart for you to do it this way. I also think that if you promote it, it will pay for itself. So that's always fun. But I, think you're going to have a life changing next two months if you follow through with this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm already, you know, the ROI is baked in into this because of it. But I guess like I want to say it because I wouldn't have thought to do this unless

just Matt, she just said that thing in passing. Like I hired a biology tutor. And in my mind, I was like, tutors are something that end when you're 20 years old. There is no more tutoring after that. And it's like, why? Why is that the case? Hold on. There's no rule about that.

And there's probably other people out there who kind of. could do something similar. So anyways, I said it out loud, mostly because if you're, well, the 1% of people that hadn't really thought about this but could benefit from it, like, do it. Do you know really what I want to do is what I wanted to do was I wanted to take a, like, one of those two-week MBA courses at Columbia or Stanford or something like that. That's my goal for next year to do it. And I went and I looked at like the list of topics that they're going to cover. And I was like, I don't, I don't even know what those topics mean. So I got to go take this online one just to prepare for this in-person one because I was so embarrassed to like,

see this. And I used to make fun of these people that would put like Stanford, you know, like two-week course. One warning, though. So I took a similar like a finance thing last year, I think. And it was good. There's nothing like, it was a good course. There's nothing wrong with the course. What you did it in person? No, it's an online thing. But I intended it and I paid attention. Like I was like, if I'm doing this, I'm going to do it. Where'd you do it? What's cool? It was on Maven. So it was a Maven finance course. And so it was a really good course. There was one thing that I'll say out loud, which is before you go drop thousands of dollars, because, oh, Sam Parr said this course is great.

Make sure that, like, to me, the way the analogy is like, these are all clothes on a hanger, but you need a hook to hang things on. And like, if you don't have a hook, the hook would be like a business you're currently running or like a place you can go apply these learnings, then I think they can be kind of like fancy procrastination or just like not worth the time of the money. So you have to have enough either battle scars or. or like a place to go apply these, that's actually going to be like relevant for you.

Otherwise, it's very easy to just like intellectually sit there and be like, yeah, cool. All right. Well, I hope I keep that in mind one day when this becomes relevant. Like, you're better off like building the business and then

learning the things just in time that you need to know when you need to know them versus trying to learn everything in advance and then be like, now I'm prepared to go do the sport of business. Well, the reason I'm doing it is because when I was selling the hustle, like this whole thing came at the end called networking capital. And I was like, I just don't know what this means.

And I optimized my business in one way, but then I didn't know what this term was. And there was many things that I could have done differently that would have helped. And like, I felt so emasculated and stupid when these people were talking to me about networking capital. And I'm like, I just can't figure this out when you're explaining it to me. I don't want to experience that pain again. And also, I'm getting my balance sheet and my income statement and the cash flow statements every month for my accountant. But I'm like, I don't know if this is good.

You're just, accountants typically tell you facts. And I'm like, but I don't know how to interpret it. I need to know how to interpret this to spot strengths and weaknesses. And I just remember when I was selling my company of not, I'm like, well, I know, I kind of know how to make the money, but I don't know what, I don't know how to optimize any of these equations. And I don't know what they mean. And I felt so stupid during that.

It was just so challenging to figure out. Can I tell you one lesson I learned from that thing? That was probably one thing I remember that I didn't know going in. I just never even thought about, which was the course, I think it's called good business, bad business or something like that. And one of the things is talking about

when you differentiate between a good and bad business financially is your reinvestment runway. So I don't know if you've ever heard this term or thought about this, but it's essentially the idea that every business, let's say, you know, $100 comes in and you get $20 out at the bottom line, right?

You have $20 net profit. What do you do with that net profit? So idiots like us, I think you probably ran your business same way I did. I don't know. It just sits in the bank account. I don't even think about it, really. It's there. I hope one day to take this out. Or maybe I'll use it to spend if we need, if you have some expense or rainy day. I don't know. I won't even think about it. And then you start to realize that, okay, the best business is they can either reinvest into the

business itself so that like when a dollar profit comes out, you can reinvest it back to the top and get more than another dollar out. And so he broke down like some of Warren Buffett's businesses that had no reinvestment potential. So, like, basically, profit comes out, and that's why Buffett would take it to the headquarters, the Holdco, and just say, the best optimization he could do was when he bought a business, he's like, you're reinvesting capital poorly. I'll take that money. I'll reinvest it in a whole different business. And you will be a little cash cow, but I'm not going to keep investing back for more organic growth into this business. Which in our case would be like, maybe like a course

business or maybe even this podcast. Like this podcast grows like mostly organically. We don't need to spend more money in order to grow. Correct. Spending more money is not going to create more money out of this business. The best thing we could do is take the profits from this bad business and invest it in a better business that actually can do that. And so, you know, that was that. And what he talks about is like every business over time, like you start out being able to reinvest, but you had a certain point where a certain dollar threshold where now you can't reinvest more than that into this business at an efficient rate. So you have to identify that. And that point and know, and then you could judge the business based on that. So similarly,

you know, the best business like Constellation Software or Berkshire, they're famous for basically taking profits from one bad business, you know, bad defined as like, it's a normal cash cut business, but you're not investing it back in that one. You're investing it to buy another one of those. And you invest that to buy another one of those. And that by the way, that's the whole point of this book, good profit or profit first. Andrew recommended, I read it this weekend. He recommended the same thing was take money out of the business. at least and put it into a different bank account and then redeploy into your fast-growing business if it warrants it.

Or if you have a business that can take the reinvestment, then you know that that business is actually even better than it looks on paper because it has this extra capability that most businesses don't have. Which is what cold punches. All of a cell is pretty beginner for like anybody in like private equity or whatever. That's not where we came from, right? Like we're basically like dorks on the internet. We then started creating internet companies who then like tried to get rich off internet companies.

and now, you know, like, we're starting to wrap our heads around like a lot of the, like, you know, 101 type of concept. Which, by the way, I think it's better to go that route. I think it's harder to start things from scratch and then learn how to optimize eventually versus you optimize. You're a good optimizer, but you don't know how to start things from scratch. Like, just creating the widget that someone wants, I think is more challenging. 100%. Plus, it makes me feel good that that's true. But, like, Y.C. did the same thing. He's like, it's going to be easier for me to take badass engineers and teach them the basics of fundraising and hire.

and firing than to take an MBA who knows everything about fundraising and hiring and firing, but can't build shit. And that was like the core bet of YC was we don't need to start these companies with MBAs. We could start these companies with engineers because it's easy to teach them that. It's impossible to teach the other way. Yeah, and I completely agree with that. And yeah, it makes me feel better that way. So therefore it is true. In summary, we're the best. Yeah, we bragged a lot in this episode. Maybe we'll have another episode where we'll just make fun of each other. No, the comments will do that for us. Here, let me move the microphone so you get a good look.

Here's my face. Here's my hair. It's my body. You can hear my voice. I stutter sometimes. Whatever you got. Go ahead. Hit us in the comments.

All right. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel. Never looking back.