My First Million - I Launched A Viral Water Brand In 8 Weeks

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Want Sam's guide to create actually-good content? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/mch Episode 735: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Dan Porter ( https://x.com/tfadp ) about how he turned canned water into a viral hit. — Show Notes: (0:00) Making water viral (24:12) Marketing from the bottom (45:15) Positioning is everything (58:22) How I got 100M followers (1:04:29) How to spot gold — Links: • 67 Water - https://www.67water.com/ • Overtime - https://itsovertime.com/ • Teach for America - https://www.teachforamerica.org/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

So this is like a canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar, and out comes this. And this is the story of that. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel. Can I just hype you up like I'm Dana White in the UFC?

Because we have here, the most entertaining man in business. The guy with the most illustrious career. He started Teach for America. He created the viral hit game, draw something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked with our Emmanuel in the talent world. Then he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet and affected culture.

And now he's here today telling us about his new ventures, his new brands, new things he's building along the way and how to do it. So, Dan, welcome. You're the reigning, defending, undefeated, most entertaining man in business. I appreciate that. You know, sometimes people go 19 and no and then they don't win the Super Bowl. So I got to keep winning until I guess I'm in the grave. So you are a teacher, Professor NMal U, and so is Scott Galloway. Who's the better professor and who has more street cred on campus? Who's got bigger pull? He's richer and more famous and I'm humbler. So I guess that's how it goes. Okay, so dude, I wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me.

You're building a water brand now? Well, you've done this crazy water brand thing. Can you, you got to tell this story. I don't think anyone even knows the story. Yeah, kind of. So this is like the unlikely story of like the fourth most followed water brand in the world on social media. And so to take a step back, I don't know if I have a lot. everybody knows what NIL is. NIL is name image likeness. It's like a revolution in college sports

where, you know, for years, players could not make any money. Reggie Bush lost his Heisman trophy. People would lose their eligibility. And then a year after we started our best of all league and started paying players, Supreme Court ruled, and all of a sudden there was NIL. So now every college and many high school players in America can make money. The difference is they can't get paid to play the sport, but they can get endorsement deals and so forth. Their name, their face. Yeah. If you think about it, like, you're in school and your roommate has, you know, is a rapper

and has a song, and your other roommate is a YouTuber and makes money, and you hoop or play football and you can't make money. It doesn't really make any sense. Right. Especially when the schools are making a lot of money off of those sports. And so the players today give a sense of the scale of this. So how much is an NIL, like top players, top basketball players? top basketball players, football players, maybe a, you know, I don't know what Cooper Flag was making last year or, you know, a SEC quarterback.

Give me a range. Like, are they making tens of thousands of dollars years, a hundred thousand dollars, millions of years, millions of years, tens of millions. What are the best players making through this NIL stuff? So if you look at a top Power 5 quarterback, SEC, whatever, seven to ten million dollars. A year. A year, a year. Right. To play for one season. wide receivers running backs, best defenders, a million to three million,

a guy on the bench, 250K. And like the NFL salary for a, if you're a first round pick as a quarterback, you would sign, so Caleb Williams in 2024, he was the number one overall quarterback picked. He signed a four-year, $39 million deal.

So he signed up deal that paid him $10 million a year. And you're saying that college guys are making, you know, range seven to ten while they're still in college. They can absolutely make that same range. By the way, does this trickle down? Like, if I'm like a woman's lacrosse player somewhere, soccer player, and we're not powerhouse, SEC football, blah, blah, blah, are I still, you know, hundreds of dollars a

month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby? Like, is everybody eaten or is it only the people at the top right now? It's really the people at the top. Top, top basketball players, one to three million. I have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million dollars in college. And it's kind of a waterfall. There's a softball player in Texas who makes a million. But it definitely kind of falls off the cliff because those are the sports,

March Madness on television, football on television that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools. And so those are the sports that they want to win at at the highest level. And in fact, a lot of NIL legislation says like you have to still support all of the other sports, the Olympic sports, the women's sports, the less popular men's sports, and so forth. But in women's basketball on the college level, you think about NIL, you know, there's not a large number of WMBA teams.

And in fact, there's only, there's three rounds to the WMBA draft. And if you're in the second or third round, you usually don't actually make it onto a team. So if you think about from the women's side, college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them than the WMBA because the path to it is just so small. It's just a numbers game. There's not enough. But are swimmers and lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Currently, they are not. Right. Okay. Okay. So NIL, good thing for the athletes overall getting some money. So now how does this take us to you building this water brand and are very very, short period of time getting it to go viral, making it one of the most followed water brands in the world. Yeah. So this is like a canned water brand, a high school basketball

player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar, and out comes this. And this is the story of that. So to take it back, you know, we have this basketball league, overtime elite. It's the second most followed basketball league in the world behind the NBA is over 12 million. followers and many, many fans. A lot of people watch the games. And there's a player in this league, Taylin Kinney, they call him TK, his initials. He's going to be a senior this year. He's being recruited by Louisville and Kentucky and Yukon and a bunch of schools. He's a great player. And he's actually a great guy. He's just like really level-headed, funny, but just like works hard, no drama. Great kid. And so last year, you know,

one of our teams is on a beach somewhere, and he and this other player joking around, and a player asks him some question, and his answer is six, seven, you know, so forth, and he moves his hands like that. It's a line from a rap song by Skrilla. About two months later, somebody texts me from our team and says, you know, there's like millions of views on TikTok where they've taken his voice and they've said six, seven. And I'm, I'm like, what? And he hasn't done anything, and we haven't done anything. This kind of one off comment that he's made basically just kind of explodes all over TikTok. And you get into kind of the spring, the fall, you know, part of last year, page Beckers, you know, how you're training, six, seven.

They're asking Cooper Flag. How many hours of sleep do you get a night? He goes, I don't know, six, seven. And it's like, and it's one of those. things. It's like New York real estate. It's like every time you try to buy an apartment in New York, you think it's so expensive. It can't get any more expensive. And then a year later, or like Palantir stock. It's so expensive. It can't get any more expensive. And then it just keeps going up. Like it just doesn't stop. And then you're like, wow, I should have bought that expensive apartment two years ago because it was so overpriced and now it's twice as expensive. And this is the same. This like meme, it keeps moving. Now on TikTok, you know, middle schoolers are going up to their teachers

and saying, what's 23 plus 54? And the teacher's like 67. Oh, 6.7. And it's this thing. And it's like, you explained it to anyone over the age of 21. And they're like, what does it mean? And you're like, it doesn't mean anything. It's literally a meme.

So hold it up. It's just a thing. Yeah. I saw you drink from it. You have one there. Hold it up real quick. All right. So you told me about this.

You were like, dude, we have this water brand that's exploding. You sent me some of the stats about the growth of it. And so I. I looked up the brand 6-7. I just, and you were like, yeah, this player, Taylin Kinney or whatever. So I just assumed he's 6'7. I didn't even think about it.

That was like two weeks ago. Then last night, I'm sort of preparing for this. And I realized the kid's 6-1. So I'm like, why is this called 6-7? I'm 37-year-old. I'm clueless to this trend, right? I don't leave my house, let alone talk to a lot of like 11-year-olds to figure out what

the memes of the day are. So last night, dude, I'm watching literal PowerPoint presentations explaining the origin of the meme. And how it started and why the hand motion and then the song, the song's called like boot toot or something like that. I don't even know what the song is from some rapper I've never heard. And then the kids are going crazy with it. And then there's handshakes.

And then it's going viral. And then famous people are saying it. And then they're tricking their teachers into saying it. And then there's a whole world of TikTok where the teachers are like, okay, guys, if a student comes in and asks you a question and then the answer is going to be six or a seven, be ready. They're going to say this. and you're going to wonder what it means,

and it doesn't mean anything. But that's why they love it, because it doesn't mean anything. There's, like, no meaning behind this. They just want you to ask and wonder, and they just find it funny. And so it's like this meme where there's not even a satisfying backstory to it. That's kind of what makes it cool.

You know, I could even, it's like so out of my realm that, like. I mean, if you think about it at the core, first of all, it's the, like, definition of postmodernism, right? Nothing means anything. into it in and of itself. It's the meaning that we ascribe to it, which is obviously the generalized postmodern condition in art and literature. But also, it's like, what it really says is that,

like, young people have an ability to impact culture and they can create things and they can mean things, whatever they mean. Right. And that's all about their power and their media as opposed to this idea of top-down culture that we create. And they both exist. Stranger Things exist this top-down culture and six, seven exists as something. And it's like, I get them to like every summer camp, everything like that. And every grown up being like, I don't know what this means. So TK is like, I want to take advantage of this. I should sell T-shirts.

And I'm like, it's like there's got to be something in life beyond selling T-shirts. And so, you know, he's trying to figure it out. And we're trying to support him because it's really him. He's the young entrepreneur. He's the creator of it. he's the face of the brand. We're kind of like the back office in this. And we just started talking about water.

And like, why do we talk about water? Because water's just not that complicated. And I've tried to make a lot of products. A lot of people have tried to make a lot of products. Five years ago, I tried to make, like, protein rice crispy treats. Oh, they were too chewy. They weren't chewy enough. The flavor wasn't this.

This couldn't happen. And I'm just thinking like, okay, memes and, trends don't last forever. Like, TK., what about you making water? And he's like, oh, I wanted to make an energy drink and I had to want to make something else. But I'm like, the thing about water is like, you don't, like, it's just water. Like, let's go tomorrow. You could be making this thing, right? And so it's just like you're not tasting it. You don't need a formulator or anything else like that. He gets totally jazz. I want to make water. He said, it's got to say you hacking family on it. because that's my other phrase.

I'm like, I don't know what that means. That is not hard to do. And so we try to find a water manufacturer for him and the designers make a couple stuff. For people who are just listening on audio, they can't see you because half people watch on YouTube half are on audio. Could you just, I'm not going to profile you,

but if I was a police artist sketching you and I'm thinking about this kid who's, how old is he's 15, 16 years old, something like that? He's 17, I think, yeah. He's 17, 17-year-old. And can you just just just just, describe who you are the unlikely co-founder duo here. Do a little of this thing.

I am in my late 50s and I'm wearing a button-down collared linen shirt and I don't poop and I have no bars and I wear glasses and I'm not super athletic. But I guess my superpower is I believe in young people and I'm good at listening. to them. Okay, great. And like, overtime is a platform for them. You know, people are like, overtime is 100 million followers in, in that kind of demo. And I always say, I don't make the posts, I don't write the captions. I just create the platform for creative young people to reach other creative young people. And I love culture and I love music and I love all these things. And so my job isn't to make this. My job is to build a platform for TK to figure out how he can build

product that he wants to do and his family wants to do and just be like kiss, right? Keep it simple, stupid. Like, just like really focus on that. What's that Olympic sport where the puck is going? And then there's the people with the brooms on the side. They're just shaving the ice or like it's smoothing the ice for the. Curling. Curling. I'm the ice shaver and curling. Exactly. All right. So everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers. The problem is that it's really hard. How do you make something that blows up that goes viral that actually gets you customers versus what most people do. They make something that's completely ignored. Well, when I ran my last company The Hustle, I had to study this. And I eventually made

content that reached 10, sometimes even hundreds of millions of readers. And so we were able to dial in between what works and what doesn't, and we made it fairly repeatable. And so with the help of HubSpot, I made a guide called the 20 Ways to Craft Irresistible Content that looks at the books that I read to learn all of this, but then also the tactics, the 20 different tactics, the 20 different strategies that we use at the hustle in order to help things go viral. So we actually got customers from the content that we made. And so if you want to create content that people actually read, you can check it out below. There's a QR code that you can scan or you can click the link in the description. Now back to the episode. And so I just say to our designers, let's make a bunch of stuff.

TK's like, I like this, I don't like this. He doesn't have to be a designer. And within 8, weeks, there's a water brand. Like, there's a, somebody in, in Michigan who's pumping out cans of water and everything else like that. And TK. is like, here's a plan. Like, we're going to, we're going to launch it on June 7th. You know why? Six, seven. Right? And so we're just like, oh, shit, we got to help him make this water brand in eight weeks. And so on six seven, it just drops. He makes a launch video. It's just him messing around. He's from Lexington, Kentucky with his friends. And then he and a bunch of his friends and some are social people, they just go to these basketball tournaments and they start giving it out. And it just starts going crazy. Like every influencer, every basketball person

is picking it up. All of a sudden, like there's 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 followers. Like a dad is offering $100 in cash to buy a can of this. But you, can't really buy it anywhere because he's just made it. We're just trying to figure it out. We talked to him and we're just like, where do people want to buy this? And he's like at the gas station. So like if it were me and I'm some corporate executive, I'm like, we got to go do a deal with Publix. We got to go do a deal with whatever. And I'm like, the gas station. He's like, yeah, that's just like where we go buy stuff. Because if you're 16, you have a car. I'm a New Yorker. So I think about a bodega that doesn't really exist in the rest of the country.

and then you're always being driven by your parents somewhere to go play in some sports tournament and there's a gas station. So he sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video and puts it in the shelf and pretends that he's founded there. And the account just keeps growing. Like, you know, kids start making their own commercials for it. People start pouring it on each other like it's holy water. And it's only been sold a couple of times.

And we just throw up a website, 25,000 people sign up. and they're like, I want to buy this. And that's as far as we've gotten. We have almost 150,000 followers. Some people are like, oh, you made a, you know, you made a liquid death for Gen Z for the urban crowd. It's canned. It's kind of gold on holding it up because you want people to, it wants to look good on social media, you want to see people across the court.

But all it really happened was like, there's a guy who's good at basketball. He accidentally created a meme. we supported him to make a product that we could make fast and easy, but was like not a T-shirt. We went out. Everybody who's a fan went crazy about it. Every grown-up I talked to who has kids or they're like, can you get my kids some of that six, seven, water? They don't know how to get it. And so I don't know.

We're on the 30-yard line. I know what I'm using a football metaphor, the 10-yard line. And like, how does it go from here? So TK is selling $100 million worth of water in 12 months? We ever really figured that out. He doesn't really know. We don't really know. We just made something big.

And now there's over 150,000 followers. Like, if you look up most water brands, they don't have that many followers. And like all of the, you know, except for, you know, liquid depth, which is hugely inspirational and very successful. And all kids mess with it. And now every player is coming up to me. And they're like, Dan, Dan, Dan, I got this idea. I got this idea for this product. And I think what's cool is, like, number one, it's like,

YouTubers do this, but athletes haven't really done it. You know, number two, 17-year-old athletes haven't really done it. And number three is like it has this whole overlap with NIL. So now if you're trying to recruit TK to come play at your school, like maybe you're going to buy 10,000 cases of six, seven water, and you're going to make it red because that's your school colors. Oh, yeah. And you're going to tell everyone, buy this and TK. is going to commit to our school.

and it all is covered by NIL. There's no eligibility issues. There's nothing else like that. So you've unlocked this whole kind of creative superpower. And if you ask him, like, and you ask the people who support him from our team, they'll be like, 6-7 isn't a water brand. It's a movement. It's a vibe.

It's a feeling like when you're just like having fun, creating culture and everything else like that. And listen, his number is zero. maybe six, seven water in nine months is called double zero water because it's really just about the concept and all of that. And so maybe the meme dies, but it takes other shapes and forms, or maybe he goes to the NBA and he is another thing, but you recognize the gold can and you recognize everything else like that. So it's really like, I'm talking to you in this process where like he's figured out a little bit, we figured out a little bit, but I can't tell you how

you know, Pepsi is acquiring this for $500 million yet because everybody's making it up as they go along. And that's what I love about this. You know, we do a lot of episodes with people after the fact, oh, you sold, draw something, right? And you made all this money. Can you go back and tell us what happened 15 years ago when you started that business? And hey, by the way, everything has changed and none of that will really work anymore. But hopefully you get some inspiration. Maybe a few nuggets I can steal from there. That's typical podcast. And then the other one that we do, is like, here's an idea. I think it'll work.

I don't really know. It's not like in motion. It's not in flight. It's just an idea. And hey, it's blue sky. This is a very unique thing. I'm in the middle. I'm literally in the middle.

You're like at the, you're just at the point where it's not nothing, but it ain't done yet. Right. And so I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I've never actually talked to somebody at this stage of the thing of a fun brand like this. So just to give this some perspective. It's now we're recording this August 5th.

So it's been almost exactly what. two months since the launch. So 6-7 was June 7th. We're about two months in. So if I'm just looking at Instagram, you're 6-7- You got to look at IG and TikTok. I know, but if I just did

Instagram just for simplicity here for a second. So like the Instagram is almost at 100,000 followers for the water brand. Okay, let's just look at a few other water brands that I can think of just off top of my head. All right. Desani water. 18,000.

Okay, so you got five times more followers. then DeSani. Aquafina, 7,000 followers. And like, you know, there's literally like 10 comments on a post. So no engagement. Nobody cares.

And they're, by the way, there's like a full social media team that they hire. Like there's, there's like half a million dollars of salary working on their social media

at all times, at the minimum. Okay, let's even think of, okay, maybe I'm picking on the most boring brands. Let's go to vitamin water, right? Big exit,

owned by big company now. 50 cent was involved a long time ago. They certainly got to be big. 81,000. You're bigger than vitamin water. Let's go. In literally less like two months. You know what the best part of this is?

The best part is like TK asks this guy Tom. What's the marketing plan? What are we doing next? Tom's like, Dan, what are we doing next? I was like, here's the marketing plan. I'm going on MFN. And like I'm just going to talk like Ben and Sean are going to hook me up. And some listener is going to be like, yeah, I own 500 gas stations.

Call me up and I'll put you in this. And then when I do the third podcast, when I come back on in a year and it's like, how I sold this, how the 17-year-old entrepreneur sold this, it was like, I came on your podcast. And then we went to the moon. Yeah, exactly. You need the gas station owner because I was going to say, we don't really have the whole, like, youth culture stuff going for us. If you want, like, a bunch of people who, you know, work remotely and want to

to take a picture and put in slack, they can do that. But, but that may not be it. You probably have five listeners who know everything about the beverage business. See, this is what you get. This is what you get about media that most people don't, right? You're like, cool, I'm going to go here because there's going to be five people that either know everything about the beverage business. They were the early distributor of this, blah, blah, or they own a chain of like 60 gas stations.

They're a huge MFM fan. And they're like, yeah, I'm in. And you're like, that was a great hour of time for me to do that. And you know what, TK is going to do? as the founder of this brand, as the basketball player, he's going to train, he's going to get buckets, he's going to commit to go to college, and he's just going to keep being him,

and that will just keep growing the brand. Which is what I love, because when I looked at the content, it wasn't like some advanced brand strategy, some, like, cool, slick anything. It was literally this kid who's, obviously he's a great basketball player, but what's even more likable about him

is he's not like a LeBron where he looks like a grown man, even though he's 17th. He's not a man child child. Like he looks young, he acts young. He's a great dude. He's not grown into his body full yet. He can hoop, he can dunk. He can do with some amazing things on the court, but he's still got like a very young energy, which is cool.

And so like just seems like the only 17 year old out there building a billion dollar brand that's not vibe coding. Yeah, that's true. That might be true, actually. Okay, so I want to kind of steal what's replicable about. this. Now, so let's break down a couple of the elements here. So the first is you were listening to the trends. You were listening to the memes. You're listening to the culture and you didn't sort of just write it off or be too busy to listen. Right. You run a company. How many employees you guys have?

400. How much money have you raised for overtime? $250 million. You run a big ass business. And for you to be like, yes, someone on my team was talking about how one player on one of our teams set a random thing and then some TikTok editors chopped it up and mixed it with a random song that like, you know, is not even like, it's not like some huge, not Drake, you know, doing this. Yeah. And you were like, huh, that's cool. Like, let's talk about, let's have a brainstorming session. That's interesting to me.

Is there like a principle or a philosophy you have that served you well that's like that? I might be asking, you know, Steph Curry, how exactly do you shoot a jump shot? He's like, I don't know, man. I just do it. I think there's a couple things. One is like, if I think about like it's like 2015, 2016, and I'm launching overtime as an example, you know, we start filming some players playing basketball in New York with some iPhones or whatever and making some posts.

And all of a sudden, I kind of realize that, like, they're players that are getting tens of thousands of views and they're not even top 100 ranked players. So my understanding is like, here's high school basketball, here's the top ranked players. here's the people who aspire to go to Sean's alma mater, Duke and Play and Hoop and everything else like that. But the reality was the deeper I looked, I realized there were all of these networks and subcultures of young people who were connecting that had nothing to do with the grown-up view of the world. And everything from like, I'd find one of them and then I'd be like, who does this person follow? And then I'd go through and I'd look at every single person who they follow and so forth and so on. So in a way, culture is cold.

It just makes things, but if you're attuned to it and social media is a cheat code for decoding it and you start to go in deep, you can just observe and find these things. It's like if I try to explain at the most elemental level, I'll say anime. Like most half people in America have no idea what anime is. But it's like once you and you're like cartoons, what is anime? And then once you see it, you realize that it's everywhere. So it's like, I remember the first time someone's like anime or whatever, you're. years ago, I go on a trip to Rome for vacation. Every t-shirt in Rome in the store has an anime character on it. And then all of a sudden, and then I'm sitting next to a kid on the

plane and he's reading, you know, a graphic or manga. And I'm just like, wait, I didn't see it anywhere and now I see it everywhere. And it's kind of like you're digging down the earth and all of a sudden you find gold and oil and all of these other things like that. And then once you see it, you assume that most people don't bother to see it. And then, you assume that most people don't bother to see it. that's where your opportunity lies. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Tumblr needed to move fast.

They were trying to produce trending content, but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. But now they use HubSpot's customer platform to email real-time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. And the result was huge. Three times more engagement and double the content creation.

If you want to move faster like Tumblr, visit HubSpot.com. All right, back to the show. There's actually a neuroscience nerd way of explaining this. There's a part of your brain that is made to do this, as you call it, reticular activating system. And basically, when I learned about this, it was pretty interesting. So it basically said, look, as a human, imagine if you had, if imagine just all the different inputs that are coming into your mind at any one time.

So your eyes, like in this room right now, there's a whiteboard, there's a piano, there's books, there's this, there's a guy sitting over there. There's this light over here that's shining in my eyes. but I need to be focused on you. So really, I'm telling my brain, this is what matters. Don't tell me about that sticking out on the wall over there that's yellow. If I look now, I see it, but like most of the time filter it out. Same thing with noises.

There's a guy mowing the lawn. I'm telling my brain, not important. Ignore, ignore. If you're at a cocktail party, there's 100 conversations going on. It just all sounds like noise to you until somebody says your name. And then suddenly it's like, whoa, my brain was actually listening because I heard my name. But I couldn't tell you the other 10 things they were talking about because it was just a chat. matter otherwise. And so basically the brain has a defense system, which just says, you know, throw away 99% of all inputs.

You're not going to need it. We'll go crazy if we try to take it all in. But there's a bouncer at the front that's looking at the idea of every little thing that's coming in and say, all right, you get to come in. And then the trick to life is when you tell the bouncer, hey, add this to the list. Add anime to the list. Start paying attention. Let anime in. Then you start seeing anime everywhere. This happens if you buy a car. You're like, oh, I'm looking for like a BMW. Suddenly you'll just start seeing that BMW. everywhere. Yeah. It's not like it just appeared.

It was always there. You just weren't paying attention to the BMWs around you until it became highly relevant here. That's that point where everyone's like, my phone is listening to me. Right. And you're like, it might be, but what you're saying might be true too. I do this thing in my class of NYU where I'm like, look around the room and find everything that's blue. I'm going to quiz you on it.

And then everybody close their eyes and I'm like, name me one thing that's red. You only see the thing that you look for. And then there's a ton of red things in the room. nobody sees them because they're looking for something else. And in a way, that's part of the reason why I've never been a massive fan of business school or hiring MBAs because I feel like what business school does is it trains everyone to look for blue. And what you as an entrepreneur building a company one is somebody whose focus isn't narrowed,

but who's incredibly wide. And they're like, oh, there's yellow, there's red. There are all of these other things like that. And we tend to be like, oh, well, you've got to refine your skills. But, like, if your whole process is just seeing blue, like you're never going to see the other colors. And then your ability to create or add value becomes extremely limited. So there's a great story about this in the early PayPal days.

I don't know. Do you ever read, like, PayPal Wars or any of the early, like, PayPal books? Yeah. The couple of them are pretty good. One of them tells a story about basically that you had Elon, who had his company was X. not like what Twitter is there, but he's loved this idea of a company named X for a long time.

And he wanted to build a bank on the internet, all your financial services, your mortgages, your loans, your checking, your business accounts, your credit cards, everything on the internet.

And he was right. He was just like 25 years too early, right? Like that's happening today with Ramp and Mercury and other companies like that. But he wanted to do it back then. And he had this top down his view of the world, and he just wanted to like make that thing come to fruition.

And it was like kind of not, working very well, but it was a big idea. And he was obviously a really, like, relentless entrepreneur. And then you had PayPal, which was this like small thing that was like, hey, you could email money to a friend. It sounded like Venmo or like, you know, just like some little game you could play. It didn't sound like transforming financial services using the internet's technologies. And what they, but the key to PayPal success was not blindly following the top down sounds good on paper vision, but it was somebody, I think, was David Sachs.

Or somebody in the customer service department that was like, hey, you know, we noticed that like all these eBay sellers are asking for like a logo that they can put as a badge on their thing. And, you know, legal's like, no, no, they can't use our logo. And then other people are like,

wait, wait, why do they want our logo? Right? They're actually like, interested. They're curious. What's red over there? It's like, they want our logo because they're trying to say, we take PayPal.

And like, they looked at their data and they're like, wow, the people who actually use PayPal are all eBay sellers. And like, then it turned into their strategy. And eventually they changed the name. It wasn't even X. It became PayPal.

And that became the killer app. Essentially, that made it a billion dollar company. And I feel like this idea of you start with a vision. It's hard to start without a vision. But if you stay blind and you're not looking for clues of what's actually happening, like what you're talking about where you're like, I don't know, just look at culture. I don't try to apply my view of what should be happening or what is good and what is bad. I just look at what is.

and I try to play in that lane. Is that something you did in the past, like withdraw something or anything like that? Could we connect the dots here? Yeah, I feel like that a vision, it's really just a premise. It's just an idea of like, this is what I think the company is going to be,

but I don't really know anything because I haven't done anything yet. And as soon as I get out there and I do something, then I start to learn. And it really fucking annoys me when people are like, you pivoted, you pivoted, you did this, pivot being a basketball term. And I'm like, I'm not pivoting. Like, I'm adapting. Like, I see this and I see opportunity.

And the thing that I think sometimes people miss is like, you start your company and let's imagine like you're on a track. You're running a race and you're on that track. Well, all the other tracks that are next to you are what's happening in the world around you. And you can't ignore those. So you start in the gaming business. You're like, I just want to make great games. Boom, the iPhone goes by you. Boom.

Facebook goes by you. Woom. Xbox goes by you. And your job isn't just to be like, oh, I'm blind to all of those things. Like, all of those things are changing. And you have to be able to make tons of micro changes around that. And I remember, like, even when we started overtime, I went into a pitch meeting. And all we were were like five people who, you know,

like sports a little bit, running around with a bunch of iPhones filming basketball in New York. And the guy's like, well, what's your distribution plan? Like, how are you going to grow? And we were like, well, now we're going to go to L.A. and we're going to film some basketball. Then we're going to go to Houston. Then we're going to go to Oakland and film some basketball. And he's like, yeah, you know, week later, he's like, we pass.

We just don't think that's the right distribution strategy. And I was like, great, because two days ago, we also gave up on that distribution strategy. Because like, whatever, you're just trying to figure it out. Like the real strategy is like, we're going to figure it out because we're going to try a bunch of different stuff. And it's like you judge everything like it's this moment in time and everything the company does is an absolute certitude. You know, it's like final, this is our decision. But instead, you're moving in space, right? You think about the best basketball players, Luka Iverson.

It's like their ability to Kairi, like they just move into space. They find where there are nobody there as opposed to somebody who comes down. and says, I'm going to run the play. You run to the corner and you go here and you give it to him and them. I will dribble three times, head fake, step through, and I'm going to make the shot. It's like, yeah, we wish it worked that way. It would be nice. Yeah.

And listen, not to be like too sporty, but like, it's a live read situation. You're like, that guy just flew his coverage. Do you get accused of being too sporty a lot? Do people just look at you and they're like, you're just too sporty then? I mean, I do a lot of sports conferences and podcasts, so for them, they're like, you're not at all sporty. Like, wouldn't you play in college? And I was like, I was the jazz DJ on the radio station.

Yeah, exactly. Piano's. But in the case of this, I don't want the non-sporty people to be like, oh, this is going deep. I want you to have his, want your watch time to be really high. I appreciate you. Looking out for me. You know, you're just, you're just improvising and you're figuring it out and you're just

paying attention. And the other thing I'll say is like, like, like, you don't need a massive data set to be able to understand where these kind of opportunities and slight tweaks are. And I always say, like, when I used to be in the app business, you could do like a really good user test. And by the time you got to the sixth or seventh person, see what I did there, not the 600th person, but the six or seventh person, like, you already knew what wasn't working. Like, you only need one or two people to say something that's really deep. And you're like, oh, I totally got it. And so,

in a way, like, if you're very attuned to small data, it usually has some level of scale around it, and you can constantly make iterations to make sure that your product lands. And the second that it lands, all of a sudden there's a new platform or Netflix changes their strategy, or Spotify changes their strategy, and you're just out there with everybody else in the ocean trying to kind of tread water and figure out how to get to land. All right, listen, the two most beautiful words in the English. language are email subscribers. You need more email subscribers. I guarantee it. I don't care how many you have. You need more of them. I need more of them. You need more of them. We all need more email

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H-I-I-V-com and use the code M-F-M-30. I'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you. Start scaling your content today. You know, you said something else here, because I think it's amazing that in eight weeks you've built the, you know, water brand that, you know, I'll call like a $10 million water brand. I don't know if it is, whatever. But the interesting thing about that, and I just threw out a number there,

the interesting thing about the number is you didn't start out by saying we, so we went out there and we put it up on Shopify, we started selling cans, that we ran some Facebook ads and then we sold some more cans. Look, we've sold, you know, we've done, you know, whatever, $300,000 of revenue in the first five weeks. That's success. And the reason I found that interesting is because you said some of the opposite. You're like, we started giving it away. And then we put some in the cooler at the gas station.

And we would go to games and you couldn't even buy it. If I go to the website right now, it just says join the wait list. You can't even buy it. And so I've seen you kind of do this before. You do this kind of grassroots brand building long game shit. And it's so different than the way I play. Whereas I normally, if I start something, I'm like, cool, let me see if people want this. And I'm trying to validate my idea.

And I'm trying to go sell as much as I can. And I get my own conviction and validation and my insecurities to start to melt a little bit. The more tangible concrete proof I have that this thing is valuable, which is measured as dollars to me. You seem to play the game differently, and I love it. And I want to know more about it. So could you just describe your approach and why you think that might? be interesting here? Yeah, I don't, I don't, I've never thought about it or categorized it, but I don't, I agree with

you. Like, I don't know, I'm just a very bottoms up type of person in terms of creation and marketing. And I think about like, to use a sports example, when people were not watching as much sports, a lot of people in the sports industry were like, we need more stats on the screen, let's show their heart rate, let's show how far they've run, let's. show all this stuff. And I'd have meetings with them. People on the team would be like, we need to show more stats. That's going to bring people back to TV. And I always say, like, who asked for that?

Well, we just think that that's what people won. And it's like, who asked for that? Who knocked on the door and said, hey, I got a question for you. I'm not really interested in watching sports on TV. But by the way, if you put their heart rate up, I fucking changed my whole schedule. And now I'm just going to do nothing but watch sports on TV. And so it's like the amount of stuff that starts up here, whereas like, and I don't know, my mom was a sociology professor, and she did, she just really liked sociology, anthropology. It's just listening and studying people. And like sometime in the 90s, I spent a summer in Starkville, Mississippi with her, just driving around, listening to the local people talk about economic development, their little businesses and

everything else like that. And I just think that, like, I could read a million business books and watch a lot of videos, but, like, there's some magic in those things that people are talking about. And as a CEO, I've always, like, wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company, because somebody has some insider observation that they don't even think is, like, that deep. And they say one thing. And you're just like, damn, that really is true. I haven't thought about it that way. And then you start to be able to...

So in a way, it's like my approach is to be in the right place at the right time in the room where it happens, to hear what all these people are saying and to try to parse through that. And to say, like, if I can find that insight, like, people care... You think they care about that, but they care about this or anything else like that. How do I figure out how to make it that much bigger? Even on the water side, some of it was like, yeah, you know what, it'd be better if young people drank water than things that have 100 grams of sugar or 100 grams of caffeine in it or anything else like that.

And listen, sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right. But if you can't, if it doesn't come from the bottoms up, I don't know who the customer is. Like, I'll give you a really non-sport great example. At some point, I was like, I want to write a book and I'm going to pitch this book. and I was working in the talent business, so I not knew a lot of book people. And this guy sat me down, and this was kind of like, you know,

Barnes & Noble is still decently big, but I use Barnes & Noble as a visual representation. He said, listen, when I go to sign an author to buy a book, I just say to them, what section are you in at Barnes & Noble? Like, I get it. You have this idea, this and that. I'm like, go to Barnes & Noble,

psychology, business, whatever. You tell me what section you're in because that's essentially the, distribution, then I know whether I want to buy this book or not. But if you're just telling me you have this idea and it's like kind of self-help, but it's kind of, you're not in any section and I can't buy it. And so it's like this kind of like the ground up isn't just the idea, it's the distribution. It's like all of those types of things like that. And it's just some level of, I think, paying attention to it. And then also having the recognition that if your idea is like,

I want to make a toothbrush with a removable head because why do I have to buy a whole new toothbrush every time? Oh, yeah, I've actually been around long enough to know that 100 people have tried to do that. And there's actually a reason that doesn't work. And I think about apps I've been pitched a million times. Let every fan monetize their fans directly. And you're like, they actually just like being on Instagram.

And it's like you've seen 10 of them and none of them have worked. So sometimes if you've got a little pattern recognition and you overlay it into paying attention, about culture and what people talk about and stuff like that. That just tends to be how I do it. And maybe you and I will collaborate because you're smarter than me, and you'll be like, I'm going to turn this into the five-step process. And you and I will go to Barnes and Noble.

You'll be like, Dan, that's the shelf your book is going to be on. Well, the one I wanted to write with you early on when I was building the Milk Road. And me and Ben called you. And you emailed us. You were like, hey, this is cool or something like that. And we were like, holy shit, that's Dan Porter. I don't think we knew each other maybe at the time. No.

And you were reading it. And so we did a call with you. And on that call, you talked about, because I had seen the rise of overtime. I didn't know what caused the rise of overtime, but I had seen the outward manifestation of it, right? I saw it go from a brand I had never heard of to basically the most popular youth basketball brand on Instagram, which was, it's not nothing, right? Like, that's so hard to do in a crowded social media space to build a number one brand.

And not only that, like, they were wearing, like, top players Zion, these guys who Nike is paying them millions of dollars trying to sponsor them. And they're like voluntarily putting your shirt on and throwing your O logo up and cameoing in your videos. And I just thought like, at any time I would see a dunk clip, it would always be from overtime first. I didn't know how you guys were always getting there first. Turns out you had this army of volunteer, grassroots kind of cameraman that were doing stuff. It turns out that that hand signal was something that you literally were sitting there. you're like, we need a sign that when one person sees another, you could throw up the sign, like a gang sign, you know, or like a team sign or like, you know, and so you started

studying bands and cults and you started studying people who have built these types of real organic tribal movements and you were picking out the best, practically, you know, the best ideas from them and saying, okay, that's interesting. And, you know, in European soccer, they have their songs. That's interesting. How do we do that? And not every idea it hits, but like, enough of them did where you built a real bird. in. You gave us advice from Milk Road where you were saying, you were like, cool, what I like about you guys is that, yeah, you're into crypto, you're a believer, but you're not like super technical or super like audacious. You're not taking yourself too seriously. Everybody else is

trying to like overdress and they look like a sort of a kid in a big baggie wearing his dad's suit and trying to be taken seriously. And you're not because you're doing that. And so you were saying, like, hey, when they have their Uber serious conference, you need to counterpriced. You need to counterpriced program against that and throw the like two beers you know conference at a at a open at a bar and just give every bar like you know a two hundred dollar tab for your readers to go and enjoy and you gave us some ideas like that that i really like there were zero people in my life that think that way and it was very intriguing to me like those are the types of things i love like you talk about ideation and marketing and distribution um but to me the thing that i pay attention to the most and maybe the thing

that I'm a little above average on is positioning. And I don't think people talk about positioning as much, but positioning is kind of like where you sit in the mind of the consumer. And when people talk about white space, it's often related to positioning. And the best way I can explain it is like the most simple way. And once you see it, you'll understand positioning forever and you don't have to watch 20 videos on it. is if you go and you look at breakfast cereals in the supermarket, they have a left to right and a top tabata.

Usually left to right is like least healthy to most healthy. So like they're not mixed up, right? So on the left, you've got the most sugary cereals. And as you start to walk down to the right, at the end you have like Ezekiel 812 whole grain cereal. like shit that looks like it should be refrigerated or whatever. So that's left to right. Top to bottom is adult to kid.

Kids cereals are most often at the bottom. Why? Because that's eye level for kids. And therefore, adults are at the top. And so if you think about it almost as this diamond with like, you know, adult kid is top bottom and like sweet, kind of super healthy left right. every cereal has to find out where its position in that market is. Right. Are you upper left, lower right or anything else like that.

And I think that that's positioning. It encompasses everything. It's like where is the market opportunity? Where is the white space? And the other thing that it does as kind of like a subfactor is that the way you compete with somebody who is much bigger, is better capitalized or anything else like that, is you make their success, their box, the box that they get trapped in. So if I go out and I make a sports platform, right, and I have to compete against maybe

ESPN, the market leader, $25 billion of revenue, everything else that they do and every other sports site, what's ESPN's superpower? It appeals to everybody. It is the de facto noun for sports. well, okay, so if I come out and I'm like, I'm appealing this demographic that's massive, right? 40% of all global purchasing in five years will be Gen Z and stuff like that. And all I do is focus on appeal to them. Well, if I'm the incumbent, I can't start being like, that's the lid. That play was fired because what happens all the 50-year-olds are falling in? They're like, I don't get it.

So you take their success and you almost make it a box or a trap that they can't get out of and then you can own something, and that's visual, language, product features, simplicity, complexity, harder to use. Sometimes people make things that are really hard to use because they don't want the mass audience, they want something else like that. You think about like the classic business school example, like the kind of IKEA example, where it's like, how do you compete with everyone else? You actually have them build the furniture themselves because it allows you pricing power.

all of a sudden you have a different level of ownership over that. It's not scary. You know, there's no words on any IKEA instruction manual. There's pictures. And so in a way, to me, a lot of those roll up to positioning. But nobody's like, oh, yeah, I just graduated from Warton. I majored in positioning. Right. You're like marketing, finance, other things. But positioning, what your position is in the market and how you make that happen and understand that is very visual. And to me, that's how I kind of think about everything. And then as you start to be successful, you think about from going to play offense

to the things that you want to do to protect that position. So all of a sudden, I create this thing, and I have this massive position in basketball, and everybody's coming at me, and I'm like, we're in football also. And all the people are like, oh, shit, we're mini overtime in basketball. Now they're just on the side of the road

because now half of overtime's business is in football. And they're called hoop this and ball that, and everything else like that. And I have a very kind of name that could go across any type of sport. And so you go for playing offense to defense to offense again in your positioning, but you're this vibrant organism

that's kind of growing and expanding all the time. And that's literally just a brained up of how I think about approaching it. That's great. I have this ism that's very, very related, which I say, all positioning is counter positioning. So I'm like you. I think positioning is super underrated.

any entrepreneur knows positioning is underrated because you've gone into markets thinking you're so great. My product is so great. My team is so great. My service is so great. And come to our, come visit us. And nobody wants to visit you. Why? Because you can't differentiate.

And then you're like, you spend your whole life differentiating. And then you look at a few other people who started out, figuring out the point of differentiations, figuring out where they live in that, that map that you described. And they found white space. And for them, they don't even have to start with the best product or the, the best service or any of that, they will have time to build it and make it better because they figured it out.

And so this idea that like all positioning is actually counterposition is important because what people, the mistake I think people make is when they think positioning, they think they just start naming positive attributes about themselves. Like it's a self-help test in People magazine. And they're like, oh yeah, our positioning is that we have really high quality service.

And, you know, we move fast or like, you know, we have great, whatever, great customer service. You know, it's like something that every brand is also trying to claim. And so even if you did it, the problem is you can't claim it because everybody else has also claimed it. You're going to have to go come up with some unique way to show, not tell, to even get anyone to believe you, right? The way, the way I totally agree with you. I'm actually obsessed with this idea from this guy, Roger Martin, who's like this business thinker. And he says something that I'm going to butcher.

But it's like, if the opposite of your strategy is stupid, then it's not a strategy. So if your strategy is like, we have the best fucking customer service out there. And the opposite of that is what company out there says, yeah, our strategy is we have the worst customer service. Or like, we make the best products. Oh, yeah, our strategy is we make the worst products. Well, if the opposite is so stupid, yours is not a strategy. That's so good. You can say something else like that.

And then I just started to like think about it as applies to everything. It's like, our strategy is on this family vacation, we're going to have fun. Well, who says our strategy on this family vacation is we're going to fight all the time and have no fun? Right. So it's like, once you realize that the opposite is really dumb, like what you have is not a strategy or really a plan. This is the same about company values. People will be like, oh, we make company value. High integrity, discipline, hard work.

Again, nobody would agree with the opposite. Mom, I just got a job at this company out of college. their values are low integrity, no teamwork, and hostility. It's going to be amazing. Right. Actually, that actually might be interesting because the opposite would not be stupid.

It might actually pass the stuff if they said that. But like Mark Zuckerberg had a good example of this. He goes, oh, somebody along the way taught me this. And he goes, your values are meaningless unless there's a tradeoff baked into it. So if you don't acknowledge that there's a cost or a tradeoff to doing the thing you say you're going to do, then it doesn't count.

So, you know, the famous Facebook value that we all remember is move fast and break things. If it was just move fast, we would not remember that that's Facebook's value. The fact that it was move fast and break things, it acknowledged the tradeoff of moving fast and how fast we're going to move and this is going to happen. We accept that trade. That's what's unique about us where other companies are not willing to accept that trade. Theirs is move as fast you can. But if you make a mistake, then you shouldn't have moved that fast, right?

which is how actually most companies operate. That's so good. And so, you know, it works at the values level. It works at the strategy level. And here's an example of who did it right. So like who competed with Facebook was Snapchat. Snapchat strategy was we're photo sharing, but all the photos are going to self-destruct in 10 seconds.

It's like, well, I could actually argue why that's a very stupid strategy and why the opposite would be very smart. You should save the photos. People want memories. People want to go back and look at it again. If you told my mom about that, she'd be like, you're going to destroy this photo. No, like that's blasphemous, but it worked for a certain use.

It actually unlocked a whole other behavior and use case, which became pretty mainstream to the baller, Facebook had to like try to clone it 50 times. And they did the thing you talked about too, which was they intentionally made things harder. So it's like, well, social networks are cool until all your aunts and uncles show up, right? Like, it's not so cool to post all my photos from this weekend knowing that like all my teachers and my aunts and uncles are going to see everything I post. So the way Snapchat worked was like intentionally kind of like confusing. And it was like grown up proof.

It's like a, you know, like medicine has like a child proof top. They had like a grownup proof top, which was like, you know when you wanted to do the face mask? There was no button that said like push here for face masks. It was like, no, you got to know to hold on your face for four seconds. Then the secret door appears and now you could do this shit. Like only could be spread like a secret password from one kid to another. And most parents thought it was too hard, too confusing. never were going to figure it out.

And so that was like an intentional strategy for a while that fits your test. It's so good. Like what I like about the tradeoff too is like when we launched our basketball league in the first year before NIL, all the players essentially lost their eligibility. And I always just say they didn't lose it. The NCAA took it away. Every college basketball coach in the world hated us. Like hate us.

I got so much hate mail. And I used to say like, I guess if, we're not pissing people off, we're not trying hard enough. Like, that's the tradeoff. Even in the early days of Teach for America, I remember I went to pitch the board in Seattle, Washington to let us come. And the teachers union hated us. And somebody came and they punched me in the chest in the middle of my speech. And I was just like, I didn't even know what to do other than to keep talking. But I guess if you're not, like, if your tradeoff is, if you're not pissing off enough people, I guess you're not trying to do something that's different enough or revolutionary enough

in that aspect. So I like that. I'm going to put that up there with my opposite is stupid. You also have a thing that when we were at our hoop group event and we ask everybody like, hey, can you give like a tiny version of a TED Talk? Like, we'll put seven minutes on a shot clock here. And everybody in this room is world class at something. Dan, your world class at brand building. Can you just tell us like a brand building brain dump of like everything you did to make overtime have 100 million followers or whatever many stupid. but number of insane followers you guys have. And the very first thing you said was,

you didn't say how you went viral. You didn't say how you grew the market. You didn't talk about an algorithm. You didn't talk about, you know, scaled processes. You go, in the first year, I replied to a million comments or some absurd number. Yeah. You go, we replied to a million comments.

And you go, we built this in a very grassroots way, bottoms up. And that stuck with me. That was like three years ago. I still remember that one line because it was so counterintuitive and surprising to me that that was like a pillar for you of like how this, how does this empire get built? You don't you don't really understand where the studs are. Like, where are the beams that this whole thing is built on? And you showed me one of the beams with that. Can you talk about that, that little part?

Because I think that's something that more brand should do. Yeah. Listen, I think everyone wants awesome growth hacks and the best way to get a lot of views on anything that you write ever on LinkedIn or whatever is like the three secret growth hacks to do this, the viral growth hacks. But like most of those are post facto and they're hard to replicate. And to build something meaningful, you've got to build a real connection. And I'll preface it by saying, I've seen this a couple times and it's it's taught me a couple times. I remember I went to a concert at State Farm, a little baby concert, and everybody had their phones up, and I was going to film

because I wanted to show people I was cool and I was at a concert. And I realized that everyone was filming themselves and I was filming the stage. And the concert was actually a backdrop for them to create content. And it reminded me years ago, right when the iPhone was coming out, somebody came when I was at Virgin to our office, and they said, hold up your phone and take a video. And they said at the end, everyone under 30 has the camera pointing at themselves, and everyone over 30 has the camera pointing out.

And we looked around the room, and it was true. And I think from those insights, you just have this idea. And I kind of like crystallized that into this point of view, that sports media is talking to people about sports, and overtime is about listening to people about sports. So, okay, that's like a different point of view. it's kind of rooted in these anecdotal observations around me. Well, how do you listen to them?

And the easiest way was they're all talking to you. They're DMing you. They're in the comments. Like, what are we going to do that no one else is going to do? We're going to respond to every single one of them. Because the other thing you see in media is like, 10 people leave a media thing and they set up and they launch a new media thing. And you imagine a bunch of men and women in front of a computer pumping out articles

and, you know, and videos. And I think, well, who asked for that? Nobody. They just thought it was a good idea. And I remember a young person had told me, yeah, I respond to a lot of people on mine. He was a kind of a smaller version of something. And he said, you know what? Once you respond to somebody when you have a bigger account over 100K, one time, they

become a fan for life. So I was like, okay, how are we going to get our first million fans for life? We're going to respond. people used to DM all the time, yo. Literally, that was the whole DM, yo. And so we'd be like, yo, what's up? And they'd be like, oh, shit, I didn't think you were going to respond. Like, you just jumped out of the corner and you scared them.

And in the early, early days, I used to take screenshots of those conversations and post them in the story. And all of a sudden, people would start to say, does overtime respond and stuff like that? And we had this kind of apex moment early on where I hired this guy who had been a Uber driver and a Hooper and he was a friend of someone, but various things he had tried, hadn't kind of hit yet. And I was like, and I realized he was just really funny. He used to make funny videos on Instagram. And we were like, your job is just to be funny. And so he'd go on the comments. And if somebody commented, he would go to their personal IG account, find a picture of them, and just make fun.

fun of them. Just like roast them. Just be like, bro, what's that with the mom jeans? Like, you got to get your fashion, whatever, stuff like that. And to the point where it hit this fevered pitch where people would just come in an overtime video and they would just say, roast me. Right. And he would go in there and roast them. And all of a sudden, you actually think it's about the video and about the dunk or the whatever, but it's actually about the mass of conversation. All of these people who were like, me, me, me, you know, who want to be, who want to be picked from the audience and you interacting. And I think it was just a really different version of media. And it put that, put that into practice.

And I will say that we have community managers now who just talk to fans all day. I'm in a group chat with 250 fans of the City Reaper's on Instagram, which is one of our basketball teams. About once every three weeks, I hop in and I answer a question. And everyone's like, whoa, wait, who is this? And I'm like, yeah, that's not happening because I run the company and I just said so. And they all go crazy or whatever. And then I'm like, got to bounce because I could get trapped in there for two hours. And I just think like your fans aren't just mindless, faceless people there.

They like, they're about it. They're the consumers of your product. And you want to live with them and you want to talk to them and you want to make sure that they know. And I think like, you know, I was looking at like Sabrina Carpenter just had different fan accounts announced the track name for her new album and every single one of them. And then she announced the final ones. And it's like there's so many, Lady Gaga, there's so many musicians who are so good at being like, I wouldn't be anything without you guys.

And Taylor Swift used to like jump into comments or like show up at people's weddings and stuff like that. Right. And I've always taken inspiration from that. And I just wanted to have a company that could be meaningful and do stuff like that too. I have this idea where like, I'm going to send one of my guys out any, where in America and the first person he sees with an overtime shirt is going to give him a thousand dollars.

And I'm going to be like, I'm in the Ohio airport right now. And it's like, I'm at a playground in Oakland or whatever. And it's just like, oh shit, I literally feel seen. Right. And that's what I think that's what everyone wants, including this generation. Have you seen what the All-American Rejects are doing? I haven't school me. So, okay, I didn't prep this out of them, though.

I don't know a bunch about the band that was popular. Like, I don't know, 90s or at least 2000, some type of thing. Kind of been off the map, off the grid, not popular, whatever. So for their comeback, what they did was really interesting. They started crashing actual, like, house parties for high schoolers, and they would just show up and play a set in someone's backyard. And that was their comeback tour, is that they're just going around America right now. And if you go look, dude, it's Instagram, like, liquid gold.

Dude, the actual content, the way it looks, when they just show up at somebody's backyard, some high school house party right before prom or whatever, and they just start playing a song. They surprise everybody. It looks cool. It looks nostalgic. It looks fun.

It like fits them. They're not trying to be like super. They're not trying to come back and pretend they're super relevant when they weren't. And they're sort of building back up in this bottoms up way and almost reinventing themselves as this like, like this band that's kind of like of the people. And it just, it's amazing what they're doing from a marketing point of view.

I'm going to lock that away and I'm going to figure out the sports version of that. Yeah. Once you watch one video, you're going to be like that. I need to create that moment because that was an amazing moment. I'm literally the second this podcast is done. I'm going to start tapping into that. And I think to me it's kind of like, listen, I work in sports with a vertical. You can work in music.

You work on B2B SaaS. It doesn't really matter what your vertical is. Most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical. I'm just like, how can sports learn? from this band, right? Like, a lot of my ideas I watch gaming. I'm a massive consumer of Korean and Japanese non-scripted television and various forms of reality

and game shows. And, like, I always get ideas from there. Give me a recommendation. Give me an example of a shell I need to be on. Oh, man, there's so many. There's actually, the audience is going to be like, these shows are terrible. What does he see in them?

Your taste is your taste. They're very slow. I'm slow. I'm a conviction in my taste. There's one, there's a Japanese one that I just watch this summer where they take 10 Japanese people to a town in France and they take away their phones and they just have to find each other and realize that they're in the same show and then some of them fall in love. And it's like glacially slow and you're kind of thinking, okay, well, it shouldn't be that hard

to find the other Japanese person in this. And then when they're like, they're like, let's meet up. They're like, well, what time? Well, in front of the bakery, what bakery? And they can't look it up or anything. And so I just, I love all those shows because it's all about the game design, right? What makes those shows work is the game design. And inherent in game design are the principles of marketing, distribution, all of those elements.

There's another one that's a little older called 19 to 20, where it's just a bunch of Korean kids who are in there basically last year of being kids who grow up who come together. and I just like I learn so much about other cultures. I learned so much about game design. I learn about things that the U.S. market doesn't think about, and then they go through my brain, and they come out as things that we could think about. Because if you're looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else, then you're just going to do the same thing everyone else does.

You've got to look in all those little pockets. And that's not unrelated to me saying, I pay attention to a meme that a 17-year-old basketball player creates, because I'm also looking in those places where other people aren't looking. I love it. Speaking of, you're big on chess right now. Why are you so bullish on chess?

Give me the pitch of why chess is the next big thing. So I think, first of all, you know, we talk about positioning, and people are like, oh, overtime is a high school sports company. And I always say, overtime's about the audience. I mean, my goal is to get 100 million Gen Z fans to love overtime. If I thought they wanted to watch grannies play three-on-three basketball, I would show grannies playing three-on-three basketball.

You can't get confused with that. And so I've always been looking for opportunities to do things that don't feel like high school sports to better explain the superpower of what we're doing. My co-founder, Zach, is like a 2,200-ranked chess. He was a Syvison chess champion, the Penn Ivy League chess champion. And chess is one of those things that's like kind of not very accessible, right? First of all, when you watch it, they're like A8 to C4. Like you've no idea what's going on. The games are like six hours.

Everybody is a mad genius. And we were always like, if our goal at overtime is to see things that other people can't see, to make things that feel niche mainstream, like what's the most out-of-the-box thing that we could do? And we were always like, well, Zach likes chess. can we do anything in chess? You kind of look at it and you're like, I don't know. And you start to talk to people and they're like, oh, you're going to do a chess championship and Magnus Carlson's going to play and that guy's going to play.

And you're just like, yeah, that's kind of already been done. And it's already obvious. And so one day Zach comes in, he goes, actually, you know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are? And I'm like, yeah, Queens Gambit, right? That kind of started it. Before that's searching for Bobby Fisher. Yep.

And he's like, yeah, those are probably the two most relevant things in culture. What do they have in common? I was like, they're movies and TV shows? He's like, no, they feature prodigies. Young prodigies, yeah. And I'm like, oh, prodigies. He's like, there's something about prodigies.

Then immediately I think about, because I play the piano, every eight-year-old I've ever watched on YouTube, who plays guitar better than B.B. King, who plays the piano and everything else like that. And you're just like, how does that person know how to sound like Herbie Hancock and they're eight years old and I'm like, oh yeah, I see it in my own life and we're like prodigies. That's it. Like they're accessible, they're interesting who they are and of themselves. And I always think about this thing that my, you know, my son who was a poker player used to say is

like, we used to play like Texas Hold'em and he'd never look at his cards. When I get my two cards, the first thing I do is look at them. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I just look at the other people. Like, I spend a lot of time watching the other people. Then I look at my cards because then I know what to do. And so you think of this idea, oh, you play the players, not the cards. And then I'm just like, okay, so you have all these prodigies. It's not actually about the chess. It's about these incredible young people with these crazy gifts.

And then you start to think 650 people or million people around the world play chess. And like, I could have a prodigy from India and Argentina and all of this other stuff like that. And then you're off and running. So I'm working on this thing. that we're trying to, you know, pitch and create called the Prodigy Cup. And it's like these chess prodigies and it's a one-night live event. And we have spent, actually, when I get off of this podcast today, we're going to do a shoot in the studio.

We've spent over 100 hours filming chess to make it so easy and fun to watch that if you and I didn't know the difference between chess and checkers, we could watch it and be super entertaining. And I think in there is the unlock. So to me, I'm actually the perfect audience because I don't like chess and I'm not very good at it. And I don't know the Sicilian opening or any of these other things like that. So I just watch it. And then I look at my watch and I'm like, I'm bored. Right. And I'm like, okay, we got to figure out how to do that. So it's this kind of opportunity where it does everything, right? It taps into this thing that is this growing trend, but it's the unexpected part. It's not the obvious way. It's great for the positioning of the company because

overtime is about something bigger than high school basketball and what better way to choose it through chess. And then it's just a lot of experimentation. And some prodigy in the middle is going to say one thing and you're going to be like, oh, shit, that's the unlock. Yeah. And you're going to pivot the whole thing around it. And I hope that a year from now, you're watching it on a major streaming service. And three years from now, I walk up to Madison Square Garden and there's a line of a thousand people and they're like, yeah, I just bought tickets. It's these two prodigies playing. I'm obsessed with this kid and I can't wait to watch it. And it's all this IP that just came out of something that was very bottoms up and organic. I love it. I love how you keep using your

weakness as your advantage. So for example, you're like, okay, ESPN, the worldwide leader of sports. you're like, oh man, I'd hate to be them. They have to cater to everybody. They're boxed in by their mainstreamness. And I could do stuff that they can't do, right? I can have this like, you know, Gen Z brand. We can say that things are Liddy and there's Riz and there's all this. And that's going to become our advantage is that we can cater to that audience in a way that if they did it, it would be way too try hard.

But we could do it because we're starting fresh. Or like, you know, with chess, you're like, cool, I don't know anything about chess. That's my advantage. I couldn't watch that if I wanted to, right? it would be too boring for me to watch traditional chess. So of course, I'm going to make something that's more accessible because I couldn't access that. I can only make something that makes sense to me. And so it would make it.

It goes back to that thing that we talked about before, where is if you train people to look for blue and you tell them to close their eyes and you're like, what's red? They're like, I don't see any of it. If you could train yourself to look for every color at every time, it's, you know, I love the education system. And I'm a professor, but it's not an accident that some of the best entrepreneurs are. dropped out because they just saw things that were broader. And I think, you know, it's just a different way of looking at the world. I don't know why that happened to me. Maybe my brain was wired that way.

Maybe that's how I learned. Maybe I didn't go to any. I never studied business. But I think, again, it's about seeing what I think other people don't see and being able to stick with it. There is a lot of herd mentality and so forth. And it takes either a lot of courage or obliviousness to just go and do something that's different than everyone else is doing. That's why I always respect people who do some crazy gap year.

They're like, yeah, everyone's going to go to college. I'm actually going to be a goat farmer for a year. And they're like, you deferred college for a year to be a goat farmer. Like, why would you do that? And they're just like, I don't know. It just feels fucking cool. And it's like those people are the people I'm going to bet on long term. I love it.

All right, Dan, you are the madman brand builder. This is fun. I love this conversation. If we fast forward, I don't know, a year. Actually, not even forget the year, that's too far. What are you most excited about for 6-7 water next, I don't know, 90 days? What's the next play, the next move, the next experiment that you're going to try to get a bucket here with 6-7 water? Ooh, get a bucket.

I love it. I think that, you know, TK. has created, T.K. has created this phenomenon with his water that we've supported him on and helped him on the infrastructure. And I think everyone's like, well, 6-7 is a trend. Have you sold a million cans yet or anything else like that? And so I think we all want to figure out how do we parlay this kind of massive social media following and this kind of ground up, something based in a kid who's just a great kid into selling a million cans. And maybe it's going to be in the gas station,

or maybe it's going to be in some place it's like completely not obvious. And maybe I'm not going to know, and he's not going to know what the answer is until Monday when we wake up. And we're like, oh my God, it's actually selling an ice cream trucks. You know, where something else like that. And that idea that you don't know, it's like nobody wants to play a video game where you don't know what is going to happen next. And so I think that aspect and then unlocking that and then doing it again with one or two amazing other athletes who are super genuine and have a massive audience connection, I think is really cool and always doing it from the bottoms up to something that makes sense and resonates with their brand.

I think that I'm really excited about. I think it would be great. I love your NIL recruitment idea, where basically if Kentucky wants him, but no, Yukon wants him more. I think we're going to try to do that. Who knows how much legal and IP and other stuff will lock that down.

But you imagine he's like, I'm going to go to the school that buys the can with the color of the school and the most amount of cans. No, he's just like, show me the little. love. Who's with it? I just want to go to the place that's the most with it.

And then they basically got to figure out how to create a stunt out of it, right? How to speak the language that he wants to speak with the water brand. And I think that would be really cool. And I think that would be also like kind of like one of these like beachhead moments where like, because when you said that my brain broke a little bit. It's like, oh, I thought I knew how college recruiting works. I thought even NIL. I thought I understood what that is. Okay, great.

Kid goes to a school. and then after they're at the school, then they're going to start to get maybe some endorsement deals. And it's going to look like endorsements, but just a younger age. And then I was like, oh, no. So if he has this vehicle, the school could kind of like pump his vehicle.

And as part of the recruitment, that's actually like pretty genius. So it's like your wife is going to be like, Sean, why are there 27 blue cases of water out? And you're like, I got to give my guy TK to do. Yeah, exactly. I got to do my part. Drink up.

Drink up, honey. I had this, when I was like in my 20s, I ran this nonprofit and education. And we eventually started some of the very first charter schools in the 90s in New York. And I had this guy who was on my board. And he had been like a 60s activist who eventually became a successful investment banker. But here's the first person in a board meeting I ever heard say no instead of yes. I didn't know you could say no. And he had said this thing to me, which now he's in his 80s and I had lunch with him.

And I was like, you said the most impactful thing to me ever. He goes, I don't remember saying that. And he said, you know, they say you got to crawl before you walk and you got to walk before you run. And if you do that, you spend your whole fucking life crawling. And I don't know. I just always like, I was like, yeah, it's a really logical, I don't want to spend my whole life crawling. I don't want to get to the running part. So he's like, I don't remember saying that.

I was like you said that to me. I was only 27 if you changed my line. So, you know, that's how we think about going after all of these things. Amazing. You don't spend your whole life crawling. All right. Well, if anybody's in the beverage industry, if anybody's got gas stations, if anybody who's listening to this drinks water, drink up.

What was it? Drink up, you thirsty people. What was this other catchphrase? It says, you hackin family. Yeah, that's what I say. Actually, I did tell you that the best part is it says on the back, it says, attention, if drinking 6-7 water doubles your vertical, please contact your coach immediately. So good.

All right, Dad, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you, brother. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called a billion dollar moves.

And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion dollar moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist. And with billion dollar moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader.

Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success. failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like my first million, check out billion-dollar moves. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Again, billion-dollar moves. All right, back to the episode.