My First Million - It’s The Most Taboo Business Model We’ve Ever Seen

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Episode 566: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) bring you the most taboo business model they’ve ever seen–plus the content funnel making this momfluencer $10M/yr.  Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 Access Hampton’s “2023 Ecommerce Analysis: People, Profits, and Projections” here - http://joinhampton.com/ecom — Show Notes: (0:00) Sam and Shaan have "the talk" (2:50) Free egg freezing. Really? (8:37) Assessing the regret score of your life decisions (10:20) Economics of revenue per employee for ecomm (13:38) The content funnel of Dr. Becky (21:34) How momfluencers build trust (25:00) Strategic relatability, beautifully done (29:45) Genius marketing antics of Mini Katana (33:55) $1b dollar business plan: Freeze-dried candy (35:17) Hormozi's best advice - Find the 10/10 opportunity (38:10) The function of quitting — Links: • Cofertility - https://www.cofertility.com/ • Good Inside - https://www.goodinside.com/ • Dr. Becky on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drbeckyatgoodinside • Big Little Feelings - https://biglittlefeelings.com/ • V Shred - https://vshred.com/ • Miss Excel - https://www.miss-excel.com/ • Kinobody - https://www.facebook.com/kinobodyfitness — 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 — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano 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

Sam, you know what they say when you're on a boat and it's sinking? Get off? Women and children first. And that's what we're doing with the podcast today. Women and children first. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I have a topic I want to talk to you about.

Have you seen this startup that's called co-fertility? How do you spell it? C-O fertility. I don't know. It could have been co, like, you spelled with a K, like in the Asian way. I don't know. Co-fertility. All right. I get it. Yeah, I'm there. So check this out. You know a little bit about egg freezing, but I didn't know much. I've never done it. But I do know there's like a growing trend of this. I think basically people are having babies later in life. And egg freezing tech has come along. And it's also become more normalized. I think some companies pay you or will pay for your egg freezing. But like just look at this Google. trends chart. So last five years, egg freezing is basically gone from, you know, roughly kind of 30-40 on the Google Trans to like basically 80. And so it is, it is on the rise. And that's just in the past, I don't know, a couple years, two, three years. I think last year, 20,000 women in

the United States chose to freeze their eggs. So still a very small number. So for like the 18-year-old men who are listening to this podcast. For me, six months ago, what is egg freeze? What do you mean? So egg freezing. So I guess I actually don't know the difference in terminology, but I know from experience, there's two ways to do it. One, a woman just freezes her eggs and then when she's ready,

I don't, why does it feel like we're having the talk? It's like when I'm mad and a woman love each other, very much. The birds of the bees. I was a participant in this. And so I guess you could freeze just eggs. And then eventually when you like meet a husband or you meet someone who you want

to like mix it with, you mix it and they stick it upside the women. and then nine months later, hopefully she has a kid. The other way you do it is you freeze embryos, which is a process that I went through, which is awesome, but every, like, leading up to doing it, I have to bring my sperm to the doctor

like 30 minutes after getting the sperm out of my body, and you just have this ultimate look of shame. And I remember my wife and I have debated what is more embarrassing and shameful, like when a woman has to go to a godacologist or when a man has to like donate sperm. It's like, when my son comes, like, I haven't seen him in a little while

and he's like a three-year-old and he just comes out of somewhere and he'll be like, I did a bad thing. That's you walking into the hospital holding a cup of sperm. It's a horrible experience. And so, yes, I, so that's what egg-freezing is. Somehow we made this about the dude side of things. But I think for the women, it's a little bit harder. They have to like literally take shots

and like harvest the egg. It's like a very hard process on your body. Anyways, it's also very expensive. So I think traditional egg freezing, one cycle is something like $10,000. And so there's a startup. Cofertility. What they came out and said was, hey, free egg freezing. How is it free?

Right? And it says, by the way, they had like this billboard or this ad, which it says, the best time to freeze your eggs is often when you can least afford it. That's why we're making it free. And I don't know if you ever heard that phrase. if it's free, then you are the product. That's basically the biggest version of this. So what they're doing, what they're doing is they're like,

we will freeze your eggs for free, but we keep half. We keep half the eggs. And this sounds a little crazy when you first hear about it, but I actually think this is pretty smart. What they've done is they've bundled together two things. They've bundled together egg freezing and egg donation. So some people do donate eggs.

they get paid for it, and they're willing to do that. They go in eyes wide open and they choose to do that. That's great because other people need eggs. And so they bundled it together where now you can get free egg freezing if you bundle in and agree to donate half the eggs up front. And on the other side, they go and charge people who want eggs. And they charge them $13,700 to as their matchmaking fee to get you your eggs. And so I think this is a pretty smart and disruptive model.

What do you think of this idea? Insane. I think this is insane. Not a bad way, necessarily. I think it's a bad way for me. I don't want to do that. But I think that the whole process that I went through, that my wife and I went through, I think it was something like $60,000 and her insurance paid for it.

But if you can't afford it, you're screwed. This is pretty wild. Do you think this could actually work as a business? I think this can totally work. I think there's a lot of people out there who, like you said, they don't have the extra tens of thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs. And so if your options were don't freeze it or this free option, but you're going to donate some of your unused eggs and you'll know that they're out there in the world,

I think there's a lot of people who will take that. And by the way, I think that because this is controversial, it's going to get so much free press. Like there is something almost strategic in doing a sort of controversial, taboo. almost a naughty idea. And you will get article after article, online argument after online argument. And all it really does is it pushes away

the people who were never going to be your customer, but it educates the people who actually might be your customer because it's going to be so noisy. Dude, let me tell you a related story. So she said I could name her name, but you and I have a friend named Kat. And, well, she's, I'm really close with her.

I don't know if you're close with her. I think you've just met her once or twice. Her and her wife wanted to have a kid. And it was, and although she's successful, she's a frugal woman, and it was really expensive to do this. And we all have a mutual friend, David, who's this wonderful man? He's like a six-foot tall, good-looking, nice, smart guy. And Kat and her wife, Emily, were like, David, would you like to, you know, could we get some of your sperm and have a baby? And they looked into like some of this egg freezing stuff, and it was really expensive.

and they were like, can we just kind of do it yourself on this one? And so they didn't have sex. They didn't have sex. But he would come over in the morning, like when they were ovulating. And he would do the deed in the bathroom. They would get the sperm. And they would just kind of, I guess they had like a do it yourself kid at home. Yeah, like a turkey baser.

I don't know. And they did that. And in the very first try, cat got pregnant. She's got a beautiful two-year-old. Wow. It worked. So what did you get? Like, free lunch?

What did David get out of this? Nothing. He just, he's like, he's like, dude, it's like on paper. That's how she's a great marketer, dude. She is a great entrepreneur and a great marketer. She convinced this guy to do this for free. You know, she used her marketing skills. Well, they have a beautiful kid and he's like the uncle.

And his parents sort of act like a mixture of grandparents and uncle and aunts. And it's like a wildly. awesome relationship and everyone's happy with the ordeal. And so this whole co-fertility thing, I think this is another interesting solution to the same problem. Similar problem. What's the slogan for Austin?

I don't know. What is it? Keep Austin weird. You kept it weird. You guys are doing your part out there. They kept it weird. If I told you this solution, like, oh, it's just possible. You'd be like, that's crazy. These three people, I guess it's a thruple. I don't know what you call this.

It's perfect. It's like the most harmonious relationship I've ever seen. Yeah, it sounds actually very healthy, to be honest. It's very healthy. So I like cofertility. Did they raise money? You know how I think they raise money? They have the like, you know when you see somebody who goes to the store and buys a new outfit?

And you're like, you're looking great. But like, can't really put your finger on what's new about it. And then you see the tag on their jacket still. You're like, oh, you got a new jacket. That's what you went shopping and got a new jacket. Their fonts are all the fonts of like a red antler brand. or you're like, oh, you launched, but you paid for fancy branding up front. You got a font that I can't find on da font.com in the free section.

And so I know that they got some money somehow to do this. This is pretty cool. Would you do this? Yeah, why not? Also, it's hilarious that on this huge life decision, I was like, why not? And then for the first time in my life, my brain responded with several reasons. Why not? Usually, why not is met with nothing.

So they did some, I was reading some study. said that 83% of egg donors share that they would donate again and only 2% regret their decision, which forget about surveys, I think, are often prone to just like finding data that supports the point you want. But I do think it's an interesting, that's an interesting statistical thing, which is what percentage of people regret X decision? Like, I would love to see a list of life decisions and then the regret score. You know, for example, Burning Man is this thing that I've been on the fence for for like 11 years, even though everybody I like and trust in my life who goes is like,

it's the best. What are you even talking about? What's the decision? Just go. And I don't know anybody that's regretted it personally in my life. I'm sure there are people because there's like a million people that go every year. But I just kind of want to see for life decisions, the regret percentage for each thing.

I think that would be very illuminating for somebody who's trying to make good decisions in life, don't you think? Wait, so why haven't you gone? To Bernie Man, I'm scared of drugs. Yeah, same. But you just literally said no one that you've met has regretted it. And when I tell them that, they're like, so then don't do drugs. I'm like, but I thought that's what you do there. And they're like, no, that's just one of many things.

You don't have to do drugs. What kind of dork-ass response was that? And then I'm like, okay, I'll think about it this year. Then I go home and I'm like, I'm still scared of drugs. I'm not doing this. My square friend, I'm straight edge. My other straight-edge friend and his girlfriend, they're like, hey, we went to Burning Man.

It was awesome. You guys want to see some pictures? I mean, I was looking at pictures and swiping their phone. And it looked a little bit normal, a little bit normal. And he's like sitting over my shoulder like, yeah, this is this cool guy we met. Like, here's a cool van that we saw. There's us just like doing this. And then there's a picture of him butt naked, like with a full frontal photo with his arm over her who's also naked.

And they're just like smiling. And then he's just like, yeah, there we were like celebrating this thing. The weather was great that day. And then just swipe and I was like, okay And I saw that I was like, I don't know, man. Those might be the scariest words in the English language. Do you want to see some pictures from my Burning Man trip?

It's like, you know, right before you go to Six Flags and they put the roller coaster thing and the thing comes down and clamps you in, that's how I feel when somebody says you want to see the pictures from Burning Man this year. I want to do another parenting one. Before I get to the parenting one, can I do a quick little thrill the shill?

Thrill me, baby. This is something I'm, I'm proud of. So in Hampton, we have access to like a thousand founders, and we've been doing these really cool surveys. What's Hampton, by the way? Hampton. It's my community for CEOs,

average CEOs doing about $25 million in revenue. You guys can check it out and you apply. We interview everyone. Fun fact, my partner Joe and I, watch 100% of the interviews, and we're the ones clicking the approve or deny button. You're like the Harvey Weinstein of the process. Would you say?

No. I would not say that. I would not. So check it out, joinhampton.com. But here's what's kind of cool. We did this survey and I was like, let's do wealth where we like ask all these people, all these questions, like, you know, how much money do you have?

What's your monthly burn? All these questions that people are embarrassing to have. It was cool. But then we're like, let's actually do it by industry. And so we're doing it by software. We're doing it by all the different industries. So one other industries, other software, marketplaces, health stuff.

We just did one on e-commerce. And if go to joinhampton.com or just search, just actually, this is easier. look in the YouTube description or just Google, join Hampton, and then blog. And you'll see our blog and you'll see all of our reports. Dude, we did this thing with e-com owners where we asked them all about their revenue per employee and how much profit they're making, how much they're paying themselves, things like that. Did you see that thing we released?

What was the revenue per employee? I'm curious. Dude, it was pretty good. So let me read you off some of the. Wow, what a satisfying answer. Thanks. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it.

The chart just says pretty good. Yeah, dees. It just says dees. I'm going to read. I'll read you off. So we had about 50 people replied. The average revenue of the responder was 25 million. Average revenue per employee, 1.3.5 million. The average founder paid themselves $385,000 a year. Net profit has grown consistently over the last couple of years and we break down each company's net profit. And shockingly, I guess this isn't shocking to you and I. Fucking meta, dude, it's still the best platform for buying ads for e-com. Dude, it is, except for there's a couple of people just dominating on TikTok shops right now.

But let me ask you something. On 1.3 million of revenue per employee, right? So 1.3 million of revenue per employee, I would say that a good e-commerce brand is doing 20% profit margins on that before taxes, EBTA. EBITA margin. And I would say the average might be between 10 and 15%. So let's just do a little math. So 1.3. And let's just use the 15%.

number, what is that, $195,000. And so I would guess the average wage might be 100 for these e-commerce stores, maybe 120. And so roughly 50 to 70k of profit per employee. And so that's why the 30th and final slide of this presentation where we go through all the numbers. It just says, e-commerce sucks. It just says, don't. Don't. But if you're listening and you are into e-commerce, check it out. Just look up, you go to joinhampton.com slash blog or just search Hampton blog and you'll see all the reports there or in the YouTube description. Now, can we talk about something that it was your idea to cover this person and I'm now obsessed with them? Who's that person? Dr. Becky. Dr. Becky. I love Dr. Becky. I love Dr. Becky. I more so love the idea of her than maybe

I actually love her. Explain what you, who she is and why you love her. I'm going to give you like the two-minute breakdown of who she is. Dr. Becky, I believe her real name is Becky Prince. Now her name is Becky Kennedy. Grew up in Scarsdale, New York, which is like a really nice suburb in Long Island. On Long Island, it's like 45 minutes outside the city. She had a bunch of issues as a kid. So she had like emotional issues that she wasn't sure how to handle.

Eventually, that developed into anorexia. And she starts going to therapy at age eight or nine. Gets obsessed with therapy. Goes to Duke and Columbia to study psychology. And then starting around the pandemic, so 2020, she just starts doing this content on Instagram. And I looked at her first post. It feels like very impromptu. So it's like her just kind of like actually like this setting or like your setting next to a wall, just with her camera up and answering questions about parenting, of which she studied at Duke and Columbia.

And it takes off. And one of the reasons it takes off is she's very charismatic. She's very cool looking. She's got the it factor. She looks like someone who you could trust and she grabs your attention nicely, although it's sort of like Andrew Huberman, where he's not doing anything like thrilling, but there's something about their personality and the way they look where you're like, I just want to trust and listen. I trust. You just trust this person. Yeah, I just want to listen to you. Now, things kind of take off and she's like, let's turn this into a thing. So she creates this business called Good Inside. And it's a community where you pay $300 a year and you get access to like this area where you can talk to other members and you could ask questions. And they also have a bunch of

she calls it good inside clinicians, but people who I guess who she's trained who are talking and answering different questions. And now it's a thriving community. Behind the community, you also can see videos of her, things like that. And by the way,

do you know who she partnered with to start this business? I do. I just found that out right before this pod. Did you catch that? I was like, Erica Belski, huh.

Is that a common last name? Or is this Scott Belski's wife? And it turns out it's Scott Belski's wife. No way. It's Scott Belski's wife. Friend of the pod, Scott Belski. Yeah, Scott Belski. Belski, who's now the chief product officer at Adobe. I don't know if he's actually been on the pod,

but we both admire him, just a wildly successful, cool dude. And that's her partner. And did you also know that they've recently raised $10 million for this business Good Insight? No way. I did not know that. And there's only like a few years old. I think it's like three or four years old. But you missed the headline. The headline of the story is their product, their product, Good Insight, has about 50,000 paying members. So their membership community is probably doing around 13, 14 million a year in revenue, giving parents parenting tips, parenting advice from two clinical physicians and mothers, right? That's kind of amazing. And this is a, it's an interesting market. There's actually a bunch of these. So I don't know if you ever saw Taking Carra babies. Do you know who that is? No, what's that one?

So if you just get her, her name is Kara and then her handle is taking care of babies. We had bought her course, like for a hundred-something bucks when I had my first kid. And she has basically like a sleep training course. Oh, yeah. Train your baby to sleep without, without crying it out. I did this too. I bought her $100 course. I sat down.

I did it. I looked at it. I watched it. And I was like, yeah, we're not going to be able to do that. But either way, it was good material. And there was some good insights in it. And basically the funnel for these is all the same. Free content on Instagram or YouTube.

And then basically like, they're just building trust on Instagram, really. where it's like, here's who I am, here's what I do. I'm going to put up stories and tips every single day. They build up trust, trust, trust, trust. And then they have the paid either membership or educational product underneath it, the info product. Taking care of babies was making somewhere between $10 and $15 million. This was not even like a company.

This is just like her. 10 to $15 million a year in revenue with fat profit margins because she was spending nothing on marketing and basically had no, you know, a small team or no team. And then she got canceled. unfortunately. She got canceled because she donated to Trump of all things. Like a pretty crazy reason to cancel somebody, but the mom's sort of en masse unsubscribed. And in all the mommy groups on Facebook, they were like, we're not going to support her if she's going to support Trump. And so she kind of got knocked down a couple of pegs.

I think she's still out there doing fine. But wouldn't like the Trump people be like, yeah, I'm even harder? Well, I think there's probably some lean in the like who uses these products and who pays for these products, which is like maybe more coastal moms and whatnot. Like it might be skewed in that. way. I'm not sure, but you're right. It doesn't fully make sense, but I remember reading that. There's other ones. Ben had bought this one called Big Little Feelings, I think. They sold 200,000 courses at an average of $100,000, so $20 million in revenue. Turns out, mom influencer,

great career. Great career if you could pull it off. And it's a very simple career, not easy to do, let me put it that way, but very simple. Free content on Instagram, lead to paid thing. but obviously these people have expertise. Maybe they've been a doula for a long time or they're a clinical physician or they're a clinical psychologist. They have to have some expertise or authority in the domain. But one of the things I really liked about Dr. Becky's content, by the way, is I think intentionally she makes it relatable.

So she's not wearing a lot of makeup. She's not sitting in front of a very well-produced thing, which of course they could afford it at this point. But she'll be like on the go to pick up her kids from soccer practice, just take out her phone when she has the impulse about some topic and say it. And I think it makes her feel like the kind of relatable but aspirational mom who like just finds time, doesn't have time type of thing. And I think there's something strategic about that. That's pretty cool. So that's what I wanted to bring up. So Dr. Becky is, I think, a very, very smart woman. And I think she runs with very smart

people because I was looking into this woman a little bit. And this sounds like I'm hating. I don't mean for it to sound that way. I'm a big fan of this person and I think they're the real deal. I think that this is far more put together than it appears to be. It tries to look like it's kind of thrown together and it's this thing. But Dr. Becky lives on the upper west side of New York where a 1800 square foot apartment is typically five to like seven million dollars. And she also like went to the best schools. She's from Scarsdale, which is a beautiful, fancy community in New York, I think that she runs around with, you know, people like Erica Belski, these people that are top-notch, top at their game. And I think that it was definitely like a, we're going to do

this and we're going to do this and we're going to do this, not, oh, what thing just happened to turn to this, to this, to this. Like, she's executing this plan perfectly. And so this again, this sounds like I'm being negative. I'm not. There's nothing wrong or unethical at all about any of this. But it like, I think this is like a perfectly executed plan is what I think it is. Yeah, I think for most content creators, it starts organically. Right? Because you don't sit there and think, and now from scratch, I shall become an influencer with millions of followers.

It's not really how much we'll start. I think she did. I don't think so. We can scroll back. Let's scroll all the way back to you. No, they deleted old posts. All the old, I already found the old post. They've been like, I looked out on on YouTube.

Like there aren't that many old posts. And here's what I think. I think that if had you met this woman 10 years ago, like, you could have been very, you could have just had a conversation with her and be like, yeah, I think you got the if factor. This is like a type of person

who I see her talking. I'm like, dude, it's very obvious that you've got like whatever these popular influencers have. Let's just put a little bit of money behind this and try this to do a thing. Well,

I like that you've gone coffee zilla on this one. You're like, hey, wait, pause that frame. That's Oprah in the background. She's friends with Oprah. You're like, if I try to find the thing, I think my personal belief,

I don't think it's plotted, but I do think it's strategic, meaning I think there is a lot of to make something look effortless, to make something look authentic and real, it actually takes some effort to make something look effortless. And it takes some thinking to make something look off the cuff in a way, right? And often it's not that you're manipulating people, but you're intentionally saying no to certain things that would ruin that vibe, that would break that trust, that would break the fourth wall or whatever. And so I do think that they've done a great job

of that. But there is the negative version. Remember those stories about Sam Bankman-Fried where they were like, hey, you're going to meet with whoever, this investor today. They're in the boardroom and they're like, Sam, you look good.

He's like, thanks. And they're like, no. Like, you need to look like a, like you need to look like a dork. And they were like, get this man some jorts. And like somebody ruffle up his hair, make it look like he hasn't slept in six weeks. And there's an article that basically was like,

we basically knew that people pattern match. And if we can look basically like Zuckerberg and a bunch of the other like kind of prodigies who are awkward, who don't know how to dress, who they have these weird personality quirks, okay, let's play up that he's vegan. Let's make him drive this car, right? Like there was intentional choices along the way to either make him look more like that or prevent anybody from polishing up those rough edges. They're like, no, no, no, the rough edges are key.

Let's keep those. and actually, let's put those front and center. And there were stories that came out. And it's very rare for those stories to come out. Because even the people that pull it off, they never have any incentive to come out and like acknowledge that. It's only when somebody has a complete downfall that his closest confidants come and betray and be like, yeah, that actually happened.

By the way, I am not remotely implying that Sam Bankman-Fried and this woman are even in the same. I'm not all I'm saying, I like this lady. I trust her advice. I think she's wonderful. You are not getting an invite to her hand to party this summer, right? What I'm saying is I think that she's just a shark when it comes to business, which is not something that you would necessarily want to portray when you're trying to be a mother expert. I'm on board with Becky.

I think she's the best. So I'm on board. Is there any niches that you think are interesting other than parenting for this model? Because this model is the most basic, simple model. Explain the model. What do you mean by that? So the model is, well, I don't know why they raise money for this, because typically you don't need to with this model.

But the model is, we'll use Andrew Sheberman as an example. Or we could use what I've done, whatever. But the model is you get popular on the internet and become a thought expert. And then you get popular oftentimes through having a blog, sometimes a podcast, sometimes on social media. And then you create a community. You create a community that is something like $2 or $300 a year. And you try to get as many people as possible.

possible. And then you also host events that cost money. And then you have courses that are between $1,000 and $2,000, something to upsell because you want your pricing to be something cheap, a little bit more expensive, and a little bit more expensive. And then you just focus on getting more and more popular and creating this business all around a lifestyle and idea. For her, her idea is, what's it called Good Inside? I think that's like her, it's like a thing she teaches called Good Inside. For other people, like there's Mark Sisson who did this with, um, good Apple, which is about like a health company. There's a lot of people who have done this in a variety of niches where it's thought leader,

blog, book, course, community, and then like some type of higher tiered membership. Yeah, definitely. Like Miss Excel did this with just teaching people Excel. Excel expert, create free content leads to courses, leads to info products, leads to membership. I think this playbook has been out for a while. and by that I just mean to say, I don't think you have to do the figuring out. All you have to do is the execution,

which is nice in a way, but it also means it's kind of competitive. It's not as easy as it might have been if you were early in the figuring out phase. But you could definitely do it. We've done it in a way. We just gave three examples in the parenting niche that have done it.

Miss Excel has done it there. People who have done it in the V shred type of model that have done it in the guys, bodybuilding. What's V shred? V shred. You don't know what V shred is? No, is that involved like the V of your abs? Yes, yes, the Dorino body, baby. You want your upper body to be shaped like an upside-down Dorito.

You don't know who V-Sread is. That blows my mind, dude. Let's V- shred. It is the perfect intersection of dudes shirtless, successful businesses and internet affiliate marketers. I can't believe you don't know who this guy is. That's your Venn diagram. Sign me up.

You don't know who V-Shred is? Oh, my God. All right. So let me give you a little V-Sread story. So you do know this guy. As soon as you see him, you're going to know this guy. I'm on his website. I've never seen this before in my life.

Basically, this guy was super jacked guy who then runs Facebook ads. You click the Facebook ad and it takes you down a funnel. And his funnels are pretty well-known in the internet marketing niche because it'd be like a V-shred click funnel. And it would be usually a quiz. and it would take you through a quiz of like, I'm a guy. It's like, do you want to get jacked or get abs?

And you're like, oh, man, or it's like both. It's like, give me both. And then it's like, what holds you back? Is it, you know, eating poorly? You're like, yeah, it is eating poorly. How'd you know? And then you just keep going down this funnel. It's like, I'm going to give you a personalized thing.

And then it gives you a personalized thing and you pay $99 for it. And he basically ran this funnel and made like, I don't know how much money this guy made. But I'm pretty sure I ran up one point. This was like nine figures. But I think I might be mixing up Kino Body and V-Shra now. Oh, you're right. I'm looking at V Shred and some, like, there's some stories saying it's done $200 million in revenue.

Yeah. So how this blog was how V Shred used a quiz funnel to drive 200 million in revenue. I don't know if this is like legit or not. But in 2020, they had 5 million monthly visitors on their website. Wow. Yeah, this guy just basically dominated with, with Facebook ads for the health and fitness niche. Now, what he was doing was, he was using ads. He was still an influencer, but he was like, cool, I'm going to pump ads.

and I have this funnel that was basically the most simple click funnel in the world. Like you go there, literally, we could show this on the screen. It's a progress bar. And then it just says, are you a man or a woman? And you're just like simple like A or B type of answers and you click, you click. You click. And then you kind of want to see what's the end here. And then they'll show you like at the end.

It's like before he sells you the thing, he shows you like five transformations. Like here's this nerd. Now he's jacked. Here's this fat guy. Now he's skinny. And it just shows you like five transformations. And it's like, do you want that shit or not? And then you buy it.

Dude, imagine them just describing it at their meeting like you did. So I'm going to show him a nerd, a fat guy, and then we're just going to say, want this shit or not. It's like, where are we going to get a nerd? Take a shirt off right now. Go and take a picture. It's you. You're the guy. Do you want to talk about this guy, Isaac?

Yeah, yeah, tell the story. Okay, this is like a full circle story. So have you seen, have you seen what the guy, that guy, that guy, Isaac's doing. The guy who we talked about his mini-catana brand. What's his last name? I have no idea what Isaac's last name is. Isaac mini-catana guy, sword guy.

And we talked about it before because he had taken a product that was super niche, literally katanas, like, I don't know, Japanese sword or whatever it is. He said me one. Yeah, and they're called mini catanas. By the way, this thing is like six feet long. That's not many. Nothing mini about it. You know how pissed my wife was?

And we got this like giant sword in the house now. I'm like, I don't know. It's supposed to be small. I don't know what happened. And they couldn't run Facebook ads or Google ads because you can't advertise weapons. And so what he did was really smart was he basically got content creators to make. He turned his disadvantage to his advantage. His disadvantage was I can't run ads.

His advantage was I sell a cool product, swords. And there's a lot of cool content you can make with swords. And he just used YouTube and TikTok to go viral many times. And he built it up to like 10 million or so a year. Basically like, you know, 10 to 20 million a year in revenue. on the Catana brand. But of course, surprise, surprise, there's not a lot of repeat purchase

in the sword niche, right? Like, you're not, you know, there are some collectors, but for most people, most people don't want a sword. Of the people who want a sword, you might just want one. You might not want to fill your house with swords.

So it was not a great econ product. But what's he doing now? Hold on. Before you get to what he's doing now, you've missed a few points about Isaac. So Isaac, I listened to a podcast with him. He was like, he did postmates and like freelancing and things like that.

And he's like, I'm going to start a business. And so he was like, yeah, we can't, like you said, we can't advertise. But you didn't say how big his channels got. So basically, he was like, I'm going hard on content. And so he gets up one billion views a month across his network of YouTube channels. And so his main channel on YouTube, which only launched in 2022, has 8.7 million subscribers and billions of views. And this is like not their main product.

Their main product is the swords. And they're just using this as marketing. But they knocked it out the park. It's an incredible example of marketing. I've used this. I've learned some things from Isaac and used them in my business that have been very effective. And it's just a different way of thinking about marketing. So what he was doing was he would say, all right, how do you sell a mini katana?

You can either go to people who already are collectors. That's a really, really small market. You go to people who might be interested. Why? Because they have interest in anime and different like interest overlaps. Where do they hang out? Okay, they hang out on TikTok and on YouTube. All right, cool.

How do I actually get them to want my product? How do I build desire for my product? And what he did was instead of saying, here's the sword, here's the features, here's how the handle looks, here's how sharp it is, whatever. He's like, do you think I can cut this bullet in half? If I shot a bullet at somebody at this ninja, do you think the ninja could cut it in half with a sword? That video has like, I don't know, 10, 20 million views.

It's like an insane video where a guy literally chops a bullet in half as it's flying at him. using a sword. And then he does another one where it's like... Which is kind of like a weird... That's like a weird thing. That's like saying like, if you punch me, me saying like, told you my face could stop that.

Like, the bullet aims at the sword. Kurt your hand, huh? Yeah. As you bleed. He also did one that was like, another marketing thing I really liked of his was how do you not mention the product in a way that drives the comments crazy? So he started a video that was art, not he,

but like one of his creators, started a video that was like, they're like cooking a steak. So you think it's a cooking video, and it's about a steak, and then they put the steak on the cutting board, and then they take a giant katana and they cut it into slices, but they never mentioned the katana.

And every comment was like, are we going to talk about him using a actual sword to cut the steak? What the hell was that? And the comments drive the virality. And it was, if he had said, now watch me use this sword, people wouldn't care.

It's when he didn't mention the sword that all the comments have to talk about, uh, bro, what is this? And it's that type of social engineering that I think was really, really smart. All he needed was a better product. I think he might have a better product now. And so he starts to sit down and he's like, all right, so my business got to like $10 or $20 million in revenue. That's not enough.

I want to go to $1 billion. And so he shared out, he goes, in late 2022, I stepped back and I said, I need to hit a billion dollar company or I want to make a billion dollar company. Here's my five requirements. Would the content playbook give us a severe? unfair advantage. Does it have a huge tam, meaning could a 1% win be a massive outcome? Is this something that I'm personally passionate about? Does this have a moat? Sort of like Mini Katana store already had, which is like making swords are really hard. So if I can figure that out, I have a moat. And then finally, the product doesn't 100% rely on marketing because I want

tailwinds. I want to catch a wave. And so he said, what can I launch? That fits that. And so what did he launch? He launched a freeze-dried candy brand called Kahnpie Foods. And it's basically a candy brand. And it's, I don't know, have you ever had freeze-dried candy? I've never tried this. I don't think I've had this. I don't really know what it is. All right. So here's what it says. Free-stried process removes all moisture from the candy, leaving behind a perfectly crunchy treat. So I think it's candy that's crunchy like a chip, basically. And light. So it's like a gummy bear, but it's like a light. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like just the sugar.

And so he, by the way, this is a great example of one of the most valuable insights that I ever had on the podcast. When Alex Hermosey came on the podcast long time ago, I don't know where this was. His first came on like three years ago. And you know, Hormosey puts out like, you know, a metric shit ton of content every month. And I don't consume all of it. But this one thing he said to me three years ago on our podcast has stuck with me. And I've repeated it to myself and many others.

I actually told Isaac this at a party once when I was talking. about, dude, you are doing 10 out of 10 execution on a 2 out of 10 opportunity. This is the advice I needed to hear early in my career because I started a restaurant. And I tried to do all the coolest shit in the world. And I tried my hardest. And I was trying to bring 10 out of 10 effort. And I thought I was a 10 out of 10 talent, but I was going after a 2 out of 10 opportunity. And that's what Hormozzi said that he, that's the advice he got from Russell Brunson about

his gym launch thing. They were like, dude, you're an amazing marketer, but you're just using your marketing to launch brick and mortar gym chains one at a time, a couple in a year maybe. What you need to do, that's you taking 10 out of 10 execution at a 2 out of 10 opportunity, brick and mortar small scale boutique gyms. Instead, what you should do is take your marketing playbook and go sell it to every gym across the country.

That's the 10 out of 10 opportunity. Similarly, just the last segment we talked about with Dr. Becky, taking her expertise in children, if all she did was saw five clients a day as a clinical child psychologist or whatever it is, that would be a smaller opportunity to what she decided to do, which was make a media product that scaled to millions of people and then charge a membership fee and make 13 to 15 million a year on her membership fees, right? That's the same skill set, bigger opportunity or same person, bigger opportunity. I think what Isaac's done is he's taken that 10 out of 10,

content playbook that he really mastered and he switched from going to a one, I would actually give the sort of thing, like honestly a one or two out of ten opportunity. And now he's going for like, you know, a sort of a five or six out of ten somebody six out of six or seven out of ten opportunity because he said it right.

He might have had a hundred percent of the mini katana market before. And it'll be smaller than him getting half a percent of the candy market or even the alternative candy market in this case. what did you do with your mini katana

it's sitting right over there on the wall in my office in a case just in case which is the problem with it which is the exact problem with that business is mine's doing the same thing it's just sitting there

and I showed it the three people one of us just to practice every day what was supposed to do with it and so did he shut down mini katana I have no idea but he should all right just light it on fire

and throwing the dumpster and hope no one finds it with that whole business? It's honestly an underrated, an underrated thing is the art of quitting. Like your whole life, you're told not to quit and you're told that perseverance is everything. Well, quitting like everything, it wouldn't exist if it didn't have a function.

And there is a function to quitting things. And, you know, it's easy to quit when everything's failing. The hard thing to quit is the slow burn of mediocrity, right? Like the thing that's not taking up all your attention, but it's taking up some. The thing that's not totally working and achieving your goals, but it's not totally failing. It's that middle zone,

the danger zone. The things that are obviously failing are easy to stop. We stop them, no problem. The things that are working are easy to keep working. You just shouldn't stop them. It's the things in that middle zone that people are very, very bad at quitting. And if I had to give myself a little pat on the back, this is the one thing I'm good at is being pretty ruthless about things in the middle zone. Like I had a venture fund that I was doing. I had a rolling fund. It paid me very well. And I was deploying, I don't know, close to $10 million a year to invest in startups. It was good. But it was in the middle. I found better investment opportunities outside of that.

But it wasn't so bad that I needed to stop. And I could have just let it chug along and eat away at my focus. And instead, just made a ruthless cut and said, I'm stopping this. And when are you stopping it? I'm stopping it yesterday. It's done. I'm just going to stop it now. That was a good time to use a line that I think we should make our line, which is not to toot my own horn, but beep, beep. You got to say it like that.

Dude, have you said that before? Is that from something? That's an MFFM special. Dude, once in a while, you just get me. Like, you make me laugh in a way that very few people can make me laugh, dude. It is so funny. That is, oh my God. Wow.

Just give yourself a little toot. I have to do my own home, but beep me. Oh, that was good. I don't want to do the podcast. anymore. I want to end it and laugh. That's an MFF special. Isaac, I think you're awesome, man. Sean, I think you're awesome for being a quitter.

Beep, beep. Dr. Becky, even though I sounded like I was being rude, I think you're also awesome. Beep, beep. Is that it? Is that the pod? That's it.

That's the pot. 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. Bye