My First Million - Lessons From Sam's New Business Venture, High Stakes Gambling, and More

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about lessons learned from Sam's new business venture, the money makers of online high stakes gambling and so much more. Also, want $5,000? Check out the My First Million Clips contest. ----- Links: * My First Million Clips contest * Mugshawtys * Stake.com * Primedice.com * Easygo * Scale * Marketbeat * Worldwide Systems * Workshop * Cloud Kidz Online Preschool * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:20) - Mugshawtys (04:35) - Cryptocurrency online gambling site owners (17:20) - Youngest billionaire (20:40) - Marketbeat (34:25) - What is a systems integrator? (46:35) - Why you should be investing more now (50:00) - Sam's new business venture (58:05) - Shaan's sister's business (01:07:40) - Ben's LDS mission ----- 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. ----- Additional 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

Okay. I just sent you something hilarious. I've been following this Twitter called Mug Shotties. And it's like a play on Mug Shots. We talked about this. Did we talk about Mug Shotties? It's so funny. And the tagline is, the tagline is Hope Bay gets bail. And it's Mug Shotties.

And it's all like good looking girls who have a mugshot. It's hilarious. It's so funny. Yeah, we've talked about that because there was the guy. who his motor shop went viral because he's got like he's just like really stunningly good looking and he became like a model after afterwards or whatever yeah i remember that guy people still talk about him can i tell you crazy stories uh so have you ever seen i think this is probably outside of your your like kind of orbit of what you pay attention to but have you seen these gambling live streams

where drake will go on twitch and he'll gamble like 20 million dollars live on stream no really yeah like a like real $20 million. A real $20 million. Like he lost like, I think $17 million on roulette one night last like two weeks ago or something like that. It seemed really that rich that I mean like if you're $200 million rich, that's 10% of your net worth in a night. That's a substantial amount.

Good question. I had the same question, which led me to some pretty interesting findings. Okay. So I saw Drake doing this and I've seen other popular streamers like XQC and these guys. They do these gambling streams from time to. time. People love to see it because they're playing kind of like high stakes online, you know, gambling and they're reacting to the highs and lows or whatever. Ben, have you seen this? I think it's probably also outside of your, you know, Mormon orbit. You don't watch these kinds of sins.

Yeah, so exactly. This is all, this is all on Twitch. It's happening on Twitch. It was happening on Twitch. Maybe some people do it on YouTube as well. But it got me curious. I was like, there's no way this guy's gambling, $25 million, $20 million of his own money. on these things. And I was like, these streams get so popular. I'm like, this is actually great marketing

for the website that it's on. So he's gambling on something called stake.com, S-E-A-K-E. And so I was like, I bet this is house money that they're giving him in order to just promote the site.

And sure enough, that's what it is. So get this. But is he losing it again? When you play blackjack, you lose against the dealer, right? House, yeah.

So they're just, like, if I gave you $20 million to come play my rigged game, I gave you $20 million, you lose it right back to me. I get not, I don't know, I'm back whole. They don't even lose the Vig because they're the house. So they would take that, you know, 4% edge or whatever that they would have.

They keep that as well. And if you win, maybe they have some deal where like, if you win, you keep the winnings. I would assume they have some deal like that with them. But it's electronic, right? Like it's like the cards are digital. It's not like a camera on. So then they could just be like, oh, shoot, Drake has 20. We have to make ourselves have 21.

Yeah, well, that's, yeah, that's a little bit, that's illegal for sure, but they wouldn't need to do that. I guess that's kind of my point is that they'll already have a house edge and over time, like, they will win. And so, and even if they don't, like this is as a marketing campaign, like, this is like kind of genius. And so what they're doing is, stake.com is this website. And it is the largest cryptocurrency-based online gambling site in the world. And nobody knew who was behind it until recently, some guy in Australia bought like a $36 million home

and they were like who is this you're in your 20s? How did you buy a $36 million home all cash? He was in his 20s? So these guys, they're in their mid-20s. I think one guy's 25 or 26. The other guy's 28.

And so there's this guy, you can just search Ed Craven. Ed Craven steak and you'll see the secret Australians, secret Australian origins of the world's biggest crypto casino. know. And so get this. So basically they have a, there's these guys in, in Australia, and they've got this office. And it's just, and the office is under this name called easy go gaming. It's like we build

online games. And the office is super nice. And people would see it on social media. They would see like, wow, these guys got like a chef and they got all these perks and they got like, they're always going on these trips and like, what's going on with easy go gaming? You guys must be an awesome gaming company. So it must just be like a couple people and they're just hanging out at someone's house. And so, well, no, no. So this is a legit company, but basically EasyGo gaming is the licensed gaming provider. Like they provide the games to the casino company steak, which is based in some place called Curacao or something like that, which is like some Dutch Caribbean island where the actual casino is based. And these guys own both.

So they were kind of known only the owners of EasyGo, but they actually owned steak. And so it all got kind of like revealed when the guy bought this home for whatever. You can see even there's like a daily mail article. I'm reading it right now. A 38.5 million dollar mansion he buys. And they're like, who is this kid? He's 26 years old or whatever. And that's kind of how people figured out like, oh, he owns stake.com.

Now, I believe these are kind of like my predictions and my guesses. So stake.com, I think, is pretty clearly clear. like billions of dollars in revenue. I think both of these guys are now self-made billionaires, possibly even 10 billion plus is what they've made off of stake.com, because this thing is a absolute cash cow. And you can kind of back into this by looking at like, they do these like Sunday raffle, whatever, lottery type thing.

And it's like, you pay, it's like, oh, wow, you know, 250,000 people bought this like $10 ticket. It's like, oh, wow, they just, You know, that was just like a $2.5 million Sunday for them. And then they pay out this much and they keep $26 million or $50 million. Like, that's just a week for them. And so you can kind of see, you could kind of back into it. I did some calculations on it.

But I'm pretty sure that these guys are both self-made billionaires, if not $10 billion at this point in equity value of stake.com. And it's just kind of crazy to me, like that this exists, that these guys are so young, able to do this. and people who are just willing to live on the edge. It's like, yeah, I'm going to go set up a company at the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, which gives out like online gambling licenses,

like, you know, my neighborhood gives up candy on Halloween. And these guys have amassed this absolute fortune kind of anonymously building this. Isn't this just like, isn't this kind of crazy to you? Yeah, this is, I'm researching, and I know how I recognize this. They're a sponsor of the UFC. Yes.

And so they're been. big UFC sponsors. They also sponsor Watford, the English soccer team. So they like pay 10 million a year as their like lead, lead sponsor for that too. So I'm doing research just as you're talking. On LinkedIn, there's, I don't, well here, one guy says he's the CEO, but that seems, I don't know if that's legit. This is, this is crazy. This is one of those amazing companies. Just like VPN and a few other things. that's completely under the radar and is totally crushing. And I've said this to you before. I actually think that people's personal homes, the price of it, you know, like a rich person

can live in a low priced home. But if you purchase a high priced home, the likelihood that you're rich is like it's indicative of what you have because it's hard to, it's not impossible, but it's hard to give a bank to give you a loan if you don't have a significant amount of income, not just assets, but income. So if he bought a 30, and if he bought a 37 million, a dollar home and cash. Is that really what it said?

Yeah, I don't know if it was all cash, but it was like three times more. The house sold in 2018 for three times less. And then the guy renovated it and this guy bought it for whatever, almost 40 million. To buy a $40 million home, I would think you'd want to be worth like at least $250 million in at least some type of liquid situation as well,

not just privately held company. So here's my notes on this thing. So I'm just going to read you my raw notes from last night. It says, a small company in Australia in Melbourne called EasyGo looks like your typical successful startup you got pington tables you got a chef you got perks you're going on on boat trips with the team

but they're hiding a massive secret they're also the founders of steak which I believe might be the world's largest casino ever it's crypto only which is a massive growth lever does that mean that it's legal you mean illegal I don't know the legality of it that's like probably a pretty complicated thing like like full tilt

went away in America. I used to play tilt. Yeah, like, you can't go. If you're on stake.com in the U.S., you can't go to it. It's like, no, this is not available to U.S. citizens. But internationally it is. And they based out of KuroCal, which gives out the online gambling. So I think they are fully licensed, but they use crypto, which I think lets them do things like, no, as I say, KYC, AML, like, know your customer. So basically, I think you could just transfer in Bitcoin or whatever, and you could just gamble it on the site. You just put an email in and you start gambling.

And so they got like all these games or whatever. I think that they're paying Drake like $20 million a month to be the like sponsor of this thing. No way. You really think that much? Because he's gambling at those stakes and I'm pretty sure that's all house money. I don't think Drake is promoting this company for by putting in $20 million of his own money and losing it every month. Well, they're not they're not giving him $20 million. They're saying you can win up to $20 million or you can.

No, they're giving him house money. They're giving him a chip or a credit line that basically says here's $20 million to go play on the site. You probably can't just cash that out. You have to gamble it here. But I'm pretty sure that's how it's working. That would be crazy. I mean, like, okay, so the private, some of the private equity guys, like Steve Schwartzman and a few other folks who founded Carlisle and Black Rock and Blackstone and all that,

there's some years, well, they'll get paid like $800 million or $500 million because of performance. But $20 million a month is $240 million a year. That would, they're probably, I can't imagine. there's more than 100 people in the whole world that earn that much income. I mean, of course, there's a lot of people who earn like paper gains, but who earn that much income in a given year. That would be absolutely astounding. So get this. So the guy buys this house for 40 million. They also own multiple penthouses like the top floor of the Eureka Tower

in Melbourne, which was the largest skyscraper. But here's what's even more interesting. When they were 18, when one of them was 18, the other guy's 20, they started something called primedice.com. is still up if you go to primedice.com. It's basically a crypto gambling site where you just bet. Is it going to be like what's going to happen? It's like heads or tails. It's like a roll of the dice. And you could just wager on it.

And like, you know, here you go. And you can just see people just betting constantly on what the dice is going to roll out to, right? And like what they're going to win for it. So they created this when they were back in, I don't know, 2013. It says, I think on the site says largest crypto, gambling sites since 2013. So they're pretty early on that. This site is wild.

Do you see all the live users betting money? Yeah, it's crazy. And it just look at this one guy. Shane recoverers just betting over and over again. This company, this is such an amazing five. Fine. This company alone, this Prime Dice thing, is awesome. So then let me tell you some of the other things that come into it.

So basically, I think one of the YouTubers that they pay, or maybe a tuitionary, this guy, Aidan Ross, I think, is getting paid a few million bucks per month to do it. That I think there's a pretty good authority on. Three million dollars a month. Yeah. I don't know. I think two, two million a month. Okay, now let me go into more.

Okay, so all of that was like, you know, this is all like not confirmed, but like these are now like some rumors. So, or I guess this part's not a rumor. Like, if you go to their website, you could see that there's a company called Medium Rare and V, which is incorporated and, Curacao, that's the company that holds the gaming license. If you Google map the address, it's just like a shitty warehouse building that you'll find of like where this company is based.

So I don't know what's going on there. It's like, you know, when you incorporate in Delaware and they give you like a PO box as your address. So, okay. And then a couple of other, you know, random rumors are like, they had, they added Dogecoin to their site as like a way to deposit back in the day. and like when all the Elon stuff was happening I think they dumped like hundreds of millions of dollars

worth of Doge they like sold it all when the Elon pump was happening to Dogecoin and yeah it's crazy so anyways this isn't just like a crazy thing well what like okay let's say you even had the idea for this I googled I googled I'm Googling these guys as you're talking there's very very very little information on these folks right there's just there's almost nothing

I do you think could I change my browser to Australia you and maybe get better results because I'm Googling their names now and there is like there's one picture on them on the whole on everything yeah I like found their Instagrams both their Instagrams are private but like yeah like I know somebody who who falls in whatever so I like stocked their Instagram too just to see like what's going on and it's are they jacked are they jacked or are they still nerds they're uh they're I wouldn't say they're jacked but they're fit and they're bros for sure like they're breaking the stereotype you know like here's the like I'm just going to describe to you.

I'll send this photo. We can put this in the other Ferrari pictures. Okay, so one, okay, picture number one. You would have guessed Ferrari, but here's a close second. Picture of a range rover with a giant bow and somebody hugging them because they just gave them a range rover. Okay, that's a classic. You got to love that one.

Another classic, you know, the like influencer balloons you get when you cross like a million followers or whatever, the yellow giant inflatable balloon of a number, they have that. And it's like some guy. you know, hugging him during that. Another one, like, court side at the Lakers game. Courtside at the French Open. Like, I could see Nadal's calf, like, you know, right behind this guy's head in this picture.

So they're definitely living it up. And as they should. This is exactly what I want my online casino dealer guys life to be. This is who I wanted to be. And this is how I want them to live. And I'm glad that they're doing exactly what they're doing. And one of them's only 26 is what you're saying? Yeah.

And this article might be a lot out of date. But, yeah. That is wild. They definitely hit this scale when they were in their 20s. Like the youngest, the richest young person in the world. Like, richer than, what's his name? The Sam Bankman-Fried guy. Yeah, and younger.

Or on par with it and younger. That is outstanding. That is crazy. What a good find. Speaking of young billionaires, I think the world's youngest self-billionaire now is this guy, Alexander Wang. Do you know this guy?

I don't really know him. I think I was in a group chat with him. Is that from that company, a startup? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what they do is pretty cool. They basically saw the kind of like machine learning trend. You know, like this is going to keep growing. And they were like, well, you know, one thing that's really hard is like when you're doing machine learning, you need like the data to be labeled.

Right. So if you're trying to teach a computer how to recognize a, you know, a kitten or something like that, it's like you first have to train it in some ways or be able to like, teach it when it's wrong and correct it. And so that labeling process is quite like time consuming. And so what they did was they created like a, I think a giant workforce of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you're a self-driving car company, if you're Waymo or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage. And then now those need to be labeled as like, yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that's a stop sign, even though it's partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That's like a human intervention. Humans go

and do that. And so scale started off as like a, it was labeling as a service. I'm sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it's pretty crazy. That's like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Is he cool? Yeah, he was cool. I didn't know him for long because as soon as there, it's pretty funny, it's like, I'm in this group chat that's like four founders, yeah, four, for a bunch of founders. It's like,

oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hang out, like we chill here. Everybody's trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things,

he's like, I'm busy. I need to leave this now. And so it's like the ultimate signal. It's like, oh, when it really takes off, you don't stay in these chats. You just sort of like,

go do your billionaire thing now. Meaning you go do your like, I'm actually on a rocket ship. I don't have time to socialize anymore. which respect to him. Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find. And now it seems like achievable

given that you just set the baseline to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one's a little, this one's much smaller but still oddly interesting. Go to the MFF or the million-dollar brainstorm document that we have. And scroll down. And so you can kind of see that like this is truthful.

The guy sent me up. picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that? Yeah, I'm looking at it. All right. So this guy named Matt Paulson, so you remember when my Twitter got hacked? Yes.

So there was, basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out, like, I'm giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like, send me $400, and I'm donating the money to St. Jude's. And this guy, Matt,

when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, he's like, I just went ahead and sent you $1,000. Just, you know, so St. Jude's has a little extra money. And I was like, oh, my God, dude, that sucks. I'm so sorry about this.

And he was like, oh, no big deal. And I was like, all right, well, who are you that you're this nice? And I clicked out, and he runs this website called Market Beat. Have you ever heard of Market Beat? Only when you shared this in the Treads group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, what is that? Your tweet was intriguing. Because you had said something like, I met a guy who runs a company.

company that does 25 million year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like 17 million of the 25 was profit. And I was like, all right. I'm fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company? Got him. Yeah. And so he sent me a picture of his quick books. And he was like, here's the profit. I mean, keep in mind, this doesn't include my huge salary. My huge salary is part of the expenses. but we actually do 17 million of profit. The P&L that he set me, it's like, I think 13 million of profit. So it's called Marketbeat.

Marketbeat.com. And for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat. What it is? Yeah. Like, what is the service? Yeah, you go to MarketBeat.com. Like, I always Google like HubSpot price targets.

Because I'm curious what HubSpotts, what analysts think the stock might be in one year. And he shows up early in Google. One, two, three. If you Google, Amazon price targets, target price targets, whatever. Like any company. And he calls it a web portal, but if you didn't know better, you would look at it and just call it a media company.

So you see different headlines and different news. It's kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks. And it's just a way to really quickly see headlines of what's coming up. So it's kind of like a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, all right, this stock has an earnings call on this date. So it's basically just a place to get information. but it's also part media company because they have, they publish 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month. And they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these.

But he told me, he goes, regardless if the articles don't actually add to any of our revenue, people come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that. And so right now, the guy has 11 employees. And I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He's got four developers. four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant,

and him. And they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They've got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20,000 and $40 a month and one ad guy selling all these ads. And it's mostly direct marketing. And he's got a bunch of different brands. Like he's got... Sorry, so you're going faster. So just to break down, that revenue. It sounded like subscriptions is something like four or five million dollars a year out of the 25. Is that right? He told me 15,000 premium subscribers and they pay either 20 or $40 a month, depending on whichever one they get. So let's call it 30. So that's five and a half million from the subscription from the premium. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 billion of ads.

Okay. Wow. Crazy, right? And there's only one ad sales person. He doesn't have a team of ad sales guys. And they'll sell directly to large, like, maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and they just say, hey, agency, you know, we've got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here. And it's just one guy doing the whole thing. Unbelievable. So it seems like, the trick for them, and by trick, I mean, hard work and strategy.

Oh, by the way, they've been around, I think they've been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It's SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea? I think early on, now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look, because their interfaces. It's really nicely organized. Like, I'm on like the Amazon one right now. And it's basically, like, it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It's like, here's the execs. Here's the CEO. Here's their age. Here's their pay. It's like here's the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Yeah, it's like, analyst targets, etc. It's kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards. Like it doesn't meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of.

But in my mind, it's perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it's like a cluttered website. It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it's this messy website, but I think it's quite good. We need to put together a compilation of what I'm calling Sam's Ugly Ducklings. And this is an example of Sam's ugly ducklings,

which is this website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn't look super fancy. It's kind of been around for a while. It's got this like niche passionate audience. Dredge Report is one. This is another. You've showed me like 10 of these in the last year.

And I think people are, I think people really dig these. And so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these. And it doesn't have to be like a podcast. It's almost like a screen share. Maybe it's just for YouTube. Or like there's this guy reaching out. He's trying to turn our podcast into like an ebook or whatever,

like a really nicely designed PDF. We should have him do it on your ugly ducklings because he's got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really? Who? This guy in India, I forgot his name, but I'm talking to him right now to get one of these made for us because I think it'd be dope, right? That'd be sick.

Dude, it's embarrassing. Like I get some people who are like, now there's people who are like, I would say kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast. whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason like kids almost like kids not kids it was more like just like

entrepreneurial I would say is definitely a big component of it which might be kids but might be like somebody of the 30s that wants to make a change or whatever or it's just like yeah I own this awesome business I'm based out of you know Peoria Illinois and it's like what the fuck who are you and how did you find us but like that was more of our main target and now I'm getting people that are like kind of the hardest

Silicon Valley that are like dude kind of got hooked to the podcast. And I'm like, I've been telling you about this for like two years. And they're like, yeah, it's actually good. And they're like,

what are like the best episodes? You got like 200. And I was like, I don't really know. He's like, well, what's like a place to find the most popular ones? I was like,

I don't have it. He's like, is there a place with summaries? I was like, nah, not really. He's like, well,

you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas? It's like, ah, there should be someone, I think, maybe what's like, all the obvious,

like, And so I'm like kind of embarrassed about that. But I'm not embarrassed. Who cares? It's working. Yeah. I know. I just think it would help us.

Like I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about Market Beat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website starter story. And one of the questions is what books and podcast do you read? And he said on the podcast front,

I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using, unique ways business owners are generating massive profits. That's how I found out. about this guy is because he said he listens to us as his only podcast. Oh, nice. That's great. Who told you that they're listening?

I don't want to say their name, but, you know, someone cool. That's cool. That's always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my parents to Europe and I brought my parents to this conference and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri and they were walking around this conference and they were like, oh, we love swag. They call it swag. I think it's like, I think it's supposed to be.

be swag. They go, we love swag, which means free stuff. And they're like, oh, let's go to this company. Get this. And it's like some like European sales marketing company. I'm like, you know, dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.com. I don't know what they do. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, he's like, oh, let's go talk to him. I'm like, dude, I don't, like, you don't even know what that means. I can tell you what, they go, what do they do? I'm like, I can use words to explain it, but you won't understand. And so he's, well, let's go get some swag. They're giving it away like free bouncy ball, boutsy balls. He thinks it's like Schwarma, but it's just... And he's like, let's go get a ball.

We're going to bring it back for the kids. They're grandkids. They go, let's go, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let's go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy. I'm like, mom, this is a snickers. Like, you could... That's awesome, dude.

He's just going to give it to you in the hotel. He's like, hey, kid, I got you this bouncing ball. And you're going to be like, sweet. And they're bringing like, they're bringing like kind of chocolate. You know, like, kind of like, I'm like, you guys realize that you can get that at 7-11 down the street from your house. Like, this isn't. special and they're just grabbing all this stuff.

And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag. And just the pile. And so like, I come home, I come home on my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, hi, we're here to help with customer solutions. Like it is. And it's like, and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I'm like, oh my God. Anyway, yeah, it's European.

It's European fashion. Yeah. They're like, what's this brand Gideon? It's just, yeah, they're just like crazy. And then they're at this conference and they're like, they're talking to people and they go to people. I hear, like, it was hard for me to stand next to him. And I hear I'm talking to people.

They go, hey, do you like podcasts? They just said, do you like podcasts? Do you love podcasts? And the guy would like, yeah, you know, I listen. He goes, my dad calls him. He goes, Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I'll tell him to listen to yours. What's the name of it again?

And I'm like, Dad, like, how do you, you don't know the name? It's called my first one. He goes, oh, okay, I'll tell him.

Hey, so it's called my first million. And then it'll come back. Goes, hey, I got you another listener. I made it click subscribe. And he's just going up to people saying,

like, you like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you. I'm going to have you subscribe. And he doesn't know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, what's it called a million dollar podcast?

He's like, I listen to do it all the time. It's my favorite. But what's it called? the game? My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She's like, I clicked your ads today to help you. I'm like, mom, I don't know. It's not going to count. It's not going to do anything. She's like, no, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right? I'm like, well, kind of. You know, you got to go buy the thing. And then she's like, oh, I'm not

going to buy it. I'm like, yeah, you also don't need to click it. In fact, you don't even need to read it. I don't think you're very interested in this subject. That's hilarious. That is so funny. God, it's so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, oh, Sammy, come look at. Let's look at this booth. And it's just, I don't even know what it is. Like, I don't even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it's like procurement. I'm like, I don't even know what that means that. Neither do you. You definitely don't know what that means. Dude, that's so funny. You said procurement. So, so, so Romine who runs like, he's my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine's got this company that's like kind of like an old school

but baller company in, based out of like Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. So he's like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more service based company that like,

I think his wife's dad or something started, he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something. It's like a sizable business. And so I've asked him, I think no less than 15 times. Like, so you'll go.

So what does your business do again? And he'll be like, yeah, we do procurement for, for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies. And I'm like, like, you get office supplies? I can't wrap my head around what procurement is.

And he's like, he's like, you know what the word procurement means, right? And I'm like, yeah, he's like, so it's that. And I'm like,

but see, I guess I don't know what the word means then because I still don't know. Like, like, does anybody use staples anymore? Like, I don't. Yeah.

And it's like, he's like, it's like, it's like, you need a vendor for something. But I was like, so then why would you just Google and get the vendor? He's like,

yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who's going to basically like help them get the things that they need. And I'm like, you get paid for that? Is it like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just. Yeah, it's like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don't know. I'm on explanation number 17.

In fact, I just feel bad now every time I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does. Because I'm like, I clearly don't know. It's almost like, you know, like there's like a spot in my brain where there's just like, if you did a scan, it would just be like, oh, there's some dark cloud here. It's like, yeah, that's the part of my brain that's trying to understand procurement. And it's just never happening. It's just like a fuzzy region. So I've got a story related to this. So two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at like a fancy place in St. Louis.

And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or my dad goes, hey, the president of NASCAR. I guess NASCAR like performed or race, whatever you call? yesterday, Sunday in St. Louis. And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, that's the president of NASCAR, like Jim Nance, or I don't forget his name. The football commentator. Yeah, the football. I think it was Nance, something.

Not Jim Nance. Yeah, not Jim Nance. And he, and I was like, oh, yeah, you know, he's sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He's like the second richest black man in the world. And that's like, it's pretty funny. I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he's worth like four or five billion dollars. And I start researching him. And I was like, yeah, I've seen that guy before.

I've seen him on articles because he's like, the second or third rich as black man and he's from St. Louis. He's like the richest guy in St. Louis. And he's got this company called Worldwide Systems. You've never heard of that, have you? No. So it does $14 billion a year. And it's like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10, largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they're a systems integrator. And that's one of those words like procurement. I heard that. And I'm like, what does that mean? And so I went on this deep dive. I'm like, I got to figure out exactly what they do.

I don't understand this. And then, like, it says they're a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco's website and I'm like, what a Cisco do? Yeah, I'm like, they're like networking, hardware networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words. And I'm like, the website will just be like networking redefined. And you're like, I didn't know the first definition. Now it's redefined.

Yeah, I didn't know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff. And I'm like, I don't know what like a switch is. I guess has to do electronics. Like, I just, I didn't have, I have any idea what this stuff did. And, but I Google it. And like, I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world. But I'm just, I like, I don't know what it is.

And so I had a research. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don't know what any, I don't know what this. I don't know what SAP does. I've been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And they're European though. They got a different word for everything.

We'd never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I'm watching TV and it'll just pop up SAP and I think it means like close captioning or Spanish or something like that. I'm like, oh, this is different. Now I'm super confused about SAP. Yeah, I don't even know why they named their company after their stock ticker. It's kind of weird. But they, so a systems integrator, basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you're like Chase and you have a hundred employees working on floor 18 and you're like, hey, we got to move these hundred employees up the floor 43 in the same building, he studies it for a few weeks. And then you go to home,

for work on Friday and you come back on the floor at 47 and you sit down at your desk that's already set up and everything just works and there's no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that. But like if you're a $20 billion company and you're selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists or if you're like a hospital and you're like, we need an app. And it's like, well, it's not as simple. It's just like check it into your lobby and saying you're there. You got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that's what they do.

But I don't know why they don't just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know either. But I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside. You know, there's basically things that are like, like, you know, NetSuite. NetSuite's another one of these where you're like.

I don't know what is NetSuite. Is that like QuickBooks but different? It's basically like, I mean, I'll butcher the thing. But like, I mean, people use it for like inventory management, for example. So it's basically like a database that's like usable for, or like it's usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got. It tells you what's like running out.

It tells you what you need. It'll tell you kind of like it'll help generate a purchase order. It'll do things like that. By the way, if you go to NetSuite's website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh, no. Procurement. It has to do with this too.

But basically there's entire companies. I think this is what, you know, like Deloitte and other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company. Like these businesses, these programs, are so unintuitive that there's entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like,

oh, like right here on their website, LoveSack uses them. So it's like, you go to LoveSack, you're like, great, you guys sell giant beanbags, huh? They're like, yeah, you know those things are getting a little out of hands,

get a little willy-nilly now that it's growing so much. Yeah, it is, sure is. Don't you wish there was just a way to have everything organized and one place and a system that just all talk to each other and every one of your employees

can log in and interface with it? They're like, that sounds pretty good. So I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website. And they're like, no, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will add net suite to your thing.

We will add Oracle. We'll add these different services to your. We will integrate them into your current business and we'll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SaaS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there's a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a dollar?

I don't know what the service, how they, what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I think it's different for different companies. But at the same time, this is sort of like if you were like, hey, Sean, you know, what does it mean to blanch a vegetable? I'd be like, you know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way. It's like, you know, like, I just don't know, right? Like, when you're asking me about like, what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like,

B2B service slash software companies? Like these are like, again, I don't know. first thing about the first thing about these. The craziest thing to me is when I think about these is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So, for example, there's Octa. Do you know Octa? That's what we use for like logging into websites and shit like that. Or there's, what's that one, Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I'm like, how did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built? You know what I mean?

just working in a big company, right? Like, okay, so for example, we were talking the other day about, what is it called? The, like, like we have, like you were like a chimp for companies. Yeah, exactly. What was the name of it again? I can't remember the name off the top of my head. I just committed to invest into it. But, but basically we, when we ran a company or like, you ran a, you know, like an email based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does convert kit do, you're like, if very well versed on like what convert kit does, because you're like, here's a scenario. You get a bunch of people come to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you're going to be able to market to them later. So convert kit lets you put

up a little webpage that grabs their email. And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they've paid for your thing or if they're free. And then like, wouldn't it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a sequence of emails, one that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it's like, You solve a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there's another one that's like, like, you know, this is basically what happens when you're, when you work inside of a large company, you're like, oh, man, there needs to be a solution for X. You just see a problem and you're like, there needs to be a solution for X.

If you understand that context because it's like, like, we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies. I started more like software, social networking type of companies. and we've done content a bunch so we can tell you all about content. We just don't have that same frame of reference to that somebody who's been like, somebody who's uses Salesforce every single day

for like 10 years. Then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. All the time I'm like, damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue. I'm like, damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter

and give the same spiel constantly. I don't want to talk about how to get your first thousand subscribers on substack. You know, I'd rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y, and Z and get, you know, get 100,000 customers. Yeah, I mean, exactly. And this is why, like, when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had, like, I wrote down, I'm going to walk out of here with, like, 10 ideas.

And I use that import, export framework, which is, like, what are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for? Like, we need something. Like, in a country needs something, they import it, you know, like, the U.S. needs oil, we import it from whatever, Iraq or Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from, Saudi Arabia. And so in the same way, companies have these pain points. And you're like, when you're sitting there, you're like, oh, damn, if somebody had us,

if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this. Like, for example, when I was there, I talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It's like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup. I would just like literally if I can stand up at my desk and be like, hey, hey, yo, headphones. We're doing this now. The company, we pivoted to this. Okay. Good. Or like, we'd be at lunch and I'd just like stand up and say something. But like at a company like Twitch, 2000 people, you know, there was like this organized every Thursday. There's an all

hands. It happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that's where they've like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they're eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation. and there was like a whole, there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony. And then there's like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing. Then they needed to stream it to remote employees. It was like all these things they had to think about.

And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. Like we use this for the Q&A. We use this for streaming. We use this for the presentation. We use this for new employees, whatever. And I was like, oh, if somebody just made like a really good like all hands software, I'm pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25,000 to $50,000,

a year for your software. And it would need to be secure. It would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone. It would need to have the Q&A integrated, like, et cetera, et cetera. And I believe that to be true. And like, I could have go validate them. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all in, the all hands thing and be like, hey, if this existed, would you buy this?

And like, I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn't even see that problem. Yeah. And we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper. But for your. company. Yeah. By the way, Workshop is the name. It came to me now. What's the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it's pretty sick. We talked to us before, which is in insight, like, we all have like MailChimp or you have like

send grid. You have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there's actually internal marketing too that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees and whether it's like, hey, remember this Friday, we're doing casual Friday, like, you know, whatever. Don't wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what's going on. Or it's like, hey, we had these wins in the company.

Like, congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us, whatever. And so what Hughes Workshop does is basically creates like a little mailchimp for inside your company. So let you do list. But did they launch this because of our podcast or were they already working on it? I think they were already working on it. And we just got connected from, we got connected when they were,

they were doing it. Somebody pointed it out to me. They're like, hey, these guys are doing almost exactly what you're talking about. I reached out and they're like, and the guy was awesome. He's like, yeah, we had this past company that was successful.

We kind of like, you know, like this is our second merry-go-round. We got the team back together to do this. And then it's like, it's working. Hey, we just signed this client, this client, this guy, big name, big name, big name. They showed me the chart of revenue.

And I was like, oh, this is like, so spot on. I really think that a tool like this is going to exist and it's going to work. Yeah, this is sick. And the design is just really good. Like, if you go to the design of the page, it's like, just like, clearly these people are good at, like, they're good at simple products. And that's kind of all you need to do to be able to build something like this. It's like nice, clean, simple, easy to use.

And they have the use cases. So for employee engagement, a change of management, company alignment, hybrid work, mergers and acquisitions, internal marketing. It's pretty sick. Measuring performance. Yeah, this is awesome. And like, you know, you send these emails out normally in your company. You don't have the open rate. You don't have the open tracking.

You don't know who's actually engaged or who's not in your company emails. You don't know how you can't test a subject line difference and be like, oh, this one got way more people to respond to the engagement survey or whatever we sent out. And so it lets the internal comms team like do their job better. They didn't really have a tool before this. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform So it shares its data

Across every application Every team can stay aligned No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases HubSpot grow better Are you angel investing actively right now? Yeah You stopped right Are you like to break?

Well I've taken a break because A the markets and B Because I'm working on this I got my I could talk about a little bit But I got like 20 customers for already For my new project Oh, nice. Okay, let's talk about that second.

Let's do the angel investing thing first, though. So I heard something interesting. Like my initial reaction was to do what you're doing, which was like, I don't know, the world's crazy. I lost a bunch of money. Everywhere I look, prices are going down. Like, you know, stocks are going down, crypto's going down.

Everything's going down. Maybe I should just bunker down for the season and just like, you know, chill out a little bit with investing at these high risk illiquid startups. But at the same time, then I heard somebody say something. I think it was somebody on all,

in on the podcast, one of their guests, he had said something, he was like, he's like, actually, they're like, are you slowing down? And he was like, no, this is the time to speed up. He goes, you know, the last few years, I was like getting pretty worried. And I thought, like, maybe it's time to slow down because valuations were getting really high. There's just, everybody was, there's too much capital flowing around. Everybody's throwing money at everything. It's really, you know, when you would do a deal, it'd be like, you wouldn't be able to get all the information you need. It's like, hey, dude, we're closing. Like, you're either in or you're out. You don't have time to do, like, certain level of diligence.

he's like, I actually think that those like vintages of companies, right? Like, you know, like a vintage of wine. Like the 1985 Bordeaux was so good. It's like basically that happens in startup investing too, where like certain vintages turn out really good and certain are kind of dry. They don't have any big winners. If you look, basically after every kind of like market crash or recession is like those next three years are some of the best vintages for startups.

And so like this happened after that kind of 2000, 2001 crash. And like the next vintage that came out was like, had LinkedIn, had Facebook, had like a bunch of large companies. I agree with that, but like the valuations, maybe it could have, it's like, it feels like it's changing week by week, but like two weeks ago when I was looking at a few deals, the valuations were still quite high. Yeah, I think they are coming down and they're coming down week by week. You're absolutely right.

And I, you know, you could be disciplined on that where you're just like, oh, you haven't gotten the memo that like, you know, what used to be 50 million is now 22 million and what used to be 20 million is now eight. like you need to get that memo and some people just haven't got that memo yet. But like a lot of that. I'm waiting like that amount, like just a few more weeks maybe until. So that's when I say wait,

that's what I mean because we were talking to people and they weren't budging. And I was like, well, all right, well wait. And now I'm getting emails from some like portfolio companies and they're like, you could see their cash balance and how much money they have left. And it's like,

damn, man, I think there actually might be like a lot of things going out of business in six months. I think they're absolutely will be. I mean, I've getting a ton of, hey, we just raised this extra money. Like a lot of smart founders basically are like taking the bag while it's available

just to give themselves a buffer because like who knows how much worse it's going to get. But the value start coming down. So I actually think that like this this year, next year, the next basically two, two and a half years are going to be like kind of an awesome vintage of startups to be investing in because you're getting all the, you know, like none of the big trends have changed. Like the world's just getting more tech enabled. Tech is just going into more and more industries. Size of the price is getting bigger.

there's more and more people coming online, machine learning and all that stuff's making stuff better. Like, all of that's still true. It's just that the prices got cut in half. And so it's like, I'm on board. I'm just like,

wait. I just think that like there's, there's so far been like this two, three week period where it's like there's a discrepancy. I'll get fixed, I think in like two, three, four, five, six weeks.

Yeah. You know, I think that's going to happen pretty, pretty soon. Should we talk about your thing? Now or you want to do a devoted. All right. Well,

we could, yeah, I don't want to do a devoted thing because I'm not. going to announce what it is entirely yet. So, but we can kind of talk about it. But basically, like, I'm kind of going back to my roots. I'm launching this new thing. I'm not even saying I'm launching it. I'm more so, like, launching enough of it to prove or disapprove if it's a good idea. Okay. And I've gotten, like, I forget exactly, like tens of thousands in revenue in the first two weeks. Amazing. And, and I didn't tweet about it once. So,

tell me this. Tell me, what are you doing differently this time around than you did? So last time you started this rodeo was maybe six years ago, something like that. Yeah, yeah. And so now with you did the whole hustle chapter. Do you get acquired? You go to HubSpot. You see a bunch of things. You meet a bunch of people. You get smarter, wiser, all that stuff. You got some hair on your chest now. And so it's like, what's, what did you decide? Like, all right, this time I'm doing these things differently. Or was early on, early on, I was like against outsourcing or hiring anyone overseas.

or hiring like cheap labor or hourly labor. And I was like, no, I want to create jobs. And I want to like do salary position with benefits. And now I'm not doing that. Eventually, maybe we'll add some people like that. But now it's like, just how do I automate this? And how do I like get someone overseas just to do this like a machine? And I just don't really care if I don't have any employees.

And I'd prefer being alone. So that's the big difference. The second difference is, well, the same similarity is I'm doing it all by hand. And this is totally the right move. And I stand by that. So before I wrote everything, I sold the first ads, I did it all. This time I'm doing the same thing. So I'm literally doing the cold emailing.

I'm getting them on the phone. I'm doing the sales. I'm listening to them. I'm doing that constantly. And getting those reps in is actually really impactful. And you could actually like see what's happening. But by the way, I got that revenue. 0% of the revenue has come through our website.

It's all been from cold emailing people on LinkedIn and getting them on the phone and then just sending them a stripe account. Amazing. What else? What else is different about your mindset? I bet there's more. Way more confident, for sure. There is still a sense of urgency. So, like, wanting to move fast and, like, I have to get this done. I have to do this. But more so, like, I have to get this done. But also, remember, like, I may do this for, like, 20 years. Right. So, like, having this longer term, this longer horizon, what I learned with my business, we sold around year five. And the truth is, the value created between year five and year six was more probably than the value of zero to five combined. And I wasn't impatient because I'm happy I did what I did because it unlocked a lot for my life. But had I not, I said this a bunch of times, if I was already wealthy, I would never have sold

because real value seems like it comes like, now I've only experienced a business from like around year five, but it seems like maybe there's something that happens year five, your six where values created. And then who knows, maybe someone who's owned a company for years is like, man, 20 and 30 is when like shit magic really happens. So I don't know.

But I do think like year five, if you bootstrap is around the time where you're like, all right, I recruited some actually good people. I've got people doing help and everything. But like I don't know, do you agree with like year five, year six,

year seven is where some crazy stuff happens? I think it's just, I think it's just generally true, right? Like you plant seeds and they water them and you water them. And you're looking at them. You're trying not to just go dig up the dirt and be like, why the fuck aren't you growing? But like at some point, those things do start to grow. Like we're seeing this with our e-commerce business too, which was, my buddy had told me this,

he goes, he goes, there's this magic moment in e-commerce where you've, you've brute forced enough of the, like, building your brand and getting new people to try you, where every month you're returning customers just come back because they love your product and you don't have to remark it. You don't have to spend money remarketing to them. And then the business goes from like this. giant cash suck to this giant cash cow if you do it right. And, and I was, and we just started to hit a tipping point like that where you could say, and it's not every month, but there's some

months where I'm like, whoa, what just happened? And it's like, oh, yeah, that's, that's what's happening. Like, we actually just last year, we brute force and got a bunch of people to love our product. And then they came back and bought and this, like a bunch of them came back and bought this month to where it outweighed all of the new investments that we're making. Like, wow, that's nice or like at Twitch we were always doing these like planning exercises about like you know these profitability targets um I can't say too much but like basically profitability targets and I think Emmett had said something he was like yeah we from the like he's like pretty early on we modeled it out and it was like it's going to take like 10 years probably and this and

he said a huge number he's like X billion in revenue for us to you know break even and I was like That's just a crazy idea that it's like, we need to get to X billion in revenue for this to be profitable. And like, but it, that's exactly, you know, that's the, that's what actually how it was playing out. Yeah. And it's like, whoa, like I hadn't even really like Amazon, I think had a sort of had a semi similar story. Amazon, I think for 15 years or something like that was like unprofitable on the whole. But the difference in Amazon was like the individual divisions were getting very profitable after like a repeatable, like a reliable, like I don't know, let's call it four year cycle. it's like books got super profitable.

But by the time books was getting profitable, they were investing heavily in CDs and music and these other things. And so then the total always looked unprofitable. But they knew internally, this is just a clock that goes, you know, every X, it's going to take four years or whatever it is

to this unit to get profitable. And once they're all profitable, this thing's going to be like unbelievable, which is where it's at now. Trusting that process is really hard, particularly for first time entrepreneurs with Bezos and Emmett or I guess, you know, after like 10 years,

it's like, well, I'm not exactly a first time, founder anymore, but you know what I mean. Well, I'll say the way I'm saying the Twitch one right now sounds a bit like a master plan. Like, ah, I can see this coming and I'll, oh, whatever. It's like, no, it was more like, uh, oh shit, we got users. Oh, fuck, the costs are really high. What if we raise money?

Okay, what do we got to tell these guys? What are you got to tell these investors or how they're going to get their money back? Uh, maybe this business model will work and maybe on this timeline. And then like, we update that information every two years and like, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think Twitch had like a thing where it's like, we're going to be profitable in three years and they've been saying that for the last six. You know, like, that's just like been a thing. But that's very common, actually, for businesses.

Right. Yeah, like entrepreneurs generally pretty optimistic. Elon's been saying self-driving cars will come out this year for four years. Like, you know, it's like entrepreneurs are usually right about the actual assessment and they're wrong about the timeline. Or somebody gave me this great phrase. They go, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance. It's like, imagine you're driving. You see something so clearly, but it's like it looks like it's just right there, right?

Just right around the corner. And like actually that corner is like a 10-year odyssey that felt like, it's got to be just two or three years away. The last big thing that's different between now and then, you know, having some experience versus no experience is the ability to say no and be like, oh, well, you're saying you don't want this product. Therefore, I guess I should change it.

It's like, oh, okay, well, that's okay if you don't want it. You're actually not who we're going for. So you didn't, you didn't, my takeaway from this is not you, that my product is not good and people don't want it. it's just that I just, now I know I shouldn't target people like you. And instead I should only target people like this other person. Right. And that's like a huge thing where it's like,

the vision is that we're going to be this for this people. Eventually, maybe it can expand beyond that. But for a while, this is what we are and this is who we are for. And if you don't talk to people who you think you are for, then it's okay. That's just, they're not the right target market. And I just targeted that customer poorly. But you should only like, you know, be one thing. for one type of person and you go deep on that.

And oftentimes people will be like, but that's not that big, but A, sometimes it is that big. And B, it's like, that's okay. You just got to like get that initial traction

and then more opportunity spots itself. But you have to be this one thing for this one person and ignore everyone else. So my sister has a business. I don't know. Have I told you about her like cloud kids thing? Well, I know she's a babysitter's a little.

That's not actually accurate, but like daycare, right? Well, it was. So it was, I guess it was kind of like an in-home daycare that became like a preschool. It became like an outdoor preschool, whatever. It kind of evolved.

Yeah, by the way, sorry, I didn't mean to call that babysitting. She would have punched me in the face. And I knew that wasn't the right. I knew it was a babysitting. I was like, I called it. I meant to say daycare. So, yeah, it's okay. That's right.

So, but during COVID, she pivoted to like an online thing. Like a lot of businesses went from like, oh, shit. Brick and mortar is really hard right now because they're like, you know, every month the government is changing the rules on what we. can and if we can and can't operate our business. So she created this thing called Cloud Kids. So if you go to Cloud Kids with a Z, I think it's preschool.com. Let me see if that's it.

Yeah, Cloud Kids with a Z preschool.com. So go to that website real quick and just look at this. I actually think she's done a pretty good job with the website. Cloud Kids. Cloud Kids, what? Cloud Kids. Here, I'll just put the link here. Cloud Kids with a Z preschool.com. So check this out.

So this is like, helping her with this has been pretty fun because she built this in like wicks. I'm like, oh, Wix. Oh, looks great. Who's using Wix? And then I was like, all right,

you need to add like, change the headline. You need to add like a video. The video needs to be, not like a full on video. Like just make it look like a teacher, teaching something like, oh, dude,

this looks amazing. Exactly. So now it's really good. It used to be like, you know, get info. Now it's like free trial, right?

Like just optimizing the landing page with her like headline, subheadline, button, hero image. you know, reasons to buy, all that stuff. Like, and then she's like working with people in like, Fiverr and Upwork to like do these designs. It's like it's actually turned out pretty good.

And so she created this thing, which is basically like these small group classes. Like let's say you have your kid at home, either because they're just like my daughter. She's too young to go to school right now. We don't want to send her to full time preschool. But like we wanted to like learn something every day. And it's like kind of takes a shit ton of energy to sit there and be like

the engaging patient parent and like keep your kids attention and be like, I'll teach you, like, how to write the letter W today. Like, but like, with this, I'm like, I sit her down in front of the computer. I get the materials in front of her with paper and crayon. And, like, the teacher is like so good. They'll be like, all right, you know, like, hi, high five. Let's sing our welcome song. And then they, like, do all the things.

And so for one hour, she gets, it's like screen time without the guilt. It's like the, she gets engaged like it's cartoons, but it's not cartoons because she's actually like learning stuff and getting better. And so she created this service and it's like, I was like, dude, this is actually a pretty good product. and she's hired these teachers and the teachers are like in Florida and different places like that

so then she was as she calls me she's like I'm just like struggling so much with the growth and so I like I was like tell me what like she's like it's not working what were the numbers and so she gives her the numbers and she's basically like I was like okay so let's draw the funnel and she's like what's a funnel and I'm like all right just imagine

like at the top you know you're getting leads like people who come to your website and then some of them give your email some of them sign for free trial some of actually show up and then some of them become a fully paid customer. So we drew that funnel out. It's like, oh, actually this conversion rate's kind of awesome. I was like, so what's your cost per lead?

Is that really high? It's like, no, it's like not high at all. And this is with like, you know, this like $50 a day, $100 a day ad budget. Like it's just like, I don't even know how to do Facebook ads. I just put in like, you know, a hundred and I just wanted to see what would happen. And like, I was like, wow, this is actually like, this business is kind of amazing. So you pay back your customer in less than a month. She's like, I don't know.

If you say so, I'm like, yeah, like, that's what you're, number say you basically pay back before your ads bill is even due that's like the the ultimate like thing you want with the ads driven business is like to get the revenue from a customer profitably before you even pay your credit card bill and and to give the listener context so it prices range from $40 a week to so you could all right all right I understand so you can get classes one day two day three day four day a week they it all ranges from like a hundred sixty a month to $400 a month. And you get, it's basically,

it's a, the tagline is actually quite good. Although the website needs a little work. Like I clicked on the FAQs and it goes to privacy policy. But that's all right. Live online preschool classes. The number one live preschool program from home. We, this is a beautiful line. We provide the curriculum, teachers, and friends.

Right. That's great. And then there's a video, is this like this woman who works for her? You don't have a white sister. Yeah, that's one of my teachers. And it is great. I'm all about this. This is beautiful.

By the way, the art is actually really good. Yeah. I think it's a group. It's pretty good, right? So this, and so then the reason I bring this up is, is because you were talking about handling a no,

handling an objection. And what I learned when I was like diving in, I was like, your funnel is not broken. Your website is good. Your services, your retention is amazing. I was like,

even your ad like Roaz, your payback period is also amazing. So I was like, what are you talking about? This thing, and she's like, well, I mean, like, I talked to like, you know, so many people, they all just, you know, they don't come back for the, from the free trial. I'm like, but you're converting 20% or something like that from free to paid. That's like, yeah, but like, I talked to eight moms that were like, you know, we can't do it for this or this reason.

And I was like, yeah, but eight out of 10 is eight out of 10 knows. That means two out of 10. Yes, is that's a 20% conversion. That's, again, amazing. And the numbers back out where this business is like an awesome business. And I think what will happen was the psychology. Because I told her, I was like, hey, if you want to close more people, call everybody who just did your free trial and see if they'll convert to paid and be like, hey, I'm the owner of the school. How did you like it?

So glad. You know, I saw I dropped in on the class. I saw she was doing great. Like, do you think you want to continue? Like, do you want to do more classes? And like, oh, payment's a problem. Like, we can help you with a payment plan. Because a lot of the people who are doing this, they're like Detroit, inner city.

Like, there's a lot of people that are basically like, hey, I can't pay. pay for full-time caretaking. I can't pay for even full school. Or like in Detroit, for example, what I learned through this was in Detroit, the public schools are full, so you just can't send your kid. Can you believe that?

So people are like six years old and they're like, yeah, the school's full and I can't afford private school. I've never heard public school can be full. And like, that's what's going on in Detroit right now. Dude, is this, is this, your sister's just like, move over, Sean. There's a new, there's a new big,

like a D at the house. Well, the funny thing is, she's got a, better product in business than I have in any of my businesses in terms of all the core metrics are stronger than all of mine. The product offering, the retention, stronger than anything. The problem is, not a problem, actually. She doesn't want to, like, she's not trying to do world domination. She's like, no, this would be great if we got to, like, 50 students. And like, well, then you'll want 100, right? She's like, no, because that'll be way more work. Like,

at 50, I already have these great teachers that can handle 50. I just want to fill up my occupancy. And, like, she truly is like, well, because when I do that, and then I can go work out. out in the middle of the day. And like, I just want my lifestyle. I can go to my daughter's thing. You know, Sean, she has something that you'll never have. Oh, no. Oh, no.

The E word. Enough. Yeah, she does. She'll have enough. My, uh, I went through. I went with my mother-in-law. She's like, hey, Sam, can I drive you to the airport? I was like, why?

She goes, well, it's two hours to get there. I need you to explain to me how online commerce works because I want to start a store. This was two or three years ago. And I, like, did the riot and I told out of use the store. Now she's got a business doing like half a million a year. and I was like, so why don't you scale this? Why don't you do this?

You could be like, I'm always like, you could be like the black Martha Stewart. Like, you could crush this. And she's like, but I like taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off. And I was like, oh, all right. Right. But if you made more, then you could take Tuesdays and Thursdays off. She's like, I could do that right now.

Right. So, yeah, it's the same exact thing. And I'm like, but, but. But, but, and just to finish the point on the rejection thing, what I learned was when she called people and eight people in a row said no, it was like completely demoralizing to her. And she started to question everything. It's like, am I going after the wrong market?

Do I have the wrong product? Am I priced too high? Am I this? Am I that? And I think it's really important to be able to back out numbers. I've seen the same mistake on fundraising all the time. So it sounds kind of silly when it's like, oh, my sister's a little preschool. Oh, you know, she has 20% conversion rate.

Obviously that's good. Like even if it was 10% it would still be great. Like it still work. Like, oh, that's so silly. You know, she got demoralized by hearing, you know, nose in a row, you know, on a Monday morning. And, um, or, or not even hearing no, just not hearing back from people. I'm like, yeah, yeah, but then I talk to founders and they're like, like, dude, raising money so hard. I need to change this, change that. Can you help me

with my pitch? I'm like, how many investors did you pitch to? And they're like, we, yeah, we talked to like, you know, these four last week. I'm like, four. And I'm like, you know, this is a numbers game. This is a sales funnel. And you need, you, you're selling your equity in your business in exchange for money. And like, like, what you're doing is you're getting highly emotional and you're taking it highly personal that somebody doesn't want to fund your business. And like in reality, yes, you should be learning from like how to pitch better. And like you may maybe, maybe in the end, you will strike out. But you don't even know that yet. You haven't hit enough people. Dude, what a lot of people realize is like one to three percent conversion rate is like normal,

which kind of means that like maybe you'll go 0 for 29 and on the 30th one, you get a one. And that's like, boom, you know, you're now, you're one for three. Or you're, uh, you're, that's a 3% conversion rate. You're good. Or maybe on your 99th one, the 10th one, boom, 1% of 100. That's good. That's why I always joke with Ben. I'm like, Mormons are probably the best salespeople because convincing someone to join a religion

has like the lowest conversion rate ever. And then you hear that like you could sell Salesforce and that has a 2% conversion rate. And you're like, piece of cake. God, this is the easiest thing ever versus condition of one. Ben, how many? Like, I don't know if that's actually what you did where you tried to get people to like quit whatever religion they were in and join your crew. But how many people do you think

who were like either atheist or in another team and they just said yeah, cool, I'll join your thing. How many people, what was your percentage rate? So let's see, I had... Did you convert anyone? Yeah, I converted low 30s. I'd have to look.

There was like 32 people on my mission. So I was two years. And, oh man, how many doors do I think I knocked on in that time. Like, I mean, it was a couple hundred, a thousand? It was hundreds of doors a day across to every, every single day for two years, right? So you knocked on a hundred doors a day?

Easily, easily a hundred doors a day. What country? Hold on. We're doing some public math. This deserves it. Let's say, well, yeah, while you do it, let me ask my question. So I was in El Paso, Texas, but I was speaking Spanish. So if you did 150 doors a day, which you're saying easily, uh, is, his estimate.

Every single day, 365 days, two years, you knocked on 109,000 doors. You did 109,000. And you did 32 at 109. So that's 0.02% or 0.02% something like that. Something that's like, you know, fractions of a percent. Dude, and how about the fact that your friends were all going these cool places in Africa or South America? and they sent you to El Paso. Yeah, but I mean, you know, yeah, my brother went to Prague.

My sister went to Moscow. But we had, what's the name, Austin from Lamb to School, which is now Bloom Tech. He was in Russia or something like that. He said he converted zero or one. He was like, oh, because we'd asked him, what would be good? He's like, one would have been great for where I was. So that's the tradeoff you make is that like, yeah, my brother and sister were in much cooler places in Eastern Europe. but Eastern Europe is hard, man, like really hard.

But I thought like, so I guess you're dealing with mostly Mexicans or some type of Hispanic. Yeah. They're the most hardcore Catholics there are. They're willing to bail. Well, so what you got to realize, though, El Paso is like very transitory. A lot of people just got there from Mexico. And so it's like, ah, well, I'm not really going to my church that I used to go to. Maybe I'm looking for something new.

Like, my life is already changing. I'm open to something new. You know, Facebook has a similar feature. It's called Recently Moved. And those are great people to target. It's true. Dude recently moved is an awesome group of people to target because they're changing their life. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If you have like a weight loss thing. Ben, can you give me the like speed version of what is the pitch? So you literally physically knock on a door. I open up what happens. Yeah. So essentially what we're taught to do is. No, just like do it. In Spanish.

Yeah, do it to me. Do it to me. No obloing. You got to bear with me. It's been, okay, so I'm 34. It's been 13 years. You do this 100,000 times. You know this like the back here.

So, you know, I'd say, hi, how are you? My name is Elder Wilson. This is, I got my companion with me. This is Elder Lopez. How are you today? You know, just whatever. Hi, good. I'm doing great.

Nice to make you. Gosh, gosh, I'm sorry. Hold on. Let me think about this. What do you want? Okay, we'll give you a second. We'll get into it. I can get into it.

But like how would I first, first start? That's what I'm trying to think of. How many times did people tell you to F off? I couldn't begin to tell you. I mean, more often than not. Do they train you or you just have to figure out how to sell this? You go to, well, so you got three weeks of training if you're speaking English. If you're learning a language, it depends on how difficult the language is.

I got six weeks of training, I think. Do you carry Mace? No. No weapon. No, nothing. a whistle you have a whistle no i think maybe the the the women it might be up to their own discretion maybe they do some stuff like that i have a friend who got stabbed he was in honduras uh like a good buddy of mine got stabbed on his mission um

i guess like i just put him up at lethal of weapon here yeah i'm trying to think about uh how you know um you start off with just like um you know we're missionaries from the church of jesus christ's latrity saints and you you start off by asking them questions like, do you believe in God? Are you someone who believes in God? Yeah. Oh, you know, what do you believe about? Do you go to a church? Oh, yeah, I go to a church. And so you start with kind of relating to them about their faith. And then you say, well, you know, our message is that, you know, you said you believe in Jesus Christ. We also believe in Jesus Christ, from the Church of Jesus Christ to Latter-day Saints. And what we believe is that the same Christ, the same church that Christ

established when he was on the earth, 2,000 years ago, was lost for a period of time. And so no one had the complete truth, but that it's been restored again, that exact same church. And so that's why we're out here trying to talk to people. If you knew that was true that Christ's church was back on the earth, the same one that he established, is that something that would be interesting to you? Oh, my gosh, this is awesome. The wolf of, the sales call.

The wolf of, of, you know, the wolf of Provo. Yeah, the Wolf of Provo. This is great. Dude, that's fascinating, man. I feel like by the way, you know, to whoever runs the budget at the, you know, the Mormon church, me and Sam are available for consultation. If you need some, you know, tips on how to brush up that opening script,

I think maybe those first few lines, maybe we could give you some other hooks, maybe some other ways in because... Also, like, have you seen the trends on TikTok where it's like a baby or something like running away and they overlay audio that says, excuse me, ma'am, can I talk to you about the line? Lord Jesus.

You know, can I talk to you about the Lord, ma'am? Have you put in church lately, ma'am? Where are you going? Can we please talk? It's like always like something funny running away. You guys should pounce on that, man. Would it be valid to do your mission through TikTok? Like if you were like, I'm going to make amazing TikTok videos that go viral and help spread our mission.

Like, could you do that? Is that like, or it has to be door knocking? Well, no. So during COVID, a lot of missions kind of went to social media, essentially. Now, you have to realize that like your mission. mission is like a, it's a right of passage, really. Like for two years when I was 19 to 21 years old, I didn't have any contact with my family except for I wrote them an email once a week. And then I got to call home on Christmas and Mother's Day. That was it. So like completely separated

from my past life, like doing this extremely hard thing. And so during COVID, missionaries did like start doing like social media missions because they couldn't go to people's doors. talk to them. But my impression was like, man, that sounds like this sucks. Like, you missed out on the right of passage. Like, I wouldn't want to do that for two years. Like, that doesn't sound fun. Just exploring yourself, losing your virginity,

going to parties, good verdict people. Well, the funny thing is, like, uh, no. This shit, baby. You're saying, you're saying, man, that sounds like it sucks. I wouldn't want to do that. And like, when you describe, like, not seeing your family and like, you know, having to like, whatever you said, like, you know.

The thing is, like, if you're going to wash your knees every day or whatever, like, you want it to be hard. You want it to be like this, like, life-changing, difficult, crazy thing that you do with your life, not, like, sitting behind a computer for two years. That's the difference between Mormons and Gentiles like us. Yeah, exactly. There's a bunch of heathes. Dude, I spend my whole life avoiding hardship. Like, I would be in the military or, like, you know, the Mormon church or whatever. Like, if I really wanted to lean in to, like, difficulty, I spend my life running.

running away from difficulty. We are not the same. Yeah, we are not the same. Yeah, it is like a big cultural thing. It's hard to explain how excited I was for this. I get it, two years. Oh, my God. Well, that's why you're, you know, are going to be probably more successful than both of us.

And happier. And happier. Yeah. I have a ton of respect for anybody who does that. I also have even more respect for whoever was able to convince people to do this. I think that is like one of the. the greatest, you know, like, the greatest, like, organizations

that, that's been created, like, with such a strong pull that its members would take such a, like, large, you know, movement in, like, to support it. And they're obligated to convince 10 other people to join. Yeah, I'm trying to get somebody to give me their email address for, like, two seconds, and I'm like, oh, this is so hard. Like, they have to give you 10% of their income. They got to give you 10% of their income and go and recruit about 50 more people.

It's the greatest thing ever. Two years of your life, 10% of your income, all of your social capital, and probably something else that I don't even know about. And we can't pay taxes either because we're giving it all the way. It's the sweetest deal in the world. It is a great deal. 10% is cheap on what you get in return. Oh, wow.

Amazing. And you have to believe it's the greatest deal in the world. I will say to you. Even better. Wow. Amazing. I'd even enjoyed this, man. I've never seen them.

I'm convinced now. You're like, do you guys want more? I'll tell you this. I do. I pay 10% of all my income. I donate a ton of time. It sucks all my time. I donated two years.

I paid for two years to be on this mission. Okay. I give up a lot. But at the same time, like, if I move anywhere, I show up in a new place. I call the local congregation. A bunch of dudes come help me unpack my boxes and move in. I go to church. I immediately have like a dozen friends.

People invite me over to dinner for the first few nights that I'm in this new city. If I need a job, there's someone dedicated in the congregation who will help me find a job. If I'm ever like down on my luck and I need food, the Church of Jesus Christ of Light of Saints will provide me with food, make sure I don't go hungry. You just described being a famous podcaster also, by the way. Sam just, Sam went on a road trip last year and was just like, hey, who wants me to drive their car? And people are like, here, here, he's the keys. And he's like, hey, anybody here's wife want to cook me dinner and give me a massage? People are like, honey, honey, this Sam's a town.

Maybe I am Mormon after all. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I look like it. Maybe I am Mormon. Maybe I should do a DNA test. Jokes aside. And also, I don't want to have the wrath of God if he does exist against me. So, you know, I think it is pretty awesome.

And also, like, I think people study, like, what makes people happy in the end. I think the biggest... It's always religion. That's always part of it. Well, I think the biggest one is like quality time spent with people you care about, which like is a combination of like family, friends, communities, spiritual community, all that stuff.

And so what you're describing is basically like meaningful relationships with people who like, you know, have like kind of an unconditional support of each other, which is great. And something that everybody would sign up for, you know, depending on, you know, what the situation, the cost. I do think believers in a religion live longer than non-believers. And I also think they're happier. I was curious about that. Sean,

I think it would have a succinct pitch for why it's a great thing. We need to send you on a mission. Elder Pourri. I would love to go knock on a hundred door. I really want to just do daughter of sales just to see if I could do it and how it would work. The pitch needs to be, excuse me, man, do you know what the average life expectancy of an atheist is? Now, what if I were to tell you that Mormon believers, it's this?

Would that interest you? Right. I don't know if the church would go for this, but if they would, we should do a YouTube series where, like, we send Sean with a couple missionaries I could hook you up with in the Bay Area and just go knock on like 100 or 200 doors with them and like see what is like, offer your thoughts. And then like give them some observations and tips from. Well, I would like to just go sell my own fake religion and just see how well I could do that. because, you know, I need that kind of fresh slate. I'm more of an entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur, if you know what I mean. So I got to create something from scratch here and keep all those tax benefits to myself as well.

I've actually considered this many times about creating my own religion because I do have my own philosophy, my own belief system. I do share it with others. And it's a life operating system. And I don't like taxes. And I think that it's fantastic to own a religion or to your own a church of a religion. And you're Indian. So, you know, you can be a guru. Like, people expect that, you know.

I know. I mean, when I had the longer hair, I was much better suited for this. But, you know, like, Sam, what would be your opening line? Like, what direction would you take it? Like, he was like, hi, I'm Ben. Do you have a moment to talk about it? I would have said exactly. I would say, excuse me, ma'am, I know this is so strange, but I got to ask you a quick question.

What would you say if I told you that the average life expectancy of an atheist was 72, but the average life expectancy of a Mormon is 84. Would you want to know why? And I think they would say, Yeah, I guess. Do you want to see your grandkids someday? Yeah, because when you believe in a religion, it means this, this, this, and this. And it just so happens, our religion, I would sell them on the idea of wanting to.

He started with, do you believe in God, right? Because, get the losers out of the way. Well, you got to separate. Are you talking to an atheist? Are you talking to somebody of another religion? Because you can't, you got to know which way you're going there. The other way is, you know, you do the thing where you're like, you know, hey, I was just at your neighbor's house and I thought I would pop by just so you're like, I hate when I get done.

I'm in the neighborhood. I would say which neighbor. Yeah, I was the Johnson's across the street. And, you know, I thought I'd stop by because blah, blah, blah. Or like, you know, I really just wanted to chat with you for a minute. Do you believe in God? Or I, you know, maybe go with something that's like, I was just wondering, have you seen this video? Hold up my phone of that.

TikTok of the baby to be chased away. I'm just trying to like, you know, stun them into not, not like automatically rejecting me, right? Like it's like, how do I get some curiosity which would be something like, you know, I'm going around the neighborhood. I'm just asking, you know, do you go to church regularly? And they're like, oh, yeah, right. Awesome.

Would you say you believe in God? Yeah, I do believe in God. You know, where did that start? Was that from your parents? Yeah, my mom was super religious. My mom, too. and then I was like, you know, trying to do something like that. That's off the top of my head how I would try to, like, you know, build rapport quickly as I get them to talk.

Stick to podcasts. Hey, give me a hundred thousand reps at this. I think I'd be pretty good by the end. Yeah, better than Ben and having to think about it. Yeah, Ben's response made me think he might not have gone on that mission after all. Hey, Sean, I have 32 converts. You've got zero so far. So you got to get on my level.

I just don't know how you forgot the script you said a thousand, 100,000 times. sounds a little suspicious. Over a decades a long time, Sean, a decade's a long time. All right, I got to go bathroom.

I'll talk to you all a little bit. Yeah.