My First Million - MrBeast of Gardening!? How The Plant Daddy Built A $27M+ Garden

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Episode 561: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) tell the story of a niche plant blog becoming a $27M/yr gardening empire. Want to see Sam and Shaan���s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) $27M ARR gardening influencer  (14:30) Fruit Marketing: How Hass avocados became #1 (23:30) New Movement: Man Camps (31:00) Search Engines - Best Business In The World (44:00) Sergey Brin and Larry Page Stories You've Never Heard — Links: • Plant Daddy on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@epicgardening • Epic Gardening - https://www.epicgardening.com/ • Kagi - https://kagi.com/ • Camp MFM Sizzle - https://tinyurl.com/5bam77eb — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

He quit his job. And in the first year, he does it. He hits actually five grand a month. So he even surpasses his one-year goal. And he just keeps going. So first year, 60K. Second year, like 100-something K. Third year, 250K.

Fourth year, seven million. Fifth year, you know, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over 30 million a year. No way. Are you kidding me? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On a road. Let's travel. Do you want to start with Updog? Am I 12? Thought I might catch you sleep in there. You should have just gave it to me. That's way below you. You should have just gave it to me.

All right. Before we start, I want to dedicate this podcast, Sean, to two groups of people. Because I've had run-ins with these two groups of people. And I've taken for granted how special these two groups of people are. The first one. People who start businesses and are English speaking as are not native English speakers. It's insane.

I like have hug out recently with a few friends that, you know, are entrepreneurs and they don't speak English natively. That's so impressive. I take it for granted so much until I've got to communicate someone of a different language. That's amazing. So I wanted to dedicate this pod to that. The second group of people, people who start businesses and they're not wealthy and they're just starting their businesses, trying to make their dreams come true while they have newborns or little kids. How impressive is that?

I kind of took that for granted. My parents did that when I was younger. I don't realize now that I have a kid, I realize how scary that is. So I want to dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people. Wow. Good guy points. Okay. I like it.

Dedication accepted. Shout out to all those groups. I have a few interesting things to share with you today. Do you have a few interesting things or what? I have two things you're going to like. What do you got? All right. So we're talking about AI.

We're talking about fancy shit, right? Well, I'm going to take you on a journey. So Sam, buckle up because I got a little something for it. I'm going to tell you about a journey I went down. And the journey starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting. And it was a tweet about, you know, Bitcoin hit an all-time high price. AI's taken off. I wasn't in.

I'm not interested. What I was interested in is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado. And I was like, what is this? And he says, she's what he said. He goes, these are the best avocados I've ever had. They were grown by my 93-year-old Japanese neighbor. I have had to use Google Transite to talk to her about the variety. And she thinks it might be one that just grew from this specific seed.

If that's true, this could be a new landmark variety. The Haas avocado was discovered in similar fashion and is now the most popular avocado in the world. This avocado that I found cannot be propagated with normal methods. It doesn't take well to air layering. I don't know what this means. He says, so I'm going to have to start with the seed. I'm going to have to grow it out the tree. I'm going to cut it from the mature tree, graft it onto its own seed.

I don't even know what any of this means. But then he's like, and then I'm going to try to recreate this avocado. It will probably be a three-year experiment. Wish me luck. And so I saw this, and I, what a noble quest. You're like, what does this avocado teach me about life? No, what does life lead me to to make my life about this avocado? because I am so fully invested in this three-year journey

about this guy who's going to try to grow a better avocado and it led me down a rabbit hole about him and about the avocado. So the guy is this guy named Kevin Espiritu. Do you know this guy he calls himself the plant daddy on Twitter? No, but I'm in. You don't know this guy? No. I think you do when I started describing me both.

So he's got a pretty amazing story. And I'm going to first tell you his story that I'm going to come back to the avocado. We're going to Tarantino this a little bit. All right. So this guy basically, he used to work at Scribe, the book in a box company that they help you produce books. So he's working at scribe.

He's like an early employee there. And on the side, he used to have hobbies of like video games and online poker and he was just playing nonstop. And so to get away from kind of his online addiction, he's like, you know what? I'm going to start gardening. Like him and his brother,

this is the quote in the article. They go, hey, let's go hit up a nursery. They go to a plant nursery. They are like, all right, we don't know anything about gardening, but like, we want to do something. We're going to do something away from a computer outside with our hands. And they go buy a bunch of stuff and they're trying to figure it out.

They go online. They're looking at blogs to learn. And along the way, he starts blogging his journey. And so he's at Scribe and his little blog starts getting, you know, a little bit of traffic because he's posting his experiments. He's very relatable because he's an absolute new beginner. And so people who are Googling are also absolute new beginners and they start to like this. And eventually he's like, you know what? I'm going to quit my job.

At the time, the blog is making, I don't know, 16, 70s. $17,000 a year. So roughly two-ish grand a month, a little bit more than that, right? So a little less than two grand a month, sorry. So he's, he quits his job and he's like, I'm going to go all in on this thing. And at the time, he's all about this one type of gardening called hydroponic garden. Is that like where the plant is like raised? Yeah, it's like not in the soil.

It's like in water. Something like that. I said exactly. I have no idea. All right. So he creates R-slash-hydro, which is like a Reddit community. So he starts just building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing. He's doing along the way he's like, oh, dude, I think this hydroponic thing is a little too niche.

He rebrands it into something called Epic gardening. Epic gardening today is huge. Dude, I'm on the website and I'm looking at his social numbers. Holy crap. He's got like 2 million on TikTok, 2 million on YouTube, a million people here. His Twitter pops off. So he's done really, really well with this epic gardening content. He's just a dude in a baseball cap, super like relatable.

when you watch his videos, he's like, he's just very likable guy. He's got the gift that you need when you're going to do this type of content. And so he keeps going. And he basically for 10 years, essentially bootstraps this company. So it starts with like a $10 domain, pays $5 for hosting. And he was like, all right, I'm going to try to get this thing. His goal was I'm going to try to get to $3,000 a month. Because $3 a month means I can live off of this like blog revenue.

He quit his job. And in the first year, he does it. He hits actually $5 a month. So he even surpasses his one year goal. and he just keeps going. So first year, 60K, second year, like 100 something K, third year, 250K, K,

fourth year, seven million, fifth year, you know, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over 30 million a year. No way.

Are you kidding me? And he just raised a huge amount of money from churning, the same guys who backed, we talked about eater, barstool, others, they have this content to commerce idea,

and they're like, this guy in the gardening niche is going to be able to do big things. And he had already kind of proven it. So what he did was, he was doing pretty well with the content. He was just like learning. So he's like, dude, I've been on YouTube for so long,

you know, since basically 10 years now on YouTube. He's not just keep evolving with whatever the new metagame is of YouTube. And what ends up happening is that in 2020, shit takes off during COVID. So COVID was the big like inflection point that like really took this from moderately successful to very successful. Two things happened. COVID first, where his channel all of a sudden,

he said he started adding like 15,000 subscribers a day. Because the same thing. he had when he was like, dude, I'm just so sick of being inside on my computer. I want to get outside, do some gardening. The whole world basically felt that when COVID hit. And so a lot of people got interested in this. And then

he's like, cool, all my money up until that point was ads and affiliates, right? So just like YouTube ad, sense, YouTube ad revenue, and then affiliate links to products. And finally, he's like... Was he doing 30 million that way? 30 million through ads? No, no, no. Way less of that.

He was doing like, you know, less than a million, doing that. But then he decides, all right, I'm going to launch a product. And he's like, I'm going to create a gardening product. And so he imports a product from Australia and immediately it works. And so he's like, oh, this is kind of a good idea. And he starts to sell that product. And the beautiful thing about these creator businesses, right? We've talked about Mr. Beast.

We've talked about Logan Paul with Prime, Mr. Beast with Feastables. You know, the mass creators, what they do is they take a mass market product like, you know, Gatorade or chocolate. And they're like, cool, we'll sell this. commodity product using our branding, and we'll use our branding to get into retail. Well, for like the medium, like the mid-tier creators like this guy or, you know, like us, for example, you have to actually create a niche product that's going to be higher ticket, higher value, and you're going to use your audience to do it.

And so what's cool about this is you create something that's called negative cack. So what does a negative cac means? Every business otherwise has a sales and marketing call. Talk dirty to me, baby. I love negative cac. Keep going. So the cat, which is customer acquisition cost is the amount of money you have to in marketing or sales to get a customer.

And for most businesses, this is maybe 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, for some companies, it's 80% of their revenues are just how much it costs to go market to acquire a customer. With a media business like this, what ends up happening is you get negative cac, meaning he gets paid $1 to $2 million a year for his YouTube stuff, for his content, right? His blog and his YouTube stuff, he's making money on that. And that's his customer acquisition channel. So it's like kind of an unfair advantage. This is what the churnin guys are really smart about doing.

Shout out to Mike Kerns over at a turn in, where I recognize they identify that, hey, some of these creators have high trust, they have high authority in a niche, and they actually have a business model where instead of spending 30 or 40% of your revenue on acquiring customers, you actually have negative cack.

It's actually, you have not only zero, it's better than zero. You actually have a profitable media company that is being used to acquire these customers. That's the beauty of it. And so then he jumped, and he went from making,

let's say, a million bucks a year to seven million, 7 million to 20 million and then now he's over 30 million a year in revenue. And the other cool thing is he's bolted on from acquisitions. Hold on what's he's selling. He's got like a seed product. So they like some tray seed crap.

I don't know. I don't know anything about this. It was called botanical seeds. And he bought that company actually. That's not the one he started. He bought that because they had retail distributions. They were in like four or five thousand stores. So he's like, cool, let me buy this because I know that my audience will help grow this.

Right. This is what I did with Shepherd too, right? It's like, let me buy this company that I is already a good business, knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it. And like, that's what happened with Shepard. We basically tripled the business using this strategy. He's doing the same thing in the gardening niche. And so he bought the seed business.

And then he bought this like house plant business, which is actually a cool story. So he's like, he gets into, he's like during COVID, but everybody wanted like houseplants. I think you guys talked about this with trends too. Dude, we were, we talked about this a year and a half, I think, before the pandemic about like, Succulents. Or like,

people are wanting to buy succulents online and there's not a lot of options. You were totally right. You were ahead of trend. What he did was he was like, cool, should I start creating this content? And he realized a very,

like, you know, in the growth of any entrepreneur, eventually you start to realize that, hey, sometimes it's actually easier to buy than build. And so what he did was like, well,

I could try to create all these articles, rank for them in SEO, or he found this website that was called like, your houseplant. com. And he's like, this actually has like good content

and it's good SEO, they just don't have any business around it. And so he's like, I think I could make this product a lot better, but I could get this off a head start. So he does a Who is lookup. And it's some Indian VC owns this as a side project. He buys it for $1,000. And then immediately, like month one, he's making more than $1,000 off this thing, and then grows that property.

And so he's done this a few times and he raised money from churning to be able to go do more of these. And so I think this guy is amazing. I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, dude, this is you are going to win and you're going to win in such a big way, it's going to shock people. Like, I think as I'm saying it now, it sounds like pretty cool, pretty obvious. And as his growth happens, but like 10 years ago, so non-obvious, even four or five years

ago, even when COVID started to get more popular, it's like, okay, cool, you're a YouTuber. Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber with an e-com shop. I say, no, no, no, you are going to be the most trusted influencer in the gardening niche. And the gardening niche, you know, look at how many, there's full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that. Like, he can take this huge if he does this right. And now it's just going to be a question of how fast his kind of business development can level up with the content skills he already has.

And he's got the look. I'm looking at his Instagram. He's wearing flannel. He's got a nice smile. Like he's got it's basically like a, what's the what's it called chip and Joanna? Yeah, Gaines. Yeah. He's got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm like, you're relatable.

I trust you. You're somehow a little bit aspirational a little bit. that sounded like an insult. I didn't mean, I didn't mean for it to sound like that. But this is awesome. And dude, these guys at Chernin have done this so many times. They did it with meat eater who we, or was it meat eater who we talked about a few podcasts ago. They did it with Cars and Bid and Doug DeMorrow. This is like when people say they're going to do this, I often think it's like at a small scale. These guys are doing it at multi, multi, multi, multi billion dollar scale. It's really cool. Yeah, exactly. So I think this is this is amazing. Now let me circle back to the avocado thing. So he says I'm going to do this three. your avocado mission, and he says something about the Haas avocado. And so I go look it up. I'm like, where did this Haas avocado come from? Learned a couple things. Number one,

it's not pronounced Haas. It's Haas. We're all saying it wrong. That's the first thing I learned. Second thing, do you know this story? Have you heard the story about the has avocado? No. Why? No. All right. So basically, avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day.

So nobody ate them. They didn't taste very good. Not even like in Mexico? No, they were just not a popular fruit. It was a green product. It was not very popular. It didn't taste very good. And it had, it wasn't even branded very well. So some people called it avocados.

Some people called them alligator pears. Some people called them like in Mexico, they called them the, like, I don't know how you pronounce the word, but it was like the Spanish word, like the native word for testicle. They're just like, yeah, you want to go eat a testicle? And so nobody really liked this fruit. So enter Rudolph Hass. Rudolph Hass basically is a mailman from Milwaukee. He's now living in California,

and he decides he wants to plant an avocado tree. So he goes and he buys some seeds, and he tries to plant it, but you have to, I guess, do some grafting process or whatever to get things to like take. And it didn't work. And so he's like, ah, it didn't work, whatever.

He thinks about just cutting it down, but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever. So he just lets the tree grow. And he lets it grow for like a year or two. And then his kids like notice that there's fruit on it. They pluck it. They plug it. They open it up.

And the kids really, like it. This is how the story goes. Kids really like it. He's like, oh, why are you eating that? That's not good. And they're like, no, it's great. He tries it. He's like, oh, this is actually really good. It's way creamier. It's got like kind of a nutty taste. And there was way more space between the seed and the peel. So it was like softer, creamier. And there was just more of the actual like filling. And he's like, whoa, these are actually really good. And so he starts eating it. The, you know, word starts to spread. He goes and he partners with a local nursery. And he's like, hey, can you only grow more of this tree? Because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit. And so the nursery is like, cool, yeah, we'll do more of this tree and we'll give you, you know, some royalty off this thing. And then now, as avocados are like 80% of worldwide avocado sales. These trees are planted all around the world, Mexico and China and everywhere.

Like, this is the dominant fruit. And it's not even that old. So he patented it in 1935. So we're talking avocados, as we know it today, are less than 100 years old. So now here's a couple of interesting things I found from this. So, number one, a lot of fruits are like this. where they actually start kind of shitty, they don't taste very good.

And then through a process of artificial selection, so like not natural selection, artificial selection, you find the good tasting fruit and then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much. Yeah, like a banana,

like an old banana from 100 plus years ago tastes like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. And that's happened to a lot of our fruit. It's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So they're like the honeychris apple. There's like a cotton candy apple right now. And a lot of like health advocates are like,

dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit because it's not exactly how it used to be and the health benefits aren't nearly as good. Yeah, it doesn't have the same properties in it because it's a different thing. Optimized for taste. So a couple more interesting facts. Number one, this guy,

even though he said he got like a fruit patent, which I was like, what the hell's a fruit patent? He didn't make much money off this thing. I don't think he really had the patent. I don't think he really benefited from it. His son, Charles, came out and told LA Times that even though my dad created the greatest avocado in the world and has

total royalties lifetime are $4,800. Less than $5,000 he made off of discovering this. And I say discovering because he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it. He didn't like manually try to create this. He discovered it. And even he says this, he goes, it was an act of God that I discovered this fruit. And so I found that interesting.

The third thing I found interesting is the marketing behind this. So even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. And one of the reasons why is that an avocado, doesn't look like most fruits. So most fruits are colorful. They look very appetizing. The reason they called it the alligator pear was because the skin was basically all wrinkly

and tough, like the way an avocado that we all know looks. And so nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, this thing looks bad. And so nobody would even try it. And so the like fruit association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, look, a couple things. Number one, we can't keep calling.

the shit testicles and alligator pairs. Like, we got to come up with one name that we like, all right, we're going with avocado. Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity. The next thing that they did that was very, very smart. They were like, cool. Why aren't people buying these? They're like, well, because they look like they've gone bad, right?

They're dark. It's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So they're like, all right, new marketing campaign. We're going to put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight. Basically that this is perfectly ripe. It's ready to eat. tonight. And this is already true. It's just that consumers don't understand this.

And so they put stickers on every avocado and suddenly avocado sales started to boom. Because once you try it, you like it. But people weren't trying it because they thought it had gone bad instead saying, this is ripe, ready to eat tonight. That was the second thing that they did. The third thing was that they were like, they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a bad avocado. And that this was a good avocado. And so they did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit. Like you don't think about fruit marketing, but everything around us is the product of some ad guy trying to boost sales. Once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing, and you can

learn a lot about the products that you see are not as they appear. You become a little more skeptical and a little more jaded towards all products when you realize that even avocados were basically like, you know, they were just someone's, some drop shipper somewhere had a great idea. Dude, first of all, this is awesome. This is very interesting. We should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing. It's actually really interesting. Planet Money had a podcast on the Honeycrisp Apple.

You know, it's the most popular. Before a lot of apples like that existed, it was Red Delicious. It's like kind of fascinating. I met a guy who had done a venture-backed startup. It was like raised a bunch of money, was trying to grow, business blows up. And we check in with them. We're like, yo, like, what are you thinking for what's next? And I think he's going to say some AI crap, some like crazy, you know, whatever, some, some big idea.

And he's like, I'm trying to invent a new fruit. And he's like, what? And he's like, yeah, he's like, you ever had a mango? Yeah, he goes, you think you've had a mango. Wait until you try my mango. I was like, I'd love to try your mango. Send it to me. He sent it to me.

And basically he was like, he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters. So for example, like the ease of. eating. So he had these like, his mangoes were in like circular spheres, basically. There's like little balls. And his little mango balls were ready to eat. They were super juicy. The texture was perfect. And I was like, wow, this is

genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for this. What's it called? Well, he kind of pivot off there. He's like, the logistics of it are so hard. He's like, to get fresh. He's like, it tastes really great when it's fresh. He's like, but just the logistics to get this like to customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way. So you pivoted off that idea in the end.

But I feel very fortunate that I got to try that mango. And the crazy part is, and this is actually kind of like an interesting moat, is that it takes 10 or 15 years to do. Because imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website and see the results and be like, ah, shit, that didn't work. Next year, let's see. Because you have to, you know, you got to wait for it all to grow. It takes a long time.

And so we should do a whole thing. And it's patentable, right? Yeah. You know, I guess though there's some rules around the past. So the rules that I read were basically like you, if you want to do a fruit patent, you can't, you basically like it has to reproduce asexually. It has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered.

If it's already in the wild, it can't be patented. Like there's a bunch of rules like that. So like, you know, the first fruit plant for the first plant patent was this guy Henry who planted the climbing ever blooming rose. And like he created that rose and he patented that plant and then he gets to benefit from that. So I think when we do our fruit and plan episode, I think we got to go find the greatest fruitpreneurs to ever live.

Yeah, I just looked them up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him. You know what's funny about Twitter is these, there's so many people, like I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church, and they're like YouTube celebrities. They'll have five or 10 million subscribers on YouTube. And you go to Twitter and they've got 10,000 followers. And on Twitter, they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business

insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular in Twitter, but he's got 10 million across all of his other socials. We could just DM them and get them on here. That's kind of cool. Yeah, let's do it. So I made a video of Camp MFM that I want to show. So originally, by the way,

this is my debut of vlogging. And you'll notice that the video is not a vlog. Why? Because your boy sucks at vlogging. It's hard. It's really hard. I learned that the hard way. He'd be like, all right, so I'll just get a shot of you

walking into the house. And I'm like, I just walk into the house. He's like, no, no, no, you can't just walk in. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you got to say something. And then you got to walk in kind of an interesting way. I was like, that I don't walk interesting or say that I just walk into places. There's no one here to talk to.

What am I supposed to say? Anyways, didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video. So two things. Number one, if you're just listening to the audio version, you got to go to YouTube to see it. We're not even going to put that in the audio version because it's not going to make sense. So go to go to the YouTube video if you want to actually see the video. Sam, I have three questions for it. What do they search?

What do they search? Oh, they search my first million. Or you can just search the greatest podcast of all time. Either one should show up if Google's doing their job, right? And you search my first million. Click on this episode and you'll see the video here. So, Sam, I have three questions for you. Number one, how much FOMO are you feeling right now,

knowing that you skipped this year's Camp MFM? In fact, we may need to not even name it Camp MFMFM, just name it Camp Sean because you didn't show up. I didn't skip it. I had a newborn child. I was committed to being with her for a certain period of time. I didn't just skip it. I couldn't go.

But there was a hilarious moment when we were there. Everyone was like, dude, where's Sam? And I was like, oh, you can't come. He just had a baby. And then everyone was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then one guy goes, wasn't that two and a half months ago? And then we were all like, yeah, what the hell? And I didn't even thought about it.

You can totally go for two days and it's two and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on. It was two and a half months ago. But I committed to three months. I committed to three months. I had to stick with it. So that's point one. What's point two?

Point two. What do you think of my not vlog video there? What could we have done better? So I wrote this down to let you know. I don't think you can have any of that music on there. You know, I think it's going to get taken down. No, I think it's going to be fine. That's Connor Price's song.

He was going to attend the camp. It's fun. The first song was Dropkick Murphy's. The first song is fine. And it's going to be absolutely fine. Nothing is going to get taken down. This isn't like a like, oh, I just got to ask for a mission type of thing. Like it literally won't like, like the algorithm is going to like prevent this from going

live. So I think you have to change that song. But it's great. I thought it was great. Okay, Nark. Okay. Third question. Third question for you.

Have you noticed this trend? Part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album, basically. But the other part is noticing that I think we started a movement, dude. I think I just fucked around and started a movement. movement. So I didn't mean to do this. Did you just invent blogging? No, not the blogging. The movement is of these kind of like man camp active conferences. I don't know. I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking it's something like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this, Camp MFF thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast. We're like,

oh, you know what would be cool? Like Sean did it for basketball. Let's do it for something else. And so I have a few of these that are now started. So a boy, Danny Miranda has like a running type of thing. Yeah, dude, I see them out there all the time. There's like 50

of them. Looks like a blast. Pat Walls from Starter's story was like, hey, what if we did this for tennis,

pickleball, whatever, and they called it the MRR open. That's pretty good. Great name. That's a great name. Better than our name.

Shit. This guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes, hey, heard about Camp FM so awesome, had the same idea. This guy, Victor,

who's like, I'm going to do this for poker. And so he did a poker getaway weekend, rented a house, invited a bunch of people and they just played poker all weekend. I think this is the new, new wave of getting, you can either just get together for drinks,

but guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone's sober as a salad. Dude, isn't it sane? Did you see Whole Foods announced the most popular beer that they sell? Do you know what it is? It's athletic brewing company, a non-alcoholic beer.

A non-alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane? No one drinks. Yeah, no one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So what are we going to do? Get together and just suck our thumbs. This is not going to work.

So next thing, nobody wants to just sit at a conference or like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers. Kind of boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing is cool. I think more people should make these. You can invite me. I would love to know about them.

And then politely passed just because I don't like to leave the house that much. But I think more people should do these. And I'm hoping that I'm just hoping. that I get credit for starting this movement. And I know people are going to go out and say, no, no, this has been going on forever. But that was the past, but I'm the present and future. And I just needed to tell you that. I think it's awesome.

I want to go to the next one. And I'm going to make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO after seeing that video. Good job. And vlogging, not only is it. I don't care if you're giving birth next year when it's happening. You better be there. It, uh, dude, Vlogging sucks, by the way.

Mr. Beast made fun of you in that video, or he made fun of it. He was always with the camera. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there? Yeah, because I showed in, you know, with a camera following me, basically. And the funny part is always with the camera. That's the first time I've ever done a vlog. As evidenced by the fact that at the end, I was like, that vlog kind of sucks.

Let's just make a hype video out of it. But it was really fun. I actually having a guy there, our buddy Max came and he did great job. It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy following them on camera. It's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very, very humiliating.

The upside. You might get famous. The downside. You're immediately humiliated. All right. Let me tell you about something. Yeah. I'm going to talk a little bit about the best business in the world.

Now, this business, Chimoth, who I think is coming on the pot, actually, has said, it's the singular best business model and monopoly ever created. This is easy for you to guess. right? Ritzcrackers. No. It's got to be Google. Google.

Google. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in Duck, Duck Go, which I called that shot. I think I missed it. I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it actually has. But it's like slowly coming about. This is, by the way, this is going to be the episode where we take credit for things

that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call a shot. and in fact, kind of doubted it earlier. Yeah, it's like, hey, do you like making right hand turns on a red light? I invented that. I was doing that. I was doing that when I was 16. Yeah. I created it. I created that. And so,

let me tell you why I've been interested in it. Type 4, athletic fitting dress pants. Hey, the auto complete didn't even, had no idea what I was doing there. That's not a common search. Thick boy pants. Yeah. All right.

I was searching for this the other day. And I had to scroll down so far to get to a website. Because if you look through like the first, it's like tons and tons of images. Is that what you see? So I see tons of images. So I see a whole shopping carousel. Then I see a couple of ads. And then I scroll down.

I see Amazon. Okay, yeah. Go ahead. So you got to scroll down a ton to get to a website. It's actually quite annoying. And so Google's been pissing. me off. And when you just talked about how they like have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company, I'm slowly to lose, I'm slowly starting to lose faith in their company

because the search has been really shit. And it's starting to piss me off. And so I've been looking for all their other alternatives. Did you Google for them? Did you just Google search for alternatives? Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like even though I hate it. I use it. You know, like it's like an abusive lover. But I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started in the late 90s. And when they did, Sergey and Larry, the founders, they created this paper called The Anatomy of Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Rividing

stuff. Please take our power writing course, Larry Page. That title is awful. And in that paper, they talk about what they think is possible with a search engine, and they kind of started from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool, though, to see their predictions.

And there's this one line. It says, in general, it can be argued from the consumer point of view, the better of the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. And then he goes, he says, the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

So like 30 years later, they just went back and edited it, and they're like, nah. Yeah. Yeah. The subtext on their, like the subheadline is just psych. Like, they just like change.

And then, And then I said, for this reason, as well as for this reason, we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs. And they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service search engine is actually the answer. Of course, that is the opposite of what they've eventually had become. You know, Google is a $1.5 trillion company, market cap company, and 95% of the revenues come

from search. And it's the greatest business model of all time. I don't know how many people work at Google exactly. I think over 100,000, but I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but like a thousand people and the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. And the crappy part about Google, well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us, is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better understands which results to give you. And so it's just going to get better and supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create an alternative. Now, ultimately, I think actually Open AI is going to be an alternative. Gardner had

this report where they said by 2026, they think 25 percent. Google search is going to be reduced by 25 percent because of AI. But I found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they like kind of made, they had like a big launch coming out party the other day. And it's kind of cool. So it's called, I actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's khadji. Yeah.

Sorry. Good start. I mean, how do you say this word? K-A-G-I? Yeah. K-A-G? K-G? Yeah, I don't know.

But it's got an interesting premise. So it was started by this guy named Vladimir. And the premise is that there are zero ads and it's $5 to $10 a month for a subscription. And I think that that's like an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work. that well. However, this guy's story is pretty interesting. So he started bootstrapping this business in 2018, slowly started making progress. And at this point, he's got about 30,000 people who pay for it. And if you go to cadg.com, K-A-G-I dot com slash stats, he reveals all of his stats. And so you can see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening

per day. All of his stuff is pretty transparent. And I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see. And the reason he had this big, like, launch recently is because they just raised $800,000, I think it was $800,000. And very stupidly, they, it looks like they're spending that $800,000 to buy 20,000 t-shirts to send to their 30,000 members. So, so Vlad, Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to

finances. Is that real? Yeah. Yeah. So they blog, like, all about the business. So if you go to their blog dot, blog dot cadgey.com, they blog about like everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing, he was like, yeah, and we're going to be sending out 20,000 t-shirts. And I was like doing the math. And I was like, oh, that's, it's like 800 grand. Like, so that's questionable. But they had, he has like this whole manifesto online. And it's pretty fascinating. And this is the type of entrepreneur I really like because he's got this blog, his personal, website. He says, I'm dedicating

the work. By the way, be honest. When you found out the founder's name was Vladimir, already you were pretty biased to like this thing, right? Yeah, I'm in. You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. Yeah, I'm in. General rule and I have no arguments with that. Yeah, he's born in Yugoslavia, and

he had all these little indie hacker projects for a long time. Worked at GoDaddy, so he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy. He was a VP of a product at GoDaddy. He had another company called ManagedWP, which was a web application that helps users manage WordPress sites, and that got to a couple million revenue. So he has some experience. But he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this

work on Kagi to my three children while I try to make the web a more humane and friendlier place for them. And I started reading that. I'm like, okay, I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested. And so on his blog, they talk all about the company and like how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these like great lines about how he's like, pay for search is unusual, but that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad-supported. You could do donations, but I don't think it's going to work. Five billion people use a search engine. Ninety-nine percent of people are never going to pay. The thing is, the tiny minority of people who think differently, the 1% that will pay,

it's still quite a large number. That's 50 million people. And it talks about 20 years of ad-supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search, but a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad-supported search is not good for them. And my point through all this is, I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think he's going to win. I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions, and I'm on board with that. And Open AI is really good for that.

But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few. There was you.com, which I don't think is that intriguing. There is Neva.com, so N-E-E-E-V-A. That was one. and there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me

that you're going to launch this, most people, as well as mine, gut reaction is like, there's not a chance you're ever going to be Google. But when you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting. And I want to know,

what's your opinion of these people trying to build these search engines? And do you actually think that any of them will work other than Open AI? Well, I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that Google's search over time has become more and more,

just you search for something and you get an app. add. And they add the result, the top half of the page is ads. And that's what, that's what you get. Google, I think in Kaji's website, it says that Google, if you just take their revenue divided by the number of users on average, I believe that they make like 300 bucks a year off of each customer. I think it's like 277. And so that's $23 a month. And that's like what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, hey, instead of Google making $23 a month off you, you pay us $10 a month and we'll have no ads. And I think that I agree with you, which is that

The big threat to Google is obviously the AI driven engines. And Google's trying to become that themselves. So whether it's chat GPT or it's Google or it's Bing or it's some new one that we haven't heard of, perplexity or whatever else, that is the big thing, which is it's a better experience. And so they're trying to win with better experience. Then you have Duck Duck, Doe Go, which is basically like we are the anti-Go. We're going to, and Kaji's in that same bucket. We're the anti-whatever.

I would say duct-tuck Ghost is the, the surprising success, the amount of traffic they had. We did a whole thing on them, you know, in a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think it's cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google. This is just like, I'm going to build this, I'm a cockroach. I'm going to build this business and you can't kill me because I'm going to be supported by my customers.

Right now, it sounds like he's probably making like, what, two to three million bucks a year in revenue? I think it's closer to one to one point five of subscription. He's making, well, let's say, $1.5 million in revenue. and he's probably able to run the thing, break even or profitably at that rate. And, you know, he'll just keep crawling. You know, next year he'll be at 40,000 members.

And next year he'll be at 60,000 members or whatever. He'll just keep growing. And he's not even worth, it's not worth killing if you're Google. It's too small to matter. And he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is like my mission is for people that, you know, believe in this.

The point, he says the 1% who would pay. I don't think it's 1%. I think it's like 0.1% that would pay. Here's your option. And now the question is, how good is this? Like, for example, you're into this. Did you sign up? Hey, are you using this now instead of Google?

It's so hard to use something instead of Google because they're the default everywhere. Yeah. And basically, my frustration with Google is borderline to the point where I'm like, all right, I'm out. But the thing is, is that I'm like, so six or seven more times, Google, and I am out of here. The issue is like, I've logged in with everything, like on Chrome. You know what I mean? I'm like, shit. I got to type of all these passwords. This sucks. But I mean, I definitely, you know, chat GPT has definitely taken away at least 30% of my like Google time, which is a pretty insane number, actually.

And I, we're going to have to do an entire episode on Sergey Brin and Larry Page. These guys are crazy fascinating. And I was reading a little bit about them when I was like researching how Google started. And they were like huge shitheads. And like Sergey Brin, dude, they were shitheads. You're going to have to explain that one to me. So, Sergey Brin, he's got this, he had his resume online. And in the code, he put, if you expect the source code of his website, you'll find

Brin's hidden objective laid out bare, which is, and this is in quotes, this is exactly what he had in the code. I want a large office, good pay, very little work. Frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus. Is that real? That's insane. That's on. You can go to the website right now and find it.

You would never expect someone. somebody who's like, innermost goal is a big office, no work, expense accounts to create fucking Google. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny. And then there's stories of Larry Page where he, he was just kind of like, they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where blunt and just like not totally

understanding normal human emotions. And so Larry and Sergey, they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other and they would call each other stupid. It'd be like, your idea is so stupid. That's dumb. Why are you? And they would like fight and fight and fight. And then one person would win and then the other person would like concede and be like, oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like, to all the other employees, they're like, that's what you all need

to do. Unfortunately, when you're at like 50 or 100 or 300 people, most people aren't like that. And there's these crazy stories of like, apparently, do you know how like a janitor, when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace the bag, they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out and they're like, well, there's a bag already there for you. Larry saw this and he was like, that's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant. And he made this whole like memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is.

And he's like, why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these like eight rules. And it was like, if you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back. Or it would be like, if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them

coffee and just like serve them. And like he would do all these things that are very logical. And like they agree some more. Yeah. Like he would say these like crazy things that you hear them and like, yeah, I mean, that's more productive. Unfortunately, like this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave. and it's very fascinating. And they were shitheads when they first started.

I think Google right now is going to this period where their CEO kind of, I think it kind of sucks, to be honest. And so I think they're going to like come back. But right now, I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're going to be around for a whole, a real long time because they're so big, but I'm eager to see something come and kind of crush them.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the funny thing about all like, crush them type of ideas is that when a company is really successful, It's like a giant castle with a huge moat. And everybody who tries to like siege the castle, it's like the kajis of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle. And it's too hard.

The castle's too big, too strong. The boat's too big, et cetera. And what ends up happening is that you, the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over like two miles and it's like, hey, this is actually, like, this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. And they build a new castle over there. and actually the thing that diminishes the castle

is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like the world and the attention has moved. The new plants that everybody wants that grow on this other land over here. And nobody took your thing, but you know, you became less relevant in the world.

Yeah, there's no one wants that thing anymore. Like Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know, by beating them at their own game, they were like, oh, actually the game is software.

It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the Microsoft monopoly and like Microsoft, the biggest tech company of the world, got then beat by the Googles and the Amazon's and the Facebooks of the world, which were like, hey, okay, cool, you can keep the operating system.

We'll take the internet. And Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. And then even when the internet was the place, then it was like, the companies that made it on mobile were the ones. They were like, oh, cool, yeah, you can have that desktop app. We're going to make Uber and we're going to create

these new mobile companies, you know, Instagram, WhatsApp, and they outpaced the growth of Facebook. And so now the thing is, well, AI is here and crypto is here. And these are the new lands and then the big projects that are getting built here, they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I think that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes, you know, a company like Google. It's that Google becomes less relevant.

You don't need search. Why do you not need search? Well, because the AI just does it. Why would I go? Why would I go search for links? That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that. I just, you know, I need the answer or even better than the answer.

Oh, I just need this little AI agent that's just going to look at what I'm doing and then, like, do jobs for me, right? Like, I don't even have to go search for an answer. It knows the answer. And then it does the task, right? That's where this is going. And so whoever does that is going to actually be the one that is the next Google without even creating a new search engine.

Right. And that's nine out of ten times it seems that's how, like, big innovative things come about where it's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a V6, turn it into a V8. And then we're going to turn into a V10. we're going to put more cylinders in, more horsepower, and then you're like, oh, this electric car just, like, went way faster and it has zero cylinders. You know what I mean? That's exactly how it works.

Did I tell you about my boss, who his boss was Larry Page? And what he told me? He didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one, which was I came in once and I was like, yeah, I was like, I was like, I was like presenting my goal. I was like, yeah, our goal is to do, you know, 9.1 this year. What I remember the metric was like, like 9.1 million users or something. but like that. And he's like, you know what Larry Page used to say when I would present a goal? Like, I'm going to do nine of something. He's like, he would just say, that's a wuss goal. If you can do nine, you can do 10. He's like, never set a goal at nine. It's like, and I was like,

what? And he's like, I just said what I said. If you can do nine, you can do 10. Saying nine is just a wussy way to go about things. And I was like, he told you that. He's like, yeah, he would tell everybody that. And so I stole that. And I made the change. And then now, in my companies, I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me, like, yeah, we're going to do four and a half. Now, you're going to do five. Yeah, we're going to do nine point two. No, no, no, you're going to do 10. Like, if you're going to get nine point two, you can get to 10. It's like when, uh, five, ten guys lie and they say they're five eleven. It's like, dog, just say six one. Be the real thing.

Yeah, act as if, my friend, act as if. Um, all right, that's the pod. world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back