My First Million - My Mom Started a $1M Side Hustle In Her 50's

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Episode 550: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) tell how Sam’s mother-in-law built a million-dollar Etsy store out of nothing.  — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (0:30) Sam rents his nemesis’s house (2:00) Should we kiss? (4:00) Sam's mother-in-law's pillow hustle (14:30) Mad Muscles (21:00) How to know which entrepreneurs to bet on (26:00) Dumpster enterprises (29:00) Niche lead gen business blueprint (33:00) The Review No One Asked Us For: Apple Vision Pro (43:00) uBiome’s $100M scam update: Happy ending? — Links: • Smithy Home Couture - https://smithyhomecouture.com/ • Mad Muscles - https://www.facebook.com/MadMusclesApp • Amo Publishing - https://amo.tech/company/amo-publishing • Dumpster Enterprises - https://dumpsterenterprises.com/ • Apple Vision Pro - https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro • Paul Buchheit post - http://tinyurl.com/4wzvnb7s — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ 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 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

Your random tweet about your mother-in-law gets to him and he writes back, Dear Smithy Soudine, both Bedbath and Beyond and myself would like to invest in your business if these are your designs. They are outstanding. And then the best part. And believe me, I know pillows. 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. All right. We're live. Sean, I've got three stories that I want to tell you. about to kick this day's episode off. You ready? I'm ready. First one. Years ago, this is going to be fast. Years ago, I was trying to get this one entrepreneur who is the CEO and founder of this very famous media company that I'm not going to call out. And he ignored me. He never got back to me. I probably said him 15 emails. Well, I'm currently

in Brooklyn, staying at an Airbnb right now for a couple of days, not an Airbnb, a different service, and visiting family. And I log on to the Netflix on the Netflix on the TV. And guess whose house I'm renting right now? That guy. I am currently staying at his house right now. Should I do anything to like, is there anything like, should I look something up on YouTube? So when he goes to his YouTube account, he sees it like in the previous searches. The whatever the, what is the most petty thing you could do? Like just change his Wi-Fi password. Just send him for a loop. He'll be like, what? What is happening right now? I don't understand this. So I'm in his house.

So I go to Netflix and I see his, the image for like the, or I go to some YouTube account or something and I see the image for like the thumbnail image for his account. And I'm like, I know this person. And then I start picking up the other details. I'm like, oh, he's logged into all the stuff. I know exactly who this is. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to get his attention. It's going to be borderline creepy regardless of how I do this, even if I do it in the most

tasteful way. But I'm going to take my shot. I'm going to leave this guy a message. It's not mean. I'm very happy. I'm happy. but I'm going to leave them a message. Hey man, I really love the place.

I'm trying to pee in the sink, but there's no stool. Do you know where you keep it? Yes, I'm going to do something. The second story that I'm going to tell you about is that we need to get our people listening to this right now to subscribe. We just crossed 400,000 followers. You tweeted out that we're going to make out when we get to a million. Is that right?

No, I didn't say. I did not say that. I said specifically, these other podcasters made out when they crossed 50K and it's a very uncomfortable video watching them in slow-mo kiss. And he's like, the guy's kissing, they're kissing each other. And one guy's like resisting it and the other guy's like trying to do the bet. And he's like, I'm just getting teeth. There's this teeth.

Can you move something? I'm just getting a lot of teeth right now. And by the way, it's a finance podcast. Yeah, yeah. The video that they make out on, it barely has any views. And they never actually like, it barely worked. That is the funniest part of the whole thing. I saw that the video has 25,000 views.

I was like, my worst nightmare is not that I have to make out with you. It's that I made out with you for the YouTube content. And it didn't go anywhere, which is exactly what would happen. If I tried to, you know, oh,

this will definitely, you know, go viral. And then it does it. By the way, there is a number for everything. I don't know if a million subscribers is that number. But I don't know if the number ends in the word

subscribers either. I think the number might have dollars. instead of subscribers. But there is a number. So if you're listening to the podcast apps, just go ahead and go to our YouTube and subscribe. The comment section is pretty fun. We read every comment.

The third story I've got to tell you. So I said this story a little bit. I haven't given an update on it. But about three years ago, my mother-in-law, who loves to sew, she previously, a long time ago, like you used to even sew wedding dresses and things like that for friends.

But now that her kids are grown and out of the house, She starts sewing again. She goes, Sam, I think I want to start a business online. Can you like, can I drive to the airport and you can like tell me how like the internet works, basically? And I gave her the free ride to the airport. Sweet. Yeah.

And I gave her like the most high level like advice ever. So I can't even remotely take credit for this because it was basically like, well, there's this thing called Shopify. Like that's basically what the advice was. There's a thing called a funnel where you get like this many eyeballs and a percentage of them. whatever, the most basic thing ever. Well, three weeks after that, she sends me this website. I'm like, Smithy, this website looks beautiful.

They named your company, the same name that you were going to name your company, though. What the hell? And she goes, that's my website. And I'm like, what? She's like, yeah, in fact, I already got my first sale. And I was blown away. Well, fast forward three years ago, she's done over a million dollars in revenue. She's doing high six figures, I think.

Or she did high six figures in 23. And what's the score? So it's a pillow store, right? What is the name of it? Smithy's pillows or something? So her birth name and the name of the store is slightly different. So her name is Smithy, but she smells her, spells the store's name, Smithy with a Y. So the word Smith with a Y at the end.

And then Home, the word home, and then Cotor. So C-O-U-R-E. If you go to her Etsy page, that's where I think a lot of her sales come from. You'll see on her Etsy page, I think it's like 8,000 or 10,000 sales. So basically what she sells is like really high-end throw pillows, which is as a young man, I was like, throw pillows. Who the hell buys that? Well, women love throw pillows. Do you see?

How does family sales? Because they're on the bed and then you have to throw them on the ground whenever you want to use the bed? What is the name for? I don't really understand this. But I do see. Do you see that pillow you have behind you in that leather chair? Oh, I got a throw over here. Okay.

You have a throw. That's a throw pillow. They're decorative, fancy pillows. 9,685 sales. So that's how many transactions she's at or how many customers she's had to check out. So almost 10,000 star seller, five star review. Very cool. And then she, so she's handmaking these?

No. Yeah, well, now she has a little warehouse in New Jersey. And she's got like four ladies like sew it. I just imagine her just like, what was that movie where the like, my fingers hurt from sewing. Well, now your back's going to hurt. You just got landscaping duty. Yeah, she just has like these four like. stay-at-home moms or I guess moms who aren't working anymore, but like the sew and they

have part-time work. So in these pillows. And then she's got like the UPS guy come into her office every day picking up these pillows. She's got like a legit small business. And I'm always like, Smithy, scale, scale, spend more. Look at this. The store, if you go there, every pillow says $2 under it. And I'm like, $2, this is an incredible deal.

Then you go. And it's like, $2 is for the swatch sample. If you want the pillow, it's $79. So I think that's definitely bringing a lot of people. in. I like it. It brings a ton of people in. And they're great pillows. I have them all over my house. And people love them. It's really high quality stuff. And so I'm like, Smithy, you got to grow this thing. Scale, scale, scale. And she's like, nope, I'm really happy with how it's going. And my mother-in-law, have you ever seen a photo of her? No. Have you seen a photo of my mother-in-law? No, that's just not a thing

people do. Well, I tweeted out pictures of her. I tweeted out pictures of her. And so she's like a very pretty woman. She like, I call her like the Haitian Martha Stewart. Like, she's always really well put together. She just like dresses nice up the time. So very charismatic, like good energy type of person. I tweeted out that story two days ago or maybe yesterday. I tweeted out that story. The tweet got like viewed by like quarter million people. But that guy Marcus from the prophet. What's his last name? Lamonis or something? Lamonis. He's now, he's on that TV show, The Prophet. I think he's the CEO and founder or CEO of Camping World, but there's like a multi-billion dollar RV business. And he's now on the board of directors at Bed Bath and

Beyond. So I think you just, you said that whole sentence so casually. Like, yeah, I tweeted this out and then that guy, Marcus from the prophet replied. Do you know, Marcus? What do you, what do you mean? The guy from the prophet replied? Like, how did this even happen? No idea. I have no idea who he is. I mean, I know him as a celebrity. I know him as a celebrity, but I don't like, I've never spoken to this person in my life. Your random tweet about your mother-in-law gets to him and he writes back, dear Smithy Soudine, right? Her name. Yeah. Both Bedbath and Beyond and myself would like to invent. best in your business, if these are your designs, they are outstanding. And then the best part, and believe me, I know pillows. And then the way that he originally communicated to me was he replied, so he tweeted that on his own, like in front of his old audience of like 600,000 people. He replied to my tweet and he goes, contact me. I would love to sell this in Bad Bath, Mion. And I go, here's my email.

He emails me. It goes straight to spam for some reason. So I'm thinking like, this might be a, I don't know. Is this really? you. So anyway, I connect them and now they're meeting and he shared it on his Twitter that he wants to like meet her. Pretty wild, right? So like I better be I better get the fucking will for this one. I deserve something. Yeah, you're going to get like a loaf of pumpkin bread, but still pretty good. Yeah. Son-in-law of the year, Sam Parr. I did not know that's what you're

that was the new year's resolution. Good, good job. This is crazy. That that. It got picked up like that. And good for her. This is such a cool story of, you know, how old is she? Right? She's probably in her, what, like 50s? Yeah, she's in her 50s. And basically her, you know, my wife is 31.

And then her other daughter's 27. And so she was just like, my kids are grown. I've got time. What should I do? And she loved us. So she always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Her husband is an entrepreneur as well. And she helped run their moving business.

And they were like, let's, you know, my husband's retired. I've got free time. I got to figure out something. And she just starts sewing these pillows. And she had the gumption to go and get this website built for like $3,000. Like she found a developer to make the website. She gets on Etsy and she, I teach her. When I say teacher, I don't actually teach her. I was like, yeah, I think, I was like, I bet you Etsy has a way that you could run like a hundred bucks worth of ads. She runs like $100 worth of ads and gets a handful of customers. And from there, she spent no money basically on marketing. I'm like, how much she's spending on marketing? She's like,

300 bucks. I'm like a day. And she's like, no, no, no. Over the past like two months. And I was like, scale that sucker up, baby. And she's like, nope, I'm happy with the workload. This is fine. It's going good. I like it. And her customers are coming back and forth. Now what she does is she goes into all the door building or the, in New York City, there's fancy high rises with doorman.

And she goes to all those buildings. And they're buying her pillows to put in the lobbies of the, so she's got like these contracts, these wholesaling contracts. Because that's what I was going to ask you. Because most annoying thing in the world for me is any business story. that's like, I had this idea and then it worked. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, what about the middle part that I'm going to have to do of like getting it to work?

What did you do? How did you actually get the initial sales? So do you know, was it just post on Etsy and Etsy brought some traffic? Or does she, sounds like maybe she went door to door and kind of was showing her product to some people and got that to mind? Well, she did what a lot of like, she didn't do any like crazy hacks. She basically had like 10 or 20 friends, including me, like buy her pillows at cost through Etsy. We left a review. She started getting reviews.

She ran like, I literally think it's $100 worth of ads. The customers love the pillows, and they started telling their friends about it. And it was mostly all word of mouth. And then now she starts going to these dormant buildings to get more sales. But it was a very word of mouth business.

So, like, I'll be with her, and customers will call her, and she'll just pick up her cell phone and just talk to them. I mean, it's like a small business where there's not really any hacks. It's just been word of mouth. Dude, so many amazing things about the story.

I'll tell you three of the amazing things. Number one, that she tweeted this and it got in touch with the guy from Bedbath and Beyond, who's going to now get her to Bedbeth Young. Number two, your mother-in-law in her 50s decides to just like start a business, become an entrepreneur. That's the second most impressive thing, that she took the action and actually did it. How many people do you know that would love to do it, but count themselves out?

She didn't count herself out. I really respect that. Number three, that she found her version of enough. It's hard enough to win. The even harder part is to actually enjoy the win and not let the wind turn into a loss because you start to stress out and try to keep up with the thing or try to grow it, try to keep going because you feel some stupid pressure to keep going. So being able to say, no, no, no, this is how I want my business to run on her terms,

even more respect for that. And actually, I got a fourth bonus one. This guy saying, and trust me, I know pillows. I am now going to end every tweet with some version of that. Like if I'm like, everyone's like this app. And believe me. I know a thing or two about apps. Like, what a gangster just style of speaking.

I love this guy. I'm totally stealing this. You're going to see this. My next 10 tweets, I'm going to end like that. It's like when Trump used to end a tweet with like the emotion. Like instead of emojis, he would be like, you know, the border is not safe. Sad! At the next page point, he would always end his tweets like that.

Well, it's kind of smart to this guy. This guy probably has no idea who you and I are and he doesn't give a shit. But he probably saw the engagement of the tweet and he's like, well, if I could like, pounce on this and just get like a little bit of like interesting press like this could or not real impressed but get impressions like it could be worth it to them and who knows if i told smithy i was like have your hopes low like who knows if this is going to work out it's a huge company even though he's on the board or whatever he is like that doesn't mean anything's going to happen but like i don't like you need to be giving her advice anymore i think she needs to be giving you advice from now on

well i agree i agree with that i was it was a little more therapist session although she doesn't need that but it was more like oh who knows you know i don't want you don't get your hopes up. All right. Well, Sam makes the will. Congratulations, dude. Yes, congratulations to me. I have a bunch more interesting stuff. Do you want me to dive in? Yeah, yeah, give me another one. There's these ads I've been getting, and it's by this company called Mad Muscle. So you actually, it might be easy if you just go to Facebook ad library and type in Mad Muscle. And they have these animations. It's a popular ad I see all the time where it's these cartoon looking guys. One picture is like a guy with kind of a beer belly at 20% body fat, and then a guy that's ripped at 10%

And it's very eye-catching ads that grab your attention. And they've got these other ads where it's like a guy doing a bicep curl. Very catchy ads. They're very catchy ads. I get this ad like crazy. And so I was curious who's behind it. And I found it very interesting thing. I do this with every ad that's catchy.

I go to the website. I scroll all the way to the bottom where it says like trademark and then I'll say like the real name of the company. And then I'll research the company. So check this out. There's these two guys in Ukraine. They started this company when they were 25. Their name is Ivan and Dimitri.

Originally, the company was called, well, the whole holding company is called AMO. So AMO. But they've got three arms of the business. And the first part of the business was AMO Publishing. Listen to these numbers. So they kind of created like these little clickbaity news websites. And then eventually they geared it toward moms. And so they have headlines like elderly couple divorces after 53 years of marriage.

Later Man sees ex-wife dating in a cafe. And it's an article. Then they switch to Facebook videos and they get crazy viral. And so at this point, they have 53 million followers on Facebook. They have this thing called Amo Mama, which has 14 million. They have Amo Nistalgia. They have Amo News. It's almost sort of like, I guess you could say like a Fuck Jerry, where it's like a

social first news company. They get huge. They get 53 million followers. From there, they create this thing called AMO Pictures. Years or not years ago, but a few months ago, you mentioned these guys that have soap operas on YouTube. And that is exactly what Ivan and Dimitri pivoted to next. So they created this YouTube channel called Dramatize Me.

Dramatized Me has 2.4 million subscribers and 500 million views, so a lot. and the average video is something like 20 or 30 minutes. And it's these actors like acting out a soap opera. And you could tell that a lot of the stuff is dubbed. So they film it one time and then they have dramatized me in different languages. And so they have different pages for each language. From there, they started launching these apps. And so their first big app that they launched,

it was to help women exercise on their periods, which I guess when you're menstruating, I guess like, you feel crappy and you don't want to work out, they created an app that helps you do that. That's got to be the hardest sale to make it. It's like, what kind of extra degree of difficulty did they take as an entrepreneur? It's like, we are going to help somebody do something

they don't want to do right at the time that they don't want to do it. Wow. Yeah, I don't know. I obviously, I don't understand how that feels, but I guess there was a need. Then they launch this thing called Unameel. which is a healthy meal plan app that costs $20 a week. So clearly they must have high churn

if they're charging $20 a week right off the bat. And then from there, they create Mad Muscles, which is the thing that I saw. So their website, this website for Mad Muscles, according to Similar Web, is getting 11 million visits a month. It's insane. Wow, 500,000 followers on Instagram.

And the app has 35,000 reviews. And so these young guys, they started this company when they were 25, just like four or five years ago. According to LinkedIn, they now have close to 400 employees in Ukraine. These young guys that nobody at least in America is talking about have this massive media empire in the middle of Ukraine. And they are like the scrappiest people that I've ever seen because they're just like launching stuff and they're like, oh, that works. Let's do this spinoff.

Oh, looks like they all have a similar problem. They want, I guess, to work out. We have a lot of middle-aged women. They want to work out on their periods. Let's create this thing. Oh, looks like workout. app's cool let's create one for men and they are like it this is an example of what we've talked about many times of these just like scrappy people who just they're i don't want to say

solace because that sounds negative but they just follow the numbers like crazy and they don't overthink it what what's that meme that you were talking about the other day it's called like the the midwit meme which is like in the middle it's like create a beautiful product study the market whatever yada yada yada the one in the left with is the idiot it's like just launch it and just keep iterating and just do whatever the customers say. And the smart person also says that. Launch it and see what works. Yeah.

That's exactly what they're doing. These guys, it's so fascinating how they're running their company. This is a crazy find. Good on you. Props Sam with a Sampar special. Finding this random app in the Ukraine or this company. I am impressed and confused. I'm impressed because clearly these guys are awesome.

And they're smart and they're figuring stuff out and they've built a really cool set of products and it looks like a pretty cool company. I'm confused because I'm like, they are doing four separate hard things at the same time. And I'm confused about that strategy. But, you know, this is actually pretty common when it comes to startups in Eastern Europe. I've actually seen this several times,

which is because they don't have a lot of venture capital, it's like bootstrap driven. And so they make businesses that are working. and one business like unlocks the next or they discover the next opportunity or maybe one taps out, but it's still good enough to stay as a business. And so they end up with this like conglomerate of like four different things. And I've seen this like 10 times now. So I'm actually not surprised that this is what's happened here.

But to go from publishing to then their pictures arm, which is like, you know, their Hollywood arm or whatever that's making movies and shows or whatever to apps, you know, like those are not related. Really? You can kind of squint and be like, oh, we use the media to promote our apps. Okay, cool. But what about these YouTube shows? Or just in general, like maybe just spend money on Facebook ads and don't do all the other stuff. So I am simultaneously impressed and confused by this. Well, first of all, I was not able to find any news about them. There was just like, even in Ukraine and Russia, there was very little information about them.

I'm like, what is going on? This app has 35,000 reviews. I can't find anything about them. I had a search to find the owner. I eventually found their LinkedIn. profiles, but it was really, really hard. And whenever that happens, I'm like, all right, I'm interested. I got to figure this out. You can tell how successful in entrepreneur is. There's many ways. Let's say I said, Sam, I'm going to give you an hour locked in a room with this entrepreneur.

You have to figure out if they're going to be successful or not or how successful they're going to be. And there's many questions you could ask them. There's many ways you could quiz them to try to see if they're good or bad. but one signal that just really never fails, if you go to their videos, their pictures section, and you go look at some of the titles and thumbnails for some of their things, it's exactly what you talked about.

And people who do this, these people never lose. So here's the first one. Because they don't give a shit. Girl sent selfies to her boss and that she's looking like worried. Next one. Gender reveal went wrong, question mark. Third one, right? Like grandpa in the gym.

da-da-da-da-nailed it. And it's like, these are things that human nature must click and must watch to find out how the payoff is. And this is like universally broadly appealing content, right? People love to see the heartwarming thing or the gossipy thing or the like, you know, the major screw up in some high-stakes situation. Those are things that people have to watch. And you know that if somebody is creating content like this, it's just a matter of

time until they create a product that goes mainstream because they understand what makes people tick and what's going to get the click and what's going to get the conversion and eventually they'll stop making silly videos or they'll stop writing funny tweets or posting on a meme Instagram page and they'll work on a bigger product and I see this all the time. I see this with younger people, but just in general, if you're running that goofy, you know, like a TikTok account that's going viral. It makes no money, but you figured out how to get people to watch your videos, what makes people click. Eventually, that's the same person that's going to have that really successful D2C brand or create that app that goes to the top of the charts because they just get it

when it comes to human nature. Well, I remember when I first started the hustle. We got 50,000 subscribers in a short amount of time, and Tim Chen was the founder of NerdWallet. NerdWallets now publicly traded company. They write articles for the best credit card or whatever. And he was like, hey, I want to invest. And I'm like, you don't even, I was like, dude, I don't even know like how we're going to make money. And he was like, well, look, I know enough to know that if you're good at getting an audience, making money off that is actually easier. And I was like, what? What are you talking about?

Like, this wasn't that hard to do. He's like, well, it's hard for many people. And Nerdwalt is kind of that answer where it took them three years to get to like, I think, $5 million or something like that in revenue. But in year four, they got to like $30 million in revenue. because it took them three years to rank in Google for people searching best credit card. It's one of the hardest terms to rank for. And now as I've grown and I've understood this, that if you can get an audience and you can get eyeballs, as long as they're, ideally, it's a math equation where it's like you want, it's like a,

the equation would be like values equals the amount of influence you have over them times their spending power multiplied by the amount they're willing to spend. If you can maximize that equation, you can build a big business and actually making the product oftentimes is easier than getting the audience. 100%. And people who understand how to get an audience,

they're going to win. It's the same way that when I meet people who are elite at a video game, like a worldwide video game, it's just a matter of time until they're fatigued of that game and they decide to play the next game called business. And guess what?

The same willingness to grind, ability to figure out the meta strategy, ability to coordinate and collaborate with their team and communicate at very fast speed. That's all going to work once they just pick a different game. So it's like, you know, that or the sneaker flippers, the eBay flippers. You know, when we started this podcast, it's called My First Million,

I was interviewing people, how'd you make your first million? And one of the things I was asked them, one of my favorite questions is, if I had, you know, if I was filming on a documentary of you back when you were 13, 12, 13, do you think I would have known that maybe you would go on to do such interesting things? Like, was there anything, what I have seen at that time, you were doing something unusual for a 13, 14 year old? And at first, the reaction was like, no, I was just a normal kid. But then you ask, you're like, so what were you doing for fun? And they're like, well, actually, I was, you know, my neighbor had these extra golf clubs.

And so I actually realized that you could sell them on eBay. And so I would go to old people's houses. I would knock on the door, ask if I could see their golf clubs. And I would buy their golf clubs and go flip them on eBay. You're like, okay, it's just a matter of time until you, you're not. You elevate from flipping golf clubs to whatever it is, SaaS software, whatever the next, the bigger game is.

But that's like such a high, like likelihood of success are so highly correlated with, with success for people who have that background. All right. Let me, can I go, can I give you one more? We're going to do one more,

a little small business one. Yeah, let's do it. All right. So go to this website. It's dumpster enterprises. com. All right.

So. Should I, is this not safe for work? Okay, here we go. It's safe. It's exactly what it sounds like. So this guy joined Hampton, and I saw that his company was called dumpster Enterprises. And I was like, dude, what the hell is this? Tell me everything about this.

And so I was like, we're on the record. I want to talk about this in the pod. So whatever you tell me, is that okay? He's like, yeah, I would love to do it. So I got his permission. And so this guy named Ian, his background is basically that he learned a little bit about SEO and web design. and he started making just a handful of how to make money websites.

And it was like, oh, this is all kind of only going okay. And so he like randomly met this guy because he was trying to rent, this guy Ian was trying to rent a dumpster. And he started like looking up the best like vendors to find in order to bring like a dumpster to his house. We're talking like dumpsters when you move. Like you want a little bit of a bigger dumpster that you keep for like two weeks. And he meets this guy and he's like, dude, I don't know how to do any of this SEO stuff.

but I know all these vendors that are similar to me. And this guy's Ian like, well, can I have the vendors and maybe we can work out a deal where I'll like pay you for like giving me this vendor list? And so he does that. And so after two years, he builds this website called dumpsterenterprises.com. And if you scroll down to the, our notes document, this guy was pretty crazy.

He gave me his full P&L for 2023. And I was like, can I read this? He's like, yeah, I don't care. So he gave me his full P&L. So in the year two of the business, he did $2.1 million in revenue. And the way that the business works is he ranks a little bit on search. And I would have to, we could look through the P&L, but we could probably figure this out. It looks like he only spent $26,000 in advertising and marketing.

So he's not spending that much money on ads, but some money in ads. And so he did $2.1 million in revenue. And the way his business works is you type in which is area code or zip code. You need a dumpster in. And then he forwards that lead to a handful of vendors or dumpster providers that he is vetted. They pay him, let's say, $100 for that lead. He's able to profit 50 because that's how much it costs him to get the leads. And he made about, it looks like he paid himself, but the business also made about $280,000 in profit.

And he was like, this is a business. It didn't take me a long time to set up. He goes, I work a few hours a day and I travel a lot. And it's like it's kind of a business that's been on cruise control a little bit. But I saw this and I was like, dude, there's a freaking business built in every niche that I never even would have thought. And so this is like a little example. People in our YouTube comments criticized us for talking about like big companies, billion dollar, $100 million companies. I wanted to give an example of an interesting small business.

We've done that twice, Smithy Home Couture and now dumpster rental enterprises. This is super cool. a good blueprint, by the way. We've seen this now several times here as we've been doing the pod, which is you take a industry that is well established and local, like it could be dumpster rentals, it could be road painting or parking lot painting, it could be senior living facilities where they need customers, but the typical owner of those businesses knows nothing about SEO or SEM. And if you just say, cool, I'll create the website that just does the lead gen for, for whatever it is.

And you're like, I'll bid all the Google keywords. I'll create the easy to use website. I'll grab the customer contact info. And then I will pass you the lead and you're going to pay me some fixed amount per lead. That's just a blueprint we've seen work over and over again. And it works even better the higher the ticket. Right. So like senior living, for example, the people who people will end up spending hundreds of

thousands in rent over, you know, a three or four year time period of renting a bed in a facility or pool construction. It's like a $30,000 project or something like that. We had a friend. You and I had a friend, or I don't know if you knew him, Dave Grossblatt. He had swimming pool quotes.com, and he was making $2 million a year and it was basically like he only made his money four months out of the year. And so the other months he would just chill.

Without having to do the swimming pool stuff, right? He's not actually going and doing the thing, right? It's like the biggest taxi in the company. Taxi company in the world owns no taxis. The biggest hotel company in the world owns no hotels like Airbnb or Uber. Well, the medium, the medium size. The most medium-sized pool mogul. Oh, it makes no pools, builds no pools.

And so, you know, high ticket. And then if that, how old school that industry is? So how much of it is mom and pop operators who don't know how to do Google ads and don't know how to do SEO? That arbitrage right there is like such a formula for a $5, $10 million business that you can build by yourself working, you know, it's a very good lifestyle business. It's not hard work. You don't need a big team.

You don't need a lot of funding. You don't need any of that. But sometimes they can be huge. So I've been doing research in this industry for a long time because I was obsessed with trucking. I talked about a ton. I almost went into that business. And there was a bunch of people who are doing it for trucking.

Meaning the trucking industry. The hiring truckers, right? Yeah. So the trucking industry has a huge short. There's a shortage of people who have their commercial driver's license. And so if you can get someone who has their commercial driver's license and send them to a trucking company, they give you this massive. finder's fee. But the biggest industry that I found that this works in is lawyers.

So I found there's like a site called like superloyers.com that's owned by Thomas Reuters, a huge multi-billion dollar, tens of billions of dollar company. But there was like a lot of the early web 1.0 businesses that I looked up were affiliates or lead gen businesses for lawyers. Because if you look at what the most expensive, and this is how you know it's a big industry, you can just go to Google keyword finder. I forget what it's called now, but it used to be called keyword finder. You could type in the word lawyer, and it will tell you how much you have to pay in order to get a click from Google for the word lawyer. Now, if you type in something even crazier, like mesophiliaoma lawyer, it's like $1,000 a click, meaning only 5% of those will close.

So this company's having to spend, I can't do that math because I'm an idiot, tens of thousands of dollars in order to acquire a client who wants to sue someone or whatever for mesophilioma issues. It has the highest cost per click I've seen is lawyer-related. And I've seen multiple of these lead-gen companies for lawyers that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue. Lead-gen, yeah, incredible business blueprint that really if you just have one skill, you just need to figure out the niche to apply it. And the one skill being, you know, SEM, search engine marketing.

And how do you use that search engine marketing in a field where the people who run those businesses aren't great at it? And if you can just become great at it, it's a big winner there. I got to ask you, have you seen this Applevision Pro thing? And what do you think about this? I haven't tested it yet, but I've seen it. What do I think of it? On one hand, I have the boomer mentality of like, this is sad.

This sucks. We're all going to be in this. But on the other hand, I'm like, it's pretty sick. Like, they push the envelope. It's pretty cool. I think it's kind of cool knowing that the current version is going to be the worst version that ever comes about. And that first version is pretty, it seems pretty awesome. Pretty dope. Yeah. What do you think? One to 10, how bad do you want one? I don't want to own one.

So not at all. But nine out of ten, I want to go to the Apple store and try one. What are you? Yeah, I didn't buy one. And like, the bar for me to buy something is pretty low. Like, I'm a pretty impulse-driven person. Like, if I'm just curious, I'll just usually get something. It's not impulse by price. It's not, but like, you know, I kind of justify anything that's in, you know, trying new tech. That's kind of my, that's kind of my job to do, to do things like that. Yeah.

So I don't do that, but I've been, I have three VR headsets already sitting in the corner of my room just staring at me. Like, really, bro? You're going to get another one of these? And each one, I tried them on. I was like, wow, this is so impressive. All right. Never touched again. That's enough.

Yeah, I guess I'll put this down and never put it back on. And that's what's happening with every viewer headset. So I'm afraid that's what's going to happen with this. I did watch a bunch of the videos. I used my Oculus for hours a day

on the day that I bought it. Right. Every time I use it, I use it for four hours. It's just it was one time. Did you watch the Casey Nistat like review? So good.

So good. So good. He goes, he puts it on and he's like, I'm so excited about this. He walks around New York. And he basically goes on the subway. And he goes to Times Square.

And then he goes to like a crispy cream and he's using it and he made a great video about it, which is less like, let me review the features and be like, how good is the field of view? Is it 110 degrees the right number? He doesn't do all that. He's just like,

I actually want to just like use this for fun and go see like, you know, what it feels like. And it seems like everybody's takeaway is kind of the same, which is kind of a magical experience. You feel like you got a glimpse of the future, but it's only a glimpse. This isn't the future yet. but you see like oh okay

five years from now this thing is going to be incredible because they're going to solve all these annoying problems it's going to become lighter weight they're going to get rid of this cord that's a battery that I have to put in my pocket

while I'm using it they're going to make it so that I can see my phone while I'm using this if I want to it's going to be as small as a pair of glasses exactly and so that's pretty exciting but it did remind me of something

that I think is forget the Apple Vision pro for a second because you know whatever it's just a device there's an incredible blog post that this reminded me of. And I think that this blog post is one of, if I had a Mount Rushmore of blog posts that informed my way of thinking as an entrepreneur, this is one of them. And it's this post by Paul Buckeye, who was the creator of Gmail.

And the blog post, I think, is called, if you're great, you don't have to be good. And what he's talking about was the iPad came out. So he wrote this right the day after the iPad was an announced or released. And all of the reviews were crushing Apple being like iPad. What a what a flop. They're announcing this big deal. But this thing, it doesn't, doesn't have a keyboard, doesn't have a USB port. You can't even do this with it. You can't do this with it. And he, the guy who wrote the blog post makes a point. He goes, people said the same thing about Gmail when we first came out. And he's like, we didn't have time to do certain things. So he's like, for example, address book. He's like, we

didn't have time to build it. And so we shipped it without it. And people were just killing us. Like, oh, my God, this doesn't even have an address book. Oh, it doesn't even have this. It doesn't have this. And he's like, we thought, oh, man, we might fail because of this. He's like, but what saved us and the same thing that's going to save the iPad is that when you like, a hit product is not a hit product because it's good in every category. It's a hit product because it's amazing. It's great in one to three categories. And he's like, weird. He's like for Google. for Gmail, we were like, cool, we're going to do, I don't remember what they were exactly, but I think it was like unlimited storage or like just like 10x more storage than the previous

email provider, well, the Hotmail was given you. Like, Hotmail was given you 20 megabytes. These guys were given you like, you know, two gigabytes. He's like, the second thing was super fast search. So you could find any email. So he's like, even though we didn't have your address book, if you just typed in somebody's name, you'd immediately find the last email from them and that you could just use that email, you know, to, to.

contact them again. He's like, and the last thing was like threaded conversations. He's like, you know, basically the ability for each email not to just be its own thing, but like every reply in one email thread, you can just see it all together. And he's like, we just wanted to be great at those three things. And we delivered, we were great at those three things. And it worked, even though we were missing these things that the experts all told us, we, you know, we would get slammed for. He's like, the iPad is the same way. He goes, the iPad does not have those ports. It doesn't have the USB. You can't connect a keyboard. You can't do all this right now. he's like, you know what it's amazing at?

It is great in that if you turn on your computer, it takes like a minute and a half to get to like being able to use a computer. Like it has to boot up and has to go to the login. He's like with an iPad, you literally click the button and it's ready for you to use. Instantaneous. He's like, number two, it's great for watching videos on your couch. It's like you can't, it's not super good for productivity right now. But man, is it amazing just to be able to walk around with the screen that you can watch

videos on? He's like, it's 10x better than the previous way. And so I kind of, when I looked at this Applevision pro, there was a bunch of people that were like, oh, it can't do this and it can't do that. And what I've learned is, don't discount something because of those like kind of those limitations. Like basically fine. Does it have any extreme strengths? Because if it has a couple of extreme strengths, it's actually going to be a winner. Well, does it?

There's this one ad that I think shows one of the extreme strengths. Watch that ad for a second. Yeah, it's awesome. So basically you see everyone else on their iPhone on a small screen and then they On an airplane. On an airplane. It's a panning across the rows on an airplane. And then you see a guy with the Apple Vision Pro and it's at, you see what he's seeing and it's

a movie theater. He's watching a Napoleon and it looks like he's in movie theater where everyone else is looking at a little three inch screen. Exactly. And so you think about what is this thing great at? Because that's the signals of like, is this going to work? Is this the future or is it not? I think one that you can identify is the ability to like,

why would you ever go to a movie theater if you had one of these, really? Because you can have an even better than movie theater experience. You're at home. It's a full screen. Like everything you can see is the screen. And even better you can like actually like change the surroundings. You could be in the jungle with the theater or you could be on,

or you know, in this case, you could be sitting on an airplane and have the theater come to you. Are you imagining somebody in a jungle? What I meant with that was like, you can change the scenery behind in the video thing. In this case, it's where he's actually sitting on an airplane where like nobody else can see what he's seeing. So it's private, which is cool. Because I hate kind of on an airplane when like you're working or whatever your type of emails. And the person next to you can just read everything.

So it's private. I sat next to a guy in the airplane and he was an old guy. And so the text on his phone was huge. Yeah. And I can see him talking to his assistant. And I can see his name. And I looked him up on Wikipedia. and it was a famous producer.

And I'm like, oh, it makes sense. This producer lives in this city where I'm leaving from. And so, like, I understood I knew all about this guy just from seeing his text messages. It's weird. So I think private video is one way that this is great. I think the second way that's great is, like, the theater experience. I think the third is like any sports or concert experience. So being able to sit courtside and watch an NBA game with this thing from home,

it's like you take a $50,000 experience that only the richest of the rich can have, and now anybody's going to be able to have it with this. And that I think is super, super cool. And I think there's a bunch of reasons why this thing is not great yet, but I think that is amazing. I'm such a neck beard that, like, Sarah wanted to go to, like, grease or something to, like, see whatever the famous stuff they have there. And I just looked it up on street view.

And I was like, got it. It's all right. Isn't that beautiful? You have your camera? Take a picture. And this would make it so much better. I'm just not going to leave my house ever again.

No, I think it's going to be cool. I don't have a need to own one yet, but the flight thing actually is pretty convincing. Yeah. And I was like, what an example of an ad. That one ad is like 15 seconds. There's no words.

There's no dialogue. And it sells the thing for you. That was the most convincing ad I've seen about this whole thing, more convincing than all the reviews. And it was 15 seconds with no words. Dude, they crush it, man. Apple crushes it on those things. All right, let me give you a quick follow-up.

So this follow-up is very, well, you'll see in a second. But basically, do you remember when we talked about U-Biom? I feel like you talk about U-Biom every fourth episode now. What's going on with U-Biom? So U-Biom, I talked about it in April of 2021. So it's been a few years. So U biom was launched, I don't actually know when. I think 2014 or so.

They started out actually as a Kickstarter and Indiegogo thing. And the whole thing was that you pay 80 bucks and you send them a piece of your poop. And they look at your poop and they tell you all about your gut, which I guess you can find illnesses through your poop. And it was started by these three people, but two of them eventually started dating and got married. Well, turns out that it was all, well, first of all, they raised from Andresen Horowitz, they raised from YC from 8 BC. So they raised in September 2018, they raised $100 million at a $600 million valuation from Y Combinator as well, from the best investors there are. Turns out, it was all a scam. And like their tests were nonsense.

And the way that it worked was basically you would send them your poop. They sent you back bullshit results, shit results, bad. results that they like weren't legit. Yeah, pun. They just completely made it up. But then what they would do is they would bill your insure $3,000. And so in doing this, they made roughly $35 million from insurance companies. So it was insurance fraud because it was a bullcrap test. And then they, the two husband and wife couples, they sold $12 million worth of their shares. Well, fast forward a few years after they raised their funding, their office gets rated by the FBI. And It turns out the whole company was a fraud.

It was one big fraud. It was nonsense. And I was curious as to what happened to the founders. I was like, man, did they get sentenced yet? Because I know that they definitely were guilty. Turns out they fled to Germany. And here's the update to the case and the story that we did in 21. They're still on the lamb.

They're international felons in Germany. They've never been caught. Totally worked. Crime does pay. They did not get in trouble. That's the update to the story. I was curious. I was like, what happened to these guys?

Where are they now? They're just chilling in Germany. For some reason, they got away with it. They're about to get like a Netflix deal on top of it. Yeah, they've completely gotten away with it. Nothing bad has happened to them. They got the money. They ran away and they're happily married.

And it worked. In love, rich, living in Europe, free. It's an extended honeymoon. They completely got away with it. Is that insane? Yeah, that's crazy. Also, I feel like Germany is not like the place I think about when I'm like they ran away and hid in some country

got away with it. It's like Germany, really Germany should be able to like, you should be able to find it. Not like, you know, some small island somewhere. Well, I was reading their Wikipedia and at the bottom of the intro, It said, like, they currently are international fugitives living in Germany, and it said they have no intention of coming back to America. Like, yeah. Duh.

Duh. Do you think, how do they know they're living in Germany still? Like, wouldn't they just leave if they're in Germany? I don't know. Maybe they're, I don't know. I don't know, but they know that they're in Germany and they've completely gotten away with it. So they've raised $100 million. They stole $35 million from insurance companies.

So we're talking $150 million close to. They know they're in Germany, and they're just chilling. They've gotten away with it. One of the most successful Indiegogo projects of all time. Is it really? Yeah. Given the outcome. Money, marriage.

Money, love, fame. Great European lifestyle. Did you see that crypto documentary on Netflix about, remember the, what was it called, what was ICO scam that these like two Brooklyn kids did in like 2020? You remember that? I didn't watch the, I know what you're talking about. I didn't watch that one. What was it called?

Or what was their scam called? I have no idea. I just saw the Netflix, like trailer. That's all I saw. I remember the scam. I've seen like 20 crypto scam movies and I'm like, I think I'm good on that category for a while. Well, we were making fun of them because we were like, no, I don't want to give my, I don't want to invest in any person who says they've got some amazing technology and

they've got perfect teeth, a red Ferrari and abs. And we were talking about this guy. And obviously, it was clearly a scam. They paid Floyd Mayweather to endorse it. They paid, what's that guy, DJ Khalid to endorse it? It was clearly a scam. And they ended- This founder of Ubiam, Jessica Richmond.

Her background, Stanford, Oxford, Google, and McKinsey. It's crazy, right? By the way, she lied about her age. So on her, like, everyone was like, dude, you're not 30. You look 50. And her weight, too. No, she completely lied about her age. It was like a known seeger in Silicon Valley at the time that this woman,

because she was, no, I know what it was. She made Forbes 30 under 30. And everyone was like, dude, you are not under 30 years old. That's hilarious. The 43-year-old on the Forbes 30-10. Yeah, she completely live. On their About Us page on the Indiago, each person has like their background, like where they went to school.

And then some people like, so for her, She's got Stanford, Oxford, Google McKinsey. But for other people, they don't have like four impressive things. They just went to undergrad and then that was it. So they just added like random taglines under them. So it's like Jennifer from customer care, cool under pressure. Yeah, no shit. Samantha, customer care.

Appetite for knowledge. Another one, hunger for fraud. Absolutely no conscience. Great at hiding. And you could like look, Google her name and you can kind of see some pictures where she's not wearing makeup and she's just like a, it's just like a normal photo that's not like a press photo. At the time of a lot of these photos, I think she was supposed to be 29 years old. And if you look at some of these like YouTube videos of her, so there's a YouTube video in 2016 of her. And I think at this time she was supposed to be like 28.

She looks 40. She could be even higher than 40. It's obviously that this woman, or it's obvious that this woman is not 28. soul. And people are like, no, you're just old. Yeah.

It's like you are an old soul. You're an old body too. You're not under 30. This is crazy. Yeah, that's a real yes and. Yes, you are an old soul.

And also. So she married the co-founder? Yeah, the guy with the beard. They like fell in love and got married. And now they're, it's like they're Bonnie and Clyde. It's just crazy.

They got away from. Hopefully you have someone who's listening to this has worked there can actually give us insight. But I looked for any type of update on this story that I could find. And everyone just says, yeah, they're just hanging out in Germany. They're just, I mean, it sounds like they're living a normal life and they completely got away with it. The haters all said it was a fraud. And the haters are right.

Shout out to the haters. Yeah, it says, listen to this. There's a headline. It says, the poop testing startup founder who lied to get on the 30 under 30 list is now officially a fugitive. Yeah. And so, like, I guess everyone knew that it was nonsense. Oh, by the way, here's her age. She's 47.

She's 47 years old. And two years before that, when she was 45, she was on Forbes 30 under 30. That's a caper, man. The husband, I mean, he just gets wrecked in this statement. It says, defense lawyers have informed the government that Richmond is suffering from a serious medical condition. And APT is her caretaker. Caretaker. It's like you go to a party for the first time with your girlfriend, and she's like,

Oh, yeah, this is my friend. Sean, my friend. And they're probably just and he's like, yeah, he's like, he's like all fucked up, man. He's shitting all over himself. He's in a wheelchair. This guy's in a horrible spot.

You guys should see this mess. He looks disgusting. I think we should do an annual update on these guys. Actually, let's mark it down the calendar. Every February 7th, we should just update still on the run. Crime still pays, I guess. It is insane. Did Sam Bankman Free get sentenced yet?

Dude, I don't know. I feel like the last thing I heard was like, oh, they just like removed five counts, like real quick, just like on a Friday news dump when other stuff was going on. It was kind of BS. Yeah,

he's, I think he's actually not going to serve a lot of time. And then Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes, how much time did she get? Was it nine? Well, she kept having babies and was like,

I can't go to jail. I'm pregnant. And they're like, ma'am, you just keep, like, you can't keep, this,

you can't have maternity leave from prison. Like, You can't just keep staying out of prison that way. And so eventually she had to go. By the way, this is hilarious. The Wall Street General Reporter described the efforts by the newspaper to track them down, believing that they live somewhere in central Berlin. And it basically says they located a building that was used for like the postal address for them.

And they were getting mail there. However, they were unable to find where they were actually living. So I think it's the building is in Germany, but that may now be where they're actually living, which would, that feels more right. That we don't know exactly where they are as they're on the run. Maybe, maybe. Who knows? But that's the update.

We're going to come back to it in a year. Dude, they should just trap her. They should do like a honeypot. They're like, okay, how do we get it? How do we get her? We need her egos. It needs to be like, we're having a contest for the like, you know, 40 under 40 Berlin. Yeah.

And it's like, they know she's going to throw her hat in the ring. She just can't resist. She's like, I need the right. this shit. Dude, I watch cops all the time. That's my favorite show. And one of the ways that they catch guys who have warrants is they mail them a thing that says, you won free Yankees tickets.

You have to come pick it up at this location. That's like a famous way to get. Have you ever seen that? Dude, they do this all the time. It's kind of the same thing. Yeah, and they'll get like, yeah. And they'll get like 30 of these guys with warrants in like a ballroom. They go, everyone, all right, you guys are all the lucky winners of the Yankees tickets.

congratulations, here they are. And then the police swarm in and arrest everyone. And they do like a, it's like a big thing. Yeah, that's what they need to do with her is a 35 and a 35 and there's going to get 34 dummies to come in to win this award and they're going to honeypot this lady. You shouldn't be allowed to lie like that, though. I mean, shouldn't be allowed to lie about winning free tickets. I'm against that. I'm all for catching these guys.

But you shouldn't be able to get someone's hopes up like that. Damn, that's harsh. You know the cops can lie about anything. Like, for example, if they're interrogating you and they're like, all right, we're going to turn off the camera. This is off the record. It's never off the record. They have got other, like, voice recorders in there. They can lie.

Police can lie about anything. Or they could say, like, we have your DNA there. They're allowed to say that. You can say anything you want. Yes, you can say anything. You'd be like, look, here's this zip, this bag. We've got a hair of yours. We found this at the crime scene.

Yeah, you can say anything you want. So they can lie to you. You can't lie to them? They can lie to you. Correct. An officer is allowed to lie. Like when you're at, when you're getting booked, they 100% can lie to you. Rough.

It's a rough role now. All right. I don't know where to end it, but that's the pod. All right, that's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.