The Pomp Podcast - #1164 Richard Ryan | Founder of Black Rifle Coffee on Product vs Distribution, Social Media Influencers, Blockchain & Web3

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Richard Ryan is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company. In this conversation, we talk about his entrepreneurial career, building mobile apps before YouTube was in the app store, how he built a media company with Verizon, all the secrets of Black Rifle Coffee, and tips to grow an audience online.  ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more.The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40.  General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Richard Ryan is a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company.

In this conversation, we talk about his entrepreneurial career, what he was doing building mobile apps before YouTube was in the app store, how he built a media company with Verizon, what are all the secrets of Black Rifle Coffee Company, and where he would be building on the internet now if he was trying to build an audience from scratch. I really enjoy talking to Richard. He's hilarious. He's got some great stories and tons of great insights. Once you get in listening to this episode, jump on Twitter and let us know what you like, what you don't like, what you agree with, and where you think that we are complete idiots.

We always appreciate the feedback, and it helps us improve these episodes for each one of you. Here is my conversation with Richard Ryan. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.

Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at CadillacCanada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility

Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for Calendar Year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli meat products for always $3.75. And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready with a whole world and more. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy. but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got richard here with me uh black rifle coffee is a fucking massive company yeah your crew's wearing a hat literally walk in people got hats on everyone loves the product uh it's a massive business now publicly traded business uh you guys went public at a multi-billion dollar valuation whole thing we'll talk about black rifle coffee in a second but you had a whole life before black rifle coffee yeah how the hell do you go from doing all these other things to actually starting black rifle what were you doing before yeah let's go down memory lane

um i moved out to los angeles uh early 2000s sorry yeah i know i was doing the typical pursuing the entertainment career out there and um for a period of time you know i was homeless living in my truck because craigslist didn't exist back then and it was really difficult to find a place in a short period of time because i flew out there relatively quick and was looking at places to stay and i was like i'll be out here in three months they're like we'll have it rented in two days so i drove out there with all my stuff and hopes and dreams and started doing stand up went to groundlings did all the comedy stuff for a while and i got really frustrated with asking permission to vent creatively yep and about 2006 youtube came around i was cast in a top 100 youtube channel doing

sketch comedy and around the same time the iphone came out 2006 2007 and started seeing the writing on the walls and so i taught myself how to program uh i was sleeping on a porch for a period of time working all these different jobs well it was it was walled up it was walled up but it was you know cheap for la it was a 400 a month porch that's not bad yeah but uh it was great i was bartending downtown i even had this uh degenerate gambler uh gc who would come in all the time and i was really good at picking college football okay i know this is really really random but i legit i worked probably eight jobs at one time okay and what were you doing in la just trying to be a comedian yeah i was just trying to do the entertainment thing all right it's hard if

you're not funny it that's true and i i am not even close i am i'm the worst i mean i remember getting my first laugh on stage i was like what is this all right so you're doing the eight jobs what do you end up doing yeah so uh i teach myself how to program you know the iphone comes out and start creating mobile apps okay and because we were doing the youtube thing at that time youtube was native to ios so you couldn't run ads on it it was like the calculator app and I was like, well, you know, this sucks. I mean, we're getting a lot of views on these videos and everything. So I started creating YouTube apps. So this was about four years before YouTube even had an app in the app store. And I was linking AdSense to content creators so that

they can monetize it. And about that time, the partner program came out. Uh, so we could see the writing on the walls that there was going to be something, a monetization mechanism downstream, but that was kind of like my claim to fame having been so early on. And that led to a great relationship with alphabet with google and youtube i came in and helped consult with the product team on various different things like what is now creator studio and a lot of the different analytics like we went over hot spots and some other things to help kind of growth hack your channel and all that fun stuff and um yeah so i didn't want to break up the band and the thing that i was doing there on the comedy channel so i went hard in the paint in a different demographic so i sat down i

was like as a branding exercise what could i do for a specific demographic i wanted to shift from that 13 to 24 female predominantly to a 18 to 45 male doing action adventure firearms explosives skydiving all this fun stuff and because my relationships with the studios i would come in i would consult for them on creative marketing strategies be it 20th century fox paramount universal so on a lot of the game developers too like ubisoft and i would help them figure out their roi because at that time hindsight's 2020 a lot of the best practices that we have like just even ads in general all that was discretionary budgets back in the day nobody really knew what they were getting from it you know they looked at tv print billboard all that stuff is more effective

than what digital was but for me i could see clearly through our demographic or key demographics on all the different channels and social platforms that there was something brewing there there was a more intimate relationship being built than that of traditional media and so from there the studios and ad agencies would be like hey do you want to help promote this product launch and if it fit with my demographic i would do it so for relativity was a good example i learned how to skydive and i And I did a halo jump, breaching with C4, went to AeroVironment. We broke down the RQ-11 Raven, the Puma, the Wasp, all these drones and everything that were incorporated in the movie. And for me, it was easy because I had this never-ending supply of movies and video games coming out.

Put my own kind of creative spin on it with slow motion footage and everything else. And ultimately, I got to where I'm at now with just short of 3 million subscribers on that and a few billion views off of that. And about 2015, a little earlier than that, Verizon wanted to launch this big Go90 initiative. I think it was a multi-billion dollar initiative that they did. And they were like one of the largest procurers of media at that time. I mean, they were buying everything, television shows and series. we launched a digital media daily editorial news brand for the heartland millennial male that's a mouthful but it was just like we we need news for that kind of 18 to 35 male yep and with a

slight conservative perspective on it now i joke i tell people like i'm libertarian short of anarchy but they wanted to they wanted to go a little bit more conservative so um that's the route we went But it was one of the fastest growing digital media brands they ever invested in. I think we got a million subscribers the first year, everything all organic because we were kind of the bastard child because we were that conservative brand in that massively blue, I guess, portfolio. But ultimately, you know, I stepped away from it in 2017 because the success of Black Rifle Coffee. What's the story there with Black Rifle? Yeah. So how does that get started?

Yeah. So of my partners, Jared, Matt, and Evan, everyone kind of had irons and other fires. Those guys were focused on transitioning from their time in military service into civilian life, and they had modes to do so with these different businesses. Jared and Matt had article 15 clothing I think they have a whiskey company and some other stuff too and Evan was doing twist rate which was a tactical instructional media company and then there was ready man which was American kind of preparedness strategy tutorials and stuff like that and evan and matt jt wanted to do a sample coffee roast profile for article 15 clothing and it sold out super super fast i think it was a thousand bags or something like that i'm i'm going to be off on the numbers but it sold out extremely fast to the point where they were like hey maybe there's something here and so and what like when you're selling those bags how much are

you selling them for usually um now we're selling them for about 16 bucks okay yeah and how much does it cost the business to actually get the bag make the bag it varies and so that was that was some of the challenges early on because we really didn't know what volume was going to be and that is for a cpg company hard extremely hard not knowing how and when to turn those dials our first year i did 350 million views on my content promoting the brand and that's through verizon so in my contract with Verizon, I had that I could promote my own brands, which is great because it was on their dime. And they were happy with it because I brought all my friends, all of my talent into that network to help this symbiotic relationship grow, which ultimately led to

them having the fastest growing digital brand they ever invested in. So for us, 350 million organic by me alone. Matt, he had a killer Facebook page. He was doing these rap videos and stuff like that that really related to just everybody. It was hilarious stuff. But the organic traffic alone in our first year, most people would kill for. I mean, you break that down in a CPM, a startup, most people can't afford that. And so for us, it became this challenge in trying to figure out really how to turn those dials because you get a viral video and you only have enough supply for 10,000 customers, you're going to get a lot of customer service inquiries, a lot of pissed off people that, you know, they're really frustrated with not being able to get their

product because it's taken a month or whatever. So for us, it became this challenge and hats off to Evan. The dude is just a phenomenal, an exceptional businessman. He like, we reinvested everything that the company made back into shoring up the supply chain. We, you know, we had to turn dials with other roasters whenever we did get those viral hits or we'd get on say fox news or something like that we'd have to lean on third parties to help us scale our roasts to be able to meet the demand so we ultimately reinvested into a roasting facility in national well manchester tennessee um and that allowed us to be able to turn the dial ourself which increased our profit margins, which today you see a lot of other coffee companies out there. Most of them are

white label. They're going to the same people we did back in the day. So their profit margins aren't going to be anywhere near what ours are. And again, hats off to Evan for really like focusing on that. And the guy's just been exceptional at what he does and hiring fast, firing fast, third parties and whatnot, and being able to scale the business. So when you think about that business, how much of it was dependent early on with the organic views from just kind of like the core group versus today it's the same thing right or have you guys gotten much smarter because i see you guys have podcasts you have tons of sponsorships like there's a bunch of stuff now going on where it almost to some degree feels like a marketing

company with a you know a coffee product and that's almost been the secret to the success is that like a fair way to think about it absolutely i mean you you can 110 say we're a media company that sells a product uh you know early on the strategy like and this isn't no secret i did this with Verizon. I did it with us. So I established a foundation. It starts with inspiration and education videos. And then there's entertainment videos or education information, then entertainment and then inspiration. So our foundation was education, be it how to make coffee in a Chemex, how to fold a Chemex coffee filter. You know, those things are intimidating to a lot of people. So we build this massive library that when people come to us, they know where the subject matter

expert on this but they also get valuable information on how to make their coffee what's the best coffee what are our coffees taste like and then when we start hitting these entertaining viral pieces of content they have this library to go to but then we work the algorithm because now youtube or whoever is seeing that oh this video is successful what about these other videos so we're going to rank higher when people are looking for coffee stuff just based off of the affiliation between our high performers. And then we switch gears into inspiration. So we shift the mission or we shift the content to our mission statement, which is far as a company's concerned, we're helping veterans transition from military service like our founders did into civilian life. But then

for our nonprofit and the company in itself, giving back to veteran and first responder communities and so having done that without organic content we wouldn't be who we are without social media black rifle coffee doesn't exist i will confidently say that now early days if anyone said that that was gonna you know be the thing that all of us were you know chips in on they'd be lying if they said that because we just didn't know back then it's just a series what's the what's saying where uh luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparedness yeah and that's exactly what it was like like like again hats off to my partners and everyone because everyone was so ready and willing to take up the mission that i don't think that anybody else could

have pulled it off like that how important was it that the product was coffee versus anything else i think it was extremely important because you look at the saturation point of specific products at the time article 15 is a great example where you had matt and jt two of my other partners they had a t-shirt company predominantly t-shirt they sold other stuff but then the market started to saturate you started getting all the all these other um veterans exiting their their military service and then they started these t-shirt companies it started to get a little saturated and like okay well what's my value proposition that somebody what's unique to it and everything for us coffee was unique i mean say what you want about starbucks but howard schultz really he was

the steve jobs at coffee he changed an industry i mean he took sugar water and made it an everyday thing like i think their their tagline is they're the third place so there's work and there's home and they're the third place um and it's true i mean you see how it's infiltrated pretty much pop culture as it is um and so now where was i going on that in terms of the coffee itself though like could you have done it with i don't know fucking body oh oh yeah yeah sorry anything else yeah so so coffee was a unique it was a unique good and that it really appealed to the culture so that key demographic of the 18 to 45 male specifically military culture because everybody is drinking caffeine via energy drinks or coffee and nobody else was doing that right so that you

had this you had this which became in that 2016 era of trump uh and the whole polarization in politics it became you know starbucks started leaning harder left and that with the immigration um you know statements and and everything else and so we became that that alternative for the military culture and and specifically like the the conservatives um and that was to our benefit because there was nobody else in that sector and does coffee like align really well with the videos and and blowing things up and like kind of like the hard charging extraordinary life you know type content is that's somebody who drinks a lot of coffee i mean you could say that but i i would argue that's just convenient okay because i've i've made the joke that

men want to be matt women want to do him it's it's just you it's hard not to like the people in the company you hang out with everyone like jared is a social butterfly like that guy he knows more people than anybody else i know like i'll i'll run into a random guy on the street and bf i don't know oklahoma i'm like oh you know jt yeah it's like like everybody knows these guys everybody wants to be them or be around them or hang out i think that's just it was a convenient thing that evan was just smart enough to really focus on optimizing the business and scaling it in a way as fast as possible and as efficient as possible how'd you guys fund it was it all self-funded it was self-funded for the most part um we brought investors in um at a couple points

for various different things the roaster um facilities um but yeah we didn't we didn't really bring in a lot of yeah and then uh the whole idea of going public a lot of people when they start a coffee company and they're like we're fucking around on the internet we're gonna sell coffee oh look it works okay that's cool oh wait hold on it's like really working at what point or like why go public yeah so that's interesting because going into covid we were positioned really well because we're a d2c company primarily and we didn't have the overhead that a lot of cpg companies had getting caught with their pants down when everything was shut down we were able to still roast still ship and get to our consumers and if anything they were they were drinking more

at home than going out and stopping at say a starbucks or a dutch bros or duncan or wherever And that worked to our benefit. But as COVID started easing up restrictions in these different areas, our focus was scaling out brick and mortar or outposts so that we could position ourselves around these military bases and larger markets strategically to get to our customers in a day to day kind of convenient way. and when you think about that experience what is like the biggest surprise through the whole thing of building that business that's whatever you just thought say that what is that what what is that what was that surprise yeah no so for me again this goes back now don't fucking bullshit me what is that okay so this goes back to the libertarian thing i like i i fall under a lot of scrutiny because i a lot of three-letter organizations like dod and atf uh i fall into their oversight uh they like you or no yeah i i don't know um i'm i'm buttoned up soup to nuts

i dot every i across every t but i just don't want another one like the sec in my life where i come on the podcast and i say something about revenue and i was like oh shit that's a forward looking statement it's like and then i have to like like i'm not elon musk i can't take like a 200 million dollar fine or something like that so i just don't like that oversight like that's i have too much oversight in my life i like to be candid yeah and i like to be as uh transparent as possible i don't like worrying about what i say that's fair yeah it's very fair all right and now you're doing other things other than just black rifle coffees. Yeah. Explain that. Yeah. So I feel fortunate in that the way I look at life is I'm a subject matter enthusiast. I've been

really good at the things that I do because I approach it as a consumer or viewer. This is what I want. And this is where I see the industry going. And for me, I've seen the writing on the wall with social, with mobile, where I see it again in blockchain. And there's an opportunity here and unfortunately there's all these people looking to extract value early days and not necessarily provide value to move the ball and i'll tell you what i mean by that is like early days mobile there were a lot of people who made millions of dollars on the flashlight app and i don't care about that i get it get your bag secure it have fun do your thing how much you guys make on the ipo hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation i wanted to

interrupt for a second to tell you about an event that we're hosting on march 4th at the miami beach Convention Center. It's called Lyceum Miami, and I've gone and asked some of the most popular guests from this show over the years to come in person at the event. It's going to be awesome. We have everyone from Cathie Wood to Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Williamson, Cody Sanchez, and many, many others. I also even have a couple of surprises for each one of you if you show up. The best part about this event is it is completely free to attend. That's right. All general admission tickets are free. You simply need to go to LyceumMiami.com. LyceumMiami.com will get you free tickets on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. And if you're a big baller and don't just want

to get a free ticket, you can also get a VIP or an insider pass. If you use the code POMP40, you'll get 40% off. They get you all kinds of cool things like the night before a cocktail with the actual speakers and a couple other perks. Go check it all out at LyceumMiami.com and use code POMP40 if you want to be a baller. I can't wait to see all of you there. Go ahead and click on the link in the description, and let's get back into this conversation. What do you have to say?

I don't know if cap tables are public or not. I assume so if it's like... Well, when you go public, yeah. Like how much do you think like the core team before or whatever made? I don't know. I don't know. I'm so reluctant to say numbers.

So I haven't said that about the flashlight app. yeah so you know public at two billion so like the four of you yeah you you did okay maybe yeah i assume so yeah you'll have to talk to my accountants but so uh the app store like apple's gonna replace that it's gonna be native right to ios i'm looking five ten years out like inventory control management via mobile device which is what we were talking about earlier with best buy most people you know now hindsight's 2020 you have the benefit of that you can say hey look you know i can go to best buy and check the inventory before i get there 15 years ago you couldn't and most people weren't thinking about that then i was i just didn't have the money to patent that process

or start building it for people uh and so i see this this opportunity and blockchain and the sins of web 2 and you know unfortunately what i'm trying to break this down for my viewers who might be listening in on this you know the early days of web 2 you know unfortunately there wasn't a payment mechanism built into the http protocol had there been we might not have taken traditional media advertising like overlays native and everything else and applied it to web 2 like youtube and everything else the unfortunate byproduct of that is you know we're we're all about a quantity we want a sheer volume of impressions because that's what gets you ads that's what gets you results so you have to tap on the nerve you got a fight or flight response

you got to be controversial you got to be angry you got to elicit uh an emotional reaction from people but i think people really just want value they don't want to be wrecked emotionally and everything so there's a lot of problems that can be solved i think in in web 3 where through incentive mechanisms monetization mechanisms if we get it right and in a permissionless way or decentralized these are i know these are a lot of buzzwords but they mean a lot and the and the implications are are vast because if you look at the gatekeepers the the apples the youtubes like their their hardware to their software like youtube as an example with the content that i would do on my YouTube channel, FullMag. Everything's legal. You will not find anyone

more buttoned up than me. I have just about every federal license and clearance that you can think of. I have permits. I have insurance. I have instructor ratings, range safety officer, all these different things. And yet still my videos will get demonetized or pulled. And it's really, really frustrating for me because what I'm doing is 100% legal. It's just by doing And so, well, you don't have the right to 100 percent distribution or reach like you can still publish it. Well, that's screwed up because I just spent 15 years of my life. And not only that, YouTube invested in my channel. I was I was part of YouTube's next step where they spent, I think it was 40 or 70 thousand dollars investing in 25 channels.

It's like, oh, OK, now you guys change the rules of the game, but I'm doing everything legally. It's just you're changing a social narrative or you're changing the distribution, which is impacting a social narrative. and it's arguably going to make those kids grow up in a world where firearms may be taboo and it's like well i disagree with that i think unless it's unless it's illegal all that stuff should be fair game like people should have a hard conversation about hard topics you shouldn't try to control that for people so i'm building a lot of products right now you know i know there's a lot of people out there like oh we'll do the guns youtube or we'll do this youtube it's like you're not going to compete with the second largest search engine you're not going to beat

them at their game there has to be a fundamental a fundamental shift in in something like a base layer that's built that people can build on top of and then they can have their own discovery and again i go back to the incentive mechanisms and the monetization mechanisms those are the key components but short term i'm working on some security products because i think that that's really important a lot of people are getting scammed a lot of people are getting phished um how bad do you think that problem is i would say it is it is 99 of all attack uh stems from some form of phishing yeah because most people they say oh i got hacked like no dude you clicked on a link here or did this like there are a few instances where higher level organizations may

have the ability to access devices remotely pion attacks and stuff like that but realistically speaking the bulk majority of consumers are getting fished now there may be some people that are getting spear fished uh where they're being specifically targeted but um that's that's it so like i'm trying to figure out ways to mitigate that and and and reduce that risk when you look kind of zoom out in the world what are like the big things that you think are important right now so obviously you guys did black rifle coffee you're focused some on the security stuff Like, what else in the world interests you right now? Yeah, it's a tough one because I'm at this point in life where I think you hit a point you probably did when you had your first child.

It's like, what does it all mean? I know it's like it's an existential crisis moment or something along those lines. But, you know, at the end of the day, if if we're just eating, sleeping, living and then dying at some point, you've got to make the world a better place. Like you've got to put a positive impact. So it starts with your family, then your community, maybe your state and then higher up. I do think people should vote third party and get away from the polarization in politics, like specifically on a local level. like i would like just play as active a role in your community as possible i don't generally talk about charitable stuff but one of the things i think have really like really really big impacts um on the day-to-day like whenever i was living in los angeles um again you know it's hard not

to get emotional it's like didn't you know i didn't have a whole lot of money yeah but i made sure I spent the time to give back so every Tuesday I go animal shelters and walk dogs because it would help with their kennel anxiety and most of the volunteers go you can walk a dog yeah so man this would like so the LA system is like it's such a process it took me almost a year to qualify because you got to apply and they approve you because they don't want people just coming and doing it for the holidays and then leaving oh interesting basically they want you to be a regular yeah and so you have to go through this whole process okay and then once you get cleared

and everything then you're good to go which it was it was really gratifying for me because again this is early days of social media but i created like the facebook page for the north valley animal shelter which was this it was one of the highest kill rate shelters in the u.s but predominantly most of their walkers were younger female and so they couldn't most of the dogs coming in are either pit bulls or chihuahuas and those have the highest euthanasia rate and so none of the pit bulls would get walked because they were just you know too big and so it was one of those things that i could i could do go there walk work with them and everything and hopefully um that made them more adoptable and relieved some of that kennel anxiety and helped a few out there along

the process but people I think they I think they think that a dollar here to this organization is great but I think your time is so much more valuable and you can make a much greater meaningful impact directly in your community than worrying about too many things abroad if your whole focus as things uh outside of your community i think you're missing an opportunity you really make a positive impact i i completely agree and i also think that a lot of people because of social media they focus on uh international or even national level issues but there's shit going on in your backyard yeah right for sure and actually there's a lot of shit going on in your backyard yeah and um i always ask people like when's the last time you watched local news

never right like who watched local news right yeah um and so when you do that you start to realize like again it's not all bad yes there's car crashes there's you know crime or whatever but also like there's somebody literally within a you know three mile radius of your of where you are that needs help or could use a helping hand or you know whatever and if you just focus on that like that's something you can actually impact what's going on in another country yeah maybe right just a little bit harder and and i would add to that too like it's not always hardship too there there's other means of giving back to your community it could be mentorship because there you know there are a lot of single parents out there and us as professionals there

may be people out there that could use some advice it could be professional advice it could be you know personal advice there's there's so many ways to have a positive impact and i think so many people are isolated even though they're so well connected and social and i think the more we start trying to find ways to interact with people in our day-to-day that's not wholly digital i think the better off will be yeah uh are there other products that you see people building or other companies that you're like wow they're really on to something they're they're absolutely killing it right now like when i just asked that like what what products or companies jump to mind as like they seem to really have figured something out

for people listening he's drinking a liquid death out of a can that's a that's a first you understand that this is the highest roi thing that they do yeah for me i don't know i'm an investor in the company and so they send all these cans and like i just like to be completely honest the only reason why i like drinking it other than we're probably making money yes people see it is uh it's in a can it's not in a bottle yes right and like every person i've talked to in the health industry is like stop drinking out of plastic bottles okay cool this is not a plastic bottle feel like i'm doing my like health kick uh but other than that what else yeah i mean then the people who are selling water hats off to them

i love them i love the hydration packets so protect is a veteran-owned company and they do these hydration packets also um sleep packets um they have like melatonin gaba in them um LMNT is another great one it's all all those things are the things that kind of have a day-to-day impact for me so it's it's hard to I don't really FOMO on many brands but I I really like what those guys are doing just because I use them on a day-to-day yeah yeah the um the other thing is I've seen more and more companies try to become media businesses so they have the products and then they go try to build the media stuff and it feels like there's a lot of people who are realizing maybe you should do it the other way is like build build the distribution and then figure

out the products chicken and the egg right because there's there's risk when you build a brand as a media company and most brands rely on personalities early on if they're going to do it that way because there needs to be a collaborative component to it typically there's exceptions to all rules but there's a risk if your key talent isn't founders owners in that yeah i don't know that's a chicken or egg they're both problems to solve for uh it's a cautionary tale for those who do do the media thing and then they try to throw a whole lot of money at it and advertising because typically what happens is they bring the wrong people in to help them advertise and their sample audiences are such a broad demographic.

If I was to give any advice to media or CPG companies or anyone that's looking to build and starting either media or product first, you've got to know your demographic. That is lesson number one. Because if you're not focused on that value proposition from day one and you start bringing the wrong people in, you're going to go into a negative either engagement or algorithmic spiral because for us, if we have an 18 to 45 U.S. male demographic

and we start serving ads up to a 65-year-old Cambodian lady, she's going to bounce really fast or she's not going to click through, whatever it is, and all of these are signals to the algorithm that she doesn't care about the content. And the more people that don't care about the content or the product, the more of an uphill battle it's going to be against getting put into search and related. and that is another lesson that a lot of people don't know it's like search related discovery

that is i would i would argue most successful creators that's going to be 50 to 70 percent of their their impressions yeah it's coming just from the search yeah or related what other platforms do you think people should be posting content on like are you long on youtube shorts on tiktok on reels on fucking something i've never heard of before man it's a that's a big one right because you have alphabet which is publicly traded and who knows what's going to happen with tiktok but you also have a potential section 230 ruling coming up january by january 30th and that has potential implications for all curators that is a that's a highly contested uh topic i guess you could say i have strong opinions about it i think that what do you think

i i think that the the platforms have been hiding behind their section 230 privileges for too long and there needs to be some changes to it also if you do away with it that takes away the search and related component to or the the recommended sorry um that has implications for the recommended content which youtube is extremely good at recommending content but also have a chip on my shoulder they don't like to recommend this stuff that i make because it's not advertiser safe or advertiser friendly i'm like well uh screw you if an advertiser spending millions of dollars a year like target and they don't know how to set exclusions for the type of content that i create that is uh 100 legal i'm sorry why should a whole industry of content

creators suffer that who have built their entire business models off of something you said was good five years ago but now the tides have shifted because it's not politically you know acceptable do you think that when they limit monetization it kills the virality and i can show you the analytics they claim they claim that's not true well they're full of shit and i can prove it like I have the data. Like fortunately for me, I can say I have a library of videos that go span 12, 15 years. And so some of my top performers are from eight years ago and they have 20, 30 million views. And the cool thing about analytics is you can see these clear spikes and dips and I get emails when they demonetize the video and there is a spike the day of straight

down and then i appeal it it gets it gets approved and we go through this whole thing and it takes weeks sometimes months and the views go from um you know i don't know let's call it a million views a month to a thousand views a month when it's demonetized and then as soon as i get it remonetized it goes back up and you could argue that something happened in the world and maybe that changed that but two of my videos they demonetized them twice and the spikes are clear you want to see something hilarious yeah this is a video that has uh 130 000 views on it right you tell me where in the video they demonetized it oh yeah no super clear super clear like what Where are we going here?

Right? You tell me where they demonetized that video. They claim that there's no impact from demonetization, but I don't know what happened. Yeah, and they'll give you some, and I totally understand it. I know a lot of people in YouTube, and I feel sorry that a lot of people get yelled at in these emails and phone calls.

I don't yell. i understand the job's hard yeah but it's still frustrating as a businessman who's who's not only youtube's invested in me but i've built my brands and like like the ego's attached to that my i feel like my soul's attached to it in some way where it's like to lose that is it i don't know i actually think if i was them i would just be like yeah when we demonetize the video or we limit the monetization distribution goes down because we don't make as much money off the video you know we would all say like i'll pay it well or i'll pay it or make sense yeah right like got it okay well let's not get demonetized i think it's the fact that people all believe i mean when you see

that right and you're like literally that exact moment is when they demonetize the video and people see that i think that they're like dude why are you guys just just say that's what's happening no i call bullshit because if it was just a monetization thing and they were worried about their advertisers screw it i have a coffee company we pay a lot of influencers for impressions i will monetize every single one of their channels we already run the shopify cart underneath our youtube videos how about you let us buy all the ad inventory of all those people you're demonetizing we'll run our ads on it give us an advantageous revenue share split on it but they won't do it so because it's on principle they don't want the distribution like they don't want that that

content to reach trending or whatever it is i'll sell the ads i don't care if you're worried about the hosting and the streaming bandwidth fuck it i'll pay for it does the shopify cart underneath the youtube ad uh youtube video work yeah of course people buy yeah yeah i mean you to be fair it takes work right and you have to have product that people actually care about a great a great strategy is if you're incorporating any type of product in a video you curate that product through the carousel on the bottom so it's easy for people to to click through on it to see it right there yeah yeah makes sense um what what other secrets or tips or tricks do you have for people who uh are trying to be on the internet this i literally people it's like people come out of

the woodwork i i don't want to say who it is but uh i recently had somebody who was an accountant uh at an accounting firm i don't use they reached out to me and they were like hey i want to become like a counting influencer person yeah and i was like why would you want to do that and they're like well because eventually i could leave maybe i could make a living just doing the content but also then i could start my own accounting firm and like they had this whole little plan and i was like sure like why not right guess what i do if i need an accountant like millions of other people around the world they google and if your content is ranking up there like you have some advantage whether it's through ads whether it's through building a business whatever sure but i was like

oh every single industry somebody's going to try to do this okay so let's break this down just off of your accountant. I love doing these kind of thought exercises with people because it's no effort for me. I have an opinion. Again, I'm a subject matter enthusiast. Take my advice with a grain of salt. Algorithms change, policies change, and what's working for people today probably won't six months from now. But having said that, for your accountant and really anyone, be consistent with your value proposition from day one. You can experiment here and there, yes, but don't fall into the trap of vanity metrics. Your ego wants you to get those vanity metrics, the likes, the comments, the views and everything else. None of that shit matters.

What matters is the people coming to consume your content care about it. That is it. Like if, if, if, if your goal is to get views, you might as well just be getting bikini models or something like that. It turned into another form of Instagram, right? You do a provocative photo or something like that, or somebody being outrageous in the thumbnail. Yeah, you'll get views, but people only buy into that for so long. And if your value proposition isn't consistent, again, let's go with your accountant here. He's starting a channel. Start creating accounting content. Don't fall into the trap of being sensational. Oh, blah, blah, blah. But be relevant in your space. Hey, I don't know what accounting thing is happening here in the world.

um you know black rock's doing this or whatever it is and and break it down for your viewers or hey here is 10 ways to save money on your taxes do collaborations he's going to have anthony over and we're going to talk about my taxes today and we're going to disclose to everybody how much you made in 2022 or whatever it is right these things these things that can help him grow but he stays in his lane and stays consistently um that that show would fucking pop if somebody if there was an accountant that created a show there i mean there are a lot and there's a no if you broke down oh people's taxes yeah especially if you start getting celebrities well and imagine again here's here's john travolta use this tax trick to avoid it's beautiful sorry i don't know anything

about john travolta i just figured he'd be no it's great but like and again i i geek out on this like i'm giving this dude a million and one suggestions i'd probably go on social blade or one of these websites and and try to forecast what a creator would make based off of impressions look and see if they had any ad deals and then maybe forecast what a production costs and like itemize and deduct and all these other different you could do like a a high level forensic for what it is like without actually having access to that stuff and people would it would probably grow. And then he could throw in these really viable, healthy hacks for people who don't have YouTube channels or whatever it is. But be consistent with that. And again, like I was

showing you earlier with hotspots and everything, he could probably find a lot of videos and ride on the coattails of it by segmenting and commenting on that stuff as a subject matter expert. The other thing I think a lot about is that's obviously a services type business that eventually could be content but the physical products i'm shocked at how many businesses that are in the physical product game do not understand how powerful the internet is like we've been doing this shit now for 20 years yeah right like like the internet works all right well content works it does but they still don't do it think about it this way though if you have a cpg company and you have distribution and it's all you need you're not d to c do you want the headache

of scaling it that way like i mean some people some people get in walmart or target and they're like i'm good i've got that like i've i've i've i've stood up this company and i've gone this path before i don't really want to deal with the headache of doing this thing i mean to each their own but if you're if you're a big brand i think that you're missing an opportunity for the longevity to not have some type of emotional fabric woven in a media narrative to kind of solidify that relationship with your your consumer when you think about um take uh somebody like mr beast right he just uh they launched a new feastable uh chocolate bar i think they're calling it these nuts yeah uh and i saw them tweet out and say uh like whoever controls the

memes controls the internet how like how do you control the memes jimmy's like it's it's weird saying it but jimmy jimmy's a beast he is the beast uh he's his own animal like i'm using all these puns but i'd use them typically in that reference but um yeah he's just a completely different different machine like the dude is yeah i like it he's he's apples and oranges in so many ways he's on such another level now that i feel like he could jump into any market as passionately as he is on everything else and just crush it like he could as long as he has the right teams to to maintain, to QC and scale, I think whatever he does. I think the average brand or entrepreneur isn't going to have that.

Yeah, of course. But how do you create or control the memes in the way that they're doing? Is it just because he's got such a big audience, he says something and it's cool? I think that's it. I mean, to be fair, what he says is relevant. What he says is funny. But a lot of other people do on the internet too,

and it doesn't catch like that. uh some people some people it's like prime you know the uh drink prime yeah you see the numbers recently no they claim they did uh i think it was logan paul my brother was tweeting about it i think it's 250 million dollars in revenue last year and i think in january they did like 40 million in revenue wow this has got to be a two three billion dollar company but where are they selling here's the crazy part talk to anybody with like a middle school child especially a middle school boy they can't find it it's sold out in all of these but is it d to c or they have distribution somewhere they have some d to c but it's it's uh it's definitely gas stations i've

seen them in gas stations interesting uh but yeah they've like gone like the traditional uh distribution path as well yeah and so like i don't care what you're you'd be selling fucking piece of paper sell 250 million dollars worth of piece of paper in a year you got a real business yeah for sure for sure props to him man props to him that is right to wow two influencers wow who like i would argue aren't just influencers right obviously these guys understand very very well how they're really smart businessmen they are lifestyle brands of themselves yeah for sure yeah yeah wow i had no clue geez so to be on pace let's call it for somewhere between 400 and 500 million dollars in revenue in 2023 for a drink business you know for for

like a beverage business coca-cola is gonna call at some point for sure and i just i you want to guess let's just put it on the record what do you think they get bought for i mean it depends i mean that like how old are they the business yeah not that old i mean definitely less than five years i mean given the market and everything i would say at least a 5x of annual right of annual revenue yeah yeah i think that they have the potential the potential five billion dollar or higher exit wow which is basically all they got to do is if they continue to grow at kind of the rate that they're growing yeah right you need another two to three years if you can basically hold on and not sell you're doing a million or a billion dollars in revenue dirty math that's what like

a 10x multiplier of like it'd be 10x from where they essentially are right now yeah give or take uh but if they can hold out for another 12 to 24 months on top of that jesus you basically get to you know close to a billion i'm sweating right now i'm just i'm thinking i'm thinking what is what is that infrastructure look like behind the scenes like how did they do this or did they just did they just work in agreement with somebody that could scale it white label it i don't know all the details but i think that somebody else had the idea started like a beverage business and then like brought them in i i believe that's true somebody will correct me if not um but yeah like it once you get to any type of scale i think people it's not like hey we came up with this

like crazy idea we don't know what we're doing and like we just happen to sell all this stuff right yeah that's the hard thing right because if for a brand to try to find influencers to bring on and kind of snowball it the risk on the influencer is little to none in that sense long as they know that they can turn the knobs and ramp up production and distribution if they if they follow through on their promise that's a great deal on their part because then they don't they're just sweat equity they're not necessarily having to even kick in any money but on the flip side for for influencers who try to build something man it is a dice roll i am so fortunate to have the partners i have like like evan just like he operationally he stepped up to the plate operationally in a way

that i don't think many people could have yeah like he he like it's there's so many ways for a business to fail especially if you're an influencer like trying to turn these dials on scaling a business it's just it's easier to have somebody who knows what they're doing and i think that's what jimmy does too i think he he probably has people reach out to him his team his network that can follow through on execution and then he gives the overall creative strategy and marketing and everything else and then they turn those aisles so when um uh when somebody asks you what do you do what do you say like are you an entrepreneur are you an investor are you a fucking influencer are you a youtuber it's hard are you an explosives expert i i struggle with

this. And so we just did this PEVC event, founder event this week. And I just tell people I'm a subject matter enthusiast. I find things that I'm really excited about and I go hard in the paint. I learn everything that I can about it and I try to be as best as I can in it. It's hard because, again, I make this joke that whenever I was in Los Angeles, people perceived me as the gun-toting redneck and when i was in nashville i was a gay love and liberal because people inherently gravitate towards the things they disagree with you on but i i it's hard because i'm also a developer i'm a marketer i'm like you know an entrepreneur you know an investor all these different things so i i'm the worst on my social media because of that it's easy for me

to define and refine a brand or an influencer but it's hard for me because i don't want to play that game. I don't want people to come to Richard Ryan on social media and only see slow motion guns or only see business advice or only see this new blockchain product. And I probably burn a lot of people whenever I talk about the thing that they're not interested in that consistent value proposition. So I read the room typically and I'm like, hey, I'm this guy. I'm the chameleon. Yeah. All right. Last question for you is I was talking to somebody recently and they were like a great exercise is 10 20 years look out and think to yourself like what does your wikipedia page say and that kind of keeps you like what's your north star for you what is your wikipedia page

not say that it will say a decade from now will not say well like what does it not have on there now so you can't you get credit for nothing you've done so far but like what does it say a decade from now well i mean regardless just happy dude because for me so i've done this thought exercise a lot in the past and i'm never never happy with who i am i am miserably competitive i i look back on myself six months let alone six years ago and i hate the guy i was like i feel like i grow so much in a short period of time and that's good like you should grow as a person you shouldn't stay stagnant in your beliefs or your knowledge and everything else but i aspire to hopefully make that person six ten years from now happy

that i am who i am now because ultimately that's the only person that's gonna matter because i don't know what the future holds so i try to live by you know my moral compass for what it is and you know decisions that i've made in my life i can look back on and i can say hey look it may not have been popular but i did it the way i thought i should and i didn't cave to either pure political or whatever pressure that may uh be against my belief system that's pretty that's pretty fucking good one yeah yeah i was gonna say like like getting uh to go public in new york and bro come on we just talked about youtube taking shit down you can cut that i don't care

where can we send people to find you on the internet yeah um really yeah anywhere anywhere it doesn't matter richard ryan on all socials twitter facebook instagram again i'm not consistent with my value propositions on there so you want to see some photos of me skydiving doing stuff it's probably on instagram talking about the world and blockchain and all that fun stuff's on twitter and like i'm just all over the place black rifle coffee.com and um full mag all these other different channels it's i love it thank you so much we'll get to do it again in the future thank you sir thanks for having me We'll be right back.