The Pomp Podcast - #269: Dan Fleyshman Reveals the Secrets of Influencer Marketing

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Dan Fleyshman is the Founder of Elevator Studio, a social media agency that's handled celebrity & influencers campaigns for products ranging from top tier fitness & apparel brands to mobile apps like Postmates & Lyft. In this conversation, Anthony and Dan discuss the story behind the "Who's Your Daddy" brand, how Dan became the youngest CEO to take a company public, what the early days of influencer marketing entailed, how he currently assesses each social media platform, the importance of educating yourself, and why he created the 100 Million Academy to educate entrepreneurs. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com =============================== TaxBit is a refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. =============================== ~ If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, tech, and finance. Check out my newsletter by visiting pomp.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dan Fleshman is the founder of Elevator Studio, a social media agency that's handled celebrity and influencer campaigns for products ranging from top-tier fitness and apparel brands to mobile apps like Postmates and Lyft. Dan also runs one of the best charities, the Model Citizen Fund, and is generally one of the most well-connected and intelligent people I know. In this conversation, we discussed the story behind the Who's Your Daddy brand, how Dan became the youngest CEO to take a company public, what the early days of influencer marketing

entailed, how he currently assesses each social media platform, the importance of educating yourself, and why he created the 100 Million Academy to educate entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dan, and he didn't disappoint. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our two sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD or Bread. If you're building in the blockchain space, then I want everyone to know about a company called Blockset. Their goal is to enable the next wave of developers and business leaders to build amazing applications. Blockset offers accessible data from all the major chains through a single easy to use API. It acts as your hosted blockchain infrastructure and it ultimately enables high quality apps to be

built at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. Go sign up for a free developer account at Blockset.com and start building today. Blockset is built by BRD or Brett, the first wallet in the app store from 2014 and one of the largest in the space today. They've taken the architecture and knowledge they've gained over the past six years to create Blockset, a robust, reliable and strategic B2B offering for developers and enterprises. Thanks to Blockset, we can all build with crypto assets at light speed using their unified API that has data from all the major chains. See how simple it is by visiting Blockset.com. Again, Blockset.com and sign up for a free account today. Go build. Our next sponsor is Taxbit. Taxbit makes paying your

taxes super simple. They automate your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. You can easily connect your exchanges to securely sync your transactions and run them through Taxbit's tax engine. Generate a completed tax form with a single click. They were founded by tax attorneys and CPAs. Taxbit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. Get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to taxbit.com slash invite slash pomp. Again, taxbit.com slash invite slash pomp. Go check them out and get your damn taxes paid. Taxbit.com slash invite slash pomp. All right, now let's get into this episode with Dan. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions

expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Dan here with me. Super excited to do this. Dan and I've known each other for a little while now. And he may be one of the most important people on the internet. Can I say that? I think so. What's going on, man? Just working away. Absolutely. All right. Let's go through your background first, and then we can get into

all the different things that you've got going on. But just start with your background. Yeah, quick background. In high school, I trademarked the catchphrase, Who's Your Daddy? for over 300 products. Licensed it out for $9.5 million when I was 19 years old. 23 years old took it public on the stock market the next five years I don't really remember I got us into 55,000 retail stores in America just didn't sleep for half a decade after that I want another feather in my cap so I started an online poker site I put on a backpack I moved to Malta started a poker site within 10 months we're the third biggest poker brand in the world so I signed Dan Bilzerian, DJ Steve Aoki all these different characters to help build the brand and then boom

online poker shut down in America. It was called Black Friday. And so I had to figure out what the heck do I do? So I became an angel investor. And I angel invested in 36 companies since then. And I started a social media agency. And the social media agency is my day job. That's my main focus. Last year, we spent $60 million with influencers for products, brands, and mobile apps. And then my main core passion is my charity, where we make backpacks for the homeless with 150 items inside so like i told everyone at the beginning you've done a ton of shit you're uh have touched a lot of different aspects of the internet um let's go all the way back to uh who's your daddy where did that idea come from so my friend in high school he kept saying it and people

kept laughing about it or they thought it was like quirky or interesting or sexual or sports there was different meanings to it and so i just decided to put t-shirts i just decided to make some t-shirt and my older brother is like oh you should trademark that but you probably won't be able to because it's such a big name it was already a music song it's already like a thing well i went and looked it up and the trademarks were available so my attorney filed trademarks all over the world we spent like 20 grand which we didn't really have and we trademarked it and then we went to a clothing convention we wrote over a million dollars in orders at the convention and we were right next to damon john fubu started the same year we're right next to damon john

and sean john because diddy started the same year also i was like i didn't know how big they were going to be back then right and so we realized we were onto something and so we went and found a clothing manufacturer got screwed made money got screwed went through all that stuff and then got a 9.5 million dollar licensing deal with starter apparel and that kind of helped us through the roller coasters and making money losing money as kids and uh the clothing was our main focus until the energy drink that became the huge focus so we got 43 distributors 55 000 stores at what point did you realize like hey the clothing store or the clothing uh line is doing well and obviously we've got kind of multiple millions of dollars there but the energy drink

could be bigger and that's where we should go focus on so i saw a void in the market there was 900 energy drinks and they all they all taste like cough syrup nobody enjoyed it and i looked at the cooler and it was all black cans and silver cans and so i just noticed that they were all replica red bull but nobody could touch red bull because they were multi-billions in sales so i was like what if i don't make the biggest energy drink i just make the best tasting one and so i went on a hunt to find this chemist that made fruity flavors like gatorade i found this guy and we licensed the the original formula which was cranberry pineapple and he said if you do a million dollars in sales i have another one which is a green tea okay great so we did a million

sales in like seven weeks i like seriously just didn't sleep i just banged on every door went to every liquor store went to every distributor and then we got the green tea we won back-to-back flavor of the year that was the most important because on bevnet they have 900 drinks to choose from when we won that it was over i went to every retailer i was like look this is us look this is us hey we're already in 7-eleven we're already in costco and i don't really remember out of all those stores i met with ever pitching like i never asked for a sale i was just helping them fill out an order form like i was explaining that they have to carry us because of this and so i think that i don't know if it's cockiness or strength or passion whatever you want to call it i sincerely

don't remember not being able to sell it and during that time the clothing kept selling but it was kind of an afterthought because it would do a couple million bucks in revenue and the licensees were doing good overseas but the energy drink had the massive explosion yeah and then when you took the company public at 23 you were the youngest ceo to ever take company public right is that still the case or somebody beat it yet no nobody beat it yet we beat that michael dell guy by a year he got me by a couple billion but i love it and why did you take the company public or what was the idea there yeah so the investment bankers that came to us they were basically like if you want to launch an energy drink you're gonna need a little war chest to go fight with

rockstar red bull and monster and they were very right because even when we got orders you're paying on net 30 or net 60 terms hopefully usually net 90 and so costco would write us an order for 1.8 million sounds great until you got to come up with 900 000 to make it ship it two months from now and get paid a month or two later and then get reorders in between and they haven't paid you for the first order and so we always needed more and more money it was very very capital intensive and so i'm glad that we went it was a headache being public back then this was right when sarbanes-oxley started um it was a headache being public because most of the time you're spending 10 to 20 hours a week with your accountants and cfos and going through audits and self-audits

and everything um but being able to get that kind of capital i needed to be public At that time, that's what I was told. Got it. That makes sense. And then what was the fascination on the poker side? Because I know you still play poker, do a lot of charity poker stuff, but when did that start? Yeah, so my family always played poker. My uncle won a bunch of championships.

My aunt and uncle owned like a small poker room in California. My dad loved it. My mom, like it was just in the family. And so I played a lot and I started playing pretty high stakes in my 20s. And I started meeting all these big business people and celebrities and athletes. in these poker games, people I would never normally get to meet, I was meeting at these high stakes poker games. And so I started incorporating it for charity poker tournaments every year. I started doing charity poker with Steve Aoki every year. I just started incorporating

into whatever business I was doing, I added poker. So when the opportunity came to start an online poker site, same thing, I saw a void in the market, 550 sites, so a huge competition, but nobody was like the cool one. And I thought, what if I go get Dozerian, Aoki, Playboy Playmates, Poker Pros, and put them all together and make a big team and so my competitors they were doing four million and eight million dollars a day in revenue like net i mean it's crazy i started i was the little engine that could i had 2.5 million total to start a poker site and so i leveraged their audiences they all had big tv shows so i went and started playing on every tv show in the world those started playing on tv shows aoki started playing i was training models how to play poker and go

have them play on high stakes TV shows just because they're like, what the heck is this girl doing here? She's never played poker before. And so we went out there that way and I couldn't afford to outspend them. So when they made a $9 million TV show, three of the nine players were my guys wearing my company name. Got it. That's how we did the marketing. Yeah. Super, super smart. And we're really just trying to understand where is attention, right? And where are people focused and how do you kind of ride that wave? Okay. And then,

So once you're doing that, you come back to the U S and, uh, and you start, uh, the social media, uh, agency, what was the, uh, the kind of driver there? So I started buying posts from different people, but this is when social media was first getting started. We're talking 2011 and 12 when it became, you know, right after the MySpace days. Now there's some social media platforms, Twitter's just getting around. YouTube is taking off. Like this is that couple of years where we were just like, you know, we weren't all on

social media, but we knew of it. Right. and so i started buying posts but the posts were completely mispriced uh courtney kardashian could charge 75 000 for one tweet back then right 25 000 50 000 like the numbers were because we didn't know but they also would send you 180 000 clicks to your site because there wasn't much else to follow right there wasn't that many people on these platforms and so i started buying posts from influencers really really cheap because they didn't know what to sell it for so i'd pay them 100 bucks 200 bucks 500 bucks 200 bucks and then when i started doing that i was also angel investing

and so some of these brands i would say hey take 10 grand or 20 grand let's go buy a bunch of posts to post about your health product or fitness product or mobile app whatever and i just saw a big arbitrage situation where as i did that i started getting hit up by friends that owned brands that i didn't have a piece of and they were like hey can i give you 100k or 50k to go play with to do what you did for your brands and so that's when i decided to formalize an actual agency out of it and yeah the rest was history got it and early on like what was the conversations like did the influencers understand um how big they would get and kind of really realize how much value they could provide or was it more hey i want to go buy something at the store you know i

need 10 grand let me get 10 grand by posting on social media yeah they still don't really understand there's like this many that actually understand what it means to get as many eyeballs as they do um but back then actually i expect that from 2012 to 17 really that half a decade was the wild wild west it's still kind of wild west like i can still i have influencers that have five million followers that i pay the same rate as i do people with 200 000 followers because there's just differences of niche influencers versus mass appeal versus just a hot guy or hot girl like there's just different categories that an influencer that has 200 000 followers that's just talks about business finance or just talks about welding or cars

a ford would pay that person way more than they would pay a five million follower person and so i saw that back then they had no idea from 2012 to 2017 literally no idea and so i was able to just make up prices and never to take advantage of them it was just like hey i'll give you 500 bucks for this post or i'll give you two grand can you do five posts for me and i never had them say no, because it was just free money to them. They're like, we don't have much to post anyway. Yeah. And a lot of these people, my understanding is like from those early days that have become the influencers everyone knows and loves today, a lot of them are friends, right? They kind of grew up together, if you will, understanding, hey, what are you doing, right? How much are

you getting paid? How do you get more followers? All that kind of stuff, right? That's one of the biggest questions I get is how much should I charge? Still to this day, but especially for those years they just don't know like it doesn't matter if it was the kardashians a fitness influencer a beauty influencer it didn't matter nobody knew because there was no forefathers of influencers like there was no like guide in every magazine or article that came out i've never seen one out of the hundreds of articles i read never one that's even close to what the rates actually are never not even close can you tell us what the rates are so it's asking the same thing is like asking how much is a car is it a Porsche

is it a Ferrari which Ferrari there's levels to Ferrari's right there's a cheap Ferrari an expensive Ferrari a rare Ferrari so it's hard because two influencers with the exact same followers that could both have pump has 1 million this girl has 1 million their rates are still completely different you could have almost everything the same and still have completely different rates and not like by a little your rate could be 10 grand and hers is 400 bucks it's really weird and so a lot of it is just understanding what their audience is like what do they talk about and will people care some brands don't care about any of that stuff they just want eyeballs like

mcdonald's we're never going to sell more burgers it doesn't matter if you're a kylie jenner you're going to sell more burgers for them right they won't feel it nothing that they could feel when they sell billions and billions and billions of burgers right they do want more eyeballs so they would pay uh actually burger king is the best example burger king used to give me rates that were three to six hundred percent higher than they needed to pay and i would tell them very bluntly like this is way too much i don't need to pay this girl or this guy that kind of money and they didn't care they just wanted impressions and they just wanted them to think about them so i'd go to influencers that i normally give 10 grand to and i'm giving them 40 and i was like it hurt me because

i was like you could i could buy four posts for you for the same price like no no this is great and so some brands are still so slow to understand what the impressions are worth and some just want to have as much adoption or as much eyeballs as possible yeah how is the pricing work right so like one of the things that really fascinates me is kind of the difference between the brand advertising versus the direct response or actual conversion do you see more people wanting to work with influencers on the direct response side or is it just hey I want to get my brand out there I want to get those impressions sure so movie studios and music related companies they just want as many eyeballs as possible because they don't care they have a main idea of their audience

but they want everybody to come to the movie right when it comes to physical products like a fit tea or sugar bear hair or fashion nova those type of brands they want roi they want to spend a thousand bucks to do 1841 in sales and whether they break even or come close to it they're happy because they know somebody will reorder, right? If you know somebody will reorder your product three, four, five, six times a year, you're willing to break even or even lose money knowing that they're going to reorder.

If your product, you don't know they're going to reorder or it's a one-time use product, like a New York Yankees hat, they might only buy once because they'll wear that same hat for years because they love it, right? They're not going to buy six Yankees hats per year. So the New York Yankees would say,

hey, I need to spend a thousand bucks, but I need to do at least two grand or more because otherwise it's a failure. so it's thinking about how much is a person worth to them and we did campaigns for draft kings and they knew a player was worth a few hundred dollars to them so for them they could spend five hundred thousand they spent five hundred thousand dollars with me in one weekend once here's five hundred thousand just for the weekend go get dj khaled amanda cerny all these king bats get all these characters all together at the same time to post about this promotion

and it worked absolutely amazing they were ecstatic we actually did a whole nother campaign in the following week it wasn't planned because it just did so well there's other brands that say here's a hundred grand go do this wah-wah-wah because the main thing about social media is I can lead millions of horses to water I can't make them drink right your products has to be good like could be but he's getting ripped apart in the media yeah 1.8 billion dollars in financing and they don't even have what is like 800,000 downloads that's insanity okay like actual insanity and they have

household names like kevin hart and jlo like huge characters that they're just not formatting to make it feel real and they're not making it's not a social brand meaning if i watch quibi on my phone i can't share it it's really strange for somebody as smart as katzenberg and meg whitman these are very smart humans that have built up huge companies it not having a social media service be social is freaking weird yeah it's super super weird um on the influencer side like what are you seeing uh in the uh change in um kind of revenue streams right so obviously early on i think a lot of people just said wait a minute you're gonna give me money i'll post on my instagram or my twitter account that sounds like an awesome deal i'll do that i think now we've seen kind of a

shift though from that to uh more people are launching their own products their own brands kind of building companies and going more the entrepreneurship route or is that me just kind of misunderstanding what's happening so influencers that have a stable following a good following we're growing following they should have their own products meant to be what it can't just be another clothing line right like we started talentless the clothing line with scott disick millions and millions and millions of dollars revenue fantastic but he only actually posted once every week or two it's not him posting all the time it's us running paid media about him into his fans most influencers don't realize if you start another phone case company or another

sweater hoodie company it's just another product and at some point your followers you've exhausted them because if you have a million followers and you post about your hoodies every single day okay we get it after a week or two or three we got it whoever's going to buy your hoodie would have got it already right and so that gets capped the only time that makes sense for them is if actually going to run paid media to go along with it however even if it gets capped they're going to make more let's say they sold 140 000 of these hoodies and t-shirts that's more to them than what they would have made in paid posts and it's easier for them to post about because let's say they like planes if they make hoodies or sweaters with planes on them that's more relevant to them

them making more or less or the same is still worth it to them and those paid posts won't go away so they can still post for the fashion brands they can still post for a headphone company right they can still do those posts and have their brand it's critical once you have a large medium to large following to do that give a small following it's really tough yeah it's super interesting too i guess because there's kind of the traditional products that you're talking about right just hey i've got another hoodie another phone case etc versus a very specific like product audience fit. Kylie Jenner is probably the best example with the lip kit. There's a couple of others. It seems like the more people are getting sophisticated, the more opportunity there is,

but you do have to be one of the folks with a stickier, larger audience. It's not just, hey, I've got a hundred followers because you can't really build a business or a product out of that. Sure. And the other thing is it's becoming easier and easier. Shopify and ClickFunnels have made it so easy to actually spin up a real site that's actually built out for your audience that's going to convert well for you before it was like you know clicking buttons trying to figure out how to make a good website shopify and made a really great platform for that also white labeling has become so easy utilizing alibaba and utilizing these drop shipping companies and utilizing white label specialists like if you want to make a coding brand you can

just use different companies the same way that jake paul and all these characters they use different platforms there's four or five main ones that the influencers all use because they'll do same day printing or same week printing and so they didn't have to stock up big inventory because they can just say hey i'm an influencer whether they sell 120 shirts that say pomp on it or they sell 12 000 they're not dealing with that you're pomp supposed to be pomp right you're the influencer So you're supposed to make the content that you create and then have somebody else that's a specialist go sell your shirts for you, deliver them, package them, deal with customer service. So the fact that it's gotten so much easier to do it, you're seeing more and more. That's probably why you're seeing more and more influencers this last year start making products because they're just white labeling.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. And then how do the influencers work together to grow their followings, right? I think a lot of folks don't realize kind of the cooperation that goes on and the realization that, hey, one plus one can equal four or five in these scenarios. Yeah. So collaborations is one of the main ways to grow followings because the algorithm got so tough. It's actually one of the only ways to grow a rabbit, like a real true following. So what happens is the Vine stars did it best. So that's why they all lived at 1600 Vine, that building back in the days. That's where they all got famous because they all did together created content together funny content fitness content

beauty content whatever you did you would do yourself but then you would also collaborate with other influencers in your field some of them did crossovers so some of them were like hey i'm a funny influencer you're a beauty influencer let's make a funny beauty video and we leverage each other's audiences and so that happened a lot it's most critical to do when you're in a niche If you're a fitness influencer, a beauty influencer in the car space, if you're in the car space and you do stuff with other people in the car space, those followings are going to interact and want to follow you. Anybody following a chef, if you're a chef and the three or four of you cook together on Sunday nights, you guys are going to gain followings together. Those collaborations are the key, most critical way to grow followings. Yeah.

And I guess really what ends up happening is they become friends over time, right? Because really you see a lot of the quote unquote influencers all hanging out together. This is no different than if you go to the podcast world where you've got kind of like the intellectual dark web, right? Where it's a loose collection of folks who all have podcasts that all go on each other's podcasts, et cetera. And then you also go to even like old school, right? All the CEOs would hang out together, et cetera.

Like this has happened just in multiple forms. And now it's kind of appearing on social media, if you will. Yes. and you'll also notice that certain celebrities are really leveraging it so you'll see somebody like a kevin hart or steve aoki or the rock they'll actually go out and interact with these influencers like kevin hart and david dobrik will make a video together steve aoki and marshmallow and an influencer and uh let's get the kid from fortnite they'll they'll all start making content together and all of a sudden they go through the roof because they're leveraging each other

audiences but kevin hart's not an influencer from the social media sense even though he has a huge social media following he's an a-list celebrity same with the rock same with aoki same with marshmallow what they'll do is they'll go get a david dobrik or a jake paul or an amanda cerny and make content with them and now everybody's happy because the influencers they die to want to be on tv right that is the ultimate goal even though a tv show only has 700 000 views and their social following post one post to get them 12 million views that is the end goal getting on the big screen whether it's tv netflix or a movie is all they care about vice versa the rocks and the kevin hearts of the world they want these influencers to post with them to gain them more

following to sell more tickets to their shows everybody wins but it's just like rappers want to be nba players and nba players want to be rappers the same concepts influencers want to be movie stars movie stars want to have influencer type engagement yeah why do the influencers want to get on television or movies so badly if they actually get less views there is it just the legitimacy of it yeah it is like i can't explain how passionate they are how many castings they go to the amount of hours and time and energy they put they'll be in my office for sometimes six hours reading a script to go to a casting that they know they're not going to get but they go through this whole process and they'll go to 40 or 50 castings to get that one thing if ever and

when it happens even when the show becomes out that's not anywhere near as big as one post that they could do or how much money they make from their posts that just adds to them so much credibility and so much there's so much passion behind it i really can't explain it's intense like they want it so bad yeah that's awesome speaking of passion uh one of the things that many people I think now have come to realize that you do is you've got this massive charity. So maybe describe a little bit about what you guys are doing with the backpacks and kind of how that works. Yeah. So this is our eighth year. It's called Model Citizen Fund. We make backpacks with 150 emergency supplies inside, but it's a 0% charity, meaning I cover a hundred percent of

costs, expenses, payroll, marketing events, everything, not a penny goes to anything but the backpacks. And that's how it's going to be forever. So with that, what we do is we ship to emergency disaster situations like Puerto Rico happens earthquake in Mexico happens we're there within a day or two like we are able to ship right away because we don't have the red tape but our main day-to-day is we ship to homeless shelters or we go out ourselves so we'll ship to homeless shelters teen abuse shelters and women abuse shelters that's kind of like our mainstay mostly on the west coast and then we'll do a bit in New York Miami Chicago and then

we'll ship to orphanages overseas Tijuana El Salvador etc but basically it's just a backpack with 14 pounds of supplies 150 items half food and drinks and the other half is like duct tape or watch books sleeping bag poncho stuff like that got it and and is the thought process that the supplies that are in there are obviously things one the recipient recipient doesn't have but two are kind of everyday items that could be useful essentially it yes so it's mainly some of those things are only going to last them a few weeks some of them will last them for years so it's not going to change their life forever it's a more of a band-aid and then some things in there like the sleeping bag the backpack itself those things will last them for

longer got it and the uh the events that you do to raise money are not uh exactly your your grandfather's charity event right so maybe talk a little bit about some of the uh the poker events that you've done on the charity side and some of the other things you've done yeah so the charity poker events are our main thing that we like to do we do four of those a year and we like to bring in different celebrities and actors and rappers and athletes to those because it gets the my rich friends if you will to want to donate more because of the scene so we create a big fun scene for them we make it easy um we're able to raise six figures per event pretty easily because everybody gets excited to be in the room with these other characters and we've done that like 30 or 40

times now we've done those a lot four times a year for eight years and then a couple times a year we'll do it for somebody else so for example steve aoki will throw his charity poker tournament to help raise money for his charity um or we'll send a bunch of players to arnold schwarzenegger's charity we'll send players to other people's charity poker tournaments just to support them for their charities as well and then once a year twice a year we'll do some big blowout like we did the world's largest pizza festival we brought in taiga two chains with califa and had this big event for charity um so we'll do sometimes big blowout things for charity as well and then four times a year uh we do it with another charity called trina's kids where we'll do a back to

school drive uh thanksgiving food drive report card day and a toy drive and we'll bring a bunch of influencers it's a lot of influencers that i named they actually come every single time and they'll support it we have these 400 families that bring all their kids and the same families for the last five years and every every year we do those four events a year to help those 400 families yeah and it's pretty cool too because not only are you getting the kind of a-list celebrities and the musicians and all of them involved you're getting in the influencers and then what you naturally see is you see people who aren't influencers celebrities also wanting to participate some of it for the social proof of uh participating some of it because they actually

care about the cause uh and some of it just because that they think that it's uh you know something worthwhile it makes them feel good yep absolutely the reason i post about it so much is i want other people to go replicate it i don't care if they donate to me because for me anybody can go make a backpack in their own city with 10 items or 3 000 items they can replicate what i'm doing. So I don't need them to donate to me. I want them to go do stuff. Go feed people or go do a school event or go do a back to school event. Go do your own thing. Like I post about it so much that I want people to go do it. I don't really solicit funds. It's very rare. I think I've asked three times in eight years to actually donate. And that was only because of like Puerto

Rico. I was like, Hey, I'll put up a kind of, I'll put up a couple hundred grand, but I want to go get way more. You guys, you know, or the Mexico city thing. I was like, Hey, I'll put up a hundred grand, but can you guys do more? Outside of that, I don't really raise money from people for my charity. I really want them, I raise awareness for charities to go replicate it. Yeah. Super cool. Um, speaking of awareness, uh, the various social platforms have, uh, really changed over the years, right? Uh, where are you seeing most of the content being created and then kind of, how do you, are you talking right now with, uh, whether it's entrepreneurs or, uh, or influencers about building the brand and building out their audiences? Sure. So each one has a different,

I don't want to call it niche, but a different reason for it. So Twitter is like a news feed. Twitter is where you go if you want to hear Trump yell about something, you want to find out what's going on in the financial markets, you want to see sports, or you want to see things. Twitter is like that fast fix, and it's really more news-oriented, information-oriented. Facebook is for the masses.

Facebook is where you're going to get your best way to spread out to the masses, but mostly if you're going to spend money, because they're restricting the reach there. So if you're spending money, Facebook is fantastic. uh linkedin has become amazing because now likes comments shares if i get 8 000 20 000 12 000 views on something that's worth way more to me than 20 000 on instagram obviously because that's the masses versus all business people on linkedin you know everybody on there has a job wants a job has a career owns a company just got fired just got hired as an investor you know that in the

business world there's no 13 year olds on linkedin and so linkedin is fantastic because they finally made it with photos videos and shareable um youtube is for long form content so you got to be a really good creator to do youtube you can't just do a phone video and post on youtube you can but it's just not going to have that much traction or feel to it youtube is much more produced it's really good for long form content and what i call evergreen content that you can make a video now that's still relevant four years from now or 10 years from now so if you're in the real estate space you make videos about short selling or VA loans or whatever those things flipping a house is still irrelevant 10 years from now

Instagram is the most emotional that's the one that you want to create your content for and then repurpose that same video or photo on the other platforms if you make your content for Instagram or Facebook that'll make it easier for you to post on Twitter Facebook etc your Instagram video or your photo so a lot of times people get overwhelmed when they hear me talk about a half a dozen and platforms you really need to make your content for one or two platforms just repurpose it on the ones that are relevant you're not going to post a funny video on linkedin but anything business related post there on twitter you can post anything on facebook post anything and the last platform

that really matters is tiktok so tiktok became all the rage this last year they spent a couple hundred million dollars with all a bunch of my friends and our agencies to get them celebrities posting the cause is huge snowball was turned into an avalanche and now it's just unstoppable um the reason is they're the only platform that allows you to share to all the other platforms and it's connected to everything and if anything is doing well on there sometimes it can go crazy like my wife made a video when she had 2 000 followers got 1.6 million views and it was just her touching a wall that was it and so i've got videos that are business videos that are getting 200 300 400 000 views on a video half a dozen times now i don't have a large tiktok following

but every so often it's like 3,000 views 12,000 views 8,000 a quarter million 10,000 15,000 400,000 and so that can't happen on any other platform it just doesn't you don't have that situation unless something goes viral on twitter which is once in a blue moon so tiktok actually allows you to go viral if you will by just doing things right make good content use the right hashtags yeah and do you feel like most of these content creators are trying to be relevant on every platform or do you see them kind of picking one platform dominating that and then maybe adding another and kind of methodically going through it in a sequential way or is it just like be everywhere all the time from day one so i recommend them all to be omnipresence i recommend them to be

on every platform very few are most of them are focused on one platform and maybe two and they're really all in on that one platform like i love instagram or i love youtube youtube influencers literally nicknamed a youtube influencer they should just be an influencer we all call them youtube influencers right and so same thing with tiktok if somebody's huge on tiktok we don't call them a social media influencer we call them a tiktok influencer and so because of that they're missing out on what could happen or should happen meaning what if tiktok goes away or what if trump says you know what no more tiktok they have this crazy situation with china done we're done with TikTok. What do you do if you're a 17 year old kid with 16 million followers on TikTok and you

only have a couple thousand everywhere else? And so I'm very huge proponent of, hey, you built up a big TikTok or YouTube or whatever, cross promote, get your other platforms going. You're not going to get as big on the other platforms, but you need to have a base. Because what if? We don't know. We don't know if Instagram goes away one day or Facebook goes away one day or TikTok goes away one day it's unlikely right facebook and instagram zuckerberg's too young and too rich why would it ever go away it's never going to get acquired but we don't know we didn't expect our whole world to get shut down over over this corona thing so like we don't know what could happen in the world so it's dangerous to be only on one platform yeah well and the vine stars saw this right where

basically vine was here that a bunch of them built up their audiences and it disappeared but many of them were able to cross out and kind of go under the platforms build an audience but many of them also didn't make it, right? No, I know a lot of them that didn't make it. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about 100 Million Academy and kind of what you're doing there and also the mastermind that you held recently. Let's start with the mastermind because I think that a lot of people I spoke with that either went to it or participated in it, they were just blown away by the quality of the event and the amount of knowledge and value that was shared. So let me tell us a little bit about what it was and kind of how you set it up.

so 100 million mastermind experience was a hundred thousand dollars per person so it's one of the most expensive masterminds in the world and if i was going to create something that expensive i had to make it like holy shit like this is a crazy level event but also not just from the celebrity side but actual content in it so what i did was i signed 22 instructors to annual contract to be the instructors the requirement was that either do over 100 million revenue spend over 100 million ads or been seen by over 100 million people. So those were the 22 instructors. So it wasn't just about me and my partner as the instructors, because most masterminds, it's all about the one or two founders and everybody else is a guest. So I assigned these instructors to actually have

to come the whole year. My partner, Joe Marion, he's got one of the biggest email lists in the world, 19 million person email list, $700 million supplement company. And so I wanted him as my partner because one, the business acumen he has, but two, he had that passion and belief with people and he liked to create these large scale events. And so we said, okay, if we're going to charge people this huge premium, $100,000 per person, how and why? And so we went out and sought after, we're going to make these weekends multi-million dollars. We spent $2.1 million in three days for our first opening weekend to put on a show. We brought in Mark Wahlberg, Nick Cannon, taiga chris tucker chris jenner magic johnson charles barkley dennis rodman all these characters

that were across different segments the ceo of sarok the owner of beauty con all different types of characters to teach amanda cerny right so it's influencers celebrities actors athletes all in one weekend and in between there we had different speakers so we had the wolf of wall street marcus the monist from the prophet uh jim quick the memory coach we had carl lens a celebrity uh preacher he's like justin bieber's preacher and he was one of the best features of the whole thing so we try to hit every check mark of like hey we have a preacher we have marcus the monist from cnbc we have the wolf of wall street like you have all different characters throughout the whole weekend and so that's where it all came from it was like we're going to make this super

high level event but we had to make sure that people paying this kind of money we have to make sure it's overwhelming for them and that's where the 100 million academy came from was well we only can have 100 people at these events right there's 100 people we sold out for so i wanted something that we can make for the masses so we made it 100 bucks a month and 100 bucks a month it's the same 22 instructors plus we filmed hundreds of hours of content with other instructors so we'll invite somebody like pump and say hey can you come on here will you come teach us about business finance and explain to us and we'll film with you for three or four hours then we'll go get this instructor to talk about cannabis this instructor to talk about email marketing this instructor to

talk about social media well we brought on all these people that all teach for three or four hours each and we have hundreds of hours of content now and then the difference is we're actually going live every single day of the week with a different instructor and so they're not just getting the hundreds of hours of content from the past or active content we keep updating but literally every single day at 6 p.m we're going live and i'm giving away bitcoin cash every single night i'm like hey what's your bitcoin hey what's your cash app code hey what's i'm just giving away cash and prizes every night with a different instructor yeah and so what's the thought process behind the types of instructors you bring on the live versus that you would record

uh kind of the more evergreen content with sure so the 22 instructors those are people that are part of the mastermind itself the ones that are coming on for the live are both so all 22 of them jump on the lives but in between there like last night we had the guy who owns 28 locations of ever bowl the acai chain tonight we have a girl she has six million a year clothing sales and she's one of the members of a different group so we're trying to make it different where you're going to get all the people that do the 100 million plus but you're also going to get these a guy with 10 million dollars retail chain a lady with six million dollar clothing brand so we're trying to get all of the above but we're not taking on anybody that doesn't have at least

mid-seven figures or higher in revenue because we want to make sure that it's all people that you really can like dive into and believe and not wonder if they should be listening to them that's kind of our vending process is that we know them we know they're doing real revenue and they're going to be helpful to our students yeah and all of this really i think kind of comes down to your belief of just like everyone needs to educate themselves right they're not going to get a lot of this education in uh school so maybe talk a little bit about that yeah so i think it's going to be a huge we're going to come back to a new world like colleges were already like a big thing you'd always hear about mark cuban a lot of characters were talking about colleges being so

expensive and unrealistic and huge college debt the debt became so unreal right now a lot of these colleges will just not reopen or they're gonna have much lower attendance because parents are realizing like whoa i'm paying 40 grand for this place but she's been learning on zoom every day just fine and maybe i don't need that now the ivy leagues are never going to go away because as parents, you're going to still want Harvard, Yale on your son or daughter's resume, right? However, I just believe that I want to learn from somebody that's done it or like really, really done it. And no offense to most instructors, but they haven't built a hundred million dollar company. And there's a big difference in talking about it and reading

history books and actually being somebody that did 148 million revenue or did 600 million protein sales, right? And so I wanted both, meaning I still like the traditional forms that you can learn from school. And I wanted to structure it in a way that somebody that did 600 million in protein or 20 million email lists or 100 million in cannabis could teach it in a way that we could learn easily and realistically. Yeah. And then what type of students are you seeing that actually are coming in and wanting to learn this? Is this people who are replacing college? Is this people kind of out of school who actually have started a company? What do you see there? Yeah. So I actually have a lot of adults. We have a lot of people that have a business,

they're an entrepreneur they own three restaurants they own a dry cleaner they have accountants and lawyers and doctors um they have a lot of adults on there i want i want college kids age and above it's not not to say that high school kids and young adults can't watch it but really our content is for somebody that's got a business or wants to expand their business or they're an influencer or they're somebody that built up a podcast they want to learn how to expand it it's somebody that has entrepreneurial wants and needs um but i say right now a lot of our members are actually older than i expected yeah it's super cool um and then any main takeaways that you've seen so far as kind of you guys have started creating the content and seeing how students are reacting from it and anything

that you've either surprised you or it's been a main takeaway yeah the main comments we get is how practical it is because they're actually using it so i'm like comments this morning i'm sending the group chat somebody said hey my email open rate went from like whatever the number was four percent to nine percent and just because i did this this and this then somebody else in the same hour said hey i had a 23 conversion on my website i changed the buy now button here just like you said and now it's 36 for eight days in a row and so we're seeing comments of just real practical stuff because again the people that are coming on teaching they're not teaching esoteric like Oh, the secret. And if you close your eyes and hope, you know, the secret is going to make it

come six months from now, we'll talk about really very practical things. And that's what I'm getting the most response about. Yeah. I love that. Um, what's your advice right now for somebody who, uh, who's usually probably a little bit younger and they say, Hey, I actually want to go and, uh, and become an influencer if you will. Right. So they want to, uh, be successful is what I usually hear them say. Uh, what they really mean is they want to build an audience online and whether it's to do advertising, it's to build a product, or even to one day, you know, be a teacher for a hundred million academy or something like that. What's kind of your general advice for them? My main thing I like to say is keep your day job because what happens is you need income

along the way, and you're going to create better content. If you have money, you're going to be able to just travel to more places, do more things. And so you don't need to be rich to be an influencer, but you need to have a couple of grand a month just to like cover your bases, cover your bills, make sure everything's taken care of. So you're not struggling for post to post. Too many influencers, we joke about the agency all the time. On like the 28th of the month, I get hit up by hundreds of different influencers like, hey, do you have any posts for me? Because the rent's due in three days. And this is the same influencer I paid four grand, eight grand, 15 grand the month before that I know that's not their overhead, but they spent all

their money. And so the main thing I would say is having some consistent income and having some money saved up, again, doesn't have to be a lot, just that consistency will help. It'll help free your mind for your content and what you have to really think is if you can focus on a niche you will stand out a beauty influencer is far and away the number one most engaged content most engaged influencer in the world it's not close then you drop way down and get to fitness influencers they do extremely well and then you have everybody else but from the everybody else's there's certain pockets like people that focus on cars or focus on video games or focus on certain Nip Beauty, et cetera, those people, they're going to crush it because if you had 110,000

followers and you just talk about video games, I'm going to get you a really good rate from a video game or mobile app company. If you're just 110,000 influencers and you sometimes play video games and you sometimes talk about salad and you sometimes talk about puppies, I'm not going to get you any kind of a rate. It's going to be like a couple hundred bucks. So if you can find a niche and really go for it on that niche and then build up your content on multiple platforms and find other people in the niche that you like so if you're in the beauty

space and you like these influencers try to replicate some of their type of content make it for you or the dream is go do posts with them or learn from them yeah why is the beauty segment so highly engaged compared to everything else so it's because their content starts off with them no makeup on in their rawest form talking through it with them for an hour and so because of that people as fans we believe them when you notice if you see a post and they're just the perfect pretty post their engagement it's very different when they do a post and they're completely raw and their bags under their eyes and they're about to do their makeup their engagement is four five six seven hundred percent higher because people believe that and so a lot of times when you even

see content and you see Gary Vee and Tai Lopez holding up their phone, right, and they're making the content just like this now, it's because that content from their phone doesn't feel like you're selling them something, right? When you see closed captioning and titles and all these graphics, it feels like a commercial or a movie. When you see them holding up their phone, you feel like you're talking to them and you don't feel like they're trying to sell you. And so you need both. You need some content that's very raw, which is why video influencers do so well, but then they show the finished product everybody loves it so whether you're a business influencer like Gary and you're making this content people feel comfortable

with you during that and then when you make yourself on stage or you have the big titles they're not scared of you because now they feel a part of you and so I would say if you can make your content feel very real when I say feel very real because it is real don't don't make it it's hard to say but like too people try to make like feel like they're sad today and then over dramatic or they say that they worked out when they didn't really work out people people can feel it yeah it almost feels like the authenticity is the is the great equalizer right absolutely that's why the kardashians are so big because we've seen them all have breakups and deaths and cheating on and this happened and that

happened and this guy left her for this and this one's dating this one like that behind the scenes is why the Kardashians are so big we felt like we've grown up with them for the last decade love them or hate them both is valuable to them yeah do you think that uh we'll see more people kind of build their audiences off these reality tv shows or is it straight to social media now so what's tough is there's just too much content available so when we grew up the real world was the real world we can name it because there wasn't any competition now there's 50 different shows on mainstream platforms that are all reality based but then there's hundreds of shows on hulu netflix apple roku this that you know like there's just too much content to choose from

when we were growing up we didn't have that many options there were just x amount of shows we can name say by the bell we knew the shows that were just like in our head in school now there's 999 channels 24 7 plus hulu netflix amazon apple disney there's just so many different things So it's just too hard. The TV side of it is really meant for credibility. Getting on a Netflix show, huge credibility, but on social media, you're going to be able to crush it way more eyeballs. Yeah. The top influencers, if you had to break down their revenue, what do you think the percentage wise advertising versus products they sell versus maybe it's television or Netflix or something like that? How do you think that revenue breaks down? Yeah. So very few of them are

actually on TV movie etc so that's really rare and even from those they're not getting paid the rates that you'd expect even though they have large followings they are getting chosen because of their social media following some of the times but they're not getting some crazy rates and there I don't think they care which is an interesting part of it however on the product side if an influencer has a large following their product revenue will crush what their paid post revenues if they have a large following because if you go sell 10,000 units of something and it's 40 bucks, that's $400,000 revenue. That's

not net, but you're going to make a hundred, 200 grand on that. It's a lot of money. That same influencer is not making six figures most of the time from their paid posts. Now other influencers, if you're talking about like a Jake Paul or Logan Paul, I mean, they're making millions and millions and millions of dollars from their paid posts, but even then their product brands are doing eight figures compared to making seven figures of paid posts. So I will always say that if you can make a product and make it scalable and make sure you ship the product and make like follow through, like it's a real product brand, like you're an actual act like a CEO, you can make way more money than your social paid posts. Yeah. What's

interesting to me is most of the products we've seen, there's very few of them that have built digital products, right? Many of them have actually built physical products. So it's the t-shirts, it's the makeup kits, it's the, you know, all the different physical products, but um maybe there's like uh i think sam harris built like a meditation app right there's a couple of people who've built digital products but not many yeah they should make games because i've watched them over and over make games number one apps or top 10 apps so many times it's crazy like app budgets i'm getting mid seven figures a year in app budgets to pay influencers but they should then make their own apps and games themselves and so what happens is they just don't

focus on it and so they'll like do a paid post for an app or they'll do a paid post for a game for me and then it does well it gets the top 10 but they don't ever i don't know why they don't go make their own because it's not that hard anymore it was hard four years ago now you want to go make a game there's all these app companies that are like hey we'll just white label this for you we already made this version of flappy birds right you know and here you go we'll call it amanda flappy and then all of a sudden that's their that's her thing it doesn't happen and i don't know why yeah yeah and i guess really once you get past the game part of the digital products there i don't know really what else they can make uh unless they have the niche right it's almost

harder if you're kind of more of a broad uh audience to actually come up with a physical or digital product versus like a sam harris the meditation app right if you were in a you know financial industry you can make maybe like a financial planning app or something like that but the niche almost feels easier to build the digital products than the uh the more broad appeal type influencer they should try to go get equity and i you know it's interesting to me because the some of these household name celebrities and big influencers should have gone and tried to get equity from these companies like you look at ashton kutcher well he got a little piece of airbnb that's a huge difference compared to most influencers or most tv stars they don't have a

piece of airbnb right where the kardashians for example i just use them as the easy example like If they had equity in an Airbnb, that would be worth more than their humongous empires, right? Would you rather have 3% of Airbnb worth X amount of billions than – because the Kylie situation is a rare one-off, right? Think about how many thousands and thousands of celebrities and thousands and thousands of influencers all have beauty brands. What she did is an anomaly, right? Why? Why was she successful and others weren't? Because that's all she cared about. she posted about it every freaking day every week and she was actually at the warehouse

she was working with with working with the manufacturer it's a very small team there's only seven or eight kids there it's not some big fancy they don't have some huge staff it's fascinating to watch because i watched it from the very beginning like it was and watch the headaches from the very beginning of how much traffic crashing their site um she was all in and too many times people just put their face on it no pun intended like they just put their face on a beauty brand and that's it and the reason that you see like a jeffree star and i mean that kid broke shopify like jeffree star what is that story so jeffree star he he partnered with like it does uh it's like 20 million views for per uh youtube video

named shane dawson so jeffree star shane dawson an odd couple if you will shane dawson does like exposés on jake paul and on different influencers and like long form they take a year to create and he makes these documentaries gets 20 million views per thing jeffree star is this very tall very flashy makeup artist covered painted on makeup he created a beauty brand doing seven eight figures revenue well shane dawson jeffree star bffs made a brand together they launched it it's on youtube you can actually watch the documentary it's pretty long but there's a couple main episodes where you can actually see the launch they broke shopify one million units they had in the warehouse think about the gamble they pre-bought one million units

they did over i think it was 60 or 70 million dollars in revenue in 24 hours wow it's hard to like say out loud like the gamble the idea the concept they like did a full national rollout with one main chain store a beauty chain store at the same time they did this launch with a million units of their kits but also they had upsells of brushes hoodies bags etc and the numbers are staggering just look up jeffree star shane dawson it'll blow your mind the numbers right yeah i mean i mean this begs the question yeah this begs the question though like is this the future of business right is it going to be now build the audience first then go build the product versus the historical model of build the product and then go find the audience right so i think

it's i think it's interesting is if you can tell the story along the way people feel more compelled and so the reason that the shane jeffrey worked was they showed the story along the way the reason highly worked was she showed her posting about all the time picking out posting like do you like red purple or blue do you like which color do you like and she's like posting asking questions people felt a part of it so by the time they came out it was it everybody wanted it they felt like they were part of the process watching it and so music artists should do that more like some of them posted the studio they should literally be posting snippets all the time for those whole that whole four months bieber did it best because he just kept posting snippets behind the scenes

showing him making the album and so when it came out it breaks all these records because people feel a part of the story people buy into the story way more than the finished product yeah i love that uh before we finish up i do some rapid fire questions uh and then you could ask me one question to end what uh what's your favorite book my favorite book is uh gosh i don't have an easy one for that i actually like thinking of rich i just like the old school classic yeah he that's uh that's easily one of my top three um what uh what's your most controversial thought when it comes to social media internet and business um people are sheep is that controversial when people don't say it everything is controversial now in 2019 20 like it's just it's a sad fact like

people are people are sheep and they believe everything and it's it's scary yeah uh what about aliens believer non-believer absolutely why i think it would be egotistical and cocky for us not to think that yeah that's uh that's fair what one question you have for me to finish up how do you do it all so you're not everywhere uh i listen uh before uh before i met polina three four years ago i didn't sleep at all uh now i actually sleep eight hours and uh somehow i get more work done so it's kind of this weird thing where when you slow down a little bit you're a little bit more intentional you can uh you can actually be more productive in some weird way rather than feeling like you're always kind of running to catch up but i don't know so far so

good. Awesome, man. I appreciate you doing this. And I think people will enjoy learning from you. And then everyone hopefully will go. So where can they subscribe to 100 Million Academy? Yeah, 100millionacademy.com. Awesome. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage. Scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to

the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.