The Pomp Podcast - 340: Greg Isenberg On Building Consumer Internet Products

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Greg Isenberg is the Founder of Late Checkout and a Growth Advisor to TikTok. He previously built and sold a number of technology companies, including acquisitions by Stumbleupon and WeWork. In this conversation, we discuss businesses as vending machines, why momentum matters for social companies, working at WeWork, the no code movement, and various startup ideas that people should go build. =============================== Our second sponsor is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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://www.pompletter.com

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. Greg Eisenberg is the founder of Late Checkout and a growth advisor to TikTok. He previously built and sold a number of technology companies, including acquisitions by StumbleUpon and WeWork. In this conversation, we discuss businesses as vending machines, why momentum matters for social companies, working at WeWork, the no-code movement, and various startup ideas that people should go build. I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to tell you about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. BlockFi

has three products currently. They allow you to deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan. You can buy and sell crypto on their crypto exchange. Or my favorite product as an investor a stablecoin and earn up to 8.6% APY. It's an unheard of interest rate compared to the legacy fiat world. Go check them out at BlockFi.com. Again, BlockFi.com. BlockFi is standing by, ready to help you achieve all your financial goals. Our second sponsor is Choice. They're a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too, but not anymore. Thanks to choice. Now you

can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax advantage dollars to do it too. That's right. A self-directed IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold your private keys and use tax advantage dollars to do it. Absolute game changer. Head on over to retirewithchoice.com slash POM. Again, Again, retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp, and let me know what you think. Lastly, I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry.

You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Greg. I hope you guys enjoy. 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. Got a special treat for us today. I have my friend Greg here. Greg's done things on the internet for a long time. What's up, man? Not much. I mean, a lot, but not much. Looking forward to getting into it. All right. For those that don't know you, let's start with, you're from Canada, right? All right. How did, when you get to the US and what was your first foray into the tech world? um you know i don't really talk about this much but maybe i'll give the the real deal story on on here this is the best time to do it this is why you come on to just share the truth

okay i'll share the truth so i'm from a city montreal canada it's kind of like paris meets las vegas in a lot of ways um and uh you know it has one of the largest internet companies no one's ever heard of it's called mind geek now mind geek actually is a monopoly on all of the adult adult content so they own you porn pornhub brazzers playboy digital that's all owned by one company one holding company it's also where a lot of gambling and a lot of the gaming companies are based as well in montreal so you know i got my start really in the underbelly of the internet and that's where i really learned um you know we would do deals like you know i was a teenager 13 14 15 it would be like adult friend finder you'll pay us five dollars for every lead

we generate and we basically used to buy traffic me and my friends and if we can spend four dollars to make five dollars then we put you know we'd go for ten dollars a day to a hundred dollars a day to a thousand dollars a day to you know and the numbers kept getting bigger um and i attribute like pretty much everything i know about human psychology and what being how do you get people to do things to my early days working in that space. So it's interesting to hear this. I did not know this because most of the best product people that I know, and you know, we've got a lot of mutual friends at some point worked on growth type products. And that's essentially what you were doing, right? You were just arbitraging the cost of traffic for what

somebody else would pay you for it. And you figured out how to essentially grow that traffic over time and make money and like that in essence is like what every business should be doing right it's like figuring out how do you make something for less than you sell it for right so it makes sense yeah it got me thinking about like businesses as vending machines and you know if it costs four dollars to make five it's like okay I want to put more money in there and I just you know I learned a lot from that experience also the difference between you know having a you know a woman or a man look at look at you you know on the landing page or if it's red hair or brown hair and if that's the difference if you make 50 grand that day or at least 50 grand that day you're gonna

pay attention you know so those learned a lot got it and so at what point do you decide to go from working on that to actually building various technology platforms or companies so after that I was kind of like, I need to get credibility. Um, you know, I want to do, so I, I basically teamed up with FGU friends and, and got into the agency game. Um, and we designed a lot of stuff that was like, you know, cool, you know, at the time, cool, like techcrunch.com and WordPress VIPs product. Um, and then we took some of that money and we built our own startup. So we built a studio model this was in this is like almost 15 years ago um and that's when i realized um you know why am i building why am i spending 100 of my time on client work when i could actually

build multiple startups so i did that um and we created a bunch of startups some of them got acquired um some of them didn't work but uh that's kind of what what i how i got the startup bug um and then after that you know i started a company um went to san francisco it was called five by it was like uh sort of the at the time there was youtube was getting really big uh 2012. there was you know millions of videos being uploaded every day but people needed sort of of curation on top of it. So we built that platform. Um, and, uh, we sold that to stumble upon, which at the time was one of the largest, um, social networking apps. So I joined the management team there. Um, and, uh, and then after that I sold, I started islands, which yeah.

What was the experience like working at stumble upon when it was so big and just so powerful, really yeah so stumble upon was started by garrett camp actually who's the co-founder of uber and he had he had recently left when i had joined he's still on the board um and you know that experience working with that caliber of a board you know garrett camp samir gandhi who's at excel um ram sharam who was on the board of google he literally put like the first dollars into google um you know this was me like i i had come from the underbelly really and i'm in silicon valley now i'm like hanging out with all these guys they're teaching me so much and and stumble upon was generating you know a billion plus page views for publishers

and i was able easily able to say like oh hey like buzzfeed let's generate 100 million page we can generate 80 million page views to you today you know 100 million page views so there was a that was a really cool experience um but i think the big learning i had from it was if you're a social app and you lose steam like you can't really come back from it you know you don't often see consumer so i can't think of one example of a consumer social company that became really big and then kind of went down and then like became really big again i actually can't of a single one that that's ever happened right yeah yeah i can i can't think of one i think you know social you just kind of have to it's a growth game and you have to continue growing you

have to continue to reinvent yourselves um day after day and kind of always be on the prowl that like someone's gonna eat your lunch and it's really momentum more than anything like growth is a big piece of it but the momentum game of how are you going to keep the growth and and kind of keep uh accelerating is a huge piece um of it and so all right so you do that leave you decide that you're going to start islands uh that's when we first met uh and maybe talk a little bit about like what you were trying to build there and why yeah um end of 2015 i'm like group chat is the new social network um it's going to verticalize um you're going to have a place for um chat with your work friends that was slack chat with your gamer friends that ended up becoming discord and

then a bunch of different verticals I've always been into creating communities in different verticals um was on the board of the largest cannabis media company in the world um I you know one of the startups that came out of the agency was one of the largest financial education communities in the world so like always been like pick a vertical learn how to grow it grow it and then in my in my experience sell it and get acquired um i saw this mass if i was like i was like okay if group chat is the new social network where do i start um and i you know was in san francisco i raised two million dollars on basically here's group chat is the new social network and i said give me money and i'll pick a vertical and we ended up on the vertical of college students

events because we were like oh hey you know facebook started at college and there's no real easy way to like open up an app and like communicate with you know like-minded people at college and and see people around you and uh that's what we did and um you know it it worked it worked so on one hand it worked we had between five and twenty five percent penetration on every school we launched that within seven days um the average user would send 50 messages every day um the average user would invite 2.1 people so we had all the metrics um on the other hand what didn't work was the timing sucked um you know now people care about social and want to try new things and want to download new apps but you know fast forward to 2018 and it was the lowest amount

of venture capital and social since I think it was like 2002 right after the internet bubble and it just goes to show you that like you can be right and you could raise from the right people and you could hire the right people hire the right people and you can do all the right things but if the market isn't in your favor like that sucks yeah and I think part of this that was really interesting to me is uh the way you found the college campus market uh you let's say did things that maybe other founders wouldn't be willing to do and so talk a little bit about uh your what was it six or twelve months uh basically living on college campuses and kind of what you were doing yeah i mean you know my whole thing is you know vertical networks right and if you

really want to get to know a vertical you kind of have to be at one with the vertical you have to really embed yourself you have done you have to really get to know it and you know I you know I've explained a bit of my past now like I barely went to college I went to McGill in Canada but like I dropped out um schools in the U.S. are very different than in Canada or anywhere in the world for that matter um and we hired you know an ex you know one of the founding team members of which was another popular social network back in the day and but I still needed to be I needed to be there so I said to myself I'm gonna spend six to twelve months and literally go every school that we're gonna launch ends and speak to people and I'm like a 28 year old dude just like walking

around wearing like all black and like you know Oxford Mississippi and people are like who the hell is that guy and because that's where we started we started in the south you know I get the feeling that they were like hey who's the old guy dressed in all black i remember like i was i was actually in oxford and i was at you know end of the day sitting at a bar i just for whatever reason wearing a black hat you know black james purse shirt and then these like black jeans with like black john barbado's converse shoes and i'm in this like bar and like i was just on my my phone i look up and i just see like everyone is like it's like 80 mostly guys wearing like polos stretch up socks like you know didn't fit in and like people were looking at me but like

you know i think i think that's what you have to do like if you really care about like crafting a business and trying to understand and you have to go there like i mean you know did i want to be in oxford mississippi like drinking a bud light you know surrounded by like 80 80 dudes named chad and brad um looking at me funny like absolutely not but i i wanted to win that's what ends up happening and uh ultimately what happens ultimately what happens with the business is um i go out there raise money um i want to raise a lot of money i get offered a little bit of money and i was just like all right if i you know i'm a go big or go home type of guy like all in you know i didn't move to silicon valley to to like not go big on this um and so i just reached out to 15 um

potential acquirers and gotten you know a few offers got the best one and we sold to WeWork to basically power their social networking experience pre-IPO. And I joined as a head of product strategy there. So a lot of people don't know this, but what you just said is a very difficult but wise decision for founders, which basically was, and I was privy to some of your thought process at the time, so I can cheat here a little bit, but it takes a certain amount of capital to do the things you need to do in order to take something that was, you know, starting to working to kind of working to now, Hey, you got to slam on the gas and you've got to drive that momentum to scale nationally very quickly. Right. And that's basically the inflection point you were

at, but it takes capital. And so when you don't get that capital, there's kind of a fork in the road. You can either say, Hey, I'll take a small amount of capital and I'll kind of do my best. Or you basically say, look, I've got deep conviction in what needs to happen here. And if I can't do that, then it doesn't make sense for me to pursue this. And by choosing the latter, I actually think it's a more responsible thing to do, right? Because you're locking in early investors getting a return and not putting a new investor's capital at risk with a plan that you're not necessarily convinced will work to some degree. Yeah, that's exactly how I felt. I was like, hey, like, if I raise an extra $3 million, I'm not sure that the market I had to

ask myself, do I think the market is going to be better in 12 months or worse than 12 months are the same. And I was like, it's probably going to be the same, like the venture, the venture environment. And when you're a social app company, you need venture capital to survive to grow, right? We talked about in the beginning, you need to grow, grow, grow. So I was just like, you know what if i can get a return for my investors um and my team you know everyone on my team pretty much bought houses from the outcome of it you know that makes that makes me feel really good so um i think that it's it's something that you know one thing founders should do is really like understand who's who should like from day one like make okay you're starting a company who's the

who are the seven companies that would are going to buy your company and who are the three people that you need to know at that company you know they call it the law of 21 how do you know how do you get those 21 people and know them from day one you start the company so that you know for us like selling the company was just a tech it was just some texts right it was like hey like we're selling hey you know head of product at xyz company we are selling the company are you do you want to make an offer versus like trying to scramble for like an intro and it's like you know they don't know who you are and you don't have that trust and i see that's where i see a lot of founders kind of struggle yeah i completely agree uh you worked at we work we work had a

incredible rise and uh then had its infamous uh stretch which you were there for uh i know you can't say too much but any kind of thoughts or uh or lessons learned or takeaways from uh the entire we work experience yeah yeah i was gonna say you know i can write a book about it but i think a lot of people are um you know you you you learn the most about yourself people and and companies when when when you're at your high and when you're at your low and you know I think you know I remember having a conversation with Garrett actually um when you know he was on the board Garrett Kemp and he was on the board of Stumble and he was at StumbleUpon and he was on the board of Uber and I was like what do you learn more from Uber or StumbleUpon and he said

he said stumble upon he was like you learn more you learn more from your downfall than your upfall and you know your upswings he's like everything is going right at at at uber so um i got i got a chance to to learn a lot about you know ups and downs from that from that business um i got a chance to learn a lot from the softbank team and what they did um and uh but you know And I don't want to learn for the rest of my life. Absolutely. And so you recently left and you started Late Checkout Please, which one is an amazing name. So we'll have to talk about where kind of that name came from.

And so let's talk a little bit about what you're planning to do now. And then I want to spend the rest of the podcast talking through just every business and startup idea that you and I have ever had. We're just going to open the kitchen sink here and kind of just dump them on people. But where did the idea for Late Checkout Police come from? And then what the hell is up with the name? Yeah, I mean, so, okay, I'll take a step back. In a lot of ways, I'd rather be a VC than an entrepreneur. Because, you know, you're all in, as an entrepreneur, you're 100% in.

Basically, close to 100% of your net worth is tied to the outcome of this business. And I think that's actually a really foolish way to live your life from an economic standpoint. So my belief is that owning smaller pieces of a business, but in a lot of businesses, is kind of the most responsible kind of thing to do. So that's one thing. The second thing is, you know, I believe fundamentally that the Internet is undergoing a complete makeover right now from broadcast to niche. And what I mean by that is there's, you know, in the Facebook era, it was all about, and Twitter really era, it was all about broadcast, get things out there, these big social platforms. And now there's these, you know, people find the refuge and Fortnite worlds and Discord chats and iMessage groups and Slack communities and all these like kind of virtual places. And that's and people are willing to spend money to access those zones.

And they also get a lot of meaning for, you know, meaning just being in those places. Um, so, you know, the reason I started late Checo was because, um, I said to myself, I want to start a product studio. I want to build as much as possible during this time. Um, you know, because I believe that this is the Renaissance time for, for so many, and I don't want to create, you know, one art piece during the Renaissance, right. I want to create as many different pieces as possible. so what lay checkout does is number one it's a product studio number two um we acquire internet

profitable internet communities so we'll literally find businesses um you know and acquire them um and and the third thing we do is we have a few clients um you know and we have basically an agency business where we help you know companies like um companies like tiktok companies like Warner Brothers music, just figure out what does community really mean? All right. And so when you are doing this, kind of transitioning back and forth between an investor seat, an entrepreneur seat, an acquirer seat, and an advisor seat, you get a really holistic view of consumer social type companies. And so where are the areas right now that are the obvious things that are working, right? So I know that you're a growth advisor to TikTok. So that's kind

of working. Maybe talk a little bit about that. And then what other areas or companies do you see kind of working? Most people would say, yes, that makes sense. And that's an obvious thing. Yeah. I mean, right now I'm kind of just obsessed with just how big platforms have gotten and and how horizontal these platforms have gotten and how vulnerable these platforms have gotten. So I'll give you examples. Zoom, we're on a Zoom meeting right now. It's, you know, being used for a thousand, 10,000 different use cases. Now, if we sat down and we kind of like jammed on it, I'm sure we can figure out 1,000 businesses where we can look at Zoom and we can target at a vertical and we could put a paywall up and we could do some content distribution

that's free and then we can bring influencers on and we can make a million dollars. And I bet we can launch a few, you know, one of those a month. And if we tried. That's Zoom. LinkedIn. linkedin launched stories yesterday i think linkedin stories like are you kidding me um i think there's a massive there's like so much opportunity to look at linkedin and and trying to figure out um where they're most vulnerable and there's certain people doing

elements of this some people are looking at the um you know looking at it from the corporate hierarchy uh you know organizational behavior kind of thing where they're like um you know putting you know you creating linkedin for their internal companies and stuff like that some people are creating professional slack communities and trying putting paywalls on it um again a bunch of ways to make a lot of money um by just chipping away at linkedin because you know i don't really want to live in a world where linkedin is the end all and be all of professional networking i think we can do better than that um and then reddit you know reddit um is surging in traffic um it's become a place where it's you know it's you can easily find

like really great content and feel like you're a part of a community and the beauty what i love about reddit is you can actually see through these products like redditlist.com and redditmetrics.com which basically gives you an insider information information as to like what subreddits are trending what's happening and basically opportunities like inside info basically opportunities where you can actually go and create and unbundle it unbundle certain subreddits and create businesses around it um that's where i'm spending most of my time thinking about vulnerabilities. Yeah. And I guess part of this is, um, when you talk about unbundling Reddit, right, let's walk through kind of an example. So, uh, there's a subreddit it's exploding,

um, and it's in some niche industry, right. Or interest. You're not talking about going and rebuilding Reddit's functionality for that industry. What you're talking about is potentially building ancillary or complimentary products for that industry, building other types of services for those types of people. But you've identified, hey, there is a group of people that are all coalescing around this one idea. And it is growing fast in both size and engagement. And therefore, I know that if I build the right thing, I can expose this community to it. And I'm likely to build a business that ends up being successful, right? Exactly. So I'll give you an example. So one of the things we do at Late Checkout is every week, all the people on the

product and design team um think about one subreddit and spend time in one subreddit and they come up with an idea to how to unbundle it so recently i did this and what i you know i was in basically a ride sharing subreddit and it's growing a lot i'm in this ride sharing subreddit and i keep seeing that they're referencing this dude named the ride share guy like who the hell this guy so i go to his website i do some poking around it's a blog he also has a podcast but it's some guy who basically gives tips and tricks around how to make more money um as an uber and lyft driver simple enough the guy's making seven figures on on this on this blog okay and it's it's literally like i think it's a wordpress blog it's like super simple and he's he's creating good

content but you know the question there is you know is there an opportunity to you know extract that value and display it in maybe a more interesting way um you know and and trying to really you know understand what are people asking for and why do they why are they flocking to this to this website um that's what i'm talking about i'm not talking about like you know i think what a lot of people when i say unbundling of reddit um a lot of people think of it as like okay i'm gonna go create like a reddit but for like uber drivers and it's like no because uber drivers might not need that. And they probably could do that very well on Facebook groups and Reddit. What I'm talking about is how do you figure out what, what do they need and what is the tool

that you can create, um, or the network that you can create, um, to serve them. And so what are some ideas there in terms of in that writing, uh, the, the ride sharing subreddit, obviously you can take that guy's information you could put it into a book or other format and kind of resell it um you know bundle it up make it look nice but it almost feels like you can go even further and you can create chat specific uh type stuff for ride sharing you can create all of the video live streaming you could sell uh any sort of um kind of video cameras uh hardware that they end up putting inside the cars. You could create an entire brand around like, Hey, here's your starter pack. Right. And that starter pack gives you, um, you know, whatever they hang on the back

of the seat and a sign and a camera and, you know, all of this type of stuff. Like there are 10 to 20 businesses just to serve the people who are doing ride share driving, right, right, right there. And now you've found the customer. And so I want to extrapolate that out and get to this idea of like what you're saying is you're finding the customers and then building the product for the customer right you and i've talked about this before we're seeing that not just in unbundling of reddit we're seeing that across the world right if you look at kim kardashian kylie uh kanye west same thing they built massive audiences then figured out what's the product that should build to then go sell to this audience so maybe talk a little bit about how you think on that kind of

reversal instead of building a product and going find customers now finding the customers first and then building the product yeah so the way i think about it is like how do you start with the community and then build the software versus starting with the software and then building the community um and so for example with this uber driver ride sharing example i actually created oh and then the other beauty is it's ridiculously cheap to to design and create products either through no code or low code so one of the things you know i did to just test this idea out you know we tested a bunch of ideas in this ride sharing component uh this ride sharing uh subreddit but one of the things i did was it's like oh hey what are they saying what are they what are they

actually saying the subreddit they're saying that they want ways to make more money and they're saying actually that they want to be surrounded by other you know uh people and ride sharing so i was like okay what if we can create an app that was basically like a party line but for uber drivers and you know i posted it and it went completely viral on on on the ride share subreddit and it's like okay maybe there's a business there right maybe maybe there's a business there and i think you know i actually think that people you know we don't have an audience in in right in that in the in ride sharing um so we have to go and like lease it and like create those relationships with like the mods the moderators and all these people but i actually think that people who have

have audiences right now the influencers the micro influencers the world actually have like an unfair advantage and if they can actually partner with people like late checkout who can actually create products then there's a huge opportunity there because what like you know if i look at you pomp it's like okay you have all this credibility and you know in the bitcoin and crypto world um and the question is like you know how could you you know i mean it's it's age-old like endorsing it's michael jordan made most of his money from nike it's it's dr dre made most of his money from from beats it's but there's not enough happening in in the digital product realm and my whole point of this thing is that literally literally if you go into reddit and you go into

facebook groups they're serving it to you on a platter they're telling you what what they want well i'll make it even more tangible right so uh take joe rogan which many people know who he is and he's got this massive podcast. And when he did the deal with Spotify, everyone was freaking out. They're like, Oh my God, Joe Rogan sold out. Like he only made a hundred million dollars. Like he could have easily done other things to make money. Right. And yes, that's true. Some of those things included sell his own advertising rather than go through the agencies. And he would have made more. Some of it would have been introduced subscriptions. So people pay him for whether it's extra episodes or he just brings the whole thing behind a paywall, whatever that was.

But I kept going back to this idea of, no, the most profitable thing that Joe Rogan could have done is started companies and then kicked all the advertisers out and taken his own companies and pushed them through his distribution and said to people, you know, take Traeger Grills is one of his sponsors. If he went to them and said, hey, this is what we're going to do. I will continue to advertise a grill, but I want to set up a legal entity with you. We're 50-50 partners and we're going to create the Joe Rogan grill. And when we create that grill, I'm going to push it through my distribution and I own 50% of the equity of this product. You own the other 50%. Let's go make a bunch of money. He would make more money by doing that than simply just doing the advertising for Trader Joe's, right? Because he owns the equity of a business and then he could just go down the line. Every single product that he has as an advertiser, he could simply just recreate, do the exact same advertising, only it's his brand versus somebody else's, and he'd make a killing. He would make billions of dollars doing this, I think, compared to just tens of millions of dollars in the advertising. Yeah, I think creators don't understand the value of their brand equity. i think that's what it comes down to um because it's really hard to value it like how you know there's not a website you can go and say like at pomp what am i worth what am i worth for

cereal what am i worth for you know different different uh you know verticals um i think that you know joe rogan did a bad deal frankly um i think um and i and i bet he's probably feeling it today i mean obviously he got he you know listen it's he got what is it 100 million dollars it's it's great you know that's awesome but i think that he definitely he definitely didn't get as much as i think he deserved and spotify is the one who when you look at that deal it's less about like is it a good deal bad deal in my situation it's just that spotify got much more value out of it than joe rogan did right because the deal would be fine if he got paid half a billion dollars or a billion dollars right you know it's just the the um the

difference of value transfer there was definitely in spotify's favor which is that's just the way deals happen uh what else are you guys thinking about or um kind of playing around with uh with late checkout what are some other ideas you have or areas that you're interested in yeah i mean And I have a list of ideas that I always have that I can pull up and we can just talk about them. All right. Let's do it. That's cool.

Yeah. And we could just pick a random one. I literally have hundreds of ideas in here. And I'm just going to literally spin the wheel and just pick one random one that comes up and then you can tell me what you think or your thoughts. And some of these are just like, also like had a couple of glasses of wine and you write an idea. All right.

Let's hear. Okay. Um, boom, well, this came out of, so, uh, the, the subreddit battle stations, so everyone's working from home, um, or a lot of people are working from home, I should say, um, especially knowledge workers, um, have, you know, are starting to want to like have dope setups Um, one of the big, you know, trending subreddits right now is this battle stations where people are taking pictures of their setups and posting it. So the question pump, is there a business, um, to create that leverages something like

battle stations? Yeah, this, this is why I love talking to you. So I've been telling people I'm waiting for somebody to come pitch me. Uh, I call it WFH or W F H box.com. Just work from home box.com. go onto a website pay 500 bucks three days later a box shows up and it is a camera a microphone headphones a backdrop an instruction manual whatever and it is like level one of getting started with work from home in terms of all the equipment you need spend twelve hundred dollars

and you get level two and go all out and spend you know three thousand dollars and you get level three for example and something just that simple of arbitraging somebody who knows nothing and doesn't want to spend that time to research what's the best microphone what's the best headphones what's the best camera what's the best light you know all that kind of stuff with i already know what the best light microphone headphone you know whatever is and how much does it cost oh it cost me 250 to get all of the equipment put it in a box for 500 bucks run some paid ads get it in front put it in this you know battle station subreddit like it's not very hard to find that traffic right now right and so again it's not going to be a billion dollar business but could you make you

know one two three million bucks a year absolutely i think yeah and that's the other thing i just wanted to highlight which is you don't for a lot of these like unbundling ideas you don't need venture capital to get started i know the vcs won't like hearing that but like you know there's nothing wrong with starting a business and doing, you know, a few million bucks a year and making money and just, and then that's it. And it's a self-contained business. It's a vending machine. You've built a vending machine, you create value and that's, that's it. I completely agree. What type of business would you build for a battle stations? um so battle station so i think for for me um i would do a high end so i would try to create an

invite only community that's luxury battle battle station so basically i would i would you know, people like aspirational brands and, um, especially with battle stations, like it's basically like porn for these people. Like they're, they're going on and they're like salivating. Like, wish I wish I had that. I wish I had that. Um, I would try to source some of the most expensive, um, kind of, uh, like some of the most expensive, like mahogany, like beautiful sort of desks and like these screens that are like zoom enabled and stuff like that and bundle it all up i would do all drop shipping um and i'd create like a feed on top of it that just shows these like beautiful pictures um and i try to figure out a way to make

it a monthly subscription because i'm just obsessed with monthly subscriptions so um maybe every month i get some sort of box at my workstation where we partner with different brands so like that's a you know i'm just we're just riffing here but you know brands want access to that realist that battle station real real estate and maybe that's the real idea right like maybe it's like how do you how do you you know send like little cactuses or succulents or or, um, different part, different partner products and, and stuff like that, stickers and stuff like that. Um, something there. I love it. What's another idea? All right. Spin the wheel. Okay. Um, okay. So this just came out of an insight. So 15%

of people actually get jobs through job boards. 85% are mostly through friends. What's a product to connect you to your friend uh what's a product to connect you um to jobs via your network i think right now if you said what's the one job board somebody should create i would immediately go and create a sub stack support job board which basically would say there's a bunch of people creating like sub stacks and kind of these personal media companies and stuff. And I would basically create a job board where they could post either one-off tasks or actual, you know, part-time or full-time roles. And they could say, Hey, I need an editor, for example. Right. And so there's a opportunity for editors to either do it in a freelance capacity

or actually get a job working for some of the most successful ones. And you could eventually expand this to all of these different creator type platforms where people are just being incentivized and given the tools to create those personal media companies they're going to need help right they literally can't do it by themselves and so you can just play matchmaker again doesn't have to be massive but you can easily build a million dollar business simply by creating an interface where people could post the opportunities and other types of folks who want to support those come in and find jobs uh so toby said something toby from shopify said something i really like which is arming the rebels.

And it's all about this whole new passion economy. And it's about, you know, arming the rebels and giving them the tools necessary they need to succeed. So I think this idea is, I mean, it's perfect, right? Like there's this whole new economy that's being created and people need help. I think it's now it's like, how do you verticalize it specific for this use case?

You know, someone might want an article to be ghostwritten. So how do you allow them to like, you know, create anonymous, anonymous posting, right? I have a sub stack with 20 to 30,000 subscribers. I'm looking for X, Y, Z. This is like, I mean, this is definitely $500,000 plus business, like, like pretty instantly. Completely agree. What is one business that you think somebody could start in a weekend? If I gave you right now $10,000, you only had the weekend to build it, and you think that within 12 months, it could do $5 plus million.

What's something that you could look at? I would think about unbundling Fiverr, which is like a big sleeper. You know Fiverr, like the $5 marketplace? Yep. They're starting to get really big, and it's cool because there's a habit there. um so it's like you know it's more than five dollars now but five ten twenty dollars for social media posts or something like that i would just create a marketplace target targeted at something you know maybe it's just like uh we create tiktok videos for you

and um and then i would do and then i just take out a bunch of facebook ads and i'd i'd basically go consistent and i would create a bunch of different i'd basically unbundle fiverr and like five or ten verticals i would uh market it specifically to that those audiences i'd pick verticals or services that are growing and new so that's why i use tiktok as an example like what are things your sub stack is another great example what are things that you can do and then you and use marketing direct paid ads on facebook to drive it that's an easy one what about you um I'm really obsessed right now with uh figuring out ways to take creators I would reach out to like 10 creators that have uh large audiences and I would say to them all right we can do drop

shipping of a specific product we're going to put your brand on it we're going to treat you like the historically athletes have been uh treated and we're going to sell these products but I wouldn't do something like merchandise like that's too easy and it's too kind of saturated i think instead what i would do is i would create um really unique hymen products so uh a very simple one that uh that i've seen is jocko wilnick sells a poster that has his like the 10 rules of a uh warrior kid i think it's called and it's literally just like a really nicely done poster that's got these 10 kind of rules of how to live your life for kids. And he signs it, sells it for 250 bucks a pop. And I can't remember if it's just the poster or it comes with a frame as well, but like how

hard is it to create the poster and the design and all this kind of stuff? It's not that hard. Well, why is it sold for 250 bucks? It's because you've got somebody who's got a massive audience and people want to kind of be associated with. And so you could go and replicate that and create an entire poster business with creators. And maybe you don't sell them for 250 bucks, but could you sell them for a hundred dollars and just, you know, replicate it over and over and over again, it costs you nearly nothing. You drop ship it. And you've got, you know, a couple of million dollar business pretty easily. I think. You got me thinking about, um, a website I, I, I saw today called bonsai Mirai. Have you seen that one? No. What's that? So basically it's this

dude who is like big in the bonsai community and he charges you 30 bucks a month to watch him trim bonsai trees and i i looked into the traffic and the guy is let's just say the guy is i mean definitely seven to eight figure revenue from it so the so the question i have is what are other verticals where you can find the guy or the girl um create a live stream that someone create a subscription around that people would be willing to pay for i've always thought that there will be a live stream subscription service that will replace daytime tv or the talk shows and if you think about um who that audience is it's moms right it's mom sitting at home and if you say hey it's 10 20 bucks and we're basically gonna live stream

and talk about gossip, right? I mean, just entertainment news and kind of all that stuff. I think there's a lot of people who would pay. One, you're diving into an industry you know exists. Two, you already know there's big businesses in terms of, you know, the magazines and all that kind of stuff. Three is, you know, that the people are sitting at home.

And then four is they've got disposable income. And so, you know, you're solving kind of this problem of loneliness, you're solving access to information. And if you can even build it more community than just live stream and now all of a sudden they can actually engage with you it's just you're taking the quote-unquote gossip right when rather than go to uh go on a walk with your girlfriend right for a mom like my mom used to go and she wouldn't go on a walk but she would like go meet up with a friend and they would sit and they would talk about you know oh did you see this actress

did this or this actor did this or whatever if all of a sudden they had a community where you could go do that with all the people in the world and then of course as you spend more time on it you get locked in because you're actually getting a community you're learning who the members are you can somehow you know hey do i want to talk to my friends today or do i want to like meet new people you can build a whole little product around it and at 10 20 bucks a month uh where else are they going to go gossip i think there's probably an opportunity to do like an hq trivia type thing with gossip for moms paid monthly with some sort of community aspect of course i mean look one of the biggest businesses that i've been really surprised by

is uh the games right all of these uh things like um uh what do you mean and you know you talk to like the guys who run um that business it's a massive business and then they've created you know six seven other games off of it and all this kind of stuff and so like whether it's a digital product or a physical product the whole idea of entertainment and games i think kind of like went to the wayside and like Zynga and all these guys, people were just like, Oh, like that's over. It's still a massive, massive business. Yeah. But I think a hundred percent, I agree. And, but also like going back to like, you know, sort of like magazine mom sort of insight, which is you're right. Like think about all those, like, like the view, right? Like how do you

modernize the view that's the question i think so i think there's a big big business there uh and especially if you kind of seed it the right way uh i just think people will uh will spend time um you know watching it in the live stream how long does the bonsai guy live stream for do you know i think oh 30 minutes so you pay 30 a month to watch him cut the tree for 30 minutes a day a week a week 30 minutes i think it's 30 minutes a week but you also get access to videos like so think about like a master class you know that's what's also happening it's the master classification of everything just kind of another thread which is interesting so you have to like and that's what people that's what founders that's what i encourage people to do

is to map all this stuff out it's like hey what listen i know nothing about bonsai trees literally um but like people know a lot of stuff about you know weird all kinds of whatever they're into so it's like okay how do you look at master classifying it how do you look at like you know unbundling reddit in that you know go to all those places and see where you can fit yourself in completely agree what's what's another idea you have on uh on the list um let's see spin of the wheel um okay this one's this one's kind of dumb but i'll it's just hilarious the uh people so my you know my brother is a doctor he he was working in the corona ward when it was it was really bad up here and you know i was like hey would you ever go on

uh, like, you know, would you fly? Would you fly? And how would you fly today in 2020? And he was just like, yeah, like I'd wear a mask and I'd wear maybe, maybe a face shield. And I would, I would, you know, get rid of my, I would basically, as soon as I leave the plane, I would like basically throw out my clothes. So the product is a flight suit for flying. I literally, uh, got on a plane in the last four months, one time. Uh, and there was a guy who had a hazmat suit on and like wasn't kidding like had the gloves the the mask the face shield like he was i didn't know if he was there to check on people or if he was a passenger right and so like i don't know if it would have to be that extreme but could you see people basically putting

something on over their clothes that at least if it didn't look horrible to get on the plane sure why not absolutely and i think it i actually like the idea of it being somewhat extreme because I think that like will go viral. And like, you know, I think that's really important. And then like, okay, you know, the question is like, okay, well, how big of a business could that be? You know, well, you know, is that $5 million in revenue, $10 million revenue? Well, you can actually a that's significant and be like, what are other products that people are going to need in this new world? Like that you can expand into so you're building a brand. So yeah, maybe you do hand sanitizer, maybe you do masks, maybe you do this, maybe you do that. So yeah, I think there

might be something there. Tell everyone about the haircut product. Because I realized that we haven't talked about this. And this will, for those that are saying like, oh, these guys are just talking about ideas, but they have no clue what they're talking about. Maybe explain what you did with the haircut thing during the beginning of quarantine. Sure. So pretty simple, um sort of viral idea called you probably need a haircut.com built in uh under 48 hours no code um you know google domain wix editor like literally but you know nothing nothing okay um and uh and basically built a marketplace for people who need haircuts um and uh and then stylists actually people of color who are stylists who are out of work and who wanted to give

haircuts um and we launched it and kind of went to sleep and in the morning we woke up and it was like everywhere on the today show abc fox npr literally millions of people went to visit this website and still continue to visit this website to book haircuts because they don't feel either their barbershops or, or salons are closed. Or they just don't feel safe. And they're just like, you know what, I want my girlfriend to help cut my hair. It's fine. And it's been it's been cool. There's like, it's still super popular. And the beauty of this is like, you're not joking when you said it took you 48 hours because of the way you built it, right? Like this is this was not something where people go, how do you get on the Today Show? Well, it's because you lined up a lot

of things and we should caveat it with like you have done a lot of work and that was the product of decade plus of experience expertise all that kind of stuff but other people could have built the exact same thing so it's not the building that's the hard part it's thinking through what is the product that people will find valuable and how do I actually go ahead and launch it yeah and I think I think it's some of the nuances like some of the things I was thinking about i think i think naming is underrated like picking a really a name that people will remember is really important so like you probably need a haircut brings a smile to people's faces so that was really important um we did a video like when you go to the website we got like a

celebrity to do the video for us um and or you know he had a show on a food network um so he has a community so he brought his initial community to like use the product again little thing um and then we kind of just worded the product in like plain english you know just like super simple you go on you get it um and that was it i love it what's one thing that you've tried that didn't work um well there's thousands of things i've tried and didn't work um you know i think i i i helped start something called wall street survivor which was a it is the most popular financial well it's the most popular stock market game on the internet to this day actually um but and in and then i i added this component to it which is like kind of

like a code academy for investing so basically you would like get fake cash and you'd go on this like sort of missions and you'd learn about the stock market this is like post 2008 when like people's net worth dropped 50 and they're like why so we're just like hey financial literacy needs to be a thing um you know the problem is we raise venture for it and um what we didn't realize is that like we we became the biggest like 85 of the top u.s business schools use it as a part of a finance curriculum they pay for the product the it is still the largest stock market game but like the the market is it caps out um so my mistake there was basically raising you know raising too much money um and and picking it's okay if the market is

capped um but it's not okay it's okay if you're self-funded but it's not okay if you you have other people's money. Makes sense. Before we wrap up, what is kind of the benefit or the inflection point caused by no code? So first of all, what is no code for those that don't know? And then kind of how has that changed this idea of ideating and quickly launching products? So, you know, the no code, low code movement has really taken off over the last few years. And it's basically the set of services that allow anyone to create a website or app with no technical skills and it's products like webflow you know it's products like squarespace etc and what it allows anyone in the world to do is have an idea being not technical um buy a domain literally that's it

eight ten bucks a year um get some storage for a few bucks a month and you know for the price of two or three lunches um you basically have a startup um and what it allows the reason it's changed the game is it allows you to test you can test like i would encourage someone listening to literally test one idea a day like you can literally if you have the ideas and we've talked a lot about a lot of opportunities between linkedin between zoom between you know reddit um all these big platforms like if you can come up with the night you can literally launch an idea a day um and you don't have to raise venture capital you don't have to go to stanford computer science and unlearn stuff um and i think a good place actually to learn about the only you know

there are some tutorials on no code. You can go to like maker pad, um, to learn about it, which is like an educational resource around it. Um, but yeah, it's completely democratized the playing field. Love it. I asked the same two questions to everyone as, uh, we end first being, what's the most important book you've ever read? Uh, the road ahead by Bill Gates. why i got it when i was when my first day in the seventh grade or second day in the seventh grade in the library of the school i was at um i just randomly came across it i opened the book and i just skimmed through the pages and and i ended up staying there like the whole day and i read basically read the book um and basically i'm not a huge bill gates fan or whatever microsoft fan or

whatever but he basically outlined the future he basically said he he predicted cryptocurrency he protected uh predicted like video conferencing predicted basically how the internet would work with social networking and this was in 1994 or something so he he really knew where the world was going and i closed the book and i was like damn you know you know i i i'm gonna go and this is i want to use technology like this is you got to be crazy not to be building on top of technology it's completely you know as a canadian i always felt like an outsider looking in you know because canada 90 of people live on within 45 miles of the u.s border we're like kind of outsiders looking in at like you know the exciting you know we're on like for example montreal's on the new york

border like new york city is right there um but i was just like wow now i can talk you know i can talk to anyone so that was the most influential book love it um more fun question aliens believer or non-believer definitely believer definitely why i mean i've met humans who are who are kind of alien me and i'm kind of like are you an npc like are you not you know like are you a real person um i think in all seriousness i mean it's like it's one of those things where it's like it when you when you see the picture of the milky way versus all you know as one just one galaxy and there's infinite galaxies like you got to be i'm not a betting man but like you got to bet on it right so that there there has to be out there and um you know i wonder if they have their own

version of substack or their own version of reddit so that's that's what i'm looking at learn more about that's an awesome answer you gotta ask me one question to end it what question do you have why bang bang i actually don't know that's that's a horrible answer i said it one time and uh i can't remember where i said i think it was on a youtube video and everyone was like bang bang bang bang bang you know and just went nuts and so then i said it again and then next i knew like it was just a thing um and uh i've actually had people like come up to me at a conference and be like you know bang bang i'm like all right that's weird uh i've had uh john nigerian uh from cnbc and and did a bunch of trading uh when he came on i was like bang bang and i don't think

he knew that i said that all the time so he immediately responds with bang bang he starts doing his finger guns at me and i was like all right man this is getting out of control but uh it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. So good. I love it. Yeah. Well, and also it's a thing. Um, in hindsight, it actually is helpful. Uh, somebody sent me a clip. Um, I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk, maybe, maybe somebody else can't remember, but, uh, they were starting all their videos with like a noise. Right. And they were trying to like, basically like audio brand their videos with that noise. And so like in hindsight, like, Oh, okay. You start off every single thing with this noise it just happens to be you don't need editing because it's just my mouth right but

like it has some of the similar effects so like i'll take it but you know it's one of these things where like i didn't think i was having a master plan but if it works it works i mean when you open up i think it was steve jobs who did this when you open up a an apple computer there's the c major chord that that happens and i think like those nuances like the bang bang nuances nuance or the C major nuance is what makes brilliant products brilliant and memorable and you the truth is most people don't probably don't even remember that you bang bang or that there's a C major chord but like they know that they enjoyed their experience and and that's what matters couldn't agree more man all right where can people find you on the internet

they can find me on twitter at greg eisenberg my name um for my thoughts or they're up there and then if you want my deeper thoughts i started a sub stack so you can check it out at late checkout.substack.com awesome all right sir thank you so much we're gonna do this again i had too much fun so you're on the hook to do it again for sure well thanks man i appreciate it