The Pomp Podcast - #406: Reid Hailey on The Business Behind Memes

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Reid Hailey is the Co-Founder and CEO of Doing Things Media, a digital content and entertainment company that owns over 20 brands and shows with a combined following of over 60 million. Some of our brands include ShitheadSteve, NeatDad, AnimalsDoingThings, MiddleClassFancy, DoggosDoingThings, GamersDoingThings, and NoChaser. One of our most popular original shows is All Gas No Brakes, hosted by the now-famous internet celebrity Andrew Callaghan. In this conversation, we discuss memes, shareable content, eCommerce products, building community, the importance of IP, and their new show All Gas No Brakes.  ============================== BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Products include high-yield interest accounts, USD loans, and no fee trading. To start earning today visit: http://www.blockfi.com/Pomp ============================== Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ============================== 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. Reed Haley is the co-founder and CEO of Doing Things Media, a digital content and entertainment company that owns over 20 brands and shows with a combined following of over 60 million. Some of our brands include Shithead Steve, Neat Dad, Animals Doing Things, Middle Class Fancy, Doggos Doing Things, Gamers Doing Things, and No Chaser. One of their most popular original shows is All Gas, No Breaks, which is hosted by the now famous internet celebrity, Andrew Callahan.

In this conversation, we discuss memes, shareable content, e-commerce products, building community, the importance of IP, and their new show, All Gas, No Breaks. I really enjoyed this conversation with Reid, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. I'm an investor in the company. I sit on the board and I am a big, big fan and a happy user. They provide three products today.

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Go check out athleticbrewing.com and use code POMP25 for 25% off your first order of the best non-alcoholic beer in the world. My refrigerator's stocked with them, so go do it. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Reed. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. 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've got Reed here. Super excited to talk about memes and making money on the internet thank you so much for doing this yeah thanks for having me on for sure uh let's jump right into your background kind of help everyone understand just who the hell is reed what'd you do before uh before you got into the media game um i would i did not come to the meme world or the the media world i guess the meme world was like always around but not really popular

with people and um i was still taking classes in college when i got into uh instagram basically and the meme uh illuminati um i started an account called shithead steve and started it as a way to like troll my friends in the beginning and then it turned into like oh wait i'm gaining followers and then i started reposting stuff um this is around the time that like uh fuck jerry and fat jewish had like 100 000 followers and i just saw them as like whoa that's that's insane and uh and i started making original content that's kind of what locked me in and helped grow the my business got it and so when you started doing that uh i'm assuming you had no you know idea you were gonna start a media company you had no idea that you were gonna kind of do any of this it was

literally just like screwing around with your friends but at what point did you end up deciding like oh wait a second like this could be a business and i should actually like go do this rather than just you know be the uh the person behind shithead steve on the internet yeah so like i started the account thinking it was a business idea like my friends thought i was so dumb and so did my parents they're like get out of our basement um but uh i saw it as like a a way to sell ads in the beginning because i saw um i was kind of following gary vaynerchuk just he was an interesting guy and uh he got me into like the social media thing um and so it was like it was kind of like a leap of faith with the advertisement stuff. And then I started selling

like shirts and I realized that it was more than just advertisements, but that's basically like why I started it. Got it. And when you did jump, you know, kind of into, okay, I want to build this business. Did you think early on about protecting the IP, um, and, and kind of really think it as more as like a franchise or was it literally just get eyeballs onto an account, sell ads and kind of, we'll figure it out from there. Yeah. So there's some other people in the meme space that had a few different pages um after i had been running shit i'd see for about a year and i only had one page and i was like wait i could just replicate this um and then that was when i was kind of like oh i'm creating all these new brands

like pretty or like very organically completely naturally and i was just like you know i made trash game paul which is like a weirder version of shit i'd see and there's all these niche uh areas where i could like create an account and then there's like a type of content that i could source or create for that brand so that we did that with like animals doing things and um gamers doing things and then derrick my co-founder um he had a video page called drunk people doing things and it was starting to really take off and uh a now advisor and partner to the business max um one of my good friends he was like you need to get into video and so i partnered up with derek and then we started like a media uh conglomerate kind of thing for

memes uh in the originally um and now it's like expanded bigger than memes you know we have an original show called all guys no breaks but it all started with memes and we all all of our stuff starts on instagram got it and so uh where does the name shithead steve come from trash can paul like these are great names and i think there's an entire generation of people who are like yeah duh like that's the account i follow on the internet but somebody came up with this like where'd that come from uh just like i was like hung over one day on my friend's couch and we were coming up with like stupid names to call each other and shithead steve and trash can paul i like came up with those randomly um and then i was like okay what should the profile picture be

when i was like wait i should start an account and call it shithead steve and the username was available which i thought was crazy um and i just like made it squints from the sandlot because i was like a a movie i loved and it was just like an iconic nostalgic character from our generation so that's kind of like it was like a random name and then also somewhat of a random picture you know there's like solo cup idea and i was like i'll just do something iconic you know that's like more me and that was it and i kind of look like him i guess a little bit I love that. So talk a little bit about you go from creating one meme page to kind of two, three and grow from there. I'm assuming it gets easier because you've got the one account to kind

of leverage. But how did you think about really moving the audience you originally built on the Shithead Steve account between all the other accounts to kind of grow them all together? Yeah, so when I just had Shithead Steve, and I was like, you know, I had like 20,000 followers, we were all talking with like I was talking to Derek we weren't teamed up yet and there's all these other memers out there and we started a group chat and basically I made a spreadsheet of like each account each day was a different person's day and we would like all collectively shout out that account so like you know there was female skewed audience pages on there there's all these different types of uh pages where there's some audience overlap but not much and then we

just kind of like do a shout rotation and it really blew us up and then so we took that same concept from you know when i just had one account and we were just growing each other for fun you know just sharing the love of the audiences liking memes um and so we did that with the different brands that we owned down the road got it and it's really interesting to me how the meme culture just an entire generation gravitated towards it like why is that right like what is it so special about the memes is it that they're shareable that they're funny like like you are an expert in memes i guess so just like why does this work i think it's a mix of like memes are a form of like just super shareable ideas and it's just like people can uh they really resonate with a lot of people

at once and it's like something everyone can kind of like come together on and like you see the likes going up you see your friends commenting or you know tagging their friends or liking it or whatever or your friend shares it in a group chat it's just like something that it's either like nostalgic which makes it shareable or it's like really hilarious and that makes it shareable or relatable which is usually funny as well but I think it's just the easiest and quickest way to share funny stuff with a friend it's like the cartoons that are in the paper except it's on your phone and you can easily send it and that goes with more than just memes you know it's like all the tiktok content you see all the you know

with our show all gas no brakes it's pretty memefied in terms of the editing of the video and like how it's like quick and it caters to the the zero attention span followers like myself included i have no attention span so i like stuff that i'm looking at on my phone to be really funny like quick so i don't have to keep staring at my phone i guess um i don't know if that answers the question but that's kind of like how i see them yeah that makes a ton of sense and talk a little bit just about once you had a couple of accounts they were growing and they were kind of very meme centric how did you end up building a whole business behind this right like what were the steps you actually took to build uh the media company yeah um started with

just like looking at each of the accounts content and like what common themes are always coming up that gives you a lot of clues uh from an e-commerce uh standpoint like okay you know Epstein didn't kill himself is trending. So maybe we can make an ugly Christmas sweater and just put that phrase on there and make it look funny or look good, but it's also funny. And so we did that, you know, around Christmas holidays. And like, that's really, really the main thing for e-commerce for us is looking at the content trends and like the engagement, you know within the first three minutes of posting something we'll know if it's the new thing like if it's the new meme like we'll know within three minutes as you know on twitter you know you'll see

your engagement start to spike on you know quicker than normal tweets or whatever i don't know twitter we have like zero followers on twitter but uh but instagram is like you know similar i feel like in the way that you are kind of tracking that um but yeah that's how we we realized for e-commerce that was like a an easy way for us to make money their advertisements um you know for each brand has its own perfect uh brand partner you know like middle class fancy is one of our accounts uh lee the creator of it um he uh was talking about crispy boys like five years ago and like created this term and bud light wanted to be attached to it and so that was like a way to take ip that we've created and uh like marry it with bud light and now bud light is a crispy boy

and that was part of the the campaign we did with them so yeah it's kind of like we've we've been just growing as quickly as possible and you know with in terms of followers and revenue we're kind of like in the beginning we were just grabbing cash wherever we could and figuring out what was the most promising thing and i and advertisements merchandise and uh you know now like subscription with patreon for uh all guys no breaks each brand has its own path to success so whether it's gamers doing things with twitch you know we have a a talent his name's spencer he's the host of the stream we're doing tournaments that's the path to success for gamers and also merch and advertisements uh but like all guys no breaks is patreon

uh advertisements soon on the podcast um merchandise are big for that brand so merchandise and advertisements are pretty consistent across the board but there's different ways you know for each one to be built out into its own business like shithead seed is going to be and already is kind of like the spencers of 2020 online you know gag gifts where it's a puzzle that looks like uh you know a field of puppies in a you know hanging out and then you open it it's like a bunch of big dogs taking huge shits in a field it's like a prank puzzle that we did around coronavirus so that's just like an example of like a few different brands of ours that like take take their own lives and like grow in their own ways talk a little bit about all gas no breaks

for those that don't know what like what is that um so all guys no breaks is a uh show uh we partnered up with andrew callahan who is the host and uh he had a former thing he was doing in new orleans where he would interview drunk people and it was like amazing and a lot of his content was getting uh shut down because it was so insane and so he came to us and was like would love to do a show with you guys i'm a big fan of the meme pages and we're like yeah this is amazing like this we've been following your content for a while um and so we took our audience and basically supercharged the growth to the show we partnered up we bought him an rv we sent him around the country uh interviewing you know tons of different people like flat earthers or uh you know conspiracy

theorists people um talladega just like really funny like iconic american things but also like underground american subcultures that you've never heard of that are ridiculous or really interesting um and so yeah it was just like us helping him out uh from a creative standpoint and also growing the show and starting the patreon and the merch business and um i think we're number six on patreon now on the whole platform so that's really cool like in a year we did that um but that's basically what it is is like andrew's this like he has this deadpan look on his face and like he just lets people talk on into a microphone and it's hilarious so definitely check it out and i think a lot of people understand advertising they understand

the merchandise business you mentioned patreon let's start there what exactly is patreon and why is that working for you guys? I think you guys have over 16,000 people who have kind of supported you there. Yeah, so it is exclusive and long form content. The Instagram is short clips, you know, a minute long each basically, that helps promote the YouTube. We also are on YouTube. So basically take the longest and most raw footage, put it into the longest form we can on patreon and uh you know any behinds this behind the scenes content we'll do on patreon only um and then we'll take shorter clips of that um you know like a 10 minute version of it or sometimes like seven minutes at the shortest on youtube and then we uh take the really short stuff and put it

on like instagram and tiktok and uh yeah that's that's basically it um we have a facebook page but, um, it's mostly Instagram, YouTube, and Patreon. And it like those three help grow each other. Everything you guys do is stuff that you own the IP, or this is stuff where people will come to you. You actually can kind of put, um, you know, kind of gas on their fire and help somebody else grow. Yeah. So we created the show. Uh, we hired him as the host and he's a partner in the show, uh, with two of his best friends. Um, so that's, that's how we did all gas and that's how we operate um for any other shows we have a few other shows and uh in the works and that's going to be the same got it and talk a little bit about the importance of intellectual

property so i think a lot of kind of creators they understand hey if i get a big audience i can sell ads maybe i can sell some merch um but that's pretty much where it ends right that's kind of the monetization strategy you guys are thinking of this much more almost like hollywood franchises right where you kind of take that intellectual property and really leverage it um for all of these different monetization channels where did that come from and kind of talk through how you guys have done that successfully yeah so we we kind of see ourselves as like a a weird version of like nickelodeon or or maybe it's like in tv like we want to have we want to create these shows and channels that um you know each have their own universe kind of like i guess kind of like a marvel

also um you know there's different characters in the all gas show and andrew is one of them the rv is like a common theme and there's all these like things we can play with and and build out businesses on their own you know like uh we have you know for shit at steve we have a board game that's going to be its own entity but it's you know born on shit at steve and we promote it through shit at steve and so like some of our accounts are really just marketing vehicles some of our accounts are actually their own brands that have their own ip like shit at steve you know there's a lot of viral products and stuff like that but like all gas no brakes is creating a lot more ip in its its own right um but yeah we just want to get as big

as possible and just be an ip factory kind of like a disney slash marvel slash whatever and just keep uh there's it's just like limitless in terms of how big it can get um now that we're branching outside of just memes um i think having a good understanding of memes and comedy and like internet comedy specifically it just helps so much with even like production of uh you know longer form stuff that's not just images um so we want to just keep expanding in that way yeah and it feels like you guys understand uh creating content you understand internet culture right so we talked about the memes uh talk about the jorts maybe i think people find that story hilarious yeah so uh we were just like hanging out in the office back when people had offices like

a year ago and uh we were like talking about jorts or something or maybe uh cargo shorts just like really memeable things and uh we're like we should make a jorts bathing suit um where it looks like jorts and uh it's not and uh so literally like a few days later we had them made and there is like sublimated bathing suit basically that really looked like jorts and uh a guy that works for us we're like hey you want to go to my pool across the street and take a picture and we literally just like watch across the street take a picture with our iphone that was the shoot cost zero dollars and then you know we sold like a ton of those um it's really funny and so when you guys have a situation like that right i think a lot of people like oh i've had

this crazy idea but i don't actually execute how do you go from oh it'd be funny to make a swimsuit that looks like jorts to four or five days later you actually have the jorts and it's like, let's take the photo and let's launch it. Like, where does that propensity for action come from? And like, what would maybe your advice be to other people who have the ideas, but they get blocked from actually going out and executing it? Yeah, definitely just take the path of least resistance, especially with new ideas. Like with us, the reason we're valuable is because we have an audience of 60 million followers, we can test products for free, basically, like, so and on top of that we pretty much lined up the different partners that could do the shit that we're not

good at like we're a media company we're good at being funny making the content around products and stuff so we you know outsourced a sublimation partner who could just do it really quick and send us a sample you know at no cost to us and then we basically did a pre-sale um and every time someone bought one you know we would just place an order so we we just did it that way it's kind of like an on-demand model but more of like a pre-sale and fulfill all orders right when and then cut it off you know um so that's kind of how we did that but uh but yeah just like before that i i made this uh easy button that was a trump button that was it's like a wall button is what it was called it was a meme uh where you know anything that pissed trump off he would just hit the wall

button and like all his problems would go away because the you know build the wall thing was like a meme and so what I did was I like went on Alibaba and placed an order for like a few thousand of these easy buttons that we I turned into the meme and sold out of them um and I mean it was like such a pain having to go through that whole process alone when it was just me running shit at Steve so um now that we're we have partners that can do that stuff I will absolutely you know let them handle it and take a slightly smaller margin um so i guess that is what i would suggest like definitely use all the resources you can use the internet and upwork like to build you can do anything now wherever you are as long as you have wi-fi um pretty much so absolutely how

did you go about finding employees and kind of building out the team right there's so many people who think they're funny on the internet but they're not there's so many people who are creating content that sucks like how do you actually find the right people who can either run an account can kind of help with the e-commerce products and it's not just you you know kind of micromanaging but actually finding people who can kind of make your life easier but still be effective and grow the business for sure so creatively those people already were like pretty much our good friends on the internet after years of growing in the meme space we looked at who was growing you know just is faster faster or whatever and we like their content we're just like hey do you want to come

work with us and uh you know we acquired middle class fancy doggos doing things a few others and brought the creators on full time to help us build this you know they have a piece of uh doing things and you know it was a cool uh and smart like really glad we did this um because they they just get it you know they already they don't need any training or anything they're just doing what they're already good at and we just help amplify their brands um and then uh what was the other question i'm blanking in terms of uh like the non-content employees how do you kind of find the right people there yeah so um max uh advisor and partner to the business he's helped out early on helping put the pieces together for you know like our basically like our financial arm we have

like a company that uh is a small partner in the business also that uh does all of our finances like anything at the company and they're awesome uh they manage a lot of like really uh like hollywood illuminati people's money and they're like really helpful in terms of like sales um i brought on todd anderman from group nine he's been amazing i just hit him up on linkedin like i saw that he worked at another media company um called group nine and i was like i looked into it he seemed awesome. And we ended up just, you know, hiring him as a president a year ago. So I used a lot of like social media, LinkedIn and networking for sure. And Todd's been really helpful finding more people for the sales team and stuff like that. And also just across the board, helping us

out with hiring. You know, some project managers came from other companies that I worked. I worked directly with them when i was like running shithead steve there's a company called herb which is like a weed themed page on facebook that like i would share their content and get paid for it basically and am i in the point person there we we brought her on uh and she's been awesome her name's amanda but uh yeah it's a lot of networking online searches linkedin and social media i guess do you guys have aspirations to get outside of just e-commerce from like a selling things to people right so you talked about you get the advertising e-commerce makes sense you've got patreon will you eventually get into whether it's building hardware products or building uh

software products actually try to kind of get into you know the higher margin more scalable type things that seem to be attractive to some creators yeah we're thinking about doing a uh we're thinking about creating a technology that's kind of like taking everything we know and our brand meme brains and like the internet trends uh side of things and turning it into a data type uh oriented technology um that brands can use and uh you know basically just help uh companies or brands or whoever understand what's you know what is trending or like you know we do a lot of advertising campaigns with memes and integrating and like organically rather than like paying, paying a platform. Um, so that's definitely one thing we're thinking of

in terms of, uh, hardware. I can't really think of anything there. Um, we're definitely wanting to do like live events and we're just trying to build businesses off the platform overall. Like, and we see commerce as part of that, like building brands, whether it's a beverage or a card game. We want to build things that like would outlive the platforms and grow on their own. Got it.

In terms of kind of scaling this out, it feels like you guys have done a really good job using that initial traction with Shithead Steve on Instagram, but on other Instagram accounts and then kind of build the business from there.

If you did not have any of this, right, like there was no accounts and you were starting today, what platform would you look at and why that platform? I think Instagram is still great. It depends on what you're making. If you're creating video content and you can do a 10-minute episode, I would say YouTube. But I think Instagram is a great place to get discovered with Reels. There's IGTV and there's the regular posts in the feed. um but yeah i don't know it depends on what you're doing like you're an influencer it might be something like reels and tiktok at the same time um instagram's still great though i think

probably instagram talk to me about monetization in terms of how do you guys think about selling the advertising is it per cpm is it per post is it uh maybe monthly like like how do you think about that and for those people who aspire to be uh creators whether it's under their own name or under um kind of these uh these account brands how should they think about early days monetization versus late stage uh monetization once they're big yeah um it's kind of a tough question uh can you repeat the last part so uh talk just about how you guys monetize it do you charge by cpns or some other model and then in terms of did that change over time right when you were starting out did you guys monetize you know one way and then over time it kind of evolved something

else yeah i mean in the beginning it was literally like what's your budget and they'd say you know like 10 grand or like okay well we need you know 20 grand or whatever like it was super scrappy in the beginning it was just like us hustling ads like we used to do ads for just like the most hilarious you've never heard of them like drop shipping companies and stuff in the very beginning um but now and you know in the past the past three years it's been cpm based um so it's it's it's understood by agencies and brands like across the board because it's kind of how they operate anyways so impressions uh you know with a cpm got it and in terms of um building out these kind of ip or brand type accounts do you guys kind of have triggers in your mind so hey when

we get started we know we're gonna have zero followers we can get to you know 50 000 followers with a couple of mentions on our other accounts that's when we'll start doing ads then once we get to 100 or 250 000 then that's when we'll go ahead and do e-commerce like is there some kind of framework you use or is it literally case by case each time yeah it's case by case and it's very like we'll see what happens you know like we want to put stuff out and see if it gets traction we're not going to try to force a brand that no one cares about like we'll start it we'll run it for a few months and then if it just doesn't pick up steam and people aren't converting then it's like whatever um on to the next so and we also don't like we have a lot of accounts that are

like you know a few hundred thousand followers and we just want to keep growing them to the million follower mark or more before we start doing ads um definitely case by case though like all gas, no brakes is different. We only want to put ads in there that are really, you know, across the board is like this, but for all gas, it's a little harder to integrate ads, uh, in the right way. So we're thinking podcast and also just it's sponsoring a whole series of episodes, um, by a really funny brand, uh, whether it's like monster energy or for a Florida man episode or whatever it is. Got it. And then talk to me about your day-to-day kind of what you focus on right are you still creative and and posting on shithead steve and a bunch of accounts and

and kind of you know deep in the meme culture or are you doing other things to kind of build the business uh on a day-to-day basis yeah so we're all wearing like a million hats um i still will occasionally like find something or like think of something and make a meme and just post it because i'm logged into like my my accounts that i would post to um but yeah so i'm the ceo um i'm doing a lot of stuff on the uh commerce side that's what i'm focusing on but i'm also like helping out on ad stuff when i can and um across the board like i'm not doing everything anymore which is great but i'm still like doing a lot of stuff and it's mainly e-commerce creative um a lot of stuff on august no breaks just like with you know picking different events

podcast guests we're actually um launching something really big i can't talk about that uh working on that. And, uh, yeah, so a lot of stuff. I love it. What's the one thing you wish that you knew when you got started? Um, I wish, well, part of me wishes that I didn't go so wide with so many accounts. Uh, just honestly, because it's like, okay, now like they're all amazing account. So it's not a bad problem. It's like, we just have to hire the correct people for each one to build it out into its path to success or whatever. But I wish I would have doubled down on the ones that were working more so than I did. But I, I mean, I did. So it's not really a regret. I wish I wish I had, I wish I hired Todd earlier. I mean, I guess that's it, because I had to do a

lot of sales stuff um for a while and it was just like really tough you know doing that plus e-commerce plus actually running the pages um i guess i wish i hired faster i wish i knew that i could hire faster without worrying about it because it was so new to me i was like i wanted to be very careful about how i grew and we still are but it was like how aggressive should i get i guess yeah i feel like that's a fairly uh common thing for people right is like um because if you mess it up you'd be saying the exact opposite thing right which is like i wish i'd hired slower yeah yeah and i also didn't know the meme space is like as big as like i didn't think it would get as big as it is but now i'm realizing i had this realization a while ago it's like memes are

just a different form of content and a lot of stuff's memefied that's not just a picture with text over it so it's really just the future of entertainment on social media absolutely how should companies think about using memes and gifs and kind of all of these like new multimedia type uh communication for their everyday um kind of marketing right so it's one thing if you're posting on shithead steve to use memes and things like that but there's plenty of people out there who say hey i run burger king social media or you know i run whatever company social media should i be using memes or should i just kind of keep it cool and you know corporate and just stick to that yeah i think you're you're gonna see more and more uh corporate like like big companies like

burger king and i think they are we're actually potentially doing something with them down the road um but like burger king mcdonald's all these like um qsr companies are starting to adopt meme stuff and you know wendy's on twitter i'm sure you've seen is like completely a meme um i don't think you have to go that hard um you know it's up to whoever is running the brand like if they think it should go full meme like slim jim or wendy's um we're running an account called fruit bowls right now for um dole and it's hilarious it's it's like a slim gem but for fruit bowls um i think there's ways to not necessarily post a lot of memes or any memes on your company's account on instagram or whatever but you can work with people like us to

integrate your messaging or whatever it is that you want to get out there in a organic and natural way so it shows up in people's feeds and they're not pissed off it's like oh that's actually a funny piece of content and then you know oh by the way it's an ad it's not in your face like when uh an ad hits that's paid and you're like or it's like on tv you just immediately whip out your phone so it's a way to get in front of uh you know millennials without uh pissing them off and they're just like they're not thinking you're cheesy necessarily they think you're funny or whatever they're getting across is getting across got it so it's working with people like us not necessarily having to post that on their own page yeah that makes a ton of sense um any words of

advice for uh the people who are running accounts right now who are kind of more creators but aspire to be in the position you are that have kind of a full-fledged business around this any advice to them um yeah I mean if you're running like a meme account just be creative and original um that's what's going to stand out these days um for sure uh if you're creating you know anything like if it's a something like interviews um just keep in mind that people have very short attention span so if you have some long intro people don't care about intros like i i've always hated intros i think you know for like certain youtube channels and stuff it makes sense but i think you should just get straight to the point because people don't have a lot of time or

you know they don't want to stare at their phone for too long so just keep that in mind whenever you're making content um you want to get the the thing started as soon as people see it Yeah, that's a great piece of advice. I asked the same two questions to everybody and then you'll get to ask me one to wrap it up. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Why that one? It's just such a straight shooting book. It's like, he's done it and this is how you do it. And it's like, it's really, really informative and super smart. Like that guy's a genius. um i'd ask the same question to you uh i i cheated because i already know uh know this question and uh i answer with the same three books which is kind of breaking the rules as well but i always

say rich dad poor dad uh the richest man in babylon and thinking girl rich and uh i'd be when did you read uh zero to one like how old were you a year ago okay so i read those three books when I was like 20, 21 years old, which like, from a finance standpoint, like that's a good time to read and kind of build habits and change the way you think about money, etc. When you're building a business, right? It's probably a good book to read is zero to one. And so I think a lot about like the book itself. Sure, it's high quality for most suggestions. But it's also like, when did the person read it? Because the timing is super important for what that impact was on that right yeah another question how did you um so you said you got started on twitter what was the

the tweet or the thing that made it pop was there any like one time where you're like that's it or maybe a tweet uh i had already worked i used to run the growth team for facebook pages and so i like knew how the algorithms worked i'd helped a bunch of people probably a lot of you know we probably have a ton of mutual friends in terms of these meme accounts or brand accounts uh and everyone had started on either instagram or maybe there's a couple people on twitter they're trying to figure out facebook right they were trying to figure out like these other platforms where they hadn't started um and so naturally i would just get introduced to them and like the conversations would be hilarious or like the fuck jerry guys were a great example they're like

so like we have all these memes and like it's working on instagram how do we like make facebook work and you're just like okay like i you know you guys should be teaching us things right you use the platform better than pretty much anyone um and so i had seen it over and over and over again just like what worked what didn't work and uh in 2017 i just realized like i'd never done it for myself and i was like what you know what the hell am i doing um and at the time it was very clear that twitter was a much better place to do this type of stuff like if you're gonna go for business and finance and that um it's harder you know to kind of do it yeah and it's also harder like do it under your own name when it's on an instagram or yeah um so i think that a lot of it

came down to like okay i don't know exactly why this is going to be valuable but i do know having an audience will be valuable in the future so like let's get started um and then you know you kind of tweet tweet tweet and you just quickly like start to like let the audience say like hey we want more of this and less of like that other stuff um and there was a time in 2017 like q4 i mean i can literally just tweet the word bitcoin and the shit would just go you know viral yeah yeah i mean yeah it's like you know right now you can literally just tweet uh what's it portnoy right like dave keeps just tweeting like stocks only go up and just explodes and so it's like you know i think your point about like you'll know what content works and what doesn't

work but based on the audience reaction like that's true on every platform right it's not just an instagram thing it's kind of anywhere yeah for sure second question is uh more fun aliens believer or non-believer it's 100 real why do you think that i agree but why do you think that because that they just have to exist i've watched way too many joe rogan podcasts to not believe in them so i'm there i'm there with you bob lazar i'm assuming you saw that one that's the one that was really like well okay they are real and then there was also the government thing uh the government's like when coronavirus is the worst or some crazy shit was happening this year it's like all a blur at this point but like they said yeah aliens are real pretty much

like there's an alien aircraft in the world and uh it's definitely from aliens it's pretty much what they said and everyone's like yeah but coronavirus like no one cared so i was the one guy who's like they're real i still am shot like i get the fact that like the videos had already leaked on reddit and stuff right i get the fact that like they're like they're ufos they're not aliens like like all of it i'm with you though i'm like wait time out you're telling me that the u.s government is publicly releasing videos being like we don't know what the hell this is flying around and you and i can look with our bare eyes and see something that we don't understand explain never seen before like you know maybe it's something weird but i'm with

you in uh that should have been a bigger deal than it probably uh people made it to be yeah big believer watch there's a an august episode about uh aliens alien con it's pretty good all right i'm gonna have to go look that one up for sure uh you could ask me one question to finish up what you got for me um i guess you're you're probably comfortable sharing i was just wondering like what's your what's the biggest part of your business and if you don't want to answer it's all we can talk about something else no uh podcast by far um in terms of uh i've tested a lot of stuff like sounds very similar and i didn't really take the business seriously like actually sounds very similar to your story of like at first it was kind of like oh okay like i'm doing this

thing and like oh wait the audience is like pretty big uh and it's like oh wait the audience is like really big now um and then it was like maybe i should like try another platform and i should like try another and like you realize like oh the audience will like move with me and okay like maybe there's something here um and i've just been shocked in terms of uh podcast monetization um some of it's just you know it's finance so there's just a lot of disposable income kind of the perfect demographic uh all these fintech companies have gotten just absolutely overwhelmed with like venture funding and frankly i think some of them like don't know what to do with it all so it's kind of you got like all these things that that work in favor there uh but also

I've been pretty shocked. I don't know if you know what a sub stack is. It's like a paid newsletter type thing. And so basically, every morning I wake up, I write a email. And it's just like my analysis on whatever I think is interesting in business, finance, Bitcoin, whatever. But I send it five days a week. If you are on the free email list, you get it once a week. If you pay 10 bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, you get it all five days a week. And these guys were like, hey, you should try this. And I was like, who the hell is going to pay? Right. And next thing you know, I've got, I think it's like the number 10 or 11 largest one on their site. And you start to realize it's like very similar, like the Patreon stuff, right? Like people, if it's good

content, I think that they are willing to support the people who create it. And so it's like pretty interesting when you start to unpack, you know, you can create content, you can do ad supported, you can do kind of, you know, audience supported, you can do e-commerce, like there's so many monetization channels. But for me, it all comes back to the one area that I think you guys have done a great job where other people haven't is just the intellectual property. Right? I'm shocked at how many people haven't. They have large audiences, but they don't just don't use it. Yeah, I was gonna say like another thing early on that we had to do was build like a video submission portal to play defense, basically, and also be able to license out videos. But

people submit a ton of videos to us. And we had to get buttoned up pretty hard on the meme pages and the video pages so i feel you absolutely where uh where can people find you on the internet read or uh or find more about doing things media um go to my instagram is reed doing things but i just post shit about my dog or like surfing or something um i'm on linkedin reed haley r-e-i-d h-a-i-l-e-y um i guess that's probably the best place for this linkedin awesome man well listen Thank you so much for doing this. You guys have built a very interesting and awesome company. So we'll have to do this again in the future.

Yeah, thanks.