The Startup Ideas Podcast - Reflecting on a crazy 2022

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

In this episode, I talk about the biggest winners and losers in 2022 as well as my own personal biggest wins and loses. I'm speaking from the heart with this one and telling some stories I've never told before. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro0:45 - Best Products Under $1002:09 - Most Underrated Company of 20224:47 - Most Overrated Company of 20225:53 - The Best Decision I Made This Year7:34 - The Worst Decision I Made This Year8:51 - My Favorite YouTube Channels of 202212:51 - Billionaire of The Year14:34 - Community of The Year15:52 - The Best Investment I Made This Year17:24 - The Worst Investment I Made This Year19:12 - My Biggest Changed outlook in 202220:45 - What Am I Most Excited About for 2023?

Hey everyone. In this episode, I talk about the biggest winners and losers in 2022 and my own personal biggest winners and losers. And I just get into it, tell some stories here I've never, ever told, and yeah, hope you like that. It's 23, January, 2023. And I kind of just want to go over some of the things I've been thinking about and reflecting upon, you know, over the last 12 months and share it with you. I'm just talking sort of from the heart here. I wrote down these questions. I'm just going to sort of, yeah, tell you what I was thinking. So best product that I bought under $100. The first is YouTube premium. It's $12.99 a month. I'm like obsessed with YouTube. I love it. I watch it every single day. The no ads experience that you get with YouTube premium is just

awesome, especially if you're watching like podcasts like this or, you know, you don't really want to like break up your core experience. So I think it's well worth the time and all the ideas, extra ideas it will give you. The second is I actually got this as a gift. My brother got this for me. This was about, I think it was about 50 US dollars or so. If you're on YouTube, you can see it. But basically, if you're listening, it's this bus. It's this collectible bus. And it's actually the bus that I used to take to go from school to my home. It's the 161 bus. And I keep it on my desk.

And it's a reminder of really where I came from. And I feel like 2022 is really when I set up my home office and my desk to be like my own space. And I think that's really important for people. And a part of that was just getting this bus and things that get me excited and put my brain in a really cool spot. So I thought that was really cool, and I recommended it to everyone. Most underrated company in 2022. So, I mean, this is a big company. It's, you know, multi-billion dollar valuation, but Zapier.

It basically is a way to automate anything. So, for example, if someone signs up to your website, it could, you know, add it as a sales lead. and then all of a sudden that sales lead, you know, adds it as a sales lead in Salesforce, and then you can have it set up so that pings a Slack bot, and then you can have it so, you know, someone reaches out to it. So it's just a way to like automate across thousands of apps, and it really saves a lot of time. And why I think it's underrated is because of what's happening with AI. So I think the magic with AI, of course, chat GPT, and, you know, it is,

magical just by using it. But the real magic is when you automate it. So AI plus automation is going to create, for example, the world's best salesman or salesperson. So it really closes the loop. So for the example I gave where it's like I got this new lead, it adds it to Salesforce. It creates this new deal. Then it sends it to Slack and then someone follows up. Well, what if, you know, chat, GTP was able to create these personalized outreach emails or even taking a step further. Imagine if, I'm sure you've seen some of the deep fake, you know, you have like Donald Trump deep fake, then he's not really saying something. It's like a video of him, but he's not, it's not really him. Or maybe you have Elon Musk saying like, I totally regret buying

Twitter or something like that and it's not really him. Well, what if you create? these AI-generated fake people that let's say maybe, you know, a Canadian is a sales lead and he starts talking with, you have this fake person essentially that gets generated, and he starts talking with, you know, a Toronto accent. And maybe people are more likely to buy from people that sound like that or that they look like each other. So I think there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with automation. AI and generative AI. And I think that's why, despite ZAPR being a billion dollar plus company,

I actually think it's underrated. All the focus is being put on, you know, Open AI, $20 billion plus valuation when I think you have to look around Open AI and ask yourself, who's going to benefit from this? The most overrated company in 2022, I'm just going to have to say it's Twitter. Now, I love Twitter. I'm on Twitter all the time. But when I say it's overrated, I just think that like, I mean, how much did we talk about Twitter, Elon Musk, what he's doing with Twitter? I think it just got a disproportional amount of the mind chair. And I expect, you know, Twitter to obviously create new products.

Like, you know, they just launched views, new features. I'm sure Elon Musk hasn't planned for it. But I actually think that a lot of other social. social networks are going to, you know, slowly start shipping at the page if not faster than Twitter. So, yeah, that's why I think it's overrated. It's just like we've talked about it a lot and maybe too much given its size. I mean, in the tech world, we're kind of like, oh, my God, Twitter is everything. But, you know, relative to a TikTok, it's actually quite small.

The best decision that I made for late checkout in 2022, and this is something I haven't talked about, but we actually got an acquisition offer in late 2021 from one of the largest social companies in the world, and it was an eight-figure acquisition offer. When you get an acquisition offer that's life-changing, it definitely you're definitely like whoa you know and me and my co-fander sat with it for for a day or two we kind of were like this doesn't feel right because we're just having so much fun doing what we're

doing and yeah it was the best decision I made uh okay fine I'll tell you who it was uh hopefully this isn't shared too too publicly but uh Twitter Twitter offered to buy us in 2021 and we thought about it in 2022. And I'm happy we didn't because we probably would have gotten fired by Elon because he fired a lot of people. So that was definitely the best decision we made when you, you know, I've started and sold companies before. And I know that when you get acquired, you lose control.

Like that's a part of why the whole point of it, why someone's buying you is you have a boss, even if they're telling you you're going to be independent, whatever. ultimately you have a boss and they tell you what to do. And I'm just glad that I built something with my team to be really special. I'm having the most fun I've ever had. And losing that, what I really sucked. My worst decision I made for lay checkout and also just personally has just been not setting enough deadlines.

So one of the things I learned in 2022 was I noticed that like, If I told the designer, hey, like, design this landing page in two weeks, they would design the landing page in two weeks. But if I said, design the landing page in one week, they would design it one week. Or two days, they design in two days. So the interesting thing here is, obviously, you don't want to put too much pressure on your teammates, and that's not cool at all. But I think thinking about how you can just set more deadlines, basically, set more deadlines

that just make people feel a little bit uncomfortable is kind of where you want to be with people. Not too uncomfortable that they're mentally stressed out, but not like, hey, like, just get it to me when you're ready, when you think it's right. So people do appreciate having some deadline to hint because it just helps them focus. And yeah, I think that if I would have set more deadlines in 2022, I think we would have built more products, launch more products. And this is only something that I really, really got more stirred with towards the end of the air. So my favorite YouTube channel of 2022 is probably Hodinky. It's actually a media company slash app that is all about watches and luxury watches. They have a website, they have videos. And they've got this show on YouTube called

talking watches where they basically sit down with well-known people. My favorite episode was with John Mayer. So they're sitting down with John Mayer and they just say like, hey John, like show us your watch collection. And you get to hear the stories of, you know, why they bought this watch, what their watch means to them, the stories of the watches. And these are people that really, really care about their watches. I'm not a watch collector yet. Maybe I will be in 2023, something I'm thinking about. Yeah, I basically can't get my head around like buying such an expensive watch for

thousands of dollars. But yeah, I think like even if you're not a watch enthusiast, just hearing about these stories and learning about the watches and learning about the movements, automatic versus quartz, gold versus white gold, two tone. learning about bezels and dials and rarity. It's in a lot of ways it's very similar to collecting anything or collecting NFTs or some stuff like that. So it's very interesting.

Haudinky talking watches. And I think it's also just a glimpse into the future of what a modern media company would look like and what a blueprint would look like there. So check it out. I also really loved a YouTube channel called CERCLA. I think it's a French channel. C-E-R-C-L-C-L-E.

And it's basically this, you know, group of people that film these incredible electronic music shows all across the world in the most, in the craziest settings in the world. Like, they'll film stuff like at the top of Mount Everest or just in these, like, crazy, you know, places. And it's just so cool to see, you know, I think what's cool about it also to me,

me is like, you know, they're getting the most well-known artist, they're putting in the coolest settings in the world, and YouTube lends itself so well to watching it on that, and it's free. And they invite, like, a small group of people, and it's just like you really feel like you're a part of the show without having a flight of Mount Everest. Again, like, kind of a glimpse also into the future of media, like, how do you do things that are just really pushing the envelope that'll get people to share it? I think Serraqla did an incredible job

and my last I know I'm always supposed to do one but I have to do three here my last favorite YouTube channel of the year is a channel called Passport Heavy it's this YouTuber called Jibril

and he basically goes to cool places the last place he was in was Belize but before that I'm just checking his YouTube channel right now he had Belize Haiti Ethiopia Ethiopia, Bali, but also travel around the U.S., Miami, San Francisco.

And he goes around and he just, he tries to live like the 1% basically. He does it. He doesn't on a budget. And he just talks about how to do it, how much things cost. And yeah, you do really feel like you're going to these places with him. So I think that's just, yeah, a really cool channel. I've watched him grow from a few thousand subscribers to 350,000 subscribers, which is really cool. I think, like, yeah, if you're interested in travel and you're interested in just, like, doing what locals would do, but also doing, like, really cool luxury stuff, passport heavy is the vibe.

All right. So moving on to billionaire of the year. So I got to put it, even though he's not currently a billionaire, like he doesn't have a billion dollars of cash. You know, Mr. Beast is my billionaire out of the year. And he's my billionaire of the year for a few reasons. But the first is, like, I think that Mr. Beast will be the top 10 wealthiest people in the world by the time he's 45. He's 24 now. He's growing the fastest.

He's the fastest growing TikTok channels. He's number one YouTube channel. We've seen that he's been able to incubate products that has gotten a lot of traction in 2022. Feastables, Mr. Beasberger. So you're starting to see that he's able to create real brands from his YouTube presence. So I think that it's only a matter of time before he becomes extremely. extremely wealthy. The only way that he wouldn't be extremely, extremely wealthy is if people get tired of his

format. So that's the question. So in 2023, will we see people get tired of his format? Will he be able to, you know, or does he want to recruit other people and create other channels and leverage his core channel to diversify? That's what, you know, I think a lot of people are looking out for. And if he's able to do that, if he's able to incubate, the guy who's going to be one of the wealthiest people in the world. So my favorite community of the year goes to Fat Fire.

And I've talked about Fat Fire on the pod. Fat Fire stands for financial independence, retire early. It's a community all around. How do you like, let's say, save up $500,000 and just live off the 4%? or 5% interest from that lump sum. And then fat fire is like a bit as a bigger number. It's like more of a fat number and how to then more of a fat lifestyle based on that. And there's a subreddit fat fire and you should check it out.

It's just, you know, even if your goal isn't to do that and make millions of dollars and retire and that sort of thing, I just find it the most interesting, it's such an interesting subreddit. hearing what are people's problems and understanding how they're thinking about things is very valuable. I've learned some like tax saving tips from it. I've learned some just general personal finance stuff from it. So my favorite community and I do contribute to that community. So that that was my favorite community of 2022, the fat fire subreddit. My best investment of 2022, and I'm not just saying it, was this podcast. Late checkout, you know, our design agency has gotten major clients from this podcast from Fortune 500 companies.

And it's just incredible what being in people's ears can do. If you've been with me through the start, you know that my co-host was a guy named Salhaw Bloom, who's awesome. and he ended up leaving the pod a couple months ago. And I had to sit there and be like, do I really want to continue this? I didn't want as many ads. So I basically just like blew up that piece of the business. And I just started funding it myself. There's a cost associated with it.

There's a mind chair associated with it. It takes time. And it's been the best investment. Not only from like a financial standpoint, like in the end, because like, clients come to us through this, but also just like, you know, even doing this, like sitting down and being like, okay, like, what did I learn in 2022? And then putting this out there and hearing from you all like, oh, hey, like, I also love passport heavy and but have you seen this YouTube channel? Like just having that connection with y'all has been awesome. So best investment.

And I think that more people should start a podcast. So hit me up if you, if you are interested doing that. My worst investment in the year, I mean, 2022 was obviously a horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible year for investing in equities and crypto. I would say my worst investment of the year was like from a percentage change was probably Solana and of course Ethereum and Bitcoin, but starting with Solana. Some of my NFTs, of course, have gone down a lot. And then in this in my stock portfolio, probably meta. I have a big chunk of change in meta.

When I bought it was basically seven months ago or so or six months ago. My thesis with meta is are people pricing in how big WhatsApp is? Like the world runs on WhatsApp and they barely monetized it. And I think there's an opportunity for them to make billions of dollars from WhatsApp. And I think Zuck knows this, but he hasn't really monetized it to what it could be. And I think that's the ace in Ducks back pocket as he's figuring out this whole metaverse VR thing. WhatsApp really big makes it a valuable investment.

I also think that, you know, Facebook is still a large platform, no huge sides of decaying yet, and they can still monetize that as well. So the narrative, I think, is just that like Facebook is dying, Instagram is dying, VR, Metaverse is an effect. but I think we often forget that WhatsApp is massive. And I think that over the long term, I actually think that a lot of these metaverse bets are going to play in the favor of meta. So I haven't given up hope.

My biggest changed outlook in 2022. So my answer to that is the concept of retirement. So what is retirement? Retirement to me has always been like, okay, you get to a certain age, you take up golfing, you hang out on the beach, you've got a lot of gray hair. That's like what I think of retirement. That's what I think about. This year, I started thinking about retirement differently.

Retirement to me is like, if you're doing what you love, you're retired. If you're spending the time how you're how you want to. to be spending it, you're retired. I don't think I'm ever going to be one of those people that are just going to play golf every single day. I want to, you know, I want to tweet forever. I want to pod forever. It's just fun. I want to run my agency. I want to run my studio. I want to do this forever. So to me, it feels like I've achieved retirement. And I think we just need to like rebrand that word and rethink that word because, you know, millennials, Gen Z think about retirement differently. And I just think that that word needs a little bit of a regret.

So that's my biggest changed outlook, like thinking about, okay, like, this is, this is kind of it, you know, I run this holding company. I want to do this forever. It's really fun. But that was my biggest change outlook in 2022. And my last question is for. For 2023, what am I most excited for? On the business side, actually let's start with the personal side.

On the personal side, getting good at tennis. So where I live, there's tennis courts right nearby. So I have a tennis racket. I have balls. I could use these cords. It's free to use. I just got to get in the habit and the routine of, playing every single day or at least as much as I can four to five times a week.

It's a routine thing. It's finding the people to play with in Miami and it's just setting in a party routine and it's just every day doing it or five times a week doing it. Like whatever that cadence is. And when people talk about New Year's resolution and stuff like that, like usually it's a goal with like setting routines. And my goal, get good at tennis, my routine. find people to play with, play with them often, have fun.

So that's the personal side. And then on the business side, I'm excited about growing our design agency, you know, probably work with one or two new clients in 2020, and help them build new products. You know, our model is that we don't work with a lot of clients. We just work with a few clients, but we go deep with them. And then incubating new agencies. So I'll talk more about that this year,

but we will be incubating new agencies. You know, we see a lot of opportunity there. And then building products for creators. So, you know, at the core of, you know,

every creator is a strong community. And, you know, we're excited about what we can build with them. So more on that soon. And I'm really excited about that. So that's, that's what I'm thinking about.

2022 and where I'm going 2023. I hope you enjoyed that. It was therapeutic talking about it here. So let me know on Twitter what you thought of this pod. And also do you mind

subscribing? Like if you're listening to this and you know, you enjoyed it at all, like if you're on Spotify or Apple podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you're on YouTube, I think I have like 8,000 subscribers. It's not very many. please, please subscribe. And you can comment on YouTube.

I look at every single comment and I respond. So thank you so much. Happy New Year and it's going to be a great year.