The Startup Ideas Podcast - "The Most Famous Artist" gives away 4 of his best $1M+/year idea

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Join us for an engaging conversation with Matty Mo, “The Most Famous Artist" and founder of Art City, as we explore a variety of startup ideas and opportunities centered around art and virality. In this episode, we dive into mural agencies, art rentals, influencer product partnerships, and even glamping sites. Matty shares his proven framework for creating businesses with inherent viral loops, a powerful method to reduce customer acquisition costs. We also discuss the power of memes, user-generated content, and how entrepreneurs can leverage art to build successful companies and lead more fulfilling lives. Whether you're looking to start your first million-dollar business or are curious about entrepreneurial strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this essential guide to launching a successful startup!🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND MATTY MO ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/famousartistguyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/themostfamousartist/Art City: https://www.artcity-inc.comEpisode Timestamps: 00:00 Intro06:17 First business: Mural Agency17:07 Second business: Art Rentals26:54 Third business: Viral Art Kits33:22 Fourth business: Glamping Site Property Management42:01 The vision for Art City

Any content that's going viral related to a creator, inventing a new style of making work and sharing it on TikTok is a product that could be sold on a monthly basis as a box company or in a marketplace. And this is a product you buy that allows you to create content around your purchase. And in doing so, you're inadvertently marketing the thing you bought. One theme in all my stuff is like, how do you make it so that your customers share your story and bring. you more business organically. Which is honestly a good prompt for anyone listening for any business. It's like pick a business and then be like, okay, I'm Maddie Mo. What is the viral version of this business?

I'm trying to cheat to make my life as easy as possible. And the viral loop built into the business is a hell of a cheat. This is going to be a special episode. Maddie Mo, the most famous artist. You don't do that many interviews these days. and I feel lucky to have snagged you for your brain to give us some startup ideas. My pleasure to be here. It's a long time coming.

Easier to pin you down for a podcast than a dinner in Miami. That is true. But for people who don't know you, can you tell them the two or three craziest things that you've done? Yeah. And done is a relative word. I mean, I operate a large art studio and work with a whole bunch of different things. people. So I've facilitated or helped out with some crazy stuff. One that might be of note is

the changing of the Hollywood sign to say, Hollyweed. That was done by an artist in my studio when California legalized cannabis a few years back. And I painted a block of houses, millennial pink. A developer came to me and said that they were having a hard time getting demolition permits. And so they said, what could we do? That would really make a sense. stinks. So we painted this block of houses, Millennial Pink. Thousands of people came to take pictures in front of them, and the city ultimately decided that the houses need to come down, which was an interesting urban development project. I taught a famous dog how to paint a portrait of itself, and that portrait and video did better than most artists ever do in their entire lives.

I directed a duffel bag full of a million dollars in cash, a transparent double bag full of a million dollars of cash around in art fair, built the fuselage of a private jet that allowed people to take selfies inside of it, got credit for all those monoliths that started popping up, and most recently have decided I want to build an art town and move to the middle of New Mexico and have been chipping away at that. So what I love about you is you hijack the narrative and you do it through art. And that's the lens of our conversation today. You've got a few cool ideas.

I just want to jam with you. Where should we start? Well, the reason I hijacked the narrative is I started an advertising technology back in like 2008, 9, 10, when Facebook's API was emerging and YouTube and the iPhone were emerging and realized that there were these new centers of attention. And there were certain metrics you can manipulate or places you needed to be seen in order to capitalize. on those attention portals or places for attention. And that's where I really hone my skills that I'm now kind of playing out in art. Most of my art to date has been me starting with a headline,

thinking to myself, like, what headline could I make? And then reverse engineering actually had to do it, which publication to pitch it to, how to create enough digital artifacts to tell the story. I've shied away from that. And I would say like, In 2020, when the pandemic hit, I was looking at you and Jack Butcher leading these digital communities and realized that was definitely the future. So I would say that you guys were a big inspiration for that and started an art community and then realized there was all these ancillary businesses in addition to being a direct consumer artist or a gallery artist that were fascinating that supported the entire ecosystem and community and that not a lot of entrepreneurs were building.

And so I think that's where we're going to start. It's like think about the world of art as more than just galleries and artists. It's a whole bunch of infrastructure between and much of it is being ignored by the powers that be, the major institutions because they're set up to sell a certain type of product to a certain type of person for a certain type of results. And that's mostly really expensive products as a store of value and sometimes a way to avoid paying taxes. Yeah, and I'm happy you said that. Because a lot of people are listening to this and are like art, I don't, like, art's cool, but I'm here because I want to create a cash filling business. And what they don't realize is that you can do both. Yeah, and you can reframe what art means.

Art doesn't have to be a square white cube with some paintings on the walls. Art can be a way of living, like a way of justifying. the materials you use, the choices you make, deeply studying your craft. I think of myself as more living an artistic lifestyle than portraying the archetypal artist. And so that's the takeaway. As a startup entrepreneur, you can live your life artfully. And that will actually lead to deeper meaning and perhaps better results. All right.

Let's dig in, bro. Okay. So should we talk about these ideas? Yeah. Okay. I think we should start with this idea of a mural agency. So it's not a new idea. I've already built one. I know the ins and outs of it very well. The challenge I had was scaling was moving to new geographies. And so the opportunity lies in individuals realizing that they're in a tier two city, a tier three city. There's no other mural agency in town. And you can, can effectively arbitrage the cost of buying a billboard or arbitrage the cost of generating social media attention by creating murals for brands. And I'll talk you through how this business works. So if you're driving around any city, you see billboards. A billboard company bought that

infrastructure. They put up billboards. They manage the placements. They manage accounting how much traffic goes to those placements. They manage sometimes the creative production, and they sell that to advertisers. Advertisers need that more and more today, especially for hyperlocal advertising or really creative out-of-home advertising. But the Billboard Mafia owns all those placements. If you're driving around a city, you also will notice a whole bunch of blank walls. And those blank walls in the Billboard world could be referred to as like remnant inventory.

their inventory that hasn't been turned into a billboard placement, maybe because it can't be turned into a billboard placement for practical reasons. But here's the pitch. You go to a business owner or a building owner and you say, hey, you've got this wall. How would you like to make a few hundred extra bucks a month? They say, wow, that's cool. Never heard of that.

You sign an agreement with them to be able to manage placements on their wall. you then photograph that wall, take dimensional measurements, package it up, you figure out kind of generally what the through traffic is, and then you can price it for sale, one, for the CPM advertising that you can sell comparable to that of a billboard to an advertiser, and two, for the artistic creation of the mural, so the services associated with that. And that can very easily scale to a multimillion-dollar business, and I'll tell you how. Hey everyone. If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert.

You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where design scientists.com comes in. It's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work, all your copywork, all your engineering, and do stuff that actually scales your revenue. You don't need a designer. You need a design scientist. Let's go. Designscientist.com. I liked it so much. I invested in the business.

One billboard placement or one mural placement. Let's go with mural placement. One mural placement can be anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. in a high traffic area. You get a handful of landlords to sign deals with you. All of a sudden, you control millions of dollars of inventory. You go find a killer sales team. You go find a few painters.

And all of a sudden, you're just back off as seeing a mural agency. Okay. And you say like start a sales team and find painters. But how do you actually go and do those things? Okay, so start a sales team. You have to have some hard skills to be able to do some of these things. Like you would need to collateralize your offering. Take photos of the billboard or the mural.

I keep calling it a billboard because that's effectively what it is. Take photos of the building, measure it, figure out the total square footage, make a nice little PDF that says this is that placement. go online and figure out what the through traffic is based on people driving by, add that, extrapolate that number out on a daily basis to a monthly basis, come up with a total number of impressions you expect to make for a particular advertiser, come up with a handful of formats of types of murals you could paint. It could be a straight sign, which is probably a lower-end production, or it could be hyper-realistic, like photograph, and that could be a higher-end production.

And then you go out to advertisers that are advertising on billboards and say, hey, billboards get ignored. Murals are cool for X, Y, and Z reasons. One of those reasons is the process of putting it up draws attention. Everyone driving by is going to see this thing going up. They're going to have some kind of emotional connection to it as it gets produced. Eventually, they're going to drive by it and be like, wow. The second thing that's kind of cool about these things is people will take a picture of a mural they will not take a picture and share a picture of a billboard.

So you're going to get organic social impressions and you're going to get a whole bunch of earned media out of this placement. And you get to work with artists. And if you pick the right artist, you might be able to get them to post on their social feed and tap into their influence. And then all of a sudden you have these multiplying effects on a placement that you're already paying for.

So why wouldn't you work with us? And so that's the sales pitch. I'm like sold, right? Then your second question was how do you get a team of artists? There's a gazillion artists out there that are not making it as full-time artists. And in fact, to make it as a full-time artist is kind of a curse because you become a like a packaging and shipping and customer service company and you no longer make art. So you've got these artists who would rather paint murals in their free time for an hourly paycheck than work at Starbucks. And so you start reaching out to them on Instagram, finding out other artists that have painted murals in your local area.

And you say, how do you like to be part of our mural agency? We'll go find you clients. We'll pay you a flat fee for production. You give us your portfolio of work. We represent that portfolio work to our clients. If a client chooses you and has some kind of like design phase that they need to go through, we'll make sure you get paid. How does that sound? Go out and get a dozen different mural.

list and all of a sudden you have a bunch of different capabilities to sell these advertisers. And from like a revenue and profit perspective, how big does this get and how profitable is it? I can speak to my business. It was a big, like a high six figure business with a dozen walls in L.A. And that was not a hundred percent fill rate. And that was with the team of like five different painters. That business shuttered during the pandemic when people were no longer buying out of home placements and this whole thing kind of fell on its head on its face but I think there's an opportunity to bring it back um you could probably get 10 grand per wall per month so good sales team um maybe it's a 10% sales fee for anyone that brings you a lead it's 1200 bucks of the or 10

or a thousand bucks of the 10 grand um painter maybe pay them 1500 bucks so you're still at a 75% margin maybe you've got some equipment, another 5%, you're at 70% margin, and then maybe paid the building under 10%,000 bucks a month, all of a sudden you've got a 60% margin business, and it's just churning out murals. Yeah, and I wonder if, and you kind of mentioned it, tier two and tier three cities, like I wonder if this is even more interesting in smaller cities

because just no one's doing it. Right. And if you get like a new local business that comes in, they're going to want something cool and splashy, and they're probably going to be willing to pay you for a couple months of advertising. Yeah, and you might not get 10 or 15 grand there because the traffic's smaller, but the margins probably are bigger there. Right.

You just got to figure out how you can get cool artists to small towns, but, you know, I think you can do that. I mean, cool artists are in small towns, and they're waiting to break out, and they're very hungry. It's just about building the frameworks around. them to actually enable them to earn with their talent. Totally. And it's cool for them because then they can point to like, hey, I did this mural and it puts

them on the map, literally. Another way you can kind of speed up your sales process is work with property developers that have tons of buildings. And then you can go out with massive scale to a big advertiser, like a Pepsi or Coca-Cola, and say, hey, do you guys want to buy 10 placements across this Tier 2 city and do this really cool campaign, and then you can charge some kind of crazy, like, handholdy services to be on top of the actual work and placements. It's really cool, because if you're doing, you know, a million bucks a city and you're making,

you know, five, six hundred grand per city, like, could, you know, could you go to four cities? Like, it's not crazy. No, and then you become an acquisition target for a Lamar billboards or colossal media, because they need to expand their current efforts, which are mostly based in Tier 1 cities. There you go. All right.

Take it. Go for it. Take it. Do it. Idea 1. Maddie Moe. I like that one. You know what I like about that one?

I like that. It's just not complicated. So easy. It's like, it's so, it has like four or five moving parts, but it's assuming. you get the artist, you understand how to sell, you're personable, you iterate with like landlords and property developers, like you figure out what your niche is, and then you pick the right city. Once you have it set up, you got a good thing going.

Yeah. If I was in a tier one city, I'd be doing that again, but I'm in a not a tier one city anymore. Fair. That's why you give it away. Exactly. we'll go we'll go with this art rentals business

and we're going to do three art businesses and then one that's kind of like close to my heart given the thing I'm doing out in Tugam Care in New Mexico so art rentals there's this art dealer called

Stefan Simkowitz who was referred to by the New York Times as the patron Satan for his art collecting practices and the way he views the art world I think he's a genius and he does a couple things.

One is he goes to artists and says, hey, I'll pay for all of your production and your studio, and I'll pay you a living wage, but all the work you create, I get to own and sell, and in some cases you get a rev share on. And what that does is it enables him to amass, a massive inventory of art at a relatively low cost per unit. it also allows him to control the supply of a particular artist's like Ove or production,

which can influence prices down the line. And in some cases, if the artist blows up, you've got all this inventory that's super valuable. And that's happened to him for a couple times. This other thing that has happened is he's got this massive inventory of art. And he was trying to think about what to do with it. And so he started to rent it out to Interior Debtor. Decorators in Tier 1 cities. People that kind of like stage homes, like $10, 20, 50 million homes in L.A.

Put really good art up. And oftentimes the house just gets bought with the art in it if it's well placed. And so he liquidates his inventory. He's getting a rental fee. And he's getting a services fee to transport the work from his warehouse and install it. Now that works really good for high-end art in Tier 1 cities. but the thinking is if you're in a small town, or let's call it a Tier 2 city, not a small town,

and you can go network in with the art community, I'm willing to bet there's a lot of inventory just sitting around with nothing to do. Artists make work, they don't know how to sell yet, their demand hasn't caught up with their production, they're not at where they want to be just yet. So you say it to them, let me consign this work,

which effectively means let me take the art, place it, sell it and take a percentage of the sale in order to do that work for you. And for many artists, that's awesome because they don't want to be sales agents. And so if you go and get enough of this work signed up, you photograph it, you inventory it, you build out a database of this work, you go talk to interior decorators, you go talk to commercial developers who are building big buildings, you go talk to hotel operators, and they're willing to lease this work from you. And you can charge something like 10% of the sale price with an option to buy it after seven years or 10 years or

whatever or a discount if you buy it after three. You charge a services fee for an installation. So the the lease or would likely want to keep the art for a while because they have to pay an installation fee and a de-installation fee. And you effectively create a subscription revenue model out of this remnant art inventory. You give a rev share back to the artists for enabling you to have access to the inventory, and you just manage a massive database of artwork sitting in studios. I think what's so smart about this idea is when artists think about their assets, their pieces of art, they think about working with galleries. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, galleries take half of the revenue. Sometimes more. Sometimes more. So a huge percentage.

Now, this is kind of flipping it on its head and it's saying, forget about the galleries. for a second. We're actually going to go to this completely new channel that you've never thought of. It's going to be like a completely new almost agent that manages it, you. And the cool part is there's probably more liquidity in, you know, condo markets and new home developments and interior design jobs than people walking into an art gallery in your local town. and being like, that piece looks cool, I want to buy it. Precisely. And it's largely requires a reframing of what art is.

Some people think of art as like the most important cultural artifacts of a generation. And to be real, many artists are not making the most important cultural artifacts of generation. They're making pretty things. And what are pretty things? Decorations. So if you're selling decorations and you can realize as an artist, you're the maker and seller of decoration, you probably want to sell through the appropriate channels, your decorations.

I wonder what other assets are like this. Like, what are other assets that are just marketed to the wrong channel? That's a really good question. I'm not smart enough to have that answer off the top of my head. What do you think? I'll give one off the top of my head. So, second, secondhand clothing. So there's this big, you know, of the last five years, let's say, shift towards thrifting and buying secondhand clothing. And right now you either sell it on Poshmark where you're not getting that much money or you give it away to Goodwill so it's free. I think that there's an opportunity to take secondhand clothing and do deals with retail shops selling clothing. I don't quite get how that works. I think it's different than art in that. Well, here, let me tell you. So you go to this store, right?

And the store is a boutique selling men's fashion, let's say. And you're like, I'm going to go put this secondhand, currently you don't sell any secondhand stuff. I'm going to go put this second head stuff that I've curated from, let's say, Goodwill or other places. And we're going to split the revenue of 50%, 50%. but I'm also going to charge you an insulation fee and a de-insolation fee

so why is this cool? Because most of these shops don't have like a secondhand section and they don't want to, it's like a whole new channel for them, right? So it's a similar concept where, and what I love about all these businesses is including your mural one, like the startup cost, aren't very much money. You just have to do the deal and find the channel.

Yeah, so I don't think it's sold in clothing stores per se, but it's like a pop-up boutique in a coffee shop or at a bowling alley or something like that where you have a secondhand retail vintage store that pops up in different locations. It's effectively flea market stuff. I'll give you another example. of one that just came to mind.

Coffee cups should have some kind of thing on them that market something. And when I was in L.A., I did a lot of the murals and brand placements for Alfred Coffee through my mural agency. They were like a network of walls that we sold through. And once a wall got painted, then the advertiser would often want to buy the sleeves for all the coffee cups as well. So it's like it's taking these services and bringing them to a retail store and adding revenue to their current infrastructure, which is the hard startup cost of getting like a brick and mortar going. Yeah, I like this a lot. Super easy.

Super easy. I also think there's another trend like on Friday I'm meeting someone for coffee at a clothing shop that they're doing a pop-up coffee shop within the clothing shop. So I think you can create an agency that is basically a marketplace of like connecting different retailers with different service providers and different advertisers and just middleman the whole thing. Agreed. So good. Go do it. Go and do it. How many people actually go do the startups and then email you and be like, I did it. I did one of these and it worked. there's actually been a few people that have emailed me and been like, you've changed my life. This has been life changing. I heard an idea that you said one year ago.

I took it and I just sold my company for X amount of dollars or I just hit one million in revenue. And especially now that the pod's grown so much, like it's getting crazier and crazier. I love that. What a service. Thanks for doing that, Greg. I mean, to me, it's just like selfishly. I'm one of those people, and I think you are too. Like, I'm an idea junkie. And to me, this is therapy. Like, getting out ideas, jamming on ideas, just to me, like, this is my time to just,

it's my guilty pleasure. And what I'm learning is that a lot of people are sick like me and sick like you probably and need time to just flesh out ideas because we see the world. and it's just not perfect, right? We see the, oh, what if this happened and what did that happen? We're like, what if people? So I don't even do it fully self-servingly. I do it also just for myself.

It's great. I love this concept. Should we jump into the next one? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so this one, I don't know that it's a gigantic business, but it could be. And here's why. It could go viral. And so this one is the,

idea that every day I open TikTok, and I love TikTok, by the way, it's so fun. Every day I open TikTok, and I see some kind of like new creative method being used by some artists that invented that method. And there's a certain number of skilled people that can replicate that method, but because they're skilled, they're probably going to be doing their own thing. but then there's this whole audience of people clicking like and commenting on these like new viral methods that would probably buy like an art kit and i'll give you an example like there's this guy that does like spin paintings and you just dump paint on a canvas that's spinning you could easily

sell that motor and a few components to enable anyone to make a spin painting or there's this other artist that has these spray caps that are unique where you like pipes out a whole bunch of different caps and as you spray it creates this really cool texture, that could easily be a product that you sell to everyone that has watched this artist videos and thought of it is really cool. Now you could do this without permission and just go out and do it because there's no real copyright on the process for the most part. Or you could go partner with these artists and provide them with a new thing to set. to their growing audience of customers.

So viral art kits, viral pottery kits, viral spray painting kits, any content that's going viral related to a creator, inventing a new style of making work and sharing it on TikTok is a product that could be sold on a monthly basis as a box company or in a marketplace. Now there's manufacturing challenges with this one. there's there's there's there's a lot more it's probably a harder startup than the first two that we've mentioned because you're actually selling a product rather than a service um or a service based product um but i wanted to kick that one out there and see what your response to that was gregg so check this out i'm going to share my screen so i met someone who her instagram handles marina minis you see my screen She creates these miniature versions of things

And it started to go really viral Because people love many things And this would be a great example of like An art kit to do small mini things With like instructions on how to do it Like she has 263,000 followers on Instagram She's got more on TikTok I think But just crazy engagement, right?

84,000 likes and this is like relatively new. So what I'd like about this idea is you can actually spend dollars, ad dollars, to target people who follow certain accounts. So you know that these people like Marine Mnities. And you can go ahead, you don't need their permission, right? You just buy the ads against it. And yes, there's the, what I don't like about this idea is the production side,

but let's just assume you can do that for a second. You start building out this marketplace of 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 creators. And by the way, someone should go and register this domain. The domain viralartkits.com is available. Somehow it's available. So unless my producer, Rafa, goes and registers during listening to this, should be available. and you grab that

and then you just start having a bunch of these creators you organize it by creators and then it becomes a thing and here's the way to take this from like a small business that's kind of annoying to an interesting big business

that has recurring revenue is you just do a monthly drop where you for $50 a month you get one of these kits and it's cool because you get to learn about a new creator a lot of these people are creative in general like that's the reason why they follow these accounts

and you're happy because you're getting that recurring revenue. Can you find 5,000 people to pay you $50 a month or $80 a month for these things? Probably. Yeah, and I think the other macro trends that this touches on is it's expensive to live in the world and people are looking for things to do at home that take time, that feel rewarding and build confidence. People are also a second macro trend is people are more. and more becoming content creators. And this is a product you buy

that allows you to create content around your purchase. And in doing so, you're inadvertently or kind of proactively marketing the thing you bought. So it's a product that has a viral loop built into it, which I quite like. Yeah. And like, you know,

I'm looking at Google Trends for things like 3D puzzles and board games. And if you look at it on a, you know, let's look at it from a 2004 to present. Like these are some big peaks. You know, people are, they want IRL things that they can touch and do. And you're right. Like when going out for a drink and a cocktail cost you $18 or something, like do, you know, you might not want to do that, right?

because at night out might cost $100, $200. You might just want to stay in and create content with your boys or your girls. So I do think that it is a trend. And I like this. This is a sneaky, good idea, dude. I'm not going to do it. Someone else should do it. Someone's going to do all these ideas.

Can't wait. Okay, the last one, which I think is kind of cool. So since we last saw each other, which has been years, I moved to this small town. I built an art residency on this ranch. I've been kind of like getting involved in the local politics of this town, joining various organizations related to economic development in this town, trying to figure out, is there a way to use creatives and culture to revitalize economies of small towns? given that there's this almost death spiral happening in big cities. They're becoming unlivable.

They're becoming expensive. People are now able to work remotely in some cases. And so is there this idea that you can take old infrastructure in small towns and create like little utopias, especially given that the majority of the population in most of these small towns are retired age and on their way to the end of their life. All of this infrastructure is going to become available. for sale, largely because the kids of these retirees don't want to move back to these small towns because quality of life isn't there. So I'm trying to figure out if I can kickstart a small town.

And my thesis started with an art residency, and that was cool. But what I really needed is people to be able to come to the small town, spend some time, enjoy nature, have an affordable experience and have something that take a lot of pictures up. So I bought 40 acres. I turned it into a glamping site. I brought in a whole bunch of big, huge, selfie-friendly sculptures and created what I'm calling Art City. And it's this concept that could be a franchise that I take to other COAs or COAs and start to acquire COAs through private equity. It's a business that I could just scale myself and have 10 art cities around the country.

It could just be like a really nice cash flow business for myself. I think my guiding principle with anything I take action on is that I have to be able to do it faster than anyone else so I can iterate and make it happen quickly. Also, it has to pencil into 25% ROI no matter what, or else it's kind of like a ungrowable business. So came up with this idea, glamping site, 40 acres, sculpture park offered 66, 20,000 people drive by every single day because of our proximity to I-40, which is a major thoroughfare, land is affordable. It just seems to work. One thing, that I had to do in order to stimulate demand for my glamp ground was sign up for hip camp,

which is like Airbnb for camping. And if you go look at the hip camp map, there's quite a lot of cool spots, but they're for the most part very much clustered around certain geographies. But the thing about campers is they're often on road trips and they're crossing the country. And there's areas or pockets of the country that have no hip camp. sites available. And why is that? Well, in order to have an appropriate HIPCamp site, you need to have shower facilities and toilet facilities and perhaps like a fire pit and some infrastructure for these people to camp on, whether they're in a tent or a van. So here's the idea. Go do a little bit of data analysis on HIPCamp, figure out where major thoroughfares are, where people are leaving

big cities heading to another location, go to that town in between, write a letter to a property owner and say, hey, I'd like to do a joint venture with you, where I'm going to invest in bringing in like a composting toilet and an outdoor shower, and I'm going to manage your listing on HipCamp, and I want a revenue share against the revenue generated. And just like folks built these Airbnb empires,

I suspect you could do this with HipCamp. And I think the macro trend here is that, for many people that are traveling, Airbnb's are too expensive. And they want perhaps a more organic, kind of a little bit more in the woodsy feel experience. And there's already a platform that does most of the heavy lifting and finding these customers for you. So I want to comment on one quick thing. I think on Airbnb, what I notice is there's a bunch of people that, don't even own Airbnbs.

They're going to people who have apartments. They call it lease arbitrage. So they're going to, people have apartments. My friend Blake Rocha talks about this a lot online. He basically will go to this building and say, listen, I'm not going to buy your building, but if I find you a tenant at this rate, like, is that cool?

Or if I manage your Airbnb at this rate, you know, can I get a cut? So I think this is kind of that same thing, but in a different vertical that no one's thinking about. Literally no one. And the other thing that's happening with campers and van lifers is they're mostly content creators. And so this has this other built-in viral loop. One theme in all my stuff is like, how do you make it so that your customers share your story and bring you more business organically? And so this particular category of accommodations does satisfy that condition that most of your customers are going to market the thing for you after they've experienced it once. Totally. I like it.

The challenge is like how do you find the perfect like composting toilet outdoor shower combo that comes on like a semi truck and you fork off and drop down and it just like works? because most people are not going to want to plug into their septic or their sewer. They're going to want something self-sustaining. This might require some capital to actually get started. Those are some of the challenges I see in building out this business. How much capital realistically does it take to get going, though? Well, like, I bought a really nice composting toilet from my site, and it was like 14 grand for a two-seater.

But this is like the top of the line. You could probably do like an outdoor shower and a composting toilet for closer to a grand or two grand or something like that. So let's say you get 40 bucks a night per camper. You've got a 50% fill rate. That's 6 grand a month. I think that's 6 grand a month. No, 600 bucks a month. You could probably break even within the year and then you own the infrastructure and you keep doing that.

my math was way off. I'm not that dumb. We swear he's not that dumb. Yeah, okay, so when the editor goes in, I'm not that dumb. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. So those are some of the ideas I had. I mean, I'm really into what Cody Sanchez was talking about related to like roll up of services, businesses, and small towns and operational. them. I'm seeing that as a need here in this town, but I'm not a subject matter expert on that.

And I'll probably end up doing it here and two can carry. But yeah, those are the big ideas for today, Greg. Three fire ideas, four fire ideas, actually, three and a bonus, which we appreciate. And I like all of them because anyone can do it. It doesn't take a lot of capital. they're all with virality built in because the problem I think with a lot of businesses is you just, it's hard to find customers. So if it's built in, that makes your life a lot easier.

And so I appreciate you, man. And where could folks learn about ArtCity and you? VisitartCity.com is where you can find day passes to ArtCity, learn about the artist involved book overnight stays. And The Most Famous Artist.com is where you can see all my work. Yeah, and if you're cruising through Toekam Carey, DM me on Instagram at The Most Famous Artist and I'll show you around.

And otherwise, my email is Maddie at the most famous artist.com. And I'm open to hearing about people starting these businesses and having tremendous success with them. And like, what does Art City look like in 20 years? Like, where do you want to take this thing? Have you heard of Marfa, Texas? Yes. Okay, so Marfa, Texas was this military town and kind of in the middle of nowhere, West Texas.

Donald Judd moved there with the help of this rich lawyer guy, bought up a bunch of infrastructure, built his studio, brought his friends out there, and Marfa's real estate 10xed in the last decade or so. That's an example of how art can kind of impact an economy. I would like to have a tremendous measurable impact on Tugan Carey and prove that like investing in art is a good thing because it drives the economy. I could see a world wherein I partner with large-scale property developers and become like the creative director of their entire portfolio, given the relationships I've got with these large-scale sculpture artists and the understanding of installing and selling this stuff. stuff. Ideally, a whole bunch of knowledge workers and artists and creatives moved to Tukumkary an entirely new industry is born. I'm not sure what that looks like. I imagine Art City and its current instantiation will be some kind of franchise business or a roll-up of a whole bunch of different campsites that I turn into Art Cities and then like a acquisition

by a publicly traded glamping grant lamp site or trailer park operator or something. like that because what I'm building is the viral version of a campsite or the viral version of a trailer park. Yeah, which is honestly a good prompt for anyone listening for any business. It's like, pick a business and then be like, okay, I'm Maddie Mo. What is the viral version of this business? It's just a good prompt. Yeah, it used to be start with the headline because headlines used to be a method through which you could go viral. And then the news media just got all wacky. And it was no longer that interesting.

And then everyone became a creator. So how do you empower people to create content because they've used your product? Right. And so what is it? It's a video. Is that, you know, reverse engineer the video? The video of what? I mean, it's just, I feel like all social platforms are now 60% video.

Right. Instagram, TikTok, even Twitter now is like a video platform. LinkedIn just added video, YouTube. Video is the atomic unit now of social. So reverse engineering, someone being like, hey, I'm at, you know, Art City, check this out. Yeah, and some kind of interactive component that's like memeable. Like a meme is just a repeated behavior. how do you allow people to repeat a behavior over and over again that elicits positive reactions from the people they're sharing it with? Because that's all that's fueling this virality is like people are going, look, I did this cool thing.

Please accept me. And then they accept you by giving you likes and comments on the cool thing you did. Totally. Yeah, exactly. And I think your goal as the business owner is, you know, if you've got 100,000 unique visitors, visiting or watching or seeing your brand, how do you get the highest percentage of that 100,000, call it 20,000, 30,000 to actually create a meme or create content so that that brings in another 100,000, and then you build a flywheel.

Yeah. And I wouldn't say I figured it out yet, nor do I have like as ambitious aspirations. is you, Greg. I don't need to be like the guy who owns a portfolio of businesses until the end of time. Like literally all I want to do is wake up and like water the plants in my garden and go for a walk and like hang out with cool people. And I've arrived at that place in my life. And so I'm trying to cheat to make my life as easy as possible. And the viral loop built into the business is a hell of a cheat. Yeah. But you're looking, yeah, you're looking for, I think all entrepreneurs are looking for shortcuts. and it's just in our nature, that's the best shortcut that we have is if you, if you can solve customer acquisition and solve word of mouth, I think you've got a pretty good cheat code. And the cool thing is, yes, like, okay, you don't want to build a huge portfolio of things.

You know, maybe I buy that. Maybe I don't. But I will say that you've built something that could, like when people ask me, oh, I want to build a holding company, how do I do it? I always say start with one thing. So you're building one thing that has this viral coefficient built in. And the beauty about that one thing is it could be scaled to different regions, if you want it. You know, if you want it.

Different regions, different revenue channels. Like I could see Art City becoming a Kith-like brand where we do collaborations with really high-end other brands. Or I could see Art City becoming like an artist representation company where we're, selling large-scale sculptures for a whole bunch of artists that we don't actually have sculptures on site with or have their sculptures on our actual property. I could imagine becoming a festival company. There's just, yeah, finding a shelling point and having it be extensible. I think that's what you're doing quite well, Greg.

Well, I think what you're doing and what I'm doing and what I think everyone should do, if you're interested in being an entrepreneur is you're putting yourself at the middle of something that really interests you. And that gives you optionality to, you're the center of gravity when it comes to art and this local art. So you have these sculptures, you're meeting artists. And then once you're at the center of it, even if it's local center, doesn't need to be global, then you have this optionality around,

okay, I can go do this thing. I can go do that thing. Totally. Yeah, optionality is important. I get bored easily. It's also more fun, dude. It's way more fun to be, to have that optionality to do different things as you evolve as like a human being. Yeah, and one thing I've seen you preaching lately or for a while now is like the lack of need for venture capital and building these types of businesses.

And I think that's totally true. But as someone that's raised venture capital for, I want to say like six or seven different startups, that process and that going through that structure has helped me think more clearly about how to operate my own businesses now. And so it's not that venture is good or bad. It's another path. And perhaps exploring it is a good way to get punched in the face a few times and learn exactly what you don't like doing yourself so that when you start your holding company, you've got

some strong foundation to stand on. Well, I think what's good about venture and, you know, yes, we've both done it is, A, you get rejected hundreds or if not thousands of times. So the process of getting rejected is just good for any entrepreneur because it allows you to, you're pitching all these VCs and a bunch of them are just, you know, the timing isn't right. you know, the metrics need to be higher. Oh, we have a conflict, right? So you're getting, you're getting all these insights, and it does force you to, like, put all your thoughts in this deck

that ultimately at the end is this potent way of explaining whatever it is you do. And that's really, really awesome. I feel like, so that's number, you know, that's A and B. I feel like someone should just create like the YC, but at the end, there's no venture investment. It's like a program designed to just help entrepreneurs and accelerate them and meet other entrepreneurs. So I think the VC ecosystem does put you in the room with a lot of other VC entrepreneurs.

And that makes you high quality. Yeah. So when next time I come to Miami, can we go for a meal? We can go for a meal. Also, I'll be in Montreal for a mural fest in a few weeks. weeks, which is a, I just Googled it. 1.15 million people go to this event that they decide, it's a nonprofit. They basically take over like 100 murals and they do all kinds of cool murals and people

go and visit it and you should check it out, the little R&D. Yeah, I'm locked in here making sure that my summer is very profitable. But maybe next year, I'll check that out. Cool. Maddie Mo, it's been real. Catch you later. Thanks, bud. Thank you.