The Startup Ideas Podcast - This $20M/year Founder shares his 3 top business ideas with me

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

I’m joined by Jason Yanowitz, Co-Founder of Blockworks, to discuss some of the most profitable business ideas on his mind: building an AI Chief Operating Office for companies, starting a business in the men's health industry, building a B2B niche media brand, and so much more.🚀  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 JASON ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonYanowitzLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanowitzjason/Episode Timestamps00:00 First business idea: AI COO for companies06:13 Second business idea: Men’s longevity business21:00 Third business idea: B2B niche media brand33:40 Opportunities and challenges in the crypto space To scale your revenue faster with conversion-focused creative sign up to https://designscientist.com

Men's interest in health is at an all-time high. You look at one of the best-selling books of the last 12 months is the Peter Attia book. The fastest growing podcast of last year is the Andrew Huberman podcast. So I think, like, you look at the longevity space right now. It used to be this thing that, like, the nerds were interested in. And now it's becoming cool. Now it's kind of breaking through to the mainstream. And so there's going to become this, like, booming anti-aging market.

I think men are going to become more and more proactive about maintaining kind of, like, a youthful appearance, both professionally and personally. And we are off. So sipping with Jason. Jason, yeah. I need my drink, huh? All right. What are you drinking? I have three drinks lined up for today.

Depending on how the podcast goes, we've got coffee. If you really put me on the hot seat. We've got a La Croy if you decide to take it easy. And we've got a water if this goes is planned. Okay. Well, we'll see. We'll see at the end. You've got some fire ideas.

So I want to get right into it. AI COO for companies. What do you mean by that? Okay. Basically, I think that so let me flip this on you for a second. How many people work at your hold? Like how many people work inside your holding company? About 115.

Okay. Yeah. So Blockworks today has, I think we're about to hit 70. I'm pretty sure. We might end the year around 90, 85. The problem that I've seen happen is the coordination problem inside of companies. So, and specifically inside of Blockworks right now. So what I mean by this, my first idea that I want to lay out here is like, I think there's a real opportunity to build an AI, either C.O or chief of staff, I don't really know what you call it, where you basically, every Slack, every email, every notion, every Google Doc, Asana, Jira, everything that is written inside of the company gets pulled into.

basically this large AI database, you basically need the founder to opt in and you need to you need everyone at the company to know that they are joining this thing, this company, where like there is opt in from day one, right? That's probably one of the problems is some employees, if you bring it to a larger company, wouldn't want to do this. But I think from if you hadn't small enough company where you could get everyone to opt in or if you could find a founder who wanted to do this from day one,

if you pulled every single message, again, including person, personal private DMs on Slack, all that kind of stuff, had the understanding that no one could read those messages except for this AI. I think you could actually build a really useful tool that ends up having a lot of these benefits inside of a company. And why COO versus data scientist or CFO or what makes you think that COO is the most interesting place to start? The problem that exists, I'm only speaking from personal knowledge here is because Blockworks is the first, you know, I've been running Blockworks for six and a half years and is really the first like quotes around this real business. But the problem that we have is, again, the coordination and communication problem as the company scales. So what I end up dealing with a lot and I know other executives and leaders and just other people at the company deal with a lot is, hey, what is this person working on this week? Hey, is anyone here working on this? Hey, do we have a document that shows the product roadmap? Hey, do you have any idea with the, you know, the ARR was in Q2 compared to Q1? What I found is when I step away, let's say someone messages me.

I have a tendency to message. I respond very quickly on Slack. If I don't respond for like a day, the problem usually gets solved in some way. And so I think that there's a lot of time that people end up spending inside of companies, just answering these like menial little questions where usually the solution is a company wiki. So what's evolved is like a company wiki. There's some tools for this. I think a lot of people now start-ups do it on Notion, but that doesn't really solve it because Notion's pages, even though I want to love them, they end up oftentimes sucking. And there's like, it's really hard to find

things. And I think that just like this one, you could basically just call it a company chatbot would really solve it. Even things like, you know, we have new hires who just started. I think we had four or five new hires who started this month. And I heard that they're asking, hey, how long does Jason, so my co-founder's name is Mike, hey, how long does Jason usually take to respond to a Slack? Hey, how long does Mike usually take to respond to a Slack? That's like, it's this weird little menial question. It doesn't really make a big impact, but it kind of does on a person's life. So there are all these different questions that you could ask it. Anything from, hey, how long does it usually take Greg to respond to a Slack all the way up to, hey, what was the revenue last quarter?

Hey, do we have a document that shows our product roadmap? Hey, do you know if anyone's working on the graphic for the Das for our event redesign, like all of these kind of things? Yeah, I think that's a really good framework for any sort of agent type experience whenever you have a bunch of Google Docs or a notion and you want the ability to extract that information in a really interesting way. Like there's probably an agent business there. Exactly. I mean, that's what I think. So this is of all of the ideas I had, right? I had some like some boring ideas, some, you know, crypto ideas. This one is really tough because I think one of the mistakes founders end up making is they don't think if I'm successful, what will the business be in five years and who will I be

competing against? And who you're competing against here in five years is Google, Salesforce and Slack. And they have the tableau business obviously as well, Microsoft, right? Because if this is successful, Google says, oh, I mean, let's just build this in, right? So you end up, that's why I, that's why this is probably my least favorite of the ideas, but I had to, had to bring some, you know, sexy AI idea to the table. Of course. You had to. It's 2024. You got to. You got to. You got it. No, I think I do like that framework, though. And I think even if it doesn't become a big business,

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I liked it so much. I invested in the business. What's your favorite idea on this list? Let's go to that one. There are a couple ideas that I would do if, I think I'd tee this up by basically saying, I've seen you talk a lot about this on Twitter and stuff. Like the nature of building a business is changing today, right? We're at a turning point in building companies.

And I've seen you tweet about, you know, how I think it makes a lot of sense. not to take venture money today. And I think all of that, I completely agree with a lot of those takes. So a lot of these are built on the back of this idea that, look, in 2008, if you knew how to code, you probably had a better chance of building a SaaS product in a space you maybe didn't know much about compared with someone with deep expertise because you knew how to code and because you could go build this SaaS product. Because software is just such a powerful thing. But today, because it is so easy to just spin up a company with these SaaS products and with these AI tools, I think deep domain expertise is now actually popular and powerful again.

And I think you're going to see this like this entire generation of founders who basically take that belief that it's super easy to build a company today. And this idea that like maybe the original idea of, hey, we don't have to be profitable. Everyone said, we don't have to be profitable. Look at Amazon. There's a whole generation of VCs that invest in companies on that one idea of, hey, we don't have to be profitable. Look at Amazon.

I think that's changing. So some of the ideas that I really like, there's probably. two here. One is around actually men's health and specifically hair transplants, Botox. If you look at basically women's health, the women's personal care market went from 27 billion in 1997 to 511 billion. It grew about 20x in the last 25 years. I think the men's care market is about to do the same thing. So there's one idea we could talk about there with men's health and like something I'd probably build around that. It's a very unsexy business, in person, physical, you have to build physical offices.

And then there's, I would probably do what I did with Blockworks again because I just, I think this idea of like creating a negative Kack SaaS business is probably the only way to build a successful SaaS business today in my mind. So I want to, I want to unpack that negative Kack piece in a bit because I need, I need to understand what you mean by it. But I want to start with the Botox for men, not because I, not because I need Botox, you know, just putting that out there. Just stay in for anyone who's not watching on YouTube, I don't need Botox.

I don't need Botox. And if you don't believe me and you're listening to this, go on YouTube. Let me know if I need Botox. But I do, I have noticed that I've seen a lot of advertising. I have in Miami, you know this. And in Miami, you know, plastic surgery, Botox, it's everywhere. And I have noticed that like 90 plus. plus percent of the marketing, the images is of women.

Like, do you know of a leading men's Botox brand? I don't. I don't know of any of them. And okay, so here's where this idea originally came from. The idea originally came from my friend who started losing his hair really quickly. And he went to try to get, he looked at the market and he tried like hymns and there's a pill that he was taking. What's a rogene? And it wasn't working.

So then he's like, oh, let me go try to get like hair. hair transplant or hair plugs or whatever. He's like, I saw a picture of Elon Musk. It looks pretty good. Let me go, you know, Tom Brady, like, clearly got this. Let me go check it out. And all of the best places in New York for hair transplants had a two-year waiting list, a two-year waiting list to go get a hair transplant.

And this is a, you know, I don't know how much it costs, but the procedure is like, you know, $20 or $30,000 or $40,000 to get, right? So this is a two-year wait list to go pay $40,000 for something. So that's when the idea started kind of like, it's like, okay, there's something there. So start looking into it. What's happening is I think we're basically at like LASIC eye surgery was 20 years ago for hair transplants. If you wanted to get like LASIC eye surgery 20 years ago, very like very risky, very expensive,

long recovery process. And that's what it is today for a hair transplant. For men, 40% of men go fully bald. 70% of men experience balding. their life and you're selling to basically this massive market of men who are honestly just to be candid like pretty desperate if they're losing their hair like what you're seeing with the technology right now there used to be this old technology called f ut where they would like take a scar like rip hair out of your head and like you'd be left with a big scar now they can do it without any of the

scarring so you're like we just hit this like technological precipice where I think we're on the other side of it but all the doctors who have the clinics they all practice the old thing And they're all set up as these like old doctor's offices. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. Like there's more I could ramble on about why I'm excited about this. But that's like a really interesting area. I think you could do hair transplants, layer on men's Botox. Great like a kind of luxury feel that feels very exclusive.

And yeah, I think that that would be a really successful business. So first of all, I love this idea. Like I feel like it's one of those ideas that would work. Like just would work with a high probability that it would work. how would how would you go about starting this like what steps would you take if you actually wanted to start this if i actually wanted to start this you need the i mean you need a doctor and you need a this is a perfect celebrity business right so you need a doctor and you need a celebrity and i don't think what you so there's the there's some chicago bears middle linebacker who got hair transplants bald guy forget

his name um and he was like plastered all over the billboards i don't think you need those celebrities. The first thing I would do is I would go get a doctor. You got to get a doctor. So I look this up. You need a doctor and you need two assistants, basically, because the way it works is they take the hair out of the back of your head, put it on the front of your head. So you need like the doctor to do that and the assistance to help with that. So that's three employees that you need. You need a physical space. So let's say you're paying a doctor to, you know, maybe let's say 300k a year. Each assistant is 100k year. So that's 500k a year. Maybe you need space in person in New York. So that's 20K a month. So that's another 250 year. So that's 750k a year right there of costs. And then I think what you need is a celebrity.

That's like big on tech Twitter. So I would pick like, you know, you have great hair. But if you were balding, I'd go to a Greg Eisenberger. I'd go to Sam Parr or Austin Reef or Kevin Rose or, you know, maybe I'd go to Tim Ferriss. There you go. All the people he said before that, great hair. Great hair. They got great flow. So I'd go to Tim, be like, Tim, man. You know how you've been losing your hair. Let me get your hair back. I can get your hair back. And you need like one or two success stories. And the good thing about this is, I mean, you can charge, let's say, $50,000 and you can do one a day. I think you can do one a day per doctor.

So I don't know, I'm trying not to do mental math these days in public, but 50 times 365 is almost $20 million. So that's $20 million per location per doctor. That's how I would start it. I also wonder, you know, would I want to start in Manhattan like at $20,000 a month of rent? Or like the people and is it just because there's the, you know, New Yorkers are willing to pay that amount? You know, I think you want to do that. Yeah, I think you want to go to New York, San Francisco or Miami where, you know, my, like the way my friend put it, he's like, I'd pay whatever to get, you know, he works in private equity. And he's just like, yeah, I'd get, yeah, I'd pay whatever to get my hair back.

I think you can basically yank the prices up and folks will not respond too much to the increase in pricing. It would be cool if you can also do it in like a three day retreat weekend. It's like, hey, I'm going to upstate New York for three days. And it's like a detox weekend. And I also like they also, there's a doctor there and he also does my hair. Okay. So Turkey is the hair transplant capital of the world. If you ever fly back from Turkey, you will see guys with bandages.

all across their head. And a lot of these places, you'll pay, let's say, $5,000 for the hair transplant, because it's a lot cheaper there. So you pay $5,000 there. And then you'll pay another $5,000 for a two-week retreat because the first two weeks are, like, if you look at the pictures, like, it's pretty gnarly. So you don't really want to be in public. You don't want to walk around.

So you end up just like staying in your home all day. But yeah, I think you nailed it. You would probably do some sort of like luxury retreat. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called Boringmarketing.com. These people just know how to rank you on Google. They are the world best.

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And Botox, like, tell me why you think, you know, Botox for men is a good idea. A couple reasons. One is Botox and women is just the fastest or second fastest growing like women's self-care, personal care, like area. It used to be like beauty and it's outpassed beauty and makeup and all that kind of stuff. I don't know why maybe the plastic surgery has gotten better. But if you look at some of the men's data, so liposuction is actually the fastest growing area. I just feel like I wouldn't want to maybe get into the liposuction arena. I don't know.

But that's the fastest growing area. then hair transplants, then Botox, actually. So I don't know why this aversion to liposuction, but I'd probably do hair transplants and then, yeah, some sort of Botox and injections. Again, I think what you need there is there's a stigma associated with getting Botox. So you need to create a very, like, exclusive, luxury, I would call it high privacy place where there's a lot of trust that nobody knows

that you're going to this place. And one of the reasons I think this is going to work, like men's interest in health is at an all-time high. You look at one of the best-selling books of the last 12 months is the, it was the Peter Attia book, right? You look at the fastest growing podcast of last year is the Andrew Huberman podcast. So I think like there's the clear interest. And then I think you look at the longevity space right now.

Like longevity is now becoming, it used to be this thing that like the nerds were interested in. Now the nerds and the billioners. And now it's becoming cool. Now it's kind of breaking through to the mainstream. And so there's going to become this like booming anti-aging market as men are, I think men are going to become more and more proactive about maintaining kind of like a youthful appearance, both professionally and personally. And if you like, I don't know, we have a lot of like millennials and Gen Z at Blockworks.

And it's very clear the men take their, I don't know, when I graduated college and like just started a job, like, I don't know, every dude just looked the same. Everyone's like wearing like a slubby button down with like some bad tucked in jeans like tucked in pants. All the guys look good now, right? People are taking their appearance much more seriously. And I think it's got a lot of tailwinds behind it. Yeah. Yeah.

I think just in general, framework wise, longevity, like that space, there's thousands of businesses to be built in the longevity space. I also think longevity for pets is talk a lot about. I've been thinking a lot about that. You know, people love their, their dogs, their cats, whatever. And, you know, they get older and it's sad. It gets very, very sad. You know, a lot of people would pay a lot of money to extend their dog's life by two, three, four, five years. Yeah, I mean, there's, when people think longevity, I think the first area that people go into is like,

some pills or supplements or something. Like everyone's, I feel like got their own supplement brand now. But yeah, I think there's a pretty like unsexy, boring physical business to be built here. The reason you should not build this business is I bet the lawsuits are rampant in this industry.

I don't know what it looks like, but I bet this dealing with insurance and dealing with like customers who are angry that their hair doesn't look as flowy as they thought it would. I bet that would be a nightmare to deal with. But I think the benefits outweigh the costs. But that would probably be the reason not to go into it. My brother's a doctor, and he once went to Las Vegas. I think he was speaking at an ophthalmology slash LASIC conference.

So it was actually a conference where all the top doctors who did LASIC surgery came in Las Vegas. And at this time, I was thinking I'm wearing, I wear glasses. I was thinking, should I get LASIC? A lot of my friends were getting it. So I asked them, I said, hey, like, just curious. what percentage of the doctors in that room were wearing glasses. And I expected him to say like, I don't know, 1%, 5%, a very small percentage, right? Because these are people who do LASIC.

So you'd expect them to not wear glasses. But he was like, you know, 85, 90% of people were wearing glasses. He was like, it was the most amount of glasses I had seen in a really long time. And I asked him why. And he said, because they know that it's like, a point, you know, six percent chance that you'll lose some vision. So they know the risks. They've seen the horror stories.

Yeah, they've seen how the sausage is made. Yeah. Yeah. Well, at this point, I don't know how the sausage is made. So I still think this is a good idea. Yeah. It's one of those it's one of the, you know, why I wouldn't do this idea is like, I don't know enough about it. So it's like, do your research, believe in it. Don't just like build a business to make money. But like, and also, There are some, like Botox specifically, there are like a bunch of benefits, I think, um, that go beyond like useful aging. Like, for example, I get migraines sometimes and like Botox is actually really good for

migraines. Yeah, I have these things called cluster headaches, which are a nightmare. And, uh, Botox has been recommended as well. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I agree. I also think like the Brian Johnson, Johnson vacation, I guess of, of, uh, everything is just men are just really are interested in it i saw you two i saw a video of him uh where it was like an mtv cribs kind of like interview where he's showing his house and he looks like

like the title is like this man looks 20 years old and like the top comment on youtube was like he just looks really slippery he looks 50 he looks really slippery he does look a little like lizardy alieny but i just yeah i mean look at huberman peter tia like Brian Johnson, like, these weird, like, health folks are celebrities now. That's never happened in the history of the U.S. or the world. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So I like this idea.

Interesting. You know, you talked about this negative KAC software piece. Like, what do you mean by that? Yeah, basically if, okay, so another business I would build is just a B2B niche media brand. I think for first time founders. I am convinced that building a B2B niche media brand is the best way to go make your first buck. If you want and to, I don't know, maybe you could go exit. Like look at what Austin Alex did with Morning Brew.

Like sold it for what, 70 million or something like that. I think rolled a little equity. Like they'll do just fine off that. And so it's not a billion dollar outcome. But because they didn't really go raise a bunch of venture, they were able to go make life change amounts of money where neither of them has to work. again, right? And so I think the first thing here before getting into negative cack is just go build a B to B to B niche media brand. That's the first thing I would do. Then if you really want to scale it,

past that 100 million valuation mark, what I would do is put a product at the bottom of my funnel. And what you're going off of there is this model that one of our advisors, Craig Fuller, who runs freight waves and sonar and a bunch of other things, which I can talk about their success. Well, I'll talk about their success now. He built freight waves into the biggest supply chain media brand and then launched a supply chain data platform at the bottom of that funnel and built that into a 300 million dollar a year business 300 million dollar a year enterprise value business that's a completely that's a subscription SaaS data business so what I mean by negative cack is if you look at how a lot of software businesses the last 20 years fund like do customer acquisition cost they

are paying money for marketing right you pay maybe your cac is 300 dollars or maybe you have a really high value subscriber and it's a hundred it's a thousand dollars whatever it may be what I mean by negative KAC is what we've built at Blockworks. So we have a negative KAC model, very similar to Freightways and Sonar. So we are getting paid to acquire these customers. That's what negative KAC means is you get actually get paid to acquire your customers. So how that works for Blockworks is we have Blockworks the media business and then we have Blockworks Research, which is a subscription, an enterprise subscription platform.

So Blockworks Media up here is conferences, podcasts, newsletters, news business. and we own this audience with several million investors interested in crypto. And up here, this is a cash flow positive business that spits off a lot of cash, but it also serves the purpose of owning the relationship with the audience, right? Where we have these people in our audience. So now you've got cash flow and you've got relationship with the audience. And then our job is to essentially try to figure out how we can convert, even if we convert 0.1% of our audience into the Blockworks research platform,

we have a, you know, we have a big old business on our hands. So that's what I think, I think you saw SaaS evolve from like just selling a SaaS product into like bundling SaaS products into SaaS companies trying to turn into platforms like a Salesforce. And now the next thing I think that's going to get really hot is, hey, how do I go build this negative KAC payback period, especially in a world where my investors are forcing me to both sign up more customers and decrease the cost of. signing up a customer that's basically breaking laws of SaaS physics. And I think this negative KAC model is the way to do it. Could you just using Blockworks as an example? Can you just share like the scale of where you are at, how many people are visiting the properties, how big the audience, how much revenue do you drive from maybe an average

user, just so people get a sense of like similar what they could expect for building a B2B niche business? So Blockworks launched May 2018. We just started kind of side hustle ideating on it, December 2017, officially quit our jobs and launched May 2018. First year of business, 250K of revenue. Second year of business, two million of revenue. Third year of business, three and a half million. Fourth year, 12 and a half million.

Fifth year, 25 and a half million. So, and we didn't raise any venture that whole time. So that was, we had no, so we had no product at the bottom of the funnel. It was all advertising and sponsorship dollars, conferences, podcasts, newsletters, and news. And so that was basically, that was the scale of the media business. Once we hit that scale, we said, and we were spitting off enough cash flow, we said, boom, let's go build the product and raise our first round. So now, so then in May or April, 2023, about a year ago, we raised 12 million at obfew.

135 post money valuation and that was to basically say look we've got this product at the bottom of the funnel it's growing tremendously we've never spent a dollar on marketing because we already own the relationship with the audience let's go put some fuel on the fire and go hire more engineers and you know analysts and things like that so that's basically our business model and that's some of the like i guess the behind the scenes and some of the numbers and you know when you started this 2018 there were there were a few other crypto media companies You know, so how did you know that there was still opportunity in this space? We picked a niche of a niche of a niche.

So what we, when we looked out at the landscape, so Blockworks is, I'll get to that. Blockworks is built on this like one thesis. And we've gotten so much wrong over the years, but the one thesis was that crypto would eventually become this big institutional asset class. And as that happened, the number of investors and professionals who can, came into the industry would grow by orders of magnitude. And those investors and professionals were going to demand a much higher quality level of information. And we basically said, look, let's go try to own and build the information stack for those professionals and for those

investors. And so to get back to your question, like when we looked out at the industry, there was Twitter, Reddit, there were a couple podcasts. There was like CoinDesk and Coin Telegraph. And they all were kind of appealing to like the mass markets, like the retail trader. or the retail investor or the college graduate who just bought some Bitcoin, we basically said, look, let's the first couple of years of blockworks, we, the niche of the niche that we picked was we said, we don't care about all of crypto. We're only going to focus on translating the, like,

what's happening in crypto to the old school institutional capital markets crowd. So that's how we were able to have success in the early years, as we said, look, there's all these cool things happening in crypto, But to get off the ground and kind of fight the 800 pound gorilla at the time, which was CoinDesk, we need to just focus on this institutional crowd of crypto. We did that for about three or four years. And then once we felt like we were kind of on par with CoinDesk, we said, now we can go a little broader. But even now, I mean, we only focus on the deeply crypto-native part of the industry. We leave a lot of the other things to other folks to cover.

And it's our bet that like the people who matter in the industry are the real crypto professionals and like power crypto users and all the other people are just kind of like passer buyers or they're people that like it just doesn't make sense from a media business model perspective to to try to capture that. Yeah, I call that niche of a niche of a niche. Like I call it a super niche. So it's like you pick your niche and then okay, you got to go deeper. So what's your super niche? The interesting thing is the super niche that you. you pick, turns out it was probably one of the highest value like niche of a niche or super niche, right?

Like, we got, we got remarkably lucky, lucky, right? Like, one of the biggest learnings of this is I think it's much better to be a mediocre entrepreneur or have mediocre products in the, in a extremely fast growing rocket ship industry than try to be the best entrepreneur in a really bad industry where the growth rate is zero, right? Because when the growth rate zero, you're basically playing a zero-sum game. You're eating away at someone else's business. Crypto grows every year. So the whole pie is expanding.

But yeah, I mean, we got lucky picking like the, I mean, the fastest growing industry in the world for the last couple of years. Yeah. And I think you can just, you can apply this model to B2B, but also B2C. Like you could, you know, we should buy longevity.com and, you know, focus on. the VC type high, high value, you know, a lot of disposable income type people and build a media business around that. And then you can sell them products. Like you can just, you can think of so many different B2C and B2B opportunities with the same model around pick a niche and then pick that super niche. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I mean, so the other, but the other thing you need to think

about if you're building a media business is where are the advertising dollars? So I have a friend. He's started another he started B2B niche media business but it turns out the readers of his newsletter and his listeners of his podcast and the readers of his publication they don't buy many things right so if you're a CMO who is the buyer of an ad you know advertised like runs the ad budget inside of a company for him they only buy conference sponsorships and he learned this a couple years into the business they only buy conference sponsorships so when he goes to them to try to sell newsletter ads well there's no one there they're not used to buying that as opposed to our audience or investors. If you run a Coinbase or Fidelity, you're very used to buying podcast ads and newsletter ads and things like that.

So I think it's important to think about like who are the buyers and sellers and what is the supply and demand of the ad market in the media business that you're launching. So how do you know that before it's too late? Because I'm sure a bunch of people will build a media business and then only realize six months or 12 months or two years even through it that, oh, wow. These advertisers are pretty sparse and I probably should have picked a different niche. I think you have, I mean, I don't really, I think you have to go talk to people. I think that's the only way. I would, though, look at existing advertisements that, the existing ad market. So let's say you're launching like a, I don't know, let's say you're launching like a wine media business or like a watch media business.

Like the first, let's say you're watching a watch business, uh, media business. media business. The first thing I would do is probably launch with like just Rolexes and Potex or something like that or maybe just for up and coming watch people who have a budget of like around 10K like Grand Seco's. Like maybe you just want the Grand Seco reader or who has like 5K to buy a watch. So that's like pick your core audience. And the reason like I think that you could go after that crowd is you already know the ad market's already been like determined for you. There's already so many watch brands of anyone in advertising as opposed to going and picking something like, I don't know, maybe wine or like, I honestly don't see many wine

ads. So yeah, that's, that's probably how I think about it. Yeah. I also, I also think like using the Gran Seco example, funny, I was, I was talking to Kevin about Kevin Rose about Grand Secos too. Like, people who buy Grand Secos are a particular type of person. Like they like to be unique. Yes. They don't want to follow the crowd. They don't want to follow the herd. So then what you can do if you have a bunch of Grand Seco readers, what are the other products that non-herd followers would like to buy, right? I bet the people who buy Grand Seco's are also people who are maybe experimenting with, like,

being sober right now. And maybe there's some CBD drinks you could market to them. So I think there's some overlap you can do. I love the generalization on Grand Seco enthusiasts. I mean, as an almost Grand Seco person, purchaser. I feel like it's fair to generalize. You want to buy a Grand Seco? I wanted to buy a watch for a long time just because I don't really own any watches.

And I wanted to buy a watch for a long time. I could not get myself to invest and to buy something for myself. Yeah. I just, I'm, I'm cheap. I couldn't get myself to do it. Well, you can start with the Seiko, right? Saco. Yeah.

$100. $100. Yeah. See how you feel. All right. It's enough about Grand Saco's. You know, I got to ask, being that you're in crypto land, do you have any crypto startup ideas for us?

So I do. I have a couple. The most successful crypto founders are deeply crypto-native. And what we've seen, we've seen a lot of failures when folks come in from Web 2 or from finance and they don't. fully drink the Kool-Aid. And the biggest mistake I hear people make when they're pitching is like, yeah, there's all these crypto nerds over here. We're going to go try to build this like a safe crypto consumer app that appeals, that brings crypto to the masses. That's never worked and it will

never work. That's not, that's, crypto has grown very bottoms up. It doesn't grow top down, as opposed to maybe something like AI. So yeah, I think that's one of the big mistakes. I am convinced that it was actually, one of our investors, Van Spencer from Frank. I tweeted this out, that crypto is, this is going to sound ridiculous to probably you and a lot of your audience, but like, I really think crypto is the only real venture investable vertical that is taking place right now. I think if you look at fintech, it's effectively dead and consolidating. If you look at consumer, there haven't been, I mean, this is your world, but like, there haven't really been any hits in the last 10, 15 years. There's like little sparks of joy, but no real businesses. If you look at enterprise SaaS, the revenue. multiples are like sub 10x now because everyone can compare them to the public markets, which makes it non-viable for large VCs. And there's a bunch of competition. And I think a lot of SaaS companies, people have realized they're just sexy front ends for Excel databases. Then you have like Anderrol and Palmer Lucky and stuff like American dynamism, defense. I think that's

interesting. But it's only really playable for like the Andresans of the world and some of the largest funds. And then there's AI. And I think that AI is possibly the last hope for some of these huge gigafuns. But there's really, I don't know how like some of the early stage funds are going to do anything here because you need huge capital commitments and a lot of the value accrual is going to accrue to the incumbents like a Microsoft or Google or something like that. So the setup, I think for this conversation is like I do have, I think there will be there will be, I think crypto is the best industry in the world to go start a company in, but you have to be deeply crypto-native, and I think you have to lean all the way in.

I don't know what you think of that, but, yeah. I mean, I'm as biased as you can possibly get money. Yeah. Listen, my honest take is there's definitely some, like, crypto has been around for now 14 or so years, right? Like, it's not going to anywhere. Yes, it's going to have ups and downs, but the idea of blockchain is decentralization, We still haven't seen like a consumer blockchain really hit to your point.

And maybe that never happens. Like maybe it just it's more around defy and stuff like that. But yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities. But then at the same time, I'm like seeing all these like meme coin stuff. And it like to me, it takes away from the industry to take it seriously. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on me coins in general? And like, do you consider meme coins of, you know, a venture opportunity? opportunity. Yeah, I'm here, here, I'll give you the, I'll give you both sides of the argument, I think. Here's the meme coin suck argument.

Memcoins suck because there's all this attention on crypto now that Bitcoin just broke through its all time high. People are looking back at crypto, you know, there's the Bitcoin having this week, BlackRock and Fidelity have their Bitcoin ETFs. Like the space is clearly coming back and we're entering another bull market. So all these eyes are on crypto. And all we see are these stupid meme coins. That's the. And it's like, and it's like, Guys, like, you're doing what we thought you kids would do playing in your stupid little crypto sandbox. You're creating these stupid meme coins. That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the meme coins are stupid argument. The meme coins are good argument is just that, um, marketing is harder than ever in today's world.

Like, finding attention on the internet is nearly impossible today. You can get these quick little hits, maybe a viral tweet or something. If you're, if you're Greg and you know how to tweet. But like, for most people, marketing is impossible. And what you're about to see are a lot of meme coins. actually turn into real businesses. So you're going to see, like, the way I think about meme coins right now is there's like the meme coins that you can just kind of speculate on whatever, everyone's going to have fun with

those. They might actually, they definitely will end in tears. And then there's going to be the meme coins where like they basically see that as a customer acquisition strategy, just like some NFT brands did. So if you look at like the most successful up-and-coming exchange today is an exchange called Backpack. They launched on the back of an NFT community called MadLad. Right. So their user acquisition strategy is let's go get 10,000 people to buy our NFTs. And then boom, we'll launch a crypto exchange. And now they're the fastest growing, I think the, the or one of the fastest growing crypto exchanges right now because they had this baked in audience of people who own the NFTs. Tensorians, right? Tensorians were another NFT community. They launched the tensor NFT exchange. They're one of the top five NFT exchanges out there. Pudgy Penguins doing the same thing. And you actually saw one, there's a coin called.

Dgen. It's like this, what I thought was a stupid little Dgen coin. They then launched their own layer three built on, built on Arbitrum, which is a layer two on top of Ethereum scaling solution. And that the Dgen chain L3 is doing the most transactions per second in the entire Ethereum ecosystem today. So that is like, I think that's what will, there will be some successful companies built on the back of these meme coins, most of them will end in tears. Many tears, many, many, many tears. I mean, same with NFTs, right? Like a lot of those ended in tears and there's some cool ones.

I also think the last era of meme coins that are interesting are speculation on events. So people have tried to build in crypto and not in crypto prediction markets for a long time, right? There's all these like betting on the election sites. There's Kalshi, I think, which is like a Sequoia or Andreessen backed company. There's polymarket. And none of these have really taken off too much. And if you look at what's happening with, there's a token called Bowden. And there's a token called Bowden and Biden.

And these actually have massive volumes and move directly in correlation with how people think the presidential election is going. So when Biden did his big speech a couple, this is probably a month ago, and people liked it, the Bodin, which is like inverse Biden, coin went down. And then Biden really screwed something up. The Bowdoin coin went up. Trump has a good speech. Bowden coin goes higher. So I do think that these like meme coins as a form of speculation will mostly end in tears, but they're also going to be a really interesting way for like the world to gamble on different events.

And like it or hate it, I kind of hate it. But the world is moving towards like a full gambling society. Right. I'm watching the NFL and like the announcers are literally talking about their parlays. I'm on the NBA app and there's gambling embedded inside of the app. So yeah, like it or hate it's, I mean, I think that's where the world is going. I agree with you. I agree with you.

I think it's the financialization of everything. That's like the nice way of putting it. The not so nice way of putting it is the world's turning into a casino and you'll be able to bet on everything. But I will say you got me thinking about if these coins are just ways to acquire audience and then you now have this audience and then you can build products for them that that you know and you could put blinders on and just focus on building products that that community is going to they're not even a community i'm not going to call them that group of people want to buy or use then

you might have a really big opportunity there i mean there's a lot that will end in tears but don't think about them as a think about them as just another growth hack to get users i talked to a company earlier this week that's doing 500k a day in revenue. They have 40,000 users. They launched a couple months ago, and they built on the back of this meme coin community. And they have no desire to be in the meme coin game. But they got 40,000 users,

and they're doing 500K a day in revenue because they leaned into meme coins. And then they're going to pivot and basically launch something else in crypto on the back of these 40,000 users. Very cool. And that's why I invited you on. I invited you on because I like how you think. I think where I know you have a podcast.

Tell us where people can listen to your podcast for more of you. Yeah, podcast is called Empire. So what we did, the reason we launched is a lot of the podcasts were not, a lot of the crypto podcasts were either people like shilling some random coin that they had a big bag of or they were just, I think they didn't really understand what was going on in the industry. And just because we, like, we've been in the industry for almost seven years full time now and running Blockworks, like we have a very like insider look into the industry and what's happening behind the scenes and had the deal. The venture races are getting structured and all this kind of stuff. And so we launched a podcast called Empire.

It's been around for almost three years. And yeah, my co-host Santiago and I basically just give you like the inside baseball of what's happening in crypto. I love it. And Blockworks research. Yeah. If you're an allocator or fund that invests in crypto, it would be. basically built the must subscribe to platform. It's $4,500 year. It's about 400 bucks a month. Actually, I guess it's a little less than that, 350, whatever it is. And yeah, I'd recommend it.

So, DM me on, I'm also on Twitter at Jason Yenowitz, and you can DM me if you want to check out the platform or go listen to the pod and whatever points your boat. Thanks, thanks for coming on, my man. Thanks for sipping with me. What would you end up sipping? Were you sipping anything? I had, I had all three, man. You were taking me for a ride there. I've one point I needed some coffee. I've got the La Croy now that you eased up on me, so we're good. I love it. All right. Take care, man.