0:00
It's insane.
Search this video
0:00
I think it's insane and brilliant. That's a good find.
0:03
Nobody knows about this account, by the way.
0:03
This account only has 750 followers, so I kind of maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here. All right, what's up?
0:18
It's time for the first ever Friday quickie.
0:19
This is a little idea me and Sam had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week that were either the best article, the best tweets, the best um you know, a little video that we saw.
0:31
Normally this is stuff we just only share in our group chat.
0:32
Um and we wanted to try it out on the pod showing it to each other.
0:37
I don't know what he's going to say, he doesn't know what I'm going to say.
0:39
We each have three, so we're going to do a list of six things. Let's run through it.
0:44
Uh Sam, you want to go All right, you want to go first? Ooh. Jinx. I'll do I'll do one. I have a quick one.
0:49
So, this is a genius deal flow hack.
0:54
You ever heard about how a hedge fund traders will like move their servers to be as close as possible to the to the pipe or they'll use a certain kind of wire so that the trades get executed faster.
1:01
I used to hear all these things about like how in traditional finance people would go to crazy lengths just to get that little edge, that little extra edge.
1:09
And I always felt a little sad that us, you know, the soft boys of Silicon Valley, we don't really do that.
1:14
We're all nice, paying it forward, we're just blogging everything that we know.
1:18
There's no like kind of uh you know, real secrecy, no real ruthless secrecy about things. Until I saw this.
1:22
So, our buddy Sully tweeted this out that there is a company that started to help VCs improve their deal flow.
1:29
So, he was like basically every VC knows deal flow matters.
1:34
Normally the way you do it is you're hosting dinners or conferences or you go on podcasts or you make, you know, a Patagonia vest that you give away, [ __ ] like that.
1:43
But they were like, the problem is you're you're you don't know what deals you're not hearing about.
1:50
So, what if there was a way where you could know about the deals you're not hearing about?
1:53
So, what they did was some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of like Sequoia and Andreessen and all these like the top funds. Is this real or an idea? I think this is real.
2:04
So, when people are leaving the office, they're like, "Hey, do you want a picture in front of the Sequoia thing? I'll send it to you."
2:09
They take a picture because it's a great moment for the entrepreneur.
2:10
Oh, this is when we pitched Sequoia.
2:13
And they're like, "Great.
2:13
What's the name of your company?"
2:14
And they're like, "Awesome."
2:16
And they basically sell that list to all the other funds.
2:19
It's like, "Hey, did you know these guys are out raising?
2:21
They were talking to Sequoia."
2:22
And um he's like he's like, "I heard about this and I thought it was amazing. Genius deal flow hack."
2:26
He's like, "The VC who told me about it was like, 'We don't pay for this, but I know it exists and others do.'"
2:32
Um I think that's brilliant. What do you think? I think it's brilliant. I think it's insane.
2:36
I think it's insane and brilliant.
2:38
There There's another version of this that I follow.
2:40
There's a Twitter account called like stealth something and it's anytime somebody who had like working on something new or stealth blah blah blah.
2:48
Anytime they change that to like the name of a project, it immediately tweets out, "This person just announced they're doing this thing."
2:55
And so, you can reach out to them and be like, "Hey, you know, that's really cool.
2:57
I like what you're doing."
2:58
What's the name of that handle? All right.
3:00
So, that account is called stealth co spy.
3:01
So, if you go to @stealthcosp y, it's a real-time notification of anytime like people It also tracks like LinkedIn.
3:09
Like, if you leave a company that they consider like a high trajectory like fast growth startup, it's like, "This person's leaving to do something new." And you can see it.
3:18
So, like for example, the last tweet was, "Julia is now building in stealth mode.
3:22
Uh she's a ex-data science director from GitHub and now and she lives in Boston. Here's her LinkedIn."
3:28
She just announced she just posted that she's she's working on something new that's in stealth. This is awesome.
3:33
be like, "Noah comes out of stealth.
3:35
He's got a platform for no-code SDK tooling for enterprise LLM applications. Here's the link. Here's his LinkedIn." This is awesome. All right. That's a good find.
3:42
Nobody knows about this account, by the way.
3:43
This account only has 750 followers.
3:44
So, I kind of maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here. This is a good find.
3:49
There's also that for when people um remove their employer off of their Twitter handle or their LinkedIn and they'll be like this person is now available. I like this.
3:59
All right, let me give you another one.
4:00
So, I was reading Reddit the other day and I found this old post. It's over a year old.
4:05
Do you remember Jake Kassan or Kassen?
4:07
I don't actually know how to say his last name.
4:09
But Jake, so he started Movement Watches.
4:12
And they were one of the first like D2C guys to go big.
4:13
And so they started this company where they sold watches, they got popular on Instagram.
4:17
I think he sold it for a hundred million dollars.
4:20
Then there was another hundred million dollar earn out, which I'm not sure if they hit or not.
4:22
But the company was bootstrapped.
4:24
So he made north of fifty million I would imagine. I found this post.
4:28
I don't know why he did this, but he did and I think it's great.
4:32
But he didn't really talk about it on social media, but I found this on this subreddit called find a path.
4:36
For those who have a hobby, passion or passing whim that they want to make a living out of but don't know how they can get there.
4:41
So that's the the description of the subreddit.
4:43
But he's got this description or this post on the subreddit and says I sold my company Movement a few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems would be solved.
4:50
I made my life really cushy and comfortable and I optimized to be as stress free as possible.
4:54
And then he goes on to say that he's new to this subreddit still trying to find out what he's what he wants to do to his with his life and that he set up his life to be easy and now it's been two years since he sold the company and he's 31, single, he never has to work again, but he's never been lonelier and depressed or depressed than ever.
5:09
And he basically talks about what he's trying to do in order to find his passion.
5:15
And I think that what's interesting about this post is A, people never talk about this type of stuff like publicly where they put their name on it and they truly say how they feel. That's fascinating.
5:23
And B, he like you see his replies of people saying like asking him different questions and he goes through really detailed replies of what he's trying to do.
5:31
So he's like, I love video editing and making movies.
5:33
So now I bought a camera and I've been trying and I took a YouTube class and I'm trying to learn how to take pictures and film new videos and chop them up or whatever.
5:39
And it's super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who's young.
5:44
I think he was 29 when he sold.
5:45
So, 29 worth tens of millions of dollars. He's pretty lonely. He's depressed.
5:50
And it's really fascinating to see someone break all this down.
5:53
I thought this was a really, really fascinating Reddit post that I didn't see shared anywhere. I love this.
5:58
Um I thought it was awesome.
6:00
I saw it because somebody on Twitter goes, "I wonder what the guys who like crushed it in the early wave of e-com are doing now.
6:05
I bet they're just killing it."
6:07
This is some somebody tweeted this.
6:09
And then this other guy goes, "Actually, I just saw this post on Reddit."
6:13
And this is this is a year ago.
6:14
He's like, "I saw this post on Reddit from the founder of Movement saying exactly what he's been doing.
6:17
And actually, you know, he's been kind of wandering and trying to figure it out."
6:20
Um and then I read this thing.
6:20
I was like, "Dude, that's the magic of the internet."
6:23
Someone just tweeting a random question.
6:24
Somebody else being like, "Oh, well, here's an obscure Reddit post that's like filled with, you know, the answer to your question."
6:29
And also just that this guy, you know, I almost felt bad I didn't bring this up on the pod cuz I was like, "It's kind of personal It's kind of personal.
6:36
Maybe he doesn't want this like you know, on blast."
6:37
I mean, he posted it publicly on Reddit, so I guess it's fair game, but he was being very vulnerable.
6:42
He's like, "You know, I'm lonelier than ever.
6:43
I'm deeply depressed, and I'm trying to figure it out."
6:46
Um but props to him for for doing that and doing it with his name on it cuz he could have have very easily just like done this same thing and just say, "I sold my company."
6:53
He didn't have to say who he was.
6:54
Um so, you know, respect to him for doing that.
6:56
I really, really appreciated that. I think it's awesome.
6:58
I think that this is a problem that not a lot of people go through, but it's really fun to for people who are dreaming of making money or who want to sell their company what happens on the other side.
7:06
I know, I think someone described this thing as called the second mountain.
7:09
So, you've climbed the first mountain, but you still need another mountain to climb.
7:14
And And he talks about They're like, "Why don't you start another company?"
7:16
He was like, "Well, in the past, money and ego were the huge motivators for me.
7:20
And I kind of those motivators are gone now.
7:23
And so, whatever I do next, I need to find fulfillment and to help others in some way."
7:25
And so, I think it's really interesting.
7:26
Um all right, what do you got? All right.
7:30
Number three, I'm going to do the Hormozi bump.
7:33
Okay, so uh Alex Hormozi, uh friend of the pod, good dude, he bought a company recently, School, from another guy who has been on the pod talking about School, the original founder of it, Sam Ovens.
7:44
So, that's like his new thing.
7:48
And that was like the He's He tweeted out, he's like, "This is the biggest bet I've ever made.
7:52
Uh you know, I'm investing a bunch of money into this."
7:53
And now he's wearing a School hat on every interview he goes on and every video he creates, and he's got, you know, trying to promote School. It's an awesome product. School's really good.
8:01
I haven't uh I've never used it. You actually used it?
8:03
Yeah, it's a good product.
8:03
That guy, Sam, is very savvy, and it's a very good product. Yeah.
8:08
And so, basically, it's say um uh it's like a community building tool for people.
8:12
You can make create a paid community, and people can join it on there.
8:15
Um it looks like it's heavy in like the like affiliate marketing, like drop shipping type of game.
8:20
When I went I went and browsed like the top communities that were on the site or whatever.
8:24
Um anyways, I think it's a it's a good good investment.
8:27
So, I was curious, how much of a bump do you think School got in web traffic after Hormozi did it?
8:35
Cuz obviously, he's doing it with this belief that, "Hey, I've just spent 2 years plus building my audience, huge audience, um of entrepreneurial people, and I'm going to invest in this thing, and then I'm going to try to use my weight to drive traffic."
8:49
So, I can, you know, this is very much the same strategy I've used, which is you can buy something at a fair price knowing that you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site.
8:57
So, I'm curious, how much do you think it went up?
9:00
So, I'll give you the um Did it double?
9:04
Yeah, what was the before?
9:06
was, let's say uh web traffic was in Let's say 3 months ago, if I was Let's say no, 1 2 3 4 5.
9:12
5 months ago was at about 8 million in in monthly monthly visitors. What do you think it is?
9:22
I'm I want to guess I would have guessed 10 or 12.
9:23
All right, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot, and this one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company.
9:29
When I say I, I mean not my team, I mean I'm the one who actually made it.
9:33
So, I've got this company called Hampton.
9:34
You can check it out, joinhampton. com.
9:37
It's a community for founders and one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys where we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask.
9:45
So, things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these like interesting questions and then we'll put it in a survey and I went and made a landing page.
9:54
So, you can check it out at joinhampton. com/wealth.
9:57
You can actually see the landing page that I made and the hard part with this is with Hampton we are appealing to a sort of a a higher end customer sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari.
10:08
So, I needed the landing page to look a very particular way.
10:09
HubSpot has templates, that's what we used.
10:11
We just changed the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy.
10:14
They have this drag and drop version of their landing page builder and it's super simple.
10:18
I'm not technical and I'm the one who actually made it.
10:21
And once it's made, I then shared it on social media and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information and I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did.
10:34
This is where the revenue came from.
10:35
So, it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it and I can say, "Oh, well, that worked, that didn't work.
10:42
Do more of that, do less of that."
10:44
And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it.
10:46
Look, I'm actually doing it, but you can check it out.
10:48
Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started.
10:51
All right, now back to MFM.
10:55
Okay, so it went from 8 million to in January it looks like spiked at almost 17 million according to like SimilarWeb, which is not exactly accurate, but directionally correct.
11:04
Um So, almost double the about about double double the traffic for that month.
11:10
Now, a lot of it is people just coming and checking it out cuz of the announcement.
11:14
It's not like necessarily the most sustainable thing, but let's now look Wow.
11:19
So, go So, mostly through February.
11:20
So, what's the February numbers looking like? But check this out. So, circle. at circle.
11:25
so I think they're called circle. co or circle.
11:27
so they're a community platform that's a competitor to school.
11:31
They've raised I think, tens of millions of dollars.
11:32
School has more than double their traffic.
11:35
They had double their traffic before they even took the money. That's insane.
11:41
And Sam actually told me, and he posted it on their about page, that he has invested $10 million of his own money, which I I think was a large percentage of his money that he had into making School a reality.
11:53
Yeah, it's interesting what these are.
11:55
So, I just sorted by paid.
11:55
So, you can see it's the digital growth community, which is like basically internet marketing.
12:00
Number two, Mark's manifestation thing.
12:04
Pay $49 a month and you're joining his thing. It's got 284 members.
12:09
Um digital wealth academy, right?
12:09
It's like it's a lot of the like uh the Adonis school.
12:14
Like-minded men who want to live the Adonis lifestyle, right?
12:18
It's like a lot of like Andrew Tate type stuff, uh which I find interesting.
12:21
But, it's cool cuz you know who I think you've done a bunch of paid communities on Facebook and now Slack and other places.
12:28
Uh you didn't use this for Hampton, right?
12:31
No, because when we started, I didn't know enough about it and I didn't think it'd be any good.
12:35
But, and then I met Sam, the guy who started it, and we were already on Slack, but I was like, oh, you actually are really smart.
12:41
I should have I I kind of regret not using it.
12:44
And I have nothing to do with this company, but I thought it was awesome.
12:47
But, they have a bunch of like non-businessy stuff.
12:47
So, there's like a stuff on like style and clothing.
12:49
And then there's one on meditation.
12:51
So, there's stuff on non-business stuff.
12:55
It's just I think anything aspirational you would want, right?
12:57
So, what do you Whatever you want.
12:58
You want a better body, you want a better style, you want a better you know, finances, whatever it is, that's how you you get there.
13:02
I think it's a great move also just in general.
13:03
The business model of I take a kind of crappy but high volume business model, which is let's say media, but I use it to buy assets in the best business model, SaaS.
13:15
Which is what he did, right?
13:15
So, he converted his YouTube fame, which doesn't pay very well, into owning a SaaS asset, which is like one of the SaaS is one of the best business models out there.
13:25
So, good move by Alex, on that one and congrats to to all involved on the on the big spike.
13:31
I hung out with Sam Ovens once, my wife and I, we were at a restaurant with him or some type of bar or something, and we were just talking, and Sam Ovens is he's a wonderful person, but he's he's almost a little awkward.
13:39
Like he's he's really in awkward in the sense of he's comfortable with silence.
13:44
And it got to the part of the conversation "Turns out I'm awkward." Yeah.
13:48
Yeah, he's he's the He's actually kind of normal, I guess. Yeah, it was me.
13:51
And it got to the point of the conversation where there was some silence.
13:56
And I was just like I was just like, "I'm going to sit in this for a minute.
13:59
Let's just see what this feels like.
14:00
Let's sit in this silence."
14:00
And so, we sit and we finish the conversation, and there's about 5 seconds, and he goes, "I delivered my baby."
14:06
You know, and he's he's from New Zealand, and I was like, uh "What?
14:10
What do What do you mean you delivered your baby? With what?" He goes, "My hands."
14:16
And he tells this story about how like his wife went into labor, and like the paramedics couldn't make it in time.
14:24
He's like, "I just He delivered it on on his own."
14:26
And it was a And he just threw that out there, and I was like, "Oh."
14:31
Dog, I would join a paying community of him just sending me a voice note every morning of that.
14:37
That was like the $9 a month.
14:38
That was like the silence breaker was, "I delivered my baby."
14:43
And I just thought it was awesome.
14:43
I was like, "You're the best person I've ever met."
14:46
All right, let me show you another one.
14:47
There's this tweet I saw, her name is Julia Chang. All right?
14:49
So, this she just shared this woman on Instagram named Amanda Wolfe.
14:54
So, she goes through What she does is she gets people to share their finances, and then she like is a personal finance wizard or something like that.
15:02
And so, she writes out all the all the I don't know.
15:05
What do they call these people?
15:08
She's some SORT OF MAGICIAN. SHE'S A WITCH. Personal finance witch. I don't know.
15:14
Whatever you call these people.
15:15
But it's normally like people who are making like 80 grand a year, and then she talks about like, you know, this looks normal, this doesn't look normal.
15:24
She got this couple that's 39 and 37 years old. A husband and wife.
15:27
One's an attorney, one's a CIO.
15:28
Their net income or their personal income is $3. 7 million.
15:34
They live in Alpine, New Jersey, and their expenses each month are roughly $77,000.
15:41
And they break through or they break down what their expenses are.
15:43
So, the biggest one being mortgage, $29,000, utilities, $1,200.
15:48
But then it gets to like some wild stuff.
15:50
So, where does it say their uh Oh, the $29,000 mortgage wasn't wild? That's wild. That's wild.
15:56
But but but but a $29,000 mortgage, I think that's what it costs to have a like $4 million house.
16:04
I mean, so that I I guess that makes sense.
16:07
But their personal trainers are four grand a month.
16:11
And she breaks down all these expenses, and I thought it was really fascinating to see kind of like what these people are spending on and like basically how you can make almost $4 million a year and you're not really saving a lot of money at all.
16:23
It's pretty ridiculous how much these people spend.
16:26
And so, they they are able to invest.
16:28
So, they invest like something like a million dollars a year.
16:30
So, that's a ton of money.
16:31
But then she kind of like per uh shows that off in a weird way where she's like, "Look, they only have $2,300 left over each month after they invest a million dollars each year."
16:39
Uh but it's kind of ridiculous to see like these expenses.
16:43
Sorry, the mortgage for $29,000 is $5. 2 million at a 4. 25% uh interest rate. But pretty crazy, right?
16:51
To like see these expenses of 80 grand a month.
16:55
And so, what does she do?
16:55
I see it all written out with nice handwriting here.
16:58
Does she just like cross it out at the end and be like, "No, start over. Change Change this."
17:03
Like what is the What's the punchline of this?
17:05
What does she take What's the takeaway?
17:07
Well, her takeaway was just basically like I don't think her takeaway is important. "Crazy, right?"
17:13
Yeah, it was just like, "Crazy."
17:13
I mean, I don't think that the take the takeaway her takeaway is actually that interesting to me.
17:17
But, I do think that four grand a month of personal trainers is ridiculous, but a nanny $10,000, their kids school $2,500, kids tutors and coach is $3,000.
17:26
My takeaway is just I If they live in Alpine, New Jersey, I bet they work in Manhattan then.
17:31
Just that lifestyle out there, even if you are making close to $4 million a year, it is really hard to get terminal velocity out to the point where you don't actually have to work anymore.
17:42
So, in order to uh in order to not work and spend a million dollars a year, you have to have something like $25 million liquid.
17:49
I think that would be the number or right around there if you want to withdraw 3% of your money every month a year, sorry, a year.
17:55
And so, in order to like actually save up that amount of money even when you're earning almost $4 million in the Manhattan area, really, really challenging if you live the life like these types of people.
18:06
And I thought that was wild.
18:08
Yeah, I think that's the key is if you if you want to spend $29,000 a month on your mortgage, if you want to spend 10 grand on your nanny, another, you know, basically eight grand on miscellaneous and personal trainer, $6,000 a month on shopping, right?
18:21
Like the shopping is separate from like just on shopping, fun, and dining out is four grand, four grand, and six grand, right?
18:29
So, like 14 grand a month on shopping, fun, and dining out. Um I don't know.
18:31
If you're not having fun with the shopping and dining out, maybe don't have another Maybe don't spend another 4K on the fun. Right?
18:39
Like you got to This is just excessive spending for that level of income, I think.
18:45
I agree, but it's just interesting.
18:45
I think a lot of people who earn that amount of money, by the way, I think they spend that way.
18:52
I think the real takeaway of this is whoever posted this is just good at social media.
18:55
They're like, "How do I enrage everybody? Okay, let me post this."
19:00
Um because all this does This is just engagement bait, right?
19:01
You're just Everyone in the comments is just like, "Oh man, what the [ __ ] Like I can't believe this. This is not real.
19:05
These people are so out of touch."
19:07
They get like so angry about it.
19:09
Dude, I I so many people who live like this, by the way.
19:11
I know a lot of people who live like this, who make multi-millions and they spend almost all of it.
19:17
I know a lot of people who earn millions of dollars a year and they still live almost paycheck to paycheck.
19:21
It sounds crazy, but I know people who do that. dumb friends.
19:29
You know you are the average of those five people you're spending time with.
19:31
Those five idiots that are somehow burning 4 million a year. Dude, it's insane, man.
19:35
I If If you live in the East Coast, man, it's insane. You spend a lot.
19:40
Um all right, you do one and then I have one more.
19:42
All right, my last one quick one.
19:42
Did you see this Liquid Death marketing campaign that they did? No. Oh, okay, genius.
19:47
So, Super Bowl was a couple weeks ago and they were like, "Hey, all right, how do we We want to do an ad.
19:53
We want to hijack this moment of this marketing moment, but we don't want to buy a $6 million Super Bowl ad." So, they There you go.
20:01
They put on eBay um the They called it the biggest ad ever.
20:05
And they go, "We have a national run of half a million Liquid Death cases.
20:09
And it's a side of this box and uh you can have this ad space.
20:13
It costs you 6 million bucks to get in front of 110 million people on the Super Bowl, but 200 million people are going to walk through the doors of these retailers and see see our our Liquid Death thing."
20:25
Pretty big leap of faith, by the way, that all of those people who attend a grocery store will look at this ad, but whatever.
20:30
And they auctioned it off.
20:30
Coinbase ends up buying this thing for half a million bucks.
20:33
So, they get first like pump one of PR in the marketing community um because marketers are like, "Oh, so smart."
20:40
Then pump two was Coinbase actually pays them $500,000 to buy the ad space.
20:45
So, they got 500 grand off this thing that was just excess inventory for them anyways.
20:50
And then pump three was the news that somebody actually bought it uh and they got three hits out of this thing.
20:54
Very smart marketing by Liquid Death.
20:58
Dude, the guy who started Liquid Death, he came on our podcast, I think, two years ago.
21:01
So, they were getting going, but they were still big, but they weren't this big.
21:04
And if I remember correctly, his background was he worked at an agency.
21:08
And my takeaway from the podcast was basically, when you're selling water, the product's not that important. It's just water.
21:14
And I don't think it tastes particularly different than any other water.
21:17
But he was just like, I'm really good at advertising and I'm going to do all of these funny things in order to get eyeballs.
21:22
And I would not have predicted that that would have worked. And it has.
21:27
And he's he's he's completely crushed it.
21:30
His name's Mike I don't know his last name actually.
21:34
I just remember him being really you pronounce Uh but if you you can go back and listen to that pod, it's really good.
21:39
He was really fascinating.
21:41
Yeah, that was a few years ago and they were a lot smaller than now.
21:43
They're like prepping for an IPO or something like that. It's pretty crazy.
21:45
Um I don't know how healthy the business is, but it definitely went way further than I ever thought it would.
21:50
I probably way further than you ever thought it would, too, because it's basically the bet was, we're just going to be incredible at marketing.
21:57
Like that was the entire bet was uh yeah, it's water.
22:01
Um and then we're going to be absolutely incredible, world class marketing, and that'll be the thing. And they pulled it off. Props to them.
22:08
All right, here's the last one.
22:08
So, I found this article. It was from houseofresh. com.
22:13
So, if you if you Google houseofresh and then David and Goliath, you'll see this article.
22:17
But, I'm going to tell you what uh why I was interested in this.
22:20
So, do you ever use review sites like to decide which product you want to buy?
22:26
Not anymore, but I did for a long time. Me, too.
22:28
I did for a long time and I started diving deep on on this and I was like, okay, so how does BuzzFeed, like which is like a I don't even know what their specialty is, know which air purifier is best?
22:37
Like, I don't know if they can actually test all of this stuff.
22:41
And I started noticing that there's all these websites like men'shealth.
22:45
com and a whole bunch of other stuff reviewing products or posting like, this is the 10 best these items.
22:51
And I'm like, I don't think that they actually review these things, but maybe I'll trust them.
22:54
Well, I read this article and at this point, I'm not going to trust any of them.
22:57
So, let me give you like a little breakdown.
22:59
So, this company that wrote this, houseofresh.
23:01
com, they're a small company and all they do is they review air purifiers. And that's all they do.
23:06
And they're like a missionary in the mercenary game, meaning most of the people who review air purifiers, they're just like BuzzFeed and they're just like, "Look, we can rank on Google, so we're just going to like read a bunch of Amazon reviews and we're going to like whatever pick the one that looks best and we're going to put that as the top of our list."
23:23
Whereas these other guys, House of Fresh, they actually buy the products and they don't they're not given it, so they're not like owed uh good coverage to any of the uh manufacturers and they test it out, whatever.
23:34
Well, they did this big article explaining how review sites work.
23:35
And so, the takeaway is basically 16 companies, so it's like Meredith, uh which owns a whole bunch of uh different magazines, Dot Dash, which owns a whole bunch of stuff, BuzzFeed, um Penske Media, who we talked about in a podcast, uh they own all this stuff.
23:52
And they basically 16 media companies get 3 billion clicks per month and they basically dominate uh Google.
23:57
And it's really hard for any small company getting into the review space in order to they they can't actually rank high because these 16 companies control the whole thing.
24:07
But, this article went and dived deep into how they're doing reviews.
24:11
They basically hire a freelancer just to like go out and do whatever and then they post the article on their websites, but then they own like they each own like 50 different websites.
24:20
They'll post it across all the other websites and they don't actually show how they're doing the reviews.
24:22
And the takeaway is that they're really likely what they're doing is they they just go to Amazon and they just review what Amazon people have actually said and they just aggregate those, curate them, and put that into their article.
24:34
And it's not a great way in order to like find out actually what's best cuz you're trusting someone else versus going out and doing the research.
24:41
And I read this article and my takeaway was two things.
24:42
One, I don't trust any website now that's doing reviews.
24:47
But number two, I only trust a few of them. There are a few.
24:52
So, I used to trust Wirecutter.
24:52
Now I'm nervous about trusting them because they're owned by the New York Times and so it's owned by much larger companies, so I think they have different incentives.
25:00
Besides that, there's a very few companies out there who I trust for reviews.
25:03
I go to Reddit, but that's even hard, but I think there's actually an opportunity to create some type of trusted review website.
25:08
I don't know how exactly you could do that and get big, but I'm pretty certain you could still do that while remaining small.
25:14
But, there's a whole bunch of like these niche websites that used to talk about really interesting stuff.
25:21
There was one for VPNs, there was one for mattress companies, and then the mattress company like Casper did or the large VPN companies, they go and actually buy the review sites and they put their link up top.
25:29
And so at this point, I'm skeptical of the entire industry.
25:33
And this may be not trust any reviews.
25:35
And I've already written written lots of articles about how Amazon reviews, most of them or a lot of them are total [ __ ] I used to have friends that would make products and they'd be like, "Hey, I'm going to make this product free on Amazon.
25:45
Will you buy it so you it says that you're a proper customer and then just give me five stars."
25:52
It's all a circle jerk and I don't trust any of the reviews online at this point.
25:56
And it's very it makes me very skeptical. 100% agree. This is crazy.
25:58
Um it's gotten completely out of hand.
26:01
This is So it's the main way that like not the main way, it's one of the major ways that news sites actually stay in business is that they basically sell their SEO juice to the highest bidder.
26:13
Um this is for everything like what you were talking about air purifiers, but also mattresses, but also everything.
26:19
It's it's all just SEO hacks.
26:21
So for example, if you want to find the best mattress, you do Google best mattress, you're not going to find the best mattress.
26:26
You're going to find who is the best at SEO.
26:30
Which mattress company is the most aggressive at SEO is the only answer you get when you Google best mattress.
26:34
And I'm totally with you.
26:37
I wish there was a better solution to this cuz there's more products than ever and you do want to find out if they're any good or which one to buy.
26:42
It's just that you can't really trust any of the current solutions.
26:45
I actually think that there's probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscription.
26:50
So what I would do is I would say, hey, we're coming out.
26:52
We're calling out the BS that exists in this space.
26:56
We're going to do a subscription product.
26:58
You pay for this and you're going to get access to like the super high quality reviews.
27:02
Only like conscious consumers will do it.
27:04
So, you start small, but again, it's like the athletic.
27:07
So, you're going to get people to actually care enough to pay.
27:08
Um and then you tell them like, "Look, because you pay, now you get no bias in the uh in the results.
27:15
We are not going to take affiliate commissions anywhere."
27:17
And I think if you drew the line there, I think there would be a market for that.
27:21
Um maybe you could even let people sort of share their subscription so that a bunch of people could you know, chip in and basically say, "Cool, I want access to."
27:27
And it's 100 bucks for all of us in order to make the economics work.
27:29
Um So, anyway, I think that's that's the solution.
27:34
Is somebody's got to say, "I'm I'm going to choose a different business model.
27:37
I'm not going to get paid on my affiliate links."
27:38
And that's the person that would end up getting trusted because their incentive is not to just push, you know, affiliate products.
27:45
You know how there's that uh infographic or image where it's a where it shows that like four companies or five companies own like 80% of the food in the grocery store? Yes.
27:55
That's what this article has.
27:55
They have one of those infographics where it's basically 16 media uh 16 media companies, Hearst, Dotdash, Bustle, Ziff Davis, The Arena Group, Red Ventures, and a handful of others.
28:05
And it shows all of the companies and titles that they own.
28:09
And you scroll through this and you're like, "Those are all supposed to be the reputable ones."
28:15
And I'm like, "I don't trust any of this anymore."
28:17
It's uh almost makes me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff and it completely ruins like my my browsing experience cuz now I see this stuff and I'm like, "I can never go to those websites in order to get reviews."
28:28
And so, it kind of opened up my eyes.
28:29
It's kind of interesting.
28:29
Uh you can see it House of Fresh.
28:31
Just Google House of Fresh David versus Goliath.
28:34
Very fascinating article that has kind of changed my opinion on review sites.
28:38
And they do a huge breakdown.
28:40
All right, is that the pod for our What are we calling it? Quickie Friday? The quickie. The quickie. All right, that's it. That's the pod.