0:00
And what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning and he would go to Phil's Coffee and he would sit down with his laptop.
Search this video
0:06
He firstly tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day.
0:07
And then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt or hey, I posted it for you.
0:16
Would love to hear your comment or hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours.
0:20
I wonder if you know or like that's in your industry.
0:22
You should check this out.
0:24
And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt.
0:28
He was the he was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it.
0:42
I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something. You seem fiery today. I got some good stuff.
0:46
Also, I just watched Do you ever watch Barstool's interviews with people?
0:50
You watch Are you talking about the Caleb Pressley one?
0:54
I don't know who that is. Maybe that's his name.
0:55
It's the one with They They interviewed Aaron Rodgers.
0:56
I was I watched it today, dude.
0:58
It was a great His name's Caleb.
0:59
Have you seen So it's called Is it called Sunday Sunday Conversations, but it's like Sunday like ice cream.
1:07
Yeah, it's like this like chubby guy named Glenny Balls who's sitting in the background and then it's Caleb who's like a bro, but he's kind of he's actually really funny. He's hilarious.
1:15
He's quite smart and he interviews these people.
1:16
He asks the best questions. He's so good.
1:18
Have you seen the past ones? I've seen a few of them.
1:21
This one is the first one I've watched like the whole thing and uh God, he's good, man. He That is amazing.
1:29
So I watched that and sometimes that's all it takes.
1:30
You just see someone being great at their thing and you're like, "I'm going to be great today. That's it.
1:35
I'm going to be great today. I saw great.
1:37
Now I need Now I need to be great."
1:39
He makes me self-conscious.
1:41
Caleb Pressley is is is very very good at these funny awesome interviews. He's great on the spot. He's very good. Yeah, he delivers.
1:48
Um all right, so let's do uh can I tell you something? This is kind of amazing.
1:52
All right, this is going to be a little hard to share on here, but I put this in to the doc so can click the links.
1:58
Uh Ben, if you can, let's screen share some of this stuff that's going to I'm going to tell you.
2:01
This is I saw this ad on Instagram, and this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen, maybe ever, but definitely for a musician. So, check this out. Stop scrolling. You have 24 hours.
2:16
We're Karalanka, an independent hip-hop group.
2:20
Last year, we had the honor of being placed on Brock Hampton's official community playlist, and we were also shouted out by Kenny Beats. Karalanka, go off. I bet you can do it.
2:29
This year, we're trying to grow our fan base.
2:31
So, for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send you a special gift. Swipe up to DM us now.
2:37
So, the the beginning of the the audio didn't play there, but it goes, "Do you recognize these people?"
2:42
And it's like Biggie, Pac, whoever, like just like a bunch of famous rappers.
2:45
It goes, "Stop scrolling."
2:46
And then he basically does this little thing.
2:48
So, I was like So, so uh Ben leave me Ben sent this to me, and I was like, "What is this amazingness?
2:54
Let me I I must swipe up.
2:54
I must know what this free gift is." So, I do it.
2:59
What does that lead you to?
2:59
It opens up Facebook Messenger with uh direct message already ready for their like for the to their team, and it just says send it automatically sends them a message from you saying, "Send me the free gift." Okay, so that happens.
3:13
And then they they respond, "Yo, what's good?" immediately, right?
3:16
So, you're like, "Okay, I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued."
3:20
The next thing that happens, I have screenshots of this stuff um uh below you some of your research.
3:24
They go, "Yo, Shawn, what's good?"
3:26
So, they use my name in the in the thing, they pull it from Facebook Messenger.
3:31
And then it says, "Give us a little bit, we'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some more details.
3:34
Thanks for your patience." Okay, cool.
3:35
One day later, I get a message.
3:37
It's an audio note from the guys who are the the the the rap group.
3:42
And it's basically like introducing themselves.
3:44
And And again, this is kind of mass-produced, but it works. They go, "Yo, Shawn."
3:47
And then it's the audio, which is like, "Yo, here's our story.
3:50
We're these guys, blah blah blah, here's what we're doing."
3:53
And then they said, um, you know, "For your gift, we wrote you your own custom song.
3:57
We personalized the lyrics just for you."
4:00
And, um, and so, you know, let me know what you think.
4:03
And they it's a links to us it's a links to their SoundCloud.
4:04
And it says, "Sean, king of the first million."
4:08
That's the name of the song.
4:08
So then, So they send the song and I'm like, okay, well, I don't know what's happening right now, but like, this has never happened before where you go from there's an Instagram and Instagram ad about a band that you never heard of, then you swipe up, then they send you an audio note in a personal message, then they send you a song the following day that's like got your name in it.
4:49
And then, they followed up again and they're like, "Yo, um, I don't know if you're in New York. I'mma pretend you are. We're doing a show.
4:57
Here's the Here's the link to our show. Here's the tickets."
5:00
And then they send like this automated graphic using Canva of You can see it there.
5:05
It's like me crowd surfing. Let's scroll down.
5:07
I don't know what is going on, but this band is kind of genius in the way that they're promoting themselves and they're still small.
5:14
They're called Caralanka.
5:14
They're still small, but when I saw this, I was like, I don't know they may not they may or may not be the best musician, but they are probably have the highest overlap of market like kind of marketing genius for a young band and they play music, right?
5:30
It's like there's a lot of marketing genius out there, but they don't make music.
5:32
There's a lot of musicians, but they don't know anything about marketing.
5:34
These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous.
5:36
I just thought this was amazing.
5:39
Is this uh effective, you think? I don't understand.
5:43
So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets to their New York show, is that right?
5:48
Well, it's not just that.
5:48
Like it's not just to buy tickets to a specific show.
5:51
It's basically the way I think about it is every business, you got to find a way to get like your first hundred or first thousand customers who love you.
6:00
And that's like a really specific thing.
6:01
It's like I just need a thousand customers who love us.
6:02
Whether it was for this podcast, like we needed a thousand people to listen who actually really love the show.
6:08
And um and every business has this.
6:08
And so the question is like how do you actually do that?
6:12
And uh at YC they have this thing that they say do things that don't scale.
6:17
They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go and they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs.
6:26
They would go to their houses, they would take professional-looking photos so that the listings look better.
6:28
And people were always laughing like, you know, that's not going to scale.
6:32
And they're like, well, first of all, it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now I don't need scale. I don't have scale.
6:38
I just need something that's going to get a thousand people to really love us.
6:41
And um that's what these guys are doing.
6:44
I thought this was just an amazing example of like actually betting on that strategy, which is that you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you, not a bunch of people who just kind of sort of like you.
6:54
Or oh yeah, I got, you know, we got 10,000 views on this thing.
6:59
It's like, okay, but those those views, do they matter?
7:00
What are those views worth versus somebody who's got a story to tell like I'm doing right now?
7:06
Or somebody who's really impressed by you or feels interested in you or is invested in your story, actually goes and clicks and learns more about you and you know, goes deeper down your funnel.
7:14
So, I think that this is amazing because they're showing they're brute forcing that thousand thousand fans who who really care about them.
7:20
Dude, I always hated this thing of well, it doesn't scale or you got to build the scale.
7:26
I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons.
7:28
Number one, most people aren't going to make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that.
7:32
Number two, you can brute force it and just manually and by hand do things to a pretty large number.
7:38
I think the largest number that I've seen Let's see. But I I think Mr.
7:43
Beast is is his whole operation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
7:48
That's a pretty brute force.
7:49
Not I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him, fairly unsophisticated operation.
7:53
I think when I talked to Nerd Wallet, you know Nerd Wallet, it was a blog that was at the time making like 30 million in revenue and I I think like 15 million in profit.
8:04
Incredibly, I like saw a little bit behind the scenes, super unsophisticated.
8:08
What What are some other thing And it was basically just them just blogging.
8:11
What are some other examples of things that you've seen that are look like a tech or internet-based company on the outside, but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary and not even like they've not even thought like, oh, we need to automate or scale or whatever.
8:26
So, our buddy Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt and he he listens to pod.
8:28
So, he he he came on the pod as well and told the story, but I was there kind of like front row when he was building that thing.
8:36
Meaning like I think I'm user number 17 in Product Hunt's history or something like that. Like very very early.
8:41
First dozen people or so that were on the platform.
8:42
And so and for some of us he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it.
8:49
And what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning and he would go to Phil's Coffee and he would sit down with his laptop.
8:56
He firstly tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day and then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt or hey, I posted it for you.
9:07
Would love to hear your comment or hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours.
9:10
I wonder if you know, or like that's in your industry, you should check this out.
9:13
And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt.
9:20
He was the He was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system.
9:23
He was all of it and at the at the time I was like this guy is literally like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails a day.
9:34
Maybe a hundred personalized tweets per day and then he would like, you know, sure enough I 6:00 or 7:00 p. m.
9:38
he'd close up his laptop, he'd go to the gym.
9:42
He's a very like structured guy.
9:42
And then he would like go home, he he hits the bed early, he's not like you know, he's not like going out and socializing or doing anything like that.
9:48
He'd wake up again the next day and he would do the same thing.
9:51
And sure enough that community that we were part of, I think that first group he sent it to was like maybe 25 people.
9:56
And it didn't even have his own website.
9:59
He was using this thing called Linky Dink at the time.
10:00
It was like some third-party tool to go use.
10:04
And every day he would send out the email more email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted.
10:07
And then he would tag each person with an individualized thing.
10:11
Oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this.
10:14
What do you think about this?
10:16
And he'd get you to share your thoughts cuz he was asking in such a nice personalized way that okay, I'll go ahead and reply.
10:21
But that generated all of the activity for that early community.
10:25
And why did Product Hunt work?
10:27
Why did it sell for $20 million?
10:29
Well, because at the beginning he got the right people from Silicon Valley to actually participate in the thing.
10:33
And the way he did that was like it's like when you watch somebody build a fire.
10:39
It's like first they're just like, you know, they're just hitting the the flint or they're rubbing the two sticks together just to get the spark.
10:44
And then when it's there they're sort of covering it, they're just blowing on it gently.
10:49
And then they're adding just the next little few pieces of sticks.
10:50
And they know it could go out at any moment.
10:52
And that's how it feels to build a community.
10:56
I saw you do the same thing with Trends basically, right?
10:57
Like for Trends when you wanted to launch that, it was by no means going to be a slam dunk.
11:04
And I think most of us who were in Trends would say the research reports you guys sent out, which was the product, they were cool.
11:11
But the real reason anybody liked Trends I think was the Facebook group.
11:13
And all it was was a Facebook group.
11:15
It was nothing you you didn't build that.
11:16
You just literally went on there and typed typed a you know, a title in and hit enter.
11:23
And then but what made the Facebook group good was you picked you hand-picked who could get in.
11:28
And then every day I felt like you were sharing like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat.
11:35
Was that intentional when you do that?
11:36
100% that was intentional.
11:38
And so what I I I did two or three interesting things.
11:40
So this Yeah, so Trends right now is making many many millions of dollars in subscription revenue.
11:46
And it's pretty simple and there's like I think there's only five people who work on it.
11:49
So it's like a pretty profitable thing.
11:50
And we added these people to this Facebook group and I would do a few things.
11:55
The first thing I would do is even people who didn't pay who I thought were impressive like you or some of our other friends, I'd be like, "Hey, I'm adding you to this group."
12:03
And I would just tell them and I would manually add them and I'd be like, "Oh, look who just joined. You know, it's Sean.
12:08
Sean has done all these impressive things. Funny seeing you here. How cool.
12:11
Um if you have any questions for uh Sean, just like ask him right here in the comments."
12:16
And I would do that all the time.
12:17
So I would add these people who didn't actually by the way cuz I was like, "Oh [ __ ] this group has cool people."
12:21
And it's in reality that you added 300 paid members that I've never heard of and then you added one interesting person but you made that Yeah. intro post baller.
12:29
You're like, "You ever seen a plane fly?
12:32
Yeah, that's cuz of this guy."
12:35
You know, it's like it was always the most like baller intro.
12:38
You're like, "Um you know, did you know they didn't have $100 bills till this guy came around?" It's like, "Wow." all the time.
12:44
And And the other thing I would do is I would just write out all these long posts of like interesting things that I was thinking about and then I would tag certain people who A either accomplished something like that and would and would talk about it or B I would write comments for smart people and message them and say, "Hey, will you do me a favor? Post this on there."
13:02
Or I would write posts for other people and make them comment.
13:05
One time uh when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then he's the founder and then CEO of the company, he joined and I messaged like 80 people and I said, "Hey, uh reply to reply to Brian.
13:20
Here's a message to say to him."
13:23
And so many people commented and then he checked in like 8 hours later.
13:25
and he's like, "Oh my god, I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications.
13:29
I can't believe how thriving this community is."
13:34
Uh and I remember thinking like, "Got him. Got him."
13:35
And that's But that like interaction is how you make all like that's the feeling you want all community members to feel.
13:41
And we used to do that all the time.
13:42
But yeah, Ryan Hoover's a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about scaring scaling.
13:47
We should have like a segment another time where we like actually think about like the most like thrown together duct tape [ __ ] that we've seen that has gotten quite large.
13:57
Um And I'm going to give you another um angle towards this.
14:00
So, there's one which is the brute force do things that don't scale and they almost do them even longer than that.
14:07
They do it even past the point where you shouldn't be able to keep this up.
14:11
Like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way.
14:14
They turned that unscalable thing of them going to people's apartments, taking photos for them and saying, "Hey, we'll we'll improve your listing for you."
14:21
And now they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that will just come do this for your listing.
14:26
It's like it's that they actually turned it into a scalable thing.
14:27
And that's another thing when people talk about, "Well, that's not scalable."
14:29
It's like, uh yeah, it is.
14:31
Like they'll talk about like an ad agency and they're like, "That's not scalable."
14:34
It's like, "What do you mean? Of course it's scalable.
14:36
You just hire 5,000 employees." Like that's scalable.
14:39
It may be that's not what you want to do, but like yeah, everything virtually everything is scalable.
14:44
Like you just have to add a ton of people probably.
14:48
Most things can scale past what most people think.
14:51
Uh like you know, this also happens in engineering all the time.
14:55
You work with engineers and they're like, "Well, we're going to need to build it right before we launch."
14:57
Or we're going to need to build it right because this won't work in production.
15:02
And this won't work when it scales.
15:02
It's like then you hear these stories.
15:03
It's like, "Yeah, Facebook was written in PHP. Why? I don't know.
15:06
That's just the language he knew at the time and that's what he did."
15:10
You know, it's like And yeah, actually it still runs, you know, for years later it was still running in that like way past where it was supposed to.
15:17
Um and like Dude, I I've got friends that are early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber.
15:22
And a lot of people don't know this, but I they might consider him a founder, but the first or second employee was this Mexican guy and you know, he like I think he was lived in America for a little while, but at the time he was living in Mexico.
15:34
And so the early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code.
15:40
And and so my friends who were early there, they told me, yeah, like I I forget this guy's name.
15:45
Do you know who I'm talking about?
15:47
I've I've I remember reading about him, but I don't know his name.
15:49
Yeah, he was he was Mexican and so they and he had you know, his friends in Mexico were like, yeah, well well I might I know a good agency.
15:56
We're going to have them do it.
15:57
And they said it was kind of thrown together and kind of janky and I've got friends now that still work there and they say every once in a while we'll find Spanish in the early code base because that is you know, what these guys were writing and we'll find like Spanish notes and things like that and that was the early version of Uber.
16:13
And think about how many rules of Uber got violated of how many rules of startups that Uber violated.
16:17
So, for example, um the Uber founders, Travis and um Garrett, they didn't work on it full-time.
16:29
Uber was not a project they were willing to do.
16:31
They just literally tweeted out, "Hey, we need a general manager."
16:33
and random guy named Ryan Graves was like, "I'm a hustler. I'll do it."
16:37
And they're like, "All right. Cool."
16:39
It's like they literally like delegated the CEO job.
16:43
Then, did they have a super strong technical team, technical co-founder who could write the code and do this in-house? Nope.
16:48
Used a third-party dev shop to build the the first version of the app.
16:51
They outsourced the coding.
16:51
You know, most of the the investors who invested in Uber would tell you, "If you're a product guy and you go in and you say, 'Yeah, I'm going to just use an agency to write the code for the app.'"
17:02
They'd be like, "Uh yeah, this is not Yeah, no go."
17:04
Did Okay, and then what's the next thing?
17:06
Then they literally broke actual laws.
17:07
It was like running and they they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying, "Hey, for every day you're operational, you owe us $5,000 per day."
17:14
and they just kept going.
17:16
Then the next you know, they just violated rule another one at the time.
17:18
I remember at the time when Uber first came out, Airbnb was was popular at the time.
17:25
And I talked to our investor.
17:25
I was like, should we be doing a product like this?
17:28
He's like, uh no, bits not atoms.
17:30
That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley, which is you want to do startups that are software based cuz they can they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins.
17:37
All these things with real world cars and homes and t-shirts and stuff like that, like that stuff super hard to scale, ends up being super super low margin.
17:46
And okay, and some people say, oh they're right, you know, Uber's not that profitable.
17:50
But the reality is that the founders and investors in Uber did fantastically well um scaling this thing up and it was kind of a narrative violation.
17:58
There was all these narrative violations, all these these general rules that were broken that like today if you said, yeah, I'm the I'm the founder of this thing, no, I'm not working on it full-time.
18:06
I found a guy on Twitter to be the CEO and then we're using this agency in Mexico to build the app.
18:12
Yeah, we're the next big thing. That doesn't fly. And guess what? It worked.
18:17
Dude, we got to go on a quick uh story tangent.
18:19
That's kind of what this whole first half is going to be, I guess, but there's this guy named Scott Belsky.
18:23
I'm friends with him or I used to be a little bit friends with him.
18:25
I haven't talked to him in a while, but you do you know Scott?
18:29
Yeah, I'm I like him a lot.
18:29
I like to think I'm friends with him.
18:31
The reality is I've talked to him twice. Yeah, friendly with him.
18:34
He invested in my company and and I've hung out with him once or twice.
18:36
He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like I'm his secret admirer.
18:39
Like he's like this like good-looking handsome dude who dresses nice as nice and seems like he's really wealthy and rich and like I I like him.
18:47
I see him, I'm like, dude, you're the best.
18:48
And I've talked to him If you have $10 million and a jawline, guess who's all in? Sam is all in. Yeah, definitely all in.
18:55
So like I love this guy and he's great.
18:57
So basically I got to tell you a quick Scott Belsky story.
19:01
So at right now he's like an executive at Adobe, but not just like an executive.
19:06
I'm pretty sure he's like in line to be CEO.
19:07
And a lot of people don't realize this.
19:09
Adobe's one of like the 30th largest companies in the world.
19:12
I think their market cap is like three, 400 billion dollars.
19:14
And Scott Belsky is he's pretty young.
19:17
He's in his early 40s and he I cold emailed him to invest in the Hustle and that's how I became friends with him.
19:23
And I met with him one time and he goes, "Yeah, so like when I was 26 years old I was starting my company called Behance."
19:28
So Behance is basically it's Behance and Dribbble are like the two companies where you go online and designers can host their portfolio and kind of talk to one another.
19:37
And he was like, "I was just starting this company and in my head I knew he worked at Goldman and I knew that he was from like a wealthy like Jewish family.
19:43
I think his his grandfather started like Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University. Oh, no way.
19:50
Yeah, and so I was like stereotyping him as, "Oh, you guys just you had everything handed to you to him."
19:53
And like he told me a few stories where I was like, "Oh, you actually like it's not exactly how it seems from the outside."
19:58
And he said, "I left Goldman and I was making 90 grand a year there and when I left I had like 50 or 60,000 dollars saved. I started Behance.
20:04
It didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it and I noticed that with Behance we were getting a lot of traffic from two different websites.
20:13
The first was called StumbleUpon and people and designers would post cool designs and we would get traffic from StumbleUpon.
20:18
And the second was a small company called Pinterest and I emailed both these guys and this was I forget what year, 2011, 2010.
20:25
He goes, "I've emailed these guys I go, 'Hey, you guys are sending us like hundreds of people a day which for us at the time was a lot of people.
20:30
What what are these websites?'"
20:31
And this guy Ben told me about this website called Pinterest and then this guy named Garrett told me about StumbleUpon.
20:35
And Ben was like, "Hey, I'm going to raise a little bit of money. Do you want to invest?
20:40
It's a $3 million valuation."
20:42
And Scott was like, "Dude, I only have like 50 grand and but I don't want to like look like a noob to this guy.
20:47
Whatever, I'll invest $15,000 and that's a big deal to me."
20:49
And then Garrett was like, "Hey, my friend and I are starting this other thing.
20:53
None of us are going to work there because I'm too busy running StumbleUpon but it's basically like a car service."
20:57
And Scott was like, "I don't want to invest in a limo company.
21:02
Like there's no way a limo company is going to take off."
21:05
But like I don't want to look like an idiot.
21:06
This guy's been sending me some traffic and I kind of want to like appear a little bit like a big shot.
21:09
And so he gave him $15,000 I think at a $3.
21:11
5 million valuation and he did both of these in the span I think of about 2 weeks.
21:17
So he's like I basically had like 50 or 60 grand in my checking account at the time.
21:20
My startup that I was bootstrapping was only doing okay.
21:22
It wasn't making much profit and I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills, but I did my wife was like angry at me, but I gave them each $15,000.
21:30
Fast forward however many years, they both went public around the sameish time and I remember sending him something to his house and he sent me his address and I remember the address being this like really fancy town home and I cuz I looked it up and I was like
21:43
doing the math and I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks turned into around 50 to 100 million dollars each inside a span of like I you'll have to look up when they went public, but they almost went public right around the same time and he gave them money each at the same time. And another thing a lot of
21:57
And another thing a lot of people don't know is Behance, his company, sold I think for $175 million and I think he owns he told me around 70% of it.
22:05
He owned the majority of it.
22:08
And so this guy has just knocked it out the park over and over and over again and a lot of it came because of Uber and Pinterest early on and he was like I don't think these are that good of ideas, but I just I don't want to look silly.
22:21
That's a as an amazing story. I love that story.
22:24
It reminds me I I just got a DM from this guy.
22:26
By the way, this is nowhere near related.
22:30
I am not trying to compare apples to apples here.
22:31
It's very hard to have a story that compares to Uber and Pinterest, but uh there's a guy who I don't know, maybe 6 months ago or 9 months ago something like that, I was like getting kind of interested in the like AI stuff about like you know, this basically artificial intelligence that can create art and things like that.
22:48
And I said something offhand on the pod.
22:49
So somebody reached out and they were like, "Hey, so you know, heard you're interested in this.
22:54
I'm trying to make apps that will do this.
22:57
Uh we just released our first one.
22:57
You know, I want to see what you think about it and uh you know, we're we're a little bit of money.
23:02
We'd love to see if you want to want to invest. Um never replied.
23:07
I go uh I get another DM or no, I uh I see somebody mention this app and I go I go click on the founder and I click the DM.
23:16
I'm like, "Oh, this guy DM'd me a while back saying I invest I should I should see how it's going."
23:19
So, I go, "Hey, how's the biz going?"
23:21
I'll show you a screenshot of this.
23:22
"Hey, how's the biz going?" And he goes, "Good, man. Good.
23:25
Yeah, that app I really ended up releasing.
23:27
It's been downloaded 120 million times." Uh-huh.
23:30
And um and then I released another one and it's also been downloaded like 100 million times.
23:34
And um "Yeah, it's really it's going really well, man. How are you?"
23:38
Oh my "Well, I'm I'm currently walking off of a cliff uh because I never responded to that initial DM." Yeah.
23:47
Your reply is like, "Well, I recently switched from Trader Joe's to Whole Foods.
23:50
Been tinkering with that."
23:56
I just did my forward cave match. Uh pretty fascinating.
23:58
Um he replies, "Not much. You? Uh that's crazy."
24:03
to share one other story that's kind of related to the do things that don't scale.
24:06
This is something I actually learned from those guys Dylan and Henry.
24:11
So, I'm a big fan of this like idea that you have to find a way to learn from three groups of people.
24:20
People that have done it before.
24:20
So, people who have done it a bunch of times.
24:24
So, that's you know, people normally try to go learn from them, mentors type people.
24:29
People that are in the game, their peers just alongside you.
24:31
That's kind of how we got to know each other.
24:33
We were in a peer group, a mastermind group.
24:34
And no, we haven't made it, but like we're all trying to make it at the same time.
24:38
And so, we can learn a lot from each other.
24:42
And then lastly is people who are just starting out in the game, fresh.
24:44
They don't know any better.
24:46
And there is a certain tactic to like A, spend time with each of those three groups.
24:52
And then B, be humble enough and know how to ask the right question so that you know how to actually get advice from all three of those groups.
24:58
Cuz if you ask the same question to all three, you're not going to get valid information.
25:02
You're not going to get the right answers from all three, right?
25:05
Like the question you would ask to somebody who's been through it before and the things you should talk to them about are different than the ones that you should talk to your your buddy who's going through it right now and the 19-year-old who just graduated from college, you can't ask the same question.
25:18
So, let me tell you something that the the sort of the 19 21-year-old or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe 21 22.
25:23
Uh Dylan and Henry, they were fans of the pod.
25:26
Then they flew they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time.
25:30
Well, and previously they were fans of the pod and they would chop up clips for us and share it on social media and a lot of their videos were beautiful, awesome, and they just brute forced their way to having a relationship with us. They exactly.
25:41
And that became a a a full-on agency that does, you know, pretty well.
25:45
They they did it for us, then they did it for the All-In podcast, they did it for a bunch of and so people kind of know them now.
25:52
Um but at the time nobody really knew who they were.
25:53
They were just guys who just graduated from college.
25:55
They had their own podcast, which was kind of like ours, uh but no you know, you go you can go look at the views, nobody nobody watches the thing. That's okay.
26:03
Like, you know, it's most podcasts nobody listens to, especially ones by guys who just graduated from college.
26:08
But they flew out to our house there and they were installing the like kind of studio setup in my garage at the time.
26:13
And um and I went out there I was like, "You guys need some water?
26:15
You guys like you guys all right?
26:17
You guys Have you guys eaten anything?"
26:19
I was like kind of like parenting them.
26:20
I was like, you know, what are you guys okay? What are you doing here?
26:23
And um and so I went out there and I started shooting the [ __ ] with them.
26:26
I was talking to them and I was like, "So, what's your guys's like I was like, "Give me advice like if I was your friend and I and I'm like, you guys got a podcast? That's pretty cool.
26:33
Like most people your age don't have a podcast.
26:34
Like what do you what's y'all's strategy?
26:37
What are you trying to do?
26:37
Why are you trying to do it?
26:38
What are you trying to do?"
26:39
And I was like, "Explain it to me like I was your buddy."
26:41
And they're like, "Well, um you know, we kind of we like podcasting, it's fun, so that's why we do it.
26:47
The second thing is um we just think that like making content like we don't have money to go advertise.
26:54
We don't have like we don't have connections that we could just go knock on a door and get into some get distribution somewhere.
26:59
So like content is our only chance.
27:01
So we just wanted to get good at content.
27:02
The best way to get good is just to do it a bunch.
27:04
And I was like, all right, that's another smart thing.
27:06
And I go, but nobody's watching your [ __ ] right?
27:08
So like is it even working?
27:10
It's kind of like what you're saying about this band thing.
27:12
Like does this even work? Like this is cool.
27:13
It's interesting, but is this valuable?
27:15
Like is this actually going to work? Yeah.
27:18
And he goes, "Oh, I'm just wait He goes, nobody watches it today.
27:23
He goes, but someday, if we start to get people to watch, there is now a library.
27:28
He goes, we call it our binge bank.
27:31
It's a place where you can go and you can binge Dylan and Henry." And I I was like, what?
27:36
And he's like, yeah, well, basically we just want to have a rabbit hole for you to go go down.
27:40
Because if anybody ever gets into like today nobody's interested.
27:41
But if people ever get interested, I want to have this bank of content that they can go binge.
27:47
And sure enough after like, you know, 45 minutes down this rabbit hole, you're going to walk out being like, I think I love these guys.
27:53
I feel like I know these guys and I want to hang out or work with these guys.
27:59
And I heard that I was like, that's really [ __ ] smart.
28:00
I was like, that's the way to think about content.
28:02
Espe- cuz most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up.
28:05
But you want to have this.
28:08
And I thought about it cuz I was like, there are several people who I've gone down that rabbit hole with and I've come out with that same exact conclusion after a 45-minute dig.
28:16
You do this all the time.
28:16
Like you discover somebody, you go read everything there is about them.
28:19
You go read their old blog, you watch their old talks, and you come out you're like, this guy is awesome.
28:23
This this girl is amazing.
28:27
And they had to create that like library of themselves, that personal library, to go and let you binge.
28:32
And I thought about it because you know the band like the the guy Macklemore, the like the famous rapper guy?
28:40
I remember, maybe 10 years ago now, me and my buddy Trevor, we started like we like found his one of his songs and we were like oh this guy's cool who is this guy? And he had a binge bank.
28:50
He had these vlogs he was doing on YouTube of him like trying to make it as a rapper.
28:53
It'd be like we're going to doing this show at this small college in Wichita.
28:57
Oh, we like we're wait every day right now we're waking up at this time.
29:02
We're trying to record in the studio cuz we suck at create the creative process.
29:04
So we're just trying to train ourselves, right?
29:07
They were just like just kind of sharing along the way and we watched the stuff and we were like I remember these videos had less than a thousand views.
29:14
They were like seven hundred views on YouTube at the time.
29:15
Like I would just went back and looked at it.
29:17
Now those have each like millions or like close to a million views each on those videos.
29:20
At the time less than a thousand.
29:23
And we became super fans of this guy. Why?
29:26
Because it's fun to be early.
29:26
We liked what they were all about and we felt like the quality of content was like higher than the views and so that made it for like an exciting it's like we found a a treasure.
29:36
Dude, people say that in our comments on YouTube.
29:40
Like oh I'm like I'm I'm surprised this isn't bigger or like I'm happy to be here before it gets like they're like I'm happy we're catching Yeah and and that that definitely gives me encouragement. It makes me happy.
29:49
But yeah, people say that in our you Little do they know that like our podcast has like ten times more downloads.
29:54
So they're like oh this little shitty podcast only has ten thousand videos on this thing or ten thousand views on this thing and I'm like yeah, we suck. Sure. Please share. Please.
30:08
But I'm a big fan of this binge bank concept.
30:10
I've I once I thought once they said that that clicked with me.
30:12
I started think about our stuff that way and then also I started remembering yeah, there's actually a bunch of people who I've gone down their rabbit hole and like and actually there could be like a product that's like this.
30:23
I I know YouTube is kind of structured this way but I kind of wish that you could just have a thing which is like your greatest hits.
30:28
It's like yo, if you if you're kind of interested in me this is the curated rabbit hole.
30:32
So This is my tweet that went viral. This is this video.
30:36
This was the first thing I ever made.
30:37
This was you know this blog post I wrote back in the day is kind of stupid, but like, you know, it captured how I was thinking at the time.
30:44
I have two tools that I use regularly and I'm paying subscribers up.
30:48
The first And do you read a lot of biographies? No, none.
30:51
So, I read a ton of biographies.
30:54
Yeah, I read a ton of biographies and so any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre-internet era, I'm a subscriber of newspapers.
31:01
com, which has aggregated like every newspaper ever.
31:06
So, like for example, I was reading a biography about Dan Gilbert or something about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage, I think it's called, and the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers or I forget all He owns everything.
31:18
And so, like his company got pop It was called Rock Financial originally.
31:20
His company got popular in the '90s and so I just Google Rock Financial Dan Gilbert set newspapers.
31:27
com to 1985 since that I knew that's when he was started to 1990.
31:32
And they went public in '92.
31:32
So, I was like, I want to find everything.
31:34
I read all of these articles about him before he was like, you know, it was like really like he was in the making at that point.
31:40
And so that's like my favorite tools, newspapers. com.
31:41
The second one for anything that's internet related is web archive.
31:45
So, like whenever I talk to anyone who's like popular on the internet, I go and look back at right when they started.
31:51
I like to look at their old websites.
31:52
And you could like see the trend and you could see the trajectory.
31:55
And that starts That teaches me a little bit about patterns and like, all right, it's okay.
31:59
And it also makes me feel like, all right, it's okay to be shitty even at this size.
32:04
It's okay to be only okay around this size. You know what I mean? Totally, totally.
32:08
Yeah, you go look at early startup landing pages.
32:09
I I have a blog post about this actually.
32:11
Like 10 throwback uh landing pages and it's like go look at the first version of Airbnb, of Uber, of Snapchat, of all these things and then you'll be like, "Oh, why are we trying to perfect this before lunch?"
32:23
Like it If you could start there and end up where these guys did, like I can start wherever the hell I am now and launch and then make it better over time.
32:29
Um Do you You want to go to a Can I Let me Let me bring up one.
32:34
So, this this guy DM'd me and I found his uh YouTube video and it was really amazing.
32:41
So, basically in two This has got me thinking on this whole topic, but in 2014, this guy graduated from Stanford and he got five job offers and he did this video that he goes, "Here's the offers that I got in 2014 and here's what happened and here's like how like this story played out."
32:57
So, he In the video, it's really great.
32:59
So, actually it looks like someone's highlighting the video. What's his name?
33:03
His How do people find this? His name is Rahul.
33:04
So, if you Google like Rahul Tech Pande. P A N D E Y.
33:07
Yeah, so you Google that or just like Rahul and then like tech tech jobs and I bet you it'll come up.
33:15
So, basically I'm going to summarize it, but here the video's great, but here's basically the offers that he got.
33:21
So, the offers that he got from Twitter with a combination of stock and salary was 190,000.
33:28
With a combination of stock and cash, his Facebook offer was $200,000 a year.
33:33
His Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year.
33:35
His Square one around $160,000 a year.
33:39
is both a combination of stock, equity, and sign-up bonus.
33:41
And his Google one was $250,000 a year.
33:43
Now, fast forward eight years, what would that stock plus cash be worth?
33:48
So, basically the stock The cash is mostly stagnant.
33:53
I think he added like an 8% annual growth.
33:55
The stock, he looks at what each what it grew since then.
33:58
So, his Twitter comp, if fast forward, it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown.
34:03
His Facebook stock, it actually would have gone a lot higher, but right now Facebook stock is down a ton and so his Facebook's uh first year comp went from 200 to 220.
34:14
His Microsoft comp it started at 200.
34:16
If you fast forward today, it would be worth around $300,000 a year.
34:20
Now, here's where things get interesting.
34:21
His Square stuff and and he was only 22 when he graduated or something like that and he His first year salary back in comp back then would be $160,000.
34:29
Fast forward, the stock is now worth a $580,000 and his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year, now worth almost $700,000 a year.
34:40
And keep in mind, so here's a few takeaways from this.
34:42
The first takeaway, he said this funny thing in the video.
34:46
He goes, "Square offered me something uh that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said, 'You know, if Square one day becomes a $7 billion company, the stock that we're offering you now, it's only worth $100,000 over 4 years. It worth $400,000.'
35:03
But he goes, 'I'm really doubtful that Square will ever be a $7 billion company.'"
35:06
Now, it's worth 50 billion and it's down right now.
35:09
I think at its peak it was 70 billion.
35:10
Uh so, the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time, most things seem expensive.
35:17
And the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand.
35:24
So, if I tell you that something is going to grow at 7% a year, every single year, that's actually kind of hard to understand, but that what that means it's going to double every 10 years.
35:33
If it's going to grow if it's going to grow at 30% a year, which a lot of these tech companies are, that means it's going to double I think every two or three years.
35:39
And like exponential growth is really hard to understand.
35:41
The The another thing that is really interesting is uh leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible even if you're a 22, 23, 24-year-old.
35:50
And so, you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them uh off one another.
35:56
And finally, the most important thing for people listening, employees at tech companies 100% can get meaningfully rich.
36:04
And people don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way, if you are good enough, it's a high bar, if you are good enough to get, but it's still like a million plus jobs if you add together FAANG I I or around there, and they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year.
36:21
So, it's not like that coveted, but if you can get a job at one of these tech companies, and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least 1,000 employees. Relatively safe.
36:29
It is such a good way to build wealth in a low-risk way.
36:35
And the final, most important thing on top of that is now's the time.
36:38
So, you're talking about Square being worth like, you know, it might be worth $7 billion.
36:44
I I have a very small lens here, but I see what the private company valuations are.
36:49
They have reset and even better, the public companies have reset.
36:54
So, we have Square, Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robinhood.
36:57
I think like a company like HubSpot or something like that, a Coinbase.
37:01
All these valuations are pretty low if you ask me.
37:03
And I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid 100, 200, 300,000 dollars a year in equity and that will could be worth potentially eight figures in 10 years.
37:16
That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot. Very well done. Very native. I enjoyed that one.
37:25
This data is wrong every freaking time.
37:27
Have you heard of HubSpot?
37:29
HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
37:31
Woah, I can see the client's whole history, call support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better.
37:45
The um when we were selling Bebo, uh we had a bunch of conversations and then, you know, you sort of compare offers.
37:52
You're like, all right, we had I think at the end we ended up with three offers. We had a Facebook offer.
37:59
We had the Twitch offer and we had a not papered, but like only because we turned it down early, but he was interested the a Discord offer.
38:08
And and I did an exercise recently where I looked back and I said, what was I thinking then? Cuz I wrote it all down.
38:15
And how did it actually play out?
38:19
And I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong on every single thing I believed.
38:20
Yeah, let's walk through this.
38:23
Yeah, let's go through each one.
38:25
So for example, I'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock.
38:27
So so basically Discord was like, "Look, uh we like you guys.
38:31
We we think this is cool, but it we there's no way we would come up with cash like you're talking about.
38:36
So it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock.
38:40
But like we think our stock is great."
38:42
So what would uh let's say let's say that you walked away with a million dollars of Discord stock back then.
38:45
And back then wasn't that long ago, that was 4 years ago. Yeah, less than 4 years.
38:49
3 years 3 4 years ago, something like that.
38:52
So at the time, I went and talked to one of Discord's investors and I was like, "What do you think about this?"
38:57
And they were like, "Well, it's real simple.
38:58
Like today, let's say Discord is valued just around you know, 1 and 1/2 2 billion dollars.
39:03
Um so let's say 2 billion.
39:06
Um or no, I think at the time Discord was valued at a billion.
39:09
And it was 1 billion then, and he goes, "You're basically just betting that Discord can be worth 5 billion.
39:14
If it was if it if it gets to five, then this is the best offer.
39:17
And if it's not going to get to five, then this is the worst offer.
39:20
And so you just have to like you know, make an educated decision about that."
39:25
And I was like in my head I was like, "Well, I do like I was a big admirer of Discord.
39:29
I was like, "Discord is kind of amazing."
39:32
Uh the CEO at Discord, Jason, he's kind of amazing.
39:35
He of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the he was actually the most impressive in there.
39:40
And he cut straight to the chase and was like, "Yeah, I'll I'll do this.
39:44
No you know, the cash is going to be small, maybe 1 2 3 million dollars.
39:49
Um and then the rest will be stock.
39:49
And so you know, you guys have to you know, is that interesting to you?"
39:54
And at the time I was like, "No, cuz that sounds really speculative and like illiquid and like I can't go buy anything cool and I can't like I I the no the total number as valued today sounds way lower." Yeah.
40:07
And in my head I was just like, "I can't do this."
40:08
Fast forward, Discord I think is worth about 15 billion now.
40:10
So it would have been by far the best deal.
40:12
Uh so we had it right the worst deal.
40:14
If If they gave you a million dollars of stock pri- and private valuations, that would be worth 15 million dollars now in four years, right? Correct.
40:24
And we were getting more than a million dollars of stock if we had done that deal. Okay.
40:28
So, uh so so that it was it was the worst deal and it would have turned out to be that.
40:31
So, now that there was one caveat, which is it's it was going to be vested.
40:34
So, you know, I'd also have to spend, you know, three years earning that stock or four years earning that stock, which I didn't Yeah, you probably would have been fired way before that.
40:45
Yeah, so so, you know, what are the odds I was going to capture all that? I don't know.
40:48
But like it just shows, you know, uh how our brain is not real like the idea of Discord becoming worth 15 billion was not really like it didn't seem very likely, but in actuality the the odds were probably in its favor, but it seemed like a very low probability thing cuz it just sounded big.
41:04
It sounded like a big jump.
41:04
It's like, is it am I betting the Discord's going to become 15 times bigger than it is today?
41:11
And actually, yeah, it did.
41:11
Like the user base grew by two or three X, the monetization grew, the the overall market grew, right?
41:16
There's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together and you get you arrive at this private market valuation.
41:22
Now, and also, whatever, private markets have corrected, maybe it's not worth as much now, but like, you know, it's it's hard to say. It's illiquid.
41:29
Then the next one was the Facebook offer.
41:30
And I was like, all right, well, Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock, um but we don't know about this we we don't know exactly which which stock's going to perform better, Facebook or Amazon.
41:41
They both seem like great stocks.
41:42
Uh and so it then it came down to intangible factors.
41:44
And we ended up ruling out Facebook for some intangible factors, we which were in retrospect somewhat silly reasons to decide.
41:50
Uh the first was a like Twitch was the leader in game streaming and Facebook was like, nobody watches game streaming on Facebook at the time, and I was like, oh man, this is just going to be like another startup.
42:03
Like they are they're at they're called Facebook, but like in this niche, they're at zero and they're hoping that we can help them win.
42:08
And like oh man, and we're going to be pushing a boulder up the hill.
42:11
I was like, I just want to go join the Warriors and like go play on the winning team.
42:16
Facebook just hadn't decided they were going to win yet. Yeah, exactly.
42:19
And also, like my mentor was like, "That's such a stupid way to think about this.
42:23
Like, you're going to walk into Facebook and they're going to be like, um cool, game streaming's over here.
42:28
And you're going to be like, actually, I'm going to wander around this area over here.
42:30
I'm going to go play in virtual reality. I'm going to go to AI.
42:33
I'm going to go to you know, news.
42:35
I'm going to He's like, you can just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing."
42:39
He's like, "They'll forget you even exist after they hire you.
42:41
Like, you're worried about what your day-to-day life is going to be like there.
42:46
And like, you have no idea what your day-to-day life is going to be like there."
42:48
And he was absolutely right.
42:50
By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah.
42:53
It's It's basically for those of you better college.
42:55
The way that I describe it, it's like a mall where everything's free.
42:59
So, like, they have like a food court.
43:01
And they don't have just one pizza place.
43:03
They've got many pizza places.
43:04
And it's one My wife worked there and I would go and I'm like, oh, this is the best thing ever.
43:07
And they have restaurants. Like a sushi restaurant. Everything's free.
43:10
They've got a ice cream place. Everything's free.
43:14
They've got a woodworking shop. Everything's free.
43:15
A laundry place, a barber, a dentist.
43:19
That's what That's the biggest one.
43:19
I was like, food, I expected.
43:20
But when I just saw you could just walk over to this guy and get a haircut, I was like, damn, that was like That was like a big draw for me.
43:26
I was like, I could just I don't have to go anywhere. It's just free.
43:29
I just walk in and get a get a haircut. That's kind of amazing.
43:31
Yeah, they're like, it's free.
43:33
All you have to give us is your life. Deal? Yeah, sign me up.
43:43
Did you say there's two pizza shops on campus?
43:46
Uh So, how much would the Facebook So, a a million in Facebook back uh 4 years ago would be worth what?
43:52
Um a million in Facebook stock would have been uh it's it's gone, I think, up 30% since then.
43:57
So, it's like, you know, a million would have been 1. 3. Right?
44:01
So, that's the like where the stock landed.
44:02
At its peak, it was about double.
44:04
So, at its peak, it would have been double, right?
44:06
So, and so in that one we made the mistake of basically um optimizing for really intangible things.
44:14
One one that seemed really tangible was like they weren't going to take our whole team, and I was like, "Oh, I don't want to like toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like, 'But not you four.
44:22
They didn't hire you guys.'
44:24
So, like uh you know, it's been awesome.
44:26
The rest of us we're going to go, and you guys uh you won't believe the recommendation letter I'm going to write you, right?
44:34
Like Here's some cab money. Thanks for last night. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
44:42
So, that would that wasn't going to feel good.
44:43
Of course, as soon as we rejected them and they were like, "Why?"
44:45
And I was like, "Well, the team thing."
44:47
They're like, "Dude, we would have just hired them a few months later.
44:48
We just didn't have the head count yet."
44:50
Like, he's like, "Oh, he's like, that's why?"
44:53
And I was like, "Yeah, and the commute was really far down there."
44:54
He's like, "Dude, we have an SF office.
44:56
We could have got you in."
44:57
I was like, Also, the commute, they have a bus, like a bus that basically has like a restaurant, cafe, like toilet, internet, TV on the bus.
45:05
It's not even a real commute anymore.
45:08
Yeah, people on the bus complained.
45:10
They're like, "Oh my god, I like the line for the pedicure on the bus was so long this morning."
45:13
It's like, you know, I don't know what you're complaining about.
45:16
Anyway, so we made a decision we made we made a really hard decision.
45:19
And it whatever, ended up fine, but I I guess like my point is it's really hard to forecast and predict these things, and especially hard to forecast and predict what stock is going to be worth down the road. That's awesome.
45:32
Uh all right, so so uh I have another topic that I want to go to. All right.
45:37
Quick I had two quick ideas.
45:37
One is around what I just talked about, predictions.
45:40
So, um there's this company that uh Brandon sent me that's called Prescient Taste.
45:49
I don't I don't even know what this is. It's a horrible name. Prescient Taste.
45:52
You go to prescienttaste. prci taste. com.
45:55
And it's some kind of like basically it's a prediction engine.
45:57
I don't even honestly know exactly how this works, but basically what it's doing is it's using data like um um cameras, um like historical trends, whatever.
46:07
And what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back like how many burgers to put on the stove.
46:13
Like how how many how many fries to take out of the freezer.
46:16
Uh cuz it's basically like how can we help you predict demand?
46:19
And so this idea aside, I actually think that there's like a lot of different ways where this is really valuable.
46:26
So, for example, we own a e-commerce store.
46:28
And we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order?
46:32
If we're ordering, you know, 6 to 9 months in advance sometimes.
46:35
And it's so hard to forecast.
46:38
What's the world going to be like 6 months from now?
46:39
It's like, oh yeah, turns out there was a pandemic, a war a war, like and you know, stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything to could go down and then shipping broke and like it was impossible to predict.
46:52
But, every but like every better prediction saves us a lot of money.
46:58
And so I actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems that entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be.
47:06
There's a couple different ways you could go about this.
47:09
So, for example, for our e-com store, it'd be nice to know how other e-com stores are trending.
47:13
Are we all trending up, trending down, by how much percent year over year in our category?
47:18
Cuz that would kind of tell us like where the overall market demand is.
47:23
Uh another prediction might be, you know, if I'm a if I'm a restaurant, what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive-thru traffic like this time of year, right?
47:31
Or in this weather pattern, how much traffic should I expect today?
47:33
That might tell me what I need for staffing and for, you know, food today versus any other day.
47:39
And if you just think about like if you can be smarter and cut waste by 10 to 15% in in these types of businesses and these types of industries, that's probably going to add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved.
47:54
And uh so I think these businesses are very interesting.
47:56
This whole like demand prediction uh industry is very interesting to me.
47:59
Dude, I have done a ton of research in the trends predict predicting business.
48:03
Obviously, like we have this thing called trends and before launching that, I was like, "What What should we do?"
48:08
I think I told you about this years ago, but everything I'm about to say is from years ago of research and I'm doing it mostly off memory.
48:14
So, I I'm going to be a little bit off, but not totally off.
48:16
But, have you heard of this company called WGSN?
48:18
I think I told you about them.
48:20
Yeah, they're the ones who like they like say like the color of the year is lavender and the smell of the year is like, you know, blue lily or whatever. But, listen to this.
48:30
So, they're publicly traded.
48:30
So, these numbers are actually facts.
48:32
So, the 2001 to sorry, 2021 revenue was 91 million yeah, pounds. It's a British company. So, 91 million pounds.
48:41
So, I don't know what that would be. 130 dollars, yeah. Something like that.
48:44
Yeah, like I don't know the conversion of Monopoly money to real money, but uh no, 91 million pounds.
48:50
Listen to their adjusted or their EBITDA was 41 million.
48:56
So, basically, for every dollar they made, uh 45 was like net income profit.
49:00
And what they do is they tell you which colors are going to be popular and I'm pretty sure the product it they only have 6,500 customers.
49:08
So, they're paying like 25 grand a year or something like that.
49:10
And I think the product basically is a quarterly PDF that tells you what colors they think might be popular.
49:18
And I'm almost positive the way that they get this is they put like tablets at fashion schools and they just ask students like what they're feeling, what they're liking, things like that.
49:29
So, it's like they're asking fashion people.
49:30
I guess the people who are like I guess they like like are you a hipster?
49:33
Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn?
49:37
Like what like whatever you the qualifications are for like you are whatever you think is cool, the normies, you know, like me are going to like start wearing.
49:45
You know what I'm saying? Nine months later. 10 months later, yeah. Yeah.
49:48
Oh, do you Are you an 18-year-old who has 100,000 followers on TikTok? Check. Oh, okay.
49:52
So, like whatever they think there's going to be cool, that's what they like what they predict is going to be cool. And uh it's just a PDF.
49:59
And a real-life use case of this is like Starbucks is going to like make 100,000 uniforms.
50:06
Millennial pink is the new color, so therefore let's make sure our name tags are this color.
50:10
So, it's a no-brainer to spend $25,000 to get this like quarterly PDF as well as the ability to like DM someone who works at WGSN and say like which shade of green is like the thing that we should be using.
50:21
And so, that's an interesting business in this trend predicting uh space.
50:27
I um I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever.
50:30
And they were like A fashion company or whatever. Yeah, as you can tell. I wear a blue shirt. Yeah.
50:40
My fashion sense is, you know, it's frozen in like the third grade, right?
50:44
Like I was writing cursive the last time I thought about fashion.
50:49
The uh And they were like, "Lemons so in this year."
50:52
And I was like, "What do you like like I didn't even I didn't even understand what they were talking mean?
50:56
A lemon like they were talking about the fruit.
50:57
And they were I thought they were talking about like literally like what you eat.
51:01
And they were like, "No, as like a print or a pattern or a color."
51:05
And I was like, "Okay, it s- I was like, it sounds like you're just making things up."
51:07
And they just pulled up their dashboard and they were like, "No, like what look at the difference between like lemon and pineapple."
51:12
And it's like, "Lemon is like Dude, pineapples were were everywhere recently, weren't they? It was.
51:19
Pineapple's a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like you you can just pick Is apples hot right now?
51:24
No, apples apples are [ __ ] out, dude.
51:26
Apples are like, you know, they're so out right now. Lemons are so in. Pineapples are so in.
51:32
Like a picture of a lemon on a shirt? right?
51:37
Like or or you know, same thing with like scents and color palettes and things like that.
51:41
And so, and I was like, "There's no way."
51:45
I was like, this is all just like, you know, isn't this just you know, ad agency fluff?
51:50
They're just fluffing each other with these like, you know, random ass like things.
51:54
And they're like, no, like this stuff is like the Bible to us.
51:57
We we need to know what people are caring about in order to do that.
52:00
I don't know if it's this exact WSN or whatever.
52:04
I don't know if that's the exact one, but they're like this concept of like knowing which colors, which scents, which which styles, which like trends are in. That's so exhausting.
52:16
Yeah, it sounds like a horrible business to be in.
52:18
Like if I'm going to be in the fashion business, I'm going to be in the men's tuxedo business.
52:21
That [ __ ] has not changed for literally a hundred years.
52:25
Have you seen Jack in Titanic?
52:25
Like that's the same [ __ ] I'm going straight big and tall for men.
52:32
Cuz literally the only criteria is like, do you fit? Great. You fit? If you fit, you're in.
52:37
If you don't fit, you're out.
52:40
That That's your only I was like, that's what I like I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion.
52:46
It's just Do you fit or not?
52:48
Cuz I just can't find stuff that fits.
52:51
Dude, fashion's exhausting.
52:51
I I I That's not a business I want to be in.
52:53
Although I do think like there are some brands.
52:57
You know what brand freaking crushes it and I never buy any of their stuff though because it's just too expensive.
53:01
But a Louis Vuitton Louis Vuitton, uh their like suitcases Louis Vuitton, yeah.
53:07
Uh LP um Dude, they've crushed it for like 150, 200 years and it's the same ass logo, the same colors, and it's just timeless.
53:20
I do love those timeless things. They They do kill it.
53:23
a there's like a little arbitrage going around.
53:24
I don't know if you've seen this, but like uh with your ago, somebody said this.
53:27
They're like, cuz the dollar and the euro like got to parity and the luxury stores hadn't changed their prices.
53:35
So, basically like um things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros uh or whatever.
53:41
So, I might get that backwards, but like you the a Louis Vuitton bag, you if you were in Paris, you could buy it in euros for a certain price.
53:50
That same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in US dollars to a US customer.
53:54
And in Paris, you would also get the VAT refund, so you'd get you'd basically net getting something like 30 to 35%.
54:03
under market, and that was like your spread that you could then go and sell it for in the United States.
54:07
It was like kind of crazy, and so um there's like a whole businesses that are around these like the version of a drug mule, so it's like you can just pay someone who's traveling to like stuff a Louis Vuitton bag in their in their suitcase and bring it over for you across the border.
54:23
And um just because like, you know, going flying to Europe to do this yourself is kind of inconvenient, but there's already people flying from Europe to the US every day.
54:31
And so, there's whole businesses that are based around this like travel arbitrage and flipping like that.
54:37
I just did research on one of these that I discovered. It's called Grabr.
54:39
So, the URL is g r a b r . io.
54:41
So, they went with like the misspelling and the .
54:47
io, so you know they're really a startup. But it's uh Grabr.
54:52
io, and their whole stick is shop anywhere, travel everywhere.
54:54
I guess that's a really bad tagline.
54:57
But basically, what it means is it connects you with people who are with these drug mules, these Louis Vuitton mules.
55:02
It connects you with people who are going to overseas places, and you they'll buy [ __ ] for you, and you'll give them the money, and it's like a marketplace for that.
55:12
This is I've got the stupidest example of that.
55:14
There's this thing called a Wicked Laser, cuz I'm like a grown-up.
55:20
I'm like Is the Wicked part just like you're self-describing a standard laser, or is it actually called that?
55:27
I'm a 12-year-old with money.
55:27
Basically, there's these I found this laser online this There's a pointer online that's so strong that they made it illegal in America.
55:42
And if you shine something, like a piece of paper, it catches it catches fire.
55:46
And you can't have it because it reaches jets in the air.
55:49
And it's a Chinese company.
55:51
And obviously, I saw this laser and it's a $300 laser, but you can only ship it to someone in Canada.
55:56
And I'm like, I want a laser that can light [ __ ] on fire.
56:02
Like, why do you not want that?
56:02
That would be a perfect in my collection of like tasers, this one laser, I have a BB gun. A blazer.
56:14
A blazer from Ben's warehouse, a taser and my laser.
56:19
So, I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my $300 laser. Wow.
56:31
It's so You should go work at grabr. io.
56:32
That's what you should go do.
56:40
We're just going to sponsor every incel like subreddit.
56:43
Like, do you like lasers?
56:45
Tired of not getting your laser?
56:48
Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers? Use Grabr.
56:50
Someone will grab it for you and bring it to you. 12-year-old with money? This is so stupid.
57:00
this TikTok, speaking of cool lasers, I saw this TikTok of a laser pointer that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it at their light switch and they go, "Watch this."
57:09
And they just held it on the light switch and they go and and they applied just enough pressure to let the switch turn off and I'm like, "This is not real."
57:16
I was like, I don't know how this is edited but this is but but I was like, the comments were like, "Bro, it's not real but like, how does it work?
57:25
How does it How does that work though?
57:28
Could it not I know this one isn't real but could it happen?"
57:33
Cuz imagine not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night.
57:36
Just grabbing your laser pointer off the bed stand and turning your light off.
57:39
That's Dude, so just imagine getting an Instagram ad where you see a guy go, "Watch this."
57:42
And he shines something across the room and it lights it on fire.
57:45
That's what I got called with these wicked lasers.
57:50
Wait, so how did the Wait, how did the light switch go down? I don't know, man.
57:53
I didn't I never got to the bottom of it.
57:55
I liked and followed to find out for part two. They got me.
58:03
They said if I didn't forward that that Tik Tok to 10 people, my family would die of lasers. So I had to do it.
58:10
Oh my god, that's so stupid.
58:12
you about another thing that's kind of interesting.
58:13
So you know like I think you met up with this guy.
58:15
I think his name is like Strip Mall Guy on Twitter.
58:19
Yeah, yeah, I know I know his real identity.
58:22
I'm one of the few people. Yeah.
58:22
No, well, Strip Strip Mall Guy is his fake name.
58:27
So it's real estate Trent.
58:28
No, uh no, there's another guy who's real estate.
58:30
Maybe they're two different guys.
58:31
All right, I think Strip Mall Guy is real estate Trent.
58:32
and Strip Mall and Strip Mall Guy.
58:32
Yeah, I met up with the Strip Mall Guy and we became friends.
58:36
And so I have to make sure I don't accidentally say his name.
58:40
So one of those guys, I forgot which one now, sorry, uh tweeted about private security.
58:44
And it caught my eye cuz he goes uh man, private security is booming right now.
58:49
I know so many cops or like I've I've seen so many cops who retired and um are just doing this because it's better money. And I was like, "What?
58:56
Like okay, tell me more."
58:58
And so um and so I started looking into this and basically you know very very very briefly, but do you know much about this like private security uh like you know like trend or industry?
59:09
I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one.
59:16
And you and I had a buddy who we knew who's or a friend of a friend who started a security business.
59:20
He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right? Like Did it work?
59:23
He tried No, he that one have But he tried to make it like sexy.
59:27
It's like he just needed to do it not sexy.
59:30
So basically, okay, so there's some big players in this thing.
59:31
So private security, so there's companies like Securitas, or if you just go to AUS.
59:34
com, it's Allied Universal Security, which I think is Both of those are multi-billion dollar companies.
59:40
Yeah, so one's 11 billion, the other one 7 billion.
59:42
I think they do everything from like mall cops to airports to events to whatever else.
59:49
But like it goes like smaller and smaller and more niche like down down as you go. Like corporate security.
59:53
So for example, I remember when I was at at working at a company, I saw on the CEO's calendar a a meeting that was like with like the private security detail to go over like the latest updates to the private security.
1:00:07
I was like, "You got private security?"
1:00:08
It's like, "Oh yeah, like you know, it's we're rich. Worth a lot.
1:00:12
Like, you know, like we're worth a lot to this company, so the company literally pays for private security for the executives um to be able to to, you know, to go out do their thing and be be safe.
1:00:22
And so I found this kind of interesting, and it makes it like it makes sense to me and and uh it makes sense to me that there's like a private world out there for kind of like retired either army you know, military or police that might be higher paying and potentially, you know, an easier job um than what they're doing today.
1:00:44
Who Who are the executives that had security?
1:00:47
Uh I don't want to say, but Are you But which company Did you say the company? I didn't hear you.
1:00:50
No, cuz that would be easy to figure out at that point.
1:00:54
Yeah, I I uh you know, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, they release what their security budget is each year.
1:01:01
And I think Bezos was 6 million, which is to me not a lot of money. Um Uh right?
1:01:11
For Facebook, they they said last year 26 million was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was 6% higher than in 2020.
1:01:17
So that's kind of crazy, right?
1:01:17
26 million just on his personal uh security.
1:01:22
You know how many people work uh work for the Secret Service? No. 6,000.
1:01:27
You know how many people they protect?
1:01:30
Yeah, you know how many people they protect? 25. 25 people.
1:01:33
Spoken like a man who owns a taser and a laser. To know the difference.
1:01:39
Dude, I just No, I met a Secret Service agent at a wedding this weekend and I just asked them everything.
1:01:43
I go, "Tell me everything."
1:01:45
And I, you know, they couldn't tell me anything, really.
1:01:49
Yeah, I was going to say, "This shitty Secret Service guy."
1:01:50
He's like, "Big fan of the pod. Happy to share."
1:01:54
They just read out the Wikipedia to me, but like uh it was pretty interesting. That's cool.
1:02:01
No, I don't know anything about security, but I think it's but I think it's a Speaking of Speaking of TikTok, there was a a TikTok of a guy who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle just like waiting to cross the street.
1:02:10
And he's just like, "Hey Jeff."
1:02:12
And he like had his TikTok recording or whatever and he's like, you know, "How's it going today?" Whatever.
1:02:16
He's like, "Go Go on fantastic."
1:02:16
And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across the street.
1:02:19
And they go and somebody who in the comments was like the top comment was like, "Check out the hand of the security guy."
1:02:26
And you look and he had basically a false I think it was like a false hand and his basically his real hand is like in his pocket like probably holding a gun or a taser or some some kind of weapon and he just had it like a kind of a fake hand out.
1:02:37
And I saw that I was like, "That's awesome." That That's sick. That's awesome.
1:02:41
Dude, you know what's even weirder is there was a I I'm a UFC super fan.
1:02:45
There was a fight backstage amongst the UFC fighters and security got involved and I kept wondering who the [ __ ] is doing UFC security?
1:02:52
They keep the UFC fighters from not fighting each other. Yeah. You know what I mean?
1:03:00
Like what what Like what type of job are are they getting into? You know what I mean?
1:03:04
Like they just see like something happening and like what are you going to do?
1:03:07
Well, you saw the the woman that Dana White hired? The Best Buy lady? Did you see this?
1:03:12
Yeah, she was a football player.
1:03:12
She like kept the woman or someone was trying to rob the Best Buy and she like got down low and like an O line like it was like pushing her out of the way.
1:03:21
Yeah, the robber was trying to run out the store and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking this person from getting this guy from getting out and he's like desperately trying to get out cuz he can't just be like stealing and just get caught inside the store.
1:03:34
And she just ends up tackling him into like a bunch of boxes.
1:03:35
She gets fired from Best Buy cuz Best Buy's like, "Hey, uh liability, you attacked a you attacked somebody in our store."
1:03:42
And she's like, "I'm like I'm doing my job.
1:03:43
I'm a security guard at Best Buy.
1:03:45
What did you want me to do?"
1:03:47
And Dana White was like, "That's bullshit."
1:03:49
Like he went on Instagram was like, "Who is this woman? I want to hire her."
1:03:53
And she's like now he's like personal security guard or something like that. Like she works for him. really? Yeah.
1:03:58
Dude, I always see those guys and I'm like, "Who like you need like an Israeli trained like Secret Service agent to like I mean who are you going to have to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UFC fighter?"
1:04:10
Springer uh security guards that have years of experience breaking this up.
1:04:15
This episode's really going off on a tangent, but do you remember how remember Steve, the security guard from Jerry Springer who also had his own TV show?
1:04:22
Probably like the top earner on Cameo right now.
1:04:26
Next to Kevin from The Office or Gilbert Gottfried.
1:04:29
Um Oh [ __ ] I think Gilbert just died actually. RIP, but whatever.
1:04:35
Uh I guess that's the episode. died?
1:04:37
Did you know that DMX died? Yeah, dude. Yeah, I saw that. I You tweeted at him. you tell me?
1:04:45
You knew this information? You withheld it?
1:04:49
That reminds me of when Dave Chappelle leave my house.
1:04:53
Dave Chappelle was talking about like celebrities and how it's weird they talked to them during tragedies and he's like, "Just imagine like 9/11 and and Ja Ja Rule was like being interviewed actually."
1:05:02
And they're like, "Where you know, we we need Ja right now to make sense of this tragedy. Where's Ja? Where's Ja? Someone go get me Ja.
1:05:09
We need Ja to make sense of this of this tragedy.
1:05:11
That's like that's like you wondering like why didn't anyone fill me in that the DMX had passed.
1:05:18
Uh but yeah, he's he's dead.
1:05:20
By the way, did you see this this blog post?
1:05:22
Let's let's close on this little last random thing, but um check out this blog post.
1:05:26
So, this guy listened to the episode that we did with Rob Dyrdek, which is probably I don't know, if not the most popular episode we did, one of the most popular episodes we've done. Uh people love that one.
1:05:38
And one of the things that Rob one of the reasons people love it is because turns out the kind of fun-loving skater guy from MTV like turns out he's like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity and like personal efficiency.
1:05:50
You know, his quote on there was, "I am human optimization."
1:05:52
And one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day.
1:05:58
And so, this guy wrote this blog post.
1:06:00
It was like the top post on Hacker News over the weekend.
1:06:03
And it's called "Write a note to your spouse every day.
1:06:05
A note A note a day keeps the divorce attorney away."
1:06:09
And he goes, "You know, I was listening to my First Million and Rob Dyrdek was on there.
1:06:14
He says that he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day about what he was working on, how he was feeling.
1:06:23
He was usually tired by then and wasn't really giving it you know his A plus."
1:06:26
So, he goes, "For the last 6 months I wrote a note to my wife every single day."
1:06:29
He goes, "All right, that's a lie.
1:06:31
You know, I I did it most days, but like whatever. Here's how it went."
1:06:36
And he goes, "It's amazing.
1:06:36
Like we're on the same page about like what's going on in our lives, our kids, our finances, how we're spending our time.
1:06:41
We talk more than ever now.
1:06:42
Um you know, we have more trust. We feel less stressed.
1:06:45
We're less aggravated with each other.
1:06:46
And like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves um about parenting."
1:06:54
And he goes, "You know, here's why. Writing is thinking.
1:06:56
So, just writing helped me clear my mind.
1:06:58
It wasn't just me dumping my thoughts onto her.
1:07:00
It was me like getting my own mind clear."
1:07:01
And he gives this outline.
1:07:04
He He "Here's what I write.
1:07:05
First, I write gratitude, like something about her, you know, for her, for how hard she works, for her looks, whatever.
1:07:12
Then, what I'm working on today, uh and like my goals or my deadlines, anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me.
1:07:19
Uh any ideas I have, just like random ideas in my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house.
1:07:22
Um transactional stuff, like oh, we need to remember to do this. We have to do this. Don't forget that.
1:07:28
Um questions, like hey, are we going to that thing?
1:07:30
Or hey, did we ever book that?
1:07:32
You know, hey, do we have an event coming up?
1:07:33
Uh and lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have, the the things we have, the time we have, the kids we have, etc.
1:07:38
He goes, I don't do all these sections every day, but those are the general categories of things I try to write.
1:07:44
Uh it takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted, and uh you know, turn Yeah, it's been a huge like win for me.
1:07:51
Is it like a physical note or a email?
1:07:54
I think it's a physical note. Uh not 100% sure.
1:07:58
I guess I should start doing this.
1:07:58
This sounds pretty cool, right?
1:07:59
And then he did this YouTube video with his wife, like where they both like talked about it afterwards, cuz the post blew up on Hacker News.
1:08:04
It got like probably, you know, 100,000 views or something like that.
1:08:08
So, then they like did an interview together like talking about this little habit. It's pretty cool, right? Yeah, this is awesome.
1:08:14
Uh I just DM'd him while you were talking saying this is uh amazing.
1:08:18
And this is a really good headline.
1:08:19
Write a note Write a note to your spouse every day.
1:08:21
A note a day keeps a door divorce attorney away.
1:08:23
This is a really good title.
1:08:25
This is a beautiful find.
1:08:27
Um I think I guess I'll start doing this, right? This is pretty sick. It sounds smart.
1:08:34
Maybe I'll start by talking to her, then I'll start No, this seems like a no-brainer.
1:08:38
I'm like reading this and I'm like huh all upside, pretty much no downside. Why am I not doing this? Right? Good for me.
1:08:54
How can I weasel out of doing this?
1:08:56
Sorry, my brain's not coming up with any valid reason not to do this.
1:08:59
No, like the calculations are like going in my head. I'm like, "Huh.
1:09:03
Yeah, I guess I'll You seem like a good husband.
1:09:05
You You probably already do this.
1:09:06
You probably leave a sticky note on her pillow every morning. No, not at all.
1:09:09
I As I was reading it, the same thing I was like, "Why would I not do this?
1:09:12
It seems really obvious."
1:09:14
But apparently no one does it.
1:09:16
My first thought Except Rob Dyrdek.
1:09:18
One episode at a at a time.
1:09:18
I feel like we had to We had to leave them with something useful because we definitely got off on like, you know, a tangent's tangent during this episode. Dude, it worked for Rob.
1:09:27
I mean, Rob is like successful.
1:09:28
I Have you seen his wife?
1:09:30
I mean, she's very beautiful.
1:09:30
I'm pretty sure she was like a a playmate.
1:09:34
Uh like a like a like a I don't know what the word is.
1:09:35
Playboy model or something.
1:09:36
I mean, she's like uh pretty pretty amazing.
1:09:42
I'm definitely doing this now. Yeah.
1:09:48
I Yeah, I guess I'll do that.
1:09:48
Why did this guy write so many words? Put a picture up. You're done.
1:09:54
Well, anyway, once like if you Google Here's how you Here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich.
1:09:59
If you Google Rob Dyrdek home, there's like 13 different articles and it's like all about like a different five or 10 million-dollar house. you mean homes? Did you mean mansions?
1:10:10
Yeah, and he buys all these houses and he seems happy.
1:10:13
He's got his act together.
1:10:15
So, yeah, I'm on board, I guess. I guess I'll do this. Fine. All right, we're out.