But I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's going to happen in 12 or 36 months, and you help them uh guess the right prediction, you can build an interesting business.
And I'm going to give you an example. Okay, so let's do it.
What uh what topic you got today?
All right, I've got one idea based on something you sent me. Oh, wow. We're rich.
Yeah, but you Thanks, Sam, for having one idea based on something I sent you.
You sound like you really put in the work today.
Look, I'm in the final interview stage for my new researcher.
Um but you told me last time you you had a lot. And uh just hear me out.
So, you sent me this thing called Exploding Topics, right? Yeah.
And you said the traffic's killing it.
And Exploding Topics, do you want to explain what it is?
Yeah, it's basically like a If you go to the website, you'll see a series of charts.
And the charts are basically saying, "Hey, this um this thing, this trend is is growing in um in popularity."
I think it started by which keywords were growing in popularity cuz Brian Dean, who owned Backlinko, a popular SEO blog, got involved with it.
And then it kind of changed to what it is now. Okay, yeah.
So, I didn't know what the underlying What are they looking at to tell you what's trending or not, but they'll be like, "Um you know, hey, there's this thing called Power Dash.
It's a vacuum cleaner for pet owners.
It's grown 3,000% right now, right?"
And they're but you know, the volume of that of that search is 320. So, not not huge.
Regenerative agriculture, right?
Uh growing 658% with 12,000 searches.
And you can look at that, you'll be like, "Huh, that's cool.
I'm interested in that topic.
Maybe there's something I could do here."
So, I think it's similar to what Trends was, which was I will tell you about things that are getting more popular before they're fully popular in order for you to take advantage of them with content business, that sort of thing. Right? That's the idea?
Yes, and the people wondering trends, so basically I used to own I sold it.
I used to own this thing called trends.
co and it was a weekly email and an online community that people would pay $300 a year for and we got it I forget what it was when I sold it, but I think it was at like 6 million a year, but it very easily could have been like a million a month or so in revenue.
But um basically we would send a weekly email and we had three or two researchers and they would comb the web and find interesting things and they would write interesting reports and they would also include one to two graphics that showed like here's based off of Reddit searches or based off of Google searches or based off of like 20 different data points, this topic is growing quickly.
Anyway, what uh Exploding Topics is doing, there's another another company called Meet Glimpse.
So I think it's meetglimpse. co or . com, I don't know.
And this is just called trends forecasting and these versions of it including my version, they're what I would call prosumer.
So people who just want to spend 10 to $300 a month on it.
They're not that big of a deal.
But there's this whole other industry of people willing to spend 25, 100,000, 10 million a year all on trends trend forecasting and I think it's a very interesting business model and I think it's a very underdeveloped industry.
And so the one that I brought up a whole bunch is called WGSN.
WGSN, it's basically a monthly report that comes out and it helps people pick which colors are going to be popular.
Which sounds trivial, but that's a really big deal.
If you're Starbucks and you got to go and buy uh 10 million name tags or something like that and you want to make sure that you've got like a good color that is like hit or for example, WGSN, do you remember Sean how pineapple was popular?
They helped predict that pineapple, the logo is going to be popular.
Their next one, I think, is the lemon.
I think they said lemon is going to be popular.
Maybe you told me that, actually.
And so, anyway, that's what this does.
But, I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's going to happen in 12 or 36 months, and you help them guess the right prediction, you can build an interesting business.
And I'm going to give you an example.
And let's just say that it's like HR or like work styles.
So, what do we think we're going to predict the the the this particular age group?
What are they going to want for working from home in the next 36 months?
And if you're Google or someone that employs 10,000 of these workers, you're like, all right, I kind of need an idea because we're going to be making X policy, we want to know how they're going to react.
The way it could work, and this is the way WGSN, and this is the way trends and a few other things work, is you do a combination of surveys.
So, you survey like you need a pool of like a thousand or 10,000 people you can survey and get intel from and make predictions.
Then, you look at like different data.
So, like you look at sentiment, you look at like what people on Reddit, on TikTok are saying, just what trends are saying.
And you consolidate in that that into a fairly easy-to-understand 1,000 or 2,000-word email that you send out monthly.
And then, you have a consultant on staff who you can call on a regular basis to be like, "Hey, we're thinking about doing X.
Based on your research, is that a wise decision?"
And then, you have monthly calls as well as a community and a conference.
And I think you could wrap this up and do it in most any industry and have something that you could charge 20 to $50,000 a year for.
And this is something that What's his name?
What's the bald-head guy who I like? Scott Galloway.
He did this with He did a little bit like this with his company that he sold for $300 million. What was it called? It was called L2.
Uh but, anyway, this is my model that I think not enough people know about and take advantage of that I think could be pretty big.
And uh I wish you had let me guess which bald guy you you like.
That could have been That we could have gone on for a couple hours on that one.
I I have so many that I could that that could have been the answer. Yeah. Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Um what uh so what would you do?
So you what was your what was your idea here of like how you would create kind of like a trend sales prediction type business?
I What I would do is I would I would package my product in the way that I explained.
But I think that most industries that you work in, you can figure out some type of thing where you can look at your the buyers of your company and be like or look at any any different roles in your company and be like, "Hey everyone, um can I just talk to you and like figure out like what decisions are you making that's going to impact us in like 2 years?
And what type of data do you wish that you had today that would make your decision easier?"
And I am sure this exists, but one version of this I can think of that's pretty valuable would be if I could poll like, "Hey, I you know, we got a we're able to survey every, you know, CIO in the Fortune 500.
And, you know, we surveyed 70% of the CIOs in the Fortune 500, here's what they're thinking in terms of their software budget for next year.
Or here's what they're thinking in terms of, you know, whether they you know, we HR people at the at the, you know, top 1,000 companies, here's what they're thinking in terms of remote pay.
Or here's what they're thinking in terms of the XYZ."
And I think if it's sort of like what GLG is uh where GLG's expert network and people will pay people like you and me $2,000 for a 1-hour call because they're making investment decisions and they need to do research and they need actual industry input to say, "Hey, what's the deal with this?
I'm not an expert at this, you are, but I need to make a $10 million bet.
And so as part of my research and diligence, I'm going to pay, you know, you and 10 other people like you, $2,000 an hour, 20 grand, no problem.
That's a that that helps me make the right directional bet here.
And so, I think rather than GLG being a one-way thing, um I think you could do it as a as a, you know, kind of like pulse survey, too.
As long as you had the right key key audience that was bought in.
Now, how do you get them to actually answer this?
I think you could A, just do it as part of a broader like media thing.
Like, if you already have an a newsletter for HR people or whatever, you could do it.
Like, Industry Dive could do this.
Um I also think you could pay them.
And so, I think there's some some version of payment and rewards that that could go with this cuz you're probably charging a lot of money, thousands of dollars for these reports.
Um but there is another business I want to tell you from a listener here. What's it do? Called Eureka Surveys. So, Google Eureka Yes.
Yeah, I love the bootstrap company.
Yeah, so these guys, if you go to Eureka Surveys, it just right?
It just says, "Get paid for taking surveys." Right?
Make money online, here's how you do it, and it's like these are the small small-time version of it.
So, basically, you go you download their app, um let me pull it up. You download their app.
say Did he say we could say their revenue?
He told me it, but I don't remember if me once, I think we could we should just say it maybe generically, but like, you know, seven figures in revenue, bootstrapped off this um off this product idea, and you know, kind of amazing.
Uh kind of amazing that they are um doing so well.
And I I think that this is like a really great business.
He acquires, I think in his case, I think he's going for kind of younger audience, sort of like, you know, Gen Z, millennial, college students, maybe stay-at-home moms, like you know, more of the average average Joe type of consumer, and able to survey them, and they offer gift cards in return.
Like, the brands who want to run the surveys offer gift cards.
And it's a great way to um it's a great way to you know, get insight, you know, quickly.
Like, for me, if I have a brand, right?
I have a brand, I want to run a survey like this, um that's pretty that's like pretty um time intensive for me to go do.
So, I would need to go to a service like this if I want to get an answer.
Well, so that's my idea for for trends forecasting.
I think the survey one's interesting.
There there's a lot of competition in that space, but I still think it's interesting.
But, that's like a simple This is like a fairly simple, straightforward thing.
It's a lot of work, but huge business, I think.
Um All right, what do you got?
Um okay, so I'm going to tell you um a couple names.
I'm going to throw a couple names out at you.
You just try to tell me the pattern.
Leonardo DiCaprio Kevin Durant Ellen DeGeneres Luka Dončić George Clooney You might be thinking movies, you might be thinking sports, it may be celebrity investing, where am I going with this? No.
They all play pickleball.
Pickleball is this crazy, crazy thing that is exploding.
It's not going to be new to most people here, but I'm just sort of late to the party.
I played for the first time the other day when we did our kind of weekend getaway for founders thing, and we played, it's a lot of fun, and I was like, I get it.
I totally get why you guys haven't been showing you that long?
Yeah, I I I don't leave the house.
So, it's not an in-my-house activity.
So, therefore, it this is the first time I got exposed to it, right?
Like, you know, like I'm those people that that that like, you know, came out, they're like, "COVID? What?"
They don't know what's going on.
Um that's what happened to me with pickleball.
And so, I started looking into it, and I think there's something I think there's a bunch of little interesting things.
I want to hear kind of what you you find interesting in this, but I'm going to throw some stats at you.
So, my my my overall take is pickleball is exploding.
Um here's some opportunities I see and I think it's going to be huge.
It already is getting huge, but I don't think I but I see some potential traps and I'll tell you what those are.
Okay, so first of all guess how many people in America It's a tough one.
Guess how many people in America played pickleball in the last year. 20 No. 5 million. It's a good guess. 36 million.
So 36 million is a crazy number, right?
That's um twice as many people as go to like Disneyland every year.
It is That's the population of California, right?
So 36 million is a kind of crazy number, right?
That's like 14% of the of the total population.
And um and you can see this trend growing, right?
So like it went from five to 36.
That was in a one-year jump.
You can see on Google Trends it's just an up into the right line.
You have celebrities, like I said earlier, billionaires buying teams, leagues, that sort of thing.
Um I personally know two people who have built multi-million dollar brands in this space.
I'm going to tell you about them.
So one one guy, I can't say his name, but he built a Amazon FBA store.
And this was two or three years ago he sold it.
So he actually sold way too early.
At the time I met him I was like Oh, great.
You You built a store doing what?
I've never even heard of this sport.
Um and he was like, yeah, I just got into it.
Um you know, got really into it and so I just thought, oh, let me just see if there's much competition on Amazon for this. There wasn't.
So I built a popular FBA store and sold it for about 8 to 10 million.
And so the guy sells it for 8 to 10 million dollars and I was like, wow.
You know, you know, rob highway robbery.
Um you know, tell that guy to lose your number and now that he owns he now that he spent 8 million dollars on this, you know, pickle what?
You know, what what the hell is this?
I bet you if you had that thing dialed be a $40 million brand.
You know, like this thing has exploded in popularity.
Whoever bought it knew what they were doing.
Um the second is there's a guy doing a newsletter called The Dink.
So, he's doing The Hustle or Milk Road for pickleball.
And we talked to him and we were like uh we talked to him when we were doing Milk Road. you spell it? Oh, I see it. The Dink, like d i n k.
And uh cool guy, he's doing a bunch of really smart things on the growth and kind of like content side.
And he was making more money per reader than we were making on Milk Road.
We're in the crypto like finance niche and he was making more money per reader in pickleball than than we were because he was a he's executing well um and b like turns out you there's like, you know, there's a lot of people who want to advertise and people who want to buy stuff and there weren't really very many mediums for them to meet each other.
And this newsletter was uh was that.
So, this guy was, you know, I think this newsletter is probably worth three three million four million dollars today.
Um So, two people I personally know that have done that have done this. Okay.
And I got a couple ideas here on I want to talk about why this works, um where this is going, and also just some of the interesting characters that are involved here. Um you've played. I assume you've played. Yeah, but hold on.
Before we I've looking stuff up while you're talking.
I have got a few I told you so's that I want to bring up.
I was I was looking this up as you were talking. Episode number 147.
This aired January 19th, 2021.
So, almost exactly 2 years ago.
Let's go to the listener notes.
It says uh Sam brings up pickleball, a booming sport in Austin.
And it talks about all the opportunities there and why he thinks it's going to be big. Sean brushes it off.
Says stupid, never going anywhere.
Sean gives Sam wedgie, tells him to f off.
Uh then you talked about Dink.
I was like, that sounds familiar.
So, I wish I could Can I share my screen right now?
I don't I won't share my screen actually.
Uh I look up Dink founder.
It's a guy named Thomas Shields.
I Google Thomas Shields Twitter. I go to his Twitter.
I click his DMs and there's an unread message that he sent me in September 18th, 2020. Hey Sam, Thomas here. Nice to meet you.
Um I And he sent me a video on YouTube where it's a custom video of him talking to the camera saying, "Hey Sam."
And he's explaining to me about this newsletter that he wants to start and he wants to know if I want to participate in it or something like that.
This is the first time I've seen this video, by the way.
I I've I've not even I've I'm watching it for the first time ever.
So, I was I take full credit for telling you about pickleball.
I take not full credit, but it it is cool that this guy hollered at me and this is four 3 years later and he's absolutely doing what he said he was going to do.
So, Man, you didn't respond to the personal video, huh?
I It Well, this is an unread Twitter message. I never saw it.
But I But anyway, that So, that's my that's my story before we Huh? I Yeah.
Well, I remember seeing it, but Twitter's actually great because you can open up a message and they don't know.
And they don't know until you hit accept.
And you can read the whole message.
And so, people are like, "Hey, you never saw it."
I'm like, "Yeah, never saw it." that's my story.
So, you were asking me, have I played pickleball pickleball before?
And my my response is to that is Does that Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?
Yes, I've played pickle pickleball before, dude. Of course I have. Have you seen me? Have you looked at me?
I'm a I'm a tall white guy from the Midwest.
Of course I play pickleball.
Do I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Sure do.
Am I Am I taking a swing of a of a of an old school Coca-Cola Classic right now? Sure am. Yeah.
Yeah, you ever had orange soda? Of course.
Um do you know how pickleball started, by the way? Uh old people.
Uh it was like a senator or something, right?
Yeah, dude, you know your [ __ ] man. This is crazy.
That's crazy you know that. Um it was a congressman.
So, it was a bored congressman who created this. It was 1965.
It was in the like the Pacific Northwest.
And they get back from some trip, him and his buddy. They have nothing to do.
They're at this house, they have nothing to do, they're bored.
The house has a badminton court.
They're like, "Great, let's go play some badminton, I guess."
They go down there, there's no equipment for badminton.
They're like, "Ah, [ __ ] What are we going to do?"
So, they're like, "Well, we got ping pong inside, but we kind of be out of kind of want to be outside."
So, they take the ping pong paddles, a whiffle ball, and they go to the badminton court, and they start inventing this game.
And they're just bored, and they invent this game, and they're like and they call it pickleball because I guess there's this phrase called pickle boat, which is like a a hastily assembled crew for a boat.
And they're like, "Ah, it was a mashup of We just grabbed the the paddles and played badminton and lowered the net.
It's like this mashup thing.
We'll call it pickleball."
And so, they create this thing.
It's like, you know, just a small regional game.
Nobody's really playing it.
And somehow, I couldn't figure out the link, but like somehow, about the last 5 years, this thing has gone like very, very mainstream.
To where now there are professional leagues.
There are um you know, tons of celebrities own teams. People are buying teams.
Gary Vee's buying a team.
Kevin Durant's buying a team.
Tom Brady's buying a team.
Patrick Mahomes is buying a team.
These teams cost a million dollars now.
Um there are billionaires that are trying to buy leagues and merging the leagues to try to make this like an official thing.
It has become kind of real.
And um there's people who are trying to create like Topgolf for pickleball.
So, there's a place called Chicken N Pickle uh and Camp Pickle that's trying to like basically create venues where you can come, drink, eat, and play pickleball.
And so, there's like this uh you know, mini gold rush that's happening right now in the world in the world of pickleball.
And I started thinking, okay, where do I think this goes?
Cuz I've seen this now a couple times.
I've seen this with MMA, right?
Going from super fringe to more mainstream.
E-sports, um and even some other things like the drone racing league.
You ever seen the drone racing league? The DRL? yeah.
That one hasn't picked up like I thought it was going to, but it maybe it will. Same. Same.
Um And so, you see these happen and you sort of think, okay, what does it take to make these work?
And I'll give you I'll give you what I think pickleball has going for it.
And then I'll tell you what I think is going to be tough for it.
So, here's what it has going for By the way, we had a writer at uh a freelancer at The Hustle who quit for a year and she became she wanted to compete in pickleball and she did and she started traveling to competitions.
Yeah, like it's like an intense thing. People love it.
What did you say to her when she told you what she was planning here?
What do you think I said? I said, that's awesome.
I said, that's a great That's awesome. Get out. Yeah. Give me your laptop. Come on.
Yeah, give me your laptop.
laptop right now and then get out. And that's awesome. Yeah. But it is awesome. text me a pic. Go laugh yourself.
And you're like, objectively, this is awesome.
Emotionally, I feel a little wounded and I'm rooting for you. Bam.
No, but she did and she's doing good.
Um okay, so here's what I think it has going for it.
So, why like let's brainstorm.
We've done this with food.
Remember you had your food thing that was I think like low-key genius and nobody really respects you for it except for me, but like That's such a left-handed compliment.
Look, people don't get it.
I do, but no one else does. No one else does.
Your parents don't understand, but I'm okay with your lifestyle.
We've talked about it two or three times just to say the joke again to see if it hits.
And it just doesn't seem to hit.
But like let's do it again.
What's your food thing and then let's let's do the equivalent for the sports world.
So for food, I was like there's like a handful of categories that you need to check off in order to make your food go viral.
So it's either going to be like a side food where it becomes the main thing.
So it's like instead of like ice cream that has cookie dough in it, it's like only cookie dough.
The other thing is it has to be a different color than normal.
So green ketchup or rainbow bagels or it has to be a different size.
So like a huge pizza or a really small thing.
Or the last one was it has to be the combination of two things that are related, but you wouldn't normally have done it like the cronut. Right. Yes, exactly. Again, genius.
Uh finally, hopefully hopefully you get your due this time.
So I think there's sort of a similar thing when it comes to creating a a hit game or hit sport.
Because when I played pickleball, I was like, okay, that was fun.
And here's what was fun about it.
Um there's zero learning curve.
Like we literally did not Nobody even really explain anything.
They were just like stand here and when the ball comes to you, hit it.
And then they were like, there's two rules.
Don't go in the kitchen and like you know, whatever, you know, here's how the scoring system works.
They they told me that as we were playing.
Um it was very intuitive.
It's like, okay, cool, got this paddle, similar enough to tennis, similar enough to ping-pong.
I I kind of already know how to move my body this way.
All right, this will this will work.
Uh so zero learning curve.
Uh we were playing and the age range of the players that we were playing with, there was somebody had their son there, uh you know, who I think is like, you know, 11 or 12.
But I I think you can basically play this game from age 8 to like 65.
And so everybody should play it.
my my mom's the close to 70 and she goes to her pickleball league twice a week.
All right, we may we may we may push it just to 80.
Uh you know, I don't know how how But this is super broad range.
And how many sports can you really say that for?
Very, very few sports can be played by extremely young and extremely old people.
Um you could just play it with two people, so you don't need like five on five or like, you know, a full football team or basket- baseball team.
Um it picked up during COVID because it was kind of like an outdoors activity that anybody could do that was sort of socially distanced.
And so I think that was like a big factor in like growth.
Um and it's basically like a lightweight version of of tennis um or even maybe even a lightweight version of golf in the way that people use it cuz you could talk while you're doing it.
You're not like just huffing and puffing and running the whole time.
Uh and lastly and most importantly, you could play the game drunk.
And so this is like, you know, if I wanted to create the perfect game, those would be my my criteria.
And then, you know, out would come would come pickleball.
So I think it's it is kind of a perfect game in that way.
So I think it has legs for that reason.
I think it's going to keep getting more and more popular.
The fact that the whole state of California worth of population plays this game has played this game in the last year is crazy.
Um and you also see other things going for it like the founder of Lifetime Fitness, you know, like the gym chain, got really into pickleball and then put $500 million into building pickleball courts in all of his like locations cuz he's like, "I love pickleball.
People are going to love this."
And so he deployed half a billion dollars into building infrastructure. Dude, I love that.
And people are converting tennis courts. All this stuff is crazy.
There's 35,000 courts in the United States now.
Dude, tennis sucks anyway.
Only like a couple people know how to play it. You know what I mean?
Like my wife took lessons on how to play it and I would go and play with her and she would serve it at me and I would basically just try to hit it back.
And that was how we played. It it sucked. That sucked.
And then I would serve it to her.
form of abuse actually is what you just described. Yeah. Tennis is stupid.
So to anyone listening who wants to capitalize this, we can brainstorm.
But I'm going to summarize this in a two simple words, okay? Vince McMahon.
If you are in this business, remember those words, Vince McMahon. Who is Vince McMahon?
Vince McMahon is the owner and current or former CEO of the WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment, I don't know what it is, but it's it's uh any time that we grew up, you know, Stone Cold, The Rock, this is WWE. Back then it was WWF.
Dude, when you think about it, WWE is just a bunch of ripped dudes in their underwear having a soap opera in front of 50,000 people and then the rest of the people on TV.
It's all it is is a soap opera and there's a little bit of ripped dudes in underwear wrestling.
That's all it is and it's awesome.
You've got grown dudes who are like the most like homophobic guys ever and yet they're like sitting there watching two oily ripped dudes just rolling around.
It's like, you know, they get past it all because all they care about is the story, the drama.
This is all you need to do.
So, if you're interested in this uh you just go and get a picture of Vince McMahon, you put it a picture of him on your wall and you just say, What would Vince do? Yeah. What would Vince do? WW uh VD. What would Vince do?
That's all I would care about if I was entering into this because that's exactly what happens.
With tennis, I only cared about what's-her-name, Serena, in that last like tournament that she was in because it was her last one.
You know what I'm saying?
Like I only care about this Naomi Namasakwa lady, I only care what's-her-name what's-her-name sorry I have Osaka. Osaka.
I only care about her because like I hear that she's kind of like going a little like she's having some mental issues and I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm kind of interested. a train wreck? Hang on. Yeah, like I'm into it.
Like that that's like what I get I get hooked on it or like, you know, some of these like sports that I don't think are mainstream, I get it.
Like Lance Armstrong, guy gets cancer, maybe he's on drugs, killing these Europeans. All right, cool. You've got my attention.
Like I need a story and that's what anyone who's interested in pickleball needs to understand.
This data is wrong every freaking time.
Have you heard of HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
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.
So, I think as funny as what you just said is, I think you're totally right.
I remember when we started working on an e-sports product, right?
Like that's what got bought by by Twitch.
We were building basically an e-sports company.
And I met with a venture capitalist, this guy Zach.
We He goes, "Love e-sports, but e-sports needs its Dana White."
Which is basically Dana White was the Vince McMahon of the UFC.
And he goes, "Dana White is like there is no UFC without Dana White, right?
Because literally the company was going bankrupt.
So so you know, I I don't think literally there would have been a company without without Vince sorry, without Dana and his and the Fertitta brothers coming in and buying it and putting in They bought it for $2 million and and then they burned another 40 or 50 million trying to make it successful at a loss before it finally turned around and started to become a thing."
And so they put in years, millions of dollars, and expertise at promotion.
Um and willing to just run through walls to make it happen, going state by state to get this thing licensed so they could even host events.
And then hosting events, figuring out how we're going to sell tickets.
And then once they sell tickets, how are we going to get this thing on TV?
Once it gets on TV, how are we going to build these characters in the storylines?
Oh, we got to invest in all of these documentaries and Dude, bring out reality TV shows and things like that.
Before smartphones were even a thing, Dana used to give his guys I remember you remember when they they they first came out?
They were these video cameras that looked almost like an iPhone looks now, but it was like a flat flip cams.
He get He goes, "Hey everyone, we're having a meeting.
You UFC fighters, everything you do, here's your flip cam.
Record it, post it on like I forget what was popular. I think it was YouTube.
But we're He was like one of the first guys to do that. Totally.
Totally was the first one and he had to do it because he no mainstream channel would let him in.
He couldn't get you know, now they're on ESPN.
It took 20 years to get onto ESPN as a sport.
You know, that's how crazy this was.
And so you need somebody like that.
Which basically just saying you need a world class one in a billion entrepreneur if you're going to make this work.
And there are some interesting characters that are involved in this thing.
Do you know who this guy is, Dundum?
Have you heard about this guy?
Just search Dundum pickleball.
Um there is this billionaire who is like really trying to make pickleball a thing.
Like so this guy made his fortune doing subprime auto loans.
Which like you didn't I didn't even have to say the Yeah, Tom. Tom Dundum? Yeah.
Yeah, subprime mortgage loans. Ugh.
Like you don't even have to say he made his fortune.
If I just said, "Yeah, he worked on subprime auto loans."
You'd be like, "Oh, so he's filthy rich, huh?"
Like you know, like there's no You don't put those four words together without being a billionaire. And so he's super rich.
He takes a bunch of big wild bets.
So he put I think like $70 million into an NFL competitor um called the AAF that like basically folded before it even had its first game and he lost $70 million trying to do that.
Um now he's basically he owns pickleball. com.
He bought the major league.
Um you know, the biggest league for pickleball or like you know, there's two competing leagues and he bought one of them.
And um this guy's like trying to make pickleball happen.
And he's Dude, he also owns the majority of Topgolf.
He owns majority of Topgolf.
Yeah, he he does a bunch of stuff like this.
So he is uh pretty fascinating guy.
There's a bunch of like really like interesting characters that have like kind of pushed this forward.
So, he's one of the guys who've pushed this forward.
Um there's another guy named Seymour Rifkind.
You ever heard of this guy? No.
Why would I have heard of him?
Here's some things about Seymour Rifkind.
Self-made millionaire by creating a marketing company, all right? Check. Uh does Iron Man's? Check. Does ultra marathons? Check. Taekwondo black belt? Check.
He has bicycled solo coast to coast? Check.
He He created um the first rating system for pickleball? Check.
And he did all of this after the age of 50. That's pretty baller.
That's a That's a pretty baller post-50 resume to have.
So, So, this guy kind of uh you know, pushed pushed the the the ball forward and kind of helped legitimize it, make it make it more popular as well.
And then obviously there's all the players and the people who have been playing at the grassroots as well.
So, so I feel like with pickleball there's just like this tremendous groundswell.
And here's a couple of my quick takes.
Uh first of all, RIP badminton.
I knew I knew from the first time I saw badminton badminton was a little bit of a [ __ ] sport. I could tell.
I saw it coming and I avoided it like the plague.
And it just needed a little a little tweak.
A little tweak there for badminton and you know, pretty sad for badminton.
It was like sitting there the whole time and missed missed this wave.
So, uh you know, that sucks.
Um second, could this happen again?
Like I need to go start playing all old people sports and just sniffing around.
Like, what's up with bocce ball?
How do you play this [ __ ] Is this good? Is this the next thing?
Like I There There might be another old person sport that could be translated down.
Um third, you may not know this, but I was on the cusp of creating the next pickleball.
Back when I was in uh middle school, me and my buddies created a game called golf.
And you might be wondering, what's golf, Sean?
And golf was basically a combination of golf and ping pong.
It was an extreme version of ping pong.
And shout out to my guy Stephen DB who was there with me in the in our game room and we created golf and it I get I get This is the most fun game ever and we invented it.
We just didn't know how to commercialize at the time. Um incredible game.
My version of that My version of that was in eighth grade.
We came up with a game called nut ball where you where It's bloody knuckles with other parts of your body? Oh, no, it's better. It's called nut ball.
You sit 20 ft apart and you sit on the ground with your legs and you open your legs.
Yeah, yeah, I remember that game too.
Yeah, and a person has to throw a ball.
The first person that flinches loses. You move, you lose. to get in trouble.
Yeah, my my the Sister Mary came up to me and said, "Sam, no more nut ball." So I I got banned.
Which is a win of itself.
Uh third funny story, um so I left here I we did that weekend kind of retreat founders thing which is like, "Okay, we're going to brainstorm.
We're going to really make plans.
We're going to, you know, think about what's happening.
Give each other great business advice."
Um I left early on the last day.
So I missed the last 24 hours.
And so I hit up Ben and I was like, "Ben, how was the How was the last day?
Would I miss anything good?
Anything really, you know, do you have do you have notes you can share with me?"
And he goes, "No, we basically just played pickle ball for 7 hours because uh Sully really wanted to beat me in pickle ball and um he couldn't but he wouldn't let me leave until he beat me but he just couldn't beat me.
And so we just played for like 5 hours straight.
And I just beat him non-stop and then after that we didn't talk.
And I think like that's the sign of a great game.
A game that could take over your life and make you a bit of a degenerate.
So I'm all in on pickle ball.
Dude, they need a leader with a good name.
When I was in San Francisco, I got into competitive skee ball and the guy who ran it was called Joey the Cat.
And he Do you remember Joey the Cat?
He branded himself in San Francisco as Joey the Cat, the skee ball guy.
And people would rent ski ball machines from him like startups.
he was just like renting out ski ball machines to bars or to offices? What was he doing? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's what he good money doing it, right?
He was making great money.
He owned buildings in the mission.
Yeah, he owned like anywhere where he had like a little warehouse with all of his ski ball machines and it was Joey the cat.
And all of his uh ski ball machines had like a tiger stripe on it.
And uh oh you got you you got a Joey the cat machine, that's great, man.
You this is popular in your office or something. Yeah.
Yeah, so you guys you guys must be doing well.
You're having you have fun in your office. Oh, cool. Like Yeah.
Or like oh, you're into like local [ __ ] Nice. Right, right, right.
Oh, you still Yeah, you're supporting this local guy. Joey the cat. You have kombucha here.
Wow, you guys got it going on.
So this guy needs a the leader of uh of uh pickleball, they need a cool name like Joey the cat.
I feel like there should be like a tiger sound every time you say that.
All right, um Okay, cool. Let's do one more topic.
Okay, I want to give you one more uh interesting person um that that I think is worth talking about.
Okay, so have you ever heard of Virtual Gaming Worlds? No, dude.
Whenever we talk about this, what's my answer?
Well, it's just kind of like a rhetorical question really. So go sports.
That's what I I play sports and I eat meat.
Have you heard about Metaverse Quest?
No, I'm too busy having fun.
You're like I beat up the last guy who said those words to me.
So go Google Google this company.
You're going to be kind of interested in this.
So okay, go to this website and I just want you to guess their revenue.
Just say we're playing a game called guess the revenue.
Uh well, it's just like a little Squarespace rinky-dink site looking I don't know, 5 million. Uh close, close.
3 and 1/2 billion a year. Oh, great. Great, great, great.
500 million of profit and they did this in 10 years.
So, what they do is they're basically They're one of the only legal online casinos in the United States.
They own one of the largest poker sites in America called Global Poker.
And basically it's casino games done via sweepstakes and trade promotions.
So, that's kind of like the legal arbitrage here to make this work is that they do it as it's not gambling, it's basically sweepstakes.
Um and they have a patent on it.
And so, they have like very He has very little competition at the moment, apparently.
Um and I got to give a shout-out to the guys.
So, there's a guy who sent me this message and a bunch of notes on this.
I'm going to shout him out real quick.
Um it's kind of uh He was like, "Dude, you got to feature this guy.
He's basically a billionaire.
He pays it like, you know, basically he he just dividend it out, you know, in the latest like whatever year quarter and just bought a private jet off the off the dividend."
It's like, uh so, shout-out to this guy Ansel who um who told me about them.
So, crazy crazy crazy business.
He's he's Ansel on Twitter. Um All right.
So, here's what here's what's interesting.
So, the guy who started it, he's an ex-financial planner.
He basically was not a builder or a seller, right?
Like the typical startup archetype is like, you're a great engineer or you're the great growth marketer. And he was neither. He was a solo founder.
He was a financial planner.
Didn't know how to do marketing.
Didn't know how to do coding.
He was basically just a badass.
And he recruited a bunch is Lawrence? Yeah, Lawrence. Exactly.
Uh he paid a development agency to handle the build-out.
So, didn't have a technical co-founder CTO, just hired a dev shop.
Um you know, it wasn't perfect.
Like they basically the code was so buggy, like the slot machines would accidentally just pay you out a bunch.
And this happened several times.
They had to like survive that.
Um and this is built out in Perth, Australia.
So, this is like built in the middle of nowhere.
So, kind of violates all the rules.
Single founder, didn't have the skill set, wasn't in a big city where, you know, oh, you got to move to Silicon Valley or New York or whatever to do this.
He came to Silicon Valley once, couldn't raise any VC cuz they can't invest in gambling opportunities.
But the good news is this that means this guy didn't take on any investment take on much investment, didn't didn't get diluted.
So he still owns 66% of this company that's doing 500 million a year in profit.
And and just you know, 3 and 1/2 billion in revenue.
And so you know, it's a you know, basically started fully remote.
They they got their first office 8 years in.
You know, 8 years into the business. It's pretty crazy.
Dude, it it says he Wow, this is amazing.
So he said they increased their profit and they made 454 million in profit and it paid dividends of 413 million dollars.
I actually have a question.
So does that mean that the company only needs 40 million dollars or whatever the Yeah, 40 million dollars in cash to operate?
Either that or they have enough cash reserves already there to for whatever Let's say their burn might be 100, they might have already a stock pile of cash reserves.
They just dividend out their excess. That's wild, man. This is wild.
all based around this workaround, which is that the US law lets you do sweepstakes and you so they offer sweeps coins that can be redeemed for cash and they have a trademark or a sorry, a patent around sweepstakes trade promotions.
Basically they worked with the US lawyers to build a system where like customers can basically buy virtual gold coins, use it to play the games.
They have no value outside of the game.
Um but they when you buy the gold coins, you get these sweep coins with it and and yeah, basically like they found a like a it was a regulatory insight, not a product or marketing insight that allowed this to happen.
So and sweepstakes are regulated basically like state by state.
So in order for something to change, every you know, different states each individually would need to change something in order to make this happen.
Um and yeah, there's basically like you know, brands that will use multinational company like there's like sweepstakes companies that you can use to run sweepstakes across states because of the of the complication.
Dude, whenever whenever people tell me, "Hey, I have an idea.
Should I hire a developer or should I hire one of these agencies to make an app?"
99% of the times I say, "No, you're wasting your money.
You're never going to do anything with it and it's just going to go to waste." Right. This is the guy. This is the guy.
TechCrunch needs to jump on this guy as like a story of how these things work.
This is This is a really fascinating story. Yeah, exactly.
And there's a video of him in 2012, he's pitching at the Launch conference to Jason Calacanis.
I don't know if it's this exact idea, but basically, you know, similar similar sort of gambling idea.
And all the judges are basically like, "Oh, you know, the opportunity's outside of the US.
It's too hard in the US."
And uh you know, didn't listen.
Like knew his knew his [ __ ] Understood that there's like a regulatory moat and a a patent moat that he could create that would allow him to do this and basically create kind of like a small a not small, sorry, a large cash cow um that's essentially like nobody's really competing with him on this, which is kind of crazy.
It's It's surprising to me that a patent would be this this powerful at at a at um stopping somebody from competing.
Cuz in tech patents usually do nothing.
Um they usually Dude, I don't care about patents at all.
When someone says they have a patent Yeah.
Whenever they say someone has a By the way, what do you call McGregor? Nice, I like that word.
You should bring that back.
yeah, a little a little Brit in me.
Yeah, you're going to call me mate. I like that. Uh that was pretty good.
Um they Whenever I hear someone say they have a patent at like at a pitch, I'm like, I I think that means nothing.
I I don't think it means anything. flag.
I'm usually like "That means you think it's something and it is nothing, which means you don't know you anything."
Yeah, it's like asking me sign an NDA to hear someone's pitch.
I'm like, "Oh, you Yeah, you're This is a joke."
We I remember at one of our startups it was like or like when we bought Bebo back we we got the patents with it and it was like, "Oh, there's a patent for uh um like the idea of like going on a social network and whiteboard like there's like a whiteboard feature where one user can draw anything on this virtual whiteboard, blah blah."
I was like, "Oh, you invented that?" He's like, "Yeah."
And I was like, "Cool, but like I use that on Facebook."
He's like, "Yeah, because this means nothing.
This piece of paper means nothing and it does nothing and like, you know, impossible to really use this or enforce this or like, you know, just way too hard in the world of like internet innovation to to make this work."
And that was my That was my belief coming in.
So, this is a bit of a frame breaker here for me on uh on like why this guy has no competition doing this.
And it might be some other reason.
There might be another reason which is It might be that this is actually shady AF and like most entrepreneurs don't want to do it or, you know, there's too many lawsuits or whatever.
Definitely that one, by the way.
Definitely I I I think it's definitely that one.
Without like knowing anything about this, and just going strictly off uh like I guess with zero information other than I see this guy owns a bunch of Ferraris. Uh probably that one.
Oh, his Instagram is prolific and you Speaking of uh of of names, this guy's got a name. Lawrence Escalante.
Like tell You can't be Lawrence Escalante and not have a profile picture as he does where he's like this at a poker table and he's just looking over. Yeah. He's them boys.
That's what his That That's what his his Instagram bio need to be just I'm them boy.
This guy's the This guy's the guy.
Uh we'll Congrats to him.
That's a good interesting find.
He uh This is a crazy story. So, Yeah.
Yeah, that's super fascinating. this over.
That's uh He knew he was like, "Dude, I got something that's great for MFM." And sure enough, it was. Yeah, that's juicy.
That's what that's called.
That's called a That's called a big juicy burger. It's a good find. By the way, we forgot. Oh. I totally forgot.
Speaking of legal agreements, patents, important important contracts, There's one more.
Look, if you've made it this far, normally we put this in the beginning.
This one's for the for the real OGs who are into this.
There's a thing called the MFM, My First Million, gentlemen's agreement.
And by the way, Sean, in our last video, you called it a gentlemen's agreement, and then you actually said, "Shoot, we have four women listeners.
We have to call it a woman's agreement."
And did you see the our four women listeners actually comment in the YouTube channel?
And in fact, many said, "I know, you have more. I'm number five."
But what they don't know is that actually there can only really ever be four for whatever reason.
It's just like a law of physics or something like that. One in, one out. It's like a nightclub.
And so, we really appreciate all of you.
All four of you are like near and dear to our hearts.
Um we look forward to getting to know you personally cuz we can cuz there's four.
And so, um and actually they don't even need to sign the gentlemen's agreement. They they're in.
They're they're grandfathered in.
They're grandmothered in.
There's two requirements here.
If you've made it this far in the video, and also if you've ever listened to more than one video, Sean and I dedicate like dozens of hours a week to make these videos.
So now, you are in debt to us, and all you have to do to repay your debt is click like.
If It don't matter if you're listening on Spotify or iTunes or I always call it iTunes, but you know what I mean.
It don't matter where you're listening to.
You go to our our YouTube page, type in My First Million, and then click subscribe, and now we're even, and we work for you.
It's called a gentlemen's agreement because we're not there.
I can't see your computer.
So you just have to do it. Just don't lie.
So please go and do that, and that's it.
Yeah, it's like you know, Biden was was thinking about canceling student debt.
Well, we're going to cancel your debt.
You're going to cancel all your podcast debt if you just do this one thing.
Like I mean, I couldn't couldn't think of a better deal for you, honestly.
So, um honor the gentlemen's agreement, go to YouTube, My First Million, click subscribe, and uh turn the notifications on, too. Why not?
Dude, by the way, this part of the pod has become a fan favorite.
This is really And I and I have to say I stole this from someone, Jesse on Fire. I stole this from him.
He's another YouTuber, but this has become a hit in my own why you're admitting that.
I would just steal everything and say that he stole it from you and let the Well, he's a he he's a UFC podcaster, so maybe he can kick my ass.
And maybe I'll see him there. it.
Uh he goes, "Look, the other day I went and I saw the dish at 7-Eleven.
It was for Alzheimer's or like muscle something distrophy and I left a quarter there and I didn't steal the other quarters.
I just left that one quarter there because that's called a gentleman's agreement and I stand by it.
And that's the same thing with this.
I edit the video, I come up with the content, I do all this work. I do it for you.
What you're going to do for me is you're going to click subscribe.
That's that's our agreement.
This is how society works and right now everyone's doing it.
And if you haven't done it, you're you're being left out. So please do that." And uh that's his pitch. It's pretty good.
It's good and it's tough to come up with it each time and I feel like in doing so we also earn our our part of the gentleman's agreement just by having by making it interesting, right?
Uh we got to we got to earn it. Uh All right.
We should uh we should wrap it up.