0:06
Okay, I just sent you something hilarious.
Search this video
0:07
I've been following this Twitter called mug shotties.
0:12
And it's like a play on mug shots. We we talked about this. You've done this too.
0:17
we talk about mug shotties?
0:20
It's so funny and the tagline is the tagline is hope bae gets bail.
0:24
And it's mug shotties and it's all like good-looking girls who have a mug shot. It's hilarious. It's so funny.
0:34
Yeah, we've talked about that cuz there was the guy who his mug shot went viral cuz he's got like he's just like really stunningly good-looking and he became like a model after afterwards or whatever.
0:44
Yeah, I remember that guy.
0:44
People still talk about him.
0:46
Can I tell you a crazy story?
0:49
Uh So, have you ever seen I think this is probably outside of your your like kind of orbit of what you pay attention to, but have you seen these gambling live streams where Drake will go on Twitch and he'll gamble like 20 million dollars live on stream? No, really? Yeah.
1:06
Like a like real 20 million dollars?
1:06
A real 20 million dollars.
1:08
Like he lost like I think 17 million dollars on roulette one night last like 2 weeks ago or something like that.
1:13
Is he really that rich that I mean like if you're 200 million dollar rich, that's 10% of your net worth. In a night.
1:20
No, okay, so That's a substantial amount. Good question.
1:24
I had the same question which led me to some pretty interesting findings.
1:27
Okay, so um So, I saw Drake doing this and I've seen other popular streamers like xQc and these guys they do these gambling streams from time to time.
1:35
People love to see it cuz they're playing kind of like high stakes online uh you know, gambling and they're reacting to the highs and lows or whatever.
1:43
Uh Ben, have you seen this?
1:43
I I think it's probably also outside of your you know, Mormon orbit.
1:47
You know, you don't watch these kinds of sins. Yeah, so exactly.
1:53
So I saw him and Uh, this is all on Twitch?
1:55
It's happening on Twitch it was happening on Twitch.
1:58
Maybe some people do it on YouTube as well, but it got me curious.
2:01
I was like, there's no way this guy's gambling $25 million, $20 million of his own money on these things.
2:06
And I was like, they these streams get so popular.
2:08
Like, this is actually great marketing for the website that it's on.
2:11
So, he's he's gambling on something called stake. com. s t a k e.
2:16
And, um, so I was like, I bet this is house money that they're giving him in order to just promote the site.
2:22
And sure enough, that's what it is. So, get this.
2:24
But, is he is he losing it again When you play Blackjack, you lose against the dealer, right? yeah. So, they're just Okay.
2:32
Like, if I gave you $20 to come play my rigged game, I gave you $20, you lose it right back to me.
2:38
I get not I I don't know I you know, I'm back whole.
2:39
Um, they don't even lose the vig cuz they're the house.
2:43
So, they would take that, you know, 4% edge or whatever that they would have, they keep that as well.
2:46
Um, and if you win, maybe they have some deal where like, hey, if you win, you keep the winnings.
2:51
Uh, I would assume they have some deal like that with him.
2:54
But, it it it it's electronic, right?
2:56
Like, it's like the cards are digital.
2:58
It's not like a camera on So, then they could just be like, oh, shoot, Drake has 20, we have to make ourselves have 21.
3:04
Yeah, well, that's Yeah, that's a little bit That's illegal for sure, but they wouldn't need to do that.
3:08
Like, I guess that's kind of my point is that they're they'll already have a house edge.
3:12
And, over time, like, they will win.
3:15
And so, and even if they don't, like, this is as a marketing campaign, like, this is like kind of genius.
3:20
And so, what they're doing is stake.
3:23
com is this website, and it is the largest cryptocurrency-based online gambling site in the world.
3:30
And nobody knew who was behind it until recently, some guy in Australia bought like a $36 million home.
3:39
And they were like, who who is this You're in your 20s.
3:41
How did you buy a $36 million home all cash?
3:43
Like, what's What's the He was He was in his 20s?
3:47
So, these guys, they're in their mid-20s.
3:48
I think one guy's 25 or 26, the other guy's 28.
3:51
And um and so there's this guy Ed, you can just like search Ed Craven.
3:57
Uh Ed Craven stake and you'll see uh the secret origins the secret Australian origins of the world's biggest crypto casino. And so get this.
4:05
So basically they have a There's these guys in um in Australia and they've got this office and it's just like and they the office is under this name called Easy Go Gaming.
4:13
It's like we build online um games.
4:18
And the office is super nice and people would see it on social media.
4:20
They would see like, "Wow, these guys got like a chef and they got all these perks and they got like they're always going on these trips and like what's going on with you man?
4:29
Easy Go Gaming, you guys must be an awesome gaming company."
4:31
So uh It must just be like a couple people and they're just hanging out at someone's house.
4:37
And so well no no so so this is a legit company, but basically Easy Go Gaming is the licensed gaming provider, like they provide the games to the casino company Stake, which is based in some place called Curacao or something like that, which is like some Dutch Caribbean island uh where the actual casino is based. And these guys own both.
4:56
So they were kind of known as only the owners of Easy Go, but they actually own Stake.
4:59
And so it all got kind of like revealed when the guy bought this home for whatever you can see even there's like a Daily Mail article he buys I'm I'm I'm reading it right now. Casino. org, yeah.
5:10
38 and a half million dollar mansion he buys and um they're like, "Who is this kid?
5:16
He's 26 years old or whatever."
5:20
And that's kind of how people figured out like, "Oh, he owns stake. com."
5:21
Now I I believe these are kind of like my predictions and my guesses. So stake.
5:28
com I think is pretty clearly clearing like billions of dollars in revenue.
5:32
I think both of these guys are now self-made billionaires, possibly even 10 billion plus is what they've made off of stake.
5:41
com because this thing is a absolute cash cow.
5:43
And you can kind of back into this by looking at like um they do these like Sunday raffle whatever lottery type thing and it's like you pay it's like oh wow, you know, 250,000 people bought this like $10 ticket.
5:58
It's like oh wow, that they just you know, that was just like a two two and a half million dollars Sunday for them and then they pay out this much and they keep 26 million or 50 million.
6:05
Like that's just a week for them.
6:07
And so um and so you can kind of see you could kind of back into I did some some calculations on it.
6:13
But but I'm pretty sure that these guys are both self-made billionaires if not 10 billion at this point in equity value of of stake. com.
6:23
And it's just kind of crazy to me like that this exists that these guys are so young able to do this and um and people who are just willing to like live on the edge.
6:32
It's like yeah, I'm going to go set up a company in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao which gives out like online gambling licenses like you know, my neighborhood gives out candy on Halloween.
6:42
And these guys have amassed this absolute fortune kind of anonymously building this.
6:48
Isn't this just like isn't this kind of crazy to you?
6:53
Yeah, this is I'm researching and I know how I recognize this.
6:54
They're a sponsor of the UFC. Yes.
6:58
And so they're big UFC sponsors and I think sponsor Watford the like uh the English soccer team.
7:04
So they like pay 10 million a year as they're like lead uh lead sponsor for that too.
7:10
So I'm doing research just as as you're talking.
7:13
Um have on LinkedIn there's I I don't Well, here one guy says he's the CEO, but that seems I don't know if that's legit.
7:21
Uh this is this is crazy.
7:21
This is one of those amazing companies this just like VPN and a few other things that's completely under the radar and is totally crushing.
7:31
And I've said this to you before.
7:33
I actually think that people's personal homes the price of it it you know, like a rich person can live in a low priced home, but if you purchase a high priced home, the likelihood that you're rich is like it's in indicative of what you have because it's hard to it's not impossible, but it's hard to give a bank to give you a loan if you don't have a significant amount of income, not just assets, but income.
7:54
So, if he bought a 30 and if he bought a $37 million home in cash, is that really what it said?
8:01
Then Yeah, I don't know if it was all cash, but it was like three times more the the house sold in 2018 for three times less and then the guy renovated it and he this guy bought it for for whatever almost 40 million.
8:12
to buy a $40 million home, I would think you'd want to be worth like at least $250 million and at least some type of liquid situation as well, not just privately held company.
8:20
So, here's my notes on this thing.
8:22
So, I'm just going to read you my raw notes from last night.
8:25
It says small company in Australia in Melbourne called Easygo.
8:31
Looks like your typical successful startup.
8:32
You got ping pong tables, you got a chef, you got perks, you're going on on boat trips with the with the team, but they're hiding a massive secret.
8:40
They're also the founders of Stake, which I believe might be the world's largest casino ever.
8:43
It's crypto only, which is a massive growth lever.
8:45
Does that mean that it that it's legal? Um you mean illegal?
8:50
I I don't know the legality of it.
8:52
That's like probably a pretty complicated thing.
8:54
Like Like Full Tilt went away in America.
8:55
I used to play Tilt or Full you can't go if you're on stake.
8:58
com in the US, you can't go to it.
9:00
It's like no, this is not available to US citizens.
9:04
Um but it but internationally it is and they they based out of Curacao, which gives out the online game.
9:08
So, I think they are fully licensed, but they use crypto, which I think lets them do things like no as I say KYC AML like know your customer.
9:17
So, basically I think you could just transfer in Bitcoin or whatever and you could just gamble it on the site.
9:21
You just put an email in and you start gambling.
9:23
And so, they got like all these games or whatever.
9:27
Um I think that they're paying Drake like $20 million a month to be the like sponsor of this thing. No way. You believe that much?
9:33
Cuz he's gambling at those stakes and I'm pretty sure that's all house money.
9:37
I don't think Drake is promoting this company for by by putting in $20 million of his own money and losing it every month.
9:44
Well, they're not they're not giving him $20 million.
9:46
They're saying you can win up to 20 mil or you can No, they're giving him house money.
9:50
They're giving him a chip or a credit line that basically says here's $20 million to play on the site.
9:54
You probably can't just cash that out.
9:55
You have to gamble it here.
9:58
Um but but I'm pretty sure that's how it's working. That would be crazy.
10:01
I mean I I like okay, so the private some of some of the private equity guys like um Steve Schwarzman and uh a few other folks who founded Carlyle and BlackRock and Blackstone and all that.
10:10
There there was there's some years where they'll get paid like $800 million or $500 million because of performance.
10:16
But um two 20 million a month is $240 million a year.
10:22
That would there probably I can't imagine there's more than 100 people in the whole world that earn that much income.
10:29
Where I mean of course there's a lot of people who earn like paper gains, but who earn that much income in a given year.
10:35
That would be absolutely astounding. So get this.
10:36
So they So the guy buys this house for $40 million.
10:40
They also own multiple penthouses like the top floor of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, which was the largest skyscraper.
10:45
But here's what's even more interesting.
10:47
When they were 18 um and when one of them was 18 the other guy's 20, they started something called primedice. com.
10:52
It's still up if you go to primedice. com.
10:54
It's basically a crypto gambling site where you just bet is it going to be uh like what what's going to happen?
11:01
Yeah, it's like a heads or tails.
11:02
It's like a roll of the dice.
11:03
And uh you can just wager on it.
11:06
And like you know, here you go.
11:06
And you can just see people just betting constantly on what the dice is going to roll out to, right?
11:13
Uh and like what they're going to what they're going to win for it.
11:15
So they created this when they were at back in I don't know uh 2013 it says I think on the site says largest crypto gambling site since 2013.
11:24
Uh so they're pretty early on that. Um this site is wild.
11:31
Do you see all the live users betting money? Yeah, it's crazy.
11:35
And uh it's I mean just look at this one guy, Shane Recover, is just betting over and over again.
11:40
This company This is This is such an amazing five find.
11:41
This company alone, this Prime Dice thing, is awesome.
11:44
So then let me tell you some of the the other things that that come into it.
11:48
So So basically, um I think one of the YouTubers that they pay are are maybe a Twitch streamer, this guy Aiden Ross, I think is getting paid a few million bucks per month to to do it.
11:59
And that that I think there's pretty good authority on. Um $3 million a month? Yeah.
12:02
Uh I don't know, I think two.
12:06
Two million a month a month.
12:07
Um okay, now let me get go into more Okay, so all of that was like, you know, this is all like not confirmed.
12:13
But like these are now like some rumors.
12:14
So uh or I guess this part's not a rumor.
12:17
Like if you go to their website, you could see that there's a a company called Medium Rare NV, which is incorporated in Curacao.
12:24
That's the company that holds the the gaming license.
12:25
If you Google Map the address, it's just like a shitty warehouse building that you'll find of like where this company is based.
12:34
So I don't know what's going on there.
12:36
It's like, you know, when you incorporate in Delaware and they give you like a PO box as your address.
12:37
Um So okay, and then a couple of other, you know, random rumors are like uh they had they they added um Dogecoin to their site as like a way to deposit back in the day.
12:51
And like when Elon when all the Elon stuff was happening, I think they dumped like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Doge.
12:56
They like sold it all when the Elon pump was happening to to Dogecoin.
13:01
Um And uh yeah, it's crazy.
13:02
So So anyways, this isn't just like a crazy thing.
13:05
But what like Okay, let's say you even had the idea for this.
13:09
Googled I Googled I'm Googling these guys as you're talking.
13:11
There's very, very, very little information on these folks.
13:15
There's There's There's almost nothing.
13:17
I Do you think Could I change my browser to Australia and maybe get better results because I'm Googling their names now and there is like there's one picture on them on the whole on everything.
13:27
Yeah, I like found their Instagrams.
13:29
Both their Instagrams are private, but like yeah, like I know somebody who who follows them or whatever.
13:34
So I like stalked their Instagram, too, just to see like what's going on and it's like Are they jacked?
13:38
Are they jacked bros now, or are they still nerds?
13:40
They're they're I wouldn't say they're jacked, but they're fit and they're bros for sure.
13:47
Like Damn, they're breaking the stereotype.
13:48
You know, like here's the like I'm just going to describe to you I'll send this photo.
13:52
We can put this in the YouTube chat. Ferrari pictures?
13:53
Okay, so one Okay, picture number one.
13:57
You would have guessed Ferrari, but here's a close second.
13:58
Picture of a Range Rover with a giant bow and somebody hugging them cuz they just gave them a Range Rover. Okay, that's a classic.
14:05
You got to love that one. Another classic.
14:07
You know the like influencer balloons you get when you cross like a million followers or whatever, the yellow giant inflatable balloon of a number.
14:16
They have that and it's like some guy, you know, hugging him doing that.
14:20
Another one like courtside at the Lakers game.
14:22
Courtside at the the French Open.
14:24
Like I could see Nadal's calf like, you know, right behind this guy's head in this picture.
14:30
So they're definitely living it up and as they should.
14:32
This is what I This is exactly what I want my online casino dealer guys life to be.
14:37
This is who I wanted to be and this is how I want them to live and I'm glad that they are doing exactly what they're doing.
14:43
And you one of them's only 26 is what you're saying?
14:48
Yeah, and this article might be a little out of date, but yeah. That is wild.
14:51
definitely hit this scale when they were in their 20s.
14:53
Like the youngest the richest young person in the world.
14:55
Like richer than what's his name?
14:59
The Sam Bankman-Fried guy. Yeah, and younger.
15:00
Or on par with it and and younger. That is outstanding. That is crazy. What a good find.
15:08
Speaking of young billionaires, I think the world's youngest self-billionaire now is this guy Alexander Wang. Do you know this guy?
15:15
I I I don't really know him.
15:17
I think I was in a group chat with him.
15:18
Uh Is that from that company a startup? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:24
So, what they do is pretty cool.
15:26
They basically saw the kind of like machine learning um trend, you know, like this is going to keep growing and they were like, well, you know what, one thing that's really hard is like when you're doing machine learning you need like the data to be labeled, right?
15:39
So, if you're trying to teach a computer how to recognize a you know, a kitten or something like that.
15:44
It's like you first have to train it in some ways or be able to like um teach it when it's wrong and correct it.
15:52
And um so, that labeling process is is quite like time-consuming and so, what they did was they created like a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you.
16:01
And so, like if you're self-driving car company, if you're a Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage and then now those need to be labeled as like, yep, that was a dog crossing the street.
16:14
Yep, that's a stop sign even though it's partially obstructed.
16:17
And so, how does that happen?
16:20
That's like a human intervention. Humans go and do that.
16:21
And so, Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service.
16:24
I'm sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it's pretty crazy.
16:28
That's like a $10 billion company now and this guy I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um so, cool? Yeah, he was cool.
16:38
I didn't know him for long cuz as soon as they're It's pretty funny.
16:39
It's like I'm in this group chat that's like four founders.
16:45
Yeah, four four a bunch of founders.
16:47
It's like it's kind of like the underground founders hangout like we we chill here.
16:51
Everybody's trying to do big things, but then when one guy actually started doing big things, he's like, I'm busy.
16:54
I need to leave this now.
16:57
It's always like the the ultimate signal.
16:58
It's like, oh, when it really takes off That's bad ass. you stay in these chats.
17:02
You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.
17:05
I mean, you know, you you go do your like, I'm actually on a rocket ship.
17:08
I don't have time to socialize anymore.
17:12
Which you know, respect to him.
17:12
Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at two 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion.
17:27
This one's a little This one's much smaller, but still oddly interesting.
17:30
Uh go to the the MFM or the million-dollar brainstorm document Okay. that we have.
17:37
And scroll down and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful.
17:39
The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that? Yeah, I'm looking at it.
17:48
All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson.
17:49
So, you remember when my Twitter got hacked? Yes.
17:52
So, uh there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like I'm giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is and just like send me $400 and I'm donating the money to St. Jude's.
18:03
And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount.
18:07
He was like He's like, "I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000 just you know, so St.
18:15
Jude's has a little extra money."
18:16
And I I was like, "Oh my god, dude, that that that sucks.
18:19
I'm so sorry about this."
18:21
And he was like, "Oh, no big deal."
18:23
And I was like, "All right, well, who who are you that you're this nice?"
18:25
And I clicked out and he runs this website called MarketBeat.
18:27
Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
18:29
Only when you you you shared this in the trends group.
18:33
So, I did a little bit of stalking at that time cuz I was like, "What is that?"
18:36
You know, your tweet was intriguing you cuz you had said something like I met a guy who runs a company that does 25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees and it was like 17 million of the 25 was profit. And I was like, Yes.
18:50
"All right, I'm fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company?" You know. Got him. Uh yeah.
18:57
Uh and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks and he was like, "Here's the profit."
19:01
And keep in mind, this doesn't include my huge sal- my huge salary is a part of the expenses, but we actually do 17 million in profit.
19:09
The P&L that he sent me, it's like I think 13 million in profit.
19:11
So, it's called MarketBeat, marketbeat. com.
19:15
And um for the first 2 years it was just him.
19:17
And you go Well, explain what it is.
19:18
Yeah, like what what is this thing?
19:20
Yeah, you you you go to marketbeat. com.
19:22
Like I always Google like HubSpot price targets, because I'm curious what HubSpot's what analysts think the the the stock might be in 1 year.
19:28
And he shows up early in Google, 1 2 3.
19:30
If you Google Amazon price targets, Target price targets, whatever, like any company.
19:38
And it's He calls it a web portal, but if you didn't know better you would look at it and just call it a media company.
19:43
So, you you see different headlines and different news.
19:45
It's kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks.
19:51
And it's just a way to really quickly see headlines of what's coming up.
19:54
So, it's kind of like a um a a portal or a data data aggregator where you could just like see like, all right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.
20:03
So, it's basically just a place to get information, but it's also part um media company because they have they publish 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month.
20:12
And they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these.
20:16
But he told me, he goes, regardless if the articles don't actually add to our any of our revenue.
20:22
People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.
20:26
And so, right now the guy uh has 11 employees.
20:28
And I actually have a list of sorry, 13 employees.
20:32
I have a list of what they all do.
20:33
He's got He's got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him.
20:41
And uh they make money through subscription and through advertising.
20:46
Most of which comes through advertising.
20:47
They've got 15,000 subscribers who pay between 20 and 40,000 20 and $40 a month.
20:55
And uh one ad guy selling all these ads.
20:58
And it's mostly direct marketing and he's got a a bunch of different brands.
21:01
Like he's got um Sorry, so you're going faster.
21:04
So, the the just to break down that revenue.
21:07
It sounded like subscriptions is something like four or five million dollars a year out of the 25. Is that right?
21:13
Uh well, he told me 15,000 premium subscribers and they pay either 20 or $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. call it 30.
21:20
So, that's five and a five and a half million uh from the subscription from the premium subscription.
21:25
the rest being ad revenue. Yeah. 20 billion of ads. Okay, well. Crazy, right?
21:29
And there's only one ad sales person.
21:31
He doesn't have a team of ad sales guys.
21:33
And he'll they'll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that.
21:50
But, if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, "Hey agency, you know, we've got some leftover inventory.
21:55
You want to put your ads in here?"
21:57
And it's just one guy doing the whole thing.
22:01
Doing all the uh Unbelievable.
22:01
So, it seems like the the trick for them and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, Yeah, oh, by the way, they've been around I think they've been around for 15 years. Right.
22:10
And it was SEO it's SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea? I think early on.
22:16
Now, it has a little bit of a brand.
22:18
Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look cuz it their their interface is nicely organized.
22:22
Like, I'm on like the Amazon one right now and it's basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together.
22:28
It's like, "Oh, here's the execs. Here's the CEO. Here's their age. Here's their pay."
22:31
And it's like, "Here's the uh you know, here's the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups.
22:36
Here's the analyst targets, etc.
22:38
It's kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2. 0 standards.
22:42
Like, it doesn't meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of.
22:46
But, it in my mind, it's perfect.
22:48
It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully.
22:51
And so, it's like a cluttered website.
22:53
It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay.
22:54
Like, it's this messy website, but I think it's quite good.
22:57
We need to put together a compilation of what I'm calling Sam's ugly ducklings.
23:03
And this is an example of Sam's ugly ducklings, which is a a website that like who the [ __ ] even heard of this?
23:10
It doesn't look super fancy.
23:11
It's kind of been around for a while.
23:14
It's got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one. This is another.
23:17
You've showed me like 10 of these in the last year.
23:21
And I think people are I think people really dig these.
23:23
And so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these.
23:27
And it doesn't have to be like a podcast.
23:28
It's almost like a screen share.
23:29
Maybe it's just for YouTube.
23:31
Or like there's this guy reaching out.
23:33
He's trying to turn our podcast into like a ebook or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF.
23:37
Um we should have him do it on your ugly ducklings, cuz he's got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really? Who? Uh this guy in India.
23:45
Yeah, I I forgot his name, but I'm talking to him right now uh to get one of these made for us, because I think it'd be dope, right? Like That'd be sick. Dude, it's embarrassing.
23:52
Like I I get some people who are like Now there's people who are like I would say kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast.
24:01
Whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason. Like Like kids. Almost like kids. not not kids.
24:09
It was more like just like more entrepreneurial, I would say is definitely a big component of it.
24:15
Uh which might be kids, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever.
24:17
Or it's just like, "Yeah, I own this awesome business.
24:20
I'm based out of you know, Peoria, Illinois."
24:22
And it's like, "What the [ __ ] Who are you?
24:24
And how did you find us?"
24:26
And but like that was more of our main target.
24:28
And now I'm getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, "Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast."
24:33
And I'm like, "Dude, I've been telling you about this for like 2 years."
24:34
And they're like, "Yeah, it's actually good."
24:37
And they're like, "What are like the best episodes? You got like 200."
24:40
And I was like, "Uh I don't I don't really know."
24:42
He's like, "Well, what's like a good place to find the most popular ones?"
24:44
I was like, "Uh don't have it."
24:45
He's like, "Is there a place with summaries?"
24:47
I was like, "Nah, not really."
24:49
He's like, "Well, you have all these ideas.
24:50
Is there a compilation of all the ideas?"
24:51
I was like, "Uh there should be.
24:52
Someone I think made one once."
24:54
He's like, "All the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like, onboarding things you would do, we've done none of.
25:00
And so, I'm like, kind of embarrassed about that, but I'm not embarrassed. Who cares? It's working. Yeah, I know.
25:04
I mean, I just think it would help us.
25:08
Like, I think it I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast.
25:11
And let me This is funny.
25:11
Let me tell you how I found out about Market Beat.
25:12
I was reading Starter Story.
25:14
I like that website, Starter Story.
25:16
And one of the questions is, "What books and podcasts do you read?"
25:19
And he said, "On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using unique ways business owners are generating massive profits."
25:29
That's how I found out about about this guy is because he said he listens to us as his only podcast. Oh, nice. Uh, that's great.
25:36
Who told you that they're listening?
25:39
Uh, I don't want to say their name, but, uh, you know, someone cool. That's cool.
25:44
That's always funny when people listen.
25:45
Dude, I was with my dad when I took I took my parents to Europe and I brought my parents to this conference and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri and they're walking around this conference and they were like, "Oh, we love swag." They call it swag.
25:58
I think it's like I think it it's supposed to be swag.
26:02
They go, "We love swag," which means free stuff.
26:03
And they're like, "Oh, let's go to this company and get this."
26:05
And it's like, some like, European sales marketing company.
26:09
I'm like, you know, Dad, like, no one gives a [ __ ] about like, you know, sales. io.
26:13
Like, I don't know what they do. Yeah.
26:16
Yeah, and he was like, he's like, "Oh, let's go talk to him."
26:18
I'm like, "Dude, I don't Like, you don't even know what that means.
26:21
I could tell you what it They go, "What do they do?"
26:22
I'm like, I can use words to explain it, but you won't understand."
26:25
And so, he's, "Well, let's go get some swag.
26:26
They're giving away like, free bouncy ball bouncy balls for like, like, shawarma, but it's just And he's like, he's like, "Let's go get a ball.
26:36
We're going to bring it back for for the kids." Their grandkids.
26:37
They go, "Let's go like, oh, they have envelope openers.
26:41
Like, let's go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy."
26:42
I'm like, "Mom, this is a Snickers.
26:44
Like, you could That's awesome.
26:45
He's just going to give it to you in the hotel.
26:47
He's like, "Hey, kid, I got you this bouncy ball."
26:50
And you're going to be like, "Sweet."
26:52
Well, and they bring it like they bring it like Kinder chocolate you know like Kinder like that I'm like you guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn't special.
26:59
And they're just grabbing all this stuff and they brought an empty suitcase cuz they knew they were going to find swag and just a pile and so like I come home I come home and my 4-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like "Hi, we're here to help with customer solutions."
27:15
Like it just and it's like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I'm like, oh my god. Anyway. Yeah, it's European. It's European fashion. Yeah.
27:27
They're like, what's this brand Gideon?
27:31
It's just it's just yeah, they're just like crazy and then they're at this conference and they're like they're talking to people and they go to people I hear like I would I was happening to stand next to him and I hear him talking to people they go, "Hey, do you like podcasts?"
27:42
And they just say, "Do you like podcast?" Do you love podcasts?
27:47
And the guy is like yeah, you know I listen he goes my dad calls me he goes, "Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts.
27:54
I'll tell him to listen to yours.
27:56
What's the name of it again?"
28:00
And I'm like, "Dad, like how do you you don't know the you don't know the name?
28:02
It's called it's called My First Million."
28:03
He goes, "Oh, okay I'll tell him.
28:05
Hey, so it's called My First Million."
28:06
And then he'll come back he goes, "Hey, I got you another listener.
28:09
I made him click subscribe."
28:12
And and he's just going up to people saying like you like podcasts? Yeah. Oh, great.
28:17
I got you a new I'll get you I'm going to get have you subscribe and and he doesn't know the name of the podcast.
28:21
Every single time he goes, "What's it called? Million Dollar Podcast?"
28:25
Uh he's like, "I listen to it all the time. It's my favorite.
28:27
But what's it called again?"
28:29
My mom does the same thing, dude.
28:29
She clicks every ad in my newsletter.
28:31
She's like, "I clicked your ads today to help you."
28:34
I'm like, "Mom, I don't know I don't think that's that's not going to count.
28:38
It's not going to do anything." She's like, "No, no, no.
28:39
You said you get paid if they click, right?"
28:43
I'm like, "Well, kind of you know, you got to don't go buy the thing."
28:44
And then she's like, "Oh, I'm not going to buy it."
28:48
I'm like, "Yeah, you also don't need to click it.
28:49
In fact, you don't even need to read it.
28:50
I don't think you're even interested in this subject, Mom." That's hilarious. That is so funny. God, it's so funny.
28:58
You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, "Oh, Sammy, come look at Let's look at this booth."
29:04
And it's just I don't even know what it is.
29:06
Like I don't even know what it is. You know what I mean?
29:07
And it's like procurement.
29:09
I'm like, "I don't I don't even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you.
29:11
You definitely don't know what that means."
29:14
So Dude, that's so funny you said procurement.
29:16
So So Romaine, who runs like I I He's my basically my partner in my fund.
29:20
And Romaine's got this company that's like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like Georgia, right?
29:27
Yeah, so he lives in Georgia.
29:29
Um so he's like in the tech scene but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of a old school more more service-based company that like I think his wife's dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it.
29:41
So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something.
29:43
Like it's like a What is sizable business.
29:45
And so I've I've asked him I think no less than 15 times, like so you know you know so what does your business do again?
29:50
And he'll be like, "Yeah, we do procurement for for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies."
29:56
And I'm like, like you get office supplies?
29:58
Like I don't I don't I LIKE CAN'T WRAP MY HEAD around what procurement is.
30:03
And he's like, he's like, "You know what the word procurement means, right?" And I'm like, "Yeah."
30:07
He's like, "So it's that."
30:07
And I'm like, "But then see, I guess I don't know what the word means then cuz Does Does anyone use staples anymore?
30:15
Like I don't I don't Yeah, like And it's like Okay, he's like he's like, "It's not office supplies.
30:17
It's like, you know, you need a vendor for something."
30:20
But I was like, "So then why wouldn't you just Google and get the vendor?"
30:23
He's like, "Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently.
30:25
They need like this middle man who's going to basically like help them get the things that they need."
30:30
And I'm like, "You get paid for that?" HE'S LIKE, "YEAH."
30:34
IS IT LIKE SOMEONE WHO JUST like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to all the companies I think I still [ __ ] don't know, dude.
30:41
Like I'm on explanation number 17.
30:43
In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does cuz I'm like I I clearly don't know.
30:52
It's almost like I you know, like there's like a spot in my brain where there's just like if you did a scan, it would just be like oh, there's some dark cloud here.
30:59
Like yeah, that's the part of my brain that's trying to understand procurement and it's just never happening.
31:04
It's just like a a fuzzy region.
31:05
So, I got a story related to this.
31:07
So, two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the fan a fancy place in St. Louis.
31:13
And we get to dinner and my dad goes All right. All right.
31:16
Yeah, my dad goes, "Hey, the the president of NASCAR."
31:17
I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.
31:23
And he goes my dad likes NASCAR.
31:25
He goes, "That's the president of NASCAR, like Jim Nantz or I don't forget his name."
31:29
And uh The football commentator?
31:31
Yeah, the football I think it was it was Nantz. Something not Jim Nantz. Yeah, not Jim Nantz.
31:35
And uh he and I was like, "Oh, yeah, you know, he's sitting with this guy named David Stewart.
31:40
He's like the second richest black man in the world."
31:42
And that like and it's like it's pretty funny.
31:43
I like I knew exactly who that rich guy was cuz he's he's worth like four or five billion dollars.
31:48
And I and I start researching him.
31:49
I was like, "Yeah, I've seen that guy before.
31:50
I've seen him in articles cuz he's like the second or third richest black man and he's from St. Louis.
31:54
He's like the richest guy in St. Louis."
31:55
And he's got this company called Worldwide Systems.
31:57
You've never heard of that, have you? No.
32:01
So, it does 14 billion dollars a year and it's like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world.
32:09
And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright.
32:12
And what they do is they're a systems integrator.
32:14
And that's one of those words like procurement.
32:16
I heard that and I'm like, "What does that mean?"
32:19
And so, I had went on this deep dive.
32:21
I'm like, "I got to figure out exactly what they do.
32:23
I I I don't understand this."
32:25
And then like it it says they're a Cisco systems integrator.
32:29
And I went to Cisco's website and I'm like, "What is Cisco do?"
32:31
Yeah, I'm like I they're like networking hardware networking or like networking hardware.
32:38
And I like read those words and I'm like like the website would just be like networking redefined.
32:41
And you're like, "I didn't I didn't know the first definition." Now it's redefined. Great.
32:46
Yeah, we I didn't know we had to change that definition.
32:47
And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I'm like, "I don't know what like a switch is."
32:51
I guess it has to do with electronics.
32:52
Like I just I didn't have have any idea what this stuff did.
32:55
Uh and but I Google it and like I know that Cisco's like one of the largest companies in the world, but I'm just I like I don't know what it is.
33:02
And so I had a research it.
33:04
It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is?
33:08
Dude, no, I don't know any I don't know what it is.
33:11
I don't know what SAP does.
33:12
I've been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. They're European though.
33:17
They got a different word for everything.
33:18
We'd never be able to figure that out.
33:20
like sometimes I'm watching TV and it'll just pop up SAP and I think it means like close captioning or Spanish or something like that.
33:25
I'm like, "Oh, wait, this is different.
33:26
Now I'm Now I'm super confused about SAP."
33:27
Yeah, but I don't even know why they named their company after their stock ticker.
33:30
I think it's kind of weird.
33:31
But they So so a systems integrator basically So what my father-in-law does for a living is if you're like Chase and you've got 100 employees working on floor 18 and you're like, "Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building."
33:48
He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that's already set up and everything just works. There's no downtime.
33:57
And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you're a $20 company and you're selling like a $3 division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all the computers are new and like this new setup exists.
34:12
Or if you're like a a hospital and you're like, "We need an app."
34:16
It's like, "Well, it's not as simple as just like check it into your lobby and saying you're there."
34:19
Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it.
34:20
And I think that's what they do.
34:22
But I don't know why they don't just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? Yeah.
34:28
Yeah, I I don't know either.
34:28
But I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there's basically things that are like like you know, NetSuite.
34:34
NetSuite's another one of these where you're like know what What is NetSuite?
34:36
Is that like QuickBooks but different?
34:38
It's basically like um I mean, I'll butcher the thing, but like I mean, people use it for like inventory management, for example.
34:45
So, it's basically like a database that's like usable for like it's usable in a couple different ways.
34:52
It tells you what you got.
34:52
It tells you what's like running out.
34:54
It tells you what you need.
34:56
It'll tell you kind of like it'll help generate a purchase order.
35:00
It'll do things like that.
35:02
By the way, if you go to NetSuite's website, I just went to it, it says complete procure-to-pay purchasing. Oh, no, procurement.
35:07
It has to do with this, too.
35:09
But basically, there's there's entire companies.
35:10
I think this is what you know, like The keyword.
35:12
What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses they're these programs are so unintuitive that there's entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like oh, like right here on their website, Love Sac uses them.
35:30
So, it's like You go to Love Sac, you're like, "Great.
35:31
You guys sell giant bean bags, huh?" They're like, "Yeah."
35:34
And like, "You know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it's growing so much."
35:38
They're like, "Yeah, it is. Sure is."
35:39
"Don't you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place in a system that just all talk to each other and every one of your employees can log in and interface with it."
35:48
They're like, "That sounds pretty good.
35:49
So, I I just go set it up on my own?
35:51
I just go to the website?"
35:53
And they're like, "No, no, no, no." We do that for you.
35:55
It takes 12 months, and we will we will add NetSuite to your thing. We will add Oracle.
36:00
We will add these different services to your We will We will integrate them into your current business, and we'll train your employees on how to actually use it.
36:07
Is that what service revenue in a SaaS line So, if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there's a huge amount of services revenue.
36:16
So, do they charge on a I don't know what the service how they what what they bucket in services.
36:21
I would have thought like does that mean just the software?
36:23
But I I I it's different for different companies, but at the same time uh this is sort of like if you were like, "Hey Shawn, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?"
36:32
I'd be like, "You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way."
36:37
It's like, you know, like I just don't know, right?
36:38
Like even you're asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies.
36:46
Like these are like again, I don't know the first thing about the first thing about this.
36:50
Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these is to understand how someone came up with this idea.
36:56
So, for example, uh there's Okta. Do you know Okta?
36:59
That's what we use for like logging into like websites and [ __ ] like that.
37:01
Or there's um what's that one? Snowflake. Do you know Snowflake?
37:05
Yeah, like a data warehouse.
37:06
So, I like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005-2015 era.
37:11
And I'm like, "How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?" You know what I mean?
37:19
just working in a big company, right?
37:20
Like okay, so for example, um we were talking uh the other day about uh what was it called?
37:26
The um Or like like we have Yeah, Mailchimp for companies. Yeah, exactly.
37:30
Uh what was the name of it again?
37:32
I forget can't remember the name off the top of my head.
37:34
Uh I just committed to invest into it, but um But basically uh we're when we ran a company or like you ran a um you know, like an email-based company.
37:41
And so if I asked you, you know, like what does ConvertKit do?
37:46
You're like if you're very well versed on like what ConvertKit does cuz you're like, "Well, like here's a scenario.
37:51
You get a bunch of people come to your website, but you you know, you want to grab their email cuz you're going to be able to market to them later."
37:56
So, you So, ConvertKit lets you put up a little webpage that grabs their email.
37:59
And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they paid for your thing or if they're free.
38:03
And then like wouldn't it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails.
38:11
One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10.
38:14
And it's like you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them.
38:20
Well, there's another one that's like uh like you know, that this is basically what happens when you're when you work inside of a large company, you're like, "Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X."
38:31
You just see a problem, and you're like, "There needs to be a solution for X."
38:33
But you understand that context cuz it's like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch.
38:39
You started media companies.
38:41
I started more like software social networking type of companies.
38:43
Um and we've done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content.
38:47
Like we just don't have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who's been like you know, somebody who's used a Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app.
39:02
all the time I'm like, "Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people have charged a million dollars a year in subscription revenue."
39:07
I'm like, "Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter or give the same spiel constantly."
39:12
I don't want to talk about how to get your first thousand subscribers at Substack.
39:18
You know, I'd rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y, and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.
39:24
Yeah, I mean yeah, exactly.
39:24
This is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, "I'm going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas."
39:32
And I I used that import-export framework, which is like "What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?"
39:39
Like we need something like when a country needs something, they import it.
39:42
You know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um Saudi Arabia.
39:49
And then so uh in the same way companies have these pain points, and you're like when you're sitting there and you're like, "Oh damn, if somebody had a if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this.
39:59
You know, we would pay X dollars for this."
40:01
Like for example, when I was there uh I I I talked about this idea way back in the day, but like All Hands.
40:07
It's like at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally [ __ ] stand up at my desk and be like, "Hey, hey, yo, headphones." Um we're doing this now.
40:17
The company we've pivoted to this, okay? Good.
40:20
Uh or like, you know, we'd be at lunch and I'd just like stand up and say something.
40:25
Um but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organized every Thursday there's an all-hands. It happens at lunch.
40:32
They do it at lunch because that's where they've like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention cuz they're eating.
40:38
And like and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there's like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there's like a Q&A and they needed like this question-answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees.
40:49
It was like all these things they had to think about and we were just stitching together like these four different tools.
40:55
Like we use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.
41:02
And I was like, "Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all-hands software, I'm pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25,000 a year uh for your software.
41:12
And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc. etc."
41:20
And um I believe that to be true and like I could have go validate them.
41:24
I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the all-hands thing and be like, "Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?"
41:32
And like I saw that problem because I was there.
41:35
Before that, I didn't even see that problem.
41:37
Yeah, and we had talked about it.
41:37
It was like a high school newspaper but for your company.
41:42
Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name that it came to me now. So, What's the URL? useworkshop. com. So, it's pretty sick.
41:48
We had talked about this this before, which is in inside like we all have like Mailchimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers.
42:01
But like there's actually internal marketing too that happens all the time.
42:04
Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees.
42:12
And whether it's like, "Hey, remember this Friday we're doing casual Friday."
42:15
Like, you know, whatever.
42:17
"Don't wear underwear this Friday."
42:17
But you have to like get some message across about like what's going on.
42:20
Or it's like, "Hey, uh we had these wins in the company."
42:25
Like, "Congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever."
42:29
Um and so what Use Workshop does is basically creates like a little Mailchimp for inside your company.
42:35
So let's you do list launch But did they launch this because of our podcast or were they already working on it?
42:41
they were already working on it.
42:41
Uh and we just got connected from we got connected when they were um they they were doing Somebody pointed out to me.
42:50
They're like, "Hey, these guys are doing almost exactly what you're talking about."
42:52
I reached out and they're like and it That was awesome.
42:55
He's like, "Yeah, we had this past company that was successful.
42:56
We kind of like, you know, like this is our second merry-go-round.
42:59
Got the team back together to do this."
43:00
And then it's like it's working.
43:02
"Hey, we just signed this client, this client, this client."
43:04
Big name, big name, big name.
43:05
They showed me the chart of revenue and I was like, "Oh, this is like so spot-on.
43:08
Like I I really think that that a tool like this is going to exist and it's going to work." Yeah, this is sick.
43:14
And like the design is just really good.
43:17
Like if you go to the design of the page, it's like just like clearly these people are good at like they're good at simple products.
43:24
And that's kind of all you need to do to be able to build something like this.
43:27
It's like nice, clean, simple, easy to use.
43:31
And they have the use cases.
43:31
So for employee engagement, right, a change of management, company alignment, hybrid work, mergers and acquisitions, internal marketing. It's pretty sick.
43:39
Uh measuring performance. Yeah, this is awesome.
43:43
And like you know, you send these emails out normally in your company, you don't have the open rate you don't have the open tracking.
43:46
You don't know who's actually engaged or who's not in your company emails.
43:49
You don't know how you you can't test the subject line difference and be like, "Oh, this one got way more people to respond to the engagement survey or whatever we sent out."
43:58
And so it lets the internal comms team like do their job better.
44:00
They didn't really have a tool before this.
44:05
I can't find this client info.
44:05
Have you heard of HubSpot?
44:07
HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.
44:12
Every team can stay aligned.
44:14
No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.
44:21
Are you angel investing actively right now? Yeah. You You stopped, right?
44:25
Or you like took a break?
44:28
Well, I've taken a break because A, the markets, and B, because um I'm working on this I got my I I could talk about it a little bit, but I got like 20 customers for already for my new project. Oh, nice.
44:38
Okay, let's talk about that in a second.
44:40
Let's do the angel investing thing first, though.
44:41
So, I heard something interesting.
44:43
Like my initial reaction was to do what you're doing, which was like, uh it's just I don't know, the world's crazy. I lost a bunch of money.
44:50
Every Everywhere I look, prices are going down.
44:52
Like, you know, stocks are going down, crypto's going down, everything's going down.
44:55
Um maybe I should just bunker down for the season and just like, you know, chill out a little bit with investing in these like high-risk illiquid startups.
45:02
But at the same time, um then I heard somebody say something.
45:06
I think it was um somebody on All-In on the podcast that one of their guests he said something he was like He's like, "Actually," they're like, "Are you slowing down?"
45:13
And he was like, "No, this is the time to speed up."
45:14
He goes, "You know, the last few years I was like getting pretty worried and I thought like maybe it's time to slow down because valuations were getting really high.
45:23
There's just Everybody was There's too much capital flowing around.
45:27
Everybody's throwing money at everything.
45:28
It's really you know, when you would do a deal, it'd be like you wouldn't be able to get all the information you need.
45:33
It's like, "Hey, dude, we're closing."
45:34
Like, you're either in or you're out.
45:35
You don't have time to do like certain level of diligence.
45:39
He's like, "I actually think that those like uh vintages of companies, right?
45:43
Like, you know, like a like a vintage of wine, like the 1985 Bordeaux was so good."
45:46
It's like basically that happens in startup investing, too.
45:47
Where like certain vintages turn out really good, certain are kind of dry, they don't have any big winners.
45:52
If you look, basically after every kind of like market crash or recession is like those next 3 years are some of the best vintages for startups.
46:02
And so like this happened after this kind of 2000 2001 crash and like the next vintage that came out was like had LinkedIn, had Facebook, had like you know, a bunch of large companies.
46:10
I agree with that, but like the valuations maybe it could have it's like feels like it's changing week by week, but like two weeks ago when I was looking at a few deals, the valuations were still quite high.
46:22
Yeah, I I I I think they are coming down and they're coming down week by week.
46:25
You're you're absolutely right.
46:25
And I you know, you you could be disciplined on that where you're just like, "Oh, you haven't gotten the memo that like, you know, what used to be 50 million is now 22 million and what used to be 20 million is now eight?"
46:36
Like you you need to get that memo and some people just haven't got that memo yet. But like a lot of Right.
46:41
That So I'm I'm I'm waiting like that amount.
46:43
Like just a few more weeks maybe until So that that's what when I say wait, that's what I mean because we were talking to people and they weren't budging.
46:50
And I was like, "Well, all right, we'll wait."
46:51
And now I'm getting emails from some like portfolio companies and they're like you could see their cash balance and how much money they have left and it's like, "Damn, man.
46:59
I think there actually might be like a lot of things going out of business in 6 months."
47:02
I I I think there absolutely will be.
47:05
I mean I've getting a ton of "Hey, we just raised this extra money."
47:08
Like a lot of smart founders basically are like taking the bag while it's available uh just to give themselves buffer cuz like who knows how much worse it's going to get.
47:14
And um but the values are coming down.
47:17
So I actually think that like this this year, next year, the next basically two or two and a half years are going to be like kind of an awesome vintage of startups to be investing in because you're getting all the you know, like none of the big trends have changed like the world is just getting more tech enabled.
47:31
Tech is just going into more and more industries.
47:33
Size of the prize is getting bigger.
47:35
There's more and more people coming online.
47:36
Machine learning and all that stuff is making stuff better.
47:39
Like all of that's still true.
47:41
It's just that the price has got cut in half.
47:42
And so it's like, "Oh, good." I'm I'm I'm on board.
47:43
I'm just like wait I just think that like there's there's so far been like this two three week period where it's like there's a discrepancy.
47:52
I'll get fixed, I think in like two three four five six weeks.
47:54
You know, I I think that's going to happen pretty pretty soon.
47:57
Should we talk about your uh your thing?
48:01
Now or do you want to do a devoted All right.
48:02
Well, we could talk we could Yeah, I don't want to do a devoted thing because I'm not going to announce what it is entirely yet.
48:06
So, but we can kind of talk about it.
48:09
But basically, like I'm kind of going back to my roots.
48:13
I'm launching this new thing.
48:14
I'm not even saying I'm launching it.
48:16
I'm more so like launching enough of it to prove or disprove if it's a good idea. Okay.
48:21
And I've gotten like I forget exactly like tens of thousands in revenue in the first 2 weeks. Amazing.
48:32
And um And I didn't tweet about it once. So, so tell me this.
48:36
Tell me what are you doing differently this time around than you did So, last time you started this Reddit was maybe 6 years ago, something like that? Yeah. Yeah.
48:45
And so now with you did the whole hustle chapter, then you get acquired, you go to HubSpot, you see a bunch of things, you meet a bunch of people, you get smarter, wiser, all that stuff.
48:53
You got some hair on your chest now, and so it's like what's What did you decide like, all right, this time I'm doing these things differently?
48:59
Or was there anything Early on, early on, I was like against outsourcing or hiring anyone overseas or hiring like cheap labor or hourly labor.
49:08
And I was like, no, I want to create jobs, and I want to like do salary position with benefits.
49:12
And now I'm not doing that.
49:15
Eventually, maybe we'll add some people like that, but now it's like just how do I automate this and how do I like get someone overseas just to do this like a machine.
49:21
And I just don't really care if I don't have any employees, and I want to and I I'd prefer being alone.
49:26
So, that's the big difference.
49:28
The second difference is well, the the same similarity is I'm doing it all by hand, and this is totally the right move, and I stand by that.
49:35
So, before I wrote everything, I sold the first ads, I did it all.
49:36
This time I'm doing the same thing.
49:38
So, I'm literally doing the cold emailing.
49:40
I'm getting them on the phone. I'm doing the sales. I'm listening to them.
49:43
I'm doing that constantly.
49:45
And getting those reps in is actually really impactful.
49:47
And you could actually like see uh what's happening.
49:51
But I By the way, I got that revenue uh 0% of the revenue has come through our website.
49:56
It's all been from cold emailing people on LinkedIn and getting them on the phone and then just sending them a Stripe account. Amazing. What um What else?
50:05
What else is different about your mindset? I bet there's more.
50:09
Way more confident, for sure.
50:09
Um there is still a sense of urgency.
50:11
Uh so, like wanting to move fast and like I have to get this done. I have to do this.
50:16
But, more so like um I have to get this done, but also remember like I may do this for like 20 years. Right.
50:25
So, like having this longer term this longer horizon.
50:28
What I learned with my business, we sold around year five.
50:30
And the truth is most the value created between year five and year six was more probably than the value of zero to five Mhm. combined. Right.
50:39
And I was I wasn't impatient because I'm happy I did what I did cuz it unlocked a lot for my life.
50:47
But, had I not I said this a bunch of times if I was already wealthy, I would never have sold because real value seems like it comes like Now, I've only experienced a a business from like around year five, but it seems like maybe there's something that happens year five, year six where value is created. And then who knows?
51:03
Maybe someone who's owned a company for years is like, "Man, 20 and 30 is when like [ __ ] magic really happens." So, I don't know.
51:08
But, I do think like year five, if you bootstrap, is around the time where you're like, "All right, I recruited some actually good people.
51:14
I've got people doing helping and everything." But, like I don't know.
51:17
Do you agree with like year five, year six, year seven is where some crazy stuff happens?
51:21
I think it's just I think it's just generally true, right?
51:23
Like you you plant seeds and they water them and you water them and you you're looking at them and you're trying not to just go dig up the dirt and be like, "Why the [ __ ] aren't you growing?"
51:30
But, like at some point those things do start to grow.
51:33
Like we're seeing this with our e-commerce business, too, which was um uh my buddy had told me this.
51:38
uh my buddy had told me this. He goes He goes, "There's this magic moment in e-commerce where you've you've brute forced enough of the like building your brand and getting cut getting new people to try you where every month your returning customers just come back because they love your product and you
51:53
don't have to remarket you don't have to spend money remarketing to them and then the business goes from like this giant cash suck to this giant cash cow if you do it right and and I was and we just started to hit a tipping point like that where you could say and it's not every
52:07
month but there's some months where I'm like whoa what just happened and it's like oh yeah that's that's what's happening like we actually just last year we brute forced and got a bunch of people to love our product and then they came back and bought and this like a bunch of them came back and bought this
52:22
month to where it outweighed all of the new investments that we're making like wow that's nice or like at Twitch we were always doing these like planning exercises about like you know these profitability targets I can't say too much but like basically profitability targets and I think Emmett had said something he
52:39
was like yeah we from the like he's like pretty early on we modeled it out and it was like it's going to take like 10 years probably and this and he said a huge number he's like X billion in revenue for us to you know break even and I was like that's just a crazy idea that's like we need to get to X billion
52:58
in revenue for this to be profitable and like but it like that's exactly you know that's the that's what actually how it was playing out yeah and it's like whoa I hadn't even really like Amazon I think we had a sort of had a semi-similar story Amazon I think for 15 years or something like that was like unprofitable on on the whole but the
53:17
difference in Amazon was like the individual divisions were getting very profitable after like a repeatable like a reliable like I don't know let's call it four year cycle it's like books got super profitable but by the time books was getting profitable they were investing heavily in CDs and music and these other things and so then the total
53:33
always looked unprofitable but they knew internally this is just a clock that goes you know every it's going to take four years or whatever it is to with unit to get profitable and once they're all profitable, this thing's going to be like unbelievable, which is where it's at now. Trusting that process is really
53:45
Trusting that process is really hard, particularly for first-time entrepreneurs.
53:48
With Bezos and Emmett were I guess, you know, after like 10 years it's like, well, I'm not exactly a first-time founder anymore, but you know what I mean.
53:55
Well, I'll say the way I'm saying the Twitch one right now sounds a bit like a master plan, like, ah, I'm I can see this coming and I'll I'll whatever.
54:03
It's like, no, it was more like uh oh [ __ ] we got users.
54:05
Oh [ __ ] the costs are really high. What if we raise money?
54:09
Okay, what do we got to tell these guys what do we got to tell these investors or how they're going to get their money back?
54:14
Uh maybe this business model will work and maybe on this timeline.
54:15
And then like, we update that information every 2 years and like I think, you know, I think Twitch had like a thing where it was like, we're going to be profitable in 3 years and they've been saying that for the last six.
54:23
You know, like that's just like been a thing and that's very common actually for businesses.
54:27
It's like Yeah, like entrepreneurs generally pretty optimistic.
54:30
Elon's been saying self-driving cars will come out this year for 4 years.
54:33
Like, you know, it's like entrepreneurs are usually right about the the actual assessment and they're wrong about the timeline.
54:39
Or somebody somebody gave me this great phrase they go, "Don't confuse a clear view for a short distance."
54:47
It's like imagine you're driving, you see something so clearly, but it's like it looks like it's just right there, right?
54:52
Just right around the corner.
54:53
And like actually that corner is like a 10-year odyssey that felt like, oh, it's got to be just 2 or 3 years away.
55:00
The last big thing that's different between now and then, you know, having some experience versus no experience, is the ability to say no and be like, oh, well, you're saying you don't want this product, therefore, I guess I should change it.
55:11
It's like, oh, okay, well, that's okay if you don't want it.
55:13
You're actually not who we're going for.
55:14
I I so you you you didn't you didn't my takeaway from this is not you uh that that my product is not good and people don't want it.
55:23
It's just that I just I I now I know I shouldn't target people like you and instead I should only target people like this other person. Right.
55:30
And that's like the the a huge thing where it's like the vision is that we are going to be this for this people.
55:36
Eventually, maybe it can expand beyond that, but for a while, this is what we are and this is who we are for.
55:41
And if you don't talk to people who you think you are for, then it's okay.
55:44
That's just They're not the right target market.
55:47
Um and I just targeted that customer poorly, but you should only like, you know, be one thing for one type of person and you go deep on that.
55:56
And all often times people will be like, "But that's not that big."
55:57
But A, sometimes it is that big.
55:59
Uh and B, it's like it That's okay.
56:02
You just got to like get that initial traction and then more opportunities pop itself.
56:05
But you have to be this one thing for this one person and ignore everyone else.
56:11
So, my sister has a business.
56:11
I don't know Have I told you about her like Cloud Kids thing?
56:16
Well, I know she's a babysitter is a little That's not actually accurate, but like daycare, right?
56:22
It was It was It was I guess it was kind of like an in-home daycare that became like a preschool, then became like an outdoor preschool, whatever. It kind of evolved. Yeah, by the way, sorry.
56:30
I didn't mean to call that babysitting.
56:32
She would have punched me in the face.
56:34
And I knew that wasn't the right I knew it wasn't babysitting.
56:36
I was like I called it I meant to say daycare. So, yeah, that's okay.
56:39
That That is That's right.
56:41
So, but during COVID she pivoted to like an online thing.
56:44
Like a lot of businesses went from like, "Oh, [ __ ] Brick and mortar is really hard right now cuz they're like, you know, every month the government is changing the rules on what we can and if we can and can't operate our business."
56:54
So, she created this thing called Cloud Kids.
56:56
So, if you go to cloudkids. com. Kids with a Z.
57:01
Uh I think it's preschool. com. Let me see if that's it. Um Yeah, cloudkids. com.
57:09
So, go to that website real quick and just look at this.
57:10
Um I actually think she's done a pretty good job with the website. Cloud Kids what?
57:15
Cloud Kids Here, I'll just put the link here. cloudkids. com. So, check this out.
57:20
So, um this is like Helping her with this has been pretty fun because she like she built this in like Wix. I'm like, "Oh, Wix."
57:28
I'm like, "Who's using Wix?"
57:29
And then and I I was like, "All right, you need to add like change the headline.
57:33
You need to add like a video.
57:34
The video needs to be not like a full-on video, like just make it look like a teacher teaching something like No, dude, this looks amazing. Exactly.
57:41
So, now it's really good.
57:41
It used to be like, um, you know, get info.
57:45
Now it's like free trial, right?
57:45
Like just optimizing the landing page with her like headline, sub-headline, button, hero image, uh, you know, reasons to it reasons to buy, all that stuff.
57:55
Like and then she's like working with people on like Fiverr and Upwork to like do these designs.
57:57
It's like it's actually turned out pretty good.
58:00
And so, she created this thing which is basically like um, these small group classes.
58:03
So, like let's say you have your kid at home, uh, either because they're just like my my like my daughter, she's too young to go to school right now.
58:10
Like we don't want to send her to full-time preschool, but like we wanted to like learn something every day.
58:15
And it's like kind of takes a [ __ ] ton of energy to sit there and be like the engaging, patient parent and like keep your kids' attention and be like, "I'll teach you like how to write the letter W today."
58:24
Like but like with this, I'm like I sit her down in front of the computer, I get the materials in front of her with paper and like the teacher is like so good.
58:33
They'll be like, "All right, you know, like hi. High five.
58:34
Let's sing our welcome song."
58:36
And then they like do all the things.
58:38
So, for 1 hour, she get it's like screen time without the guilt.
58:40
It's like the the she gets engaged like it's cartoons, but it's not cartoons cuz she's actually like learning stuff and getting better.
58:48
And so, she created this service and it's like I was like, "Dude, this is actually a pretty cool good product."
58:51
And she, um, she's hired these teachers and the teachers are like uh, like in Florida and different places like that.
58:57
So, so then she was she calls me, she's like, "Ah, I'm just like struggling so much with the growth."
59:03
And so, I like I was like, "All right, well like tell me what like" She's like, "Ah, it's just it's not working."
59:08
And what what were the numbers?
59:08
And so, she gives you the numbers and she's basically like I was like, "Okay, so let's draw the funnel."
59:12
And she's like, "What's a funnel?"
59:13
I'm like, "All right, just imagine like at the top, you know, you're getting leads, like people who come to your website, and then some of them give you your email, some of them sign up for a free trial, some of them actually show up, and then some of them become a fully paid customer."
59:22
So, we drew that funnel out.
59:24
It's was "Oh, actually this conversion rate is kind of awesome."
59:27
I was like, why do you And then And then I was like, so what's your cost per lead? Is that really high?
59:31
It's like, no, it's like not high at all.
59:33
And this is with like, you know, this like $50 a day, $100 a day ad budget.
59:37
Like And she's just like, I don't even know how to do Facebook ads.
59:40
I just put in like, you know, 100 and I just wanted to see what would happen.
59:43
And like I was like, wow, this is actually like this business is kind of amazing.
59:46
So you pay back your customer in less than a month.
59:48
She's like, I don't know, if you say so.
59:50
I'm like, yeah, like that's what your numbers say.
59:52
You You basically pay back before your ads bill is even due.
59:54
That's like the the ultimate like thing you want with an ads driven business is like to to get the revenue from your customer profitably before you even pay your credit card bill.
1:00:05
And And to give the listener context, so it prices range from $40 a week to So you can All right, I understand.
1:00:12
So you can get classes one day, two day, three day, four day a week.
1:00:15
They It all ranges from like $160 a month to $400 a month.
1:00:18
And you get basically it's a the the tagline is actually quite good.
1:00:25
It Although the website needs a little work.
1:00:28
Like I clicked on the FAQs and it goes to privacy policy. But that's all right.
1:00:31
Live online preschool classes.
1:00:33
The number one live preschool program from home.
1:00:35
We This is a beautiful line.
1:00:38
We provide the curriculum, teachers, and friends. Right. That's a That's great.
1:00:43
And then there's a video who Is this like this woman who works for her?
1:00:45
You don't have a white sister.
1:00:46
Yeah, it's one of my teachers. And it's great. I'm all about this. This is beautiful.
1:00:52
By the way, the art is actually really good. I think it's great. It's pretty good, right?
1:00:55
And so so And so then the reason I bring this up is is because you were talking about handling a no, handling an objection.
1:01:02
And what I learned when I was like diving in, I was like, your funnel is not broken, your website is good, your services your retention is amazing.
1:01:11
Um I was like, even your ad like ROAS, your payback period is also amazing.
1:01:16
So I was like, what are you talking about?
1:01:17
This thing And she's like, well, I mean like I talked to like, you know, so many people and they all just, you know, they don't come back for the for the free trial.
1:01:25
I'm like, "But you're converting 20% or something like that to from free to paid. That's like Yeah. Best on the internet."
1:01:31
She's like, "Yeah, but like, I talked to eight moms that were like, you know, we can't do it for this or this reason."
1:01:34
And I was like, "Yeah, but eight out of 10 is eight out of 10 no's.
1:01:40
That means two out of 10 yes's. That's a 20% conversion. That's again, amazing.
1:01:44
And the numbers back out where this business is like an awesome business."
1:01:48
And I think in the So what what happened was the psychology.
1:01:50
Cuz I told her I was like, "Hey, if you want to close more people, call everybody who just did your free trial and see if they'll convert to paid."
1:01:58
They'll be like, "Hey, I'm I'm the owner of the school. How did you like it?
1:02:00
So glad, you know, I I saw I dropped in on the class.
1:02:03
I saw she was doing great.
1:02:05
Like, do you think you want to continue?
1:02:07
And like, do you want to do more classes?"
1:02:08
Um and like, "Oh, payment's a problem?
1:02:10
Like, we can help you with a payment plan."
1:02:11
Cuz a lot of the people who are doing this, they're like, Detroit inner city.
1:02:14
Like, there's a lot of people that are basically like, "Hey, I can't pay for full-time caretaking.
1:02:17
I can't pay for even full school."
1:02:22
Uh or like in Detroit, for example, [ __ ] what I learned through this was in Detroit, the public schools are full.
1:02:25
So you just can't send your kid. Can you believe that?
1:02:29
So the people are like 60 years old and they're like, "Yeah, the school's full and I can't afford private school."
1:02:34
It's like, I've never heard public school can be full.
1:02:38
And like, that's what's going on in Detroit right now.
1:02:39
Dude, is this Is this your sister just like, "Move over, Sean.
1:02:42
There's a new There's a new big swinging dick in the house."
1:02:45
Well, the funny thing is she's she's got a better product and business than I have in any of my businesses in terms of all the core metrics are stronger than all of mine.
1:02:52
The product offerings, the retention, stronger than anything.
1:02:55
The problem is it's not a problem, actually.
1:02:58
The She doesn't want to like She's not trying to do world domination.
1:03:01
She's like, "No, this would be great if we got to like 50 students."
1:03:04
And I'm like, "Well, then you'll want 100, right?"
1:03:07
She's like, "No, because that'll be way more work."
1:03:09
Like, I I 50, I already have these great teachers I can handle 50.
1:03:12
I just want to fill up my occupancy.
1:03:13
And like, she truly is like, "Well, because when I do that, and I can go work out in the middle of the day and like, I just want my lifestyle I can go to my daughter's things.
1:03:21
Sean, she has something that you'll never have. Oh, no, the E word. Enough. Yeah, she she does. She'll have enough.
1:03:28
My I I went through I with my mother-in-law.
1:03:30
She's like, hey Sam, can I drive you to the airport? I was like, why?
1:03:33
She goes, well, it's 2 hours to get there and I need you to explain to me how online commerce works cuz I want to start a store.
1:03:37
This was 2 or 3 years ago and I like did the ride and I told her how to use the store.
1:03:40
Now she's got a business doing like half a million a year and I was like, why don't you scale this? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do this?
1:03:46
You could be like, I'm always like, you could be like the black Martha Stewart.
1:03:48
Like, you could crush this.
1:03:50
And she's like, but I like taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off.
1:03:54
And I was like, Oh, all right. Right.
1:03:55
Well, But if you made more, then you could take Tuesdays and Thursdays off.
1:03:58
She's like, I can do that right now. Right.
1:04:00
It's all Yeah, it's the same exact thing.
1:04:02
Then I'm like, but but but But but and just to finish the point on the the rejection thing, what I learned was when she called people and eight people in a row said no, it was like completely demoralizing to her and she started Am I going after the wrong market?
1:04:16
Do I have the wrong product?
1:04:18
Am I have Am I priced too high? Am I this? Am I that?
1:04:22
And I think it's really important to be able to back out numbers.
1:04:24
I've seen the same mistake on fundraising all the time.
1:04:27
So, it sounds kind of silly when it's like, oh, my sister's little preschool.
1:04:30
Oh, you know, she has 20% conversion rate. Obviously, that's good.
1:04:34
Um like, even if it was 10% it would still be great.
1:04:36
Like, it it'd still work.
1:04:37
Um like, oh, that's so silly, you know, she got demoralized by by hearing, you know, eight no's in a row, you know, on a on a Monday morning.
1:04:44
And um or or not even hearing no's, just not hearing back from people.
1:04:47
And like, yeah, yeah, but then I talked to founders and they're like, dude, raising money so hard.
1:04:51
I need to change this, change that.
1:04:53
Can you help me help me with my pitch?
1:04:54
I'm like, how many investors did you pitch to?
1:04:56
And they're like, we yeah, we talked to like, you know, these four last week. I'm like, four?
1:05:02
And I'm like, you know, this is a numbers game.
1:05:04
This is a sales funnel and you need you are selling your equity in your business in exchange for money.
1:05:08
And like, like, you what you're doing is you're getting highly emotional and you're taking it highly personal that somebody doesn't want to fund your business.
1:05:17
And like in reality, yes, you should be learning from like how to pitch better and like you may maybe maybe in the end you will strike out, but you don't even know that yet.
1:05:23
You haven't hit enough people.
1:05:24
Dude, what what a lot of people realize is that like 1% to 3% conversion rate is like normal, which kind of means that like maybe you'll go 0 for 29 and on the 30th one you get a one and that's like boom, you know, you're now you're one for three or you're you're you're that's a 3% conversion rate. You're good. Yeah.
1:05:41
Or maybe on your 99th one, the 10th one boom, 1% out of 100 that's good.
1:05:45
That's why I always joke with Ben.
1:05:47
I'm like Mormons are probably the best sales people because convincing someone to join a religion has like the lowest conversion rate ever and then you hear that like you can sell salesforce and that has a 2% conversion rate and you're like Piece of cake.
1:05:58
is this is the easiest thing ever ever since Fishing apparel.
1:06:02
Ben, how many like I I I don't know like if that's actually what you did where you tried to get people to like quit whatever religion they were in and join your crew, but how many people do you think who were like either atheist or in another team and they just said, "Yeah, cool.
1:06:16
I'll I'll join your thing."
1:06:16
How many people what what's your what was your percentage rate? Uh so let's see.
1:06:22
I have Did you convert anyone?
1:06:24
Yeah, I converted low 30s. I'd have to look.
1:06:26
It was like 32 people on my mission.
1:06:29
So that was 2 years and um oh man, how many doors do I think I knocked on in in that time?
1:06:36
Uh Like I mean it was it was a couple hundred? Couple thousand?
1:06:40
Uh it was hundreds of doors a day across to every every single day for 2 years, right?
1:06:45
So You knocked on 100 doors a day? Easily. Easily 100 doors a day. What country? on.
1:06:53
We're doing some public math. This deserves it.
1:06:54
Let's say Well, you yeah while you do it, let me ask you a question. What country?
1:06:57
So I was in El Paso, Texas, but I was speaking Spanish.
1:07:02
So if you did 150 doors a day, which you're saying easily is an estimate.
1:07:08
Every single day, 365 days, 2 years, you knocked on 109,000 doors.
1:07:14
You you did 109,000 and you did 32 out of 109.
1:07:19
Uh so that's point oh the point 02% or point 002% something like that.
1:07:25
Some something that's like you know, fraction fractions of a percent.
1:07:33
Dude, how and how about the fact that your friends are all going to these cool places in Africa or South America and they sent you to El Paso.
1:07:37
Yeah, but I mean, you know.
1:07:40
Yeah, my brother went to Prague, my sister went to Moscow.
1:07:45
Uh but uh We had We had um what's his name?
1:07:48
Austin from uh Lambda School which is now BloomTech. in Russia.
1:07:52
He was in Russia or something like that.
1:07:53
He said he converted zero or one.
1:07:53
He was like, "Oh, cuz we'd asked him, what would be good?"
1:07:56
He's like, "One would have been great Yeah. for where I was."
1:08:01
So that's that's the trade-off you make is that like, yeah, my brother and sister were in much cooler places in Eastern Europe, but like Eastern Europe is hard, man. Like really hard.
1:08:07
But I thought like so I guess you're dealing with mostly Mexicans or some type of Hispanic.
1:08:14
yeah, uh uh They're They're the most hardcore Catholics there are.
1:08:16
They They would They're willing to bail.
1:08:19
you what you got to realize though, El Paso is like a very transitory.
1:08:20
A lot of people just got there from from Mexico.
1:08:25
And so it's like, "Ah, well, I'm not really going to my church I used to go to.
1:08:28
Maybe I'm looking for something new.
1:08:29
Like my life is already changing.
1:08:29
I'm open to to something new."
1:08:33
Can you Facebook has that similar feature.
1:08:34
It's called recently moved and those are great people to target. It's true.
1:08:38
Dude, recently moved is an awesome group of people to target cuz they're changing their life. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:08:43
If you have like a weight loss thing.
1:08:46
Um Ben, can you give me the like speed version of what is the pitch?
1:08:48
So you knock You literally physically knock on a door. I open up. What happens?
1:08:55
Yeah, so essentially what we're taught to do is No, just Just do it. Oh, man. In Spanish. Yeah, do it to me. Do it to me.
1:09:04
It it no hablo in you got to do it in English though.
1:09:07
You guys got to you got to bear with me.
1:09:09
It's been Okay, so I'm I'm I'm 34. It's been 13 years.
1:09:11
You did this like a hundred thousand times.
1:09:15
You know this like the back of your So uh You know, I'd say hi. How are you? My name is Elder Wilson.
1:09:21
This is I got my companion with me. This is Elder Lopez. Uh How are you today? You know, just whatever. Hi, good. I'm doing great. Nice to meet you.
1:09:30
Uh gosh, how gosh, I'm sorry. Hold on. Let me think about this. What do you want?
1:09:34
Okay, we'll give you a second.
1:09:34
Can can can Once I get into it, I can get into it, but like how would I first first start?
1:09:39
That's what I'm trying to think of.
1:09:40
How many times did people tell you to f off?
1:09:42
Uh I couldn't begin to tell you.
1:09:46
I mean, more often than not.
1:09:47
train you or you just have to figure it out how to sell this?
1:09:49
You go to uh well, so you got a three weeks of training if you're speaking English.
1:09:53
If you're learning a language, it depends on how difficult the language is.
1:09:56
I got six weeks of training, I think. Do you carry mace? No. No weapon.
1:10:03
No nothing in like a whistle. You have a whistle?
1:10:06
No, I I think maybe the the the women it might be up to their own discretion.
1:10:11
Maybe they do some stuff like that.
1:10:11
I have a friend who got stabbed. He was in Honduras.
1:10:14
Uh like a good buddy of mine got stabbed on his mission.
1:10:17
Um Did I guess I got to people with a Mormon lethal and weapon here. Yeah.
1:10:22
I'm trying to think of how how I you know, um You you know, you start off with just like um You know, we're we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints.
1:10:34
You start off by asking them questions like do you believe in God?
1:10:37
Are you someone who who believes in God? Yeah.
1:10:39
Oh you know, like well, what what do you believe about it? Do you go to a church?
1:10:45
Oh yeah, I go to a church.
1:10:45
And so you start with kind of relating to them about their faith.
1:10:48
And then you say, well, you know, our message is that you know, you said you believe in Jesus Christ.
1:10:54
We also believe in Jesus Christ from the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-day Saints.
1:10:57
And what we believe is that the same Christ, the same church that Christ established when he was on the earth 2,000 years ago, was lost for a period of time.
1:11:07
And And so, no one had the complete truth, but that it's been restored again, that exact same church.
1:11:11
And so, that's why we're out here trying to to talk to people.
1:11:15
If you knew that was true, that Christ's church was was back on the earth, the same one that he established, is that something that would be interesting to you?
1:11:23
Oh my gosh, this is awesome. Just a sales call. of of you.
1:11:28
Yeah, the wolf of religion. The wolf of Provo. This is great, man.
1:11:33
Dude, that's fascinating, man.
1:11:34
I feel like, by the way, you know, whoever runs the budget at the you know, the Mormon church, me and Sam are available for consultation.
1:11:41
available for consultation. If you need some some you know, tips on how to brush up that that opening script, I think maybe the the first few lines, maybe we could give you some other hooks, maybe some other some other other ways in because
1:11:53
uh Also, like, have you seen the trends on TikTok where it's like a baby or something like running away and they overlay audio that says, "Excuse me, ma'am, can I talk can I talk to you about the Lord Jesus can I you know, can I talk to you about the Lord, ma'am? Have you been to church
1:12:05
Have you been to church lately, ma'am? Where you going?
1:12:06
Can we can we please talk?"
1:12:07
It's like always like some funny running away.
1:12:10
You guys should pounce on that, man.
1:12:12
Would it be valid to do your mission through TikTok?
1:12:14
Like, if you were like, "I'm going to make amazing TikTok videos that go viral and help spread our mission." Like, could you do that?
1:12:18
Is that like or it has to be door knocking? Um well, no.
1:12:22
So, during COVID, a lot of missions kind of went to social media essentially.
1:12:30
Now, you got to realize that like your mission is like a it's a rite of passage, really.
1:12:34
Like, for 2 years, when I was 19 to 21 years old, I didn't have any contact with my family except for I wrote them an email once a week, and then I got to call home on Christmas and and Mother's Day. That was it.
1:12:48
So, like, completely separated from my past life, like doing this extremely hard thing.
1:12:54
And so, during COVID, missionaries did like start doing like social media missions cuz they couldn't go to people's doors and talk to them.
1:13:01
But my impression was like, man, that sounds like it sucks.
1:13:05
Like you missed out on the right of passage, like I wouldn't want to do that for 2 years.
1:13:10
Like that doesn't sound fun.
1:13:12
Just exploring yourself, losing your virginity, going to parties, converting people.
1:13:16
Well, the funny thing is like, no.
1:13:18
Mission It's definitely not that.
1:13:20
You're saying you're saying it man, that sounds like it sucks.
1:13:24
I wouldn't want to do that.
1:13:25
And like when you describe like not seeing your family and like, you know, having to like whatever you said like, you know, No, but the thing is like if you're going to do it like you want it to be hard.
1:13:36
You want it to be like this like life-changing difficult crazy thing that you do with your life, not like sitting behind a computer for 2 years.
1:13:44
That's the difference between Mormons and and Gentiles like us.
1:13:49
There's a bunch of heathens.
1:13:49
Dude, I spent my whole life avoiding hardship.
1:13:54
Well, I would be in the military or like you know, the Mormon church or whatever like if I if I really wanted to lean in to like difficulty.
1:14:00
I've I've spent my life running away from difficulty. We we are not the same.
1:14:06
Yeah, we are not the same.
1:14:07
Yeah, then it is like a big cultural thing.
1:14:10
Like it's hard to explain how excited I was for this after 2 years. Oh my god.
1:14:15
Well, that's why you're you know, are going to be probably more successful than both of us. And happier. And happier.
1:14:22
Yeah, I have I have a ton of respect for anybody who does that.
1:14:25
I also have even more respect for whoever was able to convince people to do this.
1:14:30
I think that is like one of the the greatest, you know, like greatest like organizations that that's been created like with such a strong pull that its members would take such a like large, you know, movement in in like to to support it.
1:14:46
Like And they're obligated to convince 10 other people to join.
1:14:50
Yeah, I'm trying to get somebody to give me their email address for like 2 seconds and I'm like, "Oh, this is so hard."
1:14:55
Like you have They have to give you 10% of their income.
1:14:56
They got to give you 10% of their income and go and recruit about 50 more people.
1:15:01
It's the greatest thing ever.
1:15:02
of your life, 10% of your income, all of your social capital, and uh probably something else that I don't even know about.
1:15:08
And We can't pay taxes, either, cuz we're giving it all the way.
1:15:13
It's the It's the sweetest deal in the world.
1:15:15
It is It is a great deal.
1:15:15
10% is cheap on uh on what you get in return. Wow. Oh, wow. Amazing.
1:15:21
And you have to believe it's the greatest deal in the world. Oh, fantastic. Even better. Wow, amazing.
1:15:27
I really enjoyed this, man.
1:15:30
I've never seen I'm convinced now.
1:15:32
You're like, "Do you guys want more?"
1:15:34
So let me I'll I'll tell you this.
1:15:38
I do I do I pay 10% of of all of my income. I donate a ton of time. It sucks all my time.
1:15:44
I donate two I gave 2 years.
1:15:46
I paid for 2 years to be on this mission.
1:15:47
Okay, I got I give up a lot.
1:15:49
But at the same time, like if I move anywhere, I show up in a new place, I call the local congregation, a bunch of dudes come help me unpack my boxes and move in.
1:15:58
I go to church, I immediately have like a dozen friends.
1:16:03
People invite me over to dinner for the first few nights that I'm in this new city.
1:16:08
Um if I need if I need a job, there's someone that you know dedicated in the congregation who will help me find a job.
1:16:13
If I'm ever like down on my luck and I need food, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will provide me with food, make sure I don't go hungry.
1:16:20
Like Um You just described being a famous podcaster, also, by the way.
1:16:26
Sam just Sam went on a road trip last year and was just like, "Hey, who wants me to drive their car?"
1:16:29
me to drive their car?" And people were like, "Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
1:16:35
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, MAYBE I MAYBE I AM MORMON after all. Exactly. Exactly. I mean I I look like it. Maybe I am Mormon.
1:16:49
Maybe I should do a DNA test.
1:16:52
Jokes aside and also I don't want to have the wrath of God if he does exist against me.
1:16:55
So, you know, I think it is pretty awesome.
1:16:57
And also like I think people study like what makes people happy in the end.
1:17:00
I think the biggest It's always religion.
1:17:02
That's always part of it.
1:17:03
Well, I think the biggest one is is like quality time spent with people you care about which like is a combination of like family, friends, communities, spiritual community, all that stuff.
1:17:14
And so what you're describing is basically like meaningful relationships with people who like, you know, have like kind of an unconditional support of each other which is great and something that everybody would sign up for um you know depending on you know with the situation, the cost.
1:17:30
think believer believers in a religion live longer than non-believers.
1:17:32
And I also think they're happier.
1:17:36
I I was curious about that.
1:17:36
Sean, that was a succinct pitch for for why it's a great idea.
1:17:40
We need to send you on a mission.
1:17:43
Elder Puryear I would love to go knock on a I would love to go knock on a hundred door.
1:17:46
I I really want to just do door-to-door sales just to see if I could do it and how it would work.
1:17:50
the pitch needs to be Excuse me, ma'am.
1:17:52
Do you know what the average life expectancy of an atheist is?
1:17:56
Now, what if I were to tell you that Mormon believers it's this. Would that interest you? Right.
1:18:00
interest you? Right. We I don't know if if if the church would go for this, but if they would, we should do a YouTube series where like we send Sean with a couple missionaries I can hook you up with in the Bay Area and just go knock
1:18:13
on like a hundred or two hundred doors with them and like see what it's like, offer your thoughts, and then like give them some observations and tips from uh Well, I would like to just go sell my own fake religion and just see I'm sure we can do that. like how well I could do
1:18:26
like how well I could do um because you know, I need a I need that kind of fresh slate.
1:18:30
I'm more of an entrepreneur, not an intrapreneur, if you know what I mean.
1:18:33
So, I I I got to create something from scratch here and keep all those tax benefits to myself as well.
1:18:40
I've actually considered this many times about creating my own religion.
1:18:42
Cuz I do have my own philosophy, my own belief system.
1:18:47
I do share it with others and uh and it's a life operating system. like taxes.
1:18:52
And I think that it's fantastic to to own a religion or to you can own a church of of a religion. And you're Indian. You you can be a guru.
1:18:59
Like people expect that, you know. I know.
1:19:02
I mean, when I had the longer hair, I was much better suited for this.
1:19:05
But you know, if I like Sam, what would be your opening line?
1:19:06
Like what where what direction would you take it?
1:19:08
Like he was like, "Hi, I'm Ben.
1:19:09
Do you have a Do you have a moment to talk about have said exactly I would say, "Excuse me, ma'am.
1:19:14
I know this is so strange, but I got to ask you a quick question.
1:19:17
What would you say if I told you that the average life expectancy of an atheist was 72, but the average life expectancy of a Mormon is 84?
1:19:22
Would you want to know why?"
1:19:26
And I think they would say, "Yeah, I guess."
1:19:28
Well, you see, it's to see your grandkids someday?
1:19:30
Yeah, like well, because when you believe in a religion, it means this this this and this.
1:19:35
And it just so happens our religion I would tell them on the app why it was good that he he started with do you believe in God? Right?
1:19:40
Because Yeah, get get the losers out of the way.
1:19:43
Well, no, what you got to separate is are you talking to an atheist or you talking to somebody of another religion?
1:19:47
Cuz you can't you got to know which way you're going there.
1:19:49
The other way is you know, you do the thing where you're like um uh you know, hey, um you know, I was just at your neighbor's house and I thought I would pop by.
1:20:00
Um just so you're like I hate when I get that. I'm in the neighborhood.
1:20:03
I would say which neighbor?
1:20:05
Yeah, it was the Johnsons across the street and um uh you know, I thought I'd stop by because um blah blah blah.
1:20:12
Or like, you know, I I really just wanted to to chat with you for a minute.
1:20:15
Do you Do you believe in God? All right.
1:20:19
You know, maybe go with something that's like um uh I was just wondering, have you seen this video?
1:20:25
Hold up my phone of that Tik Tok of the baby being chased away.
1:20:27
You know, like I'm just trying to like you know, stun them into not not like automatically rejecting me, right?
1:20:33
Like this is like, how do I get some curiosity?
1:20:35
Which would be something like, um, you know, I'm going around the neighborhood and just asking, you know, do you go to church uh regularly?
1:20:40
And they're like, "Oh, yeah, right." Awesome.
1:20:44
Uh, would you say you believe in God?
1:20:47
Yeah, I do believe in God.
1:20:49
Do um, you know, where'd that start?
1:20:49
Was that from your parents?
1:20:53
Yeah, my mom was super religious. My mom, too.
1:20:54
And then I'd like, you know, try to do something like that.
1:20:57
That's off the top of my head how I would try to like, you know, build rapport quickly as I get them to talk, you know, get them Stick to podcasts. Stick to podcasting.
1:21:06
Hey, give me a Give me a hundred thousand reps at this, I think I'd be pretty good by the end.
1:21:09
Yeah, better than Ben and having to think about it.
1:21:12
Yeah, but Ben's response made me think he might he might not have gone on that mission after all.
1:21:16
Hey, Sean, I 32 converts, you've got zero so far.
1:21:18
So, you got to get on my level.
1:21:21
I just don't know how you forgot the script you said a thousand hundred thousand times.
1:21:24
That sounds a little suspicious.
1:21:26
Yeah, over a decade's a long time, Sean. A decade's a long time.
1:21:30
All right, I got to go bathroom.
1:21:30
I'll talk to you all in a little bit. Okay.