00:00
It's insane. This whole guy this guy's life is insane is what I can see from this. I mean, this guy's his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say. That's my yeah. I give I want the HDH dropped.
00:12
Yeah.
00:13
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can see what I You look fantastic. You upgraded.
00:20
I'm currently recording. I I wish I could turn the camera around, but I don't wanna screw it up. But I'm sitting at my friend Jack's house in Hawaii where I'm having a a week vacation.
00:30
Congratulations. Well deserved.
00:32
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's cool.
00:35
Just got here, but, gonna be here for maybe five days. But it's alright. How's,
00:40
things going with you?
00:43
Yeah. Things are good. Did you see,
00:45
this thing that the these guys you tweeted at us that were like, dude, we will pimp out your your stream Did you watch these videos that they made? No. I've been flying, but they said that they booked a ticket to Austin. Are they actually going
01:00
to our to my house?
01:02
I don't know if they I don't think no, though. They're they're waiting for us to be like yes or no, but,
01:07
these guys applied very
01:09
intelligently. I gotta give them credit. So, basically, they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff and they're like, we'll do this for you. We'll make it no hassle. I'll come to you. I will hook it up. And a few people tweeted tweeted something like that at us. And you were like kind of you know, he can ring it, I guess. And then these three guys are are kinda like I think they're like college seniors or something like that. I don't really know. Didn't look too far into it. But they sent us a video. They go watch. Here's what we're gonna do. And they recorded a video, and it looks like a casey Neistat video. Like, the quality is like that, and the editing style and storytelling is like that. It's a funny video was basically telling us how to pimp how they would pimp out our stream. And, they keep calling it, like, you know, my first million to the moon. And they're like, we're gonna take this baby to the moon. Here's how we're gonna do it. And so they did two things. He he showed how his camera set up, how they do it for their podcast, and it looks awesome, looks way better than ours. And then,
02:03
also, he's the then the next day, he sent us an edited clip
02:07
of a com of the of you telling the story of bumping into the Silk Road founder at a party and he, like, stole your girl or whatever. And,
02:14
they edited, like, a little clip, and they're like, dude, we'll pump out clips like these all the time. My first million to the moon, baby. And, Are they good? They're good. They're really good. Both videos are really good. Where first of all, why let's hire them. And second, where did they send this to on Twitter? I've I've been flying since Saturday. It's on Twitter. I sent you a link because I was like, dude, fuck. Yes. This is like this is, you know, like, it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally, you get a job app. You you you put a job up that you wanna hire somebody to do x, And then some people apply, and then you're like, are you kinda squinting? You're like, do I think this person's really gonna be able to do it? And then you'd make a guess. And then it takes some fucking six weeks to ramp up And then, or, or this guy just applies showing, look, I can do it. I've done it for myself. I'll do it for you. And, let me make this easy for you. Let me show you how bad I want this. And I just thought, like, this is so much better than than what we've been talking about of trying to find people to do this I'm looking at his okay. Cool. His name is Dylan Jarden.
03:13
Weird last name. I keep I I because I wanna say Jordon.
03:17
Yeah. Dylan, if you're listening to this, let's do it. I'm in.
03:21
And, you know, I I don't know. There's probably people at the hustle who have similar jobs, but I think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like, the gig is yours to, like, pimp out our the video side of our podcast. I think we should give we should give them the the shot. Alright. I'm in.
03:36
Cool. Alright. We have a bunch of topics you wanted to talk about. Where do you wanna start? You wanna start with this open salary thing? No. Let's start with food because I've you the the was this yours? Yeah. I've thought about this for years. So I have a lot of I've got I've got something boiling up. So you wanna you wanna think Let me intro this. Alright. So I'm talking to Ben
03:54
my right hand man, Ben. And Ben's kind of like,
03:57
you know, I'm easily excitable. You could tell by the way I talk. Ben is the opposite. He's chill mode. He's always relaxed.
04:04
And,
04:05
but when Ben mentions things, I've learned, like, when he says something, it's just like, like, oh, this is cool. You should check this out. It's actually fucking amazing. And he just doesn't say, hey, dude. He doesn't, like, shake you and say, look at this. This is amazing. And so he showed me this thing that is amazing. So he he goes, check out this website, or this Instagram handle my cookie dealer. I was like, my cookie dealer, as I go to it. You should click this like that. I'm looking at it now. I wanna eat this Dude. So alright. So so he sent me three Instagram accounts. He sent me by cookie dealer. Click the second one. One nine hundred ice cream. So, like, one eight hundred, but one nine hundred ice cream. One nine hundred ice cream looks
04:42
so good. Just like describe what you're saying. It's incredible. Is it a pie? I don't know what this is exactly like what you would call it. But it's a it's a cone. What it well, I don't know what shape this is. It looks like it looks like there's a stick. So, like, at the top of the stick where you would have like a identical. Instead, it's
04:59
like a full ice cream concoction,
05:01
which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever. It looks amazing. You should if you have Instagram, go to go to one nine hundred ice cream. There's one called the cupcake wonderland, which is,
05:12
vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, strawberry, marshmallow, thing.
05:16
God. So they call themselves they call themselves the ice cream, thirst trap slash thick check trademark,
05:23
and and they, they have a bunch of followers. They've they've grown really quickly,
05:27
twenty six thousand followers. So Ben was our son sending me these. And I was like, okay, cool food account on Instagram. That's not too new. What what what do I care about this food porn? He's like, no, no, no, dude. I've been trying to send you one of these. And I'm gonna try to, like, get these myself. They do weekly drops
05:42
of their stuff, and these are selling out instantaneously.
05:45
So I go, what do you So he showed me my cookie dealer. So my cookie dealer does a drop, a cookie drop. Every week, they do a random cookie drop. So a different flavor or whatever. And it sells out within literally seconds,
05:57
and they're doing two hundred thousand dollars a week. They're doing ten million dollars a year.
06:01
Dropping cookies
06:02
on Instagram and just instantly selling out. And then they ship them, you know, a few days later, they they know how many orders they get. And then they ship them out a few days later,
06:10
kind of like, you know, nationwide or whatever. And, there's another one Ali's banana bread. Go look at this banana bread, dude.
06:17
Just look at this banana bread. I wanna print this banana bread out and just lick the paper. It looks so good. And same thing.
06:24
Sells out. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Dude, check check this out. So if you go to,
06:30
my cookie dealer dot com, that's the website. Okay. Click click Instagram page. Are you on their Instagram? And tell me when you're on their Instagram page. I'm on it.
06:39
Okay. You see go scroll up to their profile. And you see who where it says, like, the owner is this guy named Juan Deisel Moore, Murrell. Who's that? Click it. Oh, dude. He's like a body builder. So, no. This guy is Huge. Yeah.
06:53
This guy is so big. He looks like if you've ever seen a ESPN or whatever bodybuilding competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is, and he's just humongous. He really Well, I no. I I can't tell if it's, like, the I think it's a black guy. Is he, like, he's so dark? I think it's a white guy. You know, they all, like, the white guy had to get a black tan for bodybuilding.
07:14
Well, and then look at his wife.
07:16
It's insane. This whole this guy's life is insane is what I could see from this. I mean, this guy's his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say. That's what yeah. Give I want the HDH drop. This is awesome, man. This is cool. Okay. So Ali's banana bread. So Allie's banana bread. So there's a bunch of these. So Ben is, like, deep knee deep in this world of, like,
07:36
Instagram food brands that are basically
07:39
they're kinda, like,
07:40
drop shipping baked goods all around the country. So they have them for cakes, ice creams, banana breads, and they're just specialists. And so there's a couple cool things that I wanted to bring up about this. And I know you have some stuff on food too. But the part that I thought was cool is
07:54
so the internet is the internet is really good at doing this, which is normal, before the internet,
08:00
you would just go to whatever's, like, your local whatever. So you'd find the best within your local radius of five to ten miles or whatever it is That's what you would go by. But with the internet, whether it's news or comedy or whatever,
08:13
the best thing can just get distributed everywhere. And so the best brand wins on the internet.
08:19
And so this is why you see things get so big, you know, like Facebook and other other platforms because
08:24
the best the best thing will get all the users.
08:27
And it's what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food. So if these guys really do make the best God damn banana bread or best cookies or best ice cream.
08:36
They don't need a physical shop. They could just through Instagram alone, spending zero dollars on marketing.
08:41
Have customers worldwide, like Ali's banana bread literally ships worldwide.
08:46
And, so if you're the best at making something now, you have a pathway to become, like, a multimillionaire,
08:53
where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local baker and whatever in Cincinnati
08:57
you know, you were always restricted by however many customers you could get into your local radio. So I thought that's pretty cool. The second thing is if you think about this,
09:05
you know, this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while. So we've been talking about cloud kitchens. So these are essentially
09:12
like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries. They don't have like a physical storefront necessarily. They're all in the cloud and you just order online. The second thing is direct to consumer. So they're going direct to their fans. They're getting their fans' phone numbers. And so that when they do a drop, they just text everybody, like, one picture
09:29
of the new thing, and then instantaneously people buy. And I think that's kind of, like, amazing, a way to go to direct to consumer. You don't have to worry about getting on the shelf at you know, whole foods or wherever else to to build your your brand as a cookie company or whatever. And go ahead. No. Keep going. Last one is If you think about it, like, you know, who's gonna be the next Missus Fields or Ben and Jerry's or, like, auntie Andy's pretzels, it's gonna be one of these brands. It's gonna be one of these cloud bakeries
09:56
doing it on Instagram, building a cult following like these guys are doing. And,
10:01
and you're gonna see I I predict you're gonna see just like I forgot what was the name of that meme company that sold for like a hundred million dollars? They hit, like, they were the ones behind,
10:11
Dayquan
10:12
and whatever, like, the couple of the meme Instagram accounts.
10:15
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was about eight months ago, maybe. Yeah. We talked about it on the pod. It's like Ray will pull it up. This is like what is it? You see it right there. You see it? I can't read it for you. I am GM Media. So basically, you know, some brand that just owned a bunch of, like, meme accounts on Instagram sold for, like, a hundred million dollars, I think, if I remember correctly. You're gonna see the same thing in the food space you're gonna see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they're gonna buy up, you know, Ali's Ali's banana bread. They're gonna buy up nine hundred ice cream because they're gonna be like, dude, this is the next Ben and Jerry's. And we're gonna take this this thing. We're gonna put it on steroids. We're gonna advertise the fuck out of we're gonna get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing. And so you're I think you're gonna see a bunch of these. If I can go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now, would go give them each, you know, a twenty five k check because I think these are gonna get scooped up. Okay. So let's break this down further. I've thought about this a ton. The reason I've thought about this a ton is I
11:10
I'm I'm a media guy, right? By the way, is my mic good? Yeah. You're good. Alright. I'm a media guy. I love content, and I've studied
11:17
what goes viral and why for years. And one thing that I've always been fascinated with is I've known people who have worked at Thrillist. And Thrillist,
11:26
it started as a food Well, they started as, like, things to do in New York, but one of their biggest things is food. And I remember when I started dating my wife, she was from New York City, and I hadn't been there since I was or the first time when we started dating twenty six, twenty seven years old. And I went there, and I would see these long like, I would go to, like, the areas that you see in movies where, like, the cute people hang out where they all dress, like, you know, like, they dress like Right. They go to invite. Yeah. Like, they just dress like, for me, that was like, wow. I feel like everyone looks like a movie star. Everyone was cool and hit by, you know, I don't, I don't know, Madison Square Park or Washington whatever those parks, I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time there, but you know what I mean? They would have the longest lines. And I'm like, what what are all these people waiting for? And it was like the the latest,
12:08
thrillest craze that went viral.
12:11
And so I I would walk her through Brooklyn and everything, and I would see these lines. And I'm like, what is going on? And I would do research. And I've kinda
12:21
broke it down into I like I've like studied this for a while and,
12:25
not studied right word, but thought about it a lot. And I basically broke broke it down into the in a, into a handful of categories. And what it appears
12:34
What what seems like what what happens is people have a small store, a relative, like, pretty, like, a corner store in hit parts of Brooklyn or New York where there's people who share, so like college kids mostly. And they create one or two things that that thrillists or buzzfeed or someone because all those companies are located in the cool parts that I'm describing and soho, things like that.
12:56
And one of these, buzzfeed or thrillist folks sees it,
13:00
a whole bunch of college kids see it, and then it creates a line and it creates hype. And it it becomes like a good business that lasts for three to months. And then it kinda, like, goes away and maybe, like, it's still as a remainder, like, still as a business, but it it mostly, like, as a hype cycle, whatever. And I was like, what is going on? And so I broken this down into a few categories. And I wanna go through these categories because I agree with you. I think this is so cool, and I've tried to break this down. So first,
13:26
And these are, like, different ways to to Like, formulas for virality. Yeah. Like, formulas for food virality. Okay. The first one is make a side ingredient something that's normally a side ingredient, make it the main thing. So the best example of this is cookie dough. There's a lot there's like, this is a thing I saw in New York.
13:44
There was a line out a door, the door for someone sold cookie dough as if it's ice cream. So it's like sprinkled cookie dough, then, like, ice cream flavored cookie dough. It was, like, cookie knows the main thing. Another one is cheese. Like, people do, like, fondue's. They have, like, fondue bars. Something that's, what what else is a side ingredient that could be I don't know if it's a side ingredient exactly, but, cereal does this too. There's there was these, like, viral things, there was, like, cereal bars. All you do is it's just milk and cereal, and that's it. And you can come normally that's not a restaurant. It's a side, like, it's like literally a side dish of a side dish. And, they made it the focus of the restaurant, and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable. For people to to talk about and go to. Or an I or a whipped cream bot, like, a whipped cream store, just like anything that is typically an afterthought that is a topping or a side to the main thing, make that your thing. Okay? The second one, it's doing the have normal foods, but different colors. A few examples,
14:38
rainbow bagels. Okay. Crazy popular. They're they're hype. I mean, they're still popular, but they went through, a cycle. The second one is rainbow rainbow kettle corn. That's quite popular. When I was a kid, I remember a couple times buying green ketchup. Remember green ketchup? Yeah, dude.
14:54
I love green ketchup. You get it was just red ketchup, but green. Right? It was literally the color was different. It's just the name. It's just a normal thing, but a different color. And then the latest trend on,
15:03
or this year on TikTok was cloud bread, which is basically, you know, everyone is is baking at home now. It's just bread that's kind of blue and white and looks like a cloud. Right. And by the way, your side thing main thing, I got another example that, but, you know, captain crunch The crunch berries were always just the extra. And then they came out with captain just just the berries, just the crunch berries, and it was, like, way more popular. Yeah. Or like lucky charms with only the marshmallows. Yeah. Exactly. So you you take the thing that's supposed to be the the yeah. The topping, the second, the third string thing, make it the first string thing. Right. Okay. The the third one, the same thing, but a different side,
15:38
different size. This is pretty common. So, like, huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door, huge sundays. They call it like the kitchen sink. Everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink. Or or sushi rito is another example. Have you seen sushi rideau. That's a chain. Right? Yep. So it's just sushi. That isn't cut. So it's just a long piece of sushi.
15:58
Another one, I had a friend named Seoul. You probably home, and he created a kit kat bar that was the size of, like, a cake.
16:06
Right. He he would make these things. And so I've actually never seen this sold But you get the idea. A kit kat bar that's that's like a the size of a loaf of bread. In San Francisco, they have this place, Bob's, Bob's donuts, or Bob's, whatever. Yes. And they have this humongous doughnut. It's like this doughnut the size of, you know, two of my head. And, and you could buy and then you could try to eat it and you could take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous doughnut. Boom. That's the whole book. It's not special, but
16:33
I mean, it becomes special. It's just a normal thing, but a different size. Okay.
16:37
Or like in Saint Louis, the whole thing is this is so silly how this in Saint Louis, our pizza is cut into squares.
16:44
Right. Right. Right. So it's around. You kinda said one earlier about, like, sushi sushi sometimes comes in these, like, boats. Or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever, it's like it can also be, you know, a punch bowl that's in a fish, you know, a fish bowl or whatever. Yeah. Like, it could be bigger and in a you know, in a non non traditional, like the kitchen sink, in a non traditional container? Yes. Just same thing, but different size. Okay. Or or it could be miniature. You know, just something that you know, whatever. Like White Castle, mini cheeseburgers.
17:13
Okay. So the the the fourth one, combine two things that are quite different. Okay? So I've got a this is a really easy one. There's a ton of examples. The first one is the Kronut.
17:22
Pretty easy. Right. The latest trend right now in TikTok, pancake cereal.
17:27
It's I don't even know what it
17:30
there's like recipe. I don't even know what it is, but it's
17:33
I don't know. Okay.
17:34
Look it up, actually, while we're talking to BRA, It's probably
17:37
it's probably just
17:39
I I don't know. I I don't know. Probably take case in cereal. Okay.
17:43
No. They, they bake it. They call it pancake cereal. It really is just probably normal cereal made out of, like, the same ingredients. They just bake it at home, and it looks like the shape of a pancake. Same with donut cereal.
17:53
But there's,
17:55
do you know, do you remember ramen burger?
17:58
Yeah.
17:59
Okay. So there's ramen burger. There's fairy bread. Do you know what fairy bread is? No. What is that? It's basically just bread with sprinkles. Okay. So you're just taking two things that don't normally go together. Chips. And you mash them. Just like a dessert burger.
18:13
Right. Very simple. Or you can get a a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich. Right. And the more,
18:19
more unusual, it's, you know, it's doritos Locos Taco. Right? It's,
18:23
when KFC came out with the the fried chicken bun or whatever. And I was like, the bun is fried chicken.
18:29
Like, you know, there's
18:31
the more
18:32
shocking, I would say the better in this case. Yes. You just take two things. You smash them together. Pretty easy, relatively simple. Okay? The fourth thing or the fifth thing is you make something that's normally a crappy food, but you make it fancy. So tater tots, mozzarella sticks. You add a fancy stick to them, or you probably go the the opposite way of making something pretty fancy and make it not fancy, although that would might be gross. But you get the idea. And then the final one is you,
19:01
take,
19:03
some type of food allergy, but this one isn't actually that sexy. If you take some type of food, you just make something for food allergy. So there's banza, which is a chickpea pasta.
19:12
There's a there's a Lewellen's ice cream. I think it's called in Brooklyn's vegan ice cream, only vegan ice cream. Right. Or like Oatli is like this. Right? It's milk, not made from cast. Boom. It's this is now so popular that this almost can't go viral anymore, but, maybe if you chose some category, that's not not typical, but it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream,
19:34
at this point. It works so well. Here's what I would do is I would open up a you
19:39
This was what I was thinking about doing. I mean, I would never I don't think I would do it, but maybe one day I I would want to actually. It seems pretty fun, is I would have a kitchen in New York
19:47
and I would get it in a really high traffic, high traffic area. And I would just, every three months, try to do a launch. Where I launched, like, a rainbow cheesecake or, you know, I don't even know. I'm just making you're just making stuff up. And then I would even what I would do is I would makes I would do a ton of stuff and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it and see what had the the cheapest cost per click. Right. Yeah. So so so what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle. No embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's gonna rotate every month into a new crazy concoction,
20:22
and people will line up every month to go try the new thing, and you'll build your brand as, like, Willie wonka when he would create you know, now ever last ever lasting gobstoppers or whatever, you know, like, it creates a new
20:33
a new crazy concoction that you gotta go from. It goes a step further. So do you remember Cronet?
20:39
Yeah. So Cronet's got popular in two thousand thirteen. It was invented by a guy named Dominique,
20:44
What's his last name? I don't know what his last name is, but, a French pastry chef. He's, like, a a big name chef.
20:50
But he made Cronet because he likes he was, like, I just wanna and create something new and interesting all the time. And this one just kinda hit. He actually trademarked
20:57
the name Cronut,
20:59
and he is like a purist. He's like an artist. So he didn't actually wanna license to people, but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone. And so there's a step further. So you create the food, and you gotta come up with cute name. And you could actually get a trademark and and there's licensing deals there. So I think this is super fascinating. I think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and a hundred grand or less, they could probably get one or two hits. Right.
21:27
Which
21:27
may not be the right thing to do with your life, but If that's you, if you're like, I'm doing it, great. Great. Good idea. It's definitely fun.
21:34
It seems fun, but yeah. It'll teach you a lot. I think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to to approach you know, food this way.
21:41
Okay. So a couple other opportunities I see here. So I mentioned I think, you know, investing or private equity, I think we'll start scoop up these brands. I think that's one opportunity.
21:50
Second one is I think somebody could could build a kind of guy fieri of Instagram food.
21:55
Character who basically just goes and tries to find the next, you know, who really does make the absolute best, like, oatmeal or whatever. Right? Like, come up with, like, you know, go to every category
22:07
and then just hunt for the best one ever, and then you do the drop on Instagram for, you know, for that brand, for that for that shop. And maybe you you found, you know, the absolute best Philly cheese steak in Philly and then you, you know, you drop that. So I think somebody could create that if they were if that's what if they're foodie and that was their thing.
22:24
The other thing is a little bit more boring, which is like, we've talked about
22:27
cold chain three pl. So basically,
22:30
how the heck do you ship all this stuff,
22:32
and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives? You know, three to five days later,
22:37
across the country. How do you, how do you make it work? And so I think that there's just a bigger, a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics.
22:46
And and I think we've we've heard this a few times now, and I I feel like if somebody's working on that or somebody has one of those, I would love to talk to you just to learn because I think this business is booming, and I think more and more people are gonna go into it. Okay. Do you wanna hear one more food thing that we could we to discuss. Do you remember
23:02
as a kid, seeing these books. I'm pulling them up now called Eat This, Not That.
23:08
No. What is that? Okay. So it was awesome. I loved it. I bought it once just because it was that barn noble, and, it ended up, like, being, like, pretty amazing. Google Eat This Not That. It started as one book,
23:19
like, a almost like coffee table esque book. Right. And on the left side, it says eat this, and on the right side is not that. And so, for example,
23:28
it started as just like a general
23:30
general one, but then they eventually went to, like, desserts, fast food, all types of that, all types of stuff like that. And an example, let's find an example, one that I could say. So it would say eat this,
23:41
Arby's Beef Cheddar Classic, 450 calories 20 grams of fat. Not this.
23:47
Arby's Roasted Turkey Ranch Sandwich, which has 800 calories. And so it shows two things that are quite similar and it says eat this one instead of this one. Right. And if I wanna say eat a salad, don't go to Arby's. It's saying, like, if you're at Arby's, get this one, not that one. Yeah. Or let's see if, like, they have, like, different Denny's breakfasts or,
24:09
like, IHOP versus Denny's or whatever.
24:12
Eat this or, yeah, you get the idea. Right? Yeah. Okay. This is cool. It's are you looking at? You Google it? Yeah. Yes. It's pretty sick. I it's been around since probably 2000 and
24:23
probably 2002. I mean, I I think I bought this when I was pretty young.
24:28
Let's see. There's a whole half a million followers on Instagram, which is like to I think all these old, like, kind of publications,
24:35
like, either magazines
24:36
or or little brands like this, Today, they're all just Instagram accounts. I think that's the way to, like, reinvent these.
24:43
Wow. Okay. So Eat This Not That. As of 2012, had sold eight million copies of the book. Right. And and they spun it up into a magazine and, wow, it's freaking amazing. I'm just pulling this up.
24:58
Here's what I would do right now. Today, if I wanted to get popular on Instagram is
25:02
I would do I would do the same thing just for Instagram. Yeah. Because the whole Eat This Not That, on Instagram.
25:08
Totally. And and the format is so good. It's just a split screen. It has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right, and then it has the nutrition facts about why why one versus the other. I think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on Instagram, and you would grow very quickly. Like, I can see their Instagram right now. It looks kinda shitty. Like, they're not doing a great job. I think you could basically steal this concept, pick a different name and,
25:29
grow a big Instagram account off this.
25:32
Oh, yeah. I was bored. I would do something like this. Yeah. And it's kind of a fun topic.
25:38
I'm I'm reading all about it now. This pretty amazing. I hadn't thought about this in forever. But anyway, there you go. But I think,
25:45
if you did that for six or six or twelve months, you could get hundreds of thousands of followers.
25:50
On,
25:50
Instagram.
25:52
Alright. We'll switch off food. Let's go to something else. What what do you wanna talk about? Do you wanna talk about money real quick, Tiller money? Okay. Yeah. What's this? Have okay.
26:00
Very fascinating.
26:02
Do you you what do you use to track your money?
26:05
I don't use anything to track my money. I use Excel.
26:08
Okay. Everyone says that. Oh, I've talked to. Not everyone, but a lot of people. Here's usually the answer right here. I use mint, or I use personal capital, or I use Right. I have mints, yeah, as well. And what can I ask you, why don't you use mint?
26:23
I used mints back in the day. I mean, I used mint ten years ago. So it's just kinda like one of those things that I don't have a habit of going and looking at. And I don't like looking at, that stuff because it makes me focus on, like, you know,
26:35
expenses and saving money here and there, and I just don't think that's fun. I I don't enjoy that.
26:40
So I'll I I went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about money. Because I usually use personal capital, and I don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now. But
26:49
when I asked, like, ten different people how they track their money, most who I asked, maybe five or six,
26:55
use Excel, which is kinda crazy to me because how many
26:59
how many accounts do you have that you need to track over ten? Yeah.
27:04
Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you're wealthy, you're not wealthy. Most people, like, between if they have a a wife or a husband, you have, like, your checking account, bank account, your four zero one k, your stock stuff,
27:14
maybe your home loan, credit card. Credit card. You probably have two or three credit cards. Typically, I I imagine the average Joe has ten plus. So it's actually a lot to track, regardless if you have money. And everyone I've noticed not everyone. A lot of people have noticed use Excel. So I did some research. There's this thing, and it's not like I've discovered this. I think it's pretty popular already called Tiller Money. And all it is
27:37
The landing page is beautiful, but I'm just fascinated by this business. All it is, it's a if you go to Google sheets and you click tools and then add on, Okay? You'll see the ability to add plugins to Google sheets.
27:50
Okay? Tiller money, all it is is a plugin for Google sheets that costs one hundred to I think it's a hundred dollars a year, and all it does is it automatically imports your bank accounts and any other account into Google sheets and templates that they have, or you can just make your own template. But
28:08
I've never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a Google sheet add on. It's it's incredibly fascinating.
28:17
Yeah. This is good. I like this.
28:19
I think this is
28:20
This of all the, like, kinda money manager things, this appeals to me more because it feels like I'm managing my own money. And, in reality, you know, the thing I'm always worried about is data, like, want my data on all these different services. Like, I'm not gonna try your new finance app because, like, I just don't wanna link my bank account to all this new stuff, but,
28:37
If they could do this where this was, like, self hosted in some way, like, it's just a template,
28:41
that'd be great. It doesn't look like that's the case, but it is sweet. I like it. So if you go to Google sheets right now and you click add ons on the top right, once you're in a sheet, you can see add ons. And I actually just realized I used a few add ons The other add on I I use is called Supermetrics,
28:57
which is,
28:58
it pulls in data from SQL and stuff like that. I'm I bet you they do close to eight figures a year in in revenue, but,
29:07
we've talked about plugins for WordPress.
29:10
We've talked about plugins for
29:12
Chrome,
29:13
Google sheets plugins is another thing that is super, super fascinating to me, and I completely overlooked it.
29:20
It's so neat. And so
29:22
I don't know what else to say other than it's cool.
29:25
So you you added thing that I thought was kinda interesting. That was about open salaries. What what is this, and do you wanna talk about this or or where do you wanna go? I'll let you lead a little bit, but I'll
29:35
I it's so funny. I'll I'll put stuff in here throughout, like, two weeks. And
29:40
I
29:41
three days ago passed, and I'm like, wait, did I write that, or did you write that? So, alright. So we'll do it quick. We'll do it quick. So so you put this thing on here. I got kinda intrigued. So you you open salaries. What is it? It's the idea that, like, today, it's kinda crazy that we don't know what other people make and not in a gossip kind of way, but it's really, you know, the company knows what everybody makes. But the employees don't know. And that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage. You don't know when you're underpaid.
30:08
You don't know if there's any, like, systemic bias and let's say women or minorities are not getting paid as much as, you know, tall white males or whatever. And so,
30:16
it's kinda weird that this is this, like, taboo thing. Nobody talks about it. You're not allowed to talk about it. It's seen as kind of a faux pas, but would actually be to the benefit
30:25
of any employee to know to have transparency
30:27
at as to what people are getting paid. And it can be anonymized, but being able to see what what other people at your role at your company are are getting paid.
30:36
And so you had put this thing on here that Colorado was gonna say that, hey, from twenty twenty one, employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts,
30:45
of any job that could be working Colorado, including remote jobs, which I thought was kind of interesting. And then we have companies like buffer,
30:51
and Whole Foods have been doing this for a while. Buffer kind of tried to, like, make a name for themselves by being like the open transfer company, we'll share everybody's salary. And, like, literally, you can, like, here's a link. You can go and see everybody at buffer's salary. All foods. Let's do
31:05
whole foods, you can see people's salary.
31:08
You put that in there or a braided. I don't know. I haven't seen that one, but I wanted to share a couple interesting things that I I found out to dig into this. So first, check out this this spreadsheet of buffer salaries. I just put it in the chat. So you can click this. Anybody can Google this and find it. You can go and you can see that Joel, the CEO, is making two hundred eighty thousand dollars this year. And you can go see what this is the what his EA is making. She's making eighty nine thousand dollars. And you could just go down the whole company Ross or everybody's salary is public,
31:34
which I think is, like, pretty insane,
31:36
but interesting.
31:38
Then you have things like the Google kinda secret spreadsheets. I don't know if you've seen these, but at big companies, people are starting to, like, just make an anonymous spreadsheet and say,
31:47
Hey, put in your salary and your level and your your location here.
31:51
So we can all, like, have more transparency. You don't have to put your name next to and, they circulated with inside company. So Microsoft had one. Google had one. Facebook had one. And the Google one,
32:01
the the the I forgot who was. Some woman created this. And within two days, ten thousand people had put in their information, and now there's over twenty thousand people in the open Google database. And you can go to Can you link can you link to that? Yeah. It's right here. I have it at the bottom.
32:18
So so So these are kinda cool and,
32:22
and it's interesting how viral these go. So then I was looking at levels dot FYI. Which I know you know about. It's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a place to go see, like, you can go and say, alright. I'm interviewing at Amazon and Facebook, and they they labeled me an l five software engineer located in Bay Area, like, what am I gonna get paid? How much is or I got an offer? I don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer. Did they lowball me? And so you can go on levels at FYI, and it's the same thing. Crowd sourced information about what you make at these different companies.
32:50
And, levels, if you look at their traffic, they're getting about a million and a half visits a month. And, like, there this thing is really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit. So they have, like, job boards now. If you click at the top, they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode, a negotiator as a service. So if you click the top, it's a sick little website where they they have a little calculator that says, you know, what company? Where are you located? How many years of experience? Here's what you're gonna here's what we think you should get paid based on the levels database, which is now in the, I don't know, tens of thousands of entries or something like that. And then they basically say, hey, if you pay us five hundred bucks, We'll negotiate your offer for you. We have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us. And basically, you book a time, you talk about your offer and how you're feeling about it and what you what you really want out of this. And then we'll negotiate for you and they show all these, like, success stories of, like, this person at Facebook got twenty thousand more than their offer. Person got forty thousand more. This person got ten thousand more. And so they're taking and and they just take a flat fee of, like, whatever, five hundred, six hundred bucks, I think. And, so I think there's some interesting stuff going on in this, like,
33:54
transparency
33:55
around what people are making. And it really goes and, like, fits in my values where,
34:01
I think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more. I think it would help everybody if you talked about money more. And it would be less like kinda taboo and less,
34:09
less like a big deep dark secret if people were more open about it. And I think that's what we'll just go. Can I give you a counterpoint for that? Go for it.
34:16
I thought that that was interesting,
34:18
and I'm not saying how I feel because I'm still thinking about it. But
34:22
Leo,
34:23
I forget his name, Leo, but he did it from buffer. The co founder of buffer who no longer works there.
34:31
So buffer started with this whole transparency thing.
34:35
That was, like, their whole shtick, and it worked. Wow. About everything. Users, revenue, salaries, everything.
34:40
It was it was a schtick that got popular amongst bloggers. In particular, there's this guy named, Pat, and he has this blog called smartpassiveincome
34:49
dot com. I used to read it when I was fifteen or sixteen or eighteen, something like that in high school. And he would make money by creating books and doing it a bunch of other side businesses, and he would reveal his income every single month. And other bloggers copied him, and it was a really cool thing. John Lee Doomis did it. All these, like, really cool people did it.
35:08
Buffer did it, and that was their stick to get popular. And it worked because the buffer buffer's product isn't really special. It there's so many
35:17
different versions, and they did it.
35:19
Leo,
35:21
Leo
35:22
said in an interview,
35:23
someone was like, do you this whole transparency thing, it's pretty cool. Like, you guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work? And I believe, I don't wanna quote them because I this I I saw this a year and a half ago, two years ago, but something like
35:35
this works
35:36
now, and it's great for us. But I have a feeling when we get to seventy five, eighty, ninety, a hundred people, it's not gonna work and it's actually gonna hurt us. Big time. And I forget exactly why, but I believe Steve what's that? Man, I'm getting all my names screwed up. Someone else at Apple, like, like, head honcho at apple said something that's similar. He's like, no. The transparency thing, it actually can hurt. It hurts the company after a while. We tried it. And so I actually think that maybe this is good for startups, but it kinda sucks after a long time because, look,
36:05
let's say you own a small business that does twenty million in sales,
36:09
and you're the business owner and you wanna pay yourself three million dollars a year, that's pretty shitty then if you're a fifty thousand dollar receptionist or something, but that's like you're right to do that. Why would you wanna share that with everyone?
36:22
Yeah. As the employer
36:24
It's not great. Right? Buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there's
36:28
it was it was effective growth tactic for them. Hey, if we're open about this, we'll get a bunch of people asking what the heck is buffer and some of them will use it. But, as the employer, it's not great. As the employee,
36:38
it's great. And so that's it depends kinda which side of the coin are you on. Also it depends how far you go. The buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make, bit much. But the Google thing where it's like, hey, look, there's thousands of employees here I need to know that within my level, within my kind of area, am I underpaid, overpaid, or, you know, somewhere in between,
36:58
it gives people peace of mind And I and it gives them, you know, an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information. Information that the other side has that you don't have. So I like it from the employee perspective, and I think it's but I wouldn't go the buffer way of writing everybody's names now at a small company, cool, that kinda happens. But I thought that was
37:20
I think it's kinda cool. I think there's definitely interest around this. So, you know, a couple of little ideas that of things that people could do. So levels f I dot f y I is cool, is working.
37:31
I'm surprised that somebody like, you know, our buddy, Andrew Wilkinson doesn't go by a company like this.
37:36
It's it's kind of an n of one company. It's it has, like, a unique data advantage.
37:40
It's in it does job boards, which he loves as a business model on top of all this traffic that they're getting. And it's kinda like a side project that's probably like,
37:48
you know, reach the max of that of of which, you know, the two guys behind it really can take it.
37:54
The other ways that you could do this, I think you could do this in any vertical. So I don't know. Is there levels of FYI in the, like, hedge fund world or consulting or banking.
38:03
Like, if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this, you should just make the levels that FYI database for your industry, nursing. I don't I don't know. Whatever the industry is that this product can work across those.
38:14
And so I think that's cool. Even within levels, somebody could go further and be like, alright, I'm gonna take product managers or data science and really own that if they were somebody who has a big audience for that. Like, if If that guy, Lenny,
38:27
Lenny, who's got a big blog and and kind of audience around product managers, he could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally. So I think the levels concept could be exported and and done in different areas. When we first launched, like, maybe the first couple months of launching, so we didn't have an audience. And I'm saying this so anyone could do it. We we didn't have an audience.
38:46
I wrote a post called how much money do founders make because I was trying to figure out, like, do I pay myself? Do I not pay myself. Right. Whatever. And if you Google how much money do founders have in their bank account, the hustle, you might see it. And all I did was I took a Google form and I posted it on hacker news, and it went to number one.
39:04
They eventually took it down because I think that goes against their terms of service, like, I have a survey. But I got, like, three or four hundred re replies, and I asked people how much money they have in their checking account, how much they have in their bank account, how much they pay themselves, how much they have in illiquid assets.
39:18
I got hundred, and then what their job title is and where they live. And I got hundreds of replies, and I published
39:23
all the data,
39:26
And I took out any information where you could, like, learn about someone, and people loved
39:31
sharing anonymous information.
39:33
And they loved reading anonymous information. Like, they loved, like, it was amazing. And so I agree. I think it's pretty sick. And it was way oh, there it is. I'll bring you posted it it was way easier to get people's I'm not, like, literally getting their information because it's all anonymous, but people were so forthcoming with us. It was pretty cool and pretty seeing? Yeah. I want somebody to do this with VCs.
39:56
I think most people don't know how much VCs make and all the different people in the food chain, like the GPS versus, like, a partner versus, like, a a set of c eight or whatever.
40:05
And,
40:05
I feel like somebody should, like, kind of crack that egg open and be like, look, here's the here's the numbers. Here's what it is and anonymize it.
40:13
But give people some transparency into what what's really going on. Let's talk about this for a second. So there's two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me. That when we're talking about this, the first is pitch book. You know what pitch book is? Yes. You want me to pay for it? It's so expensive. No. My sister-in-law works though, though. And so every once in a while, she'll she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of, like, to look up.
40:35
No, I don't pay for it because it's really expensive. It's like twenty five thousand dollars, I think.
40:39
So pitch book, it's kinda like crunchbase, but souped up. And so you pay twenty five grand, and you get access to, like,
40:45
a lot of information,
40:47
about privately health companies.
40:49
The second well, let's just talk about pitch book. The reason it's interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks. I don't know which country they're in, but I think the Philippines
40:57
And they literally
40:59
have, like, two hundred people. And they and and by the way, pitchbook is a public to trade company. You can go and read about them. They're owned by morning stars. So you could actually go and see their operations and how they how they work. They're growing like crazy. They're have north of a hundred million in revenue.
41:11
You can they have a team of folks, and what they do is call VCs, and they literally just ask them information, or they call companies. They just ask them information. And for some reason, I don't know how or why. People give them information, and that's one of the ways one of many of ways that they get data. The second thing is this,
41:29
business called is it called the org? Have you is that what it's called? Yes.
41:33
Okay. The org.
41:34
Very interesting because
41:36
in a nutshell,
41:37
the tagline is the org. Transparency starts here. Build a better organization with a public org chart, celebrate your colleagues.
41:45
Basically, that's just kinda crap. Let's not let's not read
41:48
their Yeah. Really, what it is. I mean, I'm sure they do all that nonsense, but It's a fucking It's an org chart. It's a public org chart. Yeah. You pay money and you get access to people's org chart and this helps you know who to email to sell shit to. Right. Exactly.
42:02
And that's cool. Like, there's no I don't know why they don't just say that, but they've raised a a lot of money, like, I think tens of millions of dollars is probably gonna be a monster business. And so I would do two things with the salary thing. One, I would actually hire
42:16
people in the Philippines or whatever and just
42:20
hit it hard and just go out and and hit it hard. And I would trust that a lot of people would be actually pretty pretty
42:25
transparent.
42:27
And the second thing is I would pay wallet kind of like the org, and I would sell this to every HR, department
42:34
in the country.
42:36
So I have a friend that is doing this with Shopify sales. I showed him
42:41
a way to roughly estimate how much a, not roughly. It's pretty good. Estimate how much, how many, how much sales a Shopify store is doing? And,
42:51
What is that one can I get? You don't have to say if it's true. Is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is? That's one of the ways. Yeah. And, that's was one of the best ways. And so I showed him, I said, look, this is this is useful.
43:03
People wanna know what their competitors are doing. And and the second way is you look at the traffic.
43:09
Yeah. You you still need a couple other pieces of information. For example, you need to know how how much the average order is and things like that. But,
43:15
but roughly that that will tell you, you know, how they're doing. And so Now he emails me a report every month that shows me,
43:24
you know, these four companies that I decided, hey, I wanna track these four companies. And he emails the report. This is their sales. This is their social media following. This is how many ads that they're running on Facebook.
43:34
And,
43:35
one other thing, which is, just like the month over changes,
43:38
between those. And I think it's a great idea. So I he was kinda looking for something to do. I told him, look, I think there's a good pivot. I don't know exactly how well he's doing. I should really shout out the name, but I kinda don't remember. Let me look it up while we're doing this, but How'd you find this person?
43:51
He was in my mastermind.
43:54
Let me see what his thing is called. It's called
44:02
Okay. Dramatic pause. Let me figure it out.
44:04
And you came up with the,
44:08
with the
44:10
I told him I was like, look, he because he was like, dude, I'm good with data. I'm interested in this kind of stuff.
44:17
But I also, like, you know, and I also have a team of the Philippines
44:21
and,
44:22
you know, so so I I really like this. Okay. So here it is. So the the website is shop sales data dot com.
44:29
And,
44:30
I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it. He still emails me my report. I hope he's taking more customers right now. But it's a monthly report of Shopify, competitor data in your inbox every month for hundred dollars or something like that a month. Yeah. This is great. I mean, you could do the same with,
44:45
Facebook ad accounts, just like, because Facebook shows everyone their ads. You can say, you know, email me my competitors ads every time they launch a new one. Exactly. And so I think that there's, like, there's some good stuff in this kinda, like, data,
44:57
data based businesses where you're just collecting data from public sources. You're cleaning it up. You're structuring it. And then you're offering it as a service to a bunch of other companies.
45:07
Okay. You wanna do a mini one? Do we have a mini one?
45:11
Yeah. Let's do a quick one. What else we got?
45:17
Do you have anything good of, like, your first week working with the real job?
45:21
It is was my first week, and now it's in my second week, and I'm sitting on a beach in Hawaii. So what you're doing? Having a job
45:30
rock
45:34
I should have done this years ago. I love having a job.
45:41
It's cool, man. HubSpot announced that they had a billion dollars in revenue,
45:44
like,
45:46
run rate. It's pretty amazing. And so there's, like, two things. This is, like, my first, like, real job, or, like, a corporate
45:53
I mean, that's not exactly true. Like, I would have friends,
45:57
like, my friend Neville, who is, like, works for himself he would be like, hey, you wanna go hang out on a Wednesday, like, at noon? I'm like, no, dude. Have a job. Like, so I treat, like, running my company. It was one hundred percent, like, normal. More than a job. It's two jobs. Yeah. It's more than it's I would call it a nine to five. I'm like, yeah. Like, I'm it was, in fact, way more than nine to five, but I was, like, I'm, like, pretty straight, like, get to work at nine. I do my thing. Like, anyway, I shut. So I I tease about this. But, yeah, first, like, corporate job,
46:26
It's
46:28
the it's gonna slow down, but, like, the amount of meetings is pretty crazy, and I told him I'm not doing meetings like this anymore.
46:35
Because I'm gonna make stuff. But I don't know how
46:39
it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done.
46:45
Yeah. I,
46:47
I realized how that works, which is just that managers don't get work done. Managers
46:52
just go to meetings. And then ICs or individual contributors as they're known are the ones who actually, like, sit down and do work because they don't have, you know, back to back meetings throughout the day.
47:04
But I think even Your work is basically just communicating between people.
47:08
But my seven days of working has shown me that even ICs have a lot of meeting.
47:14
Yeah. They should they should they should not have that many. They should have, like, whatever one or two or three a day, but
47:20
they should have, like, you know, somewhere between three and five hours of uninterrupted time. Yeah. Like, so is that a like, I just don't understand how people so, like, I'm telling everyone at my husband, I'm, like, don't no one talked to me for these hours. I had I, like,
47:33
like, and I'm like, this is I and I and I say I say it nicely, of course, but I say, I'm doing this for the better of everyone. Like, I'm gonna make good stuff. So, like, let me go up my hole and you just just don't bother me. Alright. What's been the worst part so far?
47:46
The meetings. Let's be honest. Okay. What what what what me with the meetings boring or just the amount of them? The amount. And also, like, I didn't know what workday is and all this stuff. There's just so much paperwork that I've always had people do for me that I'm having to do.
48:00
What's the worst part?
48:02
You know, like, everyone's like, is having a boss weird? Cause I've never had a boss before? No. I think it's gonna suck after a while, of course, like, having a boss might suck. I'm so pumped. I don't have to, like, I get to just shovel shit onto Kieran's plate that I don't, like, I'm, like, hey,
48:16
you know, we should be hiring this person. Like, I don't have to make that decision.
48:20
I love that. I love that. I think it's awesome.
48:23
So having a boss that has not sucked so far,
48:27
I don't know. What do you think would be the worst part? So I'll tell you if they are. What what was your worst part?
48:31
There's certain,
48:33
meeting types that you have to do that I just found, like, completely soul sucking. One of them was called a calibration meeting.
48:40
It's basically, like,
48:43
even just describing it, you know, gives me some pain here. Basically, it's like you're trying to promote people, but how do you know, like, If every manager has their own criteria for promotions,
48:53
how do you make sure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company? You have to do these things called calibration meetings where you sit down and you basically say, this person's up from promotion or they get they're getting promoted because of this, this and this, and then other person says, Well, you know, I I felt like they weren't, they weren't great at this. So they didn't do a great job with that project, and you have to kinda defend them. For me, it was boring on two levels. One,
49:15
first and foremost, I didn't know anyone else in the company. So I just sat there for three hours not being able to say anything because I didn't interact with any of these people. I just got here. I just got bought. I don't know these people. I can't give any input nor do I have any opinion on if the if the feedback is valid or not. And the second thing, I was just like, wow,
49:32
even after all this talk, like, I still just feel like the person who's the most
49:37
vocal and best salesperson,
49:40
is getting their way. And the person who's not that great at talking is not getting their way. So, like, we could have just skipped all this. Like, it it would have almost been better Had we not gotten into this room and said, you sell your person and you sell your person and you debate this person. It's like the better debater wins in big companies, and I think that that's, like, really crazy. I think we do at our company all the time, which is, like, if it will say out, like, if a speech meeting settles for thirty minutes and And, like, in the meeting, I'm like, okay, I said what I had to say. I don't need to be here anymore. I'm leaving. Or, like, it's very it wasn't considered rude to be like, hey, you need to leave now. You're done. It was, like, kind of a helpful thing. And I'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here. I'm, like, do you guys need me here? Can I can I leave? Right. Or or or or I'll just say, I'm out. You know, I I've said what I need to say. I've heard what I need to heard. You guys can talk.
50:29
I think that on Zoom or whatever. You just sort of, like, you hold up the you wave
50:34
and you click exit.
50:36
The second thing is HubSpot is doing really well.
50:39
And just the software business, and this sounds like just like like, obvious stuff from anyone who's in software, but I've never been at a company like this. Man, if you figure out how to get a if you figure out how to reduce your churn to to very little or or even positive. So for every dollar someone spends, it's above one dollar the next year.
50:59
And you pick a big enough market. It's just magical.
51:02
Like, just now I understand why people are saying like, oh, you know, why is this company valued so high, highly? It's like, well, because sticky revenue, software revenue, so something like I don't know if HubSpot would be considered of this, but something for sure where you're building an entire business off of the when you know that the switching costs are quite high.
51:19
It's pretty amazing. Like,
51:21
software, like, just start a software company. It's so much better than everything else. Like, it's really hard and it's slog early on. But if it really truly if you can get your churn to be right and you pick a big enough market, it's just some if and and you have a and you can figure out how to have a good marketing machine, which all of this is, like, Oh, yeah. If only you could do that. Like, it's
51:40
I know. But, like, you you can kind of figure it out, actually, I think given enough if you if you give yourself, like, five years to figure it out, I think you can.
51:48
Well, I think
51:50
all the things you're saying are true, and they really just point to this one lesson I've learned the hard way over and over again, which is it's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game,
52:01
because if you pick the wrong game, even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path. But if you pick the right game to play
52:10
and whether you become the best or not even the best, but, you know, just kind of the top twenty five percent.
52:15
It's just so much better to win that way. And in this case, like, We've if we've we talk about and we've done different types of businesses, right? We've done
52:23
like, I did social network. I try to make a new social network. It's the wrong fucking game to play, dude. It's so hard.
52:29
So hard. So it's a low chance of probability of success. You did a media business.
52:33
Also hard, hard, you know,
52:36
higher odds of success, but, like, lower size of the price if you could get it right. Way lower size.
52:41
E com, you know, just a fucking pain in the ass, just tons of headaches the time with your supply chain and logistics because you got real world products and you have to, like, ship them all around the world and you're gonna have customers who have returns and, like, things that just, like, are not as easy as software. And so, like, we've and, you know, we talk about all these different, you know, doing a paid newsletter or whatever. Like, There's all these different models.
53:04
And for my money, by far, the best one is to build a software business because a software business can scale. A software business can, like, be improved over time. And, you know, unlike e commerce, when you when you make a crappy e commerce product,
53:18
you know, you go make a better version, the next you know, it takes you six months to make it and then you make it and all those old customers who got the bad products still think you suck. Whereas with software, you push the update and all of a sudden, every single customer has the new best thing. You know, there's all these just tiny advantages and,
53:34
software is the way to go. But We I wanna say something that David Siegel, so we had David Siegel on last time. He had a,
53:41
a billion dollar or close to billion dollar tea business. And I go, David, why are you doing
53:46
brick and mortar stores when he could be doing software, and he said the right thing.
53:50
What did he say? He was like, oh, it's fun. I love selling product.
53:54
And I was like,
53:55
that's the best answer. That is a wonderful answer. And I think that, like, will I ever be able to start an enterprise software company? I think that if I was going to, Udi, there have to be very soon or even a few years ago. Like, you have you I would you have to do it. I think when you're, like, really, like, money is the one number one thing that's like, I gotta get paid. I gotta get my hit. And, in that case, yeah, I would do anything to make money.
54:18
But
54:20
where I am now and where I think where a lot of people are is you have really it's it's I agree with everything you said, but you have to add the and also
54:28
not like passionate about, but what what what excites you enough to that you're willing to get good at it over a decade. Right. We'll float your boat. Alright. So let's take you. Okay.
54:38
You're happy at HubSpot. Everything's great. You're gonna be there for for twenty years. We know that alternate reality you know, we all know you're happy to help spot. You'll be there for two decades. It's great.
54:48
It's, you know, sunshine and rainbows.
54:50
Let's say alternate reality. They fire you tomorrow.
54:53
You're gonna go build something else.
54:56
Where do you think you would go build? Would you do what you're would you go media? Would you go something totally different. Would you go software? What do you think you would do? Everyone's gonna laugh at me because I say trucking, but I would do some maybe something
55:08
something in the agriculture
55:10
space. Yeah. I think AgTech is is a AgTech is interesting.
55:15
I think that's the most interesting. I had a great call with this guy who I'm gonna, we gotta have this guy in the podcast. His name's,
55:24
his his son's name is Jordan, I can't remember, Rob.
55:27
Van Trump. It's called the Van Trump report.
55:30
So Van Trump report, it's this guy who has a newsletter that does twenty million dollars a year in subscription revenue. He's the only writer, and he was telling me all about ag tech. Do you know what ag tech stands for? Yeah. Agricultural tech. And he was just saying all types of, like, what's going on. And I think working with, like, middle America
55:50
people who, whether they're rich or not, they're more humble and they create things that actually impact the world, like, get food to you. I would do something in that space. Or
56:00
but I would start another media company.
56:03
But, okay, let's say you go into ag tech, art, and you're you're probably gonna be open and whatever, you know, you'll think of it then. But knowing what you know now, Would you do media in agriculture? Would you do,
56:13
you know, something with actual farms and and logistics? Would you do ten technology, hard, you know, trucking, the actual self driving trucks, would you do,
56:21
a job thing? Would you what what would you what model would you be wanting to do in that case. Well, okay. So
56:28
I don't like this question because it could it'll change every single day you ask me. But as of right now, I would start a blog with a in the ad text space, and then eventually I would turn it into a database. Kinda I like this this company, the org.
56:41
I think I could create something like, the, a database that's better.
56:46
And I yeah. That's what I would do. Okay. Nice. So I think that's what I would do as right now. That that fascinates me, or I would create,
56:54
do you know what Tiger twenty one is?
56:56
Isn't that, like, a, like, a kind of conference or club or mastermind thing or something. It's like a club for people who have investable assets north of ten million dollars and it costs thirty grand a year. It's and they have, like, a thousand people who are subscribed.
57:09
And, my friend joined, and I looked at the back end, and it was horrible. And I was, like, oh, I'm just gonna clone that.
57:15
And what do they do with the with the members? Is it events or is it,
57:20
it's like
57:21
both, but, like, they create, like,
57:24
like, little, like, safe communities where, like, you meet in groups of ten and you kinda show off your portfolio and people criticize you. And, like, try to defend make you defend your position so you get better.
57:36
But it's it got bought by private equity, so it makes a lot of money.
57:39
Alright. That's cool.
57:43
Uh-huh.
57:46
Yeah. I feel like I could rule the word I know I could be what I want to.
57:51
I put my all in it like the days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back.
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