Encarta | 6 Retro Business Ideas That Could Be As Big As LEGO ($11.8B)

00:00

Alright. This is a fun episode. Sam started doing Legos, and that sent us down this rabbit hole where he discovered two businesses that I'd never heard of. I guarantee you never heard of it. They're awesome businesses in the Lego niche of all things. And then we brainstormed

00:12

other things that people could do around these passionate niche audiences

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that most people overlook. Love it. This is an MFM classic MFM special. If you like this podcast, you're gonna love this one. And I also had, like, an epiphany about forty five minutes in. That kinda changed the way I think about this podcast. So that's that's what I got out of this episode, Sam, what did you get? So while researching this stuff, There is a ton of twists and turns to the story, the background story of how these companies started. I want you guys to listen to them. It doesn't happen. It's the second story involving Lego. Know exactly what I'm talking about when we get there. It's about two thirds of the way into the episode. I got emotional researching this, and I actually want you guys to, like, listen to the topics the companies that we brought up. I want you to go to their websites and see what I'm talking about. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you get to the the part of the episode. And let us know in the YouTube comments if this actually got to you. Like, it got to me. I dug it. It was tons of, like, weird parts of the stories that I did not expect to happen. Anyway, check it out and let us know in the YouTube comments if you actually dug this because I think you will and which parts of the stories you like best.

01:18

What is up? Sean here with Sam,

01:21

Your boys who are stuck at three hundred and ninety nine thousand YouTube subscribers,

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they said we'd never get to four hundred. In fact, they're still saying we'd never get to four hundred. So do you see this tweet that went viral that goes? To all my haters said I wouldn't make it. I didn't make it. They were right. Honestly, you could call by the haters.

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That's like a legendary tweet.

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I love that stuff. Yeah, we're at three ninety nine.

01:47

The I I read every YouTube comment to you.

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Read and reply, bro, not to everyone, but I I reply, like,

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it's like, I'm in line at a coffee shop. I'll just go through and go through a whole episode and try to reply as many as I can.

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Yeah. So, if you're listening and you're not on YouTube,

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do do your boys a favor and just click subscribe. It means a lot to us. It costs you nothing.

02:09

And, we've got a good episode today. We have we last time we talked, we both had the same topic written down.

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We did it again. It happened again this time. Before we get into the episode, I gotta tell you something.

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How big is your house, square footage?

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Fifty six hundred I'm in a house right now,

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visiting family, so I rented an Airbnb for two weeks.

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My home, my normal home, in Austin, is just a little over two thousand square feet. It's not big. It's nice, but it's not big. I'm currently renting a seventy five hundred square foot house.

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I am losing

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so much stuff. This is such a big house.

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I think that even fifty five would be too big for me. Do you like having a big house like that? Yeah. It's great. What's not to love?

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I'll tell you. One, the utility bill here, if I had to guess, it's like two thousand a month. What's your utility bill? Well, you're in California. So you don't really use too much of interest. I don't I don't look. But everything's on autopay and I don't even wanna look. I just probably liked twelve hundred, fifteen hundred dollars, I guess. Wow. Okay. So that's expensive. But whatever,

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but the other thing, things break all the time. Like, there's seven bathrooms here. And, like, one of the the guy has, like, a jacuzzi thing in one of his bathroom. It's not working. I don't and are you going in using all seven bathrooms? That's you don't you don't use half the shit. The shit. That's the trick.

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That's how it breaks. That's how it breaks. You just don't use it. And so, anyway, I I wanted to buy a big home eventually, and I'm happy I'm testing this out. It's such a big house. I understand the downsides to it of just, like, fixing things. It's a pain in the butt. Well, here's my here's my my rule. Number of humans

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plus two.

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That's how many beds that's how many bedrooms I want in my house. Number of humans plus two bedrooms.

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And one of those bedrooms turns into Mancave,

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like, where I have this studio here right now. This is one of the bedrooms we just converted, and the other one's a guest room. Now my kids are small right now, so they're, like, all sleeping in the same bed and stuff like that doesn't really

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help. But as they get older, that rule is gonna come into effect.

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Yeah. And I think maybe my needs will change, but I just wanted to test out a big house. I'm shocked by how much I dislike so far. I like I like it once you tell us everything about that. Most people don't do this at all, and you do it a lot, which is where do I wanna live? Do I wanna live? Do I wanna live in a city? Do I wanna live in the suburbs? Do I wanna live in a big house, small house, near water, you know, what matters to me? Because I think a lot of people have these predefined

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ideas that are completely based on nothing, no evidence. And, I really take a lot of inspiration from the way you test out lifestyles. You

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prototype

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like, how you wanna live, and,

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more people should do that for sure. I I do it all the time. And the reason I do it is because if you think about renting a really fancy Airbnb for a week. It could be expensive. Let's just say it's a thousand dollars a night or more. So let's just say let's round up and say it's ten grand for a week. That's expensive. But you know what's more expensive buying a home that you only see for twenty four hours and or through a one hour tour and being, like, cool. This is my place now for the next ten or twenty years. That's way more expensive.

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Honestly, you start to lose a little trust in yourself. It's like, oh, I thought this would make me happy. It turns out I didn't even like this. Right?

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I'm not listening to that guy anymore. And by the way, you don't have to be rich to do this lifestyle testing. Like, I was doing this

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when I had, you know, no no money because Well, I didn't have

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it's all relative to where you're at. Right? So it's where do I wanna live? I would move to like, I would do a road trip, but we would drive to another place. Live on a friend's couch, but we would live there for two weeks and just kinda see, okay.

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What's it like in this place? Like, where I tried Chicago, then I tried in Colorado. That, you know, I just tested out different places in order to see where do I wanna be. And, I think that's a very smart way to to go about things. You wanna talk about Legos, my man? Let's talk about Legos.

05:54

Can I introduce this category with which is the following? You text me and you go, dude.

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I'm playing a ton of Legos. What? And it's like, yeah. Every night, I'm playing Legos. Do you do this? And I was like, no. I don't do this. But I know a bunch of other people that do, and it caught my attention because I'm not sure if you know this, but this is kinda becoming this, like,

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trendy thing. So there's a bunch of, like, NBA players that kinda came out of the closet saying, yeah, this is what I do. I think, you know, the closet. Yeah. You know, the reputation for NBA players were all out at the Shrip club after games. And whenever And there's, like, this guy Miles Turner. He's, like, I'm building, like, replica Star Wars, like, you know, death stars with with my Legos at night and four or five hours a night. And I got kinda interested. So I looked at By the way, in college, I I lived with the basketball team in college, they were the biggest nerds of all the athletes.

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Like, they they didn't go out. Giving them wedgies, six, seven wedgies.

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Well, like like a Friday night was playing video games. Like, it it was, like, they were the least party animal of all the athletes. Alright. I want a quick break to tell you about Hubspot, and this one's easy because I'm gonna show you an example of how I'm doing this my company. When I say, I, I mean, not my team. I mean, I'm the one who actually made it. So I've got this company called Hampton. You could check it out join hampton dot com. It's a community for founders And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys, but we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are all these, like, interesting questions, and then we'll put it in a survey, and I went and made a landing page. So you can check it out at joinhampton

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dot com slash wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a a higher end customer sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari, so I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. Hubspot has templates. That's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy. They have this drag and drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information, and I can then see over the next handful of weeks This is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from. So it came from Twitter. It came from LinkedIn. Whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it and I can say, oh, well, that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that. Do less of that. And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it. But you could check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright. Now back to MFM.

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So do you know what this category is called?

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Is it call the is it the acronym that starts with an a?

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No. No. No. They call them they call people like you K adults.

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The toy industry, they call you guys, adults, and adults,

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or eldertainment

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is the name of this group of people that are adults buying kids toys. And that sounds like a pretty fringe thing, but it actually makes up twenty five percent of all toy sales. So billions and billions of dollars. One one of one out of every four people that go by, you know, let's say a set of Legos is gonna be an, you know, a a older teenager or adult. And But you know what they call it for? Specifically for

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specifically for Legals, it it's called, I don't it's one of those words that I've seen, but I don't know if you're supposed to you're supposed to say it, but a f o l, adult fan of Legos. That's they're you're self identified as an a f l o.

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Actual fucking old Lego makers. Yeah. So so this, this

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category

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like, it's based up all the growth in the toy industry. So toy industry, if you look at how fast it's growing, sixty percent of all the growth is just coming from this one segment it's like this, like, kind of this segment that's growing really fast. At first, I didn't understand it, but then they did some surveys. Right? Because all the toy companies were like, what's going on here? We do this is not what we planned for. So several years ago, they commissioned a bunch of studies, and they they went and asked, why are you doing this? And I'm I'm curious if you're gonna say the same thing. Because ninety percent of the adults all said the same three reasons that they do it. What are your reasons, Sam?

09:55

Bonding with my family. Well, in my family, it's my wife.

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No no screens, and we could just sit at the table and do it together while we're just talking. And maybe there will be TBR in the background background, but it's basically bonding without screens sitting at the table, and it reminds me of my childhood.

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That's exactly right. The, the three word nostalgia, which you just said,

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anti loneliness, so bonding with with whoever you're you're doing it with and detoxing from from phone as well as kinda like an anti anxiety angle to it. Like, is a real relaxed a relaxing activity. Because I'm following directions. I'm I'm just following the directions. I'm not making any decisions. I'm doing what I'm that's interesting. Oh, okay. I thought it was kind of the hands part of it, but you're saying as an adult, I'm constantly having to make decisions and think. And it's so nice to not make decisions and just be told, put this blue thing over here. Yeah. It's like, it's like,

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a PG rated dominatrix.

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You know? Like, instead of spitting in my mouth, he's telling me to, like, connect these these two pieces. Yeah.

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Some people

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You're into that stuff. Alright. To each his own.

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And so this is fascinating to me. So I want you to tell me I have some more ideas around

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like, more exam I have a bunch of examples around this trend and some ideas of what I think people could do. But before we do that, I just wanna know, what are you what are you actually doing? So you're buying Lego kits, like, which ones.

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And what do you what do you do?

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So Lego is a huge company. So that I think they do about ten billion dollars a year in sales. It was started in, like, the twenties by just an engineer.

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And now they have got they've got movies, characters. It's like a it's like a marvel almost. It's, like, a a whole franchise.

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I particularly like the line called Technics. And Technics is cool because it's basically you'll build cars or tractors

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or,

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a bridge, and there's gears within the machine. And so I'm learning how, like, you know, like, in the snow, when,

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old cars, when you spin your tires, only one tire would spin some time. That's because of a rear,

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differential. That's like a mechanical piece. And so I'm, like, building that and I'm understanding how a transmission works. I'm building I built a Land Rover that has six, six speed transmission.

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And I see how how gears work. And so it's really fascinating to me to see these moving parts. So I build techniques. I've probably spent fifteen hundred dollars on them so far. Each one is between one fifty and three fifty. And I buy only the Technics one. That that's my thing. And you're

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you finish them at one sitting or these are like multi week?

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No. I I want a week. So, but it'll take I'll sit for two hours And if my wife's not with me, I'll listen to a podcast or something, and I'll just sit there for two hours assembling it from, like,

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nine to eleven. Does you and the voice of Scott Galloway?

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Yeah. I'm just, like, I'm listening to, like, some war story. So it's, like, just, like,

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Me and Benito Musoliti as I build this land rover. Like this, like, six inch tractor?

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I love, by the way, how you're like, yeah, I built a six, you know, a six speed transmission.

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It's like, no. No. No. You didn't You really do.

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I feel like you got a lot of confidence from this that, like, I could. Just came down to it right now. Good. And,

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I don't think you could, man.

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13:11

alright. So you're doing this. Is this a fad or you think this is, like, a lifelong hobby for you? What are you what are you thinking?

13:17

Lifelong. I could see it being lifelong. Oh, wow. Yeah. I could And what do you do when you're done? You finish the the six speed tractor, whatever. What are you gonna do with this? So one of the companies that I'm gonna bring up, but basically, you can tell this company that I'll I'll break down and explain what sets you have, and you just destroy them and you rebuild them using different plans. And so you can make alternative items out of them. And so that's what I intend to do.

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Okay. Alright. They're not gonna sit on a shelf. I'm not gonna be, like, the forty year old virgin and have,

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like, the dolls and packages still. I'm used. No. I it it really is a enjoy the journey type of thing. So once I'm done with it, I'm like, I don't care about it. Okay. Good.

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So I wanted to bring up a couple other examples because I I saw this and I was like, oh, that's weird. That's interesting about Legos.

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And I was like, no. There's something to this, like,

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kidults behavior, right, where adults

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buying and doing kid things that is, you know, anti phone, anti loneliness,

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and, and nostalgic.

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And,

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I'm gonna give you some examples of of trends that are like this. So the first is calm.

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We're both friends with the the founders of Com, Alex, and Michael. And I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day,

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calm was really struggling. Today, calm was, like, kind of very popular. It's a multi billion dollar company. But back when we were living in San Francisco and hang out with Alex,

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calm was, like, small. It was a slow grower. It was not sexy. Nobody wanna do it. Well, it was kind of a joke, like, a meditation app. Are you kidding me? And Alex is very jokey. And the other things he built, like, million dollar home page were all jokes. So it's kinda like, oh, cool. And the other guy built, like, a stuffed

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animal before that.

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Yeah. So they're they were definitely, like, non serious serious entrepreneurs. They

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but I remember one time talking to Michael. So Michael came to visit from London, and he's like, I was like, so what do you do with comp? Cause you're not even here full time Alex is sitting in his apartment grinding away at this thing that's not really going too fast, growing too fast. What are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm work I work on new products. And I'm like, dude, this is not, like,

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you know, he looks at Richard Branson. I was like, this is not Virgin Atlantic. What new products? He's like, no. No. I got a great one because,

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I wanna do,

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bedtime stories for adults.

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And I was like, what? He's like,

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no. No. No. I I was like, that's okay. Whatever. Marketing stunt, I guess. He's like, no. No. I think this is gonna be a thing. He goes, peep people are gonna, like, it's like a lot of adults, they listen to things before they sleep. To help them relax and help them actually, like, fall asleep. But they're not done very well. Do you?

15:49

Yeah. I do sometimes. I have, like, I have, like, a version of white noise that I sometimes listen to, or I'll just listen to podcasts at fall asleep, which is not the same thing. But, there's like a relax people want a relax a relaxation thing. In fact, I think one of the top podcasts in the world is just, like, eighteen hours of sleep sounds.

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And it's, like,

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I listen to family guy when I go to bed and I just hear, like, Peter, like, I just hear that. Go to sleep. Yeah. I'm a family guy. She went to sleep. Exactly.

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And so He's like, I'm gonna do the same. They ended up being sleep stories, and sleep stories were

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one of the things that really let calm take off. It, like, exploded after sleep stories. In fact, I would say that calm is it's less about meditation. It is more about the state of being calm, and, really, the number one product is the sleep stories. And he they got Matthew McConaughey to narrate this, like, bedtime story. And he was hosting I don't know if you remember this in San Francisco. He would before to prototype this, he was hosting parties in San Francisco where you would go to this woman's house, and you would lay down on her carpet,

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and you would have, like, a pillow, and they would, like, set the mood, and then she would and put you to sleep, and then everybody would go to sleep. And, it was the most San Francisco thing ever. And these were that was, like, a party. It was, It was like a networking event. It was, like, it was amazing. And so is gonna have toy or you're saying the the toy is the No. I'm saying this is part of the same thing. Like, adults using adults using kid product basically. So bedtime stories for adults. That's another version of Yeah. You know, adults using Legos. My family member I have family members. I won't even say who they are. They might be embarrassed to go to sleep to calm bedtime stories. And what's embarrassing about that? It's awesome. I don't know. I don't know. You you never know. I'm not gonna add someone.

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So there's also, like, moon pals and squish melos. Have you seen these? Yeah. I know move. They're, like, basically giant stuffed animals, but they're geared more towards adults than they are for kids. And you see, like, you know, twenty four year old girls in the Bronx who, like, have, like, a, you know, like, a moon pal that they carry around. So, like, safety blanket.

17:48

Funko pop. Is that was that what it's called? What's the funko? Fonco is a publicly traded company. You know that? No. They're they're they're, like, a four hundred million dollar,

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market cap company during during COVID, when everybody was stuck at home and people started just spending money collecting or buying crypto or doing whatever, funko was, like, over a billion dollars because they were so many of these figuring doll thing. Figuring, like, dolls. That's all it is. Yeah. It's just like a little a little toy Got it.

18:14

Toy figure, action figure, no action, I guess, just just toy figurine.

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That, has an oversized head. And we

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that's funny. We had talked about mini brands as well. Like the company mini brands that makes a miniature

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I don't even, like, Coke cans.

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The those are insane too. Another one. Have you ever been to Buildebear?

18:37

Dude, they they kill it. Yeah. I've taken a nephew there.

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So Buildebear is like thing in the mall where you go build a teddy bear, it's usually, like, you know, it's four kids.

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You know that forty percent of their revenue now comes from adults?

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That's insane. That's insane. And they call it Buildabear after dark. They basically, like, open up at late hours and let adults come in and basically, like, you know, do it as a date activity and stuff like that. It's crazy.

19:01

There's Same with the, American doll. You know, I don't know if you you had sister. So you would know American dial, but I bet RA knows American dial or had an American dial. American dials still crush it.

19:12

You know what American dial is? No. Is that not Barbie? Is that something else? It's different. It's a doll that's

19:18

maybe three foot tall. It back then, they would cost a hundred fifty dollars. So it was a big deal. And there it was sort of like GI Joe, but for girls, and there was, like, an American Dow

19:28

student. And so it looked like a little girl who was going to Harvard or American doll astronaut or something like that. It was, like, themed, but they were supposed to be more high end than a Barbie and more collectible, I think. American doll only fans creator. Oh, they have, like, new new genres. That's great. So they so

19:48

there's there's just like, like, even Barbie, by the way, do you know the bar you know how the Barbie movie came about? Because, like, the Barbie movie is not not geared towards kids. Right? Like, if you've seen it, it's it's not a it's not a kid's movie, really. It's an adult. It's, like, geared towards adults, and that this is the reason why they act Bar Barbie, the company actually created an internal

20:07

movie production company. To create this movie,

20:11

year towards adults, to help sell more dolls into this kidult,

20:16

like,

20:17

segment. And so there's those marketing stunt for that. Which is kinda crazy when you think about it. I didn't realize that about the Barbie movie.

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But, like, there's also tabletop gaming. So you know those guys from Churnin,

20:27

They've made it, like, big bets on tabletop gaming, which is basically board games and adults play. They have, like, exploding kittens and they have some other ones, but That's another genre. Even McDonald's came out with an adult happy meal. I don't know if you saw this last year. Just a hilarious, like, they made a bigger box with full size fries and an adult toy. And they did this last year, and it was, like, this viral marketing stunt that went crazy because everyone's, like, oh, dude. I wanna go get one. And, like, with Viral on TikTok and stuff like that, brands are really capitalizing on this. So I have a few ideas I wanna pitch pitch you. I want you to tell me You can just give me a,

21:02

genius or idiot on these. This is sort of like a mini drunk ideas upset for you. Alright. Alright.

21:08

First one.

21:10

You know how you've seen the stats how millennials are just, like, not getting married and not having babies? Like, it's, like, a lower rate than ever before.

21:18

Yeah.

21:19

Tamagotchi's

21:21

for babies.

21:22

So, basically,

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you give you give that twenty eight year old who's single and whatever. You give them a tamagotchi, that's a baby that they gotta keep. They gotta raise, and they gotta take care of. Like, Tamagotchi's, I think, we're pets.

21:33

Screw it. We're just doing an actual human baby. You gotta take care of this thing. And it literally

21:39

is the same level of, like, same same, like, hourly needs

21:44

as a baby. And let's see what you got. So Toma got you for babies. That's my first one. So the problem with these ideas is if you would have told me about the things that are successful now that they, like, this is this is good to work, I would have said those are all horrible ideas. Correct. So this is like a really challenging category. That's why I prepped you by telling you all the ones that worked before I told you my bad ideas just to kind of, like, frame me, like, prime me for, like, hey. I don't know, man. Anything's possible. So do I think Toma yes. I think I think there there'd be legs for Tamagotchi. What what happened to the company?

22:16

Dude, I have no idea. What's Tamagatchi?

22:18

It's a it's a Japanese business. Yeah. It's a it's based in Japan. Yeah. I I'd I'd believe that a Tamagatchi for babies who are. It's a standalone device. That's gonna replicate having a baby. Alright. That's number one. Number two, do you ever use connects?

22:31

Yeah. Love connects. You ever build a big ferris wheel?

22:34

No. Because connects were hard, and I had a cousin. I have a cousin who's the same age as me.

22:39

Looks like me. Last name, Puri, and

22:43

This guy's way smarter than me. And I I'm pretty sure the reason he's way smarter than me is that his dad bought him connects when he was a little kid. And he was just making connects all day every day after school. I was playing DreamCast, and he was building Connect. Guess what he does now. I have a podcast.

22:57

He builds, like, self driving cars. This guy is a genius.

23:01

So, like, I'm pretty sure Connexus is the, you know, the number one contributing factor to this guy being a genius. Dude, listen to this. Connexus was sold in two thousand eighteen for only twenty twenty one million dollars. I know. I know crazy. What I don't what is it? How is Lego, like, a fifty billion dollar company in Connect

23:17

sold for twenty one million dollars? Like, what happened here? When you were describing the Lego techniques, it's very similar. So connects. The difference was that it was more kinda like a STEM kid thing where it's like science y and Matthew where it's like you, you know, you have these, like, little, like, rotating wheels and mo it's almost like a motor that you're creating. It's like a high functioning version of Legos. That's how I describe you, by the way. You're you're you're you're a high functioning version of a Lego. That's basically you.

23:45

But and so I think connects should just, like somebody should just reboot connects,

23:52

target it at as a for adults that wanna do legos, basically. The guy's like you. The literally connects for Sam par. That's my next idea. Go ahead.

24:00

Yeah. I'm in. That's a that's a no brainer. I'm in. So Connexus was acquired in two thousand nineteen,

24:06

and they're basically

24:07

not that existent anymore because of because of a bunch of tariffs,

24:11

something like where they couldn't do portum. But,

24:14

yeah, I mean, I think that's awesome. I think they sold a bunch through, like, Toys R Us and then Toys R Us went bankrupt, and I think they lost a bunch of revenue there. So I think just Hey. A little bad luck. You know, unfortunate bounce of the ball there. And I I I feel like Connect still is a good opportunity. Alright. Here's my next one. Alright. What else?

24:30

Easier Rubik's cube.

24:33

Can you do a Rubik's cube? No. I can't. I cannot. Can you kinda wish you could?

24:37

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what we used to do is just take the stickers off.

24:43

You take the stickers off And then you put them all back in the right place and you could brag that you did it. Oh, okay. Gotcha. You can also buy it new, and it's done. So,

24:53

What's the easiest party trick you could do? Like, I can juggle. Can you do anything like that? Yeah. If I smoke a cigarette, I could blow smoke out my ear.

25:03

Really?

25:04

I swear to god. Yeah. I've had all these your ear? I've had all these surgeries in my ear. And so, like, some pipes got rerouted, and I used to be able to blow smoke out my ear.

25:14

Dude,

25:15

how do we not start every podcast with that? Come on.

25:19

Handbag in us. We we would be at four hundred thousand subscribers.

25:23

But, dude, solving a roommate's q cube is a close second, though.

25:27

Alright. Easier Rubik's cube. So I think Rubik's cube fun little idea. It's kinda like a fidget spinner anyways, the way that the Rubik's cube feels. However, too hard, way too hard. And we get it. If you could do a rubik's cube, that's fantastic. That's chess. Where's checkers?

25:41

I need a checkers of rubik's cubes. And so

25:44

Here's what I'm thinking. Letters on the outside, and it's kinda like wordle. Wordle is a very fun game, simple game. You play every day. You could build a daily habit.

25:52

I think somebody needs to take the concept of wordle, but put it in the form factor of a rubik's cube where every day you get a notification on your phone or there's a website that posts the starting letter combination, and then you gotta rotate it to make the word. And it should take, like, five minutes. It's like, you know, Do you play the New York Times mini crossword?

26:12

No, do you? Every day. This thing's amazing. It's such a fun it's sixties it's literally like a sixty second break. It's a game. It's a crossword. Crosswords are kinda fun, but a real crossword crossword was pretty hard and time consuming. And that when New York Times made this mini, It that thing drives, like, millions of dollars. Like, it's, like, I don't know, ten percent of New York Times' revenue comes from this little game app, and it's mostly The New York Times mini crossword. This thing is an absolute hit product.

26:39

Alright. I have two more.

26:41

Candal pouring kits.

26:43

So another thing that is highly tactile, highly satisfying leaves you with a result, a candle.

26:49

Candle pouring is something I see a lot on TikTok. I don't know exactly how it goes or how it works, but I'm pretty sure this could be another, like, adult

26:57

arts and crafts relaxation

26:59

thing that that is accessible to many. And results in you actually having something that's not just clutter and junk in your house, because you could just light the candle, use it, melt it down, and then you're done. So I think a candle pouring kit, company could do pretty well. Dude, I'm in on that one because you'd wanna buy one. You you'd wanna continually buy them if you got into it. Right?

27:19

Yeah. And candles make a ton of money. Like, go look at the candle MLMs

27:24

if you wanna know what products work, go look at what MLMs work and, work backwards from there. So there are several multi level marketing schemes that are based around candles, which tells me there's a a giant market for candles. Tell me one more, and then I wanna blow your mind with a Lego story. Okay.

27:40

I'm now seeing what I wrote here, and I have no idea what this means. So I'm gonna just take this as a, as a blank canvas for myself.

27:47

Relaxation

27:48

puddle.

27:49

I don't know what I meant when I wrote this. This is late last night.

27:54

I think what I oh, I think what this is is, like, my kids, one of the things you do with kids is you give them something called, like, sensory play. So you buy this, like, box

28:04

and you put in, like, Orbeez or you put in these, like, gel circle things. You put your hand in. It's got this cool sensation. It's like it's like very cold. You they're like these, like, balls that you can kind of like, you know,

28:16

you know, you could touch a feel, but they're not like,

28:19

it's like slime. You know, slime's really popular for kids. There's, like, all these things that are very tactile. Plato.

28:24

And so you I think what I was thinking here is is very relaxing if you put your hands in this thing. What if you could put your whole body in this thing? I think is what I was thinking. It's more like those

28:33

those sensory deprivation tanks that people like to do in San Francisco,

28:37

and maybe other places as well. I'm not sure.

28:40

But something you could just go lay in, and it's, like, a super nap is really where my head was going. I'm trying to, yes, and you, but it's really hard

28:48

when the premise is a relaxation puddle.

28:52

Yeah. The word puddle is so underrated,

28:55

actually.

28:56

Sounds great.

28:57

Has all kinds of jokes and commentators, very memeable word.

29:01

And I think that's what you want with any of these. You want the idea to be so stupid

29:05

that you get maimed into popularity.

29:08

You understand what I'm saying here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna do. You're gonna do it. It's gonna sound ridiculous,

29:13

and ninety five percent of America wants to make fun of you.

29:17

But then that those articles go out, those memes go out.

29:20

And then five percent of people are like, I don't know. I'd try it. Right? Like, you remember when that thing happened that, like, guys were laying on their back and they were, like, sun tanning their butthole, you know, that's the new thing.

29:32

I don't even think that was a thing, but I think there was someone behind that that was like, you know what? We'll get rid of everywhere automatically

29:38

overnight. If I say that this is a thing, I've got this friend Chris who would send me so many photos of you to see his legs, like, as if he's halfway closed with his legs in the air. And he's like,

29:50

Just say his last name. He deserves it for doing that. Just being healthy.

29:55

Let me say, like, Crokshaw like this. Right? They're intentionally ugly.

29:59

They're intentionally so ugly. You have to talk about them. And the design, like, stands out in a not so good way, but the result of it is that,

30:06

you know, gets talked about.

30:08

Yeah. Like, you just gotta figure out what the fuck a relaxation puddle is first.

30:14

You're just starting with the words. Let me tell you two crazy stories. The second one is, in particularly crazy, and I think you're actually gonna dig it because it it's gonna revolve around your world.

30:25

So I'm a Lego fan. I I like doing Legos now. It's my new thing. There's this website called rebricable.

30:31

So rebricable is this amazing website. It clearly started by an engineer. I think his name is

30:36

actually, I don't know what the guy's name is who started it, Nathan. I think his name's Nathan. So Nathan, was,

30:42

just an engineer at some company, normal job in Australia. He started his website that he it's actually quite complicated. And what you do, there there's tens of thousands of Lego kits, you know, and it's been around for a hundred years. So there's probably hundreds of thousands of different types of Lego kits. Kids, you tell it what type of Lego sets you have And then other designers, so people who are Lego fans, have created directions on how to build their own creations. It's called an MOC, my own creation, and it's a whole community of people who build MOCs.

31:12

And he has roughly thirty thousand people who have uploaded a variety of MOCs that you can buy from ten dollars, probably all the way up to a hundred dollars.

31:21

And what's interesting about this guy, there there's so many

31:25

crazy business implications here. But what's interesting about this guy is, a, he's an engineer. And the the the the people who listen to this podcast. There's a bunch of engineers out there. There's a huge overlap by Ben Diagram of Lego enthusiasts.

31:37

And this guy adds a third circle to that Ben diagram of business people. And so, basically, it had he reveals all of his stats online. And you could go to his blog and you could see it. He started this company, I think, in two thousand and ten, and it was just a project. I looked at his LinkedIn. He worked as a full time, had a full time job since two thousand, until two thousand twenty. And he reveals every year how much page views that the website has had, how many registered users it's had, how many people are selling products on there. So it's basically a marketplace.

32:06

And so in two thousand twenty three, he had eleven million users create an account on his website, which is Wow. Which is huge. And so if you account for, let's say, three percent of people buy something, that's three hundred and thirty thousand people, or sales. Who have bought an MOC. So someone's directions on building something. Say the average sale is about fifteen bucks. That's about five million dollars in revenue that he's, collected.

32:28

And, of course, he gives a lot to most of it to the designer. But there's people who have whole, like, stores on the website, and it's really fascinating. And his page views last year, two thousand twenty three, were around a hundred and sixty million page views. And if you look at his website, he blogs every year. And he says what his stats are, how many pages he's had he has. And it's a very interesting

32:49

blog to read because, a, he's being transparent about the business. And, b, You could see how to build, like, a rabid community. So on his blog, and it's clearly a self built blog. He's not even using WordPress. He built everything from scratch. You'll see the comments saying, I love this community. I'm so into,

33:05

rebrickable.

33:06

Like, Nathan, you're the man. Like, people are are are rabid about this niche. It's incredibly fascinating. And this type of guy, I'm just gonna stereotype him. He's not a business savvy person, or at least he doesn't want to be. Like, he's not out there trying to milk this stride and make as much money as possible. But this type of business that he has, once you get users to a passionate following like this to your website, you can sell them anything. And so what Andrew Wilkinson calls us is an airport business. So once you're there, well, while you're here, we could tell you this, we could tell you It's people are here to learn and they're ready to buy. And the reason why this is fascinating is because with Legos, you know, they cost hundreds of dollars sometimes, and you wanna buy a new one every month, every couple months, And so the market is actually quite big to build a big business. This is like a a type of company that if you want it to be a PE guy, which I don't think you should, because this is like a work of art to me. But if you wanted to be a PE guy and buy a business that you could milk for tons of profit, and you don't actually have to do that much innovation, this is one of those websites.

34:03

Dude, what a great find. This is such a cool, cool business.

34:06

Yeah. Ten million users. And by the way, look at this. I looked I went to top designers.

34:11

Gotta put this on the screen so that our three hundred and ninety nine thousand YouTube subscribers can see this. The Chinese restaurant

34:18

this thing is insane.

34:20

This is insane. Who who made this up? This is so crazy. This this is insane. And the technology to build this stuff is amazing because a, you could just buy, an MOC from someone and they'll tell you what parts or kits that you need, and they they'll sell them, or you could there's this like crazy algorithm that they have where you upload

34:38

hundreds of different kits that you have, and then you click, like, submit And then you see, like, a wheels turning, and it takes, like, sixty seconds as if it's, like, doing heavy, like, calculations. And then it'll give you a huge

34:49

list of hundreds or thousands of different MOCs that others have uploaded that you can create with the parts that you have. It'll say you have a hundred percent of the parts need for this, or you have fifty percent of the parts Here's the other fifty percent that you have. You can buy them here. It's really fascinating.

35:04

And it's quite complicated, I would imagine, to build that.

35:08

You found, like, dork mecha. This is great. It's it's the best. Only adults doing Legos. Adults doing Legos

35:16

who need

35:17

custom

35:18

custom made the Lego, like, designs. This is insane.

35:22

Yeah, this is cool. I'm not, like, this Chinese restaurant,

35:26

Three thou like, two thousand pieces, ten bucks for the for the MOC. What a steal? It's amazing. And they they there's people,

35:33

like, there's people in the forms saying that they're close to making a full time living, selling their MOCs.

35:39

And so when you have a rabid base like this, it's crazy fascinating

35:43

to see what types of businesses you could build. Now this particular model is very unique to Lego, but you could look at what the sneaker heads have done with shoes. You know, like, that was, like, considered silly a few years ago, there was a small group of people Right. And they created marketplaces for it. And, but this is a perfect example of how this is executed well of these niche followings and going all in on them and building them for the community.

36:03

And what's interesting is check this out. So in year one, he had, a million people come to the website. So in year one, so, so that's eighty thousand people a month. That's pretty good, but it's it's not crazy. That's pretty good. His page used for eleven And he started that, I think, in two thousand and fifteen.

36:19

I said, most recently, until twenty three, he had, so he, eleven We had eleven million users and a hundred and sixty million page use. And you could see how slowly these types of businesses build, and it would be very hard to break company down. This is they have a true moat.

36:34

Yeah. Hundred percent. Should we help them with, like, a marketing slogan maybe?

36:38

Dude, this guy,

36:40

This guy's

36:41

this guy's killing it, man. The whenever he's doing, I wanna be part of it. But let me tell you about an even let me tell you an even crazier story. This actually should be a movie.

36:50

So there's a website called BrickLink.

36:53

BrickLink was started in two in the year two thousand.

36:57

So one of the, you know,

36:59

early, early, early first website businesses,

37:02

first internet companies.

37:04

So BrickLink, it originally started as Brick Bay, Brick Bay. The guy who started his name is Dan Jezet. So you per you spell that last name j e z e k. Do me a favor and type in Dan Jessnick,

37:17

on your on your,

37:19

Chrome, and go to his personal website. You see his personal website? It looks like a geociti

37:24

website.

37:25

Is he dead? Why is it like He's dead. He's dead. Okay. So let me tell you this story.

37:30

So Dan started he Dan was,

37:32

well, he they didn't explicitly say this, but it sort of sounded like he was a hacker type of guy. And so he was kind of, like, a little bit gray hat where he was the type of guy who probably, like, would break into, like, different websites and things like that. That's that's the vibe that I got from him. But he was fascinated fascinated with Legos. And so he built this website called Brick Bay. It was called Brick Bay at the time because he lived in Hawaii on a bay Eventually, he got sued by eBay. They're, like, you can't use Bay, so we changed it to BrickLink.

38:00

And he was kind of, like, reading about him. I kinda got vibes of Ross Olbrick. The guy who started silk road. It was one guy. He was anonymous, and he would blog about all the changes he was making to the website, but it was under the name admin. He never used his real name. And it was just him, and he had a handful of volunteer admins who helped him run the site. And he ran it like a community. And what br a brick link does is you can buy and sell different types of leg And so the thing about Legos is if you build the thing, you don't have any more joy for it sometimes so you can pack it up in the boxes, and you could sell it, and just get a little bit of your money back, and then keep or by rare or interesting pieces.

38:35

And so

38:36

he ran this for ten years, and it became a good business. However, he died tragically.

38:41

No one online actually says how he died. We don't know. A lot of people suspected a drug overdose, but we don't know. But he was working on this website.

38:50

Full time, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It was like a full time gig. When he died, his mother, imagine, like, a cute old lady who, like, baked cookies, that's what his mom looks like. And when he died, his mom loved, you know, she loved her son, and she was so passionate about the community that that he made that she was like, well, I can't let this community go away. And so her and her husband,

39:10

Dan's stepdad took over the website. But because it was just one guy running it, they didn't even have the passwords. They didn't even know how it was and so they eventually called the web hosting site or the web hosting service, and they're like, hey, here's what happened. Can you help us? They gave them the passwords, and they just spent three years figuring this out and try to make the communities thrive again. And it did. And the community stepped up and they're like, we gotta do this for Dan. This community is too good. We can't let brick brick link go away because we love buying and selling leggos here. And so they run this business for three years. And it becomes a good business. Now Dan dies,

39:40

they're running it three years later, a billionaire named Jay Kim bought it. Have you ever heard of Jay Kim?

39:46

No. So, Jay Kim, if you click his Wikipedia, obviously,

39:50

Jay Kim's now his real name. It's,

39:52

Jim Kim Jong June. Jay Kim was basically kinda like the Marcus pink Mark Pinkas of Korea. So we in the nineties, he was early in the internet and he created games, he became the biggest gaming company in Korea, then he was a billionaire, so he starts this family holding company where he buys a bunch of interesting companies. And Bricklink was one of the companies that he loved. Another one now this is where it kinda comes into your your world. He says at the time of his death, he was the third wealthiest person in all of Korea. Yeah. He's a big deal. He's a big deal. But Jay Kim, he was, like, a steward for this website. So they basically they didn't change much. But one of the reasons why he bought it, And one of the things that makes this interesting, and I'll read this excerpt from,

40:34

from,

40:35

basically, Dan, the original brick link owner's mom wrote this beautiful tribute. So if you go to dan jessic dot com, wrote this amazing tribute where they show pictures of Dan and him growing up and working on brick link, So she wrote this amazing thing, and I'll read part of it. And she said, not long before he died, he developed an international monetary exchange engine called BrickLink that allowed sellers almost anywhere in the world to sell in their own currency, and their customers could buy in their own currency as well. And every two hours, this system that he that Dan built, it would update. And so you can buy cross country and, or across the world, and your currency would automatically be updated. And so everyone was getting a fair shake. He built that in two thousand and ten, which is pretty fascinating.

41:17

And Jay Kim also owns a bitstamp. Have you heard of bitstamp?

41:21

Crypto, exchange. Right? One of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. And so the reason why this guy, Dan, and this whole story is fascinating,

41:30

is there's actually some weird crypto implications here where you see this overlap of, like, wow, what this guy Dan was doing is actually

41:38

like, in the same world

41:39

of this this whole crypto thing, and he was pretty early to it. And these Lego fans and if you go to, brick link, you'd see the comments

41:47

They're all similar. It's all a similar type of people. And this business Right. Brick link, it's fascinating. And oddly, Jake Kim, also died under mysterious circumstances in his fifties in Hawaii where Dan died. And so there's a bunch of, like, weird things going on with this story. But BrickLink is a very fascinating company, and most recently Jay Kim after he died, Lego, the company bought the website. And they openly said, we bought this website because we wanna carry on this tradition. We don't want anyone messing with it. We don't intend to do too much with it. We just wanna keep it going because this is for the people. Wow.

42:20

That's pretty cool. Very fascinating.

42:22

On on this guy's website,

42:24

on this guy's website, it says,

42:26

here's a quote from him about what he wants to do after he

42:30

there's a subject there's a post on the forum that said, it was called afterlife question mark. Who, Jake Kim, or or Dan?

42:36

Dan. Dan. He goes, after I die here and go to heaven, this is how I imagine it to be. A place where there's infinite amount of bricks and an infinite amount of time to build them with.

42:46

To build with them. There would be all kinds of bricks for all themes so that I could get so that when I got bored of building a castle, I could move on to a town or a pirate ship. Chip, there would be lots and lots of other Lego maniacs to share ideas and build with. Isn't that It's fascinating. Right? So great. And if you read this guy, Dan, if if both Dan and Nathan from the other website. They use these just like,

43:09

what what was the name dread pirates? What what's the silk road guy? Yeah. Whatever. They they it's a marketplace, but it's a weird movement, and it's a weird diary, and it's like a cult, and there's a very particular leader, and he is leading the charge. It's a really knew his name. He's he was just called admin, on Broadway. He was just admin. No one they they kinda knew it was Dan, but he never, like, revealed his name. And it was just, oh, admin's doing this. And it's just this weird, like, it all stems from, like, you know, remember, like, the phone freaks, like, people who would, like, pack into,

43:39

pay phones, and then there was, the internet, and they were doing things like that. Now there's crypto.

43:44

Like, it's this weird chain where it's actually all quite similar. It's this weird underground community. And so as a business person, I see these

43:52

I see these things. And I'm like, what other products

43:55

cost a lot of money? Have a passionate nerdy following,

43:59

and where you can build a large audience, and then eventually sell them everything.

44:03

And Lego fits that perfectly. I think there's a few others. You you've named a few, but it's it's it was actually challenging for me to find other things that were at like this, but, like, sneaker heads are kinda one of them. But there's It's just really fascinating how how big I think these businesses can be, even though they appear quite niche. Oh, dude.

44:21

Forgot.

44:22

Thrill of the shill. So first of all, the thrill of the shill is one of the chef's kiss, best inventions we've had.

44:28

And unlike the gentleman's agreement, which we kinda stole from somebody else, the thrill of the show is actually an original, but I have a different thing I wanna try today.

44:36

Are you down for it? Yes. The thrill of the show, by the way, came up literally thirty seconds before we hit record a few weeks ago. And we said, how do we promote interesting stuff? And you were like, well, we gotta tell them valuable content. And then, hopefully, they'll buy whatever we're selling.

44:48

Just call it the thrill of the show. So congratulations.

44:51

Let's hear. Yeah. So that so that was good. But now I wanna try something different. Have you ever read this thing that is,

44:57

like this the the famous Hemingway story, I'm sure you have because you're a copywriter guy, which is the six word story. Do you know this?

45:03

About the guy outside holding the the poster board?

45:07

The baker. I don't know if it's that exactly, but basically, there was a challenge, which was tell, it was a six word story contest. So it was, how do you tell a story

45:15

in six only only you only have six words. And the the the lore is that they told us to Ernest Hemingway.

45:21

And he came up with the six words wherein he won.

45:25

Which was for sale, baby shoes,

45:28

never worn.

45:30

Six words tells a tells a deep story, hits you in the emotions. There's another story like that where there's a homeless guy sitting outside, and he says,

45:38

like,

45:39

I'm blind. Please help. And a a famous copywriter writes. He goes, let me help you. And he goes, it's spring outside

45:45

or it's spring time. And then I'm blind. Please help.

45:49

And so I have a six word

45:52

challenge. Six word thrill of the show that I'm I'm gonna hit you with. Alright? So I'm gonna do my hemingway

45:57

I'm gonna do this whole ad in six words. Here we go. K.

46:01

Business for sale,

46:03

owner never hired.

46:05

And it's about this business. It's a story about a business

46:08

that failed, and it's up for sale now. And then why? Because the owner never hired. He tried to do it all himself,

46:14

If he just never made the key hires, they needed to scale the business because he didn't go to support shepherd dot com and find amazing talent overseas to hire at a low cost five times less than the United States, Boom. How was my story? That was beautiful. That was beautiful too. The Heming Way one was quite good too. But I'm still thinking about that one. What is it?

46:31

What business percentage? Shouldn't have put Hemingway before my one that I made up one minute ago. I mean, I should have done the all time best.

46:39

Against mine. What was it what was the line?

46:42

Business for sale, owner never hired. For sale. Just like the shoes for sale. Business for sale. Owner never hired.

46:49

I thought it was good. Support shepherd dot com. That's the that's the shill. The thrill was a beautiful line.

46:55

There we go. Back to the episode. You know, the other one that's most like this is fan fiction.

47:01

So wattpad reminds me a lot of this where

47:04

wapad, and there's also another one that's, like,

47:06

some wiki it's like a wiki it's like a Wikipedia, but fandom.

47:11

Fan,

47:12

yeah, I think Phantom, like, bought them or something like that, but there's another one that's just straight the Wikipedia part of it.

47:18

But fan fiction. So, and people get super, super, super passionate about Harry Potter and about, you know, different,

47:25

books. And then they kinda spin out their own their own world. Right? Like,

47:30

I remember Mugglenet, which was started by that guy, Emmerson Sparts,

47:33

and, you know, or Spats. I don't know. I don't know how he says last name.

47:37

They

47:38

built such a huge, huge website

47:40

just around fans of Harry Potter. It was very much like, you know, Brick Link or whatever. And on that, I remember I used to go in there and read people because we'd be waiting for the last book to come out, and people would write their own versions of that last book. And, they would, you, you know, you would just read, like, a full length book that somebody just wrote in their spare time for fun.

47:59

And that led to some big things, like, you know, fifty shades of gray. Came out of a fan fiction post, just like that. Like, it was written originally as a fan fiction post around twilight. And so fan fiction and a few people who were so prize that Wattpad

48:13

was giving, like, hundreds of millions of visitors every month. Like, one of the most popular websites in the world. I think they sold for six hundred million dollars to a Korean company. Recently.

48:22

Two years ago, man. Yeah. And they weren't making any money, but, like, they weren't making much money, but but the the passion and the the usage was there. It was off the charts. And then, you know, You don't have to do it much marketing because

48:32

the people who are passionate about it are just gonna search the internet for every nook and cranny to find

48:39

you know, other people like who are as fanatical about it as them. So there's a few attributes here that I I I'm just thinking about off the top of my head. So attribute number one is they seem like jokes at first. So, like, it's kinda silly. Like, almost embarrassing. Like, what do you do for a living? Oh, I run a legal blog. Like, it seems silly when you talk about it, at first.

48:57

But if there's enough people, it's it could be pretty great. The second thing is I actually think

49:02

I think these types of companies

49:05

You shouldn't build quickly. These are slower businesses,

49:09

where you don't wanna get too big, too fast. Otherwise, the nerds, the passionate ones,

49:13

be like, oh, this is lame. This is too big, too mainstream. Getting commercial. Yeah. But number three is if you do it right, they have huge motes and they're very, very hard to kill. People get very loyal to them. But just like, actually, New York Times Cooking actually had this a few years ago, so New York Times cooking is a similar community like this, passionate fans. They had a revolt because,

49:39

in their Facebook group, someone made a change, an admin made a change, and they revolted. I don't know if you remember this about two or three years ago,

49:46

they had sixty thousand people in the New York Times cooking. They changed something where, like, you had to get your posts approved as opposed as opposed to posting on your own, a change like that people revolted.

49:56

And so these communities, you're basically a steward of the people. You're not a you're not you're not all the time a dictator. You have to be very

50:04

You have your your fans are temperamental.

50:07

And so there's pros and cons of these types of companies, but I do think they are very, very valuable because of how hard they can be to ruin.

50:15

The,

50:16

do you think,

50:17

not not to be self serving, but just real, real discussion?

50:21

Do you think we can kinda do this? I I kinda think that we have the makings of doing something like this, but we also

50:28

might f it up by trying to Yes. Grow it too fast. So for example, One of the best tests. I I remember talking to Ben once, and, one of the best tests for will somebody like MFM

50:38

is this experience. Do you ever go to a restaurant

50:41

And then you can't help it, but your brain is, like, trying to calculate the, like, how much does this restaurant making? Like, you basically start counting the tables, and then you can't, you know, you you just count the tables. You figure, oh, this bills per hour. What's our bill? Our bill is this much. Okay. Average ticket is this. And you end up with, like, what's the even of this restaurant?

50:57

And

50:58

that if you're like that, you're probably gonna like this podcast. It's a very high, like, you know, overlap. But being like that is weird. Right? That's not a normal way that people are. Most people to the restaurant, they look at the menu, they order the food. And if you're sitting down with four other people, no one else at that table is gonna nerd out with you. Like, look how packed this place is. Like, Wow. How much do you think one of these servers is per hour? Right. And look how much the meal like, you know what I mean? No one you're gonna dork out with that, but no one's like, dude, shut the fuck up and just eat your chicken parm. Exactly. And so in the same way that most of the Lego people, if they went to school, could not find somebody as or if they go to in this adult one, you go to work. You're not gonna find people who are trying to build the this two thousand piece Chinese restaurant that they bought the blueprint for for ten dollars. Like, you're not gonna find your people there. And so you find your people elsewhere. You find it on brick brickly. He find it on rebrickable or whatever.

51:44

I think for us,

51:46

it's the same thing. No. That person who's at that dinner the six people that are at the dinner with you, for your family, your friends, they might not wanna dork out about it. But you find us and the community people that like this, and you're like, These are all people who wanna know the EBITDA of the restaurant. And so it becomes this, like, glue and you find your people. And I think I've been tempted in the past to try to grow this fast And the things you do to grow it faster are sort of, like, dilutive.

52:11

You actually sell out a little.

52:14

You sell out a little. Right? Like, it's the cringy YouTube thumbnail face. It's the,

52:19

you know, it's the talking about a topic that might not be the thing you would actually wanna dork out about, like, I like that this episode is basically ninety percent us dorking out about these, like, niche, lego websites

52:28

versus

52:32

things that might be more mainstream, you know, talk about the Super Bowl next week or whatever. But

52:38

it will attract the right people.

52:40

I thought the Super Bowl was in November. I didn't even know that.

52:44

But, yeah, I

52:45

that's news to me.

52:48

So,

52:49

okay, that's one thing. The second is, like, a business principle I saw. So somebody said this, and I thought it was really good.

52:54

They go. If you wanna build, like, a a a truly, a truly strong business,

52:59

build, like, a reverse funnel. I was, oh, that's interesting. So, like, I always think of every business as a funnel, but I always think about it from top to bottom. What do you mean audience first? Yeah. Top of the funnel is people who don't know you. They they they come to your website for the first time. They hear your podcast for the first time. They hear about your product for the first time. And that's, like, you know, they become aware of you. And then they might get interested, then they might actually sign up as a user, then they might sign up for the paid And the paid account is always at the bottom. And I always just thought of a funnel as top to bottom. And what this person was saying was they go, yeah, you actually want the reverse you wanna build as a reverse funnel. Meaning, You wanna find, like, the ten people

53:32

who are most interested and passionate about what you're doing to where, you know, you these are your stream hardcore users who absolutely love that you're doing this, and they will use it every day and give you feedback. And they'll annoy you with their feedback. They'll tell all their friends. Their friends won't even listen. Those doesn't even matter. And they're your power power users. And then you sort of go one rung up and you go to, like, the next hundred people who care a lot for sure, but less than those ten who were, like, really nuts. And then you go to the thousand people, ten thousand people, a hundred thousand, and you you stack the funnel

53:59

from the bottoms up is a way to think about building an enduring product because you're really gonna find the people who need it the most, who love it the most. They're gonna give you the best feedback to give you to get the product to be, you know, better. And you're gonna find, you know, the people who love it versus everybody else who's kinda like, oh, that's cool.

54:15

And and I thought, oh, that's actually a good principle too when it comes to how to build something. I don't know. When you built Hampton, did you did you do that? Yeah. For sure. Yes. How did you think about who the first, let's say, ten to twenty people should be? How did you decide that? So at first, I was like, let me figure out who wants this most. But then I,

54:33

I, and I had ideas as to who that would be. And then what I found was I was like, wow, there's a lot of entrepreneurs

54:40

in Tennessee,

54:41

Iowa, Idaho,

54:43

Delaware, some of these forgotten areas that aren't on the coast, and I'm shocked at how lonely they are and how much they need this. Let's go get more of those people. And so that's what we did is I didn't I thought it was gonna be, like, cool New York or San Francisco people. And turns out it was cool Kentucky guys too. But, like, I just didn't even they weren't even part of my, like, they weren't even part of my VINacular. I wouldn't even have thought about them. And so that's what we did. I think,

55:07

With this podcast, I think it's good that you and I have other businesses that, a, pay us money and b, can grow

55:14

faster. Because there's been very

55:17

there's been it's been very tempting to try to do things that are inauthentic, but we know they will get more

55:23

views.

55:25

And, actually, we've done a good job of sticking to, like, being authentic.

55:29

But this is the this is a very that was a really good point of yours that this podcast as well as a handful of other ones They're, like, these nerdy things that a small group of people are really passionate about. Like, for example,

55:39

do you see the meetups that people were doing for MFM. I was just about to bring that up. That's an example. The test. Dude, do you know they're still meeting? Like, they're they're still meeting. That's exactly right. So we thought

55:50

I guess, the first mind blowing thing was, oh, if me and Sam say we're gonna go to some place to a live show, wow. We could feel, like, you know, thousand to two thousand people in a in a, whatever. Theater to to come, just watch us. And it's a total work. What's that? It's a total work. We're both just like, alright. Let's not really do this. Yeah. I don't wanna find a Toronto pressure.

56:07

And and and, you know, we cool. We had the moment where it was felt good, but, like, I don't know if that's what we wanna do on an ongoing basis. And then somebody came to us. I'm forgetting her name. I thought about it. Rachel Rachael River Uh-huh. River. And she's like, hey, our product does this. She's like, yeah, our product is for creators who have a community, let your community meet up without you. And I was like, keyword without you. Love it.

56:30

And I was like, I actually, that kinda makes sense because again,

56:33

you know, while it feels good to maybe be, like, you know, the center of attention,

56:38

doesn't really feel good. And also, that's not actually what makes something really valuable. But what we'd rather do is

56:44

use

56:45

our content as a magnet as a honey pot to bring in the cool guy from Kentucky and the cool girl from Illinois who they all do the restaurant thing where they start calculating restaurant revenues when they walk into a restaurant and get them together because they're gonna hit it off, but it'd be hard for them to find each other. And so if all we serve as is basically the finding function for those people to meet, and what's cool is that they did the first meetup, but then now they've just been meeting on a monthly basis.

57:09

That tells me that we did something right. I don't know. We didn't intend to do that to be very clear. Like, that was not none of this was intentional,

57:15

but that that means something went right. I facetimed a few of them. Like, they was like, hey, we're doing this thing. I was like, alright. Cool. I'll FaceTime and just say hi. And there was people. And by the way, we we have, like, there's no, like, monetary thing. I think it's completely free. If you Google MFM

57:28

and then River meetup, you'll see, like, the landing page. I talked to people. They were like, yeah. Drove six hours to come to this one because I'm looking for a husband or a wife. Like, I wanna meet someone who has these similar values that for some reason, MFM is a proxy for. And so I thought that was, like, super fascinating. And they told me to go, oh, we're still actually doing monthly meetings because we just wanna hang out with other dorks like us. And I thought that was awesome. By the way, our our what I might tagline for people that will like this is just business nerds with a sense of humor. That's the whole thing. If you're a business nerd, meaning, like, you do business, but you also, in addition to the business you run, you actually kinda nerd out about more business stuff. You can't can't really get enough It doesn't feel like work to you to think about business or to read about businesses to learn more business stuff. And then with a sense of humor, because there's probably people that are you know, more experience in us that share more tactical stuff that are,

58:17

you know, whatever. They're smarter, better. They're more to the point.

58:21

But I think the one thing we do is we try to we have a lot of fun while we do this and that that rubs off. And so that's the the capture of, like, who is the audience for us.

58:29

So we just dorked out on, like, niche, niche passionate things. I think that, this lego shit is crazy

58:37

fascinating.

58:38

You'll have to go to the Dan jesik site, dan jesik dot com just to look at this. And maybe you guys will dork out over

58:46

this like I did. And by the way, if you made it this far into the pod, you're definitely one of these nerds. Just go ahead this is my one sellout. Go ahead and click subscribe on the YouTube page because you made it this far, and you could actually make fun of us in the comments or let us know what you think about this niche stuff. I have one more quick one that's, like, kind of in the theme of kids, stuff, games, toys, you seen this thing called Powell World? I know you're not a gamer, but do do you know about this? No. What is Powell?

59:09

Powell World is currently, like, the most popular PC game in the world. So I thought steam tell me what ste I still don't under I don't understand exactly what steam is. Steam is like an app store, but for computers,

59:20

The company that makes counter strike,

59:22

they in order to let people come download the new version of counter strike and buy it, they created steam. It's like a store to sell counter you know, countershark, but it also sold all the other games. Right? So now anybody can list their thing down. But I can't do it on Apple. Well, no. Because you're playing on a, you know, a a razor PC or something like that. Got it. So what do you need to the Apple App Store for? Right? That's that's not gonna work.

59:42

59:43

it's the Apple App Store buffer computer games.

59:47

And huge, by the way, like a multi billion dollar product.

59:50

So the number one game on Steam right now is Powell. Powell World in, like, seven days has done two hundred million in revenue. What? When games hit, they hit, like, none other. And by the way, this thing was made, like, on a ten thousand dollar budget. So it was, like, a very, very low cost game. What's interesting about this. Right? So the game is basically,

01:00:09

the game to me, the reason I wanted to bring this up, not because I I am I'm not even playing the game. Uh-uh, it was not like you play games. We don't have a lot to talk about here, but I do think it's an example of the Midwitt meme strikes again. And this is basically that the best ideas

01:00:24

the absolute best ideas are simple. And they're not just simple. They're simple to the point of sounding dumb.

01:00:30

Okay. It says simple to the point of sounding dumb. What does that mean? So,

01:00:34

to me, this is

01:00:36

Let's see. Simple to the point of sounding dumb is

01:00:39

Snapchat, the next big social app. It wasn't started as this, like,

01:00:44

grand intellectual theory on the future of of communication. It was like,

01:00:50

what if you could send someone a picture that would, like, disappear in ten seconds? Nudes. As like college nudes. Right. And people are like, what would you do with that? I don't know. Stupid shit.

01:00:58

Why stupid shit? Because it's gonna disappear in ten seconds. So I have no no filter. Right? And then after the fact, it becomes a thing that people intellectualize and they're like, well, see the thing is that,

01:01:08

you know, impermanence is actually the greatest form of permanent. It's like, what? What are you talking about? And, and people start to get intellectual about it. But that's not where the best ideas come from. The best ideas come from.

01:01:19

Really, really simple things that can be described in just a couple of words. Words, pal world, if you go look at this game, so, oh, what's the game? The game is Pokemon with guns.

01:01:29

It's like, what? It's like, yes.

01:01:31

And then Lou, that CEO, he he says this. He goes, I'm not a visionary. I I don't know how to do that.

01:01:37

I just try to make whatever people want. And I knew that, Pokemon, you know, or he didn't say Pokemon

01:01:42

because he didn't wanna get sued, but he's like, yeah, I had this idea of, like, you know, you could run around and capture these little monsters.

01:01:48

But then we added guns because, you know, Americans love to shoot things. This is insane. And that was like the the core idea. And he was like, they're like, so why did, you know, what was the decision to do this art style? He's like, oh, I didn't even wanna do that, actually. I wanted to do the, like, cool three d thing. But I didn't even know that to do that. You have to have, like, an animation rig and all this stuff. He's like, so I made one. And I was like, god, that was hard. I there's no way we could do this with, like, ten and characters, like, impossible.

01:02:14

He's like, so we had this artist that we had rejected,

01:02:17

and then we, like, hired her later. And they're like, oh, oh, they're like, what? Oh, you know, what did you tell her to do? It's like, don't know. Like, whatever our programmer could make, like, that was her mandate. They're like, what was her budget? He's like, I don't know. We had, like, ten thousand dollars, but,

01:02:29

didn't really set a budget. He's like, you know, I guess if we needed more, I would have probably just gone and borrowed some more.

01:02:34

And they're like, tell us about the developers on your team. He's like, One of my developers is a guy. I'm at, like, at a convenience store. This kid, he's, like, a teenager. But, like, he told me he could coach. I told him to come by and, you know, yeah, he works on the game. He's pretty critical. For the game. So the founder has written this, like, really amazing blog post where he, like, explains everything that you're talking about. And he's like, He's kinda he's like a shithead in the best possible way. And he's like he basically says, he goes, this game shouldn't even exist.

01:03:01

It's the antithesis of proper game development. And he says,

01:03:06

he goes, we had no budget.

01:03:08

No same company would ever start developing a game without a budget. But pocket pair, which is the developer, is not a same company. And he just talked about so I started asking myself, what's the budget? When the balance of our bank account reached zero, we could always borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt. We had about two years of runaway, and I decided just to keep working without stressing about budget, because all I was worried about was getting the game down as fast as possible. And he's, like,

01:03:31

quite

01:03:32

not, like, a corporate c CEO. This is, like, pretty awesome. He he's in Japan. Is the Japanese guy?

01:03:39

Yeah. It's a Japanese game. He basically made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money and was like, alright. I'm gonna start a game studio with this, even though he kinda wasn't, like, you know, equipped to do that.

01:03:50

Like, right now on Steam, it's the number one game that right now as we're recording this, there are over one million people concurrently playing the game. Right. Saying the second.

01:03:59

Like, the highest was two million at a time. We're playing the game concurrently. It's number one more than DOTA, more than counter strike, more than PubG, more than all of them. He was, like, this one lady applied, but I didn't think her designs were good, so I rejected her. But then she kept three months later, she sent me a d DM, and I was so amazed that she was bold enough after I rejected her to keep messaging me. So we hired her.

01:04:21

Like, like, it just has, like, story of the story of, like, that doesn't make sense. So let's do it. But that the meme the mimic meme where it's you know, the the Jedi kinda think the same thing. Right? Like, just make, like, just make the game as fast as possible. Right? Or, like, you know, if you rent out of money, just try to get some more.

01:04:38

You know,

01:04:40

what should you make it? What if Pokemon had guns?

01:04:44

That'd be cool. Alright. It's like, versus people who are, like, you know, trying to over

01:04:48

overly intellectualize

01:04:50

and over analyze everything. And, I just see this trend over and over and over again. I

01:04:55

I truly believe I didn't tell you about the Midwitt thing I'm trying to do. No. What? I truly believe this Midwitt meme explains so much of my own life And, like, I wanna see it every day as a reminder to don't overthink it. Just keep it simple. And just what's the obvious answer? What's the obvious answer is, like, it's always there, but it gets

01:05:14

fogged up by my own

01:05:16

stupidity, tried to overly, overarchitect things.

01:05:19

Or, like, wanna be an intellectual. And so George Mac, our friend, do you know do you know George? He's awesome.

01:05:24

Yeah. He's a great dude. Very interesting thinker. And so he had this idea for a like to do a super glossy, like, coffee table book, high end, but of just, like, a hundred Midwitt memes,

01:05:36

And I heard this idea and I was like, that's genius. I can't wait. And so I messaged him. And then, like, months later, I was like, dude, what happened to the book? And he's like, well, I didn't wanna do it because, you know,

01:05:47

you know, I was gonna have to do three hundred sixty five. I is the original thing was three hundred sixty five. It's, like, one a day. Three hundred sixty five Midwhip means. He's, like, identify get to three sixty five. And I thought, well, the, you know, the cost of this might be a little high. I'm not sure if I'm gonna

01:05:58

be able to make my money back, but then, you know, he's, like, in a really best selling book is something that has these attributes. And I went studied all the best selling books, and I I learned all these commonalities between atomic habits, and this and this and this, and I just sent him the midwhip beam back after his, like, thousand word, like, what's that message? And I was like,

01:06:13

make the book. It'll be fun. Right? Like, it's obvious. I just make the Just do it. It'll be fun. Who cares? Like, you don't have to do all these things. You might lose a little bit of money. It's okay. Right? Like, the people who'll buy something cool will come with this. It's it's no big deal. And so I am trying to convince him to do this,

01:06:29

to to do this book with me. I'm like, let's just make this book. It'll take us, like, two weeks, and it'll be fun. And, like, Anybody who actually buys this thing

01:06:37

is gonna be the exact type of person I want in my life. Just do it do it on your own.

01:06:42

I'm looking for an excuse to do a project with George because I really like him. And also this was his idea. So I don't wanna steal his idea. I wanna convince him to do this with me. If he if he really refuses, I'm gonna say, alright. Can I just do this myself? And I How about myself?

01:06:53

It's Monday. I think this episode goes live on Wednesday. Or I forget when, but whenever it goes live, give him he has seven days. If this doesn't get to you, he's at seven days. At George Mac, his, his Twitter handle George, George, for

01:07:07

Mac.

01:07:07

Just tweeted him at just say, do it. And he he he's gonna have to figure out why everybody's tweeting do it, Adam. And he I'm sure he will eventually put two two together and know this is what I'm this is why he needs to do it. I,

01:07:20

I enjoyed this episode. What do you think? Yeah. This is fun. I enjoyed dorking out over this stuff. I had a great time. Do we wrap here? Is that the pod?

01:07:29

That's the pod. I feel like I learned something today. Yeah. And I had a great time. That's the mid way. That's the mid way. Me, but preparing for these things, I'm like, what gets views? What what, what will what will make more money?

01:07:40

What will be more fun. Alright. That's the pod.

00:00 01:08:04