#102 - Why a Handful of Meme Accounts Sold for Nearly $100m

what's up my first million we're back sam how are you feeling i'm well how are you thrive there's these groups that i've been to where it's like a men's group here a bit of men's group maybe one time like what well we did that one with the folks who go down to the fu prison yeah and also there's one that's how what's it called a mankind project or something like that that's like a famous one that's like a national group that has like a bunch of some people think it's great some people think it's like yeah i know you go cold i i i did ky you know ky yeah i was in ky i think it's an a men's group that's just like an entrepreneurship thing right no the version i i went to an all boys high school and i went to ky i think it's a religious thing i don't even remember but it felt like a men's retreat bullets retreat we were seventeen they do a thing at the beginning it's punch sit in the circle and you talk about your feelings but before you do that you sort of check in it's like a thing that where they make you get present so it's kinda like you sit down you just sit first quietly just breathe for a second and go around the circle and it's like i'm sean and i'm checking in i'm feeling tired honestly and the you know whatever people just check in and then at the end of the thing you check out and there's always kind of amazing to see the transition between the check ins and the checkout like you can actually see how much benefit somebody got in the hour and i always felt like teams or company should do this more where you like you treat it more like a sports team where you kind of like have your pre game you talk and you huddle and you figure out what the strategy of the day is and the strategy of the week and then you get pumped up you go do some shit you check at halftime time you see how things are going you make adjustments and then in the post game you sort of you know give the give the speech and i always wanted to run my company like a like a sports team but i gotta say a lot of times i got a bunch of roll from the engineers who were just like yeah i i i don't need all this but they kinda liked it but they're also like oh god we gotta talk about our feelings against shit i don't wanna do this i think they would like it i think that people would actually like it if you ran it like an army yeah i i've never been to the army so i don't know how that goes neither have i but like i guess what i mean is like a very strict discipline when we started the company i was like yeah well what's your opinion okay let's do that and then i'm like wait a minute no actually people in more cases than not prefer just being dictated to like they're like just being told what to do right yeah you famously had a thing i forgot with somebody at true company where you like wrote like a three thousand word brief of like you're gonna do this and then this and then this and this is the way you're gonna do it and it like dictated there two or three weeks and you were like to this is i don't know if it stayed awesome but the first time you did it you're like this is awesome they're just doing exactly what they need to do and with no like uncertainty and they like it too because they got like very clear description of what to do it works it works let's talk ideas do you want me bring you one of them yes let's do well i say let's talk ideas this is something i found that was interesting do you know you've never heard of this but it's called money supermarket dot com can you go to there yeah i'm gonna go to it but tell me about it and let me make sure i said the url perfectly yeah wait is that it it's a british website it was started in the early two thousands yeah that's the right one it looks kinda ugly right okay so here it is let me read the wikipedia so i got all the exact details started in nineteen ninety three but it was before the internet and it was just like a magazine it was like a pamphlet where this guy named simon nixon would just blog about what was the best mortgage provider boring stuff not that interesting he was charging eleven dollars what's a fortnite every two weeks yeah he was charging eleven pounds for every two weeks and bankers and things like that people maybe even brokers things like that they would pay him money and he would just get a pay they would get a pamphlet where he would aggregate the best mortgages well the internet comes around and he kinda starts putting it online and it launches as this new business in let me find the exact year because this is important the year's important i'm glad you said the year's important i hate when people are like was it june twenty eleven or july and i'm like dude it doesn't matter it looks like year two thousand okay so they started it in year two thousand now i was looking at their numbers so or they sorry about two thousand two thousand one so in about the first year they did this is crazy so no sorry they starting two thousand they made very little money two thousand one very little money two thousand and two they made two million dollars with six hundred thousand dollars in profit this is all bootstrap two thousand and three which was the next year sixteen million in sales with two million in profit two thousand four forty seven million in sales fifteen million in profit and the main money maker was this eleven pounds per two week subscription to the info or no this was a of it was a little bit of that and then in the the last year i'm referring to two thousand five fifty six million sixteen million in revenue now it's a four hundred million dollar companies who growth slowed a lot that makes a hundred million a year in profit the model and the reason why i'm bringing this up is because these business models are crazy they grow so quickly if you can nail it and it is basically affiliate which is i believe this is the only i mean this is for sure how they make a lot of money i don't know i can't tell if it's the only way but basically you talk about which products are best and you get a cut if a user ends up clicking through you get paid for that and sometimes you also get paid if they actually sign up for it crazy interesting right this is like nerd wall right this is it's just like nerd want but i don't know if there's only a few categories you can do this in like car insurance home insurance travel insurance mortgages and credit cards but this is just a business model that works consistently across a variety of categories and it scales so smoothly make so much cash and not enough people realize how big these things are yeah it's always surprising when you first tore told me about nerd wallets like stats i was blown away and then i was like well i guess that makes sense i mean the credit card companies are willing to pay i mean what's the affiliate think like a thousand dollars or something right for every oh no no no probably a hundred dollars maybe as high as three hundred maybe as low as ten dollars but probably a hundred dollars but the thing is is that how what's the market size for americans who need a credit card probably half of america half yeah and how many credit cards does each person have probably one to five so and they get them every couple years so it's a pretty it's a massive market size and so the way if you're in the if you wanna do the affiliate model which i like there's a lot of downsides to it but i like it if you wanna do the affiliate model then what you have to do is you have to you have to ask yourself a handful of questions which is what's something that a large amount of people want if this is all like the variables in the equation how many people want it how much does the product cost because that's how much percentage of the take you can get how often did they need it the frequency and that's probably it frequency price and market size and rank ability right can i get the traffic from google how competitive is and do i understand seo enough to do this and what's the competitive advantage yeah right so sam what would you do let's say you had this insight so you see nerd wallet you see mean this is such a weird website too by the way what is this the tagline says be like the money bull the hell hell he talking about well it's a british website so are you on a dot if you're on the right one it should change like dot uk maybe okay i don't know but okay so you're right what do you think so is there an opportunity to just up end these guys that have been doing this for fifteen years and are kind of either too complex or too stay now or is there a new platform you could do it on or would you go for a different niche how would you approach this if if you were looking at this so i don't think there's that many niches that this could be done on now i don't and i also the best way to get traffic is through google but that's quite hard a lot of these websites nerd included they didn't really work that hard i feel like at making the product amazing and so a company like credit karma built a product so credit karma has this exact same business model and so a lot of people just do create a blog or content and you rank for content and then you go through and just click through and it's super transactional that's what nerd all is and because of that they don't really have a brand credit karma does because you you check credit karma maybe on a weekly or monthly basis or a annual basis to look at credit report so you can create some type of widget that does that wire cutter did this well people trust wire cutter and they love it because they had a really unique way of ranking in the products where they said just buy this one this one's the best and now because of that a lot of people went to the wire cutter dot com so there is definitely a way to build a brand that's good whereas most sites like best reviews dot com and things like that strictly it went the content and farm route which makes money but so yeah i think there is a way to i think that a lot of the people in youtube are doing a really good job at it so like if you started a youtube video that reviewed different stuff that would be a great way to build a brand and then you could actually have a site that gets loads of traffic it can do this yeah yeah i kind of agree i wouldn't personally go into this space because i feel like when i look at who's doing well here they all started like ten oh these guy's twenty years ago and so i feel like this was a model i got figured out kinda early and people did it for travel people did it for mortgages people did it for student loans they did it for credit cards and so i'm like okay what is the likelihood that there's a niche that's untapped here probably very very low unless you look at something new like if i was gonna have to do this i would do it in crypto i would say oh a lot of people are interested in bitcoin or cryptocurrencies you can basically be the on ramp through content about how to buy what to buy how to store it how to make sure you don't lose it what's the review on this new coin and then you're selling you know leads to gemini and coinbase base for example so so maybe there's some value there but i would be pretty hesitant to go into this space now i think they're beautiful businesses once they've you know i would love to own one of these businesses but i would probably not start them because i would be too worried that it's just super saturated or i would go for a new platform like a youtube or somewhere else where i would say okay i'm not gonna do it through google search traffic i'm gonna do it through youtube search traffic because youtube is basically the second biggest search engine in the world it's just happening people don't think of it that people think of youtube as like entertainment destination but it's the search engine with videos is the results and so i would look at okay which one of these can i translate to youtube and build a following firm here i would not do it on tiktok or something that's transient so i would look at it the different way around which is you are correct these do take a while but once they work they like grow like crazy like i i nerd numbers are similar where it was like nothing nothing and then something and then four x four x four x i mean that happens a lot about i look it the other way around which is if it takes a little while to get there that means it's hopefully we'll take a long time to be killed and it could right it could work without that like it's one of those things that we do it well and you maintain it well it could last well who knows how long right building for the internet's weird but like theoretically thirty forty fifty years the other angle i think would work here is to go so all these blogs are like kind of generic information sites so you say you know which one should i get and it says a review of the top ten credit cards and which one has the best perks for a business person and then there's kinda just imp is very imp so i would go the exact other way and go deeply personal so the model here is like mister money mustache so i think there's a big advantage for for anybody who opens up the playbook they open sourced their own finances so if you basically said hey here's my financial life and i'm gonna talk about all the different financial things i'm doing and deciding to do and blah blah subscribe to me to get my updates on my monthly p and l for me my burn rate my budget what new products i'm using what cards i'm using how much i paid for this blah blah blah because people are pretty tight to the you know most people are close to the best with money stuff so you being the exact opposite being extremely transparent with your money stuff is i think a a way to get a following sort of the way buffer did with companies i think people could do with personal finance and some people do this but i think this is just like a better path than trying to be one of these content forms and that's the other way i would approach this if it was me and i have kind of an experiment i'm gonna i'm gonna run like this soon i'll i'll announce it soon but it's exciting i think this is a path that is less saturated have you seen ant have you ever heard of answers dot com i've heard about it but i don't know what you're gonna lot of people would put it into that content farm like it's just there to get page views this business i was reading into it i believe it's answers dot com so answers dot com is a question and a a q and a is this different than yahoo answers yes it's a something thing yes it's the url answers dot com and you it's like a little bit some more similar to cora than anything and you could ask questions but somehow they have a subscription service and i believe the subscription is based off of who can answer like if you pay money you're able to answer a lot of questions and you rank up top right they do a hundred million dollars of year in subscription sales from no way way it was sold to a another company for sure if you google answers let's see how i think it was sold for was it five hundred million dollars it's pretty crazy this is such a funny this is like the user friendly looking version of it's like the happy friendly version of cor like the design of it so for me it was a sold in two thousand fourteen for nine hundred million dollars to who and for what jeez apex partner you came and find came and find a way to pay on this where waiting go i i like to give the money i don't even know how okay private equity alright that means they were actually making some money so that's an amazing business i never really heard of yeah good domain obviously so i had have really half baked idea that's kind of around this i don't know if there's a work or not but you know like the wire cutter kind of like okay in a world of information of abundant information where do i need the trust becomes more important and wire cutter became a trusted source i would love to see somebody make a thing called a hundred experts and they basically just find a hundred experts let's say and start with the category of like home gadgets or like personal security or like personal finance or whatever right and it's a hundred experts you don't know either their use real names or not but you can ask any question and it's quo with a specific set of people who can reply and they get paid to reply they get paid you know a small fraction so you kinda have these like hundred or so experts that are curated and they're sort of on commission for giving really really helpful answers and i think people would like to have kind of like a real human being who knows their shit to give an answer rather than kind of anonymous or you know like random internet forum answer and if you knew that all these people were like super legit in that field or kind of they've tested everything they've tried everything they help a bunch of people for this i feel like people like do what you think of this hap did yeah how much would it how would it make money so i think you would do is you would say i think you would charge the question ask her or you would go affiliate again if you pick the right niches you could do it through affiliate and if not you can basically say okay cool this is how would it be through affiliate so you know i'm asking for what's the best home speaker system in my living room right got it okay got it three guys chime in and they basically are like so you know my favorite is this one it's actually super affordable it's four hundred bucks blah the next thing guy says that one's but if you really want the high end one i have this in my house here's a photo it's amazing the sound quality is un unmatched and the best part is you don't have to worry about wires and the third guy says something else and then whichever one of those i click you know you can work it out where i'm gonna end up getting paid you know the eighty dollar affiliate fee for whoever buys that speaker system through through the service so that's one way or you do it on subscription where you find the people that are willing to pay for the right answer like i'm willing to pay for an expert and you know they subscribe kind of like fifteen bucks a month or whatever and then that gets split up amongst the experts based on who's answering at what volume you know what i so jelly but not a consumer like not trying to get mass consumer appeal like just more of a a commercial network alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weight like a hundred and fifteen pounds of weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting it sees how many reps you're doing how much effort you're putting in what your part rate is it's pretty amazing and then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you wanna do a twenty minute ten minute fifty minute workout it's pretty amazing but the best part is the leader board the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool but i'm obsessed with the leader board because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class so it's maybe wanna work harder lift more weight or have more endurance it's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that'll will make you live longer and this product tempo it checks that box for me so they're our sponsored today if you use the code tempo hustle you'll get a hundred dollars off so tempo dot fit is the url and tempo hustle one word you'll get hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i use it all time so check it out i think that would work if you got the right stars and i think that you'd need to get the right stars it could be a little bit of a complex back end like business problem of like who gets paid what's money which is kind of we actually kinda be neat to try to solve for answers dot com proved it's possible and yeah i think that could work i would do subscription i think that's pretty cool a lot of companies have tried to do this like a clarity remember clarity yep and that actually doesn't work well that business model sucks and so what that means is they have experts on their platform and people spend a hundred dollars pay for a phone call basically yeah and that doesn't really work historically it only works when you charge like thousand dollars or five thousand dollars per hour yeah there's a new company trying to do clarity again called super pure don't know if you've heard about it they have a little buzz behind them so you know maybe maybe maybe they found something new i don't think so i think it'll have the same clarity problem of this happens a lot in the start world you just do the same thing that failed seven years ago yeah super pure my buddy sometimes the world has changed and sometimes you just make the same mistakes or you know it dies for the same reason so super pure looks like a new clarity let's wish you a different idea i like that story topic idea give our my own idea like a four but let's go to the next one what do you got okay i got two interesting ones so alright i'm gonna do my big idea first so i actually have a couple friends who i think are gonna work on something like this but it's probably the biggest idea in my head right now the biggest idea in my head is covid has created this boom and e commerce right so like you look at this there's this chart that's like this incredible chart just shows commerce growth as a percentage of retail over time and it's like just inch up started at six percent seven percent nine percent eleven percent fourteen percent and then this year it's like thirty five percent where people are like oh shit i guess i just order everything online and they're building this these habits you know the longer that everything's closed the more they're g this habit in and so e commerce i think that's not news to anybody e commerce is gonna keep growing and you know shopify has been one of the big beneficiaries and so is amazon like shopify i know amazon stocks has gone up about sixty percent this year shopify is pretty much doubled in market cap since since covid it's like a hundred billion dollar company now so that's happening in e commerce but then you know i think the same thing is gonna happen for video services so very basically any service so just like retail like buying and selling physical goods has moved online i think buying and selling services is gonna go online as well so things that used to be kind of totally brick and mortar services doctors lawyers trainers therapists all this stuff and these have slowly been moving online telemedicine came online like doctors on demand and people started doing doctor's visits over the phone are sorry you know like video conference i think there's some of the big therapy apps like seven cups of tea and others are doing extremely well i think you know some of their numbers they're better i mean i know that they make between fifteen and a hundred so there's sometimes i there's two that are the leading ones talk space and better help or is it talk help and better you know what i mean i you had it right for first time yeah one with michael phelps and the other one when somebody else right and they do well so they took this this service which is you know a therapist that you traditionally had in person they make it digital and they make it a mobile app and it grows it it grows and it's you know doing fifty dollars to hundred million dollars a year in revenue that's kind of amazing so i think that a huge number a huge amount of services today are just being stitched together over zoom and google calendars and emails and things like that right it's like i email you we set something up send you google calendar link put a zoom link in it we do with the zoom call you pay me through paypal and this is happening all over the place and let's call this let's give it a goofy name let's call it commerce for now video commerce so i think that there's an opportunity to build shopify for video commerce so shopify for anybody who's who's delivering a service through video it's not a e commerce product where they're selling a physical item or even a digital item it is a video conversation between either one to one one to few or one to many and so i'll give you some examples i've run this mastermind group right people basically pay me and three times a month i do a call with three different groups so one once a month call with the group and basically i use gum road or stripe for payments that's how i collect that i made a website somewhere else to to describe what this is i use email and google calendar to organize it and i use zoom to do the call so why don't i just have a storefront that says hey book you know if you wanna join my mastermind group you know here's the details push this button pay me and then when the time you'll get automatically emailed a link to join the zoom call which happens right here back at my storefront and like why don't personal trainers do the same thing now therapists lawyers doctors i feel like there's gonna be a huge number of people that deliver their service through video in the future and that means that there's an opportunity to build shopify video services give me your thoughts okay cool you're describing a really big thing that needs to be sub divided so the first thing is like small things that are probably a thousand dollars or are less basically q style or home shopping network that's an interesting concept that a lot of people have been trying to solve for adjacent h has said they're looking to fund that in china they have a variety of apps you probably or you might know if anyone knows more in this conversation it's you on this because you have some chinese roots but i have no idea what they're called but do you know i'm talking about at all like this what you're talking about is people who sell physical item but they do they host their own a little a show they host their a little show it's live streamed on your phone and you can click and you could buy the things that the person is holding up they might hold up a lip gloss thing they start talking about how great it is and then i whole bunch you know a hundred people can go buy that thing with a push of a button on that yes that's different than what i'm talking about but yes well you said shopify for a video which is like in my mind a you're just saying use using a video sell right i'm saying shopify i'm i'm basically saying what a shopify shopify is a is the ability for anybody to spin up their own storefront online okay and what i'm saying is storefront fronts for people who deliver services through video oh so some kid in the trends group launched a plug in for shopify that did this forget what it was called but it was the whole intent was to help yoga teacher sell yes exactly so so how does a how does a tutor you know i say i'm an amazing sat tutor and what i wanna do is i wanna hold my sat tutoring class on thursdays and it costs seventy bucks for your kid to to join for the month or whatever i wanna be be able to say sean's tutoring you know shop put up create a seventy dollar subscription have people come here see that read the details read testimonials read reviews click buy it takes their payment it sends it to my bank account and then it sends them a thing that says hey okay you're scheduled for this time to this time slot come back to the store and it's embedded in there is the video where cool because i'm because i was a customer i now get access to this video service is yeah that first i'm explaining it it's a little bit complicated way i'm explaining it but is something here well obviously there's something there is it big i'm not sure but this good news i feel like is that's like the a crazy easy thing someone can make like fe con or a really competent dove could do that in two days right yeah so fe is working on this so so we'll see how how how go goes i don't know if his vision is exactly the same as this i'm just pretty convinced that now that i've i've kind of played in the world of e commerce i'm like oh shit it's amazing to just let people spin up a storefront but there's a whole bunch of people whose retail you know their brick and mortar place was not selling physical goods it was selling a service doctors lawyers etcetera you know fit per you know personal trainers physical therapist mental therapist whatever and you know tutors so where are they gonna go how do they do their business online and not just online as an hey have a website that has my address and i say come to come to my store and and you can you too can have sat t prep courses but actually saying cool the you know my storefront is digital and i deliver my service through video online let's talk about your e comm experience by the way so you've been in typical like iphone apps web widgets and consumer stuff you don't have to say what you're doing now because i don't think you want to or should but how's how long are you into your so sean has a e comm thing that he's tinkering with how how long into it are you yeah i'm i'm helping my wife it's her so i'm i'm helping her doing it but through that i've learned quite a bit so i've been doing it we've been doing it for let's say eight months total store launched three or four months ago and eight months since the idea you know from idea to like to it today is eight months and your three months in is have you cracked like a thousand dollars a day normally yeah and is it going well it's going great do you so do you look do you think it's awesome yeah i think it's awesome what are the physical physical product are so different i've been doing software only products for a long time and got spoiled i tweeted about this a while ago but but software is magic to me software is for for a variety of reasons i'll tell you that you five reasons why software is magic number one you know you make the product once and you sell it a million times in e commerce you wanna sell a million items you gotta make a million items a million items have to get manufactured for you to do it and hey guess what working with the manufacturer is complicated it costs money to pay for inventory it takes time to get things shipped to you the usps you know get shut down by the president and then then your customers don't get their items some items are defective you have to pay control yeah exactly there's all kinds of shit that goes on to physical products software not the case build it once sell it a million times second thing sell one sell in one place sell in all places so you can make software today and then tomorrow if a user in indonesia wants it hey cool go go ahead and sign up no problem for for the most part in software you can be you can roll out globally overnight very few businesses that's a super superpower like if you told the rockefeller like hey you figured this thing out snap your fingers and now you could do this all around the world they would have been trillion and and that's really what happened to bezos and z and all these other guys they became essentially mega billionaires because their one product took over the whole world they they consumed the whole world's market pretty much outside of china so anyways that's the second property that's amazing you know for e commerce let's say i have a whole bunch of customers in australia who are hearing about it and they want it okay shit now i have to figure out how am i gonna deliver my product over there and expand over there and every country has different customs rules shipping time shipping cost etcetera etcetera how do i do returns it's complicated let's do the next one in software you make something you make some you start with something crappy and then you make it better but every time you make it better every single customer gets the benefit of it being better in e commerce you also start crappy but let's say v two is better than v one we'll guess what you're gonna have a bunch of customers who are stuck with v one who are you know getting a crappy experience and think you suck and don't wanna buy again and you're trying to convince them no no v four is way better we fixed all those issues the buttons don't pop off and the you know the the the the wheels don't break and whatever anymore in software when you fix it overnight everybody every customer in the lifetime of your of your company can can we get the benefit of it any commerce that doesn't happen so again you're you're stuck with a slow slow path and the last one is sort of margins right with software you're able to capture larger margins typically because it's a digital product the software there's sort of zero marginal cost for every incremental user and so you're able to to capture pretty high margins although engineers can be expensive and sometimes service can be expensive but on the whole i think you get higher margins e ecommerce you know typically you're crushing it you're doing well if you're at twenty five thirty percent eb margin and and so you know software might be at a seventy five eighty eighty percent as you as you scale up so what's your outlook on this so far of this business it's a good business it's gonna be a a successful business it's already doing well it's just constrained by inventory at the moment but it's a good business it's not something i wanna dedicate my life to i think e commerce has pretty low barriers to entry in general so that's not great it also has all these headaches because logistics and operations will take up a ton of time and that's not the case with other types of so i think if you could build a software business build a software business i wanted to learn something new and try something new and my wife had this project you wanted to and said i can help you do it and so it's been pretty fascinating yeah it's gonna be a multimillion million dollar business no doubt what about the peer group business that you have do you like that no awful i think it could be great but i made a big mistake which is that i put myself in the groups which i think was part of the value prop people were like oh cool like i listened to shot on the podcast i think he's smart i think he might be able to help me with my business and so i created these peer groups but i'm in the groups and so i gotta show up and so right now i charge two fifty bucks per month per person and i have about twenty people doing it and so you know you can sort of do the math and you're like okay cool so you know you're make about five grand a month off this and it doesn't take a ton of my time like it takes nine to ten hours a month but that's not a great hourly rate for me and so every night that i do it i'm like i like these people i think it's helping them genuinely and i like that but it's a money losing proposition for me if i just use that in if i just use that same time on something else i would get much more value out of it but you know relationships are cool too and good things have come from relationships you can't really predict so you know that's good if i had done it like y'all are doing it where you're not in the group i think that's a better model but then i think it's less value for the people so we're putting it on hold because we did a big report on it and we're like and then we ran a bunch of beta groups and i'm like i don't wanna have that you gotta so like think about it in order to hit a hundred million in sales on that you you would if let's say you you'd have to charge let's say a twenty thousand people who each pay ten thousand dollars how much is that twenty thousand times ten thousand that a hundred that's two hundred million that's two hundred million okay so then what about ten thousand people paying ten ten grand a year that's a lot of people you need and that's a lot of money it's the market that big to satisfy that i don't know yeah i don't know also it's not one of those business i start saliva over i did it because a bunch of people were asking me for i was like i really wanna consult but if i just group thing maybe this will work i don't know let's try it out i looked at y p look at vista and i was like okay those are pretty good businesses after a while but and people seem to be pretty disgruntled with them they don't think they deliver a ton of value and they don't they're they think sort of a rip off the way it's running but now i see why like i should be charging ten times more than i charge essentially five to ten times more than i charge and i shouldn't be in the groups for this to work and i think if i did that that would change like today i think they're getting a tremendous amount of value and if i charge five to ten times more and i wasn't in the group i think they would be getting way less value so i don't really wanna go that path i'm probably just gonna end the experiment in a few months let's talk i don't know how to say this but you put it in there this instagram handle that was acquired for eighty five million yeah dude solve this is crazy so shout out to my buddy steven from flip mass which is if you ever wanna work with influencers you should use flip masks it's kind of a a secret gym so steven's like knee deep in the meme meme world he knows every instagram meme every you know tiktok twitter meme account when i say meme account i basically mean these accounts like this one day one or f jerry if you've ever seen you know fuck jerry's instagram account we're basically it's the influencer is not like kylie you know kylie jenner or whatever it's you know it might just be like you know hood fights or like food porn or like mommy fails or something like that and behind it is like some nineteen year old kid who post content and they're just really funny and they post great memes and you know honestly i think these members are are incredible what they do i think they're they're so talented and so undervalued and they were undervalued for a long time but i saw the other day that warner music group bought the company that's behind day kwan and i think they have like ten to fifteen other accounts for eighty five million dollars which is incredible i think it's a sign of the times right so you have warner music group who wants to always be culturally relevant wanna have distribution into the masses that's critical for a music group and then you have these guys that assembled this like cult following you know they're part of the culture they influence the culture if ten of these meme accounts all start talking about you know how house of card season two is like driving them crazy house of card season two will see a huge spike in viewership and i know this because i know the people who are behind these things and they've done campaigns with netflix with spotify with other huge companies and they're like yeah dude if we wanna make something popular we can make it popular like overnight so i just interviewed this guy from trends and he bought what did he buy nba memes or he bought balls b a l l s ball or ball or balls on instagram they also bought i think it's called nba meme i something like that each one had like one to five million followers now there's a rule in instagram you can't buy the handle but you can buy the media company that owns the handle and anyway this guy he owns a sports betting site and he bought it to use for user acquisition for a sports betting site and then he got mark cuban to throw a little money in and so mark cuban was like alright i'll use the advertising like the the some of the inventory to promote mavericks and or maverick basketball and we'll also like sell some ads on the instagram just to find help us finance it and it's pretty cool it's like a when i he told me i was like that's a great strategy can you talk about your buddy's social chains or no yes i was gonna bring him i just pulled up a a tweet from him because so i've been following this space for a while i used these mi accounts to grow my apps to like literally to number one in the charts before with you know a budget of like less than twenty five thousand dollars and you know that should cost like five hundred thousand dollars so my buddy steve so steve actually was my intern and this is like the best success story ever i'd love to take credit for it but this is all steve i didn't really do shit if anything i just identified early on that this guy has a lot of potential so he was nineteen twenty years old reaches out to me and says you know he he liked what we were building with our app he wanted to help grow it he told me a little bit about himself and i jumped on the phone them flew amount from the uk to the us let him live in the live let them live in an apartment that we owned and work for our company to help grow our app and he so start off as our intern pretty quickly realized okay this guy got a lot of he wanted to go do his own company great he went and did his own company called social chain so this was six years ago maybe five six years ago or something like that so social chain has now gone public and here's their report for the first half of twenty twenty revenue eighty eight million euros eb four million euros so you know not not huge margin there forecast for the full twenty twenty is two hundred million euros revenue and nine million eb the market cap is two hundred and twenty two million dollars for their company now how much public publicly listed company two hundred twenty million dollars do but so there's some weird stuff around that though it like merged with another the isn't it isn't there something weird going on yeah they they created a group so they merged with a whole bunch of other they they acquired some companies they merged with other companies but he's the ceo of this part of the company that went public so the whole thing i don't think it went public this is the the you know the handle is the social change a social chain ag g the handles p u eleven dot d so it's on the german stock exchange and look i don't know how legit it is i know he's legit like he built this fucking thing with his friends i remember they had twenty five employees that were all under the age of twenty three years old at one point god and it was just a shit show but like they were making shit happen you know that he would go i i think i told the story before but tell it again because i think it's kind of an amazing story so he's a super talented speaker public speaker so he would get invited to these like marketing conferences and everyone would be like you know going on stage he's talking about the importance of social media or like the importance of authenticity in twenty nineteen or whatever and he would go on stage and he'd be like hey we're the social chain we run the internet i wanna show you an example this guy put a picture on on on the screen and it was like the soccer player is he's like this guy's name is whatever like manny abi bayou manny ava bayou just got picked up by liverpool he's the youngest guy ever to get picked up a liverpool his contract seventy seven million euros isn't that amazing for like a seventeen year old and we think he's gonna be the next big star so we're gonna talk about him over the next thirty minutes on social so he starts so his all his meme accounts all his theme accounts start posting about man bah or whatever his name was and thirty minutes later he's like let's check in on so he's then continues to speech about how you know how they think about social how they think about marketing how they think about power of of sort of comedy in and memes and then he pulls up twitter and he's like oh look the number one trend on twitter manny bayou you know this tweet has gotten you know his name has been mentioned whatever hundreds of thousands of times he's also the number one news and you know all these news outlets have picked him up and wrote blog articles if you go to google and he's like oh by the way this guy doesn't exist like i i literally just made him up his name is an ana for like you know whatever social chain and like i literally just made up this guy and look what happened look how many people are talking about him look at how many news outlets have how many legit news outlets have reported this news this is insane and he's like we're social chain we run the internet and i just remember thinking like this guy is a super talented speaker and he actually has built this influenced machine of the internet by owning all these instagram and twitter accounts it was crazy i am looking this up that is crazy what a crazy story that's nuts i'd if you would've told me about that business it's not scam but it definitely probably attracts a lot of scam people he's and this guy's is like a young gary v like his instagram account now has a million followers and it's because he hired a guy with a video camera to follow him around every meeting he goes to and he edits its daily vlogs and are like super high quality and gives like kinda of life advice and he's a good speaker with the british accent and he's a good looking dude and it just works like his whole thing just works and when he would do that stuff on stage when he'd get off stage of course you know the brand you know the guy who owns a brand budget from microsoft and spotify and netflix and you know uber eats they're all like hey we would love to get some of that internet juice that you guys got like that was amazing what you did here's you know a eight million dollar contract with us you know you work your own retainer for for two hundred fifty thousand dollars you know per month and and so that's what was happening by the way business the show the story that sean said it took place in most recently there was an article written about it in june of nineteen i don't know actually know when oh sorry it he was set to prove at a soccer conference in two thousand fifteen that his agency can can can make it popular the conference what's called soccer rex soccer x and so he named the player rex so and ana of soccer x a sixteen year old who had signed to arsenal for thirty four million dollars right and it did in fact go viral and then they tweeted out it just a joke right yeah so okay i got every detail wrong but the story right it's right so no you got it right it's just crazy i mean this isn't like some i'm like oh i heard he did this i mean i just googled social chain fake soccer player and there's like all this truth the metro which what is that like the biggest paper in london wrote about the truth signed the the truth behind russ set rex sec thirty four million euro transfer move to our arsenal right and i gotta say having four million in eb on ninety million in revenue like not not great at all so you know that's like you know four percent margin so so so you know i'm not saying this is the greatest business i'm saying this kid pulled off a fucking you know heist on the internet and now the stock market and has built like an amazing business i'm super proud of them like that's like a success i i view i take credit for that success not for what he did i credit myself for being from front row as an audience member that's really all all i can say is like cool so i picked a good talent to watch and i've watched him for seven years build something kind of amazing so you know i think that's always a fulfilling feeling alright let's wrap this up with one more thing that we're gonna talk about a kid who did something crazy a few weeks ago i brought up jim shark do you remember jim shark yep and i was like man they like look at their financials like i grew like crazy the guy who runs it's only twenty seven did you see they raised money or i would even say raise money but a pe firm bought twenty percent of the business i did not see that it happened this weekend for one point three billion dollars in jim sc like a at leisure brand they make like you know gym clothing correct it's like i think it's cool my wife thinks it's cool but it would be stereotype as like what's the equivalent of like an english bro i think what do they call them lads or something yeah it's like steve and their friends owned lad bible so he didn't own it but his best friend owned lad bible which is like bro bible for the uk and that and they kind of helped each other girl like crazy and that's why i got this kinda like lab culture that's where i followed a lot of it but yeah that's of these guys are like are like the borough of england and they sell it to like the instagram girls of england and like all it's like all hot people who have ads you know and whatever but it's like cheap shit it's like real it's like you know fashion nova yep it's like fashion nova but for workout enthusiasts and they're like what mail mostly white bros of england but it's expanded so like i love a lot of people like them because it's so cheap and it's like perfectly fine for a pair of tights or some other workout gear but they're doing like three hundred million year pounds a year in sales and this kid started at nineteen it's just crazy amazing congrats know i love i'm on their site right now actually they do a lot of really smart details i can see on their site that i'm steal i like i like the way they're doing this yeah jim sharp is cool so what do you wanna talk about just like you know shout out to them or is there something well we talked about it recently and we're it was in the loop okay and we're like i think this i mean we we didn't call anything because it was already quite huge but so so let me bring up a a a company that is similar to to jim shark but i hadn't heard of it my my buddy ben who is you know my secret weapon of i've always showing me awesome stuff that i never heard about and i talk about podcast ben levy yeah he knows me stuff too and so he showed me this check out grunt style so grunt style dot com what you're gonna see is basically like a brand that is kind of like all american i wanna say like almost like trump american where where you see like extremely patriotic folks a lot of imagery is like kinda either military or flag based or whatever isn't it a grunt like a like a low end on in the military or something that that's true i don't know if that's why they call it that maybe and they do stuff like you know there's like a when they do the email pop up it's like are you a veteran or are you a you know patriot active service number are you a patriot like which one are you that say have like two million monthly unique dude i bet this company crush it exactly i have a hunch that they crush it so they make difference up they make just shirts you know like there's this gear lifestyle gear and some of it's for fitness some of its masks some of its outdoors whatever this is an example of just like knowing your audience tripling down on your niche and building like kind of an incredible little e commerce business and the innovation here is on the branding the marketing and the the sort of segmentation of who you're gonna go after so here's our thing we have taken the american fighting spirit and instilled it into everything we do you don't have to be a veteran wear grunt style but you have to love freedom freedom bacon and whiskey and they sell mostly just like t shirts that have some type of american flag or some type of like cute like whiskey helps slogan on it and then it looks like they might sell dumbbells and they sell lots of mass and lots of key chains and lots of stickers so it's just like a gift shop but i bet you these guys sell like many many tens of millions of dollars worth of stuff a year yeah i i would bet the same and it's funny it's yeah it's is like america's gift shop it's like if if you were walking around america and this was what what would the gift shop look like i think this is what it would look like for many people they got a million followers on instagram i think they're doing really really well so and i think people can take a lot of inspiration of like you know for whatever your niche is here's what it looks like to do something really really well and i doubt that they've raised money and gotten a whole bunch of press and i i don't think that's how they built this business i think they built it you i haven't looked into too much of their background but it does seem like they built it you know sort of brick by brick or organically and sort of through social rather than through anything flash i do according to the founder a over a hundred million in sales here okay it's quite huge i think that and their margins are probably fat because these are just pretty cheap t shirts one thing that's interesting and i don't care like where you fall on the spectrum but the so this is a common strategy which is you like go after a group of people who feel they're being attacked and you sell up to them because they bond together this type of person which we would say is probably a republican probably conservative probably mostly white probably like my values are being trump on with this part particularly with covid like some my rights are being taken away right this segment of people i know through being an investor in some of these companies they have the most loyal audiences of any niche i've ever seen in my life the conservative right leaning like i owe it to like my kids so like keep my rights and not whatever i know how you wanna stereotype ass shit the people who read fox the people who read bright part that audience is the most super engaged the super engaged audience i've ever seen of of anything yeah exactly there's extreme versions of it like the alex jones crowd and you can see their numbers how and insane that is b bar same and that they're sort of like you know as you get closer and closer to the center you know it gets a little wider and a little bit less over ellis but yeah it's cool cool brand cool success you know good for them i think that's awesome i like highlighting these brands that are not the like you know i like to study brands that people in s f la new york are not wearing they're not building they're not caring about because i think there's just a lot of opportunity and those are the ones that people aren't usually talking about which is why i like kinda bringing them up here i agree i agree i'm into it alright we'll wrap this one up thank you for listening cool so yeah