#129 - Why Elon Musk Is the Greatest Dropshipper and A Low Key Company Making Millions From Politics

yeah i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go less travel a looking back alright what up sam what's going on you look like you're in phone booth not where are you have we have so there's this office there you could see how big it is that's me touching it that's yeah touching the like so i'm setting up a little studio in there okay great i don't know why i was asking you where you are to start the episode it's probably the most boring way to start an episode i'm gonna be in austin for a while okay fair enough we have a bunch of topics because we have a bunch of things on this list and i did prep so i'm i'm doing thirty minutes of prep for every podcast now you will notice the difference the listeners will notice the difference i'm confident of it okay do you wanna go first yeah pick one of these things on this list and i'll talk about it let's see spy guy so spy guy okay so i don't remember have we talked about spy guy on the pod before no but i know him alan yeah so i was dm him just before this actually as well i was you know i'm gonna shot you out on the podcast probably so what is spy guy so spy guy is if you go to spy guy dot com it's a website that basically sells like spy gear or like anti spy gear also so like if you go to the website right now the first thing on the site is like this little tool that will help you detect you know hidden cameras in your hotel room or your airbnb which is you know kinda creepy but surprisingly just like is a problem there was a famous airbnb thing they came out not not long ago some girl found a hidden camera in her airbnb where the host was creep like filming her and so spy basically is a niche e commerce site started by this guy allan and he just really owns this niche nation so i thought this was awesome because it's a seven figure store so i think he's doing over three million top line revenue now so probably about a million bucks of profit a year and it's been an at for a while like initially got started in the space of like two thousand nine has been like over ten years twenty fourteen he basically found for a workweek week by tim ferris and was like oh okay i need to like system this and like this can be my muse this is my cash flow thing and like got like rein by that and had a little more strategy behind it and it started to take off and it's very different than i would say most e commerce things because a it's this niche that most people don't think about b i love the name see he doesn't use facebook's to drive traffic so he's basically like facebook has never worked for me not because it can't work like it just hasn't worked and the business has worked despite it but he's like you know we haven't quite gotten cold traffic to work on facebook yet so i think it's mostly google and you know word mouth of people knowing the spy guy name what a spy i do exactly can you explain to me he sells he basically sells other people's products so he sells like things like you know like audio surveillance hidden camera bug detection hidden camera detection stuff for your car you know like basically like it's like let's say there's a use case so i think this one smart thing on their website where he says like shot by concern so what's your concern is your concern workplace harassment or watching the babysitter center to see if they're doing a good job with the baby or tracking your car in case or tracking somebody else's car in case you wanna see where they're going and so it's gadgets that are for these you know like you know it it wanna be james bond use cases right like you know it's like having your own little alfred in your batman and you get to have these little gadgets that help you do cool shit do you have a security system at home we actually have one that i haven't said i i just started renting this place there's one installed and i haven't started it but growing up i always had one let me tell you about this product i just discovered because i'm thinking about getting it it's called the name is weird deep sent i know you sent now sentinel yeah no that have you heard of this yes i heard of i know about it jack's showed it to me what it is and i don't know anything about the space so have no idea if this is like breathtaking but it sounds breathtaking to me right you pay twelve hundred dollars and then a hundred dollars a month or twenty dollars a month i forget the exact price and you get three cameras and they could be solar powered as well so you never have to change the battery and what happens is it detects if someone is walking by and then a real life person on the other end will check in and if that person looks suspicious the security guard on the other end and won't be like hey do you know someone here who what's the owner's name and if it seems more suspicious they press a button in a loud siren goes off and have videos on youtube of like whether they call amazon pirates or something people steal packages yeah and like people breaking into cars there's so many videos of of the service in play and it looks awesome it looks so cool i totally wanna buy one yeah i so so this space of home security is pretty crazy so so they're simply safe which i think is like one of the i don't know like newer players i don't know when it started i think maybe it started in two thousand ten ish something like that but it's valued over a billion dollars now so they've su sequoia invested in it all this stuff they they do you know hundred million plus in revenue and deep sentinel what's cool about them is the the fact that they have a real human who monitors it for you right so like most of these are get an alert on your phone like i have a ring like doorbell and it's kinda like a security system in a right so it tells me oh there's motion at your door and then you like fucking you have to open the app and then you open it up and it's just your neighbor coming home like because my comp my door my a condo that doors near each other or it's like guy delivering a package it's just like nothing unsafe but with deep sentinel they basically are leveraging a bunch of work from home kinda cheap labor to like watch the camera feeds and actually alert you when there's something to be alerted by and it's just like the next level up of like pro home surveillance software and i think it's a pretty good idea i saw i saw this pretty early on because my friend james hong i think invested in it or advises them and i was like that's a pretty cool model but to have a a actual person doing now i'm surprised they're doing home versus like business i feel like businesses and like warehouses and factories need this almost in a bigger way than homes and i'm sure there's a bunch of people who serve that market too that i'm just great i think the the if i was in this industry i'd be actually afraid of just knock offs because like the electronics get cheaper and cheaper and more come comm is like at this point of security camera is like an iphone charger right like sometimes a lot of people will just buy whatever the cheapest because they think they all look exactly the same right yeah i think the the you know so my friend had taught me this a while back where he was like you have to in any business you wanna identify what is the most valuable part of the chain and it's nine times out of ten it's just the customer relationship so the the part of the value chain that is that has the customer wallet basically like the wallet subscribed to their service and so like you know the manufacturers in this market are probably just getting squeezed over time because it's just more manufacturers stuff gets cheaper not more expensive and you can swap one out for the other and people don't care but once you have like the simply safe brand and the the name recognition and the customer relationship and the marketing engine to get keep acquiring more customers like you could just sort of like swap out hardware over time it's much less important and i think like for going back to spy guy i think that's spy guy does well too right they have the the brand the name and the customer relationship of people who are kinda of paranoid and wanna buy this type of stuff and right now he's just selling other people's gadgets right like he started making his own gadgets recently like ten years into the business but for nine years you know the business has worked beautifully with with just selling other people's stuff i like allan i know i've met allan a bunch of times and i've been both with him for maybe eight years now so i'm happy to see that goes as well before that he had something else for that but well sorry what have you bought any of the spy guy stuff no because i've never owned a home that like i've lived in buildings my whole life right so i've never had yeah i've always had a doorman so i've never really had like security issues like there's like a pen that's like a voice recorder pen you click the pen and it starts to record like just shit straight out of the movies which i think is great i love this stuff i've love i i always was loving movies when this stuff exists and i'm glad there's like an easy trusted place to buy it online it makes sense to me let me bring up somewhat of a i have too fluffy but interesting topics let's see what the first one the first one is leveraging leverage and picking the right business model the reason why i've been thinking about this is so my business model is like in the middle of like great to bad which is it's all digital very low cost but i do have to deliver something every single day yeah a new thing every day a new thing every day a barber is like the worst business model ever because she can only make money when she's there doing this thing yep and it's like the worst and then can only serve people geographically you know within five blocks right so you're limited by geography but you have to be there yeah yep and then i was thinking i'm like man it's kinda crazy i never i didn't think i did not think about this when i was getting into my business of like what's the best way to do it now the interesting part is that that's important because you can think about what your skills and what do you wanna do but you have to package it in a really good business model so like perhaps a business model better than mine is nerd wallet which is the maybe i don't know this for sure but in my case i like content and i like to finance content maybe their founders did as well and they chose this business model of just ranking high on google and once you rank high on google it's hard to do and you have to work hard to maintain it but yeah that webpage page dirt law dot com best credit cards makes money forever right while you sleep you don't have to do anything if you take the day often and it just keeps on going so that's pretty good but then what's even better than that is credit karma which is they probably cared about personal finance or finance they made a little widget where you could check your credit score and monitor on regular basis it just so happens you could also get a new credit card and they make money when they sleep and the reason why this is important is because you like we all are gonna work sixty hours a week to get our thing up in the air and to get it and have it running like everyone like look like everyone thinks that like big problems or our big companies are probably harder than small companies and the truth is is that oh that is kind of true like once you get it going you could choose to work twenty five hours a week instead of eighty hours a week that's definitely true but when you're just in the phase of getting shit started you're gonna work constantly no matter what it doesn't matter if it's a hot stand or if it's a facebook you know what i mean like you're working mh really hard and i just think it's so important to package it in the right business model because your life will be so much better i think about this all the time i've been thinking about this for a long time if you remember and when you first started the hustle i was like i i thought you were great i was like this dude sam is amazing he's like a fire cracker he's gonna he's gonna make sure it happen and then i remember going to your office and hearing the business plan i was just like i don't like media businesses because of this like i think they're sort of low leverage in a way right they're medium right like at least your digital media business not like a you know some kind of like like at that time you was an events business so that was like pretty bad and if you remember like they're one of the original plans that you were kicking around was like we're gonna use content to drive people to our events and like the events business can be big and like i've remember thinking oh events that's pretty low leverage because you gotta recreate the event every time takes a bunch of people it's restricted by where you're at geographically so that's bad then even content i'm like man that's kind of like a content treadmill and it's just if you're constantly every every day every week you have to remake the product right you to make a new piece of content that's gonna get people excited that seems really hard to do so i was like i think this guy's is probably gonna succeed but i don't think it's gonna be humongous investment because compared to software where software is amazing right build it once sell it a million times build it here sell it everywhere right like those two things are superpower compared to what you do and what i'm doing right now like i think you were gonna reference like listen yeah i was gonna say i was like you're understanding it now where you're like oh man i i cut it's easy to make money if doing making the money off of this project is easy yeah maintaining it is hard but i would say that like with software i i i'm a sp small time owner a software business and i've like seen on the inside like there is customer support like any anytime someone's giving you money for something you have to fulfill the promise so you have to maintain it right yes so it's definitely not as easy as build it once like but it is build it one sell at a million times so for example like i i've now experienced four different models right i started a restaurant i did maybe five i did an energy company i did a software business i've done an e comm business and i've done a content business right and they're all of different levels so i'll let let's let's walk through real quick so right now i'm doing this content thing basically a paid newsletter called dale access pass where i'm basically like every day i'm creating a new piece of content a new daily blog post about teaching people how to execute how to how to build a business how to launch a business business from scratch and so every day i gotta remake the product which sucks but then i deliver it for free over the internet so that's good that's better than something like a physical textbook or something like that i your startup costs were literally zero our startup cost was zero and nothing's thing's doing great so like that thing is on pace to do like half a million bucks in a year so the the revenue was good and the margins are great but the effort is really high and i'll never be able to just say well i did the hard work of setting it up and now i could set it and forget it it's like no people are literally paying for me and to sit down every day and do the thing and even if it's an hour a day that's still an hour a day of commitment i have to do and be creative and be good during during that thing and so that's that's challenging so media business i'm like okay hard and content content content hard game there but you're not doing a normal media business like like it's like the guy who owns new york times isn't like this is hard he's like this is easy i got people do it all the work for me yeah so he hires like people right so there's people labor that that can help you labor is a form of leverage and so you could do that but i would argue this is one the reason why media businesses struggle is because typically the labor is not differentiated so you get like kind of low cost ish labor that puts out something that is typically un from what anybody else can put out and so like right now i'm able to put something out that people are willing to pay for because people trust me they know me so so i'm a differentiated brand myself i can't really outsource that if i started to outsource it then my product becomes less differentiated i think you've done a good job of that with the hustle where the people who write your daily email right it just about as good as you did and trends they write it they do it just about as good as you would do or if not better and so you've done a good job of using labor but then your cost goes up right so now you have to employ writers and then your your margins go down but it's still better than e comm right so eco comm is even worse because eco com you to have a physical product so you're like your your your your leverage in your business model is you know has higher cost of goods and less scalability right you can't sell a million times so you can't build it one sell a million times because you have to actually manufacture the product every single for every single time you wanna sell it but the good news is is that you can build a huge e com business with like very little people like if you explain if you told me there was a company that was doing a hundred million sales with twenty people i'd be like yeah i mean that's not crazy yeah that's not crazy but those but the the the labor the leverage there is is capital so that business is doing a hundred million a years is probably spending thirty million a year in marketing with thirty to forty million a year on cost of goods sold and it's probably making twenty million on the hundred if that maybe fifteen yes and the bad part is that they're probably not actually making that cash flow though they have zero money in their bank account they have your money in their bank account typically and they're always one tweak away from from death of like you know facebook algorithm email marketing rules changing in gmail things like that and but like that's beside the point i would just say like e com is i would say worse than media so i i'd put if i was for stack ranking leverage i put media above e com and i'd put software definitely above both and i put the restaurant i did below all of them right that's the barber it's like the worst model and so this isn't like groundbreaking but i do think it is under under thought about when you start a thing and so so i heard something the other day that i think is is relevant so emmett the ceo of twitch was doing this talk at back at yale and where he went to school and this video has like thirty nine views like nobody has seen this video yet and i was watching it and he sits on the he goes you know one of the original justin tv justin dot tv founders kyle went and built cruise which was like the self driving car company that got bought by gm for a billion dollars and he's like you know kyle you know was amazing it's an amazing engineer and when he when he went to go do this product like go to cruise it was very clear that there was zero product market fit risk meaning there's no doubt in anyone's mind any investors mind that if you could build a self driving car clearly you're gonna be a successful company you don't even have to do the hard part of like going to market getting customers because like customers will either come to you because you have a freaking self driving car or you can just license this to any other brand who sells cars already and you can make a bunch of money that way or do what they to just sell a gm ahead of time just for the technology for billion dollars so he's like there's zero product market fit risk but there was a huge technical risk of like can this even be done and he goes i think this is a mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make he goes there's you know for every one entrepreneur that's doing what kyle did there's probably nine hundred ninety nine that are doing like the opposite risk profile so it's like low technical risk you could def it's like definitely possible question valuable and he's like i think more people should be doing the opposite which is definitely valuable question possible because there's you know like it's pretty like open space over there and you know if you had to take a risk like taking technical risk is not that much worse than taking market risk in fact anyways market risk is worse because you're gonna do all the hard work of building the thing and nobody wants it that's a we get insight i think that's phenomenal and so i have another friend who who invest in things like this too where he's like i take zero target product market i a fit risk as a investor i said what do you mean he goes well i invest in automation he goes basically i only invest in a thing like he invested in this like robot that cleans bathrooms and hotel he's he's like if this company can make this little super roomba basically that will clean a bathroom in a hotel then or in an office building then for sure the office building owner is gonna buy this instead of hire jan to go clean the the bathrooms because that person's gonna be inconsistent they're gonna cost money they're gonna call in sick and you know they're i'm gonna have to you know have hr issues and like all kinds of stuff whereas if this robot can actually do it for cheaper and better than a human can like there's no doubt that i'll buy this and he so all he does is just vet does this robot do it cheaper and better than a human can and like if if it's not cheaper today but it's better do i see a pathway where it becomes cheaper you know in the next three years who is that my friend michelle michelle harp is that the younger guy he's the young guy yeah that's cool i that's a really good good idea and i never heard anybody say that i never heard anybody say i look for your product record fit risk in fact i always just the the style of entrepreneurship i did was always product market fit risk right like i'm gonna do a thing i don't know if people will want it but like let's try it and see and it's kinda interesting to take the opposite approach of like what is an absolute yes they will buy like he invest in this pizza bot company same thing it's like he's just trying to the company trying to sell pizza pizza making machines to domino's to say like y'all replace your four employees with this this you know conveyor belt that like makes pizzas precisely automatically twenty four seven like at lower cost than your humans and like if they can do that if they can just like technically pull that off they're for sure a billion dollar company because they can license that tech to everybody so that's actually a common thread that i've seen amongst the people i look up to so john rockefeller he sold oil originally it was for care scene and there was no doubt of when people want this oil he was just like can i actually get it to them and do it afford right and and then cornelius van belt he was like i need to get people from staten island to new york city okay now i to get them from new york city to nic wag like they're people who wanna do that but like literally can i pull that off like i might have to build this crazy ship but let's see if i could pull it up but like there's demand for sure right another one is andrew carnegie it was like can i make steel for cheaper than the other people like is it physically possible and that's why they came can't they that's when the the idea of steel was everyone was making iron he was like what if i made steel just as good as iron that's way cheaper like it's like a pretty cut that's like i guess you could almost say the same as the same for amazon and walmart it was like so so for the no everyone wants this but can we actually let off exactly yes exactly and i think what most people get wrong is they just do either better or cheaper and then they think they're in the boat they think they're in the same boat as the steel thing or like you know the pizza making robot but actually what they're doing is they're saying like for example there's a company called boom supersonic airplanes and these guys are basically making really fast air travel and so it's like oh you wanna get from you know la to london in four hours boom is is trying to make planes that can do that and they they they famously they went through y comb and they showed up on on demo day of y comb they got on stage and they said hey we're boom we're making supersonic jets we think air travel has stag and by the way we have i forgot what it was it was like it was like a hundred million dollars of pre orders from boeing or for or from actually virgin error at the time and basically they had the day before demo day they had gotten branson to write you know sign an lo that says if you can deliver a plane at this cost that does this will buy you know whatever twelve of them and the total was a hundred million dollar purchase price and so that works but the problem with them is that they might be more expensive than you know their their air flight air air might be more expensive than our traditional plan so they might be better but more expensive whereas the trick with like something like an uber for example uber was way more convenient and it was cheaper than a cab and so that that's better and cheaper better and cheaper is when you have zero product market fit risk but if you're better but more expensive or you're cheaper but not better then you still have the product market fit risk and you shouldn't miss out on that i think this is a fantastic conversation and i'm gonna i'll it'll it leads nicely into the next point which is i read a i read a stat recently so like i was having a little existential crisis yesterday like i normally have not existential crisis but like i need to do something meaningful my my daily questioning of life yeah like that everyone has all the time and i was because i was thinking about nurses and i was like gosh these people are doing covid like they're really the heroes it's not me who well no one thinks i'm a hero but like like like you know i mean have like business people are in heroes like the maybe sell bar but anyway i was thinking like what could i do with business that actually makes an impact and i read this crazy stat that basically the majority of things that we recycle like that go in your blue recycling bin like ninety percent of it just gets thrown away right do you know that i do know that and we did talk about this last podcast or the one before so so yeah we did talk on this one already i just i re reread this step maybe i just forgot about it where it was like nine percent of plastics are recycled i was like that is crazy that is crazy crazy crazy that is crazy to me yeah we talked about new plastics here you're right and actually somebody somebody messaged me something after the fact they go hey check this out and they sent me something that is what they called negative carbon manufacturing meaning the process to make the thing is not just carbon is you know a negative it it actually sucks more carbon out of the atmosphere that it took to make the thing and you know i'd understood like ten percent of what the person was telling me but it was like yeah these are materials that are like it's called air carbon i think so let me see okay so if you go to the website is c fashion dot com and basically it's like glasses phone cases purses and it's made with what they call air carbon which is like a new material that is a breakthrough that is than plastic and good for the environment and all that good stuff i don't know if this legit i don't know much about this but i thought it was cool and i hope people send me like a million things like this because you know anybody who's actually innovating on the material side of what we use for plastics cardboard foil all that crap tape you know like there's just like absurd amount of this stuff that's used and wasted and killing the environment and if somebody can actually make something that is better and cheaper you have zero product market fit risk i believe if you're better and cheaper i like that then if we already talked about it we could skip wanna i go to par that's interesting yeah have you seen this app at something kind of similar to so that if you guys want to talk about it but yes yeah is it i put a lincoln it's called a trade water dot u us do you guys know about what cap and trade is cap and trade now what is that yeah so like the state of california they'll put a limit on how much carbon dioxide a company can emit and if you go over that limit you could buy credits to offset that so there are companies that'll will they'll kind of offset that and then sell the credits that they earn and that's their business model and this company is one of them it's called trade water dot us i think what they specialize is these chemicals called r twelve r twenty two r five zero two and these are found in old refrigerators and acs they go around collecting these things and then they destroy them basically they'll they'll buy they're usually like laying garages people don't even know they have them and even though they're not being in use they're omit the gases so these guys they go around they're kinda like american picker there's like you guys in a truck on around picking these things up they buy it off people they put ads on facebook they buy it off people and then they destroy it basically and they get the credits for destroying it and they sell the credits they sell it on a marketplace and that's the company i think they they do several million a year in revenue thirty employees and funny thing is like on facebook they'll advertise as a different company so they have two websites because some folks won't sell it to them if they show up and say that they're gonna destroy it they're like no no that's all it's all conspiracy global warming is not real so they really they have two names so that's their that's that's what the company actually called and then on facebook they advertise as refrigerator finder dot com and they don't mention that they're gonna they don't mention that they're gonna destroy it on that website bra you your audio set right now but your content is fire i love it this is great but are you sick of are you yeah my throat kind of bad yeah okay so this is fucking great so i also have been wanting to go deeper on the carbon carbon credit marketplaces because we've talked before about how beautiful of a model marketplaces are and this is like when you pair high impact like mission oriented stuff with beautiful business model and large market size because you know so many large companies need to offset their their footprint especially as regulation changes so i think that that's a very interesting space that i feel like i just don't know enough about but i wanna know more yeah i i don't know anything about this but i think it's i'm shocked this even exists me to be honest with you yeah there was very cool when i've everybody like this is amazing i have to share it well don't you remember when we talked about like the the carbon credit cards right that's right which was like it anyway it tracks all that it's it's it's is it's intriguing do you wanna what is elon drop shipping okay let's do so elon drop shipping so you saw elon musk came out with this tequila recently have you seen this yeah i got shit on because i tweeted a bunch of fake news about it what did you do about i saw like did this analysis about how ferrari has a massive chunk of their revenue coming from merchandise and right and he was wrong it wasn't the same it wasn't he said it was like seventy percent i think it's really like thirty percent and i tried that people got that's when that kid got pissed and he goes i'm never investing in sean's right right because sam did sam didn't diligence his tweet okay so okay so basically i just wanted to highlight this i think this is just cool as any like a lot of people idol elon for a bunch of different reasons i think one cool thing that he does that more people should do is he sells his byproduct and what i mean by that is in the course of doing what they're doing right so let's say let's take the boring company right that's his company that's gonna go underground drill holes and make tunnels and sell bricks right they sold bricks they also sold this something called the boring hat and it's just a hack that says boring on the front and because you know it's was a pawn on like the drilling term boring plus you know the word boring and he sold six hundred thousand dollars worth of the hat and then he like changes twitter bio hat salesman for the day or whatever like he just knows okay i can make this limited limited edition merch that's just meant to be fun and i can use that to basically kick start a bunch of my projects and so he did flame throw for five hundred dollars because he's like what's my brand my brand is fucking rockets and electric cars cool what else do every what what else is like a little boys wet dream alright flame throw so he you know they made a flame throw a a tesla brand flame throw i think and there's five hundred bucks and he sold ten million dollars worth of it in a hundred hours and then they actually deliver them to customers and these things i think do a it's like a win win win so basically it builds your brand as somebody that's interesting that's fun that's unique it makes money so it's profitable marketing whereas marketing is almost always a cost center but he's using marketing as a profit center essentially and and then the last thing is these are you know not only does it like kind of build you know your diehard fans like gives them like reasons to like love you more and and ways to connect more but it like raises a bunch of capital upfront for you to finance things and so you know tesla so he does this with the cars themselves right like cyber truck look at this fucking thing this thing's great put down a thousand dollar deposit or a hundred dollar deposit and i think he's raised what like twenty forgot exactly how many how much he's sold of pre sales of the cars but like i believe it's like twenty million dollars worth of the car that he's pre selling or or potentially more and and so he you he's done this with merch but he's done this with his cars and i just think that more brands should do this like i i've pitched this at twitch i'm like twitch we have this huge community of a hundred million plus gamers gamers love but gamers have a sense of humor they love kind of like internet memes jokes like this we have a quirky where one of the few social networks that's not like just like hated like a facebook and treat as this like corporate overload like sure some people look at twitch that way but a lot of people think it's like fun and kind of irr in a way and and up between like twitch and snapchat i think those are the two brands that could tiktok maybe that could pull this off of like selling stuff i think the hustle should be selling stuff i think more brands should be basically selling their their brand in these like gimmick merch packages we do sell some stuff the reason we have it is we just haven't had the ability to set up i mean i guess this is kind of a shit use but it's like when you're a small company is it's actually hard to like do all this when you're elon it's a little bit easier you could you could you could just be like you ted people just go and do it but i i do agree with you do you wanna know my favorite example of this go ahead king ford charcoal you know what king ford charcoal is that's right yeah you wanna familiar with it do you know what it came from no when ford was so for a long time ford was i i might get the story wrong brave you can google it but so ford had to bring in a bunch of production in house because they were making so many cars and no one else was doing it and i think they had to make their own frames like out of iron and steel or whatever and so they had to burn a ton of stuff you know they or they to have ovens going really hot and so what they did wouldn't they had these ovens is they would put wood into an oven burn it and then what's left over is like charcoal and they would pack it together really tightly and then they would pack pack together really tightly all their extra wood scraps and created charcoal and that's where king for charcoal came out of i love it and that's i think a big business of its own right yeah multi billion dollar company and i bet you that there's a a ton of these types of things out there i love these types of things where you use the waste to i mean that's what oil ultimately is right like with oil you like this you you just use every little bit of it you make care scene you make like crude oil you or i don't i don't know anything about oil but you know what i mean that's like how the the refinery works right and this what i this was my theory with all access pass was like if i'm gonna do a project anyways why don't i just sell the byproduct which is the the learnings and process that i'm using to make this what if i just wrote that down and then sold that in addition right and so i i've raised a fund theory and i told people how i raised the fund and i made money while raising the fund i got paid to basically do the thing i was do for free anyways and and so i think that there's a whole bunch of examples that are like this that are either selling like the physical by byproduct or the reason i called elon the greatest drop shipper on earth was because he was basically just taking the kind of elon musk slash tesla brand and slapping it on simon it on a bunch commodity products that could be sold as novelty item for ten times the price right so like this isn't the best tequila it's tesla tequila the limited edition fun thing for tesla fan boys that can be you know he's charging two hundred fifty dollars a bottle for this thing that's probably you know normally would sell for thirty dollars and so he's got this like ten up ten x markup because it is a a novelty you know a novelty product to his his fan boys what alright let's go to two more of these i like what tell me what i don't know if fear nation which one do you wanna pick skip fear niche let's do parlor so i noticed this app the other day during the election i noticed this i looked at the app store and i like to keep track of the app charts just to see what's trending and whatnot and the number one app in the us free store which is almost always just like instagram facebook tiktok snapchat like you know one of these one of these apps was something called parlor and i never heard of parlor i like what the hell is this and parlor is a social network it's basically twitter slash facebook but it's like the whole thing is like it's anti censorship so it's like a whole bunch of people on the right wing in the us the conservatives and the trump supporters basically who are really upset about facebook and twitter for censoring things like you know the the other day i i tweeted this ridiculous thing out where donald trump put up a photo on instagram that just said happy the volley which is like this indian holiday it's just donald trump like just wishing happy holiday happy holiday to somebody and then underneath instagram had this like big banner under his photo that's not under any other photo that just said joe biden is the president election in twenty twenty he's like what why are you why are you fucking with this guy's photo about something he's not saying i am the president election and this is like fact checking he just said happy the ollie and this this thing like auto slap this on his photo and i looked at the comments and people were like fucking high irate as they should be like this is like a stupid thing that the platform would do that would just show its you know quote unquote bias it's bias towards low liberals left whatever that's the belief of of trump's supporters so parlor is this mysterious app nobody really knows like no badge yeah true i saw the kid today it's a young guy parlor no no they know who it is it's no they know who the ceo is and they know two of the investors but they don't know who's the main investor because the people who they say investors are these celebrity kinda like well known people but they're not like big investors i think i read it's mercer it's it's basically mercer is sit what's his name what's the simmons guy jay simmons i'm not sure anyway the guy who started renaissance hedge fund the the big shot had fund it was simmons and his partner mercer or something they also today yeah they backed b bar so they actually own b bar dot com i don't know if they own it or they they're the main i don't know how the structure is but they're basically they basically own it and the it's it it was a dad i this is a robert something mercer robert mercer is the one for rebecca and rebecca is i think his daughter's daughter yeah yeah so they fund all that stuff and so i think they're the guy james simmons it was james simmons the one who the book you know he just had the book famous book come out the man who beat the market or something right about it's about the the renaissance yeah well that his partner is mercer and mercer started b bar and now did the guy behind this i think right so so this so at this came out i think today that our article broke but yeah monday in november sixteenth so so basically for the last two weeks this thing has been number one in the charts and i tweeted something about this which was just like holy shit look at this like the number one happened of the charts is because a whole bunch of people are basically leaving they're basically saying i wanna leave twitter i wanna leave facebook and i wanna be on a different social platform to the point where they could be you know this is hundreds of thousands of downloads per day easily like half a million easily per day to be at that spot in the charts and so i thought that was kind of interesting and nobody was really covering and at the time nobody knew who was backing it and it kind of just been this app with no traction for three years and then all of a sudden went crazy and so i tweeted about this thing and it's my most popular tweet of all time because this guy dan boing who i guess is like a podcast conservative podcast like type of dude he retweeted my tweet about it and so this tweet is like seven and a half thousand likes been shared over two thousand times of me just screenshot that charts and being like look at this like app that's number one it's basically a giant middle finger to twitter and facebook saying people wanna wanna go try something else and so i thought it's pretty interesting i think this is gonna be huge already that the app has been down so like during the election that week most of the comments in reply to my tweet were just like i can't log in like the app got so slammed with like you what are hundreds of thousands of users in within you know within a foot couple of hours that you can couldn't even log in the app kinda sucks but i think that there is a there is demand for like an alternative network that is not like kinda owned by silicon valley and you know crypto often promises projects like this that are like oh decentralized anti censorship and there's been a whole bunch of like reddit but not owned by reddit and twitter but not owned by twitter like mastodon or steam it like most people haven't heard of these but if you're in the crypto world these were kind of popular projects because people thought oh would people wanna use a social network that's not owned by zuckerberg and and jack do and they never really took off but i think some of these things are about timing and when you get enough angry people who leave and want something else that can kick start a new place although i will say i think this is really bad for the for you know the country in general if like basically people just split and you just i'll be in my echo chamber and you being in your echo chamber and like we just hate each other from our own silos i think that's probably bad in the end can i let's let's stick this conservative thing so there's this website called win red dot com it's only i think two years old i got it because i subscribe to tons and tons of email lists and like i don't give a shit if you're a conservative republican but here's the truth which is that the conservative like more conspiracy driven websites like b bar they have they're far more aggressive and like they're just trying to like their audience like old white people who think that someone's gonna come and steal from you like take your take your guns and so they do incredibly aggressive of marketing so i i sign up to all them i'm just i like to learn what's going on and i got this dedicated email from win red dot com from b bar it was because i subscribe to b bar i got this email and it said like from donald trump dot com and it said it was like a message from donald like we need your help and it led to and he's like give the president as any any dollar that you can or give any dollar that you can and i will match it for my campaign or something like that and it was like nancy is gonna take your guns you got you have to help us fight and win this recount whatever and i looked at the service that was do it like the service that was promoting it had like amazing copy routing i was like what is this and it's a website called win red dot com it's only two or three years old and the that short amount of time it's trends it's it's collected roughly or it's done over i think a few billion dollars in transactions and so and so if you go to the ethics it says it says zero to one billion fifteen months republicans have raised over one billion on win red in fifteen months i don't know if i believe all this but that's been amazing and by the way they show a chart this is chart chart kind of amazing i'm gonna i'm gonna tweet this out they show act blue which is like the like the left wing side of this and they show that it took twelve years for them to get to the same point and one year for essentially one just over one year for win red to do it there's a graph that's kind of amazing okay so if you go to faqs it says they take a three and a half percent fee and then they charge you a one and a half percent like fee that they give to a mastercard a stripe or whoever gets it's shocking this website and i if you i i saw there like i guess their services as they buy like they go to bright bar or whoever or donald trump's like hey i need to raise money and he goes okay i'll i'll we'll raise money for you but it's gonna cost you like thirty grand in media buys and we'll go buy it for you we'll also even write the copy routing for you and run the website and do everything and we're gonna take a three percent fee for this by the way as well and that's probably how they do they're this run this business and like i don't care if you think it's unethical or not it's incredibly interesting three percent thirty million dollars just share there the rate rate off off of the trump train basically it's crazy this website's is crazy like yeah i you you just look at one of their ads and you're like oh these guys are like experts and there's a reason why donald trump i mean his digital media or his digital strategy is the most sophisticated of all of all the other candidates i at it that in itself doesn't matter because you know he lost but the these conservatives man they're like the most the most hardcore effective marketers i've ever seen yeah it looks like they also have like a kind of like an affiliate model where you create a team page and then they've teach you how to promote your team page to like rally up your own little support in your like local community as well which is pretty interesting it's it's a it's a it's such a fascinating thing yeah alright what else we got oh here look by the way check this out let me show show you this so the listeners i'm showing sean this email so it says donald j trump dot com this is who this message is from the election is far from over okay so let me just point out a couple things here so first the the subject line is we're not done yet period alright right now we're not done period and then special message from donald trump is like the header and then that it says the election is far from over it's red with a yellow highlight underlined and which is like you know i i love looking at these because they like just break all the like cute design patterns of silicon valley and it's like no but you'd know they're way more of hyper effective copywriting and design that is you know it's in size like forty font for anyone to be able to read with big bright photos and colors and then check this out so how does this work please contribute any amount right now to help defend the election and to increase your impact by a thousand percent i don't know what that means but they're saying if you contribute a hundred dollars that means you're impacting it that you wanna be that's weird right what the hell is that yeah what the hell does that means so check this out and then you go to the landing page and the this is win red it's it's all and like you already know that they've just tested the shit out of this oh my god like there's literally there's literally jig buttons that are like dancing trying to get you to push them like are these blue buttons that are like shaking with a giant picture donald trump it's like wow the this thing is like optimized for conversion if you're like why does my website not convert you should go through this flow and then you should steal half of these paradigm have these design patterns for your for your own product if you wanna see that what the max maximum be could be this opt in that was opted in automatically it's a weekly recurring donation so they ask you so i clicked something they try to up upsell me to get me to donate fifty dollars and then it automatically checks a box that says make this recurring until twelve fourteen and then we need your help to ensure that we do this we can't allow the left wing mob to undermine our election donate an additional fifty dollars automatically on eleven nineteen right auto auto checked and if hidden under this like giant paragraph of like propaganda telling you to to auto auto renew crazy right yeah is this not you this is just absolutely insane and let's look at the traffic of this so like tens of millions of people are coming here yeah you have the just extension open and what does this say it's says ten million plus and said twenty million yeah that's kind of insane let's talk of about one more let's do one more idea either let's do maybe qui okay so so qui is a company i was looking at investing in and i'm not sure if i will or won't yet haven't decided but i thought it was a pretty interesting concept so these guys are making duo yeah and we've talked a little about pin deal before which is a group buying a group buying app app in china that's super super popular it was one of the fastest growing companies reached over a billion dollars and so a lot of people have been trying to copy that model in the west in either in the us or in this case in india and pinto deal was more for i think their two big niches were food and fashion and other people have copied it in fashion but these guys are doing it in food and so i i thought there was two interesting like takeaways to to find here so first the way this app works well first it's not even an app it's what i call an invisible app i stole that firm from ryan hoover he he likes to call these apps where there's no interface it just lives inside and it basically says here's the price at you're your local supermarket here's the price for you to buy from us as an individual so let's say it's sixty bucks at the sixty rupees at the market forty five rupees if you buy loan or twenty nine rupees if you buy as a team and so you just get one image and it's like a picture message a today in whatsapp that's their that's their product is a whatsapp photo message and then they encourage you to basically create a team so if you go and invite five other people in your neighborhood or whatever i think a team has have minimum three you could basically you guys can all buy this for a way cheaper than than if you bought it at a grocery store and so the the the customer acquisition is really cheap because i'm clearly incentivized when i just look at this picture like damn if i had a team i could save a lot of money alright fine i'll invite two other the people into this whatsapp group that's easy for me to do and then if we buy we can all get it for this price that's cheaper and so they're getting a whole bunch of users for very cheap because they're able to because users are very incentivized to create buying teams our buying groups and and then for them they're happy to sell to these buyer groups at a lower price because they're not paying for customer acquisition because the customers are they're getting for free viral and secondly they're skipping the supermarket so they're like just going straight from the farm to the customer and just delivering a direct rather than selling it at a retail store first and so although thought that was pretty interesting concept and i've just i've just been waiting and looking for people who are gonna do this group buying thing well in some country on some product i i don't know where it is but there's something to this group buying thing that i think is really important because acquiring customers is always the most expensive and and like hard part of any business brother you're just describing group on well it is group on but it's not because for group on you're not incentivized to go tell your friends about this you were it had to tip at the beginning that how they did it that you had to you had to invite it had to well it had to tip i threshold yeah i think basically group on was oh this is so cheap i'm gonna tell my friends because this it's a cheap deal whereas this is like you can't get the cheap deal unless you invite your friends and create a group and i think somebody creating that today on top of one of the texting platforms either whatsapp or messenger that's gonna work like this this model is gonna work it group grew almost like ten years old now right more than ten years by the way everyone like everyone forgets about them they still make like two billion dollars a year the you know who tried to do this and failed miserably was james bash what company crowd tilt tilt but but this was this wasn't group buying this was that was group fundraising that was like hey we wanna buy a ke for our dorm everybody needs to pitch in oh man it's a hassle for everybody to like v moe and and i have to front the money first so let's all put it in a piggy bank first so but they make a cheaper it didn't make a change which is different what what i noticed in trends is people are always saying i wanna buy this thousand dollar software or this thousand dollar course does anyone wanna team up that happens all the time and trends i yeah i hear you but how is it not like illegal against the terms of service for a lot of services to do that well if you're trying to do it we're hey we're gonna sign up for trends as a group and we're just share and share the content illegally yeah that's it against the pos but in this case it's basically saying like for example with with group delivery are sorry group buying of vegetables it's not it's it's cheaper because a they don't have to spend any money on marketing so all those marketing all the marketing budget basically drops drops down to the bottom line or drops down to you know drops the price for the customer and the second thing is that you when you make a buying group of people within your like kind of apartment complex or your your neighborhood now they could just do like a batch delivery for all of you guys like one central location and so you know they're able to to make to get like economies of scale right because they're delivering the same thing to the same place so it works with a physical product in that way that won't work as well with like a digital product where digital product you know the cost goods sold is zero anyways what do you think work for so i think somebody i think it'll work for something like food delivery like like what these guys are doing in india i think that could work there i think you can also work in other markets as well i don't think this there's nothing just about india about this the other one that i've mentioned before that i don't know if there's a good idea or bad idea is like creating this as a shopify app so that when somebody's on shopify basically they're on your store you can basically say hey you can get this product for less if you buy this with two friends if two friends also buy you guys can all get this for cheaper and you turn your customers into your referrals or for referring agents to to to go get you more customers there's a store in nashville where i used to live and on broadway that's like the hon ton where like all the tourists and their whole logo and sc is buy one boot get two free sorry like buy one pair get two pair free okay and they do that because they always know that people are in groups of twos or threes and they're like well one pair is only three hundred dollars they're only like a forty dollar pair but i mean they're shit but like wait if i buy one i get two extras that's crazy that's like a great deal and it it works so well that everyone in nashville copied them to whereas buy one get too pair free and that totally works it totally works yeah there's something about the psychology of a deal that if you package it if you package it right it can basically be your best marketing engine because you turn your customers into your marketers yes and it works wonderfully and i don't know why it it it does it oh the name of the the name of the store i just looked it up is called two free boots they're like fuck we're all in on this they went all in on name they went all in on it it's called two free boots dot com that's their whole shit so they're they're they're taking this whole group buying to the max it's pretty crazy it works so well i remember like it there's always a line and they stay open late at night so all the drunk girls get stuff from there right it it works wonderfully yeah i i feel like somebody could bring this online because the that domain would be like pretty catchy and available to for for different products to to basically to go all in on the deal i agree with you i think there's that i think it's a good idea there's something interesting here yeah alright we we we're hit the hour so let us know what you think this episode leave a review we just added this little bot in slack that will post our reviews in front of our face so we don't have to remember to check the whole team will see so if whole team sees yeah if you hear a review everyone to see it exactly don't way do that if you if you are like whatever project you're working on invest in a little slack bot that will put front and center like every purchase and every review that you get from your customers it's so much better than going and checking at dashboard like just getting a little a little ping a little message in your in your slack channel it's like i think that's probably my favorite feature of slack yeah but it gets addict yeah i know i'd like to be addicted to to my customers i think that's the the the healthy addiction for a business alright well thank you everyone and we will talk to you soon alright see you