#130 - How Solopreneurs are Making $1m+, Why Lists Suck, and The 5 Minute City

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never look him back live you're live we live with live alright i'm looking at sam he's got like crazy background a purple background right now because he created a podcast studio in his closet i think which is kind of amazing it's a we're at our office i'd i took over a closet and i put like the one of these things called the these like panels why we put these panels sounds panels yeah so like i built the studio for i think less than two hundred dollars and i think it probably looks pretty good and sounds good it looks better than joe rogan ugly red capsule that he sits in imagine being so rich and famous and then building your custom studio and then it looks like that that's alright he did it i i think he said he he said he was gonna move and in two weeks he moved and have the studio maybe he'll fix it right alright what are we talking about let's talk okay you tell me okay so sean first of all you were in business insider today yeah congratulations to me i bought them about the one dollar pro trial so i could read the article because i was like i was like y to the writer was like could you just send me the pdf of this he's was like no you have to buy the trial exactly i have a subscription i would have you given it to you yeah it turned out okay i yeah how'd that come about some so a guy reached out and he was asking about i remember what he was asking about originally he was asking about something else and so so he's a journalist and he was asking about something from my opinion on something and then i was like by the way what happened he goes oh he was asking me because i had talked about parlor i had tweeted about parlor and he was like y do you know who's behind this and and i was like i was like no and he was like okay whatever and then he was like hey congrats you made the top hundred list of emerging vcs which who the hell knows what this list is really yeah and so he's like you made this list and i was like thank you he's like could you said be a picture was like yeah sure and then i was like and then i like shot my shot i was like by the way like you should do a feature on rolling funds these things are interesting like look at this i just like i tweeted it out on september first dear internet i'm gonna raise a million dollar rolling fund only from twitter buddies and internet strangers not taking any money from real life friends i'm trying to go from zero to one million in twenty one days and i said and look at this like within five days we crossed a million and within twenty one days we crossed two and a half million and then we shut it down we we stopped taking money in i was like there's a good story there you should tell it and then he wrote the story so that was good that's great i wanna talk about two things but the first thing is what was the outcome of that article anything nothing as far as i could as far as i could tell although there was no really clear to i call to action or something like that but yeah i think i got one person reach be like hey i'd like to invest so this one which you know i think this podcast will be five if i mentioned it on the podcast versus one and this this is insider i shared it and the second thing which is not just find a pay right i know yeah yeah yeah but i'm a i'm a subscriber this is not a disrespect to you but those lists can we talk about how bullshit all those lists are such bullshit like there's a what's that i quote where it's like i don't wanna be a part of any club that will accept me as a member that's love these loose like here's what i think is just nonsense the so i remember when i was a little bit younger i was like i wanna be on forbes thirty under thirty and then i got i was like i went to the process and i was not i think someone nominate you i got nominated it might have been my coworker who i i really don't even remember but i went to the process i was like oh this is bullshit this is this is fake this is awful right is not look this is not procedure prestigious so at all and and it's kinda that in the in our community at least it's like a negative mark of honor it's like oh you played that game to try to get that like fake prize oh that tells me all i need to know about you yeah so let's walk people through this so the forbes first of all i don't wanna sound too harsh and and because forbes is still good in many real in in many ways but in general forbes dot com is kinda bullshit it's like pretty laughable publication the magazine i think is still kinda cool but the the good contributing system on forbes is just utter bullshit and in order to get into that forbes thirty under or thirty like your p r firm will like submit you and then if you like buddy up to the people who's making the picks you get in it's bullshit it's horrible i i i wrote a recommendation letter this year for somebody they so this is some somebody who is they're my friend i think they're cool but they're not like thirty under thirty right that should be like something really remarkable and prestigious and like why not why not just make the list of badass people why why does it have to be this weird like not pay to play but like if you play the game you get to you get you get to be in so i i referred this person first of all who am i to even be able to write these recommendation letters and then who is he to actually get it and he became thirty at to thirty you like listen accomplished by just trying he has two people to write recommendation letters and they did it and then he got in the it's such bullshit and i don't like wanna hate on it because a lot of my very close friends who i love are on it and it makes him feel good so that's cool that's wonderful but let's just acknowledge that it's like stupid right right they're not stupid but it's stupid the there's a very few list that i think are worthy one of them is inc inc five hundred or what's it called inc five thousand i think yeah that's a legit list so that's a list that does revenue growth for like your fastest growing companies by revenue over the past three years i believe you need to show your financial statements in order to get that so i think that's like a legit list not everyone applies obviously they phrase it like these are the fastest growing companies in america and that's just not true it's these fastest growing companies who submitted their information to us but i think i think that's a great list i don't know any other lists that are interesting but if it's on top or forbes is probably bullshit yeah so first of all like i wish i could just buy forbes because i think the name still has value even though they've just been pissing on it for seven years about like just having no quality filter so i wish i just buy forbes and like turn it into what it should be which is like the brand that if you're in forbes that means you're something and and they they should you know the figure out a business model that works there rather than what they did secondly the only list that matter in my opinion are lists that are our merit based so like the app store charts like i'm in that list right like who's in the top grossing i i would like i would like to see that list versus any of these kinda like vanity list but the opposite is also true which is for all these systems i try not to judge it i just try to understand it and then abuse it so i myself have dabble with making lists like this where to be the list maker is a great position to be in because quarterly you just declare you know and i have a friend who did the hottest guys in tech so created a viral list of hottest guys in tech i can't say the name is anonymous builder tell you offline and and so they made this list i it was like twelve people long i you the website still probably up was like hottest guys and tech dot com or something weird like that and put a bunch of people on it that they knew would re tweet so the the criteria was not who is the hottest it was who's most likely to share this about themselves either bragging or as a joke because i want this to spread and then yeah people will say this is you know object and and stupid hot guys of tech dot com that's it oh i'm judging off who's number one i i would not the brother greg did like this he's not the builder but it's somebody who knows greg yes so he put greg there because he knew that greg had that like mix of like had a little following would share it wouldn't take it too seriously like you know like we're not gonna like pushed back on him or whatever anyways i thought this was really funny so i've i've been a fan of this jason cal did this back to make his name when he was in new york with silicon alley insider i think was the name of his like original thing he wanted to become kind of like a power player in the new york tech and business scene and so he created the silicon alley what was it silicon alley i don't remember what it was but it was like the top hundred or something like that and yeah silicon hall silicon alley one hundred i think it was called i i i don't remember exactly but he he basically was like oh this was my excuse to meet every single power player they did an interview with me they sent me their head shots i wanted to be on the list i could kinda decide who's in front of who and because i was the king maker of deciding who's on the list all of a sudden i became a power player in that scene and i just think this is like massively underrated was at any college i was bored college kid i would one hundred percent do to list one is the hottest hottest guy list and the like the other one would be kind of like the power ranking so that just the who's gonna be the most successful person out out of this college if i so two things first this let's talk about that as a business but before that so when i launched so my company before this we had a roommate matching app and in order to make it popular we weren't gonna spend any money in marketing but i knew how to make things go viral and one of the there's a few tenants or a few rules for making things go viral a couple of them are to be very specific and name names that only certain people know but they're passionate about and when we had our app we were we launched in chicago boston new york la and san francisco and i've one other city and we made infographics that it was like the stereotypical roommates of different neighborhoods right and we said like and we very specifically did it this way because we like alright so for those of who you don't limit say san for francisco the there's this neighborhood called them marina and their stereotype is f row so we put like eats at this restaurant every morning yep where's this type of clothing which is like a local marina shop get eats cupcakes here we did all that type of shit and it got shared like crazy so the the the strategy was name as many names as possible and we piled it with names and then we emailed all the people who we mentioned and it got seen by millions of people in the first months and we got tens of thousands of free users from it it works so love that that is an that is a perfect example of this this marketing idea and tactic that i've always like again observe hey this is pretty effective it's also kind of bullshit wait could i create some bullshit like this and have those effects and i've always wanted to have some excuse to do it and i never really did have the excuse to do it and that is an amazing perfect example i love that i'll i'll find it and the way that we did this was and like look at this like i just found an out out article like so we did it about different neighborhood different neighborhoods and check this out so i just sent you wanted might have seen this by the way before i moved to san francisco i think i saw this because i wanted to know which neighborhood to live in and there was this one and there was another like guide to san francisco neighborhoods that were like design like this like you have a for people who can't see it he just sent me a a article on curb curb dot com for chicago and it's like all the different neighborhoods and there's like a little illustration and it's like here's what the rent is here's kind of like where you're gonna find this person you know like bronze you'll probably find this person protesting a new billboard on thirty first street so it's like these things that are gonna get a reaction out of people smart and what's funny is that i had never even been to boston when i wrote this or i i don't i didn't know any of this we found all of it on yelp we just went on yelp and we looked at which had the most reviews and that's what we used this and the second thing that's really interesting about these lists is that i like do you realize that when we say like the fortune five hundred it's named after fortune magazine like i i use that right but i use that word so often that i like don't even i i be it's like when you say like a michelin and star restaurants you forget that that's like michelin tires or new york times best seller like you often like it's bigger the new york times best seller is bigger than new york times and there's like many lists like that like i i i would have to think of a few but i think these lists can actually be big businesses same with jd d power award which is a billion dollar company same with there there's just so many so these lists are like shockingly big businesses i think sometimes they're are scams but not all the time but the this list making business we have to categorize what this is and like come up with cool ideas around it i i call it king making when you decide who's who's who right like so so a brady found a silicon reported one hundred was a list of the hundred most influential people in new york technology put like you're you're just deciding who's the king and because you're deciding who's the king you're the actual king right your your name is on the list everybody starts catering to you you start getting access people start submitting applications and literally the fucking thing didn't exist before you just arbitrarily decided to name it and everybody you know even if they mock it initially they will buy in nobody wants to be at the bottom of the wants me left off the list and the thing is is that a lot of people are like well who am i to start this list it doesn't matter as long as you as long as you make it the people who are involved will likely share it like i share all that shit if i'm involved in it it takes something yeah like if i told you right now we just shadow on forbes thirty and into thirty if they said sam pushes this button right in front of you if you just put the push the x key on your laptop right now and you're on the list and if you don't wanna be on list just don't push that x key would you push i push it i'd be like i'm on yeah yeah and like i realize that sounds super critical but yeah whatever for few of them but it's not actually if you think about it yeah i'm saying it's a bullshit game but i'll play it every once in a while so this what i wanted to talk about was you you had this thing called all access pass and you shut it down can you tell me why and what it what it was and why you shut it down right okay what it was so the podcast that we do here we just do a bunch of ideas so let's say the let's take the idea we just did hey there's this business model type that you or maybe it's a marketing tactic called k making that you guys talked about that's really cool cool idea and what we do is the conversation has now ended and we're gonna move on with our we're talk about the next topic and the next topic in the next topic and we're never gonna go past that this level right like the podcast is designed to be about ideas and it's about it's designed to be more like rapid fire we're not like promising some thorough investigation of ideas so the number one question i would get and i'm sure you get it too in your inbox all the time is like dude i love that idea i wanna do it like will you advise me or like how would i how should i do it or i have this other idea how would you do it and i like dude don't know like he's so context dependent i don't know i have to take time to figure figure shit i don't just like know the answer like the answer is in spending a bunch of months when i figure it out and so so i was like okay well and people were asking me like do you wanna do a course like a course where you teach people about like how to do a start i was like well there's no like just catch all like how to do it that's too generic i said but maybe i could do something different i said i spent a lot of time in my life doing like zero to one of businesses i ran a freaking idea lab for six years and an idea a lab you're just cooking up an idea and you're trying to make it make it happen every single time zero to one zero to one and so i thought i'm pretty like i have i have gotten good at this over time what if what i did was i have a few projects in mind of things that i think could be cool to do what if i just built it in public so what if i just published not just like how it went but like the day to day what did i do today what did i do tomorrow what did i do the third day what did i do the fourth day as people who follow along and like it's not gonna really like apply to their project like one to one because they're not gonna be doing the same thing as me and they're not gonna have the same exact skill set as me but i thought you know the way one of the ways that i got good at shit was just by shadowing other people who really good at shit and then you see how they and you're like oh fuck that's the level of aggression action taking that's the framework they used to think about things like i should be like that so anyways all access pass was this experiment where i said alright if you pay me two hundred bucks a month you get on my paid newsletter and the paid newsletter is gonna go out five or six times a week i'm basically just gonna say day one of this project what did i do day two what did i do day three what did do and i said i'm gonna do this for a season my season's is gonna be four months long and so i've now done it for three months and i just yesterday emailed the whole list of people and saying hey i'm gonna shut it off after to three like and here's why so that's at a high level like overview we could take it whatever direction you want can you say how many people signed up already on one too yeah yeah sure like now that's over who cares so basically i was like this will be good if i can get it's twenty k a month of revenue coming from this i thought that was be like twenty k as in two hundred time or sorry a hundred times two hundred yes exactly what ended up happening was i had about three hundred something subscribers there was two prices one fifty then it became two hundred so i was making fifty k a month off this for the last three months and so some people are were like are you've nuts s your paid newsletters making fifty thousand dollars a month you're gonna turn it off like you know what kind of asshole are you and i you know i feel that but i had my reasons to be like look this is a lot of time and energy it's taking and that time energy i won't kinda wanna put in other places did you do you think so when i hear two hundred dollars a month i'm like that's pretty expensive do you with that price correctly i think so so i think it it's the most that you can charge for something like this i think once you go into like a thousand dollars or whatever you're really like only a certain type of person who has a certain business that's already really successful can't pay for that can justify paying for it or you'd have to get their work to pay for it so for this case i think this was like it was high right most paid newsletters if you go to subs stack or whatever like i bet you i was like i don't know in the top point o one percent of subs stack earners you would have been the most expensive one yeah i'm saying like overall revenue per month i'm sure there's some that like publications i make a little bit but like as an individual and from day one like i think that was pretty high i was a it was a lot more than i thought i was gonna make and i didn't do it on sub sec because i didn't wanna pay them the five or ten percent whatever they take that that that'd be like ten grand a month you know so that that was a lot so i always lost my train of thought oh the price so so i priced it at just like what i thought it was like what i thought the market would bear i think it was the right price because i think it was a lot for most people don't have a subscription that's two hundred bucks a month the period and they're like their monthly bill but at the same time like for anybody who's doing a business which was kind of the the group of people that were that were tuning in or people who wanted to do a business i made damn sure that they got the value and i'm just saying that like i obviously i'm not selling anything now like i shut it down like i felt like this extreme obligation because i was like fuck for these people for most people two hundred bucks a month for me like that's that's a expensive subscription like for an email this email better have like golden nuggets that's gonna like show me something teach me something help me with my thing way more than two hundred dollars of value and if you have a business it's not hard to get an insight that's gonna give you more than two hundred dollars of value back what would your churn so the retention was ninety three point something percent over the month so over one month or or the three month over the three yeah that's great yeah so that was great and most of it was just in the first month like just since you know people who were like oh you know i can't pay for the next month or i i didn't like this or just not what i expected it so the retention was amazing ninety three percent retention let's see what what are the other stats that matter yeah that was of and then i a free version also so i was like yeah if you can't pay there's a free version basically every sunday i'll send you one of the five post of the week i'll unlock it for you and you can tune it into that and then so that grew my free list basically like double like two x kinda like my free list through people sharing that stuff and ultimately the reason i shut it down is because my life goal is i have to talked about this kinda cheesy but like whatever my life goal is i wanna be like a teacher like i wanna be a teacher at scale like i i set myself a goal for the decade which was in ten years can i get to teaching seventy million people which is like one percent of the world's population and can can you know for seventy million people could they think of me as like a teacher who really helped them one of their favorite teachers that would be like my decade goal and so i thought well i'm doing a lot of teaching right now but i'm teaching like three hundred fifty people you know that's not gonna i'm making a lot of money but my reach is so small and i was like fuck i need to switch i need to put all my effort into the free audience because that's gonna be the mass audience because that's my actual goal my goal is not to add an extra you know zero to my bank account do you the business that you're do the business that you are documenting i know you don't like talking about it so we're we don't not talk about it but was it is it doing well like well enough that you're like i gotta focus on this yeah that was part of it like you know the business itself is an asset that's like you know that the time spent there versus writing the email is is you better spent so so i basically did the did i promise three things i said i'm gonna launch a fund which i wanted to do anyways so i'll show you how i raise this money how do i launch this fund and what what are my tactics to do that and of what goes into this and so i i did that one that was successful that was the first month and then the second month was e commerce i show people how do you get a e commerce ideas where do i look for ideas how do validate demand for that product how do you know you're not you know working on a dud how do you get it sourced you know how do you work with a factory how do you negotiate all this stuff and then how do you actually grow an commerce store and so that's kinda what i you know what was showing and i was using my wife's like e commerce store for that so i so i didn't have to i did the sourcing separately and then for the growing a store the sourcing takes time right there's like a lead time of like two months to get a product so i i didn't wanna let leave people waiting so that's kinda how i did that one and the last one was gonna be an online course and i ended up doing like a workshop and some things like that but i was like this is just a too much work and b i invested in our our mutual friend gu be new education startup new course platform and as part of that that deal was obviously very hard to get into because he's a baller entrepreneur he built you to me he built sp like a lot of people wanted to invest and part of my pitch to let me into the round was y if you let me invest i'll launch my course on your platform and it's ready and so not ready yet so basically i had i hadn't done that project yeah i saw that he asked me to or he invited me to have a discussion about it i yeah didn't end up doing it because i was too busy and i just missed the call we reschedule a call i was like i i can't really focus on this right now maybe i'll regret it but and need helped him figure it out because he did a course on of yeah the trends community as one of his like like what in his investor deck he's like here's what i've been doing because like we we don't have users we don't have revenue but how do we how can i say i have traction i was like well i've actually been prototyping and testing this i did one i did a course with the trans community i did the course with this other thing i i became a student in these five courses and that's how i've learned about and that's informed my new business yes and he introduced me to his c cofounder and i was like hey i just i have a way too much on my plate at the moment i i don't wanna get i can't i can't get involved in anything else i'm sorry and i have a feeling that's gonna cost me some money but that's okay i i couldn't get to it yeah that's a phrase i need to learn what's that like i just i have too much of plate i can't do this right now sorry yeah i i couldn't i just i didn't have time and i actually i acknowledge it's just i would he's he's gonna be at least mildly successful i just right k i didn't have the bandwidth what did people say when you canceled would they upset you know by the time you get to like one three of a thing and you know i put out fifty pieces of content that were like not just like pieces of content like i tried to make them all fucking good and i put out fifty pieces of content and like i don't know seventy days or something crazy like that so by that point i think people hey understood like yeah this this does seem like you know this this is keeping you up at night right sending these emails at like one am because after work after the baby gets to bed after i walk the dog after you know we do the podcast after all my obligations are done then i would bang this thing out i think they stood like yeah it's probably you know a lot of work and then the second thing was i think you you you earn some loyalty interest i'm sure some people were like pissed but people are polite to your face usually there there was one or two people that were like kinda dicks about it they were like dude you said and i was like yeah i know i said i'm sorry like but and you're getting your money back right or like you're canceling it sounds like they're paying something you're not getting but they were like oh i really wanted to learn the course thing and you never got to it i'm like yeah now i'm sorry shit happens that's pretty funny and did all the people come from this podcast majority i think like that's crazy to promote the thing i basically put out some free written stuff and then i did a six minute little podcast teaser about it that posted it on the feed and so those are the two i posted the facebook group as well so those are the three things i did to promote it i didn't do anything beyond that to to promote it it's pretty crazy how and i i should definitely say by the way i didn't do this myself so i recruited somebody from the community this guy ben to be like how the main operator of this thing because i didn't have the time and i very upfront about that to i like the you know this email is was like written by ben did this thing it's not me doing everything and so ben levy was like the reason i was able to do this if i if i didn't have been it would've have been impossible and it would've have sucked and i would quit way earlier because i'm a quit in that sense i definitely am like amazed that like so this podcast let's us be round up a little bit we're in like the four hundred thousand ish listeners per month listens per month i don't know if i actually don't know if that means unique or what yep but it's still like modest it's not like the biggest thing it's not small but it's not the biggest thing i'm still shocks me that that's how much revenue can be generated from a relatively small audience it shocks me it it it really is it really is quite shocking but i think it's like you know this is the theory right like the reason i do the podcast the reason i did the paid newsletter the reason do all that stuff is because like i'm a big fan of this model of solar entrepreneurship and being a creator making stuff and then having fans who like the stuff you make pay for it i just think that that is a really good business model i think it keeps you honest i think it keeps you making good stuff over time and i think it's really def defend and so so i'm a fan of this and like you know the company i work at twitch is literally the mission of the company is to like empower creators twitch is just full of like a million you know creators with their own channel and they they run their own business and they share the revenue and and so i'm just a big fan of this like creator like a create economy basically this is my experiment to dabble and be a creator and not just like building tools for creators great i'm all in i think it was cool i got a couple ideas i wanted to throw away let me start with this first one this this is an idea that already exists it's called cold sac have you seen this startup called cold d sac no i'm pulling up our list and i'm gonna i'm might go to url is like this spelled it a little funny a five minute city cold the sac exactly so their tagline it's a five minute city so basically a startup where they're they're they're in tempe arizona and they're be yes i know neighborhood i know this well so tell me what you know what it's they have big name people who is it so i think the it's a lot of i think they're ex open door people and so keith boy i think was one of their investors but i'm not i don't don't have a ton of information of who's you know ultimately behind it i think they went through yc or they're going through yc right now no they went through yc twenty eighteen so they they went a while back there's not a lot of information about it but basically they're building a five minute city which means that you know where you work where you exercise where you eat where you hang out your outdoor space is all five minutes away so it's a walk it's like a total walking walking lifestyle and you're in this little neighborhood that has every single thing you need from you need to get fresh produce you wanna get you know coffee you wanna eat at a restaurant you wanna work out it's all there and i lifestyle wise i i would love to live in a five minute city i think that's like kind of a dream what do you think of this concept as a liver and as a business okay so i first wanted to acknowledge how douche this is like this is like if it if it becomes like the startup thing and it's a bunch of like startup b people and peep very like homogeneous group like we have to acknowledge that that's just a circle jerk and it's kinda lame at the same time it's cool and i would wanna participate at it you know what i mean like that's the theme end of episode blanket things that i'd love to be part of like i would probably have fun but it's basically like a ted talk that you if it turns into a ted talk that you live at then it could get a little exhausting do you know what i mean yeah that's great that's a great way i'm putting of it like and that that's that's what it looks like i see like three different golden retriever in the picture an airs stream an airs stream shit trailer and tons of white people wearing lulu lemon like that's what like the picture yeah so i think like i would be a little nervous about participating in that yet at the same time i'd probably be into it right exactly it's like if lulu lemon and whole foods and berries boot camp like decided to share our space basically and so so i think that there's definitely like a douche factor that's that that's possible and will naturally be attracted to something like this but okay here's here's my take i think commuting definitely fucking sucks and i think that like the lifestyle we're you know i'm in a suburban neighborhood now you drive fifteen minutes to some shopping center you so like you know i take my suv to a shopping out in a park i get out i go into some big store and then i like have no relationship with them and i buy my thing and i drive back i think that's kinda lame and so i love the idea of the five minute city i think the douche factor is really real where you would the the key would be to not just get the same type of person five hundred times to live there and make it just like this totally homogeneous city and then the other thing is like as a business i wonder how this will work because i think this is like basically you know real estate development play branded as a tech start and raising money as a tech start which i think makes no sense yes i also wanna acknowledge that which is i think this could be a great business but this isn't like new like there's it's it's just a planned community which they have they've we've had this since nineteen ten like this is like it's it it it works wonderfully or it can work wonderfully planned communities could be pretty great and they're great because they're often planned quite well and so i'm on board with that i do i do wanna acknowledge you that it is an old idea that's just done with cute branding which i'm on board with so i think this is gonna be pretty cool i don't know man can you convince a bunch of people to move to tempe though yeah i i don't think so i i'm i'm surprised surprised they chose that as austin because that's where everybody's only austin or somewhere where like yeah like chicago or like where there's a lot of people willing to be already so there's one there's one variant of this that i think is is different and a brady you i don't know if you'll be able to find the name and i can't remember the name off top my head but somebody told me about a version of this planned community that i think is also cool is actually catering towards immigrants that live in america so people like my parents so my parents are indian they mostly in their social circle have like indian friends because like the holidays and the food and like the whatever there's that's where they get along with language is easy and so somebody and and being in immigrant in america is it's like hard in a whole bunch of ways you're sort of at a disadvantage and not welcome to not accept in a lot of different scenarios but i found some real estate developer who basically was these little neighborhoods that were just for like you know like brown parents and they wasn't like obviously it's not reserved for that like anybody can buy there but like word spread and a bunch of indian families parents whose kids all went to college and moved away and these empty nest all moved into this one neighborhood in the center of the neighborhood they had like these kind of shared amenities which was like you know like maybe like a religious place and maybe like a food like like kind of a dining hall where they could like have a a chef that's always making food there i thought this was a great concept i would love to put my parents in place like that where their social scene is like made for them so they're not just like alone in their house you know till they get old well it's called the nursing home but yeah not sure joking so like my neville my best bud neville he's which is like a he calls himself he's like we're kinda like jews in india which i don't exactly know what that means but it basically a it's a subset of indian i don't really know exactly what it is i think it's a religion or call i don't know how they did find themselves for even trying okay go ahead yeah i think it's a i don't know if it's culture or a race religion whatever it is he identifies and he said that when him and his parents moved here they surrounded themselves on the same block with some as well as other indians and so he was like it was the best thing ever we were raised around other immigrant parents but we were trying to fit in and be american but we still had indian roots so it was really nice to have that and so what we're doing now here nat or austin where i i'm living now is i bought a house and neville is gonna move down the block he's looking at a house on the block and then ramon is moving here in january my other best buddy and so we're all trying to move on the same because we're trying to recreate this yes so that's the dream totally i'm totally into it that that is the dream i i love that so anyway anyways think is a cool idea and more than this call sac idea is actually i like your idea better which is i think life would be great if you basically had a you know your family lives in your house and then your friends live on your block i think that's like you know the most the most quality of life improvement you you could possibly have and isn't i don't i mean i don't know too much about indian culture but i do have a bunch of indian friends it's quite normal to have your to for the families like mom and dad to live with you until you're old right i mean like it's normal that to have like a shared house yeah traditionally the parents would live with i think the oldest son maybe but depends kinda how old school you are so like for my family my family is pretty like modern my mom like you know torrance movies off of like bit torrance it like you know like we're not like in that like kind of old school mindset and so so that's not really kinda how we think about it although i think it it'd be great i would love for my mom to love with me to be dope but but she don't you know she just want to you know who another guy who's trying to do something like this that i'm actually i'm realizing it's not the same entirely and he's i think he wanted to come on here and he's like a kind of a shady well i'm not gonna judge them but a lot of people would call them kinda shady is that grant card own guy so this guy right he sells like courses like ty lopez for like two thousand dollars on how to sell or something and he uses that money to buy property and at this point he's got this whole line of properties called like ten x ten x properties or something and the reason why i thought of him is a bra you just shared the founders linkedin of this what's it called this call stack and people also viewed people who work at grant car owns ten x properties so i wonder if they're trying to poach a bunch of people from there that's funny but it's a he's trying to do something similar to that as well it's an interesting plan so so here here's another kind of fun idea curious do you think about this the do you know who this guy forte is yes he's like you know also a creator kind of solar guy online he just courses about things called building a second brain i don't know it's kind of a weird weird idea what people are into it for whatever reasons it's like a note taking app but note taking course i guess how to be organized or something like that and this dudes like crushing is he's making like a million and a half dollars a year easily on his courses and he i think it was him he tweeted out like y you know we've been talking about like these tiny homes or pre fab manufactured homes he tweeted out hey i bought these i think in austin actually a few of these cabins and you know it's underway and next year we're gonna have a retreat for you know makers and kind of creators to be able to just come and stay and this will just be a year round place you can come and stay and be in a little you're in your cabin and you're your the the cabins next to or other creators and makers and we'll just be able to rent these out and i'm making my own little kind of crater village i think i got the the concept at least half right a berry just showed me the tweet so he says here it is forte shelter to be delivered but next year to create cabins by jonathan hills so maybe it's not him a a set of creative workspaces for remote workers online creators and entrepreneurs which also fund conservation efforts and it's creator cabins dot com is the the concept of it where you can go as a creator go live in these fucking cabins what do you i'm looking at it now this is gonna be huge alright i don't know if it'd be huge it's gonna be pretty good there's another business that we mentioned a few weeks ago it's called a getaway yeah this is gonna crush this it i'm on forte shelter dot com right okay maybe that's it's a i think crater cabins dot com maybe it's the same thing i don't know oh no no forte shelter it's the guy this is him it's pictures here i guess he makes these little tiny home things they're just trailers or something like that anyway i'm totally in on that i think this is gonna be cool so what i think is cool about this what i'm studying about this is i i i don't really personally had just lifestyle i'm not gonna go to this cabin now but maybe when i was younger that would have been awesome you know the what i like is that the solar are are are dabbling with different models so like for example i looked at all the different solar models that are out there i looked at tim ferris i looked at pump i looked at tia forte i looked at a whole bunch of different guys that are out there seth god and what was striking to me was that the old wave of like most famous ones like tip ferris gary v seth gordon i felt like were hugely under monetized like the models that they picked to like capitalize on their their rabbit following or is is great he probably made two hundred million dollars well he made two hundred million dollars off of an uber investment not off of his fan base right like so you could you could say that like okay he got access to the uber investment because he's ferris that's a part of it for sure but he didn't raise a fund so he was investing his own money when he could've have been using fan money basically to to invest didn't do a course would i his course would have been pulling in five million dollars a year easily around the four hour work right chose books and ads from a podcast as his two models and he's so popular that he's still medic doing those too but that killing is like there's people with the audience a fraction of his size that are making as much money if not more than he's making off his podcast in books tia forte being a great example i bet forte is making almost as much as tim ferris does off his podcast ads or his books off of his course and pom is another great example i think pom has doing a great job of his monetization model of using you know pom raised a rolling fund pump has a paid newsletter pom had right so he has like all these different likes stacks of different ways that he's converting audience trust into value for for him and seth gordon is another one hugely popular if he used books and that he created the old nba which is like a that you think that's pretty big so that does that does definitely a few million dollars a year so he was kinda like first but they took him like he was famous for like a decade plus before even like dabble in something like that and gary v like an agency okay that you could say that that worked but i think that's like a really hard path and so i'm looking at some of these new models and the different ways that guys are doing this and this is one of them right create create turn your fame into real estate value so if you're tim ferris if tim ferris had made you know the tim ferris you know sort of zen retreat area which is like basically like a year round place where you can come if you're a maker you're trying to pursue a thoughtful lifestyle or your lifestyle hacker you love being in nature all the things that are that the lifestyle tim ferris preach breaches he could've have just made essentially a resort or a crater cabin like this and just scare me the shit out of it i think you're a little wrong these aren't solo this is just like the oprah martha stewart type of thing like seth code has a huge team i think fan or media has like eight hundred or nine hundred people i think what you're talking about is just monetizing influence which like that kylie card jenner what's the fuck is her name the what the fuck is that like yeah kylie jenner what she do yeah tell you the the makeup the makeup girl the jenner or whatever she is the famous the famous one on instagram that my wife watches on tv i mean she crushed it she probably became a close to a billionaire off that so i do think that people doing show really well cool yeah okay so you could say this is influence i i i agree with you you know i the other word i'm using right now is like a is a personal media company i see it's just a it's a person's brand they are the media company they're not a part of new york times or fox or cnbc or whatever they're they're an independent media brand themselves and that's what you know the kardashians are now and that's what seth dakota in and tim ferris and all these guys another person who did it well is that bulletproof coffee dude yep dave so so there's so there's product for this thing like for example i have this new one that i just came came out this chrome extension and i'm gonna give it to like the first one on like hundred people just test it out because i have this i have a a to do list i have a method of productivity right i have this one thing call i have this method i called the the one big thing the ob and i say fuck to do list you need to have a single focus of if i did this one thing today the day is worth it the day is is a win it's in the win column and everything else is is is just noise and i have this one focus and so my chrome extension is the one big thing chrome extension basis says good morning sean your one big thing today is and i type it in and every time i open a tab i see this fucking thing and i love it's great i had it made for me because i liked it and now i'm just gonna give access and so i'm gonna be in the software game i'm gonna be in the fun game i'm gonna be in the physical products game i'm gonna be in all these games eventually and so i'm studying these models and i i'm gonna crack the code do you think that that will be more fun than starting a business where no one knows who you are like just starting fun for me because i'm kind of an attention hoard in that way like i i i i like being known for it i know a lot of people who this whole thing doing a podcast having people you know listen to you and having people dm you every morning that the same thing that gives me energy would be a pain mask ass to them they're like no dude i just wanna like look at a spreadsheet and i just wanna like make a decision and i wanna invest the money and then i wanna like go play golf i'm like that's winning for them and that's not winning for me so yeah i think i think it depends on the person that's interesting i yeah i don't know if i would wanna do that or not maybe maybe not i i think it's interesting though and i think that you'll definitely be able to pull this off that's for sure yeah i think it takes time okay i got i got a couple more ideas i wanted to throw at you see what you think do the handwritten and letter one or just one yeah that that's the one i wanted to talk about so discovered this company again podcast success story a listener the podcast this guy steve warren who's a baller he's like i think he's head of mobile at asana or something like that so he is listening to the podcast he sent me this he's an investor in my fund and he was like y you should check out this company i invested in it's doing really good and it's called addressable and so they're their thing is just addressable i think it's addressable app dot com or something like that and what they do is they give businesses like let's say the hustle or really where they focus is real estate and nonprofit they give companies like that have this big kind of client base right if i'm a real estate agent and have a bunch of people who are like clients and potential clients if i'm a nonprofit have a bunch of donors and potential donors and i really wanna have this like personal relationship i wanna be top of mind for them when the time comes you know for real estate when it's time to sell your house for nonprofit like so that you know we give you a personal thank you when you donate and know during the holiday season when you feel like giving we're top of mind for you and so they were like look the direct mail industry is huge right if you go to your mailbox you'll see all the junk you get there and so like how do you not just have that be just a giant paper printing waste you and they're like how do you get your stuff red and how do you get it like acted on so what these guys did is it's kind of amazing he showed me their office they have these robots and the robot it's this giant robot tread it's like a treadmill looking thing with a robot on top of the treadmill and the in the robot's hand is a blue ballpoint pen and basically this is robot that all day every day is writing quote unquote handwritten letters it looks exactly like a handwritten letter with a real pen onto a letter and it basically pulls your data from your database so you could be like you could you could do this for trans subscribers for example you could be like hey you know i wanna thank all the trans subscribers you know once they hit the first month for for being a part of it and just say personal thank you from sam and so it'll be like hey sean you know pulls from the database yeah i just wanna thank you for being a trend subscriber for x number of months means a lot to us blah blah blah from sam and and then they'll the whole and then the when the robot is done writing the thing the treadmill shoots it to this next robot that robot puts it in an envelope like if fucking i lick the envelope closes it up puts it in the bin and then some like dude comes it takes the bin and mails it out that's interesting it's is that so when i was in new york i saw ads on the street constantly for this thing called bond bond what was it called bond writing letter or something like that letter and they did the same thing and i looked it up and i didn't think that it was booming like so they sold a few years ago kinda like a modest sale didn't didn't go go go crazy what they did wrong in my opinion as as i as i looked at this was i think a lot of these companies that were doing this they were trying to do it for consumer so they were like oh that's why they have a fucking billboard out there for you was like you should use us to send a a letter on your behalf to your mom and you're auntie and whatever for for christmas and what these guys zoned in on i think was a their tech actually is really good so that like they can make it look like your handwriting if you want so like the the the thing is not like laser printed on where it's like a handwriting font but it's printed no it's like this is an actual fucking pen that actually writes the thing it really does look indistinguishable from a human doing it the second thing is they went for businesses and the segment of businesses that really need this that really has problem in a big way so they have like you know salvation army and a bunch of other groups that are like big that that spend millions of dollars a year on this stuff who are now realizing oh shit if we do this we get better results and that's the last thing is that they actually track the full results so they know who they sent it to and because they hooked into your database they can tell you when that person takes an action they could show you the full roi on this campaign so they turned it into like a facebook ad essentially how did deal work there still a small company it's pretty cool though based in la how much is it public how much they raised if you wanna invest you you should invest in this company i think it's gonna be a good company i'm interested is it they had only raised up until now they'd only raised like a million and a half dollars they were they're doing well on a on a small amount of money wow i'm super interested who's the who started it what what's their story the guy an engineer he was engineer at o which i was like boom love it yeah love it that you know anytime you when you come from a a company that's like pe degrees like kinda like growth hacking i'm like yes so o cup engineer then facebook pm i was like okay great love it also and then this whole thing made a lot of sense to me it sounds like your portfolio is gonna be pretty bad ass is that do you think so i mean like i hope so i'm also just easily ex so like you know there's always a counter argument to fucking everything but but yeah i like it and i if i if didn't i wouldn't invest that's pretty bad no i'm into it i i don't i think that's a company that for sure can make tens of millions in revenue and be very profitable can it be like right who like does someone like if you have to act like a a douche vc you have to say like alright who's gonna who's how be huge who's gonna buy it or like and to those like i don't know what the obvious obvious answer is to that i'm sure there's some direct mailing company that makes billions of years in sales who exact none of us know about exactly that that's it that's my debt as well i don't even know their name i just know that direct mails like this whatever like eighty billion dollar industry that every year is dying because more of that budget going to facebook and whatnot and also i'm i have a philosophy i was gonna say thesis but then i'd have to be a douche bag so i gotta say i have a idea which is that when when when when the whole world moves one way it actually creates the opportunity back for the other thing and so like a great example of this is when facebook got so popular and facebook was like everybody's on it every post to do is public every it like your timeline and your photos is all permanent so as the world became more and more public permanent and everybody's on it it created the demand for something like snapchat where it's private it's a ep and not everybody your mom's not on it and so like it's not that snapchat was always a good idea it's that snapchat actually becomes a better idea the more facebook dominates and so i actually think the same things happening in this case for example where the more everybody pours all their money and attention into digital ads and that becomes more saturated and harder to win like these other channels like print media and like billboards like i'm i'm a big fan of these other channels now because marketers are gonna look for where we're can i get an a different roi how can i differentiate my marketing mix that's not the same playbook as everybody else and and if you could provide a better of product then then great you know and that's what i think these guys do what's the url of this company i think it's addressable app dot com i mean i shouldn't even have to give money after that fucking testimony that should be the the whole investment addressable mail dot com sorry by the way we talked about the fascination recently yes they the founder reach out to me i'm gonna meet up with him online or on zoom i think on friday it's the guy who started lisa mattresses yes i didn't know that of the cofounder yeah i didn't know that yeah and anyway i was gonna i'll i'll have to talk to that guy but addressable mail but that was because that's another hard name to spell addressable mail dot com i'm on the website yeah this is gonna be pretty sick cool alright i had three more ideas but we're out of time so we'll save it for the next one alright sweet brady what'd did you think of that episode let's leave this in the episode but but give us the give us the rating and brady you by the way love shitting on me and sam so so it's he's the right person to ask because he'll we'll give the real deal no was a fun episode you guys know made so whenever you guys are rapid fire those are my favorite this was a rapid fire no this was this was a id idea and what do you think what was the most interesting one of this to you i like the sole entrepreneur talk because i think that's a little different than the stuff that we normally talk about and i also liked s opening up about the all access pass giving little perspective of why shutting that down i think that's a little different and we can take this out would you be willing to all the paid newsletters to put it out to the members of our facebook group that you can you should no you he you should sell those don't get that shit away for free that's what ben keeps saying ben's just like dude you should just sell these for a hundred bucks sell the whole archives you know just day one through through whatever and i was like yeah sounds like a lot of work we'll leave it there i know i was i wanna do the work of going and finding customers to buy this but like yes we should sell it for anybody wants it the facebook group to look forward to that that's all point yeah if you want that i don't know if just email me and salt to you for i don't know hundred bucks you get the whole thing let's see if this little mention actually gets you anything alright thank you guys we'll talk to you soon cool alright later guys