#156 - David Segal Talks Building a 9-Figure Tea Business, Decommoditizing Boring Products & The Future of Retail

yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never look came bag alright so we got a special guest got referred in through harley from from shopify david sega s or seagull how do you say seagull but s is a lot cooler so yeah i was gonna say related to one only actually the guy who started the company with you is that a relative he also has the same last name yeah he's a a distant cousin of mine he's fifty years my senior that's the great like starting pitch it's like me and my nine year old cousin yeah let's start a tea company yeah totally so so give people like i don't know explained what is david's tease so for somebody who's never heard of it before has never been inside one sure so i mean you think about tea so we started in two thousand seven if you go back to that time you either bought it in a grocery store where it was a commodity right you picked what you wanted based on the picture on the box and the price point and you had the usual suspects earl gray cam alm mint and then you had ten brands real grey and and ten brands of mint etcetera or you somehow found a tea shop that was either very asian or very british and quiet you felt like he had to whisper and even just to walk in the story he felt like i had to know something about tea we had the idea because nobody's really doing tea in a fun way on the main streets that of the country and he was had the s vibe to it and really there was an opportunity to make it a lot younger and when you're think about tea it's it's actually a specific plant it's the communities and ans plant but how you process it makes it different but in north america we call any herbs spice fruit that you put in hot cold water that's not coffee you call it tea right yeah so i had the idea i turned to my now ninety year old cousin and said we one no so you're not joking no i thought the ninety year old thing with a with a your like i probably yeah no i mean ninety no he wasn't ninety then right it was in the seventies then i was young entrepreneur i had been a hustle you know most of my life i'd had different businesses it didn't work some that did to some degree and then came across this idea i was actually working for him at the time to help them and make investments in small companies had this idea for tea turn him we'd looked a few to invest in realize the market was pretty wide open he said you do it and i'll back you and i was like great we got to work you didn't built a brand grew it and anyway it's tight it was billion dollar market cap on the nasdaq two hundred million sales i sold my stake in two thousand sixteen i moved on and i've been doing other things that started a a restaurant brand and added two other restaurant brands and turned it into a virtual kitchen and i'm looking to get back into entity to be honest with you i think there's still a huge opportunity in tea but yeah so your your cousin who you started there he had done something cool before this right like somebody yeah that no clothing business so he had a company called le chat tow yeah was in one time very big in canada and even had a a ago at the us market as well he started at nineteen fifty nine he was selling in the sixties to like john lennon and like the was some pretty interesting characters and what he did was he brought the car street look in the sixties too montreal and it was really successful and and he stepped back from it in the mid two thousands i was looking to make these investments and yeah i mean it was a great combination of you know at the time i was twenty six years old and and full of piss and vinegar and i still am i've never heard that phrase what does that phrase just like i i guess piss vinegar is like an explosive combination i don't a good question i never actually thought about what it meant just one of these things to hear and you're like guy alright did this make you incredibly wealthy yeah i did what i i scored yeah oh great so what i was gonna ask you and i think you just answered it do you regret taking the company public because taking the company public seems pretty besides like so you generated you created a lot of wealth for yourself that's awesome besides that which is like a huge besides but besides that do you regret it i don't regret it but i wouldn't do it again i think i was in a very difficult situation at the time we had done a deal so my first million actually came when we did a deal with the private equity group and the business got complicated we we a deal with the group out of boston he capital the guy named tom stem who was the founder of staples actually and my original partner my cousin and tom it was a difficult combination my original partner wanting bring in various family members why i wanted to run a merit professional outfit fit and there's was a bit too much it just wasn't a good situation and when you're management team in your border fighting with each other you're not focused on creating value for your customers and i just wanna get out of there there are too many people bullets flying you could see there wasn't a lot of focus on the actual business and so for me it was great and i was the third largest partner third largest shareholder but i didn't really have the power the sort of piece was made in that they would go public for the private equity group to be able to exit and the ceo at the time would get fired and and the family member that my cousin his daughter that you wanted back to the business would come back in and then i was able to leave at that time as well and say you know what this is a bad combination and i'm out of here and so you because i was wondering this when you take a company public you know there's a lock up period just like a tactical lock up period i don't know how it works on actually you're in nasdaq so there's like what is it six months or something like that you can't sell six months although on this ipo we were i mean we were making like thirty million dollars of eb we didn't really need the money and so on the ipo to make the ipo big enough we were selling shares like i'm myself and highland capital sold shares my original partner didn't wanna sell and i was like i'll sell i mean it was a great price i ended up selling at an average price of fourteen bucks a share and you know stock today trades debt for how do you decide how much you're gonna sell right what's your psychology around that like you're like alright am i gonna sell a hundred percent sixty percent and then there's the optics of it so like how do you do you think about that part i think in this situation i love tea and i think there's a huge opportunity and i wanna get back into tea when management is fighting with each other you wanna get out i mean at the end of the day you wanna get out like the the future of the business does not look bright in those types of situations so under normal circumstances i wouldn't sold at all i mean i think there is an opportunity to just continue to grow and and you look at tea i mean it's one of the best hacks productivity hacks that nobody knows about north america it doesn't give you the jitter like coffee does doesn't give you the big spike in the crash it's a better high man it just is and you know in north in canada i mean it's less than two percent of starbucks sales and we don't drink it and we have these these we're missing out frankly it there's so many amazing flavors to it so i i still think there's a massive opportunity it's just it wasn't gonna happen with david's t they took their eye off the ball and and i didn't wanna be part of a team that wasn't aligned so what do you i guess what are you scheming on now well i got this restaurant concept we have three stores in in ottawa which is where i live in three in toronto we're gonna open more we added two brands to it during the pandemic so we had it's concept called mad radish it's it's bowls and salads with big international flavors we added a burrito brand which is a healthier take on a burrito and then we added a neapolitan and pizza company some luis burritos and bowls and revival pizza and we're operating about a one space with one app so we're trying to kinda combine the best elements of goes kitchen with the best element to a restaurant so we're still building up restaurants with some seating but we're dedicating more space to kitchen space and we're taking perhaps slightly less prominent real estate and being able to service one customer with different types of cuisine so you can if you have free people one if you can get an amazing burrito another one can get this salad and another one get a pizza all in one order so i'm still doing that and i an incredible operator there and an amazing marketing lead and just a great team all around so and then i'm also actually working with harley on a tea business i think there's a massive opportunity to make t cool you know david c makes t fun but people don't understand how incredible this plant is and how many amazing ingredients are and we're gonna do without any flavoring so all tea companies use lab flavoring so they call it their natural artificial flavoring and they just basically develop a liquid flavoring that they splash on and it coats the trd or the ingredients but you don't really need to do that if you get really high quality high oil content ginger or cinnamon from the best places in the world like you can make these amazing blends now to mention all these var and tea that people just don't understand i mean what's the model this time so last time it was brick and mortar stores right you opened up hundred two hundred something locations and like ti tijuana you would go in and you'd be able to buy teas there daniel and i don't know how well that work ti giovanni got acquired by starbucks how much big get bought for six hundred million six hundred million and yeah and i think they shut down their stores and now just sold out of starbucks or something like that is that yeah starbucks didn't do great on that acquisition starbucks says a history of of so so acquisitions and what why is that because that seems like you like what you're saying is dude tea is massively you know underrated and compared to like america's heavy heavy coffee tea gives you you know all of the sp with none of the fun this is the best it's huge internationally and then with starbucks distribution you would think look if tea was gonna pick up in a bigger way like t tijuana getting plugged into the starbucks engine sounds like a good idea why is that a so why was it so so as an outcome i don't think the tea was that good and i think that matter i think that there's a market for people look there's it's like wine there's three types of customers here if i was to summarize it there's the customer that just wants to get drunk wants the high right and doesn't care they're they're picking it because it's cheap and because they like the picture on the bottle then there's the customer on the other end of the spectrum that is the con they want to become a tea hobby they wanna be able to tell you about the t and then there's everybody else which frankly wants the really good wine or tea in this case they want quality they can tell when they taste it they're like wow that's good but they don't need a phd and t and i think that there's an opportunity to simplify this there's an opportunity to curate it better you don't need a hundred different blends like we're gonna have twenty case and these are the twenty like you know look i know my stuff i've been doing this for a while these are the twenty you wanna drink we've tasted thousands for you you don't need to think about that and i just think there's a way to talk about it in a language that people can understand you know tea is not just when you're sick or for hip east or you know because you romanticized travel or because you're an old granny eats cucumber sandwiches i mean it's a better drug than coffee i mean you know you think about one of the big themes in the world today as like centralized versus decentralized like coffee is centralized it's centralized our culture in many ways like no matter what you do with coffee it still tastes like coffee whereas tea you can get all these different flavors there's no dominant brand and tea today and it's in many ways the decentralized product and i just think there's an opportunity in direct to consumer you know what i do some pop up shops maybe where i do some really cool restaurant applications like an espresso type store model maybe down the road but we're gonna start as a direct to consumer business and and see if we can you know go after coffee drink and say listen and you're missing out try this out like coffee is like the pc and tea is like a mac and you should try this so at your it looks like at the biggest year in revenue you guys did was close to three hundred million is that right yeah yeah we were again up there two eighty five two eighty four and prior to this you had a software company right yeah didn't worry didn't work i think it's a cool little funky concept from what i read you basically went to department stores and you said i'll i have software that will to give you some data analytics around what people are taking into the fitting room versus buying right there's like the they're getting to the try it out step but they're not buying or they are buying it's like it's like a abandoned cart software new for real life know abandoned fitting room totally yeah because be a good idea to be honest with what happened there's a big difference between a good idea and a good business you know i kept you in the word interesting it's it's like it's very academic it's like you know yeah sure when you buy flow then you do in two steps you evaluate the look on the rack then you evaluate it fit on your body and and then when the buyers go and analyze whether the item you know they test up and then ordered larger quantities and when they go and analyze that all they know is whether it's sold or not they have very little insight as to why and so the idea was to give them more insight into the why and but it was ahead of its time in the sense that it was complicated like these are companies you know this is two thousand five right like they barely had functioning point of sale system so you go in and you're trying to give them information they gotta do something with it i kept getting them saying to me like interesting interesting and i thought i was on to something but you know the sales cycle keeps going and all of a sudden sue from marketing wants to talk to bob from it team who wants to talk to michael from purchasing and like right we got nowhere we got it into macy's though like you know in those days i was writing handwritten letters to every ceo and every clothing company you can think of like you know getting less we the founder of of limited brands and victoria's secret to respond and stuff like that but i get a lot of meetings and we even got it piloted at macy's on thirty four and seven but i realized quickly that it long complex sales cycle a nice to have product not a need to have product and i moved on but my question is this so you your friends with harley you probably have invested in and have great insight into a lot of different test style of businesses like software and i just sold my into a software company and i'm getting exposed to it for the first time your company it's revenue it's definitely a little bit bump as like versus a really good software company it's like even if it might be grow slow but it's kinda stable but you're getting back into a i don't know what's the word consumers right right you you're doing e commerce instead of software it's kinda say what while why you doing in ecommerce when software exists i'm a merchant man like i love the product i'd like to put together great collections i'd like to sell draw i like sun product and i'm not criticizing you by the way i'm not shitting on you you're way more successful than i am and your badass ass i'm just saying like a lot of my friends in this industry they complain constantly about supply chain issues and about this and about that and software has its own issues as well but if you could do anything you want i do i just want insight into why you chose this or why you're doing it again i mean the main reason why i'm doing it to your point like like i i don't need to do it i mean i could go play off aboard in florida but i love business and i love entrepreneurship i love creating something from nothing and i i have a passion for tea like i look i'm drinking an amazing green tea right now right before this podcast you know so i love the product first and foremost it's also a great business i mean the margins are good you're selling a product that does that is a drug effectively the biggest drug dealer in the world is actually how it schultz it's a great business there's no size no color like there is on shoes or clothing so the amount of items you're managing is much lower you know you can operate out of small spaces if you do decide to go into retail although but we are gonna do this direct to consumer i think there's space in the market i think that this is the product that is un not well understood by the north american customer and they're really missing out on something incredible here i'm excited to bring it to people i think it's just a lot of fun like software businesses are great but it's not what i love and i love it as a customer but i don't wanna go and create them and i i wanna sell team man i liked it you love tea like sam lo trucks there you go i talk about truck the trucking business all the time but i wanna ask you another question as well so unless we post this video you can't see your audio and visual setup like really really good is it a dslr yeah tony yeah exactly yet like an a or what's it like an a seven or and something figure rather it looks great i tweeted out the other day i go someone i'm setting myself myself up like this i couldn't do it did you do it on your own no god so i tweeted out somebody come and let me pay you money and do i can't find anyone like there's no rate turnkey solution just to come and do this for me it's pretty amazing there's a business right there right if you saw amazing suits in the eighties or nineties you got all these business people buying your product nobody's buying suits right now but i tell you there's a lot of business people that wanna buy a killer videos audio setups they need add the ads will look great because it'll be someone in a room like yours with the camera quality of yours and all that and it'll be like you know it's the men's warehouse guy saying you're gonna like the way you look yeah right that's what i want you know you it should be the same tagline but for a zoom call basically totally so and you get you can get like you know the start package the pro like i mean you'll have the five thousand dollar package this three thousand dollar package the ten thousand i think that's an incredible business have you the person who set up your camera and mike also set up like the aesthetics of the background no the background me that's his house dude yeah it's my house wall i my isn't like when i've been thinking about this alright i'm like alright we need because right now my walls are white and that's white is not good when you're doing this you actually want but i'm happy to hire two different people like a set designer style yeah person and then like a technologist technologists and i've been thinking about this a lot i've just i'm like man i would pay like two grand to have this done for me that should be part of the package right so have you guys seen we talked about this a long time ago actually when we very first started the podcast i go hey i saw this ad for this company and i don't know you know i've never heard anyone talk about it but i think it's a dope idea and i turned out there was like a super legit entrepreneur roger dick behind it he started jake and some other things and so it's called made renovation and what they do is they the all they do is bathroom renovations direct to consumer through facebook ads basically so what they do is the ad is just a before and after of a bathroom or just the after just a sick looking bathroom and they know that like in the home renovation space which is this probably a huge multi billion and trillion may make up your number space critics of the bathrooms are like i don't know seventy five percent of it and so they just started with bathrooms and they basically have three turnkey bathroom styles it's like you can have this kind of cool victorian there's cool modern and this like kind of simple plastic and they're three bathrooms so all their parts and supplies already like there's no like planning step you just say i want that one that one or that one and then they have all these installers who just know how to install this one fucking bathroom type and they're like cool we're dispatching the guy who's gonna go give you this bathroom right and it's a genius idea i'm sure i don't know what the price but it's you know in the thousands of dollars per customer beat ten thousand fifteen thousand because the worst part is the contractor right you don't wanna buy contractor deal with the contractor like it's it's a whole shit show and then the contractors today don't do any marketing right so you have you're going up against a player who's got both hands tied behind their back because they're literally not even out there selling so i love taking you know world class internet marketing pairing it with a high ticket you know high value thing that everybody you know sort of considers at some point in their homeowners ownership and then going after so i love this and i think you could do that idea for what we're talking about in the home office space i think you could do made renovation for home office now because that's become top of mind for you know i don't know how many tens of millions of people and i think you could do the same playbook for for that totally and and it's even more there's even more value add because you're dealing with with audio video setup up and it's not just brick and mortar right like exactly yeah it's more of a technical thing and less overall like you know plumbing issue you know what i'm doing is i stole this from a friend my friend noah and neville did it they found a youtuber in austin and they just said hey can i pay you like fifty bucks an hour and you spend eight hours and just make this really cool and just beforehand buy everything you need ship it to my house and then just set it up and making the lighting and everything neat it's pretty sick and i've been trying to find people who can do that for me and i don't know if someone's taking me for a ride i don't know you know like i don't know who to trust it's kind of an interesting idea you know what i also think just like you the youtuber thing so let's say you didn't wanna start a business in this crazy way but you wanna be a youtuber and you see guys like mister beast build their channel on these like kind of stunt and like giveaways and surprises and and you know there's just random acts of kindness and money throwing at people so you can do the my ride playbook as a youtube channel you could be exhibit you could go knock on someone's door and basically be like dude get your room your room we're tri out and you trick out their room to like like i should be you know my chair should be in aquarium and there's fish floating underneath my butt while i sit here like that's what the crazy level and then i think people would watch these videos and you could build a huge you know tens of millions of subscriber channel and have all of the like kind of renovations paid for by you know maybe peripheral companies or whoever like some sponsors just like mister beast did where paid them fifty grand per video so that he would go give fifty thousand dollars away and he's like cool you're paying for my growth brilliant even on the contractors side it's in i mean let's see you talk about contractors like there is no way there's no uber reviews for contractors right the how do you find contractors nowadays you either know it's all referral based right it's all word a mouth you look around there's been a lot of businesses that have been word about businesses that have platforms have been created around to be able to facilitate finding a good one have you guys heard of mods z no what's okay and it's m o d s y mo z and what it does is let me pull it up so i can explain exactly but i've view you i've spent two or three thousand dollars with them because i've done it for all my houses and apartments so basically the interesting part is the technology and so you take pictures of your house every time i've done it my home was empty yeah but i've done it a couple times with furniture in there already but you take pictures of it and like a video and they patch it together to make like a three d image of what your room looks like and then you go through a quiz and tell them what furniture interests you and like what styles interest you and then they have people who are mostly like design students so like college people who are good enough but you know don't make a lot of money and they have like a massive a group of them on staff and they send you like eight or ten different designs of what your room could look like and then you say i like this like this i like this i don't like this i don't like and then they fix it and then they give you a final one and then they have a buy now button where you can just buy all the products that they've listed and it's a for a virtual designer it's sick yeah it's pretty cool it's like five hundred dollar the room i probably have gotten right now i've got eight rooms maybe done over the course of the last four or five years if i crate barrel i'm buying these guys now where they're small right it's really fascinating i i've really enjoyed seeing this business kinda take off it's super interesting but they don't do like audio visual stuff i mean but in many ways this is a feature not a business right like i'm surprised they haven't already been scooped up yeah it's you pay five hundred dollars room and then i think they make a lot of money off the affiliate fees which is a pretty stupid business model because i don't buy any of this stuff they tell me to buy i just go out and buy stuff that looks exactly like it you know what i mean like because a lot of stuff they pi out is like brands haven't heard of and they list a leather couch i'm like i've never heard of this brand i'm gonna go to restoration hardware and buy one justin that looks exactly like it there's an idea that's lot same lance i'll talk about it quick if go to intro dot c the guy behind this is we're not super close friends but he's a good guy met him before he had sold one company to intuit it so he sold like a kind of a bookkeeping software to intuit it made good money moved to la blah blah blah and now he started this thing called intro and what intro is is like you know like these business like clarity or whatever where like clarity started in the tech base and they were like hey you can pay forty five dollars and you could talk to a head of growth at airbnb to talk about growth and it's like nice dude this is like this nerds feeding nerds and it did like i don't know just not like the coolest way to go about this idea of connecting people who want expertise with experts and so at the premium end you guys know about like gl and you guys heard of gl g yeah no you're gonna get you're gonna like this it's crazy the same business basically gl g is an expert network that hedge funds and big financial players use yeah so think let's say i wanna decide if gonna buy tesla right what i'll do is i will go to gl g and i'll i wanna talk to every like world class battery expert or or ai experts to talk about is tesla is what are they're talking about for batteries and self driving cars is this like a reality how close are they are they better than what way moe doing and whatever so you pay like thousands of dollars i'm a i'm a g expert sean so like i put on my profile i know a a lot about email marketing and i'll have like i've had morgan stanley call me and this i they they can't tell you what they're doing i have a feeling they were talk they it was about send ipo yeah and they wanted to say like you use send and i was like it's okay it's kinda complicated i prefer mailchimp you know and and i charge i put like what i thought was a wild number like two thousand dollars an hour and i started getting bids so i went on clarity the issue i had with it it's not curated like how do you really know who's a hack and who's for real right so that's what so ji does that a little bit better where they're like premium so you know like because they're charging thousands of dollars bet they can afford to vet people and like use the reviews to like curate the marketplace a little bit although to be fair i don't know how much they they really do it but in theory because the ticket price is so high they can afford those additional services and so hedge fund guys need it because they're trying to make big decisions and then on the low end nobody's really been able to do it it's the guy who started mint dot com he tried to create something called fountain which was like you need over pair or you wanna redo your lawn or your your bathroom yeah call expert contract and it didn't really work so there's been tried a bunch but i think this approach is interest doing is somewhat interesting because they chose a better market i think and they went for like they got the stylist of like justin bieber and kim kardashian stylist and the person who did the kardashians like home depot core or renovation right or interior degradation or whatever you call it and so you can pay you know fifty bucks and you could do a a video like a facetime call with justin bieber stylist and you're gonna ask them about style stuff so so as trainer for your workout exactly i could get the rocks to right yeah exactly is that the bragging rights if i talked to the rock trainer for thirty minutes that now i i too will look like re head so i don't think this is gonna work necessarily i it's a really hard business dean but people keep trying this and eventually somebody is gonna crack somebody gonna figure out how to get the dynamics right pick the right vertical like one interesting thing about this business is the astrology vertical started taking off because people were just like there's all these like celebrity kind of like astro on instagram and so they're like they would just promote like hey you can put me and i'll do a reading for you and people are like oh yeah i want you know you to do a really you know astrology reading for me and they're just making tons of money thousands thousands of dollars a month because that vertical works and so you would think it would be the more mainstream large verticals like working out clothing eating diet right it ends up being astrology go i actually no i i i buy that david do they have miss cli in canada no okay so there was this woman i don't know if it went to the two thousand but it was in the nineties and she was jamaican i don't even know if she actually was that but she was this character that would play on info commercials and she had a jamaican sounding accent and like hey darling how are you and she's like let me read your palm like or clayton one eight hundred it was like tear cards or psychic green they had a phone bank in a warehouse full of these types of people who knows what their credentials were i mean nothing right it's psych green gabriel but they did cups in only a short amount of time this company did a billion dollars in sales wow so i think that the psychic thing yeah had people on unpredictability but i mean do you really wanna be doing that you're selling snake oil right no but it's interesting yeah i think it in some ways it gives people this weird piece of mind it's like religion right like if you feel like you know something about your fate is being told to you and you get either comfort that you know everything's gonna be alright or you know that it is what it is and it's and i don't have to like stress about it anymore i don't know there's something that's deeply like there's something that just is deep in this that works for people i yeah i obviously i agree with you you know the person who's on the other end who's just got a call center of you know jamaican who are fake cl was like you know there's a question of do you wanna be that person but there's no doubt that there's demand for this kind of thing which is which is wild you could just reboot miss p today on facebook and facebook is your near info commercial and probably do extremely well what businesses are interesting you right now david besides the things that you're doing weren't doing so i mean i think it's never been easier to un comm niche products so i give you i'll give you an example i i was it was in turks and c with with harley actually and we were lighting fires on the beach like we were get someone to set this up like a bon fire right and they have this special wood and tu that for whatever reason burns lights up faster and burns longer than anything i've ever seen and i'm canadian we laid a lot of fires it's freaking cold up here so we start having this idea we're start talking about the experience around starting fires right and when you start a fire i don't know if you guys start a lot of fires but you do yeah okay so you tear up newspaper you put it in the fireplace or you buy these little puck that you buy on the back out it's like the back shelf of walmart or the back shelf of home depot and you gotta like them and you're in like usually there's fire ash already there from the last fire lit the whole thing kinda sucks you're down there you're blowing on the fire ash ashes going everywhere it's messy it's not that great so our idea was to create a fire starter not one of those logs that are full of wax and feel very chemical like the dura logs or whatever but more something that it helps you get a bed of coals and it also ideally would have some scent that it gives off so kind of emerging idea of candle with fire starter and then of course you could go further right it's leads to this idea but what about the like i'm looking here in this room i'm actually to fireplace on my left ear what about like the shovel that you get and the little broom thing in the fire poker right like there's a lot of products out on the back shelves of walmart or home depot that have been bought half hazard by some mid level buyer at the company at a trade show that are complete commodities that you could un comm create a put a little bit more thought into create a better experience around and have these niche million dollar businesses and i i think i think there's a lot of opportunity there that's the first place i would start is i would literally go down to one of these big box stores and walk the aisle and be like what product have do these guys clearly not care about but feel they have to have there's where i would go direct to consumer and create something a little bit better so dura flame i'm looking it up now crazy fascinating i believe it was sold the cl but it sells something like five or six hundred million dollars a year in these logs there's been no innovation there since i was a kid it's the exact same log but was five old they were lighting du locks that's super fascinating fire i do buy a lot of that stuff but i only buy it in store i don't ever own it ordered it online but i think i would i think i it i mean everything fucking on right exactly i mean i once upon of time bought everything in store it's just a little bit more of an like i need it right now but i would do it as well this is it's also gift right it's a nice thing like you wanted get cool a great example of your thesis there about differentiating a commodity product the guy who spoke at hu con eric brian is that his name sam yeah he's basically built his career office so his first thing was method soaked so he's like okay you know he's like you could just walk he goes i walked down the aisle in a grocery anniversary store it goes anywhere i see a a c of same ness like an ocean same thing and he he just put out a picture of the soap aisle and it's like fifty five green bottles of liquid that are all shaped the same and all look exactly the same he's like cool i'm gonna make a new bottle shape it's gonna be a different color i'm gonna market this in a kind of risk gateway way you know if you turn the back of these bottles they all have these chemicals you can't pronounce so i'm gonna make it where it's chemical free cleaners and method became like a big hit and now he's doing the same thing with well which is band aids go down an aisle and he already did it with vitamins ollie and then he did band aids so well is the probably the best example of the think you're talking about band aids are the most like commodity who cares literally the thing is meant to blend into your skin color although nobody is the color of a band aid but like that's the the idea is for it to be like totally a nothing product and then he tried to put some personality into it and selling and kind of what unique way and boom you have another winner there's still so many of these niche areas that are outstanding where you can put more thought into it i mean your competition is some buyer at a big box door who's going to the trade show and saying okay we need something that's category we'll take that and they're buying off the shelf walmart is not designing fire starters or fire poker or right like it's not a big enough category for them but you have enough for these i mean like you just said du does what five hundred million dollars in sales man i'm looking this up now and they don't have that many employees what an interesting company and lot really you guys wanna be available able to do it together let's do it what i would do you know what i would do is i would actually copy there's this guy named ricky band what's his name ricky van n he started a college humor and vimeo and he sold that to ie and then he went worked at facebook and he was married to allison william so he's like this like pretty cool dude and he started this thing called i forget what it was called home homes sick candles and they have a different candle flavor for every state so if you're from washington maybe it would be like evergreen flavored and it's really interesting and i would do that but for fire logs and have like state flavored or some yeah would do like that or different kinds of wood depending on what area you live in in and yeah yeah yeah oh that's cool man we should just open source this ideas so a hustle from the pod listeners wants to go run with this idea you could a dm me or sam your call credentials have you done anything before are you gonna make this shit happen and then run with this idea and just carve out you know ten percent for your boys and then we're good we we will thank you yeah exactly won't give you the initial capital get going if you're legit not kind of interesting that's a pretty cool idea i'm gonna explore that you know what was thinking about when i was doing a little bit of research i did very little research but just enough on david's tease to get like familiar with it and i was just looking and it was like yeah i don't know you know there's always these metrics that i don't really fully believe but directional they're correct which is like the t market is a fifty billion dollar market expected to grow into an eighty billion dollar market matter what the number is that's a big number of how much tea is sold every year because when they say a number for these that's the annual sales volume you know the market for ai is x and it's just like a you know like a valuation based thing right if you there real dollar piece a real dollars of trading hands and we on the last episode we talked about n t's which are like these kinda like crypto trading things right i've been looking at like how big is the trading card market and you know for a lot of these things it's like it's two billion three billion dollar market you have to no blockchain you have to get into this market it's super hard and then you have tea that's fifty billion dollars and you have candles that's like probably eighty billion or something like that like these spaces that are you know just commodities that are already adopted and uni unrelated and i think that there's so much so much easier to win there than it is to try to go to the new cutting edge frontier against i you can win really big on the cutting edge frontier so so another one i two other ideas i really think are bigger ideas now one is you're talking about n and of course crypto and all that stuff i think people don't realize those people that are talking about and thinking about these big innovations that are happening now in these major disruption to our financial system to our legal system of legal profession there's gonna be a lot of people that need education around that they're gonna have a really hard time grasping these things these concepts right and i think there's a big opportunity to i don't remember those books remember the four dummies these books yeah yeah dom exactly you know i think there's a a dummy two point o version that someone should really go after to try and explain some of these concepts that are are hard to grasp they're not easy so i'm actually doing this one i just brought on a guy i youtube animator guy and i'm doing the first one is bitcoin for normal people i'm gonna try to create the thing that like a normal person who's heard about it you might have even bought some or considered buying some you've looked into it once or twice and come up very un solution every so technical it's so complicated my my dad called me my dad called me the other day and like my dad seventy five like when we facetime he picks up the phone and puts it to his ear and i have to remind him dad his facetime like you know right and so i mean this is the least tech savvy person you called me the other days like what's bitcoin no know so you're gonna have this huge audience of people that as this goes into the mainstream they're gonna wanna understand it and they're gonna and they can't and you have to talk to them in a different language than you would the people that listen to your podcast i'm trying to make the video that you would forward to your dad in this case right like i think this is the best explanation of what you need to know and not anything more and guys gonna know it's simple english and for me i'm like there's not not really a business here i wouldn't wanna do it as a business i just really wanna do it and i like okay if i take some of the earnings i made on bitcoin if i just took like half a percent and i alright i'm just gonna like it's a charitable donation of like content creation for people to learn about this stuff in simple terms it's a good trade it's been good to me i can be good back to and that could be my contribution it's good end up being a big business that's my call it's usually the ones you're doing because you don't expect them to be a business then up being a business you said the two other we just said one yep what's the the other i think there's this big opportunity around discovery so plumbers has been decentralized in a way very quickly we were kids if you wanna buy a pair of running shoes you went to them mall and all the running shoes you could possibly buy we're in the mall and now there's so many different amazing shoe brands that how do you find them right like when i google's shoes i still see nordstrom come up and i don't really rep past the first page i don't see all i don't see sw you know there's all these incredible brands out there i need discover them i think you know at one time pre pandemic i wrote a deck for a pop up shop mall the idea that malls of the future would be all these online brands that you that you would operate basically brick and mortar becomes about discovery not distribution where you go to learn about cool brands and and products and then you replenish an order online could you create a mall experience around that sean like geek out over something similar about like live commerce so i have two on that one is exactly what you said have you ever heard of beta david no it's it's almost exactly what you're describing i'm gonna send you a link right here b it's b and then the letter no sorry the number eight t a dot com i love it they did exactly what you're talking about which is they this insight and i think this insight is spot on and one insight like this can change peter that's a hundred million dollar five hundred million dollar insight which is that yeah malls are now gonna be for discovery not distribution boom that's the insight you can build a career off that you can build a huge business up that and that's what they're doing which was i think covid kinda fucked everybody who's trying to do brick and mortar but like they were creating these pop ups and i as a d brand can just rent it for seven days and i basic send product and i sent some education materials while i send one of my own people there i think right and they operated it and they're sampling it they're operating it and i got this this footprint i don't need to go because all these d brands open up freaking like showrooms and it's like dude that's such a pain in the ass for like it's such expensive time consuming thing for really just trying to do marketing to get your product in front of people and so this beta if it works it's like what aws did where they were at said hey you don't need to install servers and buy hardware just rent some off fuss and what beta is doing is saying you don't need to build stores just rent ten square feet off us and i great idea yeah it's a huge problem right now the cost of advertising gets higher and higher and how do you find these places you don't like you know you ask your friends but you know one your friends are at that by the way this beta idea if anybody thinks is a good idea you can just keep doing this in every because and you need one in many different geo location for right so a call student could create beta on campuses i'd be like cool for any brand i to get in front of college students i have created the network of pop ups on every major campus and d brands pay me fifty thousand dollars for an activation a hundred fifty thousand dollars for a one month activation and we put product on every campus for them to get seen are they running it as a platform where lan like existing property owners can run the program and then get reviewed or they running it as they are the operators i don't know actually a good question when they started that they were definitely the operator but i haven't and they've been out for a few years ago you're talking about is interesting rather than rolling out ten thousand of these things where you're running this big staff in this and you're essentially being a landlord that operates stores can you outsource the debacle almost like a franchise to these operators where these and then these operators get reviewed right like because all you wanna hold is the most valuable part which is the relationship with the brands one click deploy you know every month or you know for three months whenever they do a new product or whatever you just wanna own that relationship right offer them a bunch of reach and ideally you're not paying for or managing the reach which is what you're talking about like what what did you say you said i wrote out a deck for it yeah when i left david's team it was the first idea i had and i made a pitch deck i i toy with the idea a little bit because at the time i mean you were starting to see the writing on the walls from malls especially department stores who had all the square footage i mean they're dining yeah turn hall a nursing homes man to be a nursing home yeah well that's what's happening effectively although some of these real estate companies are gonna make a fortune in the next ten years you know there's this one in canada called smart centers these guys they have all the walmart anchored stores and of course in the pandemic kit stock got killed because all the crappy shitty clothing brands from the nineteen nineties are getting wiped out but all these guys are doing they have the best real estate and suburbs so they're taking this had where they had you know some crappy jc c penny type brand and they're building a multi unit residential apartment building or a seniors home and they're either getting enormous value out of the land and even bigger returns and and not that they're building it at time with rock bottom of interest rates right before you know where we're likely to see a lot of inflation i think these sounds like a lot of opportunity repurpose that sounds like stock by what stock is that that's smart centers and but you know there's tons of these reits in the states too like you gotta find the ones that still are gonna have a decent anchor like walmart stores aren't going anywhere even if e commerce becomes everything to them they still need that last mile they need the real estate to operate their e commerce and that and i don't know you've been a walmart parking lot recently but they're still full people still going on to the stores it's it's those clothing brands that were hot ten twenty years ago that are gone right how big when you were making this deck how big did you project that it would be and what did it need to become in order to interest you to the deck is fiction here for you're yeah exactly i know but like a deck i imagine a deck the oftentimes is not necessarily what you're making to present to people but a way to get yourself excited and organize your thoughts so i saw centered around clothing and i saw one of the issues with commerce as returns where you don't know your fit so i even looked at like could i get a fit machine like they have these it actually happens these these machines that like you can scan and give you your body fit and you can keep it on file so was like can i keep a database of everybody's body shape and be able to recommend brands based off that that as well i didn't really think about how big could this be to me it could be enormous i think this is a monster i mean this is a multi billion dollar idea i believe that's pretty exciting that's cool i love i mean think about it you've shipped everybody yeah you can do it so no i been helps you i didn't do what help me you it's it's a big complicated idea you know it's a major commitment plus maybe subscribe tissue the first fitting room business right i really want fit machines exactly exactly so i wanna ask you a question you know with what james sees you guys did all these different flavors like you would have like lu watermelon or like from caramel kors or whatever and it's like yeah cool you're you're coming up a new product to get people excited great i had heard and tell me if this is bullshit i'll just have relay whatever i remember i heard there's some agency brand annual report that comes out and sam you might have been the one to tell me our steph smith from the hustle maybe long who mentioned this so tell me if you remember the name but they come out with a report every year and it's like this giant report and it's just like colors smells like w yeah yeah place them a lot it's like a if they do about ninety million dollars in sales and about like forty million in profits so is that did you guys use something like that is that charlie yeah absolutely actually funny you mentioned that i was just grip about them earlier today i've been trying to get signed up again for my food business and for new tea brand and and like they won't they're not answering the emails and on these guys don't want sales guess but so it's w g s n they're all by called essential i believe which is a publicly traded company in england that own cans like the festival and they own a bunch of trade show so i don't know if they're like doing that well but the w was like their anchor asset because it just i don't think it it doesn't really like grow but it just says the same every single year so how do they do this and are they right and is it like surprising the stuff right like they predicted like millennial pink you know millennial pink that word millennial i think they were talking about millennial pink a couple years before that so i mean sometimes they're you know like they're right they're wrong right i mean sometimes are way out there on some of the trends it's i gas it's just a guess exactly and sometimes you don't wanna be the first some ideas we definitely got inspiration from there we got inspiration from adjacent industries from the culinary world from the fashion world absolutely they'll they'll like tell starbucks like this shade red is kind of interesting so like maybe make your name tags that during christmas right or mar is a hot ingredient out of sri lanka you might wanna do a blend with it is it based on data is this do they just have pacemaker makers look how are they doing this both i think they do have in house chase people that their entire job is to go around and and look at what's new what's hot what's cool you know they're trying to find the next coconut water right and it's expensive it might cost twenty five or thirty five k year yeah right it depends how big you are are they scale it up depending on the size of your company it's a pretty interesting business and it's publicly trades so you can go in and look at it really fascinating because david i own this company we just sold it but this thing called trends and i modeled it after a little bit after that company of course we only charge three hundred dollars a year and norton make a lot of money we should have charged thirty thousand dollars a year but it's might not just charged three thousand dollars you could have bought their report for thirty distilled it down and offered right charge three there's like your mother better sam i'm gonna to sign up after this for three hundred bucks that that sounds like a way better value proposition well that's all we we except ours isn't like niche specific we look at like all types of interesting it it's basically like this podcast but way more thought out and like we have a team of researchers who like just comb through all the data and then we have a community where it's pretty sick community where people discuss it and it was heavily inspired by w and that it's a big business w gs absolutely i mean most people in the product business use w gs all the fashion guys use it most of the food guys awesome well we hit the hour david we said that we're were gonna do twenty minutes so i appreciate you staying with us it's sort of our like first date thing we're like oh i gotta meet a friend and thirty in case the guest sucks we could we have the excuse to wrap it up but you were awesome so i do this is a ton of fun i really appreciate you guys having me i i really enjoyed it what's your contact or your social presence you how should people get more instagram at david siegel t the letter t and on twitter it is you don't even know your twitter never never no this is this is the biggest thing that i should have done underscore david siegel s e e a l i underscore david siegel and i'll start posting a lot more content whereas as more followers come in did you alright i'm on it now yeah yeah my friend you change your profile picture too i think you're better looking than this pick profile picture i think like right now the way you look right now you look like a cool guy i think you could show that off previous picture there's i gotta lose the caller and answer a little too serious no like you and harley kinda have similar vibes where you like you give off this serious still fun and playful yeah like you're gonna think ass but you're like fun to be around wow listen i mean it's it's amazing to kick ass and to try and just get better better and and try and become world class but you know you gotta have fun you live once yeah so anyway just some feedback i was lot i think it's good feedback i'm i'll take a shot actually i'll take this shot from this podcast it's that was a classic like left sam par compliment which my i'm telling you you look better looking than picture alright cool alright sounds good alright thanks man thanks everybody take care guys bye