#157 - Instagram Food Drops Making $200k a Week, Chrome Extensions That are Crushing It & Open Salaries

it's insane this whole this guy's life is insane is what i could see from this i mean this guy's his steroids are you know as good as cookies i would say that's what yeah give i want the h hd h drop yeah i feel like i could rude where i know why i look what i want you look fantastic you upgraded i'm currently recording i i wish i could turn the camera around but i don't wanna screw it up but i'm sitting at my friend jack's house in hawaii where i'm having a a weak vacation congratulations well deserved yeah yeah it's it's cool just got here but gonna be here for maybe five days but it's alright how's things going with you yeah things are good did you see this thing that the these guys who tweeted at us that were like dude we will pump out your your stream did you watch these videos that they made no i'll i've been flying but they said that they booked a ticket to austin are they actually going to our to my house i don't know if they i don't think no though they're they're waiting for us to be like yes or no but these guys applied very intelligently i got it from credit so basically they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff and they're like we'll do this for you we'll make it no hassle i'll come to you i will hook it up and a few people tweeted tweeted something like that at us and you were like kind of you know humor it i guess and then these three guys are are kinda like i think they're like college seniors or something like that i don't really know didn't look too far into it but they sent us a video they go watch here's what we're gonna do and they recorded a video and it looks like a casey neistat video like the quality is like that and the editing style and storytelling is like that it's a funny video it was basically telling us how to how they would pi out our stream and they kept calling it like you know my first million to the moon and like we're gonna take this baby to the moon here's how we're gonna do it and so they did two things he he showed how his camera set up how they do it for their podcast and it looks awesome looks way better than ours and then also he's the then the next day he sent us an edited clip of a comp the of you telling the story of bumping into the silk road founder at a party and mean stole your girl or whatever and they edited like a little clip and they're like dude we'll pump out clips like these all the time my first million to the moon baby and are they good they're good they're really good both videos are really good where first of all why let's hire them and time where did they send this to on twitter i i i've been flying since saturday it's on twitter i sent you a link because i was like dude fuck yes this is like this is you know like it's like the opposite of a job application normally you get a job app you you you put a job up that you wanna hire somebody to do x and then some people apply and then you're like are you kinda sw you're like i think this person's really gonna be able to do it and then you'd make a guess and then it takes some fucking six weeks to ramp up and then or or this guy just applies showing look i can do it i've done it for myself i'll do it for you and let me make this easy for you let me show you how bad i want this and i just thought like this is so much better than than what we've been talking about of trying to find people to do this stuff i'm looking at is okay cool his name is dylan jar weird last name i keep my i i because i wanna say jordan yeah dylan if you're listening to this let's do it i'm in and you know i i don't know there's probably people at the hustle who have similar jobs but i think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like the gig is yours to like pip out our the video side of our podcast i think we should give we should give them the the shot alright i'm in cool alright we have a bunch of topics you wanted to talk about where do you wanna start gonna start this open salary thing no let's start with food because i've you that was this yours yeah i've thought about this for years so i have a lot of i've got i've got something boiling up you wanna wanna me answer this sorry so i'm talking to ben my right hand man ben and ben's kind of like you know i'm easily ex you could tell by the way i talk ben is the opposite he's chill mode he's always relaxed and but when ben mentioned things i've learned like when he says something is just like like oh this is cool you should check this out it's actually fucking amazing and he just doesn't say hey dude he doesn't like shake you and say look at this this is amazing and so he showed me this thing that is amazing so he he goes check out this website or this instagram handle my cookie dealer i was like my cookie dealer i go to it they you should click god i'm looking at it now i wanna eat this dude so alright so so he sent me three instagram accounts he sent me by cookie dealer it click the second one one nine hundred ice cream so like one eight hundred but one nine hundred ice cream one nine hundred ice cream looks so good just like describe what you're saying it's incredible is it a pie i don't know what this is exactly like what you would call it but it's a it's a cone what it what i don't know what shade it it looks like it looks like there's a stick so like at the top of the stick where you would have like a pops instead it's like a full ice cream con con which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever it looks amazing you should if you have instagram go to go to one nine hundred ice cream there's one called the cupcake wonderland which is vanilla ice cream rainbow sprinkle strawberry marshmallow icing gotcha they call themselves they call themselves the ice cream thirst trap slash thick check trademark and and they they have a bunch of followers they've they they've grown really quickly twenty six thousand followers so ben starts sent sending me these and i was like okay cool food account on instagram that's not too you what what what what do i care about this food porn he's like no dude i've been trying to send you one of these and i've been trying to like get these myself they do weekly drops of their stuff and these are selling out instantaneously what do mean so he showed me my cookie dealer so my cookie dealer does a drop a cookie drop every week they do a random cookie drop so a different flavor or whatever and it sells out within literally seconds and they're doing two hundred thousand dollars a week they're doing ten million dollars a year dropping cookies on instagram and just instantly selling out and then they ship them you know a few days later that they know how many orders they get and then they ship them out a few days later kind of like you know nationwide or whatever and there's another one ali's banana bread go look at this banana bread dude just look at this banana i wanna print this banana bread out and just lick the paper it's looks so good and same thing you sells out wait wait wait wait wait wait dude check check this out so if you go to my cookie dealer dot com yes that's the website okay click click instagram page are you on their instagram and tell me when you're on their instagram page i'm on it okay you see go scroll up to their profile and you see who where it says like the owner is this guy named wand diesel more use that click it oh dude it's like a body builder so this guy is huge yeah this guy is so big he looks like if you've ever seen a espn or whatever body building competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is and he's just huge humongous he like well no i i can't tell if it's like the tan i think it's a black guy because you like he's so i think it's a white guy you know they're like in the white the black tan for body building well and then look at his wife it's insane this whole this guy's life is insane is what i can see from this i mean this guy's his steroids are you know as good as cookies i would say that's what yeah give i want the h hd h drop this is awesome man this is cool okay so ali's banana bread so a been banana bread so there's a bunch of these so ben is like deep knee deep in this world of like instagram food brands that are basically they're kinda like drop shipping baked goods all around the country so they have them for cakes ice creams banana breads and they're just specialists and so there's a couple cool things that i wanted to bring up about this and i know you have some stuff on food too but the part that i thought was cool is so the internet is the internet is really good at doing this which is norm before the internet you would just go to whatever's like your local whatever you'd find the best within your local radius of five to ten miles or whatever it is that's what you would go by but with the internet whether it's news or comedy or whatever the best thing can just get distributed everywhere and so the best brand wins on the internet so this why you see things get so big you know like facebook and other other platforms because the best the best thing will get all the users and it's what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food so if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies are best ice cream they don't need a physical shop they could just through instagram alone spending zero dollars on marketing have customers worldwide like ali banana bread literally ships worldwide and so if you're the best at making something now you have a pathway to become a like a multi millionaire where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local baker in whatever in cincinnati you know you were always restricted by however many customers you could get into your local radio i thought that's pretty cool the second thing is if you think about this you know this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while so we've been talking about cloud kitchens so these are essentially like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries they don't have like a physical storefront necessarily they're all in the cloud and you just order online the second thing is direct to consumer so they're going direct to their fans they're getting their fans phone numbers and so that when they do a drop they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people buy and i think that's kind of like amazing a way to go to direct to consumer you don't have to worry about getting on the shelf at you know whole foods or wherever else to to build your your brand as a cookie company or whatever and go ahead no keep going last last one is if you think about it like you know who's gonna be the next missus fields or ben and jerry's or like auntie pretzels it's gonna be one of these brands it's gonna be one of these cloud bakeries doing it on instagram building a cult following like these guys are doing and and you're gonna see i i predict you're gonna see just like i forgot what was the name of that meme company that sold for like a hundred million dollars they hit like they were the ones behind day juan and whatever like the couple of the meme instagram accounts yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that it was about eight months ago maybe yeah we talked about it on the pod it's like will pull it up well you see it's right there you see i can't different mgm media so so basically you know some brand that just owned a bunch of like meme accounts on instagram sold for like a hundred million dollars i think if i remember correctly you're gonna see the same thing in the food space you're gonna see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they're gonna buy up so you know allen but ali's banana bread they're gonna buy up one nine hundred ice cream because they're gonna be like dude this is the next ben in jerry's and we're gonna take this this thing we're gonna put it on steroids we're gonna advertise the fuck out of it and then we're gonna get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing and so you're i think you're gonna see a bunch of these if i can go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now i would go give them each you know a twenty five k check because i think these are gonna get scooped up okay so let's break this down further i've thought about this a ton the reason i thought about this ton is i i'm i'm a media guy right by the way is my mic good yeah you're good alright i'm a media guy i love content and i've studied what goes viral and why for years and one thing that i've always been fascinated with is i've known people who worked at thrill list and t it started as a food well they started as like things to do in new york but one of their biggest things is food and i remember in when i started dating my wife she was from new york city and i hadn't been there since i was or the first time i've been there was when we started dating twenty six twenty seven years old and i went there and i would see these long like i would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out where they all dressed like you know like they dressed like right they go to my yeah like they just dress like for me that was like wow i like everyone looks like a movie star everyone was cool at hip i you know i don't i don't know madison square park or washington whatever those parks i don't i don't know i i don't spend a lot of time there but you know what i mean they would have the longest lines and i'm like what what are all these people waiting for and it was like the the latest correct real craze that went viral and so i i would walk or through brooklyn and everything and i would see these lines and i'm like what is going on and i would do research and i kinda broke it down into a i like i've like studied this for a while and or not studied is the right word but thought about it a lot and i basically broke broke it down into the in a into a handful of categories and what it appears what what seems like what what happens is people have a small store a relative like pretty like a corner store in hip parts of brooklyn or new york where there's people who share so like college kids mostly and they create one or two things that that thrill or buzzfeed or someone because all those companies are located in the cool parts that i'm describing and so soho things like that and one of these buzzfeed or thrill folks sees it a whole bunch of college kids see it and then it creates a line and it creates hype and it it it becomes like a good business that lasts for three to six months and then it kinda like goes away and maybe like it still is a remainder bit like still is a business but it mostly like it's a hype cycle whatever and i was like what is going on and so i broke this down into a few categories and i wanna go through these categories because i agree with you i think this is so cool and i've tried to break this down so first and these are like different ways to for viral yeah like formulas for food viral vitality okay the first one is make a side ingredient so something that's normally a side ingredient make it the main thing so the best example of this is cookie dough there's a lot there's like this is a thing i saw in new york there was a line a door the door for someone sold cookie dough as if it's ice cream so it's like sprinkled cookie dough then like ice cream flavor cookie dough it like cookie dough is the main thing another one is cheese like people do like fond du they have like fond do bars something that's what what else is a side ingredient that could be it i don't know if it's a side ingredient exactly but cereal does this too there there was these like viral things was like cereal bars all you do is just milk and cereal and that's it and you can come normally that's not a restaurant it's a side like it's like literally a side dish of a side dish and they made it the focus of the restaurant and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to to talk about and go to or an i or a a whipped cream ball like a a whipped cream store just like anything that is typically an afterthought that is a topping or a side to the main thing make that your thing okay the second one is doing the have normal foods but different colors a few examples rainbow bagels okay crazy popular they're their hype i mean they're still popular but they went through a cycle the second one is rainbow rainbow kettle corn that's quite popular when i was a kid i remember a couple times buying green ketchup remember green catch up yeah dude i love green catch up it was just red ketchup up by green right it was literally the color was different it's just the name it was just a normal thing but a different color and then the latest trend on or this year on tiktok with cloud bread which is basically you know everyone is baking at home it's just bread that's kinda blue and white and looks like a cloud right and by the way your side thing main thing i got another example of that but you know captain crunch the crunch berries were always is just the extra and then they came out with captain just just the berries just the crunch berries and it was like way more popular yeah or like lucky charms with only the marshmallows yeah exactly so you you take the thing that's supposed to be the top yeah the topping the second the third string thing make it the first string thing right okay the the third one the same thing but a different side different size this is pretty common so you like huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door huge sundae they call it like the kitchen sink everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink or or sushi redo is another example have you seen sushi r that's a chain right yep so it's just sushi that is a cut so it's just a long piece of sushi another one i had a friend named soul you probably know them and he created a kit kat bar that was the size of like a cake alright he he would make these things and so i've actually never seen this soul but you get the idea a kit cap bar that's that's like a the size of a loaf bread and san francisco here they have this place bob's bob's donuts to bob's whatever yes and they have this humongous donut it's like this doughnut the size of you know two of my head and and you could buy it and then you could try to eat it and then you could take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous doughnut boom that's the whole look it's that special but it i mean it becomes special it's just a normal thing but a different size okay or like in saint louis the whole thing is this is so silly how this works and saint louis our pizza is cut into squares right right right so it's a around you kinda said one earlier about like sushi sushi sometimes it comes in these like boats or if you go to beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever it's like it can also be you know a punch bowl that's in a fish you know fish bowl or whatever yeah like it could be bigger and in a you know in a non traditional like the kitchen sink in a nontraditional container yes just same thing but different size okay or or it could be miniature you know just something that you know whatever like white castle mini cheeseburgers okay so the the the fourth one combine two things that are quite different okay so i've got a this is a really easy one there's a ton of examples the first one is the cro nut pretty easy right the latest trend right now in tiktok pancake cereal it's i don't even know what it there's like recipe i don't even know what it is but it's i don't know okay look it up actually while we're talking about b it's probably it's probably just i i don't know part pancake some cereal okay it no they they bake it they call it pancake cereal it really it's just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients they just bake it at home and it looks like the shape of a pancake same with donut cereal but there's do you know do you remember ramen burger yeah okay so there's ramen burger there's fairy bread you know what fairy bread is no what is that it's basically just bread with sprinkles okay so you're just taking two things that don't normally go together ships and you mash them just like a dessert burger right very simple or you can get a a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich right and the more more unusual it's you know it's doritos lo tacos right it's when kfc came out with there the the fried chicken bun or whatever and it was like the bun is fried chicken like you know the there's the more shocking i would say the better in this case yes you just take two things you smash them together pretty easy relatively simple okay the fourth thing or the fifth thing is you make something that's normally a crappy food but you make it fancy so tate tots mozzarella sticks you add a fancy stick to them or you probably to go the the opposite way of making something pretty fancy and make it not fancy although that would might be gross but you get the idea and then the final one is you take some type of food allergy but this one isn't actually that sexy we take some type of food you just make something for food allergies so there's ban which is chick pee pasta right there's there's a lou ellen ice cream i think it's called in brooklyn vegan ice cream only vegan ice cream right or like oat is like this right milk not made from cast boom it's this is now so popular that this almost can't viral anymore but maybe if you chose some category that's not not typical but it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream at this point works well here's what i would do is i would open up a you this was what i was thinking about do i mean i would never i don't think i would it but maybe one day i would want to actually it seems pretty fun is i would have a kitchen in new york and i would get it in a really high traffic high traffic area and i would just every three months try to do a launch where i launch like a rainbow cheesecake or right you know don't even know i'm just making it you're just make stuff up and then i would even what i would do is i would makes i would do a ton of stuff and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it and see what had the the cheapest cost per click right yeah so so so what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle no embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's gonna rotate every month into a new crazy con and people will line up every month to go try the new thing and you'll build your brand as like willy won go when he would create you know now every last every last stopper or whatever you know like it creates a new a new crazy concussion that you gotta get it it it goes a step further so do you remember cro yeah so cro got popular in jail thirteen it was invented by a guy named dominic what's his last name i don't know what his last name but a french pastry chef he's like a a big name chef but he made corona because he likes he was like just wanna have fun and create something new and interesting all the time and this one just kinda hit he actually trademarked the name cro nut and he is like a p he's like an artist so he didn't actually wanna license it to people but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone and so there's a step further so you create the food and you gotta come up with a really cute name and you could actually get a trademark and and there's licensing deals there so i think this is super fascinating i think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and a hundred grand or less they could probably get one or two hits right which may not be the right thing to do with your life but if that's you if you're like i'm doing it great great gonna it's definitely fun it seems fun but yeah it'll teach you a lot i think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to to approach you know food this way okay so a couple other opportunities i see here so i mentioned i think you know investing or private equity i think we'll start to scoop up these brands i think that's one opportunity second one is i think somebody could could build a kind of guy theory of instagram food character who basically just goes and tries to find the next you know who really does make the absolute best like oatmeal or whatever right like come up with like you know go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever and then you do the drop on instagram you know for that brand for that for that shop and maybe you you found you know the absolute best philly cheese steak in philly and then you you know you dropped that so i think somebody could create that if they were if that's what if they're foodie and that was their thing the other thing is a little more more boring which is like we've talked about cold chain three p so basically how the heck do you ship all this stuff and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives you know three to five days later across the country how do you how do you make it work and so i think that there's just a bigger a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics and and i think we've we've heard this a few times now and i i feel like if somebody working on that or somebody has one of those i would love to talk to you just to learn because i think this business is booming and i think more and more people are gonna go into it okay do you wanna hear one more food thing that we could we could to discuss do remember as a kid seeing these books and pulling them up now called eat this not that no what is that okay so it was awesome i loved it i bought it once this because it was at barnes and noble and ended up like being like pretty amazing so google eat this not that it started as one book like a almost a coffee table ask book right and on the left side it says eat this and on the right side is not that and so for example it started as just like a general a general one but then they eventually went to like desserts fast food all types of that all types stuff like that and an example let's find an example of one that i could say so it would say eat this ar beef cheddar classic four hundred fifty calories twenty grams of fat not this ar roasted turkey ranch sandwich which has eight hundred calories and so it shows two things that are quite similar and it says eat this one instead of this one right and if i wanna say eat a salad don't go to ar it's saying like if you're at ar get this one not the one yeah or let's see if like they have like different den different denny's breakfasts or like ihop versus denny's or whatever eat this or yeah you get the idea right yeah okay that's fine it's are you looking at it google yeah yes it's pretty sick i it's been around since it's probably two thousand and probably two thousand two i mean i i think i bought this when i was pretty young let's see there's a whole half a million followers on instruments instagram which is like to i think all these old like kind of publications like either magazines or or little brands like this today they're all just instagram accounts i think that's the way to like reinvent these wow okay so to eat this not cat eat eat this not that as of two thousand twelve had sold eight million copies of the book right and and they spun it up into a magazine and wow it's freaking amazing i'm just pulling this up here's what i would do right now today if i wanted to get popular on instagram is i would do i would do the same thing just for instagram yes the whole eat those not that on instagram totally great and and the format is so good it's just a split screen so it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right and then it has the nutrition facts about why why one versus the other i think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on instagram and you would grow very quickly like i can see their instagram right now it looks kinda shitty like they're not doing a great job i think you could basically steal this concept pick a different name and grow a big instagram account off this oh yeah i bored i would do something like this yeah and it's kind of a fun topic i'm i'm reading all about it now this is pretty amazing i hadn't thought about this in forever but anyway there you go i think if you did that for six or six or twelve months do you get hundreds of thousands of followers on instagram alright we'll switch off food let's go to something else what are what do you wanna to talk about do you wanna talk about money real quick till money okay yeah what's this have okay very fascinating do you you what do you use to track your money i don't use anything to track my money i use excel okay everyone says that oh i've talked to not everyone but a lot of people here's is usually the answer right here i used mint or i used personal capital or i use right i have mint yeah as well and well can i ask you why don't you use mint i used mint back the i mean i used mint like ten years ago so it's just kinda like one of those things that i don't have a habit of going and looking at and i don't like looking at that stuff because it makes me focus on like you know expenses and saving money here and there and i just don't think that's fun i i don't enjoy that so i'll i i went and looked at a bunch of subreddit it's about money because i usually use personal capital and i don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now but when i asked like ten different people how they track their money most who i asked maybe five or six use excel which is kinda crazy to me because how many how many accounts do you have that you need to track over ten yeah yeah so it doesn't matter if you're wealthy you're not wealthy most people like between if they have a a wife or a husband you have like your checking account bank account your four zero one k your stock stuff maybe your home loan credit card credit card you probably have two or three credit cards so typically i i imagine the average joe has ten plus so it's actually a lot to track where was if you have money and everyone i've noticed or not everyone a lot of people have i've noticed use excel so i did some research there's this thing and it's not like i've discovered this i think it's pretty popular already called tiller money and all it is it the landing page is beautiful but i'm just fascinated by this business all it is is a if you go to google sheets and you click tools and then add on okay you'll see the ability to add plugins to google sheets okay till money all it is is a plugin in for google sheets that costs one hundred i think it's a hundred dollars a year and all it does is it automatically imports your bank accounts and any other account into google sheets and templates that they have or you can just make your own template but i've never seen someone built such a sick and awesome business off of a google sheet add on it's it's incredibly fascinating yeah this is good i like this i think this is this of all the like kind of money manager things this appeals to me more because it feels like i'm managing my own money and in reality you know the thing i'm always worried about is data like i don't want my data all these different services like i'm not gonna try your new finance app because like i just don't wanna link my bank account to all this new stuff but if they could do this where this was self hosted in some way like it's just a template that'd be great it doesn't look like that's the case but it is sweet i like it so if you go to google sheets right now and you click add ons on the top right once you're in a sheet you could see add ons and i actually just realized i use a few add ons the other add on i i use is called super metrics which is it pulls in data from sql and stuff like that i'm i bet you they do close to eight figures a year in in revenue but we've talked about plugins ins for wordpress we've talked about plugins ins for chrome google sheets plugins ins is another thing that is super super fascinating to be and i completely overlooked it it's so neat and so i don't know what else to say other than it's cool so you you added a thing that i thought was kinda interesting that was about open salaries what what is this and do you wanna talk about this or or where do you wanna go i'll let you lead a little bit but i'll i it's so funny i'll i'll put stuff in here throughout like two weeks and you i about it three days goes past and i'm like wait did i write that or did you write that so alright so we'll do a ahead quick we'll do it quick so so you put this thing on here i got kinda intrigued so you you open salaries what is it i so idea that like today it's kinda crazy that we don't know what other people make and not in a gossip kind way but it's really you know the company knows what everybody makes but the employees don't know and that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage you don't know when you're underpaid you don't know if there's any like systemic bias and let's say women or minorities are not getting paid as much as you know tall white males or whatever and so it's kinda weird that this is this like taboo thing nobody talks about it you're not allowed to talk about it it's seen as kind of a faux paul but would actually be to the benefit of any employee to know to have transparency at as to what people are getting paid and it could be an but being able to see what what other people at your role at your company are are getting paid and so you would put this thing on here that colorado was gonna say that hey from twenty twenty one employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job post of any job they could be working in colorado including remote jobs which thought was kind of interesting and then we have companies like buffer and whole foods have been doing this for a while buffer kind of try to like make a name for themselves by being like the open transparent company we'll share everybody's salary and like literally you can like here's a link you can go and see everybody at buffers salary whole foods let's use now whole foods you can see people's salary you put that in there or operated i don't know haven't seen that one but i wanted to share a couple interesting things i i found when i was dig into this so first check out this this spreadsheet of buffer salaries and i just put it in the chat so you can click this anybody can google this and find it you can and you can see that joel the ceo is making two hundred and eighty thousand dollars this year and you can go see what this the from what his ea is making she's making eighty nine thousand dollars and you can just go down the whole company roster everybody's salary is public which i think is like pretty insane but interesting then you have things like the google kinda secret spreadsheets i don't know if you've seen these but at big companies people are starting to like just make it anonymous spreadsheet and say hey put in your salary in your level and your your location here so we can all like have more transparency you don't have to put your name next to it and they circulate it with inside companies so microsoft had one google had one facebook ad one and the google one the the the so i forgot who was so someone woman created this and within two days ten thousand people had put in their information and now there's over twenty thousand people in the open google database and you can go to link can you link to that yeah it's right here i have it at the bottom so so so these are kinda cool and and it's interesting how viral these go so then i was looking at levels dot fyi which i know you know about it's yeah yeah yeah it's a place to go see like you can go and say alright i'm interviewing at amazon and facebook and they they labeled me an l five software engineer located in bay area like what am i gonna get paid how much is or i got an offer i don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer did they low me and so you can go on levels at fyi and it's the same thing crowds sourced information about what you make at these different companies and levels if you look at their traffic they're getting about a million and a half visits a month and like they're this thing is really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit so they have like job boards now if you click at the top they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode a negotiator as a service so if you at at the top it's a sick little website where they they have a little calculator that says you know what company where are you located how many years of experience here's what you're getting here's what we think you should get paid based on the levels database which is now in the i don't know tens of thousands of entries or something like that and then they basically say hey if you pay us five hundred bucks we'll negotiate your offer for you we have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us and basically you book a time you talk about your offer and how you're feeling about it and what you what you really want out of this and then we'll negotiate for you and they show all these like success stories of like this person at facebook got twenty thousand more than their offer this person got forty thousand more this person got ten thousand more and so they're taking and and they just take a flat fee of like whatever five hundred six hundred bucks i think and so i think there's some interesting stuff going on in this like transparency around what people are making and it really goes in like fits in my values where i think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more or i think it would help everybody if we talked about money anymore and it would be less like kinda of taboo and less less like a big deep dark secret if people were more open about it and i think that's we'll just go can i you a counter point for that go for it i thought that that was interesting and i'm not saying how i feel because i'm still thinking about it but leo i figured forget his name leo but he did it from buffer the c founder of buffer who no longer works there so buffer started with this whole transparency thing that was like the whole stick and it works about everything users revenue salaries everything it was it was a sc that got popular amongst bloggers in particular there's a guy named pat and he has this blog called smart passive income dot com i used to read it when i was fifteen or sixteen or eighteen something like that in high school and he would make money by creating books and doing a a bunch of other side businesses and he would reveal his income every single month and other bloggers copied him and it was a really cool thing john du missed did it all these like really cool people did it buffer did it and that was their stick to get popular and it worked because the buffalo buffers product isn't really special it there's so many different versions and they did it leo leo said in an interview someone was like do this whole transparency thing it's pretty cool like you guys got traffic and everything do you think that it would work and i believe i i don't wanna quote them because i this i i saw this a year and a half ago years ago but something like this works now and it's great for us but i have a feeling when we get to seventy five eighty ninety a hundred people it's not gonna work anymore and it's actually gonna hurt us big time right and i forget exactly why but i believe steve with man i'm getting all my name screwed up someone else at apple like a like head to at apple said something that's similar he's like no the transparency thing it actually can hurt it hurts the company after a while and we tried it and so i actually think that maybe this is good for startups but it kinda sucks after a long time because look let's say you own a small business that does twenty million in sales and you're the business owner and you wanted to pay yourself three million dollars a year that's pretty shitty then if you're a fifty thousand dollar receptionist or something but that's like you're right to do that why would you wanna share that with everyone yeah as the employer it's not great right buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there's it was it was an effective growth tactic for them hey we're open about this we get a bunch of people asking what the heck is buffer and some of them will use it but as the employer it's not great as the employee it's great and so that's it depends kinda which side of the coin are you on also it depends how far you go the buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make bit much but the google thing where it's like hey look there's thousands of employees here i need to know that within my level within my kinda of area am i under underpaid over paid or you know somewhere in between it gives people a peace of mind and i and i gives them you know an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information information that the other side has that you don't have so i like it from the employee perspective and i think it's but i wouldn't go the buffer way of writing everybody's names down now at a small company cool that kinda happens but i thought that was i think it's kinda cool i think there's definitely interest around this so you know a couple little ideas of of things that people could do but so levels f what dot fyi is cool is working i'm surprised that somebody like you know our buddy andrew wilkinson doesn't go by a company like this it's it's kind of a n of one company it's it has like a unique data advantage it's in it does job boards which he loves as a business model on top of all this traffic that they're getting and it's kinda like a side project that's probably like you know reach the max of that of of which you know the two guys behind it really can take it the other ways that you could do this i think you could do this in any vertical so i don't know is there levels fyi in the like hedge fund world or consulting or banking like if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this you should just make the levels that fyi database for your industry nursing i i don't know what whatever the industry is that this product can work across those and so i think that's cool even within levels somebody could go further and be like alright i'm gonna take product managers or data science and really own that if they were somebody who has a big audience for that like if if that guy lenny lenny who's got a big blog and and kinda audience around product managers he could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally so i think the levels concept could be exported and and done in different areas when lee first launched like maybe the first couple months of launching so we didn't have an audience so and i'm saying this so anyone could do it we we didn't have an audience and i wrote a post called how much money do founders make because i was trying to figure out like do i pay myself do i not pay myself right whatever and if you google how much money do founders have in their bank account the hustle you might see it and all i did was i took a google form and i posted it on hacker news and it went to number one they eventually took it down because i think that goes against their terms of service like i have a survey but i got like three or four hundred replies and i ask people how much money they have in their checking account how much they have in their bank account how much they pay themselves how much they have an ill delinquent assets i got hundred and then what their job title is and where they live and i got hundreds of replies and i published all the data and i took out any information where you could like learn about someone and people loved sharing anonymous information and they loved reading anonymous information like they loved like it was amazing and so i agree i think it's pretty sick and it was way oh there it is a where you posted it it was way easier to get people's i'm not like literally getting their information because it's all anonymous but people were so forthcoming with us it was pretty cool and pretty interesting yeah i want somebody to do this with vcs i think most of people don't know how much vcs make and all different people in the food chain like the gps versus like a partner versus like a associated or whatever and i feel like somebody should like kind of crack that egg open and be like look here's the here's the numbers here's what it is and then it but give people some transfer transparency into what what's really going on let's talk about this for a second so there's two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me with that when we're talking about this the first is pitch book you know what pitch book is yes pitch do you pay for it it's so expensive no my sister and law works there though and so everyone's she'll she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of like to look up no i don't pay for it because it's really expensive it's like twenty five thousand dollars i think yep so pitch it's kinda like crunch base but soup up and so you pay twenty five grand and you get access to like a lot of information about privately health companies the second well let's just talk about pitch book the reason it's interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks i don't know which country they're in but i think the philippines and they literally have like two hundred people and and and by the way pitch is a publicly traded company you can go and read about them their own by mornings starts so you could actually go and see their operations and how they how they work they're growing like crazy they're have north of a hundred million in revenue you can they have a team of folks and what they do is call vcs and they literally just ask them information or they call companies there's just ask them information and for some reason i don't know how or why people give them information and that's one of the ways one of many of ways that they get data the second thing is this business called is it called the org have you is that what it's called yes okay the org very interesting because in a nutshell their tagline is the org transparency starts here build a better organization with a public org chart celebrate your colleagues basically that's just kinda yeah crap let's not let's not read their marketing yeah really what it is i'll be i'm sure they do all that nonsense but it's a like it's an org chart it's a public org chart yeah you pay money and you get access to people's org chart and this helps you know who to email to sell shit to right exactly and that's cool like there's no i don't know why they don't just say that but they've raised a lot of money like i think tens of millions of dollars it's probably gonna be a monster business and so i would do two things with the salary thing one i would actually hire people in the philippines or whatever and just hit it hard and just go out and and hit it hard and i would trust that a lot of people would be actually pretty pretty transparent and the second thing is i would pay wallet kind of like the org and i would sell this to every hr department in the country so i have a friend that is doing this with shopify sales i showed him a way to roughly estimate how much a not roughly it's pretty good estimate me how much how many how much sales a shopify store is doing and what is that way what can i get you don't have to say it true is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is that's one of the ways yeah and that's what was one of the best ways and so i showed about us said look this is this is useful people wanna know what their competitors are doing and and the second way is you look at the traffic yeah you you still need a couple of other pieces of information for example you need to know how how much the average order is and things like that but but roughly that that will tell you you know how they're doing and so now he emails me a report every month that shows me you know these four companies that i decided hey i wanna track these four companies and emails we report this is their sales this is their social media following this is how many ads that they're running on facebook and one other thing which is i just like the month over month changes between those and i think it's a great idea so i he was kinda looking for something to do i told him look i think this is a good pivot i don't know exactly how well he's doing i really shout out the name but i kinda don't remember let me look it up while we're doing this but how'd you find this person he was in my mastermind let me see what his thing is called it's called okay dramatic calls let me figure it out and you came up with the with the i told him i was like look he because he was like dude i'm good with data i'm interested in this kind of stuff but i also like you know and i also have a team in the philippines and you know so so i i really like this okay so here it is so the the website is shop sales data dot com and i hope he gets a bunch more customers from this i hope he's still doing it he's still emails me my report i hope he's taking more customers right now but it's monthly report of shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for hundred dollars or something like that month yeah this is great i mean you could do the same with facebook ad accounts just like because that facebook shows everyone that ads you can say you know email me my competitors ads every time they launch a new one exactly and so i think that there's like there's some good stuff in this kinda like data data based businesses where you're just collecting data from public sources you're cleaning it up you're structuring it and then you're offering it as a service to a bunch of other companies okay you wanna do mini one do we have a mini one yeah let's do a quick one what else we got do you have anything good of like your first week working at a real job it is was my first week and now it's in my second week and i'm sitting on the beach in hawaii so what doing it having a job rocks i should have done this years ago i love having a job it's cool man hubspot announced that they had a billion dollars in revenue like run rate it's pretty amazing and so there's like two things this is like my first like real job or like a corporate job i mean that's not exactly true like i would have friends like my friend neville who it's is like a works for himself he be like hey you wanna go hang out on a wednesday like at noon and i'm like no dude do have a job like right so i treat like running my company it was one hundred percent more or more than a job it's two jobs yeah it's more than it it's i would call it a nine to five i'm like yeah like i'm it was in fact way more than nine to five but i was like i'm like pretty straight like i get to work at nine i do my thing like anyway i so i i tease about this but yeah first like corporate job it's but the it's gonna slow down but like the amount of meetings is pretty crazy and i told them i'm i'm not doing meetings like this anymore because i'm gonna make stuff but i don't know how it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done yeah i i realized how that works which is just that managers don't get work done managers just go to meetings and then i ics or individual contributors is the known are the ones who actually like sit down and do work because they don't have you know back to back meetings throughout the day but i think even like your work is basically just communicating between people but my seven days of working has shown me that even i ics have a lot of meeting yeah like they should they should they should not have that many they should have like whatever one or two or three a day but they should have like you some working between three and five hours of uninterrupted time yeah like so is that a like i just don't understand how people so like at i'm telling everyone at husband i'm like you don't know what talk to me for these hours i have like like like and i'm like this is i i and i and i say i say i see course but i say i'm doing this for the better of everyone like i'm gonna make good stuff so like let me go on my whole and you just just don't bother me what's been the worst part so far the meetings let's be honest okay what what what what me with the meetings boring or just the amount of them the amount and also like i didn't know what workday is and all this stuff there's just so much paperwork that i've always had people do for me that i'm having to do what's the worst part you know like everyone's like is having a boss weird because i've never had boss for no i think it's gonna suck after a while of course like having a boss might suck i'm so pumped i don't have to like i get to just shovel shit onto kirin plate that i don't like i'm like hey you know we should be hired this person like i don't have to make that decision i love that i love that i think it's awesome having a boss has was not sucked so far i don't know what do you think would be the worst part and i'll tell you if they are what what was your worst part there's certain meeting types that you have to do that i just found like likes completely soul sucking one of them was called a calibration meeting it's basically like you just describing it you know gives me some pain here basically it's like you're trying to promote people but how do you know like if every manager has their own criteria for promotions how do you make sure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company so you have to do these things about calibration meetings or you sit down and you basically say this person's up for promotion or they get they're getting promoted because of this this and this and then the other person says well you know i i felt like they weren't they weren't great at this or they didn't do a great job with that project and they have to kinda defend them for me it was boring on two levels one first and foremost i didn't know anyone else in the company so i just sat there for three hours not being able to say anything because i didn't interact with any of these people i just got here i just got bought i don't know these people i can't give any input nor do i have any opinion on if if the feedback is valid or not and the second thing i was just like wow even after all this talk like i still just feel like the person who's the most vocal and best salesperson is getting their way and the person who's not that great at talking is not getting their way so like we could have just skipped all this like it it would have almost been better had we not gone into this room and said you sell your person and you sell your person and you debate this person like the better debate wins in big companies and i think that that's like really crazy well i think we do at our company all the time which is like if it will say i'll like if a excuse meeting says for thirty minutes and and like in the meeting i'm like okay i said what i had to say i don't need to be here anymore i'm leaving or like it's it wasn't considered rude to be like hey you need to leave now you're done it was like kind of a helpful thing and i'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here i'm like do you guys need me here can i can i leave right or or or i'll just say i'm out you know i i've said what i need you said i've heard what need heard you guys can talk yeah i think on zoom or whatever you just sort of like you hold up you wave and you click exit the second thing is hubspot is doing really well and just the software business and this sounds like just like like obvious stuff from anyone who's in software but i've never been at a company like this man if you figure out how to get a have if you figure out how to reduce your churn to to very little or or even positive so for every dollar someone spends it's above one dollar the next year and you pick a big enough market it's just magical like just now i understand why people are saying like oh you know why is this company valued so high highly it's like well because sticky revenue software revenue so something like i don't know hubspot would be considered this but something for sure where you're building the entire business off of the you know that the switching costs are quite high it's pretty amazing like the software build like just start a software company it's so much better than everything else like it's really hard and it's s early on but if it really truly if you can get your churn to be right and you pick a big enough market it's just some if and and you have a and you could figure out how to have a good marketing machine which all of this is like oh yeah only you could do that like it's oh i know but like you you can kinda figure it out actually i think given it if you if you give yourself like five years to figure it out i think you can right well i think all the things you're saying are true and they really just point to this one unless i've learned the hard way over and over again which is it's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game because if you pick the wrong game even becoming the best player still ends up with a small outcome or a really painful path but if you pick the right game to play and whether you become the best or not even the best but you know just kinda of the top twenty five percent it's just so much better to win that way and in this case like we've if we've we talk about and we've done different types of businesses right we've done like i did social network i'm i trying to make a new social network it's the wrong fucking game to play dude it's so hard so hard so it's a low chance of probability of success you did a media business also hard hard you know higher odds of success but like lower size of the price if you could get it right weight lower size e comm you know just a fucking pain in the ass just tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and logistics because you got real world products and you have to like ship all around the world and you're gonna have customers and have returns and like things that just like are not as easy as software and so like we've and you know we talk about all these different you know doing a paid newsletter or whatever like there's all these different models and for my money by far the best one is to build a software business because the software business can scale a software business can like be improved over time and you know unlike e commerce when you when you make a crappy e commerce product you know you go make a better version the next you know takes you six months to make it and then you make it and all those old customers you got the bad products still think you suck whereas with software you push the update and all of a sudden every single customer has the new best thing you know there's all these just tiny advantages and software is a way to go but we i wanna say something that david siegel so we had david siegel on last time he had a billion dollar or close to billion dollar tea business and i go david why are you doing brick and mortar stores when you could be doing software and he said the right thing what did he say it was like oh it's fun i love selling product and i was like that's the particular answer that is a wonderful answer and i think that like well i ever be able to start an enterprise software company i think that if i was going to u either have to be very soon or even a few years ago like you have you i would you have to do it i think when you're like really like where money's is the one number one thing that's like i gotta get paid i gotta get my hit and in that case yeah i would do anything to make money but where i am now and i think where a lot of people are is you really it's it's i agree with everything you said but you have to add the ant also not like passionate about but what what what excites you enough to that you're willing to get good at it over a decade right we'll flip your boat alright so let's take you okay you're happy at hubspot everything's great you're gonna be there for for twenty years we know that alternate reality you know we all know you're happy hubspot you'll be for two decades it's great it's you know sunshine and rainbows let's say alternate reality they fire you tomorrow you're gonna go build something else where do you think you would go build would you do what your would you go media would you go something totally different would you go software what do you think you would do everyone's gonna laugh at me because let's say trucking but i would do some maybe something something in the agriculture space yeah i think ag tech is is ag tech is interesting i think that's the most interesting i had a great call with this guy who i'm gonna we gotta have this guy in the podcast his name just his son's name is jordan i can't remember rob van trump it's called the van trump report so van trump report it's this guy who has a newsletter that does twenty million dollars a year in subscription revenue he's the only writer and he was telling me all about ag tech do you know what ag tech stands for yeah agricultural tech and he was just saying all types of like what's going on and i think working with like middle america people who whether they're rich or not they're more humble and they create things that actually impact the world like get food to you i would do something in that space or but i would start another media company but okay let's say you go into ag tech art and you're you're probably gonna be open and whatever you know you'll think of it then but knowing what you know now would you do media in agriculture would you do you know something with actual farms and and logistics would you do technology hard you know trucking the actual self driving trucks would you do a job thing would you what what would you what model would you be wanting to do in that space oh okay so i don't like this question because it could it'll change every single day you asked me but as of right now i would start a blog with at in the ad text space and then eventually i would turn it into a database kinda i like this this company the org i think i could create something like the a database that's better and yeah that's what i would do okay so nice i think that's what would do as of right now that that fast me or i would create if you know what tiger twenty one is because isn't that like a like a kind of a conference or club or mastermind thing or something like a club for people who have invest assets north of ten million dollars and it cost thirty grand a year it's and they have like thousand people who are subscribed and my friend joined and i looked at the back end and it was horrible and i was like oh i'm just gonna clone that what do they do with the with the members is it events or is it it's like both but like they create like like little like safe communities where like like you meet in groups of attend and you kinda show off your portfolio and people criticize you and like try to make you defend your position so you get better but it's it got bought by private equity so it makes a lot of money like alright that's cool i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back