#160 - Paid Communities Making $20m+ (and How to Build One), Fighting Inertia & An Interview With Dave Selinger of Deep Sentinel

hey i've got a white male six foot three he's got a crow bar and i have and he's trying to break into this building here's the address i've just given them a description of the suspect a description of the crime and the existence of weapons every single police department in the nation that's what they're dispatch is designed to do and they can just describe criticize us at his own house practicing crow bar combat great yeah i feel like i could really what no whack your thing looks pretty good pretty good oh i i think it looks like look i look fucking fantastic you look fantastic this is the best this is the best i've ever looked if i look in a mirror i'd never seen this coming back so whatever this camera is doing for me this is just know if you're watching this i'm u than this looks right now so i think i'm than this looks i think you kind of look celebrity ish like you got cool hair a cool beard i think you look i think you looked like a i think you look cool than you've ever looked thank you that's how i feel i feel cool and i think i need a tattoo or something i'm just like now i'm trying to triple down on the celebrity status that i i see no i i think you look wonderful two things first today i wanna talk about paid communities a lot but before we get into that the second thing is what i wanna tell you last night my wife sarah goes good night sean because everyone's been saying that dude they say it in such a mean way is she trolling or it was it an accident he's trolling because someone tweeted like well we think that you are sean and sean do because indian guys typically a pipe pitch nerdy boys and white guys like you have like low pitched alpha voice turns out sean's the moment with the alpha voice and i'm like fuck so she called me chad thanks oh that's amazing i hope you guys were doing some great things while she called sean that was awesome yeah well she burned me good but let's get right in do you wanna get you wanna talk about paid committees i did a lot of research because this interests me right now okay let's do it okay so paid communities interest me because i came across this thing called tiger twenty one and this sounds like lame that i'm bringing this up now after selling company but i've been interested in this for for years do you know what tiger twenty one is i've heard about it what i know about it is it's kind of like a mastermind peer group thing but it's for a certain wealth level i don't know if there's is a and i don't know if there's an actual cutoff off but it's supposed to be for wealthier and i think it's mostly older people and we have a couple friends who are in it so i i texted one of them today about it so i got a little bit of info but tell me what i missed what do you know about it okay so tiger twenty one google i don't know the url maybe dot maybe just that dot com but basically it's a peer group where you have to have at least ten million dollars of invest assets in order to join it's very expensive it's thirty thousand dollars a year i wouldn't call it a mastermind because mastermind has a certain connotation but yeah it kind of is that i logged onto to the site i i'm not a member but i use a friend's log in to check it out and there's at least eight hundred and fifty members according to the what i saw and according to their site so what's that map twenty four million dollars a year in revenue they have local chapters that meet up i guess now digitally and they do things like they share one another's portfolio and you have to defend your portfolio and so it's basically rooted in rich people talking about rich people stuff mainly being investing but i think it turns into a little bit of therapy every once in a while like a lot of groups do but right what did your buddy say alright so i texted our mutual friend keith and he's he's he's a real estate guy he's been on the pod you can go listen to keith episode and keith a good dude and he goes i go your entire twenty one right he goes yes what's up and i basically asked him what do think about it he's like it's an interesting group it's because it's all about investing preserving wealth it's mainly for older people and he goes the typical meeting goes four hours you do like you said a portfolio defense where you talk about what you're holding and why and other people get interested in it and sometimes they're speakers sometimes it's sometimes it's an external speaker sometimes it's somebody from the group who speaks and there's like a moderator and they also do like events because if you go to the website you could see like they hosted a tiger twenty one event at magic johnson's house and so they're definitely trying to build this kind of like who's who network this sort of like soho club soho house vibe to the whole thing and if yeah so they do that they also you get like deals so a friend of mine sent me a deal where they basically when you're wealthy you get the thing called umbrella insurance which you paid two grand a year and it's just like general insurance and it's based the the story to tell you is like if you get the car crash and someone google's you they're gonna see your rich and they're gonna wanna sue you for five million dollars and this protects against all type of stuff and so they could do a discount on umbrella insurance and so by my calculation i actually would bet they do thirty to forty million in revenue and they recently sold the private equity and so it's a relatively big business and i actually read about read up on it and someone said like there's ninety percent retention rate which pretty amazing i've also been following reddit fat fire which is a subreddit similar to this and and it's like tripled over the last year so this space has got me incredibly interested but this is just one example of a paid community and so what i wanted to do was go through a few other paid communities that are interesting i wanted explain i'm gonna try to explain why i think they work and then where the opportunity is for other paid so i start can i start with one opportunity which is why isn't this just a business model for our podcast like why aren't we starting tiger twenty one for people that are you know that have let's call it a million dollars of invest assets so a million dollars of sort of like liquid net worth that you can go invest into something and why aren't we started this now this seems like the perfect thing to do for a podcast like this i think that probably there should be something like this i agree i if you go to the tiger twenty one to website you'll see like you know the type of models they people use on their website is like their ideal customer and it's like right sixty five year old white dudes who own insurance companies that are quite wealthy but not young or not like are kinda crew so i agree i think there's something there okay found it's fair enough so let's go into it alright so let's talk about what where should we start i've done a bunch of research how about we talk about the way sorry sorry i interrupt you one more time the thing i just said by the way i think it's important i said why isn't that the business model for this podcast i think way too many podcasts try to just do ads and we've talked in the past about like super which lets you do like a paid a paid kinda super premium version of it for your hardcore fans who pay you nine bucks a month or five bucks a month or whatever and you know i started a rolling fund largely off of the audience from this thing that said hey i've listened to this guy punch i trust him he he has a good track record and so now that rolling fund is four million dollars a year that i get to invest into startups that's more value than all of the ad revenue that we had before and so i think that more people should figure out business models that are different from the content that they're creating and so i'm surprised more podcasts don't have business models i agree with you but we it is more work we're in one of the most lucrative niches there is i mean like if you're a comedian if you're what's that shit called the two women who talk about sex all the time caller daddy yes like that's a little bit different so how do you make money off that that's a little bit different and that's actually what we're gonna talk about the page community so but talk about let's and i'm gonna bring that up so let's talk about what makes them interesting and what makes them not interest so to me what makes them interesting is that they can grow pretty quickly so you had a podcast you do this four million dollar fund now building the audience takes a while but you turned your fund on and you it was four million dollar in a matter of months very quickly so they seem relatively fast to grow they're really fast if you have an audience but compared to like a software company which could take ten years i think we definitely could build up in a matter of two or three years second they seem pretty fun to run if the interest of your community is the same interest that you have if you if if you if they don't then it's definitely not as fun but it's kind of interesting if you are very interesting that's what we you care about third you don't really need a lot of money to start one you kinda actually need no money you really could just start with a paid facebook group and you could have a really lean team to do it and finally they definitely seem pretty profitable because you can have a lean team but let's talk about the cons one and this is what i've learned with our paid stuff and from friends i think churn could be pretty hot you notice that churn was high and any paid communities you've been part of honestly the churn was not high in the paid community that i've ran but i the year yeah yeah for sure but i was it was a monthly it was a monthly fee so you could churn out monthly right for trends i think you charge annually so you don't know your churn until you know sort of later unless somebody actively cancels so it's not like like enterprise software churn where it's like a net like a one hundred negative yeah so that that i don't think that exists in most community by the way my my paid community just for real numbers mine was seven percent a month was churning which is like if you just if you're not adding any new members you you know that doesn't take long for it to go to zero but i was i think seven percent is one year no i be talking about monthly i was monthly i turning not seven percent and so so oh you're saying one year for it to go to zero i think if you have i think if you have a four percent churn that's eighteen months and and so when with including my growth i think my net churn was like one percent so i i was adding six percent and i was losing seven percent basically every month yes and can you share anything about trends what was the retention like yeah so we had some payment issues when we first launched so basically we had some issues where if someone signs up on day one and on day three hundred and sixty six they get a renewal the credit card statements there the a lot of the banks will be like whoa well what's this that's fraud so we actually had a a big fraud a problem with bank blocking it but eighty percent of people were opted into renew in the year one or in renew in the year two in our first cohort yeah ballpark ballpark about eighty percent which is pretty good but not but like it's hard to get new customers on a consistent basis yep okay so the second thing is a lot of times they don't scale that well and the reason they don't scale that well is if your community is kinda like trends where you value close knit connections or tiger twenty one more people makes it actually worse now if your community is content based which we're gonna talk about second it can actually make it way better but a lot of communities like a y po like or like if there's a hundred and fifty people at your meeting versus five people at your meeting one is worse than the other the scale gets worse for two reasons one is exclusively so if the reason to be in this group was that it's exclusive the more people in the less exclusive it is or the if the value is that oh i really like this conversation this conversation was really really nice but now you get a noisy room of a thousand people well now the it's just too noisy i can't keep up with this i don't know who these people are some of these people are saying stupid things i'm out of here right so that's the two reasons that the scale scalability hurts yes and it can work though because if you're a reddit which is a community not a pay community but it's a good community you want more you need more you need way way may more people if you are cora you need way more people if you're are some of the other examples that you need you need way more more people is good and that's great but it's not always good to add more people so what i wanna talk about is a few communities that i found that i think are interesting and then i wanna talk about opportunities in the space and then finally we can talk about what i think you need to build a successful community so the first one that i discovered and i've actually brought up here ton is called ave have you seen event to no okay so ave i know the first example it's gonna it's like it doesn't even entirely apply because i think ave is actually a free community but you need to apply and you or get invited so it's somewhat similar but ave is a community is a professional group i believe it has eighteen thousand participating members and it's four executives particularly are you on the website right now now i'm on our our notes okay basically it's for fortune five hundred or fortune one hundred people it's people like the i don't even like because i've never worked at a company i don't even under under understand all these roles but like a cio was that a chief information officer so i said c s o i'm looking at their website c i s o i don't even i don't know what c i s o means so was that chief information security officer yeah cis yeah so these are like things that i don't even oh i guess i have cfo i know that is chief financial officer so it's basically executive did you just turn into a a gloss section for sam to figure well you know what role b r is yeah that's basically your hr is chief she chief hr officer see okay i guess that one was gonna what a a c o i don't know that one chief data management officer because come on a lot of people aren't gonna know what this stuff but it's a big thing they have eighteen thousand members and check this out they sold in two thousand and sixteen for close to three hundred million dollars it was three hundred and seventy five million dollars they sold for and it was for twelve times profit which means their profit was twenty three million dollars a year and almost all of that profit came from sponsorships and so the way it works is is that they would get groups of ten or twenty people they would host a talk like i think it was mostly in an online talks that says like how walmart is gonna handle how walmart is gonna handle remote work yeah remote work and ten people like i'm just gonna guess what's a fortune five hundred so like the cmo of northern let's the i'm looking at now the chief information officer of northern trust i don't know what that is but it sounds like a huge company the cio of delta of chevron of nestle is gonna go which is like it's only ten people at that talk but it's ten people who each control twenty thousand people and sponsors will pay stupid amounts of money hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach its people enough that it makes twenty five million dollars a year profit very interesting an interesting community again like tiger twenty one if you go to the website it just kinda looks like pretty old school mostly older white people so who knows if it's if it's hip or or at least like in the know of everything but what is that where does this land with you interesting it's interesting but i think you if i'm most people i'm like okay the hard part of this is going and getting the cio of nestle or they cmo of delta to to join some group how do you do that and i remember what's the name of the the mastermind group that's the more popular company not tiger twenty one but like the other one we've both studied i can't remember the name hi young presidential organization no no that the the one that does like a hundred million dollars a year it's a competitive yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what's that i don't remember what that's called it's starts for the c i think slips my name as well the slips my brain as well anyways vest yeah yeah vest sorry not not not far as the yeah yeah vest so vest does the same thing as as this and i remember getting the phone calls saying from some you know pick up some random number and it was hey sean you know this is windy from vest okay you have we have we met yeah actually i've heard a lot about you you're the ceo of monkey inferno right yeah that's right again like where where do we meet no oc i'm i'm actually you the chapter president for san francisco for vista and i actually wanna invite you to join our ceo network we have ceos from this company this company this company and we just really think you'd would be a great fit for for our ceo group we meet up about once a month in san francisco it's a great time blah lot okay ceo group you you sound like you know me you're talking about my city this sounds pretty legit okay so what are you asking me for yeah so the membership is twenty thousand dollars a year and you you and i was like oh okay this is a sales call shit like good job you got forty five seconds into the sales call and so this is how them and i don't know it was them exactly but it was a company just like them was recruiting people it was just they were just cold calling c level people where a script that made you feel like they were calling for you based on your city and your company name and your role your job title there and so i think this is what you would have to do is you'd have to be a pretty bad cold collar and you'd have to figure out how to get this thing going with just enough brand names where this sounds legitimate i look i host an event called hustle con i've over the years i've probably had a hundred and fifty speakers tens of thousands of attendees when i started it i didn't know any of these people i called email them and there's a way to play it off that it's cool to be part of there's a way to get customers i think that's a little bit better than cold calling and now i think cold calling colby the mailing like that should exist and you should do that i think there's a few different ways like having a podcast and there there's a few interesting ways to do it but nonetheless i think it's an interesting community the second one that i wanna bring up and i got pulled of their deck a year ago and i could have invested into it and i skipped it i passed and i think that might have been a mistake but it's called sole savvy have you heard of soul savvy it's like a shoe thing and yeah it's pretty interesting it's a sneaker head lover community something like that but it cost thirty three dollars a month and you basically when when i was got their deck it was basically just a slack group that's all it was and i don't know if that is anymore but there's a lot of kids probably grown people as well who are wanna to get insider tips on when a certain drop of a shoe is and they somehow game the system like it's what it's called cooked groups so there's these like groups where they team up and somehow i i don't know anything about the space but they somehow get insider information on when a drop is gonna happen and they and they collaborate and scheme together on how they can get access to certain shoes now what sol is doing is they started with shoes it was just a slack group which i think is stupid by the way i think they're building one of these on slack group but it's not the right move but they get they get because they have a group of i think they have five thousand members now so it's a hundred and sixty thousand mr these because they have this contingency of five thousand like really big shoe fan ad they can probably give them special access to x y and z they can do interviews with special people and it's kind of interesting they raised two million dollars recently they say that they're adding four hundred people who wait to their wait list a day i don't know if that's true but you yeah it's an interesting it's an interesting space and nonetheless what do you think of that i think you did good by passing on it i think it's a cool business for the person who owns it it's definitely not a as construct right now that i don't see how that becomes a super large business worth investing in worth why they need two million dollars and how they're gonna turn that into you know a two hundred million dollar plus company i don't really see that because like we said communities themselves this you know these chat groups don't scale and you know you're looking for die hard who are gonna pay if you're paying thirty three dollars a month right like you know that's more than it's like you're providing more value than amazon prime you know what i mean like that's double less triple the price of amazon prime and so you know you really have you're yeah the the hardcore cores are gonna go for it but also the more people you let in then the more people who all have access to the same information the same tips the same drops that they're trying to go by the harder it gets for you to actually go buy anything that's valuable so i don't really see how this becomes a big big venture scale business but i think it's a great idea for somebody who's a big shoe fan addict to create a community like this i think that's an awesome lifestyle business to to own and like if that's your thing that's great i love it i agree with you so let's talk about three i can can i give you can you give you two characteristics i think make it work one is high passion and then the second one is the ability to make money on the other side so this happens a lot with stock trading groups so there are a bunch of stock chip groups out there where people are looking for additional information and they wanna be in a a group where the crowd is moving a certain direction you have this for sneaker heads you have this for n entities right now collectible so so the key characteristic is it's not just like i'm a big fan of the you know the golden state warriors so i'm gonna join this paid community for them typically that doesn't work as well as if i join this group i'm gonna get tools that we're gonna help me make more money so it's a very simple money and money out calculation for people and i think that's why it works for sneaker heads and it works for trading cards and it works for crypto but it doesn't work as well for like you know people who just love gossip accrual yeah so there's a few ways i think that if you're gonna build this you you've gotta think about the first is the amount of money that your company is gonna make is exactly what you said which is it's directly in proportion to the amount of revenue that the attention member can make that so for example if you are ent of rc cars well the equation here is how much revenue the attendee or if member is gonna make times how many there are so members of people who like rc cars i have no idea i just made that out but there's probably not that many of them and because it's like a hobby that you don't really make any money from you probably cannot charge a lot for it so that like probably won't be massive but not i mean maybe she's still do it but that doesn't mean it's gonna be actually that big so that's the math that you have to do which is how much revenue is the member gonna make and how many of those potential members are there right or or the one like you said with tiger twenty one so tiger twenty one is actually like that right when you when you go and you hear somebody's portfolio you're gonna get investment ideas and even a single investment idea a single like improvement to your portfolio if you have over ten million dollars in invest assets one good idea is gonna more than pay for the thirty thousand dollar of your membership excluding the friends you'll make and the deals you'll do together and that real estate thing you'll buy together and all that good stuff so excluding all that now on the other hand if you're looking at something like the ave or whatever where it's like what is the cmo of nestle gonna do when she meets the cmo of delta like they're not gonna directly get revenue out of i don't think that's why i think it's like how hard we're how hard is it to accumulate this group of people in a room so if it's really hard to reach these people these are all a high value people then it's the membership is worth the value of the people in the group so if it's just a bunch of sneaker head buyers each individual member is bringing zero like clout to the table but if it's cmos of different companies and it's about how much clout do they each to bring to the table that's the value not so much how much revenue they're gonna make yes and so let's talk about three groups that i have that i think this could work for so if you're wanna start picking me i'm gonna start with the bottom one or and i actually think the best one but it's fine one of our list nurses we talking about nurses a ton it's an interesting demographic i think nurses are kinda cool for this space for two reasons or three reasons the first work could pay for maybe i think work would maybe pay for it second nurses are typically i've spent time around nurses so they're typically women and they typically are people who feel like down like they feel like they're forgotten because they're not that worked overworked underpaid underappreciated yeah and that is so groups that are the whatever you just said i guess i don't know how to explain it but groups that are like the us versus them like we don't have someone speaking for us typically that's like there's a lot of like i've looked when i with researching research communities there's so many successful women like women discussing x y and z communities this is just that like that so i think that they have that us us versus them mentality and the third reason is there's a shit ton of nurses yeah have you seen this instagram account nurse life rn n no how many is it it's one point two million members on instagram it's run by this guy i think his name is eb or ebb i'm not sure exactly how he say his name and it's this guy this says black nurse and nurse private they just went private they used to be public and i think you have to like you have to request so that they can make sure that you're a nurse before they let you in which again is part one thing that communities do well the you know what's that quote it's like i don't wanna be a part of any group that would accept me you know the the better your gate at the front the more people will value being in the group and so this is a group and they they just post mostly like nurse memes so it's like you know if you it's like being under underappreciated or whatever they'll make a joke out of it or like you know coming home and realizing you still have whatever you know on your shoe and it's just you know relatable memes from the eyes of a nurse so that's how they like keep their members engaged it's just meme content that's a good like inside joke for the community but he partnered with the makers of ba shoes which is the nurse shoe brand that's coming out that's trying to be nike for nurses basically it's nike for for medical footwear and so he got equity in that company and gets paid every month because he's the promotional vehicle for the football shoes who wants to like penetrate this community right so not a paid community as such but it is a private community and on top of that they do this now what would incredible health you know the startup that's raised i don't know how much money twenty five million dollars from entries in horror and all that what would they pay to access one point two million nurses that are like engaged and trust this brand and trust this leader of the community they pay a lot right nurse job boards like so so if this guy's ambitious he could create a job board he could create the next incredible health he could take equity and abolish shoes and be a part owner of of the shoe brand like i think that's where this goes for for nurses i think this is a great example of one i think this could crush i think that guy is gonna that guy sitting on a gold mine that like if you if you pass over ten years and tell me that he turned this one point two million person instagram page to a hundred million dollar company i won't be surprised right if you go and start truck life rn right now i i i think i think that's what's gonna have it after this pod truck the second one this is shocking to me okay google sheets there's this guy who tweeted at me and he started this thing called sheets com and he had sixty seven hundred people sign up is that i mean i guess it's shocking because the like i know that probably a hundred million people plus use google sheets but and i guess it doesn't it and i guess it also doesn't shock me because i am a google sheets nerd and like i've do out about one i and some of the most profitable online courses in the world are become an excel master how to use excel become grab better at excel those are like if you'll go look at the charts of most profitable online courses highest as revenue online courses excel is always in the sort of top five yeah i'm encore the founder of teachable teachable one time yeah one time told me that there was some guy making a million bucks a year and he was like the biggest earn on teach teachable on excel exactly so google sheets i one hundred percent think you could do a paid community it would to be cheap though because it's the same it's the map of like how much money do you make for google sheets i think that there's absolutely something there and then the last thing is does someone tweeted at me a community of embedded senior engineers who talk about advanced advanced engineering concepts like how to scale a tech stack from a hundred k to ten million users totally buy into that something like that that is incredibly niche an incredibly high end where if there there's a there's this other component that we been talk about with the community is you have to make it so that information that you gather in that group you cannot find online like for tiger twenty one not that many people are gonna talk about how like because it's embarrassing how do i gift my child fifteen million dollars without the government getting hands on it that's not something you're gonna tweak because that's embarrassing same thing with a hundred thousand to ten million users there's just simply not that many people who have done it yeah so you're not gonna find a lot of reputable information on that so that's another trait of these paid communities and why i think this one in particular it's interesting i think any job in any any job can do this so nurses is a good one because you have like some are gonna be a better than others because you have you know the more people the more potential and the more kinda like insider knowledge is needed the more down in that group feels down is kind of a negative word but i kind of what you're saying like sort of like they feel that they need to take action in order to like level up in some way the better and so like you know this could work for nurses but it could also work for designers i could see somebody just making a community of you know professional designers at all these different companies it's like yep we have designers from fig and from hubspot and from o and from github and you should if you're a designer at one of these companies you're making hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year two hundred thousand dollars a year why would you not wanna be a part of the like the best network of other designers like you where you can share tools tactics salary information if you're looking for new jobs opportunities if you're looking for new jobs like every job i think needs this and the more new and fringe your job the more they the more the community is needed so like i know that our friend david sp did this with community because community was like this there's not really like there's no chief community officer at these big companies but all great companies say it's all about community facebook like it's all about community twitch is like it's all about community and what does that mean and and who in your company show me your who's in charge of community at your company right and there's typically not a a c level who's in charge community so david spin said well look there's all these like kind of mid level people who are community the they run community for these big ass companies and there's no playbook on how to do their job they're underpaid they're underappreciated and their over overworked trying to run all these events i'm gonna make the best community for community professionals and so you made the community for community people it grew pretty large he ended up selling the thing i don't know how big of a business it was in terms of a business outcome he might have been a little early but i think that's a great example of somebody doing this just taking a job and and making it happen so there's my idea in i just wanted to talk about communities so i think they're actually kinda cool businesses i think a lot of people think that they wanna start one but i also think that there's a lot of mistakes made of like charging too little and i wanted to show a few examples of companies that make like a quarter of a billion dollars of value opportunities but i think they're kinda cool so that's all i gotta say about communities i'll leave it with this which is a lot of people i think the majority of people who listen to us they would love a non nine to five way to make ten thousand dollars a month and why i we i i read that in your your survey results yeah yeah which we could talk about that but but in general that's that's the number one thing i think people listen to this would would just grab right away they don't know wanna be founders of billion dollar companies or two hundred million dollar companies or whatever but if i said hey this is something outside your ninety five it's a side hustle it doesn't take up all your time and it's gonna bring in ten thousand dollars a month i would say that this to me right now is the number one way to do it i think there are some other ways right you could try commerce or drop shipping or something like that you could try to do a newsletter or paid newsletter i would do a community if i was gonna that would be my fastest path to that right now and i'll tell you you know the reasons why are all the things you said which is like it's not that much work to run the members provide the value to each it's not all about you creating content all the time it's not that hard to spin up you just have to be smart about which group you're choosing and what where you kinda have an edge what's your group and then the last thing the downsides of it are that it can't scale super large but that's not your goal anyways you're just trying to get to ten thousand dollars a month of free free cash flow from your side hustle and so that is super achievable you know twenty dollars a month for for five hundred members and you're there you know so so i think that is where i think this business fits in and i and i and i said before i actually do think they can scale but not all of them can some of them some some of them can but i i'm someone i've built a a paid community that makes many many millions of dollar and recurring revenue and it is i would say that it's really hard actually to start because i had to create a lot of the content early on and i had to create the the culture of the community but now i barely post and it has its own culture so yeah once it's once it's taken off yes it you you create that flywheel and it works or not by the way i just did this i just did this in e commerce and it probably i've probably put in a grand total of maybe eight hours into this thing and i'll tell you what it is so i wanted to create a community for people who have e commerce stores so i created a gate at the front that said your e commerce store must be doing a hundred thousand dollars a month what well it doesn't even have a website there's no website it's it's called club lt tv lt tv is like a inside term in the e com world lifetime value it's like whatever you comp store owner wants is their their lt to go up so i called it club lt tv it's people are trying to increase their lt tv and so i said you have to have a hundred thousand dollars a month of of of revenue i told so i tweeted out so i definitely had a head start because i have an audience so that brought in about the first thirty five members you said yep and they would just send me a screenshot of their dashboard yep here's me this did you take us okay so so what i did was i made it free to join for the the store owners but you had to have this much value like this much you had to be this kind of far ahead in the game but what i did then was i went to sponsors and i basically said hey i have a group of seventy five store owners ranging from one million to fifty million dollars a year in revenue and all of them trust me like me and i meet up with them once a month and would you like to sponsor this so i have one sponsor on board they paid me five thousand dollars a month all i do is at the event i say boom i do my intro my high energy intro and then i say hey let me pass it to the guy that makes us possible that makes his group possible and he says his thing for two minutes he's had i can't say the names but know if i i i guess i just give a free plug so mercury bank is the sponsor of it because that's who i would use for e commerce projects and they're they have a big push in e commerce and so they've had at least from our group five different five out of the seventy five e commerce stores switched to mercury just from the so they've gotten their money's worth out of it including one companies that's a two billion dollar company has switched over to them and so you know they definitely got their value out of the sponsorship but it and is this still going yeah this goes every month and so all that we do we have we have about one hour a month of of prep and then ninety minutes a month of the actual event and the month the one hour of prep is that ben goes and gets a cameo made from a different rapper every month and the rapper is just shouting out club lt tv he's like so we had like you know we had sean paul do the cameo one month and he's like hey it's your boy shot paul just wanted to like big big ops to club lt tv you guys are all doing so great with your e commerce store story and he's like you know just it doesn't even make any sense but it's just like a video that plays or people like it because it's like i don't know it's kinda goofy so we do want we get one cameo ordered and he sends the calendar invite so just make sure everybody gets it sense one reminder email and then the last thing is that after the event he just says hey if you learned something really useful that you're gonna implement in your business email me the the one line of the most useful thing that happened for you in the hour because the structure of it is we break everybody up into groups of six so you're in a group with six other store owners who do between one and fifty million a year in revenue and then the the format is you say one thing you did in the last month that's really working it's driving revenue up and one thing that you're struggling with that you might want help from from the group and so afterwards they all email him the most useful things and he just he just takes he just takes that sheet and he just sends it to everybody so hey here was the top insights from the group so i would think takes a one hour what's that i wouldn't be charged for that because i can actually make much more off to sponsorships for example i've been approached by you know the companies that want you to build their e comm store on their platform there's the people who want you to use them for email marketing there's the people who want for influencer marketing who are you using for facebook advertising who are you using what's the agency that manages your your your data tracking like your pixel stuff so all these companies each are willing to pay multiple thousands of dollars i just have to onboard them now because now i have the group and the group is where the value is that's the honey pot it's the same thing you were talking about where ave they have a free group and they might they have they're making twenty five million dollars year on the sponsors who want more than that oh sorry that's the profit they're making two hundred million but that's the same model that i'm using here don't charge the members just make sure all the members have successful businesses and once the thing that is gonna get or do you care i mean put zero effort it since then but like we have seventy five people who show up every month to the thing and which is like eighty eighty five percent of the members show up every single month to the so it's they're getting value out of it and so i bet if i told ben hey go on twitter and just reach out to these two hundred fifth cold email these two hundred fifty of these five hundred e commerce stores because it's very easy to get lists of e ecommerce stores that are successful a bet we could triple the size the group if we if we put some effort into it but don't really care about it it's more of a fun but it's cool because it's a it's just free money every month and it's a good group to be and i wanna learn from these people i wanna learn what they're doing what's working what's not and make these connections that's badass well you you know i it's funny i've i've built the community as well but it's like every time i learned something like you the way you're doing it is a lot different than the way that we've done it and it's really neat to hear a different point of view and perspective on how to get a time right i optimize mine for how do i spend at lease time but get just enough value whereas i think for you is like a part of your business you're like gonna this is gonna be a multi million dollar thing and we're gonna make it fucking awesome is awesome by the way if i had to start over i would have done differently i would have charged way more money right because i've learned the mistakes that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business and a ton of people for circuits isn't necessarily good right fair we're gonna wanna gonna do one more quick one before we go only if it's you because that's all i prepare okay okay i kinda have like a like a advice thing this is my psa this is my public service announcement do you know what the word inertia means yeah it's like when something starts moving it's hard to quit moving yeah so i've noticed this and you tell me if you've if this has happened in your life but i've noticed myself and many people that kinda ask me for advice inertia explains like ninety percent of why people are doing what they're doing right they're doing what they're doing because they're already doing it and sometimes that's good because like hey the trains in motion so i kept going even when things weren't you know going gang buses but i just kept going because it was it was already in progress and i'm glad i did because i had this good outcome but more often than not whether it's your business your relationship with somebody maybe it's something you've invested in and why are you invested in it well i already own it i don't wanna sell it okay but if i gave you that money today would you buy it no so it's like you know there's all these weird things if if if i didn't if you weren't already doing this business if if i gave you a clean slate tomorrow would you go start this business again no then why the hell you doing it right and so in my life i've had this kind of like weird moment at many times where i realize shit inertia is a bitch and inertia is the reason i'm doing all these things i'm doing not because i actually want to be doing them or think that this the right thing to do right now and so i just wanted to say this for to ace see if this has ever applied to you but b for anybody out there who's listening to this and like something is not going the way they want in their life coach like just check yourself like is this am i doing these things because i really think they're the right thing to do and i want to do them or am i doing them because this is just the way that things were already going and i i don't have the courage to change it i remember with my company when we sold our company it's because i had a conversation with my buddy suing and i you know while we were talking we're were trying to figure out okay how do we make this bigger how do we make this grow and we were both looked at and we were like i don't think there's a like we i don't have great ideas like left we've tried so many things we've whiteboard all these different ideas it's like do we even believe that this is a big opportunity like knowing everything we know now would i be still doing this opportunity if i wasn't already doing it and the answer was hell no and it was like and so this was my test it's if this project ended tomorrow for whatever reason the company had to fold what i wake up tomorrow and start working on the same project and the second question was if the company had to dissolve the investor you know a the company went bankrupt and i needed to go start again would i call these same people like hey you wanna work together on the next thing because if i if if no then i have the wrong people today if yes then i have the right people today if i would call them again and so for me it was always the people were right but the project was wrong and that's when i decided look maybe i should sell this instead of keep going on this for another five years and you know just sort of keep going with the inertia so has this been a thing for you in your life yeah and i'll tell you how i combat it and i think i'm actually really good at combating i i think i'm i'm not great add a lot of stuff but i'm good at combating this and warren buffett says it's like bailing out water over a leaky shit he's like it's sometimes it's better just to get a new boat and the way that i get out of this is i do two things the first is i burned bridges so a lot of people i don't burn bridges i say no i actually do burn bridges so quit your job or move to another city or do something drastic because for me i've said i cannot focus on more than one thing at a time i can only focus on i can only focus on one thing at a time and so in order to like get to create a to break inertia and create new type of momentum i like to create some something that i have my backs against the wall and i think more people to do that i think that's the way to go they say that like once you have a kid you your that changes so that's one that's an example once you get fired a lot of things changed so i like to create those moments where i have where yes i i love those forcing factors and the second thing that i tell that i do and i actually tell people as i say just do something really small so for example if you're starting a business don't think about a million dollars what can you do tomorrow that's just one dollar and creating the little tiny things actually helps a lot because breaking the pattern is quite challenging and i love burning bridges i think that's the way to get but you gave advice on two things there you said basically you you cut things off and you burn bridges that's how you stop current momentum and then how and when you start you start with ultra small baby steps or and and i've heard this now for many people so when i went to this tony robbins event he used to say he's like how many of you have like if you think in your life has there ever been a decision that is like altered the direction of your life like obviously yes for all of us our life is full of choices and if we have made different choices we'd be in a different spot right now and so clearly like choice and decisions are like one of the super superpower that we have and he goes but how can the there's times where you're gonna maybe it's like weight loss you don't you keep saying you wanna lose weight you keep deciding to lose the weight you make that new year's resolution and then you don't do it right or this and that you know you you you say you wanna quit your job you wanna start your business then there you are nine months later still in your job still without business and so he says like the word decision we've kind of we just use it too freely he goes the word decision the la root word of it like cis precision is like kinda incision which is a cut and he's like the word decision means to cut off the other possibility when you decide x you remove the possibility for why you cut it off completely and he always says like i forgot that famous psych story or whatever but it's like you know these people going the the general is going there's just trying to surge take over this island so they arrive on boat and they're trying to trying to make it to land and they're trying to take over the land and he says you know if you wanna if you wanna win if you wanna win the war get you gotta burn the boats like like if the soldiers no there's no boats there's no place to retreat there's no boat to get back on and go back home where you came from they'll win this island and so he's you know the the the story i guess i don't know if there's real enough the story is the general burns all the boats and then the soldiers just going they win and the same idea so that's kind of what you're talking about which is you're better than most in that when you make the decision you literally cut off the other op option by physically moving by sending that email by like or cheap or i make the old option really embarrassing or hard to continue doing so a good example is this is as we speak i have i'm actually gonna talk not loud doesn't hear me i have a chef in my kitchen cooking for me and it's very expensive it's a very expensive fee and i'm doing it because i'm trying to i i got actually really fit the summertime time time and then i got a little chu and i'm gonna get fit again and it cost me a lot of money to have a guy here doing this and i don't and the reason i'm doing it is because i'm gonna lose weight quickly if eat only their food because right time wanna stop doing this and so that works really well another example is if you wanna lose weight you sign up for a competition like an iron ironman or or you can't get out of something you cannot get out of and those types of forcing functions are i have found for me personally who's pretty lazy and stubborn it's the only thing that works right i'm i'm the same way i wanna use psychology against myself i wanna use my own psychology against myself so if i say something publicly like we've said on this pod pretty we're gonna grow this pod we're gonna make this a top ten podcast this podcast is gonna be doing a hundred thousand listens per episode we've said that now egg on our face in front of all these people that we think are cool and we wanna seem cool against if we don't make it happen if we don't if they don't see us taking the steps and taking this seriously to make it happen so when they see us putting thousands of dollars into our studio adding video adding youtube doing recent more research so we're coming on to this podcast more prepared they see that we are taking massive action towards and we can't be embarrassed on it tim ferris used to do this thing where he say i don't know if i don't know how real this was or this was just a thing he used to sell his books but he used to say if i wanted to lose weight i would give my friend a five thousand dollar check and say donate this to the k k if i'm not this wait by this date it's already in the envelope you just have to put it in the mailbox and that he doesn't wanna lose the money and he doesn't want it to go to the k k he thought of the worst possible outcome for himself that would give give use his own psychology in his favor to serve him in this case yeah there's a business around that it's called stick s t i c k k or it spelled like with two k's something it's like a acute spelling and you have a referee of a challenge that you wanna do you fund the account with a certain amount of money you pick something you hate and the referee beans that you hit it or not and then that money goes to your anti charity right yeah i i i think that's a cool idea i think there's even more people can do to like use use our own psychology to get us to do the thing we really want to do in our life and of course you know like these things are kinda external motivator they're not great you know like what you would rather do is you know build great habits and you would rather be internally motivated and make a decision for yourself that this is this is like a must for you you're gonna do it it's not a should but but you know some of these these tools can help you get leverage and i was actually leave with that well what what changed what are you talking about can you say or no for what what do you mean you why did i bring this up it's yeah i was talking to a friend and i just realized like i could help this friend the friend just needs to make a change and then the rig realization was that the friend didn't even wanna be doing what they were doing anyways they were just doing it because of inertia and i looked at my own life and i saw all these different examples of where inertia had inertia was and inertia had the drivers that you know had to add the wheel and inertia should not even be in the passenger seat inertia should be in the trunk and it's just something you carry with you at at the at the at the most and so i just felt like i need to say this in case there's somebody out there listening for whom this happens because it my when my friend was in that situation i explained it and they were like dude thank you like i needed to hear that because it made it more clear and now i'm kind of embarrassed that i'll just keep doing this just because of inertia like no that's not a good enough reason for me i'm gonna actually choose the things i do and then for better whatever they turn out at least i chose that path rather than like autopilot sleep i think there's a lot of people listening that might say like i and i think you agree with me and like taking drastic changes i think there's a lot of people listening who are like that's pretty reckless and my answer to that is yeah if you want like a drastic outcome you kept the ticket of drastic so or or like be honest what is the real risk the real risk and almost all of life is mediocrity well you know like my my trainer tells me this all the time he goes most people are so afraid of so many things it's like there's a lion sitting in the room he's like i'll be the first to tell you look if there's a lion in the room don't meditate don't don't take deep breaths run if there's a lion run sure he goes but most of the time there's no lion in the room and basically what he's saying is like the things that we the things that we want to do we should have the courage to do the reason we don't do them is fear and and one of the you know like we should not be fearful all the time because most of the time is no line and the remember room most of the time the risk is much lower than you think for the things you're hesitating on and the the real risk over the long term is mediocrity is having a mediocre life the a life that's not on your terms that isn't the way you want and so you know i think that's true i think you could apply this to anybody like a brave you if you if if i if i say this to you now or as you've been listening to this the for you is there a part of your life that you you think is like that's inertia that's inertia driving not not me choosing it could be doing this podcast i don't know how long you've been i hope you won't say that it it could be though like his he brittany has big dream so brady wants to start a company he wants to do all this stuff and he you know this this podcast was a passion for him and it turned into a job for him and i don't know like is this what he wants to be doing with his time or does he have a bigger dream he's just doing this because he was doing this i don't know i what do you think bra what do we how what what this is a weird episode this is the weirdest episode it kinda came about me and but like that the community part felt less like a podcast and like we could charge for that there was so much value in there for the right person i think for a lot of people listening i think that's it was not as instantaneous as the stuff that we normally put out i think but it was more valuable if that makes sense yeah i don't know which one is that so guess we'll find out be at so we know and just tweet out us like i i don't know if a brady i don't if brady speaks for the average listener we think he does so that's why we ask him but if you're like if you're like yeah i generally agree with brady grades then tell us and if you don't agree usually and you're like don't listen with that guy also telescope just go on twitter or email us or something not don't blame you excited disagree with myself so oh also i put this out there where you put the link to the hotline in the description of this i wanna start doing q and a's as where we take ideally like somebody asking a question like you talking somebody asks this question we play it and we respond to it or we take collins ins or something like that but mean say i wanna do some bonus episodes i opted him into even asking me if he wants to but well you wanna do some bonus i committed to a third episode so and if it's a q and a that's like the eat that's that's probably zero work for me so yeah i think it'll be fun so we're gonna put a thing in it's basically a hotline where you can just ask your question to the m mfa hotline and we will get those we'll sort through them and we'll put the good ones into the episode and we'll answer them so do that alright i'm out hey everyone we did an interview with dave s a aka sully he's the founder of deep sentinel really interesting home security company dave is also really interesting himself he's a multiple time founder really cool guy not only do the guys discuss deep central but they also talk about some of the opportunities dave sees in the moment so we'll leave this interview here at the end as a little bonus as a little nugget hope you guys enjoy and as always leave us some feedback so we're gonna do a relatively quick save segment dave do you go by david or dave go by dave go by sally most of my my friends and coworkers call me sally sally alright that's a good one at sally s e sally i dig it okay so i invited you to come on because i have this thing called send deep sen i say right send deep cent sentinel yep sentinel well my friend noah you mispronounced his name you mispronounced his company is your friend's name really noah yeah i i people make fun me because i mispronounce a lot of stuff but i have been using this it's quite interesting and i wanna give a summary of what this is my friend gave me basically i had ring these ring cameras and ring is pretty good i mean it's fine it's cameras but my friend noah was like oh that's cool you can watch people steal your shit and i was like what do you mean he's like well that'd be what's the point like you gotta monitor all them and i was like yeah that's actually a great point he was here try to think called deep san so i tried to and basically what it is is it's a it's a a bunch of security cameras around my house and there's security guards watching it all the time and if something is triggered and they see someone at my door that looks as suspicious or even just someone at my door they say hey who are you do you know the person who lives here what are you what are you doing here whatever yada and i tested it online on my twitter handle and i like did the secret sign you could like put your hands above your head and do a sign and someone checks and goes hey is everything okay and it's just like pretty bad ads and so i invited you on because i wanted to learn a little bit about i did i describe the company accurately you you nailed it right like our our our motto really is in one of our one of our marketing gimmicks is that we make a a t shirt that says oh you have ring congratulations know now you can watch people steal your shit and and that's and that's literally kinda where where no i got that is that i i personally have i have a ton of cameras i've been a camera fan for a long time and my neighbor had a home invasion you and so you know the the neighborhood it's a pretty state area we'd we all freak out and we're like you know what what can we do we have the police come and i introduce myself i'm kinda of the head of the the neighborhood watch and blah blah so i i i asked the cop i say you know look my neighbor she has all these cameras she has an alarm system you know why did she still get a home invasion and the cop who who i'm now friends with by the way says like the rude possible thing which is which is straight on point he says well you're the tech guy what did you think the freaking cameras were gonna do and it was like this moment of just utter eye opening wtf was i thinking you're right like they're just cameras and they don't actually stop anything and so i i spent the next five years building a product that turns cameras into something they can stop crimes how many subscribers do you guys have we have about twenty five hundred customers across the country about half of them are businesses and half of them are are residential and how many security guards do you have and where are these security guards so you were we're we're border on like kind of the the secret sauce here but i'll tell you we have a ratio of about one guard for every about hundred properties right now and that's how we make it so that it's affordable because it it's a hundred dollars a month kind of our starting price point and if you think about like having a security guard at your app if you happen to you know have a bunch of friends who are billionaires for example they're spending thirty to a hundred thousand dollars a month for a security guard and our our entire point was like that's just not attainable to most people but security is really really important how do we make it affordable and so we use ai and like a bunch of technology in the middle to make it so that we can have one guard protecting lots of properties at once okay so you don't have to answer exactly but if i had to guess and i mean you just set it around twenty five ish security guards a couple dozen a few dozen some some number than that ballpark yep and how can this how what the question that i had when i was thinking about this business is two things the first is this whole idea of like someone real life actually doing manual work is like on the other side of a of a tech a tech product it's kind of interesting to me i remember do you guys remember when you were younger there was that service called hotshot and you could like text them a question and they would answer it totally like i think there was a real person on the of the other end who would just google to question you had because google wasn't on your phone at the time yep that's exactly what it was hotshot and that's kinda like what you're doing and so my question is this how do you scale that and do you just at the ton of guards and also what other services can i apply this to so that's exactly the way that we think about it kind of inside of our four virtual walls of the company so so number one the the number one thing that we do to scale is that if you think about the the old business of security right like a guy or a gal sitting at a chair watching the entrance to you know a corporate building that is inherently not scalable right you have no levers because you have a physical chair and what's neat about deep sentinel and and and the big kinda aha moment for me is that there's all this internet stuff that can sit between the cameras and the guards and when there's internet stuff that means you can instrument it that means you can you can start measuring things and then like what i did at amazon in my last couple companies you once you have data you can start optimizing it you can start looking at what are the real problems what are the things that aren't problems how do i how do we make the guards into super guards right like in fact at our office we have an iron ironman at the entrance because that's that's the way that we think about this is that our technology turns these you know regular awesome guards into super guards that can instead of having four guards protecting one property you have one guard protecting a hundred one guard protecting two hundred properties because all of the the the ai filters out of event it also sends them clips that it thinks are interesting that they should look at like hey here's a clip from thirty seconds ago maybe these things are tied together and so as you do more and more of that it's not like we're getting rid of the people but we're making each individual person more powerful right and more engaged in their work the last thing i'll toss out about this too is that one of the other things that a lot of people don't know about guards is let's take let's say take like the most badass special forces guy in the world right like i'm ripped i've been trained for for years and i'm gonna put you on night watch so you get to stay up between ten am and six am and you're in an area that's like that's dangerous it doesn't matter how bad as you are right the tendency to fall asleep when there's nothing happening for eight hours in a row is incredibly high one of the other neat things about what we do is because we spread this across all of our customers there's always something happening we don't have like a a lull time where where our guards are just not doing anything they're always engaged and so we're we're able to keep them awake engaged like you know stimulated in in a way that allows us to provide like what you just said you show that the the symbol on your cameras and bam within ten seconds there's a guard respond you can do that twenty four seven okay and so where are the other opportunity like the what what do you call this the this model i don't know what you it you like real real people doing stuff yeah so so the the kind of like way to still be called a tech company is you you make the human in the second part so you call human in the loop that it's a technology loop and there just happens to be a human for a tiny piece of the work versus a traditional services business where the the humans doing everything and so human in the loop it's being applied right now already in some other industries like cybersecurity uses it so if they detect like it what looks like an intrusion or like in the case of ricotta where they don't detect it until after it's done and and the hackers release it you know the the you know that that was a that was a jab at them but like you know the the idea being that the computers can detect things that are kind of anomalous but that the human really applies his or her intelligence to figure out the last little bit so it's also being applied like in in medical telehealth right so you have these experts and you use technology around them to make sure that you you take an expert who could only generally be regional historically but now a cancer expert because of video conferencing and and you know remote records and and things like that can actually have a lot lot more impact for us what we think about are how do we take this in a security context because we wanna stay in security and how do we expand that to a a a virtual greet at a multi tenant apartment building a sky rise in in new york for example how do we apply that to watching elderly folks at home who may need just a check in every fifteen minutes how do we apply it to hotels where you don't need to have a guard their twenty four seven but you need to check the lobby every fifteen minutes and how do we do that at a cost that's ten or a hundred times less than having a physical guard on location that's interesting how that how how big is that market up to checking in on wait how many doorman are there in new york you know you know it's it's it's a great question actually one of the most interesting things about this market is that it's it's pretty big right so the alarm side about twenty billion dollars and then the guard sides like twenty to thirty billion dollars but what what deep sentinel hits is like this really kinda weird theme where there hasn't been a solution at all ever and that price points between about a hundred bucks a month and ten thousand dollars a month there is nothing and and there's nothing there not because there's no demand it's supply side constraint and there's never been anybody that's been able to create a product that has a price point in that price band and so what we're finding is that there's just this huge vein of untapped demand right like a hotel like let let's use that example first my friend happens to own a a few hotels and he was telling me it costs him three thousand dollars a month thing to have this guard who's kinda s to be completely honest i don't know if that's an appropriate term on on your podcast but no i've never never heard that word and i the only jewish person on here okay so i'd so so i don't know another word for it but but he's sc so he's he's he's kinda sloppy he he you know he he's not really gonna scare anybody away and he should slap he's another place slips up to the place that's right that's right so he he shows up three times a night this is for three thousand dollars a month he shows up three times a night and just walks around the parking lot for about five minutes he gets a total of fifteen minutes of security over the course of ten hour and it's three thousand bucks whereas with with us we'd be able to provide that service for for maybe a thousand dollars a month and there'd be someone watching twenty four seven in case something happened it's just it's so massive what the disruption is when you create something where there's literally just been kind of a vac hole and so you know that's kind of a way of me avoiding the question answering the question but like it's it's tens of billions of dollars that's just untapped there's buildings that would love to have somebody greeting them in new york that don't have someone because there cost to be twenty thousand bucks a month but if it costs a thousand bucks a month damn they do it in a heartbeat so what does your security person do when they see somebody that is a potential intruder are they calling in the cops are they like yelling through the camera hey buddy back away you know i'm a i'm i'm a tough guy insight know what what are they doing to actually eliminate the threat yeah so so there's there's a bunch of different things that that we do and you know you mentioned two things on on kind of the ends of the spectrum right and it's a it's kind of like an escalation spectrum and so on one end right like hey i see a kid right that's the really most innocent thing and the kids kinda like poking at the door and so we have a juvenile protocol each of these things are in their own little protocol we train the guards on and that's part of what the technology does the technology helps them know the the potentially relevant protocols to engage here and the and and with the kid you say hey hey kiddo i i see you're there what do you belong here right and that's kind of the softest just touch right then there's an adult that that may be looking a little creepy and then we say hello this is deep sentinel security can i help you and that way if it does happen to be a friend or family we're not insulting them so sam's best friend from college that we've never seen before shows up and he decides the right thing to do is go right up to the door and start looking through the windows without knocking you know that's the the greeting he's gonna get he's gonna know somebody's there right but he's he's not going to necessarily feel insulted right off the bat if if somebody shows up and they've got a crow bar it's sirens on hey stop what you're doing and and the the we automatically escalate so either that guard or another guard is contacting police all of that's happening within about ten seconds and that's where the neat the the other neat thing starts is that because we have somebody watching our calls to police are very different than what they get from like if you have eighty t or like some some i'll use the word at some other s kind of home security system ad calls and they say hi this is this is becky from ad t i have a motion alarm in the living room and the police say well is it the homeowner is it a cat is it the wind is it the dog and she says no this is becky from ad i have no idea i'm just calling you because i thought i'd waste your time hangs up when we call i say hey i've got a white male six foot three he's got a crow bar and i have and he's trying to break into this building here's the address i've just given them a description of the suspect a description of the crime and the existence of weapons every single police department in the nation that's what their dispatch is designed to do and they just describe us at his own house practicing crow bar combat i great and and that's why two way odd by but like that's a that's a good joke but like that's why two way audio is really important because by the way homeowners do do crazy stuff and so as soon as we like a sled hammer that i used like exercise you've just described and maybe word it about and you we'll say hey like are are you there and you're say no no it's me sam here's my special code word and then we don't call the police because so when we call police it's a hundred percent verified our calls are hundred percent verified and most people don't know this when alarm company call the police and ask for dispatch it's ninety nine percent fault alarms in fact freak economics wrote a little piece about this and they're just like it's it it's horrendous it's a waste of police time right and so most police jurisdictions have actually passed laws where they don't have to respond at all to alarm calls it's that's i was gonna say in san francisco i feel like i can call the police and say hey this guy's gotta gun to my head and they'd be like well you know let's see if you could if you can resolve that with your hoa before we send somebody out there they're not gonna get his name and call us on monday that'd be great right yeah and and so how many crimes have you guys stopped we stop about fifteen to twenty crimes a day i mean that's that's crimes means like stealing packages it means everything right drum beats right like it's just it's stealing packages it's attempted break ins it's assault okay why don't you have a a tiktok channel that we every crime that stopped just footage of the crime we do it's it's the stops video channel send everyone to it okay i gotta get what what is it called it stopped and it's on youtube we're just starting tiktok we just found tiktok right like i'm old sorry so like i didn't i didn't really get tiktok my kids were on it and they were like look at me dancing and we did like the dances but i didn't really think about it is as like hey let's post these things on there people are loving it on tiktok because on youtube what has it stopped what it's the it's the stopped deep sentinel stopped video suit series and every single week we produce the the best five ten fifteen twenty it's amazing these have thousands of views great good for someone have close to a million i think yeah we have we have a couple that have a million series and and it's it's cool like it's it what's neat about it is it kinda taps into you know if you've ever been the victim of one of these crimes like you you want nothing more than to get back whether you're getting back at that individual person or just like getting back at the world because it makes you feel powerless and one of the neat things that you know we actually don't really public size that we do as a company is we we actually reach out to to people that have been the victims of of like really heinous crimes and you know a lot of times i i reach out personally and say like hey i i i'm not asking you to promote us i'm not asking you to do anything i just want you to know that we've created a product that actually can make you feel safe in your own skin safe in your own home again and i'd love to just give it to you for the next six months and and it's the neat thing like i actually this morning i happened to drive by there was a there was a home invasion in my hometown last year and i gave the system to these people that that live in pleasant inn and and i happened to be by their house this morning so i stopped in this morning and the husband answered the door and you know he's like a he's a like a big tough dude right and he he's not the person that you you would expect to say like i'm scared in my home but we all have like our our kids or our family or the moments where we're not home or or like we're asleep and it was really neat to hear him just you know eye to eye i say like this is this has really changed the way that we live and and after something that horrible our know it's it's really life changing so we only have a few minutes left in the segment but what i wanna ask you is where's the opportunities based on what you've discovered because i think like i've actually read i like reading about companies that got big twenty thirty forty years ago and there's a lot like the beginning of adp p or adp p what's what's the security company t adp adp payroll and a bunch of other like interesting security the same company but yeah go ahead a bunch of companies that like or just like like the guy who started you know wonderful brands know it'd be the palm the palm water or the palms strength and then make scott like he got a lot of his wealth i believe from a security guard company like security guard companies are just kind of interesting to me for some reason it's kind of weird in this space with this like human in the loop service in the security space where's interesting opportunities that i wouldn't know about because i'm not involved one of one of the ones that we see a lot of is construction recently and the what what's what's interesting about construction yards is you have like these massive amounts of assets with no security like literally no walls most of the time right like sometimes you have chain link fences and and and that's gonna generally in security like speaking outside of like deep sentinel in terms of human in the loop one of the other interesting things that that we're seeing is like just the movement of stuff seems pretty unsolved right like there are still companies that make a hundred million dollars a year and they have a a line of business called cash really in the age of v and in the age of paypal and in the age of apple money and facebook money and and every type of virtual currency in the world they're still people getting paid money to like put their lives in danger to go move pieces of paper around i mean it seems like so absurd i'm reading hate guide to the galaxy right now in the first chapter it says like humans are generally miserable because they spend all their time moving green paper around and green paper doesn't make them happy and and if made me think of like the this this business that like oh my god every every year people are like scared and die because they have to move the paper around how dumb is that right like there has to be something for i mean just i don't know vapor take a picture of it and vaporize it and then digitize it i don't know but that one seems like there's there's just a as nine amount of risk and opportunity there so construction is there one more what's another i mean like most of them are pretty obvious right like car lots oh my god actually carlo lots are interesting too because one of the things that that that people don't realize is that everyone thinks like oh my god carlo lots everyone's gonna come and steal a car but that's kind of a big crime actually the number one thing that we see is people going and breaking into cars at car lots because the there's just lots of cat analytic converters there's lots of stereo and there's lots of leather and so you know every once in a while there's somebody like stealing cars off the car but what we see a lot of is just these people going in and and and grabbing the doors actually wait i'll go with one more meth so meth meth is a a a horrible thing right but what meth has led to is like this really weird pattern of mail theft and i call it agricultural mail theft and so one of the things that that you'll see this a little bit on next extra like hey i saw this guy like going and and checking my door handles or checking my mailbox and then it goes on next door and everyone in the neighborhood for like fifteen miles says oh i saw that same gallagher guy too and meth has created this entire lifestyle where these people actually go in farm neighborhoods and they'll go in in a in a in a cyclical schedule go from this neighborhood tonight to this neighborhood next week in this neighborhood and they literally check every single door every single mailbox as it as again kind of tending it like they would be tending their plants in agriculture and and and it's just really it's a weird for they stealing they're they're just stealing mail or they're stealing stealing something to me yeah they're they're stealing wallets and and mail that's typically checked they're actually pretty careful when i say agriculture like they're actually careful so so when they put your mail back it's very infrequently you see them just throwing it on the ground because that that that like ruins their their agricultural area so it's actually really interesting when you see the video they're like they open your your door and then they're very careful when they put your mail back because the last thing they want is for somebody to find out and and frequently again if you look at next door what you'll find and this is why deep sentinel is needed everywhere is they'll go be like oh my god i went back for the last three months and this guy been coming every four days and i only happen to notice this one time because he took something too valuable to me and and it's just this really consistent theme across america that your doors are getting checked your mailbox is getting checked way more than you're aware of i've caught a bunch of people my camera being being weird i get an email where it says a guard being i've caught a few people i hate it yeah it's almost made me freak out more now that i know well i mean i i it the the good news is that you know you do have a layer of protection the bad news is you now know like for real like if if if you had a ring you're getting a hundred alerts a day and so you just didn't know because who's gonna comb through all a hundred of those alerts every single day just not the it's not worth well i appreciate you coming on this is super interesting i've been a fan of your product so it's nice to talk to the creator of it one of the creators of it this is pretty bad ass thank you guys yeah i mean you can like i'm super proud of it and i'm happy to talk about it any day if you put me on for five hours i'd keep going right like i love it it's it's the neat company i've ever had a chance to touch and i'm i'm so proud to be able to touch people right did you help build ring or did you do work on amazon i worked at amazon yeah so i i was there way before ring times how what did you start there two thousand two holy moly i bet we should have you one another time to ask stories about that too i i have lots of stories there's lots of people that have great stories of amazon amazon is such a neat company to have watched go from you know when i joined every single every single quarter the wall street journal would run a story when does amazon shutdown because it just isn't sustainable what number employee were you oh gosh you guys were in the thousands at that point like three thousand something like that you haven't sold too many shares congrats all them oh my god but good good wait good news is though i sold them in order to start red so and i held on to some red stocks so i did not know that dude you've been doing it wait red the real estate thing red the real estate thing i didn't know you started that so you've got all types of shit man i've tried to yeah it's been it's been really neat i've had i've been i've had a very blessed career but again like what's neat about this one is you know red really really cool it we invented interactive mapping but this business the number of times i get an email every single week that says you change my life that's there's you like tech companies get criticized for like oh you're just building toys and frivolous stuff do like it's like you're literally saving lives so so you got to do both you got to do fun you know tech with with all kinds of crazy shit involved and at the same time you're save a lot so i i like that i'm jealous with my friend james who invested in you guys early on i should have invested i remember seeing him post about it on facebook and i was this is a pretty good idea and what i didn't put i didn't think about at the time because i was like how are they gonna scale this up i thought oh they're gonna do labor arbitrage they're gonna get people the philippines to watch your stuff and you know it'll just be a lower hourly rate you know and price point will be you know sort of high unacceptable for most but what you're saying is smart which is one guard is gonna have a hundred houses under bottle most of them most of the time nothing is happening so you don't need eyeballs on the screen the ai is gonna basically say something's going on on house forty two forty two pops up human eyes decide is this good or bad next swipe to the next and so it's really it's actually more than human in the loop it's in my opinion like these should be called something else this should be called likes you know super services or something like that because it's taking a service that and it's scaling it like a superhero where it's like oh what if that security guard could not just watch one house but actually could watch hundred houses now you have a super service that can scale in the way that services typically can't and so i think that's even more i know for pitch decks you use youtube loop and i've seen that a bunch but i i think the you search i freaking love that dude i'm i'm gonna steal that from you if that's okay yeah that's great i i think this is awesome and now now i'm kicking myself because i'm like oh shit that this actually if i'd ask one question earlier this would have made sense to me and now it does so thanks for coming on and and explaining it to us hey thank you and and if you're still interested we're raising another round this year so hey you know let me know see the only problem is i'm a chief indian dude who's like oh the price back in the price then would have been i don't know what you raised your first round at maybe ten million or something like that twenty million i have no idea what it was but now i bet like have you you've raised an a right we're in the process of raising the a right now so guys okay actually i'm gonna email you i'm gonna invest in this anyways i will no at all i you gotta send it to be too look you guys have i'm not taking your spot we could both get in baby and we i mean you raised twenty four million dollars right or twenty three we we've ways we've raised a bit we have a we have a really unique investment vehicle that's open right now so you know if you're serious i they're they're opportunity because you know ad t and these guys what are the other security companies the big ones i i've looked into this before but they're all multi billion dollar sort of sleeping giant and incumbent types that for them to do something like this they either have to buy you or they have to like change their dna inside their bodies which is not gonna happen so maybe as a six billion dollar market cap and wait i'm so confused ad g has five billion in revenue and a six billion dollar market cap is that right if you look at their enterprise value that's the secret they have a six billion dollar market cap because they have ten billion dollars in debt so they actually have an enterprise value of fifteen billion dollars sixteen billion dollars okay so there's some by the way at the other way we could do this is if you happen to have ten billion dollars like a borrow i could do that too yeah this podcast doesn't pay that one yeah we we missed that one but dude send me the information i'm definitely interested if be if you wanted to talk about it or you're willing to have either of us that sounds awesome happy to do it it's funny how such small thing makes difference i saw the video sam posted and the operator the security guard who spoke back was like clearly not like you know my relative in india and i was like oh wait this is actually gonna feel totally different to have a human who's got your back who feels like a trusted american voice there with you right there with you and then like right right now my neighborhood our front gate we have like a door guy just sitting there all day couldn't stop anybody if you wanted to but you know just sort of useless you know there's there's all these little points of failure whether it's male it's the doorman it's your personal house it's my for example for e commerce our warehouse the you we spend a lot of money you know just guarding because they have millions of dollars of goods in their warehouse and and it's just so inefficient so capital inefficient the way they try to secure you know have security for those things nowadays because you have alarms which are just gonna be like kind of just a sound you know you're playing an m mp three to protect you or or you have a human you got you know a club spotify now by the way mp threes three is the old one so they try to clarify for you we're gonna stream we're gonna stream the security to you or you have a guard who's ninety nine point nine percent of the time i'm gonna do nothing yep and and so it just doesn't make sense right like i said finally you know a solution that that makes more sense and no i'm not paid to today it it just makes sense to me well i i i if i can i'll tell you one more story one of the things that that got me off my butt to do this was there was a story of this elephant that escaped a zoo and the video was the elephant again not not not a small animal right like an an elephant right my and the elephant did not escape the zoo by going around the guard the guard was sitting at the at the gate and and like you know the chairs tilted back the way that you expect the chair to be told that guard is totally asleep and a freak seeing elephant walks right by him and leaves the zoo and you're just like there has to be something better than this this is ridiculous has there ever been a conversation like in san francisco there's all these car break ins like ken city adopt this do you ever do you think a city realistically is gonna ever adopt this where you know the cameras are on the street post or you know on on on the lights and basically you can guard the whole street of cars that way or no you know we've we've talked to a couple of cities about it the thing that i don't like is i don't like the idea of big brother being part the government like i one of things i really like from kind of an ethical this is i'm a pretty principled guy i like to think is that by making this surveillance private and focused on private property and protecting property in service to that individual you don't have that like pan risk of turning into you know the evil eye and and you know we never a question who our customer our customer is the person that that pays us and owns this property and that's a it's a tried and true like deep principle of right you know american liberty that's fair enough i like that yeah the person who buys it is the one who's opting into their own the protection basically yeah yeah that's right it's my someone just rang my doorbell and i know that because my i just got a notification on my phone that deep send is talking to him it's where you're gonna be awesome by the way dude people we're gonna be like you didn't know they rang your doorbell because they rang your doorbell like oh i did know you guys i can't can't hear it but i know that i i can i can see on my phone i just got the notification i love it it it makes me feel so much safer right for for my i've got two little girls and i absolutely love it it's great i'm digging this some i mean i can see my wife and our courtyard this is awesome i'm a fan well thank you guys i i love i love getting the opportunity to be here thank you so much for bringing me on and you know and and and for being a a good customer thank you hold on good talking to man yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to all in like a days off the travel never looking back