#166 - Why a Sudoku Company Sold for $640m, "Opendoor for X" & Franchising Tech Companies

the very bottom it says this don't no this domain is not for sale please do not inquire about purchasing it all emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored sorry last updated july two thousand seven right so i email this guy i was like hey sol your what website like i think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this but i'm curious like why aren't you trying to sell this and he's like refuses to monetize it refuses to sell i think it's hilarious what what is this yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never look best let's talk about business first of all let me give you an update did you see someone in the facebook group launched a pickle ball newsletter because we told them to a few months ago because we told it's now it's now their full time job and they traveled the country getting their products in the stores and things like that so it started as a pickle ball newsletter right and then they partnered with the pro tour of pickle ball which i don't know i was a thing and then they started selling their own stuff out of a van they're own pickle ball equipment and now they're in retail stores what's tom shout thomas shield good job thomas thomas looks like a young kid he looks like a younger better looking version of me let's see what i can't yeah he looks he looks young he looks real young so congratulations thomas shield that's great i think the ceo or the founder of pickle ball either listens to the pod or you messaged once being like yeah i'm down to come on so we we can have them on if you ever want to we can do an episode about like kinda like alternative sports basically and do some research and have them on as well great and speaking of alternative sports do you wanna talk about chess yeah so i have a follow up there i don't know if you have one or or or just what i put there go ahead what what are you gonna say so we talked about the background is we talked about chess dot com last episode i tweeted about it because i was even more people love that tweet dude that tweet that ton is of engagement it was good and the the summary of this is that i actually we underestimated it so chess dot com gets around two hundred million monthly unique they have sixty million registered users they traffic has grown significantly if i had a guess they do at least a hundred million in recurring revenue subscription revenue potentially is worth a billion dollars super fascinating company we're gonna we were trying to hype it and we actually were under hiking even even though we were trying to hype it and by the way the guy who started like a x stanford guy the guy who owns it you know two how think stanford for guys which is cool like you know they didn't go the same track probably as ninety five percent of their classmates and they're gonna outperform ninety nine percent of them just by by doing something really simple that the world wanted so i started thinking about this because we talked about it you brought it up cool topic cool bit really cool business it really fits the what we call the new zealand type of business that andrew wilkinson kinda coined that that phrase which is it's this independent thing it has like a cult following it's profitable it's simple it's not nobody competes with it it's like new zealand and nobody's going to war with with chest dot com you know the biggest competitor i think it's called lie chest or something like that it's basically like an open source free you know like kind of like alternative and it's also doing extremely well and those are like the two but it seems like people kinda prefer chest dot com so i started thinking okay the next chest dot com what are the others is is there a whole slew of these guys i think that's where we didn't talk about last time that we should have and so i wanted to double click in a little so i started and and and and that would that's a really really hard question i've been thinking about it too i only came up with like domino's i looked into solitaire websites they a lot of them crushed but yeah that's a hard question to ask so i spent ten fifteen minutes on it but that was enough to tell me something very interesting so the first one they came to mind was because here's the characteristics that you need you need a game played by tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people that is not owned by a brand chess works checkers also works but the problem with checkers is it's so simple that it's not as like there's not as much depth to it therefore not as much of a like kind of like money being and passion around the the sport sid was the second one they came on so went to sid dot com and sid dot com it's little just like chest dot com it's like you you go to snow dot com and there's already like sid board waiting for you with clock going and it's like oh play here it is you don't need to download know what need to sign up you don't need to do anything just place the token i love that then they you scroll down a little bit and you see like this app advertisement for like a mobile app a mobile roku app so i click that i'm like bet this app i bet this is an amazing distribution for this app app crushing it so this company called easy brand behind it so the su app that they have has fifty million downloads the on just google play forget about iphone that's just google that's just android it's probably a hundred million total lifetime downloads the website itself gets you know ten to twenty million visitors a month so they're getting free i basically free traffic to their mobile apps where they're able to monetize an easy brain basically makes like they're like a mobile app developer that makes these apps they've had over seven hundred fifty million downloads lifetime of these little simple number game apps starting with sid they're like a remix of sid then like another number game if you like that one and they just cross promote them within each other i bet this company is crushing it they're based in your office that's like i have information on on on them i just found some interesting stuff when i googled them and went through the website there was something amazing about them that immediately stuck out and and and just as quick google it i'm wrong but it is based in cyprus anytime a company is based diapers it it's like it out it turns out these guys actually are from like the belarus they're actually from this area but they're based in cyprus so i'll i just googled it real quick so do you know that it was they were acquired three months ago no i did not know this so that's okay i have a piece i have their revenues i have their profit and i have the all their user numbers and i have can guess and yeah gonna be totally you're wrong but i'm i like to guess by the way little tip always guess before you hear any number that's how you get good at knowing numbers because you guess and then when you're wrong your brain remembers that shit and you're you start to hone that gun instinct okay so here's here's my guess i'm well how much were they what what's the revenue i'm gonna guess that their revenue was four hundred million dollars a year okay what's their profit ninety million dollars a year pretty good alright how much were they acquired for i'm gonna guess that they required for eight hundred fifty two million dollars okay and how many how many daily active users do they have across their fifteen games i'm gonna say they have twenty five million da okay so you i didn't do you didn't do horrible okay so easy brain was acquired last this most recent february they were acquired for six hundred and forty million dollars in stock and up to a hundred and twenty twenty five million dollars of additional consideration if they hit it so six forty yeah what is is that exactly eight fifty no what's six what six forty plus a hundred is seven forty plus twenty five is seven sixty five seven six seven you great job you guessed eight fifty great job you're almost there they their revenue is in two thousand twenty revenues were two hundred and ten million dollars okay so you were off there by half you guessed four hundred million but their profit was seventy million you guessed ninety right pretty good they've had seven hundred and fifty installs over the course of their the lifetime of all their all their things other their games they have fifteen live games with twelve million daily active users you guessed twenty five million okay not bad not bad what a company so okay so that was the first one i thought of and by the way i think that there's other versions of that like you know i don't know go look at like you know su online dot com i don't know what's that like you know way all the things people are gonna google search if you can get the top level domain for those that's really interesting so then i started looking at some others poker dot com so i went to poker dot com and poker dot com is like kinda like this crappy like just describe what you're looking at when you go to it let me look at this but you can't add this is an actual poker right this you're not betting it's not even a as you can't play there it's just like reviews here's a it's like an affiliate science it's like oh here's a place to play poker here's where you can because they get big kickback for basically sending a player to poker sars or wherever if they deposit and so it's horrible website crappy kinda like affiliate and reviews site dude you could do so much more with this website like if somebody was like dude i'm gonna i have a if you have a mobile poker app that's a good i would pay like un godly amounts of money for poker dot com i think that that's a and they also if you like do their traffic search see what they get it's nothing so they should be getting a lot more traffic having poker dot com okay so then there's some other ones cross word puzzle dot com cross word dot com the go to those like they don't even like cross doesn't dot com or something doesn't even like render it's like a there's like fun word asterisk restricts on the screen yeah like what's going on here because cross word is the other game that's like sid it's like chess that people played religiously and they love we talked about how how much the new york times makes off their mini cross word game i think the guess the number was ninety million dollars in subscription revenue from cross puzzles for the new york times so so i am surprised at cross puzzles cross puzzles dot com cross dot com i can't believe that these sites are not being like leveraged so i was very surprised to see this and yeah that look at that follow from this so you go to cross puzzle dot com it says please email suggestions to d dk w nine nine nine at yahoo dot com right so i i emailed the guy so so so so you see this the website is basically like a white page with a bunch of text and it's basically just literally bottom things the very bottom it says this don't no this domain is not for sale please do not inquire about purchasing it all emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored sorry last updated july two thousand seven right so you wrote this guy i was like hey saw your what website like i think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this but i'm curious like why aren't you trying to sell this and what's your you know what do you want this to be why do you believe like why do you believe that it should be done this way i you know i'm just super curious like what's your thought was so we'll see if he replies there another website that's like this and brad you see if you could find the name of this i i don't remember recall thumb head but sam you might know this there is a website that's like it's like a miss spelling of google dot com or gmail dot com i think it might be gmail dot com or something like that and it's the same thing it's an all white web page that's like yeah frank and susan you know we were married in nineteen seventy seven and like oh blah blah no if we're not gonna put ads on the site no we did not we own this before gmail came out it's like they basically just have this web page it's like and they have a power of how much traffic they get and they just show that they're getting like hundreds of thousands of hits a bay and i was like he's like refuses to monetize it refuses to sell it i think it's hilarious what what is this what brady do you find it i'm very trying to find it find it out of the pod otherwise i i have this in my like things to tweet about you know folding that's actually such a funny idea so like if if we just looked at the most visited website and find out what the typos are for each one and go and look at what those are so like right if you go to google dot com so g o gl e google owns it that redirects to most of the time they the company owns like they're plural and they're misspelled but sometimes they don't and then some those are hilarious oh my gosh i just i was looking at bing i change it to bang don't go that something else it's yeah tokyo there what else is there that's like a what what's like a like a youtube spell the right like you can do like facebook but you could do like i don't know like you you lose the a or something that i don't know see what see what that is god that's so interesting that that's actually an interesting thing facebook owns facebook with one o pretty interesting that's actually an interesting thing i'm gonna research that after this of but i'm gonna i don't know if you know the guy who owns bitcoin dot com so this is guy roger van der or whatever i don't know his name is but he's like kinda hated in the bitcoin community by like eighty percent of the people because he tried to create his own fork of bitcoin so they fork bitcoin i think it's bitcoin cash or bitcoin satoshi vision bs i forgot which one he's associated with i think bitcoin cash but basically he created you they fork bitcoin and they have their own but this guy owns bitcoin dot com and and so he's like a billionaire guy from bitcoin and like he refuses to give up bitcoin dot com but it's like it's like points to the other version of the not popular version of bitcoin you know it's like the this the fifth of jonas brother who's not in the band or whatever you know i'd it's basically like it's kind of a waste and but nobody can sue him because it's there's no company behind bitcoin and nobody owns the trademark that's a pain in the ass i hate that yeah i'm looking at it now let's talk about what which one you wanna go through we have a bunch on the agenda here okay does this interest you well first of all i wanna tell you about a company i just invested in and i want you to criticize it or tell me if it's awesome okay oh you actually read okay so i'm doing we just did a podcast a second ago and so i'm talk about angel investing i've been doing a little bit of angel investing now and my whole thing is i'm doing this thing call a syndicate i almost did a rolling fund like you but i didn't really want like a full time job so i was like i'll just do this so it's deal by deal or not a full time job but whatever it is for you right and my premise is this and you confirmed it a little bit by your reaction what i'm trying to do is find interesting deals that other angel investors who i think are smarter than me or other like firms who are smarter than me are also investing in but i try to find them where they're explained the company really poorly and i'm spending time with the founder listening to them and then i'm rewriting a memo about the company and i'm sending it to people to invest in and it's kind of working so i sent you one deck and that was really bad it was confusing and then i just rewrote it and you're like oh i wanna invest in this company maybe yeah and it worked and i was kinda gus i was like dude did they write this memo like who wrote this memo i was like this is the best investment memo i've ever you were like dude to shout out i did i just wrote some twenty minutes i was like no don't no trust me i read a lot of these things and i was like i it's all the memo was so good that i had to separate the writing which was really entertaining and persuasive and likable from the business because i like dude i wanna just like convince myself as a good business i wanted it to be a good business i you know like i love pictures where the founder can just barely explain what the hell they're doing but then i'm like oh that makes total sense and i'm like yes that's like you you get it you're not like a salesman so i'm not like gonna invest in this like hand wavy v shit it's like no it's real and it's working and you're explaining it in kind of this nonchalant way but it's actually super legit you just don't like get really excited and animated and you don't have great words to describe it yet and actually i can help you with that it sounds like you're thinking about the same thing i'm actually thing i'm gonna simplify my thing which is like just helping them with their landing page and their communication because almost every company invest in their landing page kinda sucks and landing page is really hard to make good but they need a lot of help and it's like something that not every other investor is offering to do for them and they actually are not that good at doing it and so anyways as i got off topic but your memo was really great i actually wanna like publish it in some way without like i don't know what you can do but like i feel like that should be public i wanna point to that this is great writing here's why you can go to you could if like go to angel hampton vc and you can invest if you wanna to or you could even just say you're gonna invest and then like look at it and then once it's done i'll you can publish it or i'll publish it but they this company it's lobby dot com l o b b i e dot com it's so funny because he actually did something really good basically and this kinda sounds like simple and negative but it's it's it's a cool company i've i've invested in it they it it's basically software that helps doctors schedule appointments or patients a schedule appointments with doctors in a in a in just a good way and it's kind of like an archaic space but he was like we're making the lobby digital and like and i that's so much better than creating than say we are creating software that's just a crm for doctor's office and i'm like they're like no we're making the lobby room the lobby digital we're gonna save people so much time and so basically the software what it does is that it you can you can schedule an appointment online and they'll alert you if the doctor's is running late and when you get in the parking lot you can tell so you just wait your car and they'll tell you when it come we yada i mean it's like the interesting thing about it is the guy has already started and sold the company in the space and it's at worst gonna be okay at best might be big right anyway i just thought it was so interesting how it was digitizing the lobby or the waiting room of health care and i just wanted to bring that up because i think it's so cool how they reposition that to make something that isn't that cool sound kinda neat right yeah you know that that's that's a skill that's like a super superpower in and of itself i don't have a ton of thoughts on the business itself so i don't have too much to add there but i agree with you basically the most interesting part of talking to what lobby was your memo was so damn good and i don't think we should show it to people so that they could see how do you how do you make a business seem really juicy to be a part of to invest in because i think you did a good job of that well that's what and that's what we're gonna do so what i'm doing it with joe and you and i will probably do a bunch together i hope we're all dustin and yours and you mine and the whole thing is i'm not trying to sell people i'm not trying to convince people to do it you either wanna do it or you don't like i'm not gonna try and convince you to do it because that's i that's kinda unethical but i just wanna paint the business in the most positive light or at least what i believe it to be accurate like an accurate it is cool and i wanna make sure you know it's cool and i think that this call copy anything for angel investing might end up being a a hit yeah i i think it'll be it'll be easy for you to to get people into around because people like you and the memos are good so i think i think those will be those will be good i have a company i wanted to tell you about that's a cool company that i think you're gonna have a good opinion on so have you seen what keith ru boys is doing as his new startup no so you know who he is yeah so he's the guy who he was like ex paypal then he was a coo of square he's kind of a known investor at founders fun and he started over known asshole like told you he's total asshole on twitter super hilarious to follow because he's a just absolute jerk to people you know his like number one tweet is just like wrong the period and he won't tell you why when are you back he's just tells you an idiot and then if you like try to argue you he's like this is why i'm i was more successful at the age of twenty seven than you are at forty and he's just like rips people like that and like who does that that's no nobody does that so i think that's just like really crazy and entertaining to me but anyways he's doing so he did open door and what open door is is now like a publicly listed company because it did us spa and open doors is a multi billion dollar company and basically it was like selling your house is a time consuming and stressful process what if like the day you wanna sell you could just sell your house right away give you a price you say yes or no and that's what opened door so they basically would just buy your house and then they had a lot of data to know how much to buy your house for and then they were the brokers they could keep the broker fee for themselves buying and selling and then they would sell it within like ninety days hopefully and they do this in a whole bunch of markets like arizona and stuff like that and so they've done very well you know kinda like on paper and like zillow now like does the same thing to try to compete with it them they kinda changed the way that the the business model of these big real estate companies worked we're now like the money to be made is in basically like auto buying your big auto buying your house and then resell it for you and using a bunch of technology to do that anyways his new company starting with with jake jack abraham is called open store and so you have open door and i you have open store i no they haven't released a bunch of details but i think i know what it is which is it is open door for buying businesses so it's the same idea for buying i think it's gonna be specialized in online businesses but maybe not we're basically you just say here's my business and then they say here's your offer we'll buy it off you and and so i don't know if this is gonna be specialized like commerce roll ups like a t i don't know if it's gonna be online and offline like where did we learn about this and what what can i go is there a website yet they announced it so i heard about it a few weeks ago like six weeks ago maybe and i was oh that's super interesting how did you hear about this so somebody told me about it because their friend interviewed at the company and so i was like the only way you can know about it because like when you interview they like kinda tell you the premise of the company and that guy i was like oh dude do you know cesar boys doing a new thing it's basically open door for bit my businesses and i was like oh that's sick that's a great idea because buying selling your business is also just like is even more than buying a home in terms of time consuming stressful uncertain on what price you're gonna get uncertain what price it even should be and and the marketplaces is to do that online like vibe is vibe biz sell or whatever that website is like dot com vibe is so they're so like old school you know like on how they do that and so so i think there's like room for improvement there so how that to be really interesting let me bring this up real quick which is it's so crazy how often internet marketers who often are accused of being s how and on many of them are i mean they're their accused of being that because they are but they're often ahead of the game so for example email marketing email newsletters are all the rage right now scam me guys like no i don't think this guy's actually scam me but david d used to sell dating books in the nineteen nineties by having these long emails i just stole and copy from him the other thing is paid memberships paid memberships have been a thing for decades now guys like greg your friend our friend is doing a paid community thing and greg's is like a cool guy and so it's like it's like cool to do it and there's so many more and this is another one buying and selling businesses online has been a thing that internet marketers so for example flip where you could buy affiliate websites that's been a thing for years and empire flipper is another one affiliates yeah empire builders and if you go empire flipper or empire builders i think those are actually two ups too things off yeah but they but if you go to those websites you're gonna a lot of people are gonna be immediately turned off you're gonna think that what the fuck i is this and fucking start up guys like us we just come in i guess that's what that we are we just come in and we take this up that these guys have been doing for years just say put some lipstick on it yeah one two point o make get a flat beautiful color it's so funny because like cool this sounds neat but this isn't unique right yeah i i think you know there's no unique ideas really there's you know remix of ideas there's old ideas that you make new there's new platform there's but but i think it's cool and i think it could be big it's one i'm gonna keep my eye on then i saw another business like this so i started to put together a little bit of a pattern here and i said oh what is open door for x so what other parts of life and and and and the world could use instant liquidity because that's what this is it's basically taking something that was kind of ill liquid like your house and it takes a lot of time to get liquid where you actually sell the thing and takes a lot of you know you gotta like you gotta move out you gotta stage it you gotta rep paint it you gotta get a broker you gotta list it you gotta do tours no instant liquidity we buy your house today don't do any of that shit same thing with your buying your business what else needs that and then i saw another one and this business is called i gonna grab the name but it's basically doing this for used electronics it's called back flip just got funded and back flip is basically saying we'll instantly buy any of your used electronics and because that's a lot of new thing either and and i think it's awesome and so it's not that it's new it's basically that there is a big swing being taken by people who are gonna try to do this at scale using like the modern kinda internet marketing and model models to do it and so like you know like we buy gold or whatever what let's those build gift cards you know like gift cards yeah exactly like and there's like a gift card there's actually a gift card sort of crush that that basically took the old bottle and just doesn't do cap what's it called raise i think yeah i'm at i'm on their website right now i'm looking at rays dot com holy shit i can look at the traffic and just tell you these guys are printing money yeah raise is gonna be like an a a billion dollar plus win and nobody even like hears about this company nobody talks about this company but you know super simple business of like you know gift card the gift card business re resale gift card cards essentially and so anyways i'm interested in this open door for x which is basically instant liquidity for things that were pretty interesting alright let's play off that so houses okay there's equities then which i think is badass so equities then let's see what in kinda looks more like flip up than it does like open door meaning like it's kinda hard to get in it's kind of ob twos you gotta like sign up to see shit not everything's is bare it's like a ten step process to do an investment it's like equity end is not like it's not robinhood on my phone where i could just like do my thing and so like secondary shares yeah it's like a shitty name like i don't know like it's just battle around and forge global or was the other one it's like also bad don't know i feel like somebody should can do this better carter is trying to carter is trying to do this better right now which is like secondary shares of of private companies yeah i'm not a fan of card up but i could see them doing well but i'm not a i'm not a fan of carta so i don't know if i want them to be the best of this angel also trying to do it you know there's a bunch of people trying to do this second trying to do open door trying to do what they're trying to do is a little bit different they're just still trying to do the marketplace what open door did was different it wasn't like open door wasn't it just another housing marketplace it was i will buy the thing off you right now because i know what i can sell it for and i'll i'll i'm comfortable with this five percent spread that i will i will keep so you give up five percent of your upside but you get the certainty of it being done now and and i'm comfortable in that five percent spread so somebody would need to do this for secondary shares where they just go you wanna sell your your your company stock done and then i will figure out how to re flip this thing on the other side with my own spread so there's a few people that have done this with furniture and furniture is really hard because furniture doesn't ship well yep but there is if you i don't i don't know if you know i mean i i like buying use furniture because you can get like ten thousand dollar couches for like three grand and let's oftentimes they're really nice use furniture is not really a thing on the internet or at least it's not hugely popular but you could i think there is still an interesting way you can do this with used furniture right so i think what cards is one so i know a lot of people that have sports cards they collected it as a kid it's in their attic somewhere it's in a box they kinda heard of cards that worth something but they don't like they don't know what they have they don't know what it's worth they don't have them graded they didn't send them into psa and pay the money to get them graded so i think if somebody basically did the shoe box model where you basically say put it all in a shoe box and mail it to us and we will pay you for it we're we'll do all the work of figuring out what it's worth and then we'll pay you you know seventy cents on the dollar for for what it's worth and like today you're getting nothing for it and like that that's the and if if you don't like our offer will send it back and i think that somebody do that they could just hoover up all the long tail of like trading cards that are out there that people are not doing anything with that they want to monetize that's interesting okay so we've we've we've furniture is not that trading cards is pretty interesting because it's a lot easier cars everyone a lot of people do cars caravan van does cars and i think that that is so sick they're a multi five billion dollar post the same model they use where they'll instantly buy your car off you yeah like they'll buy in a matter of minutes which if you told me this like years ago i'd be like no way that that can't be done but they made five point six billion dollars last year in sales so it works okay so it's working oh for cars is working yeah yeah totally works what else is interesting what's a huge thing like what's what are some of the bigger assets that you possibly have in your life that you wanna wow caravan market cap is forty five billion dollars holy shit yeah it's working yeah what else is there i don't know there's gonna be some obscure shit like oh like life insurance policy payouts or something like you know like something like that that i'm like i i don't even know that space but that makes sense it takes you know it's something that you get or like social security like i know like my parents are getting to the age where they can collect social security like would they take a lump sum of all their social security now and you know at at seventy cents or seventy two cents on the dollar and then you know this company just collects the the payments over time like probably i don't know like there's a lot of people who would make that trade dude did you know this so there's this a company i have to go and look at what it is but you guys can probably google it actually but i think some banks do it like goldman will do it but if you have a winning lottery ticket they'll buy it off you right and they'll give you the money up upfront and it's structured in such a way where they're they're still able to make their profit but they'll buy lottery tickets from you like we're talking like ten million dollar lottery tickets or for seven figure i it's kind of interesting people buy winning lottery tickets off of people that's actually kind of an interesting one i would actually need to do some research how many people do how much money do you think is one in the lottery per year oh dude i have no idea i mean i feel like the weekly lottery the power ball every week is like you know between fifteen fifteen and like two hundred million dollars so it's like that's that's like on a weekly basis that now it doesn't get one every week that's how it accrue and that's how it gets bigger but like you know i don't know you have the number in front me here i feel like it's gonna i don't know no i i no i i can't find it there there's sixteen hundred lotte created each year so there's at least sixteen hundred unique winners no i don't i don't have the numbers but lottery tickets is might actually be kind of interesting because you said the life insurance i'm like do you wait to get paid for that you would take a discounted upfront payment lotte is is kind as actually kind of interesting and i do know that some banks actually do that right you know how does that is white bulge you remember white bulge i've never even heard that those words in my life do you do you you know the movie that departed yes you know jack nicholas character okay yes it's model after hawaii bulge he was a gangster in boston he was an italian or irish mafia guy he mobs guy he ended up going to jail recently they found him and they he got beat the death in jail so it was like a crazy ending to the story of him he he was america's most wanted man for like twenty years and anyway he as part of his store he won the lottery three times and the way that he did it is people who had won the lottery the in the neighborhood they would have to go to him and he would buy it from you and he would go and cash the ticket and so this is like a famous like the numbers game they call it that's it's like a famous mafia thing wow okay i had no idea yes i don't know may maybe if people have good ideas on what what part of life could use instantly liquidity i'm curious to see to see what that that would be okay so a couple other things i wanted to to bring up one is a pain point or kind of a business opportunity maybe this exists if it exists tell me because i wanna use this service so in e commerce most commerce brands are just local in their own geographies and most are let's say most us commerce brands basically just sell in the us it takes time and then you start selling in canada and then you start selling in europe and then you you know but it takes a long time and the reason it takes a long time is because of the like international logistics so for example you wanna ship something to canada they have to pay like pretty heavy duty like a import duty on the product so you sell like a fifty dollar product they're gonna have to pay like twenty dollars of import taxes in addition to the shipping so it just becomes like irresponsible to buy and still some customers do because they can only get the product from the us based company but it really sucks and then the company has like fill out this form that says that these goods are worth fourteen dollars and then you submit that at the thing and then it's just annoying right and so i think there should be a company so there's these brands trying to do these e commerce roll ups i think you should do it differently i think some enterprise entrepreneur can basically say look i will boot up your canadian operation today i'll boot up your uk operation your france operation you i'll do europe i'll do uk i'll do australia whatever right so basically say i'll import your brand today you do no work so all you have to do is you need to ship me this product to this warehouse so here's the address ship me your products i need like you know whatever your normal inventory is ship ten percent to me and let's see how i do and basically you get one giant warehouse where your warehouse warehousing for all the brands that you're gonna work with and you just say look in exchange for doing this you pay me no money i will start generating sales for you but i want a royalty i want a royalty of ten cents or fifteen cents for every dollar what's point what like how is this how is this interesting or new because i don't know of a brand that that does the that exist so you know my wife has an e commerce brand we sell in the us i would love to be making more money by selling in europe but the time of the operational overhead to go to europe right now is just crazy so why aren't there more people that are reaching out to e commerce store owners and basically saying i will run your international operation and make it a low risk no risk proposition for them in order to do so and i think there's a lot of money to be made given the number of e commerce brands in the us and how you could if you're in brazil or you're in australia or you're in canada or wherever i think you could become the leading trusted like kind of like we're we are your canada go to canada go to market plan for canada and we just do all the work for you this is actually quite common in media so there's business insider india there's business insider australia there's business insider germany i believe and then i think i believe the wall journal does the same thing for those same countries but the the it's it there is buzzfeed france hu france half australia it's actually pretty common in media and those so so is it run out of the us or they hire a team there or it's a local team there that just licenses the brand basically when they report the revenue it's under licensing and so i don't exactly know what that means though because i was trying i was thinking about us and i was like man we have a lot of people who are english as a second language folks in germany so like i got germany i guess is one of the most populous i don't i don't i don't know the numbers i guess it's one of the most populous places in europe it's a very business focused so you know the germans like us same with australia australians loved us and i was like yeah let's go do it but what the fuck do i do do i just fly over there and just start recruiting like it's it's crazy i would love to partner with the word and then another thing is in particular china and japan and there's actually a whole word for this there's a word i can't remember what the word is but there's a word that describes why it's difficult to break into japan and the reason is is that the once it's hard to break into an island in particular japan and i would love to have paid someone to be like hey can you be my japanese yeah config like my my cap on the ground i'm that's those are all mob terms because i'm i'm into the mafia now can you be my my guy on the street of japan and let me know is this good am i getting the right people i think that's incredibly interesting yeah exactly so i'm i'm i'm not saying that this doesn't exist i'm saying there's still a lot of room there because i know a lot of people i have a lot of friends who are doing commerce right we we host club lt tv there's you know seventy five to a hundred ecommerce brands each doing over a million dollars a year in there and every single one of them i think has the same problem which is that we're all us focused and why are we us focused because it would be too much lift too much on a lift to go figure out how to do australia it's too small of a pie to like stu demand power on or sprint brain power on but if somebody in australia was like hey this what we do this our model we help use get sales here and we just take our cut and and so i just think that like there needs there's there's more opportunity for this and that's cool that media it sounds like there's also an opportunity to do it media too or it's being done in some way by the big players it's being done in some way but like i remember when buzzfeed like we're going through some troubles they had to lay off like their whole french office and i was like buzzfeed feed has a french office what the fuck well that's the opposite right that's we have a french office and then you have to do things like that when it's like not working out i'm saying no investment no consulting fees you just take a royalty on sales and these are all incremental sales that i wasn't getting otherwise and you take care of the whole operational headache in this case for e commerce about like i just ship your goods to your warehouse you ship it to local customers customers don't have to over pay customers don't have to do import duties for every order they make and so i just think that there's a opportunity in e commerce to like be the the go to brand for every d brand to partner with in each of these local what country would you go to next i think europe is probably the best because you want what the you know the next wealthiest high populous place but really it can work anywhere it's just like the biggest market is doing it you know throughout europe now europe is made up of so many countries maybe that's a pain in the ass if not like canada the no brainer australia next japan is a good one those would be the ones india maybe like for example i know a bunch of people in india who did this so my dad introducing these guys and i was like oh wow why is these guys their house humongous happened you know what do they do and i was like oh yeah they they partnered with jo underwear and they just became the jo like seller here they have exclusive rice to sell jo in india next guy at the dinner table what do you do oh we're the domino's guys in india what yeah were exclusive franchise of domino's for india okay what does that mean well we have like india didn't really eat pizza before this or we're like teaching people to eat pizza they fucking love it turns out and so we have like you know nine thousand domino's throughout india now like oh my god what's is going on here so like you know local franchise but for e for what's this call what's the term out what's the term for this i don't know you know maybe i should've gone into business school i think it's probably just called like in brick and mortar i think it's just called franchising franchising was the way to spread geographically you know when your brick and mortar can only scale so fast that's how you would it you would franchise out and then the franchise would pay a royalty back to the back to the master franchise of the brand of their sales and they they're the local operator but with e commerce or with digital media it's a little bit different but it kinda has the same problem so i don't if there's a new word for it man i think this is wildly fascinating this is a i didn't think it was that interesting at first but now i know what you're talking about where i've heard so many stories same thing but not maybe not of india but i am the official importer of x y and z yeah we're the distributor of x or like for you just think about for your business right like what could you have sold for more if you had like two hundred fifty thousand you know or like five hundred thousand subscribers in japan and like i think there's a world where i would've have been where i could have made more money in those markets than i did in america because even though america has more people i don't think the french or i don't think that the germans i don't think facebook kicks as much ass over there as it does here with instagram and everything and i so i think the ad markets because i i do think that europe sorry europeans if you're listening i do think that you guys are five or ten years behind when it comes to some technology stuff and the ad market suck because of facebook and google so like if you could still capture a little bit of that revenue i think you could well i i don't know if any of that that's true but i what i do know is that it's true trust me as assuming well i i think like everybody uses facebook everywhere that that's the part i'm saying i don't know well sorry but what i mean is like old media still does quite well abroad okay that that's fair that's fair the thing i'm just saying is like if while you were building your us business and all your employees are focused on your us business if somebody said i love your product i'd love to license the brand from you or or i'd love to be your partner and in the uk or in japan or in australia and i will build i will use the same playbook it'll be under your company i just want my cut for building this for you because i'm i offer you would have done in a hard right and so i have that you didn't means there was an opportunity for some entrepreneur that should have been reaching out to you saying this is a no lose proposition you still own it you still make money off of it it's still your name brand i just get to go i get to basically take your brand take your take your product and localize it or distribute it here where i'm from and i know the market yeah and my products way easier than yours it was right because it's pixels it's not anything real and i would have loved to i've done that and i used to have people emailing me all the time and then we had a bunch of people in russia some people in mexico who would just verbatim copy our shit and i would say i would have to i'd find it and i'd be like you guys stop this dude so you're not a allowed to do this and then i'd have other people who email me but can i can't you stop anyone from doing that i feel like you can't do shit if somebody takes your newsletter and they just word for word transcribe it and russia it and they're like we're called whatever how hustle are you no there's nothing you could do the only thing that i was able to do the only thing i was able to do we had someone do this in italian we had someone do in russian and we had someone do it in mexico yeah mexico and i basically shane them i said like i'm just gonna i'm not just gonna call you out and so i would tweet at them or i would email them i i would just would make it well known and my network was large enough that someone of someone knew them and they were embarrassed knock off and they yeah and they stopped doing it but no i can't do should can i have yeah and i had people email me all the time saying hey can i do this for spain and i would say yeah but i don't really know anything about you i don't know if you've got a taste i don't like i don't i know nothing about you and i would just throw it off to the side and just kinda forget about it i i wish i would have surprised this doesn't happen i'm surprised there's not just like free media dot com based in cyprus that basically takes all the content from behind the payroll of wall street journal and just says cool if you ever hit a pay wall come here look like input the input the url you're trying to go to here's the article for free i'm surprised somebody hasn't just tried to do that like it's totally boot lag entirety right but like it it is so hard to enforce that stuff i can't believe you've that somebody internationally isn't doing that that seems like the way to do it do you know what outline dot com is i know about it and i know i don't know what i could say publicly about it but yeah i know explain it i don't have any insider information so maybe you do i i don't i explain someone so outline dot com it's the tagline line is read and annotate without distractions frankly i have no idea what that means but the way that i use it and the way that everyone else uses it is when you come across a pay website you put the url into outline dot com and you can see the whole article it's just it doesn't work for everything i don't think it works for new york times but you can get you can get getting bunch a bunch of sites they they kinda stopped working on but initially it works on everything and the person behind this is somebody we know that's like well known kind of tech person that works at one of the big companies and was like they had to like distance themselves it was getting like millions of hits like people were using this thing and they had to distance themselves from it because they're were like yeah like i i was kinda told i to knock it off because like i i didn't make it for that purpose it just it works that way but yeah is it a brazilian no sight oh my god oh okay i yeah yeah i see yeah i know who you're talking about how interesting dot com what the heck it's that big i just googled the or i just looked on similar way about how big it was outline dot com crazy fascinating yeah so so i think that one's cool alright i'll bring you how did we do on the hold on yeah just a quick question but does outline dot com make money i don't think so i don't know i have no idea wow this person is so interesting alright that's it that's the episode by the way for the people listening we actually just did like a q and a before this it was sean i think it was too much talking we gotta do the q and a on the second half because i'm fucking exhausted right now but like feel like the so what from my body right no i'm i'm tired from listening now like going i'm so dead i can't if we're gonna do two hours again we have to do the i try to be lifting in the front i tried to keep the energy high but like in my brain and i also haven't eaten anything today so i'm just like dying on all fronts right now i'm hurting i'm hurting yeah no human is gonna be a separate episode dude so we're are we're getting two episodes out of this yeah we gotta i can't do it next time here we go i thought we would be able to but this is painful maybe this is hard and stay the way for another one tomorrow yeah i can do another one tomorrow i can do i can do one a day easy i think i think i can't yeah we'll have to try something else if we wanna get continue the q a's i like that them i thought the q and a was almost better than the actual episode maybe because he guys retired but the q and a came out a lot better than i thought yeah i think people are gonna like both of those yeah no the whole thing is good so good job guys yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back