#17 - Keto Ceral, Specialized Job Boards, Digital AA Meetings

really yeah okay very do that we are here it is i don't know what the name we're gonna choose for this but right now it's called million dollar brainstorm something i had people tweet at me yeah what do you using that name that name okay good i think the expectations are a little high i want these to be ideas that may or may not be million dollar ideas but we're back we got good feedback last week so we said let's do it again the idea with this is every friday morning me and sam get together and instead of getting breakfast we sort of shoot the shit on different ideas different trends different businesses that are cooking in your brain and so you and i have access to a lot of people that quote normal people don't have access to just because we and so let's just use the stories that we're hearing and and we can kinda put two and two together and tell everyone else who doesn't have the same access yeah before this one was asking for permission from a bunch of people was like hey can i talk about that idea said or this week i'm not gonna do those but by next week hopefully i have but we have friends who run or own multi billion dollar companies or companies that have sold for no big deal yeah like these like huge we they're either friends or acquaintances enough that we like i be like i heard this guys driving this those guys that i call friends and they like half remember my name yeah well but we definitely have insider information that we can kind of okay so what is this box you just put yeah i just gonna box sean's stuff it's my sperm so last week last week we talked about sperm banks it's all clean okay so you can open that box up it's clean i everything's everything's good it's called daddy is this real yeah so take that white bit off okay and then you can open the box oh man this is a total unboxing is great okay open the okay now don't touch that thing okay i i took the final boss yeah so i went and tried it it's not gonna be a hundred dollars a year a hundred dollars a year called this service called daddy d d i s e yeah and this looks good this looks like apple product here looks like a pair of headphones or something yeah and so inside is your sperm and you're gonna freeze this for how long i don't know yet i just we talked about it last week and i think it's a really good idea so i'm gonna try okay so we'll see i don't know it'll be two weeks what did you see in did you see a bunch of other people were they all people of different ages like did you notice anything else while you were there or oh no they mailed the year they just mailed it to me oh okay even better yeah and i actually talked to loads of men who are at my age even younger and a lot of them are doing it so i think that this whole sperm bank thing is actually way bigger than i actually anticipated i'm gonna pay a hundred dollars a year for it i've went into it thinking to pay for twenty years right okay wow alright awesome okay so that's one that's a that's a follow from last week really yeah and i have one more follow from last week so great we talked about looking at competitors so there's this woman on twitter her name is jane wong but her handle is wong m jane so w o n g m j a n e all she does is she reversed engineers apps yes she's like facebook script midnight right she always finds the new facebook features before facebook rolls them out yeah it's she's great so that's a good follow my friend patrick texted me and showed me that and then another great tweet that i found there was a a study i found it answer patrick and and this guy named cameron tweeted it out so they did this study i think tens of thousands of men most men above age fifty claimed they felt masculine most men below age thirty five said they do not feel masculine and we were talking about t stuff and i i was i think this subsidy to get more popular yeah i think that's one data point that shows that it might be bigger that we had said yeah you know not all the ideas that we say on this are like great ideas that's like you know it's a brainstorm but unless the sperm bank for me the t one i'm like oh my god that is a great idea there's another name that i wanna find so i'm gonna try to have google while i'm doing this there's somebody on twitter who is you were talking about competitors there's a woman on twitter who talks a lot about e commerce stuff and there's a lot of accounts on twitter that are sort of like i make six figures doing doing drop shipping you should give me a she's kinda like that like she sells guides but she puts that a lot of free content on her twitter that she tries to sell more of in the on the guide and her free content is actually pretty good so she was talking about like how do you find who supplies the brands that you buy what you was showing was you know they can all get manufactured that's outside the us usually so they have to come in through customs so you actually go to these two customs regis registry you search the company's brand name and you can see who they're res receiving shipments from you go look those companies up and what do you know these tend to be manufacturers of that product i would love and so you can go work back because you could find those exact suppliers and it's pretty clever so and a lot of times i've noticed you can do that when you so i'll like wanna know who suppliers and i'll buy the product and if you look inside the box right you red the label fine if you look in the box like in the cardboard box a lot of times or you can reverse search the sender mailing address and anyway there's a bunch of really cool things that you could do we should actually talk about okay another time yeah cool alright what else you got we got because we gotta go quick today we only got twenty minutes left okay so some new ideas here do you wanna talk about that yes okay oh first of all we have a ton of people sign up for trends after this and i got trouble for giving out a code when i shouldn't have okay so if you use that code you better hurry up to use it out otherwise it's gonna go did it go away and if you wanna sign up we put a special offer at trends dot c slash million okay and so we'll be in there or i'll be in there i think you are too and we'll we'll be talking but that's like a a special discount code for people otherwise use the other one but i'll get in trouble that we said last time okay so two things happened over the last week that we had written about trends the first thing or like a follow ups the first thing rig up yes okay so i have had this hypothesis for a few months now that i think hyper focused job boards there's a huge opportunity the reason why is in two thousand and eleven or nine or fred wilson wrote post saying that indeed dot com was one of the best companies he ever invested i think he said it was the best indeed yeah okay indeed and he was explaining the mechanics behind job boards and it was pretty amazing and so and what's the mechanics it's just here's a bunch of job a job a lot of people don't wanna actually understand how a job hosting works but basically there's like two or three models behind it but they're all great the first one is so as the job board you have to attract traffic yes so you need people who are looking for that job to come to your website okay to make money what you have to do is you do a couple things the first thing which is what indeed does i think they mostly do this is an employer will sign up and for every click or email that they get from a high intent job seeker they'll pay indeed a certain amount of money right for every lead basis for every lead it's a lead gen site and a lot of people don't even know how that works like lead site but that's basically how it works so as a business owner i own a business i'm more than happy to pay money to get people to my careers page or to send me their email of highly interested people and then if they send me fifty people i can pay them fifty dollars in email and then i can go and try and close a handful of right the second way it works is and i think this is how it works in is they pay a subscription the company itself pays a membership basically yeah so you pay five hundred dollars a month to have your job posting on there and they promise a minimum number of email sends to an email list right okay so job boards are good been around forever but rig up it seems like is a like it's a job board just for one niche i believe it's in the oil and gas and oil gas industry and here's why that's interesting i think that the formula for finding a job board that would work you gotta do an equation this is how you'd rank what's interesting which is how many openings there are available in the field okay so how many openings there are in a field multiplied by the salary of that job multiplied by the amount of friction it takes to get that job okay so for example self driving car engineers right they might make on average five hundred thousand dollars a year but that's probably on the high end but let's just say that that's true okay so if they make five hundred thousand dollars a year what's the supply of those folks how many of those people are there in the world probably not a lot right person hiring a self driving car engineer would probably be willing to pay a hundred or two hundred dollars just to get an introduction to someone who is open yeah much more than that much more than right thousands thousands of dollars a company who's google when they hire a self driving car and you know the base recruiter fee is like thirty grand if they place the person and i think for right niche jobs like this it can go upwards to fifty hundred so maybe they would pay thousand dollars a lead yeah so if you can create the the idea here now is if you can build this audience of high intent self driving car job seekers if you can build that audience you can earn for this argument and it might be true a thousand dollars per applicant that you sent and they're not they don't have to land the job they just have to show that they're interested in the job right and so you have to do this math to figure out what's interesting one thing that's incredibly interesting and i said this was a few months ago was the oil field industry the reason why that's an interesting is you can have minimal education i don't think you need a bachelor's degree there's a whole bunch of those jobs available and the salary is like a hundred grand that's amazing right so high amount of supply huge demand pretty good salary and so rig up came along and they created us a whole bunch of tools to attract these job seekers and now they're charging the companies on the back end and they just raised maybe three or four like hundreds of millions of dollars from injuries h at like a multi billion dollar evaluation yeah shout out jeff lewis the original investor in rig up is one of the best unknown investors are under underrated out there we're not really buddies he wrote a term sheet to us he was the first guy you know we did a it was christmas eve or something like that which everyone says investors you know they go away for christmas yeah they do but if they're interested they'll hunt you down i was in argentina you know we did a skype call and twenty four hours later he put a term sheet down like this guy moved quick he was at founders fund at the time now he's got his own fund we didn't end up taking because we had a cheaper source of capital but i remember being very impressed with him and he's built a badass ass portfolio he's got wish lift ti ray which is like this company in canada that's was a weed company that went public already unless i make something yeah lambda school rig up like this guy got a like killer portfolio anyways so good rig good also incredible health which was oman was on the podcast a vertical that's a niche job board like you're talking about where nurses is her field where that's another great one hey nurses is a great one huge demand and so a lot well but the thing is that a lot of people will see these companies and they won't actually understand what they're doing they're like rig up or incredible health they're just offering all this free stuff how the heck do they make money right it's on the jobs right like that is on the job so let's talk about other jobs that are interesting okay airline pilots i was doing research i think there's a nice sized shortage of airline pilots they're gonna exist for a long time there's not that many of them but and i don't think there's a significant amount of people studying them as well as the job boards that i looked at seem pretty antiquated right and this is like one of those things like a dating site where if you built the tool the platform you could actually like white label it you could just rinse and repeat it with other verticals let's say you did it with pilots you probably don't need too much different functionality to try this again with whatever consultants or whatever the next vertical you wanna try so either oh yeah so you could just you could just clone your product the technology you build and that's exactly you go to community you can go to tiny boards so tiny boards dot c it's my friend andrew he has done this for designers he's done it for like four or five different verticals i don't remember all the verticals i think ai engineers and he says it's doing wonderful excellent it's doing great okay okay so pilots are interesting construction workers i think are thing because the average payout i imagine for construction workers is at least twenty five dollars an hour you need a lot of construction workers to get a project done i imagine rig up but actually go down that route yes and then finally something that i've actually tested is truck drivers what do you mean you've tested you actually i tried this i built the website and i drove paid traffic to it and then i spoke with someone to buy the leads and i've actually researched it so there's a handful of companies out there that do a hundred million dollars in revenue and their main business is lead gen for trucking company these and well how did your experiment go like made money so i do all these experiments all the time i rarely do i actually like follow through like make them big right because i already have a job and i'm happy but i like to do these things for fun and sometimes maybe we'll hire some people to run them but anyway so i went and contacted people who could buy the leads and i okay how much would you buy leads for they said we'd buy this type of lead for ten dollars this type of lead for a hundred dollars so i got a range of ten to a hundred dollars for truck drivers to have commercial licenses mh if you read about there there's a huge truck shortage right now truck driver shortage there's a reason the reason why there's a truck driver shortages they're not making a ton of money and it's a really hard job and young people aren't doing it and so that definitely puts a kin in that idea but if you think about what america does one of our biggest things is logistics we have a huge country and as commerce goes up that's gonna just grow with it right and my father owns a company that works with truckers i have a lot of insight to this so trucking is incredibly be interesting me okay so alright so we're gonna put a pin in this one specialty job boards interesting idea number one give me another idea can we talk pay wall software last time no okay i'll reveal some stuff okay so at the hustle i think we're paying three grade a month for a pay wall software it is awful what does this do okay how does this work so there's subs stack out there subs stack is cool they just raise money they are a pay wall software for newsletters you can really easily collect money and send people exclusive newsletters for a monthly fee right great i talked to the founder i hey are you gonna open this up to web based stuff because that's what i need he said no and so the idea here is if you go back go to the new york times and you'll see how some stuffs pay wall than some isn't they built that software scratch i think they built it from scratch probably because they were using the provider that we're using now and they realized how horrible it was i went and spoke to a business of fashion you know business of fashion no it's a great website they just raised money from financial times dot com they had built their own wall street journal built their own the economist built their own like so many people are building their own tech crunch i've heard is spending north of six figures in software fees in order to use this vendor that we're using as well wow it's a pain in the butt and so so it's asking for a challenger oh my god it's so like i i will give someone right now five thousand dollars a month to if they made it to try to try to start this yes right okay love it what else you got a we wrote about this a while ago okay there's something like twenty million people in aa i gotta go look at the exact stats but we wrote about this idea of aa there's so many people alcohols anonymous of course the amount of people that have a drinking problem in america is huge aa is the biggest one they have tens of millions of members if you've ever gone to an aa meeting it's intimidating and it's old school i mean just a bunch of people who come from various walks of life who are all screwed up and they're just sitting in a room a circle of ten people explaining why they're screwed up and helping each other it seem it's pretty effective but we run about this company called tempe that is creating an online version of this that cost a fee so it's like an app yeah and they just actually raised around of funding i think in the last few days i'm quite interested in this whole addiction thing and how we can help people get through that the problem is is if you have an addiction there's like a huge barrier to entry in order to try to fix your addiction right and that barrier to entry is mostly embarrassment or having to go to like the sperm because that's like weird right right and so what i'm interested in is how will that be solved for digital right can you do it more personal more intimate more sort of frictionless more conveniently yes i think that's gonna be interesting and i didn't realize how big the demand was yeah either as a replacement or a supplement to the in person stuff yeah and what you can do is you can go to aac a's website and you could see i'm almost positive they might have like fifty million members then when i think of ideas one of the ways that i think of ideas is i look at where's demand and work backwards and work backwards there's a ton of demand there okay i got an idea for you came from the trends facebook group so shout out to ben curtis and alan tucker alright so they brought up this idea of a hunting and fishing d brand so yeah you posted about meat eater meat eater i never heard of this huge of course because i'm like you know snowflake in california that doesn't know anything about any of this my testosterone is low i don't i don't go and get their traffic their traffic not big i have to figure out where the revenue is coming from but they have a lot of revenue you're saying they raised money at a huge valuation and i talk to people who are investors and they the revenue was big okay so that was kind of interesting i didn't know about it and then these guys brought up in the group they were like hey hunting and fishing is this underserved category asking essentially for a d brand so go back and listen of the podcast with mo who started native deodorant and and basically think about okay that appeal to a certain set you know native is mostly for women who are you know health conscious and don't wanna have aluminum in the deodorant the hunting and fishing vertical which is a very much brick and mortar today can you create a digital brand that sells either accessories and yeti did it yeti didn't yeti built the phenomenal success they built a three billion dollar company for a hunting cooler right coolers exactly specifically like a hunting and fishing one and what these guys were pointing out was that you could first just make content and so this is kinda like you know our buddy ramon who does this with you know facebook how we did it with facebook pages before he he's got an episode two i think where he talked about how he built fan pages about soap opera then built a blog about soap opera and then sold that for nine million bucks same sort of thing you could do here you could build fan pages around the hunting and fishing lifestyle and then start to sell products into that group and this is very much a middle america which the categories i don't know enough about hunting and fishing to know what is the what is the product but i would just you know go and what you're saying go from the demand and work backwards well do you that's what i would do know how i guess how many americans consider themselves hunter officials how many okay okay i'm gonna say fifteen million okay according to some preliminary research that i've done a third of like a hundred million a hundred and five million wow we were talking about this at our company and some people who are hunters and fishers said i i said i can't believe this is such a same number people that drink water every day babe right what's going on i was camp i i was like this is such a small niche i can't believe they and they're like no it's not small and i'm like well it doesn't seem big because i live in san francisco of of course they go and they were did some research right there and some studies said a hundred and five million americans yeah this is a it's like a meghan it's like i work at twitch right now and twitch is it's this niche product live streaming for video games and gamers it's a megan but it's a meghan because there's so many gamers that you can do hundreds of millions of monthly users off of just gamers crazy and if you wanna learn more about this there is this guy named ryan dice who i know this isn't the same category but there's a lot of survival like people who a that's the niche within hunting like this survival category they think that the world's gonna and or they just don't wanna rely on the government and so they wanna like prepare for apocalyptic like type of things and anyway he built this blog for survival and it crushed it if you don't believe in that type of stuff i personally don't believe i respect you if you do believe it i don't and so i would never wanna like make that stuff okay i wrote down another pseudo science sort of one like this that you guys wrote about which is this ghost busters thing did you read this yeah so the story was basically there's a service there's like i think it's an insurance service and one of their sub offerings is a ghost bust service if you believe that there's your house is haunted or there's a ghost they will come to your house yeah that's do they will check and they will do the methods that don't you know don't mean anything and people are paying for this because a lot of people are spooked a lot of people believe in ghosts and i just had to believe in ghosts dude i think it's the same i think it's like a third of people in ghosts i don't think they're all afraid of ghosts or think their houses is haunted but i think a third of people believe in ghosts it's i don't not part of that category i believe in aliens but not goes okay to tweet at me if you believe in ghosts that's what i wanna know at the end of this or if you'd be willing to pay money for someone to come and get ready to go but i i just had to like pay respects to the person who was like you know what let's do it let's sell ghost you know that's actually true because one of the most popular shows on tv for a long time was the paranormal activity shows on tlc yeah exactly it's entertaining is is very entertaining okay and the people who do believe they're gonna pay right the people who believe that their house is haunted they're gonna pay because it's like this you know incredibly like tense stressful thing you just gotta get in that tele on gill like shit it's like okay give me another idea yeah we got four minutes left okay let's let's get two more ideas on the a company just launched two months ago and we covered it in on trends we i i think we actually wrote about keto cereal before it launched we looked at the search traffic and keto cereal was climbing like crazy magic spoon if you're have magic spoon i've heard of this because i've tried keto three times magic spoon it's a cereal i have a friend who like a friend of a friend and they told me their stats booming so i looked on linkedin this is this is not insider information i want can do this i on linkedin looked at what the founders were doing before it was something like a a d thing that from the outside it seems like it failed and then they like pivoted and i have seen the traffic for keto serial search like the a amount of people who search it as well as the amount of post on reddit super fascinating if you go and read p and g spectrum gamble or who all the other kellogg all the other cereal makers serial accounts for like huge i mean i imagine like like it could be like fifty billion dollars a year yeah and it's like soda where the actual thing costs so little that all the money the cost is all just marketing yeah and so they marketed it through tv tv ads and everything else and so the modern day version of tv commercials is facebook ads and i know people who have done this so someone who spoke at health khan which a lot actually a lot of these people who are talking about are gonna be at health gun you should come like for example we're having the guys who start method soap and ollie supplement and so we'll talk about this stuff but anyway this magic cereal i went to their website super basic slick but basic website i think that thing's gonna that that's gonna crush right so tabletop only raised a million dollars i think they're gonna be right wow i think they're gonna do north of a billion dollars in sales this year they they paid off dividends to their angel investors wow one of my guys who on buds with told me that he like made a living off that dividend yeah halo is huge i think this keto cereal thing will be in the same category yeah and it might be that there's other things like this like my wife's is vegan and so we buy all this like there's this candy company called unreal that's all vegan candy so it's like cool you want reese's but your vegan now well guess what we made the closest taste to reese's that's vegan and same thing with m and m's and same thing with other candies and so vegan candy so keto and m even has dairy in it chocolate milk chocolate right i i know but that's i know if it's real chocolate i don't know if though but it's not considered vegan from what i understand and so even if it is technically vegan it's sort of out of person who's vegan it says something about their lifestyle they usually don't wanna be holding a bag of m and m's even if it is even if it even if it technically is and they would prefer to have the sort of more organic the more made of real ingredients version of it got it willing to actually pay three times as much as m and m's for it and so i wonder you know paleo keto vegan i wonder which lifestyle you can piggyback off of and and make one of those products that they repeat purchase all the time like cereal i think this magic spoon thing like my early results show i think this thing gonna go to the moon cool i like alright i have one more from trends that i like and then you're gonna finish finishing this up so miniature cooking set i saw this on trends it made a lot of sense to me because people love the miniature version of anything there's something to seeing something that you know you normally see it full size many pots and pans and i think that as more people live in apartments and condos that are smaller and smaller especially in cities and people wanna cook and as the you know i think tasty came out with their own skillet to pair with their recipe book or let we wrote about that yeah and that was a clever idea but i really like this idea of miniature modern cook wear i think something can be quite big there it's not the business i would start but it's one where if i see that product if i see a good product that fits in that i'm gonna i would invest in that because i believe in the premise and i believe that anybody who does something innovative and cook where will be will stand out from the pack because everything is so bland that's a big business i think too it's just creating really high quality cast skill and things like that absolutely alright last one say one more yeah okay we have wade foster speaking at household wade started this company called zapier i called zapier zapier something like that yeah million dollars raised i think they're in the sixty million dollar arr yes which means they could be worth a lot like five hundred million bucks correct it's only four years old but this whole connecting apis and this no code economy thing this whole no code economy thing big if no code huge if we wanna call it no code economy whatever that's gonna be bigger than the sharing this whole sharing economy stuff there's web flow zapier if this than that all these things it's we should we shouldn't do we should do a whole a whole sec section on no code next time next friday we'll do i think it is just the coolest thing i've ever seen and note code websites still suck and shout out to cindy big listener of the podcast and original investor in zapier and talks about it all the time because that company's is kicking ass i love it we we just them more money every month yeah great alright sam we gotta run let's get back to life hopefully you guys like this and also we're gonna do a q and a episode so if you made it to the end of this you're probably hardcore we're doing a q and a episode so i want you to email me your questions it's pre dot sean p u r i dot sean at gmail dot com send in your listener questions we're gonna do a full q and a on those alright we gotta go see you thank you