#173 - How Beachbody Makes Money, 75 Hard Explained, & Brainstorming "HackerNews for X"

in this class it was one guy who was always talking he would raise his hand first thing for every single question he had a big opinion on all these topics like dude how does this guy know about all this stuff and he was a super into the internet and at the time my head labeled this guy as a loser i was like wow this guy's like this over eager student or who's like kind of a know at all and like kinda stepping up to the teacher and like why is he so into this wow what what loser he spends his nights of researching the like pros cause neutrality okay now fast four now that's me i'm that loser i just late to the game and that guy ended up joining coin basis one of the early employees i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back are you what is your rating of today's episode i'd go a minus we ramble a lot but i kinda like that that we go into different topics i mean we're everywhere pod hacker news stuff crypto for hacker news the the origin stories of product hunt seventy five hard tony horton sean por is hard out at the end we got everything in there what was to your top two favorite things i like talking about like the origin story so product on how ryan kind of hacked his way to growing that that was kinda cool the p ninety x origins story as well that was kinda cool i have to look up that youtube video that sean mentions that was definitely interesting but listen let us know if you like having this upfront let's get to the today's podcast alright what's what's up sorry i was late i was sitting here work podcast bro nobody knows you were late i'm never the late one i take pride that and i was just literally sitting here working and i had no idea didn't even look at that the funny thing is i was also two minutes late but when i saw your message that was like hey sorry i'm running that'll it'll be there in a minute i was boom hop i need to hop in there now so on there first yes i'm not typically late one but i was but will tell you a few things that i was working on so just a quick recap i'm working on some growth stuff so i wanna run a just a few quick ideas by you this one won't take a second but first yeah so in the last whenever we launch however long that's been not including month one to month two because it was like a five hundred percentage growth rate so and not including that we have grown on average ten percent a month okay okay this month april is not over but if if you take the average of the trailing three weeks and give it a fourth week it's gonna be about four hundred a little over four hundred thousand downloads which if you so if you take that multiplied by then to january we're gonna hit a million downloads a month by around january at ten percent growth rate if if we keep going at this drink yeah yeah so right now we're on pace for about five million downloads a year and then no what you're saying well it's it's more a hundred thousand downloads a month that's five million a year that's a that's assuming zero growth right with the with the growth it'll be like six million or something more seventy seven eight if eight okay yeah because the last the end of the year is gonna be start starting to get eight hundred nine hundred a million downloads a month and dude did people start commuting they need a little they a little good good good in their ears while they're commuting that's what we needed we took a twenty percent cut i think when covid happened yeah i saw the numbers dip and then we rebuilt from there so the the current growth rate is actually quite good it's just like it's this is this is the same thing of like if you just focus and just do the same all same all over and over and over and again it's gonna work but of course we wanna expedite that and so the things that we're working on is we we've already talked about what we worked on but let me bring up a few things first i actually think that would need to be a little bit tighter with our content meaning what are like i don't watch sports but i know you do what are like the sport shows where they like go through topic topic and they like you have like a time limit yeah like pardon interruption they do that five minutes it's like alright we're talking about and they always have like you know the shit people care about tory you know they have these these little like names on the side and it's like you kinda wanna tune in to hear what they're gonna say about what are they gonna say about why so i think we should start doing that and i'm trying to figure out how to do it but i i would like us to we're gonna start i'm gonna try it for an episode and i'll coordinate it next everything that is on instagram and on youtube we have to drive all traffic to itunes not to spotify even though a lot of people say they listen to spotify the numbers are more people just barely they'll listen to itunes but if you click subscribe on itunes it automatically downloads and we get credit for that whereas spotify it doesn't do that so gaming the the system and playing within the rules that's the way to go and we currently are not linking to any of our itunes stuff finally or no second last thing is recap old stuff so we have a hundred and seventy episodes did you know that i didn't know that it's a that's a lot yeah and so what i'm gonna do is go through all the old ones and bucket them into categories and we could re release them just with the new intro because right i think they'll be great even to that's that's really smart if we basically take our best episodes from earlier when we had half the size of the audience and maybe we cut off some bullshit if it was like there was something done but we just take the you know in the month like last year this month if we had three good episodes and we just say boom we're bringing back those business ideas and rec rep packaging them in a way that's better and we sort of re release our greatest hits i think that's a good idea i think that will work but what i was thinking of is grouping it so let's say that in episode five and then thirty four and then in eight we we there was a religion based thing like a right make religion new idea yes you do that and the reason why is so you can create a how to title because what i've looked at at all the data anything that's how to related gets more than pass more than other stuff speaking of which smart and this is the one of the last things we can re title old ones to be more click i'll fucking say it clickbait headlines and then last but not least alex garcia on my team who's been going wild on twitter is gonna join the podcast team a little bit as growth and then we also are hooking up with hubspot they've got a team that or an outsourced production company that i wanna look into and they have claimed that if you get a lot of like if you increase a production value significantly even on shit like this it increases downloads i don't believe it but it's it's interesting right well we're gonna throw it all at the wall and we're gonna see what happens speaking of growth can i transition to an app that's growing that i wanna talk about or or we can actually we can do your rundown of the thought things we're going to talk about on this episode so i'm gonna talk about some things that are in the fitness space so this app seventy five hard and how it relates to p ninety x and a whole bunch of different fitness things trends that i've seen so i'm gonna break that down in detail we're gonna talk about hacker news and basically niche news websites and you have an opinion on that so do why and then we might talk about mv i'm not sure if i'll get to it today did you have any other ones that you wanted to talk about and what was your last one mv this is when you basically can start your own cell phone carrier company it's pretty cool as much time i think that that that actually probably might be a lead for i think next one because that's a pretty big idea i it's really interesting and i and i and i what i did this week is i actually just researched everything you had and i have points and counter points and i didn't research that one because it's very interesting can we wait for the next one and but you could take it takes a lot yeah right and instead go to this teachable for deb thing because i have some intel for that so i went and got some intel on that i went and got intel on seventy five hard and i think the most interesting is the hacker do stuff i i went and talk to a friend andrew your friend our friend who owns a company in the space and they got all his numbers okay great alright where do you wanna start we can start on any of those topics hacker news okay so so i was looking at i saw this tweet from this guy dan romero and dan romero actually it's kind of a funny story i'll just leave in with with a personal story so when i was in college don't know when you were in college were you trying like what was your strategy were you trying to take the hard classes the easy classes is it what you're interested in yeah so so if you could take so some people do the hard one some people do what they're most interested and some people like me we're just looking for the easy way out yeah and sounds like you're the same and so i to to my professor i use rate my professor and i would find the easiest classes i would find out what classes the football players and the basketball players got to take because those are the easy classes so like rocks for jo was the code name for this i was like geology but it was like the easiest fucking class ever i got into this class rock i don't know how i was genuinely trying to take a a like an interesting class about sports sports psychology sports medicine or something like that and it turns out this is a class only the female basketball players that duke were in so there's was ten students they were all but female basketball players at duke the the class never i looked at the schedule i was oh there's no classroom where does this where do i go where do where do i go my class i emailed the teacher's there's no physical meetings for this course i don't know how you got do this gosh but he's like you just need to read this one book it was the lance armstrong book lifts whatever his book was called and at the end of the year so read that one book which is like the easiest fucking could book to read by the way and then at the end of the year you're write a two page report on it and that was the whole class no so sorry duke you know you definitely do the thing that all schools do with educational i i get that why it's school when you're a kid but also as a kid and now i was an adult who's gonna send his kids college i'm like what i waste waste the money what the dude i was i hit the lottery i wasn't one athlete in college and made made me take i was a runner mind you they made me take gym and the gym class was rope walking it's like if you got to the classroom you're done show up and did you go for a walk that it was called the rope and i was at middle athlete so okay so anyways in that process one class that i took that i was trying to find an easy class was called like the internet or something like that i was like oh bingo i know about that one let me give that one and at this time i'm not thinking like i'm not who i am today right i don't i wasn't thinking about business i didn't think i was gonna go into the text thought i was gonna be a doctor i was a pretty i was very average student like b minus student very lazy and that's who i was and so i go to this class and in this class i'm basically just there again because i'm trying to coast to an a in some easy class that's called the internet it can't be that hard and it really wasn't that howard a discussion about like internet topics like net neutrality and stuff like that and i didn't really give a shit i just sat there quietly like doing the cross puzzle in the like school newspaper eating chick f play a in this like classroom hoping the professor never calls on me but in this class it was one guy who was always talking he would raise his hand first thing for every single question he had a big opinion on all these topics like dude how does this guy know about all this stuff and he was a super into the internet and at the time my head labeled this guy as a loser i was like wow this guy is like this over eager student or who's was like kind of a know at all and like kinda stepping up to the teacher and like why is he so into this wow what what a loser he spends his nights of researching the like pros that cause neutrality okay now fast four now that's me i'm that loser i was just late to the game and that guy ended up joining coin baseball one of the early employees and he basically helped brian arm armstrong the ceo of coinbase base was kinda like did this tweet storm the day they went public right they go public at a hundred billion dollar valuation and he's like talking about the journey he's like when we started this you know it was such humble beginnings nobody knew about the space blah blah he's telling and then this happened and then dan romero joint came on board and like help bring us into europe and that was pivotal moment for the company where we became like the only crypto company that was like partnered with banks in europe and i was like oh my god it's that's that fucking guy from my classroom like i'm holy shit he made it and you know i bet this guy you know bank tens of millions of not a hundred million dollars plus easily just on coinbase base and if he owned any bitcoin along the way which of course he did because he he joined in twenty fourteen and if you're a believer at that time you probably grab some so anyways that's my short story of like wow if you're a college student listening to this now just be the nerd now trust me you're gonna wanna be that nerd later and really think through what do you what are you optimizing for like ease or like learning something like doing something interesting making people i think we have to send this podcast to dan i think you should apologize i i i will issue he doesn't even probably know who i was because again i was this fucking silent guy eating chip play in the back of the class never sent a word i was just judging him in my head and i i do apologize dan for judging him and clearly i was wrong and he's amazing so dan he he put out a tweet i follow him and he was like why isn't it there a hacker news so if you don't know hacker news is this website that you people just post links just like reddit and the facebook engineers reddit but only one forum and well not a forum it's like you post links and it's all nerd culture internet startup culture we you know back in the day we used to get the newspaper every day and open it up and like my dad would go to the business and politics section i would go to the sports section well the internet just made it so that there's an infinite number of sections and so now if you're an engineer you would wake up and you would maybe go to hacker news hack every single day same and anyways it's cool i'm website it's you know started by program and sort of baked into y comb i i i've i've done a exercise by the way i'm trying like what would you value hacker news at and i think it's sort of price i've i pretty much think there's no price for fall would sell hacker attributes no out because it's totally a billionaire there and he loves it but if you were just like a normal guy and you valued off revenues i think it'd would be worth fifty dollars to a hundred million dollars i bet you it could make eight million dollars a year in revenue with no employees and i bet you it's been capable of doing that for about ten years yeah i would say easily a hundred million dollars because it's it's also the category leader it's the end of one in its category anyway so dan tweeted did this out he goes why is it there a hacker news for a crypto you know like any like discussion for all the interesting things that are happening besides the price which i think is like the key distinction here which is that almost all the conversation conversations there's a lot of places i talk about crypto and they're almost all just tracking the daily price moves like over the weekend crypto went down like seventeen percent and so everybody was like talking about the price and in reality there's a whole lot of other interesting developments technologies kind of like usage that's happening that's not price related and you almost need a firewall to say look at the in this forum you don't talk about price because otherwise price always gonna dominate the conversation that's just the nature of crypto and so i thought that was kinda of interesting i started looking into some of these and i guess like for me i would say like there is an opportunity for somebody to create the hacker of crypto and so i don't throw out a couple that were pretty cool that i found one is chase bitcoin dot com and this basically a website that's just it's just a dashboard of so it's not like news and links it's just dashboard of stats that's basically saying this is the case for bitcoin it's like bitcoin is now we're we're you know ten percent of gold market cap here's new here's the top headlines about pro bitcoin it's just a pro bitcoin dash do you remember that time that you made bitcoin headlines because you tweeted that you're putting twenty percent of your net worth ed two bitcoin and someone wrote like entrepreneur and investor sean prairie and then you didn't i don't think you did put twenty percent of your no i did i did i i i tweeted i was twenty twenty five percent i ended up putting twenty percent and then it grew the price started going up so fast that that quickly became it's not now like almost fifty percent of my network worth or something so it's you know it ended up being more but but it was ridiculous that there was news about it because i think they thought i was much wealthier than i am like i'm not gonna move the needle crypto i could put a hundred percent of my where that it it was not gonna move the needle of crypto crypto just too big and so that was funny my actually my college friends texted that news article to me this week and they're like whoa what what is this by the way what have you become yeah and that like you actually got famous fame i mean you're like kind of a big deal now and that was like pre big deal well that's part of the strategy of becoming a big deal was care yourself like you're a big deal right me announcing how i'm moving my net worth around it's sort of like carrying yourself like you're a big deal even before you are and people started like they just accepted my my implication that i'm a big deal for tweeting i was gonna look great calling like my car my furniture assets and just start using words like imagine having a liquidation like now you're doing a garage bro well we we're yeah we're having a a fire a fire sale all some of the assets exactly that's the garage so i was looking at some of these websites website crypto panic dot com is a cool one anyway so there's something of these nothing i would say has has broken through as like the place where people who care about this long term and are not they don't wanna get caught in the price roller coaster day day where they go alright so i'm gonna pause there that's just the idea hey i think somebody can create this i think maybe pump or somebody who's like a central figure head in crypto similar to pulp maybe pop should be creating the hacker for crypto that is specifically not about price i i think that would be a smart move if i was palm i would consider doing that but you had some thoughts on these types of businesses and i think that's where more valuable will come so so go into yeah so let's call these ag i guess because you're not actually creating anything but you're aggregating and a and a the hustle it's like a is a little bit of an ag we we create stuff but we aggregate a lot so i know a little bit about ag businesses and i think that they're really really great if you can have them if you can make them i was with ryan what's his name ryan hoover the day before he was launching product hunt which is ultimately kinda of like an ag and he totally and he was telling me about it and i go oh this is really dumb this is not i gonna work i was wrong it worked out wonderfully he did a really good job financially it was mildly successful but it it it was culturally been incredibly successful and could've have been even more successful if he owned it for a long time but anyway now i went and talked to andrew wilkinson who's gonna be on the podcast actually tomorrow which i don't know for the people listening saying one that actually airs tomorrow the next day say something like that he bought this thing called web designer news so it's actually just web designer i think it's just designer news oh just is it just that are you sure think it's just designer news dot com yeah i'm pretty sure it is let's see oh yeah sorry not web designer designer news okay so basically this was a hacker news thing it was just for designers it's like it was literally a clone like it looked almost the same except for that how can he's kinda ugly they just clean up the design a little bit but it's the same idea yeah and it was pretty pretty good when he bought it and i asked them how's it going and he said it's basically dead it's done so i think he got the money back from what he paid for as and he earned that much back but he i don't think he anticipates making a lot more money and what i thought was his case his opinion and what happened my opinion and what happened to his site is actually kinda the same but basically here's what he told he goes the issue was is you have to get a whole bunch of people to visit daily and you're only as good as your posters because it's social notes and there's endless amounts way to gain the system with a bunch of bots which oddly people do it a lot so you need constant moderation in algorithms which is very expensive to hire the devs to make that and then you also need real live moderators which also is expensive and then if you have any period where the content gets bad then everyone just moves to red reddit so it's a little bit like lightning in the bottle and it's hess this kinda magical network effect but it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle what he said and i actually agree with that and so my point is i actually think that if you can build this it is one of the greatest things that you can own and there's a few examples of this so there's tech meme which is all all these are all things i'm fan of so it's all gonna be a little bit but tech me i i i can't submit to it as a user right it's not social here they they they curate it themselves well it solves the same problem yeah it's solves the same problem for the end customer which is you go to place and you see all the interesting links of the day in my niche that i the same habit and the reason why it's that it's important to mention tech me because with hacker news as with reddit the creators or the owners of the site can actually just submit a ton of fake stuff that you wouldn't even know they submit and it would look populated and that's in fact how reddit it red got started so the hard part of is this there's a great video by the way but on youtube if you wanna see the the how reddit got started their fake could tell you make a strategy where they had twenty or so accounts of different names and they were posting every day on the subreddit like from twenty different personalities to try to make it look like there was this great young community of interesting people and then they described they don't do that for like i know couple months or something and then they described the day where they went on it and just it was all happening before they went with their fake accounts like the real people had built up enough steam had learned the like monkey c monkey do they had learned how to behavior and they were just posting the links and commenting and it was like wait dude that's not my account there's a real account holy shit this is actually working and so that's how they start and it takes a lot of time and reddit was is ten years old so when they were i mean like the amount of websites that existed versus then then versus now they had a lot less competition it was still really hard but what i have found with this okay so there's tech meme tech meme just automatically pulls headlines based off what's most shared on the internet and then another example is let's run so let's run dot com the listener or the owner of let's run dot com is actually a listen of our podcast and i'm a big friend fan of dot com and it's basically the same thing it people submit articles and they comment on on it that's in the running machine is that why it's like do runners long distance runners it's very do so so let me tell the story of product hunt at the beginning how how ryan did right because i think for a lot of these it's one thing to hear oh it's like i would agree with you these social news sites social news are amazing when they work and they usually don't okay so how do you get a tour well i actually got to see ryan build product kinda of from the inside from bay one and if anybody doesn't know like there's a funny article basically ryan was interviewing to come work at mo furniture where out the where i was the ceo at the time i was trying to recruit ryan i i loved his blog post and he was interviewing with us and he got the final interview didn't make it and i kept in touch with i was like hey you know sorry didn't work out but like i'm still a big fan of yours and you know i wanna give you the feedback why it didn't work hope that's not salt of the wound but you know if i you i'd i'd be curious why didn't why didn't i get it and you know i really do wanna keep in touch and then the next week he was like starting product hunt literally i think one week later he launched product hunt and and i remember like you i was thinking oh this is like cool but this is like just some pet projects it's not gonna go anymore why doesn't he come work on the real shit and in reality product cut was more successful than anything we did in the lab so you know he you on the end but i would say what worked for him so he started it on this thing called link dig which was like and off the shelf little social news tool at the i don't even think it's still around it's not he started it there yeah it was like an email it was so weird it was like a so the way it worked was it was like hacker can news it was a list of links but then it would send a recap to all the subscribers of that board like an email recap so even if you forgot to go to the website you'd get the wrap up automatically that was kinda like a killer feature there because you're trying to build a habit of people coming but they first like if you could just deliver them value through email this will work so i would say like that was one like nice thing he did he didn't need a tech he didn't need an engineer at the beginning he used link and link the key was that they would email the recount then he only invited like friends that he had developed that he knew were as nerdy about products as he was so i think i'm user number fifteen or seventeen of product hunt and is because i was one of his nerdy friends who really like geek down about new apps the new products right that's what this podcast kind of right this word product or like now you'll see people like oh i'm a product guy i'm almost wasn't that part then i'm almost positive people didn't really use that word or phrase or if they did people were like what are you talking about what it it was around like product manager was a obviously a phrase people talked about product but it wasn't as like it wasn't seen as like an anime fan or a sports fan it didn't seem it wasn't like a a thing and he really said it a lot like this is for people who geek out on a prompt that was his tagline and at the beginning and that's why travis phrasing i knew what he was talking about i never heard he anyone would say that and and so he definitely kinda created a little bit of a category he made it cool don't give him i think that he made it cool to do this thing that's what i so then he he curated the initial people and they were cool people so it was like because he had been blogging for four years before that he had built up a nice network silicon valley so that again that's the hard work that happened before that prepared him to succeed so then he invites kevin rose he invites you know a bunch of interesting people onto this thing and so people and he he set set out some rules so just like i was saying for crypto hey this is for all crypto news except price he said that for product and he's was like this is for cool new products don't post facebook and instagram like we all know about that this is for the shit that you don't think the rest of the group has seen it so that's where the real value came that's where you would get here that was different than going to tech project one to the app store charge or like here you were gonna discover the new thing first and not gonna see shit that everybody already knew about so it kinda made it an insider like it's set the level playing field of like it's like if you were creating a a wine club you would say like you know this is for people who actually know about wines don't bring you know the seven dollar yellow tail you know wine here and so anyways i thought i got that right then he made it were you had to be white listed to participate in the community meaning the average person could not just go post so that solved the bots problem and the moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post and anybody could view and that that this double effect of it was now exclusive people wanted to get in they would bank to get in they would prove themselves and they if they got in they would be on their best behaviors so they wouldn't get kicked out and the last thing he did was he was pretty man about c the the community and the products like every morning he would wake up i don't know he's like kind of a robot he like wakes up a five am or six am every day like he's one of those guys he's like super productive yeah type of person and good habit you know he would go to phil coffee shopping and sit down his laptop and then he would immediately be scouring twitter anybody who mentioned product on he would thank them anybody who posted a cool product he would say hey i'd love for you to post this on product time he wouldn't do it he would tell them hey this would be really cool if for post a product i just gave you access as of that i us have any of that every goddamn day for like i don't know nine months or something like that before you hired a community manager crush i i i use product hunt regularly i i don't actually know the numbers anymore because i don't i i'm not sure but i bet you would still quite successful and it could potentially be successful for ten years plus right if you've ever seen somebody build a fire without matches like i watch survivor so something i'm not a i'm not a camper i don't know how it works but on survivor this like one of the mains stays is build a fire that's how i view building a community like when you build a fire on survivor it's like first you're gonna like take the flint and you like just kinda you shave the magnesium off the flint boom boom boom boom boom alright now you got enough of that and now you're gonna like you know add the next piece you're gonna like try to get that to catch and then as soon as it catches is you gotta very carefully don't let it like ex it it's so like fragile at that time you gotta start adding the little like brush wood or whatever i don't know the worth but like there's a certain type of thing you add next then you add the sticks then you bill and now you have this raging bon fire to me that's like what building a community is like i've seen the people who actually do that that like really hard work of shaming the flint first and i'm like oh shit that's what it takes to do these like once these communities are actually up and running i've seen it once or twice i've seen you do it as well with trends where you were posting every goddamn day in the trends group yeah for i don't know how many months a lot that was your flint phase where you were just shaving magnesium out of the the world so let me tell you about something that we're launching at the hustle i you guys can use it or not i don't care i'm not pip it out right now but it's related to this so what we're what we are launching to on tuesday this pocket comes on wednesday so it's actually already live but i don't even know if you're gonna be able to find it yeah but anyway it's called hustle plus and what we're doing is we're kinda launching something just like this because i'm obsessed with these types of products and i love these things and so when a user signs up or they can click out of the email once they're already a subscriber and they can tell us they can either explicitly tell us what they like or implicitly we could see some of your behavior and then we're gonna have a section of headlines and in order to get those high headlines we built this tech that crawls the internet and finds the most shared stuff and shared headlines and then let's say that you tell us or you click on a bunch of articles related to media and and we tagged all the links like this is a media this is a media and a bootstrapping story whatever right you're gonna get those links in your email so you're gonna get the hustle which is like two thousand words of like a editorial sup but you're gonna have one huge section with ten or twenty just headlines then we're having we're hiring a team of editors to write a one sentence description of that article so it's part human part machine telling you interesting stuff right berry very similar to hacker news tech meme things like that so that's actually we be that's cool yeah and so we're i'm doing that because i i love these types of things so it's basically a hack it's very similar to a hacker news not so much user submitted right now but kind of a similar idea so i love these businesses and we've talked about drug report i think that if you can get this to work it takes a ton of work front very little work to maintain yes yes exactly okay so let's let's switch topics because let's do one of the other ones seventy five seventy five hard so you've done a ton of research about seventy four seventy five hard i've had so many friends talk about this friends that mostly are not fit and this has inspired them to get fit it's okay so tell tell me about that part i i had i haven't heard a but only ben has told me about that my gosh everyone is talking about this man so do you remember van trump report the newsletter guy van i told i told you about this guy who's got this newsletter that crush it in an ag tech i became friends with a son his son lives in kansas city he's kinda talks to the southern accent he's not like tech he came over to my house because he was visiting in texas was like hey i know you have a gym i'm on my last workout i need to come user gym can i use and then another friend su patel has been doing it and seventy five hard has taken over like my friends and they commit to it like a religion like they don't miss it right so describe what it is to somebody and and then i have a bunch of gotcha right so seventy five hard i think what it mean it's the it's only got like six rules so it's basically you have to do for seventy five days two workouts a day each workout needs to be forty five minutes one workout needs to be outside i don't think either workout needs to be particularly hard the only rule is that you have to sweat second rule is you have to have a diet for all seventy five days it doesn't matter what diet you just have to do it and that might be it is that the only rule i think that's it so so i had heard about this ben told me about this a little while ago and then today he's like check out the app charts and it's the number three paid app in america right now i say wow that's kind of amazing and so i started looking into it and i actually didn't do a ton of of seventy five card but i'd researched this category i'm very interested category finished story on seventy five hard started by this guy andy india i don't know his last name you wrote here i don't wanna pay priscilla okay everyone makes fun me because i can't say stuff he's actually based out a right near me fe missouri he has a supplement company called i think form and it does about two hundred million dollars in sales he was in my local newspaper yeah because he they like and they bought a twenty million dollar building and invested it and made it nice so i think they're they're it's legit he's had several supplement companies because i like who is this guy because if you see if you google i was like it's one of those red flag type of profiles i entrepreneur speaker yeah best seller coach to celebrity you see know it's like fuck you what have you done who are it's screen not legit but he is legit exactly and i i mean i can't sit on it too much i got tony robbins man and if you were gonna describe tony robbins it'd be very very similar and like but you kinda gotta dig and be like i definitely what i don't do is i don't take that at face value right cool so what are those businesses okay great what is this book like you know let me let me check this out let me let me get a a sense here this guy's got actually at the top one of the top podcasts in our category in into business category as since m ceo or something like that oh my god as you know mother f and ceo or something he's got a big instagram following so who is this guy from what i know which i just did a very quick dive actually i'd love to have this guy pawn he he basically he's he started a couple supplement companies i think first was like a brick and mortar supplement company called something supplement super supplements or something like that and he's got he's done that two or three times his third one is called form one and that's like the biggest one it's been the most successful and then you know the the hooker or the tagline is like you know these brands do over a hundred million dollars a year so okay he's it a supplement space he did well with that great and then he like translated that into like a life philosophy and i think he's preach kinda of he's like a bit of the jo willing like kind of school of thought which is just like you know it's hard and you got work yeah met up do it grind a hustle blah blah those are the words so he's like gary v if gary was like jacked you know and so he's like you know in that that thing that's the outsider haven't gone i have not drank the ko aid of what his stuff is that's my outsider or a quick point of view okay great but i started thinking about this category by the way i just wanna i'm gonna cover your ass here sean sounded it's sort of a little dismissive of this guy i yeah i don't think you are trying to sell the way neither of am i think this guys seems like a good dude i view it very much in the like i can have two thoughts at the same time one thought is oh when i hear this stuff it's usually a bit of hand wavy and usually these people are kind of like stereotype kinda car architectures but also they're probably like actually giving out good information inspiring a lot of people have had great success in their life and live up to a lot of these things and like i think both of those are kinda true like i i kinda make fun of gary v but i think gary v is built like kind of an awesome brand and an awesome company and he's an awesome guy like you know like i don't know him personally but i can simultaneously make fun of the character yeah while also being like you know respect you did your thing like you did the thing you wanna do and that's not easy most people do nothing so you know props props for not not just doing nothing but doing something very unique so the pace so this space so i'm very interested in this for us kind of a recap i actually considered launching something like this so that's why i looked into it so seventy five hour i'm very interested in these time bounded challenges time bounded programs so the big one that i personally had experience with those p so i don't know if you did you ever do pete of course tony tony what was the name most was i named tony horton tony horton of course like noticed like kinda backstory of p x i think sit there's this company called beach body and what beach body did was it started by this guy carl dyke i would consider him our billy of the week so he's a ceo he's he's worth about six hundred million dollars and this guy is kind of the king of info commercials in the king of of of all of us of sort of at home fitness so he created eight minute abs you know he he created eight minute abs which is like he was inspired by buns of steel he like loved this like branding of a fitness program and he he was pretty early and jumped on in the kinda of early nineties this time really started hammering info commercials on tv that was his main channel like today facebook ads as i think the info commercials of today but he was really the master of info commercials back then and so he's like alright i'm gonna do i'm gonna create this company and originally he wanted to call it i think like he so he he's like i wanna start this company he goes to his friends and family he raised five hundred thousand dollars from angel angel investor friends and family he so says sorry i'm gonna test five products and i'm gonna see what sticks and they're gonna be in this like fitness space and the whole idea was like i'm i have this distribution channel info commercials and i'm gonna create products that are sticky at people that help people lose weight essentially get more fit and so he starts with the very first one i think was tony he goes to tony horton tony horton at the time is a celebrity trainer so he's training bruce springs and like all these kinda like musicians and actors and actresses hollywood so he goes to tony and he says let's create a cup product called great body guaranteed and he's like oh i love it great body guaranteed how can it miss and he goes to he tries to get great body dot com and it's taken and so he's like doing this thing he's walking around on the beach in la walking home one day and he's like he's on the beach he just thinks beach body beach body dot com he runs home checks at checks beach body dot com is available so he grabs it and so he starts trying to produce these info commercials with tony for this program and they produced many many programs and and he he realized at the time okay like i can't afford celebrity endorsements right like that's why tony had a good name was because he was trying for celebrities but he couldn't really afford some endorsements so they start just trying to do like like kinda like info without that so customer testimonials so he he comes up with this idea that the customer is the celebrity how do make the customer celebrity and he so what he the initial batch of info had all actually failed where he was just saying you know get a great body and it's just super jacked people on screen saying how jack they are basically and so instead the they you know it's kind of just money down the drain during that part and instead they try one version of the where they took a few testimonials that had been sent from their buyers that said hey look at you know this was me before and this is me now and me now wasn't like didn't look like a greek god but just i definitely looked better than the out of shape overweight person you know in the before photo so they slap those into the info commercial like real customer testimonials and boom this thing starts selling the hot and so he realizes oh wait the more authentic these look and so he started sc he goes i want the the customer testimonials to almost look like america's funniest home video footage like somebody at home their cats jumping on them while they're doing a sit their plant is you know dying in the background they can barely hold their balance while doing the pose and then you see the after photo ninety days later that they look great and that was his kinda core insight that was working really really well and he was very differentiated because everybody else was who was doing at home was really at this time was doing like some gimmick product like thigh master ab roller or bow legs like selling some equipment this equipment will solve your problems and it said he was like know i'm gonna make a promise you do my program for ninety days you get this result and that promise marketing was much better and that's what seventy five hard is too it's another variance of this premise marketing well there's a tiny difference i think so if i i don't know i don't think it's like this anymore but when seventy five hard first started it was around as a free movement so basically this guy would say like alright everyone it's that time of year we're doing it and he would do it's like no shave november yeah i i forget the months but i've i've seen i've seen it for a couple years now and he would basically i guess instagram like now's is the time for the challenge and i think he did it for like maybe forty years before it even became a thing so p ninety x i think it's a you enroll and you have ninety days to get it done this seventy five hard thing was a you know november first get ready like you know time to get kinda seasonal thing yeah and it worked really well i guess it's seventy five hard now like a rolling seventy five i i think it's i i think so because they have this app so i don't think it's just one time of the year but and if it's number three right now and we're in june or you know we're in so i think you know it's it's definitely not the november thing as it was before and so just to go back to beach body so beach body the company does over a billion dollars a year in revenue just to break down their business they basically so he he comes up with this concept of the of gym at home instead of a home gym so it's like how do you do the gym workout at home and he's like okay we have we're gonna use info commercials and we're gonna use dvds dvds are gonna be great because you're gonna be able to put it on your tv and you do it whenever you want sort of on demand great and so they start selling dvds and the dvds do well and programs like p xr are part of it and for p x it was actually a little bit of a pivot for them there's actually these cool videos on youtube of them in their meetings and he's pitching this he's like okay look right now we're all about losing weight it's all weight loss it's all like kinda like belly fat that's the market we go after for beach body but for p i wanna do something different he's like we need like an extreme program for the muscle builders he's like i noticed there's all these magazines like men's fitness and muscle muscle monthly and all this stuff where people are really trying to like build huge muscles and so let's set out the tenants for this thing and he's like doing a presentation he's like this is not for beginners this is at home this is meant to build muscles get shredded you're gonna get shredded ninety days he's like that's the promise we're gonna make to the people and so you know i like seeing these meetings where people are like coming up with the the the concept of then over you know takes over the nation type of thing and so their model is you have the dvds and then he's like okay cool distribution through info commercials was good but we've kinda hit our limit there so then he took a page out of the am ml playbook he's like here's what we'll do we'll get our our most successful customers will become our coaches we'll teach them how to sell this program for themselves how to be their own mini tony horton so they go and they build this nationwide network of four hundred thousand coaches here's and then of course the coaches can train other coaches and they can keep a share of their revenue right classic ml multi level marketing some people call it a pair of scheme or po scheme but there's a there's a legal way to do this and he's doing it the legal way and so the top coaches in i i think in his case it's an i'm reading all about them it's an ml n but it's not i don't find this to be unethical or bad i mean it's just he's he's making customers salespeople people for him so i was once talking to a friend and he was like dude we need to create this product and we'll do it sell it out at m ml eleven i was dude m ml eleven is it that like you know i said that like a sin he's like why i guess it's basically you get your your hardcore believers who i know problem them with the ability to sell it you know the friend yeah i think i i i think i know and i think they love ml because ml was bought them yeah and it's it's ml inherently are not wrong now exactly the way he described it he goes look there's a knob think about it this way this is a model just like affiliate marketing or any kind of viral marketing you basically give people products and let them sell it like there's a knob though the knob is like kind of like your evil knob and you could turn it down to zero and when you're at zero you're basically saying hey if you're a fan of our product you can become one of our coaches and you can there's no minimums you don't have to subscribe to this monthly thing you don't have to like you know do this the wrong way he's like or you turn it up to twelve and you go super evil and you basically say hey dude you can become a millionaire if you become one of our coaches to look at this guy he's a millionaire don't you wanna be millionaire and then you basically get them to sign up for this thing where they have to pay you a hundred dollars a month there's they have to buy ten thousand dollars of product and now they're their their kid's bedroom is full of like this this you know hair hair loss you know shampoo treatment that they need to sell and then they can't sell but they bought ten thousand dollars worth you made your money anyways and then they go broke because they try to become one of your reps and like you you that knob is like in your control to turn how screwed up you wanna be with it and so anyways i think beach body is like somewhere in the not so evil category from what i know their top their cup coaches and trainers make about like two to three million dollars a year and a lot of that revenue again comes from the coaches that they brought on board they get a percentage of their sales and the company by the way beach body i'm reading all about their ceo and he's giving an interview and he says they do this year in twenty they'll do a billion in sales and they do about ten percent eb so a hundred million and net profit earnings yeah on a billion in sales yeah i'm surprised it's not better the the way that they probably described their model ads the way they describe their model is like they have the dvds which now has become streaming they have the coaches to go like distribute those like that's their sales their salesforce and they make all their profit on the shakes so the whole thing go comes down to this like shake product they have called shake and basically it's like okay the the streaming or the dvds is the content is good but it's not like it costs so much to market it it's not that good okay you know the coaches is well you gotta recruit them we gotta train them they gotta sell they're good but they're not that good the shakes it's like a hundred thirty dollars for your one month of nutrition shakes and that's like pure margin it goes back to the andrew for show guys like supplement company is like they make all their money under the profits come from the shakes and the whole thing with the coaches is like cool we get you hooked on this program and then you want better results feel better results you got trim up that diet hey here's what i do i drink these delicious shakes they're so tasty and they are i didn't know that i did not know that yeah so that's their as their model so i think beach body is a pretty fascinating company i think that these i think that marketing your product as a x day's promise is a very smart idea because you're basically saying you're gonna get this result in this much time whether that's eight minute abs or p ninety x or seventy five hard or it's that diet hole thirty where you're gonna do thirty days of eating whole foods only like i've seen this work so many times i'm very fascinated by i don't know why it works in the psychology of the of the customer but it definitely does work and then the last piece is i think one of the reasons it works is because customers can sort of commit to like well i can do this for x days that doesn't sound too hard ninety days i can do anything for ninety days thirty day diet okay like maybe i'm not gonna change my diet and become a vegan but can i eat whole foods for thirty days alright that's a challenge and i thought it was very interesting the way he talked about this which was there's two ways to marketing it he goes we've always marketed our products as you could do it like this is so easy you can do it and what's seventy five hard p ninety x two is the opposite they go can you do it it's a challenge to you you're like i don't know if you could do it this is it's hard right so then they started creating all these they they have two versions of their marketing you can do it marketing and can you do it marketing and i love that i thought that was such an interesting way of like thinking about your business they have a program called insanity why is it called insanity because it's meant to sound super fucking hard and too crazy and why is p it's the extreme home workout it's not that easy beginner sit up and push up stuff this is the extreme so i thought that was pretty cool okay so what we gonna launch in this space so i've been working with my trainer now and i'm actually like i've hit some tipping put or i'm starting to give results like i look at my body like during the during our our sessions in my career i we work on my garage there's this one area where the sun like comes into my garage and the shadow is just perfect and i look fucking great and i'm like dude this i need to stand like by center it works with exercising it's like no results no results no results boom it all kinda have it feels like it happened dude that's how everything valuable is like slowly slowly subs slowly than suddenly and so was like all business success works that way and i'm now saying even fitness success works that way where there is this tipping point and we're now the workouts i don't dread them i enjoy them i'm looking forward to them i feel bad if i ever get miss a day whereas before i was like sweet snow don't have to work out you know like i was looking forward missing it now i'm looking forward to doing it so anyways i was talking to my trainer and i was like dude i'm gonna help you i'm gonna help you create because he's always here me talking about business and it's like he's a black belt fitness i like to consider myself like really good at a business and we're trying to help each other out and so i told him i was like dude why don't you do this like why don't you create like he's a gym to me he's not like a normal trainer he's like i told many stories about how he helps my mindset and all this stuff he's really like do i'm like dude cut above like of most people i was like we should create one of these where it's like i was like just with my friends like just the people i know in my my my life who if i post a photo of me today and i post a moto photo of me like few months ago before i started working out with you like i'm gonna post that before and after photo that's my own pride moment of like i did it i i actually turned the corner of this thing that's been forever a really hard thing for me i'm i've never really considered myself fit or shredded or like been proud to take off my shirt i think i'm gonna get there pretty soon i been within been a few i think i'm gonna get there i was like when i post that after photo i said we should open up something that says if you wanna do it like let's create our own ninety day program and like let people in because i was like the way i was thinking about it was he has this philosophy which is like we we talked about like how do you feel when your friends get successful and and i told him honestly i was like yeah like it's been hard for me like what of my friend when sam sells this company for ten and they're almost a sudden sam's tens of millions of dollars that's like i'm happy you yes i'm not like not happy for you but there's a bigger part of me in that moment right when the news hits that's like i fuck i'm behind right know i was like the honest truth was like i get kinda jealous or like okay get kinda en mds and so he helped me sort of reframe that in my mouth it's not about you but like it's spend this way for decades you know like i always felt this way if somebody's successful like good for them but bad for me and he's like you know it doesn't have to be that way good for them bad for me it can be good for them it's good for me he's like it's just this philosophy you gotta have where do you carry yourself where you say it's not just that i'm gonna win i'm gonna help bring up all the people around me we're all gonna win and it's gonna be more fun that we're all gonna win he's like you do this with investing right you share your deals and you c invest and you let your you want your friends to invest in your companies because when you win it's more fun to toast together and drink together he's like same thing with like all aspects of life you should be thinking about i'm not just gonna win i'm gonna win so much there's gonna be so much like success around me that all the people around here are gonna be successful tuesday say anyway long story short of i heard him talk tell me about that and i i took it to him i go i'm gonna help you build a business that does this so i'm gonna take the thing you're really good at that you're doing for me and now i have him worked with my sister my mom my sister's kids my sister law i pay you know like we do all of their fitness now through him he's like my family's personal coach really and so i'm like yeah he he's doing that's i'm we're his only clients anymore it's just like my family what can you like tell me what you pay this person no i don't wanna put him on blast like that you wanna name you wanna say his name or do you wanna even hide them yeah i mean i call him jay yeah that's his name his it's john alexander so he's goes short for jay and he's not being on social media nothing like that like he doesn't try to be like some influencer guy or whatever but trainer yeah he's he's trainer that's always he's been doing but fit his all life and you know this he's really good i i see him shave head white guy no i i'll send you his instagram later but basically i want to i wanna help him be successful i think we can use one of these like i think we can use this model it's p x extra seventy five hard let people commit to something that's reasonable for them that's the way i did it with him i was like alright i'm gonna i'm gonna commit i don't know how good you are how bad i am i don't know if i can do this long term but like i'll commit i'll give you thirty days to get my ass off this couch like i'll just i'm sick of this get my ass going thirty days i will do anything you fucking can say one hour a day i will sweat my ass off and like that got me hooked and so i think we're gonna come up with some program like that this is we're like months away from actually launching something but i want to do that because i think a i wanna share him with more people and b i just think this is a cool business model why do you do everything you do why like why do you not focus more on one or two and i criticize you i don't criticize you be i i challenge you often why continually why do this do that do that do this why not just do one thing and crush it because and you're your answer i might be well because i just wanna explore and see everything out there but it's pretty obvious what you're good at which is way i have a feeling that your rolling fund is gonna be wildly successful i have a feeling that like you pull out of the weight in the podcast because you're you're very good at content why do everything instead of just be the best of this your this in this little lane i do think about that i think i have graduated out of being an operator i no longer wanna operate one entity the only i wanna operate is you know sean c my life and when i think about like what would be the most exciting version that how do i how do i marry this part of me that's just super curious and every day you know i wanna go down the rabbit hole and learn how seventy five hard works and not you know p x works right before this podcast i i would do that anyways i just didn't have an excuse i didn't have an outlet i would just do the research shoving it in my head and then i would go about my job in my life and i would keep running my company which had nothing to do with fitness right this podcast was a cool thing because it gave me an excuse to do more of that thing i'm interested in and i do good at and now it's a win now i go down those rabbit holds i learned those things i come here i share the learnings and cool we we get the money step three which we're both doing which is and then you like oh i think this is actually a really gonna deal let's go put money again and then i see the company and then i basically say cool now i'm gonna invest my money i'm gonna share my knowledge to an operator who can go start that business and so my this will be my trainer business it's not gonna be my business but i will plant the seed with him that hey this would be great and i'll do everything in my power to help you be successful depending i'll give you seed funding i'll be your test customer testimonial like that's that's on me to get get you know make my after picture better than my before picture and then lastly like i'll shoot i'll spread the level spread the word about about you thing when when the time comes whenever you're ready like i wasn't planning on talking about it today it's just coincided with us talk about beach body so anyways i i would say like that to me is a more fun life i basically decided alright i want my life to be where i wake up and whatever i'm most curious about i go do because i have a way to monetize my own curiosity have a way to monetize my own learning okay so how do that's what i've decided it is my thing for the next decade i'm gonna push to bit a little bit because i actually think that that that your premise might be a little flawed here which is i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna do what i want i'm gonna no i'm going to go learn about what i'm most interested and what i'm most curious about and i would actually actually challenge so i would challenge that a little bit because it's like well i you're kind of implying that you're each day you're gonna do a new thing and i don't necessarily like like for crypto like i've spent months in crypto right because you know years of curiosity but then like months of pretty hardcore core curiosity around that i think that's great and it's become like a bigger part of my portfolio of time and money and so same you know same thing with e commerce i got more interested e commerce right same thing with live streaming for many years it was all about live streaming so these don't have to be every day it's a new topic i think that would be a a bit extreme but but with the podcast yeah we you know we do two of these a week we talked about three different topics at each time we're by no means experts at any of it's like very kinda like off the cuff type of tough conversation and research but i think it's like the way i think about it is like tim ferris has done this i've seen anybody do it i think that tim ferris has done this where he's he's very curious about certain things that he wants to go learn then he goes talks to people in that space he does experiments on himself he reads books about that topic he read research papers about the topic and then he packages it up into something that's sell sometimes and sometimes it's not sell and it's just for him it's just for zone curiosity i think i could do that i think i can create the new new business model of binghamton ferris so that would be if it what's my one thing i think it's that but to the outside it looks like a lot of variety and to me that's good it's but it's i'm not trying to criticize it here i'm just trying to bring in a different perspective because i was thinking about i i saw i know this guy who's like getting something off the ground and i see him constantly talking about like side projects day trading bitcoin yada yada yada and the business is really related to something totally separate i'm like what are you doing dude just like right lock yourself in the room don't do anything except for like be with your family exercise and like work on your thing right because like it seems almost in not not impossible some are really good at it but for most it seems almost impossible to create anything meaningful without a man mechanical amount of focus at least early on for an extended period of time more likely than that though i think that's true i think that's true and it's it would be definitely true if i said oh i'm gonna go start a company raise much money and this is gonna be i'm gonna make this huge company i'm not doing that that's not my thing right now so like if when i was doing that i didn't have a podcast i didn't have a fund i didn't have a blog i didn't have didn't have a girlfriend i didn't have many things i sacrificed on many of those because i was all in sleeping at the office opportunities year i just know that that's not what this next phase looks like for me i couldn't do that again i don't really want to and so i'm trying to see is there a better model for me that that is more of that feels effortless to me that always felt like a lot of effort and i think that there is a version of life that it doesn't have to be so hard i think it can be speedy and easy i think it can be effortless if you're doing the thing you really enjoy doing i agree with that on a basis i wouldn't use the word effortless to this but it's it's in it's a rewarding like when you play do you feel like you're working hard no like i can go play basketball i could be really tired by the end of it so i mean fatigue because i've play basketball for three hours but at no point in it would i feel like i'm having to like do something i don't wanna be doing with that i mean if wanna use that play thing like i don't always i love to exercise but i don't always wanna go do it but i'm always happy that i did do it and and like i don't like because to me working out is not like playing play is a really specific word play is like you know i could be tired from my job i'll come home i could play video games and video games take actually like you know focus hand coordination strategy talking to your teammates all that stuff but because it's fun it doesn't feel like work to me right and so i'm interested in in play now i'm not interested in hard work so where do we go from here i think we might wrap it as was been a little we went kind of tangent there yeah i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back on