#182 - How an Astrology App Makes $10m+, Why a Boxing Announcer is Worth $400m & Creating a Personal Monopoly

i think you could build a easily a hundred thousand plus person list doing this product and then there is a clear like premium offering on the back end but the the core of it is quiz funnel top daily newsletter and get there and get to a hundred thousand i i i would i'm on a throw down the gauntlet for somebody who's bored and looking for a project that will actually stick they'll actually get have some legs because i know this would have legs yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright everyone we're gonna talk about some good stuff in the steps but before you get to it could you do me a favor go to spotify and click the follow button the reason why is lately we've been getting way more listeners on spotify and i think it's because we're going up the charts but i wanna be sure of that and in order to go up the charts i need you to click follow so it's gonna be like a big experiment i'm gonna reveal the results next time but go to spotify go to my first million and click that blue button that says follow click it for me please i'll reveal the results soon i think that's means where to go up in the chart alright first segment we're gonna talk about horoscope specifically there's a couple of companies that we talk about horoscope dot com astrology dot com sanctuary world dot c that make literally tens of millions of dollars a year talking about the horoscope business it's pretty well because something like fifty percent of women in america are interested in that topic which i had no idea we also talk about judge judy and michael buffer i know that sounds weird you may not even know that named michael buffer he's guy says let's get rid of the rumble we talked about those two folks and how they make something like four hundred million dollars mean we actually break down why they make that money and how you can replicate that and then finally we talk about two little side stories about side products that sean and i have we actually launched like dozens of products that we've never modeled these are our embarrassing side projects that we haven't talked about before that we revealed yeah while we're talking about the horoscope thing they ring from starting a crystal business which is just weird you been saying that and they and also to a a fan page that i made for pip it's kinda odd and then finally i talk about a story about meeting tim ferris and actually happened when i was kinda high on drugs one time you'll you'll hear about it get to it it's in the episode like i said spotify see you at the end of the episode alright what's going on we're just talking about losing weight sean yeah you look good have how you've been doing meat only meat only is only four days in but i had heard about this joe rogan talked about the carnival ward diet and then it sounded fucking ridiculous at the time then you started sending me you know nude selfies and you're were like i was like damn sam's free stack stacked yeah you'd you have i'm just only eating meat i'm like what yeah yeah i'm only eating meat i was like the second person mentioned it and then my trainer was like he's like getting shredded for kind of his season or whatever and he's like i was like what adjustments do you make he goes i just go to kind of a pretty much a meat only diet protein only grass fed ground beef grass fed grass fed beef some fish that's pretty much it a little bit of turkey and so i was like well i don't know if this is gonna kill me later but i'll do it for two months so let's see if i if there's any noticeable chance so we'll see yeah i i was just saying you you look great you look you lost how many i mean i don't know like pounds isn't the best way to measure it but you probably have lost the equivalent of like thirty pounds of fat maybe twenty pounds of fat i don't know that'd be a lot my weight is the same or higher than it was when i started working out but my i do the dex scan which we talk about which is that business where you go you lay down and it's like a it just shows you kinda like where the fat muscle and bone is in your body sort of like an mr i don't know looks like an mri machine but it's not an mri and according to that thing i've lost you know like i don't forget forgot like i do it every three months and so the last three months i went down three or four percent body fat now i'm going down another four or five percent body fat this time so yeah hopefully it will lose like ten percent of my body fat so the first idea i wanna discuss is gonna start with a fitness story that's my segway but before we get into that you're gonna do and so for the listeners we're gonna do mini episodes i think you're gonna try the first one right i don't remember what it's gonna be but you wanted to do a rant on something and we don't even need to say what it was but we're gonna try a mini episode i wonder if it's gonna work it's gonna be probably five to ten minutes long maybe we'll see yep today we're gonna talk about a horoscope idea which sounds silly but it's actually gonna be pretty awesome and we're gonna talk about judge judy michael buffer which is actually gonna be pretty awesome and then finally we're gonna talk about something that i've asked sean to prepare and it's about how he manages this team of interns to get a lot done wanna get right into it so i wanna tell you the story about the guy named ross clark never you never heard of you never heard of ross clark probably that's okay so he kinda looks like me just a white hair blonde corn fed looking dude from i believe south carolina he was a triathlete and he used to do soul cycle and he would go to soul cycle and he loved seeing these women walk out of soul cycle with a glow they had a they had a a bunch of they're very confident when they left and he thought to himself how do i make people feel like that i wanna make people feel confident i wanna make these these women feel great about themselves i want them to have a better life and so he thinks what can i do what can i do to make that happen and then it hits them and it's kind of a weird thing that's hit up but he goes the best way that i could do this is i wanna create a store or a brand that sells crystals and zodiac necklaces and t shirts and customized birth charts and geo and sm sticks these things that make women feel great kinda weird right yes and so that's what we're gonna talk about the first idea and he says he's gonna launch this site this brand that creates all these i consider them kind of weird kind of woo woo and he goes i'm gonna create a brand that sells all this stuff but first i'm gonna start with horoscope and that's the story of sanctuary world dot c so i guess it's i think they just call it sanctuary the url sanctuary world dot c and the reason we're gonna talk about it is they just raised a seed round of five million dollars is that correct yeah something like that so they raised five million dollars and it's caused a little bit of controversy because horoscope are well they're bullshit they're bullshit in the sense that there's not a lot of facts behind them they're not real but a lot of people buy into them thinking that they are legitimate in fact something like forty percent of women check their horoscope on a regular basis and they they will make decisions based off their horoscope and the reason why i wanna bring it up is because a it's interesting so by the way what is this link to the soul cycle thing that sounds like who's this guy ross ross parker is at his name that's the story for sounds like bullshit to me ross parker it sounds like he was like oh women believe this shit people men believe this shit i'm gonna sell this shit to they've not i was standing i outside a soul cycle saw him glowing and happy and somehow like connected the dots between feeling good after exercise to sewing crystals and horoscope that doesn't make any sense to me it's it's a bullshit story but told what he's doing totally well i'll give you he's connecting full cycle he also in the article that i read he mentions heads space he's just named dropping right this is gonna be trying associate what steve at one point he called it the uber for zodiac times so yeah basically say me saying if i say three or four legitimate company names alongside mine i too will get the halo effect of being bucket in with those guys alright i'm like meditation i'm like religion i'm like fitness yeah so that's what he did i mean calm calm dot com calls themselves the nike of spiritual fitness so hey look we're like i ain't gonna hate the game right alright ain't gonna hate i'm not gonna hate the player so let me explain to you why this is interesting so josh wolf a guy that i like you like he tweeted this is bullshit whoever finds this idea is a crook yeah and i actually don't entirely agree with him i understand where he's coming from though and now i wanna give you some background about this app the industry and where the opportunities are so the way this app works is download his tweet he goes this this is josh wolf on twitter he's a a well known vc he says seriously shame on anyone for funding or encouraging just bullshit no doubt there is demand but this isn't pedal entertainment it's encouraging slippery slope snake oil flop doodle we ought to desire informed educated rational and not na gullible super society and then he'd screenshot it all the investors who participated in the round i'm here for that shots fired although i disagree with what he said go on yes and so the way this app works i downloaded it it's actually beautifully designed and it sucked me in hardcore and you sign up you see like a new dude i see the glow so i should've have known it got me and you sign up you say it what you know you click your gem i'm a gemini i i don't know what the other twelve signs are but you select your birthday and it says today is your daily reading for your horoscope go it tells you like a it's i got these like text messaging vibes so it feels like texting me this one or two sentence description of what i should expect and then it says by the way we wanna tell you more in a few hours can you please turn notifications on so we can tell you more in a few hours about what's gonna happen to you and they use this language at speaks exactly to me and then they say also we have a little bit more that we can tell you if you sign up here and then the way the app works is you can have this premium subscription where you get more info about you or you can say for free where you get daily updates or now this is where it gets interesting you could pay a little bit more money and you could talk to a live what do they call themselves i'll missed it yeah a reader you could talk to a reader and she'll tell you all about you so so basically we've talked about miss cl on and how she made like a billion dollars you get to talk to a miss cli on the phone or via text and they're gonna tell you all about what you can expect for the coming year the coming day yada yada yada now that in itself is not entirely interesting i mean it is pretty interesting but what's what what's really interesting is how big this is so as two thirty something year old men we probably don't know too much about this but it's way bigger than i ever thought and the reason why i started diving deep into this is i started reading articles about the horoscope into street in a lot of like typical liberal high educated blogs that were written by women and i would've have thought all these women are gonna shit on it they're gonna say this is a scam and you know what all the articles were very positive right even in tech crunch it was this woman named sarah perez about it and she goes horoscope aren't really harmful it's just fun meaningless entertainment whereas this guy josh completely shoot on it and the reason why these women perhaps weren't we're okay with it is something like fifty percent of women check the horror off on a on a monthly basis thirty seven percent so they checked daily i always get into these awkward situations my sister law is a big believer in like the zodiac thing so you know a situation will be happening between her kids or we'll be talking and she's like oh such a taurus you know you're such a tourist or like well that's because that's because you know their gemini and gemini are this way and i'm i'm always like you know i don't know how to respond to this because i'm like yeah yeah but like that's totally fake but yeah yeah that's super fake and yeah okay good go on like i don't know what to say it responds to that like i can't validate it or agree because i don't agree but i know share on because who cares i don't i don't care if she she believes it me them i say look if i was if i came on one second later twelve o one you're telling me that i'm gonna react differently about this or that just because that one name second four i always say well what if i'm born in australia you where the hemisphere is different and the seasons are different and the moon's different this but it's not saying wait how india they have this they have in india's like this times ten so if you think miss cli is big and miss cl was big miss cl i think generate over a billion dollars in sales if if you're if you watch tv in the nineties you know who cl is if you don't you don't but in india they have this still on tv all the time there's these guru these mystic sticks and in every village even like the poorest villages in fact especially in the poorest villages because i think that's where superstition and religion is is stronger than anywhere else you take your when your kid is born you take your kid to a kinda like your local star gaze mystic guy and he's basically he writes this giant thing on an act like on a scroll he gives you a scroll and the scroll basically says don't let him eat yellow lentils it's just like all this like hyper like he shall not be married in the months of may june or august and so people literally i know that are like you know educated doctors lawyers bankers they'll be like engaged oh my god when's the wedding this summer they're like nah we can't do summer i was like why because my parents had this reading done when i was two months old and it told them that i shall not be married in these months of the year and so the this is not just like an an american thing it's a worldwide thing under many many different names this is this is worldwide superstition it's wild and what i'm gonna tell you a little bit about the industry and some other the people succeeding in the space but i think i couldn't find too much on these folks revenue numbers because they're the they're relatively new so the way that the the company started with this young guy or he's i mean thirty nine he's ross clark or whoever i said his name was he he was he went through lauren michaels the guy who started or runs s snl he went through apparently he has a like a digital incubator i guess at nbc or someone sponsors it's weird it's weird and he went through it and now he recently raised five million dollars including i guess he raised money from nbc in lord michaels somehow has a stake he raised money from advanced capital which advanced owns loads and loads of magazines he raised money from great cross which is a media investor so he raised money from all these media people so this is like a traditional media company and or traditional media people like this type of stuff and the reason why they like this is horoscope business has been a large business for years and years and years i mean i've already just told you the numbers this is not niche i mean we're talking like a third of americans or into this shit so astrology dot com have you heard of astrology dot com yeah of course you have of course you haven't it so they do low eight figures in revenue and the way that they make money is they have they do a lot of programmatic advertising so they do low cost advertising like the bottom of the pool and operating they get you to come under to their website they make a little bit of money up advertising they have ads on their website so it's an ad arbitrage play it and then they also sell subscription so you do like a click this button and you're gonna get a little bit of an extra reading they make tens of millions low tens of millions doing that and it's been like that for like thirty years this is astrology dot com and horoscope dot com horoscope dot com another competitor they do about twenty but they get about twenty million people coming me do the website a month so it's quite large these guys have been around since like nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety nine ish so they've been around forever just making ten million plus in revenue kind of a pretty fascinating business my opinion is i about fifteen million visitors a month to their website which is a lot that that's a lot and i bet you a lot of that is direct search which is really good yeah so which way do you wanna go with so i i i think we can do a couple things one is there's the controversy you know know coastal josh wolf they came out saying oh how how evil for funding this and for doing this there's so there's agree or disagree there well we can actually address that right away which is they're i i totally disagree in their both are wrong like let's like saying like why would you ever invest in the nicotine business or our alcohol business like do dude there's there's a place for all types bullshit or a burger chain or netflix or whatever right like you can you can believe that there are sort of negative consequences for society and humanity for facebook as well right i think in this case the their their sort of view is tainted and here's the here's the easy example if somebody was doing a religion app they would be it it they would never say anything about this but because the religion is the stars instead of the gods now it's snake oil now it's bullshit now it's you know pedal you know fake science what is religion what is the difference of religion right like it is a belief in something that is supernatural that is invisible that cannot be approved by science it is blind faith in something and that faith gives people comfort entertainment community you know like many like positive benefits and so if you're gonna say this about horoscope you better also say it about religion otherwise i i view you sort of as a hip there yeah we're we're on the same page there and also like dude i don't like many people they have a shitty live they go to work they go home at at five pm and they just wanna fucking veg out if right if a little horoscope gives them a little bit of hope who cares yeah you know we i need all the help i can get and i'm sure a lot of people do too so i don't care so the and i will i i will say it's bullshit just like i think i love them religion sorry if you're religious but i respect that if you're like it but i think it's bullshit too it's okay too okay so then the second piece is that i'll just say on that is fucking annoying the virtue signaling by vcs nobody like this the grand standing that people do is so annoying to me and i i recently we'll we'll talk about this more in a month a weird teaser i know but we'll we'll go i'm gonna go in about a topic in a month about a fight ahead on twitter a good a good old twitter ru and but one of the things that came out of it was the just absolute hip critical nature of people and and virtue signaling this is almost more annoying to me than like cancel culture is virtue signaling culture where people take any chance they get to say how they're greater than others because you know they they sort of just go try to take the moral high ground at any cost and i find it to be so annoying and such a like weak move of people to do that so if you're an investor to go and say i'm a good guy i would never fund something like this that is such an annoying move to me personally what do you think of that no i completely agree with you i mean like i think that we have to remember that like there's some mom like my mother in missouri who's having a hard day she's needs to get off somehow like that sounded weird but you know what i mean she needs like find her a little bit of happiness somewhere i don't care if she wants a soap opera or reads about horoscope who cares not everything needs to save in the world it just needs to be a little bit of fun and entertainment and not everyone needs to agree with you okay you don't wanna fund it no problem you don't have to fund it but to like call out and demon the people that do fund it let them do what they want like i find it weird that the people who are trying to be so like righteous they lose the one like kind of like one of the more fundamental things which is open minded ness that maybe other people will have different beliefs than you and will act in different ways in accordance of their beliefs and and that this should not be judged or d for it so anyways i i think that's kind of annoying but okay so we're all the people yeah go to who like this let's talk about the opportunities and why this works you wanna talk about that yes i have i have a couple okay the i'll go first the first is myers briggs and other personality tests you can do this exact same thing with that the way the reason bring this as the most interesting subject to anybody is themselves themselves exactly and so that's the that's the umbrella we're not talking about selling pseudo science yeah that's actually like a technique why does this work is because the most interesting topic to me is me and most interesting topic to you is you and so because of that that if you if you accept that that is true which by the way it is once you understand that that is true it opens up a set of business possibilities that you can go through and work through in try to figure out so okay go on so the goal is to find so the reason why i went to this app why it was so interesting i bet so for most apps the free to paid conversion ratio is probably one percent maybe you think that's about right i can get higher i can get to like three four percent okay with this app i bet you it's as high as ten percent you tell if they if they told me ten i wouldn't be surprised i'd be impressed but not surprised i would be impressed and not surprised exactly and at ten percent free to pay conversion rate is stupid that is so good the reason why it's good is you could spend a lot of money to advertise now the churn might be high but that's a a situation we could address after we're already digging popular there but so the reason why they're they're let's just assume that is true let's say it's six percent the reason why it's six percent is that it's so personal and the way the reason this business works is that it is personal so what you need to do is go out and find personal stuff so that's the reason why myers any type of personality test because i could say oh so you've just told me these ten things about you that means that you're probably disorganized right let me tell you all about being disorganized and what that means personality tests are great it's actually the same in a in a way the same thing as a a a horoscope and what you can do is you could do it you could really just do a daily email if you wanted to not really simple the way all those people who are like horoscope like yeah that's for dump trump voters to believe in and then they'll also be putting on their twitter bio like i'm a ent intj they're right they'll go put their like fucking personality quiz results into their bio and i i know there's slightly more science that you know that that says that that's a real thing but i don't know i this is all yeah exactly this is all hand wavy shit as far as i'm concerned yeah and and guess what i'm in favor of it all right i take these tests i enjoy them so i think that you can do a daily email for this i also think that paid content paid subscriptions for these types of things works really well and what this app is doing that i particularly love that i think could work for so many different things if you get a top of funnel thing where you give these tests and then you do a come and talk to a person and you would charge fifty dollars per person or per hour whatever it is and as a middle person you take a cut i think that is brilliant i love i was talking to there was a a company we talked about on here it's called i feel like it's called intro was it called intro it was basically like you can book a call with like justin bieber stylist or like oh yeah yeah yeah i called intro i camera recall no it it was called something else but you oh maybe you're right so anyways it it's intro dot com right founders legit soul desires company starts this thing like oh it's great because i'm remodeling my kitchen wouldn't it be great to be able to do a thirty minute call with the person who remodel kitchen on hgtv tv and so they got only stars on and it's all good guess what vertical is the number one vertical for them readings they found all these instagram i can go on instagram you could find all these people who have like cult instagram following they have like fifty thousand hundred fifty thousand followers and they just post a daily sort of like you know reading and the people will pay to book time to get a personal reading from them it's taking off now he doesn't it if you go to the website it still looks like it's about style home everything things yeah and that is photo but nutrition makeup nutrition makeup up all these things that you know smart people will nod their head and say like that sounds good that sounds healthy then it's like what do people really want where's the where's the highest demand it was in the tell me about me through a reading either a psychic reading astrology reading whatever it is okay i wanna go back to something you said very quickly but i think is super legit and this is we need a sound effect for whenever man you have such total conviction it's like in if you watch like i don't know america's got talent or something like that or or the extra the golden button the golden buzzer where they're just like we don't need to vote i'm gonna push this button right now and you're you automatically advanced so i'm pushing the golden button right now for anybody who wants to take this idea of creating this this funnel so to do this you need you need to know nothing about code but you do need to be kind of like internet savvy and kinda clever here's what you do you and you should probably go and read like ryan hoover book hooked near i or yeah ryan who was like a editor whatever sorry near or go and read influenced by robert chapman right exactly somebody who who gets into this stuff and is non judgmental you're not gonna do this forever but here's the experiment the experiment is you create a quiz that's the top of the funnel that's it basically says find out your personality find out your ex find out your myers briggs find out whatever it is your horoscope whatever and you create a quiz at the top and then to get your results you put in your email we email you the results and then you send you a daily newsletter that's personalized to you right because you are a because you were born on this day of this year i'm gonna give you your daily horoscope i'm gonna give you your daily reading and that's the whole product right now i think if we do this i i will put put money and i bet sam puts money in into you put a little money behind the paid acquisition here and and there's inherent viral reality because people will share their their quiz results they will share their readings especially when it says like see if you're compatible with your brother your girlfriend your mother whoever right you'll get somebody to share the quiz with somebody else so i think you could build a easily a hundred thousand plus person list doing this product and then there is a clear like premium offering on the back end but the the core of it is quiz funnel top daily newsletter and get there and get to a hundred thousand i i i would i'm on a throw down the gauntlet for somebody who's bored and looking for a project that will actually stick they'll actually get have some legs because i know this would have legs and i don't know how big a legs or but i do i would say with a high degree of certainty if you work on this full time for three years you have a five million dollar a year in revenue even simple right like a lot of people who who when i surveyed my audience one of the biggest things was dude i'd love to just have a side hustle that i could do a few hours a day that would bring in a few thousand dollars a month this will do that so if you wanna do this dm me email me email email us find them find a way to contact us because i want somebody legit to actually try this let me tell you about some experiments i've done in this area i don't even know if you know right about these things so i don't know when it was not too long ago within the last couple years i was quite bored i had sold my company and i basically said you know last episode you asked like do you wanna build something that lasts for like thirty forty years like a like a long lasting company i'm like yeah sometimes i dream about that and then sometimes i dream about what's something i could do this weekend that would be fun and like i could throw away next weekend if i wanted to like a low commitment fling of a business it's a a fun scheme right hook up and so i wanna i a business hook up and yeah one night stand and i created i i created three ideas that i thought would work the first was a iq test i was wanted to know my iq i don't know my iq i'd like to think i'm smart i think i'm above average smart guess what everybody thinks they're above average smart and so i thought why isn't there like an easier way to do an iq test but if there was an ad on facebook that was like a puzzle and it's like solve this puzzle and this is like the start of an iq test i would go through that i would take the iq test for twenty minutes and then i would wanna get my results i'd give you my email and i might even pay for like the full results of of this thing so i thought that was kind of interesting doing iq tests and kind of like recreating men as as a sort of like online funnel again no physical product needed no shipping no logistics no supply chain but pure play sort of digital info product second one have you read the book the five love languages or five languages of love obviously okay yeah you're married so at some point you were given this book been like hey asshole i read this yeah and so that's one that that's a pretty successful franchise so if you go look at my facebook page right now i have my facebook profile you'll see oh what why is sean the admin of a page called the love doctor always tell you why because i wanted to take the five love languages test put it online send people through that flow where they answer a bunch of questions and then say would you like to know what your love languages put your email in and then i'll send you your results and then i say well wait we need to see who you're compatible with do your love languages match and do they know yours send this to your partner and boom and then by by the way like here by the ebook by the pdf that will tell you what to do given your love language because there's only like five i can just make five pdfs and sell them so these are these little business experiment links and i have one last one that i did because as you could tell these types of businesses appeal to me i like simple lightweight stuff that people that has a lot of demand that silicon valley likes to poo poo and say that they're they're better than that i find this as an opportunity so the last one is crystals you said something yes i did so this guy what he wants to do is he wants to sell crystals i don't like i i don't and i don't say oh my gosh and like i think it's wrong to say sell because i think it's like anything that like you know tony robbins is see bullshit yeah but i read it sometimes to make you go little comfortable bullshit so so who cares but i think crystal are nonsense yes exactly so so is a placebo a bad thing right if this thing has no measurable effects but i believe it to have a positive effect and it helps me feel better than has it not achieved its purpose of helping me feel better right so so i looked at these three ideas and i had to pick one because i didn't have too much time right i had a weekend hook up to to go to so i said should i do the i q one should i do this love doctor one the five languages love test or should i do this crystal thing as i looked into the crystal thing i saw i saw bunch interesting things which is that there's a lot of female kind of like influencers so adele carries a rose quartz crystal with her and uses it before every before she goes on stage for every performance gwyneth pal from you know with goo she's all about you know these all about crystals you know just go through the list of who's who so the kardashians after kim kardashian got mug or robbed and she was feeling like very unsafe she like she credits crystals to being one of the things that helped her center herself calm herself and feel better about herself and be able to go back in the world feel safe again so i found that wow a lot of these sort of like female celebrities and idol have pictures and quotes with these i thought oh that'd be pretty useful to help sell this thing and then i found that i could source crystals very easily right the crystals are not that expensive and so i created a e commerce store for crystals and i tried it for a couple weekends and i spent you know five ten grand of booting this thing up and i broke even and i even made a little bit of profit and in the end i sort of like got bored of the you know i got bored of the hook up was ready to move on with my yeah but i kinda validated that this idea could kind of work and there was it wasn't like gang buster like look if this started printing money i wouldn't have given it up no but it could've have been right like which is most things you have to stay at it for a bit to actually get it to work that's brilliant i like hearing these stories and i as i was thinking i made fun of crystals but i actually had something similar so there's this guy named ryan holiday know ryan holiday the author of trust me i'm lying is that it yeah i he's got have his he he's handed me i think is one of his right i have some of them up here and he's got many books and his famous thing is stoic system so he talked talks a lot about stoic which basically just means how to be how to deal with adversity how to be a tough guy obviously horoscope mostly women this is probably mostly men and i read one one of his i thought it was nice it made me feel better about myself and i went to daily stoic dot com and i bought a thirty dollar coin that says some message great thing on there that's i don't even know what it says but it translates into like you live then you're gonna die so like live well or something like that it's just and i would carry it i always like where as you who gets the the tattoo of a asian asian character on his arm and it doesn't know what it means yeah i i don't but i like it mean something to you but i was yeah like it's a got like stoic on there they're supposed to be tough and i carry it around me and i paid thirty bucks for it i think it costs a dollar for him to make i think make it a few million dollars so that shit works i i did by the way my my one night stand recently about a couple years ago as well our friend ra ramon was killing on dog stuff i'm like oh my gosh that that looks so fun and so he would create all these facebook pages about dedicated to a specific dog breed and i go whoa that's looks fine fun i just wanna tinker here i'm gonna try i created this one page called bully boom so the word bully and in space to word boo b o o i just made that word up bo is a like a bully breeds they're like pip okay whatever yada yada and i just went and got viral videos from reddit and i posted it on bully boom dude i got like ten thousand followers on facebook like in matter of six five days yeah so that shit work so anyway by the i also have a pet one heard this guy was making a bunch of money when he by printing your pets photo on socks as a gift and i was like great weekend we can hook up tried it spun up the whole thing had a guy i mean my friend eric who has this cool sock company called tribe he was like i'll print the socks for you you here's a link here's a what here's here's an easy way to set it up tried it my results weren't for but same sort of thing where i was like i really enjoy these mini experiments and here's the thing like when i share this these i think part of it is interesting of just hearing these little like random things most people listen to this i don't think do that i think we're somewhat unique in that we have done many of these right like i didn't even know you did this bully thing you didn't know i've done these three things there's actually like ten more that i've done that you've done that we we talked about so a lot of which are so embarrassing these are the ones we're talking about i imagine the ones we don't talk about so so the i think the one of the like meta takeaways is like just experiment more and be willing to spin something up quickly and then throw it away when you and you're done with it and like don't try to like marry every everything you know it's okay to date it's okay to have a hook up or a fling or a one night stand with a business and i think that it's a lot of our skill is built so in doing that i used to tell kind of one of one of my interns who was working with me on on the crystal thing he is like dude i don't if this crystal thing's gonna work but i'm just i'm amazed that in forty eight hours we went from you were just bullshit about the idea to our first sale and that's just kind of amazing he called it a flash brand he's like i love that we just created this whole brand it looks real that's got a name we like named it after my sister's kid you know like we we we we created a logo we got this like does this shopify store spun up and in doing so we learned all these like mechanics of like how do you how like how do you get better at a writing copy how do you get rid or naming things how do you get better at making a logo how do you use these tools like shopify and and cla and all these different tools that you need the piping to sell to sell stuff and i think that there's a lot of even if you think the ideas we're talking better are dumb it's not dumb to like use these as an excuse to go learn about facebook ads or to learn about building a facebook page quickly because that might come in handy again three days later or three years later when you're trying to do the next thing and of course that's not really what you're the the most important thing you're learning what you're learning is the confidence so just go through the motion and get shit done in the same way event that like it's a lot easier to get skinny when you know how to bench press properly or you feel comfortable squat and you're like oh yeah just do this this this an i eat less and boom i'm confident i can i just follow the i can i send you a mini story on this real quick and then we'll be on so i invested in that company m which is started by our our mutual friend guy and bi beyond he's he started u to and now he's got which is a a three billion dollar ed tech company and i he's got a new ed tech company for teaching online and invested in the company and in order to get in it was such a competitive deal in order to get and he's like look you guys have a good audience like you have a big twitter following you gotta you gotta do a course if you if you agree to do a course it'd be one of the teachers a be a user then i'll let you in the round and i was like done because i wanted to invest and so then he's been hitting me up like dude do the where's is your course come on man and make your course and so was like alright shit and so they're not and i was overthinking it and the lesson here is not as really has nothing to do with my course or i guess i'll tell the end of the story and i'll tell you what how almost fucked up so the end of the story is yesterday i took out twenty minutes i wrote a a three tweet tweet storm about yeah how writing has helped me and i i said you know in school i was a shitty writer in a school they want you to write long essays like they have like a minimum word count you have to hit literally and you know you study shakespeare and you think that's what good writing is or you read the odyssey but then you know in the real world it's the exact opposite you know you're paid to be concise not have a lot of words right you're not trying to write like really epic complex things you need to be simple and crisp and communicate well and i said i've gotten good at that so i sucked at school writing but i've gotten pretty good at real world writing through trial and error and studying some of the best people yourself included our friend neville i bought his course i took that whole thing i've got i got better copywriting but i said in general there's this whole like like how much value can be unlocked if you're good at writing emails tweets blog posts company memos investor letters like all those things can generate a lot of value it's made me millions of dollars i think if you can do that for other people too if you get better at writing so anyways i tweet that out and i said i wanna package you know i probably studied this stuff for like a thousand hours in my life i wanted dis steal it down into something you can learn in ten days if you're interested in that it'll cost four hundred bucks here's a link put it to a shitty google form where you put in your name and email and you tell me why you wanna take this course so i've tweeted it out guess how many responses i got three hundred so i got a thousand responses already of people who are who gave me all their info said i'd like to sign up to be in the first batch i thought so the the way that m even works is they encourage you to do this to test demand to see if you have a hundred people if you get a hundred people they say alright there's enough demand you should go like kinda figure out why they wanna do this and then then then launch your actual course a thousand blew me away off of you know one tweet basically let alone email list or anything else so i thought oh that's interesting wow like let's say that let's let's say that this is a thousand people the course cost four hundred dollars not all of them they will convert but like two hundred maybe but this but this was let's say a hundred he said about thirty to forty percent of people will will end up converting of but that's if once you qualify the list a little bit so but even this was just one tweet so let's assume i also email it out or tweet again about it i think i could probably triple the size of the interest list because this was just whoever was on twitter in that moment that's all it so i could probably triple size this list and then let's say thirty percent of them convert twenty five percent of them convert okay so let's say the net net is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars i could easily make six figures i think hundred thousand on the low end four hundred thousand five hundred a thousand on the high end of course okay so that's sweet but what's the lesson here the lesson here is actually that i didn't i was not gonna send this tweet i was telling like i was like alright you know you need to like test your test the demand for this course and i was like great so here's my plan i'm gonna first i'm gonna like work on the content of the course so i'm gonna like make sure it's good and then actually i wanna like show people i'm good at this so i'm gonna do like ten example and i'm gonna do ten emails showing me like taking something that was kinda bad writing and turning making it better so that'll like get people interested and then i'll do it i'll mention it on the podcast and then i'll do this other thing and he's like dude you don't need to do all that like trust me just say hey i'm thinking about doing this you know here's why i think it would be good for you if you're interested sign up and i was like yeah fuck you're right i'm doing that thing and that thing is what most people do which is you're afraid to fail so you overthink what you need to do to make it successful and ab b you you're listening to this you're about to go do your own startup up don't make this mistake that i was about to make that i've made many times in the past that most people make every time they go do a new venture is that they are afraid to fail therefore they you know they they overestimate what they need to do to get started i need to incorporate i need to come up with a good name i need to buy the domain i need to like build it to make sure you know i wanna have a high quality product i don't wanna have to go out with a bad product at just point people or you know i need to like create a whole website before i do this thing nope shitty tweet shitty google form thousand responses right like you you can get results with a much shit sort of go to market and so you know the classic quote here is if you're not embarrassed by by your first product you by your first version of your product you waited too long to launch and so anyways the i relearn learned was don't overthink it i i almost thought it do you know what you're gonna teach or are you gonna figure that out yeah i have a good idea actually i i think this would be cool so tell me what you think of this i haven't told anybody this yet so i think the the way to get good at writing is to write obviously sorry it's the way to good good at anything is to do it and so i'm like alright but i can't just tell you to go do it if if it was that easy you would have already done it so i i thought okay what about this what if every day i gave you a prompt so like let's say let's say the we wanna get better writing writing for the real world right so let's let's say it's a cold email like the way you called email people to come speakers of hustle great so i say we're gonna write a cold email to somebody who you want to come speak at your event i'm not gonna tell you how to do it first try it take put fifteen minutes on the clock and just try it write a shitty version so they try it then i'm gonna give them like a kind of a a learning so it's like do learn and then do so you do good yeah then i tell you how i would do it and with four examples like here's here's one way of doing it here's another way doing it here's there's another way doing it here's the common principles i'm using in all these alright you learned that good now do it again and you submit that one and i'll give feedback on all the submissions that people give them me like hey this is actually awesome or hey this is much better than your first attempt look in thirty minutes you just went from like really shitty to pretty good and here's how you go from pretty good to like amazing if you made this one tweak additional so i want people to get a daily reps at writing one of those things so it might be headline right here's the story right the headline okay cool that that was a bad headline here's here's what google has gonna do a great head better again you you better launch fast someone a listener gonna go and do this of they don't have a hundred and fifty thousand followers but yeah if you wanna do this help me doing it i think there's just this should exist i think this would be a cool way for people to get better by actually doing something and doing it in like a controlled sandbox so not just saying open it don't know go write a bunch of shit it's like very specific right this here's examples of what what what good looks like and then good boom boom now that you know the now that you've learned the principal go apply it anyways that's what i'm gonna try to teach do you wanna talk about michael buffer yes what do you so on our doc sean scott michael buffer and judge judy personal monopoly written on there i'm very curious what that even means so this started with just curiosity i was watching the alvarez boxing match that happened all last weekend and fun match guy where he fucking i broke this guy's face like focus that focus face in three places and then the guy quit between rounds so anyways boxing is this funny thing where like the match itself only lasts for you know some number of minutes but they need to charge you all this money for paper views so there's all this like pom and circumstances is all this parade around it right they walk out with music and they're kind of entourage and they're outfit and then the next person walks out and then there's the introduction and in the introductions there's always this guy you've probably seen him is his white guy who basically is like got a great voice and in boxing he says like you know ladies and gentlemen looks good ready to rumble right that's like the signature thing like he you would kinda get wired over the years of following the sport that like yes this is the main event this is the big one and and by the way do you know who that guy's brother is bruce buffer right so bruce is in the and he says i'll let you do it he goes it's it's time and by the way i didn't know that their brothers until they are like both in their fifty exactly because it creates story story so so i sorry i was just watching this and i was like how much does michael buffer get paid right so i do the search michael buffer salary just do you know how much michael you might know it sounds like you know some things no i i i don't know what is ten million a year so michael buffer has made four hundred million dollars in his career doing what he's doing he's made most of that off of the the fact that he has created personal monopoly he is synonymous with a big boxing match and his phrase let's get ready to rumble is a trademarked phrase now how is it a trade he's trademarked and he licenses it out to video games to you know like movies shows and stuff like that and actually if you go watch like the back catalog of fights they cut out bruce buffers it's time part because they don't wanna pan the royalty on its time how well first of all i i knew he was vault because he looks like he's down a lot of work out on his face so like he's got that like wayne newton look where alert like sig troy where i'm like oh that's that las vegas rich look and second how on earth is the boxing federation or what whatever it's called allow him to own it along in bruce so the the way the happened so the so the way it happened was michael buffer is the is the the announcer guy right and at first he's not making much and boxing is kinda nascent and he's he grew with the sport right so at tyson got popular and holy field and all all these big names you know you just keep seeing this one guy for like thirty years so he ended up building his own brand you know along the way so nowadays he gets paid about or sorry i don't know exactly what michael buffer gets paid per event but he he got to the point where let's say nineteen eighty four and he's saying let's get ready to rumble and bruce buffer who doesn't know that they are siblings he is half they're half siblings so he's watching what is it he's watching the event or something like that and he sees that this guy's last name is buffer and he goes that's cool i've never met another buffer doesn't think their brother he just thinks this guy's last name is also buffer that's cool i've never met another buffer he goes the yellow pages and he looks and there's no other buffers so he's like dude this it's crazy this guy's last name is buffer and he's driving with his dad or something like that and he asked his dad he's like yeah this guy's oh no he finds out he so he he looks into michael buffer he finds out he was he grew up in a town like i don't know half a mile away from bruce he's like dude dad how crazy is this this guy you know that guy on the boxing thing michael buffer last name buffer and he grew up you know half a mile half a mile away from us and the dad while driving just goes yeah i think that's your brother he's like what he's like yeah you know you didn't know this but before you and her mom you know they've been married fifty years before you and your mom got together you know i had another i had a son i don't know if it's him but maybe that's your brother and so they go and they find out that they are actually half brothers they share a dead so bruce then goes to michael and he says michael you're doing great but you have no like business manager i'll be your manager and he's like okay what does that mean he goes dude you you need to trademark this phrase this is your catch phrase so he applies for the trademark he gets it and then he basically says takes that trademark and he starts licensing it out merchandise you know hats shirts video games everything so he starts building this guy's brand and then later michael gets bruce into the comment they announcing game and bruce becomes the announcer for the usc so a different sport and bruce is making like on any given event if you go watch the of he's making fifty to a hundred grand for that night's work which is basically before every fight he just announces you know in this corner we have this guy from not right now now he makes a makes a hundred grand or big fights and fifty grand ish and this is like we got a caveat this is like you know when you google someone's net worth like i don't know if this is actually his number this is like the this is the it's in a bunch of articles but maybe they're all referencing the same shitty source i don't know right and he does probably three a month yeah and so you're looking at about three and a half four million dollars a year and it it says that you know his network network worth is sort of in the tens of millions whereas michael buffers and the hundreds of millions and so this sort of came to concept of creating a personal monopoly so how do you build yourself to the point where you are un unbelievable where and this is like ryan sea with american idol right but when american idol ford started there's two dudes and at this point ryan sea chris i actually go ahead well i was just gonna say ryan sea is now you know sort of synonymous with american idol it's like chris harrison with the bachelor it's jeff pope with survivor and you know these are these are post that on the surface it's like oh he just comes out here says a few lines anybody could do that no does it take any no the fans grow attached to this person and that becomes part of the brand of the event if and the consistency of seeing those same faces those same recurring cast members saying the same catch phrases is part of what makes it popular so judge judy and at this point ryan sea chris has ryan sea chris production productions yes which is a production company which frankly i've always been wondering like what does a production company actually mean like that that's one of those hollywood terms that i'm sure does confused i want to get it but it does something like north of a hundred million in revenue he produced the kardashians show keeping up with the kardashians he was the creator and producer of that show i think so it was his idea so he partly that into something i i don't exactly like i said i don't entirely understand that there's company work on the road because at the beginning of american idol there was two hosts and one guy after season one was like oh this is a hit i want more money and at that time he didn't have a personal monopoly yet he was replaceable because the show was so new and so they said no thanks we'll keep ryan ryan you could just be the lead guy now and ryan sea did it for like fifteen years and then by the end of it was sort of making out in a ten fifteen million bucks a season doing it because he waited until he became entrenched in the franchise as like the face and he became a valuable character like simon cowell and the other guy so judge judy is probably the greatest example of this so the highest paid person on tv was judge judy for a number of years she was making forty seven million dollars a year for i don't know fifty i think days of filming so she was making about nine hundred thousand dollars a day filming the show for judge judy which is she was a judge before that making a hundred thirteen thousand dollars a year and so from the commodity the skill of the job of being a judge to building your personal monopoly as the show is called judge judy she was able to turn a hundred thirteen thousand dollars a year of of of pricing power into forty seven million dollars year and then you know cvs bought the back catalog of judge judy for a hundred million dollars so she's still making royalties without working anymore so i just find this to be tremendously interesting it's something that was counterintuitive to me seems to me like all these people are replaceable but clearly the economics of hollywood show that they're not and and so i just found this to be very interesting and i also like the story of you know the long lost brothers one brother finds the other becomes his manager convince him into trademark market and that trademark is you know that building that personal monopoly of ip is what helped him build a a multi hundred million dollar franchise so i thought that was amazing so i wanna let's go down the treadmill hole i don't think we're gonna get to the interim thing but maybe we will let's put on the treadmill because i know a few people to have these personal brands maybe some people think that i have that but i i actually don't have it because i'm not nearly careful enough but you're you seem quite careful enough about your brand that you might you you have this but who comes down i know tim tim ferris i know tim ferris i know jeff butcher yep jack butcher is a great friend of mine he created this huge following off of visualize value great name all he does is he makes one picture that describes a thousand words so basically you have this complicated topic he makes one graphic day and it explains exactly how it works you would think that silly he's crushed it he probably makes two to three million dollars a year selling a course on that topic the second one tim ferris and the reason why i can't do this is because these guys are so protective in particular about their brand tim ferris i'm gonna tell i'm gonna tell tim ferris story that i we i don't wanna turn this into k clips don't want this to get popular what does tell a story so tim ferris years ago came to my office when it was when he had just i i know tim ferris because he would walk his dog we were neighbors we lived down the block from each other we would walk our dogs together like he would be at the park and i would be at the park and i wouldn't bring up business i wouldn't even act like i was a fan other than i'm saying hey pan just listened into this podcast the other day was wonderful good job anyway totally don't can you tell how the first time y'all met did you because i think when people meet somebody that they know and admired they often blow it by totally fan growing over them what was the story you were even remember like was the first interaction where became doing okay the the the funny story is i was on the way home from the hospital after getting a kidney stone and i was super high on morphine and knocked i had gotten a kidney stone and my wife sarah who was my girlfriend at time was driving me home it was eight am because i got the kidney stone at like five o'clock in the morning i was coming home eight am i see tim walking in front of my house and i was on the passenger seat right and dirty with my seat back and i was all behind shit and i see him walk by and i go hold on sara it back up hey hey tim what are you doing around here man and he goes i lived on the street i go that's cool i'm a big fan just got a kidney stone he got any tips for that and i was like oh obnoxious and then i saw him again the next day walking his dog and gotta go tim i just wanted to apologize i was under the influence but anyway i know your books big fan what's what's your dog's saying yeah that's it right and then we were just we would just talk about dogs that's all and then eventually he called emailed me months later when he goes hey i heard about the hustle it seems cool do you wanna have dinner so we could talk about it go to dinner and he goes wait a minute you're the guy with the dog i go yeah man what's going on it's me say i'm in a neighbor i didn't ever wanna bring up email a business to you because you know i don't attack yeah so it was a weird thing that we knew each other and so one day he after he invested in my company comes to the office he sees me drinking a coke zero and he goes hey man can i have one of those i go yeah dude you have man as you want let go get you one i give him one and he chunks it super fast he goes and i get one more i go yeah i got wrong two chuck them we get done with this meeting there's six of us in the office i'm in the we're in a little baby conference room which is basically a one bedroom bedroom in one of the apartments there's about six of my employees or four of them and then steve was there and it goes alright well that's a good meeting and he pushes the coke cans my way and i go what he goes you mind throwing those away for me and i go yeah yeah help come wait and i take him and he just didn't wanna be seen walking out with a diet soda can that's how particular this guy was and you know what i think it's great dig it and whenever we work with him if i write something and there's a a missed comma or something he's on top of right and at first i was like you know you're really being a pain of the butt and then i realized you know what you're not being a pin the button you are being tempe one you are being exactly how you should be you are protecting your brand you want things in a very particular way you're being demanding and i respect that and i like that and that's when i realized i don't think i could never be a personal brand because you have to guard that shit like crazy you have to be on top of it every single time it has to be it's gotta be exactly a very particular way every single time and that's how you build a really good brand you have to be on when you're on i mean i'm sorry that's the phrase i use i i i i know if i made this up or somebody told me i have no idea it was a long time ago ten years ago it's called epoch ep it stands for every point of contact it said if you wanna make a great brand you need to be congruent so you need to have something you stand for alright most people don't know what they stand for they're not clear about it it's not unique it's not compelling it's not it's not something notable but once you do that the second step is at every point in contact you have to embody that right so you can't be four hour body and be out of shape right you can't be like you know for hour work week guy and then you know you're super inefficient and you're working eighty hours a week so so you have to be con congruent at all times and that's that should be the goal as a brand is to at every point of contact that customer has with you in any any place they're getting that same they're getting that same thing that you stand for and and so that's that's like a aspirational goal of course you don't do that it's not a it's not achievable but it is a mindset to have in order to reinforce the brand many many times because people will have experiences with you right is like disney world disney world has all these things right where they're like you know there's no i forgot what all the things like there's no trash cans and there's no like you can't see the mascot ever taken a smoke break with their head off you know you can't see mickey mask smoking in a cigarette it's like no we have to be at every point of contact this place stands for joy and everything's gotta be joy right the bathrooms gotta be joy the food gotta be joy right like all these different things that's what great sort of brand owners are are are strive to do and what you and i do or at least i know i do it is i test stuff with people and so in a way we have a podcast i mean i say we're actually what see is what you get i mean we i you and i talk like this regardless if if the camera's is on or not but i do know like which jokes hit and i will test him on people right i i kinda see like oh this story i just told it caught that guy's attention i should tell it a little bit differently though and with tim and other people i've seen them repeat phrases like i don't pretend to be a doctor and i don't play one on tv right like that's just like this phrase that he uses and i guess it it kinda and yeah you're so celebrity yeah and and and these phrases that i've seen these quote famous people so a guy like tim else do i know that's like fits category jack is definitely one of them jack butcher i've told the story before on the pod but chris sa did this and it blew me away i met him in person and for those of who don't know chris saga is like one of the best investors ever top point where he's already retired he doesn't now he only invest in climate change stuff because he's like already already won the game of like money and success it's it's called post economic yeah he's post economic as ba taught us so i met him in person and he told the story as i was telling the story yet had all these little off offhand little moments where he's like he's like you know i didn't i didn't realize that that at that at the time or like he'd be like he he'd say something he'd correct himself hey blah blah well i guess no that would mean in this but blah blah oh but he used that line never month cnbc one day and he said the same fucking thing the exact same fucking way like a comedian does in their sense where a comedian if you go up there and it feels like a comedian has said this joke a million times they're bored of it then it's not funny but a comedian has to sort of like it's almost like they're realizing or telling this story for the first time that's when it really hits and so i saw him do that and i go oh there's levels to this shit like not only do you have to be able to be good at it this is like this is like comedy this is like storytelling this is like this is like a play you know a broadway show that goes on on stage every night and there's a new person in the crowd and they have to do it like it's the this is a tuesday night but no this is our open this is our best performance ever this is the first time we've ever done it this show matters the most and we repeat our lines and i thought oh wow i've never even thought about that but yeah i guess it makes sense you could kinda craft these stories that hit and you could tell them over a note once we have them that's in your bank and you could i tell this story people feel this way about me and that's cool so i'm gonna try and bring this back to the brand thing but before i do another way that you could see this is when you're pitching stuff so when you're pitching your a company to people you have to and i mean i did this well when i when both when i was selling the company if i was i'm trying to raise money if i'm ever trying to convince i've you know i do when i am on other podcast or and also when i am hiring someone i've got the same pitch and i look at the inflection of or i i i look at the person's eyebrows and i look at their body lane just see where i them to lean in and i get i see where i get it to full backwards and you gotta find these hooks and you constantly got throw them out and you gotta see what what what bait works and then you just rinse and repeat and he was like oh that line right or when i said i wanted to be like ted turner fuck i didn't know who ted turner was what else i get you exactly exactly so to bring back to judge judy i don't know how we gonna judge let's just move on anyways cool story about michael buffer and judge judy if you didn't know they made a bunch of money and you know it pays to have a personal monopoly alright that's the podcast yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a less travel never looking back like