#183 - How Course Businesses Work, How Irish Pubs as a Service is Making Millions & Profiting From Vacant Office Spaces

that alone is kind of like to your point here where if you're a creator with an audience with credibility if you've done something if you're actually good at a skill yeah you can get to a million dollars a year of profit not just revenue doing it as an individual course creator yes and the path is quite straightforward you the tactics are are simple but it's basically yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i going to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never look back alright everyone what's happening we have a good episode but before we get to it please do me a favor click the subscribe button on itunes and the follow button on spotify last week we got a ton more spotify listens because they're doing something i think there's like a pop up right now that shows to people when you listen to podcast podcasts and ask if you wanna follow and anyway i wanna see if that's working so go ahead and click follow and spotify and then click subscribe on itunes and the reason why is the more you click that the higher we go up the rankings higher we go open the rankings and more listens we get the more listens we get the more shit that we can do so do that now in this episode we're gonna talk about course businesses the course business is something that a lot of people are interested in i think it's one of the easiest ways to make million dollars a year but we're also gonna can talk about how companies are making a hundred million dollars a year doing it so go ahead and give us a listen we're gonna talk all about the course businesses it's gonna start in just a second and make sure to click subscribe click follow and we'll talk you soon we got a lot of cool stuff going on but how are you doing i'm good i'm just still recovering from your sick byrne about my sweatshirt they'll see on video it's it's it's not that it's bad it's just that it would've have been a lot better if you wore as like a nine year old in nineteen ninety four i look like a skateboard who got his birthday present yeah bad you know a twelve year old skateboard order who got his birthday present and then a bra you clap back at sam and told him he looks like a night who's wearing the like chain link stuff that goes under your armor you look like the extra from the this disney movie break okay i have not seen that but you you look like a nineties disney movie extra dude i wish that would be an upgrade from my reality have you do you read books i can't tell if this is another burn well transition to a real question i mean i read books do you know to read yeah read books you how many books do you read i'm not this is like real how much do you bench press i read like i'm reading like a book all the time like i i have one book that's going at any given time probably read i don't know three four a year do you when you're reading it do you feel like you absorb it yeah i intentionally read slow and i reread and i take notes so that's what i'm doing now instead of like you know how like do you know who ryan holiday is i know about it yeah i love brian he's cool but he reads like five books a week and that's popular that people will say like to their new year's resolution i'm gonna read fifty books this year right and i'm like damn that's hard just to do but like do you learn anything and right what i'm trying to do now is only read two or three books a year but i'm i'm like quiz myself i'm trying to master it and it's been really hard so what i do is i get a bunch of books like i'll buy a book every three days probably i if anything looks interesting i have a unlimited book budget for myself and i've had this for a long time where i just decided okay i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna have a budget i do the same thing by the way it's and so i've just instantly buy it on my phone i use the kindle app on my phone to read i have a kindle i have physical books sometimes but i'm all the phone is always with me so i like that better i end up reading more there and what i do is i will i'll read like five percent of fifty books in a year right like i will just pick up a book i'll start skimming through it and i just assume that most books are bad and so i i i'm very i i do not complete ninety five percent of the books that i that that i start and i think that's totally okay the book has to actually like be interesting or grab me or say something interesting for me to try to finish it but then once i do read a book that i like i will reread that book multiple times over the years like i'll reread the book two years same i i do the same thing i use as a reference book and i reread it at two times i wanna ask you so today i wanna talk to you about course businesses and i went out a rabbit hole and i called someone rep for the podcast in order to get intel and get insights it looks like you have a ton of ideas bike can we start with something really easy which is you got into an argument with someone on twitter that's what you have listed here and i am you you you alluded to it a week ago what happened i don't know what you're talking about okay so alright i wanna try to do this without getting without restarting the fight i tweeted out that i said you know i don't even know what i said exactly i basically said elon musk and jake paul have yes i i said i said elon musk you know sells cars and launches rockets and raise money and does all the stuff and the you know tesla never runs a commercial jake paul is like does the same he's gonna sell millions of dollars of paper views for this boxing match he is coming up without a commercial and i said the best marketers don't spend a dime right just kinda like an observation it's not like jeez and also all like a cute sound bite tweet yeah it's just a sound bite obviously many marketers spend money and they're great at it and it's a smart thing i i do i spend money when i advertise too it's great so that's not really the point the point was some people are able to hijack people's attention in the news and have done very well with it right so i tweet that out it doesn't even seem like that controversial of a statement to me move on with my life and then a few people start comment a bunch of people were like yeah true blah blah blah and then a couple people comment like you know yeah but jake paul's an asshole okay fair enough it doesn't matter to me and then one person who's a writer for the new york times basically says i can't believe you i can pull up the tweet i should pull up the tweet because this is gonna be stupid if i and while you're doing that the person you're talking about her name is taylor the ren she works for the new york times a lot of people in the tech world and a lot of people in general really dislike her and i'm i i actually what's the objective here a lot of people really love her so we don't always wanna go to the they can sure that but sure okay so i i have my stuff in front me and by the way i i don't have her tweet because she now has blocked me but that's that's the end of the story alright so i said elon is pumping dough coin on saturday live while the paul brothers are raking in tens of millions just by stealing floyd mate where there's hat while the camera is on the greatest marketers done spend a dime by the way did you see the hat thing that gotcha you hat so funny yeah so funny okay so if you haven't seen it jake paul's older brother logan is scheduled to flight floyd may weather logan paul a youtuber floyd may weather probably the great greatest box forever it's not even gonna be close it's not even a it's not even a my like a real contest it's like two thousand and one odds it's like a celebrity death match you have two celebrities it's agreeing to go punch each other but like one of them is actually a professional punch yeah and and so anyways but they have to sell the fight so in the press conference you know they have to pretend like oh i'm talking trash like i'm gonna beat you and you're talking trash like you're gonna beat me anyways jake paul stole the show that this wasn't trending very well because it's so one side not a lot of people wanted to go buy this because there's not much trick of what's gonna happen the only people wanna buy it are just people who wanna see a bit of a circus and so jake paul goes up to floyd with her and they're talking shit and like you know i could beat you if you could beat me up and then jake goes gotcha hat and then just took his hat and ran away like an absolute third grader on the playground funny as hell of course you know to to ham it up for tries to go fight him because he took his hat and then there's like you know seventy people all holding their camera phones up recording the thing and it just show just the shit yeah so that that went viral that goes that gets on every you know blog and that goes viral on social media some people think it's stupid some people think it's whatever it doesn't matter what your opinion is they got a bunch of attention from it so that's all i was pointing out and in fact jake paul then triple down on it which was he he did the gotcha hat thing it goes viral on social media while it's going viral he has his merch guy create gotcha hat hats puts it up out his store sells out of gotcha hats gotcha hat hats and then he gets a tattoo on his leg that says gotcha hat and post that that goes viral that jake paul got a tattoo of the thing that just happened so he got a a double pump a second pump of news p out of it i was just pointing out that these guys are good at marketing they're good at marketing themselves they're self promoter by definition you really can't disagree that the paul brothers are not good self promoter they self promoted themselves huge anyways bunch of people say yes and that a couple of people are like you know these are prank they shouldn't be labeled as great marketers don't set them up as anything to be emulate basically like don't say they're good because people lot what they were saying was like people follow you well they they were basically saying well sean they're bad people and you're like yeah i don't care that's at the point they they could be the worst person on earth i'm just saying i'm just showing that they get eyeballs yeah they're effective at marketing that's all i said it's like saying like a like a cigarette company can be a great marketer who cares if you think cigarette is good or bad and so this writer for the new times basically takes us as an opportunity to come in and promote her own article in the new york times that says i covered the story about the sexual assault allegations against him so you you know you really basically i i don't know exactly she because again she blocked and i can't go read it but it said something to the effect of like it's messed up to to promote them or say something pop like to be saying that they're good or whatever when they're actually jerks they're bad guys are assholes they're whatever say this guy's been accused of sexual assault so i kind of i don't even remember what i said back but i kinda went back at forth and i was just saying what you just said i am not saying that they're good humans i'm not saying they're great citizens i didn't say they should be president i said they're good at marketing i don't really see how that's ar and then you know they clap back again and said you know basically you're a jerk for saying that he's good and and so a couple things happen first is dude i i like r kelly could be a great singer and also a horrible he be yes and so so one of them was like you know is there really anything to learn from these guys blah blah blah and so anyways they're going back and forth and i'm i'm getting agitated at this point and so the york times writer she goes she said something that was like again just like trying to like vi signal and i just replied i go she was she said something like i don't think he i don't think he knows the point he's i don't think he he's making the point he thinks he's making talking like replying to me talking about me but as if i'm like not in the room anyways i thought that was like a weird way of saying it and so i just go you are the jake paul of journalism oh my gosh got blocked instantly and you know bunch people or were that got a big reaction out of people now i thought this was the perfect kill shot why because that's not an insult to me i'm so first of all it's true her brand of self promoting herself as a journalist is confrontation she gets some confrontations with keith boy with biology with with whoever right she just goes and picks fights on twitter with mark andre and so she she goes to the biggest names she creates controversy picks fights and then she also like then as soon as they sort of a attack back then she turns that into a story which is big bad tech is bullying me and so i was just pointing out that actually her form of self promotion is the same as jake paul's he went to floyd may weather agitated him pick got got hat and used that con controversy in that confrontation to build his own brand so i was a correct in the way and identifying her own playbook of self promotion b it's not an insult to me again i have no problem with jake paul jake paul came on the podcast you know i i think this guy's a good marketer or i i think that i i don't take such a black and white look at people and say that this person is good and this person is evil and this person is you know like i just don't think that the world is that black or white and so anyways i wasn't trying to answer her but she took it as an insult of course because that's why it was the perfect one liner i was able told without even consulting digger and so so anyways that was the confrontation and then yeah i got you know a bunch of d from people and then you know people my company were like hey can you not like pick fights with journalists and i was like okay i'm sorry i really wasn't trying to pick a fight with the journalist initially oh that's pretty funny yeah well that's a good story i by the way i still have no problem with her i actually think she's a really effective marketer of herself too like i know her name i don't know anyone any other tech journalist name i genuinely think she does a very good job at promoting herself by covering interesting and controversial topics like she cut she was covering tiktok early on and then also her brand of sort of like taking it to the you know powerful people in tech i view it as an effective form marketing i also think she's good at it so it's i really have no ill will but i did think it was a cool online i think it's a pretty good one liner i didn't i unfold like everyone on twitter i've been spending less time on it is makes me angry but i wish i would have seen that because that's pretty wonderful by the way by the way this was the best part all the white knights do know what white knight is yeah so for those white knight is like sort of a i how would you describe it like someone who like they don't they don't necessarily care about the topic they're just trying to act they're saving the day so the girl likes them yeah it's basically dudes online who come to the rescue of women to vi signal how they are you know such they're are the good noble supporters of of good and evil or whatever so anyways there's a bunch of white knights that were in the thread that were like yeah sean i can't believe you did this can't believe you would give someone this platform first of all jake paul hasn't fifty times bigger platform than me second of all yeah i i that's my that is my platform i point out things that are interesting or you know i point out truths i'm not like trying to tow the politically correct line and then i go to this guy's twitter i go to his twitter the second re tweet is conor mcgregor has sold this many millions of dollars of whiskey he's promoting it guess who also has a bunch of sexual assault allegations against them right now conor mcgregor so he was allowed to promote that conor mcgregor out i called him out i go dude i like you we've we've we've been friendly before but what a hip look at your own timeline dude you're saying this guy's greg business he goes honestly i just didn't i didn't know that about connor and so it's blah blah blah blah and then a bunch of people were eye rolling like oh you didn't know good yeah okay cool like love that everyone knows it like i like punched an older guy in the bar like it this has been on the news so yeah yeah you you thought conor mcgregor was sort of you know goody shoes yeah right like these guy's bid in in the news he's been in jail he's been done all this stuff and so i just thought that that was the the classic hypocrisy of of people on twitter well well i i didn't see it i'm happy i know the story i'm and i'm what i i love that you do that i think that is great and i think you should continue to do it hopefully you won't you not do that because you're were ass not too but we'll see do you wanna talk about the course business because i actually i didn't get into it but i i i saw a company and i that i think is kinda silly for what they're trying to disguise themselves as but i actually think it's good for what re really is and i wanna bring it but i went did a ton of research and i know that you're interested in courses as yeah okay yeah i'm i'm fully teased i go for it what is it that's the company okay so today the for this little segment let's talk about the course because the education business whatever i broke it down with four different categories but there's this company called i don't know if it's called on deck or on deck bond deck it yeah it's called on deck the u the url is b beyond deck dot com it's actually really confusing what they advertised themselves as if you go to b on deck dot com frankly i didn't know what it was i i didn't understand it i did some research i think i understand it now and the way that i see it is it's a course business so basically you pay i don't even know the price actually is it like five hundred dollars it's like hundreds of dollars i believe and you sign it's over a thousand dollars so over a thousand dollars is it under two grand yeah i think it ranges between one and two grand something like that one two maybe one and three one in three grand and you sign up to a cohort based class meaning there's a start in an end and they've have got like fifteen different classes probably at this point maybe gotta stop you these aren't it's not a class why why are you saying it's a class yeah that's what it is you you can call there's no teacher there's no okay so if here's how here here's here's how i would describe it so so we you you know eric thorn right he's i don't know oh you don't know okay eric's good guy he's he was early on at product on he left and he's created a bunch of things since then one of which was on deck so the way he thinks about on deck and the way he talks about it is on deck is basically like a modern day business school so why do people go to business school people go to business school because they wanna build a a network they wanna maybe learn about business and they're looking to kinda like pivot their career in a different direction right they were doing one job wanna go to the next shop they don't know what it is they wanna change industries change roles change whatever change careers so business schools this great pivot point to do that so what on deck did was they sort of made an un bundled and digital version of that actually should not have a digital there's a lot of in person components to it so what it is is you let's say they have a bunch of different tracks but let's say you wanna go into let's say you wanna become an angel investor and you're not an angel investor today so on deck is your pivot to do that you apply to join you say great i'll pay the fifteen hundred dollars to go to on back angels program and yes there is some education they bring in speakers who are angel investors they'll talk about angel investing that sort of thing but it's basically a x week program for you to you know go from where you are now to that track that you wanna be on and it can be with angel investors it's a little bit more like a course what you're talking about which is you're gonna learn about a thing and then by the end of you can do it but they the it started with just people who were on deck to build their next company i was like you don't know what you're gonna do next why don't you join a group of other people who are also thinking about their next opportunities maybe they have a great idea you could join their team maybe you could find a c cofounder and and do this here and it was just people who were looking to make a change and and you would pay to basically in hint to to join this to get a good network so the network is all kind of like other kinda like it's just like if you go to harvard you're getting other people who have a certain caliber of of of person who's gonna go on to do a certain caliber of things and you pay to go be a part of like an eight week program or whatever to go do that yeah that sounds like a class to me an eight week program where you're learning and you know it's just a lot less about the learning content side and it's a lot more about the network that you built then in that case i would say the likelihood that they're gonna be quite huge i think is actually lower it would actually be better they were a course business because the problem with that is they either have to raise prices to be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of the dollars a year or they're gonna have to decrease the standards of who they let in and keep the price low and thus ruin their network so so let's talk about some of the programs that they have so they have on deck founders that's i wanna go start a company they have on deck first fifty which is i wanna become i'm a talented operator i wanna go join early stage company in the first fifty employees that's gonna that's gonna be the next airbnb the next whatever right there's on deck investors where you learn about angel investing there's on deck podcast where it's like if you wanna start and kind of grow podcast podcasts join a batch of other people who wanna join to start a podcast listen to speakers who are existing successful podcast and by the end of it you'll have like built up some momentum of now going down this new path that you weren't on before so let's just say who cares about on death because it got me thinking about the course business i think it's a course business you say it's that it doesn't really matter what it this because that is what got me interested in the course business and the problem with the course business is when we say the course business oftentimes people won't categorize anything that's even remotely related to course into the same category and that's actually fault that's not that's not how it should be and so what i wanna talk about is the four categories and let's talk about what why each one is interesting and so i'll just briefly list what those are so the first one is basically one person or a small ish company making a handful of courses that's like our friend jack butcher right that's like ram seth our good friend my good friend ram seth this and we're gonna i'll go back and we'll actually talk about what makes that what it is the second r platform so things like u me things like teach teachable a lot of people say this is the course business that's out of course business that's a tech company that makes technology so people so can create and sell courses i'm not even gonna talk about that because that's a totally different category even though people do sometimes refer to it like this category or and with courses the third one is the master classes of the world these are another example is this company called the great courses these are businesses that create hundreds eventually of different courses and they go and sell to consumers for a hundred bucks to two hundred dollars three hundred dollars a year and the fourth one is b2b to b companies that sell education to company and so the company like that is plural site which sold for three billion dollars and does something like five hundred million dollars in revenue there's a there's a a a few other there's cor sarah there's there there's actually a handful of them that i didn't know about but in researching there's a handful that do three hundred to six hundred million dollars here in sales multi billion dollar business now i wanna go through each one and explain what makes them tick or at least one i think makes them tick and and i in order to do this i went and talk to my friend ryan diets ryan d runs a thing called digital marketer dot com and he he's been in the game for twenty plus years and we kind talk through this so the first category is these like single person traders i think you're like that i'm not like that at the moment i could probably easily become that and i i enjoy that and i actually think that the path to making a million dollars a year this way is incredibly straightforward and it's a very high likelihood in term all all relative to starting a business but it's like a really high likelihood of making like a million bucks a year it's very high likelihood that you can make two hundred thousand dollars a year and so these are companies like i will teach you to be rich doc is that what's called i will teach you b rich dot com it's what you've done what what was your news newsletter call the all access pass that wasn't quite a course like it's it's what i announced i don't know you saw this i tweeted it out that i was doing a course yeah makes sense and i said hey i'm gonna do a course on power writing basically like writing for the real world and i just tweeted out like would you be interested here's what this has helped this skill has helped me it's helped help me get jobs it's helped me you know get investment it's helped help me grow my companies help me make money so writing in the real world emails tweets blogs ads landing pages that type of writing you know going from good to great is a big difference would you wanna learn this i said it cost four hundred bucks for for the first batch of people whoever's like kind of the the guinea pigs let me know if you'd wanna do this and i got i think on in a twelve hundred replies of people filling out the survey saying they wanna do this and so yeah just that alone is kind of like to your point here where if you're a creator with an audience with credibility if you've done something if you're actually good at a skill yeah you can get to a million dollars a year of profit not just revenue doing an as an individual course creator yes and the path is quite straightforward the tactics are are simple but it's basically build an audience that's all has or most part that mostly has yeah but even that there's a process to that i mean it does it's not it's not easy but it's simple but you build up an audience where people rally around one type of thing and then you eventually create something that cost one hundred dollars all the way up to thousands of dollars and you sell it my good friend one of my best friends neville has done this with copywriting he probably i don't know what he makes but i if you said a million dollars a year i would think that sounds about right there's jack butcher like we said my wife sarah is actually launching one sean has one i've launched one at the hustle before but it's not live now but it was and it's pretty interesting it's it's the easiest path probably to make a million bucks a year i actually think and the way that you scale it it's really hard though here's the downside it's pretty hard i think to get past ten million dollars a year in revenue on that rapid like that should be the goal necessarily but like it definitely caps out relatively low but you could if you as long as you own basis on your personality it's a pretty good business that you could sell at like private equity or something like that for a bunch of money and after you've created the course you then create a consulting or coaching service that cost ten thousand plus a year and you could potentially have like a pretty good ten million to twenty million dollar your company i like that i i'll give you an example my uncle does this he's in real estate he's himself has like i don't know a two hundred something million dollar real estate portfolio so he created a basically how to get into multi how to do multi family apartment investing and he creates a course the course i think is like five grand he sells a bunch of those and then out of that some people pay them twenty five grand for like the more one on one in up coaching because they're like going at it and for them it's not hard to justify five or even twenty five thousand dollars because the economics of even a single apartment building that they're buying or are such that that's that's what's you're what education hip uncle oh which uncle my my uncle i mean you don't know you wanna you wanna you wanna pick him mouth though i'm i'm trying to oh i don't even know what his course call he's my he's my uncle vin i we should have him on he's got a kind of incredible story and his personality is amazing he's the most joyful person i've ever known almost to the point where people think he's like are you high or something and he but he's just like that twenty four seventies high on life twenty four seven it's kind of amazing so uncle vin is a great example there there there's a good one of example of this now the second one that i mentioned is like these master class businesses these companies there's a a pretty clear path to get to like a hundred million dollars a year in sales and what you do is you create something that is in the three two hundred three hundred dollar range for an annual subscription and you scale fast by buying a lot of ads but before you do that you have to create a a pretty big library of course content which can take many years so i know quite a bit about master class do you want me to give you of like some of the interesting bits so masterclass they started by a guy went to harvard business school i believe and then he you know one of the core insights was he wanted to create the what he said this the library of alexandra for alexandra or alexandra basically whatever the library was of like kind of like all the best of human knowledge at that time he basically was like i wanna create that of today's time and so he they spend upwards of half a million dollars per master just on the production value loan even their first one was over five hundred dollars and so the production value is like kind of insane soup it's like a hollywood shoot that they do personally i don't even know if that's necessary i think that's that's that's totally overkill but that's their state the bigger part was that they got the biggest brand name so they go if you wanna learn business well here's howard schultz from the ceo of starbucks you wanna learn basketball steph curry masterclass you wanna learn comedy here here's steve martin you wanna learn i don't know writing here's aaron so and so they took the the a plus plus talent which is a key differentiator right because most of these online courses are like you said it's me it's ram remit safety it's like these like niche you know i'll just make fun of myself here right i were nobody's in the in the world compared to compared to what master class went did and the mask was like great i can take you know chef gordon ramsay cooking course i can create a hype thirty second trailer and i can blast that on facebook ads and basically gordon ramsay has enough brand pull that i can profit acquire customers and so they do this with a bunch of create a bunch of different course creators serena williams whoever else they cut a rev share deal with so they give them an upfront kinda like minimum guarantee and then they have like a rev share on every course sold you know you get x and then they turned it into like a class pass subscription where now you pay the fifteen bucks a month you get access to all of master class and i actually talked to the founder the ceo and i was like he's a great guy and i was like you know do people i took one and you know but like do people does does a person really wanna go learn cooking from gordon ramsay and then basketball from this person then tennis from serena williams like it seems like do i need the all you can eat buffet and like do i come back is the retention high and he just showed me the numbers he was like look we're making x hundreds of millions of dollars a year it's growing at this pace and look at the churn the churn not so bad i say how how do you keep the churn so low like for an education product like this and he goes when people take a masterclass class it's they keep their subscription even if they're not coming back and taking a course every month why because it's aspirational they they have a dream of like learning photography they want that hobby to to exist they buy the master class and if they have one experience where they feel like their hero or their idol kinda shared to like a real nugget of wisdom with them that's enough to keep them hooked so i thought that was pretty interesting and that's the thing that we should discuss that's the downside of this business as well as every other category that i'm mentioning is is this freaks people out i wouldn't even say it's retention but it's completion so our our good friend nick vancouver hoover launched course and he goes do two hundred people bought you know how many people finished and did the whole thing he was like i i the number is if it's not this exact number it's close he's like three or something in yeah it was like who's was like nothing and i was like yeah man that's really normal well he was being he was like he was legit he was like dude did i make a shitty course was like no this is the this is the standard percentage completion if you go to u i remember with you there i think they had said at one point in time six percent of people complete the course six percent right hundred students come in imagine on the last day of this semester extra six people are left in the class and so you know for nick this is pretty much in line with like this single digit completion rates that was a big problem with education on that and if that sucks and actually i would say two things one for people getting this business just know that most it's so weird that you're gonna make all this money and you're crushing it most people don't even use the damn thing and by the way they're not pissed it's not that they used it because they didn't like the product often it's just life happen they got busy they didn't follow through they if they're upset at anyone they're upset at themselves for not actually taking the full action on the course they're not upset with the course yeah which just or two the second thing here is like is that even important is this even a problem worth solving and the answer i actually think unfortunately is no this is not a problem we're solving people aren't gonna take it that is just how people are and we should move on and just make money off of it because just the fact that they buy that's interesting and that kinda helps them in a weird way so just like you with books just like you would books it's like me with the books yes that's true but i would disagree in that i do think it's the fight worth fighting for because if people aren't actually taking the courts ultimately they didn't get the real value of the product which means they're not gonna come back they're not gonna tell friends to do it which means your business is gonna suffer so can it be done can you get above six percent ten percent can you can you get thirty forty fifty percent dude even that sounds fucking crazy to me i've asked people who charge five thousand dollars per course they said under thirty percent is still what they get as a completion rate it's insane because that's such a big financial commitment for people individually not out of their company's pocket out of their own pocket just to spend that money and not complete is insane to me but that's what happens now i will say though but when we had cohort classes is like a live cohort class the it was like seventy five percent completion exactly that's exactly what i was about to say lambda school switched to live cohort based and with a a clear like sort of high bar for entry so lambda will most courses right when cooper were me myself when you sell a course you want pretty much as many people as you can to take the course that's how you make your money right you're like a college you wanna admit as many people as you can unless you're the top college where your brand is really about not accepting everybody and so similarly with lambda school because lambda school doesn't get paid until you get a job their incentive was not to let any joe sc in there were incentive was dude we only want a student if they're if we think they're actually gonna finish of course if they're serious about it and so because of the filter on the front end plus the format being live and in a peer group they had like seventy five percent plus completion rates and then i invested in this company m for the same reason because they were saying hey we're gonna make it easy for you to teach a cohort based course that was appealing to me because i was like so far cohort based courses is the only thing i've seen where people actually finished the course so we'll see so but that is something it when we're going through this process we or this discussion we have to acknowledge it's that like most people don't buy your stuff won't yeah and if you're doing really well like what did you say seventy percent yeah do it so it's like kind of crazy that that's a pretty nutty nutty thing now to to wrap up the master i don't i to call this like nas consumerism course this category i don't know like linda dot com would also be in this at the time now linda more b but when linda started it was a place to go learn anything right and and so linda dot com masterclass class there's a bunch of masterclass class four x so it's like there's a master but instead of steph curry and gordon ramsay it's famous youtubers and they're called monthly i think monthly dot com they're trying to do the same thing as masterclass class but their stars are social media stars and i think they were doing actually pretty well there's another one that's masterclass class for athletes it's like okay we're just gonna take the vertical of of sports and it was you know started by that's sounds neat shit i just talked to him earlier other this would be a perfect shout out for him i i apologize that i i don't have it off top of it my hand but but basically he he was he's a trainer he's a trainer for ky irving he's a trainer for a bunch of nba stars and so he's able to carmel anthony so he was able to say hey mel create a create your course hey ky create your course etcetera and and so he's able to access top flight stars in basketball because he himself is a is a basketball trainer and create a master just of that group just for that audience which i thought was actually pretty interesting model eight was the name ida ad robin no i'll find the let me ask ben real quick but yeah go on i'll get the name so anyway the in order to make that style of business work what you have to do is create a mostly evergreen course content and the name of the game is get like it basically as many as possible that meet some type of quality bar right and you just go big and try to create hundreds of them or thousands of them how do can you what the the great courses is one example i think they do like hundred and fifty million dollars a year in revenue i don't know what master classes is but i bet they're at two hundred to three hundred ish yep alright and in the fourth or the third cat so i i had three categories i have like the small trader i had tech stuff but we're gonna get rid of the tech thing like you to me solo solo teacher platform like u to me and cor sarah and then you had high end you know a library of of courses like masterclass what else now here's the fourth one and most interesting one which is b to b education corporate training type of stuff easily the biggest one hands down now an example of this is plural site have you heard a plural site i've heard of but i could i've heard the name for but i couldn't have told you what it did until this beautiful lovely name it steered specifically towards engineers and it just teaches like the latest and greatest tech stuff that you you give to your engineers and and they go through this and plural site is one of them there's actually a bunch of more a bunch more and they there's many of them that do three hundred four hundred five hundred million dollars year in revenue and you but this is where it gets kinda shitty these businesses are based on one thing salesman shit so you just hire a fat sales team and you go out to these companies and you sell and i went and ask the people at hubspot i go why do you guys buy this stuff and they actually told me all about it and they're like well basically we're ranked really high in glass door and we recruit a ton of people and one perk that we have is that we give you five thousand dollars a year for education now and we could have bought plural site but and that would have actually solved the same thing which is we wanna be the best way ways to work we offer loads of perks like we'll teach you x y and z another example of why these courses are important is something like cisco or microsoft have test and exams that they want you to pass certifications that that they want you to pass in order to either get a promotion or just just put it on your resume if you have this interesting thing plural site teaches you how to succeed at those at those what am i saying at those sort certifications and they charge something like six hundred dollars a year per head and you just got hire a sales team with the you get each salesperson like a three hundred thousand dollar five hundred thousand dollar quota and you go here's the yellow pages start dialing and and that's why in the plural side's based in utah because the mormons are like some amazing salespeople because they've been they haven't to spent two year selling a religion of people so they're really good at it but this business is probably the biggest but i oddly it's really not so much about the it's not about education it's not about education it's about salesman shit and the way that you win this is you you you go down a very narrow knit niche you hire subject matter matter experts so people who know their stuff you pay them a flat fee sometimes royalty but you prefer to do a flat fee because your gross margins will be really really a lot bigger and then you go very niche you go very role specific and then you go and you sell into the hr and then learning it or learning and development budgets at large companies which sucks because those are typically the budgets that are slashed first but they're there and they have to get spent and so pretty much it's a game about getting inside with these people and selling to them kinda lame but there's money to be made yeah i wonder if somebody could do so so that's the way that most corporate software was sold too until slack and some others started this like bottoms up sales process inside companies where they been how it's sold though it isn't easy but there's so bottoms up saas became its own category where the model was you make your software useful to even if the whole company doesn't adopt it you let an individual person kind of in the front lines with middle ranks of a company using it they use it with their team they're kinda like their sub team other sub team teams start using it and then you go to the cio you have a meeting with them and you say hey by the way you know a bunch of a bunch of your employees are using this thing you need to buy the like the enterprise version so that you have like security stuff like secured you have oversight over what's going on and that anybody in your company can get access to this right now it's everybody's putting down their own card and trying to make this happen and so that became a pretty popular model yammer was one of the first to do it then slack and others i wonder this would be the only way i would wanna it if i was an entrepreneur going this space because i wouldn't really wanna do the enterprise sales path where it's not really about the content it's just about the sales you know how good you are at sales as a company because if you go bottoms up you're really going off of making stuff that individual employees actually want to learn from and then secondly you're only as good as as them sort of retaining or actually wanting to use this so i think that's a healthy thing in the end although it is harder actually than the other path so i i wonder if there's a way to do that the hard part here is just like there's six percent completion rate for hobby trying to learn i think similarly you know for example i know that when when the learning and development team sends out an email at twitch i asked my team i said hey do you guys do any of these courses that there's bunch of free stuff available here they pay for it you could just go take it like could help you and they're like yeah that's a good idea but like i just don't have the time like everybody feels overworked so the amount of time and employee is gonna carve out to just do optional education is so low that i just think that most of the things that live in the what's it called the learning manager whatever like the lms learning management system inside companies is untouched right it's just twin sitting on a shelf so that's exactly another that or that's another thing so not only is it about salesman shit but basically these courses the truth is it's not actually about teaching your workers something good it's about offering it and if they use it fine but the fact that you offer it it makes me look better and you could hire more people as i don't own my company anymore but when i did i would never bought the shit i would been like if you wanna take something we'll buy you any book you want i'm not i'm but we're not paying for these stupid courses because nobody's one's gonna use them but that's not how a big company thinks because they want me to put it on their perks and benefits and here we are but that is my my very high level summary of this course business i was very curious as to how they were if i was well i am i'm not gonna launch anything the same time soon but the first one the creator one that's a that's a no brainer it's a no brainer once you have an audience right that's the if if you don't have an audience it's not really gonna work it's then than you're more in one of the other buckets but i think you correctly identified if you have an audience it's a no brainer business model for people with audiences but it also has a cap and it takes up time so you gotta like you know choose accordingly alright let's talk about some other ideas i have one that i saw today that i think is pretty interesting so it's called the irish pub company did you see this tweet no so we got tagged this which is by the way that's the best signal that we're doing something right is now people just tag us and shit that they know is the type of stuff we wanna talk about like we've built the brand of like when you hear about a cool niche business that's crushing it that's like so simple and you've you you would have otherwise just never heard of this it's like this is perfect for my first million so somebody tagged us this is awesome our friend chris chris jay bach this is like handle i don't know if it's back or bak i don't know how you say it thinks back he tweeted this out so so shout to chris he was on the podcast a while back he's a super entertaining guy on twitter you should follow him so one of the things he said is he said irish pub company is one of my favorite companies they charge one to four million dollars for a irish bar in a box which basically means it's an irish bar as a service so here here's how it works they give you you know like they have like six styles to choose from a which style of irish bar and they give you like the guinness signs the the right bar tap handles you know they're kinda like all the d decor the seats the the the stuff like that and they they ship it all to you and they install it for you and like bang now you have an irish pub and i think this is such an amazing business so they've done over two thousand kits and it's about one million to four million dollars per kit according to him so i haven't this this happened like two minutes worth the bonds i didn't research too much more but that's over thirty years that's two billion dollars over thirty years that this company is generated just selling the irish bar in a box and and what they say if you go to their website is like you know hey like the here's the stats right like the irish pubs produce you know x more revenue than a a traditional bar and has this much more foot traffic and basically it's saying hey if you if you throw this kit onto a generic bar your bar is more successful it'll pay itself back what do you think of this business so the owner's name is mel mc which is like the perfect perfect got he's the founder of irish pub company is the creator of the guinness irish pub concept so he launched this in partnership with guinness brewery brewing which is basically i'm just reading me about paige sounds to me like dennis was like hey winning need more iris pubs to exist in this world okay so we could sell more ira iris spear and get spear can someone come and help us figure this out and that's what he partnered with or that's how we started this awesome awesome awesome this is so cool i love this right it's crazy the the they're making i mean i think it's just looking at the numbers if if this if these numbers on their website are accurate i think they're doing like fifty million dollars plus a year doing this just like the consulting the brand identity than the like instant the shipping and the installation and then the service after that it's pretty pretty awesome how does this guy they do it inside airports they do it and you know just different cities hotels different stuff like that how did your buddy find this i have no idea he just tweeted it out so it's great i don't know i think this is such a cool concept and then you can think about like okay how many more concepts are there like this right so like i've i can think of if you take any sort of like sub genre the question is is there a market for that so i'll give you let's just brainstorm for a second right well there's what what what a great example that you brought a long time or a year ago that i think is probably killing it and that was bathroom in a box yes made was made renovations yes all they do you select one of five different bathrooms and they come and make it you can obviously do this for every single room in the home and then we we talked about the guys who came and set up our video conferencing setup up the you know this good looking setup that we have right now with the lighting the audio the dslr camera have the the whole tech is set up the wires or you know taped to my table so i don't have a wire i told the guys i said hey you need to turn this into home home video conferencing home studio in a box right you could you could do just like the bathroom guys did you could do this in every city in america right now especially with remote with podcast and twitch streamers and youtubers a lot of people want a cool video setup up and if you just have four to choose from on your menu now you have simple operations you have scale as you buy parts and bulk that sort of thing so i think that's another version of this but just in the bar concept i think that there's a few more so i think that any brand with licensed ip so like okay you can't like you could you do but could you do this for basically disney could you do a disney diner right so you take ip that people love and you create a bar restaurant out of it right so like sort of rainforest cafe style and you just sell that as a in a box concept for any common thing coffee shops diners pubs through the role what aren't you confusing this whatever this in a box concept is compared to franchises so it's not french so this the idea would be you would partner with let's say i don't know let's call it the simpsons you partner with the simpsons franchise and you say hey look for every one of these wouldn't it be great if you could have you know i forgot what the bar called in the simpsons but like whatever the you know wherever moe works or whatever yeah or do patty pub you go yeah if you go to all sunny and you could basically have patti pub in a box and every city should have a patti pub and whatever and so you go and you say every one of these we sell you guys get ten you gotta do nothing more than let us use the name patti pub and you know the the the same items we're gonna source and now you good bars and you say hey look you as a generic bar you're only pull you have no like differentiation of why tourists should come here why the locals should choose you can you upgrade and so i think that there's a bunch of different concepts that would work with this so i think one is gaming gamers have like a deep passion and and so there's been i i i lived in denver and there were some bars like this where it was like the bar had like some old school retro arcade machines all the drinks and menus looked you know like video like you know old nintendo stuff and then they had like you know life size drink or whatever right but it was a place to go hang out you could place ski ball you could do whatever and they just got way more foot traffic than a normal one why because this one you would go to and you would have instagram worthy experiences right you would post in your story that you're drinking you know the mario drink while playing whatever duck hunt or ski ball or whatever it is and so i think gaming is one niche that's like an irish pub that you could show that hey if you if you get your bar out with this you're gonna get more foot traffic and more sales i would need to think about which which of these could work but does whatever this in a box thing it's kind of interesting i had a friend that did book in a box and they would write a book for you i think it was making eight figures in revenue but it sounded like a real pain in the ass because it was it was far too customizable to be in a box whereas a pub thing probably isn't it that's way easier that's like said like you got running water you got you know this many dimensions or this is basically just is set like as one interior decoration like theme that you just slap on and boom you got an irish pub now you don't you had a pub now you got an irish pub and so i just wonder you know a could you just compete with them or b are there other themes that are even if they're not as popular as an irish pub like what's the second most popular kinda of like is it german is it you know an asian style is it a russian drinking bar is don't know i don't know be like it tequila bar is it a you know what what is it that that is it an italian wine bar i don't know i i i don't know you're asking a non drinker i'm i'm out of the loop on this one i do have a different idea what's that that i think is kind of interesting to chat about so clear ice have you heard of clear ice what is it this to me feels like if you're i'll find you the url do go to clear ice dot life so clear ice dot life so this is not something i would do but i learned that these things that i just shake my head and like who the fuck wants to do this i learned like the hard way that like three years later it's like yeah this is like a this is like a hobby that a lot of people have that's like growing like crazy so here's other examples of this you know like sodas stream i think you probably do sodas stream right dude i have a video on tiktok one of the only videos i've ever posted it's got like two hundred thousand views because i attached a like a scuba tank size co2 thing i rigged it to my sodas stream so it can last like three years versus having to constantly replace the yeah i love soda the first heard this i was like oh you like make your own sparkling water at home like what's the fucking point of that like i stream is like a five billion dollar your company or something i don't that's my point is that when i heard i was like who would wanna why is this a hobby who wants to do this at home why is this a diy category but it was it was a huge category and like you know got bigger bigger craft beer same thing i remember like a decade ago these guys are like brewing their own beers and i was like why are you there's so many beers i don't just buy some and then like over time more and more home brewers and craft beer you been a white guy before like that's like what like there's two things that you you there's a two jokes about white people they always have bottle openers on them and they love making their own beer at home yeah basically actually this category is just shit i observe white people do and i've confused about so another one like there's this there's a bunch of these like with pour over coffees and like these like really extreme coffee habits that people have anyways there's a whole bunch of these these little niche hobbies of diy things that i don't understand but they're definitely big and then they create a whole ecosystem of businesses around them so clear ice is the latest one i saw that i like this basically what is clear ice clear ice is basically like i i might not even fully understand this it's that's how white this is okay so you you you translate this for me what i understand is it's like a it's like an amazing piece of ice so not just the shit you get out of your fridge or your little tray or the stuff you buy in a bag but it's like this is high quality it's like super clear like there's no you know impairments or like kind of stuff in it so it doesn't flavor your if you're drinking whiskey it won't like affect the flavor of your whiskey it's also one big cube so there's less surface area so it dilute less it does it dilute your drink less well you do that right i didn't think about this i don't care i it's put ice in i drink my drink it when it gets diluted i drink bread haven't like they sell these like yeah yeah they they're like sell these like cubes or balls and they yeah involves surface area and melting and diluting your shit slower right and so so anyways this hobby this is like some shit that you would find in the hustle trends thing this is my own little contribution to trends you know steph smith if you're listening put this in the music like go research this my spidey sense is tingling that this is one of those little niche hobbies that you could sell products information courses whatever and there's a lot of people that wanna make their own homemade ice again i could barely understand why but it's a thing that people are doing and i bet you that there's a a movement to be had or a a sort of a a wave to surf if you wanna build a business around this super niche but a hobby obvious business dude no i don't i'm not on board with this i think this is stupid i think why first of all is this even that big it's clear it i saw i saw it as part of like a growing tri i don't know if there's a subreddit or where i saw it but i saw it in a way i was like oh this is one of those that's like popular and i don't understand why like it's like asm asmr it's like what is that asm asmr is awesome so don't even better be careful that's how all those felt to me at the beginning when i'm like this is weird people do this and then like yeah a lot of people want this and do this yeah look i am i'm looking around on google i get it to me this sounds like a a pretty tiny thing but like tiny enough that you could make like a pretty good living doing it though like i knew a yeah what all you wanna do is you wanna catch these early right like you wanna to you wanna catch it when it's somewhat tiny but like very passionate because the bet you're making is that that passion the tiny the passion will stay and the tiny will not right that's pretty consistent is that when you have the passion there passion stays and and tiny good becomes medium sized becomes large over time yeah i guess it could work i mean i'm looking i'm trying to like look it up the i mean there is this other one there is a a homebrew company that i that i i i for a long time i didn't know that like people basically beer nerds like track all the beers that they've ever tried and i interviewed a guy to work at the hustle and he worked at one of these companies and it was like a tens of millions maybe even close a hundreds of millions of dollar revenue business and all was was an app where you could track all the beers that you drink so put that in that category of things i have no idea exists and also kinda they don't excite me alright let's do let's do one more real quick okay here's one that i'm just curious i i don't have ideas around this just yet but let's let's do way off the cuff brainstorm so there's this article that came out that was about i'll share it with you here it's about the amount of space that is now available in san francisco because of like work from home so there is some absurd amount of vacant space so there's like companies that are taking tens or even hundred million dollar write offs on their real estate just to like get out of it and move on and so they're just they're just writing it down so like here's some of the the numbers i mean so there's two hundred million dollars of real estate impairments in the past year since covid it it's almost a billion if you add in the lease related write downs from large companies like salesforce dropbox uber paypal zen just getting rid of their their real estate and so dropbox itself has four hundred million dollars of impaired real estate right now and so they think that by you know and in this quarter the first quarter of or sorry the last quarter of twenty twenty one the amount of vacant and sub lea space was ten million square feet in twenty twenty one in twenty nineteen that was three million right so it's tripled the amount of available sub lea square square footage and the companies are basically saying hey this is what it cost us ninety dollars we'll take twenty for it so you're able to get real estate for you know one fourth of the of the traditional cost we're talking this is a good i yes this is an real estate so what comes to mind what what do you think of when you hear about kind of this this opening that's in the market okay for the sake of discussion let's just assume that they like san francisco has a bunch of wacky laws like right i mean like can't do with things yeah and they also have like some really crazy tenant or what's it called rent controlled stuff so let's just assume that like we're gonna research these laws later and and that's a isn't that big video deal assume we're never gonna research these laws so actually that's really issue but so what could you do with this arbitrage i mean the obvious answer is like we were could make a killing right now if they believe in their model can they can they just go ahead and like do the thing where they lease a lot of it upfront and hopefully they can fill it but what else could you do with this i don't know man that's a hard question what would you do i don't know i think you have to see what what you i think you wanna think about it this way where is demand growing for space that being central in a city would now make a very big difference cloud kitchens cloud kitchens cloud grocery convenience like cloud cloud corner shores basically like fridge no more or something like that i think those are kinda interesting go puff because you have a whole bunch of people in the city and now when they push the button they get their thing in under ten minutes because it was they they took a floor in the bottom of the salesforce tower you know the the second floor is now all you know robo convenience stores that it will just quickly deliver to you so i think you have to find something like that maybe it is we worked style you know kind of c working spaces but there's got be something else that you would do with this p real estate maybe there's something in education that you know you create a distributed campus or something like that across a whole a bunch of different cities and so you know you take a business school you know take harvard business school online which they have and you basically say great you gonna attend harvard business school online in san francisco downtown in la downtown in all these places because that's where that type of clientele wants and now you get a once in a lifetime opportunity to lock up that real estate at a fourth of the cost i don't know those are some just random ideas off the that is a i think that's quite an interesting idea of the that's actually a good idea because that would yeah it's some you know like the equivalent of a study abroad but you're just gonna do it in san francisco right which pro prohibit was prohibitive expensive for the longest time that is actually kind of an interesting idea so what would you know what the price per square footage is right now in this there were twenty five they were saying twenty dollars a square foot which is like that's an annual number right so what it would have been ninety dollars a square foot annually and now twenty is it's kind of what's quoted in this cnbc article do you know how that compares to like an austin like a more like a c level city i don't know i think that is like what i think that would be like what a a mid level city would have been without the pandemic that's my guess it's something like that i think san francisco was four or four to five times more expensive per square foot than than you know a b level city you know i think that i've been living in austin now for just a handful of months i miss san francisco dearly i do think that if you're starting a company now and you have like a good sized workforce it would be interesting to try to kinda sign a lease now that you can book out for five or ten years i do like it's gonna roar back i think eventually i mean i think that's the opportunity here's another one let's say you're of was random let's say you're a venture fund or a late stage of venture fund what if you took the real estate and then basically any of your companies can just use this and pay you the the you know pay you market rent are slightly above us maybe slightly below so all your portfolio companies now have their real estate problem solved and you know you could place them because of that dude people were shitting on we work myself included i think now it's like this this makes sense in a lot of these cities these these we the we works of the world and not only that i think that they're just gonna come back like crazy because every employee does the exact same thing well i would love to work from home for a few days a week yeah exactly it's like well talk i can't pay reps a few days a week if i have my own leaks right i'd love to die it a few days a week yeah so i think that like the the saunders of the world and a bunch of these other companies that didn't do so hot for the last two years i think they they absolutely can be started right now and i think it sounds crazy crazy to start right now but i don't think it is even a little bit bro i loaded up on airbnb stock today oh my gosh i'm devastated i i'm seeing it go down what what does it now so what's going down because the lock up period ended i don't know if you guys sold your shares or or not but the lock period ended so people could start selling so it put a bunch downward pressure on the stock plus the market in general setting did in i thought i'll did it i didn't even know i think ended in june they ends in june so i think it's six months for some for for i think for some insiders at least dump they can jump today why at earth would you ever dump air airbnb stock right now but i bought it because hey i just i'm stupid i just buy stocks i feel like it but b i saw some data that was showing how a huge amount of airbnb bookings i think twenty eight thirty percent are actually i don't remember the percentage it's a very large percentage of airbnb revenue or bookings was coming from stays longer than thirty days now which means that it's actually not vacation rentals only you know it's actually millennials is just saying i wanna stay here for a little while which is like i think a pretty big trend of i don't wanna be i wanna buy i don't even wanna one year lease that's too much commitment how do i hop from place to play similar to what you did last year did so many day plus days i think that is actually an interesting trend that people should take advantage of and we actually have a guy coming on the podcast named bill smith i guess his names like a real generic name these started shit which sold for like six hundred million dollars based on alabama i was like an insta better he's got this new company called landing is do you know wanna i'm talk about yes what's the url it's called like landing home or something home landing but anyway what it is is they lease out apartments in different places and they take the whole lease and then they sub lease it because for people wanna say for a month and the thing about airbnb and is that they actually charge what's the fee ten percent you're seeing for two weeks if you're saying like in new york like i'm gonna be staying i'm moving to new york for three or four months it's prohibitive expensive so i if my rent is ten grand a month i'm paying a thousand dollars a month just in airbnb fees and so like can figure out how to reduce that fee to something that makes sense for the longer term i think that in the future people like us and maybe a little bit younger i think it's gonna be incredibly normal to live somewhere for nine months and somewhere for three months right and so if they could figure of that is huge but do you agree that like if you would you consider living somewhere for three months out of the year for sure i plan to do that yeah where are you gonna like i like little baby right now so it's just a little bit tricky but yeah that's that's the lifestyle i'm gonna live is lit living in one place and then the other place for two to three months out of the year without sounding like a total douche is this a rich guy thing or do you think that like lots of people are gonna be doing it well you could do it you could do it economically like i know a lot of people that did this and made money doing it right they wasn't a rich guy thing they went they live in san francisco predominantly and then they sub they they airbnb there san francisco place for a month they go live in a you know mexico or south america and actually they make money for traveling because they're san francisco airbnb costs more they're able to charge more for that than they pay in south america my lease or not my lease my mortgage and insurance and everything at my house costs about forty five hundred dollars a month and i think that we're gonna get about ten grand a month when we rent it out and we're gonna use and then we're we've already booked a place we're living in i'm living in brooklyn from july to september and so and i plan on doing that indefinitely and i think a lot of people are gonna be doing that as well cool i gotta run i gotta get out of here but good episode we're up yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a goal travel never looking back