$1M By 19, $100M+ By 35 -- Here's How He Did It

it was it was strange i was pulling up to my university or to the college and i would pull up in a at some i would pull up in like a drop top lexus like a seventy thousand dollar car and that i was like nineteen right dude so val sean he's not making it today but that's okay we so you your thing went viral today how many likes did you get like three thousand thirty three point like that i to turn off my notifications i can't do when you work with i don't know how you guys do it i don't know how people do it well running full businesses but i had to turn that off because i just can't concentrate that that that thing just my phone was just blowing up all day now you know how i feel it's it is crazy right it's crazy so you you had three thousand followers and now you have like nine maybe nine thousand something like that yeah i'm i mean it took me how many years to get up like twenty seven hundred yeah now it's i don't know i didn't look to be honest you but i'm probably at like eight nine thousand at this point so alright the background here is i met you through my like we we share like a best friend joe and we joe told me about you he goes this guy crazy and so let val let me tell you what i know about you and you tell me if it's right or wrong then i wanna hear your story but pays basically you he goes and and i'll i won't reveal too many numbers i'll let you talk about any number that you wanna talk about because i i don't know if what i know is confidence confidential or not so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna mention them but you as a nineteen year old you came from russia you came from russia i came from eleven and then you come here you get a computer at like sixteen or seventeen you start this affiliate marketing business you're the only employee by age like twenty two twenty three you've made something like thirty million in profit from this like one little business from there you part that into in a lee website that looks like one of the biggest lee websites in the world which doesn't sound that impressive but most people don't realize that lee websites are some of the most biggest websites in the world and so that made like another eight figures in profit from there you part that into a ad network that now is like huge from there you've now launched a jewelry business that apparently joe has said it's bigger than all your other companies but i don't know if that's sure or not and then throughout all this you've acquired and sold and developed like a hundred plus million dollars of real estate is all this accurate some of it oh okay so well actually my enforcement been by the way the reason i'm having you on here is because we've had a lot really successful people on here do interesting stuff and there are like a lot of them are well known but you don't i basically the other day begged you to like tweet something and i helped you write this tweet and it took like a few days got it out there but like besides that you've pretty much have never done any press you've never talked about this publicly and and when i met you i was like this is a gold mine this guy has so many interesting stories we gotta tell this story so anyway what was wrong and what was right so okay so well actually the funny part is that the the first business i had was a a playstation like a video game website so it wasn't like huge but you know i was high school and making like five thousand bucks a month that actually told me a lot of listens so the so the the search mark and you actually told me i actually tweeted another thing about you where you said hey my twelve year old son has a website that's making like two g's a day or something like that and he needs an email service provider which one should he use and i tweeted that screenshot and it would that was anonymous i guess it's not anonymous anymore but so he he's yeah that there's interesting i i saw you post that and he still has a website it's not doing as well big but not quite a two thousand anymore but he's he's working on like coding this thing away and he's like figuring out all things so it's actually amazing to see it you know at at his age at you know so where'd you get it's crazy that you and your family you just find all these opportunities where did it start so you you your thing first thing was a playstation website which what is that so a cycle called ps x extreme we this is like i launched like a ninety eight ninety nine or something like that i actually was ninety nine it was right before the the the bubble the dot com bubble burst i was like about eight months into the the the bubble and it was doing really well was very easy to to generate revenue and you know once i got the traffic it the site was all about anything related to playstation so like get cheat codes you reviews screenshots whatever anything for like playstation fan so it was like a playstation fan website then a dot com bubble hits my revenues ninety percent my traffic was still up there but i had no revenues because all the ads revenue disappeared like it went from being three dollar cpm pm down to thirty cents cpm pm if you could be lucky enough to get that how many people were going to this one it wasn't huge but i had like like ten thousand unique a day maybe twenty thousand and you ninety and ninety nine and ninety eight that's gotta be a massive site yeah it was good it was good amount of traffic and it was all free so it was interesting like experience because i to quickly learn how to generate revenue and i i had to go out there and sell advertising myself and you know like i and then once i figured out that i could sell advertising i didn't have enough traffic so i went i started going to other video game sites and saying who had much more traffic than me i hey i get all these advertisers who would spend more if had more traffic like i'll let me put ads on your sites so i went to all these other video game sites and like just was a broker for advertising so that was kinda like my first you know making decent amount of money i was making five and then like just from the side and i was making probably another ten a month from being a broker and then the thing that you tweeted today or maybe last night it base basically you told the story about how when you were nineteen after this playstation site you built an an affiliate ad site and it made like i forget the i forget the numbers but in two or three years it was like over thirty million in profit so what were you you were selling stuff on behalf of half dot com or ebay who were you or no newer york times you had like eight hundred basic you basically you had like eight hundred ad accounts that sold different stuff so like a new york time subscription for or what's sold for a hundred dollars but you were able to sell it for only thirty bucks so you're able to keep the difference something like that yeah so you know it's affiliate marketing but i use pace search which was very new back then and the at the time when after the dot com bubble burst all the advertisers gets all of a sudden advertising digital advertising stop being interesting you know for a for for a moment there people thought businesses thought in my you know internet might be over over high right yeah so all of sudden you see kind of all these budgets get you know just get pulled back right especially the brand advertising and but nobody really you know so everybody has to still figure out how to get customers so they say okay you know what we won't do brand advertising but if you if somebody drives customers will pay per customer like we can't lose on that right so performance marketing so that was around and it was very accessible and at the same time the media wasn't expensive right because the supply was there but the demand wasn't there so that's what i took advantage of i start buying up well a lot of supply mostly was search search paid search and that's what made everything so profitable because i was just playing into those supply demand that dynamics that were working in my favor but yes what i would do is i would find an advertiser that had a product i would test it on at the time you know kind of like the the modern day yahoo paid search or back down was called go dot com and then later google came around and so i would test that ad if it works i expand on it if it doesn't work right i would think about how to make it work right if there was a if there was a if there was a way to make it work and yeah just like it just you know i was able won't spend and what what things were you oh man everything everything yeah and all of this and all of this was making like like many millions of dollars of sales for your little one person operation every year yes that's crazy about yeah tell us a little bit about like what was going on in your life at the time like did you try and go to college you're doing this while you were at college did you drop out like what what are you doing with your life so nineteen i already had the business and i went i got into like i all of finance so i was like alright so i do business finance and i didn't really feel like i should be but i only did it because and i had more time for it you seem like you'd be awful at that i am i was i was awful i was actually interested in the topics especially the topics i was interested in like law or finance or business accounting all those things were like i i couldn't i i couldn't sit through biology but even even though they were interesting i had no time to study so i was sucked to tests my gpa was horrible i can't remember what it was but it was just horrible because i just didn't care to you know get prepared for the test i slept in half a the class i'm just catching up on sleep because i would go to sleep at four o'clock in the morning and then i don't you i don't you still do that i don't you go to sleep at four and get up at noon yeah at average four five yeah so if i go to sleep i think we yesterday i was to get four to i woke up at eleven so i try to get a i try to get seven hours of sleep doesn't happen all the time you know a lot of times have to you know live on in five six hours but do you do do you recognize that you're a weirdo i'm used to i'm used to it that you know what i'm i'm a weirdo i i know i'm i'm do i do everything in reverse my wife keeps telling me like like you do everything backwards so you're you're you're studying finance but you're not doing well because you're running these businesses i'm in school just because i have a jewish mother and she wanted me to go to like got school you have to be in college right i already have to go but did they know that you're like hey mom like i bet you out making more money than you i i i think she she kinda knew i don't know she knew but the what i was making i don't remember but it was it was strange i was pulling up to my university or to the college i was i went to new york city bar business of finance z england business of finance and i would pull up in a at some i would pull up in like a drop top lexus like a seventy thousand dollar car and that was like nineteen right so her eighteen whatever i was i think was eighteen at that point i think i think i even started the paid surge at this point so this business is just like crushing it so like a few in you've in your tweet you said it made over thirty million in profits like three four five years in so it's gone really well you're paying like a crazy amount of taxes you said so you decide to move to the be a little bit outside of new york city and you like buy a a cheap house in cash so things are going well right like it's but you you said you know i'm a little bored with this or i'm i'm i really wanna go much further into this in this racket i wanna try something new and then the next business was mobile fuse which is around today right so i actually launched around the same time we launched two businesses so after so on so i i i launched i launched the i let's call the the the the the music content distribution company oh that's right sorry right so that so we didn't own i didn't own actually lyric sites what i did is i built a service i built a system that connects called ringtone match and what i realized was there was demand for ringtone tones and there was all this traffic for for all this music related traffic especially in lyrics and so what i did is i build a service and the other thing i realized that the the traffic was very much international like seventy percent of of a music site or lyric site was non us and i noticed that some of the advertisers like ring advertisers were advertised they'll they'll do okay but they would have only you they could only accept us customers and they could only accept like verizon customer or only t mobile customer so i build a thing called ringtone match and ringtone match basically integrated like six sixty countries into one system so if you have a music site you could drive that those users to ringtone match and ring match we'll figure out based on geo like what country you're in right based on what carrier you use because it's carrier billing so it's important that you know i figure out like you have t mobile and to match you up to a ring on service that actually is compatible with t mobile and then the third thing we look for that content is available so if you're clicking on hey get this get toxic by britney spears ringtone on your phone i need to make sure that that song is also available in their catalog because some some ring providers had like warner music and some some of maybe just had the emi they're were like four major music companies at the time and you know these ring income providers didn't have all those catalogs so they they might have one or two at a time so i would take all that data and put it into one simple link and and how big did that how big did that business i wasn't front a ring match was in front of a half a billion people a month yeah half a billion so and it was everywhere i mean it wasn't just lyric sites i was on cbs radio aol o l radio yahoo radio last fam like every pretty much every music site i've ever even been talking to musically which is tiktok now right i haven't ever even talking to those i was talking to we were talking to whatsapp in the early days like when they were just two guys or something like we wanted to integrate because anytime somebody mentions music or a song or something like i wanted to be on my i wanna ring the match there to show up so stuff and but what what but when you're you're using the word we again it's not we no this company was so actually that company i started ring to match myself again i was a one man show at some point i we you know there was one little group of guys who were pretty good at dealing with advertisers and or actually ring providers and i felt like i need help on that front and so i merged those guys in so there were five guys that merged into my company to form tell when you say merged who bought who i was majority owner of the company and then the the the five guys had the like they they they had a third of the company i had two thirds how big it was it when it was just you it was just who's going nuts up but i think i believe the the year i think the year we merged it was ten million just again just you yeah ten billion profit which is you do you why do you think so this is the we'll get to the rest of a minute but why do you think that you find this weird stuff and why don't you hire people two different questions how on earth do you find this type of stuff you know it's it's it's it's funny like i know how i see how organized you are right like you make your goals you labor out on paper right you're you're very organized and then you could think about it you ask people for feedback i'm totally opposite of that i just kinda go with where like i typed to testing things and i'm i i guess i'm very curious and and i and i i could be very very focused but if i get distracted i get very easily distracted right so it could be like sometimes it's a occurs but sometimes it's a blessing and a lot of times it's a blessing and come across these interesting things in my career just takes it further so when i when i so the the way i actually came across this thing was because i felt that that there was it was point of my life where i was seeing google it was just too dominant part of my business and i didn't like that because i didn't don't wanna rely on any one thing so i started looking outside of page search or for supply and i came across these music sites and i actually started testing rh on them because i had such a good deal with wraps was like me start marketing side of search is it okay and i had these you know start building these relationships with the music sites and then then then i kinda tested a ringtone on service and it just crushed like it was not even close like it i did three times better and was like wow this thing is did three times better than rh and that ringtone provider was just covering us just like one or two music labels and like two carriers out of four i think i had four there were four major carriers at a time i was like hold on a second if it's already doing three times as well what happens if i start integrating everything globally right so that's how ringtone match came about was there when you launch stuff what's your first version like junk like do you get the idea when it's guy twelve hours it was a kitty script i wrote this you know guy was kind of freelancing for me a little bit i just i didn't even wanna tell him about the idea he's actually cto one of my companies now he was like fifteen sixteen years old and i didn't tell the idea so i said hey how do you script this how do you script that so i scripted it myself and and so yeah so it was pure junk it was literally just a bunch of if then statements on and and asp it was we were running windows windows server on asp infrastructure so i i i had a bunch of redirect that we're just doing a bunch of if and then statements and and and redirecting people based on certain parameters wouldn't and when you're doing it are you like see every time i've hung out with you the reason i like hanging out with you and i could joe one of my best friends and so i have like his attitude you and joe have the same attitude which is like he's really won't laid back than just and you i think he is he is i've never seen him lose his temper he is very calm and i'm like hey this didn't work out for this reason he goes oh that's okay like he's super calm but you have that too i think i think that like i think that what it you have this like i don't know if it the right word is like hot spa if the right word is like i don't know what the word is but it's almost like things ever i've heard we're gonna get to the rest of the stories because because there's like this jewelry business that you started which is like it seems like even bigger than all of the other things that you've done potentially and you like do these things where i'm like but like value you don't know anything out that and like you don't even have any employees like you don't know anything and but you just are like yeah but out you know what whatever i'll just we'll just go a little bit further and then we'll see what happens and then if it if it sucks out bail you know what i mean like you have this like all shu attitude i'm like oh you know yeah we'll see what happens it's very interesting whereas like if i was doing what you were doing and i started seeing those results i'm like is this illegal am i breaking the law am i go to jail what is going on like it would oh almost like i would have most people would have self destructive tendencies when they see this like going so well yeah look i see that all the time i feel like people tend to overthink things and spend a lot of time like analysis paralysis and the reason i think a lot of people are successful like especially somebody like me is while somebody thinking about making perfect one thing which by the way we'll still have a you know sixty percent failure right and that one thing that you just over thought i'd rather test ten things by within that same time period and i will likely have i have a better accuracy or i'll i'll have a better chance of hitting it out of the ballpark with one of those ten things and maybe more than one of those things yeah how how did you get into the jewelry business to start with so after i sold those two music related companies which i took like three years off off you know i thought i retired all but it was anything but i just got stopped started getting like my my curiosity was just taking me into all different like i was all these boards and i was like know investing into a bunch of things and and i realized after the three years i need to build something again so i started looking at i knew that i wanted to do something where it's fixing or disrupting a fragmented space i didn't really wanna go after like corporate america i wanted to go after like i'm pops that when i say mom and pops it could be like you know i'm thinking like car dealerships right they do tens of millions of dollars it doesn't mean they're tiny alright so i wanted to go after something like along those lines and i had some investments in the jewelry space had some family in the jewelry space it's a pretty tight knit community i just happened to be had some family that to that that knows that that that business i actually worked as a teenager i worked every weekend i worked in a in a jewel in a in a jewelry store i knew how to fix like i knew how to fix jewelry i mean i would sit in a bench with a blow towards at like fifteen years old because my cousin taught me it was my it was a it was a family business my my my aunts and on uncles business they had a couple jewelry stores and they taught me how to fix jewelry and to you know so i knew your business fell a bit from the retailer perspective it always seemed like a very weird way to do business i i always had questioned everything like they're doing and so so so the idea was hey like these retailers if we could integrate bill platform and services that we could integrate into them and this is a three hundred billion dollar industry by the way globally which fragmented but controls is actually bigger independents are bigger part of the business fine jewelry than the majors is the chains so i knew that i again if i could build distribution but i had to bring then then there's a lot of power there but i have to bring value and that's where my expertise in data and marketing digital all that came into for of to fruition you know so we basically put this thing together we integrate into stores and help them grow help them bring customers cut cost increase their revenue how much did you invest to start it to start it i don't i mean to start i think i we started off a couple million so you put two million dollars your the beginning yeah how big is this and but you've done more i think you put more in instance how big is this gonna be i'll put in way more i mean at this point i put in eight figures into this business i think it's a multi billion dollar company in the future for real you think it's a multi billion dollar like to sell yeah mark cab i i believe that a i don't know if there's a really big enough to buy my company with this or this company we actually have a lot of people this time no it's no longer just well we have a lot of employees i i believe this company will be if it's successful and we could do what we need to do and we could really help all these retailers step up their game i i i don't think that there's is really a company in that space that will be big enough to acquire us so like the but are you are you the ceo of that is that smart i mean that doesn't seem like you're you're just you're get up at eleven am and like you go to about for how are you the ceo of a company that can be a billion dollar company yeah no a good question look we have a great team that is able to execute how many people it's hard to say we're we became pretty global but you know our our our offices outside of the us are not all most our employees right so they're so all all all in i had to talk about factories our are are tech teams our marketing teams are we're probably talking about seventy people at this point wow and who's like but are you're not running the day to day of a business hell ninety some amount the time goes into this business so then are you like talking with the employees and things like that i mean you're like running all hands meetings and things like that yeah i'm not big on meetings they'll be honest you know to be honest with you but but i'm very accessible to my team i mean everybody on my teams of access to me i go into the office in the city we actually had the we were in the office june june twenty twenty i mean we had you know covid like it was ghost down in the city and we had to figure out how to be in the office because it's not an eco it's not just a a digital ad business that i could just operate from from work from home right we had to have people in the office and we did all kinds of things we we we we we got cars to car to to to pull people in to the office but but anyway we yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm there i'm in the weeds but it's not like you're kinda downplay playing i invested in one of their your properties we bought a six p and green point i think i forget well we essentially bought land right we we bought a house because but it's gonna be knocked down we're gonna build a brand new we're gonna ground up construction it's gonna be like a nice a nice condo building yeah yeah yeah that's that's what i mean but i didn't even look at details i was just like out anything that val does i'm part of but it's it's way bigger than you're you're just saying like it's a project i mean i think you've bought like a hundred million dollars with the real estate right no i haven't i haven't bought hundred million we have six projects a couple of them already completed third one is just about to be completed actually two the first two were completed and completely sold out the third one is about to be completed and go on the market and then we have three other projects and they're all getting bigger and bigger the value of that this this the the combined sale value of value of those projects would be approaching a hundred million dollars do you what do are you what are you tinkering on now what excites you now what and and someone asked a good question which is what is the the equivalent of ringtone tones today what's the equivalent of like it's just crazy that it's just like you're kinda like this like digital cowboy you're just like this like one guy in the wild the west doing this shit with like no rules it it just i just think it's hilarious that you are just a pirate who's taking it to the extreme where are the digital pirate that right now it has to be like tiktok what do you mean it's you know i you look for like those spaces that haven't been touched right because people asking i think i think what that's what you're saying like what's what what can you what can be marketed these days and how to get that kind of scale and i i don't it's hard because what i've seen over over my career is that the windows opportunity those white spaces right the windows windows are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter every iteration right there was the page search probably lasted with six years after that or around that the same time there was display that probably lasted a little less and then there was social media that that window probably you know the arbitrage window i right yeah yeah that probably lasted two three years at best now you're talking you know now you got like instagram tiktok and you got the re instagram reels i mean those are probably also one year windows of opportunity if you could kind of catch that lightning and build on it then you got something but your your windows and it's all rooted in distribution which is how do you get distribution quickly and you're saying that you think it that's tiktok do you think that window is still open i i think if you have a knack for understanding how get viral vitality of get content then then you have your own distribution if you don't have that knack you gotta think about how to work with people that have the that that access so there's one company that could work with all the sam parks right all the podcast how much is that worth like we're using a poly on here right now right that is just smart they're they're they're doing the right thing like they're focusing on guys like you who have all this access but they're not selling anything right they're just selling you a platform if somebody could sell figure out how to sell a product across number of podcasts that's worth a lot and you could sell i'll remove a lot of product and by the way it doesn't have to be podcasts what about all the tiktok who doing all those dances right i know i know like for one company they they scaled to like eighty million in sales a few years ago i'm not gonna mention the name of it but then they scale to like eighty million in sales just on the back of youtube influencers what was the product it was cosmetics what was like product and they just cosmetics was that cosmetics it was just like makeup or something or low yeah the numbers were just insane and yeah it it was just a long tail like it wasn't just a big influencers even the like thousands of mediocre influencers of smaller ones that just drove it so stuff like that like latch on to something that is big especially if you could latch on a like the long tail of it because not not not a lot of people look at the long tail part of sure businesses well so one thing i wonder you know like this thing that val talks about of testing out ten different things before the other guy can put his pants on right like you're you're building your perfect thing that's gonna take you six months before you can get to market great i'm mean gonna test ten things in that time that sounds really nice but also like i guess i'll i'll actually ask sam first then i'll ask you val like what do you think it is about val what do you think it is about either his skill set or his personality that allows him to do that much testing where other people just like can't figure that out apparently the i think that this is a common thread that i've seen i my buddy joe is just like this there's this thing particularly i find it amongst immigrants or children of immigrants and maybe because they've like experienced some type of hardship where they're like like dude i've experienced some crazy shit or my family has experiencing it has experienced crazy shit i have zero fear in looking like a fool if that's the worst if the worst that's gonna happen is i'm gonna look stupid or lose a tiny amount of money i'm okay with that and i don't so i don't have any fear about that that's what it that's what i think i've noticed that's the trend i've noticed amongst people like bell look i i think there's a i think that that's i think there's a huge that's a huge factor and one of the things that i look at like i'm raising kids now right how do i make sure that they kind of could they're not gotta grow up the same way i grew up right they're not gonna come out the the resources they have the access they have it's very different from what i grew up with so what i think i realized is because the power it's the power is in resourceful okay i was able to make a lot or do a lot i should say whether its money or whatever it is right this doesn't have to be just money it could be what whatever whatever whatever excites you right but i was able to do a lot with very little but it's because i had no choice and i had very little like i we weren't poor like i get i i didn't come from poverty or anything like that but but again my parents couldn't afford a computer for me for the first six years of my life here right so i i got to think like how do i recreate that and he can't really recreate that for your kids but i think okay i'm not you know i'm not gonna give my kids everything on a silver platter so so you i mean you just talk about my son like he is you're he he he he's his dna is very like my like mine like and he's way ahead of me because he has all these tools like you know he has a computer way before me i didn't buy him a computer i made him save up the money i don't care how he does it thursday's birthdays work whatever during that time he researched all parts and everything i think at the age of like seven or eight he built a computer bought the parts by himself he built a computer from scratch by himself i didn't help him that's crazy so he now built two computers like and he taught himself out to code and so i i suppress the resources for my kids systematically not like i i don't feel him like they're they're they're they they're they're they're they're doing just fine like they're they're hear school and everything and they live in a nice neighborhood but i systematically make sure that they're not given all the resources because they're that's how you naturally learned to become resourceful what do you think it fundamentally it's about doing more with less essentially you're saying yeah yeah but but it has to start from day one are you driven by money yes and no i i yes because it's it's it's it's it's it's kinda like a score right yeah i i don't see how money it's like a it's a number in a bank account right like you don't it's not like back in a days where you look you know you you know it not like we're sc my duck like when you get to jump through the through the vault of cash right like i i watched as a kid and i was like i wanna be that guy one day and but no i i think i think what i'm driven really is by just winning we and there there is i think there is a bit of sense in me of that i'm one step from losing it all you still feel that way i feel like it's still possible i i think i think it's a i think it's like an immigrant thing yeah probably by the way i feel exactly the same way i was like in bed last night tell my wife i was like i go to like a therapist or something i'm like i'm freaking out we're gonna lose everything is this is all going away i feel the exact i feel like i for a long time i like had a plan on where i would go if i was homeless like i excited talk some ways in in a in a weird way kind of excites you and i don't know the homeless but that you got a chance to figure it out from scratch again it yeah because like it does kinda make it because when you have nothing it's kind fun to play games because it's just easier to bet sometimes you can't bet as much but it's kind of exciting to be like just like a hood rat with nothing like which i which i was it is kind of writing but i get fear of like the anxiety i i feel of losing everything like i like i have so many spreadsheets that map out like alright when the money gets to this number then i gotta go and panic and get a job and start like uber like i have like a plan for that we the reason why i had you on and ben the reason why i wanted to show you this guy is now it he's hard to explain but i wanted people to understand like a truly unique and original thinker and i don't you know i we we you're gonna have to come on again but like do you does that do you understand what i'm say but it's it's very original thinking yeah and you you can see that just in the way that like you've out have have tackled like a a different set of problems than anyone else i've ever talked to the just like i've never talked to someone who's like yeah i attack little ringtone tones and then ad networks and then peer to peer lending and then the jewelry business like i just think that kinda lies how your mind functions differently than other people do you do you feel that way like do you feel that you just have unique perspective have you met anyone that looks at the world the way you do and if you acknowledge that it's weird because and you're saying that you didn't you didn't actually realize it was weird until i talked about you in the podcast like half a year ago which is weird because how old are you like thirty nine thirty eight in out just realizing that you're you're you're not ball yeah so i i i didn't see myself that way until you did the whole expose with that show on not on that one episode that you didn't tell me about but after our lunch but i know i yeah when you saw the i i i told joe i was like dude i'd never do that i almost always asked for permission before i talk about but i just was too excited and i forgot i it it it was i i actually i a story but i'll tell you that after that but so to me like when you said like oh this guy goes from this industry to that industry like jumping all over the place and these you know kind of successful or or successful and at doing it just like crazy i was like i i didn't i never thought it myself that way that but did they make sense like i i don't know why i keep jumping different categories i guess again i'm but that curiosity just kicks in and and and i just but i i i go after it instead of just what if you know i just kind of go after it but no i i i i until now really haven't realized the the that how odd that is but think thank you for letting me know i'm really strange i just think that like there there's just a bunch of unique there's just a bunch of unique things about you and i think it's so cool and when i say weird and odd that's a really good compliment by the way yeah i i know you well enough now to to know that's a compliment that so the so the funny story about look again before you i was pretty under under the radar right like yeah you could find stuff on me you you have to really look like nobody really put it out there right and so then joe tells me like you're gonna do lead the podcast and i didn't tell my wife and then the podcast comes out i'm like hey sarah they the they this guy did a podcast on me she's she's like and who cares what a podcast what you she's like you know but he's gonna talk about me like who cares i was like what a couple hundred people gonna listen like apparently these guy has like a million people listening she's like oh great she's like he asked you permission i was like not really so i don't really know what he's talking about so like okay so the thing comes out was like so we're listening to it and and you keep saying val you're saying valve valve vowel like never say right never say my last name and and then you you and sean go into like this tangent talking about red pill and blue pill or whatever so she like and so we thought like it said val part is over right she like okay it wasn't so he never mentioned your last name who how who how was gonna figure out who's val and then after you went off the your tangent with the about the pills and you're like oh by the way i forgot to mention his full name let me spell let me spell it out for you and you literally spell by last name so she's like i'm gonna kill this guy oh she was back she bad she's she's very she's very she's very nice everything i thought that everything we said you could find publicly and we didn't reveal anything like crazy and i tried to only like i just read your linkedin that's basically all i did yeah i find stuff about but it's you know it's one thing to information to be out there and for someone to look for it but it's another one when you're on full blast right like and it it is being discovered so right by audiences so so that's all new to be i know i i felt like an asshole when that happened i i'm normally always gonna at like if someone if we're out with friends and people talking about stuff i'm like hey is this private or not like they have to make sure they say it's private around me yeah it's you're you're you're you're a nice guy so i'll i'll let it slide yeah i blew up your spot and and yeah i that's something i remembered the day that happened i was like oh my god joe i didn't even realize it because sometimes i'm sean and i were recording i forget that it's a podcast i just like it just like friends talking you wanna and i forget i'm like oh my god i forgot that was i just said that on air i can't believe that so that that was one of those examples but dude this was awesome what do you think ben this is this is pretty bad ass this is great it's gonna be fired up to go i know you're doing your airbnb b's this year sam that's kinda your thing but do it though right before this podcast he said don't do it oh really yeah i think i'm gonna do it anyway but he i told him these two ideas that i might work on and he basically said dude i was like should i work on going hard on content should i work on this job board idea or this airbnb thing it goes do content and i was like that's what i don't wanna do i said don't do it now why i didn't actually he literally set me his response like three minutes before the podcast so i didn't entirely read the i haven't read the whole his whole reply but he's he's like the he's like the the the the lay thing that's just gonna bog you down that's what he said yeah i think i i i i i think something i could do in future but not though i do feel inspired after hearing for about and from val of like i need to be trying more things like just taking more swings and like putting more experiments out there to see kinda what what lands i like that yeah listen against the wall like see what sticks what's the worst but when you throw when most people throw something against the wall it's a half ass attempt when you throw stuff against the wall like you you spend money or you like you you said that when you were like when you did have much you spent like six or seven thousand dollars on ads to see if this x thing could work whereas most people will like like oh if that's i'll lose a couple hundred bucks i don't wanna do that it's like you you actually trust but that that was an accident like like in that thread that was an accident there were no budget caps back then so i turned it on and go to sleep and i woke cup to a six thousand dollar spin yeah but you still did it i mean i get just like most people just don't do you your your attempts are like good so when i was going to all these music sites you know how i get their attention i would go to a site and i would just kinda through alexa whatever i kinda know how much traffic they have and i knew these guys were outside the country and to get their attention i would literally email i'm say hey i'll give you a hundred thousand dollars i give you fifty thousand dollars i'll give you twenty thousand dollars prepaid i'll wire it tomorrow just so you could take a test my ringtone till match link for seven days if you don't like it it doesn't make enough money take the link off we'll never talk again if you want if you like how much it generates we'll sign you'll sign a contract and everybody sign a contract because those two text links were generating like five like somebody who was making like a like your sites that were making like top sites we're making like a hundred thousand dollars a month i would pay four hundred thousand a month on top of that and and how many people actually took you up and said alright fine everybody the money and then i'll put yours they all wanted the money first oh the money you got my success rate on that email was just i mean what how take money like upfront i would be like you know what i don't need you to do it up upfront i'll give it a try just because you're serious and you actually told the story on palms podcast because you're like you like bold but you have high integrity because like i think there was a guy who you owed a lot of money to because they were a customer of your or they a vendor and you just had a bill that you had to pay them and they like changed their address or something and you like dude i can't find you i owe you sixty thousand dollars and you're like held onto the sixty thousand dollars for like a long time and you just were seeking them out everywhere like hey did you go i need to pay you your money yeah yeah he pays off like it's it's it's we because we had so many international people in the music business when the great recession hidden they were they were in all these countries and where their their banks a lot of them where banks were located in weird areas we're we're we're countries like cyprus and they would literally tell us hey stop stop wiring this money we we don't trust the bank we're working with i gotta get any bank account like we help their money for they told us to hold their money for i mean we had millions in in our bank account that didn't belong to us and all these sides basically told me told me like i was kinda like their bank for a for a while because they didn't wanna get paid and they didn't they didn't trust a bank it was phenomenal to me like i couldn't understand that they they they trust us trust me with their money for years i think some in some cases up to a year we we we were holding their money because he had nowhere way to send it that's crazy dude this is a good conversation i'm happy you came on this is awesome you you listen you're you're you're doing i told you before i your podcast it's very it's very like it's it's very like lay in terms right it's it actually takes a lot of info intellect my opinion to dumb things down well thank you i appreciate that it helps yeah oftentimes i wonder like it i've all lot of my friends are english has a second language maybe a it's like i'm always a may can you imagine coming to another country we don't speak the language at like twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen and then like just crushing it i just so i i think that's just like amazing i've got a bunch of friends or esl and they'll they'll like i'll hop i'll help them write stuff because they're just little rough and i'm like dude how are you so badass i just i'm amazed that you you're i'm just amazed at some of these products and you're one of those people yeah what like whether you were i like my english is pretty good now but i still can't yeah put my thoughts together in a in a way that makes it so interesting for people to understand and you know how to break that down so like you you you help me with some of my so my you know one of my you know pieces on that so that's that's power well thank you i appreciate you coming on this is badass ass listen appreciate you guys having me on