#201 - Why You Should Spend 5x Your Budget on an Engagement Ring

i don't care if i only had a hundred thousand i'm spending fifty thousand because this is the whole point of working really really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever yeah i feel like got rude heard know could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back alright welcome to the episode we actually talked about like maybe eight legitimately wonderful ideas we talked about privacy startups we talked about ghost dot org which is a wordpress competitor that we actually think is gonna be hundred million dollar plus company we talked about bur float dot io o which is a new business that just started like two weeks ago that's quite interesting what else did we talk about we talked about ikea hacking which is the art of soup up and i upgrading a your basic furniture into something dope using it ikea parts and what you know that little trend that might actually be something that you could build build build build a business round this is gonna be an interesting episode because we actually rattle off a ton of stuff it just went from thing to thing to thing to thing and the are giving sam tells you why you should be spending three times as much on your engagement ring as you're planning to five times as much five times as much and i don't regret it at all and i actually think everyone should so listen to the end that's the that fits at the very end at fifty four minutes i think give it a listen and also go and click that subscribe button on itunes and that follow button on spotify because we're gonna be launching some more episodes that are interesting next week and subscribe to the youtube channel we just had a first video that had a hundred thousand views on youtube so we're getting big over there let's do it alright sean grab your iphone for me i'm gonna talk to you about something but first i'm gonna show you so alright go to your iphone go to settings type in privacy and click privacy type in privacy alright alright and do if you're following along on an iphone do this for me this isn't this this like a real thing alright click location services and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says system services yep alright after you click that scroll halfway down to where it says significant locations do you see that yeah click that and it asks you for your password probably it just face id me right alright now your load your latest location it might say vegas or nevada or something click it yep so what you're gonna see is my precise location your precise location tracked forever so since you use your phone and you could clear your history but you you see how it's like tracking all your stuff but i i clicked it it says arrived via a twenty seven minute drive like it knows exactly when i arrived and how i arrived because it used apple maps or like it uses a bunch of stuff it'll tell you like how you got there it'll tell you what apps that you were using when you were getting there it'll tell you all types of interesting stuff now the reason i'm talking about this is i wanna tell you a story about privacy and i wanted to show you like why this is crazy because you like knew that like if i told you like intellectual you'd be looking of course your iphone tracks yeah of course so i just wanted to do he's weird to see it like that it's weird to see it and the reason i'm bringing this up is i read the story about this guy named kyle mcdonald and in two thousand eleven he basically did the story where he well actually let me tell you this first so he was interested in in privacy and he thought he read this line and it said can you imagine living a life without any private information where with no private bank statements no private files in your computer it's hard to understand right but what if you actually asked that question a little bit differently so do trust the government do you trust large banks do trust facebook do you trust google do you trust these large entities with your information because that's kinda like the same thing we just asked a little bit differently and so he did this first test where he created this thing called key tweet and every hundred and forty characters on his keyboard automatically tweeted so like there there was no privacy because he wanted to see what was the world like without privacy and he took it a step further and so he went to an apple store in brooklyn and they had fifty computers and he installed an app on all fifty computers that automatically took a picture every like thirty or sixty seconds and anytime it detected a face it would send him the pictures and he published it as like an art an art thing of like look at what people look like when they're looking in computers at a laptop in apple and after publishing that the secret service raided his home an apple apple contacted to see what service they rated his home they took us computers they did it a thorough investigation they declined to prosecute but they definitely could have done something and i thought that was amazing when i started thinking about that i'm like isn't that crazy that i am contacted i would be i would be upset too if someone took my picture i wouldn't be upset to call the police but i would be upset i wouldn't like it is it that crazy that i'm upset about that but i like type in all my information throughout the web or i let someone track me and it's quite an interesting way and i thought what's another way so i discovered this a little hack i'm like when i see that it actually changed my perception and so there's this issue going on where i actually think these privacy startups are gonna be huge in ten twenty thirty years now my problem that i'm having personally is i'm actually struggling to find different solutions that need to like different ways to solve or different problems that need to be solved but i agree with this general premise of like when i just did that experiment where i showed you your tracking stuff and when i just like read this guy's art story i was like yeah i'm totally not okay with that i don't like that right but i get something out that that was like this you go say say your tweet you go and imagine if you walked into go ahead yeah so let's just say that you're walking around the street and a company walks you into their office and they go check this out and they give you a file cabinet you open this file cabinet and there's ten thousand pictures of you and your family taken throughout the last five years and you had no idea those pictures were being taken how would you feel about that of of course you'd feel violated now they would say yeah they would say look you were in public and i would say yeah i know i i was in public i can't be too angry but i still don't feel right about this now that's exactly how what happens with your data you know that you're opting into things you know you're you're consenting but sometimes you don't realize what you're getting into and you if you actually truly knew what was happening you might regret it and i think that the next generations of humans like the guys who are five and ten years old now i actually think that they're not gonna like this stuff and then we're gonna see a lot of products that come out that fight it because i think that like when you think of like oh wow you used to be able to smoke in a restaurant in the nineteen nineties i mean i remember when i was kid i could smoke in a restaurant or you you'd be smoking in a russia restaurant now we think that's as i think that the privacy stuff now we're actually gonna look back in twenty years and be like i can't believe that that was you were able to do that so anyway yeah i wanted to start it off with that that experiment i like that i like that story a lot and i'm with you we've talked about different quote unquote privacy focused startups ranging from like privacy dot com to duck dot go and how that's actually privacy dot com by the way become like a real com kinda like sort of competitor to to google in a and it obviously in a niche but hey it made it it made it out after like you know ten years against google and we've talked about different different versions of this whether it's browsers phones a lot of the crypto stuff is based on these these same principles right like you own your data and you just you custody it yourself rather than trusting this like kinda central companies to do to to hold it for you and so i'm definitely with you that i think that some really big companies can be there because people really give a shit about this and you could tell people give shit about this like it's ironic you were saying go to your apple iphone settings because if you want if you go down the street in san francisco you're gonna see huge billboards and it just says privacy and it's just apple and there's a phone blocking out your face like this like someone holding a phone and you can't see their face and that's their whole ad and that's their differentiation that's their s about like what they care about it at the super bowl they had that ad of somebody just looking at their phone like typing it like kind of like a a a text message to somebody they're just laughing on uncontrollably but they never explained what it is because it's like hey that's your information and and so apple is like basically bet the farm on privacy as like their core attribute that they're gonna be providing to customers like the number one value prop now and but you know here you go you go into you go into your phone settings and it's like hey yeah we've tracked your location and you can share that and here's here's all the different services you've shared that with you know here and they are trying to fight back like you've you've probably heard the facebook stuff that happened but if you're not advertising your facebook you you you should actually how big of a deal it was you should explain what's going on because even i i don't own an advertising business anymore but i and even i was a little bit under under educated but it's actually a an incredibly big deal this is an incredibly big deal for a consumer but also as business people last week we talked about this inflection with the nc athlete thing this is actually a a a new inflection it it actually helps guys like me who owned an advertising business but i don't not anymore right yeah so so basically facebook's this you know obviously it's the advertising juggernaut facebook and google and with facebook facebook relied on having obviously detailed targeting information about you people always said oh it's creepy you know your iphone hey my phone's listening to me and and and by the way do you know xfinity they they are the real explanation of why of how that works it's like dude i was just talking to my friend about this and then you know and now showing up in my my facebook ads and like the reason why is because your you your friend has searched for a thing or interactive with a product and then they know that you were close to your friend your phones are in close proximity and so they start showing you ads that have been like your friends that your friends have been interested in because they know that that works and there's a chance that you had talked about it and then you know out of thirty times that that you didn't talk about it you just saw an ad it just you went by you and then the one time it's the thing you guys were talking about it stands out and you remember that and you think facebook listening to but nonetheless facebook basically had the biggest targeting machine in the world right you could segment by state by religion by whatever and then they've slowly stripped away some of those things as they got in trouble for you know like privacy with the election about what what sorts of things you can target on but fundamentally facebook knew more about you than you knew about yourself facebook knows before you're pregnant right facebook knows you're pregnant before you know you're pregnant and it knows based on your behaviors it but knows based on your interest and knows based on many things you know a lot of stuff about you and so what happened is apple basically stripped the one thing facebook needed it lets you facebook late basically lets you opt out of data tracking so when you update to the new ios or say i apple it you update to the new ios system it says hey do you wanna share all your data so you're just like no and that one no took away facebook's entire like kind of like knowledge about you as a customer and so you've opted out of of this tracking and so now when you go visit websites facebook doesn't get that data back to it well it doesn't get that that information back and so as a facebook advertiser if you're in e commerce right now all the numbers just show sort of changed to overnight like even when you send it show facebook ad to somebody they click it and they go buy a product from you facebook is only catching like sixty percent of those conversions it doesn't know about the other forty percent because they've opted out of tracking or it didn't work and so facebook all of a sudden and it's kinda like scrambling to figure out or how the heck are we gonna like deliver the same value to our advertisers which is our main business model without the it's like you know fighting with one hand tied behind your back now halfway through the fight and so that's that's sort of what apple did to facebook and facebook tried to fight it in court and they try to do all this p r where they're like you're hurting small businesses and in in reality they are hurting you are yeah but you know net net it's good for the consumer to not have facebook just build this like super rich profile of your every move and your every taste and your every tendency just so that businesses can advertise to you better so if you're listening when you got a privacy or or something like related to this idea i would to learn to reach out to us i'm i'm interested i got a i got a few more ideas if you wanna go you wanna you wanna go after one yeah go for you you doing alright i'm gonna tell you one interesting one i'll tell you two the first is called ghost ghost dot org have you heard of ghost dot org i've used ghost yeah okay so i'm interested in this ghost it's a wordpress meat subs stack is the best maybe explanation so it's a wordpress site it's its own platform so it's a wordpress competitor but they offer a a handful of features like you can accept money for a pay wall article they have a few more features i i actually don't know all the features that they have it and why people say the use cases is you wanna spin up a website for yourself you can use ghost you wanna spin up email newsletter that's either free or paid or both you can use ghost instead of subs or you can wanna speed up a community a paid community you could use ghost and so basically ghost is this open source version of subs stack it's this low cost instead of let's say subs that take ten percent of all your revenue ghost just says hey pay us ten bucks a month that we're happy and so they don't take they don't take a percentage of your revenue so for a lot of people that could be thousands of dollars a month that you're saving if you use ghost and they have different tiers so ten dollars a month thirty dollars a month eighty to two hundred dollars a month and so there's a few interesting things about it but first like the guy behind it isn't intriguing so he launched it as a a non nonprofit which i actually think is stupid but it's it probably was good for like p r and a lot of people actually worked on it for free to help him i think definitely he should switch but it's actually making three and a half million dollars a year and he uses a ton of people like free labor like people who just wanna contribute and i think he actually has staff but what he does is if you go to ghost dot org slash about you get he actually reveals all of his revenue and i think that's interesting because i was going through this and i i'm a an a an investor in a in a in a company called convertkit kit maybe you are too i don't remember but this company called convert kit they do something like thirty million in recurring revenue right now they're in the value of like you you could say that maybe they're worth two hundred to thirty million dollars based off of like public comp so ten times revenue ish and i was looking through ghost dot org numbers they're very similar to what convertkit kit was about four years ago when they just got started and so my prediction and i wanna go and record by saying this is a i think this is awesome and b i actually think that this could be a multi hundred million dollar company in the making and you could watch this guy build it in public and i think it's interesting also he had one major quote so typically people who build these types of things are kinda like nerdy and engineer like and which means there's sometimes like reserve and held back and i which i which i like but he had a great quote that i read he goes someone goes what's your major advice for people getting started he goes honestly my single biggest piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something so what do you think about this company do agree in my prediction that this guy actually could be a multi hundred million dollar business okay kinda boring but i agree right it's more entertaining when we disagree but i i totally agree i i used ghost for many of the reasons you talked about a i was intrigued i thought their story was interesting i liked that they're kinda like kinda like pirates they were sort of like just going going against the grain on a bunch of stuff that they were doing product is good not super simple to use it's kind of like like i also find you know frankly i find wordpress to be a little bit confusing if you wanna wordpress is is incredibly confusing yeah like it's kinda like easy to get the first thing going and then to get us to do what you want takes like a lot of stuff i'm surprised this is a small so three point seven million annual run rate i'm surprised that small because ghost has been around for a while four years so so so i don't think that's i don't think it's that impressive where it is but it's sort of like a duck that go where i'm like i believe it first i believe that these guys are not gonna quit so i think that's like you know the first thing these guys aren't going away and when they don't go away they are very differentiated and you uniquely positioned where they're gonna pick up like ten percent or so of this entire wave of like pub like self publishing that's going on with subs stack and others and i i like i'm more excited about this business than i am about subs one hundred percent i completely agree with you and i i i the the the reason that i'm bringing this up to listeners is not necessarily this is a new idea that they can go and do but if you wanna go and watch this person build he updates the blog every month and he reveals most all their revenue they're also a nonprofit so if you dig around if you google like ghost foundation five zero one you probably can see their total financials because non nonprofit disclose that but really cool company that you could watch being can built it's still small now but it's gonna be fun to watch this being become huge over the next four years see yeah i'm with you on that alright i got some idea so one is from trends actually this ikea hacking thing so yeah so so i saw this in in y'all trends like whatever the weekly newsletter thing that you guys put out and i thought this was pretty fascinating so what is ikea hacking ikea hacking is when you buy something that's sort of like a basic looking piece of furniture and then because ikea is like what's it called totally modular store like any piece of any piece of furniture it's like all the wheels are kinda like they accept this one like of one peg so you can go swap fifty different wheels onto the same piece of furniture or same thing with the handle or the facade or the like you know the top the tabletop top the glass top whatever right so it has like this uniform nature to it which lets you just swap parts almost like minecraft or roadblocks or something like that and so ikea hacking is the art taking something that's sort of a simple plain jane look an ikea piece of furniture and then you go to the store and you just buy different little upgrades you know like you're soup up a car on on pi my ride and then you but your pi out your your your dresser or your your desk or whatever it is and you make something that looks pretty sick and actually it was just like you know a hundred eighty dollars worth of random ikea parts that if you assemble them correctly they take you from this before picture to this after picture it's the youtube video put up the before and after that's in from the trends thing it's awesome like it just looks so simple like very basic looking thing to like a really cool looking thing and this was all just done using ikea parts so i have some ideas around this but did i first did i even accurately describe it yeah you described it correctly and the way that we discovered this or i i i think i mean i i used this four years ago when we first started a company basically i found this subreddit called ikea hacking and what i did was i bought a hundred and fifty dollar kitchen countertop it was basically like a a really nice wood block that's all i mean that was like a like a countertop but i and then i just went and got some legs from from a from like a a totally different thing this countertop you're actually supposed to lay on like granite or like a like a like a countertop and i just but i just screwed legs on it and i put it in the middle of our room and that was like our kitchen table at our office and right that's and i i think i started talking to step about ikea hacking it's very fascinating i don't know what the business ideas are though okay so here's a business idea so first it's r slash ikea hacks it's got seventy eight thousand members on reddit so back to the episode we did with greg ge bird where he talked about un reddit this is a classic example so shout out to greg basically i would look at a community like this i would say these people pretty passionate about what's what they're doing here and like these photos are kind of amazing these would make for great ads this would make for great content just seeing seeing this right and so i would just go to r slash reddit dot com r slash r slash ikea hacks and then i would sort by like top top posts you know for the year or something like that and just go get a sense of like what's there and so i think and then click comments and read all the top comments of all the type posts so i think you could do a few things here right i think you could do so i would then take many of the proven business models and then i would like apply them here so if i was getting started what would i do to start i i would start by saying look i don't know the exact business model but what i do know is that this is great content so i would create an instagram account right away right because the first thing that you gotta know is that most people don't bury their head and reddit they're not gonna find all these knee subreddit even someone like me who uses reddit every day i didn't know about this subreddit and so let alone my sister who will never use reddit and she'll only use instagram and so like the first thing i would do is i would immediately create an instagram account that's just posting the ikea hacks the best pictures from from reddit basically is pla it and just put it there and then just credit the username from reddit in and every photo that's as a photo credit just i would just just so you instagram trouble yeah just i would say well what are you talking about i was given credit right there and it's like you you're ripping this off so that's the first thing i do i try to get that to like fifty to a hundred thousand followers on instagram because that's now my asset that's my audience that's interested in this thing that i can then leak out different products so it could be a course like a simple like a hundred dollar two hundred dollar course that's like your guide to ikea hacking it could be like individual courses it's like the the bedroom course the the off home office course the home garage you know the the garage gym course or whatever right like maybe different modules i would use i maybe think about courses i would think about maybe i could sell these as kits so like maybe i could save you the hassle of having to go to idea but like figure out oh i need this knob and then this little paper thing and then this other thing and then those three together what you used to like make vintage looking dresser maybe i would just sell the vintage looking dresser kit and it's it might just be as simple as a recipe walking into ikea go to the section one nine eight point c and go pick up this item right and so it might be something like that don't know what i would but i do think there's like a small bootstrap business and this is a good business for somebody who is genuinely passionate about this right so like how do you take what i'll call you're like okay it's not meant to be offensive but like there's a lot of hobbies that are like basic bitch hobbies so what's a basic big hobby basically charlie is a hobby that you think is unique to you it's like say like no you're you're fucking discussing no offense like but anytime you say no offense it's like it gonna be just brace yourself for some offense yeah no offense don't no fucking hate no offense so so so the lenovo events here so like for guys the basic hobby is like sports oh bro love i love the nba yeah you and like eighty million other people right now right so it's not like a unique hobby so you can't how do you turn your passion into business well it's not a unique passion so you're probably gonna have like a me too business unless you think of a new angle and so another basic big hobby is like oh i love interior decorating say like cool you in like ninety ninety million other people who like to watch hgtv and just judge stuff or like you're happy to scroll on instagram pretty looking things and push like well i think that's why if you if you look at it from this angle with like ikea hack you're finding in niche and you're building your own audience on that on that like that one kind of trend and then maybe you can release some kind of subscription product education product do product like something to that all and now you take your into over business we already talked about the basic bitch version of this for us which was the knees over toes guy yeah another another example of working out dude yeah another example of this is philips hughes philips hughes light bulbs crazy subreddit that is like has a rabbit fan base i've actually like lighting or something right what is it is it phillips use it started as just a bulb that was and you would say alexa make the bulbs or you know make the living room purple yeah but then they have like fifty other products now and people like have all these blogs and they're actually making good money i bet you like apartments therapy or like one of these bigger brands actually owns one of these blogs i'd don't have to scroll it out and look at who the copyrighted owns the copyright but basically it's blogs on where to put the lights like under the bed in order to make it feel cool right an example of who did this well is house of highlights i don't know if you followed them on instagram but they're they're big basically they they took espn sports center which was like this thirty minute television show highly produced and all it i was doing are showing you the best highlights of the day and so back in the day you know like sports would happen all day and in the evening or the morning the next morning you would watch sports center to catch up through the best highlights right it's like just the sugar and how's highlights smartly realized hey you know what we can just post those like ten second clips on instagram as soon as they happen all day and like i can basically have like two people to like people who like the nba just run this account and this account can grow like a million people so the guy like omar created this thing i i didn't and owns it yeah so he ends up selling it the bleach report and and runs it there they they run it now i bet you whatever you sold it for you sold it for way too little and so like you know over time did kinda the same thing but anyway anyways that's like an example of taking these like how do you take this content that's not your content it's not original content it's in this like kinda basic bitch hobby and then you turn it into like a media a media property that you own and then you own that audience and then you could figure out what you wanna do from there so there's this couple who they got popular because right before the pandemic started there was a french guy and his american girlfriend who are now husband and wife and they started baking croissants in their apartment and then they brought it to work and they like sold them to their friends or the coworkers and then eventually they created an instagram and they went viral and the apartment that i'm staying in right now bought like pre order you have the pre order eight weeks out because they're sold out for weeks and weeks and they're just baking this these croissants and cookies out of their apartment and the guy who owns my apartment got them and then ended up going out of the country and he's like hey you can actually have my order it's like ninety dollars of like these fancy croissants and so on sunday i'm going to get those fancy croissants and i invited dave ne the founder of bleach report and his wife to come over and eat these like i was like hey you wanna these are like fancy girl croissants like i don't understand at the time i didn't know the story but like for some reason i think this is a big deal you wanna come over and eat these with your kids so i'll be eating croissants with the founder report on sunday and i can ask them the story about house highlights that's yeah you do please do it's amazing buy by him i like matt mad credit to them for picking this up before in before espn or anybody else i think by the way he listens to the podcast or at least he like talk to us on twitter a bunch and so he seems great yeah and bleach your report i saw his talk at hu con very impressive of like the way they kind of like won and they survived i remember this one anecdote you told which was he was like yeah we basically like every other content site was kind of like okay i'm i might butcher this just because i'm trying to remember a talk for three years ago but here's what i remember i'm saying every other like sports news website was just talking about whatever was interesting to them they're all kinda putting out the same content he's like we needed to be smart smarter right like we needed to say every hour and rider is gonna spend we don't have the same number of writers or budget they need to spend writing articles that are gonna get more traffic than anybody else and so he would just reverse engineer it so he like they would just study google searches and they would say oh everybody's searching what what time is the nfl draft he's so we would immediately like have like the number one ranking thing on google for what time is nfl draft where to watch it and how to watch it and what's gonna happen in the draft just like this kind of filler content on a on a website and he's like people really like the draft okay we're gonna go like all in on the draft we're gonna write ten times more content about the draft because that's where there's a big appetite for the espn is like under serving and so i thought it was pretty awesome how they took kind of like a supply demand approach to it instead of like a arts c right like an arts c approach of like oh you know this is what this is we're a journalist publication and we should we should write the hard hitting pieces about whatever or like you know here's what i'm passionate about like no they they like took a science approach to it which i liked and then the other founder went and did that he had a non compete after his soul bleach report so he couldn't do sports anymore but he started a media company called bustle which is like women's content so all types of articles but like an example of his long tail search strategy he deployed the same strategy so like if you google like what happens when i get my period while i'm on the beach like bustle will show up number one it's like there's only gonna be like a hundred people a month or something that search for that if i be i have no idea but that i think i had heard through him that was one of the examples or if you google things like that you'll come across bustle and they do like over a hundred million in revenue and so it still works right and by the way when sort was just pivoting off the instagram thing we talked about this in the past but there's some new news so we should bring it up we talked about this this woman who's the influencer she's a fitness influence on instagram kayla i think it's seen or something i don't know exactly say last year i think it's do every woman listening to this is just gonna be like what the fuck guys i think it's it's new what there was something else we we try to pronounce that we just like could it was just like a i don't know some some fancy luxury brand for for purses or something that like yeah yeah she wears hermes bags so so anyway she has this app so she basically took this instagram following it was just posting like workout clips on instagram stuff heard her boyfriend i think or her husband i don't remember who was before the app they were just selling a pdf sarah and my wife exactly if she bought it for twenty nine dollars my sister has the pdf and she was just using this pdf for like is it like the the beach body or for figure forgot figure forgot what it's call it's like some some kinda like thirty day program yeah this is our thirty minute that was like you know from from the scroll and she was buying the pdf then they turn it into an app right so they turn it into an app apps starts doing great my wife was a subscriber you pay a hundred bucks a year and then you open up the app and it's basically like from what i remember you opened up the app there was like five women and who are like the trainers and it's like one is like very muscular one is like very just like thin one is like half kinda like tone or whatever another one has like a huge butt it's like which body do you want and go follow their program so you would just pick it and then you would get like daily workouts kind like a video that was like very good and so it was that app was doing like i think they had done over a hundred million dollars revenue i know if that's annual or cumulative but they just sold i don't know if you have the details in front of but they just sold for like four hundred million dollars or something right like they just exited exited the app this week yeah for four hundred million dollars they sold to this company called if fit which is about to go public they said they're doing a hundred million in revenue pretty amazing no brainer to buy definitely worth it i think and it's pretty weird that hundred if you doing a hundred million in revenue you you know you sold for for only four hundred million so it's pretty low multiple for like a digital product but they're probably trying think so probably spending a ton on on marketing okay yeah i i maybe maybe not i mean you have thirteen million followers and it is based on her thing on on her on her following can i tell you about an idea that someone just sent sent to me and i thought it was very amazing okay look at the thing called bird flow in the docs so it's called bird flow dot i o did you click on that i saw you text me about it this morning but i haven't checked out this so tell me about it okay so this guy sent it to me he goes hey i had this like software company and i was trying to do all these problems and solve all like it's called crowd flow i or something like that and he's like it's a i spent three years working on and then i just said fuck it i'm just gonna create a really micro small app i'm gonna build it in two weeks it just does one thing really well it's called bird flow and if you click it it says marketing automation for twitter but basically i'll i'll i'll tell you like it it does three different things but the main thing is everyone who clicks follow on your profile it automatically sends them a message and you could say anything in that message like hey thanks for following or hey thanks for following check out my website and i installed it he he's charging twenty nine dollars i installed it and it's awesome it's awesome it's awesome i love these little micro saas tools i think it's so neat this is exactly how buffer got started and that's a multi hundred million dollar business right yeah i like the micro saas tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you're already like trying to win on that's the key right so like i'm already trying to win on twitter i'm trying to win on instagram i'm trying to win on reddit whatever and if you could build the micro saas tool it's like here's you know other examples of them there's what's it called jungle scout which for amazon so let's say you're trying to win as an fba seller on on amazon or you're selling a product on amazon jungle scout is this app you can use and basically when you're searching any amazon like search trip search result you can use you can open up jungle scout you know basically tell you how much that product is worth how much how much search volume there is for it and how competitive it is to be in that niche and how much money they think that product is making so that you could find winning products that are like high demand low competition and then you could build a you know an fba business in that niche and so it's a simple saas i think jungle scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because recently partially acquired by pe in the hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation greg mercer and like is is good friends with neville and he in austin and he like this is i guess public i mean he's got like a plane and shit so whatever it was sold for like neville will post pictures go to like tell ride in private jet and i'm like dude who's just guy or he's the jungle scout guy the guy who sold part of the company who started gotcha yeah so so a super simple tool that just helped you in there and they just built they just kinda like dominate that one niche of like fba you know fba selling or in this case twitter automations right so oh somebody and so i like this a lot i need something like this for me because i'm trying to basically grow my audience on twitter and then cool the less work i can do the better right like i love digital salespeople alright a digital salesperson that's what i think about when i think about landing pages or like this like little like automations that's a digital salesperson and if somebody who's gonna work twenty four seven for me for zero cost or you know in this case whatever it was twenty nine dollars a month that's their salary and they're gonna do exactly what i say every single time predictably and they're just gonna generate more value for me and so i look at my landing page like a digital salesperson i look at my automations like convertkit things like that as digital salespeople people and yeah this is a really cool and i like this a lot now i i can see this getting really annoying i mean people hate getting these auto dms but it still will work yeah yeah it it it might be annoying but i actually just made mine it just says hey exclamation point thanks for following now here's the problem that i already found so it's already sent out a couple hundred messages for me i guess i get maybe five hundred to a thousand new followers a day this i feel like it you're saying that this say a a couple women replied yeah so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like hey what's going on you know like your wearing basically they applied yeah so like these like attractive web replied and i was like fuck i don't want like anyone gets the wrong idea it had the think that i'm holler just at them or that i'm holler at all you know and so i didn't reply to them but i was like oh my gosh like let's see i actually could might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit i could totally see right when that when that i kinda i set you that message it was kinda weird right it's hilarious yeah i could see that you know the same thing where somebody else pointed this out too which is like let's say you write a thread that goes viral you might get five thousand followers you're gonna send out what five thousand auto dms and then get like two thousand random replies back it's gonna like kinda ruin your inbox and maybe you get you banned from twitter i don't know because it'll just rate limit you so so i think there's some problems with it maybe maybe this guy's built in some rules like for me i would only wanna do this i would only wanna dm somebody who has over x followers or that i you know i already follow or something like that so then it kinda like limits the number of people this does it to like you needed to be like hey you know only if it's a you know farmer looking white boy then send this so i don't get in trouble with my wife you know like i i needed to be like this guy needs to have like you know patel or gupta his last name if it's gonna send this auto dms so my indian fan boys can can get these messages from me but not everybody else yeah i could see it get me in trouble alright you wanna do another one yeah let's do one okay a little idea that i think is kind of interesting i don't have a ton to say about the business but it's more like this is a a cool way to good idea so this is my first time traveling with with babies and travel babies it's like you know all the things you would expect like on the plane you know tip pooped through his clothes had to change and you know like on a trade table because we couldn't stand up because the fasten seat don't sign like person next to us looking as like we're gross and just supposed to is disgusting i mean you are surprised exactly i know i know i agree but there's a bunch of problems so like we had to take our car right because you can't just like be like i'll i'll get there you know used to pack light i used to be like cool get there i just need my phone i'll call uber get to my hotel if i'm missing something i'll just buy it there and with this with kids is it's like the opposite it's like can't even get in into uber because you have to like have a car seat all that's up so i saw this business called baby qui i thought it was kinda cool it's again one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of google a popular google search but the website looks like it was last updated in like nineteen ninety six those are businesses that print money and so it's like congratulations you have identified a money printer and so i don't know how successful baby group is but i would suspect it's pretty good for as a bootstrap business and what it does is it's basically a marketplace so i could say hey i just landed in las vegas i need two car seats i don't wanna lug two car seats check them in you know like on the like you know drag them to the airport check them man take them home like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that i can just install into a rental car or i can stall into to to a uber or whatever and then like let me rent it for four days and then when i'm leaving come pick it back up from the airport and so that's a baby qui is it's a baby equipment but it's a marketplace where people will bring you what you need you mean the stroller i got a stroller for you don't love that heavy thing around just use mine when i'm here people are making a lot of money just google searching i was like i was google searching and again it's a very good content play i was google searching baby travel packing list so i was like what don't i even what am i forgetting here and so they had a blog i was like here's all the things you need to pack for your baby and then at the bottom it's was like by the way if you don't wanna pack your stroller and car seats because they're heavy as hell like you know you could just use baby whipping and get it when you're there and i was like click through and i was like this is cool and so i just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems look for annoy look for inconvenience and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them thought was clever little business this is awesome so baby qui is actually it's a peer to peer marketplace so i don't think you actually said that yep i thought it was the company that would give you stuff no it's just like jane who's kid out grew her car and she realizes she can make you know two hundred dollars a month just renting it out to people if as long as she's willing go drop it off and pick it up from airport i have these guys raised money have they've been around for a while and they haven't it doesn't look like they've raised money but yeah they you know they are basically like just kind of like a looks like a boot trap business from everything i could tell launch of twenty sixteen they've had over thirty thousand orders i think they did a crowd funding campaign at some point so maybe there's a shark tank this is kind of interesting now i i'm not convinced that this is gonna this can be a huge huge thing but what what is actually what is actually interesting is let's go to new york it tells you how many reservations someone who's ever had i bet you that there could be like some mom who's just dominated like a la or a new york scene like can just rank really high on all the all the big cities and lend out all their stuff and so what it does is it it tells you how much it so what basically what happens is you land in new york you but before you land you tell baby qui you hire camilla shannon who's the top in new york she's rented it her stuff out seven seventy three times and she'll bring you any gear that you need and you could see all the gear that she has and she costs forty to sixty dollars to deliver the stuff to you plus there's gear for there's a a car seat for ten dollars a day there's a play pin for forty dollars a day there's fifteen pound pound dumbbells for five dollars a day there's a this is crazy this is awesome this is awesome this is a great fine yeah so so another example of this by the way have you used or or probably not used but you're you're familiar with them i'm assuming teachers paid teachers no what's that you've never heard of teacher's pay teachers no what i i kids it doesn't doesn't matter it this is just like one of the things that you know about because it's just awesome and so google teacher's space teacher so what this is is oh my god if you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of thirty people is it's pretty inefficient right so you go you you teach kids all day already kind of an exhausting thing now you go home and you you have to grade papers you have to come up with tomorrow's lesson plan and then you have to design the quiz for thursday's quiz then you have next friday's test you have all this stuff you're just constantly this content treadmill and what teacher's pay teachers did that was genius was they said look that's a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with the lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic so why don't we just create a marketplace or any teacher can list their lesson plans their quizzes their test and you could just find go instead of just making your own go on here for ten bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about you know geology right now and you just go by the thing for ten bucks and you've saved four hours of time and so it's like a great trade so teachers pay teachers is a marketplace doing this some teachers were making millions dollars just creating their putting their content up for sale here the business itself does i think three hundred plus million dollars a year in revenue and gross buy ip in gross revenue yeah yeah but it was bought by private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing and it's like over thirty million hits all yeah well so it's insane business beautiful business too because it's like wow you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes you turned them into stars and millionaires which is fantastic i think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet this is there's no reason not they they they shouldn't be on the other side you saved a bunch of money and and a bunch of sorry you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they're more rested and can go into class and perform instead of being you know like kind of falling behind constantly the content treadmill and so i thought this is like you know an amazing idea same it reminds me of the baby qui thing obviously this is much bigger much more successful but it's like these niche kinda like pain points turned into you know marketplace solutions this is badass maybe you could also do this for speeches i i remember doing the my brother john gave a really speeches he gave a great best man's speech and three people idea three people paid the money to write their speech and i think that you could do that for i think you could start with just wedding speeches but eventually do all other types of speeches dude that is hilarious something there's absolutely that because there's a ton of googling right like when you have to give your speech you're like oh god pressure super high rep like how many reps have i had doing this zero okay let me go google and let me try to get some inspiration internally try to get the ball rolling and we if people go to youtube where they try to watch like you know best best man speech ever right best bride between speech ever and then you're like okay like what am gonna do copy this not quite but if somebody created these templates that could be pretty good i i like that yeah i actually think you do that there's this company called booking in a box started by tucker max who was one of my investors before it was when they did book in a box they would you'd pay them any number from twenty to a hundred thousand dollars on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life so you could like get speaking gigs or you could give your kids or like whatever for any different reasons if you look like an expert be a thought leader and then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers you know they would someone would pay ten twenty thirty thousand dollars they have if someone come and talk about like best practices and meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better and then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your powerpoint and presentation for you and you'd pay more money for that and i was like that's cool that should probably be the business more so than just the book thing right and so i think that actually teacher's bank teachers you could also do speakers pain speakers i mean you can do the same thing there's another angle to they is i think that teachers are sort of this extremely teachers and nurses there these are two workforce that are very very large they have a unique set of problems they're extremely like kind of word mouth heavy and i don't think that the existing solutions were great for them so on the podcast a long time ago we had the founder of like incredible health come on which is basically like a kinda like a job marketplace thing like kinda of like vanished high that nurses yeah that was right before covid how'd that do they raised a bunch of money i don't know if they're doing well or not but i can't really say but but they raised much money because the opportunity is large meaning there are so many nurses and there's a shortage of nurses and there's high demand for nurses so there's nurses so there's a lot of fees paid for replacements so nurses want great jobs and then hospitals and and and clinics basically are happy to pay to place nurses and so there's a lot of money to be made if you can build the right network there you can build a vertical linkedin for just nurses and i think there's is a similar opportunity for teachers not in terms of placing teachers because it's not the same level of demand for like hiring teachers or but i do think that i do think that if you built like a professional networking thing for teachers that's better they don't necessarily want or need to use linkedin i think you could build a a custom solution that is four teachers it's like how do teacher how teacher's is gonna engage with like kinda like their peers alright what do what do they need to do are they gonna do they need to share tips do they are is it job opportunities is it content like teacher's pay teachers i think if you did a brainstorm if you were in if that's that's the niche issuer we're in i think there's a lot of opportunities for teachers just because there's such a huge workforce and the generic solution like linkedin is not gonna be tailored to them how much you think teachers paying teachers got acquired for i would say if i was gonna put a guess i would say five hundred million dollars yeah i i would i would guess four hundred hundred because it it is kind of a monopoly in its niche or more or more even if or rather if she said it's worth more than that now i wouldn't be surprised yeah and we can research i didn't research i didn't plan to bring it up but but we can look at it it might be it might be out there publicly no you wanna know your talk two more yeah i don't have much more what do you have i doing my load early i have won okay so we can we can end kind of like this life list so so last night we're hanging out we're talking you know i'm i'm hanging out with with some other folks who were traveling with us and the family yeah family members and so i i was as i asked this question i said alright i said what do you think i said let's take fast forward you're i don't how old are you're thirty one third something yeah you're thirty you say alright fast forward you're ninety years old and let's say your life like you you have your life as it's going so far and then let's just kind of like project forward like it just keeps going the way the things are been going like the the track you're on let's say you continue on the track you end up at ninety what do you think if you look back you're gonna be most happy with the way you lived your life and then what do you think you're gonna regret the most about the way you lived your life so far and so i was curious i i after i asked that question i got some answers from the group i was curious i was like i'm gonna ask sam this because i i don't know what he would say i think it's a hard question to be fair but i'm curious what comes to mind for you i would say that i let my temper control things you know i i lose my temper easily sometimes you know you've seen it sometimes when i get mad at you or when i get mad at dan or someone else and it's like it's sometimes they've actually done something that is warranted oftentimes it's like it's not that big a deal and so i get super fucking frustrated and i'll hold grudges over like a relatively small frustration and i let my emotions control some of my decisions and i've lost a lot of money and a lot of friends because of it so that's what i regret is that and i worked quite hard to fix it but i i wish i would've have been even more aware of that early on what else do i do i regret that's a great answer do i think that i'll regret i i i wish i didn't spend years neglecting my health thinking and like oh i can get to it and then later on like i i should have fun now i wish that when i was a kid my parents is instilled healthy eating habits because i think that like that's still kinda fucked with me right like eating a lot of bad sugar what else what about the what about the what about the flip side what's the one thing you're gonna look back and you're be like you know glad glad that you you you you lived that way or you did that thing or you you you made those choices starting at age twenty i wrote this down i said by thirty i wanna i wanna have started and started something that will make enough money that when i have children i won't ever have to worry about how to give them what they need and also i'll be able to spend time with my family even though i didn't have a family or anything like that i was like that's what i think i'm gonna want by the time i'm thirty so i'm gonna work against that and i achieved that and so i'm most proud that i now can can only worry about the emotional aspects of the family even though i don't even have a family right okay i'm most proud i got that problem out of the way the the what do you think of the financial problem what do you think of that question is this a is a good question or is it it's a really good question i i actually changed it around i asked myself this all the time well it's quite similar i go i i think like what can i do today that will make my future self proud and not regret right and so it will make myself for and and and i say ten years but i would actually change it to six months because oftentimes how many times and and the other question i asked myself is in six months will you wish that you have done this or wish that you had started trying to do blank so it's like losing weight exercising is a really good one sick in six months well you had look back at yourself and be like fuck i wish i already had started learning how to speak spanish i wish i already would have read these books i wish i already would have done this children just fucking do it make your future yourself proud so that's the question i asked i think it's a great question and what what was your answer what what do you regret and what are you proud of so i had trouble with the regret side i was thinking about it and i was like okay and i went through some i said okay i couldn't think of it easy answer so i said okay what happened and you can't think of the answer right away you you just start throwing out what might it be right so that it doesn't have to be this but what what even comes to mind and so i was like oh well i regret kinda like spending too much time working okay it's possible no a i think so i mean i think you got you're you're pretty healthy with that you worked really hard when you were single or not married yeah i worked like three times harder than i work now so it's something that made that shift well i like will i regret like working on the wrong things like you just worked on this like like right now i'm building this d business it's like well like y know this this is frankly this is a business that's meant to make money it's not like the joy of my life like this podcast is more like the joy right this is the fun and it's building up into something that's big but like the the business i'm doing is i'm doing it as a business so maybe i'll say why didn't i go try to like change the world some bigger way maybe i'll say that started brainstorming these and what i realized was that the only things i think i'm gonna regret are either gonna be health related but even then when by the i'm ninety i don't know how much i to care about that if i if i got to ninety so it didn't quite work but i think if i ask that question for like fifty or sixty i would say definitely one of the top answers would be taking care of my health better you know just just prioritizing that number one number two was like any when i think when you're ninety you're short on time so you'll probably i'll probably look back and they fuck pissed away a bunch of time on the wrong stuff and so i that's what i that's the second category is like where am i pissing away time that when i look back i'm gonna say i can't believe i wasted those precious years on on the wrong stuff or on the wrong things for carrying what the wrong things or even in the moment focusing on the wrong things the last one is relationships is like i think ultimately so my answer that i came came to in the end was i'll probably regret not having more kids because i think the older i get the more joy i mean like most the like the most value joy of my life is just gonna come from my kids and i know right now it feels like oh my god i can't i couldn't pop i have two i couldn't possibly have another because what why it's already so hard but too how'd is your wife she's young it's not the it's not the biological clock it's like the workload it's like oh my god like how am my how do i have another kid with these two kids with the business stuff with the podcast with the ten things that i do you know in in two years you can sure i'm not saying it doing i guess what i'm saying is i think that's the one thing if i look back i'm probably gonna wish i had more kids because it's probably gonna be from age sixty five to ninety it's probably gonna be the number one thing number one source of fun of my life is gonna be my shade slash i think you should you should address it i told sarah i won five and so we froze our embryos listed to this we froze our embryos and i've got six kids the reason i don't want okay sarah got this sarah sara got this thing sara got this thing there's just a net genetic component that we make sure we didn't wanna pass on so the kids were healthy and i got five kids all girls and so i'm asked her if basically go and do it do it again because i would like to have two boys two girls right and so i've got five kids wait for me but they're all girls so anyway i actually think that that's a good one i asked my twitter following how many of you how do you feel about kids and age and you almost unanimously the people who had so this is like a a bias survey right so it's like what you mean do you think about kids in age what does that mean i forget well i forget the exact way that i asked but i said do you wish that you'd had kids sooner or later in life okay gotcha and and of course like there's like a bias here like people who are already bought into one category will likely answer and support that category or support that decision but almost unanimously i feel like the answer was i wish i had my kids sooner in life and that actually shocked me because particularly in new york silicon valley la with the coastal bigger cities it's actually versus like missouri where i'm from it's actually more normal to get married and have kids at twenty one twenty two twenty three whereas on the coles coast it's like thirty one thirty two thirty three and you're constantly told you know just wait just wait even like andrew wilkinson said told me a couple of my friends told me and i guess you're you you have to sound you could actually give your opinion most everyone said i wish i had kid sooner and one guy actually changed my perspective amount own everything he i go why why do you think that he goes because now i'm just gonna die sooner and i wish i could have spent more time with them yeah i i don't i don't know the answer i think whatever i i think it it works either way it's not really i don't know i don't really think there's was right answer there but but i i i kids are great they cri are really great so so so i like that question i like the one you had too so i guess like if i was gonna do i recommend people do this after the podcast if you if you've listened this far i would basically write down both i would say what's the thing i'm gonna thank myself for and what's was the thing i'm gonna regret when i'm ninety about the way i'm living my life right now and and if i just project it forward and then there's the one you said which is six months from now what's the thing i'm gonna wish i had started doing now or stop doing now yeah because because they're still wish done it then there's a lot you could do in six months and now you're not gonna maybe have a life changing thing but like you can lose sixty pounds in six months maybe you can learn a little bit of a language enough to like go and speak maybe at a in a different country and you could read a bunch of books you can learn a new you could learn how to play the piano in six months i mean you could do a lot of like interesting stuff so yeah you could go you know repair this relationship you have if your dad or whatever you you do you could do many many things i guess that that's the other one i thought about for for for the regret it's like not having maybe spent more time or being kinda like just like nicer to my parents like again i'm gonna miss them a lot when they're gone and they're gonna go like it's gonna happen and once they do i'm just gonna i i think that's probably gonna be one of the things i'm gonna wish why didn't i why didn't i you know talk to a more or spend more time or you know tell him you know thanks you know is something like that is probably gonna be one of my answers for that for that just i'll wrap this up with a quick story that hopefully will champions people's change people's perspective so do you know who ram meets seth is safety yeah he's got this business book business slash book huge brand called il should be rich he's a good friend of mine and whenever i have money like doubts or questions i call him and he kinda like so for example and and he always like thinks about everything like very thoughtfully and i was talking to him about buying a ring for my wife years ago and like much should i spend and he goes like i told him i wanted to spend five thousand dollars and he was like no no no no no and he like told me a budget way higher he goes trust me and he explained his reasoning and i and i listened to him i went and bought a a ring that was i spent twenty seven thousand dollars on the ring and i didn't have a that much money at the time what was his reasoning though his reasoning was like first of all it's your wife like whatever she wants like what's the point of working hard it's to make someone like your wife proud and happy and she's gonna wanna show this off just make her happy second if you're gonna be married to her for potentially eighty years who gives a fuck over twenty grand divided by eighty grand or eight eighty years years and he goes just don't be cheap on the stuff that actually matters this probably really matters to her now some people doesn't matter but then the second thing was i called for me and i go hey ram me you took your family to your europe one time to italy he goes yeah you want me to plan yours for you and i go well yeah but what do you mean he goes well like i love doing this and i'll plan yours for you but i only i have one rule i said what he goes i'll plan it for you but you have to have an unlimited budget i was like what the hell he goes dude the whole point of traveling with your family like you're very so i'm taking my mom and dad and my wife to italy they my parents have really never been out of the country other than one time to visit me in australia and he goes i'm gonna you gotta give them on unlimited budget i was like dude i was gonna spend like fifteen thousand maybe and he goes no no no no we're gonna spend fifty at least and i was like that's so much money he goes dude you're never gonna go out of the country again with your family and i've done it before like one time it's the one thing that they will never stop talking about it and i don't care if i only had a hundred thousand i'm spending fifty thousand because this is the whole point of working really really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever and i was like you're right i need equip at cheap i'm gonna just put it little result i i bought my mom and dad first class they've never been first class first class tickets us to europe we're gonna like have a great time and it kinda changed my perspective on spending and and being tight so that's my quick little story that's amazing i love it alright should we should end on that alright good dan what do you think this was good i'll give you guys a nine and a half mh okay good i'll take that last one was an eight but or an eight and a half alright that's the episode yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's all on a less travel never looking back