#26 - Shopify Spy Tool, Apartment Plants & Lucrative Content Sites

okay we're here this is million dollar brainstorm sean here with sam and special guest mike who's not mic up but he's in attendance hopefully he'll be a guest on the podcast soon alright let's jump in what do you go you told me have some good ideas i've got a few so what it is is to look out your face right now well it's not an idea but it's a my to find idea what he did was he went to the site and he found websites that all use the same ip address shopify has the same ip address and this website coincidentally has a way to rank websites on an ip address so basically what i'm saying is we entered in shopify ip address and we found all of the other sites shopify is doing and it ranks them okay so for example won't link to this in the notes sorry you saying are you gonna share the the super spy tool or what well it's like it's like an ip address to even get to the site so it's like the address is like four eight three five five i mean it's like a bunch web straight to the dark web right and so amongst like the top hundred most popular shopify stores that are using shopify ip address it's like all vape companies deals like a site like daily steals which i'll talk about clothing but not like single brand clothing like outdoor voices like stores things that like they sell a lot of products and then makeup and particularly i saw one that was on there and i'm gonna i'll tell you three that stood out like seed beauty have you seed beauty never heard of it okay i went down the rabbit hole and i researched a lot of these sites side seed beauty what they do is they're the manufacturers of a store called color pop as well as a i know color pop as well as they make the makeup that kylie sells yes they own fifty other brands right this is insane if you go to youtube and search for color pop they have a office tour that they've made for like hiring i watched this thing twice it was amazing it's like this crazy factory in la the story is wild that's like there's a like a mister it was like a a family business and seed beauty is the incubator within the family business right and so they were first just manufacturing other people's makeup other companies makeup for them and shipping it and then they started making their own brands and now they white label for it jenner what little rihanna but like yeah it's incredible one no the rihanna one i think is done with what's the big french luxury conglomerate i forget what it is but it's a publicly traded company you could actually read about their numbers there but so anyway seed beauty kill on shopify fire and there's like fifty brands that they own and that was surprised the second one was daily steals dot com now have you heard of these i think they're all scams these are this is a coupon site what is this like penny bidding oh penny auctions not yeah they're horrible they're horrible for you like qui is the other one that's really popular okay so if you do this hack that i just showed you there's dozens of them in the top like and what you're saying is these are all been made by by the same person or company because they're coming from the same ip they're all well no they're all in shopify i these are all shopify okay so they're all built on top of shopify but this is a business that i would never would've have thought was actually as popular as it is i mean this was as popular at according to my rankings it has as much traffic explain what this is for somebody who doesn't understand what you're say out i think the scam what you do is you buy points to a website and then you use those points to bid on product the start at super cheap and the glance point yeah the hope is that you can buy an iphone for like eighty five points which is like i don't know two dollars exactly and sometimes it does happen but most of the time what happens is it's not like ebay where the highest bidder pays the price and if you bid second place you keep your money with this every time you bid your points go into the pool so you bid four points to see if you can get the if iphone for four points well you're not gonna win and those four points are gone and so whoever wins typically gets it for a lower amount of points than the retail price but all the bidder together have put in way more than the price of an iphone and like genius so it is genius think that it's all bullshit and it's also built on shopify which i would never have thought i would have thought that either okay and the third one which we wrote about in trends my prediction was that this industry is kinda like the mattress industry in two thousand and ten it's about to change and that is the si the si dot com right they sell plants particularly plant cute millennial plants like succulent and condo plants apartment plants yeah like fancy ones right and we wrote about them on trends we did a report on the indoor plant industry months ago now the site the si is one of the according to this thing one of most popular is one of the most popular and what are you think about when you guys put out the report it that's pretty compelling to me if i didn't have a job and i wanted to make money that sounds awesome i would have joined that the hard part shipping it and making sure it rise without being all screwed up but the margins are fat i even went and found wholesaler of succulent right it math works out wonderfully great love it okay so yeah that was a cool find that i wanted to go through alright the second one mind bloom have you heard a mind bloom no i was talking to i won't say his name ad nasa for permission don't me invested in it okay so there's this so seemed like it's sounded with a j that's okay here yeah got that alright yeah okay so i have this like weird idea where i'm not like a silicon valley high boy too much but there's this idea that like what's popular among rich silicon valley people is gonna be mainstream in twenty years right there's another theory here that i think critics and wrote about which is what the engineers do on the weekend everybody will do on the weekdays eventually yeah so it's like what the nerds and sort of silicon valley people do as her hobbies eventually go go mainstream so what i'm about to mention is not that cutting edge but psychedelics okay but mind bloom just launched it was started by a guy who started a company that previously i think we're raised a hundred million dollars it's called mind bloom i think they've launched within the past few months and they raised money for it and what it does is it connects you with a therapist in new york who will do i don't know the exact drugs i think it's ketamine and what's in mushrooms no idea whatever the mushrooms one is super cool and so they prescribe this to you or they they yeah it's legal in new york okay and i actually spoke to a guy today in new zealand how do you pronounce that so simon that's what it is is that legal in why we got mike here adding tons of value right away i think it's legal in new york but this company connects you with a doctor or therapist right who will give it to you and i actually spoke to a guy today in new zealand who we're gonna fund a little bit and he got one of the first grants in new zealand to do lsd testing totally legal we're gonna fund the research side of not well i want the hustle to write about him and then we'll people to get money to his grant he needs a hundred grand i see and i'm gonna match it gotcha love it so mind bloom okay i like mind bloom would you use it because you've talked to him in the past about yeah so i'm very interested in it i'm not in the state of mind where i'm actually i don't wanna do lsd for the people who are listening i do any drugs of i am not ready yet but i love the idea of it and sam wrote great post about when it gave alcohol yeah she should go look it up on the internet and reiterate it's good i tried to sign up to do access c therapy and i got a fight with the therapist and she kicked me out of the group both like in the pre meetings so that's why i'm interested in this so that they can introduce me to another therapist who will do it okay gotcha okay i have one for you that's i just learned about last night and i don't know if you've ever heard of called va you heard of va no i like that name i it's very new va dot sounds like a vaping i'm gonna show you this photo of it it looks super lame so just brace yourself and i know it's a podcast so you can't see this but describe what you're looking at so it's a rec incumbent stationary bicycle that kinda looks like an elliptical with a vacuum behind yeah basically looks like a seated bike with like a jet ski butt on the back of it so somebody i know my aunt basically posted about this and i was like this thing is amazing best invention of the you know the century and i was what is this so i looked it up these are the claims that come with it so it's an exercise machine you do twenty one minutes and apparently it feels like two hours of cardio this is testimonials on the website are like tony robbins says this the guy who didn't started bullet bulletproof coffee says this they're like this thing is magic and it's a low intensity workout that apparently stimulates your muscles like a high intensity worker oh the bulletproof coffee guy says that that the greatest thing ever exactly and it's it uses cooling and compression technology along with something else blah there's a whole science video i don't know what it is but i was like i heard enough interesting things i gonna go try so i'm inviting you to come try it with me they basically they don't sell these machines to you they have them at like certain facilities certain gym yeah they have like has one in their research center so we should go and check this thing yeah we'll we'll have sounds amazing photos along the way it sounds too good to be true and i like to go check those things out yeah the bulletproof coffee guy day ba i think his name is he says that he does that thing i think every day or something i don't know it's it sounds kind of magical and this not really a business idea that's necessarily it's just some i'm cool something to be able to look out yeah gonna be on the lookout for and in general like the sort of like the promise of hey by this device it helps you get fit that's a promise that never gets old and it's you know from jane fond workout videos to bow flex to ab april or p ninety x you know there's all these different sort of like hey this device this is the one this was the one that will get you to do it and there's guys like me you might be there as well who just like trying the newest gadget i just like turn the new thing yeah i like the promise i like to judge it once i try it it's anyways i found this one good what else do you okay i've got two more categories but i'll say the first category then you can go okay someone posted the transcript group what should i start this weekend i need a project i'm only wanna spend less than a thousand dollars and i am biased but i'm gonna make an argument that media right now particularly websites and blogs are shockingly undervalued a lot of them are selling for one times revenue mh because some people don't think that they're great businesses i think they're wonderful businesses if done correctly i'm gonna tell you a few examples of them done correctly great nerd wall at dot com for sure they were above a hundred million in revenue a few years ago i think now they're probably at two hundred million dollar revenue the business model is they write about personal finance stuff and they make i don't have inside information but i think it's a a hundred to two hundred dollars every time someone signs up for a credit card through their service so so i i would put it a little bit differently what they do which is they don't just write a personal finance stuff yes that's true the way i would say it is they answer highly googled questions that have valuable answers right so people are say which credit card can i buy so they go back they work backwards from what are these questions and they build this authority around all the finance questions that people ask yes so they're bigger sauces backlinks right an seo and they develop that over a long period of time right so that's got too close to a hundred million revenue with zero funding right so it's a compelling argument so i'm gonna tell you actually four or five more big businesses in the exact same space the penny holder dot com that boot bootstrap to about forty million dollars what is that i've never been there it's the same thing as nerd but for mostly i think midwestern women okay bootstrap to forty fifty million in revenue say model right content monetize a handful of the pages with credit card and insurance offers so third one money supermarket but you've never heard of that one have you ever it's a british website very similar to nerd wall they're publicly traded five hundred million dollars in revenue with something like two hundred million dollars a year in profit and these are all the nerd types right writing call finance products linking to affiliate deals of credit cards insurance and stuff like that yeah and then money saving expert sold for a hundred million dollars recently and then the points guy which someone in our facebook group said that they're at fifty million or so revenue and so when you hear these i'm like our those are great businesses can't deny that do you think you can go start something or now is not too saturated too many back too saturated like for example i wanted to bring up notion which is this new software that's out that is basically like an asana it's a glorified to do list for your company yeah it's texted at it it's like and that is one example of the idea that there's is always room better sure but when you're competing against sees guys in the google ranks how would you compete with one of these or would you do it not in the financial i would do it in a different industry and so industries that i am looking at right now two different companies that are trying to conquer industries that i think are appealing we're actually say a few the first the company is well the first industry i've said this many times software so there's g two crowd dot com i think they just changed two dot com rumors are that that's a huge business they just raise money i at a five hundred or six hundred million dollar valuation the second one is software reviews dot com that's sold along with cap terra dot com for two hundred million dollars to gardner right and then five only j two global j two global does the same thing as all these things j two global you're not even heard of that they own masha they own pc mac dot com and they own a few others it's a publicly traded company with a four billion dollar market cap so i'm incredibly fascinated by these guys are doing the exact same thing for nerd but for technology products specifically digital technology products mh i think that all the companies that i just named are completely missing the mark on solving that problem okay so i think that's an interesting one another interesting one is meat eater have you heard of meat either i've heard of it but i don't know much about it okay they just raised fifty million this is the hunting and fishing one for hunting and fifty right so if i wanted to make money which i always do but i have a job job now and i'm busy so really if i had time if i had time i would copy some of these models but i think that the tech niche sells us plenty of room this guy me eaters i think i named steve the guy runs it prove that there's that for hunting and i think that there are still plenty of spaces for something like the points guys practically the same thing as nerd but sorry for like consultants who are interested in points there's also people who do this with travel because travels another high value thing i forgot what scott's chief flights or something like that that's that's one of those what do you think oil and gas we got mike here can oh from of the oil and who's with us owns an oil and gas company so do you think a content site that's around either equipment or oil and gas or something around that and then linking off to buying products is a good way to go i think the oil and gas products are gonna be more at the corporate level so you wouldn't have like an individual consumer going that route but oil and gas news is one i know it a pretty profitable one and like a brokerage house for deals i'm a subscriber to oil and gas news okay and so i'm gonna give you a rebuttal there's a company that's publicly traded that is a hundred and fifty million dollar a year business i don't know if their market kept is called tech target and they do a thing where they talk about like really boring huge comp like your hp gonna buy something for twenty thousand employees that you talk about those products and what they do is if you click on those things you enter their email and then the company that can buy it from them so to your point if you're an oil and gas company that is gonna sell something for a million dollars yeah sure no one will buy that online or maybe they won't but you can sell information to the lead and you be willing to pay ten thousand dollars for that information of a high quality lead right so one interesting oil and gas company in that space i think is energy net and they actually are a broker house for deal so they just rate the percentage of the of the deal fees and set up buyers and sellers like ebay but for oil and gas okay so i rattled off a ton near term those are good i know if i have one i also have to run in two minutes so we'll see what can i just break up one thing real quick do yeah okay something i'm obsessed with notion okay it's called notion i don't know url it's notion dot s o i think if you know asana or evernote evernote is the closest competitor evernote okay so it's a to do list but it's used at a enterprise level so businesses are using it but it's like an asana but it's like cute they raised recently ten million dollars at a eight hundred million dollar valuation which is like when i started heard that i was like that's that's stupid but who knows it's a really good ass product i don't like it i use it but i don't like it it's cool i don't know what's cool about you gotta show me how on earth can a twenty five person company so what happens is so my friend alex to clear it i i'm trying to get him on the podcast too so he did the same thing where he just raised i think a twenty million dollar round at like a five hundred million dollars or something around valuation multiple hundreds of millions dollars a lot a different multiple than you usually get on these rounds and the reason why is he didn't need to raise the money so notion did the same where notion charges per seat for their product if you use it how big do think they are notion yeah i don't know i feel like they at release the numbers i haven't i didn't look a million users i don't know if that mean how many people are paying i don't know what that means but i do know this every company is a buyer of the office suite and so a lot of people trying to un bundle microsoft off they're going after powerpoint excel word a lot of people think this is sort of like the new frontier also business apps like this workflow apps are like very info right now you have superhuman which is email for business people i don't know if you know superhuman that well but yeah pay thirty bucks a month pay thirty bucks a month you wanna have like better faster email and so all of these are very like hot right now and so in general i'm a sort of dis and stuff that's hot i think that vcs are just sort of flock to these apps i don't think that notion is like super special i'm against it but maybe it's interesting for sure i'll give you that yeah when i saw that number i was like how are these people gonna make their money off this right and i don't think they will mike doesn't look think they will either if you invest at that you need to get a more so you're you're thinking okay it's eight hundred they're you're trying to get to eight billion that's the bet you're making best so i'm like shit what and so i saw that and what did this in my head i'm like well the people who invested are really smart so they must do what they're doing then i'm like this sound like every like financial crisis ever happens right like you're like well we pretty made off guys like these smart right smart people do dumb things all the time okay this was a quick episode million dollar brand storm anything you wanna leave to people with any other questions we're gonna do a meetup on thursday at the house office at two five one ke if you're in the bay area or you have access to an airport get to the meetup yeah i put on the event right fifty tickets available what's it's free we already have how do they find the link to this if i just posted it in the email and in facebook group we have fifty people signed up already so i'll make it like more people great twenty minute podcast good boom done well