3 Blue Collar Side Hustle Ideas From A $40M Founder

can i just read you the menu of shady gator would you guys be interested in that yeah be very interested tell me all the variations of tate tots you mean gator bites gator that tate tots or loaded loaded tots tommy me i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on alright we're live we have got sam brat by the way sean i i don't know sam that well i think you think that i know him well yeah because i know i'm like how this guy in here he's he's here because ari talked to her talked to him on the phone we do these pre calls and saying i gotta say like out of i don't know every ten pre calls we do with people that we don't know eight out a ten or or kind of like hey probably not a good fit for the pod she talked to you and she was like you gotta have this guy on so i don't even know what you did but you did something and you have some kind of story or energy or ideas that that she liked yeah basically what i know about you is by the way you're like shockingly young h twenty seven twenty six yeah i just turned twenty seven and what i know about you is you had this company that was a sports betting site you sold it for around forty million dollars a fu boat tv like i think before even launch but you've also done all these other strange things like i think you bought did you buy a river boat casino or a river boat like you've bought a bunch like you're into a lot of really strange things and for such a young person you've done like a lot of odd i mean the fact that you've done a startup that you sold for a lot of money that's already impressive but even amongst the impressive people you've done a a lot of like strange and unique things right alright so let's start with that you were you drop out of college and you start a company that you end up selling for can you say how much you sold for yeah it was forty million okay so you drop out of college you build a company you sell it for forty million at that time you must have been pretty young how old were you when you saw twenty three okay great so eighteen to twenty three ish what was what was the idea and how did you make that happen so i had gone so i was actually at the university of missouri for a year nice missouri i was i was at missouri enjoyed my time there was not for me though always wanted to kinda start a company when i dropped out i didn't really have the exact plan yet but i did always play a lot of online poker it was very active i was the kid with twelve monitors playing online poker in the dorm rooms so i kinda knew the community a lot and you know started hearing whispers of them legal you know gaming nationally here in the united states you know lifting the federal ban if you would and i thought the market it would evolve shouldn't evolve much differently than it does overseas where it's very part of the culture you can bet when you're eighteen sometimes sixteen you're betting you know at the arsenal game inside the stadium but here there was like a stigma to it you know if grandma says she buys a lottery ticket you know you're like you don't think anything but if she says she took the bear spread you're like grandma what the hell you doing it so i thought if that would be the case i just sat down and essentially just wrote out for hours how i thought the market would evolve and my conclusion was that there will be early players you'll have draft in fan they have you know audiences in fantasy but that it really would end up being dominated by either the brick and mortar casino companies or the media companies which is now just playing out with espn and stuff and to date all the technology had been built overseas because it's been around for fifty years but it was like built in the early two thousands where you had like these desktop applications to place a bat and then to get to mobile they just like compressed it into a mobile experience and like rebuild it they didn't rebuild it native ios it didn't have any good api functionality to have ticketing and merchandising and these other things so i said what if we just what if i just rebuilt all that and then call these big companies and said hey don't white label this garbage from sweden you know and pay some huge rev share what if we just do a deal can you can you pause that for sec yep so you're you're describing what sounds like a pretty sophisticated process you're like i heard you know that there's this inflection that there maybe be it was gonna get legalized so i started thinking ahead of that and then instead of just jumping right in with my two dumb friends and starting to build a product i thought i wrote down how i thought the market would evolve and then i realized that my good go to market would be to kinda undercut these rev share competitors with a mobile first product on the platform does your like eighteen nineteen years old at this time you know i couldn't figure out how my night was gonna evolve let alone how how a market was gonna evolve like was this your first rodeo and why why were you so good at it at that time so in high school i ran a snow removal business which natural pivot natural pivot and so i had been you could call in business in a very rudimentary way we were planning driveway ways but we had hundreds of houses i kinda knew how to build a business and when i realized although i learned a ton i'm like fifteen i'm learning what insurance is because some woman slipped on salt i'm learning how to you know finance you know trucks to get plow like so i kinda had this business sense hey by the way you're talking about plowing you're not talking about shoveling you just said financing trucks yeah like the plow you put on the front of trucks got it okay yeah so you so you were sophisticated you're going door to door to get these customers from door had initially it was me and a good friend of mine il who's now david do brooks right hand guy il federal which we went to ties school together i went to vernon hills which is where they went so il and i built the snow removal business and we'd be like at used car lots negotiating for plow essentially but what i learned from that how much were you making back then fifteen and sixteen years old i think we did like fifty sixty grand for the winner or something like that so and i couldn't drive that was a big problem il only had his permit i didn't have a license so we couldn't really get anywhere there was no uber early we didn't have debit cards so like we'd like walk to like mu line which like the neighboring town to like go look at the plaza it was complicated but what i learned from that is you could scale that business and actually do really well from a cash flow perspective because candidly most people don't wanna be in that business or they're like sixty years old and they've been just driving the same truck for the same couple of commercial lots but what i learned is there's no value it can't it can't scale that well that large and i was just always interested in like how big can i make something and i had that itch to do that so then i thought well if it's easy there can't be any value in it if anyone could just get into it well then there's inherently zero value long term like big if you wanna build billion dollar businesses so when i thought gambling could be big it would have been very easy to be like oh we're gonna have a fantasy slight site that is slightly different and you can pay to play and it also includes nascar or something and like all those things just to me it's like how does that get to five hundred million in revenue i don't see it i'm not interested so i knew i had to really sit down and think how will the market evolve and then i literally just looked at what are the piece of this pieces of this evolution that because it's such a headache or capital intensive no one will ever want to touch and then because of that it should actually end up being a slightly less capital intensive because no one wants to do it and then you have value it was my thought essentially and when you dropped out was that a easy decision for you to go do this gambling company was it hard and basically how did you live because i always wanted this when people drop out of college you're kind of college a very it's a bubble that's like yeah here's your bed here's the bathroom here's the library you know these are is your place and then when we pilot you're like out of the system you're neither at home nor are you in school so what was yeah so was definitely my parents were not thrilled as you can imagine and when you go home it's like when you grow up you're my son i love you and then when you turn to a eighteen you're like that guy in the house you're like you're like what are you still doing so i i went home and lived with my mom although i essentially i went to starbucks every morning and worked until from whenever they opened five or six zero am until they closed at seven and then i go to lifetime fitness and there were no yoga classes after eight so i would work in the yoga studio up upstairs at lifetime and they had free coffee free all that stuff so i kinda had like an office and it kinda got to the point where i started leaving my stuff as like a setup in the corner and i think a lot i think the instructors thought like oh that's someone else's class and it was just like my laptop in monitor and computer so i worked out a lifetime for like three like a year and it was cheap because you know lifetime whatever i was under the twenty eight age so i'm playing like the reduced thing and i would just kinda work all day so i lived at my mom how'd fund how'd you fund the company at that stage come on john credit cards baby i essentially after that snow money oh yeah we had some cash from that but essentially like i knew i needed i knew you you literally you kinda have two options if you don't have tons and tons of cash saved you essentially you can work a part time job i was unwilling to do anything but spend every waking moment on the business so i didn't wanna do that and so i kinda just went to open to credit cards and i've always been a zero backup plan guy i perfectly i failed every final before dropping out so going back was not an option because i'd be going back at like twenty three years old freshman so i'm always a put it all on the line and you will figure it out kinda of guy and purposely failed deer finals yeah that's that's why that's what i say too so yeah so i came home when i dropped up i came home you know when like you come home a little early and it's like you're surprising your parents and you're like oh like did you finish early i came home early enough where it was kinda too early for them to believe that i had finished finals so with that essentially matt i didn't show up to the finals and i got zeros on all the files so going back was now out of the question which removed the debate my parents because they kinda said well he can't really go back you ended up selling did you sell the company i was looking at the the site on a web archive did you sold the company before even launch right yeah like eighteen months but is that right yeah yeah about with alright so who who contacted you how do you even know that you were for up for grabs so what we had was essentially every component to a gambling platform that you could want so we were an authorized gaming operator of the nba major league baseball i just wheeled my way into convincing the leagues to do a deal with me candidly i think they thought i was like kinda crazy and kinda cool and they're not used to cool and crazy they're used to like disney so they were like okay we'll do the deal with you so it was like these we'll explain that yeah i would think if a nineteen year old like yeah i'm gonna go become an authorized gaming you yeah operator for the nba i'd be like yeah not really gonna happen man so what's what's your other plan so how did you do that yeah it like offer you an internship instead yeah we had a couple things we at that time we did raise a little bit of capital and it was from some venture funds in sports meeting entertainment that the leagues knew very well so they were like okay this could call us six months ago he sounds kinda crazy but now it seems like there's this article out the people that invested them seventy six capital also invested in a bunch of other companies we have deals with so there's some significance there we also they were very familiar with our lawyers because our lawyers represent espn a lot of other people so you kinda just have to put the pieces in place that kinda give them some gut feel to they're not he's not just crazy he's crazy and he has some people that we know and so at the time it was like draft kings fan mgm bar stool and then like us and and the league was also like a little carefully for like can we like we'll do this with you just don't tell anyone right now and we don't really wanna put out an art but we kinda wanna do the deal we think the platform cool so we kinda had all these assets we were an authorized gaming operator those leagues we had market access which i can get into which is the licenses we were through compliance and mostly all legal states now back then it was seventeen states or so now it's thirty five plus i think and at the time if you wanted to be in the gaming business you have to go through regulatory compliance most public boards of directors have no interest in going through a regulatory process they have to disclose their financials and all these things so and they also didn't know the business enough you know you can be a big public company but if you wanna have a book in jersey you have to go down to atlantic city and sit in an old room with regulators and lawyers and convince them as to why they should give you the license and so it was just like this old school process that they were unwilling to go through and we kinda spent the money and went through the pain of building the platform getting it through compliance getting the licenses getting the deals and we knew that what we really wanted was an existing audience and sports even if we went raised a hundred million dollars i think drafting at the time spent a hundred million dollars on corporate travel year so a hundred million dollars wasn't gonna move the needle for us to go to market without any users so we started talking about a joint venture with a handful of companies and at the time fu tv had just gone public they put on proxy they wanted to be in the gaming business and my phone rang and it was fu tv and they wanted to talk about a deal so which and so they they you they bought you for i think i i read the sec filing so like just about close to forty million what what you do with the money i have it what do you mean well i mean that's a that's that's a lot of money for anyone to get particularly for a twenty three twenty four year old what do you invested in i'm mostly in the market and then i have these small random crazy investments that i feel really good about but i'm mostly in the market i'm pretty long here's why i'm long the market if i wanna do other things with the money i'll simply take a loan against my portfolio and then take the risk if you sell the stock now you have a taxable event you get less than you like if you want to put a million bucks into something you can either sell a million dollars and have some huge taxable that and the headache to deal with with paperwork and then you invest and then if it goes to zero you're screwed or you take a line of credit against your portfolio say in an index fund like the spy and if i need a million i'll take a line of credit they keep a million two is collateral and then i get to take my million dollar shot anyways and if it doesn't work out all i gotta do is wait and in eight years i'll have the money back because the stock would have doubled anyways you know given what the interest rates are pretty low and you take a loan against like that so i have most all my money for the most part in the market so yeah i was down like during covid like millions and millions and millions of dollars they're like if you're never selling that it just doesn't really matter and if you don't need it like i kept what i needed in cash like whatever but other than that i'm pretty in the market but that's where your story gets kind of it kind of interesting so like alright selling for that amount of money at the age of twenty three pre launch that's that's you know one percent the one percent that's pretty wild but i read that you know when i already talked to you and i'm and i read in our notes i read that you bought this river boat what the hell is that and that's one of your crazy investments and you also were looking at vending machine business well yeah this is why me that you would do this okay so when you're in the online gaming business everyone who's in it for the most part is like the old trump gaming people all the regulators are the same one time we got a document and they had still they sent us the wrong copy because my partner scott bout gutierrez name was when he was president of trump so they sent us a trump entertainment resorts form like the regulators never changed so while the business is techie you could call it the industry is not so everyone you meet is like has been in this casino business for fifty years and i stumbled into this river boat because to get a license unlike a cannabis licenses where you can just apply as a dis you have to get what's called market access and the eu are sub leasing the licenses from the ones that have them and the only people that have them are the brick and mortar properties it's kinda like if you it's weird if you wanted a grocery store imagine if you had the sub lease from whole foods like a license that they have the entry the reason that's the case is because you know we took land from native americans we allowed them to have casinos on reservation property then all of a sudden in twenty eighteen the government goes we'll just legalize online gambling well then they were like well no one's gonna come to our properties anymore because they can just log on draft kings and you just screwed us so you should give us the license and then we'll sub lease it to them so they did that and then mgm and caesars and everyone went crazy because they're like whoa whoa we're the biggest tax revenue drivers in the country besides oil so if if the if the tribes are getting them then we get them fast forward everyone got them river boats counted as properties brick and mortar properties and before land based gaming in the early nineties everything was on the water because it was illegal and it started in the early forties and fifties because all the trade happened up and down the mississippi candidly mostly through saint louis and people would just like truckers pull over on the highway people would pull over their vessels and they'd have makeshift car games on a barge and then also a trans well i don't think at like a guy like sean doesn't know this but i grew up at saint louis and so when you say you're going to the casino we actually wouldn't use the word casino so we'd would say let's go to the boat the boat and all the all they're not some of them actually are like both yes but a lot of them are just like properties that are somehow floating but they they're not no it's like i guess technically they're floating but they're like not really a boat it's like they're the the boat is this like massive parking lot and then they built like a building on top of it but when i was younger we would say we're gonna let's go to the boat it's essentially a structure built on a barge is really what it is but there's no engine room it's just floating there it's like building a house and then shoving it out into the water and tying it and you meet the state standard yeah so i was talking with a buddy after i leave ts and was showing me this picture of his grandfather in atlantic city and in the background are these river boats and he said you know what happens to these things when they're done with them i was like what you mean he goes well like where do they go i was like i don't know like i have no idea and so i hang up with him i'm like where do they go it's kinda interesting i'm unemployed i don't have much to do so i emailed the general counsel of a casino company that we had done a license deal with at fu to get the license in iowa and they were a river property and i went to it a couple times we had to go set stuff up and i called the general counsel and i said hey bill i have a question for you your boats really old i heard you guys were thinking about building a property on the land what you gonna do with this cruise ship you have sitting in front of the property when you're done with it and he goes well you know when you couldn't build brick and mortar properties there was a market for him you know they'd sell because they were just operating casinos like any other property but he goes now no one wants them so they kinda just end up in junk yards and i was like you gotta be kidding me he's like no these things are unbelievable i go you just scrap them he was probably who would ever buy them and he just bought they had just bought two casinos in baton rouge that were both on vessels but operating still which they do in like places like baton rouge or kansas city and stuff and i said are there any near because i'm in chicago he's in iowa are there any near ross and he goes sam are there any boats near us i wouldn't have bought them in baton rouge louisiana and then like almost like a movie i'm hanging up the phone and i hear like hey sam sam sam and i'm like bill what's up and he said we don't know where it is but we think somebody somewhere in iowa has the catfish and he was talking about catfish band river boat casino and i said do you mean someone has because goes well they built a property like twenty years ago and no one knows where the boat went i'm unemployed i'm kind of like into this kind of stuff i have nothing to do and i it was like okay i have somewhere to be at like noon it's like ten o'clock gonna give myself an hour and a half or two and try and find this boat just for the pure fun and if not i'll never think about this again and we'll call today and so first i called every junkyard in the tri state area in chicago and iowa i called there was this place i remember in like the moines somewhere and i and the guy answered i'll never forget this and i said hey quick question who's the oldest guy at the junkyard who's been there the longest and they were like on speaker and they're all yelling and like oh it's ricky everyone grab ricky go get ricky go get and this ricky guy gets on the phone and this was like i've been on the phone for an hour with junk cars and ricky like catfish she goes he goes i would never forget if catfish band came through this junkyard we've never seen it so i'm like alright ricky so i hang up i talked to twelve ricky this boat has not gone to a junkyard it is not in and i thought to myself if they brought it down somewhere out of iowa and it got jumped in missouri so be it i can't call every junk guard in america but we're gonna move forward assuming it's still still a thing so i found i remember one time i got a ticket on my uncle uncles boats and wave runners and channel lakes and if you don't pay it it ends up on the fishing and gaming or like the the fishing and hunting ticketing site so i was like alright whoever's is goofy enough to buy this thing or have it it i definitely got like a moving violation or something i mean this thing is a cruise ship it's not like a corolla so i said let's assume they have a ticket and they haven't paid it so i went to the site and i sat there for an hour and i just clicked through hundreds of pages of tickets but you don't even see the pictures of anything it's just the entity name or the person's name and so i'm looking for like a random amenity like some kind of sign and on like a hundred and ninety four page hundred ninety something i see like cf b whatever it is llc it's like an acronym and i kinda go past it and then like i thought to myself i was like catfish bend river boat that kinda of fits and i clicked it boom big vessel moving violation twenty two thousand dollar ticket from the company that bought it at auction and then i read the court filings and essentially catfish ben built a brick and mortar property left the boat to rot kinda like icon left the casino in atlantic city to rot knowing that the city would pay for it to get cleaned up so he didn't have to pay for it they then said alright you have to move it we'll pay for the fees but you have to auction it off and so he auction it off in an anonymous auction to a marina construction company in northern iowa who does a lot of work out with the army corps of engineers fixing submarines so i thought to i myself oh he they probably want it for the engine rooms and stuff but all i had was like an entity name and it was like random and i called the buddy in iowa and i hey what do you know about this x y z enterprises or whatever and he said what are you buying a boat and now i've been on the phone for two hours trying to find this thing i got like phone in the year i'm like notes from ricky at the junkyard and then i was i dropped everything like whoa how'd do you i was talking about a boat and he said that company he goes they fixed everyone's yachts i was like no way so i called like their websites from the nineties then phone numbers floating like at the bottom of the website and i just and i just called and i said hey is did what i did with i go who's the oldest person at this company and they put this like ninety year old man on and i said i've got a crazy question for you and i swear to god he cut me off and he said tell me you're looking for the catfish baby and i said do you have it and he was like yeah he goes i have it i've been looking at it every day for twenty years i said wow i said no one knows you have this like why like what no one knows where it is and he goes yeah like you know we're quiet like whatever and he said why are you calling me what do you wanna buy it and i think my wife heard in the other room and she looked at me like you were not buying this thing and i kinda smiled i'm like i don't know maybe and he's like well why don't she come see it and i'm like okay so long story short i drew drove you know to northern iowa and it was sitting there in a quarry he had planned to use it for parts became too cost intensive to get the engines out of the engine room and i frustrated persuaded myself to buy it so but what's the game plan here yeah well okay so here's the plan it's first of all it's forty it's three interior stories all connected by elevators the things full blown casino vessel it's forty thousand square feet of some of the most unique real estate ever when you walk in you think you just walked into las vegas with elvis presley the walls the floors when i bought it all the blackjack tables all the crap tables so first i was like could be a movie set could i and mean i i the gaming business maybe i could open up a casino or maybe i'll turn it into a restaurant or night nightclub or something like that so i had some loose ideas but nothing like in place so i bought the thing had to deal with the coast guard and all this stuff and spent about a year going down the path to open up a casino long story short there's not many river boy licenses left in america so you know i was meeting with the chairman of one of the largest gaming companies in goa india he controls goa which is like atlantic city on western india side they have a bunch of vessel casinos long story short became too cost intensive to get it there but he introduced me to a deal in the in southeast asia where we had the deal on the one yard line long story short some of these countries in southeast asia are pretty corrupt and they made a big ask and my lawyer said that ask is not happening we're not talking about this anymore so now i'm kinda more pivoting back to you know partnering with someone to open up a really cool restaurant or entertainment venue and move it down south somewhere like florida or you know nashville cumberland river or something like that what did you end up paying for it i might wanna tell you that off the pod over or under seven figures can you say that under under okay you this seems like a crazy thing to to be working on when you are able to build websites for free or with just your time but you've done like you're you're kind of interesting in that you can root out these really out off the wall ideas because you did another one with vending machines didn't you didn't end up doing it but yeah so i everyone was talking about vending machines all over twitter vending machines are the next gold i'm like okay what's what well we we had a guy who like we were joking about this last episode we had a guy who like it was like dude i make it fifteenth so we talk about you know like big a hundred million billion dollar ideas and then we had this guy he was like make ten thousand a month on vending machines and for some reason that interest everyone because when you're thirteen years old that's like vending machines is like one of the things that you're fascinated by and so yeah we i don't know if we helped to make it popular or we pounce it because it was already popular but we saw that there's a chance i heard about it on on the pod i don't even know but all i know is there was like maybe it was a year ago or so there was like this thirty day rush of it was like vending machines were like crypto or the next ai everyone in the world one of vending machines so i was like alright it seems like a terrible business so why does everyone want this and it's like high cash flow like i get it but similar to atm business you have to go there it's physical it's to replace product i was like that can't be that interesting but like anything else i always go down this path of like before i say no let me do some diligence and i'm on like some one of those sites is by seller or one of those type of sites where you can buy a company and there's this rural company in the middle of nowhere like lewis in idaho not even boise like lewis there's nothing there and it did when i i looked at twenty companies and they all did about the same margins whatever they were i don't remember now this company did like three times the margin i was like why is this company so much better like either they're lying and fidget these numbers or something's going on and the broker convinced me to go so i flew into this like remote airport lewis and idaho and i drive forty minutes to this like warehouse and we open up and it is just like full blown operation i have pictures i like so many pictures of they had hundreds and hundreds of vending machines that they didn't even have out there yet that they have stocked they had more inventory you thought they like ran a hospital there was so much inventory and i was like okay this is a bigger business than the numbers i saw and so i said there's no way that the numbers i read is this business and he goes yeah they own five regions and we listed one of them but if it was the right person we'd probably sell them off and i said okay and i was trying to ask a bunch of questions and he kept just saying like you just have to go out with tom spacing on his name roger or something what whoever owned it you just have to go out with him and you'll know why everyone loves vending machines i said okay so i spent all day in idaho in the pouring rain and we drive around lewis and idaho and i realized there's no grocery stores there's no convenience stores there's no fox t coffee they rely on vending machines it's fedex distribution centers it's like this is where they do build all the turbines that go on the propellers for the fields it's like it's like you know the workers part of america and everyone's lunch break they just go to the vending machines and warehouse have fifty of them snacks cold food hot food everything they eat is out of vending machines so i said oh like every meal of the working day it's coming out of vending machine and so then when i dug how the business works usually you're buying a contract from coke pepsi and you're you're obligated to sell their product they give it to you for a rate and you have to use their machine well those are on like five or ten year deals so then during diligence i asked them to give me all of the contracts with pepsi and coke because what i knew is that this local library or this local warehouse they don't wanna have to deal with getting new machines they don't wanna deal with that and so it'd be disruptive to the business so i realized that all of his contracts with coke pepsi who were expiring soon and i was like well the only reason the margins aren't absolute sanity is because i have to pay a dollar or twenty for f and i can always sell them for two bucks but what if i got an alternative to f and and bought it for four cents and then and then sold it for now the margins are insane and so i looked into like the legality of like do i need to renew with coke pepsi and the answer was no i need to get new machines but there's companies that'll finance them so i was like what if i just buy this company wait for all the contracts to expire renew none of them and then go in without coke pepsi now you have a little bit of a distribution headache because they'll bring them to lewis and idaho but lewis and idaho there's all these like discount stores to buy product that so it could work and near the end of diligence i had just kinda had the idea to start my next company and i came to the conclusion of i don't wanna end up having to move to lewis in idaho because i bought a vending business and i need to save it and so well i think it's an unbelievable opportunity i chose not not to do it how how big do you think that could have been it was five thousand machines yeah but in dollars what what do you think it would have done annually i probably would've made like i don't know a million two a year million three a year but it would i had i'd have to run it i felt like i was gonna have to run it for two years or maybe a year and then hire someone but the other thing is you're dealing with physical stuff i need to pay drivers to go to the things i need to have inventory so everything had to be in lewis and i'm like what am i gonna move to rural idaho so if if that business is doing a million a year in cash flow what what helpful i think they wanted four million for the business five million so four times cash or yeah where they measure it so i went to the bank and and they wrote up a loan i was gonna answer and then i was like wait what if i end up having moved to idaho this is a problem so so so your due diligence on these things so the reason you're fascinating is your due diligence on these things is pretty in death like most people myself sometimes included i will end with like i'll just do a few google searches and it kinda ends there you're i mean multiple times you're flying to places and meet people yeah i i do a lot of times within five minutes i think we all on the back of the app can know if it deal make sense but i usually try and figure out everyone else thinks there's a a way to make this business marginally better by consolidating and rolling them up but how do you make it five times better and then the answer is if there's no answer i'm not interested because then i wouldn't do the deal so then i only try to figure out how could you make this five times better when everyone tries to make it ten percent better and my thought was when i looked at the line item the biggest line item ninety percent of it was the cost of goods from coke and pepsi how can i just not sell that because i can buy a store brand twin in wholesale for ten times less than i have to buy twin for and so i just read all the contracts and then i would call people like i call lawyers that i knew were in the vending business and i said do i have to renew like here's the language it's kind of like and they said like there's always this like thought from coke pepsi like you don't really have to but they give you the product they distributed it like it's names that people know brands that people know but i thought in my opinion people's willingness to buy f wasn't that much higher than a name brand because they have no alternative like like right so that was what i thought they're on they're at the job and then and honestly i could also lower the prices and those people would have been thrilled and i talked to them i go in i'd be like hey it's so cool if like talk to your employees real quick i was at like a distribution center and the guy's like sure just like don't take my vending machines like that's all i was like okay and i'd go up and i'd be like hey do i of you guys care if it wasn't f anymore and then the guy said what would it be fifty cents less i said sure they go i don't care what it is like f are free dose and i was like interesting so that's where i think the value in vending is if you're not just trying to build like some big cap like like i just wouldn't buy a vending router or an atm router or anything like that to just try to improve it because i'm a better operator like i think people think they're subs like you can be the best operator in the world but the business is the business so that's kind of how i look at those things well i love that you go down these re random rabbit holes so river gambling vending machines i'm sure you've done more and than we've just talked about in terms of thinking about ideas up you seem like you're one of us you you have that switch you can't turn off and so regardless of what you're doing you're always gonna be thinking of of ideas or you're gonna hear something that's gonna make you curious and shouldn't and you say well maybe not for me but that for somebody that would be actually pretty interesting do you have a couple of ideas you could share that maybe somebody in the audience by get get inspired about what are the other ideas the silver medal ideas things that you're not necessarily doing or you're just willing to share there was another business that would actually be a lot in my opinion a lot easier than the vending business in idaho i was at about two summers ago a lot of my friends you know they went to mi so we'll go to lake of the oz in the summer of fourth of july or something like that and the redneck riviera baby home of the home of the the the wet t shirt kinda tests and and los gopro pros at the bottom of at the bottom of forty four it's actually a good business sean if you if you wanna hire divers there's probably millions of dollars of gopro pros at the bottom of lake of the oz so i'm at leg of the oz and i hadn't been since i had left college so it'd been a couple years and we needed to get from our airbnb b to and i'm i'm sure sam knows this place a place called shady gate it is it is it is the sean if you looked up on google shady gate i think you would tell me you you're not going is what you would say it's like classic spring break it it says it says college spring break bikini wet t shirt contest as it gets and unfortunately the bridge at lake of the oz is on like the far side from where our airbnb was and the only way to get there is to drive all the way around the lake well that's like a fifty minute uber and instead of that they have water taxis and i didn't even know about this my buddy's like yeah just call a dispatcher like they'll send a a water taxi what am i in venice i was like okay so we we call this guy and like seven seconds later he pulls up to our airbnb in the water and we just get on and all my buddies were drinking and we're on their way there and all i can think about is how how much is this guy making right now and i said to my buddy i said how much we paying him like whisper and he's like it's two fifty we split it between the five of us i go i'm sorry this is like a three minute ride three minutes tops and i go and he just goes around and so i couldn't help myself i asked him i said hey do you like own this thing and you could tell he like he was driving it but he did own it but he wanted he didn't want people to realize that the owner was driving he wanted to feel like it was a company he has the brand on the boat like all the stuff and he was like yeah like he's like we own yeah he said we wait he said we and so all my buddies are like getting off and they're running in the shady gator and i am just locked on this guy i go hold on a second hold on second i was like it's two hundred and fifty dollars it took ninety seconds to get us here and he's like he's like yeah seasonal because it gets cold here in the winter but he's like we sp cash all summer and spring and summer i said what does sp cash mean exactly and he said well i have three boats and he goes all i do is i have a dispatcher and she sits behind a monitor and has like a live fee because they have like some they put like a drone up there with some so she can see where all the boats are and she has the gps and when people call she can see their ip address because when you call into the dispatcher it's like some platform that shows you so they know where people are on the lake and then she'll load it into their thing on the boat to go where to go next and a lot of these boats have like gps so you just click accept just like you do an uber and they drive around and i'm like okay and i said to him i said would you ever like raise capital for this business or like do you need more like are there more people than you can get and he said by ten twelve well how much does he make oh like like every boat made him like about four hundred grand a summer at three them so he was really like a million too yeah and he's and he's from you know you know he built this from nothing started with one boat used the money by another boat but he doesn't know how to like he's not he didn't he would wait too long because he didn't know you could just like go finance about he would just wait till could pay ninety grand cash for a speed bill like you can just put down nine grand like a car and you'd have ten tomorrow so but he didn't know how to do any of these things so i said if you had money and you had twenty boats would it be too many boats and now they're sitting around he goes i could probably fill ten boats as much as i fill these three but i don't wanna spend the cash i kinda use it to you know i bought a house we built a lake house like all this stuff and so then i was like okay that's that that's that precious mountain dew maybe so then i'm like okay what if i this is also post buying the river boat before my next company so i'm still in like the vending mode of like can i blow up a business like this and so i called him because we were talking about maybe i would invest in the company and i said hey connor i changed my mind would you sell me this business he was like sell you this business i was like yeah he because i never thought about that like i don't know what it's worth or anything and my thought process was what if i can blow this up to ten or fifteen boats on lake of the oz and then go to orange beach alabama and then go and then start going around america and building up the water taxi business baton rouge louisiana you need to get from tiger stadium to you know fred bar whatever it is and then water is the only vertical that uber doesn't have and lyft doesn't have and then i called people executives i know what those companies and they said it's so difficult it's so regional the weather all the stuff we don't wanna own boats we have to dock them all the stuff but they economy made a comment like but we'd buy it if it existed but we won't build that so i said okay so now i have a willing buyer of this business so i thought if i could do this he was taking most of the cash for himself i would buy this business i don't need any of the money so i would take all the money and just buy more boats until i've maximized lake of the oz and then i would go you know lake town by lake tom and lot of liability lot of logistical things definitely think it's worth doing but it didn't i ran all the numbers i tried to estimate forecast out what i thought this business could do and i just i had to decide i left fu that the next thing i was gonna do i had no interest in if it could be worth at least a billion dollars in five years and i thought if it could be it was the absolute ceiling and then you'd have to execute perfectly and hope there's no legal issues and weather and damage and like all this a very physical business so i chose not to do it but i think it's a big opportunity and i think we'll see uber by some water taxi company in like twenty twenty i think we'll see that can i just read you the menu of shady gator would you guys be interested in that yeah be very interested for the appetizer tell me all the missions of tate tots you mean gator bites gator ultimate tate tots or loaded loaded tots to me i'm gonna start with the shrimp happens that's where i'm gonna start sam for my friend sam he wants the brazilian sizzle those are the happen sense i this release looks phenomenal this place looks like but i think you were you you're focused on the books you needed to buy shady gator this is an institution you know like you know when rich people go by like the washington post this could've have been your wash you you you could've bought eighty gator and be like i will protect this this this national trash will cash flow for hundreds of years to come as long as there's boobs and there's white shirts this place will stay upright we we have to take shot sean has ever been to some of these places he's gotta take him a on a tour flo bam down and yeah there's this restaurant sean it's called flo bam they even made a tv show about it it was like the yeah i've seen these all through the tv safely and while i'm you know under for years that's where that's where i spent spring break flo alabama is right at the the alabama florida line there's literally a line like in the ground and this restaurant is half on each side and it's where you go for just pure deb when you are right twenty one years old or nineteen with a fake id these places are wild you have to experience a good had a buddy from new york who when i bought the vessel it's in like rural iowa and he flew into this private airport because he had to see this thing and he had never been to he's we're like running out of gas on the highway and he's like have to pull over we have to pull over he's like flipping out and i'm like we're good man there's a gas station in eight miles and we have like a reserve tank like don't worry about it like he's used to new york uber and like just getting an uber and like being in the middle of nowhere iowa he was like panicking he's taking pictures of like gas stations he thinks they're like you he needs their like monuments so yeah it's like a safari for him yeah yeah yeah yeah somewhere where we look at gas variety yeah so so you know have way i kinda wish there was a well in general i'll say this you're like we have the segment on this pod called the blue collar side hustle you're like the walking blue collar side hustle right like all of these ideas you're talking talking about are so middle america i love it and they're so just you know hustle and ingenuity that i love it and you're finding really interesting opportunities that are off the beaten path right it's like you wanna do things that the ninety nine like if you you say alright i'm not the smartest guy there is maybe i'm in the i'm in the top twenty percent of iq what you want is within that top twenty percent you wanna then go look in places where ninety nine percent of them don't look because now you're you know you're you're operating in the field of your own and it seems like that's what you're doing i kinda wish this existed nationwide because you want what you're finding is you're finding a bunch of opportunities that you know how you would execute them but now they're no longer worth your time or the the the sc that you would have to eat to do it you were willing to do it with your first business but now on your third business you're not as willing to do that you know t peter till did this thing called the teal fellowship where he was like i'm gonna pay kids to drop out of college if they're exceptional they might create big things and out of that came you know fig and ethereum and some of that like kind of breakthrough multi billion dollar tech companies i kinda feel like there should be a blue collar teal fellowship where we just go and we we hope we post a flyer in a bunch of campuses that just says stick of this shit drop out and make millions and let's just see shows up and it's gonna be the person who's like this is probably bullshit but like i'm down what else am i gonna do go to organic chemistry right now like i i gotta see what's it's here there's gonna be like eight people at the seminar of the eight you know five will leave halfway through because they i think it's a time share presentation and after of the three remaining there'll be one person who's like oh you're telling me that you'll help me go find a business within a mile and a half of this campus right now that if i just like focus for three years can make me nine million dollars alright i'm in i mean i'm sitting here i already go to you know boise state or i already you know like at where i would to school at duke there was just one bar it was our version of shady gate called shooters yep and if anybody went bought shooters like guess what sir you now have a monopoly on the nightlife scene durham yeah and every single student will come there and like this place just hasn't changed and like look if if the mechanical bowl just took apple pay your revenue would go up ten percent like there's just a bunch of easy wins that can be had just by like thinking about things slightly differently you know the example i would give shooters would be cool during the day this needs to be essentially like a yoga studio and at night it's gonna become the night club and now you're gonna go from you know ten percent usage to maybe forty five percent usage and that will be a big that's how you do your your five x i feel like that needs to exist i feel like we need to find the sam rat that are out there they're out there right now in every college and they just need a little bit of info a little bit of ideas and and a little bit of mentorship and or the problem with the businesses i found is that if the value is in the fact that it's remotely located well then it's difficult because other than finding another lewis in idaho that already has an operating business and has those dynamics of the town relies on it you can't scale it out of lewis but the reason i love the water taxi you think is because there's ten or twelve great water lake towns in america so i liked that a little bit better but my concern was when i really forecasted it out it'd be a big win but it would take it would take five to seven years and i was like nope just not willing just just couldn't yeah so that that's always a problem but for someone who has i don't know i don't wanna say it for someone who is only pure wanna execute and wants to retire and have twenty thirty forty million dollars i think that's a great play well for a lot of people that's that's not necessarily where you have to retire but it's like when you're at zero seven million dollars sounds like all dollars and and then once you have seven million dollars and you're now twenty four and your friends are you know still paying off student bet and you're sitting there being like i learned so much and i have financial freedom i could do whatever i want they can do the thing you did and go chase down this river mode for you know nine months where other people wouldn't wouldn't think to go do that right so it's it's a it's a gateway drug into doing you know more and more interesting things what were the other investments you said you made two investments that were awesome i assume one of them was the the book yeah i've invested not a lot because i really am focused on what i'm doing but i have made some private investments into startups that i should to be as helpful with as i can you said that you wanna start something that can get to a billion in i assume you might exit value in five years you have a new company now is that the one that you think you gonna do it so showroom so when i was at fu tv when i left we were doing about a billion dollars year in revenue don't quote me the apollo we can find the numbers i think about seven hundred million was the monthly subscriptions to fu tv so fifty nine ninety nine if you buy red zone you're probably near a hundred bucks whatever it was and then three hundred million give or take was the advertising which is when you scale streaming business it's the whole business so i thought to myself why are these companies coming to fu boat tv we're big but we're not massive so there's gotta be a play here that they think there's value here and what i realized is traditional cable nationwide too expensive disney plus espn plus and hulu all owned by disney kind of at a scale work pricing is probably similar to being national and we were small enough that if you wanted six zip codes in nashville we give it to you and so what clearly the sentiment was from these companies was that it's very hard to get in front of consumers google shopping while is okay for a user is unusable for a merchant because no one's out bidding calvin klein for the word underwear or black denim jacket it's become way too corporate i think like eighty percent or maybe seventy percent of the brands that buy keywords for eat for fashion footwear on google shopping i think in their last report i think it was like one of like a few hundred brands and there's tens of thousands of brands so most of them are on there and i was in a meeting once with the former cmo of like a direct to consumer cowboy boot brand and she made this interesting comment in a meeting and she was like yeah we waste like fifty cents of every dollar we spent on google and i was like whoa whoa hold on a second excuse me like stop the meeting i that's the crazy thing ever heard i why is that and she said because we pay about four dollars to own the word cowboy boots and half the time someone looks up cowboy boots it's a third grader looking up cowboy boots for their third grade presentation they need a photo to like cut out and put on their they had no intent to buying seven hundred dollar boots so we waste fifty cents of every dollar and i was like whoa and she said this is the first time i heard this concept she said that's why vertical search is so great i said what do you mean and she had been an executive she was a c or i don't know if she's a cmo but very senior at cars dot com and she said people look up toyota on google for all kinds of reasons photos videos they might be looking at toyota stock price if they look up a toyota and cars dot com they're a buyer or they're a seller there's high intent you're not just browsing around cars dot com so i said that's interesting so i was like okay so those are really google's competitor is all these vertical places to find what you wanna find that it has a better experience in more tailored than just traditional search so essentially do what i always try to do like in the vending business i call the lawyers you know the pepsi contracts i call this many engineers on the google shopping team is i could get to agree to talk to me and the sentiment was they said sam we want google flights to be a really great experience for google users but not at the detriment of stepping on the toes of our large largest advertisers speedy kayak they want them to pay and they want them to battle it out they don't think it's not a good business to be in they would just rather then battle it out and battle it out means pay google to be there and my conclusion was okay could this be done better now and i was very anti crypto still am don't like crypto at all never never owned it and so when all this ai start coming out i had this initial sentiment of like this is crypto again i don't believe in this i have changed my mind on that and what i realized i was like if i showed you two black t shirts and one's from lulu lemon and one's from gap if we remove the brand names the product descriptions the actual copy is shockingly similar it's just describing a black t shirt it's really inherent in the sentiment of the brand as to what that shirt is for lulu shirt is for one thing gap shirt could be an under shirt and so your inability to have like a ongoing conversation with a language model that knows every brand and product in the world would be very limiting and you'd end up with google shopping so what we've done is we've built this huge infrastructure we have thousands and thousands of merchants tens of millions of skus that kind of organically come into this dataset we've trained a language model to understand nothing besides what's that dataset and then that can communicate to a user so they can have an ongoing conversation with essentially think about like not just ne and marcus or not just macy's or not just a retailer who picked a couple hundred brands to carry but you can essentially communicate back and forth with an inventory of every brand in the world and the reason why shopping always had these big opportunities is because everything else has been dominated by amazon or alibaba and they have their market share in the like cheap fast fashion sector but gucci is not on amazon burberry is not on amazon every brand at ne and marcus to ko away luggage these companies like they might people might sell nike products on amazon nike not on amazon so that's why companies like shop runner had come along where they're like we're gonna be the amazon prime for everything amazon doesn't have and they scaled and sold fedex for hundreds of millions the founders on our board at showroom so there's always been these opportunities in fashion for product discovery and i actually think prior to language models this is this is absolutely a business that would have been very very hard to build because you lack that brand sentiment and so that's essentially what we've built we're launching the beta here shortly we have thousands of people on the waiting waiting list we're really excited we have revenue share deals with every single merchant in the platform those revenue share deals fluctuate you know between five and twenty percent just depending on the brand you know nike pays you you know a point probably but you know a a direct to consumer brands paying for growth they'll pay you a fifteen percent revenue share all day you're kind of doing what you did before where the with the betting site you're like well the consumers want this and i don't know if i can differentiate that and so you went to the brand side you know if a if a a marketplace has two sides you went to the brand side you're sort of doing that with with this where you're like thinking well what's the problem for advertisers but it seems like with these consumer products the hardest part is getting the consumers and once you have them oftentimes you can figure out not or i don't know if often the right word some of the times you can figure out how do you monetize a huge audience are are are you scared that you're not gonna be able to figure out how to get the actual users though because i think inherent in the platform is the transaction so then there's transaction fees the merchants pay revenue shares if you're a consumer platform for like entertainment social entertainment become a little bit of a commodity that's why netflix does these originals but everyone else like fu hulu espn disney we all just had espn and tnt and everyone has the same stuff and if you're social you have the increase engagement but if you are something where there's transactions will now inherent in the experience is transact and that's where you can really make money so that's why i think companies like the social the ones that get a big audience and then go social i think it's a huge mistake like pinterest big audience and then they went like social not commerce and to me it's like well no one mind paying fees or having hidden fees into things that they were already buying people might complain about fees on airbnb but they were already booking something and so i think the value is can you build a big consumer business that inherent in the journey is a transaction and your product is a one hundred times better shopping experience than what they had before so i always just lean on focus on the consumer forget everything else if the consumer wants it everything else's is noise you can push it through and consumers will want the product so i wanna ask you about the way your brain works because i find you very interesting and we always ask everybody before they come on what are some of your strong opinions or life philosophies that you would you live by and you gave us a couple but i want you to explain them so number one never pitch twice okay what is that so every investor i've ever had the moment i pitched them and walked out of the room called me twelve times showed up at my door in chicago and said i won in this round same thing with employees everyone i've ever you know i'm always recruiting anyone who's ever wanted to join the company the moment they wanted to join the company they wanted to drop everything they were doing to join the company in my opinion raising capital is an informative process not a persuasive one within five minutes of us getting on the call today i think we all we had some pre conceived notions of what we thought of each other and then within five minutes i'd say you'd have a ninety percent cemented view of what you think of the person and so when i'm pitching i'm going in and i'm giving them my full attention but i'm informing them of what we're building and what we're doing and it's one thing if they have legitimate diligence questions as follow ups or whatever but i never ask twice because i know that everyone who's ever really wanted to do it didn't need to be asked twice they loved it and so i would rather just move on to the next one and in my opinion you give them the information they've formed their opinions if you're ever trying to persuade them you're on the wrong side of the table from a negotiation standpoint anyways and so i just don't pitch twice i try to be as cognizant if i can that you always wanna be respectful of like venture associates at the fund because sometimes by pure volume if it's like a big funnel like a sequoia they their principles can't take every meeting they need some layers that's fine and if they have legit follow on questions i'll get back on more calls and answer emails whatever but i never pitched twice because i know that if i need to kinda sell it again then they didn't want it and that doesn't mean that you can't have luck following up and being ruthless about the follow and you there's those stories where you push it through but there's thousands of funds in my opinion capital is pretty cheap if you have a great business you're gonna raise the money and so i kinda just move on to people that are so excited by it that they are willing to get on a phone on christmas because they know this could be a life changing opportunity for that you know so that's kinda how i view pitching you've got this other one that is i don't know if controversial is the right word but it's a lot of people wouldn't decrease so you said the pit but the potential you've see in others is not real it's rarely potential realized so take everyone at face value for what they are today well the there's one one key line there that you said it's a mirror of what you would do if you were in their pipeline not what have thought about i always have like these i have like a massive massive note list on my phone and i have these concepts and and i have another notepad of concepts that i haven't really figured out a way to explain it the right way always try to boil down this thought i have to like two sentences and recently on twitter i saw someone say this which is the potential i don't know who it was but the potential you see in others is rarely realized it's simply a mirror of what you would do if you were them i have spent a lot of trying in in my life trying to i don't wanna say change other people but i i think they have such great potential but i always feel like it's like you're dragging a bag of bricks in your backpack to the office it's like they just if they don't want it on their own you just can't change them and what i see in them is really what i would do if i were them but it's not what they wanna do and so i'm not saying you can't put an effort to coach people go up and make them great members of the team but that's different than if they wanna be there or not if they don't wanna be there you know if they don't wanna a box they're not showing up to the gym and boxing for twelve hours a day to go beat for new weather they don't wanna be there and so if you think they're a great boxer and they show up every day okay you can coach them but i just feel like it's a wasted effort and you should take people for exactly what they are and what do what do those people love doing more than anything as much as i love running businesses and building businesses and doing things like this what do they love as much as i love this and can i get that task to be something in my business because then they're gonna do great but if it's anything other than that they're just better off going to somewhere else where they want that skill set and so i just think that you should pretty quickly know it's like if you're a trainer or you're a coach does the player wanna be there and if they don't wanna be there you can be mad that like they're six eight they it's like in high school when your coach goes to the volleyball team they're like peter like stop spike volleyball like you could play center you know at duke and they're like hey i like volleyball he just likes volleyball and anytime they've ever gotten that kid to say fine i'll plan the basketball team he doesn't care he doesn't wanna come to practice he's never very good and you just don't realize the potential but his potential while it looked to you if you were six eight on the volleyball team you could be a great basketball player it peter doesn't wanna be a great basketball player so it just doesn't work so that's kinda like my opinion on that that kind of stuff let's do one more you have one on here that i'm curious about it says the value is in the duck calls oh that's a good one i think that's the perfect one to end on here what does that mean me and he's well that's man in my wedding jonah roberts give them him a shout out jonah he's from memphis sound like he almost name jonah and i were no no we're definitely gonna reverse name jonah and i were in memphis tennessee in his hometown and he wanted to take me to the bass pro shop which there is like the holy grail and we're walking around which feels like ours and we cannot stop dying laughing every single aisle every product you could ever imagine you need for hunting and fishing and the home tools they have everything and right when we think we've seen every product that anyone's ever made we stumble to come around the corner to go to the like where the back of the store is and there's this big almost like when you go to a guitar store and they put all the expensive ones in a room there's this sun that says duck calls and there's like this glass door and we open and there's like what felt like a hundred thousand duck calls they've got metal duck calls polyester duck calls they've got stone duck calls they've got duck calls with two head they have different color is they have it's like this whole economy of duck calls that we didn't even know existed and so what i realized is the reason i dig to the vending businesses in the river boats and the water taxis is because the values in the duck calls the value is in the things that no one knows about that are very odd that have these niche ecosystems of communities and the people who love duck calls trust me they love duck calls they'll pay a thousand dollars for a duck call they don't go hunting for they don't go without them it's like a big thing they collect them and it's something i never knew about and so whenever i hear about something that could be really big and then i hear a bunch of people i go i go i've never heard of that like who would ever want that and then i go on like one random brands site in the duct call business and some random merchant i've never heard before there's eight hundred thousand followers and it says five million dollars a year that like cement to me that all the values in the duck calls that's in the things that people don't know about or are too complicated to find or our regional or our niche or one of those things so i always kinda sit me and john always kinda say the value is in the duck calls i i have a feeling sam well first of all are you gonna call your shot now so your new business are you are you are you gonna call your shot where in five years you're gonna it it's gonna be worth a billion dollars because what i wanna look back in five years because i think you're good you've clearly have the factor some you've already done amazing things but something more amazing i predict is gonna happen with you i don't know when but is this gonna be the one you think i do if are you gonna hit your five year goal how your year and do i know yeah i would say that would be the goal what i wouldn't i would not work on it every day i wake up it's like every day you own a building your own stock you're choosing to buy it and every day i choose to work on this i think more and more that is definitely gonna work and the moment that i think it's going the other way i will not work on it so we're gonna look it back on this december two thousand twenty eight and we're gonna see if you if you nailed it but i have a feeling you're gonna do something amazing and we appreciate you coming on man you're you're awesome thanks for having me i've been following the pilots since you started and nineteen when i was i i used to watch your videos out of the lifetime yoga studio that's amazing awesome man thank you for coming out you're you're fun alright we appreciate you and that's a pop i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back