#34 - CES Highlights, Cloning US Startups & Compliance Education

yeah what's up dude how are you hey happy new year all that show i was ces yes yeah i'm pulling up my notes now it was amazing they had had you been before no two hundred thousand people i've never been a vegas okay alright you went for that fight had you been before i've been i've been to vegas many many times because i'm a degenerate gambler but what are you really yeah like poker crap i played five hundred dollars in lost it what do you play with like i when i used to go to vegas a i was when i in college and i was like stupidly trying to like make money by gambling which is like the dumbest thing you could but i was i'm good at poker and crap you can't really be good at you can just kinda break even try to blackjack check too or poker like poker you're playing as other people got it and you just pay a table break blackjack you're playing the house you just have a defined disadvantage hey anyways i i love went face a lot like when i was younger i used to play like i'd bring like five hundred bucks and now even though i make more money i still play with like a thousand dollars and i've i've only two x because now the thrill of winning that money has gone down right but the agony of losing money when i know could spent it in other ways or like just the time that it takes like just being there for eight hours gambling i'm like this was a shitty of use of time now i was with a friend my friend i don't know how to play i was with my friend and he was showing me and he had twenty grand out wow and i played with him he was aggressive and i lost on the hour it sucks to play with a friend who's playing different stakes because you don't feel the win together if if you're both winning that guy just won eight grand and you want eighty dollars and you feel like a sc when you get up from the table you don't feel like you want you feel like you lost and even when you lose like it just doesn't feel the same because you're like damn i feel kinda awkward because you just lost a car and i lost a hundred dollars i don't feel too bad but like you lost a car and i don't know how to treat you now well the good news is he has a host or whatever at the casino so we went dinner and nice pulled up my credit card a paper dinner it's like no it's it's handled have you ever played credit card re let yeah he wanted to do that there that's just where you have a really fancy dinner and you pull out one card right yeah basically instead of split the check everybody puts the card in and then the waiter comes at the end and the waiter starts pulling out cards if the card gets pulled out you're safe last card in pays the whole bill and so i've only played it once and i lost and paid the whole like three hundred fifty dollars i did not wanna to do you know vegas everything expensive and we went hard and so like three person dinner was like five hundred dollars right i didn't wanna do that so he just paid for it even better the the host did do you wanna hear highlights yeah please alright so there was a hundred and eighty thousand people there it was very overwhelming i said the mgm grand huge mind boggling so i'm running a report actually on the hotel industry because it's really fascinating right takeaways the chinese are ridiculously and so what i would do is we would go i had a friend who was interested in the sleep industry he goes let's go find sleep products that i wanna launch and we saw w you know w yep they make fancy i have there own by nokia beautiful products he found one that he loved it was a hundred dollars it looked awesome they ago we think this gonna be big comes with an app he goes okay sounds good walked next door there was the chinese knock off making the exact same thing and he would he said white label and they go yeah and they go how much and he goes twenty dollars and he goes great found it you got my thing done versus a hundred dollars amazing so very impressed with chinese remote work i've talked about remote work a lot amazon had a huge booth and they had four harriet customers and it was like the home cook cook okay kitchen kitchen the busy parent right and there was one other one that i don't remember and then the at home office worker interesting and so if this is one of amazon's four the one four as personas this is they know none of the products were impressive i didn't i didn't see one remote thing that i thought was awesome interesting what do they even try to do like your desk your what what what is does remote work even have yeah so it was basically a good setup for doing calls so a nice big wide screen that was affordable the alexa camera yep and then the alexa speaker and that's a nothing fancy gotcha but they're going after it there was nothing fancy what were some more oh neon have you heard a neon no mind boggling so they had twelve to fifteen tvs that were six to seven feet tall also life lifetimes and they had people they're talking on the tv they looked like real people there was a park ranger who was giving directions he was talking to the camera and he's hey welcome to the park and he showed his map right they were one hundred percent fake they weren't real people okay no i mean they weren't actors like they weren't avatars oh yeah they looked totally real you look at it you're like oh so neon makes the characters or they make the screen or both the screen just a tv okay screen just tv and that was they wanna do what sort of like virtual front desk people what what are they trying to do i mean look the obvious thing is gonna be porn because porn rules everything westworld real world we'll get past that i don't know what it's used for to be honest but it was cool as in that how believable it was yeah it looks real there was a version of this at the cowboys stadium that went viral on twitter did you ever see this mh so if you go to dallas cowboys the full football exchange stadium and there's like a screen that looks like a mirror it just looks like a camera of view and if you stand there for a second out will walk in the screen a bunch of cowboys players and they know where you're standing so you can go with a group you can just be one person and the cowboys players will compose for a photo with your group they'll walk they'll basically move around you to pose for the photo and it'll take a photo for you and you can share that out and i was like this is a really cool interactive display yeah that's amazing and the final thing was delta the best booth there probably for real delta airline yeah what what are they doing okay so they give you a ticket and you put it in your pocket you gotta sign up to this and so they would like have five people stand and look at a screen i would stand here someone would stand four feet to the right and then four feet to the right another person and each person would look at the screen which was supposed to be like the ticketing thing like when your flight leaves and they look at the same screen they each see different things so it would say sean your flight leaves at four o'clock and then i would say next to you and and they would say sam your flight is thirty minutes late okay that sounds like magic and well if you remember when you're your kid and like those books would have these things where you like give angle changes angle changes and you see i think that's what it is but like yeah dozens and dozens of them right and it follows your ticket and it knows where you're standing right amazing i like that that was most impressive thing and why did you go to ces yes just wanted to check it out or you had like a purpose i wanted to go to how so i had stories for this stuff yeah okay a couple of our investors were there and i had a free ticket in a free hotel okay gotcha can't lose you know what i've never done i've never exploited the whole media pass thing once i've ever signed from media via pass so i would've gone free probably anyway had i signed up for a immediate exploited it in a good way not a bad way but i didn't sign up for that super bowl is coming up not too late yeah well i went to fc fight and tried to sneak in with the media pass and they're like oh you didn't sign up but and then i realized wait a minute i could've have just not a liar i have a media right i'm so used to just lying in the i'm like trying like scheme i'm like wait a minute i'm legitimate so that's why i went but i'm not gonna name names but we talk about d c all the time yep i cannot get over how fast some of these things grow and i wanna know what your opinion is i was with one guy first year sale about forty million forty million revenue year one yes second year they're trying to get one fifty jesus bootstrap breakeven can you say the product category or no no i'm not gonna say anything other than that okay let me ask you this were you surprised that this would do so well or that this there's even a market for this or that no opportunity it's a common item it's a common item that a lot of people use all the time but it was only an okay product right just all marketing and then mo this is public he tweeted that last month either last month in december or november so at hu he said he had twenty employees on twitter he said last month they did eight hundred thousand dollars per employee in revenue for that month right which comes out to be ten million dollars in annual sales per employee right crazy right two hundred million a year that according to his tweet right crazy right and so what do you think but they now have the target boom behind them too because now after the acquisition they got into normal retail also in addition to him yes but he was doing similar numbers when they i mean it was do a two hundred million dollars the same revenue similar revenue per head i i imagine right we're at least per non customer service head right and so whenever i hear this i like i'm like oh man i gotta do this i don't know but then i have a thing in back of my head i'm like this is a bubble this like right so i don't know but the cost of entry is so low so yeah maybe you're wrong maybe or maybe maybe it is a bubble maybe the facebook ad prices are going too high maybe it's not as easy as it sounds but you gotta ask yourself what's the cost of entry so is it a high capex can month worth of time yeah exactly it's month of the time and then you gotta ask yourself what's a month fourth of my do of my time worth and for most people that equation will say give it a shot it's amazing i have a story to tell there but i have to wait five months to tell it okay this is a bad teaser because it's too far away but we will clip this part of the audio and then have someone failing or winning i will tell the story in five months okay that's interesting yes and one of the folks i was with was telling me about rocket internet you know about rocket internet i know about so rocket for those don't know two brothers basically three free brothers yeah and they're in germany is that right yeah and they basically clone us internet companies typically and launch them in europe or brazil or different countries and they're like not ashamed to be like oh airbnb good idea here's ours here's our airbnb it's called whatever home away or whatever it is and they've created actually like quite a bit of success doing this and silicon valley loves to hate on them yeah and the more specific story is ollie the boss the the middle brother when he was twenty one he went to stanford for a month or or something and hung out and like saw silicon can valley startups when he was twenty two he cloned ebay in ninety days they sold it for fifty million dollars i believe they use that money to clone a ring company so that after three years maybe for two or three hundred million dollars and then they use all their winning to turn into a clone factory called the rock internet right and their hq in berlin and they have a chief scientist i don't know what they call them and he studies all of their clones and he's like emails the ceo he emails the amazon the philippines or amazon of africa it says hey amazon changed the color of their buttons go right and they cloned group on and they got so big that they actually beat group upon to the point of saying oh this business model so i gonna work group on right and then they got so big that there's zappos clone got too big and they couldn't sell it anyway so now they they're to operate them and their pop a lot of them are publicly traded right they have a big one in latin america like amazon for there i forgot it's called exactly but yeah and i was with the a friend who started one of their companies so they have ceos right and they went from no from him to ten thousand employees in three years and what did he say he liked it he hated it because it's they're no to have a pretty brutal culture it's both good and bad there's a lot that can be learned and there's a lot to avoid yeah he said that it was like operational excellence and they demanded it and they made him exceed expectations the downside side is they burned a ton of capital to start their companies a lot of them didn't work apparently they've burned a couple of their investors and i think they've done it in a rather unethical way as opposed to like and we're in good faith trying to grow big fast and that's okay actually but so good and bad to learn from him yep i heard a story about one of the ceos or one of the brothers flew to asia and he got twenty of the ceos in a room of their companies and goes you guys gotta work harder you gotta be more aggressive you see that guy in that room yeah every company is a b and c players i haven't firing on the phone every c player right now and then the guy who's in the other room making the phone calls gets done firing the people walks in the room and the guy goes alright now you're fired and so there's like dozens of stories like that right and it's just really fascinating that's some scarf shit i like it okay and so ces also you're interested in these like trade show conferences also right yeah he study these things i wrote a big report on trends about trade shows i didn't include ces i included other ones they're huge i mean the guy who started ces he originally called it com in the nineteen eighties and then he sold it to soft bank mh for a billion dollars and that guy his name sheldon ad he's worth fifteen billion dollars and is one of the richest in the world because he's a hotel guy right he's a guy during his conference time he goes we need bigger space so he started i think the sands hotel corporation which is now huge right super fascinating if you told me that this conference did five hundred million dollars in revenue i wouldn't be surprised right and so what do you think about that because you run a conference do you think that you know this is a model you do you guys think about applying this model is you guys yeah so the way our conference setup is like a conference the big box is in trade shows yeah that's the big money because you're selling so what's a trade show that we think could exist you know because remote work okay remote work trade show like it yeah what else construction the construction industry so i read a whole bunch of publicly traded annual letters from the biggest trade show businesses in the world and a few markets that are consolidated and there's not a clear winner the construction industry right and i brought about that report yeah okay cool if you're listening to this and you had a trade show idea email us i wanna hear your trade show ideas or if you're working on one even better because you're not and blacks stone the biggest private equity firm in the world just bought a bunch of trade shows that for huge multiples they bought one in the digital marketing space for nearly fifty million dollars mh and they only did six million in revenue mh that's a that's an outlandish multiple but it's a they're really good cash flow companies i like it okay so that's the yes i figured you're gonna have a couple things so it's a new year do you do resolutions yeah what'd did you do well what what what are three traits that i wanna embrace more of okay i like that you said that rather than resolution and i haven't done like income goals or anything like that what are the three traits to be a better leader to be more bold and i'm not gonna say the last one okay why bold i feel like you're bold i feel like you're i think i'm bold enough do you i think you're bold yeah i think you're bold in the sense that you take action very quickly so when something comes into your head you will like instantly begin the action that's required massive action to take that thing i don't think you're bold in the like range of things that you do you could probably do more things but the things you decide to do i you take like very bold action on that yeah like this podcast room we're in right now like we will be talking like we should do podcast and then it'll be like you're on the phone you're still talking to me and then you're like on the phone with somebody being like buy everything you need for yeah podcast email sean buy everything you need and let's set this up and like it needs to be where you walk in push a button and it's a podcast i don't think that's bold that's in imp okay fair enough that's a that's another way of looking at it but i like it because i that most people get held up on action the they just that we roll with i think are like crazy bold like they tell me the stories about what they're doing gotta like my god well there's different kinds right there's just insane risk so like our buddy suing sue is that who i'm thinking about he he he take he's very bold but he takes also like some insane risk like on the he's the very first episode of this podcast and he tells the story of like when they ran out of money and then they take a loan and then they run out of the loan he takes his entire net worth million bucks and secretly puts it into the company to buy them like two more months to try to see if this thing can survive and he was just willing to wipe out totally but he was not willing to live with like not seeing the product launch he's that was a big ass risk to the point where he was like i will never see this money again he's also good with taking action quickly so and so ramon yes crazy bold yes they're all immigrants do you think i'm well i think that you have a good way of thinking like well why can't i so and in a sense that is yes that is bold this i think that a lot of people but i have ideas and they're like but i can't do it i'm like well why not and you do a really good job of like well i'm gonna do this one than this and where like well why wouldn't that work where where do i lack and bold this from what you've seen sticking with something yes sticking through it even if it sucks at first yes and i've told you that totally great and you have told me that okay i think that that is the that's that if that's the only part i think where you like bold but you have very bold ideas i think we can talk with us did a deal you you told the company the way you went about that i felt was very bold yes i told the story at con actually i told it and and what i feel is the closest version of truth that i can tell it where you can't tell all the details always but i told like most of the detail i i felt that when you told me about that my jaw dropped a i was like wow maybe we had the confidence to make that happen so yes i do think you're both okay so i wanna share something with you that's and by the way in two years if you have a company that is a unicorn or something like bullshit where it's like popular and like i one hundred percent expect that you're not surprised so you're gonna be a ceo you're the ceo type i think so so it's the end of the decade right and i went back and looked so i'm thirty one now i was twenty one at the start of the decade and so i did a look back and i was remember i was like yeah i was i was living in boulder at the time just just graduated from college and so i was like what were my goals when i what were my decade goals back then and i didn't really write these down but i know what i kept saying over and over again and so i did a check in on those and be like how did i do so i'm gonna read you my what i thought i was gonna do in my twenties and what actually happened so here's i did okay so had number one i said i want a million bucks in the bank like available to me to invisible assets exact like liquid i can even liquidate it instantly or it's already liquid cash so that one is a check number two was mary a girl who rocks my world so that one's a check then comes some cringey ones that i feel like looking back i'm like fuck i i really want this is my goal so one was forbes thirty and thirty which which by the way anyone who is down on the inside track or like like on the that's total bullshit totally it's one hundred percent bullshit at the time i didn't know i thought forbes that's where you know forbes was forbes had such a big brand that they like so you know game and a lot of the people on there are fucking idiots and i referred somebody this year who made it and no knock on this guy he's great guy he's my friend but like the fact that i could just refer this guy and he just made thirty of a thirty for nothing it shows how much asked me to do it inside game yeah so it was bullshit that was on my list it was on my list too given epic ted talk so that was a fail you gave an epic hustle kinda talk yeah but i always liked ted growing up so ted was one there do a ten minute stand up comedy set in front of a hundred people forgot about it it didn't even attempt it could've have done it but didn't didn't you kinda you but you didn't to talk you kinda the on top well you're an entertainer yeah i don't know but like i'm just going through here's what the goals were it's actually more interesting what the hell i thought was important back then versus what i think's is important now so my other ones were go play and win a season of survivor i tried it out i auditioned didn't make it on but cbs i'm still out there play the world series of poker main event so the ten grand big buy tournament didn't do that either find an excuse to live in australia again i did that and then my last one what because i kind of back then even i kinda knew like is this what i should be trying for my last one was come up with better check for the next decade right so i tell you the story so i i have this hack which is i'm at twitch now and i'm on this like exec team which is basically like i don't know the top eighteen people of the company are on this like what they call the et team they they extended twitch team are you the only lab guy on there i'm the only bib guy on yeah bi and so these are all really great smart people and and so i have this networking hack that i recommend to anybody which is these are all cool people and one of the things i want out of my time at twitch just to meet awesome people and have them respect me and and maybe we can cross paths again in the future but with all these people everyone's so busy because they're all an executive managing their part of the business and so we barely interact so what i do now is every sunday i just sent an email out to just the exact team and it's just me rambling about like whatever the hell i want i just sent out for an hour and i do it in this format i stole this from james clear james clear you know who he he's a habits guy so he sends out this email called three two one so mine's one two three it's basically one photo two thoughts and three links that i find interesting and i send this out and it's kinda funny because when i first started doing this it felt a little bit awkward but now that i do it people love it people love it and they have something to talk to me about all these people who i'd never interact with you could tell they're like hey this guy is actually pretty interesting he's pretty smart i i like this guy and so one of the people on this list is this guy ethan and so ethan is actually not even at twitch he's the vp of amazon prime and so he's just on this list because when amazon acquired twitch he was part he was like the adult that they put into twitch essentially now he knows you and so he reached out at one point it was like hey by the way i love these emails like i wish we had gotten to work together and i was like i didn't know he's on this list he work not worked anymore he he runs he's like vp of amazon prime so he's at amazon prime now and so so anyways he replied to my deck i i sent this out i said hey by the way here's what my decade list was and here's how i did and so he was like i got mine lying around here somewhere so he sent his back to me and and he also said what are yours for this next decade so i don't know how much i should go into this but is this interesting i could teach i'd tell you that this decade once and what he said because i think he's pretty wise and his feedback was pretty wise so mine for this decade is total financial freedom so that's six million bucks in the bank that is working for me so i think if six million bucks is out there working at market rates so like seven per seven percent a year yeah six thousand dollars and four hundred thousand a year of just the interest my life burn is not that high so i will i i'll only be going up you'll have a ten year old yeah i don't i don't think it'll be that expensive like i live as extravagant in a very expensive city right now and not close to four hundred k year but okay so that's one number two is seventy million people which is one percent of the you know humanity considers me like one of their favorite teachers through things like the podcast or books or anything else the next one is like have a healthy lifestyle that's not using willpower so like just find food i like that's also healthy find exercise i like that's also good for me i don't have that today i brought back the stand of comedy set so that's back on there and then or the last two one is live in walking distance of five households that i love and great one that i think is the most important that's the hardest one and the hardest one i completely agree with that i can it's so that's why i'm trying to go move next to ramon i'll try to drag you there and i'll try to drag five of us i think that's a grand idea i remember when i was poor in nashville i lived in a predominantly black neighborhood in the projects and it was the happiest i was ever bitten because i'd would go on my front porch and see my neighbors and we would chilling kick it and i was way happier because i had that call the out and walking is a key thing here because when it's walk you don't have to plan you can spontaneously hang out you could dip right back to your house there's no obligation is fun if that's my college is fun exactly i think i'm just chasing college really in me too many ways of my life so i mine in two thousand eleven was like earn a hundred grand a year okay buy rolex have a certain pair jeans that i wanted a leather jacket it what was the jeans i'm a gina and willy jeans because i was really poor when i did this okay and i achieved all of them unfortunately which is like not so at which they have this goal setting thing because i'm what was like ask for goal i'm like well do you want me to say the super aggressive you want like a seven out of ten or do do what other people do in just sand bag it because then you look good because you hit your goals and they the seven out of ten rule is what they said to which is seven out of ten you want if you're hitting seven out of ten you're appropriately aggressive but not unrealistic yeah i agree with that can we talk about one idea i yes go for i've been looking into membership programs i'm very interested in those so like buying so we've talked about it where you pay a fee and you get access to the to discounts right aa is an example of one huge business aaa is an example of one arp you said it has like three million members or something i believe you said no that more i think forty email mean i like the majority of americans who are fifty years and above have a membership i bought a membership just to test it out to a yeah it's only seven or eight dollars a year the majority of the revenue comes from people who use their insurance premiums or insurance policy gotcha huge business a huge huge huge it was kinda scam actually and so i investigated founders card yep this thing called the select card have you seen it i have billboards not huge businesses from what i what i gathered this is all public i think if i i i guess that founders card is ten million in revenue select is two million in sales but other than people one hundred percent profit because you don't have any costs right and i talked to the founder and we work about this when he spoke at hu and he told me that they had that as well for their members and no one used the perks yep why do you think that is why do people not use it or why are these not bigger businesses why both i was i'm shocked to how little they are now the angle that you could do is if your founders card they claim to have thirty thousand members you have to clone or steal from b and launch your own lines of credit right i think the problem is you get these like non compelling discounts so you the people who are incentivized to give to partner up with these are people who want users so by definition they don't have a lot of traction which probably means they're not as attractive i don't like that necessarily you have shopify discounts if you use the discounts they will make like why wouldn't zoom give you a discount may just say that right we're gonna spend this money to acquire a customer anyway we'll just give you the cpa but like is a fifteen percent discount no as exciting to me for like signing up for this card for this right like i don't know i'm still trying to think about it the thing i was telling you was if i went to your site and you just said what do you use and yeah i use mailchimp at you shopify and they say boom you'll say it and it's like you're guaranteed to save this much money and therefore we'll offer you a membership at you know fifteen percent less than that so would you like free money and you've offer a variable membership rate depending on the product that use but you guarantee upfront those savings because you're making your money on the back you're making it from the companies anyways who want customers no don't make from them founders card makes one hundred percent of the revenue from the membership fees why don't know it's a weird business i was trying trying to understand it if i was founders card i would launch a bank so i would do at b what b does is the care or what's it called the the the fee that credit card companies the four percent yeah they probably go to mastercard and they go give us two percent right and you get the other too and so that's what i would you're interested in doing this for the hustle or yeah you're dabbling and so if you're out there and you what what types of products would you offer the discounts to things like shopify five mail software software and what are you curious about why why don't you just do this what's the what's the risk likely will likely will and so if people are listen to this and they want that how do how do they signal that to you eat tweet at me at the sam par at the sam yeah tweet the word yes and yeah he'll know what you're talking about yes okay i like that alright do you wanna talk about casper yeah you were researching casper when i was came out an hour ago so everything i'm saying is kinda summary that may not be accurate right but the gist is close because i couldn't read all of it from what it appears they've got fifty million dollars in cash a fifty million dollar loan that is twenty five million drawn out and they lost seventy million dollars last year in cash right so they're gonna run a money in six or twelve months the valuation is one point two billion dollars they're trying to go public right now typically i think i just did a quick search i think these companies trade for fifteen to twenty time earnings i don't see how on earth this is ever gonna work right when i walked in you just kept saying bad bad yeah i was like how is it bad i don't and this is just like you people i people don't judge too much is i've only looked at it for twenty minutes i don't understand how this will work right horrible that's what i would say horrible and what okay if you were taking the other side of it what do you think is the most promising part of the business what's my spend one dollar in marketing and they make three dollars they have well over a million customers so this whole own the sleep category it could work mh i think that could work they should not be located in new york they should not have raised all that money they should be in in how much should they raise two or three hundred many hundreds they should all their customer service should be located in h new jersey and the company had a quota should be there and or like somewhere else and it should not be a right run like it's being run but what the fuck do i know they are they built it they probably know yeah no i i think it's interesting it feels to me like this is something that they should have sold to one incumbent like some old school mattress company that has a car should've bought them and doesn't know it's like you know digital the way of the world and these guys have really pioneered the digital space for mattresses let's buy this company versus going public you really have to have a really compelling story or financials in order to to to do well and i'm almost positive that there's five founders and not one of them owns more than five percent of the business right which so if they do at a billion dollars not one founder is gonna get paid in more than fifty million dollars for creating billions of dollars with of value mh you wanna to talk about gum road two gum road the thing about gum road is it's a cool service that lets you sell pdfs and other things like that electronic files right so if you make a little ebook you can sell it for ten bucks gum road is a super easy way to do that i've made thousands in dollar of dollars off of gum road right i love it i think it's badass right i don't think that there's anything better they raised twelve million dollars the guy who started it was the second or third employee at pinterest he probably would have made money if you stayed there he raised t dollars four or five years in fired everyone moved to utah and is running it way differently super lame now very lean in their eighth year business he releases all their numbers they did so you want if you wanna see these numbers he's on twitter his at handle is just s h l that's guys somehow i don't know him but he's i i kinda like him from his twitter persona they did seventy million in transactional volume five million in net revenue because they i take a fee of the sales and only two hundred and fifty thousand in profit fifteen two fifteen horrible right horrible it's a great product and a horrible business it doesn't have to be maybe he should be charging like a monthly subscription fee instead of a percentage he should charge a i actually don't know if they do this anymore or if they do he should charge a monthly fee of twenty dollars a month for every creator and a percentage of sales right yeah i don't know what it is he's blog a lot about like this journey of like well i was at pinterest and financially that would have been a good move and then i raised money and i thought i was the shit and then raised twelve to face twenty right exactly so he was doing really well the product is really interesting and then he kinda realized look this business not gonna live up to those expectations i gotta like you know i gotta change this so you radically changed it you gotta give them credit for i mean be eight years in and at that level you know on one hand we much revenue in our second year right and i see this a lot i see great products that are fun and useful and helpful but they're not great businesses reddit cora wikipedia and gum road well i think reddit is gonna be a great business but for now i don't see i hope it is right the revenue gone growing like crazy is yeah though oh thank god yeah i just couldn't imagine advertising to that crowd right yeah it's tough but the revenue is doing really well and their growth their user growth and their engagement growth is like going through the roof because they finally built like mobile apps and they actually are working that's also i saw steve pop in at ces i don't know him as a friend other than a brief conversation i love reddit it i love it if it were of nonprofit i would i wouldn't mind and i'm a as capitalist as it gets right okay so i have one which is training and compliance so now that i work at a a big company they have so many like mandatory compliance things like anti bribery training gender training sexual harassment training whatever mandatory things that you gotta do and the content is all really bad and and i've also seen this my buddy works with a lot of schools and schools have to do like the teachers have to do professional development and so the government gives schools a budget to do professional development and so they go out and they buy whatever is the best training and and professional development stuff for these teachers and he showed me some of the videos that they have to sit through and it is god awful and so if you're a company that goes into an sexy space and you just committed to like we're gonna make the training compliance curriculum content that doesn't suck i think you do really well over time so you let me i might be able to blow your mind here i don't know the numbers was on the top head i'm googling it as we speak so there's a company in nashville that does this for nurses is called health stream i just pulled up their numbers market cap eight hundred fifty two million pe ratio fifty seven wow yeah wow that's like half of or i don't know what facebook because that's that's up there what do you think their revenue let's see their revenue is in fourth quarter their revenue was sixty million dollars so not huge revenues but not mall but they do exactly what you're describing for nurses right and i think each industry has their own like i'm sure pilots have a whole set of clients and training what and people don't realize how simple it is i'm almost positive it's just a series of videos it's just a series of videos there's basically no technology involved the hardest part is the sale and like yep there are establishing incumbents that have been selling year after year the same content of the what category is interesting so sexual harassment is like so the big one that's interesting to everyone is is like all of the new social and moral things that like i don't even personally like fully understand so like at twitch all of a sudden it's like we have a gender neutral a restroom people put when you sign in to come meet somebody you have to say what your pronouns are he him her or she whatever whatever right and i think for a lot of people like for me like this is like brand new you don't you don't know the everyone that's brand you don't know the etiquette and there's sort of like you sort of feel dumb asking and you also don't wanna like offend people by doing it wrong and so i think that the sort of like social norm like this new social etiquette is one that's there but that's not as least a provider for yours don't even know because it comes through amazon so amazon might have their own in in house for like a lot of this stuff but like you know every company is gonna need this like a company if you got fifty people you'd need to have like a training and compliance stuff for your for your employees and so that's interesting yeah my good friend you still work at health stream and they're a national i went to school and i think they only have like salespeople right and it's like that i mean a sales right there's a big business called lms which is learning management system yeah companies you buy this like crappy sap learning management system and then the videos sap makes that yeah they bought the big lms system that was out there i think sap owns it now that's crazy man this is the benefits of working at a big company you see so much opportunity that i have no idea exists correct and what i have to do is just catch myself because it's always the annoying thing and then i just reframe it it's like no this is the opportunity thing right like whenever there's something that's like a real pain point that we have to do or it's really hard for us to do but we have to check these boxes i'm like oh that's where we would buy a solution to this problem and so yeah i think what budget you have that you don't have to ask for permission sales tools honestly which is like salesforce i think does extremely well and then anything around trust safety compliance like you have to ask you don't have to ask just buy well like you have to ask of a certain number for everything but like you're likely to get it when it comes to you know security trust safety this is why i don't wanna do e com it's because i hear about this and i'm like why would i waste some time when like this is like predictable have a company that makes two hundred million dollars in revenue and they're valued at way higher on revenue than right casper is gonna so have you so have you heard like this zone of genius term you find your flow in this particular category yes it's based the intersection of like what you're really good at and what you enjoy what you enjoy and what the market wants and is willing to like pay you for right and that's the zone of genius zone of excellence is just what you enjoy and what you're good at but not necessarily what the market wants badly and so that's kinda how i think of all opportunities now is like there's so many opportunities might as well pick the one that ticks all three of those boxes like i'm really good at i enjoy doing and the market really wants and then let the let the chips fall where they may good point what else you got anything else what we need to do is just make a list of all these big corporate needs i have such a list yeah you told me you never shared to share that with you yeah i've never worked at a company so i this the simplest version of this that made me make this list is when i saw the like the ipad at the front everybody has this now the ipad at the front company huge company with the simplest goddamn product in the world it's a ipad which they didn't make it's a form which is like the first thing you make when you learn how to like if you make a website you can make a form and then all it does is just ping the employee and it's like hey they and you sign an nda and they can print your name batch right so they add it on a couple of things but like trivial can make trivial you'll probably gonna have a team of ten developers exact less even if you wanted to obviously i met ten devs with like multiple customers right i was to to start with you could start this with zero and it's something every business actually wants and will pay for so that's where i was like oh my god the needs of a big company you just need to write them down but there's some that already exist and then there's there's so many more that don't you know you had a guy on here named keith real estate i'm yeah keith washer yeah i messaged him and i was like dude can i just come and sit in your office for like four days right i won't say anything i'm just gonna sit there i'll do whatever you want i'll clean the floor yeah but just let me sit i think more people should do this i actually reach out to several people to do this early on in my career which was i did it to ceos i thought were badass i was like hey hey can i just come shadow you for two weeks i just wanna literally go room to room with you and i will shut the fuck up and listen and i'm just gonna i wanna absorb you because they don't teach what you do in school right so like and they were like yeah sure well that's exactly so that's one and then the other one is to i think kind of where you're going was less like hey keith you bad as how do you lead yours is more like what problems do you have in the real estate world that i know i could solve but i didn't tell him that right i that's your motive i said i'll sit there i won't say a word if you want my opinion i'll give it right and if you want like an aaron run i'll handle it yeah i think this type of like rotation should be like a staple of one or what people do i was like i won't say i won't say shit and i'm not even remotely a big deal but i certainly don't need to go work for someone and i one hundred percent would do that right without a doubt and i'm going to do i'm gonna go down there i'm gonna he said yeah sure say yes yeah he said yeah i go to i won't say a word if you want me to say something i will but other than that i'll you just tell you want coffee i'll get it for you and i have a feeling i'm gonna learn more in those five days about multi family real estate investing that i would reading for months one last idea that's kinda like that so been on a a bigger learning kick because i got a little more time on my hands to to learn things and so i'm i'm learning all these things that like you read a book you watch some youtube videos whatever but i more and more i this i'll frame it as a business opportunity which is there are so many great books out there that should just be online courses that are more actionable you know the teach of the principal to give you the worksheet to like do the thing yourself have you seen master classes new business courses no what is this bob ig how seen yes are a master class i'm buying them oh nice yeah so that was that was one of the ideas i had a when i was thinking about business was masterclass class for the enterprise which is kinda like what they're doing now where they take ceos and they they make masterclass class out of it but i'm just thinking for the average person so the book i was actually thinking about was the game you read the game when you were everyone read the game everyone wrote the game game except for people who didn't read the game so the game was like a book about there's was like a guy who became a pickup artist but we were like fifteen when it came out so of course all of us would have read it someone my my girlfriend gave it me when i i was like is assigned if my a girlfriend gives me a book called the game says you need to make girls reading because it's entertaining it is inter very entertaining you should read it for the entertainment you'll also learn some things about human psychology and people that are applicable but if you take the game and you if you created the sort of pickup artist version of a of a course right now i think that would do really well through facebook i think that other things that are like like i'm i'm learning one thing about like writing jokes right now like the craft of writing jokes does a master class have that i think they do actually i took the one they have where it's like steve martin he just stand a comedy no i hated it because his very surface level and you know he just does like a three minute video where he's was like you know the thing about comedy is you gotta be authentic it's like that doesn't help me like authentically self is not funny right there this great youtube channel called casually explained have you ever seen this yeah he's funny he's just just like a nerd right the nerd he's just very mono voice and a stick figure like stories he's about like better than so he has one that says how to be funny or like how to write a joke and it's way better if there was a core subversion of that i think you could sell that at like a very low price to a lot of people so this a few broad skills that people want to know like a lot of guys wanna know how to how to pick up pick up women a lot of people wanna know how to be funnier a lot of people wanna know how to write better and i nobody teach teaches those practically i'm not gonna at a course business the way most people think about it i don't think they can be they're not being big big big but i can tell you i've got my very best friend and he makes a wonderful living yes and then i've got two other friends that probably make eight figures on courses yeah eight they companies eight figures is more than i would expect for of course i looked at like the top teachable courses in the top like those are on those are just guys right just individuals they make know companies low millions like one to two million like that guy chris car he probably makes thirty million dollars you're selling education right well he's got like a blended model where he's like you know ram ram seth right he's one of my investors he's never told me he's his revenue i have no idea what it is if i had a guess i would say it was north of ten million dollars okay that's pretty good no i it has to be north of tim because i think at one point he had sixty employees oh wow and that's for her and his business is free content books and of course yep and i don't know this is for a fact he's i never asked him but like he has a blog post on the tim ferris blog where it's called like how a five million dollar launch week so this is not like a revolutionary idea i just personally think it's under exploited and again something that you can do if you're passionate about and you know about a niche topic or skill and there's enough people who wanna know about that's who wanna develop that skill for themselves and school doesn't teach you most of the skills that you want to know to have like a good enjoyable life yeah i buy courses all the time i bought roommates course even though he's my friend and investor right that's a tip by the way you have friends who have businesses don't ask her discounts by their shit right i bought his thing i got so much value of course i bought it so much value i just bought it two weeks ago and i started going through i've gone through about half of it it's awesome yeah it's pretty good the thing is i with his what i like that he does is his thing is about and as you're doing the course you know you just see him doing it so well that you're like inspired like yeah this is so engaging okay i believe that this works and i think that's awesome whenever you can sort of like embody the product while you're it amazing i don't know what he charges for it now dollars dollars i got it in like a black friday sale type of thing for like i wanna say like bucks is you know it's pretty pricey but like if you're doing a business you're gonna make that money back one by the way our company implement i buy courses i don't even think i don't care how much it is that's just the policy yep that's how i'm with books i have an unlimited book budget i don't care the most expensive course has been five grand mh don't even think about it and i think a lot more people are like that than you think yeah my uncle who is i'm gonna bring him on because he's big in real estate and i asked him you know how did the gyms no there's michael uncle who he owns multi family real estate and so he was at house he was at house he was like yeah the way i learned i i paid a i spent a hundred and eighty grand from myself and four people who i wanted to be on my team to come to this real estate like workshop is like thirty grand per person and he's like four of those were basically flushing money down the drain like they didn't do anything with it they didn't like they walked away and it's like the information left their head and he's like i learned lesson there which is like if you're the type person who will get the value from it no price is too high and he's like i knew that i would like make something out of this course and i did i he's built like a you know hundred million dollar plus real estate portfolio off of what he learned in that first course but i think this is the difference between broke people and not broke or i won't say broke because money isn't correlated to success a lot of times people who achieve what they want and people who don't which is they think oh that's way too expensive it's like no that's not how you look at look at what's the value that you derive from like and is that an roi positive thing right okay cool we should wrap up good so we're gonna do this every week every thursday alright great if you got idea send them to us if you don't have trans get trans the best part of trends is the facebook group by the way i i've been able to tell you everyone says that the info is cool and it's like good because the group has stuff to talk about but you know you've built a badass facebook group and that's what it is for the record the family said we are gonna launch it on facebook group everyone at the company i wanted to do they was saying it's a horrible idea i'm like i don't think i know that is the best idea because i check facebook every day and i would not go to trends dot c and just go click your forum i would not do that yeah the facebook group awesome but the the the ideas in that group are so high quality or they're just a conversation is so high quality it's like this is a paid membership facebook group that i do not regret buying so hopefully when we get thirty thousand people it will also still be good yeah how many of people are earn it today in the group in the group yeah maybe four thousand it's doing well for like like normally as things get bigger yeah degrade and by the way there's no community manager it's me right so there's no one there's zero self regulation other than the employees who work here but no one's job i think the filter is the price because the people who come in they are like somewhat legit and people who are legit like they behave well and they like say smart and interesting things and like or they say up well thank you and sign up trends dot c o yeah cool alright see you boom