#40 - Paid Courses with Tom Wang, Barstool Acquisition & New Startup Hubs

lesson here in a trap room you're you will have the coronavirus whenever forty two minutes whenever people ask if i'm sick i'm like oh it's just allergies and so the joke get the office like i think i'm gonna to country your allergies what's up allergies you have i'm like i have the allergies that make me throw up or like i think i know like a stomach allergies yeah call because i was like gotta go home like it's just allergies you you can catch these allergies but it's allergies probably let's just jump right in and call this guy so we're gonna call this guy tom the back here is i posted on our we made like a facebook group for the podcast if you're on facebook to search my first million and i posted them i like man i really wanna talk to somebody who's making over a million dollars a year on a course and just guy was like hey i i i do i was like wow okay fantastic there's was only like a hundred members in here one of the odds and so then he emailed me he sent me the screenshots of his dashboard and then like a work walk through of his method and i was like this is fucking great so so i saw the numbers so it's the legit so he's he's you know he's make a lot so we'll see how much he wants to share thomas wang yeah wang tom wang so and then you know we'll we'll figure it out so let me call this guy tom hey yes what's up man hung that up i wanna hear hey are you we're doing fantastic alright so you are on the podcast right now i'm here with say great we got a boy henry on the camera so it's all it's all happening right now everything you dreamed of it's happening so i wanted to call you because i was telling them i posted in the group about hey i wanna talk to somebody who's making a million dollars a year doing a course and you showed up with the goods and so i wanted you to tell whatever you're comfortable tell i'll tell your story we got a couple questions and just just so you know you could share everything and then at the end we'll believe out shit that's too sensitive okay okay sounds good okay yeah so my story i guess for me it's always been my i guess side hustle i i growing up i was trying different ways to make money from selling watches of the nine market selling like call boards all these different of things never really had it in guidance for anybody else but when i was tell my other boards i was trying to you know just create a website and i knew nothing about e commerce side so i thought you can just create a website get a facebook page and you can start making money obviously that's not the case and during that time someone actually approached me and said hey i could actually sell the probably it's for you off amazon and i live vancouver canada and amazon back in two fifteen i thought it was just a place where people buy old textbooks from i've never bought anything on before so i was pretty skeptical i was like sure okay well i guess you know if you think he was he was talking pretty big so i was like alright just let's see what you can do and he ended up having a bunch of hard boards on amazon before amazon actually pulled down all the hover boards because you know things were exploding and stuff like that so that's how it's covered to amazon and then from there basically just you know thought it was just gonna be another site hustle but it actually turned out to well turn from side hustle into a seven figure business and right now we're actually going through an acquisition so we're trying to sell the business right out yeah a couple questions so first for everybody listening he basically started a fba business got it to work and fba means fulfilled by amazon so selling selling a product on amazon and then the core the course teaches other people how to do the same so that's how the course and what you're talking about connect so right now you're in the process of selling a seven figure fba business and you have a seven figure course that teaches people how to do their own fba business so that's the lay of the is he gonna reveal the first one yeah what can you talk about about the actual business itself yeah so i can reveal like obviously i mean based on the based on the coverage conversation you have with paul like we're going through acquisition so i can't really really name of the business anything like that for percent reasons but it's a care business it's in the beauty mitch and i started that business with my girlfriend in into seventeen we started with one product which was a like on a face serum that you buy buying your face and we had no idea what we're doing for the first month with it like seven thousand dollars sales and what i woah like people are actually buying this product from us on amazon like what is going on here we had no idea what we're doing and from there first year we finished the year off at like a hundred and twenty three thousand dollars sales i was working a ninety to five job at that time so i really really want to put my next five so i focus on amazon and then the second year we're able to scale that to one point seven million dollars and then last year with at three million dollars this year if we don't sell our business what clients is doing about six million so it's growing pretty rapidly but yeah we do private label you know off some of the products that we have are actually custom formula it i don't use any of the products myself i'm definitely not passionate about skin care or anything like that my girlfriend is so i'm just helping her with like the marketing side of things branding you know optimization on amazon seo and i'm that well income be six million in sales well this year projected to do six million dollars by last year our eb was about thirty percent wow that's amazing and look at itself for three or four times income yeah so the market value you can go anywhere between roughly two to 6x so that's obviously a huge range the ones that are on the lower end are just products on amazon that are just like not branded for example like like roll go balloons or some random things like that like very comm with our product that is branded you can definitely get on a little bit higher ed so we're hoping to get at least four x of eb but yeah we'll what the progress can do nice okay good so so congrats on the fba business and then tell us about the course so why did you switch to that because i'm always skeptical like when somebody's selling a course about how to make money i'm like if you knew that secret you would just be doing it in in your case to your in fairness you are actually doing it but why did you decide to do the course and then talk about how big that's become yeah no absolutely so the reason why i lost the course is because why first started of amazon i was following all the other guru that i was it's just free information right like you go and having how to make money on amazon you see a guy with lamborghini you're like oh this guy probably knows what he's doing so you click on his and like video and started watching this videos was like this makes sense but then the the the problem is when i started implementing the strategies this guy was teaching it didn't work out for me i'm like i did exactly what you told me to do and it's not working out like what it's the disconnects here and then later found out that a lot of these guru with the you know the lamb and the whatever or a lot of them don't sell on amazon they are just really good at you know copying other people's information and making into their own and packaged it's good together and sell a course so for me i actually never thought i would launch a course i basically just started documenting my journey youtube i was like i got a camera i'm like hey like this is day fifty six of my amazon journey like things are i'll go so well but you know we'll see what happens so i started just documenting my journey and then from there people kind of like my real miss authenticity and people start following me and then i like started started getting slowly started getting an audience people are asking me the same questions over and over again i'm like well what if i just launch a course would you guys be interested in that and i remember the first course that i launched i it was a hundred dollars a month for three months i got fifty people in it and i was like wow like people actually gave me a hundred dollars from teaching of amazon so that was kinda cool and then from there i did a couple more the those courses that's the prize nail a little bit but so i do a little bit different structure than most other people i actually do in person workshops i have a friend who lives in singapore who else sells on amazon i started seeing a lot of this posts on amazon or around facebook where he's speaking in front of like hundreds of people i'm like hey like what are you doing at singapore was like oh i actually teach people how to sell on amazon in person i'm like that's interesting and thought that was gone like i thought the webinars is the the way the funnel the webinars all that stuff of stuff like yeah but you know it's it's blue ocean like i have no competitors something that's interesting so i ended up making a deal with him where he taught me how to do exactly what that singapore so i started doing it in vancouver and i i've never spoken on sage or anything like that for so i was scared share as you can probably imagine and the first time like a hundred and fifty people showed up and listened to my basically my spiel and at the end i pitched the webinar and i was just shitting my hands the whole entire time so that's how i got started i started i did that for a year thomas point is around three thousand dollars canadian and i taught about hundred people locally here in vancouver and this year it's pretty much as rinse and repeat and just about doing the same thing here in vancouver gotcha sam has got a couple of questions for you how much how much did at first one cost that was nineteen ninety seven canadian nineteen ninety six a thousand dollars yeah wow if i can get about a hundred and fifty people into the room i can plug on a good day i can convert about twenty percent of the room on a bad day is about fifteen percent of the room so the the conversion rate kept on going off going off in around twenty percent and then i was really really scared of like an internal fee that i had to bump up the price a little bit more i'm like oh it's already so expensive for my my coach bump it a little more what happens so positive on i understand the model so ask me some questions okay so having a little wonky audio thing the where fifty a hundred and fifty people paid a g to show up so so basically what he does is he does he does facebook ads basically say hey come learn this thing and tory it's twenty bucks come it's like a meetup they come and he gets you know sixty hundred people in the room there he gives them like two hours of awesome content it shows them look i actually then out net that's what says if you wanted to work at weekend can workshop that one's a grand two grand granddaughter grand whatever it is and then that's where you know if you get if you charge two grand and you're getting fifty people to do it you know you're generating you know whatever hundred a month and and that that adds up to a million bucks a year did you tom did you feel s did you feel s when you were doing this i'm not judging you here i'm just telling you that's what most people gonna think yeah a lot of people who's who see somebody you know teach at a workshop or a class on how to get rich and then up upsell the class and saying hey this was the cheap one but if you wanna go deeper right like it doesn't mean it is so easy but some people some people shy away because they're like i don't wanna i don't wanna be that guy you know did you have that fear yeah yeah no totally like totally so for me i've always i feel like my motivation has always been trying to help other other people because growing up i'm like a immigrant from china when i came here and my parents were broke as a joke and i wanna us to be rich when i grew up so growing like no i wanna to help me no one's saw anything potentially me so i wanna help other people that i were kinda in the same position as me so when i comes to laziness i think i'm kinda like the anti the anti groove like i go up on stage wearing hoodie and shorts because i tell people like this is the real me i'm not like this is the real meat is what i wear on daily basis i don't wear a big suit a fancy tie pocket square trying to sell you so we can port shops if you wanna come and learn for me great if you don't wanna come more for me i have tons and tons of free information on youtube that i i share with you anyway right so this just a fast track for you to to attach ashley part so i don't feel pleasing at all because when i get results from my students it makes me really really happy but a lot of times what i do feel like is am i worthy enough to actually teach and ask people for thirty five hundred dollars or thirty three thousand dollars even though you know i have a successful amazon business and so on and so forth so sometimes i feel that way it's like hey like you know am i worthy like am i are you the right person to teach and i feel like that's just like a self confidence sometimes and tom is there anything that we because we're we like to keep these these guest segments short where you pop in and you you help educate the world on hey you know here's here's something i figured out because we're we're like you we're trying to share share interesting pathways knowledge so that people can see a variety of options and see that there's a million ways to win and i think your way of winning was pretty dope is there anything else you wanted to share you could shout out your course what whatever you want we'll we'll link to it we'll link to it in the in the show now it's just anything else you wanted share any any good stories good tidbits you wanted to share i i think there's a lot of people that are i i i think a lot of listeners are people that maybe they're working at nine five maybe they're like you know already have a successful business whatever but for the people that are listening that have a nine to five i wanna start a site hustle that maybe eventually will become a full time hustle and then so they can quit their job and you know do this business i just think that selling on amazon it's just such a good opportunity and obviously that sounds quiet but trust me i've done so many other businesses and nothing has worked so if i'm am someone who can figure this out it just buying something for cheap from china and selling it for a little bit more and amazon gets you all the customers ready so i just think it's it really really the good opportunity and in terms of the shout out the course i i don't teach online i only teach locally if you're in vancouver you can come to my workshop it's called fba masterclass class but if you're online if you're somewhere you know somewhere else maybe one day i'll have online course but right now i don't cool tom here you're the man thanks for calling andrew dude thank you i think this what you build is pretty awesome thank you so much guys i appreciate it talk you later you know i've i've done those yeah i attended one of your yeah i'll tell that story a little bit yeah so i'm a self talk copywriter which means i studied it but i'm only average neville you're above average come i'm i'm pretty good but i'm not formally educated neville is my best friend our good friend and he is same boat but better self taught and very good and we just said we're gonna go to sean's office show up i think we said it's a thousand dollars yep i think maybe twenty five people came yeah it was basically it was an all day it was one right all day was one day morning till sort of evening and it was great you and neville were up there each made about ten g's on a saturday like thirty people or so i would say were in the crowd they'd all paid to be there everyone was excited to be there some and and i think it was only fourteen days notice people flew in right yeah you guys did it kind of on a whim and i saw that was like this is awesome this guy you just made five grand or ten grand on a saturday i think we each made ten grand that's that's amazing and you guys were just talking about what you know it was very intimate group everybody got to like workshop their shit so it was like hey i'm trying to get better i'm you know i have this landing page how would you improve this and he would put it up on the big screen and we would just work shop it together yeah and i attended because you adjacent it i wanted to learn and and i dude i like two pages of notes from that day and you know i got to go for free because i let you host it but i was like it's actually really valuable what didn't you do more of that don't know we should we should no reason i should we could do here i love tom's model where like i said blue ocean so like the conventional wisdom is online course but online yes you can reach the whole market but you're competing against the whole market yeah so if you're trying to be hey here's how you make money selling on fit on amazon a lot of other people doing that but what he realized was looking vancouver there's nobody and you know he turned out to be right with that insight which was that every month he could get you know another hundred people to show up and that in person experience was like more than worth what they've had you know we should do that actually you and me and the should do that the reason i didn't do it well first of all it's for anyone listening it there's an unfair advantage of having an audience yes so like it would be practically no more work for us yeah so that's great neville i don't know how many people are in his email list i i don't know this for a fact i would guess fifty to a hundred thousand yep my personal sam par on my email list well not the hustle probably five thousand so i could just send another a thing and it would sell out right so the reason why i didn't do it it's pretty exhausting if you're not i don't i get energy from that i just love hearing my own voice this why i like the you're you're naturally a teacher so i would like to i would partner with you neville that too i went home like when i went home i needed like two days to recover so it ruins your weekend which is interesting right so copywriting is i think interesting niche the other one you know it's just more generic one is we're here in san francisco there's a lot of people who be in a startup up but they haven't figured out how to sort of transition from that nine to five into starting their own company or how to raise money on any of these topics where i've done it and i've done it multiple times i know how to do this just pick a nation let's do it we should have that discussion i think that like overnight it would make tens of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue right a month and importantly i love doing it okay so this is let me tell you a story real quick please i tweeted out about this and it we got a little traction so alright this it's a good way to kick off the podcast so in two thousand and fifteen i got this email from this sky very typical asian name so i it wasn't like remember it wasn't memorable i mean there's ten million people with same name and i got an email i think eric eric bond introduced me i think and he said hey my name is this i i do this and it was a mildly interesting pitch but he said i would love to speak at hustle kinda and tell the story of x right and i i i i don't know if i ignored it but i no response i i could have replied i don't remember but i did not take him up on the offer he emailed me again in two thousand seventeen or eighteen and he goes i'm running for president i and this is andrew yang sandra yang who it is i'm running for president do you wanna like interview me and read would you please review my book and talk about it on the hustle i didn't reply i forgot all about it you tweeted this out i tweeted it out i forgot all about i've been watching the presidential debates and sarah and my wife ends up donating money to andrew yang and i'm like this yang guy sounds kinda of interesting i feel like that's a i i remember that name somehow and i looked up my email he was the guy who was emailing me that's crazy that you just remembered it so if you wanna see the tweet it's at the sam par that's i'm gonna go to it right now yeah funny thing is you tweeted back and of like sorry if you still wanna talk yeah let me down bro and i totally missed that one i guess so his exact thing was this is in twenty eighteen who's was not that long ago that he emailed me a fifteen and in eighteen that's so he goes do you think the hustle might do a book feature and i i can get the book to the editor to see what he thinks if you send an intro i can take from there i thought i feel like this would move some units and you know andrew yang founder of venture for america yeah and i i first i thought venture for america i was like that's some nonprofit what that that's a small thing right and second i get a lot of people asking for that and i just didn't take it up on them or i didn't take him up on it and missed that one dude that's so funny the you know the the the other thing that he did like i looked into his past he's just got a business background yeah i was like what's the business it was gm matt it was like a gm that's how bond my buddy and partner he's investor and the hustle right he's a mess of the hustle yeah helped us get started and he owned beat the gm which he sold so he knew all the gm mat guys and he was like this eric guy is gonna run for president and i was or andrew andrew andrew guy is gonna run for president and i was eric i don't wanna talk to the sky guy i'm gonna look like an idiot this guy is has no chance of right like i'm gonna look like stupid fool for like saying oh you this tech is gonna room for president i was wrong yeah totally we're wrong alright so brace what else we got what what are what are some other the topics i got a bunch written down i don't know which one i wanna start with but do you have any that you've been wanting to talk about two things so not ideas but things that are good the first one is last week we had brennan from the agency i immediately got a text afterwards once you published it from a says i have a agency that does fifty million in sales we sell to a lot of the same people but we're located in a cheaper region i'm trying not to give too much information we're located in a cheaper region and our margins eye fifty percent yep and apparently doing the podcast i asked why aren't you located in missouri where i'm from right and the guy was like he should because we make we do that we do that and on fifty million in sales we do five million in profit right so i've been looking at this there's been some some stuff written about utah lately the best so i read the same article probably you're referring so there's this thing which is like sort of the mormon valley where you know the new silicon valley there's there's a bunch of companies that are really big that are based in utah and there's way more shady internet marketing companies that show have all the ml m's are based in utah and all the a lot of the call centers and then then there's some like totally you know like no no asterisk next to their name like dom and there's some others that are like enterprise companies all candy stan socks i think adobe is started by utah mormon guy right but some are based there and some are started by mormons and the interesting question is why right and so a lot of people will sort of speculate that because mormons go on their mission they have to go door to door selling of you know religion essentially and they're you know that makes you fucking tough because you're getting rejected all the time well when your conversion rate is like point one percent and you're like oh this other thing has a three whatever season and and then on top of that you there's a sort of network effect of other people you could tap into they have similar sort of sales persuasion you know skills and and they're creating hubs and and they don't cheaper yeah they're are i think they ties so they give ten percent of their income to the church so they're probably like i need to make a lot of money right so i'm interested in utah for many reasons i wanna go out there so i wanna go i wanna go with you look at real day let's go meet some of these companies let's go what's up with these ml let's go meet them let's go find out what's you know what's what because they obviously have a stigma but i'll go with you know very interesting yeah wall tricks with the largest software company to sell i think q is from there click funnels which some people think scam they're from there but he's a great salesman and it's a good product i think it's a good product i do too so if you're listening to this room from utah host desk tell take us from give us a tour we we're we're itching to go to utah and then the second thing i wanna do i'm gonna do this in our trends facebook group what i'm gonna do is i think a great way to come up i love investing in software companies that i like i would love to start one one day i and what i've been doing is looking at our expenses so we spend a certain amount of money each month yep i'm i like to look at our quickbooks and like where are we spending our money i'm just gonna get rid of some stuff that i don't wanna reveal i'm gonna post our expenses in our facebook group right and i think that's an interesting way to see and i'd love to see others too because that's where you're gonna see some patterns and opportunity so i'm gonna do that yeah i'm gonna publish that you also need to publish your thing your the my import export list yeah i have one idea the problem so sometimes i have these ideas that i still think i'm gonna do and i don't share them but in reality i'm not actually gonna go do them or just delete some of them yeah i yeah i do but then i feel weird i'm like here's my idea list i took away the good ones that i would actually do right no i think you should feel weird i do that too so like i invested in a company that was based off a trends report and someone asked me which one it is and i like i'm not gonna tell you right i i don't wanna reveal it yeah yeah sometimes you know but i think that's part being real right it's like look when there's actually an edge or you know there's an actual arbitrage that i'm i'm currently exploiting i'm no fool i'm not gonna tell you about something that i'm currently exploiting that i know is so easy that you're gonna exploit it to and if you lives i apologize but i'm also smart that's what the smart person does and sometimes if it's like hey i noticed this i'm not gonna exploit it then cool let me give it away for free you go explain most yeah because i don't have the time to do most things yes there's just a couple things that i'm gonna do so anyways i wanna talk about that a couple of random companies i wanna talk about so tell me if you have an opinion rapid fire bite which is the new vine the founder of vine re relaunch fine what you i signed up and got the handles that i wanted squad on it and then move on yeah right where i signed up a lot of the handles were already gone and i'm like i'm it's weird i'm not an old person yet but i looked at it like an old person i saw much of young cool people on so i automatically think that was would be a hit it's like tiktok yeah what i think is interesting there is there the product actually is worse than tiktok picked up a much better product that vine never was and but then bite started as but the cool thing is that tiktok has a because it's from that chinese company and there's like there's some fear around like how much do we wanna trust the chinese company that controls this algorithm that's that so i think one interesting thing is it might be the first time foreign policy or sort of the like fear of the enemy in the east might get somebody to switch social networks i don't know what daniel gross was also speculating i agree was that that's a potential thing free idea i deleted tiktok the other day because the whole chinese thing oh really yeah nice and i love tiktok free idea i don't know if it's a good idea but i like it so there's this curve that shows airpods sales and we talked about this before and we talked about yeah accessories trends we did pod accessories and so the airpods sales curve looks like insane is hockey stick over a hundred million units sold and i saw this tweet that caught my attention which was at kids in school are basically swapping one pod yeah it's scott be shared it exactly so scott be shared this shout off to scott and it's interesting because then you could play something and your friend list you're frank can here it's just like silent communication network that's like secretive from the teachers which is actually the the backstory of about snapchat grew too was if snapchat first growth was they put it on ipads and classrooms so you could send self des distracting messages to other kids and other classrooms and a teacher can never catch it because the message goes away wants to see it and so similar sort of thing where kids are swapping airpods which lets them silently can secretly communicate with each other sort of harry's potter style and i think it's interesting once everybody gets airpods or as so many people airpods can you create a social network on top and those was a couple of people are trying to do this i seen a couple startups trying to do this but imagine being able to i just say a message quietly where only my sort of airbus can pick it up and i say your name and it sends it to you you hear it in your ear nobody else even knew that message got transmitted or i text you something but it plays in your ears text revolutionize cheating oh for sure i'm doing it if you're allowed to have headphones in when you're when you're doing can i let me give you another one yeah go for okay so i met up with chris red he's one of my investors he is a history of doing a lot of amazing stuff he has a charity or a nonprofit called the last mile have you heard to this i've heard it's like the prison yeah so what they do is created software classes for prisoners so they can get them a job when they get out right i went to san quentin and volunteered and we just walked around the yard in san quentin right it was amazing anyway what he's doing is it's a nonprofit but he's gonna potentially launch a private business on top of it and what he is what he's lobbying the government to do is allow prisoners to have iphones and it will be in a closed network and the iphones will allow you because at santa quentin they don't even have name badges they right you they literally have to count the inmates manually right four or eight times a day something like that and he's trying to do that and he's trying to get the phones for free because he's gonna be like hey at and t look there's a million prisoners a year when they if they someone does something good for them a million people a year get out of prison if they do something if so if you do something good for them other in prison they know your network right you could sell them so what do what are they gonna be able to do with the phone you should close network so what can they do what can they do well call home okay check to they'll help the the guards track yeah and so they can help like make sure everyone's where they need to be and they're what he's considering doing is building a network for them which is kind of interesting communication network yeah there's i don't know the the logistics of it because there's a there has to be a ton right you're dealing with criminals but it's kinda similar to what you're describing yeah these like sort of niche communication or new communication networks really cool business build a communication product you you win like that's the the basis of all he kinda human interaction but his niche is prisoners right and when he was explaining the idea it sounds wild like this is wrong and then you start getting into it you're like okay that kinda makes sense right i started using this product called change paste you heard of this so i read this i was looking you know i'm scrolling on instagram and this d company got me they were like look look how many toothpaste bottles get thrown away every year right it's i can insane right we all go through so many of these and and it's you know it's killing the environment and also like it's kind of a pain in the ass to use a normal toothpaste bottle because you're sort of by the end of you're sort of squeezing out the last bit it gets all crusty on top you lose the lid button so what these gonna do is it's a simple tablet and it's a version of dry toothpaste which is this niche thing today that i think could get bigger so it's a tablet you put in your mouth you start to bite on it you chew it and then you just put a wet toothbrush in your mouth and it becomes toothpaste so it's essentially zero waste because it comes in this like compost post little pouch the dry toothpaste it is like the dry tablet doesn't use all the chemicals that like crest and others do so this reminded me of like a native deodorant style business i don't know how well they're doing it but trying to reach out to the founders because i really like this product how much traffic it has on similar web i haven't checked i haven't looked into the the sales or the traffic yet but it really caught my attention because i it's a win it's doing good for the world great for traveling i think it's yeah i think it's more convenience it's actually a better experience and it's just different and i think that a lot of people like to do something different i'm one them i'll try anything and and this one caught my eye where i'm like this good and it has all those characteristics where you're can consume it in a month so they sell you sixty five tablets which is two brush teeth twice a day for thirty dollars cost i can't remember how much i pay i it was like nine nine bucks something think it's like more of the toothpaste but it wasn't like nine dollar outlet yeah i i don't know the exact price they could charge more remember what it was but i'm gonna repeat purchase right because once i adopt this this is gonna be my thing and so i'm pretty bullish on this and i i'm curious if if this is gonna be a thing that's cool i'll tell you another one someone nick sharma who is bars yeah he helped do you see what the thing that they launched the the yeah the emergency pack lucy yeah lucy it called or no lucy's jersey is something like that judy judy i hate a lot of these new d things i don't hate that one what so i'll explain what it is so judy is what i'll buy it so it's a container that has supplies for an emergency i live in california maybe there'll be an earthquake right it supposed to have the supplies for that i think flashlight or some type of radio that's crank so the cool thing to do is based on where you live they kinda know what disaster you're likely to have and so they create the go that to go bag that the you know your emergency go bag based off of okay california it's earthquakes this is what you would need and how much you would need and i have a feeling the way that you can discover this product or one like it is it's costco public a public company yeah no i don't think so i'll be wrong i might be wrong so costco has one yeah it's probably pretty good anything costco sells is they have an emergency bag yeah what i imagine the way that i would have came up with this is i would have you can if you if they're public i think they're public if if they're public you can read costco annual report and you could and they'll probably mention like products that are doing shockingly well right and i bet you emergency kits were one of them that's cool i like that i like that idea it caught my eye too you didn't even tell me about that one i separately saw it and i was like oh this is interesting yeah i i think that nick was launches a lot of interesting things he he launched up the founder but i think he's the kind of help launch yeah he helped do the costco he's public you're right they are so you could read costco annual report and and i guarantee they'll say like interesting things and so like everyone talks about kirkland jeans it's like why do they tell about kirkland jeans you just go there and you figure out why and you make that right nick launched a this thing called hot house it's like a but basically what they did and i think this is stupid i want them to win be because i like when people win i think this is a horrible idea but i think i'll be proven wrong unlikely but you can't ship liquor you can ship wine or you can ship but it's there's rules right you can ship wine it's a lot easier to ship wine it's so hard so what they did was they made like a liquor that has low percentage of alcohol and they branded it as don't get too fucked up this get a little fucked up right yeah it's kind of interesting we'll see make up for it in volume yeah well that's what i think will happen right but it's it's kind funny i don't i don't get it i'm a non drinker though i thought it was non alcoholic whiskey and i was like that's really dumb right but i drink non alcohol or a lot yeah that could be interesting i got a different for you have you heard of mystery science the company not the old show yeah also so alex on spine maybe you'll catch up so this is one of those where i saw it and i got jealous at i didn't create it which is like because it's in my niche of like i love education but they did a novel way of doing it what they did was these guys were ex google i think i don't know exactly one guy a teacher one guy was ex ex google or facebook and they create this company called mystery science and what they do is they're like look kids always start out curious right you meet a kid at like when they're young they're like why does this happen what is this why is it okay why is lava red you know does the volcano work and always asking questions and then like over time our curiosity sort of wan to the point where by the time you're at an adult for most people you're like i don't want more in idea resist learning and so what they were like is look kids are naturally curious how do we keep that curiosity but how do we build it around stem education and there noticed that like elementary school teachers we can teach math reading social studies pretty well but science is hard it takes time to like set up experiments also you have to actually know the million questions why this happens and often you're out of your depth and so they're like look we're gonna be science education as a service to elementary schools raised a little bit of money like maybe three million six million something like that prop company they're doing millions of i believe over ten ten million dollars a year in business fifty percent of elementary schools they say use them so they've like massive penetration just with elementary schools science education so they give the teacher a video that that plays and it's like the video pauses five minutes so it'll present it quite starts with a question like what happens if you kept like if you drilled into their earth what would happen if you kept going this is like an interesting question and then they start to explore and they take you to what you answer i don't know but like that's what you know that's what they that's what they teach i question i haven't take taken the courses but it would be like why is red well the other planets aren't red why is mars red and so they just they vote this curiosity and then they teach you through this video lesson and teachers don't have to do the work of preparing curriculum which is always hard takes time so they get this best in class curriculum they make the video one and it just gets distributed to all schools awesome business awesome for students awesome for teachers awesome money maker love this business amazing what i would love to learn i don't know anything about this is how hard is it to sell them to a school so so if you have to some red school i bet like the hardest thing around so i wanna get the founder on this because so i wanna talk him about it but i read some interviews and they were like yeah so here's the thing about schools they go all of our investors told us this and it was true which probably just bullshit it's a enterprise sales cycle without the enterprise price tag so you gotta go through the slope bureaucracy but you don't get to charge a hundred grand or a million dollars a year because what you're in you're in once you're in you're embedded and but they what they did say is the world is changing a little bit and teachers are more empowered to get stuff adopt it just themselves and if you like design it that way it's kinda like how slack got adopted just by a department rather than the cio making a decision for the company that's cool so that's what they say more than ever teachers just individually pick it up i don't believe that don't go if that's i believe maybe that is changing right but if i know anything about schools public this public school so some which it's not a lot by the way but the little i do know it seems just bureaucratic right very very very hard to sell too i believe that to be true like i dashboard and and you remember blackboard yeah like i imagine those things are quite huge but horrible to sell too there's another company that's like this i saw called if you heard of these guys no so they're if you just type c annual report it's all so you can see this i don't remember the numbers off top of my head but what they do is they get it's like a learning based game so it's kinda like you put a it's like it's it's like a trivia thing that teachers can do in in class so it's like question and then the students all buzz in their answer like multiple choice and then from a phone or device and then it like tell it like tells you if you gotta ride it wrong and like somebody wins in the end it's like these little short mini games companies are using this for like they're all hands and stuff like that it sounds like quiz and and they're doing i wanna say two hundred million plus in revenue it's insane how big this business is coop and and check out their or report i've heard of quiz through bootstrap i think their office was down the street from my office a long time ago bootstrap are they flash cards flashcards cards digital flashcards cards bootstrap i don't remember i looked it up a while ago if they were in the fifty to hundred revenue range i wouldn't be surprised right pretty amazing crazy shit another school kind of related thing have you seen the documentary cheer i haven't probably heard about it saw on netflix it's a cheer leading documentary on netflix and they only mentioned this for about two minutes about this thing called the varsity cheer okay and they barely mentioned it and it's who hosts the national championship and you have to pay money they didn't they mentioned it because varsity cheer didn't allow net places cameras to be inside the championship chip right so i just got curious and looked it up it's a company that recently sold to bank capital i think for four billion dollars varsity cheer yeah wow yeah yeah the two varsity city cheer league essentially least yeah for the same amount the sold yeah it could been have been two billion but i'm almost positive it was four and if it was four i bet you it would be with earn outs right bain though bain bought it well along with kicking i think so i looked it up i did research they're based in the outskirts of dallas texas they just mono cheer leading and so they do a lot of you a lot of i it sounds like people don't like them right because they own the largest cheer competition right okay so they make money off that you have to use their uniforms in order to participate and no cameras are allowed and you have to pay money to view it right it's crazy they just mono this whole fucking thing i have to look into this varsity each cheer is and they own the the company called varsity brands they mono cheer leading and now they're trying to do other niche sports like volleyball i think or something like that this is a good news for play versus who's doing high school sports and they're trying to do basically similar model i'm curious if it's crazy if it's it worked well it i kinda actually this actually isn't related but have you heard about the scrubs business scrubs like medical scrubs okay tell me about it i've looked into this because i was thinking about chris yeah man this these guys these it's the same fucking playbook of cute millennial shit right and they just an in your voice well i just it just it works it's works so good but i for some reason that i've towards it they did it for medical scrubs they hit a hundred million in sales this year yeah and so it has a cute name i forget the name but people are buying i didn't know this nurses buy their own scrubs a lot of times right and people are gifting scrubs to nurses and they're like cool looking right they're like a little more fitted and the patterns are different but it's like the same you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah there's the same thing for the shoes because people who work in restaurants and doctors and nurses are on their feet so much that they have these like special clog and i bet you if i bet you that clog brand it's a high quality product like well you know mount modern bill does a billion dollars a year in sales right so i bet you you know within that niche because there's so it's just such a large profession right like we had what's name on on from incredible health and they're talking about nursing and there's just so many there's so many goddamn down nurses and there's actually a shortage we need more and so if you can sell essentially the uniform either shoes or scrubs you have a basic captive market i agree cool bar still got acquired they already part of churn in or something yeah so basically the history and i know this because i'm in the the same game they the story is dave had the thing dave port had this business for a long time and he just milk the profit out of it which decreased the valuation which is a lot of people don't realize that's how it works but that's how it did work he's i believe he's sold fifty percent of it at only a fifteen million dollar valuation years ago four years ago four years ago then they hired erica ceo she operationalize it and professional it and dave still was able to be kinda of crazy and wacky who when she joined she said that they're doing one point two million a quarter in sales and they went at two million in cash not a lot this past year they get they scared a hundred million in sales sold for one hundred and fifty million right they sold a portion of the business for four fifty million dollars with an option to the company by the rest but penn national i looked it up today their market cap last week was two point eight billion today three point six billion so it doesn't exactly work like this but ultimately they bought a four hundred fifty million dollar company and made a hundred and fifty million in sales or i made a hundred and fifty million in mark cap additional market cap crazy right yeah that's hey that's amazing i think barb stool is kind of an amazing model and somebody tweeted at us today hey let's get the president day on on this podcast do you know the guy have you bet the guy nope he seems legit maybe erica i think would be better i don't know that guy's is pretty fucking entertaining let's see what we can do erica is i think a genius nice and a true operator dave is i think brilliant but at different things and how is that model not fact it's not because what talk talk about loads of companies have we've had a cup we had okay so the hustle we have two investors one is the under of the jive and the other is bleach jury report mh they haven't been able to do it right what do you think makes it heart what was there what was special about their it's like how hard is it to copy saturday not live mh really hard so it's on the whole the the content the culture the fan base yeah the magic of that was different yeah one hundred percent and so when you look at what do you i think that should we can do that do you think like no that's we should go a different path what do you like when you read that well first of all i think that in order to build meet business like that there's loads of pass and i actually think that they actually probably could have sold way more but they are inappropriate a lot of people think they are at least right and a lot of big companies feel like no we're not touching that espn wouldn't buy them even though it makes sense because the politics six right the they're just soft i think excuse me excuse company right they're just afraid right most media companies out there i think are built horribly they're they have shit audiences shit content and they're shit operators they're losing money like you wanna name names or well just like the big like like all the big the big companies that have raised lots of money and are unprofitable now and what makes their audience are using shit audience what is it about that they're they don't so you're not talking demographics you're talking about like the loyalty yeah so what bar did that was great was they have a equal amount of people who hate them but love them right that's what you need they're not in the middle zone of yeah it's like mike or apple exactly why donald trump won versus hillary a lot of people are like yeah vote for i guess what's the big right wing thing bright part yeah bright parts so what i do every morning is i like to go to far left and far right new sites and i at the comment section bright bar which is far right has the most comments of any new site i've ever been to right and that is the one of the highest signals of so regardless of your politics from a business perspective that's what you want yes extremely high highly engaged yeah and that's what bar still has done and and so it's really hard to replicate and a lot of people particularly committees like corporate large businesses that try to like look at the shit in a petri dis and be like well how do we replicate this well i it's really fucking hard because you gotta be a maverick a little bit and so that's why i think a lot these media companies cannot replicate it right so our podcast stuff yeah i think let's do starting next week i think we should let's just try for thirty days two or three times a week okay and and we're we'll we'll work out the details after this but two or three times a week yeah more of this yeah peep we we asked last time we kinda fished for some compliments we're like hey if wanna see us do more let us know so we got lunch and so and here's what i think my honest opinion is it might be there it might not be there yeah but the experiment is worth through it is the answer for me for sure is it is not not there was that like explain what you're talking about my or no my twitter the my the the amount of twitter replies i get on twitter proves that it might be there yeah so not for sure but not not and i think i don't know what our i know we don't have to say how many listens it's gotten yeah but it's probably gotten close to a million download so far yeah getting close which is cool because like six months of of effort getting to a million is a great milestone yeah i i know for sure what the listens are but i don't know i forget what downloaded downloads a little harder track than than a listens but if you use like i what i would call like a conservative rule of thumb we're either at a million or we're plus or minus ten percent yeah so it's about there right so that's cool right high five yeah so we'll we'll talk about that after this but we'll start doing that yeah so sweet alright we're done