dude i was at a dinner and somebody said something as a joke and i put up my finger to my lips and i said i need to write this down because it was an incredible idea the guy goes but you put your finger on his lips and then my own lives magic back forth and i was like saying no more i need to don't i don't wanna lose this idea and write this down i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on the so today you're gonna talk to talk us through a bunch of research products that you use bunch of a bunch of pipes you call right yeah internet pipes i called it research tools you said that was dumb well just sounds boring it's more accurate but it's boring i call them gold mines which is basically some people just come back and show you a little piece of gold maybe a jewelry steph shows you where the mine is so you can just keep going back to the mind for more and more gold over time because i think people wonder you know if they see your tweets or read your blog post or hear you on on our podcast they're like where does she come up with this stuff how does she find this stuff so today you can tell us exactly yeah yeah exactly i think you know the internet is such a special thing and we often rely on something like twitter to service us the information of the day but i feel like these tools are like like you said the gold mine there's so much information that tells you exactly what people want or aggregates a bunch of opportunities for you so steph tell me about this patent one because there's actually a a handful of like really good examples with this one okay that i can that i know of so there's two parts there's patent filings and patent ex so patent filings i think there's probably some databases that do this but the newsletter that i like to read is called patent drop and they'll basically break down every newsletter three or so patents from again big tech firms like fang but also companies like nike by the way i think nike is the company with the most design patents or it's up there in any case there's patent filings so you can track what these big companies are betting on what they think is interesting that they wanna you know retain some ip around and then there's also expire which is interesting i think we covered the company him before and how they basically leveraged a patent expiry to build their company at least their first products so there's a website called patents expiring today dot com which aggregates these and it obviously it takes quite a bit of sift because there's a lot of things like okay i don't care that some shin guard is expiring but i think the combination of those two definitely can can result in some business ideas have you guys heard of blue shoe you guys know what blue is blue chew yeah so about three target you and ads but the target us for sure yeah basically about six weeks ago i went to these guy's office and i met the two founders and one of the founders is a doctor and the other one was a commodities trader and basically they work together and they were like what can we start and they saw that the viagra patent was going to expire in two thousand seventeen and so they like we're just plotting and plotting and plotting and him gets a lot of credit for doing this but blue i think is actually more interesting so what blue does is i think they also own med dot com so it's basically a a a telehealth business where you call in and you say what your issue is their main thing is their pill i i guess i don't know if they call it blue shoot the name of the pill but it's a for a dermatologist dysfunction which i didn't realize it it it's like the customer base for that is like a hundred and fifty or two hundred million people in the world and then it's projected by two thousand two thousand thirty to be like four or five hundred million so it's a massive amount of people who have e dysfunction disorder and they bootstrap this company and they i don't know how big they are but i'm pretty sure they're between a hundred and two hundred million dollars a year in sales and they entirely bootstrap this company starting two thousand seventeen and it was because of that patent that expired and they built this business because of that yeah that's a it's an incredible example another kind of one chart business all you had to do is just show here's the business plan this is the expiry data viagra we're we're gonna make the you know the d generic version and yeah they just do it through instagram ads whatnot don't i i think it's meds dot com so med dot com i think it's the telehealth side and then they have blue which is like their product i think it's like cia viagra and one other that are all expired now yeah i went to their office and we were playing poker and they have like a sample like instead of having like breath it was like a sample of like you could just reach it and take one and i was like i was like my wife had a baby like two weeks ago i don't think i need this but like what happens there like here's a room also a padded room you could just go stand see the effect nobody will look at you than come back when it when in yeah i was like i don't know i if this is gonna like be in use anytime soon in my house but but there i was like looking at some of their numbers particularly on similar web and they had like two million people a month to company to their website and i was like doing back the back the envelope matt i was like i'm pretty sure this is a massive massive company tim's gets a ton of credit because they're publicly traded in they're sorry in san francisco and they had all this press i think this company is probably almost as big and i'm pretty sure the two guys own most all of they haven't taken any financing and so anyway this pad thing is is pretty wild yeah and i haven't gone through the stuff happening in twenty twenty four but another quick call out is the public domain stuff right so every year new things going into the public domain we're hitting january soon and so that's another thing to call out for folks well i think like a few years ago wasn't it like winnie the poo or something like that like like was it winnie the poo like a bunch of these like yeah and then ryan reynolds took advantage of that he did what was it in partnership with one of the phone companies and he did winnie the sc as a commercial that's pretty wild that's pretty funny by the way another one of these trends that you called out a few years ago which i thought was so stupid at the time and i've since spent probably five hundred dollars in this crap is you did my wife loves this stuff it it was like minis it was for some reason oh like mini cooking sets and stuff yeah have you seen this sean like basically it's mostly women i think you i agree but it's so i've spent when she was pregnant that i would buy i bought her to like bought like a bulk case of it and then every week i would give her like a present wait describe what is it so it's it sounds so dumb the the one that she liked was called mini brands i think and it's like any famous brand that you know of like coca cola kit kat like any type of snack but also like different products like a shoe box they make just miniature versions and you open up this small ball it's like a it's like a a baseball sized thing and you open it up and inside there's like a variety of like eight different mini things and people just love i guess looking at them i don't even understand what the appeal is but children it's weird i've step it seems like someone who's into like this minis the way this is a zulu so this is that same guy nick mow that we've talked about on the podcast the the the toy mo by way he said he wants to come on so we should we should hit him up and get them on but they're it looks like they're the makers of this this it called mini brands yeah mini brands it's and it's really expensive they're edible or these films like no no it's just like a it it looks like imagine a kit bar but just like the size of a penny that's all it is it's just small it's just many sure an excellent i have had this theory for a long time that anything mini just works like i remember in science class there was like a mini beak and everybody used to fight over it and i was like what that holds less and nobody wanted to hear me i was like that holds less stuff and but everybody wanted to have the tiny thing and i was like what's going on here there is something to this like either overly large like kind of like the loves sack like either like an overly large thing or a completely tiny thing is just like one way to make a product more a youtube channel called jenny mini cooking show that's the one i remember from years ago where i was like people will just watch this person cook cook these quote meals for hamster and they'll do the whole thing they'll have like a tiny little knife and cut the pizza and the cake and serve it on the tiny plate people love this stuff yeah and i can't i make fun of these people but one time i ordered a a birthday cake that was it was a reese's peanut butter cup that was actually the size of a birthday cake so i i just like bigger things but i understand like which sounds awesome right like you're not you're gonna be like right now i should make like the cyber truck mini basically is like the thing i should do i should make like the really tiny cyber truck that can just park in your garage that's it yeah it's weird man it's weird we're we're freaks step you wanna do oh you wanna do a few more what do you guys wanna do next to the sports one what's sports so there's this website that aggregates a bunch of reports on sports which obviously people love americans love sports so they have like a state of pickle ball report state of the industry report these cost money so what is the state of pickle ball should we go into that with the the burning question in all of our minds what is the state of pickle but what i did find was this article that basically aggregated some data from this and it don't open it because i want i want you guys to guess what the fastest growing sports are the twenty five fastest growing sports according to this s i research which is sports and fitness industry association what do you guys think were the top fastest growing sports in america i already opened it and i could tell you i wouldn't have guessed one of them i already opened it as well so the game is over but i would've have said pickle ball and and would've have said that game battle isn't there like another game that's just like pick ball but it's for people that are they wanna be like no pick balls old this is the new new shit like there's there's like two of them that's what i would have guessed it does seem like pick balls is number one but number two i would have never guessed alpine touring i don't even know what that really is i think it's just like off off country skiing and then i have never heard it what is winter fat biking it's awesome is what it is it's like so i like i need to research so these fat tire bikes are are really popular right now so it's basically a bike with a just a really fat tire is what it is and they they are they're sick looking and you see them ride by and what is this like sport you know yeah it's just mountain bike riding but the tires is particularly fat it it it's all it is you know we what do we say we like big and small things it's just a normal bicycle with a fat tire that can like imagine a bicycle that could drive on a beach got it but i guess i guess it's a sport number four of course golf interesting i don't even know what that is i when i googled it it i think it's just those machines but i guess they've turned that into a competitive sport or and then number seven is trail running i could definitely see that that is i i've i get so many videos on my instagram trail running yeah dude i was at a dinner and somebody said something as a joke and i put up my finger to my lips and i said i need to write this down because it was an incredible idea the guy goes you put but you put your finger on his lips and then my own lives magic forth and i was like say no more i need to don't i wanna lose this idea and write this down he said something he goes yeah i do the the suburban triathlon and i go what and he goes yeah suburban triathlon you you walk a you walk a half mile you into this bar you drink two beers and then you go play nine holes golf i was like you what he's like yeah it's a i i forgot he said suburban iron ironman or the suburban triathlon and i was like this has legs and i i i really think that if somebody created some kind of think for you know out of shape middle aged guys to do they'll do it and i think if you make it if you brand it almost like as the the non fit person triathlon and it's gotta have like some version of eating and drinking being one of the legs you know a a couple holes of golf as as one of the other legs and then you can really pick whatever you want is the third but dude that's the next next tough mud i think that could be a massive a massive trend that people start doing because it's kinda fun it's ironic and it's it might be pickle as the third one actually that that's probably the right bet but this is this is definitely something that i i think would appeal to people what do you guys think yeah yeah and that's beautiful branding that brand we're working backwards from the brand we really don't even know actually what it goes underneath it's just making the idea the superb on that i could that that deserves you putting your finger on his lips so they just i'm just kissing them just give them a little kiss like i love i that's beautiful it's like you bike to the grocery store you chug a beer you like i it have run aaron and that's a suburban triathlon and you gotta do it on saturday mornings steph what's what's another one gotta give a shout out to pac mccormick he aggregated this and he aggregated this from a site called tech novelty which is one of these sites where i'm just like i can't believe someone created this i think his name is bill christ or something like that who basically took all of the sci novels that have been written or most of them thousands and he put them on a site called technology and what pac did is he took this kind of very outdated html site that's hard to navigate and put it into this database you guys click the link you'll see it and you'll see that there's this first hey just just a sci f stats so it basically takes all the ideas so not just the books but the ideas within these sci find novels and says does it exist today were these ideas and bits or atoms and then it also breaks down things like for certain authors let's say they had like in some cases like as you all have had i think like ninety nine ideas how many of those ideas actually came to so you can kind of get a sense of like how how grounded let's do some certain authors example so i'm on the idea bank row one hundred ninety four it says in nineteen eleven the author hugo gu back predicted tele coasters and these were powered skate for personal transport wheel lease basically yeah or like that one viral video that went the the video of viral of people walking but with these like power skate that we're making them go way faster yeah exactly so there's like they basically break down thousands of ideas in this database and then they say if it was created and you can see in yeah the sci f idea bank tab and column them j you can see what year was first made and then you can see things like google right or credit cards when they first appeared in these sci f find novels so for example the credit card was first reference in eighteen eighty eight but credit cards like these and mastercard weren't actually created until the nineteen fifties or live news in eighteen eighty nine and then you know it took until the nineteen eighties for twenty four hour live news to actually be a thing and it's kind of interesting because now you look at all these things light credit cards or live news and you think of course right like of course that exists that doesn't sound like sci but then you can extrapolate that and probably d that many of the things that sound like sci f today or even fifty years ago likely will follow that same fashion and so i like going through this database because there are still many things that still fit in that category of not yet created but dreamt up yeah so we can create electric roller blades that just revolutionize the way we get hit by car right what are examples of things that that you're interested on this yeah i mean some of these are certainly at the point where they're becoming real but for example in eighteen ninety seven someone jumped up a non alcoholic beverage similar to wine in eighteen ninety seven as well electric bicycles which are now a reality but i think becoming way way way cheaper and way more important vat grown meat in nineteen eighty four which is another thing coming online but i think what's equally interesting is to consider some of the major tech trends like ai like some of this stuff happening happening in biotech some of the stuff happening in space all of those trends kind of intersecting and you you can ask the question whether some of the things that you see that again sound way more sci f five than something like an electric bicycle may actually be a reality so i think like an example of a company that maybe fits this bill is var right their manufacturing drugs in space which i think almost certainly a decade ago would have sounded crazy what's var doing their manufacturing drugs in space why great yeah question i think we all have in our mind what's wrong with doing it in like massachusetts like look guys i love imagine sam in the pitch meeting they're like okay hear me out drugs in space what about massachusetts so my understanding is that the way that some of these drugs are manufactured the physics when you're on earth due to gravity and some of the other forces that don't exist in space results in you not being able to create certain chemical structures and that impacts the way that drugs can be basically ingested or administered and so there's that i guess the immediate function of being able to create almost like drugs that exist today but in different structures but then there's the obvious future opportunity where you're then creating completely new compounds that could not be manufactured on earth did those guys raise a lot of funding i believe so that's wild what that yeah that's beyond what i that's beyond my my iq it's just pretty amazing yeah there's like a list of ideas that were definitely started on like an ayahuasca trip and this is one of them yeah well whenever i see these list i just think of like have you i'm not like i'm not into like wizards and game games of thrones and all that stuff but you know what do i say i i said i play sports i don't i don't read harry potter but i do like appreciate the fact that one woman just sat down and created this whole this whole world to the point where there's like like we talk about quid we're like that's just like a part of like a relatively small part of this whole universe this lady just thought up and it is actually kind of been crazy crazy to actually see some of these predictions and it it it's in a weird way it's inspiring to think that an imagination can do this and i do actually feel pretty psyche up look through this i mean like damn i'm thinking way way small and not into the future enough so i i understand that i think it's actually pretty cool i just spotted in row three thousand five hundred and forty three in two thousand three smart wallpaper so sam maybe that's coming your way next pod yeah so i'll look less pale alright you wanna do it another one next gold mine so i love this one our world in data so people have maybe heard of this website it's a website that tries to aggregate data that is a reflection of of what's really happening in the world so it includes things like data on poverty it includes really niche things like i found i went through the website and there was a graph that related to the day of the year with peak cherry tree blossoms in kyoto right so like when when the terry blossoms peak the most like so random but they're collecting data on this and i checked this website a few years ago and i wanna say there was maybe two hundred graphs on here and if you go to there our world in data dot org slash charts page i wanna say there's thousands of different data points now and so i wanted to call out a few that i thought were interesting but i guess what do you guys think isn't this crazy that there's so much data being collected i just clicked on one it's adjusted net savings per capita from nineteen seventy to two thousand twenty and you could see like how much per capita a variety of countries are saving it's pretty wild congo and portugal not saving a lot of money germany and france really great savers so like it's just like literally thousands of like different charts you know sean talks about these like one chart businesses i can't think of about anything for this chart but there's like many of these charts where you can see something in just spot interesting things one of them is this population of the world distribution so basically this is a chart that is looking at how many of all the people in the world how many are young right now meaning under fifteen how many are working age fifteen to sixty five and how many are elderly sixty five plus in the shocking thing about this chart this is a one chart this is a one chart business right here which is the elderly curve goes from today right like kinda like the twenty twenty early twenty twenties where it's under one billion it's by far the lowest you know the the smallest line two it's gonna cross over the young population and be at you know by the end of the where this has it projected two point five billion and so that's the biggest grower the working the working age one kind of flattens out the young one kinda goes down and the elderly one has this huge spike and so if you're building anything that's in the elder care that you're gonna own for let's say ten twenty years you have this immense tailwind behind you which is just that the population of people who fit you know the customer base is gonna grow dramatically we're gonna go from under one billion people to over two and a half billion people that are in that market and so that's a it's you know a case to say you know if you go there let's say let's say it's like real estate like if you owned you know senior living facilities or something like that you would be able to just benefit from the fact that oh oc occupancy is gonna go up over time in this in this way now of course technology may may may completely up end things and ai and all that but it is a very you could see these like huge trends that are gonna be very hard to reverse so it's hard to imagine a scenario that we we changed the direction of these lines it would take like a whole societal shift population level shift to change where these lines are going did you guys see the video of a it was kim jong un the the north korean leader he was delivering the speech this week where he was like pleading and begging his his people to start having sex and having babies because their population is just dwindling and he's literally crying like you see tears coming down his face crying and the rest of the audience is crying and he's begging them please have babies it's it's really it was really fascinating and pretty parts like this okay guys yeah i thought it's just been crying in front of them man crying in front of your begging to have have children i mean just like some candles and put on some some art kelly and it'll get it done yeah i mean it it was crazy idea i guess i guess i didn't realize it's funny i'm looking at this chart and seeing his video i didn't realize how big of a problem it is but there's so many here which ones stick out to you stuff so i just linked another one that i think again is this like one chart business this one's hard to get involved with but i think it's it's the lithium production if you pull that up i just linked it in the documents and you can see that lithium production which obviously is the core ingredient in many of our batteries is concentrated in just a few countries a lot of it's in china a lot of it's in a few countries in south america that's another example of just as you're browsing through a bunch of these these charts i think that one jumps out but the one i wanted to dive into in depth is air pollution so if you click the the the stat in here in our document that says air pollution is one of the world's leading risk factors for death which maybe obvious to some people but to me when i think about like what are what are the key causes of death what am afraid of air pollution is not at the top of that list however i also stumbled upon patrick call pollution page she's he's got a bunch of cool pages on his website he's got a page bunch of questions one of them is on pollution and he says that the world bank indicates that three point seven billion people so about half the world's population are exposed to this metric of pm two point five that that has to do with like the size of particles in the air they're exposed to run five times the the unit of measure that he correlates with a bunch of things which include lower gdp it includes stock market returns being lower people making worse decisions like chess players making mistakes politicians using less less complex speech so those are just you know some fun facts but i think what's what's really important is obviously the the health side of things and there's another stat that i'll just quickly share which is from a newsletter called charter which says that india's capital this was recently breached the four hundred and fifty mark on the air quality index over four times the healthy level and basically they're in this hazardous zone which is akin to smoking twenty five to thirty cigarettes a day and obviously that is an outlier but i wanted to call this out because i think air quality is something that is is a problem in a lot of places clearly some more than others but it's something that i think people are gonna be carrying about a lot more and maybe one one product that came out in the last year or so that's indicative of that a lot of people made fun of was the dyson mask headphones so i'll i'll stop there what what what were those yeah i never saw those they are headphones that have a basically a mask air purifier attached to them wow and they're expensive they're a thousand dollars i think right they are seven hundred dollars from what i can see and what this came out and people just made fun of them well if you if you google image images it it's like a white guy in like the new york subway wearing it you know what i mean it's a like it's a little off on because you're talking about india and a few other countries not maybe in the new york subway so it's kind of like a it's kinda like a misleading ad they have but that's pretty fascinating is this are these taking off no i think they're in that zone of a lot of people making fun of them however the reason i'm calling this out is because i think there is this understanding that you know it's just a new delhi it's not you know anywhere close to home but i think have you guys ever used like a an air quality index measure in your home or like a co2 monitor yeah i have multiple times and i bought like these air purifier things that also measure the air quality in my house and i have them in it's like shocking whenever it'll like basically turns red and it's like oh god there's something going on you know what we need to air this place out or or whatever yeah yeah so i mean air quality changes over time and i don't i've been noticing more even in san francisco a few days where people are like oh i'm i'm wearing a mask work not because of covid but because like oh gosh i have you checked the air quality and a lot of people aren't doing this still today but i think that'll change and i think if you use some of these like the c monitor for example you literally like if you go to bed with your door closed and you wake up and you check that thing it is wild how high it is and you know all you need to do is open a window or you know circulate there air in your home but i think it's the stuff i guess is people are more educated on it i think some of these devices like the air quality monitors are going to take off and you can see some of this data in jungle scout as well of just like the kinds of products that people are buying do you see what did you see think in jungle scout that stood out any product that's so there's one product which is has to do with an ac furnace and an air filter but guess how much this thing sells every single month what is it it's an ac furnace air filter and an air quality monitor so what does that mean literally like the filter i put on the vents of my like like i've got like eight vents around my home and i put these filters there is that referring to like those like the cloth almost filters you it's a filter you would put on your on your furnace got it okay alright so what i'm looking at here is yeah like the kind of standard air vent filters that you have to swap out every whatever six months or so but also it's a smart one so it has like a monitor associated whether that that has an app this thing cost two hundred fifty bucks yeah i have no idea but i you know sounds like it might be a little high so to tell us what what's the what a jungle scout tells for the i'm seeing four entries in jungle scout and they are seventeen million twelve million eight million and eight million so what is that all total that's like over forty million dollars per month this is this is what jungle scout is saying so you know take it with a grain of sold i'm not sure how they measure but they tend to be pretty accurate and so that's an example of i think as people again like try to understand the air quality around them i think there's a there's a growing business here that is fascinating i wanted to point out another thing so this this chart that you have of like causes of deaths at the top let's see risk factors i think i might chosen the united states here but in the united states i believe the top ones are smoking number one high blood pressure high blood sugar and obesity so i've a crazy story to tell you so i i can't say his name because he he asked me not to he said he prefers to stay out of the radar but i have a friend who is an investor and he's a very different kind of investor so what you see him on twitter often is people who are investors they like to be loud about what they do they'll just kinda spray and pray they're they're doing a lot of deals they love to be angels and fifty things putting twenty k checks my friend is very different he says that in every year there's like one thing that matters maybe two and he his old job is to just find the one or two things that matter and so i've known him for you know maybe ten years now and at one time it was like he's like bitcoin it's bitcoin right now and i like bitcoin really like the sure this is like you know let's say i don't know twenty thirteen twenty fourteen twenty fifteen somewhere there he's like it's bitcoin and then he was one who was like only fans i'm all in on only fans and i was like only fans what what is that this is before and before any of the revenue owner numbers had come out about only fans he's like i think and i was at twitch at the time and he's like only fans is bigger than twitch it's gonna be bigger than twitch and i was like no dude twitch is like one of the biggest internet sites on earth and he's like trust me it's gonna be bigger and he he and he's like called it basically each year he doesn't necessarily always get to invest he's trying to identify what is the thing did he get in on those yeah so like for a couple of these yeah he he's got the ones mentioned have already he did so then he texted me the other day and he goes gl greater than gp so this is like i talked to him maybe i don't know nine months or a year ago and he was like yeah i think this oz zen stuff is the thing for the year and i was like really like isn't it ai he's like no i think this i i think gl is bigger than gp and i was like well we'll what do you mean he's like i'm trying to figure out the right way to invest in this because they're all like basically it oz was and the the makers of these are all public stocks so he's like i could buy that but the upside is not exactly there so i'm trying to figure out what's the move and he told me he's like there was one company invested in several years ago that might actually be a beneficial beneficiary of it so yesterday sent me an article karma this car this this pharmaceutical company got bought for three billion dollars yesterday and that they're are a maker of gl drugs he was an early investor and he invested in it like seven years ago or something and i was like dude how did you get in on this he's like well you know at the time it this all wasn't clear i can't say that i i you know definitely didn't know about that but it was these guys were drug makers that were attacking obesity drugs in a different way and you know just looking at the charts about what kills everybody and like the obesity a massive massive problem there's not that that many interesting bets of who's attacking obesity in a different way these guys were one of them and i like their team and whatnot so i invest early on and i was like jeez like just to have like a three billion dollar exit i of nowhere kind of amazing what do you think his return on that was i don't wanna say but you know he got in you fairly early and three billions a big number so i think he did extremely well on that one but i what i will say is that he kinda looks at these like mega trends and this is kind what you're where you're showing here seth is that if you understand how big the wave is then the upper then it then it kinda simplifies life you can ignore all small waves if you know what the mega you know the big tidal waves are and you just figure out okay what's the best way to surface this and even if you don't figure out the best way even the fourth best way to surf a mega trend is gonna gonna work in your favor and i've heard this now from a from a few investors but also mark zuckerberg said this a a while back like i remember when we were we were working on some app that was like a messaging app like text messaging app and this was maybe twenty fifteen or something and it seemed like text messaging was the big thing and z came out and he goes there's only a few mega trends mobile was the last one and then the new one is video he goes video is a mega trend everything is moving to video people are kinda gonna communicate their video they're watching more and more video short video long video medium sized video scripted videos you just see videos it's all going into video and i had never heard anyone say this i this word mega trend and when z said that i started to pay attention and we actually ended up pivoting our company into video streaming live video we're like we'll go for live video and that's the company that got bought i when we got acquired by twitch just because we were just partially in the right space like live video streaming there weren't weren't that many people working on it in an interesting way a live video kept growing kept growing kept growing at it's like really fast rate and so it was smart to get out of the taxi and get on the the right mega trend yeah you know something i'll mention about the air quality stuff that's related to what you said there sean is i feel like one missing gap with air quality readings and devices and all that is it's not obvious as then and i feel like most people would be surprised to be like oh my gosh i inhale all this stuff and it has these adverse effects and it's you know it ranks here on you know the the likelihood of of death but it's not obvious it's not in your face like let's say like the gl ones people see themselves every day and they're constantly trying to improve their image and how other people interpret them so i think maybe one thing that if if someone was gonna go figure this out you guys have talked about the air the water filters people go into your home and like if they say like did you know like you you're drinking like this much of of like basically like rocks and other sediment and lead in your your water can you believe it and they show you and so i feel like there's an element of that whereas it's gonna take a while for people to really care about the air quality stuff but there may be some middle ground where some company is able to effectively give people that u yeah i would put it differently i don't think it's gonna take a while i think it's gonna take a marketer for people to care yeah it's just gonna take a marketer and a product design that puts it in your face and that educate you about this and kinda scares you about it but then it says don't worry there's a solution yeah and that's how a lot of things get done is you know a great marketer or a product designer figures out the way to put it interface did you guys remember what rob d said so rob d came on and he didn't spend too much time talking about this but he said he bought a good chunk of a company that is doing water filters for showers and i've got a bunch of friends that are like health freaks so justin mayer is is one of them where he's a health freak and he's a great entrepreneur and he was like man i installed this really expensive basically berkeley filter which is that big metal it's like those metal jugs that you see in people's home so he's like i wanted to install one for my whole home because i wanted my shower water to also be completely filtered and i went through this whole or ordeal to do this and then rob you to invest in this company that is basically making a shower head that is a filter so it's ideally simplifying that entire process he talked about that on this podcast but he didn't spend too much time talking about it and i went and researched a bit of it i think that is gonna be a a a pretty big company and i think there's gonna be a a whole i i i imagine it's gonna be like a like a boxed mattress trend where no one has them and then suddenly many people have them and there's tons and tons of competition because i don't think that's quite that hard of a company to to to create i don't know what the mode is entirely but i imagine there's gonna be a whole bunch of people in that space and so i'm i'm pretty much on board with with what he said and i i think you have an interesting insight with the particularly with the ac events that's another product that literally everyone has in their home you have to replace it two or three times a year and it's a really really easy instagram ad to make alright let me let's go to the next what else you next one in here is gadget flow so this is just an interesting site the aggregates gadgets friend gadgets i wanna call it two things here the first is if you look at the most popular gadgets you might say well what's the opportunity here right like i'm not gonna create a drone like dji i'm not gonna create the next ar vr device apple's doing that meta doing that like there's no opportunity but just wanted to call out that every time there's a new device that ends up penetrating a lot of people's homes or wallets there's almost always an opportunity for accessories so a good example that we covered years ago sam on trends was airpods and you have got a crazy stat on that you've got a crazy airpods was this was forever ago i wonder what it is now but back then it was like early on in the air airpods journey and it was like airpods if it was a standalone company would be in the fortune fifty or something like that i was like whoa wow i i think your stat was like airpods make more revenue than like spotify snapchat and airbnb combined yeah i think twitter was on that it was yeah and that was again that was in twenty i wanna say twenty nineteen or twenty twenty and so now there's some crazy stats with airpods which is just like seventy percent of all us teams have airpods like that is like true penetration and so early on in that trend it's like okay there's like cases there's i'm trying to remember like key chains really simple stuff but i think what is worth just understanding or or what you can take away from the sk flow website is like okay what are the newest devices that are not gonna have the scale of like hundreds or thousands of people using them but millions or hundreds of millions and what are the adjacent accessories products that i can create so how do you how do you use gadget flow so gadget flow is not as much of like you know a searchable database like something like jungle scout but it's more so just what i would do if i came to this page is first i would look at the drop down of most popular so that's where you're gonna see some of those big devices and then the other takeaway is some of the drop down categories i think so the one that caught my eye was pet accessories so remember gadget flow is like all tech devices and so if you go to pet accessories there's a bunch of different things i guess you both have owned dogs i've never owned a owned a dog but i wonder if you're familiar with any of these devices and in particular there was one that i noticed have you guys heard of fluent pet no what's that yeah what is it it is this really interesting trend of these buttons fluent pet is the particular brand that i think is going pretty viral because of one account this dog called i bunny this this account has i think a million followers on instagram and it's it's basically this buttons where you can i don't know how like how well this works for all jobs you can kind of teach them to communicate with you by pushing these buttons to indicate what they want and i've seen these and and it's and and it it is actually really cool so way the way it looks is it looks like a so it looks like a imagine like a like a twister pad and each color has a button on it and the one button means bathroom and one button means food one button means other thing and you could train your dog click a button to do what it to tell you what they want it it's actually really cool yeah it it's pretty awesome i've seen these and i i we trained our dog how to do that where like he like i i could tell what he wanted based off of a handful of activities we would teach them how to do this is actually really cool yeah my dog is going are dumb for this but this is awesome yesterday i took my dog out to i took my kids gymnastics and we brought the dog and so all these kids love to come at the dog and this kid comes up probably like i don't know seven years old or something he goes oh your dog is so cute and i was like thank you i was like you go a pet was like yeah he goes what's her name and i go yeah her name's is bun he goes oh why didn't you give her a better name winger and i was like okay maybe i i was like i didn't know how to respond i was man i just got owned by this little kid he like what i so say why did you give her a better name like rosa lena yeah it's like oh like no i one i was i was i was like got a jab in the nose and john did you name the dog i did fun what was the answer i thought it was a very regal sounding name i think your definition of regal and everyone else else's definition is a little bit like like a butler i don't i'm like oh bun steph are you just what are you doing all day are you just clicking through all these i mean you probably have a hundred or fifty different links here are you just clicking through the stuff all day tabs are open one i wanna say thirty five so and you're gonna go through those or just to hoard there's an order there's like the jungle scout tabs grouped together the like similar web tabs grouped together i don't know i mean i think so i will spend time every so often just like going through these websites and like scouring for ideas but i think there are a few newsletters and things that i pay attention to that kind of surface ideas that i then if i find them interesting will go and check them you know in similar or whatever jungle scout or whatever and i know you're at a sixteen z now and i i presume you're happy but inevitably one day you're gonna go and you're gonna start a company i that you have it in you i i think you're going to do that what do you think it will be which category because you you've seen all this data you look at all this data what what's gonna interest you whatever you do it well i don't wanna share the ideas that i actually wanna pursue soon because which category you could say games or i like the idea of you know people we've talked about before or someone if you guys remember neil ag neil dot fun yeah great great website you know part of me we talk about these big ideas like ai and biotech is all very interesting and you know someone please go become the air quality marketer that we all need but part of me just wants to create things that i wish i saw the internet or i wish existed on the internet that aggregates some of these ideas or gets people to learn things in ways that they never thought of before and so i kind of just wanna be i this is too too silly have a term for this but like an artist like an internet artist if that makes sense are you and you work at investor now is this something that you'd raise money for or you'd wanna do all all in your own i do it on my own you wouldn't raise money i don't think it's the kind of is it's not a vc internet artist who's gonna they're gonna be like do they have those in massachusetts like alright well i was just curious like new levels it's like the internet like the the the banks ceo of internet art right now like he's kinda one of those guys yeah exactly and i think you will do that i'm i'm eager to see when you when you finally do do it i think you're gonna do really well in it well they have her trapped because i saw her do something yesterday that made me just shake my head she tweeted out who's got the best company swag in the world and sell out like like a backpack and like a cozy and like a water bottle that all set a sixteen z on it and no doubt they were beautiful products it's great to get free stuff but that's how they get your stuff i was like no they're wrapping their tentacles around you you know what's the the two most addictive things in the world heroin and monthly salary well third is free swag yeah they don't even you don't even have golden handcuffs you have a black on umbrella that's like they did to you my my the internet artist that i wanna follow that i admire does not fall into the traps of company swag i they reject company swag they were reject company swag when i saw you post i was like oh no she's she's into deep it's like an inception we need to wake her up she's so far she's in level three of inception and we got snap on this well i mean i am human i am convinced by free stuff it looks like they got you with a book bag and umbrella and a poncho that's what that's yeah so all people who have rosie coach me that's all you need just send me a backpack and a poncho and i i'm eager to see you start a company where do you wanna go from here sean yeah i think well let's wrap it up but steph where can people get more of like this type of stuff specifically so like you have this very unique method to your madness that you you know the you know these nooks and cra you're like those people where you go to a city and you're like i really wish i just knew kinda like what to what tourist traps to avoid what good places to go what's the best place to eat oh she knows this hole in the wall where you can enter through that through the chef's kitchen and blah blah blah you're like that for the internet so how can people get more yeah so like you said it's my seventh time on my first million which is kind of crazy and ever since the first few where i'd come with these docs and you guys would be very nice and and hype up the dock and say oh my gosh so crazy there's so much in phone here i constantly get people reaching out asking for those docs and you know in aggregation of all the websites that i visit and how to use them and out to internet s or i like the term to use the internet pipes so i'm putting together something i don't know what to call it maybe you guys can help me with it that aggregates these internet pipes and shows people how to use them so i think the only thing i've done is aggregate them and then by the domain internet pipes but i think by the time this episode goes live i'll probably have some sort of like pre sale up on that page if people are what are you gonna charge for it okay if you guys have a minute i want i want your opinion because i think i'm gonna do something wrong here don't just don't use the c word you can't say chorus you have to call else like a re i don't know you gotta use chat gb but something involving the word research out was this one guy that used to really he had a lot of knowledge he read a lot of book he had a lamborghini in this garage and he too had course so so maybe he can take his blueprint he had a google one i mean so i don't know what i'm gonna call it i don't like the idea of it being a course because i don't i wanted to just be like a resource that people go to and it's not like a like a teachable course or something like that but what do i charge for something like that i when i did my book i did this like tiered pricing scheme where it started at ten dollars and then it went up for every like thirty or fifty sales but i have no i feel like i'm gonna end up charging too little what was that called it's called doing content right so doing content right sean tell me what you would've have done in the situation so steph worked at company yeah and she was talented at and she was talented she worked at my company while she was doing this and i remember steph someone came to me and they're like do care that steph is doing this and launching this content book and i was like no why why should i care would you have care sean i think seth you made i don't know you could say what you made but you made great money i you maybe made more than that than we were paying yeah you did did you make more doing the book than i paid you maybe in the first year and sean what what would you have said if your employee was doing this would you been pro or anti yeah i would been pro i it's finally like i no problem with that i would have had a conversation just to be like cool where we going with this like what's the where does this live in your life is this like fun side project is this what you actually wanna go do then maybe i could help you go do that in a and more like i just kinda wanna know where that lives and i just you know obviously yeah for you steph was like a star performer so you know stars do like more rope to go do things if you're like if you are doing a mediocre job and then you got the side hustle that's the final straw for me right like i then you're not putting your energy kind of towards actually getting good but steph was crushing it so you know i don't think we were pretty encouraging of people to do stuff unless they were screwing up i don't know if we ever lost an employee because of their side thing but i think like that was pre twitter getting popular like it is i think in the future i maybe wouldn't have encouraged it in that it's kinda f up but i don't know if i would've have encouraged it but i did encourage it back then well that's what i mean by i wanna know where it lives in your life meaning if this is kinda what you really wanna do then let's just be honest about it like let's just have the honest conversation then we could figure out like what's the right path forward and if you're like i just wanna make a little bit of extra money we could talk about like hey if you just did x y z here you can make that you know you don't have to start a separate business right if that's if that's the motivation if you're just like oh yeah i just use this for serendipity and networking and i just kinda like to put stuff out there in nights weekends like this is my hobby like that's what i told people when when i was doing things i was i i'd say you know business is my hobby so like you know for you when you log off work you might go to crossfit or you might go like all for what like what i do is i read i write i make things that's what i like to do on the internet and so you know this is just me doing that hobby you know you you you do wanna or whatever you do and i think there's just some people that are like that you gotta you gotta let them spread their way i mean i think also to your point john it depends is this like an ongoing thing forever you're gonna be running you know doing a course every quarter and it's gonna take up all your time i i intentionally with this project partially because i didn't want it to last forever but partially also because it's just my psychology to like get something done and out there was like i think i can compressed it until like a six week thing and i was like this is all this is the only time i'm gonna allocate to this and i feel like for this this new project that i'm launching to i was kinda the same thing where it's like i don't want to be like doing a course forever and people checking in with me and have this i i just have this like little burst of like creativity i need to get something out there to exist and then that's it yeah yeah your question was what would you what should you charge for it i don't think this is gonna make a ton of money because the who's the type of person that wants to who's the type person that wants to buy this is somebody like you so there's not that many people that are like you that are like hey i just have some disposable income that i'm gonna use so that i can have better internet random research tools and and like ability to lurk and just find interesting things on the internet i think those are awesome people but there's not it's not like mass market right so you either got charge a bunch or you go the other way and you charge very little but you use you get the value in a in a separate way like for you what i would be doing is i would use this as a honey pot to attract about like the type of person that's gonna pay even ninety nine dollars whatever two a hundred dollars a year to have access to this database is like somebody that you would wanna go hang out with for three hours most likely right and so i would just use it as like the value isn't gonna come from the the direct monetization of this asset but from the little community you build and then the interesting either investments you get out of it or you know introductions or opportunities or the company you started someone from this that's i think where you're gonna get way more value than just trying to charge premium for this for us yeah but it'll it'll it'll pay for her monthly expenses this you're doing content right plus a new thing you'll make twenty five thousand a month i think we'll see yeah but like your your needs are covered right so like you know one way one thing i think about a lot is like you know more of the same keeps me where i am so you know if i keep doing things that kinda keep me in the same level of the game i'll never have the bandwidth to do whatever it's gonna take to get me to the next level of the game and so like for example i i had a course that i was teaching maybe five to ten days a year not much and it was making over a million dollars a year so that's an amazing like effort to pay off thing and then i stopped and i was like why because for me making an extra one million dollars a year is not gonna get me to the next level of the game i'm trying to play at so i was like if i'm trying to get to the point where let's just say let's just make up a goal say i was trying to make i wanna get to where i'm making twenty million dollars a here okay let's say let's say that was the goal then i need to like have enough like room on room on my plate just empty space now will like force me to go create the thing that gets to me to the next level or i might give things away for free in fact if it's gonna like create the serendipity that's gonna take to like open up new opportunities that are bigger and so i just something to think about is like how do you if do you care about you know maybe the next level of financial freedom of of you know sort of wealth that will give you more runway more ability to like use money to do shit the shit you want like the internet thing and if you do maybe you could use this as a tool to like get the right people around you and do something else i don't it's just i mean one of the biggest learnings from the book was some people are like oh you're totally under charging but it's like how do you deliver a product at a price point that people are like so happy with that they go and share it and talk about it and and also like yeah wanna work with you and like actually digest the information instead of and requires no customer service yeah exactly where there it's just like it runs itself it markets itself that's what ended up happening with the book and so i am leaning more in that direction but then i also i was expecting you guys to be like no no no like charge more like you always under charge but i guess i guess maybe i should keep it well like tim ferris said something that changed my thinking on this tim ferris said he goes i had a strategy which was ultra free or ultra premium he goes i was gonna give away ninety nine percent of what i do for literally for free because i'm trying to reach the broadest number of people possible and i want to over be be over delivering i treat it like it's a paid product but i deliver it for free to the masses because then on the one day and he he he gives the example he did a this is back when he was doing four hour work week and whatnot so he's doing you know his blogging for free podcast for free and then he said hey i'm doing a two day kinda like in person workshops seminar thing that's gonna open the kim thing or open the yeah exactly and i think he did two or three million dollars in sales in like thirty minutes right because people were like i will pay ten thousand he's like it's it's expensive i don't expect to be able to afford this or want i'm not even gonna promise anything but if you're what do like i'm gonna do this open the kim thing it's two days and i think he made two two to four million dollars on that day and he's like if i had been trying to like kind of charge along the way like let me do this little ebook for for nine dollars i mean let me do this like monthly subscription for by making you twenty dollars a month is like i would've have had a a smaller audience and less money and so and same thing with his podcast ads he's like i would rather have no ad in the thing or charge an ultra premium to a premium brand because there's always really he said there's always a market for luxury right there's always a market for the for the absolute best so i wanted to make the absolute best product and then charge the absolute you know best price could for that and that was like his his strategy when he came to that i think alex does a similar thing so or is like look i could be trying to make a little bit of money here a little bit of money there do a course do a do a seminar or do whatever but he's said no i'm gonna be really in your face that this stuff is normally what people charge for i'm giving it to you for free builds a bunch of goodwill builds a big audience and then when he's ready to charge he'll make all the money back and more when he finally does charge for the thing in his case it's you know combination of acquisitions dot com he's like i'm gonna buy equity in your business at this like super super sweet sweetheart deal for him because he's built up so much goodwill and like reputation amongst you know his potential like you know acquisition targets or if he ends up doing ever like a a course or a seminar or a live in person thing he'll be able to charge twenty five thousand dollars per person to get in and he'll make ten million dollars on one day because he's kinda built in that way so i think there's something to learn from these people that play the real long totally i don't think i could charge twenty five k for anything but we'll see we'll see if i ever get there but well you do you you you get paid more than that that's true that's true so i mean you you you definitely do and you definitely can i think that you will eventually for sure someone by the way i read the comments and i read one from something one of the episodes i was on ages ago and someone wrote something like wow steph has a really intense case of impostor syndrome and i was like oh true anyway i guess if people wanna find by the way i'll tell you this now you do i remember when i was negotiating your salary when you first joined and you asked for a number i don't remember if i did this for you it we in particular women would typically do this they would say a number and i would say a number back or i would just say a number to them and they would just accept it and i'm really like hey you should negotiate with me women in particular were horrible at pushing back on their salary for what they should ask for and you know my company was small we in aggregate probably hired than seventy five people but i noticed a small trend of women in particular did not push back nearly as hard as the men there are many men that they would push back and it was laughable what they i'm like there's not a chance i'm going to give you this but i guess i'll meet you somewhere in the middle to like adjust this but like this is crazy i offered i was thinking you are a hundred and fifty thousand dollar your person you're asking for seven hundred thousand that like that's just ridiculous but i remember with you steph you were way we gave you a lot of bumps i think for the over the how how long you work with us but you you started way too low and i would encourage you to maybe not for this product but to definitely elevate what you should be demanding for pay i i think you're doing right now a sixty c but that i've no i've noticed that with you in in particular amongst very very very smart and qualified young women yeah it took me around what is it so twenty one to twenty eight when i twenty eight or twenty nine when i joined e sixteen z so it took me like seven years or so to actually learn to negotiate so i agree can i tell you of embarrassing version of impostor syndrome that i have which is it's not impostor syndrome but it is at what i call michael scott syndrome where sometimes i felt this for like ten years i always hire people that are like super smart and that's great upfront but the downside is sometimes you just feel like michael scott you're like oh i'm the idiot in the office and i'm telling these people i'm actually in their way and these people are like they're kinda looking at me like the way that jim helper looks at you know michael scott and i'm like no it's happening that's that the the michael scott thing is happening have i've ever felt that yes i felt that way all the time and then i realized that's actually i felt that way for a long time and then i realized oh wait no that just means i'm good at hiring so like i should just get out of the way scott would do do a compliment for himself no i felt that way too i remember hiring people that were a older than me and b smarter and i'm like what the fuck are these people did i really just convince this person did i just tricked this person into coming and joining anything i'm doing i feel horrible about that let's say one one woman that's so good at what she does and our e commerce business she's so fast like literally so fast and hyper productive she gets the like she gets like three people's stuff done in in the same amount of a day and she the one who michael scott me all the time i'm like i'll be telling her something in the meeting i'm like yeah let's follow up next week on that and she's like i already sent it out and i'm like while i was talking but i was giving you such a good anecdote in metaphor and oh you just like finished it oh okay i guess i guess i could've have shut up five minutes ago and i realized actually this is a great thing just like you said sam it's not that i'm great at her i said now this is actually the bar i only wanna hire people that make me feel like i'm michael i'm the michael scott of the office that's actually how it should feel when you're doing it good feel means are good at hiring now you just gotta get the hell out the way you did the hard bunch your money that's the other thing yeah i don't know about that i'm just gonna quickly shout out if you wanna go find it internet pipes dot com i guess we'll figure out the price it'll be live when this goes live alright that's a pod stuff thank you for doing this i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back