#63 with Andrew Wilkinson - Buying cash-flowing internet companies, starting job boards and building no code projects

what's going on listeners we get asked all the time different bits of advice on the stuff that sean and i talk about and that's great and it's actually something that sean and i do all the time which is ask people for different insights particularly those who are a lot better than us and one person who who we've been heavily inspired by is jordan harbinger i've known jordan now for eight years now and i've been listening to him for about that long and he's had podcast for years and in fact has been in the top one hundred for the last thirteen years and he has a new show called the jordan harbinger show and what he does is he talks about social engineering in particular for helping men be more charismatic which is great but what i think is even more interesting is that he teaches social engineering to seals to intelligence agencies to special operations and it's incredibly fascinating and we actually have jordan here for a minute to tell us some of his favorite episodes in particular the one that i listened to recently was how to ask for advice jordan what's going on hey thanks for having me on i really appreciate it i think the reason i chose the advice topic was because i'm sure you get this to you get an email from somebody maybe even somebody who's younger saying something like i want you to mentor me or how do i succeed in my idea or how do i come up with a good idea and these are the wrong questions a lot of people are asking for validation of their idea they're asking for permission to do something you really can't get a lot of value from that it you have to be sure if you're actually asking for advice you're actually asking for permission you're just asking for an encouragement or if it's specific intentional and explicit in detailing what you need the other half of course is being able to implement that advice and then show the other person how you've implemented their advice in a very specific way so i decided to write an article and do an entire show about this on episode three twenty one of the jordan harbinger show because it's been it's helpful for people looking for advice and it's also helpful for people who get asked for advice in the wrong way all of the time because they can just say hey listen to this and then come back to me after you're done and i get maybe three or four dozen messages a day of people doing this and breaking the rules that you've just mentioned and i've noticed that when people do it right it can be career changing has any listener came to and said thank you for giving this advice here here's what i've done effectively and how it's worked oh it happens all the time and it's great it's really rewarding for me of course when people write to me and say my dream is to start a clothing line any tips all i can do is say i don't know really what you want or what you're gonna do and then of course any tip i give them that's not go for your dreams just leaves them feeling angry so i don't like to even field those questions anymore crazy i do the same thing whenever people ask advice i just say just start if the question isn't specific enough it's impossible it's like saying how do you make art so i think this is like an incredibly useful podcast it's something that people need to listen to regardless of where they are in their journey of of building whatever they're building so us a listen i mean it it's a great podcast i actually have i've paid for a handful of your products so this isn't just nonsense i i have really been a customer for a while and i appreciate you coming on and so what where should people turn to if they wanna listen to this sure you can find me at jordan harbinger dot com but honestly the podcast is anywhere you get your podcast well thanks for coming and this really means a lot to us thank you what's up everybody hope is doing good we're all q teaming but we're thriving at least that's what i tell myself so i got sam here and then we got special guest probably the most referred to guest on the podcast even though he's never been a guest yet but we we speak your name all the time so andrew wilkinson here andrew runs something called tiny capital which is cool just tiny capital dot com is that just just tiny ever says that we we couldn't get tiny dot com so we got tiny capital dot com and so now everybody says tiny capital and i have to correct them but we have friends who own a or used to own a company called tiny as well no way what is it yeah tiny coke i'll sue them oh he are okay oh shit maybe need then and i was looking at the domain and tiny dot c i think is is not like taken by somebody right now you might have to buy it but oh damn i'm gonna jump on that nevertheless alright so andrew give people like the sixty second version of what do you what do you do now not your backstory but just like what is tiny so tiny is kind of like it's basically a long term holding company for wonderful internet businesses so so we go out and we find profitable simple often boring internet businesses and we acquire majority stakes and we take over ownership and we usually buy from founders often they're bootstrap and usually their businesses have been around for you know five ten years these are longer term things and we don't go for sexy stuff we're not doing drones and ai and vr and all that kind of stuff we look for businesses that are simple and predictable and boring so we own you know a whole bunch of design firms and different services businesses we own the largest partner in the shop fight ecosystem doing shop buy apps and themes we own a whole bunch of job boards bunch of saas businesses bunch of podcasting businesses all sorts of stuff and i can talk more about the various so what what are some names that people have heard of right dr is one that a lot of people yeah i mean the original the original business i started with was metal lab which is a one of the top now top product design agencies in the world which i started out of my parents basement about fifteen years ago and you know dr we acquired in twenty seventeen we own we work remotely which is the largest remote job board on the internet picks union which is the shopify business we own me lime which is the largest meal planning app on the app store we own castro which is one of the top indie podcast players just all sorts of different stuff can i can i even dumb this down further andrew for the listeners which is basically you had this thing called meta lab which was slack or of of lots of different people who needed products designed they would come to you and they would say andrew we need you and your team to make our app look great in function well is is that right yeah that's where we started and then that became hey you know if someone has a napkin sketch idea we can actually not only design it but we can build it as well a lot of our work has been designed only but we've also built a lot of products and shipped a lot of products as well and so also in over fifteen years you've just built that into a great company and you own all of it or you and a one or two people own i think your brother own all of it and it just made enough profit that you began acquiring and or starting other companies is that right yeah like when i started i knew nothing about business and i knew nothing about investing but it was profitable and so i did you know bank balance accounting right didn't understand anything but i knew that there was more money in the bank account at the end of the month than there was at the beginning and i went well what the hell do do with this money and i always had a like just i've always had like a million business ideas and so i looked around and you know i saw the base camp guys making a ton of money with this you know saas business base camp and i went i wanna do that too and so i started building our own software products to help me run the agency and then spun those out and i just kept starting companies and then i realized starting companies is really fucking hard i'm i'm good at starting but i'm bad at follow through and so we started buying businesses in about twenty thirteen and we've been doing that ever since with much more success and what's the skin of your empire at this point can you give numbers so people understand it well we do double digit millions revenue you know very profitable business we usually look for businesses that double digits revenue what that mean sorry double digit millions so that's out of bet lab or that's the total that's the total all all the businesses so we haven't cracked a hundred million yet but we're getting close and then you know we generally are buying businesses that have really nice profit margins so we have quite a bit of free cash flow and we just reinvest that free cash flow and buying more businesses and i tried to sell you a business do you remember that oh oh my god i no idea many years ago five years ago maybe i was running this company called and making you know few million bucks a year of profit and and i saw your and i i knew that that business wasn't gonna grow at this like incredible pace and i was trying to convince the i i'm not the main owner of it but i had a piece and i was trying to convince a main owner hey we should just flip this thing we should just sell this thing and then work on you know bigger kind of moonshot type projects and he's was well if you could find a buyer let's do it and so i had heard of your guys thing because you you do a good job of getting yourself out there to be like hey we buy you have this like thing like that this is like a twenty minute term sheet or something like that like you basically have you advertise how simple and painless the process is which i think those founders like yeah we i mean we had been corded by private equity in a variety of different businesses and we just found this horrible ridiculous experience where you know you get on the phone within an so yet and the associate spends an hour picking your brain and then you realize there's some idiot kid who just got out of college and they don't have any power to do anything and so then you talk to the partner you do five hours of phone calls and then they fly to you and all you know this all takes a month they fly they fly in it's a bunch of wall street douche bags wearing suits who speak in weird financial terms that we certainly didn't understand at the time and you know then they give you the term sheet and it's been a month or two and you go through two or three months of diligence and then at the very end they renegotiate the entire deal and lock you to an earn out and we just found that whole process totally absurd and miserable and we started reading about warren buffett we're like what the fuck like buffett makes deals in seven days and he's doing multi billion dollar deals why can't we just do the same thing and the businesses we're buying they're way less complex we like less complex than what buffett buying he's buying factories and stuff we're buying like these tiny little internet businesses with you know ten to twenty employees and so we started doing it and people love that because founders are high pay they wanna make a quick decision and get a deal done and they don't wanna waste a bunch of time on it and they don't wanna be renegotiate and drag through the mud so we let founders leave and we take over management fully sometimes we leave them with some equity if they want to or they can stay in the business if they want to but it resonates definitely right and ultimately we didn't do a deal because i wanted like a ten x multiple and you were like how about three to four and i was like now and then we we i'll have to go through those emails yeah which our email you have taken that looking back i personally think so but you know the reality is that that business like you know if you're gonna hold he's held it for a long time and if you're gonna hold it for four or five more years you would have you know you'd make your money back the along the way and so i think the reason to sell would be because you wanna go do something else and in that case you know i went and did something else the main in main owner of the business he does other things so it's not like a drain on time and so he doesn't mind holding it but in my opinion yeah it should have sold for four x and got now yeah so i think what a lot of people don't get is that you know these internet businesses can disappear in a year two years and so when we're evaluating something we're we're going like what's the staying power what prevents this from you know having a bunch of competitors destroy it or google changing an algorithm and whole business going away so paying ten times is like i'll pay that for an amazing business but depends on the quality rate right not not that i remember this business there's just there's a thing called the lin right is that the name of it the are you familiar with that where it's like no it's basically a principle was a observation sort of like observing nature and you're basically the black swan guy yeah it's basically if something's been around for ten years it's high probability it's gonna be around for another ten years and so basically the amount of time something has already survived a bit around is a very high predictor of how long it will continue so when something's hot and it's been around for two years has sort of a sort of lower lower probability of being around longer than two years and then as something so this business has been around for fifteen years so it's highly likely would sort of endure and be be durable for another yeah we technology already destructive though we see people and they come to us and say hey we've been around for two years we're growing at eighty percent year over year we're gonna keep doing that for the next five years therefore you should pay us you know thirty times earnings or whatever and i i always think like yeah maybe you'll do that but odds are the law of large numbers catches up with you this gets more hard more challenging it's a lot easier to grow business from ten thousand dollars mr to thirty thousand mr than it is from thirty thousand mr to million so we're always we're always skeptical and ultimately at the end of the day we still to buy something with some sense of how we pair ourselves back right okay cool and so you know we could do one of two things in this conversation we could be like hey andrew tell us your life story which i think is actually pretty interesting and tell us how you run your business which also is pretty interesting but i actually think what would be more fun if you're down for it and say sam you let me know what you think we can sort of decide on air here my view is that andrew andrew's is just like one of us he's sort of a you know a third of me go of the crew and what we usually do is we you know sam it's not like you interview me or i interview you we just talk about what's going on in the world to give her our crappy opinions and people seem to like it it seems to be entertaining and so i actually think we should just do that i think we just talk about what's going on stuff we think is interesting and treat it that way and then maybe a different time we can go and say hey give us the full story of how you built tiny yeah yeah down it sounds to do that and i would also after we get done with that and throughout i have a few specific questions i wanna ask you answers so but we can i'll i'll weed those in so alright everybody if you wanna make your first million with a mobile app you have to prioritize app performance first and that's where our sponsor heads is here to help you can get a custom head spin benchmark report that will give you deep insights into your apps performance from cold and warm starts to errors crashes responsiveness times including audio and video quality and biometric responsiveness that's right art there have a state of the art global device cloud that provides unique carrier network device os and app level insights and these are all happening on real sim enabled mobile devices that are in hundreds of locations all around the world no sd sdk required i like to think it as having my own fleet of testers all around the world with the push of a button and you can get a custom heads benchmark report at heads dot io o slash my first million again if you have a mobile app and new see a benchmark report of your performance it's heads spin dot io o slash my first million so maybe the starting point is i feel like you were really early to being cautious and very and and highlighting the importance of this covid nineteen crisis like i remember i don't know if it was january or february but i remember you talking about this on twitter and the you know the precautions you were taking to to stock up and why you felt that way and you're researching you know this spanish flu fluid and stuff like that so when were you when did this come on your radar and why did it immediately be like a thing you were worried about well one of the things that's making a good investor is i'm a natural pe and you know we we started in randall all of our businesses in the middle of nowhere so i'm based in victoria canada and we we haven't existed in the world you guys exist in where you know every startup founder has a million dollars thrown at them by vcs and there's unlimited capital we've always had to be super super disciplined focused on margins you know looking at the balance sheet and we we kind of take the andy grove approach of only the paranoid survive so so my my time is really spent doing two things doing new deals and then looking at the existing portfolios and scanning the horizons for some way that we get fucked so i i kind of am always on the paranoid side and i'm always you know i'm always just looking at different risks and stuff and when i started seeing the news pop up out of china i thought you know maybe there's a one in five chance one in ten chance this turns into something global and serious but when i look at the cost of protecting myself so directly with my family where you know i buy five thousand dollars of groceries or whatever fortunately i could afford to do that so me and my business partner rented a house to use as office we isolated really early we stocked up on groceries and hand sanitizer and all that kind of stuff i just looked at it as an asymmetrical bet where you know i spend a small amount of money to protect us and if we're wrong then we can laugh about it and look like idiots but it's pretty low cost and then on the company side you know we were pushing pretty hard all of our cfo to really pay attention to this dial in costs start rene negotiating any software contracts and cutting any unnecessary expenses and then making sure all of our credit lines and stuff were set up the nice thing has been that so far our businesses haven't been super affected just given their they're kind of like anti fragile so you know remote work benefits our job board people cooking at home benefits our meal planning app you know dr people are gonna be looking for more work and finding clients online if they got laid off and stuff so for the most part we've been okay but i'm always paranoid by default has met met lab been okay because i would think that would be hurt so far we've been really lucky i've got a couple friends who run agencies but they're more on the marketing side and the first thing to get cut has been ad spend and so i've seen a few friends get hit hard by that because of what medal does which is like r and d like deep r and d for big fortune five hundred companies a lot of the time it's so core to their product map that so far we haven't seen it get cut but i mean we could be in the eye of the storm we have no idea what's gonna happen so we're just we're just kinda batting down the hatch in general and preparing for whatever could come and what was the reaction when you were basically saying hey look even if there's a low odd even if there's a a low chance of becoming something really serious and spreading globally but i'm gonna take these precautions you started talking about it on twitter you know taking certain actions what was most people's reaction do people for the most part to understand did you were you treated as sort of an over reactor you know what was the reaction well so at home my wife literally pulled me aside she's like worried about your mental health you seem really paranoid like are you okay and you know i kept telling saying to heard look like i hope we can laugh about this in a month but you know it's worth having our house be sham and being covered in amazon boxes just to be prepared and then you know she's very grateful once it all happen that we didn't have to worry about stocking up on all the basics on the company side we have a ceo mailing list so basically if there's something we wanna blast out all the ceos we'll send it there i think a lot of people were kind of like humor me and going like oh man another one of andrew's ridiculous concerns but you know eventually had obviously played out and i'm glad that we were aggressive about dialing everything in early how many ceos do you have on that mailing list i think there's like ten or ten or twelve of them something like that i don't know the exact number and can i pay money to be on that mailing list the list it's mostly mostly me saying hey guys look we should save money doing this or that there's there's not much interesting stuff on there do get us on the list well you guys gotta come and run a company for me that's the bargain so andrew what do you okay so what you or when we before we started this podcast you were saying how you're a control freak you said that you have to be you move quickly and you're really good at starting things you're not great at follow through like i imagine you met once it like becomes something yeah now you own or c own ten companies including meta lab i imagine you have five hundred employees or no i don't know what two hundred you have a fair bit we've we have everyone i think there's three hundred and fifty four hundred employees across about twenty companies and the reason we have fewer ceos than companies is that some of the ceos oversee platforms so like we have a a business called tiny boards that manages all the job boards be beyond and that has one in order to do that you are operating these things i mean that'd be i think that would be close to impossible how are you del out all of your to dos and how hands on are you with different companies so we're very very hands off we literally are what we do is we basically when we buy a company we're making a few assumptions we have a few ideas for future growth and we'll kind of validate those before we buy the business so for example you know maybe we could add a new revenue line or new ad inventory or something simple like that then we might have a few ideas about where the business could go over the next two to four years when we buy a business we're hiring a ceo who we have high confidence in and we're handing them that playbook and we're saying we're gonna completely leave you alone all you have to do is send us two things once a month you're gonna send us a financial only update so we got no information about the operations of the business just the the numbers the p and l on the balance sheet and then on a quarterly basis you're gonna send us a sw analysis so strengths weaknesses threats opportunities in the business and if there's anything that's really important you gotta call us quickly so you know if one of our ceos is in crisis or as a big investment they wanna make they wanna buy a company or something like that we'll get a text of phone call from them but they're ceos that work for us where we won't hear from them for six months we'll just get the emails so it's even less than a typical private equity firm or something would do we don't do formalized board meetings or anything we're just getting these updates and so that leaves me with a lot of time to focus on the hundred thousand foot stuff and i don't really get caught up in the day to day operations at all what was that transition like at meta lab and out the reason i'm asking is i've not quite i haven't done a transition like this but i have i was running everything and then i hired a president and that made my life way better and it was highly influenced to buy you and a couple other books that i'd read and people ask me all the time how to do it and i can advise how i did it but you're doing this at a much larger scale can you and and i also think that people are shocked when they hear that not everyone is like the mark zuckerberg where you or at least what they think mark zuckerberg is where you start something and then you're the guy who is like running it into while it gets large so can you talk about the transition that you use at meta lab well i feel like really entrepreneurship is just delegation right so if you think about it you know you imagine if you own a software company it's really hard at first to delegate the support you don't trust anyone to do the support you don't trust anyone to write the copy on the own page or whatever and then over time you hire a bunch of really shitty people and it's horrible and it makes your life worse and so you tell yourself oh man you know i i can't hire other people i have to everything myself now i see a lot of businesses that are kept really small because the founder never breaks through that bubble and for me it was you know i hired a bunch of the wrong people and then i kept re hiring and eventually at hired right person and that's when i would see that part of the business explode and start doing really well so for example with metal lab i one of the stories i told myself is that i have to always be involved in sales because i can close the deals right so i would have someone who do the initial phone calls and all that kind of stuff but ultimately i was the guy who could get a really big deal over the line when i started del it you know at first we went through a variety of different people and you know eventually we came upon a team where we could just fully delegate that and they would actually close way bigger deals than i would have ever closed and the nice thing is you can specify how high to jump and you can incentivize people to do the things you don't wanna do so an example was you know for let's say like five years running metal lab i was making quite a bit of money from the business and i had actually reached my point of like my mas hierarchy of needs was met i was like totally content i drove a sweet car at a nice house at a nice life i bought the clothes i wanted and i ate out whenever i wanted what's the that point i was for me it was like a hundred hundred and fifty k or something like that a year a year yeah it was like it was around that right this is in like twenty ten and and so i didn't really give a shit about making a lot more money if it meant pain for me and one thing i hated was i hated flying to san francisco i'd always get sick i'd have a bad sleep i just didn't enjoy it and that was required to do sales and so having me do sales meant that i didn't wanna get on the plane i wouldn't go through the meetings i i wouldn't close a deal and so when i delegated that and i found people who hey love getting on planes love closing deals and only do that and then i paid them a fuck ton of money for closing those deals everything in my life got better the business grew way faster my personal life got better and i was really able just to kind of design a system and run you know a operating system for the company that's spat out cash and results on the other side and i didn't actually have to do any work and so to me invest is just the next level of delegation right hiring what's your best resource for learning about that operating system i think the one of the books that helped me was principles by red dal which i thought was quite interesting he talks lot about some of those ideas the e myth was really big the michael gerber book it's super freaking cheesy but it's a it's actually a good read and i'm trying to think of what else i think those were the the key ones but to be honest like i'm a profoundly lazy person like i know that sounds ridiculous given like around of these companies and stuff but i i hate doing anything i don't enjoy doing and i'm never somebody who pushes through something i just always want someone else to deal with it and so that's actually meant that i've been a good del and i've naturally done that whereas a lot of founders they like it's like they're precious and they're like gollum right they can't let go of their company and all their value comes from that i've always had a lot of different stuff i've been doing so when i give away one of my precious i have five others to fuck with and always have enough stuff going on so hasn't fa me like one phrase you just said which was when you're talking about you know you you said the story i used to tell myself is and you know for you it was about having to i gotta be the one who closes the sales that's how know the clients need me and i can close the big sales and i need to be involved in that that's something that i see all the time is it's like what what story are you telling yourself and so have this with employees that i managed i have this with myself where it's like okay what story am telling myself for example before before we sold be we were doing this business and i was talking to i was talking to a buddy and i was like hey he was i was like hey can you help me he's somebody i look look up to a sort of like you know smarter wiser than me in terms of business i was like can you help me out i feel like there's something wrong with the business i don't think we're gonna get where we're trying to go on the outside everything looks good but on the inside i'm not sure and he was like alright i talk him about so we were were eating dinner i was telling about it and he's like it sounds like you don't really believe that this is gonna work like you used to and i was like yeah you know honestly i don't think i don't think we're gonna get to the the size i thought we were gonna get to i it's gonna be okay think gonna be mid sized and he was like so why are you still doing it and i was telling myself the story of like well you know i don't wanna let down the investors i don't wanna let down my team i don't feel like we can pivot again blah i was like i had the story i was saw myself and as i was saying it out loud that i had that moment where i was like this is just like a story like a bet if i just talk to my investor i but if i just talk to my team i bet if i you know thought about the other options i could come up with something and then sure enough we came up with the option of hey you know this might be small for us but if this is part of a bigger platform this could actually be kind of valuable if a big company owned this and they had all the distribution and then i went and talk to them and we ended up selling the company but like it was literally just recognizing there's a story i'm telling myself that not true but is causing me to do causing me pain basically totally and i think when you have it's different when you're an employee but when you have full control over a business like you did there's no excuse right you create everyone i know there's so many these people that create their own hell right so they're in meetings all day every day they fly all over the place they're away from their families they're not doing things that are intrinsically motivated and they've created this hell for themselves because they just haven't examined how they're spending their time or why they do the things they do and so often like over and over and over again we've just proven a tiny that you just don't have to follow the private equity playbook so many of the things that they do are just ridiculous and waste people's time and again like we've done that consistently like people would say you're gonna work with like apple and google and facebook you have to be in the bay area you wanna be a big agency you have to be down here you wanna run a great company and has to be down here we just said like why the fuck can't we just run it from a small town in victoria or in canada and you know it just it just works so i i'm a big fan of not limiting growth because you're tired it's instead finding other people to run the marathon for you and just incentivizing them in the right way and letting the people that do that love this stuff do it if you don't love it give it to someone else right andrew what business do you guys own or you are so associated with or have like really close insights into so because i know you have that with way more than twenty that you think is like the perfect cash flow company like has the like what do you think like both said at the beginning we buy wonderful internet companies and wonderful means x y and z right right right you know it's durable and spits off cash flow grow and i think i know what i think i know which one of yours i like beth but i wanna hear your opinion so my my favorite business that we own is dr dr i always say you want a business to be like new zealand right so new zealand is in the middle of fucking nowhere nobody's paying the attention to it it's quietly successful it's totally food and energy independent and it could get cut off from the rest of the world and people would eat and be fine and it's away from nuclear war right and so when i think about a business i want a business that there's no intermediary there's no gateway and you have a fully self sufficient society so dr is you know one of the top thousand sites on the internet it's the largest social network for designers designers go there for inspiration to find jobs to give each other feedback to meet up all sorts of different stuff and it's this massive massive community of super button people who literally punch dr into the url bar there's no google risk there's no facebook risk people come organically and so it's kind of like if you if you own a museum and there's thousands of people that congregate in one part of the museum you could open a gift shop you could open a coffee place you could open an imax theater there's just unlimited different ways to monetize this group of people and as long as you're respectful of them and you offer them things they want you can have a wonderful business and so for us i mean it's we've barely scratched the surface we've grown that business a lot and we have an amazing ceo an amazing team and you know we've really just started with it i think there's just so many other things that we can do with it and we're working on a few things right now that i'll tell you guys about in a couple months that i'm super excited about but is it a profitable i mean i of course profitable but does it have great revenues and profit now or is this something that you think it's gonna be ten times bigger it's gonna be ten times i mean right now you know it's nice and healthy and profitable but we've been really reinvest in r and d and you know future opportunity and we think there's there's just so much more we think it's gonna be ten times bigger over the next five years and when you say you're in in investing in r and d said earlier that meta lab was an r and d company so i have a business that has an audience sean has a podcast that has an audience a lot of people here maybe have audiences what does that r and d process mean well so you know with a website like dr we have to build if if we wanna let's say that we wanted to do here's an example so all these huge companies wanted to recruit designers like facebook and google and stuff and they would come to dr and they'd say hey look we really need white glove service we need help with recruiting so the ceo had to build a special service for them where they would be able to screen candidates and we deal with payments and all that kind of stuff that would be the sort of thing we're investing r and d in but what does the maybe we have to build a sales people that yeah we have some developers building that we have a couple sales people who we need to front for a few months while we get rolling with it that kind of stuff and then just like each quarter your ceo zach he like makes the decision on which not moon moonshot but like what bet do we like we're gonna prioritize our bets every quarter yeah exactly so we we generally we you know if he wants to say look like i'm gonna go and spend five hundred k million bucks on or y z and it's way above what we've budgeted he might nudge us and say hey guys what do you think of this idea you down with this but yeah he's really driving all the decision making there do you guys buy with debt or do you do like full equity deals we're super conservative so we generally wanna be able to pay off for debt in like six months if we can so so we use a little bit of debt but as a company globally but it's very very conservative it's like less than berkshire hathaway uses you're you're in canada so what debt do you use is that is that just private lending or because i don't think you have like the sba infrastructures we have it's very similar to s we have the bd which is the business development bank of canada which is like a government funded bank that will kind of take a little more risk and be a little more friendly to small and medium sized business so we use those guys or we'll use royal right you know rbc or bmo or any of the big national banks but we and we have access to capital globally now at the scale we're at we can go to jpmorgan or whoever else you can go to sean morgan too and i'll lend you money so so if you we you're a canadian guy so are you are you actually canadian or you just live in canada yeah i'm canadian great so perfect so you can explain something that's been on we have this like one google doc we use for the podcast that's just like there's no formatting we just whatever's at the top that's like the topics so there's been one topic on here that i wanted to talk about which was shred credits and unfortunately i only know like twenty percent of a lot of things i don't know a hundred percent of anything or even close and so i haven't been explaining it because i'm like god i really even wanna research for credits i i don't know but i know enough to know how interesting and valuable this be so can you explain both people yeah so the government of canada wants to incentivize r and d projects so that could mean a pharmaceutical company taking a risk in going out and trying to build a new drug it could be a you know health device manufacturer it could be someone building novel software or whatever they just wanna incentivize people to build ip in canada and so what's really cool about that is if you spend let's say i spend a hundred thousand dollars hiring a developer to go do some new interesting novel r and d project build some cool software that d innovative the government will actually give you cash back on that salary and i mean it depending on the scale of your business and the level of profit and stuff it can be like thirty forty percent for us now it's much lower i think it's like fifteen percent or something we get it as a tax credit but it's insane like just just forever everyone's context so in canada we have currency arbitrage meaning i get paid a dollar us i get a buck forty two canadian right salaries are generally cheaper then they'd be at least in san francisco and new york on a dollar basis if and and so there's a huge arbitrage there there's significant margin from that and then we also get tread credits and then we also don't have to pay medical benefits so the government the government does public health right so we don't have to worry about all this crazy health insurance stuff sean sean i i visited andrew up there i visited andrew up there and when he's talking i'm like why do we not live here yeah it's insane i actually i have a friend who who ran a company in san francisco it was like super hot got money from it was a y comb thing he's like one of the youngest yc founders ever he was like you know the golden child and of course you know sometimes tough times happened so the business started to like not just continue to grow to infinity and over time he was like man hiring in san francisco is so hard they needed like a data scientist he's like you know we're making offers and they're getting offers of three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year four hundred thousand dollars a year five hundred thousand dollars a year for applied scientists like he's like this is so competitive and so they actually made a pretty radical decision they just moved their entire company to canada some people didn't want move obviously and they were like okay no problem we'll give you nice severance package you can go and find a new job and we're gonna restart our company like at year seven in canada we're gonna take advantage of this and i think what ended up happening if you layer on those three arbitrage the currency arbitrage the salary slash cost of living arbitrage and then the shred credits i think and tell me if i'm exaggerating here he was effectively paying the same engineer that in san francisco he's paying two hundred two hundred fifty k ultimately it was was out of pocket like thirty to thirty five k in canada after every wow i would say that's a crazy level of arbitrage we certainly don't see that level but what what i would say is it's roughly roughly sixty percent sixty five percent the the cost depending on i mean you're talking about data science right that's like pretty right hefty salary or whatever but let's say you hire a dev in san francisco i don't know what a dev is like a reasonable dev is like one sixty to two fifty you would probably see one thirty to two hundred here but it would be in canadian dollars so right which is effectively let's call it like that's not on day on a normal day it's like thirty percent off right so so let's say that that's about a hundred and then if you do the truck credits isn't aren't you able to maybe some people just use them more loosely because i think the the r and d thing is like where it's a bit subjective right and some people are a little more loose with their what they're saying gotta be you gotta be careful like you you can get audited and it's not like you go to jail it's just like a pain in the antenna so we're pretty conservative with it and but can't you get up to eighty percent with the credits or no that's not the case anymore i think if you're really early and small this is this is the crazy thing i you guys had kind of mentioned before like think through some ideas for people one of the big ideas that we've had a lot of success with is taking these bloated companies from san francisco where they've raised venture or they just have a really bad p and l and just pivoting it to canada or just tiring remote just hire a bunch people in oklahoma or something right it's really not rocket science yeah and there's also like one weird thing you you like can't fire the person right there's and there's some restriction around that oh i don't i don't know about that okay turn the labor the labor laws labor laws the labor laws are very similar to california i'd say i see okay anyways that's fred credits i don't know how know if we can call that one zero one maybe it's the the pre precursor to one zero one let's talk about andrew i wanna talk to you about talk to you about one or one business that you have and then let's talk with some ideas cool the business that so i what's what's the guys at fred wilson is that the guy from union ventures fred willis yeah he invested in the seed stage of indeed dot com which eventually sold to a japanese company for multiple billions i believe and it's probably worth way more than that now he said that indeed dot com had the best business model he had ever been part of because all the incentives that were aligned and he just loved that business and so since then i've been obsessed with job boards and then when i hung out with you you told me about tiny boards your job board company and to me that sounded like the like similar to indeed i'm like this is a perfect business the way that you guys have it set up andrew i've told you i don't know if i i don't i don't love your the model but i'll let you tell explain what it is but can you like talk about some of the economics of job boards because i think that that is one of the best businesses out there and you guys own a nice size one and it sounds like an awesome company yeah so i if you look historically one of the best businesses to be in was the newspaper business and the reason for that was classified so based once you had a captive audience and you're the number one paper in town everyone buys classified and advertisers in it that obviously got sup planted by craigslist and you know we all know why newspapers died so and then all these job boards sprung up right so there's job boards for all sorts of different niches and i mean in theory they're wonderful businesses because at the end of the day just just as an example so like we own we work remotely dot com that's our largest job board it's a remote job board that was founded by jason freed and david hana hanson from thirty seven signals in base camp and based it because they they wrote a book about remote work and in the book they just wanted a place to send people so that they could all go in hire remote and they had like a massive saas business they're distracted and i've jason for a while to do at buying businesses and they said look i'm overwhelmed i don't wanna deal with the support on this can you just buy it from us and we bought it trying to remember like four times earnings or something and i've never owned a job board before and they are if you have traffic and if you have a great community and a niche they're incredible businesses because at the end of the day you're just selling a link right so these these websites are very simple it's a a long list of jobs you might be able to filter by category or whatever and when you click a job so it might be like designer for you know the hustle you click the job it gives a description and it says you should apply here right and so in terms of software this is like something a developer can whip up in three days it's very very basic it's very easy to maintain and it doesn't require a lot of engineering so very low cost to operate and you can charge a lot for job posting so just like a classified you know you can charge anywhere from a hundred bucks to three hundred bucks on some job boards we know we own like the dr job board it's so in demand that we charge i don't know three hundred and fifty four hundred bucks or something for a post because the world's best companies are all competing for talent there and so basically if you have a captive audience they're in credible but if you own a job board and you don't have a captive audience they're horrible businesses so what happens so using you're using a job board for dr as the business model not the product the product is dr exactly job board is the business is instead monetization channel look i yeah always think the largest network always wins with this stuff right so i don't know how long the job board model continues to exist right because i think over time facebook linkedin the people the places where the people are they can always just add this feature on you can see at linkedin doing this with linkedin jobs and everyone's already on linkedin for a job why wouldn't they just use that instead a job board so what we did is we bought we were remotely we realized it was a really good business and we got excited about job boards and so we went out and we bought a whole bunch of other job boards and it turns out that we were remotely as just an exceptional job board in a growing part of the market where remote works going crazy and so you know the business keeps growing we've got a great ceo who's been optimizing it but all the other job boards we bought have mostly kind of peter out and they're kinda shitty and they don't make very much money so i would say like job boards is the sort of thing where if you have a really incredible audience like you do at the hustle for instance sam i think it's a no brainer for you guys not to have i it i don't understand why you don't have a job board at this point like subtle a no brainer you could probably add like a million dollars year of revenue and it's like you know eighty percent off probably what's should our niche b andrew andrew well i don't know start so i would say start up jobs or just tech businesses or something like that whatever whatever audience looks like there you go thanks we wanna have a couple more ideas sure what what do you wanna talk about yeah here's the deal you bring the ideas sure okay okay so one of the basic here i'll i'll i'll i'll but i'll give you some all thanks you're interested in buying at the moment things that you're on the lookout for in the next six twelve twenty four months companies that you would start right now if you had more free time so you know one of the things i'm really really excited about is no code so i started you constantly yeah like i'm i'm a obsessed with it so one of the biggest piss offs for me like i i was originally a designer i would come up with the design for a software or a website or whatever i would do it in like you know one night or two nights and then i you know i knew how a do html but i didn't know how to build the back end and so i would always get super pissed off i'd hand it off to a developer and i'd be like this seems totally easy like let's get this done in three days it would always be three weeks three months whatever it was such a slow process for simple software and you're dealing with hosting and all these complexities and so first of all like about three four years ago i saw web flow pop up and i was like holy shit this is amazing you can basically do html and css in the browser you can build a website in five hours and you can just ship it if all the hosting is dealt with you know it's like magic but what no code does is it takes that front end and it lets you build a back end into it so for example if you wanted to start a job board or you wanted to build you know airbnb clone or a marketplace for i don't know recording studios or whatever you can spin that up yourself or you can hire like a no code agency or a no code to build it and it's crazy like something that would require a month of dev can get done in like a week or a few days a few frantic days and it's not like you're gonna build this super scalable business out of this right like it'll it'll get you your first million dollars of revenue and prove the model and then you can go and build all the the deep code and you know maybe maybe it's not as good as an experience on mobile and all that kind of stuff but in terms of like proving out mvp ideas it's absolutely incredible so where are other opportunities in this space well i mean the cool thing about no code is aside from just being able to prototype super quickly and you know build real businesses like it's not just for prototyping like literally built a job board for a project working on in a few days in no code and it has strike billing like it's a fully functional job board and i don't need to pay an engineer or anything to maintain it i can do it all myself so that's cool but i think what's really interesting about it is looking at businesses that don't need to be as complicated and expensive to run as they currently are so an example would be you know let's say you find a startup up that is starting a like i said a marketplace for recording studios for podcast right so let's say there's some ding went out and he raised a million bucks from yc and he built this thing and it's only doing seven hundred k a year of revenue but he's gotta pay like five developers to maintain it if you could duplicate that in no code you buy the business you strip out all the cost and you structure it in a really simple way with no code you could actually have a sustainable business where previously you never could before but so it allows you to build smaller businesses that are actually profitable whereas right now if a business is doing that much revenue it's hard to make it profitable and didn't you say that you wanted to do a no code agency we actually did we launched one called eighty twenty run by my friend max and it's killing it so far it's been awesome and when you launched stuff like that that quickly you tweeted out you go gonna do this did you so did you just hire one ceo to run it and was he responsible for getting the first sales or did you go out and close like a fifty thousand dollar deal and then be like hey i got this deal you got a to figure this out yeah i i'm a big fan of like public statements so it forces me to actually do something so that's why i'll tweeted it out and my general way of doing this stuff is if there's a business idea i have it in my head and it'll only stay in my head and i'll only be able to focus on it for one to two weeks at most and so within that one to two weeks i have to identify who's gonna operate this business i have to hand off like here's the structure here's what the marketing should be you know here's a really high level and go and so someone like me can't function without good operators i need follow through people so you know an example of that is is i tweeted this out too but i was playing tennis with a guy like i don't know four or five months ago he told me he's a furniture designer i was in the parking lot i looked at his stuff and was like this is dope do you sell this online he says no and i just started texting hector who runs one of our agencies and i said hey i've got an e commerce project for you you know go figure out a brand design all this build a shopify store and four months later suddenly we're launching a furniture brand and in total i probably spent five hours giving feedback on it rewriting a little bit of copy and helping kind of structure it but otherwise i've had no involvement but in in in doing the cost okay so the e comm thing the cost was just the the agency's time so i guess they just had some flex time that they could work on that is that right paid i pay everybody so it was like a fully one thing one mistake a lot of people make is when they own a whole bunch of companies they try s them get them to help each other and it just ends up meaning that one of the ceos feels resent full and they feel annoyed of doing favors and so i just fully pay full rack rate so with z one the agency i used you know i spent thirty grand with them or whatever and two thirty four tiny tiny tiny my holding company and that thirty grand formed my stake in the business okay so tiny paid thirty grand to get that built yeah and then with the eight no code agency how did that how did the how do you do those things so that was the literally i tweeted about it and then i i went to this guy max who had run designer news one of our other businesses he had left the company to go take a job somewhere else but i knew he was interested in coming back if he could run something so i texted him and i just said hey look dude i love you would you come back and run this thing you'd be perfect for it and he said yeah and we pulled in again z one the agency we we own in spain and we had them do a brand and help him build the site and then i pay you paid those guys like an another thirty grand yeah another thirty grand there and so if you look at it you know i really just had a high level idea and i know how to run a services business and so you know it's me saying okay here's the playbook on how we run an agency here's the people you're gonna need here's the here's a few intros to various friends of mine who i know we'll need work or whatever and and then here i'll get you guys to build all my dumb ideas so i've got eighty twenty doing a bunch projects for me as well but that's usually how i get going and then did you pay the ceo a little like three month salary to get them started for you go get sales yeah it was like a month or two of a salary but he's he's a super scrappy incredible guy so i just knew he'd be perfect for it so i think he closed his first deal within a week so it doesn't seem to assume that a lot of your projects take like ten to fifty grand to get off the ground as well as a really competent network of operating well so i mean for years so the hard part for me was when i was an operator when i was running all the businesses i had shiny object syndrome so i'd always have a new business idea and i'd always go and start something new and when i read about buffett i realized that hey this guy doesn't start anything he takes things that are already at scale and makes them better and so i would say the tiny primary business is writing large checks and buying majority stakes and businesses hiring an exceptional ceo and getting them to run it and then i have this irresistible urge to dabble in areas i find interesting like podcasting or no code or you know e commerce or whatever and those are just me satisfying my urges and hopefully doing it profit so those businesses are kind of like the the sawdust that comes out of the sawmill they're not the core business and tell tell us about a business that didn't work so one of your kind of your brain brainchild you got excited you spent two weeks on it you spent four weeks on it and then you decided to pull the plug because i think it's easy when you hear about like hit after hit or kind of like idea after a good idea but what people miss is that there are misses in between you just sort of move on from them and you learn from them and so tell us about an idea that you were excited about that didn't pan out the last there's so many dumb ones but probably one of the dumbest ones was in man twenty ten or whatever shopify started taking off and i got really obsessed with this idea of drop shipping like this idea you could start a front end and you could sell these products but then whenever there's an order it just gets shipped from china or whatever and so i started a and i also own cats and at the time my cats you know if you look around at the pet store cat furniture is fucking ugly i have a nice house i wanted to have a nice furniture and i realized i couldn't get it locally and so i started at an e commerce store in shopify that was selling designer cat furniture and i just to be honest i didn't understand how bad commerce margins were and especially drop shipping and so i spent a ton of money on fulfillment and shipping and all that stuff and i basically realized it was impossible to make money unless i went out and spend a million dollars on inventory and even then i was looking at my other businesses that were asset light and don't have warehouses and didn't ship anything and we're just all digital and they had you know fifty percent margins and i was like man why am i wasting my time with that i also a restaurant at one point which was like pure ridiculous of like but your design ridiculous particularly if you're not single oh my god well i wasn't i wasn't when i started originally it was a nightclub and then i met my wife in a night sleep and so it then it became well no it was it was i was a dj and i i was in a nightclub and i met my wife and so i ticked that box off in the meantime i've been negotiating to buy a night nightclub because i was single and then it became a restaurant as i once i got married and the restaurant was just a complete fucking disaster classroom now it's we lost a lot of money oh my god yeah no esther now it's take care but you know i i'm like i'm like a i walk around sticking my my like a fork electrical sockets and learning lessons right and i've done that a lot over the last fifteen years and i've realized through trial and error what a good business looks like i what a bad business looks like and right now we own a lot of great businesses and we've owned in the past a lot of really shit businesses and we've learned that lesson have you ever been broke like like it seems like things have been going well but in the in the last five years or so what i mean your business have been eight eight figures i imagine in the last five years at least last five years has there ever been times where you've almost lost at all and went broke because it sounds like you well go ahead we i mean in two thousand eight we were through a really rough patch where you know the business was two years old it was mostly just the agency with some software stuff and i got to a point where i had at one point fifteen hundred bucks left in the bank and i literally went and i bought potatoes like this is this is like the depths of two thousand eight where all my clients suddenly weren't paying their bills and you know suddenly everyone wanted their security deep other deposit back and stuff so we got really really tight in two thousand eight but the business was so small at the time that i was operating it out of my house there was really no major risk but i got really really low like i i literally was down to like yeah a thousand bucks or something so because of that experience though i've always been pretty conservative about the way that we you know keep the balance sheet and finance stuff so i haven't lost sleep over the businesses in probably five years or so because we've been so diversified since then when i just had the agency i would lose sleep at night but now having all the different businesses any individual business would allow me to have a nice life so it i just feel like i'm diversified enough to sleep and we should we should wrap up in a second and i think you gotta be a recurring guest that's i i told you that first time we talked to first time we talked on the i was dude you gotta do this then at the time you were like oh i don't like to do podcast podcasts you and then you said something and before i could even counter you're were like but that's probably stupid you're like you're like like to be stealth and mobile blah but look that's such a silly thing i had to say it his twitter is great at this time what were you thinking back then as you can just decide call me back then or what well at the i first off i don't really like doing like the generic podcast interview this is way more fun just kind of jamming on ideas and stuff but at the time your podcast was kind of like a how i built this right right and i i don't know like i i've just i did a lot of the lot of podcast interviews like five years ago and i just found at the end of the day i was like i'm just repeating the same story but i know it's super fun to to do this i'd love to come back okay so i i got a question for you and then i got a thing to plug so my question is your thing is you your business called tiny but i have this question that i always ask anybody who i find really interesting especially people who are busy because they have a successful thing that they run and my question is what's the biggest idea in your head right now and basically like what is the big audacious ambitious holy shit what if you what if you did that type of idea i know that's not your mo your mo is buying often small wonderful internet businesses but i'm just curious do you have like what's the biggest idea in your head right now well i i i don't know if it's one that i'm actually going to be able to take advantage of but it's this idea of subscription podcasting so i think that everybody's totally missed the mark on the way that they're monetizing podcasts i think ads are fine but i think subscription supported podcasting is insanely exciting so the store back that was i had a a friend of mine who ran a large podcast who said hey can you help me optimize my podcast and i started taking a look at it and it what he had done is basically just said hey look if you like my podcast broadcast support me on patreon and i looked at the numbers and i was like holy shit this looks like a saas business you've got really low churn you're growing at twenty thirty percent a year and the numbers were all still pretty small but the margins were crazy because it's just him a microphone and a per time audio engineer and so i started thinking about it and going you know there's a lot of podcast podcasts where if you forced me to pay probably wouldn't pay but then there's these personality driven podcasts where i just would love more access and i would love to support them in some way so an example of that would be like howard stern like there's people who are absolutely obsessed with howard stern and they spend fifteen twenty bucks a month to be serious subscribers and i started going like well what would stop howard stern from leaving sirius and just starting his own subscription podcast and charging ten bucks a month and you start thinking about the scale of something like that where you get mark marin or terry gross or you know howard stern or rogan or whoever and you just start doing that where they do one extra episode month or they cut their podcast off after thirty minutes or you know whatever it is i think the numbers are insane on that and i think that's where it's gonna go once a few people catch on like tim ferris did this stupid thing where he's said pay me i'm gonna go listener sport pay me twenty five bucks a month and i'll give you nothing in exchange and then he said this didn't work and i was like older it back i was like dude that's like going out and saying hey i'm selling apples on my apple cart and all the apples cost eighteen dollars and normally apples cost two dollars and they're no better than any other apple like of course that didn't work but anyway we launched a company called super cast again kind of by accident which we built to help my friend and we have this software and we're like fuck it we should just roll this out as a company but essentially what it does is allows people to create private feeds for their premium supporters and give them additional content extended episodes ama all that kind of stuff and the numbers again like i can't share any specifics with customers but it's pretty mental like people are building saas businesses with no employees man sean we need to do this let's just go ahead we keep pussy foot around andrew what should we do for this podcast what i think you guys should do is do an ana so allow people to submit questions once a month it's like twenty thirty questions of hey what should i do about my business or what do you guys think of this or this or this or you know whatever let them pepper you and then also off for extended maybe extended interviews so once in a while you get some huge titan of industry and you you know you get ted turner and you make the first half free the second half only on the paid feed and then the other interesting thing i do is when you have someone cool on ask them five or ten questions like what's the best book you've read in the last five years what's one personal habit that you do every day that you know nobody knows about or whatever and have those insights only appear on the private feed because ultimately what we've realized is people want access to interesting people they wanna know what they're thinking and they wanna know what those people are doing what are the cheat codes to life that they can use to be better yeah we need to when need to do this i signed up for super cast and i've poked i poked around it's pretty cool yeah you've told us this idea like three times every time it's a good idea and we just haven't done it yet but the good news is the podcast just keep growing and so the time when we do do it it's like you need those super fans to sort of the obsessed people who are like yeah like you give me five bucks of value per month i'm build they to build the habit and love you guys right i don't think there's any rush the one thing i'll say though is like people get it weird they think like it's all or nothing where they're like oh well i like my advertisers i don't wanna say no to the ads you don't have to say no to the ads they're you just say if you're a premium subscriber there's a special feed you get it has no ads and it has all the extra stuff and then on the public feed you tease all the special stuff so the episode shows up with ted turner but a cup off after thirty minutes and then you got a recording saying to keep listening you know pay up and go on this premium feed last question if for me is that okay sean yeah go for my last question is andrew at what point what was the cash flow number that you hit from meta lab that you started pursuing buying or investing in other companies i think we were doing about seven million dollars a year in profit or something like that when we started buying businesses something like that and what year did you buy your first company twenty thirteen we bought designer news that was our first buy so and do you do you think that that was the right point for you guys or what did you wish that you'd waited or started sooner yeah you know it's a tough thing right there's a jason fried says this really well but like you shouldn't ask people who are so far along in their career for advice because they forget what it was like right there's so many lessons i've learned from operating businesses and there's so many things that like if i went back in time and i talked to myself in two thousand six and i started saying you should go out and buy businesses i didn't even know what a good business was i thought a dry cleaner was a good business right and so you have to build the scar tissue and come to this stuff what i have seen though is that people who read buffett and howard marx and you know monique per and all these like value investor books those the people that really get it like where it really jive with them it's almost irresistible you like have to do it and then there's other people where they're just hardcore operators they don't get excited about investing money they don't get excited about tweaking businesses unless they're the ones doing it and so i think it's a question of like what camp are you in are you a capital all and an investor or are you an operator love it this is amazing so so we're gonna wrap it up one quick plug so i speaking a note code so last night you know quarantined out i was like okay i wanna build something that will help the podcast and because podcast podcasts are hard to grow they just sort of grow organically over time they're not easy there's not like there's not not really great growth hacks for it but i was like you know what one thing that might be cool is we do these podcasts and we brainstorm a bunch of ideas and you know a lot of times they're bad but sometimes they're alright there might be some some diamonds in the rough and i was like what if i just dis distilled those out i did this first for myself because i was like you know what are the best ideas we've come up with i wanna have my own shortlist list out of these out of the last thirty episodes that we've done so i made that list and i was like okay i post this as a blog but instead what i did was i used convertkit kit which is like it's kinda hard to use honestly but it's a pretty dope tool but lets you spin up a landing page really quickly and automate an email sequence and i bought the domain terrible horrible no good very bad ideas dot com and i spun up page where basically every week you can get an email that has two or three new startup up ideas so it's for anyone who's like an idea junkie or kinda like know the listeners to this podcast people who like hearing about new interesting angles interesting opportunities and we launched our product hunt today so any guesses is we're we're currently the number five product on product hunt it's called terrible horrible no good very bad ideas and any guesses is sam andrew guess how many email subscribers we've gotten in the first i don't know a few hours say six hours okay five thousand so we got five thousand andrew what would you say sam one thousand alright we're gonna check right now live and we're gonna see i think we're under both of those that's my guess but we're the we're currently number five and we have six hundred and six hundred and thirty six email sign ups for this so today awesome i think across one of the one of the things i was gonna say is i think newsletters are an an incredible business they're new zealand businesses right like i think sam you own the modern newspaper essentially and i think that you're gonna be able to unlock so many businesses even this is an example right like this podcast being affiliated with the hustle it's stronger because of that affiliation you'll drive more revenue i think you have so much cool shit you can do with the hustle well that's we're look andrew i'm doing exactly what you've described this is my meta app where we're gonna build multiple companies on top of new zealand or in new zealand yeah and it's funny you said new zealand i told sean in the last podcast i i even took off my pants and i and i i have this tattoo of a pirate ship on my upper thigh and it says bold fast fun and i got it one day because we hit some revenue number that i didn't think we were gonna hit as soon as we did and the prize was had to get a tattoo in for of everyone but anyway i always tell people my email list is like my pirate ship and every email subscribers like a little bit of wind in our sales and so it's very similar to that what it happen for you to get a face tattoo i would totally do that by the way like i don't know maybe like our first like three million dollars if we get like three million dollars in monthly sales by like june i'll get i'll i'll i'll get anything tattooed on my cheek okay can you see me right now andrew can you see my face no i don't have it oh yeah now i can see yeah i mean i look like a crazy man already the quarantine has made me insane yeah what's what's the next evolution of that hair by the way you're gonna do anything else to that little mohawk no i'll shave the whole thing i shaved my head like with a razor the other day have you guys ever everyone to feel your scalp i'm worried to i'd have like a bunch of weird mole or something there out of who cares don't wanna ask don't tell policy for yeah totally like i i've always wanted to shave my head to feel like my bald yelp and it feel it felt amazing oh my god so i highly recommend you we gotta put this part at the front of the podcast because is like bad so far yeah i mean but look at me i looked like a crazy bad bat i looked like a dud person right now i'll get a tattoo on my face easy adam ryan if you're listening three million in sales by june face tattoo too i'll get your face on my face i want that i want the mike tyson style tribal i don't give a fuck i've been self employed i'll do that harp i've already buried self employed what i have to lose my dog loves me yeah my my favorite podcast the bill's simmons podcast they do this thing at the end of every service parent corner it's like five minutes and they just talk about like something like just another story that their kids being crazy or dumb or whatever we need to come up with our own i think you've you've sort of organically start this the last two which was first dropping your pants it's showing on the pirate chip this time showing up with the mohawk and talking about your face tattoo so i think we need one which is like you know how quarantine is driving us crazy yeah i'm going to insane but whatever i'm finding i'm finding it's weird like i'm vac between being happier than i've ever been and then on days when i'm tired i just fucking hate it like i'm just so angry do you have a nice car yeah i do so i don't only i a land rover which is a funny nice car but it's not like fun to drive if i had like a nice car to drive i think i would be excited because i would at least like have something fun to do at night like a porsche or something yeah but you just don't the thing is when you have kids like for me i have to be bed at nine thirty otherwise i'm just bag so for me there's just no i put the kids down by seven i've got an hour i read a book or a chill going on the sauna or something and then i'm done but i just like a twenty minute drive in victoria would be nice in a gosh totally totally yeah totally yeah sure just wait just for the record to wrap this up you said sauna i have a son two i live in san francisco i have a a twelve hundred square foot place it's not huge but i a garage i have a sauna that i bought for a thousand dollars or it was given to me from my ramon from my wedding it was my wedding gift he paid a grant for it awesome it's a game changer it's like the all the no i've a mean to tweet about this it's like the number one thing for my sanity and stress it's crazy do you have an infrared one no you need you need to get the hot rock one done studies on this and unless you're at a hundred and seventy degrees or more you don't get the same effects obviously bread still nice but the infrared ones are are so much small like i had just like a a two person or one person sauna and the the the rock ones i think are a little bit bigger typically yeah i just got a costco one so we had a we we bought the house friend there's was a hot tub in the backyard and i my wife doesn't like hot tubs so i went to costco and i grabbed this like two thousand dollar or whatever son and plop this down and that's amazing yeah hot rocks yeah wow yeah it's so good dude it's like every night i feel like i've just got off like a two hour workout after i do it for twenty minutes it's amazing isn't it isn't a song like a big thing how did you just pick this up and take it out of costco no no you buy like a kit and then they deliver it yeah everyone's shocked when i say the shot it's just like it's like the size of like a big like wardrobe i just wanna replace my shower i don't need a shower just put us on in my bathroom and like the size of a shower and it comes in like a box and it's just four walls all day but andrew said that yours ain't shit and then you need the hot rocks one my side well it's it's good good it's better than nothing but the hardest mine was a gift andrew oh mine was great nine was a gift but you just dude all you do is lift these four walls up it's just like i ikea furniture practically and then it has this like like microwave size heater that yeah i mean it's pretty sean you could literally get one that's like you sit in a lawn chair and you like drape a thing over you and there's these little panels like it's getting whoever is the biggest shitty d son company you need to sponsor this podcast by getting me and sam sauna and and so you need to give us a asana and then we'll you're the sponsor of the show i i don't know if you guys follow doctor rhonda patrick you're seeing her yeah yeah that's the reason why i wanted a asana she's like absolutely amazing we love her but and we we worked with her with super cast actually we helped her monetize her but she says infrared personas are good she says they're okay but they're not as good as hot rock look up look up the pdf but i anyway she the the amount of science that shows the benefits of asana is crazy it's absolutely amazing and if you or a week is what yeah i do it i do it seven days a week every single night i have my apple home kit turn it on at seven i get in a go thirty minutes let's know a podcast usually you guys actually lately and it's awesome so it's like i'm there with you every single day sweat on we're we're with naked andrew yeah or are you gonna let to this episode or are you like us and you can't stand your on course i and i i was i was actually interviewed another podcast today and i listened and it's just pure cringe for me even even though i don't disagree with what i'm saying i just hate hearing my own voice so i don't know about that we'll see alright let's get out of here i'm gonna go microwave some hot water and throw on myself because i don't have a asana yet until our sponsor hooks us up alright thank you andrew this was awesome that was fun guys anytime