#73 - On-Demand Appliance Technicians, Credible Authority Businesses & Homesick Food Delivery

alright we got a friend of the show here jordan harbinger he's one of the guys who's been advising us on how to build this podcast because his podcast is way more successful than ours has been around he's been doing podcasting for like twelve and half years which jordan that's gotta be as long as podcasting has existed right yeah i think pod podcast podcasts have been around for like fourteen years and i've or fifteen and i've been around for thirteen of those so yeah when i started there was no way there were no iphones so you couldn't get podcasts on your phone you had to use an ipod to play them yeah straight to cassette that's how that's how long these guy's been doing it so so jordan you know i like i like your show i've been binge binging it while in quarantine because you know what else am i gonna do besides i just try to learn something new or improve myself in some way and i gotta say like it because you do the you know the interview style show where you go deep with a guest i think you know you had i was listening to the one with tony hawk which is pretty awesome and i gotta say i like that you don't do the kind of surface level you know just just pit you know pity padding around with the questions or trying to do you know inspirational fluff where you're just saying go you can do this so with that episode with tony hawk what was that like tony hawk an icon how was it of you know interviewing tony hawk it was great he's a really interesting guy really open and fun and he told some pretty funny stories one which was very apr rapport what what's going on right now is one day he walked into his agent or some sort of marketing team that he'd hired he walked into their office this is like at the height of video games where he's making i don't know well fifty million bucks off these skating games and these brands and he goes in and he says look i got this backpack that was made pretty s and it's got my name and face on it i don't want any more stuff like that and as the agent marketer or whatever is sort of nodding his head understanding tony goes wait what's that on your shelf and it was a roll of toilet paper with tony hawk name face and logo on it and he goes what the hell is that and the guy goes oh yeah anything we put your name and face on does so well we were joking that we could put your face on toilet paper and we'd still be able to sell it and he fired them on the spot because it was clear that they didn't value his brand which i thought was a funny story and he's got a ton of stuff like that that he talked about on the show that is epic you know i actually met tony hawk we went on a trip to africa a charity trip together and believe it or not we were halfway up of a mountain in ethiopia where you know it's a like this a mountain village and somebody saw him there and they were like tony hawk you know that's one of the only english word they said to us all day they identified tony hawk on a in ethiopia that's how famous that guy is so that's an amazing guest to have on the show imagine being that famous that you get recognized in the middle of countries where like nobody speaks your language and they maybe don't even have skateboard yeah we were there trying to give people clean water they didn't even have water but then knew tony hawk that's how that's how famous i got amazing awesome well if you wanna hear more from jordan we're gonna be having him on more and more he's a friend of friend of the house and you should listen to the show it's one of the podcast podcasts that i would recommend if you liked tim ferris this stuff if you like our stuff you're gonna like his stuff and so go check out the jordan harbour show on itunes spotify wherever you get your podcast you'll find him there layoffs happened guess her at airbnb my wife works there she was not laid off still suck what did she say about it i mean i'll say this because it not like she's like showing me this stuff but we live in a small house so when she when she talks when cup her company talks to her i definitely hear some of it even though we're different rooms and i think brian handled it wonderfully i read the letter he put out and it was great and i think a couple weeks ago we kinda capped on somebody who had done an announcement that we didn't think was great and i thought this was an example of one that was pretty i also liked to previous it when in a previous meeting brian referenced that letter did okay nice what did he say i don't remember exactly but he was like yeah you know it's good that that he was able to do that i don't he's i don't remember i didn't wanna i don't even wanna be quoted because i don't remember exactly but i i think that he complimented it but he handled things brian handled things differently i think he he did great you know he he he was crying the other day we interviewed sofia rosa i think that i will speak for both of us because i think it's true that we both really liked her yeah i i tweeted this today i usually actually hate having guests i prefer if it's just me a new shooting the shit i think it guest kind of changes the dynamic the flow a lot but guests are good for growth so we put them and also i actually like the conversation with the guest it's just i don't think the podcast is very is has the same zip to it exactly but she was great and she was great for like this what sounds like the stupidest reason which was shoes just were really honest and just like said what it is and didn't try to make it sound better than it is and didn't make it un worse than it is didn't make it more dramatic it was just like here's what happened here's how much money you know we got offer we turned it down for this reason i kinda regret it i i guess i kinda learned from it but you know she even said an urban retailer try to buy them right yeah exactly i was like oh okay so urban outfitters is there any other i don't know if that's like if i my brain's too literal or what but i just thought she was really candid and we've had guess we've run i would say two or three episodes with people that we literally just didn't publish because we were like this person came on they weren't real they didn't share real stories real numbers they kind of stayed on the surface and it's kind of a not an info commercial but like it definitely was too guarded and so we just didn't run the episode we just have it in the in the vault and this was the opposite of that yeah she did great i really liked her i i followed up with her and just said thank you and i don't do that a lot well i should do that with we guess but i don't yeah we we should do it all time but we i have it i have it written down i'm sending one out today also thank eric because yeah it anyways great let's talk about a bunch of ideas i have some cool ideas to bring up can i tell you something that i've done though since saturday and i didn't mean to do this but i was like a day in and i was like let's just try this since saturday the only calories i've consumed other than a little bit of almond milk in my coffee has been meat you're going car for no i've not like going car i was just like you know you happen to do it it i just it just like it worked out that way and i was like let's just pursue this thread and i've already lost weight but so what what are you doing what's what's breakfast i i don't i don't typically eat breakfast my first meal typically at noon today i had hot wings so just baked chicken wings with frank's red hot which i guess that is a calorie but i thought frank's maybe it was yeah but it was just chicken wings less yesterday i ate a lot of rib eye and i ate ground beef and chicken and then are you planning to keep this up or wet i don't know so like i'm eating healthy because i challenged this guy to a race so i'm i gotta lose weight in order to get fit and i have a planned cheat day on may seventeenth and i've already ordered all my food that i'm gonna eat on that cheat day and so i won't keep it up until then i ordered it from gold bell which was is the coolest thing i've found in a long time have you heard heard of that tell you you you talked about it you tweeted about it or something and i was like a good name what is this and then it's like pies what what the hell is yeah so this is business talks so i'll bringing this up so what gold belly does is it's gold belly dot com i think they it's gold belly with one l which i think is stupid but what they do is so let's say sean you're from well you're not really from anywhere because you've been all over the place but let's say you grew up in like i grew in then i spent a lot of time in texas you grew up in let's say dallas and there was this one bakery that you love there and they sell i don't know what a texas dessert but let's say it's a bundle cake i don't know some texas y thing and you can only get it in texas which is the case which a lot of mom pop places and you wanna it you call them and you're like hey can i order like this one thing you guys have it's like pain in the ass well they're just a store that helps facilitate that so lou mo is a famous place in chicago for pizza i ordered a pizza from there there's a bunch of pie and doughnut and cake places in new york and there's bagel places that i ordered from and then there's some places in saint louis where i'm from that is just is you don't see that anywhere else and so it's just like a two that so so they mail it in some way that kinda like preserves it and it's a it's in like if you ordered a pizza from chicago so the restaurant mails it the restaurant mails it what happens when you get it should a gold belly box it's in a gold belly box and it has ice in it that's all it is which ships really well typically right so they just freeze it ahead of time so i ordered a deep dish pizza from lu it's a it's it was pretty frozen and then they threw ice at pack on top of it and i'll probably get here in a three year or four days so that's amazing okay i i like the guy who is is it doing i was a small thing yeah so the guy who started his name is jason go i forget his name but he they went through y comb previously he the ceo of deliver dot com so he has a history in the restaurant business they raised close to thirty million dollars and no joe joe ariel his his name he their office was up the street from my house i live in a residential neighborhood and they had a house so they lived out it and they went to y comb and i have to imagine they're booming right now they're booming so much so that the pizzas all all have delayed delivery due to high demand and so and the delivery charge is interesting the delivery charge is very hefty it's it wasn't cheap ordering two pizzas was like eighty dollars right but they know they're playing on the sort of an nostalgia the like special moment type of thing like if i gave somebody gave my wife like her favorite thing from her hometown it's like an amazing gift it's so thoughtful and food is like a you know the universal gift so so a couple of things so yes they raised thirty three million it's gold belly with two l's so normal belly normal belly it was gold belly with one else before okay got the second elk good okay so this is kinda cool so this could be a thing so like i grew up you said all over the place one of the things that happened was in high school i moved to beijing right so i finished high school in china and then i hopped around i lived in indonesia i lived in australia and one thing that happens is you if you're kind of an american living over there you're called an expat and expat patreon and so expat like you start to have these expat cravings for just like simple things that you just can't find in beijing it's like oh dude what i would give to have a box of reese's puffs cereal right now and you'll pay like twenty two dollars for that box of reese's pub cereal and there stores there that just do this they just import the like your favorite snacks from america and they just sell them at like a five x upc charge and then other people they they're sort of this sort of like drug you know can't dump drug donkey or whatever thing where it's like okay you fill up a suitcase with this one rare item that people want and you bring it back when you go for a trip and so i could see this you know this gold thing it sounds kinda when you first started describing is sounded i'm kinda stupid and now i'm pretty no it's not stupid one one of the reasons why it's not stupid is if you go to the website they've done a wonderful job of creating the brand so yeah they make it seem fun but also they have so many photos and they tell the story of the brand and they do a really good job and two other examples of people who do this wonderfully that of telling the stories of the products the first is hu berry so what the the business of hu it's basically a huge email list of one to two million guys and what they do is they find really cool clothes and they tell the story behind it so for example they had a duff bag that was made from a the founder was an army guy who used the sky dive and the duff bags were made out of old parachutes because apparently that's like a interesting material and they told the story about this and they just blasted it out in the email and they just take a cut of the revenue and it's a like a bootstrap company that does probably twenty dollars or thirty million dollars a year in sales and telling the story behind of what you're selling is really important and the second pete bill who do it is airbnb they do a really good job of telling of helping craft the story okay i like this so i i've never seen hot either so okay so here's what i would do listening and i'm an entrepreneur and i got some time on my hands right now you know there there's a version of this that is you know like tim ferris and these other guys they are kind of like con of products like you know kevin rose it's like oh you know what's you know what coffee mug do or what coffee blender do you use it's like i use this one it's made of matcha wood and it does this other thing and it's so special and you can only get this in puerto rico or whatever and so there's all these products where people care about sort of the best of the most well made is how you define best here and so you know whether it's wallets headphones it's this type of stuff you find on like mass drop or whatever but if i was somebody i would build a brand i build an email this around what is the absolute best of x product and maybe it's something that you can only find in a local geography like you know that's what kind of gold bill is doing is it's like the best pizzas oh you want shake shack that you live in you know arizona and shake shack on in arizona here it literally and i can see it on the website it's forty nine dollars to get shake shack delivered to you in arizona and so if you can tell the story of how crazy good this thing is how people go nuts for this thing and how it's the most well made well crafted pocket knife or whatever those items are i think you could get a lot of people to impulse buy and like yeah i want one if you could just just tell the story i do that constantly i buy stuff i go a wire cutter on a daily basis and i'll buy interesting things like i love gadgets so i bought a power washer from wire cutter i don't really need one but i bought one because it just looks like i nifty cool gadget i'll wire cutter has a long article and the best aluminum foil so i bought it just to try and so there's a few other but i think it's cool i bet you operator knows but at all the youtubers they get ask the same question which is what equipment microphone camera you're using and so at the bottom they have a link to like my kit and you click it and you go to like casey neistat hats k equipment kick and and and if people buy that stuff they get a an affiliate feed and so i think that those business models are fantastic yeah there's something cool here i like this and i think old belly is one of those sneaky good ideas i'm gonna say it's sort of airbnb es in a way where it's like tapping into this thing that people want that sounds a little unusual it's like how many people really wanna do that how many people really wanna stay in a you know a stranger home rather than a hotel and it's sort of like that it's like how many people really wanna order the best bagel from new york and it's like you'd be surprised is the answer yeah i think i think that it's a pretty good idea with amazing execution i'm very into gold valley i just discovered them in the past month and i think that had i discovered them prior i would have loved to have invested right okay cool what what are some other ideas you got you want one or or you want me to throw one you do one it that i got another one okay so here's the company that i am interested in investing in i've been talking to the founder of a company called nana maybe i should even say this because i kinda wanna invest before say it but whatever let's put it out there so the company called nana i discovered it because my dryer broke at home and you know i got in that's that shitty shitty state where you run the dryer three times to drive one load and it's like oh fuck what's happening this is not how it's supposed to be but i don't how to fix a dryer and like my wife's looking at me like are you a man or not it's like no no we already know i'm not i can't fix this dryer and so then i'm like okay cool where am i gonna look in a manual goddamn that's gonna suck and so what nana does is they solve this problem of a appliance repair but the way they're doing is very interesting so there's this extreme shortage of technicians who can repair appliances there's more appliances that need repairing than there are technicians available technicians tend to be older they're aging out of the workforce and young people are not really going into that profession even though you can make a lot of money so the back here is the founder of this company he's kind of like a small time hustle entrepreneur he had a cloth like a jeans store in israel in a mall and he had this other little thing that he was doing there and he's kinda hustling and making it work so he built a couple small businesses when he was in america he needed to pay his student loans he's like do i pay off like two hundred grand in the next like eighteen months and what he did was he saw his friend was repairing appliances and was making like twenty k a month and he's like whoa okay how do i learn how to do that and so he started repair he started learning how repair appliances he started doing it and he ended building a little like a one man service company that he hired up a couple other technicians under him and he was doing like two million a year in revenue he paid a whole his loans and he built a company overall over the kind of two three years it did about five million in revenue on his parent company repair wow so then he was like alright i'm gonna build and what he's built is basically lambda school for technician so you can say okay i wanna make this much money i wanna you know you pick your own hours but you can make good money if you're a technician and you don't know anything and so he's like cool i can train you in one month to repair one appliance and then in the next month i can teach you a second appliance and you know within a few months you'll have all the appliances but the whole time you can actually start working after one month you pretty much start working start making money repairing let's say dishwasher or fridge or whatever and so on one hand he's training up a technician workforce so it's a trade school for technicians and on the other side he's partnering with the manufacturers of these appliances who get the customer complaint that says hey my thing's broken and they these companies are looking to dispatch a local repairman to go fix it they don't wanna run that local repair you know fleets themselves so they used to use sears sears headlight i don't know tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of technicians in their workforce but sears has kinda gone downhill so he's trying to be the like best option for getting every lead when somebody needs a repair it's like cool we're like uber you tell us where the repair is our guys do a good job you push a button and they get dispatched and so i really like this company i'm trying to invest and i just love the concept in in general okay i like that i i don't know the economics out of it but i do know craft you know i craft yeah it was a little bit similar where what they so explain what they did from so what craft does is if you broke your iphone eight it's you take it to the the store and it's typically pretty expensive three hundred and fifty dollars to fix the screen for some phone and what i corrected was well regardless of which phone you break an it tech will come to your home and fix it for you now these businesses are actually a little bit sneaky and i i i wanna maybe you could tell you about nana is typically the way they work is they're a little bit more of a e com or marketplace than you think so they're the name of the secret to their business and ones like it is getting loads and loads of it text and then on the other side getting loads and loads of leads so they just have to go out and buy advertising rank on google for repair my iphone and then someone comes into their system they go alright i need an iphone and then their technology dispatch or i need an iphone fixed dispatch that lead to any it tech in the neighborhood or in the area and they also have to make sure that this it tech is like clean and nice and right reliable and things like that and train and the way they make money typically is they take a small cut of the fee which is pretty small small enough that it's almost like their it's like lead gen and then they sell the it text all of their screens repair tool and tool and so is nana kind of like that no so so basically they so it's is similar in some ways but i think they economics a little different i think they'll end up with like a twenty to twenty five percent margin per job so like average job will be like i two hundred bucks the technician will make about half of that there there's a parts cost and then there's what they take right so like let's call it round numbers just for just to sort of i can't give away exact but let's say a job is about two hundred bucks half of that will go to the technician twenty five percent will go to the parts cost and then twenty five percent is left over for them to take at the end twenty twenty five percent and so they don't charge the technicians they're not trying to make money there in fact they're going the other way which is they're trying to hand technicians sort of a career in a box it's like hey do you wanna be making eighty grand a year hundred fifty grand a year or whatever it is repairing these things like watch you download this app and it's like uber it's like a job will get dispatched to you you can choose to take it or not and you wear this brand and this brand means that you're a trusted technician and it's like a franchise model basically for for these like freelance technicians so i like i think it's awesome let let's talk about reasons why this would suck yeah the first reason why it would suck is so the reason why i think home joy and cleaning services are really hard and a lot of them went out business and a lot of them are only okay businesses is because for two reasons the well the yeah two reasons the first is when you have a cleaner who comes in and out often they're just shit like a cleaner is good after you get to know them for a handful of tries so they understand the difference between each person's clothes so they understand where the everything goes and so it's the second reason is also a matter of trust you really wanna trust them and you can't always trust that with home joy i mean you get a little bit of like well they represent the brand i know the brand will reimburse me and then the third reason is if i find someone who's really good i say hey fuck this platform just come to my house every two weeks i to pay you yes and so that's those are the three reasons why i think this would not work but this is different right because this is not repeat you're you don't have a broken appliance every two weeks where you're gonna like dis intermediate the platform and say hey let's just do this direct right so this is a very good thing you do so the other thing is that they're not acquiring customers directly so they're not like home joy or cherry which was a car washing company which is basically spending a ton of money trying to get a customer and then and then trying to make back the money what these guys are doing is they're getting free customer leads because they are solving a problem for the b2b vendor they're b2b partners which is like you know the maker of the washing machine the maker of the washing machine has the lead they're just gonna decide who do we dispatch this lead to and if these guys can prove that we are faster and we do the job and your your customers will stop calling you saying the thing is broken then they will become the preferred partner and so they're proving right now where they're getting they're becoming the partner for a whole bunch of these different vendors and that's like the unproven part but it's much better than if they were trying to just generically market on facebook or google and say hey sam if you ever have an appliance to prepare using and i like hopefully i'm hopefully i'm putting my ad here while you have this problem which would be really really hard to do so it's no i don't think that no i i actually disagree i don't think that would be hard to do at all and i think that's actually a great thing to do because when you search locksmith or broken search is different right search search makes sense i'm talking about just facebook ads or whatever words oh no no you need what's the difference in advertising contextual and and i forget but you you you need search you need search where there's intent i needed my buy me by fridge fixed right that's different than just i'm scrolling on facebook and somebody says we fixed fridge why do they raise money a business like that could be prop like profitable pretty fast so the reason why the this is i think the real challenge which is they have to get all these different it's a it's a local type of business so you have to build up supply density of technicians and demand in every single city for this to work and so that's why they're gonna need money because they're gonna have to bridge this gap where if there's you know the vendors aren't gonna give them leads if they don't have technicians the technicians aren't gonna come on board if there's no jobs to do and so they have to figure out how they're gonna bootstrap atlanta and then peach tree georgia and then this other suburb of georgia right like city by city they're gonna have to build up supply and demand like uber did basically and and so i think that's the main challenge and that's why they're gonna need money to be able to do it but that if i was gonna say why did it fails because damn i'm solving that local supply demand thing is not easy it's like dating apps have this problem too if i downloaded a dating app and i have nobody nearby to match with i delete this dating app and i move on and the dating apps that win aren't ones that make you a better date they're ones that figure out how to get a bunch of guys and girls in one city on the app at the same time i like this though i like people who are hustle like this guy that good fine the best the best part is that he wanna talk to it himself as a as a repair guy for two years or whatever that's like where you're like okay you're not just the typical sort of like op opportunistic who's like oh ice researched this market and i saw there's lots of appliances in the world did you say he and did you say he's israeli the league is israeli yeah i could be wrong i have a whole bunch of israeli where in tennessee i was friends with i ran around i dated a girl who was friends all israeli so all my friends ended up becoming like a bunch of israeli guys and they they all were locksmith like they all had like side hustle as locksmith and i was like this guy's name was with ram was like ram what is this locksmith shit he goes dude i make like half a million dollars a year has a locksmith because i like i learned how to rank on google and anytime i get a lead i just sent it to my friends and a lot of my friends came here from israel and i just said hey come i'll give you like a twenty five dollar an hour job and they come here and like you know they were rely me so they all work hard and and anyway this whole the this this is part and he told me he was like this is part of israeli cultures this this industry and it's super good rich i love that i think i told this before but say it again because i i i love this thing i i read this thing once which was like if you i wanna look up if it's like if so there's a tool for tool tip for hiring it's like let's say you wanted to hire a locksmith you don't wanna hire the best locksmith the guy who's best at fixing your lock you wanna hire the guy who's who's named his company aaa locksmith why because he's thinking about in the yellow pages how do i be the first listing for locksmith it's like aa aa locksmith it's like that's the person you wanna hire which is somebody who's good enough at unlocking the doors but is actually thinking through how to grow and how to get business and customers and not just a locksmith with who's spending all their time getting better at repairing locks and not thinking about how they're gonna get customers i was saying i'm trying to hire triple locksmith and nobody knows what the fuck i'm talking about i'm gonna name all my businesses alright what else you got just fucking ring okay a few weeks ago we talked about jd d power do you remember that briefly not really actually that's okay i said briefly as if i did but i totally didn't okay i'm gonna talk about a similar business okay and i and i i've talked you about them do you know what ga heard the name but i i couldn't explain their their business to me to you okay so i just subscribed to this guy's subscription it's really good i'm gonna give him a shout out it's it's called sc blurb he's just this door like i am and he just talks about interesting companies but he does incredible breakdowns and he had this one in ga and i've known a lot about ga because i think our company can almost become something a little bit similar but not quite but it's in the it's in the similar ballpark so ga before the corona it was worth about forty billion dollars i think or twenty billion whatever it's worth now it was worth double that and so it's a big company like three billion dollars a year in sales it was i read the bag the guy started he's interesting another is well what on what are they there what does ga do what do this yeah i'm explain and so okay and so the way in which people explain it it's not it does not make sense but when let's dive deep and and it will make sense so what they do is they research a variety of it tools so like what's the best tool for hr stuff what's the best marketing tool what's the best sales crm and what's the best finance tool if you're a big company you pay them a subscription fee ranging from twenty thousand dollars a year to two hundred thousand dollars a year and in exchange you get access to a database of research that examine this as well as a consultant who you can call and they can answer your questions now that sounds like a stupid thing right like why would you need that like why can't you just pick and and and that's weird and in a way it is weird but the the reason why they're so successful is for three reasons okay the first reason is that people say they want like if you so there's a a hundred thousand companies in america they have a it budget north of ten million a year and so they have to research and order to make sure they're like spending their money effectively and so they want ga research and apparently their research are really good but they're not that good now the second reason why it works and now this is what's interesting and this is the the angle i wanna get at in a second which is they buy it because any executive or it person who's making a decision on their like which like they're gonna buy like right you know five thousand laptop they they say well ga said i should use this one just so they don't fires because the execs trust ga and so they only do it they per not only but one of the biggest reasons they do it is so just cover their ass like well i don't don't blame me gardner and then the third reason why and this is where shit is also really interesting it's because they're salesforce they have this training where they where you get hired and they take you away for like a few weeks they throw you in a hotel and they doc and doc coordinate you on how to sell and use sell through their process and then at the bottom they find like the twenty percent of people who they just don't think you're gonna make it and they just fire them right away and so they create like a f alternative or so of like a amazing process of salespeople and a lot of analysts think the reason this company is any good is because their sales culture is so phenomenal and i find that to be incredibly interesting because that is not what most people would think but having like a pretty good research department but that's not significantly bit better than all the other competitors but a super good sales team is what made this company work out well and that is interesting and so when you hear this and you're like okay you said i think we could do something like actually think about that like okay what is the modern day version of this or how do we what what would be our version of this well yeah so here's a few examples which is harvard business review do you know harvard i you familiar with them harvard business review makes three hundred million dollars a year in sales and it's like half profit harvard business review like the publisher makes more revenue than harvard business school choices tuition yeah if you if you wanna all the annual reports or online so it's great to go look at harvard business school reports and the business review as well b and they make money through subscriptions and then they also sell like millions of case studies a year and why do you buy a harvard business review case study or just because it says the name harvard on it so it's real that's the the moat is building a brand that people like just trust and know and so that's kinda hard but that's definitely doable if you have the right skill set but the second thing is once you get entrenched in into your salesforce because trench a lot of people who are building stuff they don't know this because they think to themselves if i have the best product i'm gonna win that's not true and so when i think about this i'm like well i wanna have the best product but also like how do i just like build this massive sales culture and so what i wanna know to you sean is first of all what are other things in which people need to cite someone else they don't get fired because that's where like the app that's like a an interesting human cycle like that that's like an interesting psychological trick to exploit but then how do you feel about this whole sales thing because you read about people like i have no idea if this is true but let's just say like elon musk he's like no fuck salespeople people which i think might be true they don't hire salespeople people and that's like sexy and like romantic but do you so let's talk about the first one so the first thing is the the learning as an entrepreneur which is a lot of people buy your shit not because you have the best product they buy this like what is the job to be done of ga like you're saying it is to inform yes for sure i'm gonna get some information from this but really it's because when i present my proposal that we're gonna spend eight million dollars this year on x y z i need to that to not be me sean saying that we should spend eight million dollars i need that to be saying sean thinks that we should take the ga recommended path and do this so it it is c cover your ass so so so i do think there's that now this is just a general and i've see this with a whole bunch of different research things right so like there's a whole bunch of market research things that right now at my company when somebody says hey we wanna go after this opportunity and they present their research and you know the the source cited is is super important now we pay a lot for these research reports thousands of dollars who so it'll be like like for example in into esports world news zoo is a niche one that really talks about gaming and they talk about esports a lot and so using news all the time forget about the fact that news if you just go back and read their report from four years ago they're like oh esports will be at x billions of dollars and then this year now four years later it's a smaller number than they predicted like the prediction now for four years from now is smaller than it was four years ago about today so like they're wrong a lot that we we should not take their word as like you know any good here but you know because they're predicting and humans are should it predicting but i see that i see it on the like kinda like market market data so we need data about like smartphone penetration in a country the wireless you know what is the wireless speeds what is the disposable income in this should we go into this country or not all these things are there's not us like googling like we have to get to some like a deloitte paper that we pay three thousand dollars for or some some subscription we have that gives us this data that we can say look i'm not the one estimating these numbers that's them and they're a big brand and so i think that mckinsey is another brand like harvard i think if google or or amazon wanted to get into this business and say hey these are google case studies they could compete with harvard but i think as an individual person i've i've looked at this because i was like dude i could make i could write better case studies for business schools than harvard business review i know it i've bought their case studies and i know what i could do but i'm like it doesn't matter because they're not trying to buy the best case studies they're trying to buy harvard studies because that is better for their business school brand so i hear you on that i hear you on that and that you say in a way to persuade people not to do this or you persuade myself that i totally get it i come from the other end which is wow that's like their most so it might take me a little while to do it but once i do it man i'll make money for a hundred years yeah i think that's true like you wanna be in a def defensive business and unfortunately def defense businesses are pretty hard to to overtake so it's like the barrier to entry is the same reason you want to enter in the first place now i do think if you could find an angle like you go after a niche that they're not aware of that's cool right like i've thought about doing this which is instead of doing case studies on existing sort of legacy industries and businesses i know that these eight incumbents a really shit at at the cutting edge and so i'm like i could make the school of the future and we talk about cryptocurrency and we talk about a whole bunch of stuff that harvard business review is not gonna talk about for four years and so you could become the the thought leader or the stamp the the sort of credible authority in that new space like you guys could do it with d or trends or whatever right like that two pm guy right that's what we're doing with trends this is what we're doing with trends so this is why it interests me but what space would you do i think i would do so like you went on pumps podcast and i think he's been trying to do this with cryptocurrency now he's trying to do it towards consumers but i think you could sell knowledge about this to existing financial institutions at a very very high price i think you could just be scraping data about the current you know the twenty twenty cryptocurrency bitcoin landscape and i think you could sell that for thousands of dollars to all the consulting firms all the financial institutions and you could get to single digit millions in revenue pretty quickly there then you add a conference then you kinda go from there and so i think that's one where i would go towards a niche that the existing big brands don't cover because it's not their of expertise and also it's small today and so they're they're still covering all the big spaces like agriculture or whatever else okay and what do you think about the having i personally when i started my company i was like i don't want to be a sales organization i i hate salespeople i i wanna only be around like nerds not like alpha loud obnoxious now you've no who were having a sales i mean i like the results and the our salespeople people are our salespeople people are in fact the most fun like they're just like greg gary fun to be around that's like their job is to be likable but i think if you have sales driven organization it it isn't always yeah i i don't think so either i also think you gotta be i so my my take on that sales thing is every business is selling it's just a question of are you selling with salesman are you selling with digital ads are you selling with like elon is clearly one of the greatest salesman of all time and then he talks about how they don't employ salespeople but well that's part of his sales pitch that our product is so good we don't need salespeople and you know he does his sales through twitter and through video presentations like on stage and all different types of things where they you always gotta sell it's just a question of what's the vehicle i think you should just choose the tool that fits your product right so like if you have a high priced enterprise product then you should have a a fleet of enterprise salespeople people that's not always the case so atlas and claims they have no sales enough you can try to be the outlier but i'm saying like if you're and and all these companies do switch right so like slack and what on i believe now as they're trying to go get multi million dollar contracts with companies most of their revenue comes from right it comes from direct sales human salespeople people do it going out and doing things and and this is a fact by the way this is in their filing which is most of their revenue is driven by a handful of right and so i think like you know depending on what your product is and the price point of it that dictates if you have such a low price point item you just can't afford sales people and so you gotta get creative and be like okay i'm gonna sell through content marketing i'm gonna sell through you know digital ads i'm gonna sell through these other methods but you're always selling one way or another so we where this podcast is gonna be relatively short you wanna talk about oh well okay so last week we were talking about youtube channels do do we bring this on behalf so this is on twitter somebody who's song right i don't remember it all one world to me but you someone brought up is buying a youtube channel like good idea i think in most cases is it is a absolutely horrible idea and you should never do it now i was part of a a friend bought a a a website that was a content site that got a fair bit of traffic and he it came with a youtube channel that had maybe two million subscribers and so i went and get took a screenshot of the revenue and so the revenue starting in january of two thousand and nineteen to december thirty first twenty thousand nineteen your estimated revenue is two hundred and forty two thousand dollars and that is with eighty million views right and i said that again eighty million million views translated into two hundred forty grand yes so to me the answer is that sucks and i would not wanna do that and it it it's definitely different what the person was saying was hey you guys had andrew wilkinson on he rolls up internet companies hey why don't you roll up youtube channels that monetize well you could buy a whole bunch of them niche ones and and own them and that's fantastic and i was like this is a horrible idea youtube videos are are often very dependent on talent like a personality and when you buy them out you sort of take them out of the game the second thing is youtube videos are very dependent on the platform the algorithm and the search this the way that the youtube search works and that can change on a dime and when it does you're thinking and our friend actually has the youtube channel that's like this that it was doing x and now it's doing you know x divided by five overnight because da go changed and there's nothing you could do about it now it is valuable in the case of like you're nick bear and you're like a or your sophia which she doesn't have a youtube channel but like her instagram page is probably the same thing where i bet she could just pocket a quarter of a million dollars here just want the the occasional ads or on her instagram but the real value is her saying i am the ceo of whatever company i'm the ceo of here's my product check it out by it yeah that that is true youtube channels can be valuable of i'm saying buying other people's youtube channels i think is a poor way to buy your way into cash flow if you're gonna buy your way into cash flow buy a you know an apartment building that's that's spinning off cash or buy a business that's not dependent on a personality it's a you know piece software that just runs that's what i would do i if i wanted to buy cash flow now i'm gonna make a i'm gonna make a point that disregard and everything we just said which is the company group nine media which owns thrill ben lee as the ceo he bought seeker and seeker i i became friends with the guys who run it it was ran by five to ten guys in the dog patch here in san francisco and they would make educational videos on a variety of things and they bought it and they bought it for a couple million bucks so that is a an example of a youtube channel that is not so i was gonna bring up a similar one but which is those people i think are stupid they still should have bought it so so i had a friend unless the price was unless the price over so we've talked about my friend on the podcast before steve bartlett so steve was a a young guy he came in i think it was kinda like an intern basically but he was know i hired him when he was twenty years old he wanted to come work with us i worked with him for a bit honestly he was kind of a shit employee but he's turned out to be a great entrepreneur and built a company that's now you know sort of somebody got public in europe or something weird but he's built you know he's built a fortune of tens of millions of dollars for himself and and what the way he got started was by buying twitter and instagram accounts that were not owned by a personality influencer but by a theme account like i love food or whatever they have they have i think love food and it's got like six million or seven million instagram followers and they bought that account and he was figuring he figured out pretty early wow the people who run these accounts with a million million followers it's eighteen year old kid and i can offer a thousand bucks and i can get the account and he's just you know doing affiliate links for protein powder but if i aggregate all these i can go sell this to spotify as a great way to reach the masses and i can control these they're not based off of a person's face and a personality they're based off of you know harry potter memes or whatever and i can just i can just hire you know a whole bunch of fungi people to keep posting on those accounts that was a smart business plan that it did have some platform risk but the cost was so low and the personality risk was also zero and that was a pretty genius way of going about it i'm definitely a little bit allergic to schemes like that because i i don't wanna hate on him for doing that because if it it seems like it works to him i personally think i would never tell someone to do that though because i think that is short term money that can go away in a heartbeat now some people definitely pull it off but i'm allergic to that shit where i i'd rather not have stress about like wrong about that in the in that he was spending so little on it he was making his if you're making your money back in one month then there's no risk it can go away and you still like you still will end up ahead so it's all about what is what's the payback period on the thing is it a high priced item these were so low priced that he's was making his money back so quickly he's just free rolling from there and so that i'm not disagreeing with the result it it worked out wonderfully for him or i don't i don't know it seems like it did but i just personally would not wanna do that because i'm like dude if you're gonna spend like ten years your life doing something like make it make it something kinda cool like it just i i just it just it would be hard for me to like love that and i don't think a lot of people would love it really crazy to me i i think if i'm twenty one years old right now and i was running the sort of you know he could push a button and make things trend on the internet all over the place right so i think that's an awesome thing to do for somebody who's you know you don't have capital you don't have investors you don't have like any real hard skills can't code can't design can't do any of those things i thought this was a great sort of entrepreneurial thing to do from age twenty too i don't know how he's down twenty seven or something like that and he's i'm not hating the player here i'm not hitting the player here i think the game is stupid but if you got he got results i just think that it's kinda like a solace but he's office something is a media company right to like all he was doing was saying great i'm gonna buy these media properties this is a brand with an audience that cares about food or fitness or whatever it is and i'm gonna create content that they love and occasionally gonna run sponsorships how is that different than the house on paper it's not so you own an email list so hustle better that way right because you you like what happened was a lot of their twitter accounts yeah i don't care about that but you can't really get shot i think yeah i can't get shut down it it is a little different though from my perspective it's on paper it is the exact same thing it's a little bit different because i actually give a shit which maybe he does give a shit about his people his audience but gotcha so you love the topic there and the audience as well the community of of people that would be the difference yeah like i love the idea of building a brand that people know and love and trust so like what maybe some people do love these brands but like what let's say like let's say let's go with news so let's go with cnn which is in the left and fox is on the right like to their audience they're like a source of truth which people can debate all day that's true or not but they are now compare that to like fringe like far left like news things that are just like clickbait and far right that's clickbait it's like that's the difference it's like well what's the difference between porn and a a documentary where there's nudity to be like you know what when you see it and so this is like one of those things where it's like well it's nudity like well it's a little different tend slightly different you know the way feed kinda started with the stupidest of the stupid list and quizzes and now does like a bunch of investigative journalism and create a tasty and all these other things i think you can evolve that like they did this with with their stuff too they used to buy little meme accounts and post stuff all the time to go viral and over time they built then a woman's fashion like a at leisure brand where they're selling products into that community they built a a news channel that's sort of like a espn that's focused on sport but in a in a millennial kind of way and so they ended up upgrading the like i'll say level of quality around their things but it's because they had this asset that could make any of their pages big and they that was like their renewable app i agree i think i think that's i think that's possible i think that's possible i just personally don't find it to be incredibly exciting but i buy right i understand okay cool i like when we disagree makes for good good conversation alright let's try to squeeze one more and i got two minutes left what's one more thing we could talk quickly about you have something in mind okay let's do this one so why did oh what are you gonna say pray you have some stuff elon weird tweets and okay let's do this one real quick so i tweeted this thing out i said hey you know give me a book recommendation get or what's a book that you read that changed the way you see the world and i tweeted this out and i got like five hundred replies which was probably like the most reply to tweet ever had everybody gave me like ten books which is just way too much right i can't read that in one lifetime but ironically so i ended up with a good book recommendation out of i got i got a list bought all the books i started i started reading one of the books as a book called story worthy and i fucking love this book and nobody and there it was only one person who recommended this book out of the whole list of five hundred reply who reply and so story worthy is a book by this guy matthew dick's who's matthew dick's he is a teacher i think in connecticut he you you know how people do like slam poetry at these like open mic nights or whatever so there's a version of that for storytelling called like the math storytelling competition you just go to this little bar or whatever on yeah i love them off i listen to do it all the kinds he is the like twenty time moth champion storytelling that's cute he's he's he michael jordan of the math the problem is the moth is so small that nobody knows about it but anyways this guy is just a dude the moss that's small the the math is big if we're pulling our audience i've bet less than one percent know the math or something it's like npr where it's like it has a a large audience but maybe they're not like nineteen year olds who where and so so i listen to one of this guy's guy stories i was go that that's pretty good story but i read this book and this book is awesome because this book breaks down the art of storytelling and you will like i already feel like a better storytelling just from reading i've read three four to the books so far and i'm like wow this is one of the most useful books i've read in a long time because i walked away being like oh that's why the stories i love that's why i love them and for the stories that i go to i have my two or three go to stories that i'm like these stories kill i know i now know why they kill and i know why my other stories don't kill and so i'm like this you know how to like take advantage and capture people's attention and convince them to do stuff now yeah part it could be used for persuasion but i i don't think that's really definitely not his intent because he's like a you know six grade teacher or whatever i don't know but that's the that's the intent of all stories there's capture a attention that to move somebody you know emotionally right so it's a it's to get somebody to feel something now you can use that to get them to feel excited about your product or you can get that to make them feel like they'd like you and they wanna just hang with you more or whatever it is right and so idling storytelling is a superpower this book story worthy is fucking legit you should read it and next thing i'm gonna do an example of like good story your first bad story but i ran out of time today awesome this was a short one give us a review please yeah i we i we both trying and i look at the feedback every single day and iterate based on your guys feedback so leave us a review awesome cool we're out see you