#95 with Craig Clemens of Golden Hippo - The 9-Figure Business You've Never Heard Of

so today we have craig what's your title actually are you ceo or founder what what are you what's your title i just use c cofounder because i need too many different things yeah okay so c cofounder founder golden hip i don't know how you describe your you you guys but i've craig i think i met you originally at a conference and we became friends and you just tweeted something the other day that got thousands of interactions and it caught my eye and we've we chat just as friends but you tweeted this thing what what did you tweet the other day it was the ten things we learned to at golden and hip out after spending a billion dollars of our own money on media and our own money so what is your company companies called golden hip we build brands direct to consumer and we are self funded so that's where of own money comes from how so like what what's a brand what what's an can you give an example or can you say what you guys sell yeah i can give an example so we partner some of the world's top doctors people of influence people of expertise and we help them bring their ideas out the world so probably the brand we're most well known for is a brand with a doctor named stephen gun who is a world famous heart surgeon he's an inventor of a device that is used in ninety percent of all heart surgeries and we partnered with him to bring nutritional supplements it's the world based around his ideas and philosophies okay and so what are examples of products that you guys are selling with gun country doctor country so doctor gun philosophy is that we humans are a condominium for bugs aka bacteria and he calls it hollow bionic and what that means is if you take care of the bacteria that lives in us you know the twenty five trillion bacteria in our gut you guys are all familiar with microbiome and on our skin that they will take care of their home which is your body so that's something all the products have in common is that they're designed nourish the bacteria that call you home so doctor gun has like how many skus like how many like is it like just like one or two products that you're selling to his audience or do you have like a whole store with like dozens of different things yeah yeah it's like i fifty something like that you know we have everything from specific digestive health supplements to coconut bars to coffee creamer you know the whole game and is it all physical stuff or is that any information the information is available on gun md when you subscribe to our newsletter you know we send it a high quality email newsletter we do go podcast podcasts with do a youtube channel but the information is all free the products are what people could and how many roughly how many brands like him do you guys have like dozens or hundreds or or like six yeah more like you know in the ten to twenty range i actually don't know exactly because we're always launching new brands and shutting down brands that don't work got it and at the beginning you said self funded you said well the tweets form that went viral that caught my attention any others is know here's what we learned spending a billion dollars of our own money on paid media and it wasn't it's about marketing and it was about how to spend money well self funded is that because you had a big win before this or is that because you bootstrap this kinda slowly but over time accumulated a big cash flow in business so give us kinda of the the brief history yeah great question so self funded because we bootstrap no this is not my first company and i was really fortunate in my younger days to have an amazing mentor who taught me all this shit you know i was one of those kids who fairly graduated high school out of one point seven gpa i went into the lucrative field of one point seven what is what do even how do you even get a one point seven i even know that's the thing that's what i had that's what i had it's a day plus it's my okay so let's see if it was the same reason i was because i just hated degree homework yeah same yeah so hey you doing homework never got the projects in on time you know had to go to summer school i was supposed to walk in the graduation but my mom was a teacher in the same school district and she kinda smooth the principal and on graduation day i get up there and they're calling the other c so they're like clark and then they go to whatever sea comes after cl with they skip my name so i walked up and come my my diploma but my poor grandma was sitting in the stands and she never saw me she's just waiting she's like i craig you know it's it's that you're still just trying to live down that disappointment get disappointed grandma it's like okay i need to to change the little now yeah i like donald trump all trying impress his dead father you know not me with my my grandma and so so you you're a crappy student and sam you were also a one point seven gpa type i've graduated with a two a two two which is slightly above a c average oh man i'm a rhodes scholar compared to you guys it's my three point one alright so and craig were you like business motivated at that time or you were just wondering i had zero motivation i went to community college because my parents dream was for us you go to college and went there i was delivering pizzas i've then really stepped my game up and started waiting tables which is a lot more in the tip jar than the pizza delivery and then i got a job as a tele marketer and that was a real game changer for me because it was the first time i was getting paid actually to use a skill now don't get me wrong i was pretty good delivered in pizzas but this time i was actually doing one on one calls with people and the job was selling tools and industrial supplies so i call these farmers out in iowa and i'd try to sell them drill bits and rent sets and things like that it was pretty bizarre at this moment point were you were you motivated like you know pursue a happiness where you're not gonna put down the phone you're gonna try to get you know more ten percent more calls than everybody else where you did you transform in that way or or what was it you know i really wasn't i always had this thing against working hard i think it was some sort of rebellion against my mom or something who was always telling me i need to work hard and go to school or i wouldn't amount anything and i think because of that i didn't wanna do my homework i didn't wanna put the hours in so i had an eight hour shift at tele marketing company and meant i got a better tele marketing job at a company that did credit card merchant accounts and that was like a legit corporate gig you know there were people there that were making six figures wearing suits and i showed up there a twenty one year old kid i would wear my collar shirt that i would wear at the night nightclub you know it's an office to at least have some sort of upscale tire and it was straight commission and i told the boss i walked in there so cocky because i was pretty good at the tools all that i said hey how many sales do i gotta get in my first month to get one of these corner offices and he says if you get twenty accounts you can have a corner i don't know what twenty accounts was so my first day i sat there pounding the phone and i got one guy who who's was kind of interested finally i stayed there till eight pm and got him this vaccinated in his form to sign up the credit card account i just bull this dude and he ended up backing out a few weeks later of course you know because that's that's usually what happens i got like twelve accounts that first month but i just really liked partying back then i was twenty one i was going to the bars and you know waking up with a crack of eleven thirty and that's when i'd roll into the office so even though i wanted to be this hotshot salesman and make six figures i just didn't have it when it came to being straight commission and picking my own hours my own hours would be like you know eleven thirty am to six or seven pm and then the guy who passes out the leads would see me rolling in there eleven thirty where am my shit from the night before and the good lead comes in there's someone else who's been there at six in six am trying to fuse his family he's gonna get to the good lead here you know so i did make forty something thousand dollars that year which was a game changer for me i was now rich quote unquote and i was still in my boring hometown which is thousand oaks california if you guys are familiar and i hated it there and all of my friends who did have their shit together that had real grades in college had moved down to san diego to go to san diego state or usd and so i packed up my bags and i moved down to san diego and i've tried to get other jobs doing merchant accounts i sold directv i did mortgage loans and i just could not find a job or maybe anywhere near that forty grand and since it was straight commission i never had to pay the taxes on you know it's so like you hold your own money and and you wait but well i was running through these dead end jobs i spent through all my savings so pretty appreciate i was like twenty grand in debt to the irs and that was a real low point for me because by that time my friends are starting to graduate college and they were getting a salary job driving the company cars and i was still going to mcdonald's with like a dollar off coupon for the two cheeseburgers and a coke and i was was pretty depressing so that's that's where i was and then you said you hooked up with someone a mentor and i know i think i know who's is this evan pagan yeah yeah do you know who this is sean i just heard about him yesterday when i was doing my research but no tell me tell me let me tell you who he is let me take a stab at this craig because this is from an outsider perspective and this is i think i could do a good job of relating this to anyone who doesn't know so evan pagan also went by david dean angelo i was a customer of this well i assume that your male and you're this is the pick artist guy yeah but i was on the i'm thirty one so i was probably only eighteen or sixteen when this stuff happened so i think i'm on the younger age of when this was at its peak and so this guy had this thing called double your dating and it sounds s i mean none sounds like it sounds like it's trying to like hook up with girls it's not it was about how to like build the relationship with people and i was sixteen pimple and i was like fuck i want a girlfriend and so somehow i came across this double your dating thing and you enter your email and he was he would send these super long like three thousand word emails only text about these stories and he would get you to buy his book and i've been evan is still around but at the time his stage name or whatever you wanna call it brand name was david d and i am pretty sure i don't know but i'm pretty sure he was selling thirty or forty or fifty million dollars a year of this book on how to date people is that right i can i can get into all the details of that for sure so i was in your shoes where i was eighteen i only kissed one girl and no i kissed two girls in high school the the first one was legit the second one i was at a party and there was a girl who had had thrown up she was twenty i i knew were kind of from my martial arts studio she had finished p and she was walking back to the party she was wrap her back of my head and made out with me that was my second kiss right you how are you only kissing two girls you look like mark wall what's going on did you growing a mark wall later or what happened so you know i left out the part about me not graduating college and stuff i was a virgin all that whole time i was a virgin till i was like twenty two i was really bad the so i was in these forums talking about how to meet girls and i just wanted to find a girlfriend that's all i wanted i was like saving my opportunity to have a girlfriend so that was my goal i wasn't trying to be a pickup artist i just wanted one but i was just not socially able to do so i was super shy i won you know they had the high school hall of fame so in junior high school i won most bash i was one to the shy guy in the whole school and so in high school i decided to do something about it and i would buy these books like i've noticed there's one called ninety two tricks for success and personal and business relationships and i would read these things that i'd test them out so i'd go up to like the cool guy at school and i was say hey man how was your weekend and he'd say it was i was yours i was oh it was good i you know rode my bike around and stuff well enjoy the rest of your day and he'd say okay cool and i i like yes i i had a normal conversation i did that i was able to speak with him and i wasn't an idiot so i was really bad but i worked in myself and so yeah i was in all these forums talking about meeting girls and i met a guy who knew a guy etcetera etcetera and he said you should meet this guy evan because he's also based in los angeles and evan was also a dating nerd so i meet him we hung out a couple times and lose touch when i moved down to san diego and then i'm working at this other tele marketing company and what you do at the end of a tele shift because the room has these speaker boxes so everyone can hear the calls is used start prank calling all your friends and so you know we grew up on the jerky boys and we had epic prank calls so i had the this prank call that was pretty epic i would i would call people up and well sean to give you an example what's a what's the name of your current or past girlfriend pass girlfriend jessica jessica okay cool so let's say sam and i buddies and be hey call my friend sean is ex his name is it extra current ex happily married now okay got it so call you up saying hey sean this is steve johnson with long international the revolutionary penis enlargement pill guaranteed to add two to three inches on length or four three to four inches in gi within thirty days we're having a special right now and get you two bottles for the price of one and you don't pay anything out of pocket until you see the results how would you like me to send it out to you and they'd say no no i'm not interested in that you know i'm good and i'm say well you know sean man to man i mean i'm good down there too but i mean couldn't we all just benefit a little bit from some more length and especially a little more earth i say oh no no i'm really good i i don't need that shit like well sean that is free to try you don't get billed unless you actually use it if you don't look down and see more gi it's not gonna cost you anything so let me just send you out of sample no obligation and if you like it great i'll charge your credit card if not you don't pay anything no no no i really don't need to okay well sean i wasn't actually supposed to tell you this but turns out you're referred to us does the name jessica i ring any bells then like oh fuck okay here's my address send me that shit right your friend on the phone and tell him they got fun so lot of good times at the office there so i hey guys i wanna take a second to answer one of the most common questions i get which is hey i got this great idea or hey my company is doing really well and i just need a developer i need somebody who knows how a code so that i can either bring this idea of to life or i can grow faster and you know i've been there before i've dabble in the no code tools trying to make it work sometimes that works most of the time it's not good enough tried to learn programming myself that was a waste of time and you know i've looked at to overseas platforms to say hey can i find an affordable developer you know i can't afford to somebody here in the states and california and japan some silicon valley prices but maybe i can afford a developer in the philippines or in eastern europe and the big challenge has always been finding somebody who's actually like good like they're vetted like i never know if somebody's gonna just take my money and run if they're actually a good developer a bad developer and how do i know if i knew how a code i could judge their stuff but i don't how a code so what what i really like about this week's sponsor lemon dot io is that they have a vetted marketplace of remote developers from eastern europe so i know the founder pretty well his named alex and what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster so you know if you go to lemon io you're getting a developer who is actually good it's good quality is gonna get the job done and so what the way it works is you go you type what you need hey i wanna build this app or i need to add an extra fund end developer to my team and i i don't wanna hire within twenty four hours they'll match you with the right developer if it's not the right developer you just tell them and they'll switch it you know basically for free it's a replacement guarantee and they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platform so you know you get one big savings when you just go outside the us or outside of europe and you you get somebody in kind of in either eastern europe or in philippine and southeast asia you know you know you save money there but lemon dot ios i is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this and so it's stupidly effective i would just kinda take advantage of this as long as they they can offer these rates it's pretty amazing and alex basically told me that for any my first million listener they will offer a fifteen percent discount on the first six weeks of work that you have done so if you want that done if you want a developer who is vetted who can build your projects go to lemon dot io o slash m f m again that's lemon dot io o slash m f m like my first million alright enjoy back to this week's episode there so i decided i wanted to prank call evan and i dialed up the phone i hadn't talked to him in a year or so and i decided to it myself because i didn't think he recognized my voice because i didn't know him that well i've been like a year and so i call him up i say hey evan it's steve johnson with the long two the revolutionary penis enlargement pill and he goes is this craig i'm like oh fuck so didn't get the fall at the frank call but we get to talking and i say what are you doing these days he said well you know i wrote a book with the dating advice that i've been giving out for free in the forums i call it double your dating and i've been selling it as an ebook i said what's an ebook is that like amazon he goes no it's a it's a file like a pdf file and i see what do you you charge them for this file it goes yeah i charged forty bucks and then i send them the file go a second so people you are or sending you forty bucks you don't even send them a real book and he's like no no it's information i was like dude you're gonna to jail man that sounds scam me fuck and he goes well i actually sold four thousand dollars worth ebooks last month okay you know not bad i talked to a month later he sold seventeen thousand dollars worth of ebooks i talked to a month after that he'd sold seventy thousand worth of ebooks so at this point i was like okay man i'm coming to work for you i'll shine your shoes i'll get your coffee i'll wash your car whatever you need i don't care if it's scam i just need to know seventy grand a month selling of these ebooks and he goes thanks but no thanks because he knew i was just you know party animal that didn't have any useful skills besides harassing people on the phone so i go to the website as sam can probably remember and it's not even a real website it says one sentence it says you're about to learn secrets most men will never know about meeting women and then it has three or four bullet points of what you'll learn like how to get a girl's phone number you know how to kiss a girl without getting rejected and says putting your name and email address that's it that's the whole damn site so i've put in my name an email address and i start getting these huge newsletters like sam was talking about with these dating tips and advice like you know first date ideas or you know what to do if you're fresh out of a relationship all this stuff and i'm reading now i'm like you know i can write this shit and so i sit down one day and i write one i never forget it was called two tips to kiss a girl and i was careful write it in this exact funny style that he wrote which was very conversational single sentence paragraphs and it was copywriting but i didn't know what that was i wrote it and sent it to him and he wrote me back and he said okay now we can talk and he gave me a job at three thousand dollars a month which was life saving at the time and i actually didn't get hired of copywriter i got hired to do link exchange do you remember those days when you have trade links or so and i started doing customer support but not like help me download the ebook but more when people write in and they'd say hey i'm thirty years old i just got divorced will this book help me get back in the game inside i'd right yeah absolutely will help you get back in the game there's something on page thirty six i'll tell you what to do to build your confidence so i was getting to the minds that customers doing that customer support and that made me a much better copywriter later so the numbers in that business at the time i joined you know that's what about what it was doing seventy grand a month and it was one fifty that men's dating brand eventually got up to about eight million a year but then we started one for women that was called catch him and keep him and the women's market was even more rapid i don't know why i that's your counter too i wouldn't have thought that yeah i think it's better more desperate for it need more help right but here's the thing that women's ads converted much better but it wasn't all track and the takeaway that we had and it's not a hundred percent sure if this is true but you know sam did you ever tell any your friends about that dating book you bought never a million years i didn't need either i wouldn't even tell people i worked at this company when people asked me what i do i'd just say oh i do you need this is the first time and that was fifteen years ago that i ever even said that took the cover off the the game when i had the book i was like hey that's a bible it i need yeah both women they'll buy this book and they'll tell all their friends and know the book club about it so i think that's why it was selling more because women will talk about but then the other interesting thing the back end for each business was cds and dvds of live seminars and the men would buy those like crazy the men were way more valuable on the back end the women were not spending a hundred dollars to three hundred dollars on these expensive courses maybe because that made them feel desperate maybe because they weren't as desperate as the men were who knows but it was really interesting getting to be on the ground floor of this so how big did it get got to twenty million with those two combined and then you know this is early this is like two thousand four two thousand five and people are asking evan hey i'm a golf instructor can i do books on how to play better golf for hey i train guinea pigs i wanna do an ebook teaching people at train guinea pigs so he decided to launch a business course called altitude that showed people how to create their own information product businesses and so i ran this little incubator that we had there by this time i was proficient in copywriting and marketing i was that became my college education i didn't listen to music in my car for three years i only listened to like audio cassettes by jack t and now rise and good to great and you know gary hal shit you know some of the stuff we've talked about when we first linked up and that business took off and i don't remember the exact numbers on that but that's what evan is still doing today is the altitude thing and he's sold the the dating companies to a couple the top employees remember correctly and so just to give people perspective can you say how big golden hip is now i mean i just i just want i want people to be like okay this guy is worth or not worth listening to and oftentimes numbers are the best way to do that sure sure so i can tell you that we are almost nine hundred team members we're not public on revenues but we've grown to about nine hundred a big chunk of that is customer support too so we've got about four hundred agents in salt lake city utah at call center and we do all of our own fulfillment and of course email and chat support is critical these days so we've got about seventy people doing that also if i if i had a guess i would say hundreds of millions in sales that that's what i would guess yep i can say in in the nine figures accurate good okay and what makes you guys a little bit different is and i think i i said something negative about you guys and i'm gonna i i didn't mean for it to come negative but you guys do a lot of long form copy and what i said was a lot of people i think i i used the word scam me and i didn't mean to say that what i meant to say is that a lot of people perceive that as scam stuff because a lot of scammers use that i didn't mean to say you guys were scam artists artist or anything like that because i think you are but you guys do do a lot of like long form copy is that correct well we do and it's the same model that we did with the dating advice so if you remember you signed up and you got these really new really long newsletters with free tips and things like that so that's why our stuff as long as because we lead with education so i like to say that we have two offerings we have education and then we have great products and if people just stick around for the education don't buy anything that's fine you know we to leave people better than we found do you have tens of millions of email subscribers i actually don't know but i would think that that would not be true i don't think it's that many because we have a different business model than some people there's other very successful businesses in the spaces we are in that grab emails and then sell back end and that is what we did with double your dating and catch them and keep them is we would go for that email with those capture pages and at golden hip we only email for the most part existing customers we don't do a lot of email capture though it does work very well for profitable brands in the space so not against it it's just why why would you do why why did you go away from that that seems to be like the standard protocol like hey email they're willing to give it and once i have that i can start to sell them drip by drip until they're my customer well why why'd did you move away from that yeah no particular reason i've seen it work very successfully as as i was saying yep and i don't know if it's something that we wouldn't necessarily do in the future you know i know we have some some quiz funnels and things like that you know that that asked for it and so i would say a percentage of our people are our first timers but also if you've ever read a company that does a lot of emailing you learn that the more people on your list the harder it is to get your email in there yeah inbox you know especially in their like real inbox and so if you're emailing millions of people then you get on all kinds of weird lists and things like that that gmail automatically put you in the promotions tab or automatically in the spam and it's really hard to figure out why so we found that just emailing customers cuts down in the bulk of it by a lot and so that was the i think original reason and so not to say we wouldn't do it again so let's talk about some idea so the space that you're in if i like from an outsider perspective it seems like because you're launching new brands you're constantly looking at opportunity and maybe before you got into this you had no idea that steven doctor steven country like that people even bought anything that he was interested in selling what what are you currently surprised about in your space and where's is there opportunity that you think you guys were not capitalizing on because of it's just not a priority well i can tell you things that i'm not allowed to do legally that are pretty interesting yeah let's stay there yeah okay so i mean it's not gonna be anything you haven't heard before but i can't fuck with cbd which i think it's great i take it myself for sleep but it's still not federally legal to ship state to state yet it's like gray area and so i get asked all the time by you know celebrities doctors whoever if i wanna start a cbd brand with them and i have to say no because we have too much to lose but i don't tell them to not start it because i think the laws are heading in that direction where it's going to be totally fine soon but right now it's not so i can't mess with it how would you spin that up twenty four year old craig craig cl with nothing to lose would be like you know what we'll figure this out the laws get there have anything yeah i encourage people i i would i've had people come to me that we're more entrepreneurial and say hey do you wanna do this together say no we you should do this on your own because it's a big category it's something that gives results you can feel which i think is really important when you're doing something in ingest and it's it's something that helps a lot of people how would you get your first customers for that i mean i think that the cbd thing is easier because there's so how many people are already making it let's say you just wanted to sell it what would you do yeah so i like to lead with education with everything and i think one of the reasons that our advertising is successful as we give value and that's definitely why the network's love us is because people click on our ads and they learn something interesting and something interesting to a cbd customer could be why is this not marijuana i mean think about it you know your parents like do they know the difference they probably fears around that there's such a huge education opportunity around cb right now because it's derived from marijuana marijuana has been you know blacklisted since nixon center whatever you know they've been hearing and this shit's bad for them for so long why is this good for them that's a huge education opportunity so i look for spaces where there is an education opportunity and then give that education i think it's a great way to cut through the noise of the four thousand ads people see every day so you'd write a blog post about title that and then it would be like a thousand word blog post and you would drive traffic to it from like let's say operator bull or something i think facebook is the gus network in the world to do your initial testing on and the reason is because you can target so tightly and then go broader and broader so what i would suggest is you know the the blog idea is a good one and you can do different types of logs you can do on your own domain you can do a sponsored post on say well and good or or something like that you know or even la times or some of these will take sponsored posts so you can do that type of educational presentation and then yeah i'd suggest they'd go on facebook and they look for people who have raised their hand and said i followed this back pain group you know or whatever it is the people are buying cbd for the most you know a lot of you buy my cod for anxiety and their pets that's a that's a big one you know so you could target anyone that is in a i i love dog videos or cat videos group and then start off and get your advertising to where you can convert those folks that are really targeted and then uncheck the box on say cat lovers and see if it still works for just a toggle is then uncheck that box until you can go broad that i think is the the key to scaling up and that's a great thing about facebook yeah i love that that's extremely tactical you can say if get google adwords in a way with with type and traffic you know you can go on the more targeted terms you know like by cbd for my dog's anxiety during flights you know like you can do this on tail stuff or you know but you eventually wanna get to the place where you can convert on cbd or on racking so when you're when you're testing a brand a new new idea i don't think back to the last idea you guys spun up or or you were involved with what's the time frame you give it you say okay we're gonna spend six weeks on this and we kinda know within the six weeks we're gonna be able to validate this or is it not time base and something else yeah so in my post my ten things post i think it was number five and i said nothing is more expensive than a just okay converting ad campaign and not many people got that one i got a lot of comments on the other ones like when i said social media is influencer marketing is for companies like burning money got a lot of good back and forth on that but that one not too many people got except someone who i really respect jeremy liu from lights speed re retweeted just that number five and i i even wrote i was like i think you're the only one that actually got this and what i mean by that is if if you have something that shows a little bit of promise it keeps you putting money and time into it totally and you can just chase that rabbit for freaking ever man and just dump money into it you know and and so i actually would might prefer putting something up that completely tanks or it does really great and and not doing that you know i've lost a lot of money trying to build brands where i've part someone who i really like maybe i really liked their product ideas or their philosophies and then the world just didn't respond but since i liked it so much i kept going for it and going for it and going for it what's an example of a metric that says this is taken off i mean like do you want like a do you wanna put in one dollar and get out three i think that's different depending on the brand you know so if you have a subscription model for example you can spend a lot less upfront you know like if you look at gut re and proactive they're losing money on every sale and i think they have like a eight month turnaround around or something like that you know if you're doing something that is low lt tv like maybe you only have one product yeah you gotta make your money back pretty quick you know so there's no like real set metric i can give you it's different for every business but i would suggest define your metric and try to go for a home run or a strike out is there a product that you guys created where you're like where you weren't i mean i'm sure that many of your successes you were shocked by but is there something what's the one thing that took off and you were like oh my gosh i did not think that this one's gonna work as amazing as it does shoot that's a that's an interesting question i'm trying to think of which one to share because that happens all the time and one of my other points in that tweet yeah you i know think you've been doing this for you're gonna be wrong a lot well the one that's popping it into my mind is when we were doing heart health which we we still do but we had a a particular campaign that we were starting off for it and the ads had the picture of a a beating heart you know and some copy around that conversions tripled when we switched the ad from a heart to a foot weird that's fuck yeah so the the reason why is because people who are looking for support with their heart typically have circulation problems that affects their feet right and so we we did this this in the heart health space and it worked really well so well that we were running a ton of media for it and then we partnered with another doctor who has i think one of the the greatest products that that we make it's a a cream called foot medics and this product when people start taking foot foot medicate and putting on their feet they they never stop it's the lt tv isn't insane but we needed to run the the foot banners and and facebook ads and all that to sell foot med because there was a more natural product so we did this deal we created foot medics and well actually we didn't create foot medics we that was a a kind of like a acquisition slash takeover whatever that's a different story but because we were doing so much media in the hard health space putting feet all over an internet some of these networks got together and they said you know these feet on the websites aren't a good look and they banned advertising that has feet in it now you can get away with like a sexy woman shoe or something like that but if it's just like a random person's foot it's it's not allowed on the networks it's a random thing that they don't want on the site if you think about it you got some nice looking website there's just a random foot there you it's not the best look for your site you know everyone i would say everyone wants the bmw ad because you get this sleek car maybe a sexy couple and then no one clicks on it no one leaves to go buy a bmw they stay on your site and watch more ads so that's everyone's dream ad their nightmare ad is an ugly foot that someone clicks on and leaves their site because they're so interested that they buy the foot product that never go back to the facebook peter or whatever it is you know so we ruin the foot banner for everybody and then we had this great product foot medics and we had no way to advertise it and it's it's still around you know it does a little bit of of business but not to the scale it would have been had we still been able to use feet yeah i wanna i wanna go back to one thing he said which is something that has stuck with me as well and was a thing we put on our wall at at at my old house which is mediocrity is expensive which is kinda what you were talking about and i i used to say the worst thing we could do is being an just okay or mediocre business because it's gonna drain us of our most valuable assets it's gonna be really expensive on time and it's gonna be not that expensive on money and we're gonna justify keep going keep going keep going when it really we just want something that's gonna break out and the thing that's gonna stop us from finding something that breaks out is spending all our time on something that's just okay if it fails if it's obvious you don't even have to be smart we could just move on and and it won't be so expensive on time so i i i definitely agree with that one yeah there does need to be a good way to measure it because then you got guys like gary vid are like you need to hustle twelve hours a day for you know give up twenties and you know work on this same thing that just converts okay in one day it's gonna blow up and that's not true for everything i think spoke many people waste so much time cranking on these business ideas that don't have real proof of concept you know they get a couple customers but they just never break through and they think it's because they're not working hard enough or long enough or whatever it is but really it's just because you're making something that people don't necessarily want right yeah and i think that you have to the way i i'm like do i figure it out how do i know when i should be the guy from pinterest was like yeah we just kept going even with growth was flat and it started picking up years later it's like how do i know when to be that guy for you when do i be the tortoise and when do i be the hare and because there's examples on both sides and then there's a graveyard of people failing because they took either approach so it's hard to really tell and my my just my answer to myself and i don't know if this is right or wrong but i i like it and i use it is go against human nature like if my my human nature is to be really hopeful so i know that so what i should actually do is be actively skeptical about things because i know my default is gonna be to see the the one customer that it's working for and not the ninety nine that that have rejected it that have you know totally don't care about this and so i i just to try to work against my own human nature because that keeps me honest whereas if i feed into that if it's like my nature is to be optimistic delusional optimistic and then i'm actively like yeah i should just keep going even when there's no evidence of to keep to keep going i'll end up you know at at an extreme dead end yeah i'm the same way as you fortunately my brother who i run the company with is a classic pe shooting down every one of my ideas and i got fight for the ones i really like to get him executed on you know but i know if he agrees with me on something it's probably gonna be a good idea so it's good to have that balance to have something that'll check here what's your hit rate with brand so i know you said know when comes to marketing for example you never know what's gonna work it get surprised all the time i'd be wrong more than you're right but one thing i've seen as a pattern i'm curious if it applies to you guys is there's all these peep i bet people who once they become masters at things that are what seem like you know hit businesses like i have i have friends who do viral videos and i talked to him i'm like viral videos was lightning in a bottle who knows was like what's your hit rate and they showed me their their you know set of their catalog and it's was like nine out of ten and i was like nine out of ten are going viral like yeah but like eventually we figured out what emotions we're tapping into we filter out bad ideas early and then we have us distribution system that kind of ensures success and i was like wow so if something i thought would be low hit rate these guys over time have gotten to be very high hit rate i'm curious for you are you guys what's your hit rate on new brands or new products you roll out is it more like eight or nine out of ten or is it more like one or two out of ten so i'll answer you that on both sides new products and new brands new products we've never fail because we're asking the customers what we want what they want we we do a survey we say you know which of these ten products would you like next so we don't fail at new products as they told us you know i mean once in a while because sometimes you know people tell you what they want but then when it comes time to pull their credit card you know right they just aren't copywriting writing so once in a while we we don't so i would say you know let's say eight or nine out of ten on new products yep and yeah maybe it's seven out of ten because also to there's human emotion involved in our side and sometimes you end getting that product in the line that someone in formulation really loved that they just championed all the way through and then it was their dream and not the customer we forgot the customer at some point yeah so and i i've been as guilty as at as as anyone at my company so the i'd say that's on the product side on the brand side sixty percent maybe you know i'm i'm always surprised by what fails and still pretty high though i i mean we're still in business so you know it's it's but your failure is sure are pretty cheap you know when you launched with the new brand i don't think it's gonna i i don't think i don't think you're putting in ten million dollars into each one it's cheap if it fails quickly if it takes a year to realize it's it's failure that's when it's really expensive you know know how much money do invest all onto a new brand you know it's citi i so i'm not a numbers guy at all i'm the marketing positioning guy so i it's gonna guess a million bucks something like that you know i made one point five by by the time it's said and done including resources and things like that so like five or ten people well it's not mostly people cost though right you're you're talking about the whole the marketing well what i means is you throw five or ten people at something and then you give them a a little bit of of a budget to for marketing that's not the way our company does it we do it differently than your standard incubator or whatever so for example our formulation team formulate all the products for all the brands there's not a brand that has a specific formula for example there's not a brand that has a specific copywriter you know vertically integrated you you manufacture your own products you're not we don't manufacture own products but we formulate in a house okay i have a a team of people with deep backgrounds and science codes and all that stuff that are amazing at formulating million products with high efficacy at tastes really good and are you know cost effective and still best in class but i will just say quickly if i can do a little pitch or whatever we're looking at your acquisitions right now we're looking to acquire great consumer product brands we're looking to acquire startups in in finance you know personal finance like debt repair credit repair things like that you know we're expanding into some new categories this year so if people are listening who should get what type of company if i'm the type of company that's a b and c i should reach out to yes how do i reach yes sweet spot is like one to twenty million in revenues you know so some proof of concept there that could benefit from working with people who are experienced in scaling that's something that is is weak really a strong point for us is that we can help with how do they reach out they can just you know hit me pretty easy to find at craig at instagram i i read my dms or twitter or you know okay cool cool sweet so now to the ideas okay so we do this for consumer product brands someone needs to do what we do for personal brands there's a couple companies that do it but they have a slightly different model so there's mind valley that partners with authors and speakers and they put them in the mind valley educational program where i think it's like a netflix for personal development if i if i understand it right and i i was looking at mind valley last night so it's like a seventy million owned by this guy in tay where is he in indonesia yeah you should have him on the show actually he's awesome he's a friend of mine introduce you guys his name yeah so it's like a seventy million dollar information brand and they sell to dumb it down like i think one of their biggest products was like a three hundred dollar yoga course yeah he's built an incredible business and he does a bit of what i have in mind though i think there's an opportunity for a company that just helps people in the thought leader space that don't wanna learn marketing really go big on their own personal brand so my wife is a perfect example of someone who needs this that's how i thought about my wife is a holistic health practitioner she has a book coming out with hay house that helps women with body image and issues she puts out amazing content she's got a coaching practice with women all over the world that work with her one zero one she's created courses but she doesn't know how to market she's actually become a great copywriter but she doesn't know how to like run paid media and build out funnels and all that stuff and so if there was a company that worked with people like her and i also host an event in los angeles so you guys next time of you guys are in town and you're allowed to see people in person let me know but we do an event where we it's kinda like a mini ted meets pool party and we bring in speakers in all different areas and so many of the speakers say craig i wanna start doing courses and things like that i don't know where to start and you know some of them end up doing great products with vision but i think there's more of an opportunity also to partner with people on a smaller scale vision does because i think he has like forty or fifty people but maybe run you know three to ten amazing thought leader businesses under one umbrella and share resources i do know what it's you know what it's like is do you know tucker mac's company yes sc yeah yeah okay so it used to be called book in a box which was a good explanation of what it is but it wasn't a good name and he changed describe and what tucker does is authors come to him people who are consultants or like thought kinda kinda thought leader people or people who just wanna leave a legacy for their kids they give him twenty five grand or he gives them twenty five grand and you sit with a ghost writer and you tell your story and they turn it into a book which sometimes that book is just i wanna give to my kids because i want them to have like a cool story about how i grew up or i want to get speaking gigs or i wanna get consulting gigs and what you're describing is almost like a service where you probably wouldn't wanna pay up upfront what you'd wanna do is find people like your wife or people who are high caliber folks and you're like look we could turn this into a block and then a course and won't get a percentage of the revenue exactly that's interesting that's interesting yeah it's it's almost like a modern like a modern day harper collins or a modern day penguin or something like that like a modern day don't describe it because it's not just about the book anymore people want all that digital content right so brands like double your dating and catch people would be great examples for that and evan was actually getting into that with that incubator where he had me teaching them copywriting and he was gonna bring them under the umbrella then he went into the the biz biz ops space you know and and got away from but yeah that's one idea number one idea i think is waiting to be executed on and i would love it if it it existed okay the second idea is something i came up with during an ayahuasca trip i went in trip really hoping to have a personal growth moment and a breakthrough and i ended up building an app in my head for eight hours and i'm not a programmer or an app designer so it was maybe a complete waste of time but i hope someone builds this thing someday maybe that person is listening so i'm gonna share it so it's a message ag you know you get the messages on your email on your dm and instagram on your facebook on your slack all that stuff and they're just all over the place and then you gotta go to twenty different things to answer all your message every day so this thing has a a a wheel that looks like the a wheel facing you like a slot machine wheel and it puts all your emails there and you can scroll through but it also merges them with your to do list because a lot of those go together and right now emails and to do this don't connect and they don't connect with calendar either so imagine that wheel is your email and then you just can swipe over and you can see the next wheel that comes up as your to do list swipe over the next one is your calendar and you can swipe through and it's all your messages from all those platforms combined and when you hit one and let's say you answer the email it pings it says do you wanna archive here to do this list item two do you wanna take this off your calendar or if you go and hit the to today list it pulls out all of the messages that might be related to that whether it's on slack whether it's on facebook whether it's on gmail and it pulls them up so it's got it on your screen so you can just address it and get it done and then it's a game unified system like a machine gun so if you imagine the the wheel like a machine gun turret and it just keeps throwing emails and tasks that you just bang them out and get him through your day to you know hopefully get the inbox zero which is something i don't know nothing about i've never had it before but yeah someone please build that thing because i don't know how and i would love to use it we've talked about super and hey hey dot com have you paid attention to this i pay super thirty dollars a month i've only used it a couple times i've been there here so i do like it it's just a lot to learn with the keys strokes yeah and i haven't been able to figure that out yet i haven't seen hey i have a invitation waiting for me in my inbox also though i got a little turned off by the it would appeared to me from outside looking it and i didn't go deep it but it seemed like this like whole like whining about microsoft your app taking money so yeah clogging out my twitter feed and i was just like i don't wanna have any part this because isn't that common knowledge that the app store is gonna take their piece right i don't wanna get candidate but what okay so the the ultimate i like the message ag side because i have the same problem twitter dms instagram email text messages whatever it is and you sort of have to like it's like you know when old people have to take all these pills because they have like all these conditions and they have this pill pack that's like oh i gotta it's monday i gotta open these seven different lids and i gotta take these seven different pills and then by the end i'm z out that's how i feel when i check my messages and so if you could either make it fun or at least put it all in one place in theory i like that i also this this is something that paul graham the founder what comb has talked a lot about like email is essentially a to do list why is it not designed to work as a to do list or with a to do list somebody needs to do that but we'll make a lot of money and he's he wrote this like seven years ago eight years ago i think some people have tried of course people try everything but no one nailed it i i i like that and i think the hard part with that is monetization but it's it's something that superhuman and hay are doing that in a million years i never thought would work but i now completely agree is charging money for it like you're you know like that most people be like yeah we'll make money from advertising where we'll get like a billion users and hopefully something turns out but i think monthly fees for services like this is actually one hundred percent the way to go are you guys bet both bay area guys yeah yeah okay so i was up at a google summit a couple of years ago and i was talking to a a woman i forget what company she was with but she was talking about how larry and sergei back in the day were big proponents that you should never sell out to the man meeting the advertisers and then they acquired google adwords which was called i think go to at the time or double click okay yeah one of those at the same time when they were debating should we charge people four ninety nine a month for google and that that move right there ruined the world because now it's an advertising driven thing instead of a a subscription thing and she was telling this to me as though i shouldn't known this and this was some type of thing that everyone in tech knew about so i'm curious is this something that you guys have heard before and believed in and is there protests in front of google or was her back in the day or like because it was the first time i'd heard of it there's definitely a a a a revolt amongst high end insiders and i have heard that story that they're like we're never gonna do advertising but google is i think pretty good for advertising like it's like high intention or its intent like if someone's searching for something there it's it's effective yeah for sure it's effective to advertise on it in the same way facebook really effective to advertise on it i think i think you're bringing up a more philosophical first so first no i actually hadn't heard that story that google was sort of at at fork in the road moment trying to decide whether they hey do we charge for our product or do we do this sort of free and then make money off ads system and i do know that the sort of the ethos went from like advertising is a necessary evil know for facebook and for google early on like z had no interest in ads probably still doesn't have that much interest in ads and it was sort of like you know can't be or don't be evil was you know they're the phrase for google that those are marketing message as far as how they're gonna run things and then now today like you know the suits have taken over it's a you know it's a public company they have to the the the job is to make as much money as they can and so that's why you see things where you know if you look on the google front page it's like everything is an ad until you scroll type of thing and like oh how the you know how the times have changed and so yeah it's different and same thing with facebook facebook was not like there's there's interviews of of mark kind of casually sitting on a at a interview like this talking about advertising and how it's kinda lame and how he doesn't really wanna do it evan sp the same thing he thought advertising was creepy the way it was done looks like that's their business model so what are you gonna you're gonna hate your own business model or you know that's not gonna work after good things long form copy is scam but you hey look i use long form copy i i it not everyone who uses long four copy is scammers but a lot of scammers use long form copy yeah that's or but what's your i what's your your email cold email technique did it work to get a and it it worked right away with like a a oh top twenty celebrity in the world oh man yeah i i don't wanna say it was but it was it was a pretty pretty good move so i need to charge some money for that i think it's out there for free once it's a trend subscribe have that but yeah it's awesome man can i pitch trends i i you know you and only met for like five minutes at a conference yeah okay talk once in a while but we're not like homie is you know right pitch it trends is fucking awesome man it's so high value i tell people to subscribe your trends i actually wrote back once or maybe i said this directly i thought it was too good thought it was too much content to digest it was just too long and too much great information but i told people to subscribe and the paying subscription to trends all the time i think it's the the best business news newsletter that's out there i'm gonna clip this we'll probably have this clip right now of me saying this in the ad and we're gonna run this as an ad thank you the smile on sam's face i i i've never seen this guy's smile like this not alright i love you had a third idea as well okay vr i'm holding up an oc list for people who can't see yes it it fit this on my dog's head i don't know what it is but it would fit and how much fun would a dog have in vr chasing virtual tennis balls you put like the hap bite thing you know you be with the device so they can bite on the virtual tennis ball and the dog just has like the greatest day every day and the technology technologies is here right now maybe it would need to get a little bit lighter but it's it's here man you know the weight thing would definitely work with a bigger dog german shepherd or or something like that you know maybe in three years you can put it on the shih tzu but this is is here and no one's done it yet and this thing like this for example what if there's a dog adapter for this actual oc what if i can put this on my german shepherd i'm not using it because i don't wear this thing that often you know that is a billion dollar business okay so what you're saying sounds like a crazy person but i wanna give some perspective on this are dog vr you were just said dog vr and on the service that's a laughable idea but when i when i as a dog owner and someone who's involved in a couple dog businesses i know you're involved in into a pet business too right yeah pet owners have the highest engagement i have ever seen so like the pet companies that i'm associated with and maybe you can verify this because you're a pet business owner is that the highest engagement of like amongst customers that you've ever seen what that was a loaded question but yeah yeah you know i'm just so far and removed the numbers i couldn't exactly tell you it's not as good as we thought though as far as that's an them buying everything we thought they we thought they would be fan more fan mathematical of buyers than they are i will say what we did expect as you know i own four dogs once they start on the dog food they don't wanna switch because it's a very it's the healthiest option with a convenience and it's just bad to switch your dog's food a lot so that is true but they don't like buy that that's been a hard business for us to to get margin on because of the food costs and shipping and and and all that stuff you know there's this company that was that just raised ten million dollars today and they claimed that their dog it was either a pill or food that they're gonna add one four years to your dog's life and they're they've hired all these scientists they raised ten million dollars and in my head i'm like can i can i eat that food and or can i eat the dogs that are eating that food i'm like what can i do to what can i do to capture that but i mean that sounds like a company asking for a lawsuit though because there's been huge lawsuits against companies that have made those claims in the past so i don't know did they do a twenty year study with hundred dogs or something that that sounds great crazy i'd love to know the name of the company it's called they i think they raised ten million dollars today it's called celebrity so c e l e so like the word celebrity c e l e v i t y dot c okay a a consumer fourth business idea we're just gonna collectively sue them and we'll make ten million bucks pretty easily so that's all eating it and then we got the class action yeah i'm i'm i'm in yeah yeah but i mean they props to them i'd i'd love to check it out you know our our i'm gonna pitch our dog foods since people are through it since you know you should always be pitching right if you guys seen the documentary the dog doc no you and dogs too sean i have a dog and my dog is the pick eater and we've tried all these different dog foods and i'm trying to get her to eat something healthy and not like the only food i know she likes his chips and so you our dog food but watch the documentary the dog doc it's produced and directed by the same woman who produced buck the documentary on the horse yeah this is like a oscar worthy documentary and the star of it is a veterinarian and his name is doctor marty goldstein he's famous for saving oprah dog when every other vet said her dog was gonna die he saved martha stewart cats he just has us a little practice in connecticut where people from all over the world would come bring their dogs he's actually retired now but this is what he did he would help all the dogs that no one else said could be saved and he would do it with nutrition he'd take them off the medications and put them on his nutritional therapy and the healings are miraculous and and the documentary highlights it and it shows that not everything is perfect you know there's some some cases that he couldn't help it's a really great documentary and that is my partner for our pet food line it's called doctor mart i sent you some sam did you give it to your yeah yeah you sent me that like three months ago yes he's eat it at all cool cool and we're good and he's healthy sam literally eats everything like i've seen sam just when he's done with this plate he puts it on the ground and his doug eats the whole thing awesome well you know it might not be doctor marty anymore if it's i i don't if i set you months supply but no it was not six months but he ate all of it good good good well you know hopefully that that gave him some extra cash so we're kinda time but hey first year europe a fucking great storyteller i think you you know i i'm smelling a a regular friend of the pop who comes on with some regular cadences is great i wanna ask a question so when exactly did you start golden hip well you two thousand ten and so now five he said five right which is five so i got hired at evans company in like two thousand three two thousand two two thousand three and then we parted ways basically the end of two thousand eight oh when the recession hit and i had a lead generation company also that also had to be basically shut down with a recession and that was a i didn't get into that story but it was a troubling time for me i went from making really good money to making zero in like thirty days and then in the midst the recession is when we started golden hip and that's another reason why we didn't raise money aside from the fact that no one was gonna give four jackass asses with no college degrees sense you see money you know i was a recession and people weren't writing in checks like they are today so so yep the the thing i was gonna ask is now d is you know been hot me and sam always joke sam loves to say you know if i see another brand that's just millennial pink lower you know lowercase brand going into some established category raised ten million dollars and burns it you know we have friends have been super successful with d e commerce on that sort of thing but you know you see a lot of this happening what's been your what's your reaction has you've been seeing that and you're like dude do i've been here at this party for a while and then also how do you differ from the model that you see silicon valley chasing and what do you think of that model i don't know what they're doing you know it's it's it's i it it impress me because i don't know anything about it like if someone gave me ten million dollars i wouldn't even what to do with it instead go start a new brand like what do you do with ten million dollars i guess if you're that dog company you go maybe now you do the clinical studies or or something like that you know i'm impressed by some of these brands at the same time i worry for some of them because i feel like you raised that money and then you're going towards your next money then you're going towards your next money and then hopefully some big conglomerate grabs you before the rug pulled out from under that's with it feels like the business model of all these brands are to me i saw a quote from gary v that said most of these d t brands are out of business they just don't know it yet i don't know if that's necessarily true but it's something i don't understand you know right so i i am quite impressed by the companies that do that and i read i just got on the twitter you know that was like you know my fifth tweet that wasn't about like you know here's my pizza meeting today so i just started reading the the direct consumer twitter and i got on that club house too yep and most of the time when i see someone's theories on what you should do to start a d brand it is not they're not things i would do so they talk about you need to build a community you need to be omni channel right you need to do influencer marketing i don't get that i mean it it it does work i mean vital protein is just solved for you know several hundred million dollars to nestle on the back of influencer marketing and i have heard that their eb was was next was very low right you know and it works so you know proud of them but i just i it's not something i understand love it yeah i like having this sort of the other perspective because i think it's really easy to just read the articles and be like oh that's the formula but like i i'm more interested in somebody who's actually on a working formula that didn't like fundamentally working formula and yeah which i was curious about your your take on that i mean a lot of different ways do it like i said like some of my direct competitors we'll grab the email first you know it's just just different ways of doing things and i don't think there's a right or wrong it's just what you're more comfortable with you know if i had come from silicon valley and had a college degree and you know worked at a sequoia before i started this company maybe i would started it with ten million bucks right sam anything else before we go yeah i i just had to ask with you one more question which is we have a lot of people this is similar to what sean asked who have raised a whole lot of money and sometimes that's good great sometimes that's not great but the stories that you're saying you're saying that you went you you have a home that was confused for mark w house so you must have a lovely home it's not you said you're you have nine hundred team members and nine figure company how are you guys finance financing all this i mean has it just been crazy profitable from the beginning or do you take debt like what do you how does this all work and and and how are you able to cash flow so much well it it was a choice you know we didn't have money in to bank and i came from a company that didn't have any money in the bank either you know evan bootstrap the dating advice brands so we just started we we had there's four of us three of us put in twenty grand each we loaned our fourth partner his share you know so and be in sixty grand total and then we just you know didn't have a choice like i was either it's gonna make money or we're gonna try something else and have you guys been crazy profitable every year or did it just start laying just ask me the eb sam ask me the eb no i mean we yeah we've been probable since day one or else we would have had to go and raise money right so didn't need to to take on outside funding now we're talking to some people now you know we might take on some funding for some of these other categories we're getting in like you know for example like dog food is has been a tricky one and that is a brand that i could see us potentially needing some cash for to really scale it up you know dog foods expensive shipping it's is expensive it's hard to get the capacity in the manufacturing you know so it's it's not something i'm ruling out it's just not a world i come from and had i know in that world maybe i would have after we took that sixty grand and and built it up to you know whatever we did in the first year i think we did i don't know half a million of revenue in the first year or something like maybe if i knew that world back then i would have gone and done a vc road show and and done that i just don't come from that background you know i just like ed had no idea that that even existed until i started going to like summit series and meeting other people that had similar branch to mind that had raised money and they also had these things called exits that i didn't know that was a thing either you know so well that's why i'm breaking this up because sean and i we're kinda mill the road in terms of boot bootstrapping and not bootstrapping but a lot of our friends are the raise lots and lots of money and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but and i love having my frame broken and listening to other people do different things so it certainly is simple but hard what you did right like you just make profit i mean that that's duh that's like how businesses work but that's what it's always cool to see whereas a lot of people are starting stuff and they're waiting to exit in order to get big payday whereas you were kinda able to get paid along the way i i like talking about that and sharing those different stories of the there's a lot of different ways to make something happen yeah what one of the reasons the podcast called my first million is because i wanted to show all the different ways that people can make it like there's no formula there's no this you can't copy any of these actually but if you hear a hundred different stories they'll start to be like oh okay there's so many ways to win and i'm gonna be inspired by these people and i'm gonna take parts of their stuff their story that is relevant to my context and make it happen but like like sam said we wanna hear the variety of different paths not just like the same story over and over and over again and then you oh there's only one way to win yeah that you're the podcast name makes me laugh too because i once met a russian guy and he said something i'll never forget and he said we started talking about business here or whatever and i said hey you know tell me what this is that he goes never ask man how made its first million dude that should be the intro of the podcast a russian a russian voice for just saying that yeah did you hear about you at these people you know it's like like sam i think i i just saw a tweet that you did that you like andrew carnegie biography or whatever loved it yep i i'm the guy was inside of trading that's where i made all this much although all those guys were joe kennedy yeah van they all were it was all illegal shit yeah i mean hamilton blenders started off selling sex toys you know and then like turned into a blender because they had that like vibration technology how many people made their money a prohibition and you know smuggling alcohol it's just the funny saying so i like that you guys are digging in and and asking that question yeah most people would be shocked like joe kennedy he made his first million by hertz which at the time was it cab company he would george church was like hey you gotta make my stock better and so he would buy all the stock and then hurry up and sell it to a a pool of investors and it was not it wasn't illegal but it we it's probably unethical but i of all the biographies that read a lot of it starts that way yeah yeah and i had i had made my first before i started golden hip i had also lost at all so you know it's it's there were been keeping it and making it right do you have kids no but trying me okay so let's say you you have a a son or a daughter they just turned twenty two and they're like dead i wanna learn about copywriting what do you what do you point them to as like kind of abc b abc's of copyright where would you where would you send somebody for the first kinda thirty or sixty days of going down that trying to become great at it yeah i always tell people to read a book called my my in advertising which was written by claude hopkins he's one of the greatest copywriter in the nineteen twenties yeah and the psychology back then is the same as today and i tell them to read my life and advertising which is his biography not his copywriting book because it talks about how he built all these great brands that are around today like hoover vacuum and goodyear tire and pepsi and toothpaste and it's just really fascinating stories and if someone doesn't enjoy the stories then copywriting is not gonna be for that gotcha okay cool and andy i also tell people to buy that one because it's free you can just google and you can find it as an ebook and it often is alongside his copywriting book which is called scientific advertising so you can knock them both out of it you know that story sean about claude basically toothpaste didn't like toothpaste wasn't like that good of tasting but he made this ad where he says if you rub your tongue above your teeth you'll you'll feel film about and we're gonna get rid of that film with toothpaste and then he also said it like something to the effect of like it hurts in a good way like the way that you feel that like that like crisp feeling in your mouth with toothpaste that actually that that way you know it's working right like he would he would do things like that so people like it became a habit he created he is the one who like helped make tooth toothpaste at toothpaste a daily habit yeah people only five percent of people were brushing their teeth daily in the united states before pep came out within ten years with eighty five percent wow that's kind of amazing you i always have have felt that copywriter and comedian are the the truth tellers of society they they understand people the best and they're they're able to because they understand people you you can't be a great comedian if you don't understand people if you can't tell the truth and you can't become a great copywriter if you don't understand people and you can't can't tell the truth and then there's a whole bunch of jobs up the opposite yeah definitely we should jam out maybe next time since i know we're out of time but there's so many stories like that about these daily life things angry is it were created by marketers like orange juice for example most people don't know that was embedded by marketer bacon and eggs was admitted by marketer it's like all these things i don't wanna get it's such a deep gravel fascinating stuff alright well you gotta go back on this is dope thanks for thanks for doing this this is fun fun to meet you and yeah i hope hope everyone enjoys this episode yeah thanks for having you guys this is been bless this is great i appreciate thank you