Business of Trend Forecasting, Pickleball, And The Lucrative Virtual Gaming World

i actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in twelve or thirty six months and you help them guess the right prediction you can build an interesting business and i'm gonna give you an example okay so let's do it what what topics you guys say alright i've got one idea based on something you sent me oh wow rich yeah but you thanks sam having one idea based on something i sent you really put in the work today look i'm in the final interview stage for my new researcher but you told me last time you you had a lot and just hear me out so you sent me this thing called exploding topics right yeah and you said their traffic killing it and exploding topics don't explain what it is yeah it's basically like a if you go to a website you'll see a series of charts and the charts are basically saying hey this this thing this trend is is growing in in popularity i think it started by which keywords were growing in popularity because brian dean who owned backlink a popular seo blog got involved with it and then it kind of changed to what it is now okay yeah so i didn't know what the underlying what are they looking at to tell you what's trending or not but they'll be like you know hey there's a thing called power dash it's a vacuum cleaner for pet owners it's grown three thousand percent right now right there but you know the volume of that key of that search is three hundred twenty so not not huge regenerative agriculture right growing six hundred fifty eight percent with twelve thousand searches and you could look at that you'd be like that's cool i'm interested in that topic maybe there's something i could do here so i it's similar to what trends was which was i will tell you about things that are getting more popular before they're fully popular in order for you to take advantage of them with content business that sort of thing right that's the idea yes and the people wondering trends so basically i used to own i sold it i used to own this thing called trends dot c and it was a weekly email on an online community that people would pay three hundred dollars a year for and we got it i forget what it was when i sold it but i think it was at like six million a year but it very easily could have been like a million a month or so in revenue but basically we would send a weekly email and we had three or two research and they would comb the web in five interesting things and they would write interesting reports and they would also include one to two graphics that showed like here's based off of reddit searches or based off of google searches or based off of like twenty different data points this topic is growing quickly anyway what exploding topics is doing there's another another company called meat gl so i think it's meat glimpse dot c or dot com i don't know and this is just called trends forecasting and these versions of it including my version they're what i would call pros consumer so people who just wanna spend ten to three hundred dollars a month on it they're not that big a deal but there's this whole other industry of people willing to spend twenty five a hundred thousand ten million a year all on trends trend forecasting and i think it's a very interesting business model and i think it's a very underdeveloped industry and so the one that i brought up a whole bunch is called w g w g it's basically a monthly report that comes out and it helps people pick which colors are gonna be popular what sounds trivial but that's a really big deal if your starbucks and you gotta go and buy ten million name tags or something like that and you wanna make sure that you've got like a good color that is like hit or for example w gs do you remember sean how pineapple was popular yeah they helped predict that pineapple the logo is gonna be popular their next one i think is the lemon i think they said lemon is gonna be popular maybe you told me that actually and so anyway that's what this does but i actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in twelve or thirty six months and you help them guess the right prediction you can build an interesting business and i'm gonna give you an example and let's just say that it's like hr or like work styles so what do we think we're gonna predict the work the the the this particular age group what are they gonna want for working from home in the next thirty six months and if you're google or someone that employs ten thousand of these workers you're like alright i kinda need an idea because we're gonna be making x policy we wanna know how they're going to react the way it could work and this is the way w gs and this is the way trends and a few other things work is you do a combination of surveys so you survey like you need a pool of like a thousand or ten thousand people you can survey and get intel from and make predictions then you look at like different data so like you look at sentiment you look at like what people on reddit on tiktok are saying just what trends are saying and you consolidate in that that into a fairly easy to understand one thousand of two thousand word email that you send out monthly and then you have a consultant on staff but you can call on a regular basis to be like hey we're thinking about doing x based off your research is that some wise decision and then you have monthly calls as well as a community and a conference and i think you could wrap this up and do it in most any industry and have something that you could charge twenty to fifty thousand dollars a year for and this is something that what's his name what's the bald had guy who i like scott gallo he did this with he did a little bit like this with his company that he sold for three hundred million dollars what was it call it was called l two but anyway this is my model that i think not enough people know about and take advantage of that i think could it'd be pretty big and i wish you would let me guess which bald guy you you like that could've have been that we could've have gone on for a couple hours on that one i have so many that could that that could've been the answer yeah stone cold sea boston yeah what so what would you do so you what was your what was your idea here of like how you would create well like a trans size prediction type business i what i would do is i would i would package my product in the way that i explain but i think that most industries that you work in you can figure out some type of thing where you can look at your the buyers of your company and being like or look at any any different roles in your company and being like hey everyone i just talk to you and like figure out like what decisions are you making that's gonna impact us in like two years yeah and what type of data do you wish that you had today that would make your decision easier and i'm sure this exists but can one version of this i could think of that's pretty valuable would be if i could pull like hey i you know we got a we're able to survey every you know cio in the fortune five hundred and you know we surveyed seventy percent of the cios in the fortune of five hundred here's what they're thinking in terms of their software budget for next year or here's what they're thinking in terms of you know whether they you know we hr people at the at the you know top thousand companies here's what they're thinking in terms of remote pay or here's what they're thinking in terms of the x y z and i think if it's sort of like what gl g is where gl expert network and people will pay people like you and me two thousand dollars for a one hour call because they're making investment decisions and they need to do research and they need actual industry input to say hey what's the deal with this i'm not an expert at this you are but i need to make a ten million dollar bet and so as part of my research and diligence i'm gonna pay you know you and ten other people like you two thousand dollars an hour twenty grand no problem that's a that that helps me make the right directional bet here and so i think rather than gl g being a one way thing i think you could do it as a as a you know kind of like pulse survey too as long you're had the right key key audience that was bought it now how do you get them to actually answer this i think you could a just do it as part of a broader like media thing like if you already have an a news newsletter for hr people or whatever you could do it like industry dive could do this i also think you could pay them and so i think there's some some version of payment rewards that that could go with this because you're probably charging a lot of money thousands of dollars for these reports but there is another business i wanna tell you from a listener here what's to do called eureka surveys so google you're yes yeah i the bootstrap company yeah so these guys if you go to eureka surveys the utah right it just says get paid for taking surveys right make money online here's how you do it and it's like these are the small small time version of it so basically you go you download their app let me pull it up he downloaded the he say did he say we could say their revenue he told me i don't remember told one i think we we should just say it maybe generically but like you know seven figures in revenue bootstrap off this off this product idea and you know kind of amazing kind of amazing that they are doing so well and i and i think that this is like a really great business he acquire i think in his case i think he's going for kind of younger audience sort of like you know gen z millennial college students maybe staying at home moms like you know more of the average average joe type of consumer and able to survey them and they offer gift cards in return like the brands who wanna run the surveys offer gift cards and it's a great way to it's a great way to you know get insight you know quickly like for me if i have a brand right i a brand i wanna run a survey like this that's pretty that's like pretty time intensive for me to go do so i would need to go to a service like this if i wanna get an answer well so that's my idea for for trends forecasting i think this survey one's interesting that there's a lot of competition in that space i still think it's interesting but that's like a simple this is like a fairly simple straightforward thing a lot of work but huge business i think alright what do you got okay so i'm gonna tell you a couple names i'm gonna throw a couple names out at you you just try to tell me the pattern leo leonardo d cap kevin durant ellen d luca george clooney you might be thinking movies you might be sports it may be celebrity investing where am i going with this no they all play pickle ball pickle ball is this crazy crazy thing that is exploding this is not gonna be new to most people here but i'm just sort of late to the party i played for the first time the other day when we did our kind of weekend getaway away for founders thing and we played it's a lot of fun i was like i get it i totally get it while you guys haven't that long yeah i yeah i don't leave the house so it's not it in my house activity so therefore it this is the first time i got exposed to it right like you know like i'm those people that that that like you know came out there like covid what they don't know what's going on that's what happened to me with pickle ball and so i started looking into it and i think there's something i think there's a bunch of little interesting things i wanna hear kinda what you you find this but i'm gonna throw some stats at you so my my my overall take is pickle balls is exploding here's some opportunities i see and i think it's gonna be huge it already is getting huge but i don't think but i see some potential traps and i'll tell you what those are okay so first of all just how many people in america this a tough one guess so we be able america plate pickle ball in last year twenty no five million it's a good guess thirty six million so thirty six million is a crazy number right that's twice as many people as go to like disneyland every year it is that's the population of california right so thirty six million days is kinda crazy number that's like fourteen percent of the of the total population and and you can see this trend growing right so that it went from five to thirty six that was in a one year jump you can see on google trends it's just up into the right line you have celebrities like i said earlier billionaires buying teams leagues that sort of thing i personally know two people who have built multimillion million dollar brands in this space i'm a tell you about them so one one guy i can't say his name but he built a amazon fba store and this was two or three years ago he sold it so he actually sold way too early at the time i met him i was like oh great you you built a store doing what i've never even heard of this sport and he was like yeah i just got into it you know got really into it and so i just thought let me just see if there's much competition on amazon for this there wasn't so i built a popular fba store and sold it for about eight to ten million and so why sells are for eight to ten million dollars and i was like wow you know you know rock highway robbery you know tell that guy to lose your number and now that he owns the reality spent eight million dollars on this you know pickle what you know what the hell is this i bet you if you had that thing out that'd be a forty billion dollar brand yeah like this thing is exploded and popularity whoever bought it knew what they were doing the second is there's a guy doing a newsletter called the dink so he's doing the hustle or milk road for pickle ball and we talked to him and we were like we talked to about we're doing oh i see it the dink like d i n k and cool guy he's doing a bunch of really smart things on the growth and kind of like content side and he was making more money per reader than we were making on milk road we're in the crypto like finance niece and he was making more money per reader in pickle ball than than we were because he was a he's executing well and bay like turns out you there's like you know there's a lot of people who wanna advertise and people who wanna buy stuff and there weren't really very many mediums for them to meet each other and this newsletter was was that so this guy was yeah know i think this news is probably worth three three million four million of dollars today so two people i personally know that that done this okay and i got a couple ideas here on wanna talk about why this works where this is going and also just some of the interesting characters that are involved here you've played i assume you've played yeah but hold on before we i'm looking stuff up while you're talking i i've got a few i told you so that i wanna bring up i was i was looking this up as you're talking episode number one forty seven this aired january nineteenth two thousand twenty one so almost exactly two years ago let's go to the listener notes it says sam brings up pickle a ball a booming sport in austin and it talks about all the opportunities there why he thinks it's gonna be big sean brushes so yeah stupid never going any that sean gives sam wed tells them app off then you talked about dink i was like that sounds familiar so i wish i could can i share my screen right now i don't i don't share my screen actually i look up dink founder it's a guy named thomas shields i googled thomas shields twitter i go to twitter i click his dms and there's an unread message that he sent me in september eighteenth two thousand twenty hey sam thomas here nice to meet you i eddie he sent me a video on youtube where it's a custom video of him talking to the camera saying hey sam and he's explaining to me about this newsletter that he wants to start and he wants to know if i wanna participate in it or something like that this is the first time i've seen this video by the way i i've i've not even i've i've watching it for the first time ever so i was i take full credit for telling you about pickle ball i take not full credit but it it is cool that this guy holler at me and this is for three years later and he's absolutely doing what he said he was gonna do so man far a personal video i well this is an unread twitter message i never saw it but but anyway that so that's my remember four week i yeah well i remember seeing it but twitter's twitter is actually great because you can open up a message and they don't know and they don't know until you hit accept and you can read the whole message and somebody like hey you never saw it i'm like yeah never saw anyway that's my story so you're asking me have i played pickle bore pickle ball before and my my response to that is does dial does dolly part sleep on her back yes i've played pickle pickle ball before dude of course i have have you seen me have you looked at me i'm a i'm a tall white guy for the midwest of course i played pickle ball i like to eat of butter jelly sandwiches sure do you mind i get a swing of a of an of an old school company classic right now sure yeah yeah you ever had or soda of course do you know how pickle ball started by the way old people it was like a senator or something right yeah dude you know your shit that this is crazy that's crazy you know that it was a congressman so there was it was a board congressman who created this it was nineteen sixty five it was in the like the at the pacific northwest and they get back from some trip him and his buddy they have nothing to do they're at this house they have nothing to do their board the house has a bad court like great let's go play some bad i guess they go down there there's no equipment for bad they're like oh fuck what are we gonna do so they're like well we got ping pong inside but we kinda be out and i kinda wanna be outside so they take the ping pong paddle a with ball and they go to the bad court and they start inventing this game and they're just bored and they invent this game and they're like they call it pickle ball because i guess there's this phrase called pickle boat which is like a a has assembled crew for a boat and they're like i was a mash up of we just grab the the paddle and play bad and lowered the nets like this mash thing we'll call it pickle ball and so they create this thing it's like you know just a small regional game nobody's really playing it and somehow i couldn't figure out the link but like somehow about in the last five years this thing has gone like very very mainstream to where now there are professional leagues there are you know tons of celebrities own own teams so there people are buying team gary buying a team kevin durant buying a team tom brady buying a team patrick mah homes is buying a team these teams cost a million dollars now there are billionaires that are trying to buy leagues and merging the leagues trying to make this like an official thing it has become kind of real and there's people are trying to create like top golf for pickle so there's place called chicken and pickle and camp pickle that's trying to like basically create venues where you can come drink eat and play pickle ball and so there's like this you know mini gold rush that's happening right now in the world in the world of pickle ball and i started thinking okay where do i think this goes because i've seen this now a couple times i've seen this with mma right going from super fringe to more mainstream e esports and even some other things like the drone racing you ever seen the drone racing league the d quite yeah i that one hasn't picked up like i thought it was going to but maybe it will same same and so you see these happen and you sort of think okay what does it take to make these work i'll give you i'll give you what i think pickle has going for it and then i'll tell you what i think is gonna be tougher for so here's what has going by the way we had a writer at a freelancer at the hustle who quit for a year and she became she wanted to compete and pickle a ball and she did and she started traveling to competitions yeah like it's like an intense thing people love it what did you say to her when she told you what she was planning here what do you think i said it so that's awesome that's a awesome get out yeah you give me reliable back yeah give me a laugh i left laptop right now and then get out and that's awesome yeah but it is awesome up texting me a pick go laugh yourself yeah you're like objectively this is awesome emotionally i feel a little wounded and i'm rooting fail no but she did it it she's doing good okay so here's what i think it has going for it so why like let's brainstorm we've done this with food remember you had your food thing that was i think like low genius and nobody really respects you for it except for me but like i'm not something love handed the compliment look people don't get it i do but no one else does didn't no one else does your parents don't understand but i'm okay you're lifestyle we we've talked about it sure three times just to say the joke again to see if it hits and it just doesn't seem to hit but like let's do it again what's your food thing and then let's let's do the equivalent for the sports world so for food i was like there's like a handful of categories that you need to check off in order to make your food go viral so they're gonna be like a side food where it becomes the main thing so it's like instead of like ice cream that has cookie doughnut it it's like only cookie dough the other thing is has to be a different color than normal so green ketchup or rainbow bagels or it has to be a different size so like a huge pizza or a really small thing or the last one was it has to be the combination of two things that are related but you wouldn't normally have done it like the c nut right yes exactly again genius finally hopefully got it hopefully you get do this time so i think there's sort of a similar thing when it comes to create a a hit game or hit sport because when i played pickle ball i was like okay that was fun and here's what was fun about it there's zero learning curve like we literally the nobody even really explained anything they were just like stand here and when the ball comes to hit it and then they're were like there's two rules don't go in the kitchen and like you know whatever you know here's how the scoring system works they they told me that as we were playing it was very intuitive it's like okay cool got this paddle similar enough to ten a similar enough to ping pong i i kind of already know how to move my body this way alright this this will work so zero learning curve we were playing and the age range of the players that we were playing with or somebody had their son there you know who i think is like you eleven or twelve but i i think you could basically play this game from age eight to like sixty five and so everybody my my mom is took close to seventy and she goes her pickle ball the league twice a week okay we we're we only push it this to eighty you know i don't know how how but this is super broad range and how many sports could you really say that for very very few sports can be played by extremely young and extremely old people you could just play it with two people so you don't need like five on five or like you know a full football team or ba you know a baseball team it picked up during covid because it was kind of like an outdoors activity that anybody could do that was sort of socially distance and so i think that was like a big factor in white group and it's basically like a lightweight version of of tennis or even maybe even a lightweight version of golf in the way that people use it because you could talk while you're doing it you're not like just puff and puff and running the whole time and lastly and most importantly you could play the game trunk and so this is like you know if i wanted to create perfect game those would be my my criteria and then you know out would come would come pickle so i think it's it is kind of a perfect game in that way so i think it has legs for that reason i think it's gonna keep getting more and more popular the fact that the whole state of california worth of population plays this game has played this game in the last year is crazy and you also see other things going for it like the founder of lifetime fitness you know like the gym chain got really into pickle ball and then put five hundred million dollars into building pickle ball courts in all of his like locations because he's like i love pickle people are gonna love this and so they deployed half a billion dollars into building infrastructure dude i love that and people are converting tennis score all the stuff's is crazy there's thirty five thousand courts in the united states now did tennis sucks anyway only like a couple people not how to play it you know what i mean like my wife took lessons on how to play it and i would go and play with her and she would serve it at me and i would basically just try to hit it back and that was how we played it it it sucked that it sucks and then i just her weird form of abuse actually is what you just described yeah tennis is stupid so to anyone listening who wants to capitalize this we can brainstorm but i'm gonna summarize this in the two simple words okay vince mc man if you are in this business remember those words vince mc man who is vi man vi mc man is the owner and current or former ceo of the wwe the world wrestling entertainment i don't know what it is but it's it's time that we grew up you know stone cold the rock this is wwf e back then it was wwf f dude when you think about it wwe it's just a bunch of ripped dudes in their underwear having a soap opera in front of fifty thousand people and then the rest of the people on tv it's all it is is a soap opera and there's a little bit of ripped dudes in underwear wrestling that's all it is and it's awesome you've got grown dudes who are like the most like homophobic guys ever and yet they're like sitting there watching two oily ripped dudes just thrown around it's like you know they get past at all because all they care about is the story the drama this is all you need to do so if you're interested in this you just go and get a picture of vince mc man you put it a picture of him on your wall and just say what would vince do yeah what would vince do w w v d what would vince do that's all i'd care about if i was entering into this because that's exactly what happened with tennis i only cared about what's her name serena in that last like tournament that she was in because it was her last one worry you know what i'm saying like i only care about this naomi nam osaka lady i only care what's her name about oh what's her name it's oh osaka i only care about her because like i hear that she's kinda like going a little like she's having some mental issues and i'm like oh okay now i'm kinda interested got a train wreck yeah yeah i'm like i've been doing it and like that that's like what i get i get hooked on it or like you know some of these like sports that i don't think are mainstream i get it like lance armstrong guy gets cancer maybe it's on drugs killing these europeans alright cool you got my attention like i need a story and that's what anyone who's interested in pickle ball and needs to understand this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully into well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot world at him so i think as funny as what you just said is i think you're totally right i remember when we started working on an esports product right like that's what got bought by by twitch we're my ability basically the esports company and i met with a venture capitalist it's guy zach we he owes love sports but e sports needs it's dana white which is basically dana white was the vince mc man of the u and he goes dana white he's like there is no u without dana white right because literally the company was going bankrupt so you know i i don't think literally there would have been a company without without vance sorry without dana and his and the fort tina brothers coming in and buying it and putting in they bought it for two million dollars and then they burned another forty or fifty million trying to make it successful at a loss before it finally turned around and started to become a thing and so they put in years millions of dollars and expertise at promotion and willing to just run through walls to make it happen going state by state to get this thing licensed so they could even host events and then hosting an events figure out how we're gonna sell tickets and once they say sell tickets how we gonna get this thing on tv once it gets on tv how are we gonna build these characters in the storylines lines so we gotta invest in all of these documentaries and dude reality tv shows and things like that before smartphones were even a thing dana used to give his guys i remember you remember when the these they first came out there these video cameras that looked almost like an iphone looks now but it was like a flat flip cams he get he goes hey everyone raven in a meeting you u nfc fighters everything you do here's your flip cam record it posted on like i forget what was popular i think it was youtube but we're he was like one of the first guys to do that totally totally was the one and he had to do it because he no mainstream channel would let him in it couldn't get you know now they're on espn it took twenty years to get onto to espn as a sport you know that's how crazy this was and so you need somebody like that which basically just saying you need a world class one and a billion entrepreneur you're gonna make this work and there are some interesting characters that are involved in this thing do you know who this guy is done if you're the that this guy the search dun pickle ball there is this billionaire who is like really trying to make pickle ball a thing like so this guy made his fortune doing subprime auto loans which like you didn't i didn't say the tom yeah tom done them yeah yeah subprime mortgage loans so like you don't even have to say he made his fortune if i just said yeah he worked on subprime auto loans you'd be like oh so he's filthy rich like you like there's no you don't put those forwards words together without being a billionaire and so he's super rich he takes a bunch of big wild bets so he put i think like seventy million dollars into an nfl competitor called the aa f that like basically folded before it even had its first game and he lost seventy million dollars trying to do that now he's basically he owns pickle ball dot com he bought the major league you know the biggest league for pickle ball or like you know there's two competing leagues and he bought one of them and this guy like trying to make pickle ball happen and he's dude he also owns the majority of top golf he owns a majority of top golf yeah he's he does a bunch of stuff like this so he is pretty fascinating guy there's a bunch of like really like interesting characters that have like kind of pushed this forward so he's one of the guys who've pushed this forward there's another guy named see more r can you ever heard of this guy no why i heard of him here's are some things about sea more r self made millionaire by creating a marketing company alright check does iron man's check does ultra marathons check tae one black belt check he has bicycle so low coast to coast check he he created the first rating system for pickle check and he did all of this after the age of fifty that's pretty baller that's that's a pretty baller post fifty resume to have so so this guy kind of you know pushed push the the the ball forward and kinda helped legit it make it make it more popular as well and then obviously there's all the players and the people who've have been playing at the grassroots as well so so i feel like with pickle there's just like this tremendous grounds swell and here's a couple of my quick takes first of all rip ip bad and yet i knew for the first i saw bad but bed there's a little bit of a bit sport i could tell i saw it coming and i avoided it like the playing and it just needed a little little tweak a little tweak there for bad and you know pretty sad for bad it was like sitting there the whole time and miss missed this wave so you know that sucks second could this happen again like i need to go start playing all old people sports and just sniffing around like what's up with bat ball how do play this shit is this good is this the next thing like there there might be another old person sport that could be translated down third you may not know this but i was on the cusp of creating the next pick of ball back when i was in middle school me and my buddy's created a game called gulf you might be wondering what's golf john and gulf was basically the combination of golf and ping pong it was an extreme of big pong and shout to my guy's dvd who was there with me in the in our game room and we created golf and it i get i garrett this is the most fun game ever and we invented it just didn't know how to commercial at the time incredible game last version of that my version of that was an eighth grade we came up with the game called nut ball or you knuckles with other parts of your body oh no it's better it's called nut ball you sit twenty feet apart and you sit on the ground with your legs and legs and a person said yeah and a person has the throw ball the first person that flinch loses yeah you moved used get in trouble yeah like my the sister mary came up to me and said sam no more nut ball so i i got bad which is a weight of itself funny story so i left you i we did that weekend kinda retreat founders thing we're just like okay we're gonna brainstorm we're gonna really make plans we're gonna you know think about what's second we can give each other great business advice i left early the on the last day so i missed the last twenty four hours and so i hit up ben and i was like ben how was the how was the last day what i missed anything good anything really you know you have you have notes you can share with me and he goes no we basically just played pickle ball for seven hours because sue really wanted to beat me and put pickle ball and he couldn't but he wouldn't let me leave until he beat me but he just couldn't beat me and so we just take four hours five hours straight and i just been non nonstop and then after that we didn't talk and i think like that the sign of a great game a grain that could take over your life and make you a bit of a degenerate so i'm all in on pickle dude they need a leader with a good name when i was in san francisco i got into competitive ski ball and the guy who ran it was called joey the cat and he do you remember joey the cat he braid himself at san francisco joey the cat the ski ball guy and people would rent ski ball remember startups he was just like renting out ski ball machines to bars or to office started doing yeah yeah yeah yeah and he was making good money doing it right he was making great money he owned buildings in the mission yeah he owned like anywhere where he like little warehouse with all his ski ball machines and he was joey the cat and all of his ski all machines had like a tiger stripe on it and oh you got you you gotta join the cap machine that's great man you this it was like a saturday office you're like you guys you most must be doing well you're having you have fun in your office oh cool yeah like oh you're into like local shit nice right right right oh you yeah you're supporting this local guy enjoy the cat you have kombucha need like wow you guys got going on so this guy needs a the leader of of pick they need a cool name like joey the cat really there should be like a tiger's side every time you say that alright okay cool we let's do one more topic okay i wanna give you one more interesting person that i think is worth talking about okay so have you ever heard of virtual gaming worlds no dude whenever we talk about this what's my answer well it's just kinda like a rhetoric question really so good play sports that's what i as more as that i eat meet about requests you're like no i'll too busy i been fine like i beat up the last guy you said those words to me so go google google this company you're gonna be kinda interested in this so okay go to this website and i just want you to guess their revenue just say we're playing a game called guess the revenue well it's just like a little squarespace rink dink site looking i don't know five million oh close close three and a half billion a year oh great right five hundred million of profit and they did this in ten years so what they do is they're basically they're one of the only legal online casinos in the united states they own one of the largest poker sites in america called global poker and basically it's casino games done via sweep stakes and trade promotions that's kind of like the legal arbitrage here to make this work is that they do it as it's not gambling it's basically sweep stakes and they have a patent on it so they have like very he has very little competition at the moment apparently and i gotta give a shout out to the guys so this there's a guy who sent me this message and a bunch of notes on this i'm gonna shout him out real quick it's kind of he was like dude you got feature this guy he's basically a billionaire he pays it like you know basically he he just dividend out you know in the late latest like whatever year or quarter and just bought a private jet off the off the dividend and it's like so a shout out to this guy anc who who told me about them so crazy crazy crazy business he's he's ansel on twitter alright so here's what here's what's interesting so the guy who started it he's an ex financial planner he basically was not a builder or a seller right like the typical startup up archetype is like you're great engineer or you're the great growth marketer and he was either he was a solo founder he was a financial planner didn't know how to do marketing didn't know how to do coding he was basically just a badass ass and he recruited a was lawrence yeah lawrence exactly he paid a developer agency to handle the build out so didn't have a technical cofounder founder or cto just hired a dev shop you know it wasn't perfect like they basically the code was so buggy like the slot machines would accidentally just pay you out a bunch and this happened several times they had to like survive that and this is built out in perth australia so this is like built in the middle of nowhere so kind of violates all the rules single founder didn't have the skill set wasn't in a big city where you know oh you gotta move to silicon valley or new york or wherever to do this he came to silicon valley once couldn't raise any because they can invest in gambling opportunities but the good news is this that means this guy didn't take on any invest take how much investment didn't didn't get diluted so he still owns sixty six percent of this company that's doing five hundred million a year in profit and and just you know three and a half billion in revenue and so you know it's a you know basically started fully remote they they got their first office eight years in you know eight years into the business it's pretty crazy dude it it says he wow this is amazing so he said they increased their profit and they made four hundred and fifty four in profit and it paid dividends of four hundred and thirteen million dollars i actually have a question so does that mean that the company only needs forty million dollars or whatever the yeah forty million dollars in cash to operate either that or they have enough cash reserves already there to for whatever let's say their burn might be a hundred they might have already a stockpile of cash reserves so they just give it out the excess that's wild man this is wild so it's all based around this workaround which is that the us law lets you do sweep steaks and so they offer sweep coins that can be redeemed for cash and they have a trademark or ours our patent around sweep stakes trade promotions they said they worked with the us lawyers to build a system where like customers can basically buy virtual gold coins use it to play the games they have no value outside of the game but they when you buy the gold coins you get these sweep coins with it and and yeah basically like they found a like a it was a regulatory insight not a product or marketing insight that allowed this to happen so and sweep stakes are regulated basically like state by state so in order for something to change every you know different states each individually would need to change something in order to make this happen and yeah there's basically like you know brands that will use multinational company like there's like sweep states companies that you can use to run sweep state across states because of the of the complication dude whenever whenever people tell me hey i have an idea should i hire a developer or should i hire one of these agencies to make an app ninety nine percent of the times i say no you're wasting your money you're never gonna do anything with it and it's just gonna go to waste right this is the guy this is the guy needs to jump on this guy as like a story of how these things work this is this is a really fascinating story yeah exactly and there's a video of him in twenty twelve he's pitching at the launch conference to jason and cali i don't know if it's this exact idea but basically you know similar similar sort of gambling idea and all the judges are basically like oh you know the opportunities outside of the us it's too hard in the us and you know didn't listen like new his knew his shit understood that there's like a regulatory mode and a a patent moat that he could create that would allow him to do this and basically create kind of like a small and not small sorry a large cash cow that's essentially like on you know nobody's really competing with them on this which is kinda crazy and it's surprising to be that a patent would be this this powerful at at at stopping somebody from competing because in tech patents usually do nothing the you i don't care about patents at all yeah whenever they say someone has by the way would you conor mcgregor nice i like that word you can bring that back yeah little little bit yeah you're gonna call me mate i like that that was pretty good they whenever i hear someone say they have a patent at like in a pitch i'm like i i think that means nothing i actually it's red flag i'm usually like that means you think it's something and it is nothing which means you don't know anything yeah it's like asking me to sign an nda to hear someone's pitch i'm like oh you yeah you're this is a joke we i remember at one of our startups it was like or like when we bought bib back we we got the patents with it and there's was like oh it's a patent for like the idea of like going on a social network and whiteboard like there's like a whiteboard feature where one user can draw anything on this virtual whiteboard a lot was like oh you invented that he's like yeah and i was like cool like i use that on facebook he's like yeah because this means nothing this piece of paper means nothing and it does nothing and like you know impossible to really use this or enforce this or like you know just way too hard in the world of like internet innovation to to make this work it's that was my that was my belief coming in so this is a bit of a frame breaker here for me on on like why this guy has no competition doing this and it might be some other reason it might another reason which is it might be that this is actually shady a and like most entrepreneurs don't wanna do it or you know the stupid many lawsuits or whatever definitely that one by the way definitely i i i think it's definitely that one without like knowing anything about this it's just going strictly off like i a guess with zero information other than i see this guy owns a bunch of ferraris probably that one oh his instagram is prolific and speaking of of of names this guy got a name lawrence es like tell you can't be lawrence es and not have a profile picture as he does where he's like this at a poker table and he's just looking over yeah he's then boys that's what is that that's what is his a instagram bio needs to be just i'm then boy this guy the this this guy is the guy well congrats to him that's a interesting fine he this is a crazy story so yeah yeah super supervisor over that's he knew he's like dude i got something that's great for him of him and true enough it was yeah it's juicy that's what that's called that's called the that's called a big juicy burger it's a good find by the way we forgot oh i totally forgot speaking of the thing legal agreements patents important important contract there's one more look if you've made it this far normally be put this in the beginning this one's is for the for the real og or into this there's a thing called the m fab my first million gentleman's agreement and by the way sean in our last video you called it a gentleman's agreement and then you actually said shoot we have four women listeners we have to call it a woman's agreement and did you see the our four women listeners actually comment in the youtube channel and in fact many said act no you have more i'm number five but what they don't know is that actually there can only really ever be before for whatever reason it's just like a law of physics or something like that one in one out it's like a night club and so we really appreciate all of you all four of you are like near and dear to our hearts we look forward to getting to know you personally because we can because it's four and so and actually they don't even need to sign the gentleman's agreement they they're in they're their grandfather their in their grandmother there's two requirements here if you've made it this far in the video and also if you've ever listened to more than one video sean and i dedicate like dozens of hours a week to making these videos so now you are in debt to us and all you have to do to repay your debt is click like if it doesn't matter if you're listening on spotify or itunes or i host called itunes but you know what i it doesn't matter where you're listening to it you go to our our youtube page type in my million and mean click subscribe and now we're even and we work for you it's called the gentleman's agreement because we're not there i can't see your computer you just have to do it just don't lie so please go and do that and that's it yeah it's like you know biden was was thinking about canceling student debt well we're gonna cancel your debt you're gonna cancel all your podcast debt if you just do this one thing like i mean i couldn't couldn't think of a better deal for you honestly so on the general agreement go to youtube my first million click subscribe and turn the notifications on to why not dude by the way this part of the pod has become a fan favorite yeah this is really and and i have to say i stole this from someone jesse on fire i stole this from him he's another youtuber but this has become a hit don't know why you're admitting i would just steal everything and say that he stole it from you and left well he's a he he's a u c podcast so maybe he can kick my ass and how he i was remembered it he goes look the other day i went and i saw the dish at seven eleven it was for alzheimer's or like muscle something dis and i left a quarter there and i didn't steal the other quarters i just left that one quarter there because that's called the gentleman's agreement and i just stand by and that's the same thing with this i edit the video i come up with the content i do all this work i do it for you what you're gonna do for me is you're gonna click subscribe that's that's our agreement this is how society works and right now everyone's doing it and if you haven't done it you're you're you're being left out so please do that and that's this pitch it's pretty good it's good and it's tough to come up with at each time and i feel like in doing so we also earn our our part of the gentleman's agreement just plan but making it interesting right that we gotta we gotta earn it alright we should we should wrap board on