Companies of One that Make Millions with Steph Smith

this is awesome ben texted me or like slacks me while we're doing this and he goes steps been spit fire for the last fifty minutes so this is badass not to see my first millie got to the safe in the spilling got to the bank is not the see what's going on what's good how are you i'm good alright you're back sean is on a family vacation and you are the sub and i think it's a good sub so you sent me this document that we're gonna we're gonna go through a ton of stuff there's so much stuff on here how is it are you is this like a list that you've been keeping for months or is this just you made this just for this this is part of a list i've been keeping for months i i keep this list in my evernote that just every time i see a new idea whether it's from like a newsletter or something you guys talk about on my first million that i wanna respond to i just have a running list so this is probably like a quarter of that bigger list what this is fifteen pages how many words yeah just what we have here is like ten thousand words we should share this i mean at least parts of it because we're not gonna get through all of this this is amazing i if i was you i wouldn't share this i would charge people for it this is good i mean there's definitely things that i'm excluding from here you know you don't share the ones that you actually wanna build you so you told me one time that you wanna become a billionaire i think i want to we'll see if that actually happens well i said who cares if it happens or not but you said that's what you wanted do you what are you gonna do to become that i mean i feel like if i ever become a billionaire we're gonna talk hopefully about tyler perry litter it has to come from building something on my own i need to have equity and something like you don't become a billionaire from working for a company and buying etfs well there's a few examples but the likelihood of be becoming a billionaire there is slim to none the likely become of becoming a billionaire there be by being an early employee somewhere is much slimmer of that subset but it's possible it's definitely possible should we talk about these companies of one which i feel like are kind of anti not anti billionaire but a different approach to building yes and i actually don't think they're anti billionaire i think you can become a billionaire this way but just so people know so this is steph smith steph you work at the hustle you basically helped me start trends and you ran it for a while and you still kinda run it but you also do like a bunch of other different projects and you have this gum road book called doing content right is that right yep and it made like a hundred and fifty g's in the first year or something like that right yep exactly and you are the so we we aren't like really partners anymore but i felt like when we were when you ran trends i viewed it a little bit like a partnership i've worked with you pretty closely for a while now now that now we're just friends but is that out is that all accurate what am i missing i think so yeah i i build stuff on the side for fun taught myself to code a couple years ago and now i also have a podcast so if people like what they hear here it's called the shit you don't learn in school so that's my little plug and you are very you and i are similar in that there's like it's kinda like sean like there's like this there's like overlap of things that are very very similar between us but there's things that are very different in that what you're different about is that you sweat the details like crazy and you're pretty technical in the sense of like i really thinking just you're just smarter than me like you could just figure things out like you can just you can just figure certain things out so your research is actually typically more like in and technical than my research and i like that thanks i mean i don't know if i actually want the details if anyone knows me closely like if you ask cal he'd be like no she's like a mess so i appreciate that i come off that way so let's talk about companies of one so we're you're you have a list of like ten or seven companies that are run by one person that are shockingly big let's go through some of them and talk about them yeah so i think you called out two before so i'm gonna just call out those too quickly you called up built with before which is the site that basically can tell what a site is built with is it built with wordpress or squarespace or what plug ins is it is a site using and that one at the time when you found it was i think doing around fourteen million and then you've also covered no list and remote okay by peter levels and those two i think together are doing around a million a year and those two i think are both completely solo founders i know peter certainly is but there are a couple others so have you heard of ugg monk well hold on so bill with so people know built with is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here ever not the but one of built with is like it's like a i think they have a plug in as well but it's a website you're gonna built with dot com you enter in the hustle dot c let's say you wanna you you see something on our website that you like and you wanna copy and you're like how they build that what plugins ins do they use what whatever you use built with and they make money because they like what do they do i think like sell people's data or something i'm not sure actually let me look this up because i know they get a crazy amount of traffic look they've got plans on their site so they've got a basic plan i don't know what you get with it but it's two hundred ninety five dollars oh i know when you get you get basically i believe you sign up and it tells you people's so it it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their website and what type of plugins ins and i think you pay money and it'll say we have the emails or contact information of all types of people who use blank plugin and you sell a plugin that is complimentary to that therefore pay money and you could now target them and advertise against them or things like that yeah they charge so their basic plan is three thousand dollars a year their pro is five thousand their team is ten thousand there's a cool little trick they have on their pricing page if you go to it and you hover over they have like technologies keywords and they have these little gifs that they're actually like showing what you would get with the product i've never actually seen that before so that's a cute little hack and it's built by basically one guy in australia alright so what are some of the other companies okay so i was gonna call it ugg monk so this one's not as big i actually don't know exactly how much they're making but it's a really simple e commerce store they started just selling really nice t shirts which sounds like okay like there's enough t shirt stores out there but this guy jeff sheldon he focused on just really high quality shirts and then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff if you are you in the dock i'm looking at ugg monk so when i go to ugg monk i see like a pen holder and i see like a or a to do list like a it's like cute well designed like pen holders but doesn't sound neat but it honestly it looks pretty sick yeah it looks surprisingly sick if you go to let me if you click in the doc where it says look at this if you click that that is his setup and he he's like one of those builders i think has built a little twitter following as well and he just has this beautiful desk setup which is like the perfect dad and i all saying this it looks awesome i never thought i'd want to go and buy like a hundred dollar to do list but i i think i'm gonna buy one yeah i it's just like cute easy to use like mid century modern stuff yeah i'm on board how much revenue does he do i'm not sure but i'm pretty sure he does several million of a year he gets over two hundred thousand page views a month and i he's been going at this for several years so i know he makes enough to have left his full time job several years ago and he's grown a lot since then so i'd probably say call wow that's crazy alright that's a that's a good fine it's just one guy he's the only employee i think so i mean he's he he probably has some staff now that he's been growing but i i'm pretty sure he doesn't have a big team alright what's next alright card is actually one guy he might have contractors but card c a r r d i've built sites with card people probably recognize recognized card or right they've almost certainly been on a site built by card and it's built by this guy a aj and it's doing one million dollars year ar i think he actually just raised money now so i think he's kinda going for did really just raised money i would love to invest in this yeah you raised money earlier this year he was like big in the indie hacker community and then i think he posted on indie hackers this year like look i'm i'm gonna raise money i'm gonna you know really go for it but he it's kinda crazy two point five million sites have been built on card wow and yeah i can hit card as like a million error so it's a free platform for building simply for building simple fully responsive one page websites that can do anything yes i actually think so there there was this company called them you remember about me no what is that about dot me so go to about dot me if that's the url you don't remember that you're i'm just a little bit older than you which which is like then that few years probably makes a difference because about up me when i was just getting started was considered like the preeminent builder in this space and they may it it was a one page website where you can explain stuff about you and it was started by this guy named tony conrad i believe his name is and he's just cool looking can dude who is also an investor now and he sold it after only two years to aol well for like forty million dollars and it was bootstrap you see about dot me see i was like basically the same thing yeah it reminds me of you've heard of slash right i love slash so or sorry i'm not thinking of flash i'm talking about unfold unfold does this app that basically for instagram it adds different like it allows you to kinda piece together pictures for your instagram story but they also started these like one pager where basically because all these instagram they're like oh i need my linkedin bio linkedin bio is also a site like that but unfold was sold to squarespace i think like last year or something i don't know for how much though man i think that these one page website builders are actually really cool so there's this other business i almost invested in i think it's called the media kit dot com or dot c i believe it's just called media kit and all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could create your media kit kit and send it to people so and whether you're the hustle or you're just an instagram person you just had this like the hustle dot c slash media kit or like you know steph smith dot com slash media kit and it was that your media kit was on there and that sounds like not that important but it's kinda like docks so docks send if you don't know what docs send is docs send is basically all it is is powerpoint in the cloud but email gated so you have to enter your email and then you get all types of information so it you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you wanna send it to investors so you know who has it and and who views it and how long they've views it and it's basically that so anyway card is pretty bad that actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here i think yeah and i mean he actually runs card as a subscription business so that's one million arr and i think it's probably way past that today i think you're gonna like the next one though go to this next episode dot net i think it's actually next dash episode dot net it's the it's such an old site i think the guy's been running it for fifteen years and if you just open it up you'll you'll get a sense about the ui hasn't caught up to where we are today but it's amazing as this guy's been running it for fifteen years guess how much traffic this thing gets i'm looking at it on similar web this is crazy so what is this called so next dash episode dot net what is this yeah it's a site where basically like there's no way i would think that a site like this would still exist but people use it that basically helps you track your tv shows and it's a little bit of a community so i i think i've never used it but you know people watch the bachelor they hang out on this site and they find other people watch the bachelor and they talk about it but it's kinda crazy how much traffic this site gets this is awesome and so here's why i know this is a big business so if you go to similar web and you look at the traffic the estimated monthly traffic is three point six million unique a month that's decent that's not like the best but it's like really good particularly for one person but if you go to traffic source it says that eighty percent is coming from direct traffic which basically means that there's a lot of people that are just typing in this url and going there on a consistent basis and if you do that you probably can have a huge business and it looks like they have got a premium which is only two dollars a month but how big is this so i don't know exactly how big it is but he's been running it for fifteen years and i know he's definitely i i found him on hacker news one of those posts that was like hey like who's a solar who's doing this thing on their own and he's like i've worked on this entirely on my own for the last fifteen years so what this is crazy good find i can't wait so who what's this person's named do you know let me send you here it he is i found them nico nikola yeah wow this is a good find how much revenue you think he does on this i don't know about today but i'm assuming like if he's getting that many million and he he's been working on for fifteen years i'd say like maybe a million a year what do you think yeah i would agree with that and it's probably mostly all profit yeah well i mean he's literally the only one who works on it in one of the the posts on hacker news he's like yeah i started it for myself because i couldn't find such a tool back in the day and basically he's like avoided hiring other people because he doesn't want to like scale through hiring alright what else do we got so there's a ton on here there's some there's one called host five by a guy named riley who basically you know has scaled that to like a million a month and a year or two there's some good stories from back in the day or apparently survey monkey was doing nineteen million dollars in revenue with twelve employees so not a one person thing but plenty of fish is another example where they were doing currently ten million dollars and the guy was by himself he might have even been part time so that's kind of a crazy story from back in the day too how did how do how do you know this about survey monkey so it was posted it was actually you posted about built with a while ago i think and then i went through all of the comments of you basically you were like can anyone tell me something more efficient than that and this guy named tripp posted yeah survey monkey was doing nineteen million with twelve employees and you asked him if this was documented and basically someone else commented in and was like yeah trips too honest to say this but he actually invested in survey monkey in two thousand nine so he probably knows the numbers wow this is amazing i've heard this i've heard rumors about survey monkey doing this this is crazy this is so cool so did i tell you about how i told you about craigslist right so the hustle our very first office it was this apartment it basically it looked like a town home like a like a typical san francisco town home but it was zoned as business and on the bottom was this was a piano teacher in the middle it was like a three story town home but they like d it up into apartments so the bottom one was a panel teacher the middle one was this company called n dot net and rug dot net sells it's like a marketplace where you can trade like fish and grateful dead like cds that you recorded at their concerts and above that was craigslist and craigslist moved out and we moved in and this was in two thousand and sixteen i think and which means craigslist at the time the landlord told me he goes they were making around three hundred million dollars in revenue and they worked out of this little office and this office was so small it was basically a three or two bedroom apartment and he was like there's basically like fourteen people here and that was the the whole company and they were so cheap craig was so cheap that the rent the rent i was paying was like five hundred and i split it with my friend si but so the rent for the whole place is there's probably only two thousand dollars so they're paying two or three grand in rent for this place when they were that big and they were so cheap that in the lease apparently it said like toilet paper is provided by landlord and every once a while i think his name was ishmael he would forget to or emmanuel a man i forget it was like this old jewish guy he would forget to put the toilet paper and replenish it and they wouldn't pay the rent they go until we get the toilet paper you're not getting the rent and they in additionally craig worked out his i i used craig room because it had a kitchen table in one of the bedrooms that he used as his desk it was like this ugly kitchen table that was like his desk but it was really heavy and they couldn't move it and they just left it there and that was my desk for a long time it was just like weird kitchen table and that was out of the craigslist office and that's how scrappy they were dude i love that so i mentioned peter levels before he's a friend of mine from bali he once tweeted about this so i don't feel bad sharing it but he used to walk around with this like you know those bags that you get at a grocery store the like plastic bags that are like a dollar yeah so you'd think that some guy making like a million bucks a year all profit is gonna like upgrade his lifestyle he would carry his laptop around in one of those bags and like that's it and you'd see him walking around in flip flops and a t shirt and he'd be like dude like respect because like you you make a lot of money and everyone knows that because you have that open page but he's like walking around with like a grocery store bag as his laptop holder that's stupid that's very stupid every that wow what some what are some other smaller ones so i wanna call it a couple these are actually also some people i know from bali so it's it's kinda cool when you live in a place like chain because you're just running into people just like this so one of them is the thing called banner bear so if you click on the link where it says banner bear that's their open page so a lot of these people also create these cool open pages like the ones from no met list but i wanted to show you this one because if you scroll down if you're on the page do you see the modem the motor can't even say it the moto yeah what is this so i'm looking at basically a pick pictures of motorcycles yeah of like nice triumph motorcycles so basically like he's got his revenue and you can see his mr and it's pretty impressive he's at around an era of three hundred thousand i think he only started this you can see in sometime in twenty twenty but he kinda re thought the open page and he was like you know what i just i wanna just show my revenue i wanna show people like what i wanna spend this on so he loves motorcycles and he has like these different goals so like if he hits a certain mr he like unlocks a new motorcycle and so i thought that was just like a kinda cool cool little thing and you can see just like peter he he shows all of his data like you've have the number of trials per month his churn obviously the the moto his github commit activity so i think that's pretty cool because like i think years ago there was some people showing there their like open revenue but now people are kinda like rethinking what they can share what the hell is banner bear this is so cool looking what does it do so basically i think it's like it's basically like an api for generating images so do you know how like we you we could have used this at trends honestly you remember we would run events and we'd have to like go on five her and like you know it would kind of it would it wasn't very expensive but it takes some time and you're like man like we should just have like an image template for all of our events and it has like a certain background a certain theme and so he's made it possible it's basically generate images based on certain inputs so you don't have to like go and hire her designer to do that you can like auto generate images and so some people use this for like social media right so you have like a certain theme that aligns with your brand and you're just like adjusting like all of your blog posts to like use banner bear instead of going in hiring a designer to create an image for each one this guy's site is beautiful he reminds me of how do you say that peter levels guy is that is it peter yep he reminds me of that this guy looks like an artist yeah i mean i think what's cool about all of these folks is like they do the whole stack like i guess you have to do as a company as one but they do like the marketing they do they design they do the development and what's cool is that like because they're not necessarily experts quote unquote in these spaces like they're just kinda hacking it together i find they're actually a lot more creative right so they're like they're not like constrained by the marketing degree that they had you know before and so peter is like another example where he's he pretty consistently does pretty cool things on marketing or on twitter for example recently he like instead of paying ten thousand dollars for ads he's like i'm just giving ten thousand dollars way to like someone who re tweets this and it got like you eleven thousand reach tweets which obviously is like much more than he would have spent on that this in this website banner bear it was launched in ten of two thousand nineteen so let's round up to be two thousand twenty let's say it's started in in until in january twenty twenty that means it's what two years old yep is growing pretty well does it say it's growth rate i mean this could be pretty this could be a really good business yeah and and and it's just him i think he like might have hired like a part time customer service person but yeah it's going really well wow this is amazing how big do you think this could get i think pretty big because it's actually like you know it's one of those niche problems that you're like what like a you're gonna create a product like auto generates images like who needs that but then you actually think like wow every company that has a blog has to generate all these images on mass every company that runs something on social media like i think the reason it's working is it's actually even though it seems like a niche problem it's it's a problem that most companies have wow alright you wanna do you wanna pay a couple more we can just call out one more which is have you heard of headline no what's that how do you how do you find all this stuff by the way well like i said i comb through some of the threads that you posted before but headline banner bear no list like these are all people who were nomadic and i think it's a like the indie hacker community and the no mad community overlap because they're both kinda like rebellious in a way they're like don't need to live in one place or like i don't need to raise venture capital and so i think there's an overlap there and so yeah most of these guys are people that i used to like c with in bali wow okay so what's headline so headline is super super simple app but danny the guy who built it built it in like a couple months and within a year he sold it for seven figures so all it was is it was using ai to generate kind of like landing page headlines or copy and so if you look at the landing page it kinda looks like a much more complex product but it's actually pretty simple and if you've heard of copy dot ai i think there's like similar elements to it oh hey luckily on the website of headline they use my name they're ready to hear it wait i really say i just noticed that you must have seen this before make say this this guy's using my name i've never that's so funny is he trying to tell me to use this i don't know because i also don't know like i said he sold this so i don't know if he put that there if the founders put it there you're me you're c you're seeing my face and name on this website yeah totally god that's so funny why is my face on here whatever that's cool yeah well this is just like a super simple one where it's like i love it's like perfect example of like just being scrappy building something he exited seven figures within i think eight months just pretty crazy and yeah i just i think one theme is just like these people find like a niche problem that isn't or at least seems niche they solve it it has to be an existing problem that people want solve i think the thing that a lot of people do wrong when they're trying to like do their like own little startup as they look for things that like don't really exist but these are like perfect examples where it's like oh of course people need sites to like house their their work of course people need like nice t shirts and productivity stuff of course people need like landing page copy so i think that's the like one learning for me how did the sky build this he built it in the open on twitter so he just coded it and he would like keep giving updates and then i think he launched it a product hunt like pretty classic launch strategy but i think it kinda blew up after product on and then it sold it but it's just built on top of that gp three thing yep wow alright that's amazing wow i cannot believe it good fine you wanna try something else yeah let's talk about just a couple of these so another thing that i did which kind of overlaps with what we talked about is just like sites that have a surprising amount of traffic so sites that you're like wait really like there's no way and then you look it up and you're like wow i guess like you know twenty million of people a month actually look this up so one of them i wanna show you is called glitch deals so have you heard of glitch no what does that mean okay so you know how like of course e commerce is popping off a lot of companies have e commerce sites not all of them have fully functioning e commerce sites so sometimes they glitch right so sometimes an airline will you know show a a flight for like twenty bucks that really meant to me two hundred sometimes you know there'll be something that's a dollar and it's like really supposed be hundred it's just like a decimal place error and this happens all the time right and apparently according to the law like if you advertise it for a certain amount like you have to sell it for that amount so there are all these sites that basically look for glitches and i found this out because i was at my partner's like family home for christmas last year and i remember his aunt being like hey you want like a podcast mic and i was like i don't like sure i i don't know like volume what she's like i got thirty like i just don't have to give them away and i'm like what do you mean you thirty and i guess she found a glitch in one of these groups and yeah like she just got thirty podcast mics that like she she got for free so free it was free in that case it was free most of the time it's just like a crazy wild deal but the company didn't mean time so like i need to buy i'm trying to up a game and get that garage fridge you know i'm about that garage fridge like it's still it's like a store all my meat and so i on here they've got a twenty five dollar garage fridge i need that three yeah and that's how you know you make it when you get a garage fridge and they have one for fifty dollars and it looks kind of complicated to use though yeah so i have to say i've never actually glitch myself i think it's one of those like rabbit holes that like the same way people go and like try to like enter sweep steak so i think it's like a similar phenomena but there's a ton of people doing it so this glitch deal site gets four million page views a month but it's only been around for a year it's starting by the twenty i think they must scrape them or they have at least i think it's actually a separate glitch site but has they have a facebook group and this facebook group has three hundred and forty two thousand members i guess so many people post a today in this facebook group how many two hundred and fifty plus post a today that's great when i checked it had two hundred and sixty two posts and it was like was like eleven am so i'm not that surprised because when we do giveaways for the hustle we'll do like a t shirt giveaway and like these websites it's like a circular like they all like copy each other and it's basically like midwestern knee stay at home moms mostly and they love giveaways and like one time we've like we're giving away stickers and i saw one of them post this on like a forum like hey there's this news that are called the hustle you just gotta share your referral link dude they'll send you stickers i just got mine and there was hundreds of people commenting on it like talking about different strategies that allows them to get more referrals for the hustle so they'll get their t shirt or their stickers or whatever people look like this is demographic it's mostly women i've noticed and it's mostly like stay at home mom types they love this shit they love feels they love free stuff they love it's like a it's like a challenge for them because i remember asking his aunt like why did you do this like you don't need thirty podcast mix and she's like i just wanted to like i just wanted to like win almost and i think it's so interesting that so many people are doing this because like you're saying it's it's like a crazy amount of people who are like who probably don't need this stuff but are like i'm so stoked that i got like a gas grill on clearance yeah like we we were giving away we were giving away like stickers that said the hustle and it's like these ladies like they don't care about business for technique like they just didn't they didn't care about our brand but they just wanted it just because it was available to get and they felt good i yeah it was crazy to me what else we got okay so let's go to nugget comfort so if you wanna click on that it is it was actually something shared in the transcript group a while ago i don't even know how to explain what these are they're basically like cool children's pillows but there children's pillows that you can basically make into like different shapes and fort and it was just crazy to think so nugget was i think started relatively recently at seen in the last year or so i think they had some mailing lists for a prior product before that but they made over four million in sales in a month with zero ad spend so nuggets comfort was doing is doing over four million a month yes what if you go to so here's how i know that they're at least pretty big you go to their website so it looks like they're based in north carolina you go to their website and you look at you click careers and you see here they're hiring for they're hiring a senior accountant so you know that they're they're accountant counting the money and count in that bread they haven't then they need a bunch of different warehouse operators they need a production associate which means that that production associate is gonna report to someone so you know that there's like a huge like a pretty meaningfully sized meaningful sized team here this company is only a year old who started it i'm not sure who started it let me pull up this facebook post basically it's called nugget comfort it's like it looks like pillow cushions that it's like pillows but you can like build with them you it's almost like a combination of legos meets pillows yeah exactly and i don't actually know exactly the founder this was shared in the facebook group looks like it might be someone called hannah fu a former elementary school teacher yeah so actually nugget was launched so it had a previous product that i think was not geared towards young kids and i guess they had some kickstarter at the beginning and then ultimately i think covid hit and they had to reposition and somehow they came up with this like children's product which i think is just so interesting because i feel like there are certain certain industries like pets or children that like people have just like an endless budget to spend on and so these pillows i think i think they're like two hundred bucks or something it's only three hundred dollars it's not a lot of money yeah it's like they call a pillow couch this is amazing the this company this is one of the wilder things i this is brilliant i totally understand it what a cute cool thing this is amazing alright let's move on to public domain review will do one more this one is just relates to something you guys have talked about before about how certain ip you know is not in the public domain and then it moves into the public domain after a period of time and so this is a site that basically tracks all of that stuff i think i originally found this because apparently winnie the poo is going into the public domain in january and so i think i found some article about that and it was on the public domain review so i think it's one domain what's gonna happen what's gonna happen when that when that happens what's what what type of opportunities are gonna be there and what businesses do you think are gonna pop up so i think so just for like background for people listening there's tons of obviously different books or like the bible for example that's in the public domain people can like buy until you guys talked about like cool millennial bibles winnie need the to poo is a book that you know was written ages ago and then in twenty twenty two would go into the public domain so i believe i think there's like several different things that or different not patents what's it called when something is not in the public right yeah so several different like copyright and so you'd need to look into exactly what this covers versus what else exists but you could like for example potentially like go and like take a winnie need the poop book make it modern and like resell that to to new customers i think it's an example on this website public domain review dot org they've got a store where you can buy prints like the put on the wall and it's like yes really sick art so you're saying like now they can use like winnie the poo in that art or they get like resell old winnie the poo art or something like that yeah and what i'd be interested to find out is specifically about merch i don't know exactly if it's just the book right like the book ip or if it actually has to do with just like the ip overall but the crazy thing about a lot of these big franchises pokemon hello kitty winnie need the poo they've all done over eighty billion dollars of sales in merch alone a lot of people think like okay if you're talking about pokemon they made a lot of money off the show it's like no they actually didn't make that much off the show they made a ton of money off the merch and the same thing is true for like mickey mouse or star wars that's where all the money is made and so what i'd be interested to know and i don't know the answer to this is whether these things moving into the public domain does that mean like i can then go sell like oh winnie need the p shirt i'm not sure do first of all how long does it copyright last is it seventy six years i think you are gonna know this better than i believe it's seventy six years but it's pretty messed up actually when you think about it so like let's just say that like a family invented a person invented winnie the poo they they die they leave it to their family so you're telling me after set i think it's seventy six years or it's it's death of the creator plus seventy six years yeah it's it's from what i see now it's death of the creator plus at least fifty years but it can be extended to seventy is it seventy i remember because it's like the there it was like i remember the law there was a law created that did that it's kinda messed up actually when you think about it that that is going to expire why would that expire like why does it depends i mean you see the same thing with drugs right where you don't want someone to be able to like capitalize on something forever and i think probably has to do with like the public benefits from something being in a free market over time yeah because because if i bought a piece of property and a piece of land and like wouldn't that be weird if like on the third generation you could take back that land i guess so i wonder like yeah i wonder how they determine what things have these expiring copyright versus what things like that that doesn't exist i think that's interesting i would like to learn more about that but sorry go ahead about public domain review dot dot org well it's just another one of those sites where you're like wow that's one an interesting site where you can kind of browse and see like what is moving into the public domain but it's it's very fun to read yeah it also gets i mean not a crazy amount of traffic but five hundred thousand page views a month and so i wonder actually i didn't notice they are selling art or like different collections i was wondering how they were monetizing but it must be through that this is awesome i love this website you wanna do one more sure do you see one that you wanna do in here i mean one of the ones that we can talk about which is just like a super fun little thing like an internet find is this food timeline dot org there's not much of a business opportunity here but i just think it's like a fun thing to browse basically someone has gone down the internet rabbit hole and found like the first citations of when a food existed so it starts with like water and ice and then you know you get like wheat and and things like basically there's like a bunch there's like hundreds of different data points here and then of course it moves to like twenty thirteen which usually see like test two burgers but i think this is like an awesome thing where like again i don't know what the business opportunity is here but like if you have extra time you can create really nifty things like this online and this site this page alone there's only like one page here gets over like a hundred and fifty thousand page views a month i think so i don't know i just thought it was like a cool internet find this is awesome b was only invented in nineteen ninety three it's kinda crazy to look and see like wait a minute like i guess it makes sense because it's fermented but like kimchi was invented in the seventh century but then like you scroll down and you're like yeah what like what we didn't have i don't know like yeah like you said broccoli until nineteen ninety three or what's another crazy thing on here high fructose corn syrup nineteen sixty seven i what i thought that was far sooner buffalo wings only nineteen sixty four how intriguing this is a really really cool website i think that the reason why i think this is cool so this woman it's lynn oliver she launched it in nineteen ninety nine the reason why this is cool is because i respect so listen lynn oliver she or oliver she was born nineteen fifty eight she died in two thousand fifteen she was a library in food historian and the sole author of food the food timeline website so there's this she has a wikipedia page i just love that there's someone who's this weird and quirky enough to dedicate time to do this because i love people like that and people who are crazy enough to put all their energy into something like this exactly i i just think like this is the coolest thing ever and whoever actually created this like thank you for doing that i've have actually one related business opportunity what of this according to wikipedia the sites domain supposedly support expires in two thousand twenty five but as of september two thousand twenty a the the hue is database shows that it's set to lapse on april two thousand twenty two because she died so she died and no it's set to go out go out on april two thousand twenty two so there you go speaking of of copyright there you go one i guess food related opportunity have you ever looked up like healthiest fast food or like healthiest cheese or like totally do you remember that book you're you're not american so i don't know if they have this in canada but it was called eat this not that yes you like such a good book series and i would like use it to figure out like what's in what's a good like if i wanna eat a burger what's the healthiest burger at a fast food place so you're not the only one and i discovered this because i think one day i was looking at something ridiculous like healthiest cheese and so a ton of people are searching this every single month so i think some of these numbers are old but something like healthiest cereal which we all know like cereal is not good for you fifty thousand searches per month healthiest bread thirty thousand searches a month healthiest cheese twenty thousand and then there's also a ton of search volume for things like yeah like healthiest meal at taco bell or something like that which i just love because it's like it just shows again this problem where it's like people wanna eat healthy but they're real in some cases like unable to but it also reminds me of something that peter levels did with his like no met list site which is basically i call it your list is my opportunity so whenever you go you made up that phrase yes i've been thinking about it for ages but i like basically whenever i search something and the all of the results on that page are testicles right so you look up like healthiest cheese and you get a site and just like five it's like a long article with like five types of cheese and you're like oh my god like this should be easier right and there are so many sites that have basically found things with a lot of search volume and made it easier like that's what my list he's like you know what there's all these like variables and you can play with them yourself i'm gonna collect this data so that instead of getting a bunch of list when you look up like hot place in june to go traveling he's like giving you that information so you can access it yourself right he's basically like refining the information and you've seen tons of other people do this i think like that was basically like rich gardens strategy right when you built things media yeah kinda but listen i i will help someone do this or if they wanna partner with me i'll do this so here's what i'm gonna do i bet you i can make a fair bit of money like ten thousands of dollars total but like have a business that make single digit thousands of dollars you could do this in thirty days here's what you do here's what i would do so steph have you so we're doing this contest called m i forget what it's called actually but people are taking our clips and they're turning them into tiktok videos and they're posting them on tiktok and they're getting tons of views so the hashtag m m clips in a matter of like i think we only launched it seven days ago but i forget it's less than ten days in that short amount of time that hashtag has around ten million views meaning kids have made videos that have ten million views on tiktok it's crazy there's a couple videos i think there's one video that has like one point three million views and then there's a whole bunch of other videos that have about or over a million and for sure hundreds of thousands and these guys are killing it and so the way that they did it they created like a handle called like m clips or like the hustle pod or hustle diet like they just they made these thing from scratch and in literally seven days a couple of them have a million views what i would do is create a tiktok page that says craving a chicken sandwich don't eat the pope ones eat because it has this gram of fat they use these types of chemicals and said eat the chick f a one because it has this or like craving a cereal don't eat this eat this why and then you'd like you want more go to this website and you create like a wire cutter style website that does this and you for sure for sure can make a really good revenue like the thousands of dollars we're talking off of affiliate websites an affiliate website and then eventually do brand advertising deals without a doubt i would bet and that would and it and that would get popular if you had the right face you need like a a hip tiktok young looking person to do this it would absolutely crush totally i mean i feel like just the tiktok side of things like that's gonna trend no matter what and then there's so much search volume for this stuff that like you'd build up that sustainable built business over time and there's so many queries for this so if people are actually gonna go build this i want someone to do that go to age hr ahrefs go to the keywords explorer enter healthiest food and then if you go to matching terms it'll basically give you this like list of terms that are similar so you can see like healthiest food which we already talked about but also like healthiest taco healthiest breads healthiest breakfast healthiest restaurant has healthiest starbucks healthiest mexican food and we just like go down the line and there's like how many there's like hundreds of of terms already just like seated there for you and what's crazy is i was actually pretty surprised to see that the keyword difficulty for a lot of these was not very high like i would have thought if someone told me there's search volume for this stuff i would've have thought like oh someone's already tackled this no no no i just googled healthier cereal and like pure pure wow ranks number one i could out rank for a while exactly it's like thrill list or like health line and you're like someone should go and create like a site just for this and then it'll rank surprisingly quickly if you can target the right keywords this is just fantastic the eat this is so eat this dot dot com kinda does that it's owned by galvanized media so whatever i do is i go to these websites i scroll all the way down to see who owns the copyright galvanized media is a website that owns like a ton of different stuff they own eat this not that they own travel they own well and a bunch of other stuff i would i bet sure i can figure out how much money these guys make but i i would imagine like in the twenty or thirty million dollar range if i had to guess based off the website it probably a really good business wow and i mean you can start with healthiest stuff and then obviously like expand past that but that's actually like a surprisingly well i mean i guess not surprisingly i think that's a big niche not so niche niche wow okay let's wrap up with two more things so you had something in here about chess and this guy magnus who you you're like this chest nerd you're chess class you're a chess prodigy you go to chess dot com and you play there you're you're no you're known for being a chess person you had some amazing stats about this guy can you tell me about this well so if people don't follow chest magnus is the number one chess player in the world but the cool thing about magnus i read this the other day is that unlike many athletes if you wanna call chess a sport he's actually managed to already kind of build a little business empire so what a lot of you know celebrities or athletes do is they focus on like getting paid at the time but then they really really struggled to build up any sort of equity in like a product or a brand that they're building which as most people know the way that you you know actually career wealth this is through equity we'll talk about that with tyler perry he's managed to create guy magnus how old is he he's not very old let me go it looks like he was like a gm by the time he was like fourteen or something wow and he's like kinda good looking or like he's cool looking he like it looks like he's kinda charismatic he's just like like there's a story here it's not like he's just good at chess he's like seems like a like a like a like an interesting person in itself yeah he's thirty one so he's he's not old at all and yeah there's like videos of him when he's like twelve and they're like filming him at i think like world championship ships and stuff so he was really talented really early and now he's only thirty one he's built up a little empire so not only does he like compete and chest still and i think he streams on twitch and all that stuff sometimes but he also built his own little company it's called magnus chess so if you go to see what the url is magnus chess carlson dot com okay or sorry it's play magnus dot com to get redirected he has this plus membership i don't know exactly what you get from it but it's fourteen dollars a month and here's are some of the stats basically his company play magnus already is a publicly traded company has two hundred and fifty employees four million registered users and a market cap because it's public of hundred and fifteen million dollars already how much revenue does this make so i don't know how much it makes currently but i mean let's look it up it's a publicly traded company and it's publicly traded in france i think or is it nor i i actually don't know where it's publicly traded so it's definitely you're in france f i think it's it's in euros wow this is amazing who would have thought does he own this he owns a stake in it so he owns not you know not a ton but he still owns i think oh actually never mind he owns eighty five percent of the business holy crap that's amazing yeah so this guys this is amazing and so do you know what's the sales so it looks like revenue last quarter was five million so it's doing around twenty million actually it's grown a lot recently so it it's only started looks like in twenty nineteen twenty twenty had total revenue of twenty or sorry eight million dollars but it's you know last quarter was five so it's trending towards twenty million dollars wow and that's recurring revenue so that's a subscription yep this is amazing and he owns eighty five percent of this so he basically has a has a a hundred and twenty or something like that million dollar net worth just off of this yeah so it looks like i'm getting a little confused there's something called magnus chest and then there's something called play magnus so actually i think he owns only nine percent of play magnus but then he owns something else which i think is like a streaming platform called magnus chess but either way he owns substantial amount of of one of them magnus trust and he's worth several million wow so and we also actually covered chest dot com chest dot com i think it might be mostly bootstrap and it gets something like have you seen what's the monthly unique of chest dot com have you looked super high yes i have like like a hundred and fifty million i think chest dot com currently has a yeah a hundred and fifty million monthly unique and i've heard rumors that it's a multi billion dollar company i mean people pay a lot for it because they've actually built in some pretty cool features so l chest is a competitor l chest some people like because it's more like indie but just outcome has like if you go on there you can play and then after your game it'll basically say like actually hear all your blenders your mistakes and this is actually like exactly where you went wrong and it's interesting because those are the things people used to pay coaches for like when i was little playing chess their a coach would come over once a week and he'd like sit down and i'd go to tournaments and at tournaments you'd write down your moves and then we'd like study them after and he'd be like see that move like do you see how like eight moves later that really hurt you but chest dot com has that basically like built into the software where they're like see like that's where you went wrong this is crazy this is awesome ben texted me or like slacks me while we're doing this and he goes steph been spit fire for the last fifty minutes so this is badass you definitely have to come on again and there's like way more notes here if i was you selfish officially i wanna say don't share this and we'll do another one in the neck in next week or the week after ben what do you think do you think about this what what do you ring this i just got i was getting flack the other day for giving you guys too many a's so i just say but this one really was like an a plus i steph hi i know you've got your course and it's doing well but you should do another course on like how you do research people i i do kinda wanna screenshot this doc like ben that's what people say to this they tell up being sean you're saying she's even better she's better she's better than you she's better than you at this that it depends i think so you and sean are like a plus entertainer i gotta work on that and i know it's something i gotta work on you guys are so good at like making a conversation flow all your like funny bits and so i think like yeah i mean i could share how i do search on give me some credit ben we do this two or three times a week steps doing this yeah once every crew it's true you do it twice a week but it's just and so it does like it's a little une unusual because this doc that has is just like cock of real it's amazing is yeah i color i'm down to come on anytime i was a little nervous to come back on every time i come on like you know the first time it was sometime in twenty twenty guys had maybe like five thousand listens in episode and then like it's gone up so much since then that every time i'm like dude you guys just had like son mano you've had gary v and i'm like i'm just this like trends analyst or still feel that way so yeah if people like it i'm happy to come on anytime but if not we can also just like open source this research i don't i don't think i included anything here that i am gonna build myself i was actually previously going to build the like healthiest x thing and then i just realized like that's been on my to do list for two years so probably never gonna happen i'm gonna ask sarah i'm gonna go to the other room now that tell my wife sarah i'm like hey do this she should i mean seriously this is like the reason i had it on my list is because a lot of the ideas that i've shared in the past i'm like yeah those are cool ideas but like can you really do it and can you do it not that much money and is it pretty likely to succeed right those are like the variables in this one like checks those boxes dude that's awesome thank you this is badass we're gonna wrap up if steph what's your handle in twitter steph smith io or steph smith io o and i'm just gonna plug my podcast again because i'm trying to grow it just like ben it's called the shit you don't learn in school alright sick thank you and that was you do it with calvin your your boyfriend and your fiance yeah good dude alright thank you talk soon thanks guys now to see my first millie got to the safe