How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, QVC for Mobile, and More

when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing because everyone else thinks the water's too deep and it's too scary over there the rewards are like disproportionate it even to the effort the work that goes up alright what's up what i did how are you doing who did you have as a guest on the last episode when i i was doing my own episode and then you tweeted out you wanted to guess who came on two different people the first was our own ben and so ben and i did an episode or we talked about like thing people in history and if there's any commonalities between a bunch of them and then noah ka my friend noah from apps ts i asked him if he would come on and he said yeah so i recorded to that day cool did they turn out kid or you know i amazing see add noah noah was good ben n was good as well i just hope that i don't know that top the topic is gonna be a winner so we'll see noah is amazing do you know about apps i know like loosely about apps so here's a bet what i know you tell me what i don't know so what i know is that apps ts is basically it's a website where you can go to get like kind of software deals i would say they kind of like they go find cool software they make a deal they say hey we'll get you in front of like whatever fifty million people but you gotta offer a deal to our audience like sort of group on style or boot style and apparently he's doing extremely well he's been doing it for long ass time ten plus years i think it does over a hundred million in revenue so that's what i know about it almost alright so apps sum started as basically noah he emailed the founder of image integer and basically said hey you guys charge ten dollars a month if i give you a bunch of new customers at six dollars a month can i get a little cut of the pie right and that's how we started he made ten grand doing that by emailing a bunch of friends eventually it kinda still is this way but they're gonna they're being becoming more of a marketplace and a website but for like the last ten years it's basically an email list and i think there's only three hundred thousand people on that email list and they email out a few deals a week where they find companies that say hey give us a discount and give us a cut of the revenue right and it was doing okay for years it just some years it didn't do better than the year before sometimes it did a lot better and i think it only did okay for a few years now after a close to ten years he their goal this year was a hundred million in revenue it they're gonna miss it by a little bit but he said they're gonna get north of eighty million in revenue now he didn't say it on the podcast if i do if you just google it it appears as of the eighty million in revenue they pay out thirty percent to their partners and they get around sixty or seventy percent of the of the actual revenue and he owns most of the company has never taken any the outside money and they have like a hundred and fifty employees at this point wow i i didn't realize some of those things and okay so three hundred thousand people on the list so do you know if they send out an email about some product have they ever done it for the hustle by the way they ever like did you promote the hustle in there somehow or no because it's already free email i i know i don't well no i don't think we've done it in a traditional way maybe charge could i think we've done trend but we not done it in a major way so you can sometimes they'll only send it to part of the list and i think that we've done like a part list but some of the partners they'll make over a million dollars in the in one day well i guess my question is how many people take them up in their offer so how many do they need for this this business to kind of work so is it like because i think it seems like maybe bigger than it is i wouldn't be surprised if it's like yeah thousand people click the thing and a thousand people is enough for this business to work when a thousand was able to take the offer it is it a thousand or it more like ten thousand i would think that it's in the single digit thousands if i had a guess that's how many buy because the products are like four hundred dollars a year or something like that so you don't actually need that many people to buy in order to make five hundred thousand to a million of dollars you're saying they're sending emails constantly and now they have a website that people are doing so now here's where it gets interesting i asked him how much could you sell this business for right now he was like the the huge range is three hundred million to a billion i think that's what he said right and wow pretty crazy right it's it's it it it's like noah good job good job noah and like a lot of things like the hustle included like people are like and i say it as well well it's just an email us it's really simple and yeah that's true it is just an email but there's definitely a machine behind it and apps is like inherently quite simple they just holler companies they say give us a discount and give us a cut of the pie and then they just email it out to people and it's so simple and it just creates so much value there's a ryan hoover did this a while back he created a list of big companies that started off as quote unquote just email list so he created product type product hunt started off as an email list product got card by angel list which is like a three billion ish dollar company or more angel started as just an email list just a list of angels that he was doing craigslist started off as an email list and so there was a whole bunch of products that started off as just an email as some became more than that some group point an email group coupons start out group on is basically was an email us for a long time right and so you know don't underestimate do not underestimate email i that's a tattooed on sam's back do not underestimate email let's talk about a couple of things i have a i have another business i idea i have another business i wanna highlight that's a one of these like that's so simple are you joking that's the business but first before we do that one we gotta talk about this squid games thing that happened the beast games by mister beast did you watch it when it happened or have you watched it after the fact i heard basically casey neistat who i follow on twitter was talking about saying mister beast what he's doing with the squid games thing is one of the most epic things i've ever seen on youtube in casey neistat is one of the pioneers of youtube and him saying that meant a lot yeah exactly that's you know den saying wow they're great acting in this movie so alright so for those who didn't see it alright so squid games was this ultra popular i think it is the most popular show ever on netflix those watch show and it's this kind of like crazy korean death game show type of idea where you know a bunch of people enter this game and they're trying to win the big prize and then they get killed they're losing is like you die based i was like this short version of it i actually didn't watch squid games so maybe i got something wrong there but i did watch the mister beast version it so what are mister beast do he basically decided i'm gonna recreate squid games but i'm not yeah obviously people aren't gonna die but he did it even better so he invited four hundred fifty six people to this arena that was built for this and the prize was the number one the the winner of the games was gonna win four hundred fifty six thousand dollars runner up ten k and everybody who got who went got two thousand dollars each and in total the production plus the prize money so i think he did about a billion and a half dollars of prizes and two million to build and produce it three and a half million dollars is what he spent on this content on this twenty five minute video so let's talk about what happened so first players showed up they're wearing the same outfits as in good games as like kinda of green win breaker jump type thing and they all have a number so player one player two player three all the way up to player four hundred and fifty six and inside their shirt they have this like pack and the pack is like exploding paint so if you let's say one of the games is called red light green light the old like game we used to play as a kid where if you say green light you start moving red light means you gotta stop if you keep going after they said red light you're out and so they they here's a green light and you say a red light and if somebody flinch after that their little pack inside their shirt would explode and red paint would come out as if they got shot like you know like the real squid games and then they would be out and then hey you gotta go to the next you didn't make it to the next game and so in the end you know player whatever player twenty seven ended up winning four hundred fifty six thousand dollars so here's i i think this is amazing and this ties into some stuff we've been talking about so just some numbers the video got about a hundred and thirty million views in seven days which is crazy i think i i believe ben you can fact check me on this i believe a hundred thirty million views is more than what the actual squid games got on netflix flight now netflix is a paid service of whatever but like and people watched like multiple episodes yeah if twelve hours of of footage it's yes so the fact that it's comparable the fact that somebody just watched the show was like oh yeah i we'll do it like a backyard version of that and got a hundred thirty million people to watch is insane so he spent three and a half million on it just to kinda put this in perspective that's basically half the cost of a thirty second super bowl commercial wow really did you sponsor it was fully paid i i believe fully paid for by brawl stars the the big the super popular mobile game so if you look in the arena where it was where it was hosted it's a giant brawl stars arena they have a huge logo that was in every shot and so for brawl stars this such a smart move they basically paid half to cost of a super bowl ad got more viewership than super because you get a hundred thirty million people the video is like twenty minutes long twenty seven minutes long set versus a thirty second clip and this is an epic thing that's gonna get shared and then they could take this content repurpose it for ads or anything else they wanted to do after the fact if if they wanted to so really smart you know for brawl stars three million dollars is probably their daily there's always a one day of ad spend on facebook or brawl stars is owned by super cell and super sells like the the biggest game the yeah yeah and so if i i i don't know if this is how it it it would've have worked if i'm mister beast i think he could've have so he would have gotten super cell to pay for the whole thing so three and half million dollars i bet he also would have gotten another like five hundred thousand dollar just like there's a vague on top of that just like just for that and then they would have probably i would have said to them also i'm gonna keep youtube ads on this right and mister i get all of it and so if mister is getting a hundred thirty million views in the first seven days and if you do maybe four dollars per cpm that's around half a million dollars that he got in the first week plus i'd like the way his deal is gonna be a lot better than four dollar cpm because he's the number he's like you know one of the faces of youtube these guys have custom negotiated deals that i would bet a lot of money is better than the standard kind of four to five dollar what do you think it is i bet he's getting closer to ten dollar cpm so if it's ten that's one point three million yeah and just in a week in a week plus according to our notes it looks like he got ten thousand new subscribers a million million sorry sorry my god ten million new subscribers in the first week and a normal week is four hundred thousand subscribers so he is twenty x his subscriber growth so so what does this do he's continues to be the content leader he gets ten million new subscribers and those people are gonna get notified for his next video he makes a million dollars on ads he gets the whole thing paid for by a sponsor and this is a great example of something we've talked about before we talked about this with elon when elon does epic stuff like i'm gonna go to mars we talked about it with i forgot the guy's name mark la or whoever was that's building that epic train train system in america i i rant about disney disneyland last week because again when you shoot for these epic projects things that get people inspired and excited it it seems like it's harder to pull off but in many ways it's easier to pull off because you'll get talent to pour because they wanna be a part of something bold you'll get sponsors to pour in because they wanna bet on this this epic thing that's gonna happen they know it's gonna get a lot of visibility and so and you get your own motivation to get out of bed every day because you're working on something that's so so grand that you know you're motivated and everybody does their best work and people tune in to watch which is like so ben just lifted it up hundred forty million a hundred and forty two million people watch squid games on netflix hundred thirty two million watched beast games on youtube so about the same one to one so you get disproportionate prizes when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing because everyone else thinks the water too deep and it's too scary over there the rewards are like disproportionate even to the effort and the work that goes in i had a friend it it could've have been noah in fact you know noah who we talked about he was the number twentieth there's something employee at facebook and he got fired nine months into his employee working there and it's so you didn't get any of his equity but i have a friend who spoke to mark zuckerberg and he said to mark you know why don't you just sell the company for a billion or why are you raising all this money like things are growing he's like look it's good i only have twenty four hours in a day and i'm only gonna work the same amount of time in the day whether it's big or small so i mine as well make it as big as i possibly can because that's what interests me and it's just as hard it's equally hard to go big as it is somewhat like mild success and that's a perfect example of what mister beast has done is it's actually of equal work you know it's same amount of time of the day but when you see someone building someone something so epic it's exciting so many people who don't give a shit about mister beast of which i am one of them i know about this and i cared about it small ambition and large ambition take the same amount of it effort if you wanna win if you want them to work and and and that's exactly right and so i think this was brilliant i think this is another example of mister beast being one step ahead of the curve you're gonna see a lot more people try to clone this so the next thing that comes out you're gonna see four youtubers who are the wannabe be mister beast try to jump on it and recreate this and by the way this wasn't the first thing he did like this like obviously he's been doing stunt but he even did like a i'm gonna recreate fortnite they like went to an island it was a hundred people playing paint ball and it was like a game of fortnite and he made a video on that i think it did well but it wasn't this it wasn't this level but it's those reps that you you know you put in that give you the a confidence and b shots on goal until you get something to work like this and i also was watching a clip of mister beast yesterday just coincidentally and somebody said are you you you know you've talked about you wanna be a billionaire you wanna be the you know quote unquote the first billionaire creator although there have been other creators that are worth a billion dollars so you wanna be billionaire or and they're like are you there are are you there he goes no no no i'm not there yet and he goes i'm he goes i'm probably the cash wise i'm probably the the poorest person in this room and they're like no no way he goes yeah because whatever i have is like paper it's not like it's not liquid and any cash i get i just reinvest the next and reinvest my videos he goes if we make three million dollars this month i'll put three million dollars into the next video we have razor thin margins he goes i just reinvest the whole thing into content i think on average he said he he said he was spending something like two or three million dollars a month on his content i wouldn't bet which just wild i would have guessed that he made around two and a half three million dollars a month in revenue i would have guessed around thirty million in revenue off his operation and so that makes total sense in fact we talked to a couple people i believe he has mister has around thirty to forty full time people working for him and i actually recently read about like what i was like why does it like to work with him and a lot of people complained they said they said working with him is horrible he's horrible to work with that i was well you know what's going on why and they go he's a perfection i was oh okay so it's actually not that bad they they they would say why isn't this good enough why is this so bad and he would analyze every single frame and frankly that made me even love them but there's something interesting about this which is i actually think being him is exhausting because you have to show up every single time and so let me give you example of two youtubers that are incredibly interesting to me graham stefan and meet kevin do you know who those guys are i know graham stephan i don't me kevin alright me kevin i think is even more famous and he has two point five or three million subscribers he recently did a video and it was called here's my entire fifty million dollar portfolio at age twenty nine so i and i noticed that he had done one i'm clicking okay of course i click double click full screen headphones on and i noticed that he did another one of these like nine months ago or thirteen months ago something like around a year ago and his net worth then was only twenty five and i was like what is going on this guy is nuts and so he's basically this guy meet kevin i don't know his full name he it makes like three to four videos a day and he is talking about like which stocks he's buying which types of houses he's buying for investment properties and he shows his entire portfolio and at the end he goes now here's proof and he logs in to all of his accounts and you could see all of green share yeah yes which is amazing for many reasons one he's only twenty nine and he's a youtuber with fifty million dollars you fifteen hundred dollars how do you how did he get that money so he's just off of his youtube or he had some other business that he started with at age nineteen i believe he started as just a real estate agent so just a normal guy k and he made a little bit of money like a hundred grand a year took that hundred grand a year and bought some properties and then started a youtube channel in two thousand ten or two thousand eleven and he just started documenting about his real estate investing slowly that started making additional income using that income he bought even more properties eventually he had like a course and things like that where he was making like one or two million dollars a year so a significant amount of sum or a significant sum then he took that money and he started investing it and started talking about what he was investing and you could see this entire growth over the last five years of his portfolio and how it's grown of course it helps that a he's got now a significant stream of like four million dollars a year i imagine and we're in the best bull market of all time and so it kinda works but that's how he's done it and interestingly this guy kevin when gavin news was being recalled kevin ran for office and there's this republican named larry elder who got second behind gavin news kevin was third with something like hundreds of thousands of votes and so it's this kid's amazing and so that's surprising i feel like a youtuber who's got a big following should crush any it doesn't have that big a following he only has two point five or three million it's not significant and there has to be a california above eighteen voter so it's not like it's not significant but my point being with a lot of these youtubers is this video was nutty and graham stefan did the exact same thing he goes here's my prediction mister beast or a mister beast type person will run for president and will surprise people with without this type of following they get because oh absolutely whether you want to be president or not you could you know i think the original trump playbook was i'm gonna just throw my hat in the ring i'm gonna get tons of attention and press i'm gonna build my brand off the the massive amount of attention that goes into elections and i'll be the the kinda of curve ball story that everybody wants to cover everybody's got an opinion on like kanye kanye or whatever he he threw his name in you're gonna see the wild wild west of people trying to put their name in the hat for running for office or running for these kind of like positions that will sound you know how could a how could a twenty one year old youtuber be doing this and they're gonna get a little momentum and then that's gonna create a press cycle and that's gonna create more momentum i don't think they'll actually win i don't think they even want to win but it would just be a smart move for the dog eat dog world of youtube trying to get views yeah and and but here's back to the original point of getting views what is exhausting life that you have to go and and i'm thankful that mister beast does what he does i'm thankful that this kevin guy and graham are crazy enough to log in and show me there that is so cool they are fucking this exact thought that is the nuts i had have this exact thought the other day we i was figure out who was talking to but was talking to somebody and i was like oh yeah that's a great youtube i've had like five ideas about like oh yeah if we did that as a youtube video it would get clicks right like one was i was gonna show how you can make ten thousand dollars being a santa like a santa claus for christmas i was like oh this is easy i'll buy the suit i'll show that economics of that i'll go do the thing that'll make for a funny thumbnail and it'll make for this little story that's at my viral another one is going and buying buying fancy shit and like actually like like justin con did a video where he toured a fifty million dollar home is amazing and it's a you know just it's interesting content it's like a super junk food that people in our niche we just like to consume that stuff like oh yeah what what is it like you know how do you do it how much money do you make how do you invest it and there's all these videos that you can make on this at every time i think of when i think oh that would work i think to myself i do not wanna get on that treadmill i just don't wanna get on the treadmill because i know it's like the difference between sort of like knowledge and wisdom it's like i know this would work but i'm also wise enough to know that that is not a path i wanna double down on i do not wanna double down on the treadmill path because i don't feel that way about this podcast for example this podcast feels ongoing it's a it's a breeze dude we show up i just shoot the show with my friend for an hour people seem to like it it's so like it's two hours of my week that i like i'm on the i'm on camera i'm on i'm on i'm being recorded and i don't have to like and also because it's a podcast i'm not like worried about how i look and the angle and the this and the that like maybe i should a little bit but i just don't and like the way that you do when you're recording youtube videos and you have to edit everything and clip it and like doing all these cuts podcasting is podcasting has that risk reward ratio or that like effort reward ratio that works for me and this like youtube treadmill i think has a much bigger prize but i don't wanna win that way there's other ways to win and that treadmill is exhausting it's exhausting and there's a exhausting there's a reason why you don't see casey and i said anymore i've watched a couple recent interviews with them and he said now i don't do anything he goes for those three years that are recording daily vlogs everything in my life everything in my day if someone invited me to dinner i had to message him and saying i can't unless someone interesting is coming or you wanna go somewhere intriguing because it has to be content and i lost a lot of friends me and my wife almost divorced and it was exhausting and now he's thirty seven years old he's financially successful and he goes i'm not doing it anymore i have to take a break and so i think it's cool to dabble with it but i am wary of the trouble now you did a video so kind of on the other side the coin you've been putting out your fitness content which i think is probably just fun for you and motivating it's fine and then you did a video that i love which was you put a video up i think your own just your personal youtube channel of this real estate project you're doing i wanted to ask you about this here's what for those who didn't watch it here's here's the the summary of the video you bought a piece of land right next to your house i think like adjacent to or like a my next neighbor your neighbor you brought the neighbor lot next to your house and it's got this like really run down shack on it like it's a large piece of grass with a really shitty shack that somebody was living in and it's time years looks brutal like this is like you know i wouldn't wish this on an enemy these conditions so it would look like just kind this down shack and you're like cool like here's the thing i bought and you you broke down the economics you're like you know i brought this so how much did you buy for exactly six hundred and fifty thousand dollars six hundred fifty thousand dollars you bought the whole thing and you bought it leverage or you bought it all cash cash okay you bought it all cash why didn't you borrow because i wanted to purchase before they put it to un market so basically the back now it was a ninety year old couple that who owned it and they rented it to a guy and i the day i moved into this house i used a little bit of research and i found who they were and i said hey you know just so you know my name sam i'm i live now next year property if anything ever happens you wanna sell this please contact me and so the man died on a monday the wife called me on a wednesday and said would you like to buy and i bought it on a thursday amazing okay i love that and you're like this is gonna be my first kinda like you don't know shit about real estate you don't shit about building any like at home and so you're like this gonna be fun it's gonna be a hands on project i'm gonna kinda document it as i go and then you had the spreadsheet which basically said alright look yeah i bought it for six hundred and fifty k and and then you know in this in this area there's a sort of like a price per square foot that you can get in here's the range and then i talked to you got bids from some contractors and you were like you know i can you know on the low end it seems like you could build it for this much and then if i'm concerned and it might be more expensive than we think it might cost this much so i might have to put a million dollars in to build the actual structure in the home modern ground up and so you know i might be in for one point six million but based on the the price per square foot in this area i should be able to sell this for two it should be worth two or two point five like when i'm done with this thing i'd like the margin of safety was really strong it seemed like just like an absolute no brainer of a deal assuming just how you wanna spend your time right like the time is almost more expensive or the risk here more so than the the buy is great you you made your money on the buy as they say in real estate rather than trying to make your money on the sale yes but it's not taking nearly as much time and i'll tell you why so what i did was before i even bought the piece of property i found things in the area that sold for my ideal price per square foot right i went on zillow and red fin i found the architect and then i called them and then i also called the builder and i go hey guys how much would it cost to build this exact same home right now right and they told me and i go great and i do that yeah and i bought this lot lot and i called them again i go hey you know that house that's just sold for a thousand dollars a square foot do that again over here for me please so you're you're you're not trying to innovate and add the sam park touches of like a a you know a three thousand square foot gym and like a thousand square foot house like you're doing a normal house build out it's a normal house build out but i said make it a two car garage because i if i decided to live there i'll build the gym there and that's basically it yeah okay i just said i i took i took a house that was crushing it that i just hold for a lot of money and i said and i hired the same people and everything smart do it again by the way so i know i don't i'm not spending any time on it i spend no time on it just the fact that it's next door also is surprisingly gonna be like a fifty percent savings in the time and headache that's involved with this because like my family did this we've we we had a house in san francisco and then we bought a house two doors down and just the fact that it was two doors down had like all these extra benefits which was like it was super easy to go see it was super easy to like manage any any construction that was going on it's we they like share a fridge in they're like garage like yeah just use the extra fridge across street my sister runs a business out of one of them and since she's able to manage it from like without having to get in her car and commute somewhere and just the just it being like within eyesight and and like a two minute walk away is so important and like if anyone's gonna do a project like this do not underestimate that i've now seen it a couple times and i feel this way this is my rule with friends of family also which is you wanna live so close to your best friends or family that you could go unplanned to their house so you don't need to pack a bag and think about okay well then how like what you know when should we go should we beat the traffic and then you know we're gonna have to head back for the night it's like i should be able to pop over and pop back unplanned because it's so convenient and like the difference between fifteen minutes away and four minutes away is gonna fundamentally change the way the like the amount of times you you see that person or do that thing so why'd did you bring up that youtube video by the way because so that was awesome oh thanks and i just wanted to hear more about the like and the like the actual real estate side of the side of i think that the the the numbers are the way they're gonna work out and not a lot of people believe me but i think it's gonna happen this way i'm gonna make half a million dollars in profit or more from it i think there's a world where i make closer to a million than half a million there's i sell it or rent it out there's a i have a few options i can live in it and sell my home yep but the way that all this math is gonna work it's gonna be what both this house in that house i'll have made around a million dollars in profit in like eighteen months right because things just worked out and so i'll make more from this real estate project than i will my entire hustle salary combined ever and it it it only to in this project for example but you're gonna have to invest right that's the that's the kicker here so like you you couldn't have done this back then because you didn't have a spare one point six million dollars to go like invest in buying a lot plus building the home out or if i did do it it was like all of my money right exactly so you know you would had to go like completely all in on it can i tell you what else we got can i tell you about let me tell you about a company that interests me okay so i was talking to someone recently and i can't say who it is but they had a google chrome extension that made something like twenty five million dollars in revenue with only tube guys two people it's amazing i got extension did or no no i roughly category helping people on amazon sell stuff okay cool so like kinda like a what's that thing called jungle scout something in that world yeah and so basically i start i i i got kind of curious so there's two extensions that caught my caught caught my attention the first and they're basically the same thing with almost exactly the same name the first is the thing called ad block i think that's the one i used the second one is called ad ad block plus so that's why it's a little confusing and so ad block was created by one guy in georgia named michael gun and he he just kinda built this thing in two thousand and nine and he's been the only employee the whole time and i went to his personal website to learn about him and he only has fifty five followers on twitter his website is called sorry robot dot com that's his personal website and he has like python projects a unity game that he built called ash and he even has an p three of him singing a christmas song at church during christmas time this is like by the way he's linkedin his job description is just a guy he has in duluth georgia and it says i am not available for work please do not contact me about job opportunities i created a ad block the most popular chrome extension for google chrome engine and for safari with around twenty million users it's neat before that i did some other neat things and he was the only employee and then i did some research on his competitor called ad block plus now this company they have a few bit few more employees i think they've got twenty or thirty people and because they're based in europe when you're a european company oftentimes at least in england and i know it's a lot of that a lot of cases in different european countries if you make over twenty million dollars in revenue you basically have a file report that reveals your revenue and profit and so i went and looked at this company called io it's called io they own ad blocker plus in two thousand and seventeen they did forty four million dollars in revenue and twenty six million dollars in profit which is astounding and they had at least a hundred million users however if you look in the group the the chrome plug in store ad black plus has around a hundred and fifty thousand reviews and it says they've got over ten million users if you look at ad block which is the one funded by this one guy they've got something like three hundred thousand reviews and also to it says ten million users and so there's potential that this one guy had a business making all of this money tens of millions of dollars a year very likely tens of millions of dollars a year in profit just off a chrome extension is that amazing this is amazing i'm i'm still on this guy michael gun unlocks website sorry robot dot com slash resume dot pdf and i i think you said this but i was reading while you were talking so he was an engineer at google working on google ads and google adsense did you already say that part no and he he worked on google and basically he goes now fuck that i hate these ads and and so his job was as he goes at google i kept the global at google ads and adsense sense networks alive and kicking in my my at my spare time i built this other thing and i i built this other thing you know like because google has at twenty percent he's like i built those javascript framework blah blah so basically he goes from working at google and google adwords and ad to creating ad block and and makes twenty million dollar makes more than that off twenty million users who who love this thing and what year did you work at google i believe like o five two thousand five yeah so which is like right after the ipo basically yeah so he probably made thirty million dollars at google like collectively it's that's what it's sort worth now i i called it yeah if he held it so it made tens of millions of dollars off that and then reportedly now the thing about this guy is everything's very quiet about this guy he's hard to find everything's impossible however i think in two thousand and fifteen an anonymous buyer bought ad block interesting there's a world where it could have been sold for like two or three hundred million dollars mean there there's a world where that exists maybe it was lower but it was it's a it's a huge he stopped he he he stopped working on ad block or you know it's sold probably two thousand fifteen which is kinda scary because these chrome extensions are a giant security hole for people because chrome extensions can like read and write all the data on your that as you browse the web so that's all all every email you're writing the text is can be picked up by these chrome extensions and even if they start off safe because you know just a guy from duluth georgia built it and he's an engineer who has the right intentions somebody who buys it with the wrong intentions can really like do some dirty stuff yeah yeah you know with with the data and and even modifying it and things like that so you gotta be careful with chrome extensions i try to install the minimum amount of chrome extensions as possible yeah they are pretty scary and yeah they're nuts and the but it's a wild business i think that what here's here so i love these extension style businesses there's a few platforms that i think are quite interesting the first google chrome still makes a ton of sense the second shopify still makes us on a ton of sense our friend andrew has a business where all he does is buy buys shopify plug ins and it's market cap it's a publicly traded company is like in the six hundred million dollar range it's on the canadian stock exchange but the third thing which you probably have not thought of and the fourth thing you definitely haven't thought of salesforce plug ins and then finally z plug ins incredibly interesting so we used to hire this engineer at the hustle and he would he was in another country and we would pay him twenty bucks an hour to just build little apps for us for our sales team yep and i think z i would imagine is which is like a salesforce competitor but a little jan has an equal amount of users as salesforce i think you could build a really great business just doing salesforce plug ins right yeah and roll or we're rolling them up so i i don't know if i'm allowed to talk about this but i'll say it in a vague way medi guy i heard about a guy that was rolling up games inside of a big gaming platform so there's like a a very popular game and then there's games within that a little like modules people create and they monetize and this person was rolling them up and they're like dude does that mean like these are created by like i don't play games it's like you okay so for example there are big game platforms like fortnite and minecraft and roadblocks and like all these different games that exist and inside the game you can create little experiences and you can monetize them kinda like people who create like different colored guns for call of duty yeah although i don't know if i don't know if you could do people create those i thought the game created those but yeah there's there used to be great odds and you know mods of different games and maps and things like that that you can create that's always been kind of like a part of it but some of these games now are so big and they actually like formalized their little creator economy inside the game and the person i knew was rolling them up and they're like these are selling for nothing because they're like it's just like a kid who made this it sells for like less than you know like want one x revenue or stuff like that like it's a crazy like compared to going and buying that same cash flowing asset on whether it's fba or shopify or something else and now everything has different profile of like maybe this game is a fad maybe people will stop using this maybe you know the game will change the rules and you're screwed all of a sudden so yeah there's some risk but i love these game plans of go to these niche platforms we've talked about etsy we've talked about posh mark fba we've talked now you're talking about z and salesforce and slack and like all these different platforms there are little apps that just make fifty thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars fifty thousand dollars a month and you can go and you can buy these out and you can roll them up and you can have a company that does ten to twenty million dollars of revenue profit and you could buy your way there without even having to invent anything all you gotta do is go get cheap cheap debt buy this thing and profit and it's really like that simple but there's one major thing which is if call duty or fortnite or whatever it is they go hey we're gonna go to different direct exactly and that's why you got like that's same thing with fba right am all these like t and all these roll ups fba is not i mean it's you're dependent on a single platform which is amazon that's known to compete very h and there's other there's other they could change the algorithm and all of a sudden you're your thing that was at the top is now at the bottom there is definitely risk and so you gotta look at like okay if my payback period is nine months i feel pretty good about it if it's three years i don't feel so good about it anymore and so that's where you gotta like you know place your bets alright can tell can i talk about really random one like that okay so our buddy ramon tweeted this out he goes here's an example of a silly stupid business so ramon is he's ramon van me on twitter so he goes simple website money maker this emoji website gets five million visitors a month and all it does and i use this by the way all the time because if you're on your computer and you wanna use an emoji it's not easy to get the keyboard up for the emoji thing so you just you you just google like laughing emoji and then it gives it you and it says click to copier your to your clipboard and then you go and you like copy it you paste it in twitter or we'll paste it wherever you're writing your email or whatever and so all it does is it lets you look up you look up emoji copy paste them and it'll also explain what the emoji means so there's like emoji wikipedia is a is a good example of this so emoji wikipedia emoji wikipedia yeah i don't know if you ever seen this is like the top ranking one that comes through when you when you search for this stuff it's like wikipedia for emoji and so ramon was looking at you know like depending on and it's just plastered with ads there's like ads everywhere on the site and it's like depending on what their ad revenue is like this site could be making between fifty and a hundred fifty thousand dollars a month of all profit like do not underestimate these small simple sites but we've talked about this with cross words su games things like that just like these really simple things that people like to search for and if you could own the domain you can just have the really simple like online game or like sc sc word solve you know cross word hint get hint cheat you know whatever those little websites can be really good so this emoji one i thought is another example of that and even better i was like oh who owns this thing i was looking for the michael gun locks some random engineer who was like yeah i got a huge company that owns so some company bought it they own it and it's called zed and i was like okay what the heck is zed i say z d ge and this is one of those companies that you're like really this so zed is a public company its market gap is around a hundred thirty million dollars so it's a very small small cap public company on the new york stock exchange and what they do is they it's a publisher or a roll up they bought a bunch of these little apps and websites that just get a bunch of traffic because people want self expression so they bought wallpapers ring tones stickers alarm clock sounds emoji emoji wikipedia like things like that they bought all these put about them all in one roof and then they're a public companies so you can go see a bunch of their numbers so they'll do like you know now so it's almost like fifty percent they'll they'll do like fifty percent profit on their on their on their product like at least operating profit and then you know like the the eb will be closer like you know two million or whatever on their on each quarter wow hell what a company like that go public don't go public yeah i think there's a bunch of reasons why they might go public but i just thought retention they have about three hundred fifty million people have downloaded like their wallpaper app they have they say they have forty million monthly active users and this these companies that are just hidden in plain sight so it's like you know let me just look up their annual revenue again i don't if have annual quarterly i think that they do about twenty million dollars a year in revenue and ten million ten million dollars about operating profit and yeah so they did twenty seventeen they did let's see pull this up okay sales and revenue it says it's a little lower than what i saw here and i'm doing this quick so basically for the last five years it's just been flat like ten million dollars of revenue two million dollars of cogs you know their gross income is between seven and eight million and then then they pay for a huge amount of you know like other sales and you know s s g and a expenses and so you know they're they're not showing a bunch of profit at the end but i would bet that these things are like spitting off profit if you want you know they're they're putting money in their own pockets it's basically out of this so i thought that was just like a really crazy little company behind behind the stuff and it just shows you how much money and really simple things that a lot of simple things that a lot of people use so like alarm clock sounds wallpapers that sort of thing what what's live reviews this is an idea so so i just got a asana and i know you're in the market for asana well what time you get so i got a sanctuary a clear light sanctuary like the infrared sauna and i like a lot of it like i like the size the look the shape all that but doesn't make me sweat enough and so i'm like well that's the problem with fred that's a problem with in infrared there's the point of the sauna so i'm like well that's a bust and i'm like so i'm like at first i realized okay i didn't have one of the panel plugged in so that's why it was like you know part of it was like dead okay that was one issue they got better and then it's like well the best way you use it is you break a little sweat before you go in so you just deal like a quick five minute ten minute cardio just warm because what infrared doing is it's not warming up the air it's warming up your body giving you it's mike craving you which seems like pretty awful for you but i guess it's not so bad i guess it's good for you actually you know blah blah heat shock proteins blah blah so so i you know i broke a sweat before i got in and it was better but i was like dude i'm not trying to do all this i'm trying to go sit this sun on sweat in five minutes so i think for my house my space like i didn't wanna do extra electrical i didn't wanna like do i didn't wanna i didn't have a huge space where i was putting gotta put it into my garage gym so like i the dry on in retrospect i would now hold that for a dry sauna but it didn't really fit my current situation so you know whatever it is what it is so i was thinking like god i i actually did the research i i i talked to people i read reviews but you know the thing that i feel like is missing is i wish there was just so like people have tried this q c thing where it's like oh i'm gonna go live and i'm sell this item and people have tried to make q c for mobile and it's never really worked and i don't know if this would work either but i kinda wish this existed just based on this current experience and told me maybe they're is maybe there is a product here which is why can't why can't i go on and just say i'd like to talk to somebody about son and why isn't there a person live on video who is a third party impartial source that can basically show me live on video talk to me about what i'm looking for dude this is exactly what mark lori said so mark lori the guy started at jet dot com he sold it for three or two or some billions of dollars to walmart he said one thing that they were working on a jet that could have been a massive business but they shut it down for a bunch of different reasons but he goes i actually think it still could be big with concierge shopping so you simply log on and you just tell us you i'm for a toaster and a clerk is online saying okay well for your needs i think this is best would you like this one and he's he said that that would be a big business yeah and so like even with this actually the if you go to the website to buy this thing you can't just buy the son there's don't buy button you had to call someone but this is their sales rep right so i called the sales rep it's eight pm she picks up she's an american person i like whoa what the heck like i was like you worked this hour like who what who are you like you were really good at what your job like you know you you built a lot of trust quickly and you got me out over the line to buy the thousand dollars on on the phone here and and she was like yeah like we're there's a network the the way we work is we only sell the sonic company yeah so it's owned by jacuzzi the the the you know the jacuzzi company so she's just like yeah it's basically we have a network of sales reps we all pick up the phone you could if you're offline you're offline you you didn't get that commission she's like i get a commission if you buy and that's how we make our money and she's like yeah like i make good money like i'll i was how many of these you sell on today she's like on a good day i could sell like four of these in a day and on a bad day i'll sell like one or zero dude listen the reason why you and i are pretty good at what we do which in this case i'm referring to just coming up with ideas like people say shit to us all the time is and i got i'm kinda like jerk ourselves off here sorry but because of that question that you just asked and i do that all the time and people are amazed that you could do that like when you're just going to a food truck it'd be like hey how many customers you get today and they just tell you and so what you did is a perfect example you got intel that is hard to find but it was very easy to get and i i asked multiple i asked i and you could triangulate that's this the secret still ask a very rude question so how much money do you make or how much does this company make i said what's a good day and know how many do you how many of these do you sell on a good day so yeah already i soften the blow by is saying good day and i'm asking just for a day that doesn't seem like top secret information okay cool then i say and then i was i was and you're great at this like i i was like i really like this like this was like kind of an awesome experience for me on the phone i was like are you wanna like the better sales reps like do you like are you like performer or are you like like are you kinda like middle the she's no i'm like actually one of the top performers blah blah and she's like you know i picked up the phone at eight pm a lot of people just jumping pick up the phone like i'm i work like i work hard and i and i like oh interesting okay cool and then i was like i like how many reps are there i'm just like and again i'm not like digging i'm not like saying like and okay my next question is how many reps are i'm like i'm just sounding amazed because i what you say to that reply is wow are you guys all in america yeah yeah we're we're all america wow i mean where they're like ten thousand of you of course you know it's ready to be close it oh it's way smaller hundreds oh like a hundred i'm more like eight hundred right right exactly exactly and so i was able to like su out how this system works i was like i was like wow i was like that's great so i was like was like so this awesome so i bought this thing and you're gonna make like what phone or five hundred bucks off this yes i just like so now i know the commission structure and so like you know i was able to kind of like an well i'm just is doing it because i'm curious i have no agenda i'm not starting a sonic company i don't care but i'm just trying to learn and then like you know took a piece of that da i had a meeting with our own team for e i was like hey you know i had this kinda of great experience you know should we be having a phone number on the site and like should we be helping people like that like how would that work we're a way lower price point like would this still work and and then i met this guy ezra ezra fires isn't it yeah he's amazing he's we're all known in the e commerce space and he's got this famous brand called boom by cindy joseph or something like that is that makeup right so it's like kinda like makeup and like anti cream steph face cream stuff like that for like women who are like fifty to seventy or something that's what it looks like to me at least and this brand does great i think he's pretty open about it like he published stuff like i think they do like eighty dollars or a hundred million dollars a year of revenue and he told me that he told me anna a we i did a talk talk at e com world he was interviewing me of course when when was that like i don't know couple of weeks ago okay that's pretty sick he's that's a pretty legit thing yeah so it he goes he was like you know so what do sales i don't know what you mean like this is shopify you pushed the buy button he's like okay so you don't do any live chat yeah we have chat but like whatever customer service he goes okay interesting goes for us we do phone because you don't have phone i go no don't have the phone i go to you does anybody do phone does that shit work same thing it's the same type of question that will get somebody to like defend the thing they do that shit work that's what you said i was like there's no way does that shit work and he was like dude thirty percent of our sales close over the phone and i was like bing data point interesting should i be doing that that's like a alarming i doesn't take away from him like the next thing that you ask is yeah but there's no way that's profitable and they say yeah course it's profitable we only pay them eighteen eight dollars an hour are you my a bad entrepreneur no i'll tell you that i'll tell you how it all write down so yeah that's exactly the how much people pay people questions how do they pay people how much do they pay people an hour i don't know i didn't ask in this case because we were live on the panel but you know it had this been a signal normal conversation i would've have would've have been breaking it down that's badass alright you wanna do one more what's this for wait i what's this fluffy stuff about like of timing let's do that just do a a a non fluffy one because i feel like i've been doing a lot of fluffy stuff lately i feel like we've kind of been on a kick of like sort of fluffy stuff because if you let me i'm gonna talk about mindset all day and then the second thing is we did a lot of like gossip about like you know like billionaires in their like affairs a shit like that so i'm like okay just noted i'm gonna like to to turn that down a little bit so i wanna do one more or cool idea because i think you know people love that shit okay so re base have you seen this before before i put it on this sheet no i'm looking it up now alright so you know the guy who's behind this is that guy levels levels dot io o who is oh i love that guy kinda like his name is peter levels i think is his name his handles levels that i owe so he's has he's amazing prolific guy he was ahead of the curve on like remote work so i remember maybe six years ago he was he created you know no mad list he created a remote like a remote like remote working slack was like you're a remote worker or pay ten bucks and get into slack here like six thousand members i was whoa we made a lot of money off this little like just a slack invite i've never seen that and he reveals all of his revenue so i don't what's his so it's levels dot i o that's his that's one of his sites he's got like four sites i think and if you go to levels and then scroll all okay so he has his his his twitter name is levels i o i yeah it probably pronounced actually differently and you could see a link to all of his websites and it looks like he's got close to ten there and if you click them and then we'll below see the little meter in his location oh that's amazing for one amazing some that's a deal that oh my god that's beautiful it so well what it on twitter where you put your location and most people just write like san francisco or new york instead he just he used the emoji for it to create like ten squares it's like a meter and it and at the end of the meter it says five million dollars a year and then he shows the meter is like a like sixty percent of the way there and which shows that he's kind of like you know he's probably at two and a half to it's to three million dollars a year is what he's making it's just a subtle it's a subtle thing very nicely done very interesting very cool i like it and if you go to any of his sites so it looks like he's got eight or something sites listed and you click around you're gonna see a phrase on all of his sites called open start yeah and i just sent you a link do you see the link i sent you and you could see all of his metrics so you can see how much revenue they have how much like he's got weird metrics how much c removed from the atmosphere github commits daily revenue daily sign ups meetups ups organized new paid membership live streaming events last month sign ups how many customers are in total many page views where the page views are coming from you can see everything the the uptime of the websites this guy's amazing and if you know no mad list is doing five hundred and thirty one thousand dollars a year it's halfway to the goal of a million dollars a year from this business and this guy we just explained how he's kinda got this like unique little easter egg on his twitter he's got like little things like that throughout all of his websites and so this guy is in my mind he this man's an artist he's this guy's like an he's an artist who just so happens to his art just so happens to make money this guy i love this guy i don't know his name peter peter anything thinks at peter levels that's his full name i didn't know that i would just thought his company was called levels so if you look at like one of his things i was gonna show you so okay so his latest thing this thing called re base and he tries to like sniff out a trend and then quickly spin up the semi viral slightly profitable like a semi viral simple profitable version of a website so what is re rebates re rebates is people are trying to relocate with the pandemic and with tax changes and with cryptocurrency and all this good stuff people are more like kind of you know like fluid than ever there are people are gender fluid and their location fluid there's a fluidity going on so he basically said portugal came out and portugal said we wanna they i think in twenty twenty one they had the largest population decrease in the last fifty years and so they said alright our population shrinking we need foreigners to come live here and spend here and work here so they said the port portuguese government said we wanna attract high tech remote workers and they gave they create a program called the n hr program and so the hr program it basically has a bunch of benefits now i don't know if they're all as good as advertisement meaning like i didn't go read the fine print but here's some of the things it says zero percent tax on foreign income so they're not gonna tax you for income that comes outside of the state zero percent tax on crypto it's considered a currency unlike in the us where it's considered a property zero percent tax on dividends zero percent tax on wealth ten percent tax on pension twenty percent tax on freelancing so that's like you where what a lot of people would do there there's no minimum stay you can get fast track for eu passport you know they have a whole bunch of like you know sort of things that are benefits for coming here you know we're we have a ninety percent vaccination rate we have friendly people blah blah so that's so we created a website that just has the sales benefit the benefits of if you wanted to relocate or get a passport in portugal and then what levels did was you basically created okay you here's the on ramp to portugal so it's like for for a hundred and fifty bucks you'll do an onboarding call and we'll walk you through it and it'll be a tax after expert in a lawyer though analyze your situation for six hundred fifty dollars we'll get you set up with portuguese residency and you'll get a portuguese tax id for a hundred and fifty year dollars hundred and fifty bucks a year we'll do your taxes and it's like start now here's the button and i was like this is such a smart simple you know simple idea and already it's like booked out so you know he his max was that he could do that the lawyer could do fifty dot fifty calls per month and immediately it was at three hundred calls per month and so he's like trying to hire another lawyer so he could scale it up a little bit more if you had to ask like someone asked me the the other day like who i admire and i would ask you it a little bit differently which is who am i jealous of this guy peter i'm looking at his websites i am jealous of i'm jealous of so many things about him the first is creativity you it just ooze and second he can do it like every like everything that i see on his website i'm like oh my god this is perfect this is the perfect example of how a product should be made he's this guy's incredibly prolific and incredibly he's like a music producer to me like he's a producer of websites he's just making these little hit songs and they're not like he's not trying to be justin bieber the like the one mega hit franchise that it goes on tour he's just a producer that makes dope beats and instead of beats he just makes dope websites and pay for a dope lifestyle yeah i mean and a lot of other ways subscription revenue he's got like yeah look at inflation chart dot com that's one of his yeah this website tracks real inflation which is happening the governments don't tell you about in their official numbers okay yeah super easy i understand that's just a really cute neat widget i guess it's awesome even on on what's it called the website i was just talking about on re the very first benefit it goes mcdonald's has the royale deluxe mcdonald's of portugal has a royal deluxe and the big tasty devil that was the first benefit right because he could've have just gone into like tax benefit tax benefit tax but he let me get you look let me break you know let me let me break the ice here set a little fun little easter egg a little fun little nugget that just shows you who the site's built by built by somebody who's got a personality it's built by an indie software maker not some stiff company or bureaucracy and i think these little touches matt that's why he's an artist this guy's amazing i love this guy good good good fine i've known about him for a little while i i always thought he was really talented i didn't realize that he was like the kanye of like internet website builders yeah he's great okay so i wouldn't even say he's he's like you know rick rubin or something like that he's he's he's got got his sound stick anything else we wanna do otherwise we could wrap it nope nope where we could wrap it we could save that other i i i wanna hear about some of these things that you have on here but we could save them okay sounds good we're out