he quit a job and in the first year he does it he hits actually five grand so he even surpasses his his one year goal and he just keeps going so he first year sixty k second year like a hundred something k third year two hundred fifty k fourth year seven million fifth year you know they just keep trying today this business does over thirty million a year no way are you kidding me i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days all on a roll do you wanna do you wanna start with up dog at might well thought i might can't just sleep in there that's what just gave it to me that's way below you you should just gave it to me alright before we start i wanna dedicate those podcast sean oh to two groups of people because if i had run ins with these these two groups of people and i've taken for granted how special these two groups of people are the first one people who start businesses and are english speaking as a or or net not native english speakers it's insane i like have hung i hung out recently with a few friends that you know our entrepreneurs and they don't speak english natively that's so impressive i take it for granted so much and until i've gotta communicate someone of a different language that's amazing so i wanna they dedicate this pod to that the second group of people people who start businesses and they're not wealthy and they're just starting their businesses trying to make the dreams come true while they have newborns or little kids how impressive is that like i didn't take i didn't i kinda took that granted it my parents said that when i was younger i don't realize now now that i a kid i realized how scary that is i wanna dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people wow good guy points okay i like it dedication acceptance set out to all those groups i have a few interesting things to share with you today do you have a few interesting things or or what i have two things you're gonna like what do you got alright so we're talking about ai talking about fancy shit right well i'm gonna take you on a journey so sam buckle up because i got a little something i'm gonna tell you about a journey i went down and the journey starts with a tweet i saw that was very interesting and it was a tweet about you know bitcoin hit an all time high price ai is taken off my i wasn't in i'm not interested what i was interested in is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado and i was like what is this and he said here's what he said he goes these are the best avocados i've ever had they were grown by my ninety three year old japanese neighbor i have had to use google translate to talk to her about the variety and she thinks it might be one that just grew from this this specific scene if that's true this could be a new landmark variety the h avocado was discovered in similar fashion and is now the most popular avocado in the world this avocado that i found cannot be propagated with normal methods doesn't take well to air layering i don't know what this means he said so i'm gonna have to start with the seed i'm gonna have to grow it out the tree i'm must to cut it from the maturity tree graft it onto its own scene i don't even know what any of this means but then he's like and then i'm gonna try to recreate this avocado it will probably be a three year experiment wish me luck and so i saw this and i what a noble quest i said your life what does this avocado teach me about life no what has life led me to to make my life about this avocado because i am so fully invested in this three year journey about this guy who's gonna try to grow a better avocado and it led me down a rabbit hole about him and about the avocado so the guy is this guy named kevin spirit two do you know this guy he calls himself the plant daddy on twitter no but i'm in do you know don't know this guy no i think you when i just started describing people so he's got a pretty amazing story i'm gonna first tell you his story i'm gonna come back to avocado we're gonna tara this a little bit alright so this guy basically he used to work at scribe the like book in a box company there they help you produce books so he's was working at scribes he's like an early employee there and on the side he used to have hobbies of like video games and online poker and he was just playing nonstop and so to get away from kind of his online addiction he's like you know what i'm a start gardening like him and his brother they're this the quote in the article for the go hey let's go hit up a nursery they go to a plant nursery and they are like alright we don't know anything about gardening but we wanna do something we don't do something away from a computer outside with their hands and they go buy a bunch of stuff and they're trying to figure it out they go online they're looking at blogs to learn and along the way he starts blogging his journey and so he's at scribe and he his little blog starts getting you know a little bit of traffic because he's posting his experiments he's very relatable because he's an absolute new beginner and so people who are going are also absolute new beginners and it starts to like this and eventually he's like you know what i'm gonna quit my job at the time the blog is making i don't know sixteen seventeen thousand dollars a year so roughly two two ish grand a month a little bit more than that right so or a a little less than two grand sorry so he's he quits his job and he's like i'm gonna go all in on this thing and at the time he's all about this one type of gardening called hydro garden guard is that like where the the plant is like raised is that yeah it's like not in the soil and like in water something like that i said exactly i have no idea alright so he's he creates r slash hydro which is like a reddit community so he starts just building a community around other people who interested in the same type thing he's doing along the way he's like oh dude i think this hydro po thing is a little too niche he re rebranding it into something called epic gardening epic gardening today is huge he's got dude i'm on the website and i'm looking at his social numbers holy crap he's got like two million on tiktok two million on youtube a million people here he's is his twitter pops off so he's done really really well with this epic gardening content he's just a dude in the baseball cap super like relatable when you watch his videos he's like this is very likable guys he's he's got the gifts that you need when you're gonna do this type of content and so he keeps going and he basically for ten years essentially bootstrap this company so starts with like a ten dollar domain pays five bucks for hosting and he was like alright i'm gonna try to get this thing and his goal was i'm gonna try to get to three grand a month three in a month means i can live off of this like blog revenue he quit his job and in the first year he does it he hits actually five grand a so he even surpasses his his one year goal and he just keeps going so he first year sixty k second year like a hundred something k third year two hundred fifty k fourth year seven million fifth year you know it just keeps trying today this business does over thirty million dollars a year no way are you kidding me and he just raised a huge amount of money from churn in the same guys who backed we talked about eater bar stool others they have this content to commerce idea and they're like this guy in the gardening niche is gonna be able to do big things and and he had already kind proven it so what he did was he was doing pretty well with the content and he was just like learning so he's like dude on youtube for so long you know since you know basically ten years now on youtube because just keep evolving with whatever the new meta game is of youtube and what ends up happening is that in twenty twenty shit takes off during covid so covid was the big like inflection point that like really took this from moderately successful to very successful two things happened covid first where his channel all a sudden he said he started adding like fifteen thousand subscribers a day because the same thing he had when he was like dude i'm just so sick of being inside on my computer i wanna get outside do some gardening the whole world basically felt that when covid hit and so a lot of people got interested in in this and then he's like cool all my money up until that point was ads and affiliates right so just like youtube adsense since youtube ad revenue and then you know affiliate links to products and finally he's like what's he doing thirty million that way thirty million ads no no way less that he was doing like you know less than a million doing that but then he decides our i'm a launch a product and he's like i'm gonna create a gardening product and so he imports a product from australia and immediately it works and so he's like oh this this is kind of a good idea and he starts to sell that product and you know the beautiful thing about these creator businesses right we've talked about mister beast we've talked about logan paul with prime mister beast with feast you know the the mass creators what they do is they take a mass market product like yep gatorade or chocolate and they're like cool we'll sell this commodity product using our branding and we'll use our brand to get into retail well for like the medium like they're the mid tier creators like this guy or you know like us for example you have to actually create a niche product that's gonna be higher ticket higher value and you're gonna use your audience to do and so what's cool about this is you create something that's called negative c so what does negative cat means every business otherwise has a sales and marketing dirty to me baby yeah i love negative c he's go hack which is customer acquisition cost is the amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer and for most businesses this is maybe twenty percent thirty percent forty percent fifty percent for some companies that's eighty percent of their revenues are just how much it cost to go market to to to acquire a customer with a media business like this what ends up happening is you get negative c meaning he gets paid one to two million dollars a year for his youtube stuff for his content right his blog and his youtube stuff he's making money on that and that's his customer acquisition channel so it's like kind of an unfair advantage this is what the turn in guys are really smart about doing shout out to my current over at at a turn where they recognize they identified that hey some of these creators have high trust they have high authority in a niche and they actually have a business model where instead of spending thirty or forty percent of your revenue on acquiring customers you actually have negative c it's actually you have not only zero it's better than zero you actually have a profitable media company that is being used to acquire these customers and that's the beauty of and so he then he jumped and he was went from making you know let's say a million bucks a year to seven million seven million to twenty million and then now he's over thirty million a year and in revenue and the other cool thing is he's bolted on some acquisitions hold on what's he's selling he's got like a seed product so they like some tray seed crap i don't know i don't i don't know anything about this was called botanical seeds and he bought that company actually that's not the one he started he bought that because they had retail distributions they were in like four or five thousand stores so he's like cool let me buy this because i know that my audience will help grow this right this is what i did with shepherd two it's like let me buy this company that i is already a good business knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it and like that's what happened up we basically tripled the business the using the strategy he's doing the same thing in the gardening niche and so he bought the seed business and then he bought this like house plant business which is actually a cool story so he's like he gets into he's like during covid whatever he wanted like house plants i think you guys talked about this with trends too like the we were we talked about this year and a half i think before the pandemic about like right succulent or like people are wanting to buy succulent online and there's not a lot of options you were totally right you were ahead of trend what he did was he was like cool should i start creating this content and he realized a very like you know in the in the the growth of any entrepreneur eventually you start to realize that hey sometimes it's actually easier to buy than build and so what he did was like well i could try to create all these articles rank for them in seo or he found this website that was called like you know your house plant dot com and he's like this actually has like good content and it's good seo they don't have any business around it and so he's like i think i could make this product a lot better but i could like get this off a head start so he he does her who is look up and it's some indian vc owns us as a side project he buys it for a thousand dollars and immediately like month one he's making more than a thousand dollars off this thing and then grows that property and so he's done this a few times and he raised money from churn to be able to go do more of these and so i think this guy is amazing i have asked him so many times to invest because i'm like dude this is you are gonna win and you're gonna win in such a big way it's gonna shock people like i think as i'm saying it now it sounds like pretty cool pretty obvious and as his growth happens but like ten years ago so stone non obvious even four five years ago even when covid started to get more popular it's like okay cool you're a youtuber okay cool you're a youtuber with a e comm shop i say no no you are gonna be the most trusted influencer in the gardening niche and the gardening these you know look at how much you know there's full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer in different things like that like he can take this huge if he does this right and now it's just gonna a question of how fastest kind of business development can kinda level up with the content skills he already has and he's got the look i'm looking at his instagram and he's wearing flannel he's got a nice smile like he's got it's he's basically like what's the what's it called chip joanna yeah james i the again yeah he he's got that type of vibe where i look at them and i'm like you're relatable i trust you you're somehow a little bit aspirational a little bit that sounds like an insult i mean i didn't mean to it to sound like that but this is awesome and dude these guys at churn in have done this so many times they did it with meteor who we or was it meat who we talked about a few podcasts ago they did it with cars and bid and doug tomorrow this is like when people say they're gonna do this i often think it's like at a small scale these guys are doing it at multi multi multi billion dollar scale it's really cool yeah exactly so i think this is this is amazing now let me circle back to the avocado thing so he says i'm gonna do this three year avocado mission and he says something with the h avocado so got look it i'm like where did this hot avocado come from learn a couple of things number one stop pronounce h it's has so we're all saying it wrong that's the first thing i learned second thing do you know the story have you heard the story about the the has avocado no i why would no alright so basically avocados were avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day so nobody ate them they didn't taste very good not even like in mexico no they were not they were just not a popular fruit they were these it was a green product it was not very popular it didn't taste very good and it had it wasn't even branded very well so some people called it avocados some people called them alligator pairs some people called them like in mexico they called them the like i don't know how you pronounce the word but it was the like the spanish word like the native word for test like they're just like yeah you wanna go into test and it's so nobody really liked this this fruit so enter rudolph has ro rudolph has basically is a mailman from milwaukee he's now living in california and he decides he wants to plant an avocado tree so he goes and he buy some seeds and he tries to plant it but like you have to i guess do some graft process or whatever to get things to like take and it didn't work and so he's like it didn't work whatever he thinks about just cutting it down but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever so he just lets the tree grow and he lets at grow for like a year or two and then his kids like notice that there's fruit on it they they pluck it they open it up and the kids really like it this is how the story goes kids really like it he's like why you eating that that's not good and they're like no it's great he tries to he's like oh this actually really good way cream it's got like kind of a nutty taste and there was way more space between the seed and peel so it was like softer cream and there was just more of the actual like filling and he's like well these are actually really good until he starts taking it the you know war are spread he goes and he partners with a local nursery and he's like hey can he help me grow more of this tree because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit and so the nursery is like cool yeah we'll we'll do more of this tree and we'll give you you know some royalty off this thing and then now avocados are like eighty percent of worldwide avocado sales these trees are planted all around the world mexico in china and everywhere like this is the dominant fruit and it's not even that old so he pat it in nineteen thirty five so we're talking let avocados as we know it today are less than a hundred years old so now here's a couple of interesting things i found from this so number one a lot of fruits are like this where they actually start kinda shitty they don't taste very good and then through a process of artificial selection so like not natural selection artificial selection you find the good tasting fruit and then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to i just didn't really think about that too much yeah like like a banana like an old the banana from a hundred plus years ago tasted like a carrot they weren't as sweet and that's happened to that's happened with a lot of our fruit it's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter so they're like the honey ass apple there's like a cotton candy apple right now and a lot of like health advocates are like dude you shouldn't even eat modern fruit because it's like it's not exactly how it used to be in in the help benefits of it's are are same properties in it because it's a different thing right optimized for taste so couple a couple more interesting facts number one this guy even though he said he got like a fruit patent which i was like what the hell a fruit patent he didn't make much money off this thing i don't think he really had the patent and i don't think he really benefited from his son charles came out and told the la times that even though he he goes my dad created the greatest avocado in the world and his total royalties lifetime are forty eight hundred dollars less than five thousand dollars he made off off of of of discovering this and i i say discovering because he didn't invent this he didn't mean to do it he didn't like you you know like manually try to create this he discovered it and even he says that he goes it was an act god that i discovered this the this fruit and so the i found mentioning the third thing i found using is the marketing behind this so even though this thing tasted good it didn't take off right away and one of the reasons why is that and an avocado doesn't look like most fruits so most fruits are colorful they look very appetizing like the reason they called it the alligator pair was because like the skin was basically like all w and like tough like like the way an avocado that we all know looks and so nobody wanted to eat it they were like this thing looks bad and so nobody would even try it and so the like fruit association of california comes together and does probably what the greatest like greatest act of any committee ever they were like look couple things number one we can't keep calling the shit testicles and alligator pairs like we gotta come up with one name that we like alright we're going with avocado everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity the next thing that they that they did that was very very smart they were like cool why aren't people buying these they're like well because they looked like they've gone bad right they're dark it's like black basically it looks like fruit that's gone bad so they're like alright new new marketing campaign we're gonna put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight basically that this is the this is perfectly ripe it's ready to eat tonight and this is already true it says that consumers don't understand this and so they put stickers on on every avocado and suddenly avocado states sale started to boom once you try it you like it but people weren't trying it because they didn't they thought it had gone bad and instead saying this is ripe ready to eat tonight that was the second thing that they did the third thing was that they were like they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually bad avocado and then this was a good avocado and so they did all this marketing to make it work which you never really think about with fruit like you don't think about fruit marketing but everything around us is the product of some ad guy try to boost sales like once you realize that you can learn two things you can learn a lot about marketing and you can learn a lot about you know what the products that you see are not as they appear you can become a little more skeptical and lower more jade towards all products when you realized that even avocados were basically like you know they were just someone's some drop ship or somewhere had a great idea dude we first of all this is awesome this is very interesting we should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing it's actually really interesting plan money have a had a podcast on the honey apple you know it's most popular right you know before a lot of apples like that existed it was red delicious it it's like kind of fascinating met guy who had done a venture backed startup up it was like raised a bunch of money was trying to grow business blows up and we check in with it we're like you like what are you thinking for what's next and i think he's gonna say some ai crap i'm like crazy you know whatever some some big idea and he's like i'm i'm trying to invent a new fruit everyone's like what and he's like yeah he's like you ever had a mango oh yeah he goes you think you've had a mango which did you try my mango like i love to try your mango send it to he's and basically he was he was cut like he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters so for example like the ease of eating so he had these like his mango wearing in like circular spheres based there's was like balls and his little mango balls were ready to eat they were super juicy the texture was perfect and i was like wow this is genuinely an amazing mango experience thank you for this what they call well he kind of pivoted pivot updated it because he's like the logistics of it are so hard he's like to get fresh he's like it tastes really great when it's fresh he's like but just the logistics to get this like two customers is so hard i would have to go about this in this way this way this way so he off that idea in the end but and then you happen to feel very fortunate that i got to try that mango and the crazy part is and this is like actually kind of like an interesting moat is that it takes ten or fifteen years to do because imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once the year to that website and see the results to be like a shit that didn't work next year let's see because you have to you know you gotta wait for it all to grow it takes a long time and so we should do a patent right like yeah you know i guess though there's some rules around the patents so the rules that i read were basically like you if you wanna do a fruit pla patent you can't you basically like it has to reproduce ace asexual it has to be created by breeding or graft it cannot be discovered if it's already in the wild that can't be patented like there's a bunch of rules like that so like you know the first fruit pla the first plant patent was this guy henry who planted the the climbing ever bloom rose and like he created that rose and he patented that plant and then he gets to benefit from that so i think when we do our fruit and plan episode i think we gotta go find like the greatest fruit brewers tab ever live yeah we i i just looked them up on twitter i have had some interactions with him you know what's funny about twitter is these there's so many people like i remember was talking this woman named shelby church and they're like youtube celebrities still have five or ten million subscribers on youtube and you go to twitter and they've got ten thousand followers and on twitter they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business in insight and things like that this guy is not that popular in twitter but he's got ten million across all of his other socials we could just dm them and get them on here that's kinda cool yeah let's do so i made a video of camp m fm that i wanna i wanna show so originally by the way this is my debut of of vlogging and you'll notice that the video is not a vlog why because your boy sucks at vlogging it's a hard learn that it's really hard i learned that the hard way he'd be like alright so i'll just gonna shot to you walking into the house and i'm like i just walk into the house he's like no you can just walk in what do you mean you gotta say something and then you gotta walk in kind of an interesting way i was like that i don't walk interesting or say that i just walk into the places is no one here to talk to what am i supposed to say anyways didn't work out so well but we have a cool video so two things number one number one if you're just listening to the audio version you gotta go youtube to see it we're not even put that in the audio version because it's not gonna make sense so go to go to the youtube video if you wanna actually see the video tim i have three questions what did they search what did they search oh they search my first million or you can just search the greatest podcast of all time either one should show up if google is doing their job right and you search my first million click on this episode and you'll see the video here so sam i have threw questions for you number one how much fo are you feeling right now knowing that you skipped this year's camp m in fact we may need not even name it camp m just name it camp sean because you didn't know skip it i could i had a newborn child i was committed to being with her for a certain period of time i didn't just skip it i couldn't go but it was a hilarious moment when we're there everyone was like dude where's sam and i was like oh he can't come he he just had a baby and then everyone everyone's was like yeah yeah yeah and the nodding and then one guy goes wasn't that two and half months ago and then we're were all like yeah what the hell how would you can totally go for two days and it's two to half months in and so then we all laughed at you and then moved on there was two and half months ago but i committed to three months i committed to three months i to stick with it so that's point one what's point two point two what do you think of my not vlog video there what could we have done better so i was i wrote this down to let you know i don't think you could have any of that music on there you know i think it's gonna get taken down no i think connor connor prices song he was gonna the camp that's fine the the first song was drop kick murphy's the first song is fine and beauty absolutely fine nothing's gonna get taken down this isn't like a like oh i just gotta ask for a mission type of thing like it literally won't like like the algorithms gonna like prevent this from going live so i think you have to change that song but it's great i thought it was great okay na okay that's third third question third question for you have you noticed this trend right part of this is b just showing you a a vacation photo album basically but the other part is noticing that i think we started a movement dude i think i just fucked around and started a movement so i didn't mean to do this did you this bed blogging no not the blogging this the movement is of these kind of like man camp active conferences i don't i have a good name for i think it this something like a man business camp type of thing so i did this camp m fe thing then i started noticing other people who heard the podcast were like oh you know it would be cool like sean did it for basketball let's do it for something else and so i i have a few of these that are now started so boy danny miranda has like a running club type of thing yeah dude i see them out there all the time there's like fifty of them looks like a blast pat walls from starter story was like hey what if we did this for tennis pickle ball whatever and they called it the mr r open like the month pretty good everybody of great name and that's a great dave better than our name shit this guy this guy en hampton messaged me and he goes hey heard about kept him so so awesome had the same ideas guy victor who's was like i'm gonna do this for poker and so he did a poker getaway weekend rented a house about bunch of people and they just play poker weekend i think this is the new new wave of of getting you can either just get together for drinks but guess what the cool kids don't drink anymore everyone sober versus a salad dude isn't it insane did you did you see whole foods announced the most popular beer that they sell do you know what it is it's athletic brewing company okay non alcoholic beer yeah a non alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in whole foods is that insane no one drinks yeah no one drinks so nobody drinks anymore so what what are gonna get together and just you know sucker thumbs this is not gonna work so next thing nobody wants to just sit at a conference or you know like a lecture haul and just sit there and listen to speakers kinda boring you wanna weave it in with these things so i think this kinda active conference thing is cool i think more people should make these you can invite me i would love to know about them and then politely politely passed just because i don't like to leave the house that much but i think more people should do these and i'm hoping that just hoping that i get credit for starting this movement and i know people are gonna go out and say no no there's been going on forever but that was the past but i'm the present future and i just needed to tell you that i think it's awesome i i wanna go to the next one and i'm gonna make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because i do have fo after seeing that video good job but blogging not only is there if you're given birth next year when it's happening you better be there it the dude vlogging sucks by the way dude mister beast made fun of you in that video or and who made fun of he was always with the camera was he given you guys a hard time for having a camera there yeah because i showed in you know with a camera following me basically and the funny part is always with the camera that's the first time i ever done a vlog as evidence by the fact that at the end was like that's vlog kinda sucks let's just make video out of it but it was really fun to actually having a guy there this our buddy max came and he did a great job it's really embarrassing i see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy following them my camera it's it's quite embarrassing it draws a lot of attention you i find it to be very very humiliating the upside you might get famous the downside you're immediately humiliated alright let me tell you about something yeah i'm gonna talk a little bit about the best business in the world now this business tam math who i think is coming on the pot actually has said it's the singular best business model in monopoly ever created this is easy for you to guess right r crackers now it's it's gotta be google google google yeah google and so i wanted to talk you a little bit about google and search engine stuff because i've been interested in this for years i've been interested in duck go which i called that shot i think i missed this i thought i was to grow a lot faster than it than it actually has but it's like slowly coming about this is by the way this is gonna be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call her shot and in fact kinda doubted it earlier yeah it's like hey do you like making right hand turns out a red light i out that i was doing one i sixteen yes i create permit i've created it i created that and so the reason let me tell you why i've had been interested in type four athletic fitting dress pants hey the auto complete didn't even had no idea what i was doing there that's not a common search thick boy parents yeah alright i was searching for this day of other day and i had a scroll down so far to get to a website because if you look dude like the first it's it's like tons and tons of images is that what you see so i see tons of images so i see a whole shopping carousel then i see a couple of ads and then i scroll it down i see amazon okay yeah go ahead so you gotta scroll down a ton to get to a website it it's actually quite annoying and so google's been pissing me off and when you just talked about how they like have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company i'm slowly to i'm slowly sorry to lose face space in their company because the search has been really shit and it's starting to piss me off and so i've been looking for all their other alternatives did you google for that did you just google search for alternatives yeah i mean i it's like it's like even though i hated i use it you know like it's like an a an abusive lover but i was doing some research on when they first started so google started in the late nineties and when they did sergey and larry the founders they created this paper called the anatomy of large scale web search engine riveting riveting s but please take our my power writing course larry yeah that's done a little and in that paper they talk about like what they think is possible with a search engine and and and they kinda started from an academic point of view which is pretty cool though to see like their their predictions and there's this one line it says in general it could be argued from the consumer point of view the better the search engine is the fear advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want and then he goes he says the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users so like thirty years later they just went back and edited it and they're like no yeah yeah dude like the the sub techs on their like the sub headline is just psych like they just like changes and then and then i said for this reason as well as about for for this reason we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with consumers needs and they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service search engine is actually the answer of course that is the opposite of what they've eventually have become you know google is a one point five trillion dollar company market cap company and ninety five percent of the revenues come from search and it's the greatest business model of all time i would i don't know how many people work at google exactly i think oh i think over a hundred thousand but i would i would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but like a thousand people and the company would just thrive it would be the most profitable company in the world and the crappy parts about google well i guess it's good for them bad for us is that their mo is quite simple which is the more people who use the search engine the better understands like which results to give you and so it's just gonna get better or supposedly better and better and better but harder for a new person to create a an alternative now ultimately i think actually open is gonna be an alternative gardner had this report where they said by two thousand twenty six i think twenty five percent google search is gonna be reduced by twenty five percent because of ai but i found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago or about a month ago they been around quietly but they like kinda they had like big like launch coming out party of the other day and it's kinda cool so it's called actually don't know how to pronounce it it's ka yeah sorry you're a good start i'll do it i mean how do you say this word k a g i yeah ka ka keith kg yeah i don't know but it's got an interesting premise so it was started by this guy named vladimir and the premises is that if there are zero ads and it's five to ten dollars a month for a subscription and i i think that that's like an interesting premise but i don't think that that would work that well however this guy's story is pretty interesting so he started bootstrapping this business in two thousand eighteen slowly started making progress and at this point he's got about thirty thousand people who pay for and if you go to k dot com k a g i dot com slash stats he reveals all of his stats and so you could see the number of paid members you can see how many searches are happening per day you all of his stuff is pretty transparent and i love when people do that stuff it's so fascinating to see and the reason he had this like big like launch recently is because they just raised eight hundred i think it was eight hundred thousand dollars and very stupidly they it looks like they're spending that eight hundred thousand dollars to buy twenty thousand t shirts to send to their thirty thousand members so so vlad vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to finance real yeah yeah so they blog like all about the business so if you go to their blog dot blog dot k dot com they blog about like everything that's going on in the company and so they're actually pretty transparent and in the thing he was like yeah and we're we're gonna be sending out twenty thousand t shirt and i was like doing the math i was like oh that's what's like eight hundred grand like so so that's questionable but they had he has like a whole manifesto online and it's pretty fascinating and this this is the type of entrepreneur if i really like because he's got this blog his personal website he says i'm dedicating the work by the way be honest when you found out the founder name as vladimir already you were pretty biased to like this thing right yeah i'm in you can add an extra million to that evaluation if your name is vladimir america yeah i'm in general rule and i have no arguments with that yeah he's he's he's born in yugoslavia and he like had all these like little like indie hacker projects for a long time worked at god godaddy so he's got he's a very technical guy he seems very savvy he was a vp of product at god godaddy he had another company called managed wp which was a web application that helps users manage wordpress sites and that got to a couple million revenue so he has some experience but he has this blog where he goes i'm dedicating this work on ka to my three chill children while i try to make the web a more humane and and friend place for them and i re sorry started reading that i'm like okay i'm really fascinated by this guy i'm very interested and so on his blog they talk all about the company and like how it's working and things like that and he's got all these like great lines about how he's like pay search engines is unusual but that's the only choice if you wanna build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported you could do donations but i don't think it's gonna work five billion people use a search engine ninety nine percent of people are never gonna pay the thing is the tiny minority of people who think differently the one percent that will pay it's still quite a large number that's fifty million people and he talks about twenty years of ad supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search but a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad supported search is not good for them and my point through all this is i think i agree with this guy the issue is that i don't think don't think he's gonna win i think i agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions and i'm on board that and open is really good for that but i'm very fascinated with guys that are going after google at the moment there's been a few there was u dot com which i don't think is that intriguing there is n dot com so n e e v a that was one and there's a few others and this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're gonna launch this most people as well as mine gut reaction is like there's not a chance you're ever gonna be google but when you start thinking about it i think it's really interesting and i wanna know what's your opinion of these people trying to build these search engines and do you actually think that any of them will work other than open well i think i agree with you on pretty much all fronts which is that google's search over time has become more and more just use you search something and you get an ad and they add the result the top half of the page is ads and that's what that's what you get google i think in ka website it says that google if you just take the revenue divide it by the number of users on average i believe that they make like three hundred bucks a year off of each customer i think it's like two hundred seventy seven so that's twenty three bucks a month and that's like what you're worth to google so what this guy's doing is basically saying hey instead of google making twenty three bucks a month off you you pay us ten bucks a month and we'll have no ads and i think that i agree with you which is that the big threat to google is obviously the ai driven inches and google's trying to become that themselves so you know it whether it's chat gp or it's google or it's bang or it's some new one that we haven't heard of complexity or whatever else that is the big thing which is it's a better experience and so they're trying to win with better experience then you have duck go which is basically like we are the anti google right we're gonna ka in that same bucket we're the anti anti whatever i say duck ghost is the surprising success the amount of traffic they had we we did a whole thing on them you know and a few episodes ago which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were what i think it's cool about ka is that it doesn't need to beat google this is just like i'm gonna build this i'm a cockroach i'm gonna build this business and you can't kill me because i'm gonna be supported by my customers right now it sounds like he's probably making like what two to three million bucks a year and revenue i think it's closer to one to one point five subscription making let's say one point five million in revenue and he's probably able to run the thing break even or profit at that rate and you'll he'll just keep crawling you know next year he'll be at forty thousand members and then next year he'll be at sixty thousand members or whatever he'll just keep growing and he's not even worth it's not worth killing if you're google it's it's too small to matter and he doesn't have to become huge i think what he's saying is like my mission is for people that you know believe in this the the point he says the one percent who would pay i don't think it's one percent i think it's like point one percent that would pay here's your option and now the question is how good is this like for example you're into this did you sign up hey are you using this now instead of google it's so hard to you selling instead of google because they're the default everywhere yeah and basically my frustration with google is borderline to the point where i'm like alright i'm out but the thing is is that i'm like so it's seven more times google and i am out of here the the issue is like i've logged in with everything like on chrome you know what mean i'm like shit and i gotta type in all these passwords this sucks but i mean i definitely you know chat has definitely taken away at least thirty percent of my like google time which is a pretty insane number actually and i we're gonna have to do an entire episode on sergey brennan and larry page these guys are crazy fascinating and i was reading a little bit about them when i was like researching how google started and they were like huge shit heads and like sergey b dude they were shit heads so i have to explain that one to be so sergey b he's got this he had his resume online and in the code he put if you expect the source code of his website you'll find b hidden objective laid out bear which is and this is in quotes this is exactly what he had in the code i want a large office good pay very little work frequent expense account trips to exotic lance would be a huge plus is that real that's insane that's on you can go to the website right now and find it you would never expect somebody who's like innermost goal is a big office no work expense accounts to create fucking google yeah it it's that's it's funny it's funny and then there's stories of larry page where he he was just kind of like the they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where blunt and just like not totally understanding normal human emotions and so larry and sergey they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other and they would call each other stupid it'd be like your idea is so stupid that's dumb why are and and they would like fight and fight and fight and then one person would win and then the other person would like can see and be like oh your idea is better and they would bond over that and then they're like to all the other employees because they're like that's what you all need to do unfortunately when you're at like fifty or a hundred or three hundred people most people aren't like that and there's these crazy stories of like apparently do you know how like a jan when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace the bag they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out and they're like well there's a bag already there for you larry saw this and he was like that's the most efficient way i've ever seen anyone clean that is brilliant and he made this whole like memo about how the jan does that and how brilliant that is and he's was like why can't you guys be like this in fact everyone in the office needs to be like this here's the new rules and he laid out these like eight rules and it was like if you think that your idea is right go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back or it would be like if you are working on a project and you are not providing value leave that project right away and go and let the do do what they need to do and just get them coffee and like just like serve them and like you would do all these things that are very logical and like your disagree agree some more yeah like he would say these like crazy things that you you hear that them i'm like yeah i mean that's more productive unfortunately like this whole thing called human emotion kinda gets in the way and so it's probably not practical when you have five hundred employees but there's all these stories about how these guys would behave and it's very fascinating and they were they were shit heads when they first started i think google right now is going to those period where their ceo kinda i think it kinda sucks to be honest and so i think they're gonna like come back but right now i'm not bullish on google i think they're gonna be around for a whole a a real long time because they're so big but i'm eager to see something come kinda crush them yeah yeah well i think the the funny thing about all like crush them type of ideas is that when a company is really successful it's like a giant castle with a huge moat and everybody who tries to like siege the castle it's like the c of the world they're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle and it's too hard the castle is too big too strong the boat too big etcetera and what ends up happening is that you the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land it's somebody who just walks over like two miles was like hey this is actually like this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring and they built a new castle over there and actually the thing that diminishes the castle is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant like the world and the attention has moved the new plants that everybody wants they grow on this other land over here and nobody took your thing but you know you became less relevant in the there's just no wants that thing anyway anymore microsoft didn't defeat ibm or whatever by making you know by beating them at their own game they were like oh actually the game is software it's operating systems and then the things that beat the the microsoft monopoly and like microsoft the biggest tech company in the world got then beat by the google's and the amazons and the facebook of the world which were like hey okay cool you can keep the operating system we'll take the internet and microsoft missed the internet the internet was the place and then even when the internet was the place then they was like the companies that made it on mobile were the ones they were like yeah you can have that desktop app we're gonna make you know uber and we're gonna we're gonna create these new mobile companies you know instagram whatsapp apps and they out paste the growth of facebook and so now the question now the thing is well ai is here and crypto here and these are the the new lands and then the big projects that are getting built here they're just comp they're just competing for something in a different game altogether and i think that's really that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtake you know a company like google that google becomes less relevant you don't need search why do you not need search what because the ai just does it why would i go why would go search for links that doesn't even make sense anymore i don't need that i just you know i need the answer or even better than the answer oh i just need this little ai agent that's just gonna like look at what i'm doing and then like do do jobs for me right like i even have to go search for an answer it knows the answer and then it does the task right that's where this is going and so whoever does that is gonna actually be the one that is the next google without even creating a new search engine right and that's nine out of ten times it seems that's how like big innovative things come about where it's like you know all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a a v six turn it into a v eight and then we're gonna turn into a v ten we're gonna put more cylinders in more horsepower and then you're like oh this electric car just like went way faster to has zero cylinders you know what i mean that that how works did i tell you about the my boss who his boss was larry page and what he tell me sorry he didn't tell me many stories but he told me one which was i came in once and i was like yeah i was presenting my goal i was like yeah our goal is to do you know nine point one this year what i remember what the metric was like like nine point one million users or something like that and he's like you know what larry page used to say when i would present a goals like i'm gonna do nine of something he's like he would just say that's a wu goal if you could do nine you can do ten he's like never set a goal at nine it's like and then i was like what hey he's like i just said what i said if you can do nine you can do ten saying nine is just a wu way to go about things and i was like he told you that he's said he tell everybody that and so i stole that and i'd i made the change and then now like kept i do the same thing if anybody ever comes to me like we're gonna do four and a half now you're gonna do five yeah we're gonna do nine point no don't no you're gonna do ten like if you can if you're gonna get nine point two you can get to ten trust me it's like when five ten guys lie and they say they're five eleven it's like dog say six one be the real thing yeah act as if my friend and act as this alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back