One-Chart Businesses, The Lice Lady and Having A Micro-Hustle Mentality

this is an example of a business that is what i call one chart businesses i'm fully of catching shit today one chart businesses so what's the one chart business there are times you can look at one chart and one chart alone can be your business plan i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days on on a road alright we're live what's going on i haven't seen you in a week now what's going forever nice jacket by the way that's fresh we're in white this appreciate white just a it's a choice the summer move it's the choice the summer move you're going you're going to reuben party or what no i i don't think i'm i'm not on that was it last year that you were in the hampton when rick rubin was having his party and you were like what's this and do you was there some story like you hung out with all the limo drivers or the uber drivers yeah the parking lot instead of stanley the beach the beach that i went to was five doors down from his house it's a public beach and there's a parking lot there and my me and my family were just there hanging out we drove by we saw like you know hen henry k the founder of k a r you know like fifty billion dollar guy like pull up it this two billion dollar or two million dollar bug got we park in the parking lot and i see all these huge escalate all black escalate and i see like these it's mostly like these you could tell her drivers they're in suits they're playing soccer and eating sandwiches which is drink soda and i walk over i'm like what the hell is this and they're like oh this guy named michael rubin throws party i go well who are you driving and they actually tell me who they're driving and i'm like seeing how i am i i go like alright like what's the what's the shit on them like are they a good tip what's their deal and they like spilled the beans on like what's it's like he's like oh this person actually broke you know like he always h with us over five hundred dollars or yeah so i hung out the parking lot in michael rub party most a relatable blue collar thing to do is just to go and be like hey pass the sunflower seeds and just start kicking it with these guys in the parking lot i saw it was like a movie a little bit it was like they're just like playing soccer and drinking coke yeah by the way the way you described that was definitely like straight out of like a fella in brazil you're like yeah they were just a drinking coca cola and an eating sandwiches while playing soccer in the part and the gravel that's really what they were doing i mean it was it was it was like but it was fun and you know it all like these long island guys like hey what are you doing you don't like that type of thing i saw a video of that party and i think the reaction when they post that video for most people is like oh my god like so cool i i you know i hope one day i can attend this the white party at michael ribbon house i gotta say i saw that thing and i was like this would be my worst nightmare it'd be very uncomfortable right having to look cool just that alone is already i have a halfway way to hell having to look cool dressed up for the wearing on you sean's sean's wearing on mickey mouse t shirt right now just why yeah exactly and by the way i bought this recently this is new this isn't like some whole thing in the closet this i bought this during my trip just now so having a look cool and then going to a place with a bunch of people who are super famous and then having to like be in tele in conversations and do i try to get into conversations and then be in those conversations i just wanna go home i i even i i just i i already wanna go home and i wasn't even invited so mike career rubin you could lose my invite is what i'm trying to say yeah it's like you'd rather play their their characters in madden then actually hang out with yeah i start cleaning it i'd be like i'm just gonna make myself useful here because the the the rest of socializing is not gonna work i'm just gonna i'm gonna marie condo this bitch right now and like yeah taking out trash and i'm like i'll just joined the serving the crew like serving appetizers because i'd be like i know do i will have more fun doing anything besides this what do you wanna go from here i was looking at a company called after after dot com you ever heard this after dot com a very good domain so an amazing domain so after dot com is cremation as a service basically and you could prep plan it or you can do it after somebody passes away the the reason i actually wanna talk about this is it's interesting business on its own this is an example of a business that is what i call one chart businesses i'm full of catching shit today one chart businesses so what the one chart business there are times you can look at one chart and one chart alone can be your business plan so for example have you seen the rise in the popularity of cremation no popping off nowadays cremation is like it's outside it's in right now so i saw this part i thought did did not everyone get cr basically cremation in the united states and like the last i don't know twenty years or something like that has gone from like ten percent of the population chooses cremation to over fifty percent i think it's actually it's almost sixty or seventy percent now which is a kind of insane i i had no idea this was true so burial rates are going down and cremation rates are going way up and you just see that one chart alone you're like okay in twenty years this the the thing has shifted where it went from the super minority to the majority alright that alone tells me there's room for building interesting business in this space it's a one chart business and there's actually been several of these that i've i can encountered over the years like one chart one chart can tell you tell you a full story and so this is this is one of them and these guys have built a really good business on top this i i don't wanna go into too much detail about their actual thing but i just thought that was crazy and this is like where like what you guys had with trends was like kind of a cool business because you guys would identify trends like this you would say okay yeah in the nineteen in the nineteen sixties cremation was three percent and then in nineteen nineties it grew to seventeen percent and right now in twenty twenty it's over fifty percent if that's true then what what are all the second order consequences of that who are the providers for this who does the b e commerce of this who has the highest seo ranking for this and that website's actually be way more popular than than they realize because this is growing over time and so you take that one chart and you can actually run a whole business plan off wow so do they i'm a yes you're right and b i'm looking at after dot com they i don't think they've raised money they're they're their mormons they're based out of provost pro utah this is this is wild how did you find this they reached out because i was i told people i was buying minority stakes and businesses and investing in businesses and i think these guys are raising money or wanted to i think they're were raising money i not try to sell he's there they're i think they're trying to go big fund raise so they reached out this definitely could be big it's twenty five hundred dollars their tam is everyone right on earth we're all getting there eventually do but they don't own like an oven do that like they just like it's the logistics so basically what they do is they get the lead they then book the kind of like the the they they take the prep payment if you're gonna do it ahead of time or afterwards they they say okay we will be your provider they can do like kind of like the full logistics so basically you know like the domino's pizza tracker right pick up drop off delivery like they do the whole thing you know and you can see kind step by step where you're at in the process the this is wild so to to your first point our good buddy jack smith you know he started v sold it for seven hundred fifty million dollars it was making a million dollars today in revenue he told me i i was like jack why why'd do you start v he's was like well i just saw that mobile like like games on your phone we're gonna be really popular i just saw like a chart i think he said from forrest research report he's like i just saw this chart that says like oh mobile games are like taking over the world and he was like what can we make on top of that like and that's why he came up with v which was ads in a game and so he built an ad network and it was the same thing where was like oh that's the thing let's just get on that tidal wave and like just like no matter which surfboard we pick let's just pick board and hopefully it will catch and and that was like the same famously jeff bezos says this is how he decided to quit his job in i think he worked at some private equity firm that's famous and he quit his high paying job and was like i'm wanna go to start i'm gonna go start a internet company why internet company he goes i read a stat during my research for at the firm that the internet is growing two thousand three hundred percent per year and that blew my mind and if that's true that i'm gonna go build an inter internet company that line is a beautiful line so we actually use that quote on the front page of trends where he goes i started to he goes he goes i saw a report that said the internet was going by twenty three hundred percent per year nothing grows that fast unless it's in a petri dish and he's like that's what i knew i had to start something and so i wrote a list of ideas of things that we could possibly sell on the internet and we just don't happen to choose books yeah exactly they chose books because he was like oh i what is the advantage of the internet you could have infinite selection because there's there's no shelf space limit right there's no physical shelf so he's like what has a wide selection okay what also won't go bad can't be perishable it has to be durable and then what all what is easy to ship and so he's like you know those three and he's like there's market demand for it cool book folks will be a place where we restart by the way i just found a steph smith so former you know writer of of trends had a great tweet about this actually so i just pulled this up while while you were talking while i was looking for the quote and she said famously jeff bezos had this stat that made him quit his job what are the generation defining stats of today here's number one here's what she had the cost of mapping at genome has fallen by a hundred thousand percent over the last fifteen years it went from like a hundred million dollars to less than a thousand dollars so mapping genomes if that's true if the cost is dropping like a like a rock what what what could be done off that the second college tuition has out based how much people earned by ten x here's this one chart that shows you know people's earnings over time and the cost of college over time it's like costco college you going weigh up that's a one chart business right there cyber insurance loss ratios have increased for years despite exponentially growing rates so your loss ratios basically how many claims you have that so cyber cybersecurity becoming an exponential issue the percentage of men under thirty not having sex has tripled in the last decade so before men not having sex was like you know fifteen percent and now it's thirty percent of men are are not having sex under the age of thirty before the age under the age of thirty so you just made it nice so yeah ali you a couple other ones you had in here it used to be that eight hours of sleep was the norm on average now people get six point eight so the sleep industry and the like effects of of not sleeping are gonna go can go up the electronic system in a car was five percent of car cost now it's fifty percent of car costs it's not just self driving cars there's cars are basically rolling computers dude those are brilliant yeah you you like i've i've definitely have started stuff because i've seen things like that i remember sitting with one of the founders of calm this guy alex too and we were at lunch and he just burst out laughing out of nowhere and we were like what he goes i just realized that there must be like ten million people a day dying on facebook you away because like facebook must have so much churn just due to death he's like they probably have millions of users churn because they died every day that's insane and he he just starts to laughing you're like hey alex like you freaking autistic weirdo like he's just laughing it'd be normal was like can you imagine millions of people turning because they died every day from your product he's like he's like what do i do with those profiles how does that work he's like what what there's a team people just like the morgue at facebook just cleaning up these dead profiles sign up for athletes like more people died during lunch today than use our product you like more people on facebook died that i've ever used our product he's just laughing out control yes you're like yeah that's hilarious alex that's it's so funny so this is my first time recording back in austin so basically most summers between like may and october i go to new york because i have family there and we like to stay there this time we only did it for like six weeks and i'm back and every time i come back i get this immense amount of stress because typically when i go i'll go for three months and i only bring a carry on so i basically bring a pair of cro a pair of workout shoes and one nice dress shoes and then i bring like two workout shorts two workout shirts and i just cleaned them regularly cro workout shorts a box of captain crunch and a switch blade yeah that's called summer ready in with the y like this little on a little pager that on my belt yeah i got my y omega my crotch it's a bubble gum and i'm good okay so you so what why do you say you're stressed out do you mean you're stressed stress by one because alright so i bring nothing basically i bring very little stuff and i rent a furnished place and then i in my book bag i bring two lights for the podcast an extra cell phone that i hang up that's my camera in this microphone and i come back to my house and i realized i've got a closet full of stuff i've got two cars that i gotta go and i gotta make sure that like the battery didn't die i have a motorcycle i gotta make sure the battery didn't die the tires are full i've got this cold plunge where i gotta go like make sure i filled it with water and i gotta clean it i just have like shit like there's just stunning it there's stuff to like maintain and i saw a picture of our friends saw hill and he had his baby roman a beautiful baby but in the back he had literally three barrels there were barrels they were dog buckets there were barrels of toys and i see all this stuff that i have now and i'm stressed out about this stuff i've gotta go ranch an hour and a half away i gotta go check on i have all this stuff and i'm freaking out about having kids about all this other stuff i'm gonna get sarah's making like a baby shower registry and i see all this stuff and it's so much stuff it's freaking me out man i don't want any of it and i'm wondering i don't think you freak out over this because i think you you probably have a lot of stuff i got all but i for one freaking about it have you did you you don't live lightly at all bro living heavy might be the title of my auto and i i mean die live it lightly yeah i indulge our kids have tons of crap that's what kids do the they bring a bunch of crap in your house i got a dog dog not to crap i got some crap there's just stuff everywhere i literally have a ball pit and a tent and a fort and like you know i have so much stuff in every single room if you saw this room i'm in right now you would wanna like pass out but i gotta say i'm not i'm not therapist but i kinda feel like what you're having is actually like father fear and you're just redirecting it mis misguided it and pretending that you're worried about the stuff i think this is some underlying life's about to change i'm about to become a parent i'm about to lose my freedom and i think it's expressing itself in some weird ways like when you get hive because you're worried about your math test well i get a little nervous and you might be right but also i get a little bit nervous just about all the stuff i have in general so i talking to my buddy dennis and he's got he's a single guy he's got three cars and he's like i have all these cars i'm like i gotta go like run them to make sure like because i've been driven this thing in a month i gotta go like drive it around i'm like dude it's like we all wanted this shit and then we all got it and now we realize we just to go take care of it and like if i see someone with a ferrari i'm like man if you get a flat tire that's like a ten thousand dollar like repair to like get that to where you need to go where you gotta repair and you gotta fix it and everything right it just takes so much mental space and so what are you gonna do you give it all the way you just gonna cry about it what's the situation now the situation is you have to be a conscious consumer i think which is like my woo phrase of the week but basically i have to be really really careful and so i'm going through the baby registry and i'm like if it doesn't like if it's not a book we we shouldn't ask for it and we should actually like basically say to people don't bias anything but like i'm just i'm trying to say or if you want something and they sell to target you have to walk there and get it other because i don't want all these boxes around the house we got like it's isn't a crazy that we buy stuff it comes from amazon then we have to pay one eight hundred got junk to come and we have given them three hundred dollars to go throw away all the stuff you know what i mean like the boxes it's it's it's weird so i'm just gonna buy less stuff that's basically what i'm gonna do i think is that not the i think you're on the right side of history although i think with kids is a different game like for example one of reasons is i got a lot of stuff it's saying you're on the right side of history is such like a woo woo way of saying i agree like the it's like the the right side of history is what like political people use you're the right side of history you know why it works because you're talking about the most minor personal pet people so i gotta elevate it by saying you're on the right side of history making it feel a little more grand okay that's a little trick you don't i i think it's weird that you don't experience this i think a lot of people are experiencing this right now and there and like when you go to some people's homes they they have a basement full of stuff and i'm like dude a cluttered a cluttered room is a cluttered brain in my mind i threw a ways i i hired a guy to come over cleared my calendar i hired a guy to come over and he just took so much crap out of our house like we just removed everything out of the garage he took a whole dining table chairs a rug that i didn't like just took loads of stuff away and it felt like you know the satisfaction when you like pop his it or something like that it it felt like that yep i pop my house is it it does feel great when you get rid of stuff and you lighten the load but what i would say is one of reasons i a lot of stuff i have a lot of stuff as a as a parent is because you end i don't know not everybody does this to better parents at us but we bribe our kids a ton and it turns out that like the thing you want more than like a neat tidy home and foot light footprint is like thirteen minutes of and you know how you get teammates minutes relaxation you stop at freaking dollar general or whatever and you buy some crap that your kids gonna be excited about playing for like thirty minutes and like that's all you need and you if you have that alright it's worth we'll get rid of that later and so having stuff that your kids can play with is how you get to be on the internet and if you don't wanna be on the internet cool keep your minimal house and you can go and entertain your kids with your bare hands but if you don't wanna do that you're better buy the ball pit and the slide and the nugget and like all these little things so that they have stuff target you you've got the target grocery cart exactly check out because then i can say oh let's play grocery store you go shopping and buy everything and i'll be sitting over here on my laptop and then they do it in another nine minutes passes and i'm just nine minutes closer to freedom to the day that they're old enough to go to school and so you know there this is it's a really it's it's a tool for survival is what i'm trying to say yeah and the last thing on this is the reason i love going to new york is when i go is because i say like san francisco new york where i i lived in san francisco for ten years you're you're outside of san francisco now new york as well it's a land of one's intense meaning everything about that place is either a one out of ten or it's a ten out of ten the beauty the energy the excitement ten out of ten the crime like seeing the homeless people do stuff like like like feeling like it's a third one country sometimes that's a one out of ten austin is a land of six and sevens everything's mostly pretty good mostly all the time it's ever gonna blow you away with inspiration but it's always gonna be like oh this is nice i feel nice whereas you know you walk around the city of new york and like some of the time you're like makes me feel alive you know like this is like i just like eject this shit my veins and then the other time you're there you're like i need space i need quiet like a freaking out you know what i'm saying and so what i'm trying to figure out is what's a good life is it surrounding yourself with one's and tens or is it surrounding yourself is seven all the time and that's something that i that we're debating at the moment i mean this a that's a big life question what do you think the answer is i don't know yet i'm i don't have to make my decision yet but i was wondering if you've ever thought about that i've never thought about it as as well as you just put it what i would say is that anytime i learned this thing a long time ago which is one choice is no choice right because if you have if you only have one choice that means you really actually have no choice yeah just inertia two bad choices just tells you you need a third choice and so i think what you're actually saying is you need a third choice like you know the thing that worked for me was live in california but live in the be so you don't have the crime in and stuff like that you do lose a little bit on the energy and the like kind of ambition around you but you could kinda hack around that a little bit so you get kind of the weather the beauty the the the sort of the this california sunshine and all that good stuff without the the cent the downtown san francisco crime and you know reckless law i think what i'm gonna do and we could wrap up here i think what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna we're gonna rent a place for one year in west port connecticut never in a million years did i ever thought i'd say i'd living in connecticut but i met this woman who i'm gonna talk about smith and she goes i like i met it through hampton and she was like i know what you're going through i i went the same thing found this place called the west connecticut sixty minutes outside of new york city it sounds crazy come and visit me i went out there and i was like this is nice so i might do west port connecticut but i can't believe i might be a connecticut person but i think that's what we might do speaking of what you want me to talk about her yeah tell me the story i met this woman at a hampton dinner her sat next door basically her name is d smith and her her store or her company is called cove in maine so you could check it out it's a cove like you want something so c o v e t at maine like hair m a n e are you on the website yeah there's just like you know i don't wanna go rick rubin party but this party that i'm looking at it right here looks amazing this is just like beautiful women running through the like like just holding hands and running through the sand which is just hilarious dude so check this out so she started out at in real estate just doing normal stuff but her parents own a beauty supply like store like a brick like a small store and so she starts helping them out and so she starts saying like let's create a website and we'll sell hair extensions online so you i i don't know if your wife uses hair extensions my wife does sometimes hair extensions basically it costs sometimes two or three thousand dollars for really fancy ones sometimes cheaper five hundred to thousand dollars and they basically like weave this they're basically like so extra hair into your hair and it makes it look really nice for a woman and she starts selling this line she's like this doesn't really work that well the way the way that i thought it was gonna work so instead what she does is she invest around a hundred to a hundred fifty thousand dollars into starting this business and what she does is she starts holler at different beauty stores if she creates like an invite system where she's like look we don't have that much inventory and we wanna like onboard people effectively so you just apply and then if we can like make this happen we'll start sending you our product and our product is really high quality and then also we can start sending you some customers because we're gonna do really good with the marketing we're gonna send people who want our particular type of hair and hopefully when you go and get hair you'll tell your friends all i got this brand of hair you can go to their website and see who deals their stuff anyway in she only has six employees in her first year of business they did four million dollars in revenue and they're in year four or five and they're doing tens of millions in revenue by year two she was already the tens of millions year four she's doing many tens of millions they have like two or three agents agencies who work for her but only about six full time people and if you go to their website they're killing it and i was like how what are you doing so she's like man we host these like meetups where it'll be like tons of women who own these beauty supply companies so or like you know like literally a brick and mortar like beauty store and we do like these parties where like teach them a little bit about how they run their business we'll have speakers who like have best practices and then also like if they happen to want to apply to sell our product we'll do that and that's like basically how they're getting most of their customers and it's a super fascinating company because a it's just a simple ish website i mean it's nothing like crazy fascinating her the the hair is of high quality which by the way do know how they get hair from this no is it donations it's real hair it's usually no it's from it's from india so like there's i guess in certain parts of india it's like holy or something to shave your head or they go to china where you can pay people and they'll cut their hair and you buy their hair from them and so it's real hair and so it's like a process to get like a high quality hair extension but she built this company on on on on this on this idea of like going after these hair salons and it's super fascinating because a this is an industry that i knew nothing about and b i actually think things like this could be pretty huge because it costs two or three thousand dollars to get this done in some cases so i forgot i actually went down this rabbit a whole a long time ago because i got i did dinner with once you know i when i used to host these mastermind my dinners worked at this company called m did you ever hear about this company yeah they they they raised too much money i think they raised like thirty million dollars from h and serena williams and jimmy iv like out you know every cool person you can imagine and so they raised all this money and this guy taylor came to dinner and he was i think like the coo or something like that they're based in oakland and he was telling us about this and he was like is you know basically one guy explaining to like five other guys who've never like done hair extensions about how crazy this business is and he's like yeah like you have these stylist the stylist are basically like you know these kind of like independent contractors people follow them from like salon salon like wherever they're working to try to book them and then the stylist has to go and procure the actual hair and so they go to like these warehouses or these wholesaler to go buy the actual hair and then they get the hair from india i remember going on a youtube rabbit hole of like how they get the hair from villages in like india or china or where places like this because that's where the bulk of the hair gets imported from and how they get paid you know whatever dollars for for their hair and it's like kind of a controversial thing about like you know is this like is it exploit there's like rumors of like people being forced to do it which is not great and so there's all all all kinds of stuff in the supply chain about ethically sourcing the hair and there's some great videos on youtube about this if you're curious i you know recommend this is like a fun fun rabbit hole to go down i don't know what happened with m because i think they raised a lot of money and i haven't heard about them in a long time and it looks like they raised forty million more to go into walmart i mean it looks like there's seventy six million in total they've raised seventy six million dollars a lot i don't know why and i no no offense to to taylor no no offense to taylor i hope they hope they succeed but something about companies with this pattern of like cool idea usually underrepresented founder going after space that that you know white tech startups to ignore then like raises mega round from celebrity investors and then you kinda know hear about the like maybe they raised too much money like too much money can break companies this happened with like that tristan walker company like walker and yeah whatever walker brands they made like a razor for black men to shave their head i think yeah or their beard or whatever and i i think that was a great idea i was a great like model but when you raised that much money it puts so much growth pressure on the business it can sometimes break it and so i hope that this didn't break it but i've just seen this happen several times now start to start notice a little bit of a pattern yeah it says in a press release that they have they've done it says they did a hundred twenty million in revenue but they phrase it in a way where i think that means that company's span they've done a hundred and twenty million in revenue but yeah it's stupid i think that your cap tables is like one of the very few things in business that is an irreversible decision it's very challenging to make up for that mistake and so this is why this woman da shit like when i met her i was like i start talking to her i'm like are you on social media she's like a little bit but i haven't decided if i actually wanna go all in on it and i was like you're if you google this lady you'll see your names da smith i'm like you you could you know you could be like a huge deal if you wanted to like you what what did the kids say you got the wrist she's got the wrist she's like this like very charismatic very pretty tall like compose like when i see your talk i'm like oh man you're like a a proper ceo like you get the a factor and she's like like i know if i actually wanna be famous or i don't know if i actually wanna go hard that way where i'm like well whenever you want to i i think you'll kill it and so i saw i wanted she start telling me her story i had no idea that this stuff could be this big and she told me some of the numbers behind it and i was like fl acid at at this type of business yeah that's crazy so so her model is this kinda like direct to stylist model there's a few other businesses that are i like this have you heard of style seat yeah i like style seat my wife used it for little while what what exactly is it though there was a period of time where like or this happens a lot in business where there's a period of time where one idea like when an idea works it can work across like a couple of verticals not all verticals but a couple of verticals and if you figure it out it makes sense so there was a time when like mind body online was getting popular it's basically like this idea of sort of like directly booking online booking of yoga classes online booking of pilates classes and then the fact that the there was like this rise of the instructor like the celebrity instructor this happens with peloton it happened with yoga happened with pilates there's like people started there people realize that you you're not coming for the venue you're coming for the specific instructor and the same thing is true and by the way that that mind body company so mind body was software for yoga classes originally i think they went public i think it's like a wildly yeah it's like a billion dollar remedy and with very like old cool software like it wasn't like slick new fresh blah blah blah but people started to realize that like same thing it was true for stylist like you don't go to the hair so some people go to the local you know like me my selection of where i'm getting my haircut is like what is the closest place to me in that moment that i have thirty minutes right like i'm going there yeah yeah what what which great clips is available at the moment i just we've gotta big a bowl to put on there i just got a hear la i went to this fancy la place i was i this is the nearest place i went in and i sat down and then i he started cutting my hair he's saying how what do you want blah blah i was like i don't know can you cut my hair like the standard dude cut i don't even know what it's called and then he's like okay i think i know was talking about he starts and i go he's fake i go i was like i was like oh shoot because he was going so slow he was like cutting every individual hair with his scissors to like make it awesome and i go actually different instructions could you give me the best haircut you can in fifteen minutes and he's like what i was like yeah i only wanna be here for like fifteen minutes could you just do your best inside of fifteen minute time slot and he was like i don't know if i should be offended or like this is exciting and he was just like alright fifteen minutes he's like could you put a timer around i yeah i put a time around and then this guy like cut the shit out of my hair for fifteen minutes and i was like wherever you're at when you're done let's just call it he's like you can come back later he like you can come back later today man i and know i'll finish and i was like it's hair and it'll it'll be it'll be it'll be that was like as it ten days right he's like i won't charge you i was like you can pay me to come back you know i'm done i don't wanna to stick with my here dude i go to these ortho guys in brooklyn here's what my i go to these i go to these jewish guys in brooklyn and i love them because it's all about efficiency and then i'll end up sitting down at the chair anyway anyways just be like tell me about u becca i wanna hear us some stories but like i wanna a place for where there's gonna call me bob and there's gonna be a a handwritten sign that's hopefully miss misspelled that says haircut twenty eight dollars just beard trim eight dollars like that's what i want like you you better have scotch tape in that drawer of yours like otherwise i'm out if you take credit cards i'm out yeah so hey anyways i got it hey anyway anyways style seat made it easy to book a stylist and i think they got valued at one point like at a nearly a billion dollars and melody the the woman who's been running she's been doing this for like a decade now i'm really curious to see how that one that one plays out she also raised a bunch of money in and kind of what's going for it but this this hair salon barber thing is kinda big like i don't know if you've seen sq that's another billion dollar company in the space what's sq sq is the same thing for barber shops so it's basically like barber shop booking software so you know it's a it's an app that lets you book you know book your barber mobile barber were always like you know pick up the phone they're cutting someone's there they pick up the cordless phone they're yeah come on in what's your name and they're like can't even write it down because we're cutting someone's hair at the same time so sq just kinda like streamline that process and i think they might do payments as well so like people providing software to these brick and mortar like small businesses is really it's a really really hard niche but when you'd if you can do it if you can get the product product market fit the scale is really big because there is a lot of these small f like it's a giant fragmented market and there's so many of them that if you can actually figure out a product that works in a sales model that works which is the two hard things these things can be a lot bigger than they sound because it sounds like oh who software for stylist who cares well turns out it's actually like there's a lot of them yeah and i would never wanna work in that industry because i think it's it does seem impossibly hard but if you're into it it it it can work let me give you a blue collar side hustle so we haven't had one of these blue collar side hustle in a while so bring it back but do you like you like took one flight and you were around blue collar people and you got i love my house and i you know i was around somebody and who loses the podcast so shout she owns this amazing restaurant in la she i know if you know this so she listens the pod it's she's like every time you guys shout out your like four female listeners i'm like yeah that's me woo like you know i feel so good and then dude a lot of women are offended by that i don't say that anymore i still say it because i say it with with end der you know lead i lead into the joke the problem is that the joke not that funny so you know it may not be the right thing to lean into but i'm i'm committed so anyways i go to she has this restaurant in la how'd you meet her she had taken my power writing course and she had volunteered to like i do this thing where i'm like okay show your website and we do like a live tear down of it and so we had done one of her website because she sells these like mit like drink things like this kinda like mobile or sorry this little like she has like her restaurant but that she has like this e commerce side of her business too so anyways okay i done a tear out of it didn't pay bunch attention to it after the fact but ben business part of ben keeps in touch with anybody that i meet he's just like somehow has tabs on everything he's like you y she's blowing up in la and i'm like what do you mean he's like she got this restaurant she's blowing up like the restaurant getting really popular her brand is getting really popular she's got a podcast that's getting kinda popular and he's like yes what's her full name let's get we'll give her a proper shout out what's her full name felicia lopez okay so she and she's got a cookbook like she's kinda like doing her thing she's got a lot of lot of stuff going which i think is pretty fun she's got a book called side of the art of mexican style grilling i lopez i'm at her brother so anyway so she invites us she's like hey you're you're in la you're having meetings anyways come to our restaurant and like you know or whatever we we come to her restaurant she serves this amazing meal you know we talk about restaurant owner owner energy she had it she literally has restaurant owner energy like we walked in we're in her place she's like sit down food just starts appearing we're not ordering anything she's literally like making my plate by hand she's like she's like feeding me like i'm a baby like try this was it free did you have to pay i wish i could have paid she's like your money's is no good here and why so the rest restaurant owner energy was slow and i loved it i literally when we walked out our buddy was like wow is that what is like to own a restaurant i i and then our other was like this is how every entrepreneur makes the mistake of owning a restaurant because they experience the one percent amazing feeling when you host people at your restaurant and not the ninety nine percent of actually you know running a hard restaurant so she anyways we're we're we're hanging out she's like i love the pod she's like i love the blue collar side hustle and was like yeah i haven't done that about goes i got one for you i what is it she goes the l lady the l lady what are you what are you talking about so she goes she goes dude she's like i have kids that are in school and if you ever if anybody in class gets lies everybody has to get checked for life and not just every not just all the kids like your whole family basically has to get checked for life and she's like i'm thinking of like the pigeon lady in the park who has pigeons all over the place is this i got i was thinking like it's a woman that just has l all over like hanging it on her shoulders that she feeds up ground go to go to like one of these i like life's treatment l a dot com it's a mobile life testing service so what she's what she said about she goes yeah basically somebody inevitably gets licensed school everybody then has to get tested before you you can't come back until everybody gets tested clean certified clean so then you can either go and do it like or if you want them to come to you because it's time consuming to like go and book an appointment somewhere you could basically there's a light lady that you could just text in la you text her and she's like cool i'll come out there it's three hundred bucks for me to come out i'll test you and your whole family plus i don't know fifty bucks a pop or something like that a hundred dollars for like your certificates and it's basically like she makes you know like whatever five hundred six hundred dollars for doing this like test for the whole family to get them all cleared and she serves like these like eight districts in la and like that's her territory and there's like another lady out on the east side and she serves her territory they don't cross paths otherwise there's a bit of a showdown and so she's like yeah this lady making tens of thousands of dollars a month just booked she's booked out with these licensed inspections and light treatments i was like wow this is awesome this is i mean who would have ever who would have ever thought you know like this is amazing because you know you she comes over she gotta check four or five people in your house and it's a whole it's a whole deal dude a lot of them have like pretty cute branding this one's called the l lifters dot com and then there's like hair helpers dot com the hair angels dot com and they're all just made on like pretty simple wordpress if you go to simpler web they get great they're getting traffic and then they've like just crush it on the google review and the yelp review and some of them have like i'm at life slippers dot com they have locations at florida texas pennsylvania new jersey it's almost like a like a franchise this is super fascinating this is really fascinating cool right like it's you know life busters here we go you know well we'll come get you it's crazy yeah they they this is like a little model that i think works locally if it works locally you could do it in a bunch of locations if you do a bunch of locations you could even franchise it out or or go nationwide if you if you really got aggressive with it so i kinda love this this little little blue collar side also and it's in one of these like hidden an plain sight n niches right it doesn't take a genius to to pull this thing off dude if you go to life a dot com the one you're on i mean i made that up by the way is there actually a i just googled life busters light life usa a dot com they have a couple dozen locations no this is a real a a super fascinating thing yeah this is cool how much is it cost to have a life buster come to your school i bet you it's like a thousand dollars for the day or something none of yeah exactly none of them do like clear pricing on their website which is how you know it's kind of a rip but like you know they got you in a hard spot too right it's like a locksmith right they come over or they're like well this is a nineteen eighty eight gonna be an extra five hundred dollars you're like well i'm really gonna tell you to go home call another locksmith to price compare like impossible right like no one no one has more power on earth than a locksmith it's when they're at your house like it is over at you know you know that's like a huge scam right have you ever read about locksmith so i knew this guy from israel who ran one of these things and he was like if you google locksmith nashville he's like there's like eight of the ten listings on google they're all different branding i own all of them and i basically like i have like ind service so i got like my friends who come in from israel i say you have to work for me for two years and he basically sends him leads and the name of the game is you go to the person's house you tell it's two hundred dollars in the phone you actually charge her four hundred dollars and it's like known for being one the most shady things there is as the locksmith industry have have you not ever heard of i've never never been an honest locksmith guy comes to my house he's like you know first he takes it forever and it's like basically takes so long that you're like by the time this gets there you're already worn out it's like a negotiation without him even being there and then it's too late to call somebody else you just wanna get into your damn car or your house and then they show up and they're like this is gonna be trickier because the the this is a house and yeah of course it's a house it's like yeah it's got studs so we're gonna be i a stud be stuff and i'm like jesse when were you talking about bro he's like oh like this oxygen in the air i'm gonna have to charge it for that it's like and oh it's made out of wood and literally what happened the last locksmith guy came and he tried to charge to six hundred dollars and then we were like no way just out of principle no way you stand here i'm gonna break this door down with my shoulder and get it repaired for double lloyd he like i fine a hundred bucks so he's stood there and he watched us break the door down with our shoulder and then we paid twelve hundred dollars to get the door repaired i gotta tell you it never felt more satisfied thing the twelve hundred dollars because that sheet didn't get my money what did he say what do you smash the door down very alpha you laughing well the dude imagine the intent the imagine the moment of anticipation when i'm about to charge and i've only ever seen the shit in movies i have no idea how much force this is gonna take and if this fails if i get slam into this does shoulder i heard my shoulder and fall down absolutely worst case scenario now we gotta pay this guy and i gotta go to kaiser instead i was like i must get through this wall and like you know like moms can lift cars when their children are in need like my ego was trapped and i had to break this door down and there was no other option and of course i came through in the clutch so you know it it it ended up working out after two or three solid banks the the key was i didn't fully commit to the first one i gave it like a tester just kinda like let me yeah i'm gonna do it over here on the side and like if we get to the edge not a middle middle is the way go right like where's the point of weakness i can say you standing there like looking into your figure to see which where which way the wins blow yeah are like you're just like calculating like got a piece of chalk and you like do little math to figure out like we're the best like point of entry is yeah just doing things to stall i like took my shoes off like i don't know why like i was like let me just hold on know just thinking like okay what am i gonna do to get his door down and you like warm up your heads i don't know why i needed didn't to perform for this guy like i could've have just told him to leave and done it my privacy but i had told him like just that's a rip off and i'm gonna break the store down alright so let me tell you this is actually a good segue to a topic i wanted to talk you about i didn't know how we would work this in but it it worked out perfect got so there's this phrase that i love which was i'm looking for that i'm looking for a triple locksmith it's triple locksmith what's a triple locksmith so back in the day when they had the phone pages people would or the yellow pages people would go to like find a service like locksmith and it's like dude four four minute ads instead of seven minute abs you know you gotta yeah exactly you could differentiate on many things could say we're a locksmith company we're honest we have we have good pricing we are locked nobody knows that they're just looking in the l just they don't know how to find you find out anything more about you they're just gonna go based on which locksmith stands out guess who stands out the most the one at the top and so i call it the trip aaa locksmith idea because people started to gain the system they're were like oh instead of calling themselves smith's locksmith like then they're far down the list they would call themselves right a locksmith and then some other guy was like no no we're aa locksmith so a locksmith they would show up first in the like the list some other guy comes in and he's like no i'm aa aa locksmith aaa locksmith because they're gonna be first on the list because actually that's all that matters first on list gonna get eighty percent of the the dials and so i love this this story because it showed me like you want somebody who like i always said when we were hiring engineers i wanna hire aaa locksmith which is somebody who could do the job on the engineering side but they have just enough of their mind just ten fifteen percent of their mind is gonna think about hey how do we get more customers oh if i just put two a's of name i'll at the top of the list dope i'll do that that that that immigrant it's like that immigrant hospital yeah exactly so i want the engineer that's got just enough of that that that little that moment of micro hustle where they could just figure out oh this little thing is gonna help me you know help me get a little bit further in life so i was thinking about these micro hustle because again i left the house start to observe things start to notice how broken some industries are so i'm out of dinner how long were you gone for five days an eternity okay i go to dinner and sitting with some friends and the this happened five times so we went to dinner every single night while we were out while i was in la delay every single night the same thing happened at dinner we eat at the end waiter comes up and he says can i get you guys a dessert menu dessert everybody want dessert dessert and then you know his voice is going up like a hot air balloon and then every at the table awkward really looks around did you want did you want me did you want dessert i'm good i'm that's a that's a that's a rookie waiter move you you set the you just set it down even if you just set it just sort of thing said i said okay what's the micro and and so i was think about i was like what's the micro hustle move here if i'm a so i'm looking for these moments where you because i meet a lot of people that are like love the pod yeah i wanna do my own thing someday but current currently i just have this job and the like the gap between the current job and running their own successful company feels large in their mind and here's the way to shrink that gap well the real way with you app is just do it but let's say you're you're not just doing it yet yeah teach me about some teach me about some shrinkage let's go yeah you're an next expert maybe you should actually explain this yeah yeah yeah who preaching it to the choir guys so so i'm like how do you start to think like a business owner think like a little bit of an of a hustle when you're in your job find the moments where you could hustle inside inside your job and i'm not talking about pitching your boss idea i'm talking about just going rogue and making some shit happen learning how to be a aaa locksmith with how to use human psychology to advantage so the last dinner i see this guy and this guy is a little more clever one guy he goes he takes instead instead of saying dessert menu anybody want dessert she a dessert menu and instead of just putting down dessert menu and then hoping for the best this guy comes to me at the side of the table he goes he goes he goes i'll he goes i'll leave this with you to order dessert for the table nice shit that was smooth as a month and i was like wow like i guess i am the head of the table both the man of the house i do need to ride for my my my friends here you know i do need to to give them an experience and he just whispered it to me like this is our our little secret you just tell me what you tell me what you want we'll we'll surprise them so i was like that was a smooth move i and i started thinking look could go even further and so i started everywhere i was going i started brainstorming this little micro hustle moment so then even with this dessert thing i said would make it more i what if what if they actually set down a thing because most people when it comes to dessert the it looks like there's two answers yes or no but there's actually a third answer do know the third answer when it comes to dessert no what i'll have some if you want some that's actually where everybody lands it's was like yeah i'll i'll do one if you're doing one right like this is how people feel with things and so i i thought somebody should actually just set down a little thing in front of everybody say alright here's a restaurant at the end of the meal there's three little buttons i can put in front of you button number one no thanks i'm fine button number two hell yeah button number three i'll have one if everyone else wants one and on three we do all reveal we make it fun you do the reveal if anybody says yes and anybody says i'll have it if everyone else has happening say no more would you guys like the brownie or the truffle oh okay truffle yeah let's go and you could get i think you could add on like forty dollars to every ticket if you just did it this way dude i love i love those games like that it's like it's like in and out secret menu yes know what i mean like i love these games at restaurant so that's my favorite i think a lot of life is just played in your head and if you're just sitting somewhere the challenge i give everybody is how do you play a little game in your head today where you say alright let me add a little show ship let me add a little restaurant owner energy to what i'm doing right now let me add a little psychology to what i'm doing right now and if you do that every day you become a different person like i i fully believe this you literally become a different person and you have more fun versus just going through the motions as you were before so this my little rant on finding that little micro hustle being the guy who figured out how to do the dessert menu in a way that makes everybody feel good and actually gets you everyone gets everyone needing deserve because there's a version of that for your job whatever your job the mini r a little mini is you did this at the hustle we talked about when you did the everybody gets a hundred dollars let's go to costco and let's see who gets the best thing right like yeah it was the it was the best yeah that was our team building activity was we had i think we had twelve employees we gave everyone fifty bucks we said you can team up you can do it on your own but at the end we're gonna vote we're gonna have three character three awards which is most useful gift your favorite gift and the most tasty gift and you have to try to win one of those awards yeah and i and i love these stories of people who just take the ordinary and you and sort of like add a little extra to make it extraordinary alright anyways that's my rant who who are you at dinner with or who did you go la with and did you do anything amazing happen a lot so many amazing things happen i wanted to actually write my notes and send them to you so that then we could do an episode just breaking the whole thing down because there was so much so much that were you recognize recognized a lot do you get recognized about at all actually really la has got real actual famous people so maybe people don't know that you're like six one i think because lot of people i think would be surprised out tall you are when i go to la i mean i i get stops a dozen times a day i think i maybe i just stick out more than you do maybe but could be i'm shocked by that or you're just super una approachable which i could see that as well yeah i think that's actually more of it i must have just like you know whatever resting bitch face or something because yeah nobody's is really coming up to me that much it happens to actually here in the bay area but when i was la i don't think it happened one time so that was good you know it's so go roots as i say you're not from la not life but okay non famous fruits yeah where who'd do you go you with ben probably sue anyone else no it should mean ben went and then sue lives down there so he joined us wrap the trip well i wanna hear all it so i guess i have to wait i got some other quick ones i wanna i wanna hit hit you with some some quick hit so this is i'm gonna call this my weird ai tool of the week i don't know if this gonna be recurring segment but it might be because a lot of weird ai tool so click this link there's a company right now in yc c that is called round table round table dot ai and i saw this post on hacker news it wasn't the most popular in the post but i found it and i i was fascinating so this guy goes because that's what you do that's what you do you gotta find you find the exactly i was i was i was deep at the bag and i found something so they posted this lube video that says hey check this out we round table but we use ai to simulate surveys and they go they go you know research user a research and market research is really important but it's expensive takes time to design and analyze and run the run the research so here's what we do we use ai to simulate a survey i'll why and they go yeah basically l like l m's the new tech that's behind like chat gp is great at simulating what something something like a human would say and these guys just took it to the everywhere so they go you write a survey with a bunch of questions you define your audience like i want people who are forty five years old or older right and so you could say for example are you interested in buying an e bike and it would say yes is answer twenty eight percent of the time but if you narrow it down you say let me filter only people who own a tesla now yes is fifty two percent of the time and you know for example if you say where do where did you learn to code okay you could ask that question people will say one thing but if you say how old if you say only forty five years older or older then everybody will say books if you say younger than forty five seventy seventy six percent of people will say online and so you know it's kinda crazy that basically like and you can say what what's the most important factor for you choosing an airline to fly and and like five percent of people would say leg room but if you filter it say people who are six feet taller it jumps to twenty percent of people saying leg room and so i saw this and i was like what the hell like does this defeat the purpose of the survey like your literally just gonna make up the answer and give it to me but then i guess humans are actually a lot more predictable than we think this thing is trained on like the entire internet's dataset and i just thought this was remarkable and i couldn't believe like is this actually gonna be the case that you can actually just ai could just fake answer your surveys and tell you do your user research for you doesn't that sound absolutely bizarre so it's not there yet because one person he goes hey look i had i i ran a survey i said was the moon landing fake option a yes option b moon ninety four percent of people voted move and but that said i actually do think the same results would actually come if you actually asked people that exact same question like most people would be oh it's still lamp you know what i mean like oh i think i know what you're saying you you're saying you meant to put yes there so it but but this is like a really thought provoking idea yeah and honestly i haven't even spent enough time like actually figuring out like is this literally a joke or is this like the next big thing if that's kind of interesting anytime you get something that's like either get satire this was actually started onion or it's genius it's like you drive it around being like fucking i'll be a taxi did ever tell you about the time that i ran the disco the way that's not how uber the darn it just in case you didn't know one man just deciding i'll be but did i tell you that i used to do that no so one for two two new years in a row my buddy joe and i we rented a zip car minivan and we wore if if you google this you'll see photos of me doing this we wore fake a and disco closed i'll try to find it but we had the it was called the disco f taxi and we would drive around if you look up disco f taxi you'll my name you'll see disco taxi and we would drive her on and and like hey guys where are you going you wanna go to this place alright cool how about thirty bucks and they was like alright cool they would get in they'd be like alright you entered in the disco f taxis if spin the wheel you can rent win a juice by brought to you by of the touchy feely wheel which is the thing i do monday to friday yeah it's like alright your desk is my my home alright yeah let's go so you basically made your like cash cab and you would just want charge them i'm like yeah dollars because it's new year's and they're like desperate we would be like how about fifty bucks and they would say alright cool and so we would make like a thousand dollars an night on new year's was it was a disco f taxi so serious i don't remember where i'll even going with this but yeah round table cool into it really good really good i like that where do you wanna go from here we wrap up yeah let's wrap it up alright that's the pod we don't yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to all in it like the days all on a travel never looking back