The Craziest Stuff We Found On The Internet This Week

it's insane i think it's insane and brilliant that's a the nobody knows about this account by the way this account only has seven hundred fifty followers so i kind of maybe i'm blowing up my own spot here i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never what's it's time for the first ever friday quickie this is a little idea me and sam had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week that were either the best article the best tweets the best you know a little video that we saw normally this is stuff we just only share in our group chat and we wanted to try it out on the pop showing it to each other i don't know what he's gonna say he doesn't know what i'm gonna say we each have three so we're they're gonna do a list of six things let's run through it sam you wanna you wanna go first oh jinx i'll i'll do when i have a quick one so this is a genius deal flow hack you ever heard about how a hedge fund traders will like move their servers to be as close as possible to the the pipe where they'll use a certain kind of wires so that the trades get executed faster i used to hear all these things about like how in traditional finance people would go to crazy lance just to get that little edge that little extra edge and i always felt a little sad that us you know the soft boys of silicon valley we don't really do that we're all nice paying it forward just blog in everything that we know there's no like kind of you know real secrecy the real ruthless secrecy about things until i saw this so our buddy su tweeted this out that there is a company that started to help vcs improve their deal flow so he was like basically every vc knows deal flow matters normally the way you do it is your hosting dinners or conferences or you go on podcast podcasts or you make you know pat of vest that you give away shit like that but they're like the problem is you're you're you don't know what deals you're not hearing about so what if there was a way where you could know about the deals you're not hearing about so what they did was some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of like sequoia and and all these like the top funds is this real or an idea i think this is real so when people are leaving the office like hey you want a picture in front of the sequoia thing i'll send it to you they take a picture because it's a great moment for the entrepreneur oh this is when we pitch sequoia and they're like great what's company and they're like awesome and basically sell that list to all the other funds it's like hey you know these guys are out raising they were talking to sequoia and he's like he's like i heard about this and i thought it was amazing genius deal flow hack he's like the vc who told me it was like don't pay for this but i know it exists and others do i think that's brilliant what do you think i think it's brilliant i think it's insane i think it's insane and brilliant there there's another version of this that i follow there's a twitter account called like stealth something and it's anytime somebody who had like working on something new or stealth blah blah blah anytime they changed that to like the name of a project it immediately tweets out this person just announced they're doing this thing and say you could reach out to the hey you yeah that's really cool i i like what you're doing what's the name of that handle alright so that account is called stealth coast spy so if you go to at stealth coast spy it's a real time notification of any anytime like people it also tracks like linkedin like if you leave a company that they consider like a high trajectory like fast growth start up it's like this person's one's is leaving to do something new you could see so like for example the last tweet was julia is now building in stealth mode she's a x data science director from github hub and now and she lives a boston here's linkedin she just announced or she just posted that she's she's is working on something new that's in stealth this is awesome or it'll be like no comes out of stealth he's got a platform for no code sdk tooling for enterprise ll applications here's the link here's is linkedin this is awesome alright that's a knows about this account by way this account only has seven hundred fifty followers so i kind of maybe i'm blown up my own spot here this is a good find there's also that for when people remove their employer off of their twitter handle or their linkedin and they'll be like this person is now available i like this alright let me give you another one so i was reading reddit at the other day and i found this old post it's over a year old do you remember jake ka or cas i don't actually know how to say as last name but jake so we started movement one watches and they were one of the first like d guys to go big and so they started this company where they sold the watches they got popular on instagram i think he sold it for a hundred million dollars then there was another hundred million dollar earn out which i'm not sure if they hit or not but the company was bootstrap so he made north of fifty million i would imagine i found this post i don't know why he did this but he did and i think it's great but he didn't really talk about it on social media but i found this on this suburb called find a path for those who have a hobby passion or a passing win that they wanna make a living out of but don't know how they can get there so that's the those description on the subreddit but he's got this description or this posts on the subreddit and says i sold my company movement a few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems will be solved i made my life really cushing comfortable and i optimized to be as stress free as possible and then he goes on to say that he's new to this subreddit and he's still trying to find out what he's what he wants to do to his with his life and that he set up his life to be easy and now it's been two years since he sold the company and he's thirty one single he never has to work again but he's never been lone and depressed or depressed than ever and he basically talks about what he's trying to do in order to find his passion and i think that what's interesting about those posts there's a people never talk about this type of stuff like publicly where they put their name on it and they truly say how they feel that's fascinating and b he like you see his replies of people saying like asking him different questions and he goes through really detailed replies of what he's was trying to do so he's was like i love video editing and making movies so now i bought a camera and i've been interested and i took a youtube class and i'm trying to learn how to take pictures and film new videos and top them up or whatever and it's super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who's young i think he was twenty nine when he sold so twenty nine worth tens of millions of dollars he's pretty lonely he's suppressed and it's really fascinating to see someone break all this down i thought this was a really really fascinating reddit post that i didn't see shared anywhere i love this i thought it was awesome i saw it because somebody on twitter goes i wonder what the guys who like crushed it in the early wave of e comm are doing now i bet they're just killing it this is somebody tweeted this and then this other guy goes actually i just saw this post on reddit and this a year ago like i saw this post on reddit from the founder movement saying exactly what he's been doing and actually you know he's been kind of wandering and trying to figure it out and then i read this i was like dude that's the magic of the internet someone just tweeting a random question somebody else being like oh here's obscure reddit post that's like filled with you know the answer to your question and also just that this guy you know i also feel bad i didn't bring this up on the pod because i was like it's kinda of personal it's kinda of personal maybe he doesn't want this like on blast i mean he posted it publicly on reddit so i guess fair game but know he's being very vulnerable he's like you know i'm lonely than ever i'm deeply depressed and i'm trying to figure it out but props to him for for doing that and doing it with his name on because he could've have very easily just like done this same thing and just say i sold my company he didn't have to say who he was very so you know respect to him for doing that i really really appreciate that i think it's awesome i think that this is a problem that not a lot of people go through but it's really fun to for people who are dreaming of making money or who wanna sell the company what happens on the other side you know i think someone described this thing as called the second mountain you've climbed the first mountain but you still need another mountain to climb and and he talks about they're like why don't you start another company he was like well in the past money in eagle were the huge motivator for me and i kinda those motivator are gone now whatever i do next i need to find fulfillment and to help others in some way and so i think it's really interesting alright what do you got alright number three i'm gonna do the h bump okay so alex for friend of the pod good dude he bought a company recently school from another guy who has been on the pod talking about school the original founder of it sam ovens so that's like his new thing and that was like the he's he tweeted out he's like this is the biggest bet i've ever made you know i'm investing a bunch of money into this and now he's wearing a school hat on every interview he goes on and video he creates he's you know trying to promote school it's an awesome product school is really good i haven't i never used it you actually used it yeah it's a good product that guy sam is very savvy and it's a very good product yeah and so basically it's a it's like a community building tools people you can make create a paid community and people can join it yeah on there it looks like it's heavy in like the like affiliate marketing like drop shipping type of game when i went i went browse like the top communities that were on the site or whatever anyways i think it's a it's a good good investment so i was curious how much of a bump do you think school got in web traffic after her mo did it because obviously he's doing it with this belief that hey i've just spent two years plus building my audience huge audience of entrepreneurial people and i'm gonna invest in this thing and then i'm gonna try to use my weight to drive traffic so i can you know this is very much the same strategy i've used which is you could buy something at a fair price knowing that you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site so i'm curious how much do you think it went so i'll give you the the double yeah what was the before before was let's say web traffic was in let's say three months ago if i let's say no one two three four five five months ago was at about eight million in in monthly monthly visitors what do you think it is i'm i would guess i woulda guessed ten or twelve okay so it went from eight million to in january it looks like spiked at almost seventeen million according to like similar is not exactly accurate but directional correct so almost double the about about double double the traffic for that month now a lot of it is people just coming and checking it out because of the announcement it's not like necessarily the most sustainable thing but let's now look wow so go mostly through february what is the february numbers looking like but check this out so circle dot circle dot s o i think they're called circle dot c or circle dot s o they're a community platform that's a competitor school they've raised i think tens of millions of dollars school has more than doubled their traffic they had doubled their traffic before they even took the money right that's insane and sam actually told me and he posted it on their about page that he has invested ten million dollars of his own money which i i think was a large percentage of his money that he had into making school reality yeah it's interesting what these are so i just sorted by paid so you can see it's the digital growth community which is like basically internet marketing number two mark's manifestation thing pay forty nine dollars a month and your join thing it's got two hundred and eighty four members digital wealth academy right it's like it's a lot of the like the adonis school like minded men who wanna live the adonis lifestyle like a lot like entertaining type stuff which i find interesting but it's cool because you know i think you've done a bunch of paid communities on facebook and now slack and other places you didn't use this for hampton right no because when we started i didn't know enough about it and i didn't think it it'd be any good but and then i met sam like i started it and we were already on slack but i was like oh the you actually are really smart i should have i i kind of regret not using it and i have nothing to do with this company but thought it was awesome but they have a bunch you like non business stuff so there's like a stuff on like style and clothing and then there's one on meditation so there's stuff on non business stuff just anything aspirational you would want right so what do you whatever you want you want a better body you want a better style you want a better you know finances whatever it is that's how you you get there i think it's a great move also just in general the business model of i take a kinda of crappy but high volume business model which is on say media but i use it to buy assets in the best business model saas which is what he right so he converted his youtube fame which doesn't pay very well into owning a saas asset which is like one of the sas is one of the best business models out there so good move by alex on that one i'm congrats to to all involved on the on the big spike i hung out with sam ovens once my wife and i we were at a restaurant with him or some type of bar or something and we were just talking and sam ovens is he's a wonderful person but he's he's almost a little awkward like he's he's really in awkward in the sense of he's comfortable with silence and they got to the part of the conversation you're like turns out i'm awkward yeah yeah he's he's the actually kinda normal i guess yeah it was b and and it got to the point the conversation where there was some silence and i was just like i was just like i'm gonna sit in this for a minute let's just see what this feels like let's sit in the silence and so we sit and we finish a conversation and there's about five seconds and he goes i delivered my baby you know and he's he's from new zealand i was like what what do what do he mean you delivered your baby with what he goes my hands and he tells a story about like his wife went a labor and like the paramedics couldn't make it in time and he's like i just he delivered it but on on his own and it was a and he just see that out there i was like oh dog i would enjoy a paid community of him just sending me a voice out every morning of that yeah that was like what that was like the silence breaker was i delivered my baby i just thought it was awesome i was like you're the best person i've ever met alright let me show you another one there's this tweet i saw her name is julia chang alright so this she just shared this woman on instagram named amanda wolf so she goes through what she does is she gets people to share their finances and then she like is a personal finance wizard or something like that and so she writes out all the officer i don't know what do they call these people she's some sort of magician is a witch for which i don't know whatever you call these people but it's normally like people who are making like eighty grand a year and then she talked about like you know this looks normal this doesn't work look normal she got this couple that's thirty nine and thirty seven years old a husband and wife one's an attorney one's a cio their net income or their personal income is three point seven million dollars they live in alpine new jersey and their expenses each month are roughly seventy seven thousand dollars and they break through or they break down what their expenses are so the biggest one being mortgage twenty nine thousand dollars utilities twelve hundred dollars but then it gets to like some wild stuff so where's does it say they're oh the twenty nine thousand dollar mortgage wasn't wild that's wild that's wild but but but but a twenty nine thousand dollar mortgage i think that's what it cost to have a like four million dollar house i mean so that i i guess that makes sense but their personal trainers are four grand a month and she breaks down all these expenses and i thought it was really fascinating to see kinda like what these people are spending on and like basically how you can make almost four million dollars a year and you're not really saving a lot of money at all it's pretty ridiculous how much these people spend and so they they are able to invest so they invest like something like a million dollars a year so that's a ton of money but then she kinda like per shows that off in a weird way where she's like look only have twenty three hundred dollars left over each month after they invest a million dollars each year but it's kind of ridiculous to see like these expenses sorry the mortgage for twenty nine thousand dollars is five point two million dollars at a four point two five percent interest rate but pretty crazy right to like see these expenses of eighty grand a month it's so what does she do i see it all written out with nice hand handwriting here does she just like cross it out at the end it'd be like no start over change change this like what is the what's the punchline line of this what does she take what's the takeaway well her takeaway was just basically like i don't think our takeaway is important like it's crazy right yeah it was just like crazy i mean i don't think that the the takeaway her takeaway is actually that interesting to me but i do think that four grand a month of personal trainers is ridiculous but a nanny ten thousand dollars their kids school twenty five hundred dollars kids tutors and coach is three thousand dollars my takeaway is just i if they live in alpine new jersey i bet they work in manhattan and then just that lifestyle out there even if you are making close to four million dollars a year it is really hard to get terminal velocity out to the point where you don't actually have to work anymore so in order to in order to not work and spend a million dollars a year you have to have something like twenty five million dollars liquid i think that would be the number right around there if you wanna withdraw three percent of your money every month a year sorry a year and so in order to like actually save up that amount of money even when you're earning almost four million dollars in the manhattan area really really challenging if you live the life like these types of people and i thought that was wild yeah i think that's the key if you if you wanna spend twenty nine thousand dollars a month on your mortgage if you wanna spend ten grand on your nanny another you know basically eight grand on miscellaneous and personal trainer six thousand a month on shopping right like the shopping is separate for like just on shopping fun and dining out is four grand four grand and six grand so like fourteen grand a month on shopping fund and dining out i don't know if you're not having fun with the shopping and dining out maybe don't have another maybe don't spend another four on fun right like you got it this is just excessive spending for that level of income i think i agree but it's just interesting i think a lot of people who earn that amount of money by the way i think they spend that way i think the real takeaway of this is whoever posted this is just good at social media they're like how do i rage everybody okay let me post this because all this does this is just engagement right you're just everyone in the comments is just like oh man what about like i can't believe this this is not real these people show out of touch i get like so angry about it dude i know so many people who live like this by the way i know a lot of people who live like this who make multi millions and they spend almost all of it i know a lot of people who earn millions of dollars a year and they still live almost paycheck to paycheck it sounds crazy but i know people having dumb friends you know you are the average for five people years time with those five idiots that sum burning four million a year dude it's insane man if if you live in the these east coast it's insane you spend a lot alright you do one and then i have one more alright my last one quick did you just see this liquid death marketing campaign that they did no oh okay genius so super bowl was a couple weeks ago and they were like hey alright how do we we wanna do an ad we wanna hijack this moment of this marketing moment but we don't wanna buy a six million dollar super ad so they there you go they put on ebay they they called it the biggest ad ever and they go we have a national run of half a million liquid death cases and it's a side of this box and you can have this ads base it costs you six million bucks to get in front of a hundred and ten million people on the super bowl but two hundred million people are gonna walk through the doors of these retailers and see cr our our liquid debt thing pretty leap of faith by the way that all of those people who attend a grocery store will look at this ad but whatever and they auction it off coinbase ends up buying this thing for half a million bucks so they get first like pump one of p r in the marketing community because marketers are like oh so smart then pump two was coinbase actually pays them five hundred thousand dollars to buy the ad space so they got five hundred grand off this thing that was just excess inventory for them anyways and then pump three was the news that somebody actually bought it and they got three hits out of this thing very smart marketing by liquid death do the guy who started liquid death he came on our podcast i think two years ago so they were getting going but they were still big but they weren't this big and if i remember correctly his background was he worked at an agency and my takeaway from the podcast was basically when you're selling water the products not that important it's just water and i don't think it tastes particularly different than any other water but he was just like i'm really good at advertising and i'm gonna do all of these funny things in order to get eyeballs and i would not have predicted that that would have worked and it has and he's he's he's he's completely crushed it his name's mike i don't know his last name actually i just remember being he pronounce it but if you can go back and listen that pod it's really good he was really fascinating yeah that was a few years ago and they were a lot smaller than now they're like prepping for an ipo or something like that pretty crazy i don't know how healthy the business but it definitely went way further than i ever thought it would probably wafer further than you ever thought it would too because it's basically the bet was we're just gonna be incredible at marketing like that was the entire bet was yeah it's water and then we're gonna be absolutely incredible world class of marketing and that'll be the thing and they pulled it off props to them alright here's the last one so i found this article it was from house of fresh dot com so if you do if you google house of fresh and then david and goliath you'll see this article but i'm gonna tell you what why i was interested in this so you ever used review sites like decide which product you wanna buy not anymore but i did for a long time me too i did for a long time and i started diving deep on on on this and i was like okay so how does buzzfeed like which is like a i don't even know what their specialty is know which air purifier is best like i don't know if they can actually test all of this stuff and i started noticing that there's all these websites like men's health dot com and a whole bunch of other stuff reviewing products or posting like this is the ten best these items and i'm like i don't think that they actually review these things but maybe i'll trust them well i read this article and at this point i'm not gonna trust any of them so let me give you like a little breakdown so this company that wrote this house at fresh dot com they're a small company and all they do is they review air purifier and that's all they do and they're like a missionary in the mercenary game meaning most of the people who review air purifier they're just like buzzfeed and they're just like look we can rank on google so we're just gonna like read a bunch of amazon reviews and we're gonna like whatever pick the one that looks best and we're gonna put that at the top of our list whereas these other guys house of fresh they actually buy the products and they don't they're not giving it so they're not like owed good coverage to any of the manufacturers and they test it out whatever well they do this big article explaining how review sites work and so the takeaway is basically sixteen companies so it's like meredith which owns a whole bunch of different magazines dot dash which owns a whole bunch of stuff buzzfeed pens media who we talked about in the podcast they own all the stuff and they basically sixteen media companies get three billion clicks per month and they basically dominate google and it's really hard for any small company getting into the review space in order to they can actually rank high because these sixteen companies control the whole thing but this article went and dive deep into how they're doing reviews they basically hire a freelancer just to like go out and do whatever and then they post the article on their websites but then they own like they each own like fifty different websites they'll post it across all the other websites and they don't actually show how they're doing the reviews and the takeaway is that they're really likely what they're doing is they they just go to amazon and they just review what amazon people have actually said and they just aggregate those curate them and put that into their article and it's not a great way in order to like find out actually what's best because you're trusting someone else versus going out and doing the research and i read this article and my takeaway was two things one i don't trust any website now that's doing reviews but number two i only trust a few of them there are a few so i used to trust wire cutter now i'm nervous about trusting them because they're owned by new york times and so it's owned by a much larger companies so i think they have different incentives besides that there's very few companies out there who i trust for reviews i go to reddit it but that's even hard but i think there's actually an opportunity to create some type of trusted review website i don't know how exactly you could do that and get big but i'm pretty certain you could still do that while remaining small but there's a whole bunch of like these niche websites that used to talk about really interesting stuff there was one for vpn there was one for mattress companies and then the mattress company like casper did or the large vpn companies they go and actually buy the review sites and they put their link up top and so at this point i'm skeptical of the entire industry and this may be not trust reviews and i've already written written lots of articles about how amazon reviews most of them or a lot of them are total bullshit i used to have friends that would make products and they'd be okay i'm gonna make this product free on amazon well you buy it so you it says that you're a proper customer and then just give me five stars it's all a circle jerk and i don't trust any of the reviews online at this point and it's it makes me very skeptical hundred percent agree this is crazy it's gotten completely out of hand this is so it's the main way that like or it's not the main it's one of the major ways that new sites actually stay in business is that they basically sell their seo juice to the highest bidder this is for everything like what you're talking about air purifier but also mattresses but also everything it's it's all just seo hack so for example if you wanna find the best mattress and google best mattress you're not gonna find the best mattress you're gonna find who is the best at seo which mattress company is the most aggressive at seo is the only answer you get when you google best mattress and i'm totally with you i wish there was a better solution to this because there's more products than ever and you do wanna find out if they're any good or which one to buy it's just that you can't really trust in the current solutions i actually think that there's probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscription so what i would do is i would say hey we're coming out we're calling out the bs that exists in this space we're gonna do a subscription product you pay for this and you're gonna get access to like the super high quality reviews only like conscious consumers will do it and so you start small but against like the athletic you're gonna get people to actually care enough to pay and then you tell them like look because you pay now you get no bias in the in the results we are not going to take affiliate commissions anywhere i think if you drew the line there there would be a market for that maybe you can even let people sort of share their subscription so that a bunch of people could you know chip in and basically say cool i want access to and it's a hundred bucks for all of us in order to make the economics work i don't agree that's the solution is somebody's gotta say i'm i'm gonna choose a different business model i'm not gonna get paid on my affiliate links and that's the person that would end up getting trusted because their incentive is not to just push you know affiliate products you know how there's that infographic or image where it's where it shows that like four companies or five companies own like eighty percent of the food in the grocery store yes that's what this article has they have one of those infographics where it's basically sixteen media or sixteen media companies hurts dot dash bustle z davis the arena group red ventures and a handful of others and it shows all of the companies and titles that they own and you scroll through this and you're like those are all supposed to be the reputable ones and i'm like i don't trust any of this anymore and so it almost makes me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff and it completely ruins like my my browsing experience because now i see this stuff and i'm like i can never go to those websites in order to get reviews and so kinda opened up my eyes it's kinda of interesting you could see a house of fresh just google house of fresh david versus goliath very fascinating article that has kinda of changed my opinion on review sites and they do a huge breakdown alright is that the pod for our what do we call it quickie friday quickie the quickie alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back