Tiny Desk Awards: 13 Companies Making $1M+ With 0 Employees

i was like have you done any deals so like i would have heard of and he's like you know disneyland i yeah he's like a lot of windows in disneyland we do all the windows in disneyland i was like oh my god they bought a window company got him a disney contract we do all the windows at disney i feel like i could rude where to know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days on on the road alright what's up we are talking about something pretty special this episode this is gonna be different than our normal episodes which are you know free wheel free silent today we got a plan and the plan is we're gonna talk about companies that crush it with only one or two employees so the reason we thought about this was there were some news i don't know a couple weeks ago that a company that i never heard of called war graphs sold for fifty four million dollars and the yeah that's i mean that's obviously impressive but the most impressive part was that war warcraft was one dude so one guy sold his company for fifty four million dollars and i don't know do you know what did or no is it a a gaming thing it's a gaming yeah so he built basically a campaign companion app i think for a league of legends so if you play league of legends this was like a thing that would keep tracking of your stats and stuff like that help you get better at the game so he built this little companion app and it it gotten really popular i think he got like a million players that used it and was generating serious revenue and so he sold it for fifty weren't fifty four million in cash and he was up upfront he was like i got half of the sorry i got half of the fifty four million dollars in cash upfront and i have the other half as like my earn out then i have to leave it like you know if it hits you know our milestones along the way which is just super impressive for a one person company and how is the person i think he started when he was young but now it's been like you know seven or eight years so that's amazing i'm gonna guess something like thirty but the the they got me thinking it was like everybody talks about big businesses for good reason big businesses are awesome there they are but what about mighty businesses what about the the the guys who were punching above their weight so somebody who has just themselves or just one or two people that does millions in revenue profit flies under the radar and how many other war graphs are there out there so we did some research and we found some and so that's what this episode is gonna be about and we've kinda touched on this before we've done some of our most popular episodes if you go on youtube you'll see the episode with peter levels i think has couple hundred thousand listens the episode about i'm at ag wall the guy who builds g suite you know but they like google sheets plugins ins he does millions of dollars in revenue as just kinda one guy who is a blogger turned app builder and so those have been some of our most popular episode episodes so i think this is gonna be a good one too sam anything else before we jump in yeah i wanna give an honorable role mention to this one person have you listened to juvenile grown up remember rapper the rapper juvenile course you're given him a shout like he's listening yeah i like last year npr they do this thing called the tiny desk concert series you know what that is it's like in the office like playing acoustic songs yeah those are cool they said who should we have and this one guy goes you should have juvenile and juvenile replies and it goes what the what that it goes wtf t f what what the f is a tiny desk and hell no and you know what they got him to do it anyway it happened this weekend and so in preparation for this one man band show i've been listening to that juvenile concert at the tiny desk npr series it was awesome it was awesome he you never backed that ass up and more all that it was so good it was so good i had to be inspired hidden man fresh in it and it was awesome it was awesome awesome awesome so honorable so these are the tiny these are the tiny desk awards then let's call it that these are the tiny desk awards which are the the the businesses that can be run off of one tiny debts because it's just one or two people alright we're gonna do this like an award show so we have a long list but that'd be kind of boring so we're we're broke it up into categories and we each have our answer for the category so for example first category it's gonna be biggest one person business but we also have to set some rules here yeah some of these things one person it's a bit vague yeah one person oftentimes could mean like the founder and like a team of contractors or in many cases it's going to be agencies that they work with of course or it started as one person and it was that way for a long time and then they hired a team exactly so so it's more of the spirit of the law than the than the letter of the law here so you know they don't have t shirts for the company because you know there's they don't have like you know a bunch of employees and and you know moral morale they they probably won't have a an office which where a bunch of people go into it's either one or two people who are kind of the core drivers and maybe they use some contractors or vendors or agencies for for other things but that's that's generally the the way we're looking at this yeah let's get into it so what's the first one the biggest is it the the biggest so you go first so i'm gonna do one another gaming one that that i doubt you know of do you know what star valley is no what is that so star valley is this game and if you look at the game the game art looks like it's like eight bit art almost it looks like a very very simplistic game and it was made by one guy this guy eric barron and he basically is like you know i'm he gets out of school he doesn't wanna get a job so he's like well i you know i'm gonna teach myself out of code instead of going and get a good job so he's like why don't i learn how to build a game in order to teach myself how to like i don't wanna just code for coding sake i'll try to do something with it and he always liked these games back it i do of a harvest moon it's like this kinda like farming simulator game he's like very simple kinda like you know it had like a cult following and so he's like i'm gonna make my version of harvest which was like kind of was popular when i was a kid like you know fifteen years ago twenty years ago so he spends basically four years in sol tune just building this game by himself before he releases it for four years of job a job he just he just off his girlfriend his girlfriend had a like a a grad degree s end and but he had a part job as an usher god which is amazing i mean and usher is a terrible i'm gonna unless you're literally trying to be like a cover artist covering the artist usher like you know you never wanna be an usher that's not the this not your crew is not going in the right direction when you're doing that so anyways the he he launches this thing star valley has sold twenty million copies it sells for thirteen dollars a pop and so you know he sold this thing i think over time it has done a hundred and fifty million in sales also revenue and he's the only guy who built it just by himself which is honestly not that uncommon minecraft was largely built the same way there's just guy notch who was the developer behind minecraft and if you've ever seen it he'll get on twitch and he'll just code minecraft like he'll just stream himself for like twelve hours just building the game and like i think minecraft had more people overall but like one guy was really the driving force and the driving energy around it for many many years but star valley is my pick for for biggest hundred fifty million off of one one game dev the guy notch when he sold i think he sold for like multiple billions yeah three billion two billion something like that and he i think he bought like an like he out beyonce for like a eighty million dollar mansion in la and he was tweeting out or sharing how everyone hates him now he was like i'm so lonely this sucks but he's still in this like fancy eighty million dollar mansion you remember that whole like ordeal where he was talking about how he like didn't give equity to people and so some of the people who he hired hated him and he was lonely but he and he was having all these huge parties and he was lost and all that stuff you remember all that no i i missed all of that dude he like went to this whole spiel on on twitter about how like he hates his life but oh wow you know i mean the house is i'm looking at this house this house insane with the eighty million seventy million yeah it was like a it was a fad i remember like he who i love to just see beyonce getting the news it's like oh who who did it who out bid me was it was a spielberg who was it oh no it must have been let me crave it who who was who who out bid beyond this like not notch yeah got got them alright mine is stream so stream i have to remember when they launched but i think they launched in two thousand nineteen right before the pandemic hit and it was basically a it was a way to stream events online and stream interviews and things like that online these two guys scaled it to thirty million dollars in revenue in one year or eighteen months or so and this mostly happened because the pandemic ended up selling it to hop in for two hundred fifty million dollars it was a mix of cash and stock and hop in ended up laying up off a bunch of people like last year but i've heard rumors that it's killing it have you heard these rumors hop yeah no no i have not heard the opposite of those rumors but i don't know what have you heard well just like when the layoffs happened and it was like basically post covid events came back online like in person so that's naturally gonna hurt the business then they had massive layoffs and i heard that the founders have taken a ton of secondary or something like that so i heard like a hundred million plus in secondary yeah but maybe the business doing well i no idea i just heard kind of like generally though when you hear those three things it's like massive layoffs you know market you know the the the the crazy event that was driving your growth has stopped and the founders took and people start talking about how much secondary the founders took it's usually because the business is going on the wrong direction you usually people don't bitch about secondary is when the thing is exploding i don't know i i heard the other way i i also thought that and i heard the other way around we talked about stream like right when they were getting going and then we talked about like again when they were acquired did you say you knew these guys i think i met because beck when i was doing yesterday me i met like kind of everyone in this space i i i don't know i gotta look up who these guys are but i do know that they got to fourteen million in arr when it was just the two of them and then it got to thirty million when they had by that time they had hired up a team so this is kind of like a hybrid they got they got really far with just a couple of people and then they hired up you know from from as as they scaled it before they sold and i remember going to their web it was just them and i there was like the founder and he would he was on the he was on the home homepage and he was giving like a tutorial video on how to use the product and was just him like with this camera on his lap practically and he looked exhausted he looked so worn out i remember this during the pandemic when we were thinking about using them for something and he looked like super h but it was very impressive at these two guys have built this to sell for two and fifty million dollars and although it was cash and stock so i don't know if the stock is worth anything i heard it might be so that might be one of the biggest ones that i've heard of at least recent big ones another big one that it it happened a long time ago so i have no connection it was plenty of fish how much does plenty of fish get acquired for like five hundred fifty million dollars at hundreds yeah and that was started by one guy named marcus who now i see online and he seems like he like lives the most lavish life and just does crazy shit and so plenty of fish was basically one of the early dating websites it was a marketplace it was all like okay but i think it was predominantly canadian and that had to be probably the biggest exit that i've ever heard of her a really small small team yeah plenty of fish was unbelievable that guy isn't he like a nut the plenty of fish founder i feel like that's a whole another story we should do one day i think it's a whole another i think i don't know i haven't researched it enough to actually like verify the claims but i've heard like a little like gru like a little little stories that something weird is going on but i don't know the truth also i love the fact that you've met the street mirror guys and they looked tagged and you're like like in silicon valley when you see somebody like that you put your arm around i'm and you're like hey you're alright is it is it because of too much traction or not enough i just need to know how i'm gonna reach you much yeah i oh it's too much traction okay okay come here come here you sleep on my couch let me feed you just take this check put me on your cap table you know like there's there's really you know one out of ten of the h people they're gonna beat down by too much demand and nine out of ten if you met like that who have you met like that who else have you met where you remember talking to a guy who guy after met guy after and he was doing something pretty i met him after the fact when he told me the story and i i was it it was stuck with me i always remember here after hearing the story i was like i should look for that so what happened was twitter started taking off in popularity right when it kinda got going in silicon we can valley like it became like a thing and av was him and his team or they're like kinda like data science side people and so they were like alright what can we build that makes twitter work better because twitter was such a simplistic product and at the time it was like almost like a protocol like anyone could kinda build apps on top of it or use the data for something so he's trying to build something and he doesn't know what he's doing he's like he's sitting on a train and he starts coding this thing he's like i done this research on sentiment analysis and he's like i was like okay see story sounds a little bit boring who cares about sentiment analysis he's like yeah you could he's like you could figure out like how people are feeling about a certain topic because they're talking about it in a certain way so he's said home his story was boring right when he got my you know mike explored she started drift yeah i did that is there anyone else this car i could talk to i was in a car with them in an underneath ethiopia you four hours straight i there's no word to run so i'm i'm hearing i'm like alright let me hear out the story you sent him an natalie go tell me more about your phd and sentiment analysis what did this do and he's like so i was on a train and i'm building this thing i'm trying to analyze what people are saying on twitter to see if i could get the sentiment the current mood or whatever he's like but then i realized actually what i'll do is instead of figure out their mood i'll just figure out what are they talking about a lot of like a lot more than usual that's kind of interesting and he basically created trending for twitter off of twitter cool so he he's like he's like oh i could figure out that the word olympics normally is only said this much but it's being said ten standard standard deviations more so that means olympics is trending the the it's it's above its par and he's like this is super cool like i basically have the ten things that people are talking about on twitter i can kind of get that i get that signal in a way that you couldn't really get at the time on twitter and so he creates this and they create a separate website off of twitter called twitter training i forgot what what it was called loan website and they start getting millions of hits on this thing and they're just trying to and as and he's trying to keep it keep it up because he's basically drinking from the twitter fire hose and he's got all this traffic and so he's trying to keep both of them working eventually twitter buys them so they become like employees ten through twenty or something of twitter oh sick and at the time twitter had the fail well it was just like constantly twitter than the service was going down it was had so much usage and it was like in this web two point o like it wasn't like scalable yet they didn't figured out how to scale it and he's he told me he's like he's like for six months he's like i just woke up every day with like an imprint of my keyboard on my forehead like i had just passed out i was working trying to keep this damn side up pass out wake up oh where was i and i just kept going he's like that was six months straight to my life he's like i've never experienced anything like it and at the time i remember thinking oh there's levels to this thing like that's what it feels like when you really have one of the winners like and and if you talk to people early at facebook and they talk about like what the what what it was like working early at facebook facebook it's like when people talk about living in new york they're like just the energy was the energy explain it and it's like that's how that's what you get when you're inside one of these generational companies is at the early stage when they're they're scaling too fast dude that's exciting i love that one i here in those old stories like that i always read those old books like the the hatching twitter and all that shit i love that shit yeah be alright next let's go to let's wait let's go to a highest degree of difficulty well we'll skip a category and come back to it okay so this is the hardest one the hardest example the one that we're like how the hell did you even do that and there's no way anyone else would have done this you go first alright i have one it's called tiny wow so i think the url is just tiny wow dot com so do you have that pulled up tiny wow yeah got it alright so i met this guy he's a member of hampton that's why i met him name's it's evan go he had a another website called tech junkie maybe you heard of tech junkie but they like just talked about like tech topics whatever it's pretty normal website but he ended up selling it for eight figures and on the side he started this thing called tiny wow which is a bunch of tools that include like how to convert a pdf but then image editing tools that use ai and it's one of those websites where you google like convert this file to pdf it is able to he's able to come up first right now it has six point six million visits a month and the reason it's inch yeah it's insane the reason it's interesting is right now it only does twenty thousand a month in revenue because he says i haven't i just haven't turned on any of the monetization it just has like little ads he goes i'm gonna turn it on eventually but right now i'm just enjoying the summer and time at my family so i haven't really like we're dug deep and like like built it and so basically this guy evan he was you talking about the weather put on adsense what are you doing evan this is insane dude that's a cool part about these one person businesses and this is another guy who wanted to tell the story about has said the same thing he goes oh i felt like taking the summer off so i just let let it ride for a little while so this guy evan he basically had a history as a a a developer he says he doesn't do any now but he has a team of three people who are helping him or one contractor who helps him with overseas who's helped him actually like build and implement he basically just draws it and designs it but the reason why this thing has taken off is if you google or do you remember like give ever see those videos on tiktok that say like here's five websites that should be illegal but ours so good that they should be illegal yeah stick that so that is basically how the the website got popular is it's gotten popular from those videos and so the reason why this is really hard to create because a getting traffic to like a content site or any type of website like this it's very challenging oftentimes building the product is not the hard part it's getting users and getting six point six million visits a month mostly from social quite challenging we'll see if he's able to turn this but i asked him i was like how big the can get he's like well like i think of like canvas so i'm like can we i think it could make tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue because we're gonna ultimately we have this traffic we can have like a feature that says hey you can edit this picture using our platform and we'll charge a small fee i think this actually could be a big business but right now it's really tiny he told me it costs ten thousand dollars a month to run and it's making twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue well yeah do you know how much remove dot bg makes who how do you ever used just remove dot bg no what is that oh that's i mean does that that was the old way if it's like if you need to remove a background from an image like you need to just cut out the object and remove the background removed dot bg was this website that was like just to go the traffic yeah it was just a go to and oh my god fifty to sixty million and monthly monthly visits so it's just like insane and removed up bg it just had a strangle hold for me at least on on doing this it was like super quick just drag your image in it just removes the background boom there you go and then they charge for like you know you want it like ten eighty p or whatever they started charging for like little things like remove this watermark i'm sure this thing crush you know i i i don't know i don't know how how much revenue they do now but i'm sure this is one of these like mighty businesses where it's a very small team like just google says canvas acquired them it says that they had at least a hundred million people coming to their website last year that's a that's crazy so it's acquired by canvas so you can probably i don't know if canvas has gone public yet maybe they have i think actually they just did a last month you might be able to dig through their numbers and see if they got acquired and for how much but that's crazy that's so much traffic this site tiny wow definitely could be something like that they started this in twenty nineteen it's just company called cal and then they so they started in twenty nineteen they sold it this was twenty twenty one so two years later for roughly a hundred million dollars wow do they have funding i think the parent company it looks like it's a side project of the parent company the reason why i said these are the hardest to make is getting that scale of traffic that fast is so challenging you know like there's a lot of like software products that we're gonna name as one person companies and that's challenging in the sense of like you have to put it in a ton of hours and you actually have to like invent stuff and that's very challenging but getting traffic to me is more of an intellectual challenge it's like i have no idea like where to start like with whereas i what's starting with software like i'm gonna make this one feature that i'll this other feature i'll talk to my users it's a little bit involves a little bit of luck a little bit of skill but getting a lot of traffic to your website early on i think there's less people that know how to do that and so that's why i think that this is one of the harder things to start so here's my my answer for highest degree of difficulty photo p so photo p is very very similar basically it's one guy who recreated the entirety of photoshop in a web browser for free so my god photoshop is one of the most complicated products in the world he recreated it by himself give it a away for free and made it work in the browser which photoshop doesn't photoshop is a you know you have to download the app in order to make it work it's just remarkable the guy barely monetize it doesn't wanna sell it and if you go just search his like just search photo reddit or like you know founder reddit he goes and he talks about like you know why he built it how he built it and what you know how he thinks about it or whatever it's pretty insane and i think how much traffic does it get traffic wise like thirteen million according to similar web per month and he does at the time this was couple years ago he said that he was doing a hundred thousand a month off this thing and it was like literally from the most basic absolute most basic of like ads like this is one guy ivan who made and he just like puts like the very simple banner ad on the site and makes like a hundred a hundred thousand dollars a month he did a posted hacker news on april eleventh two thousand twenty one he goes hey guys i'm ivan i'm the creator of photo i made almost a million dollars in the last twelve months ninety percent from ads the rest is from premium which is users you pay to hide ads so it's not even much of a premium when you start your own project do you ever know if they'll make two fifty thousand dollars but if you get hired you can be quite sure that you will never make more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars and so that's why i started it and so this company photo i don't know how big it is but depending on how many users it has i could see this getting sold for nine figures over a hundred million dollars so he did an ama on reddit and they said hey have you hired your first employee yet this was a year ago and he says oh after i did my first ama on reddit lots of great people got in touch i did end up hiring one guy from prague who went to my university but don't take some time for him to get familiar with the code he hasn't done it he like i hasn't done anything thing yet it's pretty crazy how this guy operates so why do think this is the most challenging he's like technically recreating photoshop feature for feature is absolutely insane like i think that's just an insane endeavor and then making it work in the browser like making it performant and a browser is not easy either so like for one person to do this i think it's crazy that's insane yeah i the the cool thing about these is like what i think the the downside of these one person companies is that everything relies on you and that you don't have like anyone else to ask for help and you can't hire one you can't have anyone better than you doing something because you're the only person and so in order to do this i think a lot of these people they have a they have a handful of traits that we'll talk about in the end but i don't understand how he could grind that hard for that long with all this pressure on him by the way this guy says he put seven thousand hours into it before he made any money from it that's insane so i think that that that just takes so much will do you remember viral nova it was a guy named scott del so viral nova was basically an upward the the clone it was a it says like they're like here's a list of ten reasons why you don't wanna go swimming after eating you're not gonna believe number seven and so this guy would talk about like how it was just him writing ten articles a day and he was like i'm the pressure of all this traffic and all the success it's killing me i feel so worn out all the time and i don't understand how some people can sustain that for a really long time like this photo guy yeah this is like you know when you go to someone's house and they're like oh do you wanna see my model train set i'm building you like what yeah sure why not i'm here and they take you down to the basement and then it's just like they've recreated like the city of vienna through their like if they're just tinkering on this like one thing they're like how many hour what how long have you been doing this and they're like just come here every night i love it and this is what i do it makes me feel so good and you're like holy shit this is like the most intense hobby that's how that's how i do not that you guys i'm not that type of person are you you're definitely not i think right come on i not yeah i envy envision those people that that's an amazing will willpower alright let's do another one let's do on the other end easiest to recreate so which of these one person one or two person businesses do you think are easiest to recreate that is the opposite of the highest degree of difficulty go ahead so my would be anything that sells information or service so i put just any course creator but you and i know a bunch of these people of which you and i are both of those people you know we make hundreds of thousands or million dollars a year from like a a course or two and i think they're fairly easy to recreate another one is there's this company called design joy do you what do you know what they do i believe that design subscription basic it's him he's a but the way that he positions it it seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth but basically it's just this designer that you pay thousands of dollars a month for and you asked me to make small changes to different design related stuff and he claims that it's just him but i i believe he claims that yeah but he says just like he does a hundred thousand dollars a month so he just one point two million a year or so rough rough around that range and it's basically you buy a subscription plan so you pay and you buy like the five it's like four or five thousand a month and then you you basically get one request at a time and that's it you get to to say i'd like this design thing done and then he turns around in some i don't know what his sla is of how long he takes to to do this but it's like it's cheaper than hiring a full time designer probably unless like in in the us but yeah that's the i think that's the easiest to recreate but also the worst to run which we'll talk about later but that's probably the easiest one is like a bunch do you know any other course people that do like like i know sam ovens does ten million in revenue five million profit and for a while it was just him i met these guys i met a guy recently who does like a product management course and i was like my god who's taking a product manager course you he no no it's how to ace your job interview as a product manager like how to get a job as a pm at one of these tech companies and i think he was doing what he doing by like two million a year or something like that i think they were doing like two what two two point five yeah had two point five million a year roughly in in revenue i think it was like eighty percent ish margins and what they would do is they would basically say they would give away free content that was like how to you know how to get a job as a pm how to interview as a pm how to prep for this interview what it was like talking to a facebook pm blah blah they give away free content to get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website and then they're like hey do you wanna like get a job as a pm which will pay you let's call it a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year if you want that job buy this course and it joined this cohort course or whatever and they basically sell this course for a couple thousand dollars that's gonna help you get this job that's gonna pay you offer a hundred thousand dollars and that just like a very simple value proposition for somebody who wants to do that with their career and it was just him it was saying three it was it was three of the three three pms that kinda like got together and made this thing another example of an easy you wanna start i think i told you about this is called cyber leads so you go to get cyber leads dot com so it's c y b e r leads so get cyber leads dot com it's this guy named alex west and basically it's a newsletter where i i think it costs four to a thousand dollars a month so four hundred to a thousand dollars a month depending on what you get what you do but basically he goes and he hand picks different companies that have recently raised money and based off a bunch of he thinks are about to hire an agency and then he gets all these agency owners to sign up to his service and he emails this list out once a month along with like the contact information the hiring decision or the hiring like whoever's managing ad spend whatever and you could just contact him on got your face quotas as a testimonial do you use this no i don't use this but i talked i talked about it on the pod i talked about it on the pod like two years ago i've never used it i've never you've never used it i'm not but he sure used you he is used a me i don't know is there anything can i can you say anything about these people who do this i talked about it on the pod i said it's so f freaking simple the value is so clear i guess i said that on the podcast and he uses that as a quote is there anything i could do to decide you could tell i take it down you can always say that oh sorry let me wrap up my thing selling information so anything that you sell information that's the easiest thing to start yeah i think so i went the same route but i'm gonna give more detail because i think when you tell somebody selling information is the easiest way they like cool what so what do i do so bits i gave three examples yeah but i think you have to break it down a little further so you know guy lenny lenny russian last name i don't know like lenny re regalia or regards to something something along those lines i like lenny so lenny i think used to work at airbnb or something he was like a growth slash like product guy and so he's got lenny newsletter he's got lenny communities that lenny job board and basically he was like i'm gonna become he's like i'm gonna put out tons of free thought leader content on a specific super niche topic that only certain people are gonna care about but they're gonna care a lot and that's that's kind of the key with this stuff is how do you put up free content to establish yourself as an authority in a niche so that you you can then monetize that through either consulting services job board paid community or or paid content paid newsletter right that's that's the formula and you could look at the design joy guy he does exactly this he puts out free content examples of design work and then says you can hire me for design work lenny does the same thing he puts up free content he's got really good stuff like you know how did these ten huge marketplaces how do they get their first thousand users and he goes deep and he's like i'm gonna interview them i'm gonna talk them i'm gonna get the real answer on the specific zero to one question that's gonna be highly relevant to other people going through that same challenge i think it has a podcast too he's got a podcast like at one point this job board was doing a couple hundred thousand i'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred thousand in sponsorships i be talking about monthly or annually annually at least more these are minimal businesses way more i i know at the beginning his job board fresh i don't know what they're doing now but like i would bet his entire roll up of job board content sponsorship so podcast plus newsletter and then he's got a paid thing right ben he's he like a paid paid community what's what do think glad total thing is two million three million yeah for sure two about two to three million a year and he did that i would say in a period of like two and a half three years it seems like like i think he i think he a fun too he kinda put his foot down on the content side he kinda appeared on the scene i would say like two two ish years ago obviously you had to know your stuff right so he's like you know spent time learning you know a decade being off inside these companies in order to do so i don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic but there are people who did it without that too so another example is harry dry one of my favorite content creators in the whole world a guy i'd tried to recruit like a hundred times to do something with me because i feel like me do something great he he keeps he keeps bullshit and not saying yes but he's gonna say yes eventually so he's got marketing examples he does a great job with this blog called marketing examples now i don't know how much marketing examples makes i would guess quarter million to half a million as just him making content think he's young he's very on he didn't do the put in ten to fifteen years become an industry like like do the job cut your teeth and then go make content he's like no i'm pretty sure i could just look at what's out there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work i'll study this shit and that's how i feel like you know a lot of people also can do it you could be the curious novice approaching these topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely and so i think harry dry would also be one of the easiest to recreate not because he's not talented he's super talented but i think that's kinda something anyone can do anybody could just say y i'm gonna study what makes tiktok go viral and i'm gonna put out content about viral tiktok i'm gonna become the expert of break down content tiktok to viral and then peep brands are gonna know me as the guy that they should talk to you about tiktok consulting right like or like advertising on tiktok and like you could just build your niche audience and your niche authority in that space a lot of people trying to do this ai right now and the thing about lenny and harry was people were doing so first of all like a newsletters community podcast that's existed since forever so it's not a unique business model and also people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time but what's interesting is that they were both early ish where there was only maybe i don't know how many but they felt like they were early ish talking about it to this customer to this community on this platform so both of those guys i think got popular on twitter right before the pandemic started i think i remember seeing harry in two thousand eighteen two thousand nineteen which wasn't even really using twitter as a power user backed then but they all seem a little bit early so i think timing matters for a lot of the things so speaking of which that facebook threads thing no idea if that's gonna be a thing or not but that's an example of like hey there's this new thing right now if you want nothing lose how better be there yeah just go get go be around there see what's going on yeah that's one of i was like people did with club house i don't know if that worked out or not but there's way i i say it is like most entrepreneurs you were actually surfing waves you don't get to create the wave but you do have to paddle out you gotta be on your board out there in the water you gotta paddle out and you know which is a takes effort and then you gotta wait and sometimes it's a dud sometimes it's just a small wave you're gonna have to paddle back out again when you catch a good one you know that's what you get and we'll see how good you are surfing you might wipe out the first couple times you try it but like that's your job as an entrepreneur is to paddle out be out there and start trying to surf these waves and and get a sense for where are the big waves and and how do i not wipe out when i do when i do find one so this episode you're giving a really in up surf analogy last episode you gave a slow a baseball what did you say a fat a slow love small swing fat pitches it was fat just i you ever played baseball addiction have you ever played baseball or surfing in your life bro i was starting right field or for my high school team which anybody who knows baseball knows that means are the biggest scrub on the team because that's who that's what they put in the right field is the guy who's you know you the ball never comes to right field and the did you play baseball in china like they were just learning i was might have been in china about a minute you went to high school and you went to high school in china yeah mean or or australia like it would hey it was like we play the ball as it lies there i got a golf analogy for you too i was in china well that's where i'm be alright so let's go to the next one most fun one person business so the one that seems like the most fun to to work on i'll go first joe rogan so i'm pretty sure joe rogan media enterprise is bigger than all the late night talk shows combined so forget that tonight show letterman and andy of these yeah whoever the new get conan whoever these guys are did the letter the retired to ten years man jimmy be fallon i don't know bro who's who's watching this stuff his audience is bigger he makes hundreds of millions and he's made hundreds of millions doing it and i'm pretty sure it's just him and jim jamie i've heard from a a few of my friends who have been on it how it works so basically they told me that it's jamie who produces it and it's joe and then they have one other guy named matt i think and i figured forget his name exact i think it was matt and basically matt sends joe a list of like thirty people they're like hey i can get these thirty people these thirty let me know who you want and sometimes he just ignores it everyone in i'll say that person and that person and that's all he says and i've heard that it's just those three people that's amazing so i think most people just think oh joe rogan he's just a podcast yeah he is a podcast but that thing is a juggernaut and is immediate juggernaut so the you know spotify obviously paid him you know hundreds of millions to to be there for a couple years but even before that you know just off the sponsorships off of off of the alpha brain you know a product that they build off of it joe rogan i think has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet his is my sense he took all of his hobbies he's like oh i like u he gets to be the u comment with doing exactly what he would want he gets to go sit ring side comment for these fights and analyze the fights but he only does it the for the ones in vegas that are an hour flight away from him he doesn't do any of the the the ones that require a bunch of travel and so all the bit he does all the best ones he does none of the worst ones you know he was like i wanna do stand up comedy so he does stan comedy sells out you know theaters all around the country and you know gets to make people laugh for a living does his podcast where he he's like i'm gonna have conversations with the people i want and people are like oh joe three hours is too long he's like that's the type of conversation i wanna have so i'm gonna do it my way and it worked and so like i just think he just dictated how he wants to live life on his terms i think it is the most fun i think his a business is absolutely a mighty business and that it's just let's say one two to three people that is building a a thing that does you know over a hundred million dollars in in revenue which is like if you just valued something like that traditionally which is not it's not apples to apples but like if you have a thing that can do a hundred million a year in revenue for multiple years for multiple years you typically that's a billion dollar property you know obviously it's weird you can't really sell the you know joe rogan experience because you need him it's tightly branded with him but let's say at least he's built something worth a hundred million dollars i think we can review on that because generate a hundred million of profit for him and so he's built you know with a very small team a multi hundred million dollar business at the minimum and he has this new think i was a comedy mothers ship it's like a mile from my house in austin and there's always a line out the door to right place you'll just the club why not why not if you drive by it at six o'clock there's every single night there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome right who you got most fun alright it sounds like i'm trying to like promote hampton i'm not it's just when i had a prepared this episode i just went through our database and like picked out people and we had just written a blog post about this guy his name's is joseph m and he started this company called jim streak and this guy's super fascinating because he has all the attributes of like what a lot of these like tinker have but basically he's from zimbabwe moved to england when he was like twelve or thirteen that was the first time that he experienced the internet he taught himself how to code he taught himself design and then he launched this thing called jim streak at first it was just an app for tracking your workouts and then see what he did was he went and got his buddy to wear one of these like suits and that way he could do three d visualizations of all the exercises and what they need to look like so he has hundreds of them and so his app it's free to use and then they have some like premium thing and basically you track your workouts he uses ai to suggest which weights you should do for the next workout and if you don't know what the exercise does and they'll they'll suggest workouts and exercise to do he has hundreds of these three d models of like what a proper bi pearl or what this other type of exercise looks like in year one he did three hundred thousand dollars that was in the year two thousand twenty one in year two he did two point five million and his goal he says by in the next two years i wanna get the fifteen to twenty million dollars year revenue and he's the only employee i don't believe he has any contractors i think he he told me that he got most of his users from facebook and tiktok ads and he hired a consultant in an agency to help him learn how to do that and right now he said i'm taking the summer off so our growth this year might still only be two point five or three million year in revenue but i because i don't feel like buying ads or saying on top of that so i'm taking the summer off because we just had a kid but super fascinating to see a guy who basically came from zimbabwe didn't use the internet until he was twelve thirteen and taught himself how to do all this like one of those really cool tinker and on that blog post you could see pictures of him like arriving from africa and like learning how to work the computer it's super fascinating and you'll see pictures of him with his like iphone and a laptop at the gym filming people doing like the curl so we can use his ai or whatever to like get the three d imaging really fascinating in company i think jim s is awesome if this could get to fifteen or twenty million year in revenue like he thinks that would be a monster business for one person yeah that's an amazing story wow love that good for him that's that's really really cool next category business we most want to own so this is i think this is specifically a good question because for us a business we wanna own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us wanna really run an extra business right now so it's like which business would you wanna own because it is very much you know autopilot so it's not design joy it's not people are paying you and you're providing a subscription it's not one of those content or course businesses where you constantly have to create new content in order to stay relevant and get more customers i think we both have the same one well let's just do the same one that we we both are really interested you you explain it no you go first alright milled dot com so most people we don't know milled dot com it's m i l l e d dot com and it's a really really simple website it's just a compilation of email marketing that different companies do so if you wanna see like what are my competitors sending for their fourth of july sale you just go to build dot com you search the brand and you'll see okay here's what ridge wallet sent for their fourth of july email it's top one on the on the separate sorry right now so it says you know you just click and it shows you the exact email that they sent so you could see the design you could see the offer you could see the copy and you could use that to get inspiration for what you should be doing for your email marketing and this guy built the site i don't know how long ago now but he's post on hacker news a little bit about it and it's one person it's a side project and he does a million dollars a year on it he said i was doing email marketing for a brand i noticed two things one it's took us several days to create each email blast and two i had to subscribe to like dozens of other competitor emails just to research for for them so my hypothesis well i could create a site that would just sign up for all the brands you know email newsletters and then make it easier for anybody who's trying to do email marketing right that's that's the core core pitch for it and he's just been running it as a side project it doesn't take much maintenance doesn't you know he can just do nothing on it for a little while and it makes money through ads yeah so so they use ads on the left side here you could see like i have it open and he's basically got like i mean like a link to the brand itself and then he's got like a security like ad here popped up on below it and he's got like a care ad yeah it's just just display ads so but here's another way how he makes money so basically you or you're a marketer you go to mail and you wanna see like it looks like some shoe brand they run they ran this campaign and you wanna check out the email and you read it and get inspired whatever you click that ad and it takes you to the shoe company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes right this is a horrible way to monetize this is a a really a under amazing product under mono under monetized website for sure but good for him for forget the traffic in the first place but that's a horrible way to monetize yeah yeah i agree but i think the guy doesn't care he's just like this is easy cool low maintenance which is why i put it in my one i'd wanna own because it's low maintenance and i think it still has a lot of upside left i'll do one from one i wanna own so i said anything that is like marketplace y sort like a marketplace says sometimes if you do it right those don't they don't run themselves entirely but the the community kinda handles business built with so bill went was started in two thousand and fifteen or sixteen probably built with is like the most niche shit ever but there's it's a really big niche so you go to built with in order to see which plugins ins a website is using if they are using wordpress and the reason why that's important is you go to website that you like and you go oh i love this feature they have let's go use wordpress shopify also that's new it started with just wordpress i think and so you're like just tell me like the plugins ins and tell me the the everything that they're using shopify and built with shopify and wordpress it has something like tens of millions of people going there a month and does at the time when i first found them i think in two thousand twenty i think they're doing fourteen fifteen million in revenue it with just one person so i think that would be a really cool company to own because i think it's super valuable once you get all that traffic and those people come back to you all the i it's a really valuable site do you know about bill with yeah just what you told what you said there i've been using it for a long time basically if you see a website you wanna know what they use for whatever they use just go to build with it's pretty great it's kinda like a data it's almost like a data index right it's like more like a database than it is a a marketplace in a way but i agree it's kind of amazing alright let's keep going we got a couple categories left we have a rookie of the year so a new one a new new one that we found i think you might have already covered yours in here but i boring i didn't wanna say the same thing twice but this guy joe m this joseph mon like i love his story i think that this guy's gonna be a big deal and i and i take a lot of pride and try to find people before they're like really popular i i think he's read the blog post that i that i have linked up there from the hampton site it's really good i think this guy's gonna be a winner so that's my rookie of the year what's only finder only finder it is mine so this is one that i don't know how old it is maybe a couple years old now so only finder is a search engine for only fans so if you wanna find a type of model on only fans so you you know you're into you know blonde agents or like you know whatever good looking mid whatever whatever you're into you can search on only finder and it'll give you a list of top ranked profiles for that thing so as you know i've been down the only fans ride hole where i'm like i think there's a lot of potential in the only fans world of like businesses and this was one of them that i found and only finder run by one guy he's awesome he listens to the pod and he crush it so he crush the seo game for for only fans if you search for a bunch of different popular searches and in fact actually what what it when he did was smart which is he didn't want to just rank for like the general searches like best only fans or something like that like he wants the high intent ones so he wants the person who's searching for like whatever i don't know what people search for but like red hat yeah red i if you go to his site if you go to his site you could you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are so it's like indian girls with boys whatever or whatever yeah i don't even wanna read half of this stuff stuff people you so it's what he categories what he did was he ranks really high for the categories that people are that's like clearly people's thing and like i don't know what your thing is but i got if if you got a thing i got it for you and because of that those are really really high intense searches and then what he does on the other side is he goes to only fans models and agencies and he says hey if you want more traffic i have tons of people searching for your exact thing pay me per click for every person i sent to you so he's basically recreated google it's a search engine but you get paid per click to send it and somebody with intents to your to your to your site it does a really really good job of it and only fans does not have a discover section on purpose they decided they don't wanna be in the discovery business they wanna only be in the like the kind of the underlying tools underneath these creator profiles and so he does this and this site only finder generates like a million dollars a month because this is an incredibly lucrative business that he that he has and since insane and it's just been surfing the growth of only fans which has grown like exponentially like only fans a few years ago was very small you know five yeah whatever four or five years ago was very small and then it got bigger and bigger like sort of like i mean the curve looks looks real like only fan is bigger than twitch it's bigger than like some of these massive websites now and it generates a lot of money like they pay out billions to creators on the platform and so if you can be part of that ecosystem it's valuable that's it i i have now met multiple people and only fans that you've never heard of girls that are doing between one and two million a month on their profile no way it's all a months because their body is the cogs so there's it's it's all often basically they have like you know usually they have like they'll they'll have like some of them as you get bigger you have like agency that manages it and the funny part is by the way like the the only fence works is like okay so the money is made in basically like the chatting so it's not you pay for a picture it's actually you pay to like kind of like have some personal connection with them some as some i'm chat with them and it's like the conversation and then the stuff that happens when they're up upsell them in the conversation is where the they happens and so they just have like a call center they have like a farm of people in the philippines that are doing the chatting for them and they pay them like a rev share for revenue that they generate during the chats and so it's basically lonely dudes in in in america talking to lonely dudes in the philippines it's like that's what all the fence you know you know sort of like boils down to in many cases for these like really popular accounts because no one person could handle the amount of volume that they get so what are they doing with this money they're just did did they have huge income and how long do you think can they do it for five years three years yeah and it's funny they kinda kind of exit they burn out and they'll just sell their late name likeness and photo library and bill you run it and just give me a check give me fifty percent it's like bruce springs team that's what he did the same thing the boss this is insane i i don't know much i i don't know much about this shit this is absolutely insane the engagement on these things are wild if you have a only fans business reach out to be shot at shot dot i want to invest in only events businesses that are just cash flow are they cool like when you met these they're cool the problem is they're very hard to sell and they're very easy to be killed and so they need kinda like strategy on like no i mean the girls oh i don't know what i don't know you said you hung out with them a couple of them i hang out with i just talk to him them yeah they're they're nice people i don't know that's insane how did you get in touch with them it's the internet bro what what do you mean you i i've how many times on here if i talked about only fans and then people base are like oh you're into that so then maybe email you and well they they probably have in indian guys like dm them i mean that's insane this is insane i don't go i don't go through you know if when you see a big line at the front door you know you know you don't go wait in that line you have to go find a side door and the side door generally you know some some due who list to our podcast that runs their business or as their manager and that's kind of like the way it alright let's that if we do alright the last category worse of the best i have a different one but i would have to say only fans would be up there but what i i have another one worst one is is these are all cool businesses but which which ones is our least favorite so the year gonna be only fans no i mean it would be but i already had something else kevin van trump so kevin van trump i met this guy sean likes him a lot now i met him in two thousand and eighteen i was at a conference and kevin van trump is like six feet tall and he's like really big he's like a very very large overweight guy and he walks up to me and he's got this super thick and he goes hey what's up know how you do like he just starts talking to me and i'm like this guy so confident and he got started starts talking about all my newsletters in the hustle and all this stuff and he's got the thick accent and he's wearing a ramon t shirt and he's got like converse on he just looks like a like a like a like a walmart guy and then like he dropped he drops like one or two lines where for some reason we talked about art and he was like oh yeah that picasso i got one of them some bitches like he said something like that i was like what so i let it slide and then i go how many subscribers are on your your newsletter and he goes like oh sixty thousand and he goes hey how much do you guys charge for yours and i goes oh it's free we make money on ads you charge it goes yeah we charge like three hundred dollars a month i forget exactly what it was and i'm like do the math in my head and i'm like wait that's twenty million dollars a year he goes yeah something like that i don't even know and i started hanging out with them and and basically this guy kevin van he's got this newsletter where he talks about agriculture and like how it impacts commodity prices and it he's brilliant and i get to know him a little bit and you're like no you just have a southern accent he like was a wall street like trader the guy's brilliant he's amazing and he lives in kansas city and i've done a zoom call with him and you see like he's got like these custom built motorcycles in the back of his like house and he's got like all these picasso and shit the guy's killing it but that same day when i hung out them i was like hey do you wanna go get dinner he's like yeah go get get dinner we we hang out at eight thirty he goes hey man gotta run i gotta go write tomorrow's newsletter and i was like what he goes i do it every day i've done it every day for ten years like what do mean every day he goes six days a week i send a newsletter and it's two thousand plus words it's really long he does it every day and he was making all this money i don't think i would trade lies with him though just to have all that money i had the same answer i think he's amazing you put me on to him i met him and his son such awesome people so like they're off super fun so off just fun to be around smart really nice just kind people don't like you know no no pretense about them and same thing he was hosting farm i went because you had totally me about him and introduce me to him and when when i go there he's we're he a conference called farm con he's got farm con which is like the biggest farming conference get together so i go to kansas and i and was it awesome yeah it was amazing and i'm there and we're talking it's like eleven at night it's like the the whole event done everyone's at the bar every single person is drinking a beer every single person is drinking up here and he's like i gotta get gotta get up to the bedroom gotta i gotta go back to my room real quick right the right tomorrow's edition and i was like wait you write it yourself still and he's like yeah right it i've i've written it myself by hand every night and he started this thing more than ten years ago like i think he said like i almost like twenty years basically he's been writing this thing eighteen years or something insane every day almost yeah and it's long too it's not like just some cookie cutter like mh there's three links that are interesting it's like my now jerome powell came down said this but and he said this said that here's how this is gonna affect corn futures and here's what i'm i'm bet over here and blah and then there's a bunch of memes it's amazing it's basically his market analysis for like crop you know crop and commodities and then it's a bunch of memes underneath it and he's like nope never do ads i i just wanted to build as much trust as i can in this community so i never advertise i i charge for it that's why we have farm why everybody shows up is because you know they they i built a lot of trust over the over the years and i learned more about business from that guy i'm like one hour than i did in my entire like four year education at duke like he said to me he set us a bunch of things that i that i love i put this in my my my newsletter i did a feature on him but i wrote a bunch of the lessons but one of them that he said was he goes yeah the content cool but he's like being in he goes being an investor is the best job in the world he kidding me he's like and he he just said it so matter of fact that he's like there is no better job in the world than being an investor it is is the best and you sort of think about that like alright well that sounds you know whatever i guess kind obvious and it's like okay if that's true then how do you get into that job like if if that is true for you how do you architect your life to get there because he was basically just like look this news newsletter is great yeah makes a lot of money but i wish i was just an investor i it would have been a better better better choice blah blah and he talked about investing because he i think he was on wall street before he started doing what he was doing yeah and he goes i was early into bitcoin i was early into facebook i was like really he's like yeah he's like i wasn't as early as it could've have been he's like i got in a bitcoin like in twenty he's like we started hearing about it at farm con like in twenty thirteen twenty fourteen i didn't buy till twenty fifteen twenty sixteen i should've been in it right when i first heard it same thing with facebook he goes two lessons for you investing number one the best trades are gonna be one where bones where you buy them you put him in the drawer and you never think about them again he's like he's like that was the best thing i did about bitcoin i bought bitcoin put it in the drawer and never thought about it again heard all the news didn't care it's in the drawer and i was like damn in the drawer that's a cool concept of like what investments can you just have the conviction you put in the drawer you say i'm not gonna react to the daily news cycle about this investment i'm gonna let the ten years play out on this investment because it was a let's see what happens on the long term type of bet second thing he said was he goes you always get a second chance to get on the train with the best investments there's always a second chance on the train he's like with bitcoin and y you think he missed it and then the price will come down that's your chance to get back on the train and most people by that time you know they spend the whole way up wishing they had got on the train train comes back around and they get scared they don't get back on you the same thing happened with facebook facebook you know we had our chances and when it was private then it goes public it goes up up crash back down to nineteen dollars i got back on the show and then shut that train came around i got right back on and he's like you that will happen for the best investments and i sort look for this now of like how do you override the psychology that most have which is when it's going up you wish you and gotten in earlier then when it crashes down you're too afraid to buy in because you feel like oh shit did is it over did it pop is did i miss it was that wrong and it's like well then you lose lose you you you know you wanna buy on the way up and you don't wanna buy on the way down that's that's a recipe for being poor right like you know buy high don't buy low right that's not gonna work and so those two little lessons were were ones that stuck out for me but this guy's business is amazing he's an amazing guy and the reason he's amazing among other things is he breaks all the stereotypes he you you'll think that he's just this like hi guy just like people you still think about me and like i grew up around people just like hey turns out he's like brilliant he'll he'll like you're you're like you're talk to me about facebook and he knows way more about it than new do he'll probably knows all about bitcoin i mean the guy's brilliant and i love hanging out with him and his friends because you it teaches you like i'm a fucking idiot for judging people certain way these guys are all badass at dude and they're fun is shit i did a call the other day with another guy so another guy from farm con same same sort of guy he's this white guy maybe i don't know it his fifties ish something like that was he's super rich because somebody those guys super rich and i i think this guy i don't know how racist this guy is private jet rich i don't know how racist this guy is but the guy who introduced me to him and just like yeah this guy is worth you know three hundred five hundred million dollars personally and i was like wow okay it's crazy because i was like i was like do his deals like he's always talking about these deals like does he actually make money on these like because he had a track record of success he's like yeah he has so this guy this guy got phrases for days so i i have this doc that i keep on my phone i called freeze anytime somebody says something that's just like funny or worded well it just sticks out to me it's a punchy phrase i write it down at farm i filled out my phrases thing like because there were so many so this one guy i i don't wanna say his name to put him on blast but he he was at of dinner with so kevin and then this guy was at the dinner and it was like a private dinner at the at farm and he stands up and he goes was everyone's tables is doing introductions and sit there i'm like oh how i am sean and yeah i work in tech and just fucking kill me i guess i'm boring like you know like that's like i talked during the introduction this guy stands up he goes yeah my name so and so he goes exactly what he said he goes he starts i don't know who won the world series i can't tell you how to get six pack abs hell i don't even know where the remote is in my house but i know one thing i know how to structure deals and today i would tell you it's about a deal that i'm doing and anyway came this intro and i was like what did credit i was like what an incredible way to introduce yourself i don't know where the remote is but i know one thing i know deals and i was like that is incredible then he's talking about how old he is he goes he cut me in half he's there's gonna be a lot of rings that's the best nice and then he goes and then i i did a call with him the other day and i get on the zoom call and i had just finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because i was like dude i run i gotta be on this call and he saying alright just take a call but let's do your like kind of like we try to do like this like my old fashioned like you kinda like you rolling like a like a phone roller type of thing like you're you're kinda like phone rolling out at the end so we were doing it and he's like just do it while you're in the call phone rolled with this guy on the call i get on the call i turn on the video and like hey i'm gonna show him what's going on i'm i'm like sorry looks great i'm doing like some stretching and he goes he's a big dude and he goes okay cool if it looks like i'm stretching call nine one one because i'm having a stroke dude why would you take a call like that incredible win like to have that line immediately ready when i saved you know and then i'm stretching if it sorry if it looks to it i'm stretching i was like wow that was literally so fucking funny to me i was blown away i was i don't care what else happens on this call that that was so impressive so good what state did you live in he's in tennessee i think what the hell is a deal struck i don't even know what that means it's like he like he does he's private equity so he buys companies but he's like i just know how to find a great deal how to put the financing together and how to structure it so that like i get the maximum value out of these deals is kinda like what he does and like you know you're i'm like so i was like have you done any deals like i would have heard of and he's like you know disneyland i sucks yeah he's like lot of windows in disneyland we do all the windows in disneyland i was oh my god okay they bought a window company got him a disney contract we do all the windows in disney i was like do what with the windows like clean them we gotta hair and the pop this guys incredible what's yours for world or worst of the best i had both design joy and the kevin trump just because of the time thing so i love that kevin trump has built like this this amazing power niche in the farming industry but i i would not wanna be the guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure it's gotta go out tomorrow morning i felt that during no road for a month and i was like nope not doing it this way yeah i although i think if i was him i would just find a way to hire somebody to do that i i can't believe he hasn't done that yet does ben thompson still do i've haven't read that so ben thompson is is my version of that so he does strat and every day he writes a newsletter about basically the same four things and i know you know how he does that like he talks about facebook google amazon apple netflix and like what's like the kind of the business and strategy of what they're doing they're so long these are so long and he does this daily long form his audience is like has the highest bar his audience is like the smartest people in the tech industry are like you know vcs all them they're they're that's who reads him every morning so he's gotta come with like original content that's super smart about the same topics hey he's been doing this for like a decade and he makes three million dollars a year roughly doing this office paid and he only charges a hundred and twenty dollars a year yeah i think he upped this price i don't know what it is now but he like did raise his prices at something one twenty i'm it's twelve dollars i think it was a hundred and now it's one twenty oh my god he is it's days six thousand dollars a month for this thing you know but but he's you know i think ben's awesome so i don't beat it as an enough for him i'm saying i would hate the pressure of the daily super insightful thing that i have to write every every morning original content about like the same kind of like ten companies is i don't i literally don't even know how he does somebody told me they're gonna do that i'd be like what are you saying this makes no sense he does it day sitting in taiwan this is the worst this is the worst it it is it is amazing but yeah i would never wanna do this so what do we think that i wonder what i wanna know the listener if they think that these one all in on one topic if they dig this they dig the award category style or the award style what do think yeah this is for us of like doing a few focused episodes themed episodes so today's theme was these one or two person businesses that crush it do you like this or do you like the freestyle freestyle sounds a lot easier this one takes a lot of work but if people love this you gotta go in the youtube comments and show us if we should do more of these or no we're cool either way but this is an experiment so let us know in the youtube comments i think we should do some takeaways alright so here's my my quick takeaways the most common industries you see these one to two person businesses that crush are just like thought leader on it on social media just putting out free content on social media e commerce we didn't do any e com ones in this but like there's a bunch of e commerce that could do like you know a million dollars a year in profit that are run with one or two people and then you can do agencies for everything else games so we talked about starting valley minecraft there's a bunch of games that are built like this apps and plugins so plugins on top of things like a fig plugin a google sheets plugin a gmail plugin that sort of thing and then data ag like built with with which are basically a comp compile data like mill dot com comp piling a bunch of things that are of the same thing so it's you go search and you find what you want because they've aggregate everything only find or same thing it's a data ag strategy so here's a couple strategy points you need to be either amazing hundred awesome at distribution meaning you're the influencer you're the content creator or you either to be a hundred percent awesome on product you're the guy coding the game and and and you'll you'll hire a publisher to do the publishing and so i think that if i was gonna do this i gonna try to make this happen i would say where can i be either an incredible at distribution or incredible at product and i wanna just like put all of my emphasis on that in order to make this happen the next one you need attributes so a lot of these we made sound simple but you gotta have some attributes some skill copywriting design you know the ability like investment judgment market analysis like you gotta be expert on one of these things if you're gonna make this happen and so you know you gotta get to that expert master master of your craft level if you're gonna do this and the last one it's all about leverage so the way you can get a one or two person company to get to millions tens of millions or even some of the examples we gave were hundreds of millions of dollars was leverage so you need to be using code build it once and then it runs a software you need to use media like podcasts or newsletters or whatever or you need to use capital because you're not gonna use labor right like most companies use labor that's why there have hundreds of people working for them but if you're gonna not have hundreds of people working you gotta use these other forms of leverage code capital of money or media are are your tools of choice you gotta figure out which of those three can i use and that's how gonna do it and the beauty of it is because of the internet if you're the best at x you now get to sell to the whole world so like we didn't give an example mystic cell so miss cell is this girl who goes on tiktok and you in a high energy way dances and tells it teaches you how to use excel like microsoft excel better and she's the best in the world at teaching excel it turns out the best of the world in of teaching excel is you know how to do the pop you know the the useful stuff and you can dance turns out that's what the best of excel look like and she now gets to teach the entire world excel like the best of anything gets to used to provide that product service or education to everybody that's the beauty of of the internet and so you need to figure out how to become the best of acts because and then just make it available to everybody and the last thing i i i was gonna say was it's fucking lonely like the best times that i have in work is when i'm whether it's in the trenches and like it's a shitty day or it's a great day is celebrating with coworkers these jobs are lonely i'm actually surprised when i hear about this about like how they are able to push like i push myself because oh i have mouths to feed or i want to be held accountable by these other people and make them proud it's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when you're by yourself and it's just hard to do this every day alone so hopefully you have like a good spouse or a significant other or something because it's just challenging hundred percent degree i i mean i when i started i was i wanna be a solo solo i wanna be a solo or they call it a solo capitalist i raised a fund and i was like i wanna be a solo capitalist and i was like oh this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself yeah and not only is it not that good to do things by yourself because you know a little bit of help can go a long the way a complimentary person who's good at the things you're not good at is really really useful but on top that it ain't no fun and like most of life is the journey not the destination and you don't wanna have the shitty journey for this awesome destination and so very quickly i was like yeah this is a dual this is being a bad doing this or the fund it's me and ram doing this and i basically immediately was like i'm gonna do this even in my e comm business i gave a chunk of it to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and give me some money i was like why just because like i don't wanna be reporting into myself and only like have myself as a thought partner to be spa with on ideas about this i wanna have somebody awesome just just to do some you know idea jo on this and so i think doing it by yourself is honestly a terrible idea you should definitely try to get one other person to do this i think two people is the is the sweet spot where you get sort of the the the most autonomy you in the least like management headaches and you still get the most shit done and have a lot of fun along the way alright that's a pod whether you're listening on itunes or spotify whatever go to search my first million on youtube and go to the comments on this video and actually let us know we'll read them and see if we should keep you in these that's it i feel like i could rude where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back