Virtual Study Halls, Absurd $ For Speeches, And Pushing the Boulder Uphill

a twenty five year old i used to work in banking at m and a i made like low six figures and it was a cool job but i recently quit after listening to you guys and now i own a a bunch of vending machines and it's allowed me to make ten grand a month and do a bunch of running and he said quote do memorable things which is what you guys talked about at the end of the pod this is pretty amazing alright i think we're good we're good dude sean thanks for dressing up you look nice alright so for those who can't see the youtube video right now sam is like in some kind of like i don't even know where he's at he's in some kind of like la some kind of playboy mansion podcast studio i even know what's going on not a single wall is normal one of them is like a three d texture one of them got like a plant from you know the the amazon jungle and he's got like five people there he's at like a movie cruise somebody just came and powdered his nose i don't know what's going on i'm still in my bedroom and i recently woke up so you know we got a little yang going by what you're wearing sean a i'll say a asleep house i'll wear was hoodie no sam calls shirtless if sam sees a shoulder he has a bite panic attack it just you know i've it's something we can't all dress like arthur so i was hoping that if i came here so i came here the other day to record a podcast with this guy named danny and i came here i go i called ben like right when i was there i facetime i go ben book this for like in three days this is where we're gonna record from now on and i was like if if we do this here maybe it would inspire sean to like record with more than just one air pod in his iphone and a plant the background and maybe we can make something happen so hopefully i'm gonna wear off on you and we'll you'll do it right on your end because i think we'll get more views on youtube finally yeah the last time i felt this much pure pressure i ended up you know on s and so hopefully this just ends better but i do feel the pressure now i will find you know i don't even what is this place that you're at you give a shout out is the name of a it's called w their name but what's it call called w f media w t w w t f media i can that guy you look guy like guy danny you're on his thing too he's been email story for me oh really okay cool well i came on his thing and i came here and it was awesome i think we paid a couple hundred bucks i don't remember to be here and i think this is the actually the same studio that andrew sc and charlemagne i think record their thing right yeah right and it's like pretty easy so i just took you know rode my scooter here and and did it just like charlemagne the god did yeah alright let's let's let's jump into some stuff you have some topics i got some topics where do you wanna start we got a bunch of different ways we can go wait we gotta do this did you see this email that i got from this listener no where okay so i forwarded it to you so basically we were talking about like adventurous shit last time and this guy emailed me and let me pull it up so basically he said he goes alright you you wrote you guys talked about like living at adventurous life i wanted to write you and and fill you in on what's going on i used to be two thirty pounds and like pretty overweight but then i started running and i started listening to you guys the whole entire time i run in fact i did a fifty mile race and i only listen to m the entire time and i've lost a ton of weight and now next week i'm doing a hundred mile race and i intend to listen to you guys the whole time as well and i'm a twenty five year old i used to work in banking at m and a i made like low six figures and it was a cool job but i recently quit after listening to you guys and now i own a a bunch of vending machines and it's allowed me to make ten grand a month and do a bunch of running and he said quote do memorable things which is what you guys talked about at the end of the pod this is pretty amazing i forward it to it's that's a that's a good story right yeah dude that's my my version of torture though like having to run fifty miles while listening to my voice in my head that would be like that would be like you know worse than water boarding for me personally but dude props to this guy this is amazing you know fitness got influenced by you listen to the pod got influenced by both of us you know did the vending machine side hustle that we had talked about got to the ten k a month and now we had has the freedom he's thinking about doing short term rentals i think this might be your best friend i think you might just found an adult best friend yeah that's my little brother man i like this guys his name jack so i i saw that email and i was like we gotta bring that up that's a good one but this is he ended it with hashtag do things and i like that i like do things that's the serious version of no small boy stuff which is the official motto of my first million no very good i like that alright where do you wanna go john jack jack yeah good job jack jack ne good job i wanna tell you about an idea that i saw recently i i'm thinking gonna invest in this but it's kind of just like one of these really low key doesn't even seem like a business things but i think it's gonna be kinda big so have you ever been on youtube and seen this thumbnail of like this kinda anime character wearing headphones and it says lo chill beats study music have you ever seen kill they have they run it on live like youtube live and there'll be hundreds of thousands of people on it and i think like the other day it like was paused for like a few minutes or something like that and it was in the news right it got banned and then it got un band after a hundred and thirty three thousand people like signed a petition to be like un banned this right now that's crazy but okay and what about it so let me tell you about it so lo basically the channel has ten million subscribers it's one of the most like sort of longest watch time things on egypt because people will just sit there for hour hours studying just having this as background music they have a discord of seven hundred thousand people they have about well it's just people that are chilling it's people that want us people that are are trying to study they're trying to focus and they just wanna be in a group of other people doing the same thing it's like a virtual study hall so this is kind of like an emergent behavior it's just a thing that started happening it's not what youtube was trying to do it wasn't you know some company that started right away it's just kind of like this thing that people wanted like oh you know like i had this when i was in college my buddy would it's like oh hand him the aux plug because his music is good for us to just chill do nothing too it's not gonna be distracting that sort of thing and he would kinda be the dj so this is like a thing now and i found but it's still like kind of informal it's on youtube it's not really like easy to use in that sense like you don't you know you don't know who these other people are you can't do a private room that sort of stuff so there's a startup up called study verse that is trying to do this and what they did was they basically turned this into like its own experience so me and me and ben used this now when we work we basically go into study verse and you go in and there's like a box basically so you could just put on yeah like chill hip hop style music or chill electronic style music or whatever and both people are hearing the same thing at the same time you could turn your camera on or off if you wanna just be there microphone on or off and you could put your to do list there and other people can see and as you knock them out it makes a little sound so you can see other people knocking off their to do list there's a little chat and so and you could just set the background so you could be like let's just give them yeah yeah we're working remote we're you know like i'm in this little home office here nothing too grand but you could just set the scene like now what if we were by the beach or what if we were you know in space or wherever you want so it's just a cool little product and they're going after this use case of virtual study hall people getting together to study hangout out or work but it's really around studying i believe and this is like a big deal there are millions of students every day who do this and they do it with strangers they're not they're not necessarily hanging out with their friends they some do but a lot of people just wanna feel like they don't wanna feel kind of alone and bored when they study and so just having any other people chatting or they see the screen names their profile pictures it just makes them feel less alone when they're doing it how do you speak money i think this is gonna be big so the the lo f the lo five thing on youtube i don't know if they just run ads they monetize that way i'm not one hundred percent sure i know they also have like the music is their own music they have low f records so it's all copyright free which is kinda cool because that would be the other problem if you try to do this commercially and but for these guys i think they'll probably have some premium version or some upsell or so i don't know what they'll do to make money like the main thing right now is can they get to like a million students a day who are studying with this thing which is like at that point is we're pretty valuable to be the hub or million students today are spending like multiple hours basically did they raise money now yeah so so i'm investing on this thing you're doing it lot of time yeah i'm gonna do it this right it gives me heavy like twitch vibes in a in a way where i'm like it's kind of a behavior that doesn't really make sense until you start to think about the use case and like yeah that would be fun actually but there's thousands of them i just googled it there's so many of them well like virtual study holes yeah yeah they're they're are i don't think there's thousands of there's one serious competitor that's like been around for a little while i forgot it's called but they have together they're close to that point yeah i think it's steady together i think that's the one they have a million people in their community and and and so you know these guys are trying to build like a better user experience than that so this this i think this could sound study together it says that there's thirty thirty four thousand people concurrently online so at the hustle we are getting let's say that we are getting two or three million monthly unique basically that means that which is like two to three million a month is pretty good if it's the right niche you can make like you know a million a month off two to three million people a month if it's the right one and at any given point we would have two thousand people online like it it really would never get maybe occasionally it gets to three thousand and four thousand but virtually never and the fact that this has thirty three thousand it's pretty insane yeah that's right now i mean i don't even know if school i think it's like still summer for for people that are they're not been like in school right now and if you are in high school or or anything else like you're you're you know the middle of the day you can't be doing this while you're at school so this only gonna be like college or summer school right now i bet this number could be three times as high for them during like kinda peak seasons you know definitely so so i think that's kind of amazing and you know like you know whether they sell you know like little emo like discord did like discord makes millions of millions of dollars off of just their like they're super emoji that you can have or yeah you know you yeah that's discord business model is you pay six dollars a month or something like that for discord nit and all it gives you is like your your little your group can have its own emoji like you can upload your own emoji you could use the premium of emoji that they have and same thing with twitch like people subscribe for five or six bucks a month to a a a twitch channel and like it's not like they couldn't just watch it for free they can watch it for free too they do it to get a little badge that says i'm i'm a paid like pay patron of this person's channel and secondly they get to use the custom emoji of that channel right really the only perks like sometimes it's subscribed only chat but but that's not usually the case and so so yeah i think you could get pretty big with something like this but i think it's one of those like under the radar niche niches most people don't even really recognize that this is a niche so i think this is a cool idea i we'll see how to we talked about it before alright let me run something by you because you you just actually we have been talking about this check this out so you know who scott gallo is of course the right so for professor for those who p g yeah for those who don't know there's dude named scott gallo popular on twitter for making all these like tech takes and he gets made fun of for being wrong lot but he takes a lot of swings so he's gonna be wrong a lot basically started this company called l two which i think he sold like two hundred million bucks so he's like really successful already whatever and he's got this new thing called section four which i think it's just like courses but you check this out so new york times it said mister gallo who was already wealthy from selling two companies and taking a third public also makes more than five million dollars a year from speaking gigs he said largely from corporations and industry groups that pay him fifty thousand dollars a year or fifty thousand for a virtual event and two hundred fifty thousand dollars for an international event i should be broken up he joked which is pretty funny but that's that's a ridiculous amount of money for speaking that is huge how how how does that work because i know that you were talking about like it it has to all be it has to all work from book sales right or for you know just like me a new york times best seller yeah i think it's like a combination so like you just you're in people's face enough with like you know you you sound polish because you know they have a podcast they have he's got his blog which is pretty famous he's got he's bet he's been doing this for like he didn't do this forever dude i feel like this guy's been publishing content for like ten fifteen years at least something like that dude isn't is that right he's not like some some new no it's not he's not just a guy i mean he's he's he's he's great you know he's good and he's hilarious i listened i was out when i was in germany he spoke he was very good and like i've hung out with him a really nice guy and his stick online i don't always agree with all of his takes and i think that sometimes he's unnecessarily a hate but without a doubt incredibly entertaining when when he does talks like he's got a little bit of like a comedy stick on there he's kinda like a little f you and he like says like hilarious jokes about him being like old and like bald and stuff he's hilarious he's good and this is that but that's so much five million dollars a year from speaking is like the equivalent of having like fifty million dollars five million dollars a year of income is is is astronomical you know what i mean what that it it really is well just it's true it's like it's funny that it's it like it's funny that you're absolutely right that is an absurd number to be making and speaking fees you're like a pretty good nba player at that point yeah exactly but you're just like giving you a presentation on you're using powerpoint powerpoint and often by the way it's for the same presentation it's the same you can do for fifteen years you know what i mean it's like in your free time a little bit this is crazy it i just i heard that number and i was like i i couldn't believe it at first because it it is it's it's an astronomical number how much is like david blaine make because p is basically like inviting a magician to your conference it's like oh yeah here's the entertainment we all know and love this guy scott gallo he comes on he kind of does his little routine and he entertain you and like that's the that's what he's getting paid for is to be kind of like a name people recognize adds legitimacy to the event and and you know provide some entertainment that's not like completely off the wall circus stuff it's like well this will be entertaining but it's still relevant here's the thing here's the rub his pod it it it gets it's two times the size of ours so we get like between we get like in the hundred thousand sometimes more as a little less range per episode downloads per episode he's at two hundred and fifty thousand so it might him or who is yeah yeah the i don't i don't know it's called but it's like him and cara sweatshirt it's on i don't even fucking know what it is rec rico it was like rec rico or whatever now something knows and in my head i'm thinking i'll take half that right i mean we gotta be doing this i'll do you one better i'll take a third of that i'll undercut sam it's good i will how often you get asked the hell you want how often do you get asked to do it i don't get asked that often i i don't get asked that often the number is always good whenever i do get asked i don't get asked that often and also i'm not really that interested in doing this because like you know for this you got a travel a bunch to do it i think to do it well you gotta travel a bunch i don't think people are gonna be you wouldn't take your kids with you on like a trip somewhere not right you don't wanna see kansas city bro yeah exactly like no i do not wanna i don't know to take the the first take my kids somewhere is like already you know the prices went up so so no i wouldn't want that now but yeah later in life yeah that'd be great so by the way funny you mentioned scott gallo there's couple things people should know number one he's very entertaining great at content you number two his businesses takes are pretty awful for the most part has been wrong famously wrong many many times in fact somebody created the the anti professor gallo index or something what's that website called where it's literally really just says anytime he says to buy or sell something if you just did the exact opposite here's how you'd be doing it's like he's down x percent you know s and p five hundred up wide percent and this is up like double the s and p five hundred outperform the market it's the websites bet against the professor introducing the anti gallo index and what is the stats what does this say how does he done or how's the thing done against him so his worst prediction was that said that may i think he said that like macy's was gonna like outperform amazon so like not that good and then he also said that he also said that tesla was a bad bet so like i i don't know even know how to use so let's see since october tells nineteen tech companies that have that the professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the s and p and seen a whopping sixty one percent return so you would have made sixty one percent exactly so that's really funny whoever did that i i i do appreciate that last thing is so so i just talked to a guy yesterday about this course business so so he's got this thing section four and i was like dude how much money does that make he goes actually i kind of like i've been you know i'm in that same deal so i've been doing research on here's what i think so here's what he thinks he goes he's i think section four does like fourteen million a year in revenue they've raised like thirty seven million dollars they just did some layoffs because you know yeah and he's basically like you know that's an average of a thousand dollars a year per learner you know thirty percent discount let's say it's seven hundred dollars and he has twenty one thousand people you know paying paying to learn or something like that maybe two point one is what that was supposed to be i'm not sure but but yeah that's kind of like kinda crazy then he was like you know also ref forge you you know ref forge it was like yeah if i four is basically like some marketing school dude i would guess that ref forge is in like the eighteen to twenty range for revenue yeah do you know how much money ref forge has raised how much i have no idea much if this guy is right ref reform just raised a total of eighty one million dollars of that i'm interesting thinking just a lot of absurd for for what they're doing but they did acquire some other marketing training companies so maybe they raised a bunch of money just to buy something they had like established revenue eb so anyways these little like marketing schools that people have created like this give be kinda of big like we should've have if we if we wanted to monetize m mfa this would have been the way to do it it's to just me and you create like our own marketing school i'm pretty sure with our audience and like what we actually like we've actually done this like we we've actually done marketing to grow our businesses successfully owned and exited multiple businesses now brought multiple businesses to this to this like you know seven eight figure in revenue point like if anybody should be doing this this should be us not not these guys but you know who wants to go do that i don't know so let me talk tell you about something that i question if i actually wanna go do that but i hear the numbers and they're amazing so b to media so media companies that make content for other businesses i was talking to this guy other day and check this out he's got this company called aging media okay they make newsletters for nursing homes so i guess people who own nursing homes and people who own hospice hospice care businesses and it's like i think only three years old it's or four years old it's not a very old company but he was telling me that this year they they'll do around ten million in revenue and like three or four million in eb and completely bootstrap and they have got forty employees and if you go go to it it's called aging media go to the website and look at their shit but it is so simple it's such a straightforward business and i see this stuff and i'm like oh man i could totally do this for x y and z and that's a small example there's a bigger example the there's this company called industry dive industry dive was just acquired like a week ago i think or two weeks ago they acquired for five hundred million dollars they do a hundred and let's see they were doing where is it they were doing a hundred and ten million dollars they're doing a hundred ten million in revenue with thirty percent profit three hundred eighty employees fifty three newsletters across those fifty three newsletters two point five million subs and pretty straightforward like not not complicated not necessarily easy but not complicated it's straightforward their content i think it's okay it's just like it's basically just bullet points it's an email with bullet points of what's happening in like the restaurant industry or whatever but these companies the bar i think to be good is so low for b to b media because it's just like you know like it just mostly all sucks they like think that like you have to write a certain way but in the way they monetize and make money is so much better than a consumer media company because if you are a person who's selling software or whatever to a hospice care owner like you you'd only have a couple places to go to and one sale gets you you know hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions in revenue like a pretty huge number and so like these guys basically what they do they have ads on their site but they do webinars with a sponsor and like fifteen people sign up for the webinar or the talk it's basically like a podcast just like this but you gotta enter your email to get in they give that email to the sponsor and that sponsor hopes to go and email the ten people that signed up and like hopefully they buy their shit and it's like twenty or thirty or forty thousand dollars to charge for like getting those ten thirty fifty leads it's crazy it the bar so low yeah this this thing is crazy they have they're big like verticals or is like they have waste dive waste dive is for the waste management industry then they'll have like far like pharmaceuticals and then they'll have finance and then they'll have like you know these different things i think their biggest ones so marketing dive is five hundred and ten subscriber five hundred ten thousand subscribers bio pharma dive two hundred seventy five thousand subscribers construction dive three hundred thousand subscribers hr dive four hundred fifty five four hundred fifty thousand subscribers and then they have just a bunch of others unit know right utility dive restaurant dive retail dives their apps they're their biggest one seven hundred thousand subscribers it's pretty crazy this is not a media company really like you know they their media company but like the game isn't are you good at making content the game is are you really good at acquiring users and like acquiring subscribers in this industry that good if you're if you're like a d door like you like you don't have to be that good at this like because you're already pretty good at like trying to acquire user for two dollars so you can make eight bucks and like you're probably better more skilled you're just choosing like a less lucrative game and here's why this is interesting the guy who started industry dive named sean he previously was the president of another company called fierce markets and they did this exact same thing but they did it starting in two thousand and five or like two thousand two and it was literally the same thing but they just did a different like slightly different industries it had one point two million subs and it sold for hundreds of millions of dollars the reason why this is industry industry interesting is it it's the same shit over and over and over again they just like kinda like have like a dart of like boring shit they just like throw a couple of darts like yeah let's do that one yeah what what one what yeah like that that's i mean obviously i'm overs simplifying this but it it's incredibly fascinating to me because the bar is so low to be successful yeah one thing i have noticed though like so i i agree with you this is what are those blueprints that's like a good blue really good blueprints doesn't take like genius doesn't take ton of luck and so you know in that sense it's a good good blueprint to go after the downside is now that this is like this game i think was really awesome like over the last ten years i think over the next ten years that window was closing the same thing happened in d the same thing happened to drop shipping the same thing here the blue cross and that the blueprint is easy i think that we did company sales for five hundred million dollars doing something there's a bunch of sharks like you and i who hear about this go study their their blueprint and you get fifteen new like aggressive people who now know how big the prize is for something like this and now have a blueprint follow all doing the same thing i still think you could win and some somebody will win but it is i would say ten times harder than it was over the last ten years in my opinion because you're gonna have that set of people this is exactly what's going on in in d which is that follow cost of acquiring customers are going up why because people realized oh you could just do this with like you know pick a product run this run this facebook ad blueprint use shopify you use cla it's like the stack of like i just need to do these seven so many more people doing that than this there's so many more people starting deodorant and like jewelry brands than there are this boring but for those there's they there you can have way more right can have how many jewelry brands can the market hold it could hold a ton because people are gonna have a bunch now if let's say that the industry newsletter a way to find out what's going on in your industry how many is somebody if i'm in the waste management industry how many of those am i gonna read every week i don't know two one or two right probably one or two okay industrial industry drive is one now everybody else is gonna fight for two and then if you're not gonna go for waste management you're gonna go for the next best destination in the next now interest industry your dive has already done twenty of these niches thirty of these nations themselves so other people are gonna keep going for more and more these easter so you're gonna get to the less valuable niches or the ones that are harder car subscribers for because you're all fighting for that same one or two slots and so i think that still somebody will win but it is way harder than it was when this when the word wasn't leaked that oh this all these interesting industry newsletters can be that big that's crazy right i think you're i think you're you you you're giving people too much credit i think that not that many people are gonna get involved in this it's just so much cooler when you're twenty two to like you know like what's that one kid who sells like sex chocolate like that's just so much more fascinating what's that called tabs tabs chocolate that makes you horny that's so much cooler to like everyone in la than any of this yeah do you get some of that included when you rent the podcast through your space you're in it seems like it should just be on the desk of it alright let's do another thing okay so i have one so here's another kind of like what i'll call boring idea hidden in plain sight aunt flow have you heard of this company flow wait is it aunt or aunt wait you say aunt i say odd but it's also okay whatever alright but i yeah yeah your mom's sister like mom yeah exactly that time of the month is is the slang for that time of the month so what these guys are doing or these gals are don't i don't know who's behind it what they do is they go to a school or a company and they say hey you know your restrooms need to be a little bit more female friendly here so why don't we install this little like case that's gonna dispense tampon and you know other kind of like female men's menstrual recycled products any anything that you could think of that goes in that that that category we're gonna install this dispenser and now you're just your place is gonna be more welcoming for you know for for for females that that are attending your space so maybe girls at school or university or in your company whatever it is and they just made it sexy so they this these kind of hygiene products already exist in bathrooms but they're all like we all know it what they look like they're that boring you know silver box that looks like you know if i open this up am i gonna get tools or a circuit breaker or like you know and what am i gonna get out of this thing it's hard to hard to really say they just made it look good and feel good and like really nice packaging and design and it's like it's like the tesla of these things that are in the bathroom wall and they're doing great so let me pull up their demos they have i think nine hundred i don't know if i have all these numbers correct but they have nine hundred org that are that are working with them and basically you pay three hundred bucks to install the thing and then you pay like a thirteen hundred dollars a year for tampa refills or pad refills and so that's basically like nine thousand dollars for a school with twenty bathrooms and and think about that there's just a lot of high schools like there there are like you know i know fifteen thousand high schools in the country that's just high schools in the us then you have colleges then you have companies and they just made it like a sexy d product like the the logo looks cool the box looks cool and now states are requiring some schools like in california colorado michigan that you have to offer products for this and they do this like you know every for every ten that we sell we donate one to administrator in need like they have like whole thing around it it's like kinda crazy our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous sweet think i love our new crm our software is the best love hubspot grow better i last year i was pitched like three different of these when we ever we did that vending machine pod i had so many people reach out like i'm doing like smart vending machine things or something like that and and a lot of them were or like either tampon or like hygiene things or or then they were like healthy food right and i looked at all the numbers and most all of them were horrible and the ones that were the best they just sold coke and m and m's like just like normal like everyone wanted to do this like one particular thing but it's like man america just wants coke and m and m's and that like crushed it what what are the numbers on this one on track for ten million in twenty twenty two when start so tripled from last year i don't i don't know when they started but they you know now they're doing princeton university every app old retail store offices like google netflix disney twitter quicken loans for your contract for all k through twelve girls bathrooms in utah like why am i investing this is such a def defense business like once you get the contract they're not gonna have again they're not gonna have two of these at the bathroom and so like if you're the brand that like looks good and you can like sprint into market something like this will get i think to like thirty forty fifty million in revenue sure quickly did they raise money i think it chase this down yeah they're they're raise money or they're they've already raised somebody did you you ever seen those dick pills at like the counter at seven eleven can't i had yeah surely you have like it's like goat it's like towed i forget what it's go into seven i i don't leave the house i definitely don't walk into seven eleven it's they're in vending machines they like it's like viagra or something like that it's like some type but like i i actually have no idea what it is but it's like a it's like a herbal supplement and it's like your wife is telling me about this got it keep me one thing you you could have that one and and do you ever think it's who makes those and what are their business meetings like you know what i mean is it just like a bunch of dudes like serving monster energy drink like sitting around like you know what i mean have you seen that i've you seen whole is just done over box live just like yeah just like we'll be a serving mountain dew and and monster in order to like get this meeting started i've always wondered what those things are like and how you could be proud making that crap box this is way benson that it's not the same thing but i i've been thinking a lot about that didn't define a lot how much have you been thinking about this well like like you you know these yeah so we talked about nope boys and like the send it thing or what's it called full send send and so many people reached out to me after that and they go they make money because they're sponsored by this crypto poker thing called row what's it called ro you know about yeah yeah and i saw this video where they're were talking about it and it does like tens of millions a month in sales like it's just like astronomical just huge and i was thinking i was like that's pretty cool but i think that gambling like i'm okay that it exists but it's just not for me you know it's like right what do i always say like corn and sleep tattoos too it's cool that other people have it not for me and by the way that's just catching on it i did a meeting with somebody and they i was like oh nice hat they go yeah you know what sam says corn sleep tattoos it's not for him but it was glad something it's like like wow i i i respect it's right to exist but you know it it ain't for me but these like these these businesses that do like let's say gambling i'm like that's kinda like it's most likely a little bit shady it's definitely not legal in america but there's definitely it's related to shady this like it's in the same family and i just wouldn't be proud doing that on a i wouldn't be proud doing that on a daily basis you know what i mean right and that's why i was thinking as somebody who spends a lot of time gambling and has you know i tell you in college how we used to drive from north carolina where i went to school down to south carolina three hour drive that we would board a river boat casino that would that would sail into international waters turn off the engines and then let us gamble for four hours and then it would drive back and that's what i was doing as like a twenty year old and like you know i was playing poker once and the guy next to me either fell asleep or died and i was like oh my god like what am i doing here why am i hanging out with these low life who are this guy is like this guy you know like these people whose nails go so long they start to like cork screw like this guy looked like that and i was like this guy hasn't moved off this boat in like century and i shouldn't be here but which it couldn't resist sleep or i don't know i just left the table i was like i don't i'm not gonna tap this guy and find out it's like sc box the cat dead or not i i didn't wanna know so so i just left but yeah i lost a bunch of money doing that so i know i like gambling i think it's cool but also for sure like it's not a business i would start because i feel like i don't wanna start things where the end is me in a netflix documentary it's like what is the percent chance i to like be on the run at at some point in this business venture i don't really wanna flee the country i'm not looking to like you know find out that like you know we have a huge amount of like you know child pornography or you know you know money laundering on my my app it's like dude i'm not here for the stress like not i'm not trying to do all that and i don't need to make like a trillion dollars in a year doing this like the state guys at i i told the story about them on the pod that they need like forty million a week in revenue no way issued i i think a but how much that what's that like a net revenue versus gross this is their take they forty a week did it eight i heard they did a eight hundred million dollar dividend to their lines they i can't sell the business so i heard that they distributed like eight hundred million dollars this could be this could be wrong but i don't think it's wrong by like more than thirty percent so so that's pretty crazy these these things this guy these guys are printed cash these are the guys who bought that like they didn't know who was behind it until some guy forty million dollar like a thirty six million dollar home yeah they were like how did this twenty six year old afford this and they're like oh he what what how where's is the source of your wealth he's like i on steak dot com did people just based correct did people just message you about what and they told you that number whenever we talk about any of this crap i when same friend who told me yeah my same friend who told me about them in the first place when i featured them on here he was telling me about like you know their dividend and and stuff like that rub is also big yeah these these things are really big basically it's an online casino and so like you take one of the best business models in the world a casino and you strip away the biggest cost of it which are like you know the the building the giant building and having all this labor because all the games are digital and there's the the casino is digital and now all you have left is the marketing cost to acquire customers you could acquire customers from around the globe in their bedroom and they don't have to like fly to vegas to do right a kinda kind of an amazing model and like it's a pretty obvious why it's why it's huge but yeah you that's not for everybody alright what do you got okay i got i got another one i got a framework and then i have i actually i got two frameworks i have one framework for i got a quick one in a long one i'll just quick one first i realized this the other day i was like yeah brian brain armstrong the founder of coinbase went on le podcast yeah likes it's like so like what is what is your startup advice what is your advice for starting a startup up it's like it's one of those questions that as you know as an entrepreneur you kinda hate because you're like well it's like saying you know like what is a good life so but he gave him an answer he's he kinda broke it he's like well there's like there's like two separate eras pre product market fit and post and i was like that's i agree with that at a hundred percent like the things way life is pre and post is like important but like then okay so for alex you gotta define like what is product market fit and like it's kinda hard to define product market fit i don't know how you felt it for the hustle because you kind of hit went from events to like i feel like we never had it flashy blog posts to the newsletter you don't think the newsletter had it i mean we got to we have two point five million people a day reading so like i guess that there there's definitely something there but like people when my friends talk about it they're like oh man it just started working like it never felt like it it felt like a s the whole time it never felt like things were just working i mean do feel that way the milk road it just seems like like it i guess maybe technically there's exponential growth because it's growing like two or three hundred percent a year but it it wasn't like i can't keep up you know what i mean right yeah so i'll i'll tell you the frameworks i've heard about this so one is emmett who's the founder she said this wants that i was oh that sounds right he goes in a startup up there's a big period where it just feels like you're pushing a giant boulder up a hill you're pushing and you're pushing and you're pushing he's like and then there is a point if it works where all of a sudden you're not pushing anymore the boulder starts to roll down the other side of the hill and now you have the opposite problem you're running chasing to try to catch up with it because it's rolling faster than you can keep up with and this is what other people say too like you know your customers are like demanding you know you can't you basically you run out of inventory people it's flying off the shelves it's like these are the phrases people use to describe this feeling and so where it starts to feel like the market is pulling you rather than pushing and heard that i've experienced a little bit with our d brand where we would but it's not like it's not like this magical eden where it never feels that way it never feels hard again like that's kind of how it sounds in my head it's like oh at some point i'll stop pushing and it'll start like rolling by itself and i'll have to run in chase it it's like kinda like starts and stops of that it's more like like a mountain range where the you go up and then down and then you climb the next mountain and it's a little higher than down then the next mountain and down like that's how it feels like so for example with with the with our e commerce company okay getting the product made and getting it to market and getting people they first hear about our brand that was pushing the boulder up but then literally as soon as they like i remember it went viral in like a facebook group people started sharing it in like ent of that category they started sharing it and so we all of i remember like the third day we did like three thousand dollars in sales without like spending anything on marketing and i was where did that come from that was awesome i didn't do anything and like people started buying it and by our second month we ran out of inventory and we had a we had a full our third month our sales sucked because we just had no inventory so that was like what it felt like to pull but then to get the business to grow even more well that's you know like that magic you know sort of slow down and sure people were still telling their friends but i wanted to hit a bigger goals now i had to push again so it's been kind of starts and stops with milk road i i feel like the growth is pushing the boulder up a hill but then look at some numbers like the number of organic people who like people who joined because they got referred the thing think a really healthy percentage i'm like okay so that means people are liking it if they're sharing with friends and the feedback like the replies we get are not just like oh that was a good one today it's like they like they're using our own language and sense of humor it's like they wanna be friends with us they're like yeah they're like i'll you know the milk was so hot this morning it turned into butter and like you know it's like who said who like goes into a product uses it that day and then comes up with a funny review just because you kinda wanna be boys with the people who are making it like that's that shows that they really care in some way and we get like hundreds of those a day so so that shows me it's working but still to grow and fill the revenue slots like that feels like a s like that doesn't feel easy that feels like very very difficult and so so yeah i i don't have a good answer i've seen it firsthand with two different people so the first is i used to share this office called founder dojo you know you it was a dave grows a bunch of us when i was starting the company the hustle and there was these two guys that were like the most stereotypical like silicon valley nerds it was like a skinny indian dude and then this white guy that looked like this jo he was like really good looking jo but he was like the do dude ever and they were partners and it was a hilarious combination and they created this technology that would basically i have no idea why they wanted to create this technology technologies it's honestly kind pointless but basically it would crawl the internet and it would find the most shared and most popular h hd gifs gifs whatever on the internet that day and they built this thing and then they would spend hours making the search so if you just typed in one letter it would autofill fill with like things that you could search like gifs like if you typed in like the word c would autofill fill it cats and then like the search would just pop up and i remember we'd be like staring at the computer with them just so like look how much faster it is and it was like you can't even tell like you know how much faster it was from the previous time but they we nerd it out over this and they launched this thing and it did okay it did okay it did it okay and then one day we get into the office and they've stayed there all night and they like slept underneath the table that their desk i remember and i remember like dave had bought them pizza because like they were working the whole time we're like what's going on raj like why is this why is this happening and their website was called the worst drug which is pretty hilarious it's called the worst drug dot tv i think basically some porn guys got a hold of it and the it like they he they somehow i don't know how it worked but the most shared gifts on the web are almost all porn and so they like disabled like that not say for work feature and it was all porn and we get to the office and they had this fancy setup up like this the a huge monitor and it was the highest death porn you i've ever seen and you click like space and it would autofill with like a new porn gif and and like person legacy i used this by the way i remember seeing it it went viral like in two thousand fourteen or something it was like somebody shared it in our irc they're like this is a crazy website and it was like full screen hd immediate like porn and then you're like whoa you touch any key and it just reload another one instantaneously i was like well going i was like i before tiktok so basically there was like eight of us get eight eight guys and like we were gathered around this computer and at first we were like shocked it was like hardcore porn like shock shocking porn that would go viral or like maybe people like click on and like the whole porn thing we got past it and then we were like wow that's really high def look at that like oh if you click space like it really it loads so fast and there were just eight of us like gather and tim west just hair on his thigh yeah it was crazy it was disgusting and tim west and his assistant i figured forget her name but they i was supposed to interview them in preparation because they speaking at hustle and i told him to come to the office but they walk to the office of pandora yeah the founder of pandora they walk into the office and there's eight of us gathered around this screen just like staring intensely at this porn like wow good good job raj like when you type in see it really autofill feels like really quickly like you know like this is amazing and they walked in and like oh hey what's going on you guys wanna see something check out this technology like it was and they had like millions of people a day coming to the website overnight and they slept there at the office for weeks trying to like you know do something with the survey to keep up with the traffic and like increase the speed just a little bit and eventually something happened where like someone in romania offered to buy it they flew there and it turns out that it was like some gangster and then they like all had like guns on them and they came back and it was like a whole whole ordeal but that's the one time that i really saw product market fit work so i've heard stories like that like when instagram launched it was kind of the same thing they like they launched it they put it out in the wild you know first hour is pretty slow whatever the guys kinda go to sleep they wake up and like or like not even they go sleep it was like late at night and it was early in the morning in japan and the app had started to go viral in japan and so they were like dude what are all these like why are there only pictures of tea and like go this is in japan people having tea in the morning and they're taking instagram pictures of it and they had like twenty five thousand people downloaded that first or second day and the servers like you know basically melting and like pretty quickly the only problem became how do we get more server capacity i was like oh you you stop thinking about features you stop thinking about the logo you stop thinking about names you stop thinking about hiring it's like all i think about is like how do i add more servers and so actually i started to realize that there is this there's a test the simplest test of product market fit because people have tried to come up with these tests before in fact there's a kind of famous silicon valley one which is you survey your users this thing which is if our product went away if you could no longer use our product how would you feel very disappointed somewhat disappointed or not disappointed and the idea is if forty percent or more say very disappointed you have product market fit sounds good in theory it's sort of like like pretty astrology it's like giving you a way to have this answer to this psych mystical question and mark andre andres said this thing he goes part fit is like sex if you if you're asking if you have it you're not having it and like you know i think that's more real which is like there isn't this forty percent survey number you can't survey your way to finding out you'll know because it kinda hits you like a punch in the face it's so what i've seen is that the people who really haven't like their thing is going to go supernova they only care about two things those two things are if it's a tech product hiring more servers and if it's any kind of product hiring customer customer support people and if anytime i meet a founder now who's like yeah dude i just really you know any good like customer support people like where do i find more support people or like hey do you know how i can get like aws credits i'm like running up a crazy bill i'm like let me invest first and then also yes let me help you with that because i know when that happens that is the almost the true sign of product market fit it is the survey you don't need to go do with your customers when a founder stops thinking about features stops thinking about like future plans and marketing and you know the company culture and everything else and they're like dude the shit is melting so i asked michael birch was my my former boss and then became my investor at my ideal lab and you know michael had basically sold bib for eight hundred fifty million dollars and i wanted to know like and he he had struggled before that for three three and a half years to like make something work and so i asked him i was like you know what was it like kind of before and like you know when the turning point happened like did you were you just feeling like so good once it's once it clearly started to work here's was like well he kinda of described the boulder pushing up the hill thing he's like well before when i was like i quit my job we had two kids and a third on the way we had mortgage our house and like i had told my wife give me six months to try this and now i was three years in and i still hadn't figured out oh anything that worked but i felt like i was getting closer and closer he's like that was hard i felt like i was pushing to boulder up the hill then with be we like i finally put together all the pieces i knew that social networking was a good product to like a good category like this before facebook like i knew that social networking was gonna be big people were gonna talk to other people in the internet they were gonna have profiles and comment on each other's pages i just felt like that was true and then i knew how to grow it which was like these viral like kind of fill in your profile quizzes and share it with your friends i knew how to grow it and like so i i i launched the thing he was in nine days we had a million users and he's like back then a million users was like so huge on the internet he's like he's like you know nine days later none of them came back i had a retention problem but he's like i knew that i had like something that could light fire so i turned it off i started working on the retention to like give you a reason to come back every day like i knew this gonna work he's like i then when it works he's like i didn't feel like this immense joy like yay i finally overcame it he's like i felt even more pressure he's like dude now this is actually like you finally did it don't f this up like this can actually be valuable don't mess this up he's like that became a whole new level of pressure and like burden that i felt and he's like i worked so hard and i think after they sold like what our four years in or something like that i think he had like major heart surgery like five months later because he had been like so working so hard and under so much stress and pressure that whole time i'm sure that could contribute something like that but when you described that i was like okay so i've never felt that like i've never felt anything that you just described that means i've never felt the like the violent version of product market fit when that like a billion dollar company feels so what did brian it he didn't say what it feels he didn't define it as much he was just he had said basically some something along the lines of you know you know you're making something that people want and you know the you know there's like you know whatever true to band for he says something sort of general like that but we've they've been thinking about how do you know because that's so general that you're going to be optimistic and think you have it when you don't because god it would feel so good to have it and man i really sucks to not have it so you're always kind of like sq and looking for these like this evidence and what brian said was he goes act he goes my lucky thing was i wasn't a big analyzer or a big thinker i was just like action produces information so i would just do a thing and i produced information like oh people want this or they don't want this or they want it but there's something wrong with it like the the the be thing where oh they it grew but they didn't stick around okay but that produced information that first nine days produced a lot of information and so he's like but okay i built this wrong but now i know what's wrong with it so let me do another around and like he's like actually information so as a founder like just focus on the action part and like it'll either hit for you or or it won't but like action is really the only way you're gonna get to it and like you know smart action meaning you take action then you sort of like accurately assess what's working and what's not so that you're not taking blind action have you ever thought about the logistics of that though so coinbase there was this article a couple years ago written about them and when they were when i think in eighteen or nineteen when like the first cycle was happening and they're saying how like they've torn down walls at their office like just because they don't have enough space and like they they people needed to be in the same room to like shout at one another and then they're like we're also just taking meetings in the park i i i forget where their office was but it was weird near where you and i lived in san francisco and they were like yeah we're taking meetings in the park because they're just physically not enough space and if you think about the logistics of it you basically have this idea and the small thing in two thousand fifteen or sixteen or whatever and so right now they're at i think four thousand employees which means they've probably hired six or seven thousand if you count for turnover and if there's you know three hundred and sixty days in year or whatever it is three and fifty days a year that's like bay you're basically adding ten to twenty people a day in head count every single day for three years it's pretty wild that's wild right in to add ten or thirty people a day or whatever you and that's not even like that much compared to like a facebook or google but like the the that means that you gotta talk to yeah you're people five times ten times more yeah yeah it's if he says that and they he goes we have i think he said three thousand people now he goes but at i he's i personally i think was involved in the hiring of maybe the first like i forgot say like three hundred to five hundred he's like but then to hire this three hundred five hundred i had to talk to maybe three or five thousand people so i've done a lot of interviewing now and i have a good like if like interviews he's like i got totally burnt out from it if you just like like alright how are we're gonna get everyone on a laptop or how do we like make everything breaks everything breaks it's crazy you ever experience that person firsthand not that but i i've heard store again i've heard stories and that's how i know i didn't have forever even when i thought i had it and growth is happening i've only ever filled it one time with lab when our servers kept melting down and we was during a period where we went from about zero to two million users and like six month period and like we just kept like our vendors servers were going down then we're like shit what do we do like do your how is tok box going down how was cloudflare you know going down what's what's going on here like it was like and we were also getting ddos attacked and she'll that but but basically yeah it was that's the only time i've sort of felt it but that was like you know a very brief window of time the there's this guy dan rose i don't know if you follow him on twitter he was like a very was like number three number three guy at facebook or something yeah he was very early at amazon maybe like first fifty or a hundred people i was so guess something like that but he was early early days like he was around when the dot com bust happened i saw ninety nine two thousand two thousand one time period then he went to facebook and he was he ended up being like the number three guy at facebook behind z and cheryl and so anyways he shares these war stories from the from back day and he says these things that again you don't feel unless you're building one of these like you know thunder lizard type of companies that are just like these godzilla and he's like yeah amazon he's like we used to just do meetings in the stair well because it was just no like we ran out of desk space we're we started putting two people at every desk and that didn't even work was just working out of a stair well for like a three month period i was i just imagine like he's like yeah i took my laptop it sat there on the top stair and i was just like somebody would be walking by it but hey hey for that thing we're launching tomorrow like it can wait and then i just walk with him down the stairs while we talking and that was our meeting and so he shares these stories about like what it was like his twitter follow his twitter is a is a good follow for sure did i ever tell you did i ever tell you about the airbnb cafeteria no so when sarah my wife works there and i used to go to the office because my office is right next door to it for dinner time all the time basically they had this beautiful office in every office or meeting room is made to look like a popular airbnb like you know think you could rent and it's like this beautiful office you know brian and joe they're like designers so every and everything like in their office looks exactly like that and their cafeteria can you know see three or feed three thousand people or whatever however many people they have there and their whole stick was every single item was made there at the office so the red bull they had like airbnb bowl the ketchup up the mayonnaise made right there the trail mix like they made they they made everything one hundred percent except for the beer i think that's the only thing that they didn't make but besides that if you consumed it it's like they didn't have doritos you couldn't get a coke in that office it was all made right there on the spot and i remember thinking like this company just that in itself is like a pretty amazing feat and that's not even close to being like their thing know what i mean yeah that's exactly that's like that's not they're that's like they're thing this is all logistics you know that's their version of of lunch that's a table takes to get people to work there and i remember like thinking like how on earth you do you pull that off because like just literally five years ago or maybe three years ago i had interviewed there and it was two hundred people and it was like an okay office but it it that that'll i remember seeing that and i was like this is just amazing this is this is absolutely ridiculous dude i had the same experience i went to z office back when z was like you know still airbnb used to share an office with them i believe by the way i went to that z office as well and that office is crazy first you walk in and there's like a tunnel to enter like you remember that tunnel the light the lit up tunnel so it's like you walk in it's a led tunnel so you feel like you're entering a special you feel like you're entering a spaceship of some kind or like you know you're walking out into stadium and then there's just dogs everywhere i was like do people have allergies here how's this allowed just like yeah no we're just is it's like this free free land and i met we met the chef this guy matt matthew i think it's a du t this is what's his name it sounds like a chef name so he was like yeah let me give you a tour and so he was the one who brought us into the office i was like okay he's said like yeah give me like the kitchen tour and i was like okay cool this will take like you know two minutes and then we'll go see the other thing and like the kitchen tour took an hour because it was the exact same thing he goes he goes so this is our staff he goes everything that you eat here is made on premise and i was like okay he's like see that like i was like you guys have like he's like you wanted to drink i like yeah i'll like a sparkling water or whatever he's like cool it's on tap here and it was their fizzy water i was like you make your own fizzy water he's said like yeah we make our own seltzer cider beers they made everything he's like yeah this like you know the salad here like we grow all the the like we have a micro farm on the root that's crazy and so like this mushroom was grown here this like ar ar is grown here it's all a circular system i was like what and then he's like i was like but what about you don't have animals for like you know he's like no we do get animals and we get the full animals so he opens up the walk and fridge and there's just cow cows hanging upside down full cows and i was like what is this and he's like yeah we break down the entire car and we like you to use every bit of it for our things i was like you and what army dude he's like oh we have forty five people and our chef that's crazy executive i'm the executive chef we have forty five people on our team i was like you have i don't have forty five people in my company you have forty five people on the lunch team and i was like this is just absurd it was insane and i was like wow the arms race for like you know pam tech tech things and like building this like culture of you're building something special was you know kind of amazing to be honest it it was really amazing i i i was blown away by that i've cows on my at my ranch on my airbnb property and i've we have like eighteen of them or something like that and i've and you know they butcher them so they like every year they send away like four or five and then i see the new ones being born and i thought it'd be cool to get a freezer out there and you like paid twenty bucks and you could get a stake and be like yeah this cow is you know like the mother of the one that you see right in front of the y'all like get like the you know because you could sit on the porch like watching the cows would come up there was too sad for me and it was too sas for me i couldn't do it i need like distance from it i need to like i i ignorance is bliss for me when it when it comes to eating me yeah i didn't end up doing it because i was like this is just t i can't handle it because like i see these guys playing and like get to know and they get to know me i was like oh fuck right i'm not nearly as tough as i thought i know sure alright should we wrap it or because they're like are you paying by the minute now your surcharge here your your studio because i'm free here in my studio yeah well you know ben still getting used to like the logistics of this so i'll just leave it at that but i think i think our our time is up what do you think you are are you inspired now to look better or you still don't give a shit i'm very inspired the inspiration isn't the problem the the skill to do it it's the problem do like upgrade my own space is it i'm not gonna give it's gonna like do it do you use that room for anything i use it for for this and my wife works out of here too so but but we can use it for howard room it's an office though right it's like well like just like it'll look like a cnn newsroom just having the background like working like it looks fine they just make it look a little pretty they'll put some of this crap on there dude send them i'm open to it the doors open ring the doorbell alright well i guess that's the pod we'll see if this actually changes anything but it might