Why Is Andrew Wilkinson Monetizing His Twitter Followers?

like eight hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue if i get two and a half percent that's two million if i do five percent that's four million and if you just think about what would i pay for a business that makes me that much money a year like this is like five ten fifteen million dollars of value and so i'm looking at it and going this is great i'd pay for what i'm getting yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to all in in like a day zone a alright what's going on everyone we have andrew wilkinson on the pod today andrew's is one of our great great friends he runs this company called tiny which is publicly traded in canada it's a holding company that owns like forty different companies think it's publicly traded at like a eight hundred million dollar market cap something like that does hundred fifty ish in a year in revenue so he's i was really good insight and we talked to him about a few interesting things one thing that sounds kinda like not that cool but actually is cool as you hung out with a few folks that are worth like ten or twenty billion dollars recently and he like talked about what it's like hanging out with people in that sphere we talked about meta lab which was his agency that he started which provided all the profits in order to start tiny and how it makes something like twenty million dollars year in profit and we just said how the hell does it make so much money and what do you guys do so he gives us a breakdown on matt we also asked them which agency he would start now we asked him all about his new twitter experience so why would somebody who is worth all this money run a twitter experiment where that makes ten or twenty grand a month in sales and he gave us a slowdown and how much money his that little experiment making and then we asked him about when you take dividends from a company like what do you actually do with the dividends and where do you invest them or how much do you pay yourself and he got really transparent about that and so it was really interesting so check it out this is andrew wilkinson it's sean and me sam so if you guys like it from subscribe on youtube subscribe on your spotify subscribe on wherever podcast podcasts are and let us know if you liked it see you soon i was before you got charles make it put a badger he looks like kevin mca mom and home alone mom the mom the mom was a burned there he he looks like he he looked like he's just taken up roller blade get in the in the nineties you're saying it look like katherine herrera look at her character at the home alone she had a massive wave it was cool yeah let me make the chip back no i think we got embrace dude just you you're look like a bully in a movie i think you look good i think it's cool okay man she was hot she was hot alright but i think well welcome back there's no podcast on earth where you will just be welcomed with open insults like my first million yeah this is great like you guys wanna roast me for another ten minutes yeah i i was i was supposed to come on what like three weeks ago and then i got strep throat and dude i haven't been that sick in years i was like on death store for a year i ended up taking like three different antibiotics so i'm i'm glad to be alive and you're on a health kick now you've been living weights yeah yeah i'm doing a muscle game competition with much of friends so that's been really fun sean says he's sean has like i think forty days left to have ab many days do you have i'm i i just say i'm perpetually eight weeks away from having exactly the body i want the problem is it's this clock restarts every time at door ash you know domino's or talk about or something like that so have you tried just doing oz because like i i have so many friends that are taking that and it's just like they're suddenly ripped yeah there's it just doesn't have it doesn't do it for me and sean's very anti like are you would you are you you're are you a vaccine are you an anti vaccine guy too no but i do think that killer vaccine was not a vaccine because i was like wait a minute so you still get it you still spread it alright well that doesn't sound like vaccine me you're like anti putting stuff in your body it seems i don't drink caffeine i don't take like i guess i take some supplements like i'll take a protein powder or whatever but yeah i try not to be dependent on anything and you know the weight loss thing for me i'm already married i got you case i really care to lose weight aside from conquering my mind and doing something that i wanted to do so if i took oz to do it it would not be satisfying in the way that it will be when i just do it myself yeah i've just always told myself at one point in my life wanna look like wolverine even if it's like for one week and then it's over and it's unsustainable or whatever i wanna get there i wanna have the photo to prove it so that's my goal for the next year well you should do the the jesse is living with a seal thing i feel like that's in play for you why why aren't you doing that that sounds so freaking miserable that was the david go thing did you read that with them no i just remember you guys had him on you gotta you gotta read that book it's pretty good it's a fun it's a fun i'm living living with in seal or something l with seal and i'll dylan he writes it almost like a diary so it's just sort like a it's not like a long book with like a bunch of flower language it's very simple and you know it's like any david go and it gets motivated but this is like secondhand hand go you don't even realize the guy is david go because he doesn't say it in the book and you're reading the perspective not of david go telling you that you're soft and you need to be hard but like a guy who was kinda soft getting yelled at by david guy and so you're sort of secondhand hand of receiving the info i have you guys seen to cover this book it looks like you know remember like ernest goes to camp it looks a cover of like ernest very outdated well we and we're having the guy jesse on the pod soon he's scheduled and i was thinking about it sean we've to ask our question of like who's like who has the ideal life he's up there man is he's kinda nailed it well that's his thing the life resume what does he do so he just like has these experiments or whatever i know he went and lived with monks and he's done the navy seal thing well before that he was like i think he like a mis initially made a little bit of money by having like i think he had like a rap group and he like made songs for like the new york knicks and he like that was his career was writing jingle try to be a rapper was like alright maybe can't be like rapper rapper but i could be like commercial jingle rapper pivot with that made a couple million bucks like sold the company like four million dollars then he created the fractional jet chair company mark jets given his buddy and they sold that to net jets which buffett owns and then he married the c cofounder banks are the founder span and she's like a billionaire there yeah and then he also created like a coconut what's it called z water he bought into z coconut water z coconut water oh no z z coconut water early on and then help them sell a coke so he hey he basically he just goes like kinda like mission or passion to passion but he's had like pretty good results like your own owns a part of an nba team he was like oh i wanna i'm in into fitness so he creates this running club it he actually reminds me a little bit of you in that like i feel like you experiment like you like to experiment and you'll get into your experiments and the experiments almost start there's almost like oh why is andrew doing this almost silly thing but it's because there's something in you that's like you've identified something like right now jesse there's like i love pickles and there's no great pickle company so he's like scouring the earth to find the best pickle company to buy because he's like there's a big opportunity pickles and he's like can't believe you guys are all sleeping well while there's a pickle opportunity like this and i just find that amazing how he's getting really into these like niche passion pursuits but then kinda pulls them off in an epic way i think i think it's really cool i mean i think we talked about him for a nick gray any of these people that build their life around the thing they actually love doing because i feel like so many of us were like okay i wanna get rich i wanna build a big business or whatever and so you get into doing something we don't actually necessarily like a lot of those for tasks you do where if you can build a business where your job is like to meet interesting people or be a podcast and speak to really interesting people all the time or do these crazy life experiments i think that's awesome but i think it's a double edged sword i've made that mistake where i will get into a hobby or something like that and i'll turn it into a business and it will take the joy out of it so i think it's a little it's a little hard to find that that right in between spot that's why i didn't wanna do that twitter thing because so you're doing twitter subscribers you have like a community now i yeah i think you i know if you'll say the revenue or not but it's like actually kind of a business six figures a year in revenue yeah you enjoying that well you you told me you're doing it and i was like i wanna do that that's sounds hard yeah yeah well let me let me explain so yeah so i have about two hundred and forty thousand twitter followers i've never monetized it anyway i just you know i tweet every day and it's literally like am in the shower or i'm on the toilet and i think think of something and i tweeted it up that's always been my life on twitter and it's been amazing like i've met tons of interesting people from it but the issue is and i know both you guys have this problem too you get endless reach outs from all these people constantly and for a while i had open dms it was just overwhelming i was getting like a hundred dms from random people pitching me on like crypto scams and stuff every like twenty five people would be some incredible twenty two year old who has this amazing cash flow business they wanna sell me or they need money or something like that and so i had this incentive to go through it and i would spend like thirty minutes a day going through all these and tri them and kind of hating my life and so when i saw this subscription thing i was like okay this is actually a filter so what twitter lets you do is have gated tweets so you can say anyone who pays to subscribe to me gets these extra tweets and so what i did is i was like okay if someone will spend twenty nine bucks which is the cost to basically buy me lunch then they can dm me then they can message me then i'll you know then i'll respond and so i used this as a filter but it kinda surprised me as i started doing the math so basically what i did is i said okay twenty nine bucks i'll do an ama once a month which you know i enjoy doing anyway in a video or writing just video like a big video group or whatever and then i made a telegram group and that's it and said i won't even respond to the telegram group you know that's it you get the ama and my tweets or whatever but when you do the math like it's pretty crazy i have about five hundred and fifty paying subscribers today that's growing pretty consistently that's a book sixteen k of mr so about two hundred k a year it's basically pure profit i probably spend an hour a month two hours a month doing the or whatever whatever and if you look at the math like a one percent conversion rate on two hundred and what is it two hundred and forty thousand people that's like eight hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue if i get two and a half percent that's two million if i do five percent that's four million and if you just think about what would i pay for a business that makes me that much money a year like this is like five ten fifteen million dollars of value and so i'm looking at it and going this is great i'd pay for what i'm getting i'm getting people being filtered out the ding are filtered out i'm making money and i'm actually getting deal flow so i've like hire i've literally hired two or three people from this i now go to this group and i'm like hey i need a ceo for this business or i wanna buy a business like this and so it's been awesome and yeah i'm loving it same do you pay to follow andrew no i will i can just text them but i will i'm a ding it's like that you're in the biggest i'm a paying subscriber i i are you of course alright i'll do it are you gonna do it sean no i'm never gonna do this i paid literally to just figure out why the hell is andrew doing this and then i my mind started going with conspiracies i text andrew could i share my conspiracy theory as to what yeah yeah okay so sam i saint andrew a voice note i go this this is my logic you're way too rich to be doing this so there's gotta be another reason said why why would andrew start using all the paid features of toward these new paid features of of x why would he be doing these paid subscriber experiments and he's speaking so glowing about how this is so cool how he's discovering his true fans how he's getting all this value out of it i was like this just doesn't add up it's too much work for two little money for this guy and so then i was like i know what he's doing i've seen andrew do cool moves like this in the past where he uses he throws his weight around in order to meet the cool people he he likes and admire wants to hang out with i said oh this is the long game because guess who really wants cool interesting people like andrew using all the paid twitter features in order to to to to build a a small business and and it and would love that they're telling the world how great this is elon freaking musk and i thought oh this is genius actually andrew is using this feature on blast he's the most legit guy who's doing this with a unique use case and he's got a big following he's gonna be the gold star example he's gonna get a follow he might get a dm i mean might get invited might get invited to come out to visit andrew andrew's gonna end up friends with the elon musk from this whole that's my prediction and said i've i sent a voice note to andrew like i cracked the case like i found you know whatever the the shooter for jfk and i was like i know what you're doing you're trying to become friends with elon and he's like no just like yeah right and i was like damn i almost wish that was the answer that i would have been a better answer is that true actually i have no and i i am i've invested in spacex quite a while ago and i have a ton of friends who are friends with elon and know him and stuff i honestly i don't know what i would say to the guy right like i feel like he's like a super genius engineer like super kind of asp burger guy i own there's a lot of people i would love to meet elon i love to be at a dinner table with him but i actually don't i i don't know what i would say to him it's like meeting thomas edison like how am i interesting to this guy you know would you like most boring businesses i really wanna meet larry allison i've been trying to meet larry allison for like probably two years and i went to lana i and he owns the entire island of lana i it's insane like everything he owns their all the businesses all the hotels all the real estate and while i was there i was trying to find a mutual connection and he kept driving by me in he or drops an orange the guy the guy drives an orange corvette that and he just rips around lin eye and i just couldn't i couldn't meet them but anyway he's super fascinating dude it's so funny that from the outset so we'll do an intro to this because we just jumped into it but so andrew you're in your mid are maybe late thirties now thirties now and very very successful company in the ballpark of a billion dollars publicly traded and you still can't meet some people and so good looking it looks like the mom from come alone and we still can't get it done it's insane i claimed to fame wanted to look like wolverine and instead i look like the mom from home i didn't tell the store on the podcast yet but i went down to la and i i did a bunch of these like pod interviews that are gonna be coming out but i did some meetings that were not podcast just like really interesting people but i didn't i it didn't record i just wanted to go i went to their house i just wanted to meet them and see what they're like and one of the people so i can't say who but one of the people they were showing me around their house is a famous successful person in la you know just use that general character and the sense that they're really insightful they were talking about trying to get something and they're trying to get their kid into a school and like this a person who's rich and famous it can kinda get anything they want but there's you know these schools and a later these private schools that like their they get their thing is that they're like harvard for kindergarten they like rejected everybody and so they got rejected at the school and he's like he's just saying that he goes i he goes i couldn't tell you that morning he's like i felt something that i hadn't felt in seven years rejection he's like nobody had told me no in seven years and i was like wow that's a that's kind of amazing that you know you you sort of field rejection and so and it was my my tier larry ellis point i think it's great they do have certain things that that didn't didn't work out or you got rejected rejection because when we were in the la late we made met maybe twenty people during the week that we had meetings with and i would say a very common thing was so people were out of touch with rejection which was either one of two things they weren't trying enough new things so they're just in their comfort zone or everybody around them just said yes even to their bad ideas even to like requested did make sense and you could see firsthand how that's not a great thing oh you don't wanna be in that position has i i don't know if you've been single and successful but dan has this lying i actually wrote the dan area book which is shockingly good and he's like being famous is so much better for meeting girls than being rich he's like it's ten times better to be famous than it is rich have you found being successful has helped you with women or do they mostly not give a shit well i haven't been i haven't really been like single for a very long period of time it's definitely helped but i mean i think it ultimately comes down to status in the room you're in right so like if you're in a club you know the dj the guy who's making less than the bartender and is getting paid in drinks he's the man he's the guy that all the girls wanna sleep with right so i think you know whatever room you're in and so you know if i was at like a like a business conference and a bunch of people knew who i was yeah maybe that would help me with women but when it comes to day to day i mean yeah you're way better off being like an instagram influencer or something like girls actually care about i think it helps though i mean it helps to have your your shit together for sure how do you play the status game i had to experience recently where somebody i know i after to be real really vague about this somebody i know went to someone's house who is a billionaire that's also famous and that person entertain a bunch of people during the summers and has a bunch people at their house at the same time all of those people are also rich and famous and the person i know a regular person no you know not not like somebody would recognize or somebody who's been in people magazine or whatever him and so they felt very intimidated in that social setting to the point where they're like you know i i i'm just gonna go eat my room because it's like i don't really wanna feel like if i go here i have to engage don't really know how to engage they're they're not gonna hear about me they're really like talking themselves out of it and i think there's a very common situation i know because i've definitely felt that in a bunch of social settings i think that's probably more common than i realized i thought when when i experienced it i thought this was something that was just happening in my head then as this person was telling me about it i realized okay this probably happens to a lot of people how do you guys deal with that like kinda social anxiety where you're in your own head about the status of the people in the room and how you fit in and where where you fit i've just realized that everybody wants to talk about themselves and it's the dale carnegie thing find out what someone likes to talk about and then talk to them about that and just keep asking questions and i realized that if they've if i make them feel good if they get to talk about the thing that they're interested in they will leave that experience thinking of me as a very positive person regardless of status have you read that books sean do you know what he's talking about yeah i i have yeah there's like a famous story where this like a young guy is hanging out with this like rich guy who has the power and the young guy just asked questions for ninety minutes of this hundred minutes do and at the last ten minutes the rich guy finally like asked him just a little bit and the rich guy leaves conversation being like that was the best conversation that i've ever had that person sure is great and the other you know the nobody was like dude i barely said anything that literally happens to ben and the business partner all the time he'll come back from a meeting and i'm like how to go he's it's great guy you i asked to i have bunch questions you know he's like he literally i really didn't tell him anything i didn't say anything he didn't really ask me too much he's like i just asked him so many questions that i was interested in about him he's like at the end of it that guy stood up i was like matt this just one of the best conversations ever i really like you and i was like did it again like you know he is that he's like the walking version of that book and and you leave and you're like you know nothing about you didn't ask any questions and i think it's great if the person is really fascinating what the status stuff though where i get annoyed is so i remember i was at a conference probably like thirteen years ago and at this point my business is making you know couple million bucks a year in profit you know it's pretty successful and i sit down at this table next this vc and he seems very dis interested and you know then he says what is what is your startup do and i say well i don't have a startup i a business and it's profitable and he literally just goes oh a lifestyle business it turns his back just turn literally just turns his back away from me and just starts talking to the guy next to him and i remember who it is i one day there's gonna be like a come up in moment but i always think about that and then the other thing that happened to me recently so i was on this yacht i'll tell you guys about that later if you want do it now okay so so basically i got i got invited to go on like a hundred million dollar plus yacht which i was actually really really excited about just always been curious like it's this bizarre thing that you know you really don't get see very often and so i thought i'd love it but i actually found it incredibly odd it's something that i feel like is very desirable because others desire it and we all have this idea of it but in reality i just don't get it like you spend this insane amount of money to be isolated in a floating hotel away from all the p basically right what what's the what was the net worth of the guy in order to have a hundred million dollar yet you're worth like five or ten billion twenty billion plus like very very very wealthy guy i won't i won't say who but someone who's like a subscriber of yours on twitter let's just say somebody with though yeah that's right exactly not a ding but you know you know like you do you ever like you ever have a feeling of like you know you're you're on this you're on this like floating hotel it's shaking rattling it's slang lightly which is like in my opinion not not nice and then you like have you ever been like on on a really really nice rv like you go one of those bus rv and you're like holy crap i can't believe this rv has like the shower i can't believe it has like a king size bed but at the end of the day it's an rv king size bed it's not as nice as being in a hotel and i felt like that's the rich person equivalent right like everything on this boat is amazing but it's not as nice as staying in a four seasons and it's a hundred times the cost and you've got this thing that costs you ten to twenty million dollars a year to maintain no way really thirty staff for ten people literally this whole boat just has ten guests on it right it's just crazy but anyway while i'm on this yacht whole bunch of people there and there's this guy who runs a publicly traded company and you know i'm doing my thing i'm asking questions and chatting with everyone and he kind of like you kind of the serious guy it seems very uni by me and he goes oh so what's your business and i say oh i've got a you know holding company and he goes always a public and i say yes it's public and he goes how big is it and i go i don't know trading at like eight hundred million today and he goes oh okay and his is like ten billion he's like oh lifestyle business he's haunting you yeah exactly it was like that same feeling right and it's like i still get that the same ear irritating feeling and i just feel like i'm not gonna i'm like opting out i just can't be a lips up his legs with it just walks away like soups up that's that's no that's the weird thing with the status game right it's like there's no end of it there's no end like the bill i remember i was talking to a guy who's a multi billionaire and he goes oh my god you know lori pal steve jobs widow she's so fucking rich she's worth like twenty billion and i look at him and i'm like what can you not do that she can and he kinda goes glass eyed and he's like super yacht i can't do a super yacht yet and it's just like that is the most pathetic and insane thing but you're you yet you're falling into that trap as am i i'm sure sean is as well where you know i'm not a billionaire but i'm sure someone looks at what you know maybe what i have and they go why would you want more and in my head i'm like of course i want more and i'm angry at myself for wanting that but it's never enough yeah it's like leaving a party and you go to the and then you move to the next room and then they put you back at the kids table and you're like god i just wanna be at the adults table right now and i just keep getting ending up at a kids table no matter what level i get to we were at an event that was a basketball related event and i've said this before ben has like some facial recognition software or something like that because he's like that guy over there is the minority owner of this nba team i'm dude how do you even recognize the minority owners of these teams like that i don't even know who these people are you see him at an event you're like that's him he's standing alone just talking to nobody and so we walk over we're like oh let's introduce ourselves walk over and introduce ourselves hey what's going on i'm sure you know what brings you here and whatever something like that so he took he we kind of approach him from the side he turns he's got two airpods in i was alright double layer pot alright no opening this that's okay he'll he'll surely take one out he looks at us they say the first line and he kinda just looks at us like are you gonna leave or is there more oh there's more okay i see him he takes out his phone and he just slides the volume slider down halfway i'm like house shit he still he didn't even pause he just temporarily gave us like some space and we and we we actually know a little bit again because ben knows this guy he's like oh yeah he he's really into this and he's his business was doing this so i'm like asking him about his thing for a second and you know this guy if there was a cologne called leave me the fuck alone he would've have been spraying it all over us in that moment and this is so obvious what this this guy did not wanna talk to us so fair enough we walk away next day we see a picture of him like on of on instagram like that he's smiling and we i texted our who approached him with us and i was like oh there's somebody snapped a picture of him when we walked away like that's him smiling so bright you know as that interaction was over but i feel like it's like you know you have to experience these things so that you won't do it to others right and i always wonder like what's the moment where i kind of did that to somebody now like i i never wanna become that show me where i'm gonna die so i don't go there one i wanna ask you a i wanna ask you a question that's unrelated i think sean put this here as actually his last question and i just read it and it's the same question of i i have had and we could see this now that you guys are public so andrew's companies publicly traded tiny dot com you could slash investors you can find all the good stuff think you guys even did your annual meeting with is a podcast which is cool sean has this question how the fuck does meta lab make so much money and that is a similar question that i have it's astounding how how your your services part of tiny does so well some i think it's it's i don't know what the exact numbers you can clarify but it's something in the range of tiny making fifty or sixty million dollars a year with really healthy margins which is just a very big agency so yeah that's the question andrew how the fuck does meta ad makes so much money yeah i mean agencies can be incredibly profitable and they're incredibly hard and i think that when you do it for almost twenty years and you have a niche so for example with metal and we own you know the numbers you're seeing are the blended collection of i think six or seven different agencies what just be metal app what's the public number i don't i don't know off for that division i don't i thought it was like sixty or seventy yeah i don't know i mean this is one of the downsides of being public right i don't wanna say some number and have it be wrong and then sure you know sit whatever but but you know anyone can go look at the filings and see but for the group of those agencies you know they can be incredibly profitable if you find a really really good niche and the nice thing with mental lab is that you know we basically own product design and building like mvp vps for startups and stuff in two thousand seven and we worked at it for a really long time and so when you have that reputation people will pay up to get you right and there's really not that many people that do it and do it well and have the capabilities we do so you can charge a premium and have really healthy margins now that goes up and down depending on what's going on in the market depending on how much you know how hard it is to hire designer developer that kind of thing and the problem with an agency is that it's the most variable business in the world so you know they're wonderful they produced a lot of cash flow but for the last twenty years we've actually been aggressively diversifying away from agencies and the agencies have just been a little engine that could they just keep on growing and growing and growing we didn't ever expect that metal i would get to the scale it's at and you know it's been like an amazing surprise sean and i were just sitting the exact same way yeah i i had to stop myself like because i was like oh man we're both like little surely temple right when i saw that i was like i'll let him go first but i know that there's so many things here that well simple question does meta lab get most of its or like how many salespeople does metal lab employee or people that like their core thing is to go sell that lab as a service to other people bring in new accounts bring in business well so we they don't really do a lot of outbound so it's mostly mostly inbound demand and again that's another reason why the business is the agencies in general have been profitable like we've basically focused on reputation and organic whereas a lot of the big agencies and people that have much lower margins so like a typical agency will have twenty percent margins fifteen percent margins even five percent margins if it's poorly run often they have to have a whole bunch of people out there cold calling and selling we don't have that problem to the same degree people come to us and wanna work with us so i think the sales team is maybe six or seven people or something like that the whole company is about a hundred and fifty or something you have had a bunch of agencies you've had meta lab which is product design was that i don't know that's how i would classify it you've had a no code agency you have a content agency you have like a bunch of different agencies metal labs seems to be like the biggest winner by far like if it like there's like power law right inside your portfolio and and and meta lab is bigger it's been around for longer is it because you started at the right time is it because you were there as the founder sweating it and grew it into something big is it because that niche is better why is metal labs so much bigger why have these other agencies not had the same sort of scale that meadow app was able to see well we really only started dev based on here's what happened so med lab was the golden goose that provided all the cash flow that we used to build tiny and buy all the other businesses and to be honest we really were kind of saying we don't want more agencies you know we're happy to own that one we'll hold it forever but that's not an area we wanna is that is that beam is that is that division called beam so here i'll just read call called beam i'll here here this is from your two thousand this is from your one of the reports so founded in two thousand six with zero dollars invested never raised the cent of equity in two thousand twenty one it did sixty two million revenue with earnings of twenty one million twenty sorry that was twenty one thousand twenty two it did eighty one million with about twenty million in in operating earnings so those are the the public numbers yeah so so anyway so we have this problem so metal lab was getting to the point where they could only do projects for like five hundred thousand dollars and so we had tons of leads coming and we had no send them would just say no and so we went out and we acquired a small agency in spain we spun up eighty twenty we kind of basically said look we've got we have a saw we've got all the sawdust coming out of the saw all this demand we should go form this into wood pellets and sell it and so we've basically created like a whole constellation of smaller agencies to service the leads from the big one and then all of those agencies have kind of moved out of the house now so they're not reliant on medal ad leads anymore to the same degree and we've had some amazing successes while they're not as big most of those we started for twenty five grand maybe or up up to the biggest one we bought maybe for five hundred grand you know that business today is two or three million dollars of eb so they're we've had some really good wins but i have this whole framework of like one plus one equals a hundred and you guys had sci ed on yeah what would you think about that last week i guess i love those great and there's so much about the way that he thinks we've read all the same books a lot a lot was very similar and i was nodding my head along but what he did with wp p beginner where he goes hey i've got this huge source of traffic i've got all these users that wanna be told what plug ins to use and then he can go and buy these plug ins that have a customer acquisition problem they've built a great product they're built by a developer they don't know how to market it they don't know how to source customers when you put those two things together you're basically buying this business on historical earnings but you know you can ten it tomorrow and to me that kinda reminds me of what we've done in the agency space we've said look we have you know a hundred leads coming in every month that are you know things we can't service we might as well spin up all these agencies to make a bunch of money from those too and i love that model you told me that the revenue and the profit i mean it's almost twenty years old that the revenue and the profit in some years it's been very lumpy where like it went down a significant amount the next year right oh yeah it's it's a roller this is the thing is everybody that looks at these businesses goes wow these are incredible i'd love to own an agency the reality of an agency though is that it's a whole bunch of people their hair is always on fire they either have too little work or too much work maybe either they're over hired or under hired and the margins can swing around a lot if you're not very disciplined so these are very hard businesses they're not they're not easy but they can be wonderful businesses from a cash flow perspective and certainly i mean sai had said it as well but if i was you know if i lost everything and i didn't have my twitter subscribers i would probably go start an agency like i think that is the easiest way to make five hundred grand a year very very simply that's changing with ai probably but what niche agency would you do if you had to start over from scratch would take away all your money and all your all your audience well i would do design just because that's what i know but you know that's that's my world right like that's where i started but i don't know i don't know how that evolves over time sean are you thinking about doing an agency me hell no do you know anything about me i'm looking to get rich lazy way i'm not trying to do the hard stuff but you can do it this is what this is what drives me crazy you guys have look at nick cooper nick cooper has three hundred thousand twitter followers and he basically said okay i get five different inquiries people messaged me asking for seo they asked me for property appraisal ask me for web design and they asked me for no one asked nick for web design yeah yeah to clear sure sure for whatever whatever right like he can promote nick is one of my closest friends he's doing an seo did agency i'm like nick do people ask you for seo like i did did but he's what he's doing what he's doing is smart right so he's a human router so he's got all these en inquiries and then he's routing them and so like what sean did so this whole framework of one plus one equals a hundred like sean what you did with she right you have this business it perfectly aligns with you you know the product all you have to do is talk about it a bunch and it will do well you haven't but that is a fucking hard business that is the agency right that's a recruiting agency which is a brutal brutal complicated kid business that's just been all abstract it away from you and you could do that you could abstract away digital agency if you guys wanna buy a piece to one of my digital agencies and just promote the fuck out of it i will happily do a deal with you okay i i will do that because you know it's easy for me to tell people that shepherd lets some higher talented people for ten x lower price than in the united states it's it's easy for me to tell people that that they should go to support shepherd dot com and gonna do that that's not hard right it's not hard for you to tell people how much insane value there is and how i use that for my businesses easy stuff to do yeah and how would the yeah good point and i feel like i feel like you guys are like you know when i hear you say this it's like you're looking at it and being like oh a car wash like i don't wanna get my hands like all wet and i'm like i don't wanna scrub the cars and it's like dude you just own the car wash yeah but you have to make sure that the product is good enough that you wanna promote yeah which does involve brain power and worry for before i've started the shepherd i tested every product that does that on the market i hired through each of them i hired multiple people through shepard bet with marshall i was like okay here's a deal that makes a lot of sense and it's a it's at the right scale where it works versus these like agencies from zero i think are a lot harder but i will say the shepard experiment has been so great that i can't wait to do the next shepard because it is it's the perfect thing right their revenue doubles mh my income goes up without the operational load customers get a good service that they you know that they they need and they wanted it anyways that's that is like so much easier than for example my e com my e com business is like your agency business like you know yesterday i'm looking at the inventory forecast oh we were way under than we were way over and we're just constantly gonna get this wrong we have we need so many people to do all the operations for this because there's a physical product and you have to do photos sheets and you have to do everything to make this business work and i'm like man this is hard mode compared to you know the easy mode of what what the other side of things we're doing totally and that's the that's the thing i think like to man with a hammer everything looks like a nail so it's like you guys are probably both start newsletters i'd start an agency it's whatever you know and is easy but it's not the forever business like i have this whole thing about you wanna you wanna before you launch your rocket you need a launch pad build the launch pad this is the launch pad business right it just provides you the ability to go and do the things you're really passionate about did you explain the the one oneplus one he equals a hundred did you say what that is yeah so well basically it's the idea of if you have an unfair advantage so for sci ed it was he has wp p beginner the blog he has tons of people that are asking hey what wordpress plug ins should i use and then if he buys a wordpress plug in which he can buy for incredibly cheaply he knows he can boost it so it's like a guaranteed return to me it's like you know imagine if you own an airport and there's like ten thousand people in the lobby every day you know that you can sell them hot dogs a hotdog dog stand is not a good business but if you put a hot dog stand in the middle of an airport i can guarantee you're gonna sell a lot of hot dogs there's a story after the side thing i i started reading about warren buffett who i had i knew nothing about and i've been texting andrew i'm like oh i get why you did this like this sounds awesome you know of course it sounds awesome when it's from the best person who's ever done it but there's a story in the late sixties when he was maybe thirty five and he goes to a movie theater and he goes boy it would be nice to own a little bit of all these ticket sales of all these people come in this movie this seems like a wonderful business and then he goes you know there's this company called disney that's doing this they even have a theme park let's go check it out charlie and so they literally go to the theme park to like figure out and they talked to like the the the attendance at the attendance at the rides and they're like how many people come to this thing and they're like that's how they're doing their research they actually went to the theme park and then he ends up buying five percent of disney i think he paid four million dollars so it was worth you know not a lot of money back then and knocked out the park and then there's another story about this guy he's like yeah warren buffett was supposed to be this wonder investor and we had all heard about him but i was in new york and i saw him walking around new york like pacing counting his paces and i asked him what he was doing he's like oh we're gonna invest in some type of real estate deal and i want to figure out how many paces it made up of this square block so i could guess how many like people are going in it was like something crazy like that it was really funny he where he would actually test these things he would look at the financials and that was the most important thing and then he would go like in real life and actually test these things to see like alright is this cool is this legit what's this all about and or he would like there's a story of him literally knocking on the door at geico like hey can you get can someone talk to me about this company tell me what you guys because the financials look great and like it was pretty funny how he did some of that stuff he's was very hands on yeah buffet i'm so glad that you're deep diving on buffett now because it is it is the way i think about it is it's business abstract to the ultimate degree you think about this guy he's got ninety or a hundred companies he's got three hundred and seventy five thousand employees and he sits on his ass reading in omaha every single day and i just look at that and i go how do i how do i do that and i don't know that sitting on your ass reading all day is the thing you wanna do necessarily but how do you take enough of buffet do you have the freedom to spend your however i i always heard people say that so was like oh i could read so i've been really like thriller novels and stuff like that i'm like i'm just like buff it i'm just like tom clan and then i read it viagra geography i was like oh he's reading annual reports all day fuck that i could just home and read all day so i've been reading like history books i'm like i'm just like buff it and then i read this book that him and i'm like oh he's reading like textbooks like that's way different yeah chris when chris and i started tiny maybe eight or nine years ago we were like we were reading all the buffett books and we're like okay this is what we're gonna do we're just gonna read annual reports all day we print out all these annual reports and i think we lasted like four hours doing so i just i it's so boring and it's these guys are like they're they're so all they wanna do is read right like charlie mu he just reads all day i think buffett a five hundred pages a day that he would read it's crazy it's insane that's a book a day a five hundred a day bit it's so boring i like i also tried to do that when i went and look at the reports and i'm like they're using the same words over and over again i don't even know what these words mean it it it's challenging you have some interesting tops out here i wanna do them so what is the give me these two cool businesses so cool business number one no story loss what is that yeah so this is really cool so have you guys heard of the business story worth yeah i'm a big fan of it yeah super smart started by this guy nick bomb he him and i worked out of the same office when he was starting it so he was he he i was one of his first customers i love him yeah he's awesome he's living living up on i think he's on maui right now just live in there and live in the dream but basically you buy it for like your parents or your grandparents your siblings or whatever i think it's like ninety nine bucks and all it does is it just sends like a drip campaign of questions and so it'll be like hey like tell me about your childhood what was a moment where you struggled in a job who is your first boss all these things that you've always been curious to know about your family and you can choose all the questions or whatever and then at the end of the year it compile it into a book that you can then print and share with your family or whatever and i thought like wow this is an amazing idea so i go and i spend two hundred bucks i buy it for my parents and of course my parents fill it out for like three weeks and then they just stop and i talked to my dad and he's like well it's a lot of writing you know has a lot of time and so i i was a little annoyed but i was like whatever and then i met this guy actually locally here in vancouver and he has this business called no story loss and it's like the vip version of story worth and so what they do is you just say okay dad look we're gonna schedule like three zooms you're just gonna talk to these people and they basically have like biographer they interview your parents or your siblings or whatever and then they actually write a proper biography of them so i'm about to get this book professionally written book about my dad's life and i'm so excited to read it end my dad was just so much happier because he didn't he just had to talk and like my dad loves to talk so yeah it's a a really neat little business i think it's like two grand or something versus two hundred do you know how big the business businesses i don't i don't think it's very big wait you met this guy he has a cool business and you didn't strap them down in water board till like annual revenues i actually i invest i think i invested twenty five k in it on basically like no questions asked given twenty five k i think it's doing like maybe a million or something but i think their big problem is customer acquisition so we'll one plus one equals a hundred here i am talk about it maybe blow this up and you don't need that many people to do it in order for it to do very well but i think the problem is that so nick makes a shit ton of money i think off story works do you think so because oh because it's automated right you don't need any employees you basically build it once and and then you just market it whereas this you gotta actually have a writer work with every single person that buys so i think it's a much harder business model but as a customer i think it's a really awesome idea i feel like these are the businesses that ai is gonna like just really help all their margins because you can have an ai biographer like an ai biographer is like a very good use case for these l where they can ask questions that they know will poking prod they can take your responses and ask follow ups and they could summarize all the audio that's coming in and transcribe it before so so that the writer then can come in take the source material and like you could cut the writers work down by something probably like fifty to eighty percent if did you guys see the book or the business called them it was called book in a box then it was called scribe and sean was a customer of them but basically my friend tucker max started it and he hired a ceo to run it and basically you would talk to someone for i don't i don't even remember how long you pay thirty or forty or fifty grand the prices have gone up throughout the years and they write a book for you and it's mostly business people who wanna write a book and eventually like it's paid speaking and consulting gigs but i thought it was doing great and all of a sudden out of nowhere not only did it go bankrupt but like there was like petitions from the authors who are who worked for the company as as contractors are like revolt and like it's caused a lot of controversy but they owe you sean a book right you paid them like tens of thousands of dollars and you just forgot about it are you bail on it yeah i was like you know bought i bought i paid i was yeah i wanna write a book great these people help you write a book they'll you know i'm i'm a guy with more ideas than time this will save you time fantastic let's let's try this and it's the same sort of idea like they you have the book idea of the concepts they hop on the phone with you they help you flesh it out it's like great i i wanna collaborate with that and then as you're flushing it out you're basically you can talk and they're taking all the notes and then they'll draft in your you know in the voice to want are you edit right now and was like oh seems like a good idea but i was so busy like we we started the milk crow and i like okay i'm if i'm operating a business i have to like do this well and so i paused it and now not just an pause we have like five friends who all bought books and then paused them for various reasons failed and no not bailed in our mind the door was always open and and yeah the door is still open i guess we just have to pay a little more money to get now if we want it to well you know i think i can say this because they tweeted it but during ventures xavier and ci they bought it yes just yeah today i wasn't is that public yeah he tweeted it like he tweeted it out i heard i had heard about that but i wasn't sure if he was gonna do it or not i don't know what's going on behind the scenes but if for a company to go bankrupt that quickly without like any type of signs i wonder if something's is going on but i i i it it seems like it might be a headache but maybe it won't be we'll see yeah i actually did it too like years ago i was thinking about i'm i'm working on a book actually right now i up not doing it with scribe but i tried it and i just found that it's great i think if you wanna write like a a corporate handbook that you can hand out to like your employees or something like that like a cheesy business book but if you actually wanna write something like really really serious and legit i think a bit hard i know david go he's like they're they're hit he's their hit but i think it's just hard again for the reasons we talked about with no story lost how do you guarantee quality when you have that much demand and stuff like i think you'd have to move up market i've been waiting for you to mention that you have doing the book thing because i wasn't sure if it was public or not sean you should read his first chapter i read the whole thing only people asked me to prove stuff and i'm like i don't want to and then i started reading his and i was like okay i'm actually into this it it it's pretty good it's it's been quite good yeah i can't wait i think it's gonna be amazing thanks steve how far yeah i'll share it with you i just sent the publisher my rough draft it's still i'd say it's still in the phase where like i'm embarrassed by it but i know that's the important step to making it amazing so yeah i i think it'll come in twenty twenty four what's your motivation why write a book honestly kinda to like muddle through like a there's a lot of lessons that i haven't read in other books around business and stuff that we've learned so it's kind of the story of building tiny but also just to kinda muddle through the exact thing we're talking about before about how everybody wants more you know it's never enough they're always trying to upgrade they're always trying to get bigger they're always trying to do the next thing and play the status game or you know comes from childhood trauma or you know something else and so for me it's been about pulling that string for myself so it's been a bit of kind of personal exploration and stuff it's been it's been fun i've really enjoyed it it's probably the thing i've enjoyed most over the last couple years do you wanna talk about some of these other companies i know you have routines on here you have i can't even know how to pronounce this one it looks like a hawaiian name yeah let me me buzz through both so routines is really smart so you know when you listen to a tim ferris interview it's like two hours and sometimes you're just like look dude like look doctor you know gut microbiome doctor just tell me what you do what do you do what do i take what do i buy and i actually was talking to tim ferris about this and i was like dude you've gotta add like a little segment at the end where you just say here's the books here's the one book recommendation here's one product recommend recommendation and here's one habit recommendation from each guest he never did it too bad but that's the juice that's the stuff that i asked people when i'm one on one with them and so my friend ham who i think you know two sandy yeah i use this agency it's good tampa yeah their agency is called tampa t a m mba they do really good work but so he created the site called routines so it's routines dot club as the url and what it does is it basically runs you through the day of successful people and so they do like hub tim ferris peter they actually just did one on major yeah yeah and and basically breaks down my entire day from start to finish and it's all these things that i wouldn't even think to share it's like you know how do i organize my email how do i you know what supplements do i take in the morning your shower and skin routine is huge right shower and skin all these random things what's really funny is he's used he's used mid journey or whatever to generate images for all the things so it's this like terrifying you look like me so the first big it's first picture i mean this is just a plus i mean mid journey is like you know the world greatest wing man here second picture now you're you if feel like this is like these are two different people these are not the same person but that's you know one of those challenges mid journey so you wake up six to eight am alright big window drink what's it's depending on if my kids wake a big glass of water with electrolytes if it's sunny you make airbrush coffee nice nice plug if it's overcast you use re time what's time it's like these little goggles that you wear and they blast your eyes with bright light they're to help you kinda wake up in the morning like if it's not sunny out you know like human is like go outside and see bright light is you don't have to go outside yeah so you don't have to go outside i'm looking at either like if you read through it it'll take like twenty minutes because there's so many freaking things dude you take you take ten supplements yeah like on and off depending on what they are here's you have a good morning word team by the way what's it coffee you newark coke yeah this is good do get i shoot up i shoot heroin right my clothes and it actually says wear which foot to do it in but but so here's what's cool about this business is people wanna share this stuff right it's like a very infinitely shareable like list of like here's this person's routine or whatever but throughout it if you look at the hub one for example he recommends ag one he recommends cold plunge supplements it's all affiliate revenue yeah and so it's just like one of these amazing build the content once updated it occasionally focused on seo make like thirty thousand dollars a month plus of affiliate it's just a perfect we talked about earlier like the launch pad business it's not the sexy business it's the launch pad this is cool i like this like this example do the maui new one what is that so this one is really i i thought this was super goofy when i heard about it and so basically me and my girlfriend we were visiting maui and hub was like oh you should meet this guy jake who runs maui knew and so this guy picks me up in this like ram shack truck he looks like a navy seal he's like the super jacked guy and he starts telling me he drives us into this huge ranch that they have and he starts telling me about the business and basically there's these deer called axis deer and they're from asia i have a on my ranch yeah some hawaiian royalty brought them to hawaii to hunt like a hundred and fifty years ago and because they had no natural predators they're just an invasive species they're like rats they're like everywhere and it's actually an environmental problem so they're like a pest they actually destroy the ecosystem and so the government literally flies helicopters and takes like you know machine guns and just guns these things down that's their current solution to this and so jake was like hey we could this is great meat a lot of native hawaiian hunt the meat and it's super healthy and delicious they sell it locally but the fda doesn't let you sell meat commercially and so he basically spent the last seven years getting approval to actually hunt and sell this meat and it's this like super complex problem so there's this interesting moat in the business so gonna take someone else like seven to ten years to compete and basically what they do is they have a bunch of professional hunters go with sniper rifles and they in the middle of the night they just shoot these deer in the head right and it has to be the fda is like it has to be in the head like so imagine this you're a deer you get to live this awesome life you are eating organic food you're running all over hawaii and then one day in your sleep you just boom your dead right and so i was like okay this is really fascinating so hub tim ferris ate they all invested to and here's what's crazy about the meat so not only is it like the most ethical meat you could pro possibly have because it's like a pest these deer like killed super ethically and stuff but they've tested it and it has crazy micron nutrient content so a piece of salmon is like fourteen percent protein this is twenty percent protein like beef is like nine percent it's good for the environment the animals live natural lives and then one day boom heads shot gone and so if you're like you know you're not eating meat for ethical reasons or for health reasons this is like an incredible business and so these guys sell like i think like ten twenty million dollars a year of pepperoni six and all this stuff so anyway go check it out maui ordering this stuff to do invest in this i did yeah can you tell i mean i'm giving you the full your sales switches are good how sam how did you you said you have these these same deer on your ranch randomly in texas he just told the story about like how this japanese royalty brought it to hawaii and it's like this whole special thing you're yeah i got i got some of the players in a backyard right like what are you talking about well so it's just i i don't know anything about animals or hunting but out in my farm you can only hunt normal deer i think for two or three months out of the year but we have this thing called axis deer i don't know if axis deer is like a category of animal or what no i'm looking at it it looks the same they're basically deer with spots on them and sometimes they have like tall ears or and so they kinda look different but they're called access year they have spots and they're all over texas i don't know if it's like the same thing or if it's like a category of animal but yeah we have them in texas i love how this random guy in hawaii just told me like fascinating story i love i got a guys they're rats that are everywhere actually that like know it's totally like they just needed to get this like waste product off their hands and like you know things got twenty percent protein eighty percent luck and a hundred percent power of oil like it's like i'm buying this i love this man this is great like yeah and i'll be like oh you needed access year i got a guy you know so guys you know you're like you know like every everyone like twenty years ago was really like drinking milk right like got milk yeah and then it i was almond milk then i was oat milk you guys are gonna love my next business it's rat milk are you serious no i could've i'm gonna order some of this beef i'm so like over the last two weeks i've gotten a little soft you know i had a little injury so i didn't work out like religiously over the last two weeks and been eating a lot of ice cream because it's hot so for the next thirty days sean you should try and join this with me i'm only gonna eat meats and or plants and animals i gotta get i gotta get back to basic plants and animals oh yeah that's good i like the way you branded that that's nice plants and animals so that's for the next thirty days gotta get my together because have gonna eat too much ice cream but i'm gonna order this stuff i'm gonna order it this actually looks great is this a fun business to run it looks fun to run but it might be a headache you gotta ship this shit all the way from hawaii i think it's super complicated i think they can charge your premium because i think they're the only people that are fda approved to sell it and you know they have the story and the brand and the investors and stuff but it's a hard business for that same reason right i mean there's a lot of people there's a lot of hunters on the hawaiian islands that want the jobs and stuff but logistically you know these guys are basically going on these like hikes in the middle of the night to go and do these like you know they're snip deer and then they have to shoulder carry them back to the truck and then they've got this whole facility there to process them stuff isn't the problem isn't the problem with this so i i've got a lot of like i've got a bunch of the funny thing about austin is it's full of like crazy health people like like you know you don't even know like are they actually insane or are they being serious like you know they're afraid of wifi but every once in a while of these guys will say something that's like really interesting and like turns out the right and one of them being is like do you know butcher box butcher box is bootstrap and i think it does like two or three hundred million dollars in revenue but my health nut friends hate it they talk trash about it they're like this is the worst you should never consume that meat these guys will also say like whole foods so they they don't even touch whole foods chicken they're like you can't it's gotta like if it's not it doesn't look a certain way i don't hanging it with justin mer too much i didn't wanna make names i don't know if justin if if if justin has said that explicitly but yeah they're in the same circle it just sounds like something that justin would say for he's probably correct though he's probably but that's my thing because these guys i'll be like alright but are you being like like conspiracy or you being like truthful and they're like this one's is a little closer conspiracy but then with like the meat stuff they're like this is closer to truthful but the problem with this business i would think is the bigger gets the worst it gets right well i think when i talked to him about scaling and stuff he was like look there's a lot of hawaiian islands there's a lot of deer that is there to scale it over to time him i think is yeah oh yeah is there a lot of hawaiian other or well there's sticks or seven of them or whatever right and they they basically they do this on a tiny amount of land as it is right now so i think they can think about it's not a business investment there might be a business here is larry ellis in investment this is a this is some of rich people do which is as you make money you start investing just in things that are interesting you start you start investing in dinner party conversations it's like i can't have a whole portfolio of like health saas like yeah even if that's where you know like the most money is made i need to invest in things that are interesting to me that are cool people that i wanna hang out with that do businesses that are worth talking about in life and there's like there's like positive e associated with that that people don't really understand till you you start doing it and then you're like oh this is nice you've gotta keep the check small and do a bunch of these and so you have this portfolio of like interesting this one day i think i i would say that i would say you're wrong so duh so so imagine like you're saying the same thing about athletic greens right okay so i to you and i'm like hey guys there's like these these guys they're like a vitamin but it's powder and you're like that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard what makes athletic greens amazing is that they spent the last fifteen years building relationships with all the most influential health people in the world so it's one plus one equals a hundred right they have tim ferris they have all these people who not only they buy ads with they also have all these people owning equity in the business so a million different competitors can come out but if in your brain the winner is ag g one because that's what you've heard and all the people that you respect do you will do it and you will pay a premium right yeah but that's different like vitamins were a thing vitamins were a thing greens greens smoothies people understood oh i should eat my vegetables that's been around forever i don't know how many people are like man the protein content on my salmon is too low i need to eat deer i need to eat this brands bigger than you think it's bigger than you know what i'm looking for a deer that was shot in the head that's what i know but there's a huge there's a huge audience though for people who go i want ethically sourced i do that right that's why i don't like buying a lot of huge is because i i don't like how they kill cows sean do you actually kinda turned onto to that about like about the treatment of cows i think it's is very hypo critical i think you know anybody who's like ethically sourced meat it's like like yeah if somebody like i ethically killed your dog right ethically killed your your brother it's you know know but there's a with kills consumer it's not necessarily killing it's raising i think killing and then where i was like think about it think it think about it this way so there's that there's a broad spectrum right so you think about like industrialized meat is like concentration camps for animals right they're literally in these pens and they're fed this horrible stuff and they've used miserable lives i don't feel good about eating that do i feel good about eating an animal who lived a great life and then got sniper rifle in the head yeah i feel fine i actually feel definitely the spectrum look just to be clear though this is still in the murdering for our pleasure for our pleasure part of the spectrum and there's a there's a lot more part of the spectrum that you go to if you chose to i'm i'm i'm totally a a bit of a hip on this as an i do eat meat so i'm not like i'm not like if you can telling you this but at least i a lie of myself and tell myself that oh man i'm doing so such a good thing morally here by a kill a kilo the best way the nice way you might yeah you it's like it's like you might drive an electric car and it's better than driving a gas car but you're still producing tons of toxic chemicals because be made the batteries and stuff it's just a little bit better yeah that's right i agree with you though i do think like in a hundred years will look back at eating meat and be a little shocked yeah i'm a hundred percent well that's my my my my opinion sean would you would you if we went somewhere would you like for example for thanksgiving did i tell you for thanksgiving we killed our own turkey no you didn't tell me that how i was that yeah and so would you do that no wow okay i thought that i wouldn't do would i be excited to get i excited to go do that what i do it if that's the thing we wanted to do sure i'm not like anti the whole experience but i'm not like pumped about that nor would i like see that experience out also turkey massively overrated it sucks up an issue and by the way killing it and eating it it did not taste good at all the fake shit like the buttermilk turkeys tastes way better and turkey is a is a a horrible meat but yeah i agree what do we wanted to wrap up with one or two more things yeah let's do well you have a question for sam i think that's interesting one why don't you do that one andrew yeah i was curious so sam like i look at hampton hampton is a business i mean i've said this to you privately but hampton is the business that i've have thought about starting for ten years so i joined something called entrepreneurs organization fifteen years ago and i was like this is a very very good business every member of e pays five thousand dollars and there's all these local chapters they self organize basically and these guys just must be making an absolute killing and you have this total lock in because once you like your form group you have these like core core groups like you do at hampton or whatever people don't wanna leave they're locked in they pay their five thousand dollars a year or whatever it is they go to events etcetera and so i for years have been like someone needs to start the new e and you have and so i look at it and i i go freak damn i wish i own that business what are the things though like just like you guys being like oh my god like you know these agencies and owns are the best businesses ever what are the on the side what are the things that we we should know about hampton that are make hard to run or surprised you about run so the thing about hampton so andrew joined and sean has been like messaging like maybe i should join and i'm like andrew wanted to he's like yeah just take my money and just let me join me on like no no you have to get interview want a little vip treatment i just want a little past the line it's like we not done it to go to a friend's restaurant and you just get treated as a normal patron that doesn't feel good it's having to say agree that feels a little bad wouldn't you think well because we have to have we have to ind people we have to like get them into the values of the system we have to like teach them how to be a good community member so the thing about hampton is that in terms of like the physics behind it this is gonna be a massive company i think like there's i always tell our team there's nothing holding us back like there's like very little like outside factors that are gonna ruin it but the number one thing that sucks about it and that we we one hundred percent can screwed up and it can go to zero is if you start letting in too many people too quickly so you cannot scale it like crazy fast i think you can scale it fast but i think you can't scale it like you could a software you're not just throwing bodies into it and so we have to be super thoughtful about it about who we let in and why another thing is is that the feedback loop is fairly short so people hampton have monthly meetings and then now we have retreats that people go on once a year or twice a year so we don't get feedback that quickly and in order to like i can't just like make an assumption or i can't like have an mvp of a retreat because someone's flying across the country to go to a thing so it has to be good right away and that's very stressful that i can't like just like you know if i own like a shopify store i can't just throw up a product up there and have someone buy and then just return the money and be like sorry it'll come soon or this sucks maybe but it'll improve with tech so that's scary about not having mvp but you it the the thing about community is once you screw it up i don't think you can fix it and so it seems like it's high stakes all the time and so that's why we're trying to be meticulous about growing slowly i know andrea what am i missing you've kinda like no i think you're right i it's interesting the thing that made me leave y so the chapter the guy who ran the chapter super nice guy like amazing i love the guy but he led in a couple people who i really really didn't like and i found myself dread going to some of the events and just kind of just sketchy people right like people that ran a bit dicey businesses and gave me bad vibes and stuff and that was actually the thing that caused me to leave e and do my own forums so i now have four forums that i just manage myself but i i don't think most people are like me i think most people will stick with it but you do really have to be thoughtful about who you let in and i i think the hardest part and i've had this experience i've i've ran a lot of forums over the last fifteen years and been in a lot of forums if there's someone who's toxic the cancer has to be cut out but that is an incredibly awkward conversation and it can really piss people off obvious and we've fired a punch you but we've kicked people out if they like talk about confidential stuff publicly but also another thing about this these businesses the think about e y po vintage do you guys know vista i think i mentioned them they sold for like one point five billion dollars recently they're already doing like half a billion in revenue do they last so long so y e and vista i think all were either started in the fifties or the six these and so the cool thing about these companies is if you nail it right you can have it for fifty or a hundred years and so that's why i'm really fascinated by these types of companies because there's zero technological or there's zero tech like tech everything can change with ai yeah it will have zero hope i think how does how how does it feel to be sitting on a winner like does it did you feel the same way with the hustle does this feel different different yeah i i felt like the hustle like with with hampton i'm like well there's a clear path to get to a hundred million dollars you just gotta give it ten years if you want in revenue like i just have to like it's just a time horizon thing you just gotta sit and wait and you have to work but you have to wait whereas with the hustle it felt a little bit more like we were making we were innovating in a very small space where i'm like i don't know if the math shows that this will work it might it might not but i'm we're still learning with this business i'm like no it's one hundred percent go work the only thing that screws it up is ourselves so that's why i say there's no like like physics allows this to work perfectly you also have an unfair advantage right i think that if you i mean i guess you launched hampton privately you didn't promote it but now that you did unfair now that you have talked about it you have like you have free customer acquisition you money on you you almost have fifty million dollars a year versus of free marketing by going on podcasts on this podcast and other podcasts you're on and just talking about hampton and then your brand value as a person being associated with it it is that one plus one equals a hundred yes and right now we've had five or six or seven thousand people i i forget apply and so that makes it like the easiest thing ever but if you look at on deck on deck had that as well and they totally fucked it up they fucked it up because they they treated it like a tech company where they weren't thoughtful enough and they try to just scale and that is my fear of like getting greedy and growing too quickly well they raised venture they raised venture why would you raise venture this like this is a business that pays for it's got you have negative cash conversion cycle right people prep pay you for services delivered over a year and like it's in insane yeah so it's like a great business think it's gonna be like i don't think we'll ever sell it but i think it could be like a they can be billion dollar companies i think so it feels good well tiny if you ever decide to to sell it tiny grow i or if you ever wanna take money off the table i think i hopefully it'll be big enough that we'll be buying you i i be we i i no but and and seriously when i was looking the recent even though we're friends i really admire you because when i people haven't been and asked to invest and i'm like no dude this is my meta lab maybe like this could like this is what i love i don't ever wanna sell it but it might make a shit ton of profit and we could just use that profit to buy stuff that kind of supplements it and i don't wanna take any money because i don't wanna have to feel guilty about doing that we're gonna i'm gonna be on a helicopter and it'll land on sam's yacht and then i'll i'll get there and he'll be like oh what's your market cap and i'll be like oh like five billion and he'll be like oh hampton twenty five billion that's cute no i don't know i remember when we hit five those are the two days but not to come up as always the mic i a lot of advice for early i think it's cool but it it it feels like i haven't talked about it publicly too much it's because this is the first time where i'm like i'm just gonna shut the fuck up and just be quiet and just keep on going because it's working nicely i i think it's actually quite hard to replicate though you have to have an audience it it's quite hard to like get the early customers but yeah it feels good what's it you're reading the right book right like reading the buffett stuff and mo because that that i think that's like the ultimate like people think investing as numbers there's a little bit of that there's napkin math but at the end of the day it's like assessing like what is the moat what's the competitive advantage and you just have such a crazy competitive advantage in terms of customer acquisition and then also customer lines sean i know that you're exploring this business even before i don't even think you told me so the big learning it's a logistical nightmare so not nightmare but it's very challenging like in like imagine let's say we have ten thousand members and we're doing all these retreats that's basically a retreat a day you know what i mean like yeah it it's quite challenging logistically what we need to do is go and hire a bunch of mckinsey nerds and it's like here's how we do it by hand automate it but i don't i don't agree with that i think so what e does is they've outsourced everything so when you e has chapters there's a vancouver chapter for example all the members pay their dues and then there's a chapter head and they are managing that whole thing and then when they have retreats they're just told hey you know the budget typically is this you guys all self organize one person from the forum is responsible for managing it here's the handbook on doing it and they just kind of do it themselves so i think there maybe there's a better way to do it but i don't think you have scale up head count no i don't think you do either but you still have thousands of people flying places and you wanna make sure that the experience is optimal so there is still some quality control are you gonna do like a massive conference like a super conference of all the people in hampton with like insane speakers and stuff or is that just too much logistics yeah we want to yeah i'm just trying to figure out how to do it andrew what is this profit first methodology that's that book that you like i love this so yeah one of the guys one of the ceos is actually the ceo of beam he sent me this book and i love the idea so basically you know there's this concept of like if you eat your food on a smaller plate you're gonna eat less you guys know about that so basically what you do is very simple let's say that you earn a hundred dollars in your business and you wanna have a fifty percent profit margin you just take the day the hundred dollars comes in you take fifty dollars and you put it in a bank account that you can't see and that's it you just put it away and so then you and your team are left with fifty dollars to run the business and you know you might have to adjust the number and figure out what's sustainable but what i learned running all my digital businesses was that we had businesses with ninety percent net profit margins and if you had looked at that business and said okay well it's this kind of business it should have twenty percent profit margins we easily could have run it that way but because chris and i were incentivized we own the whole business we paid a lot of attention to the p and l and what was possible we would try and run it at the maximum profit and so this basically allows you to achieve the same thing psychologically as the smaller plate you're just showing you're basically budgeting for fifty percent profit and you're saying figure does that cause issues with your ceo of the company but we don't do it this isn't something that we do this is something that we've sent out all of our ceos is like hey this is really interesting this might be something you might wanna do but i think it works better for small businesses i know a lot of people who they talk to me and they're like oh you know i have an agency too but we just can't figure out how to make it run at x margins and i'm i kinda go like rip the band aid right if you wanna make thirty percent profit margins take thirty dollars of every hundred dollars that comes in you move it to another bank what you told me to do and i've not been comfortable with it yet dude you yeah don't even get me started sam sam and i have had like text screaming matches me just being like dude you have to dividend your money out because my whole thing is you don't wanna leave excess cash burning a hole in the ceo's pockets or making them complacent so let's say you in a business that has a payroll of five hundred thousand dollars a month a lot of people will leave like twenty million dollars in that business and i think that just lets the ceo feel relaxed i like them to basically have a month two months of cash but you're spending you're spending cash that you haven't earned yet well sometimes but if if that's the situation and they need more then they just say hey shareholders send me some of that money back but you say i'm the bank so for example in tiny tiny the holding company above is the bank and we basically say look keep your money with us and if you guys hit a snag and you need a little bit of extra money for payroll or r and d or whatever we'll send that right down in you know twelve hours so for prepaid meta customers which you i don't actually think you do prepaid but let's say you did let's say someone prepaid for a a project that will take a year and it's a hundred grand and you get that upfront you're happy or you're willing to spend that hundred grand before the year's up and the service has been fully delivered well not always but i think if you can model it and like so for example the argument we were having so someone pays ten thousand dollars for year of service in hampton and so you guys have all this cash sitting in the bank the thing is you guys have new members constantly streaming in so you have ten thousand dollars flowing in x times a day you have very predictable cash flow from my perspective i would basically just say alright what's your what's your expected margin and i just take that and dividend it out immediately and i and again it's trying to create a feeling of always always paying attention to the bank account always paying attention to the balance sheet and the p and l and i just think that when you have a year of cash just sitting there i think your ceo will naturally be like oh we could do this you know we could go do a super conference and spend ten million dollars on it or you know what it's okay we didn't do that great this month because you know we've got all this money in the bank i think psychologically you want everyone eating from a smaller play and when you say dividend out what percentage is andrew wilkinson taking home to buy a home in cars and live versus dividend out to reinvest into your own stuff i had like of well so it's different now that we're public what i used to do is i would get i owned eighty percent of of beam basically and i would get so i'd get eighty percent of those dividends those would go to my holding company i would buy stocks or invest my general framework for this though is i wanna spend five percent of what i earn at most and so whatever that number is if you're in you know ten million dollars a year five hundred grand a year is just living doing whatever and everything else should get invested so you live on five percent of your of your income and the rest goes to tiny or whatever is the setup up for your holding company or is tiny considered your holding company take tiny is my well so i have a personal holding company where i have my personal assets but you know ninety plus percent of my network isn't tiny mh so and has it always been five percent so when you're earning a million dollars a year when you're earning a million dollars year were you only spending fifty thousand no i was well i wasn't spending a ton but i was what i was doing is starting a lot of businesses i was i i i'd say maybe it was twenty percent or thirty percent back then but over time it's come down to about five percent or less and it's been there for probably ten years but but yeah one of the things i see that a lot of people do that's really quite stupid is they don't let themselves live it up so they'll own this amazing cash flowing business and they don't let themselves you know go buy the beautiful house go buy the great car and so they end up acting in this way where they go well i've gotta sell my company i've gotta have an exit and i had i have had friends where it's like dude the exit was right in your bank account you know you could've have just the money out to yourself and then you wouldn't have had this really stressful horrible experience with private equity and been through all that stuff so i'm a big advocate of like living it up living a nice life you know don't go crazy and buy faber jay eggs but like buy a nice car in a nice house and whatever and then just invest everything else sense of your income do spend sean i don't know i don't even think about like that is that like is that allergic to that or or would you tell allergic to it but it's it's like you said like you know i would say my income has ten x and my spending has two x so as long as that ratio stays about right that's fine yeah i don't really look at the percentage versus versus versus earnings so much as like you know i i guess i at the beginning when the earnings were were lower right like for a long time i was basically earning like between i don't know like in my twenties i was making like a hundred twenty to hundred sixty k a year roughly for a bunch of my twenties and you know during that time i know i was probably i living in san francisco paying california taxes like you i was probably spending if you include taxes you i was spending the bulk of my money i wasn't really saving that much probably saving twenty percent of my money thirty i don't know something like that and you know the tim ferris said this thing i was podcast i really liked he goes unless something's gonna make a shit ton of money give it away for free i think that's a great role in business and content and a great rule for creators like us i think the which is partly why i don't like your your twitter experiment although i understand the reasons why you do it i think there's the same thing for sort of like you know where do you put your mental energy around finances it's like this is either needs to make a lot of money or save a lot of money or i'm just gonna like not pay i'm gonna give it zero budget mentally because otherwise i'm just using my mental budget on too many things i'm just not gonna think i don't wanna think about things unless it's like a a large swing so for most of most of my twenties i was just trying to figure out how do you make way more money like i'm not trying to go from twenty percent savings rate to thirty percent savings rate it's like how do i ten x my income that was like the first you know like it's all i was thinking about and took me a long time but like that paid off because once you do that you don't you're you know you're so glad you never worried about the the smaller thing yeah ram meet seth has a great book called i will teach you to english and he talks a lot about that right people abs ob obsessed over like oh you know i used to spend six bucks on a f and now i just buy a black coffee and save three bucks and it's like you're so much better off focusing on the macro you know your mortgage all those sorts of big expenses and then just focusing on making way more money to the point where it really doesn't matter he goes don't focus on three dollar problems a cup of coffee focused on thirty thousand dollar problems like getting a rate so this with hiring too like you hire somebody and i'm negotiating like a five k or ten k salary difference and i'm like okay so you know you're this basically like an eight hundred dollar a month gross difference net to them after taxes is gonna be like five hundred dollars a month difference okay fair enough not saying that that's nothing but like the percentage of their concern around that difference versus like the role who i am what they're gonna learn from this like how like they don't really think about how do i use this opportunity to be able to bake ten times more money in the future or or better at what are the terms on their stock options how are they struck what's the valuation is it reasonable yeah like yeah what's my what does my incentive if i could do a great job what is gonna job even them look like here and then how much does that work to you and can i structure an incentive where if i really knock it out the park i can make three times my salary this year versus this kinda like ten k you know salary gap but you know i guess obviously not everybody cares that way or thinks things away but i don't know it seems like of of a hundred percent of the population it seems to like at least twenty percent of the population should be asking themselves those types of questions more often in the same way that like before i met any business people i just thought like oh after college you go get a job i didn't think there were other options and only once i saw that there's these other options in that man those people doing business they seem be having a lot more fun and make it more money like okay i guess i could go do that it's like you just sometimes need to see it or hear it and then it changes the way do you think and that i think more people should see or hear the question of like how do i make three times more in half the time how do i make ten times more total how do i have twice the fun on the same salary how do i twice the time on the same salary it's like there are just better questions you can ask yourself but the ones really although i will say one thing that i really miss so you you guys remember we started that business called buyer where it was negotiation as a service that was an awesome idea yeah amazing idea amazing guy who ran it kim you ended up selling it to ramp i didn't really wanna sell it but for kim i was like his first big exit so so it made a lot of sense and we're really excited for him but i really missed that business because that's one thing where i am just too busy running my business to negotiate things and for know when i'm buying like a car or you know doing a i don't know any like a big buy of furniture or like a renovation or anything i still want that so i really i put this out to the audience someone needs to restart that business negotiation as a service that's a nick cube that's a great nick hub business i agree are you gonna make money on the stock of ramp ramp is does good i think we we didn't we didn't take stop stock we just took cash because we for us we could just take the money and invested it ourselves so we knew we could get a good return with within in tiny dude these are the best podcasts these are the best podcast podcasts over we're just over we're just hanging out i wonder if the listener prefer these where it's like that just hangs but i i like those better personally yeah that was super fun guys if you like it compliment us into youtube comments you don't like it well you've probably gone by now and that's hard thank you yeah i feel like i could rude world i know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking bag but