Wordle Copycat Loses It All, Introducing Milk Road, and Guru Shaan on Finding Your Next Project

yeah so got a crazy story for you guys so you might have seen the app word recently if you guys seen it yeah and your time caught it you play yeah so new york times just bought it but about two weeks ago one of my friends he's a great mobile app developer a bootstrap he basically was like oh word is going viral and there's no mobile app that everyone's using so like the world guy had put out this crazy story he put out this story about how he was peer he didn't wanna monetize it it was just a toy for his girlfriend it went viral out of nowhere which i don't know if i believe because he works at miss mischief and like i'm not sure i totally buy that story but that was a story of the media so my friend was like holy shit there's a huge opportunity for someone to build the mobile app this guy doesn't own the trademark of the name it's kind of like ripped off an old game show so my friend built an app over the weekend called it word old the app went viral so basically like over the weekend got like thirty thousand organic downloads was top of the app store my friends one of these guys who likes to build in public so he tweets everything he always has he used to like put his portfolio up so you could see everything he's doing and what sam by the way this is this is gonna support your build in public thesis by the way this is like the perfect case study of what of how you feel about building public which is i like it in theory it's like the face tattoo thing right i like that other people do it i don't wanna do it and here's why here's the cautionary tale i like when you know when the dare officer brings like you know someone who's like been jail for drugs to the classic there's like a before and after of meth yeah like like fair but sean explain what word is because all i know i don't play word games i play real sports and so i'm not i'm not trying i don't wait side with that so when when people are what what is this game it's a game okay so this it's a simple game you you literally if you the way i get to it you just google world first link you click it and it's just five empty like letters like five squares where you gotta guess guess a word there's no clues it's not like a cross word it's literally just i guess guess a word so you type in a word you might type in like i always start with irate because der from hubspot said the word i irate has three vowels plus the letter t plus the letter r so you're getting a lot of common yeah letters there so it's a great start word so you typed that that word in and then it'll tell you either it'll either show up gray which means the letter not in the word yellow which means it's in the word but you got it in the wrong spot or green which is this is the right letter in the right spot and then you have i think five or six guesses to be able to to get the word in the end and then the and the beauty of it is at the end it's like you got it you feel the sense of accomplishment the whole thing takes you like two minutes to play the game so it's like really easy to play in that sense and then if you get it right it lets you share that you got it right but it doesn't share what the word was it shares like the like imagine what you're looking at now which is like the word and all these colors but take the letters off it just shows the colors so it'll show somebody else oh man i started off not having any of the letters then i got the t at the and then i got one letter at the end and that's that's my fourth one i got right so that's why you see that grid of green squares post on twitter and it started going viral on twitter and what what's like the score okay so i'm man just got it moist stuff and did you really just play that are you watching a video i think this morning i was trying to just do like you know illustration you know just trying to get some ass d role alright and so i understand so people have been sharing this like crazy and da the founder of hubspot he plays a daily and he even built a competitor to it as well and so your buddy ben levy what's what's this guy's name his name zach str and what's the name of the app it was called word old the app so part of the story basically so he goes and builds this app he tweets like holy shit this is the fastest growing app i've ever built you know i've built ten other businesses they've all done really well but this is the only one that's like growing organically like crazy and he basically the world creator sees it and he's like y he gets on the phone with him he calls him when he's like hey this just doesn't the way by the way this whole thing's just happening in a twitter thread ben sends me the first tweet he's like y zach because i've met zach through ben he's like y zach actually cloned word next tweet look at this shit he's tweeted out of graph it's going crazy third tweet someone someone says dude you just ripped off word word like you're gonna get whatever suit or something and you know what you don't know on the trademark for this he goes what trademark and so i'm seeing the tweet in real time and he's bragging he's bragging about how good it's doing and he's like like there was no app now i'm dominating this i'm getting all these free free downloads this is amazing and he's just tweeting update after update okay so ben pick back up so then somehow the guy gets in touch of the world guy dm and he's like y let's get on the phone and my friend zach is like hey like you don't on the trademark i know nobody owns it that there's a bunch of other apps called world before this but like let's partner something and the guy's like don't like you know he basically said some version of like i don't do this for money this is just fun you know ironically he sells the new york times like a week later but that's separate so my friend gets off the phone with him and he's like alright i'm gonna talk to a lawyer i'm gonna figure out what i should do like clearly there's no ability for us to work together here and then like twenty minutes later some big tech reported dunk on him pretty aggressively and he's like doug dunk on who your buddy or the original trade dunk on zac my friend and he's like he basically says something like wow like app developer has no ethics clones word bragging about how he's at the top of the app store and then you know when that happens everyone goes and looks at zac past tweets and he ironically had two tweets so like six months ago he tweeted i hate app clones like someone's cl my app and i'm gonna like you know he basically like disputed every app that was cl his old app and put posted a big threat about how app clones are the shit people didn't he call like sc bags or something yeah he was like there's comes of the earth that you're copying my app and then he was wait you said you said the word ironic so was he being serious no he was being serious it was ironic that he tweeted that and then he was do you know then he being opportunistic and then he also tweeted like at the beginning of the year i have two goals for jay for twenty twenty two it's like be more vulgar and make ten million dollars this year so he just gets like proceeded to get dunk on really aggressively and people start buying his domain and laura like you know i'm gonna start like i'm gonna dispute every app you've ever made i'm like gonna make sure that everyone knows you're the worst of the worst and like basically well that's what happens apple ends up pulling down every single world he calls you right somewhere in the middle here he calls you for some advice right yeah so he calls me in the middle of this and he goes hey this is crazy like app is doing really well i think this is a big business like you know i know i know how much these apps convert like free to paid this is just growing organically this is a ten to a hundred million dollar mobile app here what would you do and i was like well i think you know ethically i'm not sure i think you did kinda copy him but i get that like this is version one and you're gonna make it better like i could buy that but right now you're probably stuck like the mob has you but he's like well maybe there's a trump version to this where like you know i kind of own that like this is my approach and like i'm doing it was there is no change apologize apologize put up the white flag take it away right these are options on the table right i got i could just say sorry i did wrong i could say you know sorry i said what i said and i'm gonna make these gonna change the name i'm gonna make some concessions and then there was go full trump and full trump was like just lean into it and yeah but you could do that back down in a non like douche what you could say is yeah like look we're not claiming to be innovators here but we are we're executor and so we find things that are great and we make them available for the masses sue me like you know that's like the way that you could take this that's what that's what rec internet says they go we're not innovators we're executor we're operators so how did the conversation ben when you guys talk about these options yeah so basically i was like you know i think those three options around the table and he was like yeah but i don't think you know i don't think we're really doing anything wrong like you know yeah there is no mobile app so like while people can think that i think it's fine so he basically because like i'm gonna double down you know by the way this other guy didn't create word there was like you're saying there was a game show back in the day that was the same game he created a web version of it is that right because i think that changes it too which is yeah this guy also copied the show right like and it looks like this guy zach did he redo the app but call it word love well that that's later in the story that's like after word that shut down in the app store he recreated a new you know over another word game let's send literally just shut down all the clothes or just him yeah they they shut on everyone that was using the name word after that and to clarify yeah there was there was a game show that word was based on i think the guy's story was like did this from my girlfriend it wasn't for profits so he didn't get crucified for it see so and what did apple say why didn't they say they could just take down all these things or you don't know you don't know why they just there was no statement they just took down every word laugh and said you know you don't know this trademark like you're being taken down because we do decide what we do with so i'm i'm not a lawyer here obviously but i have done some trademark stuff and i'm almost positive that if someone's gonna correct me but i'm almost positive that even if you don't own the trademark if you're like and you you can make the argument if you're like the first or the most popular and if there's like a general consensus that like yes when people think of this name they think of you and these other clones or these other people are trying to like steal like you know like a act like they're you the courts tend to favor your side even if you don't own the trademark yeah like yeah just because they don't literally have that trademark there is probably some like you know they it would probably win yeah i think i think that's probably true and like he he knew that like there was some argument that there's been other apps called war but it was pretty clear that like they would have a good case so he proceeds to kinda double down on it gets dunk on aggressively like basically you know he doubles down a little bit like says like no like this is based in the game show you don't know a trademark i'm looking at it now versions of that and then it goes completely viral like tenth out you know it gets like ten thousand people in the tech twitter circle are dunking on him there's article we stop for a second why why was his goal be more vulgar for twenty fifteen two why was that a goal that's such a random yeah you said that and i'm my my mind is still wondering why was that does that mean like be more aggressive i think he meant like be more aggressive like when he sees opportunities be more assertive and like you know be as aggressive as possible and opportunities present themselves okay which clearly was what this was so he went he went hard got dunk on and basically what happened was people bought his own people squat on his names is actually ted dot com they were like we're gonna go vote down every single app you own we're just basically gonna attack you oh it's so how's it what have how's how's this send so i mean basically it ended with him shutting the app down as you'd expect and now he's like making a new word game because he likes the word game space but i think his like when i was talking to him about it earlier he was like you the biggest thing for me is building in public is not always good you know like the fact you know my building in public like i just assumed i you know this was great for me and this is the really dark side of me building in public well dude must be more specific the he had ten million dollars in his hands and decided that the tweet love for talking about what he was doing was was worth that because if he just stayed as an anonymous developer he just put it under some shell company developer name left it in the store didn't brag about it it wouldn't have got picked up by journalist as like the story isn't that other people there are apps in the store called world that are owned by different people that's not the story the story is look at this guy cl this thing ripping it off bragging about it and then getting shit on on twitter that's the story so if you just didn't do that then that doesn't get to apple like i think there's a pretty good chance he gets away with it because i know there's a the app store is full of clones like flap bird had a tons of clones every slot machine game there's people don't know this like random apps like slot machine apps or what like produces the most revenue in in the app store and and you know nobody really cares about it they're under these like random building company about it but you don't talk about it you're just crushing it you shut up yeah it's when you're not crushing it that you wanna talk about it as soon as you start crushing it zip yes when you're doing well you you only talk about it when you're not doing that well or when you are doing so well that you think that like you know you can't catch up that's why people are always was like why don't you talk about your e commerce thing like why is working what do i need what do i need to tell you guys about for yeah you know and i also think but transparency like yeah cool cool i i favor transparency with people i trust not strangers on the like i don't value transparency well it's like if it's my wife or my family or my coworkers alright i'll give you transparency i don't owe you my twitter follower or even my podcast listener to tell you my every detail i'll be very honest with you i tell people things when it's beneficial to me and i don't wanna i don't and i actually recommend that strategy to anybody there's no like a force that is there's nobody forcing you to tell everybody everything when there's no gain to be had for you yeah i and there's actually clear downside and this guy just totally screwed it up if he should've have shut up you just gotta shut up sometimes and that's really hard this it's the building of public thing man and also it impacted the world guy now he got all this competition and he had a lot of stress i think that like when you're doing well you just shut up you don't talk about it yeah and it's i think you know part of it becomes great identity like on i'm the building public guy so like i do everything in public and i think he was just like you know type of guy it's like i'm a really good at growth and i'm really good at building apps and wanted some love for it you know and then by the way i recommend this guy's blog or sub because he actually he does a good job of building in public like he ben what was the one that we were we were reading and i remember telling he was dude this guy's stuff is actually really good he had like no followers but like or like you know not no followers but he had a very small following but i thought his content was actually really interesting he would talk about like alright i'm gonna build this product because of this reason so first thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna go to you know lean domain search i'm gonna get a name generator for this okay i got the name boom now i'm gonna go do this boom here's how i do this boom alright i'm gonna fire up some paid ads look here's the dashboard and like he was actually making progress so he wasn't just like you know stuck he wasn't just talking theory like he was actually getting users getting revenue and he was very again he was given out a ton of value and so i was like i like to learn all this stuff great thank you very much and in those projects the trade probably worked right he got interest and respect and attention and he gave up you know just a little bit of of knowledge but in this case it did not pay off yeah and he like open the shares all of his app numbers like that link i just dropped zach dot s sos slash dashboard you can see all of his app numbers all the churn so it's a big part of his identity and he's really good at it but you know sometimes it doesn't always pay to be bay to build in public dude corn rose and face tattoos it's cool that other people do it but not for me yeah the other thing is like identity be real careful what your identity is because your identity comes with like you know some serious trade offs people have an identity and then they're like you know they use it to build a little prison for themselves here's the here's my walls and chains that i put on myself by like labeling myself in this way i like to like people be like oh i thought you said this the other day i'm like yeah changed my mind speaking well listen you know done speaking of prisoners and building an identity i saw that someone did a survey like a like a a reputable source but i forget who did a survey and they asked they did a survey and they asked young folks gen z who they follow for crypto and n advice and so and it was like i think they surveyed hundreds of thousands of people pump was number one for the most trusted person pump is like our friend and started out like just a guy on twitter now he's like pretty official how on earth does this guy do so much so he's got a two hundred thousand person email list who he talks to i think every day every day he's got a daily business show and i think he has like multiple hours of three hours it's a professionally produced morning show meaning like he's there on camera with his brothers they got out an agenda a rundown of stories they're gonna cover it's like a new show business news show i think it's called the business new show or something shit like the best business best business show and he does it for multiple hours in the morning every morning and i think i was with him and his wife a while ago and she was joking and she's like man he writes all of it i don't know how he does it but he writes really fast how on earth has this guy have this much output i i have a tremendous amount of respect for that because i know how hard that is and i know there's a there's not usually people i look at and i say i can't i couldn't do that and i know when i look at that i couldn't do that there's no way i could maintain that level of output at the same time i would not want to do that that is not a i don't wanna do that i want to build for myself i don't think he's gonna be doing he he won't be able to sustain that for more than two or three years yeah that's crazy his he's got an empire what do you what do you how big is his empire you think you think he's making more money from selling stuff as opposed to actual bitcoin we speculated on this before so let's i don't know if we we've kinda done for you wanna do it again yeah okay okay fair enough so you got a couple components right he's got the paid subs stack so he's got the free the there's like a free version of it but the daily one i think goes to a paid group ben you know roughly what the paid sizes is i think it's like think it's something like seventy thousand people paying like ten dollars a month or something like that i i wanna say it's like seventy k ish so that would be what seven hundred thousand by the way the the item don't do public math stolen from pump pumps said that i thought it was fucking hilarious and stole it because i think it's amazing it's amazing rule to live by so he's got about two hundred thousand people total on his list and he's got i think seventy that are in the paid group let's just call it that then he's got a job board i think the job board we had heard either heard or we had kind of investigated looked like it was doing about a million dollars a year that's crypto jobs dot com or something so then he said alright you learn about crypto for me you wanna work in crypto boom he also have sponsors on all the new on all the newsletter so at the end of every like thanks to these ten companies he like rolls the credit and if i hadn't yes that would be if he has two hundred thousand of free subscribers that'd be around between a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dollars a month in sponsored revenue so we're at that i think i think what we've just added up to is about two to two point a half million dollars a year and then that's stuff the his videos he does about a million dollars a year on his bitcoin course which i don't think he even shows up for or maybe he does but like i think i think he's got teachers it's like pretty automated so let's add another million there that's let's say three three and a half million on the course then there's investing so investing is probably where the real money to be made very hard to say kind of what both crypto investing so like buying bitcoin and other tokens as well as investing in companies that serve the crypto economy that's kind of like and i he had a fund the fund was pretty big ben and how big was the fund but he closed he returned all to millions of dollars hundred no that that was the fund he was at before there sorry his personal fund which is like the pop rolling fund or whatever oh yeah i think was like twenty five million a year or something like that which is the equivalent of a hundred million dollar fund so i think he was doing twenty to twenty five million a year again these are all plus or minus fifty percent so and then is youtube got four million views in the last thirty days and then his podcast i bet is around where we are but dude youtube app were four million views was that's like four thousand dollars or something here the youtube pays like nothing on just the views but maybe his sponsors he's probably because i think his best business show has a main sponsor that's like yeah it's so fine because one time i got in trouble because i i disrespect them when they're they well they're not a sponsor anymore right so can you tell the story yeah so basically one time the the hustle wrote an article about sofa ceo getting in trouble for i don't remember what did was it sexual was it a sexual thing or it fraud something like that and he in the headline we wrote so more like so fucked and they bailed as a sponsor and i told that story on his podcast and he got really he wasn't mad but uncomfortable yeah i was like well you just tell him i said it you know you didn't say i said it so so if i can't you're like a menace yeah so far like marketing team till like god everywhere comes that comes in and it's the same so far so far it's a good joke it's good joke it's anyway i would get i would so at this point i would say he's in the huge range of five and seven million in a year just off like pump that's income right they're not even counting the sort of equity value that's because there's also bitcoin pizza which was his like ghost kitchen he launched what what else is ben he's got merch is he merch i think he's got merch yeah he's got merch what are the other part of his empire his his his pom empire he's got his brother so he's that i i really respect that anyway he takes you know anybody who's got the when i eat we all eat mentality i respect that and he brought his brothers along so one brother joe he does awesome content about the the business of sports his other brothers are his c host for the best business show because when i asked him i was like dude why are you signing up to do this morning show like there's so much work to do a youtube show every day for multiple hours he's like yeah but i'm just like it's me hanging out with my brothers shooting shit busting each other's balls and talk to business it's like that's kinda of what i would if i just had what's my ideal life it's like oh just hang out with my brothers and like you know like i mean i get i can do it that the problem is like let's say you wanna take like a three week vacation you know yeah there's a difference between i like to do it and i have to do it right and he's in he's in the half to do it it seems like right now with where you know you're committed to a schedule alright you want me to tell you about an interesting company yeah actually one plug there so while ben's here so we i i don't know when we're gonna talk about the milk road i wanna talk about my new new new project that me and ben have launched a new company but there is a version of this which is the the one we were like alright this is a great idea but there's one drawback which is you have to write this email every day and it's the same thing it's a prison it's like and we we were very conscious about it it's like ben you wanna sign up for this this is the prison we're gonna choose to be in like if if this is if this is what we choose fine but let's not get here and be surprised because because that's the commitment we gotta make we are every night and so ben at you know midnight after the babies are asleep or whatever it's like you know he's like hey here's the draft for tomorrow morning's email then i i was up till two am last night editing the thing and so there's definitely a pain in the ass component to it that's you know that i i'm experiencing which is one tenth of what pop does but it's more than enough for me and you did the same thing with man it's hard i like i loved it i mean it to me it it's like i think i told you it's almost like running a marathon or like being in a fight or something it's like you're scared to do it you do it and you get in the thick of it and you like kind of enjoy it and then you get you get to a point where we could take a break and you're like this is horrible i never wanna do this again which is how i felt like last year and then you get like six months out and you're like fuck i missed the i missed the action i need to get it i need to get into it and so it's really hard to to write a newsletter every single day to do any type of content creation every single day for more than a year is very very very hard really tough and we're only what less than a month into it ben what's the where are you at the grind like i think we're we're giving it a year for like how long you you could tolerate this and and sustain this pace where are you at right now only a month one i'm at the still exciting still fund a research and write but i am at the holy shit sean's way better writer than i am point but i'm still it's still fun yeah sometimes i i i go into edit i'm like let me just touch up this little words smith and then like i overhaul the whole thing because i'm like oh no i think this could be better and i'm like actually it was fine before but like i just can't help myself like last night actually this is an interesting point to talk about sam actually so so we should say two things what we'll we'll talk about what this company is and why we started basically every year me and ben have started one company last year's company was the e commerce company and we grew that from zero to about ten million in revenue profit and we and to do that like never had done a physical product before never like never knew how to get things manufactured and all that never had been spending like you know two hundred thousand dollars a month on facebook ads and being responsible for that return and making sure you don't grow broke so so that was the adventure last year this year we were like what do we wanna do and we basically were like whatever it is it's gotta be in either crypto or like kinda like teaching slash audience building that's the stuff i like to do crypto like the topic me and ben are obsessed with and that's why we came up with this thing called the milk road which is basically it's an email you get every day and we just say it's kinda like it's the way i got it's the way i got good at crypto which was my buddy fe who's way smarter than me he was like he you know he bought ethereum in the crowds sale he bought he was mining bitcoin back in the day like this guy guy's just been ahead of the curve on stuff he's a he's an engineer and every day he basically just sends me like three links he's like yeah check this out you've seen this i'm always like no i haven't seen it and then i'm almost like wait what is this why is this interesting and he's like oh so the reason this is cool is because abc b and he just breaks it down super simple for like a dumbass like me and then i was like dude if i could just take that idea and provide that like as a user like fe doesn't care he's never gonna create a subs stack or a newsletter he's like too smart and too cool for all that shit but i was like if i could take that idea of like a smart friend just showing you one or two cool things a day that's going on in crypto and explaining it in simple plain jane english i think that that would actually be useful how many you guys have so we've been doing it for i think three weeks now and we're at sixteen and a half thousand as of today so it's grown like last we're at ten thousand so this week alone we've grown about fifty percent what cause two things we turned on paid ads and so you referred or you you you know a guy who is good with this stuff he's been helping us out he's really good actually like wait i've tried like five agencies for facebook guys this guy's like better than all so how much are you spending to acquire an email right i don't wanna say that right now but it's in the good range remember when you were like dude back in a day it used to be x now it's y we're getting it for x still but we also aren't spending a ton so maybe as we spend more that's gonna go down but honestly there's such a big appetite for learning crypto because people know people kinda know alright this seems like the next big wave like you know there was the internet it was mobile phones his iphone and now like crypto seems to be the big wave super hard to keep up with and i know there's money to be made so i think the appetite is there where i think we're gonna keep getting subscribers for pretty cheap because the appetite i've never seen an appetite for content like this in my in my life because i've been trying to make content that people want and i'm always talking about shit i'm into and like you know it's often like name is good i think the name is pretty good and you're using that platform b hive is that any good bee behaves is pretty good it's pretty new so like there's a lot of features we need where we're like we need to be able to for example if i do a partnership with somebody or what or somebody plugs us in their newsletter we or let's say facebook ads we pay for facebook ads i need to know if that subscriber like worth the same as an organics like are they still opening it twenty days later you know i need to know like based on where they came from are they still opening it to know where i should put my energy spreading the word and so they don't have features like that yet but we're kinda working with them to be like oh help us like good we need x can you build it we'll be your best customer if you can kinda like help us get what we need sick i think is i i think it's gonna work it just i think that you'll start seeing well you've already seeing progress after one year you're gonna see a lot of progress and then if you continue to do it for three years then shit really starts to accumulate the media really does compound i didn't believe that it did compound because i'm like it's not like subscription revenue necessarily but then i realized i like yeah but if i like just continue doing this and like get known you like it it becomes it compounds in terms of cultural relevance and that usually translates to revenue that's a good point and i've always said this and i've always fucked this up that's the reason i keep saying it as mostly as a reminder my self like the best advice i get the the advice i give the most to others is the advice that i've had this the lesson i've had to relearn five times because i just can't like get it through my thick head and that's that what you work on and who you work with matters way more than how hard you work and put that another way is the most important decision you make is what project to work on and so like i'll tell you like i've worked on some really shitty projects like we did a hack on and we built this app called beer hunt and it was like every time you drink a beer you like take a picture it you check it you have a you don't give a shit about that and it's like and people got excited why because oh beer everybody loves it's like it would get a big reaction anytime we told somebody about it they'd laugh and then they feel like oh that's cool i'll send to somebody my buddy or whatever and so people liked it who are especially craft beer type but i wasn't in a craft type and also like i didn't have the filter of like dude if i'm do anything it's gonna basically take up all my time for like three years minimum is this the one right and and i was treating it like a you know like a hook up and i should have been treating it like marriage because projects are more like marriage really when they like once you decide to do them you're gonna do them for multiple years right like and so so i've chosen a bunch i've did a sushi restaurant horrible project beer app horrible project try to build the next big social network and messaging app worked so hard built cool shit but like the fucking hardest industry to like you know you're just running around with the bottle trying to catch lightning so my project selection has been horrible to date the best project ever selected was this podcast and then the you know the e ecommerce one was okay not not great it like it's successful but it's more successful just because i got better at business it's still a really hard business to be in and kind of a a roll up your type of business to do i think this is probably the the next best like i think i finally did project selection right and the reason why is i think that crypto is as important as like you know mobile apps and iphone was in kinda like two thousand nine two thousand eight two thousand ten maybe and as important as like the internet was back in like nineteen ninety nine i think that's true and when there's a huge wave happening it kinda doesn't matter exactly what you do you just need to make sure you're out in the water pad with your board and i had been kind of like i had been investing and thinking about it but like it wasn't my job it wasn't my job to think about it every single day what this newsletter does like i don't know if the news i don't know if the media business is gonna be amazing i think it could be but even if it's not the fact that my job is that every day i have to learn two amazing thing like two interesting things about crypto and be able to explain it to tens of thousands of people that is like that is a job that's i think is gonna pay off in weird ways i could think of i think we're gonna get into good investments because people are gonna back like cool yeah you guys got that big distribution yeah we want you in this project yeah i mean that's i'm gonna fine that's what happened with the hustle right and it's like i'm gonna find cool projects because i'm literally i have to say something interesting tomorrow morning at seven am when this email goes out i'm not gonna say something boring so that means i gotta learn something every day so that means i'm turning myself into kind of like a learning machine so that is why i think this is the right project and the reason i share this is because i think it's the most important decision you make in any project you do and any endeavor you do is just at the beginning what project you decided to go go for dude i i i that's wonderful i'm reading three two two books on this topic the first is called wanting which is andrew suggested that's why i bought it he suggested it on this pod it's called one and it's about me mc desire sorry mime desire and the second one is the daily laws and this it's this daily it's about the forty eight laws of power and mastery all these great books but this guy named robert greene but you read just one page a day and the whole first section that i'm continuing re reading is like how do you find what you care about and it's really great because the the the thing is is you wanna find you wanna find stuff where you are able to when you get into it you actually get more energized and i've done a lot of stuff like copywriting stuff which i biggest it's fun sometimes but when i do i'm like i gotta like i'm i'll be like fine i'm gonna get this done by one o'clock on monday i gotta get this done and then i realized one time a couple years ago i moved apartments and i remember the move coming and i planned for a week i was like i wanna gonna get all these boxes we're gonna stack these box here this is how we're gonna move the movers gonna come at eight o'clock i'm gonna be there i'm gonna lift this up and then i was i i i got up at five am because i couldn't go to i couldn't sleep i was like i'm so excited to move and to like physically move these things and set up the new place and i was thinking about that when i was figuring out what i'm gonna do next and that's one of the reasons why i'm getting into short term rentals right now is because i just got and and i think that the the the point i'm trying to make is when you're thinking about what gives you energy it doesn't have to be you said it but i don't actually think you meant this this way you said i think this is a big deal and i don't think that's why it excites you it excites you just because the that i don't know why it excites you but like the literally just like it's a new money that's kind of interesting i don't think it would matter if like everyone's talking about it or not like i i don't know if you if that's what excites you what excites you is like literally the tiny minute details for some reason it's it's it just if maybe the math maybe like you're flow overthrow the system something about that is really interesting to you right and so for me i was like i just love moving these fucking boxes and moving into into new apartment i don't know why i love doing that but like i love going out on the street and hunting for places and talking to the guy at the bar like what you think about this neighborhood or all the hips are moving here like i love it i get obsessed with it and like i what i was trying to do what should i should do next is i was thinking about what do i just get so much energy up and i remember i cannot sleep the day before i've got move because i'm so excited that's so funny but i think most people hate that but you love it which is why it's even more valuable when you and the thing you get energy from is things that drain other people's energy like bingo you're gonna out compete everybody because for them it's gonna be working for you it's gonna be play like my coworker this guy paul ga told me this one he goes he was like i hadn't really thought about this i was young at that i was six maybe twenty twenty four twenty five and he goes he goes yeah so you should you should go talk at this event and i was like why is it gonna like give growth to the to our app or like we're gonna recruit people he's was like no you should go talk because you love talking right like he's like talking gives you energy so you're gonna love it and i go what he goes he goes yeah it's like you know for most people if they had to go give a talk in front of bunch of people would like they'd be drained by the time that they even get up on the stage and then afterwards there'd just be like finally some relief from the anxiety i've been feeling he's like you're the opposite he's like i noticed that he goes he goes it's like he it goes he goes it's like going to the gym you know you go to the gym and like if you just look at the math it's like well there's a lot of energy expended working out but how do you feel after you work out you feel yeah you feel physically a bit tired but you feel like your actual spirit feels energized like you go give energy and somehow you get energy in that moment and he's like so you know there's some stuff that's energy drains and even though it's not that taxing it's like just thinking about your go think about filing your taxes for like the next twenty minutes watch you'll feel fucking awful by the end of you'll go need a nap or drink and it's like on the other hand if you do stuff that gives you energy you know blah and so you know you can audit your calendar and say i'm a highlight in green the things that i do that give me energy and put in red the things that that suck my soul and and you know if i wanna have a better life i should probably just do more of the green shit i think that's that's great i think that my i i've talking to a ton of people right now who are a message they're like you know i've i've made a little bit of a name for myself i do and by my career but like don't even like it what the fuck do i do and i'm like yeah it's tough but you gotta find where where you have to find what gives you energy that doesn't necessarily mean what makes you happy by the way but what gives you energy totally because it can be really challenging and frustrating at times and you know it'll have highs and lows in fact i i i add this channel to every slack that i do so like i just put it in our e ecommerce one because we just had like a big low where we got f over by this like crazy unforeseen circumstance it's like well here's another one and so you know my team they get so bogged down by these highs and lows and i was like guys remember like we we stood in line to get on a roller coaster why are we surprised when there's highs and lows that's what a roller coaster does like if you didn't want the thrill like you know we can go sit in the grass over there we don't have to be on a roller line i'm stealing that and it's like you know so i create a slideshow called highs and lows and i say well now we have a place to put it which is in itself like therapy it's like dude this is gonna be an epic low that i put it there and we went we wrote the low and then we started riding some highs that we've had and like it just it's what you should expect don't be surprised when the roller coaster goes up and down when you you stood in line to get on the roller coaster you were excited about going on this roller coaster you know that's that's what you wanted you wanted the adventure and so and so you know that's how that i think that's like a good tip for really any business that's a great line with the milk road which milk roads the name of the the the crypto email that we mean and ben sent out every day and like you you go to milk mil dot com about the domain by the way for two thousand dollars i think it's pretty good pretty good goodbye right goodbye two grand for buy you i'm i i would i would've have thought you had had the dot c we had mil crow dot x y z and it was like such bullshit like people couldn't even like the thing wouldn't even load i don't know why but like mu dot com so when we started writing this i was like alright i found my thing now i found my thing when i was probably like thirty two or something like that alright so took me twelve years maybe to figure out what's the thing that gives me energy and mine was i just wanna get paid to be curious and it's like what does that mean it's like i don't know like every like every day i hear about different stuff are reading about things i'm talking to people wouldn't be great if just like going and learning that thing was somehow how i got rich in rich famous like wouldn't that be dope and like the podcast does that it lets me just be curious i be like oh someone's making a bunch of money selling turnkey tailgate to universities how does the economics of that work right like that shouldn't be something i'm i get i get the license to go spend three hours figuring out but the podcast gives me that license and cool it it gives me money in fame for for doing it i get power and influence great as a byproduct then the second thing the e commerce one for example does not give me this and that's why i don't think long long term right it's for me because it's not me being professionally curious it's like more of an opportunistic thing milk road is that because every day i'm like i like for example yesterday this guy came out with this thing i think you'll find interesting so most of the time people talk about the prices people tell us about a long of time talking talk about price of crypto which is kind of annoying once you stay in it for a while but like let's say the price of ethereum right now is about twenty six hundred dollars per per eth and was that out should be five thousand yeah people people come out and they should be there they're like oh like eats is going to five thousand eats is going to ten thousand eat to the moon and like nine times out of ten this is you know either hopes and dreams or it's like just clickbait like if i say i think bitcoin is going five million a coin yeah so what that's gonna get covered by bunch of people but and like bunch of people are gonna share it because it's outlandish and hey you know don't hold me to it like hey what are you do i'm just making some far fetched prediction about the future and the last one is they are like using some weak ass logic like like people do with pick bitcoin all the time to like there are fifty five million millionaires in the world and only twenty one million bitcoin there's not enough bitcoin for the millionaires to all have one so price is gonna go way way up and it's like okay like i understand the general idea of what you're saying but like that's so un compared and this is why like warren buffett comes out and says bitcoin is rat poison or it's pure speculation there's no fundamentals that was like the that's the common narrative so what i thought was kinda cool was was that if i would been just linked to an article of the chat where i did the clickbait thing where i said i'm putting twenty five percent of my net worth into bitcoin this is like you know a year and a half ago or something like that and i was like because there's a there's a wave of institutional capital coming in i'm gonna front run the wave and it just sounds great and guess what like you know these these use news websites you know don't think this like cri my face of the big bitcoin what was the thing that happen alright so this guy came out he's a he's like a kind of like a crypto quan investor he's got like his own fond or whatever and he said you know i actually think that there's a way to value ethereum like you would value any stock any stock of a company he goes so how do you value a company you value a company based on his cash flows well guess what ethereum has revenue so what's the revenue of ethereum if the has revenue because there's transaction fees and you know peep this not new but there's something new of like ethereum changed what it does with the transaction fees so now you can value it so for example bitcoin has transaction fees but the transaction fees get paid to minors so as a bitcoin holder you don't get that revenue and the miners all have different expenses one guy in greenland his expenses are low because the electricity is cheap there or whatever so you could never really get the profits the net profits of bitcoin transactions or the bitcoin network because it really wasn't that's not a it it wasn't it was apples to oranges but ethereum has changed what it does with the fees which now lets you create an valuation model so what happens alright if ethereum transaction happens let's say it's a hundred dollars for the transaction fee seventy percent of it's called the base fee and do you know what they do with the base fee you know where that goes no i don't know anything what you're talking about to be honest this okay so you okay well i'll i'll i'll explain in the most simple terms when there's an ethereum trick there's a transaction ethereum there's a fee right that's cool visa mastercard everybody has a fee when you do a transaction the ethereum fee gets broken into two parts there's the base fee which is just burned so they take seventy percent of the transaction fee and they just get rid of it why would you do that well this is like when this when a company buys back stock it's a share back buy back they basically buy stock on the open market and just get rid of it what does that do it makes it shrinks the supply of the stock which makes the price go up right there's less supply but there's the same demand so price goes up so the so ethereum started doing this thing last year where it takes the fee and it just buys back ethereum and gets rid of it which drives the price it drives the supply down price up okay cool that's the first bit the second bit is there's like a tip that's thirty percent of the fee today that goes to minors but there's a like the way ethereum there's like a ethereum two point o coming out when it does that that's gonna go to the holders of ethereum to the long term holders of ethereum so that's like a dividend being issued out so now you have now ethereum has revenue which last month that was one point three billion in fees a real significant revenue and we know that that that accrue the value accrue to the two holders of the year so what price target did did he put on it so he does a model he does a discount cash flow model he basically says based on this revenue based on this multiple and based on the this discount rate the price target for ethereum right now right now the present value of ethereum according according to this model is ten thousand dollars per eth ethan is trading at two point six thousand you know two two point six k if you believe this guy's model he's is undervalued currently buy about four x and he put the model there so anybody can go change it you the name his name is what like trying to read it what was the name ryan alice a ryan l i s and and so you could say okay maybe he's got really like aggressive assumptions in his model well actually he just used the average priced to earnings multiple of the s p five hundred and he assumed twenty five percent annual growth for the ethereum that's over the next twenty years which is not like super right it grew like a thousand percent last year four hundred percent this year like it's growing much faster than that now right now so you use pre conservative estimates now there's always risks right any i have this phrase i put in i put in the the news newsletter this morning which is that you know more fiction gets written in excel than in than in embrace you know because you can you can make a excel model dance and let make it look great just by tweaking too little variables so you always have to be careful with this stuff you gotta do your own homework but i found this to be really interesting because the common narrative is oh it's all speculation it's got no intrinsic value there's no fundamentals there's no analysis you can do on it you're just guessing what the next guy's gonna buy and that actually is true for most coins and it was true for ethereum until now and one of the best things you could do as an investor is spot when something you know common narrative is now no longer true those are usually pretty big opportunity so anyways i was i'm up till three am last night because i'm learning what this guy's model look like i'm kind of checking it for myself does this make sense to me and i'm putting that in the newsletter is like hey let me make this simple for you to understand like this is kinda cool and so even though that's a lot of work that's a prison of my own making that i'm happy to do because like i would rather be you're be to this though for years i think you will be that's the big tb but that's the that's the i think you will for now i'm into it i'm providing a fuck on of value nine months from now twenty eight months from now am i gonna feel the same i don't know by hopefully we can hire a rider who does feel the same think with most people even the shit they love it does get boring sometimes and then what you do is you walk away or you chill and then you you fall in love again i mean i have to imagine that even stealing with steven spielberg is like i don't wanna make a movie this year right you know what i mean i i think is that how they i wanna what like or or no what's what's the tennis player or the rafael nada doll yeah i wonder like what he thinks about like tennis or something like that i mean i like you saying bolt was like don't even like training man i'm just doing this because i'm good at it and it like right i i like winning but i don't really love i'm not in love with this right now and like that's normal i think that's natural and you see even like fighters like dustin po what he beat kind of mcgregor he was like man i'm over this i don't wanna like this anymore i didn't like this anymore tom brady just retired yesterday right and he's like basically he's he's one he's forty four now so he's been doing this for like you know twenty plus years professionally and he was like football is he's like i still love the games but football is a three hundred sixty five days a year commitment for me don't know if you know about tom brady but he like sleeps every day at like eight pm the guy and he started like the t twelve or whatever his thing is called the tea body or whatever his thing is called of the people on the hire oh really his his trainer yeah they guy alex i don't his trainer a business partner but like he branded up with the guy who's started it tv tb twelve method so yeah i think people do get burned tony robbins has this thing he says which he goes people's number one need in life is certainty so like you need to know where your next meal is coming if you got a roof over your head where you're gonna sleep that's why we love relationships because we love the certainty and comfort of knowing who's gonna be there who you talk to what you do every day we love your routines he goes but you know god in her infinite wisdom made it so that the second biggest need we have is uncertainty which is variety which is it's like a seesaw saw what do you do as soon as the thing is balanced you start jumping around and mess it up right and like you gotta know that about your nature and and there's like you know it's it's completely normal to enjoy a structured routine and then at the same time crave variation doesn't mean you don't like the thing or not cool anymore it's just that that's how humans are wired alright sake let's wrap up here because i've got i've got some stuff that i wanted to cover but we didn't get through today and so we'll say that for monday right okay cool producer ben what did you think of the app good episode oh dragging on good episode ben levy good edition good story yeah solid episode ben your your meme was amazing he he did his meme which is like walked into sean's office for interview is your name ben yes you're hired we're putting together a team if your name's ben and your talented get it get at us we're roger what was your what was your numbers in january ben oh i need to look it up it was it it didn't beat my best month which was like just below a hundred my best month was ninety seven or something like that and this was just below that so who what what's the latest who are you're profiling right now what store do you tell well that's still in the middle of all disney i haven't put out part two yet so i'm in the middle of that well also i'm i'm a i'm a big miss i'm a cheater when it comes to research so i'm also doing a little research on other stuff too yeah so i know a fair bit about walt disney what's like give me one tidbit that's like bet didn't know this sorry this is super what i found super fast give me one i haven't listened to the he's optimistic and he went broke and bankrupt up few times right yeah i mean that was the most amazing thing to me actually the the tidbit that like has blown my mind the most is there's a story where basically they're inventing cartoons of sound and like they're showing it to this audience audience is going crazy right so they keeps showing it to him again and again and again and finally a couple of his animators are like we can't do this it's six hours they've been showing it to him it's two in the morning so they just like go outside of the theater a little bit and are like smoking and talking and he comes out and he goes yeah what do he is gonna do you stand out here you're talking about babies or you gonna come inside and change the world and it blew in mind because i was like if you just told me that that quote out of context i would have told you it was steep jobs like it was it's so similar and then i just like started putting the sam par when he said do you want your kids to have braces so those those are just like two stories that i'm breaking this down now on the second episode the similarities between their stories are actually like kind of uncanny they have a lot of weird similarities yeah isn't a i i've always thought that like you could with all types of people that you could basically there's like i i was always trying to think how many categories are there of people because i remember meeting some people i'm like oh you are this you are exactly this human being and after listening to your podcast i remember listening to edison and i'm like oh elon is exactly like that and if i study edison i bet you i can like make sense of a lot of what elon is doing and help predict what he might do and i wonder if you could do the same for like a a jobs and a a walt disney you just put them in the same category like i i can understand a lot of stuff because of ben this is perfect for your your consulting business that you're if you've created off the pod you know those disc personality surveys where it's like you're a dominant you know indifferent or whatever you know like some bullshit like that you're a red blue and you can get along with greens you just need to do that with like great great people at history it's like you're forty two percent jobs and actually like you know you know you're forty two percent jobs at your sixty percent you know like whatever you know walt disney and it's like what does that mean it's like well you're like jobs in this way at whenever everybody he just gets a compliment it's like oh yeah i'm i'm eighty two percent edison actually and i don't work well with disney's is at w ax i need to find my job yeah yeah i do some like myers briggs over the top of it i like that alright all about making up fake personality quizzes i think that's great i gotta run i gotta go get my workout and it's about to snow and get freezing in austin like the first time in a long time so i gotta an austin like shutdown down when it's snows yeah it's stupid like last year we shut down for like a but i didn't have power and water for six days and it was like twenty degrees so it was kind of warranted by the way speaking of one liners you said an amazing one after we recorded last week the like you like he was just saying that walt disney quote what was the one that you said that our our buddy said he goes remember at the line you he goes and this guy's like worth a hundred plus million dollars she said people hate on get rich quick skewed are they crazy getting rich quick is the best way to get rich why would eddie anyone hate on that i love get rich cold i only wanna get rich quick yeah he goes you got a good get rich quick scheme for me i love that and this guy like sold this company in like two years so like it was a get rich quick scheme it worked so alright see you guys