All right, Sam in the next hour.
I am going to flood you with business ideas I am going to create an absolute lunch room food fight slinging business ideas at you You were gonna be drenched and covered with ideas.
Are you prepared for this?
Right analogy the lunchroom one did you make it up?
Yeah, that was very good By the way all of these ideas very half baked it came to me You know, I would say 75 % of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel and we said let's record anyways And how about we do some business ideas?
Let's give the people what they want tis the season of giving and we're gonna give the people what they want Which is fun business ideas.
Well, the first one you actually have a lot of Intel on right?
I have some bets I have some bets on horses and those horses are currently paying out And I haven't been talking too much about it, but I think it's time so Tick -tock let's talk about tick -tock Tick -tock right now if you open up your phone, do you have tick -tock on your phone?
No Okay For some of you you might have trouble opening the app because there might just be millions of dollars jammed in the app And it's a little bit like stuck so it might be hard to open up because there was so much money Available in tick -tock right now.
Do you use tick -tock as a user?
Of course? I'm a tick -tock addict Oh, that's why I don't use it.
I I had it and I deleted it.
I I love to think I have a lot of fun on it But I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space And I think right now people are sleeping on it when you say business bets Do you mean things that you own or investments of other people?
I own Equity in companies that are doing this that's what I'm asking Okay, so you invested in companies that are doing this not something you fully own and are operating Operate anything at this point.
Yeah, cuz that like insight is a little bit different.
Yeah Yeah, but these are all like there is something in between so there's like angel investing which is right the check sort of passive You're on the outside.
I would say you're on the other side of the fence They lob you updates over the fence and then there's things where you own, you know 10 20 30 40 percent of the company and you're active you're more actively in the loop You're not activated today with your hands, but you're active with your ears and your
mouth. Alright, so I do is right now on tick -tock Tick -tock today is a little bit like Facebook was maybe 2012 to 2014 and if you remember you at that time, we're working out of a place called founders dojo and There was a guy who used to work there named Moyza Lee and Moyza Lee today is more famous
because he started a brand called native deodorant and You want to give the like two seconds of what it was like being at the founders dojo when he was creating native Basically, it was this guy who went to Harvard Harvard law I think if so He was like clearly smart and he had a small econ startup that he
sold for like four million dollars or something like that So very promising, but still like well, you know, he was young and he's like, what am I gonna do in the founders dojo?
Which was like my little 10 person office that I shared with some other guys.
He was looking for something to sell He thought mattresses he thought a few other things eventually he landed on deodorant and right in front of us literally every day He learned how to use Facebook ads in a very short amount of time scaled his deodorant business from zero to just an idea to something
like 30 or 40 million in revenue and literally 18 months eventually sold it for a hundred million dollars in cash and like 24 months all right in front of us Yeah, two and a half years end to end from time of start to time of exit 100 million dollars sold to partner gamble Okay.
So why did he do that one?
He picked a interesting category but he was doing something that not every not a lot of other Harvard graduates smart people were doing and At that time on Facebook you could get traffic for very cheap You could get sales were very cheap and he was able to build up a consumer base at the right place
at the right time Basically, by the way, I saw his sheet.
We wrote an article on it and he like sent it to me I think he was spending four dollars and the each customer who we spent four dollars to acquire was then spending $16 with him.
I believe that was the numbers so he's like a money -making machine All right, let's take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has now They let me freestyle this ad here.
So I'm gonna actually tell you what I think is interesting so they have this thing called the fall spotlight showing all the new features that they released in the last few months and the Ones that stood out to me were breeze intelligence I don't know if you've seen this but if you're in HubSpot and you
have let's say a customer there You can just basically add intelligence to that customer.
They estimated revenue for that company How many employees it has maybe their email address or their location?
If they've ever visited your page or not And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called breeze intelligence They actually acquired a really cool company called clear bit and it's become breeze which is great because now it's built in I always hated using
two different tools to try to do this now It's all in one place and so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter So check it out.
You can actually see all the stuff they released.
It's really cool website Go to HubSpot .com slash spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself back to this episode Okay, yeah, I'm not sure the math but it was something like that It was sort of like, you know, four to one five to one six to one payout on on every dollar Okay, so which is very
hard to achieve today today You know one point five is the new four to one, right?
So basically you put in $1 you get a dollar fifty Oh that that same machine used to give you four dollars for every dollar man Those are the good old days.
Well, the good old days are right now on tick tock And so what's actually happening?
So here here's the breakdown of how this actually works So you create a product of whatever type could be digital could be physical great product Now I want you to look at something go down on our sheet There is on page four.
There's an infographic and it's from a brand called goalie.
You know what goalie is It's apple cider vinegar gummies So they just sell gummies like gummy vitamins, but specifically ACV apple cider vinegar Which was kind of like a health wellness trend and craze Now goalie dude, first of all, you could put anything in a gummy I guess like it like it started with weed
understood then like I do creatine that way Now you could do the last thing that I thought you could possibly do in a gummy, which is vinegar Yeah, yeah, and actually if you drink apple cider vinegar tastes horrible the goalie gummies taste great It's like, you know, it's apple cider vinegar without
the pain Okay, so goalie itself was a business that grew like crazy from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue I think they ran into financial trouble.
They think they had to sell bankruptcy something like that They were like they got way out of their skis The group that bought it has basically restarted it and one of the main things that they're doing is this tick tock creator Method that I'm talking about.
So look at this infographic.
This is a rewards program for tick tock creators So if you're a tick tock creator, not only do you get a little kickback on what you sell But if every month you hit a certain sales target, you can get something so low tier, you know 1500 GMV You can get an iPad.
Alright cool 4000 GMV meaning you sell $4 ,000 worth of product you get an iPhone.
Alright, let's keep going up 15 ,000 in GMV.
You get an all -inclusive trip to Aruba 50 ,000 you get a Rolex to and more you get the Aruba trip the iPad and you get the Rolex, right?
They're stacking and now let's go to the high tiers There are people that have done a million dollars.
They get a condo in Miami if you do a million dollars I think this is in a month of your GMV target It's a they're going to creators to say hey, do you want this condo in Miami?
It could be yours So creators is one way that you can make money on tick -tock so you don't even have to do the brand or service you could just say I am going to sit here and figure out how the fuck to sell Apple cider vinegar gummies If you get a month if you get a million they give you a Lamborghini,
yeah Oh my god, and there's people who have achieved these targets.
Okay, so this is their program right now So this is who you're competing against if you're going and trying to recruit these creators It's like you're a division one college basketball program You're trying to go get McDonald's all -americans to come play at your your program like there are guys it's
like Oh, man, there's this kid in Wichita.
This guy's just a creative genius He's a just sits in his bedroom and he just figures out the best hooks the best angles and Brands are putting them on retainer 10 twenty thirty thousand dollars a month in order to get this guy to create for them This is what's happening right now in the creator space.
How many views do the big videos have?
Millions tens of millions of views they can get thinking like a million likes on a video So you get a million likes you might have had five million views or six million views This is crazy.
Like there's a guy dressed up in scrubs talking about it I have no idea if he's actually works in the medical industry, but because he's wearing scrubs, I'm like, all right What do you what do you got to say?
Okay, so Goli did this Guru Nanda Teeth whitening.
Are you familiar with this?
I think the teeth whitening area is Full of scammers and I think that you are not a scammer for using tiktok shop But I think a lot of these scammers use this shit this like tik -tok thing like this way And so it doesn't surprise me that a teeth whitening company would be using it.
I'm not by the way I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all.
But you know what I mean?
Yeah, but I'm also not saying they're not no I have no idea about this brand but I know I've seen a lot of like bullshit teeth Whitening companies and I like like it in the research and I'm like, oh this is nothing Yeah, I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things.
All I know is that these they're selling a lot of product I think the Guru Nanda teeth whitening is the number one Selling product on all of tiktok and tiktok is the number like kind of the most used app In the country basically, right so if you have this like top selling product on the top selling
network It's pretty insane.
And so if they're the top on tiktok, how much revenue do you think they do?
I Have tried to back into this.
I don't I don't know the exact I don't want to say a number that's gonna be way off on this like would be crazy say like five million bucks a month I don't think that would be crazy now.
Okay, let me put it that way The brands that are doing this strategy Well are doing really well and you in the end by the way, this creates a halo effect, right?
So you you sell the products directly off that one video But then people hear about it And then when they see their ad the ad performs better because I've heard about this product before Oh, we have seen ten ten videos about this product So now when you put the paid ad in front of me those ten organic
impressions paid off or I go search for it on Amazon Amazon then takes that signal and says wow people really are searching for this name Maybe we should surface it higher or Google says we should surface this higher people are searching for this keyword brand So with that product category, so in that product
category give it more rank So there's this multiple of multiplier effect of this I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream though because Marketers are like piranhas like when there's like flesh in the water Like they all like one person tells one person and they all flock to it and they eventually
ruin it So how much life does this still have and how mainstream is this amongst brands?
Let's say it's in the red zone still so basically It's not as good as when I first discovered it and I didn't want to talk about on the pod because it's too good Right like when something's just like absolute gangbusters, right and unfair advantage You feel like you know a secret.
Nobody else knows It's not there However, more importantly, it's still in a spot where you could go do this today It would still work if you just go and do this today So still works, but you're not the only one doing it right both both are true I have you and like 10 other friends in the ecom world
and every business They complain about a variety of things with software.
It's churn whatever With ecom the complaint oftentimes is cash flow and inventory.
You're saying huge numbers Let's say hypothetically 5 million a month 60 million dollars a year But is that actually a good business when you're doing this or is this one of those things that if you get big you still are Broke look if you're bad at business, you'll find a way to lose money in any business
Even the goalie example I gave you right hundreds of millions of dollars and basically went bankrupt along the way So there are ways to lose to just not defeat from the jaws of victory There are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this and so I've seen both I've seen both examples
I don't think it's about the model I think it's about how well you actually run your business on how much common sense you use one of the great things about This from a cash flow perspective is normal econ business You put up the money for the ad you put up the capital at risk in order to get users
with this You only put up free product at risk.
So you send inventory to the affiliates the affiliates create the content You pay nothing for that ad until it does a sale is generated dude.
So if you're a digital product you crush it here Exactly.
So I have a couple of examples of digital products as well in my list.
So, okay, here we go that's a long setup for Five ideas that I think you could take on to tiktok a crush with right now number one So I want you to watch this video It's a go scroll down and look at this link that says Botox So the video starts as face taping is my jam and then the other podcast goes
tell me about this and she goes if you Had told me 14 months ago that I would not be doing Botox and I would be taping my face instead I would have said you're effing out of your mind.
It's so that what a hook, right?
So this girl's face is saying I used to boat use Botox and now I use this And I would have thought this is crazy and then the other girls like tell me more So this video itself has a quarter million likes By the way, they have it so usually it's like bro's it's dudes like discussing stuff in a podcast
setting that that becomes like the meme This is like two pretty women.
Is this even a real podcast?
Are they this one is a lot of people fake these but Process podcast so that video has five five point four million views Okay, so and they're not selling a product to be clear a lot I mean look at the comments every single comment is what's the brand anyone know the brand because she says there's this Japanese
Face tape and then Jimmy say Japanese face tape versus just face tape already elevated and Everybody's asking for the brand.
Nobody knows what the heck's going on.
Some people are criticizing.
It's a polarizing thing It's a visual thing.
These are good things when you want to sell on tic -tac So idea one is Botox face tape.
I think you can make 50 million dollars in top line revenue.
I'll say 15 % margins, so, you know, whatever that comes out to in the next 18 months.
Okay, okay Let's be more conservative 24 months if you hit this well, so you can make it a seven and a half million dollars profit You could build a brand because there's a lot if you look at the market There's a lot of people that are on tic -tac that obviously care what they look like aka everybody
There's a lot of people who are Botox curious But never gonna pull the trigger because it's either too expensive like individual Botox treatments or like thousands of dollars Or they just feel like it's too extreme and they're crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't want to do it
for that reason Maybe some maybe they'll be judged maybe self -respect.
Maybe they have to go somewhere.
It's uncomfortable.
It's like hymns, right?
This is a bunch of barriers reasons why you wouldn't do it.
Dude. I looked up if this works on chat GBT.
The answer is no Who knows right?
One of these things right like I don't do those little do those little like Jade face rollers work, you know Do this putting cucumber slices on your eyes and I'm doing it like re came on here the other day I was like, are you glowing she's like I did a chemical peel and I was like, I don't know what that is Tell
me more there's a whole world of beauty treatments that like have some On the spectrum of effectiveness and cost that you know, they land somewhere.
All I'm saying is that I think this could work I don't know if red light therapy is gonna change your skin and your hair But you know, it's it's selling and it's kind of my point right now.
I'm not a doctor. I can't make health claims I have a friend who is When is a doctor and anyway, she does Botox for people and she was at my house and she had her kit with her And she was like I need to like test this out and we were like did you get Botox curious?
I was like look at her.
I was like with that with that sucker out, baby Let's do this.
And so she gave me a little injection like six weeks ago where In my forehead Like like I was like, you know, I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this But like I'm a guinea pig, you know, you got a needle you got drugs Like I'm gonna try I would love to hear this excuse you're about to make
right now You're like I like to science and I just thought you know I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I want to support small businesses What are your other reasons that you did Botox?
Tell me Besides I wanted to look better go ahead looking dope naked I mean there's like that's the only reason why anyone does anything, right?
But it was I got so many compliments afterwards Yes, I got so many compliments and it was free.
I had But they can someone says you look really young People kept saying I looked young and I was like and it made me self -conscious on how I used to look like and dude You're hooked Have you ever you would never do that?
You're not into that.
No, dude. Come on, would you what would you say if your wife wanted to?
Do it. I think my wife does want to do it, but she's in that that boat where she's like I don't really want to do it, but I wanted to I'm curious like it's the same I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kit and was like, yeah, I can do it right now I think she would be like you and I think
her forehead would start looking.
Yeah smooth or whatever it does Yeah, like she was right here.
And I was like, yeah I mean if the needle is right there like just stick it in me like let's do the damn thing So it was I've been to Taco Bell right now If it brings it to me, I wouldn't not eat it if it's there.
So yeah, I guess you could say I'm Botox curious I'm serious All right, what's the next one?
All right next one another one of the beauty space and there's a theme here beauty things are Tap into a core human desire.
They are visual by nature they can have before and afters and they obviously are you know, high margin great businesses when you can build them and so I want to take anything that worked in the D to see in the in the prior waves of Ecommerce and I want to see if I can build a tick -tock native distribution strategy
around it That's a lot of fancy words to say if it worked with Facebook ads, I'm gonna see if it worked with tick -tock videos Okay, so one of the big winners I think she spoke at your conference was yeah Madison Reed dude, there's a location right on the shape of my house.
I think they do really well Yeah, so Madison Reed is built of real empire around hair color and I don't know the full story But basically, you know hair color is not a new idea.
They you know, there were many brands that existed My mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid, you know She would go to Target and buy, you know dark brown So she didn't want gray hair or shoot in my sister if she wanted to try it damn you're gonna do your mom like That I do it if I'm
great up You don't think my mom's great up like obviously obviously and so, you know My sister would if she wanted to try having lighter hair for season, whatever go buy a hair color So Madison Reed basically built a you don't kind of online first distribution strategy So a bunch of Facebook ads and built
a huge brand in this space.
I think Madison Reed Don't know what they're worth but I would not be surprised I just looked it up top line revenue grew 20 % last year to 150 million dollars in revenue.
Yeah, so the valuation something like 500 million plus so huge success I think you could do a new Madison Reed on tick tock I think that's just a bet worth taking which is same idea.
Maybe you have some new novel angle Maybe it's that it's easier to apply Maybe it's that it's less messy in your cleanup Maybe it's less harsh chemical so it doesn't damage your hair the same amount.
Whatever come up with your your reason why this is new and Build the brand off of tick tock and I think you could do this again with creators who are gonna Use the product show the customers build trust build your brand get people searching for your brand because there's not There's always gonna be
a new wave of people who are interested in this, right?
So there's either people who are whose hair is starting to gray There's always gonna be a new generation And so whatever the old whatever whatever media they consume is where you need to be in order to sell that right like Remember like touch of gray or whatever like men's that whatever the men's hair
color one Yeah, they did it on TV ads and the Madison Reed's it was Facebook ads Whatever the next generation is they're probably gonna get sold to over tick tock and Instagram reels I Alright my friends I have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit And it's hosted by Louise
and Fonzie Camillo And it's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and orange Theory Fitness Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between Content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top
entrepreneurs and creators And you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit You can check out a recent episode called the secret to content that converts and they break down our buddy Alex Hermoses blueprint for effective video production So you can check
out content is profit wherever you get your podcast And you know what's funny is you said there's a new generation that wants to stuff But you know, it has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks that worked in 1910 will still work today So for example, there's this Wall Street Journal
ad that tells the story of two young men one young man when they both when they both graduated college one young man got a Wall Street Journal subscription and because of that he Got a better career whatever and they tell us a story There are so many ads that replicate that story or that idea Successfully
because if you google like best Wall Street Journal ad of all time they psyched that ad and so what I like to do Is find old ads from as late as the 30s to 40s?
Like it could be like print magazine ads and just see like what's like an interesting line Yeah, what's like the human nature vibe of this and just rip it So like for example, there's this one very famous ad where it says they laughed at me sit when I sat down But then when I started to play the piano dot
dot dot and that's called the curiosity gap Which is do you remember the brand?
You know a BuzzFeed and then what was the other one called upward?
It was like, you know, 10 reasons why blank you're not gonna believe number seven That's the same hook as that piano ad and so it's really fun to find old ads and just be like what's the human nature?
Element of this and just replicate it on tiktok.
Exactly. Exactly great way to find hooks.
Okay, here's an here's a different different category So I did beauty.
Let me give you a different one self -help So one of the top selling products in the last year is something called the shadow work journal.
Have you heard of this?
No, but that's a great name shadow works So you get a if you go look on Amazon or I've seen this I have seen this The Amazon listing for this currently has over 5 ,000 ratings and this is like a self -published type of book and This journal on tiktok has sold over a hundred thousand copies You know, you
know rare it is for a book to sell a hundred thousand copies and like the first year that it ever existed with no other promotion so this was a it was a huge success and basically it was like people on tiktok would they'd have the book open they'd be like Like the gasp I gasped when I read this line.
Anyway, alright, what's the line?
And then they'll read you this like kind of heavy emo ish quote from this journal and then it's like You know, I finally figured out that my like my true shadow like what and it's like, you know, it kind of gets into like this whole like You know like the gypsy girl type of vibe It's like there's a whole
like group of people that love therapy that love like horoscopes It's like these like weird Venn diagrams that you can find where it's like people who are really into Sort of the mystic self and so this book capitalized on that I think today if you were to write I don't know why I said you I should have said
me if I were to write a modern -day version of You know, Tony Robbins his book at least apart within or Mark Manson's book the subtle art of not giving a fuck I think if I wrote a modern version of those and I just pumped let's say Nine months and a quarter million dollars of effort into Seating it on tik
-tok. I think I could have a by far a bestseller I think I could sell you know millions of copies of a book This isn't a book right?
Is this like one of those things where it's like a journal it's like two or two pages three pages of Writing and then a week's worth of like no.
No, this is not like a planner.
It's not like a daily planner It's I mean, I haven't read the whole thing But like it's basically it's a lot of text content But then there are like fill in the blanks or like what's that for you in a box?
and you write in your box, but it's not like it's not like just It's not just days and you you need a journal in it yourself.
Have you seen design your life?
Is that what it's called?
Yeah designing your life.
It's like a book by like, you know It hits all the check marks or it's like a Harvard psychologist who spent 30 years studying happiness in lifestyle design Stanford I think yeah, like writes a book on this and then it's a cool book I read it and then now they have like a journal that goes along with it
and You could just look at this and be like what works and what doesn't work but yeah, and by the way The I don't know if this angle would work with you because did you have you googled the author of that shadow?
Yeah, yeah, it's very aspirational very aspirational Nobody knew nobody can see that when they're when they're buying the when they're just watching a tick -tock because it it wasn't like It didn't look like a commercial for the book It was just somebody saying how this line in this book book really
spoke to them or how this book Change the way they view things like there's a whole hook on tick -tock that's very famous where they say some it starts with somebody saying Do you have any book recommendations and then they zoom the camera in really close like to their nose and their eyes they go I have books
that would change the way you even like look I would I have books that won't be so good You will never be able to look at a man again and they're like romance books or whatever Like I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain and they go like really intense with it And that's a that's
like a common like meme took that they use So the first it's like the first video Like I don't know if you could do this this girl's hot was the thing you basically just tried to tell me well She's a 25 year old like I'm looking at this New York Times article by the way.
She's 25, which is this amazing she's like a 25 year old like really pretty woman and That's like tick -tocks demographic like, you know, you're like you're a great boy You're a great boy should tick tock world the videos are not her the videos are whatever the videos are from the creator The creators
just looks how the creator looks they don't look like her and this is amazing by the way You know, I think I went to one point you were like I feel like I'm riding a horse like a few years after Henry Ford invented the car Like it's just like it's you can't compete when I see these videos and these
plans I think to myself I can never compete in this world of econ This is just insane Like the way that they stuck like the way that you were describing zooming in on someone's eyes if I Were in that meeting and try to figure out how to do it or in my bedroom like at night trying to like figure out
Like how do I write this script?
I would have been like this is like this is like cringe like I can't do this Yeah, like I can't you know what I mean, it's really hard totally get what you mean And I'm not saying that these are easy to do I don't I don't mean to say that I just mean that somebody's gonna do These and I think the way
to think about this is what are your attributes?
So for you and me at this point If we want to do something that's gonna be, you know successful We have other attributes like well, I could just use capital.
I have a lot of capital I could just invest in things that are already working.
That's an easy way to make money I have a good network I have a unique network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things and they will uniquely let me into something Okay, that's cool.
Maybe I have this audience from the podcast So I have attributes if your attributes are I got a shit ton of time I have nothing to lose and I have pretty shameless with my phone, right?
I'm like 24 and I grew up like mastering this stuff Yeah, I just been effing around on tick tock or I understand the meta game here better than whoever is the brand marketing manager Or the head of paid acquisition for Madison Reed or whatever these things are Then you're the one right noise It's like
I get that I can go to Facebook ads and tinker on this all day in a way that Parker and Gamble's Head of head of marketing is not gonna do they're gonna be buying Super Bowl ads They're not gonna be sitting here in Facebook ads manager every day and doing that But you know you get what I mean, right?
Like you have different Advantages than the incumbents do and I think if your advantage is that you grew up on these networks or you you're willing to hustle With with in a way that they're not you're willing to sit there and slide into DMS and send out free products To do all this stuff you can win and you
can win in these categories that already exist when I was with Moyes during that I mean when I say with him like he was just We know we weren't like a quick we were just acquaintances But I would just see him on his computer and he's like everyone check this out And he's like she would track the numbers
every single day in this spreadsheet and be like we just changed this number from a 1 % to a 1 .25 % and then it was like now that 1 .25.
That's the standard for that day Now we're gonna add in this one new change We're gonna add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing.
Boom We just got that 1 .25 to 1 .4 tomorrow.
We're gonna do this Like it was like a methodical like it was basically like I would joke It's come I was like dude We're all just spreadsheet monkeys cuz like all we're trying to do is he was just doing was just staring at the spreadsheet Turning 1 .4 to like 1 .6.
You know what I mean, right?
Well, I think by the way, he's not he wasn't just like that kind of at the beginning and now he's Like oh he's made it so he's different.
No, he's he's still the same way, dude I had a question for him about our econ business.
Like hey, here's how we're keeping track of this We're trying to use this I don't know if I should trust this or if I should trust Google analytics Or if I should try to triple whale or fish I should trust Shopify analytics They're all give me slightly different numbers.
Like how do you how did you do it?
And I just figure I just figured he'd be like, you know, I just and I just kept it simple I just did this and he goes he did say I just kept it simple and I was like, okay cool So which one did you just you just picked one and he goes no, I just kept it simple every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers
for all the platforms every single day Here's my sheet and he was still doing it now.
This is like 10 years later.
The guys Later and he wakes up in the morning and he sits down he triangulates any tracks He goes.
Yeah, they never drift between you know more than 4 % but I just do it anyways I'm just like it's kind of like a almost like a daily practice almost like like it's almost like a religious act He would do every day a spiritual act he would like offering to the economic gods If you're a chef at a bakery and you've
worked there for 20 years You know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus 45 minutes before you put it in the oven You're gonna have a very minor difference because you've done that thousands of times and that's basically like the same thing Yeah, I mean like you notice these very small
differences. I admire his Tenacity towards things I don't think he does anything in a not tenacious way Alright, let me continue.
I got two more ideas for you Okay, so I did the beauty stuff.
I did a book or self -help And by the way, that's how Mark Manson made subtle art of not giving it f like tens of millions of copies sold He was blogging before that and built a blog audience and he used the blog audience to launch the book and that was dude I'm audience to seems like so old school like
when I'm hearing this because a blog takes ten years and Hundreds of thousands of words and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts And I've told this story before but I tell it again because there's a lot of new listeners There was a time when I was building and about, you know Five to ten years
ago where I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high school Oh two teens teens will love this app So I said, well, what are we doing?
We're all just 20 to 30 year old guys sitting in this office You got it.
Let's let's go show this to some teens So we went first we stood outside of a Chipotle We said free burrito if you test our app and they looked at us like we were creeps But they took our free burritos tested the app.
So all right, we need to get more people saying yes Right now only one out of ten is willing to take a risk I said, how do we just go to where they're a captive audience?
They're trapped. So we went to a school We said hey, I'd love to come in and teach a class on business in it and at the end I'm gonna tell them about our new app.
Is that okay? So they said yeah, sure we came in We basically got to be a substitute teacher and I remember Going up in front of the class.
I think this is like a 9th or 10th grade class And I was like we're telling about their app and they're like, alright, like we'll try it like just give us the app I was that cool.
So you just got to get the test flight and we put a Link on the so can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this go to this URL Just go to this link and then you'll get the app and there's a link along with it Sean Just do this link and the guy in the back just looks up and his phone
was all like cracked and whatever He just looked at me.
Just goes links are gay And I can tell you there was no recovering from that and he said that the whole class just stopped typing they're like Yeah, he's right links are gay.
That's what's like today blog If I said hey, I'm starting a blog because I really want to use this it's kind of like building my audience to promote my book I'm gonna do they'd be like blogs are gay Ninth -grader would have shouted at me just like absolutely humiliating me, but what's old is new again.
It'll come back eventually hopefully alright, so two last ideas Candy candles click this link and if you're on YouTube, you'll see this on on our video screen It's important to look at these because these are you're selling a visual product So go down and see where I put candles Watch that video right
there. Oh my god. It's all right a mason jar Holy crap.
Wait, those are not are those real Oreos so it's a mason jar with the lady dipping what looks like Oreos and animal crackers is as if she's making like a Oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a mason jar exactly but the but instead of the smoothie its wax That's wax.
I know that was real because this is a candle.
No, this is a candle So these that's wax.
I don't know if the Oreos are real or not.
I can't tell but that's what I'm saying I can't of course it's not real look at the numbers on this video.
All right, it has 600 ,000 likes Holy shit, how many views does this have?
I don't know this so this woman has and she's just like a lady She's like a baker.
She's made that video.
So I saw that video and I was like, oh man This could be a product.
Why do I believe this?
So what just like I said, I wanted to take things that worked and the Facebook ads Payday and be like could I translate this into with the new distribution engine?
Another version of that is take anything that sells well in an MLM Because tick tock kind of works the same way tick tock is basically you you give your product to a bunch people They go and then shill it to their network in their community That's how an MLM kind of works without the pyramid part of the scheme,
but this lady's work is so good Like I'm clicking there was something.
It's like it's like frappuccinos and shit like coffee that looks like it's makes me I want to eat it.
I want to drink it but it's a candle I want to eat it drink it smell it.
I want all of it, right?
And that's what I'm doing.
It's a basically a sensory overload and that's if I see that I think this will perform This will perform if we if the armed creators with this and we had enough volume this content will always perform It has this oddly satisfying sort of delicious thing and people who like candles Love candles.
There's actually I said that wrong.
There's nobody in between you either don't use candles or you love candles There's nobody who just kind of likes candles That's a candle purchaser And so that's why if you go look up successful MLMs and I did this one night And I sort of done a MFM episode on it But like you can go break down successful
MLMs and you could try to figure out what product categories are they in because those are Categories that you could go into and be successful with if you just took out the MLM same product has the same desire But there's a new digit oils.
Yeah, there's a bunch of them and so like candles is a huge one So, I think I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into and I'll give you one last one 23 and me so 23 and me was just like really interesting company.
It got really big, but the company is blown up It is like self imploded.
It still does 300 million dollars a year of revenue But they've basically the board all resigned.
They quit the company is losing money.
The stock is in the tank It's like worth nothing now.
They had a major hack too I remember they lost six million people's DNA.
My dumbass I did it when they first launched and like it's been on there forever and I get an email saying Your shit's got like hacked like someone else has all your email.
Yeah. Yeah, it was horrible Like it was like the war that's probably it has to be the second worst hack behind besides your bank account Yeah, it's terrible.
But I think and there's others in this space ancestry has an ancestry DNA product I think you could sell that through this network.
And so I think a new way of acquiring customers I think that type of product, which is a Kind of a mix of a digital and a physical product a subscription product.
Have you seen the food once?
Well as allergy or what is it?
Yeah, so you can so the science behind this stuff is iffy It's not you know, a lot of people debate if it's legit, but that never Sensitivity is what yeah where it's like Yeah where it's like which foods are you sensitive to based off of your DNA and based off your saliva which like that make it might be
Bullshit, I actually think it is but a ton of people do them myself included So here's the deal I made most of my money from a newsletter business It was called the hustle and it's a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers And it was the greatest business on earth The problem with it was that I
had close to 40 employees and only three of them were actually doing any writing the other Employees were growing the newsletter building out the tech for the platform and selling ads and honestly It was a huge pain in the butt today's episode is brought to you by beehive They are a platform that is built
exactly for this if you want to grow your newsletter if you want to monetize a newsletter They do all of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
So check it out beehive .com That's beehiv .com Yeah, so I think there's a huge opportunity this is five ideas I thought of this morning but I do think that the the upside of it is I think that Unlike the cliche, you know people the cliche is that you can't get rich quick, you know blah blah There are actually
ways that you could get rich quick selling native in two and a half years for a hundred million dollars.
That's pretty quick It's the best way to get rich is quick as more And so I think that it is not and I and by the way I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies that we've started or incubated that have been in this space I guess what I'm saying is the growth here is quicker than I've seen
pretty much anywhere else I don't think it's easy to do.
I think it's I think you're competing in like you said sort of Sharky waters.
It's not that a lot of people are competing But all the people who are competing here are very smart and very very scrappy But there's a lot of categories out there and if you can find a category Where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this.
I think there's a lot of money to be made dude Listen to this story really quick.
So do you remember there's this company called elite daily?
Do you remember elite daily?
It's like a blog, right?
Yeah, so elite daily was a blog launched maybe in 2012 and Within one year they scaled elite daily.
It was basically a blog that said like a lot of stuff they said was like controversial, so it was like You know why men should do this or women should do that, you know And I can't which the controversial take and then sometimes it was like just a variety of lists But the guy who started it his father
was Jacob the jeweler.
You remember Jacob the jeweler the rapper Yeah, you're like, yeah, that was his apply the rappers, right?
Yeah supply the rapper that was his kid and so he started this blog when he was 22 and this was when Millennials were the Gen Z years so Millennials were the young guys and Within one year it got to be the most popular blog on the internet when she was getting something like a hundred million monthly
Unique so he did it in one year about 18 months in or something like that I went to their office in New York City and their office was a bunch of like New York kids like 22 year olds who are Being paid like 15 or 18 dollars an hour something like that And they had just rows and rows of cheap IKEA tables
and everyone just sitting there on their computer Just like banging out headlines to articles and then they would like register a couple words They would see which ones like they would post it on Elite Daily because they had so much traffic They would see which ones get a little bit of traffic and then
they would go and write out the articles and then Eventually the company sold for 60 million dollars which in the media world It was like the biggest thing on earth and so Elite Daily if you Google like Elite Daily acquired It was like this it was just like massive ass was that how many how many years
this was like ten years ago So I don't remember but I think it was something like two years Like it was like really fast like they were doing like tens of millions in revenue Literally within 12 months.
Like it was almost overnight and I Remember going to their office and I thought that this was like a legit publication it was just like these like they built like some software that like Guess what was gonna go viral and they were just banging them out in this room and it was crazy because it was crazy
It was an example of people who find one little hack and they go all in on it They dedicate their lives to it and they end up building a business that is huge Like this is kind of what this tick -tock thing which is like, oh, you're telling me if I just like get this one Mom to share this thing.
Oh, I'm gonna build a whole infrastructure all around this where a lot of outsiders look at this Like that's a crazy like what are you doing?
That's like ridiculous I can't do that and they're like, but why can't I like the math says that this one work therefore?
I'm gonna go get 300 of them and This Elite Daily thing it was insane to see this firsthand and I got to talk to those guys.
It was all wild This is like the new version of that.
And so I got to see these guys sorta like I wasn't Particularly friends with the founders.
I was friends with some of these employees So I get to see it from that angle they got rich overnight basically and it was like the exact same thing of just like finding a little tiny thing and Going all in on it.
Yeah, I think it's not it's not for everybody and it's not easy and all that And my disclaimers would be why why am I not doing this?
Well, besides the fact that I don't really want to be You know running businesses anymore, but but even if I even if I could even if I wanted to here's why I wouldn't do this It's a really frenetic and stressful space to be in that's changing like every day and so I don't like to I don't know what the right
analogy would be but it's sort of like sprinting on quicksand and I just I wouldn't really want to do it, right but But if I had no other choice or if I was wired that way where that's fun for me, I okay great I'm not really wired that way.
It's also age age age makes you different Yeah, the second thing is that most businesses like the terminal value, you know The exit value is in how durable how sustainable how sticky is this and by definition?
This is not super sticky super durable super sustainable You get the upside which is a fast spike that's sort of more than you could otherwise get organically.
But the downside is 18 months or now, I don't know if any of this will work You might fall off a cliff And so I think that's the the upside and the downside of this and then also for a lot of these it's physical products It's ecommerce, which is just its own beast in and of itself.
You have supply chains you have fulfillment you have inventory risk and you have Shitty margins generally and so like I think digital products and software Even if it doesn't grow as fast can still be a better bet to make and getting able to go there So getting big fast is not necessarily bad as long
as you have the right mindset So for example, a lot of people don't talk about this, but Jeff Bezos Amazon they got huge very fast.
They were also Google's biggest advertiser when Google first released advertising And they got big on the back of Google and it worked because they were like we're gonna use this to make ourselves huge and Also, we know that the customers always first we have to provide the best customer service with the best
product So if you combine all those things you can create something amazing Yeah, exactly.
I do think also one last I guess like important caveat on this is if you do this there's sort of a better and worse ways to do it and I would say The most important variable in something like this is just a repeat purchase.
So how much how much of a true brand and Long -term customer could you build there's a lot of people that I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once It's like man You're gonna go through all the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time and the product is not a consumable
It's not something you're meant to buy again And you're gonna have to release a new product in order another product a second product or a third product of a whole different type In order to get there that's playing the hard game on extra hard mode.
Don't I wouldn't recommend I think that reason is if I remember correctly, I'm just remembering this from like years ago I think that's why Moyes said he didn't do mattresses I think it was like looking at mattresses and this was right when Casper became a thing But he was like yeah, like a mattress
has $400 and literally everyone in America needs it, which is great But you only buy one every eight years, right?
So like of the products I mentioned the Botox thing the it's that's a constant once you get on that treadmill of you know Sort of like face improvement.
It's hard to get off.
Tell me about it. Yeah Come a little closer the camera, let's take a look at that puppy Hair color you gotta keep doing it candles you burn them they melt you gotta get another one, right?
So like these are things that are consumables that uh that have reekie purchase in them Do we want to end there and save your last one for another one?
Yeah, I had a bunch of other ideas not in the tick -tock game But I think we got excited and use the whole episode for tick -tock.
So if you like this We probably have two more episodes worth of just pure ideas Go on YouTube or tweeted us and just comment on if you're gonna comment on YouTube Just be like, you know more ideas and tell us your favorite idea of these.
All right. Thank you.
That's it. That's the pod I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to Let's travel never looking back Hey Sean here I want to tell you a little story about Winston Churchill So Churchill once said first we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us And I think this is true not just for the buildings we see in cities But also for the building
blocks you choose in your company for any company that I start I use mercury for all of my banking Needs why well, it was built by a YC founder and you could tell this is built by a founder who understands the needs of other Founders.
Second thing is is modern.
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They got bill pay checking account savings account wire transfers everything you need They got it I use it for not one but actually six of my companies right now and actually even have a personal account with them It's kind of amazing.
So if you're ready to operate in the future head over to mercury comm apply in minutes disclaimer mercury is a financial technology company at a bank banking services provided by choice financial group and evolve bank and trust members FDIC Thank you to Winston Churchill for that little ad segment.
Alright back to this episode
