Sam, I want to start with an idea today.
I have an idea that I genuinely believe is going to be big if somebody doesn't.
I've tried to convince one of my smartest friends to do this, but they're already a little too rich and too happy to go try something new.
So I've put this out there to the universe if anybody does this more power to you.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
The funny thing about this idea is that it started off on one of our drunk idea episodes, which we do from time to time where we take like, I don't know, half-baked ideas, kind of bad ideas, but maybe there's a nugget in there that's interesting.
And we call it drunk ideas where we both get a little tipsy, we pretend to be at least, and we pitch each other ideas.
What was the drunk idea?
So the drunk idea was called better than Google.
Do you remember this one?
Is that the Facebook group?
It's the Facebook group.
I joined it. I love it. Are you in it?
Yes, I love it. They didn't accept my request, oh man, I'm sitting here pending still.
So like, here's an example.
Yesterday there was this woman who like wasn't that pretty and she was like 23 years old and she was like, can I or should I get Botox now?
Well, I look prettier and she posted her face.
And there was like all these very positive, not necessarily positive.
Like you do or do not need it, but like, you know, we're not going to make fun of you, but here's the pros and cons.
The premise of this, there was a backup a second.
There was a Instagram influencer, I think her name is Amber Lancaster.
And Amber Lancaster is a Instagram mom, she's got, you know, million followers or whatever.
And she had created this group.
And I think she kind of like created it, but she's very hands off with it.
It's not like a very calculated thing that she did.
And so the group is called better than Google.
And the premise is inside this group is like 17,000 kind of like millennial moms, like moms, like her audience, people who, you know, because I was asking my wife, I was like, what is the group?
And she's like, well, it's just a bunch of moms who are like, we're all kind of like in our 30s.
We all want to have a good life, be a good mom, be a good spouse, watch good TV shows, be healthy.
Like we just have like a certain set of things.
We're just trying to have a certain quality of life.
And in doing so, if you put a bunch of those people moms together, they could really help each other out.
It's better than Google.
If you ask a question here, you're going to get better than Google type of answers.
All right, let's take a quick break.
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I don't know how they pull this off.
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Here's an example question.
Has anyone found an effective way to get rid of cellulite?
I'm pretty petite and I work out daily, but my legs still have cellulite.
And it has 30 comments of people discussing how they did or didn't get rid of cellulite.
100%. It's like a media company.
It's got juicy content, just like clickbait laying a click worthy content.
But there's no editors, no writers.
This is just people's real life.
So so a woman went on there and she was saying, my husband was cheating on me.
I found out I confronted him about it.
He got really defensive and I wanted to file for divorce.
But then over the last few days, I noticed he knew he like referenced things that were in my private messages like my messages to other people.
Like how is he reading my eye message?
And then the world's greatest tech support was in the thread where it was like, all right, you need to log out of your eye cloud.
You need to do this. You need to do this.
You might have a second eye pad that's connected to your thing and that's how he's being able to read this and they really helped you rush.
He's like, oh, thank you.
I figured it out. He mother was a side pad and whatever.
That's how he was reading my messages.
And so now I can do whatever.
That's a better answer than you would get if you just Googled the sort of same thing.
And it's more trusted and trusted the key word here.
So when I originally came on this drunk ideas thing, I was just laughing better than Google.
It's just like, you know, what a funny way to create a Google competitor.
It's like, what's better than Google machine learning artificial intelligence?
It's like 10,000 moms who are bored and scrolling on their phone.
And it's kind of true though, the wisdom of the crowds is actually a very strong force.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is actually a really good potential business idea.
Here's why. So I've long since had this theory that whenever one thing gets really popular, it creates a craving for the opposite.
So we see this in many ways.
I have a classic example of this was Facebook became the biggest social network in the world.
And Facebook was basically photos, but it was permanent and public, right?
You would post your albums there.
Everybody could see them and they stayed there forever.
Well, as Facebook got more popular, it created the need for something like Snapchat, where you would have photos that are impermanent and not public private, right?
And so Snapchat succeeded, but it wouldn't have succeeded unless Facebook had already shifted the way that culture was working in.
It almost created a craving in people for the opposite.
And I think you see that today where the more the world got woke and you can't say this and you can't say that and you have to use these pronouns to do this to that.
And then it creates a craving for a character like an Andrew Tate or even a Donald Trump or somebody who's, oh, he's a straight shooter, he's just going to call it like it is.
And those people become very popular because they're a counter punch to the way the things are going or the other strong opposition.
So similarly, I started thinking about this.
I said, man, in an AI world, a lot of shit's going to change.
And if you're going to just type into a box and it's just going to give you the answer, and it's going to scrape the internet, it's just going to give you some generic answer, that's going to be big for sure.
There's definitely a market for that.
But what's the opposite of that?
What craving does that create?
And what I realized is it's going to create the craving for almost like the old village wisdom, right?
How you can get answers from a bunch of humans who you can see their name and face and they can tell you things that are their personal experience rather than generically the right answer.
And I think that if somebody made an app that was the same premise, the better than Google premise, and it was a community of, you know, 10,000, 20,000 moms who were going to answer questions, that would be a really powerful app.
I think it would be really addictive because you would get the type of content like the Botox question.
By the way, one key thing is you can share anonymously in the groups.
You go anonymous, and then you post about the infidelity and the marriage, and that's that's part of why it works.
So I think you would need those features.
But think about how valuable that would be for a second.
Like if I could pick any one customer segment to have like a rabid community of, it would be moms.
Like it would be people that control the household budget in America.
That would be the most valuable audience segment that you could have.
And I think this is the way to get it.
Do you remember Chacha?
Chacha. Was that like the old search engine that was kind of like this?
Like Yahoo, answer type of thing?
Yeah. So I'm just pulling this up right now.
But basically I remember it when I was at high school.
And so that was about 2008.
So it was launched in 2006.
It went bankrupt in 2016.
And so basically it was a service.
And I didn't actually realize any of this, but it raised $6 million, including from Jeff Bezos.
And they had 5,000 freelance guides, meaning people who they hired.
And I would send a text message to Chacha.
I remember this was during the World Cup.
And I was like testing it out.
And I was like, what's the tallest and what's the shortest player on this particular soccer team?
Because I was just testing it out.
And I think I paid them two or three cents or something like that.
And they would mess it up and like three minutes with an answer.
Right. At the time, it was amazing.
And I'm just reading their page now.
It looks like they actually had raised up to $60 million.
And they had something like 1.7 billion questions a month of people that people were asking.
And it was like magic back then because we didn't have Google on our phone.
I didn't have a smartphone.
And I remember this being amazing.
And eventually it went out of business because Google is just better.
But I just don't know if it could ever make any money.
I think I paid like two cents or something like that.
I texted my stuff. Well, that's the beauty of it.
You don't need to actually pay for an expert answer.
So like here's some different analogs to this.
So you have a Cora, which is a bunch of more, I would call it a technor type of community.
And then you have GLG, which is highly paid intellectual information, right?
And there's a different customer for that.
For the customer for that, it's going to be a hedge fund or some sort of investment maker or something, something like that.
And then you have Google, which is the general search.
And you know, Google's market cap today is I think 2.3 trillion.
And if you think about like search on the internet, so the big, the general search on the internet, Google was 2.3 trillion.
And then you can like, silo that did into different things like searching for restaurants.
It's like Yelp. And I don't know what Yelp's market cap is.
I mean, billions, but it just hasn't grown in years.
Two billion, right? So, you know, the search for restaurants and handymen in your area became 2 billion out of the 2 trillion.
And then Glass door, which was like search for, you know, good places to work.
And then you have search for jobs and then you have search for whatever.
And there's a thousand tiny search engines.
And these are all like single digit billions companies for the most part that got created.
And so I think and then we have Duck Duck Go, which is kind of like the for the, you know, tech savvy person who cares about privacy and likes to not be doing the mainstream thing.
Here's Duck Duck Go. And we've talked about them before about how much insane amount of traffic that they have.
So I think that while search and this kind of question answer thing feels like a solved problem.
And even the community questions and answers, like you would think, well, why not core?
Why not Reddit? Dude, my wife is not getting on core and Reddit.
Reddit is just like, it repels women.
Dude, isn't it funny how Reddit works?
So Reddit is, I don't remember what they are now, but two years ago, they were like the sixth or seventh most popular website.
And yet, if you asked people, do they use Reddit?
A very common answer was like, what's Reddit?
It's a very strange thing.
I love Reddit, by the way.
I use like, it's made for dorks like us, right?
Yeah, yeah, guys with body odor, right?
It's not made for the millennial mom who wants to go in a high trust place and not get trolled and not get spammed and not get like, you know, made fun of and not like she doesn't get all the weird memes and they kind of like, it's just different.
It's a different culture.
And so I think that this kind of Reddit for moms angle, which you couldn't really, if you pitch me that generically, I wouldn't believe it.
As soon as I saw better than Google, I thought, man, if somebody really created an app that's supposed to do this and they seeded it correctly, the beauty of this was it was seeded with only followers of a certain type of Instagram influencer, which created a like-minded community of members.
And it excluded the general trolls of the internet.
If you could find a way to do that again, I think that thing would scale and I think that thing would be really, really valuable.
The value per user would be really, really high.
Let me play the pessimistic person right now.
Are you going to devil's avocado me?
Yeah, I'm a devil's avocado you.
I've built a handful of things.
And one of the hardest things that I've tried to do that I've not been able to pull off is getting people, so I own a variety of Facebook groups.
Some of them have 80,000.
There's one or two that most of them have like two or three or five thousand.
One has like 80,000. When we started them, I wanted to do a Facebook group because Facebook is where the person already was.
When I started a lot of these, there was like 2014-15.
And my reasoning was that getting someone to go specifically to a website like, for example, let's just say that you had like a food recipe website.
And then they're like, well, let's just create a community for our readers to talk.
So getting people to go to myrecipes.com slash forum and to actively participate is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
And I've never actually pulled it off.
And so I think there are people who do know how to pull it off.
I think those people are rare.
Getting people to come to a destination to tight new content and to register for something, that is one of the hardest things to figure out.
I think when it comes to mostly internet-based companies.
I agree. I'm not saying it's easy.
I'm just saying I think there's a billion dollar idea here, but like most billion dollar ideas, it requires threading the needle.
I'll give you one other analog to this.
So in terms of shopping, you have the big retailers.
I could go to target.com, I could go to maces.com, whatever.
And then Amazon came out and Amazon was like, cool, we'll just aggregate all the products.
And it Amazon's the Google of that space, right?
It's the general shopping search.
Then there's Etsy. And Etsy is like a complete counter to Amazon.
It's never going to be bigger than Amazon.
It's always going to be some tiny fraction of Amazon.
But a tiny fraction of a giant number is still a pretty damn big number.
And what Etsy did was they were like, cool, we will do basically mom buying from other moms.
So how do we do handcrafted goods?
How do we do things that are personalized?
Kind of the non-scalable non-generic products only.
And you could see the maker.
Here she is. You could trust her.
She's got her little shop.
And so it could let anybody create a little shop and sell to other people who like to shop.
Kind of that same like, you know, flea market type of vibe.
And Etsy's totally succeeded because it was so different.
And I think in a world that's going in a hyper fast speed towards AI just tells you the answer.
It's hyper intelligent.
This is generically the answer for things.
I think it's going to create more than ever the desire for more of the Etsy feel where it's like, yeah, cool.
But what if I just wanted a hundred other people like me who might have been through something like this to tell me their recommendations?
So another thing that's really popular in this group will be like, hey, I got like an Amazon gift card.
What are your best best finds on Amazon?
For me, here's my waist size.
Here's my chest size. Here's whatever.
Like what will fit me well?
And they'll just be like, oh, here's really good Amazon finds that are like clothes that are actually like pretty good fitting and actually, you know, last long, but are still good on a budget.
How are you seeing this stuff?
Are you like, hey, why give me your phone?
And like you see the role on hers?
Or is she like saying like, oh, hey, show me things, right?
So first it was her showing me and me being like, swatting away the phone like, I don't care who cares about this like, and she's like, no, like this lady was looking for somebody and then she asked a group and then the group found that person that she had bumped into it.
The bus stop was crazy. They knew it because of the description of the shirt that he wears and somebody said, wait, I think I know that guy.
I'm like, alright, whatever, who cares about the story?
And then the fourth of fifth time I was like, okay, every time I've paid attention to what my wife is really into, I'm like early to something that's actually like a very valuable investment.
What's another example of that?
You mean the econ brand that I started was very much in this, this vein.
But in general, there's like, this is not new, like Stanley Mugs, right?
Stanley Mugs now are like all the rage and like two years ago, she just kept talking about this and like, kept being so excited and wanting to show me about this like, jumbo oversized, over expensive mug that she bought.
But this is like one of like a thousand examples of these types of things.
And so yeah, anyways, this this type of stuff I've learned that I should not ignore because she is really high signal when it comes to she's a consumer and she's a specific type of consumer that is the opposite of me, right?
I am like an internet native person.
I'm the early adopter of products.
She's the opposite. But the things that do kind of pass her filter, there's something there.
Are you still using your wife the same way, by the way?
Like, is that a signal for you?
No, no, it's not. Why is that?
I mean, my wife is a young millennial or an old Gen Z.
I guess she's 31. And so typically it's with like TikTok trends.
So like, for example, remember the Hock two-e thing, like I had to be like, dude, what the hell is this about?
Like, what is this thing?
She's like your urban dictionary.
Yeah, if it's like, there's some new like singer name like Charlie X, she's like, so this woman's going to be like a huge deal.
And I'm like, why? She's like, well, just all my friends are talking about it and it's popular in TikTok.
And so she, we do it like that.
So no, but not like business stuff.
You know, like those golden goose shoes, do you know those shoes?
Those are so stupid. It's like like fucking dirty shoes that are $700.
No, they're so dumb. It was like really early on that too on that train.
And then they get on the one.
No, because she's vegan.
So that was like another thing that she was vegan.
Like a lot earlier than before the plant base became like a bigger deal.
And so I used to be like, okay, you know, great.
High maintenance. Where do we find like milk or butter or like any of the things that you need to do stuff?
And she would find these these branches.
You're like, oh, I really love only.
Oakley is really great.
This is before. Oakley was like in coffee shops and all that stuff.
And Oakley was this, it's this brand that's like, I don't know, it was like a Swedish brand or something, something in Europe.
And nobody ever heard of it.
It's got this funky bottle.
And I remember, you know, whatever, like seven years ago.
And she was showing me all these plant based products.
And then these creators who were really small at the time, but they're plant based creators that are now all huge because plant based recipes became very popular.
Another version of this was Kaleit.
It seems who we talked about on here.
I don't know how you say your last name, but she's like the fitness influencer.
Yeah. So when I was like, Hey, do you want to like do like, I don't know, like, like should we get a trainer?
We'll work out together.
My wife was doing that shit too.
Did she buy the PDF? First you bought the PDF.
I'm like, you're using a PDF to work out.
She's like, yeah, it's great.
And I'm like, a PDF you paid for a PDF.
You don't pay for anything.
And she's like, I just really trust her.
I'm like, who is this random woman in Australia?
Like, who is this person?
And then sure enough, she then creates the sweat app.
Sweat app then becomes like a multi hundred million dollar app.
And again, I was kind of like, dude, why are you paying attention to random Instagram influencer?
Like, she's not even like a real trainer.
Like, why don't you watch these videos or why don't you go to this, this official certified thing?
But no, her trust was in a certain type of person.
And I kind of wrote that off.
But then later I learned like, actually, that's just the way the world is going.
That's where people are going to get their information.
That's where people are going to get their trust from.
You know, kind of noise.
Your noise. Your world.
Sarah was like that with me with Emma, Emma Chamberlain.
Do you watch the Emma Chamberlain?
I don't, but I know about her.
Dude, this woman is the best.
I'm like, she's like Casey nice sat for chicks.
And I'm like, going back and like watching all of her old stuff.
She's so darling. Like, I'm all about it.
By the way, are you still using OpenAI every day as a search engine?
Yeah, not just as a search engine.
Can I tell you about a crazy thing that I did with OpenAI, a chat should be basically?
Yeah, it was. Like, nobody else is going to care about this.
But I think, I want to give a shit.
And I think you will find this interesting too.
So I've been playing around with the idea of writing a movie.
And so I was, but I've never done, I've never made a movie before.
Not a filmmaker. Do a play.
Do a play. Never really.
Scrape. Never in a screenplay.
I thought about play, but I had a specific idea for a movie.
There's a movie that there's a book that I wanted to buy the rights to to turn into a movie.
And so I've been like, down this rabbit hole trying to do that.
Do I know what book it is?
You don't say it. I can't say it, but yes, you would definitely know it.
And it's like, the rights have bounced around from big studio to big studio and it just never got made.
For one reason or another, oh, COVID happens and then production dies.
Oh, this person's on board, and then they get canceled and the project stalls out.
And I'm like, I can't believe this has not been turned into a movie yet.
And so, um, say, anyways, I mean, this like really, like, interesting path right now where I'm trying to acquire the rights to create a movie.
But along the way, I was like, Hey, maybe I should like figure out how movies are even made and like how this works.
So aside from like normal chat GPT stuff where I'm like, how do movies get made?
What's the name of the person who doesn't know how to do anything, but for the money and the will to make it happen.
They're like, that's called an executive producer.
And like, I had a kind of amazing magical experience with chat GPT.
So here's what happened.
I've used chat GPT to, um, like question and answer.
I don't know this. Tell me do this or explain this to me.
What I hadn't used it for was as kind of a creative assistant.
Have you ever used it in that way?
Or can I describe what I mean by that?
Yeah. Like sometimes what I'll do is I'll upload like I use the, I'll download.
I got this, uh, tool where like, for example, Scott Galway, I love his writing.
He's got a hundred blog posts.
I got this tool where I downloaded in PDF all of his blog posts.
I uploaded it all to chat GPT.
I called the voice Scott.
I'll write something. I'll say rewrite it in Scott's voice.
And I won't use the whole thing, but I'll just one or two nuggets.
I'm like, that's a cool sentence.
I'm going to be inspired by that.
So I'll use it a little bit like that.
Yeah. That's sick. And so I did the same thing.
And I was like, you know, I love Aaron Sorkin.
Uh, Aaron Sorkin wrote, you know, the social network and West Wing and newsroom and a bunch of cool things.
He's known for his like snappy fast paste dialogue.
That's witty. And specifically, there's like a bunch of like really nuanced things he does where one character says something to the other.
Like, let's say in the beginning, the beginning scene of the social network.
So the beginning scene is zuck talking to some girl who's not a date with.
Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States that can't possibly be true.
It is. Well, first and awful lot of people live in China, but here's my question.
How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on the SATs?
I didn't know they take us a season China.
They don't. I wasn't talking about China anymore.
I was talking about me. You've got a 16 hundred.
Yes, I could sing it in a knockup helicopter, but I can't say.
That mean you actually got nothing wrong.
And we're crew were in $5 to $25 PC.
Where are you getting to a final club?
I'm getting to a final club.
You know, from a woman's perspective, sometimes not singing in a knockup helicopter is a good thing.
This is serious. On the other hand, I do like guys who wrote crew.
Well, I can't do that. I was kidding.
Yes, I got nothing wrong with the test.
Have you ever tried? I'm trying right now.
To row crew. To get into a final club.
To row crew. No, are you like whatever delusional?
Maybe she's sometimes you'd say two things I want to not show which one I'm supposed to be aiming at, but you've seen guys who wrote crew, right?
It's an awesome first scene.
She's still catching up on the SATs in China, but he's like moved to the next part.
And it creates these little misunderstandings, this little bit of tension.
And it's part of why the dialogue really keeps you because it doesn't feel rehearsed.
It feels genuinely like two people kind of went a quick rally, conversational rally with the ball back and forth.
It makes a non fast pace scene feel fast pace.
Exactly. The whole scene is like seven minutes or something long as a long scene, which is a long time in a movie for just two characters just be talking to each other.
That's usually like breaks a rule of film where you want to break it up with action and movement and all these other things to keep people's attention, but he doesn't do that.
Anyway, so I upload that scene and I say, here's the screenplay for that.
How did you upload it? You uploaded the screenplay.
It turns out all movie scripts are like available online.
Like the actual original script is just there online.
So I grab the PDF. I put it into the chat.
You're my creative assistant.
We're writing a scene for this movie.
Here's the situation. Two characters and let's put them in whatever coffee shop.
All right. First, I said, explain to me what makes Aaron Sorkin's dialogue so good in this first scene.
And then it explains it.
I say, great. Using those characteristics right a new scene for this and what it did was so it spits out a scene and it's seen kind of sucks, but it's it out instantly.
And so like, there's this trade between speed and quality.
And even though the quality was quite bad, the speed was incredible.
It took two seconds. So then I could just start to inshep the quality by giving it feedback.
And so that I'm like, cool, but I don't think it's believable that the character would say this for the first line, I think it should do this.
And then it goes, sure, I've taken your suggestions from it.
I said, okay, cool, but like maybe instead of coffee shop, put it in a restaurant and it changes the restaurant because I want the waitress to say this.
And then it does it again.
I say, cool, but give me an alternative.
Just like, no, not that, but I don't really know why.
Just give me another alternative.
It gives me another alternative.
And I say, okay, cool, but make it faster and snappier.
And actually, I want the one character to be a little bit of an asshole.
Try to does it again. And what I realized was I was doing this and I just kind of step back for a second.
I said, wow, this is amazing.
It's, what I have here, I have a on demand creative collaborator.
It was 1 a.m. when I was doing this.
I couldn't have called somebody and be like, hey, do you want to just wake up real quick and just start writing with me?
So in the moment where inspiration struck, I was able to like instantly have a genius creative collaborator who had who spit out instant first draft, which let me not have to have the blank page, which is the biggest enemy to any creator, right?
Instead of being the author, I got to be the editor.
So now, chapter GVC is the author.
I'm just the editor who's like, no, something else.
Try again. Tweet this a little bit this way.
Give me another variation with this happening.
And it would instantly, instantly give me another one back.
And I thought, wow, the difference here would be, let's say I had a human doing this.
A, they wouldn't have been online.
Let's say they, let's say I caught them the next day when inspiration was half as much as it was in the middle of the night there.
Then I would say, can you write a draft of this?
That would have taken a week.
Then they would have come to me after a week.
Again, my, my, I'm out of flow.
I'm now worried about 10 other things in life.
And then they would have given it to me.
And now I would have to, as you say, bubble wrap it for them.
I'd have to give them feedback.
But I can't bruise their ego.
They just worked so hard all week, giving me exactly what I asked for.
So now I have to say, hey, I really like part of it.
But I just think maybe we could, would you be okay if we tried something like this?
Not to say this is bad, but I just want to try, just for, you know, and I'd have to do all that.
And then I'd bubble wrap it and then I'd give them the advice.
Then it take another week to get the second draft.
And now on the second draft, I have to give half as much feedback.
Because if I really push it even further, if I say no, I'll still try again, bruised egos.
So I'm like, wow, you have an on-demand creative assistant who can instantly mimic and learn from any input I give it.
Like write this in the style of this, write this in the style of this.
Protect this person as a director has no ego, takes feedback instantaneously and creates the revision instantaneously.
And by the end of it, I actually had a dope scene that was written, a dope opening scene to a movie.
And I'm a guy who's never written a screenplay before.
For me to have done that without AI would have been, I don't know, a hundred times harder.
So I thought that was pretty cool.
How was the output? The final product?
The final product is pretty good.
It's like, I mean, of course, it's not, you know, and so we're good, but like, it's a hell of a lot better than Sean.
So, you know, I got a superprower to be able to do that.
And I would say it is on par with like the average or slightly above average from a professional who I would have paid tens of thousands of dollars to write me a script.
Man, that's like, I guess, when I watch a movie, I kind of take for granted that someone had to sit down and write all that crap out.
That's so much work. Like that's so much work.
That would be so much. And so when we tell that story of Sylvester Stallone doing, how fast did he do Rocky?
He wrote the first draft during half days.
That's insane to me. That's insane.
But also if you watch Rocky, you're like, okay, it's this is not rocket science.
The script is not like super sophisticated either.
A lot. You're making a whole world.
But let me tell you two other things.
So on that note, so you had, so writing the thing that the other cool thing I got out of it, you know, when I wasn't writing, I was watching like video's a very short talk about his process.
And one of the things he says is he's like, people don't understand to get one good idea.
He's like, my brain is a rola dex flipping through 50,000 bad ideas.
And he's like, I have just exhausted so many dead end paths that this could have gone to find the one path that kind of works.
And I thought that's such a good analogy for how all creation works.
I'm sure you feel the same way about marketing ideas or business ideas.
Like, your brain flips through 50,000 permutations of what you could work on and how we could work or what the business model could be.
And then in the end, it pops out and it's like, oh, him, it's a great idea, dude.
You know, like congrats.
It seems like it just worked right away.
So yeah, it worked right away because my brain went through the idea maze on a speed run.
And I bumped into so many walls and I flipped the show many ideas and permutations with this could and could not have been until I finally figured out one that that would work.
Yeah. And it's like magic.
How it comes out. And it's crazy that the, you know, we talk about the shower thoughts.
And it's like, it is weird how I spend so much time thinking about something and all the permutations.
And then when I'm out on a bike ride, it just like, wait, why didn't I think of that?
And you know, and it's kind of all, it is like a magical process.
And if I had to do that for a script for money, that would be very hard.
Do we have to do a shell real quick?
Yeah, let's do it. Speaking of writing, speaking of writing, speaking of writing, if you're trying to get your writing out there, the way that Sam did it, the way that I did it, the two businesses that we built that we sold and probably, I don't know, some of the simpler easier, would you say a simpler, easier business that we ever made?
The simplest. The simplest was a newsletter business.
And if you're going to do a newsletter business back when we started it, back when you started the hustle, for sure, you built a bunch of things.
I had three engineers on staff.
I had three engineers on staff and we had to build everything.
And then I had like two or three growth people.
And they spent half of their time filling out Excel sheets to try to just track all the information.
Right. Or build a referral program or go and then you had 20 people in ad sales, right?
Like going just right through generate revenue.
You have, we have, I think we had like 15 people in ad sales and then we had like three people supporting them all just so we basically, when we sold the company, we were going to do about $20 million at year in revenue and we had something like 35 people, but only two writers.
And it was insane. It was insane.
Like it was actually only two writers.
And one writer was just in case the first writer got sick.
Yes. It was 1500 words of days.
It was not that hard. And so we had to build all of these tools.
It was a pain in the ass. Let's do a little bit of math on this just real quick.
So do you remember what your op-ex or payroll costs roughly were for writing that one newsletter that had two writers, but it had 18, you know, had 33 other people in the company that were doing all the other functions.
So two writers probably each made 150.
So add about 20% to that for healthcare.
So we'll just run up to $200,000.
So $200,000 for three writers is $600,000.
And then we had roughly 30 people beyond those guys.
So what's that like $8 million?
Yes. Something like that.
So $8 million. And just even just the engineers part, right?
Because I remember you were building like a tool that would segment the audience.
You were building an A.B.
testing tool. You were building all these little features to be better at your newsletter.
You lived in San Francisco at the time.
San Francisco engineer, even with the San Par Special scrappy, find somebody, convert your brand.
So that this is the dream 200 grand each.
So you're paying basically 600 grand just on product cost.
And the products weren't even that good.
Like, you know, like I'm not a tech company.
But it was hard. Not your core competency.
Well, instead, how much does behind cost a month?
I think B.I. was like 99 bucks a month or something like that.
And they got like a free plan too.
And so instead of spending $600,000 a year, you could have spent $39 a month.
That's the price of the most popular plan, the scale plan.
And with that, you get the ad network.
So they'll do your ad sales for you.
You get subscription. So you put a paywall in and you can actually do subscriptions.
You didn't have to build that feature.
You get a website builder.
You get all the email automation so that when somebody signs up, you know, 60 minutes later, you send them this.
And one day later, you send them this.
And after they refer a friend, it automatically sends them this.
You have the referral program, which was huge for you, huge for us.
And required basically, like one and a half to two people to run on our side.
You didn't have an engineer, did you?
We didn't have an engineer because Beehive was out when we started the milk road.
So we just used Beehive.
But half of these features didn't exist when we did the milk road.
So I remember when we were building it, we were like, Hey, do you have this automation feature?
Do you have analytics that will do this, this, this, do you have surveys or polls?
So at the bottom of the email, we would always write, how was it?
And it was five stars, three stars or one star.
And we used that to basically give feedback to the writers on like what worked, what didn't in each newsletter.
And we could actually measure the quality of the writing, the quality of the content.
And now they have all those features.
So if you want to do a newsletter today, though, brainer, use beehive, it's beehive.com, be, e, h, i, i, v.com.
The only downside is their name spelling is really hard.
But everything else besides once you pass the name, everything is gravey.
All right, let me tell you a quick story about someone who I spoke with the other day.
And it was kind of a life-changing conversation.
So for Hampton, we have this podcast called Money Wise where we get people to come on and they explain all their finances, whatever.
Spilled beans about the beans, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm still in that one.
Thank you. That one's down mine.
And they like to break down their hope or folio, whatever.
But this woman I talked to, have you heard of this company called Solid Core?
No. I've described as that person who I've never had a company level.
I bet your wife has heard of it.
So her name is Anne Malume.
So Anne is probably 41 right now.
And so let me tell you her story because this was like mind-boggling to me.
So Anne started her career at the age of 25.
She started a non-profit because she was out in a run and she ran by a homeless shelter.
And she was like, you know, I would love to figure out a way to help these people.
Running has helped me get over a lot of issues in my life.
I should start a running club for these guys.
And if I make them get up, or if I encourage them to get up early at 7am to come to this run, maybe that's going to encourage them to make the rest of their day better and hopefully they'll get jobs, whatever.
So she starts this thing called back to my feet.
And if a non-profit that does something like $6 million a year in revenue, which is like in corporate sponsors, she does that over the course of five years.
So at the age of 31, she goes to LA and she takes a Pilates class.
So have you ever seen like a reformer Pilates?
It's like this weird machine, where it's kind of like yoga on a machine sort of.
I've never done one but I've heard it's like incredibly challenging.
It's awesome. They're really awesome.
It's mostly what women do and but after talking to Anne, I'm actually going to start doing it because it sounds pretty great.
And she goes to this class and she's like a pretty intense runner and I think she did weightlifting.
And she kind of got was like, I get hurt every six months.
I just expect that that's part of the process of being an athlete.
She starts doing these classes and she's like, this is awesome.
And the class was really cute and darling, whatever.
And she was like, I want to do this.
And so up until that point, she had saved $175,000.
And so she moves back, goes back to her hometown of Washington, DC.
And she goes, I want to start a studio and I'm going to retire from my non-profit, which a lot of people call it they're crazy because they're like, why do you want to start like a gym, like gym, stuff, they're horrible businesses?
She's like, no, no, no, we're going to do a studio business.
So she quits her job. I believe in August and by November, she started her studio.
She started with $175,000.
She said she transferred her $175,000 in savings, put all of it into the business account and spent basically all of it except for 10 grand over two months building out the studio.
And so she launches it and saw a core.
That's the name of the business.
It's like that Pilates thing, but it kind of has like a berries kind of edge to it, you know, like berries bootcamp where it's kind of like cool, like all black letters.
The music is just like 40% too loud.
Yeah, like it's like it's like intense.
It's like a nightclub. Yeah, yeah, it's like cool.
And she starts this thing and in month one does $90,000 in revenue.
And the reason she started it was she was just doing the math.
She's like, look, like the way that this business can work is I have my Pilates instructor.
I don't even need like a front desk person.
The front desk person doesn't need to be there because we have classes going throughout the day.
And if I have like 15 of these reformers and I do eight classes a day, that adds up to $3,000 a day.
I think I could fill this up seven days a week and get a 90 grand.
And she does that in the year.
Did you tell you how she did that kind of 90 grand month one?
Was there like, how did she get the customers to come to this new new place?
Yeah, just like flyers and stuff, just like telling all of her friends.
Like it was like super grassroots.
And if you do the math, it's it wasn't that crazy.
I think her math was something like I need 15 people in every class or something like that.
And it wasn't that crazy.
And she also was really good at branding.
So these women would go to these classes and they're like, this is awesome.
I'll see you guys next Tuesday.
You know what I mean? Like they wanted to do it over and over and over again.
So in month one, it does $90,000 in revenue.
She says that she kept growing it.
And by year two, she goes, I was able to pay myself a million dollars in salary.
She was this thing took off because my costs were so low.
I basically just had to build out the studio, which wasn't terribly expensive, expensive.
And I had to build by these reformers, which are like the machines.
And she's like, our cost basis was awesome.
We are a very efficient operation.
And so by year, so we're in 2013, she launched it.
By year 2016, she has 11 studios.
Still to this point has not taken any outside funding.
Keeps growing it. By in 2020, shit happens where like everything hits the fan.
COVID happens. They have to pause the whole business for a couple years.
However, leading up to that, she had taken a little bit of funding and along the way, she had taken PE, where she took a little bit of money off the table.
So I think it was something like, she was paying herself like $2 million a year, but then took off.
I think she raised $18 million of which six went to her.
And then she raised another like $20 million and then another 10 went to her.
And then finally, after 10 years, she eventually has sold the whole business for something like $250 million and across all of the rounds, she had taken off the table, something like $90 million.
And so this woman's like crazy successful.
However, the big takeaway that I had from this lady, and I have never met someone with such a great growth mindset.
And let me give you an example.
After I sold my business, I was interested in real estate.
I learned everything about real estate, or at least enough to kind of feel confident investing in it.
I start investing into it and I get scared.
I got real nervous. I'm like, man, I just put down a lot of capital.
Like this isn't exactly working.
Like I thought it would be working.
Like it's not always up to the right.
And I got bail, and I got afraid, and I bailed.
And I've done this many times.
If you're done this, or like you learn about something, like you'll learn about like, let's say fitness.
And you're like, well, if I do this for six months, but then you're like in month one, and you're like, this is never going to work.
She did not have that. I've never met someone like her that trusted the process so much.
And she would tell people like in year two or three, she was like, I'm building this business to sell.
And so we're going to do this.
And then by year five, we're going to be here, your eight, we're going to be here, your 10, I think we're going to get like $200 million.
And here's an example of what she said.
When she originally took out, she had saved $10 million.
She bought a piece of land and developed a home in the Dominican Republic for like four million bucks in total, sold that property after like two years to Albert Poole's for like $9 million.
And I was like, that's crazy.
You did half your net worth on this.
She's like, yeah, well, I just like studied a bunch of experts.
I read a ton of books and I just like felt like I knew how to do it.
And I've never met someone who has such faith in the process.
And I was so inspired by that.
And now she's got over a hundred million dollars or around a hundred million dollars.
And she's investing in all these interesting deals.
And she's like, yeah, well, you want to allocate 10% of your portfolio to this, this, and this because I need a little bit of a high risk stuff in order to off balance my conservative stuff.
And that sounds very logical.
And academically, that makes a ton of sense.
But when 10% is $10 million and you're doing $2 million bets or whatever, that's a very nerve-wracking thing.
But she was so good at dividing her emotion from like her logic side of her brain and trusting the process.
I was incredibly inspired by this woman.
You have to follow some of the stuff that this lady has to say.
She's so interesting. Also, she looks very cool.
Got a cool haircut. She's like a walking brand.
She will kick your ass is devised.
But I get from her. She's a very strong-looking woman.
Yeah, very cool. So crazy story.
I didn't realize how big this was.
I mean, it's crazy. There's a fitness chain.
This big, this successful that I just never heard of.
Dude, it's even bigger now, by the way.
I believe what's it KKR?
I think KKR bought it. And now there's rumors that they're going to try to sell it now for $800 million.
So her business, I guess it's not hers anymore.
She sold it. In 2024, the projected to $150 million in revenue and $50 million in profit.
And Anne on the pod, she was like, I have the most profitable fitness studio because we do, we just kept it lean.
We just don't have too much excess stuff.
Well, it just seems like they must have figured something out on the marketing side that's, they're just not spending a lot on marketing.
We should. We should. And of course, the annoying answer.
I just got a lot of word of mouth.
It's like, God damn it. Word of mouth is the worst answer to hear because you're like, great.
Nothing I can do about that.
I have to go back to the drawing board and create a more viral concept.
I have to create a more remarkable concept.
I have to make my product so much better.
It's like the last thing you want to hear as a marketer is, yeah, it's just really organic.
It's like saying, I was genetically blessed.
Unfortunately, that's how it feels to me, at least on the other side of whenever I hear that.
Well, we don't with the money wise podcast, we don't talk too much about getting customers all that stuff, but we should have her on here because I would, I did like off air, I was like, how did you do that?
And she goes, I am world class at branding and community.
That's what I do. I know how to do that.
I was built to do that. And so she didn't tell me all the tactics, but I believe that's how it grew and that's stupid answer.
I have a word of mouth, but we should actually have her on and ask her all about this.
She's super fascinating.
And if you Google her name, she, she's very transparent about finances because she's like, young women aren't taught this.
And so I'm just going to like be transparent about this.
So like she's under talked about, she's not talked about a lot.
I never heard of her. I never heard of her.
I never heard of solid course.
I'm glad you put her under my radar.
This is really cool. The question I have is it seems like your takeaway was, I've never seen somebody have so much, what did you say?
Like so much faith or what did you call it?
Like first you said growth mindset.
These are trusted processes.
But okay, to business made $95,000 the first month.
The process was trusted.
What do you have to trust?
It's working right away.
Like to me, trust the process is it's not working.
It's not working. It's not working.
It's not working. And then month 29, it finally turns the corner.
That's trust the process.
But that's how people truly feel in reality.
So like with my with the hustle, when we were doing, when we crossed a million dollars a month, I still felt like fairly uncertain.
If you talk to, I mean, I talked to you talked to a lot of people.
I talked to a lot of people.
Like you can have a big business and you're still like, it's still tatering.
I don't know if this is going to work out.
You know what I mean? You still have a deal.
Yeah, but you still kept going.
It's not like you abandoned ship, right?
So I think it's pretty even if you have doubts doubts to me.
Of course, you're going to have random doubts like Creepan or you're going to have someone certainty.
Will you know, will this work?
If it starts working, will this last?
Those are natural questions.
I guess like, I think a lot of what she did is awesome.
And in fact, the first thing you said about having a growth mindset to me made a lot of sense as in she just had had the confidence and faith in herself to go do something completely different, put her entire life savings into it, and trusted in herself that she would make this work.
I think it may be that's more what you mean?
I mean, that and like when I was asking her about new initiatives and things that she would get into, like she was like, well, I wanted to learn a little bit about stock investing.
And like, so I started, I studied all the earnings per share and I learned what all that meant.
And like, I bought in video a while ago.
And it worked out. And so I guess what I mean is she was quite good at acquiring information and then trusting that that information was good and trusting that the way she learned was good and trusting that the process that she learned about would give the outcome that hopefully she wanted.
Okay, that makes more sense to me.
Okay, yeah, like that. In fact, I had a kind of similar idea.
So I'm writing this essay.
By the way, you had this in one of your emails, your what's it called Tuesday?
Tuesday? Yeah, where that guy Hoffman, his last name was Hoffman, where he said something like no good business is a good business.
Or what did he say? Ornhoffman, yeah, he basically was like, I forgot the exact wording of the tweet, but it was every business looks like a shit show on the inside.
The successful ones and the unsuccessful ones, right?
When you I think he said there's no such thing as good business on the inside.
Yeah, every business looks incredibly messy and like upside down on the inside.
And I found that that's true.
At least in my experience, like I've never been a part of a company where I'm like, wow, it feels buttoned up.
It feels figured out. It feels like this is just firing in all cylinders.
This is just a well-oiled machine.
You didn't feel that way with Twitch?
Twitch. Twitch. Twitch.
Honestly, this is to say a little bit bad, but you know, when when Twitter started getting big and suck came out and it was a little bit of jealousy or hatred, but he was like, they drove a clown car into a gold mine.
That was Twitch. Wait, Zuck said that.
Yeah, he never heard this.
No, that's awesome. It's one of the first non politically correct things he ever said, which is like just the honest thing, which is these guys are driving.
They drove a clown car into a gold mine.
And Twitch very much was the same way, which was Twitch could get 100 things wrong internally, but it didn't matter because they had a network effect.
They had a moat and they had basically once you build a market play, once you get a marketplace to work, you can now screw up so many things.
And they just got more popular as gaming groups.
So it was like, I would see just bullshit going on internally, just wasted wasted efforts here, wasted efforts here, bad strategy here.
And then COVID happens and everybody's at home playing video games online.
Boom, business takes off.
And you see, you know, we're trying this thing to create growth, trying, trying this to create growth.
Nothing is even working.
Nobody has any fucking clue to grow this thing.
Fortnite becomes the biggest game in the world played by everybody.
And Twitch grows like crazy on top of Fortnite because what Emmett and the team had done early on, they got right.
And even then probably I'm sure I wasn't there, but I'm sure many things felt broken or unfigured at that time, but they got the core thing right, which is they created the biggest marketplace of supply and demand of content creators for video gaming content and consumers.
And that gave them the privilege, the right to be wrong.
So they got to fire so many shots on goal after that that didn't even have to work out.
Didn't have to be well executed because the more popular gaming got, the more people were online streamed, you know, online being content creators, the bigger Twitch got.
And so they were just, and the analogy we used internally was, we don't create the waves.
Right. When every time somebody did the growth analysis, it's like all the things that caused growth were not out or exogenous factors.
It was not some feature we created that drove growth necessarily.
It was the popularity of a specific game where it was a new device gets released.
And now the new PlayStation drives, you know, a big boost in whatever, or the new gaming PCs or the chips get better, which make it easier to stream while you're playing, because the graphics cards can now handle both.
And so there was always these exogenous things.
And the analogy we used internally was, we are the surfer.
We are out there paddling, waiting for waves.
And when the wave comes, it's our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out.
But let's be clear, we don't create the waves.
And internally, we all wanted to create the wave, because you want growth to be a button you can push.
But in that business, that's just not how it worked.
And by the way, a Twitch diehard person would totally disagree.
I'm sure they would be, you know, shaking their fists saying, no, no, no, we we were great internally.
And you know, we improved the conversion rate and the discovery rate and the retention rates.
And that that all causes growth.
So there is like a counter argument to it.
But I think on the whole, I know what I saw.
I know what was going on inside of there.
It's not like, by the way, that's what I thought I would find.
I thought I would go from my messy startup where I'm an idiot and I created a huge mess over here and I got 20 people and I don't know how to do anything.
Oh, I'm going to go to this company that got bought by Amazon as a multi-billion dollar company with seasoned executives.
Now I'll go learn how a business is supposed to look on the inside.
And instead, I was like, man, this is not not it.
We're on a tangent. What we're originally were you going to say?
Do you remember? Oh, I'm writing this essay called, Who's Your Elon?
And I wrote this because I have this philosophy that you are what you admire.
So pick and choose what you admire because your body will start to gravitate towards that.
And I think as founders, the default, the factory setting that you get wired with when you decide I'm going to be a founder is cool.
Then you should want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.
Right. Those are the, that's the North Star.
Would you agree? For most people like it's just the default factory setting for entrepreneurs.
Yeah. And before Elon, it was Zuck.
And before Zuck, it was Steve Jobs.
And before Steve Jobs is Bill Gates or whatever.
That's kind of like the transition here.
And so Elon today, he's the goat.
And it makes sense. He's built badass companies that change the world, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, even actually, he helped create start.
He's the richest entrepreneur in the world.
He's the most famous entrepreneur of the world.
He seems like a badass because it goes after these hard problems in these big markets.
And he's just doing cool shit, electric cars, launching rockets that will land themselves on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean.
He's incredible. Convincing dozens of women to have his children.
And then convincing the rest of the public that it was cool that he was doing his part to save civilization instead of like just impregnating everybody around them.
So he's incredible. But also, I don't want to be him, right?
Because his family life is a mess.
He seems super stressed.
His schedule is not the schedule I would want.
If you want those trade-offs, great, more power to you.
It's not the trade-offs I would choose.
And so I think it is. Do you see what he tweeted out where Zuck was doing like the surfing thing on 4th of July?
And Elon was like, that's cute.
I'm busy working. That's what he could have his parties on his yachts.
I prefer to work. Oh my god.
That was the lame shit I ever heard.
Also, somebody replied with a great tweet, a thing.
They posted the analytics of how much how many tweets and likes he had done that month.
And it's like, I prefer to work.
And he's like tweeted in the lights like a thousand times that month.
It's like, for you're not working.
Yeah. Anyways, I think that Elon is great in many ways.
If he's your North Star, more power to you.
But if he's not, it's important to pick who is your North Star.
And I guess you were talking about this woman Anne and how we kind of admire that she was able to just like, fearlessly go in and learn new things, have the confidence, learn just enough to be dangerous, but also move on.
And like, have multiple chapters in her life.
I realized that that was that was my answer is somebody who's more of a polymath, somebody who has they walked into Disneyland and they said, I want to ride all the rides.
They don't spend all their time just like perfecting one ride.
They're like, I only have certain amount of time on this earth.
I want to I want to go ride all the rides.
Who are examples for you?
So like the historical example is like Ben Franklin.
It's a Ben Franklin like, you know, has a he had a scientist era.
He invented like he invented the bifocals, the Franklin stove.
And then he created the best newsletter of its time, right?
He invented a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.
And then he was a founding father and he was in politics and he helped write the Constitution.
And then he also convinced many women to have his babies.
Of course, that's a free requisite.
He then was the CEO of the US Postal System for a period of time.
And then in music, he invented like a musical instrument.
He had like he influenced many people, Mozart, Beethoven, said that Ben Franklin influenced them.
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Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
Really? Really? Really?
