Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en it was strange i was pulling up to my university or through college and i would pull up and uh at some i would pull up in like a drop top lexus like 70 000 car and i was like 19 right [Music] dude so um val sean uh he’s not making it today but that’s okay we um so your thing went viral today how many likes did you get like three thousand thirty three something like that i had to turn off my notifications i can’t do when you work with i don’t know how you guys do it i don’t know how people do it while running full businesses but um i had to turn that off because i just can’t concentrate that that thing just my phone was just blowing up all day now you know how i feel it is crazy right it’s crazy so you you had 3 000 followers and now you have like nine maybe nine thousand something like that yeah i mean it took me how many years to get up to like 20 700. um yeah now it’s i don’t know i didn’t look to be honest with you but i’m probably at like eight nine thousand at this point so all right the background here is i met you through my like we we share like a best friend joe and we joe told me about you he goes this guy’s crazy and so lit val let me tell you what i know about you and you tell me if it’s right or wrong and then i want to hear your story but basic basically you he goes and i’ll i won’t reveal too many numbers i’ll let you talk about any number that you want to talk about because i don’t know if what i know is confidential or not so i’m not going to i’m not going to mention them but you as a 19 year old you came from uh russia you came from russia i came from uzbekistan it was about the age of 11 and then you come here you get a computer at like 16 or 17 you start this uh affiliate marketing uh business you’re the only employee by age like 22 23 you’ve made something like 30 million in profit from this like one little business from there you parlayed that into in a lyric website that was like one of the biggest lyric websites in the world which doesn’t sound that impressive but most people don’t realize that lyric websites are some of the most biggest websites in the world and so that made like another eight figures in profit from there you parlayed that into an ad network that now is like huge from there you’ve now launched a jewelry business that apparently joe has said it’s bigger than all your other companies but i don’t know if that’s true or not and then throughout all this you’ve acquired and sold and developed like a hundred plus million dollars of real estate is all this accurate uh some of it uh okay so well actually my first and by the way the reason i’m having you on here is because we’ve had a lot of really successful people on here do interesting stuff and there are like a lot of them are well known but you don’t i basically the other day begged you to like tweet something and i helped you write this tweet and it took like a few days and we got it out there but like besides that you pretty much have never done any press you’ve never talked about this publicly and when i met you i was like this is a gold mine this guy has so many interesting stories we gotta tell this story so anyway what was wrong and what was right so okay so well actually the funny part is that the the first business i had was a playstation like a video game website it wasn’t like huge but you know i was in high school and making like 5 000 bucks a month that actually taught me a lot of lessons um so the so the the search market and you actually told me i actually tweeted another thing about you where you said hey my 12 year old son has a website that’s making like two g’s a day or something like that um and he needs an email service provider which one should he use and i tweeted that screenshot and it would be yeah well that was anonymous i guess it’s not anonymous anymore but uh so he he’s uh yeah that that is interesting i saw you post that um and he still has a website it’s not doing as well but uh not quite at 2000 um anymore but uh he’s uh he’s working on like coding this thing away and he’s like figuring out all these things so it’s actually amazing to see it you know at his age that you know so where’d you get it’s crazy that you and your family you just find all these opportunities where did it start so you your thing first thing was a playstation website which what is that so a site called psx extreme um we this is like i launched like 98.99 or something like that actually 99 it was right before the the bubble the dot com bubble burst i was like about eight months into the the the bubble and it was doing really well it was very easy to generate revenue and you know once i got the traffic it was the site was all about anything related to playstation so like get cheat codes your reviews um screenshots whatever right anything for like playstation fans so it was like a playstation fan website then the dot com bubble hits my revenues disappeared 90 my traffic was still up there but i had no revenues because all the ad revenue disappeared like it went from being three dollars cpm down to 30 cents cpm if you could be lucky enough to get that how many people were going to this website um it wasn’t huge but i had like like ten thousand uniques a day maybe twenty thousand and ninety 99 and 98 that’s got to be a massive site yeah it was good it was a good amount of traffic and it was all free so it was interesting like experience because i had to quickly learn how to generate revenue and i i had to go out there and sell advertising myself and you know like i and then once i figured out that i could sell advertising i didn’t have enough traffic so i went i started going to other video game sites and saying who had much more traffic than me and say hey i got all these advertisers who would spend more if i had more traffic like i’ll let me put ads on your sites so i went to all these other video game sites and like just was a broker for advertising so that was kind of like my first uh you know making decent amount of money um i was making five and like just from the site and i was making probably another 10 a month from being a broker and then the thing that you tweeted today or maybe last night it basically you told the story about how when you were 19 after this playstation site you built an affiliate ad site and it made like i forget the i forget the numbers but in two or three years it was like over 30 million in profit so what were you you were selling stuff on behalf of half.com or ebay who were you or no new york times you had like 800 basic you basically you had like 800 ad accounts that sold different stuff so like a new york time subscription for which sold for a hundred dollars but you were able to uh sell it for only 30 bucks so you were able to keep the difference something like that yeah so you know it’s affiliate marketing but i use page search which was very new back then and at the time when after dot com bubble burst all the advertisers got all sudden advertising digital advertising stopped being interesting you know for a sec for for a moment there people thought businesses thought it might you know internet might be over right so all of a sudden you see kind of all these budgets get you know just get pulled back right especially all the brand advertising and but nobody really you know so everybody has to still figure out how to get customers so they say okay you know what we won’t do brand advertising but if you dr if somebody drives as customers we’ll pay per customer like we can’t loosen that right so performance marketing um so that was around and it was very um accessible and at the same time the media wasn’t expensive right because the supply was there but the demand wasn’t there so that’s what i took advantage of i started buying up a lot of supply mostly was search search page search and that’s what made everything so uh profitable because i was just playing into those supply demand dynamics that were working in my favor but yes what i would do is i would find an advertiser that had a product i would test it on at the time you know kind of like the the modern day yahoo paid search or back then was called goto.com and then later google came around and so i would test that ad if it works i expand on it if it doesn’t work right i would figure out how to make it work right uh if there’s a if there is a if there’s a way to make it work and yeah just like it just uh you know i was like and what what things are you saying oh man everything everything um yeah and all this and all this was making like uh like many millions of dollars of sales for your little one-person operation every year yes that’s crazy about yeah tell us a little bit about like what was going on in your life at the time like did you try and go to college were you doing this while you were at college did you drop out like what are you doing with your life uh so um i already had the business um i went i got into like i’ll have finance so i was like all right so i’m gonna do business finance and i didn’t really feel like i should be but i only did it because and i had no time for it you seemed like you’d be awful at that i am i was awful i was actually interested in the topics especially the topics i was interested in like law or finance or business accounting all those things were interesting like i couldn’t i couldn’t sit through biology but even even though they were interesting i had no time to study so i would suck the tests my gpa was horrible i can’t remember what it was but it was just horrible um because i just didn’t care to you know get prepared for the test i slept in half the class of just catching up on sleep because i would go to sleep at 4 o’clock in the morning and then don’t you don’t you still do that don’t you go to sleep at four and get up at noon yeah i average four or five yeah so if i go to sleep i think yesterday i wanted to be four three i woke up at 11 so i try to get try to get seven hours of sleep it doesn’t happen all the time you know a lot of times i have to you know live on five six hours but do you do do you recognize that you’re a weirdo um i’m used to i’m used to it you know what i’m i’m a weirdo i i know i’m i’m do i do everything in reverse my wife keeps telling me like like you do everything backwards you’re you’re studying uh finance but you’re not doing well because you’re running these businesses well i’m in school just because i have a jewish mother and she wanted me to go to like you gotta be in school you have to be in college right or you have to go but did they know that you’re like hey mom like i bet you i’m making more money than you uh i i think she she kind of knew i don’t know if she knew but uh what i was making i don’t remember um but it was it was strange i was pulling up to my university or through college i went to baruch um um new york city baruch business of uh finance ziklin business of finance um and i would pull up and uh at some i would pull up in like a drop top lexus like a 70 000 car and i was like 19 right so or 18 whatever i was i think it was 18 at that point i think i don’t think i even started the paid surgery at this point so this business is just like crushing it so like a few years in you’ve in your tweet you said it made over 30 million in profits like three four five years in so it’s gone really well you’re paying like a crazy amount of taxes you said so you decide to move uh to the burbs a little bit outside of new york city and you like buy a cheap house in cash so things are going well right like it’s but you you said you know i’m a little bored with this or i don’t really want to go much further into this in this racket i want to try something new and then the next business was uh mobilefuse which is around today um so i actually launched around the same time um we launched two businesses so after han so i i launched i launched the let’s call the the the music content distribution company oh that’s right sorry right so that so we didn’t own i didn’t own actually lyric sites what i did is i built a service uh i built a system that connects called ringtone matcher and what i realized was there was demand for ringtones and there was all this traffic um for all this music related traffic especially in lyrics and so what i did is i built a service and the other thing i realized that the traffic was very much international like 70 of of a music site or lyric site was non-us and i noticed that some of the advertisers like ringtone advertisers were advertised they’ll do okay but they would have only uh they could only accept u.s customers and they could only accept like verizon customer only t-mobile customer so i built this thing called ringtone matcher and ringtone matcher basically integrated like countries into one system so if you have a music site you could drive that those users to ringtone matcher and ringtone match will figure out based on geo like what country you’re in based on what carrier you use because it’s carrier billing so it’s important that you know i figured out like ufc mobile to match you up to a ringtone service that actually um is compatible with t-mobile and then the third thing we look for that content is available so if you’re clicking on hey get this get toxic by britney spears ringtone on your phone i need to make sure that that song is also available in their catalog because some some ringtone providers had um like warner music and some of some of them maybe just had the emi they were like four major music companies at the time and uh you know these ringtone providers didn’t have all those catalogs so they might have one or two at a time so i would take all that data and put it into one simple link and and how big did that get how big did that business go i was in a front of ringtone matcher was in front of a half a billion people a month yeah half a billion so and it was everywhere i mean it wasn’t just lyric sites i was on cbs radio aol radio yahoo radio last fm like every pretty much every music site i remember even talking to musically which is tik tok now right i remember even talking to those guys i was talking to uh we were talking to whatsapp in the early days like when they were just two guys or something like we wanted to integrate because anytime somebody mentions music or a song or something like i wanted to be i want my i want to bring the matcher there to show up so and but but when you’re you’re using the word we again it’s not weird no this company was so actually that company i started ringtone matcher myself again that was a one-man show at some point i um we you know there was one little group of guys who were pretty good at dealing with advertisers and or actually ringtone providers and i felt like i need help on that front so i merged those guys in so there were five guys that merged into my company um two formed when you say merge who bought who i was a majority owner of the company and then the the five guys had the like they they had a third of the company i had two thirds how big was it when it was just you um it was just it was going nuts up but uh i think i believe the the year i think the year we merged it was 10 million just again just 10 million profit with just you do you why do you think so this is the we’ll get to the rest in a minute but why do you think that you find this weird stuff and why don’t you hire people two different questions but how on earth do you find this type of stuff you know it’s it’s funny like i know i see how organized you are right like you make your goals you lay everything out on paper right you’re very organized then you could think about it you ask people for feedback um i’m totally opposite of that um i just kind of go with where like i like to test things and i’m i guess i’m very curious um and uh and i and i i could be very very focused but if i get distracted i get very easily distracted right so it could be like sometimes it’s a curse but sometimes it’s a blessing a lot of times it’s a blessing um and i come across these interesting things and my curiosity just takes it further um so when i when i the way i actually came across this thing was because i felt that there was a point of my life where i was seeing google was just too dominant part of my business and i didn’t like that um because i didn’t want to rely on any one thing so i started looking outside of page search for supply and i came across these music sites and i actually started testing rhapsody on them because i had such a good deal with rhapsody i was like let me start marketing outside of search i did okay and i had these you know i started building these relationships with the music sites and then then then i kind of tested a ringtone service and it just crushed like it was not even close like i did three times better and i was like wow this thing did three times better than rhapsody and that ringtone provider was uh just covering us just like one or two music labels and like two carriers out of four i think i had four there were four major carriers at the time i was like hold on a second if it’s already doing three times as well what happens if i start integrating everything globally right so that’s how ringtone macho came about was your when you launched stuff what’s your first version like junk like you get the idea it was a kitty script i wrote this you know guy was kind of freelancing for me a little bit um i just i didn’t want to tell him about the idea he’s actually a cto of one of my companies now he was like 15 16 years old and i didn’t tell him the idea so i said hey how do you script this how do you script that so i scripted it myself and um and uh so yeah so it was pure junk it was literally just a bunch of if and then statements on and and asp we were running windows um windows server on asp infrastructure so i uh i had a bunch of redirects that were just doing a bunch of if and then statements and redirecting people based on certain parameters wouldn’t and when you’re doing it are you like see every time i’ve hung out with you the reason i like hanging out with you and joe i consider joe one of my best friends and so i have like his attitude you and joe have the same attitude which is like he’s a little more laid back than just and you i think he is he is i’ve never seen him lose his temper he is very calm and i’m like hey this didn’t work out for this reason he goes oh that’s okay like he’s super calm but you have that too i think i think that like i think that what it you have this like i don’t know if it the right word is like hutzpah if the right word is like i don’t know what the word is but it’s almost like things i’ve heard we’re going to get to the rest of the stories because because there’s like this jewelry business that you started which is like seems like even bigger than all the other things that you’ve done potentially and you like do these things where i’m like but like val you don’t know anything about that and like you don’t even have any employees like you don’t know anything and but you just are like yeah but uh you know whatever i’ll just we’ll just go a little bit further and then we’ll see what happens and then if it if it sucks i’ll bail you know what i mean like you have this like oh shucks attitude like oh you know yeah we’ll see what happens it’s very interesting whereas like if i was doing what you were doing and i started seeing those results i’m like is this illegal am i breaking the law am i going to go to jail what is going on oh it’s almost like i would have most people would have self-destructive tendencies when they see this like going so well yeah look i see that all the time i feel like people tend to overthink things and spend a lot of time like analysis paralysis and the reason i think a lot of people are successful like especially somebody like me is well somebody’s thinking about making perfecting one thing which by the way will still have a you know 60 failure right and that one thing that you just overthought i rather test 10 things by within that same time period and i will likely have i have a better accuracy or i’ll have a better um chance of hitting it out of the ballpark with one of those 10 things maybe more than one of those things yeah how did you get into the jewelry business to start with um so after i sold those two music related companies um which i took like three years off off you know i thought i retired all right um but it was anything but i just got started getting like my curiosity was just taking me into all different like i was on all these boards and i was like you know investing into a bunch of things and um and i realized that’s the three years i need to build something again so i started looking at i knew that i wanted to do something where it’s fixing or disrupting a fragmented space i didn’t really want to go after like corporate america um i wanted to go after like mom and pops when i say mom and pops it could be like you know i’m taking like car dealerships right they do tens of millions of dollars it doesn’t mean they’re tiny right so i wanted to go after something like along those lines and i had some investments in the jewelry space i had some family in the jewelry space it’s a pretty tight-knit community i just happened to be i had some family that too that that knows that that that business um i actually worked as a teenager i worked um every weekend i worked in a you know in a jewelry store i knew how to fix like i knew how to fix jewelry i mean i would sit on a bench uh with a blowtorch at like 15 years old uh because my cousin taught me it was my it was a it was a family business my my aunt and uncle’s business they had a couple jewelry stores and um they taught me how to fix jewelry to you know so i knew the business a bit from the retailer’s perspective it always seemed like a very weird way to do business i always had questioned everything like they’re doing so so um so the idea was hey like these retailers um if we could integrate build a platform and services and we could integrate into them and this is a 300 billion dollar industry by the way globally which fragmented but controls is actually bigger um independents are bigger part of the business fine jewelry than the majors the chains so i knew that again if i could build distribution but i had to bring um then there’s a lot of power there but i have to bring value and that’s where my expertise and data and marketing digital all that came into fruition you know so we basically put this thing together we integrate into stores and help them grow help them bring customers cut costs increase their revenue how much did you invest to start it to start it i don’t i mean to start it i think we started off a couple million so you put two million dollars a video in the beginning yeah how big is this but you’ve done more i think you put more in since how big is this going to be i put in way more i mean at this point i put in eight figures into this business um i think it’s a multi-billion dollar company in the future for real you think it’s a multi-billion dollar company like to sell yeah market cap i i believe that hey i don’t know if there’s anybody big enough to buy my company or this or this company we actually have a lot of people this time around it’s no it’s no longer just val we have a lot of employees i i believe this company will be if it’s successful we could do what we need to do and we could really help all these retailers step up their game i i don’t think that there’s really a company in that space that would be big enough to acquire us so like well but are you are you the ceo of that company is that smart i mean that doesn’t seem like you’re you’re just you get up at 11 a.m and like you go to bed at four how are you the ceo of a company that could be a billion dollar company yeah i know a good question look um we have a great team that is able to execute how many people it’s hard to say we became pretty global but you know our our offices outside of us are not all um most they’re not employees right so they’re so all all in um if i have to talk about factories our our tech teams our marketing teams are we’re probably talking about 70 people at this point wow and who’s like but you’re not running the day-to-day of the business oh hell yeah yeah 95 of the time goes into this business so then are you like talking with the employees and things like that i mean you’re like running all hands meetings and things like that yeah i’m not big on meetings i’ll be on you know to be honest with you um but um but uh i’m very accessible to all my team i mean everybody on my teams have access to me i go into the office in the city we actually had the we were in the office june june 2020 i mean we had you know covet like every it was ghost town in the city and we had to figure out how to be in the office because it’s not an eco it’s not just a digital ad business that i could just operate from from work from home right we had to have people in the offices and uh we did all kinds of things we we we got cars to car um to to pull people in to the office but um but anyway we yeah i’m i’m i’m there i’m i’m in the weeds but it’s not like you’re kind of downplaying it i invested in one of their your properties we bought a six plex in greenpoint i think i forget well we essentially bought land right we bought a house because it’s gonna be knocked down we’re gonna build a brand new uh we’re gonna ground up construction it’s gonna be uh like a nice a nice condo building yeah yeah yeah that’s that’s what i mean but i didn’t even look at the details i was just like anything that val does i’m part of but it’s it’s way bigger than you’re you’re just saying like it’s a project i mean i think you’ve bought like 100 million dollars with the real estate right no i haven’t i haven’t bought 100 million we have six projects couple of them already completed third one is just about to be completed actually two the first two were completed and completely sold out uh the third one is about to be completed and go on the market um and then we have three other projects and they are getting bigger and bigger the value of um the the the combined sale value of value of those projects would be approaching 100 million dollars do what do you what are you tinkering on now what excites you now what and and someone asked a good question which is what is the uh the equivalent of ringtones today what’s the equivalence of like it’s just crazy that it’s just like you’re kind of like this like digital cowboy you’re just like this like one guy in the wild west doing this [ ] with like no rules it’s just i just think it’s hilarious that you are just a pirate who’s taking it to the extreme where are the digital pirates at right now uh it has to be like tick-tock what do you mean it’s you know you look for like those spaces that haven’t been touched right i guess people ask me i think i think that’s what you’re saying like what’s what what can you what can be marketed these days and how to get that kind of scale and i i don’t it’s hard because what i’ve seen over over my career is that the windows of opportunity those white spaces right the windows windows are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter every iteration right there was the paid search probably lasted a good six years after that or around that same time there was display that probably lasted a little less and then there was social media that that window probably you know the arbitrage window right yeah yeah that probably lasted two three years at best now you talk you know now you got like instagram and tick tock and you got the instagram reels um i mean those are probably also one year windows of opportunity if you could kind of catch that lightning and build on it then you got something but your your window and it’s all rooted in distribution which is how do you get distribution quickly and you’re saying that you think that’s tick tock do you think that window is still open um i i think if you have a knack for understanding how get virality or get content then then you have your own distribution if you don’t have that knack you got to figure out how to work with people that that that access so if there’s one company that could work with all the sampars right all the podcasters uh how much is that worth we’re using a platform here right now right that is just smart they’re they’re doing the right thing like they’re focusing on guys like you who have all this access but they’re not selling anything right they’re just selling you a platform if somebody could sell figure out how to sell a product across a number of podcasts that’s worth a lot and you could sell i’ll move a lot of product and by the way it doesn’t have to be podcasts what about all the tic tacs who are doing all those dances i know um i know like for one company they they scale to like 80 million in sales a few years ago i’m not going to mention the name of it but um they scaled to like 80 million in sales just on the back of youtube influencers what was the product it was cosmetics and they just cosmetics was that cosmetics it was just like makeup or something or lotion yeah yeah the numbers were just insane and um yeah it was just a long place like it wasn’t just big influencers even the like thousands of mediocre uh influencers or the smaller um ones that just drove it so stuff like that like latch on to something that is big um especially if you could uh latch onto the like the long tail of it because not not a lot of people look at the long tail part of uh sure businesses well so one thing i wonder you know like this thing that val talks about of testing out 10 different things before the other guy can put his pants on right like you’re you’re building your perfect thing that’s going to take you six months before you even get to market great i’m gonna test 10 things in that time that sounds really nice but also i guess i’ll actually ask sam first then i’ll ask you val like what do you think it is about val what do you think it is about either his skill set or his personality that allows him to do that much testing where other people just like can’t figure that out apparently the uh i think that this is a common thread that i’ve seen i i my buddy joe is just like this there’s this thing particularly i find it amongst immigrants or children of immigrants and maybe because they’ve like experienced some type of hardship where they’re like uh like dude i’ve experienced some crazy [ ] or my family has experiencing it has experienced crazy [ ] i have zero fear and looking like a fool if that’s the worst if the worst that’s gonna happen is i’m gonna look stupid or lose uh a tiny amount of money i’m okay with that and i don’t so i don’t have any fear about that that’s what that’s what i think i’ve noticed that’s the trend i’ve noticed amongst people like belle look i think there’s a that’s i think there’s a huge that’s a huge factor one of the things i look at like i’m raising kids now right how do i make sure that they kind of because they’re not going to grow up the same way i grew up right they’re not going to come out the resources they have the access they have it’s very different from what i grew up with so what i think i realized is the power the power is in resourcefulness okay i was able to make a lot or do a lot i should say whether it’s money or whatever it is right it doesn’t have to be just money it could be whatever whatever it excites you right but i was able to do a lot with very little but it’s because i had no choice and i had very little like we weren’t poor like you don’t get i didn’t come from poverty or anything like that but but again my parents couldn’t afford a computer for me for the first six years of my life here right so i i got to think like how do i recreate that and you can’t really recreate that for your kids but i figured okay i’m not you know i’m not going to give my kids everything on a silver platter so you i mean you just talked about my son like he is he he he’s his dna is very like like mine like he’s way ahead of me because he has all these tools like you know he has a computer way before me i didn’t buy him a computer i made him save up the money i don’t care how he does it birthdays work whatever during that time he researched all parts and everything i think at the age of like seven or eight he built a computer bought the parts by himself he built a computer from scratch by himself i didn’t even help him that’s crazy so he now built two computers like and he taught himself how to code and so i i suppress resources for my kids systematically not like i don’t feed them like they’re they’re they’re they’re very they’re they’re doing just fine like they’re big groups they live in a nice neighborhood but i systematically uh make sure that they’re not given all the resources because that’s how you naturally learn to become resourceful what do you think it is yeah fundamentally it’s about doing more with less essentially you’re saying yeah yeah but but it has to start from day one are you driven by money yes and no um i i yes because it’s uh it’s it’s uh it’s kind of like a score right i i don’t see your money it’s like a it’s a number and a bank account right like you don’t it’s not like back in the days where you look you know you you know it’s not like we’re scrooge mcduck like you get to jump through the to the vault of cash right like i i would watch it as a kid and i was like wow i want to be that guy one day um but uh no i think i think what i’m driven really is by just winning there is i think there is a bit of sense in me of um i’m one step from losing it all you still feel that way uh i feel like it’s still possible i think i think it’s a i think it’s like an immigrant thing um probably by the way i feel exactly the same way i was like in bed last night telling my wife i was like i need to go like a therapist or something i’m like i’m freaking out we’re gonna lose everything this is all going away i feel the exact i feel like i for a long time i like had a plan on where i would go if i was homeless like i still don’t believe that in some ways in a in a weird way kind of excites you not about homeless but that you got a chance to figure it out from scratch again it yeah because i like uh it does kind of make me because when you have nothing it’s kind of fun to play games because it’s just easier to bet sometimes you can’t bet as much but it’s kind of exciting to be like just like a hood rat with nothing like which which i was um it is kind of exciting but i get fear of like the anxiety i i feel of losing everything like i have so many spreadsheets that map out like all right when the money gets to this number then i gotta go and panic and get a job and start like ubering like i have like a plan for that we um the reason why i had you on and ben the reason why i wanted to show you this guy now it’s he’s hard to explain but i wanted people to understand like a truly unique and original thinker and i don’t you know i we you’re gonna have to come on again but like d do you does it do you understand what i’m saying but it’s very original thinking yeah and you you can see that just in the way that like you’ve out have attacked have tackled like a a different set of problems than anyone else i’ve ever talked to uh just like i’ve never talked to someone who’s like yeah i tackled ringtones and then ad networks and then peer-to-peer lending and then the jewelry business like i just think that kind of belies how your mind functions differently than other people do you do you feel that way like do you feel that just have unique perspective have you met anyone that looks at the world the way you do and if you acknowledge that it’s weird because and you’re saying that you didn’t you didn’t actually realize it was weird until i talked about you in the podcast like half a year ago which is weird because how old are you like 39 at 38 and you’re now just realizing that you’re you’re you’re an oddball um yeah so i i i didn’t see myself that way until you did the whole expose with that show on that on that one episode that you didn’t tell me about but uh after our lunch but um i know yeah by the way i i i told joe i was like dude i’d never do that i almost always ask for permission before i talk about it but i just was too excited and i forgot it was i have a i have a story but i’ll tell you that after um on that but um so to me like when you said like oh this guy goes from this industry to that industry he’s like jumping all over the place and he’s you know kind of successful or or successful doing it this is like crazy i was like huh i i never thought of myself that way that but it makes sense like i i don’t know i keep jumping different categories i guess again that curiosity just kicks in and and i just but i i go after it instead of just what if you know i just kind of go after it no i i i until now i really haven’t realized uh that how odd that is uh but thank thank you for letting me know that i’m uh i’m really strange i just think that like there’s just a bunch of unique there’s just a bunch of unique things about you and i think it’s so cool when i say weird and odd that’s a really good compliment by the way yeah listen i know you well enough now to to know that’s a compliment so so the funny story about again before you i was pretty under under the radar right like yeah you can find stuff on you you have to really look like nobody really put it out there so then joe tells me like you’re gonna do they did podcast and i didn’t tell my wife and then the podcast comes out i’m like hey sarah um um the the the um this guy did a podcast on me she’s like who cares about a podcast she’s like you know but he’s not talking about me who cares like what a couple hundred people gonna listen i’m like apparently this guy has like a million people listening she’s like oh great um she’s like did he ask you permission i was like not really so i don’t really know what he’s talking about um so he’s like okay so the thing comes out is like so we’re listening to it and he keeps saying val you’re saying val val val like never say uh right never say my last name and then you and sean go into like this tangent talking about red pill and blue pill or whatever so she’s like and so we thought like it val part is over right she’s like okay it wasn’t so bad he never mentioned your last name how he’s gonna figure out who’s val and then after you went off to a tangent with about the pills and you’re like oh by the way i forgot to mention his full name let me smell it let me spell it out for you and you literally spelt my last name so she’s like i’m to kill this guy oh she was bad yeah she was mad she’s she’s very she’s very she’s very nice everything i thought that everything we said you could find publicly and we didn’t reveal anything like crazy and um i try to only like i just read your linkedin that’s basically all i did yeah you could find stuff but it’s you know it’s one thing to the information to be out there for somebody to look for it um but it’s another one when you’re on full blast right like and it’s being discovered um so right now by audiences so so that’s all new to me i know i i felt like an [ ] when that happened i i’m normally always good at that so like if someone if we’re out with friends and people talking about stuff i’m like hey is this private or not like they have to make sure they say it’s private around me you’re you’re a nice guy so i’ll let it slide yeah i blew up your spot and yeah i that’s something i remember the day that happened i was like oh my god joe i didn’t even realize it because sometimes when shawn and i were recording i forget that it’s a podcast i just like it’s just like friends talking to one and i forget i’m like oh my god i forgot that was i just said that on air i can’t believe that so that that was one of those examples dude this was awesome what do you think ben this is this is pretty badass this is great it’s got me fired up to go i know you’re doing your airbnbs this year sam that’s kind of your thing though right before this podcast he said don’t do it oh really yeah i think i’m gonna do it anyway but he i told him these two ideas that i might work on and he basically said uh dude i was like should i work on going hard on content should i work on this job board idea or this airbnb thing he goes do content and i was like oh that’s what i don’t want to do i said don’t do it well i didn’t actually he literally sent me his response like three minutes before the podcast so i didn’t entirely read the i haven’t read the whole his whole reply but he’s he’s like the he’s like the the the land thing that’s just gonna bog you down that’s what he said yeah i think i i i i think something you could do in the future but not now i do feel inspired after hearing for about and from val of like i need to be trying more things like just taking more swings and like putting more experiments out there to see kind of what what lands i like that yeah look at that throw stuff against the wall like see what sticks um what’s the worst but when you throw mo when most people throw stuff against the wall it’s a half-ass attempt when you throw stuff against the wall like you spend money or you like you said that when you were like when you didn’t have much you spent like six or seven thousand dollars on ads to see if this x thing could work whereas most people will like like oh that’s i lose a couple hundred bucks i don’t want to do that it’s like you you actually try but that was an accident like like in that thread that was an accident there were no budget caps back then so i turned it on i go to sleep and i woke up to a 6 000 span yeah but you still did it i mean i get just like most people just don’t do your your attempts are like good when i was going to all these music sites you know how i get their attention i would go to a site and i would just kind of through alexa or whatever i kind of know how much traffic they have and i knew these guys were outside the country and to get their attention i would literally email them and say hey i’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars so i give you fifty thousand dollars i’ll give you twenty thousand dollars prepaid i’ll wire it tomorrow just so you could uh test my ringtone matcher link for seven days if you don’t like it it doesn’t make you enough money take the link off we never talk again if you if you like how much it generates we’ll sign you’ll sign a contract um and everybody signed a contract because those two text links were generating like five times like somebody who was making like a like there were sites that were making like top sites for making like a hundred thousand dollars a month i would pay him four hundred thousand a on top of that and and how many people actually took you up and said all right fine everybody and then i’ll put yours they all wanted the money first oh the money my success rate on that email was just i mean who the heck is going to take money like up front i would be like you know what i don’t need you to do it up front i’ll give it a try just because you’re serious and you actually told the story on pom’s podcast because you like you’re like bold but you have high integrity because like i think there was a guy who you owed a lot of money to because uh they were a customer of your or they were a vendor and you just had a bill that you had to pay them and they like changed their address or something and you’re like dude i can’t find you i owe you 60 000 and you like held on to the 60 000 for like a long time and you just were seeking them out everywhere like hey where’d you go i need to pay you your money yeah yeah it pays off like um we because we had so many international people in the music business when the great recession hidden there they were in all these countries and uh where their their banks a lot of them were banks were located in weird areas uh we’re we’re countries like cyprus and they would literally tell us hey stop stop wiring us money we we don’t trust the bank we’re working with i got to get a new bank account like we held their money for they told us to hold their money for i mean we had millions in our bank account that didn’t belong to us and all these sites basically told me told me like i was kind of like their bank for for a while because they didn’t want to get paid and they didn’t they didn’t trust the bank um it was phenomenal to me like i couldn’t understand that they they trust us trust me with their money uh for i mean it was i think some in some cases up to a year we were holding their money because he had nowhere to send it that’s crazy dude this is a good conversation i’m happy you came on this is awesome listen you’re doing i told you before i love your podcast it’s very um it’s very like it’s it’s very like layman terms right it’s it’s actually takes a lot of intellect in my opinion to dumb things down well thank you i appreciate that it helps uh yeah often times i wonder like i’ve a lot of my friends are english as a second language maybe uh it’s like i’m always amaze can you imagine coming to another country we don’t speak the language at like 12 13 14 15 16 and then like just crushing it i just so i think that’s just like amazing i’ve got a bunch of friends who are esls and they’ll they’ll like i’ll help them write stuff because um they’re just a little rough and i’m like dude how are you so badass i just i’m amazed that you you’re i’m just amazed at some of these yeah and you’re one of those people yeah well like whether you’re a cell like my english is pretty good now but i still can’t yeah put my thoughts together in a way that makes it so interesting for people understand and you know how to break that down so like you know you you help me with some of my so my you know one of my you know pieces on that so that’s that’s power well thank you i appreciate you coming on this is badass listen i appreciate you guys having me on