Sam and Shaan dig into the business of trend forecasting — from prosumer newsletters like Exploding Topics to high-end B2B services like WGSN. They then pivot to pickleball’s explosive growth and what it would take for it to become a mainstream sports property (Vince McMahon-style promotion). They close with a deep dive into Virtual Gaming Worlds, a bootstrapped legal online casino doing $3.5 billion in revenue that nobody has heard of.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Exploding Topics and the Business of Trends [00:00:00]
Shaan: I’ve got one idea based on something you sent me.
Sam: Oh wow. We’re rich. Thanks, Shaan. You’re having one idea based on something I sent you — putting in the work today.
Shaan: Look, I’m in the final interview stage for my new researcher. But you sent me this thing called Exploding Topics. Tell me what it is.
Sam: It’s basically — if you go to the website, you’ll see a series of charts showing that this trend, this keyword, is growing in popularity. I think it was started by Brian Dean, who owned Backlinko, a popular SEO blog. It changed a bit over time, but basically it’ll say: hey, there’s this thing called Power Dash, it’s a vacuum cleaner for pet owners, it’s grown 3,000 percent. The volume of that search is 320, so not huge. Or regenerative agriculture — growing 658 percent with 12,000 searches. And you can look at that and think: huh, that’s interesting. There’s something I could do here.
It’s similar to what Trends.co was — I’ll tell you about what things are getting more popular before they’re fully popular, so you can take advantage with content, a business, whatever.
Shaan: The people wondering about Trends.co — I used to own it. I sold it. It was a weekly email and online community that people paid $300 a year for. When I sold it I think it was at around $6 million a year, but it very easily could have been like a million a month. We sent a weekly email — three or four researchers combing the web, five interesting things per email, well-written reports, and one or two charts showing: based on Reddit searches, Google searches, 20 different data points, this topic is growing quickly.
There’s another company called Meet Glimpse. These versions of trend newsletters — including mine — are what I’d call prosumer. People spending $10 to $300 a month. Not a huge deal on its own.
But there’s a whole other industry of people willing to spend $25,000, $100,000, or even $10 million a year on trend forecasting. And I think it’s a very interesting and very underdeveloped industry.
WGSN and the High-End Trend Forecasting Business [00:06:00]
Shaan: The one I’ve brought up before is called WGSN. It’s basically a monthly report that helps people pick which colors are going to be popular. That sounds trivial — but if you’re Starbucks and you’ve got to go buy 10 million name tags, you want to make sure you’ve got a color that’s going to hit. WGSN helped predict the pineapple logo trend. Their next one is the lemon, they think.
But I actually think the most interesting version of this business is: look at anything someone has to spend a substantial sum today for something happening in 12 or 36 months, and you help them make the right prediction. You can build an interesting business on that.
For example: what are CIOs at Fortune 500 companies thinking about their software budget for next year? Or what are HR people thinking about remote pay policies? If you can survey 70 CIOs in the Fortune 500 and present their consensus views, that’s valuable intelligence. People will pay for that.
The way WGSN and similar companies work: you do a combination of surveys — you need a pool of maybe 1,000 to 10,000 people you can get intel from — then you look at sentiment, what people on Reddit and TikTok are saying, and you consolidate it into a 1,000 to 2,000 word email sent monthly. Then you have a consultant on staff who customers can call and say: hey, we’re thinking about doing X, based on your research, is that wise? Monthly calls, a community, maybe a conference. I think you can wrap this up and do it in most any industry and charge $20,000 to $50,000 a year.
This is something Scott Galloway did with his company L2 — he sold it for $300 million. Not enough people know about this model or take advantage of it.
Sam: What would you actually do to create one?
Shaan: I’d package my product the way I described, but I think the key is: what decisions are people making that will impact them in two years, and what data do they wish they had today that would make their decision easier? You identify that, then build the survey panel around it.
There’s also a company called Eureka Surveys — a bootstrapped company doing seven figures in revenue. Basically you download their app, answer surveys, and you get gift cards. The brands running the surveys offer the gift cards. So they’ve built a two-sided marketplace — brands want insights fast, they go to Eureka, Eureka has a panel of regular people who’ll answer for $5 gift cards.
For me, if I have a brand and I want to run a survey, that’s pretty time-intensive to do on my own. So I’d go to a service like this. The competition in that space is stiff, but it’s still interesting.
Pickleball’s Explosion and What It Would Take to Go Mainstream [00:18:00]
Shaan: Okay, let me throw a couple names at you and you tell me the pattern. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Durant, Ellen DeGeneres, Luka Doncic, George Clooney.
Sam: Movies? Celebrity investing? Where are you going with this?
Shaan: They all play pickleball.
Pickleball is this crazy thing that is exploding. I played for the first time at our founders retreat, and I was like, I get it. I totally get why you guys have been so excited about this. It’s a lot of fun.
Sam: It took you that long?
Shaan: I don’t leave the house, so it’s not an in-house activity. This was the first time I got exposed to it.
Here are the stats: how many people in America played pickleball in the last year?
Sam: Five million?
Shaan: Thirty-six million. That’s twice as many people as go to Disneyland every year. That’s the population of California. And it went from 5 to 36 million in a single year. You can see it on Google Trends — just up and to the right. Celebrities buying teams, billionaires buying leagues.
I personally know two people who built multi-million dollar brands in this space. One guy — I can’t say his name — built an Amazon FBA store for pickleball equipment two or three years ago. He sold it for eight to ten million and thought he was getting away clean. If you had that thing now, that’d probably be a $40 million brand. Whoever bought it knew what they were doing.
The second is a newsletter called The Dink — it’s the Milk Road for pickleball. Smart guy doing smart things on the growth and content side. And he was making more money per reader than we were making at Milk Road — and we were in the crypto/finance niche. He’s in pickleball. Because there’s a lot of advertisers who want to reach pickleball people, and there weren’t really any mediums to do it. The newsletter was worth maybe $3 to $4 million.
Sam: And I told you about this in 2021, by the way. Episode 147, January 19th, 2021. I brought up pickleball.
And I just looked up Thomas Shields, the founder of The Dink, on Twitter, and there’s an unread message from him sent September 18th, 2020 — with a custom video of him talking to camera saying “hey Sam” and explaining the newsletter he wants to start. I’ve never seen this video before. He’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Three years later.
Shaan: You’re going to respond to the personal video?
Sam: Well, it’s an unread Twitter message — I never saw it. Anyway. So yes, I’ve played pickleball before. Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back? Of course I’ve played pickleball.
Shaan: How did pickleball start?
Sam: Old people. A senator or something, right?
Shaan: A congressman, actually. 1965. Pacific Northwest. He and his buddy get back from some trip, they have nothing to do, they’re at a house with a badminton court. Let’s go play badminton. They go down there — no equipment. They’re like, oh, we’ve got ping pong paddles inside. So they take the ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball to the badminton court and start inventing this game. They call it pickleball because there’s a phrase “pickle boat” — a hastily assembled crew for a boat — and this was a mashup: we just grabbed the paddles and played. They lowered the net, played on the badminton court. Small regional game. Nobody’s really playing it.
Somehow in the last five years it’s gone very mainstream. Professional leagues. Celebrities owning teams. Garyvee buying a team, Kevin Durant buying a team, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes — these teams cost a million dollars each. Billionaires buying and merging leagues to try to make it an official thing. People creating Topgolf-for-pickleball — places called Chicken and Pickle, Camp Pickle. A mini gold rush in the world of pickleball.
Why Pickleball Works: The Perfect Game Formula [00:32:00]
Shaan: I’ve seen this happen with MMA going from super fringe to mainstream, and with esports. You sort of think: what does it take to make these work? Here’s what pickleball has going for it.
Zero learning curve. When I played, literally nobody even really explained anything. They just said stand here, and when the ball comes to you, hit it. Very intuitive — like tennis, like ping pong. I kind of already know how to move my body. So zero learning curve.
Huge age range. At our retreat, somebody had their son there — I think 11 or 12. And I think you can basically play this game from age 8 to 65. My mom’s close to 70 and she goes to her pickleball league twice a week.
Two-player minimum. You don’t need five-on-five or a full football team. Just two people.
It picked up during COVID because it was an outdoor activity that was socially distanced.
Lightweight version of tennis. Or even golf in the way people use it — you can talk while you’re doing it, you’re not just huffing and puffing and running the whole time.
And most importantly: you can play the game drunk. If I wanted to create the perfect game, those would be my criteria.
Sam: I think it has legs. The fact that the whole state of California’s worth of population plays this in a year is crazy. The founder of Lifetime Fitness put $500 million into building pickleball courts across all his locations. People are converting tennis courts. There are 35,000 courts in the United States.
Tennis sucks, by the way. Only like a couple of people know how to play it.
Shaan: To anyone listening who wants to capitalize: two words — Vince McMahon. Remember those words.
Sam: Who’s Vince McMahon?
Shaan: Vince McMahon is the owner and former CEO of WWE — the World Wrestling Entertainment. Stone Cold, The Rock. When you think about it, WWE is just a bunch of ripped dudes in their underwear having a soap opera in front of 50,000 people. It’s awesome. And you get the most homophobic guys ever sitting there watching two oily ripped dudes wrestle because all they care about is the story. The drama. That’s all you need.
So if you’re interested in pickleball, put a picture of Vince McMahon on your wall and ask: what would Vince do? Because that’s what happened with tennis — I only care about Serena in her last tournament because it was her last one. I only care about Naomi Osaka because I heard she’s having some mental health struggles. That’s when I get hooked. I need a story. I need a train wreck. That’s what anyone getting into pickleball needs to understand.
Sam: I think you’re totally right. When we started building an esports product — that’s what got bought by Twitch — I met with a VC named Zach who said, love esports, but esports needs its Dana White. Dana White was the Vince McMahon of the UFC. There literally would have been no UFC without Dana White. The company was going bankrupt. He and the Fertitta Brothers bought it for $2 million, then burned another $40 or $50 million trying to make it successful at a loss before it finally turned around.
Going state by state to get licensed so they could even host events. Figuring out how to sell tickets. Building storylines. Investing in documentaries and reality TV shows. Before smartphones, Dana used to give his fighters flip cams and say, record everything, post it — he was one of the first guys to do YouTube. He had to because no mainstream channel would let him in. It took 20 years to get onto ESPN as a sport.
So you need somebody like that. A world-class, one-in-a-billion entrepreneur who’s going to make this work. And there are some interesting characters in pickleball.
Tom Dundon — search “Dundon pickleball.” Made his fortune doing subprime auto loans. Owns pickleball.com. Bought the biggest league in pickleball. Put like $70 million into an NFL competitor called the AAF that folded before it had its first game. He owns the majority of Topgolf. He’s trying to make pickleball happen.
And there’s a guy named Seymour Rifkin. Self-made millionaire. Does Iron Man triathlons. Does ultra marathons. Taekwondo black belt. Bicycled solo coast to coast. Created the first rating system for pickleball. Did all of this after the age of 50.
Virtual Gaming Worlds: The $3.5B Bootstrapped Online Casino Nobody Knows About [00:52:00]
Shaan: Okay, one more. Have you heard of Virtual Gaming Worlds?
Sam: No. What is it?
Shaan: Go to this website and guess their revenue.
Sam: It’s just a little Squarespace-looking rinky-dink site. I don’t know — five million?
Shaan: Three and a half billion dollars a year. With $500 million in profit. In ten years.
Sam: Oh my god.
Shaan: They’re one of the only legal online casinos in the United States. They own one of the largest poker sites in America, called Global Poker. It’s casino games done via sweepstakes and trade promotions — that’s the legal Arbitrage. It’s not gambling legally because it’s sweepstakes. And they have a patent on it, so they have very little competition.
A listener named Ansel told me about this. He goes: you gotta feature this guy — he’s basically a billionaire, he just paid out a dividend and bought a private jet off it.
The founder is Lawrence Escalante. Ex-financial planner. Not a builder or a seller — the typical startup archetype. Solo founder. He paid a developer agency to handle the build out — no technical co-founder, no CTO. The code was so buggy that the slot machines would accidentally just pay you out a bunch. They had to survive that.
Built in Perth, Australia. Single founder. Didn’t have the skill set. Wasn’t in a big city. He came to Silicon Valley once, couldn’t raise any VC because they can’t invest in gambling opportunities. But the good news: that means this guy didn’t take any investment. He still owns 66 percent of this company doing $500 million a year in profit and $3.5 billion in revenue.
Sam: That’s wild.
Shaan: They got their first office eight years in. Fully remote until year eight. He says they increased their profit, made $454 million in profit, and paid dividends of $413 million. I actually have a question — does that mean the company only needs $40 million to operate?
Sam: Either that, or they have enough cash reserves already and they just paid out the excess.
Shaan: That’s wild. So it’s all based around a regulatory insight. U.S. law lets you do sweepstakes. They offer sweeps coins that can be redeemed for cash. They worked with U.S. lawyers to build a system where customers can buy virtual gold coins, use them to play the games — the gold coins have no value outside the game — but when you buy the gold coins you get sweeps coins with them. And sweepstakes are regulated state by state. So in order for something to change, every state individually would need to change something. Basically a regulatory moat and a patent moat. Very hard to compete.
Sam: Whenever someone says they have a patent in a pitch, I’m like, that means nothing. That’s usually a red flag. It means you think it’s something and it’s actually nothing, which means you don’t know anything. Same with an NDA before a pitch.
Shaan: Yeah, I agree — in tech, patents usually do nothing. But this might be the exception. Or it might just be that this is Shady AF and most entrepreneurs don’t want to touch it. I’m guessing it’s probably that one, without knowing anything and just going strictly off this guy owns a bunch of Ferraris.
Sam: His Instagram name is Lawrence Escalante. You can’t be Lawrence Escalante and not be exactly what he appears to be. His Instagram profile is him at a poker table just looking over.
Shaan: His Instagram bio needs to be just: “I’m them boys.”
Sam: That’s what it should be. Congrats to him — that’s an interesting find. Shout out to Ansel, he knew this was great for MFM, and sure enough it was.
Shaan: Juicy. That’s called a big juicy burger.