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Kind: captions Language: en so so that was the other thing that sparked drama now you’ve got leaked phone calls you got the CEO calling a guy crazy he said she said and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing as the thing on Reddit small things could turn into big things that’s like part of the beauty of Reddit and that’s what was happening here dude all right first of all your energy is gonna be psyched this is a this is a great story because I have a little more for you here are you ready this is the part that that’s the background okay now let me give you some foreground right let me give you a little future future play here okay foreplay that’s okay [Music] all right what’s up we’re here um dude have you seen this Reddit Revolt that’s happening are you aware of this I am aware of it and uh is it gonna matter really so basically what happened is there’s this app called Apollo right Apollo yep here’s kind of the I would say the zoomed out version of the story so what’s happening today is If you go to Reddit right now the whole site is down so they broke all of Reddit what they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddits of these communities on Reddit were trying to protest some new Reddit policies so it started with a few of them that said you know what we disagree with this policy change that’s going on you know we’re going to do this 48-hour blackout we’re going to go to private we’re gonna go dark and they called it Reddit go this suburb it’s going dark and more and more started joining to the point where 7 000 subreddits including some of the biggest ones on there like r slash funny and r slash picks and stuff like that and I believe that’s 30 of Reddit that’s what I read yeah it’s basically it’s a huge amount like uh you know this there’s there’s this couple of cool websites that you can go to in fact uh we should go to to one of them right now so um go to this site so it’s red dark so red dark dot untone.uk very strange site but uh you can see in real time this thing’s almost like this this tool is even almost broken because so many are going dark at the same time uh and Ben if you could share your screen so it says 7240 out of seven thousand eight hundred and six that’s like 90 or something right 740 out of seven eight oh six ninety three percent of subreddits have gone dark um which is just an insane number and if you do it you can if you click the large thing there’s like a live of feed it’ll be like um animals with jobs has just gone private 5 000 members music music uh hoarder has gone private 5 000 members um crusty Windows has gone private and they just see like in real time and I’ve been watching this since yesterday it’s crazy when I when I opened this up yesterday it was at 2000 and now it’s basically all of them it’s 7 000 out of out of 7 200 out of 7 800. so almost every subreddit has decided to join this protest and so you say well what’s the policy what’s so bad and what happened is Reddit wants to IPO so Reddit wants to go public in the future Reddit is not currently profitable they make about I don’t know somewhere between 400 500 million dollars a year roughly and um they’re still not profitable and these apps that other people have made called third-party apps were just used to like you could browse Reddit and they built like special features into them that made them maybe easier to use for certain types of people power users or moderators things like that so that’s why people loved Apollo is because they had some power user features that were great for moderators and the Reddit made the mistake of not they were thought they were picking on Apollo but in fact they were pissing off moderators and that was a really really big issue and I’ll tell you why in a second so Reddit goes and says hey look we can’t keep giving these third-party apps full access to Reddit this has a couple problems first they’re hitting our servers with a bunch of requests that costs us he said what the CEO said was tens of millions per year in server requests the second thing is though server requests are now serving Reddit content onto someone else’s app so that person could monetize their app and Reddit doesn’t get a piece of that so they were like all right we want to cut costs we want to increase revenue and they had a third problem which was they didn’t want their data going to all these different places because basically open Ai and chat GPT had the scraped Reddit was like one of the key sources to make chat gbt so good and Reddit kind of was asleep when they did the first scrape but now they’re like oh no no no if any other AI company wants our data you’re gonna pay us a huge amount of money for it so to do that they needed to to basically pay all the data they needed the data only to live inside their own their own walls so they upped their API pricing they basically said for every server request you do it’s now going to be whatever 10 cents and uh a fake number but but the result was that a app like Apollo which is made by this basically this one dude who made it you know as a passion project at a college he would have to pay 20 something million dollars a year just to maintain Apollo and so he’s like dude that’s unfeasible like he’s like I have uh 50 000 paying users they paid me 10 bucks a year so he’s like I make 500k on this now I have to my costs are gonna in 30 days my costs are going to go to 2 million a month and he’s like uh that obviously kills my app and it kills not just my app all of all the third party apps and reddit’s answer was basically like shrug like you know all right well sucks to be you and um and then the way that they kind of responded well so wait hold on I want to ask you a question about how the word got out but first we had to get background here which is even though so I just looked it up Reddit is like the ninth most popular website in America and even it’s like you know it’s like when someone says uh no one you know says they use it well it’s like uh you know no one goes to that restaurant anymore it’s too crowded it’s kind of like that so Reddit is basically an uh uh I don’t even know how to describe but basically a hundred thousand plus forums all on one website and the reason why this matters is because each Forum which is called a subreddit and there’s basically a subreddit on any topic you can ever imagine in most viral news in America or viral memes start at Reddit and it’s subreddits are forums that are owned by volunteers so someone comes up with one and they create it and they run it and then they run it and I didn’t realize how much autonomy they are giving given and the reason why this is poor is important is now like this has happened before apparently Reddit fired one woman named Victoria like eight years ago and she was a community moderator and everyone loved her and so all these other subreddit it Forum leaders like did the same thing but where they shut it down a little bit now the result of that was the CEO got fired they got two back then they got 200 000 people to sign a petition saying Ellen Powell needs to get fired and so she stepped down like I don’t know a week later or days later after that happened so they you know they they do wield a lot of power they yield a ton about it so but here’s what’s crazy a Reddit doesn’t make it that much money for how large it is if you look at the top 30 websites in America I bet you I I’m not researchers but I would make a bet that it’s on the very very low end of Revenue or even value created per user per user and part of it’s because people are Anonymous and redditors are typically horrible with clicking ads and things like that uh and the other part of it is that they’re kind of in a weird way this guy Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian they created this company Reddit and it’s amazing and their users own the platform a little bit and that’s what we’re seeing here is these people basically set their channels or set their subreddits to private so you can’t access them so that’s what’s happening my question to you is when this guy will call him Apollo an Apollo guy announced that he was going to shut down his app how did he get word out that it happened and how did all these people rally around this well again the people that use this app were power users and so when he said hey guys you know here’s what’s going on and it actually happened in multiple steps so the reason this got so much heat is because it happened in multiple stages he said they announced the they announced that they were gonna update their pricing he’s like hey we’re gonna have to keep an eye out for this but I’m optimistic like I’m sure reddit’s not gonna they’re not gonna like just do something that doesn’t make any sense and right it’s like for sure for sure we’re obviously gonna take this and take everybody’s needs into account but we will have to update the pricing and he’s like you know what that’s reasonable I can’t wait to hear back what you guys have in mind that was like post one and he shared that but where’d he share this he shared it on subred on Reddit or maybe in Apollo subreddit plus some others and so like the mods summary because again a lot of moderators like Apollo and because it helps them do their job faster um because these guys they’re subreddit owners make money no they make nothing so Reddit has this huge Fleet like of the moderators that are in the dark one I think right now there’s 28 million moderators I think that was the number um that are that are like participating in this some some insane number let me see uh I had a subreddit it was called like apartment hacks and I was like trying to get people and it very quickly got like a thousand people but I I quit working on it so I got the number wrong 28 000 moderators on the 7 000 subreddits so that are participating in the in the in the blackout basically so these moderators basically they’re constantly fighting spam so when you have a site that’s as popular as Reddit there’s a huge amount of people that are trying to get you to buy their crap that are trying to get you to subscribe to their only fans that are trying to get you to click this link and install this virus and or just doing clickbait like just making it where they post something super outrageous just to get clicks and engagement upvotes in a big battle in the comments but then it kind of turns off people who were there for like you know they wanted they wanted the entertainment without it getting ruined without the party getting ruined and so the moderators with the people that were keeping this house party working where it’s like yeah we want people to come here and have fun but no dude you can’t bring 17 kegs in here no you can’t just come here and flyer your own party inside my house like no no you can’t do all that crap and they’re fighting this constantly and they do it as a giant unpaid thing now what they pointed out during this protest very reasonably was that dude where red is one of the only networks that’s all run by unpaid volunteer moderators so for example Facebook has a huge moderation program they spent about 200 or 300 million dollars a year just on moderate content moderation Twitter spends a bunch of money on content moderation um and so content moderation can be a very big cost center it’s of the moderators are like hey you’re trying to save 10 million dollars by shutting off these third-party apps have you thought about what happens when we stop doing all this free work and like now you have to pay for Content moderation or this whole site goes to [ ] like uh what’s gonna happen then maybe you should listen to us and so that’s the that’s where this is escalated to but I’ll but just to finish the story so he goes he said he says up front Okay Reddit announces change it’s going to affect us but hopefully it’s all good and some people in the comments were like dude you’re being naive these corporations are they’re like just like Twitter killed all the third party clients reddit’s gonna do the same these guys want to go public they’re going to want to own all they’re going to want to you own the user experience for all all users of Reddit they’re gonna kill you and he’s like no no no they’ve they said like you know they said they’re gonna be fair okay a couple months later it comes out and they’re like here’s the pricing it kills you and it takes into effect in 30 days and he’s like what like First of all ridiculous pricing second of all 30 days like I couldn’t possibly try to like change my app to maybe make less requests to your server or like I couldn’t do anything in 30 days like you’re just gonna kill my whole business and I took yearly subscriptions so I’m not only on my app gonna die I’m gonna have to refund like 250k to people who paid for a Year’s subscription because my app’s no longer going to work so he was in a world of trouble so he contacts Reddit and he does a call with the team from Reddit and he records the call and after the call you can you can you’re allowed to do that in some states but not in every state did he do it the right way dude a neckbeard nation it’s all good baby it’s uh it’s all legal you’re the little guy fighting the big guy you can do whatever you want yeah and so so he uh at first he doesn’t do anything with it then Reddit comes out and says this guy’s crazy he’s making outlandish claims he tried to extort us for he asked for 10 million dollars um in order to like keep supporting the app we can’t do business with this crazy guy and they basically like kind of like just you know slandered him a little bit and he’s like what are you talking about that’s not what I said and what do you what did I say that was so outrageous he’s like here’s the recording people can listen to it themselves and decide oh man did you listen to it I even listen to the whole thing but there’s a part in there where he’s like look like did you sound reasonable yeah he sounds reasonable he’s basically like look um you know obviously I’d love to just keep going independent but you guys are saying it’s too expensive you want to raise pricing that makes it untenable for me but people like this app and they’re going to be upset when this app goes down he’s like you know you guys bought Alien Blue Back in the day and you made that the Reddit app like have you considered just buying this app so that you can like you don’t have to pay for all these extra you know it’s not some external part of you that you guys but at least it lives on and like it’s a win-win solution potentially for for all of us and so he was like you know um he said something like you’re saying this cost you this will cost me 20 million a year you’re saying this costs you tens of millions a year like you could buy the whole thing for 10 million dollars and that’s you know six months of my operating costs and you know like it could work out that way and um Steve Huffman on the call is like look like you know I don’t I don’t appreciate the threat type of thing he says something about like that’s a threat he goes wait what’s a what’s a threat what do you mean because the guy said something like he goes um uh you know if if you don’t want all that like all this noise about this like you could just do this and he kind of took it as a threat like oh you’re threatening you’re gonna make a bunch of noise if we don’t pay you 10 million dollars it goes no no I’m saying um we have like you’re saying I’m making too many API calls so if you don’t want all this server noise for the API requests you could just own it and just use your internal systems to do it instead and he’s like oh sorry like okay my bad uh I didn’t realize you’re talking about API requests like I apologize I didn’t mean to like say that you were threatening us you’re saying okay no problem like I just want to like glad we’re clear on that then later he comes out and says he threatened us he’s like dude even on the call you apologize saying saying uh sorry I misunderstood you and then you took that out of context and tried to make me sound like a guy who’s trying to profit out of this um or like trying to make unreasonable requests so anyways that cross so so that was the other thing that sparked drama now you’ve got leaked phone calls you got the CEO calling a guy crazy he said she said and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing as the thing on Reddit small things could turn into big things that’s like part of the beauty of Reddit and that’s what was happening here dude all right first of all your energy is gonna be sight this is a this is a great story because I have a little more for you here are you ready this is the part that that’s the background okay now let me give you some foreground right let me give you a little future future play here okay so four four play um so Reddit may have forgot but this is how Reddit started so Reddit started because the the popular Forum side of the day dig made this big update and everybody hated it and dig said screw you guys this is better and they said see ya and they went to this little site called Reddit and Reddit blew up and that’s how Reddit became what it is is that the Dig fumbled the ball released this anti you know this this anti-user update and they usually they’re sticking it to the man yeah I stuck it to the Man well who’s to say that doesn’t happen again so I have a little proposal uh somebody should run with this idea I bought this domain and I think somebody should do this if not you know this is what I would do if I was uh if I was a little little younger and hungrier than I am today so here’s what I think somebody should do I think that was the perfect time the younger you the equally conniving just a little bit more ambitious you my T levels were a little higher back there yeah I’m a mellowed out dad now you know my daughter paints my toenails I can’t be doing all this kind of stuff yeah if you if you woke up at 10 A.M this morning and you wear a hoodie all the time you know this is for you neckbeard Nation this is the call out okay so I want you to just check out this little website here so Sam I don’t know if you know what uh the CEO Steve’s um handle is on on Reddit do you know what his his username is I used to yeah if you said it I would remember it dark something uh was it so SP easy and so I don’t know I just woke up this morning 6 a.m and I just looked at GoDaddy and I just saw that specialist.com was available and I thought huh one cent for spezless.com so I bought it I said what’s specialist I think it’s it’s Reddit without spez would you like Reddit without Steve well here’s what we’re gonna do well we’re gonna make a Reddit that’s very very very very very very similar look into this website but with one difference there’s there’s no steam there’s no Corporation that’s gonna dude the tagline needs to be same same but different same same for different exactly same same but different exactly so here’s uh Ben threw this up while we were talking because I gave him a rant this morning I was like dude here’s what someone should do and I think he just bought he told me right before we went on there he goes I’m gonna buy the domain I’m gonna put it up so he goes um it says I love Reddit I just don’t like don’t like spez uh somebody create a newsletter new Reddit it’s called specialist it’s read it without Steve uh here’s the master plan it’ll be very very very similar website to Reddit um it’s going to be a non-profit and any Revenue that it makes will get funneled back into the communities or moderators um because this blackout like this this 48-hour protest that they said it’s cool it’s gonna get headlines but Reddit really doesn’t care they’re gonna lose about three million dollars by being down for two days and then they’re just gonna move on with life and the the protesters made a big error which is they said how long they would protest for they said the pain will stop at 48 hours so all red has to do is just ignore it for 48 hours uh they’re gonna keep doing what they want so when you’re when your voice doesn’t work you gotta exit and uh so here’s here’s a little little exit boat for you it’s uh it’s basically Reddit without the [ ] and um there’s a little email signup box so if a million people sign up then uh who knows maybe we can create something here and so you know why do this as a non-profit your voice already rich we don’t need it we don’t need to make a profit on this we just create this for fun because it’s fun to to see something burned down I don’t even have a problem with CFO by the way I think he’s you know I like Steve smart guy uh I think he’s he’s fair in his opinion but also this is the internet and in the internet you you really gotta know who you’re pissing off and I think he’s pissed off too many people with this move I can’t believe that nobody’s making the alternative to this uh the people that are trying to make Alternatives they’re all trying to do it so different you don’t want to do different it needs to look almost exactly the same change the shade of red by like two hex you know like little hex color over to the right and then uh it needs to be the same site with the same structure everything’s the same except for who decides what happens so how the money flows and if you just change that you could do this as a non-profit thing and I think it would be uh very entertaining in lieu of your morning cup of coffee this morning you had a cup of rage and I and I and I dig it dudes first of all a few beautiful things neckbeard nation that was nice right that’s our new that’s our fan base so we hired this woman to help us with some T-shirts if she’s listening uh she dude this lady but hilarious hilarious thing you did so listen to this this woman this woman sent me this beautiful uh remember you say the whole thing what does she do so you get something in the mail I get this thing in the mail and it’s like this beautiful like 10 or 20 Page outline it’s clever and it says what she’s going to do for us to make t-shirts is it beautiful it looks like a giant giant PowerPoint deck that was just printed out because she knows like he might not click the link so let me just print the PowerPoint out on white and black you know paper and just put it in an envelope for him it’s beautiful like when you see like a netbeard guy doing very neck beard thing where you’re like I’m just happy this exists this is a beautiful display in that it’s a beautiful it wasn’t physically beautiful but it was very it was it was very clever and she said you can reach me at my first thought at gmail.com or something like that or yeah right yeah t-h-o-t thought which stands for that hoe over there and or she said you can just DM me on my first thought and so I talked to her and I was like this is awesome let’s do something we’ll work together it worked I email her with you on the line and I go I think I said dearesta or come on and she was like great I mean by the way uh you should look up my thought means and I was like I know what it means I thought that you you said it wanted to because yeah you said it first to be that was your Twitter handle I don’t I’m not trying to disrespect you you said it not me I’m just repeating I’m just playing the game here by the way the funniest thing is you go all right thought let’s do this yes and she was like I don’t think you know what thought means otherwise you wouldn’t have called me that she goes LMAO at being addressed as my first thought in your email Urban Dictionary below for your amusement yeah and I immediately replied I was like I’m sorry I thought I thought I thought this was a [ ] uh you’re right I’ll call you your real name my apologies so we didn’t get off to the doctor a great start right away all right let’s do this so dear thought we’re gonna uh this is why we only have four female listeners because this type of behavior I was trying to I I you know I was trying to relate I was trying to like show that I read yeah it didn’t work out well yeah it’s like when you hear hear someone call their friend they’re like yo Nikki and you’re like what’s up Nikki and they’re like it’s Nicholas okay just because he uh I was in uh LA this weekend and I went to like the La Tech week saying we went to this event and there was like 300 people and I’m not exaggerating I had 30 people of like the 300 people come up to me and like say like hey love MFM I’m a total man and so two episodes ago or one episodes ago Sean came up with this idea of this total man we got a lot of flack for it I don’t know if you saw it but people loved it in general and I had literally 20 or 30 people like in a row come up be like dude I’m the total Man by the way you’re doing it wrong it’s not total man with like a space in between because then it’s like yo I’m I’m the total man it’s I’m a total man it’s like one word it’s like it’s a it’s a thing you’re a noun it’s a different type of noun you got you got you know mammals you got humans and you got total man it’s just like a separate species get rid of the space it’s cleaner I got you yeah and uh so total man that that that’s a hit I think neckbeard Nation with you being the mayor I mean that or you being the president that that that’s that’s our new that’s the new thing we did it we got a new thing uh yeah totally agree um question which side are you on I think I’m team Reddit on this one but they screwed up they shouldn’t have done it this way in the first place uh you know their Venture Capital company they’ve got hundreds of employees probably thousands at this point they they fumbled the bag here not on the pr press or PR front which they did but like letting this get out of hand the way it has in the first place I mean you gotta you gotta pay the bills why are they what are they doing letting people build build the stuff on on their land right you know what I mean yeah I I get where they’re coming from I think they uh like many tech companies fumbled the communication and execution um but I’m also horrid at that so you know I would have done this twice as bad if I was in their position because I’m always like I’m a very much ripped ended off type of person and also like because I’m very far on the spectrum of not easily offended like it takes a lot to make me feel like mad or upset I severely underestimate how easily I can make other people mad or upset and so uh I I get their position um I think you know most likely unless unless Bezos becomes a thing they’re just gonna be like cool nice protest we hear you we’ll take you into account in the future continue using Reddit you know like life will just go on and nothing bad will happen from this unless literally somebody seizes The Narrative that’s the thing there’s a narrative right now and somebody could come in and they could surf that momentum on the narrative though we are the thing that’s hard Uber had the same thing do you remember when it was trending delete Uber like I think these things come and go like this happened in the crypto World crypto world is like the most like ruthless it’s like just like knife fighting in the streets and so openc had some policy issue or some change I don’t remember what it was it was like fee change or something why did it get people get mad at Open Sea when they I forget what it was they changed something yeah they changed like the royalty take rate or something where’s podcasting etiquette ever to ask the guy in the room who’s sitting like 10 feet behind you with no mic or headphones to ask him have you seen Joe Rogan Joe Rogan does it anyone can do it um so basically open C which was the big nft Marketplace by far the dominant 100 market share type of thing um change something in their policy people didn’t like it and literally like in like a 48 hour period somebody spun up a competitor and they did what was called a vampire attack which was they in crypto you could do this thing where you could be like okay who are all the Wallets on that use openc I can find them they’re all public that I can airdrop them tokens that say if you come over to our platform and claim them create your account here you get free tokens and people are like token might be worth something and so they just like they basically like vampire attack they just suck the blood out of one network to another and this happened several times in crypto where they’ve basically tried to do this now it’s not always 100 successful but to go from you didn’t even exist to like a million to two million users with like a shot at hey if you deliver a dope user experience you know this can work you know that’s like better than nothing and so in crypto this has happened a couple times a couple of the like defy tools have had this app before oh we don’t like your policy we’re gonna Fork your source code rename it and uh we’re gonna incentivize all the major players on yours to come over here and get like a bonus token if they if they come claim their thing here which builds the momentum in the narrative well I don’t I mean like your energy I don’t know how to like one-up you here uh you know like they say when you’re like supposed to like meet people you’re supposed to match their energy uh to like make them feel comfortable I don’t know what to say I don’t feel like I feel like I feel like we’re going to a monster truck rally like Sunday Sunday like you’re a Gravedigger right now I’m just in the stands trying to keep up with ear plugs you know what I mean but they said they said that’s so awful how do you even remember or know that that’s like they’re radio ads right yeah Monster Jam have you been to a monster truck rally in the last 700 days is the pope Catholic of course I have yeah I would go to monster truck all the time I’ve gone like five or six times dude they do backflips now I’m not not gonna go see a big ass truck do a backflip um all right let me talk to you about something that you actually are know more than me about I think because you’re friends with them yeah and then I want to talk about that’s a lot of stuff okay I want to talk about the second thing about milk Road and and nothing and we’ll leave time for that so uh turpentine is that what it’s called the turpentine big time yeah uh so basically this guy named Eric tornberg he’s been in the game for a while he’s just done a bunch of stuff on the internet including founding a company called on Deck he launched this new thing called turpentine it was very nice he gave us a little shout out uh but basically what I believe it to be is just a podcast Network for business content particularly some type of like startup B related stuff so there’s like one on media yeah yeah Tech there’s one on media I think there’s one on on fintech a few other things and he announced it have you seen this what what am I missing yeah I’ve seen this uh so Eric tornberg’s behind this Eric’s awesome guy um did he talk to you about this before he did it because I feel like if I was going to do something like this you’re my phone a friend right no you didn’t talk to me you’re my phone a friend on that I’ve never talked to him oh you never talk so you don’t know each other that well okay gotcha um because he’s on our like friend group I guess um okay so I’m curious what your take is on this because I think you know a lot about this I have a strong opinion but I want you to explain it I mean I think you said it well he’s trying to create like what uh I would say the easiest analog is like the ringer so the ringer was started by Bill Simmons so kind of like famous notable guy in the in the sports journalism landscape basically was like I’m gonna create a network of sports podcasts I’ll have my show I’ll have this guy do NBA I’ll have this guy do NFL I’ll have this guy do um you know pop culture I’ll have this guy do whatever and so they created a network of podcasts ended up selling it to Spotify for a few hundred million dollars 200 200 something million dollars and um really that was mostly because Bill had the number one sports podcast and he’s like very influential in Spotify had a strategy there so um Eric’s trying to do that for Tech so he’s like how do I be the ringer or how do I be Barstool but for the tech industry can I basically create uh like intellectual entertaining but also highly intellectual conversations about things that people care about um in Tech and then he’s looking for shows so like basically if we were you know not the badasses that we were we could be like hey let’s join turbo time we’re gonna get their back office we’re gonna get them helping us sell ads we’re gonna get like you know help with production and we’ll get cross-promoted um amongst um you know their their Network it’s very similar to like work week which we’ve talked about on here before or group’s doing this kind of with like newsletters and um turpentine is trying to do this with uh podcast plus newsletters plus other things that’s kind of the thing it says his tagline is where experts talk so it’s a network podcast covering Tech business culture and trans that are driving the future and he’s got I think three or four shows right now oh looks like maybe five three that he’s doing and then uh a couple that other people are doing but they’re all like very like fancy schmancy like the cognitive Revolution um you know media Empires Moment of Zen and so they’re they’re kind of like I would say highbrow compared to what most podcasts are yeah so here’s my opinion um I don’t think anyone that you mentioned or anyone out there is really doing it perfectly but this is beautifully done uh you go to his website wow I thought you were going to be anti you’re pretty anti-most media things no oh no it’s gonna come it’s gonna come uh you’re doing you’re doing that sandwich thing yeah yeah [Laughter] sandwiches always have it’s not it’s not I love your logo hate everything else like a sandwich is not meat cheese bread it’s bread meat cheese bread okay you gotta it begins at it and it ends with that no I I do like it so here’s the thing about these companies I think if he doesn’t raise money I think it’s awesome I think so long as he doesn’t raise money I think this could be really really cool I think owning this outright is amazing I think that’s really cool I think when I go to his website I think he borderline like if it was done a little bit the other way it would be really douchey but the way that he’s done it it’s actually quite awesome like for example he quotes Pablo Picasso and you know that could go either way that can go either way he went the right way I think when you go to the website I think the name is nice it’s all like pretty slick it’s upscale it actually looks really good I think that if you if you if you did that a little bit differently it would not work but he’s done like what’s the what’s the quote for Pablo Picasso on there do you see it uh yeah it says when art critics to get together they talk about form and structure and meaning when artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine cool I think that’s cool I think it’s cool and it’s got a nice little picture of Pablo I think it’s awesome yeah uh dude so on my next company I’m gonna get a quote from Benny Blanco it’s Pablo Picasso I’m ready Blanco we can do Bugs Bunny next too I mean I think it’s good man I think it’s good branding so my opinion is I think it’s cool if you own it I think it’s cool if so I don’t know if you know this you probably don’t because who cares but business insiders writer the writers are on strike do you know that yes well a lot of like isn’t Hollywood also on strike right now I think they’re totally unrelated other than maybe they inspired each other I think there was like a contract up and uh Insider formed at Union or something like that and they are protesting and they’re doing this thing called a digital PICC line I guess it’s called where a digital picket line where they’re like telling all the customers like not to click on Business Insider links now uh which is crazy I mean someone who follows a Business Insider journalist is probably not also someone reading Business Insider I would imagine so I I don’t know if that’s gonna go well but if you have to if so if you’re gonna start a media company I think you have to be incredibly careful not to hire folks who will unionize I think that is actually an existential crisis to a lot of media companies right now um and I think that’s like a real so if you’re so here’s the takeaways I think a it’s awesome so you’re going to do this I think it’s cool I think you should own the whole thing B look out for Union types C him going B to B that’s 100 the way to go and I want to give you an example but is this B2B I don’t think this is B2B what makes you say this I think he just has uh I think he has uh probably he’s probably going for like high-end customers more so than b to B right yeah but your ad sales people can spend that nicely to Salesforce uh like it’s not like True Crime you know what I mean it’s borderline it’s kissing cousins with the with the B2B uh real B2B it’s close but let me give you an example of a real b2b1 yeah it’s Bish um have you heard by the way did you see that guy who’s gonna getting in trouble his name is George Santos he’s like clearly I think he’s like from South America but he was um I’m gonna butcher it but he was some type of elected official out of Long Island and uh he’s getting in trouble because he did a bunch of fraudish stuff I think but one thing that’s funny is he told everyone he was Jewish and he goes well I didn’t say I was Jewish I said I was Jewish like I’m friends with the Jews I was Jew itch like you know like uh I’m buddies with them have you not seen it yet all time all time excuse he like stole 500 000 so he’s actually a crook but like the funniest part he goes I’m Jewish and you look at him and he’s uh uh like from Brazil or something like what uh so that’s pretty funny but uh anyway I think that instead of going B to be ish you gotta go all the way I can’t find this client info have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases HubSpot grow better have you heard of Aging media no okay so type in aging media it started by this guy named John John’s a member of Hampton but everything I’m actually about to say I just kind of stole from a similar web but I have heard some rumors about them but basically if you go to aging media what’s what what’s the uh you’ve been on his Hampton application we’re here to write his Revenue profits uh names of all his children and social security number you may you may have some info on this please I just clicked similar web on their site no info so I know you ain’t getting [ ] from similar web right now oh yeah yeah so here’s why here’s I’m gonna explain it to you but you know listen aging media is their like corporate website so what’s it say they have like their brands like senior housing news hospice news skilled nursing news that sort of thing those happen so what what what’s the what’s that meta tag on there is it like uh nursing home profession or yeah media for the senior care industry yeah so click like one of their websites and you can go to similar web each website only has something like 50 000 visits I believe it’s like it’s like not a lot but they’re doing something like 12 or 11 million dollars a year Revenue and like three or four million dollars a year in profit and this is a B2B hardcore B2B site they make their money through Legion so basically I imagine they’ll do like a webinar or something and if you like are in the nursing home industry you give them information they also have ads and I think I don’t know if I have podcasts but they do have newsletters on their site this is a hardcore B2B this is yeah and I love it I love it I love this you just did this guy such a disservice by seeking for for four to forty copycats on them if I’m talking about how you know business this is on here well no so like the idea listen to this podcast so like if Sam or Shawn say the n-word I don’t mean the n-word I mean newsletters if they say this is a good newsletter business the instant copy cop hats bro they’re instantly looking for a new newsletter to club no no no I apologize and on behalf of whoever this guy is in the Hampton I go hey don’t tell me anything but it just can I talk about your company and I I said here’s what I see on similar way he didn’t know what he was saying yes to no hey I got permission I go here’s here’s what I see on similar web this is what I’m gonna say are you cool with it and he gave me a thumbs up like literally a thumbs up emoji that’s how I roll I get that emoji we’re good um That’s a hardcore B2B media company so anyway my point with this turpentine thing I think it’s cool I like it I think it’s cool I hope he pulls it off I’ve thought about doing this idea actually in the past I ruled it out for a bunch of reasons but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean somebody else can’t do it I think I think it’d be great to do it takes a lot of energy and I’m totally with you that I hope you didn’t raise money he’s in his tweet thing uh announcing it he didn’t he didn’t say like so happy to have Marc Anthony recent investing in this so so I think there is uh I think there’s probably a good chance he raised money but he didn’t raise okay he didn’t raise money so so I hope he is taking it that way well you probably learned from uh from his other company on Deck like that’s another company where I think they raised a hundred plus million I forget but I think the valuation was 500 million dollars so I don’t know how much they raised but I imagine it was the United figures that’s another company where it’s like that could be cool if you don’t raise money basically screwing up your cap table is like one of the only mistakes in business that you can’t really make up for um speaking of screwing up your money can I tell you what I did post milk road with the with the money that we made well I do know that you sent me a text I I have to go look at when that came and you said I’ve sold all my equities I think it’s gonna go to the I think the Market’s going down and since then do you’ve it’s double it’s about double yeah a lot of so I know you did that with your money so what else did you say sorry about my next best decision yeah what else did he do besides not make money off your money for the record for the record uh I’ve actually I would be about even from where I was with my equities on that because I kept well I kept a portion of it but I also uh the stuff I sold has not doubled you just look at HubSpot stock because you’re like I got upside so you’re like HubSpot is the market how’s that is not the market exactly so uh so I’ll tell you that so let me um let me tell you about what I did so we got this money so we sell milk Road now this cash hitting a bank account got a couple options so it’s like do we just buy treasury bills make four percent on that uh what bank do you use what bank did I use what do you mean you use a Chase or one of the other ones security breach I’m not there’s no upside and answer this question did you use one of the ones you you were using one of the ones that got screwed up no no no I didn’t use Silicon Valley Bank no so money’s sitting there as I could buy treasury bills uh no that’s too boring um could do what Sam does I could just index into the stock market oh that’s reasonable but like you know I think uh seems like we’re coming off of a of a 13 year old bull market um don’t really need to to put this the full amount in right now let me just kind of wait and see what happens there is there something is there something that can do better than the eight percent uh that I might be able to get on that I thought well should I just invest it in a new company we start uh I don’t know maybe if we have a great idea we’ll do that but but let me just let me not do that and so I started doing this process where I was like can I I work backwards so basically like can I get 30 a year compounding and 30 a year sounds like a high number but we have a few friends who have done it and the way that they’ve done it has been through buying private companies so they buy businesses and they own Andrew Wilkinson I think is the one that most people who listen to this pod will know because he’s been on a bunch of times and talked about this how they built Tiny from a few million dollars into you know 500 million dollars by doing this sort of 30 40 compounding over over time the uh tiny annual report we’ll have to talk about it next time yeah I I read this into a letter um yeah so so and we have a few other friends that have been doing this as well uh that are less public about it so I said okay well let me do that I said but I don’t want to buy these companies and operate them so I thought what if I bought 30 Stakes so sort of like uh can I buy a minority position in companies so that they keep running them but I give them Capital so basically like the founder oftentimes was like not taking a lot off the table or they were kind of always worried like should I put this in my pocket and spend this well I don’t know what if the company needs it um even if a profitable they were kind of worried about that so say here let me give him some money and then could I help them grow and so I went through this exercise I don’t think I’ve told you about any of these but I talked to about 25 companies in the last I want to say six months to every company that you talk to DMS me and they say something of a variety of I was talking to Sean and now we’re not talking anymore but they like they like messaged me to like talk to you and I just ignore it yeah you’re like the wing man who refuses to win you you don’t have to tell me which companies I already know probably half of them my funnel was this I was just doing a review of this I thought it was kind of interesting so talk to about 20 24 companies I think um got serious I like did like did diligence I would say talk to means like uh talk to me it’s like I was interested you know obviously we looked at a little bit more than that but talk to was like oh this could be interesting maybe you could kind of squint and see a possibility then got into kind of like more serious talks and either negotiated numbers or diligence with about nine uh got to a Loi stage with three or four and ended up doing one deal and the last I want to say six months post uh post sale and so this ranged from everything from um so newsletter businesses only fans businesses Journal apps virtual events bookkeeping companies merch companies and then a bunch of random stuff that I know nothing about that were like oh that sounds interesting like uh some company that like does something called laser peening on machines to make the parts last longer and their clients are like bowing and stuff like that or um autism clinics that seem to make a ton of money but I’m like okay I don’t really know how I would add any value to this and uh in each one I was like all right can I find a good operator where I can acquire minority stake of the business at a good deal and I could help them grow and ideally they’re the category winner for for what they do and so that was kind of like my process I want to before I tell you about the deal that we ended up doing I want to hear any uh any thoughts or questions on my my Approach here because there’s a bunch of learnings yeah there’s no way you’re gonna get 30 for that long right do you actually think that’s possible what do you mean for that long that long between I don’t I mean I don’t know anything about markets I haven’t read like a Warren Buffett biography but like what’s he compound at every year oh oh okay yeah he’s been at 20 for like 50 years or something okay but if he but if you got it he’s putting billions and billions of dollars to work and uh that’s very different right okay I think that’s smart do you think you’re gonna enjoy this I think you’ll enjoy it right I’m not sure so this was a test basically to see like is this fun to do it’s definitely fun on the learning side uh now that we made the first acquisition or the first I kind of I would say not an acquisition like kind of minority investment um and it’s different than startups like we’ve done startup investing startup investing is very very different startup investing is you look at a business you’re trying to figure out is this are these three dudes in this bedroom gonna be able to build like a multi-billion dollar company right like is this husband and wife couple going to be able to pull off this this gargantuan exit and like kind of right now they have usually nothing just an idea a product maybe a little bit it’s way more of a lottery it’s a lottery and you put put in a hundred thousand dollars and then you do that with 40 companies and you know that 38 of the companies are going to be kind of like just a write-off or cost of doing business and two or three of those those 30 or 40 companies are going to be your winners but hopefully they’re winning at 100x or a thousand Acts or more uh returns and so it’s very Lottery like and you you spend very little time with them so you’re not like um they don’t want you advising them you answer questions when they call you could proactively nudge them a little bit but you’re mostly hands off I would say Angel Investing whereas if you buy 15 20 25 30 of a business uh you’re a little more involved um you know you care a little more active these businesses are not like All or Nothing businesses they’re like oh this is already a good business it’s profitable and it’s already growing so the question is can we accelerate the growth right so like the one business we bought is I don’t know super profitable it makes millions of dollars a year in profits it’s uh you know more than 50 margins and um you know we were able to buy a piece of that and I think that uh that’s just so different than every startup investment I had ever done you know it’s probably not going to become a multi-billion Dollar business I would almost guarantee that but it doesn’t need to it’s not supposed to it’s a cash flow business and so isn’t it funny how you have mocked me for like the last eight years about my slow and steady approach and now you’re you know look you’re still at first it was like laughing at eight percent I’m going for 10x every year or whatever right now it’s it’s coming down now 30 is really attractive which I agree that is really attractive before you know it you’re gonna say no dude that’s that’s not true even in a startup fund even when you have your winners that become billion dollar companies the overall fund like a great fund is doing 30 irr or twenty percent it’s still the same boring no it’s not I I reject that I reject that premise I would say you used to make a live streaming app and now you’re looking at uh a company that sells parts to Boeing but cash flow is always interesting it’s always been interesting um and now it’s more interesting than it was in the past I really didn’t I really didn’t have a lot of exposure to these types of business I lived in San Francisco you say cash flow and people think you’re talking about like you know like a leaky faucet like nobody knows what the hell the hell that means and so uh once I just started doing this podcast we got a lot more exposure to like most people listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs all around the world and so when they reach out about their business it’s like oh this guy in Minnesota with this you know marketing agency that does this per year or this person sells parts and this person does whatever uh you know they’re rolling up bookkeeping services and so you you learn about different types of businesses more through this and uh so I’ve been getting my like MBA on on non-silicon Valley businesses look the cool thing is is that you know we research stuff and like if I really dive deep into a topic I’ll research it for eight hours and I that’s not enough to make an investment but it’s enough that I say to myself oh wow this space is really intriguing you know I could see myself doing this you’re doing that but instead of eight hours you’re doing weeks and so It’s oddly in the similar vein a bit uh of course you have to do more due diligence and actually look at the numbers and get to know the people but yeah it’s like getting used to the space so the most interesting thing is what happened between the four deals that we signed Lois on and the one that we closed and I’ll try to do this without giving away any info about the companies that we didn’t do the deal with uh I could talk about the one we did but I can’t talk about the one we didn’t um but the things I though the reasons that the mistakes that we were making along the way here’s here’s trap number one that we already experienced I can fix him like the classic girlfriend mistake like yeah he you know he sucks but maybe I could fix him it’s basically like maybe I can fix this business and when you do this minority investing you’re not the majority you’re not going to be able to fix anything and so that was uh you know trap number one was getting really far down the road with the business that I thought had a ton of potential but for finally realizing I’m not going to be the one to fix it and fixing it is the wrong approach to doing going into a business like this that was mistake one mistake two was I can totally I can totally uh see this working but working at a small scale and so you have to remember basically like as you play the game it’s kind of like this is how I felt about like your Airbnb which is like you do one Airbnb that’s you basically can’t do one Airbnb you can only do one as a test to see if you want to do a bunch one Airbnb is like a bunch of headache without the size of the prize being big enough and so we had looked at one business that was like yeah which is what I have by the way yeah yeah we all make this this mistake but I think you were at least looking at it the right way where you were like maybe I could do a bunch of these you talked to people that had 50 of these in their portfolio and you have to do one to know if you want to do 50. and so we got really far down the road with this one that like if it all worked it’s like dude we could be making two hundred thousand dollars a year off this it’s like wait what are we doing what why are we doing this like yeah it’s a great deal and it’s highly likely to work but it’s highly likely to be very small and like not worth the Mind share of even doing this and so we pulled out on that one the one that we did was basically uh a company people probably know so it was in a cat so this one was not are you gonna name it yeah yeah it’s official so we first looked at the category so I was super bullish on companies that let you hire internationally so specifically like how to hire the Philippines and laddam and you know this why were you interested in that what inside like kind of scar tissue like dude you came to my office I remember you you came to my office in San Francisco when I was doing bibo and you’re like what’s your burn rate which again is like a question nobody asks somebody else out loud it’s like you know that’s like asking somebody that’s asking a woman their weight like ask a Founder their burn rate and see how they feel in my head I was like that’s bubbly you had a bubbly burn man and I was like three million a year and that’s what we were we were basically a startup that was burning three million a year pre-product Market fit because that’s what it cost we had we basically had a team of Engineers so we had like you know I don’t know 10 a month a month 2004 I think we were doing like 240 000 a month in burnt so you get like and that’s netburn does that mean no does that assume no Revenue um we had revenue from one of our projects but like no I was just saying like the overall bill so um so we basically you hire 10 people that are 200 000 each you’re doing 2 million plus you pay rent plus you have your Cloud bills especially whatever else and uh so that was really expensive and those were all Silicon Valley engineers and they were below market so those people if they were working for us for 200k they could have been making 400 500k at Facebook but they wanted to be a part of a startup so I did that and it was very stressful to have a very high burn rate uh for a company like I just didn’t like it but I didn’t know any better at the time and then afterwards as I got a little more Savvy like with our Ecom biz we’ll do probably somewhere but like a little under 20 million this year in Revenue uh were profitable because 65 of our team is overseas so we have our like our our data analysis person Argentina our designer India our customer service Philippines are the person who’s running our whole wholesale Channel like built it from scratch it did not exist and now it’s like a new Revenue unit in the Philippines and we did the same thing with milk road we were profitable milk Road from day one like I remember coming to your office at the hustle and you had like I don’t know 15 people running around there in San Francisco and like that’s a bunch of San Francisco issues they have to go home and pay six thousand dollar rent so you got to pay them money and for us we had one person in the US for milk Road and we had everybody else in the Philippines and so it was again lean mean profitable machine and I was like oh um not just is this cost savings like if you hire some of the Philippines they’re basically 10 times cheaper than the US so like you know you can hire somebody in the Philippines for a thousand dollars a month so 12 000 in a year that same person the US will cost you 80 to 120k um and these are skilled people like in Latin like the guy we have doing our data stuff he’s like he’s got his MBA like they’re these are Highly Educated highly you know he’s like a wizard with like you know power bi and looker and all these like data tools that I couldn’t even do you get to know yeah yeah of course I’m talking to them all the time the one good thing is especially with the Philippines uh this sounds terrible but I’m gonna say it anyways because it’s honest I hate managing people and I love hiring people in the Philippines because they need so little management like I uh why does that sound horrible what did I miss there because I think what people want is for you to be like I’m a good manager and I talk to my people and I’m like dude it’s [ ] great I only talk like for example my assistant I only talked to her on Fridays I mean or like it’s great they don’t want one-on-ones and like career trajectory coaching and they don’t want like like the same like in San Francisco I had let’s say I have eight direct reports that’s eight weekly one-on-ones I had to do yes well dude I’ve had that’s essentially eight hours out of the 160 hours a week that you know that that I have that I’m like uh you know I’m spending doing basically like touchy-feely stuff which is fine I understand it but it’s really nice when you don’t have to do that because it’s not the Baseline expectation there’s a bunch of roles where you don’t want someone who’s entirely ambitious like with totally an assistant it’s like you don’t want someone that’s like no I don’t want to give you all these other opportunities I want you to be great at this thing and not bail like I don’t this is what I need this is the tool that I need and I want you to be that I don’t want to have to promote you tons and tons of times I’ve hired a couple of people uh for like our hold code basically um and they’re they’re cooled or they live in San Francisco they’re awesome they’re super motivated to work with me I’m like great what do you want like I want to be you out of like wait what and then I’m like cool like you know someday they’re like yeah but I’m also spinning up my own newsletter my own podcast my own investment arm like I’m like okay well like that’s great you could do that but you that makes for kind of a shitty person to hire onto my team because like part of being on this team is being down for our mission not like your own mission necessarily and I totally get if you want to go to your own mission but you got to go do that on your own don’t get you don’t get to have both um you know at the same exact time you can do one and get mentored for a bit and then go do your own but you can’t do it at the exact same time and so it has been very nice to have people that are just like they CL like literally like our management style is they log in they say logging in here’s what I’m doing today if you have any adjustments to you you say something if not you just don’t say anything at the end they say long enough here’s what I got done today here’s everything I did here’s the files here’s the here’s the info login off so how much are you spending you know on on these on these folks I mean dude I have like in my own companies probably almost 15 to 20 people that are international now and so and what’s the average salary um it ranges so like on the low end uh 800 I think about it in months monthly because that’s like when I push payroll that’s what it says so like you know 800 a month would be the low end and that’s how you’ll say most common so that’s a customer support personal assistant things like that could be that low and then uh the higher rolls will be like twenty five hundred to three thousand and then there’s one guy who’s just amazing and I’ve promoted him up twice now and now he gets paid like a US employee because he makes the impact of somebody who’s like driving a ton of growth so I’m like oh great like you keep getting rewarded you’re at some point you break break through where you’re if you’re driving growth you get rewarded for driving correct and you also I got an email you you have a course on this now too I have a course on the personal assistant side yeah I just created it’s not even a course actually it’s just uh I don’t like I don’t go and teach it it’s just a system it’s like yo basically the best hire I made this year was I hired my personal assistant and I had thought okay personal assistant is uh uh you know personal assistants like for rich people for like Mega it’s like for Jeff Bezos it’s like Mega busy make a rich and uh and also was like I don’t wanna have to tell somebody what to do all the time like that sounds like its own pain in the ass to come up with [ ] to do and then I heard a few friends talk about theirs and I was like maybe I’m wrong let me open my mind to the possibility that I’m wrong about this three people tell me three people that I trust tell me that it’s like been a huge game changer for them let me just send it to me I want to use it I basically created the whole thing last week and I was like here’s my system so for example like here’s my my email system like I used to be terrible with email and now my email system is like super organized on top of [ ] here’s exactly what I do here’s the exact scope of work here’s how here’s how it works I just texted Ben I go I said send it to me yeah uh and so and yeah by the way there’s a like a a funny offer we did with it but I’ll explain the copy that we ended up investing in so I looked at all the ways you could do this I’ve done all of them so you can hire direct if you want to hire somebody International you can basically have three options you hire direct so you hire somebody on like a job board upwork online job something like that upside it’s basically free you just pay the software subscription like in our 99 bucks a month so you know you pay a thousand dollars for the year to be to be a pro member on there downside you have to do all the hiring vetting training sifting through candidates yourself like you put up hey I need a customer support person or a personal assistant you’re gonna get 200 applications I’m like good luck trying to find somebody good um you could also go on the high end and use like a managed service so this is things like um growth assistant or Athena they’re great they do the they do the vetting for you but there’s this huge up charge so those guys charge you three grand a month for somebody that actually costs 800 a month so you’re paying you’re paying 3x the price or more every single month forever that’s how big are those companies how big is Athena I heard they’re huge they’re big and they’re big because this is like a huge ARR thing for them and people don’t really know about it people don’t really realize like you didn’t have to pay triple the price every single month and so that’s like you know One path and but they’re good at what they do I’ve tried them yeah I’ve tried a bunch of these um the one I liked the best was the one we ended up investing in which is Shepard so people have probably heard of Shepard before I think the URL support shepard.com why like Shepherd was it’s kind of best of both so they do the like filtering screening background checks all that stuff so basically you just say I want a personal assistant they present you three great candidates or they present you five great candidates for you and they’re they’re filtered they’re checked and they’re basically like these are the best of the best so they save you a [ ] ton of time which is like as any business owner you kind of need that and the other side you don’t have to pay the monthly up charge so they’ll say great here’s you know you can make the hire directly and all you pay is the one-time finders fee for us having found you the candidate and so it ends up being you know 10 to 20 times cheaper than these other ones in the long run because you just paid you know the one-time finders fee so I like that model the best I was like long term I think this is the most sustainable because if I’m making in my business like I did 15 hires internationally I want I don’t want to be paying like this bloated cost every month from there on out nor do I want to do that all that work myself so that was the business we ended up investing in um super excited the The Branding on their website so it’s support shepherd.com yeah you have to be one of the testimonials you need a testy on there but uh it looks good it’s cute branding uh so Marshall Haas is the guy who started it Marshall I’ve known Marshall since 2012 maybe he’s the type of guy who whenever he does something it’s awesome it looks cool uh so like if you follow him on Instagram on Twitter he’s got Showmanship he’s got Showmanship he’s got the juice he’s got the juice so whenever like for example I think he just bought a new house and I’m like following the bill about us he also like he likes cars so like I saw him like redecorate his garage he owns like a boutique hotel he did this like e-commerce thing that was like super simple and actually like a really good like you know a successful successful econ business that was just like it was like a phone case and like you know it was just that and like when Kobe came out they came out with this little like hook thing like your Captain Hook that was like you can use this to open doors without having to touch the knob like a peasant I was like dude this guy’s great he just makes these like simple little businesses and he runs all the reason he did this is he ran his businesses using international hiring as his like Workforce so then he partnered with this guy in the Philippines opened up a office on the ground there with a bunch of recruiters to do all the vetting locally on the ground is he going to the Philippines his business partner lives there and is has the the office open there so that’s like how you that you got to commit if you’re going to do these types of things and so he basically partnered with the guy who’s doing that and that’s how they created Shepard and it started off just like you know solving their own Niche but turns out like a lot of people have have this itch and so and myself included so uh so if he I follow I I’m not used it but I will I will use it I I would like to use I’m literally I just texted Ben I really actually want your course I want to figure out how you do this because I want this and maybe I’ll use these guys but if his business is going so well why would he sell a portion to you like my head is I’m greedy I’m like get the [ ] out of here because I mean obviously we’re gonna drive him a little bit or a lot of bit of traffic in the Pod will is that the only reason why he would do this uh yeah basically they don’t spend any money on marketing um at all and so the way that it spreads is just Word of Mouth people coming back and then the other one is like entrepreneurs who have an audience saying saying the word so they first did this with Mick uh Huber and Nick Nichols drove them a ton of business because Nick uses it uh for all of his businesses and so he when he talks about it they get a bunch of uh they get a bunch of traffic so I think he saw the success of that and um basically you know we have a large audience now like through Twitter through this pod through other things and so there’s obviously a benefit of I don’t know like the brand Association like as well as like you know the the ability to reach you know reach a large audience that I think was appealing to him and I bought in I didn’t get free shares right like I bought I bought into the to the equity pool but I agree with you when you have a really good business you’re always hesitant it has to be like the right fit and so I think the other benefit was he listens to the Pod and so he’s seen you know if you listen to this you know how we think if you can agree be like this person’s great or this person’s an idiot you know if you want to if you would want to do business with them if you’ve listened to the Pod regularly you you have a very good idea there’s no hiding our personalities on this do they have a MFM like coupon code is it coupon coupon so if you go to my website if you go to seanbury.com remote assistant basically here’s what I got them to do which is better than a coupon thing so I was like all right if you want to do the personal assistant thing the way I did uh I was all right here’s my systems 250 bucks you get the whole like all the templates all the thing or whatever but I was like um I only want to make money from people who don’t take action and so here’s here’s how it works basically should just buy the course you don’t actually hire an assistant I keep your money but if you actually go to Shepard and you hire your assistant then Shepard will give you 2x the money back so basically you pay 250 you’ll get 500 if you actually take the action and go higher and I was like that’s kind of a no-brainer offer I was like Marshall we got to do this like do this where if people want their own assistant and they actually go like take the action and go forward with it pay them back not just what they paid for the system pay them double because uh like I bet a bunch of people are just not gonna take action but who cares like I want the people who who will take action to be rewarded for doing so and so that’s a pretty pretty sweet deal basically it’s like a you essentially get my system for free plus you make an extra 250 if you uh if you actually go go forward with it and make your higher so first I want if you’re into this [ ] I have no stake in this by the way uh but go to support Shepard I do want them to sign up because here’s what I want I want you to report back and I want to hear if this whole influencer buys companies thing actually is good I wanna so I want I want the results to be reported back in like a month and so I am curious to see like what the demand is I bet it’s gonna be quite good number two what I’m curious to see is if you like this uh I don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not I can see going at 50 50 either way so far how do you feel I mean look if this deal works then this is like the greatest thing I don’t know this one is a no but that’s not the hard part this is always easy this is already a successful company I’m already religious about hiring internationally anyways personally in my own businesses it’s like I didn’t have to be convinced that this is a good idea like I already knew there’s a good idea the question was am I going to start my own of these or should I invest in one that’s already working that I like that I use and it’s like okay cool let me just do the second one that seems like way less work you know to do that so I think this one is kind of a no-brainer in that it’s kind of a proven business I am a genuine believer in it and whether we actually drive extra traffic to them or not I think it’s it’s sort of like I don’t know like obviously for them they want that then and I would like that too but for me it was already you say it was already what percentage are you is that too much to ask or to review yeah I want to disclose that here because I think you know it’s their business I don’t wanna I don’t want to give that away too much but you know it’s a it’s a good chunk I think do you think they’ll ever sell the company or do you make your money just through dividends yeah just dividends like it’s a profitable business um it just pays out dividends like I got our first dividend check yesterday it’s awesome you did you got one already yeah it was fantastic this is going to be your See’s Candy maybe I mean if this works out that’s exciting I’m curious to see if you’re gonna like this because on one hand I could actually see you loving this because you get to spend time seeing how things work and you get to use your skill set which is content to tell people about it like this segment that we just did I’m actually interested I want to keep talking about this just because I want to hear the story about it I think that’s interesting and so it’s kind of a win-win in that regard but I’m curious if you’re going to enjoy all the due diligence like when I talk to Andrew Wilkinson he actually I don’t think does a lot of the due diligence he’s got a team to do right if you are able to pull that off I think you’ll be in a win situation um so as long as you like like doing that yeah I’m gonna try with two or three this one I knew was on a slam dunk because I’m just like just a total believer in it what’s gonna be interesting is what happens with ones that aren’t like perfectly in my zone of like I get it I used it I believe in it like it’s like this one was like Bullseye I don’t expect every business to be exactly Bullseye so the question is what happens when it’s not exactly is it still fun do I still believe do I am I still willing to talk about it like this one I’m willing to talk about because I’m like I literally wouldn’t have my econ business work the way it does or milk red worked the way it did if I didn’t use this strategy so I’m like I could talk about that now what happens when it’s like one degree separated from that am I still Gonna Wanna to tell a story on it maybe it’s not even that interesting a story I’m not gonna do it like I’m not gonna come on this podcast and bore everybody with like a story that’s not that great so I can’t I can’t commit to that yet but I don’t know if somebody wants me to buy you know a minority taking their business hit me up let’s see let’s see what happens I’m gonna try two or three of these and see see how it goes was there anything uh that you learned looking at the 24 other than what you said about the uh like fix me [ ] like was there anything any other Revelations not necessarily about what they had wrong with them or but maybe what they had to write with them any commonalities between the winners yeah uh yeah definitely I would say that the the businesses that I was most interested in were ones that had a clear a clear sales model I would say they knew how they were going to get their customers now and in the future um I don’t want to say moat because it’s like you’re just trying to be Warren Buffett like it’s not like something they had a moat but they had you know either recurring revenue or they had something that was like they’re they’re actually the category leader they’re the go-to leader and that there’s some reason why they’re not just going to get copied into Oblivion by everybody else maybe it’s maybe they have operational Advantage maybe they what’s Shepherds I mean I think branding is actually a that separates them here I think they look cool is there anything else yeah I think Shepard’s uh real Advantage is that they’re they picked a business model that’s actually more customer friendly like I said So like um if your two other options are spend a bunch of time have a bunch of uncertainty hire somebody unvetted and you save a little bit of money or pay a 3X monthly up charge like you’re kind of nuts to do the 3x monthly up charge for a long period of time especially if you’re gonna hire multiple roles eventually in your company like it’s just not a sustainable path so to me support Shepherd’s choice on the business model separated them from the current competitors now somebody else could try to do it but what are they gonna have to do they’re gonna have to go set up boots on the ground in the Philippines and in latam and really be good at you know recruiting recruiters who are then going to recruit the talent to actually deliver on these roles and hire high quality people because they they don’t really like the money’s not made in your first hire the money’s made when you’re like you see the light and you come back to them for your next six hires like what I did with Ecom is like I started with customer support and I was like cool I need somebody to do inventory forecasting people in the US really expensive for that honey 140k for that that role here could I find somebody overseas that could do inventory forecasting can I find somebody that could do can run our Amazon uh ads can I find somebody who could do wholesale as a channel like can I find people that do influencer like you start to be like oh wait this isn’t just about what it used to be which was like va’s equals low-cost labor now it’s like dude they’re pretty talented people that could do these things they got three or four years of experience doing that at another company and so you’re able to just pluck from the remote talent pool versus just your local talent pool dude I’m excited to see how this turns out at Hampton do you guys have any overseas people yet or no yeah yeah for sure we have like the guy who made our website is overseas and he’s on staff we have our accounting folks that who like the they’re called fuel Finance they’re overseas if you go to uh like we have this whole back end thing built where people can log in it was built by a guy in Hong Kong um yeah we have a ton of overseas and Marshall’s a member and so we’re gonna actually thinking about starting to use them for some data analytics stuff so yeah by the way like the fun is all a lot of overseas when I was using uh for are you coming a lot of you come people use agencies I uh I’ll hire an agency and then they like they’re like great let’s add can you add these three people to slack and all of them by their names yeah and I’m just like so like for example uh design pickle I think is like a 10 million dollar a year business to basically like design unlimited designer on demand uh we tried them out for a little bit every single designer is in the Philippines um then I hired this email marketing guy I was like oh you had to do our email email marketing and flows he’s based in call Colorado every employee is in the Philippines I was like okay that’s another one um I hired a website a web dev shop yeah owners in the US entire team is in India uh you know another one that did the entire thing in Ukraine and it’s like it’s so funny that people are basically this is now a business model is basically like owner in the US does sales fulfillment all done by it and they’re good I’m not even saying this like a bad thing like they’re talented but I’m like wow this is a whole business blueprint a template that they could use which would basically like make the margins work uh what are you gonna go there when are you going when’s the Philippines yeah when’s neckbeard Nation going to the Philippines we should host the next live pod there do we have a following there I have no idea uh unfortunately I don’t think we do I don’t think they give a [ ] dude you got to go there um I’ve been in the Philippines it’s awesome tonight and I’ve never been I’ll go tonight and tomorrow I’m taking a 15-hour road trip in my Tesla uh my first time doing it we’re gonna see if I love it or hate it so I’m gonna report back on Wednesday 15th hour you said it normally takes 12 but you add three hours for charging yeah I did a charging road trip was horrible where are you going from where are you going to what’s the distance uh Austin to St Louis okay I’m gonna visit my family uh would you get the x or the Y which one are you doing X long distance 350 miles is it a new one because the thing I screwed up was the one I rented on turo was like five years old and it just needed charging every 90 minutes it was an awful experience well how fast you go I mean it’s like highway right so you’re going like whatever 75 miles an hour I mean I speed usually is I mean I’ll go 85 or 90. so obviously what’s gonna happen crushes the battery uh it absolutely crushed the battery at least that one that I had it absolutely crushed it we had to tear we did a seven hour ride 14 hours because we had to charge so many times you know the charging thing it’s not like you can’t just like charge like there’s like certain Chargers that are fast and some that are slow you know like don’t you just use the thing on the screen that like tells you what to do well it tells you where it tells you where it tells you where the charges are but I’m saying some of the charging stations and some of the spots are fast Chargers and some are slow like there’s a like it’s like a gas pump where one will fill it up at twice the speed as the other so make sure when you do it you know that so you go only to the fast Chargers uh and none of the slow the slow ones are like you you had to be like I wanted to go watch a movie so that I could do this slow charge no I I use there’s this app called a better route I think it’s called like has built this whole like thing just on routing out people’s electric charges and so I’m gonna use that but my wife’s my wife’s flying and I was like I’m driving I want to drive I want to see what it’s like and so I’m driving and I’m gonna report back on Wednesday to see how it feels I did it so I I’m gonna leave tonight so I’ll get a few hours in and then tomorrow that way I can like I plan my life around this pod because I was like it’s we record 11 my time like I can’t arrive that morning otherwise I’ll be like tired I want better research right so I have to plan it so I get there Tuesday night but I need a full night’s rest so I can like wake up and like research and [ ] do you plan your life around this pod oh yeah to an extent right like you know this is uh this is the one unmissable appointment on my calendar everything else yeah it’s flexible this is the one non-flexible thing it’s no days off I think I mean we’ve recorded on we missed Christmas yeah so I guess we can’t really say that right now well wasn’t there like an issue yeah we had a sound issue but uh we’re like no days off people are like you missed last the last time that was like a technical error but we’ve done like whatever the most recent holiday is we’re recording whatever I think we’ve done Christmas Eve before we always record big thanks to everybody who listens this is a fun thing for us to do thank you for listening uh yeah this is like one of the one of the the dope parts of our life and I think it’s attracted a bunch of little like uh I mean neck beard Nation right so it’s attracted a bunch of people who whose brain is weird in the way our brain is weird and uh and I think that’s a lot of fun I want to end with this so I was at this I’ll tell you a very very quick story I was at this La Tech Meetup first of all our fans are that sounds weird but our listeners they come in all shapes and sizes man all colors oh I like I love it like what does that mean what are you trying to say there dude like I had this guy that looked like he was seven feet tall guy like basketball player and I thought he was like a famous guy and he comes up he goes total man and he gave me like you know like the black guy handshake I’m like black guy you are a total man like that you didn’t even need to say it bro no yes pure gaming like that got my handshake you know what I’m saying and uh and then I had this like 55 year old woman who was with her kid at the airport say what’s up and I just want to say first of all if you’re a fan thank you and second of all I can tell like walking by if someone listens or not because if they’re wearing like Lululemon ABC pants or like if they look like they go to like Columbia uh like University and they like make eye contact with you in a particular way I could tell and I would love for you to come and say what’s up so long as it’s like a quick like what’s up total man like you can say something by the way here’s the etiquette you come over you fist pound not handshake or hug so let’s do nuts that’s the way we do it we’re not trying to get a little too too much uh I’m not trying to be pumped upon with anybody and so uh give me the knocks you can say uh you can reference that you get no small boy stuff uh total man you could use any of the any of the isms that you want that just means I know you and I’m I’ll give you the head nod back like yep you’re one of us take the selfie together and then uh and then we kind of you know we keep the show rolling from there but here’s the [ ] that I need to announce to people and they and we got with us in every episode because oftentimes if they send me with my wife they’ll say what’s up they see me with like my in-laws or up to eat with friends they won’t say what’s up and every once in a while they will and it makes me feel so cool oh my God yo the more people I’m with the more I need you to be over the top with it yes my wife doesn’t listen to this podcast she’s never heard a single episode so she doesn’t think this is cool she thinks this is me playing video games up in the bedroom right now so only when she sees someone come up in person and then even you know I was with her mom there and they were like wow what my dad was there and he’s like he my dad literally goes he must have thought you’re someone else and family actually understand and so if you see us out there please give us one yeah if we’re with friends you have to do it Bella make my day I love the short thing I was out to eat and like three different guys when I was about to eat I was at my co-workers I said what’s up and I played it up like oh man I can’t go anywhere in my head I’m like I’m like oh there’s a forward I hope there’s a fourth it’s someone and my co-workers are like does this happen all the time I’m like ah I gotta say the most embarrassing version of this so uh when we were selling the milk Road I went to meet up with the guy who bought it Kendall at a coffee shop and we’re at the coffee shop for a bit and I see someone kind of like looking like I think they recognize me but I’m not sure and I’m like come over just come over right now because he doesn’t listen to the podcast and I’m trying to do this deal and I’m like I think it would help if he felt like I’m a big deal I was like I think that’d be a little nicer yes the guy doesn’t come over right so we go outside we say I say bye he starts walking away and the guy comes over and he’s like Sean and I’m like yeah he goes hey man you’re like Vandal come back yeah I literally go I was like oh Kendall I want you to be my house I was like hey uh have you met Kendall and you guys like No And I was like Kendall yeah um this guy just he listens to the party I just wanted you to it didn’t even make sense and I was like I forced it so bad dude validate me please how do you take a cool moment and make it the most lame was me being like hey wait you didn’t hear that he recognized me come here have you guys met of course not oh my God I I’ve said that before I’m like hey say what you said again but do it in front of my in-laws so I just this is the public service announcement if you think you know us or if you think it’s us even if you only think it’s kind of us uh just take a chance and say what’s up and uh feel free to be over at the top like yeah you know it’s awesome we love it uh it makes me feel good and it more so makes me look cool which is what I care about more than anything so anyway that’s awesome that’s the Pod good episode foreign