Sam and Shaan cover trust-based content businesses and the infomercial playbook. They start with Examine.com — a supplement research site with 40,000 daily visitors that Sam’s friend Sol built as the “Up-to-Date for nutrition” (Up-to-Date does $500M/year in medical content subscriptions). They discuss Consumer Reports ($245M/year, all-subscription), J2 Global/PCMag as a trust-based SaaS review empire, and “safety seal stickers” as a business model. They then dig into Guthy-Renker, the infomercial company behind Think and Grow Rich, Proactive, and Tony Robbins — which does $1.5-2B/year using celebrity endorsements and long-form direct response. They also cover Matt Mickiewicz, the serial entrepreneur who built SitePoint, Flippa, 99designs, and Unstoppable Domains, plus close with a breakdown of Ariel Helwani’s niche media empire.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Ariel Helwani and the Niche Media Empire [00:00:00]
Sam: So I got Ariel Helwani to agree to come on. You excited?
Shaan: How’d you do that?
Sam: A good buddy of mine is best friends with him. I begged. You’ve never seen me try that hard for anything.
For people who don’t know: Ariel Helwani is the god of MMA journalism. A million Twitter followers — not that niche, but he’s the guy. He recently quit ESPN, where he was making close to a million dollars a year, and he’s building his own media empire: a Substack, his own podcast, the whole thing.
What’s interesting is that he could have done basketball journalism — that was the safe move, his fan sport. Instead, he went for MMA when it was a fringe sport. John McCain called it “human cockfighting.” It wasn’t even allowed in some states. But Ariel was the only one covering it consistently for fifteen years. Deep relationships, deep respect. Dana White — the UFC president — hates him and has banned him from events. And Ariel is still the number one journalist in the sport.
Shaan: Imagine Roger Goodell banning someone from NFL games and that person is still the number one NFL journalist. That’s what he pulled off.
Sam: Go into a niche where you can own it. Start small, corner it, then grow. Or ride a niche that itself becomes massive. Twitch never really expanded beyond gaming — they tried — but gaming became so big that it didn’t matter.
Examine.com and Trust-as-a-Service [00:08:00]
Sam: Can I tell you about a business built entirely on trust?
Shaan: Go.
Sam: Examine.com. My friend Sol — S-O-L Orwell — built it. It’s basically a supplement research database. Forty thousand visitors a day. They get those visitors with free content — you go search “ashwagandha” and you get a deep evidence-based breakdown of every clinical trial, what the conclusions are, how strong the studies are. They won’t mention any brand, ever. Sol told me: “The day we start recommending brands is the day we start incentivizing the wrong thing.”
Revenue comes from a membership. You pay, you get supplement guides and a summary of recent studies — which are reliable, which aren’t, what to combine, what to avoid. They’ve got around 50,000 members, seven figures in revenue, 20 employees. Trusted by Men’s Health, Andrew Huberman, the New York Times.
Now here’s why this is a big deal. There’s a company called Up-to-Date. If you’re a doctor, you know it. Examine.com for doctors, essentially — clinical trial summaries and treatment recommendations. Doctors pay around $600 a year. How much revenue do you think they make?
Shaan: Maybe $50 million.
Sam: Five hundred million. And the parent company that owns Up-to-Date — they do the same thing for finance, tax, and accounting — is publicly traded and does around five billion in revenue. This is one of the greatest business models in the world.
Shaan: Trust is the scarce resource. We live in a world of abundance. Trust is what’s rare. And in categories where the stakes are high — your health, your money — people will pay for a source they actually believe.
Sam: Consumer Reports runs the same play. Non-profit, so you can see their numbers. They did $245 million in total revenue in 2020, $212 million of it from subscriptions. They rate everything — TVs, tires, dishwashers. That business has been running for decades. People pay because they trust it.
Then there’s J2 Global, which owns PCMag, IGN, Mashable, and Offers.com. Their market cap is $6.3 billion. The bulk of their revenue comes from PCMag recommending which software to buy. That’s a trust-based business dressed up as a media company.
Shaan: The question is: what else could this model work for? I think physical therapy is a big one. Sam mentioned his achilles injury — you’d have to read dozens of papers to find that eccentric heel drops are the evidence-backed protocol. Nobody should have to do that research themselves.
Sam: Skin care is another. The challenge is the “fear factor.” Supplements work because people are scared of taking something that could harm them. Dishwashers work because nobody wants to do their own 5,000-cycle test. Skin care has the aspiration angle but less fear. You need to find where the trust gap is biggest.
Safety Seal Stickers and LEED Certification [00:24:00]
Shaan: Here’s a blue collar side hustle: safety seal stickers. You order DoorDash, the bag has a tamper-evident sticker on it. Who is selling branded safety seals to restaurants? That person is making money.
The bigger idea: trust-as-a-service for any business. You could go from the $2 sticker version to a full certification system — like the health department score, but better. The health department is a joke. You can BS through it, wear flip-flops while selling hot dogs, get a 95 out of 100.
What if you created a real trust seal that meant something? You could dial the rigor up or down — mystery shoppers, on-site inspections, or just a self-reported checklist. LEED certification for buildings does $31 million a year just by certifying how “green” buildings are. Some buildings have the LEED incentive, some just want the brand signal.
Sam: The underlying model is great. HubSpot does it too — they have certifications that people put on their LinkedIn. People brag about being “HubSpot certified.” It’s free for them and adds brand credibility. Scrum certification costs $5,000. If you can create a certification that people want to display, you’ve got a recurring revenue machine.
Matt Mickiewicz and the SitePoint Empire [00:37:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about Matt Mickiewicz. Most people haven’t heard of him, but he’s built an incredible string of companies.
In 1998, in high school in Australia, he started SitePoint — a publisher of books, courses, and articles for web developers. Never raised funding. Probably does $5-15 million a year.
On the SitePoint forum, people were buying and selling small websites. He spun that forum out into Flippa — the marketplace for buying and selling websites and online businesses. Recently raised $20 million, hundreds of employees, pretty much the category leader below the $1M acquisition threshold.
Also on the SitePoint forum, people were buying and selling designs. He started 99designs. You pay $1,000, describe what you want, and 100 designers submit concepts. You pick the one you like, they get paid. They do close to $100 million in revenue and raised $45 million.
Then he started Hired.com — recruiting marketplace for developers. Raised $132 million. It’s still around.
Now he’s joined Unstoppable Domains — crypto domain registrar. Instead of .com you can own a .eth domain on the blockchain. His pitch when I DM’d him: “There’s a trillion-dollar asset class being navigated using the equivalent of IP addresses. ICANN is one of the oldest monopolies on the internet, and crypto gives us a way to disrupt it.” I actually agree with that.
Shaan: Any time a person who could start their own company and be independently wealthy chooses to join a company as a senior executive, that’s a signal. They think it’s potentially a $100 billion outcome. That’s the tell.
Sam: And he’s only 37. If you’re running SitePoint, then Flippa, then 99designs in parallel, and now Unstoppable Domains — you’re seeing the same kind of entrepreneurial compounding that makes a career remarkable.
The Guthy-Renker Infomercial Playbook [00:50:00]
Sam: Okay, Guthy-Renker. Do you know about them?
Shaan: I know the name. Tell me.
Sam: So they do somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion in sales per year. It started with a guy named Guthy who had a company that duplicated audio cassettes — basically like a Kinkos for cassettes. He gets an order for 50,000 copies of a cassette about real estate investing. He thinks, “What is this guy selling 50,000 copies of?” He looks it up: infomercials.
He calls his buddy Renker. Together they decide they want to do infomercials. First product: they buy the rights to Think and Grow Rich for $100,000 in 1988. They produce a 30-minute infomercial — I watched the whole thing at 4am last night. It’s brilliant.
The formula: they open with testimonials but never tell you what the product is. The founder of Dominos says: “I had the lowest GPA in my high school class. I never went to college. But I read this book and it became my blueprint.” What book? You don’t find out for three minutes. Frank Tarkington comes on: “The Rothschilds, Andrew Carnegie — Napoleon Hill was commissioned to study all the most successful people in the world. He packaged all of it into this book.” Then finally: Think and Grow Rich.
Hard sell. But it works. They made $10 million over the next three years on that one product.
Shaan: The structure is incredible. You’re withholding the product name while filling you with desire. And the testimonials do all the work before the reveal.
Sam: Then they bought Proactive. At its peak, Proactive was spending $250 million a year just on media buying — purchasing the TV slots — and Justin Bieber, Adam Levine, Britney Spears were each getting paid $5-10 million to appear in the infomercial. That’s influencer marketing at level 12.
The niches where this works best: skin care, fitness, self-help. Price point is high enough for the margin. Celebrities and aspirational endorsements work. Fear or aspiration is intense. That’s why those three verticals are dominated by direct response.
Shaan: Modern version: Mindvalley does $50 million per year. They’re essentially a direct response content company — they buy programs on sleep, yoga, meditation, wellness from experts, dress them up with long-form video sales letters, and sell subscriptions. Completely bootstrapped. Internet-native Guthy-Renker.
Sam: Golden Hippo is another. Our buddy Craig Clemens. They own nine or ten brands. Mid nine figures in revenue. Gundry MD is one of their brands — go to gundrymd.com. Looks like a small website, but if they told me it does $100 million a year, I wouldn’t be shocked.
Their acquisition funnel: they buy display ads on Taboola on random content sites, you click through to a 40-minute video that auto-plays with no pause button, at the end you’re subscribed to text messages from a “real doctor” who’s the face of the brand. Nobody in Silicon Valley knows these companies exist. We’ve shown their funnels to tech executives and they laugh. Then they go back to spending millions on banner ads that say “Download our app.” There’s a reason Golden Hippo doesn’t need to raise money.
Shaan: The lesson isn’t that their products are great. It’s that they have mastered the craft of selling. And if you want to get good at sales, you study the best-sold products, not the best products. These are the best-sold products in the world.
Sam: That’s the pod.
Shaan: If you’re starting a media company and you don’t go subscription first, you’re an idiot. That’s the clip.