Sam introduces Thomas Tull — the stealthy billionaire who went from laundromats to auto shops to accounting rollups to founding Legendary Entertainment, the film financing company behind The Dark Knight, Inception, The Hangover, and Dune, which he sold for $3.5 billion by applying a Moneyball data approach to movie marketing. The episode also covers UFC 300’s Max Holloway knockout moment as a launching pad for Sam’s five-level marketing framework (product → solution → lifestyle → feeling → identity), and closes with Sam reporting early numbers on his new venture, Sam’s List — a Yelp for accountants.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Billy of the Week: Introducing Thomas Tull [00:00:00]
Sam: Here’s the hook. This is my Billy of the Week. We used to have a Billy of the Week theme song — I don’t know if we still have it. We should dig one up or get AI to make a Billy of the Week jingle.
Shaan: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.
Sam: Okay, so let me tell you how I got hooked on this. I read a story in The Information. I don’t really read The Information normally — I don’t pay for it. But it gives you the preview and then it starts to fade. You’re saying, by the way, The Information dot com.
Shaan: Yeah, and it fades. It totally gets you hooked.
Sam: It gets me hooked. But I’m reading the fading part and as it’s fading away, there’s a line that just caught my attention. It says something like: residents of a small town in Idaho were complaining because suddenly dozens of private jets were flying into this private airport, and armored vehicles were showing up, and they’re wondering what is going on. They called the mayor — did something happen? And they’re like, “Oh, it’s just Thomas Tull.” Who’s that?
Shaan: Exactly. Who’s that?
Sam: And then it faded out. I was like, I have to ask my friend who has an Information account to bootleg me a copy of this story. And so he did.
Thomas Tull’s Origin Story: From Laundromats to Hollywood [00:01:30]
Sam: This guy is kind of a legend. He’s a stealthy billionaire. He starts off his career in laundromats — shout out to Cody Sanchez — then shifts to auto repair shops, then shifts to buying small accounting practices. He does basically a rollup and ends up with 500 worldwide locations for his accounting business, all under one banner.
Shaan: No private equity background? Just blue collar?
Sam: He had a stint in private equity — he learned a little bit about the PE business, either as an internship or something else. But I’m pretty sure he quit college or was moonlighting while in college doing the laundromat thing. Grows up with a single mom, doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s basically like, I need to fill a need. He starts with laundromats — not a great business, but it gets him going.
And the whole time he’s kind of a data nerd. Even with the laundromat business, he starts buying washing machines that can do surge pricing. So when there’s more demand, the cost goes up. He’s like, why wouldn’t it do that? The rush comes in at one period of time, that’s when I need to make money. He’s a little bit of a data nerd.
He ends up becoming famous because he takes that same data philosophy and applies it to a business that never had it: the movie business. He does what’s called Moneyball for movies.
What Moneyball for Movies Actually Means [00:04:00]
Sam: The Moneyball strategy was famous in baseball — finding undervalued assets and building a team using data as an edge rather than old-school scouts who are spitting sunflower seeds, looking at a prospect, and being like, “I like his ass. He’s got something. I always trust a guy with a big ass.” What are you talking about? Or, “He’s got a strong jaw, I think he’s got star potential.” Okay, he’ll be a leader in the clubhouse.
Moneyball was basically: forget the qualitative, let’s focus on the quantitative. So this guy does that for movies and creates Legendary Entertainment — the movie production and financing company that financed movies like the Batman series, so The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, 300, The Hangover, and more recently Dune. He builds this thing up and sells it for $3.5 billion to the richest man in China.
This guy’s fascinating. The whole journey — laundromats, auto repair shops, tax firms — and then he has a dinner with a movie exec who’s complaining about film financing. He asks how it works, and it was basically the old baseball scouting thing: we like this actor, we like this plot. He’s like, “Do you guys do any data analysis?” He realized they don’t have the Moneyball side. But they also don’t just have private equity either. He’s like, the movie business is the largest industry that doesn’t really have a private equity-focused firm. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll bring the capital — I’m not going to have the full production system, I’m not going to have the distribution rights, I’ll just bring the capital.
Shaan: Wow.
Sam: So he partners with Warner Brothers. He raises $500 million — he says this was the hardest thing he ever did. He goes in and cuts a deal: we’re going to co-finance 30 movies with you, but we’re going to build a data team that’s going to figure out which movies we should bet on and which ones we shouldn’t. And more importantly, how we promote them.
The Three Insights: Bigger Budgets, China, and Data Marketing [00:07:30]
Sam: Most of the articles I read about this guy are just handwavy: “and then he started Legendary Entertainment and sold it for $4 billion.” But what was he doing differently? Do you know?
Shaan: No, keep going.
Sam: There were two or three key insights. The first: bigger is actually better. There’s this romantic idea in the movie business about indie films — let’s go back to quality, just genuine scripts. He’s like, most of the movies that fail are these mid-market movies that cost a medium amount but don’t have a guaranteed slam-dunk reason people will watch them. He says they’re making the plot too complicated — it only appeals to an intellectual person. We need commercial appeal. It could still be elevated — he did Inception, he did Dark Knight, great movies — but Dark Knight is still Batman and Inception still has Leonardo DiCaprio.
So he leaned heavily into IP, mainstream actors, mainstream directors. By the way: Straight Out of Compton, Dune 1 and 2, Inception, The Hangover, Watchmen, Dark Knight. Great movies — still a hard business. I think they’ve only ever had two consecutive years of profitability in their 10-year run. The movie business is a hit business. When they hit, they hit really big. Other years they might lose $50 or $100 million, but when they hit they hit $500 million or a billion in net gain.
Shaan: One of his first movies was Beerfest. You’re telling me that wasn’t a hit?
Sam: They found Christopher Nolan pretty early. Turned out to be one of the best directors period, and he was kind of unproven at the time. So it’s not all easy.
Second thing he did: China. How do we make movies with international appeal, specifically in China? He’s like, China’s a big market. There’s a lot of demand and not a lot of supply of American films that can cross over. So we’re going to be international.
For that he needed a simple-minded plot — it could be well-done, but the plot needs to be simple. Good guy, bad guy. Something that transfers past the language barrier with simple appeal, like Batman. He partnered with China Film — a government-owned state company — and did a 50/50 JV. We’ll bring the movies, you give us distribution. They tried to make something for everybody with The Great Wall — Matt Damon movie set around the Great Wall being built to keep aliens out — and it flopped. China didn’t love it, America didn’t love it.
Shaan: Tried to make something for everybody, ended up being something for nobody.
Sam: Exactly. And the analytics guy is gonna die on this hill. He’s like, I don’t know man, the data showed Matt Damon was undervalued in China — we were under-indexed on Matt Damon. Like, the price for Matt Damon versus the cache Matt Damon has with that audience was a good trade. And people are like, the movie flopped, dude. He’s like, alright, but that part was right.
The Data Team and Movie Marketing as Performance Marketing [00:12:00]
Sam: The third insight is the data analytics — the Moneyball side. I didn’t fully realize this before, but in both video games and movies, if it says a movie had a $200 million budget, that’s what they spent making the film. But guess how much they’ll spend marketing it?
Shaan: I have no idea.
Sam: Another 100 to 150 percent more. If they spend $150 million on the movie, they’ll spend another $150 or $200 million on marketing. Each movie is like a meaningful-size company that lasts for three years. Same thing with Grand Theft Auto — they’ll spend $500 million marketing it.
Shaan: That’s insane.
Sam: So what Legendary realized is this: what other business spends that much on marketing? Every DTC brand. And what Thomas figured out — in the same way that guys like Moiz came in and built Native Deodorant — they said forget the Old Spice model. I don’t have enough money to do TV anyway. I have to do the Moneyball approach. Performance marketing where I can measure every dollar and attribute every single purchase to which ad I ran. That’s how you build a fast-growing DTC company on the back of Facebook.
Thomas did the same thing with movie marketing. They run Facebook ads, they run YouTube ads. Not necessarily to get you to buy a ticket on the spot, but to get you to be like, oh yeah, I heard that movie’s coming out — it looked good.
Here’s some of the stuff they do. They take trailers — the trailer is the ad creative, the thing that needs to get you to say, I want to see that movie. They’ll do 50 versions of a trailer. They’ll take a hundred people, put them in a movie theater, play the trailer, and they have a scanner on the seat in front of you that takes a facial biometric reading. They also have you wearing a heart rate monitor. They’re trying to see: do you react? What part do you react to? Does your heart rate quicken?
Now, I don’t know if this is just PR, because the guy talking about it was their head of analytics — they poached this guy. He built a sports analytics company in the Moneyball era, sold it, then got a call from Thomas: do you want to do Moneyball for movies? He’s like, I’m in. He became their head of analytics, and he says: we have a 50-person applied analytics team. That’s 49 more than every other movie producer. He’s like, nobody else even has this department.
Shaan: Do you think they think of the trailer first? Like, what’s a good movie that could be an awesome trailer?
Sam: I think 100% they do.
The Analytics Mindset: Swing Voters and A/B Testing Audiences [00:17:00]
Sam: The analytics guy had a great statement. He says: I take this population of people. On the left side of the bell curve, there are people who are never going to watch the movie no matter what we do. I don’t want to spend a dollar marketing to them. On the right side, there are people who are going to watch no matter what — the Dune fanatics with a Dune poster in their bedroom who read the books. I also don’t want to spend a dollar on them. Then there’s the people in the middle — the swing voters. They might watch it. I need to figure out who they are.
He starts slicing and dicing. This mom is going to watch because she loves that actor. This guy is going to watch because he loves a badass action scene. So we need two different trailers running as social ads at each of those audiences. And then we need a data set that tells us who actually goes to the movies — basically a map between the email addresses we’re advertising to and the email addresses used to buy tickets. We need to create these clusters and figure out what’s actually converting.
Shaan: Movie folks weren’t doing this?
Sam: I guess not — not in any serious way. But the track record is there. They built a really big thing in a really short time coming in as complete outsiders.
The Idaho Meetup: Defense Tech and the Flywheel [00:19:30]
Sam: So why was he showing up to Idaho with armored vehicles? He sold Legendary to the richest man in China. He still owns something like 10 or 20%, but you can’t really own equity in a big Chinese company as an American, so they gave him phantom stock — a profit share. And now he took that money and is investing heavily in defense tech. He invested in Anduril, Shield AI, a bunch of defense tech companies. That meeting in Idaho was basically a convening of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs building defense tech, people from Washington who lobby and know the senators and congressmen, and the generals and defense contractors.
The flywheel is fascinating: you start a defense company, then you lobby for increased defense spending, which goes to your companies. Whining and dining Washington while funding the companies that will win the contracts — it’s a very lucrative model. I’m not saying he’s doing it in a malicious way. I’m just saying it’s interesting how that can work.
You see it with guys like Joe Lonsdale — he started Palantir, started a company called 8VC, he’s building underwater drone companies. He spends a lot of time building relationships with public officials. He’ll go on CNBC and say we’ve got to stop TikTok. I don’t think he’s doing it just for the dollar. I think he genuinely believes the app shouldn’t be brainwashing the American population while the data gets siphoned off to the CCP. But it also happens to be a very strong flywheel.
Shaan: And Thomas Tull looks like a movie villain. If you Google him —
Sam: He has a cameo in Batman. In that scene where Bane blows up the football stadium, he’s in the owner’s box — because he owns a piece of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The team playing in the movie is the Steelers. He gives himself a little cameo. He’s huge. Former college football player. This guy’s impressive.
What Drives Him: A Practical, Outsider Instinct [00:23:00]
Sam: He’s not in LA. He built a Hollywood company without living in LA. He had a great line: “I just want to make great movies that people love. I don’t want to make sure I have a dinner table at Spago tonight. I don’t want the Hollywood status stuff.” So he does his thing from far away.
At one point he bought 150 acres of farmland and was like, I’m going to live off this land. He wanted to use it to learn advanced farming robotics companies — try those technologies on the land, see if companies are rebuilding the future of food. He wanted to live in a self-sustainable way.
He also invested in the gene-tech editing company — I think it’s called Colossal — the one trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And I loved how he talked about it, because he was very real. He basically said: look, I think the woolly mammoth thing makes for great PR. He was like, I don’t give a damn about bringing back the woolly mammoth. I’m not doing this as some weird billionaire fetish thing. What I like is — I met these guys and they’re really smart scientists. I thought, I need to be around them. They’re going to do really interesting things. So I’ll back them.
And he goes: I like their ethics. These guys are in the top 0.1% of intelligence, but people like that exist in China and all around the world. Not all of them have the same ethical code. These guys are going to use this for good. They’re not going to just be cloning random things or editing in a reckless way. So I thought it was good — these guys needed the backing because I mess with their moral code.
Sam: I always find it almost romantic — very intoxicating — when I read about people who don’t have a ton of formal education but dominate a certain area. He’s kind of a blue-collar guy who kicked ass at finance and deal-making without the traditional New York City big-bank background. He didn’t buy auto repair shops because he’s like, “Oh, I can do a PE rollup and get leverage.” He was just like: I live in Pittsburgh, a lot of people around here aren’t buying new cars. If your car breaks, you can’t really buy a new one. So auto shops were a good bet — people are going to try to get another year out of their beater.
And that’s also how he discovered defense tech. He was making movies and he’s like, I want the fight scenes to be realistic. So he brings in military advisers. He’s talking to them and realizing: they really don’t have as much cutting-edge tech as I thought. The Navy, the Marines — they kind of wish they could do XYZ but couldn’t. And that’s when he started funding defense tech. Sounds like there’s actually just a need for this.
Shaan: Obviously you don’t know how much of this is reverse PR, where you go back and make up a wholesome-sounding story. But I bought it, and I’m usually pretty skeptical about that stuff.
Sam: I bought it too. And this is really easy to read about but hard to actually do: you have the courage and confidence to believe you are right about something even though you’re a total outsider, and to go that big. How many people do you think told him, “You have no idea about this industry — we’ve done it this way for a hundred years, that’s not how it’s done”? And just being like: look, it makes sense that it’s this and this and this. Warren Buffett has that. Anyone who’s truly great typically has that — they believe in their own logic and their own reasoning even though most everyone else says that’s insane.
Shaan: Conviction is attractive.
Moneyball for X: Where Else Does This Apply? [00:30:00]
Sam: One thing they talked about with the Moneyball thing: in sports, all the data is public. Everyone’s stats are there, everything’s filmed on TV. But what are you going to Moneyball for movies? It’s not the same thing.
What they did — the analytics guy put it well. He goes: on the left side of the bell curve are people who will never watch the movie. On the right side, people who’ll watch no matter what. I don’t want to spend a dollar on either group. The people in the middle are our swing voters. I start slicing that audience — this mom is going to watch because she loves that actor, this guy because he loves a badass action scene. Two different trailers, two different social ad buys. And then we create a data set that maps email addresses we’re advertising to against email addresses used to buy tickets.
Shaan: Movie folks weren’t doing this?
Sam: Apparently not in a serious way. But it clearly worked — they built a massive company as complete outsiders.
Sam: It’s interesting to think about where else Moneyball for X could be implemented. Obama raised something like a billion and a half dollars and spent most of that on marketing. What the politicians do in basically a year and a half in terms of deploying marketing money — they’re savage about it. The presidential election is a marketing contest between two agencies. Each picks their front man, runs a marketing blitz, spends $500 million to a billion dollars. The last two presidents got elected using Moneyball for politics.
It helped the Red Sox win the World Series. It built tons of DTC brands. It’s in finance with the quants — Renaissance and the quant hedge funds. Pretty interesting to see how you can use Moneyball in any industry that’s not data-first. If you ask someone how they make decisions and the answer is some version of gut, eyeball, or taste — there’s probably a Moneyball variant available.
Shaan: I know a guy doing it in HVAC. He has an HVAC business doing about $150 million a year, and he tells me constantly about the data stuff they’re doing. Nobody else in the HVAC industry is doing this. It’s as simple as, what can we send and how many emails can we send to get more Google reviews — but they’re running it like a tech company with a small data analytics team.
UFC 300 and the Max Holloway Moment [00:36:00]
Shaan: Sam, I gotta ask you — did you watch UFC 300 on Saturday? The full five hours?
Sam: The whole thing. It was amazing. Set there the whole time.
Shaan: Did you make like a seven-layer nacho dip and just sit there for seven hours?
Sam: I watched the entire thing. I think it started at 6 o’clock and ended at 1 a.m. my time. I want to talk about it because a) we’re both UFC fans and it was amazing, and b) there’s actually a great business and marketing lesson in it. But first, can we just explain what Max Holloway did? Because I think that moment alone — even if you don’t watch fights — you need to know this happened.
Sam: UFC has been around since the ’90s. They’ve done thousands of events, but the major events they number — UFC 1, 2, 3. This past weekend was UFC 300. Typically, a card has five main fights and ten prelim fights with up-and-coming fighters. This time they had 15 fights and all of them were famous, great fighters. Five hours of epic fight cards.
One of the fights was for a made-up title called the BMF — the Bad Mother Effer belt. Two guys: Max Holloway and Justin Gaethje. Justin is a big favorite. Max has kind of looked like he’s on the back end of his prime, maybe on the decline a little bit.
Two things happen. One: Max starts to win. Remarkable on its own. But nothing compared to what happened at the end. The way a UFC fight works — five rounds, each round gets scored. If you’re winning four rounds to one, your corner tells you, “Hey, you’re way ahead — just play it safe. The only way this other guy wins is if he knocks you out, so don’t let him.” Nine times out of ten, a fighter does that.
But Max understands that fighting is entertainment. He wins all five rounds — not even close. At the end of the fifth round he’s basically broken this guy’s nose, got him battered and bruised. The only thing his opponent can do is knock him out. And Max Holloway decides — in the last 10 seconds, where most guys just circle around and raise their hands to tell the judges they won — he points to the middle of the ring, points down, and basically says: stand right here, neither one of us backs down, let’s just swing as hard as we can and try to knock each other out for 10 seconds.
Shaan: This sounds very savage.
Sam: It IS incredibly courageous, brave, entertaining, reckless, and stupid all at the same time rolled into one. They both start swinging absolute haymakers. And then in the last second of the fight — he knocks the other guy out cold.
I can’t even do it justice. It was probably the best UFC moment I’ve ever seen. Top three for sure. Probably number one. And I would say it was one of the best moments in sports I’ve ever seen.
Shaan: I felt so much adrenaline watching this. It was the middle of the night, my baby was sleeping, and I yelled as loud as I could. I was in awe.
Sam: It would be like — in basketball — if LeBron James was about to win the NBA Finals, and normally you just hold the ball and let the clock run out, but instead he handed the ball to his opponent, said “no, come here — you have the ball. Come to the middle of the court. Everybody get off. One-on-one right now, for the championship, for the glory.” And then also risked getting knocked out in the process.
Shaan: Mark Zuckerberg was sitting ringside, and every fighter would run up to him and start pointing at him and talking to him. It was awesome.
Sam: Don’t you think Zuck should lean into this more? This is the best PR he’s ever had — his own heel turn into becoming a fighter, being at the UFC ringside, all the fighters loving it.
Shaan: He looked cool. He had like a little afro and a white T-shirt — baggy white. He looked like a cool guy. His wife looked cool too. It’s called mob chic, what she was wearing. All black.
Sam: You know what he should do? Create the Zuck 500 — give $500,000 to whoever had the most badass performance. Not about winning — whoever showed the most heart, the underdog who put it all on the line. Because these guys don’t get paid that much and Zuck has all of the money. If he just did that for every pay-per-view, it would be its own storyline.
Shaan: Real Gladiator stuff you couldn’t buy.
Sam: The singer Sia does this for Survivor, by the way. The winner gets a million dollars, Sia is a super fan, and she called into the reunion and was like, “Hey, I just love that guy — he didn’t come close to winning but I want to give him $50,000.” The Sia bonus. Pretty genius.
Dana White’s Lesson and the Five Levels of Marketing [00:45:00]
Sam: So at the press conference after UFC 300, Dana White is there — very unfiltered as always. Somebody asks him, “On a night like this, you try to build the card, but after that it’s out of your hands. How happy are you with how it turned out?”
And Dana goes: “People ask me what I do for a living. I don’t organize fights. I sell holy-shit moments. Tonight I sold millions of holy-shit moments to millions of people.”
I thought that was a great little lesson. What are you really selling in your business?
Is Dana White selling a mixed martial arts contest? An event? He says: I’m selling holy-shit moments.
Marketers have known this for a long time. There are levels to marketing, and I want to give you my five levels based on the Dana White principle.
Sam: Level one: you sell a product. This is every shitty startup website you visit. It just says, “We are a healthcare CRM using AI.” They’re describing a product. It’s not compelling because I don’t give a damn about your product — I give a damn about myself. “We’re a blockchain-based web3 arcade sidescroller.” What? Most product websites are just selling a product. This is what failing companies do.
Level two: you sell a solution. This is effective but competitive. Head & Shoulders — “you’re having dandruff on your shoulder, use Head & Shoulders, it gets rid of the dandruff.” You’re selling a solution to a pain point. If 50% of companies just sell a product, another 45% are selling the solution to a pain point.
Now we get into the championship rounds.
Level three: you sell a lifestyle. This is Lululemon, this is Slack. Stuart Butterfield — CEO of Slack — wrote a post called “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here.” Spoiler: he says imagine you’re a saddle company. You could describe the product, or you could say your butt won’t be sore on our saddle, or you could sell the lifestyle — the joy of horseback riding. Get people to want to be on horseback, feel free, wind in their hair. Make that lifestyle aspirational. Then when they’re like, “I’ve got to do that” — super motivated — they say, “Well, what do I need?” And you say, “Well, you need a saddle, and ours are the best.” This is how Lululemon got popular. They didn’t just say, “We have the best yoga pants.” They got people into the idea of doing yoga. Once you’re into doing yoga, you want to invest in better gear.
Level four — this is the Dana White level: you sell a feeling. A consultant once told me something that stuck. He goes: “You make content. They give out a feeling.” He said, as a content creator, you are a merchant of feelings. If you give someone a feeling more consistently and more powerfully than anybody else, that’s what makes you box office.
Disney doesn’t say, “Come to our theme park, we have the fastest rides.” They tell you about the magical family experience — a lifetime memory, a magical feeling. Every Pixar movie is the same thing. Louis Vuitton gives you a feeling of status. Nike gives you the feeling of greatness. They don’t advertise rubber shoes — they show someone striving for greatness.
Shaan: Dana White said something amazing on this. He goes: “Think about this. You’re at the Super Bowl. It’s the final down, the greatest moment in NFL history. And a fight breaks out a few rows down. What are you gonna do?” You’re gonna stop watching football and pay attention to the fight. That’s the business I’m in. That’s why I knew this was going to be the greatest sport ever.
Sam: Exactly. The greatest brands live here. Disney, Louis Vuitton, Nike, UFC.
And then level five — the highest one: you sell an identity. This is what religions do. This is what political parties do. They give you a tribe, a label, a purpose, a sense of belonging. It’s almost like buying a Subway franchise — here, wear this uniform, put up this logo, here’s the packaging, here’s a portrait of bread for your wall. You now have an identity. We gave you a brand because you didn’t have one on your own. We gave you a purpose. Identity in a box.
Shaan: This was a really good monologue. You tied in some of my favorite stuff. Congratulations.
Sam: Were you watching UFC and just taking notes on marketing?
Shaan: No — I heard Dana say that in the press conference and thought, that’s exactly why I watch. I can’t get that holy-shit feeling from anything else.
Sam: Once you know the stories of the fighters, what’s in it for each guy — it’s hard to compare to any other sport. Maybe boxing is the other one, but boxing doesn’t come close. I wore a heart rate monitor one time to see what would happen. Going into the fight I was so emotionally invested, my heart rate went up 20 beats per minute before the fight even started. I get so into this that I find myself tired the next day.
Shaan: And also — go watch the old cigarette ads. They’re not selling the product. Not selling a solution. It’s all about a feeling and an identity. They gave you a feeling of greater self-importance, a cool self-image. All the marketing around cigarettes was a cool self-image. The most interesting man in the world — sitting in a bar surrounded by women, not paying them any attention, looking straight at the camera. He’s a man’s man. He’s done this, done that. And when he drinks beer, he drinks Dos Equis. That’s the cool self-image being sold.
Sam: And in our world — the tech world, the business world — most people are absolute white belts at real marketing. Even the best-in-class is just “sell a solution to a pain point, tell the benefit not the feature.” That’s level two and they stopped there.
If you’re listening and you don’t know anything about UFC — go to YouTube and type in “UFC Rose.” One of the best moments from UFC is a young woman named Rose Namajunas. She’s about to fight and she’s clearly scared. You see her mouthing to herself, “I’m the best, I’m the best, I’m the best.” The person across the ring from her looks like the Terminator. And she’s walking into the lion’s den repeating this to herself — otherwise she doesn’t stand a chance. She knocks her out. First round. And it was another great sporting moment.
Shaan: There were two Chinese women fighting — the first time that’s ever happened for the championship. One of the ladies chokes out the other woman who goes unconscious right when the bell rings, so they’re able to keep fighting. She doesn’t really wake up until she gets punched again in the second round. Epic. And then in the last fight, Alex Pereira gets kicked in the groin — the ref goes to stop it, he waves him off — and then 10 seconds later knocks out the other guy. Just full of badass moments. It was an epic event.
Sam: And to tie this back — what are we really selling on this podcast? Is it ideas? Is it business ideas? That’s kind of lame. If you’re really like, “I’m going to find a business idea from these random guys” — that’s honestly a bad plan.
I tweeted this out: what’s something you remember, and what’s the reason you actually listen regularly? The number one word that kept coming up was: inspired. “Not in a cheesy way, but if I’m driving and listening I sometimes pull over because I have to write something down. You said one phrase that’s going to be an unlock for me. I heard about this idea — I’m not going to do that idea but I’m inspired by it. You told the story of some guy who crushed it in some business under the radar and all of a sudden I feel like success is abundant. I’m inspired to go make my thing happen.”
We sell inspiration. That’s the first thing we actually sell. The secondary thing — have you ever seen that meme of the kid eating cereal next to his TV box? Like three friends on the TV box and he’s cozied up next to it? It’s companionship. People have posted: “This is me when I listen to podcasts.” It feels like hanging out with friends except they’re not there.
What I learned is that even more than the inspiration — for the ones that are super sticky — it’s companionship. “My real-life friends aren’t as nerdy about business as I am, or I live in the middle of nowhere Iowa, and I don’t know six other people I can hang out with twice a week and just nerd out about business with. You guys are basically my substitute for what I don’t have in my day-to-day life.”
Shaan: A-plus segment. Good job.
Sam’s List: A Yelp for Accountants [00:57:30]
Sam: Let me tell you about something I launched a couple weeks ago. I think there’s only a 30% chance of it working, but I can reveal some of the numbers. I launched this thing called Sam’s List. Samslist.co. Did you see when I shared that online?
Shaan: Yeah, I did.
Sam: Background: I was at the airport in January and I’d just gotten an email from my accountant that pissed me off — they didn’t catch an error I thought they should have caught. So I tweeted out: “Who has an accountant that they love?” I got about 300 responses. And I noticed that tons of people were bookmarking that tweet, as if they’re going to come back and hire an accountant. I thought, I could make something out of this.
I hired a developer who works on Bubble — the app builder — and we built a website. Basically I wanted to create a Yelp for accountants. A place where you can identify a good accountant based on referrals from your network. When you hire an accountant you don’t really have a place to see reviews — you mostly hear about them through word of mouth. And if you hire the wrong one, it’s basically a year you have to stay with them before you find out they kind of stink.
So I created Sam’s List. I got the 300 replies to that tweet, called most of them — got them on the phone or via email — and asked them: how much do you charge, who’s your perfect client, who’s NOT your perfect client, what are your specialties? As if I was going to hire them. Put them all on the website.
Shaan: You had told me one time when you went to hire an accountant, you created like your own data room and sent it to people — “who can handle this best?”
Sam: Kind of similar, yeah. It took a few weeks to get going, and then I shared it.
Here was my math: if I can get 500,000 people a month to the website, 3% of them would contact an accountant, I could charge accountants $100 per lead, and that would be something like $1.5 million a month in revenue. I figured it would take years to get there, but if I could get there, that’s interesting.
First week after sharing it — 13,000 visits. We made a really cool quiz: how much revenue do you have, is this for business or personal, whatever — and we’d recommend three or four accountants that fit your needs. 6,000 people answered the quiz.
Very few people scheduled appointments. Very few even submitted their information to the accountants.
Shaan: How few is very few?
Sam: Out of 6,000 quiz completions in one week, maybe 100 or 200 people submitted their info to an accountant. And that’s not even the main issue. The main issue is: accountants are not clamoring for these leads.
My big learning: there is a massive shortage of accountants. There’s not a shortage of people looking for accountants — there’s a shortage of people becoming accountants. Not only that, the people who ARE accountants don’t really want to grow their businesses to be very large. I thought they’d be dying to get more customers. They’re really not. That shocked me.
I basically copied the model of Smartasset.com — they do what I’m doing but for certified financial planners and advisors. You take a quiz, they recommend a few people. If you click around their site, they actually show you how much advisors pay per lead. If a person has $1 million to $5 million in assets, the advisor is paying $700 per lead. Over $5 million it’s even higher. I thought I could replicate it. Turns out CPAs aren’t like dying for business — they’re actually overwhelmed with business.
Shaan: I think you’re wrong. I think there’s a need for this and it will do well. Also — I think you’re playing us. Is this reverse psychology? Like if only the community would rally —
Sam: It’s not reverse psychology. I’ll explain why this is going to be hard. It’s the exact opposite of what I expected. And that’s why I’m not sure this is actually going to make a lot of money.
Shaan: I think you’re just being impatient. And it’s going to fail because you have a much better business you’re busy with — Hampton — and you should focus on that. THAT’s why this is going to fail. Otherwise it’s a good idea.
Sam: Let me point out a couple of the product details I like, and some things you should do differently. Can we screen share?
I love that when you go to the site, instead of an email popup it says something like “No email, no BS.” I think you should call that out even more — like, “We want to help you, we don’t need your email address.” Then a button that just says “Thank God” and that takes them down the funnel.
I also love the transparency section where you wrote: “I have this many Twitter followers, I asked if they had a CPA they love, I called all of them, asked how much they charge, asked who their perfect client is” — why would I do this? Because I’m a nerd and I needed an accountant. I thought, well how about I make this useful for others. I love how you put that. I also love that you attached every accountant’s Twitter profile to their name. For your market that’s a good touch.
You should put the prices on the front — that’s more value add to the person coming in. And you mentioned asking who their sweet-spot customer is. What I can’t tell from the site — you know how on Cars and Bids, Doug DeMuro has a speech bubble where he says, “Here’s what I think”? I think you need to lean into that. I don’t trust reviews. I trust YOU. So can you not just call these accountants, but also call like 10 of their clients and get one speech bubble that’s Sam saying: “Talked to them, talked to their clients. Here’s roughly what they charge. People are screaming endorsements or saying yeah it’s pretty good. I think they’re solid and they specifically help this type of customer.” That would make it better.
Sam: That’s a good idea. The reason I haven’t done it yet is I’d have to hire someone to help call those people, and I was like — I need to figure out if this thing even makes money first before I justify all that work.
Shaan: The dreams, baby. If you build it they will come.
Sam: Did you see the design? I just ripped it off — made it look like old Microsoft. And the image is basically Clippy. Do you remember Clippy from Microsoft Word?
Shaan: Love it. Although the calculator face only has four digits and one of them is a Q, so the AI clearly knows something we don’t.
Sam: Anyway, I figured I’d fill people in. I think in order to make this actually work, what you really do is get someone’s information and then for lead gen you usually have a small number of very large companies paying you a large sum per month for a certain amount of leads — versus one-off small accountants. That’s probably what I’d need to shift to. Still trying to figure it out, but we’ll see.
Shaan: You got anything else?
Sam: I think we’re done. Two bangers. That’s what I’m telling my wife when I go downstairs.
Shaan: How’s the pod?
Sam: Double banger.
Shaan: Double banger. Alright, that’s the pod.