Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing because everyone else thinks the water is too deep and it’s too scary over there the rewards are like disproportionate even to the effort in the work that goes on [Music] all right what’s up what up dude how are you doing um who did you have as a guest on the last episode when i i was doing my own episode and then you tweeted out you wanted to guess who came on two different people the first was our own ben and so ben and i did an episode where we talked about like uh thing people in history and if there’s any commonalities between a bunch of them and then noah kagan my friend noah from appsumo i asked him if he would come on and he said yeah so i just recorded two that day cool did they turn out kid or you know i mean we’ll see noah noah was good uh ben and i was good as well i just hope that i don’t know if that top the topic is gonna be a winner so we’ll see noah is amazing do you know about appsumo uh i know like loosely about appsumo so here’s what they tell you what i know you tell me what i don’t know so what i know is that appsumo is basically it’s a website where you can go to get like kind of software deals i would say um they kind of like they go find cool software they make a deal they say hey we’ll get you in front of like whatever 50 million people but you got to offer a deal to our audience like sort of groupon style or woot style and apparently he’s doing extremely well he’s been doing it for a long ass time 10 plus years i think it does over 100 million in revenue so that’s what i know about it almost all right so appsumo started as basically noah he emailed the founder of imager uh and basically said hey you guys charge ten dollars a month if i give you a bunch of new customers at six dollars a month can i get a little cut of the pie right and that’s how we started he made 10 grand doing that by emailing a bunch of friends eventually it kind of still is this way but they’re gonna they’re becoming more of a marketplace and a website but for like the last 10 years it’s basically an email list and i think there’s only 300 000 people on that email list and they email out a few deals a week where they find uh companies that say hey give us a discount and give us a cut of the revenue right and it was doing okay for years it just some years it didn’t do better than the year before sometimes it did a lot better and i think it only did okay for a few years now after close to 10 years he their goal this year was 100 million in revenue they’re going to miss it by a little bit but he said they’re going to get north of 80 million in revenue now he didn’t say it on the podcast if i just if you just google it it appears of that 80 million in revenue they pay out 30 to their partners and they get around 60 or 70 of the of the actual revenue and he owns most of the company has never taken any outside money and they have like 150 employees at this point wow uh i didn’t realize some of those things and uh okay so 300 000 people on the list so do you know if they send out an email about some product uh have they ever done it for the hustle by the way did they ever like did you promote the hustle in there somehow or no because it’s already a free email i i know i don’t well no i don’t think we’ve done it in a traditional way it’s maybe true i think we’ve done trends but we’ve not done it in a major way so you can um sometimes they’ll only send it to part of the list and i think that we’ve done like a part list but uh some of their partners they’ll make over a million dollars in the in one day well i guess my question is how many people take them up on their offer so how many do they need for this this business to kind of work so is it because i think it seems like maybe bigger than it is i wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like yeah a thousand people click the thing and a thousand people is enough for this business to work when a thousand people take the offer is it a thousand or more like ten thousand uh i would think that it’s in the single digit thousands if i had to guess that’s how many buy because the products are like a year or something like that so you don’t actually need that many people to buy in order to make 500 000 to a million of dollars and you’re saying they’re sending emails constantly and now they have a website that people are doing stuff now here’s where it gets interesting i asked him how much could you sell this business for right now he was like the huge range is 300 million to a billion i think that’s what he said right pretty crazy right it’s it’s it it’s like noah good job good job noah and like a lot of things like the hustle included like people are like and i say it as well well it’s just an email list it’s really simple and yeah that’s true it is just an email but there’s definitely a machine behind it and appsumo is like inherently quite simple um they just holler at companies they say give us a discount and give us a cut of the pie and then they just email that out to people and it’s so simple and it just creates so much value there’s a ryan hoover did this a while back he created a list of big companies that started off as quote unquote just email list so he created product time product started off as an email list uh production got acquired by angellist which is like a three billion-ish dollar company or more angelus started as just an email list just a list of angels that he was doing craigslist started off as an email list and so there was a whole bunch of products that started off as just an email list some became more than that some stayed an email list yeah groupon started out groupon is basically was an email list for a long time right and so you know don’t underestimate do not underestimate email uh that’s not tattooed on sam’s back uh do not underestimate email let’s talk about a couple things i have a i have another business id i have another business i want to highlight that’s a uh one of these like that’s so simple are you joking that’s the business but first before we do that one we gotta talk about this squid games thing that happened the beast games by mr beast um did you watch it when it happened or have you watched it after the fact i heard basically casey neistat who i follow on twitter was talking about saying mr beast uh what he’s doing with the squid games thing is one of the most epic things i’ve ever seen on youtube and casey neistat is one of the pioneers of youtube and him saying that meant a lot yeah exactly that’s you know denzel saying wow the great acting in this movie so all right so um for those who didn’t see it all right so squid games was this ultra popular i think it is the most popular show ever on netflix um those watch show and it’s this kind of like crazy uh korean death game show type of idea where you know a bunch of people enter this game and they’re trying to win the big prize and then they get killed they’re losing is like you die basically that’s like the short version of it i actually didn’t watch squid game so maybe i got something wrong there but i did watch the mr beast version of it so what did mr beast do he basically decided i’m gonna recreate squid games but i’m not obviously people aren’t gonna die but he did it even better so he invited 456 people to this arena that was built for this and the prize was the number one the winner of the games was gonna win 456 thousand dollars runner-up 10k and everybody who who went got two thousand dollars each and in total the production plus the prize money so i think he did about a billion and a half dollars of prizes and two million to build and produce it three and a half million dollars is what he spent on this content on this 25 minute video so let’s talk about what happened so first uh players showed up they’re wearing the same outfits as in squid games it’s like kind of green windbreaker jumpsuit type thing and they all have a number so player one player 2 player 3 all the way up to player 456 and inside their shirt they have this like pack and the pack is like exploding paint so if you let’s say one of the games is called red light green light the old like game we used to play as a kid where if you say green light you start moving red light means you got to stop if you keep going after they say red light you’re out and so they here’s a green light then you see a red light and if somebody flinched after that their little pack inside their shirt would explode and red paint would come out as if they got shot like you know like the real squid games and then they would be out and then hey you got to go to the next you didn’t make it to the next game and so in the end uh you know player whatever player 27 ended up winning 456 thousand dollars so here’s i think this is amazing and this ties into some stuff we’ve been talking about so just some numbers the video got about 130 million views in seven days which is crazy i think i i believe ben you can fact check me on this i believe 130 million views is more than what the actual squid games got on netflix now netflix is a paid service and whatever but like and people watched uh like multiple episodes yeah 12 hours of footage it’s yes it’s still amazing the fact that it’s comparable the fact that somebody just watched the show was like oh yeah we’ll do like a backyard version of that and got 130 million people to watch is insane so uh he spent three and a half million on it just to kind of put this in perspective um that’s basically half the cost of a 30 second super bowl commercial wow really did you have a sponsor it was fully paid i believe fully paid for by brawl stars the the big the super popular mobile game so if you look in the arena where it was where it was hosted it’s a giant brawl stars arena they have a huge logo that was in every shot and so for brawl stars this such a smart move they basically paid half the cost of a super bowl ad got more viewership than a super blog because you get 130 million people the video is like 20 minutes long 27 minutes long versus a 30 second clip and um this is an epic thing that’s going to get shared and then they could take this content repurpose it for ads or anything else they wanted to do after the fact if if they wanted to so really smart you know for brawl stars three million dollars is probably their daily uh what is a one day of ad spend on facebook or something stars is owned by supercell and supercell’s like the the biggest game um yeah and so if i i don’t know if this is how it would have worked if i’m mr beast i think he could have so he would have gotten supercell to pay for the whole thing so three and a half million dollars i bet he also would have gotten another like five hundred thousand dollars just like there’s a vague on top of yeah just like just for that and then they would have probably i would have said to them also i’m gonna keep youtube ads on this right and mr b i get all of it and so if mr beast is getting uh 130 million views in the first seven days and if you do maybe four dollars per cpm that’s around half a million dollars that he got in the first week plus i believe his deal is going to be a lot better than 4 cpm uh because he’s the number he’s like you know one of the faces of youtube these guys have custom negotiated deals that i would bet a lot of money is better than the standard kind of four to five dollars what do you think it is i bet he’s getting closer to 10 cpm so if it’s 10 that’s 1.3 million yeah and just in a week in a week plus according to our notes it looks like he got 10 000 new subscribers sorry i’m sorry oh my god 10 million new subscribers in the first week and a normal week is 400 000 subscribers so he is 20xed his subscriber growth so so what does this do he’s continues to be the content leader he gets 10 million new subscribers and those people are gonna get notified for his next video he makes a million dollars on ads he gets the whole thing paid for by a sponsor and this is a great example of something we’ve talked about before we talked about this with elon when elon does epic stuff like i’m gonna go to mars we talked about it with i forgot the guy’s name mark lazary or whoever it was that’s building that epic train train system uh in america uh i i ranted about disney uh disneyland last week because again when you shoot for these epic projects things that get people inspired and excited it’s it seems like it’s harder to pull off but in many ways it’s easier to pull off because you’ll get talent to pour in because they want to be a part of something bold you’ll get sponsors to pour in because they want to bet on this this epic thing that’s going to happen they know that it’s going to get a lot of visibility and so and you get your own motivation to get out of bed every day because you’re working on something that’s so so grand that you know you’re more motivated everybody does their best work and people tune in to watch which is like so ben just looked it up 140 million 142 million people watched squid games on netflix 132 million watched uh beast games on youtube so about the same one to one so you get disproportionate prizes when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing because everyone else thinks the water is too deep and it’s too scary over there the rewards are like disproportionate even to the effort and the work that goes in i had a friend it could have been noah in fact you know noah who we talked about he was the number 20 or something employee at facebook and he got fired nine months into his uh employ working there and so he didn’t get any of his equity but i have a friend who spoke to mark zuckerberg and he said to mark you know why don’t you just sell the company for a billion or why are you raising all this money like things are growing he’s like look it’s good i only have 24 hours in a day and i’m only going to work the same amount of time in the day whether it’s big or small so i might as well make it as big as i possibly can because that’s what interests me and it’s just as hard it’s equally hard to go big as it is somewhat like mild success and that’s a perfect example of what mr beast has done is it’s actually of equal work you know same amount of time in the day but when you see someone building someone something so epic it’s exciting so many people who don’t give a [ ] about mr beast of which i am one of them i know about this and i cared about it small ambition and large ambition take the same amount of effort if you want to win if you want them to work and uh and that’s exactly right and so i think this was brilliant i think this is another example of mr beast being one step ahead of the curve you’re gonna see a lot more people try to clone this so the next thing that comes out you’re gonna see four youtubers who are the wannabe mr beast try to jump on it and recreate this and by the way this wasn’t the first thing he did like this like obviously he’s been doing stunts but he even did like a i’m gonna recreate fortnite they like went to an island it was 100 people playing paintball and it was like a game of fortnight and he made a video on that and i think it did well but it wasn’t this it wasn’t this level but it’s those reps that you you know you put in that give you the a confidence and b shots on goal until you get something to work like this and i also was watching a clip of mr beast yesterday just coincidentally and somebody said are you you know you’ve talked about you want to be a billionaire you want to be the you know the quote unquote the first billionaire creator although there have been other creators that are worth a billion dollars so you want to be a billionaire and they’re like are you there are you there already he goes no no no i’m not there yet and he goes um he goes i’m probably the cash wise i’m probably the poorest person in this room and they’re like no no way he goes yeah because whatever i have is like paper it’s not like it’s not liquid and any cash i get i just reinvest the next and reinvest my videos he goes if we make three million dollars this month i’ll put three million dollars into the next video we have razor thin margins um he goes i just reinvest the whole thing into content i think on average he said he he said he was spending something like two or three million dollars a month on his content i would have bet which is wild i would have guessed that he uh made around two and a half three million dollars a month in revenue i would have guessed around 30 million in revenue off his operation and so that makes total sense in fact we talked to a couple people i believe he has mr peace has around 30 to 40 full-time people working for him and i actually recently read about like what i was like what is it like to work with him and a lot of people complained they said um they said working with him is horrible he’s horrible to work with and i was like well you know what’s going on why and they go he’s a perfectionist i was like oh okay so it’s actually not that bad they would say why isn’t this good enough why is this so bad and he would analyze every single frame and frankly that made me even love him but there’s something interesting about this which is i actually think being him is exhausting because you have to go up every single time and so let me give you an example of two youtubers that are incredibly interesting to me graham stefan and meet kevin do you know who those guys are i know graham stefan i don’t know me kevin all right meet kevin i think is even more famous and he has 2.5 or 3 million subscribers he recently did a video and it was called here’s my entire 50 million dollar portfolio at age 29. so i and i noticed that he had done one of these i’m clicking okay okay double click full screen headphones on and i noticed that he did another one of these like nine months ago or 13 months ago something like around a year ago and his net worth then was only 25 and i was like what is going on this guy is nuts and so he’s basically this guy meet kevin i don’t know his full name he um makes like three to four videos a day and he is talking about like which stocks he’s buying uh which um types of houses he’s buying for investment properties and he shows his entire portfolio and at the end he goes now here’s proof and he logs in to all of his accounts and you can see all of that screen share yes which is amazing for many reasons one he’s only 29 and he’s a youtuber with 50 million dollars how is he how did he get that money so he’s just off of his youtube or he has some other business that he started with at age 19 i believe he started as just a real estate agent so just a normal guy okay and he made a little bit of money like a hundred grand a year took that hundred grand a year and bought some properties and then started a youtube channel in 2010 or 2011 and he just started documenting about his real estate investing slowly that started making additional income using that income he bought even more properties eventually he had like a course and things like that where he was making like one or two million dollars a year so a significant amount of sum or a significant sum then he took that money and he started investing it and started talking about what he was investing and you could see this entire growth over the last five years of his portfolio and how it’s grown of course it helps that a he’s got now a significant stream of like 4 million a year i would imagine and we’re having the best bull market of all time and so it kind of works but that’s how he’s done it and interestingly this guy kevin uh when gavin newsom was being recalled kevin ran for office and there’s this republican name larry elder who got second behind gavin newsom kevin was third with something like hundreds of thousands of votes and so it’s this kid’s amazing and so that’s surprising i feel like a youtuber who’s got a big following should crush any politician he doesn’t have that big of following he only has 2.5 or 3 million it’s not significant and it has to be a california above 18 voter so it’s not like it’s not significant but my point being with a lot of these youtubers is this video was nutty and graham stefan did the exact same thing he goes here’s my prediction mr beast or a mr beast type person will run for president and will surprise people with the type of following they get because oh absolutely whether you want to be president or not you could you know i think the original trump playbook was i’m gonna just throw my hat in the ring i’m gonna get tons of attention and press i’m gonna build my brand off the the massive amount of attention that goes into elections and i’ll be the the kind of curveball story that everybody wants to cover everybody’s got an opinion on like kanye kanye did it or whatever he threw his name in you’re gonna see the wild wild west of people trying to put their name in the hat for running for office or running for these kind of like positions that will sound you know how could a how could a 21 year old youtuber be doing this and they’re going to get a little momentum and then that’s going to create a press cycle that’s going to create more momentum i don’t think they’ll actually win i don’t think they even want to win but it would just be a smart move for the dog dog-eat-dog world of youtube trying to get views yeah and but here’s back to the original point of getting views what is exhausting life that you have to go and and i’m thankful that mr beast does what he does i’m thankful that this kevin guy and graham are crazy enough to log in and show me their that is so cool they are [ ] the success that is nuts i had this exact thought the other day we um i forgot who i was talking to but i talked to somebody and it was like oh yeah that’s a great youtube i’ve had like five ideas about like oh yeah if we did that as a youtube video it would get clicks right like one was um i was gonna show how you can make ten thousand dollars being a santa like a santa claus for christmas and i was like oh this is easy i’ll buy the suit i’ll show the economics of that i’ll go do the thing that’ll make for a funny thumbnail and it’ll make for this little story that’s semi-viral another one is going and buying buying fancy [ ] and like actually like justin khan did a video where he toured a 50 million dollar home it was amazing and it’s a you know just it’s interesting content right it’s like a super it’s junk food that people in our niche we just like to consume that stuff like oh yeah what is it like you know um how do you do it how much money do you make how do you invest it and there’s all these videos that you can make around this and every time i think of one i think that would work i think to myself i do not want to get on that treadmill i just don’t want to get on the treadmill because i know it’s like uh the difference between sort of like uh knowledge and wisdom it’s like i know this would work but i’m also wise enough to know that that is not a path i want to double down on i do not want to double down on the treadmill path because i don’t feel that way about this podcast for example this podcast feels ongoing it’s a it’s a breeze dude we show up i just shoot the [ ] with my friend for an hour um people seem to like it it’s so like it’s two hours of my week that i like i’m on the i’m on camera i’m on on i’m being recorded and i don’t have to like and also because it’s a podcast i’m not like worried about how i look and the angle and the this and that like maybe i should a little more but i just don’t like the way that you do when you’re recording youtube videos and you have to edit everything and clip it and like do all these cuts podcasting is podcasting has that risk reward ratio or that like effort reward ratio that works for me and this like youtube treadmill i think has a much bigger prize but i don’t want to win that way there’s other ways to win and that treadmill is exhausting it’s exhausting and there’s exhausting there’s a reason why you don’t see casey neistat anymore i’ve watched a couple of recent interviews with him and he said now i don’t do anything he goes for those three years that are recording daily vlogs everything in my life everything in my day if someone invited me to dinner i had to message them and say i can’t unless someone interesting is coming or you want to go somewhere intriguing because it has to be content and i lost a lot of friends me my wife almost divorced and it was exhausting and now he’s 37 years old he’s financially successful and he goes i’m not doing it anymore i have to take a break and so i think it’s cool to dabble with it but i am wary of the treadmill now you did a video so kind of on the other side of the coin you’ve been putting out your fitness content which i think is probably just fun for you and motivating it’s fun and then you did a video that i loved which was you put a video up on i think your own just your personal youtube channel of this real estate project you’re doing so i wanted to ask you about this here’s what for those who didn’t watch it here’s here’s the the summary of the video uh you bought a piece of land right next to your house i think like adjacent to or like literally your neighbor you brought the neighbor lot next to your house and it’s got this like really run-down shack on it like it’s a large piece of grass with a really shitty shack that somebody was living in and it’s 20 years it looks brutal like this is like you know i wouldn’t wish this on an enemy uh these conditions so it would look like just like from this run-down shack and you’re like cool like here’s the thing i bought and you you broke down the economics you’re like you know i brought this so how much did you buy for exactly 650 000 650 000 she bought the whole thing and you bought it leveraged or you bought it all cash cash okay you bought it all cash why didn’t you borrow because i wanted to purchase before they put it on market so basically the background buy now it was a 90 year old couple that who owned it and they rented it to a guy and i the day i moved into this house i used a little bit of research and i found who they were and i said hey you know just so you know my name’s sam i’m i live now next year property if anything ever happens you want to sell this please contact me and so the man died on a monday the wife called me on a wednesday and said would you like to buy it and i bought it on a thursday amazing okay i love that and you’re like this is going to be my first kind of like you don’t know [ ] about real estate you don’t [ ] about building any like a home um and so you’re like this is gonna be fun it’s gonna be a hands-on project i’m gonna kind of document it as i go and then you had this spreadsheet which basically said all right look i bought it for 650k and um and then you know in this in this area there’s a sort of like a price per square foot that you can get and here’s the range and then i talked you got bids from some contractors and you were like you know i can uh you know on the low end it seems like you could build it for this much and then if i’m conservative and it might be more expensive than we think it might cost this much so i might have to put a million dollars in to build the actual structure in the home modern ground up and uh so you know i might be in for 1.6 million but based on the the price per square foot in this area i should be able to sell this for two it should be worth two or two point five like when i’m done with this thing i’d like the margin of safety was really strong it seemed like just like a an absolute no-brainer of a deal assuming this is how you want to spend your time right like the time is almost more expensive or the risk here more so than the buy is great you made your money on the buy as they say in real estate rather than trying to make your money on the sale yes but it’s not taking nearly as much time and i’ll tell you why so what i did was before i even bought the piece of property i found things in the area that sold for my ideal price per square foot right i went on zillow and redfin i found the architect and then i called them and then i also called the builder and i go hey guys how much would it cost to build this exact same home right now right and they told me and i go great um and how do you do that yeah and i bought this flop a lot and i call them again i go hey um you know that house that just sold for a thousand dollars a square foot do that again over here for me please you’re not trying to innovate and add the sandpark touches of like uh a you know a 3 000 square foot gym and like a thousand square foot house like you’re doing a normal house build out it’s a normal house build-out but i said make it a two-car garage because i may if i decide to live there i’ll build the gym there and that’s basically it yeah okay i just said i took i took a house that was crushing it that i just sold for a lot of money and i said and i hired the same people and i said do it again by the way so i’m not i’m not spending any time on it i spend no time on it just the fact that it’s next door also is surprisingly gonna be like a 50 savings in the time and headache that’s involved with this because uh like my family did this we’ve we uh we had a house in san francisco and then we bought a house two doors down and just the fact that it was two doors down had like all these extra benefits which was like it was super easy to go see it was super easy to like manage any construction that was going on it’s they like share a fridge in the like garage it’s like oh yeah just use the extra fridge across the street uh my sister runs a business out of one of them and she’s able to manage it from like without having to get in her car and commute somewhere and just just it being like within eyesight and and like a two-minute walk away is so important and like if anyone’s gonna do a project like this do not underestimate that i’ve now seen it a couple times and i feel this way this is my rule with friends and family also which is you want to live so close to your best friends or family that you could go unplanned to their house like you don’t need to pack a bag and think about okay well then how like what you know when should we go should we beat the traffic and then yeah we’re gonna have to head back for the night it’s like i should be able to pop over and pop back unplanned because it’s so convenient and like the difference between 15 minutes away and four minutes away is gonna fundamentally change the way like the amount of times you you see that person or do that thing so why did you bring up that youtube video by the way because i thought it was awesome oh thanks and i just wanted to hear more about the like and the like the actual real estate side of the side i think that the the the numbers are the way they’re going to work out and not a lot of people believe me but i think it’s gonna happen this way i’m gonna make half a million dollars in profit or more from it i think there’s a world where i make closer to a million than half a million there’s i’m gonna sell it or rent it out there’s a i have a few options i can live in it and sell my home yep but the way that all this math is gonna work it’s gonna be what both this house and that house i’ll have made around a million dollars in profit in like 18 months right um because things just worked out and so i’ll make more from this real estate project than i will my entire hustle salary combined ever and it only in this project for example but you’re gonna have to invest right that’s the that’s the kicker here so like you you couldn’t have done this back then because you didn’t have a spare 1.6 million dollars to go like invest in buying the lot plus building the home out or if i did do it it was like all of my money right exactly so you know you would have to go like completely all in on it can i tell you what else we got can i tell you about let me tell you about a company that interests me okay so i was talking to someone recently and i can’t say who it is but they had a google chrome extension that made something like 25 million dollars in revenue with only two guys two people it’s amazing so i got curious extension did or no no i yeah um roughly uh helping people on amazon sell stuff okay cool so like kind of like a what’s that thing called jungle scout something in that world yeah um and so basically uh i started i i got kind of curious so there’s two extensions that caught my caught my attention the first and they’re basically the same thing with almost exactly the same name the first is this thing called ad block i think that’s the one i use the second one is called ad bot ad block plus so that’s why it’s a little confusing and so adblock was created by one guy in georgia named michael gundlach and he uh he just kind of built this thing in 2009 and he’s been the only employee the whole time and i went to his personal website to learn about him and he only has 55 followers on uh twitter his website is called sorryrobot.com that’s his personal website and he has like python projects a unity game that he built called asteroids and even has an mp3 of him singing a christmas song at church during christmas time this is like by the way his linkedin his job description is just a guy uh he is in duluth georgia and it says i am not available for work please do not contact me about job opportunities i created adblock the most popular chrome extension for google chrome extension and for safari with around 20 million users it’s neat before that i did some other neat things and he was the only employee and then i did some research on his competitor called adblock plus now this company they have a few few more employees i think they’ve got 20 or 30 people and because they’re based in europe when you’re a european company oftentimes at least in england and i know it’s a lot of the k uh a lot of cases in different european countries if you make over 20 million dollars in revenue you basically have to file a report that reveals your revenue and profit and so i went and looked at this company called io it’s called io they own ad blocker plus in 2017 they did 44 million dollars in revenue and 26 million dollars in profit which is astounding and they had at least 100 million users however if you look in the group the the chrome plug-in store uh adblock plus has around 150 000 reviews and it says they’ve got over 10 million users if you look at ad block which is the one founded by this one guy they’ve got something like 300 000 reviews and uh also it says 10 million users and so there’s potential that this one guy had a business making all of this money tens of millions of dollars a year very likely tens of millions of dollars a year in profit just off a chrome extension is that amazing this is amazing i’m i’m still on this guy michael gunlock’s uh website sorry robot.com resume um pdf and i i think you said this but i was reading while you were talking so he was an engineer at google working on google ads and google adsense did you already say that part no and he worked on google and basically he goes nah [ ] that i hate these ads so his job was he goes at google i kept the global at google ads and adsense networks alive and kicking um in my spare time i built this other thing and i built this other thing uh you know like because google has that 20 times like i built this javascript framework blah blah so basically he goes from working at google and google adwords and ad sets to creating adblock and makes 20 billion makes more than that uh off 20 million users who who love this thing and what year did you work at google i believe like oh five 2005 yeah so which is like right after the ipo basically yeah so he probably made 30 million dollars at google like collectively it’s pr that’s what it’s worth now if you held it so it made tens of millions of dollars off of that and then reportedly now the thing about this guy is everything’s very quiet about this guy he’s hard to find everything’s impossible however i think in 2015 an anonymous buyer bought adblock interesting there’s a world where it could have been sold for like two or three hundred million dollars i mean there’s a world where that exists uh maybe it was lower but it was it’s a it’s a huge problem like he stopped he he stopped working on ad block or you know it sold probably 2015 which is kind of scary because these chrome extensions are a giant security hole for people because chrome extensions can like read and write all the data on your as you browse the web so that’s all every email you’re writing the text is can be picked up by these chrome extensions and even if they start off safe because you know just a guy from duluth georgia built it and he’s an engineer who has the right intentions somebody who buys it with the wrong intentions can really like do some dirty stuff yeah you know with the data and even modifying it and things like that so you got to be careful with chrome extensions i try to install the minimum amount of chrome extensions as possible yeah they are pretty scary and um yeah they’re nuts and the but it’s a wild business i think that what here’s here so i love these extension style businesses there’s a few platforms that i think are quite interesting the first google chrome still makes a ton of sense the second um shopify still makes a ton of sense our friend andrew has a business where all he does is buy buys uh shopify plugins and it’s market cap it’s a publicly traded company it’s like in the 600 million dollar range it’s on the canadian stock exchange but the third thing which you probably have not thought of and the fourth thing you definitely haven’t thought of salesforce plug-ins and then finally zoho plug-ins incredibly interesting so we used to hire this engineer uh at the hustle and he would he was in another country and we would pay him 20 bucks an hour to just build little apps for us for our sales team i think zoho i would imagine is which is like a salesforce competitor but a little jankier has an equal amount of users as salesforce i think you could build a really great business just doing salesforce plug-ins right yeah and we’re rolling them up um so i i don’t know if i’m allowed to talk about this but i’ll say it in a vague way uh met a guy i heard about a guy that was rolling up games inside of a big gaming platform so there’s like a very popular game and there’s games within that or little like modules people create and they monetize and this person was rolling them up and they’re like dude does that mean like these are created by like i don’t play games like you know okay so for example there are big gaming platforms like fortnight and minecraft and roblox and like all these different games that exist and inside the game you can create little experiences and you can monetize them um kind of like people who create like different colored guns for call of duty yeah although i don’t know if i don’t know if you could do people create those i thought the game created those but like yeah there’s there used to be mods and you know mods of different games and maps and things like that that you can create that’s always been kind of like a part of it but some of these games now are so big and they actually like formalize their little creator economy inside the game and the person i knew was rolling them up and they’re like these are selling for nothing because they’re like it’s just like a kid who made this it sells for like less than you know like 1x revenue or something like that like it’s like crazy like compared to going and buying that same cash flowing asset on whether it’s fba or shopify or something else now everything has a different profile of like maybe this game is a fad maybe people will stop using this maybe you know the game will change the rules and you’re screwed all of a sudden so yeah there’s some risk but uh i love these game plans of go to these niche platforms we’ve talked about etsy we’ve talked about poshmark um fba we’ve now talked about zoho and salesforce and slack and like all these different platforms there are little apps that just make fifty thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars fifty thousand dollars a month and you can go and you can buy these out and you can roll them up and you can have a company that does 10 to 20 million dollars of revenue profitably and you could buy your way there uh without even having to invent anything all you got to do is go get cheap cheap debt buy this thing and profit um and it’s really like that simple but there’s one major thing which is if call of duty or fortnight or whatever it is they go hey we’re gonna go in a different direction yeah exactly and that’s why you got like that’s the same thing with fba right and all these like thoracio and all these roll-ups fba is not i mean it’s you’re dependent on a single platform which is amazon that’s known to compete very hostilely and there’s other other they could change the algorithm and all of a sudden your thing that was at the top is now at the bottom um there is definitely risk and so you got to look at like okay if my payback period is nine months i feel pretty good about it if it’s three years i don’t feel so good about it anymore and so that’s where you got to you know place your bets can i tell you about a really random small one like that okay so our buddy uh ramon tweeted this out he goes here’s an example of a silly stupid business so ramon is ramon vanmir on twitter and so he goes simple website moneymaker this emoji website gets five million visitors a month and all it does and i use this by the way all the time because if you’re on your computer and you want to use an emoji it’s not easy to get the keyboard up for the emoji thing so you just you you just google like laughing emoji and then it gives it to you and it says click to copy your to your clipboard and then you go and you like copy it you paste it on twitter or paste it wherever you’re writing your email or whatever and so um all it does is it lets you look up you look up emoji copy paste them and it’ll also explain what the emoji means so there’s like emojipedia is a good example of this so emojipedia emojipedia yeah i don’t know if you’ve ever seen this it’s like the top-ranking um one that comes through uh when you search for this stuff uh it’s like wikipedia but for emoji and so ramon was looking at you know like depending on and it’s just plastered with ads there’s like ads everywhere on the site and it’s like depending on what the ad revenue is like this site could be making between 50 and 150 000 a month of all profit like do not underestimate these small simple sites and we’ve talked about this with crosswords uh sudoku games things like that just like these really simple things that people like to search for and if you could own the domain you could just have the really simple like online game or like scrabble scrabble word solver um you know crossword hint get hint cheats you know whatever um those little websites can be really good so this emoji one i thought is another example of that and even better i was like oh who owns this thing i was looking for the michael gundlach some random engineer who’s like oh yeah i got a huge company that owns so some company bought it they own it and it’s called zedge and i was like okay what the heck is zedge z-e-d-g-e and this is one of those companies that you’re like really this so zedge is a public company its market cap is around 130 million dollars so it’s a very small small cap public company on the new york stock exchange and what they do is they it’s a publisher or roll up they bought a bunch of these little apps and websites that just get a bunch of traffic because people want self-expression so they bought wallpapers ringtones stickers alarm clock sounds emoji emoji pdf like things like that they bought all these brought them all into one roof and then they’re a public company so you can go see a bunch of their numbers so they’ll do like you know it’s almost like 50 percent um they’ll do like 50 profit on their on their uh on their product like at least operating profit um and then you know like the ebitda will be closer to like you know two million or whatever on their uh under each quarter why the hell would a company like that go public don’t go public uh yeah i think there’s a bunch of reasons why they might go public um but i just thought it was interesting so they have about 350 million people have downloaded like their wallpaper app they have they say they have 40 million monthly active users um and these companies that are just hidden in plain sight so it’s like um you know let me just look at their annual revenue again i don’t know if i have annual or quarterly i think that they do about 20 million dollars a year in revenue and 10 million 10 million about operating profit and um yeah so they did 2017 they did um let’s see pull this up okay sales and revenue is a little lower than what i saw here but i’m doing this quick so basically for the last five years it’s just been flat like 10 million dollars of revenue two million dollars of cogs you know their gross income is between seven and eight million and then then they pay for a huge amount of you know like um other sales and you know ssg a uh expenses um and so you know they’re they’re not showing a bunch of profit at the end but i would bet that these things are like spitting off profit if you want uh you know they’re putting money in their own pockets basically out of this so i thought that was just like a really crazy little company behind behind the stuff and it just shows you how much money is in really simple things that a lot of simple things that a lot of people use so like alarm clock sounds wallpapers that sort of thing what um what’s live reviews uh this is an idea so so i just got a sauna and i know you’re in the market for a song oh what time did you get so i got a sanctuary a clear light sanctuary uh like the infrared sauna i like a lot of it like i like the size the look the shape all that but it doesn’t make me sweat enough and so i’m like well that’s the problem with infrared that’s the problem with infrared that’s the point of the sauna so i’m like well that’s a bust um and i’m like so i’m like first i realized okay i didn’t have one of the panels plugged in so that’s why it was like you know part of it was like dead okay that was one issue it got better and then it’s like well the best way you use it is you break a little sweat before you go in so you just do like a quick five minute ten minute cardio just because what infrared’s doing is it’s not warming up the air it’s warming up your body yeah just like microwaving you it’s microwaving you which seems like pretty awful for you but i guess it’s not so bad i guess it’s good for you actually um you know blah blah blah heat shock proteins blah blah blah so um so i you know i broke a sweat before i got in and it was better but i was like dude i’m not trying to do all this i’m trying to go sit the sun on sweat in five minutes so i think for my house my space like i didn’t want to do extra electrical i didn’t want to like do i didn’t want to i didn’t have a huge space where i putting i put it in my garage gym so like the dry sauna in retrospect i would now hold that for a dry sauna but uh it didn’t really fit my current situation so you know whatever it is what it is so i was thinking like god i i actually did the research i i talked to people i read reviews but you know the thing that i feel like is missing is i wish there was just so like people have tried this qvc thing where it’s like oh i’m gonna go live and i’m gonna sell this item and people have tried to make qvc for mobile and it’s never really worked and i don’t know if this would work either but i kind of wish this existed just based on this current experience and told me maybe there is a maybe there is a product here which is why can’t why can’t i go on and just say i’d like to talk to somebody about saunas and why isn’t there a person live on video who is a third party impartial source that can basically show me live on video talk to me about what i’m looking for dude this is exactly what mark laurie said so mark laurie the guy who started jet.com he sold it for three or two or some billions of dollars to walmart he said one thing that they were working on at jet that could have been a massive business but they shut it down for a bunch of different reasons but he goes i actually think it still could be big was concierge shopping so you simply log on and you just tell us you know i’m looking for a toaster and a clerk is online saying okay for your needs i think this is best would you like this one and he said that that would be a big business yeah and so like even with this actually if you go to the website to buy this thing you can’t just buy the sauna there’s no buy button you had to call someone but this is their sales rep right so i called the sales rep it’s 8 p.m she picks up she’s an american person i was like whoa what the heck like i was like you worked this hour like who are you like you were really good at what your job like you know you built a lot of trust quickly and you got me over the line to buy the six thousand dollar sauna um on the phone here and and she was like yeah like where there’s a network the way we work is we only sell the sonic company yeah so it’s owned by jacuzzi the the the you know the jacuzzi company so she’s like yeah it’s basically we have a network of sales reps we all pick up the phone uh you could if you’re offline you’re offline you you didn’t get that commission she’s like i get a commission if you buy um and that’s how we make our money and she’s like yeah like i make good money like i’ll sell i was like how many of these you selling today she’s like on a good day i could sell like four of these in a day and on a bad day i’ll sell like one or zero dude listen the reason why you and i are pretty good at what we do which in this case i’m referring to just coming up with ideas like people say [ ] to us all the time it’s and i get i’m kind of like jerking ourselves off here sorry but because of that question that you just asked and i do that all the time and people are amazed that you could do that like when you’re just going to a food truck you’d be like hey how many customers you get a day and they just tell you and so what you just did is a perfect example you got intel that is hard to find but it was very easy to get right and i asked multiple i asked and you could triangulate that’s the the secret yeah you don’t ask a very rude question how much money do you make or how much does this company make i said what’s a good day you know how many do you how many of these do you sell on a good day so yeah already i softened the blow by saying good day and i’m asking just for a day that doesn’t seem like top secret information okay cool then i say and then i was like i was like and you’re great at this like i i was like i really like this like this was like kind of an awesome experience for me on the phone i was like are you one of like the better sales reps like do you like are you like a top performer or you like uh like are you kind of like middle of the pack she’s like no i’m like actually one of the top performers blah blah blah and she’s like you know i picked up the phone at 8 pm a lot of people just don’t pick up the phone like i’m i work like i work hard and i was like oh interesting okay cool and then i was like i was like how many reps are there i’m just like and again i’m not like digging i’m not like saying like and um okay my next question is how many reps are there i’m like i’m just sounding amazed because i was amazed what you say to that reply is wow are you guys all in america yeah yeah we’re all in america wow which i mean were there like ten thousand of you of course you know it’s gonna be close oh no it’s way smaller hundreds oh like a hundred ah more like 800 right right exactly exactly and so i was able to like suss out how this system works i was like i was like well i was like that’s great so i was like i was like so this is awesome so i bought this thing and you’re gonna make like what 400 or 500 bucks off this yes and she’s like so now i know the commission structure is like you know i was able to kind of like and i’m just doing it because i’m curious i have no agenda i’m not starting a sauna company i don’t care but i’m just trying to learn and then like you know i took a piece of that to our own i had a meeting with our own team for e-commerce i was like hey you know i had this kind of great experience you know should we be having a phone number on the site and like should we be helping people like that like how would that work we’re a way lower price point like would this still work and um and then i met this guy uh ezra ezra uh firestone is his name yeah he’s amazing he’s super well known in the e-commerce space and he’s got this famous brand called boom by cindy joseph or something like that is that makeup right it’s like kind of like makeup and like anti-staging face cream stuff like that for like women who are like 50 to 70 or something that’s what it looks like to me at least and this brand does great i think he’s pretty open about it like he publishes stuff like i think they do like 80 or 100 million dollars a year of revenue and he told me that uh he told me on a we i did a talk at ecom world he was interviewing me and of course when was that uh like i don’t know a couple weeks ago oh that’s pretty sick he’s that’s a pretty legit thing yeah so he goes he was like you know so how do you do your sales like i don’t know what do you mean like this is shopify you push the buy button he’s like okay so you don’t do any live chat yeah we have chat but like whatever customer service he goes okay interesting he goes for us we do phone you guys you don’t need a phone i go no we don’t go do you does anybody do phone does that [ ] work same thing same type of question that will get somebody to like defend the thing they do that [ ] work that’s what you said i was like there’s no way does that [ ] work and he was like dude 30 of our sales close over the phone and i was like bing data point interesting should i be doing that that’s like a learning the next thing that you ask is yeah but there’s no way that’s profitable and they’ll say yeah of course it’s profitable we only pay them eighteen exactly eight dollars an hour am i a bad entrepreneur no i’ll tell you that i’ll tell you how it all breaks down so yeah that’s exactly the how much do they pay people questions how do they pay people how much do they pay people an hour uh i don’t know i didn’t ask in this case because we were live on the panel but you know it had this been this normal conversation i would have would have been uh breaking it down that’s badass um all right you want to do one more wait what’s this fluffy stuff about luck of timing let’s do this do a non-fluffy one because i feel like i’ve been doing a lot of fluffy stuff lately i feel like we’ve kind of been on a kick of like sort of fluffy stuff because if you let me i’m gonna talk about mindset all day and the second thing is we did a lot of like gossip about like you know like billionaires and their like affairs and [ ] like that so i’m like okay just noted i’m gonna like to turn that down a little bit so i want to do one more cool idea because i think you know people love that [ __ ] okay so rebase um have you seen this before before i put it on this sheet no i’m looking it up now all right so you know the guy who’s behind this that guy levels um levels dot io who is oh i love that guy kind of like his name’s peter levels i think is his name uh his handle is levels.i o so he’s amazing prolific guy he was ahead of the curve on like remote work so i remember maybe six years ago he was he created you know nomad list he created a remote like a remote like uh remote working slack was like oh if you’re a remote worker pay 10 bucks and get into slack and hit like 6 000 members i was like whoa you made a lot of money off this little like just a slack invite i’ve never seen that and he reveals all of his revenue so i don’t what’s his so it’s levels.io that’s his that’s one of his sites he’s got like four sites i think and if you go to levels and then scroll all okay so he has his is his twitter name is levels io i yeah it’s probably pronounced actually differently and you can see a link to all of his websites and looks like he’s got close to 10 there and if you click them and then see the little meter in his location oh well that’s amazing for one amazing that’s a feeling oh my god that’s beautiful so good so on twitter where you put your location and most people just write like san francisco or new york instead he just he used the emoji for to create like 10 squares and it’s like a meter it go and at the end of the meter it says five million dollars a year and then he shows the meter is like like 60 of the way there um which shows that he’s kind of like you know he’s probably at two and a half uh to three million dollars a year is what he’s making it’s just a subtle it’s a subtle thing very nicely done very interesting very cool i like it and if you go to any of his sites so it looks like he’s got eight or something sites listed and you click around you’re gonna see a phrase on all of his sites called open startup and i just sent you a link do you see the link i sent you and you could see all of his metrics so you can see how much revenue they have how much like he’s got weird metrics how much co2 removed from the atmosphere github commits daily revenue daily signups meetups organized new paid membership uh live streaming events um last month sign ups how many customers are in total how many page views where the pages are coming from you can see everything the uh the uptime of the websites this guy’s amazing and if you know just nomad list is doing 531 000 a year it’s halfway to the goal of a million dollars a year from this business and this guy we just explained how he’s kind of got this like unique little easter egg on his twitter he’s got like little things like that throughout all of his websites and so this guy is in my mind he this man’s an artist he’s this guy’s like he’s an artist who just so happens to uh his art just so happens to make money this guy’s i love this guy i don’t know his name peter peter i think he said peter levels that’s his full name i didn’t know that i always just thought his company was called levels so if you look at like one of his um things i was going to show you so okay so his latest thing this thing called rebase and he tries to like sniff out a trend and then quickly spin up the semi-viral slightly profitable like a semi-viral simple profitable version of a website so uh what is rebase rebase is people are trying to relocate with the pandemic and with tax changes and with cryptocurrency and all this good stuff people are more like kind of uh you know like fluid than ever there are people are gender fluid and they’re location fluid there’s a fluidity going on so he basically said uh portugal came out and portugal said we wanna they i think in 2021 they had the largest population uh decrease in the last 50 years and so they decided all right our population’s shrinking we need foreigners to come live here and spend here and work here so they said the portuguese government said we want to attract high-tech remote workers and they gave out they create a program called the nhr program and so the nhr program basically has a bunch of benefits now i don’t know if they’re all as good as advertised meaning like i didn’t go read the fine print but here’s some of the things it says zero percent tax on foreign income so they’re not going to tax you for income that comes outside of the state um zero percent tax on crypto it’s considered a currency unlike in the u.s where it’s considered a property uh zero percent tax on dividends zero percent tax on wealth 10 tax on pension 20 tax on freelancing so that’s like you know where what a lot of people would do there there’s no minimum stay you can get fast track for eu passport um you know they have a whole bunch of like you know sort of things that are uh benefits for coming here you know we’re we have a 90 vaccination rate we have friendly people blah blah so that’s so he created a website that just has the sales benefit the benefits of if you wanted to relocate or get a passport in portugal and then what levels did was you basically created uh okay here’s the on-ramp to portugal so for 150 bucks you’ll do an on-boarding call and we’ll walk you through it and it’ll be a tax expert and a lawyer that will analyze your situation for 650 we’ll get you set up with portuguese residency and you’ll get a portuguese tax id for 150 150 bucks a year we’ll do your taxes and it’s like start now here’s the button and i was like this is such a smart simple um you know simple idea and already it’s like booked out so you know he his max was that he could do that the lawyer could do 50 50 calls per month and immediately it was at 300 calls per month and so he’s like trying to hire another lawyer so he can scale it up a little bit more if you had to ask like someone asked me the other day like who i admire and i would ask it a little bit differently which is who am i jealous of this guy peter i’m looking at his websites i am jealous of i’m jealous of so many things about him the first is creativity it just oozes and second he can do it like every like everything that i see on his website i’m like oh my god this is perfect this is the perfect example of how a product should be made uh he’s this guy is incredibly prolific and incredibly he’s like a music producer to me like he’s a producer of websites he’s just making these little hit songs uh and they’re not like he’s not trying to be justin bieber like the one mega hit franchise uh that goes on tour he’s just a producer that makes dope beats and instead of beats he just makes dope websites and it’s like pay for a dope lifestyle yeah i mean subscription revenue he’s got like look at inflationchart.com that’s one of his yeah this website tracks real inflation which is happening the governments don’t tell you about in their official numbers okay super easy i understand that’s just a really cute neat widget again even on um on what’s it called the website i was just talking about on rebase the very first benefit it goes mcdonald’s has the royale deluxe mcdonald’s in portugal has the royal deluxe and the big tasty double that was the first benefit right because he could have just gone into like tax benefit tax benefit but he let me get you let me break you know let me let me break the ice here a little fun little easter egg a little fun little nugget that just shows you who this site’s built by it’s built by somebody who’s got a personality it’s built by an indie software maker not some stiff company or bureaucracy and i think these little touches matter that’s why he’s an artist this guy’s amazing i love this guy good good good fine um i’ve known about him for a little while i i always thought he was really talented i didn’t realize that he was the kanye of like internet website builders uh yeah he’s great um okay so i wouldn’t even say he’s like you know rick rubin or something like that he’s got he’s got his own stick um anything else we want to do otherwise we could wrap it no no we could wrap it we could save that other i i want to hear about some of these things that you have on here but we can save them okay sounds good we’re out you