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 [Music] i did i talk about this the other day i went to that the blippi show did i tell you about this no all right so so do you know who blippi is have you ever heard of blippi i don’t know what that is no all right so like remember like back there we had barney or like you know uh like pee wee herman or whatever he’s like it’s like it’s a dude so he kind of looks like peter herman or whatever but he’s more like a barney or you know um sesame street style show so basically there’s a guy who went on youtube created this brand called blippi and he um he’s entertaining so he’d be like oh and by the way the funny thing that he does is there’s no like set he just goes into like um hey we’re at the aquarium but they just go in like after 9 p.m it’s like closed down and so it’s just they have it all to themselves like hey we’re here in las vegas at this rock climbing studio and so he just uses that to film his thing but he gives it a shout out at the beginning of the video the video gets like 40 million views so it’s like uh well you know it’s worth it to let these guys film there and he just like goes around he’ll basically just play with toys he’ll be like i’m at an abandoned chuck e cheese and he’ll go play with a bunch of toys and there’s like music and whatever overlaid and it’s the same guy i’m looking at him now it’s the same guy every single time it is except for as he blew up and got famous then they switched him out with just a stunt double for a bit and so like that guy’s like a substitute teacher sometimes and then sometimes when flippy comes back uh but like the main guy is the main guy he wears his outfits like this blue outfit with his orange glasses he like always looks the same so anyways my daughter loved blippi we used to watch a ton of bloopy and all of a sudden we see this ad that says um blippi like the live show is coming to oakland and so we were like oh and so instantly my wife buys tickets for for all of us in the family we go to this thing last weekend and it’s it’s at the same place you did hustle con so it’s at the paramount theater and it is packed like you know hustle khan was like you know sold out ish this was like sold out sold out like all the even the back shitty seat is like sold out and it’s full of parents and their kids and then there’s this like this they basically just created like a little play like a little mini musical one hour because kids don’t have that long of an attention span and it’s just kind of like music and like you know lights and colors and he’s oh dinosaurs oh rocks oh how much should it cost so every ticket i want to say was that venue’s seats maybe like 60 bucks a seat something like that so that’s been used seats between 2 500 and 3 000 i believe yeah so i think there was 2 000 there um and i believe the tickets were something like something like 50 60 70 bucks something like that so we’re in like 120 000 and he played four shows in a row um that weekend and then he went to the next city so it was our like no he had done eight shows or he was doing something like that so it was like some crazy like thing where i was like oh wow this weekend they made whatever 800 grand um and yeah the tickets tickets basically range from like you know 60 bucks to 90 bucks and um and the place is lit by the way so like you know he comes on stage kids go crazy he’s like you know he’d be like you know what does the bubble do and everyone’s like pop and he’s like when i say pop can you say pop and like so it’s like not like a quiet show like because kids are loud anyways so some kids are just not paying attention have to like my daughter during intermission was like i want to watch blippi on youtube and so we like had to open up youtube on our phone and give it to her during intermission because she couldn’t like go five minutes without stimulation and so it’s and then they have like the merch and the like the concessions they have like all that right so it’s like pretty dope actually and i was like wow this is kind of genius they just took youtube ip and this is this guy who was there was not blippi the guy on stage was just some you know theater kid who like didn’t make it you know and so he’s like all right plan b i’ll be blippi and um and so it was like they took the ip but they made their own show out of it and so i started looking into this and there’s a company that does this called vstar entertainment awesome so v-star what they do is they go license these kids brands and then they put on kids broadway basically and they tour around the country awesome and so and blippi is just a guy with a guitar right or were there more tournaments no guitar he’s just just him he just watched so were there any instruments or was it just like a soundtrack just soundtrack and like lights and like uh stage props so wow so he he always kind of like like you know if they came out as sharks like a bunch of like little backup dancers came out as sharks and then they whatever like that’s an awesome mini theater show right and so v star entertainment they do another brand that you’ve probably heard of call or you may have heard of called paw patrol it’s basically another kids cartoon so guess how much this is my like kind of triangulation guess how much they sold in paw patrol tickets last year just take it take a guess 20 20 mil 40 million dollars and 40 million dollars in event tickets and event tickets for and that’s just the tickets not the murder that was just last year and 22. uh i don’t know it’s like this is like the just before covet numbers so like 2019 2020 something like that wow so they got bought by cirque du soleil so first so the back story is some guy decides oh you know what like he’s watching sesame street he’s like sesame street should do a live show and he goes and he basically raises 500 grand from this guy he mortgages his house he gets an extra 25 grand out of his home equity so he’s got 525 thousand dollars he goes and he gets the license to sesame street he started with the sesame street show and then muppets and like he you know did but that must have been years ago this was in like 1980 something like that yeah and then um this other guy was doing it they merged and that whole thing gets bought by cirque du soleil last year is it cirque du soleil by the way like guess how much cirque du soleil revenue was have you ever written a cirque show no i’ve not but i do know that the guy who started it uh is a canadian guy he’s a billionaire i read dan blizzarian’s book and they talk about that guy a lot i think he’s like i mean he started a circus so he’s like liberty or whatever yeah he’s really eccentric and wild and everything so it made him a billionaire how much revenue does it make um ben have you been to a cirque du soleil show cirque du soleil did a billion does a billion dollars a year in revenue which is insane ten percent a five or ten percent of all las vegas tourists go to a circ show when they’re in town is that what what’s that cirque is that the is that they have like ten shows right it’ll be like they have oh and then they have zoomanity they have like whatever and the beatles yeah i know all about it and i’m i’m into it and it’s publicly traded or at least it was before it was acquired by private equity right right private equity owns it now and um and it’s a pretty badass business the idea was do a circus but no animals so it was like only human performers and to do that they did like crazy acrobats and like great costumes it’s basically its own genre at this point though right and so he built that thing into a real juggernaut and so cirque then bought blue man group and v star entertainment and so they got blue man which is like an ad what they had said was like we do 10 million in ticket sales a year for cirque du soleil blue man adds another 2 million and then um and then v star adds another two million but they’re all like different ticket prices but like they do 14 million in tickets uh sold per year and so this this like live entertainment thing really has caught my attention because i think as the world moves more and more digital that they’re like the demand for like these one-off experiences like hey let’s get out of the house and go do something i think it’s just gonna keep going up music festivals that’s a winner and then there’s like uh i think plays and musicals are gonna be a winner i think they’re going to be bigger than they were before even though the world news digital and in fact because the world moves digital what do you think about all this i 100 agree and so earlier today i sent you a notion doc of some of my notes on i’m interested in peer businesses which is basically like you pay money and you’re part of a club and you meet up with them and i i can’t talk too much about what the names of the companies were but they were doing like uh one of them does 100 million a year in profit and it’s basically two or three meetups a year and there’s executives paying 50 000 a year to be part of them and i think actually these are going to completely boom i think conferences right now are interesting but those are really hard this actually seems way easier to pull off um all types of meetups airbnbs i’m 100 on board that i think that in person is is the move yeah i and i think that so then i started thinking like what are the other opportunities and so i think a you could just like go compete with these guys on like either the same brands or another brand so like what they did was the v star guy took tv ip turned it into a live show the what the flipping guy is doing is taking youtube ip and turning it into a live show and i think you could just even do this for more so like i think you could even do like we’ve talked about religion which is the greatest free ip in the world so i think somebody could do this for religion which would make a extremely kid friendly in fact kid-focused like christianity show basically i think you could do this for dinosaurs or science as a generic genre because like if kids love trucks and dinosaurs or whatever and you could just basically create the like the the show you know day with dinosaurs or something like that and it once you get like if you have a certain level of quality moms will spread this and they will talk about it and they will like in their mommy groups they will help you sell these tickets and um and i just feel like there’s a like it’s not that hard like you build one show and then you sell that one show a thousand times right like the show goes on tour mamma mia has made like i don’t know some stupid amount of money just being the same show on tour with replacing the the low cost action yeah anytime i’m trying while we’re talking i’m trying to find the numbers so we used to so we did events but we would do like these this thing called hustle con which was like our big one where like thousands of people would come but then we do this thing called 2x and 2x was basically from like 7 p.m to like 10 p.m and it was basically we got 15 or 10 women all who were in tech and business not that many of them were like well known but they would have 10 minutes to like tell a story and we would charge like 25 but then we would get tens of thousands of dollars in sponsors but we got to the point where we could pull this off like kind of like almost weekly in other cities and when we started doing this the hustle wasn’t that popular but we were making like i think like 30 grand a night when we were doing it and we had one employee running it right she would use a team of contractors and then we wouldn’t supply anything like i think we had free wine but i don’t know i don’t even think it was free i like we wouldn’t supply anything but then we have corporate sponsors and we crushed it and in my head i’m like i can always fall back on this to make a living because it was so much easier than people thought right yeah that’s pretty good for a tech bro um a tech bro business like all of us you you you were running one of the best like women’s entrepreneurship events yeah because you got labeled wrong dude yeah they’re i’m like an onion man there’s layers so but basically like we used to do this thing called pizza and 40s where we would do a meet-up and i would interview someone and they would drink a 40-ounce and when the 40-ounce beer was done the talk was done but then like women were like this is like there’s all dudes here and so we created like a like a wine version and that had like way better it was like called like cheese and wine i don’t even remember but that had way better engagement and so we’re like oh like let’s pursue this vein like this there’s clearly an opportunity here until we created 2x which uh comes it’s like 2x chromosomes which i thought was clever i stole it from reddit uh but anyway we would do i think we did 10 or 12 uh in one year and every single time it was like 20 and 30 grand and the cost the cost was nothing the cost was renting the venue which cost like three thousand dollars and we would make like 20 grand and you also you had readers in every city right so that’s how you sold the tickets is that yeah yeah but we weren’t basically the speakers sold the tickets the reason why we had 15 speakers was was i was like i bet each 15 will get 25 people to come plus our like a little bit of our engine like this is easy and you weren’t making the money off the tickets you’re making enough sponsors really anyway the tickets the the business model was the tickets paid for the event and then the conference was all or the sponsors were all the profit but when it’s there’s two things going on one like women so whenever you have like an underserved community like sponsors definitely are willing to pay more and two it was like a b to b component so it wasn’t kid’s component which i think would alter the economics but my point of it is that i think that it was far easier than people thought and it was way more rudimentary and raw than people thought and it worked we just used splash that i think if you google like 2x the hustle you’ll like see like the splash that is basically eventbrite it was nothing special and it freaking worked you