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] tailgate guys have you ever heard of this business no so this this came up at farm con so i go to this dinner with this guy he listens to the pod and he was telling me i was like you know uh i was trying to make small talk at this dinner where i was like okay i hate normal small talk like i’m not just gonna oh yeah how’s the conference going good yeah good how about you good good and i also don’t know anything about farming so like it’s not relevant to me so you know okay i can ask them a bunch of questions you like corn too yeah exactly you know i don’t have much to add so what’s your favorite type of corn so i was a bit of an ice breaker i was like um i was like first job like what’s your first first job first first first i don’t know i asked did you have a side hustle in college and uh i went around the table i was like did you have a side because everybody was doing something different now and they’re all established now but did you when you were in college have a side hustle and everybody had an interesting one so this i put that in my question bank of like ah interesting uh you know fun little convo when you’re in a in a kind of entrepreneurial group so one guy tells the story he goes yeah dude i um i think he went to like ole miss or like what alabama or like one of these like southern football colleges and he’s like i created a um like tailgate in a box it’s like what he’s basically like yeah like tailgating is huge before the football game people go to the parking lot they want to grill and drink and play beer pong and do all the stuff and um he’s like you know for he’s like my family used to like to do it so he’s like first my family it was so competitive so you had to go wait like kind of overnight to get your spot he’s like so they would send me i’d have to go down to the i forgot what was called the grove or something like that and i’d have to wait in the parking lot and hold my family spot then i started to be like okay cool you got the spot well like well you got to set up the tailgate for us like come on we need a tables for beer pong and we need this and that so he’s like okay i’ll get the stuff every week and i’ll go do it and he would create a good setup and then the space next to him was like hey dude can we next week can we just will you set ours up and he’s like all right uh give me like 200 bucks i’ll get you guys some stuff like yeah sure and then the price goes up and he’s like oh my i can basically charge each little tailgating square like each little group of friends 500 to just set up a cool tailgate spot for them turnkey tailgating and so he did this at his college and he’s like dude i was making thousands and thousands of dollars every semester running this um and i was like is it i googled tailgate guys did it get acquired so so that was their competitor so there was a nationwide version of this he was doing this at small scale that was his college side hustle just to make a little bit of money he’s like yeah tailgate guys tried to come in but uh they couldn’t break into our market like we owned our market and i was like who’s tailgate guys he’s like oh these guys basically took this idea and they started doing it nationwide and i was like that’s really smart he goes yeah but how does it work do you have like you just hire college kids and you say we’ll give you 50 50 an hour for three hours on saturday we get 50 you get 50. exactly and then do they do the kids go to like walmart and buy the stuff i think either you give them the supplies in bulk or um or they have to go grab it and you tell them hey you need to get this table and these bowls and this beer this whatever and you use like a company credit card exactly something that has exactly and so tailgate guy and what they do the key is they would partner with the school they would say hey we’d like to be the exclusive tailgate provider for the school and the school would give them the license and so they had a monopoly and i was like what and it’s like yeah actually this is pretty common that schools will basically pick one vendor provider they’ll sell the license rights basically they’ll let you become the official you know north carolina you know you know the tar heels you call it tar heel tailgate and it’s like their thing and you pay them a fee or a revenue share of what’s going on but in exchange you get a monopoly you get to be the only provider of this [ __ ] and it’s like super viral right because you’re just like everybody sees wow that setup looks not bootleg what is that oh they use tailgate guys or whatever okay cool we should use them next time and uh so tailgate guys apparently like i think they got bought out by private equity or something but they um they were doing like i don’t know 30 to 50 million dollars a year doing this what and um and i thought what a great example of a college hustle that you then scale up you say all right if this works at my college it’s going to work at every college and every college that has a football program that has tailgating and then we have this repeatable sales model of going to the university and we tell them hey these other eight universities partnered with us we’d like to partner with you you get extra income and we will provide a safe uh you know convenient way for your your fans to do this i thought that’s pretty this is a really cool little niche business and then i started thinking well what are the other ones what are the other businesses that use the same sales tactic of basically partnering with the school and becoming the exclusive provider so we had a little mini brain mini because the guy listens to the podcast so we had like a mini brainstorm session at dinner where he’s like dude this is happening also with scooters uh when like bird and lime came out in cities companies decided oh shoot we should become the exclusive scooter provider on campus like we’ll go drop these scooters all everywhere it’ll be branded by this with the school the school will get a rev share for every scooter ride that happens and we get a captive market that nobody can compete with us in and so this started happening with scooters and i was like oh damn what else could be done because scooters is cool because it’s a new category right tailgating worked because it was a new category so you just have to think about like what’s something today that they don’t even really have a um like an option for like they’re not really there isn’t really like a market for it you