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 there’s some kid who’s the next re gold that’s sitting on kentucky’s campus or alabama’s campus that’s going to end up being like worth 50 100 million dollars and they’re going to get their start by selling name image like this like local deals to for the local players i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right this was a jammed pack episode we talked about a lot so we talked about buying lottery tickets online and how that might become a big business we talked about what else we talked about we talked about um athlon we talked about a company called flights about um creating quickbooks for ncaa athletes what else we talk about the business of mug shots mug shots yes mug shots the business how these websites make money why they are posting mug shots online and uh and how we feel about that is that scummy or is that uh is that legit we also talk about a couple ideas for chrome extensions there’s chrome extensions that keep you focused we talked about porn addiction fighting and if that’s a big market or not so get to the episode uh can you guys do us a favor leave a review and then click like and subscribe or click subscribe if you’re on itunes and then follow up here on spotify and leave a review and let us know what you think about this episode talk soon if if you are not watching on youtube check out the youtube channel you can see our faces most people have our voices mixed up they think what they think me i am sad but sam is me the only way to know is to go to youtube that’s the number one comment we get we actually reply in all the comments like we can’t reply to podcast reviews but i actually go personally reply to the youtube comments on every episode so go subscribe there because uh honestly the youtube channel is better than the podcast feed so if you’re only on the podcast feed you’re missing out go to youtube the channel is called sam what is it called just go to youtube and type in my first mill and you’ll see it right now it’s called the hustle but they’ll see it and then hit the subscribe button all right i have a ton of stuff to cover thanks for wearing a shirt by the way dude you get all hot and bothered when i just don’t have sleeves man this this is a shirt well i guess so we don’t all we don’t all dress like you know bouncers at a miami strip club so [Laughter] i do look like that i look like yeah like a little special ed today uh do you wanna um what do you got going on i have a lot of interesting stuff all right let’s start let’s do it um all right did you see everything that i put on here uh well it changed you had a whole bunch of stuff about greeting cards and now it’s something else buying lottery tickets all right go for it okay i got a lot of stuff i got lottery tickets i got mug shots i got um uh oh the athletic stuff i actually let’s do let’s do lottery tickets first and then i want to do athletic stuff because you actually talked about that so i just talked to this guy i don’t think i’m gonna do anything with it i don’t know yet but i just talked to this guy and i thought it was really amazing now this company that i’m going to tell you about it has to deal with the powerball and lotteries which i actually think that my uh stance on it is i’m personally not in favor of it i i i’m not i’m not on board but i thought it was fascinating so there’s these companies that are there’s two of them in the space so basically the way it works is there’s two major lotteries there’s the powerball and mega millions and then each state has a state-run lottery okay and the way it works is you go to the 7-eleven you go wherever and you buy a ticket so there’s this company that i just started talking to they’re called spins um and what they do is sorry slips spins slips so you know have you heard of this or you see did i write it down i talked to them a bunch of months ago and i talked about them on the pottery but yeah but i did talk about it but we could do it again that’s okay i don’t remember you telling me about them that’s okay most people probably don’t um but how did you hear about slips i thought they just launched like a month like this month it’s been on test flight for a long time so i used it on test flight it’s that’s what you do it’s clever dude i feel the wind was blowing out of my sails just now i’m sorry okay i’ll give you a minute to recover no i want you i want you to explain now because you’re good at it i’ll try to remember so basically um a lot of people play the lottery you typically go to a 7-eleven or a gas station or something you buy it what these guys did was they let you play the lottery from your phone legally how do they do that well basically wherever you are you’ll say i’d like to buy a lottery ticket and then they will physically go send somebody to a gas station they’ll buy the lottery ticket uh so sort of like there’s a task rabbit essentially that’ll go buy the lottery ticket in person for you because you can’t actually buy them online they’ll buy it they’ll take a photo of it they’ll sort of custody it online and and give it to you and um and so that’s how they kind of bypass the rules around buying lottery like running an online lottery you can’t run an online lottery but you can pay somebody to go buy the ticket and then they can give you the ticket um and that’s like their two-step process did i think that’s brilliant you got it brilliant or you got it right and i think that’s brilliant i think it’s brilliant because i never would have thought about that and it’s the easiest possible solution and by the way i think they simplified it even further where they just paid the guy at the gas station to be the taskrabbit so now they don’t even dispatch somebody they’re just like hey when this thing rings that’s that’s somebody paying you to buy a lottery ticket uh and you pay like a little premium on top of what the lottery ticket is and that’s the kind of like service surcharge which might be like 25 cents or a dollar or something it’s not like percentage-wise is pretty significant but it’s not a huge amount of money so people don’t care it’s like ah it’s more convenient because they can i can get a push notification it says the lottery is 200 million dollars today would you like a ticket and you just say kind of like yes and that’s that’s low friction uh i was saying they have subscription they have a bunch of stuff but when i was talking to this guy i was thinking there’s a few i was thinking of the pros and cons so pros of this business it’s gonna get big fast yeah i can see it getting big fast that’s the only pro that’s a big pro in the world of business that’s that’s the main pro that’s the main pro there are so many things about why it won’t work are you like why it won’t work are you saying basically like ethically i have a problem with this or well no that’s just one of the many things so like i wouldn’t say ethically i have a problem but i would have to ask myself how i feel about that like i would have to think about it so in one regard it’s like i don’t buy the lottery and i don’t want like if you don’t have a lot of money i don’t think you should buy the lottery that said who am i to tell you what to buy and also if you want to spend i go to the casino and i like to spend 50 and that’s fun so like who am i to say what’s like who am i to judge but the second thing i would imagine a app like this would have very similar economics uh not similar economics but similar growth tactics as like a mobile game which means you have to be super aggressive about uh customer acquisition and if facebook google or that pretty much that’s it if they ban you you’re [ ] yes that’s that’s a legit problem for this and that might be the the big the two biggest what’s that also i think had some social feature that was like if you and your friend you and your friends can kind of like share it you could split tickets or something like that like did they they brought all the offline things where like you know an office pulls together and buys 100 tickets and then they agree to split the money i think they brought that into it so it’s a nice app i liked the idea i liked the idea a lot um but i just you know whatever there’s a whole bunch of reasons why i decided not to invest but i just thought it was uh i think it’s a clever idea and i’ve been looking at this for years so to your question of how do i find this is because for years i’ve been thinking about how how would you bring the lottery online and i’ve talked to many people who claimed they could do it legally and it wasn’t actually legal or it was only legal in one state to do it that way and they were hoping all the other states caught on and so i’ve just been keeping an eye out for rule changes and that’s kind of a theme like we talked about the name and the nil thing for the for college athletes name image and likeness rule change equals opportunity i have another rule change i’m going to do today um that’s another opportunity but this is this is an example of one of those types of businesses you want to talk about that and i and i nil stuff yeah what do you got for it and the reason so you brought this up and i had known about it but i just saw this other article did you see this article that went viral about this alabama kid hasn’t even like thrown a plate said he had a million bucks in revenue booked for the year or something crazy like that well the funny thing is the coach nick saban came out and he’s the one who kind of said it so he’s like oh yeah you know which creates a weird situation like our freshman quarterback uh he’s made seven figures you know he’s making all this money his teammates aren’t making that money it creates an awkward dynamic um but so some people there’s really three reactions to this one is like okay maybe there’s some truth to that the second is oh is this like for years there’s been all kinds of people who make millions of dollars like nick saban does nick saban makes tens of millions of dollars at the coach and all the players played for free and it’s like dude you’re trying to keep the players down now that they’re making a buck you got a problem with it and then there’s the third one which is the super mega evil version of this which was he added this line at the end where he goes he’s like he’s making all this money and that’s because of our brand that’s because he’s a quarterback at alabama which is true it became a recruiting pitch at the same time so he was fake being outraged but really was what they call dog whistling dog whistling to all the other you know high school athletes right now and you come to alabama that check is pretty big uh this guy hasn’t even played yet and he’s getting this type of money imagine what you’ll get when you come if you come here and so all the other college coaches the players were mad at him the coaches were mad at him and the media was mad at him i loved it it was a master a master stroke what i actually did was we contacted i i went and contacted some folks in the compliance industry at schools and they made a comment that said they’re explicitly banned from finding or facilitating any type of deals for athletes the school is yes yeah so like nick saban can’t like you know they can’t be the middle man at all but um what they’re able to do is act and so the reason i’m bringing this up is you had this idea where it i mean i guess it’s a fairly obvious thing but you said it well uh of like you have to have this software or some type of compliance software in order to manage these relationships and manage those deals these deals and i have an example as to why that’s kind of important but so the school can’t it can’t be the middleman but they have to be in the loop about what you’re doing the school will definitely pay which is why i was saying you should build a tool like this with transparency visibility reporting payments infrastructure because the schools will have to pay and once they pay they’re locked in because you’re going to be the system of record of how the athletes are making money and i want to give an example let me give you an example of a very very very specific example about why this is going to get really complicated so do you know american top team i bet you do it’s that it’s a corset yeah so it’s a a mixed martial art gym in florida they offered 500 a month to miami’s entire 90 scholarship football players to advertise their gyms on social media so that’s 540 000 but every player has to do it now there’s like these crazy there’s these crazy rules and so here’s an example um an example of the gym deal for many players we mentioned the contract states that they must advertise for the gym over social media but if they lose track and not and all 90 athletes do not post technically that’s a pay for play and not an n a n i l deal and it’s a major nc nc double a minor so it doesn’t matter if you understand that what matters is that it’s incredibly complicated and that this is going to get like really complicated i wonder if somebody can also just build the other side just build the uh build the irs so it’s like build the little police the independent police task force that’s going to be monitoring all this stuff and finding potential violations and then selling this service back to the schools which is like hey we found some athletes that are out of code here that this is actually against the thing we will sell you this type of visibility so that you guys don’t fall out of compliance that’s another way to do it is you uh you diagnose the problem and then you sell them the prescription that line is going to lead me into my next point that’s a totally different topic but when we talked about that uh when we talked about this ncaa thing did a lot of companies reach out to you yeah there was a bun no they didn’t reach out they go bro we’re already doing this we’ve been doing this that’s what i mean that’s what i mean yeah good good good for you great i i agree it’s a good opportunity i don’t know why you gotta get all defensive about it any any anything interesting uh you know i didn’t really look into them because i didn’t have time but i think like open doors was one of the ones that a bunch of people mentioned i don’t know if that’s like the number one uh i i kind of think that it’s not really going to be some player that’s been around for a while i think it’s going to be somebody i i view it as in these markets it’s whoever builds this first simple useful thing will get a ton of adoption and then it’s then it’s a race between the people who tried to build the big valuable thing and the group that got a bunch of adoption to go from small and simple to more thorough and whoever where do those lines cross which which group gets there first and i like to bet on the horse where the founders identify identified hey this is a simple thing that we can get in the hands of every athlete right now or every school right now and we can even give it away for free as long as we get them hooked into our our system we have a relationship with them i think those are going to be the interesting one so i’m kind of looking for who’s new um but i’m open-minded about it i haven’t i haven’t seen anybody make it make a very compelling case that they’ve got something good going but i do have an idea around this if you’re ready for it so are you familiar with how um sports agents make their money like if i’m a agent for an nba basketball player do you know roughly like how that money shakes out no so so basically um if i’m an agent for an nba player i’m gonna take let’s call it two to three percent on average um and i’m not an expert of this that may be more nuanced to it but this is what i have a couple friends who do this and this is what they told me so um they make about two to three percent of the contract value so let’s say in the nba like a max guy might make 40 million a year so let’s say you have two guys you got a max player and you have his buddy on the team who’s kind of a bit of a mid-level player and you have 50 million 50 million a year from the team you’re gonna make two percent so you’re gonna make a million dollars a year as an agent so you can stack some pretty good money now it is a absolutely cutthroat and ruthless business where they’re all trying to backstab each other and steal each other’s clients um and it is like a slightly dirty industry where there’s a lot of sort of like bribery wine you know some on the good end whining and dining and on the bad end sort of like bribery and [ ] talking that goes on in order for agents to get clients but i have a few uh ben was telling me about a few friends of his that have an agency as three people and their athletes under contract will bring in about three million total a year and so basically the main guy the main agent is probably banking 2.6 million 2.5 million himself and then the other 500k goes into like operations and paying the other two people they’re kind of like salary so how much is the total the contract value will be i think he takes three percent so the contract value was something like 75 million uh just for rough numbers for the year there’s like four players right and so and it’s like yeah it’s really hard to get your foot in the door but when you have this guy like typically the players will stick with you unless they have a problem with you you mess up and so you get their like 10 to 15 year career sometimes and then as long as that player has a name you can use them and their introductions to get like a couple other guys on the team that they’re buddies with that they trust when they’re looking for agents and then they keep going down market so they keep trying to get guys like right before the draft or you know in college they’re you know showing up on campus and just talking to the guy trying to not create an ncaa violation but build those relationships so what i was thinking was so that’s the gener general business i don’t think it’s a great business to be in but uh you know whatever it’s kind of there’s a few people that win big and then most people get nothing the opportunity i saw was well with this name image likeness i think this is going to breed a whole new set of college hustlers that become sports agents why is that because i’m a player at a school if i’m just some kid in the same dorm like i remember when i was on duke campus i bumped into you know gerald henderson on the first day of orientation and um and he actually kind of a funny story he was like we kind of were hitting it off which is great because normally these guys you know everyone’s mobbing them they don’t care about you they’re looking for like the hottest girl around they don’t really care about this brown indian dude what why am i talking to him but we hit it off we’re joking around and he goes oh man like what are you doing tonight i was like oh i think we’re going to west campus i didn’t even know what that was at the time was my first day on campus but i just said something i thought sounded cool he’s like he’s like oh i’m sick like hit me up when you go like here take my number and um i had finished high school in china and so i actually didn’t even have a cell phone the first day of college i was like getting my plans set up and so i was like oh you know i don’t have a phone but he he just looked at me like oh bro you don’t have a phone and he just like walked away that was the last i talked to him but the opportunity is dude you could have been friends with an nba player i know i know i blew it i blew it many many times after that too with other players um but basically let’s say i’m friends with that guy i could just go hustle i could go to the local car dealership and i could be like hey how much would you pay gerald to be on this billboard right he’s a big name in this college town so you’ll give him 1500 bucks and i could go to gerald and say hey dude i got you a 1500 deal all you got to do is like say yes and take this photo and then he would be like oh sick man and if i did that three more times i’m pretty sure i could be this guy’s like business manager within like two months of being in college and if you just plant those seeds at that stage because you’re on campus you’re one of them you could work the scene locally i’m pretty sure that that’s one way to like hit your wagon to someone who’s a future nba player and actually become an agent so i think you’re gonna find some super agents that come out of this like this one rule change there’s some kid who’s the next ari gold 50 100 million dollars and they’re gonna get their start by selling name image players yeah i mean that’s what a lot of people have done with music you know scooter braun started that way um what was his origin story so i i know who we have okay so if you don’t know who scooter braun is he um owned this company called ithaca holdings which i think just sold to uh a korean music label for three or four billion dollars scooter bronze most famous for yeah ethical holding just sold is he like a billionaire uh yeah probably wow to tell you ability you didn’t even know about how do you feel bro there i just want to do it there you go i feel great i love it how much did it sell for all right so he sold it to hybe which is the korean entertainment conglomerate that owns i think they they have the rights to bts which is like the biggest yeah yeah in the world or something um let’s see what’s the sale price i’ll look it up you keep talking um anyway so he sold this company he was most famous for being justin bieber’s manager but he also managed uh ariana grande and a few other people he’s only 35 36 37 very young you’ll see him in some of the music videos he was also famous because he bought big machine records based out of nashville which owned taylor swift’s rights and he bought that for only like 80 million dollars even though it made 40 a year something crazy like that and he got a start out of emory university i believe and when he was a sophomore somehow he started throwing parties and in doing so uh met jermaine dupri’s mom who owned a record label in atlanta where emery is mrs dupree it’s is that you well mrs dupree is like the head honcho of a of a meaningful like production and music and he starts working for him and he and and the dupries and he’s like doing this music thing and he’s like bringing people all the he’s bringing all the kids to college parties as a club promoter and making a cut to like a german degree party then eventually when he’s 22 he has a little bit of money save but not a lot like less than a hundred grand he finds this guy on youtube who is a little kid he’s like seven eight nine ten years old and he’s playing the guitar and he’s playing a guitar and he’s singing and scooter goes this kid’s gonna be a home run he’s gonna be a winner so he flies his kid and his mom down to uh atlanta and he goes i want to manage you and the kid’s like i don’t what do you mean management i don’t have a career he goes you’re gonna be a superstar one day and that was justin bieber and he uh so he discovered the biebs and he made tens of millions of dollars off that and then recently made a billion plus from selling his company what did he sell it for one one billion so it was 1.05 billion so so just two quick numbers so they sold for 1.05 billion and he had acquired that big machine like label thing with taylor swift’s rights for 300 million oh okay so my numbers are off um rich whatever um and so and let’s just go through some more numbers braun now holds a one percent stake in hybe which is worth 123 million itself the bts members each have 18 million in so there’s seven of them um and then bieber and ariana grande have 14.3 million dollars worth of worth of a stake in hybe uh high went public at 1.5 billion and it’s doubled in the last few months i would have bought this if i knew that the company behind bts had gone public uh but i was not i was not awake at the wheel here so kind of interesting i don’t even know how we got on it but but he got started in in college promoting bieber and he also you know who his second act was uh asher roth the guy who and he and at the time he was like this asher roth guy is going to be with the biggest he’s going to be the biggest yeah yeah but ashley roth came to him after doing i love college and he’s like you know i kind of like don’t really want to be famous like i don’t want to like be in the limelight i just want to be quiet and so he bailed on him respect so okay we should do we should do more on scooter and i’ve been also there’s a billionaire behind bts this guy like he’s amazing what his name is i’m gonna do a deep dive on this guy uh banksy hook uh so we’ll we’ll we’ll go on to this guy let me tell you another story are you gonna reference one thing by the way just one regret i have is that i did not hustle in college i i had like very small small like tiny schemes like i was a schemer i’ve always been a skeemer but i was such a goldfish guppy schemer back then i was trying to like find a way to win the monopoly game at mcdonald’s and i was trying to like you know get into the easiest classes i was thinking small and with my buddies and we started like a sushi restaurant thing but like had i now that i think about it college this four-year playground with a whole bunch of potential co-founders all around you with a whole bunch of potential customers all around you with nothing but free time and nothing but energy and no mortgage no nothing it’s all paid for it’s a giant summer camp damn that’s that was the time to take some shots take some experiments so if you’re listening to this or you know something so send them this clip it’s also the time to get drunk hook up with girls hook up with dudes try on different hats and explore yourself you don’t have to have the pressure to like make money i’m not saying become successful i’m saying take some shots hustle a little bit and that doesn’t mean don’t party that means um the way i prioritize things was was just dumb which was like i don’t know sleep number one class number two friends number three you know it’s like i thought i thought college was about the classes and college is obviously not almost almost not about the classes in any any shape or form but it but the illusion is that it’s about classes in a little bit i want to talk about the fat fire thing that i mentioned the other day and you kind of said something to me but right now or do you wanna talk about that now you wanna talk about some mug shot [ ] i got one other little quick quick college hustle uh idea there’s another rule change to be aware of this rule change came from angellist angelus made it where it’s now very easy for anybody who does any professional investors anybody like me or you who invests millions of dollars a year into startups we can now make it’s very trivially easy to create a scout program to have anybody become a scout for our program which all that means is you bring a great deal to me if i invest you get a piece of the upside so you get to free free roll into investments and you get to network with real investors and you get to be basically hunting startups for fun i was doing this but back back when i was i think i’ve talked about before the first angel investment i ever did i did as a scout i found a deal i diligenced it i thought it was a great deal i pitched that deal to somebody who had money and they were like great i’ll give you a piece of the upside and um and there was no like you know i was like we have to figure out our own paperwork for that well you know it wasn’t like a easy one-click button like angeles has now made it well they’ve had this i’ve used this for my thing on the back end but splitting deal by deal carry wasn’t easy for funds or rolling funds before i think for sbvs it might have been but now it’s easy for everybody so i so if you’re interested in investing the game has changed here’s what i would do my quick 30 seconds of what i would do if i was somebody who didn’t have the money to invest in startups but i love the idea of startup investing i would contact my four favorite investors maybe it’s you know me and three other people great me me and me so your four favorite investors the top four investors shawn and sean i got four email addresses so here’s what you do you send an email and you say you don’t say hey can i work for you you say hey every week uh hey i love startups i am a junkie i’m always looking for for interesting startups that are on the come up uh you know i’m a developer so i know about that or i’m into music so i’m watching the music scene or whatever right you figure out what your what your angle is and then you just say i’m gonna send you three interesting startups a week you don’t you don’t have to reply but if anything catches your eye or you think it’s either really stupid or really awesome i love a one line reply and you just start sending that for three weeks straight and if i don’t reply after three weeks you ditch me and you figure out somebody else but if you do this you’ll walk you’ll do two things it’ll be fun because it’s fun to just check out startups and play that game a fantasy investor but b you’ll actually walk away within a year you’ll have a portfolio of startups that you have equity in that you sourced that due diligence and that you pitched and that that’s like a great way to break into this industry so i think angel’s just made it way easier to break in i just wanted to put that out as a psa for people yeah and just go ahead drop your email yeah sean seanpuri.com um all right so a minute ago you said something that was actually really brilliant and it was about the ncaa stuff and what you would do is you would find the violations and go to ncaa and or go to uh like you know university alabama and be like hey this your quarterback is actually breaking the rules here the the fines are x y and z uh a buy our software for why uh way easier sell than buy our software it’s hey you have a problem here it is if you if you don’t wanna have this problem in the future we obviously we do it look i did it for you already so there’s this remember earlier a month ago i mentioned the business of mugshots correct that’s right you told me about mugshots.com i think it was yeah and so i went and did a bunch of research on these businesses there’s a whole ecosystem of this so i’m going to name a bunch of them so um it’s let’s see where are they okay so um mugshots.com gets at least 600 000 visitors a month bustedmugshots.com 666 000 visitors a month five find mugshots.com seventy two thousand visitors listed mug chats that’s just ugly people ugly mudshots is that what that is i don’t know the same thing i think it’s the same it busted like in jail not like your face is busted arrest.org 4.35 million truthfinder.com 9.1 million and then be ver been verified 23 million visits and so these are all centered around mugshots and criminal records now you want to hear how these guys make money so what they do is and and here’s a a story so there’s this guy matt creed in kansas city and he started this company called blabbermouth in 2013 and what he would do is he would post names and addresses and mugshots of local people who had already been arrested then he would mail them all letters and say we have already been blabbing to the world about your release from jail and we want to make you aware of our services as we kind of have a big mouth and for 200 we will remove all the information from our website and they would send that to people and that is exactly what mugshots.com does that’s what arrest.com does that’s what busted org.com it’s free search pay to be removed from the database scrubbed from the from from their search not only that there’s a whole bunch of removal services so there’s remove slander.com removearrest.org or racemugshot.com who charge one thousand to five thousand dollars to actually just do this to all the to all the companies i imagine what they do is they just charge you five grand and then they go and pay all the websites each like 50 bucks like they just have some affiliate deal and they just take a little bit of profit there’s probably some rule there’s probably some dmca type rule where if i request to be taken out and you have to take me down that’s probably what it is that’s my guess i don’t know if that’s right but i feel like they may not have to pay anything it’s just going and filing the claim so in in vast in the vast majority of states posting photos online of uh these mug shots is totally legal okay so you you can’t you you really can’t get a it’s not a big deal to post them it’s public record where the gray area is is that the websites uh that populate them they put the mug shots on there and then they turn around like and charge individuals money to remove them um then now a lot of these guys who run these websites like microsoft.com they the authorities are trying to look for anything little that they do wrong or anything that it didn’t matter how small but they wanted to do something wrong like for example like embezzle a little bit of money which i i think that there’s like a try figuring out if someone is embezzled like you could probably catch that mistake it’s like if they don’t file their taxes correctly you know what i mean and so the founders have actually been locked up for like three four five months at a time and a lot of these websites if you go and try and find we i went and researched them you try to find out who owns them it’s different domains in panama belize things like that it’s like this huge web but it’s incredibly fascinating there’s this entire ecosystem around mug shots and then mugshots removal and it’s very fascinating very interesting i think it’s horrible but interesting nonetheless tell me you’re shady without telling me you’re shady and then you post your your cayman islands uh incorporation documents or your belize you know headquarters address dan dan come on come on microphone real quick you’re a good human being i would say dan is a extremely straight edged human being from what i could tell and dan tell me this when i hear sam explain these businesses by literally my first reaction is awesome that was wow so smart how they thought of that and i think you probably or like many people have a different reaction which is sort of like geez these guys like whoever does this is kind of a scumbag tell me dan what is your reaction to this yeah i just chatted to you i i said the owners of all these companies are human garbage and so is that your reaction with sam describes these as like ugh gross or is it like like my reaction was i mean there’s lots of ways to make money in this world that just sounds like a horrible one that’s a good point okay fair enough so i i i i’m not like people i do not like this i would never do this i think these guys are pieces of [ ] and also i think it’s amazing like like i think that like do so doing what this guy matt did of like sending the letter that’s like table stakes any schemer who has ever wanted to do that like already schemer out there who’s been like 19 like that’s such this is the most this is some basic [ ] [ ] i think this is like the most basic like scam i would imagine but uh no i would never in a million years do it and i wouldn’t want to be friends with anyone who does it and yeah i still think it’s fascinating and interesting right so there’s like uh would i do it no uh do i think other people should be allowed to do it maybe yes or no if somebody does it do i consider them a piece of [ ] or do i consider them like you know it’s fair game it’s just not one it’s not for me right like uh i think those are the kind of to me that’s like the moral question question box i i get into with stuff like this but uh i don’t know i think these are very clever very smart i think they to me i’m always like wow okay yeah i wouldn’t do it but huh that’s interesting what like if you just piece it together there’s a bunch of layers one layer is oh man you can create businesses just taking public data that’s not really formalized for for kind of like consumers to like use and you could like aggregate it create a search engine on top of it you can create a product there yeah people do that with zillow people do that with many things so it’s just one generic business model type so then you say oh cool if i ever find other public things that are public record but i don’t know that there’s a main consumer consumer website for it i could build that then there’s like huh there’s some psychology why are so many people why are millions of people going to these websites what is there like is it just like a gossip thing is it that they are trying to solve some problem like they had some theft and they they wrote down some guy’s license plate they’re trying to figure out who it is oh maybe there’s a maybe there’s a consumer problem to be solved here and then there’s like the business model innovation or the business model tactic which is the same thing i was saying earlier about ncaa violations which is you don’t sell the the search you sell the removal right you sell the solution once they search and uh okay that’s interesting too so i i like i look at it as a bunch of different layers and then when i put the whole thing together i’m like yeah that’s kind of crappy but like as individual layers it’s pretty fascinating to me it’s fascinating you want to talk about porn yeah let’s do it you saw this thing i wrote down yeah all right so i saw this company that’s in yc right now and i don’t know how did you wait first of all how do you see all this interesting stuff that’s like saying you know how how do you pull off that shirt man i don’t know you just do it you don’t even think about it uh this case this was on hacker news it was a it was posted as a show hn so i check out hacker news when i go to hacker news i typically will go to the show tab because i find that to be more interesting than the news and uh and then i think in this case ben sent this to me yesterday when we were talking about something that we were just bullshitting about something else related and then he’s like oh yeah there’s another company like this that’s kind of interesting he was laughing at it and i was like no i actually think that’s like a legit idea he’s like what do you mean i was like well i think these taboo ideas so in this case this is a company that helps people who are addicted to porn fight their addiction so it’s a great treatment so it’s like alcoholics anonymous for people who are are uh compulsive with porn and i’ll get you addicted to this app so he sent it to me as a joke like um dude look at this and i was sort of i bet that’s actually a big problem i bet there’s a lot of people who have this problem and i bet there’s kind of nothing there’s no real legit company that’s occupying that space why not why why wouldn’t there be something that occupies a space that helps a lot of people and so i started looking into it so they have about a hundred thousand members of their community they say i don’t know if that means just registered people explain the product i’m explaining product so the it’s an overall company that’s supposed to help you overcome a digital addiction so it wasn’t just for porn but they started out with a few different products so they had the first one they had was called detox and all it was is basically it was an app that would just like get you off your phone for a period of time it would kind of like lock you off your phone and just tell you don’t use your phone for the next four hours you’re detoxing okay cool and by the way i’ve i’ve wanted to do this myself i kind of made a rule for myself one hour a day i’m just gonna lose my phone i i don’t need my phone every hour of the day um the next one they created was socialx that’s your personal role that’s my personal yeah i didn’t know about this app but i just i just put my phone in one different room and i just leave it for an hour um then there’s social dude [Music] yeah that’s a lot for me i was constant on my phone dude me too and so what i do is i just uh i don’t i yeah i only use it from nine a.m to six work hours and then i just leave it oh my god what do you do for fun um well so i’m trying so i mean i i i hear your killer in your night times what do you do i do have it on me sometimes i just use airplane mode all the time so you just can’t contact me like i just won’t see any messages what do you just use it as a clock or uh like if i were working out i’ll use headphones or music right okay but that’s it wow so after 6 p.m if i text you you’re just not gonna get it or like you get an instagram comment or something you just don’t look at it no i don’t look at instagram comment no no of course not no uh if you called me if you called me i would probably see your number and pick up but if it’s anyone else i’m not like if you’re outside the circle yeah i’m not gonna talk to you well good for you man that’s that’s really good i think that’s i think you’re saying it like it’s a normal thing and and when you say it all out it sounds perfectly reasonable i think like less than one percent of people well let me tell you this this quick story i heard about an earl nightingale you know what earl nightingale is no what’s that so he’s this uh he was around in the 60s probably the 40s and 50s actually and he was a radio host and he would tell interesting stories but he’s also kind of business-minded so a lot of like he was like the tony robbins of the day and he told the story about how he um went to a farmer’s house one time and this was right when phones just got created and he was at this farmer’s house i forget what he was talking to him about but the farmer’s phone was rigging and it was going off and going off and earl was just kind of looking at the farmer and the farmer just kept looking at him having a normal conversation and then the phone went away and then it started ringing again and kept going and earl finally goes hey you know mister like your phone’s been going off aren’t you gonna answer that and he goes why would i answer that he goes well someone’s calling you but he goes sir i installed this phone in in here for my convenience not their convenience and i don’t feel like answering it right and that’s now how i ch my opinion now toward my phone is is like no this is here for me not for anyone else i uh i similarly i picked up a phrase like that that i’ll share that i’ve been i’ve been like kind of playing with i don’t know if i’m like fully adopting this because i feel like a dick when i use it but my brother-in-law was talking i was talking to him the other day and he’s uh he’s he’s a successful guy in business and he was like he was talking about um i was asking about like a tax accountant and i was like yeah my tax accountant’s saying this and i’m saying this he goes i was like how do you do it he was telling me how he runs his relationship with his tax account i was like oh wow that’s kind of strange uh like why do you do it that way or like don’t they ask or don’t they don’t they like want you to do xyz and he’s like are they paying me or am i paying them and i was like you’re paying them he goes okay so then we’re gonna like if i’m paying you then we’re gonna do this a certain way and if you’re paying me we’re to do it a certain way he goes so many times you see people who pay someone for a service and then cater to the other person as if they’re being paid by them and i started to see this at first you said i just kind of laughed it off i do i’m not fixing this i’m paying this woman to do it right i think i even said this to dan the other day i was like uh dan was talking something about like uh the schedule this of this of like our recordings or whatever he’s like oh it’s getting real late you know because you guys are always like kind of last minute and all their deadlines and i i just had to kind of say it i was like i feel like a dick saying this but honestly like it’s this is again this is the situation dan are you paying me to record this or am i paying you to edit this thing right which way does it go because right now you’re telling me how i need to do it but i pay you to put this podcast out right so like again it feels like a total [ ] thing to say in a mentality but man it’s like been very effective i’ve used this like 10 or 15 times the last two months of just reminding myself what is the arrangement here oh person from the bank is calling me hold on wait a minute do you do you do i work for you or you work for me hold on which way does this go okay yeah yeah all right now i remember let’s do it this way instead uh and like fights my kind of like just nice guy get pushed over instincts all right anyways back to this uh app real quick so they have uh the main app the one i think that’s blowing up for them is called blocker x and basically you just you go on your phone and you basically set it to disable your ability to go to adult sites maybe on some timer or maybe just like permanently i don’t know what’s like a self-blocking thing and blocking these sites is actually not that easy um and so you want to be able to block this without blocking other sites accidentally and without letting you get through and so you and so they basically have this combination of things between like a community of people like peers like alcoholics anonymous like here’s a bunch of other people also trying to improve themselves this way here’s a tool a blocker here’s like gamification a streak or uh like points you’re getting for continuing on and i just thought this was kind of interesting like is there a modern day aaa like if people are right that social media is the new smoking right that um that that all this like kind of like overload of technology overload of digital news and information and social media is making us unhappy and lonely then isn’t somebody going to build the like aaa for that like that kind of makes sense to me even though on the surface it sounds like a weird idea what are you so i’m trying to yeah i i think this is great but let me put some stuff in perspective so i actually use a site like this i don’t use it for porn but i use it for uh sure facebook and twitter and things like that and so i wish i could share my screen right now but if i go to twitter right now it says shouldn’t you be busy working and i use this thing called stay focused stay focused is a google chrome extension yeah it’s a google chrome extension i love it and i just sent it to you according to stay focused uh the cool thing about doing research on chrome extensions is they tell you roughly how many users they have so they have roughly 600 000 users but the biggest person in this space who haven’t done a significant amount of research is uh research for they have uh it’s called it’s called a block site the thing i sent you it’s read out how many users that has block site it says a million plus users crazy right right so that’s pretty good that shows there is a lot of demand because chrome extensions are not like mainstream or like that easy to like and you know so so if if a chromecast has a million users that is a strong validation of demand it’s huge and so when i look at what these guys are doing it’s kind of interesting so what’s it called again i got to pull it up uh how do you pronounce it altmana and mana their name is not the best admonish so i’m looking at what they’re doing it’s basically it starts with a a chrome esque extension business and then offers more features to get you well i think theirs is a mobile app i think that’s i think it’s the same as what you’re talking about but with the mobile app as far as like their go to market and you can and i think that’s actually your android i actually think that’s a brilliant way to spin a thing that’s already been around yeah and to spin it a little bit differently and i’m on board with this i think this is great so the way the way we were talking about um chrome extensions if you go to the chrome extension store you can see how many downloads it has so google play does the same thing so if you click the google play button you scroll down to the bottom of any google any goo any app on android you’ll see installs and this says it’ll say you know either like less than ten thousand a hundred thousand if in this case five hundred thousand and then it’ll say a million this one’s at one million plus so you know it’s between one and i think ten million is the next cut off so it’s somewhere between one and ten million installs on android which again that’s no [ __ ] joke i should invest in this this is a good idea and i actually just researched them so they used to be called this thing called fun switch technologies when i heard that name fun switch i was like i have a feeling that they started exactly how i thought and i went to the fun switches uh fun switches uh linkedin and it said uh mobile first solution aimed at the uh uh uh getting people sorry helping millennials overcome digital addictions and helping mental health uh sorry i’m just reading this as a go are aimed at using the latest techniques and mental help to assist people suffering from those digital addictions basically it was a chrome-esque plug-in and they just spun it to be this porn thing because they saw that’s the big market to be in so i think it’s really cool i have a feeling that’s what happened i’m just doing all this research like as we’re talking but kind of interesting okay let’s do chrome all right so i had this idea while i was laying in bed this morning so my my trainer has me do this exercise you go what is it called it goes um kegel exercise it’s a kegel for my brain uh basically it’s a quick like two minute thing you do you do in the morning which is called the events of the day go my way you just sort of imagine your day going the way you want and um and it’s very simple and and and we do the same thing at night as a revision you reimagine something some part of your day that didn’t go the way you want and you just re you don’t even try to correct it and self-help and ask why what’s wrong with you why am i such an idiot you just reimagine it going good and then you go to sleep um and this is like such a lightweight mental hack but anyways the um i was doing it this morning and i was imagining this podcast going great i’m imagining you saying that is a great idea uh and this is what came to my mind so then the idea came which is how crazy is that i imagine you saying this is a great idea i had a great idea came to my brain within like 20 seconds so here’s the idea a chrome extension that pays you for the sites you go to okay let’s start there why would a chrome extension pay you to go to a website well websites want traffic right that’s what most ads are so a website i say i have an ecommerce store i know that a visitor on average the right visitor is worth you know somewhere between three and five dollars let’s say um just based on the conversion rate and the average order value and so i would be willing to pay a dollar for you to come visit my site so here’s what i’m imagining you install the the chrome extension tells you hey sean um espn will pay you 30 cents right now to go to their website um you know reddit will pay you 20 cents uh that you know that pet store that you buy from they’ll pay you a dollar to come to the site um just click the button go there and you just have to be there for for 30 60 seconds or whatever and then you’ll unlock the bounty and it’ll just go into your little piggy bank right here in the browser it’s a little piggy bank icon oh okay so so i believe that on one side you could get brands to basically buy traffic through a chrome extension and the money goes to the user um either split with the with the chrome extension or just all to the user in this case and the user goes there and the user says ah easy i just have to go to the site i don’t have to buy anything no problem but you go to the site you basically have bought their attention you bought their impression it you know they may see something new they may convert they may check out some new product that you have because that’s what you drove them to now how does this uh how does this end up paying off well two two things two interesting things happen here the first let’s say my wife is a big shopper okay traffic is going to be worth a lot more than my traffic because i’m a shitty i barely shop i just go look at information i steal and i run away so i might get low low bids she might get high bids how does it know how what to bid well it’s a chrome extension it sits in my browser it sees how much i spend it sees what sites i go to it creates a value score for me and so it knows what i’m worth the second thing is when i go to let’s say now let’s so let’s so so that’s the first part uh it’s like page rank but for users users are worth some different amount based on the sites they go to how much they spend um it’s like unbundling the facebook ad system so now the second thing is let’s say now i’m a news website and news websites always wanted this like micro payment thing like they want me to subscribe 10.99 a month or whatever but i don’t want to do that but i would pay like four cents for an article right i would pay two cents and this idea of like ultra micro payments has been around for a while people want to do this with crypto people want to do this with different things but if you first did the piggy bank thing by letting users get paid then you could go to publishers and say hey pay wall this for like two cents using that same plugin we have six million members who um who get paid daily using our thing their piggy bank has money in it all they don’t have to put in a credit card ever they can just do like tiny micro payments on their favorite sites when they go there so i think you could build a pretty i think you would change the way the internet works if you if you did this all right tell me about my idea okay so this is not i don’t think new right like the idea of like making a little bit of income from the ad arbitrage and and incentivizing you to go to a uh i mean this is maybe what would i use today if i wanted to get paid if i wanted to open up my browser and see some offers to make money to go to some of some websites that want me to go there um you know the penny holder the the kind of blog website yeah they made 80 million a year doing something like that and so uh kind of like that so they would they would show all the latest deals and all the latest like free stuff that you can get and they would make a little bit of money by sending people there and making that affiliate but you have to go to the penny order right yeah so different but same um similar but different correct um so there’s this guy named dan that one of our friends invested in and told me all about it and he he’s like ugh this is this is a scam now that’s my friend’s words sorry dad don’t hold me to this but i sent you a link to it it’s called current mobile.us and that’s a similar promise to what this guy made was basically you’re going to get paid for browsing the internet passively and i can i imagine that it was something like we will pay you that that ad arbitrage and i’m almost positive that it was like the number one app in the uh itunes store for like a very short amount of time but number one nonetheless um and i don’t know what happened to this but i remember he laughed raised 40 million dollars but looks like you’re thinking that this isn’t doing gangbusters anymore he raised i think he raised 40 million dollars through uh uh what’s it called an ico uh okay yeah so he’s got current token yeah so there’s like a bunch of like right stuff around here that it doesn’t make sense to me so brave brave browser also has like a similar idea the brave browser has bat which is the basic attention token so you earn it by going to sites or whatever and then you pay you know you’re basically like advertisers can buy the token to get your attention uh you can you can like pay the token to like see websites or whatever but yeah you’ll be using a great browser which is a great browser if you’re doing well yeah break browser has like 10 million users or something like that so then yeah this is a great idea you’re just suggesting it on chrome yeah i think that’s a wonderful idea yes right all right my my imagination has my imaginal act has turned into fact as they say i think that’s a great idea right i think it’s a great idea that’s why i said it i thought i was excited about it i think i think that somebody could do this it’s like honey right like honey is the chrome extension that basically says cool you just go around shopping on the internet we’ll tell you when we could save you money because there’s like a discount or a coupon and then they started shoving in like kind of some ad slots i was like hey this person’s not even necessarily looking at this product but you could make them an offer here um and so i think that’s i think that it’s honey but it’s for your foot traffic basically what is your foot traffic worth it’s worth something that’s a great way to and that’s a great way to phrase it facebook catches all the value google catches all the value of your foot you get none of that value and so what i think is that if you could opt in and i’ll get paid for my foot traffic i’d like to see what my foot traffic is worth you put the chrome extension in you start getting offers you start earning a piggy bank and then that can be used to just either you take the money out or you can pay for things on the websites you go to and i know that websites will pay for the right foot traffic if it performs and i see no reason why this wouldn’t perform all right let’s wrap dan tell us how we did how was this episode episode was good i liked all the ideas give you a 9 out of 10. all right solid i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like