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 okay so a couple other things i wanted to bring up one is a pain point or kind of a business opportunity maybe this exists if it exists tell me because i want to use this service so in e-commerce most e-commerce brands are just local in their own geography so most are let’s say most u.s ecommerce brands basically just sell in the us and then it takes time and then you start selling in canada and then you start selling in europe and then you know but it takes a long time and the reason it takes a long time is because of the like international logistics so for example you want to ship something to canada they have to pay like pretty heavy duty like a import duty on the product so you sell like a 50 product they’re gonna have to pay like of import taxes in addition to the shipping so it just becomes like irresponsible to buy and still some customers do because they can only get the product from the us-based company but it really sucks and then the company has to like fill out this form that says these goods are worth 14 and then you submit that at the thing and then it’s just annoying right and so i think there should be a company so there’s these brands trying to do these e-commerce roll-ups i think you should do it differently i think some enterprising entrepreneur can basically say look i will boot up your canadian operation today i’ll boot up your uk operation your france operation yeah i’ll do europe i’ll do uk i’ll do um australia whatever right so basically say i’ll import your brand today you do no work so all you have to do is you need to ship me this product to this warehouse so here’s the address ship me your products uh i need like you know whatever your normal inventory is ship 10 to me and let’s see how i do and basically you get one giant warehouse where you’re warehousing for all the brands that you’re going to work with and you just say look uh in exchange for doing this you pay me no money i will start generating sales for you but i want a royalty i want a royalty of 10 cents or 15 cents for every dollar but what’s your point what like how’s this how is this interesting or new uh because i don’t know of a brand that that does this that exists so you know my wife has an e-commerce brand we sell in the u.s i would love to be making more money by selling in europe but the time the operational overhead to go to europe right now is just crazy so why aren’t there more people that are reaching out to e-commerce store owners and basically saying i will run your international operation and make it a low-risk no risk proposition for them in order to do so and i think there’s a lot of money to be made given the number of e-commerce brands in the us and how you could if you’re in brazil or you’re in australia or you’re in canada or wherever i think you could become the leading trusted like kind of like we’re we are your canada go to canada go to market plan for canada and we just do all the work for you this is actually quite common in media so there’s business insider india there’s business insider australia there’s business insider germany i believe um and then uh um i think i believe the wall street journal does the same thing for those same countries but it’s uh there is buzzfeed france uh huffpo france huffa australia it’s actually pretty common in media um so so is it run out of the us or they hire a team there or it’s a local team there that just licenses the brand basically when they report the revenue it’s under licensing and so i don’t exactly know what that means though because i was trying i was thinking about us and i was like man we have a lot of people who are uh english as a second language folks uh in germany so like uh i guess germany i guess is one of the most populous i don’t know i don’t know numbers i guess it’s one of the most populous places in europe it’s uh very business focused so you know the germans liked us um same with australia australians loved us and i was like yeah let’s go do it but what the [ ] do i do do i just fly over there and just start recruiting like it’s it’s crazy i would love to partner with them and then another thing is in particular china and japan and there’s actually a whole word for this there’s a word i can’t remember what the word is but there’s a word that describes why it’s difficult to break into japan um and the reason is is that once it’s hard to break into an island in particular japan and i would love to have paid someone to be like hey can you be my japanese uh consecuti like my my capo on the ground those are all mob terms because i’m into the mafia now uh can you be my my guy on the street of japan and let me know is this good am i getting the right people i think that’s incredibly interesting yeah exactly so i’m i’m not saying that this doesn’t exist i’m saying there’s still a lot of room there because i know a lot of people i have a lot of friends who are doing ecommerce right we host club ltv there’s you know 75 to 100 e-commerce brands each doing over a million dollars a year in there and every single one of them i think has the same problem which is that we’re all u.s focused and why are we us focused because it would be too much of a lift too much of a lift to go figure out how to do australia it’s too small of a pie to do manpower on or spend brain power on but if somebody in australia was like hey look this is what we do this is our business model we help you get sales here and we just take our cut and uh and so i just think that like there needs there’s more opportunity for this and that’s cool that media it sounds like there’s also an opportunity to do it in media too or being done in some way by the big players it’s being done in some way but like i remember when buzzfeed uh like were going through some troubles they had a layoff like their whole french office and i was like buzzfeed has a french office what the [ ] that’s the opposite right that’s we have a french office and then you have to do things like that when it’s like not working out i’m saying no investment no consulting fees you just take a royalty on sales and these are all incremental sales that i wasn’t getting otherwise and you take care of the whole operational headache in this case for ecommerce about like i just ship your goods to your warehouse you ship it to local customers customers don’t have to overpay customers don’t have to do import duties uh for every order they make and so i just think that there’s a opportunity in e-commerce to like be the the go-to brand for every d2c brand to partner with in each of these locales what country would you go to next um i think europe is probably the best because you want um what the you know the next wealthiest high populous place um but really it could work anywhere it’s just like the biggest market is doing it you know throughout europe now europe is made up of so many countries maybe that’s a pain in the ass if not like canada’s the no-brainer australia next japan is a good one um those would be the ones india maybe like for example i know a bunch of people in india who did this so uh my dad introduced me to these guys and i was like oh wow why is these guys their house is humongous how you know what do they do it’s like oh yeah they um they partnered with jockey underwear and they just became the jockey like seller here they have exclusive rights to sell jockey in india next guy at the dinner table what do you do oh we’re the domino’s guys in india yeah we’re the exclusive franchisee of dominoes for india um okay what does that mean well we have like indians didn’t really eat pizza before this so we’re like teaching people to eat pizza they [ ] love it turns out and so we have like you know 9 dominoes throughout india now like oh my god what is going on here it’s like you know local franchisee but for what’s this called what’s the terminal what’s the term for this i don’t know you know maybe i should have gone to business school i think it’s probably just like in brick and mortar i think it’s just called franchising um franchising was the way to sp spread geographically you know when your brick and mortar can only scale so fast uh that’s how you would do it you would franchise out and then the franchise would pay a royalty back to it back to the master franchise of the brand of their sales and they’re they’re the local operator but with e-commerce or with digital media it’s a little bit different but it kind of has the same problem so i don’t know if there’s a new word for it man i think this is wildly fascinating this is a i didn’t think it was that interesting at first but now i know what you’re talking about where uh i’ve heard so many stories of the same thing but not maybe not of india but i am the official uh importer of x y and z yeah we’re the distributor of x or like for you just think about for your business right like would could you have sold for more if you had like 250 000 you know or like 500 000 subscribers in japan and like dude i think there’s a world where i would have been where i could have made more money in those markets than i did in america because even though america has more people um i don’t think the french or i don’t think that the germans um i don’t think facebook kicks as much ass over there as it does here with instagram and everything and so i think the ad markets because i i do think that europe sorry europeans if you’re listening i do think that you guys are five or ten years behind when it comes to some technology stuff um and the ad markets suck because of facebook and google so like if you could still capture a little bit of that revenue i think you could well i don’t know if any of that’s true but what i do know is that it’s true trust me as you’re building well i think like everybody uses facebook everywhere so that’s the part i’m saying i don’t know um well sorry but what i mean is like old media still does quite well abroad okay that’s fair that’s fair uh the thing i’m just saying is like if while you were building your u.s business and all your employees are focused on your us business if somebody said i love your product i’d love to license the brand from you or or i’d love to be your partner in in the uk or in japan or in australia and i will build i will use the same playbook it’ll be under your company i just want my cut for building this for you because i’m going to private you would have done it means there was an opportunity for some entrepreneur that should have been reaching out to you saying this is a no-lose proposition you still own it you still make money off of it it’s still your name brand i just get to go i get to basically take your brand take your head take your product and localize it or distribute it here where i’m from and i know the market yeah and my product’s way easier than yours it was because it’s pixels it’s not anything real and i would have loved to have done that and i used to have people emailing me all the time and then we had a bunch of people in russia some people in mexico who would just verbatim copy our [ ] and i would say i would have to i’d find it and i’d be like you guys stop this dude you’re not allowed to do and then i’d have other people who would email me like hey can i try did you stop anyone from doing that i feel like you can’t do [ ] if somebody takes your newsletter and they just word for word transcribe it in russia and they’re like we’re called whatever how hustle are you no there’s nothing you could do the only thing that i was able to do the only thing i was able to do we had someone do this an italian we had someone do it in russian and we had someone do it in mexico uh yeah mexico and i basically shamed them i said like i’m just gonna i’m just gonna call you out and so i would tweet at them or i would email them uh i i would just would make it well known and my network was large enough that someone of someone knew them and they were embarrassed and they yeah and they stopped doing it but no i didn’t do [ ] yeah and i had people email me all the time saying hey can i do this for uh spain and i would say yeah but i don’t really know anything about you i don’t know if you’ve got good taste i don’t like i don’t i know nothing about you and i would just throw it off to the side and just kind of forget about it feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like my days off on a road less travel never looking back