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 this is awesome ben texted me or like slacked me while we were doing this and he goes steph’s been uh spitting fire for the last 50 minutes so this is badass about to see my first a million got to the safe and it’s filling up got to the bank it’s not big what’s going on um what’s up good how are you i’m good all right you’re back shawn is on a family vacation and you are the sub and i think it’s a good sub so you sent me this document that we’re gonna we’re gonna go through a ton of stuff there’s so much stuff on here how uh are you is this like a list that you’ve been keeping for months or is this just you made this just for this this is part of a list i’ve been keeping for months i uh i keep this list in my evernote that just every time i see a new idea whether it’s from like a newsletter or something you guys talk about on my first million that i want to respond to i just have a running list so this is probably like a quarter of that bigger list what this is 15 pages how many words like just what we have here is like 10 000 words we should share this i mean at least parts of it because we’re not gonna get through all of this this is amazing i if i was you i wouldn’t share this i would charge people for it this is good i mean there’s definitely things that i’m excluding from here you know you don’t share the ones that you actually want to build you uh so you told me one time that you want to become a billionaire i think i want to we’ll see if that actually happened well i said who cares if it happens or not but you said that’s what you wanted do you um what are you going to do to become that i mean i feel like if i ever become a billionaire we’re going to talk hopefully about tyler perry later it has to come from building something on my own i need to have equity in something like you don’t become a billionaire from working for a company and buying etfs well there’s a few examples but the likelihood of becoming a billionaire is slim to none the likelihood become of becoming a billionaire by being an early employee somewhere is much slimmer of that subset but it’s possible it’s definitely possible um should we talk about these companies of one which i feel like are kind of anti-not anti-billionaire but a different approach to building yes and i actually don’t think they’re anti-billionaire i think you can become a billionaire this way but just so people know so this is steph smith steph you work at the hustle you basically helped me start trends and you ran it for a while and you still kind of run it but you also do like a bunch of other different projects and you have this gum road book called doing content right is that right yep and it made like 150 g’s in the first year or something like that right yep exactly and you are the type so we we aren’t like really partners anymore but i felt like when we when you ran trends i viewed it a little bit like a partnership so i’ve worked with you pretty closely for a while now now that now we’re just friends but uh is that out is that all accurate what am i missing i think so yeah i uh i build stuff on the side for fun taught myself to code a couple years ago and now i also have a podcast so if people like what they hear hear um it’s called the you don’t learn in school that’s my little plug and you are very you and i are similar in that there’s like it’s kind of like sean like there’s like this this like overlap of things that are very very similar between us but there’s things that are very different in that what you’re different about is that you sweat the details uh like crazy and you’re pretty technical in the sense of like i really think it’s just you’re just smarter than me like you could just figure things out like you can just you can just figure certain things out so your research is actually typically more like in-depth and technical than my research and i like that thanks i mean i don’t know if i actually saw the details if anyone knows me closely like if you’d have asked cal he’d be like no she’s like a mess so i appreciate that i come off that way so let’s talk about companies of one so you have a list of like ten or seven companies that are run by one person that are shockingly big let’s go through some of them and uh talk about them yeah so i think you called out two before so i’m gonna just call out those two quickly you called up built with before which is the site that basically can tell what a site is built with is it built with wordpress or squarespace or what plugins is it is the site using and that one at the time when you found it was i think doing around 14 million and then you’ve also covered nomad list and remote okay by peter levels and those two i think together are doing around a million a year and those two i think are both completely solo founders i know peter certainly is um but there are a couple others so have you heard of ugg monk well hold on so built with so people know built with is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here but not the but one of built with is like it’s like a i think they have a plug-in as well but it’s a website you go to builtwith.com you enter in the hustle.co let’s say you want to you you see something on our website that you like and you want to copy and you’re like how’d they build that what plugins do they use what whatever you use built with and they make money because uh they like what do they do i think they like sell people’s data or something i’m not sure actually let me look this up because i know they get a crazy amount of traffic look they’ve got plans on their site so they’ve got a basic plan i don’t know what you get with it but it’s 295 dollars oh i know what you get you get basically i believe you sign up and it tells you uh people’s so it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their website and what type of plug-ins and i think you pay money and it’ll say we have the emails or contact information of all types of people who use blank plug-in and you sell a plug-in that is complementary to that therefore pay money and you can now target them and advertise against them or things like yeah they charge so their basic plan is three thousand dollars a year their pro is five thousand their team is 10 000. there’s a cool little trick they have on their pricing page if you go to it and you hover over they have like technologies keywords and they have these little gifs that they’re actually like showing what you would get with the product i’ve never actually seen that before so that’s a cute little hack and it’s built by basically one guy in australia um all right so what are some of the other companies okay so i was gonna call it ugg monk so this one’s not as big i actually don’t know exactly how much they’re making but it’s a really simple e-commerce store they started just selling really nice t-shirts which sounds like okay like there’s enough t-shirt stores out there um but this guy jeff sheldon he focused on just really high quality shirts and then now he’s moved into almost like productivity stuff if you are you in the doc i’m looking at ugg monk so when i go to ugg monk i see like a pen holder and i see um like a a to-do list like a it’s like cute well-designed like pen holders which doesn’t sound neat but it honestly it looks pretty sick yeah it looks surprisingly sick if you go to let me if you click in the dock where it says look at this if you click that that is his setup and he he’s like one of those builders who i think has built a little twitter following as well and he just has this beautiful desk set up which is like the perfect ad and i oh i’ve seen this it looks awesome i never thought i’d want to go and buy like a 100 to-do list but i i think i’m gonna buy one yeah i it’s just like cute easy to use like mid-century modern stuff yeah i’m on board how much revenue does he do i’m not sure but i’m pretty sure he does several million a year he gets over 200 000 page views a month um and he’s been going at this for several years so i know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago and he’s grown a lot since then so i’d probably say a couple wow that’s crazy all right that’s a that’s a good find it’s just one guy he’s the only employee i think so i mean he’s he he probably has some staff now that he’s been growing but i i’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a big team all right what’s next all right card is actually one guy he might have contractors but card c-a-r-r-d i’ve built sites with card people probably recognize card or they’ve almost certainly been on a site built by card um and it’s built by this guy aj and it’s doing one million dollars a year ar i think he actually just raised money now so i think he’s kind of going for did he really just raise money i would love to invest in this yeah he raised money earlier this year he was like big in the indie hacker community and then i think he posted on indie hackers this year like look i’m i’m going to raise money i’m going to you know really go for it but he it’s kind of crazy 2.5 million sites have been built on card and yeah like a million ar so it’s a free platform for building simply uh for building simple fully responsive one-page websites that can do anything um yes i actually think so there there was this company called um you remember about me no what is that about dot me so go to about dot me at that’s the url um you don’t remember that you’re i’m just a little bit older than you which is like then that few years probably makes a difference because about.me when i was just getting started was considered like the preeminent builder in this space and they made it was a one page website where you can explain stuff about you and it was started by this guy named tony conrad i believe his name is and he’s this cool looking dude who uh is also an investor now and he sold it after only two years to aol for like 40 million dollars and it was bootstrapped you see about.me you see how it’s like basically the same thing yeah it reminds me of you’ve heard of unsplash right i love unsplash so or sorry i’m not thinking of unsplash i’m talking about unfold unfold is this app that basically for instagrammers it adds different like it allows you to kind of piece together pictures for your instagram story but they also started these like one pagers um where basically because all these instagramers they’re like oh i need my link in bio link in bio is also a site like that but unfold um was sold to squarespace i think like last year or something i don’t know for how much though man i think that these one page website builders are actually really cool so there’s this other business i almost invested in i think it’s called mediakits.com or dot co i believe it’s just called media kit and all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could create your media kick kit and send it to people so and uh whether you’re the hustle or you’re just an instagram person you just had this like uh the hustle.com media kit or like you know um stephsmith.commediakit and it was that your media kit was on there and that sounds like not that important but it’s kind of like docsen so docsen if you don’t know what docsen is docsen is basically all it is is powerpoint in the cloud but email gated so you have to enter your email and then you get all types of information so if you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you want to send it to investors so you know who has it and uh and who views it and how long they’ve used it and it’s basically that um so anyway card is pretty badass that actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here i think yeah and i mean he actually runs card as a subscription business so that’s 1 million ar and i think it’s probably way past that today i think you’re going to like the next one though go to uh this nextepisode.net i think it’s actually next episode.net it’s the it’s such an old site i think the guy’s been running it for 15 years um and if you just open it up you’ll you’ll get a sense of how the ui hasn’t caught up to where we are today but it’s amazing because this guy’s been running it for 15 years guess how much traffic this thing gets i’m looking at it on similar web this is crazy so what is this called so next dash episode.net what is this yeah it’s a site where basically like there’s no way i would think that a site like this would still exist but people use it um that basically helps you track your tv shows and it’s a little bit of a community so i think i’ve never used it but you know people watch the bachelor they hang out on this site and they find other people who watch the bachelor and they talk about it um but it’s kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets this is awesome and so here’s why i know this is a big business so if you go to similar web and you look at the traffic the estimated monthly traffic is 3.6 million uniques a month that’s decent that’s not like the best but it’s like really good particularly for one person but if you go to traffic source it says that 80 is coming from direct traffic which basically means that there’s a lot of people that are just typing in this url and going there on a consistent basis and if you do that you probably can have a huge business and it looks like they’ve got um a premium which is only two dollars a month but uh how big is this so i don’t know exactly how big it is but he’s been running it for 15 years and i know he’s definitely i found him on hacker news one of those posts that was like hey like who’s a solopreneur who’s doing this thing on their own and he’s like i’ve worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years so what this is crazy good find i can’t wait so who what’s this person’s name do you know uh let me send you here he is i found him nico nicole yeah wow this is a good find how much revenue do you think he does on this i don’t know about today but i’m assuming like if he’s getting that many million pages and he’s been working on it for 15 years i’d say like maybe a million a year what do you think yeah i would agree with that and it’s probably mostly all profit yeah well i mean he’s literally the only one who works on it in one of the posts on hacker news he’s yeah i started for myself because i couldn’t find such a tool back in the day and um basically he’s like avoided hiring other people um because he doesn’t want to like scale through hiring um all right what else we got there’s a ton on here there’s some there’s one called hostify by a guy named riley who basically um you know has scaled that to like a million a month in a year or two um there’s some good stories from back in the day where apparently surveymonkey was doing 19 million dollars in revenue um with 12 employees so not a one-person thing but plenty of fish is another example where they were doing apparently 10 million dollars and the guy was by himself he might have even been part-time so that’s kind of a crazy story from back in the day too how did how do you know this about surveymonkey so it was posted it was actually you posted about built with a while ago i think and then i went through all of the comments of you basically you were like can anyone tell me something more efficient than that and um this guy named tripp posted yeah surveymonkey was doing 19 million with 12 employees um and you asked him if this was documented and basically someone else commented and was like yeah tripps do you want us to say this but he actually invested in surveymonkey in 2009 so he probably knows the numbers wow this is amazing i’ve heard this i’ve heard rumors about surveymonkey doing this this is crazy this is so cool so did i tell you about how i told you about craigslist right so the hustle our very first office it was this apartment it basically it looked like a town home like like a typical san francisco town home but it was zoned as business and on the bottom was this uh was a piano teacher in the middle it was like a three-story town home but they like divvied it up into apartments so the bottom one was a piano teacher the middle one was this company called nugs.net and nuggs.net sells it’s like a marketplace where you can trade uh like fish and grateful dead like cds that you recorded at their concerts and above that was craigslist and craigslist moved out and we moved in and this was in 2016 i think and which means craigslist at the time the landlord told me he goes they were making around 300 million dollars in revenue and they worked out of this little office and this office was so small it was basically a three or two bedroom apartment and he was like there’s basically like 14 people here and that was the whole company and they were so cheap craig was so cheap that the rent the rent i was paying was like 500 and i split it with my friend sieva so the rent for the whole place was probably only two thousand dollars so they’re paying two or three grand in rent for this place when they were that big and they were so cheap that in the lease apparently it said like toilet paper is provided by landlord and every once in a while uh i think his name was ishmael he would forget to uh or emanuel a man i forget it was like this old jewish guy he would forget to put the toilet paper and replenish it and they wouldn’t pay the rent they go until we get the toilet paper you’re not getting the rent and uh they additionally craig worked out his i used uh craig’s room because it had a kitchen table in one of the bedrooms that he used as his desk it was like this ugly kitchen table that was like his desk but it was really heavy and they couldn’t move it and they just left it there and that was my desk for a long time was this like weird kitchen table and that was out of the craigslist office and that’s how scrappy they were dude i love that so i mentioned peter lovells before he’s a friend of mine from bali he once tweeted about this so i don’t feel bad sharing it but he used to walk around with this like you know those bags that you get at a grocery store they’re like plastic bags that are like a dollar yeah so you’d think that some guy making like a million bucks a year all profit is gonna like upgrade his lifestyle he would carry his laptop around in one of those bags and like that’s it and you’d see him walking around in flip-flops and a t-shirt and you’d be like dude like respect because like you you make a lot of money and everyone knows that because you have that open page but he’s like walking around with like a grocery store bag as his laptop holder that’s stupid that’s very stupid it ruined your laptop um what are some what are some other smaller ones all right so i want to call it a couple these are actually uh also some people i know from bali so it’s it’s kind of cool when you live in a place like chengu because you’re just running into people just like this so one of them is this thing called banner bear so if you click on the link where it says banner bear that’s their open page so a lot of these people also create these cool open pages like uh the ones from nomad list but i wanted to show you this one because if you scroll down if you’re on the page do you see the modem the motor i can’t even say it the moto meter yeah what is this so i’m looking at basically a pic pictures of motorcycles of like nice triumph motorcycles so basically like he’s got his revenue and you can see his mrr and it’s pretty impressive he’s at around an er of 300 thousand i think he only started this you can see in some time in 2020 um but he kind of rethought the open page and he was like you know what i just i don’t want to just show my revenue i want to show people like what i want to spend this on so he loves motorcycles and he has like these different goals so like if he hits a certain mrr he like unlocks a new motorcycle um and so i thought that was just like a kind of cool cool little thing and you can see just like peter he shows all of his data like you have the number of trials per month uh his churn um obviously the the moto meter his github commit activity so i think that’s pretty cool because like i think years ago there was some people showing their like open revenue but now people are kind of like rethinking what they can share what the hell is banner bear this is so cool looking what does it do so basically i think it’s it’s basically like an api for generating images so do you know how like we use we could have used this at trends honestly remember we would run events and we’d have to like go on fiverr and like you know it would kind of it would it wasn’t very expensive but it takes some time and you’re like oh man like we should just have like an image template for all of our events and it has like a certain background a certain theme and so he’s made it possible to basically generate images based on certain inputs so um you don’t have to like go and hire a designer to do that you can like auto generate images and so some people use this for like social media right so you have like a certain theme that aligns with your brand and you’re just like adjusting like all of your blog posts to like use banner bear instead of going and hiring a designer to create an image for each one this guy’s site is beautiful he reminds me of how do you say that peter lovells guy is that is it peter yep he reminds me of that this guy looks like an artist yeah i mean i think what’s cool about all of these folks is like they do the whole stack like i guess you have to as a company is one but they do like the marketing they do the design they do um the development and what’s cool is that like because they’re not necessarily experts quote unquote in these spaces like they’re just kind of hacking it together i find they’re actually a lot more creative right so they’re like they’re not like constrained by the marketing degree that they had you know before and so peter is like another example where he’s he pretty consistently does pretty cool things on marketing or on twitter for example recently he like instead of paying 10 000 for ads he’s like i’m just giving 10 000 away to like someone who retweets this and it got like 11 000 retweets which obviously is like much more than he would have spent on ads this in this website banner bear it was launched in uh 10 of 2019 so let’s round up to be 2020. so let’s say it started in 2000 january 2020 that means it’s what two years old yep is growing pretty well does it say its growth rate i mean this could be pretty this could be a really good business yeah and and it’s just him i think he like might have hired like a part-time customer service person but yeah it’s going really well wow this is amazing how big do you think this could get i think pretty big because it’s actually like you know it’s one of those niche problems that you’re like what like a you’re going to create a product that auto generates images like who needs that but then you actually think like wow every company that has a blog has to generate all these images on mass every company that runs something on social media like i think the reason it’s working is it’s actually even though it seems like a niche problem it’s it’s a problem that most companies have wow all right you want to do you want to pick a couple more we can just call out uh one more which is have you heard of headline no what’s that how do you find how do you find all this stuff by the way well like i said i combed through some of the threads that you posted before but headline banner bear nomad list like these are all people who were nomadic and i think it’s like the indie hacker community and the nomad community overlap because they’re both kind of rebellious in a way they’re like i don’t need to live in one place or like i don’t need to raise venture capital and so i think there’s an overlap there and so yeah most of these guys are people that i used to like co-work with in bali wow okay so what’s headline so headline is super super simple app but um danny the guy who built it built it in like a couple months and within a year he sold it for seven figures so all it was is it was using ai to generate um kind of like landing page headlines or copy um and so if you look at the landing page it kind of looks like a much more complex product um but it’s actually pretty simple and um if you’ve heard of copy.ai i think there’s like similar elements to it oh hey basically on the website of headline they use my name they’re writing wait really say i just noticed that you must have seen this before i’ve never seen this this guy’s using my name i’ve never that’s so funny is he trying to tell me to use this i don’t know because i also don’t know like i said he sold this so i don’t know if he put that there if the new founders put it there um you’re wait you’re seeing you’re seeing my face and name on this website yeah totally god that’s so funny why is my face on here whatever that’s cool uh yeah well this is just like a super simple one where it’s like i love it’s like perfect example of like just being scrappy building something he exited seven figures within i think eight months which is pretty crazy um and yeah i just i think one theme is just like these people find like a niche problem that isn’t or at least seems niche they solve it has to be an existing problem that people want solved i think the thing that a lot of people do wrong when they’re trying to like do their like own little startup is they look for things that like don’t really exist but these are like perfect examples where it’s like oh of course people need sites to like house their their work of course people need like nice t-shirts and productivity stuff of course people need like landing page copy so i think that’s the like one learning for me how did this guy build this he built it in the open on twitter so he just coded it and he would like keep giving updates and then i think he launched it on product hunt like pretty classic launch strategy but i think it kind of blew up after product hunt and then sold it but it’s just built on top of that gpd3 thing yep wow all right that’s amazing wow i cannot believe it good fine um you want to try something else yeah let’s talk about just a couple of these so another thing that i did which kind of overlaps with what we talked about is just like sites that have a surprising amount of traffic so sites that you’re like wait really like there’s no way and then you look it up and you’re like wow i guess like you know 20 million people a month actually look this up so one of them i want to show you is called glitchin deals have you heard of glitching no what’s that mean okay so you know how of course e-commerce is popping off a lot of companies have e-commerce sites not all of them have fully functioning e-commerce sites so sometimes they glitch right so sometimes an airline will you know show a a flight for like 20 bucks that’s really meant to be 200 sometimes you know there will be something that’s a dollar and it’s like really supposed to be 100 it’s just like a decimal place error and this happens all the time right and apparently according to the law like if you advertise it for a certain amount like you have to sell it for that amount so there are all these sites that basically look for glitches and i found this out because i was at um my partner’s like family home for christmas last year and i remember his aunt being like hey do you want like a podcast mike and i was like i don’t like sure i don’t know like why why do you have she’s like i’ve got 30. like i just don’t have to give them away and i’m like what do you mean you have 30 and i guess she found a glitch in one of these groups and yeah like she just got 30 podcast mics that like she she got for free so free it was free in that case it was free most of the time it’s just like a crazy wild deal that the company didn’t mean to do so like i need to buy i’m trying to up my game and get that garage fridge you know i’m talking about that garage space like it’s so i can store all my meat and so i uh on here they’ve got a 25 garage fridge i need that freezer yeah and uh that’s how you know you make it when you get a garage fridge and um they have one for 50 and it looks kind of complicated to use though yeah so i have to say i’ve never actually glitched myself i think it’s one of those like rabbit holes that like the same way people go and like try to like enter sweepstakes i think it’s like a similar phenomenon but there’s a ton of people doing it so this glitch and deal site gets four million uh page views a month but it’s only been around for a year 2020 i think they must scrape them or they have at least i think it’s actually a separate glitch site but has they have a facebook group and this facebook group has 342 000 members wow guess how many people post a day in this facebook group how many 250 plus posts a day that’s today when i checked it had 262 posts and it was like it was like 11 am so i’m not that surprised because when we do giveaways for the hustle we’ll do like a t-shirt giveaway and like these websites it’s like a circular like they all like copy each other and it’s basically like midwesterny stay-at-home moms mostly and they love giveaways and like one time we’ve like we’re giving away stickers and i saw one of them post this on like a forum uh like hey there’s this newsletter called the hustle you just gotta share your referral link they’ll send you stickers i just got mine and there’s hundreds of people commenting on it like talking about different strategies that allows them to get more referrals through the hustle so they’ll get their t-shirt or their stickers or whatever people look like this demographic it’s mostly women i’ve noticed and it’s mostly like uh stay-at-home mom types they love this they love these deals they love free stuff they love it’s like it’s like a challenge for them because i remember asking his aunt like why did you do this like you don’t need 30 podcast mics and she’s like i just wanted to like i just wanted to like win almost and i think it’s so interesting that so many people are doing this because like you’re saying it’s it’s like a crazy amount of people who are like who probably don’t need this stuff but are like i’m so stoked that i got like a gas grill on clearance yeah we were giving away we were giving away like stickers that said the hustle and it’s like these ladies like they don’t care about business or tech like they just didn’t they didn’t care about our brand but they just wanted it just because it was available to get and they felt good yeah it was crazy to me what else we got okay so let’s go to nugget comfort so if you want to click on that it is it was actually something shared in the transcript a while ago i don’t even know how to explain what these are they’re basically like cool children’s pillows but they’re children’s pillows that you can basically make into like different shapes and forts and it was just crazy to think so nugget was i think started relatively recently it’s in the last year or so i think they had some mailing lists for a prior product before that but they made over four million in sales uh in a month with zero ad spend so nugget comfort was doing is doing over four million a month yes what if you go to so here’s how i know that they’re at least pretty big you go to their website so it looks like they’re based in north carolina you go to their website and you look at you click careers and you see who they’re hiring for they’re hiring a senior accountant so you know that they’re they’re counting the money counting that bread they haven’t then they need a bunch of different warehouse operators they need a production associate which means that that production associate is going to report to someone uh so you know there’s like a huge like a pretty meaningfully sized meaningful sized team here this company’s only a year old who started it i’m not sure who started it let me pull up this facebook post basically it’s called nugget comfort it’s like it looks like pillow cushions it’s like pillows but you can like build with them it’s almost like a combination of legos meets pillows yeah exactly and i don’t actually know exactly who the founder is this was shared in the facebook group looks like it might be someone called hannah fussell a former elementary school teacher um yeah so actually nugget was launched so it had a previous product that i think was not geared towards young kids um and i guess they had some kickstarter at the beginning and then ultimately i think covet hit um and they had to reposition and somehow they came up with this like children’s product which i think is just so interesting because i feel like there are certain um certain industries like pets or children that like people have just like an endless budget to spend on and so these pillows i think i think they’re like 200 bucks or something it’s only 300 it’s not a lot of money yeah it’s like they call it a pillow couch this is amazing this company this is one of the wilder things this is brilliant i totally understand it what a cute cool thing uh this is amazing all right let’s move on to public domain review we’ll do one more um this one is just relates to something you guys have talked about before about how certain ip you know is not in the public domain and then it moves into the public domain after a period of time and so this is a site that basically tracks all of that stuff i think i originally found this because apparently winnie the pooh is going into the public domain in january and so i think i found some article about that and it was on the public domain review so i think it’s public domain so what’s going to happen what’s going to happen when that when that happens what’s what type of opportunities are going to be there and what businesses do you think are going to pop up so i think so just for like background for people listening um there’s tons of obviously different books or like the bible for example that’s in the public domain people can like buy and sell you guys talked about like cool millennial bibles winnie the pooh is a book that you know was written ages ago and then in 2022 would go into the public domain so i believe i think there’s like several different um things that um are different um not patents what’s it called when something is not in the publication right yeah several different like copyrights and so you need to look into exactly what this covers versus what else exists um but you could like for example potentially like go and like take a winnie the pooh book make it modern and like resell that to um to new customers i think so for example on this website publicdomainreview.org they’ve got a store where you can buy prints like to put on the wall and it’s really sick art so you’re saying like now they can use like winnie the pooh in that art or they can like resell old winnie the pooh art or something like yeah and what i’d be interested to find out is specifically about merch i don’t know exactly if it’s just the book right like the book ip or if it actually has to do with just like the ip overall but the crazy thing about a lot of these big franchises pokemon hello kitty winnie the pooh they’ve all done over 80 billion dollars of sales in merch alone so a lot of people think like okay if you’re talking about pokemon they made a lot of money off the show it’s like no they actually didn’t make that much off the show they made a ton of money off the merch and the same thing is true for like mickey mouse or star wars that’s where all the money is made and so what i’d be interested to know and i don’t know the answer to this is whether these things moving into the public domain does that mean like i can then go sell like a winnie the pooh shirt i’m not sure do uh first of all how long does a copyright last is it 76 years i think you are going to know this better than i believe it’s 76 years but it’s pretty messed up actually when you think about it so like let’s just say that like a family invented a a person invented winnie the pooh they they die they leave it to their family so you’re telling me after i think it’s 76 years uh or it’s it’s death of the creator plus 76 years ago yeah it’s it’s from what i see now it’s death of the creator plus at least 50 years but it can be extended to 70. is it 70 i remember because it’s like the there it was like i remember the law there was a law created that did that it’s kind of it that that is going to expire why would that expire like why i guess it depends i mean you see the same thing with drugs right where you don’t want someone to be able to like capitalize on something forever and i think probably has to do with like the public benefits from something being in a free market over time yeah because of that because if i bought a piece of property and a piece of land and like wouldn’t that be weird if like on the third generation you could take back that land i guess so i wonder like yeah i wonder how they determine what things have these expiring copyrights versus what things like that that doesn’t exist i think that’s interesting i would like to learn more about that but sorry go ahead about publicdomainreview.org well it’s just another one of those sites where you’re like wow that’s one an interesting site where you can kind of browse and see like what is moving into the public domain but it’s a beautiful site it’s very fun to read yeah it also gets i mean not a crazy amount of traffic but 500 000 page views a month and so i wonder actually i didn’t notice they are selling art or like different collections i was wondering how they were monetizing but it must be through that this is awesome i love this website you want to do one more um sure do you see one that you want to do in here i mean one of the ones that we can talk about which is just like a super fun little thing it’s like an internet find is this foodtimeline.org there’s not much of a business opportunity here but i just think it’s like a fun thing to browse basically someone has gone down the internet rabbit hole and found like the first citations of when a food existed so it starts with like water and ice and then you know you get like wheat and and things like basically there’s like a bunch there’s like hundreds of different data points here and then of course it moves to like 2013 which you see like test tube burgers um but i just think this is like an awesome thing where like again i don’t know what the business opportunity is here but like if you have extra time you can create really nifty things like this online and this site this page alone there’s only like one page here gets over like 150 000 page views a month i think so i don’t know i just thought it was like a cool internet find this is awesome broccolini was only invented in it’s kind of crazy to look and see like wait a minute like i guess it makes sense because it’s fermented but like kimchi was invented in the seventh century but then like you scroll down and you’re like yeah what like what we didn’t have i don’t know like yeah like you said broccolini until 1993 or um that’s another crazy thing on here high fructose corn syrup 1967. i would have thought that was far sooner buffalo wings only 1964. how intriguing this is a really really cool website i think that the reason why i think this is cool so this woman it’s lynne oliver she launched it in 1999. the reason why this is cool is because i respect so listen lynn oliver or oliver she was born 1958 she died in 2015. she was a library and food historian and the sole author of the food timeline website so there’s this here’s a wikipedia page i just love that there’s someone who’s this weird and quirky enough to dedicate time to do this because i love people like that and people who are crazy enough to put all their energy into something like this exactly i just think like this is the coolest thing ever and whoever actually created this like thank you for for doing that i’ve actually one related business opportunity oh listen to this according to the wikipedia the site’s domain supposedly support uh expires in 2025 but as of september 2020 uh the the hue is database shows that it’s set to lapse on april 2022 because she died so she died and now it’s set to go out go out on april 2022. so there you go speaking of copyrights there you go one i guess food related opportunity have you ever looked up like healthiest fast food or like healthiest cheese or like totally do you remember that book you’re you’re not american so i don’t know if they have this in canada but it was called eat this not that yes such a good book series and i would like use it to figure out like what’s not what’s a good like if i want to eat a burger what’s the healthiest burger at a fast food place so you’re not the only one and i discovered this because i think one day i was looking up something ridiculous like healthiest cheese um and so a ton of people are searching this every single month so i think some of these numbers are old but something like healthiest cereal which we all know like cereal is not good for you um fifty thousand uh searches per month healthiest bread thirty thousand searches a month healthiest cheese twenty thousand and then there’s also a ton of search volume for things like yeah like healthiest meal at taco bell or something like that which i just love because it’s like it just shows again this problem where it’s like people want to eat healthy but they’re realistically in some cases like unable to but it also reminds me of something that uh peter lovells did with his like nomad list site which is basically i call it your listicle is my opportunity so whenever you go you made up that phrase yes i’ve been thinking about it for ages but i like basically whenever i search something and the all of the results on that page are listicles right so you look up like healthiest cheese and you get to a site and just like five it’s like a long article with like five types of cheese and you’re like oh my god like this should be easier right and there’s so many sites that have basically found things with a lot of search volume and made it easier like that’s what nomad list does he’s like you know what there’s all these like variables and you can play with them yourself i’m going to collect this data so that instead of getting a bunch of listicles when you look up like hot place in june to go traveling he’s like giving you that information so you can access it yourself right he’s basically like refining the information um and you’ve seen tons of other people do this i think like that was basically like rich barton’s strategy right when he built things like media yeah kind of but listen i i will help someone do this or if they want to partner with me i’ll do this so here’s what i’m going to do i bet you i can make a fair bit of money ten thousands of dollars total but like have a business that makes single-digit thousands of dollars you could do this in 30 days here’s what i would do here’s what i would do steph have you so we’re doing this contest called emma uh i forget what it’s called actually but people are taking our clips and they’re turning them into tick-tock videos and they’re posting them on tiktok and they’re getting tons of views so the mfm clips in a matter of like i think we only launched it seven days ago but i forget it’s less than 10 days uh in that short amount of time that hashtag has around 10 million views meaning kids have made videos that have 10 million views um on tick tock it’s crazy there’s a couple videos i think there’s one video um that has like 1.3 million views and there’s a whole bunch of other videos that have about or over a million and for sure hundreds of thousands and these guys are killing it and so the way that they did it they created like a handle called like mfm clips or like the hustle’s pod or hustlers die like they just they made these things from scratch and in literally seven days a couple of them have a million views what i would do is create a tick tock page that says craving a chicken sandwich don’t eat the popeye ones eat because it has this grams of fat they use these types of chemicals instead eat the chick-fil-a one because it has this or like craving a cereal don’t eat this eat this why and then you’d be like you want more go to this website and you create like a wire cutter style website that does this and you for sure for sure can make a really good revenue like thousands of dollars we’re talking off of affiliate websites uh an affiliate website and then eventually do brand advertising deals without a doubt i would bet that would and and that would get popular if you had the right face you need like a hip tick-tock or young-looking person to do this it would absolutely crush totally i mean i feel like just the tick-tock side of things like that’s going to trend no matter what and then there’s so much search volume for this stuff that like you build up that sustainable business over time and there’s so many queries for this so if people are actually gonna go build this i want someone to do that go to ahrefs go to the keywords explorer enter healthiest food and then if you go to matching terms it’ll basically give you this like list of terms uh that are similar so you can see like healthiest food which we already talked about but also like healthiest taco healthiest breads healthiest breakfast healthiest restaurant has the healthiest starbucks healthiest mexican food and you just like go down the line and there’s like how many there’s like hundreds of terms already just like seated there for you and what’s crazy is i was actually pretty surprised to see that the keyword difficulty for a lot of these was not very high like i would have thought if someone told me their search volume for this stuff i would have thought like oh someone’s already tackled this no no no no i’m not i just googled healthiest cereal and like pure pure wow ranks number one i can outright yeah wow exactly it’s like thrillist or like health line and you’re like someone should go and create like a site just for this and it’ll rank surprisingly quickly if you can target the right keywords this is just fantastic the um eat this is uh so eatthis.com kind of does that it’s owned by galvanized media so whatever i do is i go to these websites i scroll all the way down to see who owns the copyright galvanized media is a website that owns like a ton of different stuff they don’t eat this not that they own travelicious they own celeb well and a bunch of other stuff i would i bet you i could figure out how much money these guys make but i would imagine like in the 20 or 30 million range if i had to guess based off the website um probably a really good business wow and i mean you can start with healthiest stuff and then obviously like expand past that but that’s actually like a surprisingly well i mean i guess not surprisingly i think that’s a big niche not so niche niche wow okay let’s wrap up with two more things so okay you had something in here about chess and this guy magnus who you you’re like this chess nerd you’re a chess pop you’re a chess prodigy you go to uh chess.com and you play there you’re no you’re known for being a chess person you had some amazing stats about this guy can you tell me about this well so if people don’t follow chess magnus is the number one chess player in the world but the cool thing about magnus i read this the other day is that unlike many athletes if you want to call chess a sport he’s actually managed to already um kind of build a little business empire so what a lot of you know celebrities or athletes do is they focus on like getting paid at the time but then they really really struggle to build up any sort of equity in like a product or a brand that they’re building which as most people know the way that you you know actually accrue wealth is through equity we’ll talk about that with tyler perry he’s managed to create this guy magnus how old is he he’s not very old he’s only 31. it looks like he was like a gm by the time he was like 14 or something um wow and he’s like kind of good looking or like he’s cool looking he like it looks like he’s kind of charismatic he’s just like like there’s a story here it’s not like he’s just good at chess he’s like he seems like a like a like a like an interesting person in itself yeah he’s 31 so he’s uh he’s not old at all and yeah there’s like videos of him when he’s like 12 and they’re like filming him at i think like world championships and stuff so he was really talented really early um and now he’s only 31 he’s built up a little empire so not only does he like compete in chess still and um i think he streams on twitch and all that stuff sometimes but he also built his own little company it’s called magnus chess so if you go to see what the url is magnus chess carlson.com okay oh sorry it’s play magnus.com they get redirected um he has this plus membership i don’t know exactly what you get from it but it’s 14 a month and here’s some of the stats um his company play magnus already is a publicly traded company has 250 employees uh 4 million registered users and a market cap because it’s public of 115 million dollars already how much revenue does this make i don’t know how much it makes currently but i mean let’s look it up it’s a publicly traded company and it’s publicly traded in france i think or is it nor i actually don’t know where it’s publicly traded so it’s definitely new yeah it’s in france fra i think it’s it’s in euros uh wow this is amazing who would have thought does he own this he owns a stake in it so he owns um not you know not a ton but he still owns i think oh actually never mind he owns 85 of the business holy crap that’s amazing yeah so this guy’s this is amazing and so do you know what’s the sales so it looks like revenue um last quarter was 5 million so it’s doing around 20 million actually it’s grown a lot recently so it’s only started looks like in 2019 2020 had total revenue of 20 or sorry 8 million dollars but it’s you know last quarter was five so it’s trending towards 20 million dollars wow and that’s recurring revenue so that’s a subscription yep this is amazing and he owns 85 of this so he basically has a has a 120 or something like that million dollar net worth just off of this yeah so it looks like i’m getting a little confused there’s something called magnus chess and then there’s something called play magnus so actually i think he owns only nine percent of play magnus but then he owns something else which i think is like a streaming platform called magnus chess but either way he owns a substantial amount of of one of them magnus chess and he’s worth several million wow so we and we also actually covered chess.com chess.com uh i think it might be mostly bootstrapped and it gets something like have you seen what’s the monthly uniques of chess.com have you looked it’s super high yes i have like like 150 million i think chess.com currently has a yeah 150 million monthly uniques and i’ve heard rumors that it’s a multi-billion dollar company i mean people pay a lot for it because they’ve actually built in some pretty cool features so light chess is a competitor like chess some people like because it’s more like indie but chess.com has like if you go on there you can play and then after your game it’ll basically say like actually here all your blunders your mistakes and this is actually like exactly where you went wrong and it’s interesting because those are the things people used to pay coaches for like when i was little playing chess a coach would come over once a week and he’d like sit down and i’d go to tournaments and at tournaments you’d write down your moves and then we’d like study them after and he’d be like see that move like do you see how like eight moves later that really hurt you but chess.com has that basically like built into the software where they’re like see like that’s where you went wrong this is crazy this is awesome ben texted me or like slacked me while we were doing this and he goes steph’s been uh spitting fire for the last 50 minutes so this is badass you definitely have to come on again um and there’s like way more notes here if i was you selfishly i want to say don’t share this and we’ll do another one in the next next week or the week after ben what do you think what do you think about this i just got i was getting flack the other day for giving you guys too many a’s so uh but this one really was like an a plus i uh steph i i know you’ve got your course and it’s doing well but you should do another course on like how you do research people i i do kind of want to screenshot this doc like ben that’s what people say to us they tell me and sean that you’re saying she’s even better she’s better she’s better than you she’s better than you at uh it depends i think so you and sean are like a plus entertainers i gotta work on that and i know it’s something i gotta work on you guys are so good at like making a conversation flow all your like funny bits um and so i think like yeah i mean i can share how i do some research on give me some credit ben we do this two or three times a week steph’s doing this yeah once everything’s true it’s true you do it twice a week but it’s just and so it does like it’s a little unequal because this dock that steph has is just like chock full of really it’s amazing yeah this is me i’m down to come on anytime i was a little nervous to come back on every time i come on like you know the first time it was sometime in 2020 you guys had maybe like 5 000 listens an episode and then like it’s gone up so much since then that every time i’m like dude you guys just had like hassan minaj you’ve had garyvee and i’m like i’m just this like trans analyst or i still feel that way so yeah if people like it i’m happy to come on anytime but um if not we can also just like open source this research i don’t i don’t think i included anything here that i am going to build myself i was actually previously going to build the like healthiest x thing and then i just realized like that’s been on my to-do list for two years so probably never gonna happen i’m gonna ask sarah i’m gonna go to the other room right now tell my wife sarah i’m like hey do this she should i mean seriously this is like the reason i had it on my list is because a lot of the ideas that i’ve shared in the past i’m like yeah those are cool ideas but like can you really do it and can you do with not that much money and is it pretty likely to succeed right those are like the variables and this one like checks those boxes dude that’s awesome thank you this is badass um we’re going to wrap up if steph what’s your handle on twitter steph smith io or jeff smith io and i’m just going to plug my podcast again because i’m trying to grow it just like ben is um it’s called the you don’t learn in school all right sick thank you and that was uh you do it with calvin your uh your boyfriend your fiance uh yeah good dude uh all right thank you talk soon thanks guys about to see my first million got to the safe and it’s filling up got to the bank it’s not big enough