Sam is out on paternity leave, so Codie Sanchez guest-hosts and brings a Notion doc full of business ideas targeted at the women’s market — areas she says men are sleeping on. They cover the trad wife movement as a market opportunity, a Hobby Lobby 2.0 retail concept, Halloween pop-up stores, werewolf romance novels, and a fertility tracking app. Then Shaan asks Codie to walk through her laundromat and small business acquisition model, explain her content strategy, and address the “business guru / grifter” criticism head-on.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Codie Sanchez (guest host)
Intro: Sam Is Out, Codie Is In [00:00:00]
Shaan: Okay, what’s up — we got Codie Sanchez in the house, guest host. Congrats to Sam, he had his baby. He’s out on daddy leave, paternity leave, whatever people call it nowadays. He is going skin-to-skin, he’s swaddling, he is diaper changing. I’m sure he’s doing all those things. Haven’t actually asked him, because you’ve got to give the man some space.
Shaan: I decided while Sam’s out I want to have guest hosts — not just a guest, but a guest host. The criteria: somebody I already know and like, a friend of the house. Number two, they’ve got to know the vibe. They listen to MFM, they know this podcast is about ideas, opportunities, and interesting businesses that not everybody knows about. So they’ve got to come prepared with that.
Shaan: So you’re taking the role of Sam, Codie. How does that feel? Are you ready to be Sam? Do I have to drink Coke Water if I co-host?
Codie: You know Sam really, really well. You’ve hung out with him in person, so I feel like you’ve got his vibe.
Shaan: Yeah, totally. Sam’s a dear friend and so is Sarah, and I think they’re going to make hell of parents, so I’m stoked. But yes, those are big, huge, giant shoes to fill — and he’s a giant man. I’ll try to do the best I can.
Shaan: For people who don’t know, give us the 30 seconds — who are you, so people understand who they’re messing with.
Codie: I run something called Contrarian Thinking, which is probably how people know me on the internet. It’s a newsletter — actually slightly inspired by Sam and our other friends at Morning Brew. It’s got a couple hundred thousand subscribers now. Hoping to get to a million by end of year. The media company overall gets about 100 million views a month, like 5 million subscribers, which is kind of cool.
Codie: I talk on the internet about boring businesses and stuff I’ve invested in for a long time. For a long time — I’m old for the internet — I was in investment banking and private equity, buying small businesses like private equity people do and then just holding them. I guess the real way to say it would be a family office. That became bigger, so we turned it into a holding company. Now we buy what I call small boring businesses and talk to other people about how to do the same.
Shaan: You sent me this Notion doc that can only be described as prolific. It’s got like 30 genuinely interesting ideas and opportunities. We’re not going to get through all of them, but I bucketed some of them into Category 1. Opportunity one — you called it: “Let’s get some estrogen in this [bleep].” Go ahead, I’ll take the floor.
Codie: I feel like, because I’m a legitimate fan of the pod, I know my fellow pod listeners. The idea was that for everybody on Twitter-brained who typically listens to this podcast, maybe there’s this segment of the market with a little bit more estrogen than you guys have that we could steal our homework from. There are all these businesses that I would love to see more of. Since people on the pod actually go out there and do things and build these businesses, we’ll give you some ideas.
Codie: I don’t know where you want to start, but I was joking with your producer and I was like, “Is this legitimate or is Codie crazy?” And she said explicitly, “I feel like you saw into my soul.” So it’s safe to say women everywhere will like these ideas — or you’ll tell us if you hate it on the internet.
Shaan: Yeah, I’ve known producer Ari for maybe three weeks now, and I’ve never seen her smiling this hard. She is so excited for this segment.
Business Idea #1: The Trad Wife Movement [00:05:00]
Shaan: I want to do the one that stood out to me right away. You said: the traditional wife movement.
Codie: I think the best business ideas start with a behavioral observation. You notice people doing something, or you notice the pendulum swinging. People used to feel one way, the popular sentiment is one thing, but you notice people starting to gravitate toward the other end of the spectrum. That’s usually where there’s a real opportunity.
Codie: So — if people don’t know the trad wife movement — I find it fascinating. How I came across it, as one does, is I was on Instagram scrolling my life away and I saw this beautiful woman in a flowy dress, no shoes, running through what I could only describe as a field that was her house. She had her little child in front of her and overlaid on top was: “Girl boss? I want to be a hobbit mama.” I was just giggling kind of ridiculously. Then I thought, well, I kind of feel that. We know from COVID everybody wanted to go be a gentleman farmer. I think you guys talked about that. This is like the 2.0 version.
Codie: What happened is Instagram realized I watched that video longer than I watch other things, so I got served up all this stuff. Before I knew it, I’m buying white pumpkins, some flowers to press onto them, and I’m hot-gluing pansies on a pumpkin. And you actually know me — I don’t have hobbies. All I do is work. I run a bunch of businesses. I’m sitting in front of the TV gluing pumpkins. That’s when I realized: I think this is going to be huge.
Codie: So I looked up TikTok views for the search “tradwife” — 187 million. That was wild. And I was like, maybe this is the counterculture movement to the Call Her Daddy era, which looks like it’s come down from the top 1 or 2 podcast to top 20 to 30 on the charts.
Shaan: First of all, do you feel threatened? I feel like you’re the girl boss. If somebody said “name five girl boss people” I’d be like, “Sophia Amoruso,” and then I’d say you. That’s kind of your public image. Do you look at this like kryptonite — like, “Oh, they’re going the other way now”?
Codie: Honestly, the whole “girl boss, boss babe, babe’s bosses money” — I want to die on the inside anytime I see any of those names. I remember once I got invited to give a speech and they were like, “We need a female CEO to speak here.” I was like, “I’m really unclear what my vagina has to do with this.” I could just feel the guy shriveling on his email.
Codie: So I’m kind of curious. I’m hugely biased, who knows if I’m right. But I’m happily married, I’m a very big family gal. I don’t talk about sex on the internet. We had these two worlds for so long — you were either single, crazy, “don’t need no man, independent” — or you were traditional, stay-at-home, protect the familial unit. Both seem sort of ridiculous. Can’t we just have people who do both? Maybe that’s just wishful thinking because the world’s too polarized for that.
Shaan: I totally agree with you. I think we simplify ourselves to make ourselves a great brand. The simpler the logo, the simpler the slogan, the less three-dimensional you are, the easier it is as a brand initially. And then of course you’re like, “No, no, no, but I have all these layers.” Anybody who’s built a brand on the internet does this — you first simplify, then you try to add depth.
Shaan: The downside of simplifying: you get a whole bunch of followers. People know you for boring businesses and kicking ass in the business world. People know Sweaty Startup for the sweaty startup thing. They don’t want to hear his stock picks.
Shaan: What I find interesting in your observation — I actually think there are three camps. There’s the Call Her Daddy camp, which is sex-positive, girls-can-be-players-too, relationship empowerment. Then you have the career empowerment camp, like “what does my vagina have to do with this.” And then you have Traditional Values. People float between all three depending on the day, the situation, the phase of life.
Shaan: I’ve definitely noticed this movement coming because my wife is exactly like this. She’s like, “I can’t say this out in the world, but I kind of like gender roles. I just want you to take out the trash, I’m down to do stuff with the kids, I just want you to always drive.” She worked really hard — she had a better career than me when we met. She was totally good at that. But she was also like, “Yeah, I really want to be a stay-at-home wife. That’s my next phase.”
Shaan: But I noticed she couldn’t really come out and say that. And anytime there’s a belief or behavior that can’t be said, there’s an opportunity. This is what Trump capitalized on when he became president — there were a bunch of thoughts in people’s heads that he was the only guy willing to say out loud.
Shaan: Grindr is a good example of this. There was a behavior happening that was not compatible with traditional dating, and Grindr came in and enabled that, spoke to that, even though it was somewhat taboo. Another example is Snapchat. Everything became public and permanent — Instagram was perfectly filtered photos publicly on display. And then Snapchat came out: make a silly face, it disappears in five seconds. The bigger one thing gets, the craving grows for the opposite.
Codie: That’s true. You can even see it with the Kardashians’ body types. They had a lot of curves going on for a minute, and that became the norm. You saw people getting fillers — huge industry. Men’s spas experienced the biggest growth increase during any historical period in the US, which is wild. We looked at investing in a couple of them and the margins were incredible.
Codie: Then what do you see now? The Kardashians are removing their Brazilian butt lifts, taking out fillers. That one — Black Chyna — got rid of everything apparently. The really really big celebrities are starting to realize the trend is changing. If you’re as committed to the cause as those ladies are, you change your whole body. That’s wild.
Shaan: That’s one way to look at it. I remember the first time I heard “BBL” I thought somebody was talking about a Brazilian basketball league. I was like, “Oh this is going to be a great conversation.” Quickly I realized I was completely out of my depth.
Shaan: So what would you do off this? You notice the trad wife movement, you see TikTok views going up, you start buying white pumpkins and hot-gluing Live Laugh Love on them — what happens next? What’s the opportunity?
Business Idea #2: Hobby Lobby 2.0 / HomeGoods for Women [00:14:00]
Codie: Okay, a couple of them I thought were fascinating. So one — I’m sure you don’t spend your weekends there, but a bunch of women do — it’s called Hobby Lobby. It’s crafting. But if you think about what the store looks like, it looks like kind of a gnarly CVS. Fluorescent lights, everything’s a little dirty, too much stuff crammed in there. It’s always packed, which astounds me. Then I was like, how big is this company? They apparently do $7 billion a year in sales. Wild.
Codie: Then TJ Maxx, HomeGoods — that whole entity is like $51 billion. HomeGoods would be like Hobby Lobby but done for you. Hobby Lobby is: here’s a bunch of ingredients, you put it together. HomeGoods is: Codie doesn’t have to paint the pumpkin, it’s already there. Live Laugh Love included.
Codie: What’s funny is, I was chatting beforehand with Ari about this and I was like, “There’s some crazy thing about women and candles.” Is your wife like this, Shaan?
Shaan: Crazy. Yeah, go on.
Codie: Don’t stand by that, wife of Shaan, by the way. She never heard one episode, don’t worry. But women — as a gross generality, I’m sure a bunch of people are going to hate this on the internet — as a gross generality, there’s something we love about a discount on like a HomeGoods item. A nice little vase, a candle. Drives men crazy. But I think there’s a play here for a HomeGoods or Hobby Lobby 2.0. All you would have to do is have any sort of retail experience, walk in there, and go, “Oh God, there’s nothing nice about this place except that it has what is required” — and just church it up. Especially because retail is so cheap right now. We own a commercial strip mall and couldn’t fill the thing.
Shaan: I have a friend who owns almost a billion dollars of real estate outright — 60/40 equity in debt. They do commercial retail. I was like, “Dude, commercial — isn’t that dead? Everything’s going online, brick-and-mortar is a graveyard. Why are you leaning in?” And he was like, “Yes in general, but the segment I went into is super resilient, nobody can touch it.” He says his number one tenant across all his shopping centers is Hobby Lobby. He goes to these giant strip mall type places that are empty, can’t fill a lease, and goes to Hobby Lobby: “Would you like to be here?” And Hobby Lobby’s like, “Yes, we’re expanding.”
Shaan: He said anything with this DIY craft thing just keeps expanding. He also explained the HomeGoods thing: there’s a treasure hunt dynamic. Women want to physically go to the store because it’s a deal-hunting experience. You can find what he called the needle in a haystack — it’s thrift shopping but in a high-end way. And he’s like, “Yeah, these are super resilient right now.”
Shaan: I’m with you — Hobby Lobby 1.0 is like half CVS, half Home Depot. It doesn’t look like Etsy or Instagram.
Codie: Exactly. And that woman — Joanna Gaines — she’s got Magnolia, the store in Texas. Have you been?
Shaan: Yeah, yeah, I’ve been. It’s fantastic. It’s Disneyland for middle-aged white women.
Codie: Damn, you went middle-aged for yourself there!
Shaan: Well, now that I’m late 30s, TikTok tells me that’s middle-aged.
Codie: What’s fascinating about Joanna Gaines is she disrupted three industries that people said were dead. Magazines — how do you get a magazine that does hundreds of millions of dollars in total revenue? She did it with an actual retail space, and she has an incredible e-commerce business. So would it just be Magnolia but scaled?
Codie: I had a friend who used to run something called West Elm Local — basically West Elm but in your local area, with cool little pop-up Etsy shops inside of West Elm from local providers. The cool part is that HomeGoods rotates its inventory almost entirely — I think it’s Tuesdays and Thursdays, I don’t know why I know that — and West Elm Local did the same thing. They’d bring in new clients because you could only get this limited edition pop-up vase for a certain period.
Codie: So I think that’d be cool. You could try like a 1.0 version. Could you do a pop-in at Hobby Lobby? Hobby Lobby is very Christian values, very American. So maybe you could talk them into like a local Christian pop-up thing that would go into the store. Or you could do a crafting pop-up around a different holiday. And then if you’re big time, like your friend with a billion bucks, I would love to go into one where it just was a better shopping experience.
Shaan: I feel like somebody should just take a house and turn the house into the shopping experience — basically stage the house, then you come in and you can push a button and get any of these things delivered to your home from there. You could even kind of franchise that concept out.
Codie: The one thing I’ll say — and I’d be curious if Ari agrees — there’s something about you go there and you get the thing. You want to leave with the candle. You want to go put the flowers in the vase immediately. If you go to TikTok and scroll for some fun times, there’s all this stuff about: if your wife is upset, just say “Let’s go to HomeGoods, honey” and get her some candles.
Shaan: That’s a great idea. Yeah, I’m going to write that down. Actually, I don’t even need to write that down — that went straight to my core memory. I’m going to do it preventatively every Friday. Just in case.
Business Idea #3: Halloween Pop-Up Stores [00:22:00]
Shaan: You had another one on here that I thought was interesting. You said you tried to buy a Halloween Express.
Codie: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Tell me why you tried to buy it — and sounds like you didn’t end up buying it, why not?
Shaan: Somebody else bought it out from under us. Basically we tried to buy it because we saw it was $600,000 for a pop-up location — three or four retail locations plus last year’s inventory. And it was right before Halloween.
Codie: So Halloween Express is like Spirit — it pops up for 60 days before Halloween, takes over a vacant space?
Shaan: Yes. Well, they can take over a vacant space, but a lot of times they pre-negotiate the contracts. Retail has so much data — they usually know that X percentage of commercial strip malls will be open at any point in time. And the wild part about Spirit and Halloween Express is that every store is 10,000 square feet. They’ll go into a Target — which might be 60 or 100,000 square feet — and only take up 10,000 feet inside the store. If you’ve ever been in one, they throw up these drapes and racks for clothing. They’re just trying to standardize the rollout quickly and cheaply.
Codie: Exactly, it’s like the IKEA of stores. We talked to a contractor who could do the buildout for us and he said those things go up in a matter of sometimes days — he said two weeks, aggressively. Two weeks and you have an entire Halloween Express up. A normal store is months, if not a year.
Shaan: We tried to buy this one kind of for fun, because I thought we could make cool content around it and maybe try to sell it. I wanted to understand the business model. But somebody else snatched it out from under us. That’s when I went down this deep rabbit hole of: oh my God, the average retail store costs millions to throw up and takes months. Spirit or Halloween Express costs maybe $1 to $50,000 to throw up and is done in days or weeks. The speed to execution has to make this a much more interesting business model.
Shaan: So how much would a business like that make? You said three locations for 600k plus inventory. What would one of those locations net at the end of Halloween season?
Codie: I think it was somewhere around a million dollars — 950 or something like that. That’s revenue, though. The margins they claimed were 30 to 45%, which seems way too high to me. I’m guessing margins are more like typical 10 to 20% on that kind of business.
Shaan: Let’s do those numbers. A million dollars revenue for the whole business, three locations. At 20% net, that’s 200k. You’re buying it for 600k including inventory. So couple years and you’ve returned your capital. But to run these things you have to buy new inventory every year — how much working capital do you think?
Codie: The interesting part about Halloween is theoretically a lot of the inventory is the same. They said about 10 to 15% of inventory is new concepts each year — the Euphoria outfit versus the witches, the lions, the wardrobes — so if the inventory was around $200,000 to $250,000, each year you’re probably paying like $50,000 to $100,000 in net-new inventory, then you can roll some over. I didn’t get to actually do it, so I don’t know the true numbers. But that seems reasonable.
Shaan: Yeah, fair enough. Okay — Halloween store, interesting. You have a couple other ones on here that I just don’t know anything about but I want to hear. You wrote the words “fantasy werewolf romance novel.” What are you talking about?
Business Idea #4: Romance Novel Publishing [00:30:00]
Codie: So we have a group where we all buy businesses together. This one lady comes on and she’s like, “I bought a romance novel book company.” They write them, distribute them, and market them — three levels to the business. I was like, that’s fascinating. She started explaining some of the titles, and she’s a funny character, and she said, “The thing is — romance werewolves. Huge category. Biggest growing category.” And I was like, okay, talk to me about that.
Codie: She basically said of all the titles she had — let’s say like 25 to 30 books — the 80/20 rule for her business was this fantasy romance category. And then because I’m a woman and I also read books, I was like, do I ever read this category? It turns out I’m a fantasy reader and some of them have werewolves. I was like, is this weird? Am I weird? Is she weird? Or is this actually a category?
Codie: I went and researched it — I think you guys have covered this before — but there’s like $1.3 billion of romance books sold a year. It’s almost a quarter to half of the entire publishing industry. The part that got me the most was realizing romance is growing hugely but with a target audience in my age range — somewhere around 18 to 45. The long-haired Fabio romance novels used to be the deal, and now this fantasy level is taking over.
Codie: If you look at the bestselling books of all time: Harry Potter, 500 million. Twilight, 160 million. 50 Shades, 150 million. They’re kind of morphing together. I can’t really see you writing a werewolf fantasy novel, Shaan — but maybe as a stunt. You know Sam wrote a romance novel once?
Shaan: Oh, I forgot about that. Or did he ghost it? Like, someone ghost-wrote it?
Codie: Basically the same sort of observation — people say “Amazon bestseller” and it means nothing. He was like, what does this actually mean? To be a bestseller you basically pick some niche category and for a day you sell like a thousand copies at 99 cents and you’ve become a bestseller. You screenshot it. It’s very gamified. So he found somebody who had done this — they were baking good money, like tens of thousands a month, selling romance novels on Amazon as just ebooks.
Codie: So he commissioned somebody to write one. It was like a boss and a secretary, and another one was like a werewolf and something. They hit the Amazon bestseller. It’s out there somewhere if you just search.
Shaan: Does he still make money on that?
Codie: No, not anymore. I think they took it down.
Shaan: That’s incredible. Wait, wait — sorry, got to clear the record. That wasn’t his book. His was called “Captivating Claw” and the cover is this really ripped guy and the secretary, and it says “A First-Time Billionaire Romance.”
Codie: Okay, there we go. That’s slightly better. I like the other story better. I think we should cut this part and just tell everybody the other one was his. I think that’s the move. But you know what’s fascinating — if you go to your bookstore and look up top charts free, this category is everywhere. The move I didn’t realize is you put one up for 99 cents or free, you get it on the top free list. And you hammer these things out. You have 47 versions of Fabio the Fantastic Werewolf. The likelihood that people will buy all of those in the series is apparently incredibly high.
Codie: A lot of these authors, if you look at them, have 50 books out. Which means somebody’s ghostwriting for them. Or like ChatGPT, by the way.
Shaan: You know the backstory of 50 Shades of Grey? Not the story itself, but how it came to be?
Codie: Uh-uh.
Shaan: So Twilight comes out, it’s great. Somebody goes on Wattpad — it’s like a fanfiction site, Canadian company — and writes a fanfiction version of Twilight. That was the early V1 of 50 Shades of Grey. People liked it. Then somebody picked it up, rebranded it as its own thing instead of Twilight fanfiction, and it became whatever the third or fifth bestselling book of all time. Started as a fanfiction blog on Wattpad.
Codie: It makes sense actually, because it’s all just copywriting in some way. Joseph Campbell talks about the hero’s journey and everybody uses that from the Bible to Star Wars to Twilight.
Codie: I actually went to a high school that was right next to the high school of the woman who wrote Twilight — Stephanie Meyer. I remember when it was going wild and I reached out to her and was like, “Hey, congratulations on your first book. I’m so excited for you. I bought a few copies to help out.” And then in retrospect I looked at her page and was like, “Oh, cool, cool, cool.” I don’t think she responded. But Stephanie, I was here for you from the beginning.
Shaan: Not really from the beginning, though. It was already successful.
Codie: That’s the bad part.
Business Idea #5: Fertility Tech and Women’s Health [00:39:00]
Shaan: Okay, let’s do one more in this segment. Pick one.
Codie: How about one that I think could be a billion dollar business but I don’t have the “how.” MFM listeners are smart — maybe you guys can figure it out.
Codie: Getting pregnant these days is hard. When we were young, it was like, yeah, if you look at that guy sideways, pregnant. As you get older it’s apparently impossible. It’s expensive — you go to the doctors, you have these different apps, you’re tracking 472 different things, and the whole experience is awful and expensive. Once a woman is ready to have a baby, we will do whatever it takes.
Codie: For instance, there’s this company called Mea. It’s got this little egg-shaped tester. A little TMI, but you pee on a stick and it tells you how fertile you are. I open the app, I’m not a total idiot, and I can’t tell what I’m tracking. There are no notifications, no gamification. And they charge you — like $50 for the sticks they send you and then $150 to $200 for this tiny little plastic egg that has to be manufactured in China. And I never saw an ad for it. All word of mouth. So I feel like the people from MFM should take this.
Shaan: Let’s brainstorm on the fly. When you started saying there’s this little egg-shaped thing, I thought — how cool would that be as a bedside replacement to your alarm clock? When it glows, hey, it’s time. You can see based on the light. That’s a little more tasteful than apps that are like “your estrogen levels are spiking right now.” Let’s just add a little bit of romance to this process that becomes very clinical. Bedside egg.
Shaan: Idea number two — have you ever heard of Flo?
Codie: Yes, it’s Flo Health — the most popular pregnancy and period tracking app in the world. Their website gets like 8 million uniques a month.
Shaan: Last I heard they were doing something like 30 million in ARR, which is pretty bonkers for a mobile app. That was like five years ago — I would not be surprised if Flo was doing like 100 million now. Let me search the revenue real quick.
Codie: And what would their valuation be? Like, Mea’s got to be — imagine you get to the point where you know the second a woman is pregnant. That’s the highest likelihood of purchasing intent you could have. What would that data be worth? You could sell the data to every medical provider imaginable, have add-ons and affiliate deals for supplements, whatever.
Shaan: I agree. Flo — over 300 million people have downloaded the app. Revenues over 100 million. It’s a billion dollar app that started off as a period tracker, such a simple little mobile app. Props to those guys. I think they’re in Europe. So the mobile app space was obviously one winner.
Shaan: Other ideas in this space — somebody said this to me the other day and I know nothing about it, but I’ll give you the 1% of the idea I have. She said, “Do you know how hard it is for a gay couple to adopt a baby?” I said I have no idea. She said nearly impossible. If anybody created a company that just helped gay male couples adopt babies — because that’s typically a very high-income segment, super high need, no price sensitivity, convoluted and low-NPS process. If somebody just went and interviewed like 100 couples that were trying to adopt right now, I bet you could find a $500 million to a billion dollar business. I don’t know what that idea is yet, but that’s enough of a map for somebody to go find their own immunity idol — to use my Survivor reference.
Codie: It’s a good point. I’ve been thinking about levels to the game of business — categorizing all businesses by multiple and margin. A level one business would probably be profitable on like day one to thirty: just the consulting aspect. I have a friend who paid $25,000 just to help them navigate the adoption process in Texas and get higher on the lists. If that exists, there’s got to be 32 different ways to do consulting for adoption in this space.
Shaan: Yeah, basically anybody who’s like “Clear” at the airport but for all life processes. Somebody’s doing this right now for H1B visas. If you’re an immigrant applying for a visa, that literally keeps you up at night. There are people who are like, “We’re the concierge. We know this process inside out. You’re just Googling forums. We know how to expedite timelines, we know where you should pay money, we know how to staple your application together for the best chance of success.” For these really complex workflows that are high-ticket and high-desire — adopting a child, getting your visa — people will pay 10 to 20 grand. You could buy the lead for this through Google for maybe two grand and you’re making 20 grand per person from that funnel.
Codie: Smart. We both invested in Hone Health too, right?
Shaan: Yeah. Part of what I think is really smart with what they’re doing is it’s such a pain to get access to TRT and different things that men want, and to do it in a legal way you can actually trust. There’s probably a bunch of that inside the women’s space too. I keep telling them they should launch something for women — I think it’s a really underserved market.
Codie: You had Tim Ferriss normalize keto, and a lot of those trends were done on men — and men and women are biologically different. My doctor Gabrielle Lyon is a stud, and she’s like, “The thing is, that doesn’t work as well for women.” I’m like, “No, no, I read the book, I’m a huge Ferriss fan…” But yeah, there’s lots of cool ways to play in that space. Also, like, peptides — although those are getting federally banned, so maybe not the best idea right now.
Shaan: Peptides are getting federally banned?
Codie: We should check my homework on that. But that’s the word from the husband. Is semaglutide a peptide?
Shaan: Semaglutide — which is Ozempic — that’s the generic name, semaglutide, is a peptide. But I don’t think that can get banned. People will ride in the streets.
Codie: We’ll close out this section — I wrote “Life partner hack, from a woman to a man.” My husband’s hack: the best money he’s ever spent being in a marriage is a subscription to flowers on a monthly basis. I totally stand by this. It’s cheap. I use one called Farm Girl Flowers — I have no affiliation, I’m not an investor. It’s a beautifully little burlap-tied bow, comes every single month, you don’t have to think about it, auto-gifts for your wife. I’ll take almost any guarantee that there will never be a wife who would be mad if they got this consistently. But husbands are just not going to remember consistently. So do yourself a solid and just buy flowers on a consistent basis.
Shaan: Okay, this is interesting. What’s the deal with flowers? Why do girls love flowers? Does it do something for you? Because if I see flowers — needle doesn’t move, doesn’t do anything. But like a candle, if I smell a candle I’m in. Or a nice little piece of art — I see it, it does something. Flowers I just don’t get. Is it the flowers, or is it “this man loves me” — is that what it is?
Codie: It’s definitely not just the love part. Flowers actually — I think when you’re in a relationship it’s lovely, it’s a low-effort, high-ROI, number one winner. But I think it’s actually just that we like plants and flowers. I don’t know if that’s a genetic disposition or if, you know, society’s patriarchy is upon us. But women like flowers.
Codie: When I was young and had no money, there was very low hanging fruit representing what a rich person would have. One of them was fresh flowers in the house every single day. That means you’re super rich. I think there’s a part of it that’s also: this is just a moment. Now when I see them I’m like, “Oh, it means we’re doing okay.” Even if it’s on a subscription and he didn’t think about it — thought about it once three years ago — it doesn’t matter. You just want the flowers.
Shaan: I’m going to try this. Report back. Don’t tell her I don’t care and I just set it up on subscription three years ago.
Codie: No qualifiers.
Codie’s Business Model: Media + Small Business Acquisition [00:50:00]
Shaan: Let’s go to the small business acquisition stuff. First, explain your business model. You’ve got a media business — your output is unbelievable. I put you alongside Pomp and Sahil as some of the most consistent, omnipresent creators. The way you guys do it is crazy. That’s a media business that can be profitable on its own. People advertise, people subscribe. I think you have a paid community, which is probably a big money maker?
Codie: A couple different things. One thing that’s interesting — of those three people you picked, what’s the common denominator? We were all in finance. Finance is categorically a miserable industry. And we all did private equity or investment banking, which means we had crazy crazy hours for a long time. So anytime a creator is like, “I’m burnt out from filming TikToks for a couple hours” — I think we’re fine.
Codie: We have sort of three different businesses now. One is the content business, which is the super public one — we kind of stumbled into that. We started around the latter part of 2020. Today that’s comprised of a newsletter, a community, a bunch of media channels, a couple of newsletters, a course on buying businesses, and some ad sponsorship — although I don’t really love that. I think we’re going to change the model to only talk about the products of the businesses we own and our own products. Looking at how the Daily Wire does it.
Codie: The second business is what was the family office, now Main Street Holding Company. That’s the small businesses I talk about. We’ve owned everything from podcast production businesses to graphic design agencies to laundromats to car washes.
Shaan: Is your own money this? You raised money?
Codie: My own money.
Shaan: So you’re using your own money to buy these. That’s a portfolio. You said there’s three businesses — what’s the third?
Codie: We have a venture capital fund, and alongside that my own passive angel investments. That’s where our minority investments go.
Shaan: When did you get rich? Was it after all this, or before? The podcast is called My First Million — when did you make your first million?
Codie: I made my first million when I was working for other people. I’m the opposite of VC — risk scares me actually. I could never have gone and done what Sam did, which is start a business with no money, sleep on a couch, and hope it turns into $160 million. That scares me too much. I worked in corporate for a long, long time. I ran a bunch of businesses, became a partner. Made millions before I ever really ran my own thing by myself.
Codie: I was so scared to leave the big corporate canopy that I bought businesses while I was still working for somebody else.
Shaan: You say you bought businesses — like laundromats, car washes? What type?
Codie: I bought some early ones that didn’t make me any money. I bought a website, I bought a fashion styling marketplace called Threads Refined, I bought another one called South — something. The ones that started making me real money were the boring ones. I tried the sexy things, websites, and I wasn’t very good at them. Then it was: oh wait, if I buy a laundromat I have a hard time messing this thing up, I can make some money on it, have somebody else run it, and if I get three or four or five of them that’s enough money for them to make a good living and me to make a good living. Back then that was not cool. Now holding companies are kind of cool on Twitter.
Codie: In fact, I didn’t tell anybody I owned laundromats. One, I thought I might get fired — potential conflict of interest. Two, I didn’t think it was cool at the time. I was running the Latin American investment business, we had a billion dollars in assets under management, and everybody thought that job was really cool including my parents. But I hated it. I was going through a divorce, working 70 hours a week, on red-eyes to Chile basically weekly. So I bought the businesses to get out of corporate. Once I replaced my income, I thought I’d go become a partner at a private equity fund, and then finally got the balls to go do it all by myself. But it took me a long time.
Shaan: Everybody’s got their path. I always joke — you hear stories like “Mark Cuban when he was six years old started a newspaper route, then a lemonade stand.” I didn’t even know the word “business” until I was 19. You definitely don’t need that starting point.
The Laundromat Deep Dive [00:57:30]
Shaan: Talk about the laundromat thing. I’ve told this story on the pod before, but I was at a dinner with a CEO of a public company and he was like, “I see these people on Instagram talking about laundromats. Are we all stupid and we should just be buying laundromats, or are they stupid and they think laundromats are a great business? Who’s stupid? I’m worried I’m stupid and I shouldn’t be doing all this stressful work running a company with thousands of employees. Do I just need to go buy four laundromats and chill?” And I had no idea what to say. I’ve never bought a boring business, don’t intend to. But you obviously are an advocate for it. Educate me.
Codie: I call these gateway drug businesses. If you’re a billionaire, you should not go buy a laundromat — terrible idea. The reason I talk about it is I believe that almost anybody who works a job could also have some ownership in a business. The world would be a lot better off if we all had a little bit of skin in the game. That’s my hill I want to die on.
Codie: When I first started talking about this, I was like, the thing is — I’ve been in finance. Finance people try to make everyone think we’re smarter than them, and we’re actually not. The worst part about running a laundromat is not reading the P&L. The worst part is: the machine breaks, what do you do? There’s a homeless person there. Somebody breaks into your laundromat and breaks the glass door. Any human can handle that. So I talk about laundromats because that was one of the first businesses I bought. And because if you can’t understand taking a coin, putting it in a machine, getting out clean clothes — you probably shouldn’t run a business. It’s a very simple business model.
Shaan: This is why I’ve been obsessing on levels to the game. The problem with laundromats is they’re a terrible business if you’re really good at business. The one I invested in — not one I owned complete control of — did $3 million a year. That’s revenue for the biggest laundromat I’ve ever seen.
Codie: It’s a very big laundromat — doing like $8,000 a day. They do 15% margins. And the way they do it is actually through the wash-and-fold business, not the walk-in laundry.
Shaan: Got it. So the real business where the higher-level customers are — single mom wants to put her bag of clothes outside her door, you pick it up, wash it, drop it back off — it requires cars, logistics, some oversight, more complex.
Codie: The average laundromat makes somewhere around $100,000 to $500,000 a year at 10 to 15% margins. And there’s not that much you can do once you have one to get a laundromat from $100,000 to $500,000. It’s really location-dependent.
Shaan: So those are making you know $20,000 to $50,000 a year for the owner. You’ve got to do multiples of these, otherwise you’re working the job of an owner but making the wage of a minimum wage employee.
Codie: That’s right. But this is where business acquisition gets interesting — it depends who you are and what you want. Everybody asks me, “What’s the best sector to buy?” That’s a dumb question. The best sector to buy is the one uniquely aligned to you.
Codie: The reason I bought the laundromat is I had the operator who already knew how to run laundromats and had found one we could buy very cheap. I was like: I don’t like a lot of risk, I could front 100K, buy this, and if it works, let’s get three to five of them and get rolling. But a lot of people I talk to — maybe you’re a teacher and you have six months off during the year — why wouldn’t you own a little laundromat?
Codie: I like to compare it versus houses or short-term rentals. Average short-term rental does something like $120 to $160 in net income a month. You put up $250,000 on average for one of those homes. Compare a single-family home for $250,000 versus a laundromat for $100,000 — and this one’s making you $20,000 to $40,000 a year and that one’s making you a couple thousand dollars a year. That’s actually a better risk-reward trade-off.
Codie: And the other thing is: you start with one business. Not a lot of Americans have run a big business before. Wouldn’t know what to do with a tech business. Starting with something pretty simple in their local community, they go: okay, I know how to run this, I made $20,000 to $50,000 on it, I didn’t risk my house. Now I go sell this and do a bigger endeavor. That’s how I think about it.
Shaan: What was the first business you bought — was it a laundromat?
Codie: My very first business was a website.
Shaan: So you bought the website stuff, then went brick-and-mortar after that.
Codie: Laundromat was my first brick-and-mortar. After that, we bought multiple laundromats. How many did I buy in total? I probably owned like 25 or 30 laundromats over my laundromating career. But that first little portfolio was probably seven or eight. I was working full-time at First Trust then, mostly in Latin America.
Shaan: Give me the best deal you ever did and the worst deal you ever did.
Codie: The worst deal: we had one business entirely go under. We got lied to and stolen from. It was a small business that supported other small businesses from a bookkeeping perspective. Kind of funny that they would be the ones doing the stealing. I lost probably a couple hundred K on that deal. The biggest issue on buying small businesses is you run out of cash because they either lied to you about the business, lied by omission, or didn’t actually track their finances very well.
Codie: The best deal was probably from land acquisition. We bought a big plot of land that had an RV park on it, a series of vending machines, a little area for people to camp. The appreciation of the land ended up being what paid the most. That business made us a few million bucks.
Codie: Maybe my best deal ever — pending knock on wood — is a series of car washes we bought. Ever since Mr. Car Wash went public at billions of dollars, multiples went up. We’ve gotten offers that are just wild. We sold out of a lot of our laundromats at great multiples and I think we’ll sell out of the car washes at really good multiples.
Codie: But I don’t always talk about my best deals because I don’t think you should get into these expecting a crazy exit. You cash flow — that’s the goal.
Portfolio Goals and the Big Bet [01:08:00]
Shaan: Me and Ben were debating this the other day: what’s a good north star goal? Two ideas: build up $10 million a year of annual cash flow, or build a $100 million portfolio value — realized, meaning sold or sellable. You could make the case these lead to the same place because $10 million of cash flow you could probably sell for $100 million. But you might buy different things depending on which goal you’re chasing. What’s your take? And what’s your north star?
Codie: What do you mean by realized value? You want to actually sell it and get $100 million, or have a third party mark it up?
Shaan: The way I thought about it — it’s either exited, or if you ran a process for 60 to 90 days you could get that value with 80% certainty. Not a Silicon Valley paper valuation where you could never actually sell the business for $100 million.
Codie: For me, I have an issue: I’m pretty ADHD. I like to do a lot of different things. The longest I ever stayed at a job was like five and a half years. So I kind of like the portfolio approach — it lets me be ADHD across a bunch of different businesses. Theoretically if I wanted to build a billion dollar business, you could argue that if I have a great idea I really love, that’s a better way to get to a billion. I just haven’t had an idea I was that obsessed with that I also still need to do.
Codie: Our goal has always been — I kind of buy my own stuff. For a long time I was going to build a bunch of businesses into my little tiny version of KKR or Berkshire Hathaway. Then I got to a point where I was like: I actually don’t think it’s good for the very few people to own everything. It’s much better experientially for society when you go to a local coffee shop than when you go to Starbucks. I refuse to go to Starbucks. We have like a company policy — you’re not allowed to buy from big corporate chains.
Shaan: What happens if someone walks in with a Starbucks?
Codie: Smack that onto the floor. Actually, Tanner here knows he walked into my place in California with two Starbucks and I just looked at him. Then the next week I ordered Chipotle on accident, so then I had to pay for my own Chipotle. Fair is fair.
Codie: At some point you’re like, I want my money to mean something. I want all this work to mean something. So we’re starting to buy a lot more businesses in the three cities I’m really involved in — San Diego, Austin, and Phoenix. I want to own where I live. That seems to make sense and feel good.
Codie: Then the second thing: I’m going to go really aggressively all in on one big single bet — which I’ve never done before. I bought the company already as an MVP, and I’m going to build something on top of it, put in a new CEO, and I’m working on recruiting that CEO right now. Can’t talk about that yet — not that anybody cares, but MFM listeners are doers and there’ll be 37 copycats by Monday.
Shaan: Hell yeah there will be. That’s what we do — we destroy all the Alpha for each other collectively.
Shaan: So what’s the complete picture of the game you’re playing? You told me the KKR game you’re not playing. You’re building “own businesses where I live.” What else?
Codie: We have a portfolio that’s worth about $75 to $100 million in value right now. A lot of car washes — a lot of soap, baby.
Shaan: Why not just retire and be a trad wife with the pumpkins and live laugh love?
Codie: Dude, honestly I bought those pumpkins and I was painting them and it brought me zero joy. I called my husband afterwards and was like, “I feel nothing. I must be dead inside.” So something’s wrong with me. I have to buy the pumpkin company for this to have been worth it as a hobby.
Shaan: I feel like you need hobbies. Do you have hobbies? Yeah, I got hobbies. I love basketball, poker, working out — basic stuff that everybody likes. But I do them in an uncommon way. Like instead of just going to 24-Hour Fitness, we do Camp MFM — rent a house, rent a gym, fly in founders and some celebrity people who love basketball, get an NBA trainer, spend the weekend pretending we’re NBA players. Common hobbies done in an uncommon way.
Codie: I need hobbies. I have basically none. I like to work out, hang out with friends, and I like working a lot — which is probably pretty sick. My husband is Captain Hobby. He’s like a black belt or purple belt in jiu-jitsu, former Navy SEAL. He and Sam are always hanging out, and Sam always wants to fight him. It’s like a son to his dad — “Let’s fight!” And the dad’s like, “Okay, sure, let’s play wrestle.”
Shaan: I want to give you one tip for hobbies. Two things that will force any person like us to get hobbies. First: hang out with people who are completely post-economic. People who are literally wealthier than wealthy. When you go to dinner with them, they don’t want to talk about business deals. The status game becomes: oh, my Burning Man camp was like this, or my new hobby is doing this crazy health kick. Because they’ve already hit the ceiling on business craziness. The only business thing that gets their pulse going is like, what is Elon doing?
Shaan: I remember sitting at many dinners feeling completely generic. The things I’m interested in — to them it’s like “yeah, we know, we’ve been doing that for 20 years, that’s not something to talk about.”
Shaan: The second thing: hang out with artists or Hollywood people who are actual artists for whom the art is the goal, not the recognition. You tell them what you’re making and they’re like, “Oh, do you think that’s cool?” And you’re like, “No, this is cringe.” And they’re like, “So why are you doing it?” And you’re like, “Because it leads to outcomes.” And they’re like, “Oh.” You value things so differently. Two ways to round yourself out: immersion, and then the embarrassment will fuel you to find a non-work hobby.
Codie: The thing I’ve found is I don’t actually care that much what people think. Hanging out with a lot of really really rich people — I don’t care about your Pauly Amar Orgy at Burning Man. Good for you. I think you should go wild. But I don’t think it’s that cool actually.
Codie: Maybe I do have one hobby, which is that I find political movements in this country interesting. Not Republican versus Democrat. I’m part of a think tank called AEI — the American Enterprise Institute. The idea is that all ideas should be in a competition, and the best ideas should win to determine how we rule our lives, what our regulations are. It’s bipartisan. They’ll debate something like UBI. They’ll have Dick Cheney and Michelle Obama on a stage together — closed doors, you can’t video it. It allows these politicians to be perhaps more realistic than they’d be on the news. I find that really interesting.
Codie: This guy Arthur Brooks who used to run AEI — you guys should get him on here. He was good friends with the Dalai Lama, simultaneously raised hundreds of millions of dollars for AEI, and really changed regulation on both sides. He gets in front of the biggest conservative donors in the world and starts talking to them about love and why love is the most important thing — which for conservatives is completely non-normalized. He has a bestselling book with Oprah now and a documentary about capitalism.
Shaan: And how much does one have to donate to get invited to the private thingy?
Codie: I think it’s $25,000 or $50,000. And you go through a screening process.
Shaan: They’re going to realize I don’t know anything and don’t give a damn about anything.
Codie: They did. I remember the first time I went, they were like, “You do what?” I told them I wrote little blogs on the internet and they were like, “Well, huh. Cool.”
Shaan: I used to not say that I don’t vote, don’t watch the news. People would look at me like I was some combination of dumb or selfish. Then somebody said to me: “An extreme in any one position — all-consuming news 24/7 or never caring at all — neither is probably very good. But toward your end of the spectrum, the world would actually be a better place if instead of worrying about the government, you learned how to govern yourself.” That really resonated. I realize I can’t even fully govern myself — whether it’s “I shouldn’t eat that” and I go eat that, or “I should wake up early” and I sleep in. I’ve yet to govern myself. What am I worried about with things 3,000 miles away that I can’t control?
Codie: I always liked that I think it was Jordan Peterson who said: before you clean up the world, clean up your room. If we all just took care of our own things — our family, our friends, our community — life would probably be a little bit better.
Shaan: Somebody also said about relationships: the wrong way to think is “I’ll take care of you and you take care of me” — because you’re constantly feeling like you’ve lacked some care. Instead: “I’ll take care of me for you, and you take care of you for me.” Much better mental model. You become the best person you can be for the other person, and if they do the same, you both end up in great shape.
Codie: Why do you have to tell other people how to live? That’s my biggest complaint. You do you and I’ll do me — and even if you don’t like it, I was going to do that anyway. Thank God for freedom.
Codie’s Content Strategy [01:23:00]
Shaan: I want to ask you about content. You’ve built a big brand across newsletters, social, TikTok, YouTube, you’re everywhere. Can you do a rant on your approach? Because I think most people don’t know what goes into that. A lot of people take an “aw shucks” mentality and say, “I didn’t think too much, it just sort of happened organically.” Anybody out there who wants to do the same is like, “Great, so I guess I’ll just hope it all happens.” Whereas I think most people who’ve built something put genuine thought and strategy into it. What went into building Codie Sanchez the brand?
Codie: I hate when people do that. I have never met somebody that, after you dig in a little bit, didn’t systematically try for the thing they created — in any aspect of life.
Codie: For me, basically what happened is I’m the opposite of a lot of people who are public now. I raised a bunch of money before for my funds. I was with a CEO of a company I worked for back in the day and I was starting to do stuff online — this is like six or seven years ago. He took me on a walk on the beach at the Montage in California and he was like, “The thing is, Cody, we get rich quietly here. We build the ‘we,’ not the ‘me.’” At the time I was like, he doesn’t get it. The internet is going to be so powerful. Steak dinners and strippers — how a lot of people in finance raise money — doesn’t work and isn’t going to work in the future.
Codie: But I realized quickly: he built a multi-billion dollar business. It was his company. I was playing with his chips. He had every right to say, “Not at my dime.” At that point I realized that what I actually like doing is watching other people grow and build based on the ideas I share with them. That little ego of mine likes when somebody tells me one of the things I did works for them. That feels like a cool legacy.
Codie: I started speaking with some nonprofits and was like, I feel better doing this than when I close a big transaction. So I started doing it more and more. And then: I think we should scale this. I started writing a newsletter and didn’t realize it was a business.
Codie: The first thing I did that I’d tell anybody to do if they want to build a content machine: steal people who have already built the thing. It seems obvious, but nobody does it. Everybody tries to do things by themselves. Because I had built a lot of businesses, I was like: this is just a normal business. We need a head of ops, a head of content, a head of finance. So I hired those three first.
Codie: After that I started going sector-specific. Hire one person for TikTok, one for Twitter, one for Instagram. They wouldn’t write everything — I’d still ghost-write most of it — but I’d say: I’m stressed about these three platforms, I’m going to transfer that stress from me to you. You shall now stress about TikTok and Twitter and Instagram. I’ll stress on the portfolio businesses, which nobody else can run.
Shaan: Do the content and portfolio feed each other? Why do you do both? Why not just do one?
Codie: The flywheel of content is the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen. Naval talked about three levels of leverage — people, capital, and code. I think the current one is audience. Audience is the only permissionless version. All the others you need banks to say yes, employees to say yes, you needed to understand code. But audience — anybody can do it.
Codie: Yesterday in one of our YouTube videos we put a lead magnet to the newsletter and got like 2,500 newsletter signups. At $1 to $2 per signup through paid acquisition, that would have cost me $5,000 through PPC. I just got it from organic content.
Codie: How I originally thought about it: I talk about buying businesses. What’s going to happen? A bunch of people are going to want to sell me their business. I’m going to buy them at better prices and faster than anybody else because they feel like they already know me and trust me. I’m almost indexing on trust. Then once they sell me their business, I’m going to build it through my audience — funnel more audience into said business. And when I go to exit, I’m going to have a community of buyers who want to buy it. Then do it again and again.
Codie: It mostly ended up working that way. Most often now I get referrals to businesses I want to buy. Not so much cold outreach.
Addressing the “Business Guru / Grifter” Criticism [01:32:00]
Shaan: I want to give you a chance to address what I view as good criticism. Good criticism is: “It’s not all perfect, there are things that are genuinely worth examining.” Every criticism I believe has a kernel of truth. So here’s what people would say about you, Codie Sanchez: “Her real business is in creating content and getting you to pay her to teach you how to buy a business — not in the businesses she’s actually bought herself.” In what way would that be true, and in what way would that be false?
Codie: I think you’re right that there’s nothing wrong with questioning that. We make more money categorically from the businesses we own than from the community. Numerically, categorically, that’s just the fact.
Codie: Now, would I be upset if we suddenly did $25, $50, $100 million in a community — if I could supplant what we’re getting in institutions and education systems? I would be thrilled. The second I make way more money from communities and courses, I will be shouting it from the rooftops.
Codie: What would be true about that criticism is that we’re really good at this. It is a big business. It does millions of dollars a year. I think we’ve quickly become the name if you want to learn how to buy a business. My goal is we will also be the name if you want to learn how to sell a business and how to build a business — own the entire ecosystem. I’m in talks right now with University of Texas and University of Austin — Joe Lonsdale’s company — to do a program where we push back on what I think is awful education taught at most institutions. Instead of telling you what to think and a bunch of political nonsense, we’re going to teach you really smart financial tactics you can apply any way you want.
Codie: What bothers me when people talk about me online is when I feel like there’s a kernel of truth, like when we messed up. One time we did a tweet thread and had “seven” instead of “two” for the number of years I was at Goldman — which you can check on my Form U4 and LinkedIn. People were like, “I knew you were just a secretary there for two years.” That one actually bothered me a little bit. We were wrong. That was a typo. But it’s like, that’s nothing.
Shaan: We get less criticism. I was wondering why — are we just less popular, less good? What I realized is: podcasts are long form, which naturally filters a bunch of people out. Second, it gives you a chance to breathe and be yourself. People get to know you and understand you and tend not to have that reactionary takeaway against you. Third, you’re just not everywhere all the time. The vibe is: I’m talking to my buddy Sam and you’re here listening as a fly on the wall. Versus someone who picks up their phone, stares down the barrel, and says, “You should do this.” All of a sudden you’re a business guru telling me what to do, and the walls go up.
Shaan: I’m wondering how you think about distancing yourself — or do you just not care — about the whole business guru thing? There’s Grant Cardone, Tai Lopez, this whole category. I personally don’t want to be associated with that group. Not that I think they’re necessarily bad — I just don’t want to be bucketed in. And I can see the tension: the more you talk about business and how to make money, the more you can be bucketed as a business guru. How do you think about that?
Codie: One, I’m a big ethical, moral compass type person. If I feel like I’m doing something wrong, that’s going to bother me a lot more than what other people think. Two — and I’d be curious your take — I want to do a math model on this. So much of what we’re told in today’s society is the opposite of what makes sense.
Codie: For instance, I have never raised money for any of the businesses I invest in from my audience. Not once. We have a venture fund that’s tiny — a $10 million fund — and I say do not invest in it if you don’t want to lose money. But I think there’s a legitimacy that comes from asking people for money to invest in your funds as opposed to teaching them how to do the thing. Which in my mind makes no sense. If I raised another billion-dollar fund family like I did before, I would make so much more money than I ever will teaching people how to do things online. But then they don’t actually learn.
Codie: I hate the comparisons to Grant Cardone or Tai Lopez. I looked at some of the fundraising docs on Grant Cardone stuff and I don’t think it’s that great for retail investors. I think it’s pretty one-sided. And Tai Lopez is very “Ferraris, women, get rich quick.” Ours is sort of the opposite: this is going to be hard, it’ll take longer than you think, it’ll be harder than you think, and maybe it’ll be worth it if you actually keep going past the point where it’s comfortable.
Codie: At some point you just have to give up what people think about you on the internet. If you have 100 million views a month, 1% is going to be nuts, just categorically. So anytime something happens I go: well, that’s the 1%, unless we’re doing something wrong.
Shaan: People who listen to this get to hear you speak, and they can come to their own opinions. I wanted to ask you these questions myself. The ideas you shared at the beginning and the model you’ve created around buying boring businesses — I’m almost jealous I don’t want to buy a boring business. Like, what’s wrong with the chip in my brain that only wants to buy exciting businesses? That’s probably a higher degree of difficulty.
Codie: You get to choose the game you play. Or you invest in other people’s thing — like we both invested in Xavier’s venture — and you support small businesses that way.
Codie: The only other thing I want to say is: I think what you guys are doing here is really cool. Although you might not call your businesses boring, you are actually doing the thing that most people in any industry hate — you’re taking complex ideas and skinning them down so more people can execute on them. There’s not a lot of people who want to share their homework. Mine might be boring and yours might be more sexy, but we’re both doing something really similar: here’s what worked for me, here’s some relatively complex stuff, here’s how I simplified it, now you go build something. That’s the only thing that makes the world a little bit better — the builders.
ShopGenie and Niche Content Businesses [01:43:00]
Shaan: I invested in the same company you did — ShopGenie. It’s a perfect example of a boring business that can be pretty big. These guys make booking software for auto repair shops. If you need to go get your car repaired today, you basically have to drive in — it’s walk-in only. You drive up and they’re like, “It’s going to be a couple hours.” I wish this worked like everything else in the world — book an appointment online, drop off my car, pay online. That’s all they do.
Codie: And when you did a little tweet about investing in them, they got like 30 franchise users who each have multiple locations. The ability to help somebody scale with a podcast like yours is really cool.
Shaan: Kieran, the founder, told me about this business and I was like, “Great idea, I would never want to do that. Sounds boring to me.” But investing is the easiest way to ride along. He also told me about this guy — Aaron Stokes, the Gary Vee of the auto repair world. I’m pretty sure this guy is making like $30 million a year just creating content for people who own auto repair shops. He has conquered this niche. He can get a thousand auto repair shop owners to show up to any conference he throws. And I was like, the content game can be niched down into even the most boring verticals in a very interesting way.
Codie: We should own more of those. A great content channel I was thinking about — my husband called it “Cringe Con.” It would just be you going to different niche industry conferences and watching their keynotes. The keynote from the self-storage industry conference. One of our friends owns a small self-storage company and he said, “I went to a self-storage conference and the keynote speaker was talking about — ‘We use the word customers, they use the word hoarders.’” I just want to see this. Giant compilation of every niche conference keynote would be hilarious.
Shaan: I’m going to speak at a brokerage conference next week and they use all these acronyms — “Acc SL in parentheses on your Twitter bio.” I have no idea what that means. I’ve seen it everywhere. I need a dictionary to speak there. You have this whole world that nobody else knows about and people have made billions or hundreds of millions off of it.
Codie: And to me that would actually be boring. I don’t need all those acronyms.
Shaan: I’ve told this story before but we got the trigger to launch Milk Road from going to Farm Con — a farming conference in Kansas City. We walk in and the panel is talking about corn and wheat futures. I was stunned. I was like, “These guys know what futures are.” Then one guy was like, “I’m all in on beans.” I was like, “Brother, I’m all in on beans too, but for different reasons.” It was such a wild experience — literally 2,000 farmers in a room just talking farming. Really good to get outside your bubble. For a guy who lives in San Francisco and talks to tech people all day, that was totally different. I should do more of that.
Codie: That’s going to be me next week. I already told the brokerage conference I’m like, “I’m pretty sure I’ll understand half of this.” He had this idea I thought was terrible: do five-minute speeches, pre-record some of them, walk up on stage and press play. I was like, “Like a DJ?” And he’s like, “So you can have a lot of them.” I was like, “This is the smartest and dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” Then he said, “Instead of coming to the conference, everyone just stays home and listens to it on their own in the podcast app.” I was like, “It’s a podcast. This is just a podcast.”
Shaan: I mean, thank God humans think differently.
Wrap-Up [01:49:30]
Shaan: All right, Codie — this has been great. Sorry I took you so far over time.
Codie: Not at all. A blast.
Shaan: Thank you for guest hosting while Sam is out. Where should people follow you?
Codie: Codie Sanchez on all the socials — pretty straightforward.
Shaan: All right, that’s the pod.