Sam and Shaan explore the booming “kidult” market — adults buying children’s toys — sparked by Sam’s new Lego habit. They profile two fascinating Lego-adjacent businesses (Rebrickable and Bricklink), brainstorm retro product ideas ripe for revival, and riff on what makes niche passionate communities so valuable and hard to kill. The episode closes with Pal World as a case study in the midwit meme: the best ideas sound dumb on the surface.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Intro and Episode Preview [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, this is a fun episode. Sam started doing Legos, and that sent us down this rabbit hole where he discovered two businesses that I’d never heard of — I guarantee you’ve never heard of them either. They’re awesome businesses in the Lego niche of all things. Then we brainstormed other things people could do around these passionate niche audiences that most people overlook.
Shaan: This is MFM classic. MFM special. If you like this podcast, you’re gonna love this one. I also had an epiphany about 45 minutes in that kind of changed the way I think about this podcast. That’s what I got out of this episode. Sam, what did you get?
Sam: While searching this stuff, there are a ton of twists and turns to the story — the background story of how these companies started. I want you guys to listen to them. It’s the second story involving Lego — you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when we get there. It’s about two-thirds of the way into the episode. I got emotional researching this.
Sam: I actually want you guys to go to the websites of the topics and companies we brought up — see what I’m talking about. You’ll know exactly what it is when you get to that part of the episode. Let us know in the YouTube comments if it actually got to you like it got to me. It was full of weird parts of the stories I did not expect. Anyway, check it out and let us know what you think.
YouTube Subscribers and House Size Tangent [00:01:30]
Shaan: What is up. Shaan here with Sam — your boys who are stuck at 399,000 YouTube subscribers. They said we’d never get to 400. In fact, there’s still people saying we’d never get to 400.
Sam: Did you see this tweet that went viral? “All my haters said I wouldn’t make it. I didn’t make it. They were right.” Honestly, good call by the haters. It’s a legendary tweet. I love that stuff.
Shaan: Yeah, we’re at 399. I read every YouTube comment. Do you read and reply?
Sam: Not to everyone, but I reply — it’s like I’m in line at a coffee shop. I’ll just go through a whole episode and try to reply to as many as I can.
Shaan: So if you’re listening and you’re not on YouTube, do your boys a favor and just click subscribe. It means a lot to us, it costs you nothing, and we’ve got a good episode today. Last time we talked, we both had the same topic written down. We did it again — it happened again this time.
Shaan: Before we get into the episode though — how big is your house, square footage?
Sam: 5,600. I’m in a house right now visiting family, so I rented an Airbnb for two weeks. My normal home in Austin is just a little over 2,000 square feet. It’s not big. It’s nice but it’s not big.
Shaan: I’m currently renting a 7,500-square-foot house. I am losing so much stuff. This is such a big house. I think even 5,500 would be too big for me. Do you like having a big house like that?
Sam: Yeah, it’s great. What’s not to love?
Shaan: I’ll tell you one thing: the utility bill here, if I had to guess, is like $2,000 a month. What’s your utility bill?
Sam: Well, you’re in California so you don’t really use too much heat. I don’t even check it — everything’s on autopay and I don’t even want to look. It’s probably like $1,200–$1,500 I guess.
Shaan: Wow. Okay. So that’s expensive. But whatever. And the other thing — things break all the time. There are seven bathrooms here and one of them has a Jacuzzi that’s not working.
Sam: You’re not going in and using all seven bathrooms. You don’t use half the stuff — that’s how it breaks. You just don’t use it.
Shaan: Anyway, I wanted to buy a big home eventually and I’m happy I’m testing this out. It’s such a big house. I understand the downside — fixing things is a pain. Here’s my rule: number of humans plus two. That’s how many bedrooms I want. One of those bedrooms turns into a man cave — that’s where I have the studio right now, this is one of the bedrooms we just converted. The other one’s a guest room. My kids are small right now so they’re sleeping in the same bed and stuff, but as they get older that rule is going to come into effect.
Sam: Yeah, I think maybe my needs will change, but I just wanted to test out a big house. I’m shocked by how much I dislike it so far.
Shaan: Most people don’t do this at all, and you do it a lot: where do I want to live, how do I want to live, do I want to live in a city or the suburbs, big house or small house, near water? I really take a lot of inspiration from the way you test out lifestyles. You prototype how you want to live, and more people should do that.
Sam: I do it all the time. If you think about it, renting a really fancy Airbnb for a week could be expensive — let’s say $1,000 a night, so $10,000 for a week. That’s expensive. But you know what’s more expensive? Buying a home that you’ve only seen for 24 hours through a one-hour tour, and being like “cool, this is my place for the next 10 or 20 years.” That’s way more expensive.
Shaan: And honestly, you start to lose a little trust in yourself. It’s like, “oh, I thought this would make me happy. Turns out I didn’t even like it.”
Sam: By the way, you don’t have to be rich to do this lifestyle testing. I was doing this when I had no money — it’s all relative to where you’re at. I’d do a road trip and drive to another place, live on a friend’s couch, and just live there for two weeks. I tried Chicago, I tried Colorado. I just tested out different places to see where I wanted to be. That’s a very smart way to go about things.
Shaan: You want to talk about Legos?
Sam: Let’s talk about Legos.
The Kidult Trend: Adults Buying Children’s Toys [00:07:00]
Shaan: Can I introduce this category? You texted me and said “dude, I’m playing a ton of Legos.” Like, every night you’re playing Legos. Do you do this? And I was like, no, I don’t do this. But I know a bunch of other people doing it.
Shaan: It caught my attention because I’m not sure if you know this, but this is becoming a trendy thing. There are a bunch of NBA players who kind of came out of the closet saying yeah, this is what they do at night. Miles Turner — he’s like, “I’m building replica Star Wars sets with my Legos, four or five hours a night.”
Shaan: I got kind of interested. By the way, in college I lived with the basketball team. They were the biggest nerds of all the athletes. A Friday night was playing video games. They were the least party-animal of all the athletes.
Sam: All right, so do you know what this category is called?
Shaan: Is it the acronym that starts with A?
Sam: No, they call people like you “kidults.” The toy industry calls this group “eldertainment” — adults buying kids’ toys. That sounds like a fringe thing, but it makes up 25% of all toy sales. Billions and billions of dollars. One out of every four people buying a Lego set is going to be an older teenager or adult.
Sam: For Legos specifically, it’s called AFOL — Adult Fan of Legos. That’s the self-identified term.
Shaan: So this category makes up all the growth in the toy industry?
Sam: 60% of all growth in the toy industry is coming from just this one segment. It’s growing really fast. At first I didn’t understand it, but the toy companies commissioned a bunch of studies and asked why adults are doing this. They found that 90% of adults gave the same three reasons. What are your reasons?
Shaan: Bonding with my family. No screens. We just sit at the table and do it together while we’re talking — maybe there’s TV on in the background, but it’s basically bonding without screens. And it reminds me of my childhood.
Sam: That’s exactly right. The three reasons were nostalgia — which you just said — anti-loneliness, so bonding with whoever you’re with, and detoxing from the phone. There’s also an anti-anxiety angle. It’s a relaxing activity because you’re following directions. You’re not making decisions. You’re just doing what you’re told.
Shaan: Oh, okay. I thought it was the hands part of it. But you’re saying as an adult you’re constantly having to make decisions and think, and it’s so nice to not make decisions and just be told “put this blue thing here.”
Sam: Yeah, it’s like a PG-rated dominatrix. Instead of — you know — it’s telling me to connect these two pieces.
Shaan: Some people are into that stuff. All right. To each his own.
Sam’s Lego Habit [00:11:00]
Shaan: So what are you actually doing? You’re buying Lego kits — which ones?
Sam: Lego is this huge company — I think they do about $10 billion a year in sales. Started in the ’20s by just an engineer. Now they’ve got movies, characters — it’s like a whole franchise, like a Marvel almost.
Sam: I particularly like the line called Technic. Technic is cool because you’ll build cars or tractors or a bridge, and there are gears within the machine. I’m learning how, say, old cars when you spin your tires — sometimes only one tire spins. That’s because of a rear differential. That’s a mechanical piece. I’m building that and understanding how transmissions work. I built a Land Rover that has a six-speed transmission. I can see how gears work. It’s really fascinating — all these moving parts.
Sam: I’ve probably spent $1,500 on them so far. Each one is between $150 and $350. I only buy the Technic ones.
Shaan: Do you finish them in one sitting or is this multi-week?
Sam: One a week. It’ll take me two hours. I’ll sit from like 9 to 11. If my wife’s not with me I’ll listen to a podcast. Just me and the voice of Scott Galloway as I build this little Land Rover tractor.
Shaan: I love how you’re like, “Yeah, I built a six-speed transmission.” No. No you didn’t. I feel like you got a lot of confidence out of this.
Sam: I could now! If it came down to it, I could.
Shaan: I don’t think you could, man.
Sam: So is this a fad or do you think it’s a lifelong hobby?
Shaan: Lifelong. I could see it being lifelong.
Sam: Wow. What do you do with them when you’re done?
Shaan: There’s a website I’m going to bring up — basically you tell this company what sets you have and they give you directions on how to destroy them and rebuild them into alternative items using the same parts. So that’s what I intend to do.
Sam: So they’re not going to sit on a shelf. You’re not going to be like the 40-Year-Old Virgin with dolls in packages, still unopened.
Shaan: No. It really is an “enjoy the journey” type of thing. Once I’m done with it, I don’t care about it.
The Trend: Adult Versions of Kids’ Products [00:14:30]
Sam: I wanted to bring up some other examples because I saw this and thought, there’s something to this “cult behavior” — adults buying and doing kid things that is anti-phone, anti-loneliness, and nostalgic.
Sam: The first is Calm. We’re both friends with the founders of Calm — Alex and Michael. I don’t know if you remember this, but back in the day Calm was really struggling. Today Calm is a multi-billion dollar company, but back when we were living in San Francisco hanging out with Alex, Calm was small. It was a slow grower, it was not sexy. Nobody wanted it. It was kind of a joke — a meditation app? Are you kidding me?
Sam: One time Michael came to visit from London and I said, “So what do you do with Calm, because you’re not even here full-time.” He goes, “Oh, I work on new products.” I said, “Dude, this is not Virgin Atlantic. What new products?” He goes, “I want to do bedtime stories for adults.” I said, “What?” He goes, “No no no — a lot of adults they listen to things before they sleep to help them relax. They’re not done very well.”
Shaan: Yeah, I do sometimes. I have like a version of white noise, or I’ll listen to a podcast and fall asleep — which is not the same thing.
Sam: So he’s like, “I’m going to do this thing.” They ended up being Sleep Stories. Sleep Stories were one of the things that really let Calm take off — it exploded after Sleep Stories. I would say Calm is less about meditation now. It’s more about the state of being calm, and the number one product is the Sleep Stories. They got Matthew McConaughey to narrate a bedtime story.
Sam: Before he launched this, to prototype it, Michael was hosting parties in San Francisco where you would go to this woman’s house, lay down on her carpet with a pillow, they’d set the mood, and she would just talk and put you to sleep. And everybody would go to sleep. It was the most San Francisco thing ever — a networking event, essentially.
Shaan: But you think Calm — you’re saying the toy… no, I’m saying this is part of the same thing. Adults using adult versions of kids’ products.
Sam: Bedtime stories for adults. That’s another version of adults using Legos.
Sam: There’s also Moon Pals and Squishmallows — have you seen these? Basically giant stuffed animals, but geared more towards adults than kids. You see 24-year-old women in the Bronx with a Moon Pal they carry around like a little safety blanket.
Sam: Funko Pop — they’re a publicly traded company. During COVID when everybody was stuck at home and people started spending money collecting things, Funko was over a billion dollar market cap. They’re selling these figurine doll things — an action figure with an oversized head — and it just blew up.
Sam: We also talked about Mini Brands. And Build-A-Bear — dude, they kill it. 40% of their revenue now comes from adults. They call it Build-A-Bear After Dark. They open up at late hours and let adults come in and do it as a date night activity.
Sam: There’s also American Girl. Do you know American Girl?
Shaan: Is that like Barbie?
Sam: No, it’s different. It’s a doll — maybe three feet tall. They cost $150 back in the day. It was sort of like G.I. Joe but for girls. There was an American Girl student, an American Girl astronaut — they were themed, higher-end than a Barbie, more collectible.
Shaan: American Girl OnlyFans creator. They have new genres now.
Sam: And the Barbie movie — do you know how the Barbie movie came about? It’s not geared towards kids. If you’ve seen it, it’s an adult movie. Barbie — the company — actually created an internal movie production company to create this movie geared towards adults to help sell more dolls into this kidult segment. A marketing stunt for dolls, when you think about it.
Sam: There’s also tabletop gaming. Those guys from Chernin have made big bets on it — Exploding Kittens and others. That’s another genre.
Sam: And McDonald’s came out with an adult Happy Meal last year. A bigger box with full-size fries and an adult toy. It went viral on TikTok. Brands are really capitalizing on this.
Retro Business Idea Pitches [00:22:00]
Sam: I have a few ideas I want to pitch you. Just give me “genius” or “idiot.” This is sort of a mini Drunk Ideas episode.
Shaan: All right. Go.
Sam: First one. You know the stats on how Millennials are not getting married and not having babies at record low rates? Tamagotchi for babies. You give that 28-year-old who’s single a Tamagotchi that’s a baby. They got to raise it, take care of it, and it literally replicates the same hourly needs as a real baby. Tamagotchi, but for babies. That’s my first one.
Shaan: The problem with these ideas is if you would have told me about the things that are successful now, I would have said all horrible ideas. So this is a really challenging category. That’s why I prepped you with all the ones that worked before I told you my bad ideas — just to prime you for: hey, anything’s possible. Do I think tamagotchi for babies could work? Yes. I think there’d be legs for it. What happened to the company?
Sam: I have no idea. It’s a Japanese business. I believe a tamagotchi for babies as a standalone device replicating having a baby — I’m in.
Sam: All right, number two: did you ever use Kinects?
Shaan: Yeah, I love Kinects. Did you ever build a big Ferris wheel?
Sam: No, because Kinects were hard. I have a cousin who’s the same age as me, looks like me — same last name, Puri — and this guy is way smarter than me. I’m pretty sure the reason he’s way smarter is that his dad bought him Kinects when he was a little kid and he was building Kinects all day every day after school. I was playing Dreamcast and he was building Kinects. Guess what he does now? I have a podcast. He builds self-driving cars. This guy is a genius.
Shaan: Kinects sold in 2018 for only $21 million. What happened? How is Lego a $50 billion company and Kinects sold for $21 million?
Sam: They were acquired in 2019 and they’re basically nonexistent anymore because of tariffs — they couldn’t import them. They also sold a lot through Toys R Us and then Toys R Us went bankrupt and they lost a ton of revenue. Bad luck. Unfortunate bounce of the ball.
Sam: I think Kinects should just be rebooted — targeted at adults who want to do Legos but more STEM-focused. Kinects for Sam Parr, basically.
Shaan: I’m in. That’s a no-brainer. I’m in.
Sam: Third: easier Rubik’s Cube. Can you do a Rubik’s Cube?
Shaan: No, I can’t. Can you?
Sam: You kind of wish you could? So we used to just take the stickers off, put them all back in the right place, and brag you did it.
Shaan: Solving a Rubik’s Cube is like a close second to blowing smoke out of your ear as a party trick. You can do that?
Sam: I swear to God. I’ve had all these surgeries in my ear and some pipes got rerouted. I used to be able to blow smoke out my ear.
Shaan: Dude, how do we not start every podcast with that?
Sam: We would be at 400,000 subscribers, easy.
Shaan: Okay, easier Rubik’s Cube — continue.
Sam: The way the Rubik’s Cube feels is great. The problem is it’s too hard. We get it: if you can solve a Rubik’s Cube, that’s fantastic. But that’s chess. Where’s Checkers? I need the Checkers of Rubik’s Cubes.
Sam: Here’s what I’m thinking: letters on the outside, kind of like Wordle. Wordle is a fun, simple game you play every day — you build a daily habit. Somebody needs to take the concept of Wordle but put it in the form factor of a Rubik’s Cube. Every day you get a notification on your phone, or there’s a website that posts the starting letter combination, and you rotate it to make the word. Should take about five minutes.
Shaan: Do you play the New York Times mini crossword?
Sam: No.
Shaan: Every day — this thing is amazing. It’s literally like a 60-second break. Crosswords are kind of fun but a real crossword is pretty hard and time-consuming. When the New York Times made the mini, that thing drives like millions of dollars. I don’t know — like 10% of the New York Times’s revenue comes from this little game app. It’s mostly the mini crossword. That thing is an absolute hit product.
Sam: All right, I have two more.
Sam: Candle pouring kits. Another thing that is highly tactile, highly satisfying, and leaves you with a result. Candle pouring is something I see a lot on TikTok. I’m pretty sure this could be another adult arts-and-crafts relaxation thing that’s accessible to many and results in you having something that’s not just clutter — you light the candle, use it, melt it down, and you’re done.
Shaan: I’m in on that one. Because you’d want to buy them continually if you got into it, right?
Sam: Yeah. And candles make a ton of money. Go look at the candle MLMs — if you want to know what products work, look at what MLMs work and work backwards. There are several multi-level marketing schemes based around candles, which tells me there’s a giant market.
Sam: One more. I wrote this late last night and I don’t know what I meant. It says “relaxation puddle.”
Shaan: I… what?
Sam: Okay. I think what this is — my kids do sensory play. You buy this box and put in Orbeez or these gel circle things, you put your hand in, it’s a cool sensation. Like balls you can touch and feel. Like slime — slime’s really popular for kids. Play-Doh, all these highly tactile things.
Sam: I think what I was thinking is: what if you could put your whole body in this thing? Like a sensory deprivation tank. Something you could just go lay in. Like a super nap.
Shaan: I’m trying to “yes, and” you but it’s really hard when the premise is a relaxation puddle.
Sam: Dude, the word “puddle” is so underrated. It’s very memeable. And I think that’s what you want with any of these — you want the idea to be so stupid that you get memed into popularity. 95% of America wants to make fun of you, but those articles go out, those memes go out, and then 5% of people are like, “I don’t know, I’d try it.”
Shaan: Yeah, like Crocs — intentionally ugly, but everybody has to talk about them. You just gotta figure out what the hell a relaxation puddle actually is first.
Rebrickable: The LEGO Fan Marketplace [00:33:00]
Sam: Let me tell you two crazy stories. The second one is particularly crazy.
Sam: So I’m a Lego fan. There’s this website called Rebrickable. It was clearly started by an engineer — I think his name is Nathan. Nathan was just an engineer at some company with a normal job in Australia. He started this website, and what you do there is: there are tens of thousands of Lego kits, and it’s been around for 100 years so there are probably hundreds of thousands of different types of kits. You tell it what kits you have, and then other designers — people who are Lego fans — have created directions on how to build their own creations. It’s called an MOC — My Own Creation. It’s a whole community of people who build MOCs.
Sam: He has roughly 30,000 people who have uploaded MOCs that you can buy — probably from $10 all the way up to $100.
Sam: What’s fascinating is he reveals all of his stats online on his blog. He started the company in 2010. It was just a project. He worked a full-time job until 2020. He reveals every year how many page views the website has had, how many registered users, how many people are selling products there. It’s basically a marketplace.
Sam: In 2023, he had 11 million users create an account. If you assume 3% of people buy something, that’s 330,000 sales. Say the average sale is about $15 — that’s about $5 million in revenue collected, most of which he gives to the designers. His page views last year were around 160 million.
Sam: You can see on his blog how to build a rabid community. The comments say things like “I love this community, I’m so into Rebrickable, Nathan you’re the man.” People are rabid about this niche.
Sam: This type of guy — I’m going to stereotype him — he’s not a business-savvy person, or at least he doesn’t want to be. He’s not out there trying to milk this dry. But this type of business, once you get users with a passionate following, you can sell them anything. Andrew Wilkinson calls it an “airport business” — once you’re there, while you’re here we can sell you this, we can sell you that.
Sam: With Legos, they cost hundreds of dollars sometimes, and you want to buy a new one every month or every couple months. The market is actually quite big to build a large business. If you wanted to be a PE guy — which I don’t think you should, because this is like a work of art to me — but if you wanted to be a PE guy and buy a business you could milk for tons of profit without much innovation, this is one of those websites.
Shaan: What a great find. This is such a cool business. 10 million users.
Sam: By the way, look at this — top designers. There’s a Chinese restaurant build. This thing is insane. 2,000 pieces, $10 for the MOC. What a steal.
Sam: The technology is amazing because you can just buy an MOC from someone and they tell you what parts or kits you need. Or there’s this crazy algorithm where you upload hundreds of different kits and click submit, and it takes 60 seconds like it’s doing heavy calculations, then gives you a huge list of MOCs others have uploaded that you can create with the parts you already have. It’ll say “you have 100% of the parts needed for this” or “you have 50%, here’s where to buy the other 50%.”
Shaan: You found Dork Mecca. This is great.
Sam: Not only adults doing Legos, but adults doing Legos who need custom-made Lego designs. There are people in the forums saying they’re close to making a full-time living selling their MOCs.
Sam: When you have a rabid base like this it’s crazy fascinating to see what types of businesses you can build. This is a perfect example of how to execute on these niche followings — go all in, build it for the community. And in year one he had a million people come to the website. His paid users were 11 million by 2023. You can see how slowly these types of businesses build, and it would be very hard to break this company. They have a true moat.
Shaan: 100%. Should we help them with a marketing slogan?
Sam: This guy’s killing it. Whatever he’s doing, I want to be part of it. But let me tell you an even crazier story. This should actually be a movie.
The Bricklink Story [00:43:00]
Sam: There’s a website called Bricklink. It was started in the year 2000 — one of the first internet companies, one of the first website businesses.
Sam: Bricklink originally started as Brick Bay. The guy who started it was named Dan Jezek. Do me a favor and type in “Dan Jezek” on your computer and go to his personal website.
Shaan: It looks like a GeoCities website. Is he dead?
Sam: He’s dead. Okay, so let me tell you this story.
Sam: Dan was — they didn’t explicitly say this, but it sounded like he was a hacker-type guy. Kind of gray hat — the type of guy who would probably break into different websites and things like that. But he was also fascinated with Legos. He built this website called Brick Bay at the time. He lived in Hawaii on a bay. Eventually eBay sued him — “you can’t use ‘Bay’” — so he changed it to Bricklink.
Sam: Reading about him, I kind of got vibes of Ross Ulbricht, the guy who started Silk Road. It was one guy, he was anonymous, he would blog about all the changes he was making to the website but under the name “admin.” He never used his real name. It was just him and a handful of volunteer admins who helped run the site. He ran it like a community.
Sam: What Bricklink does is let you buy and sell different types of Legos. If you build a thing and you’re done enjoying it, you can pack it back up and sell it and get a little money back. Or you can buy rare or interesting pieces.
Sam: He ran this for ten years. It became a good business. However — he died tragically. No one online says exactly how. People suspected a drug overdose but we don’t know. He was working on this website 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Sam: When he died, his mother — imagine a cute old lady who bakes cookies — she loved her son and was so passionate about the community he made. She said, “I can’t let this community go away.” So her and her husband — Dan’s stepdad — took over the website. But because it was just one guy running it, they didn’t even have the passwords. They didn’t even know how it was run.
Sam: They eventually called the web hosting service and explained what happened. They gave them the passwords, and they just spent three years figuring it out and trying to make the community thrive again. The community stepped up: “We’ve got to do this for Dan. This community is too good. We can’t let Bricklink go away. We love buying and selling Legos here.”
Sam: They run the business for three years, it becomes a good business. Then a billionaire named Jay Kim bought it. Have you ever heard of Jay Kim?
Shaan: No.
Sam: Jay Kim — it’s not his real name, his real name is Kim Jung Jun — was basically the Mark Pincus of Korea. In the ’90s, he was early to the internet, created games, and became the biggest gaming company in Korea. Then he started a family holding company where he buys interesting companies. Bricklink was one of them.
Sam: At the time of his death, he was the third-wealthiest person in all of Korea.
Sam: Jay Kim was like a steward for the website. They didn’t change much. But one of the reasons why he bought it and what makes this interesting — Dan’s mom wrote this beautiful tribute on Dan’s personal website. Pictures of Dan growing up, working on Bricklink. She wrote: “Not long before he died, he developed an international monetary exchange engine called Bricklink that allowed sellers almost anywhere in the world to sell in their own currency and their customers could buy in their own currency, and every two hours this system would update so you could buy cross-country or across the world and your currency would automatically be updated so everyone was getting a fair share.” He built that in 2010.
Sam: Jay Kim also owns Bitstamp — have you heard of Bitstamp?
Shaan: Yeah, crypto exchange, right?
Sam: One of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. And that’s why this guy Dan and this whole story is fascinating — there’s actually some weird crypto implications here. What this guy Dan was doing overlaps with this whole crypto world. He was pretty early to it. And if you go to Bricklink and see the comments, they’re all similar types of people. A weird underground community.
Sam: Remember the phone freaks — people who would hack into payphones? Then the internet, same type. Now crypto. It’s this weird chain. It’s all actually quite similar. A weird underground community.
Sam: And this business, Bricklink — oddly, Jay Kim also died under mysterious circumstances in his 50s in Hawaii, where Dan died. So there are a bunch of weird things going on with this story. But most recently, after Jay Kim died, Lego the company bought the website. And they openly said: “We bought this website because we want to carry on this tradition. We don’t want anyone messing with it. We don’t intend to do too much with it. We just want to keep it going — because this is for the people.”
Shaan: That’s pretty cool.
Sam: On Dan’s website — there’s a post on the forum titled “Afterlife?” — and Dan wrote: “After I die and go to heaven, this is how I imagine it to be: a place where there’s an infinite amount of bricks and an infinite amount of time to build with them. There would be all kinds of bricks for all themes, so that when I got bored of building a castle I could move on to a town or a pirate ship. There would be lots and lots of other Lego Maniacs to share ideas and build with.”
Shaan: Isn’t that… right. That’s so great.
Sam: Both Dan and Nathan from Rebrickable — they run these marketplaces but they’re also weird movements, weird diaries, like a cult. There’s a very particular leader. Dan was just “admin.” No one really knew his name. It was just “oh, admin’s doing this.” And it’s just this weird chain from phone phreaks to early internet to crypto. It’s all quite similar.
What These Businesses Teach Us [00:54:00]
Sam: As a business person, I see these things and I’m like: what other products cost a lot of money, have a passionate nerdy following, and allow you to build a large audience and eventually sell them everything? Lego fits that perfectly. Sneakerheads are kind of one. But it’s really fascinating how big I think these businesses can be, even though they appear quite niche.
Shaan: Dude, I forgot — the thrill of the shill. So first of all, the thrill of the shill is one of the best inventions we’ve had. Unlike the gentleman’s agreement, which we kind of stole from somebody else, the thrill of the shill was actually original. But I have a different thing I want to try today. Are you down?
Sam: Yes.
Shaan: So the thrill of the shill came up literally 30 seconds before we hit record: “how do we promote interesting stuff?” and you were like, “well, we tell them valuable content and hopefully they’ll buy whatever we’re selling — just call it the thrill of the shill.” Good. But now I want to try something different.
Shaan: Have you heard of the famous Hemingway story — the six-word story? So there was a challenge: how do you tell a story in only six words? The lore is that they told Ernest Hemingway, and he won with: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Six words. Tells a deep story, hits you in the emotions.
Shaan: So I have a six-word thrill of the shill. Here we go: “Business for sale. Owner never hired.” And it’s a story about a business that failed — up for sale now — because the owner never hired. He tried to do it all himself, never made the key hires he needed to scale, because he didn’t go to Support Shepherd and find amazing talent overseas at a fraction of US costs.
Sam: That was beautiful. The Hemingway one was quite good too. What was the line?
Shaan: “Business for sale. Owner never hired.” Just like “baby shoes, never worn.” Support Shepherd dot com — that’s the shill. The thrill was a beautiful line.
Fanfiction, Wattpad, and Niche Communities [01:01:00]
Shaan: The other one that’s most like this is fanfiction. Wattpad reminds me a lot of this. And there’s also the fanfiction wiki — I think Fandom bought it or something.
Shaan: Fanfiction: people get super passionate about Harry Potter or different books and spin out their own world. I remember Mugglenet — started by a guy named Emerson Spartz — they built this huge website just around fans of Harry Potter. Very much like Bricklink or Rebrickable. We’d be waiting for the last Harry Potter book to come out and people would write their own versions of it. Full-length books, just written in their spare time for fun.
Shaan: And that led to some big things — 50 Shades of Grey came out of a fanfiction post. Originally written as Twilight fanfiction.
Shaan: If people were surprised that Wattpad was getting hundreds of millions of visitors every month, one of the most popular websites in the world — they sold for $600 million to a Korean company. They weren’t making much money, but the passion and the usage was off the charts. And you don’t have to do much marketing because the people who are passionate about it are going to search every nook and cranny to find other people as fanatical about it as them.
What Makes These Businesses Special [01:04:00]
Sam: There are a few attributes I’m thinking about. Attribute number one: they seem like jokes at first. It’s almost embarrassing — “What do you do for a living? I run a Lego blog.” Seems silly when you talk about it. But if there are enough people, it could be pretty great.
Sam: The second thing: I actually think you shouldn’t build these quickly. These are slow-bird businesses. You don’t want to get too big, too fast. Otherwise the nerds — the passionate ones — will be like, “oh, this is lame, this is too mainstream.”
Sam: But number three: if you do it right, they have huge moats. They’re very hard to kill. People get very loyal.
Sam: New York Times Cooking had this a few years ago — a similar passionate community. They had a revolt because someone made a change in their Facebook group. They had 60,000 people and an admin changed something about post approval. People revolted. These communities — you’re a steward of the people. You’re not always a dictator. Your fans are temperamental. Pros and cons. But I do think they’re very valuable because of how hard they can be to ruin.
Can MFM Do This? The Reverse Funnel [01:07:00]
Shaan: Do you think — not to be self-serving, just real discussion — do you think we can kind of do this? I kind of think we have the makings of something like this, but we might also eff it up by trying to grow it too fast.
Shaan: One of the best tests for “will somebody like MFM” — I remember talking to Ben once and he said: do you ever go to a restaurant and your brain starts calculating how much the restaurant is making? You count the tables, figure out meals per hour, average ticket size, and you end up with the EBITDA of this restaurant? If you’re like that, you’re probably going to like this podcast. But being like that is weird. Most people just go to the restaurant, look at the menu, order the food. If you’re at a table with four other people, you’re going to dork out on it alone. Nobody else is going to be like “wow, how much do you think one of these servers is making per hour?”
Sam: Exactly. And so in the same way — most Lego people, if they went to school, could not find somebody as passionate. On Bricklink, on Rebrickable, you find your people. For us, it’s the same thing. The six people at the dinner — your family, your friends — they might not want to dork out about it. But you find us. And you’re like, “these are all people who want to know the EBITDA of the restaurant.”
Growing MFM Right vs. Growing It Fast [01:11:00]
Shaan: I’ve been tempted in the past to try to grow this faster, and the things you do to grow faster are kind of dilutive. You actually sell out a little. The cringy YouTube thumbnail face. Talking about a topic that might not be the thing you would actually want to dork out about.
Shaan: I like that this episode is basically 90% us dorking out about these niche Lego websites. But it will attract the right people.
Sam: I thought the Super Bowl was in November. That’s news to me.
Shaan: That’s one thing. The second is a business principle I saw. Somebody said: if you want to build a truly strong business, build like a reverse funnel. I was like, “oh, that’s interesting.”
Shaan: I always think of every business as a funnel from top to bottom. Top of the funnel is people who don’t know you yet — they come to your website for the first time, hear your podcast, become aware of you. Then they get interested, sign up as a user, sign up for paid. And the paid account is always at the bottom.
Shaan: What this person was saying is: you actually want a reverse funnel. Meaning you want to find the 10 people who are most interested and passionate about what you’re doing — your extreme hardcore users who absolutely love it and use it every day and give you feedback. They’ll tell all their friends. Their friends won’t even listen. Doesn’t matter. Then you go one rung up to the next 100 people who care a lot, but less than those 10. Then the thousand. The ten thousand. The hundred thousand.
Shaan: You stack the funnel from the bottom up. You find the people who need it most, who love it most. They give you the best feedback. They love it versus everybody else who’s like, “oh, that’s cool.” And that’s actually a good principle for how to build something enduring.
Shaan: When you built Hampton, did you do that?
Sam: For sure. At first I was like, let me figure out who wants this most. I had ideas about who that would be. And what I found was there are a lot of entrepreneurs in Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, Delaware — some of these forgotten areas that aren’t on the coast — and I’m shocked at how lonely they are and how much they need this. Let’s go get more of those people.
Sam: So that’s what I did. I thought it was going to be like cool New York or San Francisco people. Turns out it was cool Kentucky guys too. They weren’t even part of my vernacular. I wouldn’t have thought about them.
Sam: With this podcast, I think it’s good that you and I have other businesses that pay us money and can grow faster. It’s been very tempting to do inauthentic things that we know will get more views. But we’ve done a good job of sticking to being authentic.
MFM Meetups and Community [01:16:00]
Shaan: Did you see the meetups that people were doing for MFM? That’s an example of the test. Do you know they’re still meeting? They’re still meeting.
Sam: That’s exactly right. So we thought, “if me and Sam say we’re going to go do a live show, we could fill a thousand to two thousand people in a theater.” And it’s a ton of work. We were both like, all right, let’s not really do this on an ongoing basis.
Shaan: Then somebody came to us — I forget her name off the top of my head, Rachel something — and she said, “Our product does this: for creators who have a community, let your community meet up without you.” And I was like, “key word — without you. I love it.” That actually kind of makes sense.
Shaan: Because while it feels good to be the center of attention, that’s not actually what makes something really valuable. What we’d rather do is use our content as a magnet — a honeypot — to bring in the cool guy from Kentucky and the cool girl from Illinois who do the restaurant thing where they start calculating restaurant revenues when they walk in. Get them together. Because they’re going to hit it off, but it’d be hard for them to find each other.
Shaan: If all we serve as is the finding function for those people — and what’s cool is they did the first meetup, but now they’ve just been meeting on a monthly basis. That tells me something went right. I FaceTimed a few of them. I just said hi, and there were people saying, “Yeah, I drove six hours to come to this one because I’m looking for a husband or a wife. I want to meet someone who has these similar values.” MFM is a proxy for that. And they go, “We’re still doing monthly meetings because we just want to hang out with other dorks like us.”
Shaan: My tagline for people that will like MFM: “Business nerds with a sense of humor.” That’s the whole thing. If you’re a business nerd — meaning you run a business but you also nerd out about more business stuff, you can’t get enough, it doesn’t feel like work to think about or read about business — and then with a sense of humor, because there are probably people more experienced than us who share more tactical stuff and are smarter, but I think the one thing we do is we have a lot of fun while we do it, and that rubs off.
Sam: So we just dorked out on niche passionate things. I think this Lego stuff is crazy fascinating. Go to the Dan Jezek site — DanJezek.com — just to look at it. Maybe you’ll dork out over this like I did. And by the way, if you made it this far into the pod, you’re definitely one of these nerds. Go ahead and click subscribe on YouTube, because you can actually make fun of us in the comments or let us know what you think about this niche stuff.
Pal World and the Midwit Meme [01:21:00]
Sam: I have one more quick one — kind of in the theme of kid stuff, games, toys. Have you seen the thing called Pal World? I know you’re not a gamer, but do you know about this?
Shaan: No, what is it?
Sam: Pal World is currently the most popular PC game in the world and it came out of nowhere. You know Steam?
Shaan: I still don’t really understand what Steam is.
Sam: Steam is like an app store but for computers. The company that makes Counter-Strike — to let people download the new version and buy it, they created Steam. It’s like a store to sell Counter-Strike. But it also sells all the other games. So now anybody can list their game there.
Sam: The number one game on Steam right now is Pal World. In like seven days, it’s done $200 million in revenue. When games hit, they hit like none other. And this thing was made on a $10,000 budget.
Sam: Here’s why I wanted to bring this up. I’m not even playing the game — you don’t play games, so we don’t have a lot to say about the actual game. But it’s an example of the midwit meme. The absolute best ideas are simple to the point of sounding dumb.
Sam: What does that mean? Snapchat — the next big social app. It wasn’t started as some grand intellectual theory on the future of communication. It was, “what if you could send someone a picture that would disappear in 10 seconds?” And people said, “What would you do with that?” Nudes. College nudes. Because it’s going to disappear in 10 seconds so there’s no filter. And then after the fact, people start to intellectualize it: “Well, see, impermanence is actually the greatest form of permanence…” What are you talking about? That’s not where the best ideas come from. The best ideas come from really simple things you can describe in just a couple words.
Sam: Pal World — what’s the game? Pokemon with guns. The CEO, he basically says: “I’m not a visionary. I just try to make whatever people want.” He had this idea of — he didn’t say Pokémon because he doesn’t want to get sued — but “you could run around and capture these little monsters, but then we added guns because you know, Americans love to shoot things.”
Sam: They’re like, “so why did you choose this art style?” He’s like, “I didn’t even want to do that. I wanted to do a cool 3D thing. But I didn’t know that requires an animation rig and all this stuff. So I made one and was like, God, that was hard. There’s no way we could do this with 10,000 characters. So I had this artist we’d rejected and then hired later.” They’re like, “What did you tell her to do?” He’s like, “I don’t know, like, whatever our programmer could make. That was her mandate.” They’re like, “What was your budget?” He’s like, “I don’t know, we had like $10,000, but we didn’t really set a budget. If we needed more I would have probably just borrowed some more.”
Sam: “Tell us about the developers on your team.” He’s like, “One of my developers is a guy I met at a convenience store. This kid — he’s a teenager — but he told me he could code so I told him to come by and he works on the game. He’s pretty critical to the game.”
Sam: So the founder wrote this amazing blog post where he explains everything. He says, “This game shouldn’t even exist. It’s the antithesis of proper game development.” He says, “We had no budget. No sane company would ever start developing a game without a budget. But Pocketpair is not a sane company.” And he just talks about it. “I started asking myself, what’s the budget? When the balance of our bank account reached zero, we could always just borrow money or release the game just before the company went bankrupt. We had about two years of runway and I decided just to keep working without stressing about budget because all I was worried about was getting the game done as fast as possible.”
Sam: He’s quite not like a corporate-speak CEO. He’s pretty awesome. Japanese guy. He made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money and started a game studio, even though he wasn’t really equipped to do that.
Sam: Right now on Steam, as we’re recording this, there were over a million people concurrently playing. The highest was two million at a time. The number one game — more than DOTA, more than Counter-Strike, more than PUBG, more than all of them.
Shaan: And the meme — the midwit meme — where the idiot and the Jedi kind of think the same thing. Just make the game as fast as possible. Or: if you run out of money, just try to get some more. What should you make? “What if Pokémon had guns, that’d be cool.” Versus people who are trying to overanalyze everything. I see this trend over and over and over again.
Shaan: Did I tell you about the midwit thing I’m trying to do?
Sam: No. What?
Shaan: I truly believe this midwit meme explains so much of my own life. I want to see it every day as a reminder: don’t overthink it, just keep it simple. What’s the obvious answer? It’s always there, but it gets fogged up by trying to over-architect things, trying to be an intellectual.
Shaan: George Mack — our friend, very interesting thinker — he had this idea to do a super glossy coffee table book of just 100 midwit memes. I heard this idea and I was like, that’s genius, I can’t wait. So I messaged him. Months later I was like, “Dude, what happened to the book?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, I didn’t want to do it because the original thing was 365 — one a day, 365 midwit memes. I didn’t know if I could get to 365. And then I thought, maybe the cost will be a little high, I’m not sure I’ll make my money back. And a bestselling book has these specific attributes, so I went and studied all the bestselling books and I learned all these commonalities between Atomic Habits and this and this…”
Shaan: I just sent him the midwit meme back after his thousand-word WhatsApp message. “Make the book. It’ll be fun.” That’s it. Like, just do it. It’ll be fun. Who cares? It might lose a little bit of money. It’s okay. The people who buy something cool will come. It’s no big deal.
Shaan: I’m trying to convince him to do this book with me. Let’s just make it, it’ll take us two weeks, it’ll be fun, and anybody who actually buys it is going to be exactly the type of person I want in my life.
Sam: Do it on your own.
Shaan: I’m looking for an excuse to do a project with George because I really like him, and also this was his idea so I don’t want to steal it. I want to convince him to do this with me. If he really refuses I’ll say, “All right, can I do this myself?”
Shaan: It’s Monday. I think this episode goes live on Wednesday. Whenever it goes live — give him seven days. If this doesn’t get done, tweet at George Mack. His Twitter handle is just George. Tweet at him and say “do it.” He’s gonna have to figure out why everybody’s tweeting “do it” at him. I’m sure he’ll eventually put two and two together.
Wrap [01:38:00]
Sam: I enjoyed this episode. What do you think?
Shaan: Yeah, this is fun. I enjoyed dorking out over this stuff. I had a great time.
Sam: Do we wrap here? Is that the pod?
Shaan: That’s the pod. I feel like I learned something today.
Sam: Yeah. And I had a great time.
Shaan: That’s the midwit meme of preparing for these things. I’m like, “What gets views? What will make more money? What will be more fun?” All right. That’s the pod.