Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i’m going to do this i’m going to hire a santa i’m going to find a foot traffic area and i’m going to make like 10 grand in a day no way there’s no way you’re going to be able to pull this off i bet you 500 i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back should we be doing a like we right now we just roll into the conversation should we be doing a thing where it’s like this is the my family podcast where we do xyz because like if you’re a new person coming on the podcast starts with you being like we good okay so i want to tell you a story i bought a car and the car has a transmission you know what a transmission is so check this out and then you’re like you go into the thing so should we be uh educating people on what this is or you think that’s true try hard and just [ ] no i think we should we we did the intros at the end for a while where we recorded them and put them in front but how do you i don’t even know how to describe this podcast when i meet someone and they ask me what i do for a living i say oh i do this thing i also host this podcast called my first million and i’m always embarrassed to say the name but then what do you explain the podcast is yeah i would say like you know for people who are uh they’re kind of like business nerds or they’re they’re idea junkies so they’re always you know scheming or wondering you know what’s the business behind this how much money does this make how much money does this person have those types of questions that you’re not allowed to say out loud this is the place where we talk about those things out loud that’s kind of my my off top my head description and so we brainstorm if you wanna you know if you wanna sit here while we brainstorm business ideas and break down the economics behind businesses that you’ve heard over never heard of um this is the podcast for you great well there’s our intro another way another way i’d put it is every other podcast you can listen to if you go into itunes is gonna be about the past or about the future and we tell you something about the present right now so past is all interviews about [ ] you’ve done the future is you know guessing about you know what the world’s gonna look like in 20 years and what we do is we talk about business opportunities that exist today that uh that you should be looking either building investing in or just knowing about but it’s not just business for example i got messages sometimes we talk about health related stuff or we just talk about like things we’re doing with our life and i got messages saying people love it for example right now i’m staying at my friend’s house in hawaii and i posted a video on my twitter did you see that video looks sick okay it looks sick but there’s something interesting about this house and what my friend does that i think is amazing so he only has one it’s a really big living room he’s got a huge living room he’s got a very small couch the rest he’s got pads like pillows on the floor and it’s people it’s floor sitting like it’s like a floor sitting scheme or like a layout and i love it have you ever sat like they do a house where people like to sit on the floor so my sister did this unintentionally so my sister i think i think i’ve mentioned i should probably talk about her businesses because they’re pretty cool yeah but she basically does uh something called in home like in-home uh daycare or preschool so she does both and so like she took she took over my apartment so my parents were like hey my parents had a house and attached to the house was a two-bedroom condo and i was living in that right when i moved to san francisco i lived in that that place uh like for like a year and then i got noticed i was getting evicted by my parents i was like what’s going on it’s like oh yeah your sister needs the space she’s starting a business in here so like you know you got to get the [ ] out and like she’s going to take over this space so where we had the living room she basically ran a preschool out of that space and uh you told me the numbers it was a really good business oh it’s still a great business so she has three of these now uh they’re they’re all different so she’s got an outdoor so it’s even better right so first so the first genius move was instead of going in renting a commercial space she’s like oh i’ll just use like an in i’ll do in home and okay why is that good well you’re already paying the mortgage and what happens is from you know 8 a.m to 4 p.m during the day a part of your home will be used for your preschool your daycare and now if you’re a student so you would think okay yeah that seems pretty small like you got what 10 kids in there no no big deal well every kid pays three thousand dollars so that’s 30 grand a month of income coming in now uh you have teachers so you got maybe three teachers uh there it ends up being about 40 40 i want to say profit i i might be wrong ahead but it’s about 40 profit there’s another hidden benefit which is you can write off pretty much everything about your house and your in-home life because your business runs out of your home so you basically pay no taxes uh sorry your all your life expenses are also business expenses in a way uh because that couch that you got or that mat that play mat you bought that’s all for the school right all the toys you bought that your kids also get to play with they’re for the school you’re and she also sent her kids to the school so her own what she would normally be paying for daycare now she was getting you know for free because she had her own school and so and then she started she created an even better one which was an outdoor only program so what’s better than using your in-home for for for your space no space at all use the public parks and this was great because a whole bunch of parents didn’t want their kids indoors all day and like sitting you know kind of like sitting inside well you’re going to do that at home anyways why don’t you get out there like a good kid and go play go go play with nature and so she created nature kids which is this program in san francisco and it’s actually awesome has like the highest reviews and there’s i went to the class and basically all the other parents were there and i was just kind of talking to the parents it’s like oh yeah this guy he started uh kiva this guy’s ex paypal this guy is it’s like all these like billionaires of san francisco basically sending their kids to this outdoor program wait she has three of them now so she has yeah she has three total uh programs so this could be like a like a seven figure a year business yeah it is yeah so it is it is that and and so and so she has like teachers who who you know run the day-to-day she’s on walkie-talkie with them like doing like throughout the day and she has like nest cameras in the place so she can be like uh like hey you know like you know where she can keep an eye on it but she’s not day-to-day involved anymore which is great at the beginning it was her and my mom was like making the food for the kids like making tacos and [ ] and like now it’s all like you all done done and and they’re home they’re they’re floor sitters so okay yeah so back to the floor setting thing sorry so because of that whenever i go to my sister’s place um her living room there was no furniture there was no tv there was no nothing like a normal living room would have she had done like what you did with your home gym she had just turned the whole floor into play mats and even better than just the floor sitting because it’s just play mats and then like all the walls had like kind of like kids games and decals and stuff like that but then she had these like little swings for kids like you know you know like a rope swing like tarzan just like hanging from the middle of the room so like things that would occupy the kids but then when i would go hang out there i’m floor sitting i’m just like stretching while we’re hanging out with you that’s exactly what i’m doing so so i was getting so [ ] limber just like hanging out with my sister because why wouldn’t i just be stretching and rolling and just getting to know my body a little bit and then there’s a swing there so now i’m kind of like practicing rope climbs like a fireman and [ ] and i was like dude this is like i don’t know what like it’s like an ergonomic lifestyle it’s like you know there’s this whole my lifestyle just changed into this like mobile tarzan you know one with nature and one with my body that’s exactly what i got every time i’m here so he’s got this like hammock swing coming down from the ceiling and so you have to like sit in a particular way where you’re stretching and then he’s got like these cushions that are only like eight inches above the ground yeah and you just sit there and it takes a minute to get used to it it is so much better than sitting on a couch it’s so much better it’s the best i watched this youtube video recently and this guy had this whole like theory it was like it’s kind of like a ted talk this guy’s got this video and it’s all about how like sitting is like crushing us and basically his whole thing is basically that you should stand most of the time and you should stand in a very particular way where you like squeeze your butt and so it’s like your hips are directly underneath you and he’s got this whole talk and he like looks at these people who don’t sit in normal 90 degree chairs and he shows like what their butt looks like and it’s like the whatever it’s like the whole point is he like has all these visuals anyway i’ve been floor sitting and it is awesome i’m 100 gonna stick with this or at least i’m going to try to yeah it’s a total hack i should do that uh like i do love me some couch time but i definitely want to have a room that’s just pure maths and then when i hang out there work there just roll around there it’s just like a different vibe and with kids it’s perfect because that’s what they naturally want anyways and so i’m just going to do that with my giant like playroom do you want to talk about um ozzy this is amazing i got a bunch of topics i’m going to save half of them for next time but we’ll do half today um this is an amazing amazing story the story came out about aussie media and if you missed it i’m going to give you the rundown and then i want sam i want you to react yeah i know all about it okay so here’s what i know and you fill in the gaps okay so i heard about this because uh the story breaks in the new york times and they basically say and they talk about aussie media a company that i never really heard of most people have no idea what it is red flag number one so they go they were it’s a company that’s raised 150 million dollars and they were on this call with goldman sachs and goldman sachs is ready to invest 40 million dollars in the company and they’re just sort of doing their final kind of like diligent slash get to know you calls and they’re one of the selling points that ozzy was telling goldman sachs about like how it’s defensible and how we’re like this next gen media company was they were like our youtube videos which you see you know some of our youtube videos get millions of views which is good for news and media company um it’s you know youtube loves us the data shows that you know youtube sees that you know gen z or millennials like love our content so they’re big fans of our of our content we’re going to be doing much more with youtube so you know your investment now you’re investing in this like next-gen video company as well and so they they get on a call they’re like why don’t we do a call with us the founders of ozzie goldman and uh the executive over at youtube who runs youtube originals and so they get on the call and they’re on a conference call and they’re waiting for the the youtube guy emails and says hey i’m running a few minutes late sorry and so they’re on this video call and then the youtube guy says hey guys i’m you know i’m sorry i’m still stuck in traffic can’t do video can we just switch to a uh a phone call conference call sorry for the inconvenience and everyone’s like no problem we switch over to the phone call and he calls in and he says hey i’m so inside let’s call him jeff i don’t know what his name is i’m jeff from youtube yeah ozzy is amazing our data shows that it just crushes other media companies uh they’re really innovative we plan to feature them and do a whole lot more it’s so great and the goldman guys they’re like wow that sounds good but you know they sort of noticed like his voice sounded a little funny almost like it was like a like a voice changer and they’re like ah that’s probably nothing but you know like just in case let’s go ahead and just like double check in our diligence here let’s just let’s just email the guy from youtube and just just make sure you know it’s all all good and they were like oh you know he had emailed us from a gmail which is kind of weird you know like the official jeff at gmail.com like let’s just email let’s just go to youtube themselves and just email him directly and so they email and that guy of course is like what the hell i’ve never heard of aussie media no i was not on a phone call what are you talking about and so goldman’s like what the [ ] is going on and so this basically was and then they they they go back to the company and the company’s like oh my god yes we’re so sorry i’m a lapse in judgment we had that was my co-founder on the call you know like we’re embarrassed sorry that was just a bad bad decision i don’t know i don’t even know how they could with a straight face back out of that but they you know they back out of it and goldman says okay look we’re not gonna invest because obviously shady as [ ] but uh you know we’re not gonna make a big deal out of it so you know whatever so they back out and this this company if you look into aussie they had made some pretty big claims so those are some other big claims so 50 million monthly uniques they said their email newsletter had 20 million monthly subscribers which is like you know as somebody who has like the biggest thing ever yeah yeah so it would be unheard of i think the public numbers morning brewers said they had three million i think you guys are right around that same number so to to do you know 10 times more than that would be like wow that’s pretty substantial like that’s interesting and uh oh you have 50 million uniques like on your website when i go there it looks like you have less than a million according to this 50 million monthly uniques is also like a top 100 or top 200 website i mean it’s it’s huge so people start looking into it and they start looking into all their claims so they claim they’re like we are amazon prime’s first talk show and then you go look into it it’s like they used it wasn’t like amazon prime commissioned and paid them for a talk show they used something called like direct upload which just lets anybody upload their thing into the library and uh and then they claimed that they were the first and then they were using amazon’s name and all their like kind of like billboards and ads saying it was amazon’s first and amazon sent them a cease and desist and was like take our name off your [ ] and uh and he’s like i stand by our claims but you know of course we’ll take your name off this and um and then they claim that they are the fastest growing talk show on youtube and the journalist was like so how do you know that because you know we talked to social blade they measured this kind of thing they said you’re pretty like average he’s like well you know we’re the fastest growing premium talk show that’s youtube centric like their own category they made up and we looked and we couldn’t find a faster growing one and it’s like oh so you looked and you couldn’t find one and so you said you are the best one and then they look if you look at their youtube videos they’ll have like a million views but like less than 100 comments so you know a little fishy a little fishy you know what’s going on here and so um and by the way they had like pretty legit investors so axel springer uh mark lazary who owns the milwaukee bucks like steve jobs wife david drummond who’s just like you know long time google exec uh they had some pretty like legit investors still have pretty legit investors and the funny thing is after goldman sachs walked away and all this happened they still raised money always still raised another round and so what’s your what what did i miss and what’s your reaction yeah so the takeaway here is twofold the first is we actually talked about this a few weeks a week or two ago we said that you can raise a fair amount of money and pretty much lie and most people will not check in on you right yeah we said we said the following i’m surprised more people ain’t lying because it would be so easy and quite lucrative to do so yeah when it comes to the thing and we said most people us included don’t do a ton of diligence and even if you do it’s very easy to get away with the basic diligence and we’re nobodies right we’re we’re doing this and then you take these larger funds larger names and uh they still don’t do it they all got duped too you know what i mean so it’s like uh so there is a systemic problem in a way it’s a feature and a problem the feature is this industry runs on trust and the reason you you and i can do deals on a handshake is because we trust each other and we and there’s a lot of founders out there who are but the majority of people are not trying are not duplicitous or lying or committing fraud and so that’s why silicon valley can move at a fast pace because we don’t have to take three to six months to diligence every single deal we do that’s why we can move at a fast pace but the flip side of that is it does create an opportunity for fraudsters to to lie which doesn’t happen often but so basically i believe the founder’s name is carlos watson and carlos watson is a very charismatic guy i think he was a host or had a tv show or something like that on both pbs and cnn if i remember correctly they started about a year or two before us and i remember i recruited people from there or and i had one woman who worked there who have worked for us and and i would ask them about it uh ask her about them and basically they caught my eye because i would use similar web and i would notice that they had very little traffic and if you go to on their website now the hustle probably actually gets more traffic than they do and we don’t even i compared you guys have about 10 more traffic according to that than them yeah we don’t even try to get traffic like we don’t like that’s not our business is not web traffic but their business is web traffic aussie additionally their website is horrible like it’s one of these sites that looks pretty but you go to it and you’re like how the hell do you work this thing and like it’s like impossible to figure out what they’re like as a marketer and an entrepreneur i can go to a website and i can look at i’m like oh the goal is to drive me to this thing when i see their thing i’m like what are they trying to get me to do and so i’ve always had a red flag about this company because they claimed these huge valuations they claimed these this huge reach and i don’t know anyone who consumed it i when i was in new york i used to see um buses with their logos on it and they’re buying all these ads and media companies don’t buy ads media companies sell ads and you’re not buying a bus ad of all ads and so i used to see this and i knew that something weird was happening because it didn’t make sense how they made money and they constantly had to raise money and so this was always full of [ ] to me um i’m a little surprised axel springer invested in it because they’re pretty legit but i’m not surprised that steve jobs wife invested into it because she invests in a lot of non-profit making stuff so i’m like well she just gives money to anyone um but yeah this company i think is nonsense they also claim that they have these huge festivals and i’ve never heard of anyone that went to one of their festivals so i’ve always thought that this company was full of it and now there’s some proof yeah yeah funny i mean it’s crazy how this stuff goes down and then you see people who are so there’s one i think mark lazary’s on the board and i think he was i think they released a statement like oh you know we you know a lapse in judgment we we we stand by this kind of temporary momentary kind of like lapse in judgment uh you know they’re making the right steps to correct this um i don’t even think the co-founders like got fired i think i think he’s still there i’m correct dude it’s a weirdos company and they also claim that they’re you know where they they say they’re based out of is palo alto and like you and i have lived here for for 10 15. never heard of them never met a single employee yeah never met anybody who reads them or shared an article from them uh also not where you would start a media company is palo alto so you know just strange all around yeah so that’s weird um do you want can i tell you about a uh can i can i do one real quick okay so have i ever told you about um uh newspapers.com you told me about this and i remember going to it be like oh i’ve never been to like that sounds like a very common word and i remember going to it you said it was something cool but but say it again okay for me because i don’t remember in another so i believe it was owned by ancestry.com and so ancestry.com it’s a website where you can do two things you can enter in your dna or you can enter in your last name like you give them your dna and they you know do 23 me [ ] and they tell you who you’re related to or you just do um you enter in your name and you could track like you know if you came into ellis island and like who your great-grandparents were based off of civil war records and all this weird stuff and they owned they bought this archive called newspapers.com and it scans every newspaper they could possibly get a hold of and you could search it and i use it for research all the time and if you scroll down on our doc sean i actually gave you an example so dan gilbert started this company called quicken loans he owns the cleveland cavaliers is that what he owns yeah and he’s like a big shot detroit whatever and he seems like a nice guy and i was curious about his background and so i used newspapers.com to learn about his company so quicken loans originally was called rock financial and i sent you three examples of why newspapers.com is incredibly fascinating the first you can read profiles about people so quicken loans went public i think in 1997 i found an article from 1996 i think and you could read that article and it’s a profile on dan and he’ll explain they’ll say dan gilbert’s off office is really funny he’s got toys everywhere and he’ll say well my you know what i’m trying to do is build this fun work plate you know whatever and so you see like first-hand knowledge as they are building about how their philosophy on business and that’s incredibly fascinating and he’ll also say like yeah you know we started the business with five thousand dollars of savings and then we scaled to this much revenue and so you could actually see in real time how they’re describing the business and where they came from the second thing that you can do and i do this all the time is i find their ads in classified newspapers where they list jobs so i actually listed one of their their job ads so how would you do this so let’s say you’re wanting to find this can you search like everywhere rock financials mentioned or you had to literally go just let me check this sunday and check the job section and see if there’s no so what i did was i typed in rock financial i typed in show me all the newspapers within a radius of detroit because i knew that’s where they’re based out of and then i said uh make it between 1995 and 1996. and then pay for newspapers.com this is a paid service 10 a month um and when i and then i i could see it says when you’re searching it says which newspaper it’s from and which section of the newspaper and who the author is so i can very quickly see if this is a profile if this is like just dan gilbert giving a quote on the economy or if this is a job ad and i read the job ads job ads are actually amazing so if you ever want to see what a company’s launching even today you go to their website and you click jobs and if you see like oh wow youtube is hiring or i don’t know i’m making this up apple is hiring people who have experience in cars amazing they’re clearly like going into like so that’s like a no-brainer but it’s cool to see uh and also on a lot of job uh boards or websites they’ll say you know we’re aussie media we reach 20 million people a month we we cover this stuff and so you see like it’ll actually tell you a lot of uh stats about the company they have to they have to um they have to sell themselves right if you’re recruiting people and by the way super super sneaky move go interview at a competitor’s company to find out their their data because during the interview process you’ll find out a lot about the company’s strategy about their numbers things like that and that’s one way to get competitive intel that i’ve i’ve heard some people do or you can recruit the people who work there knowing that you’re not going to hire them that’s another one well that one is a little bit harder because you recruit somebody and you put them in a position and some people get really some people are like oh yeah like happy to share nothing nothing that was confidential but just you know here’s my point of view on what i think they care about and what they’re roughly the size of the of this of this part of their business but then some people are like i can’t believe you’re asking me to divulge information about my previous sure yeah you have to be respectful you got to go about it in a certain way so anyway newspapers.com i use it to look at job ads and i can see like how they describe their company back then and like what they were recruiting for sometimes you could see salary and so it actually adds a lot of context around it and then finally i look at ads that they use to get customers and so you can see like how they describe themselves how they got customers uh things like that you can see if you look at job ads you can see how they’re structuring their business it’s actually an amazing tool and so the difference is is that when you read biographies they’ll tell you like a third person point of view on like analyzing it when i do this when i do it this way i’m like well here’s exactly how they describe themselves and um like yeah it’s different because it’s moment in time versus hindsight right biography is always hindsight now that we’ve seen it all play out we can connect the dots in this way but when you just go back to the source material at that time when it went to print this is how it was seen in the moment which is which is really useful because like i’ve done this with tech companies you can go read when twitter launched on techcrunch and it’s a small blurb yeah it’s like oh this goofy thing called twitter launch it’s kind of buzzy at this party but it kind of has no point i’m keeping an eye on it blah blah it’s like oh pretty inconspicuous launch for something i guess that became as influential as twitter you could go see this for you can go see their original landing pages and their original launch press and how they position themselves you can go read original like launch announcements on hacker news for dropbox and other things you can go see the the five minute video that drew houston put up demoing dropbox and the comments of people being like dude no one needs this and um you know here we are you know 20 billion dollars and for the modern stuff like a dropbox and twitter there’s two ways you do that the first is when you search on google you there’s right underneath this uh the text bar you go all the way to the right and you click search tools and you could change the date so you change the date and so you make it so if let’s say twitter launched in 2009 you type in twitter and you take out the e because that’s how you remember they spelled it and you do like year 2005 to 2010 i forget when they first launched and you actually see it or you go to webarchive.com and or waybackmachine.com i forget just google one of those and then you can actually see the early landing pages so anyway that’s a cool hack that i wanted to show you about um it’s pretty amazing by the way this print ad i just want to re i just put it in my swipe file but like this ad for them they go it says everybody’s talking mortgage first and then there’s a quote from a customer we found out that the bank’s pre-approval is just a piece of paper with mortgage first we got a firm commitment and locked in a low rate there’s no easier way to shop for home right that’s like the print ad headline and it’s just cool to see the copywriting of these like these types of products you know it’s not it’s not the sexiest type of product to send to sell as you know a mortgage and that’s exactly my point so here’s the point when you’re starting something you say to yourself i want to be like quicken loans or i want to be like let’s say you have a clothing company i want to be like louis vuitton i want to be like gucci and you have to i want to be like steve jobs and apple and you have to remember that it’s always on nine out of 10 times it’s not glamorous early on and so you can go and look at early apple products and you’re like oh wow they’re they were [ ] just like i am like they were still trying to figure out they weren’t that great and what they said then like i can’t connect like it’s hard to imagine that this thing became this end thing right that this early ad or this early profile like i never would have guessed that therefore if you go to rocketmortgage.com now and it’s like you know this diverse crew of like white black asian people sitting on beautiful couches and it says rocket mortgage is the home loan experience designed for you you’re one of a kind your mortgage should be too start an application to see what’s possible right like a very different type of ad and so if you wanted to be the next them don’t copy what they say now now that they have kind of branded and they have a sales force all these other things go copy what they did at the beginning when they had zero brand awareness and they had to like explain what they do quickly to people in a more literal sense rather than these like kind of like fancy marketing brochures exactly that’s exactly my point and so i think this is incredibly helpful tool both intellectually because you can get ideas but also emotionally and you can see that like oh wow they weren’t always like kick ass they sucked like me or you know they were only okay or i never would have predicted that they ended where they start based off where they started right okay i got i got one for you can we switch yeah which one you’re going to do you got a lot of really good ones i’m going to give you my blue collar side hustle okay so uh so this is this is the blue collar side hustle segment for for this week which is basically a way you can make money not a ton but thousands or tens of thousands of dollars maybe a hundred thousand dollars um with just a little bit of sweat and creativity that’s the blue collar side also okay so what is it so it’s we’re we’re about to start october and this last quarter of the year is holiday season it’s the biggest shopping season of the year people are ready to spend and coming into the holidays there’s one little side hustle that i always thought was interesting and i started looking into it and it’s this business of mall santas so have you ever like have you ever done this you don’t have like a little kid so you may not have ever done this but like last two years since my daughter was born you know come christmas season uh sonya always wants to like go to the go to see the santa and have us take a family photo with the santa for like the memories with our like baby sits in santa’s lap take a photo dude which is when you think about it [ ] weird that is it’s so weird why does like this young couple who like if you’re an immigrant or you’re like in your case you’re idiot like just believe that you gotta get this picture with this fat old white dude oh by the way barely looks like santa right so the one i’m going to and also kid cries 100 of the time right because you put them in a stranger’s a stranger who looks like a monster’s lap surrounding you like dwarves they’re surrounded by dwarves and other strangers looking at you yeah you’re like give me a smile and they’re like nah i’m crying here so um okay so this little business so what is this so let me just tell you how the current system works and then what you can do so a mall santa will make between 10 and 25 000. in about a five-week sprint here and all they do is they go they they buy the outfit for about 300 and then they get hired by these like photo companies like there’s one company called iconic that does this iconic what they do is they pay they hire all these mall santas and they have 300 malls in america that they’re partnered with and then like a hundred like babies r us no and they’ll be like hey i need them i need a santa and charleston you’re gonna make you know you’re gonna make twenty thousand dollars over the next five seconds like a model agency for fat white guys exactly so then they send you they dispatch you you just go sit there on a chair for like six hours straight and uh kid gets in your lap you say oh ho ho what do you want for christmas take a picture see you later and you just do that it takes zero what do they use them for the rest of the years like a diabetes commercial like what are you going to do with these guys so let me tell you so okay so so that’s the first part so then uh so they have about 6 000 santas that they hire just themselves they showed that they get into the malls and get prime real estate because they showed the malls that having a santa there will drive about a million in incremental revenue because you get increased foot traffic into the mall because families like us come to the mall to get the photo done with the santa and you’re paying like 50 bucks per photo and you’re doing a photo you know every i don’t know minute and so like you can just add up the cost per hour that other sort of revenue per hour that iconic or the person hosting this is doing so i thought this was kind of cool then i was like where do these people come from and basically there’s been a spin-off cottage industry of santa training and santa out costume like businesses so there’s like santa costume business little e-commerce pop-ups like you know halloween pop-ups so it’s just selling certain part of the year and it’s the boots and the glasses and the beards and the hats and the robes and all that good stuff so you’ll end up spending hundreds of dollars just to have one of these outfits um i i own one of these outfits because we wanted our at-home photos to also have me in the santa outfit so you know brown santa sitting next to the tree i have a bunch of photos like that from last year dude your wife is is amazing this is all her instagram she’s like an instagram mom basically without the followers so we all of the work of being at instagram without any of the uh influencer money that we get we should be getting out of it so um so so she does she really cares about photos and so like she wants her memories and she wants cute photos so i have to do all this [ ] so okay so then what happens so there’s these schools that will charge you up to a thousand dollars for santa training and what does that mean it’s like tells you what to say it tells you how to groom your beard and your hair to look like nick and then helps you get a job as a as a santa somewhere so that’s like a whole little cottage interesting now what do i think you could do with this so i think this can be done in a whole bunch of different ways so i think you could kind of independently do this in your neighborhood so we’ve talked about like how do you do um door-to-door in neighborhoods so i think you could go door-to-door in any neighborhood and say hey tomorrow santa’s gonna be here if you want a christmas photo just come to the front of the neighborhood buy that tree and you’re like mixing up a throne this is like a pedophile’s dream like santa meets ice cream man this is weird it’s not just the kid that does the parents go with you to the thing it’s incredibly safe safer than a lemonade stand my friend so this is the lemonade stand we do in the winter which is you do a pop-up santa photo photo thing and if you were going door-to-door you could go door-to-door dressed as the elves saying that santa’s coming all right so that’s that’s one way of doing this the other is you can partner with really any place that has foot traffic so whether it’s a mall or it’s kind of like an outdoor eating area it’s a farmer’s market it’s um you know like you just need to find foot traffic and if you pop yourself down my estimate is that you’re going to be able to make per minute doing this thing uh that might be a little high let’s just say 30 per minute because people don’t always opt for the big photo pack so thirty dollars a minute add an hourly rate bro okay so hourly that’s 1800 an hour and you’re going to be there for let’s say six hours that’s 10 grand a day you can print doing this thing and all your costs are you know fat santa for uh you know hopefully that’s somebody that’s you or somebody you know that you can get to do it you buy me out for 400 another thousand dollars of props and decorations and the chair and all that stuff the photographer might cost you let’s call it a thousand dollars for the day and um and so that’s your that’s sort of your cost structure going into this i think the rest of it is pretty much free because who’s going to really kick out who uh who’s iconic iconic is the company that does like like photo experiences and stuff like that are they big i think they’re big because this isn’t their main business um so i think this is like you know part of their business if someone okay so i agree with you that someone could pull this off i would be i’m just saying you want to make 20 grand for the holiday season that’s nice a lot of people want 20 grand i would be amazed if someone is well you got to have so much courage in order to pull something like that off that scares me this scares me but why what scares you about this so it’s kind of like whenever i think of business ideas i’m like anything that involves eating something i’m like ugh that’s so that’s all you got like it’s like a big burden right it’s like a big burden uh if you like if your product is going to be eaten oh you mean selling something other people are going to eat yeah i’m like well you can’t [ ] that right you got to like you got to nail that right away and then like a tear down i’m like well anything involving children i’m like oh my god like you got to nail that too you can’t have anything weird going on there’s no risk here it’s literally a santa with the parents standing right there next to you and you sit on their knee for one second to take a photo it’s so real low risk it’s not like a daycare or something like that daycare is up there too i mean this is i would be i would be very curious if anyone’s going to pull this off this isn’t like you’re just going to the street and like break dancing like you’re going in the street and like having a kid sit on your knee i just think that uh dude i’m gonna i’m gonna do this for the uh for my for you know we were talking about our youtube channel doing some uh some little business stunts i’m gonna do this as one of them this holiday season i’m gonna do this i’m gonna hire a santa i’m gonna find a foot traffic area and i’m gonna make like 10 grand in a day no way there’s no way you’re gonna be able to pull this off i bet you five hundred dollars there five hundred dollars okay what part are you doubting okay maybe the 10 grand a day is the ambitious part no maybe it’s five okay i’ll be very curious to see if you can pull this off this would be amazing what do you think is going to happen what do you think all the risk is there’s no risk i don’t think there’s that much risk i just think there’s a huge amount of fear that i have about doing this about anything involving the risk is sean gets lazy and doesn’t decides not to do it that’s the only risk that’s the only thing preventing me from successfully doing this well let’s see if i was you if i was white i wouldn’t even i would be saving myself the the thousand dollars i’m gonna have to pay some santa here to do this because nobody i i nobody wants me to be the santa so you know i’m already working from a district are there ever black santas that is kind of interesting we gotta we gotta like what are there ever i’ve never seen a non-white santa at a mall i’m sure i’m sure there is but uh yeah maybe that’s the underserved market that i need to go for i think people want the classics i think with holidays people throw all the equality out the window and they want the classes wait do you do celebrate what religion are you are you anything i’m not religious but i do celebrate fun days like christmas yeah i didn’t but you know i know you’re not religious like in terms of like a god but like a culture like you know i’m catholic i was raised catholic but do you do you do anything oh no i celebrate all the fun holidays if any yeah oh dia de los muertos sounds great i’m i’m you know i i’m hispanic for the day well let’s do that like any any any culture has a fun holiday i’ll play why not i’m looking for more days to celebrate yeah we gotta uh yeah once i started like meeting my jewish friends i started celebrating shabbat so uh we could pick some holidays i love shabbat give me some worship yeah it’s really good what do you want to do this royalty-free music one i think this is amazing yeah okay so here’s the idea so i saw this on product hunt i kind of forgot the name but there was basically a product that launched yesterday or today and it’s a ai generated royalty-free music okay so for anybody who’s ever had to make a commercial or like create a video or you’re an agency or a freelancer music makes your video like 10 times better but it sucks to have all the music you know is copyright protected so you’ll put it up on youtube it’ll get muted or taken down or dmca noticed and if you want to use it to sell products or promote your company you really can’t do it it’s illegal if you use copyright music because you don’t have the permissions and so there’s this whole like genre of royalty-free music out there and there’s all these big um websites like pond5 that exist that will give you royalty-free you know either stock footage stock photos or stock music and this whole like stock industry is pretty big and so what i thought was cool here is take a business like pond5 so i don’t know if you’ve ever used pond5 do you know pawn five no no no no no no no no no no no so many times in my life it’s great it’s like the best place to go if you want like uh stock music for a thing is it free and so how does it work no you pay you end up buying the the the music you like like while you’re listening to the sample it’ll be like the really good music and it’ll be like pond5 in the background like just like as a watermark like every two seconds so that you can’t steal the thing you have to buy it so here’s how i know this company crushes they raised one round of funding in 2014 it was a 60 million dollar round which means they already had a bunch of traction before then since 2014 they haven’t reported any other raising of money and i know they’re still going super strong so that’s like you can sniff that and be like what’s the opposite of aussie media it’s this it’s a company that raises one mega round doesn’t raise again for the next seven years probably means it’s super profitable just spitting off cash and they probably sold who they raised 61 million dollars from they probably like it was probably they just sold a bunch of their shares yeah it’s probably to get some liquidity because i think they started in 2005 or 2008 or something like that so it was like many years into the business that they did around nerd wallet same thing right they started they ended up raising a hundred million dollars never touched the hundred million dollars like their bank account’s never been less than a hundred million dollars since then it’s like these are companies that are lean mean and just super profitable we should talk about nerd wallet do you have intel and nerd wallet uh you probably have more you’re buddies with the guy so i don’t have much but we should have him on i i was talking to uh his his partner and he was saying that he was saying oh yeah you should have one and i thought that’s a good idea well he uh i heard they were considering going public or something like that and so he couldn’t talk too much but if i don’t know if that’s the case anymore or not but we uh you know when you’re about to go public you can’t say too much and so it’s hard to get they’re not good interviews well i can tell one uh anecdote i heard which is just on how they kind of got chartered how they made it work so early on with nerdwallet what nerdwell it does is it’s a blog for like kind of like personal finance so it just kind of gives you information you need to know about about managing your own finances and their money maker is that they rank really high for credit card suggestions so if you say what credit card should i get nerd wallet’s like at the top of the list and then they’ll break down in a pretty objective way here’s you know the best credit cards depending on your goals depending on who you are pick this one it’s basically nerdwallet.com best dash credit dash card that page i think that page likely makes like 80 of the revenue and the entire company exists to make sure that page shows up number one on google when you search best credit card right exactly and i think when we say 80 of the revenue i don’t know the revenue if i was guessing i would guess that the revenue is 100 million dollars or more plus or minus 50 yeah um definitely not minus 50 okay so maybe plus 50 so so that’s pretty impressive right because when when somebody clicks that link to go buy it they they get an affiliate uh kickback and so they’ll get i don’t know what it is like two thousand dollars it’s like very lucrative to refer a credit card 2500 or something like that for a credit card referral so they make a lot per customer that hits that page so early on all the sides so because that incentive is so big every website in the early web web days was just like who’s going to give me the highest kickback fantastic you are my my recommended my recommended card and so it was kind of like it wasn’t objective right they were just there they were in the pocket of the credit card companies and they were just printing you know shitty content to try to get you to click that link um to go through this which is which is how red ventures started red ventures is a company that makes north of a billion dollars a year they basically started doing that with both credit cards and dish tv right right yeah satellite tv and so so with these like high high margin high subscription products you know they’ll pay a lot for affiliates so what nerdwallet was doing was they were just two dudes sitting in their room and they would just write blogs like high quality blogs they’re like we’re gonna write higher quality stuff because these other ones are just kind of content forms trying to generate clicks and year after year they were just like writing these things and it really wasn’t going very far it was like not that impressive now you tell me if i’m wrong on any of this uh it wasn’t really it wasn’t taking off it took just two basically in the first two years there was i don’t think there was a month where they got more than a thousand people visiting their website and if you google nerdwall hustlecon you’ll see a talk where he shows their traffic like it was you know it was a shitty it was horrible multiple years of staying the course even when the evidence all said this doesn’t work because they trusted their gut and their belief system that if we put the highest content out highest quality content out there eventually we will get the traffic and if we build it they will come and it actually worked right so like you know there is a counterpoint to every uh every piece of advice i would if there was if they were a startup doing this right now i’d be like guys two years no traffic less than 10 grand a month you’re making you how long have you been in this apartment when’s the last time you left this building uh guys look at this company they’re just shilling out shitty content and getting way more traffic and paying for it and just trying to arbitrage like do that that’s gonna work that’s working so like do that so my advice would have been horrible here because this was a tortoise-in-the-hair startup story that actually worked and so finally there’s a google update uh google updates a search engine and it punishes the low quality blogs that were out there and nerd wallet jumps in the rankings and so all of a sudden they they go from making you know zero dollars a day to like seven grand a day of revenue and that’s from the the traffic that’s coming here and then a few months later there’s another update and it goes to like 70 grand a day and uh and they sort of never look back they’ve always been kind of like near the top or at the top for this kind of thing uh since then so that that i thought was pretty remarkable and you i could have had that same idea i would have never stuck to it uh the way that those guys did and they deserve every dollar they make off this yeah it’s a it’s a pretty monster company um what but what about pond5 okay so back to pond5 so pond5 my research tells you this is quite a big company they at one point they reported 60 million a year in revenue that was like 10 years ago so wait a minute i’m pretty sure that yeah so i’m pretty sure that they’re doing 100 million dollars or north of 100 million dollars off this most stock websites will do you know 100 million dollar plus but they get consolidated so like you know i stock photo and all those things they all get owned by the same company so anyways what’s the idea here well pond5 they have their value because they have a big library so that when you’re searching for upbeat energetic music for my commercial that’s 60 seconds long that doesn’t sound cheesy i gotta find that that that thing on your website and so how do they get this library where they don’t make it themselves they let any creator just like a stock photo site you upload your content and then if someone buys your thing you get a rev share you get 50 rev share well here’s the cool thing about what’s happened like there’s been a change where ai has gotten a lot better and you can auto auto-generate music now and so what this product was doing was you put your video in and it knows okay your video is one minute and 23 seconds long so that’s how much music you need and it can even look at in you know in the future it can even look at you can mark maybe key markers on your video you say this is where the the climax happens or where my product reveal happens like i need a beat to like i need to i need an uptick here right and then it will auto generate an infinite number of music amount of music for that that’s custom fitted to your video track and you can just say i want it to be playful i want it to be energetic i want it to be serious i wanted to be foreboding i wanted to be mysterious and um and then you just hit generate it’ll give you one you say next next next just like tinder you can swipe through and they’re going to keep 100 of the revenue so whatever whoever does this i think they’re going to have the biggest library pretty much from day 10 because their neural net will have generated such a vast amount of stock footage or stock stock music or stock photos so i think they’re going to crush the existing stock stock sites because they’re going to have 100 times more content and then they’re going to crush it in terms of economics because they’re not going to have to share any of it with any content creator and they’re going to keep 100 of it so i would love to invest in one of these companies that’s doing this that’s got the right marketing mojo to get this out there because the fundamentals tell me that however big istock photo and those guys are the ai version of it is going to be you know maybe four or five times bigger and those today are like multi-billion dollar companies i’d imagine though the key to this business is not the ai generated music part i would imagine the difficult part here is getting customers because the stock photos and stock video and stock music in terms of search traffic it’s impossibly challenging like it’s it’s like oh i bet you it’s almost as hard as credit cards like best credit card right so that would be the hard part is how to get customers you know a business is basically like three things it’s like convincing people to work i guess there’s four things convincing people to work there convincing someone to give you money or figuring out how to get capital to do it making the product and then getting the sale this one falls into that fourth bucket where that’s the hard part i would imagine is getting people to go to your website consistently for at least cheap enough i would simplify it i think i think businesses get customers uh charge them enough where you get to keep some pr some profit and keep customers right you got to do those three things and get customers is usually the hardest one um and it’s the hardest one in this case so so that’s why i said the founders that have the right marketing mojo that was the key part of what i said because you have to have a tr a way that you’re gonna like get traffic for this and over time i think they will out-compete their old-school alternatives because they’re outdated now so here’s my other that 50 that goes to creators you could maybe spend on acquiring customers exactly and um and you can give away a lot of the content for free initially right because of that so here’s my hack for for this this is also a hustle this is maybe my big co side hustle this is you’re a pm at google or you’re a product manager at duckduckgo and you’re a search engine well the search engines have one way that they cheat which is when you search for something they can just give you their result as the top result always right that’s like google with their one box thing if you just say hey what’s the best holiday they surface the best results in a box so you don’t even need to click and go to a website or if you go to google images and you search for icon of this or stock photo or royalty free whatever they could just serve you the google results for this and they have all the ai talent in the world to do this and this could become a product line that generates you know nine figures a year for these companies so if you want to you know if you’re inside one of these big companies that’s another pitch you can make to your boss that says hey boss how does this sound we use our ai talent on something that we’re already getting millions of searches for a year and it will generate you know 100 million dollars plus in revenue within three years can i work on that project and then the answer will be uh yes and why haven’t i promoted you already dude i went so i’ve got two stories i went to a conference and i met this woman who was she was part of the crew that managed this so basically google makes 95 of their revenue from one thing but they’re constantly trying to launch all this other stuff so they’ve probably done stuff that you don’t even know exists um but and they’ll like buy stuff and try to run it and make it bigger like in it one example is zagat you remember zagat yeah the restaurant reviews is that right yeah google owned it a lot of people didn’t don’t even know that but google owned it and i talked to this woman whose job it was to help manage the ceos of the projects and decide what’s interesting and what’s not and she told me that they have some products that would scale to a hundred million in revenue in only a couple years and they would kill it and i was like why’d you kill it and they go well two reasons one the people who we get to run them they’re oftentimes paid so much money that they don’t give a [ ] like if you’re just like running your own startup you’re like this has to work because this is where 95 of my net worth is like i would be screwed whereas the people who work at google they’re like dude i make so much money each year i don’t really want this to succeed that much i have to work more and still get paid some and so she told me that and second they’re like google is so big that even though a product makes a hundred million plus in revenue over the course of a few years which could be worth a couple billion dollars it’s just not worth it to us we just have so much better ways to spend our time and i was flabbergasted and i knew this other woman who ran this one thing that was doing over 100 million in revenue and they killed it because they’re like this just isn’t big or interesting enough and it’s just it’s pretty wild to think about that yeah it’s insane actually i did this when we got acquired by twitch i had in one of the meetings i had with emmett i was who’s the ceo i was talking about like oh yeah if we try like this could actually make this much and i noticed he didn’t like react in any way like when i say something that i think you’re gonna get excited about you don’t get excited i’m like hey i thought you would i thought that would like register for you it looks like it didn’t tell me why that didn’t um and he was just like he’s basically like look uh we make this much revenue over here so to move the needle on revenue you have to be like the size of the price has to be x and like trying to make revenue brings in all this like legal complexity business ops complexity and like potentially stands in the way of user growth and so like we either want something that hits this threshold on revenue or make it free and just optimize for user growth i was like oh okay so like not interested in like you this kind of like eight figures plus you know uh of of revenue a year it’s like no um and i was like and i i didn’t take it i was like thank you for teaching me that because yeah that makes sense my startup brand was wired where that’s a big number but now that i’m at a big company i need to like rewire it as a small number dude when we sold to hubspot we went we sold in uh i forget mid to late january and so we went into the year 2021 with many many millions of dollars of advertising revenue booked and contracts signed and everything and this year we you know we would have made many eight figures in revenue and when they sold when we sold they go um look we make this much money i think what’s hubspot make a year like 1.2 billion a year in revenue and it’s growing quick they’re like your little 20 million dollars it doesn’t really matter to us we rather you not focus on that so we gave all the money back like we yeah we had to call them and we had to be like hey this company i know that you booked like five hundred thousand dollars in advertising sorry we can’t do it anymore we gave it back and it i was heartbroken i was like oh you’re killing me and they just didn’t and they’re right i mean it’s smart but it was crazy to think dude uh okay i want you to just don’t type hands up hands in the air guess google’s revenue last quarter i would imagine that they do i don’t know 30 40 billion dollars a year okay 34 billion a year so let’s divide by four and let’s just say round number 10 10 billion a quarter good guess that’s actually what i would have guessed they did 61 billion dollars last quarter so four times that is what 24 240 we don’t do public math yes dude what unless i’m looking at something that’s wrong but uh i’m looking on statistics right now it’s it came up in my in the first google search and i was like no right that’s annual not quarterly and then i looked at another place and says it’s second quarter revenue of 2021 was 61 billion dollars okay now how long have you felt like google’s a juggernaut like an absolute juggernaut that’s already like pete it’s already like at the peak of its powers since the beginning of years ago yeah how many years ago did you feel that way like let’s just say like at what point in time if i was like hey google’s revenue is already like you know just absolutely monstrous not too much upside left like five years ago would you have said that uh yeah so like in 2015 which was six years ago now if you told me just to like invest all my money into google i’d be like why would you why would you what why would you ever want something that’s already so big it’s not going to grow that much yeah so since that date that same quarter in 20 2015 uh this quarter was three and a half times revenue times more revenue so it went from 17 billion to 61 billion in that five-year span when i think of that so there’s like i used to be all about facebook i actually think that if you told me this could be like crazy wrong in 10 years if facebook and google are not like i think they’ll exist but if they’re not like the big shots i actually i’ll be surprised if they’re still the big shots would you agree so that could mean many things is it like there’s the big shot like microsoft is still a big shot but and it was always a big shot but like facebook and google kind of like took all their shine for like a decade plus um you know as microsoft was either flat or kind of declining but it was still big but it didn’t have the talent it wasn’t growing as fast stocks not appreciating as fast so is it that where it kind of stagnates or you’re like it’s actually going to go down i think it’s going to go down and here’s why have you ever met anyone that worked at google or facebook yes um like they currently work there yes i think that google so google is point one is that it kind of succeeds in spite of itself they basically invented this one thing that hasn’t changed that significantly and it’s always been amazing okay so they kind of have that going which is good but the second thing that they have is that people i don’t think particularly like working there like it’s not cool i think to say you work at google is like five years ago saying you worked at goldman it’s not really that particularly interesting and i also think that the people who work there unlike goldman whereas goldman will explicitly say we’re going to work your [ ] we’re going to work you down to the bone you’re going to grind and most of you aren’t going to work here in five years google’s the opposite they say we care about you we do this we do that right and can i fold your laundry can i do would you like a foot massage while you are you program you know this code right now and because they do that they create entitled babies who protest and get angry uh when anything bad happens for example i think last year there was this big event and i don’t actually know what happened i don’t know the reason it could have been justified who knows but they had a walkout so a lot of the employees just like walked out for the day and uh when i saw that i was like oh this is like the beginning of the end because if you think about google do they do things that maybe you could describe as evil or you don’t agree with definitely yes but as an employee are they overwhelmingly like a soft place to work that you get paid significant amounts of money barely have to show up and they pretty much are like oh yes honey like you need anything of course they are and if people are willing to protest that and walk out then they’re soft and they’re going they’re going to die soon that’s why i think that they’re going to die soon rant’s gone wrong there’s like a there’s like a phrase what’s it it’s uh uh hard time uh hard times no difficult times make strong men strong men make easy times easy times make soft men that and that’s like what’s going on right now at google so that’s why i wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t exist i i had a friend who worked at facebook and they would send me there’s an internal uh facebook group for employees and it’s basically just a [ ] session where they just vent and [ ] about everything that’s happening inside the company and he would send me screenshots of what the topic would be and it’d be the most petty trivial like hey i noticed that the orange juice has moved in the cafeteria you know i like to eat salads and when it was by the salad bar it just really complemented my healthy lifestyle and now that it’s over by the meat i feel like i’ve been vegan for two years and now that it’s by the meat it’s like a micro aggression against my vegan it’s like dude these people were complaining about the dumbest stuff and they would have hundreds and hundreds of comments which means just hours wasted fighting in the facebook comments amongst facebook employees and it was everything from the parking garage layout to the milk choices to the the wording and the email that was sent out to listen to the softness of the song so for the longest time and i think he still does it but when my wife worked there he was definitely doing it zuck and cheryl sandberg but i think for sure zuck or definitely for sure suck it was either every friday or one friday a month i forget zuck would do in all hands and you could show up in person and you could ask him a question and it was mostly empty like you know facebook at the time had 15 000 employees and like 100 people would be there and to me that’s crazy right that’s like imagine like going back uh years and years and like you get to ask andrew carnegie or john rockefeller like any question or henry ford like any question like that’s it’s like pretty amazing i’d be there every friday and i used to tell my wife i’m like man if you keep asking interesting questions he’s gonna get to know you but he’ll be like you know sarah that’s a great idea come and talk to me i was like you gotta just be there every time and one time i heard the story about this person he raised his hand and uh they’re like uh yeah what’s your question he goes look we have a huge problem at facebook um we don’t have tampons in the men’s restroom and it’s like discriminatory and zuck was like he said is this really what you want to spend your time discussing or can we discuss this out there and they’re like like we have to talk about he’s like all right head of hr or how to please come up here and like address this and uh i swear i heard the story of that someone asked that during the their time would suck is that crazy i feel like we should end on this just like a man it’s like just is that really what five minutes is a better look than current google employee totally isn’t that amazing it’s a such a stronger signal that your ex google than current google i completely agree do you agree with me do you think that they’re gonna go down no i think they’re kind of juggernauts but i do think like every they become less and less relevant over time i think they’ve i think facebook particularly has done an amazing job fighting off irrelevancy um like tooth and nail i think zuck knows and therefore like is he goes to war for it but they just have all the there’s the natural like father time is undefeated or whatever like basically over time there’s a natural decline and then there’s a talent drop off as for people that are going to go work there versus go work at new exciting high upside things and then there’s the like um you know like anti big tech company backlash where now if there’s a if there’s a new social network that takes off like instagram did or like um whatsapp was doing facebook can’t buy it anymore so the next one that takes off facebook can’t buy and uh that will because of antitrust and so they’re just gonna lose their stranglehold because that was their previous way of like extending their lifespan was to acquire the next best social thing and bring it in to bring it in house so that’s gone for all the tech companies they can’t do that anymore i typically hate discussing big company [ ] like google and facebook i find to be incredibly boring and i’m like who the [ __ ] cares like this doesn’t actually impact me at all and i think that takes place or that exists for a lot of our listeners so i’ll be very curious to hear if they even remotely cared about this discussion uh so let’s see let’s see what they have to say yeah tweet at us all right i’m out of here we’re done [Music] never looking back