Second-hand E-commerce, Door-to-door Sales, and Live Show Recaps

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en this is why on all my landing pages i always ask for email first 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 what’s up we’re back from miami and we got a new nickname i am sean fury he is the vanilla gorilla and we are back uh we had to wing it this episode because we had a guest cancelled last minute but i think it turned out pretty good so sam what do we talk about yeah so this episode actually turned out i think to be one of my favorite in a long time we probably discussed maybe 20 or 30 ideas um the ideas start about halfway through but we have a bunch of interesting ideas that are scattered throughout so a few things that we’ve discussed so businesses that we’ve both invested in recently including an event business we’ve talked about slingshot ideas so slingshot ideas that are ideas that have been kind of under the radar because of kovid but now that there’s a lot of pent-up demand for events for interaction things like that these are going to be slunk shot is that the right word slung shot slung shooted back into popularity we talked about litigation finance so basically there’s a whole bunch of people that will finance lawsuits and then take a cut the winning uh winning uh settlement kind of interesting we talked about secondhand stores shockingly that’s actually it seems like a huge idea and then finally we wrapped up with one of the best sean stories i’ve ever heard where we talked about door-to-door sales trust me it’s going to leave you fired up it’s in the last 15 minutes it’s awesome we were supposed to have bill smith from hello landing on i got an email from his pr team literally 60 seconds before we were supposed to hit record saying he’s not gonna make it i don’t know what what we’re gonna do today i’m so angry about that oh my gosh i’m frustrated i gotta give you credit you uh you replied back to the email to the pr person the pr person 60 seconds before the podcast is supposed to record right we’re in like the sound room in a green room getting sound check and uh it’s like hey folks uh sorry not gonna be able to make it today looking forward to rescheduling and um it just goes are you kidding one minute before the podcast no context and i thought that are you kidding was uh very ballsy i would have just i would have just ate it just took the slap and uh i think you rightfully you’re rightfully like what i mean okay so i’m reading this book called non-violent communication i’m reading it for i’m reading it for two reasons the first reason is i’ve gotten repeated feedback from you and abreu and my coworkers that i have a temper i don’t think i have a temper so i’m trying to get that and my wife sarah the second reason and this feedback is pissing me off i i yeah i i think i could be a little hot and hey you gotta say i was with you the whole week we went to austin miami and you were like an angel you were totally patient you were just being grateful the whole time it was amazing and then you i think you even noticed at the end i was going to tell you and then you go i’ve been i’ve been really kind this whole trip i’m feeling really kind and grateful so i guess we can um we can talk about that but uh yeah so bill smith sorry brother like i have a feeling i have a feeling it wasn’t bill’s fault that that’s what i would bet i bet he’s got people and i bet that he screwed that up uh they screwed it up not him but i uh i replied you know what happens like sometimes you you don’t sort of you don’t really think about the other side you’re just going about your day one thing is rolling over this other thing comes up and you’re just like uh we got to move that call thing we got to move that podcast thing and um and so you know i’ve i’ve been on that side where you know i don’t sort of fully you know appreciate that the other side of it has you know there’s a lot of prep that goes into a podcast like multiple people on board and timing and then you need to record because you have to release and then you’re preparing for him you’re researching him you’re not researching other topics so then you got to go live without them but look we’re not big shots yet i would love to be a big shot we’re not big shots yet but i would say we are big enough shots that like someone like it would be wise to take this at least seriously and give like a little bit of a heads up i’m not saying that we’re like big deals but like it’s a good it’s a good enough platform he wouldn’t have rescheduled tim ferriss a minute before the pot is that what you’re saying oh definitely not look i’m not saying that we’re big deals but i am and we are um all right now let’s just roll so i hope you come back so i don’t know what we’re gonna talk about but you wanna do a recap of this weekend uh yeah let’s do it so we had a fun week we went to i went to austin which is your hometown stayed at your house not my hometown my where your current town yeah and we did a live show uh i don’t know about 100 people were able to fit into the venue we did it at the appsumo office with noah kagan that was fun then we hopped on a plane next morning 5am and uh got to miami where the bitcoin conference was happening so there was like 10 to 20 000 people in town for you know this bitcoin thing and we were there for our miami show and i think i don’t know a few hundred people i don’t know how many ended up being maybe i don’t know what do you think dan 250 300 people something like that well 300 people rsvp’d but i think or no sorry show up yeah something like that yeah so 200 people showed up or so did the live show there met a bunch of cool people people who flew in from paraguay and you know all different types of places to attend and um yeah then we hung out and we flew home so that was a that’s what happened but there were some interesting things that were going on give me your kind of like what do you think would be the most interesting one or two things to talk about from the trip i have a so uh i have a bunch and and thank you bill smith so i’m just rattling this off the top of the dome there’s no research here but um the airports and hotel situation in both miami and in austin bananas absolutely crazy we went to the airport i think we got there at about 6 a.m we left my house at 5 30 i think and it was like an hour long wait including tsa pre-check to get past security and it was booming i went to miami the reason i came home early is because my hotels i went to book on hotel tonight and they all got canceled for some reason and i couldn’t find a single hotel in between the ranges of 200 and 2 000 in miami i had to go stay at a family uh family’s house travel is crushing it right now i’m i’m just shocked at how booming everything is yeah and also i came from california and um in california there’s just like covered you know precaution everywhere and as soon as we got to austin you were like oh yeah this is my favorite like you know coffee shop slash bar i don’t even know what the place was a lazarus or whatever it is whatever it’s called and we walk in and i was like it’s like stepping into a time machine i was like whoa everybody’s just chilling everybody’s hanging out at a restaurant indoors no masks uh ever some people had their mask on that’s cool that’s their choice and other people didn’t um but it just it was like wow life has really gone on and people are back to normal and because in florida and texas i think they’re probably two of the most like kind of forward states as far as like returning to the norm and then you know california i come back and it’s sort of the same thing you know you if your nose peeks out of your mask you get three dirty looks and uh i’m i’m over the mask mask time i’m like i’m vaccinated let’s uh let’s roll here yeah so that was a takeaway um with some covet stuff my thing where do you think that do you see any opportunities right now so like you had heard about pent up demand and how the economy is going to bounce back after seeing miami after seeing um austin airport um i’ve seen a little bit of new york it’s just it’s booming where do you think the opportunities are do you have anything off the top of your head that you’re looking at uh i’m glad i bought airbnb stock when it was down because i think everybody’s going to do very well because i do think people are pretty roaring to get back out there and doing things traveling traveling especially i know a lot of people that haven’t seen their family in you know a year and a half type of thing so i think that people are going to be be coming back out that’s not that like you know insightful of an answer it’s just sort of obvious um and i think that a lot of things that we we did as a necessary evil um are gonna go away people are gonna ditch those with quickness the same way i was ready to just ditch my mask as soon as it was okay to do it um i think you know all the remote learning stuff is gonna go away um pretty quickly because people if it wasn’t a better experience it’s like going to the graveyard as soon as you don’t have to do it and uh i think remote school is one where every parent every kid i’ve ever talked to they had to do remote like you know zoom school they are not like oh you know i really really enjoy you know school from home like there’s people who enjoy work from home i don’t know anybody that enjoys school from home so i think that’s that side is like gonna take a big hit did you see this company so i’m going to talk about a startup real quick um that i just invested in i bet you looked at it as well it was called mary have you heard of mary it’s be married.com no tell me about it uh so ankur so basically i’m friends with uh this guy named ankur who’s a successful entrepreneur and he invests in stuff and he just sends me interesting stuff i thought you were on that list because you maybe i just missed it or i think i have a feeling you missed it and so there’s this co so i’m basically i’m on the lookout for companies that are uh going to be take taking advantage we have to come up with a cute name for this like pent-up demand because it’s what are people going to care about right now so jason calacanis had a good phrase where he goes slingshot startups they had a setback they were pulled back during covid but it like it’s like a slingshot when you when you when you pull it back it’s yes it’s gone backwards but it’s building up this momentum to slingshot forward and i thought i liked that that was a good little slingshot startup so i’m looking at like event event related stuff um i think sex related stuff is going to be quite interesting what does that mean uh what are those two examples i invested in one company called fitness ai and this was like a app you use when you go to the gym so it’s like a trainer when you’re at the gym it would be like hey cool like it knows your progression so it basically say it tracks all your reps so it knows what weight you need to do next to get the next to get the maximum gains over like a few month period of time now when covet hit jim’s clothes his whole app became like useless overnight and so he had to re-architect the whole app to do at in-home fitness but the reason i would say is it’s not that this startup necessarily benefited from it but you got to see what different startups are made of when you saw the entrepreneurs you know pivot the plane mid-flight and find a new path and actually start growing at a time where they should have been having a setback another example is there’s these guys who keep emailing me um guru hotel they were a yc startup and they were you know software for hotels to increase their bookings and focus in latin america and of course you know covert hits nobody’s booking hotels their business should really struggle and like they just made all these tweaks and all these adjustments so that they first stayed flat and then actually started to grow um at a time when their business should have cratered and many lesser less determined less adaptable entrepreneurs would have uh would have gone under and so i think it was a great the great filter it weeded out the entrepreneurs and you got to see the entrepreneurs who actually succeeded despite the circumstances and those are the ones i think worth betting on what’s guru hotel about i don’t know exactly what they do they basically i think what it is is it’s shopify for a hotel so most hotel websites suck so what they did was they just make they make your hotel’s website higher converting and higher upselling and so you’re going to get an incremental 10 to 15 in revenue because instead of paying some you know your nephew to build a wordpress website for your your your hotel and it hasn’t changed in eight years and you you know you don’t even touch it because you don’t know how to code it um they basically take over the front end website for your hotel and in doing so they generate more revenue for you and then they take a cut or they take it that sounds pretty great to me um have you heard of mind body you know mind body yeah so mind body um they’re publicly traded they were started in 2000 so they’ve been around for a minute and basically they kind of started out doing that a little bit just helping a a yoga instructor i think it’s mostly like it’s health stuff yeah so it’s basically like yoga studios pilates studios stuff like that and they became the website and the booking system and payment system for all those um physical uh like locations yeah crazy good company um kind of quietly i think they’re based out of san luis obispo so they’re not silicon valley and so they’ve probably been quietly crushing it uh and what’s this called hotel guru guru hotel yeah oh they should call the other yeah they shouldn’t they should switch it it should be hotel gurus uh they should switch it’s like so obvious when you said it i hadn’t even thought about it yeah they they they need to change that guru hotel oh no never mind rescind all five compliments they uh well like i think there’s a mind body component here of like you just create the first thing and then next next next xxx next so i uh are you gonna invest in that company uh maybe like they keep sending me updates and it all sounds good but i just have this inherent thing that the best startups don’t reach out randomly to non-super famous investors like me so unfortunately and this is like this is kind of a screwed up thing if a startup is reaching out to me to try to make room i already discount 20 that doesn’t mean i don’t do it but i discount 20 how good it is even when it looks good so yeah i know i’m in anybody else i’m the same way i’m like oh you you’re willing to like it’s like that’s what i felt like when i was dating like oh you like me uh something something’s bad here right this is crazy um so there’s there’s this company called mary i just invested in like i said we send it to you and i’m not sure if this is gonna be the biggest thing but i think it could definitely be a very profitable investment it’s called uh mary m-e-r-r-o-i did you go to it it looks like a first planet be married.com um i’ll tell you why i’m interested but i’ll tell you first what it does so what it does is you need to organize an event they’ve uploaded i don’t know how maybe there’s a huge database uh out there but they’ve uploaded massive amounts of uh renderings or like floor plans of event space and then they make it really easy to drag and drop different tables and chairs and whatever you need for a wedding or a conference and you can outline what the event is going to look like and you do it in 3d because somehow the floor blue it looks like it looks like the sims so it’s like you take it you have the venue and then it lets you upload like circle table chairs banquet chairs you know like speaker like uh podium or whatever right it looks like the sims you make a little 3d rendering exactly and the reason i invested in this was because of something that andrew wilkinson said on this podcast he called something an airport business i think he called uh what’s that thing he owns dribble yeah he owns this thing called dribble and where dribble is is uh or i think he was referring to dribble when he was we’re talking about airport business but basically with dr uh with with an airport you arrive at the airport and you’re there you have to be there for three to four hours uh you’re gonna buy whatever they have you’re gonna if you’re there it’s very easy for that airport to sell you candy a magazine you’re a captive audience yes you’re a captive audience and what mary did is they made it where they uploaded all of these venues and so people who are executing weddings can go on there and pay a fee to use their software to drag and drop and like organize stuff and then what they’ve done is so the vendor can come on and put their the stuff that they want to sell so like certain types of chairs whether it’s for rent or to buy it could be on there and then as the um event planner is on there doing their thing that they can sell just the event planner loads and loads and loads of different stuff so they can make money through affiliate they can make money through subscription fees they can make money through a lot of different stuff that they’re on there and the reason why i invested in this is i think that this is a boring boring thing that could work quite well and uh there’s gonna be a massive pent-up demand for events and so we put a little bit of money into it we’ll see if it works but i love the business of houzz you know house h-o-u-z-z i’ve i’ve heard of it and i think you used that or something like that for your your house right no i use something like that yeah so i use what houses you probably don’t know houses probably the audience is probably majority women it’s a uh you basically can design your kitchen or your bedroom on houzz and they make like a billion dollars a year through affiliate feeds it’s quite amazing and it’s a it’s a multi-billion dollar company but it’s kind of been quiet in the background it’s kind of amazing what i used was uh what the [  ] did i use uh i use this service where you take a picture of your house mods yeah i took a picture uh this thing where you take a picture of your house and then they uh you pay 300 per room so i think i paid like 1200 bucks a designer designs it and then if i choose to i can purchase all these stuff that they’re telling me to buy or i just go buy stuff on my own that kind of looks like it right by the way i like these models where i don’t know about you but for me whenever it’s like hey you get the free consultation and ideas and then it’s up to you if you buy them and at the beginning i’m always sweet let me get the free expert advice and like i’m not gonna buy the things that’s how i go in and then as soon as i see it i’m like oh that looks really good like i guess i could just push this button and just order these items right like i could just buy these things and so it ends up being where they i go in knowing eyes wide open on the model like it’s like nerd wallet it’s like cool i go in i read the blog post about the credit cards i’m not gonna like just pick one of these credit cards right off here necessarily because i kind of know you know there’s like an affiliate thing but uh but then i do because it’s so convenient and there’s something to that when i was selling my house it was the same thing with staging they’re like cool like we’re going to we’re going to do all this work to give you these three free options on which one you want to do and then as soon as you see it you’re like ah okay give me the give me the expensive one i’ll do it it looks so much better um and so you know it sort of breaks you over time like a like the puppy clothes where they give you the puppy they let you keep it for the weekend and you’re like great i’ll just play with this puppy for the weekend and then by by sunday night you’re like this puppy’s never leaving my house i didn’t know that was a thing um you never heard that in sales no puppy clothes basically you give them the thing and then instead of having them opt-in you have them if okay you can opt out if you want and nobody ever opts out do you uh what are what are some other slingshot startups that you’re seeing um or or slingshot opportunities so the slingshot so it has to be something that was set back during covid so what was set back during covet i think phys physical anything physical retail schools travel hospitality like we just said um there’s other things that are like you know like concerts and stuff like that i think those are i think those sports games concerts i think those are all gonna come back so i’ll give you one which is um sports games so the nba playoffs is going on right now and um i always wondered would people have kind of like ptsd from kovad where they don’t want to be even when it’s safe they just don’t want to be close to other people without you know in confined areas um but these aren’t sold out you know as many people as they’ll let in it’s packed people are going nuts uh they’re having a good time and you know it just feels good to be back in a high energy place again with a whole bunch of other screaming you know lunatics and so but i think what happened is i think that it’s sort of like the nba franchise or the the league had to get pretty had to get like double resilient because all of a sudden this thing it just took for granted which is all this ticket revenue went away for like a year and so now they open their mind up to well what other revenue stream should we have should we allow sports betting should we like should we do that should we sponsor things that we weren’t sponsoring before should we do nfts oh okay cool you know nba top shot we’ll do nfts as a source of revenue so i think it’s pretty interesting that i think all these like pro sports are going to bounce back because they were already a premium in-person experience and now they were kind of lazy before at innovating they didn’t have to innovate and covet made them innovate the fan experience and the like business model and i think you know we should see some some good things come from that last night so did you watch the logan paul floyd mayweather fight i watched a little bit of it yeah a little bit really i was in a warehouse where we didn’t have uh streaming internet very strong and so i you know it was choppy but i got to see the last two rounds only so it was it was like it was exciting so basically if you were gonna go i was gonna go but then i realized i didn’t two things happened one someone gave me tickets and then right before i was about to go get the tickets they were like also like are you gonna mention us in the hustle and i was like no not a chance uh i thought this was a gift thank you but no thank you i didn’t know there were strings attached i’m out so i gave up the tickets and also i didn’t like miami so i came home early right it wasn’t for me uh not for me at all i i i can see why some people like it it ain’t for me um so last night basically logan paul is a six foot two probably he weighed in at 190 probably fought at 2010 210 205 huge guy and he fought floyd mayweather who’s 44. backspa best boxer of all time but 44 and 160 pounds at his heaviest right and i thought for sure floyd was going to win um and ended up being basically a draw because they don’t declare a winner because it’s an exhibition but floyd did not do well and logan did as good as he possibly could have which is he didn’t get knocked out and from what i understand floyd did the floyd thing where he just didn’t do anything he just played defense he just let the clock run out he didn’t did he was it that he was unsuccessful on offense or he just didn’t try any offense because he didn’t need to because he got paid either way i think he’s old well i think that he i think age it was a factor here and i think that he uh sides the factor here um i think that the reason why everyone says floyd lost because a loss or floyd is not winning and not knocking him out everyone including me thought for sure logan’s gonna get knocked out he didn’t he did great he’s a winner the guy like went from vining to fighting floyd in a stadium total winner but what he did before the show was logan is known for like collecting pokemon cards and there’s this whole trend if you don’t know about this on of unwrapping cards and so i actually love watching unwrapping nba cards i don’t even like the nba but the title will be like unboxing a michael jordan card i think it’s awesome i love doing it i love watching this logan has this whole thing where he does it and he in his he created a necklace that was basically the most expensive or most rare pokemon card of all time and he like put it in some type of like safety thing and he wore it around his neck as he was walking out and what i think is gonna happen it was what i would what looked like what he’s setting up is that he is um gonna sell that and i think that what his brother did jake paul was they during the knockout when he when his brother fought a few weeks ago they had an nft right after the fight right and i think that them selling the memorabilia right away after the fight is a brilliant idea and that started a little bit with nfts and but i think that that idea is here to stay uh that’s interesting yeah so so just for the context so he basically had like the way that most uh fighters come out they come out with their gold chain their you know they come out with diamonds on and he basically had a sort of diamond chain but the pendant was a charizard a one million dollar charizard card that was laminated as a holographic charizard rare uh blah blah blah and uh he’s like i’m wearing a million dollars on my chest right now and it just helps because he’s already invested in pokemon so him giving it that sign and giving it that credibility using the platform made his own collection worth more and made that individual one worth more because it now has the story of this is the one that you saw on tv uh not just the fact that it’s a rare charizard court so smart smart move all around um these guys know how to make money floyd had his mask sponsored he he had uh he had like everything sponsored on his page mask was sponsored by ethereumsomething.org like did you see that yeah i don’t know what it was it was it was crazy so his hat his mask everything was sponsored as he walked out because these guys this was a an all-time money grab it was great so i want to tell you a cool nft thing most nft things by the way not that cool you you you have to explain what we’re adding so many listeners sean that you have to actually say what ft is because i think like a lot of people don’t understand i’ve got i’ve got an aunt and a mother-in-law listening you gotta explain what an nft is all right nft is a piece of art that is uh digital that’s the way that most people are using it today it stands for this thing from crypto so you’ve heard of bitcoin you might have heard of ethereum ethereum lets you create this thing called an nft an nft just means it’s a unique uh a unique thing so for example if i have a 100 bill and sam has 100 bill we could swap it and we would just know they’re all the same 100 bills the same as the other but if i have a piece of art on my wall sam has a piece of art on his wall we can’t just swap it because my art is unique and his art is unique and they’re not going to be worth the same amount um even if we had you know sort of the same pair of of jordans you know they might be in different condition or different years whatever it is so an nft is more like a pair of fancy you know basketball shoes it’s what something that collectors will will own it can be used in many other ways but the majority is that people are using to collect sort of to create and collect digital art they got popular because um a whole bunch of people who were what i call crypto rich right they made their money on bitcoin they made their money on ethereum they got tons of money from that and when nfts came out they were using they were using their their winnings to buy nfts and so they were buying nfts for literally millions and millions of dollars so you uh and it blew people’s minds it’s like wait that’s just an image on a computer screen why are you buying it for millions of dollars and they would say you know what’s the mona lisa but some uh you know but some paint on a piece of paper right art has art its value is in the meaning that people give it so anyways nft’s got popular they’ve had sort of a crash since since the hype cycle because everybody everybody poured in thought there was a chance to make money and then uh you know it’s down the nft market’s down like 80 plus percent right now from where it was just a few months ago so it’s been very up and down but i’ll tell you something cool um that the people who are not there’s a group with any technology there’s a hype cycle where people jump in just to try to make a buck and then there’s like the people who just believed in it the whole time and when the crash happens they stay they don’t go away and so i’ll tell you a cool nft example so do you know who lamelo ball is a basketball player from the ball family and they’re kind of like a little obnoxious like the kardashians of like nba so go to lamelloball.i so i met this guy or you know actually i haven’t met him yet ben met him uh because we thought this project sounded really awesome so he partnered up with lamela ball and lamella ball created his own nft now here’s how it works the website looks awesome yeah yeah exactly very good website so um there’s there’s like four different types it’s like he turned lamella ball essentially into a pokemon card okay so he you can collect these different labellable types of of cards now what do they do well the twist here the reason i think it’s kind of cool is that this is called a dynamic nft meaning it uh most nfts when you make it it is what it is the image or the video is what it is it stays that way until the end of time a dynamic one will update or upgrade based on things that happen so what this is is it’s sort of like a bet on the player so you can buy one of these you can buy the mvp card and today it’s worth not so much because he’s never won an mvp but if in his career he ever wins an mvp the card will like um like evolve like a pokemon card it’ll upgrade uh because it has been unlocked because the thing actually happened in real life so it’s like today you’re betting these cheap options will lamella ball ever win the nft will he ever win mvp will he ever win rookie of the year will he win a championship and if he does your asset that you bought will dynamically upgrade because it takes in the data from from the real world that hey this event has happened and it is now worth more and it could do more and specifically just to like kind of round it out but the price isn’t it’s not worth more necessarily right well and you know it’s like most things right like if uh if i buy a michael jordan rookie card and then michael jordan becomes the greatest player of all time that rookie card’s worth more than it was when he was a rookie and nobody knew how good he would be how do they literally so what i’m looking at here uh is basically this 3d rotating image of the melody trophy almost how are they making i mean this looks awesome like the resolution’s amazing everything about like the way it looks is cool how are they making that i think it’s just 3d animators on the internet they get them to make some custom stuff for them and by the way those that’s a group of people who’ve had a renaissance right now because there’s a whole bunch of famous people that want their own nft and to do that you need a digital artist to make you your cool thing so anyways one cool thing about this by the way you buy the thing and it comes with access so like let me just read off the perks if you bought the most expensive one so so the gold the gold lamella one is the rookie of the year one it is guaranteed to evolve if he wins rookie of the year which by the way he will this year it comes with a it comes with a physical card it comes with 750 and guaranteed endorsement deal rewards so basically his endorsers have to give you free stuff which is kind of cool um it comes with some official merchandise from him you can you have a chance to win nba game tickets valued up to five thousand dollars you have a 50 chance to receive autograph memorabilia and you’re going to get exclusive access to video calls that he’s going to do with holders of his his collectible so it’s kind of cool right what if a basketball card came with access to the player right like you know you buy the lebron card and lebron for all the holders of the of the platinum card he’s going to do a skype call with them or why the hell did i say skype a zoom call with them you know once a year or something like that or you get you know a pair of game worn shoes you have a 10 chance of getting those or something like that this is great i think this is so cool what i want to ask well i’ll ask that in a second but uh this is awesome i think like i’m not that’s like the guy who made this i think he’s like 20 21 years old he’s a steve bartlett type of i’m seeing shades of steve bartlett again in this guy who who’s a hustler who made this happen so that’s actually what i want to ask about i wasn’t going to skip ahead but i i do we’ll come back to this so what i’m seeing on this website is that this is basically this lamello thing is basically a creation of a company called ethercards is that right uh yeah maybe that’s the name of his company yeah his company is called ethercards i’m looking at the traffic if you go to similar web and look at the traffic basically nothing nothing nothing and then in one month three million visitors all the traffic is direct meaning someone very likely is there’s just three million people in the very first month of this thing being launched in march typing in ether dot cards uh those numbers if you don’t know anything about these numbers that’s a really that’s phenomenal what i want to know is how are people discovering these types of things so beautiful question i should have said this at the beginning the change here is not oh we went from a a basketball card that’s a piece of cardboard that you buy from target um to now a digital thing that you have on on your on your phone or on your computer it’s not just that lamello owns his own ip he is releasing his own card set so otherwise the nba signs an agreement with panini they’re the guys who make the the all the the basketball cards or tops right these these brands that make cards and the players don’t get directly ascent from their their own cards popularity so right now like luka doncic he has the most popular panini cards and they’re going up they’re being sold on the secondary market for thousands and thousands of dollars you know like a lebron card will sell for for two hundred thousand dollars but lebron doesn’t get a cut of that transaction because he didn’t issue it he you know he as a collective group they signed the rights you know when they become an nba player the nba cuts a deal and so they’re gonna sure they get some like shared royalty stream of like you know whatever the licensing agreement was nba wide but the individual player doesn’t get anything and therefore also has no incentive to promote this thing whereas with this lamelo has minted his own card he owns whatever percent he negotiated with ether cards and lamella is going to be putting this in his instagram story all the time and he guess what he’s got millions of followers on instagram who love lamella ball and so he’s going to get more value out of this than he would ever get out of a traditional basketball basketball card walk me through how this young guy made ether cards and in this business so basically ethercards he just you know he made the website it’s it’s very slick very cool how is the the tracking of of all these cards possible the the back-end technology of like tracking the payment and all that do they actually make it make that are they building on top of something else i don’t know i think they’re probably building on top of something else that’s one of the best parts of crypto is that because crypto is open source crypto is about building protocols um you can use those protocols to do anything so we had fur con on here uh i don’t know did he talk about pac protocol um i don’t know if you remember he’s building furkan’s building something called the pack protocol out of his uh thing uh nft yeah and basically it’s just a protocol where you or i can go on there and say hey you know just like you said you love to watch people doing pack breaks of nba we could make our own mfm packs just like jack butcher i think did with visualize value we could say great we want we want to uh we’re going to offer these 10 possible cards right inside one of them gives you like an hour of business coaching another gives you a shout out on the podcast another gives you a free shirt another gives you just a twitter follow whatever we come up with our rewards we just type them in and it basically says assign the probability to each it’s like oh you know the follow is high probability and a hour of business coaching is only one percent of people should get this when they open a pack we set the price and it’ll basically spin up like shopify for nfts it’ll spin up a website where we can sell our packs and fans can come they could buy them and they can open them up and they can have a chance of winning x inside we didn’t have to do any coding to make that happen because they have built the pac protocol into it to make this happen and it’s all saved on the ethereum blockchain uh like it’s all the ownership is there and so and they just take a cut of every buy um in exchange for having built this technology for us so and back and back to the ether cards so so so these kids like built just the front end and used someone else’s protocol and then they hollered at they somehow got in touch with lamello i mean like hey do you agree by the way sorry just to catch up one second they i don’t know how we got touched the lumbello i’m going to ask him but uh after launching this project uh so this thing did hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first day when it dropped um so you know just the lamellae thing or the thing did did uh uh i don’t know if i could say the exact number but north of three hundred thousand dollars in during the drop um and then uh other players by the way it’s so funny saying like north of 300 like yeah it did over 300 433 thousand dollars like that’s like you know you got to give people the information without giving people these i’ll give you a hint it rides with 700 000 like that’s like what you’re saying yeah basically so uh other nba players including one of the most popular players on the planet hit him up and was like hey saw the lamellae thing let’s like talk to my people let’s do it let’s do my own and did this kid have a following already on twitter or what platforms are using so he uh i’m gonna chat with him this week but ben talked to him while we were in miami and uh and what he said was that he got big his his claim to fame before this was helping artists go viral on tick tock so he partnered with a bunch of musicians he’s like yo you know a bunch of the viral things you’ve seen on tick tock i kind of architected those behind the scenes i don’t know what that means but i’m like oh you got hustler dripping off you like this is good and did you how did ben so ben if you’re listening is uh sean’s co-worker basically they scheme together how did ben find this bet we saw the announcement on the espn announced lamela ball is doing his own nft we saw an article i go i read the dynamic nft part how it updates based on the player’s actual achievements in the real world and i go i just best event i go this is [  ] genius find the genius who made this and he went and he found the guy who made it he scheduled a call i couldn’t make that call ben ben did the call and uh ben gave me the lowdown on like who this guy is he’s like he’s awesome you should talk to him and ben met him on social media yeah just dm ben has my i don’t know if you use his twitter or he has access to my twitter where you can just dm anybody from my account and uh because my account has more followers i get a higher rate of reply so let’s do there’s so many takeaways here for a listener i want to actually want to go through these takeaways the first is like i’m actually amazed at this the way that you found this was not special correct maybe if ben used so ben doesn’t have a big following right he’s just no it looks normal bmw ben levy or ben emily i don’t know his twitter something like that ben and levy so yours looks special you have 144 000 people um most people would reply to someone they have 144 000 people but ben does it all he did was dm’d him does the kid even know does he know who you are like does he know sean is like a popular podcaster or anything no idea okay great so that’s the takeaway here is that like you found an opportunity by seeing it on espn you had ben but you didn’t have to have ben no i i’ve done this myself that’s how i found ben by the way same thing that’s a huge takeaway here the other takeaway is just that the setup tea thing is cool yeah yeah yeah exactly and i think you’re going to see more of this you’re going to see famous people launching their own limited edition nfts that come with access to the person and they own the whole thing so they’re not using they don’t have to sign with a label or sign with uh or like rely on tops to go make their card for them they’re gonna release their own cards and they’re gonna own their own upside which is obviously a much better thing for the talent yeah this is amazing i love this i have a couple other topics if you want to go go go go um okay let’s do let’s do two things how do you how do so normally when we when we research we have a document what are you using reminds us on my notes on my my my it’s from my phone’s notes because i was just typing it while we were like we’d be out we’d meet somebody like for example at the event where we did the podcast some guy came up he’s like hey i’m a lawyer i um i’ve been a lawyer in dallas for a long time i drove down for the event drove from dallas to austin and uh you know i just love you guys always get the wheels turning in fact i can’t just like be a normal lawyer anymore i really want to do more and he has this idea for litigation finance he goes you know what that means did you talk to this guy no but can i guess what that means yeah please basically uh i think this is what peter thiel did uh so is it win okay so basically peter thiel is this billionaire guy who had a vendetta against gawker because gawker outed him as being gay so peter kill is a powerful vc he’s gay he didn’t want anyone to know he’s gay gawker wrote an article saying he’s gay and so he plotted for 10 15 years probably 10 years he goes whenever i see these guys slip i’m pouncing so 10 years later after this article hulk hogan uh has a sex tape issue and peter thiel has two guys on staff just sniffing out an infraction they go hey this hulk hogan thing that’s it so the story is hulk hogan was uh either some hawk hogan was having sex with someone uh they uh some third party uh filmed it without his consent gawker published the video peter two goes boom that’s it hey hawk i got the best lawyers i’m gonna fund you and if the case wins just give me a little cut of it peter thiel probably didn’t even take a cut of it right that’s how it could have worked how could it work exactly and he did he they did the lawsuit they bankrupt they basically put gawker out of business gucker no longer is is in business the guy who built that site over the years you know it all came falling down because he pushed it too far he pissed off the wrong the wrong billionaire so and by the way some people think this is bad whatever i don’t care um so what looks not that you don’t care that if it is or is not bad you’re saying it’s interesting regardless i’m saying irrelevant to what we’re talking about as well whether billionaires should fund lawsuits and take down media or not okay whatever so yeah so litigation finance is exactly this so basically what he does is they uh he’s a lawyer he analyzes cases that could be pursued oh you might have a lawsuit here that you should be pursuing you for whatever reason maybe you don’t know if you could win you don’t realize it’s a it’s a you could potentially sue for for being wronged you don’t have the money the you know the corporation can can throw all their lawyers at this and you you don’t want to go broke trying to trying to just sue um so you kind of sit on it so i think it was like 70 plus a potential suits go um unfiled because of you know one of many reasons and so the idea here would be if you see you can submit to them hey would you back my my case and they basically underwrite the risk of it they look at it they say oh i think you have a really strong case or no i think you have a weak case if you have a strong case they’ll say great we will fund the lawsuit you get a piece of it if it works if it doesn’t work you lose nothing and uh and so basically the guy had rate has now raised or is raising uh millions and millions of dollars from family offices and other folks to fund these cases and so that’s what they’re doing now is a thing anyways i thought it was a cool listener idea i don’t know what you think of that how much have they raised how much has he raised i think they raised something like six million dollars so far to um to fund this and he’s trying to get you know basically as a proof of concept if they could show that yes we are successfully able to underwrite these cases meaning we can correctly select the winners and offer a payback great if once we know that we’re able to pay you back 25 30 on your you know annually on your on your on your financing here then we can go raise 50 or 100 or 200 million to do more okay i i’ve heard of this i didn’t realize this was such a thing i am so in so there’s a company called burford capital it’s uh founded in 2009 located in england did you see it he told me about it he goes this is big in england there’s a multi-billion dollar company burford blah blah blah i just googled this while you’re talking i googled finance legal stuff the first web the first website went to pravardi capital the website has like uh like a like a monday night football looking guy wearing a white dude wearing an ill-fitting suit right there i’m like opportunity okay like anytime there’s like these like shitty wix websites with like basic looking white dudes i’m like that’s interesting second the second thing that came up was burford capital i just googled it has a market cap of 1.8 billion dollars started in 2009 that’s pretty good right that’s pretty this is pretty amazing exactly so he was like you know i’ll send you the information uh and i told him i said look this sounds great uh i don’t know anything about this so i’m probably not gonna fund it just because i have two options i can either invest in things i really understand or like invest in things i don’t understand i used to do both but now that this podcast has gotten so popular now the number of opportunities that i do understand are so large they they exceed my investable capital now i don’t have to do [  ] i don’t understand anymore this is a really interesting business this is but was so when i you’re further along and i would actually say you’re probably a better investor than i am when i look at these types of companies i think like what’s the idea that’s important right i think of i don’t have enough time to go and verify if this is like a solid market so i look at who else is investing right that’s probably a lot of people say oh that’s boring you know are you ever going to take a chance well probably not to be honest like i like looking at that but then the third thing is i look at the person are they a competent person right um like so does this person seem like they’re going to build a huge company off this uh you know he seemed like a competent person he seemed like a lawyer who you know it’s i don’t think you need to be the visionary or like the shark executor i don’t think you need to do anything for that i think you literally just need to be um somebody who’s going to do the blocking and tackling to make this happen i don’t think it requires genius which is great that’s actually a positive thing for for this business you don’t want to invest in businesses that require genius yes but you more likely than not need some type of charisma uh in order to be i mean like you either do need to be a genius so you do need to be like a peter thiel type of guy you do need to be maybe like a water like you or me type of person which we don’t really know how to do that much but we’re charismatic enough to convince other people to come work at our companies and convince them to do the work yeah um like and then you have like a few like industry knowledge what maybe this guy has something you need attributes as conor mcgregor once said if you’re gonna be you’re gonna have some attributes yeah if you’re gonna beat me you need some attributes yeah so like look if you’re gonna like succeed you need that you need some attributes so what are the attributes gonna be like something like when you’re building a fighter or building a sports team or building like a nba player on video games and you can like put like do i make this person like as fast as possible do i make them as tall as possible do i make them as strong as possible you need something there i think that’s the next shirt you need attributes to beat me yeah so like what attributes does this guy have so that’s what i’m curious about yeah i think his domain knowledge i think that’s the biggest do you agree with me by the way you need some attributes you do and what i guess like the only point i was trying to make is that some require more attributes than other there are some where you have to be the smartest and the fiercest and fastest and you know like that’s there’s some businesses that require that and there’s some where you can be the tortoise not the hare right and i think this is one where you could be the tortoise you just have to keep going forward and that’s an attribute by the way determination and just i’m willing to do it all the time exactly and uh you know having the steady hand and being um being good at actually selecting the cases right because that’s going to just prove the track record out over time so i think the domain knowledge matters all right i wanted to do some other topics so i have like three but i don’t know which one i want to do okay i’ll give i’ll give you some options this is amazing by the way this is turning out to be quite good all right totally unplanned so and by the way i wrote these down just while we were talking about the beginning when the guy canceled all right so bitcoin miami i have a few um comments on what was going on in bitcoin miami i don’t know i heard it was horrible so we could talk about that we could talk about um i have a thing on secondhand ecommerce if you want to hear that um also door-to-door sales i have a story there and the last one is a framework about the next apple the next google the next facebook so so tell me they’re all great give me which one you want to do uh the second one and then the fourth one okay the second one i think was uh the secondhand ecommerce thing yeah all right so let’s do that so um so as you know i’ve been dabbling in e-commerce and you know building up built a brand and then have gotten built a community called club ltv that has like i don’t know 100 store owners each doing somewhere between 1 million a year and 100 million a year in sales and so in that i’ve started to learn some of the problems the pain points of e-commerce one of the interesting things that i didn’t know about that you might know about right because you’ve used poshmark i think when i was at your house you told me guess what me and sarah did this weekend we sold like 97 worth of old clothes on poshmark and i was like dude what’s happening this is your hobby and you’re like yeah i love this [  ] um i didn’t realize how big this second-hand market for for e-commerce e-commerce’s dude it’s crazy so let me tell you poshmark uh going public multi-billion dollar evaluation is a public party yeah what what is it uh i don’t know we’ll look it up but yeah it’s a public okay there’s thread up spoken hustle count raised 250 million dollars either going public or went public already uh there’s grail i discovered grail in 2011 i didn’t have any money it was launched uh first marks 3.6 billion great there’s grail i i dm’d this guy because or i messaged him on reddit years ago because i was on the day he launched it i was going to the website i didn’t invest in it i think it still could be great it’s basically poshmark for hip dudes what else is there i mean there’s like eight others yeah let me tell you what i think is interesting here we for our store for our our d2c brand we a large amount of people who buy new and they they’re willing to spend more buying new because they know there’s this has secondary value they know they could sell it three months from now six months from now either new or used and recoup a good amount of the money so uh certain certain categories you can do that better than others so anyways the uh but but managing this is is really awful so the way that people do it today is sometimes they list on poshmark or the real real or um like uh i forgot the other one makari mercari’s huge um they go they go list on those exchanges but a big part of it is they have facebook groups for every brand so every brand will have any brand with with a cult following will have a secondary market facebook group called buy sell trade bst and we b st bst so you can look up any brand name on facebook go type in the brand name and like i don’t know your favorite boots or leather jackets you liked or whatever just type in that bst so what you’ll see is that there are these these private groups on facebook communities for buying selling and trading what you already have what you do is you take a photo of your your closet or your item you lay it down on the floor you take a photo of it and you just write you know like there’s all these acronyms like if you go in there it’s another language it’s like mwt that means new with tag okay great uh or like you know iso in search of this product and so they have their own little lingo it’s this insider community and you post the item you just say here’s what i have here’s what it’s for i have no pets in the house no smokers and then somebody in the comments will just say uh they’ll just type in a number it’s like an uh a little auction that would be like 40 and then you just say done send me your what’s your email i’ll send you the paypal invoice so there’s this like it’s like this kind of like stitched together experience where then you have to send them the paypal invoice they have to pay it um then you have to like find their get their mailing address you have to ship it and then dude i just googled bst i just found one paintball bst 20k members right and that’s what they’ll have they’ll have tens of thousands of members often and they’re very active and for the brand for the brand themselves this becomes kind of a headache if it’s good but it’s bad why is it bad so the first thing is a bunch of people will buy your product just to flip it right so they’ll go and they’ll sell it for more so we have a product we have one one of our products uh it sells for 65 and then immediately so it sells out the first minute we release it and then it immediately starts selling for 10 times more so 500 or 600 dollars on mercari or the second-hand websites what’s the uh what what’s that mercari one m-e-r-c-a-r-i you’ve probably seen their billboards before um they’re very good that’s cool so um so anyways so so some one one part pain point is is these flippers but that’s okay uh the other part is like you don’t benefit from the secondhand market directly like you don’t get any cut of those sales that are happening but uh you do sometimes have customer service problems because people complain oh you know i bought this thing from the official buy sell trade group and they scammed me or they didn’t send it or they sent the wrong item and you’re like dude this is not my problem like this is that’s not even us that’s like craigslist so like so you can’t complain to us about what’s going on on craigslist so this company we found um has a very interesting take on this so i’m trying to invest in this it’s called tread how did you find this how do you find all this crap guess who i can can i how do i share him you need a you want to give a love letter to ben i think you fell in love with ben on this trip i did um tread is uh tread.com so sean has this guy who he pays a great salary to and his name’s ben and i hung out with ben for the first time and what ben i admire him so much ben is and i say this with love pretty nerdy a nerdy guy and not like in terms of like looks or acts but like just like his interests like he just loves like gadgets he loves um new stuff and i started talking about him and he just brought or talking to him and he just told me he just browses the web to find the latest and greatest stuff and he’ll use it and then he’ll dm or email or message the person who starts the thing and just say this is neat here’s tips that i would do to make it better or here’s been my experience using your thing and that’s all he says and in doing that he sees everything and knows everyone and i think it’s so fascinating right he’s just uh he’s just helpful okay it’s not it’s not trend treat is the name of it treat.kelly i’ll send it to you t-r-e-e-t dot co um okay so check that out so what they do is they have this idea of circular commerce meaning you make an item you sell it and then that person instead of it just going to waste um they can resell it to the next person and they can resell it to the next person it’s sort of a circular uh commerce model so what do they do say the url again t-r-e-e-t treat dot co so what they do is they give your shopify store a page or a tab that just creates the second-hand market right there in your store so somebody who wants to buy a used item can just go buy it secondhand whip from within your store um you don’t have to do the whole paypal invoicing facebook group you know questionable integrity type of thing anymore uh customers can just list their stuff here it can be bought from from your store which has more trust than just a random group and the transaction is processed you know online using normal credit card processing and stuff on this and the brand gets a percent cut you can set your percent cut of what you’ll take out for hosting the second-hand market so it’s an additional new revenue stream for a ddc brand i think this is really really smart this does two things a it legitimizes the sort of secondary circular nature of it and a lot of people like that that it’s not being that’s like a less wasteful version of consumerism the second thing is that it takes resale and it makes it a part of your business model as the brand so for consumers it helps because it’s higher trust you know the technology is all built you don’t have to do this manually through facebook groups and for the brand here’s an extra x percent of revenue that you’re going to make every month because now you participate in the resale market that’s crazy um i i don’t know if this is a good idea um how would you feel as a business i mean you you do i’m gonna use this because i want this for our business do you think a lot of people feel the same way i don’t know we’ll see you know what my gut says super early make more [  ] like why are you selling don’t sell out like is you selling out that sounds like a you problem not a you need a plug-in problem well it’s not just not just for selling out right some people just can’t afford the full priced item like i don’t know you bought those dumbbells in your in your garage second hand off facebook marketplace or whatever right like if you can get the good the item in good condition for half the price uh for a lot that opens up your buyer pool into a different segment that can’t maybe always afford the full price item and you don’t have to do heavy discounting as a brand okay so i’m just googling as you’re talking because we didn’t have time to research but uh so patagonia’s ceo has this great thing where he goes i actually don’t want you to uh buy more stuff buy one thing from us and if you if it rips if it rips we’ll fix it and um it should just last so like only buy one thing so i just googled patagonia pre-owned they have a url that’s dedicated to it called onewhere.patagonia.com and i’m pretty sure they have their entire yeah they have an entire way to buy and sell uh their own their own gear kind of cool actually it is actually cool you know who would buy use patagonia stuff me me i buy used clothing all the time whenever i buy red wing boots i always buy amused i actually changed my opinion very quickly i think this is cool all right i’m glad patagonia got you across the line okay i have another uh topic for you do you want to do another one or yeah keep going wrap it up no keep going this is good okay let’s do one more no no you you had four things where you were at 40. which one you want to do so your remaining options open the door door-to-door okay so this is a little bit longer patagonia’s pre-owned website by the way it’s [  ] sick 90 jeans for 38 bucks on board but could treat be a big business uh as a shopify plug-in am i being a hater just because it’s a simple shopify plug-in well i don’t even it’s not i don’t even think it is a shopify plug-in but i know what you mean uh yeah i think it’s i think it’s the wrong way to think about it because if you look at how big the centralized marketplaces are mercari poshmark those are three or four billion this is that same thing but just decentralized instead of one website where you go to find all the brands every brand has your little marketplace embedded into it so i think it’s a smart strategy where you you give the brand the marketplace instead of trying to get the customer to come to your app this is [  ] awesome some more here’s some more so door-to-door sales so this thing has been happening recently and i know you love the mormons so i think you’ll you’ll dig this love the mormons i love the mormons so i have met in the la or i’ve heard these stories in the last few days i’ll give you two of door-to-door sales i have never done door-to-door sales but i’m almost jealous that i haven’t now so i’ll give you two words two examples do you know who brian johnson is janae might might not be might be hard to place yeah so i know two different brian johnsons one sells books online and the other started braintree braintree is the guy i’m talking about okay that’s that’s pretty good you know you get you get 200 points uh for your house there all right so so brian johnson i was listening to his interview he went on um lex friedman’s podcast i was listening to it does he still work uh yeah so so his story is insane so he basically creates braintree which is like a payments uh it’s basically a online payments company stripe before strike it was straight before stripe it didn’t become stripe but it sold for about 800 800 million dollars i believe to paypal and he owned most all of it uh yeah exactly he owned a huge chunk of it he also i think they bought venmo along the way uh so so he had this strategy early on which was like we go to the merchants we get the merchants to use this because we’re so easy to use online and then we’ll build a consumer uh like side of the we’ll buy the most hit consumer app and that was venmo and that would be a valuable company and anyway so he builds his company for 800 million dollars he sells it and he decides what he wanted was he wanted to have a huge nest egg to just reinvest into a world-changing idea so he’s like how do i get as much financial capital as possible in the next few years so that i can self-fund and work on one of the most like gnarly you know like few life world-changing problems so the thing he’s working on and by the way he thought that braintree wasn’t gonna be i mean that’s like pretty and lex even brings this up he’s like you know online payments actually does help the world he’s like yeah that’s true but i knew that if i didn’t do online payment somebody else would i wanted to work on something that if i didn’t do it i don’t know if anyone else would and so the thing he’s working on is that same thing that um that elon is working on uh neural link so his is called kernel kernel it’s a it’s a brain interface so so what that means is you put this like helmet on it looks like a bicycle helmet and it’s basically reading your brain waves while you’re sitting there and so you know what does that mean first it can analyze your brain while you’re just doing things so that’s interesting you can get more insight about yourself um and there here’s what his company’s trying to do is basically spit the data so that all he’s trying to do is be able to read brain data then any developer can take that those that data and those learnings and actually build any application to improve your life off of it um so that’s what they’re trying to build with colonel so and by the way he took i think 60 million dollars after he sold braintree and he funded the first 60 million into colonel himself because yeah reading about that right now he put uh so they’ve raised um 53 from outside 54 from his own money yeah 5450 for a million of his own money exactly and so i think you know most investors didn’t want to touch it because it’s like dude this is just going to be a money pit uh you know it’s the hardest technology requires the most expensive engineers we’re not there yet it’s going to take 10 years and he’s like yeah don’t worry that’s why i that’s why i have this nest egg uh to to fund this thing myself how much did he make when he sold um braintree you think i don’t know i don’t know the exact number um but anyways this doesn’t even matter this is just set up those that’s the guy cool guy yeah i would have featured him maybe as billy of the week and maybe we’ll do a little bit of a deeper job hey dan let’s get this guy on the podcast this guy’s cool yeah we’ll get brian on the part i thought was pretty remarkable is his door-to-door sales part okay so what happened so before he starts braintree he um i think he had done a startup and it was fail it either had failed or it was failing and what he did was uh i hope i don’t butcher this story i’m just trying to remember this off top my head uh because we didn’t have time to prep today so what he did was he needed some money so he he’s like okay how do i get money fast i have my startups failing or i’d already failed uh he’s like okay i need like a sales job so he goes and he gets a sales job with a um some kind of like financial product company i think it was like either like uh credit cards or something like that for for for businesses and so he’s like he’s basically a sales rep and he’s like okay how do i um how do i become like the best sales rep for this and so it became a door-to-door sales challenge and so he was going door to door to each merchant and he was selling them on the benefits of this product and and he would then get a commission off of like kind of the whatever the value of that customer was over the the next period of time and um and so i oh my god i’m going to butcher this because i can’t remember the hack he used but he had a he had a very clever technique he was using when he was going door to door would that enabled him to become the top salesman in north america and so i’m gonna go right in brian did yeah so he became the number one sales person he basically goes door-to-door and he figures out how to sell this product and what he said was like door-to-door sales is like just this um like really formative formative experience for anybody because you have to have like an incredible amount of determination you’re going to get rejected all the time and you need to learn how to like get your foot in the door how to get somebody’s attention how to get them interested and how to close them in order to sell any product door-to-door and then i so so i heard the story from brian johnson and he talked about how important that experience was to him next day i go meet my uncle i have an uncle who i’ve talked about on the pod before because i consider him to be the happiest man on earth uh he’s a real estate uncle a real estate uncle his name’s uncle vinnie literally people uh just coined his name smiley uh so they just stopped calling him vinnie people just call him smiley because he’s just so smiley like his company they got him a trophy because he’s the number one sales person and on the trophy they didn’t put his name they just wrote smiley and that became kind of like the nickname that stuck and they didn’t even ask his permission they just knew this is the right name for this guy so he’s incredibly happy but he’s also been incredibly successful and i would say i don’t think he’s in all of my my aunts my uncles in terms of iq just raw intelligence i don’t know he’s probably either 50 percentile maybe even less maybe maybe half maybe half him sorry vinny no and i mean this with love because uh whatever the point i’m making is good thing they didn’t call him dopey smells a lot better he’s he’s the most successful of anyone in our family but it’s not because he had more raw horsepower in the brain that’s not the reason that that he was able to do it and uh so i was telling my trainer about him and he goes i’d love to meet him and i go what he goes yeah does he where does he live i go he lives in danville actually lives you know not far away from here you know 30 minute drive he goes could we just go meet him i was like yeah so i texted my uncle i said i was telling my trainer about you and he just he wants to meet you and he goes he was like sure come on bye no problem yes like can’t wait to see you uh and i was like i was like who doesn’t and i was like i noted to myself he didn’t even ask why what’s the context you want something from me he’s just like yes uh you wanna you wanna meet me yes and i also thought to myself what what a goal by the way to be the type of person that people wanna make a pilgrimage out you know to go drive an hour to go see um just just because of a description of the way you are i thought that’s kind of amazing because he doesn’t want anything from him he’s not trying to get a business deal or get a customer out of him he just heard how his personality is and i was like i gotta meet this guy so we go we drive out there and we sit down and uh you know he’s already on level 10 excitement and we’re having a great time and i started asking him i said you know when did you become you where did you become this way you weren’t born this way so how did you become this way and he was telling me the long story and he talked about this door-to-door sales job he goes i came from india and i’m a student at university he goes uh george washington university i think he goes i needed a summer job i needed he’s like i came here i only had enough tuition the government paid for my tuition for the first year i had no idea how i was gonna pay for the second year but like i have one summer to bridge that gap like how the heck am i gonna make next fall’s tuition so he looked for a job and his roommate was like hey i worked for this company that called southwestern i don’t know if you ever heard of this company you’re gonna love it but basically this company called southwestern and what they do is they sell books so they sell books door-to-door they have this fleet of college students that will go out and they’ll sell these books like encyclopedias um dictionaries bibles um um you know any textbooks of any kind and southwestern advantage is what it’s called and so and they’ve they’ve since grown like crazy they acquired all now it’s like 20 something companies and it’s like a multi-billion dollar company crazy story about the founder i’m going to have him as the billy of the week as a special profile but i want to tell this door-to-door sales story so he goes okay great so what do i do he’s like you know i can barely speak english because i’m just here from india but okay i gotta go do door-to-door sales how do i do that he’s like they gave this this training um you they give us seven books like you know how to win friends and influence you know uh you know like these seven kind of classic self-help books tony robbins and whatever he’s like read these seven books and then come to this training seminar he goes i go to this thing it’s an auditorium and it’s me and like you know the 50 other college students and there’s this stage and there’s just a door frame on the stage and you’d have to get up and you’d have to knock on the door and then they would have an act you know like the person from the company on the other side an actor who is like i’m mrs johnson and you you open the door mrs johnson and she would simulate like slamming the door on your face and being like like stop bothering us right or somebody who’s like lukewarm or somebody who’s interested and they would teach you how to sell door-to-door and he talked he talked to me he’s like i used to they used to dr uh but my job basically every day in the summer and i’m in the you know the heat of summer i would my roommate would drive me to some neighborhood any neighborhood i would just pick a different one every day and at 9am he would drop me off i didn’t own a car so i needed him to pick me up at the end of the day so he’s like 9am he’d drop me off in a neighborhood and 9pm he’d come pick me up at the end of the day and he’s like i would go door to door and i’d knock and they would teach you the skills of selling door-to-door so do you know i don’t know if you have you ever heard this i was fascinated by how you act what is the actual method of selling when you’re door-to-door have you ever heard this um no well so you typically say hey i was just talking to a bunch of your neighbors and they thought this was interesting and so here i am talking to that that’s definitely part of it but he broke it down step he’s like there’s a scientist that they taught us at this training he goes first you ring the doorbell you knock on the door and you don’t look into the door because when you look at the door it’s a little bit intimidating um and they see your face they recognize that they don’t know you um he’s like you want to look slightly you know off 45 degree angle away so that they’re gonna like when they look through the peephole they’re gonna be like okay i don’t know who this guy is but it doesn’t look too threatening and then what are they trying to get you to do like to step your foot into the door eventually basically so you they open the door and you you explain the pitch that you just said which is you know hi my name is my name is vinnie and um i’m a student here at george washington nearby um and i actually have been uh you know i’ve been talking to your neighbors uh we what we do is we sell uh you know we sell tech or whatever it is he’s basically saying i was talking to your neighbors and i wanted to stop by your place i’m a student nearby right so you you become a local you’re not a stranger you’re a friend right so you you you imagine you want to put like a time stamp like there’s only going to be i’m i actually i have to go in a second yeah exactly i don’t have a bunch of time but i would love to just you know chat with you whatever right and he goes he goes uh a lot of people what they would try to do is the door sample meaning they would tell them i’m here to sell you a textbook check out this book is this something you’re interested in and then you know the learning is nobody ever buys a book at the door and i thought that’s actually like a very applicable thing for almost every kind of sale is you’re because you’re afraid of getting rejected you rush you rush to try to just sample it you know give them give them the value so you don’t annoy them but the reality is that that’s not how a product like this would ever be bought nobody’s ever going to buy this at the door itself so he goes you want to get into the home the whole objective of the door is to get into the home and it reminded me of your writing style where you go i was about to say this this is why i always say longer is better i want them to fall down my slippery slope and explain the slippery slope it’s like the first line the goal of the first right look there’s only one goal of a headline of a sales page and that’s to get you to read the sub headline the only goal the sub headline is to get you read the first sentence and the only goal the first sentence is to get you read the second sentence i’m going to keep on doing that until you fall down the slippery slope and not only a lot of people say i want to make this very easy to read so do i i want to make it easy to read as well but i’m going to tell you a story and i’m not going to rush it and i want you to fall slowly fall down the slippery slope and i want to make it kind of hard for you because the more pot committed you are the more likely you are to buy exactly exactly so this is the same exact thing so he wanted to get into the home so he goes you asked to come in and um and you you don’t you don’t look them in the face you sort of lead with your arm and your face you sort of like point where you’re trying to go like into their living room right behind them so you say you know would you mind if i come in for a moment and you you sort of point your way into the door and uh if you’re once you’re in the door now your close rate has gone from like 0.01 to like 30 or 40 percent just because you’re there you’re sitting and you’re sitting down so you’re not like standing anymore it’s not by the way this is why on all my landing pages i always ask for email first because once you give me your email you’re just a little bit more bought in you’re in the door exactly and you know they might offer you a water or a drink you say yes you don’t say no now you’re both sitting there you have your water and you start to explain to them and now you need to put it in the context of their problem so you look around the house oh i see you have children how old are they oh i got a boy and girl myself uh yeah you know blah blah blah this this age is the craziest blah blah blah what are your kids doing for what do you do for a kind of after school education for your children and that’s how you’re leading into the encyclopedia sale that’s how you’re leading into the textbook sale is you need to frame your your product as a solution to their problem right so this is all like you know this is common sense but i just loved it yeah common dog uh i think that like a lot of people don’t know this i think you want you so i learned it so i read how to win friends and influence people by the way all those old like uh fuzzy books like how to win friends and people influence people they can grow rich it sounds silly i endorse all of them fully that [  ] totally helps you tony robbins totally helps you i’m i’m entirely on board with that right the founder of panda express makes all of his employees go through a tony robbins and how to influence people uh seminar totally on board with it um it’s that i learned how to do this when i was selling hot dogs and then you know what else i did like every other 18 year old i i use it to meet girls right and it totally worked and i mastered that well i wasn’t like that good but like for i i stepped up my game from uh significantly when i learned how to do all this right right exactly and so he told me a couple things out of that he goes um he’s like here i am i’m a hindu selling bibles to to bear i mean indian hindus selling bibles to americans and he’s like that experience that whole summer he’s like you know i it changed me he’s like first i’m working hard i’m there at 9 am i’m walking around carrying loads and loads of books and i’m walking door to door and i’m getting mostly rejected uh but then you know if i get even an inch she’s like i used to schedule a same-day follow-up he’s oh now’s not a good time you know would it be better this evening when your husband’s home like maybe 5 p.m great i’ll be back because he’s like i’m just walking around the neighborhood anyways i’ll walk right back to this he’s like so i was scheduling same-day follow-ups to keep the keep the ladies like by the second time they met me now i’m not a stranger he’s like nothing has changed they don’t know anything more about me but it’s just the second time they’ve seen me and um and so there was all these little things i thought were really applicable to sales but also i started thinking about these formative experiences the really hard experiences uh like what’s a hard business experience and i think this is actually pretty underrated so he said learn to work hard i learned how to sell i learned how to build rapport and talk to people and he’s like i wasn’t doing it to manipulate anybody he’s like i just genuinely would life was a lot more fun if i got to know the person rather than you know having a standoff relationship and then them being angry that i’m bothering them that day and it got to the point where one woman would be like are you walking around carrying all these books he’s like well yeah you know i have to uh and she’s like here’s the keys to my car here’s my van drive my van around the neighborhood instead so she gave him this car to actually do the sale so it went from most people slam the door on a door to a salesman she gave him his her car to make it easier for him to go do what he was doing he still keeps in touch with her 36 years later or something like that 40 years later he’s like yeah you know she just sent me this cake and like mrs whatever her name he’s like we’re still good friends actually because and we met because i sold her you know a bible back in the and um so i thought this was interesting so i think there’s something to this and from two levels what are the opportunities here i thought hey um who’s doing door-to-door sales now are there still companies that primarily sell door-to-door i’m going to research them and find something yeah i mean like some really they’re probably the most famous one is cutco you know cutco no what is that um wow you’ve never heard of cutco so they make knives in kitchenware their knives are actually pretty good but their whole business model is uh door to door and um like i’ve got friends that have done it it’s reputable in the sense that it’s a good product right some people think it’s scammy but because they’re like direct sales and multi-level marketing but it’s legit right and so i’m interested in these direct sales companies i’m also interested in hiring people who are successful door-to-door sales people in fact there was a guy on the podcast early on who did this for solar he’s like my first job was door-to-door sales i was selling solar like hey you know have you ever thought about doing solar it lowers your bill and blah blah blah we can help you out it’s good for the environment and he’s like dude it was hard as [ __ ] but i got good at it i became the top sales person and i kind of feel like i can i will never go wrong if i hire the top salesperson from any door-to-door sales company it’s like works hard knows how to sell um like what else do you need when you’re when you’re trying to hire somebody well you want to hear something funny you know who jordan belford is yeah the wolf of wall street oh we talked about it this weekend i think you haven’t read his book you should so jordan belford was the wolf of wall street he made hundreds of millions of dollars selling penny stocks to rich people and he was a great sales person he created this thing called straight line persuasion he started by selling fish and steaks door-to-door [Laughter] that’s how his entire thing started was door-to-door yeah it’s a great book but it was all it’s all door-to-door sales yeah so i don’t really have i don’t really know what the point of this is it’s more like i loved hearing these stories i i’m sort of jealous i never had this experience because i think i would be better at what i do if i did um and i want to go further i want to research these companies and i want to start hiring people out of this pool of talent i think it is an underrated pool of talent just like we talked about you know sort of mormons who go on the mission and they have to sell sort of the hardest thing sell a religion to somebody who never asked you to come sell it to them and they have to do that for two years that does create a certain sales ethic and work ethic in a person and uh we’ve seen that take place that’s why almost all the direct sales companies all the uh the successful direct sales companies are all based out of utah um because that’s where the talent is that knows how to do this sort of thing i think for i would say for not preparing this episode turned out to be pretty amazing and i would say even amongst all episodes this has been one of my favorite dan do you agree that this has been fire this has been great guys door-to-door sales was awesome what about the other stuff the other stuff was good too you guys just finished with a big bang yeah um i think this ended up being a winner um so that’s the episode i think right we’re gonna wrap up there let’s rap um tomorrow or wednesday i want to talk about co-working spaces i think we have to have a my first million co-working business yeah you like that idea i do that was another bad idea and i think it’s wonderful so i tweeted out who i could talk to i got a bunch of interesting stuff um we’re going to talk about that next week wednesday [Music] travel never looking back