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 other thing i think is really interesting so the adventure book let me tell you about this story have you heard do you know what this is this product the adventure book i have no idea what it is ben have you ever heard of this thing okay all right so you guys are also not on tick tock enough this is like the number one ad on tick tock that i see uh i don’t know if i’m just in their market or they just run a [ ] ton of ads but i’ve been seeing it for like a year so basically it’s a it’s kind of it’s a book you buy it’s like a high quality big book and what it is is like there’s a bunch of imagine like a scratch off like a lottery so there’s a bunch of things you can a bunch of adventures that you could scratch off so you open the book to a random adventure you scratch it off and it reveals a thing you’re gonna go do like it might be um like i don’t know i’ve never bought the book so like you know bad example but like you know you’re gonna go into a store today and you give out ten compliments to people in the store or uh you’re gonna go streaking around your neighborhood or whatever like an adventure a thing you can go do and um so this idea and and and they pair with it like a camera so you you’re supposed to take a polaroid of you doing it so it becomes a scrapbook so on one side it triggers you to go do something that you’ve never done or that’s like you know get you out of your comfort zone uh and then it gives you the ability to capture it and paste you glue the photo in and it becomes this memory book of all your adventures like cool kind of novel idea so i had seen this and i was like ah that’s a cute idea that’s a novel idea what i didn’t realize is this a hundred million dollar business that was created in the last like two years so how do i know this you know like for the podcast i don’t know if you get these emails but i definitely do um there’s a bunch of people that have like booking agents and we get all these emails which is like hey sean love my first million um have you thought about having you know joe joe on and you’re like you know it’s like oh first they’re complimenting me so i like open it and i’m like it’s like i don’t want to be a member of any club that will have me you know so it’s like that’s how i feel about the guest thing so normally i write all these off but this one caught my eye which was they said would you like to have brian ellis on he is a high school dropout now owns a hundred million dollar business called the adventure challenge and i was like it’s like that that adventure book thing and it and so i replied i go 100 million dollars no way that sounds high and she goes yeah like it’s been incredible they’ve grown blah blah blah and i said 100 i’m just like clarify i’m like 100 million cumulative revenue annual revenue what are you saying here and uh and so she goes yeah like they’ll do 85 million in revenue this year and they have a few big bigger partnerships that distribution partnerships that will get them over 100 um like in the next year and you know so the business is valued over 100 million dollars with 85 million in revenue and i was like what the [ ] and so i go and i start researching this and so here’s the story so this guy bryant he’s um so i couldn’t confirm the high school dropout part i don’t know if that was just like some post-fact [ ] like like to make this sound better but like let’s assume it’s true so uh high school dropout i think his job was he had some job which was like he was a skyscraper inspector so he’s like you know some low man on the totem pole doing a job he didn’t love and he’s like all right i’m just doing this for the money he wanted to make a business like he just he’s like my whole life i just always been i always have ideas and and uh you know i wanted to come create a product it’s like so i’m doing this job and i had this idea to do um to do this like adventure box so his original idea was take a machine uh create a box like a machine and you push a button and it’s like like prints out a receipt the receipt is like the adventure you’re gonna go on so you get like a random adventure that comes out cool idea right and um and so that was the original idea and he’s like ah just tells a couple people about it and they’re like oh yeah that’s cool and he’s like great but he’s doing his job and he hasn’t really you know figured out exactly how to do it or whatever um and he’s like he’s like okay but he’s he’s he everything’s like on hold until he gets fired from his job and he like uh he he makes a mistake they think he committed fraud his boss is like no no there’s honest mistake but either way he gets fired he’s like all right [ ] um what do i want to do so he decides i want to go to acting school so he’s like i’m going to go to acting school but i need to pay for life so he’s like i need to create a side hustle that’s going to make me 2 000 a month that’s my goal and he’s like what about that adventure box challenge thing and he’s like the idea over the course of a few months has had like evolved and he’s like all right what if it was actually like a book that you could scratch off the adventure um and so he tells a couple people about it and they’re like that’s actually a really cool idea you should do it and so he goes to hobby lobby and he buys some paper some of the scratch-off material and he and he’s like buys it goes to a different store he buys a camera and he’s like starts coming up with this idea and he basically spends six to eight months prototyping this idea because nobody had really done a like kind of like um an adventure style scratch-off book before so he’s like creating an actual physical product and so he’s like um he has this idea and he um he just keeps telling people about it and so he um he gets to the point where he’s prototyped the idea several times and there’s videos i found online of like he’s creating a vlog while he’s doing he’s like all right it’s 11 p.m april 1st uh i just got this really cool material for the scratch off i really like this one but i’m having trouble with the bindings you know and he’s like so maybe i’ll try this other thing tomorrow and then like he has the next video you know a week later he’s like okay i figured out the bindings part and now i need to figure out this other thing i love seeing the the start the early stages of these ideas so he creates a kickstarter he’s like i’m gonna do a kickstarter it’s gonna be great i wanna raise ten thousand dollars for this book and uh kickstarter goes live he makes thirteen hundred dollars the first day and he’s like [ ] yeah i’m the man he you know goes to a coffee shop he’s strutting in he’s like i made 1300 today i don’t know about you guys i’ll take you know your best give me your finest coffee and uh he’s like all right we’re you know we’re already 13 of the way the goal let’s keep going but day two four hundred dollars day three zero dollars and like the kickstarter like runs out of steam he’s like [ ] i was kind of just banking on this going viral and now it’s not viral so what now and so he’s like all right basically he’s gonna throw in the towel because like for for only seventeen hundred dollars i can’t even get the quality of book made that i want uh maybe i’ll just quit so he’s like i need to get a job to pay for life um you know like i’m out of money and so he’s like he’s like oh maybe i’ll contact my buddy i don’t forget his name but ben my buddy ben to uh to get a sales job he has like this company i can do sales so he calls him up he gets a sales he’s like i want to do a sales job i want to do it for one year and i’m just saving up money so i go back out there and build a product and the guy’s like alright cool that’s fine like you’re upfront about it like i’m down with that let’s do it so he gets a sales job there and while he’s there he’s telling people at work this idea he can’t shut up about the idea and the guy there was like you know have you tried ads he’s like oh dude nobody clicks ads like ads like uh ads like ads are scams basically like that was his mentality at the time and the guy’s like no like that’s how we grow our business like you know you should try so he puts a little money into ads he’s like i don’t know if it worked or not but like you know i got this like 10x roast and the guy’s like what like no way and he’s like yeah like people really like the ad or whatever and so the guy he partners with his buddy the guy who hired him and he so i’m fast forwarding some parts of the story but basically he ends up leaving that guy partners with him that guy’s like look we’re gonna grow this thing through ads and um and they basically run a [ __ ] ton of tick tock ads facebook ads whatever and they’ve grown this thing to now 85 if this is true 85 million dollars in sales they’ve sold about 2 million copies of this book it’s like a 40 book which is like you know something 70 something million dollars in sales if you do the math and yeah what an adventure now they have like a couple’s book so you’re like 50 fun adventures to go on with your date they have a family book here’s some things to do with your family a friend’s book and then a by yourself book yeah it’s kind of amazing