Sam introduces Val Sklarov, a low-profile serial entrepreneur who came to the US from Uzbekistan at age 11 and built a string of highly profitable businesses — from affiliate marketing and ringtone distribution to a jewelry tech platform — largely as a solo operator. The conversation covers Val’s unconventional approach to testing ideas, his philosophy on resourcefulness, and how he thinks about distribution windows in digital media.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Val Sklarov (guest, entrepreneur)
Introduction and Val’s Viral Tweet [00:00:00]
Sam: It was strange. I was pulling up to my university — through college — and I would pull up in a drop-top Lexus, like a $70,000 car, and I was like 19, right.
Sam: So Val — Shaan isn’t making it today, but that’s okay. Your thing went viral today. How many likes did you get?
Val: Like 3,000, 3,300, something like that. I had to turn off my notifications. I can’t do — when you work with — I don’t know how you guys do it. I don’t know how people do it while running full businesses. I had to turn that off because I just can’t concentrate. That thing just — my phone was just blowing up all day.
Sam: Now you know how I feel.
Val: It is crazy, right?
Sam: It’s crazy. So you had 3,000 followers and now you have like nine — maybe nine thousand?
Val: Yeah, I mean it took me how many years to get up to like 20,700. Now it’s — I don’t know, I didn’t look to be honest with you — but I’m probably at like eight, nine thousand at this point.
Sam: All right. The background here is I met you through — we share a best friend, Joe. And Joe told me about you. He goes, “This guy’s crazy.” So let me tell you what I know about you and you tell me if it’s right or wrong. Then I want to hear your story.
Basically, Joe goes — and I won’t reveal too many numbers, I’ll let you talk about any number that you want to talk about, because I don’t know if what I know is confidential — so you as a 19-year-old, you came from Russia—
Val: I came from Uzbekistan. I was about eleven.
Sam: Then you come here, you get a computer at like 16 or 17, you start this affiliate marketing business, you’re the only employee. By age 22, 23 you’ve made something like 30 million in profit from this one little business. From there you parlayed that into a lyric website that was one of the biggest lyric websites in the world — which doesn’t sound that impressive, but most people don’t realize that lyric websites are some of the biggest websites in the world. That made another eight figures in profit. From there you parlayed that into an ad network that is now huge. From there you’ve launched a jewelry business that apparently Joe has said is bigger than all your other companies — but I don’t know if that’s true. And then throughout all this you’ve acquired and sold and developed like $100 million-plus of real estate. Is all this accurate?
Val: Some of it.
Sam: Okay. And by the way, the reason I’m having you on is because we’ve had a lot of really successful people on here doing interesting stuff, and a lot of them are well known — but you’ve basically never done any press, you’ve never talked about this publicly. When I met you I was like, this is a gold mine, this guy has so many interesting stories, we’ve got to tell this story. So — what was wrong and what was right?
The PlayStation Website and First Lessons [00:03:30]
Val: So the funny part is that the first business I had was a PlayStation website — a video game website. It wasn’t huge but I was in high school making like $5,000 a month. That actually taught me a lot of lessons.
And you actually tweeted another thing about me — you said, “Hey, my 12-year-old son has a website making like two grand a day and he needs an email service provider, which one should he use?” And I tweeted that screenshot.
Sam: That was anonymous, I guess — it’s not anonymous anymore.
Val: Yeah, he still has a website. It’s not doing as well — not quite at 2,000 anymore — but he’s working on coding this thing and he’s figuring out all these things. It’s actually amazing to see at his age.
Sam: Where did it start? So your first thing was a PlayStation website — what is that?
Val: A site called PSX Extreme. I launched it like ‘98, ‘99 — actually it was ‘99, right before the dot-com bubble burst. I was like eight months into the bubble. It was doing really well, it was very easy to generate revenue. Once I got the traffic, the site was all about anything related to PlayStation — cheat codes, reviews, screenshots, whatever. Anything for PlayStation fans.
Then the dot-com bubble hits. My revenues disappeared — 90%. My traffic was still up there but I had no revenues because all the ad revenue disappeared. It went from $3 CPM down to 30 cents CPM if you were lucky enough to get that.
Sam: How many people were going to this website?
Val: It wasn’t huge, but I had like 10,000 uniques a day, maybe 20,000. And in ‘98, ‘99 that’s a massive site.
Val: It was good traffic, and it was all free. So it was an interesting experience because I had to quickly learn how to generate revenue. I had to go out there and sell advertising myself. And once I figured out I could sell advertising, I didn’t have enough traffic — so I started going to other video game sites that had much more traffic than me and saying, “Hey, I’ve got all these advertisers who would spend more if I had more traffic. Let me put ads on your sites.” So I went to all these other video game sites and was basically a broker for advertising.
That was my first real money. I was making $5K from the site and probably another $10K a month from being a broker.
The Affiliate Marketing Machine [00:09:00]
Sam: Then the thing that you tweeted — basically you told the story about how when you were 19, after this PlayStation site, you built an affiliate ad site and in two or three years it was like over 30 million in profit. So what were you doing — you were selling stuff on behalf of eBay, the New York Times? You had like 800 ad accounts that sold different stuff?
Val: Yeah. So you know it’s affiliate marketing, but I used paid search, which was very new back then. After the dot-com bubble burst, all the advertisers suddenly pulled back their budgets. For a moment people thought the internet might be over. All the brand advertising got pulled. But everybody still had to figure out how to get customers. So they said, “Okay, we won’t do brand advertising, but if you drive us customers we’ll pay per customer.” Performance marketing.
And at the same time, media wasn’t expensive — the supply was there but the demand wasn’t. So that’s what I took advantage of. I started buying up a lot of supply. Mostly it was search — paid search. That’s what made everything so profitable, because I was just playing into those supply-demand dynamics that were working in my favor.
What I would do is I would find an advertiser that had a product. I would test it on — at the time it was called GoTo.com, which was like the modern-day Yahoo paid search. Then later Google came around. I would test that ad. If it works, I expand on it. If it doesn’t, I figure out how to make it work.
Sam: And what things are you selling?
Val: Oh man, everything. Everything.
Sam: And all this was making like many millions of dollars of sales for your one-person operation every year?
Val: Yes.
College Life While Running a Business [00:13:00]
Sam: Tell us a little about what was going on in your life at the time. Did you try to go to college? Were you doing this while at college? Did you drop out?
Val: So I already had the business going. I got into — I’ll say finance — so I was like, all right, I’ll do business finance. I didn’t really feel like I should be there, but I only did it because of my mom. And I had no time for it.
Sam: You seemed like you’d be awful at that.
Val: I was awful. I was actually interested in the topics — finance, business, accounting, all those things were interesting. I couldn’t sit through biology, but even the things I was interested in, I had no time to study. So I’d bomb the tests. My GPA was horrible. I just didn’t prepare for tests. I slept through half the class just catching up on sleep because I was going to sleep at 4 a.m.
Sam: Don’t you still do that? Don’t you go to sleep at four and get up at noon?
Val: Yeah, I average four or five a.m. If I go to sleep — I think yesterday I went to bed at four, three, and I woke up at eleven. I try to get seven hours of sleep. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I try.
Sam: Do you recognize that you’re a weirdo?
Val: I’m used to it. I know I’m — I do everything in reverse. My wife keeps telling me, “You do everything backwards.” You’re studying finance but you’re not doing well because you’re running these businesses.
Sam: Well I’m in school just because I have a Jewish mother and she wanted me to go — you have to be in school, you have to be in college. But did they know that you’re making more money than them?
Val: I think she kind of knew. I’m not sure if she knew exactly what I was making.
Val: It was strange. I was pulling up to my university — I went to Baruch, in New York City, Zicklin School of Business — and I would pull up in a drop-top Lexus, a $70,000 car, and I was 18, 19. I don’t think I had even started the paid search at that point — this was just the earlier business crushing it.
Moving On: Music Distribution and Ringtone Matcher [00:17:30]
Sam: So a few years in, your tweet said it made over 30 million in profit. Things are going really well. You pay a crazy amount of taxes, and you decide to move to the suburbs a little outside of New York and buy a cheap house in cash. Things are going well — but you said, “I’m a little bored with this, I don’t really want to go further in this racket. I want to try something new.” What was the next business?
Val: So actually I launched two businesses around the same time. The first one — let’s call it the music content distribution company.
Sam: Oh right, the ringtone thing.
Val: Right. So I didn’t actually own lyric sites. What I did is I built a service called Ringtone Matcher. What I realized was there was demand for ringtones, and there was all this music-related traffic — especially on lyric sites. And I noticed that the traffic was very international — like 70% of a music site or lyric site was non-US.
Some of the ringtone advertisers were doing okay, but they could only accept US customers, only Verizon customers, only T-Mobile customers. So I built Ringtone Matcher, which basically integrated multiple countries into one system.
If you had a music site, you could drive those users to Ringtone Matcher, and it would figure out — based on geo, based on carrier, since it’s carrier billing — what country you’re in and match you to a ringtone service that’s compatible with your carrier. Then the third thing it checks: is that content available? If you’re clicking “get the Toxic by Britney Spears ringtone,” I need to make sure that song is in their catalog. Some ringtone providers had Warner Music, some had EMI — there were four major music companies at the time, and not every provider had all of them. So I’d take all that data and put it into one simple link.
Sam: How big did that get?
Val: Ringtone Matcher was in front of half a billion people a month.
Sam: Half a billion?
Val: Yeah, it was everywhere. Not just lyric sites — CBS Radio, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio, Last.fm, pretty much every major music site. I even remember talking to what is now TikTok, when they were still called Musical.ly. Talking to WhatsApp in the early days when they were just two guys. Anytime somebody mentioned music or a song, I wanted Ringtone Matcher to show up.
Sam: But when you say “we” — was this still just you?
Val: That company I started by myself again — it was a one-man show. At some point there were five guys who were pretty good at dealing with ringtone providers, and I felt I needed help on that front. So I merged those guys in. They had a third of the company, I had two thirds.
Sam: How big was it when it was just you?
Val: Just going nuts. I think the year we merged it was $10 million — just again, 10 million in profit with just me.
Why Val Finds Unusual Opportunities [00:27:00]
Sam: Do you know why you find this weird stuff? And why don’t you hire people? Two different questions, but how on earth do you find this type of stuff?
Val: You know, it’s funny. I see how organized you are — you make your goals, you lay everything out on paper, you’re very organized, you ask people for feedback. I’m totally the opposite of that. I just kind of go with where — I like to test things. I’m very curious. And I can be very, very focused, but if I get distracted, I get very easily distracted. It can be a curse, but a lot of times it’s a blessing. I come across these interesting things and my curiosity just takes it further.
The way I actually came across this thing was — at a certain point I felt that Google was just too dominant a part of my business, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to rely on any one thing. So I started looking outside of paid search for supply, and I came across these music sites. I started testing Rhapsody on them because I had such a good deal with Rhapsody — I tried marketing outside of search. I did okay. And I started building relationships with the music sites. Then I tested a ringtone service and it just crushed — it wasn’t even close. I did three times better, and I was like, “Wow, this did three times better than Rhapsody.”
And that ringtone provider was only covering one or two music labels and two out of four carriers. I was like, “Hold on — if it’s already doing three times as well, what happens if I start integrating everything globally?” That’s how Ringtone Matcher came about.
Sam: What was your first version like? Junk?
Val: It was a kludgy script. I had a guy who was kind of freelancing for me — he’s actually the CTO of one of my companies now. He was 15 or 16 years old. I didn’t want to tell him the idea, so I’d say, “Hey, how do you script this, how do you script that?” And I ended up scripting it myself. It was literally just a bunch of if-then statements on ASP — we were running Windows servers — doing a bunch of redirects based on certain parameters.
Testing Mindset vs. Analysis Paralysis [00:33:00]
Sam: Every time I’ve hung out with you — the reason I like hanging out with you and Joe, I consider Joe one of my best friends — you and Joe have the same attitude. He’s a little more laid back, I’ve never seen him lose his temper, he is very calm. But you have that too. You have this — I don’t know if the right word is chutzpah — but it’s almost like things just don’t rattle you.
I need to hear about the jewelry business, but I want to ask this first: there’s a bunch of unique things about you, and one is that thing where you like, “Oh yeah, I’ll just go a little further and we’ll see what happens, and if it sucks I’ll bail.” You have this casual attitude — whereas if I was doing what you were doing and I started seeing those results, I’d be like, “Is this illegal? Am I going to jail? What is going on?”
Val: Look, I see that all the time. I feel like people tend to overthink things — analysis paralysis. The reason I think a lot of people like me are successful is: while someone’s busy perfecting one thing — which still has a 60% failure rate — I’d rather test 10 things in that same time period. I’ll have a better chance of hitting it out of the park with one of those 10 things, maybe more than one.
Sam: Yeah, throw stuff against the wall, see what sticks. But when most people throw stuff against the wall it’s a half-ass attempt. When you throw stuff against the wall, you spend money. You said that when you didn’t have much, you spent like $6,000 or $7,000 on ads to see if something could work. Most people are like, “I’d lose a couple hundred bucks, I don’t want to do that.”
Val: That was an accident, actually. That was in that thread — there were no budget caps back then. I turned it on, went to sleep, and woke up to a $6,000 spend.
Sam: But you still did it. Your attempts are actually good attempts. When I was going to all these music sites — you know how I’d get their attention? I’d look up their traffic on Alexa, know these guys were outside the country, and I would literally email them: “Hey, I’ll give you $100,000 — I’ll give you $50,000, $20,000 — prepaid, I’ll wire it tomorrow. Just test my Ringtone Matcher link for seven days. If you don’t like it, if it doesn’t make you enough money, take the link off, we never talk again. If you like how much it generates, sign a contract.”
Val: And everybody signed a contract. Because those two text links were generating five times — there were sites making $100,000 a month, and I would pay them $400,000 on top of that.
Sam: How many people actually took you up on it?
Val: Everybody. And then you know what they’d say? “I’ll put yours on. But I don’t need you to do it upfront — I’ll give it a try just because you’re serious.” My success rate on that email was just — I mean, who is going to turn down money upfront?
The Jewelry Business and Building a Real Company [00:40:00]
Sam: How did you get into the jewelry business to start with?
Val: After I sold those two music-related companies, I took like three years off. I thought I retired. But it was anything but — my curiosity just started taking me in all different directions. I was on all these boards, investing in a bunch of things. And I realized after those three years that I needed to build something again.
So I started looking at what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to fix or disrupt a fragmented space. I didn’t want to go after corporate America — I wanted to go after more independent operators. When I say “mom and pops,” I mean businesses like car dealerships that do tens of millions of dollars — they’re not tiny, but they’re independent. I wanted something along those lines.
I had some investments in the jewelry space, some family in the jewelry space — it’s a pretty tight-knit community. I actually worked as a teenager in a jewelry store, every weekend. I sat on a bench with a blowtorch at like 15 years old because my cousin taught me. It was my aunt and uncle’s business — they had a couple of jewelry stores and taught me how to fix jewelry. I knew the business from the retailer’s perspective.
It always seemed like a very weird way to do business — I always questioned everything about it. Jewelry is a $300 billion dollar industry globally, and the independents are actually a bigger part of fine jewelry than the major chains. I knew that if I could build distribution, integrate into these retailers, and help them grow — with my expertise in data, marketing, digital — there’d be a lot of power there.
Sam: How much did you invest to start it?
Val: To start it — I think a couple million.
Sam: You put in $2 million in the beginning?
Val: Yeah. And I’ve put in way more since then — at this point I’ve put in eight figures into this business.
Sam: How big is this going to be?
Val: I think it’s a multi-billion dollar company in the future.
Sam: For real? A multi-billion dollar company — like in market cap, to sell?
Val: I believe that. I don’t know if there’s anybody big enough to buy this company. This time around it’s not just Val — we have a lot of employees. If we can do what we need to do and really help all these retailers step up their game, I don’t think there’s really a company in that space big enough to acquire us.
Sam: Are you the CEO? Is that smart? You get up at 11 a.m. and go to bed at four — how are you the CEO of a company that could be worth a billion dollars?
Val: Look, we have a great team that is able to execute.
Sam: How many people?
Val: It’s hard to say — we’re pretty global. Our offices outside the US aren’t all employees. If I count factories, tech teams, marketing teams — we’re probably talking about 70 people.
Sam: And you’re running the day-to-day?
Val: Oh hell yes. 95% of my time goes into this business.
Sam: So you’re talking to employees, running all-hands meetings?
Val: I’m not big on meetings, to be honest. But I’m very accessible to all my team — everybody has access to me. I come into the office in the city. We were actually in the office in June 2020 — it was a ghost town in the city, and we had to figure out how to operate because it’s not just a digital ad business you can run from home. We had to have people in the office. We got cars to pull people in.
Real Estate Projects [00:48:00]
Sam: I invested in one of your properties. We bought a six-plex in Greenpoint — well, we essentially bought land, a house that’s going to be knocked down, and we’re going to do a ground-up construction condo building.
Val: Yeah, yeah.
Sam: But it’s way bigger than just that one project. I think you’ve bought like $100 million worth of real estate, right?
Val: No, I haven’t bought $100 million. We have six projects. A couple are already completed, one is just about to be completed — the third one is about to go on market. Then we have three other projects that are getting bigger and bigger. The combined sale value of those projects would be approaching $100 million.
Where Are the Digital Opportunities Today? [00:51:00]
Sam: What are you tinkering on now? What excites you? And someone asked a good question — what’s the equivalent of ringtones today? You’re kind of like this digital cowboy, just one guy in the wild west doing this stuff with no rules. Where are the digital pirates at right now?
Val: It has to be TikTok. You look for those spaces that haven’t been touched yet. What can be marketed and how do you get that kind of scale?
What I’ve seen over my career is that the windows of opportunity — those white spaces — are becoming shorter and shorter. Paid search probably lasted a good six years. Display advertising lasted a little less. Social media — the arbitrage window — probably lasted two or three years at best. Now you’ve got Instagram Reels, you’ve got TikTok — those are probably one-year windows of opportunity. If you can catch that lightning and build on it, you’ve got something.
And it’s all rooted in distribution. How do you get distribution quickly?
Sam: You think the TikTok window is still open?
Val: If you have a knack for understanding virality and content, then you have your own distribution. If you don’t have that knack, you’ve got to figure out how to work with people who do have that access. If there’s one company that could work with all the Sam Parrs — all the podcasters — how much is that worth? We’re using a platform right now that’s doing exactly that. They’re focusing on guys like you who have all this access, but they’re not selling anything directly — they’re just selling you a platform. If someone could figure out how to sell a product across a number of podcasts, that’s worth a lot. You could move a lot of product.
And it doesn’t have to be podcasts. What about all the TikTokers doing those dances? I know for one company they scaled to like $80 million in sales a few years ago — I’m not going to mention the name — just on the back of YouTube influencers.
Sam: What was the product?
Val: It was cosmetics. Makeup, lotion. The numbers were just insane. And it wasn’t just big influencers — even thousands of mediocre influencers or smaller ones drove it. Latch onto something that’s big, especially if you can latch onto the long tail of it. Because not a lot of people look at the long tail part of these businesses.
What Makes Val Different: Immigrant Resourcefulness [00:56:00]
Sam: So one thing I wonder — Val talks about testing 10 different things before the other guy can put his pants on. You’re building your perfect thing that takes six months before you even get to market. I’m going to ask Sam first, then I’ll ask you, Val — what do you think it is about Val? What is it about his skill set or personality that allows him to do that much testing where other people can’t figure it out?
Sam: I think this is a common thread I’ve seen. My buddy Joe is just like this. There’s a thing — I find it particularly among immigrants or children of immigrants. Maybe because they’ve experienced some type of hardship. It’s like, “Dude, I’ve experienced some crazy stuff, or my family has experienced crazy stuff. I have zero fear of looking like a fool.” If the worst that’s going to happen is I look stupid or lose a tiny amount of money, I’m okay with that. I don’t have any fear about that. That’s the trend I’ve noticed.
Val: Look, I think that’s a huge factor. One of the things I think about now is raising kids. How do I make sure they carry some of that? Because they’re not going to grow up the same way I grew up — they have resources and access I didn’t have. What I realized is: the power is in resourcefulness. I was able to do a lot — whether it’s money or whatever excites you — with very little. But that was because I had no choice. We weren’t poor, but my parents couldn’t afford a computer for me for the first six years of my life here.
So I think: how do I recreate that? You can’t fully recreate it for your kids. But I’ve decided I’m not going to give my kids everything on a silver platter.
You talked about my son — his DNA is very much like mine. He’s already way ahead of where I was because he has all the tools. But I didn’t buy him a computer. I made him save up the money — I don’t care how he does it, birthdays, work, whatever. During that time he researched all the parts himself. I think at seven or eight he built a computer from scratch by himself. I didn’t even help him.
Sam: That’s crazy.
Val: He’s now built two computers. And he taught himself how to code. So I systematically suppress resources for my kids — not like I don’t feed them, they live in a nice neighborhood and they’re doing just fine. But I make sure they’re not given all the resources, because that’s how you naturally learn to become resourceful.
Sam: What do you think it is?
Val: Fundamentally it’s about doing more with less. But it has to start from day one.
Driven by Winning, Not Money [01:00:00]
Sam: Are you driven by money?
Val: Yes and no. Yes, because it’s kind of like a score. But I don’t see money — it’s like a number in a bank account. It’s not like back in the day when you could see it. It’s not like Scrooge McDuck — I would watch that as a kid and think, “I want to be that guy one day.” But no, I think what really drives me is winning.
And I think there’s a bit of a feeling in me of — I’m one step from losing it all.
Sam: You still feel that way?
Val: I feel like it’s still possible. I think it’s an immigrant thing.
Sam: By the way, I feel exactly the same way. I was in bed last night telling my wife, “I need to go to a therapist or something, I’m freaking out, we’re going to lose everything, this is all going away.” I feel exactly the same.
Val: For a long time I had a plan for where I’d go if I was homeless.
Sam: I still have a plan like that too. Though in a weird way doesn’t that kind of excite you? Not the homeless part — but the idea that you’d get to figure it out from scratch again.
Val: Yeah, it does kind of excite me. When you have nothing, it’s kind of fun to play because it’s just easier to bet — sometimes you can’t bet as much, but it’s kind of exciting to be like a hood rat with nothing. But I also have the anxiety of losing everything. I have so many spreadsheets that map out: when the money gets to this number, I’ve got to go panic, get a job, start Ubering. I have a plan for that.
Why Val Went Public for the First Time [01:04:00]
Sam: The reason I had you on — and the reason I wanted to show people this guy — is that he’s hard to explain, but I wanted people to understand a truly unique and original thinker. Do you get what I’m saying? You can see that in the way you’ve attacked a completely different set of problems than anyone else I’ve ever talked to. I’ve never talked to someone who’s like, “Yeah, I tackled ringtones and then ad networks and then peer-to-peer lending and then the jewelry business.” I think that kind of belies how your mind functions differently.
Do you feel that way? Do you feel like you have a unique perspective? Have you met anyone who looks at the world the way you do? And you’re saying you didn’t actually realize it was weird until I talked about you on the podcast like half a year ago — which is weird, because how old are you, 38, 39?
Val: 38. And yeah, I didn’t see myself that way until you did that episode — the one you didn’t tell me about.
Sam: Yeah — by the way, I told Joe, “Dude, I’d never do that,” and I almost always ask for permission before I talk about someone. But I just got too excited and forgot. I have a story but I’ll tell you after.
Val: To me, when you said, “Oh this guy goes from this industry to that industry, he’s jumping all over the place and he’s successful doing it” — I was like, “Huh. I never thought of myself that way.” I keep jumping different categories. Again, that curiosity just kicks in and I go after it instead of just thinking “what if.” Until now I really hadn’t realized how odd that is.
Sam: I just think there are a bunch of unique things about you and it’s so cool. When I say “weird” and “odd,” that’s a really good compliment.
Val: I know you well enough now to know that’s a compliment.
Val: The funny story — before you did that, I was pretty under the radar. You can find stuff if you really look, but nobody had put it out there. Then Joe tells me you’re doing a podcast. I didn’t tell my wife. The podcast comes out and I’m like, “Hey, Sarah, this guy did a podcast on me.” She’s like, “Who cares about a podcast? You know, a couple hundred people are going to listen.” I’m like, “Apparently this guy has like a million people listening.” She goes, “Oh great. Did he ask you permission?” I’m like, “Not really.”
So the thing comes out, we’re listening to it, and you keep saying “Val, Val, Val” — you never say my last name. And then you and Shaan go off on this tangent about the red pill, blue pill thing. So we thought the Val part was over. She’s like, “Okay, it wasn’t so bad, he never mentioned your last name — how is anyone going to figure out who’s Val?” And then after you went off on that tangent, you’re like, “Oh by the way, I forgot to mention his full name — let me spell it out for you.” And you literally spelled my last name.
She’s like, “I’m going to kill this guy.”
Sam: She was mad.
Val: She was. She’s very nice but — it’s one thing when the information is out there for someone who’s looking for it. It’s another when it’s on full blast being discovered by new audiences. So that was all new to me.
Sam: I felt like an ass when that happened. I’m normally always good about that. If I’m out with friends and people are talking about stuff, I make sure to ask, “Is this private or not?” But you’re a nice guy, so I’ll let it slide.
Val: You blew up my spot but yeah, I remember that day. When Shaan and I are recording I sometimes forget it’s a podcast — it’s just like friends talking. And I’ll be like, “Oh my god, I just said that on air?”
Closing and What’s Next [01:10:00]
Sam: Dude, this was awesome.
Ben: This is pretty badass. This has me fired up.
Sam: You know you’re doing your Airbnbs this year, Sam — that’s kind of your thing though, right? Before this podcast he said, “Don’t do it.”
Sam: Yeah, I think I’m going to do it anyway. I told him these two ideas I might work on and he basically said — I was like, “Should I go hard on content, should I work on this job board idea, or this Airbnb thing?” He says, “Do content.” And that’s the one I don’t want to do.
Val: I didn’t actually say don’t do it. I literally sent you my response like three minutes before the podcast so you didn’t read the whole thing. I think the land thing is just going to bog you down right now. I think it’s something you could do in the future, but not now.
Sam: I do feel inspired after hearing from Val. Like, I need to be trying more things. Taking more swings, putting more experiments out there to see what lands.
Val: Look at that — throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks. What’s the worst that happens? But when most people throw stuff at the wall, it’s a half-ass attempt. When you throw stuff at the wall, you spend money or you commit to it.
That was an accident, by the way — that budget thing. There were no budget caps back then. I turned it on, went to sleep, woke up to a $6,000 spend. But you still did it. When I was going to all these music sites, you know how I got their attention? I would email them and say, “I’ll give you $100,000 — $50,000, $20,000, prepaid, I’ll wire it tomorrow. Just test my Ringtone Matcher link for seven days. If you don’t like it, we never talk again. If you do, sign a contract.”
And everybody signed. Because those two text links were generating like five times what they were making before.
Sam: How many people actually took you up on the offer?
Val: Everybody. And you know what they’d say? “I don’t even need you to do it upfront. I’ll try it just because you’re serious.”
Sam: You know, you told a story on Pom’s podcast — you like, you have this high integrity thing. I think there was a guy you owed a lot of money to, and he changed his address or something. You had a bill you had to pay and you couldn’t find them. And you were like, “Dude, I can’t find you — I owe you $60,000.” And you held onto that money for a long time, seeking them out everywhere.
Val: Yeah. We had so many international people in the music business. When the Great Recession hit, they were in all these countries where their banks were located in weird areas — countries like Cyprus. They’d literally tell us, “Stop wiring us money, we don’t trust the bank we’re working with, I need to get a new account.” We held their money for — they told us to hold it. We had millions in our bank account that didn’t belong to us. These sites basically told me I was kind of like their bank for a while because they didn’t want to get paid and they didn’t trust the banks.
It was phenomenal to me. They trusted me with their money for — I think in some cases up to a year — because there was nowhere to send it.
Sam: That’s crazy. Dude, this was a good conversation. I’m happy you came on.
Val: Listen, I love your podcast. It’s very layman’s terms — and it takes a lot of intellect, in my opinion, to dumb things down.
Sam: Thank you, I appreciate that.
Val: A lot of my friends are ESL — English as a second language. I’m always amazed: can you imagine coming to another country, not speaking the language at 12, 13, 14, 15, and then just crushing it? I have a bunch of friends like that and I’m just amazed. And you’re one of those people — whether you’re ESL or not, you know how to put your thoughts together in a way that makes it interesting and understandable. And you know, you helped me write some of my stuff. That’s power.
Sam: Well, thank you. I appreciate you coming on. This was badass.
Val: I appreciate you guys having me on.