Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i used to go to an atm machine and just put my card in and say print balance and just look at it and he’s like i would just do that like every day i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to [Music] so we have an interview with microacquire uh they well we talk all about it then and and it’s within it’s with andrew he um he sells startups basically on microacquire it’s a marketplace for selling startups but we’re gonna talk about some ideas first and catch up i uh i’ve hired someone jake mcdonald to do research i just sent you you of course hired like a guy who looks like an a football player uh and yet he’s your like business researcher guy so here’s the here’s the secret which is uh sean has had a little bit of help with research for a very long time and he uh his name’s ben we’ve talked about ben ben’s amazing and i got jealous and i said i want to ben so i went and hired a ben and his name is jake i had been or had jake call ben to get all of his research tips and ben did a really good job and i just sent to you sean my notion doc with all jake’s stuff it’s good right you see how we organize very thorough yeah he’s he’s wonderful so uh now we’re gonna we’re gonna be a little bit more well researched although he doesn’t start technically kind of till next week this is kind of we’re still kind of getting used to things trainer wheels yeah all right uh cool yeah so basically we’re gonna do a couple ideas now and then andrew’s gonna join andrew is the founder of microacquire which is zillow for buying and selling companies so we bought one company on there uh i bought a basically we bought it me and andrew bought a business for for this kid uh who’s like a college senior we bought we bought him a business to go run um just as an experiment and that was kind of the first time i used it so i think it’s pretty cool he’s to tell us about like his previous company which he sold for tens of millions uh how that deal came about how he structured it um what he did with the money so we were like all right if you’re gonna come on you gotta tell us what he did what’d you do with the money so he tells us about what he bought how he invests money his kind of like very boring investment strategy and why he chooses to do that um so yeah we’re going to talk about that with andrew but first a couple ideas all right so i want to talk about this tweet i saw and it’s a tweet from doug ludlow you know who that is yeah main street yeah ceo of main street founder main street and so he tweeted this thing out he goes isn’t it crazy that bubba gump shrimp the restaurant chain does like 200 300 million dollars a year in revenue um when forrest gump the movie that the brand is based on did like 700 million like lifetime box office so he’s like the restaurant is that real restaurant has produced more money than forrest gump ever did and i was like that’s interesting he’s like why aren’t there more of these and so i kind of like this idea which is basically you take uh ip intellectual property a brand from tv or movies and you license it so they did this for um for public shrimp company and so what i went and kind of looked up the backstory of this and the backstory is pretty simple it’s like um the movie happens and paramount is actually the one who did this i thought i just kind of figured that some entrepreneur went to them and got the brand actually was the opposite so from what i could read or what i found paramount pictures goes and approaches this restaurant group called rusty pelican and they’re like hey we want you to create a brand based off the brand of the movie because it’s like a kind of a key plot point in the movie or whatever it’s a key moment in the movie and um and so some crazy things about this so first they do that uh it it generates you know 200 million plus a year it gets it got bought by the fertittas i think um and their their restaurant group but it um this is also where you know the actor chris pratt of course he was a waiter at bubblegum shrimp company and this is how he got discovered he was waiting on a table for this producer this is this director producer lady and he’s like oh i love that thing you made and she’s like oh that’s great blah blah blah and they’re talking and she’s like you know what like you know you want to be an actor he’s like yeah that’s what i’m just waiting tables i want to be an actor and that’s how he got his break in the movie industry also how did you learn about this uh just a hell of a lot of googling my friend we don’t all have buff researchers like jake so some of us gotta get our hands dirty and go do some good so let me tell you something real quick so do you know so you said the fertittas you met you were referring to the fertitta brothers right so there’s two brothers is the cousin yeah so i think he’s like a distance cousin so i was gonna i was gonna correct you but you you know the story but tillman so there’s this guy named tillman fertitta so a lot of people probably don’t know this if you live in houston if you live in texas you certainly know who this guy is he’s a pretty um he’s a pretty polarizing figure i think a lot of people who know him think he’s a huge [ ] he probably he probably is an [ ] i mean he’s pretty cut through he owns uh this thing called landry’s landry’s i i’ve never even been to one i think that’s its own restaurant yeah it’s like a steak caps i think but then he also owns bubba gump shrimps he owns uh uh i believe like jay alexander’s ruth chris steakhouse like a ton of like 30 to 50 ahead dinner places so like not particularly fancy but upscale really upsell uh upscale franchises and he owns about 600 of them but here’s a fun fact i am pretty positive uh that landry’s is the largest company in america that is owned by one person uh tillman fertitta owns 100 of the business he owns literally every single share uh right around the beginning of covid they were doing something like 5 billion in revenue and like 1.5 to 2 billion in ebitda that’s nuts by the way he owns the houston rockets now so that’s why that’s how he got a lot more famous was because when you buy the rockets people want to know who the heck this guy is um so that’s kind of crazy okay so so so back to kind of this idea real quick so a licensing ip so doug was basically saying he’s like why don’t more people do this and he’s like why isn’t there a paper company that’s like the dunder mifflin paper company or and you know and so there’s a couple of these so i went through and i kind of came up with a list of brands that i think could translate here’s here’s my list and then you tell me what you would do if you were approaching this or if you think this is a bad idea you can tell me i don’t think it’s a bad idea that’s for sure here’s my top five top five brands that i think you could license a creative company so dunder mifflin paper company yes the office is one of the most popular shows of all time it has like crazy reruns on netflix uh and there’s no signature paper companies what what is another paper company i have no idea so i think you’d stand out all right duff beer from the simpsons i think duff beer could be a real beer maybe is a real beer somewhere uh but i think duff beer is a potential one you don’t have too many more uh you don’t have another decade or two left with that one though yeah yeah that one’s sort of aging out uh wonka bars so anything with willy wonka i think you could i think willy wonka painted this picture of like wonderment around the factory and this innovative stuff so i think you could take that brand and create cool novel like chocolates and candies out of it um another one is if you’re an ad agency could you go and actually like franchise or license the mad men uh brand for for that so basically sterling cooper draper or whatever it is jay for price say the name of their agency um you know why not why not use that if you’re gonna start an ad agency versus anything else um and then i started thinking about all right where else would i go for this and i think the opportunity here is like depending on what age bracket you go for but i think the 90s had a bunch of uh brands that were famous in the 90s for our age group if you’re basically 30 or 40 right now there’s a bunch of brands that have like zero kind of like equity value anymore but the brand names you grew up with it so you just so it still means something to you and so we’ve talked about like warheads or jinko jeans yeah like a bunch of these brands and i think the move here i think one interesting play here would be you don’t actually have to create the product you could create so so another idea is to create the nostalgia licensing company and all it does is it goes and buys options on these brands and then it pedals them to existing makers of products and it just says hey why don’t you use we have this portfolio of nostalgic brands you could choose one of these that fits kind of your product category or whatever and you could just be the middleman basically you buy up buy cheap options on these brands and then you sell them at a kind of a retail price if you can and even if you get one or two hits i think the business could be quite profitable so that’s my random ass licensing idea i went to urban outfitters the other day because there’s one near my house and they had they had you know urban alfred is pretty shitty but they have like tons of old t-shirts and they it’s like their their whole genre of t-shirts was things that 30 year olds saw their dads wear and and it was like t-shirts ahead like the old coors light logo the old budweiser logo i forget some of the other logos but like i pretty remember blind skateboards or world industry skateboards or independent skateboarding it kind of like transcended a popular culture i thought but they had a lot of those things um but anyway i’m on board that’s amazing that bubblegum trip does that much revenue who and it’s it’s still owned by landry’s i guess but dude it’s a horrible restaurant i’m amazed at that it’s like it’s like an applebee’s yeah well dude one of my first investors of any business i ever had was this guy who owned 12 applebee’s and this guy was like you know i went to college at duke in durham which is a very pretty small city and this guy was like one of the wealthiest guys in durham and how he owned like i don’t know 10 to 20 applebee’s and i was like oh you could just do that and he’s like yeah here’s how it works i was like don’t even tell me i i i don’t i want to be more successful than you but i don’t care i’m less successful than you is what i mean i just don’t want to own 20 applebee’s like that can’t be the end game here i had a friend who worked on their ad agency or his ad agency won that account applebee’s and they gave him a thousand dollars to go spend at applebee’s and told him like to bring a friend and order just a ton of stuff so you understand it and we ordered everything and i’m a slob i eat anything and i’ll eat a ton of food like six months of food yeah i’m an animal and he ordered we ordered so much stuff and i eat everything and anything and i got it in front of my plate and i was like you guys just microwaved the steak like this is a microwave it was [ ] awful yeah uh what do you want to talk about i just had one cool thing which was i don’t know if you saw i tweeted this out yesterday but there’s a video of jeff bezo so i i thought this billionaire going to space it’s like elon’s doing it and then you know uh jeff bezos starts blue origin and richard branson has virgin galactic and it’s sort of like oh okay cool like this is you know golf for you know old white billionaires basically it’s like this is something that they’re playing it’s just a dick measuring contest is what it is yeah it’s a thing-swinging thing and so and so i was like all right well as i kind of wrote it off i was like you know i think elon was in it you know sort of first and genuinely for for a bunch of reasons um that seemed real to me but you know definitely there’s an ego component to it but what was cool was i found this interview with jeff bezos from to the year 2000 so 21 years ago and amazon at this time was like six years old so it was definitely a thing but it wasn’t amazon like today it was like you know it was a public company but it wasn’t uh it wasn’t it wasn’t a juggernaut like it is now and i think they probably only had a couple of categories at that point there wasn’t like prime and doing video and doing all this other stuff and he’s sitting down and they’re like you know so so you know what what would you want to do you know what would you do if you could do anything he’s like if i could do yeah he’s like you know i would love to explore space like space he’s like yeah i would love to just explore space and you know he’s like you know the space and they’re like well maybe you could do it someday yeah you’re a smart guy but if you put your mind to it he’s like well it’s hard it’s really hard like but i think you could do it and he’s like yeah you know it’s harder than you think like we haven’t made much progress for space and like in the last 20 years you know but the technology is like he’s like maybe 20 years from now the technology will be there or maybe we could we could do it and then 21 years sort of to the day he’s in a spaceship going you know in his own rocket company going into outer space uh so i thought that was pretty cool it made me give i had a different level of respect for it because it’s more like somebody having a vision and a dream 20 years ago when it wasn’t cool to talk about it or say it and then actualizing it not just sort of like copycatting elon yeah so look i think that it is like a like a like a measuring contest a pissing match but i’m all and at first you’re like well that’s lame these guys are so rich why don’t you do something good but my opinion is this is good it’s just so long-term thinking that it’s actually hard to see but i do think that we’re going to get good out of this and my opinion is when when rich people want to give money and they want [ ] named after them like a building like a hospital wing or they want to go to space and make a big deal out of it and then like maybe in 10 years we can capture some of that value of like all right they kind of paved the way at first a lot of people are like well that’s [ ] you know [ ] these guys but i’m like who gives a [ ] that’s such that’s the that’s the most fair trade on earth we named this building after you and you give us all this money hey i wrote your name on this yeah great thanks for the 100 mil yes it’s like dude let them have that who cares if they have an ego like you get the money so like in my opinion uh we should accept it as as good although for sure bezos said something kind of stupid the other day although i do like that he said it because it was kind of funny but yeah but at the same time i’m like oh you are asking for it so adam that’s not a great move so bezos flew up to space with his brother and this older woman i forget her name and a young kid i believe there was supposed to be another person on there but he had a scheduling conflict uh i swear to god that guy he had there’s supposed to be someone else and there was a scheduling conflict so the guy couldn’t make it and they go to space and they’re up there throwing skittles at each other’s face did you see that they’re like doing flips bezos he’s like he goes hey guys i brought skittles and he brings out a packet of skittles and he throws a skittle out one person he goes and the guy catches it in your mouth and you go and jeff goes let me try and jeff hands the kid the bag of skittles he goes throw one in my mouth and i thought that was kind of funny amazing amazing for skittles i’m surprised he’s not like hey i have amazon sugar circles yeah you know i’m throwing at each other you know like our own house brand so i thought that was kind of cute funny and he lands and he says i just want to thank all of you workers at amazon as well as all you customers because you paid for this and he’s he said that and i was like that’s not the best way to phrase that then this morning i i shared this with you i saw a business insider article which i think is i kind of love them but at the same time i i i can’t stand some of those things they write but uh jeff bezos was actually an early investor in business insider and the business insider article uh was written in such a way that it’s uh it was complaining about it and it said uh um bezos’s flight to space was too cramped and far too short uh oh my god and i was like oh my god you’re completely like okay a couple thoughts on what you just said that was amazing first of all the couple thoughts on what you just said i hate the haters uh okay first of all dan just looked it up the person who had the scheduling conflict paid 28 million for their seat so that’s kind of insane i think their dad paid for their seat or something look up this story dan tell me what what i’m missing here because wow you know how if you’re gonna hate someone don’t hate the billionaire who built amazon and then reinvested his money into like exploring outer space hate the trust fund kid who paid 28 million for his ticket and then and then no showed because he you know was doing a tick tock dance or something like i don’t know who i don’t know the story behind this but that’s kind of ridiculous the um i’m so tired of people just like hating billionaires randomly i’m team billionaire is what i’m trying to say um you know people are so dumb they’re like why are you wasting money on this do you know when they like do this like when you pay for when you when you fund a space company you’re paying you know that money doesn’t just like go into space and just vanish yeah i think has like 3 000 employees i think when he spends the money it’s going into people’s pockets and so it’s funding jobs it’s funding you know um expert technology development and a lot of great technology we have came because of what nasa did for the space program and so you know one of the silliest things is thinking that the money just somehow gets vacuumed into outer space the second thing is just don’t be that guy it’s not even that i’m team billionaire i’m team not the guy who’s hating on billionaires all the time um this happened actually a second ago clubhouse tweeted out oh like we are open for everybody now there’s no waitlist or something like that we got a new logo and all this stuff and you know i’m i’m obviously not you know the clubhouse cheerleader right so so don’t get me wrong but the very first comment the top comment is uh open for everybody but you don’t even have captions on the live audio so it’s not open for deaf people and i’m like okay like you know fair point that it’s you know it doesn’t have like full accessibility but like that’s the top comment that’s the first comment like this company has to provide you live audio text captioning otherwise like [ ] them like it’s just the hater culture is so annoying to me and it’s so weak and spineless to be just like a you know like the top comment just like oh yeah you did this great thing but uh you know but whatever and i know that’s gonna sound hypocritical because i wrote kind of like a giant thread hating on clubhouse um well it wasn’t exactly hating but that’s gonna be the easy criticism i wasn’t trying to hate i was basically saying what i think some of the like why i think they’re not gonna why it’s not gonna work out the way they think some of the like strategic product problems i just wrapped it in a funny even though you you explicitly said i hope none of this comes true yeah i wanted to win i think it’s cool when things win but like you know i think people are missing the boat um anyways i guess i’m just over hater culture and the easiest way to find it is go read any like response to anything that elon or jeff bezos or these people like people who are doing great things in the world and have won the game uh you know the money game they attract this like really annoying class of haters and i’d actually think you should rephrase it i’m not team billionaire what i’m team is i’m on team people who who set audacious goals and get after it do your thing if that’s your thing do your thing and let me let you do your thing i’m gonna do my thing why why do i need to worry about your thing yeah i have respect for someone who says they’re going to write a book this year and they write a book or someone who says they’re going to lose 50 pounds and they lose 50 pounds yeah i’m on team you set what you’re going to do and you actually achieve it and it just so happens that one of the big outputs of uh business is money and that’s a great way to measure it but when i look at something like uh sean parker before he got involved with facebook and before he actually became wealthy sean parker started napster napster uh a lot of people well and it probably was the case it was unethical and he actually it was a it he did not succeed financially because of it i’ve always admired that because it was an 18 year old who just revolutionized something and totally caused a [ ] storm and got in the thick of it and made something interesting and so i’m in favor of people who do that and oftentimes those are people who build a hundred thousand person company called amazon but yeah so i i would actually say if you are a billionaire hater out there i think you should actually rephrase it i mean there are people who are billionaires that i think are [ ] awful people and i don’t want them to exist but i enjoy seeing people who put their their stamp on the world and i think that’s what we should celebrate not just defaulting to hate uh the way some people do yeah or you know it’s just in general like how somebody else spends their money that’s their that’s their that’s their business right like i think elon right now is living in like a 50 square foot pop-up house or something you’ve seen this he’s living in like a shipping container or something he sold his house he sold his cars he’s living in a goddamn like 50 square foot shipping container and he uses all you know he put his entire like he whatever he made out of zip he put all he poured it all in went into debt to try to make tesla and spacex happen and like when they win you know he gets rewarded for it but even if he decided to do nothing and never work again and just wanted mansions and butlers cool that’s is your money do your thing um decide you know criticizing other people for how they spend their money really all that says i wouldn’t spend my money that way and i think that’s a fair thing to say but i think in most cases the people who are doing this they would do they would spend their money you know in the same ways or worse and for the record if i could if i could trade spots with elon musk if someone said you could trade spots automatically and by the way you’ll still be the same age that you are i wouldn’t i wouldn’t do it yeah not a million years would i trade spots with that guy but i think it’s awesome what he’s doing for him good do your thing uh all right uh here’s something on the opposite end of the spectrum have you ever heard of bill’s lemonade no all right so go to this website just type in bills lemonade this is a little fascinating business a friend kind of tipped me off to this and um i can’t say their name because i don’t know if they want their name said but basically this is this is a uh bill didn’t tell me this is like a business and a box and this business does about five million a year roughly and what they do is they just sell you a kind of like a course and the materials to start your own lemonade stand not for kids but for like adults like you could start this outside of a of a concert venue or a ball game or like at your like local like neighborhood square or whatever and what they do is they basically say hey you can you can here’s a business in a box if you have the ability to grab this bottle and shake it you can become a lemonade stand owner and you can make this much money here’s how it works then you can download their like little brochure which shows the unit economics it’s like every lemonade costs a dollar twenty to make that’s your cost and you’re gonna sell that for you know four dollars five dollars six dollars depending on your location so you’re going to have you know 70 margins on this thing and if you could sell x many per day you’re gonna make this much money and they basically just sell you this business in a box um it’s a very simple business and builds lemonade on the other side they don’t take any royalties or franchise fees they say you’re gonna get our brand we’re going to send or send you the machine the frozen you know lemonade machine the shakers the the cups the everything and uh all you do is you pay for the materials and the like information the course on how to do and i just thought this is kind of a fascinating idea and i feel like you could do this for a whole bunch of other a whole bunch of other like industries as well like whether it’s you know snow cones or ice cream trucks or pest control or something like that like i just feel like there’s a whole bunch of business boxes you could make and if you did that maybe you could even roll these up into one thing which is like hey you don’t want a job you want your own business it’s going to get you a hundred thousand dollars a year and you’ll be able to kind of control the hours you work and you’re going to work for yourself are there people out there who want that trade as a franchisee yes and then basically you just say great would you like the lemonade one would you like to drive an ice cream truck would you like to do this or that and we own all these brands it’s sort of like what 1 800 got junk has where they have the the trucks you can drive the franchise you could buy to be a junk hauler or the house painter or that i forgot they have like three or four of them but i feel like you could create a a mini version of what a hunter got junk with this dude this is awesome i’m looking at this and i’m trying to find um there was a guy when i started my hot dog stand there was a guy in tennessee who was doing this exact same things for hot dog stand so you’d give him five grand and he would send you everything you needed along with the state rules and things like that i need it for hot dog stands bill’s lemonade is better because you could spend i don’t even know what the price is like a couple hundred dollars on here and i’m looking at it now this is pretty badass you uh and these guys have been doing this forever by the way i’m looking at their website i’ve seen this brand a long time ago yeah this is badass and they just have like you can buy all your supplies from there i recognize these cups too by the way right i’ve seen the second thing at baseball games or something but yeah so i think this is kind of interesting another version of this i think you could do is in the services industry and so like here’s like another one which is like let’s say um corporate headshots so i once saw facebook ads and the profile picture i have for this podcast that’s like kind of like when i’m trying to make this like ominous look it’s because i saw a facebook ad of a really high quality headshot and a like a striking headshot and it was like i can make i can take a photo of you that will look like this like you can level up your kind of like game as far as your brand your linkedin your website whatever it is um you know it’s 300 bucks and like i shoot in you know in the bay area and i i’ll come do a shoot for you and you get to pick your photos whatever and i just remember thinking oh that’s really smart like i’ve never seen facebook ads this is somebody i’ve never seen a photographer doing facebook ads for this but i feel like you could do the same thing here where you could basically sell somebody a business in a box that says hey um maybe maybe photos a little too high skill but you could say like any kind of like service and you could say great um you’re going to be the service provider in your local area and i’m going to run the facebook ads countrywide and then whenever there’s a lead for your area i’m just going to dispatch it to you and you just go fulfill it and it’s a business in a box that way great you wear you wear our uniform you know you could do geek squad this way like tech help or something like that um you could do it for the thing we talked about with like setting up home uh uh home office and homes like office video studios what i would do is i would do it for taking so when we when i rented out my place so i took pictures and i put it online and i didn’t get that much love and then i i went online and i found a photographer to come and take pictures for me and i paid her 200 and i got way more uh traction and my wife works at airbnb and i think she has told me i don’t remember if uh who told me of i think it was her that told me that the number one uh difference between a winning airbnb and a losing airbnb is the pictures and yeah i definitely think you could have airbnb photos.com or whatever it is and that and you take 25 for every lead that you send a photographer and you could totally crush it that way right um so i like these little business of the box ideas this is like you know the opposite of the billionaire space race this is the bill’s lemonade making five million dollars selling lemonade kits to people which is just cool there was this company called i cracked icracked was started by a friend of mine aj forsyth it went out either it was acquired but uh i don’t think they even kept the brain anymore and what they did was they actually raised like 20 million or 30 million dollars from addressing horowitz and what icracked did was they were doing this for iphone repair and so i guess to switch a an iphone screen on your phone it takes only like a few hours of training uh anyone could figure it out if i just showed you how to do it and what they would do is they would send you leads and they would take a small cut of the charge so they would charge like 150 to fix your phone and maybe they would take 20 then in order to get leads from them you had to buy iphone parts from them and they would sell you iphone parts and they were doing something like 30 million dollars a year in ecom sales i don’t know how much service revenue they’re making but just selling right screens they’re doing like 20 or 30 million dollars in sales for the service yeah that’s crazy what do you think went wrong with the business uh i think they raised too much money and probably spent way too much money on ads i’m not sure if it was quite venture scale uh they got to like 20 or 30 million in sales and i don’t know if they could figure out how to get bigger than that and they try to launch more stuff and probably lost focus good gotcha but there’s other services out there that are just like them that do like 30 40 50 million dollars a year in revenue also aj my friend who’s the founder he’s a wild man and i think that he had like crazy aspirations of like having a drone come and drop off stuff uh like things like that and i don’t know if that industry is cut out for that but i do think you could have a nice company that makes 30 or 40 in sales oh this episode of visionary’s gone wrong he had a healthy business and wanted to change it to having drones drop off your iphone yeah he was also the one who like paddle boards to work every day or something right like doesn’t he do something crazy like that yeah he had a small little dinghy boat like a little tiny bow i forget what they called it but it was it was it’s super small like uh the small like the size of like a little baby desk but had like an engine on it and he would ride that from where’s the oracle office out there uh like 20 minutes away uh i forget in california but he would write it down the bay to his office uh at south park in soma yeah i think that’s awesome uh sounds like a super interesting guy i love it yeah he’s crazy um all right so do are we gonna get to the episode or the yeah let’s do the interview now all right so you’re gonna hear uh andrew and uh let us know what you think andrew so how do you pronounce your last name gazdecki my friends call me gas gas all right go ahead sean sorry i never had a cool nickname or friends for that matter but um all right so you did that you did your like micro acquire uh funding announcement thing yesterday i’m curious does that do anything so you know we’re seeing this a lot more where it’s like all the famous people on twitter and tech like did something they also promoting something me and sam have been a part of a few of these um what’s the result is that like meaningful or is it just like a feel-good moment or does it do anything for you yeah that’s a good question i would i would say both i mean really you know the goal of that fundraise was i want to build microcore with a starter community and so just having everyone involved in that for feedback and just you know really letting everybody know that this is kind of you know something to watch um so good brand value added and then yeah we saw like 2.5 million impressions on twitter so uh for those listening micro acquire so andrew you’ve had a couple companies you sold one recently or like a couple years ago which was it sounds like a home run for you but micro acquire although you guys have some really big aspirations right now if we had to like kind of dumb it down it’s a newsletter that people pay to get access to and that uh content is interesting startups that you’ve vetted and are now for sale that’s like the current iteration right well it’s not just a newsletter right like i go to the website i don’t get the i don’t even look at the newsletter it’s so it’s a market it’s like a marketplace it’s like if you want to go buy a house you go to zillow you see a bunch of houses for sale i only read the newsletter okay who’s who’s the normal user is it sam or me uh it sounds like you sean so it’s a marketplace so you can sign up create a profile list your startup in you know literally minutes then i have a team on the back end that basically creates like a sim completely free we have a streamlined process that does that and then once you go live for people who don’t know it’s basically a document that outlines basic details that buyers would want to know like revenue how much time are you spending on customer support what is the tech stack who are your competitors um why are you selling asking price market opportunity just basically a pitch deck but more geared towards like i’m selling the business and uh after you go live on micro acquire you thousand uh dollars worth of subscribers so they pay like 299 dollars a year right yeah 290. uh we’re like 675 1000. okay and so the i mean you have this grand vision here but in doing this you i mean there’s a what did you describe it did you say zillow for startups is that how you described it once zillow framing a basically what we wanted to build yeah so what we want to build is we want to build a global and modern m a marketplace um right now the whole m a marketplace is fragmented and we’re looking to consolidate it and really bring in everyone who’s involved in ma transactions like when you get on the larger side you know you have investment bankers you haven’t m a advisor on the lower end you have business brokers um even just people for due diligence or accounting or you know potential wealth management if you’re successful in your acquisition so we’re going to be really building a community of advisors that startups can hire but then on top of that we’re going to build tools to make acquisitions super easy we we bought a for somebody on here so we did a what we called a micro spec which is basically uh your idea andrew you basically tweeted it at me or something like that and i was like this is a great idea what we did was we said hey let’s put up five grand and um into a holding of blank shell company so we put give five grand to an entrepreneur and then we’ll find them a business to buy on microacquire we’ll go vet 50 deals 100 deals and we’ll go find a business for them to buy and we’ll go buy a micro business and then other people thought that was such a cool idea that somebody was like oh i’m in for five i’m in for five i’m in f and all of a sudden we had a hundred grand i think the the total amount was 85 to 100 grand that we ended up raising from random people on twitter uh to help this entrepreneur daniel buy his first business and said like he was going gonna go get a job and then it’s like okay instead you can um you can buy this shopify app that’s producing revenue that’s profitable today and uh and let’s go go buy this thing and so that’s what we ended up doing which i think is pretty cool and that experiment is uh is still running so the transaction closed he’s figuring out ways to grow it he’s sending his little like investor updates it’s awesome and i feel i i called it at the time i said this is like when you go to buy like cake mix and it’s like just add water this is a like just add hustle here’s a business it’s here’s the code’s already written the business already running the revenue’s already there and all you need to do is grow it and you just need to add that hustle in to to grow this thing yeah and we did we actually did one with the hustle and we gave and we did the same thing i don’t remember who came first but we did the same thing and the guy who won it is a dentist here in new york and he’s offering to give me free braces as a thank you do you need racism yeah i’m still working with him on uh finding a business he’s um he’s being pretty picky but uh we’ll get we’ll get something good but um yeah he’s good to be picky he was like you want to come in for a teeth cleaning retainer braces let me know i would love to thank you he’s awesome we’ve been chatting um almost weekly just going over businesses he’s interested in i give my opinion and most of them are like no that one’s like too complex or something um but sean i want to talk about that that deal that we did you have no [ ] idea how much work that was like i literally had to get notarized like 50 emails come through dude we did it legit um like like you know we formed a new inc so a new corporation to purchase and transfer the assets into uh we you know created stock agreements for 20 plus investors so this was harder than the fundraise that i i just did by a mile and uh it took like three weeks the legal bill for me was like 15k and i spent like 60 [ ] hours it was totally worth it um dan is amazing i immediately maybe it sounds sounds like it might not be worth it well well here’s the thing is it opened my eyes to a new opportunity for microacquire as well which is there’s all these amazing operators that don’t have capital but again there’s so many businesses on microwave that you know they’re built by builders they aren’t looking to scale the business they’re not familiar with sales and marketing and so we see an opportunity to potentially allow them to raise capital from other investors just like we did with dan like microspac specs are kind of getting a bad name so we might need to rebrand on that um but yeah so like if you’re if you’re like you own an agency and you see a product for two million bucks and you have tens of thousands of customers you can easily sell this product to we allow you to basically present that to other investors inside microwave and this is just like a napkin idea this isn’t like a guaranteed thing but streamlining that whole process that we went through sean like that i think could be a really really interesting opportunity and we’re thinking about that a little bit by the way the the thing you’re describing is like it’s basically what angelus did so angelus was like great we’re a marketplace to connect uh startups and investors and they started by doing that and then they were like okay cool what else can we do well startups need employees so we’ll create a jobs division and then they’re like well some of these entrepreneurs want to be investors but they’re not investors they don’t have the ability to raise capital you know it’s very hard to raise a fund okay we’ll create like rolling funds and we’ll create spvs it will create one-click ways for now you to invest instead of just being an entrepreneur and so they created what’s called a market network which is basically people have heard of a network network’s just a bunch of like let’s say let’s say there’s 10 dots on the screen and they’re connected by like little lines that’s a network and all the dots do their own thing and a market network is where it’s ten dots on a screen and there’s lines connecting all of them but there’s money signs going in between each right so like on facebook you transfer likes to each other you transfer comments to each other messages but on angel angellist when you hire someone for a job you give them money when you invest in somebody you give them money when you uh raise money from it for your rolling fund somebody’s giving you money and so there’s every transaction instead of just being a message is money and so if you’ve never heard this concept before uh it’s a pretty important one and in terms of business go research market networks james courier and the nfx team write a lot about this they’re kind of the only ones i see writing about but i think it’s a pretty important idea and then once you know oh there’s such a thing as a market network then when you see a business that’s structured as a market network you know it’s a good opportunity either to start it or to invest in it that’s why i invested microquire because i was like oh this is a this is a market network great i’ve been looking for market networks to invest in this is a good one um yeah so i just wanted to kind of throw that little theory in if nobody knows that that term and one of the reasons why we wanted you to come on andrew was um i want to hear about the micro acquire story but i want to hear particularly two things in this order the first is i want you to go through some of the coolest startups that you have sold or are selling on the platform some of the insights that you’ve gotten from them and and and things like that and then also what we should talk about at the end is you sold your last company for 20 uh maybe 30 or 40 million dollars i forget the exact amount like a a pretty significant amount and life-changing amount and you you you told me some crazy stuff that you did with the money i would definitely want to talk about that but can we start with that one i want to i want to hear that one so yeah so before micro car you start a company you sell it for ball parkish give me a range uh or rhymes with 30 million how do you describe this let’s just assume i have you know low eight figures i i candidly don’t like to specifically say how much i sold my company for i think it’s a weird flex and it’s hard to do without feeling like you’re bragging so let’s just peg it at low eight figures but um yeah the story there i started a company in college i was 21 it was a no code app builder so it was a sas company uh only raised a hundred thousand dollars for that business ran it for about eight years grew it to over 10 million in recurring revenue employees was over a hundred there’s a lot of moving parts of that um those people overseas yeah so how do you have 100 employees or you weren’t making a lot of profit and you’re underpaying people yeah so it was it was a mixture of both not underpaying people but we probably half the team was in-house so our entire engineering team was probably overseas um but the way it started was again i’m not a technical founder at all i don’t know to write code at all and when i tell people that they they’re kind of like wait what um but i was in chico and there’s no engineers in chico but i just went on upwork i previously had a job board before that that i also sold and that was a seed money for business apps but found just randomly found an engineer in china his name was raymond chester i’m still friends with him today and he was just a badass like he could have been a cto at a silicon valley company and i paid him well treated him well i consider him like a brother and considering i didn’t know how to hire other engineers or spot good engineers i knew how to manage and that’s one tip for people that aren’t technical is you know i always recommend don’t learn how to code learn how to manage engineers properly and so i ended up just hiring all his friends so we ended up having like a house for them and they had like 20 engineers in china and we had engineers uh russia we had one and we had a group we had a qa team in the ukraine um so you’re a big big communist fan i i guess you could say so i mean not not by design but you know we we did not discriminate yeah was your customer service based out of cuba or what no no so customer service was in-house but we did have 24 7 customer service so we had some customer support reps in brazil france um some other some other areas but all right so let’s just fast forward to the good bits so you you build the business and it’s good 10 million in recurring revenue you you decide to sell it why did you decide to sell it and then how did you sell it um so i was so initially i i tried selling it when i was 26 i hired an investment bank and this kind of leads into microwave as well we did you know full road show um ended up getting an offer for 30 million ended up turning turning down that offer we also had an offer from a strategic company one of the you know big do yourself website companies you could probably guess it i was young i felt i still had gas in the tank and so i wanted to push for you know a larger exit after we went through that process i just kept running the business kept growing the business kept staying focused on executing which is the number one way to really sell a business is have a good business so went back to you know executing with my team and then uh just started getting tired that’s the short answer or just you know managing that many people monday comes around it’s like hey can we talk it’s like i get it like you wanna switch jobs like please just you can just email me like i’ll write your reference like i love you like like please i don’t need to hear like you know we’re good or like i’m sick you know it just became so much management and i love you know building businesses and ideation stage the way the transaction went down was uh the private equity firm esw capital had previously reached out to us i think it was like five years ago or something like that like prior to the investment bank and i know this because during due diligence we had to share all the ndas that we had signed and i found them from usw capital i was like oh we’ve met before nice to meet you again you know let’s uh let’s see if we can make this happen they gave me fantastic terms it was an all-cash transaction uh we did a stock purchase so i benefited from qsbs which if you’re looking to sell a business look up qsbs you pay zero federal taxes on up to the first 10 million so i saved i don’t know what i saved i gotta ask my accountant but um i actually didn’t even know about qsb as well if you’re i had qsbs if you’re in california uh it’s uh about 15 so 15 on 10 million you save 1.5 million dollars or it might be even a little bit more but around one and a half million dollars in savings no it’s actually 20. i think it’s more 20. so i saved like 2 million on taxes and i paid 13. well yeah you’re my bad i i’m an idiot i totally i picked the wrong the wrong one i forgive you sean i i’m calling you the wrong name on purpose man because you butchered my name levels to that joke got you back got you back um but anyways um so we structured a really favorable deal for me so we had two million cash on hand which we added on to the purchase price so we had an agreed purchase price and i said i want a stock deal no earn out i’d love for you to buy the cash and the reason for buying the cash is they buy it um basically they just put a 1x multiple on to the purchase price and so typically if you are required you have 2 million cash in the bank account that is dividend back out to shareholders and you’re st you’re taxed at 40 so we got qsbs on that 2 million cash um quick transition in terms of me leaving the business so i was out of the business in 90 days that’s great and what’d you do uh you said you know you bought a house uh what what’s the mindset so you go from basically before that how much money did you have because you were just paying yourself a salary out of the business right like you didn’t sound like you had you were at serious selling tvs it’s not like you had a bunch of money before that you’re running the business you’re probably paying yourself some salary but probably nothing fancy and then all of a sudden you come into a bunch of money so describe that transition and what you did what you did with it yeah so i i was okay before the acquisition i i was buying ethereum at like 20. i remember like the day ethereum came on the coinbase and the etf was coming out like approval denial and i was like bitcoins going down let’s just move it into this new thing called ethereum so i bought a bunch of ethereum i had like let’s just call like you know high six figures so i wasn’t like paying debt you know as soon as we got acquired but right when you go through an acquisition you have a closing date and we had a circle closing date and then all of a sudden this gigantic amount of money just hits your bank account and you’re like what the [ ] did i just do that was my feeling i was actually kind of scared i was like is this legal like did i just sell drugs that like you know some people like think like you just celebrate and you’re like i i made it like yeah so i was like the opposite i was like you know kindly i was like chain smoking like a jewel i was like oh holy [ ] this is insane you know because you know i grew up poor like you know my dad died when i was six i grew up in detroit i moved to san clemente when i was you know like five i grew up knowing like what it’s like to like really struggle for money so going from like that to like an absorbent amount where you know i’m not flying private or anything like that like i’m not like balling like some other people you guys talk to but i’m comfortable like i was seth like i can literally buy a house cash i could you know put money into something really boring and just you know watch it grow over time so it was a life-changing moment but my reaction was holy [ __ ] this is insane and i hope you know they don’t come back and say hey we found something wrong yeah and the business when i did my deal when we did my deal i remember i called the bank ahead of time and i let them know i’m like there’s going to be like a big deposit and i don’t want you to think that like i’m doing something illegal like is there like a check mark you need to put next to this like i called you i told you like this is normal and they’re like no like it’s fine and they’re like how much do you expect to come in and i remember being on the phone i like i whispered it i was like i didn’t want anyone to hear i’m like it’s like uh around this number and they’re like i can’t hear you and i remember saying it again and i had and i whispered a little bit more and and i i it was uncomfortable i was like this is kind of weird uh saying this and they’re like yeah that shouldn’t be a problem at all and well you you don’t sound impressed like yeah sam i i i did this thing for a minute um so the the first thing i did was um i hired a wealth manager to move all the money out of my bank account he just bought bonds i knew nothing about bonds and then all of a sudden i’m like why is there more money and they’re like yeah that’s how bonds used to work at least um but when i went in to wire the money so my office was in la jolla in san diego it’s kind of like the beverly hills of san diego um the guy was like this is the biggest wire i have ever done like can we triple triple triple triple quadruple check this and i was like really like la jolla like there’s like 10 million dollar houses everywhere it’s like yeah this is the biggest one like i’m nervous and so we wired that over it’s a lot of money but what i used to do i i was i was just gonna say one other funny thing i do i would go in i this is kind of like a like a lame move but i used to go into the bank a few times before that wire and i’d pull out like a 20 bill i’d be like hey can i get like 20 bucks out just so they can see my account like like yeah i just need 20 bucks and then they look they and i come in looking like this i’m like 29 because i was 29 when i sold the business so like you know i’m gonna do some immature stuff like i’m not gonna be a professional like you know and i i i um you know i i hadn’t been married i didn’t have a kid at the time so you know it it it was party time at that at that moment um so yeah i’d go into the bank and be like hey were you like i was gonna say similarly we had uh this guy james hong who created hot or not on the podcast he said the same thing he would just do that like every day for like the first like in know week that that it happened and just he just wanted to print out the balance on his little paper rip it up and then like go about his day he just made him happy so on this podcast we’ve had a lot of really we’ve had a lot of really successful people we’ve had some people who have sold things for over a billion dollars we’ve had people who have sold things for hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve had people who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars this is all a huge amount of money but i have found myself when we talked to these incredibly we just had darmesh on the podcast and i was like dumbass isn’t it crazy i could see your lick your hubspot shares you know right now you’re worth like 900 million dollars that’s wild and um so you kind of like get in this bubble of like oh yeah it’s like you know uh 20 10 million whatever 30 million whatever the numbers are we’re like oh that’s like you know that’s a nice start you know but then when you when you think about one person having that amount of money particularly when they’re young when they’re 29 um that’s it that’s a that i ran the math here they had a friend that sold his company and he’s uh 32 now and he’s got over 50 million dollars liquid and i was like dude this is crazy that you have this and we did some research and we found out that there’s like 600 americans uh who have that much money or more who are also around that same age it’s like dude that’s crazy you’re like one of the you know almost top 500 richest young people in america that’s a an astounding amount of money and that’s kind of like what you had andrew it it’s an astounding thing and you talk about like well i can’t play private uh you can’t fly private but it’s like yeah yeah yeah you can you really can i mean you’re like incredibly wealthy if you have that amount of money at a at that young of an age the age factor is a really big deal here i i agree because i mean so moving in do you guys want to hear what i bought i told you i’d share it so the first thing my friends call me kind of like um like like a white rapper kind of guy like i love hip hop like i love fast cars i love big houses yeah detroit man if it wasn’t eminem it’d be me um so i bought a big-ass house cash um 2.5 million uh san mateo right on the golf course i see like literally deers running around in my backyard um and i recommended that to you sam cause it’s like it’s you work so hard and when you come from nothing just having i wanted something that i could just be proud of like you come over and you’re like damn you don’t get this with a regular job and i’m like yeah you don’t you need to start a business and i’m happy to talk to you about that because that’s like all i talk about is startups and stuff like that um and then also for my wife just for you know supporting me through the years and you know we wanted to start a family um bought a beautiful home uh and then i bought a c63 amg like you sam but i bought a older one the yeah badass car uh for the naturally aspirated end it was my second one um i wanted just like a newer one with less miles um and that’s that’s all i bought um that’s pretty that’s pretty much it just and then i put the rest into uh just like really boring index funds like vanguard dimensional um i don’t i barely angel the yes i got a black mercedes uh black amg mercedes i think technically mine is faster than yours but i looked i looked it up oh my god but they’re both cool they’re both cool i got a house i didn’t get nearly as fancy but a nice house and then i also put almost every single thing into a vanguard total market index fund and sean and a few other people just mercilessly like kind of kind of mock me if they don’t mock me like sean kind of rolls his eyes he’s like why aren’t you taking risks and i’m like i don’t know this seems pretty risky so you and i are the same uh same type of thing i don’t know why shawn and all these guys we hang out with i don’t know why they like buy stocks all the time i’m like what are you doing like what i don’t even know how to like what do you mean dude it’s fun it’s the real world casino uh you know like whatever you got to have some fun with it i’ve never sold a stock and i don’t and these guys are doing it like every day sharing their screenshots and i’m like you’re nuts i think that’s nutty i i guess i guess my view is like what what more money do you need like the way i view it and if you do the math like you know 10 marker returns compounded for 40 years sell when you’re 70 you’re set like you’re going to be bawling when you’re seven you’re going to be like rich like like you’re going to die with that money and so like for me i don’t like checking the stock market i don’t care to i don’t want to understand it um i no longer own any bitcoin or ethereum like i have the most boring investment strategy so people listening to this that are like in real estate or you know stocks or probably like this kid’s an idiot but i like waking up without any money problems i don’t have a mortgage i don’t care if my stock portfolio goes down like it’s just there until i’m 70 it’s a set plan i’m not deviating from it but i guess for me money buys like just peace of mind like i just i have no worries and so you know tying in the micro choir it’s like i’m comfortable taking big swings because you know i have a win under my belt um comfortable with everything i have i have no material wants it outside the lamborghini uh urus i’d take that if i could afford it or actually get it approved by my wife um who’s a very very uh cost uh conscientious italian um but other than that i mean you know just love building businesses and that’s all i focus on and that’s i think that’s the key sam is like you when you go boring it allows you to focus on what you’re really really good at rather than trying to like manage stocks like investing in startups like what’s crypto doing today like who’s this new i don’t know whatever yeah it’s it’s like zuckerberg zuckerberg wearing the same gray shirt every day he just removed one whole thing he needs to think about which is like fashion how i look what i’m gonna wear or how i’m gonna dress that day and just lets his brain focus on the one thing he wants it to focus on that day so i wanted to ask you i want to wrap this up because uh we’re gonna basically use this as like kind of half the episode than half the episode’s gonna be a different riff but i wanted to ask you because you’re seeing a bunch of businesses on mic require every day what um you know this is the podcast of business ideas what ideas or niches or spaces are you seeing interesting things give us two or three ideas that people should be looking at or spaces that people could be building in that you see opportunity um that you would do if you were kind of like you know 22 again or whatever yeah definitely well first i’m going to take the cop out answer and i would start with something you’re passionate in i think that’s huge like if you’re not passionate about it there’s someone who is and they’re gonna beat you but i think what’s really opened my eyes about microchoir every day i wake up and i get to see the most interesting startups i was telling um someone earlier today like there was a rabbit breeding company for farmers to track like when they make other rabbits or something like that make like a million a year or something like that like super niche and profitable and i’m like and it’s a sas business it’s legit um probably not like the bet i would not recommend buying that business it’s not for me but it just is an example of just how broad i think the future of of the small business economy is going to be online digital and profitable people who used to want to start like a restaurant or like a plumbing business or something like that those young entrepreneurs are going to be looking to start a niche sas company or a niche e-commerce company like categories that we see a lot of activity in are obviously shopify sas applications lots of communities even newsletters like kind of everything online and like it goes as deep as like we sold company that was a marketing automation platform for just specific types of dentists and they were making an absorbent amount of profit sold within like a couple weeks but that’s kind of where i think things are going is we’re going to have a few really really large companies you know ventures going in to you know tons of tons of different companies and we’re going to see just probably a handful of winners is my guess and then we’re going to see a long tail and the tan calculating that someone put this out where um you know you have a 2.5 chance of becoming a unicorn when you raise venture capital so those are my odds i’d probably increase it to 20 just with my my luck my friends call me gazlock that’s another nickname i have um but for the other 97.5 percent there’s you know if you build a business and you know you want to sell for you know a small but life-changing amount you’re not getting a tech wrench you can do that but yeah trends just very very niche very very focused i think is the key and those are the businesses i get most excited about and then if you’re looking to buy a business there’s a ton that just are built by really really talented engineers great for acquirers i’m seeing tons of those and then also for people that are experiencing sales and marketing you want to just like we did with dan shawn where we just let’s hustle on this thing and try to grow it that’s also a huge opportunity let’s name a few specific ones you have this one started by this guy named arson nurmagomedov i know how to say that last name because khabib khabib khabib nurmagomedov i didn’t realize that that was a common last name um but so this is a b2b saw or can you actually talk about this i’m looking at the email a b2b software company corporate gifting i don’t even know what that is 20 million in arr 3 million in profit it looks like right am i reading this right yep yeah so all those are private so i can’t name the names the one that what you’re viewing at the top is a podcast that i did so um arson sold rest pack for half a million on micro require in about a month i believe it was like a developer api tool there’s over a thousand plus startups on my require right now so i i don’t have my i’m not that smart my memory is not that good but uh keep going yeah no i just oh i i i’m looking at one of the ones you had listed here on this idea sheet i guess so that one wasn’t one that you sold so i just want to hear about a specific one a a few specific ones that you’ve sold as well as like maybe a few specific ones where you saw this you’re like oh my gosh i could have i should have started this company or like this is amazing i i if people knew that these types of things they existed they would totally be starting things like this okay so i’ll talk about the ones that i know i have permission to talk about one um was a company called uh push engage it sold to um an individual named sied he runs a firm called also motive and he basically is doing a wordpress type roll-up and he looks for yeah we’ve talked about we’ve talked about wpbeginner on here a bunch so it’s yeah awesome guy that acquisition was in the seven figures that went closer than like she had moved fast i don’t close in like two weeks or something like that i don’t i don’t know the exact details but um the founder was happy ced was happy another one would be median which sold for a quarter million 300 i don’t know the exact amount of the time i had but it’s basically like a live chat video tool so if you log on to a website instead of going to like crisp chat like this intercom button i’m seeing right here you can just click it and then like my video pops up and you’re like hey like and then i can take control of your this was probably my favorite business because you can you know add it for sales teams support teams and anytime someone has any questions and it was they had really really large enterprise agreements with some big big names that i can’t say because they’re under nda but public companies that you would recognize and that one was interesting another one the marketing automation platform for dentists that one sold really fast um i did another one with um a company called xmark clock which is like a time management solution for construction workers and the guy was based in europe and he sold for over half a million again in less than 30 days um all cash transaction i’m just trying to think of the podcast that i’ve done there i mean there’s so there’s so many so it sounds to me like i think what people should do is if you end up going on micro choir i’ve done in a couple of different platforms uh basically you can learn a lot just by checking out the different businesses so even if you’re not ready to buy uh get the premium subscription or whatever so you can read the like actual details about the businesses and that’s like a you know like a 300 mba that you can give yourself because you’re going to discover all these different niches the patterns you’re gonna see which businesses sell for more which businesses sell quickly and it’ll really shape your thinking so that’s kind of my recommendation whether if you’re buying obviously you know it’s a no-brainer but even if you’re not buying i think this is a great way to learn i’ve done this i’ve looked at probably 200 online businesses for sale just with the only intention of like learning yeah and um and that’s that’s how my brain just sort of collects a bunch of data so i would recommend doing that um but we should we should wrap it here because we’re gonna have to do one more segment after this but uh andrew thanks for coming on man thanks uh best of luck with mark require excited to to be on board with this thing and uh yeah thanks for thanks for sharing the story i think people are gonna dig it yeah i appreciate you guys having me on and uh yeah zillow for m a coming up appreciate you guys uh supporting sweet thank you let’s travel never looking back