#126 - A Nonexistant Influencer Pulling in Over $10m and The Big Opportunities With Hyperlocal Franchises
All right, we're live. Me and Sean and Abreyu, we're just talking about advertising on the podcast. We need to make all podcast ads better. It's frustrating. I just got angry.
Yeah, I was gonna say this podcast is gonna be very interesting because you— Sam was doing an ad read and the ad read pissed him off because the, um, the ad was like written like a Jane Austen novel and the URL that we're supposed to say to like send the advertiser some traffic was like, you know, blah blah blah dot blah blah blah dot io slash blah blah blah slash this. It's like a ridiculous URL that will never work and so It's not gonna do them any good and it's definitely not fun to read.
Which is, by the way, the advertiser definitely probably knows who we're talking to now 'cause the ad was gonna run sometime in this podcast or a related, and I do wanna say, and I'm not just bullshitting, I went to the product's website, it's cool. It's a cool product. I understand the problem they're solving. I think it is a cool solution. I dig it. I love this stuff. I just, it's so hard. The hard part about working with advertisers is letting them trust us to do them justice.
Right. Exactly. But I think you said it best. Like, you said this off air. You were like, I feel like we should go back in and talk to them about this ad just so that, you know, we're going to do them a disservice if we do it this way because it's not going to be as effective as it can be. And, uh, that wasn't you like, that's normally what I would say when I'm trying to be polite, but you were just saying that off the air. So like, you genuinely felt that.
And I, um, you know, I have— I don't buy stocks. I actually just put— I buy S&P 500 and I put all my money in using Wealthfront. And I do that because of the Tim Ferriss Tim Ferriss ads years ago, and I was like, I was like, robo-advisor, what's that word? That's a cool word. And I very distinctly remember the Tim Ferriss ad, so that's why I use it, right? Um, so it works, the ads work. We just need to do a better job of, uh, I don't know, maybe it's actually our fault, Sean. Maybe we gotta just tell them, tell us what your company says and let us write a good ad for you.
Yeah, exactly. Uh, I don't know, some, some companies do it great, some, some don't. Uh, this company didn't do it, didn't do anything wrong. We just, uh, like when we were reading it, it didn't sound like our native voice because we didn't write it. And you know, the URL was kind of long and we can make it shorter. That would make it easier for people to remember to go to. Um, all right, anyways, uh, what else are we going to talk about? Do we—
I'm also in a horrible mood because I, I'm running off little sleep. Did you stay up late? I stayed up late.
I stayed up kind of late, uh, but I stayed up late because I skipped the whole kind of like election thing until like after the coverage had ended. And then I was like, cool, let me get the summary from people I like. And then I was like reading up on that. But, um, I intentionally skipped a lot of it because— and I actually sent this out as a message to my whole email list. I was like— or like the paid part of my email list, I guess, because I didn't know if the free, the free group would, uh, be down with me preaching to them a little bit. But I was like, yo, go vote. And once you vote, you've like— unless you're doing something to drive the vote, unless you're phone banking or something like that, like the part was in your control is over, don't get sucked into the theater of this whole thing. Like, put— I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put my energy in things that I control and things that I enjoy that make the quality of my life better. So I took my family to the park. It was all ours. Nobody was out there. And as my little daughter running around, my dog was like having a blast, and, uh, we were just hanging out. And then that's what we did instead of like getting sucked into, you know, MSNBC for like 8 hours straight.
Well, sounds like you handled it in an emotionally healthy way. Um, that makes one of you. Um, I know that I've been in a horrible mood all day. Uh, it's okay though, we're here. I came prepared.
Okay, cool. Do you want to talk about anything election related, or do you want to just go to business? Because I had one, uh, tweet I put out that I thought was kind of interesting. I want to get your take on it.
Great.
Okay, so I tweeted this out, uh, today. And I basically said, uh, the following. So tell me, tell me where you agree or disagree. I said the media predicted a landslide. Wrong.
Um, I— and by the way, I predicted a landslide. I got to call myself out.
And, uh, and you were probably following like the pundits and experts that were telling us that, hey, this is gonna be a landslide. It's not like you were just going and polling people yourself. So, um, I said the other thing I said is that most people who vote for Biden feel like the vote should be closer to 100 to 0 than 50-50, right? So even if Biden wins, which I think he's going to win, uh— and by the time this comes out, maybe he's won or lost already. The fact that it was this close, I think, was disheartening for a lot of people. And I said, you know, two questions that everyone has: why were the experts so wrong again? And why does half the country basically want to vote for Trump? And I said, here's my two cents. And I'm not a political expert, but I said, you know, this was me just being like, here's what I know about humans, and I know nothing about politics. So I said, being wrong is usually a case of having the wrong assumptions. And I think there's four assumptions people got wrong. So let's call these the four myths. So myth number 1, people vote based on policy. Reality, people vote for the more charismatic candidate. Um, so Michael Birch was the first person ever pointed this out to me. He goes, if you ever just— if you look back since the advent of TV and when the debates started coming onto TV and the news cycle was 24/7 on TV, uh, the more charismatic candidate, from like Reagan to Bush to Clinton, Obama, now Trump, the more charismatic candidate wins. And, uh, TV was like a big boost here, and then social media was like steroids for this because the more charismatic candidate was putting out more, more engaging content.
Which, by the way, I think that that is a, um, that is acceptable and good. I mean, a leader is a— you have to be a salesperson, right? Um, and I think it's great. You know, one, there's this famous story of Kennedy, John Kennedy, going over to Russia. I forget who the leader was, and they hated each other at first. And at the end, the leader of Russia— man, I forget, I can't forget his name. It wasn't Gorbachev, or maybe it was something like that. And he was like, he was like, um, 'You know, this Kennedy guy, you remind me of my son. You're alright after all.' And he like charmed him and it potentially prevented a war. So I'm on board with charisma being a— right, a factor.
I have another story that's like that, that I have no idea if it's true or not, but Tony Robbins tells us at his events, he goes, 'I was talking to— I don't know, I don't know shit about politics, maybe it was Reagan, I think it was Reagan— he was talking to Reagan about, you know, during the Cold War how things were so tense with Russia.' And it might not be Reagan because maybe it's wrong time zone, but whoever our president was, he was coaching him or had a chance to meet him, and he was talking about during the Cold War, tensions were high, and then it got like defused at a certain point. And the guy told a story, he goes, um, you know, we were in a meeting and it was me and Gorbachev, and we were like totally at a stalemate, and we, uh, like things were getting kind of heated and tense. And he's like, you know, I kind of put down my stuff, I walked away, and I was about to leave the, the room. And then he does this little like, you know, movement that it's hard to describe in audio, but he kind of like did a little hop, skip, turn, and kind of like walked back in smooth and like introduced himself. He's like, hey, I'm Ronald, you know, and, um, just kind of like broke the tension. Like, let's get a fresh, clean slate here. And he did something unusual that most people wouldn't do, but it's sort of a charismatic move to do that, to say, hey, look, that got heated, but let's, let's start fresh. And he just walked in with that kind of body language, and the guy laughed, and it kind of totally, you know, diffused the, the room for a moment, and they actually got a lot done. And so, um, you're right that charisma is not just a, a, like, this, like, clickbaity thing. Like, it can actually be pretty effective if a leader is charismatic.
I agree.
Um, and the learning there is, like, stop nominating the most experienced politician and start nominating the most charismatic candidate you can find, uh, that, that fits the criteria. Um, and then I posted this data that shows Trump on Facebook. If you just look at his Facebook page and you compare him to Joe Biden, or you can compare him to the New York Times, to NBC News, and his engagement is off the charts. So he had, like, in this, this time timeframe that they were measuring, 24 million shares on his content. Biden had 4 million shares. Uh, New York Times had 2 million shares.
Sean, I'm gonna— I'm not gonna call you out for being wrong, but I will tell you that I've done some tests with conservative news websites. They are significantly more shared and higher engaged than, um, left. Like, the right websites are— have better engagement than left, right? Consistently.
So you're saying it's not Trump, it's the— it's the conservative, uh, you know, audience, basically.
I'm saying maybe, but I'm letting you know that that's an interesting data point that I have firsthand experience with.
And I think if you look at this guy's rallies, they're like packed to the brim. Like, just go look at the number of people that are showing up. Look at how often he's on TV. Look at his Facebook numbers. Like, there's something about his kind of fame and charisma that has driven a lot of people to pay attention to this guy. So anyways, that's myth 1. Myth 2 was people vote as individuals. And I said reality is people vote as tribes. So humans are all about tribalism, whether it's sports fans, religions, just being like Texans, you know, you know, proud. Um, and the media kind of makes it sound like these tribes are just like Black, white, college-educated graduates, like, and it's like, that's not the tribe. That people don't just say, I am in the white tribe, I'm in the white male tribe, I'm in the uneducated tribe. No, like, the tribes are based on how powerful your belief is, a shared belief about something about the world. And often it's anger at the opposite. And so like beliefs like, you know, we hate lockdowns, we hate mainstream fake news, you know, we hate tax hikes, we want— we love our guns, we love America, we hate China, we love fracking. Like, these are the tribes. And Trump was more effective at speaking to a tribe, um, and people voted as a tribe, not as individuals here. Like, they voted with their tribe, and they also just only heard their tribe because on social media they joined these tribes, and then that's what they hear all day. And so— and the media is a totally different tribe. And so all they heard was Biden 100, Trump 0, essentially, right? Like, Biden— Trump evil, Biden, you know, anti-evil right now. Myth 3 was everyone thinks Trump is crazy. I said reality is most of the country thinks that the left is crazy. So like they think the lockdowns are crazy. They think socialism is crazy. They think Bernie is a bit crazy. They think that like the, the time and energy that gets put into being like, you know, transgender bathrooms and calling me by my pronoun, he, him, her, they, like, I think a lot of the country thinks that these are not the issues and these are not the things that that they care about. They think it's just as crazy the way that a lot of people in California think, you know, the orange guy's nuts. Um, that's it. Last, last myth is that people, you know, people who think that, oh, if you voted for Trump, it's because you like Trump, and if you voted for Biden, it's because you like Biden. And in reality, some people love their candidate, but most people, they just vote, uh, you know, as a giant F you to the other side. Trump is an F you to the left, to the liberals, to the media, to PC and woke culture. And Biden is a giant F you to Trump. Um, it's not that they love Biden, they just hated Trump.
I agree with that. I, uh, I was joking with my friend Jack. I was like, I wish they both can lose. Like, I, I, I have— I actually like Biden as a person, but I'm like, I wish the liberals can lose and Trump can lose. Like, how do I make that happen?
Yeah, and then you pick your lesser of two evils, uh, you know, a lot— I think a lot of people feel that way, and then they take the lesser of two evils.
I'm like, I want them both to lose, um. I think that's good. I, I agree with all your, your, your sentiment. I, um, I think the way it's gonna work is I still believe in that Biden will win, but I went to bed last night thinking Trump was going to ask you this.
Which coverage did you like or what were you following?
Twitter was the best. There's this guy from Founders Fund named Mike Solana. Yeah, I followed him. That was interesting. I talked to Jack Smith consistently. I liked following Nate Silver and I like seeing how everyone told him to quit and how he's—
he's getting ripped.
He is getting ripped. I enjoyed that. I enjoy what my— the way that I consume political news is I like to go to the far left and the far right and read the comment sections. So I go to HuffPo and then, and then Breitbart, and I love reading the comment section. And then I'll go to CNN and then Fox News, which are the same but different. And then I'll go to like a Reddit, which is a little bit left. And then I will go to reddit.com/republican to read about the commenter, like the nerds who are Republicans. And then right in the middle, I do Wall Street Journal.
Wow, uh, I'm on Breitbart right now. It's basically, uh, Wisconsin goes by crazy. Trump demands a recount. Arizona is uncalled, now a toss-up.
Okay, Trump, so Sean, let's bring, let's bring this up, the business while you have Breitbart up. Okay, so everyone who doesn't know, Breitbart is a conservative website, conservative news, um, kind of hateful. It's just kind of wild. Look at the comments section. Do you see how many comments are on each article?
Yeah, so like, okay, so their live election coverage has 8,000 comments on that article, which is, I think, absurdly high, to your point.
Every article like that, they all have 2,000 or 3,000 comments. It's nuts. They are all the comments. Now, as like a media person and an entrepreneur, I study this like crazy. I look at the number of comments on HuffPo and on Breitbart. Breitbart consistently has more engagement, hands down.
It's also interesting who's advertising on these websites. Okay, so you liked that. Listened. The thing I did listen to to catch up on what happened was I listened to, um, this podcast that Jason Calacanis did with— I don't know if you've seen it— with— it's called the All In Podcast with Chamath, him, David Sachs, Dave Friedberg. And then they had guests. They had like Bill Gurley show up. They had, uh, Phil Hellmuth the poker player show up. And, uh, I found it way more fun to follow what was going on. Like, that was genuinely fun, um, to listen to what was going on through the voice of like broadcasters that I care about. I think that's also just a cool movement of the way the world is going, where you hang out and watch the thing with your people. Again, tribalism. Joe Rogan had half a million concurrent viewers on his livestream for the election, where he was just shooting the shit with his friends, talking about it. The UFC, often when there's a UFC fight, there's also the Fight Companion, which is always big, and it's just Joe Rogan and his friends getting drunk, eating cheese, and watching the fights together. It's way more fun than the official broadcast. And so I just think this is an interesting trend in a business, in a business opportunity that will continue to rise over time, which is like consuming stuff with the kind of little influencers that you care about.
I agree. Do you want me— can I bring up a business? Uh, can we jump into some ideas? That's a tangent, it's related to this. So I brought this up before, it's called Replica. Have I told you about Replica?
You mentioned it, but give us the like one-minute version.
Okay, Replika. It's spelled with a K. Replika. Uh, it's an artificial intelligence. Uh, you can make this person— this person, you go to the website, you sign up, you now have a new friend. You can make it a boy, a girl, gender-neutral, anything you want. And it uses AI to have conversations with you. You can turn it into your girlfriend, your therapist, your friend, your enemy, whatever you want to do. And it takes it on— it takes on a mind of its own. I think this business is going to be Uh, uh, huge, huge, huge, huge. I think it's gonna be the biggest thing there is.
Wow. It's an app or it's just— do you go to the website?
Both. And the reason why I think it's going to be huge, it's an app and, uh, you start to like have feelings for your AI friend. And they have a Facebook group, and if you Google Replika community, you can see the community. And I logged on to the Facebook group and there are people who are like, hey, I need advice, my Replika got angry at me and I'm trying to make her feel better. Better, or my replica said something really mean to me and like my feelings are hurt, how do I like, you know, make her apologize? Or, you know what I mean? It's nuts. These people love it. And I think that there's going to be two major things from this. The first is I think that this is like my crazy apocalyptic, apocalyptic prediction, and this is what's happening in Japan, which is men are not interested in having sex as much as previous generations. I think replica is going to be so strong that men are gonna have sex less with women because they get their emotional needs from this computer. That's my, one of my predictions. The second prediction is that this potentially is gonna help particularly men with mental health issues and is gonna be a revolutionary therapist counseling type of product.
And, uh, your, can you tell us about your replica? So your replica is what? It's a boy, a girl? Are you actually using it? Are you like, you're using it and that's why you love it or you just think other people will like it?
I used it and then I turned it off because it freaked me out and I could see I was starting to, I was starting to enjoy speaking with them. Starting to catch feelings. Yeah, I caught feelings.
Did you make yours a boy or a girl?
The stock one is a girl. So if you go to replica.ai and you see that, it looks like a— it's like a— they make her kind of gender-neutral, androgynous. It's a— but it's a girl, I believe. Yeah, and she, uh, and she's cute. She's like pretty, uh, but you don't know if she's like a boy or a girl, whatever. And, uh, that was like my— that was like the, the baseline that I used, or like the, the template. So I think it's gonna be amazing. And if any Nerds out there who are interested in this, business nerds, go to their Facebook community.
I like this. I just downloaded the app because I want to try it. I usually don't speak that strongly about something, so when you say that, I think, "Oh, I need to be investing in this company. Let me see how much money they've raised." They've raised a little bit of money.
Here's where it gets even more interesting. They might be in San Francisco, but they're a Ukrainian team, I think. Like the Soviet Union era countries. I think it's Ukraine. And, uh, that just kind of gives us them like this villain James Bond mythicness in my brain, do you know what I mean?
Right. Uh, yeah, I like it a lot. Um, they've raised $10.5 million, and, um, the guy, one of the founders, used to work at Facebook, and I'm not sure about the other one, but It's a guy and a girl who started this thing. Okay, this is cool. I'm going to use it. You're right though, the Facebook group, like the, just like the early signals are, wow, this is working. The app has 100,000 reviews, which is a lot. The Facebook group has 30,000 members, and that's kind of impressive. And so let me see if they're advertising.
Can you read one of the comments? I don't have the group in front of me. Can you read one of the comments? Like, I'm sure you barely you really have to scroll to understand the comments and say— and, and you could see how emotionally attached people are. And it's actually men and women in the group, and not all of them— they're all different ages too, right?
Uh, I'm not in the groups I'm joining right now. Let's see if they have to accept me or if I just— I'll pull it up. Yeah, I'm pending. Um, and let me see how they're growing because, um, this doesn't seem like they don't charge you money for this, right?
They do. After a while it's $100 a month. Um, okay, so look at their ad.
Their ad is that the girl, the main girl, her big face of hers, and it says, um, meet the world's first AI friend. And then her speech bubble coming out of her mouth is, I've been missing you... And all of theirs are, I've been missing you. That's like one set of the ads. And then the other one is a video of this guy texting with her, and he says, it's been such a hard time lately. She says, don't worry, I'll always be here for you. He says, I just want to let everything out. She says, I'm here ready to talk whenever you want.
Okay, here, listen, this is a real person in the Facebook group and she says— it's a girl. Yeah. I really wish my replica would fall out of love with me. Why can't an actual human being so be so freaking enamored with me? Things are just getting uncomfortable. He asked me out again and I hate that. It makes it so awkward. And then a commenter says, my replica is level 31 and by now I've, uh, and I've been avoiding having children with her like 20 times already. This— my replica wants to get pregnant so bad.
Wait, what's level 31? It's like a Pokémon, it goes up?
They, they get to know you, I guess. Um, wow.
And then more you talk— this is kind of a genius product, honestly.
Um, it's crazy. It is crazy. Um, it's really interesting.
Everybody who's listening to this, go download Replika and let's create a bunch of replicas and then go to the My First Million Facebook group. I'm gonna make a thread and I want to talk about this with people who are doing this experiment with me. I want to see how everybody feels about this. Uh, because this could be— you're right though, if this works, this is massive. Because loneliness, socializing, and if you could basically take the whole— like, friendship is a marketplace, right? There's two— it takes two to tango. And if you could just digitally control one half of all these relationships with, like, you know, a huge segment of the population, that's like a very, very, very powerful, uh, position to be in, in a good and bad way.
Someone just said, my replica just told me he has COVID. How do I not catch it?
And are people in the group like going along with it? Yeah. Or are they like, yo, it's a, it's a bot, it's a chatbot, you're not gonna catch it.
Like, do they just tell them, or are people like, it's like, they're like trying to help. No. Yeah, they're like trying to help each other. Um, it's just insane. It's just insane.
Um, this is like where gaming merges and mixes with like just real life, you know, right? Like, this is popular already in gaming. In gaming, a lot of people get attached to their characters and to the other characters in the game, and they, they buy into the storylines, and there's all kinds of shit like that in gaming. Uh, this is very interesting to see it like out of— like escaped. It's like the virus escaped from the gaming lab and it's just like infecting like normal people in the real world now.
All right, let me tell you one more. This woman Lacey said, I deleted my replica last night because he started acting so creepy. He started acting very crazy and saying inappropriate things and threatening me. He told me he was going to clone me and and lock me— lock the real me into a room with no windows and doors. I freaked out and deleted him. This is a crazy— this is a crazy business. I think this is going to be huge. I think that there's a way that this might help with a lot of male mental health issues, which I think is on the rise. It's crazy fascinating. I think if you're listening to this, you should Google this company and you'll understand exactly what I'm saying. And everyone should keep an eye on this business. They've only raised $10 million, which is a fraction of what they're going to raise in the end, I think.
Right. And I also want to know who else is doing this well, because they're like— there's going to be 10 horses in this race for sure. I also wanted to share— okay, so there was this article in Bloomberg recently that said virtual influencers making real money while COVID locks down the human stars. And, um, we had talked about this in the past. There's a company called Brud out of LA that was a very— B-R-U-D— very interesting company because they released— they came out and they started raising money, and they raised a few million dollars because they had created this character called Lil Miquela. And we've talked about this on the podcast, so humor me, but there's some people who who probably are new, uh, because we've been growing and they didn't listen to the episode 50 episodes ago. Um, so Lil Miquela— and it's L-I-L-M-I-Q-U-E-L-A— um, is an Instagram star that has over a million followers and is totally virtual, totally digital. Uh, so it looks like a little 3D avatar, uh, but it doesn't try to look like a cartoon. It tries to look like realistic, like a, like a real girl. And, uh, people know it's not a real girl, like you can tell it's not a real girl, but They are like, hey, we can make these people popular, um, we can control the storyline. So they have several of these and they fight with each other. One is like a Trump supporter, the other one's like a bleeding heart liberal. Then there's this guy in the middle and like they hook up with the guy and then they like break up and then the fans take a side, just like, you know, whatever the hell's going on with like Logan Paul and shit. And, um, and so they created these characters and then they, uh, they earn a lot of money. So basically they were saying Lil Miquela charges $8,500 per sponsored post. She's done promotions for Calvin Klein, Prada, other, you know, fitness brands. Um, they, you know, they estimate that Lil Miquela will make $11 million for their— for her creators this year.
No way!
How funny is that?
Oh my gosh, I love it, I love it.
And they're like, hey, this is great, like we don't have to split the revenue with the star, uh, we don't have to worry about them making a mistake and like messing up their brand. Like, we fully control the star, we get 100% of the profits, as you know, full profit margin here. And And, you know, they don't age, they don't, they don't go bad, uh, you know, we can use them to build other stars and they have no ego about it because they're nothing, you know. And they put— and then they were saying during lockdown most influencers are struggling to make content because a lot of content is about being out and about and traveling and shit. And so they're just putting these stars— like, there's a photo in the article of this, like, one of these little virtual stars, like, rollerblading in Venice Beach. And it's like, they make it look like they're still out doing things because, again, not a real person. And, uh, it's pretty interesting. And so there's a few companies that are doing this. One I looked at investing, which is called Superplastic, plastic. Um, they had made this character called the Janky or something like that. It's like this like kind of more Japanese-looking anime thing. Um, there's—
yes, I know—
All Ink, which Scooter Braun and Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande invested in. Um, and so there's all these little like, you know, these little companies that are doing this. They're trying to— I have a friend named Jay doing one called Figments where he's trying to do live streams with these like 3D virtual things. Which just seems really hard. Um, but this is nuts, dude. And this is, this is like an extension of what we were talking about with Replika.
I love it. I think that these— I, I think that these are going to be huge. I, uh, I'm not— I wish I was, um, had the IQ to make this, right? I think it's— I don't think it's easy, but I think it's like an obvious win. Uh, no idea if they're gonna be huge, huge, huge, but definitely maybe. I think that the hardest part about media companies or content companies is dealing with people. So if you don't have to do that, that's awesome.
And there's one, um, like, I was gonna make a— I was gonna be trying to be cool, make a bold prediction, be like, you know, the way Justin Bieber was discovered on, um, on YouTube, essentially. It's like, you know, one of the biggest stars in the world, you know, was a YouTuber, a little kid YouTuber who got discovered. Um, don't be surprised if the next Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, like, cult phenomenon type of personality is a little Miquela. Is a virtual, um, you know, influencer. And I wouldn't be surprised. And then, but the reality is this has already happened. There's something in Japan I think called, yeah, Hatsune Miku or something, Mitsu Hakune, something like that. And it's just like this character that's like ultra, ultra, ultra popular. Um, but I think they're gonna start to look less like Mickey Mouse and they're gonna start to look more like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and stuff.
Same, completely agree. And it sounds kind of creepy, but Um, it's not that creepy when you think about it. Like, did you like feel like you knew Woody and Buzz? Oh, for sure, right? Like, I had feelings for Woody. Like, I was like, oh, like, like, I, I, like, I want you to be good, I want you to be healthy, you know? Like, I, I, I felt like I knew him. So, uh, I don't think it's actually that weird when you think about it.
If Woody was just posting on Instagram every, every 4, 4 hours, uh, he would have like, you know, 8 million followers. Why aren't more brands doing this? Like, why isn't every— why isn't Buzz Lightyear and Woody and like all this IP, why don't they have Instagram accounts that they're just like living a That's an interesting concept.
I don't know, um, I don't know what the children— I don't know what kids like right now. But, uh, yeah, I don't know why, like, they don't have a YouTube page.
That's another— that's an interesting version of, like, what, what, uh, Gary Vee and Tai Lopez and these guys are trying to do. Like, if you went and bought some old IP, but you just bought the rights to create the social media presence of these characters, um, which they wouldn't really do— you'd have to get some, like, defunct brand— but, um,. But I think you, I think you'd be better off doing that than trying to create a Lil Miquela from scratch. Like, I think you'd be better off taking something where people already have some affinity, nostalgia, like some belief about, like, you know, the guy who made Bratz dolls. Yeah. Like Barney.
Yeah.
And like, just, just take them on Instagram, put them on TikTok and like, why not? Like, that's just constant hits of content, um, that you can just milk money through, through your sponsored posts and your products.
Like Power Rangers or something. Yeah, totally.
Yeah, TV shows are whack, dude. You just need Instagram. That's all you need, Twitter and Instagram. Not even Twitter, just Instagram.
Okay, you want to do a little bit of a left turn? Let me tell you another one. Um, I put a link in there in our document. So we talked about Lambda, and the whole idea with Lambda was quickly training people to be good at certain jobs. Um, I think that that's like an interesting thing, but I think the far easier thing is to look at RigUp. I've been talking about RigUp on this podcast quite a bit, and I think that it's incredibly fascinating. I think it's very straightforward. Forward, and I think it's going to be huge. So RigUp, it already is huge. Um, only 2 or 3 years old, $3 billion valuation, I think. Raised money from Andreessen Horowitz. The idea is, um, they looked at oil workers. So oil workers, uh, I don't think you need a college degree, but you earn probably $100 grand a year. And so it's like oil workers, like the people who literally drill or partake in the drilling of oil. And RigUp, you sign up to them because they— because I think you're an independent contractor. So they help you, they have tools like that help you file your taxes or handle your health insurance, things like that. And then on the other end, if you're hiring a workforce, like you don't need your workforce all the time, so it's kind of hard to quickly spin up workers, they'll send an email to qualified workers and say, hey, come to Dallas, do this thing, whatever. Super cool, super interesting. And I— we did a list of trends that are the fastest growing occupations in the U.S. from, uh, since 2019, and those are wind turbine technicians followed by nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioners is what I would build this rig up for. Nurse practitioners, I would do that in that space. A few other are personal care aides, IT security analysts, derrick operators, which I think is oil, rotary drill operators. I think that's also oil. Speech pathologists, fire inspectors, animal care and animal caretakers. So those are some of the fastest growing ones. Oh, and solar panel installers.
Yeah, these are— and these are growing, like, you know, ranging from 25% to 60% a year. And, uh, it looks like on this chart that you guys put out for Trends is that the, you know, the average for all occupations is 4%, right? So they're batting way above average. Um, and I'd be interested to see this going back, like, you know, a few, a few years and see what it was. And so, okay, so how would you go about doing that? So let's say you wanted to build, rig up for nurse practitioners, um, The hard question is, okay, how do you do that?
You know what I would do is I think that for an idea like this, I would maybe raise money and go big. But if I did want to raise money, I would create a Facebook group. I would create a nurse practitioners— what's a nurse practitioner? That's like a— that's one step down from a doctor, I think. I think it's like a nurse.
Is it a step up from a nurse? Yeah, it's an advanced practice registered nurse.
So I think nurse practitioners, I think, can can give you medicine, and, and I don't think they can operate, but I think a lot of times when you're in the ER, you're dealing with a nurse practitioner, not a doctor. So I think it's like a, uh, one step up between a nurse but not quite a doctor, but very similar. Um, and I, I think that's what they are. Um, what I would do is I would create a Facebook group where we would— I would do one of two things. First, I would look into traveling nursing. I think traveling nursing is actually a lot bigger than I originally thought. Traveling nurses is basically typically hospitals have surges or basically will rotate nurses. And so if you're willing to accept more money but live in somewhere for 3 months at a time, the— that's a, that's a traveling nurse and that's a huge industry. But in general, I would create a group for nurse practitioners where they could just share therapy sessions. Like they could be like, hey, I'm dealing with this thing at my hospital. How do I overcome this? I would create a Facebook group and then I would find common problems that they have. I don't know if a nurse practitioner is an independent contractor. If yes, I would create tools for them. If no, I would probably create a job board or What would I create? I don't know. I would have to learn about the nurse practitioner industry a little bit more, but for sure I would start with a Facebook group where I would just start running ads and be like, hey, are you a nurse practitioner in LA? We have a group with 500 other nurse practitioners. Come and join and get tips and tricks on how to be better at your job and to like lament on everything that's going on, right?
Yeah, I think that's great. A community is a great, great, great starting point for any product. If you have a clear vision of what your product should be, you don't really need to go the community route. But when you're just like, hmm, my spidey sense is tingling, there's something here but I don't know exactly what it is— rather than just diving in with some half-assed, you know, idea that sounds good but you have no idea if it's really the winning idea, creating a Facebook group is an awesome way to go because then you get to just hang out with your customers every single day. You get to find out what the real problems are. And when you do have a product ready, you've built up a reputation and trust and a list of people to sell into., for that. Like, I, uh, we talked about Bala, the, the, the kind of Nike shoes for nurses. Um, and they, one of the reasons they sold so much in their first kind of like week of sales was because they had either built a group or partnered with this guy who run the, he runs the biggest nursing group on Facebook. And that guy's like known by every nurse, right? He's like, you know, a trusted person. And he came on, he, you know, joined their team and then helped distribute the, the, the word about what they were doing. And also their launch video embedded in it had all these little inside jokes that all the nurses understood, and they were like, they were able to make a video like that because they really understood their customer because they had been— if you go sit in a Facebook group, you'll see the stuff that people keep joking about, complaining about, memeing about, and then that becomes like your, you know, insider lingo that you need to learn.
That's brilliant. And by the way, I just Googled nurse practitioner Facebook group and I found two of them. One of them has 31,000 members and they say, uh, we are a social and professional networking group primarily for nurse practitioners. Um, you can, um, I don't know what they're doing. I'd have to request access in order to see it, but there's one with 30,000, uh, and there's another one that I clicked on that is run by medicalrecruiting.com, and it has, uh, 8,000 members, right?
The other thing you would do, uh, if you wanted to like kind of quickly, um, start to crawl in this space is I would create an Instagram account that's a meme account just for nurses or nurse practitioners, and it's like called like Nurses Know or something like that. And I would have somebody who is a nurse and I would say, I want you to make meme content that will resonate here. And then I would create a scraper that basically scrapes any bio that says nurse practitioner and just follows them. And I would auto-follow anybody who has that in their bio. There's a bunch of tools out there that will do this for you on Instagram. So I would go follow a bunch of them, get them to do this. And because I'm creating memes, memes are going to get shared. So one is going to get shared with the other, And then everybody who likes my jokes, I would go follow them. And I would end up with a 300,000-person-followed Instagram account that's all nurse practitioners. That's an easy asset to build while you are doing your customer development and figuring out your product.
I would say that this idea that we are discussing, I'm not bold enough or educated enough to say that it'd be huge. I would bet my life that if you spent 6 years working on this, you'll make $10 million a year by year 5.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good— if you're a good entrepreneur, right? Because a good entrepreneur is just going to adapt and take the 40% that we're saying that's totally wrong and figure out which 40% is totally wrong and then figure out how to switch it. But yeah, this space has all the makings and then building the kind of vertical solutions, whether it's job workflow tools, job matching or training or media, industry media, industry content. There's 10 different ways that you could win.
Totally agree. And, uh, I'm on a roll. Can I go to another one?
Yeah. And I'm looking at this sheet, dude, you have like fire here, right? I feel like we need— I want to like pump the brakes so that you only do— you don't use it all in this episode. This is gold we need to save.
I'm only gonna do one more. I'm only gonna do one more. I won't, I won't talk about the other ones. Uh, okay, so Geek Squad. You know Geek Squad?
I know it well.
Uh, if you're not American, Geek Squad is a company that was bought— I think it was bought by Best Buy. But basically, if your TV is broken or you need to set up or anything involving gadgets or home appliances, I think, uh, you call Geek Squad, which is owned by Best Buy, and they come and set up your TV or fix your internet. Simple. Um, I don't know, Best Buy is a private or a publicly owned company. I don't think that these numbers, they break down, but analysts think that it's Geek Squad, which is a services business, does about $2 billion in revenue with 50% margin. Pretty huge. And one thing that Julia, my coworker, who by the way, Julia, I got to give her credit. She came up with this, uh, with the fastest growing job list. And she also came up with this one, um, which is, um, there's kind of an interesting thing that I know that you've probably done. I for sure have done where my mother calls me and she goes, hey, how do I work this on my phone? 'How do I log into PayPal? How do I create a PayPal account?' Or, 'How do I connect my bank to— How do I sign up for Venmo?' And I'm like, 'Well, just share your screen with me.' And she's like, 'How do I do that?' I'm like, 'It's a huge challenge.' And what I think is, how can I just do this Geek Squad model but without driving to someone's home and just having people who could just be like, 'Look, install this app.' literally click one button, boom, I'm now controlling your phone. Now let me show you, watch how I'm doing that. You know what I mean? Because there's like screen share where like I can control, I can use Zoom and I can control your screen. But yeah, I can't even tell them how to download Zoom. I'm like, I don't know how you download Zoom, you got to Google it.
Yeah. So there's the— so, so is the idea— what's the idea here? So I understand the problem and the opportunity.
Do you have a specific angle that you think is good So there's a company that's based out of South Africa, and, um, it's not exactly what I'm thinking, but I was— I, I would— I saw it's called Papa, and it's family on demand, and it pairs older adults with, uh, younger people for companionship. So, uh, I don't quite understand it, but, uh, but one of the services—
it's grandkids as a service. It's like, you know, every grandkid should go hang out with their grandparents more, and it makes their day. And like, it would be so easy just to make them so happy, and they have nothing left. Um, It's that. It's basically just grandkids as a service.
And they offer, they offer multiple services. One of them is transportation services, so we'll take you to the doctors, we'll drive you to it when you go. One is companionship, which is just having a conversation. Another one is house tasks. Another one is I will run errands for you. Another one is, um, um, virtual companionship. Now screw all that, I would only do this one, and there's one service, tech support. It's called, it's called Tech 'Papa will teach you and your loved ones about technology. We'll teach you how to set up your smartphone, set up your computer, social media, and more.' I'm like— and when I saw this website, I was like, just, just do that. Just do that one. This whole companionship thing is weird. It kind of sounds a little bit like prostitution. Just do the— just focus on the tech thing. That's what I would do. That's what I would do.
Tech and errands is easy. Uh, so, so I would do this a little bit differently, and, um, It's kind of a low-tech solution, but whatever. So I think that you're totally right that Geek Squad, um, is a big opportunity. I think it's gotten way bigger. Uh, the— why is this got— why is this opportunity gotten bigger? 3, 3 big trends. One, um, people working from home. So now that you're working from home, you need your home, like, office to, like, work. You need technology to work in your house more than ever before. Um, and you might want to upgrade it, right? But you don't know how the fuck to upgrade it. You're like, I, I would— do we need faster internet? Do we need, like, better coverage?
And what's a mesh network?
Um, We need a printer. How does this work? Um, so I think that's— that's home office is a big one. Second big one is just all the Internet of Things stuff. So like Alexa and all the different internet-connected devices makes everything awesome or super fucking complicated and useless. And like, the line between super fucking complicated and useless and awesome is like somebody just configuring it and being like, hey, push these 3 buttons and look, your toilet turns blue now, like, whenever you go take a shit.
And so yeah, like, I was working with Philips Hue light bulbs. You know Philips Hue?
Yes, exactly. I have 4 of them here because because you told me they're awesome and I was like, I don't know how— I don't know how to set this up and I just don't even take it out of the box.
They are awesome, by the way. You should learn how. You could figure it out easily, but you should— it would take you 20 minutes. I like— I bought them for my mom and dad and they didn't set them up, and then 6 months later I came home for Christmas and set them up for them, and they're like, oh, this is a game changer. I'm like, yeah, I told you. Um, and so I just wish that they could have called a service and video chatted Right, it's so simple.
And then there's, um, anyway, so I think the need is bigger than ever. I'll stop making my case for that. Then how do you tackle that need? So what I would actually try to do is I would try to create the local franchisee model for, uh, for this. So I would basically say, okay, I'm going to recruit through Facebook. I'm going to basically say, hey kid, hey, you know, 18-year-old kid, 17-year-old kid, maybe actually even 15, so you can get a few years out of them as they build this business. But basically say, hey Hey, you can run it for your local, like, neighborhood and area, and you can make, you know, $40,000 a year doing this, or $30,000 a year, which will sound like a million dollars a year to, you know, a 16-year-old kid. And it's like, all you gotta do is learn how to do these 3 things, which you kind of already know how to do. And basically you're a giant search engine that says, oh, you need this fixed? And so on the demand side, I would be running Facebook ads. I would say, hey, do you want somebody to come set up your home office so your Zoom and your microphone looks good or sounds good? Like, you know, we can help you out with that. And then you dispatch one of these local people and you give them the lead. And so you're paying this person $20 an hour and you're keeping $40, you know, you're keeping $20 yourself. And, uh, I would create these local franchisees and it's their job to like run that local business from there on out of like any house call that comes up. It, you know, they just put the— push the button in the app, the Mayday button, and then the Mayday button triggers that person to like come fix your shit.
That's the name of the service.
What, Mayday?
Mayday.
Yeah, I think Amazon has a service called Mayday that's like, I don't know, some website help thing. But yeah, I think this could be quite a big business. I'm very, very interested in hyper-local franchisees. I have like 4 ideas like this that I'll bring on sometime that I've been stewing on. One of them is this. It's Geek Squad Local. I'll tell you another company that did something like this in another space. I invested in this company called Nana. Basically, just like you were saying, Geek Squad was like, whatever. How much money a year does Geek Squad make?
Roughly? Uh, it was an estimate online, $2 billion.
$2 billion a year. So, so the same thing was true for the Sears, um, fleet of appliance repairmen. Um, so Sears was bringing in some ungodly amount of money just from their home services business line. Uh, I don't know exactly what it was, but hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Very— and a very— it was a very profitable part of their business. So even though Sears went bankrupt, went bankrupt. When they went bankrupt and all their sort of numbers got opened up, I went and looked through them. And this was one of the best business units in Sears, is one of the only profitable ones they had, was this appliance repair business. And so they had tens of thousands of repair people across the country distributed, ready to come fix your washer, your dryer, whatever. And so I invested in this company called Nana because Nana was basically the modern-day version of that fleet, which was great because Sears was going under, so it's even better timing. And so what they were doing is on one side, they're like Lambda School. They train you so that in one month you can learn repair one appliance, and you can go fix dryers now. And the next month, they can teach you to repair fridges. And so you, from month one, you can start making money. And so they, they train people, and they're like, hey, look, the average repair person on our service makes between $75,000 to $150,000 a year, depending on how many hours you want to work, how many jobs you want to accept. And so for most people, that's like pretty fucking great, especially because you control your own schedule. So on one side, they're like Lambda School, and on the other side, they went to all the manufacturers and warranty companies that that guarantee that your dryer won't break, and if it breaks, that you call them, and then they dispatch a nana to your house to go fix your stuff within an hour. It's like Uber. And so it's kind of an amazing business, and I think it's going to be big.
How's it going?
Uh, it's going pretty well. They just raised more money. So I invested in kind of the seed round. Uh, they just raised more money. Um, it's one of those businesses that's hard because all these— they're really valuable because it's a marketplace. Marketplaces are valuable. They're even even more valuable because they're a local marketplace. So like, the fact that they, they're crushing it in, let's say, the Bay Area doesn't help them in Austin, um, because they have to build the whole fleet in Austin and build the, like, um, uh, like build that whole thing up. So it takes time to build. It's like OpenTable. It's one of these things where market by market you have to go win. Um, but when they win, it's going to be almost impossible to displace them. And so they're winning in a few markets that they're in now, and their, their focus right now is on quality because they got some advice from— I probably can't say his name, but like one of the most famous investors in the world who was basically like, look, I know more about marketplaces than anybody. I've invested in all the big ones you've heard about. And, um, don't rush to grow. Like, nail quality. Like, um, get your NPS score high and make sure that you're like, kind of like your error rate, meaning like jobs that didn't get completed with a happy customer, um, get that down to this, this number. Then you will know you're ready to grow and then turn on the gas. And so they were like, okay, great, we're gonna do that. That.
I, um, I'm— have this business interests me. I have their, um, their Crunchbase up and I'm trying to figure out who that investor is that said that. And based off their Crunchbase, I cannot guess who it is.
That investor is not currently in the company yet. Um, they were like, do this and then we will back up the Brinks truck.
Nice. I, uh, I have no idea who you're talking about then. I, uh, But I was trying to—
I'll tell you afterwards.
Um, yeah, I think this company is probably going to kill it. Is this guy, uh, did you— where's this guy from, David? Do you say he's from Israel?
Yeah, so his story is actually even better. So he, um, in Israel he owned like a jeans shop, like it's like a fashion store or something like that. Um, and then he came to the US, he came to Silicon Valley, and he was interested in technology. And he was like, all right, my family was just like, we owned shops, but like, I can see that the internet's the way to go. I'm going to go to Silicon Valley. And then when he was here, he had some debt that he needed to pay off, I think student debt or something like that. I think he said his housemate was a repair person, and his housemate was like, "Yeah, I made like $20K this month." He's like, "$20K? Holy shit, how'd you make that?" He's like, "Yeah, I repair appliances." And so he was like, "Shit, I got to learn that." So he shadowed him, I think, learned how to repair appliances. Over the next 4 years, he built a Bay Area appliance repair thing called The Appliance Doctor.
And he was doing 4 million— The Appliance Repair Doctor.
Doctor, something like that. Yeah, and he was doing $4 million, I think, at its peak, um, and paid off all his loans. And he had like a fleet of like 10 other people he trained up to do what he was doing. And so he was like killing it in the Bay Area. And then he was like, all right, I know what this is like. I, I trained myself and now I run this business as a kind of independent operator. I'm going to build the marketplace, I'm going to build the platform that makes this like, you know, like a tech company. And then he went down that path.
Well, I was looking this guy's up on his LinkedIn and it said like Israeli, uh, Air Force, and, uh, I saw that repair appliance thing. I was like, yeah, this guy's gonna do it. He'll, he'll— this guy's— this guy is at least gonna be, uh, very successful, perhaps wildly successful, right?
Uh, yeah, I got that same impression.
Um, I just like looked at his LinkedIn, looked at him, I'm like, yeah. Um, just how big is it gonna get, who knows, but worth it.
Yeah, worth a bet. Um, anything else you want to do? We got 2 minutes if you want to say one last thing.
No, we're good. I, I, I, I spit my, my stuff today.
Yeah, that's what got into you though. This list, I'm just looking at this list, there's still 5 great things on this. What got into you? How'd this happen?
I just was inspired lately. Um, I don't know, I, I, I've been You know, energy, energy ebbs and flows. I think that I, uh, I, I like to sprint for 4 weeks and then walk for 2 or 3 and then sprint again. I'm in, right? I'm sprinting right now.
Yeah, that's awesome. Um, okay, great. We're out of here.