#129 - Why Elon Musk Is the Greatest Dropshipper and A Low Key Company Making Millions From Politics

Uh-huh. Yeah.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Oh yeah. Feeling like gold. I don't wanna hide it.

All right. What up, Sam?

What's going on?

You look like you're in a phone booth or something. Where are you?

We have— so there's this office there. You could see how big it is. That's me touching it. That's me touching the other side. So I'm setting up a little, uh, studio in there.

Okay, great. Um, I don't know why I always ask you where you are to start the episode. It's probably the most boring way to start an episode.

I'm gonna be in Austin for a while.

Okay, fair enough. Uh, we have a bunch of topics because we have a bunch of things on this list, and I did prep. So I'm, I'm doing 30 minutes of prep for every podcast now. You will notice the difference. The listeners will notice the difference. I am confident of it.

OK, do you want to go first?

Yeah, pick one of these things on this list.

I'll talk about it. Let's do SpyGuy.

SpyGuy. OK, so I don't remember, have we talked about SpyGuy on the pod before?

No, but I know him, Alan.

What is guy do exactly? Can you explain to me?

He basically sells other people's products. So he sells like things like, you know, like audio surveillance, hidden cameras, bug detection, hidden camera detection, uh, stuff for your car, you know, like basically like, like let's say there's a use case. So I think there's one smart thing on the website where he says like shop by concern. So what's your concern? Is your concern workplace harassment or watching the babysitter to see if they're doing a good job with the baby or, um, tracking your car in case, or tracking somebody else's car in case you want to see where they're going? And so it's gadgets that are for, um, these, you know, like, you know, wannabe James Bond use cases, right? Like, you know, it's like having your own little Alfred and your Batman, and you get to have these little gadgets that help you do cool shit.

Do you have a security system at home?

We actually have one that I haven't set up. I just started renting this place. There's one installed and I haven't started it, but growing up I always had one.

Let me tell you about this product I just discovered because I'm thinking about getting it. It's called The name's weird. Deep Sentin— I know. Deep Sentinel.

Sentinel. Yeah.

Know that? Have you heard of this?

Yes, I heard of it. I know about it.

Jack showed it to me and what it is is, and I don't know anything about the space, so I have no idea if this is like breathtaking, but it sounds breathtaking to me. Right. Um, you pay $1,200 and then $100 a month or $20 a month. I forget the exact price and you get 3 cameras and they can be solar powered as well. So you never have to change the battery and What happens is it detects if someone is walking by and then a real-life person on the other end will check in. And if that person looks suspicious, the security guard on the other end will be like, hey, do you know someone here? Who— what's the owner's name? And if it seems more suspicious, they press a button and a loud siren goes off. And they have videos on YouTube of like, what do they call them, Amazon pirates or something?

People who steal packages.

Yeah. And like people breaking into cars. There's so many videos of the service. In play, and, uh, it looks awesome. It looks so cool. I totally want to buy one.

Yeah, so, so this space of home security is pretty crazy. So, um, so there's SimpliSafe, which I think is like one of the, I don't know, like newer players. I don't know when it started. I think maybe it started in 2010-ish, something like that. But it's valued over $1 billion now. So they've, uh, Sequoia invested in it, all this stuff. They, they do, you know, $100 million plus in revenue. And, um, Deep Sentinel, what's cool about them is the, the fact that they have a real human who monitors it for you, right? So like most of these are, you get an alert on your phone. Like I have a Ring, like, doorbell, and it's kind of like a security system in a way, right? So it tells me, oh, there's motion at your door, and then you're like, fucking, you have to open the app, and then you open it up and it's just your neighbor coming home. Like, because my, my condo, the doors are near each other, or it's like a guy delivering a package. It's like nothing unsafe. But with Deep Sentinel, they basically are leveraging a bunch of work-from-home kind of cheap labor to like watch the camera feeds and actually alert you when there's something to be alerted by. And, um, it's just like the next level up of like pro home surveillance software. And I think it's a pretty good idea. I saw, um, I saw this pretty early on because my friend James Hong, uh, I think invested in it or advises them. And I was like, that's a pretty cool model that to have an actual person doing it. Now I'm surprised they're doing home versus like business. I feel like businesses and like warehouses and factories need this almost in a bigger way than homes. And I'm sure there's a bunch of people who serve that market too that I'm just not— that's pretty great.

I think that if I was in this industry, I would be actually afraid of just knockoffs because like the electronics get cheaper and cheaper and more commoditized. It's like at this point a security camera is like an iPhone charger, right? Sometimes a lot of people will just buy whatever's the cheapest because they think they all look exactly the same, right?

I like Alan. I know I've met Alan a bunch of times, and I've been friends with him for maybe 8 years now, so I'm happy to see that goes well. Before that, he had something else before that. But, well, sorry, what?

Have you bought any of the SpyGuy stuff?

No, because I've never owned a home that— like, I've lived in buildings my whole life, right? So I've never had, you know, I've always had a doorman, so I've never really had like security issues.

Like there's like a pen that's like a voice recorder pen. You click the pen and it starts to record like just shit straight out of the movies, um, which I think is great. I love this stuff. I've— I was loving movies when this stuff exists, and I'm glad there's like an easy trusted place to buy it, uh, online. It makes sense to me.

So let me bring up somewhat of a— I have two fluffy but interesting topics. Let's go with the first one. The first one is leveraging— leverage and picking the right business model. The reason why I've been thinking about this is, so my business model is like in the middle of like great to bad, which is it's all digital, very low cost, but I do have to deliver something every single day. Yeah.

A new thing every day.

A new thing every day. A barber is like the worst business model ever. Um, because she can only make money when she's there doing this thing. Yep.

Um, and it's like the worst and can only serve people geographically, you know, within 5 blocks of you. Right. So you're limited by geography because you have to be there.

Yeah. And then I was thinking, I'm like, man, it's kind of crazy. I never, I didn't think, I did not think about this when I was getting into my business of like, what's the best way to do it. Now, the interesting part is that that's important because you can think about what are your skills and what do you want to do, but you have to package it in a really good business model. So like perhaps a business model better than mine is NerdWallet, which is The, maybe I don't know this for sure, but in my case, I liked content and I liked finance content. Maybe their founders did as well. And they chose this business model of just ranking high on Google. And once you rank high in Google, it's hard to do and you have to work hard to maintain it. But yet that webpage, nerdwallet.com best credit cards makes money forever, right? While you sleep, you don't have to do anything. You can take the day off and it just keeps on going. So that's pretty good. But then what's even better than that is Credit Karma, which is they probably cared about personal finance or finance. They made a little widget where you could check your credit score and monitor on a regular basis. And it just so happens you could also get a new credit card and they make money when they sleep. Um, and the reason why this is important is because you, like, we all are going to work 60 hours a week to get our thing up in the air and to get it and have it running. Like everyone, like like everyone thinks that like big problems or big companies are probably harder than small companies. And the truth is, is that that is kind of true. Like once you get it going, you could choose to work 25 hours a week instead of 80 hours a week. That's definitely true. But when you're just in the phase of getting shit started, you're going to work constantly no matter what. It doesn't matter if it's a hot dog stand or if it's a Facebook, you know what I mean? Like you're working really hard and I just think it's so important to package it in the right business model because your life will be so much better.

I think about this all the time. I've been thinking about this for a long time. If you remember when you first started The Hustle, I was like, I, I thought you were great. I was like, this dude Sam is amazing, he's like a firecracker, he's gonna, he's gonna make shit happen. And then I remember going to your office and hearing the business plan. I was just like, I don't like media businesses because of this, right? I think they're sort of low leverage in a way, right? They're medium, right? Like, at least you're a digital media business, not like a, um, you know, some kind of like, like at that time HustleCon was an events business, so that was like pretty bad. And if you remember, like, they're one of the original plans that you were kicking around was like, we're going to We use content to drive people to our events, and like, the events business can be big. And like, I remember thinking, oh, events, that's pretty low leverage because you got to recreate the event every time, takes a bunch of people, it's restricted by where you're at, uh, geographically, so that's bad. Then even content, I'm like, man, that's kind of like a content treadmill, and it's just you have to constantly— every, every day, every week, you have to remake the product, right? You have to make a new piece of content that's going to get people excited. That seems really hard to do.. And so I was like, I think this guy's probably going to succeed, but I don't think it's going to be a humongous investment because compared to software where software is amazing, right? Build it once, sell it a million times, build it here, sell it everywhere. Right? Like those two things are superpowers compared to what you do and what I'm doing right now.

Like, I think you were going to reference like, let's say, yeah, I was going to say, I was like, you're understanding it now where you're like, oh man, I could, it's easy to make money. If doing, making the money off of this project is easy. Yes. Maintaining it is hard. But I would say that like with software, I, I'm a very small-time owner in a software business and I've like seen on the inside, like there is customer support. Like anytime someone's giving you money for something, you have to fulfill the promise. So you have to maintain it, right? Yes. So it's definitely not as easy as build it once, like, but it is build it once, sell it a million times.

So for example, uh, like I've now experienced 4 different models, right? I started a restaurant. Um, I did, uh, maybe 5. I did an energy company. I did a software I've done an e-com business, and now I've done a content business, right? And they're all of different levels. So let's, let's walk through 'em real quick. So, uh, right now I'm doing this content thing, uh, basically a paid newsletter, uh, called the All Access Pass, where I'm basically like every day I'm creating a new piece of content, a new daily blog post about teaching people how to execute, how to build, how to build a business, how to launch a business, business from scratch. And so every day I gotta remake the product, which sucks, but then I deliver it for free over the internet. So that's good. That's better than something like a physical textbook or something like that. And, and your startup costs were literally zero. My startup cost was zero, and that thing's doing great. So like, that thing is on pace to do like half a million bucks in a year. So the, the, uh, revenue is good and the margins are great, but the effort is really high. And I'll never be able to just say, well, I did the hard work of setting it up and now I could set it and forget it. It's like, no, people are literally paying for me and to sit down every day and do the thing. And even if it's an hour a day, that's still an hour a day of commitment I have to do and be creative and be good during, during that thing. And so that's, uh, that's challenging. So media business, I'm like, okay, uh, hard. And content, content, content, hard game there.

But you're not doing a normal media business. Like, like, it's like the guy who owns New York Times isn't like, this is hard. He's like, this is easy, I got people doing all the work for me.

But the good news is, is that you can build a huge e-com business with like very little people. Like, if you explain— if you told me there was a company that was doing $100 million in sales with 20 people, I'd be like, yeah, I mean, that's not crazy.

Yeah, that's not crazy. But those— but the, the labor— the leverage there is, is, uh, capital. So that business that's doing $100 million a year is probably spending $30 million a year in marketing $30 to $40 million a year on cost of goods sold and is probably making $20 million on the $100, uh, if that, maybe $15.

Um, yes, and the bad part is that they're probably not actually making that cash flow though, and they have zero money in their bank account.

That's a really good insight. I think that's phenomenal.

Who is that?

Uh, my friend Vishal, Vishal Harpalani.

Is that the younger guy?

He's the young guy, yeah.

Um, that's cool. That's a really good, good idea.

And I never heard anybody say that. I never heard anybody say, I look for zero product market fit risk. In fact, I always just— the style of entrepreneurship I did was always product market fit risk, right? Like, I'm gonna do a thing, I don't know if people will want it, but like, let's try it and see. And it's kind of interesting to take the opposite approach of like, what is an absolute yes, they will buy? Like, he invests in this PizzaBot company, same thing. It's like, he's just trying to— their company's trying to sell pizza, pizza making machines to Domino's to say like, yo, replace your 4 employees with this, this some, you know, conveyor belt that like makes pizzas precisely, automatically, 24/7, like at lower cost than your humans. And like, if they can do that, if they can just like technically pull that off, they're for sure a billion-dollar company because they can license that tech to everybody.

So that's actually a common thread that I've seen amongst the people I look up to. So John Rockefeller, he sold, um, oil. Originally it was for kerosene, and there was no doubt of of what people want this oil. He was just like, can I actually get it to them and do it affordably? Right. And, and then, um, Cornelius Vanderbilt, he was like, I need to get people from Staten Island to New York City.

Okay.

Now I need to get them from New York City to Nicaragua. Like there's people who want to do that, but like, literally, can I pull that off? Like I might have to build this crazy ship, but let's see if I can pull it off. But like there's demand for sure. Uh, another one is Andrew Carnegie. Um, it was like, can I make steel for cheaper than the other people? Like, is it physically possible? And that's when they came— they— that's when the idea of steel was— everyone was making iron. He was like, what if I made steel just as good as iron? That's way cheaper. So like, it's like a pretty— that's like, I guess you could almost say the same is the same for Amazon and Walmart. It's like, so, so for— we know everyone wants this, but can we actually pull it off?

I think this is a fantastic conversation and it leads nicely into the next point, which is I read a, I read a stat recently. So like I was having a little existential crisis yesterday. Like I normally have not existential crisis, but like I need to do something meaningful.

My daily questioning of life.

Yeah. Like that everyone has all the time. Um, and I was, cause I was thinking about nurses and I was like, gosh, these people are doing COVID. Like they're really the heroes, not me. Who— well, no one thinks I'm a hero, but like, uh, like, like, uh, you know what I mean? I'm like, business people aren't heroes. Like maybe some are, but anyway, um, I was thinking like, what could I do with business that actually makes an impact? And I read this crazy stat that, uh, basically the majority of things that we recycle, like that go in your blue recycling bin, like 90% of it just gets thrown away. Do you know that?

I do know that. And we did talk about this last podcast or the one before. So, so yeah, we did talk about this one already.

I just, I reread this stat. Maybe I just forgot about it where it was like 9% of plastics are recycled. I was like, that is crazy. That is crazy, crazy, crazy. That is crazy to me. Oh yeah. We talked about new plastics.

You're right. And actually somebody, somebody messaged me something after the fact. They go, hey, check this out. And they sent me something that is what they called negative carbon, uh, manufacturing, meaning the process to make the thing is not just carbon neutral, is, uh, you know, a negative— it actually sucks more carbon out of the atmosphere than it took to make the thing. And, um, you know, I understood like 10% of what the person was telling me, but it was like, yeah, these are materials that are like, um, it's called air carbon, I think. So let me see. Okay, so if you go to, um, the website is covalentfashion.com and Basically, it's glasses, phone cases, purses, and it's made with what they call AirCarbon, which is a new material that is a breakthrough that is better than plastic and good for the environment and all that good stuff. I don't know if this is legit. I don't know much about this, but I thought it was cool. I hope people send me a million things like this because anybody who's actually innovating on the material side of what we use for plastics, cardboards, foils, all that crap, Tape, you know, like there's just an absurd amount of this stuff that's used and wasted and it's killing the environment. And if somebody can actually make something that is better and cheaper, you have zero product market fit risk, I believe, if you're better and cheaper.

I like that. Um, then if we already talked about it, we could skip. Want to go to Parler? That's interesting.

Yeah. Have you seen this app?

That's something kind of similar to that if you guys want to talk about it.

But yes.

Yeah. What is it?

Uh, I put a link in. It's called, uh, tradewater.us. Do you guys know about what cap and trade is?

Cap and trade? No. What is that?

And they get the credits for destroying it, and then they sell the credits.

They sell it on a marketplace, and that's the company. I think they do several million a year in revenue, 30 employees. And funny thing is, like, on Facebook, they'll advertise as a different company, so they have two websites, because some folks won't sell it to them if they show up and say that they're going to destroy it. Destroy it. They're like, nah, nah, nah, it's all conspiracy. Global warming is not real. So they really, they have to have two names. So that's their, that's what the company's actually called. And then on Facebook, they advertise as refrigeratorfinders.com and they don't mention that they're going to, they don't mention that they're going to destroy it on that website.

Abreu, your audio sucks right now, but your content is fire. I love it. This is great.

Are you sick, Abreu?

Uh, yeah, my throat's kind of bad. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so this is fucking great. I also have been wanting to go deeper on the carbon credit marketplaces because we've talked before about how beautiful of a model marketplaces are. This is when you pair high-impact, mission-oriented stuff with beautiful business model and large market size, because so many large companies need to offset their footprint, especially as regulation changes. I think that that's a very interesting space that I feel like I just don't know enough about, but I want to know more.

Yeah, I, I don't know anything about this, but I think it's— I'm shocked this even exists, to be honest with you. Very cool.

When I remember, I'm like, this is amazing, I have to share it.

Well, don't you remember when we talked about like the, the carbon credit cards?

Right, that's right.

Um, which was like it— anyway, it tracks all that. It's, it's, it's intriguing. Do you want to— what is a Elon dropshipping.

Okay, let's do, uh, so Elon dropshipping. So you saw Elon Musk came out with this, um, tequila recently. Have you seen this?

Yeah, I got shit on because I tweeted a bunch of fake news about it.

What did you tweet about it?

I— someone like did this analysis about how Ferrari has a massive chunk of their revenue coming from merchandise, and I— and he was wrong. It wasn't the same. It wasn't He said it was like 70%. I think it's really like 30%. And I tweeted that people got— that's when that kid got pissed. He goes, I'm never investing in Sean's, right?

We do sell some stuff. The reason we haven't is we just haven't had the ability to set up— I mean, I guess this is kind of a shit excuse, but it's like when you're a small company, it's actually hard to like do all this. When you're Elon, it's a little bit easier. You could, you could just be like like, oh, you tech people, just go and do it. Uh, but I, I do agree with you. Do you want to know my favorite example of this? Go ahead. Kingford Charcoal. You know what Kingford Charcoal is?

That's right. Yeah, I'm familiar with it.

I love it. And that's, I think, a big business of its own, right?

Yeah, multi-billion-dollar company. And I bet you that there's a ton of these types of things out there. I love these types of things where you use the waste. I mean, that's what oil ultimately is, right? With oil, you just use every little bit of it. You make kerosene, you make crude oil. I don't know anything about oil, but you know what I mean. That's how the refinery works.

Let's go through 2 more of these. I like— tell me— I don't know what Fear Nation is. Which one do you want to pick?

Skip Fear Nation. Let's do Parler. I noticed this app the other day during the election. I looked at the App Store, and I like to keep track of the app charts just to see what's trending and what whatnot. And the number one app in the US free store, which is almost always just like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, like, you know, one of these, one of these apps, um, was something called Parler. And I never heard of Parler, so I was like, what the hell is this? And, um, Parler is a social network. It's basically Twitter/Facebook, um, but it's like the whole thing is like it's anti-censorship. So it's like a whole bunch of people on the right wing in the US, the conservatives, the Trump supporters basically, who who are really upset about Facebook and Twitter for censoring things. Like, you know, the other day I tweeted this ridiculous thing out where Donald Trump put up a photo on Instagram that just said, "Happy Diwali," which is like this Indian holiday. It's just Donald Trump like just wishing happy holiday to somebody. And then underneath, Instagram had this like big banner under his photo that's not under any other photo that just said, "Joe Biden is the president-elect in 2020." It's like, what? Why are you fucking with this guy's photo about something completely— He's not saying, I am the president-elect and this is like fact-checking. He just said happy Diwali and this thing like auto-slapped this on his photo. And I looked at the comments and people were like fucking irate, as they should be. Like, this is like a stupid thing that the platform would do that would just show its, you know, quote unquote bias. It's biased towards liberals, left, whatever. That's the belief of Trump supporters. So Parler is this mysterious app. Nobody really knows who's backing it.

Wait, no, that's not true. I saw the kid today. It's a young guy. Parler app. No, no, no, they know who it is.

It's, um, no, they know who the CEO is and they know two of the investors, but they don't know who's the main investor because the people who they say are investors are these celebrity kind of like well-known people, but they're not like big investors.

Uh, I think I read it's Mercer. It's, it's basically Mercer is, uh, uh, what's his name? What's the Simmons guy? Jay Simmons?

Uh, I'm not sure.

Uh, anyway, the guy who started, um, Renaissance, the hedge fund, the big shot hedge fund, uh, Simmons and his partner Mercer or something. They also today, yeah, they backed, uh, Breitbart. So they actually own Breitbart.com. Um, I don't know if they own it or they, they're the main, I don't know how the structure is, but they're basically, they basically own it. And the, it was a dad, is his name Robert something?

Robert Mercer is the one from Rebecca. And Rebecca is, I think, his daughter. His daughter.

Yeah, yeah. So they fund all that stuff. And so I think they're the guys. James Simmons. It was James Simmons, the one who— the book, you know, he just had the famous book come out, um, The Man Who Beat the Market or something, right?

About— it's about the Renaissance, uh, yeah.

Well, his partner is Mercer, and Mercer started Breitbart and now, uh, uh, is the guy behind this, I think.

Right. This came out, I think, today, the article broke. Monday, November 16th. Basically, for the last 2 weeks, this thing has been #1 in the charts. I tweeted something about this, which was just like, "Holy shit, look at this. The #1 app in the charts is because a whole bunch of people are basically saying, 'I want to leave Twitter, I want to leave Facebook, and I want to be on a different social platform.'" This is hundreds of thousands of downloads per day, easily. Half a million easily per day to be at that spot in the charts. Charts. And, um, so I thought that was kind of interesting, and nobody was really covering it at the time. Nobody knew who was backing it, and it kind of just been this app with no traction for 3 years, and then all of a sudden went crazy. And so I tweeted about this thing, and it's my most popular tweet of all time because this guy Dan Boingo, who I guess is like a podcaster, conservative podcaster, like, um, type of dude, he retweeted my tweet about it. And so this tweet has like 7,500 likes, been shared over 2,000 times,, of me just screenshotting that chart and being like, look at this, like, app that's number one. It's basically a giant middle finger to Twitter and Facebook saying people want to, want to go try something else. And so I thought it was pretty interesting.

I think this is going to be huge. It's already huge.

The app has been down. So like during the election that week, most of the comments in reply to my tweet were just like, oh, I can't log in. Like, the app got so slammed with like, you know, whatever, hundreds of thousands of users and within, you know, within a couple of hours. That you couldn't even log in. The app kind of sucks. But I think that there is demand for an alternative network that is not owned by Silicon Valley. Crypto often promises projects like this that are like, "Oh, decentralized, anti-censorship." There's been a whole bunch of, like, Reddit but not owned by Reddit, and Twitter but not owned by Twitter, like Mastodon or Steemit. Most people haven't heard of these, but if you're in the crypto world, um, these were kind of popular projects because people thought, oh, would people want to use a social network that's not owned by Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey? And, um, they never really took off. But I think some of these things are about timing, and, uh, when you get enough angry people who leave and want something else, um, that can kickstart a new place. Although I will say, I think this is really bad for the, for, you know, the country in general if, like, basically people just split and you just— I'll be in my echo chamber and you'll be in your echo chamber, and, like, we just hate each from our own silos, I think that's probably bad in the end.

Um, okay, so if you go to FAQs, it says they take a 3.5% fee and then they charge you a 1.5%, uh, like fee that they give to a MasterCard or Stripe or whoever gets it. It's shocking, this website. And I, if you— I saw that, like, I guess their services is they buy— like, they go to Breitbart or whoever, or Donald Trump's like, hey, I need to raise money, and he goes, okay, I'll— we'll raise money for you, but it's gonna cost you like $30 grand in media buys, and we'll go buy it for you. We'll also even write the copywriting for you and on the website and do everything. And we're going to take a 3% fee for this, by the way, as well. And that's probably how they do this, run this business. And like, I don't care if you think it's unethical or not, it's incredibly interesting.

3% off of the Trump name.

It's crazy. This website's crazy. Like, I, you, you just look at one of their ads and you're like, oh, these guys are like experts. And there's a reason why Donald Trump, I mean, his digital media or his digital strategy is the most sophisticated of all, uh, of all the other candidates. I mean, um, that in itself doesn't matter because, you know, he lost. But, uh, these conservatives, man, they're like the most hardcore effective marketers I've ever seen.

Yeah, it looks like they also have like a kind of like an affiliate model where you create a team page and then they teach you how to promote your team page to like rally up your own little support, uh, in your like local community as well, which is, which is pretty interesting.

It's such a fascinating thing.

Yeah. All right, what else we got?

Oh, here, look, by the way, check this out. Let me show you this. The listeners, I'm showing Sean this email. It says, donaldjtrump.com, this is who this message is from, the election is far from over.

Let me just point out a couple things here. First, the subject line is, we're not done 'Yet.' Period. Or no, 'We're not done.' Period. And then, 'Special message from Donald Trump' is the header. And then it says, 'The election is far from over.' It's red with a yellow highlight, underlined, which is like— I love looking at these because they just break all the cute design patterns of Silicon Valley, and it's like, 'No.' But you know they're way more effective. Hyper-effective copywriting and design that is— it's in size 40 font for anyone to be able to read, with big bright photos and colors.

And then check this out. So how does this work? Please contribute any amount right now to help defend the election and to increase your impact by 1,000%. I don't know what that means, but they're saying if you contribute $100, that means you're impacting it 1,000. You know what I mean? That's weird, right?

What the hell is that? Yeah. What the hell does that mean?

So check this out. And then you go to their landing page and look, this is WinRed. It's, it's all And like, you already know that they've just, uh, tested the shit out of this.

Oh my God, there's literally, there's literally jiggling buttons that are like dancing, trying to get you to push them. Like these blue buttons that are like shaking, uh, with a giant picture of Donald Trump. It's like, wow, this thing is like optimized for conversion. If you're like, why does my website not convert? You should go through this flow and then you should steal half these paradigms, half these design patterns for your, for your own, uh, product if you want to see that, what the maximum could be.

This opt-in that was opted in automatically, it's a weekly recurring donation. So they ask you— so I click something, they try to upsell me to get me to, uh, uh, donate $50, and then it automatically checks a box that says make this recurring until 12/14. And then we need your help to ensure that we do this. We can't allow the left-wing mob to undermine our election. Donate an additional $50 automatically on 11/19.

Right. Auto-checked and hidden under this like giant paragraph of like propaganda, uh, telling you to, to auto, auto-renew.

Crazy, right? Yeah, is this nuts? You— this is just absolutely insane. And let's look at the traffic of this. So like tens of millions of people are coming here.

Brother, you're just describing Groupon.

Well, it is Groupon, but it's not, because for Groupon, you're not incentivized to go tell your friends about this.

You were.

It had to tip at the beginning. Is that how they did it, that you had to— you had to invite?

It had to— well, it had to tip. I threshold—

see, I think basically Groupon was, oh, this is so cheap, I'm going to tell my friends because this is a cheap deal. Whereas this is like, you can't get the cheap deal unless you invite your friends and create a group. And I think somebody creating that today on top of one of the texting platforms, either WhatsApp or Messenger, that's gonna work. Like, this, this model is gonna work. It— Groupon's like 10 years old now, right? More than 10 years.

Yeah. By the way, everyone, like, everyone forgets about them. They still make like $2 billion a year. Um, the— you know who tried to do this and failed miserably was, um, James Bechara. What company? Uh, CrowdTilt.

But, but this wasn't— this wasn't group buying. This was— that was group, um, Uh, fundraising. That was like, hey, we want to buy a keg for our dorm, everybody needs to pitch in. Oh man, it's a hassle for everybody to like Venmo and I have to front the money first. Let's all put it in a piggy bank first. So it didn't make it cheaper. It didn't make it cheaper, which is different.

What I noticed in trends is people are always saying, I want to buy this $1,000 software or this $1,000 course, does anyone want to team up? That happens all the time in trends. Um, I, yeah, I hear you, but how is it not like illegal or against the terms of service for a lot of services to do that?

Well, if you're trying to do it where, hey, we're going to sign up for Trends as a group and we'll just share and share the content illegally, that's against the TOS. But in this case, it's basically saying, like, for example, with, with group delivery— or sorry, group buying of vegetables, um, it's not— it's, it's cheaper because A, they don't have to spend any money on marketing marketing. So all those marketing— all the marketing budget basically drops to— drops down to the bottom line, um, or drops down to, you know, drops the price for the customer. And, um, the second thing is that you— when you make a buying group of people within your, like, kind of apartment complex or your, your neighborhood, um, now they could just do, like, a batch delivery for all of you guys to, like, one central location. And so, um, you know, they're able to, to make— to get, like, economies of scale, right? Because they're delivering the same thing to the same place. So it works with a physical product in that way that won't work as well with like a digital product where a digital product, you know, the cost of goods sold is zero anyways.

Um, so what do you think this would work for? So I think somebody—

I think it'll work for something like food delivery, like, uh, like what these guys are doing in India. I think that could work there. I think it can also work in other markets as well. I don't think there's— there's nothing just about India about this. Um, the other one that I've mentioned before that I don't know if this is a good idea or bad idea is like creating this as a Shopify app so that, um, when somebody's on Shopify, basically they're on your store, you can basically say, hey, you can get this product for less if you buy this with 2 friends. If 2 friends also buy, you guys can all get this for cheaper. And you turn your customers into your referrals, um, referring agents to, to, to go get you more customers.

There's a store in Nashville where I used to live, and on Broadway, that's like the honky-tonk where like all the tourists go, and there's Their whole logo and shtick is buy one boot, get two free. Sorry, like buy one pair, get two pair free. Okay. And they do that because they always know that people are in groups of twos or threes and they're like, well, one pair is only $300. They're only like a $40 pair of boot. I mean, they're shit boots. Like, wait, if I buy one, I get two extras. That's crazy. That's like a great deal. It works so well that everyone in Nashville copied them to where it's buy one, get two pair free. And that totally works. It totally works.

Yes, and it works wonderfully. And I don't know why it, it, it does it. Oh, the name of the The name of the store, I just looked it up, is called Two Free Boots.

They're like, fuck it, we're all in on this.

They went all in on it. They went all in on it. It's called twofreeboots.com. That's their whole shit. So they're taking this whole group buying thing to the max. It's pretty crazy. It works so well. I remember like there's always a line and they stay open late at night so all the drunk girls get stuff from there. It works wonderfully.

Yeah, I feel like somebody could bring this online because that domain would be pretty catchy and available for different products to basically go all in on the deal.

I agree with you. I think it's a good idea. There's something interesting here.

Yeah. All right, we hit the hour. Let us know what you think of this episode. Leave a review. We just added this little bot in Slack that will will post our reviews in front of our face so we don't have to remember to check.

The whole team will see it.

So the whole team sees it.

Yeah, if you hit a review, everyone's gonna see it.

Exactly. Um, by the way, if you, if you are, uh, like whatever project you're working on, invest in a little Slack bot that will put front and center like every purchase and every review that you get from your customers. It's so much better than going and checking a dashboard, uh, like just getting a little, a little ping, a little message in your, in your Slack channel. It's like, I think that's probably my favorite feature of Slack.

Yeah, but it gets addicting.

Yeah, I know. I like to be addicted to my customers. I think that's the healthy addiction for business.

All right, well, thank you everyone, and we will talk to you soon.

All right, see ya.