#157 - Instagram Food Drops Making $200k a Week, Chrome Extensions That are Crushing It & Open Salaries
It's insane. This whole guy— this guy's life is insane is what I could see from this. I mean, this guy's— his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.
That's what— yeah, I want the HGH drop.
Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. You look fantastic. You upgraded.
Uh, I'm currently recording. I wish I could turn the camera around, but I don't want to screw it up. But I'm sitting at my friend Jack's house in Hawaii where I'm having a week vacation.
Congratulations, well deserved.
Uh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's cool. Uh, just got here, but, uh, gonna be here for maybe 5 days, but it's all right. How's, uh, things going with you?
Yeah, things are good. Did you see, um, this thing that the— these guys who tweeted at us that were like, dude, we will pimp out your, your stream? Did you watch these videos that they made?
No, I've been flying, but They said that they booked a ticket to Austin. Are they actually going to our— to my house?
I don't know if they— I don't think— no, no, they're, they're waiting for us to be like yes or no. But, uh, these guys applied very intelligently. I gotta give them credit. So basically they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff and they were like, we'll do this for you. We'll make it no hassle. I'll come to you. I will hook it up. And a few people tweeted, tweeted something like that at us. And you were like kind of, you know, humoring it, I guess. And then these 3 guys are kind of like, I think they're like college seniors or something like that. I don't really know, didn't look too far into it, but they sent us a video. They go, watch, here's what we're gonna do. And they recorded a video and it looks like a Casey Neistat video, like the quality is like that and the editing style and storytelling is like that. It's a funny video. It was basically telling us how to pimp, how they would pimp out our stream And they kept calling it like, you know, My First Million to the Moon. And they're like, we're gonna take this baby to the moon. Here's how we're gonna do it. And so they did two things. He showed how his camera setup, how they do it for their podcast. And it looks awesome, looks way better than ours. And then also he's, then the next day he sent us an edited clip of you telling the story of bumping into the Silk Road founder at a party and he like stole your girl or whatever. And they edited like a little clip and they're like, dude, we'll pump out clips like these all the time. My First Million to the Moon, baby. And— Are they good? They're good. They're really good. Both videos are really good.
Where, first of all, let's hire them. And second, where did they send this to on Twitter? I've been flying since Saturday.
It's on Twitter. I sent you a link because I was like, dude, fuck yes. This is like, this is, you know, like, it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally you get a job, you put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do X, and then some people apply and then you're like, you kind of squinting, you're like, do I think this person's really going to be able to do it? And then you make a guess, and then it takes them fucking 6 weeks to ramp up. And then, or, or this guy just applies showing, look, I can do it, I've done it for myself, I'll do it for you, and, uh, let me make this easy for you, let me show you how bad I want this. And I just thought like, this is so much better than, than what we've been talking about of trying to find people to do this stuff.
I'm looking at his— okay, cool. His name is Dylan Jardyn, weird last name. I keep— because I want to say Jordan. Uh, yeah, Dylan, if you're listening to this, let's do it.
I'm in. Um, and you know, I don't know, there's probably people at The Hustle who have similar jobs, but I think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like, the gig is yours to like pimp out our— the video side of our podcast. I think we should get— we should give them the shot.
All right, I'm in. Cool.
Um, all right, we have a bunch of topics we wanted to talk about. Where do you want to start? You want to start with this open salary thing?
No, let's start with food because I've— was this yours? Yeah, I've thought about this for years. So I have a lot of— I've got, I've got something boiling up. So you want to—
let me intro this. All right, so I'm talking to Ben, my right-hand man Ben, and Ben's kind of like, uh, you know, I'm easily excitable. You could tell by the way I talk. Ben is the opposite. He's chill mode. He's always relaxed. And, um, but when Ben mentions things, I've learned, like, when he says something, it's just like, like, oh, this is cool, you should check this out. It's actually fucking amazing. And he just doesn't say, hey dude, He doesn't like shake you and say, look at this, this is amazing. And so he showed me this thing that is amazing. So he goes, check out this website, uh, or this Instagram handle, My Cookie Dealer. I was like, My Cookie Dealer? So I go to it.
You should click. Oh my God, I'm looking at it now. I want to eat this, dude.
So, all right, so, so he sent me 3 Instagram accounts. He sent me My Cookie Dealer, click the second one, 1900 Ice Cream. So like 1-800, but 1900 Ice Cream. 1-900 Ice Cream looks so good. Just like describe what you're seeing.
It's incredible. Is it a pie? I don't know what this is exactly, like what you would call it, but it's a, it's a cone. What it—
I don't know what shape it is. It looks like, it looks like there's a stick. So like at the top of the stick where you would have like a popsicle, instead it's like a full ice cream concoction, which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever. It looks amazing. You should, if you have Instagram, go to, go to 1-900 Ice Cream.
There's one called the Cupcake Wonderland, which is vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, strawberry marshmallow icing.
Oh God, they call themselves— they call themselves the Ice Cream Thirst Trap Thicc Check trademark. And they have a bunch of followers. They've grown really quickly, 26,000 followers. So Ben was sending me these and I was like, okay, cool food account on Instagram. That's not too new. What do I care about this food porn? He's like, no, no, no, dude, I've been trying to send you one of these And I've been trying to like get these myself. They do weekly drops of their stuff and these are selling out instantaneously. So I go, what do you mean? So he showed me My Cookie Dealer. So My Cookie Dealer does a drop, a cookie drop every week. They do a random cookie drop, so a different flavor or whatever, and it sells out within literally seconds. And they're doing $200,000 a week. They're doing $10 million a year dropping cookies on Instagram and just instantly selling out. And then they ship them, you know, a few days later. They know how many orders they get., and then they ship them out a few days later, um, kind of like, you know, nationwide or whatever. And, uh, there's another one, Ali's Banana Bread. Go look at this banana bread, dude. Just look at this banana bread. I want to print this banana bread out and just lick the paper. It looks so good. And same thing, sells out.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, dude, check, check this out. So if you go to, uh, mycookiedealer.com, that's the website. Okay, click, click Instagram page. Are you on their Instagram? And tell me when you're on their Instagram page.
I'm on it.
Okay, you see, go scroll up to their profile and you see who— where it says like the owner is this guy named Juan Diesel Morel.
Who's that?
Click it.
Oh dude, he's like a bodybuilder.
This guy is huge. This guy is so big.
He looks like if you've ever seen an ESPN or whatever bodybuilding competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is, and he's just humongous.
Well, I know, I, I can't tell if it's like the tan— I think it's a black guy. Is he like—
he's so dark. I think it's a white guy, you know, they all like the white guy, the black tan for bodybuilding.
Well, and then look at his wife.
It's insane. This whole guy— this guy's life is insane is what I can see from this. I mean, this guy's— his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.
That's what— yeah, I want the HGH drop. This is awesome, man. This is cool. Okay, so Ali's banana bread.
So Ali's banana bread. So there's a bunch of these. So Ben is like knee-deep in this world of like Instagram food brands that are basically, they're kind of like dropshipping baked goods all around the country. So they have them for cakes, ice creams, banana breads, and they're just specialists. And so there's a couple of cool things that I wanted to bring up about this. And I know you have some stuff on food too, but the part that I thought was cool is, so the internet is, the internet is really good at doing this, which is normal before the internet. You would just go to whatever's like your local whatever. So you'd find the best within your local radius of 5 to 10 miles or whatever it is. That's what you would go buy. But with the internet, whether it's news or comedy or whatever, um, the best thing can just get distributed everywhere. And so the best brand wins on the internet. And so this is why you see things get so big, you know, like Facebook and other platforms, because the best, the best thing will get all the users. And it's— what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food. So if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies or best ice cream, they don't need a physical shop. They could just, through Instagram alone, spending $0 on marketing, have customers worldwide. Like, Ali's Banana Bread literally ships worldwide. And so if you're the best at making something now, you have a pathway to become like a multimillionaire, where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local baker in whatever, in Cincinnati. You know, you were always restricted by however many customers you could get in your local radius. So I thought that's pretty cool. The second thing is, if you think about this, you know, this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while. So we've been talking about cloud kitchens. So these are essentially like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries. They don't have like a physical storefront necessarily. They're all in the cloud and you just order online. The second thing is direct-to-consumer. So they're going direct to their fans, they're getting their fans' phone numbers, And so that when they do a drop, they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people buy. And I think that's kind of like amazing, a way to go to direct-to-consumer. You don't have to worry about getting on the shelf at Whole Foods or wherever else to build your brand as a cookie company or whatever.
And go ahead. No, keep going.
Last one is, if you think about it, like, you know, who's gonna be the next Mrs. Fields or Ben Jerry's or like Auntie Annie's Pretzels? It's going to be one of these brands. It's going to be one of these cloud bakeries doing it on Instagram, building a cult following like these guys are doing. And, um, and you're going to see, I predict you're going to see just like, um, I forgot what was the name of that meme company that sold for like $100 million. They had like, they were the ones behind, um, Daquan and whatever, like the couple of the meme Instagram accounts.
Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was about 8 months ago, maybe.
Yeah, we talked about it on the pod.
It's like, I'm sure you will pull it up. This is like, what is it? You see it's right there. You see it?
I can't read it. I am GM Media. So, so basically, you know, some brand that just owned a bunch of like meme accounts on Instagram sold for like $100 million, I think, if I remember correctly. You're going to see the same thing in the food space. You're going to see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they're going to buy up, you know, Ali's Banana Bread. They're going to buy up One-Nine-Hundred Ice Cream because they're going to be like, Dude, this is the next Ben Jerry's. And we're gonna take this thing, we're gonna put it on steroids, we're gonna advertise the fuck out of it, and then we're gonna get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing. And so I think you're gonna see a bunch of these. If I could go invest in those 4 brands that we talked about right now, I would go give them each, you know, a $25K check because I think these are gonna get scooped up.
Okay. So let's break this down further. I've thought about this a ton. The reason I've thought about this a ton is I'm a media guy, right? By the way, is my mic good?
Yeah, you're good.
All right. I'm a media guy. I love content and I've studied what goes viral and why for years. And one thing that I've always been fascinated with is I've known people who have worked at Thrillist. And Thrillist, uh, it started as a food— well, they started as like things to do in New York, but one of their biggest things is food. And I remember when I started dating my wife, she was from New York City and I hadn't been there since I was— or the first time I've been there was when we started dating, 26, 27 years old.. And I went there and I would see these long, like, I would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out, where they all dress like, you know, like they dress like, right, they go to NY. Yeah, like they just dress like, for me that was like, wow, I feel like everyone looks like a movie star. Everyone was cool and hip, but you know, I don't, I don't know, Madison Square Park or Washington Square, whatever those parks, I don't know, I don't spend a lot of time there, but you know what I mean. Uh, they would have the longest lines and I'm like, what, what are all these people waiting for? And it was like the latest— Craziness. —thrillist craze that went viral. And so I would walk through Brooklyn and everything and I would see these lines. And I'm like, what is going on? And I would do research. And I kind of broke it down into a, I like, I've like studied this for a while and, or not studied is the right word, but thought about it a lot. And I basically broke it down into a handful of categories.. And what it appears, what seems like, what happens is people have a small store, a relative, like pretty like a corner store in hip parts of Brooklyn or New York where there's people who share. So like college kids mostly. And they create one or two things that Thrillist or BuzzFeed or someone, because all those companies are located in the cool parts that I'm describing in SoHo, things like that. And one of these BuzzFeed or Thrillist folks sees it. A whole bunch of college kids see it, and then it creates a line and it creates hype, and it, it becomes like a good business that lasts for 3 to 6 months, and then it kind of like goes away. And maybe like it still is a remainder, but like still is a business, but it mostly like is a hype cycle, whatever. And I was like, what is going on? And so I broke this down into a few categories, and I want to go through these categories because I agree with you. I think this is so cool, and I've tried to break this down. So First, and these are like, uh, different ways to— formulas for virality. Yeah, like formulas for food virality. Okay, the first one is make a side ingredient— so something that's normally a side ingredient— make it the main thing. So the best example of this is cookie dough. There's a lot— there's like, this is a thing I saw in New York, uh, there was a line out a door, the door for— someone sold cookie dough as if it's ice cream. So it's like sprinkled cookie dough, then like ice cream flavored cookie dough. It was like Cookie Dough's the main thing. Another one is cheese. Like, people do, uh, like fondues. They have like fondue bars, something that's— what else is a side ingredient that could be it?
I don't know if it's a side ingredient exactly, but, uh, cereal does this too. There's— there was these like viral things, was like cereal bars. All you do is it's just milk and cereal and that's it. And you can come— normally that's not a restaurant, it's a side, like, it's like literally a side dish of a side dish. And they made it the focus of the restaurant, and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to to talk about and go to.
Or an— or a whipped cream bar, like a whipped cream store, just like anything that is typically an afterthought that is a topping or a side to the main thing, make that your thing. Okay, the second one is do the— have normal foods but different colors. A few examples: rainbow bagels. Okay, crazy popular. They're hype. I mean, they're still popular, but they went through a cycle. The second one is rainbow kettle corn. That's quite popular. When I was a kid, I remember a couple times buying green ketchup. Do you remember green ketchup? Yeah, dude, I love green ketchup.
It was just red ketchup but green, right? It was literally just the color was different.
It's just the name, just a normal thing but a different color. And then the latest trend on, uh, uh, or this year on TikTok was cloud bread, which is basically, you know, everyone is baking at home now. It's just bread that's kind of blue and white and looks like a cloud, right?
And by the way, your side thing, main thing, I got another example of that. But you know, Cap'n Crunch, the Crunch Berries were always just the extra, and then they came out with Cap'n just, just the berries, just the Crunch Berries, and it was like way more popular.
Yeah, or like Lucky Charms with only the marshmallows. Yeah, exactly. So you take the thing that's supposed to be the topping. Yeah, the topping, the second, the third string thing, make it the first string thing, right? Okay, the third one, the same thing but a different side. Uh, different size. This is pretty common. So like huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door, huge sundaes. They call it like the kitchen sink, everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink. Or, or Sushi Rito is another example. Have you seen Sushi Rito? That's a chain, right? Yep. So it's just sushi that isn't cut, so just a long piece of sushi. Uh, another one, uh, I had a friend named Sol, you probably know him, uh, and he created a KitKat bar that was the size of like a cake. Right, he would make these things. And so I've actually never seen this sold, but you get the idea. A Kit Kat bar that's, that's like the size of a loaf of bread.
In San Francisco, they have this place, Bob's, Bob's Donuts, or Bob's whatever. Yes. And they have this humongous donut. It's like this donut the size of, you know, two of my head. And, uh, and you could buy it, and then you could try to eat it, and you could take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous donut. Boom, that's the whole hook.
It's not special, but it— I mean, it becomes special. It's just a normal thing but a different size. Okay, uh, or like in St. Louis, the whole thing is— this is so silly how this works— in St. Louis, our pizza is cut into squares, right? Right, right.
So it's around where you kind of said one earlier about like, uh, sushi. Sushi sometimes comes in these like boats, or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever, it's like— it can also be, you know, a punch bowl that's in a fish, you know, fish bowl or whatever. Yeah, like it could be bigger and in a, you know, in a non-traditional, like the kitchen sink, in a non-traditional container.
Yes, the same thing but different size. Okay, or it could be miniature, you know, just something that, you know, whatever, uh, like White Castle mini cheeseburgers. Uh, okay, so the, the fourth one: combine two things that are quite different. Okay, so I've got a— this is a really easy one. There's a ton of examples. The first one is the Cronut. Pretty easy, right? The latest trend right now on TikTok pancake cereal. It's— I don't even know what it is. Uh, there's like recipe— I don't even know what it is, but it's— I don't know. Okay, uh, look it up actually while we're talking to Bray. It's probably— it's probably just— I, I don't know. Probably pancakes and cereal. Okay, it— no, they, uh, they bake it. They call it pancake cereal. It really is just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients. They just bake it at home and it looks like the shape of a pancake. Same with donut cereal. Um, but there's, um, uh, do you know, um, do you remember ramen burger? Yeah. Okay, so there's ramen burger, there's fairy bread. Do you know what fairy bread is? No, what is that? It's basically just bread with sprinkles. Okay, so you're just taking two things that don't normally go together, mashups, and you mash them just like a dessert burger. Uh, right, very simple. Or you can get a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich.
Right. And the more, um, more unusual it's, you know, it's Doritos Locos Tacos, right? It's, uh, when KFC came out with the fried chicken bun or whatever, and I was like, the bun is fried chicken. Um, like, you know, there's the more shocking, I would say the better in this case.
Yes. You just take two things, you smash them together. Pretty easy, relatively simple. Okay. The fourth thing or the fifth thing is you make something that's normally a crappy food but you make it fancy. So tater tots, mozzarella sticks, you add a fancy schtick to them. Or you probably go the opposite way of making something pretty, uh, fancy and make it not fancy, although that would— might be gross, but you get the idea. And then the final one is you, uh, take, um, some type of food allergy, but this one isn't actually that sexy. But you take some type of food, you just make something for food allergies. So there's Banza, which is a chickpea pasta. Right. Um, there's, uh, there's a Lou Ellen's Ice Cream, I think it's called, in Brooklyn. It's vegan ice cream, only vegan ice cream, right?
Uh, or like Oatly is like this, right? It's milk not made from cows. Boom. This is now so popular that this almost can't go viral anymore. But, um, maybe if you chose some category that's not, not typical. But it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream, um, at this point.
It works so well. Here's what I would do is I would open up This was what I was thinking about doing. I mean, I would never, I don't think I would do it, but maybe one day I would want to actually. It seems pretty fun. Is I would have a kitchen in New York and I would get it in a really high traffic, high traffic area. And I would just every 3 months try to do a launch where I launch like a rainbow cheesecake or, you know, I don't even know. I'm just making, you're just making stuff up. And then I would even, what I would do is I would make, I would do a ton of stuff and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it. And see what had the cheapest cost per click.
Right. Yeah. So what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle. No, embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's going to rotate every month into a new crazy concoction. And people will line up every month to go try the new thing and you'll build your brand as like Willy Wonka when he would create, you know, now Everlasting Gobstoppers or whatever, you know, like he creates a new a new crazy concoction that you gotta go.
It goes a step further. So do you remember Cronut? Yeah. So Cronuts got popular in 2013. It was invented by a guy named Dominique, uh, what was his last name? I don't know what his last name is, but, uh, a French pastry chef. He's like a big name chef, um, but he made Cronut because he likes— he was like, I just want to have fun and create something new and interesting all the time. And this one just kind of hit. He actually trademarked the name Cronut And he is like a purist. He's like an artist. So he didn't actually want to license it to people, but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone. And so there's a step further. So you create the food and you got to come up with a really cute name and you could actually get a trademark and, and there's licensing deals there. So I think this is super fascinating. I think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and $100 grand or less, they could probably get one or two hits. Right.
Um, which may not be the right thing to do with your life, but if that's you, if you're like, I'm doing it, great, great. Good on you. It's definitely fun.
It seems fun, but yeah, it'll teach you a lot.
I think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to, to approach, you know, food this way. Um, okay. So a couple other opportunities I see here. So I mentioned, I think, you know, investing or private equity, I think will start to scoop up these brands. I think that's one opportunity. Second one is I think somebody could build a kind of Guy Fieri of Instagram food character who basically just goes and tries to find the next, you know, who really does make the absolute best like oatmeal or whatever, right? Like come up with like, you know, go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever. And then you do the drop on Instagram for, you know, for that brand, for that shop. And maybe you found, you know, the absolute best Philly cheesesteak in Philly., and then you, you know, you drop that. So I think somebody could create that if they, if that's what, if they're a foodie and that was their thing. The other thing is a little more boring, which is like we've talked about cold chain 3PL. So basically how the heck do you ship all this stuff and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives, you know, 3 to 5 days later across the country? How do you, how do you make it work? And so I think that there's just a bigger, a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics. Um, and, and I think we've, we've heard this a few times now, and I feel like if somebody's working on that or somebody has one of those, I would love to talk to you just to learn, because I think this business is booming and I think more and more people are going to go into it.
Okay, do you want to hear one more food thing that we could— we could discuss? Do you remember as a kid seeing these books? I'm pulling them up now called Eat This, Not That. No, what is that? Okay. So it was awesome. I loved it. I bought it once just because it was at Barnes Noble and it ended up like being like pretty amazing. So Google Eat This, Not That. It started as one book, like almost like coffee table-esque book. And on the left side, it says Eat This and on the right side is Not That. And so for example, it started as just like a general one, but then they eventually went to like desserts, fast food, all types of that. All types of stuff like that. And an example, let's find an example one that I could say. So it would say, eat this: Arby's Beef Cheddar Classic, 450 calories, 20 grams of fat. Not this: Arby's Roasted Turkey Ranch Sandwich, which has 800 calories. And so it shows two things that are quite similar, and it says eat this one instead of this one, right?
And if I want to say eat a salad, don't go to Arby's, it's saying like, if you're at Arby's, get this one, not that one.
Yeah, or let's see if like they have like different Denny's breakfasts, or like IHOP versus Denny's, or whatever. Eat this, or yeah, you get the idea, right? Yeah. Okay, it's— are you looking at— you Google it? Yes, it's pretty sick. I— it's been around since probably 2000, uh, probably 2002. I mean, I think I bought this when I was pretty young.
Um, Let's see, there's a whole half a million followers on Instagram, which is like, I think all these old like kind of publications, like either magazines or little brands like this today, they're all just Instagram accounts. I think that's the way to like reinvent these.
Wow. Okay, so the Eat This, Not That as of 2012 had sold 8 million copies of the book, right? And then they spun it up into a magazine and wow, it's Freaking amazing. I'm just pulling this up. Um, here's what I would do right now today. If I wanted to get popular on Instagram is I would do, I would do the same thing just for Instagram. It's a whole Eat This, Not That, uh, on Instagram. Totally great.
And, and the format is so good. It's just a split screen. So it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right. And then it has the nutrition facts about why, why one versus the other. I think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on Instagram and you would grow very quickly. Like I can see their Instagram right now. It looks kind of shitty, like they're not doing a great job. I think you could basically steal this concept, pick a different name, and, uh, grow a big Instagram account off this. Oh yeah, I was bored, I would do something like this.
Yeah, and it's kind of a fun topic. Uh, I'm, I'm reading all about it now. This is pretty amazing. I hadn't thought about this in forever. But anyway, there you go. I think, uh, uh, if you did that for 6 or 6 or 12 months, you get hundreds of thousands of followers. On, uh, Instagram.
Um, all right, we'll switch off food. Let's go to something else. What do you want to talk about?
Do you want to talk about money real quick? Tiller money. Okay. Yeah. What's this? I have— okay, very fascinating. Do you— you— what do you use to track your money?
I don't use anything to track my money.
I use Excel. Okay. Everyone says that who I've talked to. Uh, not everyone, but a lot of people. Here's usually the answer I hear: I use Mint, or I use Personal Capital, or I use Right. I have Mint. Yeah, as well. And can I ask you, why don't you use Mint?
Uh, I used Mint back in the day. I mean, I used Mint like 10 years ago, so it's just kind of like one of those things that I don't have a habit of going and looking at. And I don't like looking at, uh, that stuff because it makes me focus on like, you know, expenses and saving money here and there. And I just don't think that's fun.
I don't enjoy that. So I, I went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about money because I usually use Personal Capital and I don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now. But when I asked like 10 different people how they track their money, most who I asked, maybe 5 or 6, use Excel, which is kind of crazy to me because how many accounts do you have that you need to track? Over 10? Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or not wealthy. Most people, like between, if they have a wife or a husband, you have like your checking account, bank account, your 401k, your stock stuff, uh, maybe your home loan, credit card, credit card. You probably have 2 or 3 credit cards. So typically, I imagine the average Joe has 10 plus. So it's actually a lot to track regardless if you have money. And everyone I've noticed— or not everyone, a lot of people I've noticed use Excel. So I did some research. There's this thing, and it's not like I've discovered this, I think it's pretty popular already, called Tiller Money. And all it is, the landing page is beautiful, but I'm just fascinated by this business. All it is, it's a— if you go to Google Sheets and you click Tools and then Add-on, okay, you'll see the ability to add plugins to Google Sheets, okay? Tiller Money, all it is, is a plugin for Google Sheets that costs $100— I think it's $100 a year. And all it does is it automatically imports your bank accounts and any other account into Google Sheets and templates that they have, or you can just make your own template. But I've never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a Google Sheet add-on. It's, it's incredibly fascinating. Yeah, this is good.
I like this. Um, I think this is, this, of all the like kind of money manager things, this appeals to me more because it feels like I'm managing my own money. And, uh, in reality, you know, the thing I'm always worried about is data. Like I don't want my data on all these different services. Like I'm I'm not gonna try your new finance app because like, I just don't wanna link my bank account to all this new stuff. But if they could do this where this was like self-hosted in some way, like it's just a template, that'd be great. It doesn't look like that's the case, but it is sweet. I like it.
So if you go to Google Sheets right now and you click Add-ons on the top right, once you're in a sheet, you can see add-ons. And I actually just realized I use a few add-ons. The other add-on I use is called Supermetrics, which is, uh, it pulls in data from SQL and stuff like that. I'm, I bet you they do close to 8 figures a year in revenue. But, uh, we've talked about plugins for WordPress. We've talked about plugins for Chrome. Google Sheets plugins is another thing that is super, super fascinating to me and I completely overlooked it. Uh, it's so neat. And so I don't know what else to say other than it's cool.
So you, you had a thing that I thought was kind of interesting that was about open salaries. What is this? And do you want to talk about this, or where do you want to go?
I'll let you lead a little bit, but I'll, uh, I, it's so funny, I'll, I'll put stuff in here throughout like 2 weeks, and 3 days goes past and I'm like, wait, did I write that, or did you write that?
So, all right, so we'll do it quick. We'll do it quick. So, so you put this thing on here. I got kind of intrigued. So you, you open salaries, what is it? It's the idea that like today it's kind of crazy that we don't know what other people make and not in a gossip kind of way, but it's really, you know, the company knows what everybody makes, but the employees don't know. And that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage. You don't know when you're underpaid. You don't know if there's any like systemic bias and let's say women or minorities are not getting paid as much as, you know, tall white males or whatever. And so, um, It's kind of weird that this is this like taboo thing. Nobody talks about it. You're not allowed to talk about it. It's seen as kind of a faux pas, but would actually be to the benefit of any employee to know, to have transparency as to what people are getting paid. And it can be anonymized, but being able to see what, what other people at your role, at your company are getting paid. And so you would put this thing on here that Colorado was going to say that, hey, from 2021, employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts of any job that could be working in Colorado, including remote jobs, which I thought was kind of interesting. And then we have companies like Buffer and Whole Foods have been doing this for a while. Buffer kind of tried to like make a name for themselves by being like the open transparent company. We'll share everybody's salary. And like literally you can like, here's a link. You can go and see everybody at Buffer's salary.
Whole Foods lets you— Whole Foods, you can see people's salary?
Uh, you put that in there or Brady did. I don't know. I haven't seen that one, but I wanted to share a couple of interesting things that I found when I was digging into this. So first, Check out this spreadsheet of Buffer salaries. I just put it in the chat so you can click this. Anybody can Google this and find it. You can go and you can see that Joel, the CEO, is making $280,000 this year, and you can go see what this— what his EA is making. She's making $89,000, and you can just go down the whole company roster. Everybody's salary is public, which I think is like pretty insane but interesting. Then you have things like the Google kind of secret spreadsheets. I don't know if you've seen these, but at big companies, people are starting to like just make an anonymous spreadsheet and say, Hey, put in your salary and your level and your, your location here, um, so we can all like have more transparency. You don't have to put your name next to it. And, um, they circulate it with inside company. So Microsoft had one, Google had one, Facebook had one. And the Google one, the, the— I forgot who it was. So some woman created this, and within 2 days, 10,000 people had put in their information. And now there's over 20,000 people in the open Google database.
And you can— can you link, can you link to that?
Yeah, it's right here. Um, I have it at the bottom. Um, so, so, so these are kind of cool and, um, and it's interesting how viral these go. So then I was looking at levels.fyi, which I know you know about. It's— yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a place to go see, like, you can go and say, all right, I'm interviewing at Amazon and Facebook and they, they labeled me an L5 software engineer located in Bay Area. Like, what am I going to get paid? How much is— or I got an offer, I don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer. Did they lowball me?. And so you can go on Levels.fyi and it's the same thing, crowdsourced information about what you make at these different companies. And, um, Levels, if you look at their traffic, they're getting about 1.5 million visits a month. And like, they're— this thing has really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit. So they have like job boards. Now, if you click at the top, they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode, a negotiator as a service. So if you click the top, it's a sick little website where they, they have a little calculator that says, you know, What company, where are you located, how many years of experience? Here's what you're getting. Here's what we think you should get paid based on the Levels database, which is now in the, I don't know, tens of thousands of entries or something like that. And then they basically say, hey, if you pay us $500, we'll negotiate your offer for you. We have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us. And basically you book a time, you talk about your offer and how you're feeling about it and what you, what you really want out of this. And then we'll negotiate for you. And they show all these like success stories of like, this person at Facebook got $20,000 more than their offer. This person got $40,000 more. This person got $10,000 more. And so they're taking, and they just take a flat fee of like whatever, $500, $600, I think. And so I think there's some interesting stuff going on in this, like transparency around what people are making. And it really goes in, like fits in my values where I think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more. I think it would help everybody if we talked about money more and it would be less, like kind of taboo and less, uh, less like a big deep dark secret if people were more open about it.
And I think that's right. Can I give you a counterpoint for that? Go for it. I thought that that was interesting, and I'm not saying how I feel because I'm still thinking about it, but Leo— I forget his name— Leo, but he did it from Buffer, the co-founder of Buffer who no longer works there. So Buffer started with this whole transparency thing That was like their whole shtick and it worked.
About everything, users, revenue, salaries, everything.
It was a shtick that got popular amongst bloggers. In particular, there's this guy named Pat and he has this blog called smartpassiveincome.com. I used to read it when I was 15 or 16 or 18, something like that in high school. And he would make money by creating books and doing a bunch of other side businesses and he would reveal his income every single month.. And other bloggers copied him. And it was a really cool thing. John Lee Dumas did it. All these like really cool people did it. Buffer did it. And that was their shtick to get popular. And it worked because the Buffer's product isn't really special. There's so many different versions and they did it. Leo said in an interview, someone was like, this whole transparency thing, it's pretty cool. Like you guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work? And I believe I don't want to quote him because I, I saw this a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, but something like, this works now and it's great for us, but I have a feeling when we get to 75, 80, 90, 100 people, it's not going to work anymore and it's actually going to hurt us big time. And I forget exactly why, but I believe Steve— man, I'm getting all my names screwed up— someone else at Apple, like a head honcho at Apple, said something similar. He's like, no, the transparency thing, it actually can hurt It hurts the company after a while, and we tried it. And so I actually think that maybe this is good for startups, but it kind of sucks after a long time. Because look, let's say you own a small business that does $20 million in sales, and you're the business owner, and you wanted to pay yourself $3 million a year. That's pretty shitty then if you're a $50,000 receptionist or something. But that's like your right to do that. Why would you want to share that with everyone? Yeah, as the employer, It's not great, right?
Buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there's— it was an effective growth tactic for them. Hey, if we're open about this, we'll get a bunch of people asking what the heck is Buffer, and some of them will use it. But, uh, as the employer, it's not great. As the employee, it's great. And so that's— it depends kind of which side of the coin are you on. Also, it depends how far you go. The Buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make, bit much. But the Google thing where it's like, hey, look, there's thousands of employees here. I need to know that within my level, within my kind of area, am I underpaid, overpaid, or, you know, somewhere in between? It gives people peace of mind and it gives them, you know, an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information, information that the other side has that you don't have. So I like it from the employee perspective. And I think it's— but I wouldn't go the Buffer way of writing everybody's names down. Now, at a small company, cool that kind of happens. But I thought that was— I think it's kind of cool. I think there's definitely interest around this. So, you know, a couple little ideas of things that people could do. So levels.fyi is cool, is working. I'm surprised that somebody like, you know, our buddy Andrew Wilkinson doesn't go buy a company like this. It's kind of an N-of-1 company. It has like a unique data advantage. It does job boards, which he loves as a business model. On top of all this traffic that they're getting. And it's kind of like a side project that's probably like, you know, reached the max of which, you know, the two guys behind it really can take it. Um, the other ways that you could do this, I think you could do this in any vertical. So I don't know, is there Levels.FYI in the hedge fund world or consulting or banking? Like if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this, you should just make the Levels.FYI database for your industry, nursing. I don't know. Whatever the industry is, that this product can work across those. And so I think that's cool. Even within Levels, somebody could go further and be like, all right, I'm going to take product managers or data science and really own that. If they were somebody who has a big audience for that, like if, if that guy Lenny, Lenny, who's got a big blog and kind of audience around product managers, he could do this for product management and do it better than Levels can generally. So I think the Levels concept could be exported and done in different areas.
When we first launched, like maybe the first couple months of launching, so we didn't have an audience. So, and I'm saying this so anyone could do it, we didn't have an audience. And I wrote a post called "How Much Money Do Founders Make?" because I was trying to figure out like, do I pay myself? Do I not pay myself? Right. Whatever. And if you Google "How Much Money Do Founders Have in Their Bank Account?" The Hustle, you might see it. And all I did was I took a Google Form and I posted it on Hacker News. And it went to number 1. They eventually took it down because I think that goes against their terms of service, like have a survey. But I got like 300 or 400 replies and I asked people how much money they have in their checking account, how much they have in their bank account, how much they pay themselves, how much they have in illiquid assets. I got hundreds. And then what their job title is and where they live. And I got hundreds of replies and I published all the data. And I took out any information where you could like learn about someone. And people loved sharing anonymous information and they loved reading anonymous information. Like they loved, like, it was amazing. And so I agree. I think it's pretty sick. And it was way— oh, there it is. I'll bring you posted it. Uh, it was way easier to get people's— I'm not like literally getting their information because it's all anonymous, but people were so forthcoming with us. It was pretty cool and pretty interesting. Yeah.
I want somebody to do this with VCs. I think most people don't know how much VCs make and all the different people in the food chain, like the GPs versus like a partner versus like an associate or whatever. And I feel like somebody should like kind of crack that egg open and be like, look, here's the, here's the numbers, here's what it is, and anonymize it. But give people some transparency into what, what's really going on.
Let's talk about this for a second. So there's two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me that when we're talking about this, the first is PitchBook. You know what PitchBook is? Yes. Do you pay for it? It's so expensive. No. My sister-in-law works there though. And so every once in a while, she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of like to look up. No, I don't pay for it because it's really expensive. It's like $25,000, I think. So PitchBook, it's kind of like CrunchBase but souped up. And so you pay $25,000 and you get access to like a lot of information about privately held companies. The second— well, let's just talk about PitchBook. The reason it's interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks. I don't know which country they're in, but I think the Philippines. And they literally have like 200 people. And, and by the way, PitchBook is a publicly traded company. You can go and read about them. They're owned by Morningstar, so you can actually go and see their operations and how they, how they work. They're growing like crazy. They have north of $100 million in revenue. Um, you can— they have a team of folks, and what they do is call VCs and they literally just ask them information, or they call companies and they just ask them information. And for some reason, I don't know how or why, people give them information. And that's one of the ways, one of many of ways that they get data. The second thing is this, uh, business called— is it called The Org? Is that what it's called? Yes. Okay, The Org. Very interesting because in a nutshell, their tagline is, The Org: Transparency Starts Here. Build a better organization with a public org chart. Celebrate your colleagues. Basically, that's just kind of crap.
Let's not, let's not read their marketing.
Yeah, really what it is, I mean, I'm sure they do all that nonsense, but it's a fucking, it's an org chart. It's a public org chart. Yeah, you pay money and you get access to people's org chart, and this helps you know who to email to sell shit to, right?
Exactly.
Uh, and that's cool. Like, there's no, I don't know why they don't just say that, but they've raised a lot of money, like I think tens of millions of dollars. It's probably going to be a monster business. And so I would do two things with the salary thing. One, I would actually hire people in the Philippines or whatever and just hit it hard and just go out and hit it hard. And I would trust that a lot of people would be actually pretty, pretty transparent. Uh, and the second thing is I would paywall it kind of like the Org and I would sell this to every HR, uh, department in the country.
So I have a friend that is doing this with Shopify sales. I showed him a way to roughly estimate how much a— not roughly, it's pretty good— estimate how much, how many, how much sales a Shopify store is doing. And, um, what is that?
What can I get? You don't have to say if it's true. Is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is?
That's one of the ways. Yeah. And, um, that was one of the best ways. And so I showed him, I said, look, this is, this is useful. Um, people want to know what their competitors are doing.
And the second way is you look at the traffic.
Uh, yeah, you still need a couple other pieces of information. For example, you need to know how much the average order is and things like that. But, um, but roughly that, that will tell you, uh, you know, how they're doing. And so now he emails me a report every month that shows me, you know, these 4 companies that I decided, hey, I want to track these 4 companies. And he emails me a report. This is their sales, this is their social media following, this is how many ads that they're running on Facebook. And, um, one other thing, which is just like the month-over-month changes, uh, between those. And I think it's a great idea. So he was kind of looking for something to do. I told him, look, I think this is a good pivot. Uh, I don't know exactly how well he's doing. I should really shout out the name, but I kind of don't remember. Let me look it up while we're doing this.
But how'd you find this person?
He was in my mastermind. Um, Uh, let me see what his thing is called. It's called— okay, dramatic pause. Let me figure it out.
And you came up with the, uh, with the—
I told him, I was like, look, uh, he— because he was like, dude, I'm good with data, I'm interested in this kind of stuff, um, but I also like, you know, and I also have a team in the Philippines and, um You know, so, so I really like this. Okay, so here it is. So the website is shopsalesdata.com, and, uh, I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it. Um, he still emails me my report. I hope he's taking more customers right now. But it's monthly report of Shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for $100 or something like that a month.
Yeah, this is great. I mean, you could do the same with, um, Facebook ad accounts, just like, because that Facebook shows everyone their ads. You can say, you know, email me my competitors' ads every time they launch a new one.
Exactly. And so I think that there's like, there's some good stuff in this kind of like data, data-based businesses where you're just collecting data from public sources, you're cleaning it up, you're structuring it, and then you're offering it as a service to a bunch of other companies.
Okay, you want to do a mini one? Do we have a mini one?
Uh, yeah, let's do a quick one. What else we got? Um, do you have anything good of like your first week working at a real job?
It is— was my first week, and now it's in my second week, and I'm sitting on a beach in Hawaii. Uh, so having a job rocks. I should have done this years ago. I love having a job. Um, it's cool, man. HubSpot announced that they had a billion dollars in revenue, like, uh, run rate. It's pretty amazing. And so there's like two things. This is like my first like real job, uh, or like a corporate job. Um, I mean, that's not exactly true. Like, I would have friends, like my friend Neville, who is like a— works for himself. He would be like, hey, do you want to go hang out on a Wednesday like at noon? I'm like, no dude, I have a job. Like, right. So I treat like running my company, it was 100% more than a job.
It's two jobs.
Yeah. It's more than— it's— I would call it a 9 to 5. I'm like, yeah, like, I'm sure it was in fact way more than 9 to 5, but I was like, I'm like pretty straight. Like, I get to work at 9, I do my thing. Like, anyway, so I tease about this, but yeah, first like corporate job. Um, it's the— it's gonna slow down, but like the amount of meetings is pretty crazy, and I told them I'm not doing meetings like this anymore. Um, because I'm gonna make stuff. But I don't know how— it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done.
Yeah, I, uh, I realized how that works, which is just that managers don't get work done. Managers just go to meetings, and then ICs, or individual contributors as they're known, are the ones who actually like sit down and do work because they don't have, you know, back-to-back meetings throughout the day. But I think even like your work is basically just communicating between people.
But my 7 days of working has shown me that even ICs have a lot of meeting. Yeah, they should, they shouldn't, they should not have that many.
They should have like whatever, 1 or 2 or 3 a day, but, uh, they should have like, you know, somewhere between 3 and 5 hours of uninterrupted time.
Yeah. Like, so is that a, like, I just don't understand how people, so like I'm telling everyone at HubSpot, I'm like, You don't— no one talk to me for these hours. I have— I like, like, and I'm like, this is— I, and I, and I say, I say it nicely of course, but I say, uh, I'm doing this for the better of everyone. Like, I'm gonna make good stuff, so like, let me go up my hole and you just, just don't bother me.
All right, what's been the worst part so far? The meetings. Let's be honest. Okay, what, what, what, what, the meetings boring or just the amount of them? The amount.
And also like, I didn't know what Workday is and all this stuff. There's just so much paperwork that I've always had people do for me that I'm having to do. Um, what's the worst part? Uh, you know, like everyone's like, is having a boss weird? Because I've never had a boss before. No, I think it's gonna suck after a while, of course. Like, having a boss might suck. I'm so pumped I don't have to— like, I get to just shovel shit onto Kieran's plate that I don't like. I'm like, hey, uh, you know, should we hire this person? Like, I don't have to make that decision. Uh, I love that. I love that. I think it's awesome. Um, so having a boss has not sucked. So far. Um, I don't know, what do you think would be the worst parts? And I'll tell you if they are. What was your worst part?
There's certain, um, meeting types that you have to do that I just found like completely soul-sucking. One of them was called a calibration meeting. It's basically like, uh, even just describing it, you know, gives me some pain here. Basically it's like you're trying to promote people, but how do you know, like if every manager has their own criteria for promotions. How do you make sure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company? So you have to do these things called calibration meetings where you sit down and you basically say, this person's up for promotion, or they get— they're getting promoted because of this, this, and this. And then other person says, well, you know, I felt like they weren't, uh, they weren't great at this, or they didn't do a great job with that project. And you have to kind of defend them. For me, it was boring on two levels. One, first and foremost, I didn't know anyone else in the company, so I just sat there for 3 hours not being able to say anything because I didn't interact with any of these people. I just got here. I just got bought. I don't know these people. I can't give any input, nor do I have any opinion on if the feedback is valid or not. And the second thing, I was just like, wow, even after all this talk, like, I still just feel like the person who's the most vocal and best salesperson is getting their way, and the person who's not that great at talking is not getting their way. So like, we could have just skipped all this. Like, it would have almost been better had we not gone into this room and said, you sell your person and you sell your person and you debate this person. It's like the better debater wins in big companies. And I think that that's like really crazy.
Well, I think we do at our company all the time, which is like, if it will say, I'll like, if a meeting sells for 30 minutes and, and like in the meeting, I'm like, okay, I said what I had to say, I don't need to be here anymore, I'm leaving. Or like, it's very— it wasn't considered rude to be like, hey, uh, you need to leave now, you're done. Uh, it was like kind of a helpful thing, and I'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here. I'm like, do you guys need me here? Can I, can I leave? Right. Or, or I'll just say, I'm out. Yeah, I've said what I need to say. I've heard what I need to hear. You guys can talk.
Yeah, um, I think on Zoom or whatever, you just sort of like, you hold up, you wave, and you click exit.
The second thing is HubSpot is doing really well. And just the software business, and this sounds like obvious stuff from anyone who's in software, but I've never been at a company like this. Man, if you figure out how to reduce your churn to very little or even positive, so for every dollar someone spends, it's above $1 the next year, and you pick a big enough market, it's just magical. Now I understand why people are saying, "Oh, why is this company valued so highly?" It's like, well, because sticky revenue, software revenue. So something like, I don't know if HubSpot would be considered this, but something for sure where you're building an entire business off of, and you know that the switching costs are quite high. Um, it's pretty amazing. Like software business, like just start a software company. It's so much better than everything else. Like it's really hard and it's a slog early on, but if it really truly, if you can get your churn to be right and you pick a big enough market, it's just, um, if you have a, and you can figure out how to have a good marketing machine, which all this is like, Oh yeah, if only you could do that. Like, I know, but like, you can kind of figure it out, actually. I think given enough— if you give yourself like 5 years to figure it out, I think you can.
Well, I think all the things you're saying are true. And they really just point to this one lesson I've learned the hard way over and over again, which is it's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game. Because if you pick the wrong game, even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path. But if you pick the right game to play, and whether you become the best or not even the best, but you know, just kind of the top 25%, um, it's just so much better to win that way. And in this case, like, we've— if we've— we talk about, and we've done different types of businesses, right? We've done— like, I did Social Network. I tried to make a new Social Network. It's the wrong fucking game to play, dude. It's so hard, um, so hard. So it's a low chance of probability of success. You did a media business. Also hard, hard, you know, higher odds of success, but like lower size of the prize if you get it right. Way lower size. Um, e-com, you know, just a fucking pain in the ass. Just tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and logistics. Cause you got real-world products and you have to like ship them all around the world and you're going to have customers who have returns and like things that just like are not as easy as software. And so like we've, and you know, we talk about all these different, you know, doing a paid newsletter or whatever. Like there's all these different models. And for my money, by far the best one is to build a software business because a software business can scale. A software business can like be improved over time. And, you know, unlike e-commerce, when you, when you make a crappy e-commerce product, uh, you know, you go make a better version the next, you know, it takes you 6 months to make it and then you make it. And all those old customers who got the bad products still think you suck. Whereas with software, you push the update and all of a sudden every single customer has the new best thing. You know, there's all these just tiny advantages and software is the way to go. But we—
I want to say something that David Siegel— so we had David Siegel on last time. He had a billion-dollar or close to billion-dollar tea business. And I go, David, why are you doing brick-and-mortar stores when you could be doing software? And he said the right thing. What did he say?
He was like, I Oh, it's fun. I love selling product.
And I was like, that's the best answer. That is a wonderful answer. And I think that like, will I ever be able to start an enterprise software company? I think that if I was going to, it would either have to be very soon or even a few years ago. Like you, you, I would, you have to do it. I think when you're like really like where money's the number one thing, it's like, I got to get paid. I got to get my hit. And, um, in that case, yeah, I would do anything to make money. But where I am now, and where I think where a lot of people are, is you really— it's, it's— I agree with everything you said, but you have to add the 'and also'— not like passionate about, but what, what, what excites you enough to that you're willing to get good at it over a decade, right? What floats your boat.
All right, so let's take you— okay, uh, you're happy at HubSpot, everything's great, you're gonna be there for, for 20 years, we know that. Alternate reality, You know, we all know you're happy at HubSpot. You'll be there for 2 decades. It's great. Uh, it's, you know, sunshine and rainbows. Let's say alternate reality, they fire you tomorrow. You're gonna go build something else. Um, where do you think you would go build? Would you do what you're— would you go media? Would you go something totally different? Would you go software? What do you think you would do?
Everyone's gonna laugh at me because I say trucking, but I would do some— maybe something, something in the agriculture space. Yeah, I think agtech is— agtech is interesting. I think that's the most interesting. I had a great call with this guy who I'm gonna— we gotta have this guy on the podcast. His name's— his son's name is Jordan. I can't remember. Rob Van Trump. It's called the Van Trump Report. So Van Trump Report, it's this guy who has a newsletter that does $20 million a year in subscription revenue. He's the only writer. And he was telling me all about agtech. Do you know what agtech stands for?
Yeah. Agricultural tech.
And he was just saying all types of like what's going on. And I think working with like middle America people who, whether they're rich or not, they're more humble and they create things that actually impact the world, like get food to you. I would do something in that space or I would start another media company.
But okay, let's say you go into agtech, all right, and you're probably going to be open and whatever, you know, you'll think of it then. But knowing what you know now, would you do media in agriculture? Would you do, uh, you know, something with actual farms and logistics? Would you do technology, hardware, you know, trucking, actual self-driving trucks? Would you do a job thing? Would you— what would you— what model would you be wanting to do in that space?
Well, okay, so I don't like this question because It could— it'll change every single day you ask me, but as of right now, I would start a blog in the ad tech space, and then eventually I would turn it into a database. Kind of— I like this company, The Org. I think I could create something like a database that's better. And yeah, that's what I would do. Okay, so nice. I think that's what I would do as of right now. That fascinates me. Or I would create— do you know what Tiger 21 is?
Isn't that like a kind of a conference or club or mastermind thing or something?
It's like a club for people who have investible assets north of $10 million and it costs $30 grand a year. And they have like 1,000 people who are subscribed. And my friend joined and I looked at the backend and it was horrible. And I was like, oh, I'm just going to clone that.
And what do they do with the members? Is it events or is it—
It's like Both, but they create little safe communities where you meet in groups of 10 and you're going to show off your portfolio and people criticize you and try to make you defend your position so you get better. But it got bought by private equity, so it makes a lot of money.
All right. That's cool.
I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.