#166 - Why a Sudoku Company Sold for $640m, "Opendoor for X" & Franchising Tech Companies

The very bottom, it says, this don't— nope, this domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry. Last updated July 2007.

Right. So I emailed this guy and I was like, hey, uh, saw your website. Um, like, I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this, but I'm curious, like, why aren't you trying to sell this? And he's like, refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious.

What?

What is this? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

Good. What's her name? Give him a shout out.

Thomas Shields. Good job, Thomas. Thomas, um, looks like a young kid. He looks like, uh, a younger, better looking version of me. Uh, let's see. Well, I can't, uh, yeah, he looks young. He looks real young. So congratulations, Thomas Shields.

That's great. I think the CEO or the founder of pickleball either listens to the pod or he messaged once being like, yeah, I'm down to come on. So we can have him on if you ever want to. Um, we can do an episode about kind of like alternative sports basically and do some research and have them on as well.

Great. And speaking of alternative sports, you want to talk about chess?

Yeah. So I have a follow-up there. I don't know if you have one or just what I put there.

So I started— and that was, that's a really, really hard question. I've been thinking about it too. I only came up with like Dominoes. I looked into solitaire websites. They, a lot of them crush. Uh, but yeah, that's a hard question to ask.

I have information on, on them. I just found some interesting stuff when I Googled them and went to the website. There was something amazing about them that immediately stuck out. And, and just this quick Google, it— I'm wrong, but It is based in Cyprus. Anytime a company is based in Cyprus, it's like, it turns out these guys actually are, uh, from like the Belarus. They're actually from this area, but they're based in Cyprus. So I just Googled it real quick. So, uh, do you know that it was, they were acquired, um, 3 months ago?

No, I did not know this. So that's okay. That's not the piece.

I have their revenues. I have their profit and I have the, uh, all their user numbers and I have, can I guess?

And I'm going to be totally wrong, but I like to guess. By the way, little tip, always guess before you hear any number. That's how you get good at knowing numbers because you guess. And then when you're wrong, your brain remembers that shit and you start to hone that gut instinct. Okay. So here's, here's my guesses.

I'm going to guess. Okay. Well, uh, how much were they? What was, what's their revenue?

I'm going to guess that their revenue was $400 million a year.

Okay. What's their, um, Profit?

$90 million a year.

Pretty good. All right. How much were they acquired for?

I'm going to guess that they were acquired for $852 million.

Okay. And how many, how many daily active users do they have across their 15 games?

I'm going to say they have 25 million DAU.

yeah, what is that? That isn't that exactly $850?

Um, what a company. So, okay, so that was the first one I thought of. And by the way, I think that there's other versions of that, like, you know, I don't know, go look at like, you know, sudokuonline.com. I don't know, what's that? Like, you know, right, all the things people are going to Google search, if you can get the top-level domain for those, that's really interesting. Um, so then I started looking at some others, poker.com. So I went to poker.com and poker.com is like kind of like this crappy, like, just describe what you're looking at when you go to it.

Let me look at this, but you can't, this isn't actual poker, right? This, you're not betting.

I think the number was, uh, $90 million in subscription revenue from crossword puzzles for the New York Times.

So, so I am surprised that Crossword Puzzle, crosswordpuzzles.com, crossword.com, I can't believe that these sites are not being like leveraged. So I was very surprised to see this. And, uh, yeah, that was my follow-up from this.

So you go to crosswordpuzzle.com, it says please email suggestions to dkw999@yahoo.com. Right.

So I emailed the guy. So you see this, the website is basically like a white page with a bunch of text and it's basically just links to some things.

The very bottom it says, this domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry. Last updated July 2007.

Right. So I emailed this guy and I was like, hey, uh, saw your website. I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this, but I'm curious, why aren't you trying to sell this? And what do you want this to be? Why do you believe it should be done this way? I'm just super curious, what's your thought process? So we'll see if he replies. There's another website that's like this. And, bro, you see if you could find the name of this. I don't recall off the top of my head, but Sam, you might know this. There is a website that's like, it's like a misspelling of google.com or gmail.com. I think it might be gmail.com or something like that. And it's the same thing. It's an all-white web page that's like, yeah, Frank and Susan, you know, we were married in 1977 and like blah blah blah. Uh, no, if we're not going to put ads on the site. No, we did not. We owned this before Gmail came out. It's like they basically just have this web page that gets like— and they have a counter of how much traffic they get, uh, and they just show that they're getting like hundreds of thousands of hits a day. And like, he's like, refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious. What?

What is this? What, uh, Brady, did you find it?

I'm going to try to find it. I'll find it after the pod. Otherwise I have this in my like things to tweet about, uh, you know, folder.

That's actually such a funny idea. Uh, so like if, if we just looked at the most visited website and find out what the typos are for each one and go and look at what those are. So like, if you go to goggle.com, so G-O-G-L-E, Google owns it. So it redirects to Google.

Most of the time the company owns like their plurals and their misspells, but sometimes they don't. And then those are hilarious.

Oh my gosh, I just, uh, I was looking at Bing. I changed it to Bang. Don't go there.

Found something else.

Yeah, don't go there. Um, what else is there that's like a— what's a— like a YouTube spelled wrong?

Like you can do like Facebook, uh, but you could do like, I don't know, like you, you lose the A or something like that. I don't know. See what, see what that is.

God, that's so interesting. Um, that, that's actually an interesting thing. Facebook owns Facebook with one O. Pretty interesting. That's actually an interesting thing. I'm going to research that after this.

I don't know if you know the guy who owns Bitcoin.com. So this is a guy, Roger van der, or whatever. I don't know what his name is, but he's kind of hated in the Bitcoin community by 80% of the people because he tried to create his own fork of Bitcoin. So they forked Bitcoin. I think it's Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, BSV. I forgot which one he's associated with. I think it's Bitcoin Cash. Basically, he created, you know, they forked Bitcoin and they have their own, but this guy owns Bitcoin.com. And, uh, and so he's like a billionaire guy from Bitcoin and like he refuses to give up Bitcoin.com, but it's like, it's like points to the other version of the not popular version of Bitcoin. You know, it's like the, the fifth Jonas brother who's not in the band or whatever, you know, it's basically like, it's kind of a waste and nobody can sue them because it's, there's no company behind Bitcoin and nobody owns the trademark.

Oh, that's a pain in the ass.

I hate that.

And I was kind of gushing. I was like, dude, did they write this memo? Like, who wrote this memo? I was like, this is the best investment memo I've ever read. You were like, dude, shut up. I just wrote this in 20 minutes. I was like, no, no, no, trust me, I read a lot of these things. And I was like, the memo was so good that I had to separate the writing, which was really entertaining and persuasive and likable, from the business. Because I was like, dude, I don't want to just convince myself this is a good business. I want it to be a good business. I love pitches where the founder can just barely explain what the hell they're doing, but then I'm like, oh, that makes total sense. And I'm like, yes, that's You get it. You're not like a salesman, so I'm not going to invest in this hand-wavy shit. It's like, no, it's real and it's working, and you're explaining it in kind of this nonchalant way, but it's actually super legit. You just don't get really excited and animated, and you don't have great words to describe it yet. And actually, I can help you with that. It sounds like you're thinking about the same thing. I'm actually thinking I'm going to simplify my thing, which is like, just helping them with their landing page and their communication. Because almost every company I invest in, their landing page kind of sucks. And landing page is really hard to make good, but they need a lot of help. And it's like something that not every other investor is offering to do for them, and they actually are not that good at doing it. And so anyways, I got off topic, but your memo was really great. I actually want to publish it in some way without— I don't know what you can do, but I feel like that should be public. I want to point to that and be like, this is great writing.

Yeah, you know, that, that's, that's a skill. That's like a superpower in and of itself. Uh, I don't have a ton of thoughts on the business itself, so I don't have too much to add there, but I agree with you. Basically, the most interesting part of talking about Lobby was your memo was so damn good, and I think we should, uh, show it to people so that they could see How do you explain, how do you make a business seem really juicy to be a part of, uh, to invest in? Because I think you did a good job of that.

Well, that's what, and that's what we're going to do. So I'm doing it with Joe and you and I will probably do a bunch together. I hope where I'll invest in yours and you mine. And the whole thing is I'm not trying to sell people. I'm not trying to convince people to do it. Um, you either want to do it or you don't, like, I'm not going to try and convince you to do it because that's, that's kind of unethical. But I just want to paint the business in the most positive light, or at least what I believe it to be accurate, like an accurate— it is cool and I want to make sure you know it's cool. And I think that this cult copywriting thing for angel investing might end up being a hit.

Yeah, I think it'll be, it'll be easy for you to get people into your round because people like you and the memos are good. So I think, I think those will be, those will be good. I have a company I wanted to tell you about. That's a cool company, um, that I think you're gonna have a good opinion on. So, uh, have you seen what Keith Rabois is doing as his new startup?

No.

So you know who he is?

Yeah.

So he's the guy who, uh, uh, he was like ex-PayPal, then he was the COO of Square. He's kind of a known investor at Founders Fund. Then he started—

he's a known asshole.

Like, um, where did you learn about this and what, what can I go— is there a website yet?

Uh, they announced it, so I heard about it a few weeks ago, like 6 weeks ago maybe, and I was like, oh, that's super interesting.

How did you hear about this?

So somebody told me about it because their friend interviewed at the company, and so that's like the only way you could know about it because like when you interview, they like kind of tell you the premise of the company. And that guy was like, oh dude, you know Keith Rabois is doing a new thing. It's basically Open Door for buying businesses. And I was like, oh, that's sick. That's a great idea because selling your business is also just like— is even more than buying a home in terms of time-consuming, stressful, uncertain on what price you're going to get, uncertain what price it even should be. And the marketplaces to do that online, like BuyBizSell or whatever that website is, like .com, they're so old school on how they do that. And so I think there's room for improvement there. So I found that to be really interesting.

Let me bring this up real quick, which is it's so crazy how often internet marketers who often are accused of being sleazy— and many of them are, I mean, they're accused of being that because they are— but they're often ahead of the game. So for example, email marketing, email newsletters are all the rage right now. Uh, scammy guys like— I don't think this guy's actually scammy, but David DeAngelo, he used to sell dating books in the 1990s by having these long emails. I just stole and copied from him. Um, the other thing is paid memberships. Paid memberships have been a thing for decades now. Guys like Greg, your friend, our friend Greg is doing a paid community thing and Greg's like a cool guy. Um, and so it's like, it's, it's like cool to do it. Um, and there's so many more, and this is another one, buying and selling businesses online has been a thing that internet marketers. So for example, Flippa, where you could buy affiliate websites, that's been a thing for years. Empire Flippers is another one. Empire Builders. And if you go— is it Empire Flippers or Empire Builders? I think those are actually two different things.

I think both. Yeah.

But they— but if you go to those websites, you're gonna— a lot of people are gonna be immediately turned off. You're gonna think, what the fuck is this? And fucking startup guys like us, we just come in. I guess that's what we are. We just come in and we take this stuff that these guys have been doing for years and we just say, put some lipstick on it. Yeah. 1.2.0. Make it a flat, beautiful color. Uh, it's so funny because like Cool. This sounds neat, but this isn't unique, right?

that's not a new thing either. And, and I think it's awesome.

And so it's not that it's new, it's basically that there is a big swing being taken by people who are gonna try to do this at scale using like the modern kind of internet marketing models to do it.. And so like, you know, like we buy gold or whatever.

What else?

Those billboards, you know, like gift cards. Yeah, exactly. Like, um, and there's like a gift card, there's actually a gift card startup that crushes, uh, that, that basically took the old model and just does it new. What's it called? Raise, I think. Raise.

Yeah. I'm at, I'm on their website right now. I'm looking at raise.com. Holy shit. I can look at the traffic and just tell you these guys are printing money.

Yeah. Raise is going to be like a billion dollar plus win. Uh, and nobody even like hears about this company. Nobody talks about this company, but, you know, super simple business of like, you know, gift card, the gift card business, resale of gift cards essentially. And so, uh, so anyways, I'm interested in this Open Door for X, which is basically instant liquidity for things that were pretty illiquid before.

All right, let's play off that. So houses, okay, there's EquityZen, which I think is badass.

Uh, so EquityZen, EquityZen kind of looks more like Flippa than it does like Open Door, meaning like it's kind of hard to get in. It's kind of obtuse. You got to sign up to see shit. Not everything is there. It's like a 10-step process to do an investment. It's like EquityZen is not Robinhood on my phone where I could just do my thing. And so secondary shares, yeah, it's like a shitty name. I don't know. It's just bad all around. And Forge Global was the other one. It's also bad. I don't know. I feel like somebody's going to do this better. Carta is trying to— Carta X is trying to do this better., right now, which is like secondary shares of private companies.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Carta, but, um, I could see them doing well, but I'm not a, I'm not a fan of Carta. So I don't know if I want them to be the best at this.

Um, AngelList is also trying to do it. Yeah, there's a bunch of people trying to do this second, trying to do OpenDoor, trying to do what they're trying to do is a little bit different. They're just still trying to do the marketplace. What OpenDoor did was different. It wasn't like OpenDoor wasn't just another housing marketplace. It was, I will buy the thing off you right now. Because I know what I can sell it for. Um, and I'll, I'll— I'm comfortable with this 5% spread that I will, I will keep. So you give up 5% of your upside, but you get the certainty of it being done now. And, um, and I'm comfortable in that 5% spread. So somebody would need to do this for secondary shares where they just go, you want to sell your, your, your company stock? Done. And then I will figure out how to reflip this thing on the other side with my own spread.

So there's a few people that have done this with furniture, and furniture is really hard because furniture doesn't ship well.

Yeah.

Um, but there is, if you, I don't know if you know, I mean, I buy, I like buying used furniture because you can get like $10,000 couches for like 3 grand. Um, and oftentimes they're really nice. Used furniture is not really a thing on the internet. Uh, or at least it's not hugely popular, but you could, I think there is still an interesting way you can do this with used furniture.

That's interesting. Okay, so we've— furniture is not that good. Trading cards is pretty interesting because it's a lot easier. Cars, everyone— a lot of people do cars. Carvana does cars, and I think that that is so sick. They're a multi-billion dollar public company.

Is that the same model they use where they'll instantly buy your car off you?

So it works. Okay. So it's working. Open Door for Cars is working.

Yeah. Yeah, totally works. What else is interesting? What's a huge thing? Like what's— what are some of the bigger assets that you possibly have in your life that you want to— wow, Carvana's market cap is $45 billion. Holy shit. Yeah, it's working. What else is there?

I don't know. There's going to be some obscure shit like, oh, like life insurance policy payouts or something, or like, you know, like something like that, that I'm like, ah, I don't even know that space, but that makes sense. It takes, you know, it's something that you get, or like Social Security. Like I know, like my parents are getting to the age where they can collect Social Security. Like, would they take a lump sum of all their Social Security now? And, you know, at, at 70 cents or 72 cents on the dollar. And then, you know, this company just collects the the payments over time? Like, probably, I don't know. Like, there's a lot of people who would make that trade.

Dude, did you know this? So there's this, uh, a company— I have to go and look at what it is, but you guys could probably Google it actually. But I think some banks do it, like Goldman will do it. But if you have a winning lottery ticket, they'll buy it off you, right? And they'll give you the money up front, and it's structured in such a way where they're, they're still able to make their profit, but they'll buy lottery tickets from you. Like, we're talking like $10 million lottery tickets or, or 7-figure Uh, I, uh, it's kind of interesting. People buy winning lottery tickets off of people. That's actually kind of an interesting one. Um, I would actually need to do some research. How many people do you, how much money do you think is won in the lottery per year?

Oh dude, I have no idea. I mean, I feel like the weekly lottery, the Powerball every week is like, you know, between $50 and like $200 million. It's like, it's like, that's, that's like on a weekly basis that it's, so now it doesn't get won every week. That's how it accrues and that's how it gets bigger, but like. You know, I don't know. You have the number in front of you. I feel like it's going to be—

I don't know. No, I, uh, no, I can't find it. There's 1,600 lotteries created each year. So there's at least 1,600 unique winners. Um, no, I don't, I don't have the numbers, but lottery tickets might actually be kind of interesting because you said the life insurance. I'm like, what do you wait to get paid for that you would take a discounted upfront payment? Lotteries is kind of— is actually kind of interesting. Um, and I do know that some banks actually do that, right? Um, you know who else does that is Whitey Bulger. You remember Whitey Bulger?

I've never even heard that— those words in my life.

Do you know the movie The Departed?

Yes.

You know Jack Nicholson's character?

Okay, yes.

It's modeled after Whitey Bulger. He was a gangster in, uh, Boston. He was an Italian or Irish Mafia guy. He, uh, mobster guy. He ended up going to jail recently. They found him and they, um, um, he got beaten to death in jail. So it was like a crazy ending to the story of him. He was, he was America's most wanted man for like 20 years. And, um, anyway, he, as part of his story, he won the lottery 3 times. And the way that he did it is people who had won the lottery in the neighborhood, they would have to go to him and he would buy it from you and he would go and cash the ticket.. And, uh, so this is like a famous, like the numbers game they call it. That's like a famous mafia thing.

Wow.

I had no idea. Um, yeah, so I don't know, maybe, maybe if people have good ideas on what, what part of life could use instant liquidity, uh, I'm curious to see, to see what that, that would be. Um, okay. So a couple other things I wanted to bring up. One is a pain point or kind of a business opportunity. Maybe this exists. If it exists, tell me because I want to use this service. So in e-commerce, most e-commerce brands are just local in their own geography. So most are, let's say most US e-commerce brands basically just sell in the US. And then it takes time and then you start selling in Canada and then you start selling in Europe. But it takes a long time. And the reason it takes a long time is because of the international logistics. So for example, you want to ship something to Canada, they have to pay a pretty heavy duty, like an import duty. On the product. So you sell like a $50 product, they're going to have to pay like $20 of import taxes in addition to the shipping. So it just becomes like irresponsible to buy. Uh, and still some customers do because they can only get the product from the US-based company, but it really sucks. And then the company has to like fill out this form that says these goods are worth $14, and then you submit that at the thing, and then it's just annoying, right? And so I think there should be a company So there's these brands trying to do these e-commerce rollups. I think you should do it differently. I think some enterprising entrepreneur can basically say, look, I will boot up your Canadian operation today. I'll boot up your UK operation, your France operation. I'll do Europe, I'll do UK, I'll do Australia, whatever. Right? So basically say, I'll import your brand today. You do no work. So all you have to do is you need to ship me this product to this warehouse. So here's the address. Ship me your products. Uh, I need like, you know, whatever your normal inventory is, ship 10% to me and let's see how I do. And basically you get one giant warehouse where you're warehousing for all the brands that you're going to work with. And you just say, look, in exchange for doing this, you pay me no money. I will start generating sales for you, but I want a royalty. I want a royalty of 10 cents or 15 cents for every dollar.

But what's your point? What, like, how's this, how's this interesting or new?

Because I don't know of a brand that does this that exists. So, you know, my wife has an e-commerce brand we sell in the US. I would love to be making more money by selling in Europe, but the time, the operational overhead to go to Europe right now is just crazy. So why aren't there more people that are reaching out to e-commerce store owners and basically saying, I will run your international operation and make it a low risk to no risk proposition for them in order to do so? And I think there's a lot of money to be made. Given the number of e-commerce brands in the US and how you could, if you're in Brazil or you're in Australia or you're in Canada or wherever, I think you could become the leading trusted, like, kind of like we are your Canada, go to Canada, go to market plan for Canada, and we just do all the work for you.

This is actually quite common in media. So there's Business Insider India, there's Business Insider Australia, there's Business Insider Germany, I believe. And then, uh, um, I think, I believe the Wall Street Journal does the same thing for those same countries, but it's, uh, there is BuzzFeed France, uh, HuffPo France, HuffPo Australia. It's actually pretty common in media. Um, and I—

who runs those? So, so is it run out of the US or they hire a team there or it's a local team there that just licenses the brand basically?

When they report the revenue, it's under licensing. And so I don't exactly know what that means though, because I was trying, I was thinking about us and I was like, man, we have a lot of people who are, uh, English as a second language folks, uh, in Germany. So like, uh, I guess Germany, I guess is one of the most populous. I don't, I don't, I don't know the numbers. I guess it's one of the most populous places in Europe. It's, uh, very business focused. So, you know, the Germans liked us. Um, same with Australia. Australians loved us. And I was like, yeah, let's go do it. But what the fuck do I do? Do I just fly over there and just start recruiting? Like, it's, it's crazy.

I would love to partner with someone.

And then another thing is in particular China and Japan. And there's actually a whole word for this. There's a word. I can't remember what the word is, but there's a word that describes why it's difficult to break into Japan. And the reason is, is that once it's hard to break into an island, in particular Japan, and I would love to have paid someone to be like, Hey, can you be my Japanese, uh, yeah, consigliere, like my, my capo on the ground? I'm— that's— those are all mob terms because I'm, I'm into the mafia now. Uh, can you be my, my guy on the street of Japan and let me know, is this good? Am I getting the right people? I think that's incredibly interesting.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm, I'm, I'm not saying that this doesn't exist. I'm saying there's still a lot of room there because I know a lot of people— I have a lot of friends who are doing e-commerce, right? We, we host Club LTV. There's, you know, 75 to 100 e-commerce brands each doing over $1 million a year in there. And every single one of them, I think, has the same problem, which is that we're all US-focused. And why are we US-focused? Because it would be too much of a lift, too much of a lift to go figure out how to do Australia. It's too small of a pie to like do manpower on or spend brainpower on. But if somebody in Australia was like, hey, look, this is what we do. This is our business model. We help you get sales here and we just take our cut. And, uh, and so I just think that like there needs— there's more opportunity for this. And that's cool that in media it sounds like there's also an opportunity to do it in media too, or it's being done in some way by the big players.

It's being done in some way, but like I remember when BuzzFeed, uh, like we're going through some troubles, they had to lay off like their whole French office. And I was like, BuzzFeed has a French office? What the fuck?

Well, that's the opposite, right? That's— we have a French office and then you have to do things like that when it's like not working out. I'm saying No investment, no consulting fees. You just take a royalty on sales. And these are all incremental sales that I wasn't getting otherwise. And you take care of the whole operational headache, in this case for e-commerce, about like, I just ship your goods to your warehouse, you ship it to local customers. Customers don't have to overpay. Customers don't have to do import duties, uh, for every order they make. And so I just think that there's an opportunity in e-commerce to like be the go-to brand for every D2C brand. To partner with in each of these locales.

What country would you go to next?

What's the term now? What's the term for this?

I don't know. I, you know, maybe I should have gone to business school. I think it's probably just like in brick and mortar. I think it's just called franchising. Um, franchising was the way to spread geographically, you know, when your brick and mortar can only scale so fast. Uh, that's how you would do it. You would franchise out and then the franchise would pay a royalty back to the, back to the master franchise of the brand, uh, of their sales. And they're, they're the local operator, but with e-commerce or with digital media, it's a little bit different, but it kind of has the same problem. So I don't know if there's a new word for it, man.

I think this is wildly fascinating. This is, uh, I didn't think it was that interesting at first, but now I know what you're talking about where. I've heard so many stories of the same thing, but not— maybe not of India, but I am the official importer of X, Y, and Z.

Yeah, we're the distributor of X. Or like, for you, just think about for your business, right? Like, what could you have sold for more if you had like 250,000, you know, or like 500,000 subscribers in Japan?

And I think there's a world where I would have been— where I could have made more money in those markets than I did in America, because even though America has more people, Um, I don't think the French, or I don't think that the Germans, um, I don't think Facebook kicks as much ass over there as it does here with Instagram and everything. And I, so I think the ad markets, because I, I do think that Europe, sorry Europeans if you're listening, I do think that you guys are 5 or 10 years behind when it comes to some technology stuff. Um, and the ad markets suck because of Facebook and Google. So like, if you could still capture a little bit of that revenue, I think you could.

Well, I don't know if any of that's true, but what I do know is that it's true. Trust me. As you're building, I think like everybody uses Facebook everywhere. So that's the part I'm saying. I don't know.

Um, well, sorry, but what I mean is like old media still does quite well abroad. Okay.

That's fair. That's fair. Uh, the thing I'm just saying is like, if while you were building your US business and all your employees are focused on your US business, if somebody said, I love your product, I'd love to license the brand from you, or, or I'd love to be your partner and in the UK or in Japan or in Australia, and I will build— I will use the same playbook. It'll be under your company. I just want my cut for building this for you because I would have done it in a heartbeat. Right. And so the fact that you didn't means there was an opportunity for some entrepreneur that should have been reaching out to you saying this is a no-lose proposition. You still own it, you still make money off of it. It's still your name brand. I just get to go— I get to basically take your brand, take your product, and localize it or distribute it here where I'm from and I know the market.

Yeah. And my product's way easier than yours. It was because it's pixels. It's not anything real. And I would have loved to have done that. And I used to have people email me all the time. And then we had a bunch of people in Russia, some people in Mexico who would just verbatim copy our shit. And I would say, I would have to, I'd find it and I'd be like, you guys stop this. You're not allowed to do this. And then I'd have other people who would email me and be like, hey, can I trade?

Could you stop anyone from doing that? I feel like you can't do shit. If somebody takes your newsletter and they just word for word transcribe it in Russia and they're like, We're called whatever, HustleRU. No, there's nothing you could do.

The only thing that I was able to do, the only thing I was able to do, we had someone do this in Italian, we had someone do it in Russian, and we had someone do it in Mexico. Uh, yeah, Mexico. And I basically shamed them. I said like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna call you out. And so I would tweet at them or I would email them. Uh, I, I would just, would make it well known. And my network was large enough that someone of someone knew them and they were embarrassed. Knockoff. And they, yeah. And they stopped doing it. But no, I couldn't do shit. Yeah. And I had people email me all the time saying, hey, can I do this for, uh, Spain? And I would say, yeah, but I don't really know anything about you. I don't know if you've got good taste. I don't like, I don't, I know nothing about you. And I would just throw it off to the side and just kind of forget about it. But I wish I would have done it.

I'm surprised this doesn't happen more. I'm surprised there's not just like freemedia.com based in Cyprus that basically takes all the content from behind the paywall of Wall Street Journal. And just says, cool, if you ever hit a paywall, come here, look, input the URL you're trying to go to. Here's the article for free. I'm surprised somebody hasn't just tried to do that. It's totally bootleg, it's piracy, right? But it is so hard to enforce that stuff. I can't believe that somebody internationally isn't doing that. That seems like the way to do it.

Do you know what outline.com is?

I know about it and I don't know what I could say publicly about it, but yeah, I know. Explain it.

I don't have any insider information, so maybe you do. I don't.

I'm just—

Well, explain what it is. So outline.com, it's, uh, the tagline is read and annotate without distractions. Frankly, I have no idea what that means, but the way that I use it and the way that everyone else uses it is when you come across a paywall website, you put the URL into outline.com and you can see the whole article. Um, it just, it doesn't work for everything. I don't think it works for New York Times.

But, uh, you can get, you can get, you can get a bunch of sites. They, they kind of stopped working on, but initially it worked on everything. And, uh, the person behind this is somebody we know that's like a well-known kind of tech person that works at one of the big companies and was like, they had to like distance themselves. It was getting like millions of hits. Like people were using this thing and they had to distance themselves from it because they were like, uh, yeah, like I was kind of told I had to knock it off. He's like, I didn't make it for that purpose. It just, it works that way. But, uh, yeah.

Is it a Brazilian? No.

Site?

Oh my God. Oh, okay. I, uh, yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. How interesting. Outline.com. What the heck? It's that big? I just Googled it, uh, or I just looked at SimilarWeb about how big it was. Outline.com. Crazy fascinating.

Yeah. So, so I think that one's cool. Um, All right. I'll bring you— how did we do on these? Wait, hold on. Yeah.

Just quick question. Does outline.com make money?

Uh, I don't think so. I don't know. I have no idea. Wow.

This person is so interesting. All right. Uh, that's it. That's the episode. Uh, by the way, for the people listening, we actually just did like a Q&A before this. It was Sean. I think it was too much talking. We got to do the Q&A on the second half because—

oh yeah, I'm fucking exhausted right now. But like, I feel like the blood is drained from my body right now. I'm tired from listening. I'm like, how the fuck is this going?

I'm so dead. I can't— if we're going to do 2 hours again, we have to do the heavy lifting in the front.

I tried to keep the energy high, but like in my brain, I also haven't eaten anything today, so I'm just like dying on all fronts right now.

I'm hurting. I'm hurting. Yeah.

No, Q&A is going to be a separate episode, dude. So we are— we're getting 2 episodes out of this.

Yeah, we got to— I can't do it next time.

Yeah, I thought we would be able to, but this is painful.

Maybe this is hard.

And Sam wants another one tomorrow.

Yeah, I can do another one tomorrow. I can do, I can do one a day easy, uh, I think, I think I can.

Yeah, we'll have to try something else if we want to keep doing the Q&As. I like that. I thought the Q&A was almost better than the actual episode, maybe because you guys were tired, but the Q&A came out a lot better than I thought. I think people are gonna like both of those. Yeah, no, the whole thing is good, so good job, guys.