#17 - Keto Ceral, Specialized Job Boards, Digital AA Meetings

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, wait, we gotta do that. We are here. It is, I don't know what the name we're gonna choose for this, but right now it's called Million Dollar Brainstorm.

I had people tweet at me. Yeah, what'd you get? Using that name.

That name, okay, good. I think the expectations are a little high. I want these to be ideas that may or may not be million dollar ideas, but we're back. We got good feedback last week, so we said let's do it again. The idea with this is every Friday morning me and Sam get together And instead of getting breakfast, we sort of shoot the shit on different ideas, different trends, different businesses that are cooking in your brain.

And so you and I have access to a lot of people that quote, normal people don't have access to just because we— and so let's just use the stories that we're hearing and we can kind of put two and two together and tell everyone else who doesn't have the same access.

Yeah. Before this one, I was like asking for permission from a bunch of people. I was like, hey, can I talk about that idea you said? Or this week I'm not going to do those, but by next week, hopefully I have.

But we have friends who run or own multibillion-dollar companies or companies that have sold for no big deal. Yeah. Like these like huge, they're either friends or acquaintances enough that we like are like, oh, I heard this guy's trying this thing.

Those guys that I call friends and they like half remember my name.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, but we definitely have insider information that we can kind of, uh, share.

Okay. So what is this box you just put on?

Yeah, I just put a box on Sean's desk. It's my sperm. Uh, so last week, last week we talked about sperm banks. It's all clean.

Okay.

So you can open that box up. It's clean. I, everything's Everything's good. It's called Daddy.

Is this real?

Yeah, so take that white bit off. Okay, and then you can open the box.

Oh man, this is a total unboxing. This is great.

Okay, open the box. Okay, now don't touch that thing.

Okay, I've reached the final boss.

Yeah, so I went and tried it. It's gonna be $100 a year.

$100 a year called this service called Daddy. D-A-D-I-S-S-E. Yeah, and this looks good. This looks like an Apple product here. Looks like a pair of headphones or something. Yeah, and so inside is your sperm and You're gonna freeze this for how long?

I don't know yet. I just, we talked about it last week and I think it's a really good idea, so I'm gonna try it. Okay. So we'll see. I'll know maybe in 2 weeks.

What did you see in there? Did you see a bunch of other people? Were they all people of different ages? Like, did you notice anything else while you were there or?

Oh no.

Oh, they mailed this to you.

They just mailed it to me.

Oh, okay. Even better.

Yeah. And I actually talked to loads of men who are my age or even younger and a lot of 'em are doing it. So I think that this whole sperm bank thing is actually way bigger than I actually anticipated. I'm gonna pay $100 a year for it. I went into it thinking to pay for 20 years.

Right. Okay. Wow. All right. Awesome.

Okay.

So that's one. That's a, that's a follow-up from last week, really.

Yeah. And I have one more follow-up from last week. So, okay, great. We talked about looking at competitors. So there's this woman on Twitter, her name is Jane Wong, but her handle is Wong M Jane. So W-O-N-G-M-J-A-I-N-E. A-N-E. All she does is she reverse engineers apps.

Yes. She's, uh, like Facebook's kryptonite, right? She always finds the new Facebook features before Facebook rolls them out.

Yeah. She's great. So that's a good follow. My friend Patrick texted me and showed me that. And then another great tweet that I found, there was a study. I found it again through Patrick and, and this guy named Cameron tweeted it out. So they did a study, I think tens of thousands of men, most men above age 50 claim they felt masculine. Most men below age 35 said they do not feel masculine. And we were talking about TRT stuff and I think I was like, I think this stuff's gonna get more popular. Yeah. And I think that's one data point that shows that it might be bigger than we had said. Yeah.

You know, not all the ideas that we say on this are like great ideas. That's like, you know, it's a brainstorm, but unless the sperm bank for me, the TRT one, I'm like, oh my God, that, that is a great idea. There's another name that I wanna find. So I'm gonna try to half Google while I'm doing this. There's somebody on Twitter who is, you were talking about competitors. There's a woman on Twitter who talks a lot about e-commerce stuff, and there's a lot of accounts on Twitter that are sort of like, I make 6 figures doing dropshipping, you should too.

She's kind of like that, like she sells guides, but she puts out a lot of free content on her Twitter that she tries to sell more of on the guide, and her free content's actually pretty good. So she was talking about like, how do you find who supplies the brands that you buy? What she was showing was, you know, they all get manufactured outside of the US usually, so they have to come in through customs. So you actually go to these 2 customs registries You search the company's brand name and you can see who they're receiving shipments from. You go look those companies up and oh, what do you know? These tend to be the manufacturers of that product. I would love to see that. And so you can go work backwards. You could find those exact suppliers and it's pretty clever.

So, and a lot of times I've noticed you can do that when you, so I'll like want to know who a supplier is and I'll buy the product.

And if you look inside the box, right, you read the label, you try to find it.

Yeah. If you look in the box, like in the cardboard box, a lot of times, or you can reverse search the sender mailing address. Anyway, there's a bunch of really cool things that you could do. We should actually talk about that. Okay. Uh, another time.

Yeah. Cool. All right. What else you got? We got, cuz we gotta go quick today. We only got 20 minutes left.

Okay. So some new ideas here. You wanna talk about that? Yes. Okay. Oh, first of all, we had a ton of people sign up for Trends after this and I got in trouble for giving out a code when I shouldn't have.

Okay.

So if you use that code, you better hurry up and use it now.

Otherwise it's gonna go away.

It's gonna go away. And if you wanna sign up, we put a special offer at trends.co/million. Okay. And so we'll be in there, or I'll be in there. I think you are too. And we'll be talking, but that's like a, a special discount code for people. Otherwise use the other one, but I'll get in trouble that we said last time. Okay. So two things happened over the last week that we had written about in Trends. The first thing, or like a follow-up, the first thing, RigUp.

Yes.

Okay. So I have had this hypothesis for a few months now that I think hyper-focused job boards, there's a huge opportunity. The reason why is in 2011 or '09, or Fred Wilson wrote a post saying that indeed.com was one of the best companies he ever invested in. I think he said it was the best.

Indeed.

Yeah. Okay. Indeed. And he was explaining the mechanics behind job boards and it was pretty amazing.

And so, and what's the mechanics? It's just, here's a bunch of job postings.

So the way a job, a lot of people don't actually understand how a job posting works, but basically there's like 2 or 3 models behind it, but they're all great. The first one is, so as the job board, you have to attract traffic. Yes. So you need people who are looking for that job to come to your website. Okay. To make money, what you have to do is you do a couple things. The first thing, which is what Indeed does, I think they mostly do this, is an employer will sign up and for every click or email that they get from a high-intent job seeker, they'll pay Indeed a certain amount of money.

Right. For every lead, basically.

For every lead. Yeah. It's a lead gen site and a lot of people don't even know how that works, like lead gen site, but that's basically how how it works. So as a business owner, I own a business, I'm more than happy to pay money to get people to my careers page or to send me their email of highly interested people. And then if they send me 50 people, I can pay them $50 an email and then I can go and try and close a handful of them. Right. The second way it works is, and I think this is how it works in Behance, is they pay a subscription.

The company itself pays a membership basically.

Yeah. So you pay $500 a month to have your job posting on there and they promise a minimum number of email sends to an email list.

Right. Okay. So job boards are good, been around forever, but RigUp, it seems like, is a, like a, it's a job board just for one niche. I believe it's in the oil and gas industry.

Yeah. Much more than that.

Much more than that.

Yeah, right. Thousands of, thousands of dollars. A company who's Google, when they hire a self-driving car person, you know, the base recruiter fee is like $30 grand if they place the person. And I think for niche jobs like this, it can go upwards of $50, $100 grand.

Yeah. Shout out Jeff Lewis. The original investor in RigUp is one of the best unknown investors or underrated investors out there. We're not really buddies. He wrote a term sheet to us. He was the first guy. You know, we did a— it was Christmas Eve or something like that, which everyone says investors, you know, they go away for Christmas. Yeah, they do. But if they're interested, they'll hunt you down. I was in Argentina. You know, we did a Skype call and 24 hours later he put a term sheet down. Like, this guy moves quick. He was at Founders Fund at the time. Now he's got his own fund. We didn't end up taking it because we had a cheaper source of capital. But I remember being very impressed with him and he's built a badass portfolio. He's got Wish, Lyft, Tilray, which is like this company in Canada that's, it was a weed company that went public already, unless I'm mixing up the names.

Jeff Lewis?

Yeah. Lambda School, RigUp, like this guy's got a killer portfolio. Anyways, so.

Good on him.

RigUp's good. Also Incredible Health, which was, Iman was on the podcast. That's a vertical, that's a niche job board like you're talking about where nurses is her field where.

That's another great one. Good pay. Nurses is a great one.

Huge demand.

And so a lot, well, but the thing is, is that a lot of people will see these companies and they won't actually understand what they're doing. They're like RigUp or Incredible Health, they're just offering all this free stuff. How the heck do they make money? Right. It's on the jobs. Right. Um, like that is on the job. So let's talk about other jobs that are interesting. Okay. Okay. Airline pilots.

Mm-hmm.

I was doing research. I think there's a nice size shortage of airline pilots. They're gonna exist for a long time. There's not that many of 'em, but, and I don't think there's a significant amount of people studying them as well as the job boards that I looked at seem pretty antiquated.

If you go to, you can go to Tinyboards. So tinyboards.co, it's my friend Andrew. He has done this for designers. He's done it for like 4 or 5 different verticals. I don't remember all the verticals. I think AI engineers. And he says it's doing wonderful. Excellent. It's doing great. Okay. Okay. So pilots are interesting. Construction workers I think are interesting because the average pay I would imagine for a construction worker is at least $25 an hour. Yeah. You need a lot of construction workers to get a project done. I imagine Rig Up would actually go down that route. Yes. And then finally, something that I've actually tested is truck drivers.

What do you mean you've tested it? You've actually tried this out?

Hmm. And how did your experiment go?

It made money. So I do all these experiments all the time. I rarely do I actually like follow through, follow, like make 'em big. Right. Because I already have a job and I'm happy, but I like to do these things for fun and sometimes maybe we'll hire some people to run 'em. But anyway, so I went and contacted people who could buy the leads and I go, okay, how much would you buy leads for? They said, we'd buy this type of lead for $10, this type of lead for $100. So I got a range of $10 to $100 for truck drivers that have commercial licenses. If you read about— there's a huge truck shortage right now, truck driver shortage. There's a reason. The reason why there's a truck driver shortage is they're not making a ton of money and it's a really hard job and young people aren't doing it. And so that definitely puts a kink in that idea. But if you think about what America does, one of our biggest things is logistics. We have a huge country and as commerce goes up, that's going to just grow with it. Right. And my father owns a company that works with truckers. I have a lot of insight to this. So trucking is incredibly interesting to me. Okay. So, all right. So we're going to put a pin in this.

Next one, specialty job boards. Interesting idea number one. Give me another idea.

Did we talk about paywall software last time? No. Okay. I'll reveal some stuff. Okay. So at The Hustle, I think we're paying $3,000 a month for a paywall software. It is awful.

What does this do?

Okay. How does this work? So there's Substack out there. Substack is cool. They just raised money. They are a paywall software for newsletters. So you can really easily collect money and send people exclusive newsletters for a monthly fee. Right. Great. I talked to the founder. I go, hey, are you gonna open this up to web-based stuff? 'Cause that's what I need. He said no. And so the idea here is if you go, go to the New New York Times and you'll see how some stuff's paywalled and some isn't. They built that software from scratch. I think they built it from scratch probably because they were using the provider that we're using now and they realized how horrible it was. I went and spoke to Business of Fashion. You know, Business of Fashion?

No.

It's a great website. They just raised money from financialtimes.com. They had to build their own. Wall Street Journal built their own. The Economist built their own. Like so many people are building their own. TechCrunch, I've heard, is spending north of 6 figures in software fees in order to use this vendor that we're using as well. Wow. It's a pain in the butt.

And so, so it's asking for a challenger.

Right. Okay. Love it. What else you got?

So it's like an app.

Yeah. And they just actually raised a round of funding, I think, in the last few days. I'm quite interested in this whole addiction thing and how we can help people get through that. The problem is, is if you have an addiction, there's like a huge barrier to entry in order to try to fix your addiction. Right. And that barrier to entry is mostly embarrassment or having to go to like the sperm bank because that's like weird. Right. Right. And so what I'm interested in is how will that be solved for digital?

Right. Can you do it more personal, more intimate? More sort of frictionless, more conveniently.

Yes, I think that's going to be interesting. And I didn't realize how big the demand was.

Yeah, either as a replacement or a supplement to the in-person stuff.

Okay, I got an idea for you. Came from the Trends Facebook group, so Shout out to Ben Curtis and Alan Tucker. All right. So they brought up this idea of a hunting and fishing D2C brand. So you posted about MeatEater. MeatEater. I had never heard of this. Huge. Of course, because I'm like, you know, snowflake in California that doesn't know anything about any of this. My testosterone's low. I don't— I don't go hunting.

I looked at their traffic. Their traffic's not big. I have to figure out where the revenue is coming from.

But they have a lot of revenue.

You're saying they raised money at a huge valuation. And I talked to people who were investors and they said the revenue was big.

Okay, so that was kind of interesting. I didn't know about it. And then these guys brought up in the group, they were like, hey, hunting and fishing is this underserved category asking essentially for a D2C brand. So go back and listen to the podcast with Moise, who started Native deodorant, and basically think about, okay, that appealed to a certain set. You know, Native is mostly for women who are, you know, health conscious and don't want to have aluminum in the deodorant. The hunting and fishing vertical, which is very much brick and mortar today. Can you create a digital brand that sells either accessories?

And Yeti did it.

Yeti did it. Yeti built a phenomenal success.

Right, coolers, exactly.

Specifically like a hunting and fishing one.

So which categories?

I don't know enough about hunting and fishing to know what is the, what is the product, but I would just, you know, go in what you were saying, go from the demand and work backwards.

Well, do you— that's what I would do. Do you know, guess how many Americans consider themselves hunter or fishers?

How many? Okay, I'm gonna say 15 million.

Okay, according to some preliminary research that I've done, a third.

Oh, so like 100 million.

105 million. Wow. Yeah, we were talking about this at our company and some people who are hunters and fishers said I said, I can't believe this is such a—

same number of people that drink water every day.

Right.

What's going on?

This is a— it's like a mega niche. It's like I work at Twitch right now and Twitch is, uh, it's this niche product, live streaming for video games and gamers. It's a mega niche, but it's a mega niche cuz there's so many gamers that you can do hundreds of millions of monthly users. Off of just gamers, which is crazy. Yeah.

And if you wanna learn more about this, there is this guy named Ryan Dice who I know— this isn't the same category, but there's a lot of survivalists, like people who, A—

that's the niche within hunting and fishing.

Yeah. Like this survivalist category, they think that the world's gonna end or they just don't wanna rely on the government. And so they wanna like prepare for apocalyptic, like type of things. And anyway, he built this blog for survivalists and it crushed it. If you don't believe in that type of stuff, I personally don't believe it. I respect you if you do believe in it. I don't. And so I would never wanna like make that stuff.

Okay. I wrote down another pseudoscience sort of one like this that you guys wrote about, which is this Ghostbusters thing. Did you read the story?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the story was basically there's a service, there's like, I think it's an insurance service and one of their sub-offerings is a Ghostbuster service. If you believe that there's, your house is haunted or there's a ghost, they will come to your house. Yeah.

That's stupid.

And they will check and they will do the methods that don't, you know, don't mean anything. And people are paying for this because a lot of people are spooked. A lot of people believe in ghosts. And I just had to—

How many people do you think believe in ghosts?

Dude, I think it's the same. I think it's like a third of people believe in ghosts. I don't think they're all afraid of ghosts or think their house is haunted, but I think a third of people believe in ghosts.

It's crazy. That's crazy. I don't. I'm not part of that category. I believe in aliens, but not ghosts.

Okay. Tweet at me if you believe in ghosts. That's what I want to know at the end of this.

Or if you'd be willing to pay money for someone to come and get rid of ghosts.

But I just had to like pay respects to the person who was like, you know what? Let's do it. Let's sell Ghostbusters.

Well, and you know, that's actually true is because One of the most popular shows on TV for a long time was the Paranormal Activity shows on TLC.

Yeah, exactly. It's entertaining. It's a very entertaining thing. Okay. And the people who do believe, they're going to pay, right? The people who believe that their house is haunted, they're going to pay because it's like this, you know, incredibly like tense and stressful thing.

You just got to get in that televangelist.

Like, it's like, okay, give me another idea. We got 4 minutes left. Okay, let's get 2 more ideas on the books.

A company just launched 2 months ago and we covered it and on trends. We, I, I think we actually wrote about keto cereal before it launched. We looked at the search traffic and keto cereal was climbing like crazy. Magic Spoon. Have you heard of Magic Spoon?

I've heard of this cuz I've tried keto 3 times.

Yeah. And it's like soda where the actual thing costs so little that all the money, the cost is all just marketing. Yeah, and so they marketed it through TV ads and everything else. And so the modern-day version of TV commercials is Facebook ads.

Yeah. Halo Top is huge.

I think this keto cereal thing will be in the same category.

Yeah. And it might be that there's other things like this. Like, my wife is vegan and so we buy all this. Like, there's this candy company called Unreal that's all vegan candy. So it's like, you want Reese's, but you're vegan now. Well, guess what? We made the closest taste to Reese's that's vegan. And same thing with M&M's and same thing with other candies. And so vegan candy, keto cereals—

M&M's even has dairy in it.

Chocolate, milk chocolate, right?

I know, but that's what I don't know if it's real chocolate.

I think this Magic Spoon thing, like my early results show, I think this thing's going to go to the moon.

Cool.

I like—

I have one more from trends that I like, and then you're going to finish this up. So miniature cooking set. I saw this on trends. It made a lot of sense to me because people love the miniature version of anything. There's something to seeing something that's, you know, you normally see at full size, mini pots and pans. And I think that as more people live in apartments and condos that are smaller and smaller, especially in cities, and people want to cook. And as the, you know, I think Tasty came out with their own skillet to pair with their recipe book.

And we wrote about that.

Yeah. And that was a clever idea. But I really like this idea of miniature modern cookware. I think something can be quite big there. It's not the business I would start., but it's one where if I see that product, if I see a good product that fits in that, I'm gonna, I would invest in that because I believe in the premise and I believe that anybody who does something innovative in cookware will be, will stand out from the pack because everything is so bland.

That's a big business. I think too, it's just creating really high quality cast iron skillets and things like that.

Absolutely. All right.

Last one. Can I say one more? Yeah. Okay. We have Wade Foster speaking at HustleCon. Wade started this company called Zapier. I call it Zapier, Zapier, something like that. Yeah. Million dollars raised. I think they're in the $60 million ARR.

Which means they could be worth a lot like $500 million. Correct. It's only 4 years old, but this whole connecting APIs and this no-code economy thing, this whole no-code economy thing, if no-code's huge, if we want to call it no-code economy, whatever, that's gonna be bigger than the sharing, this whole sharing economy stuff. There's Webflow, Zapier, If This Then That, all these things.

It's, we should, we should do, we should do a whole, a whole sec section on no-code next time. Next Friday we'll do it.

I think it is just the coolest thing I've ever seen. And no-code websites still suck.

And shout out to Cindy, big listener of the podcast and original investor in Zapier and talks about it all the time cuz that company's kicking ass.

I love it. We, we just give them more money every month.

Yeah.

Great.

All right, Sam, we gotta run. Let's get back to life. Hopefully you guys like this and also we're gonna do a Q&A episode. So if you made it to the end of this, you're probably Hardcore. We're doing a Q&A episode, so I want you to email me your questions. It's puri.shawn@gmail.com. Send in your listener questions. We're gonna do a full Q&A on those. All right, we gotta go.

See you. Thank you.