#181 - How Virtual Horses are Making Millions, A Potential 9-Figure Company & How to Bet on Anything
Do you own Dogecoin? You tweeted out that you owned it. Do you? Is that real? Yeah. Fuck. I mean, like, so it's a huge thing for you.
Uh, well, okay, so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way. Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right everyone, welcome to the episode. Do do me a favor, mfmPod.com. So that's My First Million, but abbreviated. So M-F-M Pod, like podcast. So mfmPod.com. If you go there right now, you're gonna see an inbox, an email form, enter your email. And each Thursday, Sean's sending out an email that does a summary of all the episodes that we've discussed and or launched that week. So make sure to sign up. You'll get a description of every single episode along with all the links that we've mentioned, all the cool companies that we mentioned. And also, we're doing a tour, so that comes out soon. But this June, we're going to June— or we're going to Austin and then Miami, and we're going to announce those dates and everything like that. So go to mfmpod.com and sign up, and you can be notified when all this is happening, and you'll get your weekly email that discuss the podcast. Sean, what are we talking about today?
Today we talk about Peak, a testosterone subscription company. We talked about B-Roll, which is a small little kind of bootleg company that I think could be big, could be bigger., but it does have some problems. And then we talked about a couple of gambling websites, gambling products that I think are cool. Zed Run, which is all the rage right now, people selling digital horses for $20 million, and PolyMarket, a place where you can go bet on anything. So we talked about that as well.
And make sure to listen towards the end, or I'm not trying to trick you, you could just skip ahead, but we said our feelings on today's episode, and I think a lot of people are going to like what we had to say, but you might need to listen to the first bit, the first half at least, to understand the context. So give it a Awesome. Do you guys want to do the intro?
Yeah, let's do the intro. I feel like I kind of fucked up that episode. I don't feel like I did a good job, but, um, leave, leave, leave this, leave this part in too. So I think it's worth—
why do you think it was a dud?
Uh, sometimes I just look at the clock and I'm like, oh fuck, we're halfway through the episode and I feel like we, uh, what have we said so far, you know? And then like That's what— that's how I judge it.
Uh, Abrey, what did you think?
Yeah, I thought it was a B. I thought we spent too much time on things that weren't ideas. Um, some of the ideas that we did talk about were things that we've talked about before, like Peak and Zed Run. Um, thought B-roll was actually really cool. I'm glad we spent time on that, but overall B. All right. And you guys just didn't have the energy. Sam, you didn't bring the energy today, man.
Is that crazy? That's crazy how you could tell. I don't feel well at all. Um, But I didn't think that I was low energy.
Dude, some days I'm just like having a sluggish day, bad day. I get on this call and I get your guys' energy and that just helps me get through the day.
That's funny. No, I feel horrible. I didn't sleep well. I mean, I do feel sluggish. I had a bad night's sleep. That's so funny that that radiates. That sucks.
I thought you were fine, but you usually have one or two moments in the episode that are like the Sam moment where you get really either excited or you think something's really dumb.. And, uh, yeah, so, so that didn't happen.
I did. Uh, over the weekend. I talked to him maybe Friday, and on the first call I was like— and I was actually quite skeptical of this. So this— we'll give people the context.
Uh, this is one of the first ideas that we've ever discussed as this new scheme.
I think literally episode maybe 1 or 2 of when we started doing the brainstorm, Sam goes, TRT subscription. And I was like, what? What? He's like, so I've been taking testosterone. TRT is testosterone replacement therapy. I've been taking testosterone and I think this could be a great business because, you know, if you take it, it helps you. You're going to keep taking it on a subscription. Like we were talking about why the business might be great and we were both like, dude, that's a great idea. Why doesn't somebody do this? And obviously people were already doing it. And so you recently were like, hey, there's this company Peak that I'm investing in that does that testosterone thing. You should talk to them. And so I did. And I went in with honestly kind of like lukewarm expectations. I don't know why. Like, I don't know. I just didn't like— I didn't know how big it was going to be. I didn't really know. Like, I myself, I don't take it because I'm like, I had some concerns. Like, is this really good for you or bad for you?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then I was totally convinced on the call. The guy was— the guy, Saad, who you introduced me to is an amazing communicator. Like, this guy was so good at selling me on the business. I was like, you're going to sell everybody your product if you can sell me this well on your business. He was a really, really talented guy.
Yeah, he is talented. It's a really— I think it's a pretty safe bet is what I think. I think it's a safe bet. But there So basically TRT is, I believe it, you know, I should know, I put it in my body, but I believe it's synthetic testosterone and you can put it in via, like you can rub it on your body.
We should explain the problem, right? Which is that males, you know, as you age in general, your testosterone levels go down, right? So in your 20s, you're this stallion. And then by the time you're in your 40s, your testosterone levels are, you know, I don't know, multiples less than they were in your 20s. Okay, that's just nature taking it, you know, that's Father Time. Okay. But there's also like other issues, which is that today a guy in his 20s and 30s has the testosterone levels of like a 70-year-old man 50 years ago or something crazy. There's some stats.
And there's a lot of reasons to why that's the case. Although doctors and scientists, they're like, well, we don't exactly really know, but It could possibly be that we live pretty soft lives. There's not that much fear or compared to— we don't have a death threat on a regular basis or dying of different diseases, although maybe that's different the last 2 years. We drink plastic or we drink out of plastic. What else did they say? We smoke less, which a lot of people think nicotine and testosterone levels are correlated. And there's a variety of other reasons, but basically the average person's T level, the average person, the average boy or man, the 25-year-old is like that of a 56-year-old, yada, yada, yada. And what that means is a lot of guys think, well, testosterone, okay, so you're just going to have big muscles and look good naked. That's actually kind of like a secondary thing. The first thing is that you actually become incredibly depressed and bummed and you just don't feel like I call it like aggressiveness, but it's not really like I want to fight you aggressiveness. It's like I'm a little bit more confident and I have a purpose. Anyway, I got tested for this and I had a low T and I tried a lot of different solutions. So, I tried this company. It's pretty great. I think it could be pretty cool. I think they're doing pretty big numbers already. We'll see if they can pull it off. I think a company like a testosterone business, this is one of those companies, I think, Shawn, you said it one day where you're like, there's a bunch of different risks here. There's technological risks like can you actually build it? There's market risk, like does the market actually want this? Um, in this case, those two things aren't risks. The third risk is operational excellence. Uh, are you competent enough to pull this off? And that's the risk that they have. And I actually think that's a, that's a pretty easy risk because that's a commodity. I mean, there, there's, there, if you overpay a handful of Uber employees, they're going to figure out the problem.
Yeah, you go find the guy who opened up Uber's like Atlanta business and you're like, hey, I I need you. You are an operational person. I need you to come here and solve this problem. Which, by the way, I think I've invested in 4 companies and on the founding team of each of them was like, I opened up Uber in Canada. I ran Uber's Canada business. I went there first to open it. I became the GM. Or there's an Uber competitor, Uber for flowers. If I bloom that, I invested in the guy who ran that because it's like, these guys have operational excellence. They just needed to find a good market. That really wants a product. So I think you're right that the market does want this, but there is an education step that has to be done. Product. Yeah, they have almost zero product. Yeah, product, Chris. But it really is about regulation and operational excellence. So do they have regulatory risks and do they have operational excellence? Because you have to properly handle it, right? The flow is they don't just give testosterone to anybody. You take a test, so you at home finger prick, you send the blood to the lab, the lab gets reviewed by a doctor, and the doctor says, Yeah, your levels are great or your levels are low. And if your levels are low, we can offer you a prescription if you want. And then when you get the prescription, they need to keep measuring over time to see if your levels are improving or not and that sort of thing. And so there's a big kind of like time lag. It's not just like buying a thing off Amazon or 2 days later it's at your house and there's no risk in playing with that toy. It's like, no, there's risks. This is actual medical. It's a medical, it's a digital medical workflow. and those are new. So all of the telehealth products are like this. Hims and Ro are probably the most successful versions of these where they took Viagra and they said, okay, how do we market to people who might have erectile dysfunction? How do we get them a prescription? So how do we pair a person on Facebook who sees our ad to a doctor who can prescribe them, that they had diagnosed them with erectile dysfunction, prescribe them a medicine? And how do we create the generic version of Viagra? How do we take this product and how do we sell it? And then how do we do that whole thing profitably? Right. So similar, similar mindset. Those have become multibillion-dollar companies. And I think that there's more to come in that vein. I've invested in a couple, Peak being the latest. But yeah, I think this is great. And like you said, the thing I would have been worried about was twofold. One, does this really work? And what are the side effects? And as he was talking me through it, I was like, okay, well, you're very convincing, but obviously you're somewhat biased, right? You're like, the owner of this company, but he started as a user of the product, so I think it is somewhat organic. But I was like, okay, that sounds good. I'm going to do some independent research and I'll figure this out for myself too. The second thing was I didn't like the idea of injecting myself in the butt, or I don't know, where do you inject yourself? The thigh?
I put it in my thigh and it doesn't hurt at all. I do it 2 days a week.
And so why don't you take the gummy or like the cream? That seems like a gummy seems way better than a shot.
I got used to it and I didn't want to deviate. I had a provider that only did the shot and I just was like, yeah, I'm used to it. It also feels like it's going to work better. I don't actually know if it does.
I asked him this. I go, he said he has all three and I go, why would anybody choose the shot? He goes, actually, if you look in popularity, our shot is the most popular and then the second is this and the third is this. And I said, is that because it's more effective? And he goes, no, it's not more effective. In fact, the cream is the most effective. But, uh, but people believe there's a perception that the shot— oh, this is— I'm doing the real thing. I'm getting the full effect of this. And I thought, oh, that's funny how that, like, perception is reality.
Yeah. So I like it, but I've been doing it for a while and, um, this isn't like a peak, uh, commercial. And so we'll just be explicit about this. Sean and I both have a financial incentive in this company. We are both investors of this company, but, uh, it's, it's sick. We've been talking about TRT for a while. I'm a fan, and, uh, I've been taking it now for 2 or 3 years. Um, it changed my body. I didn't take it for my body, but it changed in a good way.
Yeah, I believe that. The question is who buys it, and, um, I don't know yet. I mean, it's a pretty taboo thing, so they got to fight some taboo, uh, stuff. But, uh, yeah, we'll see. I mean, because people, when they say they're like, oh, you're taking steroids, And I joke, I'll be like, yeah, I take steroids. It's not actually steroids, right? It's not an anabolic steroid, but they do. They've got some, they've got a little bit of culture uphill battle to fight, but I think people are going to be open-minded to this actually far more than I ever thought. I know a lot of people who take TRT and I was shocked that many people do. I thought I was going to be the only one.
Especially because Joe Rogan, AKA the male Oprah, does it and vouches for it. I think that goes a big way. Like that guy has like a pretty massive mainstream following. And, uh, when he normalizes something, uh, it's just a matter of time. You know, first his diehards will go do it, and then the other people get curious and start to check it out. And eventually, as it gets more popular, people will remember that Joe vouched for it, Joe does it. So, you know, I think that goes a long way. Just like Oprah had a big effect on a lot of businesses, I think a person of Joe Rogan's magnitude is actually not just any other influencer.
Do you want to talk about some of these ideas that you have? You've got some amazing ideas. Do you want to talk about Zed? That's crazy.
Let's talk about Zed. Okay, so we both, uh, we mentioned Zed on the pod before. Why don't you explain what it is and then—
No, you do it. It's so— it's— this is like perfect for you. This is like a you. This is like a Sean company.
Okay, it's really simple. Zed is a, uh, it's digital horse racing. So if you've ever been to a horse racing track, super fun, you know, Saturday, Sunday experience. You go to a track, there's a bunch of horses. You don't know anything about horse racing. You don't know anything about the strategy. You look at the sheet. What do you do at a horse racing event? You sort of drink and you bet. And so the betting part is there's 8 horses that are about to run. You don't know anything about any of the horses. You look at the names and they all got funny names like Mother's Last Hope or something like that. And then you're like, you know what? I think Mother's Last Hope might win. I'm going to bet $50 on Mother's Last Hope, $90 on Sam Parr's ponytail, and then the last one, you know, is like whatever, me lucky charms. And so you bet on 3 horses out of the 8, the horses run across, you're cheering like crazy. You just want your horses to win. They maybe they do that, maybe they don't. And, uh, and whatever, it's a good time. And so horse racing is almost like the purest form of gambling because you really don't, there's really no strategy that you don't need any skill or strategy, but you're safe because really the other people also don't have any skill or strategy. So it's not like a poker table where if you don't know what you're doing, you'll get taken advantage of. Horse racing is very simple in that way. So what Zed did was they brought that online. Okay, well that seems kind of niche. The smart thing was they brought it online in the crypto format. So the way it works is it is a crypto project. It is an NFT project, which we've talked about before. So you go on Zed and you can buy a horse. So you can buy a horse or you can breed two horses together., and, and so you'll have a horse and then you can race your horse and then your horse can win for you or it can lose for you. It's sort of like a little Tamagotchi pet of yours. And, and every horse has like these characteristics. So there's like a probability when you breed your horse or when you buy your horse, there's like a probability it's going to be like a small fraction of chance. It's going to be the LeBron James of horses. It's so athletic, it's just going to win every race. And then there's a probability it's going to be average or below average. And, uh, so there's a gambling aspect just in the breeding and buying of horses, not just the races themselves. And so people are going on there, they're, they're buying and collecting horses like they're Pokémon, and they race them against each other and they win money. And these guys are crushing it.
So yeah, so this— what Sean just said— so the URL is zed.run. So zed.run. What he just described, it sounds kind of silly And look, like, it is silly, I guess. I guess gambling is silly, but whatever, it's fun. And the artwork is cool. And what he just sounds— sounds like a small idea, but their numbers are astonishing. So go ahead. What are the numbers?
They sell horses like in a batch. So it'll be like, you know, in June they'll do like a drop of new horses that you can go buy. And so they just did a drop a few days, 2 days ago, I think, 3 days ago. So they did a drop., and, um, it was $18 million in digital horse sales. So they sold $18 million of digital horses to 2,400 buyers. Uh, the top spender paid about $800,000, and the top 100 spenders spent $8.3 million. And, um, and so what's, what's happening here under the hood is that there's a group of people who are investors and they believe in NFTs. They love to gamble.
And what happened— one of my friends is those guys. Well, Joe, we'll just say Joe, he spent six figures on it.
That's amazing. We're going to have one of the biggest whales on the pod. I forgot to tell you this. One of the biggest whales in this whole space and the NFT space reached out and he has a crazy story and he's like, I'd love to come tell the story on your pod. So we should have him on. We'll go more in depth with him there. But my understanding is that there's these people that were really big into daily fantasy, like they play DraftKings, FanDuel. And these were the whales there. And then, you know, they were doing daily fantasy for a while. And then Top Shot came out, NBA Top Shot, and they went heavy into Top Shot. They bought a bunch of Top Shot things. They were buying and selling from each other, and that was driving up the prices. And they had these huge Top Shot collections, and now Top Shot was worth a lot more money, and they did well there. And then they said, all right, great, what's the next Top Shot? And they went to Zed Run. And Zed Run is the next Top Shot. And so, so that's what they're doing.
$18 million. Where do the proceeds go?
So I think it goes to Zed. I don't think there's anybody else to go to here. So I think Zed basically mints the horses and they buy them. So Zed gets the sort of initial sale. And then from there, if I sell my horse to you, I get the proceeds of that sale then from there. And there's maybe some transaction fees. So I think that's it. I don't think there's any other, like, I don't think there's miners and other stuff involved, but I could be wrong.
I haven't looked at it. And then we buy your horse.
And then what's the likelihood that your horse is going to win a race?
Is it— do they establish— you basically, when you're buying a horse, you're buying that probability that it's going to win?
I'm out of my pay grade here. I don't know exactly how the horse racing probabilities work. You know, how does the slot machine work? I'm not exactly sure. I just know I pull the lever and looking for cherries.
So, so it's crazy. So let me tell you, I'll give you some inside baseball here. Sean talked about— told me about this, uh, 60 days ago maybe.
Our friend Narendra told us about it, told both of us about it.
Yes. And you brought it up on the podcast and this was, was this 60 days ago, maybe 2 months ago. And you guys described it and I was like, this is silly, but Sean's been pretty spot on with some of this stuff. Narendra has been spot on as well. He was early on Clubhouse, even, you know, he sees shit. And I contacted the founders of Zeb and I got them on the phone and I spent like an hour talking to them. And they're raising money. And I was like, I'm in, they're going to let me invest. And they took a week and they said, no, we don't have either. I, they, they did. It was a vague either like they don't have room or they're not sure if they're going to raise. Regardless, that's cool. But it's pretty nuts the amount of interest that they have been getting. And the founders were really cool guys and I was devastated. I didn't get, didn't get in. You guys are listening. Call me. Um, but it's, it's pretty crazy, like, how much interest that this company is getting.
Yeah, exactly. Um, and so, so, you know, I was— I almost bought a $10,000 digital horse over the weekend because, uh, I wanted to get in before this drop, and I just got busy with Mother's Day stuff and didn't get around to it. But I think, you know, I don't know if there's a good investment or bad investment. I would— my personal opinion is that this is going to have a hype cycle and the prices are going to go up. It's going to be like, oh my God, there's you know, this company's done $300 million of digital horse sales, and then, you know, 400 days from now, um, we're gonna be like, remember Zed Run? That was, that was a fun 4 weeks. Kind of like, kind of like BitClout, kind of like BitClout, kind of like Top Shot, kind of like Clubhouse, right? Like, this is not uncommon, and it's not really even a knock on them. Like, look, they did better than 99% of startups that don't get a hype cycle. But, um, I don't see how much longevity there is here because the trick is when the primary value is speculation, then it's hard for something to sustain. And then here it's like primary value number one is speculation. I'm going to get this horse, I'm going to sell it for more. Primary value two is a game. And both games and speculation sort of fade over time with everything except for Bitcoin because For Bitcoin, the speculation is actually what makes it valuable. You know, people speculate that the price will go higher. The higher the price goes, the more it actually is a store of value. So the speculation actually creates the product, whereas that's not the case for ZET.
Do you ever ask yourself, how are we going to build, or how, you know, individually, how do we make stuff on the internet that can actually last 20, 30, 40, 50 years? Because you think of the things that are in the top, uh, 50 companies right now, most of them, I bet, that are tech-based, are launched inside the last 15— how old is Google? 20 years old? Um, ish. Yeah. Year 2000 maybe, or 96, so 25. Yeah. Everything's so new and changes so rapidly. Do you ever ask yourself, how are you going to create something that can last a long time? Or do you not care about that?
I don't really care about that. Uh, what I do care about, I guess like my view is that you've got to go on either end of the spectrum. Either you try to build something that's going to be really defensible and valuable. And really what I mean— so for me, it's not about something lasting over time. It's this one theory, which is, does it have a positive flywheel? Which means the more people who use it and the longer it's around, does it become more and more valuable? There's something called the law of increasing returns. And so I want to be in a business that's like that. Might be hard to get the flywheel turning.
Explain that. What does that mean?
Yeah, so like an example of it is— there's many, but let's say Amazon. Or Amazon is the classic example of this. So what makes a shopping store valuable? A store is valuable if it has large selection, low prices, and fast delivery. So with Amazon, for every single customer that comes on, for every single product that they add to it, they're increasing the variety available to that customer. Because they have so many customers, they can offer the lowest prices. And because they have so many customers and so much built-up sort of supply chain infrastructure behind their thing, they can offer the fastest delivery. And so for them, every new customer or every new merchant is just like— it's kind of like you used to say with The Hustle, every email is a wind. We're a pirate ship, and every email subscriber is a little wind in our sails. It's that, but basically it makes it better for everybody else. The classic example of this is Facebook, right? So every person who joins Facebook makes Facebook more valuable to all the other people on Facebook. And so in the beginning, when Facebook has zero people on it, it's not very valuable to anybody. Even the first 10 people, it's not very valuable to anybody. But once it gets every additional person, the thing gets more defensible over time. It gets more valuable to its existing customers, which makes it harder for anybody to compete. And they don't have to do a new thing. They don't have to come up with a new idea. Or a new business line, like, all they had to do was just get more people using it because the people were the value. Um, and Uber, same thing. Every additional driver on the road, um, makes the, the, the, the service more valuable to everybody because you get faster pickup times. And faster pickup times means more people will take rides. More people take rides means more dollars available for drivers, which means more drivers on the road, which means faster pickup times again, right? So like, that's the law of increasing returns. So, so that's what you really want is what's called a positive flywheel. So I care about that a lot because business is really hard anyways. But when you don't have that, you're just always working harder and harder to get more. Whereas with those businesses, you work extremely hard at the beginning to get it going, but then momentum starts to be on your side. And I like that.
I, and I used to be, and I have to fight this. You and I are I don't know if you are, but you might be. Where I like to take shortcuts when I first start stuff, or at least I used to.
I need to get going here.
Yeah. Yeah. Like, let me, like, because I was always really good. I'm like, I can blunt, I can brute force this. People always just say like, well, you know, if you want to chop down a tree, you should spend most of your time sharpening your axe. I'm like, fuck that. Give me a sledgehammer and I'm going to start banging. And by the time you're done with your sharpening, I'm going to knock this shit over.
I'll be halfway through. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm like, just get out the way. I'm going to use strength and just will, force of will, and I'm going to get it done. And that actually is super effective a lot of times, but it's incredibly harmful some of the time because I have taken shortcuts where I'm like, man, had I done this this way and just slowed down and done it the right way, it would have paid huge dividends 8 months, 10 months, 14 months later. I wish I would have done that. And when I hear these stories, um, I definitely think like it's definitely the right way. You have to put faith that you are going to be happier 2 years from now than you are if you do this one way, even though it sucks now.
Yeah, so I think the important thing is to recognize the companies that are businesses that don't have this advantage. So let's take e-commerce. E-commerce is actually quite easy to get going, um, right? Like you, you, you don't even have to have a product. You can drop ship. Or you just start doing, you know, you can do $1,000 of ads and make $2,000 of revenue. Like, great, you're in the game. It wasn't that hard to get started. You didn't need a license. You didn't need anything to get going. Maybe some initial inventory. That's kind of like the biggest barrier. But e-commerce doesn't ever get this law of increasing returns. I don't think so, at least, or it's minimal at best, which is that, you know, if you're at $1 million in e-commerce sales, getting to $2 million, you're going to have to do more work. You don't get less work over time, so you have to keep manufacturing the product. Whatever you did last year doesn't really behoove you, doesn't really benefit your growth. You keep having to spend money on advertising and marketing. It doesn't get cheaper over time. It gets more expensive the bigger you try to scale it. And so those have sort of almost negative effects over time. At the very minimum, it's neutral. And so, so yeah, basically I'm just trying to describe kind of like a network effect or a flywheel style business where how is it that when you, if you draw an arrow between all the different parts of your business, I get customers, they do X because of X, Y happens because of Y, I get more customers. That's what you want. The circle has to connect. And if the circle connects, it doesn't matter that if it's hard to get off the ground, once you do it, it's going to like start spinning faster and faster and get more and more valuable over time. That's how you get a long-lasting company. That's one way. The other way, the other thing I think about is the exact opposite. What's something that's super disposable? Yeah, this arbitrage opportunity may not be around forever, but it's here now. And so when I look at opportunities, I look at one of— I try to go on one end of the spectrum or the other when I'm being smart. And then sometimes I'm not being smart and I go in the middle and I hate my life after that.
And I actually think that it's important to acknowledge that there's room for that second one, which is everyone says or myself as well. I'll look at something like that and I'll say, oh, this is like a get-rich-quick thing. This is just some stupid meaningless arbitrage. And the answer is, yeah, it is right. Exploit it. It exists. Have we talked about B-roll?
We haven't talked about it before. Okay, so B-roll is a website that is not very well known, but it's useful in the e-commerce world. So what is this? So one of the most effective forms of advertising is what's called UGC, user-generated content. Why does this work? Well, most people are advertising on platforms like Facebook or Instagram or, you know, Snapchat, Pinterest, places like that. And what are you competing with? You're not actually— you're not competing with other advertisers. You're competing against the feed. You're competing against the scroll. If somebody's just going to scroll right by your ad to the next piece of, like, entertaining content, right? Because you're It's you're here trying to sell a product and the next person is trying to make the person laugh or click the like button and then keep scrolling. So, you know, you're competing against a meme, you're competing against an influencer, you're competing against like, you know, some model in her bikini on Instagram. So how is your ad going to compete in that, that environment? Well, turns out the best way to compete is actually not, not to stand out, but to blend in, to look like Instagram content. Well, how do you do that? So what people started doing was they were paying, started paying influencers. How do I get the Kardashians? You know, it's like that brand Sugar Bear Hair. They went and they paid the Kardashians, you know, silly money to post a picture with themselves with the little blue gummy bear in their teeth, you know, in their mouth. Basically, they're holding it. They're like biting down on it. And they took a picture doing that while holding the bottle of Sugar Bear Hair. Right. And so they go and you pay a lot of money for influencers to do things. And influencers are kind of hard to deal with. They're divas. They have managers.
And, you know, and this is B-roll.io. Yeah, B-E-E-R-O-L-L.io. B-roll.io.
And so what does B-roll do? B-roll basically says, hey, let's give— we will get you content that looks like a person on Instagram just using your product. It looks like someone just posting a review, you know, a video review where they say, you know, I bought this hat. Found this hat. I really love it. Here's why. I have this problem with the sun getting in my eyes, so this hat is amazing for XYZ reasons. Or they'll be like, you guys, I just got my package from blah, blah, blah in the mail. I'm so excited to open it. I've been waiting for weeks for this thing. And it's like, what is this? Who is this person? What have they been waiting weeks for? And then they open it up and they're like, great, here's this eye wrinkle cream. It's going to be so good. I'm going to try it on, blah, blah, blah. They make this video out of it. And so B-roll is basically a way to push a button and get a bunch of average-looking people to create the content that fits your story that you want. So you almost write a little script, a little storyboard where you say, first, say that you got the package in the mail and you're so excited. Second, open it up while you're in your bathroom and show your face in the mirror before Third, put the cream on. Then fourth, you know, do your makeup, do your hair, improve the lighting, and then show how much better you look now that you put our cream on. And then say, guys, you got to try it. I want you, you know, you guys got to— if you guys follow me, you guys got to try this or whatever.
How do they make money?
They take a cut. So what they've done is they went and got all the like wannabe influencers of the world, micro influencers. This is like, you know, some mom in Florida who wants to make 40, 50 bucks for, uh, for making a video while she's at home, like while her kid naps. Or it's like, you know, some girl in college who's in her dorm room and wants to make, you know, $100 this month to pay for whatever, you know, manicure and a pedicure. And what they get is they get your product for free and then maybe they get a little bit of cash. And in return, what you get is content for your ads that looks like real human beings making content. 'Cause it is real human beings making content for you.
Is it a big business?
It's a good business. I don't know. It's not a big business yet, but I think this could be a big business. It's sort of criminally under-marketed. Me explaining this is probably the best marketing they've had. Right. And ironically, this is actually like a B-roll, right?
Like if they—
I know if they're going to use this.
Did you see there's an app called Parkast? I think something like that. No, it's not called— I forget what it is. Oh, Pinata. And they're using your, your voice and me like commenting as an ad. I got, I got, I kind of got angry at them. So Uh, what's, what's this company called? Beehive?
I talked to the guy who, who owns it. I actually would like to buy a business like this. I think this is a really good— this is a business that can make, I don't know, it can make a lot of money. So here's what I relate this to. There's, um, there's a business called User Testing, which we've talked about on here.
I like User Testing.
User Testing did the same thing. They activated the stay-at-home mom workforce, which is there's a whole bunch of people that are staying at home. They want a little bit of side income. They don't want to have like specific skills, like, you know, some coding or designing or something like that. And they just want to make a little bit of money. They'll, they're willing to basically trade half an hour or an hour of their time for $10, $15. And, uh, they have flexibility. They do it when they want and they don't do it when they don't want it. And, um, so what user testing is, is they basically matched up that mommy at-home workforce with companies that wanted feedback on their website. So go to my website, try to do X, Y, and Z, and, uh, record yourself while you do it. And if you get confused, I want to see that so I can go improve my design. And UserTesting has become a, a very large company, hundreds of millions in revenue, and will go public, you know, probably in the next 12 to 24 months is my guess. And so UserTesting became a large company, a multi-billion dollar company. Doing that. I think this activates the stay-at-home workforce in a different way, which is to say, hey, do a review or a testimony of my product that I can put on my website or in my marketing, right? Why wait for— why pay— I overpay for influencers or wait for customers to like take the time to do this. I'll pay you, I'll give you some free product, I'll pay you a little chump change to create a testimonial or review or create whatever, you know, little, little short video clip because that's what I need to be advertising on. TikTok or anywhere else.
Great. Can I explain to you what I would do if I wanted to make money off this? Yeah. I used to have like a little like e-com things and I would go to, I hate admitting this because frankly I don't think it was a good idea, but I would go to fiverr.com and I would write a script and I would pay someone $5 to $100 to record them as a testimonial. Really, it wasn't even that good because they make it look too professional.
Yes, too professional.
Yeah, it was a testimonial nonetheless. Now I have no idea if this is what— what's it called? B-roll. I have no idea if this is what they did, but basically what they're doing is they're just taking a very specific niche of Fiverr. Fiverr.com is like probably the leader in this space. It's a publicly traded company. It's, um, their whole shtick was $5 things that you could do now, uh, like you can draw a logo or make a video, a 30-second video, and people would game it. I use fiverr.com to get 10,000 Twitter followers, and it automatically looks like I had 10,000 Twitter followers. It made me look legit, yada, yada, yada. People use it for scams. What I would do is I'm looking at Fiverr's annual report, and they'll actually tell you more likely than not what some of the fastest growing categories are, um, and what the fastest and most popular services are. Or you could just go straight to fiverr.com and do like rank by popularity. And I would just rinse and repeat and I would look at what B-roll did and I would look at which category is the most popular and I would create a website just for that. And I think you could probably build a pretty good business doing that.
We should, we should do that. We should go into, we should do a dive into Fiverr's, you know, like public reports and let's see what we find because Fiverr is a pretty interesting business. We could do Fiverr and maybe like Upwork or whoever. I'm going to show you. Oh, you can't see my screen, huh?
Like you could do you could do like, like, all right, I'm just on fiverr.com, like Fiverr but only focusing on voiceovers. So it's like, for, for $500, we'll read whatever you want for a 60-second thing, and I sound like this voiceover, I sound like a movie guy. Or you can get this other person, uh, who sounds like a commercial lady from a credit card commercial, yada yada yada yada. Or you can do, you can do like—
I'm gonna send you a screenshot of the, uh, of the, like, the storyboard that I submitted, um, to, to use this thing. And, uh, I mean, it's— the design looks like a little bit crazy, but, uh, but it is pretty cool. You'll see, like, how this works, and I think, I think it makes it very real in your mind, like, um, how, how powerful this would be. It's like, uh, so for example, if you're an e-commerce store right now, or an e-commerce owner, which is all— there's a lot of these, right? Shopify has exploded in popularity. And you, you book a photo, you book a professional photographer, you go to a studio and you go look at all your favorite brands, Lululemon, Nike, Gap, whoever. Right. And you say, we want to make commercials like them. We want to have our photos like them. That's the way this should work. We want beautiful, clean, you know, like perfect lighting, cute models wearing our stuff, smiling and holding hands. And then you go put that on Facebook and then next to it you take out your iPhone and you record your face and you're basically set. You basically are holding up your product in shitty lighting in your bathroom and you go, guys, I just got this, you know, whatever, lip gloss. And I don't know why I picked lip gloss. Like, I wouldn't even know the first thing about what to say about lip gloss. All right, let's pick a different one. Guys, I just got this hair product for my men's long hair that I have. I don't know about you guys, but I wake up in the morning, it looks like this. And then what I do is I just squeeze this on, put this in my hair, and bam, I look fantastic. And, you know, whatever, even less salesy than that. It's just like, guys, it looks so good except for this little part here, but I got to work on that. Anyways, you guys get the idea. That ad will kick ass compared to the studio photographer, official, high quality, you know, professional.
Have you even seen that the commercials on TV, people are doing this now too.
Yeah, because they saw— because before you couldn't measure TV well enough, right? TV was hard to measure. You couldn't figure out what works and what doesn't. Now you throw both ads on Facebook, you throw 1,000 ads on Facebook, and you'll see this one gets the most clicks, this one gets the longest views, this one results in highest number of purchases. So then they probably did that, spent $100 million on Facebook and said, this is the best way to communicate our product to our customers. Now, hey, TV guy, roll this instead.. And then they're like, are you sure? This looks like shit. And it's like, no, no, no, trust me, this works. And so this lifestyle type of content or user-generated style of content works so well. So then the question is, you're basically feeding into Facebook's ad engine. So this looks like a small business, right? It even sounds like a small business. B-roll, like B-E-E, like a little bumblebee. The website looks like shit.
How much revenue do you think they make?
I think they're probably doing a couple million, $1 or $2 million a year is my guess. And I think that this could easily be, you know, a 9-figure business. Why? Because you're taking a subset of the Facebook ad engine, right? Facebook— people are spending billions and billions of dollars on Facebook advertising. If you have a way for them to create more ad creative that converts better at scale without hiring their own people and doing this stuff in-house, people are going to take you up on that bargain. But you'd have to basically market yourself as well. You'd have to go and figure out how to get them all to use you.
You know what would be kind of cool? I'm just thinking about this. We talk about so many things that I would love to do. I'm like, oh, this just seems exciting. And a lot of people think that way. We should do an episode one day or make a list of where we list out the type of headaches that each business comes with. So I think the issue is that we make things sound easy, and in some regard they are. They're really simple, but they have issues that everything has issues. So like with media, the issues is you have to deal with people, personnel. 'Cause it's a, your people make your stuff. With e-com, you have to deal with like the shipping and logistics. You have to, what do you have to deal with? Cash flow issues, whatever. With B2B.
The whole supply chain, yeah.
Supply chain stuff. With B2B software, you have to deal with.
Enterprise sales, yeah.
Enterprise sales. And you also have to deal with like, it can feel like it is a little slow sometimes. Like it can be a slog. Yep. Like there's issues for everything. I would love to hear like what the headaches are for this and some of the other stuff that we talk about. So like, what are the issues with this? Probably maybe people because you're dealing with—
it's quality control. So the biggest issue is I'm an advertiser. You did all the hard work to convince me to start to try using B-roll to get some videos made. I put up my brief. Well, I kind of wrote it in kind of a shitty way because I don't know how to do this right. I wrote my script. My script kind of sucks. It was unclear, it was open-ended, blah, blah, blah. That goes to some, again, some person in Tennessee who's just doing this for fun on the weekends to make a little side cash. They half read the thing, they record the thing, but there's like background noise behind them to the point where you can't hear what they're saying. Or they didn't follow the prompt. The client really said, start the video holding up our product. And the person just didn't do that. And now the video's in, the client expects to get the video they wanted, the video creator expects to get paid, and nobody's happy. The client didn't like the video and the creator said, I did the work, what's up? And you're in the middle and you're now having to figure out how am I gonna ensure quality so that my advertisers don't get fed up and leave throughout this process. This is the problem for user testing as well. UserTesting has a whole fleet of humans and robotics to make sure that the tests that get submitted are going to make the client happy. And the client's not going to say, hey, I want a refund. This person didn't even follow our directions. Or, you know, they didn't speak. They just clicked. They didn't even give their thoughts out loud. Right? So like, we can't— I don't want to pay $15 for this test. I didn't get what I wanted. And you still owe the guy $15 because they did the work. And if you don't pay either one, they're going to leave the platform. If you don't give either one what they want, they leave the platform. Now you have a churn problem.. So quality assurance is the number one issue with a marketplace like this. In addition to the normal headaches of going and getting people to join your platform of a two-sided market.
I just want like a Glassdoor for different business ideas. Like, where's the downside? Just because everything has it. Just tell me what the downside is and what I got to deal with. Do you want to do one more or no?
Yeah, let's do one more because I feel like I was long-winded and not that interesting today. So I'm going to try to make up for it. All right, let's do one. Okay, this is cool. Polymarket. Have you seen Polymarket?
No, tell me.
All right, I'm gonna screenshot what I do on this thing. So Polymarket is a betting network. It's a place to bet on the future. So you can bet on anything. So if you go to—
Bet on your beliefs is the name is called, or the phrase is bet on your beliefs, their trademark.
So it's similar to any betting platform, like, oh, I can go bet, will the Lakers win tonight or are they gonna lose, right? But you bet on different type of stuff. So here's the top bets right now. Uh, number 1, will Dogecoin reach $1 at any point before June 15th, 2021? Will Andrew Yang win the Democratic primary of New York City in 2021? And so let's take that Andrew Yang one.
By the way, really quick, do you own Dogecoin? You tweeted out that you owned it. Do you? Is that real? Yeah. Fuck, I mean, like, so it's a huge thing for you.
Uh, well, okay, so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way. So I bought I bought a million Doge at 3 cents, and, uh, so that would be, you know, I would have made, I don't know, like half a million to a million dollars or something like that if I just held the whole thing. But I sold at 8, I sold at 15, I sold at 30, I sold that. So now I still have a slug of it left, uh, and I'm just letting that ride at, uh, it's at like 50 cents now or something like that.
Yeah, only tweet the good stuff. Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, okay, so, so, um, so anyways, this— so, so you could bet on something. So like there was, there was a bet— or there's a bet right now: will New York City be fully reopened by July 1st? And then there's a price on— yeah, it's all simple, yes and no. So if you just look at this site, it'll show you that $60,000 has been bet on this bet, and most people are betting no. So, uh, out of 100% of people who bet, 73% said no and 27% said yes. And so when you go bet, you get better odds. Like, if I'm betting the yes side and only 27% people have said yes, I get paid more if that ends up being correct. If you take one of these other bets, like, we'll both like this one, I bet this one, which is, will Floyd Mayweather beat Logan Paul in their boxing, upcoming boxing match? To me, this is like 100% probability that if the fight happens, Floyd Mayweather is going to beat Logan Paul.
Yes.
But on here, you get $0.94 basically. It's 94% think yes, and there's 6% if you bet the other side, if you bet Logan Paul is going to win. And so to me, that's free money that's going to happen in one month, right? And so I can make like a 6% return on my money this month just by putting it into that bet.
Well, no. So I put in $10,000, and if he wins, I make $10,161. No, it's only a 1.6%.
Well, so the problem is— so that's the thing. It's— there's slippage if you bet, more. So there's only been $6,000 bet into this bet. So if you bet $10,000, you would have moved the market, right? So put in $100 and you can see what your, what your return is. Um, and so for the bigger, the more popular bets, you can bet $10,000 and it's not going to move the market, right? The Andrew Yang one has $260,000 in. So your $10K is not really going to move the prices that much.
That's interesting. So I'm going to bet on this Floyd one. By the way, by the way, Floyd's going to just— it won't even be close.
Of course, it's not even a question to me. Anyway, so there's a bunch of these things that are like this.. But I think this is really cool. It's a really cool product. It's a predict— people have been talking about these prediction markets in crypto for a while, and this is a crypto-based thing.
So the problem is, who created this?
Um, just like, I don't know, some group, some team of people in the crypto world. And so what they say is, if you see at the bottom, there's a disclaimer: Polymarket is only for informational educational purposes. We do not custody your money. We do not take profits. We don't host these bets themselves. So what they say is there's a betting protocol, uh, bets get made on there. And this is just a website displaying the bets and letting you like bet into those markets or bet into those, uh, bet into the protocol or not. And so the, these bets are all made on the Ethereum blockchain. So you, um, like the whole bet is made there and then they have a system for validation. So how do, like, who's going to say if Floyd Mayweather beats Logan Paul? Well, there's like details in there of how they're going to decide., and then there's what's called trusted oracles or whatever. Yeah, there's a decentralized group of people who will all submit their answer. What happened? Yes or no? And once there's a consensus, if there is consensus, then the bet finishes, it closes. And if there wasn't consensus, like, you know, whatever. Is New York City fully reopened by July 1st? That's something to me where I'm curious. I don't know how they're going to resolve that. Like, fully open, it says it needs bars, restaurants, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.. But like, what if there's some gray area? I don't know how they resolve these bets in that case, but I find it really fun to, like, I think if you listen to this podcast by now, you know, I'm kind of a gambler. Um, I find this to be a fun, uh, way to gamble on things that, you know, you're betting are going to happen. And so I put $5K into this thing and I started betting on different bets and I'm having a blast. And so I'm going to keep doing it.
I, I, I think this is going to be quite large. Um, like I want to bet for the Saturday Night Live thing.
It said will Elon Musk mention Dogecoin on Saturday Night Live? And yes was paying out at like $0.94, but I was like, I'm pretty sure he's going to do it. And so I bet yes. And so I made— I bet $250 and I made $330 or something like that. So I made like a profit of, I don't know, I forgot what it was, like $80 or something like that on the bet.
Dude, this is badass. So how did you find this?
People in crypto talk about this thing. I'd heard the name before. I've been to it before. But this was the first time I actually started betting on it.
Yeah, I don't even know, man. I'm just like so knee-deep in the crypto world. I don't even know when I hear about things. Maybe it's Twitter, maybe it's a friend. I have no idea.
Oh, they just raised money.
Yeah, they've raised money. They're, they're kind of, well, they're like a well-considered brand, I think, um, which is kind of weird because this thing, like, if you go to the website, the how it works and stuff, it's like pretty skimpy. They don't really do a great, like, for a, for a financial betting website, you would expect them to have way more legalese and fine prints and everything, and they really don't. It's very bare bones. But yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like a Las Vegas betting system built on top of Ethereum, right? So if you wonder what's the value of something like Ethereum, is it just speculation? No, people are building essentially casinos on top of Ethereum, right? Outside of the financial system. It's pretty cool.
Do you want to do for the next episode, do you want to do the first segment on a how-to? We can do, because I think I've got good research methods and I could explain mine, but would you be interested in explaining, do you have a particular way that you find? Because I mean, I get anything that I, a lot of stuff that I've invested in or that I invest time or just like curiosity into, I learn from you. Do you want to share how you do that or is that not even a shareable thing?
Well, I have an idea of something I could share when you started talking, but my brain started to think about that, which is how to win inside a big company as an entrepreneur, how to make a mark inside a big company. So I've done a couple things since joining Twitch that I think allowed me to— I just didn't do the rat race, and instead I just put a little effort into these 4 or 5 other things that nobody else in the company does. And because of that, I got an outsized reward. I basically made a name for myself in a good way by doing X, Y, and Z. And so if you're somebody who's in a big company and you're like, well, at this point, I'm just another fish in the sea, or I want to get promoted, but I'm like, I have to climb this ladder the way it's currently constructed, my answer is, No, you don't. Uh, there is a way to be like interesting inside a big company and do a few interesting things that will let you leave a larger footprint than just your job if you do it the way everybody else who has your same job title in your company will let you do. And so I'd like to share some of those things, the how-to, how, how I made my mark inside a big company. And, uh, I'd like to share that, you know, for others to do in their company.
So a how-to, I don't know what we're gonna call it, but how to succeed in a huge company as an entrepreneur. How to, um, what I want to do is like how, how the, how we do research. And then maybe a third one that I want to learn from you is how do you manage this small team of people? And because you have like a personal crew, and like, what do you pay them? And what the cost? And what's the ROI and things like that? That is something that I would love to learn from you.
Yeah, I'm down to do that one as well. Um, and yeah, some people have asked me about that. So yeah, we can do that one. I think more people want to know. So I think people want to know that one. And there's a lot of people who listen to this that have a job and they're not like ready to go quit their job and start a company.
They don't want to do whatever. You want to tweet out those 3 ideas and, or I can do it and we'll see what the people say.
Yeah, let's do it. I think we should do all 3, just in what order? We'll do one each time.
It's okay. June, 3rd. Did I say— I think I said June 3rd to you. We're doing— Sean and I are doing a meetup. Uh, well, I guess it's Trends and The Hustle and Sean and I, whoever's doing it, we're gonna be there. We're gonna host an interview. Uh, I think with like, we can do our thing in front of everyone. And then also Noah Kagan will be there. Do you know Noah?
Uh, never met him in person, just on the pod.
So he'll be there. We're gonna do it at his office. So he's been kind enough to let us have his office. So you can go to MFN, like My First Million, MFMpod.com and enter your email and you'll get notified when that's being released. Like the—
When we come to your town.
Yeah. When we come to—
Starting with Austin.
Yeah, we're going to start with Austin. That's on June 3rd. It's likely, I'm almost positive it's completely free and we'll have room for small 50 people. And then we haven't settled on this yet, but not the day after, but likely the day after, we might go to Miami. We haven't, we gotta lock that in. If you have an office that could host 100 people.
Dude, let's lock it in. What are we waiting for? Let's lock it in. It's done. We haven't found the venue, but the decision is done.
Yeah, like I'll plan to go, but we don't have a place to be. So.
It's all right, we'll figure it out.
If you wanna host us, basically if you wanna provide light drinks and light food and you wanna have 50 to 100 people, Tell us. It's going to be in the evening. It's going to be like a 7 o'clock thing.
Maybe 500 people. Mayor Suarez, if you are listening to this, hey, we've traded a couple DMs. Hey, you know, I've been seeing you talking to my friends. Let's do this.
I think we could get 100 or 500 people. I just don't know if I personally would want to. Would you want to like riff in front of 500 people?
Yeah, if I'm going to do 100, why not 500? It doesn't make any difference to me.
Well, I don't even want to do 100, but let alone 500. But yeah, whatever. I'll go with the flow, but we need a place. So if you want to host us, you can. And I've got a couple other updates. So we're going to talk. We got a— Sean actually did most of the research for this one. We got a ton of cool ideas, but do you want an update on some podcast stuff? So I've been working with our team. Okay. So in 3.1, so what was that?
March?
March, we did 338,000 downloads. In April, we did 436,000 downloads. So that's a 30% gain about. In May, it's tracking towards around 520,000, which is another 20% increase. I think we can keep going. And I want to tell you what I think is causing all this. The first is Balaji, the biology episode. So Guests typically, we have found, don't work that well. But a really big name guest or someone that has a cult following like a Tai or Biology, that works.
Tai? Who's Tai?
Lopez.
Okay, gotcha. When we did that one, because he's got like—
He has a cult following and a cult unfollowing. He's got both.
Yeah. Yeah. So that worked. So the Biology episode is probably gonna be the most listened to one ever. Um, so that worked.
How much more is it than, than the usual? Is it like 20% more, 50% more than a typical episode?
It got to 30,000 like in the first week. Typically our episodes get to 30,000 over like 2 months.
Gotcha.
Okay. So it did that in like a week or whenever it was. When did it get released? A week ago? 5 days. 5 days.
Last Wednesday. I talked to him on the phone and he said, yeah, good episode. I shared it. So hopefully that helps. And then, uh, He's down to share more. We only tweeted out, I think, one clip from it, so he's down to share more clips. And he liked the animation. He was like, oh, like, looks like production value is going up. I was like, sweet. Yes, it is.
Yeah. Uh, so that worked out well. And then you want to know what's working really well is how-tos. So anytime a title is called how to build a paid community, how to build paid events, how to whatever we've done. Those rank the highest no matter what, or not no matter what, but more often than not. So like in our top 10 most downloaded stuff, it's either an interview with a huge, a well-known person, which like an Andrew would be a well-known person, or a how-to blank. So we have to do some more how-tos.
It's almost like they don't care about us and our great ideas. They care about themselves learning something and being able to do something they want to do.
I think that's exactly what it is. And then it's ourselves peppered in there. We are the spice. But the meat is the how-to, right? And then finally, I got last update, um, we're running some ads on— do you know this thing called the Billionaire Investors Podcast? Or what's it called? It's like a famous thing.
Is it We Study Billionaires? Is it that one?
Yeah, I love that podcast.
Have you listened to it? Yeah, they're good.
Yeah, so we're running an ad on their net— on their network, on that podcast. I think, uh, we bought it last week. I think it's gonna go live this week. Then, so there's two types of podcast advertising that I'm learning about. The one is what we do is people advertise. Now HubSpot advertises on our and people go to hubspot.com/mfm, whatever. The other one is podcast platforms. So like Overcast, have you heard of Overcast?
Yeah, like these clients, these apps you can use to listen to podcasts.
Yes. And on those clients, those users click subscribe. And the strategy that I'm doing is, or what we're doing is we are going towards niche, niche ones because those niche ones typically have a far loyal following and you could get low cost per click to downloads and subscribes.
And it makes sense because those people, if you are, you gotta be a real podcast junkie to go get like a new podcast app because it has these extra 5 features about podcasts. So it's actually a really good audience that's probably really cheap because nobody else really goes for them. So I like the strategy a lot.
And they're like, they're techie. They're like tech, tech, they're early adopters. Yeah. And so we're running ads currently on CastBox. I've never even heard of them, but it looked cool. And then Overcast. And so those are some of the updates. It's going well.
Okay. What about the— so the ad on the We Study Billionaires podcast, what is it? Because I'm always like, if I'm listening to a podcast, what's actually going to make me go subscribe? One is a guy comes on or a girl comes on and they're a guest. Like this happened with Elaine. Elaine came on our podcast, she did ideas and she said it was like, I don't know, one of her biggest— her newsletter got like a huge spike in subscribers, like her next email sent was, welcome all my new subscribers. This is amazing. And she said she got thousands of new subscribers from her appearance on the pod, which is great. And so that one makes sense because if I go and guest on somebody's podcast, you listen to it for 45 minutes or an hour because that's your favorite podcast or that's what you listen to regularly. And you might be like, oh, that guest was cool. They said they have a pod. I'll go check it out. I like that method. And I've said I got to do this. I still have to go do it, which is I want to go guest on as many podcasts as I can. That'll be part of my contribution to this growth strategy. But this ad is a little bit different. It's just like a 30-second sound clip. What are we saying in that 30-second sound clip that's going to make somebody want to subscribe?
Unfortunately, it's not a clip. I think it's going to be Stig, the main guy, reading. But frankly, I don't know. We just closed the deal on Friday.
Okay, fair enough.
So I have to figure it out. But we have our guys. So we got this team, Henry and Dylan, They're making like a hype, like a sizzle reel, right? And we might be able to use that, but I don't know. But I agree with you. Like, in theory, I agree with you. I just don't know what's available at the moment.
And we're doing some other stuff to make it easier to follow. So I'm emailing— I've grown my email list in this year from 0 to 26,000 subscribers now. And at 26,000, I just sent it out the first time last week. So just, it's just seanpuri.com. So if you go subscribe there, you get all my emails. But one of the weekly emails I send now is a podcast recap. So if you don't have time or you listen to the pod while you're on the go, I basically take the best 3 bits from the last week of episodes and I say, this was the best idea, this was kind of the second most interesting idea, and here was the third one. And so sent that out for the first time. And I think that will also make it easier for people to follow along. And if you were kind of on the fence or you were You're in and out, you listen sometimes, you don't listen other times. I think that'll keep you on the hook because it's so easy.
And then I copied your email, like, from Sean, and I sent it to like 30,000 Hustle people who clicked on a My First Million link in the past like 2 weeks. And we're actually going to increase that. So it's like 100,000 people. And my takeaway so far is it actually might be good for the user, but shitty for our numbers because you just get the information without having to listen, which kind of sucks that that like has to be the case.
Yeah, I thought about that, but I don't think that's actually how the world works. I think if you keep giving people value in every form that they want it, short form text, long form clips on Twitter, clips on YouTube, video on YouTube, podcast, audio. If you just keep giving people value, they will learn that, oh, and whenever I want ideas, whenever I want to feel that my wheels turning, if I want to get that juice, that energy, Sean and Sam are the place to go to get it. And our best The raw source, the real deal shit is in the podcast. And so I think over time, those clips, they just bring people who are on the fringes closer to the core.
I hope that's the case, and I'm betting that's the case. I'm putting my money on that. But yeah, but it's a fear. And I want to bring this back to one thing, which is a lot of times we talk about this inside stuff, and hopefully it's not like a circle jerk, like, oh, we're awesome, yada, yada, yada. I'm revealing this because a lot of people like this. I like it when I hear other people say the numbers. But also I want to point that I think we're doing really good, but I actually don't think that we are good. I think persistence is good. And the reason why this is working is because persistence works quite well. So we're actually on, we're close to episode 200. We've been doing this for, uh, is it going to be 2 years?
Almost 2 years.
Yeah. 2 years, maybe in September or August, July, something like that. July. And I would say that we miss— I get sick sometimes and I miss stuff. Sean will miss stuff because he had a baby, but we're pretty much always on. And at worst, we're mostly at least good. Like, it's typically always at least okay. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it's really good. Mostly it's okay. And like, sorry, mostly it's good, I would say. But that consistency is actually really important. And we're going to AppSumo, I guess now in 3 weeks. And there's a great story that Noah told me, and basically Noah Kagan runs this company called AppSumo. It's a weekly email where you get deals on software. This year they're going to do $100 million in gross revenue, of which like $50 million is their revenue. It's a great business. It's 10 years old. And he was like, you know, I realized something, that this business that we're running, it's done really well, but it didn't do well at first. But everyone wants to know, like, why is this doing so well? And he goes, I really just put in 40 hours a week, but I just did it for 10 years, and it has finally started to pay off and turn out and done really well. And it's just like, it's just a job, and I just— but I do it all the time, and I treat it like a job, and that has paid dividends. And I think that more people who listen to us could kick ass a lot harder if they treated their side hustle like a job.
Uh, yeah, I, I would, uh, so I agree with you, persistence is great. The one thing, um, that this reminds me of is I got some advice from the CEO of Twitch, Emmett, and, um, we— so, so when I got acquired, uh, when our team got acquired, our company got acquired, we were put on a special project inside Twitch. And it was kind of like one of the, like, most people at Twitch are working on something that already exists. Hey, this, you know, people already use us. We're already the category leader. You've got to make it better, make it more profitable, make it smoother, make it whatever. It's more like maintaining and improving an existing winner. And we were put on this little— we're on the edge of the island and we're the only team in the company basically, or one of three teams that was working on something that where we weren't the winner, it wasn't proven.. And so we, and it was considered like a kind of a top priority. So we did this thing every week, the top, my team would present to the CEO, the COO, and the chief product officer. We had an hour with them every week. And at a big company, you don't really get an hour with those 3 people every week. That's like a very expensive meeting, as they say. And because it was important, and I used to go in and I would try to basically I feel like every 2 weeks I was pulling a rabbit out of my hat trying to be like, and here's the new genius tactic that we're going to do, and this one is going to be the one that works. And some of them did make an impact. But Emmett had this observation where he was like, I feel like you have a lot of good ideas. And then every month we're sort of on a weekly or monthly basis when we sit here, It's always like, yeah, it's good, but it's not as good as we want it to be. We're still so small. We want to be so huge. And he's like, you're impatient with the results. So I changed one thing. At the top of every update, you have to bring in a memo. At the top of every memo, I was the only person in the company that was doing this. Everybody else, their memo goes straight into like, here's the weekly update, here's how it's going, here's what we're doing next. At the top I wrote in bold, impatience with action, patience with results. I said, that's our team motto. I'm putting it up here mostly for myself to remember impatience with action. That's when impatience is good, is when you're being impatient about taking action. But impatience is bad when you're impatient about results. So I'm putting it at the top of this fucking paper every week, so we're all going to see it. So that was cool. Then the second lesson came like 6 months later, 9 months later, when he was like, By the way, you guys notice we got the results. It's actually coming to fruition now. And if we look back, we can't say which one thing we did was the big growth mover. And he goes, there's this phrase that I think Andreessen Horowitz uses, which is— or they made it more popular, I guess. I don't know if they invented it, but Ben Horowitz has it in his book, which is, there's no silver bullet, there's only lead bullets. And this is about— this is basically what that means is there's no silver bullet strategy. There's no one thing you're going to go do that's just going to magically, like, make everything okay, make everything work. The only growth strategy that truly works over time is a many-lead bullet strategy, which means you fire, you do a bunch of things and you keep firing, keep firing, keep firing until the thing falls over and finally, finally you break through.. And so I would say this is a good— and so that became the second motto, which is, remember, only lead bullets. And so those were at the top of every weekly update was those two things. That's pretty good to catch myself because I'm good. But what's my leak? My leak was impatience. My leak was looking for the genius tactics when all it took was lead bullets and patience. And so if you take away one thing, us talking about our growth numbers, I think some people will like it because they like hearing the actual numbers. It's great when somebody's transparent about things.
Cool.
We're at over half a million downloads this month, like monthly now, and we're trying to get to a million. Some people will be like, why do they talk about their podcast numbers so much? But I hope the takeaway is forget about how our podcast is growing. That's probably irrelevant to you, but you probably have a project you're trying to grow. And hearing how Sam thinks and talks about how he's growing this podcast is going to be beneficial for how you do it, a.k.a. how to grow a thing. Yeah, back to our how-tos.
I think that— and we'll move on. But the last— the phrase that I've been thinking about a lot lately is people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but they underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years, in a decade.
Right.
Absolutely. And that's kind of an example here. Like, we've been frustrated on some month-to-month basis or week-to-week basis, but like It's kind of cool seeing these numbers, uh, like really start to pay off.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.