#184 - Making Millions Improving Mobility, How to Beat Linkedin & Why You're Early Even When You're Late
with this guy Ben from Knees Over Toes. I bet you he's doing $10 million a year in sales and he's not even— he doesn't even have his own app.
Yeah, 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.
Let me give you some updates real quick. Podcast numbers.
Some people— can I tease? Can I tease some ideas? Because I think people might be like, why do you guys keep telling us about the podcast? Get to the ideas. Let me tease the ideas and then you say your thing. All right. I have, I have 4 good ideas today. One, I'll just say the names of them. How to beat LinkedIn, Super Joints. You're going to like that one or you're going to hate it. That's another topic. Canva for video. All right. So those are 3 that I'm going to throw at you that we're going to talk about after this. You might have some other ones. Okay. Now go back to the podcast update.
Just really quick. I'll make it quick. All right. Last month we are at Last month, 60, right? Last month? No, last month we were at 430. This month we are supposed to be at 550. I think we might get 600, just so you know.
That's right.
So I think that's going to happen. So 600,000 listens a month. Some more update stuff tomorrow. I'm recording with Andrew Wilkinson. I'm doing another one of his things. His things are always the most popular, so I'm going to do another one of those. Originally, I signed up to do this because you just had your baby and I wanted to record more and you couldn't do it. So we're going to continue doing that. Tonight I'm flying to New York. I had this guy reach out to me, some— this like a guy named Loeb. He started— what's his first name? I don't even know his first name. Michael Loeb. He started Priceline and he invited me and he like somehow listened to the podcast or something like that.
And he's the one with the billions house.
Yeah. So I'm going to fly to his house tonight and I'm going to interview Andrew from New York tomorrow. But, um, June 3rd, Sean and I and a bunch of people, uh, on my team are gonna be in Austin. We're doing a live event. Um, I think it was sold out like right away, but yeah, we're gonna see what we can do. Um, and then the next—
we should do— we should do something else, uh, because it sold out so quick. If there are more people who want to do it, we should, uh, I don't know, let's capture their info somehow and let's just do like, I don't know, a hangout We'll just, I don't know, let's go to a park. Well, let's go wherever. I know we may not have a venue, but, uh, let's meet and greet some people who want to hang out or something. I don't know. Let's do something. Let's go to a bar.
Who cares? And then the next day we're going to do Miami.
So we got my June 3rd, Austin, June 4th, Miami. If people want to attend, Austin is already sold out, uh, but there's an Eventbrite for it. Miami, we're putting up the Eventbrite.
Yeah. And that one can seat 150 people. So that'd be cool if we sell it out, but maybe we won't, who knows. So it should have plenty of room. Last thing, we've got some cool—
By the way, by the way, on the pod we shouted out, we said Mayor Suarez to the mayor of Miami. We said, if you're listening to this, we need a venue, we need blah, blah, blah. He replied on Twitter, he goes, I got you, let's talk. And then somebody else came through and was just like, here's the venue. I don't know if we wanna shout out their name. Somebody hooked us up with a sweet venue.
No, we'll hook 'em up. We'll shout 'em out next time 'cause I've asked them exactly what they want us to shout out.
Gotcha.
Okay. So I've already asked him last things. All right. We got a couple of guests coming up. The first one, Marc Lore. So Marc Lore started Jet.com, which he sold for billions, I think.
$3 billion, I think.
So that guy's cool.
And he started something before that. I think it was diapers.com.
Yeah. And he just bought Amazon. He just bought the Timberwolves. NBA basketball. NBA. Dude, I'm such a dork. I don't even know.
Yeah. With A-Rod. A-Rod bought the Timberwolves.
And then we have Mike Maples coming on, who people probably probably don't know, but he's a pretty big name VC and he's funded a lot of, a ton of stuff that you all know. Yeah. And then finally, Bill Smith. This name, generic name, but do you know who Bill Smith is?
He, you love this guy, dude. You are, this is like your new, your new obsession is Bill Smith.
Yeah, I'm gonna tell you why. So he started like a, uh, like a credit card company in his 20s and he sold it right away for millions of dollars. Then his second hit was starting Shipt. So Shipt was based out of Alabama. It was basically very similar to Instacart, but he self-funded it and then he sold it for like $600 million. Now he's got another thing and the guy's only like 33. He's got another thing called Hello Landing that I think is really badass. So that guy's coming on soon. But that's the updates. We just hired this guy yesterday. What's his name, Abreu? Dan?
Dan. Off to a great start. Yeah, I think it's Dan.
I think Kerner's his last name. I don't need a North—
We here at The Hustle have a tremendous culture. We really care about our people.
Dude, I'm not like—
After you're hired, we find out your name. And after that, we—
Do you know, you wanna hear something funny? You know Cieva?
Yes.
One of my best friends, like one of your closest friends. I've known Cieva—
No, he's my best friend, dude.
Well, I've known him for 10 years almost. I can't tell you how to say his last name.
Yeah, because he has a Russian name.
So I don't think it's important to—
Sam, what's my last name?
I have no idea.
What's his first name?
Well, Andrei Andrade, but I don't know how to say it.
I just don't think you need to know someone's name. I mean, I try really hard to remember people's names. I hate when people say I'm bad at remembering names, so I always try to remember someone's first name. But I don't think you need to know someone's name really to like know them well. I'll just call them Bub or Chief.
Those are the two? Bub? Chief? You have something in your hand. What is that? That's an idea. Is that a stress ball?
I didn't know you could see this. No, it's just ChapStick. I'm just trying to put ChapStick on.
Are stress balls still a thing? I remember when I was a kid, I went to my mom's office And her and every other person had a stress ball on their, on their desk. And now that I think about it, I haven't seen one of these in like 10 years. And what a great idea. What a genius name and invention to just be like, how do I sell this like 5-cent item to every worker in a cubicle in America? Oh, let me call it the stress ball. Let me tell you that this gets rid of your stress and just make it kind of fun to fiddle with and play with. Why aren't more people doing that, right? We have fidget spinner for kids. We need the stress spinner for adults. I need— I want to invent the next little silly putty gadget thing that you feel addicted to playing with on your desk.
Good luck. I mean, if anyone's gonna be able to do it, it's gonna be you.
I had these things on my desk that I used to fiddle with. I think it annoyed everybody because it kind of made a little bit of a sound. But That's who I am at work. I breathe loud. I chew. I eat at my desk. You know, I'm that guy you hate at the office. So I had this thing. There's like these magnetic— it's like a little magnetic toy or something. I don't know what it was. It's like tiny little blocks that are magnetic, so they stick together. And then you just— whatever you— whatever shape you put them in, it just sticks in that shape. Or you can pull them apart and stick them back together like a magnet. And these things are so addictive. They weren't for playing with at your desk, but they're really effective. So maybe, maybe I will come out with a line. By the way, I'm— I've Kickstarted a task to make us dope merch, not to make money, but because I just want to wear our own stuff. And I figured out the first two, first two items that we need to have in our merch line.
Well, the first one is easy. That one's a notebook. So like the joke that we get in the comments, which is like, you know, don't listen while driving because you want to take notes, you'll crash.
Yeah, we are known to be more dangerous than drinking while driving. So actually in several states it's outlawed.
I hope a notebook is one of the two.
A notebook. Notebook is one. And that's actually in motion. So I, for the course I'm making, I found this illustrator, Yanis, who's amazing. I put out this tweet. I said, who's the next Jack Butcher? I saw that. And then I got a bunch of replies. Found this guy. He's amazing. You know, don't tell Jack, but I think his stuff might be better than Jack's. You know, Jack's more clever, but this guy's actual illustrations are amazing. I told him, I said, hey, I've been using this thing called the Self Journal or something like that for a long time. I think the founder of that listens to the pod. I forgot.
Do you know her name?
I think you— Katherine. Yeah. Great product. And yeah, we should come out with like a limited edition notebook thing.. So I got that in motion. I'll run it by you. But the merch stuff that I was thinking about was when Balaji came on and we were trying to beat around the bush and be like, so you're like super rich, right? And then he was like, yeah, the most humble way possible was like, I'm post-economic. And then I was like, oh fuck, that is, that is it. That is the best phrase. So now I'm getting hoodies made that just say post-economic. And, you know, those will go out to anybody who wants to buy a post-economic goodie. So that's the best one.
That's a good one. And is that the— so notebooks?
The other one that I was thinking about, you know how we have our Harvard shirts because we visited the campus? Yeah. So I think I might sell some bootleg Harvard merch before they shut me down. And all it is is it's Harvard. Yeah, I've been there. Or like, you know, love that campus. Or yeah, I was there in '04. Like Harvard '04. And on the back, it says, you know, like, tours. So maybe a Harvard one. But the real one that I want to make there is, you know, the like, kind of like, like, take the Harvard style of a sweatshirt or sweater where it kind of looks like, you know, you're a scholar, right? I went to this school. That's where I learned, that's where I got my education, that, but it's just gonna say the internet, it's just gonna say internet, or it's gonna say YouTube, because That's where I learned everything. And there's a lot of other people that are— you're like that too, where everything you learned was just through the internet. That's who we should really be giving credit to for our education. So I'm going to make a university-looking piece of apparel that's just either calling out the internet or YouTube or Twitter or something like that.
I think the post-economic thing will make money.
Well, it has to. That's by definition. All right.
Now let's do Canva for video. So, so stole this idea from my buddy Sully. He tweeted this out. He said, who's creating Canva for video? And I've had this same idea. So if you don't use Canva, you're probably not going to fully understand this idea. Not just because the metaphor, but you're going to be like, when I describe it, you can be like, that sounds simple. Like, I'm sure there's stuff like that that exists. No, there's not. So Canva, why don't you give the download on Canva? I'll talk about why Canva for video needs to exist.
Yeah, Canva was started in Australia. At this point, it's maybe 8 years old. I went and did some research there. You have $15 billion valuation, $500 million in revenue. And what's cool is that the CEO, I think her name is Melanie, this woman named Melanie, she's like a superstar. You hear her talk and you're like, oh, I will, whatever you say, I'm in. And her and her husband are the two co-founders, which is pretty badass because collectively they own 30% of the company, even though it's at a $15 billion valuation. So they crushed it. But basically the product is you can make really simple images. So a lot of times people use Google Slides like I do and you like put an image on there and then you could write some text on there and then you take a screenshot and tweet that. With Canva, it's all a little bit more intuitive and you can make really, really simple, like good looking design, good looking design. It's like Photoshop for an 8-year-old like me.
It's Photoshop for people who don't know Photoshop. That's the best way of describing it. So before, when you wanted to make a marketing brochure a flyer for your event, you know, an Instagram ad, a whatever, any kind of image or graphic to go alongside your product or your event or whatever it is, you would be like, great, let me ask my designer friend to make one, or let me go into like, you know, Paint or one of these, you know, Google Slides or PowerPoint or whatever and try to make one myself. And it always came out looking budget like you made it yourself. Or you had to overpay somebody who knows Photoshop, who has graphic design skills, who knows that this should go at this angle and that this is a cool way to do a collage and like to do a mask and whatever. So what they did was they just created this enormous library of templates. So you go on there and you say, great, I want to make an ad for a sale. Well, guess what? A lot of people have that problem. And so what they did was they just created or surfaced hundreds of templates of sale, you know, how to, how to present a sale if you're a store. So now I don't need a designer. I just go in there myself. I change the text, I drop my image into where their image is, and it's like nicely cut into a circle automatically, or it removes the background automatically without you having to know how to do that with a magic wand in Photoshop. So, um, so that's what Canva does. It's amazing. It's grown like crazy. Like you said, $500 million in revenue, done very well. I think it went public not long ago.. So Canva does that for images and they kind of have some like animation stuff, but nobody has done this for simple videos. So I'm talking about the whole world has moved to video, whether it's long form like Netflix, medium form like YouTube, short form like TikTok, even shorter form like a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad. And it still requires people who know how to edit video in order to make a simple video. And that's crazy to me. And so there's people who've tried to attack this from many angles. I would say what a lot of people try to do is they try to make Figma for video, which is like they take iMovie and they say, no, it should be in the cloud. You should be able to have multiple people using it at once and you see each person's mouse moving around the screen and it saves it all in the cloud, blah, blah, blah. No, I think you need Canva. I think you need off-the-shelf, ready-made video like short video clips that you just swap and replace your text and your images or your video clips into those. And there's some things like this that exist, but nobody has cracked this nut. I think Canva is most likely to do it. I'm sure they think about this all the time. It's not like they're listening to this and saying, oh my God, genius, we never thought about video, right? But I do think it's a gnarly problem. And I think if you are focused on this, You can outflank a lot of people just by finding the right library of, of templates and then getting the UX right where you can make it easy to swap out text and images with your own stuff.
So I think that this might be a great idea, but I'll, I'm gonna default to pessimism just for the sake of argument. I think that there's a few reasons why this would be really hard. The first reason is that, well, this is actually the, the main reason, which is more people use video, use image-based stuff than they do video-based stuff. So at a company, most everyone would— not most everyone, but a very large percentage of employees would want to use text-based stuff, whether you're making just a silly graphic for an internal email, whether you're making a sign that says happy birthday for your employees, all the way up to you're making the social post, so you're mocking up a website, yada, yada, yada. By the way, someone made fun of me for saying yada, yada, yada. I'm not going to say it anymore. But anyway, there's like so many different instances of that, right? Is there actually that many people that would—
Huge need, dude.
Huge need.
For video? Yes. Yes. Okay. It's the internet. Text is massive. Images is massive. Video is massive.
They're all massive.
They're all super massive.
Like, it's a business. It's a business use case. So if you're a business, you need to be doing all three. You need to be creating text content. You need to be creating image content and you create video content and you do them at different times. The video content is often the one that you need. That's the highest value to you and it works the best in terms of getting, getting people's attention. And so there are tools to do this. So I shouldn't say that there's not, right? Promo.com is one of them. So promo.com, it has a bunch of templates to let you do videos. I've used it. It is good. It is probably the closest thing to Canva for video. There's a startup called Motionbox. .io. They're doing this. It looks pretty cool. I haven't, I haven't actually had a chance to play with it yet. Capwing is a big one.
I've heard of that one.
Really popular. It's— that one's more for memes. So they made it really easy to make video memes. We talked about Piñata Farms also to make video memes.
When I, when I was moving out of San Francisco, the guy— I posted on Twitter that I was selling my gym and the founder tried to come and buy all my gym equipment. That's how I met Capwing.
The founder of which one?
Capwing.
Yeah. Nice. That's great. So I think— so here's my take of what's the opportunity here. The opportunity here for me is I should be going and trying to invest in all of these companies. I think they are all like— this space is going to be big. These are all viable companies. They're all at different stages. I'm going to go try to put a check into all of these because I'm such a big believer in that space. Really? But the other thing is, yes, for sure. The other thing is, if you're building, how would you differentiate? I think one of the ways to differentiate, the one I would do is I would focus on Facebook ads. I've talked about this before, but if you think about Facebook's one of the largest companies because it makes a shit ton of revenue. How does it make its revenue? From advertising. Who's advertising? You know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses that advertise on Facebook. And if you can do things to help them advertise, either save them time or make their ads better, you're going to make money on either one of those two axes. And I've found that Facebook ad tech is sort of— of course, there's companies in that space, but there's much less than you would think. There's a lot of people that build, that try to build on top of platforms. And I think that the Facebook ad platform is a great place to build products because if you make someone's life better, you are making them or saving them a lot of money. And so it's not hard to capture, you know, your $100 a month if you're able to do that.
Yeah, I think it's cool. I think that there's a, there's a, I'm going to, I'm just going to default to bad stuff because that's the dynamic we're taking right now. But the dude selling stuff for $200 a year, that software is so freaking hard. So go to— you're on your computer right now or you're on your phone?
Yeah, computer.
All right. Google Buffer revenue. Okay. So Buffer is this awesome company. I mean, it's kind of awesome. And they're one of the first people that made famous sharing their revenue. So if you're listening out there, type in on Google Buffer revenue and you're going to be taken to a— I don't know what the platform's called, but it's some type of platform where you can show all their revenue. What's their revenue look like, Sean?
So this post that was 2019, late 2019, was revenue is $21 million. They have 75,000 customers and they make a quarter million dollars per employee.
Go to, go to buffer.com/revenue.
Right. So their current one. Yes. Actually, this is— yeah. So flatlined out. So that's the number I said, 2019. That was the peak. 2020 was the same. 2021 is the same. So still at $21 million.
If you're listening, go to buffer.com/revenue and they're going to see all their revenue. It's pretty amazing.
Well, it says $26 of revenue per account.
Yeah. And so what you're going to see, here's what you're going to see. The revenue on this buffer thing, the revenue goes up really fast and then it plateaus. And that is what happens when you sell shit that costs $20, $50, $100. It's incredibly hard to keep going. It's really hard to keep going. And that happens. And I study a lot of these graphs. So like there's ConvertKit has another one. There's a lot. And if you look at the metrics, there's, if you Google like average price for software, SaaS, there's a lot of research on where they look at companies that go public and they look at how much their software costs. There's this dead zone of like $200 a year or $300 a year or something like that. And it's incredibly hard to build a big company when shit costs that much. Some people have done it. Mailchimp has done it. Canva has done it. I think it's almost impossible for most other types of people to do it.
Well, we are talking about Canva for Video, so I'm gonna hope that it falls into that category. I actually just want Canva to do this because—
Am I wrong though? Am I wrong?
You're not wrong in that there's an effort to acquire customers. It costs money and it takes time. And if your size of the prize is $26 or $99, it is very hard to get to the point you're talking about, which is going public or being a multibillion-dollar company.
No, but my point though is not necessarily if you're listening to this and you want to build something, that has to be the goal. My— but when I think about stuff, sometimes I think— now this isn't always, but sometimes it's far easier to be a small fish in a massive market than it is to like be a big fish. Like, you know, like I'd rather be like the shitty person in something that's booming because it'll be way easier to crush it.
Yeah. Although you also say, you know, niches get riches type of thing, right? Where you'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.
Well, I said I don't always think that way. I'm saying like if I want to build something that can just make a good, like, living, then yeah, that's one thing. If I want to create something that could take off, I would probably want to do the other way.
Right. And I think, you know, the thing you just said that's important is you said a market that's booming, that's different than a big market. So a big market is an already big market. A market that's booming is a growing market. And so if I was going to rank the three, I would say small fish in a booming market, then big fish in a small market, and lastly, small fish in an already big market.
Yeah, I think I agree with you. Can we talk about Super Joints? Yeah, I looked it up while you were talking and I have a lot to say about this.
Okay, well, I don't even know what you looked up. This was my own name of an idea I had.
So it's already in the public. Super Joints is— do you remember? So we talked about the book Happy Body.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Super Joints. Let's go here first.
Yeah, it looks exactly like it. Like 1970s or '80s design.
But we don't have to talk about that.
Well, the thing I was thinking about is, so my mom is staying with me right now. She's been here for the last few days. And my mom's always got some ache and pain, and she does a good job of trying to exercise and stretch and like, whatever, do the things that she can do to, you know, we bought a special pillow for the bed so that like, kind of, if she's in bed watching TV, like, she's not in a crappy posture or whatever. We try things, but this is every aging person problem is that, you know, you get bad back, bad knees, bad hip, bad shoulder, whatever, right? Like, you wrist pain, this stuff comes up. And I started thinking like, okay, you know, I think that this is going to be a, this is a massive, massive market. That nobody really is able to do much with. And so I thought, well, what is the— what is the solution? I think there's two solutions. I think the end solution is fixing it from the inside. So that's some version of like stem cells or like regenerative therapies where you're able to, to regrow cartilage or strengthen, strengthen the tendons or do something like that to reduce the, the irritation, inflammation. Okay, I don't know too much about that. I don't know where we're at in the stem cell world. Then there's the fix it from the outside. And I thought, oh, this might be actually easy. So I was watching somebody move a couch. My neighbor had a truck and they're moving and it was one person just with a dolly, just moving this huge couch and bookcase and all this stuff. And it got me thinking, man, with these simple tools that we've made, that man has made, you have so much leverage, you can lift heavy objects. Why don't we just have these as like a little knee brace that people wear that just helps you when you're trying to get up. It's just like a little spring action that is like a super joint. It is an ex— it is a sort of an external fix to the problem of joint pain.
That sounds like such an infomercial thing. I can, I can imagine this now in my head.
Exactly. That's exactly what I thought in my head. I see the old lady sitting on the couch. She's trying to get up and she's struggling, and then it like fades The black and white. Yeah, yeah. It fades to black and white and she's in pain. And then it's like her again on the couch and she gets up and she just gets up effortlessly because she's got this little thing she wears around her knee that essentially, like, as she does this motion, it's a spotter. And I just thought, why don't we have spotters for our own carrying our own body weight? So what do you think of this?
I think that, that you're cool.
I think you're thinking about this. Totally wrong. So like what you're talking about is like a silly brace. I want to like actually solve the problem. And there's 3 companies that I've been paying attention to that are in this space, um, and they're all centered around mobility. So what I've noticed amongst my friends and like the people in Austin now is a lot of them are less focused on lifting heavy weights and more focused on, um, this manly version of yoga that we call mobility, right?
Right.
It's yoga. I mean, it's like—
I'm doing mobility training.
Yeah, it's—
oh, you're stretching?
Yes, it's a little bit more interesting than yoga, and I do it a lot as well. So there's 3 things that I like. There's one called The Ready State, thereadystate.com. There's another one called— I actually don't know how you pronounce it, but it looks like it's, uh, it's Gowod, uh, uh, so the word go, and then I think it stands for workout of the day. Uh, I'm a paying subscriber of it. It's great. And then the third one is the Knees Over Toes— Knees Over Toes Guy. Have you seen Knees Over Toes Guy?
Dude, I'm all into the Knees Over Toes Guy.
I've done the whole program. It's wonderful.
Oh, you did?
I've done the whole thing. It's so good.
So basically— Did your vertical leap go up?
Yeah, but I— yeah, it all works wonderful. I love it. But basically the first two that I've described, so GoWOD and the Ready State, it's an app that you pay $100. And the founders of GoWOD, I've actually talked about on this podcast. 2 years ago, I think, or a year and a half ago. And they messaged me and they said, you're— the numbers that you're— it was someone who works there. So the numbers that you're saying are way smaller than we actually are. And I think I said they were doing half a million a month in sales. Right. And so they're both apps where you spend 30 minutes a day and they just do stretches. It's just the simplest app ever. It's just a video that shows you a stretch and it counts down from 60 seconds. The other thing is this guy named Knees Over Toes Guy. That's like his handle is Knees Over Toes Guy. His name is Ben Patrick.. And he got— he went viral on TikTok and Instagram. I found him on Instagram. And it's basically this crew of guys and he's like the leader, but he's— they're like these, quote, manly men. Like they like, they like are strong looking and fit and all that, but they like stretch a ton and they're really focused on one-legged pistol squats and being able to touch your toes and We should say he's called Knees Over Toes Guy because in classical kind of like training, anytime you train, they're always like, don't let your knees go over your toes.
Because they thought that's how you get injured. That's when you're doing a squat wrong or a lunge. Oh no, you're not lunging right. You want your knee to never go past your toe. If you're biking, they always say the same, adjust your seat height so your knees doesn't go over your toes. And this guy was like, hey, I blew out my knee, I tore my ACLs. And And, you know, I started trying to figure out how do I actually strengthen my legs? How do I strengthen my knees so that I don't get injured again? And in fact, he ended up getting stronger through it. Like, so he did some self-experimentation and whatever. And then now he's, I don't know, 43, 45 years old. He's got like a— I forgot how old he is. He's in his 40s or even maybe even his like maybe he's 50.
No, he's not that old.
He's got a 43-inch vertical leap. He can dunk. He's like, he jumps higher now than he did in his 20s. And he's been athletic the whole time. It's just that now he strengthens his leg in this way that breaks all the rules. So his stuff is intentionally let your knee go over your toes. Why? Because we want to stabilize our knees when they're in these uncomfortable compromised positions. We'll do it in a controlled way now so that you don't get hurt later. So that's the theory behind his stuff.
And this guy has almost 500,000 followers on Twitter or on Instagram, and he is putting on an absolute masterclass in marketing. I followed him and like, I, because I'm an internet guy, I know exactly what he's doing. And I'm like, it's working, it's working. I bought it. He charges $50 a month. And the reason he charges $50 a month is because the churn is probably astronomical. So the average user, I bet, only stays for 3 months because when you do the program like I did, I just wrote it down. I'm like, oh, I know exactly what to do. It's just like, it's as basic as a PDF. So like, I know what to do. But he got my $150 over 3 months. I got results, I loved it. And the way that this guy's getting, he's basically doing, you know, the best person I've ever seen at this fitness marketing is that woman Kayla Itsines, I think her name is.
And she has—
Itsines. Itsines. And she has an app called Sweat that scaled to $100 million in sales. If you're a guy, you probably don't know who she is. It's my wife Sarah used it and she crushed it. And all she did was sell a PDF and then eventually it went to an app. With this guy Ben from Knees Over Toes, I bet you he's doing $10 million a year in sales and he's not even— he doesn't even have his own app. There's all these apps called Trainerize and similar apps where what you do is you just put your program on their thing and you give them a little tiny cut of the revenue. It's a pretty amazing business. I mean, the high churn, but like it looks like a really fun lifestyle business to run.
Totally. It's what we were talking about with Judge Judy and Michael Buffer last episode, I think it was. We talked about building a personal monopoly. And finding your niche. That's what this guy did. Brilliant branding, Knees Over Toes guy, right? Beautiful, beautiful branding to latch onto that. It's a different— it's sort of, I don't know if you remember, but one of my kind of core content beliefs came from the guy who writes Wait But Why. And actually his buddy, there's two guys behind it. So this is not Tim Urban, it's the guy who helps him with his business, Andrew. Right? He was nice enough, took a call from me one day and I said, "Yeah, I'm thinking about my content and what's the strategy? What's the brand?" And he goes, "I have a really simple way of thinking about it." And he goes, "You know, in The Matrix we have Morpheus reaches out and says, 'Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?'" Meaning like, you want to keep living in your fantasy land of the way that you were told things are, or do you want the truth? That's the red pill, the harsh red pill that you got to swallow. Neo chooses the red pill because he wants to know the truth. And he basically said that's what the best way to build your content brand is by giving people red pills. So people, you know, people think one way or society tells you X, I'm going to tell you the truth and here's why. And so that's what Knees Over Toes guy did. It's a perfect red pill. Everybody says don't move your knee over your toe. I'm the Knees Over Toes guy. And so he built his niche there. He built his brand there. He went viral on TikTok by showing some pretty amazing stuff. And then he's translating that into a business. Now, I have a quick opportunity for somebody who wants to do this. So one of the things that he does in his program, you tell me, you did the program. My trainer takes pieces of the program and gives it to me. But did you buy that gadget that you wear on your foot? The monkey foot thing?
Yeah.
And who did you buy that from?
The monkey foot guys.
I think it's called Animal House Fitness. Is that who you bought it from?
Yeah.
And is that his brand or is that somebody else's brand?
It does not appear to be his, but I didn't—
Not his, correct. Okay. So Knees Over Toes guy, if you're listening, this is for you. Or if you're not going to do it, we can pair you with a hustler who's going to do this. You need to be selling this device. Okay.
So wait.
Yeah. So what this thing is, is the boot. It's like imagine a ski boot that you put on your foot, you step into it and under the boot you can put a tiny little dumbbell. So you can put like a 5-pound, 10-pound, whatever, 15-pound dumbbell into it.. And so then when you do leg extensions or calf, sorry, like knee raises, things like that, you have like weighted resistance and it helps you build strength faster. And so it's one of his like core things. Did I miss anything on it?
Yeah. He also makes slant boards. So yeah, I, I think that like there's an entire brand to be made around this. Like I, I wouldn't call it masculine cuz I think women like this too, but a non-yoga-esque like I would. I don't want to go as far to say it's feminine, but you guys get the idea. Like a—
well, it's gotten cooler because Tom Brady, you know, the greatest quarterback of all time, came out with the TB12 program, the Tom Brady 12 program. And people are like, great, Tom Brady, you're still playing. You just won the Super Bowl last year. I don't know what he is, 42, 43 years old. So he's the oldest quarterback to win a Super Bowl. How are you still playing? And, you know, he credits basically like he eats super clean. And then he doesn't do like strength and explosive training. He does all flexibility, mobility, pliability. That's what he— those are his focuses. He's like, that's how I don't get hurt, brother.
And we talked about this a year and a half ago. I was all about this.
I mean, you were talking about the subreddit you visit, right? Which is a mobility subreddit, right?
Yes. I've been all about this. The reason I'm all about this is you can feel it in your body. Like I, like I do different athletic challenges and I have done challenges where I try to get incredibly strong. And I know how I feel. I'm like, oh, I feel kind of swollen, I feel bloated, I don't feel awesome. And then I do these things where I just try to squat all the way with my butt on the ground with no weight and I'll just sit there for 10 minutes or I'll just work on flexibility. And I'm like, oh, I feel alive, I feel so much better. And so, I've been talking about this forever. I just sent you an Instagram, a guy named The Flexi Ball. That's another amazing name. I love The Flexi Ball. You immediately know what it is.
It's a—
strong person that's flexible. And so anyway, I'm all about this niche of, I don't know what we're gonna call this, like flexibility culture, whatever it is. I think that these things are the best. I think there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this space. I've seen a few people, I've seen this one guy launch this thing called the Human Garage and they go there, you go there and they stretch you. So I love all these things. I'm totally into 'em.
I also have seen that the tests, the mobility tests, go semi-viral. So I saw something, or I don't even know, maybe it was me or my mom, I don't know. One of us saw it, then they shared it with the other, and then everybody in the family did the test. And all it was is this get-up test. So you sit on the ground.
Indian style.
Cross-legged.
Oh, sorry. Is Indian style not PC?
I think it's about the Native American Indians. So, you know, you might piss off two groups if you say it. But yeah, you sit on the ground Indian style, as we used to say back in second grade. And then you're supposed to get up. And the idea is that you, I think you like for every part of your body that you have to use to touch the ground to get up, you sort of deduct a point. So like for me, when I have, when I'm sitting like that, first of all, I can barely even sit like that. Second of all, if I have to get up, it's like a fucking process, dude. It's like roll to the left. Now I'm laying down, elbow on the ground, forearm on the ground, hand on the ground, second hand pushes me. Now I'm in a pushup position. Now I get to my knees. Now I stand up. I stand up like an 80-year-old.. And the test says you basically have the fitness of an 80-year-old. You have the mobility of an 80-year-old. Because I lose— it's like you start at 7 points and you deduct a point for everything that touches the ground, something like that. And so then I did it, and then my mom did it, my dad did it, my sister. It's like everybody does it. And so there's something interesting there of, let's say you wanted to build a program like this or sell a tool like this. There's something interesting, like we talked about last time, of personality tests, IQ tests, horoscope tests. People's most interesting subject is themselves. Similarly here, I think you could build a following or an audience by giving people a simple diagnostic, a simple test. Can you like, it's like the kind of, can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time? It's like everybody wants to try it when they hear, oh, that's hard. That sounds easy, right? I saw one the other day that was like, take your arms to the side, reach them straight above your head, and then like, do they like keep your arms straight? So do it. Yeah. Keep your arms straight. Yeah. So you, okay. You're, you're not so bad, but like you're tight. You can see you're tight.
Yeah, I'm tight at my lats.
So his is like, if your bicep is able to like touch your ear while maintaining the straightness and like crossing, you're able to cross your hands, then your shoulders are like adequately, you know, flex flexible and mobile. And if not, then you want to do these 3 exercises to improve that. And so I love this model of sort of diagnose the problem and then prescribe your solution.. And I think that would be a cool way to kind of grow this. But I'm with you that, hey, flexibility, mobility, pliability, I think these are where the fitness trends are going right now.
And to wrap it up, I'll say it's never been easier to make money off this type of thing. This guy, Ben, Knees Over Toes Guy, as I said, he doesn't have his own app. He's using Trainerize, this other app. You can literally launch this today, today with $20. All right. You want to talk about LinkedIn stuff or Uh, what do you Google?
Let's do LinkedIn stuff. So you said something the other day, you go, this guy lives like down my block and he created, I don't even know what was it. Some, some guy who's done something cool. He's built some cool business.
Right. And you were like, he lives, I don't know how long he lives.
Like down, yeah, like 10 doors down, 10 doors down.
All right. So great.
So I don't know how you found that out, but I'll tell you, it's pretty funny. I tweeted a picture of myself in front of my new house and he DM'd me and he goes, I don't wanna be weird, but I, I know that house. I lived on the block.
So that, and that's a cool moment. You met somebody who's like kind of professionally relevant to you. That's also locally relevant to you.
Yeah.
What does that mean? I think that there's an opportunity to build a location-based professional network or professional networking tool, especially now that the world has gone remote. So you got a bunch of people relocating. You have people getting out of offices where they would normally be seeing kind of like peers and coworkers and stuff like that all the time.? And most people think the answer is create a coworking space or some kind of flexible workspace where you go and you work, and that's where you're going to get professional interaction. Well, I've actually seen kind of this other trend, which is you discovering people who live around you that are kind of interesting business people that you would want to meet with. And you guys kind of both opted into being like that.
Who are you learning this from?
Well, I'm saying I had a similar experience the other day. Did a call. Guy's like, where do you live? I said, oh, I live in this This little place right outside San Francisco. He goes, oh, my friend just moved there, or my friend lives there too. He's the chief product officer at blankety blank company. Which company? And I was like, oh, sick. Well, I don't want to give out his identity or whatever, but like a company, don't worry about it. It's kind of like a well-known company. He's like, oh yeah, he lives out there too. And I was like, great, I'll intro you guys. You guys should hang out because like, it was like, oh, like, you know, we're sort of, like we could be friends and we live near each other. So that's the excuse of why we might actually hang out. So I thought, that's kind of interesting. What if you could get people to basically just say, here's my job and here's where I live, or here's where I am. And it just notifies you about other people that are also there that are kind of like professionally relevant to you. If you could kind of figure out people's, like, I don't know, without being a douche, but like, if as a CEO you kind of want to talk to other like C-level people, serious guy.
Yeah.
Not like the product manager of some other company that's not like super relevant to you. So I think that would be kind of cool as a way to, as a cool product to bootstrap a new style of professional network and a new style of interaction.
And first of all, let's even mention that LinkedIn's freaking, everyone says the same thing. LinkedIn sucks. How does everyone use LinkedIn? And yet we all use it, or a lot of people do. I don't use it. Anymore, but you get the idea.
Yeah, it's— it is used and it is still the number one, even though we all say how much it sucks. Um, and I think it's true. What I think that— what that— what I think that it means is you have to find a— an angle that's not a direct angle. You can't beat LinkedIn by just building LinkedIn again and being like, but I have better features, I have better design. That's not going to work.
So the best angle— so every time— all right, I see so many companies that are trying to beat LinkedIn. And I think it's a worthy thing to try to do, I think, because I think it can be done. And I think that you can build a big business. And even if you can't unbundle them or whatever, crush them, you could do pretty good. And I— the only times I've seen people do it that seems any traction is they divide it up into subgroups. So it's typically race and it's typically gender. Um, I think—
or it could be industry, like AngelList did it with startups. AngelList basically took the whole startup companies, jobs, and candidates off of— off of LinkedIn and just said, we can do this better.
I've never seen it done really with industries. I don't agree with your— I don't totally agree with that assessment because you're kind of right. Yeah, I guess you are right. But I do— I haven't seen many. I've seen a ton of women— attempts— women-focused ones. So there's Girlboss. There's this other one called Levo. I think it was called Levo.
So yes, to be fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's Chief, Chief.com. Which I have no idea if it's succeeding or not, but it certainly seems like it is. There's, um, and there's a lot of Black-focused ones. I don't remember all their names, but I remember seeing them float around, and they seemed mildly successful, like they have some traction, but obviously I'm not a user. Um, but I've seen race and gender LinkedIn.
So here's the ones that I think have worked. I think AngelList worked, right? $3 to $4 billion company. And if I'm a startup, uh, I might have a LinkedIn, but I'm— with all of my startups, I've found better luck finding jobs and candidates through AngelList. Dribbble did this.
Yeah.
So Dribbble was like, oh, if you're a designer, LinkedIn's kind of like, it's hard to show that you're a good designer there.
Yeah. So design, let's just say where you're putting your portfolio up there, you're networking with other designers and then other people can come find, they find images and then they say, who's, who made this? And then they basically hire you, right? So I think that was kind of successful.
GitHub for developers. Exactly. That's another one. And then there's the low end where it's like Upwork, right? Where it's just like they went kind of like geography, like you were saying. And Upwork basically says, here's a way to find— workers can find jobs and jobs can find workers, but we're going to go for kind of like outsourced labor arbitrage type of thing. So I think those have all worked. Now here's a different, like, take on— here's what— here's a company I invested in that I think has a cool chance of beating LinkedIn. I want to describe their strategy, but I don't want to use the Silicon Valley jargon. You know this word orthogonal? No. Have you heard people say this? It's like, yeah, you have to take an orthogonal angle, or it's an orthogonal—
was that like Orwellian?
No, it just means like you don't go directly— like you don't beat LinkedIn Like, okay, here's the example. Let's say you think, um, PowerPoint sucks. You're like, I'm gonna build a better PowerPoint. The way to build a better PowerPoint is not to make slides that are easier to make. It's to look at the fact that people use slides to give their bosses presentations about how, like, how the business is doing. And actually the orthogonal way to attack that is to build dashboards that automate them, that are always automatically updated, that your boss can just check. And now you don't even need slides, right?
Right.
Like in order to build—
to build the best hotel business, you don't create better hotels necessarily. You get other people to list their homes.
You get Airbnb. Exactly. So, so orthogonal just means sort of attacking it from another angle. So here's, here's an orthogonal attack on LinkedIn. There's this company called Pallet.xyz. Have you seen this?
Pallet. P-A-L-L-E-T.xyz. I think that's the name. You're not going to learn too much from this, but I'll tell you kind of like where you can find these guys.
Dude, how do you find all this shit, man?
Bro, I've already given people the secret sauce, which is be super curious and then surround yourself with interesting people and then share it, right? Like my crew, I think Ben found Palantir or maybe Zach found Palantir. I'm not sure. Somebody found Palantir. I talked to the guy behind it. He's awesome. He's like a 23-year-old ex-Stanford guy. Like you just talk to him, be like, oh, okay, you're going to win.
Yeah.
Like, whether it's this business or the next one or the next one or the next one, like, you're gonna win, you're clearly super smart, you're way ahead of your time, in terms of just like polish as a CEO. And you're an engineer, and you recruited other good engineers, great. But what he's building is actually pretty cool. We found him because I am pretty interested in like, what I'm calling like, kind of like the creator stack, or basically like the solopreneur's playbook. So I look at people like Pomp, right? Pomp is a creator. He creates content in the niche of crypto.
Say who Pomp is. I actually don't think everyone knows.
Okay. Pomp, his name is Anthony Pompliano. He's kind of like a friend of ours. We don't know him super well, but he's friendly. He's come on the pod. We've been on his pod. And he's super well known. He used to work at Facebook. Then he was like, I don't know, chief something at Snapchat, left really early on, or like kind of like that didn't last very long, went on his own and started creating content about Bitcoin in like 2016, 2017-ish. And as Bitcoin got more popular, he got more popular. So he's got like, I don't know, a million followers now. He's got a Substack with 170,000, you know, like subscribers or paid subscribers or something ridiculous. He's a Bitcoin media personality, but like he's on CNBC to talk big anytime Bitcoin happens. Pomp, tell us, is it good or is it bad?
And he's kind of a troll on purpose. Like, I like Pomp, but he like, he like Uh, fucks with people.
I don't call him a troll. I think he's, um, somebody said this and they said it in a way that was derogatory, but I actually think it's like a good description of like people like this. They called him a carnival barker, which is basically like your hype man. Like somebody who's going to just keep, keep pounding the pavement and keep, keep knocking on doors and saying, saying the message.
And I don't mean troll disrespectfully. I mean like he's funny. Like he's like, he's a shithead.
Yeah. And he has a good time. He's got a good personality and he's, extremely talented with content creation and branding. So we'll talk about one of his other projects that just came out. But anyways, my point is Pomp created this job board called Crypto Jobs or something like that. Like, he's like, you want a job in crypto? And he—
you're—
I'm a trusted guy in crypto. If you want to work in crypto, here's my personal job board. I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting. Like, we've talked in the past about job boards. Andrew Wilkinson talked about how good of a business job boards are. And I thought, I wonder how successful individual creators' job boards could be. And the reason I'm interested in this is because, A, that's like kind of like my career path is being a creator. And I think about like the previous wave, like Tim Ferriss and those guys, they didn't have any of these different business models. They didn't have rolling funds, they didn't have ghost kitchens, they didn't have job boards as like a way to capitalize on their audience. They just sold books and then like that was kind of it. And now creators have a whole different arsenal of ways to make money, one of which is a job board. So he did this with, with Pomp. He did— Palette does this with, you know, Lenny, the kind of like the product management guy. So Lenny's got a job board if you want to become a PM. Well, you could just go to like LinkedIn or Indeed, but if you're a PM and you follow Lenny and you love his content about being a better PM, kind of makes sense to find a job there. Palette is the job board software that all these creators use.
Bro, you think that's going to be a huge thing? I've created job boards. You use a WordPress plugin.
Yeah. So here's the, here's the difference. This is like a classic. I think this is a classic mistake, which is like Webflow, dude, I can use Wix, right? Like Shopify. I can do this on Squarespace. It's like the— there is a benefit to when something really focuses on a use case and a niche. And attacks it from in a different way. So what they did was they built this job board thing to go to creators or communities. So like for The Hustle, you guys could be— The Hustle could be— you guys have a job board or no?
We, we— yeah, we launched one as a test.
How did it do?
It didn't do well, but I wouldn't say it's because the idea is bad. It's just that we are— when we are deciding between trends and something else, that something else was a job board and we were like, let's do this other thing.
So these individual creators, guess how much they're making off their job board?
I would love to know. I don't know.
Give me a guess. What do you think Lenny's making off his job board?
$100,000 a year at most.
So I don't want to blow up these guys' own economics, but let's just say I looked at 10 of these and I looked at, okay, how much money do each of these make? People of their level of fame, which is like, they're not truly famous. They're like niche famous.
Yeah. Internet famous. $250,000 and up.
Really? Pomp, I think, is going to make about $1 million off his job board this year. He's going to make the business job board and he doesn't have to create content every day. He doesn't have to, you know, get on it, right? So his newsletter, he's got to write a fucking newsletter every morning, right? Like that's his— people pay him $9.99 and he's got to write the newsletter every morning. The job board, that's just for free after already building the audience.
Uh, so, uh, they basically take a percentage of whatever the creator's making.
So, and so how does the creator make money?
Creator makes money because the companies who want to access talent in that niche go and they pay the $500 or $1,000 to, um, to post their job. And so they pay, let's say, $1,000 per, per job posting. They're gonna get candidates that are highly qualified. Uh, the creator can sort of like do two things. They can take some of the jobs and they can sort of like boost them and basically say, if I was, if I was you guys, these are companies that I would go work for. So you can endorse the jobs. You can also endorse the candidates. So you can take your audience and just instead of just saying, hey, my full audience is this, you can say, hey, these 400 people are like kind of like the, the, the, the top, the cream of the crop in terms of my audience. These guys are like kind of like the superstar talent.. And so you actually have to pay more to access them. Or when they match with this, I will— when you post a job, I will actually specially message those people. And that's like kind of like a premium offering. So, so they basically give you the software to do this. The reason I think this is interesting for LinkedIn, LinkedIn is one giant central like job board basically, right? So like that's the way LinkedIn makes money is—
So, so I think this is a distributed version of LinkedIn. It's basically saying nobody, nobody's going to build a 500 million person social network for professionals, professionals again, that's LinkedIn's advantage. But what if instead of 500 million people on one network, you had 500, you know, you have 50,000 people on whatever, 100 networks or whatever it is, do the math. And so you, you, you, you split it where, um, like one example they have is, um, there's a co— like a community of, of developers who all write, let's say Angular. Angular is a JavaScript like framework. So they have a big Discord of thousands of Angular developers. Well, they should have a job board for people who are trying to hire developers who write Angular, right? Angular developers. That would be the business model for running that community, for putting in all the hard work and running a great Angular community. The job board would be a great way. And if I'm an employer, I'd rather go to the Angular community and write on their job board than just post on LinkedIn.
Well, so this is— this company, they've like raised legit money.
Who?
Yeah, it's like a startup startup.
That's pretty wild. So you kind of turned my opinion on this. Who all— anyone interesting invested in this besides you?
Yeah, a lot of the creators, because a lot of the creators like, holy shit, this is great. Like, I will invest in this and I'll be a user of it because this solves a problem of mine, right? If I've done all the hard work to build a free audience and build trust with them and build a kind of a niche I'm an authority in a niche and that niche is like a job. Maybe it's design, maybe it's product management, maybe it's, you know, developers or backend engineers, machine learning experts, whatever. Once I've done that, if you have a way for me to monetize that doesn't require me to get up there and either teach or write content every day, I'm in, right? And the economics seem to work. And then the more job boards, the more niche job boards that get created through this network, Now they can just— when a company wants to post a job, you can say, hey, you only, you know, you came here to post on the Angular community, but we have these 5 other job boards that are all for developers. Would you like to cross-post? And they can help like get more reach on the job and they can help those creators get more money without marketing themselves.
So these guys— yeah, you changed my opinion. It's pretty dope. And the reason why it's interesting is the way that you described it was far better than what I thought it was going to be is ZipRecruiter. Do you know ZipRecruiter?
I know the ads. I don't— what do they do that's different? They—
it's—
oh, that's the same thing. It's one place and they will post on Indeed and they post on all the job boards, right?
Yeah. So ZipRecruiter, um, at the time, and still could be the case, they were the fastest growing company out of LA and the largest Series A company ever, meaning their valuation was the highest ever for a Series A. Um, and I believe it was— it's crazy how times have changed, but like their Series A, they valued them at like hundreds of millions of dollars. Now it's like way different. Um, but, um, and what they do is you, uh, so they raise, uh, I'm looking at now, I think they're—
are they not like public? Like they advertise on Bill Simmons's podcast.
Like, yeah, they're probably close to— so their Series A, they raised at a $300 million valuation, which unfortunately is considered small now, probably.
But they, um, they're, they're going to go public.
Yeah, they're public size, and they, they make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And what you do is They make a really— so they, what was that term? Orwellian?
What's that? Orthogonal.
Orthogonal. That's, it's a good term. I'm gonna steal that one. So what they've done is they do a couple things and if you told me what they were trying to do, I would actually say, oh wow, this is way too complicated. I don't think this can work. But basically they do a couple things. The first thing is that they make it really easy to post your job anywhere. So you just click, you upload the job description and it posts in every single place. You don't have to go to each one. And so that's why an employer posts there. The second thing that they do is now once, once they got all these people to start posting their jobs on ZipRecruiter, you can now go to ZipRecruiter.com and it says look for a job. And so they get, they get recruits right there. And then on the back end, they've now created a way that you can manage your hiring process. And the way that they make money, I believe, is by I think it's software. So you can pay a fee to get access to like the CRM as well as they'll post for free. Or you could do one-off, well, you gotta pay for it to be posted in all the places. And it's a, the strategy works really well. So I'm on board. I think ZipRecruiter is great.
But it's one of those, like, I don't know if this idea is gonna work. I thought it was worth a bet, so I invested, right? So I'm talking to my book a little bit here, but It's more like all startups are, you know, it's unlikely that they succeed. I wouldn't say the probability is that they go defeat LinkedIn. It's just that I thought, oh wow, that is smart actually. You're not going to build the 500 million person social network. That's just so hard. You have to, who's going to be able to do that? Instead, if you just say, well, all these individual creators and communities are already building their own little network. What if I created a decentralized job board? The job board, instead of being in one spot, it actually lives in each one of their little communities. And that makes sense to me because like our friend Andrew, you know, Andrew Chen, you know, my favorite person who blocks me on Twitter. You're a good buddy. He's got a great growth blog. And then, you know, a lot of, a lot of growth marketers follow.
He should post growth.
If he had his own, if he had his own growth job board, he would, you know, with essentially zero work, probably making, I don't know, easily $150 grand a year, $250 grand a year. Of companies that want to hire growth, growth hackers and growth marketers like Andrew. And so that would be a better, more targeted place to hire somebody from than going to this sort of general sea of job, you know, job applications. And so I think that, that, that part is what made sense to me with this. Although I was like you when, when I first heard this, I didn't even want to take the meeting. I was like, great, like, you know, bloggers are going to become like blogger job boards. What the hell is that, right? Like, I remember reading once that I can't get this out of my head, which is like, they go, Substack, where B players teach C players what A players do. I was like, oh shit, that's so good. That's such a kill shot.
Who said that?
I think it was Hunter Walk. I think it was on Twitter. And you know, but it's such a good call out, right? Like, in many ways, it's true, right? The most successful people, the The true icons, you know, they're not creating a ton of content typically. And sometimes they do when they retire, sometimes as part of their growth strategy. But for the most part, Elon Musk doesn't have a Substack, right? He's not trying to teach you and sell you a course on how to be a good CEO because he just is a good CEO and makes all his money there. So often it's— it is a B player teaching a C player what the A players do. And I think that's like a harsh but true critique. And, you know, I myself, you know, feel like that many times. And I think that's when I was like, from that angle, I was like, oh, will this job board thing work? But once I looked into it, I was like, this actually makes a lot of sense.
Can we speak— this is kind of relevant. Can we wrap up with this thing you have here about you're never— even when you're late, you're early? Yeah, this is a very typical you thing.
Yeah, let's end on a little philosophical.
I asked Sean last week to— we said let's come up with a 10-minute short episode. This morning I get a message from him saying, I just did it this morning. And I— that's all he said. And I clicked play and it said the first line was like, I just woke up this morning and lost $500,000. I was like, oh, hooked, I'm in. And that— we can't run this on Sunday, we have to run this right now. And so what happened? And I guess what's this you're not late type of thing.
Do you want me to talk about the thing from this morning or you want me to talk about this? You're not late thing.
This late thing.
Okay. The late thing. So I was, I was looking back and I was doing a little kind of retrospect. I said, so I graduated from college.
You did it today when you like lost all this?
No, no, no, no. This is like a month ago. I was looking back at 2010 and I remember being in college and I, you know, I had an iPhone, so I knew Apple was the shit. I used Google constantly. I used Chrome. I knew Google was the shit. I was a believer in Tesla. I think I owned Tesla shares at like, I don't know, 20x cheaper than they are today. So I saw all these companies, and at the time, Google seemed super established, right? Google's been around for— Google had been around in 2010 for so many years, right? Like over a decade. Or whatever. Same with Apple, was even older, right? 20 years old. They seemed like mature companies. They didn't seem like where all the upside was. And I looked back and I just did a little analysis. I said, when I graduated from college, how big was Google? What was the market cap? If I had just invested that day? And this isn't like when you say, oh, if you invested in Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be worth a gajillion dollars. Well, yeah. That's because Bitcoin was worth like 10 cents back then, you know, and it was like nobody knew if Bitcoin was going to be a thing. But with Google, it was clear it was going to be a thing. Apple, it was clear it was going to be a thing. Facebook, it was clear it was going to be a thing. Like my whole college was obsessed with it. It was pretty obviously going to be, you know, somewhat successful. And so here's some numbers. 2010, when I graduated, Google's revenue was $5 billion. Today, its revenue is $55 billion. And you could do the same thing with Amazon, with Facebook. And if you had just bought those companies back then, you would have made 10x your money, right? So like, if I had just taken my last year of college tuition and I just said, hey, Dad, instead of putting that into, into college, let's just put it into these 4 companies that like we use their products daily. They are already successful. They're not going to— Google's not going to tank. It's not going to fail. Let's just invest in Google. You know, we would have 10x our money or whatever by now. I don't know the exact numbers. It's not what's important. The lesson is, even when it feels late, like you're established, if it is a megatrend, megatrends have way more room to run than you expect. Some of the megatrends were the internet as a whole. Internet was a megatrend. Mobile was a megatrend, and Apple's been running on that megatrend for a while. You know, cloud. Cloud is a megatrend, and you see AWS. AWS is big, and every year it just grows at the rate of the fastest growing startup. But AWS was already like, you know, $40, $50 billion in revenue and it'll just keep growing really fast. Um, and so, so I think that, uh, mega trends are not to be underestimated. And I was listening to this Peter Thiel thing. Peter Thiel, who is like, you know, investor, uh, was one of the first investors in Facebook, created PayPal, that sort of thing. Peter Thiel said, you know, there are many money managers out there. You know, financial advisors, investment bankers, mutual funds, and they'll all try to pitch you their strategy, hedge funds. They'll all tell you how they're going to beat the market, how they're going to do well. He goes, as an investor, often it is the simplest and stupidest strategy, the most obvious strategy that is all you need to do. He goes, in 20— I think it was 2013 or 2012, Jim Cramer, the Mad Money guy on CNBC, who, by the way, I think is like Pretty awesome.
I think he's like a pretty good guy and his picks are not so bad, are they?
I think, I don't know. I haven't looked too much into him. I don't know if he's a good guy. I've never met him. But I know that for his, he's an entertainer, right? He's on TV, not 'cause he's the best stock picker. He's on TV because he plays really well in the living rooms of America. Right. And so anyways, he did something, which is what entertainers do. He made up a catchy phrase. He called Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google FANG.
He made that up?
Yeah, he invented FANG in 2013. And Peter Thiel pointed out, he goes, if you had just put your money into FANG, which were obviously great companies that were technology companies that were growing, and you didn't even need to know how fast they were growing, but if you just said, these are solid companies that, you know, seems like everybody in America is using their products, you would have made 6 times your money in the last 8 years. And he goes, that would beat the performance of almost any money manager or hedge fund or investment banker that you're thinking of working with. He goes, the problem is the strategies are too stupid. Even if a financial advisor thought that that was a good bet, they could never charge you the 1% of all your assets that they charge as their fees to just tell you to invest in Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google and go. Go to sleep. Like, don't, don't touch it for 10 years. But in reality, that was the best advice. And he goes, the same thing. He goes, I believe the same thing is true for Bitcoin today. And it's the advice is almost so, so simple that a money manager would be embarrassed to say that this is their strategy. So they'll come up with a more complicated strategy that will actually underperform. Well, I don't think Bitcoin and chilling—
I agree with that sentiment. I don't think it's just a money manager thing. And I would say, look at your actions. And my actions are similar to yours, but we are— we do a lot of silly stuff. Um, you're investing in risky startups when you're— right now you're pontificating, um, that you think Bitcoin is going to 6x in 8 years. If you think that it's going to 6x in 8 years, put all your money in it then, right? Um, so I don't think—
to be fair, I pretty much have at this point.
And I, and I'm using you as an example. I, I'm, I'm incredibly guilty of this as well. And just, I, I mean you as in a human being. But basically, like, that's what we do is we fuck stuff up because we can't sit still. What's like the famous quote of like all of humans' problems exist because we can't just sit silently by ourselves.
Yeah, man can't sit alone in a room for 30 minutes. Yeah.
And that's kind of the issue here. And it kind of sucks because I'm in the same boat. I know that if I just put it like I'm even more conservative than Fang, I'm like S&P 500. I'm like, so long as the trailing 100 years repeats itself, like if I don't think the trailing 100 years is going to repeat itself and there's probably like huge problems with America, right? And so I'm like, as long as that trailing 100 repeats itself, like, dude, like, everything's gonna be great. And days like today happen, and I'm like, oh, fuck, gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta do this, right?
Um, yeah, so, so I guess like the— I, I was a little bit long-winded in that. I don't think I really nailed my point. My point is, when there's a real megatrend, what feels like Oh, it's already played out. Nope, there's a lot more to go. And the hard part, of course, is figuring out what's a real megatrend and what's not. But in retrospect, they were sort of obvious. Mobile was a megatrend. Video is a megatrend. Internet was a megatrend. And I believe crypto is a megatrend. And so, you know, those are megatrends. And, you know, I remember I texted my dad today. I go, hey, today's a great day to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin's 30% off.
It's Black Friday.
And, uh, and he— because every day he badgers me, like, he's like, ah, you've been talking about Bitcoin since it was at $500, and then it got to $2,000, I thought it was too much. Then it got to $4,000, it got to $20,000, I thought no way this goes above $20,000. And then, you know, recently it's been sitting at $50,000, $60,000. And he's like, now I can't even— if I buy in, I'm buying at $50,000, $60,000. I should have bought it.
So did he do it?
So I told him, I said, hey, you've been bitching and moaning about this, like, here it is, it's at $30-something thousand. Go buy. Now is the time to buy. And I know what's gonna happen. He's gonna think, well, now it's in the red. Now it's not hot. You know, now I'm a little bit afraid because the whole market's afraid. And so now he'll either not do it or he'll like tiptoe in and then he'll regret it later. Like, I only put in so much because that's the classic psychology of an investor, right? Of a bad investor, I should say. And, and so, so I guess like the thought process for me here is that if you think this is a megatrend, even $50K is— it's not too late because it still has so much more room to grow if this is true. Now, of course, could be wrong, could not be, could fall over, could fail for many reasons. But I think that when you identify these things, one of the worst mistakes you can make is either selling too early because you don't ride out the winner. And then the second mistake I think you can make is feeling like you're late when history tells us that these things play out over like a 20, 30-year arc.
I agree with everything. I'm, I'm nervous that because I don't— I'm not— the most education I have on Bitcoin is you telling me whatever you like, whatever what you tell everyone else is like. This is, this is my education on it because it just doesn't interest me other than sticking it to the man. Right. And I have doubts. But not— I mean, I'm 6 figures in, so not that many doubts, but maybe I'll take your advice and do it.
Well, I would say, like, you know, you never— you know, probably the best advice I could give is never invest on somebody else's conviction, because when they're wrong, it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you didn't believe to begin with.
Well, I believe in the premise of, like, you know, like, the government doesn't control it. No one controls it. Like, it's kind of crazy that You know, yeah, I agree in the high-level premise.
I think you want to— what I'm saying is I think you want to take somebody's— if you hear my conviction, the answer is not go do it. The answer is go learn for yourself and ask yourself, how much conviction do I have in this? And then invest proportionate to your conviction, because then at the very least, when you're right or wrong, you're going to assign the credit or blame to yourself. And you'll have either a lesson learned if you're wrong or a lesson learned if you were right. About how much you followed your conviction and if your conviction was based in something real. And so anyways, not financial advice. That's not my point. My point was sort of like I thought it was a very interesting observation that sometimes it's the simplest investment strategies where you, where you set it and you hold it, you leave it actually will outperform. And one of the reasons people don't do them is it's almost so stupid, it's embarrassing if that's your strategy, especially if your job is to be an investment manager or financial manager or financial advisor. Then it's really embarrassing to just recommend such a brain-dead approach. But history will tell us that often that is the best returns.
Great. Well, I think that's a great place to end. I always like ending in those rants.