#187 - How Vending Machines are Generating Millions, The Next Big Social App & Ghost Kitchens For Gifts
So I like these like big things, software companies that can scale. But when I heard him describing this, I'm like, God, I want to get in on this. Like, this is just so like, you know what I mean?
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on the road.
Let's travel, never looking back. What's up?
Sean here. We got Sam. And today's episode, we're going to talk about a blue-collar side hustle, a.k.a. The hillbilly of the week, uh, which is a vending machine business. And Sam breaks down all the numbers behind it. We talk about this idea of creating the Edible Arrangements of DoorDash through ghost kitchens. We talk about the new, uh, hottest app in the App Store, the number one app, AKA, is this the next Snapchat? Is this the next Clubhouse? We don't know. It's called Paparazzi. And I tell a story around that. And we talk about Vimeo, a, you know, a business you've probably heard of, but may not realize that Vimeo is now an $8 billion business. And then at the end, we shoot the shit with Abreu and the new Abreu, Dan, and you get to meet him a little bit. So that's the last, I don't know, 5, 10 minutes of the episode.
All right.
Great episode.
Enjoy. All right. What's up?
Yo, you know what's funny? I put out that thing for, for merch designs and somebody had a great one that was— so the funny ones I thought were somebody made a Yada Yada Yada shirt with your face on it. I thought that was funny.. And then somebody made one that just goes, it's both of our faces. It's both our faces, like kind of illustrated. And it just says, "Abreu, we good?" Which is what you say at the end of every episode.
Do I really? Yeah. I, uh, and then another guy. So Sean, we're doing this meetup in Miami. Um, by the way, we're calling it a meetup.
I feel like that undersells it, right? Live show. We're going on tour. That sounds more badass than we're doing a meetup.
Well, Yes, you're right. But there's two things going on here. The first, I was downplaying it because I frankly, I didn't know how many people are going to show up. Yeah. So we set the limit originally at 400 and then our venue now is changing. And so we don't— I don't know how many is going to seat. Right. And so we capped it now at 335. That's how many RSVPs we have now. So if more open up, we're going to open it up. But I was doing it to like make it so if I failed, it would be okay. And also, so when you talk about show, I know that you're, I think you're pretty comfortable on stage and you actually aspire to be kind of a professional comedian. I have no idea what we're actually going to talk about.
We haven't even, we haven't even said a word to each other about what are we going to do there?
Yeah. So we'll figure it out. But basically the way it's working and we agreed to, as per usual, we agree to stuff without thinking it through. But basically we have a thing in Austin at 6 PM on Thursday. That's probably going to end at 10 PM. And then we have a 7 AM flight. And I think that flight is going to land at noon, 12:30 in Miami.
And then these are the logistics people came to listen for.
Oh, I'm sorry. But anyway, it's just we have a lot. We're going to be running them out a million miles an hour.
You know what I thought would be a fun idea? I just thought about actually while I was putting my contacts in before this. I go, what are we going to say on stage? What would be a good live show? Because I was like, either we just do research and we just have like a fire episode where it's like great ideas, great Billy of the Week, great business breakdown. We could have that ready. I said, or we could do it, you know, like when you go to a comedy show and they fucking, they take your phone, they zip it up. So you're like, you can't record this. It's like, well, if they showed up live, what can we get them that's special that we can't just say on air? So I thought maybe, I think each of us probably has a few business stories, war stories that we could share that are entertaining, that you could do kind of in an off-the-record format. And I feel like we could put out 5 stories that we could tell about stuff, you know, or 3 or 4 stories at least that could be entertaining about, you know, something that happened that is, you wouldn't just like, you wouldn't go publish a blog post about it because it's not necessarily the details you can't get out to everybody. But in a trusted group of some of our biggest fans, I think that's cool.
A 400-person trusted group.
But yeah, I think that's a group of strangers.
I think, I think maybe it might default to like Q&A, but we'll see. It's going to be weird. We're going to— I've never— I've talked— I think the most amount of people I've ever talked in front of is 5,000. And that's not a big deal. I can do that all day. But never 5,000 people who came to see me just like riff. So that's going to be weird. But we've got a lot of ideas and you want to get straight to it.
Yeah, let's do it.
Where do you want to start? You want to actually start the Vimeo one's not an idea. You have this cool thing about paparazzi or I don't actually know how you say it. That's actually a lesson. I want to start with Vimeo because there's no lesson here. I just thought it was cool. So did— so Vimeo went public 2 days ago. So I didn't even know this until I saw the tweet. It was an awesome tweet about the woman was with her kid and saying like wishing her mom a good day's work when it goes public.
A good day's work to you, you know, like, I need you, child.
Like, good luck. It was like a 3-year-old saying, you know, good luck as you ring the bell. I love that type of shit. And anyway, went public, but there's a background behind Vimeo. So do you use Vimeo? I use it all the time.
I've used it. I think everybody runs into Vimeo once in a while. I don't use it to upload unless I'm like, oh, I need a high-quality kind of private thing., and I'm just surprised this company made it. It just seemed like Vimeo was dead. I think it literally died at some point, but they pivoted and made it actually into a great business. So tell me about it.
It never died. So it's always been like kind of popular, like for a very particular type of person. I love watching it on my TV cuz I've got like a fancy TV and they have fancy videos, like high-end videos, and they particularly have like weird stuff, weird music.
They've got— what sort of, uh, fancy weird videos are you watching?
Like, like, like, like nature stuff?
What do you, what do you—
no, there's like, yeah, tons of nature stuff, like men and women stuff.
Like, what are you watching?
No, like, uh, like, um, like a drone flying around or something. Gotcha. Or, or, you know, stuff that's like— it's just, it's kind of like, it's, uh, oddly entertaining. Or they'll have really unique art pieces, like an art video. Or— so it's very niche, but it's really neat. I love it. But the way it started is actually interesting. So these guys, uh, it was a guy named Ricky Van— I think his name is Ricky Van Veen. He started with a guy named Josh and a guy named Zach, 3 of them. They were only 18 and they started this company called CollegeHumor. And you know, CollegeHumor, of course, we're a similar age. If you're young and listening to this, you probably don't know it, but basically it was like FuckJerry but before Instagram. Exactly. Or Barstool Sports, but not sports. Right. And it was like a kind of a smutty— it wasn't smut, but it was like SNL online and it was cool and it was one of the first blogs and they started it and it got going and they also had little side projects. These guys lived in New York., and they were just like your typical, like, 20-year-old cool New Yorker guy where they, like, you would see their life and they would start little side projects. It was really fun. One of their side projects was a video uploading tool that they built because they were uploading videos before YouTube was around, and that was Vimeo. And Barry Diller, who we have to do a deep dive on, he's very fascinating. He started this company called IAC. They're pretty huge. They've owned Match.com, which they spun out to be its own business. They own Tinder. They've owned a ton of stuff. Angie's List. And anyway, he bought that for $20 million in 2006, and he's held it now for almost 15 years. Vimeo, they spun it out. So what Barry Diller and IAC does is they buy these companies, they employ people to run them, and they grow them. Not like crazy fast, but they grow them, and then they spin them out to go public, and it works often. And they went public recently. They bought this business for $20 million. It's now worth $8 billion. Is that crazy?
That's insane.
Publicly traded, worth $8 billion.
By the way, if Vimeo's worth $8 billion, YouTube's worth what, $800? Like, YouTube must be— YouTube is insanely more valuable than Vimeo. So that just seems a little off, right?
Like, YouTube, dude, Vimeo does like $400 or $500 or $600. It's like many, almost close to, it's half a billion-ish in revenue.
So explain the niche. So Vimeo basically did what? They went, they sort of pivoted from consumers uploading videos to more like businesses or creative people, filmmakers, you know, type of people uploading videos.
Is that right? Yeah. So if you want to upload a video and you want to upload it quickly and you want to upload it in the highest, highest quality possible, you'll use Vimeo and you'll buy a creator's account. They also let you do some editing online. That makes it a little bit easier. You can add some captions, things like that. You can have a— people will use it to like store their portfolio. And so what you'll see if you go on there, you type in like nature, you'll see some video and like, then you'll see like, oh wait, this has, this is by Yeti and it's Yeti hosting a lot of their cool videos that they'll pay a creator to make for them as like an ad. And they'll, I don't know, actually know where they even display those videos other than Vimeo. But like you'll see, what's the coat comp— what's the outdoors company that let my people go surfing? North Face. The North Face guy, like you'll see him fishing in a stream telling like a story about the background of the company. Right. So it's a lot of outdoorsy, a lot of brand stuff. It's pretty interesting. The niche, I don't actually know how to describe that niche, but it's kind of interesting. Like it's all people who want to have higher quality stuff than YouTube in terms of like resolution. And they also do a couple of things that they like goes against their culture. Like they don't have view counts, they don't have a sort by popularity thing. So it makes it a little bit easier to discover, to discover stuff that you normally wouldn't have seen.
Well, it's good by them because all the other video upload sites, whether it's like Dailymotion or like all those other ones, they all died, right? YouTube just— YouTube took over. It ate everybody up. And Vimeo squirted away and found a niche that works for them that is actually like an $8 billion niche, right? It ended up working out and not like a, oh, that's a lifestyle business kind of way. So, you know, props to them because I don't think this was the— I don't think this was what most people would have bet was it would be the outcome once YouTube started growing like it did.
So the company that Vimeo has 200 million users, so 200 million people a month, I believe, go and use them. And also they have 1.6 million paying subscribers. So pretty substantial. Another company that I didn't put on here but is killing it in video. Do you remember Weebly?
Yeah.
The website maker. Oh, sorry, not Weebly. What's the other one? So the W— Wistia. Wistia. You know, Wistia. So Wistia is doing the same thing. So Wistia is kind of an interesting company. They also started in 2006 and they were based out of Boston and they raised a shit ton of money, built this business to be like $30, $40, $50 million recurring revenue. And then they bought out their shareholders. They raised money from, from KKR, the PE company, and bought out their investors. I bet you that company could be potentially worth $1 billion as well, but they're kind of doing something similar.
Yeah. You know, when last episode I had this thing or not the Marc Lore one, but the one before that where I said one of my learnings, one of the counterintuitive things that I learned is never underestimate these megatrends. Even when you feel like you're late, you're early. And there's another version of that, which is even when you're niche, you're big with a megatrend. And so Mark Zuckerberg came out, I don't know when it was. I didn't start using this term megatrend until I heard Zuck use it, I think 5 years ago. When he goes, video is a megatrend. I thought, oh, that's interesting. Facebook's not even at that time, Facebook wasn't even about video. They hadn't launched Watch. The feed was mostly photos and text updates. But they see everything, right? Facebook knows what's going on on the internet. They know exactly where all the opportunities are, whether they can capture them or not. And for video, I thought, huh, what does he mean by megatrend? And I think what it means is like mobile, like the internet, like now video, social, these were, um, there were like trends of trends, uh, meaning like they were gonna transform basically every space. And so you saw that, we saw this with video. All of a sudden newspapers or, you know, the kind of the meme in for media companies was we're pivoting to video, right? Um, which is like you used to write articles and now you produce videos. Um, you know, same thing happened with, with Instagram, you know, more and more Instagram content shifted from photos to videos, either through stories or posts or now like Reels or TikToks. And so video just has just eaten up more and more share of people's attention and what the internet is used for. And I think that that's pretty, pretty fascinating. And I think this is a good example of video is such a big megatrend that even being the niche kind of like The, the video uploading site for creative makers, hobbyists, fishermen, and photographers is like, boom, $8 billion, you know, $8 billion company if you end up winning that space, that niche. And so, yeah, just another example of do not underestimate a megatrend. Don't think you're, don't think you're late when it's a megatrend and don't be afraid of going niche because even the niches are big with megatrends. I would say today's megatrends, my personal bets are that today's megatrends are Anything that's actually real in machine learning or AI, um, as well as crypto. I think those are the two mega trends that are happening right now.
Speaking of mega trend, something happened the other day. An app like went crazy viral and you kind of have an insider story of it.
Yeah, a little bit. Okay. So there's this app. So I'll, I'll tell you kind of my, my, my learning here. Friend, uh, friend of the pod, actually he's never come on, but one of our friends, or I don't know if you know him very well. This guy Nikita Beer. He's an entrepreneur. His company was TBH, got acquired by Facebook for $100 million in a really crazy way. They basically were grinding, trying to build like social products, like, you know, the next, the next Twitter, the next Snapchat for a while, many years. And we're just getting really, really smart about it, learning a bunch of stuff, but never hitting the home run. And I think about a few months before they ran out of money, they just threw— you know, they were either going to wind it up, just all right, let's all go get jobs or, you know, get acquihired somewhere. They threw one last attempt at this app called TBH, and it went viral amongst high schoolers. It was like an app where we're kind of answering questions or polls about your friends, who's most likely to blah, blah, blah? Or who is your favorite person about blah, blah, blah? And then there was a place to go post like a social network for high schoolers. Takes off. Facebook buys it for, I think, $100 million was the reported price.
How do you think that deal was structured? $100 million for an app that doesn't— like, it's brand new.
I have no idea. Obviously, it was an overpay. Months later, TBH shut down. No longer— it was kind of a fad, right? It didn't have legs. They shut it down and they kept most of the talent. And so anyways, he's been there for a little while. So he tweets out, when the App Store refreshes, there's a new king. 500,000 installs on day one. All right, you got my attention. I'll bite. What is it? And people start speculating what it is. And I sort of, I sort of do some internet digging and, and I find out, okay, there's this app called Paparazzi. So have you seen what the app is? The app is called Paparazzi. It's currently the number one app in the App Store. It's had over a million installs in I think less than a week. They're, they're waitlist. Basically, they were a TestFlight app, which is like how you give it to like beta testers. It's not even in the App Store. Their TestFlight app went viral. And so they had half a million people ready and waiting to download the app as soon as— so they just, they just rushed it onto the App Store. And bang, they hit the number one. I think they're still number one on the free charts above Snapchat, above TikTok, above Facebook, above, above everybody. And okay, so what is Paparazzi? And by the way, Paparazzi has almost the same story as TBH. These guys have been working on this for a while.
They were like 3 years, I think.
Years. Yeah, they were just kind of grinding away, you know, small team. I think they're in LA.
And 2 brothers.
They, they almost got acquired or kind of acquihired for single-digit millions of dollars. Like, you know, a couple of the big social networks were talking to them. They could have took that, you know, they would have made probably, you know, a million bucks, $2 million amongst themselves if they did it. But they said, all right, fuck it, YOLO, one more try. They released this new app, Paparazzi, and it hits, and it hits big. And so we'll see if this is gonna last, right? Social apps could be like a TBH, could be like a Clubhouse, it could be the next Snapchat, right? That's the thing with social apps is they all start sort of start out looking the same. They look kind of silly. They sound kind of dumb. And then, you know, you fast forward a year and then, you know, some people are proven right. I told you that was dumb. It faded away. And then for some people like me, my, you know, I think I was right about Clubhouse, my famous Clubhouse prediction. I think it's being proven right. You know, their downloads went from like 1 million to 4 million to 10 million and then back to 2 million, 1 million, half a million, right?
So you have intel. Are you right?
I mean, the download numbers would tell us a story that I'm right so far now. But when I was saying it, it looked like this thing was going to take off. They just had 10 million downloads in a month, which is insane. Now it looks like I'm right. But of course it could turn around. Maybe they could prove me wrong.
But how did this one app get popular?
So I don't know exactly how it got popular. It's very cleverly architected the way their sort of flow works to get you to invite friends., but I think there was just like a novel hook with this. So why is it called Paparazzi? It's called Paparazzi because on every other social network you post about yourself, right? I go post on Instagram, I post a photo from my camera that I took about me and my life. And, uh, if I post a story, same thing. Paparazzi is just like the name sounds. It's other people taking pictures of you, which is kind of funny, right? So like your profile is not pictures you upload about yourself. Which tends to be you kind of in a manicured setup environment making yourself look good. With Paparazzi, it's other people taking pictures of you, and that sort of is like a photo tag onto your wall. And so your whole profile is just pictures that other people took of you, and you can sort of like accept them or deny them if you don't like the photo or whatever. And so that creates a cool dynamic where now you're getting people in more candid shots because it's other people taking photos., and which makes the content more interesting. It's more raw than what you're getting on, on Facebook. It's more raw than what you're getting on, on Instagram. It's even more raw than what, what Snapchat was, which this is the game Snapchat played on Facebook. Snapchat was more raw and candid because the photos disappeared. So people, they had less of a filter on what they posted, but still they wanted to, you know, post a certain type of thing that made themselves look good. This is even more raw than Snapchat. It's even more candid. It's content that wouldn't have made it to Snapchat makes it onto Paparazzi, which is what makes it interesting. Now you're getting new shit shared that you wouldn't have otherwise got. So that's the premise of it. What do you think of this?
Never in a million years would I have thought this was going to work. And I can't decide if I just have bad taste or if I'm old. Is that the app?
I'm opening the app. There's like a hype video.
Do you—
which is cool. More apps should do that. They should have like a trailer, like instead of a boring onboarding. This thing is playing me like, here, I'm gonna play the music. It's like, let's get it poppin'. And then there's pictures of all these like cute boys and girls. My phone is literally vibrating. It's like, that's the most excitement an app has ever showed me.
So do you, but when you were looking at this, did you think that this, so I get that it's popular now and it's easy to say, yeah, I get it.
But no, I would have never predicted this, right? Like, okay, you would have told me, I'd been like, huh, that's clever, but still probably not going to fucking work, right? Like, it seems so unlikely for anything to just like hit like this is so unlikely and it's not the expected things. So you sort of by default, you sort of, you don't imagine that this would hit. Same thing with Clubhouse. I was like, oh, that's cool. I've seen a bunch of things like that. I don't really see why this one will go viral, but it did. And so it's very hard to predict with social, even I spent like maybe like 5, 6 years of my life trying to build social stuff. I knew everybody in the space. I tried so many different things. So I would say I'm not like a novice to this stuff, but it's very, very hard to predict. And our friend Jack Smith says this best. He goes, if you look at even the guys who invested in Snapchat or WhatsApp or whatever, they go and they start like, okay, Sequoia, the best venture fund that's ever existed. Basically, they invest in WhatsApp. They invested in every single round of WhatsApp. They led every round, which was a genius move. So when it exits for $19, $20 billion, they were huge winners out of that. Cool. Guess what they also invested in? Yik Yak, a social product that died. Whisper, a social product that died, right? Like they have a graveyard of other things they tried that didn't work out. And I don't know if those are the exact ones that they invest in, but they have a bunch. And so Jack pointed out, he's like, if even the best guys who have had the home runs have a bunch of swings and misses with social, it just shows how hard it is to correctly predict social before it plays out.
I have a friend who was in the seed stage, a friend of a friend. He was in the seed stage of Robinhood and a whole bunch of other stuff and probably worth multi-billion, for sure worth multi-billions. And someone was asking him about social apps and about consumer stuff. And he goes, honestly, if the person's competent, maybe do it. But really it's just gambling and I have no idea which one's gonna work. He said, he goes, with B2B stuff, I can kind of like, I can look at some stuff and be like, okay, I understand. You can, you can, you can, the likelihood that you can make this at least a mild success is quite high. But with social and some basic consumer stuff, it's just, I'm just rolling dice and I, I have very little confidence in any of it.
So the beautiful thing about social, like who, it's like, who would try this? Right? Like, because you're right. It's so hard to predict if you're a great entrepreneur and you go into this space. You're going to a casino and you're saying, all right, my odds at the craps table are 51, I'm a 49 to 1, 49 to 51 underdog, blackjack, I'm 49 to 51. Oh, you have whatever, Chinese backgammon over here? Okay, I'll go play pai gow. I'm going to go play pai gow even though the odds are 80% chance of loss. It's like, why do you do that? Because it's A, it's fun. And B, when you get social right, you're the fucking king of the universe, right? Like, it's like, yeah, my app is the one that's used by like a billion people every day of their life. Their whole social scene is on here. They use it with their mom, their friends, their, their girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. And so it just hits different when you hit social. And that's, that's why I love even talking about things that are social that hit, because it's a rare type of game that you kind of have to be a madman to go play.
So let me bring up something that's the total opposite of this, which is you don't have to be a madman and, and the likelihood that it's going to succeed is incredibly high, but it may not be like a huge winner.
Okay.
Just with that information, do you know where I'm going with this?
I see vending machines on our thing and I think that a vending machine business is probably the most predictable, simple, understandable, guaranteed type of business you could do. Is that what you're going to?
Yes. So these two folks came to me and they pitched this idea. They're raising money for it. It's a vending machine business for— it basically is mostly female products, so tampons and stuff in bathrooms. And oddly enough, I had another guy email me a deck about a vending machine business, and I'm not going to do that one. But this first one was kind of intriguing. They've got some traction, they're making money. It's kind of intriguing. And I started doing some research and I tweeted out, who knows everything about Who's the person he talked about, Benny Machine? It got a ton of traction for some reason. I think it's a lot of people are interested in this. This guy named Quinn Miller reached out to me and I did a call with him this morning. Very fascinating. He worked and I just want to bring this up because this is the exact opposite of what we were just talking about. Right. But it's oddly as compelling and as interesting, even though it's the two totally different parts of the world. So this guy, he's 27. He worked in software sales. He quit about a year ago to start this business. He's got a vending machine business and he gave me all of his numbers and he said I could reveal it. So he's about 10 months into the thing. He's currently doing $15,000 in monthly revenue and he's doing that across 27 machines. His startup costs were $600, $500 or $400 to buy a machine and $200 to fix it and move it to the place where it had to go.
By the way, this is our weekly blue collar side hustle. This is the great blue collar side hustle.
Yeah. So on the $15,000 in revenue, 65% is profit. So he's doing around $9,700, $9,800 a month in profit so far. Total investment into the biz so far after he already bought his first machine has been $50,000. Time involvement per week, relatively high, 20 hours a week because he's actually delivering all the stuff. I asked him all about it. I was like, how does this work? Because the reason I reached out to this guy was I was like, hey, there's this like tampon startup. It kind of looks interesting. What's your tampon vending machine startup? What's your opinion? He goes, yeah, I mean, I obviously don't know anything about that, like too much. But basically my opinion is the world, he goes, America runs on Coke in Monster Energy drink. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, let me, let me explain. So I put these vending machines— I love that. I buy—
so let's slow down. So, so the guy basically buys vending machines like you and I are used to, just a snack vending machine, nothing, nothing innovative there.
Well, he does one, quote, innovative thing. He puts a— he installs a credit card machine on them for about $250. You can get a credit card machine.
So he gets a vending machine. He says, all right, people aren't carrying quarters, so I'm going to take cards. He puts them— he puts them— so he buys each machine, you said, for $500. The first one was $500.
He has 27 machines with $50K. So whatever that math is.
So what's that? $2K a machine, roughly. Yeah. Okay. So he buys a $1,000 to $2,000 machine. He puts it in places like what? Office buildings?
Apartments? Yeah. So he cold calls lower income hotels, motels, assisted living places, and low income apartments. So sorry, low income apartments, dash or comma, motels, Comma, assisted living places. Okay, great.
And so he, he goes and he basically says, hey, put this here, and he— there's a revenue split or he pays rent?
How does that work? So most of these businesses, the way that they work is they give 10% to 20% to the real estate folks, right? Uh, this guy, he goes, I actually am— because I sold software, I'm pretty good at sales, and I do what's called a value sell. And he goes, basically I say, look, your tenants are, are, if I just improve your tenant experience by just a small percent, maybe you're going to make more money because someone will want to stay or want to rent here.
He gives them nothing.
He gives them nothing. So he keeps— and so he's got a bunch of machines in like 10 different locations, and he just cold calls them. And then it's so unsophisticated. Where does he get his stuff? Costco. So he buys a can of Coke from Costco for 33 cents, and he charges a dollar for it, right? Uh, it's very simple, uh, not complicated at all.
By the way, my grandfather used to have a vending machine, so this was probably the first business I ever encountered was I think I was probably 5 years old and my parents, you know, they worked. So my dad would work in an office building and he needed me to be babysat. But then, like, you know, old people also kind of need babysitting. So my dad went for a two-for-one. He basically bought or rented out a little like kind of like a corner store inside, like a little deli inside of the office building. And, and then my, my grandfather ran it and we used to go like work the register. At the age of, you know, 7. And he was like, baby, see, baby, see, he basically, he occupied his grandparents and his kids without having to like do any, pay for any like caretakers. In fact, it made a little bit of money. And then my grandfather had this vending machine that we used to go and do this exact refill. We would go to Costco, buy the Cokes, put it in, he would collect a bag of like change. And then we would like go to the bank and like exchange the change. And I remember being like, what is this? He had one vending machine as his business.
It sounds awesome. And I asked the guy, by the way, this guy's name is Quinn Miller. I'll give him a shout out. Quinn Miller. I asked him, I go, how big can this get? He goes, look, I'm not trying to be offensive or anything, but the operators of these businesses typically are pretty hillbilly. And so they're pretty unsophisticated, which doesn't mean they're dumb. They're just not sophisticated in terms of technology or anything like that. And they want a low-key, easy life. He goes, but I met a guy in Palm Springs who had about 60 1,600 machines, and he was making anywhere from $5 to $10 million in revenue with about half in profit, right? And I was like, well, that's pretty amazing. How else can it get big? Like, what else is big? And he said that there's a company called Canteen, and I looked it up. I, I, I think it's public, uh, but they do like $15 billion in sales of this, and they're the largest vending machine company in America.
They operate them?
Yeah, and they do distribution. So the thing is, is like what this guy does, uh, Quinn, he, he finds, he finds his route. So he finds a route. So he's like, all right, if I go from destination A to B, it's a straight line, I'll do everything in between. And so I try to find locations on the way so one truck can do all of it in a, in an easy short amount of time. And he's like, I'm very specific about where I choose. And that's where you make a lot of money is you can be very efficient with your time. And so basically that's what he does. And he said this company Canteen just does that on a huge scale. And they're ultimately at the end of the day, a logistics company., and a bit of a supply chain company. But at this point, Quinn told me, he was like, I rented a small warehouse now because I'm getting so much freaking Coke. He goes, the reason I like doing that— and so back to tampons— he goes, you have to like look at what the repeat purchase rate is. He goes, if I go to like a lower income area, these folks love Coke and love Monster to the point that one guy will drink 5 Cokes a day. I'm getting $5 from him. You have to ask yourself, can you get that for, uh, tampons or other products? And he goes, in fact, a lot of the vending guys Once they move from Coke and Monster Energy Drink, they're starting to go into what's called honesty market. So basically at a WeWork, you know how they like, you swipe your credit card and you only take one sandwich for $8? Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like, that's where the money is right now.
Huh. That's interesting. So, and, um, yeah, that's, so it's almost like there's whales for the vending machine. It's not like everybody buys one, uh, every 3 days. It's like one guy drinks 9 Cokes a day, uh, or, you know, 4 Red Bulls, you know, a week. And that's where you make your money is on the like 10% of the residents who buy like 90% of the goods or something like that, probably.
Yeah, this guy was interesting, man. He's only 27. He's the— lives in San Diego, worked in tech sales. He told me that he goes like, basically, I'm a— he goes, I'm pretty— I was pretty good at selling software. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty good. And this industry that I went into, they're just kind of not that great at that many stuff. And I could outsell relatively easily. I could kind of outwork relatively easily. And so Anyway, fascinating story.
So, you know, we have the Billy of the Week. I think this needs to be the Hilly of the Week. It's the hillbilly business. That's actually great. So Quinn Miller, you are the Hilly of the Week. Congratulations. I love this business. So just to summarize, buy the thing for $1,000, cold call, you know, apartment complexes, motels, hotels, you know, low income, the better, I guess, is the way that this market works. And then you're trying to generate— he's generating off of, what'd you say, 50 machines?
27.
27 machines. Off of 27 machines, he's generating about $100,000 to $120,000 of profit a year. And so that's, you know, that's the business. And then what's the work? It sounds like it could be easily, you know, delegated, but sounds like he wants to do it and keep his margins, which is you go You buy the stuff wholesale and then you stock all the machines on some regular cadence and you collect, you know, the payments on the other side.
So that's— I was so fascinated. So like, I get when people call me a tech guy, I'm like, not really. I worked in publishing, like I'm a publisher. But I guess compared to someone who works in vending machine, I am a tech guy. And so I like these like big things, software companies that can scale. But when I heard him describing this, I'm like, God, I want to get in on this. Like, this is just so Like, you know what I mean? That's like, it's like we just got done talking about paparazzi and how this young guy named Nikita who sold an app for $100 million to Facebook and is probably 26 years old, baller, like, you'll die a billionaire if you just breathe. Okay. That's sick. But then I hear this shit about this guy who spent 50 grand and is going to make $150,000 a year in profit. And I'm like, fuck yeah, sign me up. Let's get into this. So I think it's kind of interesting. I like hearing about it.
Yeah, whatever floats your boat. You know, I, okay, let's do some quick like other ideas or other brainstorms. So I think first of all, I'll say the beauty of this is that you don't need to come up with a genius twist on it. You just do the same thing in your local market and it would work.
Okay.
So that's, that's cool. But if you were going to do a twist, right? Like I like to dabble in ideas. So let's, let's come up with some ideas. Here's a couple that I think might be interesting as twists. You mentioned the honesty market. What do you call it? Honesty market?
That's what he called it.
Yeah. So I've seen this at big companies, they do this. Like at the Adobe office, I remember they did this, which is like, there's a bunch of sandwiches in a thing, you take it out and you pay and nobody's watching you. So there's no labor cost. And they just hope that you're not going to steal shit. And that works in certain types of like high-end places. You said WeWork, things like that. Okay, I think that's cool. So maybe there's an out there. Maybe there's an opportunity there. What about subscription? So you've, if you're taking my credit card and you got this vending machine, how do you get me with saying, hey, you could buy this one right now. You could buy this one can of Coke for a dollar, but for, uh, you know, $6 a week you can get unlimited Coke, right? You can get unlimited vending machine swipes. And, uh, and you basically set up a recurring revenue business off of the residents in the, in the place. And, um, you know, it's like a breakage model. So you, you know, you did, they just can't empty you out.
And dude, I think that's the move, but you're wrong. It's not unlimited.
No, no, it's capped, right? But the machine caps you. It's like, oh hey, it's user whatever. I don't know how they would know that you're, you're you. I guess that's a little bit of a tricky one. You'd have to swipe your card every time, which feels bad.
You just need like a MetroCard, you know, like a, like a, like a MetroCard or like exactly, you need a Clipper card or whatever where you basically get a certain amount. So the question is this, if someone's gonna, if you're gonna spend So when I lived in college, I had a vending machine. Would I spend $30 a month on that vending machine? I think yes.
I think I did. Yeah.
Yeah. I think I did.
We had Snapples and I couldn't resist.
Right. So then the question is you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to give up 15% of your revenue in order to give the customer a discount if they pay up front? Yeah.
But you know, I, I think it, it works both ways. So you get two benefits. One is they prepay, so you float all the money that way and you're able to like cash flow the business better. The second thing is, not everybody's going to maximize the value. So there's like a breakage model where some people use the full amount. Great. And, you know, if 30% of people don't max out, that's just free money for you that you didn't have to spend a dime on. And easily, you know, most of— I think this is the ugly side of most subscription businesses, that people don't use the subscription, they just don't remember, they don't cancel. They're either too lazy or they forgot. And you sit here thinking you have all these happy customers. And in reality, go look at your usage numbers. How happy are they if they haven't used you in a year and a half and you're just charging their card? And so that's the truth about subscription businesses, why people love them is because the people set it and forget it. And so yeah, I think the same thing would happen here. All right. So that's another idea. Last one I'll bring up with this vending machine thing is I'm buddies with the guy who started LifeAid. He came on the podcast. They have—
yeah, I remember that—
FitAid, PartyAid, you know, RecoveryAid, whatever, SleepAid, whatever they are. They have a bunch of different drinks. I'm like addicted to FitAid. It's like my whole mini fridge in my gym here is stocked with them. And he got his break by giving— he basically went to CrossFit gyms and he said, hey, CrossFit, you don't have a mini fridge. I will give you a free mini fridge and a case of FitAid. Here you go. You know, here's a $79 mini fridge and a case of FitAid. Try it out, give it to your people, let me know what they think. And if they like it or if you like it and you guys making a little bit of income off this, just give me a call back or, you know, I'll send you a second case next month. And so this is how he grew the brand, was through the CrossFit, the CrossFit gym network, and specifically with this idea that they didn't have fridges, so they didn't have a vending machine, they didn't have a fridge. They couldn't have a vending machine because you can't be CrossFit and then sell KitKat bars. That doesn't work. And but what you could do is you could make the, the post-workout machine and you could put it in every gym. What's in the post-workout machine? It's Gatorade, Propel, it's, you know, FitAid.
It's all— did that.
All the— no, no, I'm just saying you could do this. This is idea. And then you have like, you know, I mean, the BCAAs, like the branched-chain amino acids you should take post-workout as a little supplement. You know, you could have Hydrant for your, for your hydration needs. So you could put a whole bunch of post-workout stuff that people take, protein powders, protein premixed drinks. You could put it all in a vending machine and put it in gyms. I think you could have a similar model.
Yeah, I think that could work. I would— I don't know actually what the margins are on health food versus a Coke. I imagine they're the same, to be honest. But I'm into it. Yeah, I think that those honesty market things, I bet works shockingly well.
Yeah, I remember when we were doing the sushi restaurant, we met the guys who started like, I don't know, Panera or something like that. And Panera Bread was doing this actually, I think in St. Louis, they opened up the first—
Yeah, they're from St. Louis.
The first like pay what you want restaurant. So pay what you can, I think is what they called it at the time, which is like anybody could go and you could eat and you just pick what you want. And at the end it says pay whatever you want. The average person pays $12. And what he said was that the average ticket price in that restaurant was higher than their normal ticket price. Than their normal restaurants where they have fixed prices. You would think, oh, people are going to scam you, cheat you. Anybody says that it's a bell curve. 20% of people go over, 20% of people go under, and most of the people pay the exact same, you know. But when you look at how the exact numbers break down, it's a little bit higher because people eat more and because they feel like they're getting a deal. And customers were happier because they didn't, you know, it's like kind of like a feel-good story. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Then again, I also, when he was talking, I was like, this sounds a little bit like PR. So, uh, I'm gonna like discount what you're saying by like 30% here.
I might do this for fun.
Do what?
I might do this vending thing.
The vending machine thing? I think it's, I think it's a great idea. I think you should do it as the, uh, just basically build it in public for the podcast. I think you should, you should basically give us updates on how the vending machine biz is going.
I think I will. I think I'm gonna do it. I love it. I think this is a fun weekend thing. You wanna talk about one more thing? You wanna do a ghost kitchen for gifting?
Yeah, so, um, so it was my trainer's birthday yesterday or two days ago, and I was like, ah, shit, want to get him something. What do I get him? Right? And so I was like, okay, I'm not great at buying gifts. Buying gifts is like a huge pain in the ass. I'm a procrastinator. So like, today is his birthday, so I can't like order something online. It's not going to arrive. It's going to clearly be like, I ordered this on your birthday. It's going to arrive three days later.
That's fucked up.
Yeah, that's who I am. I'm fucked up, right? Like, that's just the reality of the situation. And so I was like, okay, well, what do I do that— what can I do now that will like arrive today? And how do I be a good friend who's also a lazy bastard? And so my go-to recently has just been I just surprise order people Postmates or Uber Eats stuff. Like, I'll just like, I'll just order, you know, like, 2 Jamba Juices to somebody's house. And they're like, and I'm just texting them and be like, hey, there's something for you outside. And they're like, what? And they go and they pick it up, or the person rings the doorbell and says, hey, this is for you. And people love this shit. It happened to me. Somebody on my birthday, instead of getting me a birthday gift, they just ordered me food from a restaurant that I like. And I was like, this is fantastic. And sometimes the logistics don't work because you're not there or whatever. It's not perfect. But the food ordering apps, I think they recognize this because now, recently in all their apps, they kind of have gift a meal, like option. But what it made me think of was, oh, what's the actual business? What's the— if this is, you know what that phrase is where— have you ever seen this diagram where there's like a street or like a walkway where you're walking and it's like an L, right? Like I walk straight, then I turn left, and then there's like, if you cut across, you get there faster. And you could see in the grass, people— so many people have cut across, it's like worn out. It's called like a happy path or something like that. Like a desire path. It's basically you show what people actually want to do. It's called the desire path. And so similarly, I think the desire path here is not to randomly order food, have to ask your friend for their exact address, hope that they're there to receive it so you can't really surprise them. But instead, why don't people make— why doesn't somebody make the version of like Edible Arrangements or like one of these like gift basket products on top of Uber Eats and Postmates and all these companies that we all already use. So if you're on top of DoorDash, it already has my credit card. I'm already opening the app every day. Why doesn't somebody make the best way to just send a gift product to somebody else as a ghost kitchen on top of this? I think this is a no-brainer, successful idea.
What does Edible Arrangements do?
Oh, you never had it? Basically, it sends like a kind of like a platter or gift basket to somebody.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that in a like cool format.
And this business does like hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, it's a very, very successful business. Old school business.
No, I get that. But how do they— how do they— like, how is this any different than you just ordering food for someone?
So what Edible Arrangements— it looks like a gift. Like, it's a— it's like a gift basket. It's got like—
and you want to do that for a restaurant?
No, I think somebody should make a ghost kitchen on top of Uber Eats and DoorDash. That is specifically a way to send food gifts to other people. It looks like a gift. It's like a giant chocolate thing, right? It's like a giant fruit arrangement. It's a, it's just, you know, hearts and strawberries and chocolate-covered strawberries or whatever, right? Like it's stuff like that. And it basically, and like instead of, you know, when in DoorDash, it says customize your order, you're like, you know, I'm allergic to gluten. And instead of this, it's like, what's your gift message? We have, we print it out, we put it in there, right? Like the thing you want to be a thoughtful person is like, a cool looking thing that looks like a gift and it comes with a little message, but I want it as a last minute option. And the way to do that is as a ghost kitchen, I think.
So I was talking to Andrew this last podcast and then I talked to him afterwards. I called him, I go, hey, what we were talking about was pretty interesting. Tell me more. So he started this bakery. Basically, Andrew is being Andrew. He's always tinkering. And he was like, I want low carb, like something to satisfy me, like bread, right? And so he uses this thing called sucrose, I think, some monk fruit, some alternative sweetener, right? And he got the guy to— he hired a chef and he paid him a small amount of money, single digit, low hundreds of dollars, to come to his house for a few hours and make these recipes.
What is single digits, low hundreds of dollars? What does that mean?
Like, I don't—
like 2, 3, 4?
No, like, uh, single day, as in not like 800, or I guess That, yeah, you're right.
You paid him a few hundred bucks.
Gotcha. Yeah. A few hundred dollars to come and make a bunch of muffins, I think is what he made. Okay. And he had him use this monk fruit thing. He goes, this is sick. And he designed a website called, I forget what it was called. Something like, I forget. He made a little website on Shopify for the brand and then he put it on DoorDash or Uber Eats and he sent it to a bunch of friends and he only did local delivery in Victoria and he had the meal delivery Dude, he sold like $3,000 in month 1 worth of stuff and he's like invested $8,000 into it. So it didn't make a profit, but it kind of sick. He was able to test this idea very easily. It is. I'm like, man, of all the stuff that you do, this like agency, which makes more, way more money. This bakery thing is so much more fascinating than like just make, you know, doing a design, design work for someone. This is way neater to me. Right. And anyway, so I think you could test this so easily.
Yeah, totally. Because you could just rent out a commissary kitchen for the hour, right? You don't even have to commit to very long, right? So you could rent these things by the hour. So you can rent it for a couple of weeks, a few hundred bucks, maybe, maybe $1,000 max. You list your restaurant on your Fiverr logo. You list your ghost kitchen on DoorDash or Uber Eats. You pick one city and you start. And if this works, you basically just— you become the easiest way for people in that city to send a thoughtful little gift to others. The key is you don't have to spend the money acquiring customers, right? So like you could have always done this business, but you would be competing against, you know, 1-800-Flowers and Edible Arrangements. And I forgot what the other ones are like, David something where you send like chocolate. Like I did this for my neighbor. My neighbor lets us use their playground with my kid. And so I sent them like a big like chocolate gift basket or something like that because like, I don't know, I need to do something nice and I don't want to make anything. So like, you know, how do I spend $100 and give a thoughtful, nice gift to somebody, make them happy for 5 minutes? And so I did the same. So that's what I want to do. But I don't want to have to go Google search and figure out the brand and then like go through their website, input my credit card. No, I already open DoorDash 6 times a week. It should just be there. My credit card saved. I push the button and it goes to the person and it's done.
What's your grocery bill every month?
Is— do groceries are insane. I don't know if I'm insane or if inflation has happened, but I went to the grocery store. No joke. Last 2 times I went to the grocery store, is $450 to $500 for me, my wife, and I have a, like, you know, I have a baby who drinks breast milk. So I don't even, that doesn't even count. And then we have like a, you know, a 20-month-old.
So you go to Whole Foods.
It's Whole Foods, but like Whole Foods, you didn't, it wasn't a $500 trip for me before. It was like a $200 trip. So I think we got like a little crazy being like, yeah, let's buy these like $9 juices or something like that. I don't know what's happening, but it's crazy. What's yours?
Uh, I would have to look, but I imagine it would be between $1,000 to $1,500 a month.
$1,000. Okay. So that's like $400 a week. So about the same.
Yeah. But my thing is, even before I had anything, I would always spend a lot on it because my logic was, what's the point of living if you don't feel good? And so I'm going to buy the highest quality stuff. I know I don't care about price.
My logic was, I want this. I really want to eat this right now.
No, look, like when it comes to books, I don't care what the price is. Same. And I don't even care if I read it. If I just get one sentence from it, zero guilt. Yeah, it can change my life forever. So I don't care. Like there was one time I saw this book and it was $80. I'm like, oh my God. I'm like, nope, I don't care. I'm buying it. Um, same, uh, mostly it's the same thing with groceries. So like the healthiest, uh, freshest stuff that like, like for example, I used to buy like Kroger with, that's like the grocery store in Nashville, like Kroger generic cheese. And like, if I thought about that now, I'm like, oh, I can't even think about eating that right now.
Well, do you do the thing where you're like, you look at your parents and you're like, yo, what were you thinking? Like, yes, cheese in a can.
And like, yeah, this was like our every Thursday.
Yeah, every Thursday we used to eat like, you know, like, like Totino's, you know, pizza rolls and like Takatis or whatever those things are like.
Or like Yogurt. Yes, same exact thing.
That was the regular food we ate. That wasn't like the one-off thing.
If you ask my mom what a carb is, I don't think she could still tell you. So like, I just—
my mom will straight up be like, this is good, it has carbs. I'm like, no, Mom, see, that's the problem. You know this has carbs and you're like, yeah, pasta, that's a good hearty meal. I'm like, no, no, no, Mom, that's like— because she's still like, you know, but I can't even blame her, dude. The food pyramid. The food pyramid. How big of a lie was that? That was like a middle finger to America. The bottom of the food pyramid is like, get your grains and your carbs and cereals and pastas and breads. And then like vegetables has this small little half slice on the third layer. Like fruits and vegetables just got like, you know, shoved in last minute right next to dessert. It's crazy.
Yeah. Like if you— how many grams of sugar are in a can of Coke?
Ballpark, you know, I think it's like 30, 40 grams.
Yeah, it's great. So that's the ballpark. Yeah. So I think it's like a little bit more. It's 40. If you ask my family, like growing up, How many grams are they? Like, I have no— a million. I don't know. Like, what is it?
What is it? Yeah.
Like, I don't know. And also, like, if I told them 45, they'd be like, I don't— is that right? 45%? Like, is that good? Like, we're not— we're not at 100%. Sounds good to me. They wouldn't know. Um, so I think that there's something here about, uh, like growing up.
I, I had middle school— I used to eat the school lunch in Texas. I grew up in Houston, Texas, in middle school. And this is my first time where like, yeah, mom stopped packing my lunch and I started to buy the school lunch, 6th, 7th grade. And straight up every single day I ate a Frito Pie, which is, by the way, that's not even like a meal. Like you can't go to a restaurant and order a Frito Pie because all it is is it's a bag of Fritos emptied into a basket and then chili and cheese put on it like nachos. I ate that every day. It tastes fucking amazing, by the way. But I ate that every single day as a kid. And my parents— where was the intervention? That's what I want to know. Where was the intervention? That should not have happened.
I definitely think it's changing now. I don't think it's changed entirely at all, but I think it has changed.
Yeah, Jamie Oliver died for this, man. He tried to change the schools or whatever.
Yeah, the Naked Chef. So yeah, so when it comes to like budgeting, I— for food, I just— whatever, because like I'm putting this in my body, okay? I need it to be like the best. Stuff. So, um, but I did just drink like a Diet Dr Pepper.
Yeah, I was gonna say, pretty sure I've seen you just like just house like a whole Halloween— that's a small child's like Halloween haul. I do a podcast one time.
It is, it is a huge weakness of mine, but, uh, whatever. I, I mostly do good. Uh, we will— I'll have to do an update. So I've been— I'll, I'll say it now, I've been taking TRT now for about a year. Yeah, and both Sean and I invested in this TRT company called Peak.
It's switching its name now, but it's switching its name.
Um, and I'll— we'll like do an update on it. But basically, like, I took it not to change my body. I took it because, uh, like, I was feeling down and I got tested and they're like, oh, your T's real low. It has made me jacked, like totally jacked. Like, I, I feel like I'm still feeling down, but dude, so we're gonna have to do an update on this and I like, I told these guys, I was like, you know, like, I don't know if I want to post a shirtless pic, but I might be open to it if you want to do like a, like a— because they're appealing to like nerds, right? And I'm like, I'm that if you— but I look like a kind of a shredded nerd right now. Maybe I could be like your— you want me to post a pic like a before and after? I will. But, uh, oh my God, this TRT stuff, I feel amazing.
I took it for a little while and then I got off of it when I got, when I got Lyme, because I couldn't get like a refill or something like that. And then I got like it and then I'm back on it again now. And I, and I started using Peak. Pretty cool service. I'm not telling anyone to take this, by the way. Don't. I mean, just like this is like some doctor shit. Yeah, but it's pretty awesome.
Yeah. Don't come to our podcast for either financial or medical advice, to be honest. Yeah, but I just think to say what we do and what works for us, that doesn't mean it's going to work for anybody else. No. No promises for anybody.
I'm eating whole foods and I'm shooting up with TRT and like—
Your body's transforming.
My body is completely transformed in the last 6 months. I'm just like crazy strong. I have pretty low body fat, like 15%, which isn't that low, but pretty low. And I just feel like a professional athlete. So it's pretty awesome.
That's amazing. Congratulations. I think now we know what to do with the live show. You just need to take off your shirt. I think that's going to be your contribution. And then I'll prepare some content.
Well, I sent you a pic and Tom was like, you look like a white ape.
You look like a gorilla. You look like you were like— you looked like stunning. Like when you wear your shirt, like right now, if somebody's watching on our YouTube channel, which you should, youtube.com/hustlecon, I think is it. Yeah. If they see you right now, they're going to be like— like, I'm not meaning this as an insult, but you just look like an average person right now.
Yes.
You sent me that picture and you looked like my bodyguard. Like you look— you look like somebody I would hire to protect me, which is insane.
Yeah, it was crazy. So anyway, we'll do an update about that. My birthday is coming up in June, and I thought about maybe I'll post a shirtless pic just to like—
why aren't you, um, why don't you wear shirts that make you look more jacked? You wear stuff that like makes you look non-jacked. Are you trying to do some Clark Kent Superman shit? I don't know, it's not intentional.
I— it's not intentional. I don't think about it. So we, um, meandered a bit. We'll see if this turns out to be any good.
No, dude, that was great. The vending machine stuff alone was the price of entry. I think people will, you know, go check out Paparazzi. Vimeo, that was okay. Uh, and then the ghost kitchens for gifting, I think, is like a cool idea, but nobody's gonna go do that. But I think the vending machine thing was the star of the show today.
Or should we ask Dan? Because Abreu, you know, handing off the baton to Dan, so Well, let's start with Dan and then let's go to Abreu. Let's go for the apprentice and then the master.
All right. I liked the paparazzi. I like the Vimeo, the vending machines. I don't know. I looked at that when I was in high school, actually.
Oh, damn. The contrarian. I love it. Yeah.
And then the ghost kitchens. I don't know. You guys use DoorDash and stuff. Maybe I'm just too old. I don't use that stuff.
Wow. Yeah, I feel like that's one thing that I'm always like, yeah, everybody uses DoorDash 6 times a week. I'm like, oh wait, prob— probably not. Probably most people don't.
I like to cook.
Yeah, but what do you do when you don't want to cook?
I usually go out to eat or I'll pick something up.
I don't think—
you like to cook all the time?
Yeah, he's like, I, I like to cook. It's like, dude, but you eat 20. What do you do for the other 18 times?
I've been intermittent fasting. I also like to Yeah, I also like to cook. We have that in common, Dan.
Yeah, yeah, I, I did. I cooked too last month.
I don't think it's even— I don't think it's even an older person thing. Like, it's just expensive. You're just paying so much for the delivery.
Yeah, but like, what do you do when it's like— what do you do when you're hungry? All right, when I have an 8-figure exit, I, I guess You cook every meal?
Yeah, just about. But I also eat like chicken nuggets for lunch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. So give me, give me, give me yesterday's menu. What did you eat? Breakfast, lunch, yesterday, and snack.
Yesterday, I'll start with dinner. It was mashed potato, kielbasa, frozen veggies, toasted Hawaiian, Hawaiian bread, whatever it's called. Lunch is always the same thing. It's carrots and chicken nuggets. Every single day.
So I feed my dog. Yeah.
And then morning is just like coffee.
Okay. What's kielbasa?
It's like a Polish sausage. Yeah.
You had Polish sausage with Hawaiian bread and what?
Mashed potatoes, frozen veggies.
Dude, so you're not on the Whole Foods tip.
Dude, that's— Yeah, you're eating like my mom. My mom taught me. You're eating like my mom taught me to eat.
You're starting a company, Abreu. It's like At least go on the Whole Foods scholarship and eat. And you got to like, when you're on the Whole Foods scholarship, you got to— you fill the plate with the hot food and then you take a cart and you walk around while you're eating it and then you just— and then you just bounce.
Try that.
You can pay them back when you're done. Okay. But like, that's, that's crazy to me.
Dan, what do you eat? I feel like now, like now I feel like an asshole. Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? I'm supposed to be eating kielbasa for dinner? What?
I have a little Instant Pot. Spice pack business. So make an Instant Pot meal a few times a week. So I got some—
damn, coming in hot with the plug. What is it? What's the business?
Anispices.com. Anispices.com.
So you put spices into Instant Pots and then what, you put just like chicken in there?
Yeah. So the biggest thing I thought was the challenge with the Instant Pot was measuring out all the spices if you wanted to make something. So I had a butter chicken recipe, took 2 minutes to do everything but the spices. So we sell a pack That's compostable, has the recipe, has all the spices. You just open it up, dump it in, makes using an Instant Pot much easier.
That's not a bad idea. Okay. What's the, how's the business doing?
I kind of went on hold when COVID hit, so I'm spinning it back up.
Why would it go on hold for COVID? Like you had to go on hold?
I ended up losing all my clients. I was doing consulting for events and that kind of disappeared overnight.
I see.
I see.
Okay. Gotcha. And so you, uh, you pause the business. Okay. But are we talking, are we in the tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars?
We're in like the hundreds of dollars a month.
So, okay. All right. So everybody go to Ani Spices, order something. Let's get them into the thousands of dollars. Uh, I'll get one. What's your best one? Is butter chicken recipe?
Butter chicken. I have a little Indian 3-pack. We have a Rogan Josh, an Indian curried lentils, and a butter chicken.
If I take off my shirt, I also have a little Indian 3-pack.
Yeah. That's my nickname for Sean. What's it? I mean, that was easy.
You just— yeah, thank you for the assist.
Uh, Dan, what's the URL?
anispices.com.
anispices.com.
Yep. All right, and Dan, uh, so Abreu grades us at the end of every episode. Abreu, what'd you give this one?
I thought the vending machine thing was worth it. That made it an A-. Everything else was a— so in the A's, thanks to the vending machine.
And then, Dan, are you, are you more Simon Cowell? Are you harsh or are you Paula Abdul? You just give everybody A's. What's your, what's your grading style?
Let's do this one as a B+. I feel like there's a—
Braves literally has never given us a B, only an A. It's A or A- or A.
Dude, it only used to be B's. You guys started actually doing some work and you got some A's.
All right, fair enough. All right, good stuff. Let's let's, let's leave all this in. This is fine. People can, people can enjoy this.
So.
All right, we're out of here. See you in Austin. See you in Miami. I bought my tickets this morning.