#223 - Sam & Shaan Bet $500, Ozy Media Scam, Why Google is Dying, and More

I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna hire a Santa. I'm gonna find a foot traffic area and I'm gonna make like 10 grand in a day. No way.

There's no way you're gonna be able to pull this off. I bet you $500.

Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Should we be doing a like We, right now we just roll into the conversation. Should we be doing a thing where it's like, this is the My First Million podcast where we do XYZ? Cause like if you're a new person coming on, the podcast starts with you being like, we good? Okay. So I want to tell you a story. I bought a car and the car has a transmission. You know what a transmission is? So check this out. And then you're like, you go into the thing. So should we be educating people on what this is? Or you think that's Should we try hard and just fuck it?

No, I think we should. We did the intros at the end for a while where we recorded them and put them in front. But how do you— I don't even know how to describe this podcast. When I meet someone and they ask me what I do for a living, I say, oh, I do this thing. I also host this podcast called My First Million, and I'm always embarrassed to say the name. But then what do you explain the podcast is?

Yeah, I would say like, you know, for people who are, they're kind of like business nerds or they're idea junkies. So they're always, you know, scheming or wondering, you know, what's the business behind this? How much money does this make? How much money does this person have? Those types of questions that you're not allowed to say out loud. This is the place where we talk about those things out loud. That's kind of my, my off the top of my head description. And so we brainstorm if you want to, you know, if you want to sit here while we brainstorm business ideas and break down the economics behind businesses that you've heard of or never heard of. This is the podcast for you.

Great. Well, there's our intro.

Another way I'd put it is every other podcast you can listen to if you go into iTunes is going to be about the past or about the future. And we tell you something about the present right now. So past is all interviews about shit you've done. The future is, you know, guessing about, you know, what the world's going to look like in 20 years. And what we do is we talk about business opportunities that exist today that you should be looking either building, investing in, or just knowing about. But it's not just business.

For example, I got messages. Sometimes we talk about health-related stuff or we just talk about like things we're doing with our life. And I got messages saying people love it. For example, right now I'm staying at my friend's house in Hawaii and I posted a video on my Twitter. Did you see that video?

Looked sick.

I saw it. Okay. It looks sick. But there's something interesting about this house and what my friend does that I think is amazing. So he only has one, it's a really big living room. He's got a huge living room. He's got a very small couch. The rest, he's got pads, like pillows on the floor. And it's people, it's floor sitting. Like it's like a floor sitting scheme or like a layout. And I love it. Have you ever sat, like been to a house where people like sit on the floor?

So my sister did this unintentionally. So my sister, I think I've mentioned, I should probably talk about her businesses 'cause they're pretty cool. Yeah. But she basically does something called in-home, like in-home daycare or preschool. So she does both. And so she took over my apartment. So my parents were like, hey, my parents had a house and attached to the house was a 2-bedroom condo. And I was living in that right when I moved to San Francisco. I lived in that place for like a year. And then I got notice I was getting evicted by my parents. I was like, what? What's going on? It's like, oh yeah, your sister needs the space. She's starting a business in here. So you got to get the fuck out and she's going to take over this space. Where we had the living room, she basically ran a preschool out of that space. And, uh, and by the way, you told me the numbers.

It was a really good business.

Wait, so you have 3 of them now?

So she has, yeah, she has 3 total programs.

So this could be like a, like a 7-figure a year business.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. So it is, it is that. And so, and so she has like teachers who, you know, run the day to day. She's on walkie-talkie with them, like doing like throughout the day. And she has like Nest cameras in the place so she can be like, like, hey, you know, like, you know what, she can keep an eye on it, but she's not day to day involved anymore, which is great. At the beginning it was her and my mom was like making the food for the kids, like making tacos and shit. And like now it's all like, you know, all done, done much better.

And they're home, they're floor sitters.

So, okay. Yeah. So back to the floor sitting thing. Sorry. So because of that, whenever I would go to my sister's place, her living room, there was no furniture, there was no TV, there was no nothing like a normal living room would have. She had done like what you did with your home gym. She had just turned the whole floor into playmats. And even better than just the floor sitting, because it's just playmats. And then all the walls had kind of like kids games and decals and stuff like that. But then she had these little swings for kids, like, you know, like a rope swing, like Tarzan, just like hanging from the middle of the room. So like things that would occupy the kids. But then when I would go hang out there, I'm floor sitting, I'm just like stretching while we're hanging out, which I would do with my mother.

That's exactly what I'm doing.

So I was getting so fucking limber, just like hanging out with my sister because why wouldn't I just be stretching and rolling and just getting to know my body a little bit? And then there's a swing there. So now I'm kind of like practicing rope climbs like a fireman and shit.. And I was like, dude, this is like, I don't know what, like, it's like an ergonomic lifestyle. It's like, you know, there's this whole, my lifestyle just changed into this like mobile Tarzan, you know, one with nature and one with my body.

That's exactly what I said every time I'm here. So he's got this like hammock swing coming down from the ceiling. And so you have to like sit in a particular way where you're stretching. And then he's got like these cushions that are only like 8 inches above the ground. Yeah. And you just sit there. And it takes a minute to get used to it. It is so much better than sitting on a couch. It's so much better. It's the best. I watched this YouTube video recently and this guy had this whole like theory. It was kind of like a TED Talk. This guy's got this video and it's all about how like sitting is like crushing us. And basically his whole thing is basically that you should stand most of the time and you should stand in a very particular way where you like squeeze your butt.. And so it's like your hips are directly underneath you and he's got this whole talk and he like looks at these people who don't sit in normal 90-degree chairs and he shows like what their butt looks like and it's like the, whatever. It's like the, the whole point is he like has all these visuals. Anyway, I've been floor sitting and it is awesome. I'm 100% gonna stick with this, or at least I'm gonna try to.

Yeah, it's a total hack. I should do that. Like I do love me some couch time, but I definitely want to have a room That's just pure mats. And then when I hang out there, work there, just roll around there, it's just like a different vibe. And with kids, it's perfect because that's what they naturally want anyways. And so I'm just going to do that with my giant like playroom.

Do you want to talk about Ozzy? This is amazing.

I got a bunch of topics. I'm going to save half of them for next time, but we'll do half today.

Ozzy, this is an amazing, amazing story.

The story came out about Ozzy Media. And if you missed it, I'm going to give you the rundown and then I want Sam, I want you to react to this. Yeah, I know all about it. Okay, so here's what I know and you fill in the gaps. Okay, so I heard about this because the story breaks in the New York Times and they basically say, they talk about Aussie Media, a company that I never really heard of before.

Most people have no idea what it is.

that's like the biggest thing ever. Yeah, it'd be unheard of.

I think the public numbers— Morning Brew has said they had 3 million. I think you guys are right around that same number. So to do, you know, 10 times more than that would be like, wow, that's pretty substantial. Like, that's interesting. And, uh, oh, you have 50 million uniques, like, on your website? When I go there, looks like you have less than a million according to this.

50 million monthly uniques is also like a top top 100 or top 200 website. I mean, it's huge.

So people start looking into it and they start looking into all their claims. So they claim, they're like, we are Amazon Prime's first talk show. And then you go look into it and it's like, they used, it wasn't like Amazon Prime commissioned and paid them for a talk show. They use something called like direct upload, which just lets anybody upload their thing into the library. And then they claimed that they were the first. And then they were using Amazon's name and all their like kind of like billboards and ads saying it was Amazon's first. And Amazon sent them a cease and desist and was like, take our name off your shit. And, uh, and he's like, I stand by our claims, but you know, of course we'll, we'll take your name off this. And, um, and then they claimed that they are the fastest growing talk show on YouTube. And then the journalist was like, so how do you know that? Because, you know, we talked to Social Blade. They measure this kind of thing. They said you're pretty like average. He's like, well, you know, we're the fastest growing premium talk show that's YouTube centric, like their own category they made up. And we looked and we couldn't find a faster growing one. And it's like, oh, so you looked and you couldn't find one. And so you said you are the best one. And then they look at, if you look at their YouTube videos, they'll have like a million views, but like less than 100 comments. So, you know, a little fishy, a little fishy, you know, what's going on here. And so, And by the way, they had like pretty legit investors. So Axel Springer, Mark Lasry, who owns the Milwaukee Bucks, like Steve Jobs's wife, David Drummond, who's just like, you know, longtime Google exec. They had some pretty like legit investors, still have pretty legit investors. And the funny thing is, after Goldman Sachs walked away and all this happened, they still raised money, still raised another round. And so what's your— what did I miss? And what's your reaction?

Yeah. So the takeaway here is twofold. The first is we actually talked about this a few weeks, a week or two ago. We said that you can raise a fair amount of money and pretty much lie, and most people will not check in on you, right?

Yeah, we said, we said the following: I'm surprised more people ain't lying because it would be so easy and quite lucrative to do so when it comes to the thing. And we said most people, us included, don't do a ton of diligence, and even if you do, it's very easy to get away with the basic diligence.

And we're nobodies, right?

But so basically, I believe the founder's name is Carlos Watson, and Carlos Watson is a very charismatic guy. I think he was a host or had a TV show or something like that on both PBS and CNN, if I remember correctly. They started about a year or two before us, and I remember I recruited people from there, or, and I had one woman who worked there who worked for us, and, and I would ask them about it, uh, I asked her about them, and basically they caught my eye because I would use SimilarWeb and I would notice that they had very little traffic. And if you go to on their website now, The Hustle probably actually gets more traffic than they do, and we don't even—

I compared, you guys have about 10% more traffic according to that than them. Yeah, we don't even try to traffic.

Yeah, yeah. Funny. I mean, it's crazy how this stuff goes down. And then you see people who are— so there's one, I think Mark Lasry is on the board. And I think he was— I think they released a statement like, oh, you know, we, you know, a lapse in judgment. We stand by this kind of temporary or momentary kind of like lapse in judgment. You know, they are making the right steps to correct this. I don't even think the co-founder was like got fired. I think he, I think he's still there if I'm correct.

Dude, it's a weird-ass company. And they also claim that they're, you know where they say they're based out of is Palo Alto. And like you and I have lived here for 10, 15.

Never heard of them. Never met a single employee. Yeah. Never met anybody who reads them or shared an article from them. Also not where you would start a media company is Palo Alto. So, you know, just strange all around.

Yeah. So that's weird. Do you want, can I tell you about a, can I do one real quick? Okay, so have I ever told you about newspapers.com?

You told me about this and I remember going to it and being like, oh, I've never been to it. Like, that sounds like a very common word. And I remember going to it and you said it was something cool, but say it again for me because I don't remember.

So how would you do this? So let's say you're wanting to find this. Can you search like everywhere Rock Financial's mentioned or you had to literally go just let me check this Sunday and check the job section and see if they're there?

No. So what I did was I typed in Rock Financial. I typed in show me all the newspapers within a radius of Detroit because I knew that's where they're based out of. And then I said make it between 1995 and 1996.

And then pay for newspapers.com.

This paid service, $10 a month. And when I— and then I could see it says when you're searching, it says which newspaper it's from and which section of the newspaper and who the author is. So I can very quickly see if this is a profile, if this is like just Dan Gilbert giving a quote on the economy, or if this is a job ad. And I read the job ads. Job ads are actually amazing. So if you ever want to see what a company is launching, even today, you go to their website and you click jobs. And if you see like, oh wow, YouTube is hiring or I don't know, I'm making this up. Apple is hiring people who have experience in cars. Amazing. They're clearly like going into like, so that's like a no-brainer, but it's cool to see. And also on a lot of job boards or websites, they'll say, you know, we're Aussie Media, we reach 20 million people a month, we cover this stuff. And so you see like it'll actually tell you a lot of stats about the company.

Or you can recruit the people who work there knowing that you're not going to hire them. That's another one.

Well, that one is a little bit harder because you recruit somebody and you put them in a position and some people get really, some people are like, oh yeah, like happy to share nothing that was confidential, but just, you know, here's my point of view on what I think they care about and what they're roughly the size of this part of their business. But then some people are like, I can't believe you're asking me to divulge information about my previous employer.

Sure. Yeah. You have to be respectful. You got to go about it a certain way. So anyway, newspapers.com, I use it to look at job ads and I can see like how they describe their company back then and like what they were recruiting for. Sometimes you could see salary. And so it actually adds a lot of context around it. And then finally, I look at ads that they use to get customers.. And so you could see like how they describe themselves, how they got customers, things like that. You could see if you look at job ads, you could see how they're structuring their business. It's actually an amazing tool. And so the difference is, is that when you read biographies, they'll tell you like a third person point of view on like analyzing it. When I do this, when I do it this way, I'm like, well, here's exactly how they describe themselves. And like, yeah, it's different because it's moment in time versus hindsight, right?

Biography is always hindsight. Now that we've seen it all play out, we can connect the dots in this way. But when you just go back to the source material at that time, when it went to print, this is how it was seen in the moment, which is really useful because I've done this with tech companies. You can go read when Twitter launched on TechCrunch and it's a small blurb. It's like, oh, this goofy thing called Twitter launch is kind of buzzy at this party, but it kind of has no point. I'm keeping an eye on it, blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, pretty inconspicuous launch for something that became as influential as Twitter. You can go see this for you can go see their original landing pages and their original launch press and how they positioned themselves. You can go read original like launch announcements on Hacker News for Dropbox and other things. You can go see the 5-minute video that Drew Houston put up demoing Dropbox and the comments of people being like, dude, no one needs this. And, um, you know, here we are, you know, $20 billion.

And for the modern stuff, like a Dropbox and Twitter, there's two ways you do that. The first is when you search on Google, you— there's right underneath the text bar, you go all the way to the right and you click search tools and you could change the date. So you change the date and so you make it. So let's say Twitter launched in 2009. You type in Twitter and you take out the E because that's how you remember they spelled it. And you do like year 2005 to 2010. I forget when they first launched and you actually see it or you go to webarchive.com and or WaybackMachine.com. I forget, just Google one of those and then you can actually see the early landing pages. So anyway, that's a cool hack that I wanted to show you about.

It's pretty amazing, by the way, this print ad. I just want to read. I just put it in my swipe file. But like this ad for them, they go, it says, everybody's talking Mortgage First. And then there's a quote from a customer. We found out that the bank's preapproval is just a piece of paper. With Mortgage First, we got a firm commitment and locked in a low rate. There's no easier way to shop for a home. That's like the print ad headline. And it's just cool to see the copywriting of these, like these types of products. You know, it's not that it's not the sexiest type of product to sell, as you know, a mortgage.

And that's exactly my point. So here's the point. When you when you're starting something, you say to yourself, I want to be like Quicken Loans, or I want to be like, let's say you have a clothing company, I want to be like Louis Vuitton, I want to be like Gucci, and you have to— I want to be like Steve Jobs and Apple. And you have to remember that it's always on 9 out of 10 times, it's not glamorous early on. And so you can go and look at early Apple products and you're like, oh wow, they're— they were shit just like I am. Like, they were still trying to figure out, they weren't that great. And what they said Then, like, I can't connect. Like, it's hard to imagine that this thing became this end thing, right? That this early ad or this early profile, like, I never would have guessed that.

Exactly. That's exactly my point. And so I think this is incredibly helpful tool, both intellectually because you can get ideas, but also emotionally. And you could see that like, oh wow, they weren't always like kick-ass. They sucked like me, or, you know, they were only okay, or I never would have predicted that they ended where they start based off where they started.

Right. Okay, I got, I got one for you. Can we switch?

Yeah. Which one are you going to do? You got a lot of really good ones.

I'm gonna give you my blue collar side hustle. Okay, great. So this is the blue collar side hustle segment for this week, which is basically a way you can make money, not a ton, but like thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, maybe $100,000 with just a little bit of sweat and creativity. That's the blue collar side hustle. Okay, so what is it? So it's, we're about to start October and this last quarter of the year is holiday season. It's the biggest shopping season of the year. People are ready to spend. And coming into the holidays, there's one little side hustle that I always thought was interesting. And I started looking into it and it's this business of mall Santas. So have you ever like, have you ever done this? You don't have like a little kid. So you may not have ever done this, but like last 2 years since my daughter was born, you know, come Christmas season, Sonya always wants to like go to see the Santa. And have us take a family photo with the Santa for like the memories with our like baby sits in Santa's lap, take a photo.

Dude, what, which is when you think about it, fucking weird. That is, it's so weird. Like why does like this young couple who like, if you're an immigrant or you're like in your case you're Indian, like just believe that you got to get this picture with this fat old white dude who by the way barely looks like Santa, right?

So the one I'm going to and also kid cries 100% of the time, right? Because you put them in a stranger's, a stranger who looks like a monster's lap.

Surrounded by dwarves.

So like a model agency for fat white guys.

Exactly. So then they send you, they dispatch you, you just go sit there on a chair for like 6 hours straight and kid gets in your lap, you say, oh ho ho, what do you want for Christmas? Take a picture, see you later. And you just do that. It takes zero skill.

What do they use them for the rest of the year? It's like a diabetes commercial? Like what are you going to do with these guys?

So let me tell you. So, okay, so that's the first part. So then, so they have about 6,000 Santas that they hire just themselves. They showed that they get into the malls and get prime real estate because they showed the malls that having a Santa there will drive about a million in incremental revenue because you get increased foot traffic into the mall because families like us come to the mall to get the photo done with the Santa. And you're paying like $50 per photo and you're doing a photo, you know, every, I don't know, minute. And so like you can just add up the cost per hour that are there. So the revenue per hour that Iconiq or the person hosting this is doing. So I thought this was kind of cool. Then I was like, where do these people come from? And basically there's been a spinoff cottage industry of Santa training and Santa out costume, like, so there's like Santa costume businesses, little e-commerce pop-ups, like, you know, Halloween pop-ups, or it's just selling certain part of the year and it's the boots and the glasses and the beards and the hats and the robes and all that good stuff. So you'll end up spending hundreds of dollars just to have one of these outfits. I own one of these outfits because we wanted our at-home photos to also have me in the Santa outfit. So, you know, brown Santa sitting next to the tree. I have a bunch of photos like that from last year.

Dude, your wife is amazing. This is all her idea.

She's like an Instagram mom, basically, without the followers. So all of the work of being an Instagram mom without any of the influencer money that we should be getting out of it. So she does it. She really cares about photos. And so like, She wants her memories and she wants cute photos. So I have to do all this bullshit. So, okay. So then what happens? So there's these schools that will charge you up to $1,000 for Santa training. And what does that mean? It's like tells you what to say. It tells you how to groom your beard and your hair to look like Nick and then helps you get a job as a, as a Santa somewhere. So that's like a whole little cottage industry. Now, what do I think you could do with this? So I think this can be done in a whole bunch of different ways. So I think you could kind of independently do this in your neighborhood. So we've talked about like, how do you do door-to-door in neighborhoods? So I think you could go door-to-door in any neighborhood and say, hey, tomorrow Santa's going to be here. If you want a Christmas photo, just come to the front of the neighborhood by that tree.

You're like, I'm setting up a throne. This is like a pedophile's dream. Like Santa meets Ice Cream Man. This is weird.

The parents— it's not just the kid that goes. The parents go with you to the thing. It's incredibly safe, safer than a lemonade stand, my friend. So this is the lemonade stand we do in the winter, which is you do a pop-up Santa photo, photo thing. And if you were going door to door, you could go door to door dressed as the elves saying that Santa's coming. All right, so that's one way of doing this. The other is you could partner with really any place that has foot traffic. So whether it's a mall or it's kind of like an outdoor eating area, it's a farmer's market, it's, You know, like you just need to find foot traffic. And if you plop yourself down, my estimate is that you're going to be able to make $50 per minute doing this thing. That might be a little high. Let's just say $30 per minute because people don't always opt for the big photo pack.

So $30 a minute at an hourly rate, bro.

Who, uh, who's Iconic?

Iconic is the company that does like kind of like photo experiences and stuff like that.

Are they big?

I think they're big because this isn't their main business. Um, so I think this is like, you know, part of their business.

If someone— okay, so I agree with you that someone could pull this off. I would be—

I'm just saying, you want to make $20 grand for the holiday season, that's nice. A lot of people want $20 grand.

I would be amazed if someone is willing— you gotta have so much encouraged in order to pull something like that off. That scares me. This scares me.

Why? What scares you about this?

So it's kind of like whenever I think of business ideas, I'm like, anything that involves eating something, I'm like, ugh, that's all— that's all you got. Like, it's like a big burden, right? It's like a big burden, uh, if you're like— if your product is going to be eaten.

Oh, you mean selling something other people are going to eat? Yeah.

I'm like, well, you can't bullshit that, right? You gotta like— you gotta nail that right away. And then like a tier down, I'm like, well, anything involving children, I'm like, oh my God, like, you got to nail that too. You can't have anything weird going on.

There's no risk here. It's literally a Santa with the parents standing right there next to you and you sit on their knee for 1 second to take a photo. It's so low risk. It's not like a daycare or something like that.

Daycare is up there too. I mean, this is— I would be very curious if anyone's going to pull this off. This isn't like you're just going to the street and like breakdancing. Like you're going into the and like having a kid sit on your knee.

I just think that, uh, dude, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this for the, uh, for my— for, you know, we were talking about for our YouTube channel doing some, uh, some little business stunts. I'm gonna do this as one of them this holiday season. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna hire a Santa. I'm gonna find a foot traffic area and I'm gonna make like $10,000 in a day. No way.

There's no way you're gonna be able to pull this off. I bet you $500. There, $500.

Okay, what part are you doubting? Okay, maybe the $10,000 a day is the ambitious part. No, maybe it's fine.

Okay, I'll be very curious to see if you could pull this off. This would be amazing.

What do you think is going to happen? Where do you think all the risk is? There's no risk.

I don't think there's that much risk. I just think there's a huge amount of fear that I have about doing this. Anything involving—

The risk is Sean gets lazy and decides not to do it. That's the only risk. That's the only thing preventing me from successfully doing this.

Well, let's see.

Dude, if I was you, if I was white, I would be saving myself the $1,000 I'm gonna have to pay some Santa here to do this because nobody, nobody wants me to be the Santa. So, you know, I'm already working from a distance.

Dude, are there ever Black Santas? That is kind of interesting. We got it. We got it. Like, are there ever? I've never seen a non-white Santa at a mall.

I'm sure, I'm sure there is. But yeah, maybe that's the underserved market that I need to go for. I think people want the classics. I think with holidays, people throw all the quality out the window and they want the classics.

Wait, do you, do you celebrate? What religion are you? Are you anything?

I'm not religious, but I do celebrate fun days like Christmas.

Yeah, I know you're not religious in terms of a god, but a culture. I'm Catholic. I was raised Catholic. But do you do anything?

No, I celebrate all the fun holidays. Día de los Muertos sounds great. I'm Hispanic for the day. Well, let's do that. Any culture has a fun holiday. I'll play. Why not? I'm looking for more days to celebrate.

Yeah, we got to— yeah, once I started like meeting my Jewish friends, I started celebrating Shabbat so we could pick some more holidays.

That's great, dude. I love Shabbat. Give me some more Shabbat.

Yeah, it's really good. Do you want to do this royalty-free music one? I think this is amazing.

Yeah. Okay, so here's the idea. So I saw this on Product Hunt. Kind of forgot the name, but there was basically a product that launched yesterday or today, and it's AI-generated royalty-free music. Okay, so for anybody who's ever had to make a commercial or create a video, or you're an agency or a freelancer, music makes your video 10 times better, but it sucks to have all the music you know is copyright protected. So you'll put it up on YouTube, it'll get muted or taken down or DMCA notice. And if you want to use it to sell products or promote your company, you really can't do it. It's illegal if you use copyright music because you don't have the permissions. And so there's this whole genre of royalty-free music out there. And there's all these big websites like Pond5 that exist that will give you royalty-free, you know, either stock footage, stock photos, or stock music. And this whole like stock industry is pretty big. And so what I thought was cool here is take a business like Pond5. So I don't know if you've ever used Pond5. Do you know Pond5? No, no, no. I've used it so many times in my life. It's great. It's like the best place to go if you want like stock music for a thing.

Is it free? And so how does it work?

And they probably sold— who'd they raise $61 million from? They probably like, it was probably, they just sold a bunch of the shares.

Yeah, it was probably to get some liquidity because I think they started in 2005 or 2008 or something like that. So it was like many years into the business that they did a round. NerdWallet, same thing, right? They started, they ended up raising $100 million, never touched the $100 million. Like their bank account's never been less than $100 million since then. It's like, these are companies that are lean, mean, and just super profitable.

We should talk about NerdWallet. Do you have intel on NerdWallet?

Uh, I think you probably have more.

You're buddies with the guy, so I don't have much, but we should have him on.

I, I was talking to, uh, his, his partner, and he was saying, uh, he was saying, oh yeah, you should have him on. And I thought that was a good idea.

Well, he, uh, I heard they were considering going public or something like that, and so he couldn't talk too much. But if— I don't know if that's the case anymore or not, but we, uh, you know, when you're about to go public, you can't say too much. And so it's hard to get— they're not good interviews.

Well, I can tell one anecdote I heard, which is just on how they kind of got started, how they made it work. So early on with NerdWallet, what NerdWallet does is it's a blog for like kind of like personal finance. So it just kind of gives you information you need to know about managing your own finances. And their moneymaker is that they rank really high for credit card suggestions. So if you say, what credit card should I get? NerdWallet's like at the top of the list. And then they'll break down in a pretty objective way. Here's, you know, the best credit cards depending on your goals, depending on who you are. Pick this one.

Right, exactly. And I think when we say 80% of the revenue, I don't know the revenue. If I was guessing, I would guess that the revenue is $100 million or more, plus or minus 50%. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, definitely not minus 50%.

Okay. So maybe plus 50%. So, so that's pretty impressive, right? Cause when, when somebody clicks that link to go buy it, they, they get an affiliate, uh, kickback. And so they'll get, I don't know what it is, like $2,000. It's like very lucrative to refer a credit card. $2,500, something like that for a credit card referral. So they make a lot per customer that hits that page. So early on, all the— because that incentive is so big, every website in the early web days was just like, who's going to give me the highest kickback? Fantastic. You are my recommended card. And so it was kind of like, it wasn't objective, right? They were just, they were in the pocket of the credit card companies and they were just printing, you know, shitty content to try to get you to click that link to go through this.

So credit cards, which is how Red Ventures started. Red Ventures is a company that makes north of $1 billion a year. They basically started doing that with both credit cards and Dish TV.

Right, right. Yeah. Satellite TV. And so, so with these like high, high margin, high subscription products, you know, they'll pay a lot for affiliate. So what NerdWallet was doing was they were just two dudes sitting in their room. And they would just write blogs, like high quality blogs. They're like, we're going to write higher quality stuff because these other ones are just kind of content farms trying to generate clicks. And year after year, they were just like writing these things and it really wasn't going very far. And it was like, not that impressive. Now you tell me if I'm wrong on any of this. Uh, it wasn't really, it wasn't taking off.

It took, it took, uh, 2, basically in the first 2 years, they, there was, I don't think there was a month where they got more than 1,000 people visiting their website. And if you Google NerdWallet HustleCon, you'll see a talk where he shows their traffic. Like it was like, you know, it was a shitty, it was horrible.

Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty monster company. Um, what, but what about Pond5?

I'd imagine though, the key to this business is not the AI generated music part. I would imagine the difficult part here is getting customers because the stock photos and stock video and stock music in terms of search traffic, it's impossibly challenging. Like, it's like, I bet you it's almost as hard as credit cards, like best credit card. So that would be the hard part is how to get customers. You know, a business is basically like 3 things. It's like convincing people to work, or I guess it's 4 things, convincing people to work there, convincing someone to give you money or figuring out how to get capital to do it, making the product, and then getting the sale. This one falls into that 4th bucket where that's the hard part I would imagine is getting people to go to your website consistently for at least cheap enough.

I would simplify it. I think, I think business is get customers, uh, charge them enough where you get to keep some, some profit, and keep customers, right? You got to do those three things. And get customers is usually the hardest one, um, and it's the hardest one in this case. So, so that's why I said the founders that have the right marketing mojo— that was the key part of what I said— because you have to have a way that you're gonna like get traffic for this. And over time, I think they will outcompete their old school alternatives because they're outdated now. So here's my other hack for this.

And because that 50% that goes to creators, you could maybe spend on acquiring customers.

Exactly. And you could give away a lot of the content for free initially, right? Because of that. So here's my hack for this. This is also a hustle. This is maybe my big co side hustle. This is, you're a PM at Google or you're a product manager at DuckDuckGo and you're a search engine. Well, the search engines have one way that they cheat, which is when you search for something, they can just give you their result as the top result always, right? That's like Google with their one box thing. If you just say, hey, what's the best holiday? They surface the best results in a box. So you don't even need to click and go to a website. Or if you go to Google Images and you search for icon of this or stock photo or royalty-free, whatever, they could just serve you the Google results for this. And they have all the AI talent in the world to do this., and this could become a product line that generates, you know, 9 figures a year for these companies. So if you want to, you know, if you're inside one of these big companies, that's another pitch you can make to your boss that says, hey boss, how does this sound? We use our AI talent on something that we're already getting millions of searches for a year and it will generate, you know, $100 million plus in revenue within 3 years. Can I work on that project? And then the answer will be, uh, yes. And why haven't I promoted you already?

Dude, I went— so I've got two stories. I went to a conference and I met this woman who was— she was part of the crew that managed this. So basically Google makes 95% of their revenue from one thing, but they're constantly trying to launch all this other stuff. So they've probably done stuff that you don't even know exists, um, but— and they'll like buy stuff and try to run it and make it bigger. Like, and one example is Zagat. You remember Zagat?

Yeah, the restaurant reviews.

Yeah, it's insane. Actually, I did this when we got acquired by Twitch. I had in one of the meetings I had with Emmett, I was, uh, who's the CEO, I was talking about like, oh yeah, if we like, this could actually make this much. And, uh, I noticed he didn't like react in any way. Like when I say something that I think you're going to get excited about and you don't get excited, I'm like, Hey, I thought you would, I thought that would like register for you. It looks like it didn't tell me why that didn't. Um, and he was just like, he was basically like, look, uh, we make this much revenue over here. So to move the needle on revenue, you have to be like, the size of the prize has to be X. And like trying to make revenue brings in all this like legal complexity, business ops complexity, and like potentially stands in the way of user growth.. And so like we either want something that hits this threshold on revenue or make it free and just optimize for user growth. And I was like, oh, okay. So like not interested in like, you know, this kind of like 8 figures plus, you know, uh, of, of revenue a year. It's like, no. Um, and I was like, good to know. And I, I didn't take it as, I was like, thank you for teaching me that because yeah, that makes sense. My startup brain was wired where that's a big number, but now that I'm at a big company, I need to like rewire it as A small number.

Dude, when we sold to HubSpot, we went, we sold in, I forget, like mid to late January. And so we went into the year 2021 with many, many millions of dollars of advertising revenue booked and contracts signed and everything. And this year we, you know, we would have made many 8 figures in revenue. And when they sold, when we sold, they go, look, we make this much money. I think what's HubSpot make a year? Like $1.2 billion a year in revenue and it's growing quick. They're like, your little $20 million, it doesn't really matter to us. We'd rather you not focus on that. So we gave all the money back. Like we had to call them and we had to be like, hey, this company, I know that you booked like $500,000 in advertising. Sorry, we can't do it anymore. And we gave it back and I was heartbroken. I was like, oh, you're killing me. And they just didn't. And they're right. I mean, it's smart, but it was crazy to think about that.

Dude, okay, I want you to just— don't type, hands up, hands in the air. Guess Google's revenue last quarter.

I would imagine that they do, I don't know, $30, $40 billion a year.

Okay, $34 billion a year. So let's divide by 4 and let's just say round number, $10 billion a quarter. Good guess. That's actually what I would have guessed. They did $61 billion last quarter.

So 4 times that is what? 24, 240?

We don't do public math. Yes, dude.

That's how much? Unless I'm looking at something that's wrong, but, uh, I'm looking on Statista right now. It's, it came up in my, in the first Google search. I was like, no, that can't be right. That's annual, not quarterly. And then I looked at another place and says it's Second quarter revenue of 2021 was $61 billion. Okay. Now, how long have you felt like Google's a juggernaut, like an absolute juggernaut that's already like peaked?

It's already like at the peak of its powers since the beginning of the internet. Yeah.

How many years ago did you feel that way? Like, let's just say like, at what point in time, if I was like, hey, Google's revenue is already like, you know, just absolutely monstrous, not too much upside left, like 5 years ago, would you have said that?

Uh, yeah. So like in 2015, which was 6 years ago now, if you told me just to like invest all my money into Google, I'd be like, why would you, why would you, why would you ever want something that's already so big? It's not going to grow that much.

Yeah. So since that date, so that same quarter in 2015, uh, this quarter was 3.5 times revenue, times more revenue. So it went from $17 billion to $61 billion. In that 5-year span.

When I think of that, so there's like, I used to be all about Facebook. I actually think that if you told me, this could be like crazy wrong, in 10 years if Facebook and Google are not like, I think they'll exist, but if they're not like the big shots, I actually, I'll be surprised if they're still the big shots. Would you agree?

So that could mean many things. Is it like there's the big shot, like Microsoft is still a big shot, but, and it was always a big shot, but like Facebook and Google kind of like took all their shine for like a decade plus. Um, you know, as Microsoft was either flat or kind of declining, but it was still big, but it didn't have the talent. It wasn't growing as fast. Stock's not appreciating as fast. So is it that where it kind of stagnates or you're like, it's actually going to go down?

I think it's going to go down. And here's why. Have you ever met anyone that worked at Google or Facebook? Yes. Um, like they currently work there? Yes. I think that Google— so Google is interesting. Point one is that it kind of succeeds in spite of itself. They basically invented this one thing that hasn't changed that significantly, and it's always been amazing. Okay, so they kind of have that going, which is good. But the second thing that they have is that people, I don't think, particularly like working there. Like, it's not cool. I think To say you work at Google is like 5 years ago saying you worked at Goldman. It's not really that particularly interesting. And I also think that the people who work there, unlike Goldman, whereas Goldman will explicitly say, we're going to work your fucking— we're going to work you down to the bone, you're going to grind, and most of you aren't going to work here in 5 years. Google's the opposite. They say, we care about you. We do this, we do that.

Right. And can I fold your laundry? Would you like a foot massage while you program this code right now?

And because they do that, they create entitled babies who protest and get angry, uh, when anything bad happens. For example, I think last year there was this big event, and I don't actually know what happened. I don't know the reason. It could have been justified, who knows. But they had a walkout, so a lot of the employees just like walked out for the day. And, uh, when I saw that, I was like, oh, this is like the beginning of the end. Because if you think about Google, do they do things that maybe you could describe as evil or you don't agree with? Definitely yes. But as an employee, are they overwhelmingly like a soft place to work that you get paid significant amounts of money, barely have to show up, and they pretty much are like, oh yes, honey, like, do you need anything? Of course they are. And if people are willing to protest that and walk out, then they're soft and they're going— they're going to die soon. That's why I think that.

They're going to die soon. Damn. Rants gone wrong. There's like a—

there's like a phrase. What's it? It's, uh, uh, hard time, hard times. No, difficult times make strong men. Strong men make easy times. Easy times make soft men. And that's like what's going on right now at Google. So that's why I wouldn't be surprised if they don't exist.

I had a friend who worked at Facebook and they would send me, there's an internal Facebook group for employees and it's basically just a bitch session where they just vent and bitch about everything that's happening inside the company. And he would send me screenshots of what the topic would be, and it'd be like the most petty, trivial, like, "Hey, I noticed that the orange juice has moved in the cafeteria. I like to eat salads, and when it was by the salad bar, it just really complemented my healthy lifestyle. And now that it's over by the meat, I feel like I've been vegan for 2 years, and now that it's by the meat, it's like a microaggression against my veganism." It's like, Dude, these people were complaining about the dumbest stuff and they would have hundreds and hundreds of comments, which means just hours wasted fighting in the Facebook comments amongst Facebook employees. And it was everything from the parking garage layout to the milk choices to the wording in the email that was sent out.

Dude, listen to this.

The softest of the soft.

So for the longest time, and I think he still does it, but when my wife worked there, he was definitely doing it. Zuck. And Sheryl Sandberg, but I think for sure Zuck, or definitely for sure Zuck, it was either every Friday or one Friday a month. I forget. Zuck would do an all-hands and you could show up in person and you could ask him a question. And it was mostly empty. Like, you know, Facebook at the time had 15,000 employees and like 100 people would be there. And to me, that's crazy, right? That's like, imagine like going back years and years and like you get to ask Andrew Carnegie or John Rockefeller like any question or Henry Ford like any question. Like that's, It's like pretty amazing. I'd be there every Friday and I used to tell my wife, I'm like, man, if you keep asking interesting questions, he's going to get to know you. And he's gonna be like, you know, Sarah, that's a great idea. Come and talk to me. I was like, you got to just be there every time. And one time I heard this story about this person. He raised his hand and they're like, yeah, what's your question? He goes, look, we have a huge problem at Facebook. We don't have tampons in the men's restroom and it's like discriminatory. And Zuck was like, he said like, Is this really what you want to spend your time discussing, or can we discuss this after? And they're like, look, we have to talk about it. And he's like, all right, head of HR, please come up here and like address this. And I swear I heard the story that someone asked that during their time with Zuck. Is that crazy?

I feel like we should end on this.

Just like, imagine, it's like, is that really what—

5 minutes of silence for like where everything's at in the world.

Just like, is that really what you want to spend your time having a conversation about?

I completely agree. Do you agree with me? Do you think that they're going to go down?

No, I think they're kind of juggernauts, but I do think like every, they become less and less relevant over time. I think they've, I think Facebook particularly has done an amazing job fighting off irrelevancy. Tooth and nail. I think Zuck knows and therefore, like, he goes to war for it, but they just have all the, there's the natural, like, Father Time is undefeated or whatever, like, basically over time there's a natural decline and then there's a talent drop-off for people that are going to go work there versus go work at new exciting high upside things. And then there's the, like, anti-big tech company backlash where now if there's a, if there's a new social network that takes off like Instagram did, or like WhatsApp was doing, Facebook can't buy it anymore. So the next one that takes off, Facebook can't buy. And that will, because of antitrust. And so they're just going to lose their stranglehold because that was their previous way of like extending their lifespan was to acquire the next best social thing and bring it into, bring it in-house. So that's gone for all the tech companies. They can't do that anymore.

Typically hate discussing big company shit like Google and Facebook. I find it to be incredibly boring, and I'm like, who the fuck cares? Like, this doesn't actually impact me at all. And I think that takes place, or that exists for a lot of our listeners. I'll be very curious to hear if they even remotely cared about this discussion. So let's see what, let's see what they have to say.

Yeah, tweet at us. All right, I'm out of here. We're done. Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.