#36 - Data Privacy Tools, Food Franchises & Silicon Valley Mistruths

Let's talk about food. I just handed you something. You're not gonna be able to see this on the podcast, but it's a tiny little pouch called SuperFat. So I discovered this at HustleCon, actually. So you probably already know about it.

Yeah. So the story behind it started by David Hauser.

David, you don't know him, but I don't know him, but I have heard him talk once because he started Grasshopper.

Yeah, kind of. It's basically like a little snack or breakfast. I use it basically as a breakfast replacement. I like it a lot, actually. But the only downside, and you're gonna experience this now, which is that it's like kind of dry, and like it, it turns your mouth a little bit like, because it's so dense. So it's like, it's not like the easiest thing to sort of palate, but so I buy them as well. Taste is good. And the health is good. I like it.

So I told David this, I go, David, I hate these tops. Yeah, I don't like the tops.

It definitely does look like baby food for adults, which in some ways is okay, but it's really hard to get the food out sometimes.

It's very— it feels— it makes me feel, uh, like not like a man to eat this, right? The way it's set up, like, I feel like I don't want to eat this in public.

Yeah, I feel like an inadequate toddler because I can't, can't do it, but it's cool and I buy it as well. I bought the variety pack to see, like, to try all the flavors, which is smart. I like— that's smart decision on their part to have a variety pack first, and then now I know which flavor I like, so I'm gonna go in Uh, but I like food. What, what else you got on food?

Um, you wanna talk about food? Okay. So I think I come prepared with ideas that are really big and hard to pull off, and this is one of 'em. And you have a little more practical zero to one, but let's talk about this one. Okay. So I'm into fast food restaurants. I don't know if I told you, I have been reading a lot about 'em. Do you know White Castle? I don't think you grew up with White Castle, did you?

I didn't grow up with it, but yeah, I'm familiar.

And why are you looking at the fast food chains? You just like to know the economics because they're all kind of available or what?

Because I think that nostalgia in America is really cool. And like things that you and I thought were cool when we were 8, 9, 10 years old. Now that we have a little bit of money, we'll spend a lot of money on that stuff. Gotcha. And so a lot of these nostalgic things, some of them have done a really good job of transitioning. So Levi's has done a really good job. Some of the car companies have done a pretty good job. A bunch of other things have done great. Oh, Taco. Okay. So I was reading about Taco Bell, bought by private equity, did an awesome job of transitioning. They like lean into this stoner late night thing, right?

Wendy's are all about social.

I think— is Wendy's owned? I think Wendy's is owned by the same company. Maybe they own a bunch and they do the same thing where they say like funny, not PC things on Twitter and it works, right? Taco Bell is in the news with the $100,000 salary thing. So we wrote about that and that's why I got interested in it.

So just good quality control.

So good quality control because just a few like nuances. One is you have to be the operator. You can't do this as an investment. Second is like I think they filter pretty aggressively. So it's like, you know, harder to get into than Harvard type of thing. And then they reward, you know, they sort of really train those, those franchises differently. So they've gotten pretty phenomenal results. And I wonder why more people don't just copy Chick-fil-A because Popeyes got famous recently for trying to release their own chicken sandwich, but it can't be that hard to just copy their chicken sandwich formula. Right? Like I don't understand.

No, I don't think it can be hard. It's definitely a branding thing though. So if you look at, I was reading about, I sound like an old man, Gen Z. I went to a conference and they were talking— this makes me sound very old, even though I'm not, but Gen Z, the number one place that they spend their money on is food. And the number one place is Chick-fil-A. And it's kind of interesting because Gen Z is arguably the most open-minded generation. Like they, uh, they don't— like when we were kids, like it's easy to like call someone gay or something. Like, I don't think Gen Z does that at all. They're, they're not into that at all, which is Chick-fil-A has got a lot of crap because they're, uh, yeah.

So my thought is you do, A, if you want to compete with Chick-fil-A, you copy their chicken formula. I don't know why everyone's not doing that. Two, you stay open on Sundays and you don't do the whole religious angle because that might— you can just do it with a different value set. Three, you can go where they're not. There's not a lot of Chick-fil-A's outside of like, let's say, South and, you know, some, some different—

the closest one to where we live right now in San Francisco, I think, is 30 or 40 minutes away. Yeah, about 30 miles away.

Exactly. I can't get it delivered. I gotta drive across a bridge to go get it if I'm in San Francisco. But also just internationally, like, these food chains do really well when they go to Asia. They have to change the menu a little bit, but I'm surprised people aren't doing Chick-fil-A in other places without the religious sort of like weird social stances and staying open on Sundays.

Like, that just seems— I completely agree. And that's why I'm interested in White Castle, because why— I was, I was going through the list of top largest fast food chains. I was like, what do I think is underperforming but has an overperforming brand? Right. White Castle is one of them. Maybe Whataburger. You know, Whataburger? Yep. I think they actually just got bought by P.E., so whoever's buying them might likely be doing the same thing. White Castle is definitely one of them. Yeah. Where it's like you got to reinvent. Even if you don't like their food, it's so— it's really polarizing, which is always great for a moneymaking point of view. And anyway, I was thinking a ton about White Castle. For every reason you said, because Chick-fil-A is just booming right now. Yes. Booming. Even though they've done many things that you would think like, oh, I'm not going to go there. But then you're like, this tastes so good.

Yeah.

So that's what I'm thinking. If I— I'm not interested enough to ever actually do this. Maybe one day if I wanted to, if I was into it, I would 100% put them as a target of they have to sell to private equity, let it— a young-ish CEO who's in their 40s run it and do what Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A did.

Right. If you're starting a fast food chain, which you're probably not, but if you are, I want to know about it because, uh, A, that was the first business I ever tried to start was a sushi-related sort of fast casual chain. Uh, so I know a little bit about it, but B, uh, I just think that there's more to do there. I think there's a lot more to do there. Also now with all the delivery apps, if you started today, you would start with that in mind as like one of the main ways you're going to get your food to your customers rather than drive-through.

To wrap this up, You know, uh, Caviar. Do you use Caviar? Yeah, we use Caviar. They sold to someone— Square. Square. Um, so the— I believe it's the founders who are doing this. There's a bunch of new restaurants in this neighborhood, and I start seeing them all over San Francisco. One's called Rooster and Rice. Have you seen that?

I've seen it, but I don't know anything about it.

One's called Bamboo Asia, or Asia Bamboo. Those are owned by those guys, I believe.

And what are they doing?

So just restaurants? Yes. What they're doing is they've looked at what sold best on Caviar, and now their restaurants are— Rooster and Rice, they only sell— or sorry, chicken and whatever it's called, they only sell chicken and rice and broccoli. That's all they have. And when they serve it to you, it's in a paper takeout box. So they're clearly setting this up to be delivery profitable for delivery, right? Same with the Bamboo Asia one. So piggyback off what you were saying.

Yeah, I like that. Uh, you also had the ramen thing. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so I am an angel investor and also friends with a guy named Kevin He started this thing. It's going to be live in 6 months. It's called ImmiEats.com. He sent me the mockups. Very bullish on that. When I invested, he just said keto ramen. I was like, yeah, in. That may or may not be a good idea, right? I also did it because he's a friend and I trust him. I just saw the mockups. They're doing this like Momofuku brand that I like. It's like, it's like a cool hip brand. They're not using like the millennial pink. Which is, you know, what everyone does. I'm very bullish on that. I have no idea how they're gonna, how do you make a keto ramen? I don't know.

How much do you think one of these, what's it called? A flavor?

What? Flavor House or Flavor Lab?

What? Where do you, where are those? Where's it? Those aren't like Chinese companies.

No, no, no. This is like in LA. This is like, you know, nearby here. And so I had a guy on the podcast who started, he started FitAid, the energy drink.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

And you know, $100 million beverage company. And he was same thing. He was like, yeah, I went to a flavor blah, blah, blah, Flair House. And I told him like, look, I want to have these vitamins in it because I know that these give you energy boosts, but I don't want to have it be high caffeine, and I don't want to have this like sort of acidic taste that Red Bull and others have. I don't want it to taste like metal. And they were like, ah, it's not really possible what you're asking for. How do we make it healthy and really palatable like that? Those don't go together usually. And then he's like, okay, I guess I'll go somewhere else then that can do it. And then finally he got to one where they were like, Yeah, we could do this. And so he— that's— they created his beverage formula.

That's badass.

Yeah, that's how you do it.

That's great because I'm not in this space, but I would have thought I had to do a lot more work to like— I would have to like be in my kitchen making that shit.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. And then when he said that, I was like, oh, of course, of course. And I actually think that food scientists are sort of in short supply right now.

Oh, that's cool.

And so there's sort of like these niche professions that I think you could— you could do like a Lambda School type of model for. To pump out, you know, we, we kind of know about programmers and data scientists. Uh, but I think food scientists could be one that's sort of in short supply given the way the world is going. That's awesome. And how valuable, like Taco Bell and all them. That's what they do too. They basically work with these, they work with two things.

Well, they own their own thing, I think, you know, well, they work with ad agencies who come up with like, dude, Dorito taco.

And then they work with the flavor. They have their own flavor house or they work with a flavor house to be like, try 20,000 zany combinations this year and tell us if any of them taste good type of thing. Cause they're constantly trying to do food innovation.

That's badass. Okay, that's cool. I had no idea about that.

Okay, let's see what else I got. Okay, a couple things. I had this tweet that went viral that was basically— it's my most successful tweet. So I did that in 2019, at the end of 2019. 1,000 likes. And it struck a chord because what I did was— it's not gonna sound that genius— basically, anytime I see an ad on Instagram now that I'm like, oh, that looks kind of cool, maybe I should buy that. It's like, there's this posture correcting brace.

I saw this.

Did you end up getting it yet?

I didn't buy it, 'cause I didn't necessarily want it, but this is the hack. Most of the things you're gonna see in—

Do you wanna explain AliExpress?

Yes.

'Cause I don't even entirely know. It's one of those things I feel like it's underground, and I'm like, wait, this is Alibaba.

So some people have heard of Alibaba. Alibaba basically is like, it's like eBay, but, On eBay, you're buying from like, you know, a random mom in the Midwest. In Alibaba, you're buying from a factory. And so you don't buy one unit, you buy like 500, 1,000, 'cause it's, you're buying it for your business to sell. You're buying wholesale to sell retail. So that's how Alibaba got big, 'cause they had all the manufacturers in China who didn't have a big online presence, so they put them all in one marketplace, and now you can find them to source products. What AliExpress is, is it takes some, those same products,, but you can buy one, one piece. This is how Wish is powered. So Wish is just a layer on top of AliExpress, essentially, because the only catch for AliExpress is that you're going to have to wait like 3 weeks for it to arrive.

Well, and if you go—

and the quality might be bullshit.

And if you go to the website, it's very poor English, like the descriptions.

Well, AliExpress is actually a pretty good website, but the listing might have like, yeah, you know, the listings by the shop owner. So you don't know what— it's low trust, low speed. Low cost, right? And so for some people, that's a dope trade, right? And Wish made a sort of better interface.

That's what I mean. When you go to a product description, you're like, this person definitely— they're not an English first speaker. What am I getting myself into? Yeah, it's too good to be true.

So how big did that— how many people hollered at you?

—had like over 1,000 like whatever retweets or likes or whatever it is. But my friend did— my cousin did this too where he— shout out to Ron, he listens to the pod. So he did it with Theragun. So you know that massage gun? Yeah.

So this thing sells for like $600. I know when I went on CES, I saw the knockoffs.

He went on AliExpress and got it for $50. Had to wait 2 and a half weeks for it to arrive. It arrived and he's like, it's fantastic.

And like, wait, did he say it's as good, you think?

He was like, it's really good. Now it might breakdown or something, you know, the long-term quality might not be there, but you got it at a tenth of the price. So you could literally buy 5 of these and still be, you know, still come out.

So remember when I went to— I told you I went to CES and there'd be like the Theragun booth. I don't actually know if they have theirs, but there'd be like one like that and then the Chinese knockoff right next door, and some of the stuff was not as good.

Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there's a, there's a quality drop. But okay, so that's just like a random thing. From trends, I liked this, uh, AirPod accessories. So crazy. AirPod sales are going like this. I'm doing a curved line with my hand.

And not all— like, let's put math on that. We, we had a cool stat.

What was it? I don't know the exact revenue. It is multi-billions in revenue, like a product line for Apple. I believe it's a faster selling product than iPod, iPhone, or iWatch. So it's doing phenomenally well for its first, whatever, 2 years of existence.

Oh, I know it was something like if AirPod was its own company, it would be like bigger than Airbnb or something. Like, it was like, it like put it in context, right?.

I agree. Yeah, I'm into that. And now they're actually selling— I never thought Apple would do this— they're selling non-Apple brand AirPod cases at the Apple Store.

Oh really? Oh, they shelve other people's cases.

I went there the other day and they had other people's cases. That's interesting. Okay, you got anything? Otherwise I'll just rattle off— keep going, you're on a roll.

I do, but I'll rattle off a couple more. So Tough Mudder said that they were going bankrupt, which was— wait, wait, when? So Tough Mudder— I don't know what this means. It says like involuntary filing for bankruptcy, which I just assume is bad.

The guy who started Tough Mudder is a Harvard Business School grad, so maybe he's doing some savvy—

yeah, that's kind of— there's always a thing with bankruptcy where sometimes it's like just a shrewd businessman.

He's a former banker, so he's probably a shrewd guy.

we wrote about something called Sandbox VR. Have you heard of that? I know about—

yeah, I know. And so explain for somebody who doesn't know.

And apologies, the heater's gonna go off, just—

oh, that'll stop. Yeah, I feel like this room's haunted. What's going on behind me?

It's that we have like a— the radiator that the building controls, we don't control it, so it's just gonna beep for 30 seconds. Sandbox VR, I think it's only— you're only allowed to have 6 people in a room, maybe 7, but you pay a fee of $20 to $100 and you get to run around in a room playing Oculus games, right?

So the room is like 4 walls that are all green-screened. It's like, I don't know, 15 by 15 room, and you wear a backpack with a VR headset on and you're— yeah, then they create these experiences like— and it's a team game, so that you'll go in with a bunch of people and it'll be like Hey, zombies are coming at you guys from all angles, shoot them. And then it shows you who's shooting more and who's shooting less. And it's pretty cool.

The downside is I think the games are only okay. Yeah, the games are only okay. But the idea is cool. Idea is cool.

It's fun to do definitely once, you know, this will get better and this will be a thing down the road, but for now it's like a novelty.

Yes, I agree. So experiences— so Top Gunners going out of business. So the—

so I think the esport one is, is interesting because I think that for teenagers who want to do something. And I think, I think that setting up these pop-up esport festivals, esport tournaments where you get to come and experience playing in a competitive gaming tournament, that's gonna be bigger and bigger over time.

I have two more of those. Yeah, go for it. You went to one, you already know this one. House of Ice Cream. House of Ice Cream. Yep. They raised $25 million at a $200 million valuation. A lot of people mocked them.

By the way, I went to it. Underwhelming. Underwhelming.

Underwhelming. Always a line. There's always a line outside of it.

Yeah. Doing phenomenally well.

How much did you pay?

I don't know. My friend bought my ticket, so I, I don't actually—

Yeah. You and Suli and you guys went with your kids. Yeah. Or Ramon and you brought your kids. Yeah. It's always a line and their real estate's prime time. I don't know if they own that place or they lease it.

It's like, it's a cool idea and there's cool things, but man, I was like, man, they got away with like not going. I thought it would be like walking into Willy Wonka's factory. Like, I don't know, maybe my expectation was crazy. I just thought it would be, really well done. And it was like, nah, I mean, you just felt cramped. Each room is like just like this hot little small thing and then you sort of move on.

Like, basically what it is, is it's a, it's a 10,000 or 5,000 square foot room with multiple rooms. It's like a museum. Yeah, but it's all ice cream stuff and you could like play with it, eat and take photos, which is genius.

That's genius.

It's one house or multiple houses.

I think they only have a few. They only have a few. Yeah, but they're huge. But like, how— hundreds of thousands of people a year go to them and they charge $30 or something, right?

And now that I have a kid, my daughter's too young to go to Chuck E. Cheese, but my nieces go. And I don't know if you've been to a Chuck E. Cheese in like 20 years, but Chuck E. Cheese is like really garbage now compared to like, I guess like at the time, trashy at the time where the standards were, or maybe I was just a kid, it seemed alright. Now that I go back, I'm like, man, this place is trashy. And And, uh, but the need is there for something where kids want to go play games, eat pizza and ice cream, and feel like they're in a mini Disneyland that's nearby your house instead of going to, you know, Florida.

Well, Dave Buster's kind of did a good job, but that too is pretty trashy.

But I also think that's more adult. I still think that kids, you know, kids need this. Kids need a place for birthday parties, that sort of thing. So there's all these other ones. There's like a House of Air, which is a trampoline park. So there's a whole bunch of these.

So dangerous if you're like a brick-and-mortar type of person.

I, I I really believe this out-of-home entertainment, whether it's like Museum by Ice Cream, whether it's like a new-age Chuck E. Cheese, it just seems like there's a lot of room there.

That amazes me that Tough Mudder went out of business, by the way, because I think they bootstrapped to $100 million in sales. Yeah, it's very strange.

We should look more into it. We should see. You were talking about privacy companies.

And so what are some companies that are interesting here?

Or what, where do you think there's opportunity? VPNs are intriguing to me. I'm also looking for more. I'm really— I love this space. I love DuckDuckGo. Do you use it? I started using it because I did start getting nervous about this. When I heard about DuckDuckGo a few years ago, I thought it was so stupid. Right. I saw they make all their— the number of searches they get a month, they make public. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. They're growing like crazy. I love DuckDuckGo. I love VPNs. Other than that, I like Privacy.com. Do you know Privacy.com? I like Privacy.com a lot. I love Privacy.com. What else? But there's not that many.

There's Brave browser, which is Maybe doing okay. It's hard to say. They say good things, but they're basically making a private— more a privacy-focused browser, a privacy-focused search engine. That's DuckDuckGo. A privacy-focused sort of like e-com checkout experience. That's Privacy.com. So I agree with you that pendulum is swinging back in that direction. People care about this stuff. And if you can make it convenient, if you can make it easy to control this stuff, people will adopt it, but you gotta make it easy. And I think that's where, you know, If you make it hard and expensive, only sort of the really like conscious folks will do it.

Yeah. And the thing that I don't like about this space is the majority of people were like, yeah, you just sign up for this and then you get all your data. And I'm like, I, uh, like, I, I don't know what that means, man. You're not making this like actually apply to my daily life and making me benefit. Right. You're just making me feel a little better, but you're not, it's really hard.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think, I don't know where the next sort of opportunity is in this space. If I did, I would, You know, go for it.

I'll tell you one. Yeah, go for it. It's still vague, but I think about it a lot. You know Safeway or Kroger or Target? When you type in, you know how they ask for your phone number every single time? Why? Why the hell do they do that? Well, they do it because they want to know all the shit that you're buying and your profile, right? And have you read The Power of Habit, that book? Uh, no. There's a great story in there about the habits are so ingrained to us that Target— there was— I have no idea if it's true, but the story is cool— where a father saw they were getting mailed ads about pregnancy, pregnancy, right? And he was like, my daughter's 16, she's not pregnant. I would know if she's pregnant. And he went and complained to them and they go, no, no, no, we think your daughter's definitely pregnant. And he finds out a month later that she is in fact pregnant and Target knew that so well. So anyway, when I think about that stuff, I— this is, like I said, it's vague. There's got to be something. There's something there that I think about.

Yeah, very leaky. You know, people say things like You know, you have to sign this. Uh, but my signature's everywhere. You can literally electronic signature. You can copy paste my signature exactly as, as is and, and forge me. My credit card is, you know, you give it out over the phone sometimes. You put it in every e-commerce site. That's like trivial to, to sort of like take and do something with. And your email address. Social security number, my email address.

Like when you buy something at Nordstrom, they go, okay, what's your email address? I'm like, I don't wanna give it to you. And they're like, oh, he's shocked. They're like, we have to. I'm like, no, I don't. Right.

It happens all the time. Privacy-focused people there that are doing that. That's cool.

Proactive. I'm into that. I, I, I'm very into that. And when we asked in the trends group, I think we got 30 replies. It was really cool.

One company did. One company owns it for all these, you University Funds.

What's— they advertise on Facebook. I forgot their parent company name.

Is this like a legit VC?

I think it's a legit VC, but it's just a smart— like, when you normally want to go raise a fund, most people stop because they're like, well, I don't have access to super high net worth people. Or if I go pitch this, you know, most partner— most people who invest in VC funds are institutions like pension funds and, you know, you know, school endowments and things like that.. And so, you know, they're going to pick the best VCs. They're not going to pick an up-and-comer that has no track record. So these guys got really clever and were like, well, what if we just got like $25K or $50K from all the wealthy alumni of one school? That could be like—

Oh wait, is this for raising the fund?

That's how they raise the fund. And then they say they invest in entrepreneurs from that school, but I don't know how strict it is.

It might just be like— Well, Sieva did something like this. He had the MBA fund. Yeah. —And they would—

I would love to know who that is. So what's the opportunity there? Are you saying, oh, you're saying that's cool. I'm just saying it's cool. Or interesting.

I think it's a very interesting approach to, yeah, very non-traditional approach to doing this stuff. Once I figured out what their model was, I was like, oh, that's fucking smart.

So for anyone who's listening who wants to start a company and raise money, I think the takeaway here needs to be, and this is something that it's hard to know your first time, it is so easy. There's so much capital right now going on and so few places to put it that people are doing these things. Like, I, so I think that entrepreneurs, people who want to start a business, they undervalue themselves. They don't realize that there's just people seeking out, they like, we have to put this money in somewhere interesting. Right.

And what school did you go to?

Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Private price, but without the—

that is not good. Do not do that. That is a horrible decision. So I think it's so— and I married a woman who went to an Ivy League school. I see the network and I know the network, or I don't know your network, but Duke. I mean, when I think of Duke, I think of the University of California school system. All like, you are at a huge advantage with that network. Totally.

I guess my thing is I don't tap into it enough. I think most people don't tap into it at all. And one of the questions I get the most, I think because of the podcast, people are like, man, dude, see, your network is killer. That's why you're able to do XYZ.

Bullshit. They don't realize that your network and my network came from cold emailing people. Exactly.

I'm like, oh, you want that network? Here's a trivial way to do it. And then they still don't do it most of the time, but it's way easier than you think. And of course you got to ask, like, where did this come from? This didn't just come from nowhere. Like the thing to me, there's two principles on network. One is you got to be interesting. Like the reason you, you know, when the founder of Pandora meets you, you know, the way you got there was the cold email. I cold emailed.

And people don't realize I cold emailed him literally 30 times over a year. Right. And he never answered. Now we're homies, and me and my wife, we got dinner with him, right?

And so like, there's the cold outreach part, and there's a science to that, and there's a persistence that has to come with that, and the volume you got to do. But on the other side, be an interesting person. Like, the reason they want to hang out with you, right? Like, yeah, they did the favor after the cold emails. Like, all right, this guy emailed me 30 times, I'll go talk at HustleCon. But it could have just died there. The reason they like you is because you do interesting shit, and you actually do this more than I do.

You, from the other side of someone who you have young people holler at you and you actually take them under your wing way more than I do. Yeah. You have like a pretty cool alumni network, like both ways of people who— well, yeah, you did this with Michael and a few others, but you have people who email you and you're like, okay, come hang out. Yeah. Like we went to, uh, we did a Spartan race with those two, with that one young guy. Like you do that all the time.

I do it all the time. Uh, I do it selfishly. Like I don't like giving back, but it's selfish thing is like, Young people are more like dynamic, interesting, fresh, and, and doing more interesting stuff. And so I need to actively, like, my, my friends are now 30 or 31 or 35 or whatever. I need to actively do something if I'm ever gonna hang out with a 21-year-old. Right. And so that's what I try to do. I try to like curate a set.

You do that really well.

And I ask them like, who are you hanging out with? And then we like hang out.

And I, that excuse of, and this leads into one thing I wanna bring up, that excuse of, well, Sean, your network's really good. It's like, dude, my net— it— I didn't have a network, right? I just cold emailed people. I had— in my wedding, I had 6 groomsmen, like 5 of them I met via cold emailing, right? I met you, we became friends. There's so many people who you know that you just know through Twitter, right? It's crazy. People don't understand that.

I think you told me about it, but you told me about it like half an hour ahead of time. Yeah.

And so I've done 3 of these now, and each time it's not only awesome, but everybody's like, man, thank you for doing this. I also have experienced that where there's cool people on Twitter who I don't know in real life. No, no, no, no. They pay for themselves. I'm not gonna pay for their dinner.

I'm gonna do a Twitter dinner. Good idea. Yeah. Do you have more ideas? Because I have something that's not an idea, but I can bring up.

I have 2 follow-up questions. Are you still paying to freeze your sperm?

I paid to do it and I mailed it too late after I gave the sample and it got denied. Dead sample. Okay. So, um, I'm looking for another place to do it. Er, yes. Long story short. Yeah.

Okay. Uh, that's why, that's my only question. I just wanted to just know.

No, I went through the process and I like, I was an idiot. I like mailed it back. It was kind of gross, but I mailed it back on like maybe a Friday and I didn't realize it had to be a 24-hour turnaround. So. I went through the process. Okay, give me your idea. You and I did a little live podcast here at this office 2 months ago, maybe a month ago, and someone said something that was very San Francisco. And they said, like, I don't remember exactly, but something to the line of like, you got to be passionate and solve a problem. And you and I both looked at each other like, no, you don't. Like, or they're like, you can't— they said something like, you can't just care about money if you want to, like, really get rich. You gotta like care about like the problem. And you and I both looked at each other and we're like, no, that's not true.

It's not true. You can totally do it that way.

You can do it that way. And you can also not give a shit and just be the best plumber and make a fuck ton of money. Right. And I thought that was funny. And I was thinking about that last night and I was like, that was so funny how we both were like, uh-uh. Because we know so many people that just kill it on random shit. And so I was thinking of things that are not true that we all say they are because it sounds really good to tweet about it. Great. Love this. Okay. I'm excited. Okay. And so there's a few. The first, which I just mentioned, is passion. Like you have to like care about the, you really got to care about the, the, uh, the problem that you're solving. It's got to wait. So this list is for things that you can make a mild amount of money. Okay. So I think that to have the outliers, like the huge ones, I think that a lot of these will not be true, but to like just make it, to get a really good win, this can happen. You don't have to be that passionate. You really don't have to. The second thing is the best product does not always win. Oftentimes the things that make the most money, they fucking suck. Okay, so unfortunately your product doesn't actually have to be that good. The third thing, people say you gotta hire the best people. A lot of times you don't.

And if everybody thinks they're doing that, by definition you're not, by the way.

Yes. And look, I'm not saying don't hire the best people you can find. What I'm saying is I have seen proof and I've talked to people that say, "I don't do that," and they have made tens of millions of dollars. So, I'm not saying to do this, I'm just saying it is possible. And there are some people and they're like, "Man, my team's just okay." Right. "We just do it every day and it worked out," or, "I just am putting every— this whole thing on my shoulders and I'm gonna hero this into existence." This is another good one, design. A lot of people have slick-ass design. On their pages and stuff, you'd be shocked. There are so many websites. We— you talked about Ramon. Ramon was on the podcast. Ramon's a guy who had a soap opera news, news website that made, I don't know, $400,000 a month in profit. Yep. It was littered with ads. It was not pretty, right?

It was a $49 WordPress theme.

It was horrible. People freaking loved it. The customers loved it. Not the design.

We have a friend who's doing a DTC business. I can't say what it is. You know, we'll probably do $15 million in his first year, first full year of existence in revenue, $15 million. And when I looked at the product, I expected, I was like, oh, well, it's probably so sweetly packaged. The brand is just on point and that's the innovation. And I looked at it and it looked like, you know, uh, if you're at a pharmacist, uh, you know, in the back, They have these, you know, these things that are unlabeled. That's how bad the packaging is. It's like you would never expect that this is the brand that's crushing it. And it totally was. It definitely defies that assumption.

It totally does. Now, I think like to be great, to be great, great, great, great, great, like all-time great, you do have to have all these. Right.

That's the caveat to all these, right? Hiring great people is a great thing. Being passionate about what you do is a great thing. Great— having great design is a great thing. But what trips people up is they think it is a requirement to success. It is not a requirement. We have seen, we have exact examples that defy those rules. It's like the black swan rule. It's like, nope, you're telling me that's a requirement. Here's an example where we did not have—

That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. And another one is delegation. Okay. So they're both this, this works in both cases sometimes, which we, the same people we're talking about, there are people who everyone else who works there is just customer service and just handles busy work. And this person does everything and they don't delegate a thing. Right. Uh, we, I have seen success to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This done the exact opposite has been true as well, which is I just came up with the idea and I had either had a little money or convinced people to do it and I delegated it all and I just check in with them weekly and I focus on other stuff that has worked wonderfully as well. Right. A lot of people don't understand that. I didn't understand that when I started my company. I thought I had to do everything. Now I realize, oh my God, the business can keep growing. I actually don't like— I don't need to be involved as much as I thought. Right. Or You know what I mean? Okay, and the final thing is brand. Okay, so branding, and you would be shocked, like everyone thinks that brand means it's gotta look a certain way, or it's gotta feel, they're like, I care about the user experience. I know so many people, they go, no, fuck that, like it looks fine, but I'm just, when people sign up to buy my product and they don't buy and they give me their email, I'm gonna blitz 'em with emails and email 'em fucking 5 times a day, and like they don't give a shit about user experience. Oftentimes in these cases it works, right? People are shocked by that. And so, but this is a very like, it comes from a place of fear.

So I'll tell you one blog post that explains why these are true. Have you ever read this blog post by this guy Paul Buchheit? He's the creator of Gmail.

I know who he is, but I've not read the blog post.

And that's really hard to take that advice because you're like, you just have to— like, you have to say, like, I know this one part sucks. I'm going to let it suck. And that's hard for a lot of people because they get fearful. But it is very true. And if you like go to the top of the Fortune 500, you go to like the top 10 brands and like, of course, Apple, their products actually are great. Most people think they're great. Their brand is great. They're very thoughtful. But go all the way down to like maybe a Fortune 1000 and look between 500 and 1000, or even like the top 20 but not the top 10. And you'll be like, man, HP, like, it's not that good, right? Or like, but so why does it exist? Like, and you're like, they're just kind of good at a bunch of stuff, right?

Okay, I want— I'm gonna hand you my phone. This is in line with what you're talking about, trying to be great, not good here. So I want you to just click go. I typed in the address already, so We, over the weekend, we made a website, myfirstmillionpodcast.com, and we've been talking about no-code. We went to the extreme of no-code. So what you're seeing when you go to this website is a very, uh, is an extreme hack. So we were trying to make a website.

This is a Google, this is a Google site.

It's a Notion. It's a Notion doc. That's awesome. So we were trying to make a website and we were like, oh, should we use, you know, should we hire a programmer? I had a bunch of people reach out to the podcast being like, I'll do this for free for you. We could have used a WordPress guy, an Upworker. I was like, no, no, no, even simpler. Should we use Webflow? Should we use a no-code tool? I was like, no, even simpler. We basically had already in Notion this, like, Notion's like a document editor type of thing, like a TextEdit. It's just like a Sana. Yeah, it's just like a, it's a little, you like a WordPad, an Evernote. And so we went in Notion, we already had like an outline of what we wanted the website to be. And I was like, what if this was just the website? Can we make our website just load this? Because this is super easy to edit.

I've wanted something like this forever.

And so we found out where I tweeted the founder of Notion. I was like, hey, can I do this? Can I make a website? That's my domain name, but it just loads a Notion page. He's like, no, we can't do that yet. I found a workaround online that let us do this. Over the weekend we built this where now— this is awesome. My First Million podcast, check it out. It's so, it's so budget, but it's so amazing, dude.

This is better than a lot of websites.

I agree. I agree. And so it has like the embedded player, it has the transcripts of the podcast, it has like I shortlisted like my favorite episodes, like stuff like that. That's better. And it was so easy and like literally zero code.

Yeah. And I just hate when people say the excuse of, I gotta hire a designer. I gotta do this. Like you don't, right? You don't like, you're just overthinking it. That looks good. I think, I actually think that looks great and that will work really well. But I was thinking about that time when someone said it to us and you and I completely looked at each other and we're like, uh-uh. That's not true. Like, I could give you 10 examples of people who show that that's not true. And I felt like we were crushing his soul a little bit, and I almost felt bad, but I'm like, just so you know, that's not true.

Yeah, because if you come to the live show, it's like, I look up to these people, I kind of want to hear, you know, things that are in line with me. And I think he looked at us and was like, oh. Now that doesn't mean you should—

like, if you have those, I actually think you will be better. Of course. But you actually— A+. If your goal is to like I, I, you could make billions of dollars actually just being I.

Totally. The way I look at it is you gotta bring energy to whatever you do. So if you're gonna do something, you definitely have to have the energy and enthusiasm to push. Uh, but for some people, that energy enthusiasm comes from being really passionate about the problem. For some people it comes from, I just like business. For some people it's like, I want this type of lifestyle and I'll run through anything if it gets me this lifestyle of financial freedom. Right. I don't care what's giving you the energy.

Yeah, there's many ways, and I'd actually—

I'm not hating on it. I think it's stupid, but I don't hate them for doing it. There's this great company that I like called Wonderful Brands. You know them? No. Stuart and Linda Resnick, they're in their late 80s. They owned Fiji Water, they own Palm, that Palm drink. Oh no, what's that drink? It's like pomegranate juice. It's like— Oh, Pom. Yeah, yeah. The Pom. And then they own pistachio, like a pistachio brand that you maybe heard of. And then they own like 20 that you probably don't even know what they are. And the way that they got started was they started selling like memorabilia, like those $50, like quarters that like are like, it's like a President Trump was elected in 2016. Here's a memorabilia coin. Right. A $50 quarter. That's how they got their start. That's how they started making it, and they still do that. And I'm looking at all their brands.

These are great brands. So they have the Halos, Oranges, Fiji Water, Palm, Pistachios, Almonds, these two wine things.

And I— if I'm reading you right, you're saying this not because you're— you're not trying to say build shitty products. What you're trying to say is don't overthink it. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to win, and you don't have to do all of them at the A+ level in order to win. We know successful cases where you have to get some things right but not all.

And I am saying that there are a thousand different ways to get it done. And what a lot of people tell you is you have to have a product that's 10 times— that's what Sam Altman from Y Combinator says— your product has to be 10 times better. No, it doesn't have to be. Maybe the likelihood of succeeding or like being a huge outlier will be higher if it is 10 times better. But there are examples of something being actually worse, but it wins. Right. And I just don't want people to take— and I have taken— I just accepted everything that I read. And now that I've been around a little bit, like experienced a little bit more with business, I'm like, that wasn't true. I wish I didn't believe that. And a lot of my friends who didn't believe it, I are better off.

I had a guy at HustleCon who had a huge company that many people know, and his talk was all about his employees and how he empowers his team. And afterwards, he came off stage. I was like, I know you, you're really aggressive, and a lot of your employees hate you. Why did you say that? And he said, because that's— I think that's what people want to hear, and it will make my employees feel good. And I was like, do you really believe that? He goes, I definitely believe it, but not as much as I— he's like, no, I'm way aggressive, and I just want fuckin' win. And I was like, man, I wish we missed the mark on that one. We should have been honest and like told the truth. I think people would appreciate that. But if he thought that, and he only told me because they knew me, so many more people would think that, right?

Cool. You got any other—

no, I'll save the rest. Well, we could talk about the Casper S one another time. Okay, we're back next week. Oh, if you happen to listen to this whole thing, maybe we could do a tweet about it. So who knows how many people listen to the whole thing. We're gonna consider doing these daily or more often than weekly. Yeah, and I would like to hear what people's—

I think we're also gonna bring in some guests to do this with us, to do the brainstorms with us. So I've had— I've been having a lot of fun with these, and what I realized is the interviews with guests are good. Like the last one we did with a Peak Design guy, I think was actually a really good like story and interview.

People say they like these the most, which is—

they like these the most. And I actually think it'd be fun to bring in some people who either already run the podcast or Forget telling your story, just come to the brainstorm.

And well, because you can just give like a 3-minute background, like this person is this, they do this, right? So what do you— I'm gonna— what do you think about this? You know, like you can like— exactly.

Okay, cool. That's it. We're done.