The Guy Mafia, Agency Affiliates, Mini Katanas, and More
Okay. Next one. Um, uh, hosted buyer meetings on a plane. B2B decision makers get a free vacation if they agree to have X number of conversations on a flight. It's like the timeshare idea. It's like, so you get a free flight, uh, but you're going to get on a plane full of vendors. It's like that movie Snakes on a Plane. There's snakes. It's just B2B software vendors just waiting to just barrage you. For the next 7 hours on your way to Maui.
So here's— I'm gonna tell you about something that's interesting. There's a guy who I love and his name's Anand. Do you, uh, he started CB Insights. Do you know him?
Yeah. Listens to the pod. Love the guy.
Yeah, he's a great guy. He is one of my good friends and I was thinking about this. So there's a lot of things that second time or third time entrepreneurs think about that mostly first time entrepreneurs don't think about. One of 'em being distribution. So they'll think like, oh, I'm just gonna make a cool product and it'll somehow get into people's hands. That's false. You gotta have marketing baked in, or like it's gotta be part of like the ideation phase marketing. The second thing is pricing. Uh, they think, oh, I'll just charge $5 a month and I'll get like millions of people to buy this. And then you actually start doing, and, and you're like, wow, this is incredibly challenging to get thousands or tens of thousands, let alone millions of people to buy something. That's really hard. And so I've been thinking about that pricing thing. So things that fit my wants and my needs and my skill sets. So for example, content. There's Industry Dive, which probably only has 5 or 10 million people a month reading their website, but they make shit for like people who own grocery stores, like content for people who own grocery stores versus BuzzFeed, which makes stuff for stay-at-home moms who like cat videos. BuzzFeed worth $100 million. Industry Dive does the exact same thing, way smaller audience, makes or sold recently for $500 or $600 million. So like, I've been thinking about like those, that price, just like that, that different ways of packaging. And so Anand from CB Insights, he's got this company that's brand new. It's only 90 days old. It's been way low-key and under the, under wraps. And I recently discovered it and I asked him, so it's called Yardstick. So go to yardstick.com and tell me what you see. It's called Yardstick. So it's the word yard, like a backyard, and then stick is S-T-I-Q. He's getting a little cute on us.
Uh, let's see. Okay. So Yardstick. Powered by CV Insights. Learn what software buyers really think about their vendors. Great title. All right. Great headline. Yeah. Great. Um, and then it says access thousands of analyst-led conversations with software buyers to quickly understand pricing, competition, evaluation criteria, and subscription and satisfaction. So basically they interview software buyers and they get the scoop on how do you really feel about X tool, and then they summarize it so that you can you can see how other people think about this tool before you buy it.
Exactly. That's it. And they charge like something like $30,000 or $40,000, by the way. They charge. Yeah, it's really smart. And I'll explain how this works, but they charge like $30,000 or $40,000 a year for this. And I think this could be a $100 million a year business. And they're just— I'm downplaying, but right now the MVP is just interviewing people and showing transcripts. Eventually, I'm sure they're going to have—
This is really smart. I remember you talked about this back in the day because there's that website. What is it? G2 Crowd?
Yes, exactly.
And, um, there's basically like software is a massive category and people are like, oh, which CRM should I use? And it's like, oh, you know, it's HubSpot fighting with 10 other people to try to be the answer to that question. And so reviews is always this thing that people are trying to like, I think people in general want the idea of a review, but it's hard to trust reviews nowadays. You don't know if the reviews are faked. Uh, you don't know if they're from people like you who have the same problems as you., and the website, like, you know, G2 Crowd and these other ones, they're pretty bad. And I've seen a, I've seen several people try to create a new software review site to compete with them. And they have to do two things. One, they have to actually be better at the reviews. And two, they have to rank higher in SEO for when somebody searches for, you know, whatever, xTool alternative or what's the best, which is hard, you know, sales tool for me to use. And it's really hard to beat their SEO. And so they're fighting a very uphill battle. This I think is smart for two reasons. One, they already have a bunch of customers that they could just sell this, sell into with this. Two, the idea of instead of saying, okay, well whoever reviews it, hopefully they're good reviews. They're like, no, we're just gonna hire people to do these conversations. And like the math works out. If we get these brands to say what they think about these tools, you know, we might only need to invest, I don't know, $200,000 into the, to the collection of that data. And that gives us like, like a better review, a better, um, content system.
And it, what you've nailed everything. And there's a third thing though, which is basically G2 or, um, softwarereviews.com or a lot of these websites, the way they typically work is they give an affiliate fee or some type of like advertisement fee. They, they collect that from the brand who wants to advertise on the website, which means they have to go and get traffic and they've gotta convince these brands to give money whereas this business, Yardstick, it does exactly what I said before. It changes the way they package it. And so they just go, no, you're the customer, you're going to read this and you're going to get value from this. You're giving us $30 grand a year. And so we're just going to make shit for you. And it's just that's our, that's our, that's our exchange. And so that's what we're going to do. And so basically the background behind this business is this is something that I didn't know about until recently, and probably you didn't either, because we both had small companies. And so a small company in this definition is anything that's below $1 billion in market cap or value. Meaning typically the people who buy this shit have 500 employees. And the reason that's important is when you buy a software provider or you buy a CRM or you buy like some type of, what's it called, where you like your customer, like you do give customer feedback, like, or you like interact with your customers and your customer service agents use it.
Doing business, I don't know, customer happiness.
I don't, you know, whatever, like the software is like a Zendesk or something like that. So, but like picking the wrong software, if you are a 500-person company, it will cost you like so much money. And so you have to do actually a fair amount of research, including like who invested in this company. So I know they're not even going to go out of business. And I never even in a million years thought about that. I'm like, dude, I'm just going to Google like what's better, Gusto or Zenefits? And like, we'll just pick one and then we'll switch if it sucks. And so what Yardstick is doing is they actually have just— it's Anand and 7 other employees are the early people starting this company. And they basically just ask like 7 questions to people who have bought software, in the last 2 years. And they say like, who else did you consider? Who'd you pick? What price did you pay? Would you renew? What's your customer satisfaction? And then, um, the people who purchase this Yardstick product are either investment bankers, so people who are like making investment decisions from the public markets or, or private markets, and they wanna know what the customer satisfaction is, or people who are going out and buying software and they could see these other reviews. And it's just like a really interesting business because there's, there's a companies like GLG, you know, GLG. It's like, uh, you get paid 2 grand an hour.
GLG calls back in the day.
Yeah. You get paid 2 grand an hour to like answer questions, but that's 1-to-1. And so what they're saying is like, no, we're not gonna do 1-to-1, but we'll just make it so you could just read like dozens and dozens of interviews. So anyway, interesting company for all everything I said, but secondly, it's an interesting company because this business is only 90 days old. And I think if you go and sign up for their email list now, it's kind of like you can watch like a big business being built in real time.
Yeah, this is really good. Like, I'm jealous I didn't think of this idea. Um, I kind of wish he had just done this outside of CB Insights. I feel like this could have been his next hit. I think it's going to be as big as CB Insights. So I think there's a slight, you know, although it's good to be able to sell into those same customers, I think it would have been worth it to, uh, you know, spin this out. But you know, that's a, that's a more complicated decision, by the way. This guy Anand, he has a giant list of startup ideas. Have you seen this?
No, where?
I'm trying to find the list. I remember seeing it on, um, Twitter one day, but, uh, here, well, why look for a second?
The background behind Anand is he started CB Insights. They're close to $100 million in revenue. He's kind of a shithead in a really good way. For example, he signs, he writes their daily newsletter and he signs the newsletter with, "I love you." Or in his Twitter profile, it says, "Please sign up for CB Insights. I owe people money." And like, he is like, like kind of like a cheeky, like mischievous guy and very, very likable. And that's— and his content's amazing. And so that's— Anand's really interesting.
If you, if you wanna know what speaks to our heart, you gotta be somebody who's trying to do something. So you gotta be ambitious or successful in some way. And the second thing is, a little bit of a shithead. So, you know, like have that. So I don't like to eat my wings without sauce. You gotta have a little dipping sauce to your personality if you're gonna, if you're gonna get me on board and he's got the sauce. All right. So let me tell you some of these ideas. So I don't have the full list. I remember seeing this like a year ago or something like that. Um, we should get them on the pod, but let me just read a couple of the ideas that were tweeted out from this list. Okay. So first one, Tough Mudder for kids. So here's what he says. Really any sort of manufactured adversity for semi-affluent or affluent kids. Parents talk about wanting their kids to have perspective, resilience, and reduce their entitlement and get them off screens. Um, Tough Mudder for kids, super high margin. Unsure if, uh, you know, unsure exactly how it works, but money to be made for sure.
Okay. Spartan races now, Spartan races. I'm signing up for one. They actually have a kids version right now.
Uh, that's a good name.
Startup idea: Duolingo for teaching finance or accounting. Teach the principles of accounting or finance via gamified Duolingo-style app. What do you give that one?
Uh, yeah, that's cool.
Okay. Next one. Um, uh, hosted buyer meetings on a plane. B2B decision makers get a free vacation if they agree to have X number of conversations on a flight. It's like the timeshare idea. It's like, so you get a free flight. Uh, but it's, you're going to get on a plane full of vendors. It's like that movie Snakes on a Plane. There's snakes. It's just B2B software vendors just waiting to just barrage you for the next 7 hours on your way to Maui.
And just tons of Coke and just everything that like a 45-year-old guy named Todd who wears tight blue jeans and brown shoes, whatever they need to like.
Yeah. This is Jennifer. She wants you to call her Jenny and she happens to like you.
Yeah, I think it's actually, uh, I think you actually could build a business that way.
If I'm being honest. If you sign up for a free trial, you get to go to first class. That'd be great. Uh, yeah, this is actually, uh, kind of a genius idea. Okay, here, here we go. Buyable Google Doc travel itineraries. So friends often share their travel plans via Google Docs. You know, here's what I did in Iceland. Um, since they're friends, I trust their judgment. Um, you know, the idea would be, let me just buy the whole itinerary with a buy now button. My vacation plan is done.
Awesome.
Quick reaction. Yeah. Okay.
Um, oh, that's a small business, but cool.
Win-loss reporting for employee hiring and attrition. So when somebody doesn't accept your job offer, the service would, would dig in and find out the real reasons why. When somebody leaves, phenomenal. The service digs in and finds the real reason why. It would maybe anonymize or synthesize the insights over time. Today the process is very ad hoc. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. That is a really good idea. Uh, wow. That's a, that's a solid one. Okay. Uh, here's a not so solid one, but more fun. The Nike of baby diapers. So create high-performance premium diapers, use sodium polyacrylate to make them super absorbent, like astronaut diapers, other tech to increase comfort, make cleanup easier. Why? Because parents spend a stupid amount of money on their kids.
Okay, dude. Anytime, anytime you say it's the Nike of something, it's like when I see a restaurant on the side of the road, it says world's greatest coffee or like the best pie in town, I automatically I'll automatically buy it. That's my rule. If it says it's the world's greatest, if you're just bold enough to think that, I'm going to try it.
I'm in. Dude, I had the same realization yesterday where I was listening to some talk where Jony Ive was talking. And, um, and I knew somebody who met Jony Ive, like used to hang out with Jony Ive regularly. They like lived near each other in San Francisco. And I was like, oh, what's Jony Ive like? For those who don't know, he's basically the head designer at Apple for like all the great products, iPod, Macintosh, iPhone, all that good stuff. So this guy's basically the greatest product designer in the world. He's the guy Steve Jobs trusted the most at Apple. I was like, what's he like? And they're like, oh, he's kind of like you would expect. He's got a sort of a dry but funny personality. He's a pretty focused individual. He's not effing around a whole lot. He works really hard. And they'd be like, yeah, they'd come to me, they'd be like, yeah, Johnny had an idea. I was like, oh my God, what's this Johnny Ive idea? Now I don't remember the specifics. This was like 8 years ago or something.
But they just said that for every idea.
But it'd be like a closet that's beautifully designed. What does that mean? And then I realized I started using this. I'd be like, you know what you guys should do? I was giving somebody advice the other day. I was like, when you guys— it's an e-com brand. I was like, when you send your package, you should put in there just like beautiful pamphlet, just like super well done. That just will make somebody, they'll read it, they'll know your story, but just, just a beautiful pamphlet. And then I realized, I was like, wow, if you just say like a beautiful thing, a beautiful, and then just like generic thing and say just super well done, the idea goes from like a whatever idea to like, that's a great idea. Yeah.
I could see that.
It's like when, uh, honestly it's not totally BS. There is something to it. If you said like, you know, let's just make like a really, like just a hilarious YouTube video. It's like, actually that is the correct strategy, you know, but there's not much more to it. It's just a question of can you, can you do something that's actually beautiful or really well done or really funny? But honestly, that's not a bad business plan for most things to just say, just a beautifully done, just all the details nailed.
And it's like when Andrew Wilkinson, Andrew Wilkinson says, we try to buy wonderful companies. Right. And like our beautiful businesses, we wanna buy beautiful businesses. Buys like a job board. Yeah. I'm like, wonderful.
You're right.
That is, it's wonderful.
He's like, okay, we're gonna bake this cookie, but it's just gonna melt in your mouth. And you're like, okay.
All right.
All right. I'm in. It's like, you know, otherwise it's just a cookie. And so I think there's something to this, but, um, all right, I'm gonna keep going. By the way, I feel like I'm reading this guy's diary. And just, you know, I feel, feel wrong just taking all these startup ideas here so rapid fire.
This could be like 12 episodes of content for us, but I'm going to have to go through it. Don't read it. Let's just steal it.
Well, I know, but I'm like, I want to just use them all now. I want to binge eat this whole like tub of ice cream right here. Let me give you a couple more. Um, HappyCam, a highlight reel of the best moments of your life. How? A wearable camera that records audio and video only when you're laughing. It captures the conversation of who you're with and great moments. All right. Fictitious.
Even the great ones are gonna miss once in a while.
Yeah. Just to show a little balance here.
Yeah.
Um, okay. How about, let me pull up another one. Okay. How about this? Um, he also wrote Bad Startup Ideas, I think so. Bad but sexy. So startup ideas that suck you in. But they're actually bad startup ideas.
Here we go. Yeah.
Personal CRM.
Always a bad one.
Preaching to the choir.
Yeah.
Curated news recommendations.
Well, in most cases it's bad, but hey, look, that's what you, me, and Austin Green are doing.
We gotta do that one. Yeah.
Um, it's something gonna be like a college campus, like Craigslist, and then like laundry on, uh, like, uh, delivery laundry.
Here's one. What are my friends up to right now apps? These apps promise you, hey, what if your friend was 2 blocks away? You didn't know this with this app. You could have met up with them. No, wrong, dude.
By the way, did you know that girls share their location on their iPhone with other girls? Like my wife does this with her friends. Did you know people do that?
For like safety purposes?
I don't know why they do that, but like I was out with like my wife and a bunch of her friends and they all did the same thing with themselves. Like that group of friends and other people, like they know where their real-time location is at all times.
Hold on. Why, what, honey, why are you going to the car? My friend's going to the restroom, but she wanted somebody to go with her. I'm driving to meet up with her.
Dude, it's crazy.
They, I don't even know how to use that feature. I don't even know where that feature is on a phone.
I don't know. You click a thing and it says like share location for an hour or share indefinitely.
Yeah. Seems like a trap. Uh, yeah.
Not going to happen.
To-do list software. Yep. That's one classic startup idea that everybody does. Um, Glassdoor for VCs, a website that rates VCs. Nobody really cares very much about VCs. They're infrequent decisions for most entrepreneurs. They'll take money from who they can get. Yeah. Um, in, in most cases, founders are lucky enough to have a good choice. They probably already know who's good. Okay. So those are some of the bad, bad startup ideas, but he's got a bunch here. I'm not gonna—
we should have him on. Yeah. The guy's interesting.
He's pretty cool. He's earned his, he's earned his spot for sure.
I forgot to remind you these last few times, you being the listener, about our gentleman's agreement. So like, Uh, have you ever— yes, uh, there's like— have you ever gone to 7-Eleven and you've seen like, uh, like an Alzheimer's or like a sick children's like bowl and you like leave a quarter and you take a piece of candy, right? So that, that whole thing works. And they use this thing called an honor system, a gentleman's agreement, where you put down a quarter and you take a piece of candy and it's just, it just works. That's kind of what our podcast is like a little bit with subscribing to our YouTube channel. So Sean and I spent all this time We talk about stuff constantly about what we're gonna do on the pod. I live an epic life actually, just so I can talk about it on the pod. I dedicate my life to this and all I want in exchange is not even a quarter. It's just for you to click subscribe on YouTube. So if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify, whatever, just go to your YouTube and just click subscribe. That's all we want because that helps the algorithm. We get a little bit higher and then we'll just, it helps our ego. I mean, that's really it all.
Today, if you're making the choice between Alzheimer's children and us, Make the right choice. Choose us.
Yeah. It's free.
It's crazy. 60% of our YouTube views come from people who don't subscribe. And that's crazy. All I can ask them is, are you not entertained? Do you not want more of this? Click subscribe. All right. So that's that, uh, gentlemen's agreement reinforced.
Well, everyone's been doing it lately. So if you don't do it, you're going to, you'll look silly. So I think you should do it. Um, all right.
Okay. I want to talk about a different little trend that I've seen on Twitter. And I call this the guy mafia.
And I saw that line. I thought that was really funny. I mean, I would have called the guy mafia just the mafia, but the guy mafia.
Well, so what, what am I, what am I calling the guy mafia? You've probably seen this trend. Like, I feel like it's kind of new, but it's basically a whole bunch of Twitter accounts that are branded like car dealership guy. Mobile home park guy, strip mall guy, self-storage guy, right? There's like, and they're basically just saying it's an anonymous account, so you don't know who's behind it. The promise is basically, hey, I'm in, I've been in this, this, this space for a while. I got, you know, I've been doing this for 10, 20 years. I will share insights, but also kind of like industry secrets about the way our industry works. The, you know, the, the, the dirty laundry.. And, um, these accounts are blowing up. They get really big, blowing up really fast. I just bought a car from Car Dealership Guy.
Did you really?
I don't know who this guy is. I just, yeah, I just dropped, dude.
I almost bought a car from him too. I almost bought a car from him too. Tell people who he is.
Well, no, I don't wanna say his, his identity.
He did, he did eventually tell me his identity, but I know who he is too.
So he's Car Dealership Guy on Twitter. He's basically, he's always just tweeting out about like, you know, insights into the car market, right? Which I like following, right? Because I want to know about the car market without doing any work.
So here's one that he just tweeted. He said, market is literally flooded with Buicks. They're rotting on car lots like trash. You could score a deal on these if you're willing to suffer the embarrassment of being seen in one. Buicks are at 100— Buicks are at 121-day supply. For context, Toyota is less than 30-day supply. Ridiculous. The simple people terms: day supply means the number of days it would take to deplete the current new car inventory at the current rate of sales. And so immediately I went, let's go look at a Buick.
Yeah. These guys are very influential. I'm telling you, I spent a lot of money on a car through this guy that I never saw. So what he's doing with his like concierge service, which, so, okay, let me give you the full idea then, then I'll break it down, but here's, we'll use him as an example. So he creates the car dealership guy and I don't think he's been had it for very long.
So, uh, pull up kind of the December '21.
So December '21, so that's one year basically. He added 93,000 followers in the last 30 days.
Oh my God, he's at 225,000 now.
Literally when we wrote this thing, like, you know, 2 days ago we did the research for this, he was at 219,000. So like 2 days, he added 6,000 followers. This guy is blowing up. Um, and what he's doing is tweeting out insights like, okay, you know, here's what the used car prices are doing. Here's what the market is. Here's which models and makes are, are hottest right now. Here's why G-Wagons are selling for this, and here's where I think that's going. Here's what's happening with auto loans, and here's what that means for the industry. All that good stuff. Okay. So he, he gets the following cuz he's tweeting out interesting stuff. Secondly, he then says, okay, well what do I do with this? What do I create a, a newsletter, paid community? You know, people are like the Sam and Shawn playbook, you know, they open up their little like red, red book and they're like, is this what I wanna do? But actually he got some good advice from a buddy of mine. Who said, screw that. Don't, don't make a newsletter and then try to find ads or sponsors or paid per— he goes, just help people buy cars. You're building up a load of trust on Twitter. People will buy cars from you. In fact, go buy me a car. So my buddy is like, I wanna buy a Toyota Sequoia. And I think there's like Toyota Sequoia, he was telling me, he's like some crazy things where it hasn't been updated in like 15 or 18 years or something like that. Like the last update was like in 2004. Or some shit like that. And there's like a 100,000-person waiting list for the Toyota Sequoia, some like crazy number like that. And he's like, yeah, but I bet there's gotta be one somewhere in the country. You know what? I'll get, I'll buy in any color, any goofy color. And this guy, because car dealership guy is a, has a background as a dealer, he can, at least we think, access the car dealership, the car dealer network. So basically they can buy cars they have like their own little MLS system, right? So they can buy cars out of auction. And, uh, and what— that's how dealers acquire cars, and then they could sell those cars at a retail markup. And so what he's doing is he's just buying cars out of the auction, not really applying the retail markup, and just charging a flat fee as a concierge for purchasing the vehicle.
Which we talked about before. We talked about negotiating, uh, negotiating car price as a service. From a guy who like knows the ins and outs of car dealerships and he knows the time of month, who to talk to, what to say, things like that. This is like that, but more in depth.
And so I told the guy, I was like, hey, I want an Escalade.
And he's like, you want an Escalade?
I said, I want an Escalade. By the way, hilarious thing. I go, I was like, you know, let me just— I was like, I'm not going to go test drive these cars, nothing. So I was like, let me just go read the reviews online real quick. But if you search for like reviews, you get these like It's like, dude, is this just like some SEO optimized website? So I go Reddit, right? Let me go to Reddit and see what people are saying. Let me tell you how people on Reddit feel about car dealerships. The same way that people in prison feel about pedophiles. Like, people on Reddit do not like Escalades. They are like, dude, I've never met a non-jerk in an Escalade, right?
Like, Escalade, you're gonna start smoking cigars, drug dealers, and desperate housewives..
And then I was like, hey guys, category number 3, Indian podcasters. Here we go.
And so, wait, are you getting the hybrid one or the electric one or something like that?
No, no, no, no. You gotta go full on.
Well, they have good self, you know, they have great self-driving technology. I actually looked at one too.
I didn't do that much research, to be honest with you. But, um, just got the, the big one. So the, the, the extended version. So anyways, the, my point is a lot of trust, but anyways, bought a car with this guy.
So, Dude, you live in the suburbs of San Francisco and you drive an Escalade. You are warping into something. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's definitely a stereotype that you're fitting into. You're like the Tony Soprano of Danville. I can't believe that.
Let me tell you some of these other guys. So we have Strip Mall Guy, who, you know, he's basically—
I love him.
Little strip malls are like, I don't know. I don't know what you would call it. These little like B-class shopping centers. Uh, there's the, uh, Franchise Wolf. Franchise Wolf is a guy who talks about buying franchises and what franchises are doing. Oh, Crumble Cookies exploding like crazy. Here's what's going on with that franchise. That's a great, that's a great niche to be in because interested franchise buyers are super, super valuable. That's that customer, a lead who's interested in buying a franchise is worth tens of thousands of dollars to these, uh, companies. Secret CFO, another great name. That's a beautiful name. I didn't go with the guy, but I like Secret CFO. So I like Franchise Wolf. I like Secret CFO. These are great names, great brands. And I think they work for a couple of reasons.
Number one— Wait, what about the watch guy? I talked to him. I almost bought a watch from him. He just will post—
I didn't even know about him.
Yeah, there's a, it's a, he's, it's a watch guy. It's called, I think just Watch Guy actually.
I see a new one like every day right now. And by the way, this is—
Dude, the Watch Guy's good.
Is going to get flooded. It's already getting flooded because people people see it now that we're talking about it and breaking it down. Everybody who's like, I am a dental hygienist, dental hygienist guy, you know, like there's going to be like just like a ton of these coming out.
But honestly, and they all use cartoons as their avatar. By the way, I sent you in the Riverside chat the Luxury Watch Guy, and he does the exact same thing. He goes, here's what I'm seeing. This Rolex retails for $20,000. It's an 8-month wait. And so therefore what we're actually seeing is people are buying it for $35,000. Or this month, mostly because of the crypto guys, this particular model of Rolex is going way down because they're selling it because they need to afford rent.
And by the way, if anybody wants to do the NFT guy, you know, for, for crypto, you know, we'll hire you for the billboard. We'll pay you to build this account if you're good. So, so, so basically this is the trend. Okay. So why do I think this works? Number one, the, the value proposition is in the name. You don't even need to click to the bio. They're a walking billboard for what value they're gonna provide to you, what, what they're gonna teach you about. I think that sets them apart from just like, oh, this is Steve, uh, you know, Steve Irwin. You, you know, you don't know that he's the nature guy, right? Like you don't know that you have to, there's still a leap of faith. You have to click in, read the bio, then you get the val— then you understand the value. Here it's right on top. Second thing, they promise basically data insights and industry secrets, and people really like industry secrets. Love it. And so you can go viral with some of these, like, here's the dirty little secrets about buying a used car or buy— go about what happens when you walk into a car dealership. I sat in these rooms for 30 years. I know what conversations the, the seller is having when you walk in like a fish. And it's like, I gotta click this, I gotta read this. And at the end of it, I'm gonna trust them as a niche expert. Um, so I think those are the two kind of like core reasons that it works. It's also just a focused feed. So versus my account, sometimes you're gonna hear me talk about sports. I'm gonna crack a joke. I'm gonna complain about my kids. And sometimes I'm gonna tweet tech stuff. And in reality, people just kind of want you for one of those things at, at upfront, upfront, a focused feed is gonna do better. So I think that's why these are, these are working. And, um, and I think all of these people who do this are gonna make at least low millions of dollars. And a few of them who've really learned how to capitalize, capitalize on this or will make tens of millions of dollars of a business that basically the core of their business is just this Twitter account where they are the, um, you know, the gas station guy. Like I saw one yesterday, it was mobile home park guy tweeted one interesting thing about mobile home. I insta-followed. I have no real desire to buy a mobile home park, but I kind of want to know about it, be smarter about it. And then turns out the guy DMs me, he's, it's my friend. I'm like, you, you do this? And he's like, yeah. I was like, what the hell's going on here? And so, you know, you never know what's It's your dad.
Your dad's doing this side hustle. I, uh, I think this is a really, really good insight that you've had. Um, and I completely agree. I think someone like a car, the car guy, I think could make tens of millions of dollars.
Now let me give you, now let me give you the, so what would I do about this? Let me add to it. Right. So, oh, by the way, another good thing about this, you can have ghostwriters or contributors because you're just under this anonymous umbrella brand. Um, so it's, that's another benefit here. Um, okay. So what can you do with it? So first I think avoid the, you know, let me do shoutouts, let me do paid ads and a free newsletter. Let me do a community. Like if somebody says the word community, you should stiff arm them in, in this. If you're doing these, you got like, you wanna do it where you actually, you actually get towards the transaction. Uh, maybe a high ticket course can work, but like, I, I do think you wanna be more like the car dealership guy who's actually doing this, or you want to be the strip mall guy and you want to raise a giant fund off of this.
Well, dude, have you asked why? Because I'm the same way. I would— I almost sold my car recently, and I had him give me a quote on it to tell me how much they're selling for. And then I go, oh, I— and I made a $100,000-plus decision because of his advice. Have you asked yourself, why do we trust just these guys? Like, they don't even— they use a cartoon.
It's the same reason people trust us from this podcast or from Twitter, which is that I think when you get to see somebody think out loud, which is what writing is, or, or talking on a podcast, um, and they're not talking to you, you're overhearing them and they're not selling you anything. They're just giving, give, give, give, give, give, right? This is the Gary Vee playbook, right? The jab, jab, jab, hook is give, give, give, ask. And so that's what they're doing right now. They're just in give mode. And I think that's the absolute right way to be. Give, give, give, give, give insights, insights, insights. And then there's a surprising number of wealthy people who will say, hey, can you help me? I want to do this. I want to buy one of these, or I want to get your opinion on this. And they will come to you hat in hand like me and you did to these suckers, like suckers to these guys. Okay. So that's the first thing. Um, secondly, I think that I would get away. I called it the guy mafia, but I'm calling it right here. It's time to start the gal mafia. We need, we need car dealership lady. We need strip, strip club queen. We need, we need the female version.
MLM queen.
Yeah, exactly. We need the, uh, it's called, uh, network marketing or some shit like that, by the way. That's how that, it's like when you meet somebody who's proud of being in an MLM, you're like, wait, you know you're in MLM? They're like, yeah, I'm a, I'm a, I'm great at network sales. So what the fuck is network sales? If you can say the word, I have a downline, like if those words have come out of your mouth, like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're a pimp. That's what the, that's what the, that's what the Twitter profile should be like. Does, does the word downline make you weak at the knees? If yes, you're at the right place, my friend.
Right. If I presented you the shapes circle, square, and triangle, and you're, you immediately gravitate towards triangle. It's like those like psych tests, the Rorschach test or whatever. Um, Okay. So I think you should brand it as a woman, whether you're a guy or a girl, to be honest with you. Um, I think, you know, catfish away, go. I think, I think that's the first opportunity. Um, second, you gotta go find all the valuable niches. So luxury watch, sneakers, cars, gas stations, real estate. I mean, what else? There's franchises.
There's— dude, but are women using Twitter? I surveyed my audience and I go, select if you're a male or a female. And it was, it was 93% male. It was all dudes. It was probably all dudes looking for a father figure. Like, it was all young men. Our, our, our—
like, have you—
when me and Sahil did the meetup, it was like, uh, literally 100 to 1 men to women. It was crazy. If you're a single woman, you gotta come to our meetups. You will love it. Um, do you have any women followers, you think? Like, it's— or is all Twitter this way?
No, I think it's more us than it is all of Twitter. I think Twitter probably skews, but not to the 90%. Uh, that's like, that's kind of a crazy ratio there, but okay. By the way, so here's, here's my crazier ideas. Okay. So first of all, I think Twitter's the wrong place to do this. Um, I think it works on Twitter for sure, but I also think LinkedIn, I think that, uh, there are other networks where you should probably be able to do well with this. Um, I don't know if LinkedIn allows like anonymous accounts or like fake names. Maybe it doesn't. But the second thing is, honestly, I think there could be a whole social network that's basically just, yo, you join here and there's just verified, like people who are industry insiders that you get to read their content from and, and, and subscribe and follow them. I think you could literally, like, it is not likely to work, but it's more likely than a lot of stupid social app ideas, uh, cuz it has really clear value prop. So anyways, that's my like long shot idea around this.
Yeah, I think this is a really, really good insight that you've had. And I completely agree that there's a massive opportunity here. I tried to make the argument this summer that there's going to be a billion-dollar empire started on Twitter, just like there has been on YouTube and all these other things. And I think one of these people— it wouldn't— it's not out of this world that one of these folks could be that person. Another thing that I've noticed on Twitter, and I didn't entirely plan this, but because you brought up, I'll bring it up. Have you noticed people doing affiliates for agencies. So basically, who— a question that you and I probably get asked a lot is like, who's a good accountant, accounting firm, or who's a good growth marketer for newsletters? Or, you know, there's like 8 questions that you and I get asked all the time. And I did this with My Body Tutor. So My Body Tutor, they were like, hey, do you just want to like earn money every person you send to us? Because you're already sending tons of people. I go, Hell yeah, give me a link.
I'm reading a bunch of like a bunch of shoutouts. I was like, are you getting kickbacks here or what's going on? I feel like you've tweeted.
No, I haven't. I just started doing it for My Body Tutor because they're like, dude, you sent us so much, like, we'll just give you some money if you want. But no, I've, I've not. Who have I tweeted out lately? I just, I just call out them.
And it was one other one that I saw that I was like, Jason Yanowitz. It was your Diego, my video guy. Yeah.
Yeah. No, no, I know. I just like, I'm just like, fuck it, dude. You've done well. What I told him was I go, hey, if you're He does it for free for you, right? I go, do it for free for me, and if you're good, I'll tell people about you. And so I made him do it for free for me for 6 months. And so, and so I was just like, I'll just share you with you. But then you and I have friends, and I've seen people do this, and I think they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by referring people to certain agencies. And the right way to do this is to find a product or a service that you're already a fan of and ask for an affiliate, or go and start the thing with someone and just be an affiliate. And I think that there's like this world— we had Neil Patel on the pod and he basically founded an agency. And the reason why he was considered the founder was he did start it, but he wasn't running it. But a lot of the early leads and probably a lot of the leads to this day came from neilpatel.com because people were using his website to search like SEO stuff. And we haven't seen people do that on Twitter, but it actually is really good because Twitter, unlike the other social media platforms, is ideal for link clicks. And that makes it really easy to attribute growth. And I think that there's a lot of people making a significant amount of money referring people to these high-ticket products. And I think we can continue to see that. And it might be a lot, pretty quite, quite big. I've thought about doing this.
So one thing I've been thinking about doing is post Milk Road. Okay. We sold the Milk Road, got some time. What do I want to do next? I kind of want to focus on the pod, make the pod bigger, uh, better, all that, all that good stuff. One of the ways I think, but the pod, you know, the pod itself is free. If you're listening to this right now, you've paid me, you know, $0. So how, how does this ever, you know, become something that, that you could justify saying, I'm not gonna go build another business, I'm gonna do this instead. And one way is that, can the pod basically provide some kind of win-win value for people? And so this one thing I was thinking about was like, I kind of wanna buy a bunch of businesses that like, of people that I've worked with, like either, you know, like go to my accountant or go to my lawyer or go to my estate planner. And basically buy the, a majority stake in their firm. And in exchange be like, cool, there are a lot of other founders like me who also want estate planning, who also want legal help, who also want trademark help, who also want accounting, and basically just build an MFM-style, like, back office, um, set of businesses. And instead of an affiliate, like, actually own them, make sure that they're, they're great, like, trust in them. And, um, and then drive a bunch of value to the, to those businesses. And then in return, there's a bunch of people, founders like me, who are constantly asking for recommendations about like, yo, I'm trying to find a good blank. And I've burned through 7 accountants before I found one I like. Same thing on the estate planning side, same thing on, and so it's like, no, not everybody should have to redo that work. And so that's one thought I've had as to like a cool business to build that just kind of helps kind of founder entrepreneur, you know, types. And yeah, just like own those, own a collection of those businesses that and then, you know, have audience, you know, people in this audience who want that, want those same services, be able to just go find who we use.
Yeah. And the, the cons are like, can you possibly vet the right people and have like actually quality? But the pros are like This is pretty much what Richard Branson did with Virgin. And so it's definitely possible. I often wonder why, like, more celebrities like the Kardashians and stuff, like, why don't they own an equity stake in more things than they do? It doesn't seem like they do for a lot. They have done for one or two things that ended up being quite big. And so I wonder, like, what's the strategy? Like, where's— where does— because every celebrity has thought about this too. And so I think like, well, where's the down— where's the Where's the mistake?
It's like, you know, how much, how many, if you're gonna take equity stakes, you know, how much, how many things can you promote and how many things can you, you know, you're better off basically in the, in those cases, like you're better off finding the one or two product categories that you can own a large chunk of and go big, right? This is like SKIMS for, for Kim Kardashian. This is Kylie's lip stuff. This is Conor McGregor's whiskey, Irish whiskey. It's like, you know, he took the Irish whiskey thing, was like, oh, I'm just gonna put this on blast. I'm gonna own a chunk of this. I'm gonna put this on blast. I think they sold it for $500 or $600 million, um, within 3 years, something like that. So, you know, that was like worth a lot more than like affiliate linking out to 20 services or trying to own tiny chunks of 20 businesses and then have to use your clout to promote 20 different businesses. That's kind of exhausting. So I think that's why.
Want to do a different topic? Yeah, I, um, well, let me brainstorm. Or do you want to go to— is your Painfotainment thing really good?
Both of my things here I think are pretty good, but I can save them because I think to the end.
Go, go, go, go.
Which one do you want? Painfotainment?
Yes.
Or the Katana Store?
The Katana Store is a horrible name. So what is that actually? I've seen this. Is this the guy who keeps tweeting about his YouTube page?
Yes.
Yes. I thought that was beautiful. I kept— I'm like, wait, Katana? Is this a joke? Like you literally just sell swords?
Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I see this guy, I've been, I've been seeing this guy for a while now. And so he sells, I think his website's called minikatana.com. So it's mini katanas.
But what does that mean? Like a Tech Deck? Like a, like a, like a Tech Deck, but a sword?
What's a Tech Deck? I don't know what that is.
You remember the mini finger skateboards?
Oh no, no, it's not that small. It's like, you know, like 2 feet in length instead of like a full samurai sword is like, you know, 5 feet or whatever. Uh, this is, this is, uh, you know, like half the size of a normal thing. Maybe, you know, 2 feet instead of 4.
I didn't know this. I didn't know the standard size of a katana.
If I'm being honest. Yeah, I realized I said that and like, you know, the katana guy is going to come after me here and that's not who you want on your bad side. All right. So if you go to this website, you'll see that it does about 1 to 2 million monthly visits, which is a lot. That is a lot of traffic for an e-com store. Uh, he tweets about their revenue sometimes.
Yeah, actually that's a good, that's a good thing. So I think this business does, it does, he said 8 figures, it does at least $10 million a year in revenue.
I think it's probably closer to 20. I would get way more.
Um, so I think it's probably closer to 20 based on the traffic. And one of the main ways that they do it is through YouTube. Okay. So really there's two kind of like hardcore takeaways that I have out of this. So this I'm calling my, um, I'm calling this my new theory, my updated theory on what it takes to have a great e-com brand.
By the way, these are dope. I'm, I'm finna buy me a fucking sword.
These are sick. Yeah. You went from making fun of this to add to cart in like 6 seconds.
Okay. So yeah, I'm going to buy me a gold sword. Who doesn't like that?
I call this the Stranger Things Law, which is basically if you want to make it an e-com, one of the things you got to do is find people who are strangely and unapologetically obsessed with a certain lifestyle, and then you just need to sell them things. So, uh, so, you know, that's, that's the whole model, right? So here's an example, Katana store, right? So it's like you have this people, you have people who are just obsessed with Japanese culture for some reason and they're always like, fedora, like fedora, you'll never find an Indian guy who loves Japanese culture, right? Like you're finding white people who are super into Japanese culture, not Japanese people. And, and so you're like, um, and, and there's people who are really into something that's kind of irrational. And I remember meet one time I met this guy who was the first product guy, first product manager at Twitter. He joined when Twitter was maybe like 10, 15 people, uh, total. And I was like, I remember talking to him and I was like, so was it obvious at that time Twitter was gonna be huge? He goes, no, no, no. Like Twitter was, it was like basically nothing at the time. It was very small. It was just kind of this thing that tech people were doing, but even the tech people who were using it kind of felt like, well, this is stupid, right? Like we're all just text messaging what we're like, what we're having for lunch right now. Like, That doesn't seem like the next big thing. And he goes, but luckily I had learned a very valuable lesson, which is anytime you observe a weird behavior, people doing a phenomenon where people are en masse just doing this thing that makes no sense. I first, your first reaction is say, that's weird. And you kind of judge it. He goes, but I've learned you gotta lean into that phenomenon.
If people are doing it, yeah, like people playing video games, there's a reason.
Exactly. This reminded me of my experience when I was in college. I remember freshman year of college, I walk into my buddy Tofiq's dorm room and I was like, I see him playing video games and he's got his back to me. He's playing, I don't know, StarCraft at the time, I think. And then I'm like, yo, Tofiq. And then he turns around and I'm like, oh, sorry. I didn't realize you're in a game. And because he took off his headphones, he turned around and I noticed that the game is still going and he's not touching the mouse anymore. And I was like, What are you— wait, what are you doing? What, are you just like in like a demo mode? What is this? He goes, oh no, I'm not playing, I'm watching. I know, you're watching this. 2010. I'm like, uh, 2007 or something like that, 2008. And, um, I'm like, you're watching somebody play video games? And he goes, yeah, I have— I always do this. I'm like, you woke up— I was like, it's 8:30 in the morning. You woke up at 8:30 in the morning and started watching somebody play StarCraft? Why don't you just play? He's like, no, this is like one of the best players. I just want to watch him. And I was like, nerd. I was like, hold on, let me go get 4 friends so we can make fun of you together because this is not going to be fun alone. And I literally went and grabbed my roommate. I was like, come see what Tofiq's doing. This guy's literally— I was like, do you know, is this your friend?
He's like, well, no, did you start like making fun of him but you actually like sit next to him? You're like, well, hold on, hold on, let me like—
I'm like, why is he doing that with his dragon?
You know, like, yeah, well, yeah. Wait, why did he go left? He should have gone left.
He went right. He's like, this guy's the best player on the Korean server. So they played this match last night, Korean time, whatever. I'm watching it now. And I was like, you are the weirdest nerd. And this guy is the weirdest guy. Uh, he does like many, many weird things. This was one of them. And I remember just laughing at him, making fun of him. Fast forward 10 years, I go and I'm like announcing in our LinkedIn or whatever, like, hey, we sold our company Bebo to Twitch. Super excited. Joined the exec team at Twitch. He called— I get this call from Tofiq. Tofiq calls me, you know, twice a year. I get this call from Tofiq. I pick up. I'm expecting congratulations. He just goes, you little bitch. And I'm like, what? And he's like, you used to make fun of me for this shit and now you're Mr. Twitch. And I was like, oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. Dude, you were way ahead of the curve. I should have listened to you. Like, I could have created Twitch if I had like, if I had leaned into this insight that people want to watch other people play video games. God, I love a guy who holds a grudge for 10 years. By the way, dude, he was, he was ready.
I like the cut of your jib, guy. I'm about it.
And so anyways, that, that's kind of the, the, the, this learning of if you see people doing the strange behavior, right? Like I remember seeing people wear those Vibram Five Toe shoes where you're like, you're gonna run barefoot? Why do you do that? Like, yo, and they're like super into that lifestyle. I saw a video of Joe Rogan talking about people who hunt white bucks or some shit like that. Like, you know, some certain type of deer, I guess. He goes, dude, people don't realize how crazy this lifestyle is. And he started explaining that people will build fields of like food and like lounge areas to try to attract these bucks in to hunt. They like spend months building these like, you know, man caves for bucks just to attract them. And then they hunt them, right? And I was like, that's crazy.
That I bet there's people who are getting— people getting cold ice baths every morning.
People ice baths every morning, just like you. People who, um, I met a guy yesterday, makes $5 million doing a woodworking course.
Woodworking. No way.
And it's like, why? Because people who are into woodworking are not just kind of into woodworking. You can almost be really into woodworking.. And, um, so there's this crazy— if you see this strange obsession, that is the basis for a store.
Our software is the worst.
Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM.
Our software is the best.
Grow better.
So that's the first thing. Second thing, these guys are crushing it with YouTube organic content. They built their YouTube channel up to 2 million subscribers. Oh my God. This is one of those like really cool growth hacks. I think it's worth going and looking at where they just do these unboxings. They got like, you know, like cute girls who are into katanas, like nerding out about katanas as they unbox them. It's like, yeah, I can see a bunch of dudes getting really into this channel. That makes sense to me. Like, I think that's going to be like, I think there's a lot of people who are going to like this brand and like this content there. And so I think they're just doing a really good job. I think it's really good execute, like 10 out of 10 execution at like a 5 out of 10 opportunity. Um, but like, you know, still nonetheless, a lot, lot you can kind of learn from this.
Dude, I'm looking at their YouTube. I don't understand a lot of these references because it's like anime based, but they don't do that many videos. It looks like they do 1 or 2 a month and they all kind of hit.
This is crazy. They also do, I think, a lot of TikToks maybe. So I think they do, they do TikToks. They basically just moved their Facebook ad budget into hiring a full-time female creator to do this content and that sort of thing. And so, uh, yeah, I think they're, it's a, it's a really cool, really cool brand.
So I just wanted to give the guy a shout out because I forget his name, but on Twitter he's like showing all of the backend, like he's taking screenshots of their YouTube and he's a really, really good follow. He's really been fascinating. I forget his name too. I'll find it, but he said something like, um, He said something like they, uh, they got something like 200 or 300 million views in the last year and they only started this past year. Uh, and he's like, we're getting 80 million a month. Isaac, what's his—
so his name is Isaac. He's TheIsaacMed, M-E-D. And his bio says scaling a sword brand to 9 figures with organic video marketing. Well, if that ain't exactly what we just described, you know, like perfect description.
Yeah, he did a really good job.
He's really cool. Also, I like his profile picture a lot. He kind of looks like a madman. He did like a good clear headshot, but he kind of looks like a madman instead of like a tryhard. And I just appreciate anybody that's not a tryhard. By the way, pet peeve. I feel like all of Twitter is so cringe and tryhard, and I don't know if anything changed or I changed, but do you feel this way? Like, I feel like 90% of tweets and including my own tweets, I'm like, is there a tweet that's not cringy?
I think that we were the tryhards and now we're over it and we're making fun of people that are doing the exact same thing that we did.
Yeah, I love that. You, you use the ladder, climb up, and then you pull the ladder up behind you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's what we're doing, you know.
When I did it, it was cool, but when you do it, that's small boy stuff.
Yeah, I think, I think we're just being haters, which is cool, which is fine. It's a natural, it's a natural thing. Let me explain. I'll wrap up with one quick thing. I posted a researcher job. So basically, I don't really have a researcher. You do. And I'm envious of that. I want that. I need a little help because you're— you always come with fire. I need a little help coming up with good content for the pod. And by the way, if you want to see the job, just go to my Twitter and like scroll down and you'll see like a Google form. But so I tweeted this out. I got like 300 applicants. And in order to apply, I was very specific. I was like, if you screw up one thing on these directions, like, I'm not even gonna consider hiring you. I was like, you have to like put your link in here.
The most important part of job application.
Well, yeah, because I was like, dude, if you're not gonna sweat the details on this, then you're not gonna— that's what I said. If you, if you don't do a good job on this, I, I, I don't believe you'll do a good job on anything else. And I made people, I was like, I was like really simple, come up with 3 ideas and make it in a Google Doc and put the Google Doc link in this form. Make it so it's readable so I can just click it. If it's not readable, I'm not even gonna ask to like, I won't even look at it. And I got hundreds of applicants. About half of them followed directions and about a good chunk, 25%, were actually pretty legitimate. What do I do with like these 100, like, decent people? You know, it's kind of like an interesting— this is like an interesting business problem or an interesting problem if you have people. So we did this with apartments. So our— my first business that was an online company, was basically, look, in San Francisco, an open bedroom for a $1,200 a month apartment, an open bedroom in a 3-bedroom house that gets like 500 applicants and all 500 are interested in living in the same neighborhood. They're all interested in this ad. So they clearly have similar interests. We should just group them into their own thing and move them into their own apartment. And that was the premise of my first company. With this, I'm like, man, I got like 300 people, 100 are, are somewhat qualified. What do you do with this group of people? If I can, it kind of seems like such a waste that I'm just using one of them. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Unfortunately, not a lot of people need a researcher like this. So I think you just need to translate it to like something like most people don't have a podcast that requires researching random business stuff. So what could these people do? That's what's a job that's more common that these people would be really good for? Is it like chief of staff type roles? Is it like something like that, you think?
I don't know. I have to, I just started thinking about this ahead of time, uh, like right before we started recording, but I did think this is like the, uh, the app, the application process is, and this is just a little small thing. Imagine if you're, uh, Burger King or something or some huge company and you get like, you know, a million applicants a year. Uh, it's like kind of interesting where if you, you can only hire a couple of 'em. And so you're like, are wasting 98%. You know, in the same way that Ford decided to make charcoal out of their burnt wood that they were using to heat their furnaces when they were making iron, can I, what can my charcoal be of these 299 applicants that I don't actually hire?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Um, I don't have an answer. I don't have an answer. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry, people. Like, this is the letdown, but yeah, it's an interesting question.
The thing to do would be like, what, what common job do these skills translate to? And then you have now a cohort or a pool of people that are, you know, somewhat vetted that you could create like a job board or some sort of like matching marketplace or service where people could just hire, you know, people like this for, for that common job. But, uh, I'm not sure.
Well, I wonder like, like the people who have enough probably don't care, but what, like the people who like the, the engineering companies or some, someone who's getting like a startup that's getting an engineering company. Or getting engineers to apply, what they should do is just like be like, hey, I'm sorry you didn't get the job, but here's like 5 other gigs that are kind of cool and just take like the $30,000 referral fee.
Do you know what I mean? So our buddy Ryan Hoover kind of did this. He, he was hiring a researcher or like an analyst for his fund and he's like, dude, I got like hundreds of applicants. I interviewed them and he's like, these— I forgot how many. Let's call it 30 just for an example. He's like, these 30 were really good. I just, I can't hire 30. I only needed one.. And so he emailed me and a bunch of other people who had funds. He's like, do you need an analyst? Like, here's our kind of vetted analysts that we thought were good. Um, if you need one, like, I'd love to help these people get a job. Like, he wasn't asking for any money because Ryan's a nice guy and, you know, this is not how he's looking to make money. But like, it was kind of great. At the same time, I was sort of like, I'm not looking for the sloppy seconds. Like, these, these people weren't good enough for you. Why, why are they good enough for me? There's a part of me that's like that too. So I think you have that challenge. If I'm a tech company, I'm looking for engineers. That's fair. And I hire these people and you didn't hire me, but you know, Facebook didn't hire you, but Google should. And I think Google's got a little problem with that. So you have to find some way around that. That's fair. Signal problem. Uh, same thing with investments. If I send an investment to you, I'm like, hey, great deal. Not doing it though. You should, you, you should invest in this. It's like that. Those are the worst in— those are the worst emails. Cuz it just, sometimes it's true. It's like, oh, this is just your niche or it's your stage or whatever. But a lot of times it just adds like a negative flag to it for no reason.
Well, and the answer to this might be there's nothing I could do. Fuck 'em. Sorry guys. Like you gave me, you did all this work for me and you're just not, you're not going to get the job. And there's some guys who have applied for like 8 jobs that I've had throughout the years and I feel so sad. I'm like, sorry. Yeah. You missed again.
We're not hiring that many people. Right. So it's just a hard, hard thing to do. Um, all right, let's wrap it up there. Good episode. And, uh, yeah, we'll see you guys a couple days.