#40 - Paid Courses with Tom Wang, Barstool Acquisition & New Startup Hubs

I'm gonna sit here in a trapped room. You will have the coronavirus in 22 minutes.

Whenever people ask if I'm sick, I'm like, "Oh, just allergies." And so the joke at the office is like, "I think I'm gonna catch your allergies. What type of allergies do you have?" I'm like, "I have the allergies that make me throw up." Right. Or like, "I think I'm gonna—" You know, like the stomach allergies?

Yeah. The cough.

Because everyone's like, "You gotta go home." Like, "It's just allergies. You can catch these allergies, but it's allergies, probably." So let's just jump right in and call this guy.

So we're gonna call this guy Tom. The backstory here is I posted on our, we made like a Facebook group for the podcast. If you're on Facebook, just search My First Million. And I posted in there, I was like, man, I really wanna talk to somebody who's making over $1 million a year on a course. And this guy was like, hey, I do. I was like, wow, okay, fantastic. There's only like 100 members in here, what are the odds? And so then he emailed me and he sent me the screenshots of his dashboard and then like a walkthrough of his method and I was like, this is fucking great, so. So I saw the numbers, so. Legit. So he's, you know, he's making a lot. So we'll see how much he wants to share. Um, Thomas Wang. Yeah, so, uh, and then, you know, we'll figure it out. So let me call this guy. Tom. Hey, yes, what's up, man?

Turn that up, I want to hear it. Hey, how are you, man?

Uh, we're doing fantastic. All right, so you are on the podcast right now. Uh, I'm here with Sam. We got our boy Henry on the camera, so it's all, it's all happening right now. Everything you dreamed of, it's happening. So I wanted to call you because I was telling them I posted in the group about, hey, I wanna talk to somebody who's making $1 million a year doing a course, and you showed up with the goods. And so I wanted you to tell whatever you're comfortable telling, tell your story, we got a couple questions. And just so you know, you could share everything and then at the end we'll bleep out shit that's too sensitive, okay?

Okay, sounds good. Okay. Yeah, so my story, I guess for me it's always been like a side hustler ever since I was growing up. Was trying different ways to make money from selling watches at the night market, selling hoverboards, all these different things. Never really had any guidance from anybody else, but when I was selling hoverboards, I was trying to just create a website, and I knew nothing about e-commerce at the time. So I thought you can just create a website, get a Facebook page, and you can start making money online. Obviously, that's not the case. During that time, someone actually approached me and said, "Hey, I can actually sell these hoverboards for you on Amazon." 'And I live in Vancouver, Canada, and Amazon back in 2015, I thought it was just a place where people buy old textbooks from. I've never bought anything on Amazon before.' So I was pretty skeptical. I was like, 'Sure, okay, well, I guess if you think—' He was talking pretty big. So I was like, 'All right, just let's see what you can do.' And he ended up selling a bunch of hoverboards on Amazon before Amazon actually pulled down all the hoverboards because things were exploding and stuff like that. So that's how I discovered Amazon. And then from there, basically just thought it was just going to be side hustle, but it actually turned out to, well, it turned from side hustle into a 7-figure business. And right now we're actually going through an acquisition, so we're trying to sell the business right now.

Yeah, a couple questions. So first, for everybody listening, he basically started an FBA business, got it to work. FBA means? Fulfilled by Amazon, so selling a product on Amazon. And then the course teaches other people how to do the same, so that's how the course and what you're talking about connect. So right now you're in the process of selling a 7-figure 7-figure FBA business and you have a 7-figure course that teaches people how to do their own FBA business.

So that's the lay of the land. Is he going to reveal the first one?

Yeah, what can you talk about about the actual business itself?

What would your income be in $6 million in sales?

Wow, that's amazing. And what could it sell for? 3 or 4 times income?

Nice. Okay, good. So, so congrats on the FBA business. And then tell us about the course. So why did you switch to that? Because I'm always skeptical, like when somebody's selling a course about how to make money. I'm like, if you knew that secret, you would just be doing it. And in your case, in fairness, you are actually doing it. But why did you decide to do the course? And then talk about how big that's become.

Gotcha. Sam has got a couple questions for you.

How much did that first one cost?

That was $1,997 Canadian.

$1,997? Are you saying $1,000? Yeah. Wow.

So pause for a sec. I understand the model, so ask me some questions.

Okay, so having a little wonky audio thing. Uh, the 150 people paid a G to show up.

So, so basically what he does is he does, he does Facebook ads that basically say, hey, come learn this thing, and it's free. It's $20, just come. It's like a meetup. They come and he gets, you know, 60, 100 people in the room. There he gives them like 2 hours of awesome content, he shows them, look, I actually do this. And then he says, you know, if you want to do the weekend workshop, that one's a grand, 2 grand, 3 grand, whatever it is, and then that's where, you know, if you charge 2 grand and you're getting 50 people to do it, you know, you're generating, you know, whatever, $100K a month, and that adds up to a million bucks a year, right?

Tom, did you feel sleazy?

Did you feel sleazy when you were doing this?

I'm not judging you here, I'm just telling you that's what most people are gonna think.

Yeah, a lot of people who see somebody, you know, teaching a workshop or a class on how to get rich and then upselling the class and saying, hey, this was the cheap one, but if you wanna go deeper, right, like, it doesn't mean it is sleazy, but some people shy away 'cause they're like, oh, I don't wanna be that guy, you know? Did you have that fear? Yeah, yeah, no, totally.

And Tom, is there anything that we, 'cause we like to keep these guest segments short where you pop in and you help educate the world on hey, you know, here's something I figured out, because we're like you, we're trying to share interesting pathways, knowledge, so that people can see a variety of options and see that there's a million ways to win, and I think your way of winning was pretty dope. Is there anything else you wanted to share? You could shout out your course, whatever you want.

We'll link to it.

We'll link to it in the show notes. Just anything else you wanna share? Any good stories, good tidbits you wanted to share?

I think there's a lot of people that are, I think a lot of listeners are people that maybe they're working a 9 to 5, maybe they're like, you know, already have a successful business, whatever. But for the people that are listening that have a 9 to 5 and want to start a side hustle that maybe eventually will become a full-time hustle and so they can quit their job and, you know, do this business. I just think that selling on Amazon is just such a good opportunity. And obviously that sounds biased, but trust me, I've done so many other businesses and nothing has worked. So if I'm someone who can figure this out, um, it's just buying something for cheap from China and selling it for a little bit more. And Amazon gives you all the customers already. So I just think it's a really, really good opportunity. And in terms of the shout out to the course, I don't teach online, I only teach locally. So if you're in Vancouver, you can come to my workshop, it's called FBA Masterclass. But if you're online, if you're somewhere, you know, somewhere else, maybe one day I'll have an online course, but right now I don't.

Cool. Tom, you're the man. Thanks for calling in, dude. Thank you. I think this, what you build is pretty awesome.

Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it.

Talk to you later. You know, I've done those. Yeah, I attended one of yours. Yeah, tell that story a little bit. Yeah, so I'm a self-taught copywriter, which means I studied it, but I'm only average. Neville— you're above average. I'm pretty good, but I'm not formally educated. Neville is my best friend, our good friend, and he is same boat but better, self-taught and very good. And we just said we're gonna go to Sean's office Show up. I think we said it's $1,000. Yep. I think maybe 25 people came.

Yeah, it was, uh, basically it was an all-day. It was one day, right? All day. It was one day, morning till sort of evening, and, uh, it was great. You and Neville were up there.

We each made about 10 G's on a Saturday.

Yeah, like 30 people or so, I would say, were in the crowd. They had all paid to be there.

Everyone was excited to be there. Some— and I think it was only 14 days notice. People flew in, right?

Yeah, you guys did it kind of on a whim, and I saw that. I was like, this is awesome. This guy, you know, just made 5 grand or 10 grand on a Saturday. I think we each made 10 grand. That's amazing. And you guys were just talking about what you know. It was a very intimate group. Everybody got to like workshop their shit. So it was like, hey, I'm trying to get better. I have this landing page. How would you improve this? And he would put it up on the big screen and we would just workshop it together. Yeah. And I attended because— You and Jason did. I wanted to learn. And I have like 2 pages of notes from that day. And I got to go for free because I let you host it. But I was like, this is actually really valuable. Why didn't you do more of that?

—don't know, we should. We should. There's no reason. I should.

I get energy from that. I just love hearing my own voice. That's why I like the podcast.

That's why I like being on stage. Well, you're naturally a teacher, so I would like to, I would partner with you. Neville's like that too. I went home, like when I went home, I needed like 2 days to recover. So it ruins your weekend, which is no big deal.

The niche is interesting, right? So copywriting is, I think, an interesting niche. The other one, you know, just more generic one is we're here in San Francisco, there's a lot of people who want to be in a startup, but they haven't figured out how to sort of transition from that 9 to 5 into starting their own company or how to raise money. On any of these topics where I've done it and I've done it multiple times, I know how to do this, just pick a niche and let's do it.

We should have that discussion. I think that like overnight it would make tens of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue, right? A month. Uh, and most importantly, I love doing it.

Okay. So this is—

You tweeted this out. I tweeted it out.

I forgot all about it. I've been watching the presidential debates and Sarah, my wife, ends up donating money to Andrew Yang and I'm like, "This Andrew Yang guy, he sounds kind of interesting. I feel like that's a mem, I remember that name somehow." And I looked up my email. He was the guy who was emailing me.

That's crazy that you just remembered it. So if you want to see the tweet, it's @thesamparr. That's how I'm gonna get to it right now. Yeah, funny thing is you tweeted back and I'm like, sorry, if you still want to talk, yeah, let me know, bro. I totally missed that one. Okay, so his exact thing was, uh, this is in 2018, this is not that long ago.

Not that— he emailed me at '15 and in '18.

And so he goes, do you think The Hustle might do a book feature? You know, I can get the book to the editor, see what he thinks. If you send an intro, I can take it from there. I feel like this would move some units. And, uh, you know, Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America.

Yeah, and I, I first I thought Venture for America, I was like, that's some nonprofit, what, that's a small thing, right? And second, I get a lot of people asking for that, and I just didn't take it up on them. I didn't take him up on it and missed that one.

Dude, that's so funny. You know, the, the other thing that he did, like, I looked into his past because he's got a business background. Yeah, like, what's the business?

It was a GMAT. It was like a GMAT. That's how Eric Bahn, my buddy and partner, investor in The Hustle, right? He's an investor in The Hustle, yeah, helped us get started, and he owned Beat the GMAT, which he sold, so he knew all the GMAT guys, and he was like, this Eric guy is gonna run for president, and I was like, Andrew, Andrew guy is gonna run for president, and I was like, Eric, I don't wanna talk to this guy, I'm gonna look like an idiot, this guy has no chance of, like I'm gonna look like a stupid fool for like saying, oh yeah, this tech guy's gonna run for president. I was wrong. Yeah. Totally wrong.

Alright, so brainstorm, what else we got? What are some other topics? I got a bunch written down, I don't know which one I wanna start with, but do you have any that you've been wanting to talk about?

So I've been looking at this. There's been some stuff written about Utah lately.

The best. So I read the same article, probably you're referring to.

So there's this thing which is like sort of the Mormon Valley, where, you know, the new Silicon Valley. There's a bunch of companies that are really big that are based in Utah.

And there's way more shady internet marketing companies that you probably don't know.

So all the MLMs are based in Utah.

And all the, uh, a lot of the call centers.

And then there's some like totally, you know, like no asterisk next to their name, like Domo, and there's some others that are like enterprise companies.

Uh-huh. Skullcandy, Stance Socks. Right. I think Adobe is started by a Utah Mormon guy.

Well, when your conversion rate is like 0.1% and you're like, oh, this other thing has a 3% conversion rate, that's easy.

And, uh, and then on top of that, you know, there's a sort of network effect of other people you can tap into that have similar sort of sales persuasion, you know, skills. And they're creating hubs and it's way cheaper. And they don't drink.

They're hardworking, great work ethic. They tithe, so they give 10% of their income to the church, so they're probably like, I need to make a lot of money.

Right, so I'm interested in Utah for many reasons. I just wanna go out there, so I wanna go, I wanna look at real estate, let's go meet some of these companies, let's go, what's up with these MLMs? Let's go meet them, let's go find out what's what, 'cause they obviously have a stigma, but.

I'll go with you and I'll ball tricks. With the largest software companies to sell. I think Qualtrics is from there. Right. ClickFunnels, which some people think is scammy, they're from there, but he's a great salesman.

And it's a good product.

I think it's a good product. I do too.

So if you're listening to this from Utah, host us, tell us, take us around, give us a tour. We're itching to go to Utah.

And then the second thing I want to do, I'm going to do this in our Trends Facebook group. What I'm going to do is I think a great way to come up— I love investing in software companies and I like— I would love to start one one day. I, and what I've been doing is looking at our expenses. So we spend a certain amount of money each month. Yep. I'm, I like to look at our QuickBooks and be like, where are we spending our money? I'm just gonna get rid of some stuff that I don't want to reveal. I'm gonna post our expenses in our Facebook group. Right. And I think that's an interesting way to see.

And I'd love to see others too, because that's where you're gonna see some patterns and opportunities.

So I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna publish that. You also need to publish your thing, your—

the import-export list. Yeah, I have one idea. This problem— so sometimes I have these ideas that I still think I'm gonna do and I don't share them, but in reality I'm not actually gonna go do them.

I'll just delete some of them.

Yeah, I should— yeah, I should do it. But then I feel weird. I'm like, I'm— here's my idea list. I took away the good ones that I would actually do, right?

No, I don't think you should feel weird. I do that too. So like I invested in a company that was based off a Trends report and someone asked me which one it is and I was like, I'm not going to tell you, right? I don't want to reveal it yet.

Yeah, sometimes, you know, but I think that's part of being real, right? It's like, look, when there's actually an edge or, you know, there's an actual arbitrage that I'm currently exploiting, I'm no fool. I'm not going to tell you about something that I'm currently exploiting that I know is so easy that you're going to exploit it too. And if you're listening, I apologize, but I'm also smart. That's what the smart person does. And sometimes if it's like, hey, I noticed this, I'm not going to exploit it, then cool, let me give it away for free. You go explain most. Yeah, cuz I don't have the time to do most things. Yes, there's just a couple things that I'm gonna do. So anyways, I want to talk about that. A couple of random companies I want to talk about. So tell me if you have an opinion, rapid-fire. Byte, which is the new Vine, the founder of Vine.

Yeah, I signed up and got the handles that I wanted.

Yeah, squat on it and then move on.

Yeah, right when I signed up, a lot of the handles were already gone, and I I'm like, I'm— it's weird, I'm not an old person yet, but I looked at it like an old person. I saw a bunch of young, cool people on it, so I automatically thought it was gonna be a hit.

It's like TikTok. Yeah, what I think is interesting there is their— the product actually is worse than TikTok. TikTok's a much better product than Vine ever was and then Byte started as. But, uh, the cool thing is that TikTok has a, um, because it's from that Chinese company and there's like, there's some fear around like, how much do we want to trust this Chinese company that controls this algorithm that's —that they're trying to move their headquarters. So I think one interesting thing is it might be the first time foreign policy or sort of the, like, fear of the enemy in the East might get somebody to switch social networks. I don't know. That's what Daniel Gross was also speculating. I agree. Was that that's a potential thing. Free idea.

I deleted TikTok the other day because of the whole Chinese thing. Oh, really? Yeah. Nice. I love TikTok.

Free idea. I don't know if it's a good idea, but I like it. So there's this curve that shows AirPod sales, and we talked about this before when we talked about Yeah, on Trends we did AirPod accessories. And so the AirPod sales curve looks like insane. It's just this hockey stick, over 100 million units sold. And I saw this tweet that got my attention, which was that kids in school are basically swapping one AirPod. Yeah, Scott Belsky shared it. Exactly. So Scott Belsky shared this. Shout out to Scott. And it's interesting because then you could play something and your friend— listen, your friend can hear it. It's just like silent communication network that's like secretive from the teachers, which is actually the backstory of how Snapchat grew too, was Snapchat's first growth was they put it on iPads in classrooms, so you could send self-destructing messages to other kids in other classrooms, and the teacher could never catch it, 'cause the message goes away once you see it. And so, similar sort of thing where kids are swapping AirPods, which lets them silently, secretly communicate with each other, sort of Harry Potter style, and I think it's interesting. Once everybody gets AirPods, or as so many people get AirPods, can you create a social network on top? I know a couple people are trying to do that. I've seen a couple startups trying to do this, but, Imagine being able to— I just say a message quietly where only my sort of earbud can pick it up, and I say your name, and it sends it to you, and you hear it in your ear. Nobody else even knew that message got transmitted.

Or I text you something, but it plays in your ear, so the text is gonna revolutionize cheating. Oh, for sure, I'm into it.

If you're allowed to have headphones in when you're, when you're doing stuff.

Can I— let me give you another one. Yeah, go for it. Okay, so I met up with Chris Redlitz. He's one of my investors. He is he has a history of doing a lot of amazing stuff. He has a charity or a nonprofit called The Last Mile. Have you heard of this?

I've heard, it's like the prison—

Yeah, so what they do is they created software classes for prisoners so they can get them a job when they get out. I went to San Quentin and volunteered and we just walked around the yard in San Quentin. It was amazing. Anyway, what he's doing is, it's a nonprofit, but he's gonna potentially launch a private business on top of it and what he is, What he's lobbying the government to do is allow prisoners to have iPhones, and it will be in a closed network, and the iPhones will allow you— because at San Quentin they don't even have name badges. They literally have to count the inmates manually, right? 4 or 8 times a day, something like that. And he's trying to do that, and he's trying to get the phones for free because he's gonna be like, hey, AT&T, look, there's a million prisoners a year. When they— if they— someone does something good for them, or a million people a year get out of prison. If they do something— if you do something good for them while they're in prison, they know your network. —right— you could sell them.

So what are you— what are they gonna be able to do with the phone? You said closed network, so what can they do? What can't they do?

Well, call home. Okay. Um, check in to, uh, uh, it'll help the guards track. Yeah. And so they can help like make sure everyone's where they need to be. And, uh, they're— what he's considering doing is building a network for them, which is kind of interesting. Communication network. Yeah. There's— I don't know the logistics of it because there's a ton— there has to be a ton, right? You're dealing with criminals, um, but it's kind of similar to what you're describing.

Yeah, these like sort of niche communication or new communication, uh, networks.

Really cool business.

If you can build a communication product, you win. Like, that's the basis of all kind of human interaction.

But his niche is prisoners, right? And when he was explaining the idea, it sounds wild, like this is wrong. And then you start getting into it, you're like, huh, okay, that kind of makes sense, right?

I started using this product called Change Paste. You heard of this? Uh-uh. So I read this, I was looking, I was scrolling on Instagram and this D2C company got me. They were like, look, look how many toothpaste bottles get thrown away every year, right? It's like insane, right? We all go through so many of these and, and it's, you know, it's killing the environment. And also like it's kind of a pain in the ass to use a normal toothpaste bottle because you're sort of by the end of it, you're sort of squeezing out the last bit. It gets all crusty on top. You lose the lid.

Yeah.

So what these guys do is a simple tablet, and it's a version of dry toothpaste, which is this niche thing today that I think could get bigger. So it's a tablet, you put it in your mouth, you start to bite on it, you chew it, and then you just put a wet toothbrush in your mouth and it becomes toothpaste. So it's essentially zero waste because it comes in this like compostable little pouch. Um, the dry toothpaste is like, uh, the dry tablet doesn't use all the chemicals that like Crest and others do. So this reminded me of like a Native deodorant style business I don't know how well they're doing. I've been trying to reach out to the founders because I really like this product.

You know how much traffic it has on SimilarWeb?

I haven't checked. I haven't looked into the sales or the traffic yet, but it really caught my attention because I think it's a win-win.

It's doing good for the world, great for traveling.

I think it's— yeah, I think it's more convenient. It's actually a better experience, and it's just different. And I think that a lot of people like to do something different. I'm one of them. I'll try anything. And, and this one caught my eye where I'm like, this is good. And it has all those characteristics where You can consume it in a month. So they sell you 65 tablets, which is to brush teeth twice a day for 30 days. Cost— I can't remember how much I paid. I think it was like $9 or something. It's like more than toothpaste, but it wasn't a $9 outlet. Yeah, I don't know the exact price.

They could charge more.

I don't remember what it was, but I'm gonna repeat purchase, right? Because once I adopt this, this is gonna be my thing. And so I'm pretty bullish on this, and I, I'm curious if this is gonna be a thing.

That's cool. I'll tell you another one. Someone, Nick Sharma, who is an associate of ours. Yeah, he helped. Do you see what the thing that they launched?

The emergency pack?

Yeah, Lucy's a call or no Lucy's juicy, something like that. Judy. Judy. I hate a lot of these new D2C things. I don't hate that one. So explain what it is.

So Judy is what?

I'll buy it. So it's a container that has supplies for an emergency. I live in California. Maybe there will be an earthquake, right? It's supposed to have the supplies for that. I think flashlight or some type of radio that's crank.

So the cool thing they do is based on where you live, they kind of know what disaster you're likely to have, and so they create the go— the to-go bag, the, you know, your emergency go bag. Based off of, okay, California, it's earthquakes. This is what you would need and how much you would need.

And I have a feeling the way that you can discover this product or one like it is— is Costco public? A public company?

Yeah.

No, I don't think so. Hmm. I'd be wrong. I might be wrong. So Costco has one. Yeah, it's probably pretty good. Anything Costco sells is— they have an emergency bag. Yeah. Well, I imagine the way that I would have came up with this is I would have— you can— if you— if they're public, I think they're public. If they're public, you can read Costco's annual report and you can see, and they'll probably mention like products that are doing shockingly well. Right. And I bet you emergency kits are one of them.

That's cool. I like that idea. It caught my eye too. You didn't even tell me about that one. I separately saw it and I was like, ooh, this is interesting.

Yeah, I think that Nick launches a lot of interesting things. He launched—

He's not the founder, but I think he's the kind of help launch.

Yeah, he helped do this. Costco is public, you're right. They are. So you could read Costco's annual report and I guarantee they'll say like interesting things. And so like everyone talks about Kirkland jeans. It's like, well, why do they talk about Kirkland jeans? You just go there and you figure out why and you make that right. Nick launched this thing called Hause. It's like a— basically what they did. And I think this is stupid. I want them to win because I like when people win. I think this is a horrible idea, but I think I'll be proven wrong, likely. But You can't ship liquor. You can ship wine, or you can ship, but it's— there's rules, right? You can ship wine. It's a lot easier to ship wine. So hard. So what they did was they made like a liquor that has low percentage of alcohol, and they branded it as Don't Get Too Fucked Up, Just Get a Little Fucked Up, right? Uh, Tipsy.

Yeah.

And it's kind of interesting. We'll see.

Make up for it in volume.

Yeah, well, that's what I think will happen. Right, but it's, it's kind of funny. I don't, I don't get it. I'm a non-drinker though. I thought it was non-alcoholic whiskey, and I was like, that's really dumb, right? But I drink non-alcoholic beer a lot. Yeah, that could be interesting.

that's what they teach. I have a question.

I haven't taken the courses. Um, but it'll be like, why is Mars red? All the other planets aren't red. Why is Mars red? And so they just evoke this curiosity, and then they teach you through this video lesson, and teachers don't have to do the work of preparing curriculum, which is always hard, takes time. So they get this best-in-class curriculum, they make the video once, and it just gets distributed to all schools. Awesome business, awesome for students, awesome for teachers, awesome moneymaker. Love this business. Amazing.

Uh, what I would love to learn, I don't know anything about this, is how hard is it to sell into a school? So, so if you have some public school, I bet it's like the hardest thing around.

But once you're in, you're in.

Once you're in, you're embedded. And, but they— what they did say is the world is changing a little bit, and teachers are more empowered to get stuff adopted just themselves. And if you like design it that way, it's kind of like how Slack got adopted just by a department rather than the CIO making a decision for the company. That's cool. So that's what they say. More than ever, teachers just individually pick it up.

I don't believe that. Go. If that's— I believe maybe that is changing, right? But if I know anything about schools, public— this public school system, which is not a lot, by the way, but the little I do know, it seems just bureaucratic, right? Very, very, very hard to sell into.

I believe that to be true.

Like Blackboard. And you remember Blackboard? Yeah. Like, I imagine those things are quite huge. Um, but, uh, horrible to sell to.

There's another company that's like this, uh, that I saw called Kahoot. Have you ever heard of these guys? No. So they're— if you just type Kahoot annual report, it's all online so you can see this. I don't remember the numbers off top of my head, but what they do is they get— it's like a learning-based game. So it's kind of like, um, you put a— it's like, it's like a trivia thing that teachers can do in, in class. So it's like, question, and then the students all buzz in their answer, like multiple choice, and then, uh, from a phone or device, and then it like tells you if you got it right or wrong, and like somebody wins in the end. It's like these little short mini games. Companies are using this for like their all-hands and stuff like that.

It sounds like Quizlet.

And they're doing, uh, I want to say $200 million plus in revenue. It's insane how big this business is, Kahoot. Uh, and check out their annual report.

It's like— you know Quizlet? I've heard of Quizlet through Bootstrap. I think their office was down the street from my office a long time ago. Bootstrapped. Are they flashcards? Flashcards, digital flashcards, bootstrapped. I don't remember, I looked it up a while ago. If they were in the $50 to $100 million revenue range, I wouldn't be surprised. Right. Pretty amazing. Crazy shit. Another school, kind of related thing. Have you seen the documentary Cheer? I haven't. Probably heard about it.

I saw it on Netflix.

It's a cheerleading documentary on Netflix, and they only mentioned this for about 2 minutes about this thing called varsity cheer. Okay. And they barely mention it. And it's who hosts the national championship and you have to pay money. They didn't— they mentioned it because Varsity Cheer didn't allow Netflix's cameras to be inside the championship. Right. So I just got curious and looked it up. It's a company that recently sold to Bain Capital, I think, for $4 billion.

Varsity Cheer.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

The high school varsity cheerleading league, essentially a league. Yeah. For the same amount the UFC sold for.

I have to look into this.

Varsity Cheer is— and they own a company called Varsity Brands. They monopolize cheerleading, and now they're trying to do other niche sports like volleyball, I think, or something like that.

This is good news for PlayVS, who's doing high school esports, and they're trying to do basically similar model. I'm curious if it's crazy if it's—

it worked well. And it kind of actually— this actually isn't related, but have you heard about the Scrubs business?

Scrubs, like medical scrubs? Okay, tell me about it. I've looked into this because I was thinking about creating—

yeah, man, this— these guys, these— it's the same fucking playbook of cute millennial shit, right? And they just—

the angst in your voice. Well, I just—

it just— it works. It works so good. But I, for some reason, I have hatred towards it. Uh, they did it for medical scrubs. They hit $100 million in sales this year. Yeah. And so it has a cute name. I forget the name. Um, but people are buying— I didn't know this— nurses buy their own scrubs a lot of times. Right. And people are gifting scrubs to nurses and they're like cool looking.

Right. They're like a little more fitted and the patterns are different, but it's like the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's the same thing for the shoes because people who work in restaurants and doctors and nurses are on their feet so much that they have these like special clogs. And I bet you, if I bet you that clogs brand, it's a high-quality product, but like, well, you know, Crocs still does $1 billion a year in sales, right? So I bet you, you know, within that niche, because there's so— it's just such a large profession, right? Like we had— what's her name, Iman Onn from Incredible Health, and they're talking about nursing. And there's just so many goddamn nurses, and there's actually a shortage. We need more. And so if you can sell essentially the uniform, either shoes or scrubs, you have basically a captive market.

Yeah, that's a— that's amazing. I think Barstool is kind of an amazing model. And somebody tweeted at us today, hey, let's get the Presidente on, on this podcast. Do you know the guy? Have you met the guy?

No. He seems legit. Maybe Erica, I think, would be better.

But I don't know, that guy's pretty fucking entertaining.

Let's see what we can do. Uh, Erica is a, I think, a genius, uh, and a true operator. Um, Dave is, I think, brilliant, but at different things.

And how copyable is that model?

Not— it's not. Because what? Loads of companies have. We've had a couple. We had— okay, so The Hustle, we have two investors. One is the founder of The Chive, and the other is Bleacher Report. Mm-hmm. They haven't been able to do it, right? What do you think makes it hard?

What was there— what was special about their situation?

Like, how hard is it to copy Saturday Night Live? Mm, really hard.

So it's on the whole— the content, the culture, the fan base. Yeah, the magic of that was—

yeah, yeah, 100%. And so when you look at that, what do you think?

I think that we can do that. Do you think like, no, that's— we should go a different path? What do you like when you read that?

Well, first of all, I think that in order to build a business like that, there's loads of paths. And I actually think that they actually probably could have sold for way more, but they are inappropriate. A lot of people think they are, at least, right? And a lot of big companies are like, no, we're not touching that. ESPN wouldn't buy them even though it makes sense because the politics, right? They're just soft, I think.

Yeah, it's a Disney company, right?

They're just afraid, right? Most media companies out there, I think, are built horribly. They're— they have shit audiences, shit content. Uh, and they're shit operators. They're losing money.

Like, you want to name names, or—

well, just like the big— like, like all the big— the big companies that have raised lots of money and are unprofitable now.

And what makes their audience— are you saying shit audience?

What is it about their audience? They don't—

so you're not talking demographics, you're talking about like the loyalty?

They're not in the middle zone of—

yeah, it's like—

like— or apathy.

Exactly why Donald Trump won versus Hillary. A lot of people were like, yeah, I'll vote for her, I guess.

What's the big right-wing thing? Breitbart?

Yeah, Breitbart. So what I do every morning is I like to go to far left and far right news sites, and I look at the comments section. Breitbart, which is far right, has the most comments of any news site I've ever been to. Right. And that is the one of the highest signals of —So regardless of your politics, from a business perspective, that's what you want.

Extremely highly engaged audience.

—Yeah, and that's what Barstool has done. And so it's really hard to replicate. And a lot of people, particularly committees, like corporate large businesses that try to like look at this shit in a petri dish and be like, "Well, how do we replicate this?" Well, it's really fucking hard because you gotta be a maverick a little bit. And so that's why I think a lot of these media companies cannot replicate it. Complicated, right? So our podcast stuff. Yeah, uh, I think let's do starting next week. I think we should— let's just try for 30 days, 2 or 3 times a week. Okay. And we'll work out the details after this, but 2 or 3 times a week.

Yeah, more of this. Yeah, we asked last time, we kind of fished for some compliments. We were like, hey, if you want to see us do more, let us know. So we got a bunch.

And so, and here's what I think, my honest opinion is It might be there, it might not be there.

Yeah, but the experiment is worth doing. It is.

The answer for me for sure is it is not not there. What does that mean?

Like, explain what you're talking about.

Uh, my hard— no, my Twitter, the, my, the amount of Twitter replies I get on Twitter proves that it might be there. Yeah. Um, so not for sure, but not not. And I think, I don't know what our— I know we don't have to say how many listens it's gotten, but it's probably gotten close to a million downloads so far.

Yeah, getting close, which is cool because like 6 months of effort getting to a million is a great milestone.

Yeah, I know for sure what the listens are, but I don't know, I forget what downloads are.

Downloads are a little harder to track than the listens, but if you use like what I would call like a conservative rule of thumb, we're either at a million or we're Plus or minus 10%. Yeah, so it's about there, right?

So that's cool, right? High five. Yeah. So we'll, we'll talk about that after this, but we'll start doing that. Yeah, sweet.

All right, we're done.