Tiny Desk Awards: 13 Companies Making $1M+ With 0 Employees

I was like, have you done any deals that I would have heard of? And he's like, you know Disneyland? I was like, yeah. He's like, a lot of windows in Disneyland. We do all the windows in Disneyland.

I was like, what? Oh my God.

They bought a window company, got them a Disney contract. We do all the windows at Disney. Yeah.

All right, what's up?

We are talking about something pretty special this episode. This is gonna be different than our normal episodes, which are, you know, freewheeling, freestyling. Today we got a plan, and the plan is we're gonna talk about companies that crush it with only 1 or 2 employees. So the reason we thought about this was there was some news, I don't know, a couple weeks ago that a company that I had never heard of called WarGraphs sold for $54 million and the, yeah, that's, I mean, that's obviously impressive, but the most impressive part was that Warcraft was just one dude. So one guy sold his company for $54 million. And I don't know, do you know what Warcraft did? Are you familiar with it?

No. Is it a gaming thing?

And how old was the person?

I think he started when he was young, but now it's been like, you know, 7 or 8 years.

So that's amazing.

I'm going to guess something like 30, but The, the, it got me thinking, it was like everybody talks about big businesses for good reason. Big businesses are awesome. They, they are. But what about mighty businesses? What about the, the, the guys who are punching above their weight? So somebody who has just themselves or just one or two people that does millions in revenue profitably flies under the radar and like how many other Wargrafts are there out there? So we did some research and we found some. And so that's what this episode's gonna be about. And we've kind of touched on this before. We've done some of our most popular episodes. If you go on YouTube, you'll see the episode with Peter Levels, I think has a couple hundred thousand listens. The episode about Amit Agarwal, the guy who builds G Suite, you know, basically like Google Sheets plugins. He does millions of dollars in revenue as just kind of one guy who was a blogger turned app builder. And so those have been some of our most popular episodes. So I think this is going to be a good one to Sam, anything else before we jump in?

Yeah, I want to give an honorable mention to this one person. Have you listened to Juvenile growing up? Remember rapper, the rapper Juvenile?

Of course. You giving him a shout out like he's listening? Yeah.

I like last year, NPR, they do this thing called the Tiny Desk Concert Series. You know what that is? It's like they're in the office, like playing acoustic songs.

Yeah, those are cool.

They said, who should we have? And this one guy goes, you should have Juvenile. And Juvenile replies and he goes, what the, what the, he goes, WTF, what, what the F is a tiny desk? And hell no. And you know what? They got him to do it anyway. It happened this weekend. And so in preparation for this one man band show, I've been listening to that Juvenile concert at the tiny desk NPR series. It was awesome. It was awesome. He, he, you remember Back That Ass Up and Slow Motion for Me and all that? It was so good. It was so good. I had to be inspired. Him and Manny Fresh did it and it was awesome. It was awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

So honorable mention. These are the tiny desk awards then. Let's call it that. These are the tiny desk awards, which are the businesses that can be run off of one tiny desk because it's just one or two people. All right. We're going to do this like an award show. So we have a long list, but that'd be kind of boring. So we're, we broke it up into categories and we each have our answer for the category. So for example, first category is gonna be biggest one-person business.

But we also have to set some rules here. Yes. Some of these things, one person, it's a bit vague. Yeah. One person oftentimes can mean like the founder and like a team of contractors, or in many cases it's going to be agencies that they work with.

Of course.

Or it started as one person and it was that way for a long time and then they hired a team. Exactly.

So it's more of the spirit of the law than the letter of the law here. So, you know, they don't have t-shirts for the company because, you know, there's, they don't have like, you know, a bunch of employees and, and, you know, morale. They, they probably won't have a, an office which a bunch of people go into. It's either one or two people who are kind of the core drivers and maybe they use some contractors or vendors or agencies for, for other things. But that's generally the way we're looking at this.

Yeah, let's get into it. So what's the first one? The biggest. Is it the biggest? So you go first.

So I'm going to do one, another gaming one that I doubt you know of. Do you know what Stardew Valley is?

No, what is that?

So Stardew Valley is this game, and if you look at the game, the game art looks like it's like 8-bit art almost. It looks like a very, very simplistic game, and it was made by one guy, this guy Eric Barone. And he basically is like, you know, I'm— he gets out of school, he doesn't want to get a job, so he's like, well, you know, I'm going to teach myself how to code instead of going to get a job. So he's like, why don't I learn how to build a game in order to teach myself how to code? Like, I don't want to just code for coding's sake. I'll try to do something with it. And he always liked these games back in the day. I don't know if you know Harvest Moon. It's like this kind of like farming simulator game. These like very simple kind of like, you know, it had like a cult following.. And so he's like, I'm going to make my version of Harvest Moon, which was like kind of was popular when I was a kid, like, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. So he spends basically 4 years in solitude just building this game by himself before he releases it for 4 years.

What was his job? Did he have a job?

The guy Notch, when he sold, I think he sold for like multiple billions, right?

Yeah, $3 billion, $2 billion, something like that.

And he, I think he bought like an, like he outbid Beyoncé for like an $80 million mansion in LA. And he was tweeting out or sharing how everyone hates him now. He was like, I'm so lonely. This sucks. But he's still in this like fancy $80 million mansion. Do you remember that whole like ordeal where he was talking about how he like didn't give equity to people. And so some of the people who he hired hated him and he was lonely, but he, and he was having all these huge parties and he was lost and all that stuff. Do you remember all that?

No, I missed all of that, dude.

He like went through this whole spiel on, on Twitter about how like he hates his life, but oh wow.

You know, I mean, this house is, I'm looking at this house. This house is insane.

Was it $80 million?

$70 million.

Yeah, it was like a, it was fat. I remember like he, I would love to just see Beyoncé getting the news.

It's like, oh, who, who did it? Who outbid me? Was it, was it Spielberg? Who was it? Oh no, it must have been Lenny Kravitz. Who, who was it? Who, who outbid me on this? Like, nah, it's Notch. Yeah, got him.

Yeah. No, no, I have not heard. I've heard the opposite of those rumors, but I don't know.

What have you heard?

Well, just like when the layoffs happened and it was like basically post-COVID Events came back online, like in person. So that's naturally going to hurt the business. Then they had massive layoffs. And I heard that the founders have taken a ton of secondary or something like that.

So I heard like $100 million plus in secondary.

I don't know. I heard the other way. I also thought that, and I heard the other way around. We talked about StreamYard like right when they were getting going, and then we talked about them again when they were acquired. Did you say you knew these guys?

I think I had met, because back when I was doing video streaming, I met like kind of everyone in this space. I don't know. I got to look up who these guys are, but I do know that they got to $14 million in ARR when it was just the two of them. And then it got to $30 million when they had, by that time they had hired up a team. So this is kind of like a hybrid. They got, they got really far with just a couple of people and then they hired up, you know, from, from as they scaled it before they sold.

And I remember going to their website when it was just them and I, there was like the founder and he was, he was on the, he was on the homepage and he was giving like a tutorial video on how to use the product and it was just him like with this camera on his lap practically. And he looked exhausted. He looked so worn out. I remember this during the pandemic when we were thinking about using him for something and he looked like super haggard, but it was very impressive that these two guys have built this to sell for $250 million. And I, although it was cash and stock, so I don't know if the stock is worth anything. I heard it might be. So that might be one of the biggest ones that I've heard of, at least recent big ones. Another big one that it happened a long time ago. So I have no connection. It was Plenty of Fish. How much did Plenty of Fish get acquired for? Like $550 million, I think. Yes. Hundreds. Yeah. And that was started by one guy named Marcus, who now I see online and he seems like he like lives the most lavish life and just does crazy shit. And so Plenty of Fish was basically one of the early dating websites. It was a marketplace. It was like OKCupid, but I think it was predominantly Canadian. And that had to be probably the biggest exit that I've ever heard of for a really small, small team.

Yeah, Plenty of Fish was unbelievable. That guy, isn't he like a nut? The Plenty of Fish founder? I feel like that's a whole nother story we should do one day.

I think it's a whole nother— I think— I don't know. I haven't researched it enough to actually like verify the claims, but I've heard like a little, like grumblings, like a little, little stories that something weird is going on, but I don't know the truth.

Also, I love the fact that you've met the StreamYard guys and they looked haggard and you're like, it's like in Silicon Valley when you see somebody like that, you put your arm around them and you're like, hey, you all right? Is it, is it because of too much traction or not enough? I just need to know how I'm going to treat you. It was too much. Yeah. Oh, it's too much traction. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Come here.

Come here. Sleep on my couch, let me feed you, just take this check, put me on your cap table. There's really 1 out of 10 of the haggard people, they're getting beat down by too much demand and 9 out of 10 are—

Who have you met like that? Who have you met like that?

Who else have you met where you just like, dude, I remember talking to a guy who, this guy Abder, met a guy Abder and he was doing something pretty, I met him after the fact, but he told me this story and it always stuck with me and I always remember And after hearing the story, I was like, I should look for that. So what happened was Twitter started taking off in popularity right when it kind of got going in Silicon Valley. Like it became like a thing. And Abner was, him and his team, or they're like kind of like data science type people. And so they were like, all right, what can we build that makes Twitter work better? Because Twitter was such a simplistic product. And at the time it was like almost like a protocol. Like anyone could kind of build apps on top of it or use the data for something. So he's trying to build something and he doesn't know what he's doing. He's sitting on a train and he starts coding this thing. He's like, I had done this research on sentiment analysis. And I was like, okay, this story sounds a little bit boring. Who cares about sentiment analysis? He's like, yeah, you could figure out how people are feeling about a certain topic because they're talking about it in a certain way.

Did you tell him his story was boring right when he got going? Bored.

The chin started to drift. Yeah, I did that. I was like, is there anyone else in this car I could talk to? I was in a car with him in Ethiopia, you know, for 4 hours straight. I, there's nowhere to run. So I'm, I'm hearing, I, I'm like, all right, let me hear out the story. Sentimental. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me more about your PhD in sentiment analysis. What did this do? And he's like, so I was on a train and I'm building this thing. I'm trying to analyze what people are saying on Twitter to see if I could get the sentiment, the current mood or whatever. He's like, but then I realized actually what I'll do is instead of figuring out their mood, I'll just figure out What are they talking about a lot of, like a lot more than usual? That's kind of interesting. And he basically created trending for Twitter off of Twitter.

So he, he's like, he's like, oh, I could figure out that the word Olympics normally is only said this much, but it's being said 10 standard deviations more. So that means Olympics is trending, that it's, it's above its par. And he is like, this is super cool. Like, I basically have the 10 things that people are talking about on Twitter. I can kind of get that, I get that signal in a way that you couldn't really get at the time on Twitter. And so he creates this and they create a separate website off of Twitter called Twitter Trending. I forgot what it was called. It's his own website. And they start getting millions of hits on this thing. And they're just trying to, and he's trying to keep it up because he's basically drinking from the Twitter fire hose and he's got all this traffic. And so he's trying to keep both of them working. Eventually Twitter buys them. So they become like employees 10 through 20 or something of Twitter. Oh, sick. And at the time, Twitter had the fail whale. It was just like constantly Twitter, the service was going down. It had so much usage and it was like in this Web 2.0, like it wasn't like scalable yet. They hadn't figured out how to scale it. And he told me, he's like, he's like, for 6 months, he's like, I just woke up every day with like an imprint of my keyboard on my forehead. Like I had just passed out. I was working, trying to keep this damn site up, pass out, wake up. Oh, where was I? And I just kept going. He's like, that was 6 months straight of my life. He's like, I've never experienced anything like it. And at the time I remember thinking, oh, there's levels to this thing. Like, that's what it feels like when you really have one of the winners. Like, and if you talk to people early at Facebook and they talk about like what the, what, what it was like working early at Facebook, Facebook, it's like, When people talk about living in New York, they're like, just the energy was— it's just the energy. You can't explain it. And it's like, that's how— that's what you get when you're inside one of these generational companies at the early stage when they're, they're scaling too fast.

Dude, that's exciting. I love that one. I like hearing those old stories like that. I always read those old books, like the Hatching Twitter and all that shit. I love that shit.

Yeah, me too.

All right, next one. Let's go to— let's wait. Let's go to a highest degree of difficulty. We'll skip a category and come back to it.

Okay. So this is the hardest one, the hardest example, the one that we're like, how the hell did you even do that? And there's no way anyone else would've done this. You go first. All right.

I have one. It's called TinyWow. So I think the URL is just tinywow.com. So do you have that pulled up? TinyWow?

Yeah, got it.

And so basically this guy, Evan, he was basically talking about the weather, put on AdSense. What are you doing? This is insane, dude.

That's the cool part about these one-person businesses. And this is another guy who I'm going to tell the story about has said the same thing. He goes, I felt like taking the summer off. So I just let, let it ride for a little while. So this guy Evan, he basically had a history as a developer. He says he doesn't do any development now, but he has a team of 3 people who are helping him, or 1 contractor who helps him with overseas, who's helped him actually like build it, implement. He basically just draws it and designs it. But the reason why this thing has taken off is if you Google, or do you remember, like, do you ever see those videos on TikTok that say like, here's 5 websites that should be illegal, but aren't so good that they should be illegal. Yeah, it's like a shtick. So that is basically how the website got popular is it's gotten popular from those videos. And so the reason why this is really hard to create, because A, getting traffic to a, like a content site or any type of website like this, it's very challenging. Oftentimes building the product is not the hard part. It's getting users and getting 6.6 million visits a month, mostly from social, quite challenging. We'll see if he's able to turn this. But I asked him, I was like, how big can this get? And he's like, well, like, I think of like Canva. So I'm like, can we, I think it can make tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue because we're going to ultimately, we have this traffic, we can have like a feature that says, hey, you can edit this picture using our platform and we'll charge a small fee. I think this actually could be a big business, but right now it's really tiny. He told me it costs $10,000 a month to run and it's making $20,000 a month in revenue.

Wow. Yeah. Do you know how much remove.bg makes? Who? Do you ever use remove.bg?

No. What is that?

Oh, that's, I mean, that was the old way. It's like, if you need to remove a background from an image, like you need to just cut out the object and remove the background, remove.bg was this website that was like just the go-to. Look at the traffic. Yeah, it was just the go-to and oh my God, 50 to 60 million in monthly visits. So it's just like insane. And remove.bg, it just had a stranglehold for me, at least on doing this. It was like super quick. You just drag your image in, it just removes the background. Boom. There you go. And then they charge for like, you know, you want it like 1080p or whatever. They started charging for like little things like remove this watermark. I'm sure this thing crushes, you know, I don't know, I don't know how much revenue they do now, but I'm sure this is one of these like mighty businesses where it's a very small team.

Uh, here we go.

So I just Googled it.

Canva acquired them. Canva acquired them. It says that they had at least 100 million people coming to their website last year. That's a, that's crazy. So it was acquired by Canva. So you can probably, I don't know if Canva has gone public yet. Maybe they have. I think actually they just did last month. You might be able to dig through their numbers and see if they got acquired and for how much, but that's crazy. That's so much traffic. This site, TinyWow, definitely could be something like that.

They started this in 2019. It's this company called Kaleidio, and then they, so they started in 2019. They sold it. This was 2021. So 2 years later for roughly $100 million.

Wow. Do they have funding?

I think the parent company, it looks like it's a side project of the parent company.

The reason why I said these are the hardest to make is getting that scale of traffic that fast is so challenging. You know, like there's a lot of like software products that we're going to name as one-person companies. And that's challenging in the sense of like, you have to put it in a ton of hours and you actually have to like invent stuff. And that's very challenging. But getting traffic to me is more of an intellectual challenge where it's like, I have no idea like where to start. Like, whereas with starting with software, it's like, I, I'm going to make this one feature, then I'll do this other feature. I'll talk to my users. It's a little bit, it involves a little bit of luck, a little bit of skill, but getting a lot of traffic to your website early on, I think there's less people that know how to do that. And so that's why I think that this is one of the harder things to start.

So here's my, my answer for highest degree of difficulty. Photopea. So Photopea is very, very similar. Basically, it's one guy who recreated the entirety of Photoshop in a web browser for free. So, oh my God, Photoshop is one of the most complicated products in the world. He recreated it by himself, gives it away for free, and made it work in the browser, which Photoshop doesn't. Photoshop is a, you know, you have to download the app in order to make it work. It's just remarkable. The guy barely monetizes it, doesn't want to sell it. And if you go just search his, like, just search Photopea Reddit or like, you know, founder Reddit, he goes and he talks about like, you know, why he built it, how he built it and what, you know, how he thinks about it or whatever. It's pretty insane.

And I think it's how much traffic does it get?

Traffic-wise, like 13 million according to SimilarWeb per month. And he does, at the time, this was a couple years ago, he said that he was doing 100,000 a month off this thing. And it was like literally from the most basic, absolute most basic of like ads. Like this is one guy, Ivan, who made it and it's, he's just like, puts like the very simple banner ad on the site and makes like $100,000 a month.

So Um, he did an AMA on Reddit and they said, hey, have you hired your first employee yet? This was a year ago. And he says, oh, after I did my first AMA on Reddit, lots of great people got in touch. I did end up hiring one guy from Prague who went to my university, but it'll take some time for him to get familiar with the code. He hasn't done it. He hasn't done anything yet. It's pretty crazy how this guy operates.

So why do you think this is the most challenging?

Just like technically recreating Photoshop. Feature for feature is absolutely insane. Like, I think that's just an insane endeavor. And then making it work in the browser, like making it performant in a browser is not easy either. So like for one person to do this, I think it's crazy.

That's insane. Yeah. I, the cool thing about these, like what I think the downside of these one-person companies is that everything relies on you and that you don't have like anyone else to ask for help and You can't hire anyone. You can't have anyone better than you doing something because you're the only person. And so in order to do this, I think a lot of these people, they have a handful of traits that we'll talk about in the end, but I don't understand how he could grind that hard for that long with all this pressure on him.

By the way, this guy says he put 7,000 hours into it before he made any money from it.

That's insane. So I think that just takes so much will. Do you remember Viral Nova? It was a guy named Scott DeLonge. So Viral Nova was basically an Upworthy clone. It was a— it says like, they're like, here's a list of 10 reasons why you don't want to go swimming after eating. You're not going to believe number 7. And so this guy would talk about like how it was just him writing 10 articles a day. And he was like, I'm— the pressure of all this traffic and all of the success, it's killing me. I feel so worn out all the time. And I don't understand how some people can sustain that for a really long time. Like this Photopea guy.

Yeah, this is like, you know, when you go to someone's house And they're like, oh, do you want to see my model train set I'm building? You're like, what? Yeah, sure, why not? I'm here. And they take you down to the basement and then it's just like they've recreated like the city of Vienna through their like, and they're just tinkering on this like one thing. And you're like, how many hours? What? How long have you been doing this? And they're like, oh, I just come here every night. I love it. And this is what I do. It makes me feel so good. And you're like, holy shit, this is like, the most intense hobby. That's how, that's how I feel about that.

I'm not that type of person.

Are you?

You're definitely not, I think, right?

Come on. I am not. Yeah, I envy those people. That, that's an amazing willpower. All right, let's do another one. Let's do on the other end, easiest to recreate. So which of these one-person, one or two-person businesses do you think are easiest to recreate that is the opposite of the highest degree of difficulty? Go ahead.

So mine would be anything that sells information or a service. So I put just any course creator. But you and I know a bunch of these people, of which you and I are both of those people. You know, we make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year from like a course or two. And I think they're fairly easy to recreate. Another one is there's this company called Design Joy. Do you know what they do? I believe that—

design subscription, basically. It's him.

He's a designer. Yeah, but the way that he positions it, it seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth. But basically it's just this designer that you pay. Thousands of dollars a month for it. And you ask him to make small changes to different design related stuff. And he claims that it's just him, but I believe he claims that.

Yeah. But he says that's just him. He does $100,000 a month. So he does $1.2 million a year or so around that range. And it's basically, you buy a subscription plan. So you pay and you buy like the 5, it's like $4,000 or $5,000 a month. And then you basically get one request at a time. And that's it. You get to just say, I'd like this design thing done. And then he turns around in some, I don't know what his SLA is of how long he takes to do this, but it's like, it's cheaper than hiring a full-time designer, probably unless like in the US.

But yeah, that's the, I think that's the easiest to recreate, but also the worst to run, which we'll talk about later. But that's probably the easiest one is like a bunch of, do you know any other course people that do like, like I know Sam Ovens does $10 million in revenue, $5 million in profit. And for a while it was just him.

I met these guys. I met a guy recently who does like a product management course and I was like, oh my God, who's taking a product management course? He goes, no, no, no, it's how to ace your job interview as a product manager. Like how to get a job as a PM at one of these tech companies. And I think he was doing, what was he doing? But like $2 million a year or something like that. I think they were doing like 2, what? 2.5. Yeah. $2.5 million a year roughly in in revenue, I think with like 80%-ish margins. And what they would do is they would basically say they would give away free content that was like how to get a job as a PM, how to interview as a PM, how to prep for this interview, what it was like talking to a Facebook PM, blah, blah, blah. They give away free content to get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website. And then they're like, hey, do you want to like get a job as a PM, which will pay you, let's call it $120,000 a year. If you want that job, buy this course and join this cohort course or whatever. And they basically sell this course for a couple thousand dollars that's going to help you get this job that's going to pay you over $100,000. And that's just like a very simple value proposition for somebody who wants to do that with their career.

And it was just him?

It was him and 3, it was 3 of them, 3 PMs that kind of like got together and made this thing.

Another example of an easy one to start, I think I told you about this, it's called Cyber Lead. So you go to getcyberleads.com. So it's, C-Y-B-E-R leads. So getcyberleads.com. It's this guy named Alex West. And basically it's a newsletter where I think it costs $400 to $1,000 a month. So $400 to $1,000 a month, depending on what you get, what you do. But basically he goes and he handpicks different companies that have recently raised money and based off a bunch of attributes he thinks are about to hire an agency. And then he gets all these agency owners to sign up. To his service, and he emails this list out once a month along with like the contact information, the hiring decision, or the hiring, like whoever's managing ad spend, whatever. And you can just contact him on—

He's got your face and quote as a testimonial. Do you use this?

No, I don't use this, but I talked, I talked about it on the pod. I talked about it on the pod like 2 years ago. I've never used it. I've never—

You've never used it, but he sure used you.

He is using me. I don't know, is there anything Can I, can you say anything about these people who do this? I talked about it on the pod. I said it's so frickin' simple. The value is so clear. I guess I said that on the podcast and he uses that as a quote. Is there anything I could do to stop you from doing that?

You can always say that.

Oh, sorry. Let me wrap up my thing. Selling information. So anything that you sell information, that's the easiest thing to start.

Yeah, I think so. I went the same route, but I'm going to give more detail because I think when you tell somebody selling information is the easiest way, they're like, cool. What? So what do I do?

Bitch, I gave 3 examples.

Yeah, but I think you have to break it down a little further. So you know this guy Lenny, Lenny Russian last name? I don't know. I like Lenny Rogowski or something along those lines.

I like Lenny.

I think he has a podcast too.

He's got a podcast. Like at one point his job board was doing a couple hundred thousand. I'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred thousand in sponsorships.

Are you talking about monthly or annually?

Annually at least.

But these are minimal. I bet there's way more.

Like I know at the beginning his job board was crushing. I don't know what they're doing now, but like I would bet his entire roll-up of job board content sponsorships, so podcast plus newsletter, And then he's got a paid thing, right, Ben? He's got like a paid, paid community. What's it, what do you think Lenny's total thing is? $2 million, $3 million?

Yeah, for sure.

About $2 to $3 million a year. And he did that, I would say, in a period of like 2 and a half, 3 years, it seems like.

Like, I think he, I think he has a fund too.

He kind of put his foot down on the content side. He kind of appeared on the scene, I would say, like 2-ish years ago. Obviously, you had to know your stuff. Right? So he's like, you know, spent time learning, you know, a decade being awesome inside these companies in order to do so. So I don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic, but there are people who did it without that too. So another example is Harry Dry, one of my favorite content creators in the whole world. A guy I tried to recruit like 100 times to do something with me. 'Cause I feel like we could do something great.

Me too.

He keeps bullshitting and not saying yes, but he's going to say yes eventually. So he's got marketing examples. He does a great job with this blog called Marketing Examples. Now, I don't know how much Marketing Examples makes. I would guess quarter million to half a million as just him making content there.

I think he's young. He's very young.

He didn't do the put in 10 to 15 years, become an industry, like, like do the job, cut your teeth, then go make content. He's like, no, I'm pretty sure I could just look at what's out there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work. I'll study this shit. And that's how I feel like, you know, a lot of people also can do it. You could be the curious novice. Approaching these topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely. And so I think Harry Dry would also be one of the easiest to recreate, not because he's untalented, he's super talented, but I think that's kind of something anyone can do. Anybody could just say, yo, I'm gonna study what makes TikToks go viral and I'm gonna put out content about viral TikToks. I'm gonna become the expert of breaking down content TikToks going viral, and then people, brands are gonna know me as the guy that they should talk to about TikTok consulting. Right? Like, or like advertising on TikTok and like you could just build your niche audience and your niche authority in that space. A lot of people are trying to do this AI right now.

And the thing about Lenny and Harry was people were doing, so first of all, like a newsletters community podcast that's existed since forever. So it's not a unique business model. And also people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time. But what's interesting is that they were both early-ish where there was only maybe, I don't know how many, but they felt like they were early-ish talking about it to this customer, to this community on this platform. So both of those guys, I think, got popular on Twitter right before the pandemic started. I think I remember seeing Harry in 2018, 2019, which I wasn't even really using Twitter as a power user back then, but they all seem a little bit early. So I think timing matters for a lot of these things. Speaking of which, that Facebook Threads thing, no idea if that's going to be a thing or not, but that's an example of like, Hey, there's this new thing right now.

If you want to see it, you better pounce on it. You got nothing to lose. You better be there. Yeah. Just go get, go be around there. See what's going on.

Yeah. That's one of those things people did with Clubhouse. I don't know if that worked out or not, but there's—

So this episode you're giving a really in-depth surf analogy. Last episode you gave a slow, a baseball, what did you say? A fat, a slow, small swing. Fat pitches. It was fat pitches. Have you ever played baseball?

I got a baseball addiction.

Have you ever played baseball or surf in your life, bro?

I was starting right fielder for my high school team, which anybody who knows baseball knows that means you're the biggest scrub on the team because that's who they put in right field is the guy who's, you know, the ball never comes to right field.

Yeah, but didn't you play baseball in China? Like they were just learning.

I might have been in China. I might have been in China.

You went to high school in China. Yeah. I mean, or Australia. Like it was scrubs. It was like.

We play the ball as it lies there. I got a golf analogy for you too. I was in China. Well, that's where I'm gonna be. All right, so let's go to the next one. Most fun one-person business. So the one that seems like the most fun to, to work on, I'll go first. Joe Rogan. So I'm pretty sure Joe Rogan's media enterprise is bigger than all the late night talk shows combined. So forget The Tonight Show, Letterman, and any of these guys, whoever the new Conan, whoever these guys are.

Dude, the Letterman's been retired for 10 years, man.

Jimmy Fallon. I don't know, bro. Who's watching this stuff? His audience is bigger. He makes hundreds of millions in— he's made hundreds of millions doing it. And I'm pretty sure it's just him and young Jamie.

I've heard from a few of my friends who have been on it how it works. So basically they told me that it's Jamie who produces it and it's Joe. And then they have one other guy named Matt, I think. And I forget his name exactly. I think it was Matt. And basically Matt sends Joe a list of like 30 people. They're like, hey, I can get these 30 people, these 30, let me know who you want. And sometimes he just ignores it. Every once in a while he'll say that person and that person. And that's all he says. And I've heard that it's just those 3 people.

That's amazing. So I think most people just think, oh, Joe Rogan, he's just a podcaster. Yeah, he is a podcaster, but that thing is a juggernaut. It is a media juggernaut. So the, you know, Spotify obviously paid him, you know, hundreds of millions to, to be there. For a couple years. But even before that, just off the sponsorships, off of the AlphaBrain product that they build off of it, Joe Rogan, I think, has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet is my sense. He took all of his hobbies. He's like, oh, I like UFC. He gets to be the UFC commentator doing exactly what he would want. He gets to go sit ringside, commentate for these fights and analyze the fights. But he only does it for the ones in Vegas that are an hour flight away from him. He doesn't do any of the ones that require a bunch of travel. And so all the bit, he does all the best ones. He does none of the worst ones. He was like, I want to do standup comedy. So he does standup comedy, sells out theaters all around the country and gets to make people laugh for a living. Does this podcast where he is like, I'm going to have conversations with the people I want. And people are like, oh, Joe, 3 hours is too long. He's like, that's the type of conversation I want to have. So I'm going to do it my way and it worked. And so like, I just think he just dictated how he wants to live life on his terms. I think he has the most fun. I think his business is absolutely a mighty business in that it's just, let's say, 1, 2 to 3 people that is building a thing that does, you know, over $100 million in revenue, which is like, if you just valued something like that traditionally, which is not, it's not apples to apples, but like, if you have a thing that can do $100 million a year in revenue, For multiple years. For multiple years. Typically that's a billion dollar property. You know, obviously it's weird. You can't really sell the, you know, Joe Rogan experience because you need him. It's tightly branded with him. But let's say at least he's built something worth $100 million. I think we can agree on that because it's generated $100 million of profit for him. And so he's built, you know, with a very small team, a multi-hundred million dollar business at the minimum.

And he has this new thing called the Comedy Mothership. It's like a mile from my house in Austin. And there's always a line out the door to get into that place.

Yeah, build his own comedy club. Why not?

Why not? If you drive by at 6 o'clock, there's every single night there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome.

Right. Who you got most fun?

Yeah, that's an amazing story. Wow. Love that. Good for him. That's, that's really, really cool. Next category, business we most want to own. So this is, I think this is specifically a good question because for us, a business we'd want to own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us want to really run an extra business right now. So it's like, which business would you want to own because it is very much, you know, autopilot. So it's not Design Joy. It's not people are paying you and you're providing a subscription. It's not one of those content or course businesses where you constantly have to create new content in order to stay relevant and get more customers. I think we both have the same one. Let's just do the same one that we, we both are really interested in.

You, you explain it. No, you go first.

So, but here's another way how he makes money. So basically you are, you're a marketer, you go to Milled and you want to see like, it looks like some shoe brand, they run, they ran this campaign and you want to check out the email and you read it and get inspired, whatever. You click that ad and it takes you to the shoe company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes, right? This is a horrible way to monetize. This is a really amazing product. Under-mono— under-monetized website for sure. But good for him for getting the traffic in the first place. But that's a horrible way to monetize.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. But I think the guy doesn't care. He's just like, this is easy.

That's cool.

Low maintenance, which is why I put it in my one I'd want to own because it's low maintenance and I think it still has a lot of upside left.

I'll do one for one I want to own. So I said anything that is like marketplace-y, sort of like a marketplace, because sometimes if you do it right, those don't— they don't run themselves entirely, but The, the community kind of handles the business. BuiltWith. So BuiltWith was started in 2015 or '16, probably. BuiltWith is like the most niche shit ever, but there's, it's a really big niche. So you go to BuiltWith in order to see which plugins a website is using if they are using WordPress. And the reason why that's important is you go to a website that you like and you go, oh, I love this feature they have. Let's go and see what they're using.

By the way, not just WordPress, Shopify also.

That's new. It started with just WordPress, I think. And so you're like, just tell me like the plugins and tell me the, the everything that they're using Shopify and BuiltWith Shopify and WordPress. It has something like tens of millions of people going there a month and does at the time when I first found them, I think in 2020, I think they were doing $14, $15 million in revenue with just one person. So I think that would be a really cool company to own. Because I think it's super valuable once you get all that traffic and those people coming back to you all the time. I think it's a really valuable site. Do you know anything about BuiltWith?

Yeah, just what you told me, what you said there. I've been using it for a long time. Basically, if you see a website and you want to know what they use, for whatever they use, just go to BuildWith. It's pretty great. It's kind of like a data, it's almost like a data index, right? It's like more like a database than it is a marketplace in a way. But I agree, it's kind of amazing. All right, let's keep going. We got a couple categories left. We have a Rookie of the Year. So a new one, a new, a new one that we found. I think you might have already covered yours in here, but I have a new one.

Dude, it's boring. I didn't want to say the same thing twice, but this guy Joe Mambre, this Joseph Mambre, like I love his story. I think that this guy's going to be a big deal and I, and I take a lot of pride in trying to find people before they're like really popular. I think he's— read the blog posts that I, that I have linked up there from the Hampton site. It's really good. I think this guy's going to be a winner. So that's my rookie of the year. What's OnlyFinders?

OnlyFinders is mine. So this is one that I don't know how old it is, maybe a couple of years old now. So OnlyFinders is a search engine for OnlyFans. So if you want to find a type of model on OnlyFans. So you, you know, you're into, you know, blonde Asians or like, you know, whatever, good looking midgets, whatever, whatever you're into, you can search on OnlyFinders and it'll give you a list of top ranked profiles for that thing. So as you know, I've been down the OnlyFans rabbit hole where I'm like, I think there's a lot of potential in the OnlyFans world of like businesses. And this was one of them that I found. And OnlyFans is run by one guy. He's awesome. He listens to the pod and he crushes it. So he crushes the SEO game for OnlyFans. If you search for a bunch of different popular searches, and in fact, actually what he did was smart, which is he didn't want to just rank for like the general searches, like best OnlyFans or something like that. Like he wants the high intent ones. So he wants the person who's searching for like, whatever. I don't know what people search for, but like redhead.

Yeah. Redhead. If you go to his site. If you go to his site, you could, you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are. So it's like Indian girls with boyfriend, whatever.

That's insane.

I have now met multiple people on OnlyFans that you've never heard of, girls that are doing between $1 and $2 million a month on their profile.

No way. It's all million a month because their body is the cogs.

So it's all profit basically. They have like, you know, usually they have like, they'll have like some of them as you get bigger, you have like an agency that manages it. And the funny part is, by the way, like OnlyFans works is like, okay, so the money is made in basically like the chatting. So it's not you pay for a picture. It's actually you pay to like kind of like have some personal connection with them, some chat with them.. And it's like the conversation and the stuff that happens when they're upselling them in the conversation is where the thing happens. And so they just have like a call center. They have like a farm of people in the Philippines that are doing the chatting for them. And they pay them like a rev share for the revenue that they generate during the chats. And so it's basically lonely dudes in America talking to lonely dudes in the Philippines. It's like, that's what OnlyFans, you know, you know, sort of like boils down to in many cases for these like really popular accounts. No one person can handle the amount of volume that they get.

So what are they doing with this money? They're just— they have huge income. And how long do you think can they do it for? 5 years? 3 years?

Yeah. And it's funny, they kind of— some of them kind of exit. They burn out and they'll just sell their name, likeness, and photo library and be like, you run it and just give me a rev share, give me 50%.

It's like Bruce Springsteen. That's what he did. Same thing. The Boss. This is insane. I don't know much. I don't know much about this shit. This is absolutely insane. The engagement on these things are wild.

If you have an OnlyFans business, reach out to me, sean@seanpuri.com. I want to invest in OnlyFans businesses that are just cash flowing.

Are they cool? Like when you met these— they're cool.

The problem is they're very hard to sell and they're very easy to be killed. And so they need kind of like strategy on like how—

no, I mean the girls.

Oh, I don't know. I don't know them.

You said you hung out with a couple of them.

I didn't hang out with them. I just talked to them. Yeah, they're nice people. I don't know.

That's insane. How did you get in touch with them?

Internet, bro. What do you mean? You know, I've— how many times on here have I talked about OnlyFans and then people basically like, oh, you're into that, so that they email you?

And well, they probably have a million Indian guys like DMing them. I mean, that's insane.

This is insane. I don't go through, you know, when you see a big line at the front door, you don't, you know, you don't go wait in that line. You have to go find a side door and the side door is generally, you know, some, some dude who listens to our podcast that runs their business or is their manager. And that's kind of like the way it—

All right, let's— that if we do— all right, the last category is worst of the best. I have a different one, but I would have to say OnlyFans would be up there. But what if I have another one?

So worst one is, is these are all cool businesses, but which, which one's our least favorite? So yours is going to be OnlyFans?

I had the same answer. I think he's amazing. You put me onto him. I met him and his son, such awesome people. So like, they're awesome.

Super fun. So awesome.

Just fun to be around. Smart, really nice, just kind people. Don't like, you know, no pretense about them. And same thing. He was hosting FarmCon. I went because you had told me about him and introduced me to him. And when I go there, he's—

he has a conference called FarmCon.

He's got FarmCon, which is like the biggest farming conference. Get together. So I go to Kansas and I—

and was it awesome?

Yeah, it was amazing. And I'm there and we're talking, it's like 11 at night, it's like the, the whole event's done, everyone's at the bar, every single person is drinking a beer, every single person is drinking a beer. And he's like, I gotta get up, gotta get up to the bedroom, gotta, I gotta go back to my room real quick, write the, write tomorrow's edition. And I was like, wait, you write it yourself still? And he's like, yeah, I write it, I've written it myself by hand. Every night. And he started this thing more than 10 years ago. Like, I think he'd said like, it's almost like 20 years basically that he's been writing this thing. 18 years or something insane.

Every day almost.

Yeah. And it's long too. It's not like just some cookie cutter, like, here's 3 links that are interesting.

It's like, my nose.

He's an amazing guy. And the reason he's amazing, among other things, is he breaks all the stereotypes. He, you'll think that he's just this like hickey guy, just like people used to think about me. And like, I grew up around people just like him. Turns out he's like brilliant. He'll, he'll like, you're, you're like, you're gonna talk to me about Facebook? And he knows way more about it than you do. He'll probably knows all about Bitcoin. I mean, the guy's brilliant and I love hanging out with him and his friends because You, it teaches you like, I'm a fucking idiot for judging people a certain way. These guys are all badass and they're fun as shit.

I did a call the other day with another guy. So another guy from FarmCon, same, same sort of guy. He's this white guy, maybe, I don't know, in his 50s-ish, something like that.

Was he super rich? Because so many of those guys are super rich.

And I think this guy, I don't know how rich this guy is.

Private jet rich.

I don't know how rich this guy is. But the guy who introduced me to him was just like, yeah, this guy's worth $300 to $500 million personally. And I was like, wow, okay, that's crazy. Because I was like, do his deals, like he's always talking about these deals. Like, does he actually make money on these? Like, has he had a track record of success? He's like, yeah, he has. So this guy, this guy's got phrases for days. So I have this doc that I keep on my phone that I call phrases. Anytime somebody says something that's just like funny or worded well, it just sticks out to me. It's a punchy phrase. I write it down. At PharmCon, I filled out my phrases thing because there were so many. So this one guy, I don't want to say his name to put him on blast, but he was at a dinner with, so it was Kevin Van Trump, and then this guy was at the dinner and it was like a private dinner at PharmCon. And he stands up and he goes, everyone on the table is doing introductions. And so I'm like, oh, hi, I'm Sean and I work in tech and just fucking kill me. I guess I'm boring. That's basically how I felt during the introduction. This guy stands up, he goes, my name's so-and-so. He goes, exactly how he said. He goes, he starts, I don't know who won the World Series. I can't tell you how to get six-pack abs. Hell, I don't even know where the remote is in my house.

But I know one thing.

I know how to structure deals. And today I'm going to tell you guys about a deal that I'm doing. And he gave this intro and I was like, what an incredible way to introduce yourself. I don't know where the remote is. But I know one thing, I know deals. And I was like, that is incredible. Then he's talking about how old he is. He goes, you cut me in half, there's going to be a lot of rings.

That's the best.

Nice. And then he goes, and then I did a call with him the other day and I get on the Zoom call and I had just finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because I was like, dude, I got to run. I got to be on this call. He's like, all right, just take your call, but let's do your like, kind of like we try to do like this like myofascial, like kind of like you're rolling like a like a foam roller type of thing. Like you're kind of like foam rolling out at the end. So we were doing it and he's like, just do it while you're on the call.

You foam rolled with this guy on a call?

So I get on the call, I turn on the video and I'm like, yeah, I'm going to show him what's going on. So I'm like, sorry, this looks weird. I'm doing like some stretching. And he goes, so he's a big dude. And he goes, okay, cool. If it looks like I'm stretching, call 911 because I'm having a stroke.

Dude, why would you take a call like that?

Incredible wit. Like, to have that line immediately ready when I say, you know, that I'm stretching— sorry if it looks weird, I'm stretching— I was like, wow, that was literally so fucking funny to me. I was blown away. I was like, I don't even care what else happens on this call. That was so impressive. So good.

What state did he live in?

He's in Tennessee, I think.

I'm like, what the hell is a deal structure? I don't even know what that means.

Like he, like he does, he's like private equity. So he buys companies, but he's like, I just know how to find a great deal, how to put the financing together and how to structure it so that like I get the maximum value out of these deals. It's kind of like what he does. And like, you know, I'm like, so I was like, have you done any deals that like that would have heard of? And he's like, you know, Disneyland. I was like, yeah. He's like a lot of windows in Disneyland. We do all the windows in Disneyland.

Oh my God.

They bought a window company, got them a Disney contract. We do all the windows at Disney. Do what with the windows? Like clean them?

We got to have this guy on the pod.

This guy's incredible.

What's yours for world's worst of the best?

I had both Design Joy and the Kevin Van Trump just because of the time thing. So I love that Kevin Van Trump has built like this, this amazing power niche in the farming industry. But I would not want to be the guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure is it's got to go out tomorrow morning. I felt that during Milk Road for a month and I was like, nope, not doing it this way. Yeah. I, although I think if I was him, I would just find a way to hire somebody to do that. I can't believe he hasn't done that yet.

Does Ben Thompson still do Strat— I haven't read this in a while.

Oh yeah. So Ben Thompson is my version of that. So he does Stratequery and every day he writes a newsletter. About basically the same 4 things. And I don't even know how he does that. Like he talks about Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and like what's going on, like the kind of the business and strategy of what they're doing.

They're so long. These are so long.

He does this daily, long form. His audience is like, has the highest bar. His audience is like the smartest people in the tech industry. Like, you know, VCs and all that. That's who reads him every morning. So he's got to come with like original content that's super smart about the same topics. He's been doing this for like a decade and he makes $3 million a year roughly doing this off his paid.

And he only charges $120 a year.

Yeah, I think he upped his price. I don't know what it is now, but he like did raise his prices at some point.

$120. It's $12. I think it was $100 and now it's $120. Oh my God.

Like he needs to charge like $1,000 a month for this thing, you know, but But he's, you know, I think Ben's awesome. So I don't mean it as a knock for him. I'm saying I would hate the pressure of the daily super insightful thing that I have to write every, every morning, original content about like the same kind of like 10 companies is, I don't, I literally don't even know how he does it. If somebody had told me they're going to do that, I'd be like, what are you saying? This makes no sense. He does it every day sitting in Taiwan.

This is the worst. This is the worst. It is. It is amazing, but yeah, I would never wanna do this. So what do we think that— I wonder what— I wanna know the listener, if they think that these one all in depth on one topic, if they dig this, if they dig the award category style or the award style, what do you think?

And the last thing I was going to say was it's fucking lonely. Like the best times that I have in work is when I'm, whether it's in the trenches and like it's a shitty day or it's a great day, is celebrating with coworkers. These jobs are lonely. I'm actually surprised when I hear about this, about like how they are able to push, like I push myself because, oh, I have mouths to feed, or I want to be held accountable by these other people and make them proud. It's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when you're by yourself. And it's just hard to do this every day alone. So hopefully you have like a good spouse or a significant other or something, because this shit's challenging.

I mean, when I started this, I was like, oh, I want to be a solo solopreneur. I wanted to be a solopreneur, or they call it a solo capitalist. I raised a fund and it's like, I want to be a solo capitalist.. And I was like, oh, this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself. And not only is it not that good to do things by yourself, because, you know, a little bit of help can go a long way. A complementary person who's good at the things you're not good at is really, really useful. But on top of that, it ain't no fun. And like, most of life is the journey, not the destination. And you don't want to have the shitty journey for this awesome destination. And so very quickly I was like, yeah, this is a duopreneur. This is me and Ben doing this. In the fund. It's me and Ramin doing this. And I basically immediately was like, I'm going to do this. Even my e-com business, I gave a chunk of it to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and would give me some money. And I was like, why? Just because like, I don't want to be reporting into myself and only like have myself as a thought partner to be sparring with on ideas about this. I want to have somebody awesome to do some idea jousting on this. And so I think doing it by yourself is honestly a terrible idea. And you should definitely try to get one other person to do this. I think 2 people is the sweet spot where you get sort of the most autonomy and the least like management headaches and you still get the most shit done and have a lot of fun along the way.

All right, that's the pod. Whether you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or whatever, go to search My First Million on YouTube and go to the comments on this video and actually let us know. We'll read 'em and see if we should keep doing these. That's it. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Life.