My Mom Started a $1M Side Hustle In Her 50's
Your random tweet about your mother-in-law gets to him and he writes back, dear Smithy Saudine, both Bed Bath and Beyond and myself would like to invest in your business. If these are your designs, they are outstanding. And then the best part, and believe me, I know pillows. 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.
All right, we're live, Sean. I've got. 3 stories that I want to tell you about to kick this day's episode off. You ready? I'm ready. First one, years ago— this is going to be fast— years ago, I was trying to get this one entrepreneur who is the CEO and founder of this very famous media company that I'm, I'm not going to call out, and he ignored me. He never got back to me. I probably sent him 15 emails. Well, I'm currently in Brooklyn staying at an Airbnb right now for a couple days— not an Airbnb, a different service. And, um, visiting family, and I log on to the Netflix on the TV, and guess whose house I'm renting right now? That guy. I am currently staying at his house right now. Should I do anything to like— is there anything like, should I look something up on YouTube so when he goes to his YouTube account he sees it?
Like, yeah, you've got to do the most— the whatever— the— what is the most petty thing you could do, like just change his Wi-Fi password. Just send him for a loop. He'll be like, what, what is happening right now? I don't understand this.
So I'm in his house. So I like go to, I go to Netflix and I see his, the image for like the, or I go to some YouTube account or something and I see the image for like the thumbnail image for his account. And I'm like, I know this person. And then I start picking up the other details. I'm like, oh, he's logged into all this stuff. I know exactly who this is. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to get his attention. It's going to be borderline creepy regardless of how I do this, even if I do it in the most tasteful way, but I'm going to take my shot. I'm going to leave this guy a message. It's not mean. I'm very happy. I'm happy, but I'm going to leave him a message.
Hey man, really love the place. I'm trying to pee in the sink, but there's no stool. Do you know where you keep it?
Yes, I'm going to have to do something. The second story that I've got to tell you about is that we need to get our people listening to this right now to subscribe. We just crossed 400,000 followers. You tweeted out that we're going to make out when we get to a million. Is that right?
No, I didn't say that. I said specifically these other podcasters made out when they crossed 50K and it's a very uncomfortable video watching them in slow-mo kiss. And he's like, the guy's kissing, they're kissing each other and one guy's like resisting it and the other guy's like trying to do the bet. And he's like, I'm just getting teeth. There's just teeth. Can I, can you, can you move something? I just, I'm just getting a lot of teeth right now.
And by the way, it's a finance podcast. Yeah. The video that they make out on, it barely has any views. Yeah. And they never actually— like, it barely worked.
That is the funniest part of the whole thing. Was when I saw that the video has 25,000 views, I was like, my worst nightmare is not that I have to make out with you. It's that I made out with you for the YouTube content.
For nothing.
Didn't go anywhere, which is exactly what would happen if I tried to, you know, oh, this will definitely, you know, go viral. And then it doesn't.
By the way, there is a number for everything. I don't know if a million subscribers is that number, but please subscribe.
I don't know if the number ends in the word subscribers either.
I think the number might have dollars instead of subscribers. But there is a number. So if you're listening on, uh, through the podcast apps, just go ahead and go to our YouTube and subscribe. The, the comment section is pretty fun. We read every comment. The third story I've got to tell you. So I said this story a little bit. I haven't given an update on it, but about 3 years ago, my mother-in-law, who loves to sew— she previously, a long time ago, like, used to even sew wedding dresses and things like that for friends. But, uh, now that her kids are grown and out of the house, she starts sewing again. She goes, Sam, I think I want to start a business online. Can you, like— can I drive you to the airport and, uh, you can, like, tell me how, like, the internet works, basically? And I gave her Free ride to the airport. Sweet. Yeah. Yeah. And I give her like the most high level, like advice ever. So I can't even remotely take credit for this because it was basically like, well, there's this thing called Shopify. Like, that's basically what the advice was. Like, there's a thing called a funnel where you get like this many eyeballs and a percentage of them buy whatever the most basic thing ever. Well, 3 weeks after that, she sends me this website. I'm like, Smithy, this website looks beautiful. Is the, they named your company the same name. I didn't think that you were going to name your company though. What the hell? And she goes, that's my website. And I'm like, what? She's like, yeah, in fact, I already got my first sale. Uh, and I was, I was, I was blown away. Well, fast forward 3 years ago, she's done over a million dollars in revenue. She's doing high 6 figures, I think, or she did high 6 figures in '23.
And what's the store? So it's a, it's a pillow store, right? What is the name of it? Smithy's Pillows or something?
So her birth name and the name of the store is slightly different. So her name is Smithy, but she spells her, spells the store's name Smithy with a Y. So the word Smith with a Y at the end, and then home, the word home, and then Couture. So C-O-U-T-U-R-E. If you go to her Etsy page, that's where I think a lot of her sales come from. You'll see on her Etsy page, I think it's like 8,000 or 10,000 sales. So basically what she sells is like really high-end throw pillows, which is, as a young man, I was like, throw pillows? Who the hell buys that? Well, Women love throw pillows. Do you see how does how many sales?
Because they're on the bed and then you have to throw them on the ground whenever you want to use the bed. That's what is the name for? I don't really understand this, but I do see.
Do you see that pillow? You see that pillow you have behind you on that leather chair?
Oh, I got a throw over here. Okay.
You have a throw. That's a throw pillow. They're decorative fancy pillows.
9,685 sales. So that's how many transactions she's had or how many customers she's had check out. So almost 10,000 star seller, 5-star review. Very cool. And then she, so she's hand-making these now. Yeah.
Well, she, now she has a little warehouse in New Jersey and she's got like 4 ladies like sew it. I just, I just imagine her just like, what was that movie where they're like, my fingers hurt from sewing. Well, now your back's going to hurt. You just got landscaping duty. Uh, yeah. She just has like these 4, like stay-at-home moms or I guess moms who aren't working anymore, but like to sew and they have part-time work. Sewing these pillows and then she's got like the UPS guy coming to her office every day picking up these pillows. She's got like a legit small business and I'm always like, Smithy, scale, scale, scale, spend more.
It brings a ton of people in. And, uh, they're great pillows. I have them all over my house and people love them. It's really high quality stuff. And so I'm like, Smithy, you got to grow this thing. Scale, scale, scale. And she's like, nope, I'm really happy with how it's going. And my mother-in-law, have you ever seen a photo of her?
No. Have you seen a photo of my mother-in-law? No, that's just not a thing people do.
Well, I tweeted out pictures of her. I tweeted out pictures of her. And so she's like a very pretty woman. She like, I call her like the Haitian Martha Stewart. Like she's always really well put together. She just like dresses nice all the time. So very charismatic, like good energy type of person. I tweeted out that story 2 days ago, or maybe yesterday I tweeted out that story. The tweet got like viewed by like quarter million people, but that guy Marcus from The Prophet, what's his last name? Uh, Lamonis or something. Lamonis. He's now, he's on that TV show, The Prophet. I think he's the CEO and founder or CEO of Camping World, which is like a multi-billion dollar RV business. And he's now on the board of directors at Bed Bath Beyond.
So I think you just, you said that whole sentence so casually. Like, yeah, I You tweeted this out and then that guy Marcus from The Prophet replied. Do you know Marcus? What do you, what do you mean the guy from The Prophet replied? Like, how did this even happen?
No idea. I have no idea who he is. I mean, I know him as a celebrity. I know him as a celebrity, but I don't like, I've never spoken to this person in my life.
Your random tweet about your mother-in-law gets to him and he writes back, dear Smithy Saudine, right? Uh, her, her name.
Yeah.
Both Bed Bath and Beyond and myself would like to invest in your business. If these are your designs, they are outstanding. And then the best part, and believe me, I know pillows.
And then the way that he originally communicated to me was he replied. So he, he tweeted that on his own, like in front of his old audience of like 600,000 people. He replied to my tweet and he goes, um, contact me. I would love to sell this in Bed Bath Beyond. And I, I go, here's my email. He emails me. It goes straight to spam for some reason. So I'm thinking like, this might be us. What? I don't know. Is this really you? So anyway, I connect them and now they're meeting and he shared it on his Twitter that he wants to like meet her. Pretty wild, right? So like, I better be, I better get in the fucking will for this one. I deserve something.
Yeah, you're going to get like a loaf of pumpkin bread, but still pretty good. Yeah. Son-in-law of the year, Sam Parr. I did not know that's what you were. That was the New Year's resolution. Good, good job. This is crazy that it got picked up like that and good, you know, good for her. This is such a cool story of, you know, how old is she, right? She's probably in her, what, like 50s?
Yeah, she's in her 50s and basically her, you know, uh, my wife is, uh, uh, 31 and then her other daughter's 27. And so she was just like, my kids are grown. I, I've got time. What, what should I do? And she loved to sew. She always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Her husband is an entrepreneur as well. And she helped run their moving business and they were like, let's, uh, you know, my husband's retired. I've got free time. I got to figure out something. And she just starts sewing these pillows and she had the gumption to go and get this website built for like $3,000. Like she found a developer to make the website. She gets on Etsy and she, I teach her. And when I say teach her, I don't actually teach her. I was like, yeah, I think I bet I was like, I bet you Etsy has a way that you could run like $100 worth of ads. She runs like $100 worth of ads and gets a handful of customers. And from there, she spent no money basically on marketing. I'm like, how much are you spending on marketing? She's like, $300. I'm like, a day? And she's like, no, no, no, like over the past like 2 months. And I was like, scale that sucker up, baby. And she's like, nope, I'm happy with the workload. This is fine. It's going good. I like it. And her customers are coming back and forth. Now what she does is she goes into all the door building or the, in New York City, there's fancy high rises with doormen. And she goes to all those buildings and they're buying their, her pillows to put in the lobbies of the, so she's got like these like contracts, these wholesale contracts.
That's what I was going to ask you. Cause most annoying thing in the world for me is any business story that's like, I had this idea and then it worked. And it's like, yo, yo, yo, what about the middle part that I'm going to have to do of like getting it to work? And what did, what did you do? How did you actually get the initial sales? So do you know, was it just post on Etsy and Etsy brought some traffic or did she It sounds like maybe she went door to door and kind of was showing her product to some people and got the word out.
Well, she did what, she did what a lot of, like, she, she, she didn't do any like crazy hacks. She basically had, uh, like 10 or 20 friends, including me, like buy her pillows at cost through Etsy. We left a review. She started getting reviews. She ran like, I literally think it's $100 worth of ads. The customers loved the pillows and they started telling their friends about it. And it was mostly all word of mouth. And then now she starts going to these dorm buildings to get more sales. But it was a very word of mouth business. So like, I'll be with her and like customers will call her and she'll just pick up her cell phone and just talk to them. I mean, it's, it's like a small business where there's not really any hacks. It's just been word of mouth.
Dude, so many amazing things about the story. I'll tell you 3 of the amazing things. Number 1, that you tweeted this and it got in touch with, uh, the guy from Bed Bath and Beyond who's going to now get her to Bed Bath and Beyond. Number 2. Your mother-in-law in her 50s decides to just start a business, become an entrepreneur. That's the second most impressive thing, that she took the action and actually did it. How many people do you know that would love to do it but count themselves out? She didn't count herself out. I really respect that. Number 3, that she found her version of enough. It's hard enough to win. The even harder part is to actually enjoy the win and not let the win turn into a loss because you start to stress out and try to keep up with the thing or try to grow it, try to keep going because you feel some stupid pressure to keep going. So being able to say, no, no, no, this is how I want my business to run on her terms. Even more respect for that. And actually I got a fourth bonus one. This guy saying, and trust me, I know pillows. I am now going to end every tweet with some version of that. Like if I'm like, hey, everyone's like this app and believe me, I know a thing or two about apps. Like what a gangster just style of speaking. I love this guy. I'm totally stealing this. You're going to see this, my next 10 tweets, I'm going to end like that. It's like when Trump used to end a tweet with like the emotion, like instead of emojis, he would be like, you know, the border is not safe. Sad. Exclamation point. He would always end his tweets like that.
Well, it's kind of smart to this guy. This guy probably has no idea who you and I are and he doesn't give a shit, but he probably saw the engagement of the tweet and he's like, well, if I could like pounce on this and just get like a little bit of like interesting press, like this could, or not really press, but get impressions. Like it could be worth it to them. And who knows if— I told Smithy, I was like, have your hopes low. Like, who knows if this is going to work out. It's a huge company. Even though he's on the board or whatever he is, like, that doesn't mean anything's going to happen.
But I don't think you need to be giving her advice anymore. I think she needs to be giving you advice from now on.
Well, I agree. I agree with that.
I was—
it was a little more therapist session, although she doesn't need that. But it was more like, oh, who knows, you know? I don't want you— don't get your hopes up.
All right, well, Sam makes the will. Congratulations, dude.
Yes. Congratulations to me. I have a bunch more interesting stuff. Do you want, do you want me to dive in? Yeah.
Yeah. Give me another one.
There's these ads I've been getting and it's by this company called Mad Muscle. So you actually, it might be easier if you just go to Facebook ad library and type in Mad Muscle and they have these animations. It's the, it's a popular ad I see all the time where it's these cartoon looking guys. One picture is like a guy with kind of a beer belly at 20% body fat and then a guy that's ripped at 10%. And like, it's very eye-catching ads that grab your attention. And they've got these other ads where it's like a guy doing a bicep curl. Very catchy ads. They're very catchy ads. I get this ad like crazy. And so I was curious who's behind it. And I found a very interesting thing. I do this with every ad that's catchy. I go to the website, I scroll all the way to the bottom where it says like trademark, and then it'll say like the real name of the company, and then I'll research the company. So check this out. There's these two guys in Ukraine. They started this company when they were 25. Their name is Ivan and Dmitry. Originally, the company was called— well, the whole holding company is called AMO, so A-M-O, but they've got three arms of the business. And the first part of the business was AMO Publishing. Listen to these numbers. So they kind of created like these, these, uh, a little clickbaity, like news websites. And then again, eventually they geared it toward moms. And so they have headlines like elderly couple divorces after 53 years of marriage. Later, man sees ex-wife dating in a cafe. And it's an article. Then they switch to Facebook videos and they get crazy viral. And so at this point they have 53 million followers on Facebook. They have this thing called Amo Mama, which has 14 million. They have Amo Nostalgia. They have Amo News. It's almost sort of like, I guess you could say like a FuckJerry, where it's like a social first news company. They get huge. They get 53 million followers. From there, they create this thing called Amo Pictures. Years, or not years ago, but a few months ago, you mentioned these guys that have soap operas on YouTube. And that is exactly what Ivan and Dmitry pivoted to next. So they created this YouTube channel called Dramatize Me. Dramatize Me has 2.4 million subscribers and 500 million views. So a lot. And the average video is something like 20 or 30 minutes. And these, it's these actors like acting out a soap opera. And you could, you could tell that a lot of the stuff is dubbed. So they film it one time and then they have dramatize me in different, in different languages. And so they have different pages for each, for each, uh, language. From there, they started launching these apps. And so their first big app that they launched, it was to help women exercise on their periods, which I guess when you're menstruating, I guess like you feel crappy and you don't want to work out. They created an app that helps you do that.
That's got to be the hardest sale to make. It's like, yo, what kind of extra degree of difficulty did they take as an entrepreneur? It's like, we are going to help somebody do something they don't want to do right at the time that they don't want to do it.
Wow. Yeah, I don't know. I, you know, I, I honestly, I don't understand that, that how that feels, but I guess there was a need. Then they launched this thing called Unimeal, which is a healthy meal plan app that costs $20 a week. So clearly they must have high churn if they're charging $20 a week right off the bat. And then from there, they create Mad Muscles, which is the thing that I saw. So their website, this website for Mad Muscles, according to SimilarWeb, is getting 11 million visits a month. It's insane.
And the app has 35,000 reviews. And so these young guys, they started this company when they were 25, uh, just like 4 or 5 years ago. According to LinkedIn, they now have close to 400 employees in Ukraine. These young guys that nobody, at least in America, is talking about have this massive media empire in the middle of Ukraine, and they are like the scrappiest people that I've ever seen. Because they're just like launching stuff and they're like, oh, that works. Let's do this spinoff. Oh, it looks like they all have a similar problem. They want, I guess, to work out. We have a lot of middle-aged women. They want to work out on their periods. Let's create this thing. Oh, looks like workout apps was cool. Let's create one for men. And they are like, this is an example of what we've talked about many times of these just like scrappy people who just, they're, I don't want to say soulless because that sounds negative, but they just follow the numbers like crazy and they don't overthink it. What's that meme that you were talking talking about the other day? It's called like the, the midwit meme, which is like the, in the middle, it's like, create a beautiful product, study the market, whatever, yada, yada, yada. The one on the left with the idiot, it's like, uh, just launch it and just keep iterating and just do whatever the customers say. And the, you know, the smart person also says that.
Launch it and see what works.
Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. These guys, it's, are, it's so fascinating how they're running their company.
This is a crazy find. Good on you. Props Sam with a Sam Parr special finding this random app in the Ukraine or this company. I am impressed and confused. I'm impressed because clearly these guys are awesome and they're smart and they're figuring stuff out and they've built a really cool set of products and, uh, what looks like a pretty cool company. Um, I'm confused because I'm like, they are doing 4 separate hard things at the same time., and I'm confused about that strategy. But you know, this is actually pretty common when it comes to startups in Eastern Europe. I, I've actually seen this several times, which is because they don't have a lot of venture capital, it's like bootstrap driven. And so they make businesses that are working and one business like unlocks the next, or they discover the next opportunity, or maybe one taps out, but it's still good enough to stay as a business. And so they end up with this like conglomerate of like 4 different things. And I've seen this like 10 times now. So I'm actually not surprised that this is what's happened here. But to go from publishing to then their Pictures arm, which is like, you know, their, their Hollywood arm or whatever, that's making movies and shows or whatever, to apps, you know, like those are not related really. Like you can kind of squint and be like, oh, we use the media to promote our apps. Okay, cool. But what about these like YouTube shows? Like, or just in general, like maybe just spend money on Facebook ads and don't do all the other stuff. So I am simultaneously impressed and confused by this.
Well, first of all, I was not able to find any news about them. There was just like, even in Ukraine and Russia, there was very little information about them. I'm like, what is going on? This app has 35,000 reviews. I can't find anything about them. I had to search to find the owner. I eventually found their LinkedIn profiles, but it was really, really hard. And whenever that happens, I'm like, all right, I'm interested. I gotta figure this out.
You can tell how successful an entrepreneur is. Like there's many ways. Let's say I said, Sam, I'm gonna give you an hour locked in a room with this entrepreneur. You have to figure out if they're gonna be successful or not, or how successful they're gonna be. And there's many questions you could ask them. There's many, uh, you know, like, you know, ways you could quiz them to try to see if they're good or bad. But one signal that just really never fails, if you go to their, um, like videos, their pictures, um, section. And you go look at some of the thumb— uh, the, the titles and thumbnails for some of their things. It's exactly what you talked about. And people who do this, these people never lose. So here's the first one, because they don't give a shit. Girl sends— girl sent selfies to her boss and that she's looking like worried. Next one, gender reveal went wrong, question mark. Third one, right, like, Grandpa in the gym, da da da, nailed it. And it's like, these are things that human nature must click and must watch to find out how the payoff is. And this is like universally broadly appealing content, right? People love to see the heartwarming thing or the gossipy thing or the, like, you know, the major screw-up in some high-stakes situation. Those are things that people have to watch. And you know that if somebody is creating content like this, It's just a matter of time until they create a product that goes mainstream because they understand what makes people tick and what's going to get the click and what's going to get the conversion. And eventually they'll stop making silly videos or they'll stop writing, you know, funny tweets or posting on a meme Instagram page and they'll work on a bigger product. And I see this all the time. I see this with younger people, but just in general, um, if you're running that, that goofy, uh, you know, like, uh, TikTok account. That's going viral. It makes no money, but you figured out how to get people to watch your videos, what makes people click. Eventually, that's the same person that's gonna have that really successful D2C brand or create that app that goes, you know, to the top of the charts because they just get it when it comes to human nature.
Well, I remember when, um, I first started The Hustle, we were, we got 50,000 subscribers in a short amount of time, and Tim Chen was the founder of NerdWallet. NerdWallet's now a publicly traded company. They write like articles for the best credit card or whatever. And he was like, hey, I want to invest. And I'm like, you don't even— I was like, dude, I don't even know like how we're going to make money. And he was like, well, look, I know enough to know that if you're good at getting an audience, making money off that is actually easier. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? Like, this wasn't that hard to do. He's like, well, it's hard for many people. And NerdWallet is kind of that answer where It took them 3 years to get to like, I think $5 million or something like that in revenue. But in year 4, they got to like $30 million in revenue because it took them 3 years to rank in Google for people searching best credit card. It's one of the hardest terms to rank for. And now I, as I've grown and I've understood this, that if you can get an audience and you can get eyeballs, as long as they're ideally, it's a math equation where it's like You want, it's like a, the equation would be like values equals the amount of influence you have over them times their spending power multiplied by the amount they're willing to spend. If you can like do maximize that equation, you can build a big business and actually making the product oftentimes is easier than getting the audience.
100%. And, um, people who understand how to get an audience, they're going to win. It's the same way that. When I meet people who are like elite at a video game, like a, like a hard, like a worldwide video game, it's just a matter of time till they're fatigued of that game and they decide to play the next game called business. And guess what? The same, you know, willingness to grind, ability to figure out the meta strategy, ability to coordinate and collaborate with their team and communicate at very fast speed. Like that's all going to work once they, once they just pick a different game. So it's like, you know, that or the sneaker flippers, the eBay flippers. You know, when we started this podcast, it's called My First Million. I was interviewing people, how'd you make your first million? And one of the things I always asked them, one of my favorite questions is, if I had, you know, if I was filming a documentary of you back when you were 13, 12, 13, do you think I would have known that maybe you would go on to do such interesting things? Like, was there anything, would I have seen at that time you were doing something unusual for a 13, 14-year-old? And at first the reaction is like, no, I was just a normal kid. But then you ask, you're like, so what were you doing for fun? And they're like, well, actually I was, uh, you know, my neighbor had these extra golf clubs and, uh, so I actually realized that you could sell them on eBay. And so I was, I would go to old people's houses, I would knock on the door, ask if I could see their golf clubs, and I would buy their golf clubs to go flip 'em on eBay. You're like, okay, it's just a matter of time until you elevate from flipping golf clubs to whatever it is, SaaS software, whatever, whatever the next, the bigger game is., but that's like such a high, like, likelihood of success or so highly correlated with, with success, um, for people who have that background.
All right, let me, can I go, can I give you one more? We're gonna do one more, a little small business one.
Yeah, let's do it.
All right, so go to this website called, uh, it's dumpsterenterprises.com.
All right, so should I, is this not safe for work? Okay, here we go.
It's safe. It's exactly what it sounds like. So This guy joined Hampton and I saw that his company was called Dumpster Enterprises. And I was like, dude, what the hell is this? Tell me everything about this. And so I was like, we're on the record. I want to talk about this in the pod. So whatever you tell me, is that okay? And he's like, yeah, I would love to do it. So I got his permission. And so this guy named Ian, his background is basically that he learned a little bit about SEO and web design and he started making like just a handful of like how to make money websites. And it was like, uh, this is all kind of only going okay. And so he like randomly met this guy because he was trying to rent— this guy Ian was trying to rent a dumpster. And he started like looking up the best like vendors to find in order to bring like a dumpster to his house. We're talking like dumpsters when you move, like you want a little bit of a bigger dumpster that you keep for like 2 weeks. And he meets this guy and he's like, dude, I don't know how to do any of this SEO stuff, but I know all these vendors that are similar to me. And this guy's Ian, like, well, Can I have the vendors and maybe we can work out a deal where I'll like pay you for like giving me this vendor list? And so he does that. And so after 2 years, he builds this website called dumpsterenterprises.com. And if you scroll down to the, uh, our notes document, this guy was pretty crazy. He gave me his full P&L for 2023 and I was like, can I, can I read this? He's like, yeah, I don't care. So he gave me his full P&L. So in year 2 of the business, he did $2.1 million in revenue. And the way that the business works is he ranks a little bit on search. And I would have to— we could look through the P&L, but we could probably figure this out. It looks like he only spent $26,000 in advertising and marketing. So he's not spending that much money on ads, but some money in ads. And so he did $2.1 million in revenue. And the way his business works is you type in which area code or zip code you need a dumpster in. And then he forwards that lead to a handful of vendors or dumpster providers that he has vetted. They pay him, let's say, $100 for that lead. He's able to profit $50 because that's how much it costs him to get the leads. And he made about— it looks like he paid himself, but the business also made about $280,000 in profit. And he was like, this is a business. It didn't take me a long time to set up. He goes, I work a few hours a day and I travel a lot. And it's like, it's a very, it's kind of a business that's been on cruise control a little bit. But I saw this and I was like, dude, there's a freaking business built in every niche that I never even would've thought. And so this is like a good little, little example. People in our YouTube comments criticized us for talking about like big companies, billion dollar, $100 million companies. I want to give an example of an interesting small business. We've done that twice, Smitty, uh, Home Couture and now Dumpster Rental Enterprises.
This is super cool. This is a, a good blueprint, by the way. We've seen this now several times here as we've been doing the pod, which is you take a industry that is well-established and local, like it could be dumpster rentals, it could be, um, you know, uh, road painting or parking lot painting, it could be, senior living facilities where they need customers, but the typical owner of those businesses knows nothing about SEO or SEM. And if you just say, cool, I'll create the website that just does the lead gen for whatever it is, and you're like, I'll bid on the Google keywords, I'll create the easy-to-use website, I'll grab the customer contact info, and then I will pass you the lead and you're gonna pay me some fixed amount per lead. That's, it's just a blueprint we've seen work over and over again, and it works even better the higher the ticket,, right? So like senior living, for example, the people who, people will end up spending hundreds of thousands in rent over, you know, a 3 or 4 year time period of, of, of, you know, renting a, a bed in a, in a facility or pool construction. It's like a, you know, $30,000 project or something like that.
And so we had a friend, you and I had a friend, or I don't know if you knew him, Dave Grossblatt. He had swimmingpoolquotes.com and he was making $2 million a year getting, and it was basically like he only made his money 4 months out of the year.
And so the, the other months he would just chill without having to do the swimming pool stuff. Right? He's not actually going and doing the thing, right? It's like the, that quote, you know, like the biggest taxi in the company, taxi company in the world owns no taxis. The biggest hotel company in the world owns no hotels, like Airbnb or Uber. Well, the medium, the medium size, the most medium size pool, pool mogul makes no pools, builds no pools. Um, and so, you know, high ticket. And then if that, how old school that industry is. So how much of it is mom and pop operators? Who don't know how to do Google Ads and don't know how to do SEO. That arbitrage right there is like such a formula for a $5, $10 million business that you can build by yourself working, you know, very, it's a very good lifestyle business. It's not hard work. You don't need a big team. You don't need a lot of funding. You don't need any of that.
But sometimes they can be huge. So I've been doing research in this industry for a long time because I was obsessed with trucking. I talked about it a ton. I almost went into that business. And there was a bunch of people who are doing it for trucking, meaning, uh, the trucking industry—
truckers, right?
Yeah. So the trucking industry has a huge short— uh, there's a shortage of people who have their commercial driver's license. And so if you can get someone who has their commercial driver's license and send them to a trucking company, they give you this massive finder's fee. But the biggest industry that I found that this works in is lawyers. So I found there's like a site called like superlawyers.com that's owned by Thomas Reuters, a huge multi-billion dollar tens of billions of dollars company, but there was like a lot of the early Web 1.0 businesses that I looked up were affiliates or lead gen businesses for lawyers. Because if you look at what the most expensive, and this is how you know it's a big industry, you can just go to Google Keyword Finder. I forget what it's called now, but it used to be called Keyword Finder. You could type in the word lawyer and it will tell you how much you have to pay in order to get a click from Google. For the word lawyer. Now, if you type in something even crazier like mesothelioma lawyer, it's like $1,000 a click, meaning only 5% of those will close. So this company's having to spend— I can't do that math because I'm an idiot— tens of thousands of dollars in order to acquire a client who wants to sue someone or whatever for mesothelioma issues. Like, it has the highest cost per click I've seen is lawyer related. And I've seen multiple of these lead gen companies for lawyers that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue.
Lead gen. Yeah. Incredible business blueprint that, uh, really, if you just have one skill, you just need to figure out the niche to apply it in. The one skill being, you know, SEM, search engine marketing, and how do you use that search engine marketing in a field where the people who run those businesses aren't great at it? And if you can just become great at it, it's, it's a big winner there. Um, I gotta ask you, do you, have you seen this Apple Vision Pro thing, man? And what do you think about this?
I haven't tested it yet, but I've seen it. What do I think of it? On one hand, I have the boomer mentality of like, this is sad, this sucks, we're all going to be in this. But on the other hand, I'm like, it's pretty sick. Like they push the envelope. It's pretty cool. I think it's kind of cool knowing that the current version is going to be the worst version that ever comes about and that first version is pretty, it seems pretty awesome.
Pretty dope. Yeah.
Yeah. What do you think?
Uh, 1 to 10, how bad do you want one?
Uh, I don't want to own one, so not at all, but, uh, 9 out of 10, I want to go to the Apple Store and try one. What are you?
Um, I, yeah, I didn't buy one and like the bar for me to buy something is pretty low. Like I'm a pretty impulse-driven person. Like if I'm just curious, I'll just usually get something.
It's not an impulse buy price.
It's not. But like, you know, I kind of justify anything that's in, you know, trying new tech that that's kind of my, that's kind of my job to do, to do things like that. Yeah. So yeah, I don't do that, but I've been, I have 3 VR headsets already sitting in the corner of my room just staring at me like, really, bro? You're going to get another one of these? Um, and each one I tried them on, I was like, wow, this is so impressive.
All right. Again.
That's enough. I guess I'll put this down and never put it back on. And that's what's happened to me with every VR headset. So I'm afraid that that's what's going to happen with this. I did watch a bunch of the videos.
Right.
Yeah.
Like, every time I use it, I use it for 4 hours.
It's just, it was one time.
Um, did you watch the Casey Neistat, like, review?
So good.
So good. So good. So he goes, he puts it on., and he's like, I'm so excited about this. He walks around New York and he basically goes on the subway and he goes to Times Square and then he goes to like a Krispy Kreme and he's using it and he made a great video about it, which is less like, let me review the features and be like, how good is the field of view? Is it 110 degrees the right number? He doesn't do all that. He's just like, I actually want to just like use this for fun and go see like, you know, what it feels like. And, um, it seems like everybody's takeaway is kind of the same, which is kind of a magical experience. You feel like you got a glimpse of the future, but it's only a glimpse. This isn't the future yet. And, but you see like, oh, okay, 5 years from now, this thing is going to be incredible because they're going to solve all these annoying problems. It's going to become lighter weight. They're going to get rid of this cord that's a battery that I have to put in my pocket while I'm using it. They're going to make it so that I can see my phone while I'm using this if I want to.
It's going to be as small as a pair of glasses.
Yes, exactly. And so that's pretty exciting. But it did remind me of something that I think is— forget the Apple Vision Pro for a second because, you know, whatever, it's just a device. There's an incredible blog post that this reminded me of. And I think that this blog post is one of— if I had a Mount Rushmore of blog posts that informed my way of thinking as an entrepreneur, this is one of them. And it's this post by Paul Buchheit. Who was the creator of Gmail and the blog post I think is called If You're Great, You Don't Have to Be Good. And what he's talking about was the iPad came out. So he wrote this right the day after the iPad was announced or released and all of the reviews were crushing Apple being like, iPad, what a flop. They're announcing this big deal, but this thing, it doesn't have a keyboard. Doesn't have a USB port. You can't even do this with it. You can't do this with it. And the guy who wrote the blog post makes a point. He goes, people said the same thing about Gmail when we first came out. And he's like, we didn't have time to do certain things. So he's like, for example, address book. He's like, we didn't have time to build it. And so we shipped it without it. And people were just killing us. Like, oh my God, this doesn't even have an address book. Oh, it doesn't even have this. It doesn't have this. And he's like, we thought, oh man, we might fail because of this. He's like, but What saved us, and the same thing that's going to save the iPad, is that when you— like, a hit product is not a hit product because it's good in every category. It's a hit product because it's amazing. It's great in 1 to 3 categories. And he's like, we'd— he's like, for Google, for Gmail, we were like, cool, we're gonna do— I don't remember what they were exactly, but I think it was like unlimited storage, or like just like 10x more storage than the previous email provider. Well, the Hotmail was giving you like Topmail was giving you 20 megabytes. These guys were giving you 2 gigabytes. He's like, the second thing was super fast search so you could find any email. So he's like, even though we didn't have your address book, if you just typed in somebody's name, you'd immediately find the last email from them and you could just use that email to contact them again. He's like, and the last thing was like threaded conversations. He's like, basically the ability for each email not to just be its own thing, but every reply in one email thread. You could just see it all together. And he is like, we just wanted to be great at those 3 things and we delivered. We were great at those 3 things and it worked even though we were missing these things that the experts all told us we would get slammed for. He's like, the iPad is the same way. He goes, the iPad does not have those ports. It doesn't have the USB. You can't connect a keyboard. You can't do all this right now. He's like, you know what it's amazing at? It is great in that if you turn on your computer, it takes a minute and a half to get to being able to use a computer. It has to boot up and has to go to the login. He's like, with an iPad, you literally click the button and it's ready for you to use instantaneous. He's like, number 2, it's great for watching videos on your couch. It's not super good for productivity right now, but man, is it amazing just to hold, be able to walk around with a screen that you can watch videos on. He's like, it is 10x better than the previous way. And so I kind of, when I looked at this Apple Vision Pro, there was a bunch of people that were like, oh, it can't do this and it can't do that. And what I've learned is don't discount something because of those, like kind of those limitations. Like basically find, does it have any extreme strengths? Because if it has a couple of extreme strengths, it's actually going to be a winner.
Well, does it?
There's this one ad that I think shows one of the extreme strengths. Um, watch that ad for a second.
It's awesome. So basically you see everyone else on their iPhone on a small screen and then they—
on an airplane, they're handing across the rows on an airplane.
And then you see a guy with the Apple Vision Pro and it's at— you, you see what he's seeing and it's a movie theater. He's watching Napoleon and it looks like he's in a movie theater where everyone else is looking at a little 3-inch screen.
Exactly. He's— and so you think about what is the— what is this thing great at? Because that's the signals of like, is this going to work? Is this the future or is it not? I think one that you can identify is the ability to— like, why would you ever go to a movie theater if you had one of these? Really? Because you can have an even better than movie theater experience. You're at home. It's a full screen. Like, everything you can see is the screen. And even better, you can like actually like change the surroundings. You could be in the jungle with the theater or you could be on, or, you know, in this case, you could be sitting on an airplane and have the theater come to you.
Are you imagining somebody in a jungle?
Uh, what I meant with that was like, you can change the scenery behind, uh, in the thing. In this case, it's where he's actually sitting is on an airplane where like nobody else can see what he's seeing. So it's private, which is cool. Cause I hate kind of on an airplane when like you're working or whatever, you're typing emails and the person next to you can just read everything. Um, so it's, it's private.
I sat next to a guy on the airplane and he was an old guy. And so his, the text on his phone was huge. Yeah. And I could see him talking to his assistant and I could see his name and I looked him up on Wikipedia and it was a famous producer. And I'm like, oh, it makes sense. This producer lives in this city where I'm leaving from. And so like, I understood, I knew like all about this guy just from seeing his text messages. It was weird.
So I think private, private video is one way that this is great. I think the second way that it's great is like the theater experience. I think the third is like any sports or concert experience. So being able to sit courtside and watch an NBA game with this thing from home, it's like you take a $50,000 experience that only the richest of the rich can have. And now anybody's going to be able to have it with this. And that I think is super, super cool. And I think there's a bunch of reasons why this thing is not great yet, but I think that is, is amazing.
I'm such a neckbeard that like, Sarah wanted to go to like Greece or something to like see whatever the famous stuff they have there. And I just looked it up on Street View and I was like, got it. It's, it's all right. Yeah. Like, isn't that beautiful? You have your camera, take a picture. Like, and this would make it so much better. I'm just not going to leave my house ever again. No, I think the, I think it's going to be cool. I just don't want, I don't want to, I don't have a need to own one yet, but the flight thing actually is pretty convincing.
Yeah, that, and I was like, what an example of an ad. That one ad is like 15 seconds. There's no words, there's no dialogue, and it sells the thing for you, right? Like, that was the most convincing ad I've seen about this whole thing. Um, more convincing than all the reviews, and it was 15 seconds with no, no words.
Dude, they crush it, man. Apple crushes it on those things. Um, all right, let me give you a quick follow-up. So This follow-up is very— well, you'll see in a second. But basically, do you remember when we talked about uBiome?
I feel like you talk about uBiome every fourth episode now. Uh, what's going on with uBiome?
So uBiome, they— I talked about it in April of 2021, so it's been a few years. So uBiome was launched, uh, I don't actually know when, I think 2014 or so. They started out actually as a Kickstarter and Indiegogo thing, and the whole thing was that You pay $80 and you send them a piece of your poop and they look at your poop and they tell you all about your, your gut, which I guess you can find illnesses through your poop. And it was started by these 3 people, but 2 of them eventually started dating and got married. Well, turns out they, it was all, well, first of all, they raised from Andreessen Horowitz, they raised from YC, from 8VC. So they raised in September 2018, they raised $100 million out of $600 valuation from Y Combinator as well, from the best investors there are. Turns out it was all a scam and like their tests were nonsense. And the way that it worked was basically they, you would send them your poop, they sent you back bullshit results, shit results, bad results that they like weren't legit. Yeah, pun. They just completely made it up. But then what they would do is they would bill your insurer $3,000. And so in doing this, they made roughly $35 million from insurance companies. So it was insurance fraud because it was bullcrap tests. And then they, the, the two husband and wife couples, they sold $12 million worth of their shares. Well, fast forward a few years after they raised their funding, their office gets raided by the FBI and turns out the whole company was a fraud. It was one big fraud. It was nonsense. And I was curious as to what happened to the founders. I was like, man, did they get sentenced yet? Because I know that they were definitely guilty. Turns out they fled to Germany. And here's the update to the case and the story that we did in '21. They're still on the lam. They're international felons in Germany. They've never been caught. Totally worked. Crime does pay. They did not get in trouble. That's the update to the story. I was curious. I was like, I was like, what happened to these guys? Where are they now? They're just chilling in Germany. For some reason they got away with it.
Yeah, they've completely gotten away with it. Nothing bad has happened to them. They got the money, they ran away, and they're happily— they're happily married and it worked.
In love, rich, living in Europe, free.
It's an extended honeymoon. They completely got away with it. Is that insane?
Yeah, that's crazy. Also, I feel like Germany is not like the place I think about when I'm like, they ran away and, you know, hid in some country and got away with it. It's like German, really, Germany should be able to like, you should be able to find them. Not like, uh, you know, some small island somewhere.
Well, I was reading their Wikipedia and at the bottom of the intro it said like, they currently are international fugitives living in Germany. And it said they have no intention of coming back to America. Like, yeah, duh.
And do you think, how do they know they're living in Germany still? Like, wouldn't they just leave if they're in Germany? I don't know.
Maybe they're, I don't know. I don't know. But they know that they're in Germany and they've completely gotten away with it. So they've raised $100 million. They stole $35 million from insurance companies. So we're talking $150 million close to, uh, they, they know they're in Germany and they're just chilling. They've gotten away with it.
Is it really?
Yeah. Given the outcome.
Money, marriage.
Money, love, fame. Great European lifestyle.
Did you see that crypto documentary on Netflix about, remember the, what was it called? What was ICO scam that these like two Brooklyn kids did in like 2020? You remember that?
Uh, I didn't watch the, the, I know what you're talking about. I didn't watch that one.
What was it called? Uh, or what was their scam called?
I remember this scam.
I've seen like 20 crypto scam movies and I'm like, I think I'm good on that category for a little while.
Well, we were making fun of them because we were like, no, I don't want to give my, I don't want to invest in any person who says they've got some amazing technology and they've got perfect teeth, a red Ferrari and abs. And we were talking about this guy and obviously it was clearly a scam. They paid Floyd Mayweather to endorse it. They paid, what's that guy, DJ Khaled to endorse it. It was like clearly a scam.
And this founder of uBiome, Jessica Richman, her background, Stanford, Oxford, Google, and McKinsey.
It's crazy, right? By the way, she lied about her age. So on her, like everyone was like, Dude, you're not 30. You look 50.
And her weight too.
No, she completely lied about her age. Like it was like a known secret in Silicon Valley at the time that this woman, cause she was, no, I know what it was. She made Forbes 30 Under 30 and everyone was like, dude, you are not under 30 years old.
That's, that's hilarious. Just a 43-year-old on the Forbes 30 Under 30.
Yeah.
She completely lied to everybody. On their About Us page on the Indiegogo, each person has like their background, like where they went to school. And then some people like, so for her, she's got Stanford, Oxford, Google, McKinsey. But for other people, they don't have like 4 impressive things. They just went to undergrad and then that was it. So they just added like random taglines under them. So it's like Jennifer from customer care, cool under pressure. Yeah, no shit. Samantha, customer care. 'Appetite for knowledge.' Another one, 'Hunger for fraud.' Just absolutely no conscience.
Great at hiding. Uh, and you could like look, Google her name, and you could kind of see some pictures where she's not wearing makeup and she's just like a— it's just like a normal photo that's not like a press photo. At the time of a lot of these photos, I think she was supposed to be 29 years old. And if you look at some of these like YouTube videos of her, so there's a YouTube video in 2016 of her. And I think at this time she was supposed to be like 28. She looks 40. She could be even higher than 40. It's obviously that this woman, or it's obvious that this woman is not 28.
She's like, I'm an old soul. And people are like, nah, you're just old.
Yeah. It's like, you are an old soul. You're an old body too. I mean, everything.
Yeah. You're not under 30.
This is crazy. Yeah. That's a real yes and. Yes, you are an old soul. And also.
So she married the co-founder?
Yeah, the guy with the beard. They like fell in love and got married and now they're, it's like they're Bonnie and Clyde. It's just crazy. They got away from, we hopefully have someone who's listening to this has worked there can actually give us insight, but I looked for like any type of like update on this story that I could find and everyone just says, yeah, they're just hanging out in Germany. They're just, I mean, it sounds like they're living a normal life and they completely got away with it.
The haters all said it was a fraud and the haters are right. Shout out to the haters.
Yeah, it says, uh, listen to this. It says there's a headline. It says the poop testing startup founder who lied to get on the 30 Under 30 list is now officially a fugitive. Uh, yeah. And so I guess everyone knew that she, it was nonsense. Oh, by the way, here's her age. She's 47. She's 47 years old. And 2 years before that, when she was 45, she was on Forbes 30 Under 30. That's a caper, man.
The husband, I mean, he just gets wrecked in the statement. It says defense lawyers have informed the government that Richman is suffering from a serious medical condition and Apti is her caretaker. I mean, it's like you go to a party for the first time with your, with your girlfriend and she's like, oh yeah, this is my, uh, this is my friend Sean. My friend.
And they're probably just— and he's like, yeah, he's like He's like all fucked up, man. He's shitting all over himself. He's in a wheelchair. This guy's, he's, he's in a horrible spot. You guys should see this mess.
He looks disgusting. I think we should do an annual update on these guys. Actually, let's mark it down on the calendar. Every February 7th, we should just update. Still on the run. Crime still pays, I guess.
It is, it is insane. Did Sam Bankman-Fried get sentenced yet?
Dude, I don't know. I feel like the last thing I heard was like, oh, they just like removed 5 counts like real quick, just like on a Friday news dump when other stuff was going on. It was kind of BS.
Yeah, he's— I think he's actually not going to serve a lot of time. And then Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes, how much time did she get? Was it 9?
Well, she kept having babies and was like, I can't go to jail, I'm pregnant. And they're like, ma'am, you just keep— like, you just— you can't keep this. You can't have maternity leave from prison. Like, you can't just keep staying out of prison that way. And so eventually she had to go. By the way, this is hilarious. The Wall Street Journal reporter described the efforts by the newspaper to track them down, believing that they live somewhere in central Berlin. And it basically says they located a building that was used for the postal address for them, and they were getting mail there. However, they were unable to find where they were actually living. So I think the building is in Germany, but that may not be where they're actually living, which would that feels more right that we don't know exactly where they are as they're on the run.
Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? But that's the update. We're going to come back to it in a year.
Dude, they should just trap her. They should do like a honeypot. They're like, okay, how do we get her? We need her ego. So it needs to be like, we're having a contest for the 40 Under 40 Berlin. Yeah. And it's like they know she's going to throw her hat in the ring. She just can't resist. She's like, I need the recognition.
Yeah, dude, I watch Cops all the time. That's my favorite show. And one of the ways that they catch guys who have warrants is they mail them a thing that says, you won free Yankees tickets. You have to come, you have to come pick it up at this location. That's like a famous way to get— have you ever seen that?
No, but—
Dude, they do this all the time.
It's kind of the same thing.
Yeah. And they'll get like, yeah. And they'll get like 30 of these guys with warrants in like a ballroom. They go, everyone. All right.
We're going to—
you guys are all the lucky winners. Of the Yankees tickets. Congratulations, here they are. And then the police swarm in and arrest everyone and they do like a, it's like a big thing. Yeah. That's what they need to do with her is a, a 35 under 35 and there's going to get 34 dummies to come in to win this award and they're going to honeypot this lady.
You shouldn't be allowed to lie like that though. I mean, shouldn't be allowed to lie about winning free tickets. I'm against that. I'm all for catching these guys, but you shouldn't be able to. Get someone's hopes up like that. Damn, that's harsh.
You know, the cops can lie about anything. Like, for example, if they're interrogating you and they're like, all right, we're gonna turn off the camera, this is off the record— it's never off the record. They have got other, like, voice recorders in there. They can lie. Police can lie about anything. Or they could say, like, we have your DNA there. They're allowed to say that. You could say anything you want. Yes, you can say anything. You'd be like, look, here's, uh, this zip— this bag. We've got a hair of yours. We found this at the crime scene. Yeah, they could see— you could say anything you want.
So they can lie to you, you can't lie to them?
They can lie to you, correct? An officer is allowed to lie. Like when you're, when you're at, when you're getting booked, they 100% can lie to you.
Rough. It's a rough world out there. All right.
I don't know where to end it, but that's the pod. All right. That's the pod.
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.