5 Dead Simple Business Ideas You Can Start With A FB Ad | ft. George Mack
And by the way, you know how I know this is a great episode? Because I feel like I need to get off this and go do these ideas right now. Like, I don't even want to finish this episode. I want to go do one of these things right now. That's how I know this is a banger.
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 look back.
Have you guys ever heard this idea that the Australian accent is just drunk English accent? Because like Australia was populated by all like the criminals or the drunkards from, uh, Aiglin, and that the accent in Australia is just a drunk London guy.
It's not far off.
There's a great Paul Graham blog post that I don't know if you guys have read called Cities. I think it's called Cities and Ambition. And he has this concept in it. He says that every city whispers something to you. Every city is whispering something. So he's like, you know, maybe it's in LA, right? The whisper that's there for you is, You know, become somebody, right? Become like sort of known, become a power player, a famous person. Basically, you're not famous enough. And in Silicon Valley, he says the whisper is you're not ambitious enough because the status symbol here is not who's the most beautiful or the most famous or even the most rich, to be honest. The status symbol is like who's doing the big mission here, right? Who's like the AI guys now, they're the highest status. Even if you have a really amazing, if you're the CEO of Workday and you're like, dude, I gotta, $80 billion company over here, you're low status compared to the, you know, the guy who's trying to make, you know, the next version of an LLM. And so he says New York whispers something. He basically is like, you should think about which cities you want to live in because that's what's going to get whispered to you all the time. Uh, I don't know what it would be for Austin. I'm curious. You guys, Sam, you've lived there. What's the Austin whisper?
The Austin whisper is how do you live a fit life on your own terms, which means like being very balanced. So Austin is very much a balance. So how do you work 6 hours a week, go for walks, be with your family, wake up early, be healthy? Austin is a place of balance, I think.
George, what's the Dubai whisper right now?
Is it like, uh, like, you're poor?
Like, there's definitely a little bit of that. Like, I never thought I would have ended up being in Dubai for a little bit of time. But it was during COVID and the second lockdown came along and I wanted to go to the mountains by myself. And Chris, my friend from Modern Wisdom, said, come to Dubai. And I was like, I grew up reading like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens. I'm scared of going to like an Islamic country. And Chris gave me the ultimate reply of don't be a virgin, come. And I went for 2 weeks, stayed for 3 years, but it's a very unique, weird, bizarre, fascinating place.
That's great. All right, let's jump in. So you have, you knew that we love business ideas and I'll give you two things. You wrote an intro for yourself. I'm gonna read it, but I think you didn't do yourself justice. So you said, you know, I'm excited to come on. You said, I don't have crazy high stakes, huge exits of my business. I'm more of a mom's basement writing ideas online, coming up with weird ideas and essays kind of guy. Um, so, you know, I have some ideas, some business ideas and opportunities, uh, but I have a lot of philosophies and frameworks. I think that's great. You also didn't do yourself full justice. You have a great marketing agency, so you have a successful business there. Also, you're not just a kid in a basement writing essays. You're a kid in a basement writing essays that get read by everybody from, uh, you know, Joe Schmo to Elon Musk. Elon's been retweeting you a lot lately, and I think that's a good sign, bro. You've made it.
I appreciate that. You're, uh, killing the British syndrome out of me, so I do appreciate that.
What happens when Elon retweets you, by the way? Do you get like a lot of traffic?
Uh, yeah, I get quite a lot of traffic. I mean, the one thing I did notice of— I've reached like hundreds of millions of people on Twitter and I've never had one DM from a girl. And then Chris Williamson started sharing my videos on Instagram and it changed a little bit. Like it's all men, tech, things on Twitter like that. But, uh, yeah, you do get quite a lot of traffic. The notifications bell does start to break a little bit.
All right, so let's start with business ideas. What, uh, what have you got for us? So what are the opportunities, ideas, little half-baked startups that, that you're in your mind right now?
Yeah. So as Sean kind of mentioned, I run the Ad Professor account, so people might know that on Twitter as well, where we make some of the best ads online. I'm obsessed with from an advertising angle and all my business ideas. Think of the advert first and then I kind of work from that. So the first business idea that I think would be pretty cool that I've always wanted to do but I've never got around to is essentially— I know you guys love personality tests. Like the personality test business model that exists. It's quite an easy find out about yourself. Everybody's fascinated by it, even if a lot of it is pseudoscience. And I'll never forget the day I'm in the car with my mum. Hope she don't mind me telling the story. I'm in the car with my mum. My dad's there, my brothers are there. My mum's heavily dyslexic, so she doesn't want to do the personality test, but she wants me to read it for her and then she's answering. So I'm reading out the question of I don't like to get into arguments. And she'll be like, oh, I heavily disagree. And then me and my dad are like, no, heavily agree. So quickly realized that personality tests are often answers that you want to be true about yourself versus the actual reality. And this kind of idea of a self-awareness test where the personality test you potentially fill out, but everybody in your close circle, so your wife, your parents, your business partner fills out. And you have a note there. Reason why I like this idea is it's a little bit of a lot of clues. You've got one, stacking on personality tests that have always worked, but two, the social graph effect, and then three, the advert angle of being able to run adverts directly on find out what your wife thinks about you. The question I would have is, is it a great business? You like it?
It is a great idea. I, I've been talking about tests like this. I have like a notebook of like What's the new IQ test? The Five Love Languages test. And I've been really fascinated. Could you run a Facebook ad funnel to, uh, to one of these businesses? Because I think most of the people who do this, they do like a book funnel, which is like the slowest old way of doing things. They write a great book about the science, the love languages thing. And then in it, like StrengthsFinders, write a book and then in it, they give you like a code or whatever to, to go take the test and you go pay for the test. Um, but I love this for the reason you just described, the viral factor. Um, can I tell you a story of why I think this might work? So when, um, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for this guy, Michael Birch, and he had built a social network called Bebo that he sold for $850 million. But before he built Bebo, he built a social network called Ringo that was the same exact thing as Bebo, but just like 12 months earlier, um, that he sold for like $2 or $3 million. And what he did was he built Ringo. It started to grow. He didn't know, he couldn't keep up with the server costs. He didn't know how, like at the time there was no Facebook, like he didn't know how social networks were ever going to make money. So he was at a meetup and a guy offered him like $4 million for it. And he's like, done. Then he worked for that guy and they had a quiz company called Tickle. And Tickle was basically like, it started out more on the Myers-Briggs, like intellectual tests.
Then it became everything.
Then it became what breed of dog are you? And turns out what breed of dog are you was way more viral than like, what is your life passion supposed to be? Right. There's like harder, more introspective tests. People wanted the what dog are you? And so what dog are you went really viral. They sold Tickle for $100 million to Monster. So he was like, holy shit, quizzes are this amazing viral thing because people want, like you said, their favorite subject is themselves. Then they're curious to know the answer. Where, where do I land? And then when they're done, they post or they share where they landed and other people say, ooh, that's what you are. I wonder what I am. And they go take it as well. So the only difference he made between Ringo, the thing that was, you know, growing kind of fast and, you know, sold for $4 million and Bebo, which grew really fast, a million users in 9 days, the first 9 days, the only change he made was that when he launched Bebo, it was a copy paste of Ringo. But with one difference, instead of filling out a profile, you just started off with a personality quiz, which was the best, I think it was called the Best Friend Test. It was how well do you know me? So you would answer questions about yourself and then other people would try to, and you would say, you would send it to your friends and be like, see how well you know me. And then it would show you who knows you the best and you would kind of compete. And when, after they would fill yours out, like I'm guessing how well I know you, then I would fill my own out and I would send it back to you. And so it went super viral. Off this one mechanism. And so the thing you described, I think, would work really well because it is a how well do you know me, but your, your version was how well do I know myself. But I think the real question there actually is what do other people think about me, which is probably the biggest question that I have is what do other people think about me and can I kind of anonymously find that information out.
So Sean, do you remember, um, like 6 episodes ago you were talking about going to Victoria and how Someone said they did this like— Jack Skeen. Yeah, they did this like executive coaching thing where you do a quiz and it tells you about yourself. So I loved that. And turns out with Hampton, we have access to thousands of executives. And so we are thinking about, should we integrate this? And so, um, we're currently testing it actually with like 3 or 4 customers where what we've done is we've created a quiz. Like you've described, George, where it talks about like, uh, whatever you're asking your mother, like these questions of like, what's your opinion of, of yourself for these questions? And then you actually send it to 20 different, um, coworkers, wife, husband, whatever. And then you get the results and we have put together this presentation to help you improve. And maybe it's a product that we could charge thousands of dollars for, but then—
George, do you know about this? Like the, the, the thing we're talking about? Have you ever heard about this? No. So this guy basically does this for executives and it's like a 360, like basically brutal honesty punch in the face. So that's the idea is like he charges, I think like $30 grand for this. You pay $30,000 to take this test. And what they do is they go interview. It's not just a quiz. They go and actually like sit down, talk, interview your wife, your business partner, your people who manage you, people who you manage, all this stuff. And they then come back to you with like, here's like the truth. Here's where you're amazing. Here's maybe where you rub people the wrong way. And here's, you know, something that's, yeah, whatever they give you that feedback. I don't know how great it is, but the two people I know who have done it were both like, yeah, this was massive for me. Now they were both also in that phase where they sold their company for hundreds of millions of dollars and needed a little bit of direction and purpose and wanted to indulge. It's a luxury item.
They were a thirsty person asking for water.
Yeah, exactly. But hey, Hampton is a group of thirsty people asking for water. So Sam, my prediction is I think you will either double or triple the lifetime value of your customers if you integrate this thing. I think that is a genius idea, Sam.
So George, you got any more tips for me?
That's it. So people, what I like about this is it rides a few societal memes as well. You've seen the gurus on Instagram chat about self-awareness. But what does that actually mean? And what— show me where that grows corn. Like, what does self-awareness actually mean? Whereas this, it's a quite a bit of a practical way of seizing self-awareness. And I remember there's a line from Daniel Kahneman who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. So he's the ultimate cognitive behavioral researcher, Nobel Prize winner. Every cognitive bias you can think of came largely downstream of Daniel Kahneman. He's the godfather of And his overwhelming lesson was that essentially all that research taught him nothing. And the only thing it taught him was it's much easier to see mistakes in other people than to see it in yourself. And this is that kind of idea, right? That other people— we don't notice we have bad breath, but people, other people can realize within seconds. We don't realize we're dating the wrong partner till 20 years and a horrific divorce, but your best friend sees it in 2 minutes. So there is something about when Your ego is removed from it and other people see things a lot clearer than you can.
Wasn't his other takeaway was that he was like, at the end of his life, he was like, oh, I was, I think I was wrong. I think a bunch of this, I think a bunch of this research, uh, he like did this book and it was amazing. And he goes, I think we got a lot wrong about that.
Uh, is that true? Is that what happened?
Is that what happened, George? It was something like that where he like, it's like, you know, we said these like 5 theories and like these 3, I think actually are wrong?
There's a few he definitely got wrong, but there's a few funny ones of where he talks about planning fallacy and even knowing planning fallacy doesn't prevent planning fallacy. So even the guys that came up with the idea of planning fallacy, when they were putting in research of how do we teach planning fallacy to kids at schools or to in a curriculum, they even, they underestimated how long it would take for the curriculum of planning fallacy itself. So Just because you know the cognitive biases doesn't mean you can escape them.
What is that? What's the planning fallacy?
The planning fallacy is this idea that if you say I'm going to achieve X within a month, it will probably take 2 months. And no matter how long, and even being aware of the planning fallacy doesn't prevent it from not happening. So you constantly, it takes 3 times as long as you think it will and costs twice as much, which is interesting when you read Elon's biography. I wonder if that's one of the reasons why he just always sets absolutely absurd deadlines. Because he knows that even with that factored in, it's still going to be later than you think.
Well, that's what I was going to ask you. So is the way to fix that, that you make stupidly ambitious goals? And then like, if it's where you shoot for the stars and if you miss, you land on the moon type of vibe?
I, that's what he does. I think there's definitely something to that, but I wonder if you can actually bullshit yourself to that level. I don't know.
Yeah. The other, I think the other way to do it is you burn the boats. So you make it where it has to get done. There is no way for it to spill over. Like it's not physically possible. Because that's when the remarkable things happen, right? Like, you know, it's when he runs out of money and the last rocket has to take off. It can't explode like the previous 3. That's the rocket that actually went because he's actually out of money at that point. There is no other way. And I think this is where there's a lot of remarkable stories of people in sort of like when they're actually backed into a corner and there's no out, that's when they're able to perform the miraculous. They're able to do what seemingly couldn't have been done before. You said something interesting. I want to go back to real quick. You said, when I think about businesses, I start with the advert, which is the ad, and you work backwards to the business. So what, like, explain that more because I think it's really smart. What do you mean by that? Or maybe what's an example of that?
I've helped so many founders with their advertising and the amount of them will spend years on their idea and then realize there's no distribution for this thing. It just isn't. Distributed native. So I always think from the compression algorithm. I know we spoke about this, Sean, of like a sticky idea, which is essentially all adverts, like good adverts themselves are a sticky idea, which is essentially the following algorithm of total amount of emotion times number of people that can understand it. And that is what makes ultimately a good advert. And if I can't compress it down, because people talk about an elevator pitch, it's almost like the ad pitch, right? Can you compress this thing down to person who doesn't give a fuck about you scrolling in their feed and then immediately going, I'm going to give money towards this, that 2-second snapshot. And I think if you can't compress that down, it needs, it needs more work.
You, uh, you have an idea on here. And the sentence that you're going to reply with when I ask what your second idea is, is it's just the most ridiculous sentence that will ever be said on this podcast. So what's that one?
Yeah, number 2.
Sean already knows me quite well, so he knows I'm an absolute weirdo, Sam, but obviously first impressions today, I'm ruining it for you.
Um, I love weirdos. You're— this is great. This is exactly what I'm about.
So sex is going to potentially die as a reproductive mechanism. So if we just go through the history of sex, so if you could imagine a chart of sex to baby ratio from like the 1500s. So you had the first official condom that came in in 1855. There's talk that it was actually in the 1500s, people using animal parts, but like the condom as we know it, the condom as we know it now, like a sheep intestine. Yeah. Now that's a dropshipping store right there, right? And then the morning-after pill came in the 1920s. And then full effect in like the 1970s. So if you can imagine number of times having sex to baby, it's going like this with time. It's completely plummeting. What I think is looking more and more likely with— and another, we talk about advert-first approach. I think you spoke about this before, Sean, where you look at different technologies coming in. So you've obviously got IVF, you've got biobanks with lots of genetic data, you've got phenotype tests, genotype tests. I think you're already seeing this, but my friend Jonathan has a company that they're going to be launching probably around about next year that essentially, particularly for wealthy people, and I think it will trickle down society where you have 10 embryos and they can basically map out, okay, if you want to avoid diabetes, Crohn's disease, cancer, etc., we recommend this embryo selection. And then obviously it's going to probably get weirder, weirder with time, whether that's height, eye color, IQ, things like that. So we're really on the precipice of this, and all you're going to need is a few people with being able to crunch the, the data, and it's going to be a wild couple years.
So that's actually pretty convincing because Sam's right. When I read this, you said we're one of the last generations to be created via sex. I was like, I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Yeah, test tube babies. And then, but when you just made that case, I gotta admit, it went from George is nuts to, oh, he's right. Which is basically that like, we already have the tech now to basically have a baby, to create a baby without having sex. Cool. IVF does that all the time. And then when you say, well, what's the benefit? The benefit is selection, right? So first it's deselection of, you know, horrible diseases. Who can argue against that? Then you have pro-selection, which is, do you want the blue-eyed, smarter, taller? Like, what do you want? Right? The higher likelihood chance.
Right.
And let's say. Let's say that science is making that more and more possible over time. Seems like that's where the puck is going. At that point, are you going to be the parent who's like, nah, I'm crapshooting it. I'm just rolling the dice. I'm just going to go do the animal way. We're going to, we're going to In-N-Out this burger animal style. We're just going to go do it. And then whatever happens happens. Whereas all your friends and neighbors are the ones, you know, handpicking best babies out of test tubes to say, we want the embryo that's going to be the healthiest, the, the, the most sort of set up to thrive. It seems like you're at a disadvantage if you're going to go choose the old school way, right? It's driving stick when the world moves to automatic.
When I read the sentence, George, I was like, when George, George is going to love the Earth when it comes back down to reality. Like once he leaves Mars and comes back, you're going to love Earth. It's great.
We have water here. Yeah.
But then I realized, hey, guess what? I had my child via IVF.
So I wasn't going to say it, but Sam, you did this exactly what you are describing.
I did, my friend. Yeah.
Oh, there we go.
And it, it, listen, we did it because there's a gene that runs in, uh, uh, in our blood that we didn't want to pass on and we did it. We all, we mission accomplished. We eliminated that gene. We got rid of the target.
The too sexy gene, dude.
Yeah.
You got rid of that?
Damn.
Being beautiful's caused too many problems for you?
Yeah. We wanted our kids to be 5'8", uh, and, uh, it worked. And so yeah, I did exactly the thing that you're talking about.
I'm going to get rid of the British self-doubt. I think, I guess there's two types of people that hear this. There's one type that goes, this is really weird. Why would anybody ever do this? And the second type goes, oh my God, I've been so worried about this family hereditary condition for so, so long. Of course. So the first people, if you actually hear that and think that, you're probably quite lucky that you don't have it. But anybody who has, like, I've got a few different family chronic conditions. And as soon as I heard this, I was like, oh, if I could not see my child go through pain that I've seen other family members go through, whatever money this takes— goes back to Sean's point, work backwards from the Facebook ad. Like, are you concerned about ABC, diabetes, Crohn's disease, insert condition? Funnel right there. And immediately you can see how you can have very wealthy people paying a lot of money for that. And with time, the unit of economics will go down further and further.
And it also makes sense because people are waiting. Like, I've got so many friends who are in their 30s, late 30s, and they're wanting to have their first kid, uh, because like they're yuppies and they focused on career for a long time. And then you get in your late 30s and you're like, shit, my parts aren't working as they're supposed to. Like, I could use a little help to, to like make this happen. It's so, so common, so much more common than I ever thought.
So, yeah, funny story. So we were doing the podcast with somebody who's super, super wealthy, like a billionaire. And before we did the pod, I wanted to meet the person. So I went to their house. Hung out with them, got to know them a little bit. Ben was with me and we, so we hung out, it was great. We had a long conversation about a bunch of different subjects, business, tech, life, blah, blah, blah. And somewhere along the way, this person was like, they mentioned, oh yeah, we, you know, I have this many kids and I'm expecting, we're expecting our next one. We're like, oh, congratulations. So anyways, we leave. And so when we're leaving the house, we, you know, say bye to everybody, you know, meet the family, say bye. Afterwards, I'm like, Ben, so what's the, what were your big like notes? What were your takeaways? Because what did we learn? Wow, we just got this amazing access to this person. None of this was recorded, but like, we can learn from this. What did we learn? And I had like all these like business nuggets, like, oh, he mentioned this growth tactic. Oh, he said this was the reason why that thing succeeded. And Ben goes and looked at his notes. He goes, oh, I found the ultimate luxury item. I was like, what, like his car or what are you talking about? And because he had showed us his garage of cool cars and he's like, no surrogate. I was like, what? Because when we were walking out, we saw his wife and he said like, we're expecting a baby next month, but his wife is not 9 months pregnant. Fucking Columbo. He's like, that is gotta be, he's like, right? That's gotta be the ultimate luxury item. It's like, you don't have to go through like this, like incredible body, you know, experience to, to, to carry and then birth this baby. That's the ultimate luxury. And so I started laughing at that and I thought, he's kind of right.
I think there is something. I so disagree with you on that.
Disagree that what, that it's a luxury item?
Yeah, I think it's—
or that everybody wants it.
No, I think I don't want— I mean, look, it's a bunch of dudes talking about shit that we ain't going to experience, but like, dude, I could barely form a sentence.
I called it a body transformation.
Yeah.
I got 3 kids and I still don't really understand what's going on.
Yeah. But no, I think that's like a necessary thing to go through in order to bond with your, with your kid. Um, so I don't think that's the ultimate—
that's like saying if you're adopted, you're not going to have a bond or this is— I think there's a lot of nuance to that.
But George, what do you think?
I mean, I like these things because I don't—
tell me your opinion on what we should do with women's bodies.
Yeah, put me on the spot there.
Okay. I'll give you like a different angle to this. When I— so my wife wanted to deliver naturally, so no medication, no nothing. And I was like, are you nuts? Why are you trying to do this the hard way? She's like, no, that's what I want to do. So we went to this birthing class, giving birth the natural way. By far the most scarred into my brain 3 hours I've ever been in. And one of the things that I raised my hand at one point because it's like 90 minutes in and they're just describing what seems like voluntary torture. And I'm like, hey, ask, is this what most people do? And she's like, no, I think she said 80-something percent, 85% of people choose an epidural. And I was like, Makes sense to me. And epidural is also kind of a new, newer technology, right? Like, so for, you know, hundreds of years, there was no such thing as epidural. But once you had the option to have a baby that was without, you know, being able to feel all of the pain and the delivery and the labor, obviously a lot of people opted into that. And so there's a whole bunch of like birth businesses that are like, you know, the epidural is a birth business. Like after we had our baby, they're like, do you want to freeze the cord blood and like eat the placenta? And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about, but like. No to the eating. Freezing? Uh, what's that for? They're like, well, if your kid ever has a thing and they need a, you know, stem cells, this is like super rich thing of stem cells. I'm like, cool. So how does this work? And they go, well, we're going to take the cord right when the baby's born and this might save your baby's life someday, but we're just going to freeze it and you're going to pay us, you know, a couple thousand dollars now and then like $500 a year for now until the end of time. And I was like, okay, yes, but also how do I go buy one of these businesses? Because this is the most incredible business I've ever heard of. You're playing on parents' fear at a time when all of their love endorphins are kicking up and they're like, okay, my purpose in life is to protect this baby. And then it's a set it and forget it, you know, tens of thousands of dollars subscription, uh, for a thing that you're just going to— the ultimate insurance policy for your kid. That has to be the best business I've ever heard of.
That's good.
So if anyone has one of those out there, I'm still actually looking to buy them. I've never seen one for sale. Which I think is another signal that it's a very good business.
100%. What, um, what's the selling eyes is art thing?
Yeah. So this is one thing I noticed whilst I was traveling around Europe. Have you guys seen this store? Let me pull it up.
So again, how old are you, George?
I'm 30. Just turned 30.
You got good energy. I like your energy.
This is called an indicator of interest from Sam. When Sam starts to ask like, sup? Yeah, sup. Yeah, exactly. So before we do that, let's, let's talk. And you've passed the first 20 minutes of the pod where it's like, does this person have anything interesting to say? To now, like, wait, I need more of this guy in my life.
The second, the second a British guy says whilst, uh, I'm like, you have my attention. That's my favorite word.
Oh my days. Well, can you guys see this? So for the people who are listening. Your eye for art. So in Amsterdam right now, I walk past this store, I walk past the store, and in the outside of the store, there's this thing where you kind of lean into a telescope and reflecting back from the telescope is your eye. And what's fascinating, I've got relatively nice eyes. I don't get many compliments on them.
Blue eyes. You can say that again, George.
There you go. You're going to get me blushing too much, Sam. So you then have You then have certain friends of yours that are probably beautiful eyes. They get compliments all the time. What's actually fascinating, similar to the personality test, when you zoom into someone's eye, even if they've got the ugliest eyes in the world, they're beautiful. So like my eye, I was like, wow, this is incredible. You can even do it where couples like partner their eyes. And this is one of the fastest growing companies out of Europe right now. Like it's growing really, really fast.
Did you do this?
I did do it. Yeah. Me and my girlfriend got the eyes scanned.
Is it like on the wall behind you?
Where is it at?
No, no, no, it's not. It's not on the wall behind me. I'm getting it my mom as a gift.
Is it a print or digital? What do they do? What do they give you?
You can print it, um, and then you can do like big blowups on the wall. And they charge quite a lot for these things. It's like £200 to £300 quid.
And the reason why you like this is because you're all about distribution, and you were walking down the street, you saw the storefront, you can look into this thing and they show you a picture of it, and then you pay money to buy it.
And you said the sticky idea is emotion times market, right? So this is— everybody's the market and the emotion I think is pretty strong in this.
Yeah, it's so personalized to them and it looks beautiful, dude.
And you could buy like, you can buy like a necklace or a ring or something of your wife's, like, eye print. Correct. This is awesome.
There's probably no repeat purchase here, but this is awesome as a one-time thing.
And it's so much more beautiful. Even if you think you've got boring eyes, when they zoom in at that level, It's like seeing the universe. You go, oh my God, this is its own mini universe inside of me.
I notice on their landing page they don't have very many, you know, boring black eyes like mine. So it's all like beautiful greens and blues and hazels.
I think you'd be surprised. I think you'd be surprised to quote Renan Sharpe. I think when you get under that, it's crazy.
Well, I'm definitely curious. Like, I definitely would want to do this if this was around me. I would definitely want to do it. I would certainly do it with my wife or my kids. Uh, because it's just like a thoughtful— it's a thoughtful, cool thing rather than like, you know, same old, same old.
So one of the innovations I'd like to see is, could you distribute this online? So with smartphone cameras getting better and better, is there an ability? And like AI scanning the image, is there something there? Or is it that you send a little device that sits on their camera that gives even more definition so they could do it at home?
All of a sudden you can imagine the advert first of, oh dude, if you could do this with an iPhone, how beautiful your eyes are.
Boom. Global market immediately.
I'm going to send this to somebody to try to make this.
This is awesome. I just, I just texted this to my wife. I said, hey, let's go to Europe.
This is awesome.
No, they have a New York location. If you, if you click find gallery, they have galleries all over the world.
So George, you said this business is doing well. What do you know about them?
Doing really well. From when I went into the store, I was like, this ticks all my boxes. Like the lot of polos are a fact right here. It's ticking all my boxes. And they said it's like one of the fastest growing startups in America. They opened 150 locations in the last year or something like that. So it's growing like bananas.
You guys want to hear something? So the other day, have you guys seen this? It's mostly women. And it's this thing on TikTok where you go to this place and they hold up colors to your face and they tell you your color palette. Yeah. What's that called? Color scale or color grade or like. So it's like, it's like a noun where it's like, hey, what's your blank? Uh, I forget what it's called, but anyway, my wife wanted to, she saw an ad on TikTok for it and she was like, this looks cool. And I was like, I'll go. And you pay $100 and they rented this tiny, like, it's like a huge closet basically. And you just sit there and they just hold up a shade to you and they go, no, not that one.
Is it for clothes or for makeup or it's for everything?
It's for, and at the end you get this thing and it says you are this one, whatever. Like there's like 18 categories, which means This makeup, this clothing color, this, all these colors, these are your colors. And it basically, like, for me, it was like, it's all women. It's like Margot Robbie. Like, it just said like some other white lady who, that's like, she is also an example of this person. And so you should wear clothing in the wintertime that are these colors in the summertime, these colors, whatever. But it's a brick and mortar thing that has been franchised out very similarly, I imagine, to this business. And I was like, how many of these a day do you have? She's like, I'm packed. I've got, uh, 14 a day and each one has paid $100 and I give HQ, like the headquarter company, half of it or something like that.
What was it called? What's the name of it?
Yeah. And I think I went, I think the place that I was called, the place that I went, it was called The Color Lab or something like that, where it's like, sign me up. And I taught and it had the same type of shtick as this one, George, where it was like a brick and mortar. It was franchised.
It's like Dexa.
Yeah, there was like a thing outside and you're like, yeah, of course I have to know like what color I am, otherwise I'm going to be ugly. It totally got me. Have you, have you seen this, guys, on like TikTok or Instagram? It's mostly like a women thing.
I've heard of the trend, the like the color analysis type of thing. And I don't— George, you probably know the, the fancy word for these things, but there's like— so there's the concept of consumerism, right? Which is like, you know, how Americans basically feel like we, we, we need to buy certain things, we need to like I'll give you the example. A friend came, a friend who lives in India came over to visit and they go, yeah, India has really changed. One of the things is like India feels like America. We've become consumerized. He's like, you know, before he's like Indians used to have one max two pairs of shoes. He's like, but now it's normal to feel like you need like 10 pairs of shoes. You need like all the different colors and all that. It's like that's not a real need, but it starts to embed itself in culture. It's like you almost convince yourself that you need this much. This much stuff. You need to buy more things. And I think that there's like this personal consumerism, which is around, you need to know X about yourself. You need to know your quantified health. You need to know your color grade. You need to know your personality test. And I think you can just keep selling into that. And there just seems to be an increasing amount of consumerism around, around the self too, not just around material things in your house.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the specific thing for it, but it's this idea of the infinite consumer abyss. You stare into it and it Stares back into you.
Dude, look at this guy. The infinite consumer abyss just off the dome. That's, that is why this guy's the guy.
If I'm gonna, if we're gonna have an infinite, uh, consumer abyss, I'm getting red because according to, uh, Lily's Color Lab, that's, those are my colors.
Wait, so you did this or you made it sound like your wife did this?
Well, she was like, let's do this. And I was like, I'm in. Here's $200.
Let's is plural.
Yeah. Like let's find out our colors.
So what's your color?
I don't know, dude. I didn't use any of it. Like, I don't know. I just went to experience what it was all about. I don't know.
Sam Lilac Parr, let's go.
I just wear blue and black anyway. It was, that was, that's my color.
All right, let's do the, um, let's do these other two ideas. Cause I'm curious now. Uh, by the way, you know how I know this is a great episode? Cause I feel like I need to get off this and go do these ideas right now. Like, I don't even want to finish this episode. I want to go do one of these things right now. That's how I know this is a banger. All right, so let's do number 4, mold cleanup as a service. What do you mean by this?
Yes. So one big meme slash wave that I was noticing in America is people becoming more and more concerned about mold in their house.
Yeah, people freak out about that in Austin particularly.
Yeah, 70% of houses in America apparently have mold in them. Obviously it varies in terms of the amount, but downstream effects of autoimmune conditions, severe health issues, asthma, et cetera, et cetera. Working backwards from the ad first, find out if you have mold in your house, like a horrific image of the mold and horrific insights into the damage that mold can do. You could sell the visit for free and people are ripping up their houses, spending tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because if it's your home and you have poison in it, the— like friends that I have that are renting are literally moving out of the house. They're not sticking around now. So if you actually own the home, it's even stickier. I like it from an ad perspective, a health perspective. If you could partner with a big like health influencer, that's your chief influencer officer that could just chat about mold all day and just run the funnel of find out for free and then sell them all the services on the back end. Similar to what Marit Kalls has done for blood optimization, but doing it in the house. I think there's a lot of money to be made riding that wave. And I know Sean, you chat about one-shot businesses. You put mold in Google Trends, it's just every year, like steadily getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
I love that for a bunch of reasons. So what is that? You said 30% of houses have mold?
70%.
70%. Okay. So that is also killer hook for the ad, right? 75% of the, 70% of the houses have mold. Find out for free if yours does. Type in your address and we'll send out a person for free to go diagnose. And if you know the 70% have something, then your conversion, even if 10% or 5% of those people are going to spend, you know, a few thousand dollars getting rid of the mold, that's pretty good. You could target, you know, high value areas. You could also just run this as lead gen only. So people who do mold servicing probably are not great at Facebook ads. And so you could just be the great at Facebook ads part and then farm out all the leads to the mold companies all around the country. So that seems like a really good part of this business. And then the last thing is like, there are so many people that have undiagnosed, you know, health issues. So maybe it's like fatigue, maybe it's bad allergies, whatever, whatever's going on. And you can't find the root cause of these. And I think this is why something like gut health has taken off in such a big way. Cause it seems like one of these, like, yeah, if your gut's screwed up, then everything downstream is going to be screwed up. It could explain 15 different health conditions. And it's the same thing. Like if your environment is toxic, then that could explain 15 different conditions that you might have. And who's going to argue that no, I want to keep it toxic once you find out that they are, you know, we had a pest control guy come to our house and he's like, yeah, see that little like nook under the house. That means you have, you know, mice and rats that are under the house. And, you know, even if you're not seeing them in the house, they're here, they're at your house. Would you like me to seal this and like play some traps and I can come by every month and spray? I was like, cool, here's $300 a month, go for it. And, um, you know, that's a $300 a month subscription that I'm on now. For the vague possibility that there's like a mice, like, you know, a rodent problem at our house.
What you're going to learn, George, moving to Austin, is that like, it's like the most health-conscious city I've ever been to. And like, some people are pretty extreme, but it's kind of exciting to be around those extreme people. And I know people who have like a Brita, like a Berkeley water filter for their whole, their entire home. And I started researching it. Have you guys ever seen the inside of a water heater? Like a water tank.
They're horrible. It's disgusting.
It's horrible.
You see that? There's a picture of somebody literally just holding two fistfuls of what just looks like either mold, fungus, or just mulch of some kind.
And so I saw one of these videos where they just cut open a water tank, like a water tank for the water heater.
Water heater tank autopsy.
It looks like the— it looks like what you would see with like an old coffin that you woke up, open up with just like a bunch of like rotted skeleton bones. Like, it's just like, what the hell is this? I don't even know what this is. And it makes you like crawl. And so I remember seeing this and I'm thinking, is my water heater like this? Are my pipes like this? I have to get one of these Berkey water filters. I need one of these things. And this is very similar. And the difference is, is I think getting mold out of your home is either, it's actually quite hard, or in some cases it's impossible. I think like, I don't know. I don't know if the problem I'm not sure if that problem in many cases can actually be solved. Getting a new water heater, getting a water filter at your house, much more solvable. Particularly like my in-laws live in New York City where these buildings are built in the '50s. It's a lot of times the similar pipes or the water that goes through New York City. It's like pipes have been around for a long time. And I remember seeing these videos of these like water heater, like where they, where they cut them open and do autopsy. And I'm like, yeah, I'm never drinking water from any of this shit ever again. Like, and I, I was like, I, I need to find a, a, a, I need to find, find someplace to replace this. That is in line with what you're talking about and maybe even more of a pungent ad.
Yeah, that's a good one. Should we move on to the next one?
Yeah.
All right, let's do this last one. So your final idea I think is a really fun one because it's not even a business, it's That's like a country-level idea. Like you should be the CMO of the UK. Explain this idea.
Yeah. I like how when Balaji went from like cryptocurrency to now trying to build his own country and you have, I've been thinking about companies this entire time.
People are out here thinking of countries and I don't know the city's whisper, right? He's in Silicon Valley for too long. It's like, you need to be more ambitious.
You're starting companies.
Oh, that's cute. I start countries.
So one of my reflections as a, coming from the UK, and we spoke about it to begin with, on experiencing America. And despite all the political shenanigans that America has, attending 4th of July in Nashville, and I'm going, this is wild. Like there's flags everywhere. There's people chanting USA, USA, USA. Everyone's on the streets. So I was at the end of the day chanting USA and then people were going, you can't do that. That's why we're chanting because we got rid of you guys. And anyway, I then reflected on it and I realized that I'd never met an American that doesn't celebrate their national day in some regard. And then I realized I've never met a Brit that does celebrate their national day. And then I realized I've never met a Brit who even knows the day of their national day.
Well, because you guys have been like the bosses, like there is no Independence Day. You were like the colonizer, right?
Like the Exactly. So that's one of the issues with it. So the irony is, by the way, the national day is St. George's Day. I'm English, called George, and I had to Google it. It's April 23rd. In England, there's no flags anywhere. You can't have national pride. And I do think part of it is the colonization side. Also, St. George, it's like, who was this guy? Whereas with Independence Day, you have a clear enemy. So thinking from an advert perspective, who is St. George? It's, he slayed a dragon. Nobody cares. And essentially canceling St. George's Day and creating Dunkirk Day. So, yeah, the Britain's finest hour. We've made a lot of mistakes, but Britain's finest hour was when we escaped Hitler's Germany. 400,000 men with Churchill, all of Britain came up together, sending the boats across. And literally the only reason the country exists and we're not speaking German, and I arguably Adolf Hitler doesn't conquer the whole of Europe, is because of this day. So there's an enemy no matter where you stand politically. Adolf Hitler, number one enemy when it comes to that ad strategy. And make it the most British day imaginable. So from midnight to 12:00 PM, you can complain, moan, drink tea, talk about what's wrong in the past, present, and future. But come 12:00 PM, get the RAF in the sky, get kids dressed as— like, if you look at the number of British icons, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, John Lennon. Like there's so many like icons of history that the world should be grateful for. And I think you could add billions to the tourist economy of the UK and unite a difficult nation for at least an afternoon.
Sign me up, my friend. This sounds awesome. There we go. Like we got, we could Oasis, by the way, just announced they're going on tour.
Going to that.
Yeah.
He's like Darwin, Shakespeare.
Honestly, playing Wonderwall would not be a bad idea. That might be the official song of Dunkirk. Kirk Day.
There we go.
So you posted this. Did anybody like hit you up? Did you get some like, you know, a PM in the DMs?
What happened? From who? The, the, the, the pre— I mean, who's the, the like—
I don't know, Harry reach out? Who, who's supposed to reach out?
Not yet. Not yet. We're, we're, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna keep banging the drum for a while.
I think honestly you should run ads to your essay, to, uh, to your blog post targeting specifically as hyper-specific as you can.
The zip code of the royal family.
10 grand of ad spend, and I'm pretty sure you're going to get a meeting at the palace where we're here to discuss.
Let's do it. Let's do it.
Don't cock die.
That's fantastic. That is like a funny conundrum that England is in when it's like, well, you guys have been the man for so long that there's not really like a, like a started from the bottom, now we're here type of story. It's more like, You've been the man for so long and now you're like in fourth. So that's like pretty good longevity.
Well, the thing is you need the brand, right? So like, I bet if I walked outside right now and I went to like, you know, just like a nearby, I don't know, if I went to Home Depot and if it was a busy day at a Home Depot, I feel like if me, if I could get two other people with me to start chanting USA, I'm pretty sure the whole store would just start arbitrarily, not on a July 4th, just start chanting USA. Because there's such a pride and USA has like, the brand is really, really strong, right? It's like freedom number one, right? There's the American dream. There's like sort of the pride of America. Whereas like, I think what would the country stand for? So you were like, drink tea and wine, which is like, okay, that's like, you know, humorous in a way. But like, what would be the thing? Would it be like, uh, would it be creativity? Would it be art? What would be the thing that's like, we can hang our hat on of like, We're the best at this. The British pride. What is the British pride about?
I think from first principles, the reason why Independence Day works is because there's an enemy that you escaped and just using, creating an enemy again, talk about advertising tactics earlier, great advert angle, but the, the enemy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany can unite is the only thing that can unite this country, I think.
Right.
So, and then just go through the, like, whatever you want to pick, you want to pick literature. You want to pick the Industrial Revolution? Like, we've got some classic hits in the library. We've got a lot.
I think I have an answer to my question, to my own question that adds on what you just said, which is the UK is sort of like the Harvard of countries. It is Ivy League. It is prestige. It is old money. It is old history. It is, we've been here forever. And the great minds have come from us. I think that's the branding, which is like the US is more like, I don't know, a big state school. It's a bit of a party school, right? And whereas, you know, we're more USC, whereas the UK is more Harvard, Yale, Princeton in its vibe and its brand. And so it's got that old luxury, old money, old prestige brand, which is like, it's elevated. And I think that's part of Well, that's what I would lean into more. It's not like modern and super high-tech. I would lean into the other side on the branding.
One of my favorite ad campaigns, George, of all time, it was in the '70s. It was a Rolex campaign and it would show a picture of Dwight Eisenhower, the general during World War II and then the president of America, giving a speech to troops. And he had a Rolex on. And then it showed, an admiral of a great ship, like giving directions to his folks and he looks like he's going to war and he's wearing a Rolex. And then I think it showed JFK wearing a Rolex while he was, like talking to Castro or something like amazing, whatever. And it, the headline was the men who control the destinies, the men who control the destiny of the world wear Rolex. And it's one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time because you, you like, it makes me associate Rolex with prestige and like doing something, not just being elite, but actually flexing that muscle. And I've never seen a good idea on how to reuse this ad campaign that I love so much, but this might be the one where it's like the people who have like given the world art or the people who have kind of helped shape the destiny of the world are British, whatever. But that's one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time.
Yeah. If you, I think the copy is, if you were here tomorrow, you'd be wearing a Rolex and he does different variations of that. I broke that one down a few times. It's, it's so hypnotic. Even that line back, if you were here tomorrow, you would wear a Rolex with like an image of the White House. Therefore, aspiration, association of the White House. It puts you, so it puts you in it. It's literally, that is hypnosis. If you spoke to a hypnotist about a sentence, that sentence is all literal hypnosis.
Like for example, there's a Porsche one that I love, Sean, and it's, um, It says, um, too small to get laid in, but you'll get laid the second you get out of it. And it's a picture of a Porsche, right?
Or the New Balance one, right? The only, the only shoe worn by high fashion models in London and, and, uh, dads in Ohio.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love that one, right? That's like such a good one.
Like I said, we've broken down a lot of these on the Amp Professor. So like one of the Porsche ones is, honestly now, did you spend your youth dreaming about someday owning a Nissan or a Mitsubishi?
Yeah, that's good.
You may get lost, but not in the crowd.
That's another good Porsche one.
If this car doesn't excite you, check your pulse. You may be dead. So yeah, there's so many. Like, if you go to the Ad Professor on Twitter, we've got so many of them.
So we should talk about the Ad Professor real quick. So you have this marketing agency and to grow it, I thought you did a brilliant thing, which is you created this anonymous account on Twitter. The Ad Professor. And I think you didn't tell people at the beginning that that was you, right?
Nobody knows to this day, really. Well, we just—
there you go. Breaking news. Scoop came out the closet. YouTube thumbnail: George Mack comes out, reveals his truth. We got it.
Yeah.
People will click on that.
They already know.
So, um, he creates this thing, The Ad Professor, and all he does is just give. It's like, I, I love ads, which you, you do, and you collect them. And so you just started threading, here's just badass ads. And then in that, people start DMing you and it, from what I understand, it's a better salesman than any sales guy you could have hired to go out and pitch for business. Is that true? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. We also then create ads for brands. So like we did one that tried to reach like 30 million people. It's like 23 different ads of ads that we've created from like Ryanair. So we did a Tesla one of—
What you're saying is you created ads like on spec, meaning you pretended Tesla was your client and here's the ad we would make for you, Tesla. Here's the ad we would make for you, Ryanair. In there and you just did those. Those also went viral because you really made it, did a good job of that, right?
Exactly. So like the Tesla one was, it takes, I think, like 3.4 seconds to read this ad, the same time it takes a Tesla to go from 0 to 60.
So you do that and then people just start sliding into your DMs wanting to work with you guys, or how do they even know? Because you don't even say I have an agency, by the way, right? You don't do heavy calls to action on this, or am I wrong?
A little bit like plug at the end, but it's always value first. And I think that model of who you went to school with and knowing people that way versus just making dope things online and people seeing the ads and realizing that those Porsche ads from the '70s still have relevance today and trying to create ads that are just super sexy. There's this weird, like, I discovered it via looking at, um, Adhorn on Reddit and there's like hundreds of thousands of communities dedicated to people chatting about ad porn and then created The Ad Professor off the back of that. But yeah, nobody knew it was me until today, I guess.
Does this make good revenue?
We do okay.
And how many people work?
Say the name of your agency, by the way, so that people can go find you.
Yeah, that's just— I just go to adprofessor.com. Sam was mentioning the website then. We have about 40 people, give or take.
Wow, this is awesome. And you're— this is really cool. I would like to use you guys.
Thank you.
I feel sold. Like when I go to this website, I'm like, this is cool. And I've followed that Twitter handle. I thought it was really cool.
All right, we are going to split this. So that was part 1 of an episode with George Mack. That was ideas, ideas, ideas. I thought he had some bangers in there. The next part we're going to do is his frameworks, which is actually what he's more known for. This guy has published essays and tweets that are— he gets retweeted by Elon Musk like once every week. So he has some really awesome ideas and frameworks that he has curated or uniquely come up with. We're gonna talk about those. That's all part 2 with George Mack.
Yeah.
The big ideas.
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.