5 TikTok products that could print money for you
All right, Sam, in the next hour, I am going to flood you with business ideas. I am going to create an absolute lunchroom food fight, slinging business ideas at you. You are gonna be drenched and covered with ideas. Are you prepared for this? 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. Great analogy. The lunchroom one. Did you just make that up? Yeah, that was very good. I'm ready.
By the way, all of these ideas, very half-baked, came to me, you know, I would say 75% of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel and we said, let's record anyways. And how about we do some business ideas? Let's give the people what they want. 'Tis the season of giving and we're going to give the people what they want, which is fun business ideas.
Well, the first one you actually have a lot of intel on, right? You actually use this.
The first one, I have some bets. I have some bets on horses and those horses are currently paying out and I haven't been talking too much about it, but I think it's time. So TikTok, let's talk about TikTok. TikTok right now, if you open up your phone, do you have TikTok on your phone? No.
Okay.
For some of you, you might have trouble opening the app because there might just be millions of dollars jammed in the app and it's a little bit like stuck. So it might be hard to open up because there is so much money. Available in TikTok right now.
Oh, that's why I don't use it. I had it and I deleted it.
I love TikTok. I have a lot of fun on it. But I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space. And I think right now people are sleeping on it.
When you say business bets, do you mean things that you own or investments of other people?
I own equity in companies that are doing this.
That's what I'm asking. Okay. So you invested in companies that are doing this, not something you fully own and are operating. Correct.
Because I'm trying not to operate anything at this point. Yeah.
Because that, like, insight is a little bit different.
Yeah. Yeah. But these are all like, uh, there is something in between. So there's like angel investing, which is you write the check, sort of passive. Uh, you're on the outside. I would say you're on the other side of the fence. They lob you updates over the fence. And then there's things where you own, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40% of the company and you're active. You're more actively in the loop. You're not active day to day with your hands, but you're active with your ears and your mouth. All right. So anyways, right now on TikTok. TikTok today is a little bit like Facebook was maybe 2012 to 2014. And if you remember, you at that time were working at a place called Founders Dojo, and there was a guy who used to work there named Moiz Ali. And Moiz Ali today is more famous because he started a brand called Native Deodorant. Um, you want to give the, like, 2 seconds of what it was like being at the Founders Dojo when he was creating Native?
Basically, it was this guy who went to Harvard, Harvard Law, I think. And so he was like clearly smart and he had a small e-com startup that he sold for like $4 million or something like that. So very promising, but still like, well, you know, he, he was young and he's like, what am I gonna do? In the Founder's Dojo, which was like my little, uh, 10-person office that I shared with some other guys, he was looking for something to sell. He thought mattresses, he thought a few other things. Eventually he landed on deodorant. And right in front of us, literally every day, he learned how to use Facebook ads and in a very short amount of time scaled his deodorant business from zero to just an idea to something like $30 or $40 million in revenue in literally 18 months. Eventually sold it for $100 million in cash in like 24 months, all right in front of us.
Yeah, 2.5 years end to end, uh, from time of start to time of exit, $100 million sold to Procter Gamble. Okay, so why did he do that? One, he picked a interesting category, but he was doing something that not every, not a lot of other Harvard graduates, smart people were doing. And at that time on Facebook, you could get traffic for very cheap. You could get sales for very cheap. And he was able to build up a consumer base at the right place at the right time.
Basically, by the way, I saw his sheet. Uh, we wrote an article on it and he like sent it to me. I think he was spending $4 and the, each customer who we spent $4 to acquire was then spending $16 with him. I believe that was the numbers. So it was like a money-making machine.
Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure of the math, but it was something like that. It was sort of like, you know, 4 to 1, 5 to 1, 6 to 1 payout on, on every dollar. Okay. So, which is very hard to achieve today. Today, uh, you know, 1.5 is the new 4 to 1, right? So basically you put in a dollar, you get a $1.50. Oh, that, that same machine used to give you $4 for every dollar, man. Those are the good old days. Well, the good old days are right now on TikTok. And so what's actually happening? So here, here's the breakdown of how this actually works. So you create a product of whatever type, could be digital, could be physical, great product. Now I want you to look at something. Go down on our sheet. There is, uh, on page 4, there's an infographic and it's from a brand called Goalie. You know what Goalie is? It's apple cider vinegar gummies. So they just sell gummies, like gummy vitamins, but specifically ACV, apple cider vinegar, which was kind of like a health wellness trend and craze.
Now goalie, dude. First of all, you could put anything in a gummy, I guess. Like, it, like, it started with weed, understood. Then, like, I do creatine that way. Now you could do the last thing that I thought you could possibly do in a gummy, which is vinegar.
Yeah, yeah. And actually, if you drink apple cider vinegar, it tastes horrible. The goalie gummies taste great. Uh, it's like, you know, it's apple cider vinegar without the pain. Okay, so goalie itself was a business that grew like crazy. From zero to hundreds of millions in revenue. I think they ran into financial trouble. They think they had to sell, bankruptcy, something like that. They were like, they got way ahead of their skis. The group that bought it has basically restarted it. And one of the main things that they're doing is this TikTok creator method that I'm talking about. So look at this infographic. This is a rewards program for TikTok creators. So if you're a TikTok creator, not only do you get a little kickback on what you sell, but if every month you hit a certain sales target, you can get something. So low tier. You know, 1,500 GMV, you can get an iPad. All right, cool. 4,000 GMV, meaning you sell $4,000 worth of product, you get an iPhone. All right, let's keep going up. 15,000 in GMV, you get an all-inclusive trip to Aruba. 50,000, you get a Rolex and more. You get the Aruba trip, the iPad, and you get the Rolex, right? They're stacking. And now let's go to the high tiers. There are people that have done $1 million. They get a condo in Miami. If you do $1 million, I think this is in a month, um, of your, your GMV target. And so they're going to creators and say, hey, do you want this condo in Miami? It could be yours. So creators is one way that you can make money on TikTok. So you don't even have to do the brand or service. You could just say, I am going to sit here and figure out how the fuck to sell apple cider vinegar gummies.
And if you do this, if you get a month, if you get $1 million, they give you a Lamborghini. Yeah. Oh my God.
And there's people who have achieved these targets. Okay, so this is their program right now. So this is who you're competing against. If you're going and trying to recruit these creators, it's like you're a Division I college basketball program and you're trying to go get McDonald's All-Americans to come play at your program. Like, there are guys, it's like, oh man, there's this kid in Wichita. This guy's just a creative genius. He just sits in his bedroom and he just figures out the best hooks, the best angles, and brands are putting them on retainer, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month. In order to get this guy to create for them. This is what's happening right now in the creator space.
How many views do the big videos have?
Millions, tens of millions of views. They can get, they can get like a million likes on a video. So you get a million likes, you might've had 5 million views or 6 million views.
This is crazy. Like there's a guy dressed up in scrubs talking about it. I have no idea if he's actually works in the medical industry, but because he's wearing scrubs, I'm like, all right, what do you, what do you got to say?
I think the teeth whitening area is full of scammers, and I think that you are not a scammer for using TikTok Shop, but I think a lot of these scammers use this shit, this like TikTok thing, like this way. And so it doesn't surprise me that a teeth whitening company would be using it. I'm not, by the way, I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all, but you know what I mean?
Yeah, but I'm also not saying they're not.
No, no, no, no, no. I have no idea about this brand, but I know I've seen a lot of like bullshit teeth whitening companies and I like look at it in the research and I'm like, oh, this does nothing.
Yeah, I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things. All I know is that these, uh, they're selling a lot of product. I think the Guru Nanda teeth whitening is the number one selling product on all of TikTok. And TikTok is the number, like kind of the most used app in the country basically, right? So you have this like top selling product on the top selling network. It's pretty insane.
I have tried to back into this. I don't, I don't know the exact— I don't want to say a number that's going to be way off on this podcast.
Like, would it be crazy to say like $5 million a month?
I don't think that would be crazy. No.
Okay.
Let me put it that way. The brands that are doing this strategy well are doing really well. And you— and by the way, this creates a halo effect, right? So you, you sell the products directly off that one video, but then people hear about it. And then when they see their ad, the ad performs better because I've heard about this product before. Oh yeah, I've seen 10, 10 videos about this product. Like, so now when you put the paid ad in front of me, those 10 organic impressions paid off. Or I go search for it on Amazon. Amazon then takes that signal and says, wow, people really are searching for this name. Maybe we should surface it higher. Or Google says, wait, we should surface this higher. People are searching for this keyword brand. So, uh, with that product category. So in that product category, give it more rank. So there's this multiple multiplier effect of this.
I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream though, because marketers are like, piranhas, like when there's like flesh in the water, like they all like one person tells one person and they all flock to it and they eventually ruin it. So how much life does this still have and how mainstream is this amongst brands?
Let's say it's in the red zone still. So basically it's not as good as when I first discovered it and I didn't want to talk about on the pod because it's too good, right? Like when something's just like absolute gangbusters, right? And unfair advantage, you feel like, you know, a secret nobody else knows. It's not there. However, more importantly, it's still at a spot where you can go do this today. It would still work if you just go and do this today. So still works, but you're not the only one doing it, right? Both, both are true.
I have you and like 10 other friends in the e-com world and every business they complain about a variety of things with software, it's churn, whatever. Uh, with e-com, the complaint oftentimes is cash flow and inventory. You're saying huge numbers, let's say hypothetically $5 million a month, $60 million a year. But is that actually a good business when you're doing this? Or is this one of those things that if you you get big, you still are broke.
Look, if you're bad at business, you'll find a way to lose money in any business. Even the Goalie example I gave you, right? Hundreds of millions of dollars and basically went bankrupt along the way. So there are ways to lose, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Um, there are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this. And so I've seen both, I've seen both examples. I don't think it's about the model. I think it's about how well you actually run your business and how much common sense you use. One of the great things about this from a cash flow perspective is normal e-com business, you put up the money for the ad, you put up the capital at risk in order to get users. With this, you only put up free product at risk. So you send inventory to the affiliates, the affiliates create the content, you pay nothing for that ad until the sale is generated.
Dude, so if you're a digital product, you crush it here.
Exactly. So I have a couple of examples of, of digital products as well in my list. So, okay, here we go. That's a long setup. For 5 ideas that I think you could take onto TikTok and crush with right now. Number 1, so I want you to watch this video. It's, uh, go scroll down and look at this link that says Botox. So the video starts, says face taping is my jam. And then the other podcast goes, tell me about this. And she goes, if you had told me 14 months ago that I would not be doing Botox and I would be taping my face instead, I would have said you're effing out of your mind. And so what a hook, right? So this girl's basically saying, I used to use Botox and now I use this. And I would have thought this is crazy. And then the other girl's like, tell me more. So this video itself has a quarter million likes.
Uh, I don't know how many views this thing has. By the way, they have it. So usually it's like bros, it's dudes like discussing stuff in a podcast setting that that becomes like the meme. This is like two pretty women. Is this even a real podcast or are they just like— This one is.
A lot of people fake these, but this is the Wellness Process podcast. So that video has 5.4 million views. Okay. So, and they're not selling a product to be clear. A lot. I mean, look at the comments. Every single comment is, what's the brand? Anyone know the brand? Because she says there's this Japanese face tape. And anytime you say Japanese face tape versus just face tape, already elevated. And everybody's asking for the brand. Nobody knows what the heck's going on. Some people are criticizing. It's a polarizing thing. It's a visual thing. These are good things when you want to sell on TikTok. So idea 1 is Botox face tape. I think you can make $50 million in top line revenue, I'll say 15% margins. So, you know, whatever that comes out to in the next 18 months. Okay, let's be more conservative. 24 months. If you hit this well, so you can make, you know, $7.5 million profit. You could build a brand because there's a lot— if you look at the market, there's a lot of people that are, um, on TikTok that obviously care what they look like, AKA everybody. There's a lot of people who are Botox curious but never going to pull the trigger because it's either too expensive, like individual Botox treatments are like thousands of dollars, or they just feel like it's too extreme and they're crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't want to do it for that reason. Maybe some— maybe they'll be judged, maybe self-respect, maybe they have to go somewhere. It's uncomfortable. It's like hymns, right? There's a bunch of barriers, reasons why you wouldn't do it.
Dude, I looked up if this works on ChatGPT. The answer is no.
Who knows, right? Health and wellness is like one of these things, right? Like, I don't do those little— do those little like jade face rollers work, you know, do just putting cucumber slices on your eyes and doing this. Like, uh, Ari came on here the other day. I was like, Ari, you're glowing. She's like, I did a chemical peel. And I was like, I don't know what that is. Tell me more. There's a whole world of beauty treatments that like have some on the spectrum of effectiveness and cost. They, you know, they land somewhere. All I'm saying is that I think this could work. I don't know if red light therapy is going to change your skin and your hair, but yeah, it's selling. And that's kind of my point right now. I'm not a doctor. I can't make health claims.
I have a friend who is, went, is a doctor. And anyway, she does Botox for people and she was at my house and she had her kit with her and she was like, I need to like test this out.
And we were like, did you get Botox curious?
I was like, look at her. I was like, whip that, whip that sucker out, baby. Let's do this. And so she gave me a little injection like 6 weeks ago. Where? In my forehead. Uh, like, like I was like, you know, I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this, but like, I'm a guinea pig, you know, you got a needle, you got drugs.
Like, I'm going to try. I would love to hear this excuse you're about to make right now. You're like, I like science and I just thought, you know, I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I wanted more small businesses. What are your other reasons that you did Botox? Tell me. Let's make a list of Sam's reasons besides I wanted to look better.
Go ahead. Looking dope naked. I mean, there's like, that's the only reason why anyone does anything. Uh, right. Uh, uh, but it was, I got so many compliments afterwards.
Did you really?
Yes. I got so many compliments and it was free. On your forehead? Someone says you look really young. People kept saying I looked young and I was like, and it made me self-conscious on how I used to look like.
And dude, you're hooked.
Have you ever, you would never do that. You're not into that.
No, dude. Come on.
Would you, what would you say if your wife wanted to do it?
I think my wife does want to do it, but she's in that boat where she's like, I don't really want to do it, but I want to do, I'm curious. It's the same. I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kit and was like, yeah, I can do it right now. I think she would be like you. And I think her forehead would start looking smooth or whatever it does.
Yeah. Like she was right here and I was like, yeah, I mean, if the needle's right there, like just stick it in me. Like, let's, let's do the damn thing. So it was awesome.
I'm gonna drive into Taco Bell right now. But DoorDash, if it brings it to me, I wouldn't not eat it.
Yeah. If it's there. So, uh, yeah, I guess you could say I'm Botox curious.
Yeah. I think you're beyond curious. I think you're Botox activated.
All right. What's the next one?
All right, next one. Uh, another one in the beauty space. And this is a theme here. Beauty things are tap into a core human desire. They are visual by nature. They can have before and afters, and they obviously are, you know, high margin, great businesses when you can build them. And so I want to take anything that worked in the D2C, in the, in the prior waves of e-commerce, and I want to see if I can build a TikTok-native distribution strategy around it. That's a lot of fancy words to say, if it worked with Facebook ads, I'm gonna see if it worked with TikTok videos. Okay. So one of the big winners, I think she spoke at your conference, was a brand called Madison Reed.
Dude, there's, uh, a location right down the street from my house. I think they do really well.
Yeah. So Madison Reed has built a real empire around hair color and I don't know the full story, but basically, you know, hair color's not a new idea. They exis— you know, there were many brands that existed. My mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid. You know, she would go to Target and buy, you know, dark browns cuz she didn't want graying hair or she, you and my sister if she wanted to try it.
Damn, you're going to do your mom like that?
Oh dude, dude, if I'm grayed up, you don't think my mom's grayed up? Like, obviously, obviously. And so, you know, my sister would, if she wanted to try having lighter hair for a season, whatever, go buy hair color. So Madison Reed basically built a, you know, kind of online-first distribution strategy. So a bunch of Facebook ads and built a huge brand in this space. I think Madison Reed, I don't know what they're worth, but I would not be surprised.
I just looked it up. Top line revenue grew 20% last year to $150 million in revenue.
Yeah. So the valuation, something like $500 million plus. So huge success. Um, I think you could do a new Madison Reed on TikTok. I think that's just a bet worth taking, which is same idea. Maybe you have some new novel angle. Maybe it's that it's easier to apply. Maybe it's that it's less messy in your cleanup. Maybe it's, uh, less harsh chemicals. So it doesn't damage your hair the same amount, whatever. Come up with your, your reason why this is new. And build the brand off of TikTok. And I think you could do this again with creators who are going to use the product, show the customers, build trust, build your brand, get people searching for your brand because there's not— there's always going to be a new wave of people who are interested in this, right? So there's either people who are— whose hair is starting to gray. There's always going to be a new generation. And so whatever the old— whatever, whatever media they consume, is where you need to be in order to sell that, right? Like, remember, like, Touch of Grey or whatever, like men's, whatever the men's hair color one. Yeah, they did it on TV ads and the Madison Reed did it with Facebook ads. Whatever the next generation is, they're probably going to get sold to over TikTok and Instagram Reels.
And you know what's funny is, you said there's a new generation that wants this stuff, but you know what has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks that worked in 1910 will still work today. So for example, there's this Wall Street Journal ad that tells the story of two young men. One young man, when they both, when they both graduated college, one young man got a Wall Street Journal subscription and because of that he got a better career, whatever. And they tell us a story. There are so many ads that replicate that story or that idea successfully because if you Google like best Wall Street Journal ad of all time, they cite that ad. And so what I like to do, um, is find old ads from as late as the '30s, the '40s. Like it could be like, uh, print magazine ads and just see like what's like an interesting line or an interesting— yeah. What's like the human nature vibe of this and just rip it. So like for example, there's this one very famous ad where it says, they laughed at me when I sat down, but then when I started to play the piano, dot, dot, dot. And that's called the curiosity gap. Which is, do you remember the brand, you know, uh, BuzzFeed and then what was the other one called?
Upworthy.
It was like, uh, you know, 10 reasons why blank, you're not going to believe number 7. That's the same hook as that piano ad. And so it's really fun to find old ads and just be like, what's the human nature element of this? And just replicate it on TikTok.
Exactly. Exactly. Great way to find hooks.
Okay.
Here's an, here's a different, uh, different category. So I did beauty. Let me give you a different one. Self-help. So one of the top-selling products in the last year is something called the Shadow Work Journal. Have you heard of this?
No, but, uh, that's a great name. Shadow Work.
I've seen this. I have seen this.
Yeah, the Amazon listing for this currently has over 5,000 ratings, and this is like a self-published type of book. And this journal on TikTok has sold over 100,000 copies. You know You know how rare it is for a book to sell 100,000 copies in like the first year that it ever existed with no other promotion? Um, so this was a, it was a huge success. And basically it was like, um, people on TikTok would, they'd have the book open. They'd be like, like the gasp. I gasped when I read this line. And you're like, all right, what's the line? And then they'll read you this like kind of heavy emo-ish quote from this journal. And then it's like, or they'd be like, you know, um, I finally figured out my, this, like, my, my true shadow. You're like, what? And it's like, you know, it kind of gets into like this whole, like, you know, like the gypsy girl type of vibe. It's like there's a whole, like, group of people that love therapy, that love, like, horoscopes. It's like these, like, weird Venn diagrams that you can find where it's like people who are really into sort of the mystic self. And so this book capitalized on that. I think today, if you were to write— I don't know why I said you. I should have said me. If I were to write a modern-day version of Tony Robbins's book, Unleash the Power Within, or Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I think if I wrote a modern version of those and I just pumped, let's say, 9 months and a quarter million dollars of effort into seeding it on TikTok, I think I could have a, by far, a bestseller. I think I could sell, you know, millions of copies of a book.
This isn't a book, right? Is this like one of those things where it's like—
This is a journal.
It's like 2 words or 2 pages, 3 pages of, of, of writing and then a week's worth of like notes. No, no, no, no.
This is not like a planner. It's not like a daily planner. It's, I mean, I haven't read the whole thing, but like, it's basically, it's a lot of text content, but then there are like fill in the blanks or like, what's that for you in a box? And you write it in your box, but it's not like, it's not like just, it's not just days and you, you, you need a journal in it yourself.
Have you seen Design Your Life? Is that what it's called? Yeah. Designing Your Life. It's like a book by like, you know, it hits all the check marks where it's like a Harvard psychologist who spent 30 years studying happiness and lifestyle design. Stanford, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Like writes a book on this and then it's a, it's a cool book. I read it. And then now they have like a journal that goes along with it and you could just look at this and be like, what works and what doesn't work? Uh, but yeah. And by the way, The, I don't know if this angle would work with you because did you, have you Googled the author of that shadow?
Yeah. Yeah.
She's very aspirational.
She's very different than me.
Very aspirational.
But that's not, nobody knew, nobody could see that when they're, when they're buying the, when they're just watching a TikTok, because it wasn't like, it didn't look like a commercial for the book. It was just somebody saying how this line in this book really spoke to them or how this book changed the way they view things. Like there's a whole, um, hook on TikTok that's very famous where they say some, it starts with somebody saying, um, do you have any book recommendations? And then they zoom the camera in really close to their nose and their eyes. They go, I have books that will change the way you even like look at the world. I have books that will be so good. You will never be able to look at a man again. And they're like romance books or whatever. Like I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain and they go like really intense with it. And that's a, that's like a common like meme hook that they use.
So the first, it's like the first video.
By the way, I like how you were like, I don't know if you could do this. This girl's hot was the thing you basically just tried to tell me.
Well, she's a 25-year-old. Like I'm looking at this New York Times article, by the way, she's 25, which is just amazing. She's like a 25-year-old, like really pretty woman. And that's like TikTok's demographic. Like, you know, you're like, you're a gray bush. You're a gray bush in TikTok world.
The videos are not her., the videos are whatever, uh, the videos are from the creator. The creator just looks how the creator looks. They don't look like her.
And this is amazing, by the way. You know, I think at one point you were like, I feel like I'm riding a horse, like a few years after Henry Ford invented the car. Uh, like it's just like, it's, you can't compete. When I see these videos and these plans, I think to myself, I can never compete in this world of e-com. This is just insane. Like the way that they start, like the way that you were describing zooming in on someone's eyes. If I were in that meeting and trying to figure out how to do it, or in my bedroom, like at night, trying to like figure out like, how do I write this script? I would have been like, this is like, this is like cringe. Like, I can't do this. Do you know what I mean?
You'd never be able to push post?
Yeah. I'm like, I can't, you know what I mean? It's really hard.
I totally get what you mean. And I'm, by the way, I'm not saying that these are easy to do. I don't, I don't mean to say that. I just mean that somebody's going to do these. And I think the way to think about this is what are your attributes? So for you and me at this point, if we want to do something that's going to be, you know, successful, we have other attributes like, well, I could just use capital. I have a lot of capital. I could just invest in things that are already working. That's an easy way to make money. Um, I have a good network. I have a unique network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things and they will uniquely let me into something. Okay, that's cool. Maybe I have this audience from the podcast. So I have attributes. If your attributes are I got a shit ton of time, I have nothing to lose, and I have pretty shameless with my phone, right?
And I'm like 24 and I grew up like mastering this stuff.
Yeah, I just been effing around on TikTok. I understand the metagame here better than whoever is the brand marketing manager or the head of paid acquisition for Madison Reed or whatever these things are. Then you're the one, right? Moise, it's like I get that I can go to Facebook ads and tinker on this all day in a way that Procter Gamble's head of, head of marketing is not going to do. They're going to be buying Super Bowl ads. They're not going to be sitting here in Facebook Ads Manager every day and doing that. But, but you know, you get what I mean, right? Like you have different advantages than the incumbents do. And I think if your advantage is that you're, you grew up on these networks or you, you're willing to hustle with, with in a way that they're not, you're willing to sit there and slide into DMs and send out free product to do all this stuff. You can win and you can win in, in, in these categories that already exist.
When I was with Moise during that, I mean, when I say with him, like, uh, he was just, you know, we weren't like acquaint— we were, we're just acquaintances, but I would just see him on his computer and he was like, everyone check this out. And he like, he, he would track the numbers every single day in this spreadsheet and be like, we just changed this number from a 1% to a 1.25%. And then it was like, now that 1.25%, that's the standard for that day. Now we're gonna add in this one new change. We're gonna add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing. Boom. We just got that 1.25 to 1.4. Tomorrow we're gonna do this. Like, it was like a methodical, like, it was basically like, I would joke, I just call him, I was like, dude, we're all just spreadsheet monkeys. 'Cause like all we're trying to do is, he was just doing was just staring at the spreadsheet, turning 1.4 to like 1.6. You know what I mean?
Right. Well, I think, by the way, he's not, he wasn't just like that kind of at the beginning and now he's like, oh, he's made it, so he's different. No, he's, he's still the same way, dude. I had a question for him about our e-com business. Like, hey, here's how we're keeping track of this. We're trying to use this. I don't know if I should trust this or if I should trust Google Analytics or if I should trust Triple Whale or if I should trust Shopify Analytics. They're all giving me slightly different numbers. Like, how do you, how did you do it? And I just figured, I just figured he'd be like, you know, I just, you know, I just kept it simple. I just did this. And he goes, He did say, I just kept it simple. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. So which one did you just— you just picked one? And he goes, no, I just kept it simple. Every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers for all the platforms every single day. Here's my sheet. And he was still doing it. Now this is like 10 years later.
The guy's $100 million animal.
Yeah, $100 million later. And he wakes up in the morning and he sits down, he triangulates, he tracks. He goes, yeah, they never drift between, you know, more than 4%, but I just do it anyway. So I'm just like, it's kind of like almost like a daily practice, almost like a like a, almost like a religious act he would do every day, a spiritual act he would do. Oh, like an offering to the economic gods.
If you're a chef at a bakery and you've worked there for 20 years, you know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus 45 minutes before you put it in the oven, you're gonna have a very minor difference because you've done that thousands of times. And that's basically like the same thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you notice these very small differences.
Uh, I admire his, um, tenacity towards things. I don't think he does anything in a not tenacious way. All right, let me continue. I got 2 more ideas for you. Okay, so I did beauty stuff. I did a book or self-help. And by the way, that's how Mark Manson made Subtle Art of Not Giving a F, like tens of millions of copies sold. He was blogging before that and built a blog audience, and he used the blog audience to launch the book.
And that was, dude, a blog audience too. Seems like so old school. Like when I'm hearing this, because a blog takes 10 years and hundreds of thousands of words and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts.
And I've told this story before, but I'm gonna tell it again because there's a lot of new listeners. There was a time when I was building, and about, you know, 5 to 10 years ago where I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high school. Oh, dude, teens, teens will love this app. So I said, well, what are we doing? We're all just 20 to 30-year-old guys sitting in this office. You got to Let's go show this to some teens. So we went first, we stood outside of a Chipotle and we said, free burrito if you test our app. They looked at us like we were creeps, but they took our free burritos, tested the app. So, all right, we need to get more people saying yes. Right now, only 1 out of 10 is willing to take a risk. I said, how do we just go to where they're a captive audience? They're trapped. So we went to a school. We said, hey, I'd love to come in and teach a class on business. And at the end, I'm going to tell 'em about our new app. Is that okay? So they said, yeah, sure. We came in, we basically got to be a substitute teacher. And I remember going up in front of the class, I think this was like a 9th or 10th grade class. And I was like, uh, we're telling 'em about their app and they're like, all right, like, we'll try it. Like, just give us the app. I was like, cool. So, um, you just gotta get the TestFlight and we put a, uh, link on the, uh, I said, can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this, go to this URL, uh, just go to this link and then you'll get the app.
—and there's a link. Was it like shaun.com/it'sfree1?
It was like JGL498, whatever. I was just like, just write it down. It's just a— just do this link. And the guy in the back just looks up, and his phone was all like cracked and whatever. He just looked at me and just goes, links are gay. And I could tell you there was no recovering from that. And he said that, the whole class just stopped typing. They're like, yeah, he's right. Links are gay.
Links are gay.
That's what's Like today, blog. It's like if I said, hey, I'm starting a blog because I really want to use this as kind of like building my audience to promote my book, I'm going to do— they'd be like, blogs are gay, is what like that 9th grader would have shouted at me, just like absolutely humiliating me.
Dude, but what's old is new again. It'll come back eventually. Hopefully.
Hopefully. Uh, all right. So 2 last ideas. Candy Candles. Click this link. And, uh, if you're on YouTube, you'll see this on, on our video screen. It's important to look at these because these are You're selling a visual product. So go down and see where I put candles. Just watch that video right there.
Oh my God. It's a Mason jar. Holy crap. Wait, those are not— are those real Oreos? So it's a Mason jar with a lady dipping what looks like Oreos and animal crackers as if she's making like an Oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a Mason jar.
Exactly. But the, but instead of the smoothie, it's wax. That's wax. I thought that was real. 'Cause this is a candle. No, this is a candle. So these, these, that's wax. I don't know if the Oreos are real or not. I can't tell.
But that's what I'm saying. I can't, of course it's not real.
Look at the numbers on this video.
All right. It has 600,000 likes. Holy shit. How many views does this have? I don't know.
This, so this woman has, and she's just like a lady. She's just like a baker. She just made that video. So I saw that video and I was like, oh man., this could be a product. Why do I believe this? So what, just like I said, I wanted to take things that worked in the Facebook ads heyday and be like, could I translate this into with the new distribution engine? Another version of that is take anything that sells well in an MLM because TikTok kind of works the same way. TikTok is basically you, you give your product to a bunch of people, they go and then shill it to their network and their community. That's how an MLM kind of works without the The pyramid part of the scheme, but this lady's work is so good.
Like I'm clicking, there was stuff. It's like, it's like frappuccinos and shit, like coffee that looks like it makes me, I want to eat it. I want to drink it, but it's a candle.
I want to eat it, drink it, smell it. I want all of it. Right. And that's what I'm doing. It's basically a sensory overload. And that's, if I see that, I think this will perform, this will perform. If we, if we armed creators with this and we had enough volume, this content will always perform.. It has this oddly satisfying sort of delicious thing. And people who like candles love candles. There's actually— I said that wrong. There's nobody in between. You either don't use candles or you love candles. There's nobody who just kind of likes candles, uh, that's a candle purchaser. And so that's why if you go look up successful MLMs, and I did this one night and I should have done an MFM episode on it, but like you can go break down successful MLMs and you could try to figure out what product categories are they in, because those are categories that you could go into and be successful with if you just took out the MLM. Same product has the same desire, but use a new—
Scented oils.
Yeah, there's a bunch of them. And so like candles is a huge one. So I think, I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into. And I'll give you one last one. Um, 23andMe. So 23andMe was this like really interesting company. It got really big, but the company is blown up. It is like self-imploded.. It still does $300 million a year of revenue, but they've basically— the board all resigned. They quit. The company's losing money. The stock is in the tank. It's like worth nothing now.
Dude, they had a major hack too.
I remember they lost 6 million people's DNA.
Whoops. My dumbass. I did it when they first launched and like it's been on there forever. And I get an email saying your shit's like hacked. Like someone else has all your—
That's a bad Lexi email.
Yeah. Yeah. It was horrible. Like it was like the wor— that's, probably has to be the second worst hack behind it besides your bank account.
Yeah, it's terrible. But I think, and there's others in this space. Ancestry has an AncestryDNA product. I think you could sell that through this network. And so I think a new way of acquiring customers, I think that type of product, which is a kind of a mix of a digital and a physical product, a subscription product.
Have you seen the food ones? No.
What is that? Allergy or what is it? Yeah.
So you can, so the science behind this stuff is iffy. It's not, you know, which a lot of people debate if it's legit, but that never, that never— food sensitivity is what you're talking about. Yeah. Where it's like, yeah. Where it's like, which foods are you sensitive to based off of your DNA and based off your saliva? Which like that, it might be bullshit. I actually think it is, but a ton of people do them, myself included.
I think it's bullshit. That's why I do it. That's why I do your annual subscription. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's a huge opportunity. This is 5 ideas I thought of this morning, but I do think that, uh, the, the upside of it is I think that unlike the cliché, you know, people, the cliché is that you can't get rich quick, you know, blah, blah, blah. There are actually ways that you could get rich quick, you know, Mois selling Native for in 2 and a half years for $100 million. That's pretty quick. It's the best way to get rich is quick, as Mois says. And so I think that it is not. And by the way, I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies that we've started or incubated that have been in this space. I guess what I'm saying is the growth here is quicker than I've seen pretty much anywhere else. I don't think it's easy to do. I think it's— I think you're competing in, like you said, sort of sharky waters. It's not that a lot of people are competing, but all the people who are competing here are very smart and very, very scrappy. But there's a lot of categories out there, and if you can find a category where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this, I think there's a lot of money to be made.
Dude, listen to this story really quick. So do you remember there was this company called Elite Daily? Do you remember Elite Daily? It was like a blog, right? Yeah. So Elite Daily was a blog launched maybe in 2012, and within one year they scaled Elite Daily. It was basically a blog that said like, a lot of stuff they said was like controversial. So it was like you know, why men should do this or women should do that, you know, and like, what's the controversial take? And then sometimes it was like just a variety of lists. But the guy who started it, his father was Jacob the Jeweler. You remember Jacob the Jeweler, the rapper? The guy who like— Yeah, that was his— Supply the Rappers, right? Yeah, Supply the Rappers. That was his kid. And so he started this blog when he was 22, and this was when millennials were the Gen Zers. So millennials were the young guys. And within one year, it got to be the most popular blog on the internet, which it was getting something like 100 million monthly uniques. He did it in one year. About 18 months in or something like that, I went to their office in New York City, and their office was a bunch of like New York kids, like 22-year-olds who are being paid like $15 or $18 an hour or something like that. And they had just rows and rows of cheap IKEA tables and everyone just sitting there on their computer, just like banging out headlines to articles. And then they would like write just a couple words. They would see which ones, like they would post it on Elite Daily because they had so much traffic. They would see which ones get a little bit of traffic and then they would go and write out the articles.. And then eventually the company sold for $60 million, which in the media world, it was like the biggest thing on earth. And so Elite Daily, if you Google like Elite Daily acquired, it was like the, it was just like massive.
How fast was that? How many, how many years?
Uh, this was like 10 years ago, so I don't remember, but I think it was something like 2 years. Like it was like really fast. Like they were doing like tens of millions in revenue, uh, literally within 12 months. Like it was almost overnight. And I remember going to their office and I thought that this was like a legit publication. It was just like these, like they built like some software that like could guess what was gonna go viral and it, they were just banging 'em out in this room. And it was crazy because it was crazy. It was an example of people who find one little hack and they go all in on it. They dedicate their lives to it and they end up building a business that is huge. Like this is kind of what this TikTok thing, which is like, oh, you're telling me if I just like get this one mom to share this thing, oh, I'm gonna build a whole infrastructure all around this. Where a lot of outsiders look at this and they're like, that's crazy. Like, what are you doing? That's like ridiculous. Like, you can't do that. And they're like, but why can't I? Like, the math says that this one worked, therefore I'm gonna go get 300 of them. And, uh, this Elite Daily thing, it was insane to see this firsthand. And I got to talk to those guys. It was all wild. Uh, this is like the new version of that. And so I got to see these guys sort of like, I, I wasn't, uh, particularly friends with the founders. I was friends with some of these employees. So I got to see it from that angle. They got rich overnight, basically. And it was like the exact same thing of just like finding a little tiny thing and going all in on it.
Yeah, I think it's not, it's not for everybody and it's not easy and all that. My disclaimer would be why, why, why am I not doing this? Well, besides the fact that I don't really want to be, you know, running businesses anymore. But even if I, even if I could, even if I wanted to, here's why I wouldn't do this. It's a really frenetic stressful space to be in that's changing every day. And so I don't like to— I don't know what the right analogy would be, but it's sort of like sprinting on quicksand. And I just, I wouldn't really want to do it, right? But, but if I had no other choice or if I was wired that way where that's fun for me, I— okay, great. I'm not really wired that way. It's also age.
Age, age makes you different.
Yeah, the second thing is that most businesses, like the terminal value, you know, the exit value is in how durable, how sustainable, how sticky is this? And by definition, this is not super sticky, super durable, super sustainable. Um, you get the upside, which is a fast spike that's sort of more than you could otherwise get organically. But the downside is 18 months from now, I don't know if any of this will work. You might fall off a cliff. Uh, and so I think that's the, the upside and the downside of this. And then also for a lot of these, it's physical products. It's e-commerce, which is just its own beast in and of itself. You have supply chains, you have fulfillment, you have inventory risk, and you have, um, shitty margins generally. And so like, I think digital products and software, even if it doesn't grow as fast, can still be a better bet to make and getting able to go there.
So, and getting big fast is not necessarily bad as long as you have the right mindset. So for example, a lot of people don't talk about this, but Jeff Bezos, Amazon, they got huge very fast. They were also Google's biggest advertiser when Google first released advertising, and they got big on the back of Google. And it worked because they were like, we're going to use this to make ourselves huge. And also we know that the customer is always first. We have to provide the best customer service with the best product. So if you combine all of those things, you can create something amazing. Yeah, exactly.
I do think also, one last, I guess, like important caveat on this is if you do this, there's sort of a better and worse ways to do it, worst way to do it. And I would say the most important variable in something like this is just the repeat purchase. So how much, how much of a true brand and long-term customer can you build? There's a lot of people that I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once. It's like, man, you're going to go through all the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time and then The product is not a consumable. It's not something you're meant to buy again. And you're going to have to release a new product in order— another pro— a second product or a third product of a whole different type in order to get there. That's playing the hard game on extra hard mode. Don't— I wouldn't recommend doing that.
I think that reason is, if I remember correctly, I'm just remembering this from like years ago. I think that's why Moyes said he didn't do mattresses. I think he was like looking at mattresses and this was right when Casper became a thing, but he was like, yeah, like a mattress is $400 and literally everyone in America needs it, which is great, but you only buy one every 8 years, right?
So like of the products I mentioned, the Botox thing, the— it's— that's a constant. Once you get on that treadmill of, you know, sort of like face improvement, it's hard to get off. Tell me about it. Yeah, I know, I know you're feeling the burn right now. Come a little closer to the camera. Let's take a look at that puppy. Um, hair color, you got to keep doing it. Candles, you burn them, they melt, you got to get another one, right? So like these are things that are consumables that, uh, that have repeat purchase in them.
Do we want to end there and save your last one for another one?
Yeah, I had a bunch of other ideas, not in the TikTok game, but, uh, I think we got excited and used the whole episode for TikTok. So if you liked this, we probably have 2 more episodes worth of just pure ideas. Go on YouTube or tweet at us and just comment on, uh, if you're going to comment on YouTube, just be like, yo, more ideas and tell us your favorite idea of these.
All right. Thank you. That's it. 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.