#97 with Andrew Wilkinson - The Warren Buffett of the Internet Returns

What up everyone, today we have Andrew Wilkinson. He's been on here a bunch of times. Uh, we don't need to do a proper intro other than Andrew started this thing called Meta Lab, which he has spun into Tiny, which owns like 10 or 20— he just owns a lot of stuff and, uh, he's really interesting. Um, I am moving tomorrow out of San Francisco. We've talked about this a lot. I'm moving out of here, Sean. I'm going to go to Park City and then I'm going to go to St. Louis and then New York. And then I don't know. Along the way, I'll be doing this, obviously. And I'm going to take a little bit of an academic nerdy approach to it where I'm going to like, I'm reading these books and I'm going to outline like, what is like the most desirable, like what are the attributes that make a happy neighborhood? And I'm on a mission to find that neighborhood.

There's some movie. I don't know if you've seen it. There's some documentary about the happiest city or the happiest society. It's like in Sweden or something like that. It's just like very communal living. Do you know, you guys know what I'm talking about? I'm only remembering.

Isn't St. Louis, Abipso or whatever in California the happiest place in the United States? I think it's sunny like 300 days a year.

San Luis Obispo.

Yeah. Yeah. Have you checked that out?

I have, but here's why I don't think so. I actually think that people overestimate how much weather impacts them. I'm almost positive that the number one attribute is your tribe. Yeah. Can you have a tribe of people?

I think it is your tribe, but I think weather's like 2 or 3. Like, I think it's, I think it's way up there because just spending time in nature.

Where I live in Canada, it's like you're always surrounded by nature. It's free. It's not freezing cold. It gets shitty and rainy probably like half the year. And then it's beautiful and sunny the other half, never too hot, never too cold. And I find just having the contrast, I don't know if I'd be happy if it was always sunny. I talk to people in LA, I feel like they just don't appreciate it.

Yeah. I've grown to actually hate San Francisco weather. I want really hot or really cold. But Andrew, you have family up there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I grew up here and I hated it. I thought it was the lamest place in the world. And then I started traveling and I realized like, holy crap, this is the most beautiful place in the world. And it's awesome. And it's exactly what you said. I have a tribe. I have all these amazing entrepreneurs I meet up with every single week. I have great friends. I've got family here and now I wouldn't go anywhere else. But before I had the tribe, I hated it.

And Sean has a tribe in San Francisco. So he has no reason to leave.

Yeah, exactly.

Cause I lived in so many different places. I think I've lived in like 10 different countries or something like that. And people are always like, oh, which one did you like the best? I'm like, well, literally my whole experience was just a function of like, Who I hung out with. And if I had great friends and my family was around, I had an amazing time. It didn't even matter what the city was. And if they weren't there, again, it didn't matter how sunny and how many beaches there were.

It's like, I used to, I used to work in a cell phone store and it's a shitty job. It's an objectively shitty job. Like literally on welfare Wednesday, you're dealing with all these like rude people who are addicted to drugs and it's super stressful. But I worked with all these awesome people and we all had fun and hung out. And I love it. Right. And so I think it's the exact same thing. It doesn't really matter what the settings are if the people are awesome.

Andrew, have you heard of this thing called Hello? I think their URL is HelloLanding and their URL or the URL is HelloLanding. It's called Landing. And what they're doing is you pay an annual fee of $100 and you get access to a ton of furnished apartments throughout 20 major cities in the US. And you can stay there for a monthly fee as opposed to 12-month terms. Have you heard of this? And what's your opinion on this type of business?

Yeah. I mean, it's fine. Like, staying in a hotel sucks. I travel for work when there's not a pandemic or whatever. So I understand the appeal of something like maybe a little cozier, but I feel like it's kind of like these people who talk about like van life and glorify that. Like, In reality, it probably sucks not having your friends and family around, being cold, not having consistency. This is maybe a nicer version of that, but at the end of the day, I wouldn't want to live that lifestyle where I'm just bouncing from city to city. Like what you're talking about doing is exciting because there's a purpose. And the purpose is at the end of a month or two months, you're going to decide where to live. But, um, it's, I mean, maybe if I was a business traveler, I'd be stoked about it, but I hate traveling.

I'm in the same boat. And I actually had a question similar to that. I've read this, or in the same vein as that. So Shawn, have you read when Marc Andreessen, or I think you told me about this. So Marc Andreessen, famous investor guy, said something like Warren Buffett talks about See's Candy and he kind of like with disdain said like, I don't want to build See's Candy. I want to create the next scientific candy that's going to blow them out the water. What Warren Buffett is betting on is that change won't happen. What I'm betting on is that lots of change is going to happen. Andrew, you're like a technologist and an internet guy like us, but would you say you agree more with Buffett on that if you had to pick one or the other?

How long did it take you to be self-aware of that? Because nearly everyone, I imagine, originally sees like an Elon Musk and they're like, That's the best. You got to do that, right? Um, and then maybe they're like, uh, this is, this kind of sucks.

Uh, I, I, I don't know, probably like you guys, like I grew up worshiping Steve Jobs and I read every single biography of him. And as I read more and more biographies, I just went like, wow, like everybody he worked with thought he was a genius, but also felt he was an asshole. He didn't seem super happy. It seems like a really stressful path. And like, again, it's like, Holy shit, that guy like transformed all these different industries and did all this amazing stuff. But at the end of his life, like, is— was he happy? Did he enjoy all that time or did he not know his kids? Or, I mean, I don't know. I have no insight to that. But to me, it just looks really stressful.

Well, the world's worse if they don't both exist. You need people like Buffett to be a steady hand and make sure that those businesses are well taken care of once they get scale and they don't need to innovate anymore. But then if you don't have the people innovating on the bottom, we live in a boring, shitty world. Technology ultimately makes everyone's lives better, makes everyone richer. We all live like kings compared to how people did 100 years ago. Even the poorest person today is way better off. So you need the innovators. I just go, man, I'm not built for that. I know I've no— I've gotten to know a lot of those people. They're amazing. But I often just go like, wow, there's a lot of personal sacrifice here. They're 45 and they don't have kids. They are super stressed. They're sick all the time. They don't sleep, et cetera. I just, I just don't want to do that. And I think at the end of the day, I think we all know that the world's super competitive and If Steve Jobs hadn't done the iPhone, a year later, someone else would have, right? Or Samsung would have done it, it would have sucked, and then it eventually would have evolved and gotten to where it is today, right? So I just think fundamentally innovation is a competition and there's hundreds of people competing. If it's not you, it'll be someone else. I don't think you have like this mission and duty to do innovation.

Yeah, you don't have to play that. It's sort of like The way I think about it is, okay, what's the purpose? What, like, what— not what's the purpose of life, but what's the purpose of your life? And like, I'll say there's 3 kind of high-level goals that I can think of. Maybe there's more, um, maybe there's like a 4th one that's religious in some way that I'm— it's out of my blind spot. But the 3 that I think about is, okay, um, my overarching goal is to be happy, right? That's one. And it's that— Andrew, sounds like you're sort of in that bucket. Enjoy my life. I have the highest quality of life I could possibly have. The second one is, um, I want to make the biggest impact or contribution to society, the world, or someone, you know, the world at large. And so if you chose that path, you would want to be, you know, curing diseases. You'd want to be, you know, advancing humanity forward, removing scarcity, all those things, because you think the highest calling for you, for yourself, is to contribute in some way. And then the last one might be the highest calling is to win and to push yourself and challenge yourself as much as you can. And you view life as basically a series of obstacle courses. And in doing them, that gives you the most pleasure and meaning to your life. Um, there might be a fourth one, which is like, you know, to, to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ or something. I don't know, whatever. Um, but those are the three that I know about. And as I look at the people around me, I could just see, oh, that's their track. They've chosen the track of impact contribution, they've chosen the track of quality of life, and they've chosen the track of winning/competing/challenging themselves. And I am at a point in my life where I've now realized that this is the case. This is the frame I— this is the best frame I can use to describe the world. And now I'm deciding which one am I going to go into, which track am I going to go into.

Well, there's so many different ways that you can contribute to that track, right? You look at it and go, okay, you could be the guy who invented the burrito, or you could be the guy who created Chipotle, or you could be the CEO who took Chipotle and made it, instead of one place that was really awesome, 50 places that were really awesome. And you think like every single part of the management and growth of that business, someone got inspired by it. Right? And so if you're just the boring steady Eddie guy who took it from 5 locations to 50, yeah, maybe that's not as innovative, but that also inspired all the innovators to go create a whole bunch of new burritos because burritos are hot now or whatever it is. So I think like everyone's contributing in their own way and it doesn't matter. You should just own your strengths and do what you want to do. When I say I want to live a happy life, that doesn't mean I don't want to be socially responsible, build great businesses, make them as big as I possibly can. I'm just not going to go and, you know, try and build the next great business in VR. I'm going to wait a while and wait for all those guys to figure that out. And then maybe I'll do something there.

Well, let's talk about what's interesting you at the moment. You guys, Andrew has been on a bunch of times going. I think his episode might be like a top 3 or 5 most listened to one. Basically, Andrew started this agency in Canada that was incredibly successful and he used the profits to buy more companies. And so Andrew, at this point, how many companies do you guys either own part of or fully?

So we have about 30, 30, something like that. And then we've invested in about another 80 businesses just in a minority capacity, like venture.

And so what— and you're just— you, me, and Sean are all incredibly similar where we have this ADHD where we just like to jump around and look at new things, even if we don't ever do it. It's just exciting for us, um, to geek out. What, uh, what are you geeking out right now? For a few months ago, it was cat furniture, and it's always been— it's been podcasting, uh, podcasting software. What now?

So I, um, it's been interesting. So, you know, I spent 12, 13 years running all my businesses, super stressed, trying to bash my head against the wall and grow them. And then I finally read about Buffett and I was like, "Okay, I can hire other people to run my business." And when you do that, you kind of go into shock, right? You're used to being this ideas guy and you start all these businesses and then you're running them and you wake up every morning and you're drinking out of a fire hose. And when I got out of my businesses, I suddenly stopped getting emails. I wasn't needed. I went through this existential crisis and I was like, How do I still be creative and do stuff and start businesses, um, while also just supporting the existing businesses we have? And so I suddenly had all this white space to just start screwing around where I'd be like, okay, I'm going to spend $30 grand and I'm going to, you know, try, you know, starting a new little business. We've started a variety of these businesses. And to be honest, the purpose of them is to distract me. So that I don't make dumb mistakes. I like taking action. I like doing stuff. But the best investing is done while you're just sitting there on your hands, maybe not even making a move for a year or more.

Hey guys, I want to take a second to answer one of the most common questions I get, which is, hey, I got this great idea, or hey, my company's doing really well and I just need a developer. I need somebody who knows how to code so that I can either bring this idea to life or I can grow faster. And, you know, I've been there before. I've dabbled in the no-code tools trying to make it work. Sometimes that works, most of the time it's not good enough. Tried to learn programming myself, that was a waste of time. And you know, I've looked into overseas platforms to say, hey, can I find an affordable developer? You know, I can't afford somebody here in the States, in California, paying some Silicon Valley prices, but maybe I can afford a developer in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe. And the big challenge has always been finding somebody who's actually like good, like they're vetted. Like I never know if somebody's gonna just take my money and run, if they're actually a good developer or a bad developer, and how do I know? If I knew how to code, I could judge their stuff, but I don't know how to code. So what I really like about this week's sponsor, Lemon.io, is that they have a vetted marketplace of remote developers from Eastern Europe. So I know the founder pretty well, his name's Alex, and what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster. So you know if you go to Lemon.io, you're getting a developer who is actually good, is good quality, is gonna get the job done. And so what, the way it works is you go, you type what you need, hey, I wanna build this app, or I need to add an extra frontend developer to my team and I don't wanna hire. Within 24 hours they'll match you with the right developer. If it's not the right developer, you just tell 'em and they'll switch it, you know, basically for free, it's a replacement guarantee. And they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platforms. So, you know, you get one big savings when you just go outside the US or outside of Europe and you, you get somebody in kind of either Eastern Europe or in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, you know you save money there. But Lemon.io is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this, and so it's stupidly effective. I would just kind of take advantage of this as long as they can offer these rates. It's pretty amazing. And Alex basically told me that for any My First Million listener, they will offer a 15% discount on the first 6 weeks of work that you have done. So if you want that done, if you want a developer who is vetted who can build your projects, go to lemon.io/mfm. Again, that's lemon.io/mfm, like my first million. All right, enjoy. Back to this week's episode.

Right.

So we've got 25% of the population opening.

Facebook, dude, you're the next Facebook.

I can nerd out for this all day, and I have a feeling we're going to. Sean, you wanna go down this vein?

Should I just leave and just go get a coffee and let you guys nerd out about local newsletters?

Let's go down this vein a little bit. So let me give the listener a little bit of background here. And Andrew, I don't know how well-versed you are, but I'm a geek in this. Local news is a— digital local news is something that people have been trying to solve since the beginning of the internet. Um, the most important, or one of the bigger, uh, attempts was Tim Armstrong. You know Tim Armstrong, Andrew?

Yeah, AOL.

Yeah, he was like the CEO or something, some executive at AOL, and he started Patch. And I'm sure you've investigated that, right? Um, they were— okay, so patch.com, they're, they're, um, he started it as a thing in AOL and they try to make it big in the early 2000s. And it's not big, but it's not not big. It does probably $50, $60 million a year in revenue, but not much profit. And it's kind of hard, and he's invested a lot of money into it. So that's that. And then a bunch more people have tried to do it, particularly one guy named Kevin Ryan. Kevin Ryan started Business Insider, he started Gilt, he started MongoDB, he started Ad— what's the thing that became AdWords? DoubleClick. DoubleClick. Yeah. So incredibly successful guy. He recently, what he did was something you did, Andrew, where he invested $300,000, I think, into this thing called the Denverite. And they were going to turn the Denverite into Capital— what's your thing called?

Capital City? Capital Daily.

Capital Daily. So he tried to do this and he told me, he goes, I can't figure it out. I quit. I can't figure it out. So, so many people have tried to do this. And almost all of them have failed. But there's a handful out there that are actually doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Um, there's business journals. I don't know if you— I don't know if they have those in Canada. Do they have business journals? You know what I'm talking about, Sean?

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Um, make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subscription. Um, and there's a few other ones that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue successfully. It is such a sexy and fun project to work on. It just sucks that so many people have failed at it.

Well, it's so, it's so, it's one of those things. It's like starting a restaurant, right? It's like, it used to be the world's best business. Now it's the world's worst business. The question is, if you apply modern technology and you run super lean, can you do it effectively? I mean, dude, like some of the, some of the media companies up here that own all the papers, some of them do hundreds of millions of dollars. Like one of them, the Toronto Star, which was like the, I would say it's like the Washington Post of Canada, basically. Those guys just sold for $50 million and they had $50 million in the bank.

Right.

How did they— and now they had— well, so basically they get to a point where the business doesn't make money or it loses money. Right. So it's slowly eroding that cash. And then they also have $50 million of pension obligations because paper owners used to make so much fucking money that the staff would unionize, right? And that was a normal thing. And, you know, labor versus ownership and all this stuff. And it kind of made sense then because the ownership was making so much money. And so they'd unionize and they'd get all these crazy pension benefits. And that was totally fine because it was a duopoly. Usually you have one or two big papers in the city and you just make shitloads of money forever. And then all of a sudden, 20 years ago, the business just died. It's like, Imagine if you own Coca-Cola and you're like, I don't see what could possibly disrupt me. And then some unforeseen, you know, the new science of pop where you can make pop that, you know, is better in every way and healthy. And it just totally disrupts Coke. Like, it's just unthinkable. So these companies are still huge. They make like— this company that sold for $50 million, I think it did $250 million. But as Chris and I actually looked at it, we were like, maybe we could buy this. As we picked it apart, it's just a nightmare. It's full of landmines.

I think it's like, if you look at it, it looks like it's like physical, which I think is fine. But I think at the end of the day, like being able to do email with zero cost is way superior. I mean, it's like, why would you guys send out The Hustle as like a newsletter, like a physical newsletter? It'd be so stupid.

I know it sounds stupid. I've talked to, uh, old school competitors and they go, we're digital only. But then he goes, we offer this new thing now where we charge you $500 a year and all we do is send you out like a basic ass, like, like almost like printer paper version. And he goes, people love it.

Sam, you should be doing this with Trends. Trends should be a magazine. That comes out quarterly that summarizes everything, and it should be a print magazine with awesome photos and just take the best, you know, stories.

Pain in the ass to organize though.

Have you seen what that guy— what's his name? Nathan. Kind of, yeah, that guy, that guy, uh, that guy's like a— he's a total tool, um, he's a total tool, but I like that he's—

he's also— there is someone, someone basically said he's a con artist. I don't know if it's true, but it wasn't there some Someone called him out, Vulture or something.

Vox. Well, he's not really—

where he's kind of like, he's basically, he's, yeah, he's basically never really done anything. And then he also apparently has people on his podcast and then he grills them for their numbers and then he goes out and he sells that data to people or something like that.

Yeah, he had me on it and he was like, you know, first it is pretty impressive the way he operates it. Like, he's got this like drip system where he's just ping, you know, he's got these VAs who are just pinging everybody, anybody who's got a pulse, to be like, you want to be on this podcast? It's the number one podcast. It was featured in Forbes. It's like an article he wrote as a Forbes guest contributor. And it's like, and then it's just like, hey, when do you want to do this? Hey, does this date work for you? Hey, come on, what's up? Hey, your competitor just did it. Like, whatever, this is like this drip sequence. And so, um, so I went on and he's like, yeah, we asked, you know, it's all about numbers, listeners like actionable stuff. I was like, oh yeah, that's reasonable. I was like, but you know, I'm not going to share any of the numbers. Yeah, yeah, that. And then he, he's like, yeah, no problem. He goes on there, he's like, so what's your revenue? First question, basically. Oh my God. Hey, yeah, we're not really sharing that. Um, so how many users do you have and how much do you make per user? I was like, well, that's the same question just with a different, uh, angle.

He's literally got a data collection business that's like faked as a podcast or whatever.

Exactly. And nobody— I don't know who's listening to this, but he's got this sort of army of, uh, like sort of equally like dumb people who think that he's great. And it's like, oh no, this is the blind following the blind. Yeah. Um, and so yeah, anyways, but I like that he's doing a magazine. I give him credit. The guy hustles more than most people. And, um, although I don't really respect him because I don't think he's on the up and up, um, I think he comes up with some clever like mechanics.

This is why it's so— whenever I remember when I was like 20, I would see like, oh wow, someone's like Forbes 30 Under 30, as if it's like, you know, the editor-in-chief chose, and it's literally just whoever has the best PR and pushes the hardest to get in. And it's amazing how it validates people who have achieved nothing. It's crazy.

So Sean, by the way, quick caveat, whenever someone like starts off hot like that and says, what's your revenue? I, my immediate reply is always like, what do you look like naked? Or like, how big is your dick? Or like, what was it like when you lost your, what was it like when you lost your virginity? That's the immediate reply. That's good. It's like, uh, how much— they'll be like, what's your revenue? I'll say like, how much do you have in your checking account right now?

Right.

I can't stand it. Um, oh, so local media is interesting to you, Andrew. What do you think, Sean?

Uh, yeah, I think it's cool. I think, uh, The Athletic surprised me in how, um, how many subscribers they were able to pull doing just local sports news and making you pay for it. And as a giant sports fan, I was like, what are you talking about? Like, sports information, news, opinion is everywhere. It's one of those like supply-demand things where everybody loves sports, so everyone's willing to talk about sports and everyone thinks they're an expert and everyone's got an opinion. So like, you're gonna charge people for that? That doesn't make any sense. And then what they got right was people have sort of an infinite thirst for things that are extremely relevant to them, which is either stuff about yourself, stuff about your friends and family, or stuff about where you live. And that works for local sports teams. There was just a bigger appetite than was being served by the national publications.

Well, also, it was so much of the reason why people subscribed to the newspaper. They just flip straight to the sports section. So if you unbundle that, boom.

Exactly. And so there's that side of it. There's like, Nextdoor does this with neighborhoods. Citizen does this with crime alerts for like every police alert in your area. Like, there's lots of examples of where this works. Um, I don't know if it's the most exciting— it's definitely not an exciting business to me personally, but also the question is, what— where does technology lever this? So like, okay, email is better than a news bundle, I get that, but it's not— email's not cheaper than a blog per se, right? Like, there's internet already made sort of like free the like printing process. And so, um, where are you getting new leverage is kind of the question I would have around it.

To me, there's like this social— I look at it and I go, yeah, maybe each city could make $200 grand a year, $500 grand a year profit, whatever. It's like not that exciting. But what I get excited about is the idea of being the flashlight in the dark, right? I think there's all this stuff that is gray area, gray area shittiness that happens in a city where if you just sat at the court, like, and you just like look at all the dockets that go up, you'd be like, holy shit, like there's all this crazy stuff happening in this innocent little city. And being able to like point attention to injustice and crime and all this stuff that is just too in the middle. I think that's the purpose of the local paper. And so that's what I'm excited about. It's like getting to play Batman a little bit, even though I'm like, at the end of the day, not directing it anymore. But it's cool to actually know I'm making a positive impact in my city.

Who you found to be the operator of this? Because this is the one giant black box of your operation. I love your life in a way, but then I'm like, oh God, I'd have all these projects and they would all be execution dependent and I'm not doing the execution. And I, in my, in my life, I found it very difficult to find people who can, um, replace the CEO and be great CEOs and hiring great CEOs. It seems like something that's absolutely essential for your model to work. So like, just walk me through the example of this. Like, who did you find as a CEO or whatever?

The execution barely matters, right? Like it was such a simple model where it was like, at first it was just literally my stay-at-home mom friend would spend 2 to 4 hours a day doing it. And I would just go, and I went to some friends who run a PPC agency and I said, I'll pay $2 per acquisition, exactly what Sam does with The Hustle, and we'll scale it up. And that got us to like 10,000 subscribers or 15,000 subscribers. And then at that point, I was like, okay, like, I need actual journalists to make sure this is all kosher and start doing the original reporting and run a news team. And there was actually a guy who I went to high school with, who was at one of the big national papers and wanted to move back to Victoria. So I just poached him and put him in charge. And then, you know, we got to a certain point now where we're bigger and we need more business leadership. So we just hired a CEO who we haven't announced yet, But you know, it's iterative, right? And again, the bar's so low. It's not like I'm going into like drone racing and I need like the best CEO to execute amazingly. It's like, it's not hard to send out a MailChimp every day and write a bulleted list.

Yeah, but that's not exactly what Sean's saying. What Sean's saying, it sounds like a nightmare to have 30 CEOs because if you have 30 CEOs and they each stay with you for 2 to 4 years, like that means like every other couple weeks. Like, you're— someone's gonna be quitting.

What he's saying is the difference between, like, all the great— like, the difference between good and great, uh, from my experience at least, is, is quite large and, uh, comes from a person who's gonna just solve a bunch of problems, have one or two creative ideas to get you unstuck or get you to the next level. And, um, I just find— I just feel like those people are really hard to find. Like, even when I invest in companies, I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I don't even believe this person is going to be able to do it. And that's their baby. That's their original idea that they've been pushing forward. And I'm like, I don't think you're going to be great.

You know, that's what Chipotle did, by the way. Chipotle at 10 restaurants took an investment from, or I think it was at 10 McDonald's and McDonald's like, hey, we have the, we have the playbook of how you get 200 locations up in the next year. And we're gonna run that. This is the legal guy, and that's the construction guy, and this is the other person, and like, you just kind of need to move out of the way for a bit, and like, we're just gonna do this. And then they did that, and then several other people— these all started in Colorado, like Noodles and Company came next, and then they just hired all the ex-Chipotle people. They're like, oh yeah, this is the lawyer who did the Chipotle deals, all their leases. Cool, they're doing all my leases now. And they just did the same thing, and it's sort of a Silicon Valley for fast casual food in Colorado. And the same things happen, the same thing happens in Silicon Valley where it's like, yeah, you hire the ex-Facebook, the ex-Twitter people because you're the new Snapchat and you want to experience growth and build data teams and do all the things that, you know, you've probably never done before, but they did.

And Andrew, when you do this, do you accept mediocrity? Like I was reading this book, um, Before the Exit or something, and their whole argument, I think that's what it's called. And their whole argument was like, You actually, it's really hard to build a business that makes profit and good money. Like it's hard to build a business that's worthy of even being sold or bought. Maybe you should not even sell it and you should hire a mediocre CEO to run it. And like, like that was basically their, and they're like, look at the math. It kind of makes sense. And you know, I don't know, I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but is that what, do you accept a mediocre CEO?

No, I mean, I'd like to think I don't, but I think the key is buying businesses where they can withstand a mediocre CEO, where they're already organically growing so well and their business model is so simple that it's hard for somebody to fuck it up, right? So, you look at The Hustle and you go like, okay, if you just keep doing what you're doing, you could put almost anyone in there as long as they didn't go, let's blow a bunch of money, let's go and try and build some crazy new software and run, do crazy R&D. And so to me, it's like, is your business good enough to withstand somebody who's not optimal? Do I want an optimal CEO and the best possible CEO in every business? Absolutely. There are situations where I have a CEO who's extremely weak in one area where I know that, for example, let's say they're a great operator, and I see a great innovative strategy they could be doing, or they could be doing M&A and rolling, rolling up and growing faster, I have to accept those limitations because at the end of the day, the most important thing for that individual business is, okay, the product is freaking awesome and the team is happy, right? Sometimes you do have to make those sacrifices.

Yeah. And we were talking about that. You have this one company that I like and you're, and I was like, man, you guys can improve this so much if you did X, Y, and Z. And you're like, I know, I've been telling them to do this. And I'm like, well, why don't you just do it? And he's like, they'll figure it out. And I was like, that's such a Zen way of approaching it. And I guess it's working for you.

It's the hardest thing about what I do is like, I see, first of all, you guys know this, like, it's so much easier to criticize someone else's business and be like, why don't you just do X and Y and Z? And it's always like, well, I don't have enough awesome people to do that, or we don't have buy-in on it, or, you know, there's complexity that you don't understand because you don't have context. We have that in so many of our businesses. I have a million ideas for the CEO, but I've realized that at the end of the day, I hire and fire CEOs and I give my opinion, but I can't tell them what to do because if I tell them what to do and they execute what I do and they're pissed off because they didn't get to do what they want to do, they resent me, or they think that— they build a counter-narrative that if only they had been able to do what they wanted to do, they would have been hitting their bonus or the business would be doing well. So I've realized, like, I can just set up the guidelines and create the incentives, which will be a magnet to get them to achieve the thing that I hopefully want, right? But yeah, it's really, really hard to tell someone what to do, as both you guys know.

And if— well, think about it. Imagine if they have to make a layoff and they go, ah, the board is making me do the layoff, right? Because that's the easy thing to do is blame the board. Well, now the board's vilified. The whole company thinks they're working for evil, evil people, right? You're so right. It has to be the decision Every tough decision has to be the CEO's.

That's like a traditional gangster, like in all the gangster movies, they're like, they act like the mob boss.

The mafia code.

Or the gang leader is like up top and then someone speaks their name and they're like, oh, you thought I went soft? And you gotta like step down and like, you know, fuck someone up every once in a while just to prove you still got it. That's like the traditional, that's like how all the gang movies work.

Hey everyone, Abreu here. We're giving away a free masterclass pass. All you have to do is go to today's July 31st edition of the Hustle newsletter, click the link, and enter the code word Hustlers. Again, the code word is Hustlers. We'll email a winner on Wednesday, August 5th. Good luck.

What else, Andrew?

What else? I got a question. So, um, you listen to the podcast, you know, pretty regularly. Um, what's been something that we talked about, an idea or a space that like you either know something about that we didn't know, or you're excited about it, or sort of like imagine we could have patched you in in that moment, but like we can do it now. So was there, was there a topic or an idea or a theme that's— that got your attention?

Well, I got really interested. You guys were talking a lot about this idea of how do you make a lot of money in a short period of time. I think it was $3 million bucks in 3 months. Is that what it was? Yeah, $3 million.

Did you guys ever—

we didn't, we didn't do it. I've listened. No. Yeah. So what everyone would— I think, I think it's the wrong— to be honest, I think it's the wrong— it's probably the wrong question to ask, right? With it, it kind of creates this incentive of like, you know, I'm going to put everything on red or whatever. But I was thinking about what I would do. And I think I'd do the Million Dollar Homepage 2.0. Like I'd find some poor kid who he'll, he'll, he loves tattoos and people can buy an inch of his skin and you go and you sell this kid's skin, you know, for tattoos or whatever. I think you could easily make $3 million if you pumped it up and put it on The Hustle and stuff. Right. Um, but I was really racking my brain trying to think like, how do you ethically make $3 million in 3 months? That's a, that's a hard one.

But like, that's okay if it's profitable.

You still do it.

Yeah, you would still do it.

Yeah, you do it on credit cards and you keep scaling it up. Yeah.

And there's another one that was like a, uh, it's crazy. You go look at these apps, uh, plant identifier. You just take a, you just point your camera at a plant and it tells you what plant it is. And this app has millions of installs. And, um, you know, who knew, but people care about this stuff. And so anyways, there's these simple, really simple apps to build that generate a lot of revenue and you don't have to go this venture capital path. You don't have to reinvent fucking rockets or like, the new cloud software, blah, blah, blah. Like, you just tap into these really simple things.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's one of those things though where at the end of the day you have no competitive advantage. So it's like a good 3-month business, but you're picking up pennies in front of the steamroller. Other affiliates catch on, other lead gens catch on. There's nothing you can do to protect your business. I always think what's interesting is finding something like, just to go back to the hustle, you guys have this audience And you're clearly, when someone buys an ad for $100 grand or whatever, obviously it's making them $120, $150, $200 grand. Have you guys ever thought about like doing that exact thing, lead gen, except for like just basically do affiliate? Like why don't you guys do affiliate?

So I can actually kind of talk about this. I don't like talking about the hustle too much on this podcast cause I hate revealing secrets.

What's your revenue?

Yeah. What was it like when you first met your wife and saw her naked?

Yeah, it was great.

That's the awkwardness that I'm looking for. Um, uh, so, so with the whole— something I'm thinking about doing is when you have people's email, um, you actually have a ton of information about them. So if, uh, Sean@bebo.com signs up, I could tell where he works because I've always linked in information, his Twitter information, anything that he's used that email for. Something that we're thinking about doing, um, is for people, instead of saying like, click here to go to salesforce.com and tell them you're interested in buying, It should be just click here and a Salesforce rep will contact you. And if you just click here, I can send Salesforce to 5,000 people who clicked it and all in the list of leads of like where they work at and things like that, because no one's gonna buy like $100,000 of Salesforce like on a one-click whatever, or most won't. And so I'm thinking about like maybe I can like say like click here and we'll have someone who's interested in you, uh, we'll have someone from Salesforce contact you and just sending that directly to Salesforce.

You've almost qualified them versus right now. It's like they click through and they have to track them and they don't know if they're going to convert or whatever.

And they don't have any information on them because we don't reveal anything. I mean, I could tell you everyone, I could, I could, I know who's clicked all the ads, but we don't tell that to them because of privacy purposes. But that's something that is interesting to us.

Oh, and I'm looking at your website. You're using MailChimp. If you pay a little bit of extra money, MailChimp will give you social profiles so you can, What you can do is tell that car person, this woman clicked, this person clicked, she's a woman who lives in this area of the city, she works at this company, so go ahead and reach out to her and maybe this is the proper language to use or maybe she's interested in minivans as opposed to Ferraris or something.

What, uh, Sean, have you seen on Product Hunt that would fit that?

Um, like there's one— I actually have seen some, some cool stuff recently, so let me pull it up. But, uh, the first thing that comes to mind when you say that, there was this app called Jiff. And Jiff is a— it's basically AI to make your camera look better while you're teleconferencing. So it'll either remove the background, it'll kind of like sharpen up your image, it'll just auto kind of Filter your thing so a little bit brighter, you look a little bit better. And I fundamentally believe people want that. People want to look better, especially now that this is the way that all business is done. And so there's a little business like that. And now, like, you know, Phil Libin came out with Mmhmm, and that's like, you know, a lot of people are excited about it. It's kind of the same idea, just, oh, this guy was the founder of Evernote, and so there's a lot of hype behind it. And, you know, he can build that company and probably raise at a $50 million valuation today. Whereas these two guys, you know, this Indian guy who made Jif probably is in the trough of sorrow. Like, he did his Product Hunt launch, it was probably exciting, got, you know, 2,000 people to click his thing, and now there's probably like 40 active users. And he's like, wait, should I just be an engineer at Google and go make, you know, $400 grand right now? Like, maybe that's better than Jif.

And like, well, and imagine if he'd done the plan identifier or the voice changer, right?

Right.

He wouldn't know Oh shit, I can go do app installs and if I spend $10 grand, it turns into $50 grand within 30 days. But if you know that, you can go and do that.

I'll give you a perfect example. So, um, so there's this developer who I work with who's brilliant. This guy can build anything, super young, super smart, all that stuff. But he just doesn't know— his, his knowledge of like what the problem space is in the world is so low. He like doesn't know of most of the problems that most people have, so he doesn't know where to apply his talent.. And so I was telling him about e-commerce and I said, you know, one thing in e-commerce is like your photos mean everything. And so you spend a lot of money on like getting your little photo shoot set up where you buy lights, you buy the little white parchment paper and you try to get a DSLR camera, you try to take good photos. But even after that, you then upload them, you then curate them, you go into Photoshop and you try to touch them up. 'Cause like, you know that like if your storefront photos look good, you'll sell more. It's like very clear. Plus it's like from a vanity perspective, you just want your site to look good., so store owners care about this. There's like, you know, million-plus e-commerce shops on Earth. And I told him, I said, there's this one app that's called Light and Airy, and this is another one of those apps that I bet is printing money that most people don't know about. And I know it's big because in the mommy community, uh, moms constantly talk about how they use Light and Airy. It's a mobile preset, so it's basically a set of like, they tuned all the sliders, so that all of your photos have the same look, which is this very light, airy, kind of like—

this is the mommy, classic mommy blogger.

Someone built this, but it was more manual. Like, it was like, you ship us your product, we'll photograph it perfectly. We'll do like the 3D renderings and all that stuff.

Yeah. So there's a product called Soona that, that there's a company called Soona that I think is doing that, S-O-O-N-A, which is cool. I kind of want to check them out too, but that's a little different because you got to send them the photo, the items and all that stuff., and it's more manual. Whereas this is like, dude, we all take photos. If you can make my photos look 25% better, I'll pay you $20 a month. Like, it's worth it for my store. And so, um, you just have to like— and people have done this, people have— it's remixing, right? People have done photo touch-ups and filters for Instagram for your personal life. But like, somebody, you know, we need to do that for e-commerce. Done. Like, that's the whole idea. And, um, you know how to market it, and this thing will work.

And, you know, totally.

That's my job description if there's a developer out there.

Like that. Let me bring up one more topic. Uh, we have all been using, or it's something similar to it, Levels. Do you guys know, or is it called Levels? You know, love, uh, the, the— there, you got it, you got it.

Uh, that looks different.

Is that— I don't have— I don't have Levels, I have Dexcom. Dexcom's way better.

There you go.

Okay, so for those listening about 6 months ago, Sean and I did this project where we wore these things on our arms and they told us our blood sugar level. And anytime we were not in the thing that we agreed on, we had to give someone $100 or something like that. It was pretty neat. A lot of errors, but still neat nonetheless. So the company that made the technology to make this all work was called Levels, right? Is that what it's called?

Levels?

Yes.

Yeah. I invested in them in their angel round. Just recently. Um, do you— did you guys get in on that or no?

I did not invest. I didn't, I didn't because they, they don't control the hardware. Yes, that's my number one.

They don't own the most valuable part.

Well, uh, yeah, I, I truthfully, I didn't even look at them.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Like one of the diabetes companies will.

I was like, I'm pretty sure Abbott will buy this. In a couple years just because Abbott has so much money and they're like, uh, we'll just employ this guy.

I don't know either. Yeah, I mean, I think the coolest thing about it has been I used to, you know, I'd eat like oatmeal in the morning and be like, oh, I'm being healthy, steel cut oats or whatever. And then when I got the glucose monitor, I just realized there was all these seemingly healthy foods, like black bean tacos that were spiking me like crazy. And I really think like when I have friends that are like, I want to lose weight, I'm just like, put this on, but there's such a resistance to it. Right. It's this big bulky thing. They think it's a needle. It's scary. So I think like we're 5 years ahead of where we need to get to. I hope Levels is successful. I know some of the people involved and they're really awesome.. But, um, my worry is, yeah, the hardware, they could be disintermediated so easily.

And by the way, the, the founder, I like what they're doing, like the way they did that challenge. I think that was really smart. And then we came on here and we were like, yeah, it was a cool idea, but we didn't love the execution. And then the founder reached out and was like, hey guys, we've made shit way better. Let's try it again. Here, here's another month on me. Uh, let's do like, like, I want you guys to see the improvements. And, you know, I love that. Like, I think he's doing the right things and they're, they're approaching it in the right way.

Well, I put in—

it's super cool.

I put in $10 grand. We'll see what happens.

You're going to be on your Gulfstream calling us on the next podcast when these guys exit. Me and Sean will be very upset.

I hope my $10 grand turns into $20 grand. I'm going to get a sick used motorcycle. And this is what angel investing dreams are made of.

The problem with angel investing, right, is like you go like, yeah, it could be a zero or it could be this huge thing and you have no clue. And you're just playing roulette for like 10 years.

Yeah, that's what the 10 years is the problem. I'm down with roulette if I get to spin the wheel and 10 seconds later I find out the result. And with this, it's I spin the wheel and 10 years later I find out if it was red or black.

Have you had—

I have, Andrew.

I agree with that. That's why I'm talking $10,000 checks, not $10 million.

It was awesome. I got so many messages.

Well, they like all took it as an insult. I'm like, I'm kind of complimenting you guys. Like, I'm saying you're successful even though you're stupid. So like, you're awesome.

You're winning. Well, in a way, you have to be stupid to do real estate because you have a ceiling on your return, right? So, if I go and buy an apartment building and I go, okay, I'm going to renovate it and I'm going to put in new tenants, I'm going to increase rents or whatever. That's awesome. But there's a very distinct ceiling on it and you can't compound your capital to the same degree you could in a business where in a business you can innovate and you can drive outsized returns. Like, that's why I wouldn't do real estate. That said, it's really hard to lose money in real estate and that's why you can still be dumb and succeed. And again, it's like, it's not even dumb. It's like you just don't have to innovate at all. And an apartment building is worth something in almost any scenario.

It's super boring. It's also super boring. It's very slow and boring.

Super boring. And it takes forever. I've got a friend who, um, he's a real estate developer. And I remember I met him about 10 years ago and the building he was working on, this incredible building that is like a centerpiece in the city, but it took 10 years. Like, I, I'm, I'm, I have so much respect for him that he can actually spend the time and, you know, do a 10-year project. But I think I'd go insane. Like the, it just takes forever to do anything.

Sean, anything else you wanna go over?

I got two quick questions for you. You had tweeted out two interesting things and I wanna know what happened from them. So the first one, if you have any updates, when HEY launched and it was like all the rage, you had tweeted out basically like, okay, instead of like a new email service provider, I'm just gonna take the three best ideas, best feature ideas of HEY and just make it a Gmail plugin. Like, who wants this? And everybody was like, oh fuck, I want that. Did you ever build that? Or what was that?

Andrew, would you do—

yeah, uh, there's no link yet, but it's called Mailman. I'll, I'll, uh, we're launching a beta waitlist, so I'll, uh, make sure to send that to you guys when we go live.

When you do this, do you— are you creating—

who's—

is Andrew funding this? Like, does Andrew put like $10,000 into a new business account, or does Tiny fund it? And you run, uh, creating different LLCs for different entities for each one?

Well, my business partner is much more the steady Eddie. He doesn't want to— he like, I'm anti-innovation. He's like extreme anti-innovation. He doesn't want to start a new business, doesn't want the trouble. So I'm funding this through my holdco. And then what I basically say to Chris is, whenever I have a dumb idea, I will let you buy a portion of it when I start doing it. And once I know what it is, But if you don't do it, then, you know, we're not going to do it together. Right. And so he, there's been certain things we've done together and certain things we don't. And what that does is it creates, um, a lack of resentment. If, cause I'm not off going and spending our money jointly on my silly ideas, I'm spending my own money. And then if he wants to or feels left out, he can invest in it. Right.

So that's kind of how we do it. You literally wire $20,000. I mean, what's your typical startup cost for an idea? $20 grand.

$20,000 to $50,000 usually for, you know, get a business to a point where we can sell a product and see if people like it.

So then do you literally put $50,000 into an alternative account?

No, I just go, we have a corporation that we use to incubate ideas. So I'll hire whoever I need to or contract whoever I need to.

And then once it works and once it has revenue, we spin it out as a and then you just have an email list of people who you want to hire and you go, hey everyone, today I'm going to work on this thing. Who wants to work on it?

Pretty much. I'll just tweet. Like, I mean, in this instance I tweeted and some guy who's been amazing, this guy Mohit in India, has been absolutely phenomenal and he's just been a great partner. And like, you know, it's, it just randomly happened because of Twitter. All right.

What should we be talking more about on future episodes? What do you want to hear? What do we do more of? What do we do less of?

Number one feedback is more brainstorming, fewer like kind of interviews or whatever. I think like, unless you guys have someone crazy on who I'm like, I have to hear their story, I just love hearing you guys brainstorm. And it's cool having guests like brainstorm with you, but the brainstorming is the value. And then the other thing is, from a business perspective, I just think You guys need to be offering more to the community. Like, you know, there's got to be an inside track, right? Like, I know you guys personally. I have thoughts. I'll text you. But I'm sure the audience wants feedback on their ideas. I'm sure the audience wants access to you. You guys should be doing AMAs, you should be doing business critiques, and those should all be behind a paywall.

Love it. Okay, uh, we're over time, so we should, we should wrap it. Andrew, anything else?

No, I don't, I don't think so. That was fun, guys.