Greatest Hits of 2021 (Vol. 2)

Hey guys, welcome to My First Million. This is producer Ben here with another best of episode. On this one, we compiled some of the best guest moments from the past year. On this first clip, we have the one, the only, the world-famous Rob Dyrdek. Rob is a famous skateboarder, celebrity, TV show actor, host, and producer, and now he's a really great entrepreneur. With a number of different businesses. In this clip, he's explaining exactly how he manages his time and how he has managed to become, as he says, human optimization.

I've mastered time, energy, and capacity, right? So I live this extraordinarily balanced life by design where I only dedicate 30% of my time to podcasts and my shooting television and, uh, building my businesses. I spend 30% sleeping, 10% on my health, never compromised, and then 30% with my family.

You know, how much is 30% for you? Like, how many hours are you looking at? 30% of a 40-hour work week or 30% of your waking?

He's saying my entire life, all hours.

So 8 hours basically, right?

That's it. So give us an example.

What software are you using to track all that time?

Yeah, that dashboard I created. I, I had a, I had a, a programmer write me a script that goes inside Google, the Google Calendar.

It's an app on your phone or it's just on like a spreadsheet?

You know, you're saying So many amazing things. I got to dive into each one.

All right.

So, you just said something, did I brain train? What's that mean?

I use the Luminosity app, right? Like where it's just adding flexibility and just letting your mind do all of these things that are different than just getting in and reading your emails and, you know, just going through your rhythm is really what I do that for.

And you wake up at 5:00. What's the morning routine like? Sounds like you're pretty organized.

Yeah, look, I'll get up. I have to get up before 5:00, but depending on what time I go to bed, I'll get up at 4:00, 4:32, right? And then to me, uh, you know, always have that, that coffee pre-made so I can get up and get cooking. Um, and then I track all my numbers from the previous day, fill in all my time if I missed any time to make sure that all my data is there.

On your phone or on your computer?

On the computer, right? And then, um, and then I try to just like organize and knock out sort of my more executional work before the kids get up and all that. Um, then at 6 o'clock I brain train, 6:30 I meditate, when I jump out of meditation, I sent— or actually at 5:15, I bring my wife a coffee and I send her an email of every single thing that I'm doing that day, what it means to me, with a love quote on top, right? Again, this is—

what do you mean, what it means to me? Like each thing you're doing?

Just like, you know, just like what you're doing. Yeah, in my— in my— one of the— one of the pulls of our relationship was like, I do so much stuff that she would be— it'd be— I'd just be talking to someone, it'd be the first time she ever heard of it. And so, she would just like— I would do so much stuff in a day, she just would feel disconnected. So, I just started giving her an email every day of what I'm doing, what it means with a nice love quote. And, that then settled down the energy of feeling disconnected from everything that I'm doing. Bring her a coffee at 5:15. God bless her, she started doing 5:30 calls for her business, which means she's going to be tired earlier. That means we can go to bed by 9:30, which is another sort of blessing.

And, this is happening in LA, right? This is where you're at?

Okay, and then, you know, I pop out of meditation at 7:00, wake the kids up, get them both down to breakfast. At 7:30, my trainer doctor comes to the house, 7:30 to 8:30 training, and then take the kids to school at 8:30, right? And then the day, depending on what the week is, you know, sometimes I go to breakfast dates with my wife. Sometimes it's, you know, on Mondays, you know, I basically run a flat organization, right? So I have, you know, 10 core divisions that are ran by by an executive, and I just spend Monday fully organizing from when I get up 4:00 into my chief of staff for an hour, into my president and COO for an hour, and then half hours for every single person that runs that division so that we can just be highly organized and then plan the rest of the week, which of course is inside Thursday night date nights and Friday night sushi night with my wife and picking my kids up and all of— I design balance and then I only work within the structure of balance. And then depending on how I feel, depending on how my wife feels, then I'll even adjust that to lean into making sure that my family is feeling priority above business always.

You are like, yeah, you're like, you know, like people make fun of Silicon Valley people because they're like, here's my calendar, I've got to adjust it like this, this, and this. But I'm sitting here looking at you. I think it looks like you're wearing a black blazer with a black sweater and you got these slick AirPods in. You are more Silicon Valley techie in tune with this than like the stereotypes of it. And I, I love it.

I'm flabbergasted, Sean.

For this next clip, we're gonna be listening to the world-famous comedian Hasan Minhaj, and he explains how he prepares for his shows.

What's the system you've developed to get on stage and have that switch flipped?

Okay.

Cause you, when you came on within 2 seconds, it's like this guy's in a state of mind. He's in a state, as we say.

Yeah.

Of like, he's here to perform. He, he knows what he's here to do.

Yeah.

There's no like, tiptoeing into it. Yeah. So I was wondering, what do you do the 5, 10 minutes before or an hour before? I don't know what your kind of like warm-up routine is. Routine. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you're ready.

The listeners want to know this?

I'm sure. I don't know.

Really?

This is your personal curiosity.

I want to know it. And I'm just— my trainer has this great phrase. He goes, who are my customers? The people that love what I do. Like, because he's like, people always ask, oh, who are your customers? Is some demographic, right? Some like some like marketing intellectual answer. He's like, yeah, easiest way in the world is the people who love— who, who— your customers are the people who love what you do.

So just do what you do. Yeah. You will naturally attract the people who love that. You will repel the people who aren't interested. Yeah. And you will never have to guess what the heck people want because you just do what you want. And so that's the approach I take to the pod.

Yeah. Um, no, I love it, man. I love, I love talking shop like this. For me, it's actually, it's a, it's the 3 hours before. So what I try to do before any show, I try to make sure that like I exercise in some capacity because, and I don't know if you feel this way, maybe it's within our community. It's so funny to go back to what you're talking about where you're like, oh, he seems like a guy who works really hard. This is funny. I was doing Marc Maron's podcast and Maron said the same thing about me. He's like, yeah, you seem like really put together. And he's like, why aren't you unraveling like the way other comics are?

Right.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm just philosophically not from that camp. I'm not from the tortured artist camp. I'm more from the place of like, I'm creating from a place of passion and love. And actually, real talk, it's about emptying the tank. I just want to put it all out on the court, right? You know, and this court happens to be the stage, right? And I want to do my best. I want to be like, I put everything into picking out this outfit. I put everything into picking out these jokes, these tags, the stage design, the lighting design, like This is it. And I want to know when I go to sleep here at night, when I put my head down on the pillow, I did everything I could, right? Like living a life without regret. And only you can answer that is the best, right? Everybody's talking about chasing happiness. To me, it's about chasing satisfaction like that. Self-satisfaction. And you know what it is, right? You know what it is, right?

And you know when you sold out, you know, you got a good result, but you kind of didn't do it the right way. Yeah, that sticks with you. And some people just like let that stick with them. Yeah. Other people say, all right, even if I won, I'm not going to win on those terms again.

Yeah.

Even if I lost, I can lose on these terms and be good at night.

Yeah.

And I'm sure there's listeners to the pod that spend their time retweeting the right things and quote tweeting and dunking on VC people. And, you know, they say the right things, they'll regurgitate the right opinions, but they know when they put their head down at night, hey, you were supposed to train, you jerked off instead, you were supposed to do this, you didn't. But only you can answer that, right?

So you can signal all you want.

For me, what that stage represents is like, no, I'm putting myself in a high level of accountability in front of 3,400 people. I'm putting it all out here. Right. Even. And if you don't think I'm good, if you think I'm corny, if you think I'm whatever, hey, it is what it is. But I stood here, right? And I did it. I did me and on my terms and I did my best.

So you're saying—

so you're saying 3 hours before, 3 hours before, what I do is I like to do the, the some form of exercise and I try to get out of my head.

Like a workout workout or you're just trying to break a sweat. What do you—

what's the— Yeah, trying to do On tour, it's just about body maintenance. So I'll do running, I'll do some pull-ups, some core stuff, just stuff to get my body going and start breaking a sweat. And what I love about like right around minute 30 to 45 is I'll get out of my head and into my body. And so much of life right now, getting out of your head. And it's funny, I called you randomly. I was appreciative. I appreciate you picking up the phone the other day. We had a long conversation. We can get into that later. But so much of, I think, what you do and what you put out in the world, and I call it like tech Twitter talk, it's all in your head.

Intellectual.

And so Luka is like a kid and kids do this well. Yeah, kids do this pretty naturally.

I love that.

The older you get, the more heady you get, which is you got to fight.

Yeah, you got to fight that, right? And so that's a great way to get out of my head, get into my body. Then I'll probably— I eat something, I take a shower, and then I put on the outfit. And for me, it's like being on stage, uniform, and putting on that. It feels like a uniform. And like, for me, it feels— I want it to feel like a show. Like, from the watch to the jacket to the pants, I'm like, there's a level of confidence that you have when you move into a room and you're like, hey, from, from my heels all the way up to my head, I'm wearing my armor, right? Like, I'm coming correct, right? And you just, you carry yourself with a little bop. You're like, no, I feel better about myself. My shit isn't slouching. There's no stains on my stuff. You know what I mean? Like, the moment I saw you today, you walked in, you're wearing your tech pants. I could tell you washed them a few times, but there's some stains on the backside. You know what I'm saying? But that feeling of like, no, man, when I'm coming in here, I'm going to be fresher than Sean. Yeah, I'm going to— I'm going to— I'm just gonna be fresh. Yeah. That already gives me a feeling of like confidence. I know what I'm doing, you know? And by the way, the opener, Marcela, like Marcela was just like dressed to the nines, you know? It's a feeling. Then I get to the show, I finish eating, I'll meditate. So meditation for 10 to 15 minutes will allow me to just again get out of my head. And drop into my body and something simple, just Headspace, right? Like, I'm not getting too crazy about it. And what I love about Headspace specifically is so much of it is just basic breathing, establishing a level of intention. I'll meditate, then I'll pray. And for me, like, prayer is really important because it's got to be about something bigger than just myself and my corporal being. I'm like, what am I doing this for? And just establishing an intention. And for me, the intention is like love. Let me give joy to people. Right. And I want the seed of everything that I'm doing to come from that. Not be like, not be petty energy, angry energy. I'm going to prove you wrong energy. Like, I'm in the laughter business, right? Like, I'm here to make you feel joy, right? And that warm feeling. So establishing an intention there, I get to the I'll get to the venue about an hour before. I'll have a double shot of espresso. I'll let my bowels do what they do. You always get those jitters, like you got to pee, you got to do what you got to do. And then about like 30 to 45 minutes before, I like to be loose just with the, with the staff. Right. Let them know like, hey, what's up? How are you? Door guy, security guy, openers. Right. You know what I mean?

Another way to get out of your head, by the way.

Yeah.

Be with others, be there. Yeah. Talking to others, serving others in a way.

Right.

And then I get on stage, and by the time I get on stage, there's just this feeling of like, now it's just pure play. Whatever happens, happens. Right. And when I'm on stage, what I try to do is I try to remember when, when I'm opening in front of my crowd, they're like really hot. And one of the things I try to remember is don't yell, don't scream. Try to actually bring them to you. Mm-hmm. Like set the tempo of the game, right? Don't get like too excited or too hot. Like you can whip 'em up, but then like sit down at the stool, bring them to you.

For this next clip, we have longtime guest Steph Smith, and she talks about companies with only one employee that are able to make millions of dollars.

So let's talk about companies of one. So we're, you're, you have a list of like 10 or 7 companies that are run by one person that are shockingly big. Let's go through some of them and talk about them.

Yeah. So I think you called out two before. So I'm going to just call out those two quickly. You called out BuiltWith before, which is the site that basically can tell what a site is built with. Is it built with WordPress or Squarespace or what plugins is it, is the site using? And that one at the time when you found it was, I think, doing around 14 million. And then you've also covered Nomad List and Remote OK by Peter Lovells. And those two, I think together are doing around a million a year. And those two, I think are both completely solo founders. I know Peter certainly is, but there are a couple others. So have you heard of Uggmonk?

Well, hold on. So BuiltWith, so people know, BuiltWith is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here, but not the, but one of. BuiltWith is like, it's like a, I think they have a plugin as well, but it's a website. You go to builtwith.com, you enter in thehustle.co. Let's say you wanna, you, you see something on our website that you like and you wanna copy and you're like, how'd they build that? What plugins do they use?

What—

whatever. You use BuiltWith and they make money because— what do they do? I think they like sell people's data or something.

I'm not sure, actually. Let me look this up because I know they get a crazy amount of traffic. Look, they've got plans on their site. So they've got a basic plan. I don't know what you get with it, but it's $295.

Oh, I know what you get. You get basically, I believe you sign up and it tells you people's— so it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their website and what type of plugins. And I think you pay money and it'll say, we have the emails or contact information of all types of people who use blank plugin and you sell a plugin that is complimentary to that, therefore pay money and you could now target them and advertise against them or things like that.

And it's built by basically one guy in Australia. All right. So what are some of the other companies?

Okay. So I was going to call it Uggmonk. So this one's not as big. I actually don't know exactly how much they're making, but it's a really simple e-commerce store. They started just selling really nice t-shirts, which sounds like, okay, like there's enough t-shirt stores out there. But this guy, Jeff Sheldon, he focused on just really high quality shirts. And then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff. If you, are you in the doc?

I'm looking at Uggmonk. So when I go to Uggmonk, I see like a pen holder and I see like a to-do list. Like a— it's like cute, well-designed, like, pen holders, which doesn't sound neat, but it honestly, it looks pretty sick.

Yeah, it looks surprisingly sick. If you go to— let me— if you click in the doc where it says, look at this, if you click that, that is his setup. And he, he's like one of those builders who I think has built a little Twitter following as well. And he just has this beautiful desk setup, which is like the perfect ad. And I—

oh, I've seen this.

It looks awesome.

I never thought I'd want to go and buy like a $100 to-do list, but I, I think I'm gonna buy one.

Yeah, I, it's just like cute, easy to use, like mid-century modern stuff. Yeah, I'm on board. How much revenue does he do?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure he does several million a year. He gets over 200,000 page views a month and he's been going at this for several years. So I know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago and he's grown a lot since then.

So I'd probably say a couple mil. Wow, that's crazy. All right, that's a, that's a good find. It's just one guy? He's the only employee?

I think so. I mean, he's cert— he, he probably has some staff now that he's been growing, but I, I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a big team.

All right, what's next?

All right, Kard is actually one guy. He might have contractors, but Kard, C-A-R-R-D. I've built sites with Kard. People probably recognize Kard, or they've almost certainly been on a site built by Kard. And it's built by this guy AJ, and it's doing $1 million a year AR. I think he actually just raised money now, so I think he's kind of going for—

Did he really just raise money? I would love to invest in this.

Wow.

And Yeah, I think he hit like a million AR.

So it's a free platform for building simply, uh, for building simple, fully responsive one-page websites that can do anything. I actually think so. There, there was this company called, you remember About.me?

No, what is that?

About.me. So go to about.me. That's the URL. You don't remember that? You're, I'm just a little bit older than you, which, which is like then that few years probably makes a difference because About.me, when I was just getting started, was considered like the preeminent builder in this space. And they made it, it was a one-page website where you can explain stuff about you. And it was started by this guy named Tony Conrad, I believe his name is. And he's this cool looking dude who is also an investor now. And he sold it after only 2 years to AOL for like $40 million. And it was bootstrapped. You see about.me, you see how it's like basically the same thing?

Yeah, it reminds me of, you've heard of Unsplash, right?

I love Unsplash.

So, or sorry, I'm not thinking of Unsplash. I'm talking about Unfold. Unfold is this app that basically for Instagrammers, it adds different, like it allows you to kind of piece together pictures for your Instagram story. But they also started these like one-pagers where basically, cause all these Instagrammers, they're like, oh, I need my link in bio. Link in bio is also a site like that. But Unfold was sold to Squarespace, I think, like last year or something. I don't know for how much though, man.

I think that these one-page website builders are actually really cool. So there's this other business I almost invested in. I think it's called mediakits.com or .co. I believe it's just called Media Kit, and all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could create your media kit and send it to people. So And, uh, whether you're The Hustle or you're just an Instagram person, you just had thehustle.co/media-kit or like, you know, stephsmith.com/media-kit. And it was that your media kit was on there. And that sounds like not that important, but it's kind of like DocSend. So DocSend, if you don't know what DocSend is, DocSend is basically all it is, is PowerPoint in the cloud, but email gated. So you have to enter your email., and then you get all types of information. So it, you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you wanna send it to investors so you know who has it and who've used it and how long they've used it. And it's basically that. So anyway, Card is pretty badass. That actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here, I think.

Yeah. And I mean, he actually runs Card as a subscription business, so that's $1 million ARR and I think it's probably way past that today. I think you're gonna like the next one though. Go to, uh, this nextepisode.net. I think it's actually, next-episode.net. It's the, it's such an old site. I think the guy's been running it for 15 years. And if you just open it up, you'll, you'll get a sense of how the UI hasn't caught up to where we are today, but it's amazing because this guy's been running it for 15 years. Guess how much traffic this thing gets?

I'm looking at it on SimilarWeb. This is crazy. So what is this called? So next-episode.net. What is this? Yeah.

It's a site where basically, like, there's no way I would think that a site like this would still exist, but people use it that basically helps you track your TV shows. And it's a little bit of a community. So I think I've never used it, but you know, people watch The Bachelor, they hang out on this site and they find other people who watch The Bachelor and they talk about it. But it's kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets.

So I don't know exactly how big it is, but he's been running it for 15 years. And I know he's definitely— I found him on Hacker News, one of those posts that was like, hey, like, who's a solopreneur who's doing this thing on their own? And he's like, I've worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years.

So what? This is crazy. Good find. I can't wait. So who— what's this person's name? Do you know?

Uh, let me send you Here he is.

I found him. Nico—

Nicolet.

Yeah.

Wow, this is a good find. How much revenue do you think he does on this?

I don't know about today, but I'm assuming like if he's getting that many million page views and he's been working on it for 15 years, I'd say like maybe a million a year. What do you think?

Yeah, I would agree with that. And it's probably mostly all profit.

Yeah. Well, I mean, he's literally the only one who works on it.

And there's no cost.

In one of the posts on Hacker News, he's like, "Yeah, I started it for myself because I couldn't find such a tool back in the day." And basically he's avoided hiring other people because he doesn't want to scale through hiring.

All right, what else we got?

How did you know this about SurveyMonkey?

So it was posted. It was actually you posted about BuiltWith a while ago, I think. And then I went through all of the comments of you basically, you were like,, can anyone tell me something more efficient than that? And this guy named Trip posted, yeah, SurveyMonkey was doing $19 million with 12 employees. And you asked him if this was documented. And basically someone else commented and was like, yeah, Trip's too modest to say this, but he actually invested in SurveyMonkey in 2009, so he probably knows the numbers.

Wow, this is amazing. I've heard this. I've heard rumors about SurveyMonkey doing this. This is crazy. This is so cool.

Okay.

From million-dollar businesses, we're moving to billion-dollar businesses. On this next clip, we have Jack Abraham. He's the founder of multiple great startups and he's currently leading tons of successful investments at Atomic. In this clip, he tells us the frameworks that he uses to recognize opportunities for billion-dollar companies.

Go to the patterns. I'd be curious to what those are.

Cool.

Like what? Like Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers. Now everybody can push a button, have a private driver pick them up.

yeah, that's a good framework—

is an interesting one and is pretty tried and true.

And so what's a— what's an idea in that space? So what are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us don't? What are some other— what are some other examples in there that, that, you know, haven't looked into it but might be, might be interesting?

Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech, partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources around planning, access to the markets. You know, there's this whole 99% versus the 1%, and people have kind of figured that out. And I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think that that's actually really interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there. We're starting one or two, um, that we think can help empower people in that area, for example. Um, so that would be, you know, one example of, of an area that—

are you going to do anything in the wealth advisor space?

We are kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do there. You know, wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great.

It's not great. Have you heard of— have you heard of AdPar, Sean?

No.

So I bet you have, Jack, right?

Adapar.

Yeah, Adapar. Sorry. And so Adapar was started by Joe Lonsdale, I think, right? I only know like, you know, the Wikipedia version, but basically it's a— it's kind of like Mint.com, but for really wealthy people. I actually— but like billionaire wealthy people. I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that something a little bit— what would you, Jack, what's it have that's more robust, you know?

Um, sorry, can you repeat that?

What, what does Adapar have that's more robust?

It basically has tracking of like everything, every fund everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets. But they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals. But Joe and that company has an in— like a big vision for where that can go, and you might be able to work with it as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines.

So disrupt that.

So I work with some of these folks and they send me like the jankiest stuff ever and their login. So like Morgan Stanley, the login to like look at your investments, it's horrible. Yeah, I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheets on my own. This is really bad. You know, I've heard of this Adapar thing and they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like $1 billion. It's really, really expensive. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, Are you kidding me? Just like give me a Mint.com login or something and you guys like become the admin and just like, let's share this. You could just tell me because this is dogshit. And so I think that, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space. But to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately because you I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you go live, but so I was trying to— I'm trying to get something out of you.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone basically in that space. It's pretty universal. A lot of room for improvement.

So that's one pattern for great ideas. So what are the— what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And, and other— if a few people have that desire and they've pushed out to that limit, other people would want it if you can make it accessible, cheaper and more available to them. That's, that's an amazing one. I think there's tons of great ideas there. What's another— what's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas?

Yeah. So one that I think is, is pretty interesting, that's also I would put in like the tried and true bucket. Is if you take something that people consistently do and they have to do and they feel like they have to do it, but it takes a lot of steps and/or time, and you dramatically simplify it and you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like they have to do. So some good examples of this would be For example, booking online travel, you know, it used to be so hard to do. You'd have to go to so many different sites. The Kayak founders had the vision of let's just pull it all into kayak.com. You go to one site, you see it all in one place. They made it really easy. And the case—

Yeah.

9 out of 10 friends I talk to who have an e-commerce store don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell.

They don't even know.

Yeah.

What, whose door do I knock on? What do I need to have ready? And so therefore I just, I'm just not going to do it. And, um, and it's like the Opendoor thing where not everybody's going to do this, but sure. If Opendoor captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales, like multibillion-dollar company. Same thing for, for open source. So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, why the— what am I doing with my life that I'm not doing this idea? This makes total sense.

Oh man, well, thanks for saying that.

Don't worry, I'm not gonna copy you.

But Keith and I are having a ton of fun, ton of fun building out that company, um, here in Miami. That's been a blast, building a, a great team, a huge team. And yeah, it solves this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your company And all you need to do is come to a website, we give you a price, and you can sell your company. And it's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team. We're hiring really aggressively. If anyone wants to join, it's, you know, anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team. I think it's going to create this almost Miami Mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity. Scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.

Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.