Framework
The platform-jump play: YouTuber to pay-per-view millions
Shaan breaks down why the Paul brothers' move into boxing is a genius business model: selling pay-per-views is one of the best things a single person can do, and each event simultaneously grows their brand for free via media coverage.
“I think that this move they did to go from YouTuber, Viner to YouTuber, and then YouTuber to basically one of the best business models you can do as a as a single person is basically sell pay-per-views. And why is that right? So like this fight, I wouldn't be surprised if they sold 1 million pay-per-views. And so you sell 1 million pay-per-views at, you know, roughly $60 a pay-per-view, you know, per pay-per-view, you know, that's $60 million.”
Steal thisBuild an audience on a cheap platform, then graduate to a monetization model where a single event can net millions while compounding your brand.
Idea
A $10K corporate bootcamp teaching companies to run social like Jake Paul
Sam pitches a B2B social-media school: charge companies $10,000-$15,000 to send employees through a 6-week, twice-weekly bootcamp with recorded talks from Jake and Logan plus live sessions with their editors. He thinks it could be at least a $10M/year business, modeled on the Miami Ad School.
“what you do is charge $10,000 to $15,000 and your employees would go to it and you would have recorded talks by Jake Paul, by Logan, but then you'd also be like, all right, now we're going to talk to these editors. They're going to show you how they do it. And it's a 3-week— no, you do a 6-week thing. You meet twice weekly for 3 hours apiece and you just have a curriculum and it's just like a boot camp. I'm pretty sure you could build at least a $10 million a year company doing just that.”
Steal thisSell social-media training to enterprises (not kids) at $10K-$15K per seat with celebrity-led curriculum.
Number
Sam guesses the Paul brothers sell $20-30M/year in merch
In the debrief, Sam estimates Jake and Logan Paul collectively sell $20-30M a year in merchandise, with Shaan adding that Logan's enterprise (Impaulsive podcast, Maverick brand) is likely the bigger of the two.
$30M
Estimated combined annual merch sales, Jake and Logan Paul · USD/year
“I bet you him and his brother sell collectively $20 to $30 million a year in merch.”
Idea
Sell an ungraded collectible card hoard as $100 mystery boxes
Faced with a multi-million-card collection too costly to grade individually, Shaan considers the Logan Paul model: sell cards as $100 mystery boxes where buyers might pull a $100K holographic Charizard, skipping the grading process entirely.
“Let's go down that path because I have thought about that, of like, what if I just sold these as mystery boxes? So look, I don't want to go through the process of grading and marking these. I know that there's X millions of dollars of value somewhere in this, and I'm going to sell them as individual mystery boxes. Now, the challenge I thought of was, how do I get the word out, right? I'm not Logan Paul.”
Steal thisLiquidate a large ungraded collection as fixed-price mystery boxes seeded with a few high-value items to drive demand.
Idea
Let the bottom 99% of creators monetize one viral piece
Altucher is actively building a way for ordinary creators to monetize content. Today only the top 0.1% (like Logan Paul) can monetize YouTube, and someone with 300 followers can't monetize a tweet 20M people see, even though the platforms have the ecosystem to enable it.
“So you have to be like, you know, Logan Paul to monetize your YouTube channel and the other 20 billion people on YouTube, even if they have one video that goes viral, they can't monetize it. So, or, or like even if you have a, if you have a tweet that 20 million people see, but you have only 300 followers, you can't monetize it. So I've been figuring out a way to use these ecosystems to allow people to monetize content.”
Steal thisBuild the rails that let a creator monetize a single viral post even without a large following.