A million dollar brainstorm, we're back episode three. It's been fun so far. We had a guy who texted us about the TRT thing. We got a call that guy.
So the guy who reached out to us. Jason. Jason. Yes.
We talked about the TRT businesses. He has owned apparently a few, sold it for what he said with seven figures. It's interested in expanding. I'm not going to start that.
But somehow he got both of our numbers. I don't know how. I thought he was a friend of yours when he texted us. I thought he was a friend of yours.
He said that's like, like, yeah, don't us forever. Well, play Jason. So he somehow got both of our numbers and was like, hey, guys, you're talking about this TRT thing. Trust me, I know way more about this than you do.
I started a TRT business brick and mortar, sold it for seven figures. I can help you guys do this thing you guys are doing. I'm going to do it. And you guys can sort of be involved in some way.
And I was like, wow, that's cool. Like, this is luck coming to us. I love that. You're right.
Well, let's create more luck. And when we left off last week, I had brought up the idea of Zapier. Are you familiar with that? I am familiar with it.
But if you need to give the basics of luck. Wade, his name's Wade. He's a young guy. I don't know.
But I've chatted with him on Twitter. So the story is that he went to college at university and they raised $1 million in funding from YC or something like that. And they're fully distributed. I've got a friend who works there.
So no office. And what they've done is they've built a really easy system to allow you to connect to programs via API. So for us, we run our whole business office. So if there is a new entry form onto Google Sheets, it will tell Slack you have a new entry form.
And you could do that with probably 1,000 different apps that they have already uploaded. It's like funding or piping between all your different programs. Yeah. I think that this is the very early stages of that.
And this whole idea of connecting different apps through a way that does not involve coding. It's this whole thing right now that I've heard from the no code movement. Have you heard of it? I've heard of this a lot lately.
I think this is trending. Yes. And it is going to get much bigger. So first of all, Zapier, they've built this company now.
I've heard there's been a hustle account. So we'll learn. But I've heard that it's a 50 or 60 million recurring business. They've only raised $1 million in funding.
So on the really high end, this company could be worth $1.5 billion on a lower end, maybe $100 million. So very valuable. And so why? Why?
It's growing so fast. And I think it's because this whole no code thing. And I'm incredibly fascinated by companies in that space. So one of the ones at Webflow, Webflow has been around for 60 years.
They actually started right before I started at HustleCon. I thought it was not going to be a big thing. It is going to be a big thing. And there's a handful of other things.
Have you seen any other no code ones? Yeah, there's a couple good ones. So Webflow and Zabir are the two most successful ones. And I have one on my phone.
People are trying to do this where can you make a mobile app without coding? Right? Yeah. And I don't think this is not going to be a fact.
I believe this is going to be a thing. So much so that a friend of mine, St. Andrew Wilkinson, he owns this agency called Metalab, which is I think they're 200 person agency. They create user interfaces like Slack, or they created that for Slack.
He is opening up an agency only around no code. So the goal is how do we hire designers and marketers and have them actually build such a code experts? No code experts. That's amazing.
So if I was trying to make money, right now, I would create an entire community around this. So I had a guy reach out after last one. I heard you guys mentioned no code. By the way, I've created the largest directory of no code tools and reviews.
And here, check this out. I think it's called Codeless. And he sent me an invite and was like, let me know what you think. It wasn't super awesome yet.
But it was like, look, here's three things I would do with this if I was you. I don't think you need a directory of everything. I think you need to be able to say, here, you're trying to do X. Here's the best no code tool.
And here's a course on how to use that no code tool. And just be curating the best no code tools and then training people on how to use them. Kind of like a question. So I want to use that as a segment into something similar.
I have one no code tool. I want to hear what you're saying. Retool is the name of the no code tool. I've heard of this.
No. Retool. I think I saw the founder's stripe tweet about this. He's like, this is awesome.
And I saw it. And I was like, this is actually amazing. So what these guys did was, every company has internal dashboards. So you create some pairs of data.
So everybody creates them. And it's not just about data, but you create some admin interface. And you're like, oh, I need to be able to, you know, for you guys, you might need to be able to go in and change something in the email over tomorrow. Or go in and give the advertiser some permission or something like that.
So most software companies have some admin panels, admin dashboards that you need to do. Dashboard not for data, but for doing things, like running your business. And so what Retool did was they were like, look, developers, like smart developers hate building these things. And typically people do a poor job of building them.
Because there's like, oh, this is internal anyway. It's just like task work. It's just task work. You kind of need it to run your business.
And UX always sucks because the designers never touch it because it's not facing customers. And it'll break. You need to click that button twice for a torque. So what I know that is broken.
We haven't got to run a fix. So what Retool did was they made internal admin dashboards as a service for any company. And they are taking off. And so we used them with our e-sports platform.
Because sometimes we needed to go in and manually update the scores of the tournaments if our scoring system is wrong. And we needed to be able to go look up if someone was cheating or not. And so we used them for our dashboards. So you still need to be a developer.
But it makes the developers job way easier. And you also don't need to be like a deep, a full stack developer. You could be like, you know, very, very sort of a light engineer and use Retool and set it up for your company. So are these guys how big is the company?
So they went through a combinator recently. I don't know how big they are in terms of revenue or people. But I do know that for the first six months, eight months, they were kind of floundering. It wasn't really working.
And then all of a sudden it started taking off. This past year has just been like, during that mode, where you're just trying to keep up with growth. Like 30 people, 10 people? I haven't met them.
I don't know how many people in the company. Probably something like 15 to 20. So let me tell you what I would do right now. I'm all in on this.
I think this is going to be huge. The first thing I would do, which would be hard, but worth it is you start with these companies all around no code that is not going to happen overnight. You're going to have to get a team together. Maybe raise money.
You're going to have to get people together to build this. 100%. I would pick a niche and go after this. But the second thing, which is, oh, by the way, those things could be huge.
So you do a tableau. So these are multi-hundred million dollar year companies. Probably traded some of them at billions of dollars in valuation. This guy's a limit for anyone in this space.
The second thing that I would do, and this is more labor intensive, but you could crush it around the bat, is I would create a business that goes into companies like the hustle or Twitch and charges $10 to $30,000 for a two or three day seminar and says, on the promise of this, hey, pedagrowth marketing or marketing or head of this department, I'm going to make it so your team can move two times faster by teaching them just how to make their own stuff. You're not going to need any depth time. Would that interest you? Of course.
Of course. Let me come in and teach your team how to use this suite of tools, and they'll never have to ask it to help you. I would do that. I would pay my company, which is a small company.
I would pay someone $3,000 to $5,000 to come and do that. Right. So trend here is the no code movement. The availability of all these no code tools.
What you're saying is a couple companies keep an eye on Webflow, Zapier, Retool, and then now you're saying new opportunity, you can actually serve that industry either through workshops through building a no code company, connecting a bunch of different tools, building a directory, whatever it may be. Do you have budget for your account now to make a call? Like to hire people to come in and say, yeah, yeah, we have a training budget. A few thousand dollars.
I would, because my team is all engineers, but what I would do, I also work with this other group called Partnerships, where they literally would beg for engineering time and can never get it in the company. And so if I told them, hey, look, here's three tools out here that could make job a lot easier, and these guys are going to come in and do this. Yeah, I would do this. All right.
I got a different idea. Drone, like, shows. Oh my god, those are awesome. Have you seen this?
They're awesome. OK, so if you're sitting in front of a computer at Google this right now, Drone Light Show, think fireworks, but modern eyes. How big do you think the firework industry is? I've not done the research.
That is the reason. Who's the person in the back here doing friends research? Look at Fireworks and look up Drone Light Show. So basically what these guys do is they get a fleet of drones, like, I don't know, 50 drones, small, little cheap drones.
Yeah, like tiny little drones. Yeah, like tiny little drones. They put lights on. But you software to synchronize the patterns.
They can go and they can dance. They can go into different shapes. It can be a flower and then a rainbow and then whatever. And they do this at music festivals, birthday parties, conventions, whatever.
It is the new fireworks. And it looks so cool. And the product sells itself. Because if you see it at one event, someone in that house person will want to use it at their own event.
And so I think that Drone Light shows are going to be really big. So your wife does things at conferences where she draws. Correct. And she draws what the conference speaker is speaking about.
Exactly. You might have seen that someone's talking and live in real time on a giant whiteboard that's as big as a wall. She's drawing an infographic story of what the person's saying live. And this is like a magic trick.
It's a wonderful living doing this. Yeah, she makes great money. She has no website, no business card, has never had one. Has been doing this for 10 years.
And it's basically booked around if she wants it. She just turns down gigs. And I'm like, because the product is viral, because people see it at the conference and they want it for the company. How about it?
Yeah. And do this for the Drone Fireworks. I love that. I would want to Google Drone Fireworks.
Drone Light Show right now. And I will invest in a Drone Light Show company right now. Because I believe as soon as I saw it. That would be a cash flow thing.
That would make cash from the first couple of weeks. After you get started getting buggings. Exactly. And drones are kind of like commodities now.
You can buy very cheap drones. The programming of drones is very simple now. And then the last piece, by the way, somebody could make a no code type of tool to program drones. People are doing no code type tools to program Amazon Alexa, like voice apps.
I can make a voice. I can make an Alexa skill without knowing how to code now. Somebody's going to do the same for programming drones as drones get more and more positive. Two ideas right there.
OK, go. What's next? OK, so you were talking about someone had a directory that would tell you the best no code tools. So my company, the Hustle Trends, we're a small business of about 30 employees.
We make, let's just say, eight figures in revenue. So a small business, but they can offer our spending money and stuff. The way our costs work are we spend the three top tiers are advertising to get new customers, people employees. And the third one is software.
I was doing our accounting and the other number. So our company, like I said, is small. We might spend $20,000 to $30,000 a month in software. These are things like you guys may not use this, but MailChimp and then Slack and then other tools.
But then also payroll. I just paid $15,000 for years to switch to rippling or close to $15,000. Kaiser HealthCare, just like all these platforms, like stuff that you just have to have, including payroll, HR stuff, performance review stuff. Anyway, I bet you have wasted at least $100,000 in the lifetime of our company by selecting software that I didn't know why I did it because I thought it was a thing.
And then I realized, oh, wait a minute. This is like already packaged into this other thing. And like, shit, I've got to like, I'll just let the, so like right now we're paying two grand a month or something. And I'm like, damn, this other thing already, like it's gonna offer, I just got to let this expire, I guess, I'm out of the money.
And so, here's the thing is that most all early stage companies have like, it's like an 80, 20 thing. Like 80% of us all just need the same problem solves. And so I've been thinking a lot about this, how this could be solved, almost like a business back end in a box, which is why like gusto or Zenipids or something is trying to offer. But what I'm interested in is content sites, like a wire cutter.
In my head, I'm like, why is there someone not blogging and just telling me like, all right, you need your basics, this will do the job, just, it's all the suite of tools, you're good. That would have saved me so much money. And here's why it's looking at for the content owner, is because, so let's say, I don't know this for a fact, but it is generally true with a lot of companies. Something like a Mailchimp, I tell you to sign up to Mailchimp and use my link and you pay $100 a month for Mailchimp.
Mailchimp will pay me the affiliate $30 a month for the life. Amazing. Huge affiliate fees. And that makes sense.
So, transit subscription business, I will gladly pay someone like a 30% percentage for a new customer for life. Well, we do actually. And in my head, I'm like, someone saved me money and just tell me, like, do the wire cutter of business software and just tell me exactly what to do. I don't wanna read this article, but I just like this really long thing.
Just tell me, you know what I mean? Yes, I have an idea that's similar to this in the same space, but this is a company called Vendor. I'm looking up right now, so I make sure that I get it. Right, V-E-N-D-R is their company.
And I think what they're doing, I might be wrong, but I think what they're doing is you pay for, you know, these same seven piece of software. What they do is they realize that you can, all these are negotiable. All the prices are negotiable. Mailchimp prices are negotiable.
Slack prices are negotiable. They do basically group buying, they do negotiation on your behalf. That's cool. And whatever they save you, they keep a cut of whatever they save you.
Because companies spend so much on software, and especially big companies, they spend so much on software, these guys will manage your contracts. So they show you what cycle everything's on, when it expires, all that stuff. And they save you money on the- I'm just telling someone the other day, I'm like, man, I just look at our expenses. And we had two or three different people paying for Photoshop and two or three people paying for like the Wall Street Journal.
I'm like, God, we should just share this. What are you guys doing? I just want to sign up for something and they just find out where all the duplicates are or things that we're not using. And they automatically cancel it for me.
I'll give them a cut of the revenue that they save me. I looked up this company and I have one template email I sent to a few companies a year, which is just, hey, founder's name, Ryan. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love this idea. Let me know if I can help or invest.
You sent it to them. And then we got in touch. But this is one of those ideas that I love, love, love, love. Great.
We're on the same page. OK, I got another one for you. So this is kind of a follow up on last week. So we talked about the Mini-Trickware.
And I was like, oh, of course, people love Mini-Stuff. This week, what I like what you guys did, which was you followed up, there's a presentation that you guys made. I don't know if you saw this day. That was like mini everything.
Yeah, shout out to Steph. So Mini-Everything, it was like Mini-Trick-Quares on the rise. Guess what? Tiny-Homes is also on the rise.
Guess what? Here's this other thing. Also, here's how they're doing it. They're leveraging YouTube because tiny stuff is really entertaining to like vlog about.
So people are vlogging, hey, I live in this 100 square foot tiny home. You're getting nearly a couple of tiny home things. The greatest. And so there's something to this mini thing.
And I just liked the follow up deck because it actually shows that you could build a brand around the lifestyle of mini-of minimalism. And if you look at like Marie Kondo and kind of minimalism, I think is a growing trend. And I think that tiny stuff and miniature versions of things is related there. So you could build a brand that does the cookware, that does the homes.
You could do everything just with one powerful overarching brand. Yeah, that was a good deck. I love that. I had no idea that miniature was such a thing.
But when you actually think about it, getting distribution, getting eyeballs on a business on these miniature things, so easy. Just because you already can see what the Instagram ad is going to look like in your head. Like there's like 10 or 20 different combinations of an Instagram ad. Like I'll click it right on that.
It's going to be stupid. Yeah, exactly. I was scrolling to Instagram. I saw one of those tasty videos.
And tasty videos, if you haven't seen it, those videos that are feed that are like, it starts with like a really juicy burger. And then you see somebody putting some sauce on it. And like all of a sudden you've watched 30 seconds. It's a 30 second recipe.
And I like this general premise of working backwards from what would work on the Instagram feed. That's how I think about things. What's really visual, what's really novel, and would catch my eye on Instagram, and then work backwards and build a business. That's how I think about it.
Which is, I like the Eight of Principal. Attention, interest, desire, action. Attention, interest, desire, action. Yeah, that's my framework when I do copywriting.
So when I think of a business, I go, ooh, does this have a really fast attention grabbing headline or attention grabbing video? And then, can anyone stop in the tracks? Okay, and then can I interest them as to like getting the phone on the cliff a little bit further to watch my video? And then can I make them desire by actually showing them the value?
And then can I easily collect their money by getting them to take action? So like a tiny home would be a little bit difficult if you have to do financing. But like a miniature set of something, that's 50 bucks, just take your credit card, that's easy. So another one that came to me on Twitter today, related to Tiny Homes is rent the backyard.
It's a new startup that's basically doing tiny homes, but it puts it in your backyard as a guest house that you can Airbnb. And so a lot of people don't want to move into a tiny home, because that's a pretty radical life shift. What if I could put a tiny home in your backyard, you could use it to Airbnb, and then you have it whenever it's not Airbnb, as like a novelty thing. I can't have it in San Francisco, but one day when I move, I will be in RBC.
Yeah, and so I thought, oh, this is another one of those. Hey guys, I love, love, love, love this idea. This is really- Did I get back here? We'll see, I got to intro from a friend.
And so we'll see, but like my parents have a tiny backyard. I have a tiny backyard. If I could put a little tiny home in the tiny backyard, I would do that. Is that, what's a considered structure?
Is it a good permit? So all the big cities, because they don't let you build the compromise that they're doing on the regulatory level, is they're saying, okay, these in-law homes, which is what these are called, like your in-law, guest house, whatever, these are now allowed. So if you have this much space, you're allowed to put an additional structure, because they think, oh, that kind of eases the burden on the housing problem in a lot of these cities. And so they actually are encouraged, right, before it was outlawed for a very long time.
That's awesome. Love this. I love anything that makes it really easy for someone to make exciting come. Easy.
Okay, I think I have one more on my list. Okay, so I'm sick of talking about because you have stuff like hard goods. The reason why is I don't think it's really intellectually challenging. It's just like the same crap, but you just smack on lowercase letter logo and like a pastel color, and then you triple or quadruple the pricing clock premium.
Easy. Right. Do it, but it's easy. But I do like the ancillary things around it.
So there's this guy who I know, I'm not close with him, but I've hung up on the couple of times. His name's Syed. S-Y-E-D. He owns this blog called WP Beginner.
Okay, it's a eight figure of your blog, and all he does is he blogs about the best WordPress themes and plugins. And over the years, I've got to know him and I've read about him. What Syed has done is built an empire, well WordPress empire. So he owns WP Forms, which is installed probably by a million people.
And if you want the premium version, it's like 50 bucks a month. He owns Optin Monster. He owns like, I'm almost positive. He owns 40 or 50 more plugins.
And if I had to guess, I would say he makes $50 million you're doing this. And what he's done is he's, this blog that he has, WP Beginner, he's been able to see what's the most clicked on affiliate sort of themes, and then he just goes and buys them or starts them. And it got me really interested in this. And so there's this company called Envato.
I wrote about it on trends a while ago. And Envato, all they are, they probably went like my oversimplification, but it's basically a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins. And since 2008, this thing has grossed $300 million in sales. And in 2017, they did $94 million in revenue.
It's something like $33 million in profit. And I'm amazed at that. And so I asked myself, well, what's the next thing? Well, it's not even the next thing.
It's already here called Shopify. A friend of mine, I've mentioned him earlier, Andrew Wilkinson, last week or two weeks ago, he announced that they raised $25 million or $30 million. And their whole purpose of raising this money is to go out and buy Shopify plugins. And I think that it's not like early early, but it's still early enough that there's a lot of.
There's still opportunity left. And so I think that people, I think Chrome plugin are like this as well. I'm going to be incredibly fascinated to see all the Shopify plugins and a holding company exists that will buy all of these. And so the reason the WordPress thing works is because WordPress powers like 22% of all the websites.
So if 22% of all the websites are using WordPress, there's going to be this economy around making a WordPress like better. And these guys are capitalized. Yeah, I just bought it in Bato thing yesterday on a whim. $100.
I bought one as well. Shopify is very similar. I don't know what the percentage is, a percentage of online stores that you Shopify. But I guess it's probably also like 22% or 50%, something like that.
Therefore, and also these people are all making money or have the dream of making money on their shop. So it might be even, the plugins marketplace might be even better for them. It might be even better. Yes.
And so if you Google WeCommerce, which is the name of Andrew's new company, you'll see they go, we've just raised $33 million or $30 or something like that. And all we're going to do is buy Shopify partners, which means plugins and things like that. Right. Not the shops themselves.
No, these guys would never do that. No, it's picks and acts as neck old. Gotcha. And so I like this theme.
And I like what you said there too, which is that part of that empire is the content sites that say, hey, we recommend this. Here's that tutorial about how to do this. And center knowledge. Right.
And so these guys have in center knowledge because they own an agency that would build Shopify store for people. And so they started like, oh man, everyone's installing this commenting software for their Shopify site. Right. That's that third type of luck.
The keen eye that's able to see opportunities before. Yeah, and that looks really easy to get. You're just getting the mix. OK, I have another one that's similar to this.
My buddy, Zach, has sleep apnea. And I think I also have sleep apnea. I just haven't gone and done the sleep test because I don't want to get diagnosed because, hey, the diagnosis is really annoying. You have to go sleep overnight at this lab or whatever.
And then B, if you have sleep apnea, which a lot of people do, you can put on this like breather machine when you sleep. And it's supposed to help. But it's like you feel like a dying patient given the way that the treatment works. And so Zach went through this process.
He's going through this process where he's like, all right, I've had this my whole life. I've been snoring. Nobody wants to sleep in the same room as me. And I think I have the sleep apnea thing, but this whole system seems busted.
Here's what I'm going to do. He's created a YouTube channel called Sleeping with Zach. And so for 30 days, he's basically going to document his journey of figuring out, do I have it? How do I get tested?
Trying out all the different products in this industry to be like, what actually works and what's bullshit? And then getting to the bottom of like, can I actually cure my sleep apnea in a way that I want? And I think this is a really, really smart way to start this business. I think it's a catchy name.
I think doing the YouTube videos will be fun. Other people want to see it and not be sold something. But say, oh yeah, this guy's like me. He's had problems snoring his whole life, and he's trying to solve a trial that he's trying to try all the two.
What's Zach's last name? Hargraves. I think I know him. Yeah, he's in our circle.
Here's my prediction. If he executes on this well, he will be able to sell this for at least a million dollars to sleep apnea company, or make a million dollars in sponsorship. So there's the content side of things. And then if that starts to become a steam, and there's a potential also to even start a sleep apnea company, where he actually devises a better product for either the diagnosis, or the, could you not diagnose this with a phone listening to sleep?
Could you have a wearable, or is there on the treatment side? Is there something? I know he has a sleep apnea audience. Exactly.
That's why I like that he started with the YouTube channel. Normally I would just be like, just cut straight to the taste, but in this case, I like the idea of starting with the audience, and seeing if you can build that. Slick with Zach. Yeah.
And I called this approach the curious beginner. So I believe in content, there's like two major routes you can go. You're either the generous expert. I know something, I'm going to tell you guys about it, and I can get famous for that.
The other one is I know nothing, but I'm going to go do all the work and research, and I'll share with you guys what I'm learning. I'm just as clueless as you. That's the curious beginner. And so I like that he's taking the experience to the beginning approach.
So I want to find good social content. Just learn and post what you learned the week before. Right. Exactly.
It works. And the way I do this podcast is both. So when I interview guests, that's my curious beginner. I'm saying, hey, how did you do this?
Can you tell me what you learned? And I'm just sharing it in real time. When I'm learning from these successful people, I'm just sharing. And then this episode's a little bit different, where it's like, hey, we have some expert knowledge about some different opportunities, different spaces, because trends are doing all just research, we have friends that are doing interesting things, we're thinking about stuff, and we're just giving away these ideas for essentially.
Okay. Can I wrap up with one idea? Yes, please. Okay.
I think that your friends with Guy Steve, we'll have to talk about it too much because he's going to be on your- Yeah. That's a point. So I read an article, this is called Social Chain. I think I'm going to dumb it down about what I think it is, is that they own loads of different Twitter handles, which I actually follow a ton, and what I'm just called like failures, or what I'm just called like, shit men do, or something, and it's just like funny Twitter videos.
They call them theme pages. I love them. I follow up. They're like, this name history.
And it's an agency, basically. So I'll give you the brief story, because it's kind of amazing. Steve's 18, 19 years old, starts a company, and he's targeting college students. He wants to market, but he has no money because he's 19 years old.
He's broke. And so he's like, oh, you know what? Me and all my friends, we all follow these two Twitter accounts. One was like, shit, freshman say, and then the other one was like overheard in the library or something like that.
And the student theme meme accounts, and they have millions of followers. And so he reached out to him and was like, hey, can I get you to shout out my product? And it turns out he was owned by like another student at the school. Like all of these meme pages were created by like 17 year old kids just having some fun, and then, you know, fast forward six months, and now they have two million followers.
And they didn't kind of realize they were sitting on a gold mine. But Steve was pretty smart. He did realize that. And so he thought, well, I'm not going to say, hey, can I add you to my network of theme pages?
And when we get some advertising money, I'll give you, you know, I'll pay you to post. And so he built up this agency. They had about 25 employees. All of them were under 23 years old.
So it was like, the upstart ad agency. He would go on stage, and he would start a talk, and he would be like, hey, we control the internet. And people were like, okay, what are you talking about? He's like, watch, give me a word.
I'm going to make a trend on Twitter by the end of this talk. And somebody would throw out a word from the audience, and then the theme pages would all start like dropping memes about that word. And sure enough, by the end of the talk, it'd be like the number one trend on Twitter. And so he harnessed this and then did the same thing with Instagram, and he built the biggest collection of these theme pages.
And it's like influencers, but you don't have to deal with the personalities because it's a theme. It's not a human being that's behind it. And so you can actually control all of the influence. And you can own the influence instead of being like the manager to Logan Paul.
So the idea of this sounds amazing to me. Yes. When I hear you describe this, I'm like, if that is as good as you're saying this, I think it's amazing. My prediction is that it's a horrible business.
And let me explain why. And we'll find the truth. I definitely want to be wrong. I've been trying to do this before.
So I'm trying to take a look at what I'm going to look like and then I'll do a breakdown of what I think Gary Vayner, Chuck's VaynerMedia, what his revenue is and what his employee headcount is. And so I've tracked it for nine years. And so this is all based off of public data. So it could be wrong, but this is straight out of his mouth.
So I got it from year one to nine and it basically ranges from, or it starts at $500,000, $1.3 million, $4.7 million, $14 million, $30 million, $54 million, $76 million, $125 million. So that's super fast for us. But in order for that to grow, his head count has grown from 20, 30, 125, 300, 525, 600, 800, 800. So the Rev per head count is like under $100,000.
That's what I think, well, these, when I hear this company, in an article I read about the social chain thing, and I have no incentive information, and so you'll have that soon, I have another truth. It said something like 800 employees, and like not a lot of revenue. Yeah, I think that's wrong, so I think they have a lot of revenue, but we'll have Steve clear the air. So before spec, I would say this, agencies are bad businesses in general.
Maybe that's the right word, pain in the ass is the right word. And they're pain in the ass, because you're dealing with clients, which are typically pain in the ass, that's head count, which is also pain in the ass. But the reason I say that is because they're not very defensible, right? Like you don't accrue a whole bunch of value, you kind of have to keep fighting for clients, and you have to, and the channels you're advertising on always change.
And it's not like you're building one product, you're constantly having to be the most creative kid on the block, coming up with a thing that's gonna give the clients a more fun. So, in all of the agencies, what I did like that they did was they started launching their own products to their own audience. So that's a twist. They use their data to say, oh look, we have these five pages about food, the audience is all female, let's create, cookware, they did another one with women's athleisure, and they created a knowledge of a brand.
You not have to look it up, it's somewhere. Yeah, and I think you should have an entire episode around this because, and I wrote about this, if you send out a trends, you'll see this or if you're already part of trends, I'll share in the group actually right now. Right? Basically, if my numbers are right, which they could be wrong, but I think they are, I think that having an agency like this looks cool on the outside is hell on the inside.
Because at my company, we're growing more profitable, but if I wanna be more profitable, I'm just not gonna spend on advertising and I'll just make millions of dollars in profit. And I can do that with a click button. When you have an agency, it doesn't work like that. And I see these numbers, and I'm like, oh my god, this sounds like hell.
Yeah, I don't know, we'll see. We'll find out. Well, I guess we'll go on an agency, tweet at us, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, but it seems like a grind, it seems really hard. We should give a shout out to the guy who did the airplane cocktail kit.
Yeah, so last week, trends wrote about airplane cocktail kits and how people are searching like that, they're crazy. So explain what this is, what is an airplane cocktail kit? So it's not, I'm not the target demo, because I don't drink, but apparently, I guess when they started alcohol on the plane, they don't like give you a lot of accessories. And so this, it comes with, I think it comes with sugar.
It comes with all the mixers. So let's say you wanna have a Moscow mule, a great drink, when the air host is coming down the aisle, she's not gonna stop and make you a Moscow mule and mix the bitters and do this thing and shake it up. But this looks like a little sewing kit. And it has all you need.
I think it's like you could charge $20 for it. It's $24, I think $25 to buy one of these. It's nicely designed, at least at the packaging, it looks cool, that's for sure. I'm also not the target demo, I would never buy something.
I'd barely trust it. But I get it, it's like, I would buy that for someone as a cute gift. And so this guy, we wrote about it, and then an hour later, he comes back and he goes, everyone, I just bought airline, what was it? It's like airlinecocktailkits.com.
Yeah, he goes, I would start selling them. I was like, I don't know what he's gonna do with it, but I appreciate the bias for action of like, you know what? It doesn't matter what he does with it, because if he creates a Shopify store, then runs some of these Instagram ads, where the theme behind the ad is like, you make it look like you're in a smoke jacket and you're in your den with mahogany wood and you zoom out and you're really on the airport. Or you know what I mean?
And you make that ad, you will sell $10,000 a month in products. Right, yeah, so shout out to I think his name's Ankur who bought the domain and took some action right away. Okay, cool, if you like this, let us know, can email me, it's purry.shot at gmail.com. If you are doing one of these ideas, let us know, we wanna track it and hear what happens.
And we'll be doing these for a while longer, and this is my pitch that I will always be giving, is if you wanna be part of trends and get these reports that my team is doing all day, trends.co slash million, you'll get like a special deal if you sign up there. Trends is so good right now that I don't know if it's because you guys want some new product and you really care about it, so you're making it really freaking good every week. So I'm like, is this sustainable? Like can they continually, like a year from now?
I'm curious, is it gonna be as good? I think trends is gonna happen. I think trends is gonna turn into like Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal or like the hustle is gonna turn into like Wall Street Journal and trends is like a real estate section and I think our goal, I think it's gonna happen. High value.
Yeah, I think we're gonna have multiple sections. So right now trends is like a general interest thing. Soon we're gonna have trends just for the software. That'll be just for D to C stuff.
And I think you'll pay one fee and you can access all of it. It's really interesting right now. So like whoever's behind it, great job. Okay, cool, we're done.