$2.4M In ONE Day?!

Let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched the product. He had more demand than he was willing to let in.

He let in 5,000 people. That's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching the product. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to.

I'm all in it like a day. He's all on the road. Let's try to live. It's me and Sam, two guys who you can't live without.

I literally just start talking in whatever time I'm out of time. And then also, it's 9 a.m. for me. I wake up.

I don't talk to anyone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. So these are the first words I say, period. And that's what came out.

All right. Well, here we are. We both have one topic in both of our lists, which is very, very rare. We have overlap here.

We both have this topic because there's a business that sold for $500 million. That is a badass story. And it's called Follow-Up Boss. I've never heard this company before.

I find out they sold $500 million in cash. Tell me about Follow-Up Boss. I think you know more. You know how I know about them.

I know about them for two reasons. The biggest reason, they're a hands-in member. And so I saw them post that they just sold. Man, this story's crazy.

So I had never heard of this company. Have you? Never heard of them until today. So there's not really a reason why we would have heard of them other than we're just business nerds, but it's a real estate platform.

So it's a vertical software. And so basically, the gist of it is that if you are a real estate agent or if you own a company that has multiple real estate agents, you get leads from Redfin, Zillow, whatever else. Ideally, you get thousands of leads per month, as well as you have homes that you're selling and people who are buying homes get tracked. It's basically kind of what HubSpot or Salesforce does, but specifically for real estate agents.

The guy, Dan, he started it 12 years ago, I think. Do you know how he started it? That's what's fascinating about it. I don't know how he started it, but you're right.

So the gist of it is, it's a niche down CRM. So agents get leads. They can follow up with those leads. You got to keep track of all those leads.

So it's a HubSpot for real estate agents. Just zoomed in, zoomed way in on that one niche. Has a pretty insane exit. So how did they start it?

So what was the final sale? $500 million, $400 million upfront cash and another $100 million earn out. Listen to how this guy started. His name's Dan.

He's from Australia, but they live in Wyoming now. So I guess it's technically, it's a remote company, but they're a Wyoming startup. It's going to be one of the bigger tech exits out of Wyoming. Man, listen to this.

So he actually went through the foundation. Do you remember that course like 10 years ago? It was like a course to teach you how to start a startup? Yeah, that's what it was called.

And it's like their greatest success story, I guess. But he went to this thing and he started just trolling Facebook groups and he was like working a normal job. He was a marketer at a normal big company. He was like, I want to start a company.

I need some ideas. And so he was like, well, I've got a buddy in real estate. That kind of interests me. So he started joining these Facebook groups for real estate agents.

And he just started like skimming in all the posts. Like, what are people complaining about? What's a common thing? And he saw this guy complain.

He's like, man, I'm paying 500 bucks a month for the software that I hate for tracking all my leads. It kind of stinks. Like, how are you guys like tracking your leads? And he saw like, okay, that's interesting.

And so he partnered with a guy as a developer, a business developer. They build an MVP. They say that it took them like six months and only had one customer paying 150 bucks a month. But he said, he goes, man, we built like, this interview that I read with him is a few years old.

So I don't know if it was true till the end. But he's like, we basically built our entire business on Facebook, but not Facebook ads. He goes, I would just go into all these Facebook groups as the CEO. And I would see them talk about like, hey, what's a good platform for this?

And it wasn't even related to Follow Up Boss, which was his software company. He was like, I was just like being helpful constantly. And people would click my Facebook profile and see that I was the CEO of this one platform or this one tech company. And then they would click off and buy it.

And I would call them and become friends with them. But he became, they found this idea just through trolling Facebook groups. And he would see people complain about stuff. And he would DM them on Facebook and be like, hey, I think I'm building a solution for you.

I don't care if you buy it or not. But like, could you just give me 10 minutes of your time to figure out and make sure I'm solving the right problem. And he did it so often that that's how they came up with this idea for the software. They bootstrapped the whole company.

I don't know how much their revenue was. The only source that I found was a source that I don't entirely trust online, but it was like 28 million a year in revenue, less than 100 employees. And a huge asset. People have to tell you the revenue when you join Hampton.

Don't you just have this? Just take a peek at the quick hit of a record here. But I would never cite that. And so I just Googled like, you know, follow up boss of revenue.

And I'm just like, what can I see? That's public. So I don't know. Yeah, this is an awesome story and a good example of the niche down, the niche down zoom in pivots.

And I think that this is a, you know, there's many like, um, business plan blueprints. So for example, those guys in 37 signals, what they're doing is they just go, hey, what's a super popular thing, but it has too many features. We're gonna make it do less and take up less of your life. And that's like, as an example, you know, hey, your email client.

Yeah, it's just gonna do these things in this way. Less features, the better. Less clutter, the better. And they're doing it again with once where they're doing software that you only pay for one time.

No monthly recurring, right? So their thing is, it's the stripped down version of X. I don't know if you saw, I don't know if you saw, but the guys who started Tuft & Needle came out with a new company. Did you see this?

Crazy. What's it called? Boring Mattress? Boring Mattress.

So the guys who created Tuft & Needle is the name of their website. It's like, this is a plain mattress. Our friends told us that we should tell you about all the cool benefits, features that will make this quote different and quote sellable. But we're not convinced.

We don't think you'll fall for that. So here's just a really good mattress that'll last you a while. No frills. And it's only $400, right?

Or it's like, it's cheap. Yeah, 500 bucks. And so that's their new thing. So that's one blueprint in a business is to do the same thing with less frills, actually, like, you know, less of a brand pump or less features that you need to use.

Trello's a good example of this. All productivity apps have more and more and more features. Trello's like, hey, we're just gonna have less features, right? It's just the equivalent of the next cards on the internet that you can move around.

There's actually another takeaway here, though, which is how long, so you started an e-commerce company. How long until you hit your first $100,000 in revenue per month? Like three months, probably. Okay.

You're involved in Shepard. How long do you think it took them to hit their first $100,000 in revenue? I have no idea. I'm going to guess six months.

Yeah, quick. Okay, six months. So we're talking months. Hampton took a short amount of time, months as well.

The hustle, I think it took nine months. Do you know how long it took follow-up boss to get to $100,000 in revenue? Or, sorry, $100,000 in monthly sales? Well, you said they had one customer for $100,000 hanging by a thread for a while.

So is it more than a year to get to that first milestone? Four years? Four years? Four years.

Four years. So I was reading this interview with them. It took them four years, and they had 11 employees, and they were at $100,000 in monthly revenue They said around $100,000, so they've been a little bit more. But what's crazy is these software companies, so I don't know what their revenue was.

Like I said, I think it was between $25,000 and $30,000. Just Google, like, follow up awesome revenue. That's what I saw. They sold for $400,000, well, potentially $500,000, $400,000 up front.

What's crazy is these software companies, you and I both have this thing where we want to go fast. We need to learn and have a little bit of this attitude. I got 20% of this. You are more of a stick-to-it kind of guy.

Do you think, I mean, if you're under $100,000 in revenue, four years in, are you doing this still? It's hard. So, like, all right, so I have an audience now. Do you think you could have stuck with it?

It depends where I was in life. If I was, if it was a 5% chance, it would be really hard. It would be hard. If I had to go into those meetings and be like, all right, guys, we're going to review the metrics today.

Hereabouts, everybody, we're going to say the revenue number. We're going to say we're at 42,000 in year four. But there's other things to be excited about. But we talked to Darmesh about this, and Darmesh is pretty low-key about it.

He's like, it took forever. In reality, Darmesh, HubSpot, HubSpot, I think, grew, like, actually a lot faster. But he was like, man, the first, like, six years, we only got to, like, four million or something. I forget exactly what he said.

But he, like, conveyed the idea. He was like, it's a slog at first. At that time, things just grew slower. Now, things grow much faster, right?

The eventual expectations are way different. But you have to have faith. And of course, we're talking about the one that worked. And there's a lot.

There's so many more that don't work. But to have that faith of, like, this can work and to stick to it for 10, 11, 12 years, if you have the right metrics, this shit pays off. These software companies are so much cooler than what we typically start. So I did it.

I remember many years ago. I did a fireside chat with Michael Birch, who was, at the time, was my mentor. He was my boss. He's a guy who's built four or five super successful internet companies that scaled millions of users.

He's basically a billionaire at this point in Silicon Valley. And a bunch of entrepreneurs came over, and they were asking questions. One of the questions they asked was, how do you know when to pivot or persevere? Meaning, you hear the stories about follow-up laws or Pinterest where it's like, it was not taking off for a while.

And then, you know, they stuck with it. And then it did. And then it took a long time. Pinterest took a long time.

The graph was, you know, not like some explosive social app at the beginning. And so I turned to him because I was like, come on, I know this answer too. This is like, I want to know, what is the guy who's done it in Silicon Valley? What does he say?

He goes, this is the hardest question for any entrepreneur. It's deeply personal and situational. He goes, for every, you know, one story you hear of a Pinterest that just keeps going after 12 months, even though there's no signs of life, you know, there's a hundred people that did that and failed. You just never hear them.

They don't get to pocket the conference, right? So he's like, it's super hard because you have the survivorship bias to know which story should you listen to. And so he's like, this is the one where there's no real advice you can give from somebody else. The one thing that we think we can hit this milestone by this date.

And setting that time box is really important because it keeps you honest up front when you're super optimistic. All right, let's say something then. We think that in the first, like I said one for this new company, I haven't announced it yet on the pod, but I said one I said, I think we can get to 500,000 ARR in the first 60 days. 500K of revenue in the first 60 days.

And I said that now, if we don't hit that, that's going to be like, throw the towel, shut it down. But maybe. Not me, you never know. But the reality is, you set that so that you have to have a conversation about why you didn't hit your expectation.

What were you wrong about? Or what assumption did you have that was incorrect? It might be a fatal assumption or might just be, oh, I was just, I underestimated how long it takes to do X. And that's okay, you can have that conversation.

The thing we did when I worked with Michael was, we asked the question, what metric gives us the most faith? So what metric worries us the most and what metric gives us the most faith? So let's say four years ago, we don't have a million, I hope we don't have a hundred thousand revenue. That's the one that worries us the most.

We have very little revenue. Okay, but what gives us the most faith? It's, well, of the 52 customers we do have, they love it and nobody's churning, right? They're just like, oh, okay, what can I hang my hat on to give myself the excuse to keep going?

So I think that's a useful question to ask me. If you don't know whether I should pivot or persevere, I think what metric is giving me the most faith and what metric is keeping me up at night? And then you can almost kind of weigh the two against each other. You know, if the thing that's giving you faith is like, yeah, that one guy told me he likes it it's like, oh, that's not a very strong counterpunch to the fact that the evidence on your revenue and you subside is pretty low.

But it feels horrible when you're in it. So I posted a link in our MDB document. Okay, so it goes to a tech crunch. I remember, it goes to a tech crunch article, but I remember when we were running the hustle, I looked up to, there weren't that many media companies to look up to, and so I really looked up to Business Insider.

And the reason I liked it was Henry Blodgett was fairly transparent about their traffics. And so Henry Blodgett, they wrote an article, it looks like maybe six years into the company, and he made a funny joke. He's like, we eaked out a net profit of $2,100 on revenues of $4.8 million. It's basically enough to buy a MacBook Pro.

And he reveals their traffic. And you see that it looks like this nice, like arc where it's like, or this nice graph was like exponentially going up. But I remember when I was running the hustle, I was like, well, their graph looks amazing. Like, they look amazing.

But then I zoomed in on this picture, and you can see that it's broken down by month. And if you really focus on it, what you can see is basically February of 09, they hit an all-time high. And then they didn't surpass that until something like December of 09. So basically for a whole year, for 10 months, yeah, the whole year, which I think it looks like they started in 07.

So for 10 months, two years into the company, the monthly traffic, which for a site with Business Insider, that's how they would gauge if they're doing a good job, it basically either went down or didn't go up. And when you do that every single day, every single week for 10 months, it feels miserable. And then you zoom out and you like see like, okay, well, it has gone up. But these graphs are never a smooth going up.

And a lot of times, sometimes I imagine for two years, it'll be pretty shit. Three years, three years, it'll be shit. And then after a while, it starts picking up if you do a handful of things, right? But that requires extreme faith.

And it's very, very, very hard to manage our emotions every day when it's like that. I totally agree. This is a, Tony Robbins said this thing, he goes, the number one choke point of any business is the psychology of the owner. Every problem you think your business has, if you do the root cause analysis, it goes right back to the root cause, to the psychology of the owner, right?

Let's say, oh, we're not growing fast enough. Why? Because, you know, we don't have our paid acquisition sucks. Why?

Because we, the guy who's been in our paid acquisition has been doing it for six months of his life. Why? Because we're not hiring the right people. Why?

Because our owner hasn't made that a priority and isn't willing to spend money, right? Or is afraid to spend money on talent. And so everything just goes back to the psychology of the owner, which is both empowering and also I think scary for some people. The empowering part is, it's in control.

The scary part is, shit, it's my fault. And it goes back, you can also like go back to like what inefficiencies or like where does the owner or CEO, where do they like suck? So for example, I remember at the hustle, I was always fearful of overspending. And so I was cheap about shit.

And I was actually overly cheap. And when there was time when Facebook ads opened up, it's like, dude, we got to spend more here. Looking back, I spent way more, but I didn't because I was being too cheap. And like, why am I cheap?

Well, because of all this other shit that I experienced in life. And so like, it's basically like what they say, like a person with money is, it's just going to like magnify the things that the traits they already have. Or like you always say that with people when they're drunk, like, oh, the true feelings are just going to come out. It's the same thing as with running a company.

And you got to like master that in your game. It's really hard. Yeah, for sure. Let's do another one.

Um, I want to talk about, um, let's do the other one. Peter levels is insane. Tell me the Peter levels is insane. That's a good headline.

I love this guy. So Peter levels we had in the pod. I think we've only had him once, but he's got an open invitation. So Peter levels, we both love him.

He has like four or five different businesses that he runs. I think he's by himself doing it. Collectively, his businesses probably do 2 million a year in sales. And he's super transparent about all of it.

So he puts his revenue in his bio on his Twitter. He shares everything really fascinating, thoughtful guy. Did you see what he did with his stock portfolio? So basically, so click that tweet and you'll see it.

But he basically created a Google sheet. And he, you can kind of, I don't know, he doesn't explicitly say, but you can do the math. And he says, here's how much my stock portfolio made me. Um, and it was up 32%.

So you can kind of like just do basic algebra and figure out how much he has in his portfolio. And he reveals every holding that he has. And I think that A, I'm happy he's doing this. B, I would never, ever do this though.

Like it's, this is like, this transparency is wild, but it's super fascinating to see what this guy's doing when it comes to like sharing his numbers out in public. It's pretty, pretty fascinating. I got to say two things up here. So, uh, first, Peter, come back from the pod.

We miss you. Uh, you've done a bunch of interesting stuff. This plus your new AI stuff that we didn't talk about yet. So I want to do that.

Second, we've got a bunch of people on this podcast. Some that have big names, some that have, you know, big, uh, big track records of billionaires who built this $100 billion company or whatever. Nobody, and I mean, nobody has a higher approval rating amongst entrepreneurs on the internet than Peter Lovells. Have you ever met anybody that is not a fan of Peter Lovells?

I've had billionaire friends, like, or associates in a conversation and they'll go, that guy's doing it right. Everyone likes this guy. Put this guy's profile picture up on the, on the fucking screen. Go to YouTube and just look at this guy's profile picture.

This is a personal branding seminar. Look at this guy's profile picture. It's him on a couch in the, like, international pose of, like, guys scheming on the internet, just messing around, having fun on the internet. He's on a couch, half of his body's dangling off.

He's got his laptop, he's no shirt, he's got his laptop up on a pillow because, you know, the laptop starts to just squirt you after a while. And he's got this messed up angle, his neck's all messed up. But you know, this guy's a one-man band just having fun. And this is why, you're right.

CEOs of, like, you know, major companies are like, that guy. That guy's doing it right. Because everybody is jealous of being able to be this guy. A guy who's just one-man on a laptop, travels around the world, builds projects, whatever he wants for fun.

He builds cool stuff like an artist that, um, whatever he builds tends to have some juice behind it because he's a very creative guy. Um, he's had many failures, but who cares? And he's got a bunch of successes. He's very open about them.

He's not trying to sell you anything. Peter Levels is a hero amongst makers and nobody, I will contend this, nobody has a higher approval rating on the internet amongst entrepreneurs than Peter Levels. He's great, man. he's great and i think on this podcast a lot of people like oh you're talking about just big companies too often or whatever and it's like we always reiterate this it's like we like people who carve their paths and that path could lead to a huge exit it could lead to something really small like uh just you could just be a great artist it doesn't matter if it's a big money thing or not and peter levels the reason why he's so fascinating is he has carved the hardest path and he sticks to it he's very value-based really really really cool guy he did a tweet that goes only four out of the 70 projects i've ever done have made money and grown 95% of everything i ever did failed i can't really 5% so shit more it's just literally a like a you know like a vs code like a screenshot of projects that made money and grew four he's got nomad list remote top rebase and the youtube network this is before his day i think and then there's all of his all of his projects and stuff like ice cream chat tuba linux gif book taylor telegram chatbot superstartuportreats.com um places to work fire calculator i don't even know what any of these are but each one of these is like you know uh a great week it's like a great weekend uh that was had by him doing these projects you know that meme where it's like uh babe wake up sean curry just tweeted again or like babe wake up you know like peter levels bottom domain yes whenever peter replies to one of my tweets it's like one of those it's like hey wake up peter just said he liked what i'm doing that's how i feel about this guy really cool guy and i have a theory that people ultimately what is lacking in most lives is um that they don't live life on their own terms and then the way that that expresses itself is uh you have a lot of fun when you live on your own terms when you're just doing your not your thing you're doing your thing if you're doing your thing you're having a good time peter levels that profile picture of him on his couch like all crooked just on his laptop he's doing his thing and i feel like this is honestly it's a bit of why people like this podcast we're not the most prepared or researched or well spoken whatever but people can tell we have fun in our lives that we like we literally just do shit that we want to do and we're having a good time and it might be that the things we do are not all the things you want to do right sam's like buying a ranch and like a thousand i don't know what all this shit you do i want to do all that stuff but i can tell that you want to do all that stuff and that's awesome it's great that you want to do all those things you know build your like gym and your farmhouse and all that good stuff i think that peter levels is a great example of somebody who's just living life on his own terms and that is one of the most attractive traits that people have in general and it's so funny because what most people do is the exact opposite peter levels has a bunch of influence but when most people try to become influencers they uh you know strip down their personality and try to um appeal to others and then people can sniff that out yeah i i just think he's the best and i dm him on a regular basis he replies to me 10 percent of the time so peter if this makes it to you come on the pod man come on come back on what do you got all right uh let's do um so another person who is gone from zero hero brian johnson have you seen a t-shirt that he wears lately don't die yeah don't die that's a new brand you know what i like about it it's the same look as the austin 316 t-shirts yes johnson 316 don't die it's good man make johnson 316 don't die shirts because that's who he should become um all right so i was looking at the name because i saw that brian johnson finally started to sell something and me and you had made a prediction about six months a year ago we said you know what i don't think brian's doing this for the money i don't think he's doing this for the fame although he's gonna make a lot of money and i'm sure the fame you know the attention feels good in the moment very obvious prediction very obvious prediction but we said dude is this the greatest pre like pre-launch marketing set ever because what he did was he basically turned himself into a character and a lot of people have done this in the fitness niche but he's not a fitness influencer he brand himself as a longevity influencer a live forever a don't die influencer and he spent a couple million bucks on tests and content and building his brand he came on pods like ours you can look at google trends you can see the interest in brian johnson throwing over time actually we should map out where our podcast was with him on that trend i'm curious where that was and he's built an amazing following he's doing everything you should do as a as an influencer not that he wants to be an influencer he's doing everything you should do like i don't know if you've seen his meetups that he's having maybe these runs that he's doing yeah they look awesome he's taking people and they chant like don't die and they run up a hill or something like that they get at the bottom and they eat like just a pot of lentils and they're all eating lentils amazing and so he's building his little cult and it's a great thing so he came out with his first paid product did you see it it was it's the meal service right no no no so he came out with like a it's kind of like meal service it's like basically it's a part one of his blueprint diet as a you know ready to eat sort of like delivery package i think you pay 330 bucks a month and you get this thing 12 000 people apply wait wait wait but what is it how is it not you you said you implied i was a little wrong with meal service it is a meal service but it's just like powder right yeah yeah it's not like meal delivery it's not like blue apron but it is like you know the supplements and the drink and whatever it's like some version some skimmed down version of the um of his like anti-aging protocol got it it's the blueprint self-experimentation study and there's like a level one and there's level two level three so there's 67 interventions in this and it looks like there's a couple of powders there's a bottle of olive oil and there's a bunch of pills i like all those things powders pills and powder pills and oils send me out so he um he got 5,000 he got 12,000 people applied 5,000 people paid so let's do a little public math here let's break a rule he just launched this product he had more demand than he was willing to let in he let in 5,000 people that's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching the product and 20 million of ARR for a subscription supplements business essentially is like a 200 million dollar business what do you think uh athletic greens is that revenue wise like they raised at 1.2 billion in valuation 100 150 is like that 200 wow okay not yet you know but this is day one day one from out the gate with 20 million and this is only letting less than half of the demand that he had right so he could have been at 40 million if he wanted to again i don't think he's doing this for the money but god damn that's a that is an impressive start of business and it shows that i just raised now that i say and my wife doesn't think it's cool she's the one i've tried it on but i say this i say all content is now marketing and all marketing is now content and this is what brian johnson did he was put down content it happened to be marketing and that marketing is now leading to a lot of sales um for his new protocol when you say that to your wife i can just hear the world's loudest eye roll of like shut the fuck up sean that shit works out those fucking dorks that listen to you take out the fucking trash sean this is awesome it's sort of like uh have you seen that what's that movie where they talk about the biggest short and uh ryan goss's character you know like what are you getting out of this ryan he goes look look listen you're getting ice cream you're getting nuts you're getting the chocolate syrup you're getting whipped cream and when this works out i'm gonna get the cherry on top that's my feet i just get a little bit of this that's that's that's what uh brian johnson is doing with this business he's doing everything else i think actually just cuz because he's a dork he enjoys the shit then it just so happens that he got famous and now he's like yeah yeah that's pretty cool okay fine i'll do that too you know and i dig that and isn't it weird like why do you think we have so much trust and faith in this guy it's part of it is because he already has like a few money and so we think like he didn't give a shit he's just doing this just cuz but the way he's turned himself in the character is actually really interesting in his case there was a high beard entry spent millions of dollars doing this he also kind of lived like a hermit for two years to like perfect this but the idea of turning yourself into a character and then doing it in front of a lot of people that's actually a really appealing that's an exciting route to go for a lot of people where just like you change your identity and you go all in on this and you can actually make a great living by doing this it's the same reason i bought shoes from knees over toes guy right i probably never bought shoes from any brand besides 90 in like 20 years and then i see this guy who's over 40 years old dunking a basketball i see what he looked like before he was doing his thing and how he had knee surgeries undeniable proof is a very very powerful lever this guy literally just does like a somersault and he gets up and dunks a basketball he's like this 45 year old white guy which shoes he came out with a pair of shoes um that are like you know the knees over toes like thing not great shoes by the way for the record um definitely don't buy v1 if anybody's anything um so so you know it wasn't great but i have a high amount of faith and trust in this guy because again all content markets for two years he was just put out free content didn't sell a thing and so for two years all he was put out very helpful content and showed an undeniable level of proof that this guy was in incredible shape that his legs were super super strong and that you know where he started where he was a very powerful transformation so anybody who wants to have that transformation will trust him and then he comes out with a thing and he says hey this is what i use people will buy it and it's very very effective by the way i also bought knees over toes shoes before he came out with that shoe company he was always wearing these other shoes and i also bought them i also bought them that white shoe that looks like that's $70 or something $45 couldn't even really get it on i have like a thick american foot or something like this is like european shoe dude i wear the shit out of them i love those shoes i remember seeing the picture and like googling like what are those shoes they're not very comfortable they look cool though they look great like fougazier um can i do a quick thrill the show by the way okay go all right so basically at hampton we got access to all this data and so in order to grow we decided i love data you know they say this is a new oil i already mentioned i love oil i don't know i don't know how to make money off of it yet but somehow oil is good we've been doing these surveys where we surveyed different industries and we get benchmarks different uh different industries right now we just did one on agencies and so we did this thing where we surveyed 60 agencies give us all their revenue all their profit and we did like this whole survey where we saw here's the benchmarks for profit uh per employee revenue per employee you can find out if you go to joinhampton.com and then you go to our blog you'll see the surveys we did one on wealth so like people say their net worth how much money they're spending each month how much income they're part i think sean that if i if i decide to do this have you ever heard of the i think this would work have you ever heard of like benchmarking like i didn't know anything about this industry you know about benchmarking yeah of course i didn't know that people would ever pay for this and so there's the most common form of benchmarking is salary benchmark so there's a couple called salary.com and there's like 10 or 20 other ones who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars whatever i think in a couple years if i get enough data i think i can spin this off and create a data company where i do benchmarking for different industries and the problem that we'll be solving is let's say that you're an agency let's say you're an econ business and you're buffering your revenue you want to know are we spending the right amount for ads are we spending the right amount for employees whatever i think we can build a cool data business office so that's the thrill of shill but i just wanted to call my shot and say maybe eventually i think we're gonna do this i don't think it's calling your shot if you say maybe eventually the call your shot is i'm going to do this that's the only requirement of calling your shot is to say i'm gonna do this not call my shot i so happen to do this which probably won't but it's gonna work it's like a babe bruce is like that's the point you just went like like shrug dude also you reminded me of something i don't mean to rain on your thrill of your shill here but do you remember have you seen these release i'm sure you've seen this because we're both internet like uh what's it called like the people who look for fossils whatever um when mark zuckerberg had his old like aim messages leaked when he was 19 years old starting facebook and he was like these idiots here's the transcript he goes he just dm'd a friend just because you can't wait to break yeah so if you ever need anyone if you ever need any info about anyone at harvard just ask i have over 4 000 emails pictures addresses social security numbers his friend goes what how did you manage that one people just submitted it i don't know why they well trust me yeah every agency just submitted their profits their revenues their growth tactics they trust me for the record i want to say dude i want to say i have access to zero of the documents that people uh submit for in order to join hampton i've got zero access i purposely did this just like for years i purposely didn't ask your name of your econ business i just like i don't know because i don't accidentally say anything i have zero access to this not only because i don't say anything and also because i just literally don't know how to you know like use computers and like log in my password that was the equivalent of uh you know i'm like i don't even know how to use my computer trust me all right let me stop making money about that let's move on let's do another one all right so last year i invested in this company called consensus and they basically it was like an ai company for research for like scientific research so if you want to like figure out like uh you know instead of reading individual studies this website would just tell you in aggregate what many studies would show and they're only doing okay there it was basically just two guys and they're still just trying to figure it out like it was like this sounds interesting but like i don't even know if it's gonna work let's see well something happened a few weeks ago that i think it's gonna change their business but i think that there's inflection so basically like when the iphone came out the app store happened and we heard stories about pandora so pandora was a company before they were the music service the app store came out and they're like oh let's just use our service and pivot and build an app they're one of the first apps that's what made pandora popular when covid happened there's companies like better help which is like uh uh therapy online or there's like telemedicine because the laws during covid change where a doctor can describe meds cross state lines there's been a bunch of these right now one just happened so i think january 14th so i think it was 10th or january 10th open ai created an app store they've kind of done this where they've like made their own like you can make your own gpt and all this other stuff but they created an app store i don't even think they said what the pricing was so with the iphone app store i think the developer gets what 70 percent of the revenue apple gets 30 percent open ai hasn't even said what that what it's gonna be so it's still really early and so this company that i invested in they're like oh well like our thing is going okay but like what if we just like went all in on this like plug-in for open ai store and so their version is basically like you just type in you ask a question specific questions it gives you a slightly better answer than open ai but it's a lot better or at least enough that you want to pay for and there's not that much traffic right now or not that many new apps in the open ai open ai app store but this is one of those inflection moments so here's two more examples remember honey that company that was like a uh what do they do coupon codes for your website and then gramerly did the same thing they both did that with the chrome store you have a bunch of friends because you kind of ran in that world where people did this with the facebook uh platform so zynga i don't know how much money they eventually made but it was at one point multi-billion dollar company i think right now we're gonna see like a facebook store you're gonna see like all these mafia wars all these like weird games i think you had a buddy what was the guy's name dan who came from fm who started like omg pop or something like that and i think he had a multi-hundred million dollar exit i think this is right now about to happen with the open ai like plug-in store it's really fascinating what's happening you asked the guy or somebody asked the founder he said i think it's gonna be something between like more than the chrome extensions market but less than the app store you know short-term it's awesome for marketing functionality for users um and open ai is footing the bill on a lot of the compute costs um and in the medium term we have to exit the usage of the next biggest gpt and i think canva is next so this is the number one gpt yeah yeah it's taking off and these guys they're smart guys but it was still when they were starting their company i was like uh i don't know hopefully we'll figure it out and there was a time where i was like you guys better figure this out soon like i don't know if this is gonna work out and then this this is awesome i just went to their site i didn't do the chat but just their app it's really cool so you go there you ask any questions are microplastics dangerous for humans and then it has all these papers but then you hit synthesize which i think is the credits that you buy but you start with 23 credits and it says summary we looked at 10 papers the study suggests microplastics are dangerous for humans and carry toxic chemicals um contaminate ecosystems are linked to various health issues including cancers and immune system disruptions and then it says we looked at 14 papers yes it was 43 percent of the time possibly 57 percent of the time no 0 percent of the time and that was the like that was the thing and then you could see below each specific paper and it's like oh this is a rigorous journal this is highly cited um and you can kind of get AI to summarize each of those papers this is this is a sick like this is a sick product it's cool and it by the way just like all great stuff it did not start that way i'm glad you didn't tell me about this this is why did i invest in this this is great it wasn't obvious by the way it's still not obvious this company just like any startup it could still totally fail and not work no but it's a very interesting bet right like to do a verticalized google specifically for scientific papers and AI being the the why now of what you could do differently than you could do before this makes a lot of sense and it was uh i'll give the shot it's consensus.app that's their website but the point being a consensus is great i think it's actually gonna work out these guys uh they've kind of put their head down for like 24 months and they're really starting to figure out there's gonna be a lot of stuff just like them um the chat store because i think when we invested in them i don't remember exactly i'm almost positive the word ai didn't come up one time like it wasn't like it was like we have this like we know what the outcome that we want to be but we're not entirely sure how we come to that and then they start figuring out ai got popular and then this chat store opened up and like boom we found the path and i think that path is opened right now now it's more competitive than the app store and it's more competitive than chrome because there's more people who are doing this stuff opening is already huge but that inflection is happening right now this is one of those things that's happening in real time and i want to call out because i think opening i even said we don't know what payment terms we're gonna give these people like they're still all figuring it out but this is happening this second right now there's an opportunity for a lot of different copies they're like around like you know some celebrity relationship like oh we don't know we don't want to label on it yet so we're just exploring each other just figuring out you know who we are together individually yeah it's definitely trying to figure out have you seen perplexity have you perplexity i don't like it i don't know why people are doing nuts for it it's pretty cool it's just like open ai but for some reason it's like a science bet that's all these companies i don't know i don't know much about it this is an uninformed opinion but i feel like every vc who missed like you can't get an open ai or if you get it now it's a hundred billion valuation how much money to be made as an investor there and so all the capital you know realize all the investors realize holy shit this is the big thing and they're like what's the next best diffusion and complexity the next thing the next thing is super inflated valuations and um i don't know i'm not really a believer in that i think those get way ahead of the skis and i just seen that story many times this happened in crypto this happened in uh you know when mobile when mobile was happening and you get you know for every instagram you would then get the 10 super funded other apps that didn't make any sense and um yeah i would take i would take the under i would short that uh after the pod go to your email and type in consensus i'm almost positive that i heard about this company and you were cc on the email just i just want to put that out there i i it was like 2002 two years ago i'm almost positive you're like take some minor fluid no one finds that what happens we're gonna burn it out and hide it uh do a rant about something so i've had a realization that my world like a lot of the content i'm consuming was algorithmic all right that's pretty obvious you everybody's i mean just twitter tiktok whatever everything i was using you go to um you go to twitter it's an algorithm telling you here's the content you need to see you go to tiktok algorithm facebook instagram yes all of that even uh email email is not really algorithmic exactly but it's uh you go there and it's here's what other people want you to look at here's my problem hey here's my problem read me right uh and the same thing same thing with you know all news you go to news up hey here's everybody's problems in the world here you know i'm calling it the intentional internet which is i started really being intentional about oh no no if i'm going on the internet right now what is it that i want to see what is it i'm curious about what is it that i want to learn about and then i go in and i'm stiff arming algorithms left and right uh you know i'm marshall lynch on that one run where he just sheds eight defenders it goes all the way it just rumbles to the end zone that's me on the internet now and i think more people should be doing this join me on the intentional internet where you get on and you don't just you're not just uh you know a little puppy you're seeing the puppy child the algorithms give you go on with an intent and say what is it that i'm looking for i want maybe i want a certain type of entertainment maybe i want a certain type of information or i want to be inspired okay so then go look for the things that will give you you follow that way you follow 13 000 people on on twitter right what do you do well twitter's not a great place right because if you go to twitter you're going to get your first thing you're going to start off is a feed and you're going to start reading books that's very unlike you so i make a little list so you know what here's how this started i want to learn more about this and then i'll go to youtube or google or wherever looking for that but just adding that little paper step in between me and the internet has been very very useful and i learned a bunch of interesting things the last three days i got more out of the internet so i'm just putting that out there what's been on your list i'll give you an example um i was doing research one thing and i saw this name do you know this guy eric van veen yes he's amazing i have got him oh wait are you talking about ricky van dean or eric oh he's ricky ricky facebook guys dude dreamy super dreamy this guy's dreamy as shit i've talked to him a bunch uh you know no man this is great so this guy created college humor yeah and then he created um a couple other things what he created college humor and then he he created a few other things like crack whatever they bundled up sold it to iac and he was running media and iac and then he's forgetting the biggest thing they started which one so at college humor this was like pre-youtube days they create this is like e-bombs world days they created a better way to host videos and that's what video is which they sold to iac iac spun off and became a billion dollar plus publicly traded company so creates video praise college humor goes to iac iac is a super interesting company with like a very cool pedigree of people that come out of it like tinder came out of iac um you know there's a bunch of really interesting things about iac they're sort of like they're the cracker and gamble of the internet they're a conglomerate of internet sites mostly media and then dot com i think came out of there now he's head of like creative like video or head of creative content at facebook and i was like oh this is interesting i just kind of noted it because i think i was thinking about college humor and um who's behind that what are they doing now and i think this what are they doing now has been one of my threads so i'll think of something that was cool and i'll be like where did they go i haven't heard about their new album what are they working on and i'll go look at that that's a very it's a very useful um way to go look at it so by the way ricky ricky ended up marrying and i don't think they're together anymore but like if you just google like tabloids or whatever he married alison williams you know the famous like actress whose father is brian williams the famous news caster and if you google his name the guy's just like hanging out with like all these celebrities and stuff and he's like seems so cool like this guy's creepy as shit so i'm i'm i have a list of cool companies or cool things that were built you know 10 years ago and i'm wondering what those people do now college humorous level so i go look at this guy and i'm like i'm researching video and i'm looking at him and i'm like he gave this talk in um 2008 at this media conference and he it's probably gets no views on the internet but for nerds like us who create media content on the internet it's very interesting to see what somebody thought in 2008 which is like the iphone has come out but it hasn't changed the world yet and like literally the presentation is like yeah kids are blackberries are not gonna be doing xyz and back then um you know we created college humor it became the number one um comedy entertainment site on the internet way bigger than cartoon network and all these other like incumbents okay that's interesting then he comes back and he's like here's what i got right here's what i got wrong one of the things he's talking about he's like he's like at some point people on the internet will stop leaving the internet like they'll stop using the internet as a springboard to go on to netflix or on to get cast into a tv show or whatever like they'll realize that their youtube channel is worth more than their shows and they won't want to leave um to go do this and they want to view this as a stepping stone and that's happening basically had like four or five predictions about where the world was going he put up all the sites like viral nova and upwardly and whatnot he's like right now these are the hottest sites in the world their traffic is crushing ours and they're getting more traffic than anybody more traffic than god he's like i think all of this is going to zero i think this is highly commoditized and it's not gonna work for these reasons he was absolutely correct and so it was very interesting to go learn from this guy who's kind of a master at what he does and i've done this before with like um when i looked up all the infomercial kings so the guys who created like you know proactive and acne uh you know medicine how did that story happen right but if i just log on the internet i just take the last thing that somebody tweeted or the latest you know i'm playing defense i'm playing their game not mine right so i'm just trying to have a little bit more intention when i when i use the internet so you know i'm not the type of just gonna go like total digital detox that's not using internet but when i do use it i'm trying to use it in a healthier way so ricky did he predicted that the viral novas of the world he predicted that it was gonna go zero and he did yeah did i ever tell you the story about my partner joe and hampton um and a bunch of other stuff did i tell you a story about little things you mentioned before they got like really the most traffic facebook referral right and then he had an offer to sell and he didn't take it yeah so joe's an amazing entrepreneur so he started his first company was an ad tech company he sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was like 25 so he just had this like huge success at a young age then his next business he started was called uh i forget exactly what it was called but uh pet flow it was a pet food company and they started it before chewy except he was a little conservative he was like we have to spend money profitably on ads and that's hard to do and so we're gonna go a little bit slower chewy comes in and go no after that we're gonna lose money for the first six or 12 months of customer and we're gonna do such a good job that they're gonna come back and joe was like that's a dumb strategy turns out it was right but in order to uh pet flow grow he created a blog where they just wrote content on pets and within a very very very short amount of time they started getting 10 20 30 million people a month coming to this blog on pets and he's like screw that let's just do this blog and so within four years they were the most shared website on facebook bigger than byronova bigger than buzzfeed bigger than huffpo all these publishers that were huge in the 2014-15 era and it started getting something like 250 million unique some months to the website and they were scaled up i think to 90 million revenue in four years it was a huge company i called email them i went to his office he had these studios and like facebook lives the next big thing we just built up this 250 000 studio in the in the manhattan office and it's gonna be the greatest thing ever we have 150 employees it's gonna be the biggest thing ever the problem of course that we all know was zuck does what zuck wants and they built this entire company little things.com on the back of facebook and they got an loi to sell the business and they were literally three weeks from selling they were gonna sell for hundreds of millions of dollars facebook puts out this annual report they go we're actually changing we're pivoting from this thing to this thing and three weeks away or something like that from this deal closing for hundreds of millions of dollars the company uh backed out and within six months the business basically laid off everyone and had to shut down all in a matter of like six or seven months of like we're on top of the world making 100 million a year or two now we are not and it's a crazy crazy story if you google like his name just buys their little things you'll see the story uh i think uh ink just did some big story on it but it's pretty wild ah the lessons we learn unfortunately that's you know that's like uh it's cool to be like yeah you learned so much from failure but it's like god sometimes it's so painful yeah he posted this publicly he was like i was set to make 50 million dollars and three weeks away from the closing it went away and i feel like he's always crazy about that what's he like to work with because you picked him as your partner for hampton um why'd you pick him he's the best man he's the best he's the best he's a harmonious partner he's even keo he's very easy not like the partnership dynamics what does he what's his edge what's he great at what's he what's he like what's he amazing at you ever hang out with israeli guys and like israeli guys have a culture of like they're quite competent because they serve in the military and they're like really good at stuff oftentimes they're good at spotting opportunities but it's also part of the culture of like just like negotiating well like finding interesting deals he is so good at spotting opportunities and he's technical and he's so fast i've never met someone who's like significantly faster than i am at making stuff and going all in and like he'll just find an opportunity he'll build a website for it and he's like yep this is what i'm doing now and he pounces so fast i've never met someone who moves faster one thing that we did that was so great did you ever have this with ben or any of your partners where you do like a you know look before we got to bed before we get married here let's just sit down and map out what do you want your life to be like what do you want five years and ten years what do you want on a day-to-day basis you like write out like how you want to live what you're willing to uh what you're willing to give up what you're not willing to give up have you ever done that not exactly but you know you told me you did that i think there's a version of that i do but i'm not i think everything changes uh so you know it sounded really great in theory and i think it's a useful exercise just to clarify your own thoughts but i don't i think people themselves are quite incongruent in general well yeah you change you change but also you don't know what you want and also you say one thing because it sounds good or you think you want it but then something comes you know something comes up and you're you know it's your stated preference versus your revealed preference i think it's very hard to get to people's revealed preferences their true preferences or their true um their true you know desires or whatever and so i think it's a good exercise to do but i don't put as much weight in it as you did i think well i think that i think that it starts a really good conversation so like let's be transparent just like you should with like your wife or your girlfriend you're like let's talk about like what type of life that we potentially want to be very open about that so i think that like training that like let's just be very clear about and we'll acknowledge it will change so i think it creates a great version of that but joe's also 42 i think he's older than me and so i would think that at that age he has a little bit of solidified the values he stands for and so it was i think if i did exercise when i was 24 it would not have been good in fact i did do that exercise when i was 24 and it sucked i said i wanted you don't know what i said i wanted when i was 24 i said i want 10 000 employees i go would be awesome if you had 10 000 employees and then i hired three people and i'm like yeah that's no for me dog like this that's gonna work so i think if you're a little bit older and you have some experience you might know a little bit more you want but when i was younger no that wouldn't have worked my uh thinking on this is the buffet thing if you want some partner with energy integrity intelligence i think that's the like core thing you i look for at least which is basically i didn't order energy is the easiest spot and it's the easiest one to try to write off if somebody doesn't have it um meaning seems like a seems like a nice to have it's actually not a nice it's a must-have for me um and so energy is the first one that shows up and it's the easiest one that i've tried to talk myself out of with certain people and that's been a mistake every single time i've done it who have you worked with that's high energy and like almost exhaust you because you're like i can't keep up so at least like that uh he's super high energy but not in an exhausting way no like i get energy from it so it's all good i don't mean exhausting like they wear you out but you're like oh my god dude like you're almost hard to keep up you move so fast it's inspiring yeah everybody that's a good way um like yeah that's a good way and that they bring their own energy to the table i'm not bringing it out of them um ben is a fun so ben's my current business partner on the surface he's a more quiet guy he's more reserved he's not like he doesn't come across like this huge booming personality but ben's got that energy where it comes out for him like through text message or through like you know he'll just wake up and do something he can't sleep at night because he's thinking about something so energy reveals energy is not just being a wacky flailing arms guy it's do you have the are you driven yourself do you take action quickly do you think about things all the time or are you am i trying to force you to by dragging your brain into the conversation and do you get excited about things are you when an opportunity rises do you shift yourself energy is the first one then it's um intelligence or competence which is like what are they great at oh this person's great at selling this person's great at building this person's great at um just pushing the ball forward every day uh whatever it is and then the last one which is integrity is the hardest one to feel for which is how's this person going to treat me when they have the opportunity to be selfish will they be selfish when they have the opportunity to be selfish and it's very very hard to know that you can kind of only talk to people i've worked before or ask them questions and try to see if they're they're pretty honest about that um and then i just work with them on something first before we commit so it's like we have that conversation sure but let's like i would always trade an experience for a belief and if i can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks that's gonna be way better than me trying to take a leap of faith on a bunch of things you said or you wrote down on google talk did you just make up that word or that phrase oh that's that's yours now do you uh what how late into the evening are you working on business stuff versus family time 2 p.m uh so basically like i've done i've done enough where i could stop working i wake up i work i wake up in my morning and then i work and then i take a break to work out and i'll either just if i'm done enough that day i'll just play with my kids i'll start playing with them and just hang out if i haven't i'll do another hour or two of work and then i do family time till about till they go to bed so they're you know usually fully asleep 8 30 or 9 and then i chill out slash work one of the two they're both kind of the same to me so sometimes it's just like watching a show sometimes it's working or reading something and i'll do that till 11 or phone i'm gonna go to sleep but between that 11 or between kids kids go to sleep and you go to bed are you on the phone talking to people ever no no that's me time that's uh me on the internet uh i'm not talking to people no i uh i've got a bunch of friends who are like that and they'll like my wife she'll try to talk and i will be like i'm doing no talking i'm doing no talking right now it's a nice way of saying like i don't want to talk to you i'm doing no talking there's like this like unspoken rule at my house where like at eight or nine when she wants to like ask me like hey what dates you want to this place and I just mumble I go that means like dude I just shop at Ikea all day I'm overwhelmed I can't look at anything I can't think don't ask me a date I'm not thinking about anything you know what we've been doing lately it's fucking Legos have you ever done Legos?

I've never done Legos I have a whole separate pod topic about adult Legos because I think it's a thing and you're one of those we should have to do a full segment on it I'm so into it I'm so into it that's all I'll say I just got into it in November I'm a Lego guy now we're gonna talk about that next time I gotta jump this has been good this is the pod that's the pod I feel like I can rule the world I know I can be what I want to I'm all in it like my days off on the road let's travel never looking back