#213 - How to Build a Community

The dominant way to advertise is not super high production value, finely produced content. It's what we call selfie content, right? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to.

I put my law in it like a day zone. So let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's do it. We're here.

What's going on? What's up, man? OK, you want to jump in a little bit of chat? How you want to do it?

I want to tell you a quick story. So our friend, the guy who emailed hotels and asked for discounts. Can we name him or not? No.

OK. While he's our friend, he emailed hotels for a European trip, and he got some crazy good deals. He got like a $3,000 room for like $350. So I'm in New York.

I need a place to stay from September versus September 25. I made a list of 20 hotels, and I emailed them. And these hotels probably would cost me maybe 15 to 20,000 for that period. So like $1,000 a night.

I'm getting some at like $350, $400 a night. It's working. That's amazing. What's the gist of the email?

I have something that's unfair. So I say, hey, my name is Sam Parr. I am in town for three months, but I need to place this day from September 21st. I need a relatively big room because I record this podcast called My First Million.

And we have about, I say like a million listeners a month. And we record it with videos. So I need to look really nice. I also write this daily email that goes out to 2 million people.

So I need a comfortable place to work for my home. My budget is $350 tonight. Can you help me? And that works.

So why don't they give it to you for free, bro? That's a big influencer shit. You should be getting it for free. I don't know.

I'm happy to pay for it. I don't want to be a total mooch. I just want to discount. It's not moochin.

You're going to give me a shout, right? Who am I picked? No, I won't. I wouldn't give them a shout out just because they get me a place to stay off.

Yeah, actually the other day, there's a company that I'm using their product. Sorry, we stopped to them. I was like, hey, I can name it. I think I can name it.

I think they should be fine. So basically, I use this thing called Passport. It's like international shipping company. So you'll say you have a brand.

You want to ship products to France or UK or Australia, or whatever. Each country has its own little problems with shipping, with customs, with tax, with finding the right carrier, to get low shipping costs there. All that. So these guys take care of it.

So I'm like, oh, this is a great product. Great idea. So I emailed the CEO Alex and I was like, hey, man, like this is great. We're going to use it.

How do I invest also? And he's like, oh, we're not really raising around right now. And I was like, please. And he was like, is it going to what?

I think you've already been pretty helpful. He's made some intros. I think you can do some more. I think you can do more.

He's like, I don't want to fuss with paperwork. Honestly, it's just a big headache. How about I just give you some free shares? And I was like, ah, perfect.

That's amazing because this is like a legit company. It's not like, oh, here's advisor shares in my no name, no revenue, no user company. This is a real company. And it's a very small amount.

But I was like, he's so smart because he used to have me and he goes, hey, dude, sound happy more. Just signed this return. He goes, here's kind of my expectations. Like, what would make this a win for me is A, B, and C.

And they're all like totally reasonable requests. But he just made it clear what he wants. And I was like, dude, you couldn't have paid me to do these things. But just by giving me something free, I feel the need to reciprocate by over delivering on this for you.

I would rather, in retrospect, I would rather just buy my shares and not have any obligations. But cool. I'm glad we did it this way. This is going to be more fun and ultimately, smart move by you.

So that's called the law or reciprocity. So there's been a lot of studies on this. And if you read the book, influenced by Robert Chavdini, hey, Sean here, I ordered pizza and they gave me two. Here's an extra one if you'd like.

OK, so I did something for you. I gave you something. The next day, I go, hey, I don't have a car. Can I borrow your car for an hour?

You are actually incredibly likely to let me borrow the car. Even though those two favors are not at all equal, in order to make this rule works regardless of if they're equal or not, if someone owes you one, you want to pay them back in some capacity, and you'll do it in the first possible chance you have. So it's actually a great rule. When I used to buy stuff, when I'd buy cars, I would always come with two.

I wrote a blog post. I would come with two cans of Coke. And I would have one. I'd have to sell you a $3.00.

I would get discounts like that through buying stuff. Dude, that's great. The Coke can hack is awesome. Yeah, I actually now am so aware of it that I have to fight my inner tendency to want free shit.

So if somebody wants to send me something, I'm like, not only do I not want to give out my address anymore, I'm just like, I don't want to feel like I need to reciprocate anything to use. It's actually not worth it for me to take these things. Like, this is different because I think this is a company that's going to be really big. I really respect the founder.

But now I'm like, somebody hands with that dad Coke? No, thank you, sir. Right? It's not like I think they're trying anything.

It's just I don't want to have any inner balance sheet. I don't want to have any debts. I don't want assets on that. My internal balance sheet.

I completely agree. I do the exact same thing. If someone offered me something, and I do want someone sent me something for my dog because this hips were hurting. And I was like, you know, I'm not going to give you a shout out.

If I think of the things like life changing, I'll talk about it just casually. But like in no way are you. You're just doing me. You're getting this gift, not a payment.

Exactly. All right. So let's jump into some ideas or some topics. What do you want to talk about?

I want to talk to you about a couple things. I want you to teach me about something that you want to talk about. Those two things. Friends with benefits.

Are you prepared to discuss that? Yeah, we can talk about it. Because this is your realm. But this is it's totally your world.

But it's the first time I've seen something in this space that actually interests me. And I think it's like, well, OK, so first explain what it is. And then I'll tell you about basically and I'll tell you why I'm interested. But basically it's like the first time I've seen the second I was to use in a useful way that isn't just gimmicky.

Right. There you go. I know which mean. And ironically, this is the one that I think I'm interested in.

But I'm like, I don't want to get it. And then I like move on. So it's cool. We're on the other end of this.

OK, so what is this? Friends with Benefits is a space and community. It's a membership club that was created by this guy in LA that he was a co-founder of this company called Brood. And they make Lil Makayla, that influencer who's just like a digital avatar.

It looks like a kind of looks like a real girl. But like clearly it's kind of digital. And so they're using like Disney Pixar style technology to make influencers on Instagram. That's the company.

So he creates friends with benefits. He's basically like, all right, this is like a digital Soho house, basically. We're going to invite only cool people in. And you basically buy the Friends with Benefit token in order to enter.

So you buy this token called FWB. And so there's a million FWB out there. And you buy in. And in order to get access to the club, which is basically just a Discord group, right?

It's not like there's nothing there's no physical place to go. There's no perks or discounts or whatever. It's basically it's literally like you get to go into our Discord and talk to other members here. And so they were selling this thing.

It was like 75 tokens or something to join it again, which was like, I don't know exactly what it was. But I think it was more like $100 when it started. And now that thing is that's like a $4,000 membership to join. That same because the token has appreciated like crazy.

So the token even just since we were going to talk about this last podcast. And I was like, $9. Hang on, I'm going to talk to somebody who knows about the stuff. Let's do it in the next episode.

It's up 46% since last week's. And we talked about this. And so that means it's $6,825. Yeah.

So the membership is roughly $7,000 now to join. And like Equinox, which is like a high-end gym in LA, New York, SF, where you get to go to the fancy gym, with a Haspah Steam Room, members, whatever. Equinox is $2400, I think. $2400, $23,000.

So this is double that now to get into the Discord. So obviously you can tell I'm a little bit skeptical. Just to put some more numbers around it, just to give you a sense of how big this is. So basically, this is now a $90 million market cap community.

I think the founders' tokens are like, I don't know exactly how much he holds, but roughly, I think the guy has like $40 or $50 million of his token. Now, the thing that's which is exciting, but you can't sell. That's the real problem. You can technically go sell on a market.

But on Uniswap, you can go sell this thing. But you, practically speaking, if the founder started to sell, he's like, sweet, I want to bank $10 million from this. I think to it would a crash the price and be a negative signal or as they call in the crypto world, like it's a rug pull. You pull the rug out from under the people who believed in you and bought into this thing and you basically screw them all over.

And so this is like, when I bought your big cloud, and you sold all your big cloud, and it's like, oh fuck, I'm holding this empty bag that Sam cashed out of, I bought his token, I believed in him. Sorry, I didn't even know that. So that would be, I don't know if I actually did, but plenty of people did. And right now on big cloud, let's say I have, I think my token, I have like $50,000 of my own token.

Cool. My current usage of big cloud is pretty low. My belief in becoming the next big thing is, you know, it started off like a long shot and now it's a longer shot. So I would love to go sell that.

But doing so would basically screw over the people who invested in my token. So I'm not going to do it. I mean it for long haul. So I think that's the challenge with this model is on paper, you get this big gain, but in reality, I don't know how much value they can rebound at this.

So that's a high level. Tell me some things. Yeah, so I'm going to tell you why I think this is actually incredibly interesting. Friends with benefits itself, that's not interesting to me.

Basically, if you look at it, it's just like really good looking dudes and ladies who are like going and hanging out, like it's like a hip, young LA, New York type of thing. I don't really have too much faith in those types of businesses. They're more jokes to me than they are actual real businesses. Would you say that's accurate?

Why is it a joke? Because I don't know if this is run like when I see it, I'm like, oh, you're just going to run this like an art project. Not necessarily like a company. Are you a party promoter?

Is this a nightclub? So either it's a fad, right? Because the problem with cool exclusive things is when you try to grow them, they become less cool and less exclusive because you're letting more people in. Who, you know, who comes with comes less less stagnant?

The other thing is, are you doing this because you want to be a cool guy? Or are you doing this because it's actually like a really solid business underneath? I think that's kind of the other thing you're talking about, which is like, what are your sort of intentions with this thing? Do I take it seriously or no?

But and here's the but. So the thing about communities, communities are great companies. The problem with them though, is that they're challenging to scale. The more people who join, oftentimes the worst it gets.

That's like, that's a law of communities. But why are you saying that communities are great businesses? I would say communities are not great businesses. What communities do you think are great businesses?

Well, let's define what many of these are all generalizations. Let's define how we mean great. When I say great, I don't mean it's really hard to be huge, like north of 100, north of a billion dollars. But like they could make someone 10 to 20 million in sales a year, a pretty good profit margin.

And you can use that profit to build more stuff. So for example, trends, I didn't realize it at the time, but had I still owned it or the hustle, we could have turned that into trends as a pay community. We could have turned it into investment vehicle, to invest in cool startups, things like that. And so that's why it would have been great for me to own, even though it may not be huge in itself, it would have led to opportunities and it could have been quite profitable.

You know, I could have paid myself millions of dollars a year because of it. So that's my definition of great. Now, what's interesting about friends and benefits is they use a software called Collab Land. Have you looked at Collab Land?

Yeah, well, actually they used to use a different platform. They used to use a role, I think. So role was their old platform. Then they got rolled, got hacked.

And so all the tokens that were built on, all the social tokens that were built on, role crashed when that happened. So I guess they switched over to Collab Land. So Collab Land is cool because the thing about communities is the more people who join, the sometimes the worst it gets. And so why this is interesting to me is that people are incentivized to stay and make the community valuable, because their value goes up.

Even if they don't necessarily want to sell it. Well, I actually do think that one or two people could sell their thing, their token if they want to bail, but they're incentivized to make the community better. And I think that's a great model. I really actually think this model is amazing.

So I thought about this two different ways. So let's first do, let's break it into three parts. There's, what is this and why is this interesting? There's, how big could this be?

And then there's, what other shit could you do like this? What do you think the future looks like? So let's do, what is this and how big is it? So I would say we kind of explain friends with benefits.

It's a social token. It's used to create a membership club. The membership costs now $7,000. It's really appreciated like crazy.

You know, friends with benefits, if you hold that token, Ben is a member. So Ben got in at like probably 100 or a couple hundred bucks membership. He never uses it. So he's like, oh, the discord is super noisy.

Like, I'd have to like really go spend time in there to make friends and do all this stuff. I'm too busy for all that. So like, I never, I basically never go in there. But he's like, it's cool because I hold his token.

It's going up. So I have this like seat in the club and I can sell that if I want to do or I could use it if I wanted to. So he's like, it's kind of cool. He bought it kind of like just to, just to play with the technology, just to play with like this new experiment.

So these are called social tokens. The idea is that, you know, any creator, any set of creators could create one of these. So, you know, the Paul brothers, I think have had like the Maverick club. I think the Milk Boys have their own club.

And these are just like, you know, traditional, you pay a monthly subscription and you get access to insider content. So this is basically owning instead of renting. So instead of renting your spot in the club through a monthly fee, you own your spot in the club and there's a limited number of spots. And then that's an asset that you could then flip later to somebody else if you want to get out of the club and you want somebody else to take your spot.

And that's one line. And everyone is aligned. Everyone is aligned and it becomes instead of a expense, it becomes an investment. So I think that is a switch that gets flipped, right?

Instead of a $9 month. Okay, cool. I paid $900, but I owned this thing. And if I was correct at betting that, like, let's say we made one for my first million, right?

If we, if they were correct in betting that this, like, let's say nine months ago, they're like, Oh, I think this podcast is going to get bigger. Well, guess what? It did. And if there was only whatever 1000 spots in our, in our private club and our private group, but we're sharing either insights, deals, making introductions between people, that sort of thing, community of people, that could be pretty valuable.

Like there's a pretty strong case why we should create one of these for the like kind of fans of the show that are like hardcore members, right? And then they own it and then they say, all right, cool. The more popular Sean and Sam get, the more people are going to want to get into this club and my $1,000 seat, I'm going to get value from it today. And then I might flip it for three grand or 10 grand two years from now.

That's like the promise. Yeah. And I think that's a great idea. Now, let me put something in perspective.

So did you know that Soho House went public recently? I saw you put this here. I started doing some research on it. Pretty, pretty fascinating.

Break it down. Yeah. So Soho House, it doesn't have to be a bad business, but it is. So Soho House is basically a members only club.

It's basically a country club, but instead of a golf course, you get access to like a library, it's feeling building, like a bar and a restaurant and maybe a pool, maybe sometimes they have a gym. And it's basically in New York, LA, probably Paris London. It's in, we're all like rich, cool, young people live. It costs about $2,000 or $3,000 to join depending on how old you are.

And they have a hundred thousand members and they recently went public at a $3 billion market cap. And the reason why their business is great is they took on a lot of debt. COVID really hurt them. And I think maybe it's slightly mismanaged, but it's not a bad company.

I'm putting some numbers around that. I think they had like $900 million a debt from because they're buying real estate in the most prime locations, right? They have real estate or at least as well. And I don't know which one in like, you know, Manhattan, LA, not San Francisco around London.

So they had 870 million, I think of debt. And then during COVID, they furloughed 90% of their workforce, I think. So they furloughed 90% of the workforce. The only churned 10% of members because A, the members were kind of wealthy and whatever.

And B, they like offered other perks like digital perks and tried to come up with other ideas because you can go into the building and do your Soho house like, you know, mingling or whatever people do at the places. And so the reason why friends benefit interests me is I don't care about this. I don't care about that company. Like I said, I don't think that they're going to run it like a proper company.

But if you were going to, I think I would do the Soho house model where I try to have buildings that are really nice and you really want to come and it's running like a proper company, I would 100% do it this way. That takes a lot of risk, you know, like I got to make sure that these members, the membership stays valuable, but it incentivizes me to make it great for my members and I could use some of that money to buy buildings. And I think so, I think that I would use this model for a Soho style membership. Yeah.

So what do you think about us doing it? Why would you or why wouldn't you do it? I think that it makes a ton of sense. There's really only one reason why you wouldn't do it, which is do you want to more work?

Yeah. Pretty much the only reason. And it's like the thing we're talking about the very beginning like reciprocity of somebody gets you a Diet Coke. You feel like you're kind of cool.

All right. Cool. I'll kind of pick up there's somebody who comes to remember the club you feel obligated to make a really fucking awesome club. You're like, I will not sleep until this club is until you feel like you're getting the edge on this deal by 10x.

Unfortunately, that's the way my personality is wired. And I think you're the same. And so it's like, okay, do I want to over deliver on something right now? I don't know.

I got to think before I commit to that because that's the only reason why you wouldn't do it. But if you wanted to run this like a company and you wanted to create a co-working space and you wanted to do it with this model, I think that's a, that's a, I wouldn't say easy, but it's a very interesting path to build something quite big. Yeah. And I don't know if I agree with you that you have to have a physical space.

I don't really think it's that. It's more like, you have to have value. So, okay. So how is this valuable because it's a place you can go.

It's kind of like a third place. You can go to the Discord, Slack, Facebook group, whatever, where everybody's cool. Like you've seen this with trends. That's pretty valuable.

People dig that, they think about that. Like with trends, you produce research reports, right? So you're going to get access into Intel. Intelligence about the market.

That's interesting to you. Cool. That works too. There's also other stuff like, for example, I think that being able to access deals and deal flow is like pretty important to people, or at least certain people who have more, more sort of money than good investments, I think good investment opportunities around them.

And then the last piece is you could also do this with, you could sort of like auction off time in a way. So like there's a world where we basically would say, all right, we create a friend with benefit token. And with that token comes, you're going to get access to me and Sam. Like right now, that token gets you one hour with me and Sam.

And so we create basically a thousand booked, applicable hours when we mint these tokens. But you also know that our time is going to become more valuable and you want to use it when it's really important to you. And so that's going to appreciate in value over time as our, you know, Elon Musk in 2000 is time is easier to book than it is today. It's basically priceless.

You basically cannot pay any amount of money. There might be some huge amount of money that you'd have to pay to get an hour of his time with him not getting anything else in return. And so something that's the other thing you could offer a value is basically time with people of value. And that time could be like an investment.

You're basically betting today that I want to hold a block of Sam's kind of like advice or coaching or just hangout time because I think that's going to go up in value over time. Yeah. So anyway, it interests me. And I agree.

I think we're aligned there. Can I tell you about one more interesting thing that is related to rich people? I, yes. Have you ever heard of this company called WealthX?

No. What is it? Okay. So every year, WealthX is a company, it's a database company.

And what they do is they basically use publicly available records, so property records and sometimes you can get people's tax returns, things like that. And they look for people who are ultra high network. They find this $30 million in assets and they create this massive database. I believe there's 800 to 700,000 people in the world that are considered ultra high network.

And all they do is they comb through loads of different data and then they have independent researchers who work their hardest to verify that this is true. And the reason why I discovered this is for years, WealthX is famous. Every year they put together a study that says, here's how the wealthy are investing their assets and they create this end of year asset allocation. They say, well, people have this much in gold, this much in real estate, whatever.

And I think that this is an interesting business and it was actually recently acquired by publicly traded companies. So I was able to look back at their numbers. And I actually think that a company like this is shockingly easy to start. And I think this company under sold.

So they sold for $20 million in cash. They were doing about $12 million in revenue with $800,000 in profit. If I was the founder of this company, I never would have sold. They sell this to other companies for $15,000 a year for subscription access.

And they basically are selling it to people who manage people's money. So, well, that's interesting. Things like this. But the interesting thing to me and the takeaway to this, if you're listening, I think this model of business, this data business, we've called this, I think we said that messy data wants to be free.

Is that, sorry, data wants to be free? Yeah. Data wants to be free. And the founder of free doesn't mean free price wise.

It wants to be, it's like trapped and it wants to be let free, basically. Correct. And the founder of CD Insights that does kind of like this for publicly, for privately held companies, he told me the same thing. He goes, our whole motto is, there's a bunch of dirty, muddy data out there and we're going to go and find it and just make it really easy to consume.

That's what WealthX did. I'm just pretty certain, I read the Glassdoor of yours. I'm pretty certain that this business is amazingly easy to copy and to figure out. So the ways that they get data is they'll tell you, they'll look at who owns a jet.

They'll figure out who's donating money. So if you donate money to a non-profit, oftentimes that's made public. If you're buying personal property, if you have certain hobbies, if you donate- That's it on the list. They don't know how much you have, but they're like, oh, Sam Parr, big donation.

Must have money. All right, put them on the list. Yeah, they look at what, so if you're part of Tiger, what's it called, Tiger 21, if you have certain interests, certain hobbies, if you donate money, that's how they get their information. It's just not that hard to build this type of business.

Now, it is hard to sell, but everything's hard to sell. If you're going to get on the phones and you got to copy them, you got to sell some 15 grand, that's always hard. So, by creating data out of your blogs, I think this is such a straightforward business if you wanted to make some money. So they didn't make a ton of money.

Yeah. And why is that? So this seems like CB Insights is a big business. I don't know what CB Insights is worth.

What's the worth of $100 million worth that or making that? Revenue. Yeah, exactly. It's worth probably closer to $1 billion then.

Yeah, a million dollars then. By the way, founder listens to the pod, shout out to Anand, I think he's a pretty abolitioner. So that business worked in a much bigger way, but same principle, like your saying, right? Data's there, it's muddy.

We go dig it up, we wash it off, we rinse it, we polish it, we package it, we say, here you go, here's that data you've been looking for. It was here, like, yeah, you could have gone and got it yourself. But man, you don't want to go scrub through that mud. Well, let us do that for you.

Let us organize this whole thing. So you just type in the name you want to know about, type in the industry you want to know about and bam, here's the info. And so that business work. Why is it?

Is it because financial advisors, there weren't enough of them? No, there's a lot of them. They weren't willing to pay for this info. Why do you think this business didn't work?

And what would you do differently? It probably didn't work because they probably just hired a ton of people to make this stuff. So if you go to the website, you can kind of tell some of their technologies. But I think the first thing I would do is I would use something like import.io or another third party service like that, and I wouldn't build too much technology.

I would only have my only technology that I would build was a pretty interface that pulls it all together. But I think you could build most of the stuff using Zapier, import.io, air table, things like that. I think that you could build a pretty robust MVP that you charge money for using things like this. And so I probably didn't make money because their staff was just a bloated staff.

The company was founded in 2010. So when they launched a lot of this technology, that third party technology wasn't available. And so I think they just have a bloated staff that was mostly doing manual work to go and find these types of people. Yeah, okay.

So I'm going to go read the report. I think that's pretty dope. By the way, I want to say one other thing on the community side that we were talking about. Going back, I don't think communities are great businesses.

That's what I mean. Community of communities of communities can be great businesses. Discord is a community of communities. Reddit is a community of communities.

And both of those are like 10 billion-ish sized companies. And so if you can build, so that's why I actually think Collab Land, if I was going to put money somewhere, I'd go put it in Collab Land, not in front of benefits. Same page. The platform you're using to launch all these different communities.

That has the potential to be much bigger than any one of these random tokens. I don't know who the fuck is buying friends benefits. This might be a thing that they could just manipulate themselves, by the way. I have no idea.

I think these thinly traded things could be a potential. I'm just saying they did. I'm just saying who the heck is beating up the price like this? It doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

But yeah, my main point is that community of communities are better businesses than an individual. Once a community, once a technology company. So my point of bringing it up was Collab Land, I would rather invest in. But I think that you can own a community that does 10 or 20 in sales and is profitable.

But you're not going to knock it out the park with that business. All right. Let's do another one. Let's do, okay.

I have a little hot girl side hustle. So we've done blue collar side hustle. We've done teenage, the puberty side hustle. And now this is my hot girl side hustle.

So I'm just trying to identify simple things that anybody who's in a certain demographic can do that will generate 10 to $50,000 a month of profit without big upfront cost or specific hard skills that you need to have. And I'm not going to say only fans, although that is definitely a hot girl side hustle. So this hot girl side hustle is a little bit different. I don't know if you kind of follow this too much.

Actually, you do. You guys run ads like this. The dominant way to advertise for products now, because you're advertising on social networks, the dominant way to advertise is not super high production value, finally produced content. It's what we call selfy content, right?

UGC, I call it selfy because it's, you just eat with the fuck those of that. So use a generated content basically. And they're not just doing this on social at this point. If you look at a commercial on TV for Chime, it's the same thing.

Well, yeah, the digital first companies when they go to TV, like Chime, right? It's first spent $100 million on digital. And now they go to the first TV spot and their whole company's been trained of like, you know that works when it just looks like a normal person talking because an ad people just get sort of blind to an ad that just glaze right over it. And so what works really well, like I see this with you guys with Morning Brew, which basically like it's a TikTok ad and the person's like, you know, my secret to getting my boss to think I'm super smart.

And then it's like, I fucking subscribe to the hustle. And it's like that gives me the news every morning. I look really smart. That that that that touches that tagline like so Morning Brew does it.

The skin does it. The hustle does it. All of everyone who's in the email space does that. You know who invented that or who first use that line?

No, I wrote that. I wrote that. I wrote that in 2016, I think. I stole it from an old ad book of like something about a guy being a piano player.

There was like a piano lesson ad from the 1960s about being a great piano player. He goes, he thinks I'm naturally a great piano player. I'm not. I really just use this lesson or this way of learning music.

And I took that and I applied it here. And now everyone uses it. Well, that's kind of genius because that's not even like a word for word, right? That's actually like quite a different thing, but you got inspired by it.

Yeah, it's called swipe file. So I keep swipe file. So I keep digital files of all my favorite old ads. So for example, there's just one great ad about the Wall Street Journal and they've made them like $50 million from a recurring revenue and it was launched in like the 70s and it was called like the tale of two young men.

And it was like both of these young men went to the same college that had similar jobs. One did this and one did that. One earned this one earned that. What were the difference?

One bought the Wall Street Journal subscription their freshman year of college. And that's like the whole story of the ad and like the headline is like the why did these two young men do the almost the exact same thing. But and so so. We should run that same ad for the podcast and we should be like basically that one was it's one was it's my first million one didn't one became a millionaire by 30 and the other one you know still still like hoping that retirement kicks in you know 65 we should run that same ad and we should when you click it we should tell the backstory of the ad basically and it's a great ad.

It's a great ad. I keep a file full of these types of things so anyway go ahead. If people want to see go to swipe file dot com or for Neville owns swipe file dot com which is a great little domain to have. And he's built like a pretty fucking awesome WordPress digital swipe file.

I wish mine was like that. Mine is like in my notes app and I have a slack channel that's where I keep my swipes but like if I could I would have one like that but he's got tons of great stuff there. Okay going back to actually this marketing thing by the way that I kind of want to give you more props that's kind of a genius way to market the hustle right so how would a normal person purchase it say hustle to daily newsletter so I'm going to say sign up for our daily newsletter get the news delivered to you every morning right like that they would focus on the product and you focused on basically the happy ending and even the happy ending you didn't just say and now you're informed because that doesn't like get people emotionally to like register at all right what you're basically saying is what's the outcome you want you want to look smart from your boss when it looks smart at work we help you look smart at work you know read the hustle if you want to look smart at work you like drew this line is that how you think about that's how I think about how do you think about exactly what your frame basically one user told me one time that they were in a job interview for Lyft and they brought up a certain line like a certain story at the end of an interview that wasn't going well and that created a relationship with this person interviewing her and it's like okay great I'm in this person's head we were able to check chat thank you also you maybe look smart and so the idea here is I wanted a story but I only wanted to be able to tell that story in like 200 characters and so I believe the original ad was like my boss thinks I'm smart parentheses I'm not the hustle is my secret weapon to trick them though it's working wonderfully try it or something like that and that was the whole idea behind the ad that's made that has reached 300 million people I think at this point yeah and then everybody copied it but you know whatever you do it together too so okay what was I talking about before this I was talking about oh tick tock okay so you know what I was trying to get to is basically that my high girls I also was trying to do is almost all digital advertisers have realized that the selfie style content that looks like native content if you're on tik tock it's gonna look like it's gonna be a funny or cute or interesting or amazing video or if it's on Instagram it's got a look like an Instagram post I'll basically go look at Facebook post those perform better than your professional commercials your professional ads that look highly polished people just skip past the polish up because they're looking for entertainment so you have to look like the type of entertainment that looks like that's native on the platform so this has created a shortage of people who can create great on script on brand selfie content and so I know this for our brand but for many many brands everybody's trying to farm this out to either influencers or agencies the agencies are like look we can run your ads but like making this creative takes a lot of time and energy and thought like we don't have actors and like a place to a nice house to do this in so the high girls I just as there's a girl on Twitter named social Savannah if you look her up she's like a kind of like a I'll help your brand grow through Facebook ads through tik tock ads and she's not what she's not doing or what she does some of it's not the important part is like I do brand strategy I do advertising strategy well guess what a lot of agencies fix that same thing we will we will manage it we'll run your ads will be your ad ad agency what she does that's different is she basically is it's her and I think she has a couple of other like girls with her that do this like send us the product and then we'll take a bunch of these selfie videos and we will be the actor in your content and because I know what ads work I know what to say on here and I just look like an average person and that's why this ads gonna work because I just look like an average person I'm not like I can make I can get somebody's attention when this rolling but I don't look like an actor in a set with a professional camera and professional background I look like a girl in her house so this is my if you're a college student if you're a college girl specifically there are huge number of brands that will pay you don't try to become Instagram famous become Instagram ad famous and what that means is be the person who can take any product and just do a demo a sales page testimonial and create branded ad content and you can charge thousands of dollars a month and you can charge even a percentage of the ad spend for this which is kind of insane if you're good how much do you think flow from the progressive commercial that's paid a year oh my god I don't even know what depends how good her agent is but you know they're spending tens of millions easily on that campaign she's like a branded part of it like if you switch if you switched out flow it'd be like hey wait that's not flow who the heck is that it's like you don't know this but there's this children's cartoon that's like the second most video watch video on YouTube it's called Blippi we're gonna blippi like Blippi is this guy what he does is he goes into like toy stores after they're closed and he films a video of himself playing with all the toys and it's like mesmerizing for like my daughter she can't look away when Blippi can play for an hour it's like you're playing with the toys you're just watching him and then like halfway through like the YouTube channel they just switch the guy and all the parents are like who the hell is this guy like this guy you can just switch Blippi like I can see this case no it's not like there's a new Barney under the hood it's like so kids can't tell or at least like at the age my daughter she's like she can't tell maybe like a four year old can tell or something like that but but the parents always have to sit there with it and so like there's tons of online forums where people like they do you see that they try to just switch Blippi on us like that like whatever so basically yeah I don't know if they can switch flow at this point maybe they can't like old Spice guy the deseces guy these become like part of the actual like they become like non-fungible you know parts of the of that I think this is great for this woman how much money thinks you should make in this house this what's her name social Savannah I have no idea I mean if you told me she's making fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a month I'd say yeah that's not right yeah that's not right yeah I'm trying to make a little bit less I'd say she's probably gonna be at fifty to a hundred thousand a month soon that's not because brands need this content I don't want to have to arrange photo shoots or put myself in front of the camera I just want to send you know product to this person once a month and they sit there in their bedroom and they record a new ad every day and I have 30 pieces of creative at the end of the month by the end of the month I'm testing on Facebook and I'm saying this one works this one doesn't do more like this and that's what I want this woman is perfect she is perfect this is so here's why she's perfect she's perfect because so I've run my team we run eight figures and ads a lot of ads I personally have probably around five million maybe eight million so like a fair amount of when we first started I ran a lot of them and my podcast we've got an accused of being bros I'm just gonna say what I'm gonna say but don't like it's true okay this is just the truth okay so we would have three different types of ads well actually for a hot guy like a good looking but not like hot like a everyday next door type guy right the office yeah the equivalent for a woman so like a pretty girl next door woman and then like a smoking hot like traditional yeah or at least like the stereotype of like this like you know whatever you think a model looks like if you're gonna make a have a model for your brand yes for both men and women the pretty next door girl worked significantly better significantly it always works and so that shocked me it worked amongst both men and women and when I look at this woman I'm thinking my head this is like kind of exactly the that we run they look like this woman the ones that won at least exactly that's exactly it so even though I called it my hot girl side hustle it's really not a hot girl it's actually should be called more like the reason actually the way I was thinking about this was approach ball girl next door side hustle basically and if you if you are like cute basically that's the bar because you have to get somebody's attention when they're scrolling and the social media works whether people like this or not if this is a country statement like get over yourself the way social media works is people react to when they stop or they pause when they see somebody attractive in their feet right we're like monkeys just scrolling through our feet and so so that's why I think you have to be certain of the fact is but really the most important part is the thing has to look like somebody just like posting something from their their account not a branded thing and that works in that so anyways I think this is an easy way to get to five to ten thousand dollars a month easily and I think the upside can be hundred thousand dollars if you're gonna manage a group of people like there's some people who are on college campuses that are smart they know how to put other people on campus to work for them you could easily get the six figures a month of income and it's almost all profit I I don't know this woman but we run the same circle so this woman I'm looking it up now so there's a guy named Taylor Holiday and I forget the other person's name but they're listeners of the podcast they follow both of us on Twitter and they used to run this company called Common Thread Collective and I think it's just an agency right it's just an agency yeah they seem like great guys and I looked up at Social Savannah on LinkedIn so her name is Savannah Sanchez this woman and she used to work at that company as a paid manager and yep and I imagine what happened when she was there was they were like hey we gotta get these ads and then somehow we came like oh Savannah you're like you're like good looking in your charismatic and your creative like let's just use you and she's like okay fine and then she actually kind of learned how the business worked a little bit while she was there and this is how she started this agency this is amazing I'm totally on board with this it basically unbundles the ad agency so the ad agency does they do creative but they when they use when they do creative they usually farm it out to a photographer a videographer another creative ad agency whatever they'll do media like strategy like what you're buying strategy how much you can structure your campaigns what your budgets etcetera they do like reporting client reports all that bullshit then they're like oh you need to be on Google Facebook snapchat we'll manage all those we'll put all in one place for you we'll keep it all organized and the smart thing is somebody that's unbundled and said man the most important part of this whole thing is the ad creative that's also the part where you don't have to do almost any of the client services and that undifferentiated stuff and the good part of this is that if you are good at it it's like sandwich video where basically you get known as the group to go to that's who the DTC companies go to so I think there's like an opportunity in that to become like sandwich video for DTC and look at the link I just sent to you in Zencaster of the people who work there all right let's take a look please please yeah okay yeah they all look they all fit the profile yes I love this company yeah exactly like if I could invest this company of the cake great just I don't want to not long term like give me a monthly dividend out of this company and I'll be very very happy I think I'll make my money back in six months god this is great all right you want to do one more thing yeah let's do one more all right let's do I'll do I have more high tech one okay so we did the bro bro science one I'll give you kind of like a cool technology one so cool technology one is more blue color actually there's a whole bunch of blue color jobs around construction sites like forklifts whatever the big I don't know what they call the tractors like the things that dig up there cement trucks whatever do you know the alway part was today you know they like what the fuck your problem no they nobody emailed me because nobody else knows about the party there unless you come from a certain part of America I'm sure I think a lot of people do know they were just like rolling their eyes like how's this guy not know this so the thing I was going to bring up is on construction sites you have a lot of these heavy machinery drivers basically so drivers of forklift drivers of cranes things like that and these are really expensive labor and it takes scale and it's also dangerous right and so I think what's going to happen is if you just fast forward 10 20 years from now I think all of this gets replaced with this technology that's it's not self driving it's more like self operating which is basically like remote or what's called teleoperated so have you ever seen a teleoperated thing have you ever seen a demo of this yeah so I forget what their call but basically I remember about in 2015 I went to my friend's office AJ and it was called iCract and he had an office in New York and an office in San Luis Obispo or sorry San Francisco in New York or something like that and he had this like thing you know remember like a hoverboard like the two wheels yeah and he had like a stick coming up from it and then an iPad and basically what you could do is you could use your iPhone and you could be remote and you could have this like screen hover around the office and you could be looking at it from your phone and talk to people so you can go into different rooms things like that and they also have them at stores now so some stores are fully operated by those things yeah there's a there's a I used to have in our office it was kind of like a joke I know what he really used it but yeah it was like a segue but it's like an iPad on top of it and anybody who's not there could like roll around the office in theory so it's a similar sort of idea but basically there's a set of technology to say hey look self driving like full AI that's hard and far away but what we can do is we can basically have a we can do kind of like a labor arbitrage so you can have like a driver you know instead of being in Los Angeles where a labor might be expensive you have a driver in Santa Fe or a driver in the Philippines and that's and basically the driver can basically drive and you could drive a full car so they're just like eight cameras the driver is basically looking at it like it's a video game like they have three monitors the front monitor is the front windshield the left monitor is if you looked at the left window and it looked at a rear-view mirror and the right one is the right one and basically they just drive and like they've gotten us down low latency where you can have a I can go sit in a car I've done this I sat in a car that was being driven by somebody at a computer somewhere else that I'd never met that I never knew and drove me around the parking lot no problem parked the car and I got out and I was like oh that's cool that's cool that's uber but the driver's not here the driver's a video game player somewhere else and then that gets even better because okay that's that takes advantage of geography right maybe I make $25 an hour here and I can pay $12 an hour in another city but still that's like kind of a lot of technology and risk for just saving you know $12 an hour so then they go next time where they say well you know we really only need the driver when they're at an intersection trying to make a left turn or trying to park so but like on a highway or you know on a straight road very simple stuff the computer just do it's an idiot super accurately so what they do is it's like the deep center like the security company that you invest in where one security guard monitors a hundred different doors because for security guard they only need to look when there's a when there's a person at the door if there's no person at the door that screens off and so what Steve Sentsman did was smart was they made it where like you have like a super super agent who instead of just a bodyguard monitoring or security officer monitoring one location they can monitor a hundred at a time similarly with this technology you have things driving and then only when the computer is confused or gets into a defined situation that's like hey this is a left turn we only trust humans to left turn right now then it pops up on the driver's screen the driver says great I will take over from here they do the left turn and then they say back to autopilot and then the thing drives off again and so that's called human in the loop technology where there's it's mostly AI but then there's a human in the loop of doing the process so human in the loop is super interesting most people view it as like a just a band-aid like a bridge until we get the full AI but I think there's gonna be big companies that just do human in the loop stuff and one of the human in the loop things that things can happen is remote operated heavy machinery on construction sites because if you take the people away you reduce a lot of the danger you reduce the skill requirement and then maybe you only need an operator to do certain high-skilled tasks and they just like basically load in like a video game they do the task and then they leave and then they go do it again so one driver can be like working on 10 construction sites every day I think that's gonna be pretty cool because that person will make they'll make three times more so there's a couple different companies that are doing this there's some that are doing this with construction other their names then there's a company that's just doing tele operation as a service so basically it says hey you want to you want to create a company doing teleoperated forklift school or cranes great put our kit on your on your crane and it'll work but our software kit this is this is what your driver sitting somewhere else is gonna use his hour hour camera kit basically and that's a company called almost like shadow or something let me see that's pretty great as a service phantom phantom dot auto is one of the companies I don't I've heard some you know mixed things I don't know if it's a great company this is a former YC partner left to go start this they raised a bunch of money who they're trying to do it for self-driving cars what do you say who who I got a lot of fans of auto founder and what were the mixed things well some people are just like you know anybody who's gonna do this they end up building this in house they don't actually like self-driving is you have so many engineers you're working on this so hard in your your use case might be different and so they were skeptical that a third party can provide the software that every one of these companies gonna use because it's not like there's gonna be millions of companies that need this it's more like dozens of companies today that need this and all dozens of those companies are probably gonna do this in house I want to say phantom was done by the YC I mean something else but maybe I think maybe I'm mixing up two of these no I think I'm mixing up two of these there was a different YC founder doing this so really quick there's this company called winner winner so winner winner dot com have you ever been there yep I've checked it out but explain it because it's pretty cool it's pretty cool so Joe Spizer you know our friend he's maybe a co-founder or help get it going but basically what they do is they have a warehouse in Las Vegas well so how cheap is Las Vegas warehouse you would know more than I did you know I mean it's dirt cheap so like you could have like I think Ramon had a massive like many tens of thousands of square feet for like 20 grand a month and then these guys these guys read this massive warehouse and then they filled it with claw machines and you could play a claw machine like you see the camera there's a camera on it and you could play this claw machine virtually from your phone and then when you pull a gift I've done it you've done it what happened there may be a little tea so like you basically you buy credits and then you like play the thing and then if you win the toy you can basically like pay I think you have to be at a certain level to get the free shipping otherwise you like pay to have the toy ship to you it's a arcade you can play from far away and it's a teleoperated little claw that goes down and picks up the items it sounds silly these are actually really popular names both in the US but in Japan I think this is like a pretty big market for this either in Korea or Japan and then winner winner their numbers are pretty decent as well like they're doing they're doing very well I think you guys invested right? No we haven't but they're thinking about we don't know if there's gonna be a conflict of interest we're trying to figure it out but they're not at the ball you know like it's getting to that size yeah it's a really cool concept it's definitely worth like playing with once to see it kind of like makes you think more is possible than you thought of right like it's kind of a crazy idea to be like hey you know that little like $2 thing where you can like maybe win an iPhone or like a stuffed animal like yeah what if you just play that from your phone I don't think they're that hard to set up either like crazy they say like because little things do matter like latency or like if I push right and it doesn't go right until like it lags but by then I push right three more times now goes right three times and I'm like you can easily just get frustrated throwing your phone and be like this is stupid so there's definitely some tech you have to do to smoothen that out but that's getting better and better every day and you know any any group of smart people can solve that that's a lot easier than you know stuff running cars or whatever but I think this whole space to watch is tele operation remote operation remote drivers remote arcade games remote you know construction remote cleaning there's a whole bunch of things where the machine can do 80% of the stuff the machine can't do the last 20% so instead of just waiting until the machine is perfect you say cool we're gonna put a human in the loop the human will take over when that 20% needs to be done when a decision needs to be made when an adjustment needs to be done or whatever and then the machine goes back to doing it and now you have humans that are working remotely they make more money than they would if they were just working on one site and the cost of the thing goes down too because you don't need so many humans working on stuff to make it work so I think it's like a win win win that's gonna be more popular but people don't really talk about that today do you follow you know how much on its old for you know on it yeah Joe Rogan's like thing you told me something they sold for 100 million right dude someone told me like 200 million dollars right is that crazy so on its own by this guy named Aubrey Marcus do you follow him on Instagram no should I this guy is nuts I've heard some crazy stories about this guy like I don't know when I say nuts I don't I think he's a fine guy but he's just like an oddball I've heard some stories about him that basically one time he went to this role area and went to an isolation area but it wasn't like an isolation tank it was like a room with no sound or no light and he stayed there for like four or five days I've heard other stories about how he goes to this area it does massive amounts of LSD I've heard stories about how he had an open relationship with his wife and it didn't work out and she was like I believe her name's Whitney I think she's like a former Miss America something like that and they had an open relationship this guy is wild if you follow him on Instagram and he's like he's like a honk like he's like he looks really good looking like he's good looking and he's like I've heard the word honk a long time dude he's like a honk he's like ripped he's huge he's good looking he's got like cool tattoos this guy you got to follow this guy on Instagram it's wild this is like some weird show I'm watching him I'm watching him work out with a steel mace and then this guy is so fascinating to me I love the founders of all these companies like if you want to see interesting founders look at the founders of supplement companies you know like energy drink companies like go look at the guy from Bang Energy dude tell me that's not a good time tell me that's not a good time on Instagram go look at the guys who do supplements the energy guy is like legit weird yeah all these guys are legit weird dude and that doesn't mean like it's not a bad thing but they're not you know they're not like you know some corporate they're running corporations but they're not corporate they are not buttoned up they are they're a little while yeah man this is a good follow you got a follow-up market he like he does all the spiritual stuff like there's here's a video of him he's getting like blessed by a spiritual shaman or something not even understand like some of this terminology and all right I have a good follow for you to on his room of a tech founder do you follow the founder of telegram powerful no is he is he nutty okay so it's just typing all the p a v e l it's a telegram yeah telegram if you don't know it telegram is basically what's up but it's made by this kind of like guy who's he won't sell the company so he's like you know this guy's actually kind of like a genius I think he started vk which is the Russian Facebook it's the only country durov du rov du rov du and his handle is just durov du urov yeah so so this guy's story is pretty nice so he starts vk namie's jvk is the the Russian Facebook Facebook the facebook basically is taking over every other like oh I'm facebook for brazil it was like or no facebook comes wins it's like oh i'm facebook for like bebo facebook in ireland in the uk and in australia boom facebook one and then in russia they just could never be vk for like a combination of like slightly political reasons but also i've seen interviews with like dude their engineers these are like the most brilliant mathematicians ever and they've just made it their mission in life as soon as we release anything they've haven't copied in 24 hours like it's and it's like pixel for pixel copy so vk is facebook but instead of blue it's red it's like a pixel for pixel copy of facebook but it's red and it has with facebook facebook has not been able to win in russia even after like all this time but then you know poutin or whoever the government there they basically took over vk they just like took over the company and like demanded certain things he refused and so this guy had to flee the country so this guy flees he creates telegram which is this like idyllis this like encrypted messaging app and it's like what's app but it's not owned by facebook so a lot of people like it i love it it's great product and he basically self-funded it for a long time like he's put like 50 million of his own money into like doing his things no ads or whatever and then he made much money when they did an ico a token sale but they never actually went through with it but they got free money for a while but this dude's instagram following his hilarious version you'll never see anyone else in his instagram feed no friend no girlfriend boyfriend wife kid nothing it's only him it's usually him with no shirt on and he's boy ripped and he's very ripped i mean he looks like very good he is always doing like model esque photoshoot he's like veto he's like sitting on a sand dune or he's like riding a horse into the sun so he's like he's an under a waterfall and this guy is just hilarious to follow i just find this guy to be like an actual character he's got he's 36 years old worth 20 billion dollars and he's got like pictures of him like with his make it yeah this guy's fascinating i'm gonna i'm gonna have stuff over this guy he's the billy of the week pommel the pommel you are the billy of the week so where's he live just for just for just for he floats around he doesn't tell anyone where he lives he's in Dubai a lot but he travels around and he doesn't he can't go back to russia and he can't go he can't go back to the state he can't come to the states just want to come to the states and so he just goes to like you know beautiful places that are you know i don't know if he lives in one place he's just like always traveling it's him sometimes in u.s sometimes in Dubai Finland Brazil wherever Paris and then he runs the company sort of like remotely so what kapedia says i don't know the word aesthetic what's that mean aesthetic i guess i mean you don't know much any he promotes your positions he promotes freedom of property so i guess he doesn't own that much stuff yeah wow he rents some nice shit i'll tell you that less so he's renting like a mega yeah probably a hundred million dollar yacht so he's kind of like mission in life is just sort of to be like the anti-facebook anti-vk it's i find him to be cool because he's like an idealist like if you use telegram he writes the update and he'll be like we have you know 10 million more members uh telegram remains 100 free 100 encrypted 100 you know like um uh what's it called like you know independent and he's like you know we release these new features and he's just like he definitely has like an idealistic streak around privacy around freedom at least that's what he promotes and this company is like a 20 billion dollar company right or like a multi-billion dollar startup telegram would be a multi-billion dollar startup but again there's no there's no outside investors and there's no he'll never sell so you know it's nobody knows the real value this might be one of the most valuable companies per employee i'm looking at their jobs page they only have like five jobs a content moderator a translator a translator a junior accountant and assistant to the ceo dude that's a sick job if you can become this if if follows a ceo that's a sick job that's crazy right yeah it's the same interesting company does it make money uh no it doesn't make any money he doesn't care about making money he doesn't want it to make money they did they were like pretty pure until they did this ico thing they basically they were like we're gonna beat ethereum we're gonna like build a better version of ethereum with all this crazy shit they released this white paper that was like we were solving all these impossible computer science things and people who were smart technically they were like all right well like if anyone's gonna do it it's gonna be these guys but i don't think i don't think anybody can do this and definitely nobody can do this in this timeline if they're talking about um like the crazy sharding schemes or whatever and basically they um so so so they did this ico i think they raised like four billion dollars or three billion dollars i have some of the details right i've read prepared for this one but they raised a few billion dollars and then the u.s.

basically said you can't that's security offering you can't do that unless you follow these regulations and so they just pulled the plug on the ico but for a year they held everyone's money saying it's gonna get listed at the end of the year or two years maybe even they held everybody so they had like a free float of a multi-billion dollar float for multiple years and then they gave back the money but for the deal was so hard to get into that all these middlemen who had allocation i think you had to buy 20 million dollar slots that was a minimum purchase at the time i think people would buy the 20 million and then they would sell chunks of it to individual retailers like me for 30 million a 40 million total and so people got back to 20 million but if they sold it for more than that initial strike price you were screwed so a lot of people put in you know a hundred thousand dollars into this thing got back 72 years later um you know but that's the reason you're gonna be replacing it. um that's the episode i gotta run cool all right see you later