#48 - NSFW Tech, HQ Trivia & Auctions
All right, we're good.
Babies?
He's like, okay babies, let's talk.
It's hilarious. I only watch his clips. Make sure to subscribe from this to this podcast. And then unsubscribe and subscribe again so we climb up the charts.
Yes, we're climbing. We were top 50 a few days ago when I checked. Top— we were 65, and then we were creeping to 55, so I saw some good movement there.
It's like the movies where there— it's like a band is like climbing up the Billboard charts and they show like, yeah, exactly, number one. The clips that we're posting on our social, they're not getting as much traction as I wish.
Traction like what, views or comments or what?
Well, I only care about views and comments in order to get more podcast, right, listeners.
Yeah, so I guess there you would need people essentially tagging their friends, or you need to start showing up in Discover.
Yeah, and it's still starting. I also have noticed that when I— I have a smaller following than our branded channels, but when I share something, it gets way more engagement than a brand.
So yeah, people like following people and listening to people more. I also don't ever share it, so I should share it to that big 9,000 Twitter followers I got.
And you know, you have 500 more than me, you have 500 more than me, but I'm gonna beat you in the next 4 days.
I think I also bought 5,000 a long time ago.
Me too.
They degraded, they like go away because Twitter like bans the accounts. But when I bought the 5,000, I got way more followers per day. Same, because people wanted to follow somebody who already has a lot.
So I'm averaging 200 new people a day.
I don't even check. I don't even check. All right, what do we got? I want to talk about— talk about this idea. It's not even an idea, it's a company. Arsenic.
Yeah, they've been around for about 4 years now. Yeah, I know.
I don't know how they're doing. Do you know if they're doing well?
They were doing okay. Basically the way that I I knew some like media people who talked about them and knew them, and I'm almost positive that it's run like it looks like it's run, which is a bunch of kids who are good-looking and rent a mansion and they just do, right, so like debauchery.
And so the idea is Arsenic is essentially Playboy for the Snapchat generation. And so they have a Snapchat channel because, you know, the idea is like, okay, Playboy's a big deal. What would Playboy be like today? It would not be a magazine, it would be, you know, a Snapchat channel. And so they created this Snapchat channel, which is perfect because it's like if you follow it, you get it. If not, it's not in your face. So it's not like— like Facebook would be a little weird, Instagram would be a little weird.
And they have email too.
And they just have this mansion and they have all these models, and it's not porn, but it's definitely models who are good-looking. And they just have one model like sort of take over the channel. At least is what it was 3 years ago. I just think there's a great idea. They raised $3 million. I don't know how they're doing.
So they've got books, they do like tours. I think that it could be doing— the idea is cool.
It's a cash cow.
I think it Hmm, well, I—
because they were getting millions of views back then on their videos. I can only assume it's grown unless Snapchat blocked them, but they're not outside the bounds of what Snapchat allows.
No, they don't allow porn, but they see a lot of porn.
They allow nudity?
They don't. If you're putting on your stories, you'll get banned eventually if you're doing it.
What if you have a private—
they do— they don't do nudity.
What's that?
For a private account, you can eventually— if it gets flagged, they'll take it down. Like, it's not in the rules to do nudity.
OnlyFans. So basically what happened is on Snapchat, all these porn stars were putting up like porn. Yeah, like, well, softcore porn. I don't think it was like sex, but, uh, like, pay me $10 and I'll let you follow me, right?
And you'll follow my account where I post nudes.
And OnlyFans launched, and what they did was it was a platform where they— I don't think they started with porn, but now it is that. Yeah. Uh, so just embrace it. But basically if you— I don't even think it's porn. I think it's like web girls, like webcam girls, and you pay $20, however much they want you to, and you get access to their private video feeds.
Yeah. It's like Patreon, but porn basically. So you pay, you become a contributor and then you get their private photos and videos.
It's taken off.
Has it?
Yeah. And the reason— yeah, cause I was doing like, who cares if I consume it or not from a business point of view? That's just how I know about it.
Well, we all care if you can. Um, and, uh, And, uh, I mean, no surprise.
Like, so I did research on it. I did research. Yeah, but so here's, you know why I think these things take off is the people who don't take care of the creators, they, they, they, for these types of things, they, they go away. Yes.
Um, and so there's always demand. So the demand is always there. The question is, does the platform allow the supply to do what they want to do? And the big platforms don't do it because it's not worth their brand and risk and all the stuff because they—
That's insane. At one point in time when we had a— we had Blab, like, live streaming product, and it wasn't working. We had to pivot, and we pivoted eventually to video gaming. But I definitely laid out a case to the company, that investor. I was like, look, porn is the— porn is where that porn would be the best.
Like, these— they're not fucking on camera, I don't think.
Okay, well, whatever you want to call it, like softcore porn or whatever, but like, um, going after the sort of the camgirl market, um, is a pretty— it's a big market, and the websites that are there really, really suck. And so it sounds like WolfieFans did well. We had kind of a heart-to-heart. We're like, is this what we want to build? And, uh, you know, my co-founder felt a certain way, the investors felt a certain way.
What did Furkan want to do?
Um, he was like not down with that.
I'm so down with that.
Yeah, so I think it's— you got to make a personal choice. Are you? Then I've had a bunch of entrepreneurs reach out being like, hey, we saw you did Blab, we read your postmortem, You guys got to 4 million users, but it didn't work. I have a very similar concept. I think it's going to work. Can you give me some advice? And I tell them from the bat, jump. I'm like, this version is not going to work. Consider porn. I think it could work. Consider the camgirl angle because, you know, that's the one stone we didn't turn when we were considering, you know, where to pivot this thing to make it.
I would for sure do that because all these like Patreon, all the shit, they're like, we're going to empower creators. Okay, I'm behind that. But even though a lot of times I think they don't, but if you're going to empower a creator, imagine this like woman who can just crush it by not breaking the law and just using her own body. I'm philosophically, I'm so in favor of that, right?
Yeah. I think as a business person, I'm definitely in favor of it. I think it's just a personal—
as a business person, I love it. As just like a human being, I'm like, yeah, so you want to do your body, do your thing.
Two little ideas or trends off this. So one, there's this fund called Vice Ventures that is basically investing in things that we've covered it on Trends that other investors won't. Invest in. Because like investors, typically if you're a VC, your investors, they're called LPs, they are typically not just like rich individuals, they're institutions. So it'll be like a pension fund for firefighters in New York, or this, you know, the school endowment will give you $20 million. And so you can't— so they won't want their money going into certain types of companies. This is why cannabis investments started to take off, because only alternative investors, investors who had a little more freedom were able to go into them. Big investors knew they were good spaces, but they weren't able to move on it as quickly because they had to worry about their LPs. So Vice Ventures came out and they were like, look, you know, sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever, right? Like they're basically like taking sort of the seven sins. And they were like, we specifically look for companies that are doing business in this— in these areas and we'll invest in them. And I think it's a very— I think it's a— if you're going to do a venture fund, you could either just make another cookie cutter Hey, we're a seed fund. Come to us instead of all these other guys. Or you take a focus and build a brand around being different. And I think it was a very, very smart approach.
I like it. I've— I invested in this company called Lucy. Yeah, it's a nicotine replacement or it's basically Nicorette gum.
We got to get— what's his name?
Dave. Dave.
We have to get him on because when I met him for the first time through you after HustleCon, he spit off 7 ideas. And when we were just standing there talking and I was like, I'd ask for one and then he gave me like a Dope idea. And I was like, you got more of those? He goes, yeah, I got a list. And he started reading off his ideas and they were fantastic.
So he might be listening. We got to get him on the, on the couch to hear a quick porn story. Yeah. Okay. So I worked out of this, like, I work—
we have a nod of approval.
I worked out of this office called the Founders Dojo and it was the greatest thing ever. I'll tell another story about it. But basically it was— if you've seen the TV show Silicon Valley, it was— we had Erlich Bachmann. It was an Erlich Bachmann type of guy named Dave, who was a great guy but totally inappropriate and disgusting in a good way. And the office was filthy. And there was this guy, I forget his name, Ritesh and Chris. Oh yeah, I remember this. And it was this little skinny Indian guy and he was crazy and awesome. And he was like the stereotypical Silicon Valley hacker where he could get a job at any big company and make $200,000 a year, but he was like, no, fuck that. I'm like, fuck the corporate pigs. And so he would sleep at that office and Dave would buy him pizza all the time because he was like, like, get— wanted to be poor and do this thing. And so he created an app, or no, a site, a website that would crawl Tumblr. No, I think all the internet. Okay. For the fastest— for the GIFs that had the highest velocity of growth. And so if a GIF launched, popular GIFs, he would tell you right away which one's gonna be the most popular, and then you would see it on the screen. And it was called The Worst Drug. The Worst Drug dot TV. It's not there anymore. And that sounds like a silly thing, but that's not why he did it. He did it because what he was trying to do was, A, find the fastest, uh, like technology that could find the fastest growing stuff. And if you would go to theworsttruck.com, you could type in something like dog and the search feature would autofill like wicked fast, like way faster. And then you would click enter and it would be bam, a high-def GIF.
It was high-def, it was full screen, and it was full screen. It was laser fast.
So the technology is very like Pod Piper-like. The technology wasn't like whatever Pod Piper did. It was the fact that it was all behind behind these scenes, like a bunch of nerds being like, yeah, our GIFs load the fastest, and like, look, it's like HD and it happened in nanoseconds. And he would spend nights, and I would come back and it would be just as tiny improvement, but we'd all gather around it. Well, so here's the cut, uh, this, the, the point of the story. Turns out the most popular GIFs on the internet, 99% of them, are super hardcore raunchy porn, like real raunchy porn.
And so Yeah, because when I went to the site, it was all porn. There wasn't like porn and then some basketball gyms and then a funny one. It was only porn. So I was like, this is a porn site.
And so at the office, at the dojo, we would have these huge screens of like his workstation. And the way that he sat was everyone could see it. And we kind of got immune to it. But it was like the raunchiest shit ever. And we would— he'd be like, guys, check this out. Early in the morning, we would come in 11 AM, which was early, and he'd be rubbing his eyes and shit. And he'd be like, check this out. And all 8 of us would gather around this high-def screen and be like— and he would type in the word like, like facial. And like, he's like, watch how fast this loads. And we were just so immune.
We were like, you're not even looking at the content.
We're not even looking at the content. We're like, oh yeah, wow, you could like see the shine in the liquid. Like it was like, it was so funny. And we would have like these like lawyers come into the office and people who are actually like investors who would try to raise money for the other companies. And we would forget that this was on the big screen.
And what happened? So this sounds like—
what's the end?
So what is this guy doing now?
The site, the site, The Worst Drug, got millions and millions and millions of visitors. The, the engagement was stupidly, like, good. He couldn't monetize it. They couldn't use it. So there were so many restrictions. No ad network would allow him to use it. And so even though the site, I think it was getting at least for sure millions, I think maybe tens of millions of monthly uniques, and it made zero money and only cost him a lot of money. And the story ends with like someone in Bulgaria or Latvia, like this, like communist, ex-communist country, wanted to buy the site and it was all weird. They flew him out there and he's like, wait, these guys are like mobsters. And they ended up like bailing and they just shut it down because it was—
No, he bailed. I've never seen him. He stole my skateboard. I had a skateboard. I left at the office. He stole it and I've never seen him since.
He had to get away, dude.
I've never seen him.
He needed transportation.
Raj, that's his name. Raj. I've never seen Raj from—
this guy down, because he— that guy is gonna build something amazing, or it's gonna be a very sad ending. But either way, it's gonna be not average, not the usual.
He was— he was like, if you think of like this idea of what Silicon Valley is, that was that, right?
Wow, okay, that's incredible. I like that story. Okay, we were talking about R-Snake real quick. Quick idea: so what they're doing is the Playboy on Snapchat, if that's working— and I don't know if it's working, so go look into it— but if it is working, in a big way. I don't think that there's just gonna be one of those. So like, in the same way that there's all these porn brands, right? There's like Girls Gone Wild, it focuses on college-age things. Somebody out there could create Arsenic for college or for different, like, whatever genre. And so I just—
just to clarify, Arsenic is not porn.
Yeah, current Playboy.
Exactly. So you could build Playboy but of other genres, and just— or you could just literally clone them. And I think it would be very low cost. And I think you would be able to do a lot of— you'd be able to drive a lot of views and ultimately get a lot of sponsorships in the same way that Maxim and Playboy were able to make pretty big businesses out of what they do. Now, they had subscriptions, so I don't know if you would do subscriptions. Maybe you use OnlyFans. I'm not sure, but we should figure it out. Yeah, I, I'm going to look up the OnlyFans revenue.
I'm interested in this. I have a lot of ideas. I'm going to— I'll come back a little more prepared on this because I think there is something there.
Um, what else you got?
Okay, so, uh, you have HQ. So HQ died, obviously.
Yeah.
Um, I thought like it could have been cool. I'm like, they could be like Jeopardy. Jeopardy's huge.
So if you don't know what HQ was, it was a mobile app. It was a game show like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, whatever, but that was all done on a mobile app, which was— when I saw this product, some— our friend Eric, um, uh, who does Tribe Socks, he showed me this app and he was like, Dude, my friend went to go work at this company. It's really interesting. Check this out. And he pulls it up. So at 6:00 PM every day, they would do the game show. So you get a notification at 6, you open the app, there's a host, live guy, you know, live, live game show host on, uh, live streaming. And he would ask trivia questions that you would push the button, or you have 10 seconds to answer. You'd push the button real quick to answer. And if you got all 10 or 12 questions right, you'd win the prize at the end. Which at that time it was, there was 400 players and the prize was like $500. This thing grew like crazy. They had games with over a million concurrent players.
I feel like sometimes like a million and a half.
And exactly, over a million players. And over— I believe they had over a million dollars in prize money over time. And so this thing had this run, and they got tons of funding. Founders Fund funded them, $10 million in funding at $100 million valuation. And then they had, um, big-time brands launch stuff on there. So they were like, you know, this game is sponsored by Nike, it's all trivia about athletes, and we're gonna drop this shoe. The new shoe release is happening live on HQ, and that's the prize. They were doing some interesting stuff, but it was kind of a fad. And which everyone knew, which everyone knew, because it was like, games all have this hype cycle and then this decline over time. They're not— games aren't super, super sticky, most of them. And this was definitely that. So this big novelty grew like crazy, viral product. In many ways, as somebody makes products, it was very inspiring because it was like so simple yet so awesome.
And I actually felt like product there— I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, but I felt like there was some revolutionary things for sure.
It was like, oh, I'm looking at the future, this is, this is what the future looks like. I still think that's what the future looks like. HQ died for many reasons.
The founders are fucking crazy.
Literally one founder died, he overdosed on drugs. The other founders, they are sort of always infighting. They were both sort of like, kind of come across at least from the outside as sort of like moody artists. Yeah. One of them I believe started Vine also.
Russ. Yeah, yeah.
So definitely sort of brilliant guys in a way, but Everyone says that Russ is a dick.
Yeah, and he had— he got removed as CEO because he had some problems. He was, you know, he was a dick or whatever. The other guy got removed also. Never figured it out. And the, the game show host Scott became this kind of like cult sensation because he was the host. Everyone saw him every day. And he tweeted out when it shut down recently, he was just like, this company died for one reason alone, and that's the sort of incompetence and arrogance of the founders. And I was like Yeah, damn, that is like— you don't usually hear that. Like, everybody's so PC and always just worried about their career.
Well, he's a comedian. He didn't give a fuck.
Yeah, he definitely did not give a fuck because that was, that was pretty brutal on the day that it shut down.
Let's say— can I tell you what I would do? Yes. Okay, so I would be— I have no idea if they did this or not. I would have built this knowing that's gonna die. And so it's like, it's my thing is I'm gonna be a hit machine, right? And I'm gonna use this formula and And I always thought about this with— remember like Cronut? Yeah. Okay. You know how like these viral food things, like these food things go viral? I like one day sat down, I'm like, what makes them go viral? So it's— and I've like broke it down to a handful of categories, which is like, it's either a— it's got to be a food that's typically a side, but you're going to eat it in excess. So for example, only cookie dough instead of— so ice cream that's just cookie dough, right?
Or you make the— you make the topping the main.
Yep. So like—
One formula you could use.
Yep. Another, like, or like fondue. So like fondue is typically an appetizer, fondue only. Right. Another thing is you take the shape of it and you make it a ridiculous shape. Yes.
Easy. Including small to big, like there's Bob's Donuts.
And that's my next one, which is sizing. So you make something small, big, and big, small. Right. The fifth or fourth thing is color. Rainbow bagels. So you just take the color, green ketchup.
Instagrammable, yes.
Yes. And then I had a fifth one, which was, um—
Oh yeah, and then that was the fifth one.
You take the Doritos Locos Taco, one of the most successful fast food things in like the last 10 years was this Doritos Locos Taco, and then every fast food chain hired these agencies to be like, find me the next Doritos Locos, right?
And so those are the 5 like categories that I discovered. And then it's like, okay, so you just make it go viral by— you have to have distribution via Thrillist, BuzzFeed, and then eventually it's like Well, you just have your own handle and then you're just gonna make these go, and then you're gonna have a small shop outside, outside in Brooklyn or in Manhattan, and you're just gonna—
you're always putting out bangers.
Yeah, you're just gonna fucking knock it out the park and you're gonna have a line all the time. And then 3 months later, boom, that one shut down. Switch. Now we're doing cookie dough ice cream.
Every season you come out with a new one, viral sensation.
Yeah, it's like, all right, now we're doing this, we're doing rainbow cake now. Or green ketchup and hot dogs. Like, you just like, you're just like, okay. And so if I was— I've always thought about like, man, that's the way to go. You just have a small— you just are banging these, you're banging these out. And then for the ones that last and are hits, like Corona might be a hit. I mean, that's kind of like its own category now. Yeah. Then you've— that's like you're one of your temple franchises, right?
It's always available.
So this is like Supreme for food. It's like like you have this limited, scarce, kind of like out-there thing. What you're doing is you're making these, these sort of wild concoctions on the food side using these 5 different—
yeah, but it's all formulaic.
Yes, it's just like one of these 5 formulas, and then you, you do a limited edition drop. You basically say, you know, you tweet out at 1:00 a.m., it's live, you get a huge line, people cover the fact that there's a line, and then it becomes a thing in a hipster town.
Yeah, this is so easy, like Bagel Bites. It's like pizza on bagel.
So this is back when you were doing your hot dog stand. If you knew everything you know now, but you still needed to do a hot dog stand, you would end up doing something more like this, like green ketchup, like that.
My shtick, the ketchup would only be green, right? And what I did back then was I had— what I did was like, you just have a little shtick. Like mine was my onions. I would boil them in Coca-Cola, which a lot of people do. I would just tell everyone I did that, right? And so there's— this is actually a famous copywriting trick, which is Have you ever heard of, um, a time— like a watch, like a wristwatch being described as like with quartz movement? Yes, they all have fucking quartz movement, right? They all do. All of them do. Or like space-age aluminum. They all— that's not even a thing, first of all.
Like, what's that Mad Men line? It's like, our filters are rolled, or something like that.
And they're like, well, everyone's is. And they're like, well, they don't know it, right? So space-age aluminum, that That means nothing. First of all, all aluminum.
First of all, nonsense.
Yeah. And second of all, quartz movement? Every single watch has that. Right. And so the idea here is you just take something that they don't know, even though all the insiders know, and you just tell them.
Right. We did this experiment when we were doing the sushi restaurant where we took the descriptions of our food. So it'd be like, you know, you take a Philadelphia roll, which is like this Americanized— it's salmon, it's cream cheese, and it's cucumber. In a sushi roll. And then we would just— so Dan Ariely was one of our advisors and he's the guy who wrote Predictably Irrational. And so he would— he told us like, hey, one of the reasons wine charges this premium is because they created a whole language around what they do. You need to create a language around sushi so that people who start to learn about it feel like they know more and they want to pay more so they can have the better thing. Just teach them what is the better thing. And so we would, you know, we started just adding words as one experiment. We would have one version of our website where it was all online ordering. So it was one version of our website would be the normal website, then our A/B test was the other variation was our Philadelphia roll would be called like, it'd be called the Philadelphia roll, and then the description would be like, Atlantic fresh, you know, never frozen salmon with, you know, Philadelphia authentic Philadelphia cream cheese and a finely sliced cucumber. And we would raise the price and we would get like more orders even despite the higher price.
That's crazy.
And so it's just like a psychological thing around—
yeah, that shit works.
Yeah, around the descriptions around things. Okay, back to HQ for a second. So they did try to release other games. They came out with like a word scramble type game. I think they kind of ran out of time, and also they had built the hype too much. And lesson to be learned: when you build this much hype, if you start to fail, you death spiral way faster because the high— the pressure of your expectations and hype will crush you.
Well, so that's what I mean is I would have built this company and expecting that. Like, we discussed that claw game, and they're like, well, they're building it, so they're gonna just capture all the value up front and then let it die, right? So if you would have built that right, like, built that into it, it would have been— it could have been a company. Kind of like, I imagine Zynga does this, which is they just have like— they're like, all right, this game is only gonna last 80 days maybe, right?
So two quick ideas on this HQ thing. So HQ died, okay, you know, rest in peace. But two things you could do if you wanted to make, make use of this, of the insights that were found in this. I think you can do this on top of Twitch or YouTube or any live streaming platform that already has audience. So you don't need to be your own app. You should just host— create a channel that's hosting a show and give away the prize money and promote it in the same way. And so I think somebody could build this on top of one of the existing platforms, not have to build your own tech, and not have to acquire downloads of your app, which is really expensive. And I think if you just did this every day at 7:00 PM on Twitch, I think a bunch of people would tune in. Second idea around this is Maybe the HQ format, which is this live video streaming with this charismatic host and question and answer, could be used in education. And so I would love to see somebody create an after-school game that parents actually pay $3 a week to subscribe to, where your kid learns science through some Bill Nye the Science Guy type of host. And it's trivia, it's interactive, and they get sort of points as they—
that's interesting.
I thought about starting that company, but I really think that that could work. I think it might also have the sort of fade in interest. But I remember as a kid I loved Brain Quest, and I played all these like learning games, and they were great. And so I think this is a modern-day version.
That's interesting. That, that is quite sticky. I think that as we get older— I mean, your kid's not old enough, so you'll— I imagine you'll learn this once she gets old enough. But these things that we use as we are kids were just huge. Yes, huge. Um, I'm into that.
And you wouldn't need tens of millions of people because you're not advertising. You'd be on subscription because parents would be like, oh, I don't have to go drop my kid off at tutoring, and I don't have to learn this myself. My kid already wants to sit in front of the iPad all day, so okay, here's an iPad game that I feel good about because you're learning. It's kind of cool because it's live and interactive and I could play with you, and I'll pay $3 a week for that.
Do you want to hear what I— in that same category that I'll come back with some more research, but I was just surfing around and saw— is that but for allowance.
Okay, tell me more.
So a friend Ramon's kid had— I was like, I was like, hey Victor, does your dad give you allowance? Like, you better be giving you some money, right? And he goes, yeah, but it's all on this app. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, it is automated and I get $10 a week if I do everything and I have a list of everything I got to do. And then it just sends me this $10, but it sends it into an account and I could use those on the, the places that he's already approved that I could spend it on. Or if he wants, I can get this debit card that only works at a handful of places.
That's a great idea.
Yeah. I was like, of course, of course.
Idea. Yeah, I get mad at myself for not thinking of it.
So I'm gonna go— I haven't thought— I haven't seen their financials or any— I've done— I'm going to. Yeah. Uh, when he told me that, I was like, oh, okay, obviously, great, right?
Um, what else we got?
So on trends, we released this on Tuesday. Two things were interesting that our guys found— or Steph and our guy— so men and women found, um, which we only have two people, so, uh So your guy and gal found that— two things. I'm like thinking about all of it. First, everyone talks about meditation being like the most popular, like being a huge trend right now. People searching for sleep is actually significantly more, like, like sleep products. And not— and this makes total sense because Calm— I'm a subscriber to Calm. They're stories. They're pushing sleep like crazy.
Yeah, sleep stories, I think, was the breakout product for breakout feature for—
That's crazy. And so I didn't realize this until they like pointed it out, and I'm like, oh yeah, that does make sense. Sleep is way bigger than meditation, and meditation is huge.
Sleep is also— a lot of people search for it because— so for meditation, you're trying to teach a new habit. Sleep, everybody does. Also for sleep, a lot of people have problems sleeping, so they will actively search for and pay for solutions that will help them sleep.
I pay for a bunch of them. I pay for What's your sleep? An Alexa app called Nature Sounds, and they have like 26 sounds, and I pay extra money to combine them. So my— the one I sleep to is Winter Railroad. And so what does that sound like? It's a train going through the mountains in winter.
What's the winter part? What is the sound of winter?
You hear like wind.
Oh, okay.
I love it.
You shared something very personal there. I love it.
I use it. That's why I go, Alexa, play Nature Sounds or sometimes I'll do ship in winter because it sounds like an icebreaker. And then Alexa, turn off in 20 minutes.
And this is also like one of these, you know, hackathon projects where some developers like, okay, watch this, just say two words and I go search the internet for sounds and I smash them together and it makes an audio thing. Yeah, like this shit. At FurCon's next hackathon, they should build this.
Like, I don't even know what it could be, like chickens in China Street.
Yeah, exactly. What happens to Sarah? She doesn't like— does she like the sound? Yeah, she's down with it. She's down with it. Um, so do you take any sleep aids, like, like a, like a vitamin or supplement or CBD or something?
Melatonin.
Melatonin?
Yeah.
Does that work?
Help? Or— Yeah, it does. Um, if I really can't sleep, I'll take one of those Unigel. Did my computer die? I think it died. One of my, um, Unigel— is that what it's called? Unisoft? It's a, it's basically like a mild dosage of, uh, NyQuil without the medicine part.
Oh, that's good. So, okay, so it's the way some people take NyQuil just to sleep. And so this is the just to sleep part. It's just— I don't have a cough.
Yeah, it's just a light version. You don't take that stuff?
Uh, I, uh, I heard this phrase today: I could sleep in a ditch. Uh, so I just— when I decide to go to sleep, I instantly fall asleep, and I do not wake up at night, um, ever. And so I'm blessed.
You— I am typically like that as well, but not as bad. Um, there's this guy that we should profile. He, um, He, he's a Japanese billionaire— or sorry, Chinese billionaire. And he started a— so he's a big shot now and he owns like half a bank and all this other shit. And he got rich by creating a melatonin— he just took melatonin and rebranded it and made it sexy and called it a sleep aid and whatever. It got huge. And then he launched the Zynga of China and he ended up buying like the building that they lived in, just like Zynga, and they worked in. It became this huge thing. We'll have to do— I'll have to bring him up because I love him because he's reckless and he's built a fortune and lost it all like 3 times, right?
Yeah. You love that.
I love those guys. Okay. And then we also talked about do-it-yourself perfume. So apparently that's a huge community, is do-it-yourself perfume. And there's not a ton of companies in the space.
So what's— what's happening? What are these people trying to do? They don't want to buy perfume. They want to mix their own at home.
Yeah. So basically perfume is a huge business. Paris Hilton. A lot of people forget about her. She has sold roughly $5 billion of her perfume.
Cycling back to the porn conversation earlier. Okay, Paris Hilton.
Yes, yes. And let's say her stuff costs $100, which it doesn't. It's typically 90% margin.
Yeah, incredible.
So huge fat margins. And everyone now knows this. And so the idea here is that people are trying to make their own perfume at home, and it's got— there's a lot of subreddits around it, a lot of communities who discuss different perfume, like how to create your own perfume, but there aren't too many companies that are making it easy to make your own perfume and formulas and things like that.
Dude, that makes a lot of sense. This is like one of those industries where when you hear about the winner later, you're like, oh, okay, was set up for success. So for example, Warby Parker, you know, one of the reasons Warby Parker works so well was that that the existing eyewear, eyeglass, you know, industry was all owned by this one conglomerate, Exotica, that had pricing power and was marking shit up like crazy. So they didn't have to like invent something to lower the price. They just had to not be greedy and be like, okay, yeah, we can offer this at a fair price and still have margin. And so, um, do you own cologne? I own cologne. And, um, so what you're saying is basically cologne vastly marked up in the same way razors are super marked up and Dollar Shave Club came in. But instead of somebody just making a Dollar Shave Club version of cologne, they're giving you a DIY kit. And then these like probably Reddit communities of homebrewers for perfume.
Yeah, it's actually pretty great.
There's an infinite number of recipes and scents, so you're gonna—
yeah, and what would be interesting is if you took it a step further and interesting scents could be sold already.
Yeah, so you could create a marketplace where you could sell yours. You too, just even to your own friends and family. You could create a kit for people to do this and make a better kit and I'm sure there's one that exists. Well, another idea, you know, we were talking about kids stuff earlier, like my niece would love to mix her own perfume.
She would—
that would be like a great afternoon. And my, my sister would buy her, you know, this little kid-friendly perfume-making kit. It's like one of the arts and crafts things that she gets to do, and she makes it. Then everyone who comes over, she gets to show him— show her— show them their—
yeah, I'm into that.
I think you could do this for kids, and it'd be a big deal.
Here's another angle that we found in trends is is soap, do-it-yourself soap. Big thing, people wanna make their own soap. And what was the third one? Juice, but we already know that. Right, juicing, yeah, okay. Okay, so a topic that we talked about yesterday that you wanted me to look into more was auctions.
Auctions, yes.
I had never heard of this company that you showed me, Heritage Auctions. Yeah. I think that auctions, particularly marketplaces, I would love someone to criticize this because I want to hear the downsides. I think that they are potentially one of the top, like, 2 or 3 business models. Uh, auctions, or— well, auctions and marketplaces.
Oh, marketplaces for sure.
Yeah, but auction-style marketplaces, right? I think they're one of the best.
Yeah, and I think eBay sucks, by the way. There's— someone's totally gonna crush them. I mean, they're gonna be Dead.
Not dead, but somebody told me this is half, half, half information. Somebody told me eBay has had like a revival and they don't do the auction stuff as much anymore. They're all like, it's basically Amazon-ish.
Yeah, I fucking hate it.
I hate it. But somebody said that their numbers have turned around. I don't know if that's true.
Well, they're a behemoth. They're not going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, they're like Google. Like, you're like, oh well, they're sucking. Like, okay. I mean, they're gonna last for another 50 years at least. Yeah. So anyway, um, I love auctions. I like, I, and I love niche auctions. Um, and Heritage, which you pointed out, they do that. Um, you, you got the, you got that pulled up, Henry? Uh, and you could pull it up on your phone. Um, so they did $800 million in sales. So it's not on the screen.
Yeah. No, I know.
Um, so let's look at their top categories. Do you have it on your phone?
Yeah, I still have it. So coins, I think was their top, right?
Yeah. So they do, I think $300 million in currency. Right. Okay, but look at some of the more interesting ones. Movie posters, $10 million. $10 million in sales. What was comics? Comics is on there.
Yeah, let me just pull it up.
Sports, $60 million.
Sports, $60 million.
Sport collectibles, basically. $300 million. Luxury real estate, $19 million. Wine, $10 million.
Crazy, right? Tons. Crazy. And here's what I like about it.
This is a big idea. We talk a lot. In fact, I have a pet peeve. We talk a lot about these like small little business arbitrages, hacks, little businesses. This would be a big, big company if you could get this right.
And so what— so I love marketplaces and I love auctions. I love auctions because there's a time component to it. Yeah. And that urgency makes you buy more. And What I think is even better, and so for Heritage Auctions, I think roughly half of their sales, of their $800 million sales, are online and the other half are in person. You want to know another in-person auction that's doing wonderfully? Which one? Barrett-Jackson. Have you heard of Barrett-Jackson?
No.
What is it? Barrett-Jackson is based in Arizona, bootstrapped, owned by one guy.
Is that his name?
Barrett? Maybe. Barrett is dead. Jackson is alive.
Okay.
Or it could be the other way around. One of them is dead. But what they do is they actually have a— they put this on TV all the time. I watch it all the time. What they do is sell cars, so classic cars, right? Not all classic cars, but just like rare or like interesting cars. You could buy like a $10,000 car there. But so they'll have a car on and they'll say like, this Ferrari, there was only 500 of them. This, it sells for $200,000. And they showed it and you're like, oh, awesome, that sale just happened in 3 minutes. That was great. And so they'll— they do, I believe, 68 shows a year and they make hundreds of millions of dollars, uh, in revenue. Yeah, it's a huge business and I love that. And so another one is Bring a Trailer. They do cars as well. And the guy who started Bring a Trailer also started Mailbox, uh, Gentry Underwood. So he's like a— which he sold to Dropbox, right? And so I like these auction places. And, uh, first of all, I like niche auctions. So I like watches, anything that's niche. But tell— but what do you What is another— and I have one idea— what's a current marketplace that's very illiquid and hard to sell and you wish that could go away faster?
Mm-hmm. Houses is one. Luxury houses they put on here because takes a while to sell a house in general. And so OpenDoor is trying to make that instant as a market, as a real estate company, not as much as an auction. Mm-hmm. I have a friend who did this with sneakers. —people are doing that now, I think it's working well—he did it as a 90-minute auction. So he would say the sneaker goes live, it's 90 minutes, and we're gonna get you your guaranteed price. Or we— they basically offer the seller, they're like, we will buy it at this price if the auction doesn't go higher. So if you agree to that, you start the process and it's 90 minutes. What else?
I don't know, what else you got? Small businesses.
Okay, just flip my business.
And this is a maybe would just fall flat. This is one of those— it could be amazing or it would just be horribly idea. But if I were Quiet Light Brokerage, who sponsors this, or if I were another brokerage, I would 100% have an event and try to gather 1,000 people and we're going to auction off these businesses.
My idea from yesterday, the first dibs where you're auctioning future, the future first, future first, whatever you're going to create. I think that would work really well with this as well. But businesses, the hard part is you have— there's so many hard parts about it. There's a lot of hard price. But one is just the diligence, right? So like when I buy the, um, the movie poster or whatever, if it has sort of the certification and the person who's, you know, selling it sort of says this is authentic, um, I don't need to look too much more into it. Whereas with a business, you really have to sort of understand all these different components. I think that's hard.
I agree it's hard, but I think it's interesting because like if someone just— like if I knew Shopify apps or something and there was this gathering and they're just auctioning off a shit ton of them and it's kind of like a Storage War where it's like, which you're not sure what you get, but let's just find out. Like, it could be fun to gamble tens of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, just storage units. That would be interesting, like a mystery box basically that you're buying. Well, fuck yeah, actually, that would be really fun and, and interesting. It'd have to be cheap enough. That's interesting.
Is someone doing store— a storage unit, like blind auctions? Yeah, yeah, surely they have to be, right?
I don't know, but you could tie some of these ideas together, right? So like what HQ showed where they did basically, they took a a traditional TV show and turn it into a live streaming mobile app where the game shows on, on your phone. This is the future of TV. Like, you can do a QVC, or I don't know what show you talked about you watched the auctions on, but like, well, that's Barrett-Jackson, but there's another one called— turn these into mobile live stream shows, and you could essentially sell these all through, through, you know, you could take— so one way to look at Antiques Roadshow, that's what I was thinking about, right? So one way to look at this is you, you start selling some item that's not currently sold on these auction places. Might be hard because a lot of time has passed and sort of like, you know, the law of supply-demand has pulled things that want to be sold this way into the market. But maybe you can find a new niche, or you just take the existing platforms and you make them smaller, more lightweight, and mobile-focused. You just win that way. And so like, I don't know if you know Top Hatter.
Yeah, what are they?
Top Hatter, incredible company. It's Wish. So it's a mobile app where you see a bunch of really cheap stuff from China, random stuff. It can be like a back brace and a ring and a you know, whatever, a poster, dollar store crap, dollar store. Well, it's like the— it's like the Wish crap, which is like random electronics and memorabilia, laser pointer items. Yeah, laser pointers and class rings and like, you know, whatever. But what they do is, which is interesting, is it's a— this item starts— so you open up the app and you see all these things, and like, you've never seen your adrenaline spike like this in a mobile app before. All the prices are starting at like, whatever, $50, and they just start dropping. And then somebody just hits buy and then they buy it. And so you kind of want to wait to get it lower, but you don't want to wait too long. Somebody else is gonna buy it. So Top Hatter's a startup here in San Francisco and they do hundreds of millions of dollars revenue. Very good, very interesting business. I don't know how profitable it is, how sticky it is, blah blah blah. But when you go into the app, it's like a—
it's like being in like this high-stakes Chinese market, like those dollar auction, like those penny auctions things. It's— those are all like fucking—
a little bit like that, but they— but you don't have to buy credits and stuff like that. It's more like Wish. But instead of— what they tap into is instead of browsing and picking, they pick— they, they like inject into your FOMO, you know, part of your brain. And so you're like, okay, this item, do I want it? Do I want it for $6, $5, $4, $3? I'll take it. And you end up buying a whole bunch of shit. And it's just a bunch of moms who are bored at home that are just shopping on this thing, and they feel like, hey, we're getting tons of value. But like, this is stuff you didn't even know you wanted. You don't even want— this is shit.
It's just shit. And I'm gonna download it and buy buy some stuff. I buy shit all the time. Top Hatter's cool. Um, we want to do one more or end it there?
Um, uh, let's do one quick one. So, uh, I have this career advice. So there's this great line I think Sheryl Sandberg said a while back, which was, um, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask which chair, you just sit down and buckle up. Something like that. That's her quote. And, um, I see people get this wrong all the time. And so you're making— let's say you're listening to this and you're making career choices— So we talk a lot about businesses, business ideas, but a lot of people who are listening to this are not yet, they haven't, you know, they have a job and they haven't yet, you know, started their own company necessarily. So when it comes to job selection, if you think about the companies you're thinking about joining, I want you to classify them into cars, rocket ships, or Titanics. And basically, you gotta, the goal in your career advice is not to look at the role, you know, like what does the job description say? It's not even really to look at the compensation package, although, you know, there should be a minimum from there. Um, but you want to optimize for getting onto rocket ships. And so a rocket ship is a company that's growing really, really fast. They've figured out what they're doing, and there's still a whole bunch of problems to be solved, and they're the right type of problems. A bad problem is nobody wants our product, we have to figure out how to get them to want it. A good type of problem is too many people want our product, we have to make sure we can keep up with this demand. And so you want to, you want to find a rocket ship, and you want to take whatever roles you can get on that rocket ship. You want to sit down, you want to buckle up, because what ends up happening in these fast-growing companies is if you're good and you kill it for even 2 months, you'll get moved and promoted to a better spot because they'll be like, oh, this person can actually do something. We have so many fires to put out. Okay, we thought you were a junior, but like, hey junior, you're now working on this thing because you're the best we got and we— I've seen you problem-solve so far. And so what a mistake people make is they try to pick a role that's a higher-ranking role initially or better compensation initially, but they join either a slow-moving company where they're not gonna learn, it's not gonna grow, Or they join a Titanic, which is just, you know, about to sink. But hey, I got the best seat on the Titanic. You don't want that either. And so my advice is find the rocket ship companies, take whatever seat they'll give you, crush it, and then they'll move you up.
Great. I think that to add to that analogy, a lot of people shouldn't join that fast-growing thing, or do they want that fast-growing thing, but they want something that's mildly growing. Is that what that car is?
Yeah, I think that's, that's where— yeah, I'm speaking to the people that, like, someone that is trying to max out but they're currently in the job track. So if you're trying to max out and you're not starting your own business, this is the next best thing in my opinion.
Yes, like, not a lot— some people, a lot of people don't want to max out. They have kids and they're like, I want a nice life, right? I don't want a high-risk, high-reward life, right? And to those people, that advice doesn't apply, right?
And I'm just guessing a lot of those people don't listen to the podcast, because if you're that person, you probably listen to, like, I don't know, Bon Jovi on your way to work. You don't listen to like a podcast about business and ideas and all that stuff. Sure. I think we've self-selected at least. I think that's good advice.
Um, and by the way, when you—
so have you had a job? Have you been employed, let's say, not like kind of like college age, but like since then? Or have you just done businesses of your own?
Uh, we had like an acquisition and I was kind of employed there, but I—
but you haven't gone and just interviewed for jobs?
I interviewed once, uh, a couple times and I never got them. What'd you interview for? For? For Vungle, for Jack Smith. My best friend, I interviewed for his job and I didn't get it. What happened? They just didn't call me back.
I started to call you back.
Jack didn't tell you? The guy who's like my best friend now, I didn't know him. I interviewed at his job.
Oh, you didn't know him at the time?
I didn't know him. Okay, they interviewed me and they didn't hire me, and then 2 years later we became best friends.
And you were trying to be a salesperson or what?
I don't even remember. I think so.
Um, by the way, I have a similar story. I, uh, applied to Stripe Stripe. I think I might have told the story already, so apologies if I did. But, uh, 2012, I applied to— I, I was gonna apply for a job for the first time in my life. I had started two companies before that. I was like, I'm moving to Silicon Valley, I'm gonna get a job, I'm gonna learn from other people, um, rather than start my own thing. And, um, I only applied to two jobs. One was Stripe, and I got to the phone screen, um, and I, I really had it made because the guy who was interviewing me, his mentor in wife was one of my former advisors in my startup and had written a blog post being like, this guy Sean is like— he said it specifically— he has the highest bias for action of any entrepreneur I've ever met. He made a warm intro to this guy and was like, trust me, this guy's legit, you should hire this kid.
How the fuck did you not get that job?
And so I thought I was cruising too, and maybe that's why I didn't get it. But I get to the part of the interview where he was like, all right, you know, this job has a lot of sort of sales and persuasion stuff, um, so, you know, piece of software. So I want you to, you know, we're gonna do a little role play. You're gonna sell me a piece of software. And he's like, you can pick any software you like, whatever you're familiar with.
Oh, you probably got creative or something.
And I was just like, um, I was like, okay, so I— here's what I would do. I would talk to you about this. He said, no, no, don't tell me what you would do. Like, I'm the customer. Hello, I just picked up the phone. Go. And I was like, fuck. And so I, I was like, hey, uh, you know, I'm telling you about— I picked Basecamp as my software. Big mistake, because I don't even know Basecamp very well. And so I just like pulled—
I just— so they didn't call you back for that reason?
By the, by the end of that role play, he was just like, yeah, I don't think this is for you. I'm just being honest with you. Um, like, I just don't think you're, you know, uh, how old were you for this?
That was 8 years ago. Some—
yeah, I was like probably 23 or 24 at the time. How— ah, fuck, how early? I'm like, I, I blew it. Like, it wasn't their bad. Like, I definitely blew that interview. How early of an employee would you have been? So I think they were at like 50, maybe 50 people or less, or 100 people or less.
Damn, that could have cost you $5 million.
Well, yeah, I don't know how much equity I would have— I would have had to do the rocket ship thing. I would have had to start in a crappy seat, crush it, and then get into a good seat to get equity.
But like, I did that with Uber and Airbnb. I had job interviews at Airbnb and Uber early-ish, first 100 people. And, uh, one of them I got employed, one of them I got the offer, but then they rescinded it because I lied about my resume. And the other one I didn't get past the What did you lie about? I had a criminal record and I told them I didn't. Okay, so I moved all the way out here. I moved all the way out here and they're like, oh, all right, uh, don't come to work on Monday.
Dude, that's hilarious. Um, at least you had good eye for picking these companies.
And then I applied at Vungle and they sold for $800 million. So I always tell people, find out where I want to work at who will also deny me and then invest there.
Okay, let's start with where would you want to work at today if you were you back then? Where would you be applying today?
Great question. Do you have an answer?
Do you wanna go first? Couple years ago, I answered this. I was like, the only place I would be really interested working was AngelList at the time.
No, that'd be horrible place to work.
And so I thought AngelList was doing really interesting shit, and I think it's gonna be big. And it did end up becoming big. And this was like 7 years ago, so there's a while ago.
Yeah, no, that would be a horrible place to work though, because that Naval guy is fucking crazy. Really? I love Naval. Well, I don't know, but he seems like a brilliant genius. Is so a great person to listen to, but a horrible person to manage you. If, okay, if I had to work somewhere, I probably, hmm, probably just somewhere with really good managers.
Um, most startups have horrible managers and it means like when you were looking at Uber, Airbnb, you didn't know the managers, so you weren't using that criteria then.
No, but, and I don't know if it would have been successful. Sarah, my wife, works at Airbnb and she loves her managers. And you know how everyone's like, so what are you gonna do next? They always say that. And she's like, What do you mean? Why would I ever do anything next? This is awesome. I'll be here for a really long time. Right. And, uh, I would love to have that feeling.
I would probably now look for a company that's— I would go find all the most interesting, uh, biotech-based companies. So anybody doing something with genetics and genomics modification, anything like that, I think that's a big wave that's coming. I'd go try to be early there. Self-driving cars. If there's someone who's awesome there, I would do something in that. If— or, um, it's hard though.
It's really hard. If I wanted to make a lot of money let's say I wanted to like be like, all right, I'm gonna try and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in the next 3 years of work. Just go work at Facebook or what? Facebook, Google, or an enterprise sales role at a super boring B2B, uh, uh, enterprise software company, right? Where the, where the average deal is like $300,000 or $400,000 a year. Right.
That's what I would do. So, so if I took my own advice, I would look for who's a rocket ship. So I would try to maybe like Lambda School, I think is interesting. I would just basically try to go find who's the fastest growing startup right now that's at maybe 50 people or 20 people or what are the 10 people, whatever they are. I would go try to find them and then I would be like, hey, I'll come solve any problem you got.
Like, we'll figure it out. I went to the Substack office the other day. They just raised $16 million in funding. You know how many employees they have? 5. 5. I would— that would be an interesting place to work.
Ooh, ooh. Uh, okay, so for creating the owner's wealth, OnlyFans. For creating a valuable company that could potentially sell for more, Substack by far.
So take both paths, right? Substack's gonna either have to sell or go public, and OnlyFans might just, you know, spit off cash.
If I had to work, so where would I work?
No, no. Which business do you think nets more, more money in the end? Which business? OnlyFans. OnlyFans.
But if they do it right, I think it could be really big. Yeah. I was talking to that guy Hamish. I think he came to here the other day. Okay, cool. I was trying to get him on this podcast and he was—
I already asked him.
He said no. Yeah, he was like, oh, you know, my first million. I don't want to.
That's what he told me too. I'm like, shut up, just come do it.
Yeah. I was like, you're overthinking this, dude. You're just doing interesting things. We just want to talk about your shit. In front of a bunch of people who are interested. And he was like overthinking it a little bit.
Nice guy, but I went and met with him and the, their old CEO. We could probably get him on. They're just, uh, engineering dorks.
They're cool, right? And then, um, I think they're gonna have the same problem Patreon has, which is they're gonna build an awesome product that supports a lot of people, and people have— it's a really valuable tool, but they're taking a very small cut of a very small amount of money.
Yeah. And so what I'm trying to do is tell them to pivot. I'm like, guys, we'll pay you a fuck ton of money if you create paywalls for bigger companies, right?
They're not gonna pivot. They raised their money and they, they have their dream.
We're a few meetings in, we'll see. Yeah, I think it's a 10% chance. All right, that's pretty good.
Okay, cool. What else we got? Anything else?
Nope, we're cool. We'll end it now.
All right, thank you for listening.