Billy
Marcus Bullock turned prison into Flikshop, hustling into 2,700+ prison systems
Marcus Bullock, a former inmate (armed carjacking, tried as an adult), built Flikshop - an app that turns a photo and text into a physical postcard mailed to inmates - and personally pitched wardens to get it into over 2,700 prison systems.
“you basically do whatever you do with Twitter or Facebook You click on an image and you send it, but instead of sending an image between phones, you are sending it to Flikshop and they're going to write a postcard for you with the image and the text. And what's amazing about the story is the hustle involved for him to get into like over 2,700 prison systems in America. He was like meeting these wardens and administrators like in person, trying to convince them that they should allow Flikshop.”
Number
The US prison complex: 2.2M incarcerated, $81B spent, ~10% of population affected
Citing Cicero Institute stats, Trung sizes the prison market: 2.2 million people incarcerated, government spending of $81 billion, and an estimated 20-30 million family members directly affected - roughly 10% of the US population.
$81000M
US government spending on the prison system · USD per year
“I mean, 2.2 million incarcerated. And what Marcus said was essentially when you go to prison, your whole family goes to prison, right? So 2.2 million times what— call it the average family is 4 or 5 people, maybe extend is 10. You're talking 20, 30 million people directly affected by the prison industrial complex, right? That's 10% of the US population. US expenditure, government, state and federal, spent $81 billion on the prison system.”
Story
A Jay-Z lyric became Marcus Bullock's entrepreneurial mentor in prison
Asked who mentored him in prison as a teenager, Marcus Bullock pointed to Jay-Z's first album and a line from 'You Don't Know' - 'You can make $40 off a brick, but one rhyme can beat that' - which sold him on non-traditional, legal paths to entrepreneurship.
“He literally said he got hold of Jay-Z's album, his first album, and Jay-Z was rapping about these non-traditional paths to entrepreneurship. And the line that he said was from the song You Don't Know, he goes, You can make $40 off a brick, but one rhyme can beat that. So he's like, why be in the street hustling if there's these other paths that you can possibly use, right?”