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Buying NBA meme pages to acquire users for a sports-betting site
Sam relays a Trends interview: a guy who owns a sports-betting site bought Instagram meme accounts like 'ball'/'balls' and 'NBA Meme' (each 1-5M followers) for cheap user acquisition, then got Mark Cuban to chip in and promote the Mavericks using the ad inventory. You can't buy the handle, but you can buy the media company that owns it.
“Now there's a rule on Instagram. You can't buy the handle, but you can buy the media company that owns the handle. And anyway, this guy, he owns a sports betting site and he bought it to use for user acquisition for a sports betting site. And then he got Mark Cuban to throw a little money in.”
Steal thisAcquire a large niche meme page (buy the media company, not the handle) and use its owned audience as cheap, built-in user acquisition for your product.
Story
vidIQ's Rob fired his team, moved to surf in Santa Cruz, and pivoted to a Chrome extension
Greg tells the story of vidIQ founder Rob Sandie, who built a Hootsuite-for-YouTubers, then made a radical bet: he let go of most of his team, moved to Santa Cruz to surf 4-5 hours a day, and pivoted the whole company from a website to a Chrome extension — a move he had to justify to investor Mark Cuban.
“he gets rid of most of his team and moves to Santa Cruz, California, and becomes like, surfs every day, like 4 to 5 hours a day. So now remote is obviously more of a thing, but back then, no. And then decides to completely pivot the business. And because he fundamentally believed, hey, I'm going to forget this website. I'm going to change this to a Chrome extension. Imagine writing that email to your— to Mark Cuban's one of his investors”
Story
Mark Cuban ground 7 years on MicroSolutions, sold for ~$2M
Before Broadcast.com made him a billionaire, Mark Cuban ran IT-integration business MicroSolutions for 7 years from his mid-20s to early 30s, selling it for about $2 million. Sam uses it to show even billionaires put in long, slow years first.
“And with that business, he ran that business for 7 years. So from his mid-20s to his early 30s, and when he sold it, he made about $2 million, which is a lot of money, but he had a business for 7 years and he eventually became a billionaire.”
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Mark Cuban's driver: solve the problem, not chase the hours
Cuban reframes his workaholism: he didn't set out to work 36 hours straight. He saw each software problem as intellectually fascinating and was driven to solve it — plus he wouldn't get paid if he didn't. Love of the puzzle, not the grind itself.
“I looked at it as saying, okay, this is fascinating. This is intellectually challenging. I want to solve this problem. And if I don't do it, I'm not going to get paid and I'm going to lose all this time. So solve the problem. And that's what I would do.”