dude a freaking plug-in who would have thought and he kind of had like a funny eating grin on and i was like how big are you guys he was like we do over a hundred million dollars a year in sales and i was like would you ever believe it he was like yeah i thought it could be done and then and then i go you just raise money he goes yeah we raised 100 million the other day i go why he goes because it's a north of a billion dollar evaluation i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want what's up everybody we just recorded the pod we talked about uh i was on cnbc today so we talked about going on tv going on cnbc we talked about a bunch of business ideas that are chrome extensions which is kind of like a niche that nobody really talks about but sam's super into it and uh he brought the fire and then at the end we shoot the about a bunch of random things in maybe the last 10 minutes uh talking about you know some of the stuff from the michael saylor episode and uh and some cool stuff we have going on we just shoot the at the end that might have been the best part so stick around for that last 10 minutes of the pod all right enjoy all right great what's going on um congratulations um do you want to talk about family stuff or no uh yeah sure had a kid uh four or five days four days ago i think now congratulations what are the details uh but baby boy is here his name is banks and uh banks why banks uh i don't know we thought of the name a lot when we were trying to name my first kid and we her name's blush and so i just thought banks and blush go well together um i don't know i just thought it was a cool name wanted to do something cool name it's a cool name it's just a unique name so i was wondering if there's a reason yeah at least this one is a name uh the first one when we named her blush we googled like oh blush name meaning and there's literally like it's like that that's not a name bro so what is banks um banks is popular last name and because of that some people started doing it as a first name um hillary duff's kid his name banks i know that uh that's pretty much the extent of the popularity of it i don't really care to pick a popular name i'd rather pick a unique name um but i could tell like when we tell our family they're like what uh is their nickname what are we gonna do with this no banks is good my nephews are named avit like the ava brothers and jude like hey jude and then now they have a girl named billy so i'm team odd names there you go i know we can't all be sam's right or well people call you shen yeah um there's people that just straight call me shane and they just keep calling me that and i just am not correcting them and i've just now it's like we're years into the relationship it's like vendors that i work with um well congratulations so you're a year and a half older than me i am i'm 31 i for the longest time i was like i'm going to wait to have kids but then a few things happened the first so my wife sarah's 28. the first is that um a few of my friends one of them is 39 and um i think your wife's older than you right yeah by a year so like early mid 30s and and then a few of my friends are late 30s and these women are having kids and they're like oh my god it sucks so bad i wish i would have done it when i was younger right so i've changed my i've like i've thought about having wait the guy is saying that or the woman no the woman well the guys are like it's definitely harder to parent when you're in your 40s than when you're younger but mainly for the woman they're like just harder on the body and second i had a friend and he was like dude have a kid now i was like why like i want to have all this freedom he goes it's way different once i had a kid i realized the later that i had it the less years i'm gonna be able to spend with him and now i'm just gonna die sooner and i wish i would have had 10 more years and done it at 25 than 35 and i was like oh that's an interesting perspective so my opinion has been changing lately i might have a child soon but we're still deciding yeah and by the way before we get to the first idea congratulations on cnbc you were on there today did anyone reach out to you and because they saw you uh not really only people who knew me already you know like my mom was probably the most excited you know basically like people who are 30 years older than me were like this is amazing cnbc this is the i was on cnbc for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something like that and so but nobody you know like i don't know if i go tweet something i'll get a lot more messages than uh than going on tv which is weird but it definitely was a cool feeling and like i don't know it's like one of those things that like i woke up before my alarm clock because i was like okay today is a good day today's a big day i got something to do today that i've never done before these these broadcast networks like you think they're huge and they are huge and they have reach and all that but like the average viewers is only like 200 000 people at a time it's not uh it's not like crazy high in the world of social media yeah even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers they are it's like it's kind of like a background thing so and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience it's hard to get like it's hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment um yes so like it's i it's prestigious but it's definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you're coming on to talk about it was right or this podcast right more people will listen to this podcast and i'll get more mileage out of this it just doesn't have the same it doesn't feel the same it doesn't get the juices flowing in the same way that being on cnbc does but i also say this this is what i think is more interesting for anybody who's ever done this um have you ever gone on it's such a weird experience have you ever gone on a tv thing so you get you get connected in and it's like a zoom call basically right now um and you can't see them so on tv it looks like you're all like split screen like you see your face their face another person but in reality you have no you there's no facial expressions because you can't see each other's video so you're only hearing each other you don't know when when it's your turn to talk and then the thing i screwed up because i was like i was going on this checklist of like worry it's like okay is my home internet going to be good all right is my you know is my hair gonna look stupid am i gonna say something stupid am i gonna and then like it's never like the things you expect it's always something else so as soon as it started i was like like 10 seconds in you look if you watch the video my eyes are like darting around everywhere because i have nothing to look at they're not on video and so i'm just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and i look like it like i look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty and then like 30 seconds and i realized oh i need to be staring at this camera because that's what will look normal and so that was like a weird thing i did uh and the other thing was i said kim kardashian's butt and i said i know i thought that was funny balls and stuff so i said some stuff maybe i wasn't supposed to say no they kim k you're it was good you you were a good interview it was great uh i watched the whole thing it was good thank you um all right you want to talk about the first idea yeah let's do it you want to do uh this thing toucan yes okay so i um along with joe spizer we i'm kind of following in your footsteps a little bit we created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we're just investing we're just investing in companies again i grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called hampton and joe is wealthy and has a house in the hamptons all right we were thinking about names and i was like uh i grew up on this street called hampton you live in the hamptons it's just money or it's a fund we're mostly our my own money but uh him and i uh joe's an investor in your thing yeah and he would like man i want to put even more money and he goes you just want to invest with me i go yeah sure and then he's like you want to do a rolling phone i was like no that sounds like a lot of work yeah uh he's like you want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals like okay cool i'll do it with you right so it's just like a deal by deal basis so we created an angelus syndicate which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something sean you got you have to tell me and then i'll invest yeah dude i have a bunch um also i heard this great description of angel list which is like it's sub stack for vcs um which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund uh the same way right right lets you spin up a little newsletter it's awesome so yeah we did it and like so we i found a company already um and we invest and i was just gonna invest like i was gonna do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to 5 000 all the way up to 25 000 yeah i was just gonna do a ton of stuff but all low prices and um he was like why don't you just do the syndicate thing i was like all right let's try it so doing that but can i tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with so i know i know about this company but give the give the what is your kind of like two sentence description of it it's called toucan and it's basically the really dumbed down version is it's like duolingo which is a language learning website but it's a chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you're reading into the language that you want to learn so it's contextual learning um more complicated than that but that's the simple version right yes exactly so it helps you learn a new language without the effort i would say it's kind of genius honestly the founder what's your name taylor something she's magical she's great she's been a fan of the podcast actually she messaged us a long time ago like before this fundraise uh being like hey the pod is cool check out what i'm doing or maybe i did she really oh i can't believe i missed it and so i um so i've been following it since then i kind of thought about investing i didn't pull the trigger maybe i should have um but i thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it's okay so here's my thing um anything that there's a lot of these things that people want to do you want to work out you want to learn a new language you want to like become blah blah blah you have all these kind of like i should i should i should and you as as tony robbins calls it you should all over yourselves because you're just not doing the thing and the biggest friction is not that it's that hard to learn a language it's hard to make the time to like sit down open the book or download the app open the app and focus and just do duolingo for 30 minutes a day it doesn't sound that hard but in practice it's like it's a separate thing to do what i think is super smart about what toucan is doing is you don't have to make it a separate thing it's like you're already just browsing the internet so why don't we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every web page you're visiting so you're not you don't have to go to start a separate activity to learn the language you'll learn the language in bits and pieces while you're browsing so i thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius to be honest and um and you also like the space of chrome extension you kind of tip me off on the power of chrome extension so actually i don't even know why i didn't invest it seems like a great idea maybe maybe i'll hit her up after this and see if i can get in have you talked yeah do it if you don't know her well i can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her but this woman's a superstar i met with her and like within five minutes i was like oh well you're gonna be the ceo of a billion dollar company like oh really okay i hope it's this one but like she was just so put together she was so poised she was charismatic she it just she just oozed ceo um interesting i've never heard you say that who else have you felt that about if there's does anyone come to mind um the guy from superhuman whenever i heard him talk i was like oh yeah like you are uh some you i would bet on you for just about anything yeah whatever he was gonna do if he said i'm gonna write a book i'd be like oh it's gonna be great yeah i was like you know what i'm pretty sure you're gonna be successful yeah so i felt that about him um when we met with the shopify guy harvey or harley harley uh i kind of but obviously he's already hugely successful but like there's a handful of people we've interviewed when he came in he just had camera quality like nobody's business and so he just had this good looking guy in this great looking office with an incredible camera and i feel like you know he couldn't he didn't even say a word i was like oh wow this guy's like a power player yeah and so this woman i felt that with her i was like oh you she just she just was on top of it i just felt great another person and this is a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named pay y'all i think that's her name who started class pass pal pyle uh when i talked to her i was like oh you're really special uh so uh anyway this woman taylor met with her i was like oh you're i'm whatever yeah sounds good i'm in no matter what um and so but i started like also i mean let's we'll just we'll move on past two can but it's joinedtoucan.com the reason it's interesting is they have this like heads she worked at headspace so they have this like headspace cute branding right um by the way we should say toucan is like the bird toucan sam type of thing it's it's not yeah it's spelled like that t-o-u-c-a-n yeah toucan um which i don't know do those birds like speak or something i don't know maybe maybe that might be it yeah so so do you have any kind of stats you could share about them like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working uh i didn't ask her for permission to ask to talk about that but basically duolingo does like 200 million dollars a year in sales and has like i think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high and i just thought that and what i want to talk about in this segment is chrome plugins and i'm like well this company duolingo is very successful it's a 5 billion dollar company i think um i i've been thinking about chrome plugins what i think is like do two things one look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say well how can i just create this in the form of a google plugin or two which behaviors do people want but they don't do it because there's a little bit of friction and how can i use this plug-in to alleviate that friction right now there's a ton of downside with google plugins you know you're a google plugin so google can ruin you but it's incredibly incredibly incredibly interesting to me and that's what i wanted to bring up was some google plugin stuff and so basically what this i don't know if this is how she did it but she basically um uh or the way that i look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing so for example learning a language people already want to learn a language you just change the text of the article to a different language or at least parts of it grammarly did this with grammar so you just fix it as you write uh one that i use all the time is similar web so it tells me the traffic of someone's website uh passwords you use passwords on a regular basis so a plugin just inserts different passwords and loom is another one have you heard of loom oh yeah my buddy was with the guy who started it isn't that worth like a billion dollars uh not yet but getting close it's several hundred millions i think it was the last round and all it does is uh screen record recordings yeah so so they basically say oh you want to show something on your screen here's a click boom record share um so the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is honey because honey sold to paypal for several four billion four billion dollars so honey had i think 17 million users when they sold and what honey does is if you're about to go check out on some website honey will go in the background it's looking for is there is there a deal on this is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else or a coupon you can use right now and its surface is a discount okay that makes total sense i don't have to take an action i have to remember to go look for a coupon it's just gonna do it and it's the honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you so that was one grammarly was another that i think shocks people because grammarly does over 100 million dollars a year so the grammarly founder spoke at hustlecon and he's an engineer he's like a very um by the book like straight shooter engineer he's really cool his name's max and i was like shooting the with them and i was like dude a freaking plug-in who would have thought and he kind of had like a funny eating grin on and i was like how big are you guys he was like we do over a hundred million dollars a year in sales and i was like would you ever believe it he was like yeah i thought it could be done and then and then i go you just raise money he goes yeah we raised 100 million the other day i go why he goes because it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation yeah i was like oh my god you pulled it off yeah they did it exactly um so those are like the big successors but there are some other ones right so we have pinterest was started as i believe a chrome chrome extension so it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for pinterest to be a cool app uh you needed a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web so that was one and then there's others that like like for example if i look at the plugins that i have installed i have adblock or you know ublock origin or whatever that's definitely one of them and so i think i think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company it's like dude you're just making this like plug-in and definitely there's a lot of people like my mom doesn't know what chrome extensions are she doesn't know there's a chrome extension store she doesn't really know how to install them like she knows apps but she doesn't know chrome stuff so you're gonna get a little bit more of a tech savvy audience you know it's a smaller market overall but the first one is a big deal i actually want to change your opinion of that so i went and looked at the numbers there's 1.6 billion iphone users okay 1.6 billion users 2 million iphone apps in the store right now chrome users 3 billion chrome users 200 000 plug-ins there's a ton of opportunity here i hear you that like your mom doesn't know how to do this but does your mom if she saw a commercial on tv for grammarly i bet you she would know what to do you just go to grammarly.com actually she does grammarly because of that um she saw it and she's self-conscious about her english because she learned english later in life and she like doesn't want to write something stupid so she downloaded grammarly for that reason actually and so that's why when i saw this toucan thing i was like oh you guys just run a commercial for this on tv that's easy you're going to get so many users and the the plug-in the reason why the plug-ins are interesting to me is the churn is so low churn on plug-ins are so low compared to iphone apps or and we built so we both have plug-ins do you have a plug-in for the hustle i have a plug-in for my my one big thing framework of just like what's the turn on one there's like no churn on it dude we have like thousands of users now the engagement's not super high like they don't always use the thing uh but they leave it installed and um it's like you know it's so we've both dabbled in this not seriously i would say neither of us took it super seriously but we were interested enough for both of us to build a chrome extension and get it out there to you know five ten thousand people it's interesting and i think that uh um i just think that people discount it and i think that it's far more it's far more interesting than most people realize and so i actually had a brave pull some of the biggest uh plug-ins so it's uh ad block ad block plus adobe acrobat what do you use adobe acrobat for i don't know probably like flash or something i don't know um safe price which is a deal thing video conferencing from uh cisco google translate which is kind of an indicator about for two can which is interesting honey pinterest say button skype what's uh tamper monkey uh i don't know it looks like it's trying to keep you safe dude there was a cool one got ghostery back in the day that would just show you who who's trying to track you on every website you go to that was kind of cool and try to shut that down uh there's also these paid ones so are there was there anything interested in the paid group no but tell me about the ones that you've invested in because they're actually similar because i and so in this document that we have i said screenshots would be great and you said oh i invested in this thing called bubbles which i remember you telling me about it but what is that bubbles is a lot like loom which we talked about earlier so the idea is how do you easily share what's on your screen with your co-worker who wants to see it and be able and so how do you do that some people just take a screenshot right they use the hotkey on their keyboard they take a screenshot and it goes into their desktop file then they have to go grab that then they drag and drop that to their friend and then the friend has to comment on it but they can't comment on it they have to like send it back as another file it's kind of annoying right so what bubbles does is much simpler it says it's a little chrome extension and on any page you go to you can say i want to record a screen recording like a video i want to take a screenshot or my favorite one is a scroll screenshot so like you know when you're on a website that like is long and you want to take screenshots of the website you have to take like eight screenshots and then send them as separate files to something yeah it's a pain with this it just takes one long screenshot and sends it to the person so it's it's easy to capture what's on your screen you can then comment like bubbles so it's like a speech bubble so you just click anywhere where you want to point something out on the screen like let's say for the hustle you want to make the trends website better you would click bubbles you would record a screenshot you would tap on the part of the screen where you're like this thing is stupid we need to change this and you would write this thing as stupid we need changes and then that's a the whole file is a link you just share a link with somebody else and they can comment back like a google doc and so is it doing well yeah it's doing well it's doing well specifically actually i think the niche initial niche that they've done well with is agencies and so agencies like creative agencies there's always creative people within the team that are sending ideas mock-ups concepts back back and forth with each other and then they have to share with the client also and the client has to give feedback so there's a lot of showing screen stuff and commenting back and forth on it and so that's where they're getting an initial foothold and i think it'll kind of break out from there so it's like loom but it does more than what loom does and what's dashworks so dashworks is a company of sn that is um it's like the home page for your company so this is this is a chrome extension that's sold to companies so let's say um somebody joins the hustle you give them their laptop if you work with dashworks when they when they open up their google chrome for the first time to use the internet they would not just see like the generic google like new tab page they would see like the hustle's branded page and that page can do three things one there's a search bar and you could type in anything into that search bar and it'll find the file inside your company so like most companies now use slack and google drive and dropbox and asana and github and like all these different tools that are all in the cloud so like if you've ever been on your macbook and you want to find a file you just use like the little spotlight search finder right you just type it into spotlight it finds the file on your computer but the thing is now with the cloud none of the files you need are on your computer they're all in the cloud so this is basically that search bar for all your cloud apps so now that so what it does is it helps any any employee find any file that's in your network without knowing where to go to find it right it's just like it's working yeah this is cool so then the second thing you can do is you can search anyone's name so i could be like oh what does steph smith do with the hustle i type steph it'll show me her profile show me what she does who she reports to and that sort of thing and then the last thing is that um you as the kind of ceo or your kind of your your admin at the company can post announcements or updates that will show up in their chrome like new tab bar so you can be like oh welcome these new employees or like happy birthday to this person or hey remember this friday we're all doing you know happy hour or whatever and so it's a kind of a communication pipe also so that that i thought was cool they're taking the chrome extension to deliver critical internal company stuff a search for people search for files and and internal announcements so um this this is interesting and another one i actually don't know how to say this company but you wrote it in here how do you pronounce that luster uh jack our friend jack was one of the early users and i think invested in it and he says it's awesome but basically they look at wire cutter amazon and dozens and dozens of other sources and anytime you have a product in front of you it tells you the average review um kind of interesting i don't know how i think it's a little better than that i think what they do is you say yourself yeah my description was about a year ago you yeah i think what it does is you go on amazon or whatever and you search for flat screen tv and uh you know it's there's so many products out there and all of them you know great it's four stars what do i make of that um and so what luster does is try to make the buying process simpler so it'll basically say here's the recommended option for what you searched for is the mo this rrai has searched all the reviews all the different websites has all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you're looking for and then here's the high-end version of it and here's maybe the low-end version of it and so i don't know if the product's evolved too much since then but that's what it kind of did at that time was it would help you figure out which product should you actually buy using data and again you didn't have to remember to go to luster it was a chrome extension so you're just on any website shopping you can go to walmart go to amazon you go bestbuy.com wherever you're searching and luster will be like hey here's the product we recommend and here's why here's what the reviews say about it summarized automatically for you which i thought was pretty cool i think that that's a this could be a good product when he pitched it to me and when jack told me about it i was like this is stupid i'm not in uh i understand though i actually i think i i was wrong about it it's really cool yeah so the founders was really smart and and um for this one he showed me a chart uh a graph that was doing pretty well so here's some other ideas of things so those are ideas that we've either invested in or seen i have a couple more for you so let's use your framework of take a popular app like duolingo that shows that there's a need or a demand people want to learn a language and you make it a chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app so or at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution right so let's take meditation right you have headspace you have calm um why don't you have a chrome extension a chrome plug-in that will basically say it'll see you know you've been on you've been browsing for two hours straight you've had you have 85 tabs open hey let's take a minute would you like to earn some earn some mindfulness points and take one minute quick meditation and it just you tap the thing it turns on there's a clock and there's like a guided voice that's doing a guided meditation for you i think so i think i think meditation delivered through a chrome extension could work because it's so popular as a mobile app but again for mobile app you have to remember to go do it whereas this could just kind of like as you go it could pause you and uh and help you out that's great i think that has that has legs uh i'll i'll i'll keep going with this game um do you know the you know how do you on your iphone what's that thing called where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time oh yeah like time something i don't know i don't know what do you think part of that i never use that no do you yeah i mean i have it installed screen time screen time um i used to have this chrome plug-in called nukem i think it was called nukem or the option was called nukem where after a certain amount of time you would nuke your website and you cannot go to certain websites so you could only go to like google docs email and that was it uh i loved it so similar to meditation i would 100 percent try to create more of a of of these uh what do you call this uh change your stop using stuff app right right right yes defend yourself against yourself okay i have a smart idea and i have a gimmick idea which one you want okay smart one or the gimmick one smart one first all right smart one first okay we had the founder of you mentioned the founder of superhuman he's the guy who built rapportive before that we both loved rapportive it doesn't exist now so some people might not know what it is but what reported was doing was when you were emailing somebody as soon as you typed in their name or their email a little sidebar would pop out of your email that would just show you their face show you their name show you the last few tweets it was like at the time it was like magic we were like how on earth do they know all this it was so it just makes you a more thoughtful person because you can see the person you can see what they're up to you can click their linkedin get a little more information and it kind of did like it served it up it was like you had an amazing assistant executive assistant who was like you know by the way sir you need to know this about this person so i think you could take rapportive all around the web so i think you could make it where any time it sees a name on a web page it just highlights it yellow and then if you just hover over that it'll just tell you something about that person so i think you could bring this idea of like anytime you see a name tell me a little bit more about that person i could think you could turn that into a chrome extension rather than something that was just for email how would you make money off of it um ads boom that's my easy answer i don't know oh all right um okay but here's my gimmick one which definitely needs ads so uh i think there should be a chrome extension let me take that back i don't think this should exist i think this would be funny if somebody tried to do this um so if you ever remember million dollar homepage it was kind of this cool idea of like here's a web website there's a million pixels on the page buy a buy pixel and sponsor it okay that's cool i've always thought about similar ideas how could you make a million bucks of something simple and goofy and there's this concept in in the bitcoin world of i think it's called a fountain or a tap it's basically a website where you go to and then sometimes there's like a think about like a spout like a fountain and uh sometimes bitcoin free bitcoin comes out and so a bunch of people like to go to these to so some projects use these to say like go collect your coin for my new coin go there and get some and you like go to the website you like collect some of the new coin that you can get and then other people have done this to be like hey sometimes something comes out sometimes it doesn't it's a game of chance it's like a um what do they call this they call it a um there's this company that did this with candles we talked about them it was called like diamond candles i think and at the bottom of every single candle we're talking candles like a wax candle that you burn in your bathtub or whatever like like cool candles that's the only way i don't use candles is what i'm saying i like that you start dropping f-bombs to like get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles yeah i gotta do it i use my my bath bombs or what are they called uh yeah anyway i've got all of them i'm a i'm a sensitive guy man and anyway uh they at like one in ten thousand candles probably has a one thousand dollar diamond right the rest have like nothing right uh something but like a like a like a cracker cracker jack ring and what you could do with this is you could always have coupons or discounts off of something and if you redeem them you get the chrome extension gets a kickback but every once in a while one out of x does get a bitcoin right yeah so something like that where basically every time you open a new tab there's a little little package in the middle of the screen you give it a quick click and then you're either gonna get nothing you get air you get you know a tiny little something it's like a puzzle piece or you know maybe like a little something i don't know something or you can actually get some bitcoin you can get you can get little satoshi's basically and so it would just become this little like the little hamster game where every time you open a new tab are you really gonna not click the thing and um and so i think you could get a lot of people to install this to try to get free bitcoin while they just browse the internet every time they open a new tab it's like a little mini scratch off lotto ticket that they get to scratch off that might have some crypto inside and um you could give away little coins you could give away micro amounts of bitcoin you can give away little puzzle pieces and if you get it right it's like the monopoly game at mcdonald's where you actually earn the bitcoin if you get all the pieces you can make a game out of it basically and uh and then the rest of the screen you just plaster with ads or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad and i think that's how you make money off of my gimmick chrome extension well i hope someone tries this because i think it would be hilarious that they create a product out of your joke so long story short we'll move on to we'll move on from uh chrome plugins but i think it's so cool i think people are underestimating this space a ton and i'm excited to see what comes out of there the last thing i'll say on this is the general idea here is just um there's a platform with three billion users and it has an app store there's gonna be winners right that now that i look back isn't it obvious like i still stand by hey there's only 200 000 chrome extensions and there's two million apps right so it's 10 times less but hey like that doesn't matter there's several winners that we've talked about here so i would say how many other platforms are like this right so like you know there's everyone talks about apps and you know google play or the apple store but what else is there right like hubspot has a platform um you know salesforce has a platform slack has a platform you know where are all these platforms and there's gonna be winners like once these platforms reach a critical mass somebody's gonna build something that's frictionless on top of it that um is able to generate revenue so i think there's there's money to be made in the unconventional app platforms that you don't really think about first yeah and i could go on forever about it but i think there's it's wordpress i think there's google sheets i think there's gmail right i mean it's a lot of google stuff but i think there's way more than people think right um what do you want to do um let's do uh what's the update on social stuff what is that oh i was saying just like our videos man our videos are crushing it we're uh the guys um henry and jordan or henry and dylan who are making these um we made an offer to them to make dozens and dozens a month are they doing it because i love their videos i think they're gonna do it so we're gonna do like i asked them i'm like send me a quote to do 30 to 60 of videos a month right so they'll do our stuff i actually think that they can reduce the quality a little bit like they're too good well like they take a long time i think that i think they can reduce the quality on youtube because i think people watch youtube a bit more passively i think and they should uh continue with the high quality on instagram and twitter because it's only two minutes long so um weird so so people need to subscribe to watch the videos because they're not just it's not just a video of what we talk about it basically takes this hour-long thing where we're just shooting the it finds the most interesting two minutes it edits us down so that we sound smart and it animates over the top of it so it's like actually fun to look at and it makes way more sense than just hearing us talk about so where do they go to actually watch the videos because we need them to subscribe to the video place so there's a few ways you can do it the first is you follow either sean or sean and i on twitter and we share them a lot personally the second is the hustle's twitter which is just the hustle the third is the hustle's instagram which is the hustle daily the fourth is our youtube channel which we actually have to figure out how to do this because we're using our old youtube account called youtube.com hustlecon so just google the hustle my first million on youtube you'll see it but we have to figure out how to manage that because they're actually kind of getting popular now you know five or ten thousand views a video um and if we do three a week which we're going to start doing that's kind of that gets to be somewhat interesting right so we got to figure that out but those are the ways that they can find it right now yeah i like that i go through the youtube one i like youtube myself and so uh but they're getting a ton of comments yeah the comments are great and i love responding to the comments so i'm just right now it's early days right i'm responding to all the comments because me too fun and they make fun of me a lot i can make fun of you more than you soon there'll be too many comments to respond to but for now i think there's like 17 000 subscribers so i want to like triple that just off of the listeners from this podcast so go to youtube.com hustlecon like hustle.com and then um subscribe to that thing so that you get the videos from us and then work and there'll be a video a video will have only 5 000 views but like 100 and some odd comments which has kind of been crazy and then the instagram is getting stupid amount of engagements and i think sean you're actually crushing me in terms of clips with hits so a handful of your clips have gotten close to 100 000 views um we had one with zach crockett one of our riders and he got 70 000 i think the other day nice and so we're just gonna start churning them out and we're going to do way more of these um i think we're going to launch a few more podcasts it's tbd but there's one called like how x makes money so like steph wants to break down how um something makes money and then a similar podcast is the economics of blank uh well we'll talk about the economics of something else um what else are we gonna do i forget a few but anyway we gotta like we're gonna just churn out these clips yeah it's way better to listen to honestly like when i listen to those i'm if i listen to the podcast i kind of cringe myself because i'm like i hate hearing my voice and also you know we wander it's a it's an off-the-cuff unedited conversation but the clips um they're great they're just great all right anyways what else let me wrap this up one thing and i just want to say this now because i think i want to like look back and remember this i think that in one year from now and maybe two years from now these style of clips that we're doing on social are definitely they're kind of their own genre would you agree like it's not like we're changing the world here so i don't want to like over no we're going to get copied if that's what you're getting at because already every time we every time i retweet one of them other successful podcasters or like youtubers are like holy who's making your clips and i'm just like dude you don't i don't know their name i forgot i swallowed that key and that box is locked because i think they're great i think they're better than everyone else's and i don't want everybody copying us and having the same but it's gonna happen it is gonna be the beginning of a new genre do you agree like no one makes high quality for a twitter video yeah and it's uh it's like easy it's easy pickings basically for for us now um all right uh we'll do one more segment yeah let's do it what do you have i got two quick ones so first gumroad just raised five million dollars through a crowdfunding campaign uh i wanted to get your take real quick we can go quick on i don't know how much we have to talk about this but good investment bad investment and then the background yeah secondly i want to know because you raised crowdfunding also so i want to hear your thoughts on that but i'll give the two seconds on gumroad so uh if you've never used it gumroad's awesome as a product it's uh the easiest way as a creator like if i make an ebook or if i make a pdf that i want to sell that has a bunch of information on it i'll go to gumroad all in 10 minutes i'll have a website up that can that i can sell my digital product and i can take payments from it so it does two things right it lets you sell a digital product so like shopify is not great for this shopify is more for like physical products and uh it's just simple it's like i'm just selling one thing i don't need a complicated store and i want to like have to like write code and also like i just want somebody to be able to come and pay with a credit card and the other cool feature they have is you can make it like kind of like pay what you want uh so it's sort of like a tip jar essentially for for something you make and so some people have made you know a lot of money doing this i think some people at the hustle i know steph did a book on i think gumroad that did like thirty thousand dollars in sales maybe 50 or something like that it did 70. i've made 10 i've made tens of thousands of dollars on gumroad what was your product you sold on gumroad how to so before the hustle i owned a roommate matching business and i mastered craigslist and in cities like san francisco and new york um a person on craigslist will get hundreds of replies to their apartment and so i just taught people how to email people in order to get an apartment on craigslist and it was so successful that on the first date with my now wife i asked her how she got an apartment she's like oh i just needed some guide online and she bought my guide i mean i sold a lot of them so that was my product that's hilarious i didn't know that um yeah so gumroad is called by the way i'll plug it gumroad the miracle craigslist template there you go um okay so so it's for that kind of thing it enables a different kind of seller been around for like i literally think 10 years now they went through this crazy story where they came out got hot raised a bunch of money from like big name vcs then things didn't go so well had to basically unwind the whole thing so like laid off or let go or employees left or whatever went back to like kind of like a one to three person operation i think um they went to like kind of bootstrapping it and went back to kind of like focusing on profitability and because they realized they couldn't raise any more money and then now they're back 10 years later so that was like you know a 10-year arc and now they're like kind of restarting it again like we're going big again and uh and they have some pretty interesting metrics so bray you pull up their go to their uh fundraising thing the metrics are are it doesn't make that much money but it has a so basically the way gumroad works is people post stuff for sale and so in terms of gross transactions i don't think they re no before that is 200 200 and something million 220 ish uh million dollars in gmv which is a bit like a month or a year yeah per year yeah so pretty high gmv it's growing like crazy uh it's a really good product i love it but the actual not the net income but like the uh net revenue um it's not significant it was like 200 000 a month it was like um i think i just read it so so i'll pull these up but uh or you go get the republic their fundraising page it has all the stats on it but basically if i remember correctly it's like eight to nine million dollars of net income last year that they got to keep and then from that they had one million dollars profit at the end of the year i don't think then it's that high but that would be cool if it were but the basis basically exploded during the kind of like covid um bump it so you could check check out this this fundraising page real quick we'll just we'll just yeah go ahead read off the stats and then i'll tell you my opinion well i'll just tell you my opinion now while you're looking that up which is i would not invest in this at all i would run away from this okay so i'll do the number i'm gonna explain why in a second last year okay i was a little high so last year 73 million this year 143 million um and then their revenue off that was 9 million their gross profit they say is 2.6 million and the net income at the end of the day for them was 1 million dollars uh in 2020. and it was only 1 million because they only had one employee so of that two so they really had two point six million dollars in revenue and the only thing they had to support was one or two employees and certainly nine million in revenue nine million was their take off the total transaction and then they have more than one employee now i think because he kind of like rebooted the company to grow again and so nine million is what the company made so but they're raising i think at like a hundred million dollar valuation or something like that um i would not i would not invest in this at all we've really butchered the numbers here sorry yeah we should have prepped this one uh i would not invest in this at all and i'll tell you why i was a fan of gumroad since 2012. my friend nathan barry told me about it because he had a book there and he went and spoke at the gumroad office and i went to their office and watched him speak and i was like damn this is great what is this whole government thing this is awesome yadda yadda i started i began as a governor to use in 2011. but the founder was like a prodigy his name sahil i think his name seemed like a like a cool dude real smart he left pinterest as the third employee to start this he was like a prodigy started the company at 19. but he failed um which is great that's fine you know you take swings it doesn't always work out and he raised 16 million dollars he got the investors to write it off saying like all right we'll give you back all the equity this is dead for us and then he went and worked on it and he kept working on it which is cool but now none of the investors or the employees who previously worked there all their equity got completely canceled out because somehow in good faith they said we're out of here fine you could have it and it's actually going to turn out to be something and i wouldn't want to invest in this person for two reasons the first i don't think that he cares about investors i think that he just cares about creating cool stuff and making his lifestyle great which is no no problem i'm like that as a little bit as well but i wouldn't want to invest money at 100 million evaluation someone with that attitude two if he takes the money and doesn't give money back to the people who gave equity to and tries to build this thing to sell uh i think that that's unethical and i don't wanna be part of that so that's why i would pass on this interesting yeah i've i heard somebody else talking about that as well uh i don't know the whole situation so i can't say you know exactly how those conversations went down and what everybody was on board with and whatnot by the way i don't know the whole situation either a lot of what i've just said is is is that's the public sound i've heard rumors and a lot of it is hypothetical but this is what i think is i mean if you if you just read publicly what's going on you can kind of it's right that's in line with what i've heard so none of that's out of line i don't think that he did it to screw anybody at all i don't think so i think literally the expectations of the company were too high it wasn't going to continue growing at that pace it wasn't i don't think he tried to do anyone either so he was like either we shut this down we fire sale this or we kind of unwind it and get it back to a bootstrappable company but if we're going to do that then this whole venture structure and all these employees don't make any sense anymore and i'm great with that right i'm great with that until right now you're going back to the growth story now the reason i wouldn't invest is just pretty simply i don't think it's a great business i don't like businesses like this i don't like patreon i don't like substance for the same reason i think they are amazing products they are good for the world but they make for crappy businesses if you just look at the numbers if you know these guys doing 150 million dollars of gmv 10 years into the business and they're making a million dollars a profit at the end of the day still is there so that million dollars of profit you're valuing at 100 million dollars today which means for me to get 10x on my money which is what i need for a illiquid early stage startup this has to become worth a billion dollars or more and so you're telling me that this company that's doing you know sub 10 million in revenue sub you know like about 1 million in profit is gonna be worth a billion dollars i find it like i think it's a bad bet and you're not getting paid for the risk you're taking because you're already paying up at 100 million valuation why because he's super popular on twitter he's super well connected with other investors like naval as an investor and all this stuff um because they're friends and whatnot and so i think that i don't think the retail investor is getting a great deal here i think that's also i have this general thing that's kind of unpopular which is uh crowdfunding is the you know bottom of the barrel companies like the best companies the ones that are hot that are growing get picked up by professional investors and the stuff that you end up seeing on crowdfunding sites i don't think are the big breakout companies in general now i know the hustle actually did a small crowdfunding thing but yours was a little different yeah i could raise that you raised from real investors and you could have raised all the money from real investors you raised most of it you just opened up a small amount so your community would feel like bought into the product i think that's a different thing then it is a different thing i actually regret doing that and i wish i didn't do it um and i wish i didn't do it because when you do that you now have a whole lot of people who are going to ask you questions and things like that and it's quite distracting and did they get paid out by the way from this deal that the deal they all got to check so they all know what the thing sold for then right how are you how are you planning to keep it a secret if they are all going to get some multiple of their money because the multiple that they get was because the total consideration was like the retention of employees and all that stuff they don't get that yeah like i personally am going to make a ton like maybe more money just off the retention package than the cap table package right um so there's things like that and also it depends i'm not saying for my deal but for some deals it depends how the note's structured yep um but it's it's not fun i think because you have to report to people on a quarterly basis about certain stuff and so it's basically like you're a publicly traded company yeah that may not be worth the hassle i don't think it's worth the hassle um and i do agree that a lot of them are bottom of the barrel not all but a lot right yeah that said if you're okay with the not having privacy which some people are cool with that i do actually think it's wise to get some users to invest in you you know this is actually how um samuel adams beer company got started they let their customers buy shares in the company before it went public and then and and in their case they said it helped them a ton i agree i like when you raise from customers i don't and i think that's a totally different thing than just going on a crowdfunding platform and saying hey person who wants to invest in tech but you don't have the network and you don't have the know-how and you're not in any of the funds um like you should just invest in my thing you're not a customer of it whereas like let's say you're samuel adams or next week next episode i'm going to talk about ben and jerry's ben and jerry's did the same thing they did it they did a share offering to their local customers in vermont so that they would be more likely to shop at their store continue to come back to the store because they feel like a part owner what you guys do with the hustle you let the readers invest um i think that's very different than what you see on most of the crowdfunding sites which is basically what when you show up on a crowdfunding site it's typically i struck out with real investors so this is my last show you know and that's why i say bottom of the barrel that's not nice and you know i'm sure that's not the case for all the companies i have friends that have done this and the friends i've had that have done this that's exactly what happened they struck out with the sophisticated investors so they go to the unsophisticated investors and try to patch together three thousand dollar checks five thousand dollar checks or whatever to get and it doesn't mean that they're not going to be successful it just means they weren't they couldn't get it done in the church where the business is at today was not juicy enough where these hawks the you know professional investors are like hawks they circle these companies that are that are high growth potential that could be big big winners and they pounce on them but you can't even you know before they even start fundraising they'll often get picked up and so um typically if you're at the crowdfunding point that means you've not only not got scooped up early by the hawks you probably went and pitched them and they said no and now you're on the retail investor great well you want to do one more topic or yeah let's do one more uh the other one is this idea or something cool that uh ben showed me called study stream live have you heard of this no google it somebody tried doing this for working but it's basically like hey everybody's working from home remotely it can be kind of lonely and i forgot what the name of the of the work related one was but it's basically i had one it was called peak and it was horrible dude there was like times where like we had this one plug-in where it would take a picture every 30 seconds or every two minutes or something so you could like see your co-workers and do but like there'd be times like like look this isn't this sounds like bro and embarrassing but there's definitely times where you're shirtless where you're on the toilet using your computer where you're like walking around in your underwear and there was times they caught me like shirtless in a peek and i was like oh my god this is right like right when you're laying in bed like playing on the computer or like so that's a bit of a different thing alright so i know what you're talking about that's like a uh kind of like spontaneo like it's kind of like a passive way of sharing what you're what you're doing this is different there's this is you want a focus do you want kind of like a study buddy and so you say all right for the next hour match me with someone else i think focus mate is the name of the one i was thinking about which is it matches you with one person and you get to work together you're both going to work on something at the beginning you're like oh yeah i'm working on my email newsletter today and the other person's like yeah i have this report i need to give to my boss okay i'm on there right now i'm on their website i already know what's going to happen with this company so let me explain what it is first so so you get paired for the hour you're supposed to focus and get something done so it's supposed to increase your productivity because you kind of have like a buddy who's holding you accountable from just drifting off and doing nothing um and you also can meet people and it's like kind of like a speed dating thing where you're gonna end up bumping into people and you're not just alone all day in silence in your house so that's the idea focus mate was trying to do it for for work this study um the study thing what was called study what livestream it's study stream live so these guys are doing it for studying for university students who are doing remote learning and um it is blowing up actually and so if you go there and you try to join one of these rooms they have like ten thousand person rooms uh like you can go join like a server like okay i'm gonna join this server there's a thousand spots they're all full like go go i've tried i tried them sometimes they're full uh most of the most of the day and uh which is interesting that means there's about 10 000 people that can concurrently using this product at any given time how did ben find this he said oh this thing's going viral on tick tock um and so that they might be like a temporary thing where they're full right now because they're going viral on tick tock but you know tick tock is kind of a younger generation and they're basically it speaks to them which is like hey you know you're at home it's kind of lonely it's kind of boring and you don't meet anybody but you don't get to see your friends you don't get to meet any people and you i want to focus i wouldn't say it's going viral the most video has 35 000 views um but they do have traction for sure like every video has seven thousand views so yeah i think it's other people it's not their own videos i think there's other people talking about it that went viral that's how people discovered it somebody okay i'm on the website right now i go to their website it says boost your focus join a 24 7 virtual room i click a room to join uh i click focus room and i click the room to join and it just takes you to a google uh a zoom room right like don't do it it's going to mess up the podcast but don't join it well i just clicked it and it like prompts you for a zoom room now am i weird or dirty and thinking i think this is just going to become like dicks i mean i think that the younger people the people who use this uh are like better internet people than our generation so i don't think i don't i actually like our generation i think would default to thinking it would be dicks i think that this these folks would not default to that but is this looks like a really innocent and lovely internet community is it going to be ruined with that that's probably wherever there can be dicks there will be dicks right so i think i think there definitely there's going to be some people doing it they're going to have to figure out a way to stamp that out one thing might be you know the big thing here is can they can they pull off a subscription so can they get you to pay to have this this you know study buddy kind of set up where you get to focus you get to meet some new people will people pay i i'm skeptical of it but i found it interesting this is new i don't know how to feel about it and so i think rather than judge i'm just i'm just kind of like i'm gonna watch this one and see what happens so a whole bunch of media dorks that i'm friends with they're all like oh media is like the future of education commerce and community like they use these stupid ass buzzwords and they say all this no or they say like we're going to create like a 3d thing things you can it's like no no no you guys are thinking about this whole like first of all colleges are always going to exist and we're always going to need them whatever yeah yeah but this company that i'm seeing uh study stream this is a crazy unique gen z like the people who i've talked about who say this are typically in their 30s and 40s um this looks like it was created by an 18 year old who's in the know and it's totally unique it's so interesting i don't care if this fails i think it's a really good uh swing very unique very very unique very great person it was like a student project i don't think this is meant to be like a company necessarily like there's a kind of like an about page on there you could probably check it out but it sort of said like this was made by the student group of whatever like some place and it just seems kind of like a humble side project that is getting a little bit of momentum and it kind of tells you like there's something interesting there it's not easy to get that level of traction uh well i don't know if it'll stay it's probably not gonna be the biggest thing in the world but i thought that was a pretty neat idea i think that this is an incredibly successful um project uh who created this i'm looking for it there is a guy named paul scott did he create this i just like him googling the url um you can't find anything about it people on reddit are talking about it uh this is crazy that's yeah this is super interesting it's very it's still very underground yeah seriously i thought this was cool um that's all i kind of have for today i have uh i have two good ones for next uh the next pod so i'm excited about that i found it uh it had this thing has funding it's like a company company so i googled studystream.live and i went to a guy's linkedin page and he's the co-founder of a vc firm it's called knowledge collective is a venture builder focused on global impact by disrupting health education and sustainability and he has studystream.live as one of their portfolio companies along with studypal dot live young leaders.digital and dot institute i think that's all that's all for this episode let's wrap it um i'll break you what'd you think of this one oh by the way uh everyone said that the um recap at the michael thing was the best thing so i guess we should do those more yeah i thought that was good i hope people stuck around to the end because we didn't uh i think we probably should have put a line in at the beginning that was like hey this is an interview with michael saylor he's an awesome guy for this reason and uh you know the interview was a little bit weird we actually debriefed it at the end of the show uh if you want to skip to the last 10 minutes you want to listen to it that's the last 10 minutes but blah blah i feel like there's probably a lot of people who got five minutes in or 10 minutes in and we're just like what's going on here uh yeah i'm gonna listen to something else i'm gonna go do something else but the people who didn't make the end gave us a lot of good feedback on it but by the way some of the feedback that we got was like why'd you guys try to brow out with him at the beginning about cars and like he didn't want that like dude we actually what's so funny is we like planned that we're like what should we like do icebreakers like we said like eight ideas and i was like i can just ask them about cars right and we're like oh that's the best of the worst just ask them about cars yeah i would agree with them that it didn't work but i would not agree that you should just like not try to get the guests into like like to shake off their pr speak right like it you know more times than not it's better to get somebody feeling loose and comfortable and laughing and talking about something that they're genuinely like something about themselves than them just showing up for their you know eighth interview of the last week and just saying the same thing again which you know for a guy like him he does a ton of interviews so you know if you want to listen to one of those like i've listened to many of them they're all the same on youtube you can go listen they're good but they're all the same and so i was hoping to shake them uh we failed at it and i actually had a kind of an interesting learning afterwards uh that i'll tell you about i um i was thinking afterwards i was training i went and worked out right after the thing and my trainer could tell my head was kind of somewhere else at the beginning he's like what's up and i was like man we just had this interview with this guy i'm so excited about it because i think he's a baller but honestly the interview was kind of awkward and um and i felt like he was he was a little bit flat it didn't seem like he wanted to be there and then i feel like you know i thought we could shake him out of that i thought we could make it good no matter how the guest comes in but like it didn't work or the we tried didn't work and he was like he asked me a question and i i sort of thought about it he goes you know he got me thinking there's this woman named glo who is the executive coach for a bunch of the top dogs at twitch i think for the ceo oh she's been her exec coach for like 14 years or something like that and she always comes and does these like with the exact team she'll do this like team building thing with us where she'll come to our off site and um normally if you get all the execs in a room it's just very type a it's like we need to talk about our problems we need to talk about our goals and our plans and like how we need to be more cross-functional and blah blah blah and when glow is there she won't let you just like stay in the logical part of your brain you have to like get real a little bit you have to be like a more of a human being more more open more emotional you have to be able to say if you're pissed off at somebody she'll get you to actually say what's on your mind and not just stay at the surface so she's like a master and this woman's like i don't know 80 something years old so what she she is like uh she was so good at this like i remember the ceo emmett he has this like twitch type a little like tick like a kind of like a speaking tick he has where when he's thinking hard or if he's like disagrees with you he'll start like kind of like grabbing this thing on his neck and he'll just do this for like 10 minutes while he's talking to you and i noticed it many people noticed it but nobody's ever gonna say anything to emmett about this like i'm not gonna be like dude what are you doing um or like hey you know you do that like i would just never say it and nobody ever says it so he always does it but it's like um and so this is the first time i knew she was a baller was as soon as he started doing it in one of the big exact kind of off-sites she was like emmett knock it off with that thing you're doing on your neck and i was like i was like whoa this lady is like and like that was just like she was just she didn't think about it she said it and she said it in such a like harmless way he took no offense he's like oh yeah thanks he just moved on and then for other and then she'll like actually do like some pretty sophisticated techniques where you say something and she'll be like you know you kind of hesitated when you said that and i know you you're a confident guy you typically don't hesitate what's what was that and then you like start pouring your soul out the glow and she like gets you she opens everybody up so anyways i was thinking what would glow have done if she was in that interview with michael sailor and that's when i realized what we should have done we should have just five minutes in we both recognized like hey this is not going super well and um i don't know about you that's how i felt would you say the same about five minutes in yes and so what we should have done is just been like you know michael like i'm i've watched a ton of your videos you are super smart you have uh taught me a lot about this space and honestly i was really really excited to have you on like i'm a fan of yours and i don't say that about most of the guests uh and i've seen you when you're switched on and like you know when you explain something uh it just it just it's so spot on and it really resonates and i feel like you're not fully switched on right now like and we should have just addressed it and just been like hey like i know you probably do a ton of these but i've seen you at your best and like can you give us your best like can you give us your a game can you and we should have i don't know what the phrasing is it doesn't really matter what the phrasing is to be honest with you but i think we should have at the beginning and not in the debrief while it was happening we should have found a way to just just open them up just say hey look let's call what it is right now like what are we doing here and let's make this great you know there's people out here who have never heard i've heard all your interviews people listen to this that have never heard of you they've never heard we should have 100 and i think what a lot of people don't realize and what i didn't realize until i got into this game was we're like try to be like friends with these people or at least cordial friendly and it's really awkward to to be like this is weird isn't it like it's like imagine just like having a conversation with a stranger at a party that you met i mean that's kind of what we're doing yes and it's really uncommon it's really uncomfortable to do that but we should have done that and that's what we should do more of and even now while i'm rambling i'm not saying the right thing like it's not coming out right but what i do know is that was the move that was the move and there's no there's no um that was the lesson that was the that was the big gain of that like i thought the episode was going to be amazing frankly i don't think the episode was amazing but an amazing thing came out i really liked it i know but for me it wasn't something i'm proud of but the thing i the amazing thing that did come out of it was we got into an uncomfortable situation and we got a rep trying something that was hard to do we kind of failed at the rep but because of that situation i now know next time what i will do if i'm ever in that situation again um and so like that was the that was the goal that came out of that for me i wanted to share that yeah and i would actually want to interview more crazy interesting off-the-wall people um i think we just need a few more reps to get to to get in there most people we've interviewed have been pretty easy i mean ty lopez was hard and we i think we actually kicked that one in the ass yeah i thought we were good on that one that one was also challenging and i was thinking um i actually think you're really good at naturally doing the thing which is naturally warming the guest up because i think you're very informal you're very casual so that just like they're like oh that's the tone of this thing uh he's not trying to like give this polished intro you'll just be like you're like a interesting guy right like you're cool and then they're like what then you're like you know you're like a cool guy and you you're clearly smart and like you know and you do this thing and like i remember with the guest who came on for deep sentinel you were like talking about how you wanted to like convert your truck into an overlander and then he like had that in common and it actually worked out amazing to just talk about like some you know something that was not just hey tell me about your company and why it's so great because he knows that pitch will go into it'll go into autopilot and you got him talking about something that was not autopilot and with like others like uh the david's tease guys or whatever you were like um i think you called him like a handsome dude or something like you know he's like it like gets them into they get some laughing it gets them out of there i call them really good-looking yeah yeah you're really looking um he doesn't expect that and so i think you do a good job of it but sometimes obviously it's a swing it didn't work dude michael alfied me out alphaed me so hard i was like yeah i got this card so fast he's like yeah like a jet he's like i prefer jets and yachts i was like all right right all right daddy you got me um i brayu what do you think about today and last week actually one of the video was is i've seen dozens of these videos and nobody's ever asked them about that ship so there you go sam was the first to ask about the ship um i think you should have them back on i think second time around might be better yeah and um i think sean one thing that i don't think i'm handling well and tell me if you're struggling with it is with these videos getting out we're getting way more comments and becoming a little bit more public figures um it definitely uh like i'm a i think i'm a pretty tough guy like in terms of like i don't let a lot bother me it bothers me sometimes does it bother you uh it's definitely the case that one negative thing i hear it 20 times forever you know it's like one negative is worth 20 positive comments it doesn't even be negative just like because often it's like something totally true and or it's just something you know ridiculous but uh a negative thing does like sit in your brain a little bit more and i think that there's probably some like getting used to of that where eventually that'll just wear off right like like in any public speaking or any kind of like any time you put yourself out there like you do develop thicker and thicker skin as you go for us we weren't like i wasn't podcasting i don't know like a little over a year ago right i didn't i didn't make content i didn't put my face on video i didn't put my name behind ideas that are good or i didn't try to like go you know interview a billionaire and do all this stuff i wasn't really trying to do that and so it's definitely definitely getting thicker skin i would say like on the whole i don't feel like i'm too sensitive about it because um uh like i just i spend very little time thinking about it but if i if i'm honest yeah a negative comment definitely does um you know reverberate in my ears ten times more than a positive compliment which i just kind of brush off immediately and don't i don't care about positive compliments they like they might as well not exist i don't even see them but and it's not to the point where it ruins my day but it like gives me it's like a shitty half hour right it's like a shitty half hour i also think i'm more fortunate than anybody right like when i did the cnbc thing today i watched the video in the first 10 seconds i'm like why the do i blink so much what am i doing do i always blink if it makes you feel better nobody else you look cool i think you looked cool i the the way that you look now is like a hundred times cooler than you way you looked a year and a half ago yeah my hair out it passed the uh awful zone of growing it out and now it's like okay no and you're like you used to have a little baby face you just look better i just think you look like a cool person oh thank you appreciate that yeah the facial the facial hair i think you look like a cool guy uh i said you're back i like compliments all right there we go i'm back i'm back in the game right up right you am i wrong he looks way cooler now the thing that you probably don't like is when they come when like one of them likes if like if they love you and they hate me or they love me and they hate you those are the ones that suck because it's one thing just to be a hater but if it's like no i like that guy i just don't like this other dude it's like it's like more personal than just being like you guys are idiots it's like yeah whatever i what's interesting though is i don't think there's a favorite so far i think that um you i think they hated you more and um they liked me more and i think it's slowly shifted a little bit so now i actually think we're equal i think we're equal in terms of uh the dislike and the likes yeah it's good practice though uh to do this kind of thing i really recommend to anybody who i don't know like if you got time if you got like that extra hour that you're spending on like just watching tv like make content you'll learn a lot of making content you'll learn a lot about yourself you learn a lot about what makes other people like resonate with something and not and you have to like come up with interesting things to say which means you need to become a more interesting person so i really think making content is uh is something everybody should should go do for a period of time just so that they experience it what do you think of bray abreu i think this part was almost better than the podcast the last 10-15 minutes i don't know if that's an insult or a compliment no the podcast was good but this part made me this part made me smile and laugh and when the podcast can do that as well that's great but this podcast didn't although it was informative um yeah i think you guys should take the good with the bad right like being out there sean you've been able to create this big newsletter you raised the fund you got all this positive stuff so like a few bad comments like i don't know you the the positives weight outweigh the bad i guess it's like i think that's a way of looking at it do you have a big newsletter now uh that's like the same it's like actually the the thread that went viral just now the clubhouse thing that added a few thousand people to it but let me see what it's at i think it's like 22 23 000 subscribers now i will say it makes i feel so validated in my sense of self-worth that i was doing newsletters five years ago and now all the cool kids like shawn and greg and all every cool kid and i literally finally stupid what you were doing i was like what is he doing finally finally all of the cool kids get it it took it took them forever but i do feel validated yeah it's like you did it right you got it big and you cashed it out and i think that's the you know that's the um you went full you you're lapping us at this point like you already did the whole thing and all of us right now are still like oh we got to make interesting content then we got to capture that person well get that let's get their email address that'll work like that's a good idea and then like let's let's hit them up regularly with something and then let's figure out how to make money it's like you've already done like eight of those steps we're all just like no i think i think there's there's room to build significantly bigger things in significantly shorter times but i 100 percent feel validated i mean i i i'm wrong all the time this is just the one time that i've been right and it makes me feel validated my sense of self-worth has just boosted by the way i tried this thing okay so check out this thing behind me this vesta board have you seen this before no is it a bitcoin ticker no no no i don't know if you could see um i don't know if you could see it because my camera like doesn't autofocus on it i tried to have this behind me so on on the thing behind me right now so for those who are listening to see this i basically have this giant um like board and the board is like if you go to a train station and you see where it's like you know like those little like flipboard signs where it's like you know this train is at station six and it's like and it switches train departs at station eight now it's like so it's one of those it does the thing and so you can put any message on here so you can program it where like i could put like you know today's revenue and it'll like keep updating every hour on there i could put a message i could put like a quote that i like on there so it's like a art piece of art that kind of changes behind me but i tried to get this up for the cnbc thing uh because i was going on i bought the domain that dude on tv.com because i was like oh my gosh that is awesome great idea i was like what if i can get a chance to shout something else like oh dude i'm gonna do my name no one's gonna spell that no one's gonna remember sean poori sean with two freaking a's like that's not gonna work great so i got i got that dude on tv.com if you go to it it just redirects you to my website and then i just had it behind me uh during the interview so that anybody who saw it could like go to it but the but the guys on tv were like hey we need you to move over to the middle i was like it's gonna block my sign but he's like no you need to be centered and i was like okay whatever but that was my little attempt to get any traffic uh i don't know i haven't had a chance this morning's been so busy dude i we did that i did a cnbc thing and then i'd take care of my daughter um and then and then with this crazy like situation with my wife's ecommerce store where there's like you know like crazy theft going on in the warehouse or like trying to deal with that and trying to feel like how do we deal with that so you know there's crazy stuff going on but i'm just trying to get back to my like paternity dad life and just chill with the baby that's that's what i want to do i'm basically just going to chill with the baby for the next few weeks and just try to record this podcast you know for for you know one hour one hour a week or whatever two hours a week that we do this well i'll pray you a b c d hey ah all right we could never leave without bray you're like kind of like you tell us the bedtime story we can't get off the air until you give us the validation i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the travel never looking back