#142 - Digital Meet and Greets, A Little Known $30m Empire, And Shaan's Twitter Controversy

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a go travel never look bag what up sam twenty twenty one congrats happy two thousand twenty one the best ad that i saw recently it was a match dot com ad and you see the devil in central park just waiting and then a woman comes up and she goes hey are you satan and he goes yeah are you two two thousand twenty are they like it's like two thousand twenty say satan meeting on a date are they fall in love with each other it was the best at that i've seen in a long time it was awesome it's was by match dot com and it was how two thousand twenty and that satan met it was wonderful so you just signed up you're like fuck it great great marketing it worked i'll do that if i see a great ad i'll give it a click i'll go add something to cart just so that they you know just to reward reward the ad a little bit hey now that i'm officially like a dad homeowner i'm not a dad but i'm definitely acting like i've made a few purchases the first thing sean tell me if you've made this purchase a hatch it do you have a hatch no for protection or for work for for everything for breaking down boxes i bought a hatch it i like i love buying things on amazon that only cost ten or twenty or thirty dollars and they're just shit that is cool but you're not sure if you're gonna need it so bought hatch it i got a nice sharpen for my pocket knife pocket so useful for boxes what else did i buy you can buy a blow torch on there i bought a board porch there being what there bring the internet on amazon bought a flashlight that pretty much goes like five miles in the sky i've just been buying all gadgets wow okay i think they're i made some of those purchases but i feel like yours are like half prep half homeowner like not all of those were just homeowner things well they're all i admittedly the i love gadgets so they're all gadgets but they do kinda have a little protective vibe but i'm not gonna kill someone with the hatch but i am gonna break down boxes and like i just got like a i got something delivered to me and it was came via a pallet and what do you do with the palette like you gotta like pay money to code away dude sucks when they give you the pallet yeah so i bought an axe to break that down figuring out i'll be down many things what's the difference between hatch it in an axe and axe you use two hands and ax is has a long handle and use two hands a hatch it is a one hand like it's a hammer with a with the ax hat on it okay great yeah i have like a box cutter that's small and it looks like a pen so i i don't think i'm ready for all this do you have an alarm system we do what do you have it was just like i rent this place so it just came like with the place i don't even know what the brand is it's kind of like an old tool one and then yeah we have a bunch of like nest cameras set up everywhere so we talked about deep senegal recently right yep i went to noah ka house for new and he had one and it's pretty cool it's pretty bad ass i want that for ring where i just have these folks i don't think they have to be in america or they could be anywhere that monitors the camera and then just says something like hey who are you do you know the owner know like the police are on their way you know what i mean that would just be lovely i want that service yeah why don't you get it it's available i've only found it on deep senate and i would do i would use them but i've already installed the ring and i bet imagine more people or definitely more people have ring the math so i'm i don't understand why that doesn't exist yet right right right i think they don't get the live feed in the same way i don't or something like that i'm not sure but yeah that seems like a a hack if you could just do the deep central thing without the hardware yeah and the deep sen thing it's expensive but i we we should get the founder on because i bet you're it's a killer business but it seems pretty cool and you could also like give you know i love these industries and businesses where you can give people like relatively low skilled jobs to people and they can kinda learn stuff and get better and improve and like that seems like you can do something for you know someone who just gets out of jail or something like you like you just sit here and monitor these cameras and maybe eventually you learn something could do something else i thought got my mom a job at user testing as a user tester when i first moved to san francisco was like you should do this because i was using user testing and i was like this is a great service right you build a product basically you just send your website or app to use you you you input in in user testing and you pay like fifteen dollars per user test and basically if somebody gonna use your product and it records them using it and they have to talk out loud and you can give them tasks you you'd be like try signing up try sending a message try like go to the pricing page talk out as you go to the pricing page what you think about it so you get to see just normal people going through your website and it's all recorded and they're speaking out loud and so you could see what's confusing what's not how people react to certain things i found it super useful so i told my mom i was like this is great you can do this from home it takes zero skill like it's even better if you're like not super tech savvy so you're like more like a real user essentially all you have to do is go to website and if you're confused good you're confused just say it if you know what to do great do do you know what to do there's zero skill involved so she did it for a while and then she got hired by them as a reviewer of the testers and that business is a great business they're doing really really well because they were able to tap into the stay at home mom workforce of people who just at home they a computer they have their phone and they wanna make ten bucks per test they can do you know two or three tests in an hour they can make twenty thirty bucks in an hour if they're if they're user testing at home it's way better than you know going and doing something that's a lot of manual labor i think that company is a billion dollar business yeah so there's this guy i'm trying to find him right now what is his name he's in the trends group his name starts for a p i think he's estonian he's a copywriter and he originally had this thing called like copy xl or something maybe a bra you can search his excel is that what you're thinking about conversion xl right conversion xl that was called yeah what's that guy's name dan ser pep la sorry peep i'm i know i'm doing your name up so he's got he's zero chances his name is p it's it's p p e e p space l a j a okay that's p blah they've not b sorry pete i talked to him before he's badass ass anyway he's got this great company called winter let me pull it up and it's winter with a y and w y n t e r i don't even think you could find it but anyway what they're doing is actually pretty cool it's so user testing is a multi billion dollar company and it's exactly what sean is explaining up someone just going onto to your website and telling you what they think it means well they're doing the same thing but specifically just for copywriting so if you go to winter dot io o w y n t e r dot io o and you tell them what type of customer you're trying to attract and they will go out and find people who fit that demographic and they will tell you what they think of your messaging and product positioning and it's really cool because i actually do this all the time whenever i'm writing copy for the sales page i'll find people who fit my demographic and i do this because i've got a lot of friends in the space and i just send them my google doc and i say tell me what you think about this and they hate doing it but it is so like you know they don't wanna waste time to redeem my shit but it it actually helps me so much and so you could be like i'm targeting homeowners parents men women certain ages us not us senior marketers map marketing managers founders copywriter and you could send them your landing page and they give you their your opinion of the copy and positioning it's pretty cool have you used this one or not yet no it's brand new for a long time you couldn't even sign up i sign up for beta and so if you go to like become a tester it just goes to a type form page so i think the business is less than a year old i don't even know if they're letting new people in yet it's a really interesting idea because i thought that that business of user testing is pretty amazing i think there's another one called the user voice right yeah i think they acquired user your voice now and i believe they've raised like between fifteen a hundred million like in in that ballpark and i think they've said publicly they're north of a hundred million in recurring revenue so it potentially is a multi billion dollar space and i think it's pretty cool i imagine they're hard to make i guess what's the moat there having a huge pool of testers and quality control so just like any marketplace it's you know you need the supply and so there's supplies you can say i want you know women on iphones who's speak english who are in this inca bracket whatever you there's some targeting you can set and then they basically ping out the network they're like hey test available and then like within minutes people have taken up all the tests because they wanna make you know a quick ten bucks and so they hit yeah i'll take this test they have the software that does the whole thing and then they basically deliver you with no work you don't have to go recruit you know recruit users and get the feedback like just it's there and then you watch it and then you can basically you know send it to your teammate your coworkers little clips and be like look on this page they have no idea where the button is that's true it's it's hidden okay now that now that we're seeing them get frustrated and it's so painful you're cri because you're like just see it just do the thing that we want you to do and they don't how to do it that cringe is where our products get better i don't know what you'd would call maybe we need a category maybe they already is but there's a handful of services where one person at your company signs up and does it and then other people do it and you're like we have a count go ahead just do it and the initial thing only cost fifty bucks but you keep get you get used to it and it removes this small task so you just keep like using it and using it and using it an example is this user testing user voice service so it's like well instead of just asking joe all the time like what do he thinks of like this color and it does does just make sense i'm just gonna use user testing oh it's only fifty dollars and then over time you like start spending tens of thousands a month another is rev dot com so for transcriptions you're like i don't feel like transcribing this i'll just sit through and do that what's like i know a lot of law firms and they actually have associates who transcribe it and then i don't know if a law firm can sign up for it but one person at our company sign up per perez rev now i look at our bill i'm like oh my god we're spending so much money on that another one is fiber so like one person did a logo on fiber and then everyone at our company is like oh i'm putting this internal document together it's only five bucks i'll just use our and they keep keys of this bottom bottoms up viral reality basically so you don't need to go the top and sell the company to adopt this thing that's too hard you just need one curious person to sign up and then the nature of the product is that you're gonna share the results you're gonna share the outcomes and then that spreads it through the company another example or so look user testing a bra just said they do over a hundred million in revenue and they only have two thousand organizations who use it right they started with you know we were using this six years ago it's tiny startup you know like we're spending maybe couple thousand bucks a year but now it's like coca cola and hilton hotels and it's like you know all these giant brands that that they need their website tested they get a lot of traffic and they wanna do usability testing and they wanna do it consistently and they they have all kinds of crazy stuff there like they can do like live sessions where you can be there with them it's pretty cool business i actually think there could be more businesses like this so when i used it the majority use case i was using was not actually the usability of our website you know do you know where to go is this confusing to you but just do you like this do you like this concept does this resonate with you do you like i can see for example somebody doing this with e commerce or d products where it's like go shop here and just tell me what do you think of our selection you know what do you think of the what do you think of the way that this you know that how do we compare to other stuff that you use when you shop and just try to get into the mind of the buyer it could be even where you send them a physical thing it's like we're gonna send a sample out to two hundred fifty people and then they're gonna record themselves unboxing it using it reacting to it and then you're gonna get two fifty videos back of your product you know for ten thousand dollars or whatever it is you could see how this concept of a large pool of customer feedback could be useful for other business ideas totally i think that you would i mean this is a shit we talking about all time you just niche down and get super specific and i think it's really cool i would imagine what you'd wanna do is create like a google plugin like a chrome plugin and when you're you know you're an employee at a company and you're on a page or like review this page click just like why like you know this page looks a little wonky it just me well let's see what someone else what do people think yeah yeah click like review what type of review who boom done great well you'll hear from us in two hours right fine june done move on the next half and you just spent fifty dollars to even realize it yeah that's actually pretty cool you could do that like kind of in even in a micro payment way so you could do it on the other side too if you did a chrome extension like honey but it's for people who wanna get paid like couple bucks just to give their quick feedback on a website so you go and if the if the website has the pixel installed it'll flash like three dollars for you to give this feedback right now it's gonna take less than two minutes and you click like yep accept you do the like it just pops up in your webcam you use the website and then you had done video sense to them you get your three bucks in your piggy bank and you just continue on going on browsing the internet you can get a bunch of people who who would install that as testers as well you know what another service is in the same ballpark as us and you and others shot me down so hard but i i think it's so interesting it's printing okay printing physical printing printing stuff of course you would need a twenty four hour delay but physical printing stuff using a chrome extension what does that oh chrome center okay i was what do testing no it's just like mindless stuff that you just set it and then you can come back in a few hours and your task is done it's so interesting to me i feel like for printing maybe somebody's gonna do like an airbnb for printing like in my neighborhood i'm sure forty percent of the houses have printers and so if you if you just created a network of people who have printers and dump but are in very close proximity and you said basically yeah like fedex i'll i'll pay for this print job but yeah but it's without the fedex right you don't need fedex you just have your neighbor who has a printer and they're like yeah i'll take a bucks for this can we talk really quick about two things that one one thing that you've brought up a bunch that i found something that was great okay so you have said that you love looking at internal emails of people describing stuff that was unknown at the time but now it's like a huge deal and you like seeing like the early stuff yes so why had two things that happened the first there was i don't know why maybe it's for an anti monopoly case for some reason zuckerberg and kevin sis is that a same yep the founder of instagram their messages were released i have a feeling it was on facebook messenger and you can read a five or ten page transcript of them talking saying like hey man cool hanging out let's talk about buying your company you know don't look like i'm thinking five hundred million what do you think and kevin it it kevin replying like you know that's not really what i'm interested in i was thinking more two billion and then mark saying like look i know he goes specifically he goes you could because there's some gaps right because they're like less meat in person and then they come back online and then you get the trans period and and that part was like luck was like look i can't get to two billion like you didn't know where the two billion came everybody's like look you said two billion you know just been honest we can't we we can't get to two billion but oh blah you know so if that's your number then not then we shouldn't continue and then kevin's like no no you asked me what's my you know two billion was my yes absolutely number so that's my yes absolutely number but i you i'm willing to talk and then they say like well look you wouldn't meet up sure let's meet up at one guy goes fine let's do dinner and yeah the dinner thing was so fucking funny dude and and duck goes yeah okay let's do dinner that he replies you know what i've already eaten like like he was gonna to cancel the meeting because he had already he's like you know i already ate and the dinner other guy's like that i was like yeah you know we probably shouldn't go to a restaurant and be like seen you know to together talk about this and palo out or whatever so like your house yeah dinner yeah we can order i actually okay i'll eat before i come then it's like dude yeah like did your mom pack your lunch why are you talking guys like dude just shut up that just shut a show up and if you i just eat fucking again it's a two billion dollar deal you don't need to like be like okay do you have gluten free options at your house or like should it was so funny i bet he says oh by the way there's like you see him texting along the ways like sorry stuck in traffic and san mateo gonna be fifteen minutes late it's quite funny and it's a good but it's a good thing to read like it was pretty funny because in your you you are like oh wow look these billionaires are just like me they're just messaging each other then you're like think it's stuck in traffic too yeah they get stuck in traffic there was a large amount of like nice threats embedded in there so it would be like you you know you guys have a great thing going i would it's so first of all any acquisition it always starts with like we should just work together more closely like yeah we should discuss like a partnership and both sides kinda know what that means because you say you don't really want the partnership but you can't just say i want you to buy me or i wanna buy a you and so it often starts with that's they're like they're talking about it they're like yeah you know it'd be great to have you partner more deeply with with open graph which is like facebook's kinda news feed protocol so he's like you know it'd be great to do like a deeper integration so that all the instagram photos show up on facebook and then the instagram phone is like yeah but like you know kinda don't know if i want all the instagram photos just to get sucked into facebook and like that kinda defeats the purpose of instagram a little bit and then mark like no no like look think about it this way and he's like you could do this but like we're also working on our own mobile photo you know app with filters so like we'll just have to figure that out you know they guy's like yeah totally wanna figure that out but really what they're saying is like z basically saying i'm gonna fucking kill you with my app unless you do this and the other guy's like i don't want you to kill me but i also don't wanna like give you the gun and let you shoot me so they're just like going back and forth in this like pseudo like it'd be great to discuss what a tighter integration would be while really the instagram guys is just like i really hope facebook doesn't cut crush us and z basically is like we can totally crush you you need to sell to us meanwhile kevin system from instagram guys having a conversation with a former facebook executive who's now an investor of instagram yeah and kevin goes mark's gonna destroy a yeah and the i think it's matt caller he was said something like yeah probably like if he sets his eyes on it he's gonna like attack and he's like what do i say so he doesn't go into destroy mode that's what it was the destroy mode that's what it was so i reading this thing it's on your twitter if people wanna find it it was really good it was also good i don't know what kevin's systems background is i don't know if he i mean if i had a stereotype i would imagine he already came from a somewhat comfortable wealthy family just because he's like a tall good looking stanford kid who knows so maybe i i no idea of his background but the fact is is that he was working on this business for two years they had a million in funding at first and then two or three or sixteen million like mild amount at first of substantial amount at second but if he is in fact self made he wasn't definitely rich because it's not like that money was going to him and after a year and a half z offered him five hundred million and he had the nerve to say no so that's pretty amazing kevin sis his mom was executive at zip car and also worked at monster during the dot com boom got it and then his dad was the vice president of human resources at tj j x which i think is i think that's tj j maxx so definitely yeah definitely affluent went to stanford and then like jobs were basically like google at twitter basically and then went off like at worst upper middle class more likely upper class backgrounds so he yeah for sure upper class yeah he had money but that doesn't mean who cares yeah yeah but you didn't just like how do you react to to a five hundred million dollar or billion dollar offering well i think that you some people will react to it differently if they're poor right right like if you're entirely self made you're like look like i'm i was living paycheck to paycheck recently i didn't have anything you know i really would love the security that's one thing it doesn't matter though it's still balls that he said note of five hundred million and it and it's a really cool story and you could read the memo and then i found there's this guy you probably know how to say his name is it called sir sa sri rom yeah sri rom is the name s r i a m i think heard i so here's a website it's called s r i r a m k dot com you go there and you click memos and he has dozens of of of these style memos that he's collected and they're really good you know he's got memos from steve jobs as explained to early employees about this and that he's got memos from the founding of hulu the founding of mtv of i'm i'm putting i have a section like this i'm making on my website as well as was working on it yesterday which is called the the museum and i think about what what the last part is like it's like the museum of of badass or museum of the internet or something like that or i'm just putting these like kind of like things i found like oh the first pitch deck for this company or the first memo for powerpoint or whatever just putting them all there that's cool so anyway wanted to bring that up it was pretty awesome not an idea but pretty awesome okay so i have two ideas and then i have i wanna talk to you about the tweet i did last week that had a little bit of controversy so i wanna do that was gonna ask you to bring which one you wanna do first let's do tweets so we can get it out the way okay do you wanna give the context sir or should i i would like you to say what happened so i don't remember what this was maybe a few days ago four days ago or something like that i went on twitter and i basically tweeted out a a thread of just highlighting a bunch of twitter accounts that are like my favorite twitter accounts and so i was basically saying here's a bunch of twitter accounts if you follow these you'll get smarter i followed them for years and really enjoyed their thoughts and i kinda broke it up into groups i was like okay you know here's a bunch billionaires that just like don't give a fuck they say interesting things here's some people who buy businesses here some real estate people here's are some people who publish frameworks etcetera etcetera and i publish this list i hit send i'm just on my phone this is like after my workout i just tweet this thing out hit send forget about it go eat lunch and then i look at my phone and my phone is blowing up and i'm like oh cool people liked that thread i did and it was true like definitely people like that thread but like i think it had like i don't know a few thousand have five thousand likes or something like that so so definitely did well but then i saw a whole bunch of people who are really angry and the threat also i was like what are people are angry about and basically there's a whole bunch of people who are like oh my god you just published a list of twenty seven people that are like you know must follows and not one of them was a woman and then people just started getting really pissed they were just like oh my god this is what's wrong with tech this is what's wrong with you know the world this is what's wrong with sean this is this is just what's wrong is you could publish a list of twenty seven twitter accounts and not a single one was a woman and so i wanted to get your reaction when you saw it and then i'll tell you kinda like i don't know where i'm at now let's start with this big deal little deal no deal little deal okay little borderline no deal okay so like i think that at all is about intentions right your intentions were not bad at all you shouldn't which which nobody would know right nobody knows anyone's tensions i know you know because you know me but yes your intentions were wonderful your intentions were actually the opposite of that they were good you're trying to help people right now i i do like wanna promote diversity and different backgrounds and different ways of thinking and things like that but you are just saying who your favorite bands are or who your favorite authors are in the same way that behind me you the readers listeners can't see this i have eight people on my wall who who inspire me most of them are like athletes or like boxer and like a rapper right and all men all men okay actually all i know no white man all black men i right and so i think that when it comes to naming your heroes or your taste i don't i think that it's unfair to say that you should have or shouldn't have a certain type of person right so that's what i thought too so i'll tell you what i went through so first was i was like oh this is interesting like first a i didn't realize like the you know i didn't think about it's not like when i was writing it i was like i let's make sure this list is diverse that's not a thing i think about personally some people will say that's the problem you do need to be thinking about that i personally disagree i don't want to be thinking about what i'm thinking about my favorite things or things that i think are really great i don't wanna be thinking about things that are really great that hit a certain quota of diversity that's not like personally what i wanna do and i'm okay with people thinking that that's fucked up what i'm not okay with him thinking is that that's fucked up and the only answer is that it's fucked up i think we could disagree that if people think that i should be thinking about diversity with that but there is one there's one big caveat here and i think and this sounds so lame for me to say i think you and i have just crossed the threshold of regular person to having a little bit of influence not that we're we're certainly not even close to famous but we do have some type of audience and some crazy enough people look to us for some type of feedback and advice and i agree with not having quotas i agree with all that and for a long time my opinion has slightly changed like well if i a voice i should like i should get what interests me and i don't think being a is bad like being a is not bad being chic brand or wherever the opposite of a bro brand it's not bad either right like there's like cosmopolitan palettes magazine and then there's maxim magazine whatever both are great and server purpose i don't wanna be a male brand i wanna be a anyone who's doing cool stuff brand and so i do think it is up to us to have different types of people promote different types of people right but when you listing out the your preferences i think that's nonsense yeah so not that's so i basically tried to respond because the first i was like oh who cares some people are upset it's the internet nobody cares then i was like it was this was probably the first time that i because i'm it's not like i'm out there trying to be controversial all the time to get a bunch of attention so i was accidentally controversial in this case so i started getting a whole bunch of mentions people dm me emailing me and i was just like what is all this and so i was kinda like fucking up my day so i'm trying to go about my day it was like my before new year's whatever spent a family time and i couldn't help but check i wanted to see what was it was like a fight i couldn't stop like turning my neck i wanted to see oh someone saying some shit about me then these other people are coming and defending me and i wanted to see the fight and i couldn't look away and the thing i was bothering me was fuck i feel like my my mind should be stronger than this impulse to just keep fucking checking this thing and so i just felt so weak because i was oh i'm just like all these other people who just care what everybody else thinks about them and so that really bothered me that i couldn't look away but it was my first thing i was like okay i think i will get hardened to this but man i'm not there i i would've have thought i'm there already i'm not there yet the second thing was i was like alright if i'm wrong i'm wrong right if i screw up i'll just be like okay i screwed up i should have done this and i was like well i think it's fair for people to be upset about it i also think it's fair for me to not feel the need to hit diversity quotas when i'm listing my favorite stuff i gave the same analogy i was basically like if i say my favorite authors or musicians or athletes or whatever i should not have to be like oh my favorite basketball players here's five from the nba five from the w nba five from this the chinese basketball league like that's crazy i mean i even tweeted this out i was like you know all my favorite basketball players are black man don't cancel me because you know i just felt like someone's taste or personal taste should not have to do that now i think other people totally think the other people would totally disagree and so i wanted to get a sense check of like am i am i just being hard headed about nothing what course what you thought about this too let let me say one thing real quick which is no i don't think you're being i don't think you're wrong but we do have to be we do have to recognize that there is some bit of influence that we've created and having different voices is important and i'm not necessarily saying by gender or by color i'm just saying like having open minds is actually important and i do actually think we owe to a lot of people and we could serve as a good example bra go ahead no that's basically what i was gonna say sam like yeah i think it is important to kind of be inclusive but at the same time it's like i read that list i didn't like think twice that they were all men i mean maybe that's part of my ignorance but you should like who you like so so then i'll tell you the okay evil sean so evil sean is reading these comments and evil sean it's someone's being mean to i wanna fight back yeah exactly so i was like oh excellent time to clap back and luckily ben was basically ben has access to my twitter as well and so he was like he's like don't fight back like hey you're not gonna change anyone's mind about anything so you know that first of all like you're too smart to think that you're gonna change these people's mind you're the same way that they're not probably gonna change your mind about what you believe and you know the the second thing is you have a lot more to lose than you have to gain in like just coming back at people and like calling them so for example somebody was like here's a better list and then they listed a list like full of women and then like there was no there was no black person on the list it was like dude what a hip like you are trying to come in here and be a white knight and be like oh here's real list and then you all include white people and so i thought that was funny but i had to rest myself from like commenting on it because i was like i agree there is no there's no nothing to benefit i do have more to lose than i have to gain through any of this stuff and it made me really just be like you know what kinda like fuck social media and fuck the like fear people have like so i i would say i thought it was stupid i are like not stupid but like i was kinda like oh what a shame like i can't say back what i really think because you know in trouble i might get canceled basically and i was like what does that do in the end all it does is make people fake being a certain way and then really think what they think on the inside and like in private channels share that stuff but not in the public forum and so the like the whole canceled culture thing i don't think it actually helps because people get afraid of being canceled so they just hide their thoughts from the public forum and they just keep it in private and they hold resentment that's how i felt and so i don't that was kind of my reaction to the whole thing it's a tough situation i had something not nearly as was kinda controversial happen but this weekend i one of my biggest pet peeve is people who collect domain names and never start anything i saw this yeah so you tweeted as something like don't collect domain don't go buyer your domain like go get customers so it's kinda like your point also sit there and trying to get the right domain and the point was like look if you know you're gonna execute and you know you're gonna do something and you have a history of executing yeah go beat your domain and make a pretty side do this do that but a lot of people are in the habit and what you meant was what you meant was like going and paying to get a certain named establishment or like obviously going to godaddy for five seconds and just hitting by for a nine dollar domain like no harm done it wasn't actually about getting a domain it was about getting the right domain right it was one hundred percent about not getting like who cares if you don't get the right domain name and also like who cares if you don't even have a domain name just use like dumb road use wordpress you could use these free ones get like a little bit of traction talk to some customers and then like go make that domain name in fact domain names aren't even that important early on i mean you can like go and get customers without a website but like just get a little bit of traction to shows the shows that you're actually gonna file through versus all the other people who go and get an on who would get a llc get business cards get a logo get a to money before they they even have started and end up doing that literally fifty times a month i call that playing business it's like when you're a little kid and it's like oh let's play house it's like oh welcome you know just fake party it's playing business when you when you do everything except for the key part which is get customers and like make a product and get it to customers it's like i got my domain i got my business cards i got my swag it's like you're just playing house right i had hundreds of people in the domain industry tweet at me being so angry one a domain blog like domain king dot com wrote an article about it and they're like if you wanna see some most nonsense advice of the day check out sam parks yeah guy sit people it was crazy how angry these people got and i did the same thing where i was trying not to be a smart ass and reply but it slipped a little what's ironic is i tweeted out hey here's the people i follow on twitter that like make me wanna open the twitter app and like check it ten times a day because there's a bunch of smart people saying interesting things that was like the intent of my tweet ironically then every moment i open twitter i saw the exact opposite i saw the thing i hate about twitter which is the mass easily offended crew just running around trying to like police the fucking internet this is the opposite these are the people to me not to follow compared to these people i said say interesting things the least interesting thing you could do is going around trying to police the internet is your wife on twitter no sarah's trent is getting into twitter now and she's trying to get a little bit of a following and figure out who to follow and she was like there are no women on here it is all dudes i mean we're in like the texting scene so she was like it's all tech guys there's no tech women and so if you're a woman listening to this i definitely think there's opportunity there there there she's totally right it is all a bunch of dudes it's pretty crazy i mean i don't if it's all it's definitely not all of twitter i think it's just our a little i have no idea although though of our little tech world what percentage of that is of twitter obviously it feels like it's like eighty or ninety percent to you and me i have no idea what the reality is maybe it's mainstream but it is a lot of dudes there's definitely a lot more dudes in that are prominent on twitter and so so so the other thing that's actually like it's funny it's not funny but it's funny at the same time in my kind of like my follow up i won't call an apology because i didn't apologize but i was basically saying like hey here's how i think about it like oh interesting here's the reaction okay here's my thoughts and like here's my honest thoughts so i was like look there are a bunch of you know like people who are female on twitter that like i like to follow that i think really interesting to say interesting stuff and i i mentioned a few of steps smith who works at at the hustle and i mentioned disco girl who's at julie four and this purse this this one at post underscore market i just casually mentioned a few i was like there's a bunch of interesting people i just i don't know like when i was tweeting it didn't come to mind as that and also i mostly shout out people that i've been following four years i've been on twitter for like eight years and so some of these people are like you know they don't know me but they're like i mentor right because i've been following years if i've been following your thoughts for seven years like you know them yeah like you've really genuinely helped me and that's why i'm just giving some kudos back and saying hey you might help some other people if they follow i wasn't saying here's the best people on twitter to follow like here are here are the here's is the definitive list of thirty like you know top people i was just say who i liked who had helped me and so then ironically somebody was like by the way you know post market is not a woman i was like what it's was like the pictures of a woman it's like yeah it's like a student like a synonymous account i was like god fuck i was like get a good thing that you know like didn't know that either whatever it's all about not judging it i don't think about it that way like i don't think about it in men and women and like how many muslims did i tweet out and how many like christian people that i i don't think about it that way this is not how my brain works it's just it's who's interesting consistently it's all about intentions and now you have forty four thousand people like i feel like just last week it was like twenty thousand yeah dude i added twenty thousand followers this month which is crazy and in fact this tweet storm is insane so multiple people on this six or seven people who are oh i tweeted it out they they were like what the fuck is going on so i have had people who had three hundred followers before this that now have ten thousand why so the average person that i tweeted out on this added nine eight or nine thousand followers just from this thread in the the following twenty four hours how oh my i added four i got four thousand new followers i got four thousand new followers the average person from this got eight thousand or nine thousand what was the reach how many people did it reach i don't know i also don't like believe any of these reach numbers and should will be like oh half a million people saw this it's like well what does that mean like what do you mean what does that mean it's not that hard to understand what that means it's just like okay that's a huge number like what so what like is that does it matter like this says nine hundred thousand impressions yeah that i believe that what do you mean what do don't what to understand it's just a list of people it's just a list of people who like you're just you're calling on the timeline who cares you know what i mean like so total engagement six hundred twenty two thousand engagements yeah five hundred ninety one detail expands five hundred ninety one thousand detail expand over we're about six hundred thousand people clicked into the tweet i guess which is pretty great yeah do more of that yeah it's insane like you know nikita beer he's one of the people put in like the memes category because he just tweets out funny all time he was like did you need to start an agency he's like i started this morning at like sixteen thousand followers i have twenty five thousand followers like in one day what yeah well good job sean tagged me there they all he said is like a brave you check this out or something i gained like twenty followers from that i am officially at influence right now and i officially need to have diversity because of my power comes great responsibility is what i'm what i'm hearing are you is this are the listeners who like this nonsense or not something who knows but i like it i like then if you like to spend like a new group every week we got big domain we got twitter yeah yeah that that was my other point which is like hey controversy definitely works it wasn't my intention but shit that that shit worked this thing blew up nice did you see the hilarious email from the king at the end can i read oh my gosh i'm not wanna laugh for that person i feel bad they're really insane someone dm me and they're basically just like broke no women i was like oh yeah like sorry you know it was just tweeting out a list of accounts i liked that i never thinking about it but that's it that they're they're like and then they started going one by one to the people in the list and they're like keith not even interesting his tweets i i went back to his time i it's not even interesting so i i think less of you now because of that i was like okay they're like and plus he's his dad was rich so he basically got it all handed him i was like alright yeah it's not relevant nor is that like true really so okay and he's like just kept going just tweeting about we just dm me about each person on list i was like dude i go dude if you don't like the list just ignore it no need to waste my time cri taking everything on the list he goes then block me yeah i'm just challenging you to think of the other if i'm wasting your time why do you keep engaging and i was like dude i trying to be polite and not block you because you've dm me before but like alright fine see you and then he emails us i block him and then he emails me biggest mistake ever subject decline and then you just fucked up blocking me right now say goodbye to owning five to ten percent of a deck of corn is i guess let's okay what his company is gonna be a ten billion dollar company because i'm gonna continue to email you updates so you know you made the big mistake here life imagine being the investor who blocked a future king that's what you did he just went on all and i was like what is going on i got a bunch of these like kind of like by i gotta a handful these messages that's just insane and he ends by the way with best regards and then you know he followed up a day later it was like i was out a line and i should have done that you you don't have to unblock me but just you know whatever i was like dude just stop contacting me like i'm not interested in any of this aside from the humor of the thing you emailed me about being the future king you called yourself the future king you're gonna get made fun of now you are not off limits because you called yourself the future king have to have him on the podcast well if you're listening send sean an update and this in a few months maybe we should cover one idea alright i have two can i just do them real real quick alright so cameo is an interesting company we've talked about and cameo premise is basically like you know us the insight that that the guy had chris name i kinda know the guy came on the podcast but steven i think it's his name steven gl and so the founder came on here yeah he was on the pod like at the beginning of when i was doing interviews oh and he went to do and stuff like that to with when i was there too so he i heard that's a billion dollar company by the way yeah i think it is valued around there with only like fifty engineers so so he he he told me that on the thing he goes well what i realized was that now when people see a celebrity you they go up to they don't ask for an autograph they asked for a selfie and he goes selfie is the new autograph so that was kinda like one of the core insights of well what if you could just pay somebody to send you a little selfie video a personalized shout out that's like worth you know that's like a super autograph basically that's what cameo is so cameo takes off cam a successful blah blah blah you know you try to do a cameo where you got sean paul to speak at your mastermind group yeah so i do this e commerce meetup up for anybody who's going from a hundred thousand dollars a month to a million dollars a month you're scaling up it's called club lt tv and i made it like a club and i got sean paul to do the he's like i told him i go because he he starts everything off where he's like i don't even know what he says it's like this sort of mister steele girl intro where he's just like it's not a ball coming to your live from club lt tv he's like you know where you only go up with it he's just like doing his like thing so i got it i got him to make a cameo i love cameo anyways one of the other things people like to do with celebrities that i noticed is meet and greet so at twitch con with twitch con is like the annual conference for twitch the star streamers kinda like the big famous streamers they're all there in person at this event and they each have like a meet and greet session that'll go for like let's say an hour so it'll be like a bunch of tables and there's just lines and lines of tables set up and the streamer sitting at the table and then there's people waiting like three hours in line just to go up and be like hi and the guy's like hey and then they're like kind of like you know shake hands they're they give them high hi five and then they like take a photo together and then they're like oh my god i'm your biggest fan and then they're like oh thanks so much like oh i love the what you do this is like thank you alright next and like the next person goes up and so i remember seeing that twitch gonna be like this is wild these people have hours and hours of lines all day they can just lose her all day and like each person gets there one minute and they love it they're like it's worth standing in line for two hours to get that one minute with your favorite person so i thought could you do this digitally now i don't think this is a great business but i do think this is kind of a viral product like our friend greg is who who has that little studio late check i think he should do this as a fun simple viral product like he did with the your you need a haircut dot com or whatever it was where like you know a virtual haircut over zoom during quarantine so the idea is you create an event like let's say you get fifteen tiktok to say hey we're doing a virtual meet and greet on this day tickets are ten dollars and then what happens is on the day the website goes live you just see everyone's face you just click to get in line for the person you wanna meet and all it is is like a zoom room that's just two squares one is the celebrity and the other ones you and you're just in line and then you get one minute and you're on camera with them and you have your minute you can say whatever the hell you want they can talk to you it takes like a screenshot selfie of you guys you have kind of the memory that you can go share somewhere and then when the minute ends it moves and the next person in line comes on and the celebrity would like if the celebrity was selling these for ten bucks or fifteen bucks or whatever it is the tickets for the meet and greet let's just say it was per person in this case they could do in one hour you know they might do well if it's only minute sixty succeed but let's down down and say forty five yeah let's say they're doing forty five in an hour and they're basically making five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars an hour i think depending on what you price it at which is like not bad for you know what i'll call like your instagram famous but you're not real world famous which is kinda where cameo sweet spot is too they have mostly like people who used to be famous like reality tv stars there's heaven from the office kevin from the office who made a million dollars this year doing cameo and so for kevin from the office if he was able to make like eight hundred dollars an hour nine dollars an hour and all he has to do is just sit there just fans come up and say hi you know this is a thing that people do like authors do this when they go in book tours this is a thing that hasn't really translated into digital yet and so i just think it would be a funny simple idea and i think everybody would share their moment with their celebrity on their instagram and their snap so i think you'd get a ton of viral growth just through people sharing their kind of like their selfie with the celebrity on their own social media this is kinda like a startup up bro thing for me to say but like it is fascinating how you and the cameo guy like your this framework here of just like looking at things that you forget don't have to happen that way and you're like well what if i just did this on my phone i mean that that sounds like there's like this meme of this like guy who's high who's like what's that meme you know the guy who's high like oh my god like if you're wet or if you're a fish the wet means you're in the air right like i like you know the guy was high and has these like yeah that's what these ideas it's like what if it was that what's like digital yeah that was yeah that's why i'm like this i saw like a pot head like in god eat burrito so hot even he can't eat it right so like i feel like that right now i do think there's just a lot of room to grow with like basically giving people if you make it lightweight enough like for example let's say let's say even the autograph use case could you basically just submit a photo and then like the person literally just signs it with their finger on on their phone and like this send it back to you for like twenty dollars yeah that'd be your your cell phone wallpaper which is like you know like your girl have fun sean sean paul i even i just feel like there's a lot of there's a lot of room in the the business model of acknowledged me sen by like i just like people want their kind of like famous people it's a great gag it's a great gift and it's great for any super fan to be able to like these people and if you could do it with less friction faster and just for a small payment through your phone i just think that there's more i think i i don't think cam is the end i think there's more i dig it i'm doing it i don't know if this would work but i think it's a really easy and cool thing to try so if you're looking for an idea in a sexy space which i don't particularly wanna work in a sexy space but if you are this seems like an interesting thing to give it a shot the big problem here is of course just like begging celebrities to do something i hate that it's like the worst i've done it so many times like oh what i just get if i just get influencers to use my thing it just sucks to try to get influencers do anything why you utility it's just like degrading you're just like basically you're it's so hard to get to them and then when you get to them they're like so f with their attention they're just on their phone and you're like hey well you just fucking listen for like a second i'm giving you the easiest way to make more money and they're just like yeah i'm like whatever and like then they do it and then they like don't follow through it's just it's in you're in a very weak position whenever you're trying to get celebrities to like use your thing that's kind of the the recording thing alright i wanna do a quick idea or a quick kinda cool company that i think is there's probably more companies like this so i saw this tool called uc cal dot pro so it's the letter u cal dot pro and all this website does all this app does is it lets you embed a calculator on your website so calculators are kinda of like amazing little things for seo so like your boys that nerd wall use a bunch of calculators like oh what's my mortgage payment if i buy this house can i afford this house or like you know how much will i make if i put this much into my retirement account for twenty years just like a compound interest calculator and it's a clean little website clean website and all this does is just make it really easy to be like yeah what is what is the calculator you want and so you don't have to have the developer do this i love this simple idea i wanna buy this company because i think it's a great little tool probably makes awesome cash flow super high margin people just embedded it on the website they probably don't take it off and they keep paying you the monthly fee of nine dollars or whatever it is and so i think it's a great tool if you wanna add a calculator to your website which i do and so i wanna share it for others who wanna add calculators to their website as a way to engage your users in a way to like get seo traffic and then the other thing is i just think it's a great example of a simple useful business that is awesome as a bootstrap little company it started by a it's like a russian guy i can't find the guy he's like nowhere to be found on the internet i just looked him up oh that's cool so if you're listening to this yu cal guy i wanna buy yu cal from you there's people talking about them on hacker news interesting recently or old two thousand so one year ago yeah pretty cool is it's like a nifty little thing yeah imagine owning about a hundred of them yeah and and so that's what i was trying to do is try to like i get one and it's like cool this thing is profitable just cash flows every month well this is a class idea of like simple widgets that you add to websites or simple widgets for for websites that you know you don't wanna have to pay a developer to build something custom for you you should be able to customize this out of the box survey tools are like this check this out there's this guy named sa how do spell is last name s ba how do b a l k h i s ba high sorry sa okay anyway he has a business so he originally started wp p dinner dot com which is a blog all on wordpress and it gets like five or ten million unique a month like gets a lot because a lot of people are searching for wordpress stuff and he'd like teaches you how to do everything frees site whatever probably makes ten million plus a year he saw which of his plugins were getting the most article views and then he was like i'm gonna go and buy a plug in like that and promote it here and so he owns this thing called opt in monster which is basically like really cool pop ups yep he owns wp p beginner he owns monster insights which is like google analytics plug in for wordpress and then he owns wp p forms which i have a feeling i think is the largest one which is just a form builder for wordpress yep he owns wp mail s m t p i that's something technical i don't know what it means then he owns he owns it looks like wow raffle plus which is oh my gosh i looks i love this model so basically super popular blog looks at which tools people want goes and buys the tool because he knows i can funnel a fuck on of traffic to this and then owns those tools in each of the categories of like a lot of wordpress sites need a form a lot of wordpress sites wanna capture emails so they do they need opt monster how much do you think this guys make it's gotta be this guy is gonna be really profitable i heard from a few people i i have no idea if this is true so it looks like he owns maybe eight he probably owns outright eight plugins ins and then i heard that he owns like a forty or thirty percent stake in like fifty more i heard it's in the thirty to forty million dollar recurring revenue range right which is pretty cool and it's probably very profitable on his personal blog like s then his last name dot com he talks about buying property so he owns a bunch of gas stations which is funny are i think this guy's i think he's pakistani our pakistani friends sean also by our pakistani internet friends also by a ton of gas stations which is was just like ultimate little brown guy this is a great brown guy businessman man i'm proud of him he's done fantastic gas job so and he talks about buying gas stations and then he talked about buying a bank like literally the building he bought like a chase building and then leased it to bank of america or something like that and he was like i don't like debt so i just bought it in cash so the best way i think one of the easiest ways is to look at how much money someone has is by looking at how big their home is or how big their real estate holdings are and so it makes enough money to to have like dozens of properties that he pays for in cash amazing okay shout out to this i you i like him we should have him on i know that he's quite cage though i i don't know him personally i've only shook his hand or and said what's up a couple times we have a bunch of mutual friends one of our good buddies bought a business from him pretty interesting guy well we'll have to have this guy on i think he's pretty cage but maybe we can get a out of i like it did you have any ideas or anything you wanted to do none that i wanted to discuss now because i don't like going too much over time okay i like keeping them it i like keeping them short okay cool yeah alright i gotta go