#143 with Jeremy Cai of Italic - Influencer Coffee Making Millions, What Cold Chain Is and Why It's Booming, And Tons of Ideas

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel never looking back good yeah i'm recording on my side well let's do it jeremy do you know sean yeah funny story sean was one of my role models back in college why look at me now wait why so so i went to college in the small school called ba in in boston and and you know most of people there eventually end up in like finance but the the main stick of the college is like it's not supposed to be number one for entrepreneurship a lot of kids were like really into that and and around boston me like organized a trip to san francisco visited a bunch of tech companies so it's back in like twenty i think twenty winter twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen and and monkey inferno and and be but like you know sean was this like really impressive guy who we we visited and office with spectacular so it's mostly just the office of that well also sean but like i i think i think we've mentioned that office a little bit but this is how i actually met sean as well and i let's i don't want care if sean shouldn't describe it us because it was kinda his but he had this office jeremy that was it was called monkey inferno it it could have housed or you know not probably fifty people could worked there if they wanted to for maybe more it's really impressive if i like they had an espresso machine they had i think a a cook that would come every day like a professional kitchen it had tables that looked it had a table that was maybe fifteen feet wide and it looked as if you cut down a yosemite tree and turned it into a table look it looked like a two hundred thousand dollar table the worst part was i thought that was every start up so so i was like oh man that these guys are living the dream like working in this dope office and you know and then reality hits when you actually move here and like oh that is that is like one of a million so it sean do you think that that place costs more than two million dollars to decorate no no that's a little bit much but the we got lucky because you know my main investor and the guy who actually started the lab he owned the building so first so he was the landlord it's not like we were paying some crazy rent you know to some landlord so he had bought this building at in two thousand and eight thousand nine right after the real estate crash so he scooped it up for super cheap some i don't know like a couple million bucks i think he got this on this building that was at the time seven different like loft like apartment loft and he just smashed down the walls and combine them into a giant live workspace and he left one loft so there's actually an apartment at the top so it's three stories of office like office floors but we only use the top floor for desks the second floor we turned into like ping pong like the classic you know stereotypical stupid startup blowing money thing it's like ping pong table snack room we turned it we created a weight room in there like to exercise in the third floor was wherever is desk and the fourth floor was just this loft this apartment where you could just crash in if you stayed late and so my first year there i slept in that apartment two hundred days out of the three sixty five of the year was basically my house jeremy yeah i mean like the this office is it also had like oh it had like a mac one computer like the first mac right i remember i picked up a coaster once so so the story is so so michael and z bur owned the building they started the lab they had had a ton of success they wanted to work in like their dream environment so they built their dream environment which most entrepreneurs can't afford to do they owned the building they did their renovation they had this one designer of this guy ken folk who is like this like kind of designer to the stars type of guy and he's like wow like like you have art behind you sam this guy would come in every two months i just rotate the art so we would come into the office one day and like all the art had changed but you wouldn't notice because they're the same position but it's just a different picture in there and he was just like an elf that would like turn over the office with new shit all the time and i was like repay for this what's going on and i remember picking up a coaster and it said seven hundred dollars on a sticker under the coaster is still out there for and do you think it was seven hundred for one coaster no i think it was probably the the rack this this the stack of six or whatever but i was like seven hundred dollars and you know that i was crazy to be like it had mirrors that were one way mirrors so you would go to the restroom and when you would look out the the the window that they say said the mirror the the wall of the restroom it looked like everybody could see you peeing but it was actually a one way mirror when they looked at you they they they just saw a mirror they couldn't see you peeing so we got i wanna we have to ask jeremy who he is and what he does but before we get there i do wanna say one thing to you sean yesterday i foster i began fostering a dog and i just wanna make the announcement that if time magazine decides to honor me with person of the year because i'm doing this but you accept i i i'll accept so if anybody needs a dog followed me on twitter i gotta like find this dog a whole is a stray like you just took it in no i like signed up i'm just being a saint that yeah whatever i'm just i'm an angel so yeah i just wanna wanna know what what are you covering up for would you what you do that made you wanna go out and do a good deed just i'm just i'm just a saint so if follow me on twitter and and someone come adopt this dog jeremy who are you whatever yeah i i am the founder and ceo of a company called it alec and and and also a c founder with my girlfriend of a company called not pot both of which are companies in eco com so happy to dive into you there and and share more and that's not pot dot cup not pot like weed it is it is literally not pot it is it's a it's say american i i i usually say it's an american wellness brand but yes it's a cbd brand it's been around for no but i just mean how do you spell it pot right ot t so not pot great name by the way was that the first name that came to or i mean i can't take credit for any of the creative that's that's all katie she's the the genius there but yeah yeah that's that's my day to today and then it metallic we've talked about before amazing company i believe i don't know if we've signed the papers yet i believe i'm an investor officially in the company at some point all i think it's an amazing concept you guys basically and tell me if i get this wrong my butcher you guys basically have high end kind of premium goods so it could be bags jackets scarves whole bunch of different skews that are the same manufacturers that do you know production for gucci and prada and like all the big brands and basically you offer those same quality products without the brand name label and therefore almost like at factory pricing so you become a metallic member as a member you get access to this like sort of factory pricing of premium goods if you want quality but you don't want to you don't wanna over pay ten x for the label essentially yep exactly that's exactly right so so yeah and and and to anyone who we've okay for what it's worth we've never done this before so it's the first time we're doing it like for anyone who wants to try it out i did make a code it's m f m pod i think and you get it free year which is normally hundred twenty bucks for a member i i actually i don't even know like how big this podcast justice so i i hope i didn't just shoot myself there your business the m f m f pod m pod yeah so so it's it italian dot com slash m pod jeremy i'm a customer of yours i'm a paying member i wish i would've have been able to use this i i own your knives and a coat oh thank you well thanks thanks for supporting us i you know promised to to keep supporting you there but yeah i mean the the the the the idea is basically you know i think when most people start brands or or companies in e com like you normally start they could you could be if you're a venture type of founder you're like i your two mba and you're like i'm gonna sell x y z online because it's a big market or you're like a lifestyle brand you you wanna kind of bootstrap this up but i think for for it tell really the the goal is to kind of build the suite of tools and technology to empower manufacturers to become merchants of their own and it tell obviously you know does well by kind of building the the pipes and the rails to kind of provide access to a global market but to a customer it's like a killer value prop right you're getting high quality products from the same factories as the these really premium you know legacy heritage brands and it's well designed you know it's it's you know that they're quality goods but we're offering them at prices that are like sixty seventy eighty percent you know lower than what brands do and and then we we monetize through you know to your point that the membership so it's like the costco model exactly right and how big the business it's pretty i mean we started about two years ago we just launched the membership so we're we just crossed like the ten thousand member mark and and things are are pretty good like most members you know i think in eco com also notice you typically see like one of two things if you wanna hopefully make it and and it's like you either have to be profitable on first purchase or you know hopefully you have enough replenish or frequency of use to come back and really the goal with it alec and also i think most of the times like you had there was this narrative of like hey we're gonna start in this one category like raise a whole bunch of money to capture it and then hopefully like raise more money to enter into new verticals and that like almost never works so it was important for us to also start like pretty horizontal from day one so we don't get pitch pigeon hold into like one category of use so yeah people are are are are spending quite a bit it's typically right now we're about one order a month per member and members are getting to like six seven hundred dollars of spend in the first six months so it's been is amazing it's been a good start dude i i know i know successful e comm brands that are no have half those economics so i think that's a a very solid place to be yeah i mean the other thing i i will say though you know for what it's worth and and i don't i don't know if this is a good thing to share up but i i i do think most venture backed com businesses play themselves out to be bigger businesses than the actual business like is yeah there's many more bootstrap there's like you know for every it alec out there there's like a thousand plus you know bootstrap com brands that are doing like multiples of what we're doing so i wanna ask you about that that's what i wanna ask you which is like to name names but i just had a quick question which is how old are you i'm twenty five wow yeah prepared to feel bad sam i know i don't know i i've been no you you look young and you i mean you speak mature but you you definitely look young it's very impressive so so jeremy we brought you in and we i believe i believe a brand you gave you the context of the i know if you're listed the pod but the context of the pod is we basically shoot the shit and brainstorm you know business ideas as well as just cool stuff we're seeing or businesses that most people haven't heard about we can kinda break down and walk through like why that business is really interesting and so i don't know data you give you that context or are you surprised to hear we say i have a whole list of ideas to to go through with you i had to clear them with with katie who wants to do like katie who's my girlfriend before so i a couple of these i'm like alright you can't say that because i wanna do that but but i i a big deal no i are you actually afraid of that because i feel like you know we sean and i have had a handful of people executing on our ideas we had one guy create a a newsletter that we had really kinda went deep on and he sold it for maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah and we within a few months yeah we we've done it a few times but in general i would say the ratio of ideas to execution is quite low no i i mean i totally i i grew with you there for sure i and in fact i think i think chong had mentioned i tell like as a as a feature which i'm super appreciative of and and a trends like newsletter a while ago but or was i think it was a hustle newsletter but and and and then in there at the bottom i think he yeah like put two ideas and like i got i got i i i counted it i i had at least forty people reach out about one of them and i didn't expect bella never happened so i i do think people do execute i i think the percentage to your point is like very low but also i think you know in college like i or at least like the older you get and and and and tech at least i feel like the more you've do value good ideas i think in the beginning it's like ideas are deck dime dozen and all that matters it's execution and blah blah but i don't know i do think like hey you could be step setting down a path for five ten years of your life and you know if it's not a good idea you kinda just waste that you didn't waste it you learned a lot but like you know it it could have been better if you did spend a little bit more time on on the idea side so i i do think ideas aren't valuable so let's let's pop in one idea so let's take one idea off your list and let's see what we're working with give me like a b plus idea don't give me an idea yet i'm not ready for the warm me up with a b to b plus right okay so i'm gonna pull up my list right now okay i i've got so oh by the way before i got in like i i think the the a one thing i was curious about to hear is like is most of your audience kind of interested in like building venture backed businesses life's like we talk about it we you know we talk we talk about everything we have a lot of people like the venture back guys they'll hear us story of a youtuber making three million bucks a year and they're like that is awesome they're like whoa i gotta start a youtube channel and then the bootstrap guys who have a bills business that makes eight hundred grand and they pay themselves a hundred hundred thousand dollars they love a because sean and i able to talk about someone who did the x y and z now it's end like a hundred million a year no you know why they love it because we'll be like yeah this business they just got valued at a hundred fifty million dollars doing seven million in revenue and then there's some guy with like an elevator you know repair business who's like we do fourteen million we does that mean we're valued at three hundred million dollars and it's like they're like part angry part curious about like what the fuck going on with these venture backed companies so there's definitely interest on both sides you see the transition once in a while though i i think you know between the two you know with like anyways i'll i'll i'll i'll get so one of the one of the ideas i jot it down like at the site start of covid when people started staying home a lot was this idea for a subscription box and and i think you know subscription boxes i think nowadays have like a bad rep you know you after companies like apron and whatnot start but but i think for this one it could be a a niche there's a huge rise interest in kind of home cooking so the idea is the subscription bread of the month club so make your own bread we send you the ingredients you can call it doughy dough girl dough godaddy yeast club you know whatever don't love the daddy with the names i like dough godaddy daddy i think that was a winner yeah right so hold on let me go let me go to godaddy real quick and see if i can snatch that daddy i like her what my product is that the next domain is gonna be godaddy do do you know anyone who runs a box yeah there are some that like have really flown under the radar and have like exploded like what i mean i i i think the the best example i would just share is like you know va fine is like this company that i think venture investors have overlooked for a long time now and and i think it's just like you know it's very sustained component growth they they've this year specifically really exploded i think with covid so can can i give you the background or what i know about fab fit fun and you could cut you can kinda fill in the blanks so fab fit fun i researched them a bit because so my business is the hustle were a an email business or it starts it started that way i think fab fit fun also started that way so i think it was they gave fitness and beauty related tips to young women via an email right so they built that up to like tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people and they go alright well let's make money in a different way than advertising and they launched this box and i think they've been around for around ten years right and they're based out of la i think they raised a little bit of money to start but not yeah not a significant amount and they have since grown it to something like is it they have two hundred thousand subscriber or more i don't remember the exact number of subscribers but like top line wise they're in hundreds of millions yes and they send a quarterly box right that's right yep yep and and the the interesting thing that they've done and i think you know we we've thought about a lot as well is they've created lock in you know post purchase so right now i think that the nuance with subscription businesses is oftentimes there's a number of types of subscriptions but like oftentimes the product is the subscription so like for spotify for example when you pay the subscription like you are getting spotify you're getting access to spotify and that's the product you have to pay additional same with fat fun although they do upsell you i think what we've seen with that fun and even stitch fix as well as it's like they want to move towards one time purchases that go outside of subscription frequency which is always like you know the grass is always greener and then the side is like for you know companies that are more transactional or like one time purchase how do we layer on more frequency use whether that's a subscription box or not so how has fa fit fund done that do you think like what can what can i learn from them well what they've done you know i think that the common trope is like you know if you're a media business you should be doing e comm and if you're an e comm business you should be doing media and like frankly that like nine times at a time that never works it's right so it's and i would actually go as far as saying it's much harder to do the second where you're e com you're trying to build media but but i do think that fund has done that you know in an an interesting way like post purchase you get access to a community that actually like retains you have you tried to turn the like people will post like i'm i'm thinking about canceling and people actively say like hey don't cancel like here's why i'm still a member but what's the what's the like a kit a good community is like a good call which means you have like a a what what a belief system yeah like cults all have like an identifiable leader they have like an us versus them mentality they have a a unified belief they have a a a series of rituals that you typically have to do and they're inclusive what is the what is the belief system that all like what we have this thing called trends it's all it it has like this entrepreneurial thing what's like the us versus them mentality well i think when it comes to like well i think in in e com you can either sell you know one of i guess like one of three things and like one is you know you can sell the the concept of value and it's like hey you're getting a good you know bang for your buck or you're getting like a deal that you feel smart about or you're in the now or whatever it is and i i think for fab fun it is like the value sense and you know value is not like an easy thing to build a community around but like there are people who are like really passionate about like saving that extra dollar and even though they won't necessarily talk about it that way i think that community like does bond around that i think there's others where i guess the other two i was gonna say is like one is kind of around the the the you know the the actual use case so i like the best you know recent example is probably peloton in which you know people just love being peloton on users and mps is super high churn is extremely low you know and so and so forth but i think the third is is actually interesting and there's like a cultural one i think you know for for and i'll speak directly with like our our kind of counterparts but companies like dossier and which is oftentimes touted as like the leading kind of skincare slash beauty brand in in the venture ecosystem even though they actually do oftentimes less run rates than like the the bootstrap kind of lesser known you know lesser known brands i i think you know they put out this feeling of like hey we are this cool millennial girl in a big city and you know we put out this feeling that you're you it's like a cool twenty five year old right the customer set is actually like high schoolers and i think i i can name a bunch of other examples like this like a way for example i think when they started is this cool millennial like product you know got all these influencers but the actual customer in the beginning was probably business travelers so so i think you know i think there's areas to build like an aspirational like you know community where it's like hey i want to achieve that and there is these leaders in our space like for example with a away maybe it was like carly k or maybe with glossy it was actually the ceo emily who we've built that like or like celebrity but but i think that's actually the hardest to maintain because you know customers are flipping and and they'll kind of like churn out can can i tell you or say something about something you just said sean you might like this so at the hustle we do give away sometimes so like sign up for the hustle and you win a macbook pro one time we gave away a tesla like a thirty thousand dollar tesla and when we do these giveaways there's these websites i i have to go and remember what they're called but it's like super savers or it's like there is this and and we get so much traffic from it it's crazy and if you google like the hustle giveaway there's these huge communities and we get so much traffic from it and it's mostly middle america stayed at home moms and they are doing giveaways like crazy they are all about saving money like we have these socks that say hack act now that's very coastal male branding and they don't like i'm like normally if it were like if it costs a little bit of money they wouldn't want that but because it's free they're obsessed with it and like we have a teacher shirt that says always be hustling and like bailey from missouri who's got three kids doesn't want like an always be hustle like that's that's not her mantra probably but they love this crap and the fab fit fun thing is sounds like it's tapping into that community of this like state home mom bargain hunter i have been surprised another company that's similar to that is the penny holder dot com which we talked about recently which re recently just sold for a hundred million bucks or one twenty or something it's a crazy community you're probably not the best customer set right because i think the the you know even though the set like the that the so area where most people chase are like okay i wanna sell to people like me right so that's like typically for us it's like bi stalls big city middle high income leans laughed well educated you know so on and so forth but i think the actual most consistent customer that's actually the cheapest to acquire is the middle american mom and she's also that like a pretty big spend too and if you get her loyal to one thing like she's gonna be with you for you know years and years and years and i think that's what a lot of like venture you know brands kind of overlooked sometimes is like that's actually who you should be going for but i mean you can make comparison to like door versus you know what what post post made instead like city versus suburb but but i i don't know i i think i would actually say they're they're a great customer yeah i i totally agree sean did you ever see the analytics for soap hub so soap hub was our friends soap opera news website have you seen the analytics i've seen you guys posted something about it you did a blog post i've seen what you posted publicly because i met him after he sold it we had the founder of bleach report look at so we have this friend who has is blog all he did was blog about soap opera and we had the founder bleach report look at his google analytics and he goes i've never seen engagement like this and it was all middle america moms i'm telling you that market's good no no i i totally agree the middle america mom is a great market the super say that like that what's the first not penny orders but get you said before that the ones you guys like i don't know if that's actually a thing professional like contest enters yeah that's not the best right they're the ones who are trying to leech your your programs and be like oh cool they have a referral bonus let's create a giant referral chain and like milk this baby and so like they've so hard and it's like man this is like this like eight dollars just buy it it'll be easier and sometimes it's okay like for example for it metallic your value proposition is value right you're getting amazing good at like a fraction of the price that you would normally pay so attracting the value shopper is the right the right move probably whereas if your thing is all about status like for example my wife has e commerce business and one of the kinda of core things that people do is collect they you know like i've only i've only ever seen businesses where you chase customers you're trying to tell customers to buy from you her business they do new style drops of like you know a new product you know every friday and people are lining up so it's like an apple you know like an iphone launch so basically you have to inter you have to implement these rules that you can't buy more than x of of every product because it like it's selling out too quickly type of thing right so i've never even seen somebody limit a cart it's like aren't always trying to build the cart to be bigger and it's like no no we have it where you can max by two items because you know we have to it's like more you know when hand sanitizer was flying off the shelves and grocery stores had to had to put a limit on it that's what happens there because that's a collector's mentality they want they wanna get every one of the new the new like stuff that comes out because it's rare they will wake up in the morning early to be at their computer trying to get it within one minute of the of the drop like all the revenue happens in a like hundred twenty second period and then it's like over for the day i dig it i'm into it that's a that's a good idea it's almost like i mean it's real scarcity but it's also like by enforce it i think the more often you like reinforce the scarcity of a of a product to a a a very active audience like but do so in a classy way of the better it's almost like black friday where it's like hey you can get this in this very short bounded period of time and then it's it's gone and you're gonna have to wait another year so i know it's a totally different comparison but yeah make sense cool what what else you got i i've have so many i don't know like how fast do you wanna i meet mean to go through i have okay i have like venture tech businesses and i have like more standard you know like that's fine well well okay what do we just cover do does do go ab b a b i subscription bread of the month i i think would be great for like someone who wants to just start something you know and and you can you know start at small and why why bread why did you pick bread versus support margins are you can i mean if you position it as like a premium product or you you position it as like a utility hey like we're skipping the grocery store you're gonna do this anyways you want the best yeast you want whatever it is like here's a starter kit i think the margins on that and the re the the retention will be really strong if you can deliver on that and it's also like you know it doesn't have to be expensive so and also brett hot right now sean don't you know this well that's what saying like me the give you the trends mister everyone knows a bread but banana bread in particular is going through the room right everybody knows this everybody knows banana read us through the room you had you know he knows and nobody knows been banana to the rest i'll bra you do you know this anyone who has an instagram or tiktok knows that home baking in britain be you can't use a bra he works for you jeremy am i right or wrong is is banana bread like searching right now yeah said pears over the fruit of the year so yeah i'm i'm just jealous you're not talking about pears okay so so this i forgot so i did see this in the wild somewhere and i thought they did did a good job with that but okay so that that was one idea hold on me tell you one thing i like about that by the way i think that the you wanna make brag worthy products meaning can the product after the consumer has it is it instagram worthy will they share this on instagram or tiktok the thing that they're doing because that's gonna drive a lot of your adoption and this is such a good one where it's like it's an interesting thing making brad it's something people don't usually do but the skill cap is actually probably pretty low you're actually gonna be able to do it and have a good output and then lastly it's brag worthy it doesn't look like a brag like if you bought something expensive and you share it well that's only a certain type of person would do that but i think a lot of people would happily share that they're doing a fun thing today in quarantine which is like baking bread at home and shit happy with how it turned out so i i love the brag of that idea i think there's a lot of like subscription things that you you can do that are not like you won't have fatigue like you know you the the downside i think a subscription food for example or subscription apparel is like it is you know it's limited to quarterly or in the in the case of food like if you do let's say you actually wanna go out to eat right like what are you gonna do with your box you you feel like you have to cook it at some point so right anyways i think subscriptions are are are super interesting when it comes to actually like product boxes i think another idea like that's a little bit more this can go either way i think i listen to one of your podcast podcasts and i think you guys mentioned sundays which i have i love that business i think it's like super smart you you wanna which it is oh so it's it's basically like it's a it's a suite of products at like kind of provide lawn care how do you put it's kind of like a products to help people who have lawns take care of their lawns and the to dump it down it it's a roundup up alternative that has no chemicals and is d seed or whatever you what deep d d seed well i mean for people who who lived in cities i don't even know if they would know a roundup a it so i think that i mean that's i i think that's part of the whole suburban like kind of market and yeah weed killer yeah another this is i think a smaller you know total addressable market but i think the the basket size could be larger is doing this similar thing for pool care the number of pools out there are it's huge there's actually a lot of like software built for you know these pool services and so on and so forth but when you actually do research into the the products that they use it's like it's like it's really kind of gnarly old school looking you know covering based stuff so that's right now that was one idea do you guys first of all there's this company called leslie pool so yeah did you guys grow up with pools no i have one now i this is the first pool overhead so i used to go to the store called leslie with my dad i would go there called leslie pool supplies all i do it's like a relatively small rink dink store and you go and you buy like a variety of bleach beaches i mean was all pretty harsh stuff they have a market cap i just looked it up a five billion dollars it's just a chain like small stores do you guys probably didn't experience this but if you have blonde hair these chemicals were so strong that if if i would swim too much my hair and if you're like a white blonde hair person your hair turns green have you have you ever seen that no but that's that's an amazing amazing way to position an alternative so so there was a guy who reached out from the podcast a listener who said hey i have a product and i i can't remember the name sam you might know this guy also he might have reached out to you as well ravi he oh i don't know what his his name is but the his product was basically a modern day pool maintenance subscription thing kinda like what you're talking about jeremy so what he he's doing is you know in pools they have this like floating little b that's kinda like a monitor so normally the pool guy comes he sticks this little thing in there he checks the like chemical to ph levels and you know figures out what's going on so this guy had basically created a smart sensor so like it's just a floating thing in your pool anytime on your phone you can go check the ph levels you could see if there's like you know what the temperature of the pool is whatever and then they sell you the kinda like chemical packs a little like essentially tide pods that you put into this thing and it like you know like treat a pool and i was like that is a great business idea he was doing pretty well i think it's kinda like low seven figures a year in revenue yeah his name is it's called my su so my su dot com s u t r o dot com my su dot com his name's is ravi he acts actually was a founder dojo joke guy sean so that's how i knew him gotcha a good he's a good dude he's been at this for years it it does i don't know why this actually hasn't isn't significantly larger figure yeah right actually think a lot of like this is so kind of this is like i i think you guys have talked about like constellation and software and like you know there's so and and what was the cup like service titan or something there's so many like opportunities in these like niche neighborhood businesses that you think are like so you know most people would think are so small but there's like literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of these businesses like across the us alone and and providing like vertical soft this is not i still don't think as venture business building straight for vertical software for those use cases such as pool maintenance which know exists like to a large degree because i did my own research on it but i i think you could do this for a number of those vertical that was actually not on my list but i i can keep going if you want i i could kind of run through a couple if you want or yeah keep be going alright i've got one so i i think stripe atlas list for those who don't know is basically company formation as a service and you this is not new by any means you know and plenty of people have done this from turkey to i think then there's a new one called first base and whatnot generally cost like between you know maybe three hundred to a thousand dollars depending on the at the state and in service but i think there are verticals for administration like that that is more niche and you can actually charge more for so for example trust fund administration i think could be interesting as a as a service there's a lot of like i basically i think jeremy describe clerk because i was a user of clerk and i think they've gone out of i don't know if they've gone out of business but it's kinda like on autopilot it seems yeah i think so i i've used a i've used clerk for two companies in the past and it's it was amazing yeah i mean it's basically a standardized set of documents that you can use for company information as at del c corp which is what most your know venture businesses would would form us and and you can do it for like you know it it's so cheap i think that danger with cookies is like every founder out there who's listening like who who's new the eighty three b process you like really have to be careful of you just i'm not gonna explain the whole thing just like make sure you do your research and actually like file the eighty three b so that you are purchasing your you know shares you the reason why i bring it up is like there's a time limit but clear able almost screw us twice on that so that was kind of one downside with it versus a an actual you know dedicated service but yeah i think it's on auto autopilot and i'm sure they're so clerk it's like they had maybe forty documents that were standardized but it had a doc sign component and i think it was nine dollars a document and we had thirty six investors and so we sent this to them so thirty six times let's say ten bucks so we only paid them three and sixty bucks but it was one of those services sean and you actually just discussed this the other day where you start using it and you're like it's only this much of money whatever you just keep doing it you keep doing it you keep doing it and it slowly adds up yeah alright one more i i so much okay one is homeschooling software i think there's a lot of you this is i think like a a significantly growing trend in homeschooling not just because of covid i think covid was an acc so providing software that and i think there's a venture company called primer doing something kind of akin to this but providing things like attendance report cards grading test generators admin services where you basically can run a home for you or even a marketplace of you know having like dedicated homeschooling teachers that was one so let's talk a little bit about that because i know a little bit about this space so i was a little bit surprised to learn that about three to four percent of you know like school age kids do homeschooling that was higher than i thought it would be it's still a low percentage but you know we're talking about a a a a population of two and a half to three million and now with covid you know like easily double that you know we'll we'll come out of this and so let's call it you have two and a half billion customers three million maybe as a round number and that's just in the us and they have very specific set of challenges so if you want a homeschool school kid first there each state has a different process to like establish yourself as like a legal home person so i have a friend who started their business doing stripe atlas the one of the the previous idea for homeschooling so like hey just type in your kid's name and birthday and all that and we will file the homeschooling paperwork for you you don't have to figure out what the state of georgia requires you to do for that that then you know so they they got a bunch people who are like oh good because didn't know how to do this the second problem that that that parents have is and you're supposed to document all the work that your kid is doing so you have to like take photos of their of their worksheets blah up so there's like a whole like where do you put those photos this is just in your camera roll alongside all your other light that doesn't seem very good so so you could build like you know so that's the second part of the stack is like the record keeping third part of the stack well what worksheets should they even be using are you gonna create your own curriculum like most people who homeschool are not oh like gonna be creating a full set of curriculum with like really good worksheets and so whatnot so they need to access what the heck do i teach my kid on a day to day basis so that's kinda like one whole stack and there's a company called go you know primer that's going after it my friend forrest started going after that he pivoted to something called zip school so zip school basically is is doing the bill nye the science guy live on zoom so what he did was he created he he found all these teachers who were kinda like out of work or had extra time and he filtered them for like who has the biggest person and can kinda like pop on zoom and what he does is like it's like after school education so you have a kid at home and whether you're homeschooling them and you just want for one hour for them to be with this digital teacher ali or after school you just want them to like learn more science or whatever and all his topics are kinda like magic school bus or bill nye the science guy where it's like let's learn about rockets and it's about like actually like what elon musk is doing with rockets so something that's interesting that you don't like it's just not the like cookie cutter school lesson or like why you know why sharks are not the scariest animal in the ocean right it's like stuff like that that's like it's very intriguing to a student and then they have a teacher with a green screen behind them and they kinda like live teach a class with like kinda like some low end special effects so that it's interesting and all the kids are just kinda like on mute and they're like mute to like say things from time to time or whatever and parents pay like a pretty low subscription like pay fifty bucks a month for your kid to be able to go to three four five classes a month and so he raised a little bit of money from entries h because there was a little bit of momentum he was getting classes where he started with like like you know five students showed up he was running facebook ads and for very cheap he was acquiring users like i wanna say sub dollar he was acquiring users drink covid because every parent in america was like shit how the hell am i supposed to teach mike a i need a babysitter and b like i need to like educate my kid because they're like out of school for so long and so he was getting people to come in and he was joining classes and these classes got up to like five hundred people they were breaking the zoom limit of like how many people can be in one session and now they do like more like smaller group classes i think his people are more willing to pay for that but i thought this is very interesting the idea of taking the old bill nye the science guy model so so what do have i mean what's going on with that company now it's going i think it's going fine they they have a bunch of teachers on the roster that each you know this guy specializes in space this guy specializes in science and surgeries or whatever different topics and they do small group classes like six to eight people and of of like after school education basically and covid still has like so many people it's hard to know what's gonna happen to this business post covid but i would say like this is like a variation of homeschooling schooling it's not pure homeschooling it's either something you can add into your home day for an hour or it's a hey i i send my kid to public school they come home from school and like wanna watch tv and stuff anyways well we can do this for thirty minutes instead and i feel like at least my kid got like enriched a little bit and i'm i'll happily pay the equivalent of like ten bucks a week for how to have this tutor basically tutoring money my kid over zoom they but it's done in a educating entertaining way by the way sean are you just wearing a robe yes okay i i just i just noticed that i just thought we should get that out of the way you're were you like it's audio only baby we i don't know if anyone sees these clips i just assume it's audio on me i'm in the room alright alright i i wanna get three out first and then i'll i'll kind of shout up for bit one is i'm i'm personally i i think you you guys might be into this but i i'm i've been really into the idea of like franchises for a long time i think it's like you know i think sometimes i i think people you know in in in our ecosystem at least like we'll look down on these types of businesses but some of them like are phenomenally profitable and they're extremely capital efficient and it's a really lightweight to build kind of a brand and a go to market you know strategy without actually having to kind of be out a super rich you know person to to start or raise a bunch of money i think there's there's opportunities to to modernize a lot of the kind of legacy franchises so for example are you guys familiar with a company called sander oh yeah a hotel kind company yeah so they basically like take over people's leases and they manage the properties and originally there's a listing platform to you know they would take those properties and they were listed on like craigslist or can be and so on and so forth and get you know they would manage it and then i think more recently they're starting to like aggregate the demand on their side so that people actually go to son dot com and then you know actually book directly so they don't have to pay the fee you know i i think they're like i think the largest like one of the largest list like unified listeners on airbnb at some point but i think there's an opportunity to do something similar with with with actually fitness centers and gyms you know the concept exists for hotels like you know you'll have like marriott or whatever come over and kind of manage the property but i think gyms right now like you have either you you have like a i think a bifurcation in the market of like really low end gyms which you you might pay like a depending on you're like ten twenty thirty forty bucks a month for or you have like the really premium gyms of which they're like you know some in in in la was like two hundred or two twenty five per month for an e and it's an annual subscription and so it's huge upfront commitment i think there's a mid market operator to mid market opportunity to do something similar and so i i mean sandra is familiar to i think us audience there's also like audio rooms you know internationally which has done this for hotels but at a various like very very low end budget kind of model i think there's an opportunity to do something in the mid market for for fitness centers and gyms right right now obviously it's like the worst time to to do this but it's an idea that i think is interesting along the same lines i think there's a real opportunity to do something similar in convenience stores this is actually an area that i've i've it's like super un sexy but like it's a huge like there's so much volume that goes into convenience stores and it's it's for an obvious reason right like there's companies like go or whatever but i believe i i think like they'll get to maybe ten fifteen twenty percent market penetration at both kind of like what you commerce right now i think mean stores will probably always exist but right now like it's super you know new york you have bode and like suburbs you have like seven eleven but i think there's an opportunity to either do a roll up and the reason why i i think there's an interesting use case there is like right now convenience stores are retailers and they have to buy a wholesale from brands or distributors and they don't have any negotiation leverage as an independent like as a one kind of man show or or you know a small shop but i think if you had a a larger kind of supply base to to purchase off of that could be interesting and you could do it either as a franchise model or as a roll up of your own and i also think the mcdonald's can tell them all over here but like they're you know the mcdonald's model how like franchisees will actually buy they'll buy the license to become a franchise but then mcdonald's will actually buy the the real estate and then the the sale the proceeds from the actual you franchise will actually go towards the real estate purchase i think that actually could be interesting because convenience stores have like the best real estate possible in like a lot of these bigger cities and sometimes separate because they're in the middle of like a town i don't sam i don't know if you were gonna say anything there i think no my wheels are turning i'm thinking i'm scheming in my head this is this is a a fun one like for anyone who runs a an american factory there's a lot of these like malt smaller kind of you know let's say two thousand to five thousand square foot factories in the us i think there's actually opportunities to create like really well loved high affinity branded factories and i know that sounds really weird but like think willy won and the chocolate factory if you run a chocolate factory and you like did a daily show i'm like hey i'm grinding like you know i just got my shipment of you know c i'm like going through the roasting process or you could do it for coffee i think there's actually a lot of opportunity for building brands online factory i think i'm a chamberlain like has i mean she's this is a very far fetched example but like what she's who well oh i'm a i'm a chamberlain like one of the biggest youtube yeah yeah yeah i love this woman i i just discovered her what does she i don't know her she's like she's just like a a cool yeah she's just a youtuber but she's like pretty cool i don't know she's like you know like obviously cute and charming and entertaining she what does she talk about or she just talked about lives left it's like a flop it's almost like a very nothing yeah she didn't but like interesting sheet like the the i i think you know you guys talked about the an i think these cloud kitchens which i love by the way i think like those guys are you know re read and and night media they're also investors for for it talk as well but nice yeah great amazing people to have but i think the you know most times when people do merch with influencers it's like it's crap like you're not you're gonna buy it like maybe if you're a super fan but like you know it's a teacher shirt like what are you actually gonna do with it but i think when you do things that are like really on brands so for example what emma did was she partnered with a a a coffee manufacturer's really into coffee partnered with a coffee manufacturer and launch chamberlain coffees and i think like they're probably doing multiple of what we're doing right now for it so i think there's opportunities to do things so it's wait let's we we gotta talk about this for a second so sean this emma chamberlain google her she's like nineteen she's got the she kinda she looks like this i don't know what her stereotype is like quirky quirky like a cute yeah i don't know what her stick is i watched a video over her where she rented a hotel room by herself because she wanted to stay patient and i have no idea why i watched it was a twenty minute series she's just entertaining she's good her tagline chamberlain coffee zero bullshit just coffee that chamberlain coffee zero ball bullshit just coffee like it's it's it's like it's like a legit brand now it it when it started it was kinda like like you know a crappy squarespace side but now like it's a beautiful brand i think it's like the they that i think that's like an influencer slash celebrity brand done right and it's so rare you know it so do you think does she own one hundred percent of this do you think because i'm looking it usually here's what and i always i like to go through the stuff with the listener what i like to do is whenever i go to these websites i scroll all the way to the bottom and i find out who it owns the copyright or trademark or what the copyright trademark is and then if you typically google it in quotation marks you can find out who owns it do you think but i don't see that on her site i think i think yeah i don't know i don't wanna speak like incorrectly but how did you how much revenue do you think this this woman makes off this the top line sales on chamberlain coffee you think they do more than forty million in sales no i i i don't think yet i think they started like last summer or so so i think they're they're still getting there but i i wouldn't be surprised if they up there pretty soon and it's the best part of our coffee is it's subscription right so and i think with these types of deals like if you're a factory out there and you know you you can say like your margins are already crap right like that's a whole point of it vitality is to help you you know basically earn margin and kind of gain your own distribution channel of your own but but but if you're saying like hey we can sell a prop and by the for factories like normally they'll make fifteen to twenty percent on top of cost of goods you know and this is like depend regardless of the category regardless to of where you whether you're in us or china you know italy it might be twenty five thirty percent sometimes but that's like on cost of goods a brand will buy that and sell up for ten x it's like normally so if you even said like hey to a factory hey we will do a fifty fifty revenue split you're already like on a retail price and you you match what's on par with the rest of the industry you're basically like more than five their margins like and that's that's not like an abnormal and and in exchange you're they give you what distribution which is the most expensive part of the game anyways so and i think you know i i think that you you talked about this previously as well but i think like influencers are late most are lazy like they don't have aspiration to go beyond kind of like what they're currently doing they're happy to do a promo happy to do whatever but if you made it really easy and i was just like hey like we have a designer we have a you know whatever it's kind of like we'll build a business in a box for you but but it's actually like catered to you in know wait like okay a a good example is i was looking at a chocolate factory and in in a right above i was in marin county and like really high quality why why were you doing that from manufacturers from years and years ago for for not it was originally chocolates and then we moved into companies this is like twenty sixteen twenty seventeen but they they went for sale and i was like okay this is interesting might as well actually look there's this guy who's like a sexy willy won tiktok character i forgot his name but just imagine like hey put literally put that guy in the factory make him do a video once a day he's gonna be huge like he's already huge and you could do like a golden ticket you know you know one out of every thousand you get like a thousand bucks or something like that there's always like i think it has to be catered for the influencer but i think there's branded factory opportunities where you have you know rev sharing and you know i know there's agents who do this for like skin skincare and beauty but like i think beyond the standard merch and care there's a lot of opportunity that that's like a lot more interesting than you know selling a t shirt did we talk about the buck thing sam what is that maybe okay so alright so this is this a crazy story so i got a dm by the way this is the best part about doing a doing this podcast so i just get dms that are interesting interesting characters your dms open yes my damn open i had to turn them off for a little while for what i don't know i just didn't wanna read up all all of while you look for that can we just say this chamberlain coffee thing i'm buying it or i'm buying those stuff this site's beautiful it's great it's a it totally convinced me to buy at it's end to end like a really well done brent and you barely even for venture backed companies that try like it's very rare that you see to happen so no they crushed it sam loves cute girls and curly font so he he was in at first sight alright so so this guy so i met this guy chris and chris says hey man i got kind of a crazy story and i think the hustle might have actually done a feature on this i'm not i'm a hundred percent sure but he tells me the story he goes so there's this chain of alright kinda like gas stations in texas called buck i lived in texas i didn't even know about this do you have you guys ever heard of this chain most people if you're not in texas you probably haven't heard of this buck buck it's b u you know oh the b gas in the gas station exactly they're gas for two things one they have the cleanest restroom so if you're on a road trip or you're stopping buck is a place to stop because they the cleanest bathrooms you know out there let alone for a gas station the second thing is they have a whole bunch of snacks like they basically have their own branded snacks in the gas station whatever that you buy and it's built kind of like a cult brand they're an influencer gas station if you will right so you get buck that has this is this loyal following it's like you know every kind of region has their version of this like i went to school in north carolina and cook out was like oh you gotta go to cook out and get the shakes or whatever like the ever there's these little like regional brands that people just go crazy about and so this guy chris chris corner he decides to start buying he notices that buck does not have e commerce you could buy it in the store but there's no e commerce so he just starts buying a whole bunch of products from the store and then just selling those same things online and he just like let me test this out so we run some ads and basically he's like oh if you love buck like here's a way to buy buck beaver nuggets which are like their little like best nuggets my right here here's their the their chocolate cover milk you know like chocolate covered everything or whatever here's their hat here's their mug and so he just starts selling this kinda like you know like on the down basically and he's and so he calls at texas snack dot com or something like that texas snacks over the x and put the link here but he starts selling it and sure enough to ad start performing phenomenally people who see this are like oh my god i love buck or my husband loves buck so this is the perfect gift for them they'll feel so good that so so he starts selling this and the ants start performing great and so he's like yeah you know i'm spending x and i here's my ro and he's showing me the numbers i'm like wow these numbers are kind of like amazing for e commerce and he's like i was like so what is this just gonna get like shut down or whatever and he's like no actually they reached out they were like hey this is cool what you're doing like we actually tried commerce a few years ago like we spent three million dollars like setting up e commerce and they're like never went anywhere we kinda like just ditched it but that's cool that you got guys are doing this like how can we help and he's like well you know like i'd like to you know just get the blessing from you and you know it's like you know as long as i'm like an a approved vendor this is great and the second thing that he did with that was like he's buying it at the retail price so he's not like asking them for some he's not eating into their business at he's buying it from a store at the retail price he's just up charging it from there for people who want it delivered and he himself owns a three p so he's like this is perfect i can fulfill this really easily so i loved this little store i thought this is like a very clever local thing to do basically this is similar to what we had talked about with ty lopez which is like take one established brands kirk who reach out to you chris is his twitter handle is serial trip like serial entrepreneur and i saw was like you have like fifty thousand followers how do you do you have somebody many followers he's like oh like i was doing some bitcoin stuff like you know years ago it got really popular you know like you know john mca was invited me to his house for some shit and like kinda got blown up from that but like yeah i changed my domain name now i changed my handle now so that you know it's more generic not about crypto okay listen i'm gonna talk about something that a friend has been telling me that he wants to do and i'm gonna i'm gonna mention it because i have to i'm am looking at send eats dot com so if you go to texas snacks dot com that's this guy's website if you scroll to the very bottom it looks like it's owned by and send cent eats dot com and basically it's a service that how do they describe themselves they just do it with that buck things for everyone oh this is the same guy this is their yeah this is his company so basically they there are a three p which basically just means because they're like the warehouse and fulfillment so you store your products there they stay packet it ship it out to your customers for you and in their about page they saying two thousand twenty they expanded to cold chain do you know what cold chain storage is the it's basically where your temperature controlled you temperature handled right yes and a lot of insiders of of this space this legit food say i don't know what you would call it but i've been talking to some friends in that space and there many people have said to me cold chain expansion cold chain storage is the number one category for growth oh it's crazy you you can't you literally can't find a a vendor for it right now it's like i i'm telling my my parents have a warehouse in chicago and they they have like manufacturing business that's our family business but like i i'm trying to get them till like convert their warehouse through cold chain like you know cold storage so what can you i don't really know too much about what that means scenes in detail can you explain to me jeremy what was why is it the need exploding is that covid thing or just in general well i think it's just in general basically like you know the you're and by way this this is a really interesting area i i actually personally invested in this company called air house it was founded by the the founder and ceo of ship s h y p that was my first job in in out of college and that's when i met sean so anyways cold cold chain and i culture logistics and in storage specifically is you have to have it if you work with like a distributor or you you sell any perishable product that is not like dry goods so so so like let's say we're talking about oat for example i i don't know the supply chain this is just a guess but if oat wants to distribute that product to whole foods you know they need a store and they they'll produce it more likely than not in the us right now you know those they'll they'll have suppliers you know wherever produced in us the they'll need to have a pickup and then they'll which will be a reverse so like a refrigerator truck and then and then that refer drop yeah that's what it's called they drop it off at like that cold store so you have like those three p like have to have that space allocated and more often than not it's like the whole space it's not like half half and it's more expensive store just more but if you wanna introduce it the whole thing it's like you have to do it and retail is just like you know popped off ever since covid or grocery not retail grocery has popped off ever since you know covid started so and i don't think that's slowing down by any means especially with like nowadays a lot of the cold storage fulfillment center used not do direct to consumer fulfillment it was purely for retail as a lot of these brands transitioned online for covid i think the need for direct to consumer kind of distribution went up a lot and the cost of this is really high and the the both in terms of shipping to a customer but also the setup cost so so yeah it's there's basically not enough like cold storage in the us right now for like a new brand if you wanna start so start this company don't quit selling pot not or not pot your parent what are what is your parents warehouse for they they do they've been doing like very heavy duty industrial manufacturing for a long time so they've produced parts for like tesla like general motors like etcetera etcetera so it's like mining auto so you were buying tesla stock early you're like oh shit look at this purchase order baby we get we got who we gotta buy i i was not smart enough to do that so well at least you weren't dumb enough to sell tesla like if you're actually court tesla i think the irony i i i this is not from my parents but i think this it's just in general like i've heard is they they come to you s saint like you know they're they're big you know they're they're just like hey we're this huge huge company but in reality like the the orders aren't actually that big relative to i this is a common story right like four chips a zillion times more you know which cars and tesla does but like the market i have a quick question jeremy you are somewhat steep in this vc world although a little bit i mean you you got your foot in your family are they would they own warehouses they they have a manufacturing company so they produce born right here in chicago classic asian immigrant story so moved yeah and i'm stereo typing you and and i was right so they're there are these immigrants who came here from and and they're the american dream right they started probably a small business that maybe they had like some type of store and they're like oh we actually just start making the thing and they like have slowly built it up over like two decades right yeah in this case forward yep great so they're american dream and pretty traditional right of like doing it slowly probably maybe they took a little bit of debt but they certainly didn't have investors right yep yep yep just slow and steady yep slow and steady is it lucrative has it done well for them yeah i think so i mean i i think i i actually don't even know the numbers and they won't tell me so i actually don't know another super high income like you it was super rich i i think we're like very healthy between middle to high income so so my question is this what how has your experience of like raising money and trying to like i mean i'm sure maybe they saw that and they're were like this is outlandish why are you doing this is stupid maybe maybe i don't know i mean that's at least how my family was but how has your experience and your friends experience different from them and which do you think you like better well if that's a huge question actually i mean you could ask that to like everyone in silicon valley and i think you get like a thousand different answers you know i think when i was growing up i i'm sure you guys like probably felt someone like i i think didn't feel perfectly you know i'd like the classic chicago track and in chicago is like a very specific mark i'm from saint louis by the way oh nice okay so you got it's like you grow up you become an accountant you got you gotta buy you gotta you go become an accountant in a big four work in insurance or lamar someone get married and like your life is not work it's it's your life right and and your your your sole purpose is like to fulfill you know your family's needs and and continue what's so on and so forth and i think like when you have an immigrant fit i think another thing i will say is growing up asian in the midwest is very growing up asian in the west coast and also in east coast like in the midwest like you're talking about like korean churches you know it's super like conservative you know education is everything whereas if you grew up in the west coast like you have asians who like go home and then your visions become billionaires like neither of those really happened in in the midwest so i think for me i was hey i wanna get out of here move to to somewhere else and i think in the beginning like it was a hundred percent like just hustle i was like okay go big or go home like that's the whole reason why i dropped out and did the whole you know feel shifting and like so on and so forth all of which i'm really you know grateful for but i i think you know as i get older i i think in like that's that's the irony of like being twenty five i i guess like i've been on this path for six seven years now and i feel like ancient by now but relative to a lot of the the newcomers but i think you know now that you've been in the game for a bit it's like okay the the flip flipside is now like i think when we started in twenty fourteen ish you know the there were so many narratives that i think are no longer true today so you know remote there was no way you could do if you wanted to raise money like you had to basically kill yourself to do so you know this is like a twenty four seven hustle this this is the arrow of like i think the uber and and so on whereas nowadays i think like you know founder i i don't know if it's because more capital has flown into the you know the ecosystem so that founders have more you know leverage but i don't know i i think that the opposite you know the the the the more conservative like compounding side of the business is i think equally valued now not by investors by any means but i think buys as a founder it's an actual legitimate shin whereas if you're in san francisco like twenty thirteen there's no way you're gonna do that right it's like you're gonna look down in every company unless it was raising money you were kind of always comparing you know who raised more or whatever but nowadays it is like a lot of these companies are way bigger than ours so i don't know it's it's what which which are you referring to that's bigger than you like a gloss or i don't know who you consider actually i i i i love like the glossy brand i think they're like they did a great job but i i will say like hey if you were glossy and you're the founder there you gave up like more than probably half your company and you had c founders or whatever no i bet you she owns less than ten percent yeah i bet she owns ten percent i mean it's a lot though it's a it's a it's a billion dollar business maybe i mean who that's that's true maybe but i i think on the flip side there's like companies like milk makeup d you know i can name so many here that probably have achieved similar run rates but they kept the entire thing you know in house and when it comes to an exit you know you you keep the whole thing and and by the way like you don't have to kill yourself down on dan day out to like hire engineers whatever it is and and they've achieved and jim sc like probably the more more recent example of this right so i don't know i and jim sc the comp you could use this like outdoor voices right like which is both both are great brands but like yeah the woman who started out outdoor voices was fired yeah exactly so or well i i i think what your parents are doing is the more interesting path which is like you know the easier it gets to start certain businesses and i'd say e commerce is getting easier and easier by the day to start the harder and harder it will be to build durable successful brands and the more valuable things like you know cold chain you know cold chain logistics or you know being a manufacturing plant that's providing that's that you know that's building for you know fifty different brands you know i feel like that's where the durable value is because it's very hard for a little fish like us so it's like i got an idea to swim upstream and go do what they do whereas it's very easy for you know another person to enter the enter the fold and start selling their d to c chocolates and gum and shirts and hats and whatever else and so i think that like the long term comp you know compounding most value is from def and i just think that like having hard to do stuff is much more def than the like kind of quick you know d to thing but you know there's something you doesn't mean you can't make money doing both but it's like which one ultimately is more valuable and i i i think you know where your parents are at is actually where a lot more value is is to be add and i wonder what would happen if you took like a technologist or an innovator and you you know who was like your parents probably don't think wake up every day everyday trying to like grow and expand and more and more and more like they're probably like you know like running a good solid business every single day and like that's their mindset like i wonder what would happen if if i took away all your other projects and twenty five year old you took over your family business where does that business go in the next ten years probably ten x and becomes a billion dollar like you know industrial family you know pete people have done i have a couple of friends who who come from manufacturing families and they they basically like put out a consumer brand on top and they're doing like you know one of my friends started out which is like the the furniture company and now they're doing like tens of millions so so they own their factory it was a it was a i think the it was a family business for the the manufacturing same with buff like the comfort they bootstrap for a while before you know taking on capital and that was a family business there's so many examples like that but these are just the three ideas that i i wanted it to share and then i'll i'll i'll officially be done cool one is i i think for these are like a more controversial ideas but i i think like you know nowadays you as a foundry you can actually have the way to do whatever you want i think all alcoholic anonymous online is actually really talked about that have you okay perfect a little bit know i mean go for it but we talked to there's i think we talked about this a while ago no this is super interesting and there's a company called the tempe hat that has that was launching around when we start talking about this and so they're actually further along now i i wanna i i we should do a check up on them just to finish idea you were saying hey online basically digital mobile app or something even have to be specifically like hey i think there's like a a million like specific you know use cases but i think the the the the bigger idea is was just like hey can you build a specialized community for support groups and it doesn't have to be like an all encompassing generalized like universal here is a support group platform like reddit but instead i think you can create like customized you know product ties like versions of each so right you know in aac case like you know you have the steps and you know there's a number of other ones for like mental health or whatever it is so that was one the second one is just following up and something you guys have talked about a bunch which is and this could go either in venture or lifestyle i think you know you guys have talked about like andrew wilkinson consent like what he's done with the capital daily i think it's awesome like i i think everyone respects that i i think the way he he goes about building businesses is it's very you know specific and and well known nowadays to to him but i do think there's actually a venture approach as well in which you can create more of a democrat system of like hey we're gonna find local editors in you know mid market cities for example here like pro is a pretty big city around here and there's like so boise you know so on and so forth and and i think like a lot of those basically the idea is like i think you can create a modern day patch which was acquired you however many years yeah well they're their patch is still going get natural i no i i i i i think the the idea like patches i think the reason patch kinda sucks as a user is like the content is like not curated whatsoever there's like just a little old looking yeah it's old it's like there's so many things going on but if you just have like a a paid you know you you monetize through subscription businesses as opposed to advertising i agree and like a dollar a week or whatever it was i think there's enough people in there's like mid market cities that you can actually build a sizable like you know multi dollar run rate per per you know country business and your job as a venture company would be to build the tools to empower and source those editors kind of like the athletic actually as a as a good example yeah and if people are are curious patch was started by aol i think it was like tim armstrong it was like it was tim armstrong it he was a he was an a tim i'm armstrong helps start was an early google guy and then per minute he was a ceo of aol patch was his baby i don't know if he started it or if he bought it i don't know i forget but it was like a localized news website i guess and it's never gone out of business and i think now they're doing tens of millions of revenue but it was like touted as like the next big thing and it didn't exactly become the next big thing yeah and then i've a bunch more but my last one i'll just keep kinda short i i know actually i'll i'll just kinda like run through them and i won't even like explain i just wanna get these ideas out and if anyone's working on these like please do let me you know because i've been thinking about these a lot one is so actually you actually mentioned the the manufacturing piece of this but i think uber was probably the best like modern example of a managed marketplace in which like when you actually i i think you guys talked about this as well but like when you use the uber service you're not thinking of like hey i'm like contracting uber to find me a driver to use their car it's like i'm booking in uber versus airbnb where it's like i'm booking airbnb but it's like a specific stay so i think the concept of managed marketplaces actually hasn't ventured into business services as much as it could a couple companies have done this already so i think flex port was a great example of doing this for a modern day like free brokerage z was actually the one i was gonna mention that has done this for manufacturing so they've basically aggregated a marketplace of of preferred manufacturers underneath the hood so that when you place an order with them or sample or whatever like they'll go and kind allocate this order to the right person at the right time there's also i mean on the three p side like that was i think the past ten years but now in the past three to four years there's companies like air house flex you know floor space that have built like four p or wrappers on top of these channel eight is another one pilot is one that has done this for bookkeeping bench has done this for bookkeeping so i think manage marketplaces is a good idea financing for niches is a good idea as well i think like if you provide financing for products like weddings or you know or even like home repairs or maintenance i think there's a lot of room there and you can actually charge a premium this is a lifestyle business i think if you built like a brand called kids next door and you offer things like back to school products box composition notebooks backpacks i think there's a niche business there okay i i'm mean we'll stand promise order via qr codes this is an air like i live in china bunch over the past like decade and this is an area where like every time i come back to the states you kind of wonder like where is the american like innovation in this why don't we just like like all the pos systems have the ability to order and transact through if you are and then you can actually run the transaction through apple pay google pay you know whatever it is v moe even cash app but all of them are local like right now the like right now the innovation on menus and ordering has on quick service has like ended at a qr code showing you the menu like the i don't know why anyone it like toast should do this like they should just connect the final step which is like actually let them transact and this is how like every restaurant in china works whether it's a high end one or a low end one last one group buying this is something that does not it's like it exists in middle like you know i think you know the classic like tu wear parties or whatever in like middle america but on the reason i think you know this is coming called pin and china that i know a lot of people nowadays know i don't know how do you spell that oh p i n d u o d u o it is actually i think the craziest venture stories here yes john has brought this up many it's insane it's it's but the the mechanic that people i think oftentimes fix it on when it comes up eyes like the group buying i don't actually think that's the reason why it succeeded they they had group buying like prior to this like there there was two companies that eventually like merchants one it's a really crazy founding story but like they focus on produce and i think the the concept of actually like getting one person in a community to buy bulk produce and then distribute it to like the rest of the moms or or you know whoever it is that's the primary kind of like cooker i guess the chef in in the household it's i i think actually what led to pd like doing really well in the beginning i think it it's if you can figure out so of the logistics of pd works so i or so so definitely it's you buy in bulk and save so it's like a community you can kinda buy vegetables fresh produce so is it actually one person receives it that's like a know one of the customers holds it and then distributes it out themselves or does pd deliver to each house it's it's changed over the years you know nowadays it i think they've built the mechanics so that it's that's you the payments will actually happen like separately so they'll orchestrate the payments and then they'll all also ship separately so it's just all about like lowering c at that point it's just like hey yeah can i get you to refer someone else at like now and then you know as opposed to waiting later but there's companies like in early earlier on and what they did like in china there's companies it's called a like nice twin mist fresh etcetera where it is like one person who buys for a local community and you get like a huge kind of bundle of product and and you distribute it locally so it's almost like a the the basket size is enormous and their the frequency of use is very high so group buying and then okay this i know i said last time avant this is actually my last one yeah okay this this is the probably the craziest one but it's like if if if there's any like hard tech people out there that i think are like into this i actually think this is a potentially like really big opportunity this this is the most other so i i was thinking you could build a like we we know right now like we have crop failures a lot and and and there's also a shortage of honey beach like honey are actually like going down immediately you're talking to a bee keeper in insane or he's literally he's a he's an actual bee keeper oh wow okay well anyways i mean i don't know anything i just bought it off man like i just not like i like i can't tell you about b stats all i know is i had some b's yeah the i the idea is basically hey can you build either autonomous crop poll which i think is actually a an increasing challenge right now for oh had be your own it's like a drone b well you you i mean yeah you you could you could take it either way but i think like right now the the issue like specifically with the companies like months monsanto not is like you have kind of like like how do you i even put it like you have spread between like months monsanto based crops as well as like non months monsanto based crops and then like that genetic variation can actually cross like it it look like there's no physical barrier to prevent like a crop crossing over and they're all there are the actual like service right now for poll cop crops is a bee like literally going to a farm and like releasing bees and saying like okay and i'm gonna charge you for the day and i i think this is gonna be continuing like you know trend i i know this is really out there but i actually think there's a big opportunity for it yeah it's actually i don't understand the idea so so what would be the idea here so you would do hold on listen sean what you have to do is right now if you're a bee keeper and these are people who i bought my bees from they actually you pay money and sometimes they'll drive literally cross country but and a farmer will pay a fee and a keeper will bring literally hundreds of hive i've i own two hive so someone would bring like hundreds and they would place them in your field for maybe four weeks and then at the end of the bees poll because you need b's in order to grow the plant so the b goes from plant to plant to plant and then doing so drop seeds and stuff like that or i think drops seeds probably but okay i don't know if it's dropped seeds but so except something happens rubs the poll on each other yeah yeah like it it helps create more plants is basically what it does and a farmer will pay them from one month of that and then the bee keeper goes back picks up their bees brings them home grows more gets more and then does it again crazy like you look to poll commercial like large scale crops you need really some yeah like like millions of acres like this is actually how it's done mean it's mind blowing to me and and the b population is like dying like it's it's dropping year over year so what what would be the solution so you're saying a non b solution for the poll nation well i think they're you could do two two ways like you could do you could do it like via like large scale drone and and i think like i i actually i mean you could do it that way in which like you basically blanket at a certain like set area the alternative as you actually go like actually try to create like micro you know i don't know if it's i don't know if you talk about it like from the sit standpoint of like a robot b but i think there's ways to go about poll engineer a b basically you can even have a like you can even have like a standardized like robot kind of like drive between i guess the rows of a of a crop and and like sprint i don't know there's i just think there's an opportunity there i i missed in this company called pike a couple years ago that's doing like autonomous crop dusting in in new zealand they never got the license i don't think in the us yet but i think there's a lot more opportunity in like the commercial farm like there's all these like really but i know i think sam you're really into trucking but i think there's all these like opportunities in like farming that is just like as large and it's a really i mean if you think that it's like critical to everyone right whether it's vegan or this is what i've been saying since of beginning in this podcast i like sometimes people dismiss trucking and particularly farming me my parents are in that industry and i'm like if the truckers go away you're not getting anything and yeah if the farmers can't farm you're not gonna eat anything no one know what's hating on truckers at farms everyone loves our truckers we love our farms that's not what everybody say we're the the only thing i was ever said is like hey if these trucks can drive themselves you probably won't have trucking be the number one job in america you know so so maybe those truckers will have to shift into doing something else if the trucks drive themselves because maybe we don't want humans driving eighteen hours a day as like they're you know the way they live their like my point is that i just think driverless list trucks is quite far my the only thing i was just gonna make a point here which is like hey those industries are like i i think trucking now is recognized by like the vendor community is like hey this is actually really big opportunity but i think the commercial farming industries like it's it's like as large i think as this trucking and there they're like really big opportunities that if you have any interest in business applications wouldn't you rather build like i mean this this is my whole thing i i i started i dropped out to start a company in hr saas and like no kid drops out to go and work on like hr tech right like that's not what you dream of but if your goal is to make money and that's like what you wanna do through software or technology like it's a really great place to can spend time how are you when we should wrap up in a second but how are you spending your term right now because you have this business it which i imagine is that's like your job you know it's your ninety five or more than that but you also have this not pot thing it sounds like you are you're you all types of scheming in how do you well for what it's worth a lot of these ideas are things that like i've just jot down over the years so it's not like in preparation for this podcast i was like okay gotta come up with like a trade ideas there just things that i think i'd i'd really love to see in the world or someone to take on and know whether that's in the the facet of being an investor or or you know advising or whatever it is because specific i i really don't have much time so i just wanted to get these out there and i feel like this is a the perfect place to to do it in terms of day to day it's like yeah it's it's like you know how the startup up boundary grind is it's like right nine to late at night ninety nine percent of it is is it like and and it's it's talk like is like a really hard business to to start it is not something that i recommend to anyone so please don't try to copy it's it's it's not worth it believe yeah i mean hopefully it'll be worth it for for for you know sean and and every one of our investors and so on but the amount of work that goes this is why i love pi out bitcoin because the more people that copy me them higher the price goes that that is the beauty of bitcoin and as long as we all keep doing that then we all win and last question it i did you used to own fountain dot com we still do yeah it's it was i think it's like is like eighty k or something interesting that's i it was more so how much was it metallic dot com i think alec was like a hundred fifteen did you guys say broker or what what'd you do yeah yeah used breaker i mean a hundred k look how much have you raised we've rephrase about fifteen new i mean a hundred k for metallic dot com if you're trying to build a big brand i mean yeah please he paid in cash she just brought the brief briefcase for that one i mean hundred fifteen i tried i really did i i tried to get the guys had it since the nineties like you know i i'd tried every trick in the book before i went to a broker and just said like let's get it so right yeah i i used my sister's college gmail like you know all that stuff all wow that's smart well i got a run thank you jeremy this is awesome thanks for coming on dude good senior always thank you thanks for having me a lot of fun and yeah we'll share this talk soon alright