Breaking Down Two +$1B Companies Hidden In Plain Sight

there's like stories where she's raising funding and a guy leans over the table and was like so why should i trust you to be the ceo of this company and she leans back over she goes because i'm a complete and total animal and the guy leans back and he's like thing alright i'm in yeah i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a roll okay what's up we're here and i got two little special announcements for you first one we got merch the boys got merch we're a little late to the game we're a little slow most people start selling merch as soon as they get a following took four years but sam we figured it out you gotta sell t shirts on the internet and hoodies but that's i think that's all we have we'll we'll we'll add we'll add more stuff but we have a few stuff it's pretty stupid that neither of us are wearing it today mine's in the in the dryer at the moment again slow and stupid yeah but yeah it's pretty cool we have stuff that has some of our favorite sayings and dude this no small boy stuff shockingly caught on caught on in a big way i'll tell you something i don't know if you listen but i did an episode with sami from colin and sami mirror and they basically are like they're youtubers that study other youtubers so they're like always studying creators and he handed me two things when he came to the interview he handed me a newspaper that's should did i say about this no he handed me a newspaper that was they made their own newspaper a dish like one one edition special edition for their like they hit a milestone so they printed them a newspaper and it was like all of the like kind of content or interviews from their show we're like it's like here's the here's the monthly magazine or whatever here's the thing for for our stuff dude let's do that that's a great idea it's a great idea it look like a normal thing but they they made it using their content and i was like i love this he gave me one he's like this the last one we have i don't know if that's true or not but man you know how to make a boy feel special when you say that the second thing he handed me this hat that was a dope hat that says press published it's like this blue hat they have this super high quality and i was like oh this is like much higher quality than normal merch and he goes oh yeah here's how i think about merch he goes if you're logan paul or your mister beast you make consumables think prime energy drink it's a consumable i'm selling the sooner you're gonna drink it use it whatever and he goes mister beast chocolate he's gonna or even mister beast merch just t shirts these are all just consumables and he goes we don't make consumables we make collectible he goes this if you're a creator you should pick one of the two paths and i love this collectible side idea he's like because what you want is you wanna weigh you're look you don't need to make a you're not gonna make a fortune you don't need to make a fortune through your merch and which is why we've never done merch because it's like i don't know do been while really care about making a couple thousand bucks on on t shirt sales never been never been a motivator for us because we're rich if you missed that part alright so the but the reason is oh my god what a should we play like is that the our new collectible like douche bags are us is that yeah we're going to a store near you but the collectible thing made total sense to me where he's like you want the people who are like kind of your your thousand most but most like kind of devoted people people who actually give shit about what you do they're all about what you're all about they think the way you think they act the way you act they're very similar to you they're like for them this is like collectible badge of honor so make a limited edition number of units and when it's gone it's gone and it never comes back and on top of that you it's a signal so that anytime anybody else sees them with that they know oh they know you like part of the tribe they know you're part of the tribe like if i meet somebody ben said this to me the day he goes it goes oh you don't wanna i like because he he what he'll do often is he'll talk to people who come through my dms or email us or whatever he loves to go meet them and talk to them and i'm like that's great you get a lot of energy from that i'm more introverted don't like doing that as much but he goes no it's he goes the reason i like it he's like normally i don't like just talking to strangers but he's like if you like m there's like a ninety five percent chance we're gonna be friends he's like because if filters in people who think the way we think and act the way we act and like you got a sense a humor and it's like you're not gonna like this content if you don't if you're not a biz total business junkie in nerd you don't like to nerd you if you like don't like to learn nerd about business you're not gonna like this podcast and if you like everything buttoned up and serious you're also not gonna like this podcast and so it's a great filter it's sort like when i see another grown man glass of whole milk for dinner you know what i mean like a dinner like oh hey we probably have similar value cheers good good catholic what's up so yeah i i feel that if you got a favorite flavor of skittles sam sam do you guys what's the second thing you have so okay that's the first price second surprise is a eclipse channel so this one so actually we should done a long time ago if you go to clip m m m dot com so this is our new clips channel which is basically you we do these podcasts about an hour each clip clip m m m does is it's a youtube channel for only the clips of the best bits from the pod clipped out for you so that you can watch them in sort of like three four minute burst and for every episode we're only pulling out the one to three moments that actually mattered so where somebody told a great story had an amazing idea or shared something about the the way their business works to broke something down in a level of satisfying detail and at first i wanted to outsource this and then i was like no fuck that i'm gonna hand curate these clips myself because i'm like i want the channel that i would wanna watch because this is how i consume a lot of podcast podcasts like if you're like how do you like leg streaming yeah like it love the pod great pod i never actually watch the full ones what do you search to find it if you just go to m m dot com that'll take you there or the you get search my first million clips and i tweeted it out it's got like seven hundred subscribers now but i need this to get into the tens of thousands of subscribers because if you listen to this podcast you're gonna want to like why would you not want to just get the best stuff faster or like in a more simple way so yeah anyways that's my that's my sales pitch for both the merch and the the merchants collectible limited number of units and it's it's just a way for our tribe to kind of signal to each hey this you know i'm in the i'm in the club and on the other side we have the clip channel how did i do with my sales pitch that was a great pitch and the skin and joke was very funny and you made me feel very guilty because my wife listen listen my wife has her birthday this sunday and i was gonna a surprise her with a pinata hopefully she doesn't listen to this episode and i have a closet here in the studio room that is where i've have hidden the pinata and i've also hidden tons of bags of candy that i went and bought from party city lots of skittles on unfortunately i've gotta go back to party city today because i've eaten all of the bags skittles so you nailed valid it's all they're all empty there's a there's like a a whole bunch of at skit bags it looks like a went through that bag that's not even like a small hole you what why did you need a face size hole in that bag because when i do nighttime eating i go into bare mode and i'm like i'm like a bear getting like a like a like a bee high you know i'm just like i'm just like imagine just like using your fist instead of your fingers that's like what i am at night my sister says this thing to her girls so like she wanted them to like just go to their room and take put themselves to bed a so she invented something called night nighttime sister play playtime so that they would feel excited about oh you guys just wanna to do night nighttime sister play playtime time and they're like oh my god yeah night nighttime sister play time so they go to their room by themselves they play and they fall asleep and so i created nighttime daddy play playtime which is just when my kids are gone and i get to just eat and be on the internet and that's nighttime daddy playtime and i celebrated every single night dude i like am like putting my fist in in a jar peanut butter at night like i'd wake up and there's like bear clothes all all over the place so listen i wanna break up a topic you put it on your list and it's so funny you put it on your list don't say what it is yet but you put it on your list and i did a ton of research on this topic and it's incredibly fascinating so i'm tell you about the sorry we gotta give credit the reason we both have it on our list so someone tweeted that they did they go you should do it they just said you should break down this particular company and i was like one of the very few times where ready i go that's a great idea sir that's a that's a good we're gonna do that so let me tell you how i got started it's super fascinating so there's a guy named steven b you have no idea who he is but i bet you know court tv he started court tv that's one of my all time favorites you know predecessor of cops my favorite show of all time and in turns it to a huge success and then he also starts american lawyer media which is like a six or eight hundred million dollar lawyer media company that he sells so his next company it's called verify identity pass it started an o three after nine eleven and he wants to come up with an interesting way to make getting onto a plane easier and safer he comes up with this thing where it's like a credit card and you could swipe it and in order to like prove that you're i guess not a terrorist something like that and it gets you know a little bit of traction he raises a hundred million dollars to start this business he gets two hundred thousand p people to sign up flops done work out so there's this woman her name's karen i forget karen's last name actually but she's got this hedge fund very successful hedge fund what are you laughing at her name anyone named karen i just always almost think sam what a what a sides swipe they got in life by by this this trend that just started into whatever twenty twenty two and all of a sudden their name was never the same again she spells it c a r y n which somehow makes it better to be honest i would too yeah it it it does i just tried like better on if i was i think very just have to make a slight for like you know pronunciation change yeah like how i call look la qui hotels qui it it's just a slight ray so anyway she has this head fund it's successful at all but she hears about this company going out of business and she's like you know this is actually interesting and i think they made a a mistake they didn't brand it correctly i think this should be more of a luxury good company and so she buys the business out of bankruptcy for six million dollars then she goes on and raises fifty million dollars and she rename the company and she calls it clear clears is that thing that a lot of you folks see at the airport they are at around fifty three airports i think it's kind of confusing at first when you see it because you're like oh there's two lines there's a tsa line there's a clear line what the hell is going on turns out this company is crazy successful and it actually has a lot more implications than i ever imagined so clear does something like six hundred million dollars of your in revenue market cap of three billion dollars and what they do is they built this technology at that stand where it looks at your eye and it uses biometrics so it looks at your eye to figure out who you are it looks at your fingerprint and they like fast track you in that line but have you ever wondered how they like get these contracts at these airports it's like a monopoly yeah i don't know how they do so they give away ten to thirteen percent of their revenue to the airports and what that comes out to be is something like of their revenue in two thousand nineteen they're doing like three hundred fifty million revenue they gave out thirty five million dollars to airports their most popular airport was la lax that made them around twenty five million dollars in subscriptions of which they gave three million back to la lax and so they're kind of like in embed with the government a little bit and they have these people on their board who are they took funny from delta and they have delta employees on their board so like they had of delta they have like the former head of tsa security on their board and it's crazy fascinating because what they're doing now wait but tip i was doing bad listening because i was looking it up while you were talking how did they get the what like what was the thing that got them in because it's like seems like once you're into the airport and you're the you're the one of course this is an amazing business but what did they do because in what did she what was the miracle that they pulled off there they promised airports that they would give them a percentage of the revenue so they would open up a new revenue stream and also what they did was they took funding from a couple airlines and they on their board they added like former head of tsa and things like that and so like they like some old fashioned gentleman's agreement yeah yeah so it's pretty fascinating what they did but what's even crazier hey karen's actually pretty amazing there's like stories where she's raising funding and a guy leans over the table and was like so why should i trust you to be the ceo of this company and she leans back over she goes because i'm a complete and total animal and the guy leans back and he's like alright i'm in and so they're but they're killing it now they have seventeen million users but here's where it gets really interesting what they're doing and i went read a bunch of their like annual reports it's it's super fascinating and also scary what they're doing is you can now sign in to linkedin using clear so you can create an account verifying your identity you can also go to certain stadiums and buy beer using just your your eyes and so her whole theory is like look we're gonna start with the airport but eventually you're not gonna use a wallet anymore you might use apple pay for some stuff for for but for something that involves your identity you don't need to pull out your license anymore we're just gonna look at your eyes and it's super fascinating with these guys have pulled off and i didn't realize i kinda thought it was like a douche company because i'm like this is fifty dollars for tsa for five years this other thing is like a hundred and fifty bucks for one year why do i need this thing but people still buy it i i think i was with you one time and you bought it you even know what it was right well we were late we were about to be you were about to miss a flight to miami and so i was like alright my guy this line how do we do this okay let me just sign up for clear real quick and see if we could jump the line and it it worked you had tsa i didn't have it and so i cleared my way and and we we got on the plane it totally worked and so it saves you just a little bit of time but like what's crazy is that their vision is huge and it actually is like a super interesting vision that they have on how this business can be can be much bigger than it is now and it's just like goes way more in depth than i ever thought yeah i'm not sure i'm a believer in the rest of that vision because like i don't care like the amount of effort it would take for the you're at a ball game and you wanna buy a beer and now each beer vendor is gonna buy hardware to scan my retina and i have to stand still for seven seconds while it scans my eyes just to verify my age like feels like that's not the right payoff off like the airport one makes sense because it's like hey look airport security it's a big deal okay you can skip this line and if you're business traveler you're gonna miss a flight those are high stakes that's important and so it seems like the right payoff to kinda like work ratio i wonder where else that really exists where you actually need to do on the spot verify your identity so last summer a new law was enacted and so right now if you live in i believe it's virginia and you go to porn hub dot com or a bunch of other porn sites yeah go for it i see you type in interesting interesting website i'll mark this one so there's a new law enacted that for people in virginia you have to verify your identity in order to go to certain porn websites to prove that you're over eighteen and so it like brings up like a camera where wants to take your picture from your computer lens to like check your identity shame you it just starts shame it starts with your headphones like camouflage thrones shame yeah shave yeah shave yeah like the avatar is like a it's like a non holding a rosa and the she's like are you sure but but like there's like a a few instances where this actually is interesting by the way those porn companies some of the thing that they're doing is they're putting it on they're they're making it so if even if you're outside of virginia some porn websites are still making you register in order to like make you pissed off at the virginia congressman who approve this is like you like should put is hey mark ingram and virginia is forcing you to open your eyes and get scanned before you watch porn if you feel any kind of way about that pushes this button well they even have like a gmail login for some of these points it's it's it's it's weird it's weird is what it is but like i it's it's crazy but there are a few instances but the most crazy thing about clear is like this is a total monopoly that they have in airports and i'm shocked that they've had this i don't know anything about public valuations it seems potentially like an undervalued company but what is it value and what was the revenue again it's in the five or six hundred million dollar range they claim they have ninety percent retention so it's not like as good retention as software but it looks like their market cap as of today is three billion dollars i mean well that's kind of an amazing like a three billion dollar company that does such a simple thing and you said they're only in like sixty three airports or something like that that's that's crazy that it's so so big with such a small footprint and a such a simple product very impressive yeah they're in fifty three airports in their their the trailing twelve months they've done five hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue wow that's impressive here's our random related startup up did you ever see this company called evolve they they make metal detectors no so their big thing was they're like it's a one of these businesses like one of the meta takeaways of of this podcast is all the businesses are hidden in plain sight the right in front of you and if you just start once you start paying attention you're like oh this didn't just get here who put this metal detector here there's a company that does this how do they work is this the same company at all of these places how do they get that contract and so metal detectors are at every big venue right you know stadiums concert for whether it's for concerts or sports airports that sort of thing and so there's a company that had raised money from luxe luxe capital like a a vc firm that does like whatever slightly hard tech or or hard tech and what these guys did was they're made a middle detector good good pitch for them they do i don't know whatever well i was gonna say like cutting edge hard tech and then i was tunnel tell me about the metal detector and it's like that i mean guys those guys the beach were nuts ultra old meta detectors i can't really call this pet edge yeah we do slightly hard stuff yeah or part of the commerce so they but the their actual demo is pretty cool so what they're doing is it's a metal detector that can let you just walk straight through much faster so like you don't need to i think it's like you don't need to like take you don't need to take out everything for your kits and you don't need to like you know like i guess it could just detect it faster so the flow of traffic is faster than a traditional metal detector and that's kinda just crazy to me that that's like such a simple idea that i'm like yeah i guess like i guess that's true like if somebody just made a better metal detector going forward they're gonna win a bunch of contracts i have the thing called cricket i wanna tell you about they spelled this funny do you know what this is by the way have you have you ever have you ever heard of a cricket machine no and so it's c r i c u t no what is that okay yeah ari new producer aria is here by the way first episode so if you if you like how this produced this episode going if you like how it's edited credit to ari if you hate this episode blame on ari alright so alright have you ever heard of this machine the cricket machine i have not okay this is it's a diy like home crafting machine it's twenty years old this company makes a billion dollars a year in revenue hundred million dollars of free cash flow year sam how does that sound i like this none of that and what it is is it's basically a cutter so you put in some material it could be plastic it could be a sticker like paper and then it'll cut the shape for you so you could do like die cuts like sticker or whatever but by the way i barely understand how this works so i'm gonna put you i'm i'm looking at it now it's it's it looks like a printer but i guess it it's like a printer but it's it's more for cutting than from printing yeah so it's basically a way to cut different shapes of things so you wanna put something on a water bottle you wanna make a label you can cut it using your cricket home home credit it is this an invention that they made or is this a style on is this like a k x tissue type of thing no it's more like when steve jobs like i want you know every or bill gates to whoever was like you know every home was gonna have a personal computer he's like you know a computer on every desk and that that's basically what these guys so there was like these machines were there before for for you know for people for industrial application and then this what the the company that started it was called like pro craft or something like that they were making these machines for craft shops so you would take your design to a craft shop and you'd say hey i'd like you guys to cut this for me this way and they would have the machine on the on the countertop to cut it for you because you're not gonna have your own machine these are expensive what these guys did was they made it smaller and made it more affordable so that people could just have these at home and so you know if you go look at etsy you go look at things like this a lot of those people know all about the cricket machine because they have them at home and they use it to make their goods so how do they cut your name out in this cool looking font they don't do it by hand they have a cricket machine that would cut it for you and so just an incredible business and i saw i heard about this because we were looking at an investment so we're looking at an investment from some of the original guys who were early there and they've spun off and they're doing like a new a new like better version of of the cricket machine and i'm like yeah i just don't know how big this space can be like well i think it's gonna be bigger than cricket which does a billion dollars a year and this spinning off a hundred million of free cash flow and you know is a public company and i was like oh yeah yeah so my bad and he's he was telling me some pretty incredible things about the crafting community so he's like you know stores like michaels they he goes michaels if you go read their kind of like you talk to their leadership or read their ernie snippets or whatever he's like michaels believes that every single person who walks through their door is an etsy seller their default assumption is that if you come to a michaels you are she gonna sell on etsy and because it's like more the majority than the minority which is kind of amazing and it etsy this obviously this marketplace to go sell your goods but if you look okay if that's how you sell your goods well then how do you make them underneath that and so i am very tempted to invest in this space because it is such a big space what's their product too i don't wanna give it up just because it's like kind of proprietary but it's like some something like cricket something like cricket but better it does more things so the cricket just cuts this does other things in addition to cut got it so now this came by the way through our buddy a don't so if you go back and listen to the episode with big a a and his mom start a company in the quilt space and the little bread crumb trail is we have patrick campbell on the podcast patrick campbell runs a payments company called profit well and we were like hey you see the payments of like lots of companies he's like any cool trends in the payment space that we wouldn't have thought about he's like quilt thing we're like what he's like quilt is enormous like quilt thing like the grandma hobby he's like yes enormous there are companies that do blah so he told us about that afterwards i get a dm from a he's like hey i'm one of those companies that we make hundred you know a hundred million plus a year and my mom joe jenny jenny don't or whatever started this business and i joined her and like yeah we sell like kinda crafts for quilt like quilt squares right it's like patches the squares the the fabrics and they do like a daily flash deal it's like oh here's the quilt thing of the day and like that's how they do it so they built this huge thing to the point where he now bought a small town and he turned it into like the mecca of quilt it's like disneyland for quilt the disneyland for quilt it's like if you're a quilt and you wanna take a trip to like indulge in your hobby this is where you go and i'm like wow this guy thinking big i love this guy he's a funny guy and so he was talking about quilt and then he introduced this deal he's like yeah i'm investing in this thing because i'm in this craft space and you this is like one of the best kind of concepts we could do here so i'm just get i'm just scratching the surface on like this space i know nothing about but i'm very fascinated by this i wanted to share that with you dude the etsy platform is wild have you looked into like how big some of these sellers are my mother law's started an etsy store and she's making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling pillows on etsy right and one of the cool things about etsy is you can go to the store and it'll show you how many life time sales how many transactions have happened to that store it's visible on every profile yeah and you'll like look up something very up your and you'll see that they've sold fifty thousand versions of whatever they're whatever they have it it's wild how powerful it etsy is by the way i believe this is how moist started native deodorant it so i think they're like public story is like my sister got pregnant and i was concerned for her health and i wanted her to have aluminum impairment free deodorant i interviewed him about this the real story is what so i was in his office like we shared an office and so basically he was just looking i think he was like maybe i'll do mattresses a lot of people are buying mattresses this so and this is right when casper was getting going and and he called that so he's like yeah mattresses and then he's like shit these are heavy this is hard to ship i don't know if there's like a lot of repeat buying on this and then he randomly came across a lady selling chemical free deodorant on etsy he ordered that and then he ordered like five or ten other ones and he asked everyone in the office like put this under your arms how does this feel and it like some of it was good and he's like some of it was was bad but he found one that was great and he goes hey lady can i slap a native label on this and we just resell your stuff and that's how it starts and then eventually he gets big and gets traction he's like alright now we're gonna make our own thank you very much and i think i think she helped him like formulate it and and didn't keep up with the demand she was like dude i don't want i'm not trying to scale this to this level like i'm you know my fingers hurt sir like you know can i i can i take a break here and she was like how about this how about i buy the formula he's like how about buy the formula off of you and you help me figure this out and then we'll we'll bring this to a manufacturer because we've outgrown your scale now like a yeah and then and then after two years he sells the business for a hundred million dollars in cash and he that was like you know i think the business probably does like two hundred million dollars a year in sales so you could argue it was early but i think he turned out alright but he like sold the business like right before maybe two years three years before like the whole d thing was like alright this is more challenging than we thought but but one of the insights was this is i think it i think natural deodorant was one of the top selling products on etsy and that's why he he had market validation that there's something here aluminum free deodorant and i think this is not like like hit him and many other people do this where like you know the business has this this you know touching origin story this is this wonderful backstory but like these are often you know reverse engineered later you know the that's not how a lot of these businesses work one of my fun things is like let's just be honest out this podcast and like say what it is you know like i started like started the milk road because i was interested in crypto i saw what you did with the hustle and i was like oh i get it i could do that and i just did that with with milk road hustle crypto and i just like went down that road and did it and my goal was make a business i made a bunch of money right like that's the that's the thing and i thought oh cool doing this i'll learned about crypto that's my that's the transparent story there wasn't like some some origin story where you know my cousin needed a it hit me and then it hit me i should just write this seat email off for my cousin you know and and i didn't stop there i decided you know let's us open up for friends you're all my cousins yeah exactly yeah and so like i think you could do that again on etsy i think you could always go back to etsy and look for top selling products and use that as inspiration for for thing and you know for boys i'm sure i don't know this but like i'll i'll put a guess out there which is that like in arranged beard he had a checklist he's like what is under one pound for shipping what is a recurring purchase that's consumable what is something that has a you know differentiation against a a big market but has a unique differentiator like natural deodorant that's chemical free you versus what old spice and these other guys were doing and like yeah had a checklist last and he's like oh good deodorant lightweight you know repeat purchase with a clear differentiator got it by the way these cricket machines are awesome i'm i'm a think i might get one of these these are six they're they're expensive they're like a a grand there's promo code sean craft at checkout for yeah ten cents off these are awesome does a good find i mean it's not like it was like some like a rare thing but it's read us i guess but this is good find yeah this is out of our bubble for sure i bet this company that does this for for bathrooms and so they they make women's like hygiene products are like tampon pads that go in that go into like the vending machine women's it's installed on the wall and so it's just like a better a better version of of what used to be there's always something there and it was just like kinda it looked like a something a jan designed and then they just made like a really beautiful version of one that was like easier to use more friendly just look cleaner like looked more h and then what happened is that every state started enact laws saying that hey yeah every woman's restroom needs to carry these products just like you you know you have toilet paper whatever you need to carry these products and so state by state this is rolling out and what they're doing is they're going state by state into into these stadiums or schools universities and they're getting these multi you know multi million dollar contracts for installing their thing and once they're installed they're not gonna take them out it's sort of like clear it's like these little mono monopoly that you can you can get if you're the right product and the right place at the right time with the right sales pitch because once it's installed i don't think they're ever gonna go uninstall these things and change vendors because somebody has a slightly nicer design is that company working yeah like i be i haven't i can't share their like numbers right away it's like those disgusting baby changing stations what are those called kangaroo or jack something yeah yeah exactly those are filthy yeah her name is claire coat she's very like she's a very strong like leader kind of personality type person and so she she does a great job like she's on linkedin she's like super active with it it's called the company by is called amp flow and so has like a more more you know friendly name versus like what was there before and when she described kinda like what the process was before versus after you're like oh i get it and i get why other people haven't attacked the space because if you know most of the vc funding is going towards men a lot of of founders who are trying to start these venture skill companies are men not even aware of this issue never even been in the bathroom you can't you wouldn't even know that this problem exists but she's done an amazing job of like identifying the problem and then building a like super like just a likable brand and a likable story where it's like if you could choose between the default alternative or this like you'd obviously pick this that's cool i got pitched on a bunch of those i passed on all of them because i don't know but like that that sounds good that it's working hopefully it makes up money i mean getting those when i saw i was like i don't know man selling like two dollar things in the bathroom it can be a big thing but you said they're getting million dollar contracts who pays for it the facility the facility has to has to do that like the facility needs to stock this product and it's a recurring thing right they install the dispenser for let's just call like five hundred dollars it's five dollars to install the dispenser and then you're every you know every month or every quarter you're gonna like have to do refills and again that thing's gonna sit on the wall forever it's not gonna go anywhere and so to me these is like owning a piece of real estate in all these that's gonna pay your rent and i i think that that's just like i don't know if this becomes like a ten billion dollar company you know that that's like different next level stuff but it's clear that this is a def def business it's clear that it's gonna have recurring revenue it's clear that while there's a lot of facilities out there and they're all gonna have women's restrooms multiple of them per building and each one of those gonna need to have this in it so you starts to add up pretty quick okay so let me tell the story you know actually these guys much better than i do i only know it's secondhand hand but i'm a i'm a fan of this so back in the day when you were doing the hustle one of the very first things before i knew you one of the very first things you created was this infographic about a business that i found fascinating and it was a business called i cracked and i think what you were doing was you were trying to sell tickets to your conference he was a speaker and yeah in your genius you were like okay instead of saying come to my conference buy tickets you said look at this incredible story of i cracked these guys were in their you know whatever college dorm room a aj and tony and they realized the smartphones are taken off and so they decide hey everyone else is building apps let's just try to fix people's cracked phones because there's the more cell phones there are there's more crack phones is gonna be and they made this like on demand service so if you crack your phone same day they know that's a big problem for most people the same day they'll come to you grab your phone and fix your phone and it had this crazy n npr score and it starts scaling they get to like i think in the first you know they only raised five hundred k and they get to seven and a half million in revenue and you write this you make this great infographic and i'm this was in the infographic heyday infographics were like the thing back then were they you were the only one i saw do with it but they were great you and what's name named john i think he was their just he was the design guy you guys did an amazing job was just youtube doing the hustle and so and then you what you did was you're like love the story wanna hear more stories at this in fact one of hear aj tells the story himself he's speaking in a health in three weeks buy your ticket and then and i didn't want i'm not just gonna buy a ticket but you would release one everyone like week or so yeah one a week one a week and by the third week i was like damn i love these stories i don't alright i'll go to this conference like it sounds like it sounds like these are great stories and so i went to hustle con when i met you in the you know the story you know happy it has a happy ending so these guys okay so it's let me finish their story now because they're what they're doing is pretty interesting so they go they what they realize is okay we need people are gonna have crack phones we need to scale and they scaled through colleges so they're like they looked at this business like it tech i guess it's just like you know sort of like a geek squad type thing and they were like alright basically we just need to copy paste what we're doing to like actually i don't know it tech was the company they're copying or that's what they called their people but like they looked at like how to scale this they figured out on one college campus it's like okay we need these runners were gonna be able to cover this radius and repair these phones this way and they just copy pasted across college campuses and they basically they they taught college kids how to repair phones and i crack would send them the leads and they make alright you gotta go show up at this guy's house so you're gonna charge them three hundred dollars it's all on the phone you get a hundred we get two hundred whatever it was back that it's just so of scale they blitz and in thirty days they're on twenty eight college campuses which is amazing they had booted up twenty eight campuses in thirty days which i love they get into yc they're one of the only non technical teams to even get into yc and it's because this hustle was like obviously very appealing and and so at at one point they even buy like two hundred smart cars so they like rap in their cracked logo and they give to their ipads and they're so they're all running around san francisco fix an iphones it shit it was pretty cool and then it's like okay how you scale from there they go well we started using seo and press and they're like we've realized that the press loves to talk about the following headline twenty four year old making millions doing relatable thing and it's like he's actually started out of his kyle college college dorm room and they're just doing something that all of us need repairing your cracked phone and these twenty four year olds say they're making millions and so they just took that story and they did it at the local level so these cincinnati you know the cincinnati this guy grew up in cincinnati he's making millions other guy grew up and wherever he's making millions whatever college they went they did it locally there and oh they just booted up at this college campus so they it locally then they did it nationally and they started stacking so that when you searched fixed cracked iphone they could show up organically at the top through seo from these high authority publications that were writing puff pieces about them love it so these guys are great now here comes the problem they're they've only raised five hundred k they're at seven point half million it's profitable business are growing fast they never announced this but they go and they raise fifty million dollars to scale the business and that fifty million gets them to go international and at peak they get to thirty six million in run rate but it's just getting harder and harder to keep take to keep up with the growth monster and the growth monster is demanding that they get to a hundred million in revenue because you raise fifty million that means you gotta go huge you've you've cut off your options and so they just couldn't do it and they just could not scale the business beyond that and they end up selling it to allstate yeah insurance company and so they the one of the guys he stays there for three years he earns out his deal and he decides our out after year three i'm gonna quit star by next company and that takes us to cloud poker i used it your buddies you get it hampton what you do and well we tested it i was an a beta user and it didn't quite work out when we start when you would be a beta user i am beta they called the right guy we need a beta yeah to stay on the phone it it it was a little we started because there's was only a few weeks in but i think now he like nailed it and it was actually really fun so i wanna do two things i wanna show the homepage because i love what they wrote as the landing page the copy on this home homepage have you been to it's so good read read it off so it says poker is the new sport for business minds golf is yesterday's news request access and then there's a photo it's a cute dealer dealing to that's anthony's wife that's the founder wife doing okay great by the way your dealer so so and then there's like whatever people playing and you could get a demo of the product so super strong landing landing page then you scroll down it says business minds who love poker so just thinking out the positioning so almost everybody would be like online poker night right cloud based poker for you know poker software right this is like the generic shitty way to market this but instead they not only say the benefit of it they go even bigger they just say big picture gulf is the old way poker the new sport for business people that's the that's the we don't sell saddle z we don't sell saddle here here mantra like when stuart butter field created slack hero wrote this great memo if you've never read it go read it it's called we don't sell saddle here and he's like look guys we made slack we know it's awesome now our job is to teach the world that this is awesome here's the problem most people you talk to that run a company are not in the business for chat software they're not looking for a team chat tool it's just not a thing they even do they're not even looking for it so even if we say we're the best team chat software doesn't matter they don't care they're not into it he's like lulu lemon made you want to do yoga to live the yoga lifestyle and he's like we need to do the same thing we need to we need to sell instead of selling saddle and saying we make the best saddle we need to sell the joy of horseback riding and then when they once they fall in love with the idea of horseback riding they're gonna say where do get a saddle or we're gonna say we provide yeah we sell the best saddle and so same thing here i love what he's doing by saying poker is the new sport for business people that's the that's the selling the dream and then okay how are we gonna go play poker use our software and other day they have all these like quotes about you know successful people who have played poker and i i recognize a few of these people there's warren buffett there's say sam alt there's paul graham peter t and look at that there's the chairman of the milk road is on there that's you're on there say i had you i did that sean sorry that i did that i i'm on the page two of the carousel if you swipe so i never got that for it but what they did was they go business minds motherfucker then it's a quote it says which leader said this warren buffett cha off or paul graham and you're like that sounds like cha jamal nope it was paul grab okay cool and then it asked and it shows you another one so again using sort of the the people you already trust to say that poker they're not saying cloud poker night is great but they're saying poker is the bet is the sport for business people and then it's why poker so great blah blah and then it says why you should use our software which i love i think this landing page is amazing but you have to explain how it works so basically well i've used it so what it is is you we are gonna use it for hampton and and we're still going to but we did it for a team night and the way it works is it's almost like zoom meets poker so they have like a professional setup in in my case when i use it was anthony the founder he's got this like home setup that's a that's a card table and then there's a camera on him and you see him dealing the cards and you see him talking to you and interacting with you and you could see all your other teammates also playing but he puts the cards over another camera of which only you your you know the user you see your own cards so it's really like live poker and there's even a dealer who's like shoot shit with you and like asking if you wanna hit it's it's really fun it's very interactive it's awesome i think is a great business idea for a bootstrap business i i love this idea yeah i i love poker i played poker whole i i i really i think this is quite i would love to do an m m version of this so like that's a great idea give me hold on i think they did make one for so i asked the guy this morning i go hey this would be amazing i don't like like the live shows we did were cool because we got to meet people who listen to the pod that's awesome but i don't like travel like leaving my house and so this is great because we get to play poker we get to be on camera meet other people who are listeners to the show and we could just host our own tournament and so i think he's gonna do cloud poker night dot com slash m f so there will be a something there he says to to rs should be for this so wants playing a poker night we should do that with people who listen the pod i think they'll that'd be kind of amazing by the way the other founder so you talked about anthony anthony martin he's one of the c cofounder of i cracked the other c cofounder founder a aj he's one of my great friends he's a crazy person he's one of the wildest people have hung out with his other company or his new company that he started it's a they call it a like what headline called it the tesla for chicken coop so if you go to coop dot farm it's a smart chicken coop and he like keys into like bee keeping and he's always had chickens and animals and shit like that so he made a smart chicken coop that like opens the doors automatically and feeds the chickens automatically it's pretty funny i almost invested in it but i'll explain one of the reasons that got made me nervous is the like the day or a few weeks or something like that before the round closed when the ukraine thing happened a aj went to poland for like a month and was a volunteer helping like ukrainian refugees and the guy's crazy ukrainian no he just is into that shit he just does wild shit all the time like i'll be hanging out him and he's was like he used a boat to work yeah he he lived right near oracle and the office his i cracked office was in redwood city but it was across this little bay and he would take this little boat to work but every once in a while they had offices at soma and he would ride his this is like a small boat literally fit to people he would ride this little boat twenty miles up the bay to soma and dock his boat there the guy is crazy you he would do create no and when i say boat i remember you told me that like a decade ago and i still remember you were like yeah my friend he's kayak to work by the way bolt not the best word it's better describe it as a a jet ski that you stand up on so like he would jet ski to work basically that's smallest this thing was so was he pad or it was a motor no i had a motor it had a modem he was like motor it was like a jet ski he was like he was like kenny powers he was like jets jet ski to work he's the aj aj is crazy he's a he's a crazy person this raise a bunch of money from peter teal yes yeah they raised buddy for peter till like he's like peter like i see you're crazy and i raise you it's like say with me peter chicken it's it's a it's a it's a weird business but i think it could work yeah that's amazing so i think it's a really cool business i wanna see how this goes i actually wanna invest in this and i what i wish i could own a piece of this and just host poker because one of the great things about business like this is the viral vitality so i'm very interested in products that can grow viral and most people get this wrong products that grow viral are not products that succeed through word mouth like if you talk to a normal person oh yeah it's spread viral people used to go tell the friends because they loved it so much no no that's called word mouth viral is literally like the word sounds it's like a virus you you're not even trying to get it on other people but it gets on them it they catch it from you so like the classic example of this was hotmail at the end of every email it was signed like you know sent through hotmail you know sent with love through hotmail or something like that so you weren't trying to tell somebody hey you should start a hotmail account but it was added to every email as almost like you know a a little little virus that was attached to the email that basically said sent through hotmail get your free account today and so people started signing up and had this crazy viral coefficient and products like cloud poker i have a different kind of viral vitality which i think i don't know what what it's called a group viral vitality or something similar to how event break grows or meetup up dot com grows which is an attendee becomes a host so a host creates an event naturally they need to invite a bunch of other people because that's how an event works and then you might be in the hundred people that attend some event and if you like that experience the next time you're thinking about hosting an event you'll go use that same product because you got sort of it it was inc your brain through somebody else i think the same thing will happen here what i would wanna do is i would wanna host a bunch of these for fun using the m mfa community but then guess what the m mfa community when they have a good experience as a player would then host it their bonding night or their corporate events or sales sales of events or whatever for for their businesses and i think that's how these businesses can grow yeah i think it's cool what's what what do you wanna do cricket cut or gamer or dating ideas i'll do the gamer dating okay so sam here's why you should data a gamer i know you're married but if you could go back here's why you should have dated a gamer and me you i my my wife she doesn't play any games i just bought a ps five hoping that maybe that would sway her she it's instead just got upset so here's why you should data a gamer you're not a gamer are you i'm like the least gamer gamer but i'm in the club but just barely i'm by the door by the i'm by the exit door i played call duty last night for like the first time in the year it's shit's impossible these kids are too is so difficult unbelievably so it's sucks also all the popular games out they're like pub g it's like yeah you jump out of a airplane i'm like wow that sounds exciting and then it's like you land and now you just sort of walk around like you live twenty minutes and then you're not gonna see anybody during that whole time you just be collecting supplies i'm like okay cool but for what it's because then when you do see someone like i never see anyone like yeah that's the problem you're just gonna get shot the head and there's gonna start again and it's like these games where nothing happens it's is crazy anyways here's what you should did by way i i i played i played call judy last night and i played this thing where three guys we're on a team and we have to do shit together and it was two guys that must have been friends and they were talking to each other in spanish and i was so i was so bad that i couldn't see or hear or understand they're were writing i couldn't understand any of the words that they were saying other than but this is a bot he's so bad it's a bot domino's and they quit on me because i was so bad that's bot domino's like that's all that's bad i remember i you got call it a bot and i thought it was a good thing because i was like oh aim bot i must be aunt not like unlocked and they're calling me a bot and then i was like no this is they're they're saying this is like a npc alright so let me do my bit here here's your data gamer they're smart they you'll never have to worry about where they are on a friday night you know they're just gonna be the room plan you know and they're not at the club they're not not doing anything scandalous they'll fight for you she's did gamer they'll they'll stand up for you they're used to go into war on these things they're easy to trick into doing things because you just give them a a badge or a level or some sort of you you know medallion and they'll just grind for that for that prize they're tech savvy they can set up your internet fixed stuff whenever anything's broken and they'll always give you space if you get for the temper i need space they'll give you space but here's the problem you may want a data gamer after for that great sales pitch but the problem is there's no gamer dating app and that's my idea i think there should be an app for gamers to meet other gamers here's why this matters wouldn't there be a sausage fest i mean how many gamers are women all dating after sausage fest that's the trick they the guys only see the girls the girls only gonna see the guys unless you search the settings right so it's like yes like all dating apps the ratio will be thirty to one that that's that's expected but that's that's normal for a dating app here's why i think it's cool i think gamers have a lot in common i think gamers are a pretty big market there's hundreds and hundreds of millions of gamers out there like gaming the gaming industry makes more than that money than hollywood so it's like if you think people like movies people like games more but there's no easy way to meet the gamer and if you meet the game you actually have a lot in comment and you might have things to do in common and so i think one of the hard parts about dating apps is that they're all profiles right and flirt and no not really dates and then a bunch of companies came in and we're like we're gonna get you on a date but then the reality was like getting people out of the real world to go on a date is kinda like really really high friction and matching them was a pain in the ass i did a bunch of those i think that gamer or dating would work you could be like cool you matched you guys are both interested in each other and you might you have some games in common because that's part of your profile of what games you buy both liked to already play go squad up play game go play call duty together and in doing so you're gonna be talking you're gonna be doing something together it's like going bowling and go public a golf but just more fun and so i think somebody could i this is a legit idea first i was gonna save this for a drunk ideas episode and then it kinda grew on me i like no no this could actually work like if you think this can't work let me remind you that there is a dating app called farmers only right there's there's dating apps called black people meet and those that those at work if you think those can work and gay dating can't work your nuts game dating could definitely work and it could definitely be big definitely go sell to match for like seventy five million dollars in three years it's farmers only still a thing yeah i haven't checked in on it a little while but they used to run like tv commercial you haven't been keeping tabs still lot looks very old still paying the the hosting beep fee alright they're doing seven hundred k and monthly visits so not bad that's so funny what's your name for it i don't have one just yet you know working title tb open to suggestions yeah i think it's a pretty bad idea well i sold it pretty hard so this disappointing i mean maybe dude dating dating app suck the that's the worst business there is man because only like three or four of them it's like a winner take all market you know what i mean i don't wanna take there's tons of dating apps it it i mean who's the winner that took all tinder nope what bum nope batch e harmon nope okay keep though it's like social media where it's like there could be you know there's a hundreds of social media platforms so but there's like four of that matter do you know what i mean i remember when i was at monkey for a guy came to the office getting k and he's like i'm gonna make it indian like you know there's jewish dating apps there's farmer dating apps there's black the dating apps i'm gonna make an indian dating app i was like alright that's you got a good idea i guess and i was like do you have any background on this he's like i'm in the end and i trying to date is like you know that's my background i was like okay i guess super qualified and then he's like he's like here's what we're gonna do differently he's like i was like so what are the features like like what do you have to do to to differentiate he's like i told you it's a indian dating up so the app's gonna say this is for indians trying to meet other indians i was like oh he's right that is actually the main feature is that you're gonna curate the people and sort of filter for people who wanna meet other indians for farmers wanna meet other farmers whatever for jewish people wanna meet the other jewish people and so i was like okay i guess that is already better than tinder if you're in any person who wants to be an indian because you're gonna get a hundred percent hit rate here versus maybe five percent hit rate on a a generic dating at and i was like okay so how you make money like do you know how much people pay for dating apps like to is i'll do the same business model was like alright i'm trying to poke holes but he's just got it covered and i was like how are you gonna like i was like what do we need to care about more than others he goes oh that's where i'm gonna do something different i'll go okay here it is what's the big feature what's the big tech breakthrough he's like like your mom is your like c user you log in with linkedin and i go what and he goes yeah he's like because i don't know people know like indian culture it's like a big deal of like there's like a check indian people date on like a checklist it kinda stems from like the arranged marriage background where literally you marry on a checklist you know what the pickup line is for like i i have most of my friends are indian because you and neville my best friends in indian the pickup line when you're around other indians is so what do you do that's basically like that's like what they do yeah so basically he's like you're gonna log in with linkedin so we know that you have like a legit job and i was like okay and then he's like that's like the main thing that you know helps separate people you know i was like whoa so he builds this app it's called dill mill and he which means like heart's meet how do you spell it d i l m i l he builds this app and i'm keep track of the this guy and he ed sure enough he just starts going into like all the niche communities newsletters blogs youtubers starts promoting it running ads basically saying hey if for in any person you're tired of striking out on dating apps because any people will have like terrible success rates on indian apps on on on normal dating i think okay said that like the worst like in the in the free market of dating i think the absolute worst was an indian male second of close second was like chinese male they were like the two least desirable according to the o match data that they've released i you know what the highest was i think the highest the most liked person i think was an asian woman yeah exactly i think it was a a asian woman was was number one because they were getting all these things from the asian guys and the white guys i think i was like the the data what what it showed is like they get like it's like top preference amongst two big user groups or something and there's just like weird stereotype that like asian women are supposed to be more submissive and dumb shit like that and i think that there's like some weird like kinks out there of of looking like a true white guy like no it's like man who have had really like mothers of the white know so hey it's on the it's on christian rudder wrote that blog post the fighter i think that's like the whole thing their blog posts were great that was a great strategy you we had anyway so he at whenever five years later he he sells the thing i think he sold it for seventy five or a hundred million dollars to to the match way and they were like yeah we match group is a collection of dating apps we have our our generic catch all mass market app tinder and what's see the other one match dot com and then they have like all the niche apps and so they own like twenty dating apps or something like that and so if you just fill one of those verticals that they don't have a winner in they'll buy you at like a preset multiple and i was like wow that's pretty impressive they paid fifty million dollars for i don't know man this guy k he's pretty good looking and now he's rich i think he i think he he he's probably doing a same with up with him the other day and he was like you didn't believe and i was like i was like well you're right i didn't believe and actually sort of you know when i didn't believe i really wanted to be right i'm sorry about that i was kinda rooting again you in way but then you proved me wrong and you were absolutely right congratulations you did a great job have have you seen the indian netflix show where it's like your parents are setting you up with like this match maker dude so at first i thought that shit's the worst where you know like your parents are telling you what to do but when you think about it it's kinda like it's kind of like the paradox of choice right whether it's like this is it this is the one you were doing this you kinda are forced to find happiness in that right and it doesn't seem actually maybe the worst arrange marriages are they i have no idea are are they bad or is it kinda of they can be and they can't if a stat show it's about the same divorce rate as in america but what that doesn't show is that any people don't get divorced they like you know they're like we will suffer in this unhappy marriage rather than get divorced and be happy and but have society know that we failed at our marriage or whatever i whatever so i i don't think there's a way to really know how unsuccessful or unsuccessful it is me and me and by the way a quicken needs story me neville were out to dinner with da at hubspot and neville was saying how he doesn't he's like man india like that's where i'm from and i go back there and it makes you grateful to in america because like these guys got nothing and like it's not very nice over there this and that and da and he was like not insulting like poor indians but like saying like it's like a a pain in the butt to be in that situation and da was like yeah that was me i was that guy i had nothing and i came here we're were i was like one of those guys like we you know we had nothing and they were all just talking about india india sounds like a wild place man it just seems loud if people describe things like that because how do you you know you can only agree with that you can't really disagree with x is a wild place it's the same thing as our business pitch of like it's this just beautifully done we're just gonna do it beautifully and it's the same thing was like dude that's a wild place like what the food the the cult to crime what are we talking about here's the story you told the story you told is that when your mom came to america i don't know if you were joking or not you said tooth exactly my mind you said the first thing you said she she had never used utensils you said that do you remember saying you this is all on record you're like she didn't use utensils that's what you that's what you said on this spot and if you listening so i know you never said that i didn't say that i'm being fully by you no i am not i'm not putting any judgment here i am repeating what you said the second thing you said you go wait when she went to hang the phone she didn't know how to hang up the phone she said that's what like hang on the base phone and it was a while to hear that story that that was it was like it made me love your mom is what it did she told me the story it was unbelievable she's like i got on the plane i'd never been on a plane before my parents just dropping me at the airport i'm seventeen years old i'd never been on a plane before don't even know what a plane is really just gets shuffled along i show somebody my ticket they send me here send me there okay get on a plane and she's like i think it's like a train that's all i've ever seen a train and so i'm just thinking this is gonna be like a train ride and she's flying like fourteen doors tell her that it goes in the air our parents didn't know either they never been on train a plane either they were just like this how you get to america she's was like okay didn't ask don't ask too any questions and so she she's like i you know plain seat belts are kinda funky she's like i did it i just like put it push it and i went in on the first try somehow miraculously and the person next to me looked at me was like oh you've flown before and she's like i was like oh my god i don't even know what i'm getting myself into no i don't have no idea what i just i have no idea how i'll get this off and whatever i guess i a few hours to figure how to un unbox this by the time i need to get off to at my stop so then for fourteen hours she's lying and she stays awake because she's like i don't wanna miss my stop and she's like this thing's not stopping what's going on she's like doesn't know how planes work it was crazy the whole thing was insane doesn't that make you feel soft your mom your mother is so much more brave than we are it makes me feel incredibly lucky that you know she did all the hard stuff so that i don't have to do yeah shout out it's like you up mom bird moms like chew food and then just spit it in their baby's mouth so they don't to chew that's what i feel like she did with life she's just like chewed life for me and it's spit it in my mouth and i just have like the easy like and on that visual stop alright well thank you that's a pod what is it m m m pod dot com we got the merge and then what what's the clip website clip clip m m dot com or just go to youtube and search my first mail clips and please subscribe that way we'll have the like when there's five hundred subscribers we don't have lot of incentive to do the work of cutting you know picking the perfect parts trimming them down cutting them and tit them and making them like available to you if you don't have time to watch the full episode or you wanna share just the best bet bit with somebody because you know sharing an hour long podcast to somebody like assigning you know asking somebody to help you move on saturday like just a tough ask but sharing a clip is like doing somebody a favor and so go subscribe to that thing so that we yeah we're we were like motivated to get to do that wanna see that thing grow alright check it out that's the pod it's yeah i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a goal travel never looking back