I Launched A Viral Water Brand In 8 Weeks

so this is like a can water brand a high school basketball player and a tiktok meme walk into a bar and comes this and and this is the the story of that i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from all in in like a days off on a less travel i just hype you up like i'm dana white in the u c because we have here the most entertaining man in business the guy with the most ill career he started teach for america he created the viral hit game draw something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars he worked with ari emmanuel in the talent world that he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet and affected culture and now he's here today telling us about his new ventures his new brands new things is he's he's building along the way and how to do it so dan welcome you're the reigning defending undefeated most entertaining man in business i appreciate that you know sometimes people go nineteen to know and then they don't win the super bowl so i gotta keep winning until i guess i'm in the grave so you are a teacher professor nyu and so is scott gallo who's the better professor and who has more street cr at on campus who's got bigger pull he's richer and more famous and i'm humble so i guess that's that's how guys okay so dude i wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me you're building a water brand now well you've done this crazy water brand thing can you you gotta tell this story i don't think anyone even knows the story yeah kind of so this is like the unlikely story of like the fourth most followed water brand in the world on social media and so to take a step back i don't know if everybody knows what n is name image likeness it's like a revolution in college sports where you know for years players could not make any money reggie bush lost his he trophy people would lose their eligibility and then a year after we started our be oli started paying players supreme court ruled and all of a sudden there was n so now every college and many high school players in america can make money the difference is they can't get paid to play to sport but they can get endorsement deals and so forth their name they go back phase yeah if you think about it like you're at school and your roommate has you know is a rapper and has a song and your other roommate is a youtuber and makes money and you hoop or play football you can't make money it doesn't really make any sense right especially when the schools are making a lot of money off of those sports and so the players today give a sense of the scale of this so how much is an n n like top players top basketball players football players maybe you know i don't know what cooper flag was making last year or you know a sec quarterback give me a range like are they making tens of thousands of dollars a hundred thousand dollars millions years tens of millions what are the best players making through this i stuff so if you look at a top power five quarterback scc whatever seven to ten million dollars a year wide a year a year right to play for one season wide receivers running backs best offenders a million to three million a guy on the bench two hundred and fifty k and like the nfl salary for a for a if you're a first round pick as a quarterback you would sign so caleb williams in twenty twenty four he was the number one overall quarterback picked he signed a four year thirty nine million dollar deal so he signed up deal that made paid him ten million dollars a year you're saying that yeah college guys are making you know sort of that same range seven to ten while they're still in college they can absolutely make that by the way does this trickle down like if if i'm like a woman's lacrosse player somewhere soccer player and we're not powerhouse sec football blah blah are i still you know hundreds of dollars a month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby like or are is everybody eaten or is it only the people at the top right now it's really the people at the top top top basketball players one to three million i have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million dollars in college and it's kind of a waterfall there is a there's a softball player in text who makes a million but it definitely it kind of falls off the cliff because those are the sports march madness on television football television that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools and so this those are the sports that they wanna win at at the highest level and in fact a lot of n n legislation says like you you have to still support all of the other sports the olympic sports the women's sports the less popular men's sports right and and so forth and so but in women's basketball on the college level you think about n n you know there's all there's not a there's not a large number of of w nba teams and in fact there's only there's three rounds to the w nba draft and if you're in the second or third round you usually don't actually make it onto a team so if you think about from the women's side college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them then the w mba because the path to it is just so small it's just a numbers game there's there's not enough so but our swimmers and la lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars currently they are not right okay okay so n n good thing for the athletes overall getting getting some money so now how does this take take us to you building this water brand in a very short period of time getting it to go viral making it one of the most followed water brands in the in the in the world yeah so this is like a a a canned water brand a high school basketball player and a tiktok meme walk into a bar and comes this and and this is the the story of that so to take it back you know with this basketball league over time a lead it's the second most followed basketball in the world behind the nba is over twelve million followers and many many fans a lot of people watch the games and there's a player in this league tale kin that called tk k his initials he's gonna be a senior this year he's being recruited by louisville and kentucky and yukon in a bunch of schools he's a great player and he's actually a great guy just like really level headed funny but just like works hard no drama great kid and so last year you know one of our teams is on a beach somewhere and he and this other player joking around and the player asks them some question and his answer is six seven you know so forth and he moves his hands like that it's a line from a rap song by sc about two months later somebody text me from our team and says you know there's like millions of views on tiktok where they've taken his voice and they've said six seven and i'm like what and he hasn't done anything and we haven't done anything this kind of one off comment that he's make basically just kind of explodes all over tiktok and you get into kind of the the spring the default you know part of last year page backers you know how you're training six seven there they're asking cooper flag how many hours of sleep do you get a night he goes i don't know six seven and it's like and it's one of those things it's like new york real estate it's like every time you try to buy an apartment in new york you think it's so expensive it can't get any more expensive right and then a year later or like pal stock it's so expensive it can't get any more expensive and then it just keeps going up like it just doesn't stop and then you're like wow i should have bought that expensive apartment two years ago because it was so overpriced and now it's twice as expensive and this is the same dislike meme it keeps moving now on tiktok you know middle schoolers are going up to their teachers and saying what's twenty three a plus fifty four and the teacher's like sixty you said oh six seven and it's this thing and it's like you explained it to anyone over the age of twenty one and they're like what does it mean and you're like it doesn't mean in anything six a me you'll hold it up here just i tell you yeah saw you drink from it you have one there hold it up real quick alright so you so you told me about this you were like dude we have this water brand that's exploding you sent me some of the the stats the about the growth of it and so i looked up the brand six seven i just and you were like yeah this player taylor kenny or whatever so i just assume he's six foot seven i didn't even think about it i was like two weeks ago then last night nine i'm sort of preparing for this and i realized the kid's six one so i'm like why is this called six seven i'm i'm thirty seven years old i'm clueless to this trend right i don't i don't leave a house let alone talk to a lot of like eleven year olds to figure out what what the memes of the day are so last night i dude i'm watching literal powerpoint presentations explaining the origin of the meme it's a and and how it started and why the hand motion and then the song the song called like boot or something like that and i don't even know what the song is from some rap i've never heard and then the kids are going crazy with it and then his handshakes and then it's going viral and then famous people are saying it and then they're tricking their teachers into saying it and then there's a whole world of tiktok where the teachers are like okay guys if a student comes in and ask you a question and then the answer is gonna be six or a seven be ready they're gonna say this and you're gonna wonder what it means and it doesn't mean anything but that's why they love it because it doesn't mean anything there's like no meaning behind this they just want you to ask and wonder and they just find it funny and and so it's like this meme where there's not even a satisfying backstory to it that's kinda what makes it cool you know i i again this is it's like so out of my realm that i i mean if you if you think about it at the core first of all it's the it's the like definition of post right it nothing means anything in into it in and of itself it's the meaning that we as sc to it which is obviously the generalized post modern condition in art and literature but also it's like what it really says is that like young people have an ability to impact culture and they can create things and they can mean things whatever they mean right and that's all about their power and their media as opposed to this idea of top down culture that we create right they both exist stranger things exist this top down culture and six seven exist to something and it's like i get them to like every summer camp everything like that and everyone up being like i don't know what this means so tk k is like i wanna take advantage of this i should sell t shirts and i'm like it's like there's gotta be something in life beyond selling t shirts and so you know he's trying to figure it out and we're trying to support him because it's really him he's a young entrepreneur he's the creator of it he's the face of the brand we're kinda like the back office in this and we just start talking about water and like why do we talk about water because water's just not that complicated and i i've tried to make a lot of products a lot of people tried to make a lot of products five years ago i tried to make like protein rice crispy treats oh they were too chewy they weren't chewy enough the flavor wasn't this this couldn't happen and i'm just thinking like okay memes and trends don't last forever like tk what about you making water and he's like oh i i wanted to make an energy drink and i had to wanna make something else but i'm like the thing about water is like you don't like it's just water like let's go tomorrow you could be baking this thing right and so it's just like you're not tasting it you don't need a formula or anything else like that he gets totally jazz i wanna make water he said it's gotta say you hack and family on it because that's my other phrase i'm like i don't know what that means that is not hard to do and so we try to find a water manufacturer for him and the designers the way by stuff for people who are just listening on audio they can't see you because know half people watch on youtube half rod audio could you just i'm not gonna profile you but if i was a police are sketch you and i'm thinking about this kiddo who's how old is he's fifteen to sixteen years old or something like that he's seventeen i think he's seventeen seventeen year old of and can you just describe who you are the unlikely cofounder duo hero do duo of this i am in my late fifties and i'm wearing a button down collar linen shirt and i don't poop and i have no bars and i wear glasses and i'm not super athletic but i guess my superpower is i believe in young people and i'm good at listening to them okay grand like i over overtime is a platform for them you know people are like over overtime is a hundred million followers in in that kind of demo and i always say i don't make the posts i don't write the captions i just create the platform for creative young people to reach other creative young people and i love culture and i love music and i love all these things and so my job isn't to make this my job is to build a platform for tk k to figure out how he can build this product that he wants to do and his family wants to do and just be like kiss right keep it simple stupid like just like really fuck olympic sport where the puck is going and then there's the people with the broom on the side they're just shaving the ice are like you just seasoning the ice for curling curling yeah on the ice shaver curling exactly alright so everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers the problem is that it's really hard how do you make something that blows up that goes viral that actually gets you customers versus what most people do they make something that's completely ignored but when i ran my last company the hustle i had to study this and i eventually made content that reach tens sometimes even hundreds of millions of readers and so we were able to dial in between what works and what doesn't and we made it fairly repeatable and so with the help of hubspot i made a guide called the twenty ways to craft irresistible content that looks at the books that i read to learn all this but then also the tactics the twenty different tactics the twenty different strategies that we use at the hustle in order to help things go viral so we actually got customers from the content that we made and so if you wanna create content that people actually read you can check it out there's a qr code that you can scan or you can click the link in the description not back to the episode and so i just say to our designers let's make a bunch of stuff tee k is like i like this i don't like this he doesn't have to be a designer and within eight weeks there's a water brand like there's a somebody in in michigan who's pumping out cans of water and everything else like that and tk is like here's the plan like we're we're gonna we're gonna launch it on june seventh do you know why six seven right and so a word just like oh shit we got we gotta help make this one around in eight weeks and so on six seven it just drops he makes a launch video it's just him messing around these from lexington kentucky with his friends and then he and a bunch of his friends and some are social people they just go to these basketball alternatives and they start giving it out and it just starts going crazy like every influencer every basketball of person is picking it up all of a sudden like there's five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand followers like a dad is offering a hundred dollars in cash to buy a cannabis but you can't really buy it anywhere because he's just made it we're just trying to figure it out we talked to him and we're just like where do people wanna buy this and he's like at the gas station so like if it were me and i'm some corporate executive i'm like we gotta go do a deal with pub we gotta go do a deal with whatever and i'm like the gas station was like yeah that's just like where we go buy stuff because you're sixteen you have a car i'm a new yorker so i think about bode day that doesn't really exists in the rest of the country and then you're always being driven by your parents somewhere to go play in some sports tournament and there's a gas station so he sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video and puts it in the shelf and pretends that he's founded it there and the account just keeps growing like you know kids start making their own commercials for it people start pouring it on each other like it's holy water and it's only been sold a couple of times and we just throw a website twenty five thousand people sign up and they're like i wanna buy this and that's as far as we've gotten we've have almost a hundred and fifty thousand followers some people are like oh you made a you know you made a liquid death for gen z for the urban crowd it's canned it's kinda gold i'm holding it up because you want people to it wants to look good on social media you wanna see people across the court but all it really happened was like there's a guy who's good at basketball he accidentally created a meme we supported him to make a product that was we could make fast and easy but was like not a t shirt we went out everybody was a fan went crazy about it every grown up i talked to as kids or they're like can you get my kids some of that six seven water they don't know how to get it and so i don't know we're on the thirty yard line i know i'm use a football metaphor for the ten yard line and like how does it go from here so tk selling a hundred million dollars worth of water and twelve months we really figured that out he doesn't really know we don't really know we just made something big and now there's over a hundred and fifty thousand followers like if you look up most water brands they don't have that many followers and like all of the you know except for you know liquid death which is hugely inspirational and i'm very successful and all kids mess with it and now every player is coming up to me and they're like dan i got this idea i got this idea for this product and i think what's cool is like number one it's like youtubers do this but athletes haven't really done it you know number two seventeen year old athletes haven't really done it and number three is like it has this whole overlap with n so now if you're trying to recruit tk k to come play at your school like maybe you're gonna buy ten thousand cases of six seven water and you're gonna make it red because that's your school colors oh yeah and you're gonna tell everyone buy this and tee is gonna commit to our school and it all is covered by n n there's no eligibility issues there's nothing else like that so you've all unlocked this whole kind of creative superpower and if you ask him like and you ask the people who support him from our team they'll be like six seven is a water brand it's a movement it's a five it's a feeling like so when you're just like having fun creating culture and everything else like that and listen his number is zero maybe six seven water in nine months is called double zero water because it's really just about the concept and all of that and so maybe the mean dies but it takes other shapes and forms or maybe he goes to the nba and is another thing but you recognize the gold can and you recognize everything else like that so it's really like i'm talking to you in this process where like he's figured out a little bit we figured out a little bit but i can't tell you how you know pepsi is acquiring this for five hundred million dollars yet because everybody's baking it up as they go along and that's what i love about this you know we do a lot of episodes with people after the fact oh you sold draw something right yeah and and you you'd made all this money can you go back and tell us what happened fifteen years ago when you started that business and hey by the way everything has changed and none of that will really work anymore but hopefully you get some inspiration maybe a few nuggets i can steal from there that's typical podcast and then the other one that we do is like here's an idea i think it'll work i don't really know it's not like in motion it's not in flight it's just an idea and hey it's blue sky this is a very unique thing we i in the middle i you're literally middle in the middle you're like at the you're just at the point where it's not nothing but ain't done yet right and i'm like oh that's interesting i've never actually talked to somebody at this stage of the thing of a fun brand like this so just to give this person some perspective it's now we're recording this august fifth so it's been almost exactly what two months six the launch so six seven was was june seventh we're about two months in so if i'm just looking at instagram your six look at i g tiktok but if i do if i just take instagram just for simplicity here for a second so like the instagram is almost at a hundred thousand followers for the water brand yeah okay let's just look at a few other water brands that i can think of just off top of my head alright i des water eighteen thousand okay so you got five times more followers than des lisp aqua seven thousand followers and like you know there's literally like ten comments on a post so no engagement no nobody cares and there by the way there's like a full social media team that they hire like there's there's like half a million dollars of salary working on on their social media at all times at the minimum okay let's even think of okay maybe i'm picking on the the most boring brands let's go to vitamin water right big eggs exit owned by big company now fifty cent was involved a long time ago they certainly gotta be big eighty one thousand you're bigger than vitamin water let's go and and literally let's say like the two months what what the best part of this is the best part is like tk k this sky tom what's the what's the marketing plan what are we doing next tom's like dan what are we doing next i was like here's the marketing plan i'm going on m msn and like i'm just gonna talk like ben and s sean are gonna hook me up and some listener is gonna be like yeah i own five hundred gas stations call me up and i will put you in this and then when they write when i do the third podcast when i come back on in the year and it's like how i sold this how the seventeen year old entrepreneur sold this it was like i came on your podcast and then when we went to the moon yeah exactly you you need the gas station owner because i was gonna say we don't really have the whole like you youth culture stuff going for us if you want like a bunch of people who you know work remotely and wanna you know take a picture and put in slack they can do that but but but mean you probably have five listeners who know everything about the beverage business see this is what you get this is what you get about media that most people don't right you're like cool i'm gonna go here because there's gonna be five people that either know everything about the beverage business they were the early distributor of this blah blah blah or they on a chain of like sixty gas stations they're a huge fan and they're like yeah i'm in and you're like that was a great hour of time for me to to do that cool and you know what tee k is gonna do as the as the founder of this brand as the basketball player he's gonna train he's gonna get buckets he's gonna commit to go to college and he's just gonna keep being him right that we'll just keep growing the brand which is what i love because when i looked at the content it wasn't like some advanced brand strategy some like cool slick or anything it was literally this gonna this kid who's obviously he's a great basketball flavor well it's even more likable about him he's not like a lebron where he looks like a grown man even though he's seventies he's ninety some man child he's like a child child like he like looks young he acts young he's a green dude he's not growing his body fool yet he can hoop he can dog you can think with some amazing things on the court but he's still got like a very young energy which is cool and so like just he's seventeen year old out there building a billion dollar brand that's not vibe coating yeah that's true that might be true actually okay so i wanted kinda steal what's replica about this now so let's break down a couple the elements here so the first is you were listening to the trends you you're were listening to the memes you're listening to the culture and you didn't sort of just write it off or be too busy to listen right you run a a company how many employees you guys have four hundred how much money have you raised for overtime two hundred and fifty million dollars you you run a big ass business and for you to be like yes someone on my team was talking about how one player on one of our teams set a random thing and then some tiktok editors chopped it up and mixed it with a random song that like you know is not even like not like some huge not drake you know doing this yeah and you were like that's cool like let's let's talk about let's have a brainstorming session that's interesting to me is there like a prince or a philosophy you have that served you well that's that's like that i might be asking you know steph curry how do how exactly do you shoot to jump he's like i don't know man i just do it i think there's a couple things one is like if i think about like it's like twenty fifteen twenty sixteen and i'm launching over overtime as an example i you know we start filming some players playing basketball in new york with some iphones or whatever and making some posts and all of a sudden kinda realized that like they're players that are getting tens of thousands of views and they're not even top hundred ranked players so my understanding is like here's high school basketball here's the top ranked players here's the people who aspire to go to sean's alma mater duke and play and hoop and everything else like that but the reality was the deeper i looked i realized there were all of these networks and sub cultures of young people who were connecting that had nothing to do with the grown up view of the world and everything from like i'd find one of them and then i'd be like who does this person follow and then i'd go through and i'd look at every single person who they follow and and so forth and so on so in a way culture is culture it just makes things but if you're att to it and social media is a cheat code for decoding it and you start to go deep you can just observe and find these things it's like if i try to explain it the most elemental level i'll say anime like most half people in america have no idea what anime is but it's like once you and you're like cartoons what is the anime and then once you see it you realize that it's everywhere so it's like i remember the first time someone's like anime or whatever years ago i go on a trip to rome for vacation every t shirt in rome in the store has an anime character on it and then all of a sudden and then i'm sitting next to a kid on the plane he's reading you know a graphic arm manga and i'm just like wait i didn't see it anywhere and now i see it everywhere and it's kinda like you're digging down the earth and all of a sudden you find gold and oil and all of these other things like that and then once you see it you just you assume that most people don't bother to see it and that's where your opportunity lies hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show there's actually a a a neuroscience nerd way of explaining this there's a a part of your brain that is made to do this as you call it particular activating system i'm basically when i learned about this it was pretty interesting so it basically said look as a human imagine if you had if imagine just all the different field inputs that are coming into your your mind at any one time so your eyes like in this room right now there's a whiteboard there's a piano there's books there's this there's a guy sitting over there there's this light over here that's shining in my eyes but i need to be focused on you so really i'm telling my brain this is what matters don't tell me about that sticking out on the wall over there that's yellow if i look now i see it but like most of the time filter it out same thing with noises this a guy mowing the lawn i'm telling my brain not important ignore ignore if you're at a cocktail party there's a hundred conversations going on you're it just all sounds like noise to you until somebody says your name and then suddenly it's like well my brain was actually listening because i heard my name but i couldn't tell you the other ten things they were talking about because it was just chatter otherwise and so basically the brain is a system which just says y throw away ninety nine percent of all inputs you're not gonna need it we'll go crazy if we try to take it all in but there's a bounce at the front that's looking at the idea of every little thing that's coming in and say alright you get to come in and then the trick to life is when you you tell the bounce or hey add this to the list add anime to the list start paying attention let anime in then you start seeing anime everywhere this happens if you buy a car you're like oh i'm looking for a a bmw suddenly you'll just start seeing that bmw everywhere yeah it's not like it just appeared it's always there you just weren't paying attention to the bmw around you until it became higher that point whatever i like my phone is listening to me right and you're like it might be but but what you're saying might be true too i i do this thing in my class at nyu where i'm like look around the room and find everything that's blue i'm gonna quiz you on it right and then everybody close their eyes and i'm like name me one thing that's red you only see the thing that you look for and then there's a ton of red things but nobody sees them because they're looking for something else and in a way that's part of the reason why i've never been a a massive fan of business school or hiring mba because i feel like what business school does is it trains everyone to look for blue and what you as an entrepreneur building a company one is somebody who's whose focus isn't narrowed but who's incredibly wide and it they're like oh there's yellow there's red they're are all of these other things like that and we we tend to be like oh well you've gotta refine your skills but like if your whole process is just seeing blue like you're never gonna see the other colors and then your ability to create or add value becomes extremely the limited did so there's a great story about this in the early paypal days i don't know have have you ever read like paypal wars or any of the early like paypal books yeah the couple them are are pretty good one of them tells a story about basically that you had elon who had his company was ex not like what twitter's twitter say but he's loved this this idea of a company named x for a long time and he wanted to build a bank on the internet all your financial services your mortgages your loans your checking your business accounts your credit cards everything on on the internet and he was he was right he was just like twenty five years too early right like that's happening today with bra and mercury and other companies like that but he wanted to do it back and he had this top down his view of the world and he just wanted to like make that thing come to fruition and it was like kind of not working very well but it was a big idea and he was obviously a really like relentless entrepreneur and then you had paypal which was this like small thing that was like hey you could email money to a friend it'll sounded like v moe or like you know just like some little game you could play it didn't sound like transforming financial services for using the internet's technologies and what they but the key to paypal success was not blindly following the top down sounds good on paper vision but it was somebody i think it was david tax somebody in the customer service department that was like hey you know we noticed that like all these ebay sellers are asking for like a a logo that they can put as a badge on their thing and you know legal like no they can't use our logo and then other people are like wait why do they want a logo they're actually like interested their curious what's read over there it's like they want a logo because they're trying to say we take paypal and like they looked at their data and they're like wow the people who actually use paypal are all ebay sellers and like then it turned into their strategy and eventually right they changed the name it wasn't even became paypal and that became the killer killer app essentially that made it a billion dollar company and i feel like this idea of you start with a vision hard to start without a vision but if you stay blind and you're not looking for clues of what's actually happening like what you're talking about where you're like i don't know yeah look at culture i don't try to apply my view of what should be happening or what what is good and what is bad i just look at what is and i try to play in that that lane is that something you did in the past like withdraw something or in anything like that there any could we connect the dots here yeah i i feel like that a vision it it's really just a premise it's just an idea of like this is what i think the company is gonna be but i don't really know anything because haven't done anything yet and as soon as i get out there and i do something then i start to learn and it really fucking annoys me when people are like you pivoted you pivoted you did this pivot being a basketball term and i'm like i'm not pivoting like i'm adapting like i see this and i see opportunity and the thing that i think sometimes people miss is like you start your company and let's imagine like you're on a track you're running a race and you're on that track well all the other tracks that are next to you are what's happening in the world around you and you can't ignore those so you start in the gaming business you're like i just wanna make great games boom the iphone goes by you boom facebook goes by you boom ex xbox goes by you and your job isn't just to be like blind to all of those things like all of those things are changing and you have to be able to make tons of micro changes around that and i remember like even when we started over time i went into a pitch meeting and all we were were like five people who you know like sports a little bit running around with a bunch of iphones filming basketball in new york and the guy's like what's your distribution plan like how are you gonna grow and we were like well now we're gonna go to la and we're gonna film some basketball then we're gonna go to houston then we're gonna go to oakland and film some basketball and he's like yeah you know week ladies like we passed we just don't think that's the right distribution strategy and i was like great because two days ago we also gave up on that distribution strategy because like whatever you're just trying to figure it out like the real strategy is like we're gonna figure it out because we're gonna try a bunch of different stuff and it's like you judge everything like it's this moment in time and everything the company does is an absolute cert you know it's like final this is our decision but instead you're moving in space right you think about the best basketball players luca iv it's like their ability to ky like they just move into space they find where there are nobody there as opposed to somebody who comes down and it says i'm gonna run the play you run to the corner and go here and you give it to him three times yeah fake step through and i'm gonna make the shots like yeah we wish worked that way it would be nice yeah it's doesn't not not to be like too sporty but like it's a live reed situation you're like that guy just flew his coverage do you get accused of being too sporty a lot do people just look at you and they're like you're just too sporty them i mean i do a lot of sports conferences at podcasts so for them they're like you're not at all sporty like they like wouldn't you play in college and i was like i was bad dj on the radio station yeah exactly piano but but in in the case of this i don't want the odds forty people to be like oh this going deep what you'd have is what your watch time to be really high so appreciate out for you you know you're just you're just improvising in and and you're you're figuring it out and you're just paying attention and the the other thing i'll say is like like you don't need a massive dataset set to be able to understand where these kind of opportunities and slight tweaks are and i always say like when i used to be in the app business you could do like a really good user test and by the time you got to the sixth or seventh person see what i did there not the six hundredth person but the sixth or seventh person like you already knew what wasn't working like you only need one or two people to say something that's really deep and you're like oh i totally got it and so in a way like if you're very att to small data it usually has some level of of scale around it and you can you can constantly make iterations to make sure that your product lands and the second that it lands all of a sudden there's a new platform or netflix changes their strategy your spotify changes their strategy and you're just out there with everybody else in the ocean trying to kinda tread water and figure out how to get to land alright listen the two most beautiful words in the english language are email subscribers you need more email subscribers i guarantee it i don't care how many you have you need more of them i need more of them you need more of we all need more email subscribers because email is an amazing way to build your business to build an audience and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on the tiktok algorithm the instagram algorithm it's how you get people to engage directly with you so you can get them to trust you to like you click 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a single purpose thing it's what i use for my newsletter i sent a newsletter out to over a hundred thousand people and that's what i use and so for listeners with my first there i should do in a special code so if you're thinking about hey i should have a news newsletter i should have subscribers i kinda wanna build an audience that way we'll check it out they'll give you thirty percent off use the code m f m thirty go to b h dot com that's b e e h i i v dot com and use the code m m thirty i'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you start scaling your content today you know you said something else here because i think it's amazing that in eight weeks you've built the you know water brand that you know i'll call like a ten million dollar water brand i don't know if it is whatever but the interesting thing about that i just threw out a number there the interesting thing about the number is you didn't start out by saying we so we went out there and we put it up on shopify we started selling cans and we ran some facebook ads and then we sold some more cans and look we've sold you know we've done you know whatever three hundred thousand dollars of revenue in the first five weeks that's success and the reason i found that interesting is because you said some of the opposite you're like we started giving it away and we put some on the in the cooler at the gas station and we would go to games and we would you couldn't even buy it if i go to the website right now just as joined the wait list you can't even buy it and so i've seen you kind of do this before you do this kind of grassroots brand building long game shit and it's so different than the way i play whereas like i normally if i start something i'm like cool let me see if people want this and i'm trying to validate my idea and i'm trying to go sell as much as i can i get my own conviction and validation in my insecurities to start to melt a little bit the more tangible concrete proof i have that this thing is valuable which is measured as dollars to me you seem to play the game differently and i love it and i wanna know more about it so could you just describe your approach and and why you think that might be interesting here yeah i don't i don't i've never thought about it or categorized it but i don't i agree with you like i don't know i'm just a very bottoms up type of person in terms of creation and marketing and i think about like to use a sports example when people were not watching as much sports a lot of people in the sports industry where like we need more stats on the screen let's show their heart rate let's show how far they've run let's show all this stuff and i'd have meetings with them and people on the team would be like we need to show more stats that's gonna bring people back to tv and i always say like who asked for that well we just think that that's what people want and it's like who who asked for that who's who knocked on the door and said hey i got a question for you i'm not really interested in watching sports on tv but by the way if you put their heart rate up i fucking change my whole schedule and now i'm just gonna do nothing but watch sports on tv and so it's like the amount of stuff that starts up here whereas like and i don't know my my mom was a soc sociology professor and she did she just really like sociology anthropology it's just listening and studying people and like sometime in the nineties i spent a summer in stark mississippi with her just driving around listening to to local people talk about economic development their little businesses and everything else like that and i i just think that like i could read a million business books and and watch a lot of videos but like there's some magic in those things that people are talking about and as a ceo i've always like wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company because somebody has some insider or observation that they don't even think is like that deep and they say one thing and you're just like damn that really is true i haven't thought about it that way and then you start to be able so in a way it's like my approach is to be in the right place at the right time in the room where it happens to to hear what all these people are saying and to try to parse through that and to say like if i can find that insight like people care you think they care about that but they care about this or anything else like it how do i figure out how to make it that much bigger and even on the water side some of it was like yeah you know what it'd be better if young people drank water than things that have a hundred grams of sugar or a hundred grams of caffeine in it or anything else like that and listen sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right but if you can't if it doesn't come from the bottoms up i i don't know who the customer is like i'll give you a really non sport great example at some point i was like on wanna write a book and i'm gonna pitch this book and i was working the talent business so i not knew a lot of book people and the guy sat me down and this was kind of like you know barnes and noble still decently big but i i used barnes and noble as a visual representation he said listen when i go to sign an author to buy a book i just say to them what section are you in at barnes and noble like i get it you have this idea this and that i'm like gold barnes and noble psychology business whatever you tell me what section you're in because that's essentially the distribution then i know whether i wanna buy this book or not but if you're just telling me you have this idea and it's like kind self help but it's kind you're not in any section and i can't buy it right and so it's like this kind of like the ground up isn't just the idea it's the distribution it's like all of those types of things like that and it's just some level of i think paying attention to it and then also having the recognition that if your idea is like i wanna make a toothbrush with a removable head because why do have to buy a whole new toothbrush every time oh yeah i've actually been around long enough to know that a hundred people have tried to do that and there's actually a reason that doesn't work and you i think about apps i've been pitched a million times let every fan monetize their fans directly and you're like they actually just like being on instagram and it's like you've seen ten of them and none of them have worked so sometimes if you've got a little pattern recognition and you overlay it into paying attention about culture and what people talk about and stuff like that that that just tends to be how i do it and maybe you and i will collaborate because you're smarter than me and you'll be like i'm gonna turn this into the five step process and you and i will go to barnes and noble and you'll be like dan that's the shelf your book is gonna be on well the the one i wanted to write with you early on when i was building the milk road and me and ben called you now are you call i i you emailed to us you're like hey this is cool or something like that and we were like holy shit stand portal i i don't think we knew each other maybe at the time no and you were reading it and so we we did a call with you and on that call you talked about because i had seen the rise of over overtime i didn't know what caused the rise of over but i had seen the outward manifestation of it right i also saw it go from a a brand had never heard of to basically the most popular youth basketball brand on instagram which was it's not nothing right like that's so hard to do in a crowded social media space to build the number one brand and not only that like they were wearing t like top players zion on these guys who nike is paying the millions of dollars trying to sponsor them and they're like voluntarily putting your shirt on and throwing your o logo up and cameo in your videos and i just thought like at anytime i would see a dump clip it would always be for overtime first i didn't know how you guys were always getting there first turns out you had this army of volunteer grass kinda a camera that we're doing stuff it turns out that that hand signal was something that you literally were sitting there you're like we need a sign that when one person sees another you could throw up the sign like a gang sign you know or like a like a team sign or like you know so you started studying bands and cults and you started studying people who have built these types of real organic tribal movements and you were picking out the best practically the best ideas from them and saying okay what's that's interesting and you you know in european soccer they have their songs that's interesting how do we do that and not every idea hits but like enough of them did where you built a real brand you gave us advice from milk road where you were saying you were like cool what i like about you guys is that yeah you're in into crypto you're a believer but you're not like super technical or super like day you you're don't you're not taking yourself too seriously everybody else is trying to like over dress and they look like a sort of a kid and a big bag wearing his dad's suit and trying to be taken seriously and you're not because you're doing that and so you were saying like hey when they have their uber serious conference you need to counter program against that and throw the like two beers you know conference at a at a at a bar and just give every bar like you know a two hundred dollar tab for your readers to go and enjoy and you gave us some ideas like that i really like there were zero people in my life that i think that way and it was very intriguing to me like those are the types of things i love like you talk about idea radiation and marketing and distribution but to me the thing that i pay attention to the most and maybe the thing that i'm a little above average on is positioning and i don't think people talk about positioning as much but positioning is kind of like where you sit in the mind of the consumer and while people talk about white space it's often related to positioning and the best way i can explain it is like the most simple way and once you see it you'll understand positioning forever and you don't have to watch twenty videos on it is if you go and you look at breakfast cereals in the supermarket they have a left to right and a top to bottom usually left to right is like least healthy to most healthy so like there's not it's they're not mixed up right so on the left you've got the most sugary cereals and as you start to walk down to the right at the end you have like ezekiel eight twelve whole grain cereals like shit like it should be refrigerated or whatever so that's left to right top to bottom is adult to kid kids cereals are most often at the bottom why because that's eye level for kids and therefore adults are at the top and so if you think about it almost says this diamond with like you know adult kid is top bottom and like sweet kind of super healthy left right every cereal has to find out where it's positioned in that market is how you upper left lower right or anything else like that and i think that that's positioning it it encompasses everything it's like where is the market opportunity where is the white space and the other thing that it it's it does as kind of like a sub factor is that the way you compete with somebody who is much bigger is better capitalized or anything else like that is you you make their success their box the box that they get trapped in so if i go out and i make a sports platform right and i have to compete against maybe espn the market leader twenty five billion dollars of revenue everything else that they do and every other sports site what's espn superpower it it appeals to everybody it is the d facto now and for sports well okay so if i come out and i'm like i'm appealing this demographic that's massive right forty percent of all global purchasing in five years will be gen z and stuff like that like and all i do is focus on appeal to them well if i am the incumbent i can't start being like that's the lid that really was fire because what happens is all the fifty year olds falling there they're like i don't get it so you take their success and you almost make it a box or a trap that they can't get out of and then you can own something and that's visual language product features simplicity complexity harder to use sometimes you will make things that are really hard to use because they don't want the mass audience they want something else like that and you think about like the classic business school example like the kind of it ikea example where it's like how do you compete with everyone else you you actually have them build the furniture themselves because it allows you pricing power all of a sudden you have a different level of ownership over that it's not scary you know there's no words on any ikea instruction manual there's pictures and so in a way to me a lot of those roll up to positioning but nobody's like oh yeah i just graduated from war and i major in positioning right you're like marketing finance other things but positioning what your position is in the market and how you make that happen and understand that is very visual and to me that's how i kind of think about everything and then as you start to be successful you think about from going to play offense to the things that you wanna do to protect that position so all of a sudden i create this thing and i have this massive position in basketball and everybody's coming at me and i'm like warren football also and all the people are like oh shit where many over overtime in basketball now they're just on the side of the road because now half of overtime businesses in football and they were they're called hoop this and ball that and everything else like that and i have a very kind of name that could go across any type of sport and so you go from playing offense to defend to offense again in your positioning but you're this vibrant organism that's kinda growing and expanding all the time and that's that's literally just a brain up of how i think about approaching it that's great i have this ism that's very very related what i say all positioning is counter positioning so i i'm like you i think positioning super underrated any entrepreneur knows positioning is underrated because you've gone into markets thinking you're so great my product is so great my team is so great my service is so great and come to our come visit us and nobody wants to visit you why because you can't differentiate and then you're like you spend your whole life differentiating and then you look at a few other people who started out figuring out the point of differentiation figuring out where they live in that that that map that you described and they found white space and for them they don't even have to start with the best product or the best service or any of that they will organ they have time to build it and make it better because they figured it out and so this idea that like all actually counter position is important because what people the mistake i think people make is when they think positioning they think they just start naming positive attributes about themselves like it's a self help test in people magazine and they're like oh yeah we're are positioning is that we have you know really high quality service and you know we move fast or like you know we have great whatever have a great customer service so you know like something that every brand is also trying to play and so you're you know what even if you did it the problem is you can't claim it because everybody else has also claimed it you're gonna have to go come up with some unique way to show not tell to even get anyone to believe right the the way the way i i i totally agree with you i'm actually obsessed with this idea from this guy roger martin who's like this business thinker and he says something that i'm gonna butcher but it's like if the opposite of your strategy is stupid then it's not a strategy so their strategy is like we have the best fucking customer service out there and the opposite of that is what company out there says yeah our strategy is we have the worst customer service right we're like we make the best products oh yeah our strategy is we make the worst products well if if if the opposite is so stupid yours is not a strategy that's right so you can you can say something else like that and then i just started to like think about it as applies to everything it's like our strategy is on this family vacation we're gonna have fun who's as our strategy on this family vacation is we're gonna fight all the time and have no fun right so it's like not realize that the opposite is really dumb like what you have is not a strategy or really a plan this is the same about company values people are like oh we make companies about high integrity disciplined hard work yeah again nobody would agree with the opposite i just got a job at this company out of college their values are low integrity no teamwork and hostility it's gonna be amazing right actually that actually might be interesting because the would not be stupid if i'd actually pass this exactly if they said that but like mark zuckerberg had a good example of this he goes oh somebody along the way top me this and he goes your values are meaningless unless there's a trade off baked into it so if you don't if you don't acknowledge that there's a cost or a trade off to doing the things you say you're gonna do then it doesn't count so you know the famous facebook value that we all remember is move fast and break things if it was just move fast we would not remember that they're that what that that's facebook's value the fact that it was move fast and break things it acknowledged the trade off of moving fast and how fast we're gonna move and this is gonna happen we accept that trade that's what's unique about us where other companies are not willing to accept that trade theirs is move as fast as you can but if you make a mistake then you shouldn't move that fast right which is how actually most companies operate so good and so you're it works at the values level it works at the strategy level and here's an example of who did it right so like who competed with facebook with snapchat snapchat strategy was we're photo sharing but all the photos are gonna self des destruction in ten seconds it's like well i could actually argue why that's a very stupid strategy and why the opposite would be very smart you should save the photos that's people want memories people wanna go back and look at it again if you told my mom about that she'd be like you're gonna destroy this photo no like that's bla but it worked for a certain it it actually unlocked a whole of behavior and use case which became you know pretty ancient to the bar of facebook had to like try to clone it at fifty times and they did the thing you talked about too which was they intentionally made things harder so it's like well social networks are cool until all your aunts and uncle show up right like it's not so cool to post all my photos from this weekend knowing that like all my teachers and my aunts and uncles are gonna see everything i post so the way snapchat worked was like intensely kind of like confusing and it was like grown up proof it's like a you know like medicine has like a child proof top they had like a grown up top which was like you know when you wanna do the face mask there was no button that said like push here for face mask it was like no you got a know to hold on your face for four seconds and then the secret door appears and now you could do this shit like only could be spread like a secret password from one kid to another and most parents thought it was too hard too confusing they never gonna figure it out and so that was like a intentional strategy for a while that fits your your your so good like what i like about the trade off too is like when we launched our bass league in the first year before n n all the players essentially lost their eligibility and i was just said they didn't lose it the mca took it away every college basketball coach in the world hated us like hated us i got so much hate mail and i used to say like i guess if we're not pissing people off we're not trying hard enough like that's the trade off even in the early days of teach for america i remember i went to pitch the board in seattle washington to let us come and the teacher's union hated us and somebody came in and they punched me in the chest in the middle of my speech i'm my and i was just like i didn't even know what to do other than to keep talking but i guess if you're not like if your trade off is if you're not pissing off enough people i guess you're not trying to do something that's different enough for revolutionary enough in in that aspect so i like that i'm gonna put that up there with my opposite is stupid you you also have a thing that when we were at our hoop group event and we ask everybody like hey can you give like a tiny version of a ted talk like we'll put seven minutes on a shot clock here and everybody in this room is world class at something daniel your world class at brand building can you just tell us like a brand but building brain dump of like everything you did to make over time have a hundred million followers or whatever don't have any stupid number of insane followers you guys have and the very first thing you said was you didn't say how you went viral you didn't say how you grew the market you didn't talk about an algorithm you didn't talk about you know scaled processes you go in the first year i replied to a million comments or something some some absurd number yeah you go we replied to a million comments and you go we built this in a very grassroots way bottoms up and i that's that's stuck with me that was like three years ago i still remember yeah one line because it was so counterintuitive and surprising to me that that was like a pillar for you of like how this how does this empire get built you don't you don't really understand where the studs are like where are the beams that this whole thing is built on and you showed me one of the beams with that can you talk about that that little part because i think that's something that more brand should do yeah listen i think everyone wants awesome growth hacks and the best way to get a lot of views on anything that you write ever on linkedin or whatever is like the c three secret growth hacks right do this the viral growth hacks but like most of those are post facto and they're hard to replicate and to build something meaningful you've gotta build a real connection and i'll i'll preface it by saying i've seen this a couple times and it it's it's it's taught me a couple times i i remember i went to a concert at at state farm a little baby concert and everybody had their phones up and i was gonna film because i wanted to show people i was cool and i was at a concert and i realized that everyone was filming themselves and i was filming the stage and the concert was actually a backdrop for them to create content and it reminded me years ago right when the iphone was coming out somebody came when i was at virgin to our office and they said hold up your phone and take a video and and they said at the end everyone under thirty has the camera pointing at themselves and everyone over thirty has the camera pointing out and we looked around the room and it was true and i think from those insights you've just have this idea and i kind of like crystallize that into this point of view that sports media is talking to people about sports and over overtime is about listening to people about sports so okay that's like a different point of view is kinda rooted in these anecdotal observations around me well how do you listen to them and the easiest way was they're all talking to you they're dm you they're in the comments like what are we gonna do that no one else is gonna do we're gonna respond to every single one of them because the other thing you see in media is like ten people leave a media thing and they set up and they launch a new media thing and you imagine a bunch of men and women in front of a computer pumping out articles and and you know and videos and and i think well who asked for that nobody they just thought it was a good idea and i i remember a young person had told me yeah i respond to a lot of people on mind he was a kind of a smaller version of something and he said you know what once you respond to somebody when you have a bigger account over a hundred k one time they become a fan for life so i was like okay how are we gonna get our first million fans for life we're gonna respond people used to dm all the time y literally that was the whole dm y and so we'd be like y what's up and they'd be like oh shit i didn't think you were gonna respond like you just jumped out of the corner and you scared them and in the early early days i used to take screenshots of those conversations and post them in the story and and all of a sudden people would start to say does overtime respond and stuff like that and we had this kind of apex moment early on where i i hired this guy who who'd had been a uber driver and a hoop and he was a friend of someone but various things he had tried hadn't kinda hit yet and i was like and i realized he's just really funny he still like to make funny videos on instagram and we were like your job is just to be funny and so he'd go on the comments and if somebody commented he would go to their personal ig account find a picture of them and just make fun of them just like roast them just be like bro was with the mom jeans like you gotta get your fast or whatever stuff like that and to the point where it hit this fever pitch where people would just comment in an overtime video and they would just say roast be right and he would go in there and roast them and all of a sudden you actually think it's about the video and about the dunk or the whatever but it's actually about the massive conversation all these people were like me me me me you know who who wanna be who wanna be picked from the audience and you interacting and i think it was just a really different version of media and it put that put that into practice and i will say that we have community managers now who just talked to fans all day i'm in a group chat with two hundred and fifty fans of the citi reapers on instagram which is one of our basketball teams about once every three weeks i hop in and i answer a question and everyone's was like whoa wait who is this and i'm like yeah that's not happening because i run the company and i just said so and they all go crazy or whatever and then i'm like got a bounce because i could get trapped in there for two hours and i just think like your fans aren't just mindless face people there they like there they're about it there the consumers are your product and you wanna live with them and you wanna talk to them and you wanna make sure that they know and i think like you know i was looking at like sabrina carpenter just had different fan accounts announced the track name for her new album and every single one of them and then she announced the final ones and it's like there's so many lady gaga there's so many musicians are so good at being like i wouldn't be anything without you guys and taylor swift used to like jump into comments or like show up at people's weddings and stuff like that right and i've always taken inspiration from that and i just wanted to have a company that could be meaningful and do stuff like that too i i have this idea where like yep i'm gonna send one of my guys out anywhere in america and the first person he sees with an overtime shirt he's gonna give them a thousand dollars would be like that's i'm in the ohio airport right now and it's like i'm gonna play ground in in oakland or whatever and it's just like oh shit i literally feel seen right now and and that's what i think that's what everyone wants including this generation have you seen what the all american rejects are doing i haven't school me so okay i i didn't prep this out of them though i don't know bunch much about that but band that was popular like i don't know nineties or least two thousand some some side of the thing kinda of been off the map off the grid not popular whatever so for their comeback what they did was really interesting they started crashing actual like house parties for high schoolers and they would just show up and play a set in someone's backyard and that was their comeback tour is that they're just going around america right now and if you go look dude the it's instagram like liquid gold dude the actual content the way it looks when they just show up at somebody's backyard at some high school house party right before prom or whatever and they just start playing a song they surprise everybody it looks cool it looks an nostalgic it looks fun it like fits them they're not trying to be like super they're not trying to come back and pretend they're super relevant when they weren't and they're sort of building back up in this bottoms up way and almost reinventing themselves as this like like this band that's kind of like of the people and it just it's amazing what they're doing whole marketing point of view i'm a lock that away and i'm gonna figure out the sports version of that yeah you you once you watch one video you're gonna be like that i need to create that moment because that was an amazing moment i'm literally the second this this podcast is done i'm gonna start tapping into that and i think to me it's kind of like listen i work in sports was a vertical you music you were a b saas it doesn't really matter what your your vertical is most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical i'm just like how can sports learn from this band right like a lot of ideas i watch gaming i'm a massive consumer of korean and japanese non scripted television in various forms of reality and shows and like i always get ideas give me a recommendation give me a example of a shell i need to be on and there's so many there there's actually the audience is gonna be like these shows are terrible for this the your taste is your taste maybe conviction in my taste there's there's one there's a japanese one that i just watch this summer where they take this ten japanese people to a town in france and they take away their phones and they just have to find each other and realize that they're in the same show and then some of them fall in love and it's like glacier slow and you're kinda thinking okay well it shouldn't be that hard to find the other japanese person in this and then when they're like they're like let's meet up they're like what time well in front of the bakery what bakery and they can't look it up or anything and so i just i love all those shows because it's all about the game design right what makes those shows work is the game design and inherent in game designer the principles of marketing distribution all of those elements there's another one that's a little older called nineteen to twenty where it's just a bunch of korean kids who are in there basically last year of being kids who grow up who come together and and i just like i learned so much about other cultures i learned so much about game design i learn about things that the us market doesn't think about and then they go through my brain and they come out as things that we could think about because if you're looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else then you're just gonna do the same thing everyone else does you gotta look in all those little pockets and that's not unrelated to me saying i pay attention to a meme that a seventeen year old basketball player creates because i'm also looking in those places where other people aren't looking i love it well speaking of you're big on chess right now why do you are so bullish on chess well give me the the pitch of light chess is the next big thing so i i think first of all you know we talk about positioning and people are like oh overtime is a high school sports company and i always say over time about the audience i mean my goal is to get a hundred million gen z fans to love over time if i thought they wanted to watch gran play three on three basketball i would show randy playing three on basketball like you can't get confused with that and so i've always been looking for opportunities to do things that don't feel like high school sports to better explain the superpower of what we're doing my cofounder zach is like a twenty two hundred drank chess who's a s and chest champion the pan ivy league chest champion and chess is one of those things that's like kind of not very accessible right first of all when you watch it they're like a eight to c four like you've have no idea what's going on the games are like six hours everybody is a mad genius and we were always like if our goal at over time is to see things that other people can't see to make things that feel niche mainstream like what's the most out of the box thing that we could do and we were always like zach likes chess can we do anything in chess you kinda look at it and you're like i don't know and you start to talk just people and they're like oh you're gonna do a chest championship in magnus carlson gonna play and that guy gonna play and you're just like yeah that's kind of already been done and it's already obvious and so one day zac comes in he goes actually you know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are and i'm like yeah queen's ga right that kinda started before that searching for bobby fisher yep and he's like yeah those are probably the two most relevant things in culture what are they have in common i was like their movies and tv shows he's like no they feature prod young prod yeah and i'm like oh prod he's like there's something about prod then immediately i think about because i play the piano every eight year old i've ever watched on youtube who plays guitar better than b king right who plays the piano and everything else like that you're just like how does that person know how to sound like herb hancock in they're eight years old and i'm like oh yeah i see it in my own life and we're just like prod that's it like they're accessible they're interesting who they are in and of themselves and i always think about this thing that my you know my son who was a poker player used to say is like like we used to play like texas hold them and he'd never look at his cards when i get my two cards the first thing i do is look at them i'm like what are you doing he's like i just look at the other people he's like i spent a lot of time watching the other people then i look at my cards because then i know what to do and so you think of this idea oh you play the players not the cards and then i'm just like okay so you have all these prod it's not actually about the chess it's about these incredible young people with these crazy gifts and then you start to think six hundred and fifty people or million people around the world play chess and like i could have a prodigy from india and argentina and all of this other stuff like that and then you're off and running so i'm working on this thing that we're trying to you know pitch and create called the prodigy cup and it's like these chest prod and it's a one night live event and we have spent actually when i get off of this podcast today we're gonna do a shooting in the studio we've spent over a hundred hours filming chess to make it so easy and fun to watch that if you and i didn't know the difference between chest and checkers we could watch it and be super entertaining and i think in there is the unlocks so to me i'm actually the perfect audience because i don't like chess and i'm not very good at it i don't know the a silly opening or any of these other things like that so i just watch it and then i look at my watch and i'm like board right and i'm like okay we gotta figure out how to do that so it's just it's this kind of opportunity where it does everything right it taps into this thing that isn't is is this growing trend but it's the unexpected part not the obvious way it's great for the positioning of the company because over time is about something bigger than high school mass and what better way to choose it do chess and then it's just a lot of experimentation and some prodigy in the middle is gonna say one thing and you're gonna be like shit that's the unlock yeah and you're gonna pivot the whole thing around it and i hope that a year from now you're watching it on a major streaming service and three years from now i walk up to madison square garden and there's a line of a thousand people and they're like yeah just bought tickets since these two prod playing i'm obsessed with this kid and i can't wait to watch it and it's all this ip that just came out of something that was very bottoms up and organic i love it i i love how you keep using your weakness as your advantage so for example you're like okay the worldwide leader of sports you're like oh man i'd be i'd hate to be them they have to cater to everybody they're boxed in by their mainstream and i could do stuff that they can't do right i can i can have this like you know gen z brand we can say that things are lid and there's r and there's all this and that's gonna become our advantage that we can cater to that audience in a way that if they did it would be way too try hard but we could do it because we're starting fresh or like you know with chess you're like cool i don't know anything about chess that's my advantage i couldn't watch that if i wanted to right it would be too boring for me to watch traditional chess so of course i'm gonna make something that's more accessible because i couldn't access that i can only make something that's that makes sense to me and so it would make it goes it goes back to that thing that we talked about before if you took if you train people to look for blue and you tell them the close eyes and you're like what's read they're like i don't see any of it right if you could train yourself to look for every color at every time it's you know i i love the education system and i'm professor bus beside an accident that some of the best entrepreneurs dropped out because they just saw things that were broader and i i think you know is it's just it's just a different way of looking at the world i don't know why that happened to me maybe my brain was wired that way maybe that's how i learned maybe i didn't go to any i never studied business but i think again it's it's about seeing what i think other people don't see and and and being able to stick with it and there is a lot of deferred mentality and so forth the and it takes either a lot of courage or oblivious to just go and do something that's different than everyone else is doing that's why i always respect people who do some crazy gap year they're like yeah everyone's gonna go to college i'm actually gonna be a goat farmer for a year and they're like you deferred called for a year to be a go farmer like why would you do that and they're just like i'll don't know it just feels fucking cool and it's like those people who are the people i'm in a bed on long term i love it alright dan you are the mad band brand builder this is fun i love i love this conversation if we fast forward i don't know a year say alright actually i don't forget the year if that's too far what are you most excited about for six seven water next i don't know ninety days what's the what's the next play the next move the next experiment that you're gonna try to get a bucket here with us with six seven water who get a bucket of it i think that you know tk k has created tail kin tk has created this phenomenon with his water that we've supported him on and helped him on the infrastructure and i think everyone's like well six seven is a trend have you sold a million cans yet or anything else like that and so i think we all wanna figure out how do we par this kind of massive social media following in this kind of ground up something based in a kid who's just a great kid into selling a million cans and maybe it's gonna be in the gas station or maybe it's gonna be in some place it's like completely not obvious and maybe i'm not gonna know and he's not gonna know what the answer is until monday when we wake up but we're like oh my god it's actually selling in ice cream trucks you know where something else like that and that idea that you don't know it's like nobody wants to play a video game where you don't know what what is gonna happen next and so i think that aspect and then unlocking that and then doing it again with one or two amazing other athletes who are super genuine and have a massive audience connection i think is really cool and always doing it from the bottoms up to something that makes sense and resonates with their brand i think that i'm really i'm really excited about i think it'd be great i love your n recruit idea where basically if if kentucky wants them but no khan wants some money we're gonna try to do that who knows how much legal and ip and other stuff we'll lock that down but you imagine he's like i'm gonna go to the school that buys the can with the color of the school and the most amount of cake he's just like show me the love yeah listen who's with it who so i just wanna go to the buy that's the most with it and then they basic gotta figure out how to create a stunt out it right how to speak the language that he wants to speak with the with the water brand and i think that would be really cool and i think that would be also like kind of like that would these like moments where like because when you said that my brain broke a little bit like oh i thought i knew how college recruiting works i thought even n i thought i didn't understood what that is okay great kid goes to a school i think after they're at the school then they're gonna start to get maybe some endorsement deals and it's gonna look like endorsements but just a younger age and then i was like oh no so if he has this vehicle the school could kinda like pump his vehicle and part of the recruitment that's actually like pretty genius so it's like your your wife is gonna be like sean why there twenty seven blue cases of water out and you're like i gotta give what i got to do eggs because i gotta do my part drink up to drink drink up i had this i when i was like in my twenties i ran this profit and education and we eventually started some of the very first charter schools in the nineties in new york and i had this guy who was on my board and he had been like a sixties activist who eventually became a successful investment banker but here's the first person in a board meeting i ever heard say no and said a yes and i didn't know you could say no and and he had said this thing to me which now he's in his eighties and i had lunch with him and i was like you said the most impactful thing to me ever goes i don't remember saying that and he said you know they say you gotta crawl before you walk and you gotta walk before you run and if if you do that you spend your whole fucking life crawling and i don't know i just always like i was like yes it's really logical i almost put my whole life crawling i wanna get into the running part so he's like i don't remember saying i was like you said that to me i was only twenty seven if you changed my line so you know that that's how we think about going after all of these things spend your whole life crawling alright well if if anybody's in the beverage industry if anybody's got gas stations if anybody who's listening to this drinks water drink up what was it drink thirsty people what was this other catch for first says don't you hack family yeah that that's what i that's what i say you i can tell you that the best part is it says on the back it says attention if drinking six seven water doubles your vertical please contact your coach immediately so good hi did thanks for coming on then yeah i appreciate you brother i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the number one audio destination for business professionals billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn founders and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure fear your courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode