We found 7 business ideas that will blow up in 2026

alright sam i got a question for you have you ever dated anyone who's a little little crazy could be side and crazy could be bad crazy there is a difference between good crazy and bad crazy yeah there's a there's a a thin line so i have five to seven ideas for you that i want you to help me figure out are the good crazy or bad crazy i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a roll just happened the make please yeah okay so obviously we're super superstars via content and so i just had my my my quote editorial meeting where we talk about like cool stuff i wanna talk about on instagram or whatever and previously i told them how i'm reading a book about ted bundy because i'm a sick and like reading like stories of like crime and stuff and he brings me a series of tweets on things that i've learned from ted bundy and i was like are you kidding me i've not tweeting out things that i've learned about business from ted bundy this is the nonsense that you know superstar creators still have to deal with we're just like you know we're just like the average show not as easy as it looks oh my god it was ridiculous i was like are you kidding me it's like ted bundy didn't leave any fingerprints for the first fourteen murders therefore you should learn how to pay attention to the details and play ahead i'm like being mission driven oh yeah you're bomber case got yeah a story of a obsession alright what do you got you have something for me alright sam i got a question for you have you ever dated anyone who's a little little crazy could be side and crazy could be bad crazy there is a difference between good crazy and bad crazy yeah there's a there's a a thin line and you know arguably they would say that about me that i was the crazy one but yeah we're the crazy yeah but yeah i've i've updated some people there are off the rocker okay so today i have ideas for you that i wanna know are they good crazy or bad crazy these are startup up ideas that exist but some that people are doing and in business it's this weird thing because if your idea is too normal too understandable too expected you actually have no shot yeah so if you say it's an idea and everybody in the room nods if one hundred percent of the the room nods and says that's a good idea run away you're about to waste three years of your life you need some people to think this is the worst idea this is the craziest who would do that who would who would just let strangers sleep on their couch who would let strangers into their car you're just gonna let some random guy drive you to your destination all the great ideas sound a little crazy upfront and so you just have to differentiate the fine line between good crazy and bad crazy so i have i think five to seven ideas for you that i want you to help me figure out are the good crazy you're bad crazy we have a little bit of a rule in this podcast so we try to default to optimism and being happy about the people we talk about and so for anyone moving forward who we insult for this segment we are actually complimenting you because as you've just said the worst idea the better of the company it might be that's like my apology that i'm gonna say right now and i'm not gonna say it's a good idea that's a compliment and if say it's a crazy idea also a compliment gotcha yeah they're very advanced alright first idea i wanna do is called pet chat i i don't know if you saw this but gone viral right now chinese startup that has it's a dog collar that uses ai to translate your pets bark dude the same it's a it's a white family with a golden retriever with a white picket fence why on earth would you think this is a chinese company it has like chinese vibes the whole yeah promo a video you know what i mean like what i lived in china and they used to have this phrase and and qr and they're like yeah we have kfc here but it's n npr i what's npr i think of not quite right yeah and it's like it's kfc but it's not gonna taste exactly like kfc you're used to same same but different same same but different and so this promo this launch video was was a little n npr of like i don't think this was made in san francisco on length with ninety five percent accuracy they claimed they can tell you what your pet wants awesome okay good crazy bad crazy more like amazing stupid it's a group i gave by way good chris here bad crazy i would say it's pretty it's pretty interesting that's actually great this is great good crazy okay you're into it you're a dog guy so i do you i knew there's a part of you that would be like oh my god that's ridiculous but if it were i'd like two you know what i mean like it's kind of in that category now the problem is it's like all pet products that we've talked about on this podcast what's what's the my first million rule about pet products who knows who knows and if but by the way best aspect of a pet business yeah is is the who knows that factor is their gut health better yeah who knows is is it making them calmer and happier or who knows so pet supplements work this way and for this the ninety five percent accuracy everybody in the comments is like how are you verifying what is that checked against nobody knows what they want so what are you claiming a lot of dog i mean i was i had a great dog for fifteen years and i could tell what each bar meant like if i heard them like and was in the other room i was like alright someone's at the front door base off of that or now he's gotta go to the bathroom or now he just wants me to come and give attention like i could like here i could tell what each meant a hundred percent there's like the the the i just there's water versus food very clear to me yeah there's hey i gotta a poop and it's your problem unless you do something about this right now there's you there's different different parks and so i i think i put it in bad crazy just because i think dog owners know they're they're dog's sparks it's it's not that hard to figure out alright the next one also we're gonna stay in china for this one it's called super brain hey i wanna tell you about something pretty cool we have a database of all of the un sexy business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast so hundreds of episodes the team at hubspot went through they pulled out all the sexy ideas so not the super high tech ones but the simple relatable interesting profitable ideas that we have brainstorm and they're all available for download for free just click the link in the description below thank you to our friends at hub lot for sponsored this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys back to the show what you're gonna see is a person holding up what looks like almost like a baseball card or like a tom ga of some sorts but it's grandma or grandpa so basically it's a way to memorial and stay connected to loved ones who passed away you upload their video and audio recordings and their personality and then you can chat with them in your hand anytime you missed them that's messed up man that that that'd break my heart okay so you're you're you're out on this one yes i want it but i if it's for a grand grandparent who i knew was gonna die i mean it just it would make me cry all the time but i think it's awesome cute i've got yet had picked a aside on the idea so far just well let me just raise something really quick they called it super brain i've noticed so i live in manhattan and my office is in this a chinese area and i've noticed like can you read this i cannot what does it say okay it's a it's a electronic store that just says like air mart usa incorporated and then like down the street from that it's like american cowboy inc and they sell like iphone chargers and then like a block away from that it's like you know like usa number one or yeah yeah i love that i love when when these democrats come over here and they're not exactly sure like the west the best way to phrase things and they're like what's the most american thing we could think of like i that's my favorite thing on earth i love those stores i always patron patronizing and i love the the thai food near me yes yes or like your restaurant thai food near me so it shows up at the top of your google maps or google search triple a locksmith i'm in yeah so i love that and so that's so funny they call this super brain because that could just be anything when i started super brand thought something else but yeah that's pretty amazing it it breaks my heart but that's amazing i would say good crazy yeah have you seen there you're you're not you're not watching the nba i've watched i'm watching the knicks partially because i like seeing the celebrities on sitting like who's sitting on the floor but also jay b it's pretty cool so say the version of aaa locksmith that you'll appreciate so these two women we're going viral because every time they would show the coach of the spur behind the coach of the spur was two ladies of big boo two and dad women that's they were there from one game and people were like oh wow like y hey i'd love to get more coach shots and then they were there again the next time and they're like what's going on here turns out these are two girls to only fans creators who had the genius marketing idea of sp for strategic tickets where they knew the tv camera will show them literally only from the between the neck and the belly button and they're perfectly positioned right behind the coach so every time they show the coach to show these girls and their instagram and their only fans is popping off right now and i was like wow this is the modern day triple locksmith or how do you how you show first in the yellow pages as you call yourself aa locksmith this is that and i was like honestly women i you know i ladies ever respect the hustle this is a incredible marketing move i do appreciate it that was pretty brilliant how we started with super brain and then went to aaa a locksmith smith and you weave that in if you talk to me for long enough that is where i end up just a question is take ten minutes or ten hours the conversation will land there alright ready for the next one yeah this is kind of up your alley you're a health and fitness and i would say early adopter ar influencer but have you seen the trend of hyper barrier chambers at home yes so hyper barrier chambers are interesting that looks ridiculous that looks like a kinda like awesome it looks like we're like you know you would be put the death it looks like he's like a astronaut or something yeah hyper barrier chambers are interesting so the reason i've known about them is i'm a huge running nerd and in the sixties seventies and eighties and well and even tilt the to this day a lot of the us olympic runners would go and move to flags staff for three or four or five months at a time because they would wanna be at altitude and then people were like what would happen if we let these guys sleep in a chamber that had less i guess less air or thinner i don't know the right terminology and you would build you would just be more efficient with oxygen and thus a better endurance athlete and now a lot of people think that this for the average human is pretty cool is that the story yeah so there's people are now trying to build like we've seen sauna become something that used to be at a gym or in an external location now there's at hope brands do hundreds of millions in revenue we saw the same thing with cold plunge i think the the plunge guys you know they sent us a a home cold plunge tub and you know those i forgot what they were doing but you they were doing a hundred million just direct to consumer no retail presence of people buying cold tubs for the home and the prediction or the idea here is just like it happened for sauna and cold tubs and red light it's gonna happen for hyper chambers next and so there's a couple companies trying to do these at home hyper chambers what i liked about this one was the look was very different than the normal hyper chamber and it's visually distinct and i think the visual just like how cold punches and sauna became something that you would share on instagram because it's like this weird like wellness flex or like discipline flex i think hyper barrier chambers could have that same potential what what do you think good crazy or bad crazy hips i keep saying good but it's awesome do you know what i think it just what it should be is have you ever traveled with your children and in a hotel room you have to like share a room and so there's these like dark tents like a blackout ten a blackout ten they're pretty awesome so like you travel and you like can build like a crib but it's completely dark so you could still like have the light on in your bedroom if your kid has to sleep in the room my opinion is if i was eight sleep or a sleep company it needs to be a sleep company just needs to make like you know how like little girls have like these beds that have like the like the the princess that be the princess canopy yeah it you need like like a a king canopy where it's like you know you go in and you sleep it with less air and you come out that's that's what it should be i don't know if physics allows it to be like no it's got pressurized air right yeah you have to like actually i think one of the challenges with this is it's technically a medical device so h b which is i guess the hyper barrier whatever therapy is a medical device you can't make claims without clearance or safety risk pressurized oxygen in an enclosed space it's harder to make it sexy like a cold plunge which is basically a tub of water so i think that's the the potential downside of this one but could be something there also don't you just need your head in it like bat whole body so could you just do like a astronaut helmet that'd would be amazing alright next one number four the blue collar meats nerd combination that you didn't expect it's kinda like what's a food you didn't expect not the corona nut it's like the real taco well what else it's like what is the unexpected food combination that sounds gross but it's actually great this is that it's learning to be an hvac technician by playing a game on the oc quest that my meta made i don't know if you've seen this so they they've created can't these created these quest games that are like data center operations engineer and you're like playing like a flight simulator but they're actually using it to train and hire people because they badly need more technicians for these jobs okay and i think this is pretty interesting what what what say you about this look at this guide like tell me you wouldn't play this game i don't play video games really but i do love like wars fact no i like like war sims and oddly enough there's like a trucking sim a trucking simulator that i find oddly relaxing but i do like simulator in but i don't want to play with a i don't wanna do be an hvac person no okay look at this i know like i actually need this it's not even a wand i think you think i might actually need that you know what i used to do is i used to love buying old motorcycles and like taking them apart and like cleaning all the parts and putting them together that was like a huge hobby i had i love doing that college i would definitely play a game where i had could do that but i wouldn't wanna do hvac so i think this is a this is how height is the bond when you made another person who loves motorcycles or taking them apart it's sort of like when i see another mixed race couple i just you get a nod it's a nod one bounce up yeah straight bird base yeah in that it's like we know like the intentional walk and then you get to go all around the bases actually whenever we used to see before i whenever i saw a mixed race couple with the with a stroller i had to stop myself because the first like eight times i would like i was like staring into the the stroller so hard and i'm like sorry i'm just trying to see like what your combination is gonna look like just so i know what we're gonna look what my kids will look like i have a pant tone shade chart feel like i just wanna see where you paul because i just wanna know and there was there's whole instagram handles dedicated to that like different combinations don't you think they need a better term for it than mixed race cup i feel like you deserve a much cooler phrase for that i call my kids super babies i'm like they're super babies they're they have a diverse cool yeah you need like i like what's the thing called would you do for and it's like the black and white sw like you mean that oh alright app on medic quest are teaching blue collar trade skills like hvac repair welding plumbing electrical through hands on ver simulation you put on a headset you practice diagnosing a broken ac unit and assembling an e battery pack risk free repeatable and ga amplified there's multiple players doing this like interplay learning in austin texas they're the leader they have hundreds of hours of hvac solar plumbing and electrical training they they can actually get you like certified as a technician or an associate just using quest skill vary does this for welding and painting simulations there's a massive shortage five hundred thousand un unfiltered that plumbing jobs in the us alone and training a expensive and dangerous to do on real equipment i am a believer in this sam good crazy my buddy who owns an hvac company they have this thing called hoffman university where they put new recruits in for months or weeks at a time and so i'm i'm a little bit familiar with what he was just telling me and i went and saw the facility where they have like they called a university it's just like a you know a two month training program or whatever it is it's pretty cool and there's a huge need for this i didn't i didn't fully understand it until i saw his place so yeah it's pretty cool just don't wanna play as a game right right but if you wanted the job because if i wanted the job or you wanna hire people this is brilliant number five end point arena you're gonna need to i'm gonna put the glasses down and do the sort of nerdy push up the glasses here because this one's a little high brow it's combining two things that i only partially understand prediction markets and biotech clinical trials so i don't know if you've seen seen this but these guys made a prediction market for clinical trials so i don't know if you're familiar but basically on the stock market there's lots of drug companies pharmaceutical companies that their trading is highly dependent on the outcomes of up coming you know phase one phase two phase three clinical trials and there's a huge i mean my cousin used to work at a hedge fund and the whole idea was like if we can have a higher estimation of the probability of success of that trial we know where the stock is gonna move once that's confirmed and so there's a huge incentive to understand the science and understand this the actual true probability versus what the stock market is predicting and so endpoint arena created a poly market essentially just for betting on you know right now lu one seven seven ro pat t t the metastatic pro pro prostate cancer so that that's obviously what i'm pretty well versed in and right now it's thirty three percent yes sixty seven percent no and you could see how much is being bet on it and you can actually either hedge positions by betting here in addition to the stock you can use these you know prediction markets which are typically higher accuracy than than you know individual experts because you get the wisdom of the crowds that have skin in the game so it's very interesting me what do you what do you think of what do you what do you have to make of this super fascinating how'd you find this a guy tweeted this out interesting name i think i love it but you know why it's called endpoint arena is go to the top left of the website and tell me what you see sean end endpoint arena season five is that what you're looking at yes it says season five which leads me to believe are they trying to make it like a series like is the end endpoint arena like this is the show and the show is like will this drug get approved or not yeah i have no idea this is amazing so that's kinda of fascinating right okay here let me read you this article one day in early may a web based platform from ka sheet tied two contracts to a upcoming psilocybin drug they could wage your on when on when the company would submit the drug application for a blah blah and the fda would approve it or not these are event contracts which is kind of the basis of all prediction markets they're trying to speed up science point arena ceo michael fisher who's was a phd study at economics computer science at stanford became curious about the promise of prediction markets and he created an app around this he said i became very in the concept of experimentation and encouraging other people to think about and place bets on what they think is gonna happen if they do certain experiments he argues used at clinical trial focused prediction markets can democrat keyword that's a tricky word for us yeah democrat the trial process and give participants motivation to become experts and improve experimentation blah blah blah okay so the why here is a little bit of a turn off i don't think i i think he said a lot of words but he really was just saying we wanna gamble i think that's i don't find that interesting i wouldn't wanna widen this for prediction markets and correct me is this like is this you and me if we take opposite ends of the bet are we betting against each are we buying sticks we so the way it works is there's a price for a yes contract and every time somebody says yes on the yes contract the price of yes will go up unless there's corresponding pressure on the no side so it's basically there's no there's no book there's no middle man who sets the price the market sets the price the yes is versus the no it's not directly like a stock market where on buying your shares necessarily but i can buy i can put money in at yes and the more i do it it'll skew the price ups to incentivize people to take the other side of the action potentially let me just read you what he said he made the bold claim that prediction markets could eventually provide scientific benefit here's a hypothetical example a known gl one drug is being studied in a new indication if somebody already taking therapy for the therapy for diabetes or obesity experience improvements related to the new condition being evaluated of the trial they could use the firsthand information to it form a prediction on the market in theory patterns that emerged through those predictions could provide early signals about a drug potential and additional indications before the trial is released so for example one could do a more focused targeted with fewer people it's a way to speed up science to create a market where one is incentivized to move quickly and use fewer resources to get towards outcome i don't know if i fully understand a or buy that i don't know if i fully understand it hill or or or buy i don't understand it therefore i i'm gonna say this too no i don't understand it and i guess therefore i know i don't buy it if this is i can't decide i think it's very interesting but i would say bad crazy hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog post emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses number six the cleveland great name this is a interesting company so check this out it's a bath house plus a steak house in cleveland this is actually the reboot of the office alright so a ninety eight year old jewish bath house in cleveland that combines russian style steam cold plunge and massages with giant t bone steaks and cocktails you sweat you plunge you eat steak it's a full social experience part spa part steakhouse park private member's club isn't this amazing it's blowing up right now boris tool called it the hottest reservation in the country this winter a hundred sixty five dollars a person covers your drinks your steam yeah your cold plunge and a full meal their phones are ringing off the hook with reservations at all hours that's attracting millennials and gen z who are discovering it through social media they recently opened ladies days and c ed days after being mail only for decades a group you know for example a group of six friends could book a saturday at the sc they alternate between the steam and cold for a couple hours get massages then sit down for steaks and cocktails it's the new going out it replaces the bar restaurant spa or night club for an outing i'm in that's awesome it's not even crazy this is just it's downright spectacular have you heard of this company called other ship i'm an investor in another ship i love other ship so i went to my first other ship session so basically the best way to describe it what it is to somebody who doesn't know so the one liner that i would describe it is it's soul cycle for son and so in manhattan where i live it's all like young it's like a combination of hippie dip but also like yep tech people it's quite fun and you go for an hour long or maybe forty five minute long session and there's cold plunge and then there's a huge sauna where you're in you're like basically you know naked with like fifty people in asana and then there's like a leader who's doing breath work and and is like moving the towel to get like the eucalyptus flavoring in your face and nick calms you down in a weird way i'm i'm not doing it justice this but it's actually quite awesome and there's loud music going on again i'm not doing it justice this but for some reason you do get in this little strange tran where it is it's hot in there you you have a certain smell you hear noises you feel the wind going against you it's quite cool and they even have like single nights where you can like go and like you know everyone there is single and it's pretty awesome i'm actually i thought it was amazing i went one time and then my wife and i are like we'll go on like our date night and you can go at like nine pm that's amazing yeah i've i'm so jealous i haven't gone they opened up new york i think they opened up one more location somewhere they got a bunch in the works i really want one to be out here in the bay area it a good business it's a get great business and i i think the hard part is his he didn't try to make like the subway sandwiches of like locations where it's just like this very simple box no this is high end this is like high end everything and it's like he he wanted to make what i think he successfully made which is the most epic kinda sauna breath work experience that's probably ever been made as like a place you can go and so i i saw dana white the president of u did want he went to one he didn't anything about it he went to he's like standing on he's like i don't know what like this is the most amazing place i've ever been to he's like if you're in new york you need to go to this place this lease is incredible and he engraved this like he went live on instagram because he was just so hyped from he's like that was amazing and so i'm i'm pretty jealous i really wanna to go to go check it out i'm a big believer in breath work i've been using the other ship yeah you've been talking about breath work for like six years now yeah i think they're kinda d the app but even better than the app is like people don't don't really use or know about this phrase but state is gonna become a very important word over the next ten years managing your state being in a great state it can you know state of mind but really it's just how you feel how you experience the things you experience so if you are in a bad mood you can go to a good thing and have a bad time if you're in a great mood you can like i've told the dmv story before you can go to the dmv and have a great time and i think most people are pretty poor about managing or controlling their state and the easiest way to manage control state is not to think your way there but to use the body the body can drag the mind and so going into hot cold breath and music and you could and certain odor like you eucalyptus you can literally change your state and i think that's gonna become very addict to people i think people are gonna love what they're getting out of that and this is very similar to why soul cycle berries boot camp work it's not because it's the best workout in fact you could argue in many ways crossfit berries soul cycle are not ideal workouts you're not great for strength training you're not people's form is all over the place but you go you're in a dark room with a talk of other people it's a communal experience the music is pumping and there's the leader who makes it so you don't have to think you feel a sweat you're doing hot yoga you know you get the temperature thing you change states and i think that's what people go truly for not the fitness layer it's kinda becoming a recurring joke that every everything comes back to like when we were fourteen fifteen years old reading books on pickup artist and how to meet girls and one of the first things that they try to teach you is you have to go into like a session to meet a girl like if you go to a bar and you're like i wanna meet a girlfriend whatever you have to change your state and you have to be in a positive state and then what they try to teach you is when you meet someone how to bring them into your state and so that's pretty funny that you predict that states the new word the word generative is out state is in state gonna be in i think it's gonna be in so i've i think this is awesome i'm i think we love it which it wasn't in cleveland though but i i do like that that's a horrible name cleveland sc shit fits fits yeah it just sounds like there's a lot of bacteria there like when i think of that word i think of like the steam is coming from like a sewer that's the oakland shit alright number seven the fun day press have you seen this no alright so imagine a newspaper like the sunday press but it's the sunday press it's a newspaper that has none of the news that just makes you depressed and only the fun games and comics so this is made by a guy that we we met who is like a pretty prolific board game designer that guy right there on the left and he's made a bunch of like like i think he made is it cards against humanity he made like one of the big games like that's like one of the best sellers in the world so guy has a very creative guy i went did a call with him and behind him like his backdrop was not like a library of books it was a library of only board games like thousands of different board games that you've never heard of and this guy's is like a game designer and so he created this actual physical newspaper that gets delivered to you that's got like cross words and sid and like just the fun parts and none of the depressing head stuff that comes in normal news what what's i you amazing i'm so to this i think this is awesome do you remember highlights magazine no what is that is that like the city like cool stuff in the city is that what that is no so if you google highlights i assume this is for kids right no this is for adults oh this is not i it looked like a like it was telling you like cool like oh it's kinda like the lego kits for adults and like you know like what what do what do we call it adult adult is the trend it's like a multi billion dollar industry of like yeah giving adults things that feel like their childhood that will help d stress them i think that's a horrible word because that just makes me wanna punch myself if i say i'm a adult it's like when people say like you're you're the name police today it's like when people say like they're adult because they i schedule their first doctor's appointment my reply to that is what you've heard before wasn't on your bingo card it's like yeah it's like dude you're twenty two okay if this was nineteen forty six you'd have eight confirmed kills in the south pacific like don't tell me that you're adult by scheduling a doctor's appointment okay be a man and just call and get up doctor's appointment i don't need got gallo of you guys those those tight i like that i just think it's ridiculous i think that consulting is stupid that said the fun day press you literally do this by the way collect mini foods out of lol dolls and you do buy elaborate lego sets that you do like for nights on it i'm not gonna hashtag it though but i will talk about on a podcast in front of millions of people so it's different this is pretty interesting yeah so highlights magazine was i thought was sort of kids so but highlights magazine is like when i grew up like reading as a kid so i thought this was gonna be comparable but this is pretty interesting does it sell do do people buy yeah i think it's kinda new but okay here's the here's what it says it's an early stage project there's a competitor called the sunday club that runs the exact same model all games no news also the new york times games only product so no news from the new york times is has a million paying subscribers at five dollars a month sixty million in arr so this is basically the physical printed out version of of that idea yeah i think it's pretty awesome let me show you something kind of interesting i've been really interested in physical newsletters and this is sort of tangent to it but i read this article in the wall journal how there's this crossing the headline is the crossing guard making fourteen thousand dollars a month mailing out her mu from her job and so it's this woman named christine and she has a monthly physical newsletter where she just writes about like things that she's experiencing as a crossing guard and it's just entertainment it's just silly it's cool and she posts she like how to forget how she shared this up but i think she had a very big audience and now she has tens of thousands dollars a month where the people paying money to get this physical newsletter and i i think i said this two years ago actually that i think that like these i wouldn't call a magazine but i would literally call it a physical newsletter the jan the better like if it looks like it's on printed paper that's staple together in a manila folder i think that you can make some really cool products that way and i think that people are gonna continue to be drawn to quirky things like this and the fun day press is one of those that fits that category alright well i appreciate playing my game crazy crazy good or crazy bad do you want me to tell you something that's similar to this that you can i'll give you two more ideas that are actually quite similar to this last one that you can kinda you can judge thanks podcast is brought you by my friend at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo and chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through financial group and call them an a members fdic alright so i bought this thing called i guess it's i don't know what they the noun that they would describe it but it's a dumb phone but go to dumb dot c bookmark alright dumb dot c hello from the flip side okay so check this out it's a flip phone so i have this flip phone it's just a no it's just a tc phone it's twenty five dollars and then twenty dollars a month after that and what they've done is they've created an app that i have on my phone and it's basically i believe this phone is its own phone but reality is is that it's more like a forwarding phone so if you call my phone i can turn my phone and my i can turn my iphone and dumb mode or smart mode if it's in dumb mode that basically means i can't receive calls and all the calls are gonna go to here and all the techs are gonna go to here and replying to a text message on here is a huge pain in the ass because it's like the nokia you know what where you have to like to get to the letter c you gotta click it three times three times yeah and so it's pretty cool but here's why i think this is particularly interesting and so they have this when you order it they had this documentation they give you a pamphlet on like how to set it up and the branding is quite good so like if you go to their website click where it says i think month free of phone and so there's not any articles written about this company and so they actually have a customer service number i just called the customer service this morning and i was like what's the story of this company tell me everything and i could tell i i was talking to the cto i could tell it was like a three or four person company because i could hear people in the background and i was literally calling his phone because i could like facetime him i could tell basically the background is it's a guy who previously had a company he's sold that he's self funding this company they have four full time employees according to the person i called this morning and it started because he hosted like a friend's challenge where it was one month without a phone and they found that one month without a phone wasn't particularly feasible and so he's an entrepreneur and so he created this app that helped you turn a twenty five dollar tc phone which is what this is into a forwarding device where you can sort of like replace your iphone at least for parts of the day and it's quite interesting and their branding is really cool if you go to the website everything is like very like old school y and and but but fun and there's like polaroid pictures and i have a feeling that this is gonna take off i don't know if this company is gonna work but i think it potentially could the reason i think that is if you go to there's a subreddit called dumb phones that i've been a subscriber to for a while now and it's been taking off i think it has two hundred thousand subscribers on and i've been noticing that it's definitely been growing it's definitely been growing a lot and it's quite fascinating and i looked up a a bunch of different reviews for a variety of phones and i settled on this one and i went and looked and cnn recently did the best ad campaign ever for this company so basically they took one of their presenters and they had him do a brain scan where they measured his short term memory so they had them read something and they were able to don't know how the science works but they were able to look at like how focus were you when you were reading something how much did you remember in a few other tests then they gave them this phone this brand how i found it they gave them this phone for two weeks and then they had them redo the test and his capacity to focus and his capacity to remember went up significantly and i saw that and i was like that's the greatest ad i've ever seen this is perfect plus you do these one month challenges where you buy the phone and it's only twenty dollars and it's twenty dollars or twenty five dollars a month after that to subscribe and get their service i think it's really cool i think this could take off and the company i believe is only four months old have you been using it i just got it this morning i just got this morning i just got it this morning and so i'm gonna test it out i can give like an update but i think it's really promising and i noticed that when i walked out into my office and showed it to my team i was like check this out everyone was like clamoring they're like what is that let me see that and i think it's really fascinating i mean the the problem is the problem is so real total agreement on the problem and the question is which of these solutions is gonna be the one like you've told me about brick before how you break your phone you've told me about the dumb phone and you know there's other people you know george mac has two phones one the smartphone one's a dump like you know people have these like different systems i'm really curious what the right solution is gonna be but the problem is is t because everybody's got the phone and every everybody everybody has the phone is addicted to the phone i really don't know anybody who's not addicted to their phone so you don't in my life i don't know of all the people i know it seems like there's a ninety five to ninety eight percent addiction rate and the question is what's gonna be the nicotine patch for that what's gonna be the the aa for that how are people gonna get off this addiction is there gonna be a solution that that some percentage of people gravitate towards my opinion is that this to all the big companies out there this appears to be a very niche silly thing my prediction is that in ten years this will not be i do not think apple came out with this if apple came out with a version of this i think they could sell a billion of these things well you know that they're like if you google apple flip phone like there's they're they're working on yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't think it's rumors i think they've announced it but there's for sure rumors iphone fold is what it's gonna be called now i don't know if it's like another screen i don't know what it is but they're calling it like a flip phone so i guess like there's all these and it's not important what exactly what it is but there's all these bread crumbs out there that i'm seeing that's pointing to like this is actually gonna be a mega trend and not just a niche thing and i can give you another really cool example have you heard this lady named cat gp no okay look her up that's her instagram handle okay so this lady started getting popular on instagram i think she has four six hundred thousand followers incredible name yeah it's cool and she started doing educational videos on ai and one day in two thousand twenty three she came up with this idea to create a physical phone like a landline and she like made a post about it and like no one wanted of it so she gotta put on the back burner and then last year she was like you know what ai is actually like can make this process a lot better let me see if i can use chad to make this product a little bit better and she used the product chat to help make this a physical landline it's not really a physical landline but it looks like a rotary phone like the ones that like your grandparents maybe you had or like these like old school physical phones and she used chat to like help get it approved by the fcc because you had like do some approval process and to help like design it whatever and she put a video out about it and it went quite viral i believe there is amazing it's a it's a physical phone like the old school phones like you could either have another the wall the rotary one or just a normal normal corded phone but it's a bluetooth device to your actual phone yeah so smart and her branding is beautiful and what one of these in two thousand and twenty five she launched this to her audience and she was like you i tried this in twenty three no one really wanted this but i have a bigger audience screw it let's do it and she sold eight hundred thousand dollars worth of these this product in five months now in two thousand twenty six she's tracking or she this says the goal and and and it's early in the year but tracking towards five million dollars a year in revenue and if you go to our website to me what's quite clear is that she can have all types of skews and i think she said this i think she wants to launch this thing called cat labs so basically she can create all types of phones but if i was her i would basically look at everything in my phone that does something or even my alexa that does something how do i create a product that undo it now this sounds crazy but you could have like a handheld gps or you could have like an old school more old school alarm clock that that doesn't do anything else but just goes off and on and maybe you could use your voice to like turn it on and off or you could have like a like a a jail for your phone and you could become an a a company that's all about phone addiction issues and you could have a variety of skews in the same way ridge wallet started with wallets and now they also sell given a away free game here i love it she should do the phone jail is a great idea it's cool right and if i used to have a phone gel it was just like kitchen aid but you gotta like make it look like course i had one that was just like a a timed tu wear container but i think that she does a beautiful job with branding and everything's pretty cute and cool and and it's like it's the clear like you know david versus goliath with goliath being addiction and david being like but don't you just want to like focus and make your brain feel good and be less lonely and i think that's such a great marketing story and she's doing a really good job with it this is a great find i love this that is really cool and i like the sorta ant just be the anti of the main thing it not like you're trying to convince everybody it's just that one percent of people are gonna feel overs stimulated by the thing and if you can provide the alternate and you can do marketing via tiktok with really visual buzz products that are gonna get people talking in the comments which is exactly what this does like her top tiktok just says i brought back landline lines and she's holding one of the physical phones and there's your people who like it who hate it it doesn't matter but it's gonna get a reaction that's how you can grow you know grow these types of businesses and then you if you just up level it and say well am i really just selling a landline or am i selling a return to the physical yeah right a return to the real and it's like oh i like that there's a lot of people who wanna return to the real what is what does that entail oh there's other products that might make a lot of sense in that case yeah it's sort of like what what's that funny bottled water company murder water death liquid death like it's sort of like that where it's like with these phones and like this thing that i have here the moat is not the technology right now the moat is not the product the moat is the brand and i think that with if he took someone who was in advertising and you said just focus on ads and focus on building a brand that's really really cool that is the moat did you see zach whatever i forgot it zach had a gh the guy the guy who did the cali i app so the did he major i know what his new thing is did he announce it yeah it's honda he did to like a youtube videos kinda let's talk about it so just give the context so he came on here when he was set at seventeen years old or something like he was in high school he like came on the podcast in between class periods you like skip a script skipped class to come be beyond our podcast and he was doing a calorie tracking app not an entirely new idea but he did it he made a simple app with his friends and they really leveraged tiktok to grow the the app and he talked exactly about what he was doing he was at a few million in in arr at the time and they grew it to something like twenty or thirty million in arr and they sold the business and he's now he's like a college student who you know sold sold a business for i don't know bunch of money somewhere between the let's call it fifty dollars to a hundred million bucks last time he was on he came on after he sold it and he was talking about what he wants next he said i wanna do something in with hardware something physical partly because it's just a fun challenge partly because seeing yeah where can i go where there's less competition for when it's getting easier and easier to create content easier and easier to create apps how do i do something that's a little bit different and so he just came out with youtube video announcing his new thing which you wanna describe it i didn't watch the video i had just known that i knew what space it was gonna be in and remember roughly the product what i didn't see the video where did he what's a an alarm clock it's an alarm clock and it's basically an alarm clock that you it's like a physical brick so you put it somewhere else so your your phone alarm won't stop beeping until you tap your phone to the brick so it's kind of like a way to get up out of bed and stop doom scrolling and his idea is like wait one understand how does that help you stop doom scrolling because you have to get out of bed and go touch your phone to this thing that you put presumably in the kitchen or somewhere else somewhere where you you need to be up and active not just sitting in bed on your you know most people they wake up with an alarm clock they look at their phone they see bunch of them notifications got got it they snooze the alarm and they stay in bed looking at their notifications social media whatever for twenty thirty minutes and that's how they start their day got it so the idea would be your alarm goes up and that beeping is not gonna stop until you're up out of bed and you touched the thing awesome is is new things called flow is the name of the the company oh cool wow okay he released this yesterday so flow alarm clock dot com this is awesome great video too i thought that my prediction was good but then seeing like a young guy who's way more in the no and like in the in the pulse of young people because he'd likes that it's like kind of that's like the real validation yeah so are you on board with some of this stuff i'm on on board with it what do you mean the dumb phone and one i don't trust myself meaning i love to buy a gadget but there's a graveyard of gadgets i don't use in my office and i'm learning like hey look i gotta really be committed to actually like commit to the bit if i'm gonna do it like i gotta really wanna use the thing and change my lifestyle to do so don't don't just buy all these things for no reason so i'm gonna kinda wait and see if you tell me like yeah dude i use it all the time this is if four weeks from now you're like this is my new normal then i'll buy it the brick has stuck with me that is it's at my front door and depending on which activity i'm gonna go out and do so if i'm going out with my family that continues to have maps text messages calls and uber right i think that's that and then i'm gonna go out it literally just has my workout app that's it in spotify that's it see i just deleted social media off my phone it i kinda did the same thing there's not really much else to do on my phone once you take that off what am i just too easy to go to twitter dot com oh i didn't even think of that i would i even think to do that it's such a bad experience dude they're just constantly trying to get you download app they nuke it for you like you can't see a reply you can't like can't do anything but then i end up just spending so much time on claude asking a questions so i just had like nuke everything i had like you what just like i don't know i just like it's just the habit of like i have i'm in the elevator in my pocket pull it out do something and like that that like action has to like go away entirely and and word report it to go away i just can't have anything working yeah that's fair alright is that it that's it alright that's a pop i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break let's talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing ken presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics this is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast