I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
All right, we live. How do I look
you? Look fantastic you
upgraded? I'm currently recording I
Wish I could turn the cam around but I don't want to screw it up, but I'm sitting at my friend Jack's house in Hawaii where I'm having a week vacation.
Congratulations. Well
deserved. Yeah, it's cool. Just got here but gonna be here for maybe five days, but it's all right. How's things going with you?
Yeah, things are good. Did you see this thing that the these guys who tweeted at us that were like do we will pimp out your stream. Did you watch these videos that they
made? No, I've been flying but they said that they booked a ticket to Austin are they actually going to my house?
House,
I don't know if they don't think know they're there waiting for us to be like yes or no, but these guys applied very intelligently I gotta credit. So basically they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff and they're like will do this for you. We'll make it no hassle. I'll come to you I will hook it up and a few people tweeted something like that at us and you were like kind of humoring it I guess and then these three guys are I think they're like college seniors or something like that. I don't really know didn't look too far into it, but they sent us a video they go watch here's
Going to do and they recorded a video and it's looks like a Casey neistat video. Like the quality is like that and the editing style and storytelling is like that. There's a funny video. It was basically telling us how they would pop out our stream and they keep calling it like, you know, my first Million To the Moon and I we're going to take this baby to the Moon. Here's how we're going to do it. And so they did two things. He showed how his camera setup how they do it for their podcast and it looks awesome looks way better than ours and then the next day he sent us an edited clip if you telling the story of
Going into the Silk Road founder at a party and he stole your girl or whatever and they edited like a little clip there. Like dude will pump out Clips like these all the time my first Million To The Moon baby and I think good they're good. They're really good. Both videos are really
good. First of all, let's hire them and second. Where did they send this to on Twitter? I've been flying since Saturday.
It's on Twitter. I sent you a link because I was like dude fuck. Yes. This is like this is you know, like it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally you get a job a put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do X.
Then some people apply and then you're like you kind of squinting you're like, I think this person is really going to be able to do it and then you make a guess and then it takes some fucking six weeks to ramp up and then or this guy just applies showing look I'd can do it. I've done it for myself. I'll do it for you and let me make this easy for you. Let me show you how bad I want this and I just thought like this is so much better than than what we've been talking about of trying to find people to do this stuff.
I'm looking at is okay cool. His name is Dylan Jardin weird last name.
Keep because I want to say Jordan. Yeah, Dylan, if you're listening to this, let's do it. I'm in
I don't know there's people at the hospital who have similar jobs, but I think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like, the gig is yours to like pimp out our the video side of our podcast. I think we should give them the
the chuck. All right. I'm in cool. All right, we have a bunch
of topics you want to talk about where do you start? You know start with this Open salary
thing? No, let's start with food because I've there was this yours. Yeah. I've thought about this for years. All right,
so let me enter this. All right, son.
I can have been my right-hand man Ben and Ben's kind of like I'm easily excitable you could tell by the way I talk been is the opposite. He's chill mode. He's always relaxed but when been mentioned things I've learned like when he says something is just like oh, this is cool. You should check this out. It's actually fucking amazing and he just doesn't say hey dude, he doesn't like shaky and say look at this is amazing. So he showed me this thing that is amazing. So he goes check out this website or this Instagram handle my cookie dealer. I was like my cookie dealers I go to
it.
Oh my God, I'm looking at it now. I want to eat this.
So he sent me three Instagram accounts. He sent me by Cookie dealer. Click the second one one nine hundred ice cream. So like 101 900 ice cream one and Under Ice Cream looks so good. Just like describe what you're saying. It's
incredible. It's it up. I I don't know what this is exactly like what you would call it, but it's a cone. I don't know what shape this
is. It looks like there's a stick. So like at the top of the stick where you would have like a popsicle instead. It's like a full ice cream.
Which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever. It looks amazing. You should if you have Instagram go to one nine hundred ice cream.
There's one called The Cupcake Wonderland, which is vanilla ice cream. Rainbow sprinkles strawberry marshmallow icing God. I want this they
call themselves The Ice Cream thirst trap / thick check trademark. They have a bunch of followers. They grown really quickly twenty-six thousand followers. So Ben was are sending me these and I was like, okay cool food account on Instagram. That's not to knew. What do I care about this food porn?
He's like no, no, dude. I've been trying to send you one of these and I'm trying to like get these myself. They do weekly drops of their stuff. And these are selling out instantaneously. So I go what do you mean so he showed me my cookie dealing? So my coke dealer doesn't drop a cookie drop every week. They do a random cookie drop so different flavor whatever and it sells out with in literally seconds and they're doing two hundred thousand dollars a week. They're doing ten million dollars a year dropping cookies on Instagram and just instantly selling out and then they ship them few days.
They know how many orders they get and then they ship them out a few days later kind of like, you know, Nationwide or whatever and there's another one Ali's. Banana bread. Go. Look at this. Banana bread, dude. Just look at this. Banana bread. I want to print this banana bread out and just lick the paper. It's looks so good and same thing sells out
instantaneously the check this out. So if you go to my cookie dealer.com, yes, that's the website. Yes. Ok, click Instagram page and tell me when you're on their Instagram page. I'm on it. Okay, you see scroll up to their
I'll and you see who where it says like the owner is this guy named Juan diesel more Morel. Click it
of Duties like a bodybuilder. This guy is huge. He's
gotten so
big. He looks like if you've ever seen it ESPN or whatever bodybuilding competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is and he's just humongous even
like why do I can't tell if it's like the tan I think it's a black guy. I think it's a
white guy, you know, they like the white guys like tan for
bodybuilding.
That look at his
wife. It's insane. This guy's life is insane is what I could see from this. I mean this guy's his steroids are you know, as good as his cookies, I would say
that's what ya get I want the HGH drop. This is awesome man. This is cool. Okay, so Ali's banana bread
Ali's banana bread. So there's a bunch of these some pain is like deep knee deep in this world of like Instagram food brands that are basically they're kind of like Drop Shipping baked goods all around the country. So they have them for cakes ice creams banana breads, and they're just
Specialist and so there's a couple cool things that I wanted to bring up about this and I know you have some stuff on food to but the part that I thought was cool with the internet is really good at doing this which is normal before the internet. You would just go to whatever's like your local whatever so you'd find the best within your local radius of 5 to 10 miles or whatever it is. That's what you would go by but with the internet whether it's news or comedy or whatever the best thing can just get distributed everywhere and so the best brand wins on the internet, so there's why
See things get so big, you know, like Facebook and other platforms because the best thing will get all the users and what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food. So if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies are best ice cream. They don't need a physical shop. They can just through Instagram alone spending zero dollars on marketing have customers worldwide like Ali's banana bread literally ships worldwide. And so if you're the best at making something now, you have a pathway to become a
a multi-millionaire where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local Baker and whatever in Cincinnati, you know, you were always restricted by however many customers you could get in your local radio. So I thought that's pretty cool. The second thing is if you think about this, you know, this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while. So we've been talking about Cloud kitchens. So these are essentially Cloud ice cream shops are Cloud bakeries. They don't have like a physical storefront necessarily they're all in the cloud and you just order online. The second thing is direct to Consumer, so they're going direct to their
And they're getting their fans phone numbers. And so that when they do a drop they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people by and I think that's kind of like amazing a way to go to direct to Consumer. You don't have to worry about getting on the Shelf at you know, Whole Foods or wherever else to build your your brand as a cookie company or whatever last one is if you think about it, like, you know, who's going to be the next mrs. Fields or Ben & Jerry's or like Auntie Anne's pretzels. It's going to be one of these Brands. It's going to be one of these Cloud bakeries.
He's doing it on Instagram building a cult following like these guys are doing and you're going to see I predict you're going to see just like I forgot what was the name of that Meme company that sold for like a hundred million dollars. They hit like they were the ones behind Daquan and whatever like the couple of the meme Instagram
accounts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was about eight months ago. Maybe.
Yeah we talked about on the Pod. It's like
dude are you will pull it up mg? What'd he say? You see? It's right there. You see it. Yeah.
I am GM media some brand that just owned a bunch of like me.
The council Instagram sold for like a hundred million dollars. I think if I remember correctly, you're going to see the same thing in the food space. You're going to see a bunch of private Equity companies coming in and they're going to buy up Ali's banana bread. They're going to buy up one 900 ice cream because they're going to be like dude. This is the next Ben & Jerry's and we're going to take this thing. We're going to put it on steroids. We're going to advertise the fuck out of it. And then we're going to get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing. And so you're I think you're going to see a bunch of these if I can go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now. I would go give them each, you know 25k check.
Because I think these are going to get
scooped up. Okay. So let's break this down further. I've thought about this a ton. The reason I've thought about the stun is I'm a media guy. I love content and I've studied what goes viral and why for years and one thing that I've always been fascinated with as I've known people who have worked at thrillist and thrill us started as a food. Well, they started as like things to do in New York, but one of the biggest things is food, and I remember when I started dating my wife she was from New York City and I hadn't been there since I was the first time I'd been there was when we started dating 2627.
Old and I went there and I would see these long like I would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out with they all dress like, you know, like they dress like right side is gonna say my yeah, they just dress like for me that was like, wow, I feel like everyone looks like a movie star. Everyone was cool and hit by you know, I don't know Madison Square Park or watching just whatever those Parks. I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time there, but you know what? I mean, they would have the longest lines and I'm like, what are all these people waiting for? And it was like the latest thrillist craze. That went viral.
And so I would walk tour through Brooklyn and everything and I would see these lines and I'm like what is going on and I would do research and I kind of broke it down into I'd like to study this for a while and not studied is the right word, but thought about it a lot and I basically it broke it down into a handful of categories. What happens is people have a small store a corner store in hit parts of Brooklyn or New York where there's people who share so like college kids mostly and they create one or two things that
Or BuzzFeed or someone because all those companies are located in the cool parts that I'm describing and Soho things like that and one of these BuzzFeed our throws folks sees it a whole bunch of college kids see it and then it's creates a line in the crates height becomes like a good business that lasts for three to six months and then it kind of like goes away and maybe like it still is a remainder bit like still as a business but it mostly like is a hype cycle whatever and I was like what is going on? And so I broke this down into a few categories and I want to go through these categories because I agree with you. I think this is so cool.
Cool, and I've tried to break this down so first and these are like different ways to successful as for virality. Yeah, like formulas for food virality. Okay. The first one is make a side ingredient. So something that's normally a side ingredient make it the main thing. So the best example of this is cookie dough. This is a thing I saw in New York. There was a line out the door the door for someone sold cookie dough is if it's ice cream, so it's like sprinkled cookie dough. Then like ice cream flavored cookie dough is like cookie dough is the main thing another one is cheese like people
Fondues they have like fondue bars. What else is a side ingredient? That could be? I don't know if it's a siding reading exactly.
But cereal does this to there was these like viral things like cereal bars. All you do is it's just milk and cereal and that's it and you can come normally that's not a restaurant. It's a side. It's like literally a side dish of a side dish and they made it the focus of the restaurant and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to talk about and go to
or an IRA or a whipped cream, but like a whipped cream store just like anything that is typically an afterthought. That is a
Topping or a side to the main thing make that your thing. Okay. The second one is doing the have normal foods, but different colors a few examples rainbow Bagels. Okay crazy popular there hype I mean, they're still popular but they went through a cycle. The second one is Rainbow kettle corn. That's quite popular when I was a kid. I remember a couple times buying green ketchup. Do remember
green catch up, which was just read catch up by Green, right? It was literally just the color was different. Yeah,
just a normal thing but a different color and
The latest trend on our this year on Tick-Tock with Cloud bread, which is basically, you know, everyone was baking at home. Now. It's just bread. That's kind of blue and white and looks like a Clap
by the way your side thing main thing. I got another example that Captain Crunch the crunch berries were always just the extra and then they came out with Captain just just the berries just the crunch berries and it was like way more
popular. Yeah or like Lucky Charms with only the marshmallows. Yeah, exactly. So you take the thing that's supposed to be the topping the yeah the topping the second the third string thing make it.
The first string thing, right? Okay, the third one the same thing but a different size. This is pretty common. So you like huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door huge Sundays. They call it like the kitchen sink everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink or sushi Rito's another example. Have you seen Sushi Rito thats a chain, right? Yep, so it's just sushi that isn't cut. So it's just a long piece of sushi another one. I had a friend named Soul. You probably know him and he created a Kit Kat bar. That was the size of like a cake.
Right, he would make these things and so I've actually never seen this old but you get the idea a Kit Kat bar. That's like a the size of a loaf of bread
in San Francisco. They have this place Bob's Donuts or Bob's whatever and they have this humongous donut. It's like this Zone at the size of you know, two of my head and you could buy and then you can try to eat it and you can take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous donut. Boom. That's the
whole Hood. It's not special Abby to become special. It's just a normal thing but a different size okay or like in st. Louis the whole thing is this is so silly how this works in St.Louis our pizzas.
'he is cut into squares. Right? Right,
right. You kind of said one earlier about like sushi sushi. Sometimes it comes in these like boats or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever. It's like it can also be you know, a punch bowl that's in a fish, you know, fish bowl or whatever. Yeah, like it could be bigger and in a non-traditional like the kitchen sink in a
non-traditional container. Yes, just same thing but different size okay, or it could be miniature, you know, just something that like why Castle mini cheeseburgers the fourth one combine two things that are quite different. Okay. This is a really
You on there's a ton of examples. The first one is the Cronut pretty easy the latest Trend right now and Tick Tock pancakes cereal. What is that? I don't even know what it is. Okay, they look it up actually while we're talking about you. It's probably just I don't know I can take some serious. Okay? No, they bake it they call it pancakes cereal. It really is just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients. They just bake it at home. And it looks like the shape of a pancake same with donut cereal but remember ramen burger. Yeah. Okay. So there's ramen burger. There's fairy bread, you know what fairy bread is
No, what is that? It's basically just bread with sprinkles. Okay, so you're just taking two things that don't normally go together mashups and you mash them just like a desert Burger very simple, or you can get a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich,
right and the more the more unusual it's you know, it's Doritos Locos tacos, right? It's exactly as he came out with the Fried Chicken bun or whatever. It was like the bun is fried chicken the more shocking I would say the better in this
case. Yes, you just take two things you smash them together.
Easy bro actively simple. Okay. The fourth thing or the fifth thing is you make something that's normally a crappy food, but you make it fancy. So tater tots mozzarella sticks you had a fancy stick to them or you probably go the opposite way of making something pretty fancy and make it not fancy. Although that would might be gross but you get the idea and then the final one is you take some type of food allergy, but this one isn't actually that sexy be take some type of food. You just make something for
$1 you so there's banza which is chickpea pasta. There's a llewellyn's ice cream. I think it's called in Brooklyn. It's vegan ice cream. Only vegan ice cream
or like only is like this right milk not made from cows. Boom. This is now so popular that this almost can't go viral anymore, but maybe if you chose some category that's not typical, but it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream at this point. Okay, let's take a minute and tell you a little bit about this week's sponsor lemon dot IO lemon is the perfect solution if you are a technical co-founder,
Under maybe you just need to delegate some of the work because you got too much on your plate or you're doing a project that needs a specific technology and you don't have that skill set in your team. And you can either try to learn it and will take months or hire somebody which will take six weeks to find somebody you just want to have somebody, you know yesterday or you just growing super fast in your company needs to add developers quick. Let me dot IO is a perfect place to find vetted remote developers in Eastern Europe, they test and interview every developer which eliminates the risk of a failed project and there's a zero risk replacement guarantee, so they will match you.
Somebody within 24 hours and if it doesn't work out it's on them. So go to go to Lemon dot IO and if you want a 15% discount for your first six weeks of development any MFM fan, that's my first million fan can claim this 15% discount go to Lemon dot IO / MF M as in my first million, so limited IO / MFM to claim the offer 15 percent discount for six weeks. That's not bad. That's a big chunk of change. They're much cheaper to use the hiring Engineers with other Outsourcing even even more than other how Outsourcing
Terms like top talent others. So check them out. Let me dot IO back to this week's episode.
This was what I was thinking about doing. I mean, I would never I don't think I would do it but maybe one day I would want to actually it seems pretty fun. As I would have a kitchen in New York and I would get it in a really high traffic area and I would just every three months try to do a launch where I launched like a rainbow cheesecake or you know, I don't even know just making sure you're just making stuff up and then I would even what I would do is I would makes I would do a ton of stuff and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it and see what had the cheapest cost per click.
Yeah, so
So what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle. No Embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's going to rotate every month into a new crazy concoction and people will line up every month to go try the new thing and you'll build your brand as like Willy Wonka when he would create now Everlasting Gobstoppers or whatever, you know, like it creates a new a new crazy concoction that you got to go
try it goes a step further. So do you remember Crona? Yeah, so cronuts got popular in 2013. It was invented by a guy named Dominic. I don't know what is lost.
Name is but a French pastry chef. He's like a big-name chef but he made cronic because he likes you is like I just want to have fun and create something new and interesting all the time. And this one just kind of hit. He actually trademarked the name Cronut and he is like a purist he's like an artist so he didn't actually want to license it to people but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone and so there's a step further so you create the food and you got to come up with a really cute name and you could actually get a trademark and there's licensing deals there. So I think
A super fascinating I think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and a hundred grand or less they could probably get one or two hits
right which may not be the right thing to do with your life. But if that's you if you're like, I'm doing it great great good
on you. It's definitely fun. It seems fun, but it'll
teach you a lot. I think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to approach, you know food this way. Okay, so a couple other opportunities I see here. So I mentioned I think investing or private Equity. I think we'll start to scoop up these Brands. I think that's one opportunity second one is
if I think somebody could build a kind of Guy Fieri of Instagram food character who basically just goes and tries to find the next you know, who really does make the absolute best like oatmeal or whatever right? Like come up with like, you know, go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever. And then you do the drop on Instagram for that brand for that shop and maybe you found, you know, the absolute best philly cheesesteak in Philly and then you you know, you drop that. So I think somebody could create that if they're foodie and that was their thing.
The other thing is a little more boring which is like we've talked about cold chain 3pl. So basically how the heck do you ship all this stuff and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives, you know, three to five days later across the country. How do you how do you make it work? And so there's just a bigger a bigger and bigger need for cold chain Logistics. We've heard this a few times now and I feel like if somebody's working on that are somebody has one of those I would love to talk to you just to learn because I think this business is booming and I think more and more people are going to go into
it. Do you remember?
Brr as a kid seeing these books and pulling them up now called Eat This Not That know what is that? Okay, so it was awesome. I loved it. I bought it once just because it was at Barnes & Noble and ended up like being like pretty amazing. So Google Eat This Not That it started as one book almost like coffee table asked book and on the left side. It says eat this and on the right side is not that and so for example, it started as just like a general one, but then they eventually went to like desserts fast food. I'll type stuff like that and an example, let's find an
Ball one but I can say so it would say eat this Arby's beef chatter classic 450 calories 20 grams of fat. Not this Arby's roasted turkey Ranch sandwich, which has 800 calories and so it shows two things that are quite similar and it says eat this one instead of this one. So it's
not saying eat a salad don't go to our bees. It's saying like if you're at Arby's get this one not that
one. Yeah, they have like different Denny's breakfast's or like IHOP versus Denny's or
Never eat this or yeah, you get the idea, right? Yeah. Okay this cooled. Are you looking at you Google it? Yeah, it's pretty sick. It's been around since probably 2002. I mean, I think I bought this when I was pretty young
so they have half a million followers on Instagram. I think all these old like kind of Publications like either magazines or little Brands like this today. They're all just Instagram accounts. I think that's the way to like reinvent
these wow. Okay. So the Eat This Not That as of 2012 had sold 8 million copies of the book then they spun it up into a magazine.
Wow, it's freaking amazing. I'm just pulling this up. Here's what I would do right now today. If I wanted to get popular and Instagram is I would do the same thing just for Instagram just a whole Eat This Not That on Instagram
totally and the format is so good. It's just a split screen. So it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right and then it has the nutrition facts about why why one versus the other? I think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on Instagram and you would grow very quickly. Like I can see there. It's Graham right now. It looks kind of shitty like, they're not doing a great job. I think you could basically steal this concept.
A different name and grow a big Instagram account off this if I was bored, I would do something like
this. Yeah. It's kind of a fun topic. I'm reading all about it. Now. This is pretty amazing. I hadn't thought about this in forever. But anyway, there you go. The I think if you did that for 6 or 12 months you get hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. All
right. Well switch off food. Let's go to something else. What do you want talk
about? You want to talk about money real quick tiller money. Okay. What's this? What do you use to track your money?
I don't use anything attract more money. I
use Excel. Okay. Everyone says that oh, I've talked to not
One but a lot of people here is usually the answer I hear I use Mint or I use personal capital or I
use I have minty as well.
Can I ask you why don't you use men?
I used meant back in the day. I mean, I used meant like 10 years ago. So it's just kind of like one of those things that I don't have a habit of going and looking at and I don't like looking at that stuff because it makes me focus on like expenses and saving money here and there and I just don't think that's fun. I don't enjoy that.
So I went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about money because I usually use
capital and I don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now. But when I ask 10 different people how they track their money most who I asked maybe five or six use Excel which is kind of crazy to me because how many accounts do you have that you need to track over 10? Yeah. Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or not wealthy most people like between if they have a wife or a husband you have like your checking account bank account your 401k your stock stuff. Maybe your home loan credit card credit card. You probably have two or three credit card.
Typically, I imagine the average Joe has 10 plus so it's actually a lot to track where cuz if you have money and everyone I've noticed or not everyone a lot of people I've noticed use Excel. So I did some research there's this thing and it's not like I've discovered this. I think it's pretty popular ready called tiller money and all it is the landing page is beautiful, but I'm just fascinated by this business all it is it's a if you go to Google Sheets and you click tools and then add on OK you'll see the ability to add plugins to Google Sheets.
It's okay tiller money. All it is is a plug-in for Google Sheets that costs. I think it's a hundred dollars a year and all it does is it automatically Imports your bank accounts and any other account into Google Sheets and templates that they have or you can just make your own template. I've never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a Google sheet add-on. It's incredibly fascinating.
Yeah, this is good. I like this just of all the like kind of money manager things this appeals to me more because it feels like I'm
Managing my own money in reality. You know, the thing I'm most worried about is data. Like I don't want my data on all these different services like I'm not going to try your new finance app because like I just don't like my bank account till all this new stuff, but if they could do this where this was like self-hosted in some way like it's just a template that be great. It doesn't look like that's the case but it is sweet. I like
it. So if you go to Google Sheets right now and you click add-ons on the top right once you're in a sheet, you can see add-ons and I actually just realized I use a few add-ons the other add-on I use is called super metrics.
Which is it pulls in data from SQL and stuff like that. I bet you they do close to eight figures a year in Revenue, but we've talked about plug-ins for WordPress. We've talked about plugins for Chrome Google Sheets plugins is another thing that is super super fascinating to me and I completely overlooked it. It's so neat. And so I don't know what else to say. Other than it's cool.
You had a things. I thought was kind of interesting that was about open salaries. What is this? And do you?
I want to talk about this or where do you want to
go? I'll let you lead a little bit but I'll put stuff in here throughout like two weeks. And if I forget about it three days goes past and I'm like, wait, did I write that or did you write that will
do a quick so so you put this thing on here, I got kind of intrigued so you open salaries. What is it? So idea that like today it's kind of crazy that we don't know what other people make and not in a gossip kind of way, but it's really, you know, the company knows what everybody makes but the employees don't know and that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage.
It's you don't know when you're underpaid. You don't know if there's any like systemic bias and less a women or minorities are not getting paid as much as you know, tall white males or whatever. And so it's kind of weird that this is this like taboo thing. Nobody talks about it. You're not allowed to talk about it seen as kind of a faux pas but would actually be to the benefit of any employee to know to have transparency at as to what people are getting paid to make it would be anonymized but being able to see what other people at your role at. Your company are getting paid you would put this thing on here.
That Colorado was going to say that hey from 2021 employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts of any job that could be working Colorado including remote jobs, which I thought was kind of interesting and then we have companies like buffer and Whole Foods have been doing this for a while buffer kind of tried to like make a name for themselves by being like the open transparent company will share everybody's salary and like literally you can like here's a link you can go and see everybody at buffers salary right now
Whole Foods you can see people's salary you
put that in there or braided. I don't know. I haven't seen that one.
I wanted to share a couple of interesting things. I found I was digging in this. So first check out this this spreadsheet of buffers salaries. I just put it in the chat so you can click this anybody can Google this and find it you can go and you can see that Joel the CEO is making two hundred eighty thousand dollars this year. I didn't go see what the for what his EA is making should making eighty nine thousand dollars and you can just go down the whole company roster. Everybody's salary is public which I think is like pretty insane. But interesting then you have things like the Google kind of secret spreadsheets. I don't know if you've seen these
but a big companies people are starting to like just make an anonymous spreadsheet and say hey put in your salary and your level and your location here so we can all like have more transparency. You don't have to put your name next to it and they circulate it with inside company. So Microsoft had one Google had one Facebook had one and the Google one. I forgot who was some woman created this and within two days 10,000 people had put in their information and now there's over 20,000 people in the open Google database and you can go see it. So these are kind of cool.
It's interesting how viral these go. So then I was looking at levels that FYI, which I know you know about it's a place to go see like you can go and say alright, I'm interviewing at Amazon and Facebook and they labeled me an L5 software engineer located in Bay Area. Like what am I going to get paid? How much is or I got an offer. I don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer to they low-balled me and so you can go on levels that FYI and it's the same thing crowd-sourced information about what you make at these different companies and levels if you look at their traffic, they're getting about a million and a half.
Visits a month. This thing is really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit. So they have like job boards. Now if you click at the top they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode a negotiator as a service. So if you click the top, yeah, it's a sick little website where they have a little calculator that says, you know, what company where are you located at? How many years of experience here's what we think you should get paid based on the levels database which is now in the I don't know tens of thousands of entries or something like that and then they basically say hey if you pay us 500 bucks will negotiate your off for
You we have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us. And basically you book a time you talk about your offer and how you're feeling about it and what you really want out of this and then we'll negotiate for you and they show all these like success stories of like this person at Facebook got 20,000 more than their offer this person got 40,000 more this person got 10,000 more and so they're taking and they just take a flat fee of like whatever 500 600 bucks I think so. I think there's some interesting stuff going on in this like transparency around what people are making.
And it really goes in fits in my values where I think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more. I think it would help everybody if you talked about money more and it would be less like kind of taboo and less less like a big deep dark secret if people were more open about it and I think that's the way the world is
going. All right. Can I give you a Counterpoint for that? Go for it? I thought that was interesting and I'm not saying how I feel because I'm still thinking about it. But Leo, I forget his name Leo, but he didn't it from buffer the
Founder of buffer who no longer works there so buffer started with this whole transparency thing. That was like the whole shtick and it
worked about everything users Revenue salaries
everything. It was a stick that got popular amongst bloggers in particular. There's this guy named Pat and he has this blog called smartpassiveincome.com. I used to read it when I was 15 or 16 or 18 something like that in high school and he would make money by creating books and doing a bunch of other side businesses and he would
Reveals income every single month and other bloggers copied him and it was a really cool thing John Lee Dumas. Did it all these like really cool people did it buffer did it and that was their stick to get popular and it worked because the buffers product isn't really special it. There's so many different versions and they did it Leo said in an interview. Someone was like dude this whole transparency thing. It's pretty cool. Like you guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work and I believe I don't want to quote them because I saw this a year and a half ago two years ago, but something
Like this works now and it's great for us. But I have a feeling when we get to seventy-five eighty. Ninety a hundred people. It's not going to work anymore and it's actually going to hurt us big time. And I forget exactly why but I believe Steve and I'm getting all my name's screwed up someone else that Apple like a head honcho dapple said something that's similar. He's like no the transparency thing. It actually can hurt. It hurts the company after a while we tried it. And so I actually think that maybe this is good for startups, but it kind of sucks after a long time because look,
Say you own a small business that does 20 million in sales and you're the business owner and you wanted to pay yourself three million dollars a year. That's pretty shitty then if your $50,000 receptionist or something, but that's like your right to do that. Why would you want to share that with everyone?
Yeah as the employer it's not great right buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there's it was an effective growth tactic for them. Hey, if we're open about this, we got a bunch of people asking what the heck is buffer and some of them will use it. But as the employer it's not great as the
Ye it's great. And so that's the depends kind of which side of the coin. Are you on also? It depends how far you go the buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make bit much but the Google thing where it's like, hey, look there's thousands of employees here. I need to know that within my level within my kind of area a my underpaid or overpaid or you know, somewhere in between it gives people peace of mind and I give them, you know an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information information that the other side has that you don't
Have so I like it from the employee perspective, but I wouldn't go the buffer way of writing. Everybody's names down now at a small company cool that kind of happens, but I think it's kind of cool. I think there's definitely interest around this so, you know a couple of little ideas of things that people could do so levels ephod FYI is cool is working. I'm surprised that somebody like, you know our buddy Andrew Wilkinson doesn't go by a company like this. It's kind of an of one company. It has like a unique data Advantage. It does job boards, which he loves as a business model.
On top of all this traffic that they're getting and it's kind of like a side project. That's probably like reach the max of which you know, the two guys behind it really can take it the other ways that you could do this. I think you can do this in any vertical so I don't know. Is there a levels I FYI in the hedge fund world or consulting or banking if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this. You should just make the levels and FYI database for your industry nursing. I don't know whatever the industry is. This product can work across those and so I think that's cool even within levels some
We could go further and be like, all right, I'm gonna take product managers or data science and really own that if they were somebody who has a big audience for that. Like if if that guy let me who's got a big blog and audience around product managers. He could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally so I think the levels concept could be exported and done in different
areas. When we first launched maybe the first couple months of launching so we didn't have an audience. So I'm saying this so anyone could do it. We didn't have an audience. I wrote a post called how much money do founders make
I was trying to figure out like do I pay myself do I not pay myself whatever and if you Google how much money do founders have in their bank account the hustle you might see it and all I did was I took a Google form and I posted it on Hacker News and it went to number one. They eventually took it down because I think that goes against our terms of service. Like I have a survey but I got like three or four hundred replies and I ask people how much money they have in their checking account how much they have in their bank account how much they pay themselves how much they have until liquid assets. I got a hundred and then what their job title is and where they live.
And I got hundreds of replies and I publish all the data and I took out any information where you could learn about someone and people loved sharing Anonymous information and they loved reading Anonymous information. Like they love like yeah, it was amazing. And so I agree. I think it's pretty sick and it was way. Oh there it is over you posted it. It was way easier to get people's I'm not like literally getting their information because it's all Anonymous, but people were so forthcoming with us. It was pretty cool and pretty
Resting. Yeah, I want somebody to do this with VCS. I think most people don't know how much feces make and all different people in the food chain, like the GPS versus like a partner vs. Like a Associated or whatever. I feel like somebody should like kind of crack that egg open and be like, look, here's the numbers. Here's what it is and anonymize it but give people some transparency into what's really going
on. Let's talk about those for a second. So there's two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me that when we're talking about those the first is pitchbook, you know at pitchbook
is yes, you bought you do pay for it.
It's so
expensive know my sister-in-law works there though. And so everyone small she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of like look up know. I don't pay for it because it's really expensive. It's like $25,000. I think yeah pitchbook. It's kind of like crunchbase but souped up and so you pay 25 Grand you get access to like a lot of information about privately held companies the second. Well, let's just talk about pitchbook. The reason it's interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks. I don't know which country they're in but I think the Philippines and they literally have like
What are people and the end and by the way pitchbook is a publicly traded company, you can go and read about them their own by Morningstar so you can actually go and see their operations and how they work. They're growing like crazy. There have north of a hundred million in Revenue. They have a team of folks and what they do is call VCS and they literally just ask them information or they call companies and there's a scam information and for some reason I don't know how or why people give them information and that's one of the ways one of many of ways that they get data. The second thing is this business called is it called the org have you is that what it's called? Yes.
Yes, okay, the org very interesting because in a nutshell their tagline is the org transparency Starts Here build a better organization with a public org chart celebrate your colleagues. Basically that's just kind of crap. Let's not let's not read their marketing. Yeah, really what it is. I mean, I'm sure they do all that nonsense. But
really we can it's an org charts a public or
Charter. Yeah, you pay money and you get access to people's org chart and this helps, you know who to email to sell shit too. Right? Exactly and
Cool, like there's no I don't know why they don't just say that but they've raised a lot of money. I think tens of millions of dollars. It's probably going to be a monster business. And so I would do two things with the salary thing one. I would actually hire people in the Philippines or whatever and just hit it hard not rich and just go out and hit it hard and I would trust that a lot of people would be practically pretty transparent and the second thing is I would pay want kind of like the org and I would sell this to every Department in the country.
So I have a friend that is doing this.
With Shopify sales. I showed him a way to roughly estimate how much a not roughly. It's pretty good estimate. How much sales a Shopify stores
doing? What is that? What can I get? You don't have to say if it's true. Is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is?
That's one of the ways. Yeah, and that's one of the best ways and so I showed him I said look this is useful people want to know what their competitors are doing.
And and the second way is you look at the traffic.
Yeah, you still need a couple other piece of information. For example, you need to know how much the average order is.
Like that, but roughly that that will tell you, you know, how they're doing. And so now he emails me a report every month that shows me, you know, these four companies that I decided. Hey, I want to track these four companies and even as we report this is their sales this is their social media following this is how many ads that they're running on Facebook and one other thing which is I just like the month over my changes between those I think it's a great idea. So I he was kind of looking for something to do. I told him look I think this is a good pivot. I don't know exactly how well he's doing. I should really
A shout out the name but I kind of don't remember. Let me look it up while we're doing this.
But how do you find this
person? He was in my Mastermind. He was like dude. I'm good with data. I'm interested in this kind of stuff and I also have a team of the Philippines. So I really like this. Okay. So here it is. So the website is shop sales data.com and I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it. He still read mostly my report. I hope he's taking more customers right now, but it's monthly report of Shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for
Dollars of light that a
month. Yeah, this is great. I mean you could do the same with Facebook at accounts just like because it Facebook shows everyone that ads because they email me my competitors ads every time they launched a new one.
Exactly. And so I think that there's like there's some good stuff in this kind of like data data based businesses where you're just collecting data from public sources, you're cleaning it up you're structuring it and then you're offering it as a service to a bunch of other
companies. Okay, you want to do a mini one. Do we have a mini one?
Yeah, let's do a quick one. What else we got?
Not do you have anything good of like your first week working at a real
job? It is was my first week and now it's in my second week and I'm sitting on the beach in Hawaii. So why do
it
having a job rocks? I should have done this years ago. I love having a
job.
It's cool man HubSpot announced that they had a billion dollars in Revenue like run, right? It's pretty amazing. And so there's like
Two things. This is like my first like real job or like a corporate job. That's not exactly true. Like I would have friends like my friend Neville who is like a works for himself. He would be like, hey you want to go hang out on a Wednesday like at noon? I'm like, no dude. I've a job running my company. It was 100% like a normal more than a job. It's two jobs. Yeah, it's more than its I would call a nine-to-five. I'm like, yeah, like I'm sure it was in fact way more than nine to five but I was like, I'm like pretty straight I get to work at 9:00. I do my thing like anyway, I tried right so it's-- about this. But yeah.
Yeah, first like corporate job. It's going to slow down but like the amount of meetings is pretty crazy. And I told him not doing meetings like this anymore because I'm going to make stuff but I don't know how it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done.
Yeah, I realized how that works, which is just that managers don't get work done managers just go to meetings. And then I seized or individual contributors is the known are the ones who actually like sit down and do work because they don't have back to back meetings throughout the day.
I think even off my
your work is basically just communicating between
people but my seven days of working has shown me that even I seized have a lot of meeting.
Yeah, they should not have that many. They should have like whatever one or two or three a day, but they should have like, you know somewhere between three and five hours of uninterrupted time.
I don't understand how people so like I'm telling everyone that has problem. Like don't know what talk to me for these hours. I have like and I say I say I say of course, but I say, I'm doing this for the better of everyone think I'm going to make good stuff. So like let me
Go up my whole and you just just don't bother me. All right, what's been the worst part so far the meetings
with the meeting is boring or just the amount of
them the amount and also like I didn't know what work day is and all this stuff. There's just so much paperwork that I've always had people do for me that I'm having to do. What's the worst part? You know, like everyone's like is having a boss weird because I've never had a boss for no. I think it's gonna suck after a while, of course like having a boss might suck. I'm so pumped. I don't have to like I get to just shovel shit on to Karen's plate that I don't like right. I'm like, hey, we should we hire this person.
Have to make that decision. I love that. I love that. I think it's awesome. So having a boss as not sucked so far. I don't know. What do you think would be the worst Parts about tell you if they are. What was your worst part?
There's certain meeting types that you have to do that. I just found like completely soul-sucking one of them was called a calibration meeting. It's basically like even just describing it, you know gives me some pain here. Basically, it's like you're trying to promote people but how do you know like if every manager has their own criteria?
Here for promotions. How do you make sure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company. So you have these things called calibration meetings where you sit down and you basically say this person's up from emotion or they get their getting promoted because of this this and this and then other person says, well, you know, I felt like they weren't they weren't great at this or they didn't do a great job with that project and you have to kind of defend them for me. It was boring on two levels one first and foremost. I didn't know anyone else in the company. So I just sat there for three hours not being able to say anything because I didn't interact with any of these people. I just
Out here. I just got bought. I don't know these people. I can't give any input nor do I have any opinion on if the feedback is valid or not? And the second thing I was just like wow, even after all this talk, like I still just feel like the person who's the most vocal and best salesperson is getting their way and the person who's not that great at talking is not getting their way. So like we could have just skipped all of this like it would have almost been better had we not gotten into this room and said you sell your person and you sell your person or you debate this person's like the better debater wins.
I'm in big companies and I think that that's like really
crazy. Well, I think we do at our company all the time, which is like if it will say like if a scheduled meeting sells for 30 minutes in the meeting, I'm like, okay I said what I had to say, I don't need to be here anymore. I'm leaving or like it's very it wasn't considered rude to be like, hey, you need to leave now you're done. It was like kind of a helpful thing and I'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here. I'm like, do you guys need me here? Can I leave right or I'll just say I'm out. I've said what I need to said, I've heard what I need heard you guys can
talk. Yeah, especially on Zoomer.
Never you just sort of like hold up that you waive. You click exit.
The second thing is top spot is doing really well and just the software business in the sounds like just like like obvious stuff from anyone who's in software, but I've never been at a company like this if you figure out how to reduce your turn to very little or even positive so for every dollar someone spends its above $1 the next year and you pick a big enough market. It's just magical now. I understand why people are saying like, oh, you know, why is this
A company valued so highly it's like well because sticky Revenue software Revenue so something like I don't know if Hot Spot would be considered this but something for sure where you're building an entire business off of they'll you know that the switching costs are quite high. It's pretty amazing like just start a software company. It's so much better than everything else. It's really hard and it's log early on but if it really truly if you can get your turn to be right and you pick a big enough market and you can figure out how to have a good marking machine, which all this is like. Oh, yeah. If only you could do that like duh, I know.
You can kind of figure it out. Actually, I think given enough if you give yourself like five years to figure it out. I think you can
write all the things you're saying are true. And they really just point to this one lesson. I've learned the hard way over and over again, which is it's much more important to pick what game you play then to try to be the best player of the game because if you pick the wrong game even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path, but if you pick the right game to play and you whether you become the best or not, even the best, but just kind of the top 25%
It's so much better to win that way. And in this case like if we talked about and we've done different types of businesses, right we've done like I did Social Network. I try to make a new social network is the wrong fucking game to play dude. It's so hard so hard so it's a low chance of probability of success. You did a media business also hard higher odds of success, but like lower size of the prize if you get it, right? Yeah weight lowers time become just a fucking pain in the ass just tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and Logistics is you got real-world products and you have to like
Ship them all around the world and you're gonna have customers who have returns and like things that just are not as easy as software. We talked about all these different, you know doing a paid newsletter or whatever like there's all these different models for my money by far. The best one is to build a software business because the software business can scale a software business can like be improved over time and unlike e-commerce. When you when you make of crap e-commerce product you go make a better version the next you know takes you six months to make it and then you make it and all those old.
Customers who got the bad product still think you suck whereas with software you push the update and all of a sudden every single customer has the new best thing, you know, there's all these just tiny advantages and software is the way to go.
I want to say something that David Siegel so we had David Siegel on last time. He had a billion dollar or close to billion dollar tea business and I go David, why are you doing brick and mortar stores when you could be doing software? And he said the right thing. What did he say? It was like, it's fun. I love
selling product and I was like, I think that
that's the best answer.
That is a wonderful answer and I think that like well I ever be able to start an Enterprise software company. I think that if I was going to it would either have to be very soon or even a few years ago. Like you have to do it. I think when you're like where money's the one number one thing that's like I got to get paid. I got to get my hit and that case. Yeah, I would do anything to make money but where I am now and where I think where a lot of people are is you really it's it's I agree with everything you said but you have to add the and also not like passionate about but what excites you enough to?
That you're willing to get good at it over a
decade. We all know you're happy to help spot. If either for two decades, it's great. It's you know, sunshine and rainbows. Let's say alternate reality. They fire you tomorrow. You're going to go build something else. Where do you think you would go build? Would you do what your would you go media? Where'd you go something totally different would you go software? What do you think you
would do everyone's gonna laugh at me because I say Trucking but I would do something in the agriculture space. I think AG Tech is interesting. I think that's the most interesting. I had a great call with this guy who I'm gonna
Gonna have this guy in the podcast. It's called the Van Trump report. So Van Trump report. It's this guy who has a newsletter that does 20 million dollars a year in subscription Revenue. He's the only writer and he was telling me all about AG Tech. Do you know what act X stands for?
Yeah agricultural
tech and he was just saying all types of like what's going on and I think working with like Middle America people who whether they're rich or not. They're more humble and they create things that actually impact the world like get food to you. I
do something in that space or
I would start another Media
company. But okay, let's say you go into ad Tech and you're probably gonna be open and whatever, you know, you'll think of it then but knowing what you know, now would you do media in agriculture? Would you do you know something with actual farms and Logistics would you do technology Hardware, you know Trucking the actual self driving trucks would you do a job thing? What model would you be wanting to do in that
space? Well, okay, so I don't like this question because it'll change every single day you asked me. But as of right now, I would start a blog and the
Text base and then eventually I would turn it into a database kind of I like this company to org. I think I could create something like a database that's better. Yeah, that's what I would do. Okay. Nice. I think that's what I would do. As of right now that fascinates me or I would create to do it tiger 21 is
isn't that like a like a kind of a conference or club or Mastermind thing or something like
that? It's like a club for people who have investable assets north of ten million dollars it cost 30 grand a year. It's and they have like a thousand people who are subscribed and my friend joined and I looked at the back.
And it was horrible and I was like, oh, I'm just going to clone
that and what do they do with the with the members is it events or is it
digital both but they create little like safe communities where you meet in groups of 10 and you can show off your portfolio and people criticize you and like make you defend your position. So you get better but it got bought by private Equity. So it makes a lot of money.
Okay, we're over time. We should we should wrap it up. I have some more stuff for next week. I have like a ton of topics that we just can chew through over the next few weeks. I'm excited.
