13 Businesses Making +$1,000,000/Year With 0 Employees

I was like have you done any deals like that I would have heard of and he's like you know Disneyland I was like yeah he's like a lot of Windows in Disneyland we do all the windows in Disneyland oh my God they bought a window company got him a Disney contract we do all the windows at Disney [Music] all right what's up we are talking about something pretty special this episode this is gonna be different than our normal episodes which are you know freewheeling freestyling today we got a plan and the plan is we're going to talk about companies that crush it with only one or two employees so the reason we thought about this was there was some news I don't know a couple weeks ago that a company that I had never heard of called War graphs sold for 54 million dollars and the yeah that's I mean that's obviously impressive but the most impressive part was that Warcraft was just one dude so one guy sold his company for 54 million dollars and uh I don't know do you know what wargrass did are you familiar with it is it a gaming thing it's a gaming thing yeah so he built basically a companion app I think for a League of Legends so if you play League of Legends this was like a thing that would keep track of your stats and stuff like that help you get better at the game so he built this little companion app and uh it had gotten really popular I think he got into like a million uh players that used it and was generating serious revenue and so he sold it for 51 54 million in cash and he was upfront he was like I got half of the uh sorry I got half of the 54 million in cash up front and I have the other half as like my earn out that I have to look at like you know if it hits you know our Milestones along the way which is just super impressive for a one-person company and how old is the person uh I think he started when he was young but now it's been like you know seven or eight years so that's amazing I'm gonna guess some something like 30 but the the it got me thinking it was like everybody talks about big businesses for good reason big businesses are awesome uh there they are but what about Mighty businesses what about the the guys who are punching above their weight so somebody who has just themselves or just one or two people that does millions in Revenue profitably flies under the radar and like how many other War graphs are there out there so we did some research and we found some and so that's what this episode is going to be about and we've kind of touched on this before we've done some of our most popular episodes if you go on YouTube you'll see the episode with Peter levels I think has a couple hundred thousand um listens the lesson uh sorry the uh episode about Amit Agarwal the guy who builds uh G Suite you know maybe basically Google Sheets plugins um he does millions of dollars in Revenue as just kind of one guy who was a blogger turned app builder and so those were some of our most popular episodes so I think this is going to be a good one too Sam anything else before we jump in yeah I want to give an honorable mention to this one person Have you listened to juvenile growing up remember rapper the rapper juvenile of course you're giving him a shout out like he's listening yeah I like last year NPR they do this thing called the tiny desk concert series you know what that is it's like they're in the office like playing acoustic songs yeah those are cool they said who should we have and this one guy goes you should have Juvenile and juvenile replies and he goes what the what that he goes WTF what what the f is a tiny desk and hell no and you know what they got him to do it anyway it happened this weekend and so in preparation for this one-man band show I've been listening to that juvenile concert at the tiny desk NPR series it was awesome it was awesome he he remember back that ass up it was so good it was so good I had to be inspired him and Manny fresh in it and it was awesome it was awesome awesome awesome so honorable these are the tiny Desk Awards then let's call it that these are the tiny Desk Awards which are the the businesses that can be run off of one tiny desk because it's just one or two people all right and uh we're gonna do this like an awards show so we have a long list but that'd be kind of boring so we're we're broken up into categories and we each have our answer for the category so for example first category is going to be biggest one-person business but we also have to set some rules here yes some of these things one person it's a bit uh vague yeah one person oftentimes can mean like the founder and like a team of contractors or in many cases it's going to be um uh agencies that they work with of course or it started as one person and it was that way for a long time and then they hired a team uh exactly so it's more of the spirit of the law than the letter of the law here so you know they don't have t-shirts for the company because you know there's they don't have like you know a bunch of employees and and uh you know morale they they probably won't have a uh an office where a bunch of people go into it's either one or two people who are kind of the core drivers and maybe they use some contractors or vendors or agencies for for other things but uh that's that's generally the the way we're looking at this yeah and so uh let's get into it so what's the first one the uh is it the the biggest so you go first so I'm gonna do one another gaming one that I doubt you know of do you know what stardew valley is no what is that so stardew Valley is this game and if you look at the game the game art looks like it's like 8-bit art almost it looks like a very very simplistic game and it was made by one guy this guy Eric Barone and he's basically is like you know I'm he gets out of school he doesn't want to get a job so he's like well you know I'm gonna teach myself how to code uh instead of going to get a good job so he's like why don't I learn how to build a game in order to teach myself how to code like I don't want to just code for coding's sake I'll try to do something with it and he always liked these games back if you have a harvest moon it's like this kind of like Farming Simulator game um there's like very simple kind of like uh you know it had like a cult following and so he's like I'm gonna make my version of Harvest Moon which was like kind of was popular when I was a kid like you know 15 years ago 20 years ago and um so he spends basically uh four years in solitude just building this game by himself before he releases it and for four years his job did he have a job he just lived off his girlfriend his girlfriend had a like a grad degree stipend and uh and then he had a part-time job as an usher is amazing I mean and Usher is a terrible unless you're literally trying to be like a cover artist covering the artist Usher like you know you never want to be a notcher that's not the that's not your crew's not going the right direction when you're doing that um so anyways the he launches this thing stardew Valley has sold 20 million copies um it sells for 13 a pop and so uh you know he sold this thing I think over time it has done 150 million in sales or Revenue um and he's the only guy who built it just by himself it's just honestly not that uncommon Minecraft was largely built the same way there's this guy Notch who's the developer behind Minecraft and if you've ever seen it he'll get on Twitch and he'll just code Minecraft like he'll just stream himself for like 12 hours just building the game and like I think Minecraft have more people overall but like one guy was really the driving force and the driving energy around it for many many years uh but stardew Valley is my pick for for biggest 100 50 million off of one one Game Dev the guy Notch when he's sold I think he sold for like multiple billions right three billion two billion something like that and he uh I think he bought like an like he outbid Beyonce for like an 80 million dollar mansion in uh LA and he was tweeting out or sharing how everyone hates him now he was like I'm so lonely this sucks but he's still in this like fancy 80 million dollar mansion do you remember that whole like ordeal where he was talking about how he like didn't give Equity to people and so some of the people who he hired uh hated him and he was lonely but he was having all these huge parties and he was lost and all that stuff do you remember all that no I I missed all that dude he like went through this whole Spiel on on Twitter about how like he hates his life but oh wow you know everything what else is uh I'm looking at this house this house is insane with the 80 million 70 million it was like a it was a fat I remember like I would love to just see Beyonce getting the news it's like oh who who did it who outbid me was it was it Spielberg who was it oh no it must have been uh but Lenny Kravitz on this like not ch [Laughter] um all right mine is a stream yard so stream yard I'll have to uh remember when they launched but I think they launched in 2019 right before the pandemic hit and it was basically a it was a way to stream events online and stream interviews and things like that online these two guys scaled it to 30 million dollars in Revenue in one year or 18 months or so and this mostly happened because the pandemic they ended up selling it to happen for 250 million dollars it was a mix of cash in stock and hop in ended up laying up off a bunch of people uh like last year but I've heard rumors that it's killing it have you heard these rumors pop it yeah no no I have not heard I've heard the opposite of those rumors but I don't know what have you heard well just like when the layoffs happened and it was like basically post covered events came back online like in person so that's naturally going to hurt the business then they had massive layoffs and I heard that the the founders had taken a ton of secondary or something like that so I heard like a hundred million plus in secondary yeah but maybe the business went well I have no idea I just heard kind of like that generally though when you hear those three things it's like massive layoffs you know Market uh you know the the crazy event that was driving your growth has stopped and the founders people start talking about how much secondary the founders took it's usually because the business is going in the wrong direction you usually people don't [ __ ] about secondaries when the thing is exploding I don't know I I heard the other way I I also thought that and I heard the other way around we talked about stream yard like right when they were getting going and then we talked about them again when they were acquired did you say you knew these guys I think I met because back when I was doing video streaming I met like kind of everyone in this space I I don't know I gotta look up who these guys are but I do know that they got to 14 million in RR when it was just the two of them and then it got to 30 million when they had by that time they had hired up a team so this is kind of like a hybrid they got they got really far with just a couple people and then they hired up um you know from from as they scaled it before they sold and I remember going to their website when it was just them and I there was like the founder and he was he was on the he was on the home page and he was giving like a tutorial video on how to use the product it was just him like with this camera on his lap practically and he looked exhausted he looked so worn out I remember this during the pandemic when we were thinking about using them for something and he looked like super Haggard but it was very impressive that these two guys have built this to sell for 250 million dollars and although it was cash and stock so I don't know if the stock is worth anything I heard it might be so that might be one of the biggest ones that I've heard of at least recent big ones another big one that uh it happened a long time ago so I have no connection it was Plenty of Fish how much did plenty of fish get acquired for like 550 million dollars yes hundreds yeah and uh that was started by one guy named Marcus who now I see online and he seems like he like lives the most lavish life and just does crazy [ __ ] and so plenty of fish was basically one of the early dating websites it was a Marketplace it was like okay Cupid but I think it was predominantly Canadian and that had to be probably the biggest exit that I've ever heard of for a really small small team yeah plenty of fish was unbelievable that guy isn't he like a nut that Plenty of Fish founder I feel like that's a whole another story we should do one day I think it's a whole another I think I don't know I haven't researched it enough to actually like verify the claims but I've heard like a little like grumblings like a little little stories that something weird is going on but I don't know the truth also I love the fact that you've met the stream yard guys and they looked Haggard and you're like it's like in Silicon Valley when you see somebody like that you put your arm around them and you're like hey you all right is it is it because of too much traction or not enough I just need to know how I'm gonna be super much yeah oh it's too much traction okay okay come here come here you sleep on my couch let me feed you just take this check put me on your cap table uh you know like there's really you know one out of ten of the Haggard people they're getting beat down by too much demand and nine out of 10. like that who have you met like that who else have you met where are you I remember you're talking to a guy who um this guy Abner met a guy abder and he was doing something pretty I met him after the fact but he told me the story and I it was it was stuck with me and I always remember here after hearing the story I was like I should look for that so what happened was Twitter started taking off in popularity uh right when it kind of got going in Silicon Valley like it became like a thing and Abner was him and his team or they're like kind of like data science type people and so they were like all right what can we build uh that makes Twitter work better because Twitter was such a simplistic product and at the time it was like almost like a protocol like anyone could kind of build apps on top of it or use the data for something so he's trying to build something he doesn't know what he's doing he's like he's sitting on a train and he starts coding this thing he's like oh I've done this research on sentiment analysis and he's like I was like okay so yeah well the story sounds a little bit boring who cares about sentiment analysis he's like yeah you could he's like you could figure out like how people are feeling about a certain topic because they're talking about it in a certain way so he said so tell him his story was boring right when he got oh my you know my channel started to drift yeah I was like is there anyone else in this a car I could talk to I was in a car with him in Ethiopia you know for four hours straight there's nowhere to run so I'm I'm hearing I'm like all right let me hear about the story sentimentality yeah go ahead tell me more about your PhD and sentiment analysis what did this do and he's like so I was on a train and I'm building this thing I'm trying to analyze what people are saying on Twitter to see if I could get the sentiment the current mood or whatever he's like but then I realized actually what I'll do is instead of figuring out their mood I'll just figure out what are they talking about a lot of like a lot more than usual that's kind of interesting and he basically created trending for Twitter off of Twitter oh cool so he's like he's like oh I could figure out that the word Olympics normally is only said this much but it's being said 10 standard standard deviations more so that means Olympics is trending the the it's it's above its par and he's like this is super cool like I basically have the 10 things that people are talking about on Twitter I can kind of get that I get that signal in a way that you couldn't really get at the time on Twitter and so he creates this and they create a separate website off of Twitter called Twitter trending I forgot what it was called Zone website and they start getting millions of hits on this thing and they're just trying to and as and he's trying to keep it keep it up because he's basically drinking from the Twitter fire hose and he's got all this traffic and so he's trying to keep both of them working eventually Twitter buys them so they become like employees 10 through 20 or something of Twitter oh sick and at the time Twitter had the fail well it was just like constantly Twitter the service was going down it was had so much usage and it was like in this Web 2.0 like it wasn't like scalable yet they hadn't figured out how to scale it and he told me he's like he's like for six months he's like I just woke up every day with like an imprint of my keyboard on my forehead like I had just passed out I was working trying to keep this damn Side Up pass out wake up uh where was I and I just kept going he's like that was six months straight of my life he's like I've never experienced anything like it and at the time I remember thinking oh there's levels to this thing like that's what it feels like when you really have one of the winners like and if you talk to people early at Facebook and they talk about like what the what what it was like working early at Facebook Facebook it's like when people talk about living in New York they're like just the energy was it's the energy you can't explain it and it's like that's how that's what you get when you're inside one of these generational companies at the early stage when they're they're scaling too fast dude that's exciting I love that one um I like hearing those old stories like that I always read those old books like the hatching Twitter and all that [ __ ] I love that [ __ ] yeah me too um all right next let's go to let's wait let's go to a highest degree of difficulty we'll skip a category and come back to it okay so this is the hardest one the hardest example the one that we're like how the hell did you even do that and there's no way anyone else would have done this you go first all right I have one it's called tiny wow so I think the URL is just tinywow.com so do you have that pulled up tiny while yeah got it all right so I met this guy he's a member of Hampton that's why I met him his name is Evan Gower he had a uh another website called Tech junkie maybe you heard of tech junkie but they like just talked about like Tech topics whatever it's pretty normal website but he ended up selling it for eight figures and on the side he started this thing called tiny wow which is a bunch of tools that include like how to convert a PDF but then image editing tools that use Ai and it's one of those websites where you Google like convert this file to PDF it is able to he's able to come up first right now it has 6.6 million visits a month and the reason it's yeah it's insane the reason it's interesting is right now it only does 20 000 a month in Revenue because he says I haven't I just haven't turned on any of the um monetization it just has like uh little ads he goes I'm going to turn it on eventually but right now I'm just enjoying the summer and time at my family so I haven't really like dug deep and like built it and so basically this guy Evan he wasn't you talking about the weather put on AdSense what are you doing Evan this is insane dude that's the cool part about uh these one-person businesses and this is another guy who I'm gonna tell a story about has said the same thing he goes I felt like taking the summer off so I just let it ride for a little while uh so this guy Evan he basically had a history as a a developer he says he doesn't do any development now but he has a team of three people who are helping him or one contractor who helps him with uh overseas who's helped him actually like build and Implement he basically just draws it and Designs it but the reason why this thing is taken off is if you Google or do you remember like do you ever see those videos on Tick Tock that say like here's five websites that should be illegal but aren't so good that they should be illegal yeah so that is basically how it the the website got popular is it's gotten popular from those videos and so the reason why this is really hard to create because a getting traffic to a a like a Content site or any type of website like this it's very challenging oftentimes building the product is not the hard part it's getting users and getting 60 point six million visits a month mostly from social quite challenging we'll see if he's able to turn this but I asked him I was like how big can this get he's like well like I think of like canva so I'm like can we I think it can make tens of millions of dollars a year in Revenue because we're gonna ultimately we have this traffic we can have like a feature that says hey you can edit this uh picture using our platform and we'll charge a small fee I think this actually could be a big business but right now it's really tiny he told me it cost ten thousand dollars a month to run and it's making twenty thousand dollars a month in Revenue wow yeah do you know how much uh how much remove that BG makes who do you ever use remove.bg no what is that oh that's I mean that's that was the old way it's like if you need to remove a background from an image like you need to just cut out the object and remove the background remove.bg was this website that was uh like just because of traffic yeah it was just a go-to and uh oh my God 50 to 60 million in monthly monthly visits so it's just like insane and remove.bg it just had a Stranglehold for me at least on on doing this it was like super quick you just drag your image in it just removes the background boom there you go and uh and then they charge for like yo you want it like 1080P or whatever they started charging for like little things like remove this Watermark and um I'm sure this thing crushes you know I I don't know I don't know how how much uh Revenue they do now but I'm sure this is one of these like Mighty businesses where it's a very small team uh canva acquired them it says that they had at least 100 million people coming to their website last year yeah um that's a CR that's crazy so it's acquired by canva so you can probably I don't know if canva has gone public yet maybe they have I think actually they just did a last month you might be able to dig through their numbers and see if they got Acquired and for how much but that's crazy that's so much traffic this site tiny while definitely could be something like that they started this in 2019. um it's this company collidio um and then they so they started in 2019 they sold it this was 2021 so two years later for roughly 100 million dollars wow and uh wow do they have funding I think the parent company it looks like it's a side project of the parent company the reason why I said these are the hardest to make is getting that scale of traffic that fast is so challenging you know like there's a lot of like software products that we're gonna name as one person companies and that's challenging in the sense of like you have to put it in a ton of hours uh and you actually have to like invent stuff and that's very challenging but getting traffic to me is more of an intellectual challenge where it's like I have no idea like where to start like whereas with starting with software like I I'm gonna make this one feature then I'll do this other feature I'll talk to my users it's a little bit involves a little bit of luck a little bit of skill but getting a lot of traffic to your website early on I think there's less people that know how to do that and so that's why I think that this is one of the harder things to start so here's my my answer for highest degree of difficulty photo p so photo p is very very similar basically it's one guy who recreated the entirety of Photoshop in a web browser for free so oh my God Photoshop is one of the most complicated products in the world he recreated it by himself gives it away for free and made it work in the browser which Photoshop doesn't Photoshop is a you know how you have to download the app in order to make it work it's just remarkable the guy barely monetizes it uh doesn't want to sell it and uh if you go just search his like just search photo P Reddit um or like you know founder Reddit he goes and he talks about like you know why he built it how he built it um and what you know what how he thinks about it or whatever it's pretty insane and I think how much traffic does it get uh traffic wise like 13 million according to similar web uh per month and um he does at the time this was a couple years ago he said that he was doing a hundred thousand a month um off this thing and it was like literally from the most basic absolute most basic of uh of like ads like this is one guy Ivan who made it and it's he's just like puts like the very simple Banner ad on the site and makes like 100 000 a month he uh did a post at Hacker News on April 11 2021 he goes hey guys I'm Ivan I'm the creator of photopee I made almost a million dollars in the last 12 months 90 from ads the rest is from premium uh which is useless you pay to hide ad so it's not even much of a premium when you start your own project you never know if it'll make 250 000 but if you get hired you can be quite sure that you will never make more than 250 000 and so that's why I started it and so this company photo P I don't know how big it is but depending on how many users it has I could see this getting sold for nine figures over a hundred million dollars so um he did an AMA on Reddit and they said uh hey have you hired your first employee yet this was a year ago and uh he says oh after I did my first AMA on Reddit uh lots of great people got in touch I did end up hiring one guy from Prague who uh who went to my university but it'll take some time for him to get familiar with the code he hasn't done it it is like it hasn't done yet it's pretty crazy how this guy uh operates so why do you think this is the most challenging uh just like technically recreating Photoshop feature for feature is absolutely insane like I think that's just an insane Endeavor um and then making it work in the browser like making it performance in a browser is not easy either so like for one person to do this I think it's crazy that's insane yeah I uh the the cool thing about these like one I think the the downside of these one-person companies is that everything relies on you and that you don't have like anyone else to ask for help and you can't hire anyone you can't have anyone better than you doing something because you're the only person and so in order to do this I think a lot of these people they have a they have a handful of traits that we'll talk about in the end but I don't understand how he could grind that hard for that long with all this pressure on him by the way this guy says he put seven thousand hours into it before he made any money from it that's insane so I think that that just takes so much will do you remember Viral Nova it was a guy named Scott de long so Viral Nova was basically an Upworthy clone it was a it says like they're like here's a list of 10 reasons why you don't want to go swimming after eating you're not going to believe number seven and so this guy would talk about like how it was just him writing 10 articles a day and he was like I'm the pressure of all this traffic and all the success it's killing me I feel so worn out all the time and I don't understand how some people can sustain that for a really long time like this photo P guy yeah this is like you know when you go to someone's house and they're like oh do you want to see my model train set I'm building you're like what uh yeah sure why not I'm here and they take you down to the basement and then it's just like they've recreated like the city of Vienna and through their like and they're just tinkering on this like one thing they're like uh how many hours how long have you been doing this and they're like oh I just come here every night I love it and this is what I do it makes me feel so good and you're like holy [ __ ] this is like the most intense hobby that's how that's how I'm not that guy I'm not that type of person are you you're definitely not I think right come on if not uh yeah I envy those people that's an amazing uh willpower all right let's do another one let's do on the other end easiest to recreate so which of these one person one or two person businesses do you think are easiest to recreate that um is the opposite of the highest degree of difficulty go ahead um so mine would be anything that sells information or service so I put just any course creator but you and I know a bunch of these people of which you and I are both of those people uh you know we make hundreds of thousands or Millions dollars a year from like a course or two and I think they're fairly easy to recreate another one is uh there's a company called design Joy you know what they do I believe it's a design subscription basically that's him yeah but the way that he positions it it seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth but basically it's just this designer that you pay thousands of dollars a month for and you ask them to make small changes to different design related stuff and he claims that it's just him but I I believe he claims that yeah but he says it sounds like he does a hundred thousand dollars a month so he does 1.2 million a year or so around that range and it's basically you buy a subscription plan so you pay and you buy like the five it's like four or five thousand a month um and then you you basically get one request at a time um and that's it you get to just say I'd like this design thing done and he turns around in some I don't know what his SLA is of how long he takes to uh to do this but it's like it's cheaper than hiring a full-time designer probably unless like in the US um but yeah that's the I think that's the easiest to recreate but also the worst to run which we'll talk about later but that's probably the easiest one it's like a bunch do you know any other course people that do like like I know Sam Evans does 10 million in Revenue 5 million profit and for a while it was just him I met these guys I met a guy recently who does like a product management course and I was like oh my God who's taking a product management course he goes no no it's how to base your job interview as a product manager like how to get a job as a PM at one of these tech companies and I think he was doing what was he doing but like 2 million a year or something like that I think they were doing like two what two 2.5 they had 2.5 million a year uh roughly in in Revenue I think it was like 80 percentish margins and what they would do is they would basically say they would give away free content that was like how to you know how to get a job as a PM how to interview as a PM how to uh prep for this interview what it was like talking to a Facebook PM blah blah they give away free content to get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website and then they're like hey do you want to like get a job as a PM which will pay you let's call it 120 000 a year if you want that job um buy this course and join this cohort of course or whatever and they basically sell this course for a couple thousand dollars that's going to help you get this job that's going to pay you over a hundred thousand dollars and that's like a very simple value proposition for somebody who wants to uh wants to do that with their career and it was just him it was him in three it was it was three of them three three PMS that kind of like got together and made this thing another example of an easy one to start I think I told you about this it's called cyber lead so you go to get cyberleads.com so it's c-y-b-e-r leads so get cyberleads.com it's this guy named Alex West and basically it's a newsletter where I I think it costs four to a thousand dollars a month so four hundred to a thousand dollars a month depending on what you get what you do but basically he goes and he hand picks different companies that have recently raised money and based off a bunch of attributes he thinks are about to hire an agency and then he gets all these agency owners to sign up to his service and he emails this list out once a month along with like the contact information the hiring decision or the hiring uh uh like whoever's managing ad spend whatever and you can just contact him on he's got your face and quota as a testimonial do you use this no I don't use this but I talked I talked about it on the Pod uh I talked about it on the Pod like two years ago I've never used it uh I've never you've never used it but he sure used you he is he was a big I don't know is there anything can I can you say anything about these people who do this I talked about it on the Pod I said it's so freaking simple the value's so clear I guess I said that on the podcast and he uses that as a quote is there anything I could do decide to take them down you can always say that um oh sorry let me wrap up my thing selling information so anything that you sell information that's the easiest thing to start yeah I think uh so I went the same route but I'm gonna give more detail because I think when you tell somebody selling information is the easiest way they're like cool what so what do I do so [ __ ] I gave three examples yeah but I think you have to break it down a little further so um you know this guy Lenny Lenny Russian last name I don't know I like Letty Rogowski or vegetative uh something something along those lines I like Lenny so Lenny I think used to work at Airbnb or something he was like a growth slash like product guy and so he's got Lenny's newsletter he's got Lenny's communities he's got Lenny's job board and basically he was like I'm gonna become he's like I'm gonna put out tons of free thought leader content on a specific super Niche topic that only certain people are gonna care about but they're gonna care a lot and that's that's kind of the key with this stuff is how do you put out free content to establish yourself as an authority in a niche so that you can then monetize that through either Consulting Services job board paid Community or um or paid content paid newsletter right that's that's the formula and you can look at the um the design Joy guy he does exactly this he puts out free content examples of design work and then says you can hire me for design work um Lenny does the same thing he puts out free content he's got really good stuff like you know how did these 10 huge marketplaces how did they get their first thousand users and he goes deep and he's like I'm gonna interview them I'm gonna talk to them I'm going to get the real answer on the specific zero to one question that's going to be highly relevant to other people going through that same challenge I think he has a podcast too he's got a podcast like at one point his job board was doing a couple hundred thousand I'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred thousand in sponsorships I think about monthly or annually annually um at least these are minimum [ __ ] way more like I know at the beginning his job boards crushing I don't know what they're doing now but like I would bet his entire roll-up of job board um content sponsorship so podcast plus newsletter and then uh he's got a paid thing right Ben he's got like a paid paid Community what's it what do you think bloody's total thing is 2 million three million yeah for sure about two to three million uh a year and he did that I would say in a period of like two and a half three years it seems like like I think he think he has a fun too he kind of put his foot down on the content side I like he kind of appeared on the scene I would say like two two-ish years ago um obviously you had to know your stuff right so he's like you know spent time learning you know a decade being awesome inside these companies in order to do so I don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic but there are people who did it without that too so another example is uh Harry dry one of my favorite content creators in the whole world a guy I tried to recruit like a hundred times to do something with me because I feel like made to do something great um he keeps he keeps bullshitting and not saying yes but he's gonna say yes eventually so he's got marketing examples he does a great job with this blog called marketing examples now I don't know how much marketing examples makes I would guess quarter million to half a million as just him making content I think he's young he's very young he didn't do the put in 10 to 15 years become an industry like like do the job cut your teeth then go make content he's like no I'm pretty sure I could just look at what's out there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work I'll study this [ __ ] and that's how I feel like you know a lot of people also can do it you can be the Curious novice approaching these uh topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely and so uh I think Harry dry would also be one of the easiest to recreate not because he's not talented he's super talented but I think that's kind of something anyone can do anybody could just say yo I'm gonna study what makes tick tocks go viral and I'm gonna put up content about viral tick tocks I'm gonna become the expert of breaking down Tick Tock going viral and then brands are going to know me as the guy that they should talk to you about Tick Tock Consulting right like or like advertising on Tick Tock and like you could just build your Niche audience and your Niche Authority in that space A lot of people are trying to do this AI right now and the thing about Lenny and Harry was people were doing so first of all like a newsletters Community podcast that's existed since forever uh so it's not a unique business model and also people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time but what's interesting is that they were both early-ish where there was only maybe I don't know how many but they felt like they were early-ish talking about it to this customer to this community on this platform so both of those guys I think got popular on Twitter right before the pandemic started I think I remember seeing Harry in 2018 2019 which I wasn't even really using Twitter as a power user back then but they all seem a little bit early so I think timing matters for a lot of these things uh speaking of which that Facebook threads thing no idea if that's going to be a thing or not but that's an example of like hey there's this new thing right now if you want nothing to lose you better be there yeah just go get go be around there see what's going on yeah that's one of those things people did with Clubhouse I don't know if that worked out or not but uh the way I say it is like you uh most most entrepreneurs were actually surfing waves you don't get to create the wave but you do have to paddle out you got to be on your board out there in the water you got to paddle out and you know which is a takes effort and then you gotta wait and sometimes it's a dud sometimes it's just a small wave you're gonna have to paddle back out again well when you catch a good one you know that's when you get and we'll see how good you are at surfing you might Wipe Out the first couple times you try it but like that's your job as an entrepreneur is to paddle out be out there and start trying to Surf these waves and get a sense for where are the big waves and um and how do I not wipe out when I do when I do find one so this episode you're giving a really in-depth surf analogy last episode you gave us a fat uh a pitching of baseball what do you say a fat ass fat pitches it was fat pitches if you ever played bass addiction never played baseball or serp in your life bro I was starting right fielder for my high school team which anybody who knows baseball knows that means you're the biggest scrub on the team because that's who that's what they put in right field is the guy who's you know the ball never comes to right field and yeah but did you play baseball in China like they were just learning I might have been in China you went to high school and you went to high school in China yeah I mean or or Australia like it was hey scrubs it was like we played the ball as it lies there I got a golf analogy for you too uh I was in China but that's where I'm gonna be our software is the worst have you heard of HubSpot see most crms are a cobble together mess but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous I think I love our new CRM our software is the best HubSpot grow better let's go to the next one most fun one-person business so the one that seems like the most fun to to work on I'll go first Joe Rogan so I'm pretty sure Joe Rogan's media Enterprise is bigger than all the late night talk shows combined so forget the Tonight Show Letterman and any of these whoever the new coming in whoever these guys are do the lettermen's been retired for 10 years Man Jimmy Fallon I don't know uh bro who's what who's watching this stuff his audience is bigger he makes uh hundreds of millions and uh he's made hundreds of millions doing it and I'm pretty sure it's just him and young Jamie I've heard from a few of my friends who have been on it how it works so basically they told me that it's Jamie who produces it and it's Joe and then they have one other guy named Matt I think and I forget his name exactly I think it was Matt and basically Matt sends Joe a list of like 30 people they're like hey I can get these 30 people these 30 let me know who you want and sometimes he just ignores it every once in a while say that person and that person and that's all he says and I've heard that it's just those three people that's amazing so I think most people just think oh Joe Rogan he's just a podcaster yeah he is a podcaster but that thing is a juggernaut it is a media Juggernaut so the you know Spotify obviously paid him you know hundreds of millions to to be there uh for a couple years but even before that you know just off the sponsorships off of uh off of the Alpha Brain you know um product that they build off of it Joe Rogan I think has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet it's my sense he took all of his Hobbies he's like oh I like UFC he gets to be the UFC commentator uh doing exactly what he would want he gets to go sit ringside commentate for these fights and analyze the fights but he only does it for the ones in Vegas that are an hour flight away from him he doesn't do any of the the ones that require a bunch of travel um and so all the bit he does all the best ones he does none of the worst ones uh you know he was like I want to do stand-up comedy so he does Stand Comedy sells out you know uh theaters all around the country and um you know gets to make people laugh for a living does this podcast where he's like I'm gonna have conversations with the people I want and people are like oh Joe three hours is too long he's like that's the type of conversation I want to have so I'm gonna do it my way and it worked and so like I just think he just dictated how he wants to live life on his terms I think he has the most fun I think his business is absolutely a mighty business in that it's just let's say one two to three people that uh is building a thing that does you know over 100 million dollars in Revenue which is like if you just valued something like that you know um traditionally which is not it's not Apples to Apples but like if you have a thing that can do 100 million a year in Revenue for multiple years for multiple years typically that's a billion dollar property and um you know obviously it's weird you can't really sell legit you know Joe Rogan Experience because you need him it's tightly branded with him but let's say at least he's built something worth 100 million dollars I think we can agree on that because it's generated 100 million of profit for him and so he's built you know with a very small team a multi-hundred million dollar business at the minimum and he has this new thing called The Comedy Mothership it's like a mile from my house in Austin and there's always a line out the door to get into that place yeah Comedy Club why not why not if you drive by it at six o'clock there's every single night there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome right who you got most fun all right so scroll up to the very top of this dock I put a link in there it sounds like I'm trying to like promote Hampton I'm not it's just that when I had to prepare for this episode I just went through our database and like picked out people and we had just written a blog post about this guy his name's Joseph mambra and he started this company called gym streak and This Guy's super fascinating because he has all the attributes of like what a lot of these like Tinkers have but basically he's from Zimbabwe moved to England when he was like 12 or 13. that was the first time that he experienced the internet he taught himself how to code he taught himself design and then he launched this thing called gym streak at first it was just an app for tracking your workouts and then he what he did was he went and got his buddy to wear one of these like suits and that way he could do 3D visualizations of all the exercises and what they need to look like so he has hundreds of them and so his app it's free to use and they have some like premium thing and basically you track your workouts he uses AI to suggest which weights you should do for the next workout and if you don't know what the exercise does and they'll suggest workouts and exercises to do he has hundreds of these 3D models of like what a proper bicep curl or what this other type of exercise looks like in year one he did three hundred thousand dollars that was in the year 2021 in year two he did 2.5 million and his goal he says by in the next two years I want to get the 15 to 20 million dollars a year in revenue and he's the only employee I don't believe he has any contractors I think he he told me that he uh got most of his uh users from Facebook and Tick Tock ads and he hired a consultant in an agency to help him learn how to do that and right now he said I'm taking the summer off so our growth this year might still only be 2.5 or 3 million a year in Revenue but I because I don't feel like buying ads or staying on top of that so I'm taking the summer off because we just had a kid but it's super fascinating to see a guy who basically came from Zimbabwe didn't use the internet until he was 12 13 and taught himself how to do all this he's like one of those really cool Tinkers and on that blog post you can see pictures of him like arriving from Africa and like learning how to work the computer it's super fascinating you'll see pictures of him with his like iPhone and a laptop at the gym filming people doing like the curls so he can use his AI or whatever to like get the 3D imaging really fascinating company I think Jim streak is awesome if this could get to 15 or 20 million a year in Revenue like he thinks that would be a monster business for one person yeah that's an amazing story wow love that uh good for him that's that's really really cool um next category business we most want to own so this is um I think this is specifically a good question because for us a business we'd want to own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us want to really run an extra business right now so it's like which business would you want to own because it is very much uh you know autopilot so it's not design Joy it's not people are paying you and you're providing a subscription it's not one of those content or course businesses where you constantly have to create new content in order to stay relevant and get more customers um I think we both have the same one let's just do the same one that we we both are really interested you you explain it go for it no you go first all right milled.com so most people don't know mill.com it's m-i-l-led.com and it's a really really simple website it's just a compilation of email marketing that different companies do so if you want to see like what are my competitors sending for their fourth of July sale you just go to mill.com you search the brand and you'll see okay here's what Ridge wallet sent uh for their fourth of July uh email it's the top one on the on the Cyber site right now so it says you know you just click and it shows you the exact email that they sent so you can see the design you can see the offer you can see the copy and you could use that to get inspiration for what you should be doing for your email marketing and this guy built the site uh I don't know how long ago now but um he's post on Hacker News a little bit about it and it's one person it's a side project he does a million dollars a year on it he said I was I was doing email marketing for a brand I noticed two things one it took us several days to create each email blast um and two I had to subscribe to like dozens of other competitor emails just to do research for for them so my hypothesis was I could create a site that would just sign up for all the brands uh you know email newsletters and um and then make it easier for anybody who's trying to do email marketing right that's the uh that's that's the core core pitch for it and he's just been running it as a side project doesn't take much maintenance doesn't you know he could just do nothing on it for a little while and it makes money through ads yeah so so they use ads on the left side here you can see like I have it open and he's basically got like in a like a link to the brand itself and then he's got like a cyber security uh like ad here popped up below it he's got like a skincare ad yeah it's just display ads so but here's another way how he makes money so basically you're a marketer you go to milled and you want to see like uh it looks like some shoe brand they run they ran this campaign and you want to check out the email and you read it and get inspired whatever you click that ad and it takes you to the shoe company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes right this is a horrible way to monetize this is a a really amazing product under model under monetized website for sure but good for him for getting the traffic in the first place but that's a horrible way to monetize yeah yeah I agree uh but I think the guy doesn't care he's just like this is easy that's cool uh low maintenance which is why I put it in my one I'd want to own because it's low maintenance and I think it still has a lot of upside uh left I'll do one for one I want to own so I said anything that is like marketplacey uh sort of like a Marketplace because sometimes if you do it right those don't they don't run themselves entirely but the the community kind of handles the business uh built with so built what was started in 2015 or 16 probably built with is like the most Niche [ __ ] ever but there's it's a really big Niche so you go to built with in order to see which plugins a website is using if they are using Wordpress and the reason why that's important is you go to a website that you like and you go oh I love this feature they have let's go inside without WordPress Shopify also that's new it started with just WordPress I think um and so you're like just tell me like the plugins and tell me the the everything that they're using Shopify and built with uh Shopify and WordPress it has something like tens of millions of people going there a month and does at the time when I first found them I think in 2020 I think they were doing 14 15 million in Revenue with just one person so I think that would be a really cool company to own because I think it's super valuable once you get all that traffic and those people coming back to you all the time I think it's a really valuable site do you know anything about built with yeah uh just what you told what you said there I've been using it for a long time basically if you see a website you want to know what they use for whatever they use just go to build with it's pretty great uh it's kind of like a data it's almost like a data Index right it's like more like a database than it is a Marketplace in a way uh but I agree it's kind of amazing um all right let's keep going we got a couple categories left we have a rookie of the year so a new one a new a new one that we found I think you might have already covered yours uh in here but dude it's boring I didn't want to say the same thing twice but this guy Joe mombre this Joseph mombre like I love his story I think that this guy's gonna be a big deal and I and I take a lot of Pride to try to find people before they're like really popular I think he's read the blog post that I that I have linked up there from the Hampton site it's really good I think this guy's Gonna Be A Winner so that's my Rookie of the Year what's only finders only finders is mine so this is one that I don't know how old it is maybe a couple years old now um so only finders is a search engine for only fans so if you want to find a type of model on only fan so you you know you're into you know blonde agents or like you know whatever good looking midgets whatever whatever you're into you can search on only finders and it'll give you a list of top ranked profiles for that thing so as you know I've been down the only fans Rabbit Hole where I'm like I think there's a lot of potential in the only fans uh world of like businesses and this was one of them that I found and um only finders run by one guy he's awesome he listens to the pod he um and he crushes it so he crushes the SEO game for for only fans if you search for a bunch of different popular searches um and in fact actually what what he did was smart which is he didn't want to just rank for like the general uh searches like best only fans or something like that like he wants the high intent ones so he wants the person who's searching for like whatever I don't know what people search for but like redhead yeah redhead if you go to his site if you go to his site you could you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are so it's like Indian uh he ranks really high for the categories that people are that's like clearly people's thing and it's like I don't know what your thing is but I got if you got a thing I got it for you and because of that those are really really high intense searches and then what he does on the other side is he goes to only fans models and agencies and he says hey if you want more traffic I have tons of people searching for your exact thing pay me per click for every person I send to you so he's basically recreated Google it's a search engine where you get paid per click to send a somebody with intent to your to your to your site and um he could do it he does a really really good job and only fans does not have a discover section on purpose they decided they don't want to be in the discovery business they want to only be in the uh like the kind of the underlying tools underneath these Creator profiles and this is insane and it's just been surfing the growth of only fans which has grown like exponentially like only fans a few years ago was very small uh you know five years whatever four five years ago it's very small and then it got bigger bigger it's like sort of like I mean the curve looks looks unreal like only fans is bigger than twitch it's bigger than like some of these massive websites uh now and it generates a lot of money like they pay out billions to creators uh on the platform and so if you can be part of that ecosystem it's valuable that's interesting I have now met multiple people and only fans that you've never heard of girls that are doing between one and two million a month on their profile because their body is the cogs so there's it's all profit basically they have like you know usually they have like a they'll they'll have like some of them as you get bigger you have like a agency that manages it so what are they doing with this money they're just they have huge income and how long do you think can they do it for five years three years yeah and it's funny that someone kind of exit they burn out and they'll just sell their light name likeness and photo library and be like you run it and just give me a web show give me 50. it's like Bruce Springsteen that's what he did the same thing the boss uh this is insane I I don't know much I I don't know much about this [ __ ] uh this is absolutely insane the engagement on these things are wild if you have a holy fans business reach out to me shot at seanpuri.com I want to invest in only fans businesses that are just cash flow are they cool like when you met these they're cool the problem is they're very hard to sell and they're very easy to be killed and so they need kind of like strategy on like no I mean the girls oh I don't know I don't know you said you hung out with a couple of them and I hang out with them I just talked to them yeah they're nice people I don't know that's insane how did you get in touch with them it's the internet bro what do you mean you know I've how many times on here have I talked about only fans and then people basically like oh you're into that so that they email you and then they they probably have a million Indian guys like dming them uh I mean that's insane this is inside um I don't go through you know when you see a big line at the front door you don't you know you don't go wait in that line you have to go find a side door and the side door is generally you know some some dude who listens to our podcast that runs their business or as their manager and that's kind of like the way in all right let's that if we do or the last category is the worst of the best I have a different one but I would have to say only fans would be up there but I have another one the worst one is this is these are all cool businesses but which which one's our least favorite so uh yours is gonna be only fans no uh I mean it would be but I already had something else Kevin Van Trump so Kevin Van Trump I met this guy Sean likes him a lot now uh I met him in 2000 and 2018. I was at a conference and Kevin Van Trump is like six feet tall and he's like really big he's like a very very large overweight guy and he walks up to me and he's got this super thick accent he goes hey what's up man how you doing like he just starts talking to me and I'm like this guy's so confident and it starts talking about all my newsletters and the hustle and all this stuff and he's got this thick accent he's wearing a Ramones t-shirt and he's got like Converse on he just looks like a like a like a like a Walmart guy and then like he dropped he drops like one or two lines where for some reason we talked about art but he was like oh yeah that Picasso I got one of them some [ __ ] like he said something like that I was like what so I let it slide and then I go how many subscribers are on your your newsletter and he goes like Oh 60 000 and he goes hey how much you guys charge for yours and I go oh it's free we make money on ads you charge it goes yeah we charge like 300 a month I forget exactly what it was and I like do the math in my head and I'm like wait that's 20 million dollars a year he goes yeah it's something like that I don't even know and I started hanging out with him and he basically this guy's name is Kevin vandtrump he's got this newsletter where he talks about agriculture and like how it impacts commodity prices and it he's brilliant and I get to know him a little bit more and you're like oh no you just have a Southern accent he like was a Wall Street like Trader the guy's brilliant he's amazing and he lives in Kansas City and I've done a zoom call with him and you see like he's got like these custom built motorcycles in the back of his like house and he's got like all these picassos and [ __ ] the guy's killing it but that same day when I hung out with them I was like hey you know go get dinner he's like yeah I can go get dinner we we hang out at 8 30 he goes hey man I gotta run I gotta write tomorrow's newsletter and I was like what he goes I do it every day I've done it every day for 10 years I go what do you mean every day he goes six days a week I send a newsletter and it's 2 000 plus words it's really long he does it every day and he was making all this money I don't think I would trade lights with him though just to have all that money I had the same answer I think he's amazing you put me on to him I met him and his son such awesome people so like they're awesome super fun so awesome just fun to be around smart uh really nice just kind people don't like you know no no pretense about them um and same thing he was hosting Farm con I went because you had told me about him and introduced me to him and when when I go there he's we're at the conference called Farm con he's got Farm con which is like the biggest farming conference get together so I go to Kansas and I and was it awesome yeah it was amazing and I'm there and we're talking it's like 11 at night it's like the whole event's done everyone's at the bar every single person is drinking a beer every single person is drinking a beer and uh he's like I gotta get up gotta get up to the bedroom gotta I gotta go back to my room real quick right there right tomorrow's Edition and I was like wait you write it yourself still and he's like yeah I write it I've written it myself by hand every night and he started this thing more than 10 years ago like I think he said like it's almost like 20 years basically he's been writing this thing 18 years or something insane every day almost yeah and it's long too it's not like just some cookie cutter like here's Three Links that are interesting it's like no drone Powell came down said this but and he said this said that you know here's how this is going to affect corn Futures and here's what I'm I'm betting over here and then there's a bunch of memes it's amazing basically his market analysis for like crap you know crop and commodities and then it's a bunch of memes underneath it and he's like nope never do ads um Isaac I just wanted to build as much trust as I can in this community and uh so I never advertise I I charge for it and uh that's why we have Farm con so everybody shows up is because you know they I built a lot of trust over the over the years and I learned more about business from that guy in like one hour than I did in my entire like four-year education at Duke like he said to me he said a bunch of things that I loved I put this in my my newsletter I did a feature on him that I wrote a bunch of the lessons but one of them that he said was he goes yeah the content's cool but he's like being he goes being an investor is the best job in the world you kidding me uh he's like and he just said it so matter of fact that he's like there is no better job in the world than being an investor it is it is the best and you sort of think about that you're like all right well that sounds you know whatever I guess kind of obvious and it's like okay if that's true then how do you get into that job like if if that is true for you um how do you architect your life to get there because he's basically just like look this newsletter is great yeah question makes a lot of money but I wish I was just an investor uh it would have been a better better better choice blah blah they talked about investing because he I think he was on Wall Street before he started doing what he was doing yeah and he goes um he goes you know one thing I only he goes I was early into Bitcoin I was early into Facebook I was like really and he's like yeah he's like I wasn't as early as I could have been he's like but there's always uh he's like I got into Bitcoin like in 20 he's like we started hearing about it at Farm con like in 2013 2014 I didn't buy it till 2015 2016. I should have been in it right when I first heard it he's like same thing with Facebook he goes one one lesson I learned in investing he goes um he goes two two lessons for you in investing number one the best trades are gonna be ones where bones where you buy them you put them in the drawer you never think about them again he's like he's like that was the best thing I did about Bitcoin I bought Bitcoin I put it in the drawer never thought about it again heard all the news didn't care it's in the drawer and I was like damn in the drawer that's a cool concept of like what investments can you just have the conviction and you put in the drawer you say I'm not gonna react to the Daily News cycle about this investment I'm gonna let the 10 years play out on this investment because it was a let's see what happens on the long-term type of BET um second thing he said was he goes uh you always get a second chance to get on the train with the best investments there's always a second chance on the train he's like with Bitcoin you know you think you missed it and then the price will come down that's your chance to get back on the train and most people by that time you know they spend the whole way up wishing they had got on the train train comes back around and they get scared they don't get back on yeah same thing happened with Facebook Facebook you know we had our chances uh when it was Private then it goes public it goes up up crashed back down to 19 I got back on the track that train came around I got right back on and he's like yo that will happen for the best investments and I sort of look for this now of like uh how do you override the psychology that most people have which is when it's going up you wish you had gotten in earlier then when it crashes down you're too afraid to buy in because you feel like oh [ __ ] is it over did it pop is it did I miss it um was I wrong and it's like well then you lose lose you know you want to buy on the way up and you don't want to buy on the way down that's that's a recipe for being poor right like you know buy High don't buy low right that's not gonna work and so uh those two little lessons were ones that stuck out for me but this guy's business is amazing he's an amazing guy and the reason he's amazing among other things is he breaks all the stereotypes he you you'll think that he's just this like hickey guy just like people used to think about me uh and like I grew up around people just like him turns out he's like brilliant he'll he'll like you're like you're gonna talk to me about Facebook and he knows way more about it than you do he'll probably knows all about Bitcoin I mean the guy's brilliant and uh I love hanging out with him and his friends because you it teaches you like I'm a [ __ ] idiot for judging people a certain way these guys are all badass dude and they're fun as [ __ ] I did a call the other day with another guy so uh another guy from Farm con same same sort of guy he's this uh white guy maybe I don't know it is 50s ish something like that was he Super Rich because so many of those guys are super rich and I think this guy I don't know how racist guy private jet rich I don't know how rich this guy is but the guy who introduced me to him was just like yeah this guy's worth you know 300 500 million dollars personally and I was like Wow uh okay that's crazy because I was like I was like do his deals like he's always talking about these deals like does he actually make money on these like is he had it track record of success he's like yeah he has um so this guy this guy's got phrases for days so I I have this doc that I keep on my phone I call phrases except somebody says something that's just like funny or worded well it just sticks out to me it's a Punchy phrase I write it down at Farm con I filled out my phrases thing like because there were so many so this one guy um I don't want to say his name put him on blast but he uh he was at a dinner with uh says Kevin vantrum and this guy was at the dinner it was like a private dinner at the at Farm con and uh he stands up and he goes everyone on the table is doing introductions and sit there I'm like you know how I am Sean and yeah I work in Tech and uh just [ __ ] kill me I guess I'm boring like you know like that's basically like how I felt during the introduction this guy stands up he goes yeah my name's so and so he goes um you know uh he goes exactly where he said he goes he goes uh I don't know who won the World Series I don't know who won the World Series I can't tell you how to get a six-pack abs hell I don't even know where the remote is in my house but I know one thing I know how to structure deals and today I'm gonna tell you guys about a deal that I'm doing and you're like gave this intro and I was like what did he Crush I was like what an incredible way to introduce yourself I don't know where the remote is but I know one thing I know deals and I was like that is incredible then he's uh he's talking about how old he is he goes he cut me in half there's gonna be a lot of rings that's the best nice and then he goes and then I did a call with him the other day and uh I get on the zoom call and I had just finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because I was like dude I gotta run I gotta be on this call he's like all right just take your call but let's do your like kind of like we try to do like this like myofascial like kind of like you're rolling like a like a foam roller type of thing like you're you're kind of like foam rolling out at the end so we were doing it and he's like just do it while you're on the call foam rolled with this guy so I get on the call I turn on the video and I'm like yeah I'm gonna show them what's going on so I'm like sorry if uh sorry this looks weird I'm doing like some stretching yes the big dude he goes okay cool if uh if it looks like I'm stretching call 9-1-1 because I'm having a stroke dude why would you take a call like that incredible win like to have that line immediately ready when I say you know that I'm stretching if sorry if it looks weird I'm trying to I was like wow that was literally so [ __ ] funny to me I was blown away I was like I don't care what else happens on this call that that was so impressive so good what state did he live in uh he's in Tennessee I think what the hell is a deal struck I don't even know what that means like he like he does he's like private Equity so he buys companies um but he's like I just know how to find a great deal how to put the financing together and how to structure it so that like I get the maximum value out of these deals it's kind of like what he does um and like you know I'm like so I was like I was like you know what um uh I was like have you done any deals like that I would have heard of and he's like you know Disneyland I was like yeah he's like a lot of Windows in Disneyland we do all the windows in Disneyland so oh my God they bought a window company got him a Disney contract we do all the windows at Disney do what with the windows like clean them this guy's incredible what's yours for uh world uh worst of the best um I had both design joy and the Kevin Trump just because of the time thing so I love that Kevin vantrope has built like this this amazing power niche in the farming industry but I uh I would not want to be the guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure is it's got to go out tomorrow morning I felt that during milk Road for a month and I was like nope not doing it this way yeah although I think if I was him I would just find a way to hire somebody to do that like I can't believe he hasn't done that yet um does Ben Thompson still do I haven't read this oh yeah so Ben Thompson is my version of that so he does strategory and every day he writes a newsletter about basically the same four things and I don't even know how he does that like he talks about Facebook Google Amazon Apple Netflix and like what's going like the kind of the business and strategy of what they're doing they're so long these are so long he does this daily long form his audience is like has the highest bar his audience is like the smartest people in the tech industry uh like you know VCS and all that that's who reads him every morning so he's got to come with like original content that's super smart about the same topics he's been doing this for like a decade and he makes three million dollars a year roughly doing this office paid and he only charges 120 a year yeah I think he upped his price I don't know what it is now but he like did raise his prices at some point 120 um it's 12 I think it was 100 and now it's 120. a month uh for this thing you know but but he's you know I think Ben's awesome uh so I don't beat it as a knock for him I'm saying I would hate the pressure of the daily super insightful thing that I have to write every every morning original content about like the same kind of like 10 companies is uh I don't I literally don't even know how he does it if somebody told me they're gonna do that I'd be like what are you saying this makes no sense and uh he does it every day sitting in Taiwan this is the worst this is the worst it is it is amazing um but um yeah I would never want to do this um so what do we think that I wonder what I want to know the listener if they think that these one all in depth on one topic if they dig this if they dig the award category style or the award style what do you think yeah this is an experiment for us of like doing a few focused episodes themed episodes so today's theme was these one or two person businesses that crush it um do you like this or do you like the freestyle freestyle's a lot easier this one takes a lot of work but if people love this you got to go in the YouTube comments and show us if we should do more of these or no uh we're cool either way but this is an experiment so let us know in the YouTube comments dude I stressed out for so long doing this these These are these are emotional for me can I give some takeaways because I don't think we did that uh I think we should do some takeaways all right so here's my my quick takeaways the most common Industries you see these one to two person businesses that Crush are uh just like thought leader on it on social media so just putting out free content on social media e-commerce we didn't do any Ecom ones in this but like there's a bunch of e-commerce that could do like you know a million dollars a year in profit that are run with one or two people and then you can do agencies for everything else um games so we talked about stardew Valley Minecraft there's a bunch of games that are built like this um apps and plugins so plug-ins on top of things like a figma plug-in a Google Sheets plugin a Gmail plug-in that sort of thing and then data aggregators like built with which are basically compiling data like mill.com compiling bunch of things that are of the same thing so it's you go search and you find what you want uh because they've aggregated everything only finder same thing it's a data aggregator um strategy so here's a couple strategy points you need to be either amazing 100 awesome at distribution meaning you're the influencer you're the content creator or you need to be 100 awesome on product you're the guy coding the game and and you'll you'll hire a publisher to do the publishing and so I think that if I was going to do this if I was gonna try to make this happen I would say where can I be either an incredible at distribution or incredible that product and I want to just like put all of my emphasis on that um in order to make this happen the next one you need attributes so a lot of these we made sound simple but you gotta have some attributes some skill copywriting design uh you know the ability like investment judgment market analysis like you got to be expert on one of these things if you're gonna make this happen and so you know you got to get to that expert master master of your craft level if you're gonna do this uh the last one it's all about leverage so the way you can get a one or two person company to get to Millions tens of millions or even some of the examples we gave were hundreds of millions of dollars um was leveraged so you need to be using code uh build it once and then it runs as software you need to use uh media like podcasts or newsletters or whatever or you need to use Capital because you're not going to use labor right like most companies use labor that's why they have hundreds of people working for them but if you're going to not have hundreds of people working you got to use these other forms of Leverage code Capital some money or media are your tools of choice you got to figure out which of those three can I use and that's how I'm going to do it and the beauty of it is because of the internet if you're the best at X you now get to sell to the whole world so like we didn't give an example Miss Excel so miss Excel is this girl who goes on Tick Tock and she in a high energy way dances and tells it teaches you how to use Excel like Microsoft Excel better and she's the best in the world at teaching Excel it turns out the best of the world of teaching Excel is you know how to do the pop you know the useful stuff and you can dance turns out that's what the best teacher of excel look like and she now gets to teach the entire world Excel like the best of anything gets to is to provide that product service or education to everybody that's the beauty of of the internet and so you need to figure out how to become the best of X because and then just make it available to everybody and the last thing I I was going to say was it's [ __ ] lonely like the best times that I have in work is when I'm whether it's in the trenches and like it's a shitty day or it's a great day is celebrating with co-workers these jobs are lonely I'm actually surprised when I hear about this about like how they are able to push like I push myself because oh I have Milds to feed or I want to be held accountable by these other people and make them proud it's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when you're by yourself and it's just hard to do this every day alone so hopefully you have like a good spouse or a significant other or something because it's just challenging I I mean when I started this I was like oh I want to be a solo solopreneur I wanted to be a solopreneur or they call it a solo capitalist I raised a fund and it's like I want to be a solar capitalist and I was like oh this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself yeah and not only is it not that good to do things by yourself because you know a little bit of help can go a long way a complimentary person who's good at the things you're not good at is really really useful but on top of that it ain't no fun and like most of life is the journey not the destination and you don't want to have the shitty Journey for this awesome destination and so very quickly I was like yeah this is a duopreneur this is being bad doing this or in the fun it's me and rameen doing this and I basically immediately was like I'm gonna do this even my econ business I gave a chunk of it to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and would give me some money and I was like why just because like I don't want to be reporting into myself and only like have myself as a thought partner to be sparring with on ideas about this I want to have somebody awesome just to do some you know idea jousting on this and so uh I think doing it by yourself is honestly a terrible idea you should definitely try to get one other person to do this I think two people is the is the sweet spot where you get sort of the the most autonomy and the least like management headaches and you have uh you still get the most [ __ ] done and have a lot of fun along the way all right that's the Pod whether you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or whatever go to uh search my first million on YouTube and go to the comments on this video and actually let us know we'll read them and see if we should keep doing these that's it [Music] [Music]

Channel: My First Million

Views: 285,248

Keywords: my first million, my first million podcast, my first million podcast episodes, the hustle, the hustle daily, the hustle trends, shaan puri, sam parr, sam parr the hustle, the hustle podcast, the hustle podcast my first million, startup podcast, entrepreneurship podcast, business entrepreneurship podcast, business, podcast, entrepreneurship

Id: giis6_u8n3M

Length: 73min 24sec (4404 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023