6 Retro Business Ideas That Could Be As Big As LEGO ($11.8B)

24:41And it should take like five minutes it's like you know do you play the new york times mini crossword no do you every day this thing's amazing it's such a fun it's 60 it's literally like a 60 second break it's a game it's a crossword crosswords are kind of fun but a real crossword crossword is pretty hard and time consuming and that when new york times made this mini it that thing drives like millions of dollars like it's like i don't know 10 of new york times's revenue comes from this little game app and it's mostly the New York Times mini crossword. This thing is an absolute hit product. All right, I have two more.

25:15Candle pouring kits. So another thing that is highly tactile, highly satisfying, leaves you with a result, a candle. Candle pouring is something I see a lot on TikTok. I don't know exactly how it goes or how it works, but I'm pretty sure this could be another adult arts and crafts relaxation thing that is accessible to many. And results in you actually having something that's not just clutter and junk in your house because you could just light the candle, use it, melt it down, and then you're done. So I think a candle pouring kit company could do pretty well. Dude, I'm in on that one because you'd want to buy one.

25:50You'd want to continually buy them if you got into it, right? Yeah. And candles make a ton of money. Go look at the candle MLMs. If you want to know what products work, go look at what MLMs work and work backwards from there. So there are several multi-level marketing schemes that are based around candles, which tells me there's a giant market for candles. Tell me one more and then I want to blow your mind with the Lego story. Okay. I'm now seeing what I wrote here and I have no idea what this means. So I'm going to just take this as a blank canvas for myself. Relaxation puddle. I don't know what I meant when I wrote this.

26:25This is late last night. I think what I, oh, I think what this is, is like my kids, one of the things you do with kids is you give them something called like sensory play. so you buy this like box and you put in like orbeez or you put in these like gel circle things you put your hand and it's kind of this cool sensation it's like it's like very cold you they're like these like balls that you can kind of like you know um you know you can touch and feel but they're not like uh it's like slime you know slime's really popular for kids there's like all these things that are very tactile play-doh and so you i think what i was thinking here is it's very relaxing if you put your hands in this thing what if you could put your whole body in this thing.

27:05I think is what I was thinking. It's more like those sensory deprivation tanks that people like to do in San Francisco and maybe other places as well. I'm not sure. But something you could just go lay in and it's like a super nap is really where my head was going. I'm trying to yes and you, but it's really hard when the premise is a relaxation puddle. The word puddle is so underrated actually. Sounds great. It has all kinds of jokes and commentates, very memeable word. And I think that's what you want with any of these. You want the idea to be so stupid that you get memed into popularity. You understand what I'm saying here?

27:43You're going to do it. It's going to sound ridiculous. And 95 % of America wants to make fun of you. But then those articles go out, those memes go out. And then 5 % of people are like, I don't know, I'll try it. Remember when that thing happened that guys were laying on their back and they were like sun tanning their butthole. And they're like, yeah, that's the new thing. I don't even think that was a thing. But I think there was someone behind that that was like, you know what, we'll get written up everywhere automatically overnight if I say that this is a thing. I've got this friend, Chris, who would send me so many photos of you just see his legs like as if he's not wearing clothes with his legs in the air.

28:23And he's like, just say his last name. He deserves it for doing that. Just being healthy. Let me tell you, like Crocs are like this, right? They're intentionally ugly. They're intentionally so ugly, you have to talk about them. And the design stands out in a not so good way. But the result of it is that it gets talked about. Yeah, you just got to figure out what the fuck a relaxation puddle is first. You're just starting with the words. Let me tell you two crazy stories. The second one is in particularly crazy. And I think you're actually going to dig it because it's going to revolve around your world.

28:59So I'm a Lego fan. I like doing Legos now. It's my new thing. There's this website called Rebrickable. So Rebrickable is this amazing website. It was clearly started by an engineer. I think his name is... I actually don't know what the guy's name is who started it. Nathan. I think his name is Nathan. So Nathan was just an engineer at some company, normal job in Australia. He started this website that he... It's actually quite complicated. And what you do, there's tens of thousands of Lego kits. And it's been around for 100 years. So there's probably hundreds of thousands of different types of Lego kits.

29:30kits. You tell it what type of Lego sets you have. And then other designers, so people who are Lego fans, have created directions on how to build their own creations. It's called an MOC, My Own Creation. And it's a whole community of people who build MOCs. And he has roughly 30 ,000 people who have uploaded a variety of MOCs that you can buy from$10 probably all the way up to$100. And what's interesting about this guy, There's so many crazy business implications here. But what's interesting about this guy is, A, he's an engineer. And the people who listen to this podcast, there's a bunch of engineers out there.

30:08There's a huge overlap, a Venn diagram of Lego enthusiasts. And this guy adds a third circle to that Venn diagram of business people. And so basically, he reveals all of his stats online. And you can go to his blog and you can see it. He started this company, I think, in 2010. And it was just a project. I looked at his LinkedIn. Again, he worked as a full-time... Had a full-time job since 2000... Until 2020. And he reveals every year how much page views that the website has had, how many registered users it's had, how many people are selling products on there. So it's basically a marketplace. And so in 2023, he had 11 million users create an account on his website, which is huge.

30:47And so if you account for, let's say, 3 % of people buy something, that's 330 ,000 people or sales who bought an MOC. So someone's directions on building something. Say the average sale is about$15. That's about$5 million in revenue that he's collected. And of course, he gives a lot to most of it to the designer. But there's people who have whole stores on the website. And it's really fascinating. And his page views last year, 2023, were around 160 million page views. And if you look at his website, he blogs every year. And he says what his stats are, how many page views he has. And it's a very interesting blog to read because A, he's being transparent about the business.

31:26And B, you could see how to build a rabid community. So on his blog, and it's clearly a self-built blog. He's not even using WordPress. He built everything from scratch. You'll see the comments saying, I love this community. I'm so into Rebrickable. Nathan, you're the man. People are rabid about this niche. It's incredibly fascinating. And this type of guy, I'm just going to stereotype him. He's not a business savvy person, or at least he doesn't want to be. He's not out there trying to milk this dry and make as much money as possible. But this type of business that he has, once you get users to a passionate following like this to your website, you can sell them anything.

32:04And so what Andrew Wilkinson calls this is an airport business. So once you're there, well, while you're here, we can sell you this, we can sell you that. People are here to learn and they're ready to buy. And the reason why this is fascinating is because with Legos, they cost hundreds of dollars sometimes and you want to buy a new one every month, every couple months. And so the market is actually quite big to build a big business. This is like a type of company that if you wanted to be a PE guy, which I don't think you should, because this is like a work of art to me. But if you wanted to be a PE guy and buy a business that you could milk for tons of profit, and you don't actually have to do that much innovation, this is one of those websites.

32:37Dude, what a great find. This is such a cool, cool business. Yeah, 10 million users. And by the way, look at this. I went to top designers. We got to put this on the screen so that our 399 ,000 YouTube subscribers can see this. The Chinese restaurant, this thing is insane. This is insane. Who made this up? This is so crazy. This is insane. And the technology to build this stuff is amazing because A, you could just buy an MOC from someone and they'll tell you what parts or kits that you need and they'll sell them. Or you could, there's this like crazy algorithm that they have where you upload hundreds of different kits that you have.

33:15And then you click like submit. And then you see like a wheels turning and it takes like 60 seconds as if it's like doing heavy calculations. And then it'll give you a huge list of hundreds or thousands of different MOCs that others have uploaded that you can create with the parts that you have. And it'll say you have 100 % of the parts need for this or you have 50 % of the parts. Here's the other 50 % that you have. You can buy them here. It's really fascinating. And it's quite complicated, I would imagine, to build that. you found like dork mecca this is great it's not only adults doing legos adults doing legos who need custom custom made lego like designs this is insane uh yeah this is cool this chinese restaurant three thousand like two thousand pieces ten bucks for the for the moc what a steal it's amazing and they there's people like there's people in the forums saying that they're close to making a full-time living selling their MOCs.

34:13And so when you have a rabid base like this, it's crazy fascinating to see what types of businesses you can build. Now, this particular model is very unique to Lego. But you can look at what the sneakerheads have done with shoes. That was considered silly a few years ago. There was a small group of people and they created marketplaces for it. But this is a perfect example of how this is executed well, of these niche followings and going all in on them and building them for the community. And what's interesting is... Check this out. So in year one, he had a million people come to the website. So in year one, so that's 80 ,000 people a month.

34:45That's pretty good. But it's not crazy. That's pretty good. His page views were 11 million. And he started that, I think, in 2015. I said, most recently, in 2023, he had... So he 11X'd it. So he had 11 million users and 160 million page views. And you could see how slowly these types of businesses build. And it would be very hard to break this company down. They have a true moat. Yeah, 100%. Should we help them with a marketing slogan maybe? Dude, this guy's killing it, man. Whatever he's doing, I want to be part of it. But let me tell you an even crazier story. This actually should be a movie.

35:25So there's a website called Bricklink. So go to Bricklink for me. Bricklink was started in the year 2000. So one of the early, early, early first website businesses, first internet companies. So BrickLink, it originally started as BrickBay. The guy who started his name is Dan Jezek. So you spell that last name, J-E-Z-E-K. Do me a favor and type in Dan Jezek on your Chrome and go to his personal website. You see his personal website? It looks like a GeoCity website. is he dead why is he dead he's dead okay so let me tell you this story so dan started he dan was a well he they didn't explicitly say this but it sort of sounded like he was a hacker type of guy and so he was kind of like a little bit gray hat where he was the type of guy who probably like would break into like different websites and things like that that's that's the vibe that i got from him but he was fascinated fascinated with legos and so he built this website called Brick Bay.

36:29It was called Brick Bay at the time because he lived in Hawaii on a bay. Eventually, he got sued by eBay. They're like, you can't use bay. So he changed it to BrickLink. And he was reading about him. I got vibes of Ross Ulbrich, the guy who started Silk Road. It was one guy. He was anonymous. And he would blog about all the changes he was making to the website. But it was under the name Admin. He never used his real name. And it was just him. And he had a handful of volunteer admins who helped him run the site. And he ran it like a community. And what BrickLink does is you can buy and sell different types of Legos.

37:01And so the thing about Legos is, if you build a thing, you don't have any more joy for it sometimes. So you can pack it up in the boxes and you could sell it and just get a little bit of your money back and then keep going or buy rare or interesting pieces. And so he ran this for 10 years and it became a good business. However, he died tragically. No one online actually says how he died. We don't know. A lot of people suspected a drug overdose, but we don't know. But he was working on this website full-time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was like a full-time gig. When he died, his mother...

37:32Imagine a cute old lady who bakes cookies. That's what his mom looks like. And when he died, his mom loved... She loved her son. And she was so passionate about the community that he made that she was like, well, I can't let this community go away. And so her and her husband, Dan's stepdad, took over the website. But because it was just one guy running it, they didn't even have the passwords. They didn't even know how it was run. And so they eventually called the web hosting site or the web hosting service. And they're like, hey, here's what happened. Can you help us? They gave them the passwords and they just spent three years figuring this out and try to make the community thrive again.

38:03And it did. And the community stepped up and they were like, we got to do this for Dan. This community is too good. We can't let BrickLink go away. We love buying and selling Legos here. And so they run this business for three years and it becomes a good business. Now, Dan dies. They're running it. Three years later, a billionaire named Jay Kim bought it. Have you ever heard of Jay Kim? No. So, J. Kim, if you click his Wikipedia, obviously, J. Kim's not his real name. It's Kim Jong-Joon. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. He's a Korean guy. But he was famous in Korea because if you Google J.

38:38Kim, you'll have to type in like J. Kim Gaming Korean Billionaire. Jay Kim was basically kind of like the Mark Pincus of Korea. So in the 90s, he was early in the internet and he created games and he became the biggest gaming company in Korea. Then he was a billionaire. So he starts this family holding company where he buys a bunch of interesting companies. And Bricklink was one of the companies that he loved. Another one. Now, this is where it kind of comes into your world. He says at the time of his death, he was the third wealthiest person in all of Korea. Yeah, he's a big deal. He's a big deal.

39:10But J. Kim, he was like a steward for this website. So they didn't change much. But one of the reasons why he bought it, and one of the things that makes this interesting, and I'll read this excerpt from basically Dan, the original BrickLink owner's mom, wrote this beautiful tribute. So if you go to danjezik.com, wrote this amazing tribute where they show pictures of Dan and him growing up and working on BrickLink. So she wrote this amazing thing, and I'll read part of it. And she said, Not long before he died, He developed an international monetary exchange engine called Bricklink that allowed sellers almost anywhere in the world to sell in their own currency and their customers could buy in their own currency as well.

39:50And every two hours, this system that Dan built, it would update. And so you can buy cross-country or across the world and your currency would automatically be updated. And so everyone was getting a fair shake. He built that in 2010, which is pretty fascinating. And Jay Kim also owns Bitstamp. Have you heard of Bitstamp? Yeah, crypto exchange, right? One of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. And so the reason why this guy, Dan, and this whole story is fascinating is there's actually some weird crypto implications here where you see this overlap of like, wow, what this guy Dan was doing is actually in the same world of this whole crypto thing.

40:29And he was pretty early to it. And these Lego fans, and if you go to BrickLink and see the comments, they're all similar. It's all a similar type of people. And this business, Bricklink, it's fascinating. And oddly, Jay Kim also died under mysterious circumstances in his 50s in Hawaii, where Dan died. And so there's a bunch of weird things going on with the story. But Bricklink is a very fascinating company. And most recently, Jay Kim, after he died, Lego, the company, bought the website. And they openly said, we bought this website because we want to carry on this tradition. We don't want anyone messing with it.

41:03We don't intend to do too much with it. We just want to keep it going because this is for the people. Wow. That's pretty cool. Very fascinating. On this guy's website, it says, here's a quote from him about what he wants to do. There's a subject, there's a post on the forum that said it was called Afterlife? Who, J. Kim or Dan? Dan. He goes, after I die and go to heaven, this is how I imagine it to be. A place where there's infinite amount of bricks and an infinite amount of time to build with them. there would be all kinds of bricks for all themes so that I could get so that when I got bored of building a castle I could move on to a town or a pirate ship there would be lots and lots of other Lego maniacs to share ideas and build with isn't that wholesome this is so great and if you read this guy Dan both Dan and Nathan from the other website they use these just like what was the name Dread Pirates what's the Silk Road guy whatever it's a marketplace but it's a weird movement and it's a weird diary and it's like a cult and there's a very particular leader and he's leading the charge it's a really his name he was just called admin on admin he was just admin no one they kind of knew it was dan but he never like revealed his name and it was just oh admins doing this and it's just this weird like it all stems from like you know remember like the phone freaks like people who would like hack into um uh pay phones and then there was uh the internet and they were doing things like that now there's crypto like it's this weird chain where it's actually all quite similar it's this weird underground community and so as a business person i see these i see these things and i'm like what other products cost a lot of money have a passionate nerdy following and where you can build a large audience and then eventually sell them everything and lego fits that perfectly i think there's a few others you've named a few but it's it was actually challenging for me to find other things that were like this, but sneakerheads are kind of one of them.

43:01But it's just really fascinating how big I think these businesses can be, even though they appear quite niche. Oh, dude, I forgot. Thrill of the Shill. So first of all, the Thrill of the Shill is one of the chef's kiss best inventions we've had. And unlike the gentleman's agreement, which we kind of stole from somebody else, the Thrill of the Shill is actually an original. But I have a different thing I want to try today. Are you down for it? Yes. The Thrill of the Shill, by the way, came up literally 30 seconds before we hit record a few weeks ago. We said, how do we promote interesting stuff?

43:32You were like, well, we got to tell them valuable content and then hopefully they'll buy whatever we're selling. Just call it the thrill of the shill. Congratulations. Let's hear it. That was good, but now I want to try something different. Have you ever read this thing that is the famous Hemingway story? I'm sure you have because you're a copywriter guy, which is the six-word story. Do you know this? About the guy outside holding the poster board? I don't know if it's that exactly, But basically, there was a challenge, which was a six-word story contest. So it was, how do you tell a story in six words?

44:04You only have six words. And the lore is that they told this to Ernest Hemingway. And he came up with a six-word story, and he won, which was, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. Six words, tells a deep story, hits you in the emotions. There's another story like that, where there's a homeless guy sitting outside, and he says, like, I'm blind, please help. And a famous copywriter writes, he goes, let me help you. And he goes, it's spring outside or it's springtime. And then I'm blind, please help. And so I have a six word challenge. Six word thrill of the show that I'm going to hit you with, right?

44:43So I'm going to do my Hemingway. I'm going to do this whole ad in six words. Here we go. Business for sale, owner never hired. And it's about this business. It's a story about a business that failed and it's up for sale now. And then why? Because the owner never hired. He tried to do it all himself. And he just never made the key hires that he needed to scale the business because he didn't go to supportshepherd.com and find amazing talent overseas to hire at a low cost five times less than the United States. Boom! How was my story? That was beautiful. That was beautiful. Dude, the Hemingway one was quite good too.

45:16I'm still thinking about that one. What is it? Maybe I shouldn't have put Hemingway before my one that I made up one minute ago. Maybe I should have done the all-time best against mine. What was the line? Business for sale, owner never hired. Business for sale, just like the shoes for sale. Business for sale, owner never hired. I thought it was good. SupportShepherd.com. That's the shill. The thrill was a beautiful line. There we go. Back to the episode. You know the other one that's most like this is fan fiction. So Wattpad reminds me a lot of this. where Wattpad, and there's also another one that's like some wiki.

45:55It's like a wiki. It's like a Wikipedia, but fandom. Yeah, I think fandom like bought them or something like that, but there's another one that's just straight the Wikipedia part of it, but fan fiction. So people get super, super, super passionate about Harry Potter and about different books, and then they kind of spin out their own world, right? Like I remember MuggleNet, which was started by that guy Emerson Sparts and you know, or Spats I don't know how you say his last name they built such a huge, huge website just around fans of Harry Potter. It was very much like, you know, Bricklink or whatever and on that, I remember I used to go on there and read people because we'd be waiting for the last book to come out and people would write their own versions of that last book and they would, you know, you would just read like a full length book that somebody just wrote in their spare time for fun and that led to some big things like you know 50 shades of gray came out of a fan fiction post uh just like that like it was written originally as a fan fiction post around twilight and so fan fiction and a few people who were surprised that wattpad was giving like hundreds of millions of visitors every month like one of the most popular websites in the world i think they sold for 600 million dollars to a korean company recently two years ago yeah and they weren't making any money but they weren't making much money but but the the passion and the the usage was there it was off the charts.

47:17And then you don't have to do much marketing because the people who are passionate about it are going to search the internet for every nook and cranny to find other people who are as fanatical about it as them. So there's a few attributes here that I'm just thinking about off the top of my head. So attribute number one is they seem like jokes at first. So it's kind of silly, almost embarrassing. What do you do for a living? Oh, I run a Lego blog. It seems silly when you talk about it at first. But if there's enough people, it could be pretty great. The second thing is, I actually think these types of companies, you shouldn't build quickly.

47:55These are slow bird businesses where you don't want to get too big, too fast. Otherwise, the nerds, the passionate ones will be like, Oh, this is lame. This is too big, too mainstream. It's getting commercial. But number three is, if you do it right, they have huge moats and they're very, very hard to kill. People get very loyal to them. but just like actually New York Times cooking actually had this a few years ago so New York Times cooking is a similar community like this passionate fans they had a revolt because uh in their Facebook group someone made a change an admin made a change and they revolted I don't know if you remember this about two or three years ago uh they had 60 ,000 people in the New York Times cooking they changed something where like you had to get your post approved as opposed to posting on your own a change like that people revolted and so these communities you're basically a steward of the people you're not you're not you're not all the time a dictator you have to be very you have your your fans are temperamental um and so there's pros and cons of these types of companies but i do think they're very very valuable because how hard they can be to ruin the um do you think uh not to be self-serving but just a real real discussion do you think we can kind of do this.

49:11I kind of think that we have the makings of doing something like this, but we also might F it up by trying to grow it too fast. So for example, one of the best tests, I remember talking to Ben once, and one of the best tests for will somebody like MFM is this experience. Do you ever go to a restaurant and then you can't help it, but your brain is trying to calculate how much is this restaurant making? You basically start counting the tables and then you just count the tables. You figure, oh, this many meals per hour. What's our bill. Our bill is this much. Okay. Average ticket is this. And you end up with like, what's the EBITDA of this restaurant?

49:45And that, if you're like that, you're probably going to like this podcast. It's a very high like, you know, overlap. But being like that is weird, right? That's not a normal way that people are. Most people just go to the restaurant, they look at the menu, they order the food. And if you're sitting down with four other people, no one else at that table is going to nerd out with you. Like, look how packed this place is. Like, wow, how much you think one of these servers is per hour? And look how much the meal is. Like, you know what I mean? You're going to dork out with that, but no want to be like, dude, shut the fuck up and just eat your chicken parm.

50:12Exactly. And so in the same way that most of the Lego people, if they went to school, could not find somebody as, or they go to this adult one, you go to work, you're not going to find people who are trying to build this 2 ,000 piece Chinese restaurant that they bought the blueprint for for$10. You're not going to find your people there. And so you find your people elsewhere. You find it on Bricklink. You find it on Rebrickable or whatever. I think for us, it's the same thing. That person who's at that dinner, the six people they're at the dinner with, your family, your friends, They might not want to dork out about it.

50:41But you find us and the community of people that like this. And you're like, these are all people who want to know the eat bit of the restaurant. And so it becomes this like glue and you find your people. And I think I've been tempted in the past to try to grow this faster. And the things you do to grow it faster are sort of like dilutive. You actually sell out a little. You sell out a little, right? Like it's the cringy YouTube thumbnail face. It's the talking about a topic that might not be the thing you would actually want to dork out about. I like that this episode is basically 90 % us dorking out about these niche Lego websites versus things that might be more mainstream.

51:22You know, talking about the Super Bowl next week or whatever. But it will attract the right people. I thought the Super Bowl was in November. I didn't even know that. That's news to me. So, okay, that's one thing. The second is like a business principle I saw. So somebody said this that I thought was really good. They go, if you want to build like a truly, a truly strong business, build like a reverse funnel. I was like, oh, that's interesting. So like, I always think of every business as a funnel, but I always think about it from top to bottom. What do you mean? Audience first? Yeah, top of the funnel is people who don't know you.

51:57They come to your website for the first time. They hear your podcast for the first time. They hear about your product for the first time. And that's like, you know, they become aware of you. and then they might get interested. Then they might actually sign up as a user. Then they might sign up for the paid account and the paid account is always at the bottom. I always just thought of a funnel as top to bottom. And what this person was saying was they go, yeah, you actually want to reverse, you want to build as a reverse funnel, meaning you want to find like the 10 people who are most interested and passionate about what you're doing to where, you know, these are your extreme hardcore users who absolutely love that you're doing this and they will use it every day and give you feedback and they'll annoy you with their feedback.

52:31They'll tell all their friends. Their friends won't even listen. It doesn't matter. And they're your power, power users. And then you sort of go one rung up and you go to like the next hundred people who care a lot for sure, but less than those 10 who were like really nuts. And then you go to the thousand people, 10 ,000 people, a hundred thousand, and you stack the funnel from the bottoms up is a way to think about building an enduring product because you're really going to find the people who need it the most, who love it the most. They're going to give you the best feedback to give you, to get the product to be better.

52:58And you're going to find, you know, the people who love it versus everybody else who's kind of like, oh, that's cool. and I thought, oh, that's actually a good principle too when it comes to how to build something. I don't know, when you built Hampton, did you do that? Yeah, for sure, yes. How did you think about who the first, let's say 10 to 20 people should be? How did you decide that? So at first I was like, let me figure out who wants this most. But then I had ideas as to who that would be and then what I found was, I was like, wow, there's a lot of entrepreneurs in Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, Delaware, some of these forgotten areas that aren't on the coast.

53:34And I'm shocked at how lonely they are and how much they need this. Let's go get more of those people. And so that's what we did. I thought it was going to be cool New York or San Francisco people. And it turns out it was cool Kentucky guys too. But I just didn't even... They weren't even part of my vernacular. I wouldn't even have thought about them. And so that's what we did. I think with this podcast, I think it's good that you and I have other businesses that A, pay us money and B, can grow faster. Because there's been very... It's been very tempting to try to do things that are inauthentic, but we know they will get more views.

54:13And actually, we've done a good job of sticking to being authentic. But this is a very... That was a really good point of yours that this podcast, as well as a handful of other ones, they're like these nerdy things that a small group of people are really passionate about. Like, for example, did you see the meetups that people were doing for MFM? I was just about to bring that up. That's an example. That's the test. Dude, do you know they're still meeting? Like, they're still meeting. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we thought, I guess, the first mind-blowing thing was, oh, if me and Sam say we're going to go to someplace to do a live show, wow, we could fill like, you know, 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 people in a, whatever, a theater to come watch us.

54:49And it's a ton of work. It's a ton of work. We were both just like, all right, let's not really do this. Yeah, I don't want to find a Toronto. A lot of pressure. And, you know, cool. We had the moment where it felt good, but I don't know if that's what we want to do on an ongoing basis. And then somebody came to us. I forget her name. I thought about it. Rachel, I think. Rachel River. From River. And she's like, hey, our product does this. She's like, our product is for creators who have a community. Let your community meet up without you. And I was like, keyword, without you. Love it. And I was like, actually, that kind of makes sense.

55:20Because again, while it feels good to maybe be the center of attention, it doesn't really feel good. And also, that's not actually what makes something really valuable. What we'd rather do is use our content as a magnet, as a honeypot, to bring in the cool guy from Kentucky and the cool girl from Illinois, who they all do the restaurant thing where they start calculating restaurant revenues when they walk into a restaurant and get them together because they're going to hit it off, but it'd be hard for them to find each other. And so if all we serve as is basically the finding function for those people to meet, and what's cool is that they did the first meetup, but then now they've just been meeting on a monthly basis, that tells me that we did something right.

55:59I don't know. We didn't intend to do that, to be very clear. Like that was not, none of this was intentional, but that means something went right. I FaceTimed a few of them. Like they was like, hey, we're doing this thing. I was like, all right, cool. I'll FaceTime and just say hi. And there was people, and by the way, we have like, there's no like monetary thing. I think it's completely free. If you Google MFM and then River Meetup, you'll see like the landing page. I talked to people. They were like, yeah, I drove six hours to come to this one because I'm looking for a husband or a wife. I want to meet someone who has these similar values that for some reason MFM is a proxy for.

56:30And so I thought that was super fascinating. And they told me to go, oh, we're still actually doing monthly meetings because we just want to hang out with other dorks like us. And I thought that was awesome. By the way, my tagline for people that will like this is just business nerds with a sense of humor. That's the whole thing. If you're a business nerd, meaning you do business, but you also, in addition to the business you run, you actually nerd out about more business stuff. You can't really get enough. it doesn't feel like work to you to think about business or to read about businesses or learn more business stuff.

56:57And then with a sense of humor, because there's probably people that are more experienced than us that share more tactical stuff that are whatever. They're smarter, better. They're more to the point. But I think the one thing we do is we have a lot of fun while we do this and that rubs off. And so that's the capture of who is the audience for us. So we just dorked out on niche, niche passionate things. I think that this Lego shit is crazy fascinating. You'll have to go to the Dan Jezik site, danjezik.com just to look at this and maybe you guys will dork out over this like I did. And by the way, if you made it this far into the pod, you're definitely one of these nerds.

57:38Just go ahead. This is my one sellout. Go ahead and click subscribe on the YouTube page because you made it this far and you can actually make fun of us in the comments or let us know what you think about this niche stuff. I have one more quick one that's like kind Kind of in the theme of kids, stuff, games, toys. Have you seen the thing called Pal World? I know you're not a gamer, but do you know about this? No. What is Pal World? Pal World is currently like the most popular PC game in the world. So it's on Steam? Tell me what Steam... I still don't... I don't understand exactly what Steam is.

58:06Steam is like an app store, but for computers. The company that makes Counter-Strike, they... In order to let people come download the new version of Counter-Strike and buy it, they created Steam. It's like a store to sell Counter-Strike, you know, sold Counter-Strike, but it also sold all the other games, right? So now anybody can list their thing there. But I can't do it on Apple? Well, no, because you're playing on a, you know, a Razer PC or something like that. Got it. So what do you need to the Apple App Store for, right? That's not going to work. So it's the Apple App Store, but for computer games.

58:34And huge, by the way, like a multi-billion dollar product. So the number one game on Steam right now is Pal World. Pal World, in like seven days, has done$200 million in revenue. What? When games hit, they hit like none other. And by the way, this thing was made like on a$10 ,000 budget. So it was like a very, very low cost game. What's interesting about this, right? So the game is basically the game to me, the reason I wanted to bring this up, not because I'm not even playing the game. It's not like you play games. We don't have a lot to talk about here. But I do think it's an example of the midwit meme strikes again.

59:09And this is basically that the best ideas, the absolute best ideas are simple. And they're not just simple they're simple to the point of sounding dumb okay so simple to the point of sounding dumb what does that mean so uh to me this is uh let's see simple to the point of sounding dumb is snapchat the next big social app it wasn't started as this like grand intellectual theory on the future of of communication it was like what if you could send someone a picture that would like disappear in 10 seconds nudes it's like college nudes right and people are like what would you do with that? I don't know, stupid shit.

59:46Why stupid shit? Because it's going to disappear in 10 seconds, so I have no filter, right? And then after the fact, it becomes this thing that people intellectualize, and they're like, well, see, the thing is that impermanence is actually the greatest form of permanence. Like, what? What are you talking about? And people start to get intellectual about it, but that's not where the best ideas come from. The best ideas come from really, really simple things that can be described in just a couple words. Pal world, if you go look at this game, it's like, oh, what's the game? The game is Pokemon with guns.

1:00:17It's like, what? It's like, yes. And then the CEO, he says this. He goes, I'm not a visionary. I don't know how to do that. I just try to make whatever people want. And I knew that Pokemon, he didn't say Pokemon because he didn't want to get sued, but he's like, yeah, I had this idea of like, you know, you could run around and capture these little monsters. But then we added guns because, you know, Americans love to shoot things. That's insane. That was like the core idea. And he was like, they're like, what was the decision to do this art style? He's like, oh, I didn't even want to do that, actually.

1:00:48I wanted to do the cool 3D thing, but I didn't even know that to do that you have to have an animation rig and all this stuff. So I made one, and I was like, god, that was hard. There's no way we could do this with 10 ,000 characters. Impossible. He's like, so we had this artist that we had rejected, and then we hired her later. And they're like, oh, what did you tell her to do? He's like, I don't know. Whatever our programmer could make, that was her mandate. they're like what was your budget he's like I don't know we had like $10 ,000 but we didn't really set a budget he's like you know I guess if we needed more I would have probably just gone and borrowed some more tell us about the developers on your team he's like one of my developers is a guy I met at a convenience store this kid he's like a teenager but like he told me he could code so I told him to come by and you know he works on the game he's pretty critical for the game.

1:01:35So the founder has written this like really amazing blog post where he like explains everything that you're talking about and he's like He's like a shithead in the best possible way. And he basically says, he goes, this game shouldn't even exist. It's the antithesis of proper game development. And he says, he goes, we had no budget. No sane company would ever start developing a game without a budget. But PocketPair, which is the developer, is not a sane company. And he just talks about... So I started asking myself, what's the budget? When the balance of our bank account reached zero, we could always just borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt.

1:02:11We had about two years of runaway. And I decided just to keep working without stressing about budget because all I was worried about was getting the game done as fast as possible. And he's quite not like a corporate CEO. This is pretty awesome. He's in Japan? Is this a Japanese guy? Yeah, it's a Japanese game. He basically made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money and was like, all right, I'm going to start a game studio with this, even though he wasn't equipped to do that. Right now on Steam, it's the number one game. Right now, as we're recording this, there are over 1 million people concurrently playing the game.

1:02:45That's insane. The second. Like the highest was 2 million at a time were playing the game just concurrently. It's the number one. More than Dota, more than Counter-Track, more than PUBG, more than all of them. He was like, this one lady applied, but I didn't think her designs were that good, so I rejected her. But then three months later, she sent me a DM, and I was so amazed that she was bold enough after I rejected her to keep messaging me. So we hired her. Like, he just has story after story. of like, that doesn't make sense, so let's do it. But the meme, the midwit meme where it's like, you know, the Jedi kind of think the same thing, right?

1:03:20Just make the game as fast as possible, right? Or like, you know, if you run out of money, just try to get some more. You know, what should you make it? What if Pokemon had guns? That'd be cool. Right? It's like, versus people who are like, you know, trying to overly intellectualize and overanalyze everything. And I just see this trend over and over and over again. I truly believe, did I tell you about the midwit thing I'm trying to do? No, what? I truly believe this midwit meme explains so much of my own life and I want to see it every day as a reminder to don't overthink it. Just keep it simple and just what's the obvious answer?

1:03:58What's the obvious answer? It's always there, but it gets fogged up by my own stupidity trying to over-architect things. Or want to be an intellectual. And so George Mack, our friend, And do you know George? He's awesome. Yeah. He's a great dude. Very interesting thinker. And so he had this idea for a, like to do a super glossy, like coffee table book, high end, but of just like 100 midwit memes. And I heard this idea and I was like, that's genius. I can't wait. And so I messaged him. And then like months later, I was like, dude, what happened to the book? And he's like, oh, well, I didn't want to do it because, you know, you know, I was going to have to do 365.

1:04:37His original thing was 365, like one a day, 365 midwit memes he's like i didn't know if i get to 365 and i thought well the you know the cost of this might be a little high i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to make my money back but then you know he's like really a best-selling book is something that has these attributes and i went and studied all the best-selling books and i i learned all these commonalities between atomic habits and this and this and this and i just sent him the midwit meme back after his like thousand word like whatsapp message and i was like make the book it'll be fun right like it's obvious i just make the just do it it'll be fun who cares like you don't have to do all this you might lose a little bit of money.

1:05:10It's okay. Right? Like the people who buy something cool will come with this. It's no big deal. And so I'm trying to convince him to do this, to do this book with me. I'm like, let's just make this book. It'll take us like two weeks and it'll be fun. And like anybody who actually buys this thing is going to be the exact type of person I want in my life. Just do it. Do it on your own. I'm looking for an excuse to do a project with George because I really like him. And also this was his idea. So I don't want to steal his idea. I want to convince him to do this with me. If he really refuses, I'm going to say, can I just do this myself?

1:05:41It's Monday. I think this episode goes live on Wednesday. I forget when, but whenever it goes live, give him, he has seven days. If this doesn't get him to do it, he has seven days. Just tweet at George Mac, his Twitter handle. George underscore Mac. Just tweet at him at, just say, do it. And he's going to have to figure out why everybody's tweeting, do it, Adam. And I'm sure he will eventually put two and two together and know this is why he needs to do it. I enjoyed this episode. What do you think? Yeah, this is fun. I enjoyed dorking out over this stuff. I had a great time. Do we wrap here?

1:06:15Is that the pod? That's the pod. I feel like I learned something today. Yeah, and I had a great time. That's the midwit. That's the midwit meme of preparing for these things. I'm like, what gets views? What will make more money? What will be more fun? All right, that's the pod.

1:06:38On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:06:45All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. and the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:07:13It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. I highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:07:38For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.